. Birds through an opera-glass . breast thatdiscloses a large black collar separating his thicklyspotted breast from the plain light throat. The song of the yellow hammer is like the Ger-man th — he has nt any. He has a variety of criesand calls, however, and a trill that sounds like agreat rattle shaken in the air. Mr. Colburn at-tributes twelve of his names to imitations of thesevarious sounds; clape, cave-due, fiddler, flicker,hittock, hick-wall, ome-tuc, piute or peerit, wake-up, yaffle, yarrup, and yucker. Mr. IngersoU refers flicker to his flight, andif you watch your yellow hammer till
. Birds through an opera-glass . breast thatdiscloses a large black collar separating his thicklyspotted breast from the plain light throat. The song of the yellow hammer is like the Ger-man th — he has nt any. He has a variety of criesand calls, however, and a trill that sounds like agreat rattle shaken in the air. Mr. Colburn at-tributes twelve of his names to imitations of thesevarious sounds; clape, cave-due, fiddler, flicker,hittock, hick-wall, ome-tuc, piute or peerit, wake-up, yaffle, yarrup, and yucker. Mr. IngersoU refers flicker to his flight, andif you watch your yellow hammer till he flies offto another tree you will see that the adjective de-scribes his peculiar but characteristic woodpeckerflight better than the most labored description. 60 BIRDS THROUGH AN OPERA-GLASS. Mr. Colburn says he is called taping bird fromit, because lie looks as if measuring off tape. If you are persevering enough to follow him tohis nest — and you never feel thoroughly ac-quainted with birds any more than with people ^^^. mntil you see them in their homes — you will dis-cover why he is called high-hold, high-holder,and high-hole — that is, if the nest he hasmade is one of the high ones. Sometimes yellowhammers build very low. However this may be,the entrance to the nest is a large round hole, cutout of the wood of the tree, as the pile of chipson the ground attests. Inside, the hole is very YELLOW HAMMER. 51 deep and the white eggs are laid on the chips atthe bottom. The usual number of eggs is six. A gentleman tells me a curious case of miscal-culation on the part of a yellow hammer that builtin an old apple-tree near his house. He says theold birds kept bringing food to the nest so long-that he thought something must be wrong, andwent to investigate. The nest was just within hisreach, and he found that, as he had supposed, thebirds were more than large enough to fly. In factthey were so large they could not get out of themouth of the nest, and were actually impris
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, bookidbirdsthr, booksubjectbirds
