hat
birds so gentle could be so bold and that sweet-voiced singers could
so fiercely fight and scold.

Of all the great singers that sweeten Wisconsin one of the best known
and best loved is the brown thrush or thrasher, strong and able
without being familiar, and easily seen and heard. Rosy purple
evenings after thundershowers are the favorite song-times, when the
winds have died away and the steaming ground and the leaves and
flowers fill the air with fragrance. Then the male makes haste to the
topmost spray of an oak tree and sings loud and clear with delightful
enthusiasm until sundown, mostly I suppose for his mate sitting on the
precious eggs in a brush heap. And how faithful and watchful and
daring he is! Woe to the snake or squirrel that ventured to go nigh
the nest! We often saw him diving on them, pecking them about the head
and driving them away as bravely as the kingbird drives away hawks.
Their rich and varied strains make the air fairly quiver. We boys
often tried to interpret the wild ringing melody and put it into
words.

After the arrival of the thrushes came the bobolinks, gushing,
gurgling, inexhaustible fountains of song, pouring forth floods of
sweet notes over the broad Fox River meadows in wonderful variety and
volume, crowded and mixed beyond description, as they hovered on
quivering wings above their hidden nests in the grass. It seemed
marvelous to us that birds so moderate in size could hold so much of
this wonderful song stuff. Each one of them poured forth music enough
for a whole flock, singing as if its whole body, feathers and all,
were made up of music, flowing, glowing, bubbling melody
interpenetrated here and there with small scintillating prickles and
spicules. We never became so intimately acquainted with the bobolinks
as with the thrushes, for they lived far out on the broad Fox River
meadows, while the thrushes sang on the tree-tops around every home.
The bobolinks were among the first of our great singers to leave us in
the fall, going apparently direct to the rice-fields of the Southern
States, where they grew fat and were slaughtered in countless numbers
for food. Sad fate for singers so purely divine.

One of the gayest of the singers is the redwing blackbird. In the
spring, when his scarlet epaulets shine brightest, and his little
modest gray wife is sitting on the nest, built on rushes in a swamp,
he sits on a nearby oak and devotedly sings almost all day. His rich
simpl