meaning to follow it for a mile or two, but finding myself
insufficiently shod for so deep a slush, I turned back after going only
a little way. It was too bad I should have been so improvident, I said
to myself; but accident is often better than the best-laid plan, and
so it was now. As I neared the bunch of cedars--which I have looked
into day after day as I have passed, hoping to find the linnets again
there--I descried some smallish bird in one of the topmost branches
of a tall old poplar across the field. My opera-glass brought him
nearer, but still not near enough, till presently he turned and took
an attitude. “Ah, yes,” said I; “a purple finch.” Attitude and gait,
though there may be nothing definable about them, are often almost as
good as color and feature for purposes of identification. I had barely
named the bird before he commenced singing, and as he moved into a
slightly better light (the sky being clouded) I saw that he was a red
one. He seemed to be not yet in full voice; perhaps he was not in full
spirits; but he ran through with his long, rapid, intricate, sweetly
modulated warble with perfect fluency, and very much to my pleasure.
It was the first song of spring. The linnet is of the true way of
thinking; spring, with him, begins with the turn of the month.
Purple finches, by the bye, are among the birds of which it has been
said--by Minot, and perhaps by others--that both sexes sing. I hope
the statement is true; I could never see any reason in the nature of
things why female birds should not have musical susceptibilities and
musical accomplishments; but I am constrained to doubt. It is most
likely, I think, that the opinion has arisen from the fact that adult
males--a year or more old, and fathers of families--sometimes continue
to wear the gray, sparrow-like costume of the gentler sex.
My bird of this morning dropped from his perch while I was trying to
get nearer to him, and could not be found again. I still suppose that
the flock is spending the season somewhere not far off. I have lived
with myself too long to imagine that birds must be absent because I
fail to discover them.
Half an hour before, in almost the same place, I had stopped to
look at six birds perched in a bare treetop. They were so silent,
so motionless, and so closely bunched, that I put up my opera-glass
expecting to find them cedar waxwings. Instead, they were nothing but
blue jays. While my glass was still on them, the whole flock seemed to
be taken with a dancing fit. This lasted for a quarter of a second,
more or less, and was so quickly over that I cannot say positively
that it was anything more than an optical illusion. The next moment all
hands took flight with loud screams. They did not go far, and presently
crossed the road in front of me, still screaming lustily, for no reason
that I could discover signs of. However, the blue jay is as far as
possible from being a fool, and whenever he talks it is safe concluding
that he has something to say.
It has long been an opinion of mine that the jay language is worthy of
systematic study. Some man with a gift of patience and a genius for
linguistics should undertake a jay dictionary; setting down not only
all jay words and phrases, but giving us, as far as possible, their
meaning and their English equivalents. It would make a sizable volume,
and would be a real contribution to knowledge.
All bird language, I have no doubt, is full of significance. It
has been evolved exactly as human language has been, and while it
is presumably less copious and less nicely shaded than ours, it is
probably less radically unlike it than we may have been accustomed
to assume. That it has something answering to our “parts of speech”
we may almost take for granted. It could scarcely be intelligible--as
it assuredly is--if some words did not express action, others things,
and still others quality. Verbs, substantives, adjectives, and
adverbs,--these, at least, all real language must possess. The jay
tongue has them, I would warrant, in rudimentary forms, but in good
number and of clearly defined significance.
Jays are natural orators; for among birds, as among men, there are
“diversities of operations.” “All species are not equally eloquent,”
said Gilbert White. And the same capable naturalist made another shrewd
remark, which I would commend to the man, whoever he may be, who shall
undertake the jay-English dictionary that I have been desiderating.
“The language of birds,” said White, “is very ancient, and, like other
ancient modes of speech, very elliptical; little is said, but much is
meant and understood.”
The blue jay, I am confident, though I do not profess to be a jay
scholar, makes a large use of interjections. This will constitute one
of the difficulties with which his lexicographer will have to contend;
for interjections, as all students of foreign tongues know, are among
the hardest words to render from one language to another. A literal
translation is liable to convey almost no meaning. When a Spaniard
grows red in the face and vociferates, “_Jesús, María y José!”_ he is
not thinking of the holy family, but in all likelihood of something
very, very different; and when a devout New England deacon hears
some surprising piece of news, and responds with “My conscience!” he
is not thinking at all of the voice of God in the soul of man. Such
phrases--and the jay language, I feel sure, is full of them--are not
so much expressions of thought as vents for feeling. You may call
them safety-valves. Emotion is like steam. If you stop the nose of
the tea-kettle, off goes the cover. The hotter the blood, of course,
the more need for such exclamatory outlets; and the jay, unless his
behavior belies him, is Spaniard, Italian, and Frenchman all in one.
I pity his lexicographer if he undertakes to render all his subject’s
emotions in prim literary English. But I hope he will do the best he
can, and I promise to buy his book.
The linnet’s was the first spring song, I said; but it was first
by an inch only; for even while I was setting down the paragraph a
white-breasted nuthatch broke into a whistle close by my window. I
turned at once to look at him. There he stood, in the top of the elm,
perched crosswise upon a small twig, just as a sparrow might have been,
and every half a minute throwing forward his head and emitting that
peculiar whistle, broken into eight or ten syllables. Between times
he looked to right and left, as if he had been calling for some one
and was expecting a response. No response came, and after a little he
disappeared.
That was the second spring song, and a good one, though not to be
compared with the linnet’s for musical quality. Now, say I, who bids
for the third place? Perhaps it will be a bluebird, perhaps a robin,
perhaps a song sparrow.
CHIPMUNKS, BLUEBIRDS, AND ROBINS
The season was opened, formally, on the 10th of March. I am speaking
for myself. Friday, the 8th, brought genuine spring weather, sunny
and warm, an ideal day for the first bluebird; but I was obliged to
waste it in the city. The 9th was rainy and cold, and though I spent
some hours out-of-doors, I saw no vernal signs. Birds of all sorts
were never so few. The next morning--cloudy, with a raw northeasterly
wind--I was fifteen minutes away from home when a squirrel came out of
the woods on one side of the way and ran across the road before me. It
was a chipmunk, my first one of the new year, wide-awake and quick on
its legs; and it was hardly in the hazel bushes on the other side of
the road before another joined it, and the two chased each other out of
sight. Spring had come.
Chickarees and gray squirrels have been common enough throughout
the cold weather, but the chipmunk, or striped squirrel, takes to
its burrow in the late autumn, and sleeps away the winter. In other
words, along with the woodchuck (the largest and the smallest of our
New England squirrels being alike in this respect), it migrates--into
the “land of Nod.” I imagine, however, that its sleep is not so sound
but that it wakes up now and then to feed, though as to this point I
know really nothing, my impression arising wholly from the fact that
chipmunks store away food. They would hardly do this, I should think,
unless they expected to find a use for it.
Late in September, five months ago, I went to visit friends in the
White Mountains, and one of the first things I heard from them was that
Betty had disappeared. She had not been seen for about two months.
Betty was a chipmunk that had been in the habit of coming upon the
piazza, and had grown tame under kind treatment till she would take
food from her friends’ fingers and even climb into their laps. Once,
indeed, the lady of the house, having gone upstairs, noticed the
presence of something heavy in her pocket (she is a naturalist, and
for that reason, I suppose, still wears a pocket in her gown), and on
putting her hand into it, found Betty inside.
But, as I say, Betty had suddenly discontinued her visits, and there
was mourning at the cottage. Worse yet, there was wrath, and the stable
cat had barely escaped with his life. But now, on a Sunday noon, when
the cottagers appeared at the hotel dinner-table, they announced with
beaming faces that there was great news: Betty had returned! I must
come over and see her; for up to this time I knew her charms only by
report.
As soon as dinner was finished, therefore, we repaired to the cottage
veranda, and pretty soon, while we were talking of one thing and
another, the lady said, “Ah, here she is! Here’s Betty!” Filberts had
been provided, and she began at once to climb into our laps after
them. She carried them away three at a time,--one in each cheek-pouch
and one between her teeth,--going and coming in the most industrious
and businesslike manner. She would pass the winter in a state of
hibernation, without a doubt, but her conduct obviously implied that
she expected to see a time now and then when a bite of something to eat
would “come handy.”
My 10th of March chipmunks were a welcome sight. I wondered how long
they had been awake. For several days, probably. And I tried to imagine
what it must be like to open one’s eyes after a five months’ nap.
Hibernation has the look of a miracle. And yet, what is it but a longer
sleep? Well, perhaps sleep itself is a miracle--as truly so as life or
thought. Probably, the world being all of a piece, if we understood one
thing we should understand everything. Who knows? Anyhow, spring had
come.
But there were no bluebirds. I kept on for two hours, past the
likeliest of places, but saw and heard nothing. It was too bad, but
there was no help for it. Bluebirds, blackbirds, song sparrows, fox
sparrows, all were still to be looked for.
Then I sat indoors for an hour or two; I would stay in till afternoon,
I thought; books, also, are a world, as Wordsworth said; but pretty
soon the sun shone out; things looked too inviting. “I will go over as
far as Longfellow’s Pond,” said I. “Perhaps there will be something in
that quarter.” That was a happy thought. I was hardly in the old cattle
pasture, feeling it good to have the grass under my feet once more,
all bleached and sodden though it was, when I stopped. Wasn’t that a
bluebird’s note? No, it was probably nothing but my imagination. But
the sound reached me again; faint, fugacious, just grazing the ear. I
put up my hands to my ears’ help, and stood still. Yes, I certainly
heard it; and this time I got its direction. A glance that way and I
saw the bird, pretty far off, at the tip of an elm sapling standing by
itself down in a sheltered hollow. I leveled my field-glass upon him
(it was well I had brought it), made sure of his color, a piece of pure
loveliness, and hastened to get nearer. Before I could turn the corner
of the intervening wire fence, however, he took flight, and another
with him. I followed hastily, and was approaching some roadside maples
when the voice was heard anew, and the two birds, both calling, mounted
into the air and vanished beyond the wood northward.
What a sweet voice the bluebird’s is! Calling or singing, it is the
very soul of music. And the spring was really open. I went home in high
spirits.
This happened on the 10th. Now it is the 13th. I have seen no more
bluebirds, and song sparrows are still missing; but this morning an
ecstatic purple finch warbled, and better still (for somehow, I do not
know how or why, it gave me more pleasure), a flicker called again and
again in his loud, peremptory, long-winded manner. He, or another like
him, has been in the neighborhood all winter, but this was his first
spring utterance. It was no uncertain sound.
The bluebird peeps in upon us, as it were. His air is timid. “Is winter
really gone?” he seems to say; but the flicker is a breezier customer.
His mood is positive. He pushes the door wide open, and slams it back
against the wall. “Spring, spring!” he shouts, and all the world may
hear him. Soon he and the downy will begin their amorous drumming on
dry stubs and flakes of resonant bark.
This was early in the morning. Since then I have been over to the
cattle pasture, and in it found a flock of ten or twelve robins. They
were feeding in the grass, but at my approach flew into some savin
trees and fell to eating berries. As seems to be always true at this
time of the year, they were in splendid color, and apparently in the
very pink of physical condition; their bills were never so golden, it
seemed to me, nor their heads so velvety black, nor their eyelids so
white. They would not sing, but it was like the best of music to hear
them cackle softly as they flew from the grass into the cedars. Say
what you will, the robin is a pretty fine bird, especially in March.
MARCH SWALLOWS
The birds are having their innings. They have been away and have come
back, and even the most stolid citizen is for the moment aware of their
presence. I rejoice to see them so popular.
Two or three mornings ago I met a friend in the road, a farmer, one
of the happy men, good to talk with, who glory in their work. A phœbe
was calling from the top of an elm, and as we were near the farmer’s
house I asked, “How long has the phœbe been here?” He looked up, saw
the bird, and answered with a smile, “He must have just come. I haven’t
heard him before.” I made some remark about its being pleasant to have
such creatures with us again, and he responded, as I knew he would, in
the heartiest manner. “Oh, I do love to see them!” he said.
I was reminded of a lady of whom I had been told the day before. She
had felt obliged, as I heard the story, to attend a meeting of the
woman’s club, but remarked to one of her assembled sisters that she had
had half a mind to stay at home. The truth was, she explained, that
two or three meadow larks were singing gloriously in the rear of her
house, and she could hardly bear to come away and leave them. I hope
her self-denial was rewarded.
On the same day I heard of a servant who hastened into the sitting-room
to say to her mistress, “Oh, Mrs. ----! there’s a little bird out in
the hedge singing to beat the band.” The newcomer proved to be a song
sparrow, and the lady of the house was fully as enthusiastic as the
servant in her welcome of it, though I dare say she expressed herself
in less picturesque language.
And I know another house, still nearer home, where a few days ago the
dinner-table was actually deserted for a time, in the very midst of the
meal. Three bluebirds, with snowbirds, goldfinches, and chickadees, had
suddenly appeared under the windows. “There! there! In the maple! Will
you look at him! Oh-h-h!” The dinner might “get cold,” as the prudent
housewife suggested, but it did not matter. Such a color as those
bluebirds displayed was better than anything that an eater could put
into his mouth.
Yes, as I say, the birds are having their innings. In whichever
direction I walk, in town or country, I am asked about them. A
schoolgirl stopped me in the street the other day. “Can you tell
me what that bird is?” she inquired. A white-breasted nuthatch was
whistling over our heads in a shade tree. Possibly the study of live
birds will be as fashionable a few years hence as the wearing of dead
ones was a few years ago.
On the 22d of March, as I stood listening to a most uncommonly
brilliant song sparrow (now is the time for such things, before the
greater artists monopolize our attention) and the outgivings of a too
chary fox sparrow, the first cowbird of the year announced himself.
Polygamist, shirk, and, by all our human standards, general reprobate,
I was still glad to hear him. He is what he was made. Few birds are
more interesting, psychologically, if one wishes an object of study.
Saturday, the 23d, was cloudless, a rare event at this time of the
year, and with an outdoor neighbor I made an excursion to Wayland, to
see what might be visible and audible in those broad Sudbury River
meadows.
We took a “round” familiar to us (to one of us, at least), down the
road to the north bridge and causeway, thence through the woods on the
opposite side of the river to a main thoroughfare, or turnpike, and
back to the village again over the south causeway. Meadow larks were
in full tune, now from a treetop, now from a fence-post. They were my
first ones since the autumn, and their music was relished accordingly.
As we stopped on the bridge to look down the blue river and across the
overflowed meadow lands to a gray, flat-topped hill far beyond toward
Concord, we suddenly discovered a shining white object on the surface
of the water. It proved to be a duck, one of two, jet black and snow
white, and presumably a merganser, though it was too far away to be
made out with positiveness. Thoreau, I remember, makes frequent mention
of mergansers and golden-eyes in his March journals.
We were admiring this couple (a couple only in the looser sense of the
word, for both birds were drakes), when all at once some small far-away
object “swam into my ken.” “A swallow!” said I, and even as I spoke a
second one came into the field of the glass. Yes, there they were, two
white-breasted swallows, sailing about over the meadows on the 23d of
March. How unspeakably beautiful they looked, their lustrous blue-green
backs with the bright sun shining on them! The date must constitute a
“record,” I assured my companion. Once before, at least, I had seen
swallows in March, but that, I felt certain, was on one of the last
days of the month. Strange that such creatures should have ventured so
far northward thus early. If Gilbert White could see them, he would
be more firmly convinced than ever that swallows “lay themselves up
in holes and caverns, and do, insect-like and bat-like, come forth
at mild times, and then retire again to their latebræ.” For my own
part, not being able to accept this doctrine, I contented myself with
Americanizing Shakespeare. “Swallows,” said I,--
“Swallows that come before the daffodil dares,
And take the winds of March with beauty.”
I could hardly recover from my excitement, which was renewed an hour
afterward when, on the southern causeway, a third bird (or one of the
same two) passed near us. But now see how untrustworthy a clerk a man’s
memory is! On reaching home I turned at once to my book of dates, and
behold, it was exactly four years ago to an hour, March 23, 1897, that
I saw two white-breasted swallows about a pond here in Wellesley. We
had broken no “record,” after all. But I imagine the Rev. Gilbert White
saying, “Yes, yes; you will notice that in both cases the birds were
seen in the immediate neighborhood of water.” And there is no doubt
that such places are the ones in which to look most hopefully for the
first swallows of the year.
All this time a herring gull, a great beauty in high plumage, was
sailing up and down the meadows like a larger swallow. He, too, was one
of Thoreau’s river friends at this season; and since we are talking of
dates, I note it as a coincidence that precisely forty-two years ago
(March 23, 1859), he entered in his journal that he saw “come slowly
flying from the southwest a great gull, of voracious form, which at
length, by a sudden and steep descent, alighted in Fair Haven Pond [a
wide place in the river], scaring up a crow which was seeking its food
on the edge of the ice.” Our bird, also, made one “sudden and steep
descent,” and picked from the ice some small, dark-colored object,
which at our distance might have been a dead leaf. But if Thoreau saw
ducks and gulls, he saw no March swallows. His earliest date for them,
so far as the printed journals show, seems to have been April 5.
The woods brought us nothing,--beyond a chickadee or two,--but we
were hardly out of them before we heard the blue jay scream of a
red-shouldered hawk, and presently saw first one bird and then another
(rusty shoulder and all) sailing above us. A grand sight it is, a
soaring and diving hawk. May it never become less frequent. I must
quote Thoreau once more, this time from memory, and for substance only.
I am with him, heart and soul, when he prays for more hawks, though at
the cost of fewer chickens. And I like the spirit of a friend of mine
who girdled a tall pine tree in his woods, that it might serve as a
perching station for such visitors.
As we approached the village again, we came upon two phœbes. Like the
white-breasted swallow, the phœbe winters in Florida, and is by a
long time the earliest member of its family to arrive in New England.
Red-winged blackbirds were numerous, of course, every one a male, and
in one place we passed a flock of crow blackbirds feeding on the ground.
Not the least interesting bird of the forenoon was a shrike, sitting
motionless and dumb in an apple tree. The shrike has all the
attractiveness of singularity. He is no lover of his kind, save as
the lion loves the lamb and the hawk the chicken. Lonesome? No, I
thank you. Except in breeding-time, he is sufficient unto himself.
Even when he happens to feel like conversation, he goes not in search
of company. He is like the amiable philosopher who was asked by some
busybody why he so often talked to himself. “Well,” said he, “for two
reasons: first, I like to talk to a sensible man, and secondly, I
like to hear a sensible man talk.” In the present instance the shrike
may very well have considered that there was little occasion for his
talking, either to himself or to anybody else, since a bunch of twenty
masculine redwings in some willow trees near by were chattering in
chorus until, to use a good Old Colony phrase, a man could hardly hear
himself think. Blackbird loquacity, each particular bird sputtering “to
beat the band,” is one of the wonders of the world.
WOODCOCK VESPERS
When I came to this town to live, in April, ten years ago, one of my
first concerns was to find a woodcock resort. The friend with whom I
commonly took a stroll at sundown had never heard the “evening hymn”
of that bird, and, knowing him for a lover of “the poetry of earth,” I
was eager to help him to a new pleasure. If the thing was to be done at
all, it must be done soon, as the bird’s musical season is brief. So we
walked and made inquiries.
A farmer, who knew the region well, told us that woodcock used to be
common about a certain swamp, but had not been so, he thought, of
recent years. We visited it, of course, but heard nothing. Then the
same man bethought himself of a likelier place, farther away. Thither,
also, we went, having to hasten our steps, for the bird must be caught
at precisely such a minute, between daylight and dark. Still we had
our labor for our pains. And so the season passed, with nothing done.
Then, a year or two afterward, walking one afternoon in a quiet back
road, I startled a woodcock from directly beside the track. “Well,
well,” said I, “here is the very place;” for I noticed not far off a
bit of alder swamp, with a wood behind it and an open field near by.
All the conditions were right, and on the first available evening, with
something like assurance, I made my way thither. Yes, the bird was
there, in the full ecstasy of his wonderful performance--for wonderful
it surely is.
My friend was not with me, however, and for one reason or another,
now past recall, another year went by without our being able to visit
the spot together at the necessary minute. Then a day came. He heard
the bird (well I remember the hour), was delighted beyond measure,
and that very evening, still under the spell of the “miracle,” put
his impressions of it on paper. The next day they were printed, and I
remember still my pleasure when the most competent of all men to speak
of such a matter sent me word that it was the best description of the
performance that he had ever seen. If any of my readers desire to see
it, it is to be found in a little volume of most delightful outdoor
essays entitled “The Listener in the Country.”