United States or Zimbabwe ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
There were times when the piazza was as far out-of-doors as it was expedient to venture. But even then I was not without excellent feathered society. The most familiar of our door-yard friends, however, to my surprise, were the yellow-rumped warblers.
Hence, as we stood about our camp-fire one afternoon looking out over the lake, I was the only one to see a little commotion in the water, half hidden by the near branches, as of some tiny swimmer struggling to reach the shore. Rushing to its rescue in the canoe, I found a yellow-rumped warbler, quite exhausted, clinging to a twig that hung down into the water.
According to my own observation, the number of species of warblers which one living in the middle districts sees, on their return in the fall, is very small compared with the number he may observe migrating north in the spring. The yellow-rumped warblers are the most noticeable of all in Autumn. They come about the streets and garden, and seem especially drawn to dry, leafless trees.
A little mite of a creature, like the hermit-thrush, he fills the wild, remote woods of the North with melody, and has not been known to breed further south than Lake Mohunk. The brown creeper and the yellow-rumped warbler I will merely mention. Both migrate to the North in the spring, and the latter is only an occasional winter resident.
Hence, as we stood about our camp-fire one afternoon looking out over the lake, I was the only one to see a little commotion in the water, half hidden by the near branches, as of some tiny swimmer struggling to reach the shore. Rushing to its rescue in the canoe, I found a yellow-rumped warbler, quite exhausted, clinging to a twig that hung down into the water.
The yellow-rumped warbler I saw, and one of the kinglets was leading its lisping brood about through the spruces. In every opening the white-throated sparrow abounded, striking up his clear sweet whistle, at times so loud and sudden that one's momentary impression was that some farm boy was approaching, or was secreted there behind the logs.
To my surprise, saw a chewink also, and the yellow-rumped warbler. The purple finch was there likewise, and the Carolina wren and brown creeper. In the higher, colder woods not a bird was to be seen.
The pines were scrubby, what are known as the loblolly pines, and from ten to twelve inches through at the butt. In a low bottom, among some red cedars, I saw robins and several hermit thrushes, besides the yellow-rumped warbler. That night, as the sun went down on the one hand, the full moon rose up on the other, like the opposite side of an enormous scale.
"And bayberry is that low sweet-smelling shrub that we gather in the rocky pasture, to fill the great jar in the fireplace," said Olive. "Some call it candle-berry, and others wax-myrtle." "Yes," said Rap, "and these Warblers stay round that pasture in winter as long as there is a berry left." The Yellow-rumped Warbler Length about five and a half inches
You may have been his friend for years, but the next time you go into the woods he will likely enough put you to shame by singing something not so much as hinted at in your description. I thought I knew the song of the yellow-rumped warbler, having listened to it many times, a slight and rather characterless thing, nowise remarkable.
Word Of The Day