WHAT BIRDS SAY AND SING 247 



song of the nightingale, the call of the quail, and 

 the notes of the cuckoo. If this bird can be said 

 to have a song, it is merely a repetition of its call 

 notes differently accented and inflected. 



A bird which reminds me of the cuckoo in the 

 handling of his notes is the whippoorwill, named 

 from his cries singly uttered. These constitute 

 a call note. In trouble, he hisses almost like a 

 hawk. In giving a musical performance, he em- 

 ploys the "Whip-poor-will," cry. The notes are 

 differently accented by different birds, but most 

 of the time in a show performance they manage to 

 quaver the "poor" and one can hear a sort of 

 catch of breath before the falling note, when the 

 quaver is unusually long. 



A distinctive note, without which no summer at 

 the Cabin, north, would be perfect, is the clearly 

 intoned, incisive cry of the scarlet tanager. With 

 the Cabin site, which included the song sparrow, 

 there was a tanager thrown in for good measure. 

 The bird does not truly belong to me. He does 

 his courting and food hunting in Wildflower Woods, 

 but he builds his nest every year in a maple tree 

 about six inches on my neighbour's side of the line 

 fence. His tribal call "Chip-bird, chip-bird!" 

 sounds constantly around the garage and through 

 the grounds as near to the Cabin as the woodshed. 

 I never have seen him visit the lake front even once. 

 If I wish to show him off to visitors in all the glory 

 of his bloody coat and black silk wings, I must 



