FRIENDS IN FEATHERS 



devious course through the valley and there were many pools 

 that lay filled throughout the summer. 



In all the surrounding country, here was the one spot ex- 

 actly filling the requirements of an ideal location for Wood 

 Thrushes; so when those notes of bell-toned sweetness sounded, 

 evening after evening, from the same tree, it was evident that 

 somewhere in the shrubs beneath that divine singer there 

 brooded a bright-eyed brown-coated mate to whom he was pour- 

 ing out his heart in notes of tenderness and cheer. 



The following morning, starting an hour earlier than usual 

 and hitching my little black horse to a telephone pole on the 

 levee, I climbed down the embankment. My way in the thicket 

 could be made only by stooping beneath the branches, creeping 

 between bushes, and sometimes using my hatchet. My feet 

 sank deep into the damp muck beneath the thick layer of dead 

 leaves; there were many small pools to avoid and once my course 

 changed entirely, because a great flood of a few months previous 

 had filled the whole valley with one broad, raging torrent that 

 overwashed the levee. Lodged in underbrush were a drowned 

 cow and some pigs. 



When the tree from which my bird had sung was located, I 

 began searching around it, in an ever-widening circle, for the 

 nest. The first thing I found was a big carp, firmly impaled at 

 the height of my head on a thorn tree and dry as any herring 

 another result of the flood. My next trophy was the nest of a pair 

 of Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, which defied the rules of naturalists, 

 because they did not build in a wild grape-vine, where grape- 

 vines were plentiful, nor did they build of last year's dried grape- 

 feelers, but of sticks and twigs. Then I found the largest 

 Cecropia cocoon of my experience; in a few weeks there would 

 emerge from it a beautiful moth; but that was so high above my 

 head it could not be secured that morning. I cut it a week later 



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