somewhat longer and stouter than the robin. It is known, by sight
at least, to almost every one who notices birds at all, and perhaps
for this reason it has received an unusual number of popular names.
“Golden-winged woodpecker,” which is probably the best known of these,
comes from the fact that the bird’s wings are yellow on the under side.
“Harry Wicket,” “Highhole,”--because its nest is sometimes pretty far
above the ground,--“Yellowhammer,” and “Pigeon-woodpecker” are also
among its more familiar nicknames.
Unlike other birds of its family, the flicker passes much of its time
on the ground, where it hops awkwardly about, feeding upon insects,
especially upon ants. As you come near it, while it is thus engaged, it
rises with a peculiar purring sound, and as it flies from you it shows
a broad white patch on its rump--the lower back, above the root of
the tail. Every one who has ever walked much over grassy fields must
have seen the bird and been struck by this conspicuous light mark. He
must have noticed, too, the bird’s peculiar up-and-down, “jumping”
manner of flight, by which it goes swooping across the country in long
undulations or waves.
The flicker’s general color is brown, with spottings and streakings
of black, and more or less of violet or lilac shading. On the back of
its neck it wears a band of bright scarlet, and across its breast is a
conspicuous black crescent.
It is fond of old apple orchards, and often makes its nest in a
decaying trunk. In some places, near the seashore, especially,--where
it is commoner than elsewhere in winter, and where large trees are
scarce,--it makes enemies by its habit of drilling holes in barns and
even in churches. I remember a meeting-house on Cape Cod which had a
good number of such holes in its front wall--or rather it had the scars
of such holes, for they had been covered with patches of tin. That was
a case where going to church might be called a bad habit.
In fall and winter, if not at other seasons, the flicker feeds largely
upon berries. In years when the poison ivy bears a good crop, I am
pretty sure to find two or three flickers all winter long about a
certain farm, the stone walls of which are overrun with this handsome
but unwholesome vine, although it is hard to imagine that the dry,
stony fruit should yield much in the way of nourishment, even to a
woodpecker.
As spring comes on, the flicker becomes numerous and very noisy. His
best-known vocal effort is a prolonged _hi-hi-hi_, very loud and
ringing, and kept up until the listener wonders where the author of it
gets his wind. This, I think, is the bird’s substitute for a song. He
has at all times a loud, unmusical _yawp_,--a signal, I suppose,--and
in the mating season especially he utters a very affectionate,
conversational _wicker_ or _flicker_. Every country boy should be
familiar with these three notes.
[Illustration: FLICKER
_1. Male. 2. Females_]
But besides being a vocalist,--we can hardly call him a singer,--the
flicker is a player upon instruments. He is a great drummer; and if
any one imagines that woodpeckers do not enjoy the sound of their
own music, he should watch a flicker drumming with his long bill on
a battered tin pan in the middle of a pasture. Morning after morning
I have seen one thus engaged, drumming lustily, and then cocking his
head to listen for an answer; and Paderewski at his daily practice upon
the piano could not have looked more in earnest. At other times the
flicker contents himself with a piece of resonant loose bark or a dry
limb.
One proof that this drumming--which is indulged in by woodpeckers
generally--is a true musical performance, and not a mere drilling for
grubs, is the fact that we never hear it in winter. It begins as the
weather grows mild, and is as much a sign of spring as the peeping of
the little tree-frogs--hylas--in the meadow.
The flicker’s nest, as I have said, is built in a hole in a tree, often
an apple-tree. Very noisy in his natural disposition, he keeps a wise
silence while near the spot where his mate is sitting, and will rear
a brood under the orchard-owner’s nose without betraying himself. The
young birds are fed from the parent’s crop, as young pigeons and young
hummingbirds are. The old bird thrusts its bill down the throat of
the nestling and gives it a meal of partially digested food by what
scientific people call a process of regurgitation. Farmers’ boys, who
have watched pigeons feeding their squabs, will know precisely what is
meant.
XVII
THE BITTERN
It was a great day for me when I first heard the so-called booming of
the bittern. For more than ten years I had devoted the principal part
of my spare hours to the study of birds, but though I had taken many
an evening walk near the most promising meadows in my neighborhood, I
could never hear those mysterious pumping or stake-driving noises of
which I had read with so much interest, especially in the writings of
Thoreau.
The truth was, as I have since assured myself, that this representative
of the heron family was not a resident within the limits of my everyday
rambles, none of the meadows thereabout being extensive and secluded
enough to suit his whim.
There came a day, however, when with a friend I made an afternoon
excursion to Wayland, Massachusetts, on purpose to form the
stake-driver’s acquaintance. We walked up the railway track across
the river toward Sudbury, and were hardly seated on the edge of the
meadow, facing the beautiful Nobscot Hill, before my comrade said,
“Hark! There he is!”
Yes, that certainly was the very sound--an old-fashioned wooden pump at
work in the meadow.
We listened intently for perhaps half a dozen times; then I proposed
going further up the track to get the notes at shorter range, and
possibly--who could tell what unheard-of thing might happen?--to obtain
a sight of the bird. We advanced cautiously, though as we were on the
track, six feet or more above the level of the meadow, there was no
chance of concealment, and the bittern went on with his performance.
Meanwhile we maintained a sharp lookout, and presently I descried
a narrow brown object standing upright amidst the grass--a stick,
perhaps. I lifted my opera-glass and spoke quickly to my friend: “I see
him!”
“Where?” he asked; and when I lowered my glass and gave him the bird’s
bearings as related to the remains of an old hayrick not far off, he
said, “Why, I saw that, but took it for a stick.”
“Yes, but see the eye,” I answered.
Within half a minute the bird suddenly threw his head forward and
commenced pumping. This was good luck indeed,--that I should surprise
my very first bittern in his famous act, a thing which better men than
I, after years of familiarity with the bird, had never once succeeded
in accomplishing. Who says that Fortune does not sometimes favor the
fresh hand?
The fellow repeated the operation three times, and between whiles moved
stealthily through the grass toward the leavings of the haycock before
mentioned.
When he reached the hay, we held our breath. Would he actually mount
it? Yes, that was undoubtedly his intention; but he meant to do it in
such a way that no mortal eye should see him. All the time glancing
furtively to left and right, as if the grass were full of enemies, he
put one foot before the other with almost inconceivable slowness,--as
the hour hand turns on the clock’s face. It was an admirable display
of an art which this race of frog, mouse, and insect catchers has
cultivated for untold generations--an art on which its livelihood
depends, the art of invisible motion.
There was no resisting the ludicrousness of his manner. He was in full
view, but so long as he kept still he seemed to think himself quite
safe from detection. Like the hand of the clock, however, if he was
slow he was sure, and in time he was fairly out of the grass, standing
in plain sight upon his hay platform.
Once in position he fell to pumping in earnest, and kept it up for more
than an hour, while two enthusiasts sat upon the railway embankment,
twelve or thirteen rods distant, with opera-glasses and note-books,
scrutinizing his every motion, and felicitating themselves again and
again on seeing thus plainly what so few had ever seen at all. What
would Thoreau have given for such an opportunity?
“The stake-driver is at it in his favorite meadow,” he writes in
his journal, in 1852. “I followed the sound, and at last got within
two rods, it seeming always to recede, and drawing you, like a
will-o’-the-wisp, farther away into the meadows. When thus near, I
heard some lower sounds at the beginning like striking on a stump or a
stake, a dry, hard sound, and then followed the gurgling, pumping notes
fit to come from a meadow.
“This was just within the blueberry and other bushes, and when the bird
flew up, alarmed, I went to the place, but could see no water, which
makes me doubt if water is necessary to it in making the sound. Perhaps
it thrusts its bill so deep as to reach water where it is dry on the
surface.”
This notion that water is employed in the production of the bittern’s
notes has been generally entertained. The notes themselves are of a
character to suggest such an hypothesis, and at least one witness has
borne circumstantial testimony to its truth. In Thoreau’s essay on the
“Natural History of Massachusetts,” he says:--
“On one occasion, the bird has been seen by one of my neighbors to
thrust its bill into the water, and suck up as much as it could hold;
then, raising its head, it pumped it out again with four or five heaves
of the neck, throwing it two or three feet, and making the sound each
time.”
Similar statements have been made as to the corresponding notes of
the European bittern. None of our systematic writers upon American
ornithology have ever witnessed the performance, as far as appears, and
being too honest to draw upon their imaginations, they have left the
matter a mystery. Now, on this auspicious May afternoon, if we learned
nothing else, we could at all events make quite sure whether or not the
bittern did really spout water from his beak.
My readers will have guessed already that our bird, at least, did
nothing of the sort. His bill was never within reach of water. The
operation is a queer one, hard to describe.
The bittern has been standing motionless, perhaps in the humpbacked
attitude in which the artists, following Audubon’s plate, have commonly
represented him; or quite as likely, he has been making a stick or a
soldier of himself, standing bolt upright at full stretch, his long
neck and bill pointed straight at the zenith.
Suddenly he lowers his head, and instantly raises it again and throws
it forward with a quick, convulsive jerk. This movement is attended
by an opening and shutting of the bill, which in turn is accompanied
by a sound which has been well compared to a violent hiccough. The
hiccough--with which, I think, the click of the big mandibles may
sometimes be heard--is repeated a few times, each time a little louder
than before; and then succeed the real pumping or stake-driving noises.
These are in sets of three syllables each, of which the first syllable
is the longest, and somewhat separated from the others. The accent is
strongly upon the middle syllable, and the whole, as oftenest heard, is
an exact reproduction of the sound of a wooden pump, as I have already
said, the voice having that peculiar hollow quality which is produced,
not by the flow of the water, but by the suction of the air in the tube
when the pump begins to work.
But the looker-on is likely to be quite as much impressed by what he
sees as by what he hears. During the whole performance, but especially
during the latter part of it, the bird is engaged in the most violent
contortions, suggestive of nothing but a patient suffering from
uncontrollable nausea. Moreover, as soon as the preliminary hiccoughs
begin, the lower throat or breast is seen to be swelling; the
dilatation grows larger and larger till the pumping is well under way,
and so far as my companion and I could detect, does not subside in the
least until the noises have ceased altogether.
How are the unique, outlandish notes produced? I cannot profess to
know. Our opinion was that the bird swallowed air into his gullet,
gulping it down with each snap of the beak. To all appearance it was
necessary for him to inflate the crop in this way before he could pump,
or boom. As to how much of the grand booming was connected with the
swallowing of the air, and how much, if any, with the expulsion of it,
my friend and I did not agree, and of course neither of us could do
more than guess.
I made some experiments afterwards, by way of imitating the noises;
and these experiments, together with the fact that the grand booming
seemed to be really nothing more than a development of the preliminary
hiccoughs, and the further fact that the swelling of the breast did not
go down gradually during the course of the performance, but suddenly at
the close,--all these incline me to believe that the notes are mainly
if not entirely caused by the inhalation or swallowing of the air; and
I am somewhat strengthened in this opinion by perceiving that when
a man takes air into his stomach the act is attended by a sound not
altogether unlike the bittern’s note in quality, while the expulsion of
it gives rise to noises of an entirely dissimilar character.
That the sounds in question were not made entirely by any ordinary
action of the vocal organs was the decided opinion of both my friend
and myself.
As I have said, we watched the performance for more than an hour. We
were sitting squarely upon the track, and once were compelled to get
up to let a train pass; but the bittern evidently paid no attention to
matters on the railway, being well used to thunder in that direction,
and stood his ground without wincing.
When he had pumped long enough,--and the operation surely looked like
pretty hard work,--he suddenly took wing and flew a little distance
down the meadow. The moment he dropped into the grass he pumped, and
on making another flight he again pumped immediately upon coming to
the ground. This trick, which surprised me not a little in view of
the severe exertion required, is perhaps akin to the habit of smaller
birds, who in seasons of excitement will very often break into song at
the moment of striking a perch.
As we came down the track on our way back to the station, three
bitterns were in the air at once, while a fourth was booming on the
opposite side of the road. One of the flying birds persistently dangled
his legs instead of drawing them up in the usual fashion and letting
the feet stick out behind, parallel with the tail. Probably he was
“showing off,” as is the custom of many birds during the season of
mating.
Our bird across the road, by the bye, was not pumping, but driving a
stake. The middle syllable was truly a mighty whack with a mallet on
the head of a post, so that I could easily enough credit Mr. Samuels’s
statement that he once followed the sound for half a mile, expecting to
find a farmer setting a fence.
In the midst of the hurly-burly we saw a boy coming toward us on the
track.
“Let’s ask him about it,” said my companion.
So, with an air of inquisitive ignorance, he stopped the fellow, and
inquired, “Do you know what it is we hear making that curious noise off
there in the meadow?”
The boy evidently took us for a pair of ignoramuses from the city.
“I guess it’s a frog,” he answered. But when the sounds were repeated
he shook his head and confessed honestly that he didn’t know what made
them.
It was too bad, I thought, that he did not stick to his frog theory.
It would have made so much better a story! He appeared to feel no
curiosity about the matter, and we allowed him to pass on unenlightened.
Not all Wayland people are thus poorly informed, however, and we
shortly learned, to our considerable satisfaction, that they have a
most felicitous local name for the bird. They call him “plum-pudd’n’,”
which is exactly what he himself says, only that his _u_ is in both
words somewhat long, like the vowel in “full.” To get the true effect
of the words they should be spoken with the lips nearly closed, and in
a deep voice.
A few days after this excursion I found a bittern in a large wet meadow
somewhat nearer home. At the nearest he was a long way off, and as I
went farther and farther away from him, I remarked the very unexpected
fact that the last syllable to be lost was not the second, which bears
so sharp an accent, but the long first syllable. It seemed contrary to
reason, but such was unquestionably the truth, and later experiments
confirmed it.
This was in the spring of 1888. In May of the next year, if all went
well, we would see the show again. So we said to each other; but a
veteran ornithologist remarked that we should probably be a good many
years older before we had another such piece of good fortune.
It is a fact familiar to all naturalists, however, that when you have
once found a new plant, or a new bird, or a new nest, the experience is
likely to be soon repeated. You may have spent a dozen years in a vain
search, but now, for some reason, the difficult has all at once become
easy, and almost before you can believe your eyes the rarity has grown
to be a drug in the market. Something like this proved to be true of
the bittern’s boom.
On the afternoon of the 2d of May, 1889, I went to one of my favorite
resorts, a large cat-tail swamp surrounded by woods. My particular
errand was to see whether the least bittern had arrived,--a much
smaller, and in this part of the country, at least, a much less common
bird than his relative of whose vocal accomplishments I am here
treating.
I threw myself down upon the cliff overhanging the edge of the swamp,
to listen for the desired _coo-coo-coo-coo_, and had barely made myself
comfortable when I heard the _plum-pudd’n’_ of the bittern himself,
proceeding, as it seemed, from the reeds directly at my feet. Further
listening satisfied me that the fellow was not far from the end of a
rocky peninsula which juts into the swamp just at this point.
I slipped down the cliff as quietly as possible, picked my way across
the narrow neck leading to the main peninsula, and by keeping behind
rocks and trees managed to reach the very tip without disturbing
the bird. Here I posted myself among the thick trees, and awaited
a repetition of the boom. It was not long in coming, and plainly
proceeded from a bunch of flags just across a little stretch of clear
water.
I looked and looked, while the bittern continued to pump at rather
protracted intervals; but I could see nothing whatever, till presto!
there the creature stood in plain sight.
Whether he had moved into view, or had all the time been visible, I
cannot tell. He soon pumped again, and then again, for perhaps six
times. Then he stalked away out of sight, and I heard nothing more. He
was much nearer than last year’s bird had been, but was still a pumper,
not a stake-driver, and his action was in all respects the same as I
had before witnessed.
There had been no bittern in this swamp the season previous, nor did
any breed here this summer. I visited the place too often for him to
have escaped my notice, had he been present. This bird, then, was a
migrant, and his booming was of interest as showing that the bittern,
like the song-birds, does not wait to get into summer quarters before
beginning to rehearse his love music.
Two days after this my companion of the year before went with me again
to Wayland, and, not to prolong a long story, we sat again upon the
railway and watched a bittern pump for more than an hour. This time, to
be sure, he was partially concealed by the grass, besides being farther
away than we could have wished.
It was curious, and illustrated strikingly the utility of the bird’s
habit of standing motionless, that my friend, who is certainly as
sharp-eyed an observer as I have ever known, was once more completely
taken in. As luck would have it, I caught sight of the bird first, and
when I pointed him out to the other man he replied, “Why, of course I
saw that, but it never occurred to me but that it was a stake.”
We returned from this excursion fairly well convinced that in the early
part of the season, while the grass is still short, one may hope to
see a bittern pump almost any day, if he will go to a suitable meadow
which has a railroad running through it. The track answers a double
purpose: it gives the observer an outlook, such as cannot be obtained
from a boat, and furthermore, the birds are quite unsuspicious of
things on the track, while the presence of a man in the grass or on the
river would almost inevitably attract their attention.
XVIII
BIRDS FOR EVERYBODY
Some birds belong exclusively to specialists. They are so rare, or
their manner of life is so seclusive, that people in general can never
be expected to know them except from books. The latest list of the
birds of Massachusetts includes about three hundred and fifty species
and sub-species. Of these, seventy-five or more are so foreign to this
part of the country as to have appeared here only by accident, while
many others are so excessively rare that no individual observer can
count upon seeing them, however close a lookout he may keep. Other
species are present in goodly numbers, but only in certain portions of
the State; and still others, though generally distributed and fairly
numerous, live habitually in almost impenetrable swamps or in deep
forests, and of necessity are seen only by those who make it their
business to look for them.
It is something for which busy men and women may well be thankful,
therefore, that so many of the most pleasing, or otherwise
interesting, of all our birds are among those which may be called
birds for everybody. Such are the robin, the bluebird, the Baltimore
oriole,--or golden robin,--the blue jay, the crow, and the chickadee.
Of all these we may say that they are common; they come in every one’s
way, and, what is still more to the point, they cannot be mistaken for
anything else. Others are equally common, and are easily enough seen,
but their identity is not so much a matter of course.
The song sparrow, for example, is abundant in Massachusetts from the
middle of March to the end of October. Outside of the forest it is
almost ubiquitous; it sings beautifully and with the utmost freedom; it
ought, one would say, to be universally known. But it is _a_ sparrow,
not _the_ sparrow. In other words, it is only one of many, and so,
common as it is, and freely as it sings (it is to be heard in every
garden and by every roadside in the latter half of March, when few
other birds are in tune), it passes unrecognized by the generality
of people. They read in books of song sparrows, chipping sparrows,
field sparrows, tree sparrows, swamp sparrows, vesper sparrows,
white-throated sparrows, fox sparrows, yellow-winged sparrows, savanna
sparrows, and the like, and when they see any little mottled brown
bird, they say, “Oh, it’s a sparrow,” and seek to know nothing more.
The family of warblers--among the loveliest of all birds--are in
a still worse case, and much the same may be said of swallows and
blackbirds, thrushes and vireos. The number of species and their
perplexing similarity, which are such an attraction to the student,
prove an effectual bar to those who have time and money for newspapers
and novels, but can spare neither for a manual of local ornithology.