or hear the bird through the vista of the years, the song touched with
the magic of youthful memories! One season a friend in England sent me
a score of skylarks in a cage. I gave them their liberty in a field
near my place. They drifted away, and I never heard them or saw them
again. But one Sunday a Scotchman from a neighboring city called upon
me, and declared with visible excitement that on his way along the
road he had heard a skylark. He was not dreaming; he knew it was a
skylark, though he had not heard one since he had left the banks of
the Doon, a quarter of a century or more before. What pleasure it gave
him! How much more the song meant to him than it would have meant to
me! For the moment he was on his native heath again. Then I told him
about the larks I had liberated, and he seemed to enjoy it all over
again with renewed appreciation.
Many years ago some skylarks were liberated on Long Island, and they
became established there, and may now occasionally be heard in certain
localities. One summer day a friend of mine was out there observing
them; a lark was soaring and singing in the sky above him. An old
Irishman came along, and suddenly stopped as if transfixed to the
spot; a look of mingled delight and incredulity came into his face.
Was he indeed hearing the bird of his youth? He took off his hat,
turned his face skyward, and with moving lips and streaming eyes stood
a long time regarding the bird. "Ah," my friend thought, "if I could
only hear that song with his ears!" How it brought back his youth and
all those long-gone days on his native hills!
The power of bird-songs over us is so much a matter of association
that every traveler to other countries finds the feathered songsters
of less merit than those he left behind. The stranger does not hear
the birds in the same receptive, uncritical frame of mind as does the
native; they are not in the same way the voices of the place and the
season. What music can there be in that long, piercing, far-heard note
of the first meadowlark in spring to any but a native, or in the
"o-ka-lee" of the red-shouldered starling as he rests upon the willows
in March? A stranger would probably recognize melody and a wild woodsy
quality in the flutings of the veery thrush; but how much more they
would mean to him after he had spent many successive Junes threading
our northern trout-streams and encamping on their banks! The veery
will come early in the morning, and again at sundown, and perch above
your tent, and blow his soft, reverberant note for many minutes at a
time. The strain repeats the echoes of the limpid stream in the halls
and corridors of the leafy woods.
While in England in 1882, I rushed about two or three counties in late
June and early July, bent on hearing the song of the nightingale, but
missed it by a few days, and in some cases, as it seemed, only by a
few hours. The nightingale seems to be wound up to go only so long, or
till about the middle of June, and it is only by a rare chance that
you hear one after that date. Then I came home to hear a nightingale
in song one winter morning in a friend's house in the city. It was a
curious let-down to my enthusiasm. A caged song in a city chamber in
broad daylight, in lieu of the wild, free song in the gloaming of an
English landscape! I closed my eyes, abstracted myself from my
surroundings, and tried my best to fancy myself listening to the
strain back there amid the scenes I had haunted about Haslemere and
Godalming, but with poor success, I suspect. The nightingale's song,
like the lark's, needs vista, needs all the accessories of time and
place. The song is not all in the singing, any more than the wit is
all in the saying. It is in the occasion, the surroundings, the spirit
of which it is the expression. My friend said that the bird did not
fully let itself out. Its song was a brilliant medley of notes,--no
theme that I could detect,--like the lark's song in this respect; all
the notes of the field and forest appeared to be the gift of this
bird, but what tone! what accent! like that of a great poet!
Nearly every May I am seized with an impulse to go back to the scenes
of my youth, and hear the bobolinks in the home meadows once more. I
am sure they sing there better than anywhere else. They probably drink
nothing but dew, and the dew distilled in those high pastoral regions
has surprising virtues. It gives a clear, full, vibrant quality to the
birds' voices that I have never heard elsewhere. The night of my
arrival, I leave my southern window open, so that the meadow chorus
may come pouring in before I am up in the morning. How it does
transport me athwart the years, and make me a boy again, sheltered by
the paternal wing! On one occasion, the third morning after my
arrival, a bobolink appeared with a new note in his song. The note
sounded like the word "baby" uttered with a peculiar, tender
resonance: but it was clearly an interpolation; it did not belong
there; it had no relation to the rest of the song. Yet the bird never
failed to utter it with the same joy and confidence as the rest of his
song. Maybe it was the beginning of a variation that will in time
result in an entirely new bobolink song.
On my last spring visit to my native hills, my attention was attracted
to another songster not seen or heard there in my youth, namely, the
prairie horned lark. Flocks of these birds used to be seen in some of
the Northern States in the late fall during their southern migrations;
but within the last twenty years they have become regular summer
residents in the hilly parts of many sections of New York and New
England. They are genuine skylarks, and lack only the powers of song
to make them as attractive as their famous cousins of Europe.
The larks are ground-birds when they perch, and sky-birds when they
sing; from the turf to the clouds--nothing between. Our horned lark
mounts upward on quivering wing in the true lark fashion, and, spread
out against the sky at an altitude of two or three hundred feet,
hovers and sings. The watcher and listener below holds him in his eye,
but the ear catches only a faint, broken, half-inarticulate note now
and then--mere splinters, as it were, of the song of the skylark. The
song of the latter is continuous, and is loud and humming; it is a
fountain of jubilant song up there in the sky: but our lark sings in
snatches; at each repetition of its notes it dips forward and downward
a few feet, and then rises again. One day I kept my eye upon one until
it had repeated its song one hundred and three times; then it closed
its wings, and dropped toward the earth like a plummet, as does its
European congener. While I was watching the bird, a bobolink flew over
my head, between me and the lark, and poured out his voluble and
copious strain. "What a contrast," I thought, "between the voice of
the spluttering, tongue-tied lark, and the free, liquid, and varied
song of the bobolink!"
I have heard of a curious fact in the life-histories of these larks in
the West. A Michigan woman once wrote me that her brother, who was an
engineer on an express train that made daily trips between two Western
cities, reported that many birds were struck by the engine every day,
and killed--often as many as thirty on a trip of sixty miles. Birds of
many kinds were killed, but the most common was a bird that went in
flocks, the description of which answered to the horned lark. Since
then I have read in a Minnesota newspaper that many horned larks are
killed by railroad locomotives in that State. It was thought that the
birds sat behind the rails to get out of the wind, and on starting up
in front of the advancing train, were struck down by the engine. The
Michigan engineer referred to thought that the birds gathered upon the
track to earth their wings, or else to pick up the grain that leaks
out of the wheat-trains, and sows the track from Dakota to the
seaboard. Probably the wind which they might have to face in getting
up was the prime cause of their being struck. One does not think of
the locomotive as a bird-destroyer, though it is well known that many
of the smaller mammals often fall beneath it.
A very interesting feature of our bird-songs is the wing-song, or song
of ecstasy. It is not the gift of many of our birds. Indeed, less than
a dozen species are known to me as ever singing on the wing. It seems
to spring from more intense excitement and self-abandonment than the
ordinary song delivered from the perch. When its joy reaches the point
of rapture, the bird is literally carried off its feet, and up it goes
into the air, pouring out its song as a rocket pours out its sparks.
The skylark and the bobolink habitually do this, while a few others of
our birds do it only on occasions. One summer, up in the Catskills, I
added another name to my list of ecstatic singers--that of the vesper
sparrow. Several times I heard a new song in the air, and caught a
glimpse of the bird as it dropped back to the earth. My attention
would be attracted by a succession of hurried, chirping notes,
followed by a brief burst of song, then by the vanishing form of the
bird. One day I was lucky enough to see the bird as it was rising to
its climax in the air, and to identify it as the vesper sparrow. The
burst of song that crowned the upward flight of seventy-five or one
hundred feet was brief; but it was brilliant and striking, and
entirely unlike the leisurely chant of the bird while upon the ground.
It suggested a lark, but was less buzzing or humming. The preliminary
chirping notes, uttered faster and faster as the bird mounted in the
air, were like the trail of sparks which a rocket emits before its
grand burst of color at the top of its flight.
It is interesting to note that this bird is quite lark-like in its
color and markings, having the two lateral white quills in the tail,
and it has the habit of elevating the feathers on the top of the head
so as to suggest a crest. The solitary skylark that I discovered
several years ago in a field near me was seen on several occasions
paying his addresses to one of these birds, but the vesper-bird was
shy, and eluded all his advances.
Probably the perch-songster among our ordinary birds that is most
regularly seized with the fit of ecstasy that results in this lyric
burst in the air, as I described in my first book, "Wake Robin," over
thirty years ago, is the oven-bird, or wood-accentor--the
golden-crowned thrush of the old ornithologists. Every loiterer about
the woods knows this pretty, speckled-breasted, olive-backed little
bird, which walks along over the dry leaves a few yards from him,
moving its head as it walks, like a miniature domestic fowl. Most
birds are very stiff-necked, like the robin, and as they run or hop
upon the ground, carry the head as if it were riveted to the body. Not
so the oven-bird, or the other birds that walk, as the cow-bunting, or
the quail, or the crow. They move the head forward with the movement
of the feet. The sharp, reiterated, almost screeching song of the
oven-bird, as it perches on a limb a few feet from the ground, like
the words, "preacher, preacher, preacher," or "teacher, teacher,
teacher," uttered louder and louder, and repeated six or seven times,
is also familiar to most ears; but its wild, ringing, rapturous burst
of song in the air high above the tree-tops is not so well known. From
a very prosy, tiresome, unmelodious singer, it is suddenly transformed
for a brief moment into a lyric poet of great power. It is a great
surprise. The bird undergoes a complete transformation. Ordinarily it
is a very quiet, demure sort of bird. It walks about over the leaves,
moving its head like a little hen; then perches on a limb a few feet
from the ground and sends forth its shrill, rather prosy, unmusical
chant. Surely it is an ordinary, common-place bird. But wait till the
inspiration of its flight-song is upon it. What a change! Up it goes
through the branches of the trees, leaping from limb to limb, faster
and faster, till it shoots from the tree-tops fifty or more feet into
the air above them, and bursts into an ecstasy of song, rapid,
ringing, lyrical; no more like its habitual performance than a match
is like a rocket; brief but thrilling; emphatic but musical. Having
reached its climax of flight and song, the bird closes its wings and
drops nearly perpendicularly downward like the skylark. If its song
were more prolonged, it would rival the song of that famous bird. The
bird does this many times a day during early June, but oftenest at
twilight. The song in quality and general cast is like that of its
congener, the water-accentor, which, however, I believe is never
delivered on the wing. From its habit of singing at twilight, and from
the swift, darting motions of the bird, I am inclined to think that in
it we have solved the mystery of Thoreau's "night-warbler," that
puzzled and eluded him for years. Emerson told him he must beware of
finding and booking it, lest life should have nothing more to show
him. The older ornithologists must have heard this song many times,
but they never seem to have suspected the identity of the singer.
Other birds that sing on the wing are the meadowlark, goldfinch,
purple finch, indigo-bird, Maryland yellow-throat, and woodcock. The
flight-song of the woodcock I have heard but twice in my life. The
first time was in the evening twilight about the middle of April. The
bird was calling in the dusk "yeap, yeap," or "seap, seap," from the
ground,--a peculiar reedy call. Then, by and by, it started upward on
an easy slant, that peculiar whistling of its wings alone heard; then,
at an altitude of one hundred feet or more, it began to float about in
wide circles and broke out in an ecstatic chipper, almost a warble at
times, with a peculiar smacking musical quality; then, in a minute or
so, it dropped back to the ground again, not straight down like the
lark, but more spirally, and continued its call as before. In less
than five minutes it was up again. The next time, a few years later,
I heard the song in company with a friend, Dr. Clara Barrus. Let me
give the woman's impression of the song as she afterward wrote it up
for a popular journal.
"The sunset light was flooding all this May loveliness of field and
farm and distant wood; song sparrows were blithely pouring out
happiness by the throatful; peepers were piping and toads trilling,
and we thought it no hardship to wait in such a place till the dusk
should gather, and the wary woodcock announce his presence. But hark!
while yet 'tis light, only a few rods distant, I hear that welcome
'seap ... seap,' and lo! a chipper and a chirr, and past us he
flies,--a direct, slanting upward flight, somewhat labored,--his bill
showing long against the reddened sky. 'He has something in his
mouth,' I start to say, when I bethink me what a long bill he has.
Around, above us he flies in wide, ambitious circles, the while we are
enveloped, as it were, in that hurried chippering sound--fine,
elusive, now near, now distant. How rapid is the flight! Now it sounds
faster and faster, 'like a whiplash flashed through the air,' said my
friend; up, up he soars, till he becomes lost to sight at the instant
that his song ends in that last mad ecstasy that just precedes his
alighting."
The meadowlark sings in a level flight, half hovering in the air,
giving voice to a rapid medley of lark-like notes. The goldfinch also
sings in a level flight, beating the air slowly with its wings broadly
open, and pouring out its jubilant, ecstatic strain I think it
indulges in this wing-song only in the early season. After the mother
bird has begun sitting, the male circles about within earshot of her,
in that curious undulating flight, uttering his "per-chic-o-pee,
per-chic-o-pee," while the female calls back to him in the tenderest
tones, "Yes, lovie; I hear you." The indigo-bird and the purple finch,
when their happiness becomes too full and buoyant for them longer to
control it, launch into the air, and sing briefly, ecstatically, in a
tremulous, hovering flight. The air-song of these birds does not
differ essentially from the song delivered from the perch, except that
it betrays more excitement, and hence is a more complete lyrical
rapture.
The purple finch is our finest songster among the finches. Its strain
is so soft and melodious, and touched with such a childlike gayety and
plaintiveness, that I think it might sound well even in a cage inside
a room, if the bird would only sing with the same joyous abandonment,
which, of course, it would not do.
It is not generally known that individual birds of the same species
show different degrees of musical ability. This is often noticed in
caged birds, among which the principle of variation seems more active;
but an attentive observer notes the same fact in wild birds.
Occasionally he hears one that in powers of song surpasses all its
fellows. I have heard a sparrow, an oriole, and a wood thrush, each
of which had a song of its own that far exceeded any other. I stood
one day by a trout-stream, and suspended my fishing for several
minutes to watch a song sparrow that was singing on a dry limb before
me. He had five distinct songs, each as markedly different from the
others as any human songs, which he repeated one after the other. He
may have had a sixth or a seventh, but he bethought himself of some
business in the next field, and flew away before he had exhausted his
repertory. I once had a letter from Robert Louis Stevenson, who said
he had read an account I had written of the song of the English
blackbird. He said I might as well talk of the song of man; that every
blackbird had its own song; and then he told me of a remarkable singer
he used to hear somewhere amid the Scottish hills. But his singer was,
of course, an exception; twenty-four blackbirds out of every
twenty-five probably sing the same song, with no appreciable
variations: but the twenty-fifth may show extraordinary powers. I told
Stevenson that his famous singer had probably been to school to some
nightingale on the Continent or in southern England. I might have told
him of the robin I once heard here that sang with great spirit and
accuracy the song of the brown thrasher, or of another that had the
note of the whip-poor-will interpolated in the regular robin song, or
of still another that had the call of the quail. In each case the
bird had probably heard the song and learned it while very young. In
the Trossachs, in Scotland, I followed a song thrush about for a long
time, attracted by its peculiar song. It repeated over and over again
three or four notes of a well-known air, which it might have caught
from some shepherd boy whistling to his flock or to his cow.
The songless birds--why has Nature denied them this gift? But they
nearly all have some musical call or impulse that serves them very
well. The quail has his whistle, the woodpecker his drum, the pewee
his plaintive cry, the chickadee his exquisitely sweet call, the
highhole his long, repeated "wick, wick, wick," one of the most
welcome sounds of spring, the jay his musical gurgle, the hawk his
scream, the crow his sturdy caw. Only one of our pretty birds of the
orchard is reduced to an all but inaudible note, and that is the
cedar-bird.
III
NATURE WITH CLOSED DOORS
December in our climate is the month when Nature finally shuts up
house and turns the key. She has been slowly packing up and putting
away her things and closing a door and a window here and there all the
fall. Now she completes the work and puts up the last bar. She is
ready for winter. The leaves are all off the trees, except that here
and there a beech or an oak or a hickory still clings to a remnant of
its withered foliage. Her streams are full, her new growths of wood
are ripened, her saps and juices are quiescent. The muskrat has
completed his house in the shallow pond or stream, the beaver in the
northern woods has completed his. The wild mice and the chipmunk have
laid up their winter stores of nuts and grains in their dens in the
ground and in the cavities of trees. The woodchuck is rolled up in his
burrow in the hillside, sleeping his long winter sleep. The coon has
deserted his chamber in the old tree and gone into winter quarters in
his den in the rocks. The winter birds have taken on a good coat of
fat against the coming cold and a possible scarcity of food. The
frogs and toads are all in their hibernaculums in the ground.
I saw it stated the other day, in a paper read before some scientific
body, that the wood frogs retreat two feet into the ground beyond the
reach of frost. In two instances I have found the wood frog in
December with a covering of less than two inches of leaves and moss.
It had buried itself in the soil and leaf mould only to the depth of
the thickness of its own body, and for covering had only the ordinary
coat of dry leaves and pine needles to be found in the wood. It was
evidently counting upon the snow for its main protection. In one case
I marked the spot, and returned there in early spring to see how the
frog had wintered. I found it all right. Evidently it had some charm
against the cold, for while the earth around and beneath it was yet
frozen solid, there was no frost in the frog. It was not a brisk frog,
but it was well, and when I came again on a warm day a week later, it
had come forth from its retreat and was headed for the near-by marsh,
where in April, with its kith and kin, it helped make the air vocal
with its love-calls. A friend of mine, one mild day late in December,
found a wood frog sitting upon the snow in the woods. She took it home
and put it to bed in the soil of one of her flower-pots in the cellar.
In the spring she found it in good condition, and in April carried it
back to the woods. The hyla, or little piping frog, passes the winter
in the ground like the wood frog. I have seen the toad go into the
ground in the late fall. It is an interesting proceeding. It literally
elbows its way into the soil. It sits on end, and works and presses
with the sharp joints of its folded legs until it has sunk itself at a
sufficient depth, which is only a few inches beneath the surface. The
water frogs appear to pass the winter in the mud at the bottom of
ponds and marshes. The queen bumblebee and the queen hornet, I think,
seek out their winter quarters in holes in the ground in September,
while the drones and the workers perish. The honey-bees do not
hibernate: they must have food all winter; but our native wild bees
are dormant during the cold months, and survive the winter only in the
person of the queen mother. In the spring these queens set up
housekeeping alone, and found new families.
Insects in all stages of their growth are creatures of the warmth; the
heat is the motive power that makes them go; when this fails, they are
still. The katydids rasp away in the fall as long as there is warmth
enough to keep them going; as the heat fails, they fail, till from the
emphatic "Katy did it" of August they dwindle to a hoarse, dying,
"Kate, Kate," in October. Think of the stillness that falls upon the
myriad wood-borers in the dry trees and stumps in the forest as the
chill of autumn comes on. All summer have they worked incessantly in
oak and hickory and birch and chestnut and spruce, some of them
making a sound exactly like that of the old-fashioned hand augur,
others a fine, snapping, and splintering sound; but as the cold comes
on, they go slower and slower, till they finally cease to move. A warm
day starts them again, slowly or briskly according to the degree of
heat, but in December they are finally stilled for the season. These
creatures, like the big fat grubs of the June beetles which one
sometimes finds in the ground or in decayed wood, are full of frost in
winter; cut one of the big grubs in two, and it looks like a lump of
ice cream.
Some time in October the crows begin to collect together in large
flocks and establish their winter quarters. They choose some secluded
wood for a roosting-place, and thither all the crows for many square
miles of country betake themselves at night, and thence they disperse
in all directions again in the early morning. The crow is a social
bird, a true American; no hermit or recluse is he. The winter probably
brings them together in these large colonies for purposes of
sociability and for greater warmth. By roosting close together and
quite filling a tree-top, there must result some economy of heat.