I am impatient for the concert to begin. It is the 7th of February. For
three weeks I have been in Miami; birds are plentiful; the country,
one may almost say, is full of them; the weather, mostly a few shades
too warm for a pedestrian’s comfort, seems to be all that birds could
wish; but thus far there has been scarcely a sign of the grand vernal
awakening. Warm or cold, for the birds it is still winter. Phœbes, to
be sure, have sung ever since my arrival, I cannot help wondering why;
and the same is true of white-eyed vireos. It is impossible to walk
through the hammock woods without getting somewhat more than one’s
fill of their saucily emphatic deliverances. For aught I can see, they
are quite as loquacious now as they will be two or three months hence.
Once in a while, hardly oftener than once a week, I should say, I have
heard a mockingbird letting himself loose, and rather more frequently,
especially during the last few days, cardinal grosbeaks have sweetened
the air with their whistle; but for much the greater part the birds are
dumb. On the morning of February 1, as I stepped out upon the piazza,
a house wren sang from a live-oak by the kitchen door. I remembered the
date. “Good!” said I to myself, “the time of the singing of birds is
come.” But I was too much in haste. Since then I have heard plenty of
wren chattering, but not another note of wren music.
Still the opening of the annual concert cannot be much longer delayed.
When I was in Florida nine years ago, mockingbirds were in free song at
St. Augustine, before the middle of February; and at this point, three
hundred miles and more farther south, the season must be earlier rather
than later.
Some of the more distinctively Southern of the birds about me I am
especially desirous of hearing--the Florida yellow-throats, for
example, a local race of the Maryland yellow-throat, so called. They
are everywhere in sight (the dark brown of the flanks distinguishing
them readily), and as their music is said to be very unlike that of
their familiar Northern relative, I am naturally desirous of adding it
to my (memorized) collection. It will be nothing great, presumably, but
it will be something new.
Still more interesting will be the song of the painted bunting, or
nonpareil, a beauty of beauties that I had never seen (a wild one, I
mean) until this winter. About Miami it is decidedly common, though
the green females show themselves ten times as often as the red,
blue, and yellow-green males. What a superbly dressed creature the
masculine nonpareil is! And he carries himself as if he knew it. “Dear
me,” he seems always to be saying; “this Joseph’s coat of mine makes
me so conspicuous! Some day it will be my undoing.” My readers will
most likely have seen the gorgeous little creature in cages (I found
one many years ago in the Boston Public Garden, I remember), though
the chances are that they have never seen him in anything like his
brightest and liveliest feather. A bird, like a butterfly, was born
to be looked at out of doors with the sunlight on him. So far I have
heard no note from the nonpareil except his rather soft chip. The birds
frequent weedy tangles in open grounds, showing special fondness for
patches of the white bur-marigold, and seem to be well scattered over
the country.
Day after day I walk down through the hammock (I have spoken of it
before, and most likely shall do so again) between Miami and Cocoanut
Grove. Indeed, so constant are my peregrinations thither that I begin
to find my innocent self treated as a kind of mysterious personage--one
of the “features” of the place, so to speak, an “object of interest,”
like the gumbo-limbos, the air-plants, and the blossoming lime trees.
Three times, at least, I have overheard a driver describing me to
his fares as “the man who comes down through this hammock _every
day_”--with strong emphasis on the last two words. One passenger was
good enough to surmise, quite audibly, that I might be a botanist,
while another loudly proclaimed his belief that I must be “a sort of a
bird fiend.” So much for being useful in one’s day and generation. The
tourist mind--like the tourist stomach--abhors a vacuum. It must have
something to browse upon. And the drivers know it. It is a bad day for
the cow when she loses her cud.
In sober truth the hammock is well worth a daily visit; and almost as
often as I am here it comes over me what a glorious concert hall it
will be when all these thousands of birds find their voices, if they
ever do; for it may be, I know, that the great majority will start
on their journey northward before that happy day arrives. Here--to
name only some of the more common species--here are mockingbirds,
catbirds, cardinals, house wrens, Carolina wrens, ruby-crowned
kinglets, palm warblers, myrtle warblers, parula warblers, prairie
warblers, black-and-white warblers, Florida yellow-throats, oven-birds,
blue-gray gnatcatchers (a host), white-eyed vireos (another host),
solitary vireos, chewinks, painted buntings, phœbes, crested
flycatchers, and blue jays. What a chorus there would be if the spring
should get into all their throats at once! Might I be here to listen!
Then, indeed, I could make a list, with the hearing to help the
eyesight. Now I follow the road, and find only such birds as happen to
be near it at the moment when I pass. Then it would be another story. I
should need a stenographer. The names would crowd upon the pencil.
It is really an astonishing, unnatural-seeming thing--this multitude
of birds, in this cloudless summer weather, with mating-time so close
at hand, and no impulse to sing. Yet that expression is a trifle too
strong, or at least too sweeping. This forenoon I heard a gnatcatcher
warbling softly, as if to himself, tuning his instrument, it may be,
or, more likely, dreaming. The cardinals, too, are certainly growing
amorous. I see the bright males quarreling among themselves here and
there (they are constantly in the road), and not infrequently, as I
have said, they whistle with all sweetness. At that work there is
no bird to excel them. How any female heart can resist such appeals
is more than any bachelor’s heart can imagine. I rejoice in their
numbers. I should love to walk through the hammock and hear them all
whistling together, a chorus a good mile in length and no rod without a
bird.
Loggerhead shrikes are paired or pairing. The other day I saw one fly
up from the ground and feed another perched on a telegraph wire. He was
doing no more than was meet, her cool-appearing, unresponsive manner
seemed to say. Mockingbirds, also, though singing little, are beginning
to manifest symptoms of jealousy. If all the mockers and all the
cardinals should break into voice at once, the air itself would hardly
contain the music.
Two pileated woodpeckers that I see every few days at a particular spot
in the hammock have already come to an understanding, or so I fancy
from certain bits of conduct that I have been privileged to witness.
This morning I stood watching the female as she hammered to pieces a
decayed branch close by me, when all at once her mate called in the
distance. Instantly she held up her head, as much as to say, “Hark!
Was that he?” and the next moment she was gone. Then I heard low
conversational notes, followed presently by loud drumming on a resonant
stub or branch. I thought of what I have heard preachers say, that
Heaven is a state, not a place.
Pileated woodpeckers are birds good to look at, and, wild as they
look, it is pleasant to find them so approachable. But in fact, this
is most productive woodpecker country. Here are flickers in abundance,
red-bellies almost as many, and along with them the red-headed, the
red-cockaded (in the pine lands), the yellow-bellied (least common of
all), the downy, and the hairy; all, in short, that could be expected,
with the exception of the ivory-billed; and (such is human nature) I
would give more to see him than all the rest together.
Well, I will not wish time away, as the saying is. I begin to perceive
that I have none to spare. But I shall rejoice when some morning I go
out and find the conductor’s arm lifted, and the chorus minding the
beat.