Our Common Birds and How to Know Them 



Thoreau had the faculty of quick and accurate observation to a most extraordinary 

 degree. Emerson, in a biographical sketch of him, says : "He noted what repeatedly 

 befell him, that after receiving from a distance a rare plant, he would presently find 

 the same in his own haunts. And those pieces of luck which happen only to good 

 players happened to him. One day, walking with a stranger who inquired where 

 Indian arrow-heads could be found, he replied, 'Everywhere,' and, stooping forward, 

 picked one on the instant from the ground. At Mt. Washington, in Tuckerman's 

 Ravine, Thoreau had a bad fall, and sprained his foot. As he was getting up from his 

 fall, he saw for the first time the leaves of Arnica mollis." 



Read in his journals how he chronicles the reddening of the maple buds, the first 

 appearance of the skunk-cabbage, the earliest note of the tree-frog, the arrangement of the 

 sand upon the rail-road embankments in tiny ridges caused by showers of rain. Nothing 

 is too trivial to escape him, and there is nothing that does not secure the interest of his 

 reader also when once pointed out and commented upon in his own happy manner. 



Not every one may hope to equal White or Thoreau. Few people have either their 

 talent or the leisure for its exercise. But there are many, nevertheless, whose love of nature 



