106 AUTUMN NOTES IN IOWA 



was only a catbird, shameful as that confession 

 may be. But — while to the scientist nothing is 

 so vexatious as uncertainty, to the sentimentalist 

 there is charm not only in the first discovery, in the 

 personal rarity that may be a neighbor 's common- 

 place, but even in the uncertainties, the forever 

 elusive. "What poetry of the failing quest in the 

 story of the woman from New England who sought 

 here for years, with her revered eastern botany as 

 guide, to identify the waterleaf blooming yearly 

 under the wild plum thicket in her yard — who 

 died, perhaps, with the secret still unknown. There 

 is delight now in remembering those years when 

 flocks of Harris sparrows whistled along the osage 

 hedges in plain sight — yet were not so much as 

 named in any of the bird books at our command. 

 The first scarlet tanager, lying dead in a college 

 student's hand in the Sugar Creek woods, had a 

 little richer color than any tanager we have seen 

 since. The ^^wood robin" pointed out by a neigh- 

 bor one summer evening in our front-yard cotton- 

 wood, was more of a thrush than any later ac- 

 quaintance of his kind; and the first Baltimore or- 

 iole whose nest we saw hanging from a branch of 

 that same tree — have any other orioles had quite 

 the same penetrating, thrilling voice, and brilliance 

 of contrasting orange and black? The first dis- 

 covered American bittern, heard afar booming 

 across solitary meadows as spring dusk deepened 



