TALKS WITH YOUNG OBSERVERS 287 



A French missionary, said to have been a good 

 naturalist, writing in this country in 1634, makes 

 this curious statement about our hummingbird: 

 "This bird, as one might say, dies, or, to speak 

 more correctly, puts itself to sleep in the month of 

 October, living fastened to some little branchlet 

 of a tree by the feet, and wakes up in the month of 

 April when the flowers are in abundance, and some- 

 times later, and for that cause is called in the Mexi- 

 can tongue the * Revived. ' ' How could the good 

 missionary ever have been led to make such a state- 

 ment ? The actual finding of the bird wintering in 

 that way would have been the proof science demands, 

 and nothing short of that. 



A boy in the interior of the State wrote to me the 

 other day that while in the field looking after Indian 

 arrow-heads he had seen a brown and gray bird with 

 a black mark running through the eye, and that the 

 bird walked instead of hopped. He said it had a 

 high, shrill whistle and flew like a meadowlark. 

 This boy is a natural observer; he noted that the 

 bird was a walker. Most of the birds hop or jump, 

 keeping both feet together. This boy heard his 

 bird afterward in the edge of the evening, and "fol- 

 lowed it quite a ways, but could not get a glimpse 

 of it." He had failed to note the crest on its head 

 and the black spot on its breast, for doubtless his 

 strange bird was the shore lark, a northern bird, that 

 comes to us in flocks in the late fall or early winter, 

 and in recent years has become a permanent resident 

 of certain parts of New York State. I have heard it 



