To have a smooth grassy lawn about your house on the Pacific coast is to
have spread out before you at nearly all hours of the day a pretty
spectacle of wild-bird life. Warblers, sparrows, thrushes, titlarks, and
plovers flutter across it as thick as autumn leaves--not so highly
colored, yet showing a pleasing variety of tints, while the black
phœbe flits about your porch and arbor vines.
Audubon's warbler is the most numerous, probably ten to one of any other
variety of birds. Then the white-crowned sparrows, Gambel's sparrow, the
tree sparrow, and one or two other sparrows of which I am not sure are
next in number.
Two species of birds from the Far North are usually represented by a
solitary specimen of each, namely, the Alaska hermit thrush and the
American pipit, or titlark. The thrush is silent, but has its usual
trim, alert look. The pipit is the only walker in the group. It walks
about like our oven-bird with the same pretty movement of the head and a
teetering motion of the hind part of the body.
While in Alaska, in July, 1899, with the Harriman Expedition, I found
the nest of the pipit far up on the side of a steep mountain. It was
tucked in under a mossy tuft and commanded a view of sea and mountain
such as Alaska alone can afford.
But the most conspicuous and interesting of all these lawn birds are the
ring-necked plovers, or killdeers. Think of having a half-dozen or more
of those wild, shapely creatures, reminiscent of the shore and of the
spirit of the tender, glancing April days, running over your lawn but a
few yards from you! Their dovelike heads, their long, slender legs, that
curious, mechanical jerking up-and-down movement of their bodies, their
shrill, disconsolate cries as they take flight, their beautiful and
powerful wings and tail, and their mastery of the air--all arrest your
attention or challenge your admiration. They bring the distant and the
furtive to your very door. All climes and lands wait upon their wings.
They fly around the world.
The plovers are the favored among birds. Beauty, speed, and immunity
from danger from birds of prey are theirs. Ethereal and aerial
creatures! Is that the cry of the sea in the bird's voice? Is that the
motion of the waves in its body? Is that the restlessness of the surf in
its behavior?
However high and far it may fly, it has to come back to earth as we all
do. It comes to our lawn to feed upon earthworms. The other birds are
all busy picking up some minute fly or insect that harbors in the grass,
but the plover is here for game that harbors in the turf. His methods
are like those of the robin searching for grubs or angle-worms. He
scrutinizes the turf very carefully as he runs about over it, making
frequent drives into it with his bill, but only now and then seizing the
prey of which he is in search. When he does so, he shows the same
judgment which the robin does under like conditions. He pulls slowly and
evenly, so as to make sure of the whole worm, or to compel it to let go
its hold upon the soil without breaking. All birds are wise about their
food-supplies.
On the beach the wild life that I see is all on wings. There are the
tranquil, effortless gliding herring gulls, snow-white beneath and
pearl-gray above, displaying an affluence of wing-power restful to look
upon--airplanes that put forth their powers so subtly and so silently as
to elude both eye and ear. At low tide I see large groups of their white
and gray-blue forms seated upon the dark, moss-covered rocks. Fresh
water is at a premium on this coast, and the thirsty gulls avail
themselves of the makeshift of the drain-pipes from the town, which
discharge on the beach.
There are the clumsy-looking but powerful-winged birds, the brown
pelicans, usually in a line of five or six, skimming low over the waves,
shaping their course to the "hilly sea," often gliding on set wings for
a long distance, rising and falling to clear the water--coasting, at it
were, on a horizontal surface, and only at intervals beating the air
for more power. They are heavy, awkward-looking birds with wings and
forms that suggest none of the grace and beauty of the usual shore
birds. They do not seem to be formed to cleave the air, or to part the
water, but they do both very successfully. When the pelican dives for
his prey, he is for the moment transformed into a thunderbolt. He comes
down like an arrow of Jove, and smites and parts the water in superb
style. When he recovers himself, he is the same stolid, awkward-looking
creature as before.
A bird evidently not far removed from its reptilian ancestors--a bird
that is at home under the water and hunts its prey there on the wing--is
the black cormorant. There is a colony of several hundred of them on the
face of a sea-cliff a short distance above me.
I see, at nearly all hours of the day, the black lines they make above
the foaming breakers as they go and come on their foraging expeditions.
In diving, they disappear under the water like the loon, and penetrate
to as great depths. One does not crave an intimate acquaintance with
them, but they are interesting as a part of the multitudinous life of
the shore.