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However, I still keep a careful description of it, which I took down on the spot, and which I expect some future golden-wing to verify. But the most celebrated of the warblers in this regard is the golden-crowned thrush, otherwise called the oven-bird and the wood wagtail. His ordinary effort is one of the noisiest, least melodious, and most incessant sounds to be heard in our woods.
This fact was guessed at on the thirteenth day, when the concealed little ones came out of the darkness up to the door, and the parents' movements in feeding could be seen; but the whole curious process was plain two days later, when a young golden-wing appeared at the opening and met his supplies half-way.
It was solely on his account and principally, I must confess, to try and surprise a wild bird at the above described entertainment so as to determine its character, that I wished to make acquaintance with its free relations, study their ways when at liberty in their own haunts, and have a glimpse if possible of the Golden-wing babies.
All this while there had been other birds in view besides the bluejay chick-a-dees and nut-hatches hunting their tiny prey among the dark branches of the fir-trees, Canada sparrows fluting their clear call from the tree tops, flycatchers darting and tumbling in their zig-zag, erratic flights, and sometimes a big golden-wing woodpecker running up and down a tall, dead trunk which stood close by, and rat-tat-tat-tatting in a most businesslike and determined manner.
Golden-Wing bore her swiftly along, and she looked down on the green mountains, and the peasant's cottages, that stood among overshadowing trees; and the earth looked bright, with its broad, blue rivers winding through soft meadows, the singing birds, and flowers, who kept their bright eyes ever on the sky.
Whatever the drama enacted in that mysterious home, I was too late to see, and I have not been able as yet to make close acquaintance with the free Golden-wing. The bird that had so interested me in his whole family I found in a bird store in New York in the month of November.
He was exactly like the parents, with a somewhat shorter tail. I should hardly have suspected his youthfulness but for his clumsy movements, and the fact that he did not at once take flight, which a Golden-wing more experienced in the ways of human-kind would have done instantly.
Unlike most of his kinsmen, the golden-wing prefers the fields and the borders of the forest to the deeper seclusion of the woods, and hence, contrary to the habit of his tribe, obtains most of his subsistence from the ground, probing it for ants and crickets. He is not quite satisfied with being a woodpecker.
Of our common species the most beautiful are, perhaps, the blue yellow-back, the blue golden-wing, the Blackburnian, the black-and-yellow, the Canada flycatcher, and the redstart; with the yellow-rump, the black-throated green, the prairie warbler, the summer yellow-bird, and the Maryland yellow-throat coming not far behind.
The notes of the golden-wing much more varied and musical than those of other woodpeckers are probably the results of his new free life, and the modified tongue and bill. In the woods one seldom hears from him anything but the rattling rat-a-tat-tat, as he hammers away on a dry old pine stub.
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