"I have observed recently a new species of bird here. They alight upon
the buildings and fences as well as upon the ground. They are
_walkers_." In a few days he obtained one, and sent me the skin. It
proved to be what I had anticipated, namely, the American pipit, or
titlark, a slender brown bird, about the size of the sparrow, which
passes through the States in the fall and spring, to and from its
breeding haunts in the far North. They generally appear by twos and
threes, or in small loose flocks, searching for food on banks and
plowed ground. As they fly up, they show two or three white quills in
the tail like the vesper-sparrow. Flying over, they utter a single
chirp or cry every few rods. They breed in the bleak, moss-covered
rocks of Labrador. Their eggs have also been found in Vermont, and I
feel quite certain that I saw this bird in the Adirondac Mountains in
the month of August. The male launches into the air, and gives forth a
brief but melodious song, after the manner of all larks. They are
_walkers_. This is a characteristic of but few of our land-birds. By
far the greater number are _hoppers_. Note the track of the common
snow-bird; the feet are not placed one in front of the other, as in
the track of the crow or partridge, but side and side. The sparrows,
thrushes, warblers, woodpeckers, buntings, etc., are all hoppers. On
the other hand, all aquatic or semi-aquatic birds are walkers. The
plovers and sandpipers and snipes run rapidly. Among the land-birds,
the grouse, pigeons, quails, larks, and various blackbirds, walk. The
swallows walk, also, whenever they use their feet at all, but very
awkwardly. The larks walk with ease and grace. Note the meadow-lark
strutting about all day in the meadows.
Besides being walkers, the larks, or birds allied to the larks, all
sing upon the wing, usually poised or circling in the air, with a
hovering, tremulous flight. The meadow-lark occasionally does this in
the early part of the season. At such times its long-drawn note or
whistle becomes a rich, amorous warble.
The bobolink, also, has both characteristics, and, notwithstanding the
difference of form and build, etc., is very suggestive of the English
skylark, as it figures in the books, and is, no doubt, fully its equal
as a songster.
Of our small wood-birds we have three varieties, east of the
Mississippi, closely related to each other, which I have already spoken
of, and which walk, and sing, more or less, on the wing, namely, the two
species of water-thrush or wagtails, and the oven-bird or wood-wagtail.
The latter is the most common, and few observers of the birds can have
failed to notice its easy, gliding walk. Its other lark trait, namely,
singing in the air, seems not to have been observed by any naturalist.
Yet, it is a well established characteristic, and may be verified by any
person who will spend a half-hour in the woods where this bird abounds
on some June afternoon or evening. I hear it very frequently after
sundown, when the ecstatic singer can hardly be distinguished against
the sky. I know of a high, bald-top mountain where I have sat late in
the afternoon and heard them as often as one every minute. Sometimes the
bird would be far below me, sometimes near at hand; and very frequently
the singer would be hovering a hundred feet above the summit. He would
start from the trees on one side of the open space, reach his climax in
the air, and plunge down on the other side. Its descent after the song
is finished is very rapid, and precisely like that of the titlark when
it sweeps down from its course to alight on the ground.
I first verified this observation some years ago. I had long been
familiar with the song, but had only strongly suspected the author of
it, when, as I was walking in the woods one evening, just as the
leaves were putting out, I saw one of these birds but a few rods from
me. I was saying to myself, half audibly, "Come, now, show off, if it
is you; I have come to the woods expressly to settle this point," when
it began to ascend, by short hops and flights, through the branches,
uttering a sharp, preliminary chirp. I followed it with my eye; saw it
mount into the air and circle over the woods, and saw it sweep down
again and dive through the trees, almost to the very perch from which
it had started.
As the paramount question in the life of a bird is the question of
food, perhaps the most serious troubles our feathered neighbors
encounter are early in the spring, after the supply of fat with which
nature stores every corner and by-place of the system, thereby
anticipating the scarcity of food, has been exhausted, and the sudden
and severe changes in the weather which occur at this season make
unusual demands upon their vitality. No doubt many of the earlier
birds die from starvation and exposure at this season. Among a troop
of Canada sparrows, which I came upon one March day, all of them
evidently much reduced, one was so feeble that I caught it in my hand.
During the present season, a very severe cold spell, the first week in
March, drove the bluebirds to seek shelter about the houses and
out-buildings. As night approached, and the winds and the cold
increased, they seemed filled with apprehension and alarm, and in the
outskirts of the city came about the windows and doors, crept behind
the blinds, clung to the gutters and beneath the cornice, flitted from
porch to porch, and from house to house, seeking in vain for some safe
retreat from the cold. The street pump, which had a small opening,
just over the handle, was an attraction which they could not resist.
And yet they seemed aware of the insecurity of the position; for, no
sooner would they stow themselves away into the interior of the pump,
to the number of six or eight, than they would rush out again, as if
apprehensive of some approaching danger. Time after time the cavity
was filled and refilled, with blue and brown intermingled, and as
often emptied. Presently they tarried longer than usual, when I made a
sudden sally and captured three, that found a warmer and safer lodging
for the night in the cellar.
In the fall, birds and fowls of all kinds become very fat. The
squirrels and mice lay by a supply of food in their dens and retreats,
but the birds, to a considerable extent, especially our winter
residents, carry an equivalent in their own systems, in the form of
adipose tissue. I killed a red-shouldered hawk, one December, and on
removing the skin found the body completely encased in a coating of
fat one quarter of an inch in thickness. Not a particle of muscle was
visible. This coating not only serves as a protection against the
cold, but supplies the waste of the system, when food is scarce, or
fails altogether.
The crows at this season are in the same condition. It is estimated that
a crow needs at least half a pound of meat per day, but it is evident
that for weeks and months during the winter and spring, they must
subsist on a mere fraction of this amount. I have no doubt a crow or
hawk, when in their fall condition, would live two weeks without a
morsel of food passing their beaks; a domestic fowl will do as much. One
January, I unwittingly shut a hen under the floor of an out-building,
where not a particle of food could be obtained, and where she was
entirely unprotected from the severe cold. When the luckless Dominick
was discovered, about eighteen days afterward, she was brisk and lively,
but fearfully pinched up, and as light as a bunch of feathers. The
slightest wind carried her before it. But by judicious feeding she was
soon restored.
The circumstance of the bluebirds being emboldened by the cold, suggests
the fact that the fear of man, which now seems like an instinct in the
birds, is evidently an acquired trait, and foreign to them in a state of
primitive nature. Every gunner has observed, to his chagrin, how wild
the pigeons become after a few days of firing among them; and, to his
delight, how easy it is to approach near his game in new or unfrequented
woods. Professor Baird tells me that a correspondent of theirs visited a
small island in the Pacific Ocean, situated about two hundred miles off
Cape St. Lucas, to procure specimens. The island was but a few miles in
extent, and had probably never been visited half a dozen times by human
beings. The naturalist found the birds and water-fowls so tame that it
was but a waste of ammunition to shoot them. Fixing a noose on the end
of a long stick, he captured them by putting it over their necks and
hauling them to him. In some cases not even this contrivance was needed.
A species of mocking-bird, in particular, larger than ours, and a
splendid songster, made itself so familiar as to be almost a nuisance,
hopping on the table where the collector was writing, and scattering the
pens and paper. Eighteen species were found, twelve of them peculiar to
the island.
Thoreau relates that in the woods of Maine the Canada jay will
sometimes make its meal with the lumbermen, taking the food out of
their hands.
Yet, notwithstanding the birds have come to look upon man as their
natural enemy, there can be little doubt that civilization is on the
whole favorable to their increase and perpetuity, especially to the
smaller species. With man come flies and moths, and insects of all
kinds in greater abundance; new plants and weeds are introduced, and,
with the clearing up of the country, are sowed broadcast over the
land.
The larks and snow-buntings that come to us from the North, subsist
almost entirely upon the seeds of grasses and plants; and how many of
our more common and abundant species are field-birds, and entire
strangers to deep forests?
In Europe some birds have become almost domesticated, like the
house-sparrow, and in our own country the cliff-swallow seem to have
entirely abandoned ledges and shelving rocks, as a place to nest, for
the eaves and projections of farms and other out-buildings.
After one has made the acquaintance of most of the land-birds, there
remain the sea-shore and its treasures. How little one knows of the
aquatic fowls, even after reading carefully the best authorities, was
recently forced home to my mind by the following circumstance: I was
spending a vacation in the interior of New York, when one day a
stranger alighted before the house, and with a cigar box in his hand
approached me as I sat in the doorway. I was about to say that he
would waste his time in recommending his cigars to me, as I never
smoked, when he said that, hearing I knew something about birds, he
had brought me one which had been picked up a few hours before in a
hay-field near the village, and which was a stranger to all who had
seen it. As he began to undo the box I expected to see some of our own
rarer birds, perhaps the rose-breasted grossbeak or Bohemian
chatterer. Imagine, then, how I was taken aback, when I beheld
instead, a swallow-shaped bird, quite as large as a pigeon, with
forked tail, glossy-black above, and snow-white beneath. Its
parti-webbed feet, and its long graceful wings, at a glance told
that it was a sea-bird; but as to its name or habitat I must defer my
answer till I could get a peep into Audubon, or some large collection.
The bird had fallen down exhausted in a meadow, and was picked up just
as the life was leaving its body. The place must have been one hundred
and fifty miles from the sea, as the bird flies. As it was the
sooty-tern, which inhabits the Florida Keys, its appearance so far
north and so far inland may be considered somewhat remarkable. On
removing the skin I found it terribly emaciated. It had no doubt
starved to death, ruined by too much wing. Another Icarus. Its great
power of flight had made it bold and venturesome, and had carried it
so far out of its range that it starved before it could return.
The sooty-tern is sometimes called the sea-swallow, on account of its
form and power of flight. It will fly nearly all day at sea, picking
up food from the surface of the water. There are several species, some
of them strikingly beautiful.
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES:
[3] I am aware that the redstart is generally classed among the
fly-catchers, but its song, its form, and its habits are in every
respect those of a warbler. Its main fly-catcher mark is its beak, but
to the _muscicapa_ proper it presents little or no resemblance to the
general observer.
INDEX.
PAGE
Audubon, 231, 241
Birds, as to nesting, classified, 143
songs of various, 17, 18, 52, 53, 67
distribution of, in a locality, 29
geographically, 50
instinct of cleanliness in, 116
propagation in, 119
relations of the sexes of, 118
Blackbird, Crow, 157
Bluebird, 12, 13, 211-224
Bobolink, 163
Bunting, Black-throated, 164
Cow, 18, 70
Buzzard, Turkey, 152
Cat-bird, 36
Cedar-bird, 100, 111, 160
Chat, Yellow-breasted, 172
Chickadee, 122
Creeper, Black and White, 80
Crow, 152
Cuckoo, Black-billed, 23, 24
Yellow-billed, 23
Dakota Skylark, 243, 244
Eagles, The, 141
Finch, Pine, 86, 100
Purple, 69, 86
Finches, The, 238
Fly-catchers, The, 236
Gnatcatcher. 134
Goldfinch, American, 112
Blue, 129
Cardinal, 174
Grossbeak, Rose-breasted, 67
Grouse, Canada, 107, 206
Hawk, Hen, 43
Pigeon, 42
Red-tailed, 132
Heron, Great Blue, 90
Humming-bird, 67, 101, 133
Indigo-bird, 126
Jay, Canada, 250
King-bird, 62
Kinglets, The, 240
Lark, Shore, 155
Larks, The, 244
Oriole, Baltimore, 126, 135
Orchard, 162
Owl, Screech, 63
Partridge, 75
Pewees, The, 62, 140
Phoebe-bird, 16, 63, 139
Redbird, 174
Robin, 14, 126
Skylark, Dakota, 243, 244
Snow-bird, 55, 86, 127
Sparrow, Canada, 157
Chipping, 18, 41, 124
Field, 24, 238
Fox, 163
White-throated, 86
Wood, or Bush, 26, 126
Sparrows, The, 238
Swallows, The, 117, 124, 161
Tanager, Scarlet, 68
Tern, Sooty, 250
Thrush, Golden-crowned, 64
Gray-cheeked, 242
Hermit, 33, 57, 59, 100
Louisiana Water, 171
New York Water, 203, 243
Wilson's, 35, 56, 161
Wood, 31, 34, 57, 187, 190
Thrushes, The, 237
Titlark, American, 244
Vireo, Red-eyed, 54, 132, 235
Solitary, 130
Warbling, 80
White-eyed, 28, 234
Vireos, The, 234
Veery, 35, 56, 161
Wren, Winter, 12, 28, 55
Wrens, The, 240
Wagtails, The, 245
Warbler, Audubon's, 87
Blackburnian, 58
Black-throated Blue-back, 79
Black-throated Green-back, 79
Blue-Gray (or Gnatcatcher), 134, 171
Blue, Yellow-back, 58
Chestnut-sided, 78
Kentucky, 170
Mourning Ground, 77, 131
Speckled Canada, 70, 73, 87
Varied Creeping, 80, 130
Warblers, The, 171, 232
Woodpecker, Downy, 19, 115
Golden-winged, 17, 20
Red-headed, 113, 174
Yellow-bellied, 115, 204
Transcriber's Notes
For this version of the e-book the oe ligature in the word 'phoebe'
has been replaced with a simple 'oe.'
All obvious punctuation errors have been corrected.
Hyphenation has been normalised.
Pg 22. The word 'wanderdering' was changed to 'wandering.'
Pg 36. The extra 'the' was removed from the following sentence, "It
has the the nightingale's habit of singing in the twilight, as
indeed have all our thrushes."
Pg 56. The word 'intruder' was changed to 'intruders.'
Pg 65. The word 'for' was changed to 'far' in the following sentence,
"He has a for rarer song, which he reserves for some nymph whom he
meets in the air."
Pg 76. The word 'righful' was changed to 'rightful.'
Pg 76. The second occurence of the word 'when' was removed from the
following sentence, "Scarcely have the trees expanded their buds,
when, in the still April mornings, or toward nightfall, when you
hear the hum of his devoted wings."
Pg 91. The sentence, "In the woods are sounds and voices, and a
dumb kind of companionship; one is little more than a walking
tree himself; but come upon these one of mountain-lakes, and the
wildness stands relieved and meets you face to face," has been
changed to "In the woods are sounds and voices, and a dumb kind
of companionship; one is little more than a walking tree
himself; but come upon one of these mountain-lakes, and the
wildness stands relieved and meets you face to face". Pg 104.
Pg 104. The word 'docdor' was changed to 'doctor.'
Pg 108. The words 'over night' were changed to 'over-night.'
Pg 120. The word 'cannnot' was changed to 'cannot.'
Pg 126. The word 'linging' was changed to 'lining.'
Pg 128. A comma has been added to the sentence, "Among the five,
the nest that interested me most was that of the blue grossbeak."
Pg 173. The word 'duke' was changed to 'duck.'
Pg 184. The word 'nighfall' was changed to 'nightfall.'
Pg 192. One occurrence of the word 'the' was removed from the
following sentence, "After looking in vain for the line of
marked trees, we moved off to the the left in a doubtful,
hesitating manner, keeping on the highest ground and blazing the
trees as we went."
Pg 251. The word 'parti-webbed' was retained as it may have been a
word intentionally invented by the author.