have alluded to the rude structure of the rose-breast, and might have
used nearly the same language concerning the tanager's, which latter is
often fabricated so loosely that one can see the sky through it. Yet
these two are among the most gorgeously attired of all our birds. On the
other hand, while the wood pewee is one of the very plainest, there are
few, if any, that excel her as an architect. During the season under
review I had the good fortune to light upon my first nest of this
fly-catcher; and, as is apt to be true, having found one, I immediately
and without effort found two others. The first two were in oaks, the
third in a hornbeam; and all were set upon the upper side of a
horizontal bough ("saddled" upon it, as the manuals say), at the
junction of an offshoot with the main branch. Two of them were but
partially done when discovered, and I was glad to see one pair of the
birds in something very like a frolic, such a state as would hardly be
predicted of these peculiarly sober-seeming creatures. The builder of
the second nest was remarkably confiding, and proceeded with her
labors, quite undisturbed by my proximity and undisguised interest. It
was to be remarked that she had trimmed the outside of her nest with
lichens before finishing the interior; and I especially admired the very
clever manner in which she hovered against the dead pine-trunk, from
which she was gathering strips of bark. Concerning her unsuspiciousness,
however, it should be said that the word applies only to her treatment
of myself. When a thrasher had the impertinence to alight in her oak she
ordered him off in high dudgeon, dashing back and forth above him, and
snapping spitefully as she passed. She knew her rights, and, knowing,
dared maintain. When a bird builds her nest in any part of a tree she
claims every twig of it as her own. I have even seen the gentle-hearted
chickadee resent the intrusion of a chipping sparrow, though it appeared
impossible that the latter could be suspected of any predatory or
sinister design.
The shallowness of the wood pewee's saucer-shaped nest, its position
upon the branch, and especially its external dress of lichens, all
conspire to render it inconspicuous. It is an interesting question
whether the owner herself appreciates this, or has merely inherited the
fashion, without thought of the reasons for it. The latter supposition,
I reluctantly confess, looks to me the more probable. It must often be
true of other animals, as it is of men, that they build better than they
know. Their wisdom is not their own, but belongs to a power back of
them,--a power which works, if you will, in accordance with what we
designate as the law of natural selection, and which, so to speak,
enlightens the race rather than the individual.
After all, it is the ground birds that puzzle the human oölogist.
Crossing a brook, I saw what I regarded as almost infallible signs that
a pair of Maryland yellow-throats had begun to build beside it. Unless I
was entirely at fault, the nest must be within a certain two or three
square yards, and I devoted half an hour, more or less, to ransacking
the grass and bushes, till I thought every inch of the ground had been
gone over; but all to no purpose. Continuing my walk, I noticed after a
while that the male warbler was accompanying me up the hillside,
apparently determined to see me safely out of the way. Coming to the
same brook again the next morning, I halted for another search; and lo!
all in a moment my eye fell upon the coveted nest, not on the ground,
but perhaps eight inches from it, in a little clump of young
golden-rods, which would soon overgrow it completely. The female
proprietor was present, and manifested so much concern that I would not
tarry, but made rather as if I had seen nothing, and passed on. It was
some time before I observed that she was keeping along beside me,
precisely as her mate had done the day before. The innocent creatures,
sorely pestered as they were, could hardly be blamed for such
precautions; yet it is not pleasant to be "shadowed" as a suspicious
character, even by Maryland yellow-throats.
This was my first nest of a very common warbler, and I felt particularly
solicitous for its safety; but alas! no sooner was the first egg laid
than something or somebody carried it off, and the afflicted couple
deserted the house on which they had expended so much labor and
anxiety.
Not far beyond the yellow-throats' brook, and almost directly under one
of the pewees' oaks, was a nest which pretty certainly had belonged to a
pair of chewinks, but which was already forsaken when I found it, though
I had then no inkling of the fact. It contained four eggs, and
everything was in perfect order. The mother had gone away, and had never
come back; having fallen a victim, probably, to some collector, human or
inhuman. The tragedy was peculiar; and the tragical effect of it was
heightened as day after day, for nearly a fortnight at least (I cannot
say for how much longer), the beautiful eggs lay there entirely
uncovered, and yet no skunk, squirrel, or other devourer of such
dainties happened to spy them. It seemed doubly sad that so many
precious nests should be robbed, while this set of worthless eggs was
left to spoil.
I have already mentioned the housekeeping of a couple of chickadees in a
low birch stump. Theirs was one of three titmouse nests just then
claiming my attention. I visited it frequently, from the time when the
pair were hard at work making the cavity up to the time when the brood
were nearly ready to shift for themselves. Both birds took their share
of the digging, and on several occasions I saw one feeding the other.
After the eggs were deposited, the mother (or the sitter) displayed
admirable courage, refusing again and again to quit her post when I
peered in upon her, and even when with my cane I rapped smartly upon the
stump. If I put my fingers into the hole, however, she followed them out
in hot haste. Even when most seriously disturbed by my attentions the
pair made use of no other notes than the common _chickadee, dee_, but
these they sometimes delivered in an unnaturally sharp, fault-finding
tone.
My two other titmouse nests were both in apple-trees, and one of them
was in my own door-yard, though beyond convenient reach without the help
of a ladder. The owners of this last were interesting for a very decided
change in their behavior after the young were hatched, and especially as
the time for the little ones' exodus drew near. At first,
notwithstanding their door opened right upon the street, as it were,
within a rod or two of passing horse-cars, the father and mother went in
and out without the least apparent concern as to who might be watching
them; but when they came to be feeding their hungry offspring, it was
almost laughable to witness the little craftinesses to which they
resorted. They would perch on one of the outer branches, call
_chickadee, dee_, fly a little nearer, then likely enough go further
off, till finally, after a variety of such "false motions," into the
hole they would duck, as if nobody for the world must be allowed to know
where they had gone. It was really wonderful how expert they grew at
entering quickly. I pondered a good deal over their continual calling on
such occasions. It seemed foolish and inconsistent; half the time I
should have failed to notice their approach, had they only kept still.
Toward the end, however, when the chicks inside the trunk could be heard
articulating _chickadee, dee_ with perfect distinctness, it occurred to
me that possibly all this persistent repetition of the phrase by the old
birds had been only or mainly in the way of tuition. At all events, the
youngsters had this part of the chickadese vocabulary right at their
tongues' end, as we say, before making their _début_ in the great world.
But it was reserved for my third pair of tits to give me a genuine
surprise. I had been so constant a visitor at their house that I had
come to feel myself quite on terms of intimacy with them. So, after
their brood was hatched, I one day climbed into the tree (as I had done
more than once before), the better to overlook their parental labors. I
had hardly placed myself in a comfortable seat before the couple
returned from one of their foraging expeditions. The male--or the one
that I took for such--had a black morsel of some kind in his bill,
which, on reaching the tree, he passed over to his mate, who forthwith
carried it into the hollow stub, in the depths of which the hungry
little ones were. Then the male flew off again, and presently came back
with another beakful, which his helpmeet took from him at the door,
where she had been awaiting his arrival. After this performance had been
repeated two or three times, curiosity led me to stand up against the
stub, with my hand resting upon it; at which the female (who was just
inside the mouth of the cavity) slipped out, and set up an anxious
_chickadee, dee, dee_. When her mate appeared,--which he did almost
immediately,--he flew into what looked like a downright paroxysm of
rage, not against me, but against the mother bird, shaking his wings and
scolding violently. I came to the unhappy lady's relief as best I could
by dropping to the ground, and within a few minutes the pair again
approached the stub in company; but when the female made a motion to
take the food from her husband's bill, as before, he pounced upon her
spitefully, drove her away, and dived into the hole himself. Apparently
he had not yet forgiven what he accounted her pusillanimous desertion of
her charge. All in all, the scene was a revelation to me, a chickadee
family quarrel being something the like of which I had never dreamed of.
Perhaps no titmouse ever before had so timorous a wife. But however that
might be, I sincerely hoped that they would not be long in making up
their difference. I had enjoyed the sight of their loving intercourse
for so many weeks that I should have been sorry indeed to believe that
it could end in strife. Nor could I regard it as so unpardonable a
weakness for a bird to move off, even from her young, when a man put his
fingers within a few inches of her. Possibly she ought to have known
that I meant no mischief. Possibly, too, her doughty lord would have
behaved more commendably in the same circumstances; but of that I am by
no means certain. To borrow a theological term, my conception of bird
nature is decidedly anthropomorphic, and I incline to believe that
chickadees as well as men find it easier to blame others than to do
better themselves.
Here these reminiscences must come to an end, though the greater part of
my season's experiences are still untouched. First, however, let me
relieve my conscience by putting on record the bravery of a black-billed
cuckoo, whom I was obliged fairly to drive from her post of duty. Her
nest was a sorry enough spectacle,--a flat, unwalled platform, carpeted
with willow catkins and littered with egg-shells, in the midst of which
latter lay a single callow nestling, nearly as black as a crow. But as I
looked at the parent bird, while she sat within ten feet of me, eying
my every movement intently, and uttering her wrath in various cries
(some catlike mewings among them), my heart reproached me that I had
ever written of the cuckoo as a coward and a sneak. Truth will not allow
me to take the words back entirely, even now; but I felt at that moment,
and do still, that I might have been better employed mending my own
faults than in holding up to scorn the foibles of a creature who, when
worst came to worst, could set me such a shining example of courageous
fidelity. It is always in order to be charitable; and I ought to have
remembered that, for those who are themselves subject to imperfection,
generosity is the best kind of justice.
FOOTNOTES:
[71:1] The birds at once became quiet, and I went back complacently to
my book under the linden-tree. Who knows, however, whether there may not
have been another side to the story? Who shall say what were the
emotions of the snake, as he wriggled painfully homeward after such an
assault? Myself no vegetarian, by what right had I belabored him for
liking the taste of chicken? It were well, perhaps, not to pry too
curiously into questions of this kind. Most likely it would not flatter
our human self-esteem to know what some of our "poor relations" think of
us.
A GREEN MOUNTAIN CORN-FIELD.
Thus, without theft, I reap another's field.--SIDNEY LANIER.
I was passing some days of idleness in a shallow Vermont valley,
situated at an elevation of fifteen or sixteen hundred feet, circled by
wooded hills, and intersected by an old turnpike, which connects the
towns near Lake Champlain with the region beyond the mountains. Small
farmhouses stood here and there along the highway, while others were
scattered at wide intervals over the lower slopes of the outlying hills.
With all the brightness and freshness of early summer upon it, it was
indeed an enchanting picture; but even so, one could not altogether put
aside a feeling of something like commiseration for the people who, year
in and year out, from babyhood to old age, found in this narrow vale,
with its severity of weather, and its scarcity of social comforts and
opportunities, their only experience of what we fondly call this wide,
wide world.
From my inn I had walked eastward for perhaps a mile; then at the little
school-house had taken a cross-road, which presently began to climb.
Here I passed two or three cottages (one of them boasting the
singularity of paint), and after a while came to another, which appeared
to be the last, as the road not far beyond struck into the ancient
forest. First, however, it ran up to a small plateau, where, out of
sight from the house, lay a scanty quarter of an acre, in which the old
parable, "First the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear,"
was in the primary stage of its fresh annual fulfillment. The ground was
but newly cleared, and the brambles still felt themselves its true and
rightful possessors. Who was this puny-looking, good-for-nothing
foreigner, that they should be turned out of house and home for his
accommodation? So they seemed to be asking among themselves, as they
lifted up their heads here and there in the midst of the pale-green
shoots. The crows, on the other hand, bade the newcomer welcome,--as
the wolf welcomes the lamb. Against these hungry lovers of his crop (who
loved not unwisely, but too well), the farmer had fenced his field with
a single string, stretched from corner to corner. He must put
extraordinary faith in the considerateness of the birds, a looker-on
might think; such a barrier as this could be, at the most, nothing more
than a polite hint of ownership, a delicate reminder against thoughtless
trespassing, a courteously indirect suggestion to such as needed not a
physical, but only a moral, restraint. Or one might take it as an appeal
to some known or fancied superstitiousness on the crows' part; as if the
white cord were a kind of fetich, with which they would never presume to
meddle. But the rustic would have laughed at all such far-fetched
cockneyish inferences. This strange-seeming device of his was simply an
attempt to take the suspicious in their own suspiciousness; to set
before Corvus a hindrance so unmistakably insufficient that he would
mistrust it as a cover for some deep-laid and deadly plot. Probably the
scheme had not been crowned with complete success in the present
instance, for from a pole in the middle of the inclosure a dead crow was
dangling in the breeze. This was a more business-like signal than the
other; even a cockney could hardly be in doubt as to its meaning; and
the farmer, when I afterwards met him, assured me that it had answered
its purpose to perfection. The crow is nobody's fool. "Live and learn"
is his motto; and he does both, but especially the former, in a way to
excite the admiration of all disinterested observers. In the long
struggle between human ingenuity and corvine sagacity, it is doubtful
which has thus far obtained the upper hand. Nor have I ever quite
convinced myself which of the contestants has the better case. "The crow
is a thief," the planter declares; "he should confine himself to a wild
diet, or else sow his own garden." "Yes, yes," Corvus makes reply; "but
if I steal your corn, you first stole my land." Unlike his cousin the
raven,--who, along with the Indian, has retreated before the
pale-face,--the crow is no ultra-conservative. Civilization and modern
ideas are not in the least distasteful to him. He has an unfeigned
respect for agriculture, and in fact may be said himself to have set up
as gentleman-farmer, letting out his land on shares, and seldom failing
to get his full half of the crop; and, like the shrewd manager that he
is, he insures himself against drought and other mischances by taking
his moiety early in the season. As I plant no acres myself, I perhaps
find it easier than some of my fellow-citizens to bear with the faults
and appreciate the virtues of this sable aboriginal. Long may he live, I
say, this true lover of his native land, to try the patience and sharpen
the wits of his would-be exterminators.
The crow's is only the common lot. The whole earth is one field of war.
Every creature's place upon it is coveted by some other creature. Plants
and animals alike subsist by elbowing their rivals out of the way. Man,
if he plants a corn-field, puts in no more grains than will probably
have room to grow and thrive. But Nature, in her abhorrence of a vacuum,
stands at no waste. She believes in competition, and feels no qualms at
seeing the weak go to the wall.
"The good old rule
Sufficeth her, the simple plan,
That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can."
If she wishes a single oak, she drops acorns without number. Her
recklessness equals that of some ambitious military despot, to whom ten
thousand or a hundred thousand dead soldiers count as nothing, if only
the campaign be fought through to victory.
Man's economy and Nature's prodigality,--here they were in typical
operation, side by side. The corn was in "hills" uniformly spaced, and
evidently the proprietor had already been at work with plough and hoe,
lest the weeds should spring up and choke it; but just beyond stood a
perfect thicket of wild-cherry shrubs, so huddled together that not one
in twenty could possibly find room in which to develop. If they were not
all of them stunted beyond recovery, it would be only because a few of
the sturdiest should succeed in crowding down and killing off their
weaker competitors.
The import of this apparent wastefulness and cruelty of Nature, her
seeming indifference to the welfare of the individual, is a question on
which it is not pleasant, and, as I think, not profitable, to dwell. We
see but parts of her ways, and it must be unsafe to criticise the
working of a single wheel here or there, when we have absolutely no
means of knowing how each fits into the grand design, and, for that
matter, can only guess at the grand design itself. Rather let us content
ourselves with the prudent saying of that ancient agnostic, Bildad the
Shuhite: "We are but of yesterday, and know nothing." The wisest of us
are more or less foolish, by nature and of necessity; but it seems a
gratuitous superfluity of folly to ignore our own ignorance. For one,
then, I am in no mood to propose, much less to undertake, any grand
revolution in the order of natural events. Indeed, as far as I am
personally concerned, I fear it would be found but a dubious improvement
if the wildness were quite taken out of the world,--if its wilderness,
according to the word of the prophet, were to become all like Eden.
Tameness is not the only good quality, whether of land or of human
nature.
As I sat on my comfortable log (the noble old tree had not been cut
down for nothing), birds of many kinds came and went about me.
Wordsworth's couplet would have suited my case:--
"The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure;"
but I could hardly have rounded out the quotation; for, joyful as I
believed the creatures to be, many of their motions were plainly not
"thrills of pleasure," but tokens of fear. It was now the very heyday of
life with them, when they are at once happiest and most wary. There were
secrets to be kept close; eggs and little ones, whose whereabouts must
on no account be divulged. For the birds, too, not less than the corn,
the bramble, and the cherry, not less even than the saint, find this
earthly life a daily warfare.
The artless ditty of the mourning warbler came to my ears at intervals
out of a tangle of shrubbery, and once or twice he allowed me glimpses
of his quaint attire. I would gladly have seen and heard much more of
him, but he evaded all my attempts at familiarity. Nor could I blame him
for his furtive behavior. How was he to be certain that I was no
collector, but only an innocent admirer of birds in the bush? Sought
after as his carcass is by every New England ornithologist, the mourning
warbler exercises only a reasonable discretion in fighting shy of every
animal that walks upright.
It is evident, however, that for birds, as for ourselves, the same thing
often has both a bright and a dark side. If men are sometimes heartless,
and never to be altogether confided in, yet at the same time their
doings are in various respects conducive to the happiness and increase
of feathered life; and this not only in the case of some of the more
familiar species, but even in that of many which still retain all their
natural shyness of human society. A clearing like that in which I was
now resting offers an excellent illustration of this; for it is a rule
without exceptions that in such a place one may see and hear more birds
in half an hour than are likely to be met with in the course of a long
day's tramp through the unbroken forest. The mourning warbler himself
likes a roadside copse better than a deep wood, jealous as he may be of
man's approach. Up to a certain point, civilization is a blessing, even
to birds. Beyond a certain point, for aught I know, it may be nothing
but a curse, even to men.
Here, then, I sat, now taken up with the beautiful landscape, and anon
turning my head to behold some fowl of the air. I might have mused with
Emerson,--
"Knows he who tills this lonely field,
To reap its scanty corn,
What mystic fruit his acres yield
At midnight and at morn,"
--only "mystic fruit" would have been rather too high-sounding a phrase
for my commonplace cogitations. Hermit thrushes, olive-backed thrushes,
and veeries, with sundry warblers and a scarlet tanager, sang in chorus
from the woods behind me, while in front bluebirds, robins, song
sparrows, vesper sparrows, and chippers were doing their best to
transform this fresh Vermont clearing into a time-worn Massachusetts
pasture; assisted meanwhile by a goldfinch who flew over my head with an
ecstatic burst of melody, and a linnet who fell to warbling with
characteristic fluency from a neighboring tree-top. At least two pairs
of rose-breasted grosbeaks had summer quarters here; and busy enough
they looked, flitting from one side of the garden to another, yet not
too busy for a tune between whiles. One of the males was in really
gorgeous plumage. The rose-color had run over, as it were (like Aaron's
"precious ointment"), and spilled all down his breast. It is hard for me
ever to think of this brilliant, tropically dressed grosbeak as a true
Northerner; and here once more I was for the moment surprised to hear
him and the olive-backed thrush singing together in the same wood. Could
such neighborliness have any patriotic significance? I was almost ready
to ask. Across the corn-field a Traill's flycatcher was tossing up his
head pertly, and vociferating _kwee-kwee_. I took it for a challenge:
"Find my nest if you can, brother!" But I found nothing. Nor was I more
successful with a humming-bird, who had chosen the tip of a charred
stub, only a few rods from my seat, for his favorite perch. Again and
again I saw him there preening his feathers, and once or twice I tried
to inveigle him into betraying his secret. Either his house was further
off than I suspected, however, or else he was too cunning to fall into
my snare. At any rate, he permitted me to trample all about the spot,
without manifesting the first symptom of uneasiness.
What a traveler the humming-bird is! I myself had come perhaps three
hundred miles, and had accounted it a long, tiresome journey,
notwithstanding I had been brought nearly all the way in a carriage
elaborately contrived for comfort, and moving over iron rails. But this
tiny insect-like creature spent last winter in Central America, or it
may be in Cuba, and now here he sat, perfectly at home again in this
Green Mountain nook; and next autumn he will be off again betimes, as
the merest matter of course, for another thousand-mile flight. Verily, a
marvelous spirit and energy may be contained within a few ounces of
flesh! But if Trochilus be indeed Prospero's servant in disguise, as one
of our poets makes out, why, then, to be sure, his flittings back and
forth are little to wonder at. How slow, overgrown, and clumsy human
beings must look in his eyes! I wonder if he is never tempted to laugh
at us. Who knows but humming-birds have it for a by-word, "As awkward
as a man"?