Legends and Short Stories to Share on Bird Day

One day in early May, Ted and i also made an expedition to the Shatter a, a still, dark, deep stream that loiters silently from the woods a little way from my cabin. As we paddled along, we were around the alert for virtually every bit of wild lifetime of bird or beast which may arrive.

There have been a lot of abandoned woodpecker chambers within the small dead trees even as went along i always determined to secure the area of a tree containing a powerful one for taking home and set up for your bluebirds. "How bouts we the bluebirds occupy them here?" inquired Ted. "Oh," I replied, "blue birds are not equipped until now into the woods since this. They prefer nesting-places in the open, and near human habitations."


After carefully scrutinizing a few of the trees, we at last saw the one that did actually fill the bill. It was a small dead tree trunk seven or eight inches in diameter, that leaned out above the water, and from where the top had been broken. The hole, round and firm, was ten or twelve feet above us. After considerable effort I succeeded in breaking the stub off near the ground, and brought it down into the boat.

"Just the thing," I said, "surely the bluebirds will prefer this a great artificial box." But, lo and behold, it already had bluebirds from it! We had not heard a sound or seen a feather till the trunk was in our hands, when, on peering in to the cavity, we discovered two young bluebirds about 50 % grown. This became a predicament indeed!

Well, one and only thing you can easily do were to stand the tree-trunk up again together with we're able to, and as near as you can easily to where it had stood before. This was no easy thing. But after having a time we had it fairly well replaced, one end waiting in the mud on the shallow water along with the other resting against a tree. This left the opening to the nest about ten feet below and to either side of the company's former position.

Just then we heard the voice of one in the parent birds, and now we quickly paddled to the other side of the stream, fifty feet away, to watch her proceedings, saying to one another, "Too bad! too bad!" The caretaker bird had a large beetle in her beak. She alighted upon a limb a few feet above the former site of her nest, looked down upon us, uttered a note or two, and then dropped down confidently to the issue in the vacant air the spot that the entrance to her nest ended up being but a few moments before. Here she hovered on the wing a second or two, trying to find something that has not been there, and then returned on the perch she had just left, apparently not a little disturbed. She hammered the beetle rather excitedly upon the limb once or twice, as if it were someway at fault, then dropped down to try for her nest again.

Only vacant air there! She hovers and hovers, her blue wings flickering in the checkered light - surely that precious hole MUST be there - but no, again she is baffled, and again she returns to her perch, and mauls the poor beetle till it must be reduced to a pulp. Then she makes a third attempt, then a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth, till she becomes a good deal excited. "What could have happened? Am I dreaming? Has that beetle hoodooed me?" she seems to say, and in her dismay she lets the bug drop, and looks be wilderedly about her. Then she flies away from the woods, calling. "Looking for her mate," I thought to Ted. "She actually is in deep trouble, and she or he wants sympathy and help."

In a few minutes we heard her mate answer, and presently both the birds came hurrying for the spot, both with loaded beaks. They perched upon the familiar limb above the site with the nest, as well as the mate did actually say, "My dear, what is happening to your account? I can find that nest." And he dived down, and brought up in the empty air just as the mother had done. How he winnowed it with his eager wings! How he did actually bear on to that blank space! His mate sat regarding him intently, confident, I think, that he would find the clue. But he did not. Baffled and excited, he returned to the perch beside her. Then she tried again, then he rushed down once more, then they both assaulted the place, but it wouldn't normally give up its secret. They talked, they encouraged one another, and they kept up the search, now one, now the other, now both together. Sometimes they dropped down to within a few feet of the entrance to the nest, and we thought they will surely find it. No, their minds and eyes were intent only upon that square foot of space the spot that the nest had been. Soon they withdrew to a large limb many feet higher up, and did actually say to themselves,

"Well, it is not there, but it must be here somewhere - why don't we look about." A few minutes elapsed, when we saw the mother bird spring from her perch and go straight as an arrow to the nest. Her maternal eye had proved the quicker. She had found her young. Something similar to reason and mother wit had come to her rescue - she had taken time and energy to look about, and behold! there was that precious doorway. She thrust her head into it, then returned a call to her mate, then went farther in, then withdrew. "Yes, it is true, they are here, they are here!" Then she went in again, gave them the food in her beak, and then gave place to her mate, who, after similar demonstrations of joy, also gave them his morsel.

Ted and I breathed freer. An encumbrance have been obtained from our minds and hearts, and we went cheerfully on our way. We had learned something, too - we had learned that when in the deep woods you think of bluebirds, bluebirds may be nearer you than you think.