Upon The Tree-Tops

by Olive Thorne Miller

from the other, the plaintive notes of the meadow lark.

THE LARK'S "SPUTTER."

Lovely indeed the lark looked among the buttercups in the pasture, stretching himself up from the ground, tall and slim, and almost as yellow as they; and very droll his sputtering cry, as he flew over the road to the deep grass of the meadow, to attend to the wants of his family, for the meadow was full of mysterious sounds under the grass, and seemed to give both bobolink and lark much concern.

The call I name the "sputter," because it sounds like nothing else on earth, is a sort of "retching" note followed by several sputtering utterances, hard to describe, but not unpleasant to hear, perhaps because it suggests the meadow under the warm sun of June, with bobolinks soaring and singing, and a populous colony beneath the long grass. Now night was coming on, and the larks were passing from the pasture, where they seemed to spend most of the day, some with song and some with sputter, over the road, to drop into the grass and be seen no more;

"While through the blue of the sky the swallows, flitting and flinging,
Sent their slender twitterings down from a thousand throats."

Sometimes, on that lonely road, which I passed over several times a day, I was treated to a fairy-like sight. It was when a recent shower had left little puddles in the clay road, and the eave swallows from a house across the meadow came down to procure material for their adobe structures. Most daintily they alighted on their tiny feet around the edge, holding up their tails like wrens, lest they should soil a feather of their plumage, and raising both wings over their backs like butterflies, fluttering them all the time, as if to keep their balance and partly hold them up from the ground,—a lovely sight which I enjoyed several times.

Under the eaves of the distant house, where the nests of these birds were placed, and which I visited later, were evidences of tragedies. The whole length of the cornice on the back side of the house showed marks of many nests, and there were left at that time but four, two close together at each end of the line. I cannot say positively that the nests had fallen while in use, but in another place, a mile away, I know of a long row having fallen, with young in, every one of whom was killed. Where was the "instinct" of the birds whose hopes thus perished? And was the trouble with their material or with their situation? I noticed this: that the nests had absolutely nothing to rest on, not even a projecting board. They were plastered against a perfectly plain painted board.

THE PHŒBE'S TALK.

Another bird whom I caught in a new rôle, apparently giving a lesson in food-hunting to a youngster, was a phœbe. Hearing a new and strange cry, mingled with tones of a voice familiar to me, I looked up, and discovered a young and an old phœbe. The elder kept up a running series of remarks in the tone peculiar to the species, while the infant answered, at every pause, by a querulous single note in a higher key. Every moment or two the instructor would fly out and capture something, talking all the while, as if to say, "See how easy it is!" but careful not to give the food to the begging and complaining pupil. No sooner did the parent alight than the youngster was after him, following him everywhere he went. After a while the old bird flew away, when that deceiving little rogue took upon himself the business of fly-catching. He flew out, snapped his beak, and, returning to his perch, wiped it carefully. Yet when the elder returned he at once resumed his begging and crying, as if starved and unable to help himself.

A friend and bird-student, whose home is in these mountains, assures me that the phœbes in this vicinity do not confine themselves to the traditional family cry, but have a really pleasing song, which she has heard several times. That, then, is another of the supposed songless birds added to the list of singers. I know both the kingbird and the wood pewee sing, not, to be sure, in a way to be compared to the thrushes, though far excelling the utterances of the warblers. But why are they so shy of exhibiting their talent? Why do they make such a secret of it? Can it be that they are just developing their musical abilities?