190 SOME COMMON LAND-BIRDS. 



aspect wore away and left me once more bewildered by a 

 newness that was not new. 



Among the birds many are old friends, some just the same 

 and some a little changed. Eave and barn and tree swallows 

 twitter and sport in the air, and with them is a new acquaint- 

 ance, the violet-green swallow. The social chimney swift is 

 lacking, but his place in the air, if not in our affections, is 

 filled by the rarer and more retiring Vaux's swift, which still 

 nests in hollow trees as a bird of the wilderness. A towhee 

 in black and white and chestnut, apparently our own, shows 

 his unlikeness by mewing at you from the lower boughs of 

 an evergreen. It is the Oregon towhee, an unfamiliar species, 

 though from his color you would never guess it. A junco 

 spreads his white-edged tail as he flits to one side ; but it is 

 the Oregon junco, a little browner on the back and sides than 

 ours, though similar in habits. When I found its nest in a 

 horse's hoof -print in a deserted woods-road, it seemed to me in 

 all respects like our little Eastern j unco's home in bank sides 

 and under tree roots. In the woods, the ruffed grouse that you 

 hear drumming is the Oregon ruffed grouse our bird in all 

 save the brighter red-brown tinge of the back. On a high 

 branch a flicker but the red-shafted flicker of the North- 

 west coast whickers familiarly, and where the timber is 

 heavy our old Maine friend, the pileated woodpecker, the 

 king of all the Northern woodpeckers, raps unseen at his work, 

 or cackles on his undulating flight from tree to tree. 



Mingled with those we recognize are other birds new 

 and strange, the dark-colored Steller's jay that replaces our 

 blue jay; the red-breasted sapsucker, a gayer substitute for 

 our yellow-bellied sapsucker, at a distance nearly resembling 

 our red-headed woodpecker ; the Oregon jay, as hoary-headed 

 a villain as our Canada jay, and no improvement in either 



