A WARBLER SHOWER. 



13 



Years ago I thought this bird invisible to human eyes. 

 It seemed that his ethereal music could never have 

 proceeded from a mortal body. Now he comes every 

 spring and fall into our back yard. He reserves his 

 hymn for the woods, but he gladdens our eyes with 

 his presence. 



A brown creeper, which I had not seen for two 

 months, was sliding up a pear tree, flat against the 

 bark. Then, to my great delight, I saw on the fence 

 a white-crowned sparrow. The white-throated spar- 

 rows arrived a week ago, and the garden has been full 

 of their "Peabody, Peabody" notes ever since, but the 

 white-crowned is a rarity. I had seen but one before, 

 on May 21, 1903, in our back yard. Until I saw that 

 one, I had always feared that the two cousins might 

 look so much alike that it would need a magnifying 

 glass to distinguish them; but there is no difficulty. 

 The white-crowned has a broad band of pure white 

 reaching from his bill to his nape, while a narrower 

 band encircles his head. John Burroughs considers 

 him the handsomest of the sparrows. He is indeed 

 a beauty, though his extremely broad "part" gives 

 him a somewhat bald-headed effect. A little later, I 

 saw another bird with a striking central stripe. This 

 time it was orange-brown, set between two bands of 



