s of the north, appear within a few days' time.

A backward season brings strangers into close company for a while. A
white-throat sings his clear song of the North, and a moment later is
answered by an oriole's melody, or the sweet tones of a rose-breasted
grosbeak--the latter one of those rarely favoured birds, exquisite in both
plumage and song.

The glories of our May bird life are the wood warblers, and innumerable
they must seem to one who is just beginning his studies; indeed, there are
over seventy species that find their way into the United States. Many are
named from the distribution of colour upon their plumage--the blue-winged
yellow, the black-throated blue, chestnut-sided, bay-breasted, and black
poll. Perhaps the two most beautiful--most reflective of bright tropical
skies and flowers--are the magnolia and the blackburnian. The first fairly
dazzles us with its bluish crown, white and black face, black and
olive-green back, white marked wings and tail, yellow throat and rump, and
strongly streaked breast. The blackburnian is an exquisite little fellow,
marked with white and black, but with the crown, several patches on the
face, the throat and breast of a rich warm orange that glows amid the
green foliage like a living coal of fire. The black poll warbler is an
easy bird to identify; but do not expect to recognise it when it returns
from the North in the fall. Its black crown has disappeared, and in
general it looks like a different bird.

At the present time when the dogwood blossoms are in their full
perfection, and the branches and twigs of the trees are not yet hidden,
but their outlines only softened by the light, feathery foliage, the
tanagers and orioles have their day. Nesting cares have not yet made them
fearful of showing their bright plumage, and scores of the scarlet and
orange forms play among the branches.

The flycatchers and vireos now appear in force--little hunters of insects
clad in leafy greens and browns, with now and then a touch of
brightness--as in the yellow-throated vireo or in the crest of the
kingbird.

The lesser sandpipers, both the spotted and the solitary, teeter along the
brooks and ponds, and probe the shallows for tiny worms. Near the woody
streams the so-called water thrushes spring up before us. Strange birds
these, in appearance like thrushes, in their haunts and in their teetering
motion like sandpipers, but in reality belonging to the same family as the
tree-lov