October 29, 2004

• Birds Every Child Should Know, illustrated with photos from 1906.
  

  Did you ever hear a rushing, whirring, booming sound as though wind were blowing across the bung-hole of an empty barrel? The nighthawk, who makes it, is such a high flyer, that in the dusk of. the late afternoon or early evening, when he delights to sail abroad to get his dinner, you cannot always see him; but as he coasts down from the sky-not on a sled, but on his half-closed wings-with tremendous speed, the rush of air through his stiff, long wing feathers makes an uncanny, aeolian music that silly, superstitious people have declared is a bad omen.

  Did they talk like that in 1906?

  • 9:22 am
  • 1 Comment