Nor is it only the true songs that delight us. We love
to hear the flickers call, and we readily pardon any one of their number
which, as occasionally happens, is bold enough to wake us in the
early morning by drumming on the shingles of the roof. In our ears the
red-winged blackbirds have a very attractive note. We love the screaming
of the red-tailed hawks as they soar high overhead, and even the calls
of the night heron that nest in the tall water maples by one of the wood
ponds on our place, and the little green herons that nest beside the
salt marsh. It is hard to tell just how much of the attraction in any
bird-note lies in the music itself and how much in the associations.
This is what makes it so useless to try to compare the bird songs of one
country with those of another. A man who is worth anything can no more
be entirely impartial in speaking of the bird songs with which from
his earliest childhood he has been familiar than he can be entirely
impartial in speaking of his own family.
At Sagamore Hill we love a great many things--birds and trees and books,
and all things beautiful, and horses and rifles and children and hard
work and the joy of life. We have great fireplaces, and in them the logs
roar and crackle during the long winter evenings.
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