peculiar to it, if any such there are; and I was no sooner off the
hotel piazza for my first ante-breakfast stroll at Highlands, than I
was on the watch for Carolina snowbirds and mountain solitary vireos,
two varieties (“subspecies” is the more modern word) originally
described a few years ago, by Mr. Brewster,[8] from specimens taken
at this very place. I had gone perhaps a quarter of a mile over the
road by which I had driven into the town, after dark, on the evening
before, when I was conscious that a bird had flown out from under the
overhanging bank just behind me. I turned hastily, and on the instant
put my eye upon the nest. My ear, as it happened, had marked the spot
precisely. “Here it is,” I thought, and in a fraction of a minute
more the anxious mother showed herself,--a snowbird. The nest looked
somewhat larger than those I had seen in New Hampshire, but that may
have been a fault of memory.[9] It contained young birds and a single
egg. I was in great luck, I said to myself; but in truth, as a longer
experience showed, the birds were so numerous all about me that it
would have been no very difficult undertaking to find a nest or two
almost any day.
Birds which had been isolated (separated from the parent stock) long
enough to have taken on some constant physical peculiarity--without
which they could not be entitled to a distinctive name, though it were
only a third one--might be presumed to have acquired at the same time
some slight but real idiosyncrasy of voice and language. But if this is
true of the Carolina junco, I failed to satisfy myself of the fact. On
the first day, indeed, I wrote with perfect confidence: “The song is
clearly distinguishable from that of the northern bird,--less musical,
more woodeny and chippery;” more like the chipping sparrow’s, I meant
to say. If I had come away then, with one bird’s trill to go upon, that
would have been my verdict, to be printed, when the time came, without
misgiving. But further observation brought further light, or, if the
reader will, further obscurity. Some individuals were better singers
than others,--so much was to be expected; but taking them together,
their music was that of ordinary snowbirds such as I had always
listened to. For aught my ears told me, I might have been in Franconia.
This is not to assert that the Alleghanian junco has not developed a
voice in some measure its own; I believe it has; probability has more
authority than personal experience with me in matters of this kind; but
the change is as yet too inconsiderable for my senses to appreciate on
a short acquaintance, with no opportunity for a direct comparison. In
such cases, it is perhaps true that one needs to trust the first lively
impression,--which has, undeniably, its own peculiar value,--or to
wait the result of absolute familiarity. My stay of three weeks gave
me neither one thing nor another; it was long enough to dissipate my
first feeling of certainty, but not long enough to yield a revised and
settled judgment.
The mountain vireo (_Vireo solitarius alticola_), like the Carolina
snowbird, may properly be called a native of Highlands; and, like the
snowbird, it proved to be common. My first sight of it was in the hotel
yard, but I found it--single pairs--everywhere. A look at the feathers
of the back through an opera-glass showed at once the principal
distinction--apart from a superiority in size, not perceptible at a
distance--on which its subspecific identity is based; but though to its
original describer its song sounded very much finer than the northern
bird’s, I could not bring myself to the same conclusion. I should never
have remarked in it anything out of the common. Once, to be sure, I
heard notes which led me to say, “There! that voice is more like a
yellow-throat’s,--fuller and rounder than a typical solitary’s;” but
that might have happened anywhere, and at all other times; although
I had the point continually in mind, I could only pronounce the song
to be exactly what my ear was accustomed to,--sweet and everything
that was beautiful, but a solitary vireo’s song, and nothing else. And
this, to my thinking, is praise enough. There is no bird-song within
my acquaintance that excels the solitary’s in a certain intimate
expressiveness, affectionateness, home-felt happiness, and purity. Not
that it has all imaginable excellencies,--the unearthly, spiritual
quality of the best of our woodland thrush music, for example; but such
as it is, an utterance of love and love’s felicity, it leaves nothing
to ask for. What a contrast between it and the red-eye’s comparatively
meaningless and feelingless music! And yet, so far as mere form is
concerned, the two songs may be considered as built upon the same
model, if not variations of the same theme. There must be a world-wide
difference between the two species, one would say, in the matter of
character and temperament.
My arrival at Highlands seemed to have been coincident with that of
an extraordinary throng of rose-breasted grosbeaks. For the first few
days, especially, the whole countryside was alive with them, till
I felt as if I had never seen grosbeaks before. Their warbling was
incessant; so incessant, and at the same time so exceedingly smooth
and sweet,--“mellifluous” is precisely the word,--that I welcomed it
almost as a relief when the greater part of the chorus moved on. After
such a surfeit of honeyed fluency, I was prepared better than ever to
appreciate certain of our humbler musicians,--with a touch of roughness
in the voice and something of brokenness in the tune; birds, for
instance, like the black-throated green warbler, the yellow-throated
vireo, and the scarlet tanager. But if I was glad the crowd had gone,
I was glad also that a goodly sprinkling of the birds had remained;
so that there was never a day when I did not see and hear them. The
rose-breast is a lovely singer. In my criticism of him I am to be
understood as meaning no more than this: that he, like every other
artist, has the defects of his good qualities. Smoothness is a virtue
in music as in writing; but it is not the only virtue, nor the one that
wears longest.
After the grosbeaks, whose great abundance was but transitory, two
of the most numerous birds were the Canadian flycatching warbler and
the black-throated blue,--two Northerners, as I had always thought
of them. Every mountain stream was overhung, mile after mile, by a
tangle of rhododendron and laurel, and out of every such tangle came
the hoarse drawling _kree, kree, kree_ of the black-throated blue, and
the sharp, vivacious, half-wrennish song of the Canadian flycatcher. I
had never seen either species in anything near such numbers; and I may
include the Blackburnian warbler in the same statement. Concerning the
black-throated blue, it is to be said that within a year or two the
Alleghanian bird has been discriminated by Dr. Coues as a local race,
with a designation of its own,--_Dendroica cærulescens cairnsi_,--the
points of distinction being its smaller size and the color of the
middle back, black instead of blue. I cannot recollect that I perceived
anything peculiar about its notes, nor, so far as appears, did Mr.
Brewster do so; yet it would not surprise me if such peculiarities were
found to exist. The best of ears (and there can be very few to surpass
Mr. Brewster’s, I am sure) cannot take heed of everything, especially
in a strange piece of country, with a voice out of every bush calling
for attention.
A few birds, too familiar to have attracted any particular notice
on their own account, became interesting because of the fact that
they were not included among those found here by Mr. Brewster. One
of these was the Maryland yellow-throat, of which Mr. Brewster saw
no signs above a level of 2100 feet. (The elevation of Highlands, I
may remind the reader, is 3800 feet.) At the time of my visit, the
song, _witchery, witchery, witchery_, or _fidgety, fidgety, fidgety_
(every listener will transliterate the dactyls for himself), was to
be heard daily from the hotel piazza, though so far away that, with
Mr. Brewster’s negative experience in mind, I deferred listing the
name till, after two or three days, I found leisure to go down to the
swamp out of which the notes, whatever they were, evidently proceeded.
Then it transpired that at least five males were in song, in four
different places. And later (May 25) I happened upon one in still
another and more distant spot. Probably the species had come in since
Mr. Brewster’s day (eleven years before), with some change of local
conditions,--the cutting down of a piece of forest, perhaps, and the
formation of a bushy swamp in its place. A villager closely observant
of such things, and well acquainted with the bird, assured me from his
own recollection of the matter (and he remembered Mr. Brewster’s visit
well) that such was pretty certainly the case.
Another bird seen almost daily, though in limited numbers, was the
red-winged blackbird, which Mr. Brewster noticed only in a few places
in the lower valleys. It seemed well within the range of probability
that the same changes which had brought in one lover of sedgy tussocks
and button-bushes should have attracted also another. I made no search
for nests, but the fact that the birds were seen constantly from May 7
to May 27 may be taken as reasonably conclusive evidence that they were
on their breeding-grounds.
Two or more pairs of phœbes had settled in the neighborhood, and two
or more pairs of parula warblers. The former were not found by Mr.
Brewster above a level of 3000 feet, and the latter he missed at
Highlands, although, as he says, the presence of trees hung with usnea
lichens made their absence a surprise.
Hardly less rememberable than these differences of experience was one
striking coincidence. On the 25th of May, when I had been at Highlands
more than a fortnight, I was sitting on the veranda waiting for the
dinner-bell, and reading the praises of “free silver” in a Georgia
newspaper, when I jumped to my feet at the whistle of a Baltimore
oriole. I started at once in pursuit, and presently came up with the
fellow, a resplendent old male, in a patch of shrubbery bordering the
hotel grounds. I kept as near him as I could (in Massachusetts he would
scarcely have drawn a second look), and even followed him across the
street into a neighbor’s yard. He was the only one I had seen (he was
piping again the next morning, the last of my stay), and on referring
to Mr. Brewster’s paper I found that he too met with one bird here,[10]
and in exactly the same spot. The keeper of the hotel remembered the
circumstance and the pleasure of Mr. Brewster over it. In my case, at
any rate, the lateness and unexpectedness of the bird’s appearance,
together with what a certain scholarly friend of mine would have called
his “uniquity,” made him the bringer of a most agreeable noonday
excitement. Where he had come from, and whether he had brought a mate
with him, were questions I had no means of answering. He reminded me of
my one Georgia oriole, on the field of Chickamauga.
The road to Horse Cove, of which I have already spoken, offered easy
access to a lower and more summery level, the land at this point
dropping almost perpendicularly for about a thousand feet. In half an
hour the pedestrian was in a new climate, with something like a new
fauna about him. Here were such birds as the Kentucky warbler, the
hooded warbler, the cardinal grosbeak, and the Acadian flycatcher, none
of them to be discovered on the plateau above. Here, also,--but this
may have been nothing more than an accident,--were the only bluebirds
(a single family) that I saw anywhere until, on my journey out of the
mountains, I descended into the beautiful Cullowhee Valley.
At Highlands the birds were a mixed lot, Southerners and Northerners
delightfully jumbled: a few Carolina wrens (one was heard whistling
from the summit of Whiteside!); a single Bewick wren, singing and
dodging along a fence in the heart of the village; tufted titmice;
Carolina chickadees; Louisiana water thrushes and turkey buzzards:
and on the other side of the account, brown creepers, red-bellied
nuthatches, black-throated blues, Canada warblers, Blackburnians,
snowbirds, and olive-sided flycatchers.
An unexpected thing was the commonness of blue golden-winged warblers,
chats, and brown thrashers (the chats less common than the other two)
at an elevation of 3800 feet. Still more numerous, in song continually,
even on the summit of Satulah, were the chestnut-sided warblers,
although Mr. Brewster, in his tour through the region, “rarely saw more
than one or two in any single day:” a third instance, as seemed likely,
of a species that had taken advantage of new local conditions--an
increase of shrubby clearings, in the present case--within the last ten
years. Here, as everywhere, the presence of some birds and the absence
of others were provocative of questions. Why should the Kentucky
warbler sing from rhododendron thickets halfway up the slope at the
head of Horse Cove, and never be tempted into other thickets, in all
respects like them, just over the brow of the cliff, 500 feet higher?
Why should the summer yellow-bird, which pushes its hardy spring flight
beyond the Arctic circle, restrict itself here in the Carolinas to the
low valley lands (I saw it at Walhalla and in the Cullowhee Valley),
and never once choose a nesting-site in appropriate surroundings at
a little higher level? Why should the chat and the blue golden-wing
find life agreeable at Highlands, and their regular neighbors, the
prairie warbler and the white-eyed vireo, so persistently refuse to
follow them? And why, in the first half of May, was there so strange a
dearth of migrants in these attractive mountain woods?--a few blackpoll
warblers (last seen on the 18th), a single myrtle-bird (on the 7th),
and a crowd of rose-breasted grosbeaks and Blackburnian warblers (on
the 8th and 9th, especially) being almost the only ones to fall under
my notice. After all, one of the best birds I saw, not forgetting the
Wilson’s phalarope,--my adventure with which has been detailed in a
previous chapter,--was a song sparrow singing from a dense swampy
thicket on the 25th of May. So far as I am aware, no bird of his kind
has ever before been reported in summer from a point so far south. He
looked natural, but not in the least commonplace, as, after a long wait
on my part,--for absolute certainty’s sake,--he hopped out into sight.
I was proud to have made one discovery!
In such a place, so limited in the range of its physical conditions,--a
village surrounded by forest,--the birds, however numerous they might
be, counted as individuals, were sure to be of comparatively few
species. Omitting such as were certainly, or almost certainly, migrants
or strays,--the blackpoll, the myrtle-bird, the barn swallow, the
kingbird, the solitary sandpiper, and the phalarope,--and such as were
found only at a lower level, in Horse Cove and elsewhere; omitting,
too, all birds of prey,--few, and for the most part but imperfectly
identified; restricting myself to birds fully made out and believed to
be summering in the immediate neighborhood of Highlands; omitting the
raven, of course,--I counted but fifty-nine species.
All things considered, I was not inconsolable at finding my
ornithological activities in some measure abridged. I had the more
time, though still much too little, for other pursuits. It would have
been good to spend the whole of it upon the plants, or in admiring the
beauties of the country itself. As it was, I plucked a blossom here
and there, stored up a few of the more striking of them in the memory,
and enjoyed many an hour in gazing upon the new wild world, where, no
matter how far I climbed, there was nothing to be seen on all sides but
a sea of hills, wave rising beyond wave to the horizon’s rim.
The horizon was never far off. I was twice on Satulah and twice on
Whiteside, from which latter point, by all accounts, I should have
had one of the most extensive and beautiful prospects to be obtained
in North Carolina; but I had fallen upon one of those “spells of
weather,” common in mountainous places, which make a visitor feel as
if nothing were so rare as a transparent atmosphere. For ordinary
lowland purposes the days were no doubt favorable enough: a pleasing,
wholesome alternation of rain and shine, wind and calm, with no lack of
thunder and lightning, and once, at least, a lively hailstorm. “Weather
like this I have never seen elsewhere. Such air!” So I wrote in my
enthusiasm, thinking of physical comfort,--a man who wished to walk and
sit still by turns, and be neither sunstruck nor chilled; but withal,
there was never an hour of clear distance till the morning I came away,
when mountain ascents were no longer to be thought of. The world was
all in a cover of mist, and the outlying hills, one beyond another,
with the haze settling into the valleys between them, were, as I say,
like the billows of the sea. Nothing could have been more beautiful,
perhaps; but a curtain is a curtain, and I longed to see it rise. A
change of wind, a puff from the northwest, and creation would indeed
have “widened in man’s view.” That was not to be, and all those lofty
North Carolina peaks--of which, to a New Englander, there seem to be so
many[11]--were seen by me only from railway trains and from the hotel
veranda at Asheville, on my journey homeward. On Satulah and Whiteside
I was forced to please myself with the glory of the foreground. What
lay beyond the mist was matter for dreams.
But even as things were, I was not so badly used. There was more
beauty in sight than I could begin to see, and, notwithstanding the
comparative narrowness of the outlook,--partly because of it,--one of
my most enjoyable forenoons was spent on the broad, open, slightly
rounded summit of Satulah. Here and there (“more here than there,” my
pencil says) a solitary cabin was visible, or a bit of road, a ribbon
of brown amidst the green of the forest, but no village, nor so much as
a hamlet. The only other signs of human existence were a light smoke,
barely distinguishable, rising from Horse Cove as I guessed, and,
for a few minutes, a man whom my eye fell upon most unexpectedly, a
motionless speck, though he was walking, far down the Walhalla road. I
turned my glass that way, and behold, he had the usual bag of grain on
his back.
The date was May 12. I had been in Highlands less than a week, and my
thoughts still ran upon ravens, the birds which, more even than the
southern snowbird and the mountain vireo, I had come hither to seek.
They were said often to fly over, and this surely should be a place to
see them. They could not escape me, if they passed within a mile. But
though I kept an eye out, as we say, and an ear open, it was a vigil
thrown away. Buzzards, swifts, and a bunch of twittering goldfinches
were all the birds that “flew over.” A chestnut-sided warbler sang so
persistently from the mountain side just below that his sharp voice
became almost a trouble. From the same quarter rose the songs of an
oven-bird, a rose-breasted grosbeak, and a scarlet tanager. On the
summit itself were snowbirds and chewinks; and once, to my delight, a
field sparrow gave out a measure or two. After all, go where you will,
you will hear few voices that wear better than his,--clear, smooth,
most agreeably modulated, and temperately sweet.
The only trees I remember at the very top of the mountain were a few
dwarfed and distorted pines and white oaks,--enough to remind a Yankee
that he was not in New Hampshire. On the other hand, here grew our
Massachusetts huckleberry (_Gaylussacia resinosa_), which I had seen
nowhere below, where a great abundance of the buckberry--so I think
I heard it called (_G. ursina_),--taller bushes, more comfortable
to pick from, with larger blossoms--seemed to have taken its place.
I should have been glad to try the fruit, which was described as of
excellent quality. On that point, with no thought of boasting, I could
have spoken as an expert. With the huckleberry was chokeberry, another
New England acquaintance, fair to look upon, but a hypocrite,--“by
their fruits ye shall know them;” and underneath, among the stones,
were common yellow five-fingers, birdfoot violets, and leaves of
trailing arbutus, three-toothed potentilla (a true mountain-lover),
checker-berry, and galax. With them, but deserving a sentence by
themselves, were the exquisite vernal iris and the scarlet painted-cup,
otherwise known as the Indian’s paint-brush and prairie fire, splendid
for color, and in these parts, to my astonishment, a frequenter of
the forest. I should have looked for it only in grassy meadows. Here
and there grew close patches of the pretty, alpine-looking sand
myrtle (_Leiophyllum buxifolium_), thickly covered with small white
flowers,--a plant which I had seen for the first time the day before
on the summit of Whiteside. Mountain heather I called it, finding no
English name in Chapman’s Flora. Stunted laurel bushes in small bud
were scattered over the summit. A little later they would make the
place a flower garden. A single rose-acacia tree had already done
its best in that direction, with a full crop of gorgeous rose-purple
clusters. The winds had twisted it and kept it down, but could not
hinder its fruitfulness.
These things, and others like them, I noticed between times. For
the most part, my eyes were upon the grand panorama, a wilderness
of hazy, forest-covered mountains, as far as the eye could go;
nameless to me, all of them, with the exception of the two most
conspicuous,--Whiteside on the one hand, and Rabun Bald on the other.
For my comfort a delicious light breeze was stirring, and the sky,
as it should be when one climbs for distant prospects, was sprinkled
with small cumulus clouds, which in turn dappled the hills with moving
shadows. One thing brought home to me a truth which in our dullness we
ordinarily forget: that the earth itself is but a shadow, a something
that appeareth, changeth, and passeth away. The rocks at my feet were
full of pot-holes, such as I had seen a day or two before, the water
still swirling in them, at Cullasajah Falls. As universal time is
reckoned,--if it is reckoned,--old Satulah and all that forest-covered
world which I saw, or thought I saw, from it, were but of yesterday, a
“divine improvisation,” and would be gone to-morrow.
More beautiful than the round prospect from Satulah, though perhaps
less stimulating to the imagination, was the view from the edge of
the mountain wall at the head of Horse Cove. Here, under a chestnut
tree, I spent the greater part of a half day, the valley with its road
and its four or five houses straight at my feet. A dark precipice of
bare rock bounded it on the right, a green mountain on the left, and
in the distance southward were ridges and peaks without number. A few
of the nearer hills I knew the names of by this time: Fodderstack,
Bearpen, Hogback, Chimneytop, Terrapin, Shortoff, Scaly, and Whiteside.
Satulah was the only _fine_ name in the lot; and that, for a guess, is
aboriginal. The North American Indians had a genius for names, as the
Greeks had for sculpture and poetry, and will be remembered for it.
I had come to the brow of the cliffs, at a place called Lover’s Leap,
in search of a particular kind of rhododendron. It bore a small flower,
my informant had said, and grew hereabout only in this one spot. It
proved to be _R. punctatum_, new to me, and now (May 23) in early
blossom. Four days afterward, in the Cullowhee and Tuckaseegee valleys,
I saw riverbanks and roadsides lined with it; very pretty, of course,
being a rhododendron, but not to be compared in that respect with the
purple rhododendron or mountain rose-bay (_R. Catawbiense_). That,
also, was to be found here, but very sparingly, as far as I could
discover. I felicitated myself on having seen it in its glory on the
mountains of southeastern Tennessee. The common large rhododendron (_R.
maximum_) stood in thickets along all the brooks. I must have walked
and driven past a hundred miles of it, on the present trip, it seemed
to me; but I have never been at the South late enough to see it in
flower.