trunk, the bark of which a woodpecker of some kind, almost certainly a
sapsucker, had riddled with holes till it looked like a nutmeg grater;
and the most noticeable thing about it was that the punctures--past
counting--were all on the south side of the tree, where the sap may be
presumed to run earliest and most freely. Why this particular tree was
chosen and the others left is a different question, to which I attempt
no answer, though I have little doubt that the maker of the holes could
have given one. To vary a half-true Bible text, “All the labor of a
woodpecker is for his mouth;” and labor so prolonged as that which
had been expended upon this hemlock was very unlikely to have been
laid out without a reason. Every judge of rum cherries knows that some
trees bear incomparably better fruit than others growing close beside
them; and why should a woodpecker, a specialist of specialists, be less
intelligent touching hemlock trees and the varying quality of their
juices? A creature who is beholden to nobody from the time he is three
weeks old is not to be looked down upon by beings who live, half of
them, in danger of starvation or the poorhouse.
The end of summer is the top of the year with the birds. Their numbers
are then at the full. After that, for six months and more, the tide
ebbs. Winter and the long migratory journeys waste them like the
plagues of Egypt. Not more than half of all that start southward ever
live to come back again.
Of this every bird-lover takes sorrowful account. It is part of his
autumnal feeling. If he sees a flock of bobolinks or of red-winged
blackbirds, he thinks of the Southern rice fields, where myriads of
both species--“rice-birds,” one as much as the other--will be shot
without mercy. A sky full of swallows calls up a picture of thousands
lying dead at once, in Florida or elsewhere, after a winter storm. A
September humming-bird leaves him wondering over its approaching flight
to Central America or to Cuba. Will the tiny thing ever accomplish that
amazing passage and find its way home again to New England? Perhaps it
will; but more likely not.
For the present, nevertheless, the birds are all in high spirits,
warbling, twittering, feeding, chasing each other playfully about, as
if life were nothing but holiday. Little they know of the future. And
almost as little know we. Blessed ignorance! It gives us all, birds and
men alike, many a good hour. If my playmate of long ago had foreseen
that he was to die at twenty, he would never have been the happy boy
that I remember. Those few bright years he had, though he had no more.
So much was saved from the wreck.
Thoughts of this kind come to me as I recall an exhilarating half-hour
of our recent stay in Franconia. It was on the first morning,
immediately after breakfast. We were barely out of the hotel yard
before we turned into a bit of larch and alder swamp by the shore of
Gale River. We could do nothing else. The air was full of chirps and
twitters, while the swaying, feathery tops of the larches were alive
with flocks of whispering waxwings, the greater part of them birds of
the present year, still wearing the stripes which in the case of so
many species are marks of juvenility. If individual animals still pass
through a development answering to that which the race as a whole has
undergone--if young animals, in other words, resemble their remote
ancestors--then the evolution of birds’ plumage must have gone pretty
steadily in the direction of plainness. Robins, we must believe, once
had spotted breasts, as most of their more immediate relatives have to
this day, and chipping sparrows and white-throats were streaked like
our present song sparrows and baywings. If the world lasts long enough
(who knows?) all birds may become monochromatic. Wing-bars and all
such convenient marks of distinction will have vanished. Then, surely,
amateurish ornithologists will have their hands full to name all the
birds without a gun. Then if, by any miraculous chance, a copy of some
nineteenth century manual of ornithology shall be discovered, and some
great linguist shall succeed in translating it, what a book of riddles
it will prove! Savants will form theories without number concerning it,
settling down, perhaps, after a thousand years of controversy, upon the
belief that the author of the ancient work was a man afflicted with
color blindness. If not, how came he to describe the scarlet tanager
as having black wings and tail, and the brown thrasher a streaked
breast?
These are afterthoughts. At the moment we were busy, eyes and ears,
taking a census of the swamp. Besides the waxwings, which were much
the most numerous, as well as the most in sight--“tree-toppers,”
one of my word-making friends calls them--there were robins, song
sparrows, white-throats, field sparrows, goldfinches, myrtle warblers,
a Maryland yellow-throat, a black-throated green, a Nashville warbler,
a Philadelphia vireo, two or three solitary vireos, one or more
catbirds, as many olive-backed thrushes, a white-breasted nuthatch, and
a sapsucker. Others, in all likelihood, escaped us.
In and out among the bushes we made our way, one calling to the other
softly at each new development.
“What was that?” said I. “Wasn’t that a bobolink?”
“It sounded like it,” answered the other listener.
“But it can’t be. Hark!”
The quick, musical drop of sound--a “stillicidious” note, my friend
called it--was heard again. No; it was not from the sky, as we had
thought at first, but from a thicket of alders just behind us. Then we
recognized it, and laughed at ourselves. It was the staccato whistle of
an olive-backed thrush, a sweet familiarity, over which I should have
supposed it impossible for either of us to be puzzled.
The star of the flock, as some readers will not need to be told,
having marked the unexpected name in the foregoing list, was the
Philadelphia vireo. What a bright minute it is in a man’s vacation when
such a stranger suddenly hops upon a branch before his eyes! He feels
almost like quoting Keats. “Then felt I,” he might say, not with full
seriousness, perhaps,--
“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken.”
Yet how unconcerned the bird seems! To him it is all one. He knows
nothing of his spectator’s emotions. Rarity? What is that? He has been
among birds of his own kind ever since he came out of the egg. Sedately
he moves from twig to twig, thinking only of another insect. This
minute is to him no better than any other. And the man’s nerves are
tingling with excitement.
“You will hardly believe me,” said my companion, who had hastened
forward to look at the stranger, “but this is the second one I have
ever seen.”
But why should I not believe him? It was only my third one.
Philadelphia vireos do not feed in every bush. Be it added, however,
that I saw another before the week was out.
There were many more birds here now than I had found six or seven
weeks before; but there was much less music. In early August hermit
thrushes sang in sundry places and at all hours; now a faint _chuck_
was the most that we heard from them, and that but once. And still our
September vacation was far from being a silent one. Song sparrows,
vesper sparrows, white-throats, goldfinches, robins, solitary vireos,
chickadees (whose whistle is among the sweetest of wild music, I being
judge), phœbes, and a catbird, all these sang more or less frequently,
and more or less well, though all except the goldfinches and the
chickadees were noticeably out of voice. Once a grouse drummed, and
once a flicker called _hi, hi_, just as in springtime; and every warm
day set the hylas peeping. Once, too, a ruby-crowned kinglet sang
for us with all freedom, and once a gold-crest. The latter’s song is
a very indifferent performance, hardly to be called musical in any
proper sense of the word; nothing but his ordinary _zee-zee-zee_, with
a hurried, jumbled, ineffective coda; yet it suggests, and indeed is
much like, a certain few notes of the ruby-crown’s universally admired
tune. The two songs are evidently of a common origin, though the
ruby-crown’s is so immeasurably superior that one of my friends seemed
almost offended with me, not long ago, when I asked him to notice the
resemblance between the two. None the less, the resemblance is real.
The homeliest man may bear a family likeness to his handsome brother,
though it may show itself only at times, and chance acquaintances may
easily be unaware of its existence.
The breeziest voice of the week was a pileated woodpecker’s--a
flicker’s resonant _hi, hi_, in a fuller and clearer tone; and one of
the most welcome voices was that of an olive-backed thrush. We were
strolling past a roadside tangle of shrubbery when some unseen bird
close by us began to warble confusedly (I was going to say autumnally,
this kind of formless improvisation being so characteristic of the
autumnal season), in a barely audible voice. My first thought was of a
song sparrow; but that could hardly be, and I looked at my companion
to see what he would suggest. He was in doubt also. Then, all at once,
in the midst of the vocal jumble, our ears caught a familiar strain.
“Yes, yes,” said I, “a Swainson thrush,” and I fell to whistling the
tune softly for the benefit of the performer, whom I fancied, rightly
or wrongly, to be a youngster at his practice. Young or old, the echo
seemed not to put him out, and we stood still again to enjoy the
lesson; disconnected, unrelated notes, and then, of a sudden, the
regular Swainson measure. I had not heard it before since the May
migration.
Every bird season has peculiarities of its own, in Franconia as
elsewhere. This fall, for example, there were no crossbills, even at
Lonesome Lake, where we have commonly found both species. White-crowned
sparrows were rare; perhaps we were a little too early for the main
flight. We saw one bird on September 23, and two on the 26th. Another
noticeable thing was a surprising scarcity of red-bellied nuthatches.
We spoke often of the great contrast in this respect between the
present season and that of three years ago. Then all the woods, both
here and at Moosilauke, fairly swarmed with these birds, till it seemed
as if all the Canadian nuthatches of North America were holding a White
Mountain congress. The air was full of their nasal calls. Now we could
travel all day without hearing so much as a syllable. The tide, for
some reason, had set in another direction, and Franconia was so much
the poorer.
AMERICAN SKYLARKS
“Right hard it was for wight which did it heare,
To read what manner musicke that mote bee.”
SPENSER.
On the second day after our arrival in Franconia[11] we were
following a dry, sandy stretch of valley road--on one of our favorite
rounds--when a bird flew across it, just before us, and dropped into
the barren, closely cropped cattle pasture on our left. Something
indefinable in its manner or appearance excited my suspicions, and I
stole up to the fence and looked over. The bird was a horned lark, the
first one that I had ever set eyes on in the nesting season. He seemed
to be very hungry, snapping up insects with the greatest avidity, and
was not in the least disturbed by our somewhat eager attentions. It
was plain at the first glance that he was of the Western variety,--a
prairie horned lark, in other words,--for even in the best of lights
the throat and sides of the head were white, or whitish, with no
perceptible tinge of yellow.
The prairie lark is one of the birds that appear to be shifting or
extending their breeding range. It was first described as a sub-species
in 1884, and has since been found to be a summer resident of northern
Vermont and New Hampshire, and, in smaller numbers, of western
Massachusetts. It is not impossible, expansion being the order of the
day, that some of us may live long enough to see it take up its abode
within sight of the gilded State House dome.
My own previous acquaintance with it had been confined to the sight of
a few migrants along the seashore in the autumn, although my companion
on the present trip had seen it once about a certain upland farm here
in Franconia. That was ten years ago, and we have again and again
sought it there since, without avail.
Our bird of to-day interested me by displaying his “horns,”--curious
adornments which I had never been able to make out before, except in
pictures. They were not carried erect,--like an owl’s “ears,” let us
say,--but projected backwards, and with the head at a certain angle
showed with perfect distinctness. The bird would do nothing but eat,
and as our own dinner awaited us we continued our tramp. We would try
to see more of him and his mate at another time, we promised ourselves.
First, however, we paid a visit (that very afternoon) to the upland
farm just now spoken of. “Mears’s,” we always call it. Perhaps the
larks would be there also. But we found no sign of them, and the
bachelor occupant of the house, who left his plough in the beanfield
to offer greeting to a pair of strangers, assured us that nothing
answering to our description had ever been seen there within his time;
an assertion that might mean little or much, of course, though he
seemed to be a man who had his eyes open.
This happened on May 17. Six days afterward, in company with an
entomological collector, we were again in the dusty valley. I went
into the larch swamp in search of a Cape May warbler--found here
two years before--one of the very best of our Franconia birds; and
the entomologist stayed near by with her net and bottles, while the
second man kept on a mile farther up the valley to look for thorn-bush
specimens. So we drove the sciences abreast, as it were. My own hunt
was immediately rewarded, and when the botanist returned I thought
to stir his envy by announcing my good fortune; but he answered with
a smile that he too had seen something; he had seen the prairie lark
soaring and singing. “Well done!” said I; “now you may look for the
Cape May, and incidentally feed the mosquitoes, and the lady and I will
get into the carriage and take our turn with _Otocoris_.” So said, so
done. We drove to the spot, the driver stopped the horses opposite a
strip of ploughed land, and behold, there was the bird at that very
moment high in the air, hovering and singing. It was not much of a
song, I thought, though the entomologist, hearing partly with the eye,
no doubt, pronounced it beautiful. It was most interesting, whatever
might be said of its musical quality, and as we drove homeward my
companion and I agreed that we would take up our quarters for a day or
two at the nearest house, and study it more at our leisure. Possibly we
should happen upon a nest.
In the forenoon of May 25, therefore, we found ourselves comfortably
settled in the very midst of a lark colony. The birds, of which there
were at least five (besides two pairs found half a mile farther up the
valley), were to be seen or heard at almost any minute; now in the road
before the house, now in the ploughed land close by it, now in one of
the cattle pastures, and now on the roofs of the buildings. One fellow
spent a great part of his time upon the ridgepole of the barn (a pretty
high structure), commonly standing not on the very angle or ridge, but
an inch or two below it, so that very often only his head and shoulders
would be visible. Once I saw one dusting himself in the rut of the
road. He went about the work with great thoroughness and unmistakable
enjoyment, cocking his head and rubbing first one cheek and then the
other into the sand. “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” I thought I
heard him saying.
So far as we could judge from our two days’ observation, the birds were
most musical in the latter half of the afternoon, say from four o’clock
to six. Contrary to what we should have expected, we saw absolutely no
ascensions in the early morning or after sunset, although we did see
more than one at high noon. It is most likely, I think, that the birds
sing at all hours, as the spirit moves them, just as the nightingale
does, and the hermit thrush and the vesper sparrow.
As for the quality and manner of the song, with all my listening and
studying I could never hit upon a word with which to characterize it.
The tone is dry, guttural, inexpressive; not exactly to be called
harsh, perhaps, but certainly not in any true sense of the word
musical. When we first heard it, in the distance (let the qualification
be noted), the same thought came to both of us,--a kingbird’s formless,
hurrying twitters. There is no rhythm, no melody, nothing to be
called phrasing or modulation,--a mere jumble of “splutterings and
chipperings.” Every note is by itself, having to my ear no relation
to anything before or after. The most striking and distinguishing
characteristic of it all is the manner in which it commonly hurries to
a conclusion--as if the clock were running down. “The hand has slipped
from the lever,” I more than once found myself saying. I was thinking
of a motorman who tightens his brake, and tightens it again, and then
all at once lets go his grip. At this point, this sudden acceleration
and conclusion, my companion and I always laughed. The humor of it
was irresistible. It stood in such ludicrous contrast with all that
had gone before,--so halting and labored; like a man who stammers and
stutters, and then, finding his tongue unexpectedly loosened, makes
all speed to finish. Sometimes--most frequently, perhaps--the strain
was very brief; but at other times a bird would sit on a stone, or a
fence-post, or a ridgepole, and chatter almost continuously by the
quarter-hour. Even then, however, this comical hurried phrase would
come in at more or less regular intervals. I imagined that the larks
looked upon it as the highest reach of their art and delivered it with
special satisfaction. If they did, I could not blame them; to us it was
by all odds the most interesting part of their very limited repertory.
The most interesting part, I mean, of that which appealed to the ear;
for, as will readily be imagined, the ear’s part was really much the
smaller half of the performance. The wonder of it all was not the music
by itself (that was hardly better than an oddity, a thing of which one
might soon have enough), but the music combined with the manner of its
delivery, while the singer was climbing heavenward. For the bird is
a true skylark. Like his more famous cousin, he does not disdain the
humblest perch--a mere clod of earth answers his purpose; but his glory
is to sing at heaven’s gate.
His method at such times was a surprise to me. He starts from the
ground silently, with no appearance of lyrical excitement, and his
flight at first is low, precisely as if he were going only to the next
field. Soon, however, he begins to mount, beating the air with quick
strokes and then shutting his wings against his sides and forcing
himself upward. “Diving upward,” was the word I found myself using. Up
he goes,--up, up, up, “higher still, and higher,”--till after a while
he breaks into voice. While singing he holds his wings motionless,
stiffly outstretched, and his tail widely spread, as if he were doing
his utmost to transform himself into a parachute--as no doubt he is.
Then, the brief, hurried strain delivered, he beats the air again
and makes another shoot heavenward. The whole display consists of an
alternation of rests accompanied by song (you can always see the music,
though it is often inaudible), and renewed upward pushes.
In the course of his flight the bird covers a considerable field, since
as a matter of course he cannot ascend vertically. He rises, perhaps,
directly at your feet, but before he comes down, which may be in one
minute or in ten, he will have gone completely round you in a broad
circle; so that, to follow him continuously (sometimes no easy matter,
his altitude being so great and the light so dazzling), you will be
compelled almost to put your neck out of joint. In our own case, we
generally did not see him start, but were made aware of what was going
on by hearing the notes overhead.
One grand flight I did see from beginning to end, and it was wonderful,
amazing, astounding. So I thought, at all events. There was no telling,
of course, what altitude the bird reached, but it might have been
miles, so far as the effect upon the beholder’s emotions was concerned.
It seemed as if the fellow never would be done. “Higher still, and
higher.” Again and again this line of Shelley came to my lips, as,
after every bar of music, the bird pushed nearer and nearer to the sky.
At last he came down; and this, my friend and I always agreed, was the
most exciting moment of all. He closed his wings and literally shot to
the ground head first, like an arrow. “Wonderful!” said I, “wonderful!”
And the other man said: “If I could do that I would never do anything
else.”
Here my story might properly enough end. The nest of which we had
talked was not discovered. My own beating over of the fields came
to nothing, and my companion, as if unwilling to deprive me of a
possible honor, contented himself with telling me that I was looking
in the wrong place. Perhaps I was. It is easy to criticise. For a
minute, indeed, one of the farm-hands excited our hopes. He had found
a nest which might be the lark’s, he thought; it was on the ground,
at any rate; but his description of the eggs put an end to any such
possibility, and when he led us to the nest it turned out to be
occupied by a hermit thrush. Near it he showed us a grouse sitting upon
her eggs under a roadside fence. It was while repairing the fence that
he had made his discoveries. He had an eye for birds. “Those little
humming-birds,” he remarked, “_they_’re quite an animal.” And he was an
observer of human nature as well. “That fellow,” he said, speaking of a
young man who was perhaps rather good-natured than enterprising, “that
fellow don’t do enough to break the Sabbath.”
And this suggests a bit of confession. We were sitting upon the piazza,
on Sunday afternoon, when a lark sang pretty far off. “Well,” said the
botanist, “he sings as well as a savanna sparrow, anyhow.” “A savanna
sparrow!” said I; and at the word we looked at each other. The same
thought had come to both of us. Several days before, in another part
of the township, we had heard in the distance--in a field inhabited
by savanna and vesper sparrows--an utterly strange set of bird-notes.
“What is that?” we both asked. The strain was repeated. “Oh, well,”
said I, “that must be the work of a crazy savanna. Birds are given to
such freaks, you know.” The grass was wet, we had a long forenoon’s
jaunt before us, and although my companion, as he said, “took no stock”
in my explanation, we passed on. Now it flashed upon us both that what
we had heard was the song of a prairie lark. “I believe it was,” said
the botanist. “I know it was,” said I; “I would wager anything upon
it.” And it was; for after returning to the hotel our first concern was
to go to the place--only half a mile away--and find the bird. And not
only so, but twenty-four hours later we saw one soaring in his most
ecstatic manner over another field, a mile or so beyond, beside the
same road.
The present was a good season for horned larks in Franconia, we told
ourselves. Two years ago, at this same time of the year, I had gone
more than once past all these places. If the birds were here then I
overlooked them. The thing is not impossible, of course; there is no
limit to human dullness; but I prefer to think otherwise. A man, even
an amateur ornithologist, should believe himself innocent until he is
proved guilty.
A QUIET MORNING
“Such was the bright world on the first seventh day.”
HENRY VAUGHAN.
It is Sunday, May 26, the brightest, pleasantest, most comfortable of
forenoons. I am seated in the sun at the base of an ancient stone wall,
near the road that runs along the hillside above the Landaff Valley.
Behind me is a little farmhouse, long since gone to ruin. At my feet,
rather steeply inclined, is an old cattle pasture thickly strewn with
massive boulders. The prospect is one of those that I love best. In
the foreground, directly below, is the valley, freshly green, and, as
it looks from this height, as level as a floor. Alder rows mark the
winding course of the river, and on the farther side, close against the
forest, runs a road, though the eye, of itself, would hardly know it.
Across the valley are the glorious newly clad woods, more beautiful
than words can begin to tell; and beyond them rise the mountains:
Moosilauke, far enough away to be blue; the shapely Kinsman range, at
whose long green slopes no man need tire of looking; rocky Lafayette,
directly in front of me; Haystack, with its leaning knob; the sombre
Twins and the more Alpine-looking Washington, Jefferson, and Adams.
Farther to the north are the low hills of Cleveland and Agassiz. A
magnificent horizon. Lafayette, Washington, Jefferson, and Adams are
still flecked with snow. And over the mountains is the sky, with high
white clouds, cirrus and cumulus. I look first at the mountains, then
at the valley, which is filled with sunlight as a cup is filled with
wine. The level foreground is the essential thing. Without it the
grandest of mountain prospects is never quite complete.