Monday, 30th.—Very warm. Thermometer 80 in the house; 89 in the shade without.
Walking in the lane toward evening, saw a couple of meadowlarks in great agitation; perhaps some disaster had befallen their young; it seems rather late for them to have little ones, but they raise two broods in the summer. They were flying from one bush to another, and back again over the same ground, crying as they went quite piteously. These birds build on the ground; their nest is made of different grassy plants, quite cleverly contrived, and almost always placed in a meadow. They are decidedly larger and handsomer than the European sky-lark, but their simple note is not at all remarkable; the female sings a little as she rises and falls, like the wife of the red-wing black-bird. Their flight is very different from that of their European kinsman, being heavy and laborious; they like, however, to perch on the very highest branches of trees, which is singular in birds living so much on the ground, and moving apparently with some effort. Climate seems to affect them but little, for they reach from the tropics to 53′ north latitude, and they are resident birds in the lower counties of our own State, though never remaining, I believe, among these hills.
It is to be regretted that neither of the two great singing-birds of the Old World is found in America; that both the sky-lark and the nightingale should be strangers on this side the Atlantic. In some respects the nightingale differs from the common notions regarding it in this country. We have read so much of “plaintive Philomel,” that most of us fancy a solitary bird, in the deep recesses of the grove, chanting by moonlight an air “most musical, most melancholy.” But this is far from being always the
