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Here the spring had passed, scattering her fresh green. The tops of the trees were already in half-leaf; the lower branches just budding, so that it seemed the sowing must have been from above. Last year's leaves, softened and packed by the snow, covered the ground with an indescribably beautiful and noiseless carpet. Through it pushed the early blossoms of the hepatica. Grackles whistled clearly.
It's a great rack of sticks, half as big as a haystack; for they mend it every season, and so it keeps growing until now it is almost ready to fall out of the old tree that holds it. And, do you know, sir, that Purple Grackles have stuck their own nests into the sides of it, until it is as full of birds as a great summer hotel is of people."
Why leave these places to the Sparrows, the Grackles, and perhaps the Starlings, when Bluebirds and Thrushes are within hail, eager to come if the hand of invitation be extended?
"The wine of life keeps oozing, drop by drop; The leaves of life keep falling, one by one." Flocks of grackles spend their days in the cornfields which run down to the creek bottom and their nights amid the wild rice and the rushes and willows in the swamp.
In addition to the birds already named three of them new to me we had seen great blue herons, little blue herons, Louisiana herons, night herons, cormorants, pied-billed grebes, kingfishers, red-winged blackbirds, boat-tailed grackles, redpoll and myrtle warblers, savanna sparrows, tree swallows, purple martins, a few meadow larks, and the ubiquitous turkey buzzard.
Magpies, grackles, cat birds, and many other of the winged tribe, appeared in considerable numbers among the trees, or disporting themselves on the lake or river. "It is so long since we have had a gallop, that I vote we take a good long one," exclaimed Norman; and Sybil and Effie, whose spirits had also risen, expressed their readiness to do as he proposed.
If that is next summer, then I shall find a colony of twenty sparrow families around the hawk's nest. The purple grackles will be gone. And the fish-hawks? Only the question of another year or so when they, too, shall be dispossessed and gone. But where will they go to escape the sparrows? From a mile away I turned to look back at the "cripple" where towered the tall white oak of the hawks.
The cold draws all the birds of a species together. Dark hordes of clacking grackles pass by, scores of red-winged blackbirds and cowbirds mingle amicably together, both of dark hue but of such unlike matrimonial habits.
First of all, stop spring shooting; secondly, enact a Bayne law. In the name of mystery, who is there in South Carolina who desires to kill grackles? And why? And where is the gentleman sportsman who has come down to killing foolish and tame little doves for "sport?" Stop it at once, for the credit of the state.
Dainty green warblers nest in its tree-tops, and red-eyed vireos choose a location below. It is the home of bell-birds, finches, and thrushes. There are flocks of blackbirds, grackles, and crows. Jays and catbirds quarrel constantly, and marsh-wrens keep up never-ending chatter. Orioles swing their pendent purses from the branches, and with the tanagers picnic on mulberries and insects.
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