I became an
observer of birds I never saw any.

In size the shrike is a little inferior to the blue jay, with much the
same form. If you see an unknown bird about your orchard or fields in
November or December of a bluish grayish complexion, with dusky wings
and tail that show markings of white, flying rather heavily from point
to point, or alighting down in the stubble occasionally, it is pretty
sure to be the shrike.

V

Nature never tires of repeating and multiplying the same species. She
makes a million bees, a million birds, a million mice or rats, or other
animals, so nearly alike that no eye can tell one from another; but it
is rarely that she issues a small and a large edition, as it were, of
the same species. Yet she has done it in a few cases among the birds
with hardly more difference than a foot-note added or omitted. The
cedar-bird, for instance, is the Bohemian waxwing or chatterer in
smaller type, copied even to the minute, wax-like appendages that
bedeck the ends of the wing-quills. It is about one third smaller, and
a little lighter in color, owing perhaps to the fact that it is
confined to a warmer latitude, its northward range seeming to end about
where that of its larger brother begins. Its flight, its note, its
manners, its general character and habits, are almost identical with
those of its prototype. It is confined exclusively to this continent,
while the chatterer is an Old World bird as well, and ranges the
northern parts of both continents. The latter comes to us from the
hyperborean regions, brought down occasionally by the great cold waves
that originate in those high latitudes. It is a bird of Siberian and
Alaskan evergreens, and passes its life for the most part far beyond
the haunts of man. I have never seen the bird, but small bands of them
make excursions every winter down into our territory from British
America. Audubon, I believe, saw them in Maine; other observers have
seen them in Minnesota. It has the crest of the cedar-bird, the same
yellow border to its tail, but is marked with white on its wings, as if
a snowflake or two had adhered to it from the northern cedars and
pines. If you see about the evergreens in the coldest, snowiest weather
what appear to be a number of very large cherry-birds, observe them
well, for the chances are that visitants from the circumpolar regions
are before your door. It is a sign, also, that the frost legions of the
north are out in great force