A May Morning
BY FRED. H. KENNARD
THERE is a bird pasture, as I call it, about a half hour’s ride from Boston, and thither I went on May 30, 1898, to see if I could find the nest of a White-eyed Vireo that I had often hunted for in years gone by, but never yet succeeded in finding.
This bird pasture, on one side of which runs the road, consists of eight or ten acres of old, wet pasture land on a hillside surrounded on two other sides by fields and an orchard, and immediately above a marsh in which the sedges and grasses grow which is bordered by alders, birches and other swamp-loving trees. The pasture itself is very wet in one portion, and has been overgrown with birch, alders, oak and tangles of grape-vines, wait-a-bits, poison ivy, etc. In another part it is more open, and is more sparsely covered with red cedars and white pines, while the ground is dotted with wild roses and hard-hack, interspersed with clumps of alders. This combination of hill and marsh, field and orchard, cover and open, as well as evergreen and deciduous growth, makes it an ideal place for birds and their breeding; and one that is hard to duplicate in any locality, combining also woods and civilization as it does, for there are houses and barns in the immediate vicinity. You probably cannot duplicate this pasture, but those of you who love birds, and who can find any spot approximating this in conditions, would do well to appropriate it, metaphorically speaking, as I have this.
But to return to the birds — I thought I would carefully note all those I saw or heard in the course of a short hour I had to spare, and with the following results: As I took down the bars in order to take my bicycle into the pasture, a Baltimore Oriole was singing on top of an elm close by, and I have no doubt that its mate was sitting on the nest that hung pendent from the next tree. A Catbird slunk off into the bushes to the right of me, from a thicket in which she last year raised a brood; and, while chaining my wheel, I heard the glorious notes of a Brown Thrasher singing, a little way off, on the top of a tall white oak. Several Red-eyed Vireos were there too, their steady, rippling song forming a soft accompaniment to the more conspicuous notes of the other feathered songsters. Next, I flushed a Quail, and, while watching its flight, I almost stepped on two more, which got up from the underbrush at my feet.
I started in now on my hunt for the White-eye’s nest, and for
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