THE BIRDS AND BIRD-SONGS AT THE OLD FARM
"Sing away, ye joyous birds,
While the sun is o'er us."
Looking back to that first fortnight after my arrival at the Old
Squire's, I think what most impressed my youthful mind was the country
verdure and the bird-songs. Everything looked so very green, accustomed
as my eyes were to the red city bricks, white doorsteps and dusty
streets. The universal green of those June days at times well nigh
bewildered me.
Astronomers tell us that there are systems of worlds in outer space,
presided over by green suns; it was as if I had been transported to such
a world. Moreover, the effect was cool and calm and healthful; cities
are abnormal places of abode; man originated and during all the early
ages of his development, lived in the green, arboreal country,
surrounded by rustic scenery and sylvan quiet. The clangor and roar of a
great city, particularly the noise by night, is unnatural; nor are the
reflected colors from urban structures normal to the eye. Add to these
the undue tension to which city life, as a whole, braces the living
substance of brain and nerve, and the reason why city populations have
to be so constantly recruited from the country is in some degree
explained. Children even more than older persons need country
surroundings.
Next to the deep novelty of the wide green landscape, came the
bird-songs. It was June. The air seemed to me all a-quiver with
bird-notes, and I was listening to each and every one. Ah, to my
untried, youthful eyes those fresh great hay-fields, whitening with
ox-eyed daisies, reddening with sweet-scented clover and streaked golden
with vivid yellow butter-cups, over which the song-convulsed bobolinks
hovered on arcuate wings!
I had never heard the nesting song of a bobolink before. What a song it
is!--the eager zeal, the exultation in it. The overflowing, rollicking
joy with which it is poured forth, filled me with such gleeful
astonishment, the first time I heard one, and struck such a chord of
sympathetic feeling in my heart and so powerfully, that I recollect
shouting, "ye-ho!" and racing tumultuously after the rapturous singer.
"What does that bird say?" I cried.
Laughing quietly at my fresh curiosity, the Old Squire told me that the
bird was supposed to say,--
"Bob o' Lincoln, take-a-stick-and-give-a-lick, Bob-olink, Kitty-link,
Withy-link, Billy-seeble, see, see, see!"
Addison gave a somewhat different interpretation which has now slipped
my memory; I deemed the Old Squire's version the more reliable one.
While strawberrying in the fields, that summer, I searched three or four
times for the nests which I felt sure were close by, in the grass, for
the little plain gray wife of the noisy singer sat on the weed-tops,
crying,--"Skack! skack!" but I could not find them.
Once, I remember, the following year Theodora and I resolved that we
would find the nest of one bold fellow that kept singing close over our
heads, as we were gathering strawberries in a grassy swale, in the west
field. We set down our dishes and crept over every foot of a tract at
least a quarter of an acre in extent, and went over a part of it two or
three times. At last, we found it, but not till we had crushed both nest
and eggs beneath our crawling knees--a denouement which distressed
Theodora so much that she declared she would never search for a
bobolink's nest again. "Clumsy monsters that we are," said she; "the
poor thing's nest is crushed into the dirt!"
When we came to mow that swale a few days after, Gramp first marvelled,
then grumbled repeatedly; for the grass was in a mat. He spoke of it at
the dinner table that day, making a covert accusation against Gram,
whereupon Theodora and I owned up in the matter, Doad naively adding
that we had done it "on the strength of Gram's original permit," but
that we had agreed never to do so again. The Old Squire laughed a little
grimly and said he wanted it understood, that the permit, alluded to,
was not transferable. But the old lady now interposed her opinion, that
the permit could be made a moderate use of by others, if she saw
fit--and needed strawberries.
A pair of blue-birds built their nest in a box which Addison had nailed
to a short pole and set up in the barnyard wall; and every morning, as
we milked the cows, we would hear their plaintive notes, repeated over
and over to each other as they flew about;--"Deary, cheer up, Deary,
cheer up!" as if life needed constant mutual consolation, to be
supported. "Old Ummy," the house cat, was much inclined to watch their
box and once attempted to climb up to them.
Two pairs of peewees built about the premises, one just inside the south
barn cellar, the other under a projecting window-sill at the end of the
wagon-house. These two pairs, or younger birds reared there, had built
in these same places for seven or eight years. Night and morning as we
milked, and at noon also, as we sat grinding scythes at the well, those
old peewees would alight on posts, or gables, rub their beaks twice on
the dry wood and cry, "Peewee, peewee, peewitic; pewee, peer-a-zitic!"
For some not very good reason, I took a boyish dislike to peewees. They
are very useful birds, great destroyers of worms, moths and flies, and
so far as I know, never do the slightest harm, which can hardly be said
of all our feathered favorites.
As we hoed potatoes and corn on those green June days, the song of the
little gray ground sparrows was constantly in my ears, although the
others seemed not to notice it.
"And what does that one say?" I asked Gramp.
"What one?" the old gentleman asked.
"Why, that bird! It sings all the time," I rejoined. "Don't you hear
it?"
He stopped and appeared to listen, at a loss, for a minute, as to what I
heard.
"Oh, those sparrows," replied he, at length. "Addison, can you tell him
what they say?"
"Yes," replied Ad, laughing, "they say and say it very distinctly, too,
'Charlotte, Charlotte, don't you hear me whistle?' Charlotte is his
mate, you know; and the reply to that is 'Philip, Philip's sitting on
the thistle.'"
"That is a little different from what they used to tell me when I was a
boy," Gramp remarked. "I was told that they say, 'War-link, war-link,
christle, christle, christle; high-link, high-link, twiddle, twiddle,
twiddle.'"
"Good deal anybody knows what a bird says," Halstead exclaimed,
derisively. "They don't say anything that I can make out."
But it seemed to me, after Addison had mentioned it, that the first, or
opening note of the song sparrow, was much like, "Charlotte, Charlotte,
don't you hear me whistle?" They had several other notes, too, not as
easily likened to human language; indeed, these humble little sparrows,
when one comes to listen closely to them in all their moods, have a
curious variety of short _arias_.
During my second week at the farm, I found a sparrow's nest in a small
bunch of hard-hack, a few rods from the cow-pasture bars, with four
eggs, resembling, only a little larger than, speckled garden beans; and
I visited it every morning, till the sprawling, skinny little chicks
were hatched. But on the third morning the nest was empty; something had
taken them. Addison said that it was most likely a crow, but possibly a
snake. We often found the nests, while haying in the fields; the scythe
generally passed over them without doing any harm, and to save them from
the rake, we would put up a stick close beside them. But their enemies
are wofully numerous; not half the nests of young are reared. Ants, I
think, kill numbers of the nestlings, soon after they are hatched, when
they chance to be near an ant-hill.
But in the early mornings and evenings, and before the quickly gathering
south rains, the songsters of all others, which made the air vocal, were
the great, bold, red-breasted robins, not fewer than nine pairs of which
had their capacious nests in the garden, orchard and Balm o' Gilead
trees. They always took the greater part of our cherries, till Addison
at a considerable expense, some years later, bought mosquito netting to
spread over the tree tops; and they also ate strawberries greedily; but
we as constantly overlooked their offenses, they sang so royally and
came familiarly back to us so early every spring. No one can long find
the heart to injure Robin Red-Breast.
I do not think it necessary to qualify, or speak of this our fine bird
as the "American robin, or red-breasted thrush," because a different
bird is called the robin in England. This our bird is the Robin; and we
shall call it so without apology, or explanatory adjectives.
The robin songs in the Balm o' Gileads, just across the yard from our
chamber windows, were the matins that often waked us in June, and
sounded in our drowsy ears as we lay, still half asleep, reluctant to
rise and dress. For however it may be with most boys, I am obliged to
confess that both then and later, I was a sleepy-head in the morning;
it always seemed to me on waking, particularly in the summer months,
that I was not half rested, and that I would give almost anything I
possessed for another hour of sleep. As a fact, I now feel sure that I
did not get sleep enough, from half past nine in the evening to five in
the morning; and I think that most boys and girls of thirteen and
fourteen need nine hours of sleep in every twenty-four hours, especially
where they are in active exercise or work throughout the day. It is
really cruel to drive a boy up when he is so shockingly sleepy! There
was always so much going on, that we could not well go to bed till after
nine in the evening, although I would sometimes steal away up-stairs as
soon as it was dark.
Curiously enough it was when I was but about half awake in the morning,
that those robin-songs sounded the most distinctly, and I seemed to hear
every note and trill which they uttered.
"Tulip, tulip, tulip; skillit, skillit,
Tulip, skillit; fill it, fill it, fill it;"--
followed after a moment or two, perhaps, by a shrill and noisy "Piff!
piff! piff!"--as some sudden dissension broke out, or some suspicious
cat, or other marauder, came near the nest tree. The crows, always bold
in the early morning hours, would come into the Balm o' Gileads after
birds' nests, sometimes, before we were astir. I remember that Addison
once cut my nap short by firing his gun from the chamber window at a
crow that was sneaking into the Balm o' Gileads after young robins. He
shot the crow, but my own ear rang for more than two hours, and I was so
confused for a time, that I scarcely knew enough to dress myself.
There is no combination of letters which more nearly represents the song
notes of the robin than the above, I think, although many attempts have
been made to render them into some semblance of human language. Addison
always insisted that they said, "Dew-lip, Dew-lip; bill it, bill it,
bill it;"--the whole song being an exhortation of the robin to his mate
whose name was _Dew-lip_, to get up and _bill it_ for worms. Halstead
had somewheres got hold of a medical rendering of the song, by a waggish
doctor who declared that the robins were constantly admonishing him in
the line of his profession:--
"Kill 'em, cure 'em; physic, physic."
But the rest of us scouted this partisan interpretation.
The explosive, alarmingly energetic danger cry of, "Piff, piff," which
will so suddenly wake the entire vicinity of the nest, is at times
modified and given quite a different intonation, as if to express
discontent: "Fibb, fibb!" and sometimes even loneliness: "Pheeb,
pheeb!"--very mournful.
During a shower, accompanied by wind in heavy wrenching gusts, in the
night, that summer, a nest containing four young robins fell from a
maple, a few rods down the lane, into the grass beneath. Theodora heard
the outcry of the old robins, blended with the thunder and the roar of
the rain, in the night, and noticing their mournful notes next morning
about the tree, made search and discovered the calamity. Addison and she
gathered up the nestlings and putting them in an old berry box, lined
with grass and cotton batting, tied the improvised nest to a branch of
the maple. For an hour or two the scolding old birds would not go near
the thing, but later in the day we saw them, feeding their young in it,
quite as if nothing had happened to disturb them.
In the rear of the wagon-house there grew a good-sized mountain ash or
round-wood tree which nearly every fall was crowned with the usual great
bright-red clusters of bitter berries. Late in October the robins
always came for those berries, and sometimes a flock of fifty or sixty
would assemble. We often tried to frighten the birds away, for the red
clusters are beautiful in winter, but for a long time we never succeeded
in saving them. The robins would linger about for a week, or more,
rather than leave a single bunch of those berries ungathered. Addison
once placed a stuffed cat-skin in the tree, at which the robins scolded
vociferously for a day or two from the neighboring shrubs and fence; but
they suddenly discovered the deception and got all the remaining berries
in the course of a single forenoon. Addison was boasting a little of the
success of his ruse when, at dinner, Ellen quietly bade him go look at
the tree. The robins had already got every berry and gone, leaving the
feline effigy in the bare tree, an object of mirth and ridicule. A
scarecrow made of old clothes, stuffed with hay and crowned by an old
hat, set up in the tree the following year, served no better purpose.
Ellen and Theodora then hung an old tin clothes boiler in the tree, and
arranged a jangling bunch of tin ware inside it, with a long line
running to the kitchen window, where they could conveniently give it a
jerk every few minutes. This device answered well for a day or two, and
it was very amusing to see those robins scatter from the tree, when the
line was pulled. They were some little time making up their minds
concerning it, and would sit on the back fence and rub their beaks on
the posts, at intervals, as if making a great effort to comprehend the
cause of the "manifestations" inside the boiler. No doubt the more
superstitious ones attributed it to "spirits." Skepticism increased,
however, and by the second day one unbelieving red fellow refused to
budge, till the line was jerked twice, and soon after that they wore the
girls out, pulling it, and got the berries as usual. The year after,
Addison saved the berries by stretching one of his cherry-tree nets over
the round-wood tree, in October. It chanced, however, that the tree
failed to produce a crop of berries the next season and died a year or
two later;--a circumstance which Gram hinted, mysteriously, might be a
"dispensation," on account of our persistent efforts to thwart the
robins. It should be taken into account, however, that the mountain-ash
is not long-lived, and that this was already an old tree.
In a large maple, down the lane, a preacher-bird sang every day in June
and until into August, generally loudest and most continuously, from
eleven till two o'clock. On coming to or going from our dinner, we would
often hear him: sometimes he sang in the morning and now and then after
supper. This bird--it is the red-eyed vireo--has an oddly persistent,
pragmatic note, which can hardly be called singing, being more like
declamation and somewhat disconnected and disjoint, as if the "preacher"
were laying down certain truths and facts and seeking by constant
iteration to impress them upon dullards. Betwixt every one of these
short sentences, there is a little pause, as if the preacher were
waiting for the truth to strike home to his hearers; but if the bird is
watched, he will be seen to be picking and hopping about on the branch
which serves him as a pulpit, snapping up a bug or a seed here and
there. Yet his discourse goes steadily on, by the half hour, or hour,
sometimes with a rising inflection, as after a question, sometimes the
falling, as having given an irrefutable answer, himself. Once the idea
that the bird is preaching has entered a listener's mind, he can never
shake it off.
"My hearers--where are you?--You know it--you see it.--Do you hear
me?--Do you believe it?" And so on, upon the same insistent and at
length tiresome strain.
"Oh, I do wish that preacher bird would stop," Ellen would exclaim at
times. "He has 'preached' steadily all the forenoon!"
His place for singing was always about half way from the ground to the
top of the maple, and he rarely came out in sight. The female was
probably sitting on her nest, hard by. They are trim little olive-tinted
birds and often rear two broods, I think, for they remain north till
autumn.
Once while Elder Witham was with us, in haying time, Ellen exclaimed,
inadvertently, as we were going in to sit down at table one day,
"There's that preacher bird again!"
The Elder looked at her a moment and said slowly, "'Preacher-bird,
preacher-bird,' what kind of a bird is that, young lady?"
Greatly abashed at her lapse, Ellen hardly knew how to best explain it,
but Addison came to her rescue. "There are two of those vireos," he
remarked in a perfectly natural, matter-of-fact tone. "One of them, the
warbling vireo, they call the 'brigadier' on account of its peculiar
note, and the other or red-eyed vireo, the 'preacher,' from its earnest
manner of utterance. I don't know," Addison continued, with candid
frankness, "that the names are very well chosen, but we have got in the
habit of calling them that way."
The Elder listened to this, observing Addison closely, then appeared
thoughtful for a moment and said, impressively, "Well, all God's
creatures preach, if only we have ears to hear them." Ellen drew a long
breath of relief, and after dinner, out on the wood-shed walk, she took
Addison by the button and said, "You're a treasure, Ad; ask me for a
cooky any time after this."
The brigadier, or warbling vireo, frequently sits on the tops of trees,
when singing; while the preacher takes his stand midway from the ground
upwards; the brigadier, too, more frequently joins in the great opening
overture of all bird voices, at dawn, to usher in the new day, while
preacher reserves his notes till the earlier choir has ceased its
anthem. Withal the little preacher is much more apt to nest in trees
near the habitations of men than his congener, the brigadier, who not
unfrequently makes his abode at a distance from buildings, where forests
border pastures, or old roads enter woody lands.
Another shrill, small songster of habits quite similar to the brigadier
we used sometimes to hear, but rarely saw, on our way over to the "Aunt
Hannah lot," an adjunct of the Old Squire's farm, to reach which we
crossed a tract of sparse woods. Its notes, prolonged on a very sharp,
high key, resembled the words, _My fee-fee-fee-fee-fee!_ each louder and
keener than the preceding.
Addison was quite uncertain as to this bird, during the first and second
summers we were at the farm. We only saw it once or twice; for its
favorite place, while singing, is at the top of some large dense tree;
and we were never able to find its nest. Addison at length decided that
it was an oven-bird, a surmise which he greatly desired to verify by
finding the rest.
Later in life he has often laughed over our ignorance and our fruitless
quests at that time.
Among the raspberry and blackberry briars, beside the stone wall on the
south side of this same old road, leading to the Aunt Hannah lot, we
used to see, occasionally, a deep blue indigo-bird, a very active little
fellow, always flitting and hopping about amongst the briars. But we
never heard it sing, nor utter any note, save rarely a petulant _snip,
snip_, and never found its nest.
To the south of the same lot there was a tract of mixed wood, sapling
pines, maples, a few beeches, and farther down, nearer the brook, white
ash and great yellow birches, with swamp maples, osier and alder. Here
among the beeches, maples and pines, we at times heard a Theresa-bird.
Theodora chanced to know something of this bird; and I remember that the
first time we ever went there together, she called out to us to listen
to the low, sweet note, which otherwise, in our haste, we should not
have noticed. Addison had never heard it then, and his volumes of
Audubon did not describe New England birds very clearly; but Theodora
said this was a Theresa-bird (which we subsequently found to be the
Green Warbler) and that its song was supposed, in Catholic countries, to
be a petition to _St. Theresa_, viz.,--"_Hear me, St. Theresa_,"
beginning quite high and sinking to a much lower strain. I have since
seen in the naturalist Nuttall's work, that this author compares the
note of the Green Warbler to the syllables, _te-de-deritsea_, repeated
slowly and melodiously.
On the north side of the lane, leading from the house down to the road,
opposite the maple above alluded to, where the robins had a nest, there
stood two elms, quite tall trees, in the uppermost of which, during
three summers, a pair of Baltimore orioles built. These orioles had
never come there previously; at least, the Old Squire had never seen
one, but Gram recognized them the first time one sang, as an old
acquaintance of her girlhood days; she called them Golden Robins and was
much delighted to hear them. They came on one of the first days of June;
and as I had arrived but a few days previously, Gram declared that I
"had brought them with me." But the fact is, that the Baltimore oriole
moves its habitat slowly northeastward, in the wake of man and his
orchards and shade trees; for it is one of those birds which, like the
robin, depend on mankind for protection. This pair constructed a hanging
nest from a twig of one of the drooping elm branches and reared a brood
successfully that season; and throughout that entire month of June,
their song, uttered at intervals of their labors, was a daily delight to
us all. Next after the wood thrush and the robin, the loud yet sweetly
modulated call of the Baltimore oriole is the most pleasing of all our
bird notes. Pure and sweet as it is, too, it nearly always startles the
hearer, from its regal volume and 5 strength. Gram's version of its song
was, _Cusick, cusick!_ _So-ho-o-o!_ _Do you know I'm back with you!_ But
the words themselves give no idea whatever of the song, unless uttered
with the strange, liquid modulations which characterize it.
During the third season some accident befell the pair, or their nest;
they suddenly disappeared and thenceforward we missed their melodious
invocations. Gram, in particular, lamented their departure. A pair,
perhaps the same pair, afterwards built in a butternut tree near the
Edwards' farmhouse; but they never returned to us. To the lover of
birds, the oriole in its flight among the trees, like a yellow meteor
flashing past, is a sight that instantly rivets the attention, and is as
delightfully startling to the eye as its song is to the ear. But I know
of no device by means of which they can be attracted to nest in any
given locality; their tastes are not well enough known to us; "houses,"
like those which attract the blue-bird and the martin, possess no charm
for the oriole. With the first of June Gram watched, wistfully, for the
return of this pair, during a number of successive springs; and for her
sake especially, we all hoped they would come back.
I arrived too late the first spring, to hear the woodlands echo to the
May-note of the white-throated sparrow. Once only, while going out to
get the cows with little Wealthy, the second week after I came, I heard
it twice repeated, from the woods along the south side of the pasture,
and when I asked my small companion what kind of a bird that was, she
roguishly cried, "Oh, that's old Ben Peabody."
"Is that what he says?" I asked, for the name at once struck me as being
like the bird's note.
"Yes," cried Wealthy. "He says, 'Old Ben Peabody, Peabody, Peabody,'
just as plain as anything; Theodora says so; and so does Nell and all of
us, but Addison. Ad thinks he says, 'All day whittling, whittling,
whittling.' And Alf Batchelder says,--but I'll not tell what he thinks
the bird says."
"What is it?" I queried.
"It's nothing very pretty," quoth Wealthy, running off to get around the
cows, thereby evading the question altogether, for she had not as yet
grown very well acquainted with me.
But I have perhaps lingered too long with birds and bird-songs. It is a
fond subject, however, and scarcely can I forbear to speak of the
veeries, the vesper-birds, and "hair-birds" whose nests we so often
found in the orchard; the cedar birds or cherry birds which so
persistently stripped the wild cherry trees and pear-plum shrubs; the
wood thrushes that trilled forth such sad, mellow refrains in the cool,
gray border of the wood-lot below the fields, at eventide; the
yellow-hammers that tapped on the pasture stumps and cried out
boisterously when rain was impending; the wrens that filled and
re-filled a bit of hollow aqueduct log on the lane wall, with sticks for
a nest and laid thirteen eggs in it; the hundreds of black-birds that
built in the reeds down at the great bog, near the head of the lake; the
sap-suckers that punctured the trunks of the apple-trees with thousands
of tiny holes; the many-voiced blue-jays that came around when the corn
was ripening in September and sometimes lingered all winter in the
neighborhood.
And of the great pileated woodpeckers, a pair of which occasionally
cried loud and long from the five lofty pine stubs in the colt pasture,
beyond the Aunt Hannah lot; the yellow-birds that piped, _pee-chid-aby_,
_pee-chid-aby_, on wavy lines of flight, upon the last days of August,
just ere taking wing for warmer climes; the imitative cat-birds that
built in the alders along the road across the meadow, whose nests the
boys held it lawful to destroy because, forsooth, "they sucked other
birds' eggs," a false accusation rendered plausible, perhaps, from their
disagreeable feline squalls, and not wholly ingenuous imitations of the
songs of the thrush, the veery and the robin.
How well, too, I recall the cuckoos that, night or day, intoned so
moodily in the willow copses below the east field fence and suffered
from a like unpopular accusation of "laying their eggs in other birds'
nests." Also the mated triads of sooty chimney swallows that rumbled
nightly in the great brick flues of the farmhouse, and at first almost
terrified me, but at length furnished the thalamian refrain that most
surely lulled me asleep; the red-headed woodpeckers that with sharp
cries and concave stoop of flight moved fitfully, from tree to tree,
tapping this one loudly, that one low and dull, and whose nest hole in
the dead maple on the hillside was re-occupied year after year, till at
last the stub blew down and broke short off at the hole itself; the
king-fishers that with the same stooping flight, sprung their sharp
rattles along the brooks and lakeside; the martins that feloniously
caught the bees, and every season dragged their squalling, screaming
young out of their pole-house, then poked them off the platform to fly
for themselves, having first, however, cleared the yard of cats.
The militant king birds, too, that built every June on the tops of the
small apple-trees in the young orchard, and raged in mid air, overhead,
pouring out a wild farago of sharp cries, never so happy as when in full
career after crows, hawks, cats or dogs; the moth-catching night-hawks
that cried _peerk_ from their wide mouths, high in the sky at nightfall,
and dived far aslant on stiff wings, with a long drawn _soo-oo-ook_;
the clucking whip-poor-wills, that chanted from the bare flat pasture
rocks; the chickadees that came into the orchard and about the great
loose farm woodpile, in February, with their odd little minor refrain of
_cic-a-da-da-da-da_, mere feathery mites of ceaseless activity that
somehow did not freeze, at 20 deg. below zero.
In this freezing weather, too, came the white-winged flocks of
snow-buntings, that heralded the coming storm and flew away, blending
with the whirling snowflakes, uttering queer thin notes that seemed like
spirit voices from the upper air: all these and many others, Nature's
humble angels, what part and parcel they were of that dear old farm life
of ours!
Nor yet have I mentioned the larger game birds, nor the birds of prey;
the "hoot-owls" that both in summer and winter, but oftenest in March
and October, on still, dark, cloudy evenings, uttered their dismal, deep
bass _hoot, hoot, hoo-oo-oot_, from the depths of the gloomy forest
side, beyond the Little Sea; the hen-hawks that cried down _chickee-ee_
to us, from endless mazy circles high over the farm, and occasionally
decimated the poultry, or were seen sailing low across the fields with a
snake dangling from their claws; the eagles that seldom, but on a few
occasions paid a brief visit to the vicinity; the herons that frogged
along the boggy shore of the lake and built their nests in the tops of
the Foy Brook pines; the wild geese that flew northward in a wide V,
early in the spring and again southward in October; the sheldrake and
the black ducks which Addison had such success shooting every fall, in
the old mill pond, beyond the east wood-lot; the swift-diving loons of
the blue Pennesseewassee, that flew heavily across the hills, to several
northerly ponds, uttering shaken, hollow cries, or that in the early
evening and morning hours, pealed their mellow, alto horns from the calm
bosom of the lake; the partridges that "drummed" in the outlying copses
and patches of second growth, in April, and led forth their broods in
June, subject every autumn to our first excited, early efforts at
gunning; and last of all, the flapping, canny, thievish, black crows
that like the foxes were always about, and always at loggerheads with
the farmers.