That night the temperature rose, until the very breath of spring seemed to be in the air; and early the next morning, before even the faint glimmer of the dawn-dusk had shown, I was awakened by hearing a croon so soft and sweet that it ran for long through my dreams without waking me. Again and again it sounded, like the singing ripple of a trout brook or the happy little cradle-song that a mother ruffed grouse makes when she broods her leaf-brown chicks. I recognized the love-song of the little owl, months before its time--a song which belongs to the nights when the air is full of spring scents and hyla-calls.
Perhaps the singer was the same bird who visited Sergeant Henny-Penny one Christmas night. During the day the Band had taken a most successful bird-walk. We had seen and heard some twenty different kinds of birds; heard the white-breasted nuthatch sing his spring-song, "Quee-quee-quee," as a Christmas carol for us; met a red fox trotting sedately through the snow, and altogether had a most adventurous day. That evening I was reading in front of the fire when from Sergeant Henny-Penny's room came an S.O.S. "Fathie, come quick, there's a nangel flyin' around my room," he called.
I hurried, for angels flying or sitting are rarely scored on my bird-lists. When I reached the room, Henny-Penny had burrowed so far under the bedclothes that it seemed doubtful if he would ever reach the surface again. When I switched on the light, at first I could see nothing, and I began to be afraid that the "nangel" had escaped through the open window. Finally on the picture-moulding I spied the celestial visitor. It was a screech owl of the red phase,--they may be either red or gray,--and when I came near it snapped its beak fiercely, to the terror of the Sergeant under the clothes. With a quick jump I managed to catch it. At first it puffed up its feathers and pretended to be very fierce, but at last it snuggled into my hand and was with difficulty persuaded to fly out again into the cold night.
[Illustration: NO ADMITTANCE PER ORDER, MR. SCREECH OWL]
Another singer of the night is of course the whip-poor-will. When I lived farther out in the country than I do now, for two successive years I was awakened at two o'clock in the morning by a whip-poor-will passing north and singing in the nearby woods. The third year he broke all records by alighting on my lawn at sunset in late April. There, under a pink dogwood tree which stood like a statue of spring, he sang for ten minutes. Only once before have I ever heard a whip-poor-will sing in the daylight. Once at high noon in the pine-barrens, one burst out so loud and ringingly that the pine warbler stopped his trilling and the prairie warbler his seven wire-thin notes which run up the scale. It was as uncanny as when the Lone Wolf gave tongue to the midnight hunting chorus for Mowgli, at the edge of the jungle by day.