With the coming of the first spring month I am convinced that the northward movement of migrating birds has begun. The redwing blackbirds have already gone, so far as the migrating flocks are concerned. Yet this morning a redwing sat up on the tree-top and showed me his handsome epaulette and sang lustily. He was a trifle smaller than the average blackbird of my northern meadow-side acquaintance and his bill seemed slenderer. Moreover on the end of his song was just an extra gleeful twist that changed “konkaree” into “konkareedle” and marked the difference between the Florida redwing who stays at home in the State, summers and brings up his children there, and the migrants who are already on the way to distant Northern swamps. In the same way I heard a robin singing for the first time. The world has been alive with robins in huge flocks that scatter during the day and regather at night for roosting. These are half way home already, perhaps just stopping off at Washington to see what is doing in conservation legislation, which is a matter of vital interest to all birds. Yet here was a robin greeting the first day of the first spring month with the good old home song with nary a twist or an extra syllable in it. It wakened a thousand memories that echoed among gray New England hills, not yet touched with the green of spring. Yet I smelled it in the swollen brooks and heard it in their roar; and then the wind was in the palm trees again and there was only the shout of the salt-laden trades, heavy with the odor of newborn orange blossoms, and I knew that my robin was probably one of those that elect to stay behind and chance it with the summer weather in the far South. The March day was a little farther advanced when the meadow-lark chorus began. Like the robin the meadow-lark breeds from the Gulf to New Brunswick, but whereas most robins migrate well North, the proportion seems to be somewhat the other way with the meadow-larks. How their ground-built nests and eggs escape gliding snakes and prowling opossums and raccoons with which the savannas are infested I do not know. I have but to examine the mud along ditch sides of a morning to find it literally criss-crossed with the tracks of these night prowlers, till it seems impossible that any ground-nesting bird could escape. Yet the savannas are full of larks’ nests every summer, and the numbers of them singing cheerily all about are a proof that the birds are wiser or the vermin stupider than anyone might suppose. The meadow-lark’s song is a sweet little trilling whistle. The neighbors say that it says, “Laziness will kill you,” and after you have once fitted these words to it you can hear no other translation. I think they sing it to each other in gentle raillery, for they are among the last of the singing birds to begin in the morning. CHAPTER XVIII IN GRAPEFRUIT GROVES