and not far away the ground is matted with trailing arbutus, still
in plentiful bloom. One of the most attractive things here is the
few-flowered shadbush (_Amelanchier oligocarpa_). The common _A.
Canadensis_ grows near by; and it is astonishing how unlike the two
species look, although the difference (the visible difference, I mean)
is mostly in the arrangement of the flowers,--clustered in one case,
separately disposed in the other. To-day the “average observer” would
look twice before suspecting any close relationship between them; a
week or two hence he would look a dozen times before remarking any
distinction. With them, as with the red cherry, it is the blossom that
makes the bush.
So much for my first May morning on the Notch road and by the lake: a
few particulars caught in passing, to be taken for what they are,--
“Samples and sorts, not for themselves alone, but for their
atmosphere.”
In the afternoon I went over into the Landaff Valley, having in mind a
restful, level-country stroll, with a view especially to the probable
presence of Tennessee warblers in that quarter. One or two had been
singing constantly near the hotel for two days (ever since my arrival,
that is), and Sunday I had heard another beside the Bethlehem road.
Whether they were migrants only, or had settled in Franconia for the
season, they ought, it seemed to me, to be found also in the big
Landaff larch swamp, where we had seen them so often in June, ten or
twelve years ago. As I had heard the song but once since that time, I
was naturally disposed to make the most of the present opportunity.
I turned in at the old hay barn,--one of my favorite resorts, where
I have seen many a pretty bunch of autumnal transients,--and sure
enough, a Tennessee’s voice was one of the first to greet me. _This_
fellow sang as a Tennessee ought to sing, I said to myself. By which
I meant that his song was clearly made up of three parts, just as
I had kept it in memory; whereas the birds near the hotel, as well
as the one on the Bethlehem road, divided theirs but once. No great
matter, somebody will say; but a self-respecting man likes to have his
recollections justified, even about trifles, particularly when he has
confided them to print.[7]
The swamp had begun well with its old eulogist; but better things
were in store. I passed an hour or more in the woods, for the most
part sitting still (which is pretty good after-dinner ornithology),
and had just taken the road again when a bevy of talkative chickadees
came straggling down the rim of the swamp, flitting from one tree to
another,--a morsel here and a morsel there,--after their usual manner
while on the march. Now, then, for a few migratory warblers, which
always may be looked for in such company.
True to the word, my glass was hardly in play before a bay-breast
showed himself, in magnificent plumage; then came a Blackburnian,
also in high feather, handsomer even than the bay-breast, but less
of a rarity; and then, all in a flash, I caught a glimpse of some
bright-colored, black-and-yellow bird that, almost certainly, from
an indefinable something half seen about the head, could not be a
magnolia. “That should be a Cape May!” I said aloud to myself. Even as
I spoke, however, he was out of sight. Down the road I went, trying to
keep abreast of the flock, which moved much too rapidly for my comfort.
Again I saw what might have been the Cape May, but again there was
nothing like certainty. And again I lost him. With the trees so thick,
and the birds so small and so active, it was impossible to do better. I
had missed my chance, I thought; but just then something stirred among
the leaves of a fir tree close by me, on the very edge of the swamp,
and the next moment a bird stepped upon the outermost twig, as near me
as he could get, and stood there fully displayed: a splendid Cape May,
in superb color, my first New England specimen. “Look at me,” he said;
“this is for your benefit.” And I looked with both eyes. Who would not
be an ornithologist, with sights like this to reward him?
The procession moved on, by the air line, impossible for me to
follow. The Cape May, of course, had departed with the rest. So I
assumed,--without warrant, as will presently appear. But I had no
quarrel with Fate. For a plodding, wingless creature, long accustomed
to his disabilities, I was being handsomely used. The soul is always
seeking new things, says a celebrated French philosopher, and is
always pleased when it is shown more than it had hoped for. This is
preëminently true of rare warblers. Now I would cross the bridge, walk
once more under the arch of willows,--happy that I _could_ walk, being
a man only,--and back to the village again by the upper road. For a
half mile on that road the prospect is such that no mortal need desire
a better one.
First, however, I must train my glass upon a certain dark object out
in the meadow, to see whether it was a stump (it was motionless enough
for one, but I didn’t remember it there) or a woodchuck. It turned out
to be a woodchuck, erect upon his haunches, his fore paws lifted in an
attitude of devotion. The sight was common just now in all Franconia
grass land, no matter in what direction my jaunts took me. And always
the attitude was the same, as if now were the ground-hog’s Lent. “Watch
and pray” is his motto; and he thrives upon it like a monk. Though the
legislature sets a price on his head, he keeps in better flesh than
the average legislator. Well done, say I. May his shadow never grow
less! I like him, as I like the crow. Health and long life to both of
them,--wildings that will not be put down nor driven into the outer
wilderness, be the hand of civilization never so hostile. They were
here before man came, and will be here, it is most likely, after he is
gone; unless, as the old planet’s fires go out, man himself becomes a
hibernator. I have heard a hunted woodchuck, at bay in a stone wall,
gnashing his teeth against a dog; and I have seen a mother woodchuck
with a litter of young ones playing about her as she lay at full length
sunning herself, the very picture of maternal satisfaction: and my
belief is that woodchucks have as honest a right as most of us to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
As I walked under the willows,--empty to-day, though I remembered more
than one happy occasion when, in better company, I had found them alive
with wings,--I paused to look through the branches at a large hawk and
a few glossy-backed barn swallows quartering over the meadow. Then,
all at once, there fell on my ears a shower of bobolink notes, and the
birds, twenty or more together, dropped into the short grass before
me. Every one of them was a male.
A strange custom it is, this Quakerish separation of the sexes. It
must be the females’ work, I imagine. Modesty and bashfulness are
feminine traits,--modesty, bashfulness, and maidenly discretion. The
wise virgin shunneth even the appearance of evil. Let the males flock
by themselves, and travel in advance. And the males practice obedience,
not for virtue’s sake, I guess, but of necessity; encouraged, no doubt,
by an unquestioning belief that the wise virgins will come trooping
after, and be found scattered conveniently over the meadows, each by
herself, when the marriage bell strikes. That blissful hour was now
close at hand, and my twenty gay bachelors knew it. Every bird of them
had on his wedding garment. No wonder they sang.
It took me a long time to make that half mile on the upper road, with
the narrow, freshly green valley outspread just below, the river
running through it, and beyond a royal horizonful of mountains;
some near and green, some farther away and blue, and some--the
highest--still with the snow on them: Moosilauke, Kinsman, Cannon,
Lafayette, Garfield, the Twins, Washington, Clay, Jefferson, and Adams;
all perfectly clear, the sky covered with high clouds. A sober day it
was, sober and still, though the bobolinks seemed not so to regard it.
While I looked at the landscape, seating myself now and then to enjoy
it quietly, I kept an ear open for the shout of a pileated woodpecker,
a wildly musical sound often to be heard on this hillside; but to-day
there was nothing nearer to it than a crested flycatcher’s scream, out
of the big sugar orchard.
On my way down the hill toward the red bridge, I met a man riding in
some kind of rude contrivance, not to be called a wagon or a cart,
between two pairs of wheels. He lay flat on his back, as in a hammock,
and, to judge by his tools and the mortar on his clothing, must have
been a mason returning from his work. He was “taking it easy,” at all
events. We saluted each other, and he stopped his horse and sat up.
“You used to be round here, didn’t you?” he asked. Yes, I said, I had
been here a good deal, off and on. He thought he remembered me. He had
noticed me getting out of Mr. Prime’s carriage at the corner. “Let’s
see,” he said: “you used to be looking after the birds a good deal,
didn’t you?” I pleaded guilty, and he seemed glad. “You are well?” he
added, and drove on. Neither of us had said anything in particular,
but there are few events of the road more to my taste than such chance
bits of neighborly intercourse. The man’s tone and manner gave me the
feeling of real friendliness. If I had fallen among thieves, I confide
that he would have been neither a priest nor a Levite. May his trowel
find plenty of work and fair wages.
This was on May 22. The next three days were occupied with all-day
excursions to Mount Agassiz, to Streeter Pond, and to Lonesome Lake
path. With so many hands beckoning to me, the Cape May warbler
was well-nigh forgotten. On the morning of the 26th, however, the
weather being dubious, I betook myself again to the Landaff swamp,
entering it, as usual, by the wood-road at the barn. Many birds were
there: a tanager (uncommon hereabout), olive-sided flycatchers,
alder flycatchers (first seen on the 23d, and already abundant),
a yellow-bellied flycatcher (the recluse of the family), magnolia
warblers, Canada warblers, parula warblers (three beautiful species), a
Tennessee warbler, a Swainson thrush (whistling), a veery (snarling),
and many more. The Swainson thrush, by the way, although present,
in small numbers apparently, from May 22, was not heard to sing a
note until June 1,--ten days of silence! Yet it sings freely on its
migration, even as far south as Georgia. Close at hand was a grouse,
who performed again and again in what seemed to me a highly original
manner. First he delivered three or four quick beats. Then he rested
for a second or two, after which he proceeded to drum in the ordinary
way, beginning with deliberation, and gradually accelerating the beats,
till the ear could no longer follow them, and they became a whir. That
prelude of four quick, decisive strokes was a novelty to my ears, so
far as I could remember.
I had taken my fill of this pleasant chorus, and was on my way back
to the road, when suddenly I heard something that was better than
“pleasant,”--a peculiarly faint and listless four-syllabled warbler
song, which might be described as a monotonous _zee-zee-zee-zee_. The
singer was not a blackpoll: of that I felt certain on the instant.
What could it be, then, but a Cape May? That was a shrewd guess (I had
heard the Cape May once, in Virginia, some years before); for presently
the fellow moved into sight, and I had a feast of admiring him, as he
flitted about among the fir trees, feeding and singing. If he was the
one I had seen in the same wood on the 22d, he was making a long stay.
Still I did not venture to think of him as anything but a migrant. The
Tennessee had sung incessantly for five days in the Gale River larches
near the hotel, as already mentioned, and then had taken flight.
The next morning, nevertheless, there was nothing for it--few as my
days were growing--but I must visit the place again, on the chance of
finding the Cape May still there. And he _was_ there; sitting, for part
of the time, at the very tip (on the terminal bud, to speak exactly)
of a pointed fir. There, as elsewhere, he sang persistently, sometimes
with three _zees_, sometimes with four, but always in an unhurried
monotone. It was the simplest and most primitive kind of music, to
say the best of it,--many an insect would perhaps have done as well;
but somehow, with the author of it before me, I pronounced it good. A
Tennessee was close by, and (what I particularly enjoyed) a tanager
sat in the sun on the topmost spray of a tall white pine, blazing and
singing. “This is the sixth day of the Cape May here, yet I cannot
think he means to summer.” So my pencil finished the day’s entry.
Whatever his intentions, I could not afford to spend my whole vacation
in learning them, and it was not until the afternoon of the 31st that
I went again in search of him. Then he gave me an exciting chase; for,
thank Fortune, a chase may be exciting though the bird is not a “game
bird,” and the man is not a gunner. At first, to be sure, the question
seemed in a fair way to be quickly settled. I was hardly in the swamp
before I heard the expected _zee-zee_. The bird was still here! But
after half a dozen repetitions of the strain he fell silent; and he had
not shown himself. For a full hour I paced up and down the path, within
a space of forty rods, fighting mosquitoes and awake to every sound.
If the bird was here, I meant to make sure of him. This was the tenth
day since I had first seen him, and to find him still present would
make it practically certain that he was here for the season. As for
what I had already heard,--well, the notes were the Cape May’s, fast
enough; but if that were all, I should go away and straightway begin to
question whether my ears had not deceived me. In matters of this kind,
an ornithologist walks by sight.
Once, from farther up the path, I heard a voice that might be the one
I was listening for; but as I hastened toward it, it developed into
the homely, twisting song of a black-and-white creeper. Heard at a
sufficient distance, this too familiar ditty loses every other one
of its notes, and is easily mistaken for something else,--especially
if something else happens to be on a man’s mind,--as I had found to
my chagrin on more than one occasion. Eye and ear both are never more
liable to momentary deception than when they are most tensely alert.
Meanwhile, nothing had been heard of the Tennessee, and it became
evident that he had moved on. The customary water thrush was singing
at short intervals; gayly dressed warblers darted in and out of the
low evergreens, almost brushing my elbows, much to their surprise; and
an olive-sided flycatcher kept up a persistent _pip-pip_. Something
was troubling his equanimity; I had no idea what. It had been one of
my special enjoyments, on this vacation trip, to renew my acquaintance
with him and his humbler relative, the alder flycatcher,--the latter
a commonplace body, whose emphatic _quay-quéer_ had now become one
of the commonest of sounds. The olive-side, by the bye, for all his
apparent wildness, did not disdain to visit the shade trees about the
hotel; and once a catbird, not far off, amused me by whistling a most
exact reproduction of his breezy _quit, quee-quée-o_. If the voice had
come from a treetop instead of from the depths of a low thicket, the
illusion would have been complete. It is the weakness of imitators,
always and everywhere, to forget one thing or another.
Still the bird I was waiting for made no sign, and finally I left the
swamp and started up the road. Possibly he had gone in that direction,
where I first saw him. No, he was not there, and, giving over the hunt,
I turned back toward the village. Then, as I came opposite the barn
again, I heard the notes in the old place, and hastened up the path.
This time I was lucky, for there the bird sat on the outermost spray of
a fir-tree branch. It was his most characteristic attitude. I can see
him there now.
As I quitted the swamp for good, a man in a buggy was coming down the
road. I put on my coat, and as he overtook me I said, “I was putting on
my coat because I felt sure you would invite me to ride.” He smiled,
and bade me get in; and though he had been going only to the post
office, he insisted upon carrying me to the hotel, a mile beyond.
Better still, we had a pleasant, humanizing talk of a kind to be
serviceable to a narrow specialist, such as I seemed just now in danger
of becoming. The use of tobacco was one of our topics, I remember,
and the mutual duties of husbands and wives another. My host had seen
a good deal of the world, it appeared, and withal was no little of a
philosopher. I hope it will not sound egotistical if I say that he gave
every sign of finding me a capable listener.
Once more only I saw the Cape May. His claim to be accounted a summer
resident of Franconia was by this time moderately well established;
but on my last spare afternoon (June 3) I could not do less than
pay him a farewell visit. After looking for him in vain for twenty
years (I speak as a New Englander), it seemed the part of prudence
to cultivate his acquaintance while I could. At the entrance to the
swamp, therefore, I put on my gloves, tied a handkerchief about my
neck, and broke a stem of meadow-sweet for use as a mosquito switch.
The season was advancing, and field ornithology was becoming more and
more a battle. I walked up the path for the usual distance (passing
a few lady’s-slippers, one of them pure white) without hearing the
voice for which I was listening. On the return, however, I caught it,
or something like it. Then, as I went in pursuit (a slow process, for
caution’s sake), the song turned, or seemed to turn, into something
different,--louder, longer, and faster. Is that the same bird, I
thought, or another? Whatever it was, it eluded my eye, and after a
little the voice ceased. I retreated to the path, where I could look
about me more readily and use my switch to better advantage, and anon
the faint, lazy _zee-zee-zee_ was heard again. _This_ was the Cape
May, at all events. I was sure of it. Still I wanted a look. Carefully
I edged toward the sound, bending aside the branches, and all at
once a bird flew into the spruce over my head. Then began again the
quicker, four-syllabled _zip-zip_, I craned my neck and fanned away
mosquitoes, all the while keeping my glass in position. A twig stirred.
Still the bird sang unseen,--the same hurried phrase, not quite
monotonous, since the pitch rose a little on the last couplet. That
was a suspicious circumstance, and by this time I should not have been
mightily astonished if a Blackburnian had disclosed himself. Another
twig stirred. Still I could see nothing; and still I fought mosquitoes
(a plague on them!) and kept my eye steady. Then the fellow did again
what he had done so often,--stepped out upon a flat, horizontal branch,
pretty well up, and posed there, singing and preening his feathers. I
could see his yellow breast streaked with jet, his black crown, his
reddish cheeks, with the yellow patch behind the rufous, and finally
the big white blotch on the wing. We have lovelier birds, no doubt
(the Cape May’s colors are a trifle “splashy” for a nice taste,--for
my own taste, I mean to say), but few, if any, whose costume is more
strikingly original.
I stayed by him till my patience failed, the mosquitoes helping to
wear it out; and all the while he reiterated that comparatively lively
_zip-zip_, so very different from the listless _zee-zee_, which I had
seen him use on previous occasions, and had heard him use to-day.
He was singing now, I said to myself, more like the bird at Natural
Bridge, the only other one I had ever heard. It was pleasant to find
that even this tenth-rate performer, one of the poorest of a poor
family, had more than one tune in his music box.
My spring vacation was planned to be botanical rather than
ornithological; but we are not the masters of our own fate, though we
sometimes try to think so, and my sketch is turning out a bird piece,
after all. The truth is, I was in the birds’ country, and it was the
birds’ hour. They waked me every morning,--veeries, bobolinks, vireos,
sparrows, and what not;[8] and as the day began, so it continued. I
hope I was not blind to other things. I remember at this moment how
rejoiced I was at coming all unexpectedly upon a little bunch of yellow
lady’s-slippers,--nine blossoms, I believe; rare enough and pretty
enough to excite the dullest man’s enthusiasm. But the fact remains,
if comparisons are to be insisted upon, that a creature like the Cape
May warbler has all the beauty of a flower, with the added charm of
voice and motion and elusiveness. The lady’s-slippers would wait for
me,--unless somebody else picked them,--but the warbler could be
trusted to lead me a chase, and give me, as the saying is, a run for my
money. In other words, he was more interesting, and goes better into a
story.
My delight in him was the greater for a consideration yet to be
specified. Twelve or thirteen years ago, when a party of us were in
Franconia in June, we undertook a list of the birds of the township,--a
list which the scientific ornithologist of the company afterward
printed.[9] Now, returning to the place by myself, it became a point of
honor with me to improve our work by the addition of at least a name or
two. And the first candidate was the Cape May.
The second was of a widely different sort; one of my most familiar
friends, though more surprising as a bird of the White Mountains than
even the Cape May. I speak of the wood thrush, the most southern member
of the noble group of singers to which it belongs,--the _Hylocichlæ_,
so called. It is to be regretted that we have no collective English
name for them, especially as their vocal quality--by which I mean
something not quite the same as musical ability--is such as to set them
beyond comparison above all other birds of North America, if not of the
world.
My first knowledge of this piece of good fortune was on the 29th of
May. I stood on the Notch railway, intent upon a mourning warbler,
noting how fond of red-cherry trees he and his fellows seemingly were,
when I was startled out of measure by a wood thrush’s voice from
the dense maple woods above me. There was no time to look for him;
and happily there was no need. He was one of the consummate artists
of his race (among the members of which there is great unevenness in
this regard), possessing all those unmistakable peculiarities which at
once distinguish the wood thrush’s song from the hermit’s, with which
alone a careless listener might confound it: the sudden drop to a deep
contralto (the most glorious bit of vocalism to be heard in our woods),
and the tinkle or spray of bell-like tones at the other extreme of the
gamut. As with the Cape May, so with him, the question was, Will he
stay?
Two days later I came down the track again. A hermit was in tune, and
presently a wood thrush joined him. “His tone is fuller and louder
than the hermit’s,” says my pencil,--flattered, no doubt, at finding
itself in a position to speak a word of momentary positiveness touching
a question of superiority long in dispute, and likely to remain in
dispute while birds sing and men listen to them. A quarter of a mile
farther, and I came to the sugar grove. Here a second bird was
singing, just where I had heard him two days before. Him I sat down to
enjoy; and at that moment, probably because he had seen me (and had
seen me stop), he broke out with a volley of those quick, staccato,
inimitably emphatic, whip-snapping calls,--_pip-pip_,--which are more
characteristic of the species than even the song itself. So there were
two male wood thrushes, and presumably two pairs, in this mountainside
forest!
On the 1st of June I heard the song there again, though I was forced
to wait for it; and three days afterward the story was the same. I
ought to have looked for nests, but time failed me. To the best of
my knowledge, the bird has never been reported before from the White
Mountain region, though it is well known to breed in some parts of
Canada, where I have myself seen it.