woodpecker had been flying several times in and out of a hole in a tree
where he (or she) had a nest. At length, when he remained within the
cavity for some minutes, I stepped to the tree and rapped on the trunk
with my cane. The bird bolted like a small cannon-ball from the orifice,
wheeled around the tree with a swiftness that the eye could scarcely
follow, and then dashed up the lane to an orchard a short distance away.
But he had only leaped out of the frying-pan into the fire. In the
orchard he had unconsciously got too near a king-bird’s nest. The
king-bird swooped toward him, and alighted on his back. The next moment
the two birds, the king-bird on the woodpecker’s back, went racing
across the meadow like a streak of zigzag lightning, making a clatter
that frightened every echo from its hiding-place. That gamy flycatcher
actually clung to the woodpecker’s back until he reached the other end
of the meadow. I cannot be sure, but he seemed to be holding to the
woodpecker’s dorsal feathers with his bill. Then, bantam fellow that he
was, he dashed back to the orchard with a loud chippering of exultation.
“Ah, ha!” he flung across to the blushing woodpecker; “stay away the
next time, if you don’t fancy being converted into a beast of burden!”
A large part of a bird’s toil, after there are children in the nest,
consists in providing victuals for them. For this purpose the whole
country around must be scoured, and sometimes long journeys must be
made. I have watched a kingfisher flying again and again from a winding
creek in the valley to her nest on a hillside nearly a half-mile
distant, with a minnow in her bill, while the sun was pouring a
sweltering deluge upon the fields. It kept her busy every moment to
supply the imperious demands of her hungry brood in the bank. A common
field-bird, which I watched one day for a long while, would often return
to her nest every minute with an insect. Many, many times have I obeyed
Lowell’s injunction,—
“Come up and feel what health there is
In the frank Dawn’s delighted eyes,
As, bending with a pitying kiss,
The night-shed tears of Earth she dries.”
But even at that early hour the feathered toilers have always been ahead
of the human wage-workers in beginning the labors of the day. The
nestlings must have a twilight breakfast; and then, in the evening, as
long as the gloaming lasts, they noisily demand just one more mouthful
for supper.
Young birds are ravenous feeders. They seem to live to eat, and have no
thought of eating to live. For an hour and a half, one August day, I
kept watch of a nestful of bantlings, and during that time the parent
birds were so shy that they fed their infants only twice. At last the
little things became fairly desperate for food, springing up in the nest
and opening their mouths with pitiful cries every time the breeze
stirred the bushes about them. They were so famished that I hurried away
lest they should go to preying on one another, for they would sometimes
greedily seize one another by the bills or heads, and try to gobble one
another down. Incidents like this prove that the old birds must be on
the jump every moment to procure a sufficient supply of food for their
young. Even after they have left the nest, the juvenile members of the
family must be fed for several weeks. As long as mamma and papa will get
their luncheons for them, they will make little effort to help
themselves. I have seen the dainty little accentor feeding a great,
overgrown mossback of a cow-bunting, which had to “juke” down to her
like a giant to a dwarf to receive the morsel she offered him. What a
drudgery it must have been to collect victuals enough to fill his
capacious maw! Think of a toil-worn, care-fretted little mother feeding
a strapping boy that will not work!
Moreover, adult birds often are kept busy for hours supplying their own
craving for food. One April day a hooded warbler, natty little beau,
near an old gravel-bank in the woods, was watched by me for an hour and
a half. During that time he must have caught an insect almost every
minute, and sometimes no sooner had he gulped down one than he made a
swift dash for another. Had he not been so very, very handsome, I should
have dubbed him a gourmand.
At certain seasons of the year what an active life the red-headed
woodpeckers are compelled to lead, in order to satisfy the demands of
their stomachs! With intervals of scarcely more than a few seconds, they
bound out from a perch, seize an insect on the wing, and wheel back
again. For hours this half work, half frolic is kept up. By the way,
almost all birds sometimes engage in this flycatcher game of taking
their prey on the wing. The Baltimore orioles, the bluebirds, the
yellow-bellied woodpeckers, the crested tits, the chippies, the
indigo-birds, and even the white-breasted nuthatches and English
sparrows, to say nothing of many species of warblers, catch insects in
this way.
Many birds have to “scratch for a living,” and that in a literal sense.
There is the towhee bunting, for example. Instead of getting down on his
breast, however, like the hen or the partridge, he stretches himself up
on his legs as if they were stilts, and then bobs up and down in an
amusing fashion, while he scatters leaves and dirt to side and rear. I
do not know whether the robins scratch or not, but they often jerk the
leaves from the ground with their bills, and hurl them away with a
half-disdainful air. Several young wood-thrushes kept in a cage removed
obstructions in the same way.
Even the merry bobolink, the Beau Brummel of our meadows and
clover-fields, cannot spend every day
“Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony;”
for the time comes when he must do the work of a staid husband and
father, and help to take care of the growing brood. With all his
pirouetting in the air, he carries in his bosom an anxious heart, as you
will quickly see if you go too near his snuggery in the grass. The wild
scramble in which birds of all kinds often have to engage, in order to
secure a refractory insect, proves that there is ample room for the play
of their best energies. Thus we see that the birds have plenty to do
besides rollicking, singing, enjoying gala-days, and taking excursions
to gay watering-places. Like their human brothers and sisters, they must
toil patiently on “through the every-dayness of this work-day world.”
They, too, may have their literature—unwritten, however—on the “dignity
of labor.”
V.
BIRD PLAY.
How strange it is that animals never laugh! If you watch a group of
monkeys playing their antics, you will find their faces as sedate as a
judge’s, save, perhaps, a merry twinkle of the eye. Comical as their
gambols are, one would think they would break into convulsions of
merriment. True, animals have various ways of giving vent to their
exuberant feelings, but this is done very slightly by means of facial
expression. Their risibles must be meagrely developed. What has been
said in regard to animals in general is also true of birds, whose eyes
often twinkle and are intensely expressive, but whose countenances
proper reveal very little of the emotion swelling in their breasts.
Yet by the movements of their bodies you can easily read their feelings.
You can tell at a glance by the conduct of a bird whether or not it is
alarmed at your presence, or whether it is engaged in a frolic or in
watching a wily foe. How different is the behavior of most birds in the
breeding-season, with a nest near at hand, from their demeanor at other
times! Look at that brown thrasher perched in a tree-top on a spring
morning, singing his pæan to the surrounding woodland, and notice how
fearless he appears. Contrast his manners two months later when he goes
skulking through the tanglewood, afraid to be seen. Conceal their secret
as they may, an expert student of birds can almost always tell if there
is a nest in the neighborhood.
It is, therefore, by their conduct rather than by their facial
expression that birds reveal their love of play. That they do have their
frolics, no one can doubt. Much of their time is occupied in labor, and
that often of the most serious, if not arduous, kind, and they
frequently combine toil and play; but there are times when they seem to
give themselves up to unmixed sportiveness. There is not much system in
their games, so far as I have observed. They mostly engage in frolics of
a rough-and-tumble kind, for the pure love of the fun, and perhaps with
no thought of winning a prize.
It is possible, however, that the company of red-headed woodpeckers I
watched one day in the woods were having a genuine flying-race. One tree
was selected as a point of departure, from which they would start and
fly around in a wide circle,—perhaps their race-track,—always returning
to the same tree with loud chattering, which sounded like shouts of
applause. This exercise they kept up for hours, always starting from the
same tree and describing nearly the same circle. If it was not a contest
of speed, I am at a loss to know what it was.
The woodpeckers, especially the youngsters, have another game that has a
decidedly human flavor; it is the game of bo-peep among the trunks and
branches of trees. A red-head will shy off from his companions, conceal
himself somewhere behind a tree-trunk, and then peep from his
hiding-place in an exquisitely comical way, until he is espied by some
sharp-eyed fellow-frolicker. A vigorous chase will follow, as pursuer
and pursued dash wildly away among the trees. Sometimes, when the
fugitive is too hotly pursued, he will stop and keep his companion at
bay by presenting his long, spearlike bill as a sort of bayonet.
Another tree-climber is the brown creeper. I have described many of his
pranks in the first chapter of this volume. One November day I witnessed
a performance that beats the record. Two creepers were hitching up the
trunks of the trees in their characteristic manner, when one of them
suddenly dropped straight down about fifteen feet, scarcely more than an
inch from the trunk of the tree; then, instead of alighting, he darted
straight up again the same distance, fluttered a moment uncertainly on
the wing, and then dropped again to the foot of the tree, where he
alighted, and resumed his upward march. But that was not all. Presently
his companion, not to be outdone, began to whirl around and around the
tree, descending in a spiral course until he reached the foot. There he
tarried a moment to take breath, and then, much to my surprise, whirled
himself up in the same way, a distance of perhaps twenty feet,
accomplishing it in four or five revolutions. But, as if to distance all
creepers’ pranks ever witnessed before, he descended again in the same
spiral course. These performances can be interpreted only as ways in
which to give vent to the spirit of frolic in the creeper nature.
On the same day my dancing dot in feathers, the golden-crowned kinglet,
performed one of his favorite tricks, which is not often described in
the books. You will remember that in the centre of the yellow
crown-patch of the males, there is a gleaming golden speck, visible only
when you look at him closely. But when the little beau is in a
particularly rollicksome mood, or wants to display his gem to his mate
or kindred, he elevates and spreads out the feathers of his crest, and
lo! a transformation. The whole crown becomes golden! That gleaming
speck expands until it completely hides the yellow and black of the
crown. It has been my good fortune on several occasions to see the
ruby-crowned kinglet transfigure himself in the same way, except, that
his entire crown became ruby. Probably the little Chesterfield that can
exhibit the most brilliant coronal wins the sweetest damsel in the
kinglet community for a wifie.
Perhaps, as a rule, our winter birds find the season rather cold for
play; yet they often frolic in the snow like children, even when they do
not stalk through it in quest of food. This is especially true of the
snow-birds and tree-sparrows. Birds are especially fond of splashing in
water. Even in the winter-time, when it flows ice-cold into the stream
or pond from the melting snow on the banks, certain birds will plunge
into it, and enjoy their bath for many minutes. They do not seem to be
satisfied with merely wetting their plumes, but remain in the water,
twinkling their wings and tails, much longer than is actually necessary.
Several times in the autumn I have seen a large company of warblers of
different species taking a bath in a woodland pond. How they enjoyed
their ablutions! Again and again they would return to the water, as if
loath to quit it.
To my mind, the flicker is one of our most playful birds, spite of his
staid looks. I have seen a half-dozen of these birds on a single tree,
scudding about after one another and calling, _Zwick-ah! zwick-ah!_ in
their affectionate way. Not infrequently two of them will face each
other, and begin bowing in a vigorous style, turning their heads
dexterously from side to side to avoid collision. This is sometimes kept
up for several minutes. It is very comical, the only drawback being that
the birds themselves do not laugh. Why they should engage in so
ridiculous a performance with so serious an air, is a problem that still
belongs to the unknown.
A cut-throat finch, a pet, was, as a rule, a very sedate little body,
but one day he had to come down from his pedestal to get rid of his
surplus of feeling. This he did by dancing a sort of jig to his own
music, swaying his body to and fro in a most laughable way. On another
day an English sparrow flew upon his cage, which was hanging on the
veranda, when “Pompey” turned his head toward his visitor, burst into
song, and bobbed his head from side to side. No doubt the sparrow felt
that he was receiving an ovation.
A most laughable incident occurred one day in my large cage of birds.
“Flip,” a fine young wood-thrush, was rehearsing his song. A young
thrasher leaped up beside him on the perch. The two birds turned their
heads to each other, and looked into each other’s eyes a moment; then
Flip opened his mouth at his visitor, and broke into song, the tones
coming right out of his gold-lined throat. All the while he jerked his
head from side to side or up and down in perfect time with his music,
his eye gleaming intelligently, as if he enjoyed the fun. Even my loud
outburst of laughter did not put a stop to the little farce. Flip was a
bright bird. He afterward had a cage all to himself, and regaled his
hosts with many a cheerful song, such as only the wood-thrush is master
of. Occasionally he would leap to the end of his cage, open his mouth
wide at “Brownie,” whose cage stood next to his, and sing a comic song;
at least, it seemed comic.
These incidents, although they do not prove that birds have elaborate
games, do prove that they possess the play spirit, and no doubt their
pastimes and amusements are relished fully as much by them as ours are
by us; perhaps more so.
VI.
BIRD DEATHS.
If only some master dramatist could write the tragedies of bird land!
They would be highly exciting, and would afford ample room for the play
of genius; for there are adventures and disasters without number.
Perhaps it is on account of the many reverses that there is so often a
pensive strain in the songs of the birds,—a minor chord running like a
shimmering silver line through the weft of the woodland music. Robert
Burns, in his “Address to a Woodlark,” touched the very marrow of bird
sadness, and pleaded with the little singer to cease its song, or he
himself would go distracted,—
“Say, was thy little mate unkind,
And heard thee as the careless wind?
Oh! nocht but love and sorrow joined
Sic notes o’ wae could wauken.
“Thou tells o’ never-ending care,
O’ speechless grief and dark despair;
For pity’s sake, sweet bird, nae mair!
Or my poor heart is broken.”
If Coleridge had studied the birds more carefully, and acquainted
himself with their griefs, he never would have written, in mockery of
Milton’s “L’Allegro,”—
“A melancholy bird! O, idle thought!
In nature there is nothing melancholy!”
I have seen a pair of birds whose little brood had just been cruelly
slaughtered, and my heart bled for them when I saw that their anguish
was too great for expression. Perhaps birds that have been bereaved soon
forget their sorrow, and yet I doubt it; for if you listen to the minor
treble of the black-capped chickadee, you cannot help feeling that he is
singing a dirge for some long-lost love, or, if not that, may be
recounting, by some occult law of heredity, the story of the many
sorrows of his ancestors from the beginning down to his own generation.
What ravishing sadness there is in the songs of the white-throated and
white-crowned sparrows! The bluebird is always sighing as he shifts from
post to post, and nothing could be more melancholy than the call of the
jay in autumn. The crow at a distance complains of his disappointment,
while the wood-thrush, in his evening and morning voluntaries, rehearses
the sad memories of his life. Keats speaks of the “plaintive anthem” of
the nightingale, and Thomson declares that even the merry linnets “lit
on the dead tree, a dull, despondent flock.”
It would be difficult to arrange a “table of mortality” for the birds.
However, as they know nothing about life insurance, there is no call for
such a compilation; but even if the statistician could state the number
of deaths, there is no arithmetic that could compute the heartaches and
heartbreaks experienced by “our little brothers of the air.” “In the
midst of life we are in death,” might well be put into the litany of the
birds. If they had burial-grounds, there would be plenty of employment
for the sexton and some grave “Old Mortality.”
The elements themselves sometimes play sad havoc with the birds. Mr.
Eldridge E. Fish, of Buffalo, N. Y., tells of an October storm in which
many golden-crowned kinglets were dashed to the ground, while others
flew against windows of houses in which lights were left burning. The
storm was so severe that the little voyagers, travelling southward by
night, were compelled to alight, and thus many of them were destroyed.
The same writer speaks of a cold rain which froze as it fell, coating
everything with ice, and thus cutting off the birds’ supply of food, so
that many bluebirds perished. To my certain knowledge, robins, which
breed very early in the spring, sometimes are frozen to death while
hugging their nests, when a cold wave swoops from the north. The same
calamity sometimes overtakes the crossbill during the winter in the
forests of Canada. Apparently even Nature herself is not always a tender
mother to her offspring. Do not ask me why, for I am not writing a
philosophical thesis.
Birds have many natural enemies. I can still hear the cries of a young
bird that a sparrow-hawk had seized in his talons and was bearing
overhead. What a savage cannibal he seemed to be! Not for anything would
I cast undeserved odium on the reputation of any bird, but I fear very
much that the blue jay is both a robber and a murderer. In the season
when eggs and young birds are in the nest, he has a sly, hang-dog air,
which, to my mind, proclaims not only a guilty conscience, but also a
sinister purpose. At other seasons he seems to have an open, frank
manner. It is true, I myself have never seen him in the very act of
robbing a fellow-bird’s nest, but I have often seen pewees, vireos,
sparrows, and goldfinches charge upon him with desperate fury when he
came in the vicinity of their homesteads. Indeed, all the smaller birds
seem to have a mortal terror of him, which can be accounted for only on
the ground that he is known to be a highwayman.
A farmer friend, who loves the birds, and has none of the unreasoning
prejudice against them sometimes displayed by country folk, told me that
he once saw a blue jay pounce upon a chippie’s nest, snatch up a callow
bantling in his bill, and fly off with it across the field to his nest.
In a few moments he returned, and bore away another nestling. By this
time the farmer’s ire was aroused, and he got his gun and put an end to
the feathered brigand’s life on his return for the third mouthful. This
is more than circumstantial evidence. Yet in defence of the handsome
rascal it may be said that he does good in other directions, for he rids
the earth of many pestiferous insects. Gladly would I acquit him of all
blame if that were possible.
Mr. Burroughs thinks that birds which have suffered at the blue jay’s
hands—or, rather, beak—often retaliate by destroying the jay’s eggs. He
found a jay’s nest with five eggs, every one of which was punctured,
apparently by the sharp bill of some bird, with the sole purpose of
destroying them, for no part of their contents had been removed. He
suggests that in the bird world the Mosaic law may be, “An egg for an
egg,” instead of “An eye for an eye.”
The life of young birds hangs on a very brittle thread. A kind of
Damocles’ sword seems to be dangling over them. What a “slaughter of
innocents” in a single season! I think that of the many nests I found
during the spring of 1892 fully half were raided. How often, on finding
a nest, I have resolved to watch it until the young birds were ready to
leave; but on going back a few days later, the cradle was rifled of its
treasures. These frequent “tragedies of the nests” make the bird-lover
sick at heart. It is no paradox to say that many birds are killed before
they are born.
Birds often meet with fatal accidents. They sometimes impale themselves
on a thorn, or creep into places in thorn-trees from which they cannot
extricate themselves. A robin hung itself one spring by a kite-string
that swung in a loop from the roof of my house,—a case of involuntary
suicide. A nuthatch that I saw one day in the woods had its leg broken,
and I could not help thinking of its lingering agony before it would
starve to death. A pet nonpareil, a dear, bright-hued little fellow, was
well and happy one evening; but the next morning he lay dead on the
bottom of the cage, perhaps the victim of a convulsion. Another pet
nonpareil was not in good health; so I thought a bath in tepid water
might be good for him; but alas! the ablution proved too much for the
little invalid, which, in spite of our utmost efforts to save his life,
succumbed to the inevitable. A like fate befell a young turtle-dove
which a neighbor found in the woods and brought me for a gift.
But the cause of a great deal of mortality among birds is man’s
inhumanity to them. The thirst for blood seems to be inherent in many
coarse natures, and as killing a fellow-man is illegal and almost sure
to be summarily punished, many men gratify their greed for gore by
slaying innocent birds and animals.
“Butchers and villains, bloody cannibals!
How sweet a plant have you untimely cropped!
You have no children, butchers! if you had,
The thought of them would have stirred up remorse.”
The small boy with a sling or a spring-gun or an air-rifle is a source
of much grief to the birds. He even kills the tiny kinglets that flit to
and fro in the trees bordering our streets, and seems to think it sport.
More senseless and wicked still was the fashion in vogue a few years
ago, perhaps not yet quite obsolete, which compelled the massacre of
thousands of bright-hued birds for feminine—I should say
unfeminine—adornment. To say nothing of the “loudness” and bad taste of
such a fashion, it is extremely unwise to put birds to death, for no one
can compute the number of injurious insects they annually devour. A bird
on the bonnet means so much less bread on the table. A bird in the
orchard is a sort of scavenger and pomologist combined, and does his
share in giving you a dish of fruit for dinner. The scarlet tanager
looks like a living ruby in a green tree; but—I speak bluntly—it looks
like a chunk of gore on a woman’s bonnet. In behalf of good taste and
the birds, I enter my protest against this barbaric custom.
True, birds have elements of the Adamic nature in them. Many of them do
relish forbidden fruit, and must be driven off, lest they rifle your
cherry-tree; but it is seldom necessary to kill them, even then,
especially those that live wholly on insects and fruit.
A correspondent once sent me a number of queries. How do birds come to
their “last end”? Do none of them die natural deaths? If they do, why do
we never, or at least very rarely, find dead or dying birds in the
fields and woods? My response to these questions is: Very few birds die
natural deaths,—that is, merely of sickness or old age,—though a few of
them may. When a bird becomes feeble or is crippled, it falls an easy
prey to a prowling hawk, owl, shrike, eagle, or cat. Should a bird
escape all these enemies, and finally lie down and die in a natural way,
it would doubtless soon be found and devoured by a carrion-eating fowl
or quadruped, and thus its corpse would never be seen by human eyes. Sad
indeed it is to think of the numberless ways in which birds meet “the
last enemy.”