The Spring of the Year. Sharp Dallas Lore

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СКАЧАТЬ pick up the hen, study the falling of the feathers carefully, and lo! here is law and order, every feather as important to Nature as a star, every quill as a planet, and the old white hen as mightily looked after by Nature as the round sphere of the universe!

      Once a year, usually after the nesting-season, it seems a physical necessity for most birds to renew their plumage.

      We get a new suit (some of us) because our old one wears out. That is the most apparent cause for the new annual suit of the birds. Yet with them, as with some of us, the feathers go out of fashion, and then the change of feathers is a mere matter of style, it seems.

      For severe and methodical as Mother Nature must be (and what mother or teacher or ruler, who has great things to do and a multitude of little things to attend to, must not be severe and methodical?) – severe, I say, as Mother Nature must be in looking after her children’s clothes, she has for all that a real motherly heart, it seems.

      For see how she looks after their wedding garments – giving to most of the birds a new suit, gay and gorgeous, especially to the bridegrooms, as if fine feathers did make a fine bird! Or does she do all of this to meet the fancy of the bride, as the scientists tell us? Whether so or not, it is a fact that among the birds it is the bridegroom who is adorned for his wife, and sometimes the fine feathers come by a special moult – an extra suit for him!

      Take Bobolink, for instance. He has two complete moults a year, two new suits, one of them his wedding suit. Now, as I write, I hear him singing over the meadow – a jet-black, white, and cream-buff lover, most strikingly adorned. His wife, down in the grass, looks as little like him as a sparrow looks like a blackbird. But after the breeding-season he will moult again, changing color so completely that he and his wife and children will all look alike, all like sparrows, and will even lose their names, flying south now under the name of “reed-birds.”

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      So nature pricks (stirs) them in their hearts.

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So nature pricks (stirs) them in their hearts.

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