the deep woods
beyond the walls you may frequently hear and see the dusky grouse and
the pileated woodpecker, or woodcock almost as large as a pigeon. The
junco or snow-bird builds its nest on the floor of the Valley among the
ferns; several species of sparrow are common and the beautiful lazuli
bunting, a common bird in the underbrush, flitting about among the
azalea and ceanothus bushes and enlivening the groves with his brilliant
color; and on gravelly bars the spotted sandpiper is sometimes seen.
Many woodpeckers dwell in the Valley; the familiar flicker, the Harris
woodpecker and the species which so busily stores up acorns in the thick
bark of the yellow pines.

The short, cold days of winter are also sweetened with the music and
hopeful chatter of a considerable number of birds. No cheerier choir
ever sang in snow. First and best of all is the water-ouzel, a dainty,
dusky little bird about the size of a robin, that sings in sweet fluty
song all winter and all summer, in storms and calms, sunshine and
shadow, haunting the rapids and waterfalls with marvelous constancy,
building his nest in the cleft of a rock bathed in spray. He is not
web-footed, yet he dives fearlessly into foaming rapids, seeming to take
the greater delight the more boisterous the stream, always as cheerful
and calm as any linnet in a grove. All his gestures as he flits about
amid the loud uproar of the falls bespeak the utmost simplicity and
confidence--bird and stream one and inseparable. What a pair! yet they
are well related. A finer bloom than the foam bell in an eddying pool
is this little bird. We may miss the meaning of the loud-resounding
torrent, but the flute-like voice of the bird--only love is in it.

A few robins, belated on their way down from the upper Meadows, linger
in the Valley and make out to spend the winter in comparative comfort,
feeding on the mistletoe berries that grow on the oaks. In the depths
of the great forests, on the high meadows, in the severest altitudes,
they seem as much at home as in the fields and orchards about the busy
habitations of man, ascending the Sierra as the snow melts, following
the green footsteps of Spring, until in July or August the highest
glacier meadows are reached on the summit of the Range. Then, after the
short summer is over, and their work in cheering and sweetening these
lofty wilds is done, they gradually make their way down again in accord
with the weather, keeping below the sno