"The throstle with shrill sharps," etc.
Ben Jonson's "lusty throstle" is still better. It is a song of great
strength and unbounded good cheer; it proceeds from a sound heart and a
merry throat. There is no touch of plaintiveness or melancholy in it; it
is as expressive of health and good digestion as the crowing of the cock
in the morning. When I was hunting for the nightingale, the thrush
frequently made such a din just at dusk as to be a great annoyance. At
Kew, where I passed a few weeks, its shrill pipe usually woke me in the
morning.
A thrush of a much mellower strain is the blackbird, which is our robin
cut in ebony. His golden bill gives a golden touch to his song. It was
the most leisurely strain I heard. Amid the loud, vivacious, workaday
chorus, it had an easeful, _dolce far niente_ effect. I place the song
before that of our robin, where it belongs in quality, but it falls
short in some other respects. It constantly seemed to me as if the bird
was a learner and had not yet mastered his art. The tone is fine, but
the execution is labored; the musician does not handle his instrument
with deftness and confidence. It seems as if the bird were trying to
whistle some simple air, and never quite succeeding. Parts of the song
are languid and feeble, and the whole strain is wanting in the decision
and easy fulfillment of our robin's song. The bird is noisy and tuneful
in the twilight like his American congener.
Such British writers on birds and bird life as I have been able to
consult do not, it seems to me, properly discriminate and appreciate the
qualities and merits of their own songsters. The most melodious strain I
heard, and the only one that exhibited to the full the best qualities of
the American songsters, proceeded from a bird quite unknown to fame, in
the British Islands at least. I refer to the willow warbler, or willow
wren, as it is also called,--a little brown bird, that builds a
dome-shaped nest upon the ground and lines it with feathers. White says
it has a "sweet, plaintive note," which is but half the truth. It has a
long, tender, delicious warble, not wanting in strength and volume, but
eminently pure and sweet,--the song of the chaffinch refined and
idealized. The famous blackcap, which I heard in the south of England
and again in France, falls far short of it in these respects, and only
surpasses it in strength and brilliancy. The song is, perhaps, in the
minor key, feminine and not masculine, but it touches the heart.
"That strain again; it had a dying fall."
The song of the willow warbler has a dying fall; no other bird-song is
so touching in this respect. It mounts up round and full, then runs down
the scale, and expires upon the air in a gentle murmur. I heard the bird
everywhere; next to the chaffinch, its voice greeted my ear oftenest;
yet many country people of whom I inquired did not know the bird, or
confounded it with some other. It is too fine a song for the ordinary
English ear; there is not noise enough in it. The whitethroat is much
more famous; it has a louder, coarser voice; it sings with great
emphasis and assurance, and is a much better John Bull than the little
willow warbler.
I could well understand, after being in England a few days, why, to
English travelers, our songsters seem inferior to their own. They are
much less loud and vociferous, less abundant and familiar; one needs to
woo them more; they are less recently out of the wilderness; their songs
have the delicacy and wildness of most woodsy forms, and are as
plaintive as the whistle of the wind. They are not so happy a race as
the English songsters, as if life had more trials for them, as doubtless
it has in their enforced migrations and in the severer climate with
which they have to contend.
When one hears the European cuckoo he regrets that he has ever heard a
cuckoo clock. The clock has stolen the bird's thunder; and when you hear
the rightful owner, the note has a second-hand, artificial sound. It is
only another cuckoo clock off there on the hill or in the grove. Yet it
is a cheerful call, with none of the solitary and monkish character of
our cuckoo's note; and, as it comes early in spring, I can see how much
it must mean to native ears.
I found that the only British song-bird I had done injustice to in my
previous estimate was the wren. It is far superior to our house wren. It
approaches very nearly our winter wren, if it does not equal it. Without
hearing the two birds together, it would be impossible to decide which
was the better songster. Its strain has the same gushing, lyrical
character, and the shape, color, and manner of the two birds are nearly
identical. It is very common, sings everywhere, and therefore
contributes much more to the general entertainment than does our bird.
Barrington marks the wren far too low in his table of the comparative
merit of British song-birds; he denies it mellowness and plaintiveness,
and makes it high only in sprightliness, a fact that discredits his
whole table. He makes the thrush and blackbird equal in the two
qualities first named, which is equally wide of the mark.
The English robin is a better songster than I expected to find him. The
poets and writers have not done him justice. He is of the royal line of
the nightingale, and inherits some of the qualities of that famous bird.
His favorite hour for singing is the gloaming, and I used to hear him
the last of all. His song is peculiar, jerky, and spasmodic, but abounds
in the purest and most piercing tones to be heard,--piercing from their
smoothness, intensity, and fullness of articulation; rapid and crowded
at one moment, as if some barrier had suddenly given way, then as
suddenly pausing, and scintillating at intervals, bright, tapering
shafts of sound. It stops and hesitates, and blurts out its notes like a
stammerer; but when they do come they are marvelously clear and pure. I
have heard green hickory branches thrown into a fierce blaze jet out the
same fine, intense, musical sounds on the escape of the imprisoned
vapors in the hard wood as characterize the robin's song.
One misses along English fields and highways the tender music furnished
at home by our sparrows, and in the woods and groves the plaintive cries
of our pewees and the cheerful soliloquy of our red-eyed vireo. The
English sparrows and buntings are harsh-voiced, and their songs, when
they have songs, are crude. The yellow-hammer comes nearest to our
typical sparrow, it is very common, and is a persistent songster, but
the song is slight, like that of our savanna sparrow--scarcely more than
the chirping of a grasshopper. In form and color it is much like our
vesper sparrow, except that the head of the male has a light yellow
tinge.
The greenfinch or green linnet is an abundant bird everywhere, but its
song is less pleasing than that of several of our finches. The goldfinch
is very rare, mainly, perhaps, because it is so persistently trapped by
bird-fanciers; its song is a series of twitters and chirps, less musical
to my ear than that of our goldfinch, especially when a flock of the
latter are congregated in a tree and inflating their throats in rivalry.
Their golden-crowned kinglet has a fine thread-like song, far less than
that of our kinglet, less even than that of our black and white creeper.
The nuthatch has not the soft, clear call of ours, and the various
woodpeckers figure much less; there is less wood to peck, and they seem
a more shy and silent race. I saw but one in all my walks, and that was
near Wolmer Forest. I looked in vain for the wood-lark; the country
people confound it with the pipit. The blackcap warbler I found to be a
rare and much overpraised bird. The nightingale is very restricted in
its range, and is nearly silent by the middle of June. I made a
desperate attempt to find it in full song after the seventeenth of the
month, as I have described in a previous chapter, but failed. And the
garden warbler is by no means found in every garden; probably I did not
hear it more than twice.
The common sandpiper, I should say, was more loquacious and musical than
ours. I heard it on the Highland lakes, when its happy notes did indeed
almost run into a song, so continuous and bright and joyful were they.
One of the first birds I saw, and one of the most puzzling, was the
lapwing or pewit. I observed it from the car window, on my way down to
Ayr, a large, broad-winged, awkward sort of bird, like a cross between a
hawk and an owl, swooping and gamboling in the air as the train darted
past. It is very abundant in Scotland, especially on the moors and near
the coast. In the Highlands I saw them from the top of the stage-coach,
running about the fields with their young. The most graceful and
pleasing of birds upon the ground, about the size of the pigeon, now
running nimbly along, now pausing to regard you intently, crested,
ringed, white-bellied, glossy green-backed, with every movement like
visible music. But the moment it launches into the air its beauty is
gone; the wings look round and clumsy, like a mittened hand, the tail
very short, the head and neck drawn back, with nothing in the form or
movement that suggests the plover kind. It gambols and disports itself
like a great bat, which its outlines suggest. On the moors I also saw
the curlew, and shall never forget its wild, musical call.
Nearly all the British bird-voices have more of a burr in them than ours
have. Can it be that, like the people, they speak more from the throat?
It is especially noticeable in the crow tribe,--in the rook, the jay,
the jackdaw. The rook has a hoarse, thick caw,--not so clearly and
roundly uttered as that of our crow. The swift has a wheezy, catarrhal
squeak, in marked contrast to the cheery chipper of our swift. In Europe
the chimney swallow builds in barns, and the barn swallow builds in
chimneys. The barn swallow, as we would call it,--chimney swallow, as it
is called there,--is much the same in voice, color, form, flight, etc.,
as our bird, while the swift is much larger than our chimney swallow and
has a forked tail. The martlet, answering to our cliff swallow, is not
so strong and ruddy looking a bird as our species, but it builds much
the same, and has a similar note. It is more plentiful than our swallow.
I was soon struck with the fact that in the main the British song-birds
lead up to and culminate in two species, namely, in the lark and the
nightingale. In these two birds all that is characteristic in the other
songsters is gathered up and carried to perfection. They crown the
series. Nearly all the finches and pipits seem like rude studies and
sketches of the skylark, and nearly all the warblers and thrushes point
to the nightingale; their powers have fully blossomed in her. There is
nothing in the lark's song, in the quality or in the manner of it, that
is not sketched or suggested in some voice lower in the choir, and the
tone and compass of the warblers mount in regular gradation from the
clinking note of the chiffchaff up to the nightingale. Several of the
warblers sing at night, and several of the constituents of the lark sing
on the wing. On the lark's side, the birds are remarkable for gladness
and ecstacy, and are more creatures of the light and of the open spaces;
on the side of the nightingale there is more pure melody, and more a
love for the twilight and the privacy of arboreal life. Both the famous
songsters are representative as to color, exhibiting the prevailing gray
and dark tints. A large number of birds, I noticed, had the two white
quills in the tail characteristic of the lark.
I found that I had overestimated the bird-music to be heard in England
in midsummer. It appeared to be much less than our own. The last two or
three weeks of July were very silent: the only bird I was sure of
hearing in my walks was the yellow-hammer; while, on returning home
early in August, the birds made such music about my house that they woke
me up in the morning. The song sparrow and bush sparrow were noticeable
till in September, and the red-eyed vireo and warbling vireo were heard
daily till in October.
On the whole, I may add that I did not anywhere in England hear so fine
a burst of bird-song as I have heard at home, and I listened long for it
and attentively. Not so fine in quality, though perhaps greater in
quantity. It sometimes happens that several species of our best
songsters pass the season in the same locality, some favorite spot in
the woods, or at the head of a sheltered valley, that possesses
attraction for many kinds. I found such a place one summer by a small
mountain lake, in the southern Catskills, just over the farm borders, in
the edge of the primitive forest. The lake was surrounded by an
amphitheatre of wooded steeps, except a short space on one side where
there was an old abandoned clearing, grown up to saplings and brush.
Birds love to be near water, and I think they like a good auditorium,
love an open space like that of a small lake in the woods, where their
voices can have room and their songs reverberate. Certain it is they
liked this place, and early in the morning especially, say from half
past three to half past four, there was such a burst of melody as I had
never before heard. The most prominent voices were those of the wood
thrush, veery thrush, rose-breasted grosbeak, winter wren, and one of
the vireos, and occasionally at evening that of the hermit, though far
off in the dusky background,--birds all notable for their pure melody,
except that of the vireo, which was cheery, rather than melodious. A
singular song that of this particular vireo,--"_Cheery, cheery, cheery
drunk! Cheery drunk!_"--all day long in the trees above our tent. The
wood thrush was the most abundant, and the purity and eloquence of its
strain, or of their mingled strains, heard in the cool dewy morning from
across that translucent sheet of water, was indeed memorable. Its liquid
and serene melody was in such perfect keeping with the scene. The eye
and the ear both reported the same beauty and harmony. Then the clear,
rich fife of the grosbeak from the tops of the tallest trees, the simple
flute-like note of the veery, and the sweetly ringing, wildly lyrical
outburst of the winter wren, sometimes from the roof of our
butternut-colored tent--all joining with it--formed one of the most
noteworthy bits of a bird symphony it has ever been my good luck to
hear. Often at sundown, too, while we sat idly in our boat, watching the
trout break the glassy surface here and there, the same soothing melody
would be poured out all around us, and kept up till darkness filled the
woods. The last note would be that of the wood thrush, calling out
"_quit_," "_quit_." Across there in a particular point, I used at night
to hear another thrush, the olive-backed, the song a slight variation of
the veery's. I did hear in England in the twilight the robin, blackbird,
and song-thrush unite their voices, producing a loud, pleasing chorus;
add the nightingale and you have great volume and power, but still the
pure melody of my songsters by the lake is probably not reached.