among those present. The redwing blackbird may linger
a day or two after these, but he does not wait to any more than
see September arrive before he, too, is off. The bobolinks,
perfectly unrecognizable in plain brown coats, continue to flock
sparrow-wise about the meadows until say, the tenth. Then they go
chink-chinking down the marshes southward by way of Florida to
Central America. Yucatan and the delta of the Orinoco may be
lonely places in summer, but I do not think one need to be
homesick there in mid-winter with all these intimate friends
sitting about on the palm trees and chatting about the way things
went in my meadows and woods a few months before.

As our summer residents go and the passing migrants arrive and
depart we may begin to expect the winter visitants. I am looking
for myrtle warblers now. Their usual date of arrival is the
twentieth, and if I do not find them here it is probably my fault.
The pastures are blue now with bayberries, which seem to be their
favorite food. Feeding on these the myrtle warblers should be
spicy, sprightly creatures, full of quaint romance, as indeed they
are. The junco may come as early as this, according to the best
authorities, though I confess I never have any luck in finding him
much before November. The junco is a snowbird, anyway, his colors
match leaden skies, and he seems to me out of place without a
fellow flock of snow flakes.

The golden crowned kinglet and the winter wren, the white-throated
sparrow and the brown creeper, all may be looked for between the
20th of September and the passing of the month, though as for the
brown creeper those two ardent bird students, Frederic H. Kennard
and Fred McKechnie have demonstrated that it is not a winter
visitant only but an occasional all-the-year resident, they having
found nests and eggs in the Ponkapoag swamp. So the list might be
enlarged vastly till we found a new comer or a new goer or both
for every day in this month of transition, September.

*****

To me, though, the most potent signs of the presence of autumn are
neither the migrants nor the changing foliage. They are the
mysterious voices of the woodland which change at about this time
often to an eerier and lonelier note. The voice of late September
winds in the trees has a wild call of melancholy in it. There is a
spot in my wood where an ancient pine, dead and stark long ago,
lies in the arms of a sturdy scarlet oak. All summer the leaning
trunk h