Baby zephyrs nap on the worn-out linings, and the rain runs its slim fingers through the fading meshes. Even the domestic feline, who was wont to peep into the heart of every one of them, no longer is discovered inquiring into the nesting habits of birds. Forsaken are the nests. Naked are the boughs. We will leave them for the winter winds to question—and the winter winds will ravel more bark for next year's nests, and they will make the meadow-grasses molt their softest wrappers for linings. And it is the winter winds that will swirl the dead leaves into lint, and pull the weed stalks into fiber.
Therefore, long live the winter winds!
[CHAPTER XVI]
THE ROMANCE OF ORNITHOLOGY
The birds must know. Who wisely sings
Will sing as they.
The common air has generous wings:
Songs make their way.
What bird is that? The song is good,
And eager eyes
Go peering through the dusky wood
In glad surprise:
The birds must know.
Helen Hunt Jackson.
As everybody knows, ornithology means a discourse about birds—and people have discoursed about birds ever since spoken or written language gave us the means of exchanging thoughts.
In the Biblical history of the creation, birds occurred in the fifth epoch of time, when the evolution of grass and herbs and trees and seeds and fruits had made for them a paradise. With the grass and trees and seeds and fruits had evolved a variable diet for the feathered folk, and by instinct they have continued to follow after their food, migrating on merry tours the wide world over. Lovers of them from earliest dates have discoursed of their ways and means, of their habits, their favorite resorts, their uses relative to cultivation of lands, their faults in connection with civilization. Students of nature have divided the birds into "classes" and "species," as the human race itself is divided. As "order is heaven's first law," ornithologists have taught us to distinguish it in the study of birds; and so we have the "groups," always with reference to individual habits and anatomical peculiarities.