No such notion has the barn-swallow. He believes in family equality, even in the matter of clothes; and having been born in a pretty and becoming suit, wears it all the time. When the cinquefoil fingers the grass, you may look for his swallow-tailed coat in the air; and if the April sun strikes its steel-blue broadcloth, and discloses the bright chestnut muffler and the pale-tinted vest, you will rejoice that old fashions prevail in swallow-land. These swift-flying birds have something higher to think about than changing their clothes.
It seems otherwise with some birds of the meadow. That gay dandy, the bobolink, for instance, lays himself out to make a sensation in the breast of his fair one. When he started on his southern trip last autumn, he wore a traveling-suit of buff and brown, not unlike Mistress Bobolink's and the little Links'. No doubt he knew the danger lurking in the reeds of Pennsylvania and the rice-fields of Carolina, and hoped to escape observation while fattening there. In the spring, if fortunate enough to have escaped the gunner, he flies back to his northern home, "dressed to kill," in human phrase, happily not, in bird language. Robert o'Lincoln is a funny fellow disguised as a bishop. Richard Steele, the rollicking horse-guardsman, posing as a Christian hero, is a human parallel. With a black vest buttoned to the throat, a black cap and choker, bobolink's front is as solemn as the end-man's at a minstrel show. But what a coat! Buff, white and black in eccentric combination; and at the nape of the neck, a yellow posy, that deepens with the buttercups and fades almost as soon. Bobby is original, but he conforms to taste, and introduces no discordant color-tone into his field of buttercups and clover. In his ecstatic flight he seems to have caught a field flower on his back; and if a golden-hearted daisy were to speak, surely it would be in such a joyous tongue.
A red, red rose never blooms in a clover meadow, and the grosbeak does not go there for his chief spring adornment. Red roses do bloom all the year, though none so lovely as the rose of June; and so the grosbeak wears his distinctive flower at his throat the round year, but it is loveliest in early summer. I do not know a prettier fashion—do you?—for human kind or bird, than a flower over the heart. I fancy that a voice is sweeter when a breast is thus adorned. If ever the rich passion of a red, red rose finds expression, it is in the caressing, exultant love-song of the rose-breasted grosbeak. The one who inspires it looks like an overgrown sparrow; but grosbeak knows the difference, if you do not. If that wise parent should ever be in doubt as to his own son, who always favors the mother at the start, he has but to lift up the youngster's wings, and the rose-red lining will show at once that he is no common sparrow.
That pretty fashion of a contrast in linings is not confined to the grosbeak. The flicker, too, has his wings delicately lined with—a scrap of sunset sky. I do not know whether he found his material there or lower down in a marsh of marigolds; but when he flies over your head into the elm tree and plies his trade, you will see that he is fitly named, golden-winged woodpecker. He makes no fuss over his spring clothes. A fresh red tie, which, oddly enough, he wears on the back of his neck, a retinting of his bright lining, a new gloss on his spotted vest and striped coat, and his toilet is made. Madame Flicker is so like her spouse that you would be puzzled to tell them apart, but for his black mustache.
The flicker fashion of dressing alike may come from advanced notions of equality; whatever its source, the purple finch is of another mind. He sacrifices much, almost his own identity, to love of variety; and yet he is never purple. His name simply perpetuates a blunder for which no excuse can be offered. Pokeberry is his prevailing hue, but so variously is it intermingled with brown at different times and seasons and ages, that scarcely two finches look alike. The mother-bird wears the protective colors of the sparrow, while young males seem to be of doubtful mind which parent to copy; and so a purple finch family presents diversity of attire puzzling to a novice.
But why, pray, should a bird family wear a uniform, as if a charity school or a foundling hospital? The gay little warblers are not institutional to that degree. An example of their originality is redstart—another misnamed bird. He wears the colors of Princeton College, or rather, the college wears his; and a lordly male privilege it is, in both cases. His mate contents herself with pale yellow and gray, while the young male waits three years before putting on his father's coat. The first year he wears his mother's dress; the second, a motley betwixt and between; the third, he is a tree "candelita," or little torch, lighting up his winter home in a Cuban forest, and bringing Spanish fashions to New England with the May blossoms.
When dame nature in the spring
For her annual opening
Has her doors and windows washed by April showers;
When the sun has turned the key,