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Updated: June 2, 2025
It is commonly placed in the fork of the slender branches of a maple, linden, or poplar, and is fastened to them with singular ingenuity. I have frequently heard his notes on warm days in March, and once, in a very mild season, I heard one warbling cheerily on the 18th of February. But the Linnet does not persevere like the Song-Sparrow, after he has once commenced.
The first flock of geese is seen beating to north, in long harrows and waving lines; the gingle of the song-sparrow salutes us from the shrubs and fences; the plaintive note of the lark comes clear and sweet from the meadow; and the bluebird, like an azure ray, glances past us in our walk.
When the stream runs out into the old clearing, or down through the pasture, you find other and livelier birds, the robins, with his sharp, saucy call and breathless, merry warble; the bluebird, with his notes of pure gladness, and the oriole, with his wild, flexible whistle; the chewink, bustling about in the thicket, talking to his sweetheart in French, "cherie, cherie!" and the song-sparrow, perched on his favourite limb of a young maple, dose beside the water, and singing happily, through sunshine and through rain.
No one of the New England birds is an autumnal warbler; though the song-sparrow often greets the fine mornings in October with his lays, and the shore-lark, after spending the summer in Labrador and about the shores of Hudson's Bay, is sometimes heard in autumn, soaring and singing at the dawn of day, while on his passage to the South.
In March, before the violet has ventured to peep out from the southern knoll of the pasture or the sunny brow of the hill, while the northern skies are liable to pour down at any hour a storm of sleet and snow, the Song-Sparrow, beguiled by southern winds, has already made his appearance, and, on still mornings, may be heard warbling his few merry notes, as if to make the earliest announcement of his arrival.
The bird-lover who is himself keen of ear is never tired of listening, when in the field, for the two low notes with which the vesper sparrow introduces a song, the rest of which is not at all unlike the one of his song-sparrow cousin.
The other incident comes to me from Vermont. "While returning from church in 1876," says the writer, "as I was crossing a bridge... I noticed a striped snake in the act of charming a song-sparrow. They were both upon the sand beneath the bridge. The snake kept his head swaying slowly from side to side, and darted his tongue out continually.
That day his brookside singer became the Song-sparrow; the brown triller, the Veery Thrush. The Trilliums, white and red, the Dogtooth Violet, the Spring-beauty, the Trailing Arbutus all for the first time got names and became real friends, instead of elusive and beautiful, but depressing mysteries.
Ice has no sooner disappeared than we desire it. There is a smile, if one may say so, in the blue sky, and there is. softness in the south wind. The song-sparrow is singing in the apple-tree. Another bird-note is heard, two long, musical whistles, liquid but metallic.
And then we saw our warbler. He was little and plump and red-faced, with a greasy hat and a drooping beer-gilded moustache, and he wore on his coat a bright blue peddler's license badge. He shuffled along, stooping over a pouch of tin whistles and gurgling in one as he went. There's your poem, we said to Endymion "The Song-Sparrow on Grand Street."
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