2 T HE -A U*DeU'B ON} B Use heii 
a brown thrasher. A dear little yellow-hammer insisted We, wie ich habe 
dich lieb! Strange frogs lifted their voices 
from the ponds and at last I heard the sky- 
lark overflowing with incredible gladness. 
One striking song I could not place; it 
was brief, but proud and fiuted and lovely. 
The birds were across the pond and I could 
not see them in the aspens. I tried to think. 
Hadn’t I heard this before? Then a memory 
began to shape from four years earlier when 
Gottfried Schiermann had taken me on an all 
day tramp in the Unterspreewald not far from 
Berlin. The golden oriole! Could it be he? 
My hopes mounted. I followed a wagon track 
across'the meadow and sat on a stump to wait. 
Suddenly there he was in his resplendent 
golden plumage with jet black wings and tail 
and black line through the eyes. The Germans call him pirol, the French 
loriot, and the scientists Oriolus oriolus oriolus. He is the original oriole, 
while our American orioles belong to the blackbird family, or Ictevidae. 
Y ellow-hammer 
The next afternoon I explored further, following a backwater bordered 
by old polled willows, among the sprouts of which an array of plants had 
established themselves, grasses and blackberry bushes, buttercups and 
dandelions, and even a bush of fragrant snowball. Cowslips brightened the 
water and a blackcap (Sylvia atricapillus) gave his pretty song. In a 
nearby orchard I heard an insistent baby note and there was a bob-tailed 
youngster begging from its parent tree 
sparrow (Passer montanus), a bird re- 
lated to our English or house sparrow. 
On the last day of May Dr. Konrad 
Lorenz and I went to the meadows in the 
morning when the fields were golden with 
what I had called “morning dandelion” 
but later discovered to be goatsbeard. We 
saw a nuthatch gathering clay for its 
nest, and a goldhammer with dead grass 
in her bill. We heard the marsh warbler Tree sparrow 
(Acrocephalus palustris), the most musi- 
cal of its genus, and caught Lacerta agilis, the only lizard of the region. 
Dragon flies and damsel flies looked like those we have at home, but the 
one caddis fly we discovered was somewhat different from any I had ever 
seen before. It had made itself a long, slim tube of bits of green leaves. 
There were two kinds of newts or tritons in the pools, both with crests 
on their backs. Rana esculenta sang determinedly with a bladder puffing 
out each side of his mouth. 
Most exciting of all to me was to discover the author of the most 
insistent sound on the Danube meadows—a low, musical mmm mmm that 
made me think of the sound of telegraph wires in the wind that I had 
