Bird Stories

by Edith M. Patch

What would you give to see this miracle—a bobolink flying through the night? For it has been seen; there being men who go and watch, when their calendars tell them 't is time for birds to take their southward flight. Their eyes are too feeble to see such sights unaided; so they look through a telescope toward the full round moon, and then they can see the birds that pass between them and the light. Like a procession they go—the bobolinks and other migrants, too; for the night sky is filled with travelers when birds fly south.

But though we could not see them, we should know when they are on their way because of their voices. What would you give to hear this miracle—a bobolink calling his watchword through the night? For it has been heard; there being men who go to the hilltops and listen.

As they hear, now and again, wanderers far above them calling, "Chink," one to another, they know the bobolinks are on their way to a land that lies south of the Amazon, and that neither sleep nor darkness bars their path, which is open before them to take when and where they will.

And yet Bob and his comrades did not hasten. The year was long enough for pleasure by the way. He and May had worked busily to bring up a family of five fine sons and daughters early in the summer; and now that their children were able to look out for themselves, there was no reason why the birds should not have some idle, care-free hours.

It was time for the Feast of the Vagabonds.

Besides, it was time for the Feast of the Vagabonds, a ceremony that must be performed during the first weeks of the Migrant Flight; for it is a custom of the bobolinks, come down to them through no one knows how many centuries, to hold a farewell feast before leaving North America. If you will glance at a map of the Bobolink Route, you will see the names of the states they passed through. Our travelers did not know these names; but for all that, they found the Great Rice Trail and followed it. They found wild rice in the swamps of Maryland and the neighboring states. In South Carolina they found acres of cultivated rice. For rice is the favorite food during the Feast of the Vagabonds, and to them Nature has a special way of serving it. This same grain is eaten in many lands; taken in one way or another, it is said to be the principal food of about one half of all the people in the world. Bob didn't eat his in soup or pudding or chop-suey. He used neither spoon nor chop-sticks. He took his in the good old-fashioned way of his own folk—unripe, as most of us take our sweet corn, green and in the tender, milky stage, fresh from the stalk. He had been having a rather heavy meat diet in Maine, the meadow insects being abundant, and he relished the change. There was doubtless a good healthy reason for the ceremony of the Feast of the Vagabonds, as anyone who saw Bob may have guessed; for by the time he left South Carolina he was as fat as butter.

In following the Great Rice Trail, Bob went over the same road that he had taken the spring before when he was northward bound; but one could hardly believe him to be the same bird, for he looked different and he acted differently. In the late summer, the departing bird was dull of hue and, except for a few notes that once in a great while escaped him, like some nearly forgotten echo of the spring, he had no more music in him than his mate, May. And when they went southward, they went all together—the fathers and mothers and sons and daughters in one great company.

In the spring it had all been different: Bob had come north with his vagabond brothers a bit ahead of the sister-folk. And the vagabond brothers had been gay of garb—fresh black and white, with a touch of buff. And Bob and his band had been gay of voice. The flock of them had gathered in tree-tops and flooded the day with such mellow, laughing melodies as the world can have only in springtime—and only as long as the bobolinks last.

The ways of the springtime are for the spring, and those of the autumn for the fall of the year. So Bob, who, when northward bound a few months before, had taken part in the grand Festival of Song, now that he was southward bound, partook of the great Feast of the Vagabonds, giving himself whole-heartedly to each ceremony in turn, as a bobolink should, for such are the time-honored customs of his folk.