The Cedar Waxwing 247 



most beautiful. I examined it carefully and could not find any 

 marks of violence upon its body. Evidently it had flown 

 against a telephone wire and thus killed itself. I did not know 

 the bird, and after supper carried it to Mrs. Elizabeth C. Mar- 

 mon, a student and great lover of birds, for identification. She 

 identified it as the cedar waxwing, ampelis cedrorum. I spent 

 an hour with her in looking through her library and hearing 

 her tell how, in her after life, she became interested in the 

 birds. I then and there resolved that I would take up the 

 study of them, and made a list of what she regarded as her 

 best books, and since then I have pursued the study of the 

 birds in books and in their haunts as I have tramped through 

 the fields and forests. I was then fifty-nine years old. Before 

 that I had been a lover of outdoor life and had done much 

 tramping, but without any object in view, except to enjoy 

 myself. Since then a new zest has been added to my tramps 

 and reading, that of trying to acquire exact knowledge concern- 

 ing the common things I see and about which I read. I find 

 the books full of interesting matter, much of which I have 

 used in the preparation of this one. And this has all come of 

 the fact that a colored boy sympathetically brought to my 

 study the dead body of a cedar waxwing, one of the most beau- 

 tiful of our birds one that is always sleek, smooth and unruf- 

 fled, and to the last degree particular about his clothes. The 

 only thing that I have found charged against him is that he 

 loves cherries and takes many of them that the selfish farm- 

 ers think they ought to have. They forget the good he does 

 in destroying destructive pests. At Buzzard's Roost the wax- 

 wings are to have all the cherries they can eat, for there I 

 have planted and am growing eight hundred cherry trees, and 

 from these no waxwing or other bird is ever to be driven. 





