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Updated: June 11, 2025
Sun up; the yellow-throated meadowlarks lilting and tossing their liquid gold notes straight to heaven; the desert flowers such a mass of gorgeous, voluptuous bloom as dazzle the eye cactus, blood-red and gold and carmine, wild pink, scarlet poppy, desert geranium, little shy, dwarf, miniature English daisies over which Tennyson's "Maud" trod gorgeous desert flowers voluptuous as oriental women who said our Southwest was an arid waste?
Leander S. Keyser, author of "Birds of the Rockies," relates in "Forest and Stream" the results of his experiments with a variety of birds taken from the nest while very young and reared in captivity; among them meadowlarks, red-winged blackbirds, brown thrashers, blue jays, wood thrushes, catbirds, flickers, woodpeckers, and several others. Did they receive any parental instruction?
"Yes, but you should hear the noise they make in spring, when there are crowds of birds along the river and back in the meadows. The Redwings and Meadowlarks sing all day long, the Marsh Wrens come along to join in, the Snipe begin to call, the Spotted Sandpipers whistle up, and we get a visit from the Wild Geese as they fly north. I tell you it is fine to be down here then.
That day was more toilsome than the last, but a very happy one. The meadowlarks kept singing like they were glad to see us. But we were still climbing and soon got beyond the larks and sage chickens and up into the timber, where there are lots of grouse. We stopped to noon by a little lake, where I got two small squirrels and a string of trout.
Then the prairie dogs would stand a-tiptoe to listen. The meadowlarks would stop their singing even the trailing shadows would seem to waver uncertainly and only the creek would go gurgling on, uncaring. Around a bend would rattle the wagons of the Double-Crank, with a lone rider trotting before to point the way; down to the very bank of the uncaring creek they would go.
The sun, which was still high, was shining as only a Wyoming sun can shine, from out of a blue-vaulted canopy, flecked with fleecy clouds. Swinging from the tops of the sagebrush, or an occasional cottonwood, yellow-breasted meadowlarks were singing sweetly.
She had fed her young son with meadowlarks' tongues, to make him quick of speech; but in late years was loath to admit it, though she had come through the period of unfaith in the lore of the clan with a fine appreciation of its beauty and significance. "What good will your dead get, Seyavi, of the baskets you burn?" said I, coveting them for my own collection.
"That's just why," Graham answered. "I've got to get it finished. It doesn't seem I can work like you do. The ranch is too alluring. I can't get down to the book. I sit over it, and sit over it, but the confounded meadowlarks keep echoing in my ears, and I begin to see the fields, and the redwood canyons, and Selim. And after I waste an hour, I give up and ring for Selim.
The quick increase of suns at the end of spring sometimes overtakes birds in their nesting and effects a reversal of the ordinary manner of incubation. It becomes necessary to keep eggs cool rather than warm. One hot, stifling spring in the Little Antelope I had occasion to pass and repass frequently the nest of a pair of meadowlarks, located unhappily in the shelter of a very slender weed.
The birds flying over the alders are Red-winged Blackbirds; those coming from the pines are Purple Grackles; the big black ones flying overhead are Crows; and the yellow-breasted fellows walking in the grass are Meadowlarks. We must first make the horses comfortable, and then we can spend the day with the birds among these marshes and meadows."
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