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Updated: June 9, 2025
A great humble-bee, sheltered under the same fern as myself, shut his eyes at every flash; a grasshopper had sheltered itself under its great green branches, and some poor little crickets had scrambled up a poppy to save themselves from drowning. But what was most frightful was a nest of warblers quite close to us in a bush.
Slight rainstorms are likely to be encountered in a trip round the mountain, but one may easily find shelter beneath well-thatched trees that shed the rain like a roof. Then the shining of the wet leaves is delightful, and the steamy fragrance, and the burst of bird song from a multitude of thrushes and finches and warblers that have nests in the chaparral.
Robins do not breed in flocks, but in pairs. Every gas is a vacuum to every other gas; and every locality is a vacuum to the different species of birds that breed there. The seed-eaters, the fruit-eaters, the insect-eaters, and the omnivorous feeders, like the robin in other words, the sparrows, the flycatchers, the warblers may and do all live together in harmony in the same narrow area.
I think it very probable, mine having been only flying visits, though extending over several years and at various times of year, I may have omitted some birds, especially amongst the smaller Warblers and the Pipits, and perhaps amongst the occasional Waders.
The boys got their share and a big share but the biggest share, by all odds, was eaten by the birds the blackbirds, who lived there very comfortably all the year, and sang in return the best they could; the orioles, pretty birds of passage, who helped them in summer, and the sparrows, and the warblers of every variety; and the tomtits, swarms of them, with feathers as thick as your fingers, and they hung on the branches and pecked at a grape or scratched a pear veritable little beasts of prey, whose only "thank you" was a shrill cry like a saw.
Never in my experience has there been a worse spring season than that of 1903 for the birds, more especially for the short-winged migrants. In April I looked for the woodland warblers and found them not, or saw but a few of the commonest kinds. It was only too easy to account for this rarity.
"This habit of travelling by night has caused a great many of these beautiful Warblers to lose their lives, for they often fly against telegraph wires, high steeples, and lighthouse towers, and are killed.
I think well of old man Barberry, too; better I fancy than he does of me. I admire his stocky growth which has a sturdy grace of its own, and I love him for the birds that he shelters, the yellow warblers that love to build their cottony nests in his arms. But he was born in the pasture long before I was and he usually resents my advances.
At the same station I recently had a very different experience. Some weeks ago I noticed one of these warblers fly with a straw in its beak to a place on a steep bank under a small bush. I could not see what it was doing there, but in a few seconds it emerged with the bill empty. Shortly afterwards it returned with another straw.
"It is wool scraped from the stalks of young ferns," said the Doctor; "the soft brown wool that is wrapped round the leaves to keep them warm in their winter sleep until they stretch out of the ground and feel the warmth of the sun. The little Warblers gather it in their beaks and mat it into a sort of felt." "There is something else in the nest-lining that looks like feathers," said Nat.
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