mountains.

[Illustration: Green-tailed Chewink.

(One half natural size.)]

Just there, in that small open place between the trees,--how well I
remember the afternoon,--I saw a new bird come out of the bushes; the
green-tailed chewink he proved to be, on his way back to the Rocky
Mountains. He was a beautiful stranger with a soft glossy coat touched
off with yellowish green, while his high-bred gentle manners have made
me remember him with affectionate interest all these years. Across the
garden I heard my first song from that unique rhapsodist, the
yellow-breasted chat. The same place marks another interesting
experience. While I was sitting in the crotch of an oak a thrasher came
out of the brush into an open space in front of me. Her feathers were
disordered and apparently she had come from her nest. She walked with
wings tight at her sides and her tail up at an angle well out of the way
of the rustling leaves; altogether a neat alert figure that contrasted
sharply with the lazy brown chippie which appeared just then in
characteristic negligee, its wings hanging and tail dragging on the
ground. The thrashers of Twin Oaks have bills that are curved like a
sickle, and this bird used her tool most skillfully. Instead of
scratching up the leaves and earth with her feet as chewinks and
sparrows do, the thrasher used her bill almost exclusively. First she
cleared a space by scraping the leaves away, moving her bill through
them rapidly from side to side. Then she made two holes in the ground,
probing deep with her long bill. After taking what she could get from
the second hole, she went back to the first again, as if to see if
anything had come to the surface there. Then she lay down on the sand to
sun herself and acted as though going to take a sun bath, when suddenly
she discovered me and fled.

When watching the bird at work I got a pretty picture in the round disk
of my opera-glass. The glass was focused on the digging thrasher, but a
goldfinch came into the picture and pulled at some stems for its nest
and a cottontail ran rapidly across from rim to rim. I lifted the glass
to follow him and saw him go trotting down the path between the bushes.

The thrasher's curved bill gives a most ludicrous look to the bird when
singing. He looks as if he were trying to turn himself inside out. I
once saw an adult thrasher tease its mate for food, and wondered how it
would be possible for one curved bill to feed another curv