76 



City Birds. 



traverse a crowded street with one's eyes 

 leveled at the third story windows. In 

 fine, I longed for a wider field. 



But the field was by no means easy to 

 find. The suburbs of a city are neither 

 agreeable nor safe for a solitary wanderer, 

 whose eccentric attitudes, whose field-glass, 

 whose gaze intent on space, and whose 

 rapturous exclamations are calculated to 

 make her anywhere an object of attention. 

 She must have a place not too populous to 

 disturb her pursuits, nor too lonely to af- 

 ford her protection; it must be sylvan for 

 the birds and urban for herself; it must 

 abound in forests and policemen; it must 

 be near enough to the city for frequent 

 visits, yet not so near as to be unvisited by 

 the shyest dwellers in the woods; it must 

 be safe, secluded, convenient, frequented 

 and rural. 



And a place was found which met all 

 these requirements — the cemetery. It lay 

 just on the borders of the city, an inclosure 

 of fifty or sixty acres of rolling ground, the 

 greater part kept like a garden, with long 

 flowerbeds among its clumps of beech and 

 evergreen; in its neglected hollows, crowded 

 with fern and wild sunflower, the bluebirds 

 and goldfinches chased each other, while 

 from the alder thickets on the hillside, song 

 sparrows chorused all the afternoon. On 

 the sunny uplands, flocks of the golden- 

 winged woodpecker — the pigeon wood- 

 pecker, with its dove-like eyes — waded 

 through the warm grass; a few acres of 

 wild forest land made a covert of oaks and 

 beeches for a multitude of warblers, and 

 for the rest the bird was hard to suit who 

 could find no place to his mind either 

 among the hemlocks, tangled inextricably 

 with woodbine, or where the graveled 

 walks ran through trim rows of pear trees, 

 or the bittersweet ran wild over the crumb- 

 ling granite basin of the fountain. 



Among the graves I did not wander 

 much. It was from behind a marble head 

 stone in the spring, that I watched with 



breathless interest the nest-building of a 

 pair of brown thrashers, in the lower 

 branches of an arbor vit^, and it was on 

 the point of some white shaft that the 

 robin and the bluejay sat, with conscious 

 pride, to display their charms. But it was 

 not while they posed that one learned to 

 know them best. Down in some of the 

 many valleys where the meadowlarks rose 

 from the long grass, or a hundred yards be- 

 yond, where the redstart built among the 

 alders, and the ovenbird and the Maryland 

 yellowthroat tripped and flew; or the her- 

 mit thrush in the black depths of a spruce, 

 sang out at sunset — these were the spots 

 where one learned without a book, and car- 

 ried back to town that sense of relations — 

 an instructive sense of the fitness of time 

 and place — that makes one recognize at a 

 glance the difference between the birds 

 which float and the birds which flutter, the 

 sprightliness of one family, the elegance of 

 another, the vagabond boldness of a third. 

 This bird which steps about with dignity 

 under yon solitary apple tree at the " town- 

 house," has nothing in common with the 

 other which rustles through its branches 

 and is gone before you can do more than 

 recognize the general roundness, restless- 

 ness and kaleidoscopic coloring of the 

 typical warbler. 



It is not necessary to know the birds'' 

 names, to know the birds themselves. One 

 can do as Adam did and give them names. 

 To one who has been with them for an 

 autumn, long forgotten bits of bird lore, 

 picked up unconsciously, come back. The 

 birds grow familiar and soon they will have 

 classified themselves. Nothing but a wren, 

 we are certain, though we never saw one 

 before, could stick its tail up so straight; 

 nothing but a kingbird would dart out of 

 a tree in that determined way, and then 

 settle quietly down in the same place, like 

 the King of France and his ten thousand 

 men. Those little brownish, mottled birds 

 all unavoidably suggest the English spar- 



