Norwich bulletin., 1919-05-24

Thee is no long wait between the I fitting of the winter birds and the | coming of our summer frlends-no l short songless Eden. The visiting | . grosbeaks came on Thanksgiving and did not leave us till the, first week in April when robins, 9rackles, blue birds and song sparrows were back. i'll 1 Imposing numbers. Before the last bunch of southern iuncos had passed by. there were owlet fiedglings, early 1 robins and sparrows were building, | well-feathered hawks nests held incu- 1,bated eggs, starlings were feeding 1 young in crevices of our ash trees and 1 in holes in the peak of the roof in | the old village postoffice and there
 were young grackles in the rookery
 on Fremo,h street, Putnam.
 From the grosbeaks four months stay, from their number, their colorful
 grouping, their cheerful chatter, and
 entire lack of shyness I could almost Eendorse the expression of local ob- Eserver T tell you what! These pineys
 and evenings, beat our rosybreasts all
 hollow We'll, not quite, you know. But when in spring or summer can fyou see a quartette of showy male birds like tanagers or orioles in a vision of four maie pine grosbeaks. in nuptial plumage on a flat stone at our very feet, stunning, faintly chirping, and preening each others feathers, I with no shade of pickering, while in a circle around them were twenty sober females feeding and watching the mutual admiration of their gaudy 1 lords. If there was a day without the I pines, the evenings would appear, and 1 if neither species was a hand at The | Naples. they could be seen at Pigeon | Tor fo fo1 I bsaJ-
 I'Watched the grosbeaks picking crumbs
 from the doorsteps and grass seed on
 the barn floor but chiefly eating the
 maple seeds, till apparently at a given
 signal they would closely bunch and
 hurry back to the Naples, their fav
 orite stopping place.
 For eight days watched the
 grackle rookery in the tall pine trees
 on Fremont street, Putnam-larger
 | than last year-and a greater scourge
 l to all robins meeting in the vicinity.
 Yet the bronze males were an attrac
 tion, stalking on the nearby lawns
 and scavenging in back yards, while
 both sexes were busy at all hours of
 the day feeding their squabs, which . surely get d big allowance of insects rI and mixed food. It was real comfort to see bluejays make two raids on ex- } posed corners of the rookcry. and I 7 saw jays drop grackle eggs on the } granolithic walk May Sth and 9th. It t reminds me of seeing crows rading jays nests near Norwich city reservoir, st There's litle honor among thieves you ? know.
 z A bit of difference in the site of this T. crow blackbird colony and the one in F tthe swamp east of Chunkymount
 Fishers Island where 70. pairs of
 grackles nest in the low cedars and I naples. Lobstermen once took two l trout creels of their eggs, and three
 buckets. of night heron's eggs from platforms a little higher up. The . whites of the herons eggs are leathery P boiled or fried, but the blackbirds eggs = ae delicious. A populous rookery n once existed on the Broad street side S of the Slater estate. Norwich, and was r not the ax laid to the roots of the fine e evergreen circle in the Yantic- ceme- s tery because the grackles robbed every : robins nest on the grounds? The Long S Society burying ground harbored a d colony of these pests, and the Jen- S nings' hothouse plant on the East Side o another. I have seen grackIes rifle n the redwings' homes in the swanpy U fork of the Broad Brook and Volun- z town turnpike.
 $ The spirit of federal and state pro V lection laws would not be broken ii d now and then boy should be en.
 l couraged to get up a collection ot ..t eggs, provided he only ''coIlected" eggs f of horned owl cooper and sharpshin- r ned hawks, crow, gracllfe, bluejays if starling, cowbird and English spar 0 row" Not single specimens, but en- VI tire sets, side blown and in a series |, of a dozen sets of each species. Oo- ei logically not a remarkable lot, but VI these would be some interesting feat 0 ures. The light blue of the coopers : would contrast with the owls, anc e while in plumage cooper hawks are the t exact counterpart of sharpshins, the $ eggs are widely different and are the n chief help in separating the species II Though the sharpshin is the deadlies Il foe to the chicken coops and most per = sistent feeder on small birds except tho .4 l! shrike, still it's eggs are the mos s beautiful of all our birds of prey. n Eleven markings on green or gre, sI ground would generally be ] own il
 a series of blue jay sets, relieved now
 and then by a set with a fine choco " late ground color like the tint on egg. V of the American bittern. The monot o ony of English sparrows eggs i. q broken by one egg in every set beins a | lighter than the rest of the clutch l. VI this the first or last egg laid? A Ions 1 series of crows eggs may show a SC o of six and rarely a blue egg. The diff n ference in size of lazybirds' eggs vii = be noticed and the fact that they lool d like street sparrows' eggs. Starlings e eggs are a novelty to the old tim si Yankee collector, but in a series the, q run pretty true to type.
 u Regarding the ground breeding bird e L. E. Rawson has again been killin; the snakes that hibernate in the an e cient cellar-hole. By d quick grab h. - got a good hold of five necl<s at ono :. as they were sticking out for frs ' warm sun, but it took both hands an
 every ounce of muscle in his arms t )l i