The yellow warblers nest by scores within the limits of the parks of all 

 Northern cities. I found the nest of this bird once fastened to the slender stem 

 of a rose-bush in the rose-garden at Jackson Park, Chicago. It was not more 

 than three feet from the ground, and at the edge of a walk upon which passed 

 the thousands of visitors who went daily to enjoy the bloom of the flowers. The 

 little home was flanked on either side by a great blossom, while another opened its 

 petals just above. Within the space of a few cubic inches there was as much 

 of beauty as it is the province of this world to hold anywhere within like restricted 

 limits. The people poked inquisitively into the warblers' housekeeping, but the 

 birds paid little heed, though their hearts probably fluttered with an unutterable 

 fear. The mother bird fed the little ones while trespassing human beings lifted 

 the red rose roof to look into the nest. Though disaster was feared, the devoted 

 parents finally successfully led the young forth for their first flight in life. 



The bluebirds, the scarlet tanagers, the cerulean warblers, the Baltimore 

 orioles, the robins, nearly the whole tribe of native sparrows, the woodpeckers, 

 and not infrequently the hawks and the owls, find rest and food within sound of 

 the clanging bells of surface cars and of the rumble of the wheels of elevated 

 roads. I once flushed a woodcock at the base of the Lincoln Park statue of the 

 Indian pony and rider, and for three weeks of one spring month a wild wood 

 duck rested on the waters of a pond in the park and showed its brilliant plumage 

 to thousands of visitors. 



It is to Lincoln Park that I owe the first chance since boyhood of seeing a 

 living passenger pigeon. There are men of middle age today who remember 

 Avhen the flocks of wild pigeons darkened the sun, and when every gun in the 

 land brought down its share, and more than its share, of the creatures that flew 

 low and blindly to tlieir destruction. There were so many millions of the birds 

 forty years ago that no one dreamed that the day would come within a generation 

 when a single pigeon sitting on a tree in a city park might be thought to be the last 

 of its race. No satisfactory explanation has ever been given for the disappearance 

 of the passenger pigeon. Today it is well-nigh as rare as the great auk, and the 

 reported occurrence of one of the birds in any part of the country is a matter of 

 scientific interest. 



The pigeon that I met on that April morning in the year 1894, in Lincoln 

 Park, was perched on the limb of a soft maple and was facing the rising sun. 

 It was a male bird in perfect plumage. There were no trees between him and 

 the lake to break the sun's rays from his breast. Every feather shone, and the 

 bird's neck was gem-like in its brilliancy. Tennyson needed no special poetic 

 license to write of the "Burnished dove." I watched the pigeon through a glass 

 for fully ten minutes. A park loiterer approached and said he wished that he 

 had a gun; that it was the first wild pigeon he had seen in thirty years. That 

 man had no soul above pigeon pie. 



A city park is not the safest resting-place for a creature upon whom may 



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