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Updated: May 14, 2025
Did it occur to you that those same rouge-finished queens of the ballet would describe us, and how they 'worked' us for a wine supper, to other jays, and that no doubt they have done so to one or a dozen since that night? They were pert and saucy, it is true, and up to date so far as slang goes, but did you really enjoy their society?"
He dropped on his knees and began to pray for happiness, instead of for violence, when the drink that he had had should seize him in its embrace. He prayed with a voice that roared like thunder and which made the charcoal fall from the log in the fireplace, and which alarmed the jays and inquisitive mockingbirds about the little clearing.
Blue jays flitting, a magpie drooping across from elm to elm; young rooks that have escaped the hostile shot blundering up into the branches; missel thrushes leading their fledglings, already strong on the wing, from field to field. An egg here on the sward dropped by a starling; a red ladybird creeping, tortoise-like, up a green fern frond.
If there ever was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson. Cosmopolitan they call it. You bet. So's a piece of fly-paper. You listen close when they're buzzing and trying to pull their feet out of the sticky stuff. "Little old New York's good enough for us" that's what they sing.
"Have you been worshipping at another shrine? Are you recreant to your whilom friends? Speak, Sir Knight, and defend yourself." "Oh, come off," says Harold, in his deep, musical baritone; "I've been having a devil of a time fitting pants on a lot of bow-legged jays from the cotton-patch. Got knobs on their legs, some of 'em big as gourds, and all expect a fit.
Foxes robbed birds' nests whenever they got a chance, and the blue jays knew this. Therefore, a fox in the neighborhood of their home was not to be tolerated. They flew down like two blue streaks and landed their sharp bills on the head and face of Mr. Fox. One stroke came so near to one of his eyes that he dodged and ducked, and stopped pursuing Bumper long enough to snap at the birds.
When I was on the Harriman Expedition I asked Robert Ridgway, the eminent ornithologist, how these sudden flittings were accomplished, and he frankly confessed that he didn't know, but guessed that jays and many other birds carried their eggs in their mouths; and when I objected that a jay's mouth seemed too small to hold its eggs, he replied that birds' mouths were larger than the narrowness of their bills indicated.
And the two quarrelsome jays had brought their family squabble to the edge of the timber. It was their wrangling that roused Carrigan to the fact that he was not dead. It was a thrilling discovery that and the fact that he made out clearly a patch of sunlight in the sand. He did not move, but opened his eyes wider. He could see the timber.
Blue jays and crested flycatchers were doing their best to outscream one another, with the odds in favor of the flycatchers, and a few smaller birds were singing, especially two or three summer tanagers, as many yellow-throated warblers, and a ruby-crowned kinglet.
Letting the reins fall slack, she turned to her mother with reassuring words. "There! Now we're safe. We won't meet anybody on this road except possibly a mover's outfit. We're in the forest again," she added. For two hours they crawled slowly upward, with a roaring stream on one side and the pine-covered slopes on the other. Jays and camp-birds called from the trees.
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