and less often I hear the sweet voice of a bluebird. Both phœbe and
bluebird are most delightfully plentiful in all this fair mountain
country. They are of my own mind: they like old farms within sight
of hills. Crows caw, a jay screams, and now and then the hurrying
drumbeats of a grouse come to my ears. Somewhere in the big sugar
grove behind me a great-crested flycatcher has been shouting almost
ever since I sat down. The “great screaming flycatcher,” he should be
called. His voice is more to the point than his crest. He loves the
sound of it.
How radiantly beautiful the red maple groves are just now! I can see
two, one near, the other far off, both in varying shades of red,
yellow, and green. The earth wears them as ornaments, and is as proud
of them, I dare believe, as of the Parthenon. They are bright, but not
too bright. They speak of youth--and the eye hears them. A red-eye
preaches as if he knew the day of the week. What a gift of reiteration!
“Buy the truth,” he says. “Going, going!” But it is never gone. Down
the valley road goes an open carriage. In it are a man and a woman, the
woman with a parasol over her head. A song sparrow sings his little
tune, and the bluebird gives himself up to warbling. Few voices can
surpass his for sweetness and expressiveness. The grouse drums again
(let every bird be happy in his own way), a myrtle warbler trills (a
talker to himself), and a passing goldfinch drops a melodious measure.
All the chokecherry bushes are now in white. The day may be Whitsunday
for all that my unchurchly mind can say. Red cherries, which whitened
the world a few days ago, are fast following the shadbushes, which have
been out of flower for a week. Apple trees, too, have passed the height
of their splendor. The vernal procession moves like a man in haste.
The sun grows warm. I will betake myself to the maple grove and sit in
the shadow; but first I notice in the grass by the wall an abundance
of tiny veronica flowers (speedwell)--white, streaked with purple, as
I perceive when I pluck one. Not a line but runs true. Everything is
beautiful in its time; the little speedwell no less than the valley and
the mountain. A red squirrel, far out on a tilting elm spray, is eating
his fill of the green fruit. Mother Earth takes care of her children.
She raises elm seeds as man raises wheat. And foolish man wonders
sometimes at what he thinks her waste of vital energy.
I have found a seat upon a prostrate maple trunk, one of the fathers
of the grove, so huge of girth that it was almost a gymnastic feat to
climb into my position. Here I can see the valley and the mountains
only in parts, between the leafy intervening branches. Which way of
seeing is the better I will not seek to determine. Both are good--both
are better than either. A flycatcher near me is saying _chebec_ with
such emphasis that though I cannot see him I can imagine that he is
almost snapping his head off at every utterance. Much farther away is
a relative of his; we call him the olive-side. (I wonder what name the
birds have for us.) _Que-quee-o_, he whistles in the clearest of tones.
He is one of the good ones. And how well his voice “carries”--as if one
grove were speaking to another!
About my feet are creamy white tiarella spires and pretty blue violets.
The air is full of the hum of insects, but they are all innocent. I
sit under my own beech and maple tree, with none to molest or make me
afraid. How many times I have heard something like that on a Sunday
forenoon! Year in and out, our dear old preacher could never get
through his “long prayer” without it. He would not be sorry to know
that I think of him now in this natural temple.
An unseen Nashville warbler suddenly announces himself. “If you must
scribble,” he says, “my name is as good as anybody’s.” The little
flycatcher has not yet dislocated his neck. _Chebec, chebec_, he
vociferates. The swallows no longer come about me. They care not for
groves. They are for the open sky, the grass fields, and the sun;
but I hear them twittering overhead. If I could be a bird, I think I
would be a swallow. Hark! Yes, there is the syllabled whistle of a
white-breasted nuthatch. He must go into my vacation bird-list--No. 79,
_Sitta carolinensis_. If he would have shown himself sooner he should
have had a higher place. And now, to my surprise, I hear the rollicking
voice of a bobolink. The meadow below contains many of his happy kind,
and one of them has come up within hearing to brighten my page.
All the time I have sat here I have been hoping to hear the hearty,
“full-throated” note of a yellow-throated vireo. This is the only place
in Franconia where I have ever heard it--two years ago this month.
But the bird seems not to be here now, and I must not stay longer. My
companion, who has gone higher up the hill to visit a thorn-bush, will
be expecting me on the bridge by the old grist-mill.
Before I can get away, however, I add another name to my bird-list,--a
welcome name, the wood pewee’s. He has just arrived from the South,
I suppose. What a sweetly modulated, plaintive-sounding whistle! How
different from the bobolink’s “jest and youthful jollity!” And now the
crested breaks out again all at once, after a long silence. There is a
still stronger contrast. Four flycatchers are in voice together: the
crested, the olive-sided, the least, and the wood pewee. I have heard
them all within the space of a minute. As soon as I am in the valley
I shall hear the alder flycatcher, and when, braving the mosquitoes, I
venture into the tamarack swamp a little way to look at the Cape May
warbler (I know the very spot) I shall doubtless hear the yellow-belly.
These, with the kingbird and the phœbe, which are about all the farms,
make the full New Hampshire contingent. No doubt there are flies enough
for all of them.
As I start to leave the grove, stepping over beds of round-leaved
violets and spring-beauties, both out of flower already, I start at the
sound of an unmusical note, which I do not immediately recognize, but
which in another instant I settle upon as a sapsucker’s. This is a bird
at whose absence my companion and I have frequently expressed surprise,
remembering how common we have found him in previous visits. I go in
pursuit at once, and presently come upon him. He is in extremely bright
plumage, his crown and his throat blood red. He goes down straightway
as No. 81. I am having a prosperous day. Three new names within half an
hour! Idling in a sugar orchard is good for a man’s bird-list as well
as for his soul.
An oven-bird is declaiming, a blue yellow-back is practicing scales,
and a field sparrow is chanting. And even as I pencil their names a
nuthatch (the very one I have been hearing) flies to a maple trunk
and alights for a moment at the door of his nest. Without question he
passed a morsel to his brooding mate, though I was not quick enough to
see him. Yes, within a minute or two he is there again; but the sitting
bird does not appear at the entrance; her mate thrusts his bill into
the door instead. The happy pair! There is much family life of the best
sort in a wood like this. No doubt there are husbands and wives, so
called, in Franconia as well as in other places, who might profitably
heed the old injunction, “Behold the fowls of the air.”
IN THE LANDAFF VALLEY
The greatest ornithological novelty of our present visit to Franconia
was the prairie horned larks, whose lyrical raptures, falling “from
heaven or near it,” I have already done my best to describe. The rarest
bird (for there is a difference between novelty and rarity) was a Cape
May warbler; the most surprisingly spectacular was a duck. Let me speak
first of the warbler.
Two years ago I found a Cape May settled in a certain spot in an
extensive tract of valley woods. The manner of the discovery--which
was purely accidental, the bird’s voice being so faint as to be
inaudible beyond the distance of a few rods--and the pains I took to
keep him under surveillance for the remainder of my stay, so as to make
practically sure of his intention to pass the summer here, have been
fully recounted in a previous chapter. The experience was one of those
which fill an enthusiast with such delight as he can never hope to
communicate, or even to make seem reasonable, except to men of his own
kind.
We had never met with _Dendroica tigrina_ before anywhere about the
mountains, and I had no serious expectation of ever finding it here
a second time. Still “hope springs immortal;” “the thing that hath
been, it is that which shall be;” and one of my earliest concerns,
on arriving in Franconia again at the right season of the year,
was to revisit the well-remembered spot and listen for the equally
well-remembered sibilant notes.
Our first call was on May 17. Perhaps we were ahead of time; at any
rate, we found nothing. On the 23d we passed the place again, and
heard, somewhat too far away, what I believed with something like
certainty to be the _zee-zee-zee-zee_ of the bird we were seeking; but
the dense underbrush was drenched with rain, we had other business in
hand, and we left the question unsettled. If the voice really was the
Cape May’s we should doubtless have another chance with him. So I told
my companion; and the result justified the prophecy, which was based
upon the bird’s behavior of two years before, when all his activities
seemed to be very narrowly confined--say within a radius of four or
five rods.
We had hardly reached the place, two days afterward, before we heard
him singing close by us,--in the very clump of firs where he had so
many times shown himself,--and after a minute or two of patience we
had him under our opera-glasses. The sight gave me, I am not ashamed
to confess, a thrill of exquisite pleasure. It was something to think
of--the return of so rare a bird to so precise a spot. With all the
White Mountain region, not to say all of northern New England and of
British America, before him, he had come back from the tropics (for who
could doubt that he was indeed the bird of two years ago, or one of
that bird’s progeny?) to spend another summer in this particular bunch
of Franconia evergreens. He had kept them in mind, wherever he had
wandered, and, behold, here he was again, singing in their branches, as
if he had known that I should be coming hither to find him.
The next day our course took us again past his quarters, and he was
still there, and still singing. I knew he would be. He could be
depended on. He was doing exactly as he had done two years before. You
had only to stand still in a certain place (I could almost find it in
the dark, I think), and you would hear his voice. He was as sure to be
there as the trees.
That afternoon some ladies wished to see him, and my companion
volunteered his escort. Their experience was like our own; or rather
it was better than ours. The warbler was not only at home, but behaved
like the most courteous of hosts; coming into a peculiarly favorable
light, upon an uncommonly low perch, and showing himself off to his
visitors’ perfect satisfaction. It was bravely done. He knew what was
due to “the sex.”
On the morning of the 27th I took my farewell of him. He had been there
for at least five days, and would doubtless stay for the season. May
joy stay with him. I think I have not betrayed his whereabouts too
nearly. If I have, and harm comes of it, may my curse follow the man
that shoots him.
The “spectacular duck,” of which I have spoken, was one of several
(three or more) that seemed to be settled in the valley of the Landaff
River. Our first sight of them was on the 20th; two birds, flying low
and calling, but in so bewildering a light, and so quick in passing,
that we ventured no guess as to their identity. Three days later, on
the morning of the 23d, we had hardly turned into the valley before we
heard the same low, short-breathed, grunting, grating, croaking sounds,
and, glancing upward, saw three ducks steaming up the course of the
river. This time, as before, the sun was against us, but my companion,
luckier than I with his glass, saw distinctly that they carried a white
speculum or wing-spot.
We were still discussing possibilities, supposing that the birds
themselves were clean gone, when suddenly (we could never tell how it
happened) we saw one of them--still on the wing--not far before us; and
even as we were looking at it, wondering where it had come from, it
flew toward the old grist-mill by the bridge and came to rest on the
top of the chimney! Here was queerness. We leveled our glasses upon the
creature and saw that it was plainly a merganser (sheldrake), with its
crest feathers projecting backward from the crown, and its wing well
marked with white. Its head, unless the light deceived me, was brown.
The main thing, however, for the time being, was none of these details,
but the spectacle of the bird itself, in so strange and sightly a
position. “It looks like the storks of Europe,” said my companion.
Certainly it looked like something other than an every-day American
duck, with its outstretched neck and its long, slender, rakish bill
showing in silhouette against the sky.
Meanwhile, it had put its head partly out of sight in the top of the
chimney, as if it had a nest there and were feeding its young. Then of
a sudden it took wing, but in a minute or two was back again, to our
increasing wonderment; and again it dropped the end of its bill out
of sight below the level of the topmost bricks. Now, however, I could
see the mandibles in motion, as if it were eating. Probably it had
brought a fish up from the river. The chimney was simply its table.
Again, for no reason that was apparent to us, it flew away, and again,
after the briefest absence, it returned. A third time it vanished, and
this time for good. We kept on our way up the valley, talking of what
we had seen, but after every few rods I turned about to put my glass
upon the chimney. Evidently that was the duck’s favorite perch, I said;
we should find it there often. But whether my reasoning was faulty or
we were simply unfortunate, the fact is that we saw it there no more.
On the 25th, at a place two miles or more above this point, we saw
a duck of the same kind--at least it was uttering the same grating,
croaking sounds as it flew; and a resident of the neighborhood, whom
we questioned about the matter, told us that he had noticed such birds
(“ducks with white on their wings”) flying up and down the valley,
and had no doubt that they summered there. As to their fondness for
chimney-tops he knew nothing; nor do I know anything beyond the simple
facts as I have here set them down. But I am glad of the picture of
the bird that I have in my mind.
Enthusiasm is a good painter; it is not afraid of high lights, and
it deals in fast colors. And to us old Franconians, enthusiasm seems
to be one of the institutions, one of the native growths, one of the
special delectabilities, if you please, of that delectable valley. The
valley of cinnamon roses, we have before now called it; the valley of
strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries; the valley of bobolinks and
swallows; but best of all, perhaps, it is the valley of hobbyists. Its
atmosphere is heady. We all feel it. The world is far away. Worldly
successes, yea, dollars and cents themselves, are nothing, and less
than nothing, and vanity. A new flower, a new bird, the hundred and
fiftieth spider, these are the things that count. We are like members
of a conventicle, or like the logs on the hearth. Our inward fires are
mutually communicative and sustaining. We laugh now and then, it may
be, at one another’s peculiarities. Each of us can see, at certain
moments, that the other is “a little off,” to use a “Francony” phrase;
not quite “all there,” perhaps; a kind of eighth dreamer, “moving
about in worlds not realized;” but at bottom we are sympathetic and
appreciative. We would not have each other different, unless, indeed,
it were a little younger. A grain of oddity is a good spice. If we are
not deeply interested in the newest discovery, at least we participate
in the exultation of the discoverer.
“That’s a good fly,” said the entomologist. We were driving, three of
us, talking of something or nothing (we are never careful which it is),
when the happy dipteran blundered into the carriage, and into the very
lap of its admirer. Ten seconds more, and it was under the anæsthetic
spell of cyanide of potassium, which (so we are told) puts its victims
to sleep as painlessly, perhaps as blissfully, as chloroform. It was
an inspiration to see how instantly the lady recognized a “good” one
(it was one of a thousand, literally, for the day was summer-like), and
how readily, and with no waste of motions, she made it her own. I was
reminded of a story.
A friend of mine, a truly devout woman, of New England birth, and
churchly withal (her books have all a savor of piety, though all
the world reads them), is also an enthusiastic and widely famous
entomological collector. One Sunday she had gone to church and was
on her knees reciting the service (or saying her prayers--I am not
sure that I remember her language verbatim), when she noticed on the
back of the pew immediately in front of her a diminutive moth of some
rare and desirable species. Instinctively her hand sought her pocket,
and somehow, without disturbing the congregation or even her nearest
fellow-worshiper (my helpless masculine mind cannot imagine how the
thing was done) she found it and took from it a “poison bottle,” always
in readiness for such emergencies. Still on her knees (whether her lips
still moved is another point that escapes positive recollection), she
removed the stopple, placed the mouth of the vial over the moth (which
had probably imagined itself safe in such ecclesiastical surroundings),
replaced the stopple above it, slipped the bottle back into her pocket,
and resumed (or kept on with) her prayers. All this had taken but a
minute. And who says that she had done anything wrong? Who hints at a
disagreement between science and faith? Nay, let us rather believe with
Coleridge--
“He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things, both great and small,”--
especially small church-going lepidoptera of the rarer sorts.
With zealots like this about you, as I have intimated, you may safely
speak out. If you have seen an unexpected, long-expected warbler, or a
chimney-top duck, or a skyward soaring lark, you may talk of it without
fear, with no restraint upon your feelings or your phrases. Here things
are seen as they are; truth is cleared of false lights, and Wisdom is
justified of her children. Happy Franconia!
“Has she not shown us all?
From the clear space of ether, to the small
Breath of new buds unfolding? From the meaning
Of Jove’s large eyebrow, to the tender greening
Of April meadows?”
Happy Franconia! “Nested and quiet in a valley mild!” I think of her
June strawberries and her perennial enthusiasms, and I wish I were
there now.
A VISIT TO MOUNT AGASSIZ
Mount Agassiz is rather a hill than a mountain; there is no glory to
be won in climbing it, unless, perhaps, by very small children and
elderly ladies; but if a man is in search of a soul-filling prospect he
may climb higher and see less. The road to it, furthermore (I speak as
a Franconian), is one of those that pay the walker as he goes along.
Every rod of the five miles is worth traveling for its own sake,
especially on a bright and comfortable August morning such as the Fates
had this time sent me. It was eight o’clock when I set out, and with
a sandwich in my pocket I meant to be in no haste. If invitations to
linger by the way were as many and as pressing as I hoped for, a mile
and a quarter to the hour would be excellent speed.
Red crossbills and pine siskins were calling in the larch trees near
the house as I left the piazza. The siskins have never been a frequent
sight with me in the summer season, and finding almost at once a flock
in the grass by the roadside, feeding upon seeds, as well as I could
make out, and delightfully fearless, I stopped for a few minutes to
look them over. Some of the number showed much more yellow than others,
but none of them could have been dressed more strictly in the fashion
if their costumes had come straight from Paris. Every bird was in
stripes.
Both they and the crossbills are what writers upon such themes agree to
pronounce “erratic” and “irregular.” Of most birds it can be foretold
that they will be in certain places at certain times; their orbits are
known; but crossbills and siskins wander through space as the whim
takes them. If they have any schedule of times and seasons, men have
yet to discover it. When I come to Franconia, for example, I never
can tell whether or not I shall find them; a piece of ignorance to be
thankful for, like many another. The less knowledge, within limits, the
more surprise; and the more surprise--also within limits--the more
pleasure. At present I can hardly put my head out of the door without
hearing the wheezy calls of siskins and the importunate cackles of
crossbills. They are among the commonest and most voluble inhabitants
of the valley, and seem even commoner and more talkative than they
really are because they are so incessantly on the move.
An alder flycatcher is calling as I go up the first hill (he, too, is
very common and very free with his voice, although, unlike siskin and
crossbill, he knows where he belongs, and is to be found there, and
nowhere else), and when I reach the plateau a sapsucker alights near
the foot of a telegraph post just before me; a bird in Quakerish drab,
with no trace of red upon either crown or throat. He (or she) is only
two or three months old, I suppose, like more than half of all the
birds now about us. Not far beyond, as the road runs into light woods,
with a swampy tract by a brook on the lower side, I hear a chickadee’s
voice and look up to see also two Canadian warblers, bits of pure
loveliness, the first ones of my present visit. I talk to them, and
one, his curiosity responsive to mine, comes near to listen. The
Canadian warbler, I have long noticed, has the bump of inquisitiveness
exceptionally well developed.
So I go on--a few rods of progress and a few minutes’ halt. If there
are no birds to look at, there are always flowers, leaves, and berries:
goldthread leaves, the prettiest of the pretty--it is a joy to praise
them; and dwarf cornel berries, gorgeous rosettes; and long-stemmed
mountain-holly berries, of a color indescribable, fairly beyond
praising; and bear-plums, the deep-blue berries of the clintonia. And
while the eye feasts upon color the ear feasts upon music: a distant
brook babbling downhill among stones, and a breath of air whispering
in a thousand treetops; noises that are really a superior kind of
silence, speaking of deeper and better things than our human speech has
words for. Quietness, peace, contentment, we say; but such vocables,
good as they are, are but poor renderings of this natural chorus of
barely audible sounds. If you are still enough to hear it--inwardly
still enough--as may once in a long while happen, you feel things that
tongue of man never uttered. Life itself is less sweet. Now and then,
as I listen, I seem to hear a voice saying, “Blessed are the dead.” I
foretaste a something better than this separate, contracted, individual
state of being which we call life, and to which in ordinary moods we
cling so fondly. To drop back into the Universal, to lose life in order
to find it, this would be heaven; and for the moment, with this musical
woodsy silence in my ears, I am almost there. Yet it must be that I
express myself awkwardly, for I am never so much a lover of earth as at
such a moment. Life is good. I feel it so now. Fair are the white-birch
stems; fair are the gray-green poplars. This is my third day, and my
spirit is getting in tune.