FIRST WEEK] 



May 



107 



mode of life of the ancestor of the many warblers? Did 

 he cling to and creep along the bark, as the black-and- 

 white warbler, or feed from the ground or the thicket as 

 does the worm-eating? Did he snatch flies on the wing 

 as the necklaced Canadian warbler, or glean from the 

 brook's edge as our water thrush? The struggle for 

 existence has not been absent from the lives of these 

 light-hearted little fellows, and they have had to be 

 jack-of -all-trades in their search for food. 



The gnats and other fly- 

 ing insects have indeed to 

 take many chances when 

 they slip from their cocoons 

 and dance up and down in 

 the warm sunlight! Lucky 

 for their race that there are 

 millions instead of thousands 

 of them; for now the swifts 

 and great numbers of tree 

 and barn swallows spend the 

 livelong day in swooping 



after the unfortunate gauzy-winged motes, which have 

 risen above the toad's maw upon land, and beyond the 

 reach of the trout's leap over the water. 



It would take an article as long as this simply to 

 mention hardly more than the names of the birds that we 

 may observe during a walk in May; and with bird book 

 and glasses we must see for ourselves the bobolinks in 

 the broad meadows, the cowbirds and rusty blackbirds, 

 and, pushing through the lady-slipper marshes, we may 



BLACK AND WHITE WARBLER. 



