The wild life around us is usually so unobtrusive and goes its own way
so quietly and furtively that we miss much of it unless we cultivate an
interest in it. A person must be interested in it, to paraphrase a line
of Wordsworth's, ere to him it will seem worthy of his interest. One
thing is linked to another or gives a clue to another. There is no surer
way to find birds' nests than to go berrying or fishing. In the
blackberry or raspberry bushes you may find the bush sparrow's nest or
the indigobird's nest. Once while fishing a trout-stream I missed my
fish, and my hook caught on a branch over my head. When I pulled the
branch down, there, deftly saddled upon it, was a hummingbird's nest. I
unwittingly caught more than I missed. On another occasion I stumbled
upon the nest of the water accentor which I had never before found; on
still another, upon the nest of the winter wren, a marvel of mossy
softness and delicacy hidden under a mossy log.
Along trout-streams with overhanging or shelving ledges the fisherman
often sees the nest of the phœbe-bird, which does not cease to please
for the hundredth time, because of its fitness and exquisite artistry.
On the newly sawn timbers of your porch or woodshed it is far less
pleasing, because the bird's art, born of rocky ledges, only serves in
the new environment to make its nest conspicuous.
Sitting in my barn-door study I see a vesper sparrow fly up and alight
on the telephone wire with nesting-material in her beak. I keep my eye
upon her. In a moment she drops down to the grassy and weedy bank of the
roadside in front of me and disappears. A few moments later I have her
secret--a nest in a little recess in the bank. That straw gave the
finishing touch. She kept her place on the nest until she had deposited
her first egg on June 24th, probably for her second brood this season.
Some young vespers flitting about farther up the road are presumably her
first brood. Each day thereafter for four consecutive days she added an
egg. Incubation soon began and on the 10th of July the young were out,
the little sprawling, skinny things looking, as a city girl said when
she first beheld newly-hatched birds in a nest, as if they were
mildewed.
These ground-builders among the birds, taking their chances in the great
common of the open fields, at the mercy of all their enemies every
hour--the hoofs of grazing cattle, prowling skunks, foxes, weasels,
coons by night, and crows and hawks by day--what bird-lover does not
experience a little thrill when in his walk he comes upon one of their
nests? He has found a thing of art among the unkempt and the disorderly;
he has found a thing of life and love amid the cold and the insensate.
Yet all so artless and natural! Every shred and straw of it serves a
purpose; it fairly warms and vivifies the little niche in which it is
placed. What a center of solicitude and forethought.
Not many yards below the vesper's nest, on the other side of the road,
is a junco's nest. You may know the junco's nest from that of any other
ground-builder by its being more elaborate and more perfectly hidden.
The nest is tucked far under the mossy and weedy bank, and only a
nest-hunter passing along the road, with "eye practiced like a blind
man's touch" and with juncos in mind, would have seen it. A little
screen of leaves of the hawkweed permits only the rim of one edge of the
nest to be seen. Not till I stooped down and reached forth my hand did
the mother bird come fluttering out and go down the road with drooping
wings and spread tail, the white quills of the latter fairly lighting up
the whole performance.
A very shy and artful bird is the junco. I had had brief glimpses of the
male many times about the place. The morning I found the nest I had seen
one male spitefully pursuing another male along the top of the stone
wall opposite, which fact, paralleled in a human case, would afford a
hint for detectives to work on. The junco is evidently a very
successful bird. The swarms of them that one sees in the late fall and
in the early winter going south is good evidence of this. They usually
precede the white-throats north in the spring, but a few linger and
breed in the high altitude of the Catskills.
When the sun shines hot the sparrow in front of my door makes herself
into a sunshade to protect her nestlings. She pants with the heat, and
her young pant too; they would probably perish were not the direct rays
of the sun kept from them. Another vesper sparrow's nest yonder in the
hill pasture, from which we flushed the bird in our walk, might be
considered in danger from a large herd of dairy cows, but it is wisely
placed in view of such a contingency. It is at the foot of a stalk of
Canada thistle about a foot and a half high, and where, for a few square
yards, the grazing is very poor. I do not think that the chances are one
in fifty that the hoof of a cow will find it. I do not suppose that the
problem presented itself to the bird as it does to me, but her instinct
was as sure a guide as my reason is to me--or a surer one.
The vesper sparrow was thus happily named by a New England bird-lover,
Wilson Flagg, an old-fashioned writer on our birds, fifty or more years
ago. I believe the bird was called the grass finch by our earlier
writers. It haunts the hilly pastures and roadsides in the Catskill
region. It is often called the road-runner, from its habit of running
along the road ahead when one is driving or walking--a very different
bird, however, from the road-runner of the Western States. The vesper is
larger than the song sparrow, of a lighter gray and russet, and does not
frequent our gardens and orchards as does the latter. In color it
suggests the European skylark; the two lateral white quills in its tail
enhance this impression. One season a stray skylark, probably from Long
Island or some other place where larks had been liberated, appeared in a
broad, low meadow near me, and not finding his own kind paid court to a
female vesper sparrow. He pursued her diligently and no doubt pestered
her dreadfully. She fled from him precipitately and seemed much
embarrassed by the attentions of the distinguished-looking foreigner.
When the young of any species appear, the solicitude and watchfulness of
the mother bird are greatly increased. Although my near neighbor the
vesper sparrow in front of my door has had proof of my harmless
character now for several weeks and, one would think, must know that her
precious secret is safe with me, yet, when she comes with food in her
beak while I am at my desk ten or eleven yards away, she maneuvers
around for a minute or two, flying up to the telephone wire or a few
yards up or down the road, and finally approaches the nest with much
hesitation and suspicion, lest I see her in the act. When she comes
again and again and again, she is filled with the same apprehension.
After a night of heavy but warm rain two of the half-fledged young were
lying on the ground in front of the nest, dead. There were no murderous
marks upon them, and the secret of the tragedy I could not divine.
What automatons these wild creatures are, apparently so wise on some
occasions and so absurd on others! This vesper sparrow in bringing food
to her young, going through the same tactics over and over, learns no
more than a machine would. But, of course, the bird does not think;
hence the folly of her behavior to a being that does. The wisdom of
nature, which is so unerring under certain conditions, becomes to us
sheer folly under changed conditions.
When the mother bird's suspicion gets the better of her, she often
devours the food she has in her beak, so fearful is she of betraying her
precious secret. But the next time she comes she may only maneuver
briefly before approaching the nest, and then again hesitate and parley
with her fears and make false moves and keep her eye on me, as if I had
only just appeared upon the scene.
One of the best things a bird-lover can have in front of his house or
cabin is a small dead tree with numerous leafless branches. Many kinds
of birds love to perch briefly where they can look around them. I would
not exchange the old dead plum-tree that stands across the road in front
of my lodge for the finest living plum-tree in the world. It bears a
perpetual crop of birds. Of course the strictly sylvan birds, such as
the warblers, the vireos, the oven-bird, the veery and hermit thrushes,
do not come, but many kinds of other birds pause there during the day
and seem to enjoy the unobstructed view.
All the field and orchard and grove birds come. In early summer the
bobolink perches there, then tiptoes, or tip-wings, away to the meadows
below, pouring out his ecstatic song. The rose-breasted grosbeak comes
and shows his brilliant front. The purple finch, the goldfinch, the
indigo bunting, the bluebird, the kingbird, the phœbe-bird, the great
crested flycatcher, the robin, the oriole, the chickadee, the high-hole,
the downy woodpecker, the vesper sparrow, the social sparrow, or chippy,
pause there in the course of the day, and some of them several times
during the day. Occasionally the scarlet tanager lights it up with his
vivid color.
But more than all it is the favorite perch of a song sparrow whose mate
has a nest not far off. Here he perches and goes through his repertoire
of three or four different songs from dawn till nightfall, pausing only
long enough now and then to visit his mate or to refresh himself with a
little food. He repeats his strain six times a minute, often preening
his plumage in the intervals. He sings several hundred times a day and
has been doing so for many weeks. The house wren during the
breeding-season repeats his song thousands of times a day, while the
red-eyed vireo sings continuously from morning till night for several
months. How a conscious effort like that would weary our human singers
and their hearers! But the birds are quite unconscious, in our sense, of
what they are doing.
When we pause to think of it, what a spectacle this singing sparrow
presents! A little wild bird sitting on a dead branch and lifting up its
voice in song hour after hour, day after day, week after week.
In terms of science we say it is a secondary sexual characteristic, but
viewed in the light of the spirit of the whole, what is it except a song
of praise and thanksgiving--joy in life, joy in the day, joy in the mate
and brood, joy in the paternal and maternal instincts and solicitudes, a
voice from the heart of nature that the world is good, thanksgiving for
the universal beneficence without which you and I and the little bird
would not be here? In foul weather as in fair, the bird sings. The rain
and the cold do not silence him.
There are few or no pessimists among the birds. One might think the call
of the turtle-dove, which sounds to us like "woe, woe, woe," a wail of
despair; but it is not. It really means "love, love, love." The plaint
of the wood pewee, pensive and like a human sigh, is far from
pessimistic, although in a minor key. The cuckoo comes the nearest to
being a pessimist, with his doleful call, and the catbird and the jay,
with their peevish and complaining notes, might well be placed in that
category, were it not for their songs when the love passion makes
optimists even of them. The strain of the hermit thrush which floats
down to me from the wooded heights above day after day at all hours, but
more as the shades of night are falling--what does this pure, serene,
exalted strain mean but that, in Browning's familiar words,
God's in his heaven--
All's right with the world!
The bird may sing for his mate and his brood alone, but what puts it
into his heart to do that? Certainly it is good to have a mate and a
brood!
A new season brings new experiences with the same old familiar birds, or
new thoughts about them. This season I have had new impressions of our
cuckoos, which are oftener heard than seen. Of the two species, the
black-billed and the yellow-billed, the former prevails in the latitude
of New England, and the latter farther south. We cannot hail our
black-billed as "blithe newcomer," as Wordsworth does his cuckoo.
"Doleful newcomer" would be a fitter title. There is nothing cheery or
animated in his note, and he is about as much a "wandering voice" as is
the European bird. He does not babble of sunshine and of flowers. He is
a prophet of the rain, and the country people call him the rain crow.
All his notes are harsh and verge on the weird. His nesting-instincts
seem to lead him, or rather her, to the thorn-bushes as inevitably as
the grass finch's lead her to the grass.
The cuckoo seems such an unpractical and inefficient bird that it is
interesting to see it doing things. One of our young poets has a verse
in which he sings of
The solemn priestly bumble-bee
That marries rose to rose.
He might apply the same or similar adjectives to the cuckoo. Solemn and
priestly, or at least monkish, it certainly is. It is a real recluse and
suggests the druidical. If it ever frolics or fights, or is gay and
cheerful like our other birds, I have yet to witness it.
During the last summer, day after day I saw one of the birds going by my
door toward the clump of thorn-trees with a big green worm in its bill.
One afternoon I followed it. I found the bird sitting on a branch very
still and straight, with the worm still in its beak. I sat down on the
tentlike thicket and watched him. Presently he uttered that harsh,
guttural note of alarm or displeasure. Then after a minute or two he
began to shake and bruise the worm. I waited to see him disclose the
nest, but he would not, and finally devoured the worm. Then he hopped or
flitted about amid the branches above me, uttering his harsh note every
minute or two.
After a half-hour or more I gave it up and parted the curtain of thorny
branches which separated the thicket from the meadow and stepped
outside. I had moved along only a few paces when I discovered the nest
on an outer branch almost in the sunshine. The mother bird was covering
her half-grown young. As I put up my hand toward her, she slipped off,
withdrew a few feet into the branches, and uttered her guttural calls.
In the nest were four young, one of them nearly ready to leave it, while
another barely had its eyes open; the eldest one looked frightened,
while the youngest lifted up its head with open mouth for food. The most
mature one pointed its bill straight up and sat as still as if
petrified. The whole impression one got from the nest and its contents
was of something inept and fortuitous. But the cares of a family woke
the parents up and they got down to real work in caring for their
charge.
The young had a curious, unbirdlike aspect with threadlike yellow
stripes, and looked as if they were wet or just out of the shell.
That strain of parasitism in the blood of the cuckoo--how long in the
history of its race since it mastered it and became its own
nest-builder? But a crude and barbarous nest-builder it certainly is.
Its "procreant cradle" is built entirely of the twigs of the thorn-tree,
with all their sharp needle-like spines upon them, some of the twigs a
foot long, bristling with spines, certainly the most forbidding-looking
nest and nursery I ever beheld--a mere platform of twigs about four
inches across, carpeted with a little shredded brown fibrous material,
looking as if made from the inner bark of some tree, perhaps this very
thorn.
In the total absence of the tent caterpillar or apple-tree worm, which
is their favorite food, cuckoos seem to succeed in finding a large green
worm here in the orchard. In the beech woods they can find a forest worm
that is riddling the leaves of the beeches. The robins are there in
force and I hope the cuckoos will join them in the destruction of the
worms. It is interesting to see the cuckoo fly by several times a day
with a big green worm in its beak. Inefficient as it seems, here it is
doing things. It is like seeing a monk at the plough-handle. It is a
solemn creature; its note is almost funereal.
Our indigo bunting is as artful and secretive about its nesting-habits
as any of the sparrows. The male bird seems to know that his brilliant
color makes him a shining mark, and he keeps far away from the nest,
singing at all hours of the day in a circle around it, the radius of
which must be more than fifty yards. In one instance the nest was near
the house, almost under the clothes-line, in a low blackberry-bush,
partly masked by tall-growing daisies and timothy. I chanced to pass
near it, when off went the little brown bird with her sharp, chiding
manners. She is a very emphatic creature. It is yea and nay with her
every time.
The male seems like a bit of the tropics. He is not a very pleasing
singer, but an all-day one and an all-summer one. He is one of our rarer
birds. In a neighborhood where you see scores of sparrows and
goldfinches you will see only one pair of indigobirds. Their range of
food is probably very limited. I have never chanced to see them taking
food of any kind.
How crowded with life every square rod of the fields and woods is, if we
look closely enough! Beneath my leafy canopy on the edge of the beech
woods where I now and then seek refuge from a hot wave, reclining on a
cushion of dry leaves or sitting with my back against a cool, smooth
exposure of the outcropping place rock, I am in a mood to give myself up
to a day of little things. And the little things soon come trooping or
looping along.
I see a green measuring-worm taking the dimensions of the rim of my
straw hat which lies on the dry leaves beside me. It humps around it in
an aimless sort of way, stopping now and then and rearing up on its hind
legs and feeling the vacant space around it as a blind man might hunt
for a lost trail. I know what it wants: it is on its travels looking for
a place in which to go through that wonderful transformation of creeping
worm into a winged creature. In its higher stage of being it is a little
silvery moth, barely an inch across, and, like other moths, has a brief
season of life and love, the female depositing its eggs in some suitable
place and then dying or falling a victim to the wood pewee or some other
bird. After some minutes of groping and humping about on my hat and on
dry twigs and leaves, it is lost to my sight.
A little later a large black worm comes along. It is an inch and a
quarter long, and is engaged in the same quest as its lesser brother of
the green, transparent coat. Magnify it enough times, say, many thousand
times, and what a terrible-looking monster we should have--a traveling
arch of contracting and stretching muscular tissue, higher than your
head, and measuring off the ground a rod or more at a time, or standing
twenty feet or more high, like some dragon of the prime. But now it is a
puny insect of which the caroling vireo overhead would quickly dispose.
With a twig I lift it to a maple sapling close by and watch it go
looping up the trunk. Evidently it doesn't know just where it wants to
go, but it finally strikes a small sugar maple and humps up that. By
chance it strikes one of the branches six feet from the ground and goes
looping up that. Then, by chance, in its aimless reachings it hits one
of three small branches and climbs that a foot or more, and a dry twig,
six or eight inches long, is seized and explored. At the end of it the
creature tarries a minute or more, reaching out in the empty space, then
turns back and hits a smaller twig on this twig about an inch long. This
it explores over and over and sounds the depths that surround it, then
loops back again to the end of the main twig it has just explored,
profiting nothing by experience; then retraces its steps and measures
off another small branch, and is finally lost to sight amid the leaves.
Has the course of life up through geologic time been in any way like
this? There has been the push of life, the effort to get somewhere, but
has there been no more guiding principle than in the case of this worm?
The singular thing about the worm is its incessant reachings forth into
surrounding space, searching, searching, sounding, sounding, as if to be
sure that no chance to make a new connection is missed.
Finally the black worm comes to rest and, clinging by its hind feet,
lets itself down and simulates a small dry twig, in which disguise it
would deceive the sharpest-eyed enemy. No doubt it passed the night
posing as a twig.
Among the sylvan denizens that next came upon the stage were a
hummingbird, a little red newt, and a wood frog. The hummer makes short
work of everything: with a flash and a hum it is gone. This one seemed
to be exploring the dry twigs for nesting-material, either spiders' webs
or bits of lichen. For a brief moment it perched on a twig a few yards
from me. My ardent wish could not hold it any longer. Truly a fairy
bird, appearing and vanishing like a thought, familiar with the heart of
all the flowers and taking no food grosser than their nectar, the winged
jewel of the poets, the surprise and delight of all beholders--it came
like a burnished meteor into my leafy alcove and was gone as quickly.
All sylvan things have a charm and delicacy of their own, all except the
woodchuck; wherever he is, he is of the earth earthy. The wood frog is
known only to woodsmen and farm boys. He is a real sylvan frog, as
pretty as a bird, the color of the dry leaves, slender and elegant in
form and quick and furtive in movement. My feet disturbed one in the bed
of dry leaves. Slowly I moved my hand toward him and stroked his back
with a twig. If you can tickle a frog's back in any way you put a spell
upon him. He becomes quite hypnotized. He was instantly responsive to my
passes. He began to swell and foreshorten, and when I used my finger
instead of the twig, he puffed up very rapidly, rose up more upon his
feet, and bowed his head. As I continued the titillation he began to
give forth broken, subdued croaks, and I wondered if he were going to
break out in song. He did not, but he seemed loath to go his way. How
different he looked from the dark-colored frogs which in large numbers
make a multitudinous croaking and clucking in the little wild pools in
spring! He wakes up from his winter nap very early and is in the pools
celebrating his nuptials as soon as the ice is off them, and then in two
or three days he takes to the open woods and assumes the assimilative
coloring of the dry leaves.
The little orange-colored salamander, a most delicate and highly colored
little creature, is as harmless as a baby, and about as slow and
undecided in its movements. Its cold body seems to like the warmth of
your hand. Yet in color it is as rich an orange as the petal of the
cardinal flower is a rich scarlet. It seems more than an outside color;
it is a glow, and renders the creature almost transparent, an effect as
uniform as the radiance of a precious stone. Its little,
innocent-looking, three-toed foot, or three and a half toed--how
unreptilian it looks through my pocket glass! A baby's hand is not more
so. Its throbbing throat, its close-shut mouth, its jet-black eyes with
a glint of gold above them--only a close view of these satisfies one.
Here is another remarkable transformation among the small wild folk. In
the spring he is a dark, slimy, rather forbidding lizard in the pools;
now he is more beautiful than the jewel-weed in the woods. This is said
to be an immature form, which returns to the ponds and matures the next
season; but whether it is the male or the female that assumes this
bright hue, or both, I do not know. The coat seems to be its midsummer
holiday uniform which is laid aside when it goes back to the marshes to
hibernate in the fall.
Wild creatures so unafraid are sure to have means of protection that do
not at once appear. In the case of the newt it is evidently an acrid or
other disagreeable secretion, which would cause any animal to repent
that took it in its mouth. It is even less concerned at being caught
than is the skunk, or porcupine, or stink-bug.
In my retreat I was unwittingly intruding upon the domain of another
sylvan denizen, the chipmunk. One afternoon one suddenly came up from
the open field below me with his pockets full of provender of some sort;
just what sort I wondered, as there was no grain or seeds or any dry
food that it would be safe to store underground for the winter.
Beholding me sitting there within two yards of his den was a great
surprise to him. He eyed me a long time--squirrel time--making little,
spasmodic movements on the flat stone above his den. At a motion of my
arm he darted into his hole with an exultant chip. He was soon out with
empty pockets, and he then proceeded to sound his little tocsin of
distrust or alarm so that all the sylvan folk might hear. As I made no
sign, he soon ceased and went about his affairs.
All this time, behind and above me, concealed by a vase fern, reposed
that lovely creature of the twilight, the luna moth, just out of her
chrysalis, drying and inflating her wings. I chanced to lift the fern
screen, and there was this marvel! Her body was as white and spotless as
the snow, and her wings, with their Nile-green hue, as fair and delicate
as--well, as only those of a luna moth can be. It is as immaculate as an
angel. With a twig I carefully lifted her to the trunk of a maple
sapling, where she clung and where I soon left her for the night.
While I was loitering there on the threshold of the woods, observing the
small sylvan folk, about a hundred yards above me, near the highway, was
a bird's nest of a kind I had not seen for more than a score of years,
the nest of the veery, or Wilson's thrush. Some friends were camping
there with their touring-car outfit in a fringe of the beech woods, and
passed and repassed hourly within a few yards of the nest, and, although
they each had sharp eyes and sharp ears, they had neither seen nor
heard the birds during the two days they had been there.
While calling upon them I chanced to see the hurried movements of a
thrush in the low trees six or seven yards away. The bird had food in
its beak, which caused me to keep my eye upon it. It quickly flew down
to a small clump of ferns that crowned a small knoll in the open, about
ten feet from the border of the woods. As it did so, another thrush flew
out of the ferns and disappeared in the woods. Their stealthy movements
sent a little thrill through me, and I said, Here is a treasure. I
parted the ferny screen, and there on the top of the small knoll was the
nest with two half-fledged young.
A mowing-machine in a meadow in front of my door gave an unkind cut to a
sparrow that had a nest in the clover near the wall. The mower chanced
to see the nest before the sickle-bar had swept over it. It contained
four young ones just out of the shell. At my suggestion the mower
carefully placed it on the top of a stone wall. The parent birds were
not seen, but we naturally reasoned that they would come back and would
alight upon the wall to make observations.
But that afternoon and the next morning passed, and we saw no anxious
bird parents. The young lifted up their open mouths whenever I looked
into the nest and seemed to be more contented than abandoned birds
usually are. The next night was unseasonably cold, and I expected to
find the nestlings dead in the morning; but they were not, and,
strangely enough, for babes in the wood or rather on a stone wall, they
seemed to be doing well. Maybe the mother bird is still caring for them,
I said to myself, and I ambushed myself across the road opposite to them
and watched.
I had not long to wait. The mother sparrow came slyly up and dropped
some food into an open mouth and disappeared.
Who does not feel a thrill of pleasure when, in sauntering through the
woods, his hat just brushes a vireo's nest? This was my experience one
morning. The nest was like a natural growth, hanging there like a fairy
basket in the fork of a beech twig, woven of dry, delicate, papery,
brown and gray wood products, just high enough to escape prowling ground
enemies and low enough to escape sharp-eyed tree enemies. Its safety was
in its artless art. It was a part of the shadows and the green-and-brown
solitude. The weaver had bent down one of the green leaves and made it a
part of the nest; it was like the stroke of a great artist. Then the
dabs of white here and there, given by the fragments of spiders'
cocoons--all helped to blend it with the flickering light and shade.
I gently bent down the branch and four confident heads with open mouths
instantly appeared above the brim. The mother bird meanwhile was
flitting about in the branches overhead, peering down upon me and
uttering her anxious "quay quay," equivalent, I suppose, to saying: "Get
away!" This I soon did.
Most of our bird music, like our wild flowers, is soon quickly over. But
the red-eyed vireo sings on into September--not an ecstatic strain, but
a quiet, contented warble, like a boy whistling at his work.