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Updated: June 2, 2025
The little gray squirrels awoke, and looked sleepily out from the leafy screen that shaded their mossy nest. The early notes of the wood-thrush and song-sparrow, with the tender warbling of the tiny wren, sounded sweetly in the still, dewy morning air; while from a cedar swamp was heard the trill of the green frogs, which the squirrels thought very pretty music.
If the day be pleasant, the cheerful chirp of the inevitable song-sparrow and the song of the wild canary are heard; a thrush or robin, surprised and alarmed, starts from the brush; swallows and snow-white gulls from the sea circle over and about the streams; and odd, unfamiliar little birds hop about in the willows. How they get there, the Lord only knows.
The bird has yet another lay, however, which has made it notorious. Where is the nest of song-sparrow, or Maryland yellow-throat, or yellow warbler, or chippy, that is safe from the curse of the cow-bird's blighting visit?
He sings, that the maidens of his nation have eyes and feet like the antelope, that their songs are sweeter than the melodies of the song-sparrow, and their motions more graceful than the motions of a young willow, bowed by the wind.
After the full rays of the sun have silenced the early performers, the Song-Sparrow and the Red Thrush continue to sing, at intervals, the greater part of the day. The Wren is likewise heard at all hours; but when the languishing heat of noon has arrived, and most of the birds are silent, the few that continue to sing become more than usually vocal, and seem to form a select company.
The Blue-Bird seems to represent simply spring's faint, tremulous, liquid sweetness, the Song-Sparrow its changing pulsations of more positive and varied joy, and the Robin its cheery and superabundant vitality. The later birds of the season, suggesting no such fine-drawn sensations, yet identify themselves with their chosen haunts, so that we cannot think of the one without the other.
The voice itself may be strong or tiny, that of a seraph, or that of a song-sparrow; the range and power of combination may be Beethoven's, or only such as are found in the hum of bees; but in this genuineness, this depth of ancestry and purity of growth, this unmistakable issue under the patronage of Nature, there is a test of genius that cannot vary. He is not inimitable who imitates.
A northeast storm from the southwest! there is no bitterer satire than this. It lasts three days. After that the weather changes into something winter-like. A solitary song-sparrow, without a note of joy, hops along the snow to the dining-room window, and, turning his little head aside, looks up. He is hungry and cold.
It brought back dear memories of glorious April mornings on Long Island, when through the singing of robin and song-sparrow comes the piercing cadence of the meadowlark; and of the far northland woods in June, fragrant with the breath of pine and balsam-fir, where sweetheart sparrows sing from wet spruce thickets and rapid brooks rush under the drenched and swaying alder- boughs.
Like the shadow of fate the cow-bird suddenly appears, and has doubtless soon ferreted out her cradle. In a certain grassy bank not far from where I am writing, at the foot of an unsuspecting fern, a song-sparrow has built her nest.
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