After the red maple trees and the yellow birches are mostly bare, and
the greater part of the sugar groves have passed the zenith of their
brilliancy, then the poplars come to the rescue. The hills are all
at once bright again with a second crop of color, an aftermath of
splendid sun-bright yellow. I knew nothing about this beforehand, and
am delighted over the discovery. From my Franconia window I am looking
at as pretty an autumnal wood as any man need wish to see, and it is a
wood the seasonable glories of which were ended, I thought, more than
a week ago. As I look at it I feel sorry for my last week’s companion,
who went home too soon. Since his departure the days have been outdoing
one another in the softness of their airs and the beauty of their
lights. Mother Earth has been in her most amiable mood. Nothing is too
good for her children. I have never seen fairer weather; though some, I
dare say, might criticise it as a few degrees too warm. It is hard, I
admit, for a walker to keep a coat on his back, far along as the season
is getting, when the sun wrestles with him for it.
An interesting thing to me has been the tardy brightening of individual
maple trees. It is one more manifestation, I assume, of Nature’s gift
of versatility, her faculty of variation, to which, all but universal
as it is, scientific men attribute so much potency in the evolving of
so-called species. What I notice just now is that, as some bushes and
trees mature their fruit later than others of the same kind, living
apparently under the same conditions, so some maple trees are a week or
two behind their immediate neighbors in ripening their foliage. I have
passed within a day or two both sugar maples and red maples that were
just donning their gay robes. Well done, I am moved to say, as my eye
lights on them. They and the poplars, together with certain extensive
maple groves on the higher levels, still keep the world arrayed in a
really barbaric splendor. Two weeks ago I should have prophesied that
before this time the landscape would be stripped for winter; and so it
would have been, perhaps, if a cold storm had supervened instead of
this period of summery brightness and calm. Great is weather. There
is nothing like it. It makes a man--and a tree, too, for aught I
know--glad to be alive.
That it makes the birds happy is beyond dispute. You can see it with
half an eye. Many of them are gone, it is true, but many others are
left; and wherever you take your walk you may have joy of them. You
will need to be blind and deaf, or of a hopelessly sour temper, not
to catch a little of their cheeriness. Three days ago (it was an
anniversary with me, and I was early abroad) I went into the kitchen
garden before breakfast, as I have been doing frequently of late, to
see what birds might be there. For a month and more, as the coarse
grasses and weeds have ripened their crop (the garden, luckily for me,
having been allowed to go untended), the place has been a favorite
resort of sparrows. There I saw the Lincoln finches in their time,--on
September 5 and subsequently,--and there for a fortnight past I have
always been able to begin the day with a few white-crowns.
Well, on the morning in question one of the first things I heard was a
brief, uncharacteristic, autumnal-sounding ditty which, being too short
for a song sparrow’s work, I at once credited to a white-crown; and, to
be sure, when I looked that way, there the bird stood on a top stone
of the wall, a young fellow, not yet “crowned,” practicing his first
musical exercises. The morning was cool,--the ground had stiffened
overnight,--and every time he opened his mouth to sing, a tiny cloud of
vapor could be seen rising from it. It was visible music. Again and
again I watched him. The dear little chorister! Nobody’s birthday was
ever more prettily honored. He “sang to my eye” indeed--in a daintily
literal sense such as the poet never thought of. I wonder if any one,
anywhere, ever saw and heard the like.
The white-crowns have been surprisingly musical (the weather, no doubt,
being a provocation), but I have not once heard their spring song, or
anything which to my ear--none too well accustomed to it--has seemed
to bear any relation thereto. Song sparrows, on the other hand, while
mostly contenting themselves with incoherent, _sotto voce_ twitterings,
have now and then--almost daily, I think--varied the programme with
more or less successful attempts at a fuller-voiced and more formal
melody. As for the vesper sparrows, they have mainly kept silence, but
on one or two bright mornings have sung as sweetly as ever they do in
May. Indeed, I might truthfully say more than that; for at this season,
when all bright things are taking leave, a strain of wild music is more
grateful to the ear than by any possibility it can be when every newly
green bush is part of the universal choir gallery.
To us who have been in the habit of coming to this valley in
bright-leaf time nothing is more characteristic, as nothing is more
welcome, than the continual familiar presence of bluebirds. This year,
because I have stayed later than usual, it may be, they have seemed
uncommonly abundant. Their voices are sure to be among the first to be
heard as I step out of the door in the morning, and wherever I walk--in
the open country--I find myself surrounded at frequent intervals by a
larger or smaller flock. Two days ago I counted forty in sight at once;
and a bunch of forty bluebirds--well, there may be pleasanter sights
for a bird-lover (a flock of sixty, for example), but it is a sight to
raise low spirits, especially for a man who remembers the time--after a
cruel winter--when the vision of a single bird was accepted by all of
us as an event to talk about.
Myrtle warblers (yellow-rumps) are still more numerous, and if a
bluebird quits a perch and takes wing it is almost an even chance that
a yellow-rump, who has been sitting near at hand, waiting for this to
happen, will be seen dashing in pursuit. You may go down the village
street and watch the trick repeated half a dozen times within half a
mile. To my walking companion and myself the sight has come to be part
of a Franconia autumn. If you are pretty close to the birds you may
hear a bill snapping (the warbler’s, I think), as if in anger, but on
the whole I am inclined to believe that the thing is no more than
an innocent, though one-sided, game of tag. All young creatures must
have something to play with, somebody to make game of. So it is with
yellow-rumps, I dare say; but why should they so universally pitch upon
the inoffensive bluebird, I should like to know. It is to be added,
however, to make the story truthful, that if there are no bluebirds
handy, the warblers take it out by a free chasing of each other. To
watch them, one would think that life, by their apprehension of it,
were all a holiday.
And while I am talking of bluebirds I ought to mention their habit of
hanging about bird boxes in these last days of their Northern season.
Only this forenoon, since the foregoing paragraphs were written,
I passed a box perched upon a pole beside a house, and at least
six bluebirds were sitting upon its platform, or investigating its
different apartments. Sometimes a pair (so they looked, one bright
colored, the other dull) sat side by side before a door, like married
lovers. Sometimes one would go inside, sometimes both, while out of the
next door another bird would be peeping. The box was very unlikely to
have been their home; the countryside is overrun with bluebirds, too
many by half to have summered hereabout; but evidently the sight of
it had suggested family pleasures. Perhaps they were living over the
past, perhaps forecasting the future. Bluebirds have their full share
of sentiment, or both voice and behavior are rank deceivers. Concerning
this aspect of the case, however, the frivolous yellow-rumps cared not
a farthing. They sat in a small apple tree conveniently near, and as
often as a bluebird ventured upon the wing, one or two of them started
instantly in pursuit. If he alighted upon a fence-post, down they
dropped upon the next rail and waited for him to make another sally.
Once I heard a bluebird utter a pretty sharp note of remonstrance, but
that, we may guess, only made the fun the greater. Birds will be birds.
My morning stroll (it is October 13, my last day in Franconia) showed
me, in addition to the birds already named, one lonesome-mannered
hermit thrush, a few robins, two or three ruby-crowned kinglets, one of
them running over with his musical _twittity, twittity, twittity_,
a single yellow palm warbler (this and the myrtle have been the only
warblers of the month), a red cross-bill, going somewhere, as usual,
and leaving word behind him as he went, a small flock of pine siskins,
a strangely few song sparrows, one vesper sparrow, one white-crown,
a multitude of snowbirds, a purple finch or two, a goldfinch, and a
grouse, with the inevitable crows, jays, chickadees, and red-breasted
nuthatches. Had my walk been longer and into a more varied country, I
should have found gold-crested kinglets, winter wrens, brown creepers,
titlarks (perhaps), white-throated sparrows, field sparrows, chippers,
tree sparrows (probably), and three or four kinds of woodpeckers.
And speaking of woodpeckers, I must allow myself to boast that within
the last few days I have had exceptional luck with the big fellow of
them all, known in books as the pileated. On the 9th I saw one and
heard the halloo of another, and on the 11th I saw two (together) and
heard a third. One of those seen on the 11th shouted at full length,
and at the top of his voice while flying.
The pileated woodpecker is a splendid bird. A pity he cannot find
himself at home in our Massachusetts country. To see him here in New
Hampshire one might imagine that he belonged with the mountains and
would be homesick in other company; but if you would see him oftener
than anywhere else, you may go to a land where there is scarcely so
much as a hillock--to the peninsula of Florida. There or here, he is a
great bird. The brightest maple leaf that ever took color was not so
bright as his crest.