One day last July I sat under the big OLD elms at Willard and Ola Hooley’s old place in Indian Cove, editing my stories for Pigtails and Other Tales. (The house was built by my Uncle Paul, and is now Mark and Lucille Hamilton’s home, Mark being my second cousin.) There were swallows in the trees and swallows darting out and over the open fields, and there were a couple splats of white-wash on the lawn chairs beneath the tree. Looking up overhead we spotted the nests, each ensconced by a parent bird. I had forgotten about the birds!
A bird with yellow, chatted and tweeted from a nearby sapling along the fence, and I figured it was the bee martin, that bird that scolded and dive-bombed our cat walking under an elm at our place down the road. Dale tells me these birds are not martins, but kingbirds.
The swallows and this kingbird got me to thinking and listing other birds I had known in the Cove. There are the cooing morning doves, musically-inspired red-wing blackbirds and meadowlarks, the common English sparrow, and those irritatingly noisy magpies and starlings. In Spring Mama made sure we caught sight of the migratory yellow canaries that flitted through. And, when Robin Redbreast would appear, I was hopeful we might be able to shed our shoes for barefoot days; but no, we must wait for the first butterfly. The geese and ducks flying in formations over us, came with the cooling Fall, and the “Chinie” (Chinese) Ring-necked pheasant was game to hunters (–visiting hunters should get permission to trapes through Cove fields, even if there was no “NO HUNTING” posted on a post.)
How could I have forgotten to talk about the birds? One afternoon a strange, tall, long-legged bird was discovered leisurely walking in our driveway, and daddy invited it clear into the kitchen with some morsels of food! It seemed quite comfortable with the whole scenario, and was probably as busy checking us out, as we were it! It didn’t stay long, and was never sighted again.
Birdie, birdie, flying by,
Dropped a white-wash in my eye.
Birdie, birdie, I won’t cry,
Just be glad that cows don’t fly!
It’s your turn to share some remembering, with the rest of us. Please do!
DitchWriter 
As you dislike the magpie, I miss them a little. We (in Canby, Oregon) have blue jays which are their close relative. They are bullies, noisy, and pigs at the bird feeder. The “Idaho” bird I really miss is the meadowlark. It’s song in the spring is so lovely.
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This on magpies from Joy Barber Mintzer, in Claude’s book “The Life and times of Claude and Katie Barber.”
“Magpies were considered a real nuisance, stealing chicken eggs, baby chicks, or baby turkeys. There was a bounty on magpies, one cent for each whole egg and three to five cents for each magpie head. This was not get rich-quick proposition.”
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