CITY BIRDS, 



TO us who dwell in cities, the hints that 

 nature gives of herself are so faint 

 and few that it scarcely occurs to us to try 

 and make a connected story of them. We 

 walk between our high walls day after day, 

 unheeding the weeds that grow for us in 

 the cracks of the pavement, oblivious of 

 the fact that through the slit between the 

 housetops we can see the stars come out 

 each night, aud perfectly unconscious of 

 those go-betweens of flowers and stars, the 

 song birds. Many a time have they looked 

 down from the tree tops on the corpses of 

 their cousins adorning the hats of one-half 

 the passing women, and heard the other 

 half murmur indignantly at the barbarous 

 custom, and vaguely wonder how those 

 same dead birds would look alive. " We 

 bird protectors," say they, "would so 

 gladly know our friends, but how can we ? 

 There are no birds here in the city but the 

 pigeons and English sparrows." 



Are there not ? We continue to walk 

 unheeding, till some day there flits before 

 our astonished eyes a stray woodpecker, 

 who shows us for five delightful minutes 

 his scarlet head, the brilliant black and 

 white of his plumage; you hear his energetic 

 hammering on the elm where he has lighted, 

 you see him walk around its stem as though 

 he owned it; a second later he is gone, 

 and " all creation widens in your view." 

 This is interesting. If there is one bird 

 here, there may be more; if the rest are as 

 handsome as this one, they are worth seeing, 

 and straightway you begin to look for them. 

 You strain your eyes among the dingy 

 trees, to be rewarded sometimes by a 

 glimpse of the warbling vireo; you extend 

 your walks to the suburbs, where in the 

 open space before the houses, you may 

 catch sight of whole troops of jolly robins, 

 hopping, running, gamboling on the grass 

 plots. At first you probably know not so 

 much as their name, but you begin to rea- 



lize that there is more to be seen here than 

 you had thought. Accordingly you hunt 

 out an old field-glass from your uncle's 

 army trunk, or you take an opera-glass, or 

 better yet, you take just your own eyes, 

 with the resolve to use them better than 

 ever before, and you begin to make morn- 

 ing excursions — the sooner after sunrise, 

 the better. 



When you have done this twice, you are 

 an enthusiast. You come in to breakfast 

 radiant, in raptures, having heard the jubi- 

 lant morning song of the robin, having 

 found a bluebird's nest in a decaying post 

 of the band pavillion in the park, or hav- 

 ing met your first waxwing which you recog- 

 nized at sight from the description in the 

 Audubon, and with which you are hopeless- 

 ly in love. This, at least, was very much 

 the way in which I began to observe. There 

 is probably no one in the United States 

 who knew so little about birds. 



For years the bluejays had been lighting 

 in an apotheosis of blue and white upon 

 the clothes-poles in the back yard; for 

 years the blackbirds had built and paired 

 in the steeple opposite; the pine grosbeak 

 on its southern journey had lit in the maple 

 outside my window, and the purple martins 

 sat in rows upon the telegraph wires, yet I 

 did not even know of their existence. It 

 was the sight of a family of robins that, late 

 one August, reminded me of other days and 

 oth^r scenes, in which I had known a lover 

 of birds, and thought to myself "Why should 

 not I too have friends among the birds?" 



It would take a book to tell all that I 

 learned in the next year, and how I learned 

 it. You know how I began, but before 

 long the city streets set too narrow bounds 

 to my explorations; the birds, though charm- 

 ing, were too few to satisfy my new-born 

 zeal for knowledge; it was unpleasant to 

 use a field-glass where there were more 

 spectators than birds, and impossible to 



