soul. A bird and his voice—one can not separate them, and 
the voice to me is the most important thing about him. It 
need not be of the rarest to endear its owner to me. Some 
of the simplest and plainest songs have a charm which some 
of the more elaborate ones do not possess. The cheery, 
familiar call of the phoebe, the “conk-a-ree” of the red- 
winged blackbird, the soft contented talk of swallows, this 
is music, fit for a king, to my way of thinking. Indeed, I do 
not know a bird’s voice that is unpleasing to my ears — not 
even the rattle of the king bird, the explosive creaking notes 
of a blackbird, or the raucous cries of gulls or other water 
birds. 
One exception I make, the harsh, persistent chirping of our 
truly obnoxious bird, the English sparrow. I woke one morn- 
ing, I remember, at a quarter past four, and heard a sparrow 
squawking energetically. I began to count his squawks, 
and when I had reached 1121 I fell asleep to waken later and 
hear him still at it. Upon which I felt for the rooth time a 
deep-dyed, rancorous, ineradicable, enmity towards the 
benighted beings who have painstakingly imported these 
foreign rascals! 
To learn to know the voices of the different birds is to my 
mind, the most delightful part of bird study. It is not easy. 
It takes much patience and a keen sense of discrimination in 
sounds. You hear a dozen birds where you see one in thick 
woods. The birds are indeed “A Choir Invisible.” You can 
hear them while you are driving, walking, working, outdoors, 
in your garden, or within at your sewing — if your windows 
are open — and can enjoy the songs without so much as a 
pause in your occupation. Then our ears can take in a much 
wider range than our eyes, almost too wide, it sometimes 
seems, when a confusing chorus of bird songs greets us all at 
once on a lovely May morning. You almost despair of ever 
being able to separate the concert into definite and distinct 
parts, but by a process of elimination you gradually succeed, 
at least partially. Each year a few new songs can be learned 
till we are familiar with the voices of the commoner birds at 
least. Some songs, I confess, are very hard to learn, such as 
those of many of the warblers, which resemble each other so 
closely, or are so devoid of individual form or quality that it 
is extremely difficult to recognize them. An added difficulty 
is the fact that the same bird will often sing several different 
songs. But I suppose it is these very obstacles in the way 
which makes the study of these warblers songs so alluring, 
and each year I attack the problem with renewed vigor. One 
summer I spent a month on the rocky coast of Maine in a 
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