Then Sigurd went his way and roasted the heart of Fafnir on a rod. And
when he tasted the blood, straightway he wot the speech of every bird
of the air.
It takes longer nowadays. Yet the years are well spent. There is a
strange indescribable happiness that comes with the knowledge of the
bird-notes. As for the songs--they are not only among the joys of
life, but they bring with them many other happinesses. Even as I
write, the memory of many of them comes back to me: wind-swept
hilltops; white sand-dunes against a blue, blue sea; singing rows of
pine trees marching miles and miles through the barrens; jade-green
pools; crooked streams of smoky-brown water; lonely islands;
orchid-haunted marsh-lands; far journeyings and good fellowship with
others who have learned the Way--these are but a few of them. Let me
entreat you to leave the narrow in-door days and wander far afield
before it be too late.
Come sit beside the weary way
And hear the angels sing.
Ride with Aucassin into the greenwood. There perchance, as happed to
him, you will see the green grass grow and listen to the sweet birds
sing and hear some good word.
To him who will but listen there are adventures in bird-songs
anywhere, any time, and any season. It was but last winter that I
found myself again in the dawn-dusk facing a defiant hickory, armed
only with an axe. Let me recommend to every man who is worried about
his body, his soul, or his estate during the winter months, that he
buy or borrow a well-balanced axe and cut down and cut up a few trees
for fire-wood. As he forces the tingling iced oxygen into every cell
of his lungs, he will find that he is taking a new view of life and
love and debt and death, and other perplexing and perennial topics.
Quite recently I read a journal that a young minister kept, back in
the fifties. One entry especially appealed to me.
"Decided this morning that I was not the right man for this church.
Chopped wood for two hours in Colonel Hewitt's wood-lot. Decided that
this was the church for me and that I was the man for this church."
On this particular morning, I heard once more the wild dawn-song of
the Carolina wren, full of liquid bell-like overtones. As I listened,
my mind went back to another wren-song. I had been hunting for the
nest of a yellow palm warbler in a little gully in the depths of a
northern forest. The blood ran down my face from the fierce bites of
the black-flies, and the mosquitoes stung like fire. Suddenly, from
the side of the tiny ravine, began a song full of ringing, glassy
notes such as one makes by running a wet finger rapidly on the inside
of a thin glass finger-bowl. Listening, I forgot that I was wet and
tired and hungry and bitten and stung. For the first time I listened
to the song of the winter wren. For years I had met this little bird
along the sides of brooks in the winter and running in and out of
holes and under stones like a mouse; but to-day to me it was no longer
a tiny bird. It was the voice of the untamed, unknown northern woods.
It is hard to make any notation of the song. It flowed like some
ethereal stream filled with little bubbles of music which broke in
glassy tinkling sprays of sound over the under-current of the high
vibrating melody itself. The song seemed to have two parts. The first
ended in a contralto phrase, while the second soared like a fountain
into a spray of tinkling trills. Through it all ran a strange
unearthly dancing lilt, such as the fairy songs must have had, heard
by wandering shepherds at the edge of the green fairy hills. At its
very height the melody suddenly ceased, and once again I dropped back
into a workaday, mosquito-ridden world, with ten miles between me and
my camp.
On that day I found two of the almost unknown, feather-lined nests of
the yellow palm warbler, and climbed up to the jewel-casket of a
bay-breasted warbler, and was shown the cherished secret of a
Nashville warbler's nest deep hidden in the sphagnum moss of a little
tussock in the middle of a pathless morass. Yet my great adventure was
the song of the winter wren.
It was under quite different circumstances that I last heard the best
winter singer of all. Never was there a more discouraging day for a
collector of bird-songs. The year was dying of rheumy age. On the
trees still hung a few dank, blotched leaves, while the sodden ground
plashed under foot and a leaden mist of rain covered everything. Yet
at the edge of the very first field that I started to cross, a strange
call cut through the fog, and I glimpsed a large black-and-white bird
crossing the meadow with the dipping up-and-down flight of a
woodpecker. It was the hairy woodpecker, the big brother of the more
common downy, and a bird that usually loves the depths of the woods.
Hardly had it alighted on a wild-cherry tree, when an English sparrow
flew up from a nearby ash-dump and attacked the new comer. The
harassed woodpecker flew to the next tree and the next, but was driven
on and away each time by the sparrow, until finally, with another
rattling call, it flew back to the woods from whence it had come. A
moment later a starling alighted on the same tree, unmolested by its
compatriot.
[Illustration: THE JUNCO ON HIS WATCH TOWER]
I followed the fields to a nearby patch of woods. It is small and
bounded on all sides by crowded roads, but at all times of the year I
find birds there. As I reached the edge of the trees white-skirted
juncos flew up in front of me. Mingled with their sharp notes, like
the clicking of pebbles, came the gentle whisper of the white-throated
sparrow, and from a nearby thicket one of them gave its strange minor
song. For its length I know of no minor strain in bird-music that is
sweeter. Like the little silver flute-trill of the pink-beaked field
sparrow, and the lovely contralto notes of the bluebird who from
mid-sky calls down, "Faraway, faraway, faraway," the song of the
white-throated sparrow is tantalizingly brief and simple in its
phrasing. Up in Canada the guides call the bird the "widow-woman."
Usually its song, except in the spring, is incomplete and apt to
flatten a little on some of the notes; but today it rang through the
rain as true and compelling as when it wakes me, from the syringa and
lilac bushes outside my sleeping-porch, some May morning.
Through the dripping boughs I pressed far into the very centre of the
wood. In a tangle of greenbrier sounded a series of sharp irritating
chips, and a cardinal, blood-red against the leaden sky, perched
himself on a bough of a hornbeam sapling. As I watched him sitting
there in the cold rain, he seemed like some bird of the tropics which
had flamed his way north and would soon go back to the blaze of sun
and riot of color where he belonged. Yet the cardinal grosbeak stays
with us all winter, and I have seen four of the vivid males at a time,
all crimson against the white snow. To-day he looked down upon me, and
without any warning suddenly began to sing his full song in a whisper.
"Wheepl, wheepl, wheepl," he whistled with a mellow and wood-wind
note; and again, a full tone lower, "Wheepl, wheepl, wheepl." Then he
sang a lilting double-note song, "Chu-wee, chu-wee, chu-wee," ending
with a ringing whistle, "Whit, whit, whit, teu, teu, teu," and then
ran them together, "Whit-teu, whit-teu, whit-teu." As his lovely
dove-colored mate flitted jealously through the thicket, he tactfully
and smackingly cried, "Kiss, kiss, kiss," and dived into the bushes to
join her. Again and again he ran through his little repertoire, so low
that thirty feet away he could hardly be heard. Leaden clouds and dank
mists might cover the earth, but life would always be worth the living
so long as one could find snatches of jeweled songs like that sung to
me by the cardinal. As I started homeward under the dripping sky,
crimson against the dark green of a cedar tree, my friend called his
good-bye to me in one last long ringing note.
Late that afternoon the rain stopped, the clouds rolled back, and in
the west the sky was a mass of flame, with pools of sapphire-blue and
rose-red cloud. Above, in a stretch of pure cool apple-green, floated
the newest of new moons. As the after-glow ebbed, one by one all the
wondrous tints merged into a great band of amber that barred the dark
for long. Just before it faded in the last moments of the twilight,
there shuddered across the evening air the sweetest, saddest note that
can be heard in all winter music. It was a tremolo, wailing little cry
that always makes me think of the children the pyxies stole, who can
be heard now and again in the twilight, or before dawn, calling,
calling vainly for one long gone. In the dim light in a nearby tree, I
could see the ear-tufts of the little red-brown screech-owl. Like the
beat of unseen wings, his voice trembled again and again through the
air, and answering him, I called him up to within six feet of me.
Around and around my head he flew like a great moth, his soft muffled
wings making not the faintest breath of sound, until at last he
drifted away into the dark.
That night the temperature rose, until the very breath of spring
seemed to be in the air; and early the next morning, before even the
faint glimmer of the dawn-dusk had shown, I was awakened by hearing a
croon so soft and sweet that it ran for long through my dreams without
waking me. Again and again it sounded, like the singing ripple of a
trout brook or the happy little cradle-song that a mother ruffed
grouse makes when she broods her leaf-brown chicks. I recognized the
love-song of the little owl, months before its time--a song which
belongs to the nights when the air is full of spring scents and
hyla-calls.
Perhaps the singer was the same bird who visited Sergeant Henny-Penny
one Christmas night. During the day the Band had taken a most
successful bird-walk. We had seen and heard some twenty different
kinds of birds; heard the white-breasted nuthatch sing his
spring-song, "Quee-quee-quee," as a Christmas carol for us; met a red
fox trotting sedately through the snow, and altogether had a most
adventurous day. That evening I was reading in front of the fire when
from Sergeant Henny-Penny's room came an S.O.S. "Fathie, come quick,
there's a nangel flyin' around my room," he called.
I hurried, for angels flying or sitting are rarely scored on my
bird-lists. When I reached the room, Henny-Penny had burrowed so far
under the bedclothes that it seemed doubtful if he would ever reach
the surface again. When I switched on the light, at first I could see
nothing, and I began to be afraid that the "nangel" had escaped
through the open window. Finally on the picture-moulding I spied the
celestial visitor. It was a screech owl of the red phase,--they may be
either red or gray,--and when I came near it snapped its beak
fiercely, to the terror of the Sergeant under the clothes. With a
quick jump I managed to catch it. At first it puffed up its feathers
and pretended to be very fierce, but at last it snuggled into my hand
and was with difficulty persuaded to fly out again into the cold
night.
[Illustration: NO ADMITTANCE PER ORDER, MR. SCREECH OWL]
Another singer of the night is of course the whip-poor-will. When I
lived farther out in the country than I do now, for two successive
years I was awakened at two o'clock in the morning by a whip-poor-will
passing north and singing in the nearby woods. The third year he broke
all records by alighting on my lawn at sunset in late April. There,
under a pink dogwood tree which stood like a statue of spring, he sang
for ten minutes. Only once before have I ever heard a whip-poor-will
sing in the daylight. Once at high noon in the pine-barrens, one burst
out so loud and ringingly that the pine warbler stopped his trilling
and the prairie warbler his seven wire-thin notes which run up the
scale. It was as uncanny as when the Lone Wolf gave tongue to the
midnight hunting chorus for Mowgli, at the edge of the jungle by day.
Now, when I live nearer civilization, and alas! farther from the
birds, I have to travel far to hear whip-poor-wills. One hour and
eleven minutes from my office in time, thirty-seven miles in space,
but a whole life away in peace and happiness and rest, I have a little
cabin in the heart of the barrens. There in spring I sleep swinging in
a hammock above a great bush of mountain-laurel, ghost-white against
the smoky water of the stream.
Below me in the marsh, where the pitcher-plants bloom among the sweet
pepper and blueberry bushes, is a pitch-pine sapling bent almost into
a circle. Sometimes my friends cut exploration paths through the bush
or, in the winter, search for firewood, but no one is ever allowed to
touch that bent tree. There some spring night, as a little breeze,
heavy with the scent of white azalea and creamy magnolia blossoms,
sways me back and forth, from the bent tree showing dimly in the
moonlight through the tree-trunks, the whip-poor-will perches himself,
lengthwise always, and sings and sings. Through the dark rings his
hurried stressed song, with the accent heavy on the first syllable.
The singer is always afraid that some one may stop him before he
finishes, and he hurries and hurries with a little click between the
triads. At exactly eight o'clock, and again at just two in the
morning, he sings there. Up in the mountains, where we once found the
whip-poor-will's two lustrous eggs lying like great spotted pearls on
a naked bed of leaves, he sings at eight, at ten, and at three. Some
people dislike the song. To me the wild lonely voice of the unseen
singer pealing out in the dark has a strange fascination.
There are certain bird-notes that strike strange chords whose
vibrations are lost in a mist of dreams. I remember a little runaway
boy, who stood in a clover field in a gray twilight and heard the
clanging calls of wild geese shouting down from mid-sky. Frightened,
he ran home a vast distance--at least the width of two fields. As he
ran, there seemed to come back to him the memory of a forgotten dream,
if it were a dream, in which he lay in another land, on a chill
hillside. Overhead in the darkness passed a burst of triumphant music,
and the strong singing of voices not of this earth. From that day the
trumpet-notes of the wild geese bring back through the fog of the
drifting years that same dream to him who heard them first in that
far-away, long-ago clover field. A few years ago there was a night of
April storm. Until midnight the house creaked and rattled and
clattered under a screaming gale. Then the wind died down, and a dense
fog covered the streets of the little town. Suddenly overhead sounded
the clang and clamor of a lost flock of geese that circled and
quartered over the house back and forth through the mist. That night
the dream came back so vividly that, even after the dreamer awoke, he
seemed to feel the cold dew of that hillside and hear an echo of the
singing voices.
It was only a few months ago that this same dreamer found himself on
the shore of Delaware Bay, with the three friends who had gone
adventuring with him for so many happy years. In the middle of a maze
of woods and swamps shrouded in clouds of low-lying mist, they found
at last the nest of the bald eagle for which they were searching. It
was in the top of a towering sour-gum tree, and the great birds
circled around, giving futile little cries that sounded like the
squeaking of a slate pencil. As it was too misty to photograph the
nest and the birds, the party started off exploring until the light
became better.
Following the song of a fox sparrow, the dreamer became separated from
the others in the mist, and after plashing through half-frozen
morasses, found himself on the barren shore of the bay itself. As he
stood there, with the white mist curling around him like smoke, from
the sea came a clamor of voices. Nearer and nearer it swept, until a
wild trumpeting sounded not thirty feet above his head. Around and
around the clanging chorus swept, while, stare as he would, he could
not spy even a feather of the flock so close above him. At the sound
the years rolled back. Once again he was in the clover field in the
gray twilight. Once again, on a far-away hillside, he heard that other
chorus of his dreams. For a moment, in the lonely mist by the sea, he
had a strange illusion that the life of which that cold hillside was a
memory was the reality, and the present the dream.
* * * * *
It takes five years to understand Eskimo. It takes a long lifetime to
learn bird-language. At any time, in any place, the collector of
bird-notes may hear an unknown bird or a strange song from a known
bird. Wherefore let no ornithologist vaunt himself. He may be able to
distinguish between the song of the purple finch and the warbling
vireo, or the chestnut-sided warbler, the redstart, and the yellow
warbler, and then hear some common bird, like the Maryland
yellow-throat, sing a song which he has never heard before and may
never hear again; or an oven bird, or even a phoebe, rise to the
ecstasy of a flight-song which no more resembles their everyday
measure than water resembles wine.
Early in my experience as a bird-student, I learned to walk humbly. It
happened on this wise. I had been invited to spend my summer at a
Sanitarium for Deserted Husbands. Said retreat was maintained by a
noble-hearted benefactor in a vast, rambling cool house, bordered on
three sides by dense woods. The day of my arrival I was approached by
one of the older inmates, who, with false and flattering tongue,
praised my scanty knowledge of bird-ways, and made me promise to teach
him the different bird-songs as he heard them from the house.
Early the next morning, as I lay in bed, there sounded a strange song.
It seemed to come from a tree at the other end of the house and
possessed a peculiar rippling, gurgling timbre. A minute or so later
my new acquaintance rushed in and seemed much pained that I did not
know the singer. Thereafter my life was burdened by that song.
Occasionally it sounded in the early morning, when I wanted to sleep
but was awakened by my enthusiastic disciple. Another time I would
hear it in the evening. One day it would come from the house, and
again from the edge of the woods. Yet, skulk and peer and listen as I
would, I could never locate the singer or identify the song.
The revelation came one Sunday morning, as two of us were breakfasting
on the terrace close to the house. Suddenly that vile song began. It
seemed to come from near the top of a tree by the farther end of the
house. I rushed to the place, my napkin flapping as I ran. By the time
I reached the tree, the song came from the opposite side of the house.
Back I hastened, only to find that the bird had once more flitted to
the other side. I hurried there, but again that bird was gone, and a
moment later sang from the farthest end of the house. Three separate
times I circled the place, with the singer and the song always just
ahead of me. It was only when I noticed that my companion at breakfast
had fallen forward on the table overcome by emotion, that I began to
suspect the worse. I hid behind a tree and waited. A moment later I
saw the alleged bird-enthusiast, clothed in preposterous pink pajamas,
and blowing false and fluting notes on a tin bird-whistle, the silly
kind that children fill with water and blow through. I have not yet
been able to live down that bird-song.
* * * * *
When I was a boy, there were four of us who always hunted and fished
and tramped and explored together. We never supposed that anything
could separate us. Yet the years have blown us apart, and we go
adventuring together no more. Alone of that quartette I am left to
follow the trail that seemed in those days to have no ending. The same
years, however, have made me some amends. Once again there are four of
us who spend all our holidays in the open. We collect orchids and
bird-songs, and find new birds and nests, and quest far among the
wild-folk in our search for secrets and adventures. Sometimes we go
south, and become acquainted with blue-gray gnatcatchers and
prothonotary warblers and summer tanagers and mocking-birds and blue
grosbeaks, and other birds which we never see here. Sometimes we
explore lonely islands hidden in a maze of sand-bars, and discover
where the terns and the laughing gulls nest; or we find wonderful
things waiting for us on mountain-tops or hidden among morasses and
quaking bogs.
Two years ago we decided to follow Spring north. First we welcomed as
usual the spring migrants and the spring flowers in April and May.
When the sky-pilgrims had passed on, and the lush growth of summer
began to show, we traveled northwards to the top of Mount Pocono, the
highest mountain of our state, and found Spring waiting for us there.
The apple blossoms were just coming out and the woods were sweet with
trailing arbutus. There we found the nests of the yellow-bellied and
alder fly-catchers, solitary vireos, and black-throated blue and
Canada and Blackburnian warblers. As once more Summer followed hard on
our heels, we took passage and traveled to a lonely camp in northern
Canada. The second day of our trip we overtook Spring again, and were
traveling through amethyst masses of rhodora and woods white with the
shad-blow. At last the apple orchards were not yet in flower, and for
the third time that year we found ourselves among the cherry blossoms.
We never stopped until we reached a lonely bay far to the north. The
sun was westering well down the sky when at last we crowded into a
creaking buckboard for a ten-mile drive. The air was full of strange
bird-songs. From the fields came a little song that began like a
feeble song sparrow and ended in a buzz. It was the Savannah sparrow,
which I had seen every year in migration, but had never before heard
sing. At the first bend in the road we came to a bit of marshland so
full of unknown bird-notes that we stopped to explore. From the edge
of the sphagnum bog came a loud explosive song--"Chip, chip, chippy,
chippy, chippy, chippy!" The singer was a greenish-colored bird, light
underneath, with a white line through the eye, and looked much like a
red-eyed vireo except that it had a warbler beak, the which it opened
to a surprising width as it sang. It was none other than the Tennessee
warbler, so rare a bird in my part of the world that even to see one
in migration was then an event. Here it was one of the commonest birds
of that whole region.
Then I stalked a strange vireo-song, something like the monotonous
notes of the red-eyed vireo, but softer and with a different cadence.
I finally found the singer in a little thicket, and studied it for
some ten minutes not six feet away. For the first time in my life I
had seen and heard the smallest and rarest of all the six vireos, the
Philadelphia, so named because it is never by any chance found in
Philadelphia. Its tininess and the pale yellow upper breast shading
into white were noticeable field-marks. To me it seemed a tame, dear,
beautiful little bird.
Just at starlight we reached the camp, and I fell asleep to the weird
notes of unknown water-birds passing down the river through the
darkness. Followed a week of unalloyed happiness. Each day, from
before dawn until long after dark, we met strange birds and found new
nests and listened to unknown bird-songs. One morning we heard a loud
yap from a dead maple-stub. On its side grew what seemed to be an
orange-colored fungus. As we came nearer, it proved to be the head of
a male Arctic three-toed woodpecker, who wears an orange patch on his
forehead and shares with his undecorated spouse the pains and
pleasures of incubation. As we came nearer, he flew out of the nest,
showing his jet-black back and white throat, and fed unconcernedly up
and down the tree, even when we climbed to where we could look down at
the five ivory-white eggs he had been brooding.
Later on we were to learn how favored above all other ornithologists
we had been, in that within one short week we had found such almost
unknown nests as those of the Arctic three-toed woodpecker, the yellow
palm, the bay-breasted, and the Tennessee warbler. We learned the
jingling little song of the yellow palm warbler, who has a
maroon-colored head, a yellow breast, and twitches his tail like a
water thrush. Another new song was the "Swee, swee, swee" of the
bay-breasted warbler, who wears a rich sombre suit of black and
bay. Over on the shore we heard the plaintive piping of the
brownish-gray-and-white piping plover, who ran ahead of us and was
hard to see against the sand. Right beside my foot I found one of the
nests, a little hollow in the warm sand, lined with broken shells,
containing four eggs, the color of wet sand all spotted with black and
gray.
All through the woods we heard a strange wild, ringing song much like
that of the Carolina wren. "Chick-a-ree, chick-a-ree, chick-a-ree,
chick" it sounded. Then between the songs the bird sang another like a
rippling laugh, and then for variety had a note which went "Chu, chu,
chu" like a fish-hawk. It was some time before we found that these
three songs all came from the same bird, and it was much longer before
we learned the singer's name. For days and days we searched the woods
without a glimpse of him. We found at last that he was none other than
the ruby-crowned kinglet, that tiny bird with a concealed patch of
flame-colored feathers on the top of his head, who sings so
brilliantly as he passes through the Eastern states in the spring. Not
once during that week did we hear the intricate warble which is the
kinglet's spring song. Evidently this talented performer has a
different repertoire for his home engagement from that which he uses
while on the road.
One of the most beautiful songs of that week I heard in the middle of
a marsh, up to my knees in muck, water, and sphagnum moss. Around me
grew wild callas, with their single curved dead-white petals and
pussy-toes, grasses topped with what looked like little dabs of warm
brown fur. I was painstakingly searching through the wet moss and
tangled reeds for the little hidden jewel-caskets of the
yellow-bellied flycatcher, Lincoln finch, Wilson, Tennessee, and
yellow palm warblers. I had just found my fourth yellow palm warbler's
nest, all lined with feathers, and with its four eggs like flecked
pink pearls, the nest itself so cunningly concealed in a mass of moss
and marsh-grass that the discovery of each one seemed a miracle that
would never happen again.
Suddenly, out of a corner of my eye, I caught sight of a tiny movement
under the drooping boughs of a little spruce half hidden in a tangle
of moss. There crouched a little brown rabbit, not even half-grown,
but yet old enough to have learned that maxim of the rabbit-folk--when
in danger sit still! Not a muscle of his taut little body quivered
even when I touched him, save only his soft brown nose. That was
covered with mosquitoes, and even to save his life Bunny could not
keep from wrinkling it. It was this tiny movement that had betrayed
him. I brushed away the mosquitoes and was watching him hop away
gratefully to another cover, when down from mid-sky came a rippling
whinnying note as if from some far-away aeolian harp. As I looked, a
speck showed against the blue, which grew larger and larger, and into
sight volplaned a Wilson snipe, the driven air whining and beating
against its wings in little waves of music, and we had added to our
collection of bird-music the famous wing-song of the Wilson snipe,
even rarer than the strange flight-song of the woodcock.
A little later one of my friends found our first olive-backed thrush's
nest, lined with porcupine-hair and black rootlets, and containing
blue eggs blotched with brown. Just beyond the nest I heard what I
thought was a gold-finch singing "Per-chickery, per-chickery." The
song was so loud that I stopped to investigate, and to my delight
found that the singer was a pine grosbeak, all rose-red against a dark
green spruce. All around us magnificent olive-sided flycatchers
shouted from their tree-tops, "Hip! three cheers! Hip! three cheers!"
and we heard the listless song of the beautiful Cape May warbler, with
its yellow and black under-parts and orange-brown eye-patch and black
crown. "Zee, zee, zee, zip," it sang, something like the song of the
blackpoll warbler, but lacking the high, glassy, crystalline notes of
that white-cheeked bird.
I was responsible for the last bird-song which appears on the lists of
my three friends--but not on mine. We were to start back for
civilization the next morning, and I was walking along the river-bank
in the late twilight, while my more industrious and scientific
companions were writing up their notes and compiling lists of
everything seen and heard on our trip. Through the windows of the
gun-room I could see their learned backs as they bent over their
compilations. Suddenly the eerie little wail of a screech owl floated
up from the river-bank. Curiously enough, it came from the very tree
behind which I was crouching. Instantly I saw three backs straighten
and three heads peer excitedly out into the darkness. When I at last
strolled in half an hour later, they told me excitedly that they had
scored the first screech owl ever heard in that particular part of
Canada. I never told them. It is not safe to trifle with the feelings
of a scientific ornithologist. Undoubtedly my reticence in regard to
that particular bird-song is all that has saved me from occupying a
lonely grave in upper Canada.
* * * * *
Sweetest of all the singers, the thrush-folk--what shall I say of
them? of the veery, with its magic notes; of the hermit thrush whose
song opens the portals of another world; of the dear wood thrush who
sings at our door. While these three voices are left in the world,
there are recurrent joys that nothing can take from us.
It was the veery song that I learned first. More years ago than I like
to remember, I walked at sunrise by a thicket, listening to bird-songs
and wondering whether there was any way by which I might come to learn
the names of the singers. One song rippled out of that thicket that
thrilled me with its strange unearthly harp-chords. "Ta-wheela,
ta-wheela, ta-wheela," it ran weirdly down the scale, and strangely
enough, was at its best at a distance and in the dusk or the early
moonlight. I was to learn later that the singer was the veery or
Wilson thrush. That was many years ago, but I have loved the bird from
that day. Once I found its nest set in the midst of a dark
rhododendron swamp; and as the mother bird slipped like a tawny shadow
from the wondrous blue eggs gleaming in the dusk, from nearby vibrated
the whirling ringing notes of its mate. Again, on a tussock in Wolf
Island Marsh I found another; and as both birds fluttered around me
with the alarm note, "Pheu, pheu," the father bird whispered a strain
of his song, and it was as if the wind had rippled the music from the
waving marsh-grasses.
In the dawn-dusk on the top of Mount Pocono I have listened to them
singing in the rain, and their song was as dreamy sweet as the
tinkling of the spring shower. The veery song is at its best by
moonlight. I remember one late May twilight coming down to the round
green circle of an old charcoal-pit, by the side of a little lake set
deep in the hills and fringed with the tender green of the opening
leaves. That day I had climbed Kent Mountain, and seen my first eagle,
and visited a rattlesnake den, and found a dozen or so nests, and
walked many dusty miles. It was nearly dark as I slipped off my
clothes and swam through the motionless water. The still air was sweet
with little elusive waves of perfume from the blossoms of the wild
grape. Over the edge of Pond Hill the golden rim of a full moon made
the faint green tracery of the opening leaves all show in a mist of
soft moonlight. As I reached the centre of the lake, from both shores
a veery chorus began. The hermit thrush will not sing after eight, but
the veery sings well into the dark, if only the moon will shine. That
night, as from the hidden springs of the lake the heart-blood of the
hills pulsed against my tired body, the veery songs drifted across the
water, all woven with moonshine and fragrance, until it seemed as if
the moonlight and the perfume, the coolness and the song were all one.
Some April evening between cherry-blow and apple-blossom the wood
thrush comes back. I first hear his organ-notes from the beech tree at
the foot of Violet Hill. Down from my house beside the white oak I
make haste to meet him. In 1918, he came to me on May 3; in 1917 on
April 27; and in 1916 on April 30. He seems always glad to see me, yet
with certain reserves and withdrawings quite different from the
robins, who chirp unrestrainedly at one's very feet. His well-fitting
coat of wood-brown and soft white, dusked and dotted with black,
accord with the natural dignity of the bird. It is quite impossible to
be reserved in a red waistcoat. Some of my earliest and happiest
bird-memories are of this sweet singer.
The wood thrush has a habit of marking his nest with some patch or
shred of white, perhaps so that when he comes back from his twilight
song he may find it the more readily. Usually the mark is a bit of
paper, or a scrap of cloth, on which the nest is set. Last winter I
was walking across a frozen marsh where in late summer the blue blind
gentian hides. The long tow-colored grass of the tussocks streamed out
before a stinging wind which howled at me like a wolf. I crept through
thickets to the centre of a little wood, until I was safe from its
fierce fingers among the close-set tree-trunks. There I found the
last-year's nest of a wood thrush built on a bit of bleached
newspaper. Pulling out the paper, I read on it in weather-faded
letters, "Votes for Women!" There was no doubt in my mind that the
head of that house was a thrushigist. That is probably the reason too
why Father Thrush takes his turn on the eggs.
Once in the depths of a swamp in the Pocono Mountains I was hunting
for the nests of the northern water thrush, which is a wood-warbler
and not a thrush at all. That temperamental bird always chooses
peculiarly disagreeable morasses for his home. In the roots of an
overturned tree by the side of the deepest and most stagnant pool that
he can conveniently find, his nest is built, unlike his twin-brother,
the Louisiana water thrush, who chooses the bank of some lonely
stream. On that day, while ploughing through mud and water and
mosquitoes, I came upon a wood thrush's nest beautifully lined with
dry green moss, with a scrap of snowy birch-bark for its marker.
The song of the wood thrush is a strain of woodwind notes, few in
number, but inexpressibly true, mellow, and assuaging. "Cool bars of
melody--the liquid coolness of a deep spring," is how they sounded to
Thoreau. "Air--o--e, air-o-u," with a rising inflection on the "e" and
a falling cadence on the "u," is perhaps an accurate phrasing of the
notes. Many of our singers give a more elaborate performance. The
brown thrasher, that grand-opera singer who loves a tree-top and an
audience, has a more brilliant song. Yet there are few listeners who
will prefer his florid, conscious style to the simple, appealing notes
of the wood thrush. Although his is perhaps the most beautiful strain
in our everyday chorus, to me the wood thrush does not rank with
either the veery or the hermit. His song lacks the veery's magic and
the ethereal quality of the hermit, and is marred by occasional
grating bass-notes.
My own favorite I have saved until the very last. There is an
unmatchable melody in the song of the hermit thrush found in that of
no other bird. The olive-backed thrush has a hurried unrestful song, a
combination of the notes of the wood thrush and the veery. I have
never heard that mountain-top singer, the Bicknell thrush, or him of
the far North, the gray-cheeked, or the varied thrush of the West, but
from the description of their songs I doubt if any of them possess the
qualities of the hermit.
As I write, across the ice-bound months comes the memory of that
spring twilight when I last heard the hermit thrush sing. I was
leaning against the gnarled trunk of a great beech, between two
buttressed roots. Overhead was a green mist of unfolding leaves, and
the silver and gray light slowly faded between the bare white boles
of the wood. A few creaking grackles rowed through the sky, and in the
distance crows cawed on their way to some secret roost. Down through
the air fell the alto sky-call of the bluebirds, and robins flocking
for the night whispered greetings to each other. Below me the brook
was full of voices. It tinkled and gurgled, and around the bend at
intervals sounded a murmur so human that at first I thought some other
wanderer had discovered my refuge. It was only, however, the
mysterious babble that always sounds at intervals when a brook sings
to a human. It was as if the water were trying to speak the listener's
language, and had learned the tones but not the words. Now and again
the wind sounded in the valley below; then passed overhead with a vast
hollow roar, so high that the spice-bush thicket which hid me hardly
swayed.
I leaned back against the vast thews and ridged muscles of the beech,
one of the generations upon generations of men who pass like dreams
under its vast branches. One of my play-time fancies in the woods is
to hark back a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years, and try to
picture what trees and animals and men I might have met there then.
Another is to choose the tree on which my life-years are to depend.
Give up the human probabilities of life, and live as long or as short
as the tree of my choice. Of course it would be a lottery. The tree
might die, or be cut down, the year after I had made my bargain; and I
used to plan how I would secure and guard the bit of woodland where my
life-tree lived. Of all those that I met, this particular beech with
the centuries behind it and the centuries yet to come, was my special
choice, for the beech is the slowest growing of all our trees. This
one towered high overhead, while its roots plunged down deep into the
living waters and its vast girth seemed as if nothing could shake it.
That evening, as I lay against it and bargained for a share of its
years, I thought that I felt the vast trunk move as if its life
reached out to mine. Life is given to the tree and to the mammal. Why
may they not meet on some common plane? Some one, some day, will learn
the secret of that meeting-place.
So I dreamed, when suddenly in the twilight beyond my thicket a song
began. It started with a series of cool, clear, round notes, like
those of the wood thrush but with a wilder timbre. In the world where
that singer dwells, there is no fret and fever of life and strife of
tongues. On and on the song flowed, cool and clear. Then the strain
changed. Up and up with glorious sweeps the golden voice soared. It
was as if the wood itself were speaking. There was in it youth and
hope and spring and glories of dawns and sunsets and moonlight and the
sound of the wind from far away. Again the world was young and
unfallen, nor had the gates of Heaven closed. All the long-lost dreams
of youth came true--while the hermit thrush sang.
MCGRATH-SHERRILL PRESS
GRAPHIC ARTS BLDG.
BOSTON
Transcriber's note:
Archaic and inconsistent spelling and punctuation retained.