THE BLUEBIRD.
By Mabel Osgood Wright.
The National Association of Audubon Societies Educational Leaflet No. 24.
Who dares write of the Bluebird, thinking to add a fresher tint to his plumage, a new tone to his melodious voice, or a word of praise to his gentle life, that is as much a part of our human heritage and blended with our memories as any other attribute of home?
Not I, surely, for I know him too well and each year feel myself more spellbound and mute by the memories he awakens. Yet I would repeat his brief biography, lest there be any who, being absorbed by living inward, have not yet looked outward and upward to this poet of the sky and earth and the fullness and goodness thereof.
The Bluebird's
Country.
For the Bluebird was the first of all poets,—even before man had blazed a trail in the wilderness or set up the sign of his habitation and tamed his thoughts to wear harness and travel to measure. And so he came to inherit the earth before man, and this, our country, is all The Bluebird's County, for at some time of the year he roves about it from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Mexico to Nova Scotia, though westward, after he passes the range of the Rocky Mountains, he wears a different dress and bears other longer names.
The Bluebird's
Travels.
In spite of the fact that our eastern Bluebird is a home-body, loving his nesting haunt and returning to it year after year, he is an adventurous traveler. Ranging all over the eastern United States at some time in the season, this bird has its nesting haunts at the very edge of the Gulf States and upward, as far north as Manitoba and Nova Scotia.
When the breeding season is over, the birds travel sometimes in family groups and sometimes in large flocks, moving southward little by little, according to season and food-supply, some journeying as far as Mexico, others lingering through the middle and southern states. The Bluebirds that live in our orchards in summer are very unlikely to be those that we see in the same place in winter days. Next to the breeding impulse, the migrating instinct seems to be the strongest factor of bird life. When the life of the home is over, Nature whispers, "To wing, up and on!" So a few of the Bluebirds who have nested in Massachusetts may be those who linger in New Jersey, while those whose breeding haunts were in Nova Scotia, drift downward to fill their places in Massachusetts. But the great mass of even those birds we call winter residents go to the more southern parts of their range every winter, those who do not being but a handful in comparison.