end of the first syllable. The song seems to be cut off short, as if the
notes had stuck fast in the singer’s throat, or as if something had
occurred to divert his mind from the song. Perhaps this hiatus is caused
by the sudden appearance of an insect glancing by, which attracts the
musician’s attention. This bird usually chooses a dead twig or limb in
the woods as a perch, on which he sits and sings, turning his head from
side to side, so that no flitting moth may escape him.
And what a persistent singer he is! He sings not only in the spring when
other vocalists are in full tune, but also all summer long, never
growing disheartened, even when the mercury rises far up into the
nineties. What a pleasant companion he has been in my midsummer strolls
as I have wearily patrolled the woods! On the sultriest August days,
when all other birds were glad to keep mute, sitting on their shady
perches with open mandibles and drooping wings, the dreamful, far-away
strain of the wood-pewee has drifted, a welcome sound, to my ears
through the dim aisles. He seems to be a friend in need. How often, when
the heat has almost overcome me, as I pursued my daily beat, that song
has put new vigor into my veins! When Mr. Lowell wrote that
“The phœbe scarce whistles
Once an hour to his fellow,”
he must have been listening to a far lazier specimen than those with
which I am acquainted.
Most birds fall occasionally into a kind of ecstasy of song, and the
wood-pewee is no exception. One evening, after it had grown almost dark,
a pewee flew out into the air directly above my head from a tree by the
wayside, and began to sing in a perfect transport as he wheeled about;
then he swung back into the tree, keeping up his song in a continuous
strain, and in sweet, half-caressing tones, until finally it died away,
as if the bird had fallen into a doze during his vocal recital. I
lingered about for some time, but he did not sing again. Why should he
repeat his good-night song?
I have frequently heard young pewees in midsummer singing in a
continuous way, instead of whistling the intermittent song of their
elders. It sounds very droll, giving you the impression that the little
neophyte has begun to turn the crank of his music-box and can’t stop.
His voice is quite sweet, but his execution is very crude. Wait,
however, until he is eight or nine months older, and he will show you
what a winged Orpheus can do. My notes say that on the thirtieth of
July, 1891, I heard a “pewee’s quaint, prolonged whistle, interlarded
with his ordinary notes.” Thus it will be seen that he is a somewhat
versatile songster, proving the poet’s lines half true and half untrue:—
“The birds but repeat without ending
The same old traditional notes,
Which some, by more happily blending,
Seem to make over new in their throats.”
Younger readers may, perhaps, need to be informed that the wood-pewee
belongs to the family of flycatchers, as do also the king-bird or
bee-martin, the phœbe-bird, the great-crested flycatcher, and a number
of other interesting species, all of which have a peculiar way of taking
their prey. The pewee will sit almost motionless on a twig, lisping his
plaintive tune at intervals, until a luckless insect comes buzzing near,
all unconscious of its peril, when the bird will make a quick dash at
it, seize it dexterously between his mandibles, and then circle around
gracefully to the same or another perch, having made a splendid “catch
on the fly.” If the quarry he has taken is small, it slips at once down
his throat; but should it be too large to be disposed of in that summary
way, he will beat it into an edible form upon a limb before gulping it
down. Agile as he is, he sometimes misses his aim, being compelled to
make a second, and occasionally even a third attempt to secure his
prize. I have witnessed more than one comedy which turned out to be a
tragedy for the ill-starred insect. Sometimes the insect will resort to
the ruse of dropping toward the ground when it sees the bird darting
toward it, and then a scuffle ensues that is really laughable, the
pursuer whirling, tumbling, almost turning somersault in his desperate
efforts to capture his prize. Once an insect flew between me and a pewee
perched on a twig, when the bird darted down toward me with a directness
of aim that made me think for a moment he would fly right into my face;
but he made a dexterous turn in time, caught his quarry, and swung to a
bough near by. If one were disposed to be speculative, one might well
raise Sidney Lanier’s pregnant inquiry at this point, the reference
being to the southern mocking-bird, and not to our pewee,—
“How may the death of that dull insect be
The life of yon trim Shakspeare, on the tree?”
It has been my good fortune to find one, but only one, nest of this
bird. It was placed on a horizontal branch about fifteen feet above the
ground, and was a neat, compact structure, decorated on the outside with
grayish lichens and moss, giving it the appearance of an excrescence on
the limb.[6] It is said by those who have closely examined the nests,
that they are handsomely built and ornamented, and are equalled only by
the dainty houses of the humming-bird and the blue-gray gnat-catcher.
The eggs, usually four in number, are of a creamy white hue, beautifully
embellished with a wreath of lavender and purplish-brown around the
larger end or near the centre.
Though our bird prefers solitary places for his home, he is far from
shy, if you call on him in his haunt in the wildwood. He will sit
fearless on his perch, even if you come quite near, looking at you in
his staid, philosophical way, as if you were scarcely worth noticing.
Nor will he hush his song at your approach, although he does not seem to
care whether you listen to him or not. It is seldom that he can be
betrayed into doing an undignified act; and even if he does almost turn
a somersault in pursuing a refractory miller, he recovers his poise the
next moment, and settles upon his perch with as much _sang froid_ as if
nothing unusual had occurred. Altogether, the wood-pewee is what
Bradford Torrey would call a “character in feathers.”
XII.
A PAIR OF NIGHT-HAWKS.
The night-hawk and the whippoorwill are often confounded by persons of
inaccurate habits of observation. It is true, both birds are members of
the goatsucker family; but they belong to entirely different genera, and
are therefore of much more distant kin than many people suppose. The
whippoorwill is a forest bird, while the night-hawk prefers the open
country. Besides, the whippoorwill is decidedly nocturnal in his habits,
making the woods ring at night, as every one knows, with his weird,
flutelike melody; whereas the night-hawk is a bird of the day and
evening. Then, a peculiar mark of the night-hawk is the round white spot
on his wings, visible on the under surface as he performs his wonderful
feats overhead,—a mark that does not distinguish his woodland relative.
As a rule, the gloaming is the favorite time for the night-hawk’s
wing-exercises; then he may be seen whirling, curveting, mounting, and
plunging, often at a dizzy height, gathering his supper of insects as he
flies; but his petulant call is often heard at other hours of the day,
perhaps at noon when the sun is shining with fierce warmth. Even during
a shower he seems to be fond of haunting the cloudy canopy, toying with
the wind.
His call, as he tilts overhead, is difficult to represent phonetically,
both the vowels and consonants being provokingly elusive and hard to
catch. To me he seems usually to say _Spe-ah_. Sometimes the _S_ appears
to be omitted, or is enunciated very slightly, while at other times his
call seems to have a decidedly sibilant beginning. On several occasions
he seemed to pronounce the syllable _Scape_.
I had often watched the marvellous flight of these birds, as they passed
like living silhouettes across the sky; but they had always seemed so
shy and unapproachable that, prior to the summer of 1891, I had
despaired of ever finding a night-hawk’s nest. However, one evening in
June, while stalking about in the marsh, I suddenly became aware of a
large bird fluttering uneasily about me in the gathering darkness.
Presently it was joined by its mate, and then the two birds circled and
hovered about, often coming into uncomfortable proximity with my head,
and muttering under their breath, _Chuckle! chuckle!_ Several times one
of them alighted for a few moments on the rail-fence near by, and then
resumed its circular flight. Even in the darkness I recognized that my
uncanny companions were night-hawks, and felt convinced that there must
be a nest in the neighborhood, or they would not display so much
anxiety. It was too late to discover their secret that evening, and,
besides, I really felt a slight chill creeping up my back, with those
dark, ghostly forms wheeling about my head, and so I went reluctantly
home.
Two days later I found time to visit the marsh. On reaching the spot
where the two birds had been seen, presto! a dark feathered form started
up before me from the ground. It was the female night-hawk; and there on
the damp earth, without the least trace of a nest or a covering of any
kind, lay two eggs. At last I had found a night-hawk’s nest! The
ground-color of the eggs, which were quite large, was of a dirty
bluish-gray cast, mottled and clouded with darker gray and brown.
The behavior of the mother bird was curious. She had fluttered away a
few rods, pretending to be hurt, and then dropped into the grass. On my
driving her from her hiding-place, she rose in the air and began to
hover about above my head, and then, to my utter surprise, she swooped
down toward me savagely, as if she really had a mind to attack me. As I
walked away, she seemed to grow angrier and bolder, making a swift dash
at me every few minutes, and actually coming so near my head as to cause
me involuntarily to raise my cane in self-defence. A quaver of
uneasiness went through me. I really believe she would have struck me
had I given her sufficient provocation. There was a brisk shower falling
at the time, and so, fearing the eggs might become addled, I hurried to
the remote end of the marsh. Suddenly my feathered pursuer disappeared.
Wondering if she had resumed her place on the nest, I sauntered back to
settle the doubt, but presently espied her sitting lengthwise on a top
rail of the fence, while her eggs lay unprotected in the rain. Her dark,
mottled form and sleepy, half-closed eyes made a quaint picture. I
slowly withdrew, and as long as I could see her with my glass, she kept
her perch on the rail without moving a pinion.
On the twenty-third of June another call was made on the night-hawk
family, when I found two odd-looking bairns in the nest, if nest it
could be called. They were covered with soft down, the black and white
of which presented a wavy appearance. Their short, thick bills were
covered with a speckled fuzz, except the tips. I stooped down and
smoothed their downy backs with my hand, but there was no expression of
fear in their sluggish eyes.
Both parents were present on the twenty-sixth of June. For a while the
male bird pursued his mate savagely through the air, as if venting on
her his anger at my intrusion, and then, mounting far up toward the sky
and poising a moment, he plunged toward the earth with a velocity that
made my head dizzy, checking himself, as is his wont, with a loud
resounding _Bo-o-m-m_. The female again pursued her unwelcome visitor,
swooping so near my head two or three times that I could have reached
her with my cane. The cock bird, curiously enough, never displayed so
much courage, but kept at a safe distance.
On the twenty-ninth the young birds had been moved about a half rod from
the original site of the nest, and hopped off awkwardly into the grass
when I tried to clasp them with my hand. The benedict was absent this
time, and was never seen on any of my subsequent visits while the young
birds were fledging. By the first of July the bantlings hopped about in
a lively manner at my approach to their domicile, and wheezed in a
frightened way, spreading out their mottled pinions. On the seventh of
July neither of the parents was to be seen, and the youngsters sat so
cosily side by side on the ground that I had not the heart to disturb
their slumbers. Approaching cautiously on the tenth, I almost stepped on
the mother bird before she flew up. At the same moment both young birds
started from the ground, and fluttered away in different directions on
their untried wings, their flight being awkward and labored. A few weeks
later four night-hawks were circling about above the marsh,—no doubt the
family that had been affording me such an interesting study. What was my
surprise when one of them resented my presence by swooping down toward
me, as the female had done a few weeks before!
Reference has already been made incidentally to the night-hawk’s curious
habit of “booming,” as it is called. This sound is always produced as he
plunges in an almost perpendicular course from a dizzy height,—or, more
correctly, at the end of that headlong plunge, just as he sweeps around
in a graceful curve. There is something almost sepulchral about the
reverberating sound. How it is produced is a problem over which there
has been no small amount of discussion in ornithological circles. But
after considerable study of this queer performance, I am persuaded that
it is a vocal outburst, produced either for its musical effect (though
it is far from musical), or else to give vent to the bird’s exuberance
of feeling as he makes his swift descent.
His thick, curved bill seems admirably adapted to produce this sound, as
do also his arched throat and neck. It has seemed to me, too, that his
mandibles fly open at the moment the boom is heard, although I cannot be
sure such is the case. Besides, the peculiar _chuckle_, previously
referred to, had about it a quality of sound suggestive of kinship with
the bird’s resounding boom. The hollow, wheezy alarm-call of the young
birds, heard on several of my visits to the nest in the marsh,
corroborates this theory. But there is still further proof that this
hypothesis is correct. The night-hawk often makes his headlong plunge
without booming at all, but merely utters his ordinary rasping, aerial
call, which has been translated by the syllable _Spe-ah_. Then he
sometimes combines the two calls, and on such occasions both of the
sounds are uttered with a diminished loudness, as one would expect if
both are vocal performances, but as one would _not_ expect if the
booming were made by the concussion of the bird’s wings with the
resisting air, as some ornithologists suppose. The female sometimes
booms, but her voice obviously lacks the strong, resounding quality that
characterizes the voice of her liege lord.
XIII.
A BIRDS’ GALA-DAY.
In Mr. Emerson’s poem entitled “May Morning” this stanza occurs:—
“When the purple flame shoots up,
And Love ascends the throne,
I cannot hear your songs, O birds,
For the witchery of my own.”
It would seem, therefore, that to be a poet does not always give one the
coign of vantage in observing Nature, but may, on the contrary, prove a
positive disadvantage. Should the rambler go about “crooning rhymes” and
making an over-sweet melody to himself, instead of keeping his ear alert
to the music around him, he would be likely to miss many a wild, sweet
song fully as enchanting as his own measured lines. No music of my own,
however, diverted my mind from Nature’s blithe minstrels as, on the
twenty-ninth of April, 1892, I pursued my avian studies in some of my
favorite resorts.
It was nine o’clock when I reached the quiet woodland lying beyond a
couple of fields. The first fact noted was the return of a number of
interesting migrants which had not been present on the preceding day.
They had, as is their wont, come by night from some more southern
rendezvous. Among them was the oven-bird or accentor, announcing his
presence with his startling song, which at first seemed to come from a
distance, but gradually drew nearer, like a voice walking toward me as
it grew louder and more accelerated. On account of this quaint
ventriloquial quality of voice, the little vocalist is often very
difficult to find, and you are sure to look in a dozen places before you
at last descry him. What a sedate genius he is, as he sits atilt on a
twig, or walks in his leisurely fashion on the leaf-carpeted ground,
looking up at you at intervals out of his sage, beady eyes.
I have hinted that the oven-bird was first seen and then heard. In this
respect the habits of different species of birds differ widely. The
accentors, meadow-larks, orioles, bobolinks, Bewick’s wrens, summer
warblers, white-crowned sparrows, and some other species usually begin
at once to celebrate with pæans their return to their old haunts;
whereas the wood-thrushes, brown thrashers, and white-throated sparrows
seem to wait several days after their arrival before they tune their
harps,—a diversity of behavior difficult to explain. Scarcely less
inexplicable is the fact that some species arrive in scattered flocks,
others in battalions and armies, and others still, one by one. My notes
made on this day contain this statement: “Yesterday I heard a single
call of the red-headed woodpecker; to-day the woods are full of these
birds.”
On the first day of April the first Bewick’s wren of the spring
appeared, but, strange to say, not another wren was seen until near the
end of the month. A single bird often goes ahead of the main body of
migrants like a scout or outrider; while not infrequently a small
company precedes the approaching army in the capacity, perhaps, of an
advance guard.
Threading my way through the “dim vistas, sprinkled o’er with
sun-flecked green,” to an open space near the border of the woods, I had
the opportunity of listening to an improvised cat-bird concert, without
a cent of charge for admission. Here some mental notes were made on the
vocal qualities of this bird in comparison with those of the celebrated
brown thrasher, and with some hesitancy I give my conclusions. Each
songster has his special points of excellence. The thrasher has more
voice volume than his rival, his technique is better, he glides more
smoothly from one part of his song to another, and executes several runs
that for pure melody and skill in rendering go beyond the cat-bird’s
ability; but, on the other hand, it must be said that the latter
minstrel’s song contains fewer harsh, coarse, unmusical notes; his
voice, on the whole, is of a finer quality, is pitched to a higher key,
and his vocal performances are characterized by greater artlessness or
_naïveté_. Though professing to be no connoisseur, I have never felt so
deeply stirred by the thrasher’s as by the cat-bird’s minstrelsy. There
does not seem to be so much fervor and real passion in the vocal efforts
of the tawny musician.
A little farther on, I again turned my steps into a dense section of the
woods. Suddenly there was a twinkle of wings, a flash of olive-green, a
sharp _Chip_, and then there before me, a few rods away, a little bird
went hopping about on the ground, picking up dainties from the brown
leaves. What could it be? Was I about to find a species that was new to
me? It really seemed so. My opera-glass, when levelled upon the bird,
revealed olive-green upper parts, yellow or buff under parts, and four
black stripes on the head, two on the pileum and one through each eye.
It was the rare worm-eating warbler (_Helmitherus vermivorus_) at
last,—a bird that had for many years eluded me. The little charmer was
quite wary, chirping nervously while I ogled him,—for it was a male,—and
then hopped up into a sapling, and finally scurried away out of sight.
A few steps farther on in the woods an extremely fine cat-like call
swung down, like thread of sound, from the tree-tops. Of course, it was
my tiny acquaintance the blue-gray gnat-catcher, and his pretty spouse,
who had arrived, perhaps from Cuba or Guatemala, a few days before. What
an immense distance for their frail little wings to traverse, “through
tracts and provinces of sky”! You seldom see anything more dainty and
dream-like than the fluttering of these birds from one tree-top to
another, reminding you of an animated cloudlet hovering and darting
about in mid-air. Not a more fay-like bird visits my woodland than the
blue-gray gnat-catcher. Even the ruby-throated hummingbird, though still
smaller, seems rather roly-poly in comparison; and no warbler, not even
the graceful redstart, can flit about so airily. One of the
gnat-catchers in the tree-top presently darted out after a miller, which
tried to escape by letting itself fall toward the ground. A vigorous
drama followed. The bird plunged nimbly after, whirling round and round
in a spiral course until it had secured its wriggling prize.
The gnat-catcher lisps a little song,—a gossamer melody, it might be
called. His slender voice has quite a “resonant tang.” On that day I did
not take notes on his music, but the next day I had a good opportunity
to do so; and I give the result, especially as no minute description of
this bird’s song has been recorded, so far as I know. I had often heard
it before, but had neglected to listen to it intently enough to analyze
its peculiar quality. Bending my ear upon it, I distinctly and
unmistakably detected, besides the bird’s own notes, the notes of three
other birds,—those of the cat-bird’s alarm-call, of the phœbe’s song,
and of the goldfinch’s song and call. The imitation in each case was
perfect, save that the gnat-catcher’s tones were slenderer than those of
the birds whose music he had (if I may so speak) plagiarized. Is this
tiny minstrel a mocker? Perhaps my description may be a surprise to many
students of bird minstrelsy, but I can only say that, having listened to
the song for fully an hour, I could not well have been mistaken. Several
times the reproduction of the goldfinch’s song was so perfect that I
looked the tree all over again and again with my glass for that bird,
but goldfinches there were none about. Moreover, the gnat-catcher was in
plain sight, dropping quite low in the tree part of the time; and there
can be no doubt that every strain proceeded from his lyrical little
throat.
The forenoon and part of the afternoon slipped away all too rapidly,
bringing many valuable additions to my stock of bird lore; but I must
pass others by to describe the most important “find” (to me) of this
red-letter day in my experience. At about half-past four o’clock I
reached an old bush-covered gravel-bank where many birds of various
species have been encountered. As I stepped near a pool at the foot of
the bank, a little bird flashed into view, setting my pulses all
a-flutter. It was the hooded warbler, the first of the species I had
ever seen. He was recognizable at once by the bright yellow hood he
wore, bordered all around with deep black. A bright, flitting blossom of
the bird world!