drop into the damp grasses along the edge of the south Lincoln Park pond. The 

 sparrows discovered the big bog-trotter as soon as I did. They weighed down 

 the willow branches just above his head, and were all talking at once and at the 

 tops of their voices. They asked the bittern what he was doing there, what right 

 he had on sacred sparrow soil, where he got his long legs, and why he needed 

 a bill the size of a plumber's. They questioned him and jeered at him for five 

 minutes, but he answered not a word. Finally the stakedriver, as the bittern is 

 called in swampy society, became tired of the noise and fiew to the little willow- 

 planted island in the middle of the pond. A small bird rarely attacks a larger 

 one when the object of attack is at rest. On the ground or in a tree the assaulted 

 one can readily use its weapons of offense and defense. On the wing, however, 

 it is a different matter. No sooner had the bittern left the ground in lumbering 

 flight than the sparows descended upon him in a cloud, each one pecking the 

 hapless visitor in passing. Some of the assailants fairly rode on his back using 

 both beak and claw to his torment and confusion. When the bittern reached a 

 resting place at the island's edge, he was in a state of mind. In the broad 

 stretches of his native swamp the English sparrow was an unknown quantity. 

 There were swamp sparrows there to be sure, but they were an American product, 

 musical, harmless, and good fellows withal; surely these ill-mannered creatures 

 could be no kin of theirs. 



Once lighted, the bittern turned from the water and faced inland. He was 

 looking squarely into the eyes of a score of his sparrow persecutors. He took 

 one comically awkward step forward and made a drive with his powerful beak 

 at one of his tormentors. The blow fell far short of the mark, but had the beak 

 been a foot longer, the alert sparrow would have been out of range before that 

 sharp battering ram could strike home. The bittern was attended by a train 

 of sparrows all the day long. He tried every part of the south pond's banks. 

 He was allowed neither to eat nor to rest. I saw the sparrow horde still harrying 

 the bird as I passed the place at sunset. The next day the visitor had disappeared, 

 and I "hope that his night's flight landed him safely among the marsh wrens and 

 the red-winged blackbirds of the swamp stretches which he calls his home. 



Lincoln Park, Chicago, has become known as the highway of the warblers. 

 From the time that the first myrtle bird appears in April until the last "Cape May" 

 has passed north in the month whose name it bears, the park is a rich field for 

 the study of this most interesting family. The warbler, whether you find it in 

 Lincoln Park or along the spring flood-burdened banks of the Illinois River, has 

 a beauty and a character all its own. There are bird-students who seek other 

 fields of study for other birds, but in the full tide of the warbler migration they 

 turn their steps to the city's parks. It is not at all unusual in a good warbler 

 year to find every park tree that offers a food supply of insects bearing a burden 

 of these little creatures, in gold, brown, red, yellow, black, blue, and scarlet. 

 Some of them, with seemingly barely feather surface enough to show one color, 

 are attired in almost every hue known to the eye of man. 



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