They have the overture to themselves all along in the open, for there the song sparrow does not sing till some ten minutes later. Of these again you shall hear a single bird, followed by a chorus in the next breath, and close upon the heels of the sparrow voice come the notes of innumerable warblers of many kinds whose songs you shall not distinguish one from another and name unless you are an expert. Behind these again come the chewinks and thrashers, not so early risers by any means, and very late the catbird. The catbird is clever but, like many clever people, he is lazy.
Over to the other side of the pasture, a mile from the lane as the crow flies, is a swamp which is part of the pasture, indeed, but a part of the wilderness beyond, also. It was on the edge of this that I had chosen to meet the dawn, picking my way to it through the darkness in part by scent, for the swamp has a musky fragrance of its own, which it sends far on the night air. Coming down the slope to it you pass through a tangle of scrub oak that leads you to a lower region of alders snarled with greenbrier--“horse brier” we call it familiarly.
Here the ground begins to be soft, with occasional clumps of sphagnum moss, which is like a gray-brown carpet of velvet, not yet made up, but tacked together with yellow bastings of the goldthread. Among the scrub oaks a stately pine here and there shoulders up, sending you a reassuring sniff of pitchy aroma. The scrub oaks know their allotted ground and cease wandering when their toes touch swamp water, but the pines are more venturesome, and often lift with their roots little mounds of firm brown carpeted ground in the midst of the quaky sphagnum. Slender cedars crowd in from the swamp toward these pines, plumed like vassal knights that rally to the support of their overlord.
On one of these pine islands on the edge of the swamp an oven bird had built her nest, and on this particular night in June she was in much distress because she could not get into it. The oven bird builds a nest on the ground among low bushes and vines, choosing often a spot where pine needles are scattered among the dead leaves. She roofs this nest with care--and dried grass--and builds a tunnel-like entrance to it so that you may see neither the eggs nor the bird sitting on them. You may step on an oven bird’s nest before you will see it, even when looking for it, and you may know for a certainty that it is within a definite small patch of ground, and yet hunt long before you find it. The mother bird had been frightened from her nest by the crush of my foot at its side in the darkness, and she did not dare come back, for I had unwittingly sat down beneath the pine almost across the entrance. Frightened for her nest as well as herself, she fluttered about like a bird ghost, now dozing in the thicket for a time, then waking to strangeness and fear, and making her plaint again.