内容简介：
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE FAMILIAR BIRDS I CALL the birds familiar in the sense that they make themselves very much at home with us, and not in the sense that their lives become an old story and fail to arouse our interest. It is a story perpetually retold, with endless variations. After you have named them all and have made yourself acquainted with their various characters and habits, your next walk to the fields and woods or along the highway or about your own dooryard may reveal some new trait in finch or thrush, or some significant incident in their lives that kindles your interest afresh. The birds are pioneers that begin the world anew about us each season, and their lives touch and cross ours at new points at all times. They are always the same familiar birds, the birds of our youth, but they are new as the flowers are new, as the spring and summer are new, as each morning is new. Like Nature herself they are endowed with immortal youth, and always present to us an endless field for fresh observation. The first robin, the first bluebird, the first song sparrow, the first phoebe, the first swallow, is an event which we mention to our neighbor, or write in our letters to our friends. It is an old story with a new interest. The birds have lived, and we have lived to meet again the old scenes. They bring us once more the assurance of the unfailing return of spring, and the never-ending joy and fecundity of life. Many of them are very likely the identical robins or song sparrows that charmed us last season, but they come back to us with a new story to tell, and new service to render. They have passed the winter in strange lands, and we may have done so, too; but now, on the home acres, our lives meet and mingle once more. Does that brief visitation in May of the rarer warblers ever...