Wayside Observations 151 



gorgeous scarlet tanager announced his arrival one morn- 

 ing with a lively sonnet, which was heard long before the 

 singer was seen; whereas his cousin, the summer tanager, 

 uttered only his quaint alarm-call, " Chip-burn, chip- 

 burn," and was excessively shy, dashing wildly away as 

 I approached, unwilling to vouchsafe a wisp of song. 

 Once he even pounced angrily upon his black-winged 

 relative and drove him to the other side of the hollow, 

 precisely as if he meant to say, " Your singing is out of 

 place, sir, and dangerous, too! Don't you know that the 

 man prowling about yonder will shoot little birds who 

 betray their presence by singing?'* 



One of our most lavish singers all summer long is the 

 indigo bunting; yet when he first came back from the 

 South he was very shy, and his voice seemed to be out 

 of tune, so that, even when he tried to sing, which was 

 seldom, his effort sounded like the creaking of a rusty 

 door-hinge. Afterwards, however, when he got the cob- 

 webs out of his larynx, he made up for all his previous 

 silence. Quite different is the habit of the towhee, which 

 announces his presence by his loud, explosive trill all 

 too brief or his complaining "chewing." 



Sometimes the rambler and bird gazer meets with 

 other than avian " specimens" in his excursions. One 

 evening I was loitering in a distant hollow, ogling with 

 my field glass several lark sparrows that were flitting 

 about on the ground in an adjacent patch of some kind. 

 The birds were singing as only these beautiful sparrows 

 can, and the quiet of the evening lent an idyllic charm 



