Consummate Mastery Of The Air

May is the month of migrant warblers, for in this month nine-tenths of our stock of these beautiful and delicate birds pass northward through our forests. A few are of limited range in the South, and scarcely leave our borders for the winter. But many summer in our northern states and in Canada, and in winter go far south. Their wanderings are fraught with romance, if we but pause to consider them. On some bright morning we may awake to find our treetops musical with bright-coated creatures that have appeared from somewhere in the night. This gaudy one with the yellow black-flecked breast and bars of white across tail and wing, called the Magnolia because the immortal Wilson associated him with that beautiful tree, has come from Yucatan.

Straight across the Mexican Gulf he flew, and, working ever northward, last night passed high over one or two broad states. Today he lingers with us, feeding and resting; tonight, perchance, he will push on. Within a week he will be building his warm nest in the same spruce thicket in Maine or Quebec where last year he and his mate raised their brood. This flame-breasted Blackburnian, what of him? In the jungles of Peru or Ecuador, amidst the mildness and bounty of the tropics, he spent the winter, and is now hastening to the pine grove where, far out on lofty swaying branch, he first saw the light; and so with this slower-moving Baybreast, lately from the Colombian wilds, and now on his way to Hudson Bay or Newfoundland, and the tiny Wilson's Black-cap, nervous and restless, on his way to Labrador; they are all far travelers.

In the West another band of gaudy wood-elves, those beauties named for Townsend, and Audubon, and Macgillivray, are busy at their May-moving from the Tropics to the Sub-arctics. In this month, over most of our country, those elves of the air, the swallows, are winging northward. What wonder that birds showing such consummate mastery of the air, whose coming presages warmth, and creatures of such friendly confidence, have always been beloved and revered by country people.

In the not-distant past, their sudden disappearance in autumn, and their regular spring-coming, led to the belief that they wintered in the mud of ponds, or even changed to frogs. To those who found it hard to believe such things, legally attested affidavits were presented. But the real facts attending the migrations of the swallows are now known, and they are scarcely less wonderful than the fables.

By: davidbunch

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