An early morning hour found me climbing the acclivity

A four days outing along the Ohio River one spring brought me some finds that may be of interest to bird lovers. Everywhere there were the twinkle of wings, the twitter of voices, and the charm of song; indeed, so plentiful were the feathered folk that the title of this article is far less poetical than realistic and descriptive. It was the latter part of May, the time in that latitude when the birds were in full song, at least those which were not too busy with their family cares. Sixty-four species were seen during a stay of four days in the neighborhood.
Mine host was a farmer whose premises afforded a habitat for numerous birds, there being many trees and bushes in the yard and a large orchard near by. In one of the silver maples a pair of warbling vireos had built a tiny pendent cradle, as is their wont, set in a bower of shining twigs and green leaves. There it swayed in the zephyrs, rocking the birdlings to sleep and filling their dreams with rhythm; and the lullabies that the happy  parents sang were cheerful and engaging, in spite of the fact that some critic has pronounced the minstrelsy of the warbling vireo tiresome. Tiresome, forsooth! Truth to tell, the more closely you listen to it the sweeter it grows. All day long, from peep of dawn to evening twilight, those quaint, continuous lays could be heard, now subdued and desultory, now almost as vigorous as a robins carol.
It sometimes seemed as if the vireos and orchard orioles were rival vocalists. If so, a prize should be awarded to both,to the vireos for persistency, for never letting up; to the orioles for richness and melody of tone. Many a rollicking two-part concert they gave.
But there were other voices frequently heard in the chorus, though not so continuously as those of the birds just mentioned. A song-sparrow, which had built a dainty cot in a bush not two rods from the veranda, sometimes trilled an interlude of entrancing sweetness, taking the bays for real tunefulness from every rival. Then, to my surprise, a Maryland yellow-throat, shy little fellow in other places, would frequently sing his heart out in the small trees and silver maples of the front yard. He did not fly off or discontinue his song when an auditor stood right beneath his perch, but would throw back his masked head, distend his golden throat, and deliver his trill to his own and everybody elses satisfaction. Very often, too, the indigo-bird, just returned from a bath in the cerulean depths, would enrich the harmony with the most  rollicksome, if not the most tuneful lay of the chorus. As a sort of accompaniment, the chipping-sparrow often trilled his silvery monotone; and once a robin added his Cheerily, here, here!
So much for the birds about the house, though there were many others that have not been mentioned; in fact, there were some twenty species in all. There were also birds a-plenty in other places. A half day was spent in some fields bordering the broad river. On a green slope was a bush-sparrows nest, daintily bowered in the grass by the side of a blackberry bush, and in a thicket hard by two yellow-breasted chats had placed their grassy cradles, proclaiming their secret to all the world by their loud cries of warning to keep away. It is odd that these birds, shy and nervous as they are, should go so far out of their way to tell you that they have a nest somewhere in the copse that you mustnt touch, mustnt even look for. While you are yet a quarter of a mile away, they will utter their loud cries of warning; and if you go to the thicket where they are, you will be almost sure to find their nest, so poorly have they learned the lesson of discretion.
In a little hollow of the copse a dying crow lay prone upon the ground. At intervals he would struggle and gasp in a spasmodic way. When I gently moved him with my cane, he grasped it with his claws and held it quite firmly. I put the stick to his large black beak. He took hold of it feebly, ready to defend himself even with his last gasp, for that it proved to be; he lay over and died the next  instant. I could not give the pathology of the case, as no wounds could be found on his body.
One of the most interesting finds of the day was the nest of a green heron, often called fly-up-the-creek. The nest, only a loosely constructed platform of sticks, was placed on the branches of a leaning clump of small trees, and was about twenty feet from the ground. The startled bird flew back and forth in the row of trees, and even went back to the nest while I watched her at a distance, but was too shy to remain there when I went near. In spite of the offensive nicknames foisted upon this heron, it is a handsome bird. As this one flew back and forth she made quite an elegant picture, with her long, glossy-brown neck and tail, white throat-line, ash-blue back, dappled under parts, and the long, slender feathers draping her hind-neck. But why was she called the green heron? Look as sharply as I would, I could descry no green in her plumage. A few days later, however, I examined a mounted specimen, and then the puzzle was solved; for an iridescent green patch on the wing was so marked a feature of its coloration as to account for the birds common name.
Memory will always linger fondly about a certain afternoon and evening spent on the steep hills mounting up toward the sky a quarter of a mile or more back from the river. To a pedestrian like myself, used to rambling over a comparatively level scope of country, these high hills afforded a wonderful prospect, and almost made my head dizzy, as I  clambered far up their steep sides. Perhaps the mountain-climber would think them tame. It made my head swim that evening to see a towhee bunting dart from a copse near by and hurl himself with reckless abandon down the declivity, as if there were not the slightest danger of breaking his neck or dashing himself to pieces. He stopped just in time to plunge into another thicket for which he had taken aim.
As the sun sank, I seated myself on the grass far up the steep, and looked down on the beautiful valley below me. There was the broad Ohio, wending its way between the sentinel hills, the green clover fields and meadows smiling good-night to the sinking sun, and the brown ploughed fields with their green corn-rows. A wood-thrush mounted to a dead twig at the very top of a tall oak some distance below me, and poured forth his sad vesper hymn, so bewitchingly sweet and far-away; the while Kentucky warblers and cardinal grossbeaks piped their lullabies or madrigals, as they chose, from the darkling woods; and, altogether, it was a never-to-be-forgotten evening.
An early morning hour found me climbing the acclivity and mounting to the top of the hill. In a clover-field the gossamer Tse-e-e of the grasshopper sparrow, a birdlet among birds, pierced my ear. Presently a pair of these sparrows were seen on the fence-stakes, and, yes, one of them had a worm in its bill, indicating that there were little ones in the neighborhood. If I could find a grasshopper sparrows  nest! Often had I sought for one, but without success. For a long while my eyes followed the bird with the worm in her bill. Every now and then she would dart over into the grass as if to feed her bantlings, and I would mark the spot where she alighted; but when I went to it no nest or birdlings were to be found. Again and again I fairly trembled, thinking myself on the verge of a discovery, only to be balked completely in the end. But one victory was won; I got close enough to the bird to see distinctly with my glass the yellow markings on the edge of the wings,a characteristic I had never before been able to make out. Curiously enough, one wing of this bird was quite profusely tinged with yellow, while the yellow of the other could just be distinguished.
Why should not a bird-student frankly chronicle his failures as well as his successes? During the day I encountered three birds that I was unable to identify, try as I would. One was singing lustily in some tall trees, and when at length I got my glass upon him he looked like a Carolina wren; but that bird has been a familiar acquaintance for many years,comparatively speaking,and I have so often heard his varied roundels that they certainly are all known to me. Moreover, the quality of this mysterious singers voice and the manner of his execution were wholly different from those of the Carolina or any other wren of my acquaintance. The following is a transcription of the song as near as it could be represented by letters: Che-ha-p-e-e-r-r-r!  che-ha-p-e-e-r-r-r! repeated at brief intervals loudly and vigorously, but without variation. The bird had a white superciliary line, brownish-barred wings, and whitish under parts. A consultation of all the manuals in my possession fails to solve the problem.
In a deep gorge, cut through the country by a small creeksmall now, at leaston its way to the river, two curious bird calls were heard; but one bird kept himself hidden in a dense thicket, and the other bolted into the dark woods that covered a steep acclivity. The first bird sang rather than called, and the words he said sounded quite distinct: Che-o-wadell-wadell-chip!a sentiment that he repeated again and again.
In spite of these disappointments my jaunt through this ravine was exceedingly pleasant,so delightfully quiet and solitary; not a human sound to disturb the sacredness of the place; nothing but the songs and calls of wild birds.
Twas one of those charmed days
When the genius of God doth flow;
The wind may alter twenty ways,
A tempest cannot blow:
It may blow north, it still is warm;
Or south, it still is clear;
Or east, it smells like a clover-farm;
Or west, no thunder fear.
In one of the loneliest parts of the ravine there appeared on the scene my first Louisiana water-thrush, often called the large-billed wagtail. There it stood teetering on a spray or a rock, or skimming through the shallow water, its speckled breast  and olive back harmonizingI had almost said rhymingwith the gray of the creeks bed, the crystal of the water, and the green of the thicket-fringed banks. It was part and parcel of the scene,a lone bird in a lone place. But, hold! not lone, after all. Presently a young wagtail, the image of its mamma, emerged from somewhere or nowhere, and ran toward the old bird with open mouth, twinkling wings, and a pretty, coaxing call. She thrust something into its mouth; but still the bantling coaxed for more, when she dashed away a few feet, picked up another tidbit from the water, ran back to her little charge, and fed it again. But now, when it still pursued her, she seemed to lose her patience, for she rushed threateningly toward it, causing it to scamper away, and then she flew off. Yet after that she fed either the same or another youngster a number of times. Once a water-thrush went swinging down the gorge, the very poetry of graceful poise and movement, looking more like a naiad than a real flesh-and-blood birdlet.
On a horizontal branch extending out over the rippling stream, a wood-thrush sat on her mud cottage; but whether she appreciated the romantic character of the situation or not, she did not say. There were many other interesting feathered folk in the gorge and on its wooded steeps, each a brother of the dancing leaves; but to describe them all would take too long, and merely to name them would be too much like reciting a dry catalogue.

The same old traditional notes

Almost every person living in the country or the suburbs of a town is familiar with the house-pewee, or phbe-bird. It is usually looked upon as the sure harbinger of spring. In my boyhood days my parents and grandparents were wont to say, Spring is here; the phbe is singing. And if blithesomeness of tone and good cheer have anything to do with the advent of the season of song and bursting blossoms, the pewit, as he is often called, must be a true herald and prophet. He seems to carry the subtle essence of spring in his tuneful larynx, and in the graceful sweep of his flight as he pounces upon an insect. It is quite easy to make the transition from his familiar song of Phe-e-by to the exclamation, Springs here! by a little stretch of the fancy.
But the phbe has a woodland relative, a first cousin, with which most persons are not so well acquainted, because he is more retiring in his habits, and seeks out-of-the-way places for his habitat. I refer to the wood-pewee. If your eyes and ears are not so sharp as they should be, you may get these  two birds confounded; yet there is no need of making such a blunder. The woodland bird is smaller, slenderer, and of a darker cast than his relative; and, besides, there is a marked difference in the musical performances of these birds. The song of the phbe is sprightly and cheerful, and the syllables are uttered rather quickly, while the whistle of the wood-pewee is softer and more plaintive, and is repeated with less emphasis and more deliberation. There is, indeed, something inexpressibly sad and dreamy about the strain of the wood-pewee, especially if heard at a distance in the emerald twilight of the woodland privacies. Mr. Lowell seldom erred in his attempts to characterize the songs and habits of the birds, but in his exquisite poem entitled Phbe he certainly must have referred to the wood-pewee and not to the phbe-bird, as his description applies to the former but not to the latter. He calls this bird the loneliest of its kind, while the pewit is a familiar species about many a country home. Taking it for granted that he meant the wood-pewee, how happy is his description!
It is a wee sad-colored thing,
As shy and secret as a maid;
That ere in choir the robins ring,
Pipes its own name like one afraid.
It seems pain-prompted to repeat
The story of some ancient ill,
But Phbe! Phbe! sadly sweet,
Is all it says, and then is still.
· · · · · · ·

“Phbe! it calls and calls again;
And Ovid, could he but have heard,
Had hung a legendary pain
About the memory of the bird.
· · · · · · ·
“Phbe! is all it has to say
In plaintive cadence oer and oer,
Like children who have lost their way,
And know their names, but nothing more.
This poetical tribute is certainly very graceful, and would be true to life if the phonetic representation were a little more accurate. Instead of Phbe, imagine the song to be Pe-e-w-e-e-e or Phe-e-w-e-e-e, and you will gain a clear idea of the minstrelsy of this songster of the wildwood. However, he frequently varies his tune,to prevent its becoming monotonous, I opine. He sometimes closes his refrain with the falling inflection or circumflex, and sometimes with the rising, as the mood prompts him. In the former case the first syllable receives the greater emphasis and is the more prolonged, and in the latter this order is precisely reversed. When the last syllable is uttered with the rising circumflex, it is usually, if not always, cut off somewhat abruptly. Moreover, this minstrel often runs the two syllables of his song together,a peculiarity that I have represented in my notes, taken while listening to the song, in this way: Phe-e-e-o-o-w-e-e-e! There is a characteristic swing about the melody that refuses to be caught in the mesh of letters and syllables.
In some of the pewees vocal efforts he does not  get farther than the end of the first syllable. The song seems to be cut off short, as if the notes had stuck fast in the singers throat, or as if something had occurred to divert his mind from the song. Perhaps this hiatus is caused by the sudden appearance of an insect glancing by, which attracts the musicians attention. This bird usually chooses a dead twig or limb in the woods as a perch, on which he sits and sings, turning his head from side to side, so that no flitting moth may escape him.
And what a persistent singer he is! He sings not only in the spring when other vocalists are in full tune, but also all summer long, never growing disheartened, even when the mercury rises far up into the nineties. What a pleasant companion he has been in my midsummer strolls as I have wearily patrolled the woods! On the sultriest August days, when all other birds were glad to keep mute, sitting on their shady perches with open mandibles and drooping wings, the dreamful, far-away strain of the wood-pewee has drifted, a welcome sound, to my ears through the dim aisles. He seems to be a friend in need. How often, when the heat has almost overcome me, as I pursued my daily beat, that song has put new vigor into my veins! When Mr. Lowell wrote that
The phbe scarce whistles
Once an hour to his fellow,
he must have been listening to a far lazier specimen than those with which I am acquainted.

Most birds fall occasionally into a kind of ecstasy of song, and the wood-pewee is no exception. One evening, after it had grown almost dark, a pewee flew out into the air directly above my head from a tree by the wayside, and began to sing in a perfect transport as he wheeled about; then he swung back into the tree, keeping up his song in a continuous strain, and in sweet, half-caressing tones, until finally it died away, as if the bird had fallen into a doze during his vocal recital. I lingered about for some time, but he did not sing again. Why should he repeat his good-night song?
I have frequently heard young pewees in midsummer singing in a continuous way, instead of whistling the intermittent song of their elders. It sounds very droll, giving you the impression that the little neophyte has begun to turn the crank of his music-box and cant stop. His voice is quite sweet, but his execution is very crude. Wait, however, until he is eight or nine months older, and he will show you what a winged Orpheus can do. My notes say that on the thirtieth of July, 1891, I heard a pewees quaint, prolonged whistle, interlarded with his ordinary notes. Thus it will be seen that he is a somewhat versatile songster, proving the poets lines half true and half untrue:
The birds but repeat without ending
The same old traditional notes,
Which some, by more happily blending,
Seem to make over new in their throats.

Younger readers may, perhaps, need to be informed that the wood-pewee belongs to the family of flycatchers, as do also the king-bird or bee-martin, the phbe-bird, the great-crested flycatcher, and a number of other interesting species, all of which have a peculiar way of taking their prey. The pewee will sit almost motionless on a twig, lisping his plaintive tune at intervals, until a luckless insect comes buzzing near, all unconscious of its peril, when the bird will make a quick dash at it, seize it dexterously between his mandibles, and then circle around gracefully to the same or another perch, having made a splendid catch on the fly. If the quarry he has taken is small, it slips at once down his throat; but should it be too large to be disposed of in that summary way, he will beat it into an edible form upon a limb before gulping it down. Agile as he is, he sometimes misses his aim, being compelled to make a second, and occasionally even a third attempt to secure his prize. I have witnessed more than one comedy which turned out to be a tragedy for the ill-starred insect. Sometimes the insect will resort to the ruse of dropping toward the ground when it sees the bird darting toward it, and then a scuffle ensues that is really laughable, the pursuer whirling, tumbling, almost turning somersault in his desperate efforts to capture his prize. Once an insect flew between me and a pewee perched on a twig, when the bird darted down toward me with a directness of aim that made me think for a  moment he would fly right into my face; but he made a dexterous turn in time, caught his quarry, and swung to a bough near by. If one were disposed to be speculative, one might well raise Sidney Laniers pregnant inquiry at this point, the reference being to the southern mocking-bird, and not to our pewee,
How may the death of that dull insect be
The life of yon trim Shakspeare, on the tree?
It has been my good fortune to find one, but only one, nest of this bird. It was placed on a horizontal branch about fifteen feet above the ground, and was a neat, compact structure, decorated on the outside with grayish lichens and moss, giving it the appearance of an excrescence on the limb.[6] It is said by those who have closely examined the nests, that they are handsomely built and ornamented, and are equalled only by the dainty houses of the humming-bird and the blue-gray gnat-catcher. The eggs, usually four in number, are of a creamy white hue, beautifully embellished with a wreath of lavender and purplish-brown around the larger end or near the centre.
Though our bird prefers solitary places for his home, he is far from shy, if you call on him in his haunt in the wildwood. He will sit fearless on his perch, even if you come quite near, looking at  you in his staid, philosophical way, as if you were scarcely worth noticing. Nor will he hush his song at your approach, although he does not seem to care whether you listen to him or not. It is seldom that he can be betrayed into doing an undignified act; and even if he does almost turn a somersault in pursuing a refractory miller, he recovers his poise the next moment, and settles upon his perch with as much sang froid as if nothing unusual had occurred. Altogether, the wood-pewee is what Bradford Torrey would call a character in feathers.

Common redheaded woodpecker

It is surprising what odd and variegated costumes are sometimes worn by the juvenile members of the bird community. Frequently their attire is so different from that of their elders that even the expert ornithologist may be sorely puzzled to determine the category to which they belong; yet there are usually some characteristic markings, however obscure, by which their places in the avian system may be fixed. As a rule, the plumage of young birds is more striped and mottled than that of mature specimens, Nature playing some odd pranks of color-mixing in tiding a bird over from callow infancy to full-fledged life. Fashion plates in the world of bantlings would be of little account, as no fixed patterns are followed.
Some parts of the growing birds plumage change to the normal color sooner than others. I remember a young male indigo bird that I saw in October, whose garb, just after fledging, must have been a warm brown almost like that of the adult female; but now he had cast off a part of his infantile robes, and put on in their stead the cerulean of his male parent; his tail, rump, and the base of his wings  were blue, while the rest of his plumage was brown. He made a unique and pretty picture as he sat atilt on a blackberry stem, asking me with loud Tsips to admire his quaint toilet. Early in the spring I have seen indigo birds in whose plumage the tints were quite differently blended and arranged.
What a party-colored suit the young bluebird wears! His breast, instead of being plain brick-red as in the case of the adult bird, is profusely striped with dark brown on a background of soiled white; and his upper parts, in lieu of the warm azure of riper years, are a lustrous brown curiously mottled with tear-shaped blocks of white; while his wings and tail have already assumed the normal blue of this species. In the days of his youth the chipping-sparrow also dons a striped vest, so that, if it were not for his smaller size, it would be difficult to distinguish him from his relative, the grass-finch.
My admiration was especially stirred, one midsummer day, by the dainty appearance of a small coterie of bush-sparrows flitting about on a railroad which I was pursuing on foot; a large patch on their wings was of a dark, glossy brown tint, extremely pretty, and looking precisely as if it had been painted by the deft hand of an artist. Their under parts were variously streaked with white and dusk. At first I scarcely recognized my familiar little sylvan friends; but their intimacy with several adult specimens, as well as several well-known diagnostic markings, settled the question of their identity beyond a doubt.

Not every person is aware that the common redheaded woodpecker is no red-head at all during the first summer of his buoyant young life, but a black-head instead, or, rather, his head and neck are very dark gray. However, one day in September I was delighted and amused to find an adolescent woodpecker whose head and neck were beginning to turn quite reddish, flecked everywhere with white, giving him a decidedly picturesque appearance as he scuddled up an oblique fence-stake. Of course the red-head is always sui generis, but in this case he seemed to be more so than usual. Nearly all the woodpeckersthe downy, the hairy, and the golden-wingedare devoid of the red spots on their heads, while young, to prevent them, I suppose, from becoming vain.
Sometimes an entirely foreign tint is introduced into the plumage of the young bird during his transition state. One day I was surprised to observe a decidedly bluish cast on the striped breast of a young towhee bunting, which was all the more curious because there is no blue whatever in the plumage of either the adult male or female. But the most curious freak of Natures dyeing I have ever seen in the bird world was in the case of a young scarlet tanager, whose body, including the wings, was completely girded with a band of white, the border of which was quite irregular. As every observer knows, the only colors visible in the adult males plumage are black and scarlet; still, when the scarlet feathers are pushed aside, they show  white underneath, and that may account for the albino quality of this specimen.
When he is first fledged, the pattern of the young cardinal grossbeaks plumage very much resembles that of his mother; but soon the bright red of his full dress begins to peep here and there through the grayish-olive of his kilts and trousers, so to speak, making him look as if he had been meddling with a keg of red paint and had splashed himself liberally with it. By and by there is a very odd blending of tints in his suit. Scarcely less curious is the garb of the young white-crowned sparrow; his whole head is black or blackish-brown, except a tiny speck of white in the centre of the crown, gleaming like a diamond in its dark setting. In the adult bird the whole crown is a glistening white, bordered on each side by a black band, which circles about on the forehead and separates the crown-piece from the white superciliary line.
Some of the warblers are scarcely recognizable in their juvenile attire. For example, the young black-poll, bay-breasted, and chestnut-sided warblers bear little, if any, resemblance to their parents, whose diversified nuptial robes make our woodlands radiant in the spring. The young are quite tame in their soiled olive plumes, and look so much alike that the ornithologist is often at his wits end to tell them apart. Were it not for the yellow rumps of the magnolia and myrtle warblers when young, one would scarcely know them from a dozen other species as they pursue their journey southward in  the autumn. The Maryland yellow-throat does not deign to wear his black mask until he is about eight months old, and the boy redstart contents himself with his mammas style of dress until he returns in the spring from his sojourn in the south, and does not seem to be ashamed to be tied to her apron-string. And there is that natty little dandy, the ruby-crowned kingletit is said, on good authority, that he must be two years old before he is entitled to wear the ruby gem in his forehead; which must be a sore deprivation for this little aristocrat in feathers. Perhaps in kingletdom a bird does not become of age until he is two years old.
Thus it will be seen that the study of ornithology is made more difficult, and at the same time more interesting, by this change of toilet among the birds,more difficult, because the observer must learn to identify the birds in their youthful as well as in their adult plumage; and more interesting, because of the greater variety thus given to this branch of scientific inquiry.