in the fields--large and partridge-like, with breast
washed yellow from the bill to the very knees, except at the throat,
where hangs a brilliant reticule of blackish brown; his head and back
are of hawkish colors--umber, brown, and gray--and in his carriage is
something of the gamecock. He flies high, sometimes alone, sometimes in
the flock, and is our winter visitor, loving the old fields improvidence
has abandoned, and uttering, as he feeds, the loud sounds of challenge,
as if to cry, "Abandoned by man; pre-empted by me!"

Jimmy Phoebus also heard the bold, bantering woodpecker, with his red
head, whose schoolmaster is the squirrel, and whose tactics of keeping a
tree between him and his enemy the Indian fighters adopted. He mimics
the tree-frog's cry, and migrates after October, like other
voluptuaries, who must have the round year warm, and fruit and eggs
always in market. Dressed in his speckled black swallow-tail coat, with
his long pen in his mouth and his shirt-bosom faultlessly white, the
woodpecker works like some Balzac in his garret, making the tree-top
lively as he spars with his fellow-Bohemians; and being sure himself of
a tree, and clinging to it with both tail and talons, he esteems
everything else that lives upon it to be an insect at which he may run
his bill or spit his tongue--that tongue which is rooted in the brain
itself.

In the hollow golden bowl of echoing evening the sailor noted, too, the
flicker, in golden pencilled wings and back of speckled umber and
mottled white breast, with coal-black collar and neck and head of
cinnamon. His golden tail droops far below his perch, and, running
downward along the tree-trunk, it flashes in the air like a sceptre over
the wood-lice he devours with his pickaxe bill. "Go to the ant, thou
sluggard!" was an instigation to murder in the flicker, who loves young
ants as much as wild-cherries or Indian corn, and is capable of taking
any such satire seriously upon things to eat. Not so elfin and devilish
as the small black woodpecker, he is full of bolder play.

The redbird, like the unclaimed blood of Abel, flew to the little trees
that grew low, as if to cover Abel's altar; the jack-snipe chirped in
the swampy spots, like a divinity student, on his clean, long legs,
probing with his bill and critical eye the Scriptures of the fields; the
quail piped like an old bachelor with family cares at last, as he led
his mate where the wild seeds were best; and throug