This was on a Saturday. Saturday afternoon and Sunday are busy people’s days in the woods. For their sakes I am always glad to meet them there—bird students, flower pickers, or simple strollers; yet I have learned to look upon those times as my poorest, and to choose others so far as I can. One does not enjoy nature to great advantage at a picnic. There are woods and swamps of which on all ordinary occasions I almost feel myself the owner, but of which on Saturday and Sunday I have scarcely so much as a rambler’s lease. This I have learned, however,—and I pass the secret on,—that the Sunday picnic does not usually begin till after nine o’clock in the forenoon.
When bird study becomes more general than it is now, as it ought to do, the community will perhaps find means—or, to speak more correctly, will use means, since there is no need of finding them—to restrain the present enormous overproduction of English sparrows, and so to give certain of our American beauties a chance to live.
Two days ago I was walking through a tract of woodland, following the highway, when I noticed, to my surprise, a white-breasted martin (tree swallow) just over my head. The next moment he fluttered before a hole in one of the big telegraph poles. His mate came out, and he alighted in the entrance, facing outward. And there he sat, while I in my turn took a seat upon the opposite bank and fell to watching him. The light struck him squarely, and it was good to see his blue-purple crown and his bright black eye shining in the sun. He had nothing to do inside, it appeared, but was simply on guard in his mate’s absence. Once he yawned. “She’s gone a good while,” he seemed to say. But he kept his post till she returned. Then, with a chirrup, he was off, and she dropped into the cavity out of sight.
All this was nothing of itself. But why should a pair of white-breasted martins, farm-loving, village-loving, house-haunting birds, a delight to the eye, and as innocent as they are beautiful—why should such birds be driven to seek a home in a telegraph pole in the woods? The answer was ready. I walked on, and by and by came to a village, young and I dare say thriving, but overrun from end to end with English sparrows, whose incessant clatter—
Soul-desolating strains—alas! too many—
filled my ears. Not a bluebird, not a tree swallow, nor, to all appearance, any place for one.
And so it is generally. One of my fellow townsmen, however, has an estate which forms a bright exception. There one sees bluebirds and martins. Year after year, punctual as the spring itself, they are back in their old places. And why? Because the owner of the estate, by a little shooting, mercifully persistent and therefore seldom necessary, keeps the English sparrows out. My thanks to him. His is the only colony of martins anywhere in my neighborhood.
A FAVORITE ROUND
After three days of heat, a cool morning. I take an electric car, leave it at a point five miles away, and in a semicircular course come round to the track again a mile or two nearer home. This is one of my favorite walks, such as every stroller finds for himself, affording a pleasant variety within comfortable distance.
First I come to a plain on which are hay-fields, gardens, and apple orchards; an open, sunny place where, in the season, one may hope to find the first bluebird, the first vesper sparrow, or the first bobolink. A spot where things like these have happened to one has henceforth a charm of its own. Memory walks beside us, as it were, and makes good all present deficiencies.