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Updated: June 10, 2025
Many of our warblers and song birds are now exceedingly rare. Ruffed grouse greatly decreased during the past 10 years. MINNESOTA: The sandhill crane has been killed by sportsmen. I have not seen one in three years. Where there were, a few years ago, thousands of blue herons, egrets, wood ducks, redbirds, and Baltimore orioles, all those birds are now almost extinct in this state.
After the corn had been shipped, the boat had steamed down the river, and the place, lately so full of busy life, had returned to its accustomed quiet seclusion, the redbirds came to peck up the corn left upon the ground. I remember how once, upon a cold, gray afternoon, I put on my wraps and ran down to the Sycamore Barn, on purpose to watch the shy, beautiful things.
For all the man's censure, the redbird knew that if Teddy Roosevelt had killed the sparrow instead of being killed by it, the grocer would have been much more grieved at the loss, for he had heard him say the sparrow was like one of his family. The man forgot that the result might have been different if the redbirds had been older.
But if you breathed that air, and shut your eyes, north, you could see blue flags, scarlet lilies, buttercups, cattails and redbirds sailing over them; east, there would be apple bloom and soft grass, cowslips, and bubbling water, robins, thrushes, and bluebirds; and south, waving corn with wild rose and alder borders, and sparrows, and larks on every fence rider.
In a clump of briers across the stream was the nest of a pair of redbirds that I was watching. One day just before the young could fly they were carried off. I knew who did it. On the same side, up under the fence by the woods, a litter of rabbits was destroyed. The snake killed them. It was he, too, who ate the eggs of the bluebirds in the old apple-tree along the fence in the adjoining field.
Maria started toward the line fence, but she paused repeatedly to listen; and it was no wonder, for all the redbirds from miles down the river had gathered around the sumac to see if there were a battle in birdland; but it was only the Cardinal, turning somersaults in the air, and screaming with bursting exuberance: "Come here! Come here!" "So dear! So dear!" crooned the Cardinal
Redbirds, I call 'em. I went over there, one day, an' walked along between the hummocks, spush! spush! You won't find a nicer feelin' than that, wherever ye go. Take off your shoes an' stockin's, an' wade into a swamp! Warm, coarse grass atop! Then warm, black mud, an' arter that, a layer all nice an' cold that goes down to Chiny, fur's I know!
But the dragon in the swale ought I to tolerate him? No. There are moments when I should be glad to kill him, yet I doubt if the swale would be quite so wild and thrilling a spot if I knew there was no dragon to meet me as I crossed. But the redbirds, bluebirds, rabbits? I see no shrinking in their numbers because of the snake. A few of them breed as they always have along the swale.
I was ready to christen the road anew, Redbird Road. But the redbirds, many and conspicuous as they were, had no monopoly of the road or of the day. House wrens were equally numerous and equally at home, though they sang more out of sight.
In whatever way you walk, at whatever hour, the birds are sweetly calling in the way-side oleanders and the wild sage-bushes and the cedar-tops. They are mostly cat-birds, quite like our own; and bluebirds, but of a deeper blue than ours, and redbirds of as liquid a note, but not so varied, as that of the redbirds of our woods. How came they all here, seven hundred miles from any larger land?
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