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Vocal music bulks large in our avian springtime chorus, but don't
overlook the instrumental music that accompanies it. The drumming of
the downy woodpecker on the dead limb of a maple near my bedroom window
is as much a part of my spring as is the cheery cheerup of our robin.
It's not that woodpeckers are voiceless that they drum. The flicker
can be called in with his particularly rich repertoire to repudiate it
vociferously. All day the downy woodpecker goes about pounding his head
against tree trunks, with his bill chiseling out wood-boring insects
to eat. What more natural when springtime comes and he wants to tell
the world, and especially other woodpeckers about it, to select a
dead limb with a nice tone in my maple tree and hammer out a rolling
tattoo--his love song and his challenge.
A DRUMMER The gray-brown ruffed grouse of a wood lot we used to have
in the Chicago area is a drummer I miss. "Thump-thump ..." he started
slowly, and then quickened to a roll that filled the forest with hollow
sound and you wondered whence it came, unless you happened to know, as
I did, that an old log in the patch of gray birch was the old cock's
favorite performing stand. There he came to roll out his invitation to
the demure hen grouse. A drummer, I've called him, yet he has no drum.
It's his wings, striking the air, that thump and build up into a roll,
its volume testifying to his great breast muscles as well as does the
whir of wings as he hurtles away through the air when I come too close.
The snipe of a nearby marsh makes music with feathers and wind, music
that is more enthralling to me than the song of the yellowthroat or
the vocal imitation of stake driving by the bittern. Circling high,
then with a change of pace, his "winnowing" or "bleating" spring song
comes drifting down. There is still room for argument, but probably
it's air rushing past the outer tail feathers that makes the sound. One
year a short-eared owl nested in the nearby meadow. Owls generally are
vocalists, even if we don't rate very high their hoots or yelps, but
the short-eared owl also has an instrumental performance. Sometimes,
when giving his mating song on the wing, a series of "toots," he
interrupted this by a dive in which he brought his wings together under
his body, with a clapping sound. It's part of the performance, but
not, as might be said, the owl applauding his own show.
Over our public school each evening in early summer a nighthawk booms.
He has a voice, and he uses it, calling "beep" as he circles high. But
the climax of his performance is instrumental, wind on feathers. He
heads down, wings high, toward the flat gravel roof on which his mate
is sitting. As he approaches the roof he moves his wings down; the air
rushing past the quills gives a tearing boom as he comes out of the
dive and mounts skyward again.
At dusk, at a damp corner of our old wood lot, in the spring, I
listened for the woodcock's flight song, a twittering of wing music as
he circles up, and sweet music, too, for a wild fowler's ears, is the
whistling of the wings of a passing pair of black ducks on their way in
the early darkness.