Across the Fields. 



251 



breeding place, and at many points not at all, it is marked by a certain sort of 

 provincialism that is not to be passed by unnoticed. 



Before the days when facilities for travel began to increase, before the 

 posthorse was the synonym for rapid transit, travel was full of difficulties and 

 trials not to be undertaken without due deliberation. Only stern necessity 

 of some sort forced anyone on prolonged journeys and men were on the 

 whole practically stationary. Their intercourse was limited to the vicinity 

 of the place in which they were born. One of the results was a diversity of 



MEADOWLARK. 



dialects of those who spoke the same general language, so that men speak- 

 ing German, or French, or even English, from different regions of their re- 

 spective lands, found it not only difficult but often impossible to understand 

 the language of their fellow countrymen. Birds' songs, supplemented by 

 their various call notes, are undoubtedly their language. They learn it from 

 one another. Orioles, Robins, Wood Thrushes, Jays, and other birds which 

 I have reared from young birds, birds that were not educated by their par- 

 ents, all sing, but no song that their friends in the forest would recognize 

 or understand no song by which a trained ornithologist would recognize 

 them, without seeing the singer. And should you hear the song of the 

 Meadowlark, say at Denver, near New York, or at any point in Florida, I 

 feel sure you would never recognize it as the song of the same bird. They 

 have not travelled far, provincialisms in song and call note have sprung up 

 and have been adopted and perpetuated till now, at the several extremes of 

 its habitat, this practically non-migratory bird has developed his own dia- 



