WINGED LIFE
[Sidenote: The first day’s walk.]
The desert’s secrets of life and growth and death are not to be read
at a glance. The first day’s walk is usually a disappointment. You
see little more than a desolate waste. The light of the blue sky, the
subtle color of the air, the roll of the valleys, the heave of the
mountains do not reveal themselves at once. The vegetation you think
looks like a thin covering of dry sticks. And as for the animals, the
birds--the living things on the desert--they are not apparent at all.
[Sidenote: Tracks in the sand.]
[Sidenote: Scarcity of birds.]
But the casual stroll does not bring you to the end of the desert’s
resources. You may perhaps walk for a whole day and see not a beast or
a bird of any description. Yet they are here. Even in the lava-beds
where not even cactus will grow, and where to all appearance there
is no life whatever, you may see tracks in the sand where quail
and road-runners and linnets have been running about in search of
food. There are tracks, too, of the coyote and the wild-cat--tracks
following tracks. The animals and the birds belong to the desert or
the neighboring mountains; but they are not always on view. You meet
with them only in the early morning and evening when they are moving
about. In the middle of the day they are in the shadow of bush or rock
or lying in some cut bank or cave--keeping out of the direct rays of
the sun. The birds are not very numerous even when they come forth.
They prefer places that afford better cover. And yet as you make a
memorandum of each new bird you see you are surprised after a time to
find how many are the varieties.
[Sidenote: Dangers of bird-life.]
[Sidenote: No cover for protection.]
And the surprise grows when you think of the dangers and hardships that
continually harass bird-life here in the desert. It may be fancied
perhaps that the bird is exempt from danger because he has wings to
carry him out of the reach of the animals; but we forget that he has
enemies of his own kind in the air. And if he avoids the hawks by day,
how shall he avoid the owls by night? Where at night shall he go for
protection? There are no broad-leaved trees to offer a refuge--in fact
few trees of any sort. The bushes are not so high that a coyote cannot
reach to their top at a jump; nor are the spines and ledges of rock in
the mountains so steep that a wild-cat cannot climb up them.
[Sidenote: The food problem.]
[Sidenote: The heat and drouth again.]
[Sidenote: A bird’s temperature.]
No; the bird is subject to the same dangers as the animals and the
plants. Something is forever on his trail. He must always be on guard.
And the food problem, ever of vital interest to bird-life, bothers him
just as much as it does the coyote. There is little for him to eat
and nothing for him to drink; and hardly a resting-place for the sole
of his foot. Besides, it would seem as though he should be affected
by the intense heat more than he is in reality. Humanity at times has
difficulty in withstanding this heat, for though it is not suffocating,
it parches the mouth and dries up the blood so rapidly that if water is
not attainable the effect is soon apparent. The animals--that is, the
wild ones--are never fazed by it; but the domestic horse, dog, and cow
yield to it almost as readily as a man. And men and animals are all of
low-blood temperature--a man’s normal temperature being about 98 F. But
what of the bird in his coat of feathers which may add to or detract
from his warmth? What is his normal temperature? It varies with the
species, so far as I can ascertain by experiment, from 112 to 120 F.
Consider that blood temperature in connection with a surrounding air
varying from 100 to 125 F.! It would seem impossible for any life to
support it. One may well wonder what strange wings beat this glowing
air, what bird-life lives in this fiery waste!
[Sidenote: Innocent-looking birds with savage instincts.]
[Sidenote: The road-runner.]
Yet the desert-birds look not very different from their cousins of
the woods and streams except that they are thinner, more subdued in
color, somewhat more alert. They are very pretty, very innocent-looking
birds. But we may be sure that living here in the desert, enduring its
hardships and participating in its incessant struggle for life and for
the species, they have just the same savage instincts as the plants and
the animals. The sprightliness and the color may suggest harmlessness;
but the eye, the beak, the claw are designed for destruction. The
road-runner is one of the mildest-looking and most graceful birds of
the desert, but the spring of the wild-cat to crush down a rabbit
is not more fierce than the snap of the bird’s beak as he tosses a
luckless lizard. He is the only thing on the desert that has the
temerity to fight a rattlesnake. It is said that he kills the snake,
but as to that I am not able to give evidence.
[Sidenote: Wrens and fly-catchers.]
And it is not alone the bird of prey--not alone the road-runners,
the eagles, the vultures, the hawks, and the owls that are savage of
mood. Every little wisp of energy that carries a bunch of feathers
is endowed with the same spirit. The downward swoop of the cactus
wren upon a butterfly and the snip of his little scissors bill, the
dash after insects of the fly-catchers, vireos, swallows, bats, and
whip-poor-wills are just as murderous in kind as the blow of the condor
and the vice-like clutch of his talons as they sink into the back of a
rabbit. Skill and strength in the chase are absolutely necessary in a
desert where food is so scarce, and in proportion the little birds have
these qualities in common with the great.
[Sidenote: Development of special characteristics.]
[Sidenote: Birds of the air.]
And naturally, as in the case of the animals, the skill and the
strength develop along the line of the bird’s needs, producing that
quality of character, that fitness for the work cut out for him, to
which we have so often referred. There are birds that belong almost
solely to the kingdom of the air--birds like the condor, the vulture,
and the eagle. Upon the ground they move awkwardly, not having
better feet to walk with than ducks and geese. The talons are too
much developed for walking. When they rise from the ground they do
it heavily and with quick flapping wings. Not until they are fairly
started in the upper air do they show what wonderful wing-power they
possess.
[Sidenote: The brown-black vulture.]
[Sidenote: The vulture hunting.]
[Sidenote: The vulture sailing.]
The common brown-black vulture or turkey buzzard is the type of all the
wheelers and sailers. The “soaring eagle” of poetry is something of a
goose beside him. For the wings of the vulture bear him through wind,
sun, and heat, hour after hour, without a pause. To see him circling as
he hunts down a mountain range a hundred miles or more, one might think
that the abnormal breast-muscles never grew weary. He goes over every
foot of the ground with his eyes and at the same time watches every
other vulture in the sky. Let one of his fellows stop circling and drop
earthward on a long incline, and immediately he is followed by all the
black crew. They know instantly that something has been discovered.
But often the hunt is in vain, and then for whole days at a time those
motionless wings bear their burden apparently without fatigue. With no
food perhaps for a fortnight and never any water, that spare rack of
muscles sails the air with as little effort as floating thistle-down.
No one knows just how it is done. In blow or calm, against the wind or
with it, high in the blue or low over the ground, any place, anywhere,
and under any circumstances those wings cut through the air almost like
sunlight. You can hear a whizz like the flight of arrows as the bird
passes close over your head; but you cannot see the slightest motion in
the feathers.
[Sidenote: The southern buzzard.]
[Sidenote: The crow.]
The hot, thin air of the desert would seem a less favorable air for
sailing than the moister atmosphere of the south; but the vulture
of the tropics is not the equal of the desert-bird. He is heavier,
lazier, and more stupid--possibly because better fed. There are several
varieties in the family, the chief variants being the one with white
tipped wings and the one with a white eagle-like head. Neither of them
is as good on the wing as the black species, though none of them is to
be despised. Even the ordinary carrion crow of the desert is an expert
sailer compared with any of the crow family to be found elsewhere.
The exigencies of the situation seem to require wings developed for
long-distance flights; and the vultures, the crows, the eagles, the
hawks, all respond after their individual fashions.
[Sidenote: The great condor.]
The condor is perhaps the vulture’s peer in the matter of sailing. He
belongs to the vulture family, though very much larger than any of its
members, sometimes measuring fifteen feet across the wings and weighing
forty pounds. He is the largest bird on the continent. At the present
time he is occasionally seen wheeling high in air like a mere insect in
the great blue dome. It is said that he soars as high as twenty-five
thousand feet above the earth. But to-day he sails alone and his tribe
has grown less year by year. With the eagles he keeps well up in the
high sierras and builds a nest on the inaccessible peaks or along the
steep escarpments. He belongs to the desert only because it is one of
his hunting-grounds.
[Sidenote: The eagles and hawks.]
[Sidenote: Bats and owls.]
[Sidenote: The burrowing owl.]
This may be said of the eagles and the hawks. They hunt the desert
by day, but go home to the mountains at night. The owls are somewhat
different, not being given to long flight. The deep caves or wind-worn
recesses under mountain ledges furnish them abiding-places. These
caves also send forth at dusk a full complement of bats that seem not
different from the ordinary Eastern bats. The burrowing owl is perhaps
misnamed, though not misplaced. There is no evidence whatever, that I
have ever seen or heard, to show that he burrows. What happens is that
he crawls into some hole that is already burrowed instead of a cave or
recess in the rocks. A prairie-dog or badger hole is his preference.
That the place has inhabitants, including the tarantula and (it is
said) the rattlesnake, does not bother the owl. He walks in with his
mate and speedily makes himself at home. How the different families
get on together can be imagined by one person as well as by another.
They do not seem to pay any attention to each other so far as I have
observed. Ordinarily the desert animals, birds, and reptiles agree to
no such truce. They are at war from the start. I do not know that the
owls, the bats, the night-hawks have any special equipment for carrying
on their part of the war. Sometimes I have fancied they had larger
eyes than is usual with their kinds outside of the desert; but I have
no proof of this. Perhaps it is like the speculation as to whether the
buzzard sees or scents the carrion that he discovers so readily--hardly
amenable to proof.
[Sidenote: The ground birds.]
[Sidenote: The road-runner’s swiftness.]
[Sidenote: The vicious beak.]
All of the air-birds are strikingly developed in the wings and equally
undeveloped in the feet, while all the ground-birds of the desert
are just the reverse of this--that is, deficient in wings but strong
of foot and leg. The road-runner, or as he is sometimes called the
chaparralcock, is a notable instance of this. He is a lizard-eater,
and in order to eat he must first catch his lizard. Now this is by
no means an easy task. The ordinary gray, brown, or yellow lizard
is the swiftest dodger and darter there is in the sand, and even in
straight-line running he will travel too fast for an ordinary dog to
catch him. His facility, too, in dashing up, over, and under bowlders
is not to be underestimated. The road-runner’s task then is not an
easy one, and yet he seems to accomplish it easily. There is no great
effort about his pursuit and yet he generally manages to catch the
lizard. It is because his legs are specially constructed for running,
and his head, neck, and beak for darting. His wings are of little use.
When chased by a dog he will finally take to them, but only for about
fifty yards. Then he drops to the ground and starts on foot again. He
will run away from a man, and sometimes even a horse cannot keep up
with him. Oddly enough, he seems always to run a little sideways. The
long tail (used as a rudder) is carried a little to the right or the
left and gives this impression. When frightened, his top-knot is raised
like that of the pheasant, and he often runs with his beak open. It
is a most vicious beak for all that it looks not more blood-thirsty
than that of the crow. It snaps through a scorpion or a centipede like
a pair of sheep-shearers. And with all his energy and strength the
road-runner weighs only about a pound. He is a long-geared bird, but
not actually any larger than a pigeon.
[Sidenote: The desert-quail.]
[Sidenote: Wings of the quail.]
[Sidenote: Travelling for water.]
The blue valley-quail--whether of Arizona or California breeding--is
quite as strong of leg as the road-runner, though not perhaps so
swift. He does not care much about using his wings; and at best they
are not better than the rather poor average of quails’ wings. By that
I mean that all quails rise from cover with a great roar and bustle,
and they fly very fast for a short distance; but they are soon down
upon the ground, running and hiding. The flight of the quail, too,
is straight ahead. It is not possible for him to rise up over five
hundred feet of canyon wall, for instance, and even on an ordinary
mountain side he takes several flights before he reaches the summit.
The wings are not muscled like the legs, and that is because the quail
is a ground-bird. He gets his food there and spends most of his time
there. In the East Bob White always roosts upon the ground, but the
desert-quail is usually too clever to trust himself in such an exposed
place. He will travel miles to get into a cotton-wood tree at dusk, and
if there is water near at hand so much the better. He dearly loves the
water and the tree, but if he cannot get them he accepts the situation
philosophically and goes to sleep on a high ledge of rock with water
perhaps in his thought but not in his crop.
[Sidenote: Habits of quail.]
[Sidenote: His strong legs.]
Thanks to his capacity for travelling, the quail usually manages to
get enough of small seeds and insects to keep himself alive. He is a
great roamer--in the course of a day travelling over many miles of
country--and his quest is always food. He likes to be among the great
bowlders that lie along the bases of the mountains; and when disturbed
he flies and jumps from rock to rock, much to the discouragement of the
coyote that happens to be the disturber. When forced to rise he flies
perhaps for a hundred yards or more and then drops and begins running.
In the spring he mates, raises a brood, and teaches the young ones
the gentle art of running. In the fall he and his family of a dozen
or sixteen join with other families to make a great covey of several
hundred, or in the old days before the market-hunters came, several
thousand. And they all run. The bottom of the quail’s foot is always
itching for the ground; and he seems never so happy as when leaving the
enemy far behind him. His little legs take him through the brush so
fast that you cannot keep up with him. Every muscle in him is as tough
as a watch-spring. You may wound him, but you have not yet got him. He
will creep into some cactus patch or crawl down a snake-hole--elude you
in some way--and in the end die game just out of your reach.
[Sidenote: Bush-birds.]
[Sidenote: The woodpeckers and cactus.]
There are few trees upon the desert and few bushes of any size; yet
there are birds of the tree and the bush here just as there are birds
of the air and the ground. The most of them seem the same kind of
linnets, sparrows, and thrushes that are seen along the California
coast; though probably they have some peculiar desert characteristic.
I cannot see any difference between the little woodpeckers here and
the woodpeckers elsewhere; yet this desert variety flies from sahuaro
to sahuaro, alights on the spiny trunk with a little thump, and
immediately begins hitching himself up through the worst imaginable
rows of needles just as though he were climbing a plain pine-tree. The
ordinary turtle-dove with his red pigeon-feet alights on the top of the
same sahuaro, the wren bores holes in it and makes a nest within the
cylinder; and the dwarf thrush dashes in and out of tangled thickets of
cholla all day long, and yet none of them suffers any injury. It seems
incredible that birds not accustomed to the desert could do such things.
[Sidenote: Finches and mocking-birds.]
[Sidenote: The humming-bird.]
Possibly, too, these bush-birds--insect-devourers most of them--have
some special faculty for catching their prey, though I have not
been able to discover it. The fly-catchers, the mocking-birds, the
finches, in a land of plenty are quick enough in breaking the back of a
butterfly or beetle, and any extra energy would seem superfluous. Still
there is no telling what fine extra stimulus lies in an empty crop. And
crops are usually empty on the desert. Even the little humming-bird
has difficulty in picking a living. In blossom time he is, of course,
in fine condition, but I have seen him dashing about in the fall when
nothing at all was in bloom, and evidently none the worse for some
starvation. He is a swifter flyer than the ordinary bird and is also
duller in coloring, but in other respects he seems not different. He
breeds on the desert, building his nest in the pitahaya; and he and
his mate then have a standing quarrel with their neighbors for the
rest of the summer. There is not in the whole feathered tribe a more
quarrelsome scrap of vivacity than the humming-bird.
[Sidenote: Doves and grosbeaks.]
[Sidenote: The lark and flicker.]
[Sidenote: Jays and magpies.]
[Sidenote: Water-fowl.]
The dwarf dove common to Sonora, the oven-bird, the red grosbeak, and
many other of the smaller birds known to civilization, are found on
the desert; but apparently with no special faculty for overcoming its
hardships. This is due perhaps to the fact that they are not always
there--are not exclusively desert-birds. Nor do any of the migratory
birds belong to the desert, though they stop here for weeks at a time
in their flights north or south. At almost any season of the year one
sees the cow-blackbird and the smaller crow-blackbird. The mocking-bird
comes only in the spring and fall, and the lark in early summer. The
lark looks precisely like the Eastern bird, but his note is changed;
whereas the flicker has changed the color under his wings from yellow
to pink, but not his note. The robin is no whit different from the
front-lawn robin of our childhood; and the bobolink rising from
salt-bush and yucca, singing as he rises, is the bobolink of ancient
days. At times there are troops of magpies that come and go across the
waste, and at other times troops of blue-jays. And high in air through
the warmth of spring and the cold of autumn there are great flocks of
ducks, geese, brant, divers, shags, willet, curlew, swinging along
silently to the southern or northern waterways. They seldom pause,
even when following the Colorado River, unless in need of water. On
the mesas and uplands one sometimes sees a group of sand-hill cranes
walking about and indulging in a crazy dance peculiarly their own, but
the sight is no longer a common one.
[Sidenote: Beetles and worms.]
[Sidenote: Fighting destruction by breed.]
And again the prey--what of the prey? Has Nature left the beetles,
the bugs, the worms, the bees, completely at the pleasure of the
bird’s beak? No; not completely, though it must be acknowledged that
she has not provided much defensive armor for them individually. She
incases her beautiful blue and yellow beetles in hard shells that other
insects cannot break through, but they are flimsy defences against the
mocking-bird. To bugs and worms and bees she gives perhaps a sting,
deadly enough when thrust into a spider, but useless again when used
in defence against a cactus-thrush. And this is where Nature shows her
absolute indifference to the life or the death of the individual. She
allows the bugs and beetles to be slaughtered like the mackerel in the
sea. But she is a little more careful about preserving the species. And
how does she do this without preserving the individual? Why, simply
by increasing the number of individuals, by breed, by fertility, by
multiplicity. Thousands are annually slaughtered; yes, but thousands
are annually bred. What matter about their lives or deaths provided
they do not increase or decrease as a species!
[Sidenote: The blue and green beetles.]
[Sidenote: Butterflies.]
[Sidenote: Design and character.]
The insects on the desert are mere flashes of life--pin-points of
energy--but not without purpose and not without beauty. The beasts and
the birds may be bleached brown or gray by the sun; but the insects are
many of them as gay as those of the tropics. The ordinary beetles that
a chance turn of a stone reveals are like scarabs of gold, turquoise,
azurite, bronze, platinum, hurrying and scurrying out of the way. The
tarantula-wasp, with his gorgeous orange-colored body and his blue
wings, is like a bauble made of precious stones flickering along the
ground. The great dragon-fly with his many lensed eyes, the bees with
black and yellow bodies, the butterflies with bright-hued wings, the
white and gray millers--all of them dwellers in the sands--are spots of
light and color that illumine the desert as the rich jewel the Ethiop’s
ear. The wings of gauze that bear the ordinary fly upon the air, the
feet of ebony that carry the plain black beetle along the rocks, are
made with just as much care and skill as the wings of the condor and
the foot of the road-runner. Nature in every product of her hand shows
the completeness of her workmanship. She made the wings and the legs
for a purpose and they fulfil that purpose. They are without flaw and
above reproach. Once more, therefore, have they character and fitness,
and once more, therefore, are they beautiful.
[Sidenote: Beauty of birds.]
[Sidenote: Beauty also of reptiles.]
I need not now argue beauty in the birds, the beetles, and the
butterflies. You will admit it without argument. The slate-blue of the
quail, the gay red of the grosbeak, the charm of the rock-wren, the
vivacity of the bobolink or the scale-runner, captivate you and compel
your sympathy and admiration. Yes; but everyone of them is, after
his kind, as much of a butcher, just as much of a destroyer, as the
wild-cat or the yellow rattlesnake. And they have no more character
and perhaps less fitness for the desert life than the sneaking coyote
or the flattened lizard which you do not admire. But why are not the
coyote and the lizard beautiful too? Why not the beauty of the horned
toad and the serpent? Are we never to love or to admire save where form
and color tickle the eye? Are these forever to monopolize the name of
beauty and gather to themselves the world’s applause?
[Sidenote: Nature’s work all purposeful.]
[Sidenote: Precious jewel of the toad.]
If we could but rid ourselves of the false ideas, which, taken _en
masse_, are called education, we should know that there is nothing ugly
under the sun, save that which comes from human distortion. Nature’s
work is all of it good, all of it purposeful, all of it wonderful, all
of it beautiful. We like or dislike certain things which may be a way
of expressing our prejudice or our limitation; but the work is always
perfect of its kind irrespective of human appreciation. We may prefer
the sunlight to the starlight, the evening primrose to the bisnaga,
the antelope to the mountain-lion, the mocking-bird to the lizard; but
to say that one is good and the other bad, that one is beautiful and
the other ugly, is to accuse Nature herself of preference--something
which she never knew. She designs for the cactus of the desert as
skilfully and as faithfully as for the lily of the garden. Each in its
way is suited to its place, and each in its way has its unique beauty
of character. And so, more truly perhaps than Shakespeare himself knew,
the toad called ugly and venomous, still holds a precious jewel in its
head.