NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS 



numerous and skillful, and their guns more and more 

 deadly. The bobolinks are fewer than they were a 

 decade or two ago, because they are slaughtered 

 more and more in the marshes and rice-fields of the 

 South. The bluebirds and hermit thrushes were 

 threatened with extinction by a cold wave and a 

 severe storm in the Southern States, a few years ago. 

 These birds appear to have perished by the hundred 

 thousand. But they have slowly recovered lost 

 ground, and seem now to be as numerous as ever. 

 I see fewer eagles along the Hudson River than I 

 used to see fifteen years ago. The collectors and the 

 riflemen are no doubt responsible for this decrease. 

 But the robins, thrushes, finches, warblers, black- 

 birds, orioles, flycatchers, vireos, and woodpeckers 

 are quite as abundant as they were a quarter of a 

 century ago, if not more so. 



The English sparrows, no doubt, tend to run out 

 our native birds in towns and smaller cities, but in 

 the country this effect is not noticeable. They are 

 town birds anyhow, and naturally take their place 

 with a thousand other town abominations. A friend 

 of mine who lives in the heart of a city of twenty 

 thousand people amused me by recounting his obser- 

 vation upon a downy woodpecker that had made up 

 its mind to pass the winter in town. In November it 

 began to excavate a chamber for its w^inter quarters in 

 the dead branch of a maple that stood on the curb in 

 front of my friend's window. The English sparrows 



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