friends of other years. In the maple next the oriole home site was the empty 

 tenement of a warbling vireo. My companions had visited the valley the year 

 before, and had found the vireo nest when it held its treasure of eggs. They 

 told me how the father bird relieved his patient wife of her household duties at 

 intervals during the day, and how all the while that he sat upon the nest he 

 sang sweetly the warbling song that gives him his name. Somewhere in this 

 habit of the vireo there is hidden a lesson for humankind. Not much search- 

 ing is needed to find it. 



The Kankakee flows along not more than a hundred yards from our farm- 

 house headquarters. We started for the river bank, but found bird-life so 

 abundant that we made little more than half the journey before the breakfast 

 bell summoned us. The field sparrow, the little fellow with the red bill and the 

 chestnut crown, sang his sweet note from the fence post and did not appear 

 at all discouraged because his brother song sparrow was giving a much better 

 entertainment within a rod. From a little patch of bushes in the damp pasture 

 came the call, "Witchety-witchety-witchety," and in a moment a Maryland 

 yellow-throat showed his black-masked face to us through the tender green of 

 the foliage. The yellow-throat is a beauty, but one cannot say as much for his 

 voice. There were some chewinks, perhaps better known as towhees, in the 

 pasture, and one of them kindly sang for us. The towhee's song, it has always 

 seemed to me, has just about volume enough for a bird of half its size. But 

 then we mustn't expect too much ; the towhee wears a beautiful suit of black, 

 terra-cotta, and white, and he knows how to show it to advantage. He charms 

 our color sense, and we forgive him readily for not being a nightingale. 



The cow blackbird is despised above all feathered kind. It is a parasite, 

 building no nest of its own, but depositing its eggs in the homes of smaller birds. 

 The warblers are generally the ones imposed upon. They often seem unable to 

 detect the deception, and hatch the egg and rear the cow-bird to a sacrifice 

 of their own young. This habit is too well known to be dwelt upon. The 

 cow-bird, in the spring, has just one sweet note. That is to say, at times this 

 one note is sweet. If the bird tries to continue the performance it fails miser- 

 ably, producing something like the sound of a file drawn over a lemon-grater. 

 As we stood that May morning listening for a repetition of the yellow-throat's 

 "witchety," there came one liquid note from a treetop. In chorus we said, 

 "Cow-bird." The next instant there followed note after note of liquid beautv 

 from the same treetop, and shamefacedly wc looked at one another and said, 

 "Wood thrush." If greater ignominy can come to bird-students who have 

 haunted the fields for years than to mistake the note of one of America's 

 sweetest singers for that of the despised cow-bird, let it be named. The wood 

 thrush forgave us for the insult and heaped coals of fire on our heads by con- 

 tinuing his song as long as we staid to listen. 



The catbirds and the l)rown thrashers sang their medleys from the thicket. 



71 



