12 TH BAUD iW BO NSE Ue Lee 
From Our Window 
By ¥F. J. FREEMAN 
A LONG TIME AGO, as the life of popular music is measured, there was a 
song about a man who would climb the highest mountain and swim the 
deepest river to find his love. I do not remember how the words went, 
but they gave promise of a lot of effort to find this unique “you”. Yet 
she could not have been as hard to win as the song implied. In fact, if 
the singer had been content to dawdle on the brink of the aforesaid river, 
his heart-throb would have probably leaped down that mountain and swam 
that river herself. It would have saved him a lot of wear and tear. 
From the adventures of some ornithologists, it seems that the finest 
experiences are had in far-away places at untimely seasons of travel 
or unearthly hours of arising. Stay-at-homes who confine their bird- 
watching to the back yard feeder sigh for such sights and sounds as 
come to the ornithologist who goes to any extremes to attain his ends. 
Such sighing is needless “vanity and vexation of spirit.””’ Some very fine 
ornithological work has been done in back yards. Mrs. Margaret M. Nice 
has attained international ornithological fame for her study of the life 
history of song sparrows in her back yard. Ada Clapham Govan, whe 
wrote “Wings at My Window,” had ornithologists beating a path to her 
door because of the outstanding work she was doing in the banding of 
birds at her back yard feeder. 
While no such fame has attended the back yard watching ‘of the 
writer of this article, we have occasionally been able to glean a bit of gold 
from the dross of sparrows, starlings and pigeons that live off our 
generosity. We recall a snowy day on the fourth of February when a 
cardinal stuffed himself at our feeder while awaiting in the tree around 
him were half a dozen sparrows, a junco, two blue jays and two chick- 
adees. It looked lke a picture of the successful bird feeder, and was very 
pretty, with snow flakes drifting down. 
Another memory was the peculiar defense behavior of a catbird which 
we observed several times. ‘This catbird had a nest somewhere off the 
lot but dearly loved ‘to feed from our suet stick. A pair of blue jays 
brought their young into the yard, took over the maple tree from which 
the suet stick hung, and drove away all other birds. When they caught 
the catbird at the suet stick they flew at him, and as a defense, he flew 
away as though he were a fledgling struggling from its nest. He fluttered 
with half-open wings, sinking rapidly to the ground and then just gaining 
the lower branches of the apple tree across the garden. There he paused 
for a moment, fiitted his tail, mewed saucily and flew off toward his 
nesting area in an adult manner. It reminded me of a puppy at the mercy 
of a strange dog offering as its sole defense the fact that it was only. 
a puppy. 
One of the most unusual things my wife and I saw from our window 
one February was a pair of cardinals in the sugar maple tree above the 
feeder. Although the day was cold and wintry, the female cardinal 
carried on as though it were spring. She squatted down and fluttered, 
