at pileated woodpeckers, a pair of which occasionally
cried loud and long from the five lofty pine stubs in the colt pasture,
beyond the Aunt Hannah lot; the yellow-birds that piped, _pee-chid-aby_,
_pee-chid-aby_, on wavy lines of flight, upon the last days of August,
just ere taking wing for warmer climes; the imitative cat-birds that
built in the alders along the road across the meadow, whose nests the
boys held it lawful to destroy because, forsooth, "they sucked other
birds' eggs," a false accusation rendered plausible, perhaps, from their
disagreeable feline squalls, and not wholly ingenuous imitations of the
songs of the thrush, the veery and the robin.

How well, too, I recall the cuckoos that, night or day, intoned so
moodily in the willow copses below the east field fence and suffered
from a like unpopular accusation of "laying their eggs in other birds'
nests." Also the mated triads of sooty chimney swallows that rumbled
nightly in the great brick flues of the farmhouse, and at first almost
terrified me, but at length furnished the thalamian refrain that most
surely lulled me asleep; the red-headed woodpeckers that with sharp
cries and concave stoop of flight moved fitfully, from tree to tree,
tapping this one loudly, that one low and dull, and whose nest hole in
the dead maple on the hillside was re-occupied year after year, till at
last the stub blew down and broke short off at the hole itself; the
king-fishers that with the same stooping flight, sprung their sharp
rattles along the brooks and lakeside; the martins that feloniously
caught the bees, and every season dragged their squalling, screaming
young out of their pole-house, then poked them off the platform to fly
for themselves, having first, however, cleared the yard of cats.

The militant king birds, too, that built every June on the tops of the
small apple-trees in the young orchard, and raged in mid air, overhead,
pouring out a wild farago of sharp cries, never so happy as when in full
career after crows, hawks, cats or dogs; the moth-catching night-hawks
that cried _peerk_ from their wide mouths, high in the sky at nightfall,
and dived far aslant on stiff wings, with a long drawn _soo-oo-ook_;
the clucking whip-poor-wills, that chanted from the bare flat pasture
rocks; the chickadees that came into the orchard and about the great
loose farm woodpile, in February, with their odd little minor refrain of
_cic-a-da-da-da-da_, mere feathery mites of c