fatal malady. If birds have leprosy, this must have been leprosy. The
poor thing dropped down through a maple-tree close by the house, barely
able to flit a few feet at a time. Its plumage appeared greasy and
filthy, and its strength was about gone. I placed it in the branches of
a spruce-tree, and never saw it afterward.
III
A boy brought me a dead bird the other morning which his father had
picked up on the railroad. It had probably been killed by striking
the telegraph wires. As it was a bird the like of which he had never
seen before, he wanted to know its name. It was a wee bird, mottled
gray and brown like nearly all our ground birds, as the sparrows,
the meadowlark, the quail: a color that makes the bird practically
invisible to its enemies in the air above. Unlike the common sparrows,
its little round wings were edged with yellow, with a tinge of yellow
on its shoulders; hence its name, the yellow-winged sparrow. It has
also a yellowish line over the eye. It is by no means a common bird,
though there are probably few farms in the Middle and Eastern States
upon which one could not be found. It is one of the birds to be looked
for. Ordinary observers do not see it or hear it.
It is small, shy, in every way inconspicuous. Its song is more like
that of an insect than that of any other of our birds. If you hear
in the fields in May and June a fine, stridulous song like that of
a big grasshopper, it probably proceeds from this bird. Move in the
direction of it and you will see the little brown bird flit a few
yards before you. For several mornings lately I have heard and seen
one on a dry, gravelly hillock in a field. Each time he has been near
the path where I walk. Unless your ear is on the alert you will miss
his song. Amid the other bird songs of May heard afield it is like a
tiny, obscure plant amid tall, rank growths. The bird affords a capital
subject for the country boy, or town boy, either, when he goes to
the country, to exercise his powers of observation upon. If he finds
this bird he will find a good many other interesting things. He may
find the savanna sparrow also, which closely resembles the bird he
is looking for. It is a trifle larger, has more bay about the wings,
and is more common toward the coast. Its yellow markings are nearly
the same. There is also a variety of the yellow-winged sparrow called
Henslow's yellow-winged sparrow, but it bears so close a resemblance
to the first-named that it requires a professional ornithologist to
distinguish them. I confess I have never identified it.
I never see the yellow-wing without being reminded of a miniature
meadowlark. Its short tail, its round wings, its long and strong legs
and feet, its short beak, its mottled coat, the touch of yellow, as if
he had just rubbed against a newly-opened dandelion, but in this case
on the wings instead of on the breast, the quality of its voice, and
its general shape and habits, all suggest a tiny edition of this large
emphatic walker of our meadows.
The song of this little sparrow is like the words "chick,
chick-a-su-su," uttered with a peculiar buzzing sound. Its nest is
placed upon the ground in the open field, with four or five speckled
eggs. The eggs are rounder and their ground color whiter than the eggs
of other sparrows.
I do not know whether this kind walks or hops. This would be an
interesting point for the young observer to determine. All the other
sparrows known to me are hoppers, but from the unusually long and
strong legs of this species, its short tail and erect manner, I more
than half suspect it is a walker. If so, this adds another meadowlark
feature.
Let the young observer follow up and identify any one bird, and he will
be surprised to find how his love and enthusiasm for birds will kindle.
He will not stop with the one bird. Carlyle wrote in a letter to his
brother, "Attempt to explain what you do know, and you already know
something more." Bring what powers of observation you already have to
bear upon animate nature, and already your powers are increased. You
can double your capital and more in a single season.
The first among the less common birds which I identified when I began
the study of ornithology was the red-eyed vireo, the little gray bird
with a line over its eye that moves about with its incessant cheerful
warble all day, rain or shine, among the trees, and it so fired my
enthusiasm that before the end of the season I had added a dozen or
more (to me) new birds to my list. After a while the eye and ear become
so sensitive and alert that they seem to see and hear of themselves,
and like sleepless sentinels report to you whatever comes within
their range. Driving briskly along the road the other day, I saw a
phœbe-bird building her nest under a cliff of rocks. I had but a
glimpse, probably two seconds, through an opening in the trees, but
it was long enough for my eye to take in the whole situation: the gray
wall of rock, the flitting form of the bird and the half-finished nest
into which the builder settled. Yesterday, May 7, I went out for an
hour's walk looking for birds' nests. I made a tour of some orchards,
pastures, and meadows, but found nothing, and then came home and found
a blue jay's nest by my very door. How did I find it? In the first
place my mind was intent upon nest finding: I was ripe for a bird's
nest. In the second place I had for some time suspected that a pair
of jays were nesting or intending to nest in some of the evergreens
about my house; a pair had been quite familiar about the premises for
some weeks, and I had seen the male feed the female, always a sure
sign that the birds are mated, and are building or ready to build.
Many birds do this. I have even seen the crow feed its mate in April.
Just at this writing, a pair of chickadees attracted my attention in
a spruce-tree in front of my window. One of them, of course the male,
is industriously feeding the other. The female hops about, imitating
the voice and manner of a young bird, her wings quivering, her cry
plaintive, while the male is very busy collecting some sort of fine
food out of the just bursting buds of the tree. Every half minute or so
he approaches her and delivers his morsel into her beak. I should know
from this fact alone that the birds have a nest near by. The truth is,
it is just on the other side of the study in a small cavity in a limb
of a pear-tree. The female is laying her eggs, one each day, probably,
and the male is making life as easy for her as possible, by collecting
all her food for her.
Hence, when as I came down the drive and a blue jay alighted in a maple
near me, I paused to observe him. He wiped his beak on a limb, changed
his position a couple of times, then uttered a low mellow note. The
voice as of a young jay, tender and appealing, came out of a Norway
spruce near by. The cry was continued, when the bird I was watching
flew in amid the top branches, and the cry became still more urgent and
plaintive. I stepped along a few paces and saw the birds, the female
standing up in her nest and the male feeding her. The nest was placed
in a sort of basket formed by the whorl of up-curving branches at the
top of the tree, the central shaft being gone.
It contained four eggs of a dirty brownish greenish color. As I was
climbing up to it, a turtle dove threw herself out of the tree and
fluttered to the ground as if mortally wounded. My little boy was
looking on, and seeing the dove apparently so helpless and in such
distress, ran to see "what in the world ailed it." It fluttered along
before him for a few yards, and then its mate appearing upon the scene,
the two flew away, much to the surprise of the boy. We soon found the
doves' nest, a shelf of twigs on a branch about midway of the tree.
It held two young birds nearly fledged. How they seemed to pant as
they crouched there, a shapeless mass of down and feathers, regarding
us! The doves had been so sly about their nesting that I had never
suspected them for a moment. The next tree held a robin's nest, and the
nest of a purple finch is probably near by. One usually makes a mistake
in going away from home to look for birds' nests. Search the trees
about your door.
The blue jay is a cruel nest-robber, but this pair had spared the
doves in the same tree, and I think they have made their peace with
the robins, as I do not see the latter hustling them about any more.
Probably they want to stand well with their neighbors, and so go away
from home to commit their robberies.
IV
If a new bird appears in my neighborhood, my eye or ear reports it at
once. One April several of those rare thrushes—Bicknell's or Slide
Mountain thrush—stopped for two days in my currant-patch. How did I
know? I heard their song as I went about the place, a fine elusive
strain unlike that of any other thrush. To locate it exactly I found
very difficult. It always seemed to be much farther off than it
actually was. There is a hush and privacy about its song that makes
it unique. It has a mild, fluty quality, very sweet, but in a subdued
key. It is a bird of remote northern mountain-tops, and its song seems
adjusted to the low, thick growths of such localities.
The past season a solitary great Carolina wren took up its abode in a
bushy land near one corner of my vineyard. It came late in the season,
near the end of August, the only one I had ever heard north of the
District of Columbia. During my Washington days, many years ago, this
bird was one of the most notable songsters observed in my walks. His
loud, rolling whistle and warble, his jocund calls and salutations—how
closely they were blended with all my associations with nature on the
Potomac. When, therefore, one morning my ear caught the same blithe,
ringing voice on the Hudson, be assured I was quickly on the alert. How
it brought up the past. How it reopened a chapter of my life that had
long been closed. It stood out amid other bird songs and calls with a
distinctness that attracted the dullest ears. Such a southern, Virginia
air as it gave to that nook by the river's side!
I left my work amid the grapes and went down to interview the bird.
He peeped at me inquisitively and suspiciously for a few moments from
a little clump of weeds and bushes, then came out in fuller view, and
finally hopped to the top of a grape-post, drooped his wings and tail,
lifted up his head, and sang and warbled his best. If he had known
exactly what I came for and had been intent upon doing his best to
please me, he could not have succeeded better.
The great Carolina wren is a performer like the mockingbird, and is
sometimes called the mocking wren. He sings and acts as well. He
seems bent on attracting the attention of somebody or something. A
Southern poet has felicitously interpreted certain notes by the words,
"Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweet."
Day after day and week after week, till the frosts of the late October
came, the bird tarried in that spot, confining his wanderings to a very
small area and calling and warbling at all hours. From my summer-house
I could often hear his voice rise up from under the hill, seeming to
fill all the space down there with sound. What brought this solitary
bird there, so far from the haunts of his kind, I know not. Maybe he
was simply spying out the land, and will next season return with his
mate. Mockingbirds have wandered north as far as Connecticut, and were
found breeding there by a collector, who robbed them of their eggs. The
mocking wren would be a great acquisition to our northern river banks
and bushy streams. It is the largest of our wrens, and in the volume
and variety of its notes and the length of its song season surpasses
all others.
A lover of nature never takes a walk without perceiving something new
and interesting. All life in the winter woods or fields as revealed
upon the snow, how interesting it is. I recently met a business man who
regularly goes camping to the Maine woods every winter from the delight
he has in various signs of wild life written upon the snow. His morning
paper, he says, is the sheet of snow which he reads in his walk. Every
event is chronicled, every new arrival registers his name, if you have
eyes to read it!
In December my little boy and I took our skates and went a mile
distant from home into the woods to a series of long, still pools in
a wild, rocky stream for an hour's skating. There was a light skim
of snow upon the ice, but not enough to interfere seriously with our
sport, while it was ample to reveal the course of every wild creature
that had passed the night before. Here a fox had crossed, there a
rabbit or a squirrel or a muskrat.
Presently we saw a different track and a strange one. The creature that
made it had come out of a hole in the ground about a yard from the
edge of the long, narrow pool upon which we were skating, and had gone
up the stream, leaving a track upon the snow as large as that of an
ordinary-sized dog, but of an entirely different character.
We had struck the track of an otter, a rare animal in the Hudson River
Valley; in fact, rare in any part of the State. We followed it with
deep interest; it threw over the familiar stream the air of some remote
pool or current in the depths of the Adirondacks or the Maine woods.
Every few rods the otter had apparently dropped upon his belly and
drawn himself along a few feet by his fore paws, leaving a track as
if a log or bag of meal had been drawn along there. He did this about
every three rods.
At the head of the pool where the creek was open and the water came
brawling down over rocks and stones, the track ended on the edge of the
ice; the otter had taken to the water. A cold bath, one would say, in
mid-December, but probably no colder to him than the air, as his coat
is perfectly waterproof.
On another pool farther up the track reappeared, and was rubbed out
here and there by the same heavy dragging in the snow, like a chain
with a long solid bar at regular distances in place of links. At one
point the otter had gone ashore and scratched a little upon the ground.
He had gone from pool to pool, taking the open rapids wherever they
appeared.
The otter is a large mink or weasel, three feet or more long and very
savage. It feeds upon fish, which it seems to capture with ease. It
is said that it will track them through the water as a hound tracks a
fox on land. It will travel a long distance under the ice, on a single
breath of air. Every now and then it will exhale this air, which will
form a large bubble next the ice, where in a few moments it becomes
purified and ready to be taken into the creature's lungs again. If
by any accident the bubble were to be broken up and scattered, the
otter might drown before he could collect it together again. A man who
lived near the creek said the presence of the otter accounted for the
scarcity of the fish there.
V
The other day one of my farmer neighbors asked me if I had seen the new
bird that was about. This man was an old hunter, and had a sharp eye
for all kinds of game, but he had never before seen the bird, which was
nearly as large as a robin, of a dull blue or slate color marked with
white.
Another neighbor, who was standing by, said the bird had appeared
at his house the day before. A cage with two canaries was hanging
against the window, when suddenly a large bird swooped down as if to
dash himself against it; but arresting himself when near the glass, he
hovered a moment, eying the birds, and then flew to a near tree.
The poor canaries were so frightened that they fell from their perches
and lay panting upon the floor of their cage.
No one had ever seen the bird before; what was it? It was the shrike,
who thought he was sure of a dinner when he saw those canaries.
If you see, in late autumn or winter, a slim, ashen-gray bird, in size
a little less than the robin, having white markings, flying heavily
from point to point, and always alighting on the topmost branch of a
tree, you may know it is the shrike.
He is very nearly the size and color of the mockingbird, but with
flight and manners entirely different. There is some music in his soul,
though his murderous beak nearly spoils it in giving it forth.
One winter morning, just at sunrise, as I was walking along the streets
of a city, I heard the shrike's harsh warble. Looking about me, I soon
saw the bird perched upon the topmost twig of a near tree, saluting the
sunrise. It was what the robin might have done, but the strain had none
of the robin's melody.
Some have compared the shrike's song to the creaking of a rusty
gate-hinge, but it is not quite so bad as that. Still it is
unmistakably the voice of a savage. None of the birds of prey have
musical voices.
The shrike had probably come to town to try his luck with English
sparrows. I do not know that he caught any, but in a neighboring city I
heard of a shrike that made great havoc with the sparrows.
VI
When Nature made the flying squirrel she seems to have whispered a
hint or promise of the same gift to the red squirrel. At least there
is a distinct suggestion of the same power in the latter. When hard
pressed the red squirrel will trust himself to the air with the same
faith that the flying squirrel does, but, it must be admitted, with
only a fraction of the success of the latter. He makes himself into a
rude sort of parachute, which breaks the force of his fall very much.
The other day my dog ran one up the side of the house, through the
woodbine, upon the roof. As I opened fire upon him with handfuls of
gravel, to give him to understand he was not welcome there, he boldly
launched out into the air and came down upon the gravel walk, thirty
feet below, with surprising lightness and apparently without the least
shock or injury, and was off in an instant beyond the reach of the
dog. On another occasion I saw one leap from the top of a hickory-tree
and fall through the air at least forty feet and alight without
injury. During their descent upon such occasions their legs are widely
extended, their bodies are broadened and flattened, the tail stiffened
and slightly curved, and a curious tremulous motion runs through all.
It is very obvious that a deliberate attempt is made to present the
broadest surface possible to the air, and I think a red squirrel might
leap from almost any height to the ground without serious injury. Our
flying squirrel is in no proper sense a flyer. On the ground he is more
helpless than a chipmunk, because less agile. He can only sail or slide
down a steep incline from the top of one tree to the foot of another.
The flying squirrel is active only at night; hence its large, soft
eyes, its soft fur, and its gentle, shrinking ways. It is the gentlest
and most harmless of our rodents. A pair of them for two or three
successive years had their nest behind the blinds of an upper window of
a large, unoccupied country house near me. You could stand in the room
inside and observe the happy family through the window pane against
which their nest pressed. There on the window sill lay a pile of large,
shining chestnuts, which they were evidently holding against a time of
scarcity, as the pile did not diminish while I observed them. The nest
was composed of cotton and wool which they filched from a bed in one of
the chambers, and it was always a mystery how they got into the room to
obtain it. There seemed to be no other avenue but the chimney flue.
There are always gradations in nature, or in natural life; no very
abrupt departures. If you find any marked trait or gift in a species
you will find hints and suggestions of it, or, as it were, preliminary
studies of it, in other allied species. I am not thinking of the law
of evolution which binds together the animal life of the globe, but
of a kind of overflow in nature which carries any marked endowment or
characteristic of a species in lessened force or completion to other
surrounding species. Or if looked at from the other way, a progressive
series, the idea being more and more fully carried out in each
succeeding type—a kind of lateral and secondary evolution. Thus there
are progressive series among our song-birds. The brown thrasher is an
advance upon the catbird, and the mockingbird is an advance upon the
brown thrasher in the same direction. Each one carries the special gift
of song or mimicking some stages forward. The same among the larks,
through the so-called meadowlark and the shore lark, up to the crowning
triumph of the skylark. The nightingale also finishes a series which
starts with the hedge warbler and includes the robin redbreast. Our
ground-sparrow songs probably reach their highest perfection in the
song of the fox sparrow; our finches in that of the purple finch, etc.
The same thing may be observed in other fields. The idea of the flying
fish, the fish that leaves the water and takes for a moment to the
air, does not seem to have exhausted itself till we reach the walking
fish of tropical America, or the tree-climbing fish of India. From the
protective coloring of certain insects, animals, and birds, the step
is not far to actual mimicry of certain special forms and colors. The
naturalists find in Java a spider that exactly copies upon a leaf the
form and colors of bird droppings. How many studies of honey-gathering
bees did nature make before she achieved her masterpiece in this line
in the honey-bee of our hives? The skunk's peculiar weapon of defense
is suggested by the mink and the weasel. Is not the beaver the head
of the series of gnawers, the loon of divers, the condor of soarers?
Always one species that goes beyond any other. Look over a collection
of African animals and see how high shouldered they are, how many hints
or prophecies of the giraffe there are before the giraffe is reached.
After nature had made the common turtle, of course she would not stop
till she had made the box tortoise. In him the idea is fully realized.
On the body of the porcupine the quills are detached and stuck into
the flesh of its enemy on being touched; but nature has not stopped
here. With the tail the animal strikes its quills into its assailant.
Now if some animal could be found that actually threw its quills, at a
distance of several feet, the idea would be still further carried out.
The rattlesnake is not the only rattler. I have seen the black snake
and the harmless little garter snake vibrate their tails when disturbed
in precisely the same manner. The black snake's tail was in contact
with a dry leaf, and it gave forth a loud humming sound which at once
put me on the alert.
I met a little mouse in my travels the other day that interested me. He
was on his travels also, and we met in the middle of a mountain lake.
I was casting my fly there when I saw just sketched or etched upon the
glassy surface a delicate V-shaped figure, the point of which reached
about the middle of the lake, while the two sides as they diverged
faded out toward the shore. I saw the point of this V was being slowly
pushed toward the opposite shore. I drew near in my boat, and beheld
a little mouse swimming vigorously for the opposite shore. His little
legs appeared like swiftly revolving wheels beneath him. As I came
near he dived under the water to escape me, but came up again like a
cork and just as quickly. It was laughable to see him repeatedly duck
beneath the surface and pop back again in a twinkling. He could not
keep under water more than a second or two. Presently I reached him
my oar, when he ran up it and into the palm of my hand, where he sat
for some time and arranged his fur and warmed himself. He did not show
the slightest fear. It was probably the first time he had ever shaken
hands with a human being. He was what we call a meadow mouse, but
he had doubtless lived all his life in the woods, and was strangely
unsophisticated. How his little round eyes did shine, and how he
sniffed me to find out if I was more dangerous than I appeared to his
sight.
After a while I put him down in the bottom of the boat and resumed
my fishing. But it was not long before he became very restless and
evidently wanted to go about his business. He would climb up to the
edge of the boat and peer down into the water. Finally he could brook
the delay no longer and plunged boldly overboard, but he had either
changed his mind or lost his reckoning, for he started back in the
direction he had come, and the last I saw of him he was a mere speck
vanishing in the shadows near the other shore.