204 NATURE vSTUDY. 



The Transcription of Bird Songs. 



BY FREDERICK W. BATCHELDER. 



The attempt to describe the song of a bird is one of the 

 most baffling experiences that comes to the student of bird 

 life. Literature teems with descriptive passages, frantic, 

 rhapsodical, nonsensical for the most part ; occasionally 

 sincere and suggestive, if not accurate ; very rarely just 

 and exact. As in other matters pertaining to the domain 

 of musical and individual taste, training, quickness of per- 

 ception, keenness of S3aiipath5% all these things influence 

 the mind of the writer and give color and shape to his 

 thought. Modern professed authors of works on nature 

 study would of course be expected to come nearer to 

 achieving a success in this line, and it is doubtless true 

 that they have done so. Yet it must be admitted that 

 their attempts are for the most part very unsatisfactory. 

 For my own part I am glad of it ! I am glad there is to be 

 something left to us which is not likely to submit to quan- 

 titative and qualitative analysis, which cannot be weighed 

 nor measured nor made into a dried or stuffed specimen. 

 Without some such vivifying element of uncertainty, liter- 

 ature would be in danger of strangulation at the hands of 

 analysis. There is more need than ever of romance in this 

 matter-of-fact century, this era of machinery-worship ; so 

 let us be thankful that there will alwa3's be the romance of 

 the birds, with the marvels of flight and of plumage and of 

 love-making and of song, a new volume every year, ever 

 fresh and .soul-inspiring, so long as the world shall last. 



It is not, however, the description but the transcription 

 of bird songs which I propose to treat of at present. At 

 the outset I am compelled to admit that I approach this 

 subject with less confidence than when I began to study it 

 several years since. It is easy enough to rhapsodize about 



