While calling upon them I chanced to see the hurried movements of a thrush in the low trees six or seven yards away. The bird had food in its beak, which caused me to keep my eye upon it. It quickly flew down to a small clump of ferns that crowned a small knoll in the open, about ten feet from the border of the woods. As it did so, another thrush flew out of the ferns and disappeared in the woods. Their stealthy movements sent a little thrill through me, and I said, Here is a treasure. I parted the ferny screen, and there on the top of the small knoll was the nest with two half-fledged young.
A mowing-machine in a meadow in front of my door gave an unkind cut to a sparrow that had a nest in the clover near the wall. The mower chanced to see the nest before the sickle-bar had swept over it. It contained four young ones just out of the shell. At my suggestion the mower carefully placed it on the top of a stone wall. The parent birds were not seen, but we naturally reasoned that they would come back and would alight upon the wall to make observations.
But that afternoon and the next morning passed, and we saw no anxious bird parents. The young lifted up their open mouths whenever I looked into the nest and seemed to be more contented than abandoned birds usually are. The next night was unseasonably cold, and I expected to find the nestlings dead in the morning; but they were not, and, strangely enough, for babes in the wood or rather on a stone wall, they seemed to be doing well. Maybe the mother bird is still caring for them, I said to myself, and I ambushed myself across the road opposite to them and watched.
I had not long to wait. The mother sparrow came slyly up and dropped some food into an open mouth and disappeared.
Who does not feel a thrill of pleasure when, in sauntering through the woods, his hat just brushes a vireo's nest? This was my experience one morning. The nest was like a natural growth, hanging there like a fairy basket in the fork of a beech twig, woven of dry, delicate, papery, brown and gray wood products, just high enough to escape prowling ground enemies and low enough to escape sharp-eyed tree enemies. Its safety was in its artless art. It was a part of the shadows and the green-and-brown solitude. The weaver had bent down one of the green leaves and made it a part of the nest; it was like the stroke of a great artist. Then the dabs of white here and there, given by the fragments of spiders' cocoons—all helped to blend it with the flickering light and shade.
I gently bent down the branch and four confident heads with open mouths instantly appeared above the brim. The mother bird meanwhile was flitting about in the branches overhead, peering down upon me and uttering her anxious "quay quay," equivalent, I suppose, to saying: "Get away!" This I soon did.
Most of our bird music, like our wild flowers, is soon quickly over. But the red-eyed vireo sings on into September—not an ecstatic strain, but a quiet, contented warble, like a boy whistling at his work.
VII