File:Birds and nature in natural colors - being a scientific and popular treatise on four hundred birds of the United States and Canada (1913) (14752114271).jpg

Identifier: birdsnatureinnat02chic (find matches)
Title: Birds and nature in natural colors : being a scientific and popular treatise on four hundred birds of the United States and Canada
Year: 1913 (1910s)
Authors:
Subjects: Birds -- North America
Publisher: Chicago : A.W. Mumford, Publisher
Contributing Library: American Museum of Natural History Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

View Book Page: Book Viewer
About This Book: Catalog Entry
View All Images: All Images From Book
Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book.

Text Appearing Before Image:
he winds blow raw and thestreams hide their faces! Hardy Norsemen they,—the redpolls, the longspurs,the horned larks, and the snowflakes. They burst upon us in the wake of thefirst storm, and set up in our back pastures a wintry Valhalla, where good cheerof a very sturdy sort reigns supreme. In spite of striking difference of form and color a strange similarity existsamong these northern visitors, so that one may easily contruct a mental genrepicture—or, at most, two such—which will fairly represent them all. Thus thesnowflakes, the longspurs. the horned larks,—and through them even the daftpipits—have a common fashion of giving themselves to the air to be blownabout at hazard: or, when the season advances, of setting their faces also withequal steadfastness against the gainsaying of the blast. Their notes, too (ex-cepting this time the inane yipping of the pipit), have a weird wind-born qualitywhich is inseparable in thought from the shrill piping of the storm. To carry 360
Text Appearing After Image:
the matter further, the siskins, the crossbills, the purple finches and the redpollshave each a mellow rattle, which lends itself with equal facility to that genericconception of the iceberg children. The dialect may differ, but in all of themthe accent is Hyperborean. I well remember my first meeting with that prince of storm waifs, thesnowflake. It was in eastern Washington, where the climate is not less hospitablethan that of much lower latitudes farther east. A distant-faring, featheredstranger had tempted me far afield, when, all at once, a fluttering snowdrift, con-trary to natures wont, rose from earth toward heaven. I held my breath whileI listened to the mild babel of tiit-ut-nt-tezvs with which the snow buntingsgreeted me. The birds were loath to leave the place, and hovered indecisivelywhile the bird-man drank them in. As they moved slowly off each bird seemedalternately to fall and struggle upward through an arc of five or six feet, inde-pendently of his fellows, so that t

Note About Images