Birds Of Kansas

INTRODUCTION. You must have the bird in your heart before you can find it in the bush and when once you have it in your heart the finding of it in the bush is a secondary matter, John Burroughs. We may with profit take a look at the life and ways of some ot our common birds, and study with a growing interest a few of the parts that characterize them and that fit them so perfectly for their life in the air. There is a perpetual interest centering in the study of the adaptation and fitness of the varied forms of life as it may be seen about every home, be it ever so humble, and that, too, with no other equipment than ones eyes and patience. Fortunate is that person whose home or school life has been of such a character as to develop a love for the beautiful in nature. He may drink from the same fountain with poets and artists, and picture to himself the greatest works of art, and read first hand the most beautiful poems in all the realms of literature. So it is with everything so it is with the birds. The interest they excite is of all grades, from that which looks upon them as items of millinery, up to that of the makers of ornithological systems, and who ransack the world for specimens, and who have no doubt that the chief end of a bird is to be named and catalogued the more synonyms the better. Somewhere between these two extremes comes the person whose interest in birds is friendly rather than scientific who has little taste for shooting, and lass for dissecting who delights in the living creatures themselves, and counts a bird in the bush worth two in the hand. Such a person, if he is intelligent, makes good use of the best works on ornithology he would notknow how to get alongwithout them but he studies most the birds themselves, and after awhile he begins to associate them on a plan of his own. Not that he mistrusts the approximate correctness of the received classification, or ceases to find it of daily service but though it were as accurate as the multiplication table, it is based and rightly, no doubt on anatomical structure alone it rates birds as bodies, and nothing else while to the person of whom we are speaking, birds are, first of all, souls his interest in them is, as we say, personal and we are none of us in the habit of grouping our friends according to height, or complexion, or any other physical pecu- liarity. The bright plumage and sweet, cheery song of the bird fills every heart with pleasure, unuttered, perhaps, or expressed in such words as Bryants To a Waterfowl Whither, midst falling dew, While glow the heavens with the last steps of day, Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue Thy solitary way Vainly the fowlers eye Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong, As, darkly seen against the crimson sky, Thy figure floats along. Seek st thou the plashy brink Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide, Or where the rocking billows rise and sink On the chafed ocean side There is a Power whose care Teaches thy way along that pathless coast, The desert and illimitable air, Lone wandering, but not lost...