A well-groomed hobby will carry its rider comfortably over many a
slough.
I was on my way westward to El Paso, and knowing that the train was due
there before daylight, I left my berth early, and had gone out upon the
porch of the observation car to catch a bite of fresh air and enjoy
the first faint flushes of the dawn, when a train-hand, passing in the
semi-darkness, informed me that the wreck of a freight train was on
the track in front of us, and that we should probably not be able to
move for eight or nine hours. I had noticed that we were standing still
upon a “siding,” but such halts are not infrequent on a single-track
road, and having my mind upon pleasanter themes, I had passed the
circumstance by without further thought.
The news of our trouble spread, as one passenger after another made
his unhandsome, half-civilized appearance from behind the curtains,
and though we proved to be a pretty philosophical company, as
transcontinental travelers have need to be, the general run of comment
was not hilarious.
A turn outside, as it grew lighter, showed that we were at a station
called San Elizario (a pleasing name, surely), some three thousand two
hundred feet above sea-level. The westerly breeze was a refreshment,
and three or four ranges of jagged mountains glorified the horizon. If
we must be delayed, the Fates had chosen a favorable place for us.
I, for one, soon began to feel reconciled to the turn affairs had
taken, and went back to the car for an opera-glass. It must be a dull
day in Texas when a tender-footed bird-gazer cannot find at least one
novelty, and till the “first call for breakfast” I would be out trying
my luck.
An adobe building, windowless and unoccupied, stood not far off, and
near it was a cottonwood tree, still holding, in spite of all those
Texas winds, part of its last season’s crop of dry leaves. I walked
in that direction, and at the moment three birds, with musical,
goldfinch-like twitters, flew into the tree. A glance showed them to be
not goldfinches, but small birds of the purple finch group, very bright
and rosy (the two males), and thickly streaked underneath. “The house
finch!” I exclaimed.
This is a Western beauty, greatly beloved for its color, its music, and
its engaging familiarity, by all to whom it is a neighbor. I had read
of its charms, and had freshly in mind an enthusiastic eulogy of it by
an old friend, now a resident of Colorado, whom I had chanced to fall
in with a fortnight before in a railway car. With those three lovely
creatures talking to me, I felt that the day was saved.
A Say’s phœbe was near by, in a pear orchard (for the piece of prairie
land on which we so unexpectedly found ourselves was under irrigation),
and as I had met it first only forty-eight hours before--at Del Rio--I
was glad to see more of its very demure and pretty habits, especially
of its clever trick of hovering at considerable length just over the
grass. The rather bright buff of its under-parts is one of its striking
characteristics, and now, when I caught sight of it in the distance, I
had for a moment thoughts of some unfamiliar kind of oriole.
There was barely time to pay my respects to the phœbe before a flash of
blue wings made me aware of something more interesting still, a bevy
of bluebirds. It would be good fortune, surely, if they should turn
out to be of one of the several Western forms that I had never seen. I
drew near, therefore, with all carefulness, and needed but one look to
assure myself that such was indeed the case. Their backs were not blue,
but of a chestnut shade. The blue of the wings, moreover, was not
quite the same as that of our common Eastern _Sialia_.
Whatever they were, the color of the backs would probably be enough to
name them, and I returned to the car for breakfast and, first of all,
to make sure of my new birds’ identity. A consultation of the handbook
showed it to be reasonably certain that they were of the sub-species
_Sialia mexicana bairdi_, the chestnut-backed bluebird; but I had
failed to observe one important mark: the throat should have been
“purplish blue.” I wished very much to see them again, but they had
disappeared. Doubtless they were migrants or stragglers, and by this
time were far away. A pity I had not been more painstaking while I had
the opportunity. The one safe rule is to note everything, though it is
a rule more easily laid down than lived up to, to be sure, especially
in a new place, with many distractions. Anyhow, the birds must be of
the chestnut-backed sub-species, I reassured myself, for the sufficient
reason that it was impossible, here in western Texas, that they should
be anything else.
Allaying my scruples thus, I started across a field toward a farmhouse,
and on the way noticed a crow flying over. It was the first one I had
seen since reaching San Antonio,--the chaparral country not favoring
birds of the crow-jay tribe,[11]--and I remarked it with pleasure. And
then, remembering something I had lately read of Arizona, I thought,
“But is it a crow, after all? Isn’t it one of the white-necked ravens
that are set down as so common and familiar in this part of the world?”
And, in fact, it was; for the next moment it began calling in a voice
that put the possibility of its being a common American crow, the only
one that could possibly be met with in all this region, quite out of
the account. Another new bird! The third within half an hour! Surely
this was better than getting into El Paso on schedule time. Let El Paso
wait. It would probably last the day out.
But the story was not yet done, for after a little the meadow larks, of
which there were many in the fields (with large flocks of horned larks,
also), began singing. I was disappointed in the song, of the beauty of
which I had formed the most exalted expectations, but consoled myself
with believing that the birds were not Western meadow larks proper,
but the Texan sub-species; otherwise I must conclude that their voices
were still somewhat winter-bound, or at least, not yet keyed up to
concert pitch.
A sparrow hawk beside the farmhouse before mentioned allowed me
to stand almost under his low tree before he took wing, and when
at last he did so I had a feeling that he was rather surprisingly
long. I thought nothing more of the matter at the moment, but later,
discovering by a reference to the handbook that a variety of _Falco
sparverius_, somewhat larger and with a longer tail, had been described
from this region, I concluded it probable, not to say certain, that
my impression had been correct, and that the bird was not my old
acquaintance of the East, but _Falco sparverius deserticola_. That
would make the new birds of the morning four instead of three.
All this while, it must be understood, there was always the possibility
that the train might start at any moment, no positive information upon
that point being obtainable, so that I could move about only within
a narrowly limited area. For a man thus tethered I was doing pretty
well, whatever my unornithological fellow-travelers might think of my
peculiar movements and attitudes. And to increase my enthusiasm, as I
turned to go back to the train for dinner, in crossing an irrigation
ditch (now dry), bordered with a dense thicket of low shrubs, I caught
the tinkle of junco voices and presently a glimpse of white tail
feathers. Now, then, since luck was the order of the day, it was as
likely as not that these were not simple _Junco hyemalis_ such as I had
found at San Antonio, but one of several Western kinds that might, for
aught I was aware, be looked for hereabout.
And so it proved. The birds were amazingly shy and secretive, but
with patience I had three or four of them under my glass one after
another; and they were noticeably different from our Eastern junco, and
belonged, as the book’s description made clear, to the variety _Junco
hyemalis connectens_, the intermediate junco, so (not very poetically)
called.
I went to dinner with an excellent appetite, and afterward, the delay
of the train still continuing, though with rumors that its end was
near, I took one more turn in the field, and this time happened upon
still another stranger, the handsomest of the day, so wonderfully
handsome, though “handsome” is too cheap a word, that a man would have
to go far to beat it--an Arizona _Pyrrhuloxia_; a bird--related to the
cardinal grosbeak group--having no representative in the East. It would
be a shame to attempt a description of it here at the end of a hurried
sketch, but it made a glorious sixth in my list of the day’s findings.
I shall see more of it, I trust, when I reach the territory to which it
more distinctively belongs.
One other piece of good fortune I must not fail to chronicle, though I
have omitted to do so in its proper place. Late in the forenoon, after
I had given the bluebirds up for lost, I discovered them sitting, the
six together, a lovely company, among the leaves of a cottonwood tree,
as if they had taken shelter from the wind; and the book’s description
was borne out: their throats were “purplish blue.”
The nine hours--for so long the embargo lasted--passed all too soon. If
I could have had two or three hours of free wandering, who knows what
other bright names I might have brought back? I went so far, indeed,
as to inquire of the postmaster and variety storekeeper--a genial,
smiling German--whether there was any place in the neighborhood where a
stranger could be put up for the night; but he thought not, and advised
me, not at all inhospitably, to stick to the train. And possibly, after
all, I had found more rather than less for being compelled to beat a
small space over again and again, instead of ranging farther afield. At
all events, I had discovered a new use for ornithological enthusiasm,
and I might almost add for railway accidents. I do not expect to find
many birdier places, no matter where my wanderings take me, than that
piece of dry, winter-bleached prairie about San Elizario.