the only new one heard in Virginia, I ought perhaps to have guarded
my words. I meant to say that the worm-eater was almost the only
species that I there heard sing for the first time,--a somewhat
different matter; for new songs, happily,--songs new to the individual
listener,--are by no means so infrequent as the songs of new birds. On
the very forenoon of which I am now writing, I heard another strain
that was every whit as novel to my ear as the worm-eater’s,--as novel,
indeed, as if it had been the work of some bird from the other side of
the planet. Again and again it was given out, at tantalizing intervals,
and I could not so much as guess at the identity of the singer; partly,
it may be, because of the feverish anxiety I was in lest he should get
away from me in that endless mountain-side forest. Every repetition
I thought would be the last, and the bird gone forever. Finally,
as I edged nearer and nearer, half a step at once, with infinite
precaution, I caught a glimpse of a chickadee. A chickadee! Could he
be doing that? Yes; for I watched him, and saw it done. And these
were the notes, or the best that my pencil could make of them: _twee,
twee, twee_ (very quick), _twitty, twitty_,--the first measure in a
thin, wire-drawn tone, the second a full, clear whistle. Sometimes the
three _twees_ were slurred almost into one. Altogether, the effect
was most singular. I had never heard anything in the least resembling
it, familiar as I had thought myself for some years with the normal
four-syllabled song of _Parus carolinensis_. For the moment I was half
disposed to be angry,--so much excitement, and so absurd an outcome;
but on the whole it is very good fun to be fooled in this way by a bird
who happens to have invented a tune of his own. Besides, we are all
believers in originality,--are we not?--whatever our own practice.
Human travelers were infrequent enough to be little more than a welcome
diversion: two young men on horseback; a solitary foot-passenger, who
kindly pointed out a trail by which a long elbow in the road could be
saved on the descent; and, near the top of the mountain, a four-horse
cart, the driver of which was riding one of the wheel-horses. At the
summit I chose a seat (not the first one of the jaunt, by any means)
and surveyed the valley beyond. It lay directly at my feet, the
mountain dropping to it almost at a bound, and the stunted budding
trees offered the least possible obstruction to the view. Narrow as
the valley was, there was nothing else to be seen in that direction.
Immediately behind it dense clouds hung so low that from my altitude
there was no looking under them. In one respect it was better so, as
sometimes, for the undistracted enjoyment of it, a single painting is
better than a gallery.
There was nothing peculiar or striking in the scene, nothing in the
slightest degree romantic or extraordinary: a common patch of earth,
without so much as the play of sunlight and shadow to set it off;
a pretty valley, closely shut in between a mountain and a cloud; a
quiet, grassy place, fenced into small farms, the few scattered houses,
perhaps half a dozen, each with its cluster of outbuildings and its
orchard of blossoming fruit-trees. Here and there cattle were grazing,
guinea fowls were calling _potrack_ in tones which not even the magic
of distance could render musical, and once the loud baa of a sheep came
all the way up the mountain side. If the best reward of climbing be to
look afar off, the next best is to look down thus into a tiny valley of
a world. In either case, the gazer must take time enough, and be free
enough in his spirit, to become a part of what he sees. Then he may
hope to carry something of it home with him.
It was soon after quitting the summit, on my return,--for I left the
valley a picture (I can see it yet), and turned back by the way I
had come,--that I fell in with the grosbeaks before alluded to: a
single taciturn female with two handsome males in devoted and tuneful
attendance upon her. Happy creature! Among birds, so far as I have ever
been able to gather, the gentler and more backward sex have never to
wait for admirers. Their only anxiety lies in choosing one rather than
another. That, no doubt, must be sometimes a trouble, since, as this
imperfect world is constituted, choice includes rejection.
The law is general. Even in the modern pastime which we dignify as the
“observation of nature” there is no evading it. If we see one thing,
we for that reason are blind to another. I had ascended this mountain
road at a snail’s pace, never walking many rods together without a
halt,--whatever was to be seen, I meant to see it; yet now, on my way
down, my eyes fell all at once upon a bank thickly set with plants
quite unknown to me. There they stood, in all the charms of novelty,
waiting to be discovered: low shrubs, perhaps two feet in height,
of a very odd appearance,--not conspicuous, exactly, but decidedly
noticeable,--covered with drooping racemes of small chocolate-colored
flowers. They were directly upon the roadside. With half an eye, a
man would have found it hard work to miss them. “The observation of
nature”! Verily it is a great study, and its devotees acquire an
amazing sharpness of vision. How many other things, equally strange
and interesting, had I left unseen, both going and coming? I ought
perhaps to have been surprised and humiliated by such an experience;
but I cannot say that either emotion was what could be called poignant.
I have been living with myself for a good many years; and besides,
as was remarked just now, all our doings are under the universal law
of selection and exclusion. On the whole, I am glad of it. Life will
relish the longer for our not finding everything at once.
The identity of the shrub was quickly made out, the vivid yellow of
the inner bark furnishing a clue which spared me the labor of a formal
“analysis.” It was _Xanthorrhiza apiifolia_, shrub yellow-root,--a name
long familiar to my eye from having been read so many times in turning
the leaves of the Manual, on one hunt and another. With a new song and
a new flowering plant, the mountain road had used me pretty well, after
all my neglect of it.
My one new bird at Pulaski--and the only one seen in Virginia--was
stumbled upon in a grassy field on the farther border of the town.
I had set out to spend an hour or two in a small wood beyond the
brickyard, and was cutting the corner of a field by a footpath, still
feeling myself in the city, and not yet on the alert, when a bird
flew up before me, crossed the street, and dropped on the other side
of the wall. Half seen as it was, its appearance suggested nothing in
particular; but it seemed not to be an English sparrow,--too common
here, as it is getting to be everywhere,--and of course it might be
worth attention. It is one capital advantage of being away from home
that we take additional encouragement to investigate whatever falls in
our way. Before I could get to the wall, however, the bird rose, along
with two or three Britishers, and perched before me in a thorn-bush.
Then I saw at a glance that it must be a lark sparrow (_Chondestes_).
With those magnificent headstripes it could hardly be anything else.
What a prince it looked!--a prince in most ignoble company. It would
have held its rank even among white-crowns, of which it made me think
not only by its head-markings, but by its general color and--what was
perhaps only the same thing--a certain cleanness of aspect. Presently
it flew back to the field out of which I had frightened it; and there
in the short grass it continued feeding for a long half-hour, while
I stood, glass in hand, ogling it, and making penciled notes of its
plumage, point by point, for comparison with Dr. Coues’s description
after I should return to the inn. I was almost directly under the
windows of a house,--of a Sunday afternoon,--but that did not matter.
Two or three carriages passed along the street, but I let them go.
A new bird is a new bird. And it must be admitted that neither the
occupants of the house nor the people in the carriages betrayed the
slightest curiosity as to my unconventional behavior. The bird, for
its part, minded me little more. It was engrossed with its dinner,
and uttered no sound beyond two or three _tseeps_, in which I could
recognize nothing distinctive. Its silence was a disappointment; and
since I could not waste the afternoon in watching a bird, no matter
how new and handsome, that would do nothing but eat grass seed (or
something else), I finally took the road again and passed on. I did not
see it afterward, though, under fresh accessions of curiosity, and for
the chance of hearing it sing, I went in search of it twice.
From a reference to Dr. Rives’s Catalogue of the Birds of the
Virginias, which I had brought with me, I learned, what I thought I
knew already, that the lark sparrow, abundantly at home in the interior
of North America, is merely an accidental visitor in Virginia. The only
records cited by Dr. Rives are those of two specimens, one captured,
the other seen, in and near Washington. It seemed like a perversity of
fate that I, hardly more than an accidental visitor myself, should be
shown a bird which Dr. Rives--the ornithologist of the state, we may
fairly call him--had never seen within the state limits. But it was not
for me to complain; and for that matter, it is nothing new to say that
it takes a green hand to make discoveries. I knew a man, only a few
years ago, who, one season, was so uninstructed that he called me out
to see a Henslow’s bunting, which proved to be a song sparrow; but the
very next year he found a snowbird summering a few miles from Boston
(there was no mistake this time),--a thing utterly without precedent.
In the same way, I knew of one lad who discovered a brown thrasher
wintering in Massachusetts, the only recorded instance; and of another
who went to an ornithologist of experience begging him to come into the
woods and see a most wonderful many-colored bird, which turned out,
to the experienced man’s astonishment, to be nothing less rare than a
non-pareil bunting! Providence favors the beginner, or so it seems; and
the beginner, on his part, is prepared to be favored, because to him
everything is worth looking at.
Dr. Rives’s catalogue helped me to a somewhat lively interest in
another bird, one so much an old story to me for many years that of
itself its presence or absence here would scarcely have received a
second thought. I speak of the blue golden-winged warbler. It is
common in Massachusetts,--in that part of it, at least, where I
happen to live,--and I have found it abundant in eastern Tennessee.
That it should be at home here in southwestern Virginia, so near the
Tennessee line and in a country so well adapted to its tastes, would
have appeared to me the most natural thing in the world. But when I had
noted my first specimens--on this same Sunday afternoon--and was back
at the hotel, I took up the catalogue to check the name; and there I
found the bird entered as a rare migrant, with only one record of its
capture in Virginia proper, and that near Washington. Dr. Rives had
never met with it!
This was on the 28th of April. Two days later I noticed one or two
more,--probably two, but there was no certainty that I had not run
upon the same bird twice; and on the morning of May 1, in a last
hurried visit to the woods, I saw two together. All were males in full
plumage, and one of the last two was singing. The warbler migration
was just coming on, and I could not help believing that with a little
time blue golden-wings would grow to be fairly numerous. That, of
course, was matter of conjecture. I found no sign of the species at
Natural Bridge, which is about a hundred miles from Pulaski in a
northeasterly direction. In Massachusetts this beautiful warbler’s
distribution is decidedly local, and its commonness is believed to have
increased greatly in the last twenty years. Possibly the same may be
true in Virginia. Possibly, too, my seeing of five or six specimens,
on opposite sides of the city, was nothing but a happy chance, and my
inference from it a pure delusion.
I have implied that the warbler migration was approaching its height
on the 1st of May. In point of fact, however, the brevity of my
visit--and perhaps also its date, neither quite early enough nor quite
late enough--rendered it impossible for me to gather much as to the
course of this always interesting movement, or even to understand the
significance of the little of it that came under my eye. My first
day’s walks--very short and altogether at haphazard, and that of the
afternoon as good as thrown away--showed but three species of warblers;
an anomalous state of things, especially as two of the birds were the
oven-bird and the golden warbler, neither of them to be reckoned among
the early comers of the family. The next day I saw six other species,
including such prompt ones as the pine-creeper and the myrtle-bird, and
such a comparatively tardy one as the Blackburnian. On the 26th three
additional names were listed,--the blue yellow-back, the chestnut-side,
and the worm-eater. Not until the fourth day was anything seen or heard
of the black-throated green. This fact of itself would establish the
worthlessness of any conclusions that might be drawn from the progress
of events as I had noted them.
On the 28th, when my first blue golden-wings made their appearance,
there were present also in the same place three palm warblers,--my
only meeting with them in Virginia, where Dr. Rives marks them “not
common.” With them, or in the same small wood, were a group of silent
red-eyed vireos, several yellow-throated vireos, also silent,
myrtle-birds, one or two Blackburnians, one or two chestnut-sides, two
or three redstarts, and one oven-bird, with black-and-white creepers,
and something like a flock (a rare sight for me) of white-breasted
nuthatches,--a typical body of migrants, to which may be added, though
less clearly members of the same party, tufted titmice, Carolina
chickadees, white-throated sparrows, Carolina doves, flickers, downy
woodpeckers, and brown thrashers.
It is a curious circumstance, universally observed, that warblers,
with a few partial exceptions,--blackpolls and myrtle-birds
especially,--travel thus in mixed companies; so that a flock of
twenty birds may be found to contain representatives of six, eight,
or ten species. Whatever its explanation, the habit is one to be
thankful for from the field student’s point of view. The pleasurable
excitement which the semi-annual warbler movement affords him is at
least several times greater than it could be if each species made the
journey by itself. Every observer must have realized, for example, how
comparatively uninteresting the blackpoll migration is, particularly
in the autumn. Comparatively uninteresting, I say; for even with the
birch-trees swarming with blackpolls, each exactly like its fellow, the
hope, slight as it may be, of lighting upon a stray baybreast among
them may encourage a man to keep up his scrutiny, leveling his glass
upon bird after bird, looking for a dash of telltale color along the
flanks, till at last he says, “Nothing but blackpolls,” and turns away
in search of more stirring adventures.
Students of natural history, like less favored people, should cultivate
philosophy; and the primary lesson of philosophy is to make the best of
things as they are. If an expected bird fails us, we are not therefore
without resources and compensations; we may be interested in the fact
of its absence; and so long as we are interested, though it be only
in the endurance of privation, life has still something left for us.
Herein, in part, lies the value to the traveling student of a local
list of the things in his own line. It enables him to keep in view
what he is missing, and so to increase the sum of his sensations. One
of my surprises at Pulaski (and a surprise is better than nothing,
even if it be on the wrong side of the account) was the absence of the
phœbe,--“almost everywhere a common summer resident,” says Dr. Rives.
Another unexpected thing was the absence of the white-eyed vireo,--also
a “common summer resident,”--for which portions of the surrounding
country seemed to be admirably suited. I should have thought, too,
that Carolina wrens would have been here,--a pair or two, at least. As
it was, Bewick seemed to have the field mostly to himself, although
a house wren was singing on the morning of May 1, and I have already
mentioned a winter wren which was seen on three or four occasions.
He, however, may be assumed to have taken his departure northward
(or southward) very soon after my final sight of him. Thrashers and
catbirds are wrens, I know,--though I doubt whether _they_ know
it,--but it has not yet become natural for me to speak of them under
that designation. The mockingbird, another big wren, I did not find
here, nor had I supposed myself likely to do so. Robins were common,
I was glad to see,--one pair were building a nest in the vines of the
hotel veranda,--and several pairs of song sparrows appeared to have
established themselves along the banks of the creek north of the city.
I saw them nowhere else. One need not go much beyond Virginia to find
these omnipresent New Englanders endowed with all the attractions of
rarity.
Two or three spotted sandpipers about the stony bed of the creek
(a dribbling stream at present, though within a month or so it had
carried away bridges and set houses adrift), and a few killdeer plovers
there and in the dry fields beyond, were the only water birds seen
at Pulaski. One of the killdeers gave me a pretty display of what I
took to be his antics as a wooer. I was returning over the grassy
hills, where on the way out a colored boy’s dog in advance of me had
stirred up several killdeers, when suddenly I heard a strange humming
noise,--a sort of double-tonguing, I called it to myself,--and very
soon recognized in it, as I thought, something of the killdeer’s
vocal quality. Sure enough, as I drew near the place I found the
fellow in the midst of a real lover’s ecstasy; his tail straight in
the air, fully spread (the value of the bright cinnamon-colored rump
and tail feathers being at once apparent), and he spinning round
like a dervish, almost as if standing on his head (it was a wonder
how he did it), all the while emitting that quick throbbing whistle.
His mate (that was, or was to be) maintained an air of perfect
indifference,--maidenly reserve it might have been called, for aught
I know, by a spectator possessed of a charitable imagination,--as
female birds generally do in such cases; unless, as often happens,
they repel their adorers with beak and claw. I have seen courtships
that looked more ridiculous, because more human-like,--the flicker’s,
for example,--but never a crazier one, or one less describable. In the
language of the boards, it was a star performance.
The same birds amused me at another time by their senseless conduct
in the stony margins of the creek, where they had taken refuge when I
pressed them too nearly. There they squatted close among the pebbles,
as other plovers do, till it was all but impossible to tell feather
from stone, though I had watched the whole proceeding; yet while they
stood thus motionless and practically invisible (no cinnamon color
in sight, now!), they could not for their lives keep their tongues
still, but every little while uttered loud, characteristic cries. Their
behavior was a mixture of shrewdness and stupidity such as even human
beings would have been hard put to it to surpass.
Swallows were scarce, almost of course. A few pairs of rough-wings were
most likely at home in the city or near it, and more than once two or
three barn swallows were noticed hawking up and down the creek. There
was small prospect of their settling hereabout, from any indications
that I could discover. Chimney swifts, happily, were better provided
for; pretty good substitutes for swallows,--so good, indeed, that
people in general do not know the difference. And even an ornithologist
may be glad to confess that the rarity of swallows throughout the
Alleghanies is not an unmitigated misfortune, if it be connected
in any way with the immunity of the same region from the plague of
mosquitoes. It would be difficult to exaggerate the luxury to a
dreaming naturalist, used to New England forests, of woods in which he
can lounge at his ease, in warm weather, with no mosquito, black fly,
or midge--“more formidable than wolves,” as Thoreau says--to disturb
his meditations.
By far the most characteristic birds of the city were the Bewick wrens,
of whose town-loving habits I have already spoken. Constantly as I
heard them, I could never become accustomed to the unwrennish character
of their music. Again and again, when the bird happened to be a little
way off, so that only the concluding measure of his tune reached me,
I caught myself thinking of him as a song sparrow. If I had been in
Massachusetts, I should certainly have passed on without a suspicion of
the truth.
The tall old rock maples in the hotel yard--decaying at the tops--were
occupied by a colony of bronzed grackles, busy and noisy from morning
till night; excellent company, as they stalked about the lawn under my
windows. In the same trees a gorgeous Baltimore oriole whistled for
three or four days, and once I heard there a warbling vireo. Neither
oriole nor vireo was detected elsewhere.
Of my seventy-five Pulaski species (April 24-May 1), eighteen were
warblers and fifteen belonged to the sparrow-finch family. Six of
the seventy-five names were added in a bunch at the very last moment,
making me think with lively regret how much more respectable my list
would be if I could remain a week or two longer. With my trunk packed
and everything ready for my departure, I ran out once more to the
border of the woods, at the point where I had first entered them a
week before; and there, in the trees and shrubbery along the brookside
path, I found myself all at once surrounded by a most interesting bevy
of fresh arrivals, among which a hurried investigation disclosed a
scarlet tanager, a humming-bird, a house wren, a chat, a wood pewee,
and a Louisiana water thrush. The pewee was calling and the house wren
singing (an unspeakable convenience when a man has but ten minutes in
which to take the census of a thicket full of birds), and the water
thrush, as he flew up the stream, keeping just ahead of me among the
rhododendrons, stopped every few minutes to sing his prettiest, as if
he were overjoyed to be once more at home after a winter’s absence. I
did not wonder at his happiness. The spot had been made for him. I was
as sorry to leave it, perhaps, as he was glad to get back to it.
And while I followed the water thrush, Bruce, the hotel collie, my
true friend of a week, whose frequent companionship on the mountain
road and elsewhere has been too much ignored, was having a livelier
chase on his own account,--a chase which I found time to enjoy, for
the minute that it lasted, in spite of my preoccupation. He had
stolen out of the house by a back door, and followed me to the woods
without an invitation,--though he might have had one, since, being
non-ornithological in his pursuits, he was never in the way,--and
now was thrown into a sudden frenzy by the starting up before him
of a rabbit. Hearing his bark, I turned about in season to see the
two creatures going at lightning speed up the hillside, the rabbit’s
“cotton tail” (a fine “mark of direction,” as naturalists say)
immediately in front of the collie’s nose. Once the rabbit ran plump
into a log, and for an instant was fairly off its legs. I trembled for
its safety; but it recovered itself, and in a moment more disappeared
from view. Then after a few minutes Bruce came back, panting. It had
been a great morning for him as well as for me,--a morning to haunt
his after-dinner dreams, and set his legs twitching, for a week to
come. I hope he has found many another walking guest and “fellow
woodlander” since then, with whom to enjoy the pleasures of the road
and the excitement of the chase.
For myself, there was no leisure for sentiment. I posted back to the
inn on the run, and only after boarding the train was able to make a
minute of the good things which the rim of the forest had shown me.
It was quite as well so. With prudent forethought, my farewell to
the brook path and the clearing at the head of it had been taken the
afternoon before. Here, again, Fortune smiled upon me. After three days
of cloudiness and rain the sun was once more shining, and I took my
usual seat on the dry grassy knoll among the rusty boulders for a last
look at the world about me,--this peaceful, sequestered nook in the
Alleghanies, into which by so happy a chance I had wandered on my first
morning in Virginia. (How well I remembered the years when Virginia was
anything but an abode of quietness!) The arbutus was still in plentiful
bloom, and the dwarf fleur-delis also. On my way up the slope I had
stopped to admire a close bunch of a dozen blossoms. The same soft
breeze was blowing, and the same field sparrow chanting. Yes, and the
same buzzard floated overhead and dropped the same moving shadow upon
the hillside. Now a prairie warbler sang or a hyla peeped, but mostly
the air was silent, except for the murmur of pine needles and the faint
rustling of dry oak leaves. And all around me stood the hills, the
nearest of them, to-day, blue with haze.