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They usually precede the white-throats north in the spring, but a few linger and breed in the high altitude of the Catskills. When the sun shines hot the sparrow in front of my door makes herself into a sunshade to protect her nestlings. She pants with the heat, and her young pant too; they would probably perish were not the direct rays of the sun kept from them.
But this too was easier said than done, for the horse found himself in very pleasant quarters, and refused to leave them; there was the sweetest of pasture all round him in the shape of juicy, milky, corn-ears; the long green stems would have made a pleasant resting-place, and then there were the larks carolling above him, and the white-throats and yellow-hammers twittering on all sides; while the sun shone warmly enough to make work tedious and repose delightful; so that altogether the horse did not feel disposed to return to his hard bondage of drawing the hay waggon, so heavily laden that he had to put out all his strength to draw it over the soil yielding surface of the field; and he showed this as plainly as he could by refusing to "come then."
Perhaps this custom of nesting together in adjacent trees and using the same one year after year is not so free from cares and jealousies as the solitary plan of the little white-throats here. Last March I was standing near a rookery, noting the contention and quarrelling, the downright tyranny, and brigandage which is carried on there.
But as time went on and no sign was ever found of the Weeoombeens, the black fellows became sure that the brothers had turned into the little white-throated birds which had sat on the bush by the hole, so, they supposed, to escape their vengeance. And ever afterwards the little white-throats were called Weeoombeens.
Broad-meshed nets were hung on either side of a path on the fringe of a plantation, and in the middle of the path were placed cages containing the decoys, whose songs soon attracted all the birds of the neighbourhood red-breasts, white-throats, black-caps, nightingales, fig-peckers of all sorts.
Broad-meshed nets were hung on either side of a path on the fringe of a plantation, and in the middle of the path were placed cages containing the decoys, whose songs soon attracted all the birds of the neighbourhood red-breasts, white-throats, black-caps, nightingales, fig-peckers of all sorts.
Nightingales, blackcaps and white-throats also nested there, and were louder and more emphatic in their protests when approached.
Thrushes are fond of the ash, and sing much on its boughs. The beech is the woodpecker's tree so soon as it grows old birch one of the missel-thrush's. In blackthorn the long-tailed tit builds the domed nest every one admires. Under the cover of brambles white-throats build. Nightingales love hawthorn, and so does every bird.
They belong in fields and pastures, in roadside thickets, or by fence-rows and old stone-walls bordered with barberry bushes and alders. But these white-throats are children of the wilderness. It is one charm of their music that it always comes, or seems to come, from such a distance, from far up the mountain-side, or from the inaccessible depths of some ravine.
He was still there in the afternoon, and I had hopes of his remaining through the winter; but I never could find him afterwards. Ten days prior to this I had gone to Longwood on a special hunt for this same sparrow, remembering a certain peculiarly cozy hollow where, six or eight years before, a little company of song sparrows and white-throats had passed a rather severe winter.
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