ong as the winds draw hard down the alley past
my window.
But I have more than a window and a broken rain-pipe. Along with my five
flights goes a piece of roof, flat, with a wooden floor, a fence, and a
million acres of sky. I couldn't possibly use another acre of sky, except
along the eastern horizon, where the top floors of some twelve-story
buildings intercept the dawn.
With such a roof and such a sky, when I must, I can, with effort, get well
out of the city. I have never fished nor botanized here, but I have been
a-birding many times.
Stone walls do not a prison make,
nor city streets a cage--if one have a roof.
A roof is not an ideal spot for bird study. I would hardly, out of
preference, have chosen this with its soot and its battlement of gaseous
chimney-pots, even though it is a university roof with the great gilded
dome of a state house shining down upon it. One whose feet have always
been in the soil does not take kindly to tar and tin. But anything open to
the sky is open to some of the birds, for the paths of many of the
migrants lie close along the clouds.
Other birds than the passing migrants, however, sometimes come within
range of my look-out. The year around there are English sparrows and
pigeons; and all through the summer scarcely an evening passes when a few
chimney-swallows are not in sight.
With the infinite number and variety of chimneys hedging me in, I
naturally expected to find the sky alive with swallows. Indeed, I thought
that some of the twenty-six pots at the corners of my roof would be
inhabited by the birds. Not so. While I can nearly always find a pair of
swallows in the air, they are surprisingly scarce, and, so far as I know,
they rarely build in the heart of the city. There are more canaries in my
block than chimney-swallows in all my sky.
The swallows are not urban birds. The gas, the smoke, the shrieking
ventilators, and the ceaseless sullen roar of the city are hardly to their
liking. Perhaps the flies and gnats which they feed upon cannot live in
the air above the roofs. The swallows want a sleepy old town with big
thunderful chimneys, where there are wide fields and a patch of quiet
water.
Much more numerous than the swallows are the night-hawks. My roof, in
fact, is the best place I have ever found to study their feeding habits.
These that flit through my smoky dusk may not make city nests, though the
finding of such nests would not surprise me. Of cours
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