The experience of this lady is the experience of all in whom is kindled this
bird enthusiasm. A new interest is added to life; one more resource against
ennui and stagnation. If you have only a city yard with a few sickly trees in
it, you will find great delight in noting the numerous stragglers from the
great army of spring and autumn migrants that find their way there. If you
live in the country, it is as if new eyes and new ears were given you, with a
correspondingly increased capacity for rural enjoyment.

The birds link themselves to your memory of seasons and places, so that A
song, a call, a gleam of color, set going a sequence of delightful
reminiscences in your mind. When a solitary great Carolina wren came one
August day and took up its abode near me and sang and called and warbled as I
had heard it long before on the Potomac, how it brought the old days, the old
scenes back again, and made me for the moment younger by all those years!

A few seasons ago I feared the tribe of bluebirds were on the verge of
extinction from the enormous number of them that perished from cold and hunger
in the South in the winter of '94. For two summers not a blue wing, not a blue
warble. I seemed to miss something kindred and precious from my environment --
the visible embodiment of the tender sky and the wistful soil. What a loss, I
said, to the coming generations of dwellers in the country -- no bluebird in
the spring! What will the farm-boy date from? But the fear was groundless: the
birds are regaining their lost ground; broods of young blue-coats are again
seen drifting from stake to stake or from mullen-stalk to mullen-stalk about
the fields in summer, and our April air will doubtless again be warmed and
thrilled by this lovely harbinger of spring. -- JOHN BURROUGHS, August 19,
1897