tree is its lungs through which it breathes. I want all the trees around me to breathe deeply of the precious air, so I try always to save the bark. It is much easier to take off the wires than it is to take nails out of a tree. Already some insects had made nests and cocoons under this sheeting.
My way of getting acquainted with birds was by keeping a notebook. In it I wrote everything I saw any bird do: what he ate, how he sang, what he looked like, where he was generally seen, etc. I always watched a bird as long as it stayed in sight. When it left I observed its flight and its shape. Then I looked at the colored pictures in my bird books, to see if I could find a bird similar to mine. If I did find him, then I read all about him to see whether that bird ate the kind of food, and acted, and flew, and sang, in the way my strange bird did. If he did, then I knew I had made the acquaintance of a new bird.
For instance, I had written about one bird:
"Rather plump, head pointed, bill long. Head and back olive. Front yellow. Wings dark with white bars. Tail brown with dark marks. Is on the fence getting strings. Also visits the basin. Never sings. Likes bread crumbs. Nearly as large as robin."
Sometimes there came with this bird a beautiful black and orange bird. In a little pocket guide I found both these birds pictured as mates. They were the Baltimore orioles. She was the bird I had
