Some Summer Days in Iowa | Page 7

trees, but when they reach the meadow lands they drop to about the same height above the surface of the ground. Only a few of them are nesting yet. The tall thistle by the roadside is nearly ten feet high, but its heads have not fully opened. They like its down for their nests and its seeds to feed the fledgelings. They fly in pairs often and in the evenings they cling prettily to the catnip by the pasture fence, digging into each calyx for its four sweet nutlets. The woodthrush has a late nest in a young elm; her first family was eaten by the blue-jays just after the hatching,--so were the young grosbeaks in a nearby tree, but the cedar waxwings were slain and eaten by the cannibalistic grackles. A blue-jay is just approaching the wood pewee's nest in the burr oak, but the doughty husband does battle with the fierceness of a kingbird and chases him away. Three tiny birdlings, covered with hairs soft and white as the down of a thistle, are in the nest, which is saddled snugly to the fork of a horizontal tree. In another nest, near by, the three eggs have only just been laid. The path which used to run under the over-hanging trees is grown up with grasses. Here the slender rush grows best, and makes a dark crease among the taller and lighter-green grasses, showing where the path winds. Twenty feet overhead, on the slender branch of a white oak, is a tiny knot, looking scarcely larger than the cup of a mossy-cup acorn. It is the nest of the ruby-throated hummingbird, so well concealed by the leaves and by the lichens fastened to its exterior that it would not have been noticed at all but for the whirling wings of the exquisite creature a month ago. Her two tiny eggs have since been safely hatched and the young birds reared; now the nest is empty, a prize to be taken and preserved for future study and admiration.
At the foot of a figwort stalk in the pasture, shielded by a little sprig of choke-cherry and a wisp of grasses, a new nest is being builded. That is why the chewink sings so happily from dawn till dark. His summer song is now heard more often than his spring song. Through April, May and June he sings:
Fah do do'-do'-do'-do'-do'
But now, this song is heard more often:
Me' fah'-fah'-fah'-fah'-fah'
This song is more appropriate to the summer. There is more of fullness and beauty in it, more of the quality of the woodthrush's songs, for which it is often mistaken.
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From a tiny hawthorne bush, no higher than a collie's back, a field sparrow flies nervously to a low limb of a hickory tree and begs that her nest be not disturbed. It is neatly placed in the middle of the bush about a foot from the ground, made of medium grasses and rootlets and lined with finer grasses and horsehair. The three bluish-white eggs with rufous markings at the larger end are the field-sparrow's own. Into a nest found a month ago, at the foot of a yarrow stalk, the cowbird had sneaked three speckled eggs, leaving only one of the pretty eggs of the field-sparrow. At that time the cowbirds were to be seen everywhere; they chattered every morning in the trees, and the females left their unwelcome eggs in nearly every nest. One little red-eyed vireo's nest had five cowbirds' eggs,--none of her own. But the birds which are building now are generally safe from the parasite. Only rarely is a cowbird's egg found after the middle of July. No cowbirds have been seen since the first week of the month, save the young one on the stump, which the field-sparrow was feeding this morning. They disappear early, seeking seclusion for the moulting. When they emerge from their hiding places they form into flocks, spending their days in the grain-fields and near the rivers where the food is most abundant and easy to procure. At nightfall they congregate, like the red-winged blackbirds, in the sand-bar willows on the river islands.
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Daintily flitting from one branch to another, the redstart weaves threads of reddish gold and black, like strands of night and noon, among the old trees. He has wandered over through the woods from the creek, where his mate built a cup-like nest in a crotch toward the top of a slender white oak. Busy always, he stays but a few moments and then passes on as silently as a July zephyr. The halting voice of the preacher, the red-eyed vireo, comes out of the thicket; then, from an oak overhead, where a little twig is trembling, the softer voice of the warbling vireo