I was attending to the winter wren on the 11th, and on the 14th
appeared the first pine-creeping warblers,--welcome for their own sakes,
and doubly so as the forerunners of a numerous and splendid company; but
aside from these two, I saw no evidence that a single new species
arrived at my station for the entire fortnight.

Robins sang sparingly from the beginning, and became perceptibly more
musical on the 8th, with signs of mating and jealousy; but the real
robin carnival did not open till the morning of the 14th. Then the
change was wonderful. Some of the birds were flying this way and that,
high in air, two or three together; others chased each other about
nearer the ground; some were screaming, some hissing, and more singing.
So sudden was the outbreak and so great the commotion that I was
persuaded there must have been an arrival of females in the night.

I have heard it objected against these thrushes, whose extreme
commonness renders them less highly esteemed than they would otherwise
be, that they find their voices too early in the morning. But I am not
myself prepared to second the criticism. They are not often at their
matins, I think, until the eastern sky begins to flush, and it is not
quite certain to my mind that they are wrong in assuming that daylight
makes daytime. I have questioned before now whether our own custom of
sitting up for five or six hours after sunset, and then lying abed two
or three hours after sunrise, may not have come down to us from times
when there were still people in the world who loved darkness rather than
light, because their deeds were evil; and whether, after all, in this as
in some other respects, we might not wisely take pattern of the fowls of
the air.

Individually, the phoebes were almost as noisy as the robins, but of
course their numbers were far less. They are models of perseverance.
Were their voice equal to the nightingale's they could hardly be more
assiduous and enthusiastic in its use. As a general thing they are
content to repeat the simple _Phoebe, Phoebe_ (there are moods in
the experience of all of us, I hope, when the repetition of a name is by
itself music sufficient), but it is not uncommon for this to be
heightened to _Phoebe, O Phoebe_; and now and then you will hear
some fellow calling excitedly, _Phoebe, Phoebe-be-be-be-be_,--a
comical sort of stuttering, in which the difficulty is not in getting
hold of the first syllable, but in letting go the last