Large birds like the heron and rail appear but rarely; ugly looking and fierce.
The hateful English sparrow has been so reduced in numbers by sparrow traps that now they keep away and the bluebirds take their own boxes again.

The place is a safe and happy haven for hosts of birds.
I have a circle of houses for the martins and swallows and wires connecting them, where a deal of gossip goes on.
The pigeons coo-oo-o on the barn roof and are occasionally utilized in a pie, good too! [Illustration: GRAND ELM (OVER TWO HUNDRED YEARS OLD)] "I wonder how my great trees are coming on this summer." "Where are your trees, Sir ?" said the divinity student.
"Oh, all around about New England.

I call all trees mine that I have put my wedding ring on, and I have as many tree-wives as Brigham Young has human ones." "One set's as green as the other," exclaimed a boarder, who has never been identified.
"They're all Bloomers,"-- said the young fellow called John.

(I should have rebuked this trifling with language, if our landlady's daughter had not asked me just then what I meant by putting my wedding-ring on a tree.) "Why, measuring it with my thirty-foot tape, my dear, said I .-- I have worn a tape almost out on the rough barks of our old New England elms and other big trees.

Don't you want to hear me talk trees a little now?
That is one of my specialties." "What makes a first-class elm ?" "Why, size, in the first place, and chiefly anything over twenty feet clear girth five feet above the ground and with a spread of branches a hundred feet across may claim that title, according to my scale.