Indeed, what would be more interesting than the history of our birds for the last two or three centuries.  There can be no doubt that the presence of man has exerted a very marked and friendly influence upon them, since they so multiply in his society.  The birds of California, it is said, were mostly silent till after its settlement, and I doubt if the Indians heard the wood thrush as we hear him.  Where did the bobolink disport himself before there were meadows in the North and rice fields in the South?  Was he the same lithe, merry-hearted beau then as now?  And the sparrow, the lark, and the goldfinch, birds that seem so indigenous to the open fields and so adverse to the woods,—­we cannot conceive of their existence in a vast wilderness and without man.

But to return.  The song sparrow, that universal favorite and firstling of the spring, comes before April, and its simple strain gladdens all hearts.

May is the month of the swallows and the orioles.  There are many other distinguished arrivals, indeed nine tenths of the birds are here by the last week in May, yet the swallows and the orioles are the most conspicuous.  The bright plumage of the latter seems really like an arrival from the tropics.  I see them dash through the blossoming trees, and all the forenoon hear their incessant warbling and wooing.  The swallows dive and chatter about the barn, or squeak and build beneath the eaves; the partridge drums in the fresh sprouting woods; the long, tender note of the meadowlark comes up from the meadow; and at sunset, from every marsh and pond come the ten thousand voices of the hylas.  May is the transition month, and exists to connect April and June, the root with the flower.

With June the cup is full, our hearts are satisfied, there is no more to be desired.  The perfection of the season, among other things, has brought the perfection of the song and the plumage of the birds.  The master artists are all here; and the expectations excited by the robin and the song sparrow are fully justified.  The thrushes have all come; and I sit down upon the first rock, with hands full of the pink azalea, to listen.  With me the cuckoo does not arrive till June; and often the goldfinch, the kingbird, the scarlet tanager delay their coming till then.  In the meadows the bobolink is in all his glory; in the high pastures the field sparrow sings his breezy vesper-hymn; and the woods are unfolding to the music of the thrushes.

The cuckoo is one of the most solitary birds of our forests, and is strangely tame and quiet, appearing equally untouched by joy or grief, fear or anger.  Something remote seems ever weighing upon his mind.  His note or call is as of one lost or wandering, and to the farmer is prophetic of rain.  Amid the general joy and the sweet assurance of things, I love to listen to the strange clairvoyant call.  Heard a quarter of a mile away, from out the depths of the forest, there is something peculiarly weird and monkish about it.  Wordsworth’s lines upon the European species apply equally well to ours:—­“O blithe new-comer!  I have heard, I hear thee and rejoice:  O cuckoo! shall I call thee bird?  Or but a wandering voice?