Length -- 7 inches. About an inch longer than the English
sparrow.
Male -- Upper parts, wings, and tail bright blue, with rusty wash
in autumn. Throat, breast, and sides cinnamon-red. Underneath
white.
Female -- Has duller blue feathers, washed with gray, and a paler
breast than male.
Range -- North America, from Nova Scotia. and Manitoba to Gulf of
Mexico. Southward in winter from Middle States to Bermuda and
West Indies.
Migrations -- March. November. Summer resident. A few sometimes
remain throughout the winter.
With the first soft, plaintive warble of the bluebirds early in March, the
sugar camps, waiting for their signal, take on a bustling activity; the farmer
looks to his plough; orders are hurried off to the seedsmen; a fever to be out
of doors seizes one: spring is here. Snowstorms may yet whiten fields and
gardens, high winds may howl about the trees and chimneys, but the little blue
heralds persistently proclaim from the orchard and garden that the spring
procession has begun to move.Tru-al-ly, tru-al-ly, they sweetly assert to our
incredulous ears.
The bluebird is not always a migrant, except in the more northern portions of
the country. Some representatives there are always with us, but the great
majority winter south and drop out of the spring procession on its way
northward, the males a little ahead of their mates, which show housewifely
instincts immediately after their arrival. A pair of these rather
undemonstrative
matter-of-fact lovers go about looking for some deserted woodpecker's hole in
the orchard, peering into cavities in the fence-rails, or into the bird-houses
that, once set up in the
old-fashioned gardens for their special benefit, are now appropriated too
often by the ubiquitous sparrow. Wrens they can readily dispossess of an
attractive tenement, and do. With a temper as heavenly as the color of their
feathers, the bluebird's sense of justice is not always so adorable. But
sparrows unnerve them into cowardice. The comparatively infrequent nesting of
the bluebirds about our homes at the present time is one of the most
deplorable results of unrestricted sparrow immigration. Formerly they were the
commonest of bird neighbors.
Nest-building is not a favorite occupation with the bluebirds, that are
conspicuously domestic none the less. Two, and even three, broods in a season
fully occupy their time. As in most cases, the mother-bird does more than her
share of the work. The male looks with wondering admiration at the housewifely
activity, applauds her with song, feeds her as she sits brooding over the
nestful of pale greenish-blue eggs, but his adoration of her virtues does not
lead him into emulation.
"Shifting his light load of song,
From post to post along the cheerless fence,"
Lowell observed that he carried his duties quite as lightly.
When the young birds first emerge from the shell they are almost black; they
come into their splendid heritage of color by degrees, lest their young heads
might be turned. It is only as they spread their tiny wings for their first
flight from the nest that we can see a few blue feathers.
With the first cool days of autumn the bluebirds collect in flocks, often
associating with orioles and kingbirds in sheltered, sunny places where
insects are still plentiful. Their steady, undulating flight now becomes
erratic as they take food on the wing -- a habit that they may have learned by
association with the kingbirds, for they have also adopted the habit of
perching upon some conspicuous lookout and then suddenly launching out into
the air for a passing fly and returning to their perch. Long after their
associates have gone southward, they linger like the last leaves on the tree.
It is indeed "good-bye to summer" when the bluebirds withdraw their touch of
brightness from the dreary November landscape.
The bluebirds from Canada and the northern portions of New England and New
York migrate into Virginia and the Carolinas, the birds from the Middle States
move down into the Gulf States to pass the winter. It was there that countless
numbers were cut off by the severe winter of 1894-95, which was so severe in
that section.