Some Spring Days in Iowa | Page 3

past three weeks a pair of blue birds have made many visits every day to a Chinese matrimony vine, by the dining room window of the writer's home. This vine, as everyone knows, has a wreath of juicy red berries in the fall, which hang through the winter and are dried, but still red, in the spring. It was the first week of March when the family first heard the pleasing notes of the blue bird outside the window at breakfast time, and saw the brilliant male sitting on a post on the back lawn and his less brilliant, but equally attractive mate sitting on the clothesline. A little later and he flew to the vine, picked off one berry and ate it, took another one in his mouth and then returned to his post, while she followed his example. Both chirped and pronounced the berries good, though up to that time the members of the household had supposed they were poisonous. After a few more bites of the morning meal the birds went all around the house, inspecting every nook and crevice. But they found every place fully occupied by the pestiferous English sparrows, who darted at them maliciously. For two whole days the blue birds stayed around the lawn and garden, but the sparrows made their lives miserable and finally they went to the timber an eighth of a mile away and selected an abiding place in the cavity of a basswood. But every morning and evening, sometimes many times during the day, they came for their meal of berries from the vine. Usually they were on hand as soon as the sun was up, and a more devoted and well behaved couple was never seen either in the bird or the human world.
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We rise at length and walk along the wooded slope admiring new beauties at every step. Here is a thicket of wild gooseberry filled with dark green leaves and the tinkling notes of tree sparrows, and we hardly know which is the more beautiful. A little farther and we are in a tangle of pink and magenta raspberry vines from which the green leaves are just pushing out. The elder has made a great start; the yellowish-green shoots from the stems and from the roots are already more than six inches long. The panicled dogwood and the red-osier dogwood (no, not the flowering dogwood) as yet show no signs of foliage, but the fine white lines in the bark of the bladdernut, which have been so attractive all winter, are now enhanced by the soft myrtle green of the tender young leaves. The shrubby red cedar is twice as fresh and green as it was a month ago, as it hangs down the face of the splintered rock where the farmer boys have set a trap to catch the mother mink. But Mrs. Mink is wary. Here is a pile of feathers, evidently from a wild duck, which seems to indicate that while the duck was making a meal of a fish which she had brought to shore, the mink pounced upon her and ate both duck and fish.
While we stand looking there is a slight movement among the roots of a silver maple at the river's brink. A moment later Mrs. Mink comes around the tree and towards us. She is about eighteen inches long, with a bushy tail about another eight inches, her blackish-brown body about as big round as a big man's wrist, and she has a "business-looking" face and jaw. Did you ever try to take the young minks from their nest in the latter part of April and did Mrs. Mink fight? She hasn't seen or smelled us yet, but suddenly when she is within seven feet of us, there is an upward movement of that supple, snakelike neck, a quick glance of those black diamond eyes, and she turns at right angles and dives into the river. A frog could not enter the water so silently.
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We climb the slope again and pause in front of a big sugar maple, a rather rare sight hereabouts. The sap-sucker has bored a row of fresh holes in the bark of the tree and the syrup has flowed out so freely that the whole south side of the tree is wet with it. Scores of wasps, bees and flies of all sizes and colors are revelling in the sweetness.
Finally we come to where there is less grass but more dead leaves and leaf mould, and here is the first real herbaceous flower of this spring, the dwarf white trillium, or wake-robin. How beautiful it looks, its three pure, waxy-white petals, its six golden anthers and three long styles, and its pretty whorl of three ovate