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Updated: July 20, 2025
Its constant supply of food, its shelter from the winds on every side, and its admirable hiding-places for nests, made this warm, sunny corner the chosen home of many birds. Warblers were there from early spring, heard, though not always seen. Veeries nested on its borders, woodpeckers haunted the dead trees at the edge, and all the birds of the neighborhood paid visits to it.
Curved-bill wood-hewers, birds the size and somewhat the coloration of veeries, but with long, slender sickle-bills, were common in the little garden back of the house; their habits were those of creepers, and they scrambled with agility up, along, and under the trunks and branches, and along the posts and rails of the fence, thrusting the bill into crevices for insects.
From the time I left my hotel until I was fairly above the dwarf spruces below the summit of Lafayette, I was never for many minutes together out of the hearing of thrush music. Four of our five summer representatives of the genus Turdus took turns, as it were, in the serenade. The veeries Wilson's thrushes greeted me before I stepped off the piazza.
I had found out what sort of places the veeries in this neighborhood liked. After that I never went into the woods, on whatever errand bent, but I kept my eyes open for the chosen situation. I examined dozens of promising spots, and I found nests that had been used, which proved that I was on the right track, and kept up my courage.
The far left invites one to a wild tangle of fallen trees and undergrowth, where veeries sing, and enchanting but maddening warblers lure the bird-lover on, to scramble over logs, wade into swamps, push through chaotic masses of branches, and, while using both hands to make her way, incidentally offer herself a victim to the thirsty inhabitants whose stronghold it is.
The way back was through a narrow path beside the oven-bird's pretty domed nest, then between the tangle of wild-berry bushes and saplings, where a cuckoo had set up housekeeping, and where veeries and warblers had successfully hidden their nests, tantalizing us with calls and songs from morning till night; from thence through the garden, past the kitchen door, home.
On every side the robins shouted their joy from the treetops, the bob-o'-links tinkled their fairy bells as they wheeled above the clover-fields; and from the dainty line of white-stemmed birches that guarded the stream came the mingled even-song of the frogs and the veeries. There was but one pedestrian on Champlain's Road this quiet evening.
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