[Illustration]
That is the name which the northern Indians give to the black-capped
tit-mouse, or chickadee. "Little friend Ch'geegee" is what it means;
for the Indians, like everybody else who knows Chickadee, are fond of
this cheery little brightener of the northern woods. The first time I
asked Simmo what his people called the bird, he answered with a smile.
Since then I have asked other Indians, and always a smile, a pleased
look lit up the dark grim faces as they told me. It is another
tribute to the bright little bird's influence.
Chickadee wears well. He is not in the least a creature of moods. You
step out of your door some bright morning, and there he is among the
shrubs, flitting from twig to twig; now hanging head down from the
very tip to look into a terminal bud; now winding upward about a
branch, looking industriously into every bud and crevice. An insect
must hide well to escape those bright eyes. He is helping you raise
your plants. He looks up brightly as you approach, hops fearlessly
down and looks at you with frank, innocent eyes. _Chick a dee dee dee
dee! Tsic a de-e-e?_--this last with a rising inflection, as if he
were asking how you were, after he had said good-morning. Then he
turns to his insect hunting again, for he never wastes more than a
moment talking. But he twitters sociably as he works.
You meet him again in the depths of the wilderness. The smoke of your
camp fire has hardly risen to the spruce tops when close beside you
sounds the same cheerful greeting and inquiry for your health. There
he is on the birch twig, bright and happy and fearless! He comes down
by the fire to see if anything has boiled over which he may dispose
of. He picks up gratefully the crumbs you scatter at your feet. He
trusts you.--See! he rests a moment on the finger you extend, looks
curiously at the nail, and sounds it with his bill to see if it
shelters any harmful insect. Then he goes back to his birch twigs.
On summer days he never overflows with the rollicksomeness of bobolink
and oriole, but takes his abundance in quiet contentment. I suspect it
is because he works harder winters, and his enjoyment is more deep
than theirs. In winter when the snow lies deep, he is the life of the
forest. He calls to you from the edges of the bleak caribou barrens,
and his greeting somehow suggests the May. He comes into your rude
bark camp, and eats of your simple fare, and leaves a bit of sunshine
behind him. He goes with you, as you force your way heavily through
the fir thickets on snowshoes. He is hungry, perhaps, like you, but
his note is none the less cheery and hopeful.
When the sun shines hot in August, he finds you lying under the
alders, with the lake breeze in your face, and he opens his eyes very
wide and says: "_Tsic a dee-e-e?_ I saw you last winter. Those were
hard times. But it's good to be here now." And when the rain pours
down, and the woods are drenched, and camp life seems beastly
altogether, he appears suddenly with greeting cheery as the sunshine.
"_Tsic a de-e-e-e?_ Don't you remember yesterday? It rains, to be
sure, but the insects are plenty, and to-morrow the sun will shine."
His cheerfulness is contagious. Your thoughts are better than before
he came.
Really, he is a wonderful little fellow; there is no end to the good
he does. Again and again I have seen a man grow better tempered or
more cheerful, without knowing why he did so, just because Chickadee
stopped a moment to be cheery and sociable. I remember once when a
party of four made camp after a driving rain-storm. Everybody was wet;
everything soaking. The lazy man had upset a canoe, and all the dry
clothes and blankets had just been fished out of the river. Now the
lazy man stood before the fire, looking after his own comfort. The
other three worked like beavers, making camp. They were in ill humor,
cold, wet, hungry, irritated. They said nothing.
A flock of chickadees came down with sunny greetings, fearless,
trustful, never obtrusive. They looked innocently into human faces and
pretended that they did not see the irritation there. "_Tsic a dee_. I
wish I could help. Perhaps I can. _Tic a dee-e-e?_"--with that gentle,
sweetly insinuating up slide at the end. Somebody spoke, for the first
time in half an hour, and it wasn't a growl. Presently somebody
whistled--a wee little whistle; but the tide had turned. Then somebody
laughed. "'Pon my word," he said, hanging up his wet clothes, "I
believe those chickadees make me feel good-natured. Seem kind of
cheery, you know, and the crowd needed it."
And Chickadee, picking up his cracker crumbs, did not act at all as if
he had done most to make camp comfortable.
There is another way in which he helps, a more material way. Millions
of destructive insects live and multiply in the buds and tender bark
of trees. Other birds never see them, but Chickadee and his relations
leave never a twig unexplored. His bright eyes find the tiny eggs
hidden under the buds; his keen ears hear the larvæ feeding under the
bark, and a blow of his little bill uncovers them in their
mischief-making. His services of this kind are enormous, though rarely
acknowledged.
Chickadee's nest is always neat and comfortable and interesting, just
like himself. It is a rare treat to find it. He selects an old
knot-hole, generally on the sheltered side of a dry limb, and digs out
the rotten wood, making a deep and sometimes winding tunnel downward.
In the dry wood at the bottom he makes a little round pocket and lines
it with the very softest material. When one finds such a nest, with
five or six white eggs delicately touched with pink lying at the
bottom, and a pair of chickadees gliding about, half fearful, half
trustful, it is altogether such a beautiful little spot that I know
hardly a boy who would be mean enough to disturb it.
One thing about the nests has always puzzled me. The soft lining has
generally more or less rabbit fur. Sometimes, indeed, there is nothing
else, and a softer nest one could not wish to see. But where does he
get it? He would not, I am sure, pull it out of Br'er Rabbit, as the
crow sometimes pulls wool from the sheep's backs. Are his eyes bright
enough to find it hair by hair where the wind has blown it, down among
the leaves? If so, it must be slow work; but Chickadee is very
patient. Sometimes in spring you may surprise him on the ground, where
he never goes for food; but at such times he is always shy, and flits
up among the birch twigs, and twitters, and goes through an
astonishing gymnastic performance, as if to distract your attention
from his former unusual one. That is only because you are near his
nest. If he has a bit of rabbit fur in his bill meanwhile, your eyes
are not sharp enough to see it.
Once after such a performance I pretended to go away; but I only hid
in a pine thicket. Chickadee listened awhile, then hopped down to the
ground, picked up something that I could not see, and flew away. I
have no doubt it was the lining for his nest near by. He had dropped
it when I surprised him, so that I should not suspect him of
nest-building.
Such a bright, helpful little fellow should have never an enemy in the
world; and I think he has to contend against fewer than most birds.
The shrike is his worst enemy, the swift swoop of his cruel beak being
always fatal in a flock of chickadees. Fortunately the shrike is rare
with us; one seldom finds his nest, with poor Chickadee impaled on a
sharp thorn near by, surrounded by a varied lot of ugly beetles. I
suspect the owls sometimes hunt him at night; but he sleeps in the
thick pine shrubs, close up against a branch, with the pine needles
all about him, making it very dark; and what with the darkness, and
the needles to stick in his eyes, the owl generally gives up the
search and hunts in more open woods.
Sometimes the hawks try to catch him, but it takes a very quick and a
very small pair of wings to follow Chickadee. Once I was watching him
hanging head down from an oak twig to which the dead leaves were
clinging; for it was winter. Suddenly there was a rush of air, a flash
of mottled wings and fierce yellow eyes and cruel claws. Chickadee
whisked out of sight under a leaf. The hawk passed on, brushing his
pinions. A brown feather floated down among the oak leaves. Then
Chickadee was hanging head down, just where he was before. "_Tsic a
dee?_ Didn't I fool him!" he seemed to say. He had just gone round his
twig, and under a leaf, and back again; and the danger was over. When
a hawk misses like that he never strikes again.
Boys generally have a kind of sympathetic liking for Chickadee. They
may be cruel or thoughtless to other birds, but seldom so to him. He
seems somehow like themselves.
Two barefoot boys with bows and arrows were hunting, one September
day, about the half-grown thickets of an old pasture. The older was
teaching the younger how to shoot. A robin, a chipmunk, and two or
three sparrows were already stowed away in their jacket pockets; a
brown rabbit hung from the older boy's shoulder. Suddenly the younger
raised his bow and drew the arrow back to its head. Just in front a
chickadee hung and twittered among the birch twigs. But the older boy
seized his arm.
"Don't shoot--don't shoot him!" he said.
"But why not?"
"'Cause you mustn't--you must never kill a chickadee."
And the younger, influenced more by a certain mysterious shake of the
head than by the words, slacked his bow cheerfully; and with a last
wide-eyed look at the little gray bird that twittered and swung so
fearlessly near them, the two boys went on with their hunting.
No one ever taught the older boy to discriminate between a chickadee
and other birds; no one else ever instructed the younger. Yet somehow
both felt, and still feel after many years, that there is a
difference. It is always so with boys. They are friends of whatever
trusts them and is fearless. Chickadee's own personality, his cheery
ways and trustful nature had taught them, though they knew it not. And
among all the boys of that neighborhood there is still a law, which no
man gave, of which no man knows the origin, a law as unalterable as
that of the Medes and Persians: _Never kill a chickadee_.
If you ask the boy there who tells you the law, "Why not a chickadee
as well as a sparrow?" he shakes his head as of yore, and answers
dogmatically: "'Cause you mustn't."
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