It is the best of all out-of-door sports bar none. The thrill of
hidden treasure, the lure of adventure, the joy of escape from in-door
days--all these are part of it. Try it of a May day, or before sunrise
some June morning. I have a friend who leads a double life. During
business hours he is the president of a bank. Outside of them he is
the most abandoned bird's-nester of my acquaintance. If his depositors
could see their president going up the side of a perpendicular
oak-tree with climbing-irons, to look at the dizzy home of a red-tail
hawk, or picking his way across bottomless bogs in search of the
bittern's nest, there would probably be a run on his bank.
I know a woman seventy-two years young, who took up bird's-nesting in
order to help forget a great sorrow. While her contemporaries are
dozing their lives away in caps and easy-chairs, she is afield in all
sorts of weather, and sees more birds and finds more nests in a year
than the average woman meets in a lifetime. Incidentally she gets more
health and happiness out of life than any woman of her age whom I have
ever met.
Another woman, in a little town in New Jersey, by the sudden death of
her husband was left alone with but little money and no friends.
Moreover, her doctor advised her that she had only a year at most to
live. One day she found the nest of a prairie warbler, that little
jewel-casket lined with fern-wool. It held four eggs like pink-flecked
pearls. The very next day she bought a bird-book, and forgot all about
herself, and spent the happiest months of her life hunting nests. At
the end of a year in the open, she notified her indignant physician
that she had become too much interested in her hobby to confirm his
diagnosis. To-day she supports herself happily by writing about what
she sees and hears among the wild-folk.
The moral of all this is, go bird's-nesting. This past summer,
practising what I preach, I spent all my spare holidays in May, June,
and July hunting rare nests. Let me say in preface that I collect only
with a note-book and a camera. Personally, I prefer to have memories
and notes and pictures of my bird's-nests rather than cabinets full of
pierced and empty eggs; for I believe that a human who visits his
brethren of the air as their friend will find out more about them than
he who follows them about like a weasel, only to rob their nests.
The first of my bird-holidays was on May 20th. Four of us were to meet
at Mount Pocono, the highest mountain in Pennsylvania, on a hunt for
the rare nest of that tiny bird, the golden-crowned kinglet. Late that
evening we reached the camp near the top of the mountain, where we
were to make our headquarters. Up there the weather had harked back
to March, and the water froze on the porch that night. We pooled our
blankets and curled up together for warmth.
At one A.M. a whip-poor-will began his loud night-song. He always
sings as if he were wound up, and in a great hurry to finish his song
before the mechanism runs down. Later, in the darkness, we heard the
drumming like distant thunder of the ruffed grouse. One of our party
claims that on this mountain the grouse always drum at four-thirty in
the morning; and his stock as an accurate ornithologist went above par
when we examined our watches and found that it was just half-past
four. As the darkness turned to the dusk of dawn, the first day-song
was the beautiful minor strain of the white-throated sparrow. "O
Canada, Canada, Canada," he fluted. Then came a snatch of the wheezing
strain of the song sparrow. Finally, sweetest of all, sounded two or
three tantalizing notes of the hermit thrush, pure, single, prolonged
notes of wonderful sweetness, followed by two arpeggio chords.
We were up and out before sunrise; for he who would find rare nests
must look for them while the birds are laying or brooding. Four hours
distant, back in Philadelphia, summer had come. Here the trees showed
the green tracery of early spring, and the apple trees were still in
blossom, while everywhere the woods were white with the long pure
snow-petals of the shadblow. Some day we four are going to follow
Spring north, bird's-nesting all the way, until within the Arctic
Circle we find her in mid-July.
To-day the first nest discovered was that of the junco, or
slate-colored snowbird, whose jingling little song and the flutter of
whose white skirts were everywhere throughout the woods. This one was
close to the camp, hollowed out of the side of a bank of pine-needles,
and held four white eggs sparsely spotted with reddish-brown. The
little mother-bird chipped frantically, with a clicking note which the
Architect said always made him think that she carried pebbles in her
throat.
There were trillions of trilliums, as the Artist remarked
epigrammatically. Some were the common trilliums, of a dark
garnet-red. Besides these we found many of the rarer painted
trilliums--a pure white triangle with a stained crimson reversed
triangle in the centre. All of the trilliums are studies in triangles.
The painted trillium has the crimson triangle in the centre, set on
the white triangle made up of three petals which, in their turn, are
fixed in a reversed triangle of green sepals, and the whole blossom is
set in a still larger triangle made up of three green leaves.
Everywhere the woods were full of purple-pink rhodora, the earliest of
the azaleas. Its blossoms were silver flecked with deeper-colored
spots.
The next nest found was to me the most eventful one of the day,
although not an especially rare one on that mountain. The Architect
was walking beside one of the strange hummocks which are thought to
have been formed by buried tree-trunks in the path of some old-time
cyclone. Suddenly his eye was caught by the gleam of four sky-blue
eggs shining like turquoises from a nest directly on the ground,
lined neatly with red-brown pine-needles and with dry dark green moss
on the outside, the hall-mark of the nest of the hermit thrush. In
front of it was a cushion of partridge-berry vines, with their green
leaves and red berries, while blueberry fronds, covered with tender
green leaves, arched over the nest, and sprays of ground-pine
sheltered its sides. It was a fitting home for the beautiful twilight
singer. The eggs of a hermit thrush actually seem to gleam from the
ground, unlike the mottled and speckled and clouded eggs of most
ground-nesters.
As the sun came up, the whole mountain-side rang with bird-songs.
There was the abrupt strain of the magnolia warbler, who to my ears
says, "Wheedle, wheedle, whee-chee." The black-and-white warbler sang
like a tiny, creaking wheel, as he ran up and down tree-trunks. Down
in the meadows beyond the lake, the long-tailed brown thrasher said,
"Hello, hello! Come over here, come over here. There he goes, there he
goes. Whoa, whoa, ha-ha, ha-ha." If you do not believe my reading of
his song, listen the next time one sings to you, and see if these are
not his exact words. Overhead we often heard the squeal of the
red-shouldered hawk, sounding almost like the cry of the blue jay.
Then there was the loud yet gentle warble of the purple finch; and
once we saw a beautiful rose-red male and his gray-brown wife feeding
each other on a limb like a pair of lovebirds. Another song which was
interesting to me, because almost new, was that of the solitary or
blue-headed vireo, who sang, "See, see me-e. See me, you! you!" His
whole song is in couplets. The Artist said that my rendering was too
imaginative, and that what the bird really said was "Che-wee--che-woo,
che-wee--chu, chu," which perhaps is more accurate.
[Illustration: THE RED-SHOULDERED HAWK]
Through appalling swamps and tangled thickets of rhododendron we were
led by the Banker, who had highly resolved not to return without a
sight of the golden-crowned kinglet's nest. Once we came to a large
spruce in which had been cut, in the living wood, great square holes
like those in bar-posts. On one side we counted five, on another
three, while on the opposite side were no less than ten, with a new
one on the top cut right into the solid heart-wood. It was a
feeding-tree of the great pileated woodpecker of the North, a
magnificent black and white bird with a scarlet crest, nearly the size
of a crow. All that morning we searched in vain for the kinglet's
nest. Only as we came back to the cabin at noon for lunch, were our
hopes raised.
As we walked down the trail, not a hundred yards from the
cabin-entrance, in a spruce tree, the Banker spied a great hanging
nest made of wool and lined with feathers, from the top of which flew
the only golden-crowned kinglet which we saw that day, with the orange
patch on the top of his tiny head edged with black and yellow. The
nest was empty, but the Banker felt that he had made the great
discovery of his life and discoursed learnedly on the industry of this
tiny bird, which could find and carry such a mass of wool and build a
nest at least a hundred times larger than itself. It was not until a
month later that he was reluctantly convinced that what he had found
was the nest of a deer-mouse.
That afternoon we skirted the little lake and saw, not forty feet
above us, a bald eagle flying down toward us with its snowy neck and
pure white tail. He flew with four or five quick flaps, and then would
soar. In the distance we saw another eagle pursued by a scurrilous
cawing crow. The eagle flew over to the shore, and alighted and drank,
and then, standing on the edge of the water, seemed to be fishing. His
pursuer also alighted just behind him, and walked close up. Every time
the eagle would turn, the crow would scuttle off, like some little
blackguard boy following and reviling one of his elders. Several times
the crow flew over the head of the eagle and tried to gain courage
enough to make a dab at him. Through it all the king of birds paid
absolutely no attention to his tormentor. The comparison of the crow
with the eagle gave some idea of the size of the latter. He seemed
over three times as large as the crow.
It was the Banker again, on the other side of the lake, who made the
next discovery. We were hunting a little apart through the woods, when
he announced from where he stood that he had just caught a glimpse of
a Brewster's warbler. For the benefit of other bird-students who are
in my class, let me write what I learned that day in regard to said
bird. A Brewster's warbler is the rare hybrid between the
golden-winged warbler and the blue-winged warbler, more closely
resembling the golden-winged. When it takes after the blue-winged, it
is called the Lawrence warbler. This specimen we studied feather by
feather for over half an hour at short range, and the experts of the
party pronounced it beyond peradventure a Brewster's warbler,--a bird
not seen often in a lifetime. It was solid blue on the back, pearly
white underneath, and showed white tail-feathers, together with a
greenish-yellow patch on the very crown of its head. It had two broad
yellow wing-bars, one large and the other small, and its white throat,
innocent of any black mark, was the field-mark by which it could be
told from either of its parents or from its half-brother the Lawrence.
It was the Artist who made the last discovery of the day. Near the
crest of the mountain, he gave a piercing cry and announced that he
had discovered an Indian cobra. We all hastened to his rescue, and saw
a fearsome sight. Coiled in front of him, hissed and struck a bloated,
swollen snake, with flattened head and up-turned snout. It was none
other than the American puff-adder, which ought to be called the bluff
adder since, in spite of its threats, it is never known to bite, and
is really a harmless and gentle snake.
The last thing the writer can remember of that trip was hearing, as he
fell asleep, the Architect tell the Banker of the time he found two
loon's eggs, which a man had discovered on the top of a muskrat's
house and put under one of his hens to hatch.
The next day we were back in Philadelphia and summer again, with a
list of seventy-six different kinds of birds identified on the trip
and a total of ten nests found.
A few days later I went bird's-nesting with another friend in the very
heart of the city of Camden. Through the manufacturing district a
sluggish creek winds its way past factory after factory. There, under
a clump of golden-rod leaves, he showed me the nest of a spotted
sandpiper, made of reeds lined with grass, containing four
eggs--dark-brown eggs, spotted at the larger end with chocolate marks,
and coming to a sharp point at the other end. Later on, I found
another nest in the middle of a mass of horse-tail. Then, in the very
centre of a base-ball diamond, not far from second base, on the naked
ground, he showed me a killdeer's nest--a hollow scraped in the
gravel, with four eggs which so matched the stones that they had
escaped the notice of the players all around them. On the bank of the
creek we found song sparrows' nests, and out in a patch of marsh, on
the very last tussock, the dried-grass nest of a swamp sparrow, which
was much thicker than the song sparrow's, while the four eggs were of
a marbled warm brown and white.
Then we pushed on, still in the city limits, until we came to an old
quarry-bed half-filled with water, which had turned into a noisome bit
of marshland. Pushing a rickety raft out through the muck and
water-reeds of the stagnant water, my friend showed me, on a clump of
pickerel weed on a sunken stick, a nest of twigs on which was
sitting a strange bird. Its long sharp beak pointed straight skyward.
Its back was a combination of shades of soft reddish-browns, while its
breast was reddish-brown streaked with white. The most curious things
about it were its eyes. They were almost all pupil, with a bright
golden ring around the extreme edge, and stared at us unwinkingly like
a great snake. Although we came close up, the bird absolutely refused
to leave her nest, and stabbed viciously at a stick which I poked out
toward her. Finally, not daring to trust my hand within reach of that
stabbing yellow beak, I lifted her up bodily with the long stick,
enough to show five whitish-blue eggs rounded at each end. It was the
rare nest and eggs of the least bittern, a bird a little over a foot
long, which has a strange habit of clutching with its claws the stalks
of reeds and walking up them like a monkey. As we left, amid the
clicking notes of the cricket-frogs and the boom of the bull-frogs we
heard a very low "Cluck, cluck, cluck." It was the least bittern
singing the only song she knew, in celebration of the fact that she
still had her eggs safe.
[Illustration: MRS. KILDEER AT HER NEST]
The Architect and myself decided to travel once again, later in the
season, to the mountain, in the hope that we might make a better
nesting record. We reached the cabin on June 17th, and again found
ourselves back in spring. The peepers were still calling, and there
were wild lilies-of-the-valley in the woods, and pink rose-hearted
twin-flowers, with their scent of heliotrope. Everywhere grew the
dwarf cornel, or bunch-berry, with its four white petals--the smallest
of the dogwoods, which grows only a few inches high.
The first nest was found by me. It was built on a foundation of tiny
twigs in a bush, and had a two-story effect, the upper story being
made of fine grass. As I came near the bush, a magnificent
chestnut-sided warbler, with the bay patches on his sides and his
yellow crown, made such an outcry that I suspected the nest and
finally found it. There were three eggs in it and one tiny young bird,
smaller than a bumblebee. Everywhere grew the beautiful northern
azalea, of a clear pink with a perfume like sandal-wood. The Canadian
warbler, with its black necklace on its yellow breast, sang everywhere
a song which sounded like, "Ea-sy, ea-sy, you, you"; and we heard also
the orange-throated Blackburnian warbler's wiry, thin notes.
Near the top of the mountain are two sphagnum bogs, difficult to find,
but the home of many a rare bird. We finally located the larger of
these bogs, and there the Artist made the great discovery of the day.
Right out from underneath his foot, as he splashed through the wet
moss, flew a yellow-bellied flycatcher, which gives a note like the
wood-pewee and whose nest had been found only once before in the state
of Pennsylvania. Right in front of him, hidden in the deep moss, was
this long-sought nest. It was set deep in club-moss and lined with
white pine-needles, and contained four pinkish-white eggs with an
aureole around the larger end, with light rufous markings. It was so
overshadowed with wintergreen leaves and aronia and bunch-berries
that, even after the Artist had pointed out the place to me, it was
with very great difficulty that I found it.
As we crossed the marsh, I heard the song of the olive-backed thrush,
which sounds to me like a cross between the notes of the wood thrush
and the strange harp-chords of the veery or Wilson thrush. In another
part of the bog sang the rare Nashville warbler, whose nest we have
yet to find. Its song starts like the creak of the black-and-white
warbler and ends like a chipping sparrow. In a marsh beyond the
sphagnum bog, I found the nest of a Maryland yellowthroat, set in a
yellow viburnum shrub some six inches from the ground. This nest is
usually on the ground. It was set just as a gem is set in a ring, the
setting consisting of leaves which come up into five or six points.
Held by the points is a little cup of grass. The eggs were the most
beautiful we saw that day--of a pinkish-white with a wreath of
chestnut blotches around the larger end. On the farther side of the
marsh, a white-throated sparrow flew out from in front of me; and
after a long search I found its nest--a little moss-rimmed cup of
gray-green, yellow grass, containing four eggs of a faint blue clouded
with chestnut, which was massed in large blotches at the larger end.
With the four eggs was a dumpy young cow-bird, that fatal changeling
which is the death of so many little birds. In this case we saved four
prospective white-throated sparrows from being starved to death by
their ugly foster-brother. The white-throat is a dear, gentle, little
bird. Even its alarm-notes are soft, instead of being harsh and
disagreeable like those of most other sparrows.
The next day I found a song sparrow's nest and a catbird's nest, and
then in the midst of dark, cool woods, where an icy brown trout-brook
ran through a mass of rhododendron, a thrush suddenly slipped away
ahead of me out of a clump of rhododendron bushes. The light color of
the bird and the lighter spotted breast marked it as a veery or Wilson
thrush. On looking at the bush, I saw the nest, a rough one made of
hemlock twigs matted together, and lined with pine-needles with a
basis of leaves. Inside were four small eggs of a heavenly blue. They
are among the smallest of all of our pure-blue eggs.
That same day the Artist found a beautiful nest of a
black-throated-blue warbler, also set in a rhododendron bush. The nest
was made of the light inner bark of the rhododendron, which was of a
bright yellow. Inside, it was lined with black and tan rootlets so
fine that they look almost like horse-hair. These are the same
rootlets which the magnolia warbler uses to line its nest, and up to
the present time no ornithologist whom I have met has been able to
identify them.
* * * * *
"Can you go to Maryland to-day on a bird-trip?" telephoned the
Banker.
"No," said I, "lawyers have to work for a living."
"There'll be blue-gray gnatcatchers and mocking-birds and Acadian
flycatchers," he tried again.
"No," said I.
"I've found out where the prothonotary warbler lives," he said once
more.
"No," said I.
"We may find its nest," he continued. "No one up here has seen one for
years."
"No," said I firmly. "What time does the train start?"
Sunset found me Somewhere in Maryland. I was squeezed into a buggy
built for one, along with the Miller, at whose house we were intending
to stop, and the Banker, who is constructed on flowing, generous
lines. We drove creakingly through miles and miles of blossoming peach
orchards. At the Miller's house we ate the worst supper that money
could buy. The Miller's wife had evidently been born a bad cook, and
by careful practice had become worse. It was over at last, and the
Banker and I retired to a room under the rafters which contained one
window and a mountainous bed. The rest of the space was taken up by
mosquitoes. I undressed, jumped into the bed, and sank out of sight.
The Banker located me by my muffled cries for help, and pulled me to
the surface just in time to save my life. Thereafter we molded a
conical crater in that feather-bed and carefully fitted ourselves in,
leaving a large air-hole at the top.
It was a hot night. The mosquitoes bit steadily, and the feather-bed
was like a furnace seven times heated. All night long a whip-poor-will
called his name under our window over three million times. The Banker
said he counted the notes. Finally, after hours and hours of agony, I
fell into a troubled sleep and was instantly awakened by the Banker,
who said it was time to get up. We breakfasted on what remained of the
corpse of the supper of the night before, which we found on the table.
A few moments later I was morosely moving an alleged boat through the
mists of the morass.
Without further alliteration, let me chronicle what paid for all the
toil, hardships and privations of the trip. It was the sight of a bird
of burnished gold flashing through the curling mists. "Tweet, tweet,
tweet," he called ringingly as he flew. The note reminded me somewhat
of the loud song of the Kentucky warbler, and the Banker, of the note
of the solitary sandpiper. Every now and then we caught tantalizing
glimpses of this warbler, which never by any chance stands still, but
flits here and there among the trees over the water. From the trees I
constantly heard squeaking notes, apparently of young birds. They
sounded everywhere, and I decided that the whole marsh must be full of
nests. The Banker laughed at my ignorance and told me that this was
the note of the blue-gray gnatcatchers--"like a mouse with a
toothache," as Chapman describes it. With great difficulty I caught a
glimpse of the tiny bird here and there among the tree-tops, and saw
the two long feathers of its tail, and had a glimpse of the gray and
white of its plumage. Some weeks before, the Banker had found down
there one of its rare and beautiful nests, like a large hummingbird's
nest, lined with down and thatched on the outside with lichens, and
fastened to a high bough.
That day I found the first nest of the prothonotary warbler. This bird
uses deserted woodpeckers' nests in dead trees set in marshes, so it
was necessary to paddle around to every dead tree which showed a hole.
I finally saw a little red-birch stub sticking up in the corner of the
marsh, and rowing over to it, noticed a small hole in its side.
Picking away the bark, I made it larger and a piece of the fresh green
moss, from which the nest of the prothonotary warbler is always built,
showed itself. Imbedded in the moss was a vivid orange-yellow feather,
which could belong to no other bird. The nest was just built and
contained no eggs.
The Banker found the second nest, in a willow-stub ten feet from the
ground, in an old downy woodpecker's nest. He found it by seeing the
male bird fly into the hole. Climbing up to the nest, he found that in
it were four young birds. Perching on a limb, he sat about four feet
from the nest while I was in the boat perhaps ten feet away. The
cock-bird flew up with a May-fly, making a soft alarm-note something
like that made by a field sparrow, only gentler. He flew up close to
where my friend sat and hesitated for a long while. Finally, the
hungry little birds inside gave a prolonged squeak, which probably
meant, "May-flies immediately!" This was too much for Mr.
Prothonotary. With a farewell look at the Banker, he turned his back
and dived into the nest, placing himself entirely at the mercy of this
giant who was keeping guard over his home. Seven times he did this
while we watched, bringing in two beetles, a small wasp, a fly, and
three May-flies. The hen-bird would come up time and time again with a
fly in her beak, but never could quite muster up courage enough to go
into the nest, but absent-mindedly swallowing the fly herself, would
go off.
We had a wonderful chance to study the coloring of this rare bird. The
cock-bird had a bright black eye which showed vividly against his
yellow cheek, as did his long black bill. His colors were gray,
yellow, and olive. The underside of his tail was pure white, and he
had a white edge to his wings, while the top of the wings was
greenish-yellow. The whole head, throat, and breast were of an intense
golden, almost orange yellow, and the wings were bluish-gray. The bird
itself was just about the size of the common black-and-white warbler.
The female was of the same coloring, only much paler.
After that came the tragedy of the day for me. An overhanging bough
knocked off my glasses, and they sank in the black waters of the marsh
and continued sunk, in spite of my frantic groping and diving for
them. The rest of the day I realized how the blinded galley-slaves
felt who were chained to the oar in mediæval times. The Banker kindly
described to me all the sixty-five different kinds of birds he saw in
that marsh. As my vision was limited to a range of about two feet, I
did not see many more birds personally. In spite of my blinded
condition, I did discover, however, another prothonotary's nest. I had
taken hold of a rotten willow-stub while pushing the boat through a
thicket. It broke in my hand, and there, in an exposed downy
woodpecker's hole, was a newly made nest of green moss, with a few
twigs and bark-strips on top, but no eggs. The fourth and last nest
was found by the Banker, again in a downy's hole. He saw something
move and thought it was a mouse or chickadee. Finally a long bill came
out of the hole and then a head. It was a hen prothonotary building
her nest. She had the hole already filled with moss, and was bringing
in grass, and would whirl around and around inside, modeling the nest
carefully. Within, she had lined it with grass, just as a chipping
sparrow's nest is lined with hair.
This was the last nest of the day. The Banker suggested that we stay
over another night, but I felt that home was the best place for a
blind man. My last memory of the golden prothonotary was hearing him
call, "Tweet, tweet, tweet" from the willows, as we started back to
the mill.
The last of my nesting-trips was on July 7th. The Artist in some
mysterious way had learned the secret of Tern Island, one of the few
places on the New Jersey coast where the Wilson tern still nests. In a
rickety old power-boat--probably it was the first one ever built--we
traveled haltingly through the most intricate channels imaginable,
and finally reached an island hidden by shoals and salt-marshes, but
whose farther beach faced the ocean. There, in a space about four
hundred by one hundred feet, we found seventy nests of tern,
containing a hundred and sixty-five eggs. Most of the nests contained
two eggs, some three, and one, four. The nests were merely hollows in
the sand, lined with bits of pure-white shell. The usual color of the
eggs was a blue-green background, heavily blotched with chocolate
blotches, although I found one egg of a light green, speckled all over
with light-red specks. In only one nest was there a young bird. The
little chick lay flat in the burning sun, while overhead hung the
mother tern, pearl-white with black-tipped wings, making a grinding,
scolding note. The young tern was downy like a duckling, and had tiny
red feet and a pink beak tipped with black. We put up a stake to mark
the nest, and later in the day, when we came back to photograph it, we
found that the little tern had crawled out, followed the shadow which
the stick had made, and lay with its head in the scanty shade far away
from the nest.
We met other rare water-fowl that blazing day. We saw the rare piping
plover, whose nest I was afterwards to find in Upper Canada, black
skimmers, with their strange slant-cut beaks, black tern, least tern,
loons, black-bellied plover, and everywhere throughout the
salt-meadows enormous great-blue herons.
This was the last trip of our quartette for the summer, and we are
looking forward to many more springs and summers among the bird-folk.
Let me end as I began--go bird's-nesting. Escape into the open from
these narrow in-door days, and learn the way to where the wild-folk
dwell. Seek their paterans and share their secrets. In their land you
will find the help of the hills, and hope wide as the world, and
strength and youth and health and happiness in full measure. Try it.