SOME MINOR SONG-BIRDS. 



Our interest in wild song : birds must in- 

 crease apace with the narrowing of our wooded 

 areas, and in proportion to the constant lessen- 

 ing of our opportunities for ornithological 

 study at first hand. As our thrushes and 

 orioles and warblers one by one take flight, 

 we suddenly, in realizing our loss, feel in a 

 new way the sweetness of their voices. When 

 we were children, even if we lived in the heart 

 of the city, we often had glimpses of the 

 country with its great dense woods and its 

 green fields, its orchards, and its cottages 

 covered with morning-glory vines. In those 

 days the brown-thrush, the cat-bird, and the 

 cardinal grosbeak, sang in every thicket and 

 throughout every orchard. Now these charm- 

 ing little lyrists are gone from many a former 

 haunt ; indeed there are wide areas of country, 

 where they used to nest and sing, in which 

 they never will be seen in a wild state again. 



Not long since I returned, after twenty 

 years' absence, to a neighborhood in which 

 my infancy was spent. I remembered a cer- 

 tain brook in a little field, a crooked lazy little 

 stream bordered with yellow willows and water 

 hazel, where the cat-bird loved to swing and 

 sing in shade and sun. It was with an inde- 

 scribable regret that I found the willows and 

 hazel all gone and the brook, sunken under 

 ground, groping its way through tubular tiles. 

 Where wide woods of beech and sugar-trees 



