LANDLORD TO THE BIRDS 25 



When I remember the twinkling eye of the mother 

 phoebe that watched us from her nest over the inside 

 rafter of the porch, and the cheery outlook on the 

 garden world maintained by her spouse from a 

 perch just outside, in a spray of blossoms, I think of 

 them both as members of the family, like the robin 

 who for three years built under another porch, and 

 would let us mount a chair and see her babies at 

 close range. And when I think of the packed snow 

 outside the house in winter, and the fearless little 

 brown sparrows, or the juncos, fluttering from the 

 protecting evergreens or leaving their task of hop- 

 ping under the weed stalks near by, and gathering 

 around for crumbs, I think of the gentle saint of 

 Assisi, though no sermon comes to my lips for this 

 feathered congregation. It is not spiritual food they 

 are after! Indeed, by their busy little lives, so full 

 of danger, yet so full of song, it is rather they who 

 do the preaching. They are so faithful to their 

 single mates, so few of them ever kill their kind in 

 the struggle to survive, they work so hard to bring 

 up their families properly, they do not even fight 

 (except occasionally and in bloodless combat, to 

 get first turn at the tub), they are so beautiful to 

 look at, so pleasant to hear! The air without birds 

 would be an aerial desert, cold and void, and with- 

 out their song without the fluting of the white- 

 throat in the spring, the midsummer chatter of the 

 wrens, the reveille of the robins and the vesper of 

 the song-sparrows, without the piercingly sweet call 

 of the meadow-lark behind the summer-house and 

 the cool, elfin, woodland clarion of the thrush which 

 lives in the great trees just up the hill a silence 



