I believe I have seen two of the oddest birds in Texas--the road-runner
and the scissor-tailed flycatcher. The first was mentioned some time
ago in these letters; the second I have but lately met with. When I
was in San Antonio in January, he was absent for the winter. He would
return, I was informed, shortly after the middle of March, and I have
kept it fast in mind that I must stop here on my way home and make his
acquaintance.
I knew he was odd, but he has turned out to be odder even than I
supposed. Other places, other birds, as a matter of course, but surely
this one, to use Emerson’s word, is the “otherest.” When I saw him
first, in San Pedro Park (everything is saintly in the Southwest), I
thought for an instant that I was looking at a bird which had seized a
long string, or a strip of cloth, and was flying away with it to his
nest. Seen more fully, he looked, I said to myself, like a Japanese
kite, or some other outlandish plaything. Even now, when he has been
in sight pretty constantly for five or six days, I can hardly say that
he looks like a bird to me. His enormously long tail feathers are so
fantastic, so almost grotesque! They render him a kind of monstrosity.
One feels as if he had been made, not born; and some Oriental must have
been the maker.
Yet if ever a bird was alive, he is. His spirits are effervescent and
apparently inexhaustible. Few birds are noisier or more continually
on the move. When six or eight scissor-tails meet for consultation
in one small tree, even though it be in a cemetery, there are “great
doings,” as the country phrase is. What the disturbance is all about,
it is beyond me to tell, but it seems a reasonable assumption that it
has to do somehow with questions of love and marriage. So far as I have
noticed, such sessions do not last long. In the nature of things they
cannot. The hubbub increases, the discussion, whatever its subject,
waxes more and more animated, and then, of a sudden, the assembly
breaks up (I was going to say explodes), and away fly the birds (and
the birds’ tails), every one still contending for the last word.
But there is no need of six or eight to set the pot bubbling. Two are
a plenty; and indeed I suspect that a single bird would have it out
with himself rather than forego for an hour or two the excitement of a
shindy. In temperament the scissor-tail, as well as I can determine,
is own brother to the kingbird. As I said, he is brimming over with
spirits. If he gave them no vent he would burst.
So after a few minutes of quietness, the calm that precedes the storm,
he darts into the air, with vehement, mad gyrations, opening and
shutting his tail feathers spasmodically, and uttering loud cries of
one sort and another. Perhaps he flies straight upward, or as nearly
so as possible (this is one of the kingbird’s tricks), and with tail
outspread comes down headfirst like an arrow. He is like a creature
full of wine, or like one beside himself. What he does, he has to do.
There is no holding him in.
Sometimes, when there are two in the air together, and for anything
I know at other times,--I tell what I have seen,--they utter most
curious, hollow, throbbing, booming noises, such as one would never
attribute to any bird of the flycatcher family. They utter them, I say,
but I mean only that they make them. How they do it, whether with the
throat, the wings, or the tail, is something I have yet to discover.
The only book I have at hand makes no mention of such noises, and I was
greatly taken aback when I heard them.
As the reader perceives, I am dealing in first impressions. They are
all I have. Most of the scissor-tail’s tricks and manners, indeed, I
have yet to witness. I have not seen him chase a crow, for instance,
or a raven (he would have to travel a hundred miles, I suspect, to
find either the one or the other), but give him half a chance, and
I am sure he would do it. One thing I have seen him do: I have seen
him fly before an English sparrow. The action seemed unworthy of him,
but I dare say he did not so regard it. Perhaps it was all a joke.
But apparently no bird considers it a disgrace to be put to rout by a
smaller one. The shameful thing is to be afraid of one that is larger
than yourself. This is not the human way of looking at such matters;
but perhaps that does not prove it a false way. I seem to see that much
might be said in defense of it.
It is surprising how common the scissor-tail is, and more surprising
yet that nobody seems to notice him. I should have thought that all the
passers-by would be stopping to stare at so half-absurd a prodigy. But
when he performs his craziest evolutions here in the Alamo Plaza, in
the very heart of the city, nobody appears to mind him. The truth is
that to these people--to most of them, at least--he is an old story,
while to me he is like a bird invented last week. Wherever you notice
men, you will perceive that it is not the wonderful that attracts their
attention, but the novel and the out-of-the-way. The moon and the stars
they are used to, and quite properly look upon with indifference; but
let a neighbor’s hencoop catch fire, and they cannot run fast enough to
behold the spectacle.
Another and better thing I have accomplished during my present brief
stay in San Antonio: I have heard and seen the Cassin sparrow. A
Washington ornithologist, familiar with this Southwestern country,
learning that I was on my way thither, wrote to me in January: “On no
account return without hearing the Cassin sparrow.” To confess the
truth, I had almost forgotten the injunction, emphatic as it was; but a
few mornings ago, on my way back to the terminus of the street-car line
after a jaunt into some old pecan woods, five or six miles out of the
city, I stopped short at the sound of a few simple bird notes. What a
gracious tune! And as novel as it was gracious! I had never heard the
like: a long trill or shake, pitched at the top of the scale, and then,
after a rest, a phrase of five notes in the sweetest of sparrow voices,
ending with the truest and most unexpected of musical intervals. For
mnemonic purposes, as my custom is (useful to me, if to no one else),
I at once put words to the tune: “She” (this for the long trill),
“pretty, pretty she.”
The birds were in some scattered mesquite bushes (very bright now,
in their new yellow-green leafage), and I hastened to get through
the fence and make up to them. They proved to be very small, and
distressingly deficient in marks or “characters,” but I took such note
of them as I could, in a poor light. The main thing, for the time
being, was the song. That prolonged opening note, with its sound of
an indrawn whistle, ought to be the work of a _Pucæa_, I told myself,
remembering the Florida representative of that genus, and the singers
should therefore be Cassin sparrows.
The next morning, having refreshed my memory by a reading of the
handbook, I took the car immediately after breakfast for another visit
to the place. This, I should have said, was in the rear grounds of an
asylum for the insane. It was Sunday morning, and as I crawled through
the fence and took up my position among the mesquites, I presently
found myself under fire from the windows and balconies. The distance
was too great for me to understand what was said, but there was no
doubt that the inmates of the institution regarded me as a queer one.
However, I believed in my own sanity (as things go in this world),
and did not propose to be hindered. The birds were there, and that was
enough.
And now, to my intense satisfaction, I found that they were doing
just what the handbook described: springing into the air for a few
feet, after the manner of long-billed marsh wrens, and with fluttering
wings dropping slowly back to the perch, uttering their sweet, “She,
pretty, pretty she,” as they descended. I secured somewhat fuller
observations of their plumage, also, and became morally certain--which
means something less than scientifically certain, though really, taking
Mr. Attwater’s list of the birds of San Antonio as a guide, there is
nothing else they can be--that the singers were Cassin sparrows.[19]
And glad I am to have heard them. I cannot speak for others; judgment
in such matters must always be largely a question of personal taste;
but for myself I have heard few bird songs that satisfy me so well; so
quaint and original, yet so true and simple. San Antonio mockingbirds
are numberless, and their performances are wonderful; I think I should
never tire of them; but somehow those six quiet notes of the sparrow
seem to go deeper home.