Birds Every Child Should Know

by Neltje Blanchan

While training his ears, Nature is also training every muscle in his body, sending him on long tramps across the fields in pursuit of a new bird to be identified, making him run and jump fences and wade brooks and climb trees with the zest that produces an appetite like a saw-mill's and deep sleep at the close of a happy day.

When President Roosevelt was a boy he was far from strong, and his anxious father and mother naturally encouraged every interest that he showed in out-of-door pleasures. Among these, perhaps the keenest that he had was in birds. He knew the haunts of every species within a wide radius of his home and made a large collection of eggs and skins that he presented to the Smithsonian Museum when he could no longer endure the evidences of his "youthful indiscretion," as he termed the collector's mania. But those bird hunts that had kept him happily employed in the open air all day long, helped to make him the strong, manly man he is, whose wonderful physical endurance is not the least factor of his greatness. No one abhors the killing of birds and the {vii} robbing of nests more than he; few men, not specialists, know so much about bird life.

Nature, the best teacher of us all, trains the child's eyes through study of the birds to quickness and precision, which are the first requisites for all intelligent observation in every field of knowledge. I know boys who can name a flock of ducks when they are mere specks twinkling in their rapid rush across the autumn sky; and girls who instantly recognise a goldfinch by its waving flight above the garden. The white band across the end of the kingbird's tail leads to his identification the minute some sharp young eyes perceive it. At a considerable distance, a little girl I know distinguished a white-eyed from a red-eyed vireo, not by the colour of the iris of either bird's eye, but by the yellowish white bars on the white-eyed vireo's wings which she had noticed at a glance. Another girl named the yellow-billed cuckoo, almost hidden among the shrubbery, by the white thumb-nail spots on the quills of his outspread tail where it protruded for a second from a mass of leaves. A little urchin from the New York City slums was the first to point out to his teacher, who had lived twenty years on a farm, the faint reddish streaks on the breast of a yellow warbler in Central Park. Many there are who have eyes and see not.

What does the study of birds do for the {viii} imagination, that high power possessed by humans alone, that lifts them upward step by step into new realms of discovery and joy? If the thought of a tiny hummingbird, a mere atom in the universe, migrating from New England to Central America will not stimulate a child's imagination, then all the tales of fairies and giants and beautiful princesses and wicked witches will not cause his sluggish fancy to roam. Poetry and music, too, would fail to stir it out of the deadly commonplace.

Interest in bird life exercises the sympathies. The child reflects something of the joy of the oriole whose ecstasy of song from the elm on the lawn tells the whereabouts of a dangling "cup of felt" with its deeply hidden treasures. He takes to heart the tragedy of a robin's mud-plastered nest in the apple tree that was washed apart by a storm, and experiences something akin to remorse when he takes a mother bird from the jaws of his pet cat. He listens for the return of the bluebirds to the starch-box home he made for them on top of the grape arbour and is strangely excited and happy that bleak day in March when they re-appear. It is nature sympathy, the growth of the heart, not nature study, the training of the brain, that does most for us.

Neltje Blanchan.
Mill Neck, 1906.

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CONTENTS

	CHAPTER	PAGE
I.	Our Robin Goodfellow and His Relations	[3]
	Robin, Bluebird, Wood Thrush, Wilson's Thrush.
II.	Some Neighbourly Acrobats	[17]
	Chickadee, Nuthatches, Titmouse, Kinglets.
III.	A Group of Lively Singers	[31]
	Mockingbird, Catbird, Brown Thrasher, Wrens.
IV.	The Warblers	[51]
	Yellow Warbler, Black and White Creeping Warbler,Ovenbird, Maryland Yellow-throat, Yellow-breasted Chat.
V.	Another Strictly American Family	[67]
	The Vireos.
VI.	Birds Not of a Feather	[77]
	Butcherbirds, Cedar Waxwing, Tanagers.
VII.	The Swallows	[91]
	Purple Martin, Barn Swallow, Cliff Swallow, Tree Swallow,Bank Swallow.
VIII.	The Sparrow Tribe	[105]
	Purple Finch, English Sparrow, Goldfinch, Vesper Sparrow,White-crowned Sparrow, White-throated Sparrow, Tree Sparrow,Chippy, Field Sparrow, Junco, Song Sparrow, Swamp Sparrow,Fox Sparrow, Towhee, Cardinal, Rose-breasted Grosbeak,Indigo Bunting, Snowflake.
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IX.	The Ill-assorted Blackbird Family	[135]
	Bobolink, Cowbird, Red-wing, Meadowlark, Orioles,Blackbirds.
X.	Rascals We Must Admire	[151]
	Crow, Blue Jay and Canada Jay.
XI.	The Flycatchers	[159]
	Kingbird, Crested Flycatcher, Phoebe, Pewee, Least Flycatcher.
XII.	Some Queer Relations	[173]
	Nighthawk, Whip-poor-will, Chimney Swift, Hummingbird.
XIII.	Non-union Carpenters	[187]
	Our Five Common Woodpeckers.
XIV.	Cuckoo and Kingfisher	[203]
XV.	Day and Night Allies of the Farmer	[211]
	Buzzards, Hawks, and Owls.
XVI.	Whistler and Drummer	[233]
	Bob-white and Ruffed Grouse.
XVII.	Birds of the Shore and Marshes	[245]
	Snipe, Sandpiper, Plover, Rails and Coots, Bitterns andHerons.
XVIII.	The Fastest Flyers	[265]
	Gulls, Ducks, and Geese.
	Index	[275]

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