156 



THE NIDIOLOGIST. 



room could banish — threw off iiu' equally 

 dij^uified and uticonifortable habilaraents of 

 the mornins^, put on something cool — no 

 matter what it is or how it looks, for I am 

 quickly out of town, and all the world's 

 asleep. 



Except my bird. With all the boyhood in 

 me electrified by a rare sense of real rest, I 

 actually ran down my now shady hillside, 

 and when my "Thrasher" flushed I noted 

 quickly, as when one shoots a Bob-white 

 on the wing, and established to my own 

 satisfaction an identity to my Wilson's 

 Thrush, which I would almost have sworn to 

 were I a swearing man. But this sort of 

 identification will not suit even one who 

 confesses to frequent inward quarrelings 

 with the prim and grim and unpoetical 

 requirements of science. In a moment I 

 lay, cooling my heated body and warming 

 my scientific ardor under the deep shade of 

 a bush, close by the nest, yet giving eye- 

 access to all the surrounding shrubbery. 

 Then even a naturalist was all ears — except 

 his eyes — which taking guidance, ere long, 

 from the ears, in their detecting of the well- 

 known and plaintive alarm cry, soon located, 

 repeatedly, the beautiful tawny bird as she 

 darted, quick and silent, from shadow to 

 shadow, with shy solicitude pleading with 

 me to awa}'. And presently I went — not, 

 however, homeward, but among the wil- 

 lows, creekward, to moisten my temples, 

 for in my intentncss I had stood long in the 

 scorching sun. 



I passed through a fairly large plat of 

 huckberry, every bush of which I examined 

 minutely, in '92, vainly trying to locate an 

 invisible but tantalizingly audible Traill's 

 Flycatcher, whose dexterous ventriloquism 

 mocked mj' toils, daj' after day, for days. 

 Jiut this day, as I stood at the very margin 

 of the dense, cattle-cropped and many- 

 twigged copse, I suddenly stopped before 

 one bush denser than its fellows, and, 

 mechanically parting its top, I found a neat 

 and typical nest of Traill's Flycatcher, 

 containing — imagine four pale, elongated 



eggs of the Least Flycatcher — thin-shelled, 

 rough, one or two bearing a pale "fly- 

 speck" or two, and all so fragile that one 

 of them was blown next morning through 

 a "natural" at the small end — imagine 

 this, and you have the contents of that nest. 



The eggs were warm, yet no bird was 

 near nor came, to sight or hearing. But 

 nest, location, date, and the previous year's 

 barren experience established the identity 

 to any reasonal)le body's satisfaction. 



Home again. Dressed, and away to my 

 Sunday evening work. My new experi- 

 ences were lost in the thought of more 

 precious and enduring things — to return 

 with the rest of the later evening. How 

 strange it is that in the days of our callow 

 collecting we never dreamed how sweet and 

 freshening a foil is field work, as with the 

 swiftly oncoming years we tend to grow 

 over-stern with stress of care and increasing 

 sense of the earnestness of life! 



Monday morning, at three o'clock, as the 

 Kingbird, first harbinger of dawn, was 

 muttering his first faint feasible tweezle to 

 his wife, I hurried, all clad in rubber, to- 

 ward where my climbers ought to be. How 

 quiet a joy I felt as the pure freshness of the 

 morning swept over me. And what a shud- 

 der of chilling passed through my vitals as 

 the great beads of dew bespatted me with 

 showers while I ran along the narrow path, 

 pasture-ward, through ripening rye. "Find 

 my spurs?" Yes, but only after a dreadful 

 panic, as the moments passed and it grew 

 brighter and brighter and later and later — 

 panic because I had a score of things to do 

 before the eight o'clock express should take 

 northward — panic that led me, many times, 

 fruitlessly beside the spot where my climb" 

 ers lay. My fragile F'^lycatchers' eggs were 

 safely blown, likewise the nearly half- 

 incubated Thrush's eggs — clean, safely, 

 through the small holes which we all affect 

 (or ought to, at least). Beguiled by this 

 success, I attacked the Cuckoo egg through 

 a small hole also — carelessly, I admit — and 

 yet would not even a scientist argue this 



