The Indigo Bunting 



i«i 



•and chants for half an hour at a time. Its song is not one continuous strain, 

 but a repetition of short notes, commencing loud and rapid and falling by 

 almost imperceptible gradations, for six or eight seconds, until they seem 

 hardly articulate, as if the little minstrel were quite exhausted; and, after a 

 pause of half a minute or less, commences as before. ' ' Then, too, the Indigo 

 bird sings with as much animation in the month of July as in the month of 

 May, and not infrequently continues his song until the last of August." 



Nuttall writes that though usually shy the Indigo bird during the nesting 

 ■season is more frequently seen near habitations than in remote thickets: 

 "Their favorite resort is the garden, where, from the topmost branch of 

 some tall tree that commands the whole wide landscape, the male regularly 

 pours out his lively chant, and continues it for a considerable length of time. 

 Nor is this song confined to the cool and animating dawn of morning, but 

 it is renewed and still more vigorous during the noon -day heat of summer. 

 This lively strain is composed of a repetition of short notes, which, com- 

 mencing loud and rapid, and then slowly falling, descend almost to a 

 whisper, succeeded by a silence of almost half a minute, when the song is 

 again continued as before. 



"In the village of Cambridge (Mass.), I have seen one of these azure, 

 almost celestial musicians, regularly chant to the inmates of a tall dwelling- 

 house from the summit of the chimney or the tall fork of the lightening-rod. 

 I have also heard a Canary, within hearing, repeat and imitate the low 

 lisping trill of the Indigo bird, whose' warble indeed often resembles that of 

 this species." 



This combination of musical ability, lovely plumage and its seed -eating 

 qualities long since has made the Indigo Bunting in danger of extermina- 

 tion, through the fact of its being universally, throughout the South, cap- 

 tured and sold as a cage-bird, both for home use and for export. In that 

 section the bird is called "blue pop," a corruption of "bleu pape," or ' 'pope," 

 of the French. Thomas Nuttall and Alexander Wilson, both writing in the 

 early years of i8oo, speak of the Indigo Bunting as one of the most familiar 

 of cage birds. Not only has this traffic existed since the days of Wilson, 

 but, until a very few years ago, when the Audubon movement began to be 

 a power, this Bunting, together with its cousin, the beautiful Painted Bunt- 

 ing, or Nonpareil, the Cardinal Grosbeak and the Mocking-bird were listed 

 and sold, as a matter of course, by every bird-dealer in the country. 



Oh, the untold misery and waste of this caging and selling of free-born 

 birds! It is only one grade less direct a slaughter than killing them to trim a 

 bonnet. While the sufferings of the bonnet-bird have ended, with it life 

 those of the caged bird have only begun as the door closes behind him. 



A few exceptional cases, where birds in the care of those who are both 

 able and willing to make their surroundings endurable, count as nothing 

 against the general condemnation of the practice of caging birds born wild. 



