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The big soft clouds are sailing their wider sea; the sweet sunshine, the lesser winds, the chickadees and kinglets linger with you in your sheltered hollow against the hill you and they for yet a little slumber, a little sleep before there breaks upon you the wrath of the North. But is this sweet, slumberous, half-melancholy day any nearer perfect than that day when
You children have a thoughtful mother, and you must be thoughtful of her," added the old man, who felt that the incident admitted of a little homily. What appetites they all had! If some of the potatoes were slightly burned and others a little raw, the occasion added a flavor better than Attic salt. A flock of chickadees approached near enough to gather the crumbs that were thrown to them.
It hid me perfectly, and on its top was a carpet of soft pine needles, on which I could lie at my ease. Hour after hour passed by. A little black woodpecker with a yellow crest ran nimbly up and down the tree-trunks for some time and then flitted away with a party of chickadees and nut-hatches.
The only birds that sang during the month unless we include the red-bellied nuthatches, whose frequent quaint twitterings should, perhaps, come under this head were the chickadees and a single robin. The former I have down as uttering their sweet phoebe whistle which I take to be certainly their song, as distinguished from all their multifarious calls on seven of the thirty-one days.
By exercising extreme caution, and approaching inch by inch, I have climbed a tree to the nest of a yellow-throated vireo, and at the first attempt handed the bird a meal-worm with my fingers. At one time I had two house wrens, a yellow-throated vireo, a chipping sparrow and a flock of chickadees that would come to my hand."
Surely no man of intelligence needs to be told to protect woodpeckers to the utmost, and to feed them in winter. Nail up fat pork, or large chunks of suet, on the south sides of conspicuous trees, and encourage the woodpeckers, nuthatches, chickadees and titmice to remain in your woods through the long and dreary winter.
While I was walking in the December woods, one day, my attention was attracted by a great hue and cry among these birds. I found them in and about a hemlock-tree, eight or ten chickadees and four or five red-bellied nuthatches. Such a chiding chorus of tiny voices I had not heard for a long time. The tone was not that of alarm so much as it was that of trouble and displeasure.
The Nuthatches and other cousins of the Chickadees took this warning seriously, and set about learning how and when to go; but Tomtit, who led his brothers, only laughed and turned a dozen wheels around a twig that served him for a trapeze. "Go to the south?" said he. "Not I; I am too well contented here; and as for frost and snow, I never saw any and have no faith in them."
When he came out again I had but a glimpse of him till he appeared on the rail near me beside his mate. Their little ruse was now quite evident. They had come back from gathering rabbit fur, and found me unexpectedly near their nest. Instead of making a fuss and betraying it, as other birds might do, they lit on the rail before me, and were as sociable as only chickadees know how to be.
Now and then little troops of birds of many kinds passed wood-hewers, ant-thrushes, tanagers, flycatchers; as in the spring and fall similar troops of warblers, chickadees, and nuthatches pass through our northern woods. On the rocks and on the great trees by the river grew beautiful white and lilac orchids, the sobralia, of sweet and delicate fragrance.
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