There were trillions of trilliums, as the Artist remarked
epigrammatically. Some were the common trilliums, of a dark
garnet-red. Besides these we found many of the rarer painted
trilliums--a pure white triangle with a stained crimson reversed
triangle in the centre. All of the trilliums are studies in triangles.
The painted trillium has the crimson triangle in the centre, set on
the white triangle made up of three petals which, in their turn, are
fixed in a reversed triangle of green sepals, and the whole blossom is
set in a still larger triangle made up of three green leaves.
Everywhere the woods were full of purple-pink rhodora, the earliest of
the azaleas. Its blossoms were silver flecked with deeper-colored
spots.
The next nest found was to me the most eventful one of the day,
although not an especially rare one on that mountain. The Architect
was walking beside one of the strange hummocks which are thought to
have been formed by buried tree-trunks in the path of some old-time
cyclone. Suddenly his eye was caught by the gleam of four sky-blue
eggs shining like turquoises from a nest directly on the ground,
lined neatly with red-brown pine-needles and with dry dark green moss
on the outside, the hall-mark of the nest of the hermit thrush. In
front of it was a cushion of partridge-berry vines, with their green
leaves and red berries, while blueberry fronds, covered with tender
green leaves, arched over the nest, and sprays of ground-pine
sheltered its sides. It was a fitting home for the beautiful twilight
singer. The eggs of a hermit thrush actually seem to gleam from the
ground, unlike the mottled and speckled and clouded eggs of most
ground-nesters.
As the sun came up, the whole mountain-side rang with bird-songs.
There was the abrupt strain of the magnolia warbler, who to my ears
says, "Wheedle, wheedle, whee-chee." The black-and-white warbler sang
like a tiny, creaking wheel, as he ran up and down tree-trunks. Down
in the meadows beyond the lake, the long-tailed brown thrasher said,
"Hello, hello! Come over here, come over here. There he goes, there he
goes. Whoa, whoa, ha-ha, ha-ha." If you do not believe my reading of
his song, listen the next time one sings to you, and see if these are
not his exact words. Overhead we often heard the squeal of the
red-shouldered hawk, sounding almost like the cry of the blue jay.
Then there was the loud yet gentle warble of the purple finch; and
once we saw a beautiful rose-red male and his gray-brown wife feeding
each other on a limb like a pair of lovebirds. Another song which was
interesting to me, because almost new, was that of the solitary or
blue-headed vireo, who sang, "See, see me-e. See me, you! you!" His
whole song is in couplets. The Artist said that my rendering was too
imaginative, and that what the bird really said was "Che-wee--che-woo,
che-wee--chu, chu," which perhaps is more accurate.
[Illustration: THE RED-SHOULDERED HAWK]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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