People who have not made friends with the birds do not know how much
they miss. Especially to one living in the country, of strong local
attachments and an observing turn of mind, does an acquaintance with
the birds form a close and invaluable tie. The only time I saw Thomas
Carlyle, I remember his relating, apropos of this subject, that in his
earlier days he was sent on a journey to a distant town on some business
that gave him much bother and vexation, and that on his way back home,
forlorn and dejected, he suddenly heard the larks singing all about
him,--soaring and singing, just as they did about his father's fields,
and it comforted him and cheered him up amazingly.
Most lovers of the birds can doubtless recall similar experiences from
their own lives. Nothing wonts me to a new place more than the birds. I
go, for instance, to take up my abode in the country,--to plant myself
upon unfamiliar ground. I know nobody, and nobody knows me. The roads,
the fields, the hills, the streams, the woods, are all strange. I look
wistfully upon them, but they know me not. They give back nothing to
my yearning gaze. But there, on every hand, are the long-familiar
birds,--the same ones I left behind me, the same ones I knew in my
youth,--robins, sparrows, swallows, bobolinks, crows, hawks, high-holes,
meadowlarks, all there before me, and ready to renew and perpetuate the
old associations. Before my house is begun, theirs is completed; before
I have taken root at all, they are thoroughly established. I do not yet
know what kind of apples my apple-trees bear, but there, in the cavity
of a decayed limb, the bluebirds are building a nest, and yonder, on
that branch, the social sparrow is busy with hairs and straws. The
robins have tasted the quality of my cherries, and the cedar-birds have
known every red cedar on the place these many years. While my house
is yet surrounded by its scaffoldings, the phoebe-bird has built her
exquisite mossy nest on a projecting stone beneath the eaves, a robin
has filled a niche in the wall with mud and dry grass, the chimney
swallows are going out and in the chimney, and a pair of house wrens are
at home in a snug cavity over the door, and, during an April snowstorm,
a number of hermit thrushes have taken shelter in my unfinished
chambers. Indeed, I am in the midst of friends before I fairly know it.
The place is not so new as I had thought. It is already old; the birds
have supplied the memories of many decades of years.
There is something almost pathetic in the fact that the birds remain
forever the same. You grow old, your friends die or move to distant
lands, events sweep on, and all things are changed. Yet there in your
garden or orchard are the birds of your boyhood, the same notes, the
same calls, and, to all intents and purposes, the identical birds
endowed with perennial youth. The swallows, that built so far out of
your reach beneath the eaves of your father's barn, the same ones now
squeak and chatter beneath the eaves of your barn. The warblers and
shy wood-birds you pursued with such glee ever so many summers ago, and
whose names you taught to some beloved youth who now, perchance, sleeps
amid his native hills, no marks of time or change cling to them; and
when you walk out to the strange woods, there they are, mocking you with
their ever-renewed and joyous youth. The call of the high-holes, the
whistle of the quail, the strong piercing note of the meadowlark, the
drumming of the grouse,--how these sounds ignore the years, and strike
on the ear with the melody of that springtime when the world was young,
and life was all holiday and romance!
During any unusual tension of the feelings or emotions, how the note or
song of a single bird will sink into the memory, and become inseparably
associated with your grief or joy! Shall I ever again be able to hear
the song of the oriole without being pierced through and through? Can it
ever be other than a dirge for the dead to me? Day after day, and week
after week, this bird whistled and warbled in a mulberry by the door,
while sorrow, like a pall, darkened my day. So loud and persistent was
the singer that his note teased and worried my excited ear.
"Hearken to yon pine warbler,
Singing aloft in the tree!
Hearest thou, O traveler!
What he singeth to me?
"Not unless God made sharp thine ear
With sorrow such as mine,
Out of that delicate lay couldst thou
Its heavy tale divine."
It is the opinion of some naturalists that birds never die what is
called a natural death, but come to their end by some murderous or
accidental means; yet I have found sparrows and vireos in the fields and
woods dead or dying, that bore no marks of violence; and I remember that
once in my childhood a redbird fell down in the yard exhausted, and was
brought in by the girl; its bright scarlet image is indelibly stamped
upon my recollection. It is not known that birds have any distempers
like the domestic fowls, but I saw a social sparrow one day quite
disabled by some curious malady that suggested a disease that sometimes
attacks poultry; one eye was nearly put out by a scrofulous-looking
sore, and on the last joint of one wing there was a large tumorous or
fungous growth that crippled the bird completely. On another occasion
I picked up one that appeared well, but could not keep its centre of
gravity when in flight, and so fell to the ground.
One reason why dead birds and animals are so rarely found is, that on
the approach of death their instinct prompts them to creep away in some
hole or under some cover, where they will be least liable to fall a prey
to their natural enemies. It is doubtful if any of the game-birds, like
the pigeon and grouse, ever die of old age, or the semi-game-birds, like
the bobolink, or the "century living" crow; but in what other form can
death overtake the hummingbird, or even the swift and the barn swallow?
Such are true birds of the air; they may be occasionally lost at sea
during their migrations, but, so far as I know, they are not preyed upon
by any other species.
The valley of the Hudson, I find, forms a great natural highway for the
birds, as do doubtless the Connecticut, the Susquehanna, the Delaware,
and all other large water-courses running north and south. The birds
love an easy way, and in the valleys of the rivers they find a road
already graded for them; and they abound more in such places throughout
the season than they do farther inland. The swarms of robins that come
to us in early spring are a delight to behold. In one of his poems
Emerson speaks of
"April's bird,
Blue-coated, flying before from tree to tree;"
but April's bird with me is the robin, brisk, vociferous, musical,
dotting every field, and larking it in every grove; he is as easily atop
at this season as the bobolink is a month or two later. The tints of
April are ruddy and brown,--the new furrow and the leafless trees,--and
these are the tints of its dominant bird.
From my dining-room window I look, or did look, out upon a long stretch
of smooth meadow, and as pretty a spring sight as I ever wish to behold
was this field, sprinkled all over with robins, their red breasts turned
toward the morning sun, or their pert forms sharply outlined against
lingering patches of snow. Every morning for weeks I had those robins
for breakfast; but what they had I never could find out.
After the leaves are out, and gayer colors come into fashion, the robin
takes a back seat. He goes to housekeeping in the old apple-tree, or,
what he likes better, the cherry-tree. A pair reared their domestic
altar (of mud and dry grass) in one of the latter trees, where I saw
much of them. The cock took it upon himself to keep the tree free of all
other robins during cherry time, and its branches were the scene of
some lively tussles every hour in the day. The innocent visitor would
scarcely alight before the jealous cock was upon him; but while he was
thrusting the intruder out at one side, a second would be coming in on
the other. He managed, however, to protect his cherries very well, but
had so little time to eat the fruit himself that we got fully our share.
I have frequently seen the robin courting, and have always been
astonished and amused at the utter coldness and indifference of the
female. The females of every species of bird, however, I believe, have
this in common,--they are absolutely free from coquetry, or any airs and
wiles whatever. In most cases, Nature has given the song and the plumage
to the other sex, and all the embellishing and acting is done by the
male bird.
I am always at home when I see the passenger pigeon. Few spectacles
please me more than to see clouds of these birds sweeping across the
sky, and few sounds are more agreeable to my ear than their lively
piping and calling in the spring woods. They come in such multitudes,
they people the whole air; they cover townships, and make the solitary
places gay as with a festival. The naked woods are suddenly blue as with
fluttering ribbons and scarfs, and vocal as with the voices of children.
Their arrival is always unexpected. We know April will bring the robins
and May the bobolinks, but we do not know that either they or any
other month will bring the passenger pigeon. Sometimes years elapse and
scarcely a flock is seen. Then, of a sudden, some March or April they
come pouring over the horizon from the south or southwest, and for a few
days the land is alive with them.
The whole race seems to be collected in a few vast swarms or
assemblages. Indeed, I have sometimes thought there was only one such
in the United States, and that it moved in squads, and regiments, and
brigades, and divisions, like a giant army. The scouting and foraging
squads are not unusual, and every few years we see larger bodies of
them, but rarely indeed do we witness the spectacle of the whole vast
tribe in motion. Sometimes we hear of them in Virginia, or Kentucky
and Tennessee; then in Ohio or Pennsylvania; then in New York; then in
Canada or Michigan or Missouri. They are followed from point to point,
and from State to State, by human sharks, who catch and shoot them for
market.
A year ago last April, the pigeons flew for two or three days up and
down the Hudson. In long bowing lines, or else in dense masses, they
moved across the sky. It was not the whole army, but I should think at
least one corps of it; I had not seen such a flight of pigeons since
my boyhood. I went up to the top of the house, the better to behold the
winged procession. The day seemed memorable and poetic in which such
sights occurred.
[Footnote: This proved to be the last flight of the pigeons
in the valley of the Hudson. The whole tribe has now (1895)
been nearly exterminated by pot-hunters. The few that still
remain appear to be scattered through the Northern States
in small, loose flocks.]
While I was looking at the pigeons, a flock of wild geese went by,
harrowing the sky northward. The geese strike a deeper chord than the
pigeons. Level and straight they go as fate to its mark. I cannot tell
what emotions these migrating birds awaken in me,--the geese especially.
One seldom sees more than a flock or two in a season, and what a spring
token it is! The great bodies are in motion. It is like the passage of
a victorious army. No longer inch by inch does spring come, but these
geese advance the standard across zones at one pull. How my desire goes
with them; how something in me, wild and migratory, plumes itself and
follows fast!
"Steering north, with raucous cry,
Through tracts and provinces of sky,
Every night alighting down
In new landscapes of romance,
Where darkling feed the clamorous clans
By lonely lakes to men unknown."
Dwelling upon these sights, I am reminded that the seeing of spring
come, not only upon the great wings of the geese and the lesser wings
of the pigeons and birds, but in the many more subtle and indirect
signs and mediums, is also a part of the compensation of living in
the country. I enjoy not less what may be called the negative side of
spring,--those dark, dank, dissolving days,
yellow sposh and mud and water everywhere,--yet who can stay long
indoors? The humidity is soft and satisfying to the smell, and to the
face and hands, and, for the first time for months, there is the fresh
odor of the earth. The air is full of the notes and calls of the first
birds. The domestic fowls refuse their accustomed food and wander far
from the barn. Is it something winter has left, or spring has dropped,
that they pick up? And what is it that holds me so long standing in the
yard or in the fields? Something besides the ice and snow melts and runs
away with the spring floods.
The little sparrows and purple finches are so punctual in announcing
spring, that some seasons one wonders how they know without looking in
the almanac, for surely there are no signs of spring out of doors. Yet
they will strike up as cheerily amid the driving snow as if they had
just been told that to-morrow is the first day of March. About the same
time I notice the potatoes in the cellar show signs of sprouting.
They, too, find out so quickly when spring is near. Spring comes by two
routes,--in the air and underground, and often gets here by the latter
course first. She undermines Winter when outwardly his front is nearly
as bold as ever. I have known the trees to bud long before, by outward
appearances, one would expect them to. The frost was gone from the
ground before the snow was gone from the surface.
But Winter hath his birds also; some of them such tiny bodies that one
wonders how they withstand the giant cold,--but they do. Birds live on
highly concentrated food,--the fine seeds of weeds and grasses, and
the eggs and larvae of insects. Such food must be very stimulating and
heating. A gizzard full of ants, for instance, what spiced and seasoned
extract is equal to that? Think what virtue there must be in an ounce
of gnats or mosquitoes, or in the fine mysterious food the chickadee and
the brown creeper gather in the winter woods! It is doubtful if these
birds ever freeze when fuel enough can be had to keep their little
furnaces going. And, as they get their food entirely from the limbs and
trunks of trees, like the woodpeckers, their supply is seldom interfered
with by the snow. The worst annoyance must be the enameling of ice our
winter woods sometimes get.
Indeed, the food question seems to be the only serious one with the
birds. Give them plenty to eat, and no doubt the majority of them would
face our winters. I believe all the woodpeckers are winter birds, except
the high-hole or yellow-hammer, and he obtains the greater part of
his subsistence from the ground, and is not a woodpecker at all in his
habits of feeding. Were it not that it has recourse to budding, the
ruffed grouse would be obliged to migrate. The quail--a bird, no doubt,
equally hardy, but whose food is at the mercy of the snow--is frequently
cut off by our severe winters when it ventures to brave them, which is
not often. Where plenty of the berries of the red cedar can be had, the
cedar-bird will pass the winter in New York. The old ornithologists say
the bluebird migrates to Bermuda; but in the winter of 1874-75, severe
as it was, a pair of them wintered with me eighty miles north of
New York city. They seem to have been decided in their choice by the
attractions of my rustic porch and the fruit of a sugar-berry tree
(celtis--a kind of tree-lotus) that stood in front of it. They lodged in
the porch and took their meals in the tree. Indeed, they became regular
lotus-eaters. Punctually at dusk they were in their places on a
large laurel root in the top of the porch, whence, however, they were
frequently routed by an indignant broom that was jealous of the neatness
of the porch floor. But the pair would not take any hints of this kind,
and did not give up their quarters in the porch or their lotus berries
till spring.
Many times during the winter the sugar-berry tree was visited by a flock
of cedar-birds that also wintered in the vicinity. At such times it
was amusing to witness the pretty wrath of the bluebirds, scolding and
threatening the intruders, and begrudging them every berry they ate. The
bluebird cannot utter a harsh or unpleasing note. Indeed, he seems
to have but one language, one speech, for both love and war, and the
expression of his indignation is nearly as musical as his song. The male
frequently made hostile demonstrations toward the cedar-birds, but did
not openly attack them, and, with his mate, appeared to experience great
relief when the poachers had gone.
I had other company in my solitude also, among the rest a distinguished
arrival from the far north, the pine grosbeak, a bird rarely seen in
these parts, except now and then a single specimen. But in the winter of
1875, heralding the extreme cold weather, and no doubt in consequence of
it, there was a large incursion of them into this State and New England.
They attracted the notice of the country people everywhere. I first saw
them early in December about the head of the Delaware. I was walking
along a cleared ridge with my gun, just at sundown, when I beheld two
strange birds sitting in a small maple. On bringing one of them down, I
found it was a bird I had never before seen; in color and shape like the
purple finch, but quite as large again in size. From its heavy beak,
I at once recognized it as belonging to the family of grosbeaks. A few
days later I saw large numbers of them in the woods, on the ground,
and in the trees. And still later, and on till February, they were very
numerous on the Hudson, coming all about my house,--more familiar even
than the little snowbird, hopping beneath the windows, and looking up
at me apparently with as much curiosity as I looked down upon them.
They fed on the buds of the sugar maples and upon frozen apples in the
orchard. They were mostly young birds and females, colored very
much like the common sparrow, with now and then visible the dull
carmine-colored head and neck of an old male.
Other northern visitors that tarried with me the same winter were the
tree or Canada sparrow and the redpoll, the former a bird larger than
the social sparrow or hair-bird, but otherwise much resembling it, and
distinguishable by a dark spot in the middle of its breast; the latter a
bird the size and shape of the common goldfinch, with the same manner
of flight and nearly the same note or cry, but darker than the winter
plumage of the goldfinch, and with a red crown and a tinge of red on the
breast. Little bands of these two species lurked about the barnyard all
winter, picking up the hayseed, the sparrow sometimes venturing in on
the haymow when the supply outside was short. I felt grateful to them
for their company. They gave a sort of ornithological air to every
errand I had to the barn.
Though a number of birds face our winters, and by various shifts worry
through till spring, some of them permanent residents, and some of them
visitors from the far north, yet there is but one genuine snow bird,
nursling of the snow, and that is the snow bunting, a bird that seems
proper to this season, heralding the coming storm, sweeping by on bold
and rapid wing, and calling and chirping as cheerily as the songsters
of May. In its plumage it reflects the winter landscape,--an expanse of
white surmounted or streaked with gray and brown; a field of snow with
a line of woods or a tinge of stubble. It fits into the scene, and does
not appear to lead a beggarly and disconsolate life, like most of our
winter residents. During the ice-harvesting on the river, I see them
flitting about among the gangs of men, or floating on the cakes of ice,
picking and scratching amid the droppings of the horses. They love the
stack and hay-barn in the distant field, where the farmer fodders his
cattle upon the snow, and every red-root, ragweed, or pigweed left
standing in the fall adds to their winter stores.
Though this bird, and one or two others, like the chickadee and
nuthatch, are more or less complacent and cheerful during the winter,
yet no bird can look our winters in the face and sing, as do so many of
the English birds. Several species in Great Britain, their biographers
tell us, sing the winter through, except during the severest frosts; but
with us, as far south as Virginia, and, for aught I know, much farther,
the birds are tuneless at this season. The owls, even, do not hoot, nor
the hawks scream.
Among the birds that tarry briefly with us in the spring on their way to
Canada and beyond, there is none I behold with so much pleasure as the
white-crowned sparrow. I have an eye out for him all through April
and the first week in May. He is the rarest and most beautiful of the
sparrow kind. He is crowned, as some hero or victor in the games. He is
usually in company with his congener, the white-throated sparrow, but
seldom more than in the proportion of one to twenty of the latter.
Contrasted with this bird, he looks like its more fortunate brother,
upon whom some special distinction has been conferred, and who is, from
the egg, of finer make and quality. His sparrow color of ashen gray
and brown is very clear and bright, and his form graceful. His whole
expression, however, culminates in a singular manner in his crown. The
various tints of the bird are brought to a focus here and intensified,
the lighter ones becoming white, and the deeper ones nearly black.
There is the suggestion of a crest, also, from a habit the bird has
of slightly elevating this part of its plumage, as if to make more
conspicuous its pretty markings. They are great scratchers, and will
often remain several minutes scratching in one place, like a hen. Yet,
unlike the hen and like all hoppers, they scratch with both feet at
once, which is by no means the best way to scratch.
The white-throats often sing during their sojourning both in fall and
spring; but only on one occasion have I ever heard any part of the song
of the white-crowned, and that proceeded from what I took to be a young
male, one October morning, just as the sun was rising. It was pitched
very low, like a half-forgotten air, but it was very sweet. It was the
song of the vesper sparrow and the white-throat in one. In his breeding
haunts he must be a superior songster, but he is very chary of his music
while on his travels.
The sparrows are all meek and lowly birds. They are of the grass, the
fences, the low bushes, the weedy wayside places. Nature has denied them
all brilliant tints, but she has given them sweet and musical voices.
Theirs are the quaint and simple lullaby songs of childhood. The
white-throat has a timid, tremulous strain, that issues from the low
bushes or from behind the fence, where its cradle is hid. The song
sparrow modulates its simple ditty as softly as the lining of its own
nest. The vesper sparrow has only peace and gentleness in its strain.
What pretty nests, too, the sparrows build! Can anything be more
exquisite than a sparrow's nest under a grassy or mossy bank? What care
the bird has taken not to disturb one straw or spear of grass, or
thread of moss! You cannot approach it and put your hand into it without
violating the place more or less, and yet the little architect has
wrought day after day and left no marks. There has been an excavation,
and yet no grain of earth appears to have been moved. If the nest had
slowly and silently grown like the grass and the moss, it could not
have been more nicely adjusted to its place and surroundings. There is
absolutely nothing to tell the eye it is there. Generally a few spears
of dry grass fall down from the turf above and form a slight screen
before it. How commonly and coarsely it begins, blending with the debris
that lies about, and how it refines and comes into form as it approaches
the centre, which is modeled so perfectly and lined so softly! Then,
when the full complement of eggs is laid, and incubation has fairly
begun, what a sweet, pleasing little mystery the silent old bank holds!
The song sparrow, whose nest I have been describing, displays a
more marked individuality in its song than any bird with which I am
acquainted. Birds of the same species generally all sing alike, but I
have observed numerous song sparrows with songs peculiarly their own.
Last season, the whole summer through, one sang about my grounds like
this: _swee-e-t, swee-e-t, swee-e-t, bitter._ Day after day, from May
to September, I heard this strain, which I thought a simple but very
profound summing-up of life, and wondered how the little bird had
learned it so quickly. The present season, I heard another with a song
equally original, but not so easily worded. Among a large troop of
them in April, my attention was attracted to one that was a master
songster,--some Shelley or Tennyson among his kind. The strain was
remarkably prolonged, intricate, and animated, and far surpassed
anything I ever before heard from that source.
But the most noticeable instance of departure from the standard song
of a species I ever knew of was in the case of a wood thrush. The bird
sang, as did the sparrow, the whole season through, at the foot of my
lot near the river. The song began correctly and ended correctly; but
interjected into it about midway was a loud, piercing, artificial note,
at utter variance with the rest of the strain. When my ear first caught
this singular note, I started out, not a little puzzled, to make, as
I supposed, a new acquaintance, but had not gone far when I discovered
whence it proceeded. Brass amid gold, or pebbles amid pearls, are
not more out of place than was this discordant scream or cry in the
melodious strain of the wood thrush. It pained and startled the ear. It
seemed as if the instrument of the bird was not under control, or else
that one note was sadly out of tune, and, when its turn came, instead of
giving forth one of those sounds that are indeed like pearls, it shocked
the ear with a piercing discord. Yet the singer appeared entirely
unconscious of the defect; or had he grown used to it, or had his
friends persuaded him that it was a variation to be coveted? Sometimes,
after the brood had hatched and the bird's pride was at its full, he
would make a little triumphal tour of the locality, coming from under
the hill quite up to the house, and flaunting his cracked instrument
in the face of whoever would listen. He did not return again the next
season; or, if he did, the malformation of his song was gone.
I have noticed that the bobolink does not sing the same in different
localities. In New Jersey it has one song; on the Hudson, a slight
variation of the same; and on the high grass-lands of the interior
of the State, quite a different strain,--clearer, more distinctly
articulated, and running off with more sparkle and liltingness. It
reminds one of the clearer mountain air and the translucent spring-water
of those localities. I never could make out what the bobolink says in
New Jersey, but in certain districts in this State his enunciation is
quite distinct. Sometimes he begins with the word _gegue, gegue._
Then again, more fully, _be true to me, Clarsy, be true to me, Clarsy,
Clarsy,_ thence full tilt into his inimitable song, interspersed in
which the words _kick your slipper, kick your slipper,_ and temperance,
temperance (the last with a peculiar nasal resonance), are plainly
heard. At its best, it is a remarkable performance, a unique
performance, as it contains not the slightest hint or suggestion, either
in tone or manner or effect, of any other bird-song to be heard. The
bobolink has no mate or parallel in any part of the world. He stands
alone. There is no closely allied species. He is not a lark, nor a
finch, nor a warbler, nor a thrush, nor a starling (though classed
with the starlings by late naturalists). He is an exception to many
well-known rules. He is the only ground-bird known to me of marked and
conspicuous plumage. He is the only black and white field-bird we
have east of the Mississippi, and, what is still more odd, he is black
beneath and white above,--the reverse of the fact in all other cases.
Preeminently a bird of the meadow during the breeding season, and
associated with clover and daisies and buttercups as no other bird is,
he yet has the look of an interloper or a newcomer, and not of one to
the manner born.
The bobolink has an unusually full throat, which may help account for
his great power of song. No bird has yet been found that could imitate
him, or even repeat or suggest a single note, as if his song were the
product of a new set of organs. There is a vibration about it, and a
rapid running over the keys, that is the despair of other songsters. It
is said that the mockingbird is dumb in the presence of the bobolink.
My neighbor has an English skylark that was hatched and reared in
captivity. The bird is a most persistent and vociferous songster, and
fully as successful a mimic as the mockingbird. It pours out a strain
that is a regular mosaic of nearly all the bird-notes to be heard, its
own proper lark song forming a kind of bordering for the whole. The
notes of the phoebe-bird, the purple finch, the swallow, the yellowbird,
the kingbird, the robin, and others, are rendered with perfect
distinctness and accuracy, but not a word of the bobolink's, though the
lark must have heard its song every day for four successive summers. It
was the one conspicuous note in the fields around that the lark made no
attempt to plagiarize. He could not steal the bobolink's thunder.
The lark is a more marvelous songster than the bobolink only on account
of his soaring flight and the sustained copiousness of his song. His
note is rasping and harsh, in point of melody, when compared with the
bobolink's. When caged and near at hand, the lark's song is positively
disagreeable, it is so loud and full of sharp, aspirated sounds. But
high in air above the broad downs, poured out without interruption for
many minutes together, it is very agreeable.
The bird among us that is usually called a lark, namely, the meadowlark,
but which our later classifiers say is no lark at all, has nearly the
same quality of voice as the English skylark,--loud, piercing, z-z-ing;
and during the mating season it frequently indulges while on the wing in
a brief song that is quite lark-like. It is also a bird of the stubble,
and one of the last to retreat on the approach of winter.
The habits of many of our birds are slowly undergoing a change. Their
migrations are less marked. With the settlement and cultivation of the
country, the means of subsistence of nearly every species are vastly
increased. Insects are more numerous, and seeds of weeds and grasses
more abundant. They become more and more domestic, like the English
birds. The swallows have nearly all left their original abodes--hollow
trees, and cliffs, and rocks--for human habitations and their
environments. Where did the barn swallow nest before the country was
settled? The chimney swallow nested in hollow trees, and, perhaps,
occasionally resorts thither yet. But the chimney, notwithstanding the
smoke, seems to suit his taste best. In the spring, before they have
paired, I think these swallows sometimes pass the night in the woods,
but not if an old, disused chimney is handy.
One evening in early May, my attention was arrested by a band of them
containing several hundreds, perhaps a thousand, circling about near a
large, tall, disused chimney in a secluded place in the country. They
were very lively, and chippering, and diving in a most extraordinary
manner. They formed a broad continuous circle many rods in diameter.
Gradually the circle contracted and neared the chimney. Presently
some of the birds as they came round began to dive toward it, and the
chippering was more animated than ever. Then a few ventured in; in a
moment more, the air at the mouth of the chimney was black with the
stream of descending swallows. When the passage began to get crowded,
the circle lifted and the rest of the birds continued their flight,
giving those inside time to dispose of themselves. Then the influx began
again, and was kept up till the crowd became too great, when it cleared
as before. Thus by installments, or in layers, the swallows were packed
into the chimney until the last one was stowed away. Passing by the
place a few days afterward, I saw a board reaching from the roof of the
building to the top of the chimney, and imagined some curious person or
some predaceous boy had been up to take a peep inside, and see how so
many swallows could dispose of themselves in such a space. It would have
been an interesting spectacle to see them emerge from the chimney in the
morning.