BY THE WAYSIDE 
35 
.• 
ing strength for the long flight back to 
us. I did not hear them sing because 
they rest from this too, and us alone, do 
these birds favor with their songs, for 
most birds sing only to win their mates 
and cheer them, while they are hard at 
work, building their nests, sitting upon 
their eggs and caring for their young. 
The birds in this way teach us a lesson. 
We should sing most and be happiest 
while we are working the hardest. One 
day a hawk alighted upon a tree near me, 
and what kind do you think it was? 
The broad-winged hawk, one of the com¬ 
monest and most useful of our hawks in 
Illinois and Wisconsin. One of our 
most beautiful of North American birds, 
the summer tanager, spends its winters 
in Central and South America. I saw 
them often in Costa Rica. In Panama, 
I saw our yellow warbler. He goes still 
further south for his winters—to the 
northern part of South America. In the 
coffee plantations of Venezuela I saw 
many redstarts. How far away from 
home they seemed and yet they were 
perfectly happy. If we could have 
tliked, how pleasant it would have been 
to have talked about home! Along the 
bank of a stream, near where I saw the 
re Istarts, were a few water thrushes, and 
one lesser yellow-legs. I could tell much 
more about the birds I saw in these trop¬ 
ical countries, but I must stop .—John F. 
Ferry. 
_ 
On Meeting Our Feathered Friends. 
When you begin the study of birds, 
your first pleasure will be in learning 
their names. Without a name a bird is 
like a skillet without a handle—difficult 
to use. Moreover, until vou have mas- 
tered the nomenclature of the science, the 
great mass of ornithological literature, 
whether technical or popular, will be a 
riddle without a key. 
After you have identified all the com¬ 
mon birds in your neighborhood, you 
will begin to keep a sharp lookout for 
the rarer ones, especially those which are 
only migrants of the spring and fall, or 
are only winter visitants—the latter being 
birds that drop down from the North in 
the winter time. Each new friend, if 
Bird Notes. 
In looking backward over thirty years 
of delightful contact with the birds, each 
year, month, week and day fraught with 
experiences which only a bird-lover can 
understand, the first thing that attracts 
my attention is the readiness with which 
the memory forgets all the unpleasant 
episodes connected with our outings, 
leaving only a long unbroken memory of 
pleasant observations. 
Lest we forget entirely, and in order 
to round out more interestingly the bird 
notes taken from day to day I have, in 
later years, entered not only the much- 
wanted facts concerning the life history 
and habits, and the many items directl}’’ 
connected with the birds themselves, but 
many of the episodes which occurred, es¬ 
pecially when on trips to out-of-way 
places. It has resulted in a shelf full of 
more or less musty volumes, full of mat¬ 
ter in the shape of a running journal of 
events of decided interest to the writer 
and often read by the following genera¬ 
tion. 
All the scientific notes are copied off 
at intervals into a modern card index 
system under the name of the bird to 
which they refer. That this method of 
keeping notes in the form of a daily 
record of events is nothing new, one only 
has to refer to the letters of that English 
naturalist, Gilbert White, each a classic 
in itself, and all published in 1789, under 
the title of “The Natural History of Sel- 
borne.” 
The carefully written note book, or 
journal, will often recall many a mishap 
or danger, which at the time added spice 
to the observations. This is especially 
true with those who have had the pleas¬ 
ure of exploring unfrequented parts of 
the West, where mountain and desert of¬ 
fer much in the way of odd form and 
environment to attract the student. I 
recall with what pleasure I saw my first 
zone-tailed hawk, the dainty verdin and 
LeConte’s thrasher in their desert homes 
and also the opposite sensation when 
caught in a ten-days quarantine in a 
mining camp near by on account of an 
outbreak of smallpox; one victim wan¬ 
dering off into the waterless waste, never 
to return. The account of the birds 
