70 Bird -Lore 



from the great god Pan — charms us to this day. Curiously enough, too, the Laric 

 is apparently connected in the old Celtic mythology with a notion that its song 

 was of ill omen, and 'laverock' has the same significance. Alaudidce, from 

 Alauda, a supposedly Celtic word meaning the high song. "Insectivorous" 

 calls up a picture of the bird foraging over arable land in quest of its choice food, 

 and "migrator}" has in it all of the mystery and fascination of that marvelous 

 instinct of bird life. Scientific knowledge, aside from its recognized utility, 

 is thus an added power for appreciation. 



Ornithology has a literary background, as well as the larger background 

 of nature. Who has not some richly stored memories of Wilson or of Audubon? 

 To have come upon these books in the formative period of one's life was indeed 

 a happy circumstance. I remember one spring, many years ago, poring over 

 the second volume of The Birds of America. Each plate and its accompanying 

 text became a part of my mental life. And that May I saw my first Warbler — 

 a Chestnut-sided — an atom of the migratory wave, of which I then knew nothing, 

 swept, as I thought, by some miracle, into a solitary tree in the back yard of a 

 city residence. Audubon's account of this species was to the effect that he had 

 shot five of these birds one cold May morning in the year 1808, at Pottsgrove, 

 Pennsylvania. Whatever else he had written was for the moment forgotten. 

 I had seen the sixth individual of its kind, and I went to school that day in a state 

 of mind which only those who have had a like experience will understand. And 

 Wilson was a delight. An early edition of the 'American Ornithology' was 

 an heirloom in my family. It was deliciously musty, and the plates had made 

 copper-colored impressions on the opposite pages of the text. In the distribution 

 of things, these volumes drifted to me, and a turn of their old leaves still unlocks 

 a gate that opens on 'The Road to Yesterday.' 



Those of us who acquired a taste for ornitholog\- in the seventies can never 

 forget the 'Key to North American Birds,' 'Birds of the Northwest,' and Field 

 Ornithology', nor Samuels' 'Birds of New England', nor Baird, Brewer and 

 Ridgways' work, nor even the old Smithsonian 'Check-Hst.' 



This reminiscence suggests another background — that of history — the 

 change of habit and of habitat of many birds, as the forests were cleared and the 

 land became domesticated. I have elsewhere dwelt on this aspect of our bird 

 life in a paper published some years ago in the 'Popular Science Monthly.' In 

 that paper, entitled 'Birds of the Grasslands', I thought to show that certain 

 of our eastern field birds — those that are peculiar to the open tracts of countr\-, 

 like the Vesper, the Grasshopper and Savanna Sparrows, the Meadowlark 

 and the Dickcissel — might be a surplus population from the prairie region. The 

 history of the Dickcissel in the east gave a strong color to this view. It was either 

 this or a radical change of habit in the several species concerned. Today I do 

 not feel as sure of the solution as I did at the time of writing that paper. The 

 l)roblem to me, however, is one of very great interest — this effect of the settle- 

 ment of a country on its bird life. If I may be allowed to quote a paragraph 



