20 THE ATLANTIC ALMANAC FOR 1869. 
long Jitme.afternoons, — courting the breezes that whis 
through the elm=tops,— courting the glances that.flashed upen 
us (rarely, to be sure) from freidenly eyes, == courting the future 
with brave promises (so many of then broken). 
We counted eighty, or.metr it, then; some fifty-now ; thirty 
dropped by the roadside. — 
May they rest in peace ! 
1 
} 
THE SONG-BIRDS OF NORTH AMERICA. 
By THomas M. Brewer. 
Can any theme be presumed more replete with attractions, or 
one atthe same time more filled with discouraging and disheart- 
ening suggestions? Certainly no subject can more abound with 
the charms. of variety, the attractions of marvellous beauties, or 
with blending inspirations of association and recollection, derived 
from past enjoyments. It is all the more, because we meet on 
the threshold this untold wealth, —it is because we feel, almost 
instinctively, that the music of our birds, with all its infinitude of 
sweet charms, is still a theme to do full justice to which mortal 
pen is all inadequate, that we bespeak the indulgent consideration 
of the reader. We can, it is true, tell you some things in regard 
to the local habitation and the name of most of our more noted 
musicians. We can mark the boundaries within which most of 
them may be found, during the pleasant season. We can tell 
when they come, and when they leave for parts known or un- 
known, and various other minor incidental peculiarities touching 
the private history of each and all; and this is not without more 
or less of intrinsic interest. But to do fall and adequate justice 
to our singing-birds as musicians, to set before our readers the 
peculiar and individual merits of any one of our songsters, as 
a vocalist, that is indeed a task for which we, in the beginning, 
must plead the incompetence of uninspired humanity. As we 
may not represent on mortal canvas a perfect picture of the more 
glorious wonders of physical nature, still less can any one de- 
seribe the vocal beauties of the grove. To be able to judge in 
either case with entire accuracy, one must see or hear in very 
person. It is not a case where we can trust to the ears of another, 
but one which seems to contradict those oft-quoted lines of Horace, 
wherein he tells us that : 
“What we hear 
With weaker passion will affect the heart, 
Than when the faithful eye beholds the part.” 
And then again, all this exuberance of wealth, this apparently 
inexhaustible character of our subject, almost appals us by its 
vastness. Our space would hardly hold the names even of the 
two hundred and ninety-seven species which our learned savant 
at Washington classes among the Oscines, or singing-birds of 
North America! Happily for us, and yet more happily for our 
present purpose, they do not all sing, although they ought so 
to do, at least in theory. They are all said to possess that pecu- 
liar apparatus for singing, composed of five pairs of muscles, 
upon which the very learned Dr. Cabanis has founded his new 
and most revolutionary order of birds, which do or ought to 
sing, and which he calls Oscines. 
We call this new order revolutionary, because it seems to be 
playing the very mischief with every previous mode of classi- 
fication in ornithology. If not utterly overturning the various 
systems of the great men of the past, such as Linnzeus, Cuvier, 
Swainson, Temminck, Gray, etc., it certainly opens a wide breach 
in every other previous mode of arrangement. And if we may 
lious frame of mind towards this new system, when we are told 
that by it our well-known and favorite Phabe, whose welcome 
notes are among the first to hail our tardy spring, that our com- 
mon King-bird, and the Wood Pewee, who were among our boy- 
hood’s favorite songsters, are unceremoniously counted out of this 
order ; that they, forsooth, are not “ singers,”’ but are to be ranked 
as Clamatores, or “ screechers ”’ ; while such delightful vocalists as 
the Crow, the Raven, the Magpie, the Jay, the Grakles, birds 
whose monotonous and discordant cries are “ notes so often re- 
newed as to be at a decided discount,” are (Heaven save the 
mark !) singing-birds. When we follow our worthy systematist 
to such an absurd conclusion as this, we can only infer that either 
he must have been misinterpreted, or that there is somewhere an 
important screw loose in his system itself. 
But to go back to our subject, and to our song-birds. How 
often have foreign tourists, and our own superficial observers, dwelt 
upon our poverty in this country in respect to our singing-birds ! 
The former miss here the notes of the Skylark, the Mavis, the 
Nightingale, the Blackbird, and many others of their most fa- 
miliar vocalists. They fail, therefore, to appreciate our boundless 
wealth in respect to other singing-birds of equal and even of 
superior powers. All of these we may not hope, in our short 
space, to be able to present to the notice of our readers. We 
will only endeavor to make brief mention of a few of the more 
noticeable. Among these we shall include several of those least 
known to most of us. 
Nor is it true, though the fact may be new to many, that 
we have in North America no genuine bona fide Skylark. We 
do possess a very superior representative, and one said to be 
very nearly or quite equal, in its powers of song, to the bird 
immortalized in the verses of Shelley and the Ettrick Shep- 
herd. There is found in our far Northwestern regions, on the 
barren and unattractive table-lands of Dacotah, a bird which, in 
its peculiar and remarkable powers of song, and in its general 
habits, is an almost exact reproduction of the Skylark of Europe. 
Our great bird-painter, Audubon, was the first to meet with it in 
1843, near the junction of the Missouri and the Yellowstone Rivers. 
He called it Sprague’s Skylark, in honor of one of our Massa- 
chusetts naturalists. It has since been found in the British Posses- 
sions, still farther north. 
Our friend and brother ornithologist, the late Edward Harris 
of New Jersey, who was one of Mr. Audubon’s party, was so 
completely deceived by the sound of the music of these Skylarks 
that, for a long while, he sought for them on the ground. Their 
voices seemed to come to him, from the prairies around. It was 
only after having crossed and recrossed them, to no purpose, that 
he at last discovered that the exquisitely trilling notes he was 
listening to with so much delight proceeded from several of these 
birds, who were soaring at so great an elevation above him as to 
be almost lost to view. At times some of them actually did 
disappear from sight, even in the wonderfully clear and trans- 
parent atmosphere of that country. As they rose from the ground, 
these Skylarks flew in an undulating manner, and continued to 
rise in increasing circles, until, when about a hundred yards 
high, they began to sing. After a while, suddenly closing their 
wings, they would glide down to the prairie below. 
Passing by, for the present, our unsurpassed and unapproach- 
able Mocking-bird, which, in the power, compass, variety, and ex- 
quisite harmony of its own original and unimitative music, very 
far transcends any rival, native or foreign, we will here mention 
that the finest vocalist which has fallen under our own immediate 
observations was met with by us in the thick and swampy woods 
of Eastern Maine and New Brunswick. Its song is equally won- 
derful in respect to the sweetness, the brillianey, the power, the 
be pardoned this digression, we must plead guilty to a very rebel- | compass, and the variety of the notes. It begins with low, soft 
a 
