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Suppose a bird should open his mouth and throat as widely as possible, hold all his lyrical organs steady, and blow his windpipe with all the strength his lungs could command, it is obvious that the effect would be a clear, loud, uniform whistle, such as the meadowlark sends across the green fields.
"For Bobby Bobolink can pass the singing test as easily as flying." "I hope so," Buddy Brown Thrasher retorted. "I promise you that I'll be present when Bobby sings before the Society. And if his singing isn't what it ought to be, you can depend on me to know it." Well, Mr. Meadowlark couldn't object to that. So he told Buddy Brown Thrasher that his promise was fair enough. And then Mr.
But Bobby Bobolink told him that that wasn't what he meant. "I'm afraid," he explained, "my wife may not consent!" IT had never occurred to Mr. Meadowlark that Bobby Bobolink's wife might object to her husband's joining the Singing Society. But Bobby seemed doubtful. "I'll have to ask her," he said. "You see, we're just about to build ourselves a house.
He said that in his opinion Bobby Bobolink was the finest singer that had ever come to Pleasant Valley. And Mrs. Bobolink was so pleased that she confessed she hoped her husband could take his test just as soon as possible. "He shall take it to-morrow!" Mr. Meadowlark promised. THE time had come for Bobby Bobolink to sing before the Pleasant Valley Singing Society. Mr.
The porcupine behaves in the Rockies just as he does in the Catskills; the deer and the moose and the black bear and the beaver of the Pacific slope are almost identical in their habits and traits with those of the Atlantic slope. In my observations of the birds of the far West, I went wrong in my reckoning but once: the Western meadowlark has a new song.
Here as you watch, the swift winged swallows dart from their homes in the steep bank of the stream; the kingfisher sounds his discordant rattle and hangs poised in mid air as he gazes into the waters below; the woodbine like a staunch friend still clings round the oak or hangs out its crimson banner in autumn; the meadowlark walks sedately on the vast coils of the serpent calling, "Spring o' the year," or as we fancied, "they are not here," as he did on that first morning.
Nobody ever drew from it, and from the howling of the wolves, the honking of the geese, the calls of the ducks, the strange cries of the cranes as they soared with motionless wings high overhead, or rowed their way on with long slow strokes of their great wings, or danced their strange reels and cotillions in the twilight; and from the myriad voices of curlew, plover, gopher, bob-o-link, meadowlark, dick-cissel, killdeer and the rest day-sounds and night-sounds, dawn-sounds and dusk-sounds more inspiration than did the stolid Dutch boy plodding west across Iowa that spring of 1855, with his fortune in his teams of cows, in the covered wagon they drew, and the deed to his farm in a flat packet of treasures in a little iron-bound trunk among them a rain-stained letter and a worn-out woman's shoe.
These still, hazy, brooding mid-April mornings, when the farmer first starts afield with his plow, when his boys gather the buckets in the sugar-bush, when the high-hole calls long and loud through the hazy distance, when the meadowlark sends up her clear, silvery shaft of sound from the meadow, when the bush sparrow trills in the orchard, when the soft maples look red against the wood, or their fallen bloom flecks the drying mud in the road, such mornings are about the most exciting and suggestive of the whole year.
The third warm day, and, behold, all the principal performers come rushing in, song sparrows, cow blackbirds, grackles, the meadowlark, cedar-birds, the phbe-bird, and, hark! what bird laughter was that? the robins, hurrah! the robins!
The birds that come in March, as the bluebird, the robin, the song sparrow, the starling, build in April; the April birds, such as the brown thrasher, the barn swallow, the chewink, the water-thrush, the oven-bird, the chippy, the high-hole, the meadowlark, build in May, while the May birds, the kingbird, the wood thrush, the oriole, the orchard starling, and the warblers, build in June.
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