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Updated: May 15, 2025
The robins, the cedar-birds, and a host of others eat these berries gladly, and fly far with them, planting the seeds as they go. They find shelter in the close drawn blanket of evergreen foliage which the trees seem to wrap about them to keep out the cold and they fill the pasture with flitting wings all the month.
The third warm day, and, behold, all the principal performers come rushing in, song sparrows, cow blackbirds, grackles, the meadowlark, cedar-birds, the phbe-bird, and, hark! what bird laughter was that? the robins, hurrah! the robins!
Then there is the never-failing crop of birds robins, goldfinches, king-birds, cedar-birds, hair-birds, orioles, starlings all nesting and breeding in its branches, and fitly described by Wilson Flagg as "Birds of the Garden and Orchard." Whether the pippin and sweetbough bear or not, the "punctual birds" can always be depended on.
Six cedar-birds disappeared over the bank, a song sparrow flew shrieking across the field, a squirrel interrupted in his investigations fled madly along the rail fence, every few steps stopping an instant, with hindquarters laid flat and tail resting on the rail, to see if his head was still safe on his shoulders.
No other bird's absence has surprised me so much; and it is the more remarkable because the comparatively rare yellow-bellied species is to be met with nearly every season. Cedar-birds show themselves irregularly.
One man made the cruel boast that the winter previous he had killed one thousand cedar-birds for hat trimmings. Many of our family had located for a time near the coast, but here too, on these sunny plains, the death messengers followed us and slew us by the thousands. We learned that one bird man handled thirty thousand bird skins that season.
Then I began to be aware of faint, sibilant noises about me, and, glancing up, I saw that the ground was already "preëmpted" by a company of cedar-birds, who, naturally enough, were not a little indignant at my poaching thus on their preserves. I began to feel ashamed of myself, and for once in my life was literally hissed off the stage.
The same thing may be noticed among the birds in their love chasings; the pursuer seems to know perfectly the mind of the pursued. This concert of action among birds is very curious. When they are on the alert, a flock of sparrows, or pigeons, or cedar-birds, or snow buntings, or blackbirds, will all take flight as if there were but one bird, instead of a hundred.
The lower orders, such as the humming-bird with his insect-like stomach and sucking-tube, and so on up through the warblers and flycatchers, more strictly bound by the necessities of their life, closely follow the sun, while the upper-ten-thousand, the robins, cedar-birds, sparrows, etc., like man, omnivorous in their diet and their attendant chevaliers d'industrie, the rapacious birds, allow themselves greater latitude, and go and come occasionally at all seasons, though in general tending to the south in winter and north in summer.
Nevertheless, if I were selling that "waste," that "hole in the ground," it would not hurt my conscience, such as it is, to declare that the birds on it alone are worth more than it cost: wood-thrushes and robins, golden orioles, scarlet tanagers, blackbirds, bluebirds, oven-birds, cedar-birds, veeries, vireos, song-sparrows, flycatchers, kinglets, the flicker, the cuckoo, the nuthatch, the chickadee and the rose-breasted grosbeak, not to mention jays or kingfishers, swallows, the little green heron or that cock of the walk, the red squirrel.
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