nest was straw-color, apparently run over with little ones, and both the
parents were industriously feeding. The cries suggested the persistence
of young orioles, but it was not a Baltimore's swinging cradle, and the
old birds were so shy, coming from behind the leaves, every one of which
turned itself into a reflector for the sunlight, that I could not
identify them.
Later in the day I paid them another visit, and finding a better post of
observation under the shade of a sweet-briar bush, I saw at once they
were orchard orioles, and that the young ones were climbing to the edge
of the nest; I had nearly been too late!
Four o'clock was the unearthly hour at which I rose next morning to
pursue my acquaintance with the little family in the apple-tree, fearful
lest they should get the start of me. The youngsters were calling
vociferously, and both parents were very busy attending to their wants
and trying to stop their mouths, when I planted my seat before their
castle in the air, and proceeded to inquire into their manners and
customs. My call was, as usual, not received with favor. The mother,
after administering the mouthful she had brought, alighted on a twig
beside the nest and gave me a "piece of her mind." I admitted my bad
manners, but I could not tear myself away. The anxious papa, very
gorgeous in his chestnut and black suit, scenting danger to the little
brood in the presence of the bird-student with her glass, at once
abandoned the business of feeding, and devoted himself to the protection
of his family,--which indeed was his plain duty. His way of doing this
was to take his position on the tallest tree in the vicinity, and fill
the serene morning air with his cry of distress, a two-note utterance,
with a pathetic inflection which could not fail to arouse the sympathy
of all who heard it. It was not excited or angry, but it proclaimed that
here was distress and danger, and it had the effect of making me ashamed
of annoying him. But I hardened my heart, as I often have to do in my
study, and kept my seat. Occasionally he returned to the lower part of
his own tree, to see if the monster had been scared or shamed away, but
finding me stationary, he returned to his post and resumed his mournful
cry.
At length the happy thought came to me that I might select a position a
little less conspicuous, yet still within sight, so I moved my seat
farther off, away back under a low-branched apple-tree, where a redbird
came around with sharp "tsip's" to ascertain my business, and a catbird
behind the briar-bush entertained me with delicious song. The oriole
accepted my retirement as a compromise, and returned to his domestic
duties, coming, as was natural and easiest, on my side of the tree. His
habit was to cling to the side of the nest, showing his black and
red-gold against it, while his mate alighted on the edge, and was seen a
little above it. After feeding, both perched on neighboring twigs and
looked about for a moment before the next food-hunting trip. I thought
the father of the family exhibited an air of resignation, as if he
concluded that, since the babies made so much noise, there was no use in
trying longer to preserve the secret.
As a matter of fact, both our orioles need a good stock of patience as
well as of resignation, for the infants of both are unceasing in their
cries, and fertile in inventing variations in manner and inflection,
that would deceive those most familiar with them. Two or three times in
the weeks that followed, I rushed out of the house to find some very
distressed bird, who, I was sure, from the cries, must be impaled alive
on a butcher-bird's meat-hook, or undergoing torture at the hands--or
beak of somebody. It was rather dangerous going out at that time (just
at dusk), for it was the chosen hour for young men and maidens, of whom
there were several, to wander about under the trees. Often, before I
gave up going out at that hour, my glass, turned to follow a flitting
wing, would bring before my startled gaze a pair of sentimental young
persons, who doubtless thought I was spying upon them. My only safety
was in directing my glass into the trees, where nothing but wings could
be sentimental, and if a bird flitted below the level of branches, to
consider him lost. On following up the cry, I always found a young
oriole and a hard-worked father feeding him. The voice did not even
suggest an oriole to me, until I had been deceived two or three times
and understood it.
The young ones of the orchard oriole's nest lived up to the traditions
of the family by being inveterate cry-babies, and making so much noise
they could be heard far around. Sometimes their mother addressed them
in a similar tone to their own, but the father resigned himself to the
inevitable, and fed with dogged perseverance.
The apple-tree nest looked in the morning sun of a bright flax color,
and two of the young were mounted on the edge, dressing their yellow
satin breasts, and gleaming in the sunshine like gold.
A Baltimore oriole, passing over, seemed to be attracted by a familiar
quality of sound, for he came down, alighted about a foot from the nest,
and looked with interest upon the charming family scene. The protector
of the pretty brood was near, but he kept his seat, and made no
objections to the friendly call. Indeed, he flew away while the guest
was still there, and having satisfied his curiosity, the Baltimore also
departed upon his own business.
When the sun appeared over the tree-tops, he came armed with all his
terrors. The breeze dwindled and died; the very leaves hung lifeless on
the trees, and though, knowing that
"Somewhere the wind is blowing,
Though here where I gasp and sigh
Not a breath of air is stirring,
Not a cloud in the burning sky,"
the memory might comfort me, it did not in the slightest degree make me
comfortable--I wilted, and retired before it. How the birds could
endure it and carry on their work, I could not understand.
At noon I ventured out over the burning grass. The first youngster had
left the nest, and was shouting from a tree perhaps twenty feet beyond
the native apple. The others were fluttering on the edge, crying as
usual. As is the customary domestic arrangement with many birds, the
moment the first one flew, the father stopped coming to the nest, and
devoted himself to the straggler, which was a little hard on the mother
that hot day, for she had four to feed.
While I looked on, the second infant mustered up courage to start on the
journey of life. A tall twig led from the nest straight up into the air,
and this was the ladder he mounted. Step by step he climbed one
leaf-stem after another, with several pauses to cry and to eat, and at
last reached the topmost point, where he turned his face to the west,
and took his first survey of the kingdoms of the earth. A brother
nestling was close behind him, and the pretty pair, seeing no more steps
above them, rested a while from their labors. In the mean time the first
young oriole had gone farther into the trees, and papa with him.
The little dame worked without ceasing, though it must have been an
anxious time, with nestlings all stirring abroad. I noticed that she
fed oftenest the birdlings who were out, whether to strengthen them for
further effort, or to offer an inducement to those in the nest to come
up higher where food was to be had, she did not tell. I observed, also,
that when she came home she did not, as before, alight on the level of
the little ones, but above them. Perhaps this was to coax them upward;
at any rate, it had that effect: they stretched up and mounted the next
stem above, and so they kept on ascending. About three o'clock I was
again obliged to surrender to the power of the sun, and retire for a
season to a place he could not enter, the house.
Some hours passed before I made my next call, and I found that oriole
matters had not rested, if I had; the two nestlings had taken flight to
the tree the first one had chosen, and three were on the top twig above
the nest, which latter swung empty and deserted. Mamma was feeding the
three in her own tree, while papa attended as usual to the outsiders,
and found leisure to drop in a song now and then.
While I watched, number three took his life in his hands (as it were)
and launched out upon the air. He reached a tree not so far away as his
brothers had chosen, and his mother sought him out and fed him there.
But he did not seem to be satisfied with his achievement, or possibly
he found the position rather lonely; at any rate, the next use of his
wings was to return to his native apple, to the lower part. During this
visit, the mother of the little brood, seeing, I suppose, her labors
growing lighter, indulged herself and delighted me with a scrap of song,
very sweet, as the song of the female oriole always is.
It was with forebodings that I approached the tree the next morning,
foreboding speedily confirmed--the whole family was gone! Either I had
not stayed late enough or I had not got up early enough to see the
flitting; that song, then, meant something--it was my good-by.
Indeed it turned out to be my farewell, as I thought, for the whole
tribe seemed to have vanished. Usually it is not difficult to hunt up a
little bird family in its wanderings, during the month following its
leaving the nest, but this one I could neither see nor hear, and I was
very sure those oriole babies had not so soon outgrown their crying;
they must have been struck dumb or left the place.
Nearly three weeks later I was wandering about in what was called the
glen, half a mile or more from where the apple-tree babies had first
seen the light. It was a wild spot, a ravine, through which ran a
stream, where many wood-birds sang and nested. On approaching a
linden-tree loaded with blossoms, and humming with swarms of bees, I was
saluted with a burst of loud song, interspersed with scolding. No one
but an orchard oriole could so mix things, and sure enough! there he
was, scrambling over the flowers. Something he found to his taste,
whether the blossoms or the insects, I could not decide. On waiting a
little, I heard the young oriole cry, much subdued since nesting days,
and the tender "ye-ep" of the parent. The whole family was evidently
there together, and I was very glad to see them once more.
The nest, which I had brought down, was a beautiful structure, made, I
think, of very fine excelsior of a bright straw-color. It was suspended
in an upright fork of four twigs, and lashed securely to three of them,
while a few lines were passed around the fourth. Though it was in a
fork, it did not rest on it, but was suspended three inches above it, a
genuine hanging nest. It was three inches deep and wide, but drawn in
about the top to a width of not more than two inches, with a bit of
cotton and two small feathers for bedding. How five babies could grow up
in that little cup is a problem. The material was woven closely
together, and in addition stitched through and through, up and down, to
make a firm structure. Around and against it hung still six apples,
defrauded of their manifest destiny, and remaining the size of
hickory-nuts. Three twigs that ran up were cut off, but the fourth was
left, the tallest, the one sustaining the burden of the nest, and upon
which the young birds, one after another, had mounted to take their
first flight.
This pretty hammock, in its setting of leaves and apples, still swinging
from the apple boughs, I brought home as a souvenir of a charming bird
study.
XVII.
CEDAR-TREE LITTLE FOLK.
'T is there that the wild dove has her nest,
And whenever the branches stir,
She presses closer the eggs to her breast,
And her mate looks down on her.
CLARE BEATRICE COFFEY.
One of the voices that helped to make my June musical, and one more
constantly heard than any other, was that of the
"Mourning dove who grieves and grieves,
And lost! lost! lost! still seems to say,"
as the poet has it.
Now, while I dearly love the poets, and always long to enrich my plain
prose with gems from their verse, it is sometimes a little embarrassing,
because one is obliged to disagree with them. If they would only look a
little into the ways of birds, and not assert, in language so musical
that one can hardly resist it, that
"The birds come back to last year's nests,"
when rarely was a self-respecting bird known to shirk the labor of
building anew for every family; or sing, with Sill,
"He has lost his last year's love, I know,"
when he did not know any such thing; and add,
"A thrush forgets in a year,"
which I call a libel on one of our most intelligent birds; or cry, with
another singer,
"O voiceless swallow,"
when not one of the whole tribe is defrauded of a voice, and at least
one is an exquisite singer; or accuse the nightingale of the superfluous
idiocy of holding his (though they always say her) breast to a thorn as
he sings, as if he were so foolish as to imitate some forms of human
self-torture,--if they would only be a little more sure of their facts,
what a comfort it would be to those who love both poets and birds!
No bird in our country is more persistently misrepresented by our sweet
singers than the Carolina or wood dove--mourning dove, as he is
popularly called; and in this case they are not to be blamed, for prose
writers, even natural history writers, are quite as bad.
"His song consists," says one, "of four notes: the first seems to be
uttered with an inspiration of the breath, as if the afflicted creature
were just recovering its voice from the last convulsive sob of distress,
and followed by three long, deep, and mournful moanings, that no person
of sensibility can listen to without sympathy." "The solemn voice of
sorrow," another writer calls it. All this is mere sentimentality, pure
imagination; and if the writers could sit, as I have, under the tree
when the bird was singing, they would change their opinion, though they
would thereby lose a pretty and attractive sentiment for their verse. I
believe there is
"No beast or bird in earth or sky,
Whose voice doth not with gladness thrill,"
though it may not so express itself to our senses. Certainly the coo of
the dove is anything but sad when heard very near. It has a rich,
far-off sound, expressing deep serenity, and a happiness beyond words.
First in the morning, and last at night, all through June, came to me
the song of the dove. As early as four o'clock his notes began, and
then, if I got up to look out on the lawn, where I had spread breakfast
for him and other feathered friends, I would see him walking about with
dainty steps on his pretty red toes, looking the pink of propriety in
his Quaker garb, his satin vest smooth as if it had been ironed down,
and quite worthy his reputed character for meekness and gentleness.
But I wanted to see the dove far from the "madding crowd" of blackbirds,
blue jays, and red-heads, who, as well as himself, took corn for
breakfast, and I set out to look him up. At first the whole family
seemed to consist of the young, just flying about, sometimes accompanied
by their mother. Apparently the fathers of the race were all off in the
cooing business.
So early as the second of June I came upon my first pair of young doves,
two charming little creatures, sitting placidly side by side. Grave,
indeed, and very much grown-up looked these drab-coated little folk,
silent and motionless, returning my gaze with an innocent openness that,
it seemed to me, must disarm their most bitter enemy. When I came upon
such a pair, as I frequently did, on the low branch of an apple-tree or
a limb of their native cedar, I stopped instantly to look at them. Not
an eyelid of the youngsters would move; if a head were turned as they
heard me coming, it would remain at precisely that angle as long as I
had patience to stay. They were invariably sitting down with the
appearance of being prepared to stay all day, and almost always side by
side, though looking in different directions, and one was always larger
than the other. A lovely and picturesque group they never failed to
make, and as for any show of hunger or impatience, one could hardly
imagine they ever felt either. In every way they were a violent
contrast to all their neighbors, the boisterous blue jays, lively
catbirds, blustering robins, and vulgar-mannered blackbirds.
Sometimes I chanced upon a mother sitting by her youngling, and although
when I found her alone she always flew, beside her little charge she was
dignified and calm in bearing, and looked at me with fearless eyes,
relying, as it appeared, upon absolute stillness, and the resemblance of
her color to the branches, to escape observation; a ruse which must
generally be successful.
The nest, the remains of which I often saw on the tree where I found an
infant, was the merest apology, hardly more than a platform, just enough
to hold the pair of eggs which they are said always to contain. Indeed,
no baby but a serene dove, with the repose of thirty generations behind
it, could stay in it till his wings grew. As it is, he must be forced to
perch, whether ready or not, for the structure cannot hold together
long. The wonder is that the eggs do not roll out before they are
hatched.
Several things made the bird an interesting subject for study; his
reputation for meekness, his alleged silence,--except at wooing
time,--and the halo of melancholy with which the poets have invested
him. I resolved to make acquaintance with my gentle neighbor, and I
sought and found a favorite retreat of the silent family. This was a
grove away down in the southeast corner of the grounds, little visited
by people, and beloved by birds of several kinds. Till June was half
over, the high grass, that I could not bear to trample, prevented
exploration in that direction, but as soon as it was cut I made a trip
to the little grove, and found it a sort of doves' headquarters, and
there, in many hours of daily study, I learned to know him a little, and
respect him a good deal.
It was a delightful spot the doves had chosen to live in, and so
frequented by birds that whichever way I turned my face, in two minutes
I wished I had turned it the other, or that I had eyes in the back of my
head. With reason, too, for the residents skipped around behind me, and
all the interesting things went on at my back. I could hear the flit of
wings, low, mysterious sounds, whispering, gentle complaints and
hushings, but if I turned--lo! the scene shifted, and the drama of life
was still enacted out of my sight. Yet I managed, in spite of this
difficulty, to learn several things I did not know before.
No one attends to his own business more strictly than the dove. On the
ground, where he came for corn, he seemed to see no other bird, and paid
not the slightest heed to me in my window, but went about his own
affairs in the most matter-of-fact way. Yet I cannot agree with the
common opinion, which has made his name a synonym for all that is meek
and gentle. He has a will of his own, and a "mild but firm" way of
securing it. Sometimes, when all were busy at the corn, one of my
Quaker-clad guests would take a notion, for what reason I could not
discover, that some other dove must not stay, and he would drive him (or
her) off. He was not rude or blustering, like the robin, nor did he make
offensive remarks, after the manner of a blackbird; he simply signified
his intention of having his neighbor go, and go he did, _nolens volens_.
It was droll to see how this "meek and gentle" fellow met blackbird
impudence. If one of the sable gentry came down too near a dove, the
latter gave a little hop and rustled his feathers, but did not move one
step away. For some occult reason the blackbird seemed to respect this
mild protest, and did not interfere again.
Would one suspect so solemn a personage of joking? yet what else could
this little scene mean? A blackbird was on the ground eating, when a
dove flew down and hovered over him as though about to alight upon him.
It evidently impressed the blackbird exactly as it did me, for he
scrambled out from under, very hastily. But the dove had no intention
of the sort; he came calmly down on one side.
The first dove baby who accompanied its parent to the ground to be fed
was the model of propriety one would expect from the demure infant
already mentioned. He stood crouching to the ground in silence,
fluttering his wings a little, but making no sound, either of begging,
or when fed. A blackbird came to investigate this youngster, so
different from his importunate offspring, upon which both doves flew.
There is a unique quality claimed for the dove: that with the exception
of the well-known coo in nesting time he is absolutely silent, and that
the noise which accompanies his flight is the result of a peculiar
formation of the wing that causes a whistle. Of this I had strong
doubts. I could not believe that a bird who has so much to say for
himself during wooing and nesting time could be utterly silent the rest
of the year; nor, indeed, do I believe that any living creature, so
highly organized as the feathered tribes, can be entirely without
expression.
I thought I would experiment a little, and one day, observing that a
young dove spent most of his time alone on a certain cedar-tree, where a
badly used-up nest showed that he had probably been hatched, or feeding
on the ground near it, I resolved to see if I could draw him out. I
passed him six times a day, going and coming from my meals, and I always
stopped to look at him--a scrutiny which he bore unmoved, in dove
fashion. So one morning, when I stood three feet from him, I began a
very low whistle to him. He was at once interested, and after about
three calls he answered me, very low, it is true, but still
unmistakably. Though he replied, however, it appeared to make him
uneasy, for while he had been in the habit of submitting to my staring
without being in any way disconcerted, he now began to fidget about. He
stood up, changed his place, flew to a higher branch, and in a few
moments to the next tree; all the time, however, answering my calls.
I was greatly interested in my new acquaintance, and the next day I
renewed my advances. As before, he answered, looking bright and eager,
as I had never seen one of his kind look, and after three or four
replies he became uneasy, as on the previous day, and in a moment he
flew. But I was surprised and startled by his starting straight for me.
I thought he would certainly alight on me, and such, I firmly believe,
was his inclination, but he apparently did not quite dare trust me, so
he passed over by a very few inches, and perched on the tree I was
under. Then--still replying to me--he flew to the ground not six feet
from me, and step by step, slowly moved away perhaps fifteen feet, when
he turned and flew back to his own tree beside me. I was pleased to
notice that the voice of this talkative dovekin was of the same quality
as the "whistling" said to be of the wings, when a dove flies.
The last interview I had with the dear baby, I found him sitting with
his back toward me, but the instant I whistled he turned around to face
me, and seated himself again. He replied to me, and fluttered his wings
slightly, yet he soon became restless, as usual. He did not fly,
however, and he answered louder than he had done previously, but I found
that my call must be just right to elicit a response. I might whistle
all day and he would pay no attention, till I uttered a two-note call,
the second note a third above the first and the two slurred together. I
was delighted to find that even a dove, and a baby at that, could "talk
back." He was unique in other ways; for example, in being content to
pass his days in, and around, his own tree. I do not believe he had ever
been farther than a small group of cedars, ten feet from his own. I
always found him there, though he could fly perfectly well. This
interview was, I regret to say, the last; the next morning my little
friend was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps mamma thought he was getting too
friendly with one of a race capable of eating a baby dove.