The naturalist can content himself with a day of little things. If he
can read only a word of one syllable in the book of nature, he will make
the most of that. I read such a word the other morning when I perceived,
when watching a young but fully fledged junco, or snowbird, that its
markings Were like those of the vesper sparrow. The young of birds
always for a brief period repeat the markings of the birds of the parent
stem from which they are an offshoot. Thus, the young of our robins have
speckled breasts, betraying their thrush kinship. And the young junco
shows, in its striped appearance of breast and back, and the lateral
white quills in the tail, its kinship to the grass finch or vesper
sparrow. The slate-color soon obliterates most of these signs, but the
white quills remain. It has departed from the nesting-habits of its
forbears. The vesper sparrow nests upon the ground in the open fields,
but the junco chooses a mossy bank or tussock by the roadside, or in the
woods, and constructs a very artistic nest of dry grass and hair which
is so well hidden that the passer-by seldom detects it.
Another small word I read about certain of the rocks in my native
Catskills, a laminated, blue-gray sandstone, that when you have split
them open with steel wedges and a big hammer, or blown them up with
dynamite, instead of the gray fresh surface of the rock greeting you, it
is often a surface of red mud, as if the surface had been enameled or
electrotyped with mud. It appears to date from the first muddy day of
creation. I have such a one for my doorstone at Woodchuck Lodge. It is
amusing to see the sweepers and scrubbers of doorstones fall upon it
with soap and hot water, and utterly fail to make any impression upon
it. Nowhere else have I seen rocks casehardened with primal mud. The
fresh-water origin of the Catskill rocks no doubt in some way accounts
for it.