As we crossed the marsh, I heard the song of the olive-backed thrush,
which sounds to me like a cross between the notes of the wood thrush
and the strange harp-chords of the veery or Wilson thrush. In another
part of the bog sang the rare Nashville warbler, whose nest we have
yet to find. Its song starts like the creak of the black-and-white
warbler and ends like a chipping sparrow. In a marsh beyond the
sphagnum bog, I found the nest of a Maryland yellowthroat, set in a
yellow viburnum shrub some six inches from the ground. This nest is
usually on the ground. It was set just as a gem is set in a ring, the
setting consisting of leaves which come up into five or six points.
Held by the points is a little cup of grass. The eggs were the most
beautiful we saw that day--of a pinkish-white with a wreath of
chestnut blotches around the larger end. On the farther side of the
marsh, a white-throated sparrow flew out from in front of me; and
after a long search I found its nest--a little moss-rimmed cup of
gray-green, yellow grass, containing four eggs of a faint blue clouded
with chestnut, which was massed in large blotches at the larger end.
With the four eggs was a dumpy young cow-bird, that fatal changeling
which is the death of so many little birds. In this case we saved four
prospective white-throated sparrows from being starved to death by
their ugly foster-brother. The white-throat is a dear, gentle, little
bird. Even its alarm-notes are soft, instead of being harsh and
disagreeable like those of most other sparrows.
The next day I found a song sparrow's nest and a catbird's nest, and
then in the midst of dark, cool woods, where an icy brown trout-brook
ran through a mass of rhododendron, a thrush suddenly slipped away
ahead of me out of a clump of rhododendron bushes. The light color of
the bird and the lighter spotted breast marked it as a veery or Wilson
thrush. On looking at the bush, I saw the nest, a rough one made of
hemlock twigs matted together, and lined with pine-needles with a
basis of leaves. Inside were four small eggs of a heavenly blue. They
are among the smallest of all of our pure-blue eggs.
That same day the Artist found a beautiful nest of a
black-throated-blue warbler, also set in a rhododendron bush. The nest
was made of the light inner bark of the rhododendron, which was of a
bright yellow. Inside, it was lined with black and tan rootlets so
fine that they look almost like horse-hair. These are the same
rootlets which the magnolia warbler uses to line its nest, and up to
the present time no ornithologist whom I have met has been able to
identify them.
* * * * *
"Can you go to Maryland to-day on a bird-trip?" telephoned the
Banker.
"No," said I, "lawyers have to work for a living."
"There'll be blue-gray gnatcatchers and mocking-birds and Acadian
flycatchers," he tried again.
"No," said I.
"I've found out where the prothonotary warbler lives," he said once
more.
"No," said I.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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