All the out-door world seems dreamy with the same delight. The blue jays flutter back and forth on softer wing, and their usual strident clangor is subdued to an almost caressing babble, in which you think you hear the tones of spring love-making. They know the feel of nesting weather, and though it is but for a day it soothes them to happy response. This morning a robin, sure that spring had come again, sat up on the elm tree outside my window and greeted it with full-throated song, just as he had in June, and all day long there has been twittering of birds in the pasture and the forest.
Only a few of our host of summer visitor song birds remain, and the great wave of southward migration has passed us, yet to-day the pasture was vocal with the twittering of late passing warblers, and some even sang, _sotto voce_, to a sand-dance accompaniment of rustling leaves. The myrtle warblers were busy among the blue-gray, waxy, aromatic berries of the bayberry, which is their favorite food. The crop is good this year, portions of the pasture being almost blue with the close-set berries, and I think the myrtle warblers will linger long with us. Indeed, they have been reported as staying all winter when the bayberry supply is ample and sheltered from the worst of the north winds.
If they do the robins will stay with them, for the crop of cedar berries is a good one also. Almost all the red cedars have some, and some are so thick-set with them that their bronze-green, now yellowing a little with the lessening sap, is all lightened up with an alluring blue. I do not blame the robins for lingering long with the cedar berries. I like them myself. They are a little dry, but very pleasantly sweet; and after the sweetness is gone there lingers on the palate a spicy aromatic flavor which is most enticing.
Some of our Norfolk County swamps are so thickly set with swamp white cedars that it is almost impossible for a man to push his way through their young growth. That north wind that can cut its way to the heart of these must be keen indeed, and here, when the berries are plentiful, you may find not only robins, but now and then a bluebird, and more frequently partridge woodpeckers, all winter long.