ILLINOIS AUDUBON SOCIETY 



An Illinois Boy Among Illinois Birds 



"A boy's will is the wind's will, and the thoughts of youth are long, long 

 thoughts." 



Adam was assuredly the first boy who studied birds and collected their 

 eggs. I am sure that he knew all the birds in the Garden of Eden, and all 

 about them; hidden away in some corner of his ancestral cave his collection 

 of bird's eggs would have done credit to a modern museum. 1 can readilv 

 fancy his joy upon finding his first clutch of eggs of the bird-of-paradisc. 



And ever since then, this primal passion for bird-study and the collection 

 of birds' eggs has been part of every real boy's character. Like the inherent 

 wanderlust that sends a boy far afield, his love for birds has kept his heart 

 clean and his mind stimulated, all through the ages. He has to pass through 

 the egg-collecting stage, but it is only temporary — and thank goodness it is, 

 for else there would long ago have been no birds left. 



As a boy I grew up on a prairie farm in Central Illinois, and almost 

 before I had donned trousers I had become a lover of birds. I remember 

 very well how my father carried me out into the yard one late fall evening 

 to see the hundreds of wild pigeons that had settled to rest in the Norway 

 spruces. It must have been in 1885 or 1886 that this happened and I never 

 saw them again. It was about the time of their extinction, I think, and they 

 never returned. 



About the same time another experience with birds happened which I 

 never forgot. The sapsuckers on their spring migration north were tapping 

 the spruces and I tried very hard to catch some of them. My father, who 

 saw me at it, advised me to go to the salt-barrel, get some salt, and put it on 

 the birds' tails. In all confidence I tried for a long time, before I finally 

 gave up the futile pursuit. 



Still another experience of my very early days taught me that the shrike 

 is a ' 'butcher-bird." The snow lay heavy upon the ground and hundreds of 

 juncos and tree sparrows were feeding about the garden and the millet and 

 haystacks. While I stood at the window watching the storm and the bird- 

 I if e a shrike dashed into the flocks of small birds in pursuit of a junco. The 

 poor junco had no way of escape. He flew against the window-sill, and was 

 at once pounced upon and carried off by the shrike. 



In my boyhood, most of the sloughs of the prairie counties were as yet 

 undrained, and the great migration of ducks, geese, and snipe still followed 

 the Illinois prairie route. In the spring especially the great flights swept 

 northward and I distinctly recall wedges of ducks, geese, and brant, miles 

 in length. The cornfields were filled with feeding waterfowl, and the 

 musical honk of the Canada goose was common for weeks. The last wild 

 swans that I saw on the prairie alighted in a small creek not far from the 

 .country-school that I attended, and I remember well how all the pupils 

 wondered what the big birds were. 



Then as I grew older my interest and my knowledge grew by leaps and 

 bounds. I did not have any way of learning the right names for most of 

 the birds, so I named them myself. The marsh wrens I called "cat-tail 

 birds," the woodcock I called "scare-birds" because they always startled me 

 when I flushed them; I named the Maryland yellow-throat the "Little 

 slough-meadowlark," an obvious enough name : and so, except for the com- 



