Rensselaer Journal, Volume 11, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 September 1901 — SOME BIRD SINGERS. [ARTICLE]

SOME BIRD SINGERS.

Cheery Notes of Song—Sparrow, Bobta and Gay Bobolink. The song-sparrow’s sweet treble Is the first full bird musio to greet the ear in our early spring walks. Both he and his songs are so well known that little need be said of them. Pew biros have so extensive a repertoire; none is more common, more lovable, more vivacious, modest yet irrepressibly happy. Heard after the long winter silence, his dainty, pure aria touches the heart like the smile of baby lips, and when he awakens in the beauty or a moonlit night, he will sing himself to sleep again with a joyous lullaby. The song-sparrow has a cousin called the grass finch or vesper sparrow. He is almost as common, and dellgnts In singing in the twilight, morning ana evening. The robin’s cheery morning strain, his frank satisfaction with himself, his almost aggressive neighborliness, make him a bird to be missed above most others. Certain individuals have something of the delicious tonai quality of their famed gray-brown cousins; but as singers they are excelled in their own style of music. Another bird, too, the meadow lark, u a great favorite with almost everybody. His two or three common notes, which he almost but not quite whistles, am inexpressibly sweet, but I have never heard the sustained song of from ten to twenty notes which good authorities in some sections report In th« June fields with the meadow lark (which is not a true lark at all) is a bird of the same family, which, In its peculiar mode and tonal color, has no peer or even second. The bobolink we call him. South he is the reed bird and rice bird, so Protean are his ways and dress. He is the true troubadour among birds; in summer the most riotously gay, the most madly merry of feathered minstrels. Gaily dressed in black and white, with a dash oi yellow on the nape of the necks, colonies of them swarm in the tall grass, or rock and sway on the tops of tall weed-stalks, or wheel in horizontal flights above the meadows flinging bursting bubbles of tinkling melody to their sombre mates. The bobolink’E is one of the witching, haunting songs—its tone a mystery of sound. It has in it the bubbling of brooks; the tintinabulation of metallic plates; the resonant purity of xylophone taps. And if you have ever heard it, you can Imagine the delight that once came tc me, when awakened in the first flush of the morning in a southern hunting camp, by a chorus of a hundred such songsters, northward bound on flashing wings.—Outing.