FIELD AND STUDY 



in our letters to our friends. It is an old story with 

 a new interest. The birds have lived, and we have 

 lived to meet again the old scenes. They bring us 

 once more the assurance of the unfailing return of 

 spring, and the never-ending joy and fecundity of 

 life. Many of them are very likely the identical 

 robins or song sparrows that charmed us last sea- 

 son, but they come back to us with a new story to 

 tell, and new service to render. They have passed 

 the winter in strange lands, and we may have done 

 so, too; but now, on the home acres, our lives meet 

 and mingle once more. 



Does that brief visitation in May of the rarer 

 warblers ever become an old story? We do not see 

 them when they come, nor when they depart; they 

 are here eagerly feeding in the trees in the morning 

 as if they dropped down out of heaven with the 

 rising sun, as doubtless they did; and they are gone 

 in a day or two, as if they had vanished again in 

 the heavens at the going-down of the sun, as is 

 very surely the case. All night they travel through 

 the trackless upper air above the sleeping earth, 

 their pole-star the breeding-impulse. Unfavorable 

 weather conditions will cause them to tarry longer 

 with us some seasons than others. This season 

 (1916) the bay-breasted, the Blackburnian, and 

 the Canada warblers lingered nearly a week with 

 us, and the veery, or Wilson's thrush, lingered and 

 sang in unwonted places. 

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