THE BEGINNINGS OF SPRING 129 



birds, I explained, either because the season had 

 advanced, or for some other reason, had pretty 

 nearly deserted the jungle of West Indian trees, 

 shrubs, and vines, for such this particular ham- 

 mock is, and had betaken themselves to the 

 more open country, especially to certain groves 

 of newly clad live-oaks, whose sturdy, wide- 

 spreading, rival-killing, trust-creating, monopolis- 

 tic arms, by the time the trees are of middle age, 

 have made for themselves a relatively sunny 

 clearing. 



I had been growing aware of this change in 

 the face of things for a week or two, and now, 

 when the newcomer has been three or four days 

 in Miami, the reality of it is conclusively estab- 

 lished. On two mornings of the present week, 

 for example, I found in a few minutes' stroll be- 

 fore breakfast a highly interesting flock of per- 

 haps twenty kinds of birds in the live-oaks and 

 other scattered trees on the very edge of the 

 city, within a hundred rods of my own doorstep : 

 fish crows, boat-tailed grackles, crow blackbirds, 

 red-headed woodpeckers, downy woodpeckers, 

 red-bellied woodpeckers, flickers, catbirds, mock- 

 ingbirds, house wrens, cardinals, palm warblers, 

 myrtle warblers, parula warblers, prairie war- 

 blers, black-and-white warblers, yellow-throated 

 warblers, solitary vireos, yellow-throated vireos, 



