

E-text prepared by Robin Monks, Joseph Cooper, Leonard Johnson, and the
Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
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BIRDS IN THE BUSH

by

BRADFORD TORREY

Sixth Edition







Boston
Houghton, Mifflin and Company
New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1893

Copyright, 1885,
by Bradford Torrey
All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.




Wherefore, let me intreat you to read it with favour and attention, and
to pardon us, wherein we may seem to come short of some words, which we
have laboured to interpret.

_The Prologue of the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach._




CONTENTS


                             PAGE

   ON BOSTON COMMON             1

   BIRD-SONGS                  31

   CHARACTER IN FEATHERS       53

   IN THE WHITE MOUNTAINS      75

   PHILLIDA AND CORIDON       103

   SCRAPING ACQUAINTANCE      129

   MINOR SONGSTERS            155

   WINTER BIRDS ABOUT BOSTON  185

   A BIRD-LOVER'S APRIL       211

   AN OWL'S HEAD HOLIDAY      243

   A MONTH'S MUSIC            277




                           ON BOSTON COMMON.

    Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room;
    And hermits are contented with their cells;
    And students with their pensive citadels:
    Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
    Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
    High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
    Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
    In truth, the prison unto which we doom
    Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
    In sundry moods 't was pastime to be bound
    Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground;
    Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
    Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
    Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

                                         WORDSWORTH.


                           ON BOSTON COMMON.


Our Common and Garden are not an ideal field of operations for the
student of birds. No doubt they are rather straitened and public. Other
things being equal, a modest ornithologist would prefer a place where he
could stand still and look up without becoming himself a gazing-stock.
But "it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps;" and if we are
appointed to take our daily exercise in a city park, we shall very
likely find its narrow limits not destitute of some partial
compensations. This, at least, may be depended upon,--our
disappointments will be on the right side of the account; we shall see
more than we have anticipated rather than less, and so our pleasures
will, as it were, come to us double. I recall, for example, the
heightened interest with which I beheld my first Boston cat-bird;
standing on the back of one of the seats in the Garden, steadying
himself with oscillations of his tail,--a conveniently long
balance-pole,--while he peeped curiously down into a geranium bed,
within the leafy seclusion of which he presently disappeared. He was
nothing but a cat-bird; if I had seen him in the country I should have
passed him by without a second glance; but here, at the base of the
Everett statue, he looked, somehow, like a bird of another feather.
Since then, it is true, I have learned that his occasional presence with
us in the season of the semi-annual migration is not a matter for
astonishment. At that time, however, I was happily more ignorant; and
therefore, as I say, my pleasure was twofold,--the pleasure, that is, of
the bird's society and of the surprise.

There are plenty of people, I am aware, who assert that there are no
longer any native birds in our city grounds,--or, at the most, only a
few robins. Formerly things were different, they have heard, but now the
abominable English sparrows monopolize every nook and corner. These wise
persons speak with an air of positiveness, and doubtless ought to know
whereof they affirm. Hath not a Bostonian eyes? And doth he not cross
the Common every day? But it is proverbially hard to prove a negative;
and some of us, with no thought of being cynical, have ceased to put
