544 
A YEAR WITH THE BIRDS 
hardy than others, like the ground pine, laurel, and winter- 
green, and are able to hold their leaves through very cold 
weather, and we call them evergreens. 
You notice that the birds appear in spring even before the 
pussy-willows bud out, and that every morning when you wake 
the music outside the window and down among the alders on 
the meadow border is growing louder, until by the time the 
apple trees are in bloom there seems to be a bird for every tree, 
bush, and tuft of sedgegrass. 
By the time the timothy is cut and rye harvested you do 
not hear so great a variety of songs. The Robin, Song Spar- 
row, House Wren, and Meadowlark is still in good voice, and 
an occasional Catbird, but the Bobolink has dropped out, and 
the Brown Thrasher no longer tells the farmer how to plant his 
corn : “ Drop it, drop it, cover it up, hoe it, hoe it ; ” and very 
wise he is, too, for the corn is all planted. 
Later still, when the stacked cornstalks fill the fields with 
their wigwams, like Indian encampments, the pumpkins are 
gathered in golden heaps, and the smoke of burning leaves and 
brush pervades the air, you hear very few bird songs, for 
many birds have either dropped silently out of sight or col- 
lected in huge flocks, like the Swallow, swept by and disap- 
peared like clouds, while others, like the Purple Grackle or 
Common Crow-Blackbird, walk over the stubble and cover the 
trees, making such a creaking, crackling noise that one would 
surely think that their wings as well as voices were rusty and 
needed oiling. 
What has become of the birds? Where do they go when 
they disappear? 
Being warm-blooded animals they cannot dive into the mud 
and hide, like fishes, or crawl into cracks of tree bark and 
wrap themselves up in coccoons, like insects. Neither do they 
drop their feathers and die away as tender plants drop their 
leaves and disappear. 
People once thought that Swallows dived through the 
water into the mud, where they rolled themselves into balls and 
slept all winter. They thought this because Swallows are 
seen in early autumn in flocks about ponds and marshes, where 
they feed upon the insects that abound in such places. People 
thought that as Swallows were last seen in these places before 
they disappeared that they must have gone under the water; 
but this was merely guessing, which is a very dangerous thing 
