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Updated: June 14, 2025
Surveyors were running lines and making plats in the suburbs, peeped at by gophers, and greeted by the roundelays of meadow-larks. But on the street-corners, in the offices of lawyers and real-estate agents, and in the lobbies of the hotels, the trading was lively. Then for the first time the influx of real buyers from the outside became noticeable.
Great white tumbling clouds were piled high all around the horizon and what a long length of sky it was in every direction down in the mountains, he had to look straight up, sometimes, to see the sky at all. Blackbirds chattered in the cedars as he went to the yard gate. The field outside was full of singing meadow-larks, and crows were cawing in the woods beyond.
Here also in the mesquite and giant cactus were thrush and Western meadow-larks and mocking-birds mimicking the call of the cat-bird. Down in the brush by the river was the happy little water-ousel, as cheerful in his way as the dumpy-built musical canyon wren. The Mexican crossbill appeared to have little fear of the migrating Northern shrike.
From the full-orbed song from the maple by my window, down to the faintest chirp and twitter, there was no discord; while from the fields beyond the village the whistle of the meadow-larks was so mellowed and softened by distance as to incline one to wonder whether their notes were real or mere ideals of sound.
Thumbkins kept very quiet, for the baby meadow-larks were sleepy little fellows, and before he knew it Thumbkins was sound asleep himself, with an arm around one of the baby birds. Thumbkins did not know how long he had been asleep, but when he awakened the rain had ceased. Thumbkins knew it had stopped raining for he could no longer hear the rain drops pattering upon Mamma Meadow-Lark's back.
By way of illustration, here is a sample game report, from Las Animas, Colorado, Feb. 22, 1912: "After the most severe winter weather experienced for twenty years we are able to compute approximately our loss of feathered life. It is seventy-five per cent of the quail throughout the irrigated district, and about twenty per cent of meadow-larks.
He produced from among a bunch of pocket-worn envelopes and memorandums a clipping hacked from a newspaper with a nail-file, and read: "'The combat and mystery of the sea; the uplift of the hills and their promise of wonder beyond; the kindliness of late afternoon nestling in small fields, or on ample barns where red clover-tops and long grasses shine against the gray foundation stones and small boys seek for hidden entrances to this castle of the farm; the deep holiness of the forest, whose leaves are the stained glass of a cathedral to grave saints of the open; all these I love, but nowhere do I find content save on the mid-western prairie, where the light of sky and plain drugs the senses, where the sound of meadow-larks at dawn fulfils my desire for companionship, and the easy creak of the buggy, as we top rise after rise, bespells me into an afternoon slumber which the nervous town shall never know.
Though the little girl was yet only five and a half years old, she had tried many times in her life, without success, to make the slat cage the home of some feathery pet. Snipes and plover, orioles and ovenbirds, bobolinks and meadow-larks, all had lived in it by turns for a few days.
So Thumbkins crawled beneath Mamma Meadow-Lark's wings and, snuggling down close to the bottom of the meadow-lark's nest, he found three tiny little baby meadow-larks. It was too dark for Thumbkins to see them, but he felt that the baby Meadow-Larks were as warm as toast.
After them came the myriad small birds of the prairie, the countless flocks of blackbirds, whose "fl-ee-ce," in continuous chorus filled all the daylight hours; the meadow-larks, singly or in pairs, announcing their arrival with a guttural "tuerk" and a saucy flit of the tail, or admonishing "fill your tea-kettle, fill your tea-kettle" with a persistence worthy a better cause.
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