Hence, when as I came down the drive and a blue jay alighted in a maple near me, I paused to observe him. He wiped his beak on a limb, changed his position a couple of times, then uttered a low mellow note. The voice as of a young jay, tender and appealing, came out of a Norway spruce near by. The cry was continued, when the bird I was watching flew in amid the top branches, and the cry became still more urgent and plaintive. I stepped along a few paces and saw the birds, the female standing up in her nest and the male feeding her. The nest was placed in a sort of basket formed by the whorl of up-curving branches at the top of the tree, the central shaft being gone.
It contained four eggs of a dirty brownish greenish color. As I was climbing up to it, a turtle dove threw herself out of the tree and fluttered to the ground as if mortally wounded. My little boy was looking on, and seeing the dove apparently so helpless and in such distress, ran to see "what in the world ailed it." It fluttered along before him for a few yards, and then its mate appearing upon the scene, the two flew away, much to the surprise of the boy. We soon found the doves' nest, a shelf of twigs on a branch about midway of the tree. It held two young birds nearly fledged. How they seemed to pant as they crouched there, a shapeless mass of down and feathers, regarding us! The doves had been so sly about their nesting that I had never suspected them for a moment. The next tree held a robin's nest, and the nest of a purple finch is probably near by. One usually makes a mistake in going away from home to look for birds' nests. Search the trees about your door.
The blue jay is a cruel nest-robber, but this pair had spared the doves in the same tree, and I think they have made their peace with the robins, as I do not see the latter hustling them about any more. Probably they want to stand well with their neighbors, and so go away from home to commit their robberies.
If a new bird appears in my neighborhood, my eye or ear reports it at once. One April several of those rare thrushes--Bicknell's or Slide Mountain thrush--stopped for two days in my currant-patch. How did I know? I heard their song as I went about the place, a fine elusive strain unlike that of any other thrush. To locate it exactly I found very difficult. It always seemed to be much farther off than it actually was. There is a hush and privacy about its song that makes it unique. It has a mild, fluty quality, very sweet, but in a subdued key. It is a bird of remote northern mountain-tops, and its song seems adjusted to the low, thick growths of such localities.