The days of my youth have come back to me. I am again at the foot of
the ladder, a boy in the primary school, a speller of a-b-abs. The
experience is pleasant, but not unmixedly so; it is sweet, with a
suggestion of bitter. I am finding out daily that one is never too old
to be mistaken. I knew it before, of course; but I am still finding it
out; for the two things are not incompatible. One may know a thing,
and still have need to learn it. It is possible that the most erudite
scholar has never more than begun to apprehend his own ignorance; nay,
that he would never make more than a beginning in that salutary study
were he to burn the midnight oil for a thousand years. In that time he
might square the circle and discover the philosopher’s stone, but he
would not discover how little he knew. In that respect, in respect to
what we do not know, human capacity is unlimited. Finite creatures that
we are, we are endowed with a kind of negative infinity. And, for one,
I wish to make the most of my greatest gift. It shall not be “lodged
with me useless,” if I can help it.
I saw a strange warbler the other day. That is to say, I thought I
saw one. I had been wandering for a whole forenoon amid the chaparral
just outside the city of San Antonio, and had enjoyed a good number of
novel sensations, when suddenly (such things always come suddenly, but
it seems necessary to repeat the word) a tiny bird moved in a low bush
directly before me. “A gray warbler with no wing-marks,” I said; and
the next instant I saw that its crown was light yellow. It moved again,
and the forward parts came into view. Its throat also was yellow. At
that moment it was eating a yellow berry. Its ground color was near the
shade worn by a juvenile chestnut-sided warbler, and the yellow of the
crown and throat was very lightly laid on over the gray, so to express
it, just as it is in the chestnut-side’s case.
Now what kind of warbler can this be? I asked myself: a gray warbler
with a yellow crown and a yellow throat, and no other adornments.
And with the question there came into my mind, as by the effect of
immediate inspiration, the word Calaveras. Whether it was Calaveras or
something else, there could be no doubt of my being able to clear up
the question, once I should have a book in my hand.
I resumed my peregrinations, therefore, the bird having moved on,
as birds do, being provided with wings for that very purpose, and by
and by, walking at a venture round one clump of bushes after another,
I came again upon the stranger, who, it should be said, was of a
peculiarly unsuspicious disposition, and this time was swallowing
piecemeal what seemed to my New England mind a very unseasonable
caterpillar. And now I made a further discovery: the shoulder of the
bird’s wing was edged with a line of pretty bright red, of a shade
between chestnut and carmine! Surely, it was only a matter of surviving
to reach the hotel and the mystery would be solved. Calaveras or what
not, it was impossible that there should be two warblers marked in this
singular manner.
Well, I got back to my room, and sure enough, not only were there not
two warblers thus marked, there was not even one. Calaveras was nothing
to the purpose. My inspiration must have come from the wrong place. At
any rate, it was unprofitable for instruction. It wasn’t far to go, you
may say, but I was at my wits’ end.
That evening I had occasion to answer a letter from an eminent
ornithologist, who has herself worked much in the Southwest, and
besides has at her elbow the best of American bird collections. She
would be able to help me out of my difficulty. In all innocence,
therefore, I stated my case. It was possible, I admitted (thrice lucky
admission--it is always politic to seem modest, however one may feel),
that the bird was not a warbler, after all, though, if it were not, I
had no idea what it could be.
Well, the next day I was out in the country again, this time in a
pecan grove, with tall seed-bearing weeds standing by the acre under
the tall, leafless trees (a paradise for sparrows), when I heard a
chickadee whistling his four notes in the distance. “How closely his
music resembles that of his relative as we hear it in Florida,” I said
to myself. And this reflection set me asking, “Where is that odd little
titmouse, the verdin, that was said to be common about San Antonio at
all seasons?” And then, like a flash, came the answer: “Why, man, that
was a verdin you saw yesterday, out in the chaparral, and mistook for a
warbler.” And so it turned out. Red shoulder-strap and all, everything
suited. The verdin, by the by, is a distinctively Southwestern species,
not _Parus_, but _Auriparus_. My bird had been a female, I suppose,
showing less yellow than her mate would have done. Perhaps if I had
seen him instead of her, I should not have been so befooled.
No sooner was the puzzle thus satisfactorily solved, than I began to
meditate, with something less of satisfaction, upon the letter I had
written the evening before. I thought, too, of the many more or less
foolish letters that I had myself received (and sometimes smiled at,
I fear) in the past twenty years, letters in which eager searchers
after ornithological knowledge had confided to me marvelous accounts
of the wonders they had seen afield, and by an unhappy fate could find
no description of when they returned to the study. Not many of these
correspondents, as well as I could now remember, had ever mistaken a
titmouse for a warbler! I must dispatch a postscript to my letter by
the earliest mail. And so I did, ostensibly, of course, to save my
friend the trouble of a reply, but really to prove to her that, though
I was capable of blundering, I was also capable of a second thought.
And now, having made my confession, I am bound to add that some who
may laugh at me would possibly have been little wiser than I, had they
stood in my shoes; for the verdin does not look the least in the world
like anything that goes by the name of titmouse or chickadee up in our
Northern country. I hope to see more of it, and especially to hear its
song, which is said to be of surprising volume.
Really (and this is why I have told this not very exciting tale at
such length), it is the chief delight of bird-gazing in a strange
country that one has to begin, as it were, all one’s studies over
again; as I have seen a professor of botany in similar circumstances
fingering the leaves of the manual like the veriest schoolboy, as for
the time being he was. It is not the proudest way of renewing one’s
youth, but it will answer. And conditions being as they are, nothing
else will answer.
Such is my present case here in Texas. Even now, in the dead of winter,
with the number of species greatly reduced, the novelties seen in one
walk are so many that the man who uses no gun, and so can take no
specimens home with him for inspection, is often put to his trumps
when he comes to run over his day’s notes. Though he may have done his
best, he is certain to have overlooked or forgotten some detail which,
with the book before him, turns out to be all important. What a pity
he did not note with more exactness the proportion of white on the
tail feathers, or the position of a certain black spot on the side of
the head! He must go out again, and--if he is fortunate enough to find
the bird--secure a stricter and more intelligent observation. It is
plaguing fun, but it is fun, nevertheless, and good practice, besides;
and withal, it leaves work for to-morrow.
It must be admitted, moreover, if the truth is to be told,--and it is
sometimes better to tell it,--that no amount of observation in the
field will be likely, in a month or two, at any rate, to settle all
the nice questions that confront the student in a new region in these
latter days; especially if the region happens to be, like this about
San Antonio, one in which Eastern and Western forms of the same species
are to be found overlapping each other. It was very well for Emerson
to speak, poetically, of naming all the birds without a gun. He lived
before the day of trinomials; or if that be not quite true, before our
younger brood of ambitious closet ornithologists had set themselves
so zealously at the work of dividing and subdividing. Time was when a
song sparrow was a song sparrow, and there was an end of it. Now to
call a bird by that name is only the beginning of sorrows. What kind
of song sparrow is it? My Western handbook enumerates about fifteen
sub-species, and the differences, I suspect, are many of them almost
too fine for opera-glass determination. For what I know, a microscope
might be more to the purpose.
The man who refuses a gun must accept the limitations that go with that
refusal. Time and repeated observation will do much; a good ear will
help--in some cases it will do the larger half of the work; but he
must not expect to accomplish with a glass and patience exactly what
another man accomplishes with powder and shot and a pair of dividers.
In the study of ornithology, as elsewhere, there are diversities of
operations, and possibly not the same spirit.
If I cannot be certain whether the vesper sparrows I saw to-day were
light-colored enough to pass for _Poœcetes gramineus confinis_, or were
probably nothing but plain _Poœcetes gramineus_, I must put up with my
ignorance, distressing as it is. Possibly, if I were to see species and
sub-species side by side, even in the field, I could tell them apart;
possibly I could not. Whether their songs differ, is a point concerning
which my book, after the manner of books, has nothing to offer; and as
the birds are now dumb, there is nothing for me to do but to call them
vesper sparrows, and await developments.
And some things can be settled, even in Texas, with no weapon but a
field-glass. I know, for example, that I have to-day seen Mexican
goldfinches, and Arctic towhees, and red-shafted flickers. That is more
than half a loaf, by a good deal, and several times better than no
bread.