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Updated: June 28, 2025
There were warblers, cardinals, tanagers, waxwings, song-sparrows, and chickadees. Flitting droves of bush-tit dropped on to slender weeds, scarcely bending them, so light were they. Then in a minute they were gone. In the swamps or marshes were countless red-winged blackbirds. The most unobservant person could not help but see birds here.
Little cajoling breezes scuttled around corners and down thoroughfares, blowing good humor in and bad humor out. Birds of passage song-sparrows, tanagers, bluebirds, and orioles even a pair of cardinals stopped wherever they could find a tree or bush from which to pipe a friendly greeting.
The wild flowers all about were so close to these that all their perfumes blended, and the phlox and pinks could see their own cousins but a few feet away. The short path ran through a clump of bushes but a few yards from the creek. In these bushes song-sparrows and "chippy-birds" built their nests.
Instead of the chipping sparrow everywhere, one sees the lazuli-painted finch, or the Rocky Mountain bluebird; in place of the American robin's song, most common of sounds in country neighborhoods on the Atlantic side of the continent, is heard the silver bell of the towhee bunting, sometimes called marsh robin, or the harsh "chack" of Brewer's blackbird; the music that opens sleepy eyes at daybreak is not a chorus of robins and song-sparrows, but the ringing notes of the chewink, the clear-cut song of the Western meadow-lark, or the labored utterance of the black-headed grosbeak; it is not by the melancholy refrain of the whippoorwill or the heavenly hymns of thrushes that the approach of night is heralded, but by the cheery trill of the house wren or the dismal wail of the Western wood-pewee.
The migratory tide of robins, song-sparrows, phoebes, and other early birds was still moving northward; but multitudes had dropped out of line, having reached their haunts of the previous year. The sunny hillsides and its immediate vicinity seemed a favorite lounging-place both for the birds of passage and for those already at home.
It should contain the natural history of the woods around my shifting camp for every month in the year. It should tie their astronomy, botany, physiology, meteorology, picturesque, and poetry together. No bird, no bug, no bud, should be forgotten on his day and hour. To-day the chickadees, the robins, bluebirds and song-sparrows sang to me.
The Hiltons always waked early. So did their neighbors, the crows and song-sparrows and robins, the light-footed foxes and squirrels in the woods. When John Hilton waked, before five o'clock, an hour later than usual because he had sat up so late, he opened the house door and came out into the yard, crossing the short green turf hurriedly as if the day were too far spent for any loitering.
Have you twenty pounds to spend and are you thinking of spending it all in diamonds to take home as a gift to your mother?" "Oh, no, I have only one pound to spend, and mamma wouldn't wish me to spend all that upon her." "Then let's talk of something else; song-sparrows or sand-peeps or sea-gulls, or something not so sordid as gold and diamonds. Look at that yacht out there, isn't it a corker?
One day a tragedy was enacted a few yards from where I was sitting with a book; two song-sparrows trying to defend their nest against a black snake. The curious, interrogating note of a chicken who had suddenly come upon the scene in his walk caused me to look up from my reading.
Some blackbirds were calling sweetly in a clump of bushes, and song-sparrows sang as if they had but one hour in which to crowd the whole raptures of the spring. As I pressed through the budding bayberry bushes to reach some milk-white sprays of shadbush which grew by the water-side, I startled three curfews. They flew away, trailing their long legs, and whistling fine and clear.
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