The Sierra Hermit Thrush is a bird of the mountains, living and nesting habitually above 5000 feet. It frequents thick, damp woods and loves the company of rushing mountain streams. There are several species of hermit thrushes found in the northwestern part of the continent, but this is the only one that is common in Oregon in summer. The Sierra hermit thrush is considered the finest songster of all the Pacific coast birds. It has a more reddish cast to its plumage than the russet-backed thrush.
Our song sparrow is very much darker than this one, but the picture gives you some idea of the bird we know here. Mottled above and streaked below, it has a noticeably larger splotch of brown in the center of the breast. As his name denotes, the song sparrow is one of the most tuneful of the sparrow family. He is not a great or showy musician, but a singer of songs, plain every-day home songs with the heart left in them. His content and good cheer are so contagious that you welcome his voice wherever you hear it. Usually it sings from some high perch, and quite often in the evening.
These are the ones that should really be called the “Cherry Birds.” They get into the cherry trees when in flower an dip off the blossoms. Just why they do it, or what they accomplish thereby, is still a matter of doubt. The male is brightly tinged with cherry red, or with purplish colored feathers, while the female is grayer, like an ordinary sparrow, her feathers tinged with a greenish color. The Purple Finches can be heard in the fruit trees singing their song all day long. You notice the peculiar kind of beak they have — that short, conical beak that is characteristic of all the sparrow family.
Here are the male and the female Red-wing Blackbird. These birds live commonly in swamps, around tule grass areas, or along the side of a river, slough, or some such place. The male is black all over except on the tips of his shoulder where he has some bright red feathers, which may be edged with yellow in some cases. The female is gray mottled with darker brown. She has no dark colors. This bird may be distinguished from the ordinary Blackbird of our fields, the Brewer’s Blackbird, which has a white eye that can be seen a a very long distance.
This is not really a hawk, but is often called one. Some people call it the “Bull Bat”. It can be distinguished easily because of its long, slender wings, and the two white spots which you see represented. It is a relative of the Whip-poor-will, and belongs to that family. It lives entirely upon insects and has none of the Hawk’s habits. You can see these birds on a summer evening, almost at dusk, flying about, high in the air, and then descending with a great swoop. The nose dive and the tail spin are evolutions which some of our aviators may have evolved from watching the habits of this bird. They make a great booming sound when flying towards you, especially if you happen stumble upon their nest or even approach it. Some of us associate with nightfall in our childhood two sounds from the sky which seemed mysterious, and one of them sometimes, perhaps, a little dreadful. One was the steadily repeated “Paent” and the other the occasional sudden booming or whirring sound which the Nighthawk, out of sight, would send down to our ears. We may, from this boyish experience, understand how the Indians became superstitious respecting the latter sound and thought it “was the Shad Spirit warming the shoals of shad about to ascend the rivers to spawn, of their impending fate.”
The sharp-shinned hawk may be seen sitting on a telegraph pole, or in a fence corner, out in the country while the ordinary hawk, which we see flying overhead, is usually the Red-tail — a good sized bird, much larger than an ordinary chicken and not, as a rule, harmful. Its diet consists chiefly of the different species of ground squirrels so common and destructive in the West. Occasionally it may carry off some poultry, but it is a rare habit for this species. A white forehead marks the Swainson Hawk, a white rump the Marsh Hawk, and the “Rough-legged” has its distinguishing mark indicated in its name. Hawks and Owls are a peculiar group of birds. They have habits just like people; some of them good and some of them bad. It is not right to say that all hawks and all owls should be killed.
This is one of the common birds here and must not be mistaken for the Bank or Cliff Swallow. One of the most common swallows we have in this country is the Violetgreen, named from the violet-greenish color of its black wings. Its breast is a pure white, so that when sitting on a white or on the fence it looks as if it were decked out in a dress suit with a wide expanse of shirt front. The Barn Swallow can be distinguished from the others by its forked tail, the two outer feathers of which are very long. The back of the birds is a steel blue. The throat and the breast are a reddish-brown rather than white. It nests inside the barn and is not the bird that builds the mud nests outside.