Part 8

Burroughs says: "Robin is one of our most native and democratic birds; he is one of the family (in the north) and seems much more to us than those rare exotic visitors with their distant and high-bred ways." The carol of the robin is very inspiring as you hear him:

"Heavenward lift his evening hymn,"

or perhaps when you first wake in the morning at early dawn, and listen to his love song, as he perches on some treetop in the edge of a nearby woods. How rich his red breast looks from such a perch just as the sun comes above the horizon and reflects its first rays against him! Just one experience like this in the whole year, how much it would add to life's pleasures! "With this pleasing association with the opening season, amidst the fragrance of flowers and the improving verdure of the fields, we listen with peculiar pleasure to the simple song of the robin. The confidence he reposes in us by making his abode in our gardens and orchards, the frankness and innocence of his manners, besides his vocal powers to please, inspire respect and attachment, even in the truant schoolboy, and his exposed nest is but rarely molested," says Nuttall, who writes eloquently of the robin.

The robin sings in autumn as well as in spring, and his autumn song is by no means inferior to his spring song, and I have always loved the old song, _Good-bye to Summer_, because of the special tribute to the robin's song, the chorus of which goes,

"O, Robin, Robin, redbreast! O, Robin, Robin, dear! O, Robin, sing so sweetly, In the falling of the year!"

It is rather interesting to note, however, that they usually sing in concert when they return south in the autumn. You can hear them in great numbers singing while feeding around a patch of _Ilex glabra_, the berries of which afford them considerable food in mid-winter. I love to welcome them back to the south in the autumn, and to hear their beautiful concert song.

BLACKBIRDS

It is rather remarkable to note how easy it is to cultivate the friendship of birds, even birds that are ordinarily quite wild. When I used to go to my office in the early morning, I always scattered a few handfuls of grits around the back window that I might accommodate some of my special friends to a breakfast, and it required only a short time for me to win the confidence of so many birds that I had to limit them to quite a short breakfast. At first no blackbirds came near me or my place of business. Soon they would sit on nearby trees and return to the grounds immediately after I returned from the yard back into the house. I had among my daily visitors not less than three or four hundred of these welcome friends. They would play around in the yard very amusingly and pick at each other much like children and afforded me much amusement and many pleasant moments in the course of a week.

Blackbirds have very little music in them or rather get very little out of themselves. John Burroughs has this to say of their music: "Their voices always sound as if they were laboring under a severe attack of influenza, though a large flock of them heard at a distance on a bright afternoon of early spring produce an effect not unpleasing. The air is filled with crackling, splintering, spurting semi-musical sounds, which are like pepper and salt to the ear." I really enjoy the mingled sounds produced by a great congregation of them, and often follow a flock of them down the creek side to their favorite resting place, just to hear them. They are always in great flocks here during the winter, and sometimes when feeding along on a hillside, the rear ranks marching over the bulk to the front in rapid succession, present an appearance somewhat like heavy waves of the sea, and one a short distance looks on with admiration and even surprise, to see such symmetry and uniformity in their movement.

One cannot fail to appreciate how much good a great flock of them do in a day as they move across a field covered with noxious grass and weed seeds. They seem to form an army in order to co-operate with man in every possible way to balance up the powers of nature. Weeds prevent crops from growing. Every seed that germinates in the soil and is allowed to grow, if only for a short while, tends to exhaust the soil. If the birds get these seeds in winter before germination begins, the useful plants will have a much larger fund of food from which to draw. Once in a while our blackbirds get a little grain and the farmer condemns them and looks upon them only with a murderer's eye. The birds do a hundred times more good than evil, and should not be condemned on such slight provocation. Their hard fare during the winter makes them rush into the fields sometimes in spring and get a taste of grains useful to man, but surely they should be pitied rather than censured, and so long as I can get them to depend on me for help, I am going to put out a mite for their breakfast. With sorrow I bid them good-bye each spring, but with renewed delight I hail with joy their return in autumn with their young.

THE NUTHATCH

Could I ever be satisfied were I located in some nook of this old earth where the voice of the nuthatch is not heard once in a while! His simple song--I speak of the white-breasted nuthatch--beats time to my daily routine of laboratory and field work and its very simplicity adds dignity to my little friend's life. All will easily recognize this useful little neighbor. His coat is of light blueish gray above, with a crown, nap, and upper back black. His tail and wings have black markings, while his lower parts and sides of head are white in the main. It is remarkable to find the nuthatch so ready to make friends with us, when he is generally considered a forest bird in this part of the country.

I see two or three of them near my office every day, and take much delight in my study of them and their habits. They have a peculiar way of perching, head downward, on the trunk of a tree and go that way most of the time. A small white-breasted bird on the trunk of a tree with head downward, is pretty good evidence that it is the nuthatch. This attitude is so natural that the older ornithologists--Audubon and Wilson--claim that they sleep in that position. I am not prepared to affirm or deny the rumor as my study of this bird, and all other birds, is restricted to their daylight comedies and tragedies, though I do often hear certain members of bird families singing at all hours of the night during certain seasons.

His song is, as above stated, quite simple only one note repeated over and over--konk-konk, konk-konk, two strokes generally in rapid succession--a kind of a nasal piping, or as one bird lover has said: "A peculiar, weird sound, somewhat like the quack of a duck, but higher keyed and with less volume, having a rather musical twang."

During the winter months he finds much time to search about on the ground for food, and consequently his crop is at such time partly filled with noxious weed seeds. In spring and summer, he searches all round the trunks and branches of trees for small insects and insect eggs, and as you approach him to study him he seems entirely unconscious of your presence, which I have thought almost approaches human affectation, and I wonder if this is not one of the alluring arts of the white-breasted nuthatch. Birds, in some way or other, express almost all human attributes, love, hate, anger, joy, sorrow, if we only are able to read them, and it is not unreasonable to assume that they are sometimes affectatious. The Southern mocking bird certainly seems to border vanity sometimes.