Bluebird. 49 



BLUEBIRD. 



What delightful suggestions are wafted into our minds 

 with the touching carol of the bluebird!^ Its first faint, 

 wind-borne warble is a herald of bluer skies and sunnier 

 days, though the author often appears in our latitude be- 

 fore the departure of winter, and frequently encounters 

 bleak winds and leaden skies ere spring exerts its full 

 sway. However, we who love the birds look eagerly for 

 the appearance of the bluebird, and we regard its arrival 

 as an earnest of the brighter days certainly at hand. How 

 can we fail to regard its azure except as a fragment from 

 the blue of the summer noonday arch, or its white except 

 as a shred from the floating fleeces of the spring midday? 

 Surely the bare outlines of the maple in whose top the 

 first bluebird is warbling are speedily to be clothed in a 

 living garb of* green. We think of 



<<* « « deep shadows on the grass, 

 Of meadows where in sun the cattle graze, 



Where, as the breezes pass, 

 The gleaming rushes lean a thousand ways." 



And so we read in the tender utterances of the bluebird 

 a message from the very heart of summer, and we seem to 

 hear the gentle rippling of the poet's returning flood of 

 life as it creeps upon the shore of our environments. 



The first bluebirds of the season appear in the open 

 regions of central Illinois early in February. The date of 

 their earliest arrival noted in my journal is February 3, 

 1884, and the date of their latest arrival recorded by me 

 is February 25, 1881. Some observers in this locality, 

 however, report the residence of the bluebirds through the 

 winter. I have never seen them about this neighborhood 

 in midwinter, the open prairies here doubtless affording 

 them no suitable shelter from our chilling winds. Yet 

 they remain in numbers in the heavy forests of the Mis- 

 sissippi, Ohio, and other river bottoms in the southern 

 part of our State, where they find supplies of berries 

 of the mistletoe, sumach, scarlet thorn, holly, besides wild 

 grapes, and a few hardy insects. The notes of Mr. O. 

 Widmann upon "Bird Migration in the Mississippi Val- 

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