16 THE OA U.D Ul BrOcN= Be Dy Le here 
birds from the far north, busily feeding on some small pines, their gay 
plumage vivid against the green and white background. They do not come 
this far south every year and they were the first I had ever seen. In the 
afternoon of this day we found some barn owls that stared at us quizzically, 
and a little saw-whet that permitted us to come so close that the small boy 
of the group tried to catch it in his hat, which indignity, however, it 
escaped. Another trip to the Arboretum stands out because, although not 
yet the middle of February, the day was like spring and migration had 
started. Tree-sparrows, robins, and bluebirds were singing. For the first 
time I heard the song of the prairie horned larks. 
One misty day in April a friend and I were looking for birds in 
Oak Woods Cemetery. She stopped suddenly, took my arm and said under 
her breath, ‘Look there!” We had nearly stepped on a tiny bird threading 
its way through the wet grass. “Why, it’s a Henslow sparrow,” I ex- 
claimed. To our astonishment it was not the least afraid of us. When we 
came closer than two or three feet it would fly a short distance and 
resume feeding. After nearly half an hour of watching we tried to catch 
it by dropping my hat over it, but it slipped out under the brim. 
During the first week of May I was at our Indiana farm. A cousin 
and I decided to walk to an adjoining farm that had been our grand- 
parents’. They had been dead for fifty years but the house and barn they 
had built when first married were still being used. Though I had my 
binoculars I was only partly interested in birds, my cousin not at all. 
We wanted to satisfy a nostalgia for the places we had known so well in 
childhood. We stopped for a brief visit at the house with the tenant’s wife, 
then went out to the big barn. Its threshing floor and hand-hewn beams 
were still staunch. We recalled the story our mothers had told us so often 
of how grandfather had determined to raise it without serving liquor to 
the neighbors who came to help. He did so and it became known as the 
first barn in the country round about to have been raised without hard 
drinks. In the pasture beyond the barn was a flock of small birds feeding 
on the ground. They were constantly rising a few feet from the ground 
to settle in a new spot, as though they were leaves blown about by sudden 
gusts of wind. At first I could not identify them, but gradually by a 
process of elimination I decided they were pipits. Sure enough when I 
returned to the house and looked in my bird books I found I had been 
right, also that I had been lucky as they stay only a day or two in one 
place during migration. On two previous occasions I had seen a single 
pipit when it had been pointed out to me but here I had a whole fiock 
all to myself. 
The emotional high tide of the year came one evening in early May when 
I was looking for birds by myself in Oak Woods Cemetery. I was just 
entering a willow thicket by a small stream when I flushed a woodcock 
nearly under my feet. I looked at the ground where it had been and my 
startled eyes seemed for a moment to see only a tiny whirlwind in the 
dead leaves. Five newly hatched woodcocks were running off in as many 
directions. I stooped, picked up one, and cupped it in my hands. Weak with 
excitement, I sat down on the bank to study the tiny brown and tan ball 
