38 THE BIRDS ABOUT Us. 



had them within arm's length, and when so near, to 

 look at me with a curious twist of the head and ex- 

 pression of satisfaction, as much as to say, " I'm glad 

 I'm not such a looking thing as that ;" and well they 

 may be. 



Thoreau, under date of October 4, records, 



" The birds seem to delight in these first fine days of the fall, in 

 the warm, hazy light, robins, bluebirds (in families on the almost 

 bare elms), phcebes, and probably purple finches. I hear half-strains 

 of many of them, as the song-sparrow, bluebird, etc., and the sweet 

 phe-bee of the chickadee. Now the year itself begins to be ripe, 

 ripened by the frost like a persimmon." 



Again, he says, 



"As I stood looking, I heard a smart tche-day-day-day close to 

 my ear, and, looking up, saw four or five chickadees which had come 

 to scrape acquaintance with me, hopping amid the alders within three 

 or four feet of me. I had heard them farther off at first, and they 

 had followed me along the hedge. They day-day 'd and lisped their 

 faint notes alternately, and then, as if to make me think they had 

 some other errand than to peer at me, they pecked the dead twigs, 

 the little top-heavy, black-crowned, volatile fellows." 



The above tells the whole story of a chickadee's 

 winter life, and no professional naturalist ever told it 

 half so well. 



It is to be regretted that the Crested Titmouse is not 

 a New England bird. Emerson and Thoreau would 

 have made good use of it. Strangely enough, Wilson 

 says but little about it, and Nuttall goes extensively 

 into the matter of its song, but nothing else. In 

 New Jersey this bird is a resident, and whatever the 

 weather, is not to be found skulking. I have seen 

 one clinging to the very top of a tall shell-bark in the 



