Song Birds and Water Fowl 



of Central Park in New York City, this spot, 

 though so accessible and provided with several 

 intersecting roads, is yet so wild and secluded 

 as to retain a large number of its migrant spring 

 visitors through the summer ; and thus affords 

 favorable opportunities for studying their more 

 interesting aspects of song and nidification. 



About the middle of May one always finds 

 here not only a remarkable variety of species, 

 representative of all our land-birds, but an im- 

 mense number of specimens of all the various 

 sorts. Leaving the train at Hackensack, two 

 miles south of Englewood, and inquiring for 

 the road leading thither of a gentleman who 

 thought it preposterous that I should wish to 

 walk, when I could just as well have ridden — 

 thus betraying the fact that he was not a natu- 

 ralist — I at once found myself in the midst of a 

 company of clear-voiced field-sparrows. Simple 

 and artless as it is, nothing in the range of mu- 

 sic could have expressed more happily the spirit 

 of peace pervading the pastoral scene to which 

 I had come, with the harsh rattle of city pave- 

 ments as yet hardly out of my ears. 



Pretention is as far from the heart of any 

 sparrow as the east is from the west ; but, in 

 this respect, perhaps the bashful little field-spar- 



