THE BLUEBIRD 
By MABEL OSGOOD WRIGHT 
jBational ot Audubon feocietie^ 
EDUCATIONAL LEAFLET NO. 24 
The Bluebird’s 
Country 
Who dares write of the Bluebird, thinking to add a fresher tint to his 
plumage, a new tone to his melodious voice, or a word of praise to his 
gentle life, that is as much a part of our human heritage and blended with 
our memories as any other attribute of home? 
Not 1, surely, for I know him too well and each year feel myself more 
spellbound and mute by the memories he awakens. Yet I would repeat his 
brief biography, lest there be any who, being absorbed by living inward, 
have not yet looked outward and upward to this poet of the sky and earth 
and the fullness and goodness thereof. 
For the Bluebird was the first of all poets, — even before man 
had blazed a trail in the wilderness or set up the sign of his 
habitation and tamed his thoughts to wear harness and travel 
to measure. And so he came to inherit the earth before man, and this, our 
country, is all The Bluebird’s Country, for at some time of the year he 
roves about it from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Mexico to Nova 
Scotia, though westward, after he passes the range of the Rocky Moun- 
tains, he wears a different dress and bears other longer names. 
In spite of the fact that our eastern Bluebird is a home-body, 
loving his nesting haunt and returning to it year after year, 
he is an adventurous traveler. Ranging all over the eastern 
United States at some time in the season, this bird has its nesting haunts 
at the very edge of tke Gulf States and upward, as far north as Manitoba 
and Nova Scotia. 
When the breeding season is over, the birds travel sometimes in family 
groups and sometimes in large flocks, moving southward little by little, 
according to season and food -supply, some journeying as far as Mexico, 
others lingering through the middle and southern states. The Bluebirds 
that live in our orchards in summer are very unlikdy to be those that we 
see in the same place in winter days. Next to the breeding impulse, the 
migrating instinct seems to be the strongest factor in bird life. When the 
life of the home is over. Nature whispers, "To wing, up and on!” So a few 
of the Bluebirds who have nested in Massachusetts may be those who linger 
in New Jersey, while those whose breeding haunts were in Nova Scotia 
drift downward to fill their places in Massachusetts. But the great mass of 
even those birds we call winter residents go to the more southern parts of 
(i) 
The Bluebird’s 
Travels 
