404 AN AMERICAN HUNTER 



mon, well-known friends of the lawn, the garden and 

 the farm land; and with most birds nowadays observa- 

 tions on their habits are of far more value than their 

 skins can possibly be. But there must be some shooting, 

 especially of obscure and little-known birds, or we would 

 never be able to identify them at all ; while most laymen 

 are not sufficiently close observers to render it possible 

 to trust their identification of rare species. 



In one apple tree in the orchard we find a flicker's 

 nest every year; the young make a queer, hissing, bub- 

 bling sound, a little like the boiling of a pot. This same 

 year one of the young ones fell out; I popped it back into 

 the hole, whereupon its brothers and sisters " boiled " for 

 several minutes like the cauldron of a small and friendly 

 witch. John Burroughs, and a Long Island neighbor, 

 John Lewis Childs, drove over to see me, in this same 

 June of 1907, and I was able to show them the various 

 birds of most interest the purple finch, the black- 

 throated green warbler, the redwings in their unexpected 

 nesting place by the old barn, and the orchard orioles and 

 yellow-billed cuckoos in the garden. The orchard orioles 

 this year took much interest in the haying, gleaning in 

 the cut grass for grasshoppers. The barn swallows that 

 nest in the stable raised second broods, which did not 

 leave the nest until the end of July. When the barn 

 swallows gather in their great flocks just prior to the 

 southward migration, the gathering sometimes takes place 

 beside a house, and then the swallows seem to get so 

 excited and bewildered that they often fly into the house. 

 When I was a small boy I took a keen, although not a 



