7 2 STARLIGHT AND SUNSHINE. 



Not a few of our common birds have been self-christened, and 

 are at one in the popular as well as the scientific vocabularies. 

 The phcebe, chickadee, chebec, chewink, towhee, pewee, and Bob 

 White need no printed plate or page for their identification. Nor 

 does the whippoorwill, known throughout the continent by its 

 weird nocturnal cry. Indeed, how little else than this uncanny 

 "wandering- voice" of the bird is known to the popular mind! 

 How many a rural octogenarian will you find who has ever seen 

 the strange, wide-eyed, mottled bird that from earliest memory, 

 perhaps, has made its nightly haunt upon his well-sweep or even 

 the domestic door-sill ? 



The penny trumpet of the nuthatch occasionally takes up its 

 tiny part in the orchestral score from the maple above the house. 

 " Ouah, quah," says Thoreau ; but the "Yank, yank" of Burroughs 

 is certainly more truly caught, not only in its phonetic quality, but 

 in its suggestiveness of that prying, tugging bill among the scales 

 and crevices of bark. 



I am not aware that poet or ornithological stenographer has 

 yet transcribed the vocal performance of the wren those "five 

 notes to wanst," as the Hibernian listener once observed (and pat 

 it was in truth) being certainly very discouraging to such an 

 undertaking. And there is another of our bird songs scarcely 

 less disheartening in its intricacy. How have the bird historians 

 and poets labored in its whirling rapids cast their hooks and 

 nets, as it were, to catch the bursting bubbles in its rippling 

 wake ! Listen ! that pell-mell, gushing rhapsody from the mead- 

 ow below a sextet, with obligate and piccolo variations all 

 from a single throat. Can it be possible, indeed, that yonder 

 sable minstrel swaying on the dock is alone responsible for all 

 this Babel ? Hark ! a moment more and he will find his breath 

 again. There ! " Bob o' link o' loo o' happy go lucky O lucky." 

 Such is often the introductory refrain, once or twice repeated, 

 with a brief interval. But who shall follow the subsequent vocal 

 revelations ? Even though possible of analysis by the ear, would 

 it not take six pens in simultaneous effort to chronicle ? Who 

 knows what unsuspected melody may not be submerged in that 



