222 HOMING WITH THE BIRDS 



Another household pet, a part of the family life 

 at the Cabin, is the chickadee. His call note is 

 given in the freest manner, with the most human 

 inflection of any bird note I know. The little 

 whiff of grey feathers, sharply touched with black 

 and white, comes fluttering around the back door 

 for crumbs, conversationally remarking: "Chick- 

 a-dee-dee-dee ! " Sometimes he leaves off the first 

 two syllables and simply says: "Dee, dee, dee!" 

 His song is two or three pure sweet whistled 

 notes that I can not reproduce in words, and can 

 not find reproduced in any book on bird music 

 in my library. He is a winter bird that takes the 

 summer place of the wrens around the Cabin, even 

 tamer than the wrens; for with a few minutes of 

 immovable offering of food, when the chickadee 

 is cold and hungry in winter, he can be induced to 

 alight on the head or hands to pick at a piece of 

 bread. 



I have had as much, if not more, personal expe- 

 rience with the cardinal than with any other bird 

 of our ornithology. He was a close friend of my 

 childhood, handled constantly as a pet bird during 

 my school days. When I went afield with a 

 camera, I set it up before more cardinal nests 

 than those of any other birds, because my first 

 book dealt only with his kind; so it was necessary 

 to have a large number of interesting reproduc- 

 tions of his free, wild life for the illustrations. 

 The cardinal is a bird extremely alert, living on 



