A BIRD MEDLEY 77 
most cases, Nature has given the song and the plu- 
mage to the other sex, and all the embellishing and 
acting is done by the male bird, 
I am always at home when I see the passenger 
pigeon. Few spectacles please me more than to see 
clouds of these birds sweeping across the sky, and 
few sounds are more agreeable to my ear than their 
lively piping and calling in the spring woods. They 
come in such multitudes, they people the whole air; 
they cover townships, and make the solitary places 
gay as with a festival. The naked woods are sud- 
denly blue as with fluttering ribbons and scarfs, and 
vocal as with the voices of children. Their arrival 
is always unexpected. We know April will bring 
the robins and May the bobolinks, but we do not 
know that either they or any other month will 
bring the passenger pigeon. Sometimes years elapse 
and scarcely a flock is seen. Then, of a sudden, 
some March or April they come pouring over the 
horizon from the south or southwest, and for a few 
days the land is alive with them. 
The whole race seems to be collected in a few 
vast swarms or assemblages. Indeed, I have some- 
times thought there was only one such in the United 
States, and that it moved in squads, and regiments, 
and brigades, and divisions, like a giant army. The 
scouting and foraging squads are not unusual, and 
every few years we see larger bodies of them, but 
rarely indeed do we witness the spectacle of the 
whole vast tribe in motion. Sometimes we hear of 
them in Virginia, or Kentucky and Tennessee; then 
