Some Spring Days in Iowa | Page 7

the bed of the creek, and
watch the red sun brightening the gray of the eastern sky, while the
robins and the meadow larks are singing joyous matins we steep our
senses in the delicate colorings of earth and sky that signalize the
awakening of another day and the real revival of another year. April
was encouraging, but there were many bare boughs and many of the
last year's leaves still clung to the oaks and made a conspicuous feature
of the landscape. The leafy month of June will show us more foliage,
but it will be of a darker and more uniform shade of green. Now, as the
sun rises higher and sends his rays through both the woodlands and the
brushlands we thrill with delight at the kaleidoscope of color. There are

no withered leaves to mar the beauty now. Seen in mass, and at a
distance, the woodlands are a soft cinerous purple. But the tops, where
the ruddy rays of the sun are glancing, are a hazy cloud of tender green,
pink, yellow and pale purple. Nearer trees show in their opening leaves
pale tints of the same gorgeous colors which we see in the fall. The
maple keys and the edges of the tender leaves glow blood-red in the
morning sun. The half-developed leaves of the birch and the poplar are
a yellowish-green, not unlike the yellow which they show in autumn.
The neatly plaited folds of the leaves of the oak display a greenish or
cinerous purple, a soft and delicate presentment of the stronger colors
which come in October, just as the overture gives us faint voicings of
the beauty which the opera is to bring; just as Lowell's organist gives us
"The faint auroral flushes sent Along the wavering vista of his dream."
The edge of the cliff is lined with shad-trees. Each twig is a plume of
feathery dainty white The drooping racemes of white blossoms, with
the ruby and early-falling bracts among them look like gala decorations
to fringe the way of Flora as she travels up the valley. The shad-trees
have blossomed rather late. In them and under them it is fully spring.
There is a sound of bees and a sense of sweetness which make us forget
all the cold days and think only of the glory of the coming summer.
There comes a song sparrow and perches on one of the twigs. He
throws back his little head, opens his mouth and pours forth a flood of
melody. Next comes a myrtle warbler, eager to show us the yellow on
his crown, on his two sides and the lower part of his back. He is one of
the most abundant of the warblers and one of the most charming and
fearless. He perches on a hop hornbeam tree from which the catkins
have just shed their yellow pollen and goes over it somewhat after the
manner of a chickadee or a nuthatch, showing us as he does so the
white under his chin, the two heavy black marks below that, the two
white cross bars on his wings, and his coat of slate color, striped and
streaked with black. He goes over every twig of the little tree and then
flies off to another, first pausing, however, to give his little call note
"tschip, tschip" and then his little song, "Tschip-tweeter-tweeter." A
pair of kingfishers, showing their blue wings and splendid crests, fly
screaming down the creek. Their nest is in a tunnel four feet in the clay

banks on the opposite side.
Purple finches, a bit late in the season, are feeding on the seeds of the
big elm. The snows of late April and early May must have delayed their
journey northward. When the bird-designer made this bird he set out to
make a different kind of sparrow, but then had pity upon the amateur
ornithologist who finds the sparrows even now almost as difficult to
classify as the amateur botanists do their asters; so he dipped the bird in
some raspberry juice--John Burroughs says pokeberry juice--and the
finch came out of the dye with a wash of raspberry red on his head,
shoulders and upper breast, brightest on the head and the lower part of
his back. Otherwise he looks much like an English sparrow.
* * * * *
Now the belated April flowers are seen at their best, mingled with
many of the May arrivals. It is such a day as that when Bryant wrote
"The Old Man's Counsel." On the sloping hillsides, around the leafing
hazel "gay-circles of anemones dance on their stalks." In the more open
places the little wind flower, with its pretty leaves and solitary white
blossoms, blooms in cheerful companionship with its fellows, and the
more sterile parts of