at eae ve OS LOUN Swim) slap rerum ela 
By eleven I’m back at the cottage. The woods are 
silent except for occasional call notes. A young Blue Jay 
whose breast is still all downy but whose wing and tail 
feathers are well developed, comes in for a drink. He dips 
his beak in, then puts his head way back and seems to let 
the water trickle slowly down his throat, repeating the 
action six or seven times. | wonder how much he really 
gets. Finally, he takes a bath, seeming quite tentative about 
the whole thing. His first bath? He barely makes it to the 
jackpine with his extra load of water. 
When I go out to replenish the birdbath a Mourning 
Dove flies suddenly from a low branch of the pine by the 
cottage door, then does a broken wing act, just like a 
Killdeer, all the way down the driveway. Sure enough 
there is a nest (if you can call such a poor collection of 
twigs a nest) with two eggs in it. I’ve seen nothing in the 
literature about this broken wing act of a Mourning 
Dove, but I know an observer who saw it in Kansas too. 
A Bond-Street-tailored male Towhee eats a few seeds 
on one of the low stumps, then vanishes in the privet and 
calls with a particularly strident off-pitch voice. Sounds 
like a piano tuner testing. He calls 8 or 10 times and then 
changes key and we're all happier. I love to watch Tow- 
hees feed. They don’t walk or flutter from place to place 
but jump as if they had coiled springs in their knees. Can 
man jump as high proportionally as a Towhee can? He 
makes no running start, just springs into the air. 
If I had gone the other way, out of the sand and 
dune swales, I would have headed south toward a big 
orchard, old meadows, and some soy bean and grain fields. 
I would have seen or heard the Song Sparrow, Chipping 
Sparrow, Eastern Meadowlark, Eastern Bluebird (nesting 
in a neighbors R.F.D. mail box) and occasionally a 
Killdeer, Cedar Waxing or Kingbird as well as all the 
“Black Trivia’’ as we have dubbed the Starling, Cowbird, 
Grackle, Blackbird, Redwing and Crow. 
Toward nightfall I hear the Field Sparrow, Bob- 
white and the ever-circling Purple Martins out in the 
meadow again. The Titmouse, Chickadee and Nuthatch 
who comprise ‘‘our family’ hurry in for a few last seeds, 
as do Mrs. Grosbeak and a pair of Grackles. The Blue 
Jays are greediest of all—swallowing 15 or 16 whole 
seeds, one right after the other as fast as they can pick 
them up. What’s their digestive system like, or do they 
regurgitate them and crack them elsewhere? 
33 
