Part 5

My second nest of this species was within twenty rods of the first, and was in use at the same time; but it met with no better fate, though I was not present to see it robbed. The third was more prosperous, and, unless something befell the young at the last moment, they were safely launched upon the wing. This nest was situated in a clump of witch-hazel bushes, at a height of eight or nine feet. I remarked a grosbeak singing near the spot, and, seeing him very unwilling to move away, concluded that his home could not be far off. It was soon found,--a slight, shapeless, frail-looking bundle of sticks, with the female upon it. I took hold of the main stem, just below her, and drew her towards me; but she would not rise, although I could see her moving uneasily. I had no heart to annoy her; so I called her a good, brave bird, and left her in peace. Her mate, all this while, kept on singing; and to judge from his behavior, I might have been some honored guest, to be welcomed with music. The simple-hearted--not to say simple-minded--fearlessness of this bird is really astonishing; especially in view of the fact that his showy plumage makes him a favorite mark for every amateur taxidermist. He will even warble while brooding upon the eggs, a delicious piece of absurdity, which I hope sooner or later to witness for myself.

While watching my first couple of grosbeaks I suddenly became aware of a wood thrush passing back and forth between the edge of a brook and a certain oak, against the hole of which she was making ready her summer residence. She seemed to be quite unattended; but just as I was beginning to contrast her case with that of the feminine grosbeak overhead, her mate broke into song from a low branch directly behind me. _She_ had all the while known where he was, I dare say, and would have been greatly amused at my commiseration of her loneliness. The next morning she was compelled to make longer flights for such stuff as she needed; and now it was pleasant to observe that her lord did not fail to accompany her to and fro, and to sing to her while she worked.

The wood thrush has the name of a recluse, and, as compared with the omnipresent robin, he may deserve the title; but he is seldom very difficult of approach, if one only knows how to go about it, while his nest is peculiarly easy of detection. I remember one which was close by an unfenced road, just outside the city of Washington; and two or three years ago I found another in a barberry bush, not more than fifteen feet from a horse-car track, and so near the fence as to be almost within arm's-length of passers-by. This latter was in full view from the street, and withal was so feebly supported that some kind-hearted neighbor had taken pains to tie up the bush (which stood by itself) with a piece of dangerously new-looking rope. And even as I write I recall still a third, which also was close by the roadside, though at the very exceptional elevation of twenty-five or thirty feet.

It is one of the capital advantages of the ornithologist's condition that he is rarely called upon to spend his time and strength for naught. If he fails of the particular object of his search, he is all but sure to be rewarded with something else. For example, while I was unsuccessfully playing the spy upon a pair of my solitary vireos, a female tanager suddenly dropped into her half-built nest in a low pine-branch, at the same time calling softly to her mate, who at once came to sit beside her. Unfortunately, one of the pair very soon caught sight of me, and they made off in haste. I lingered about, till finally the lady appeared again, with her beak full of sticks, standing out at all points of the compass. She was so jealous of my espionage, however, that it looked as if she would never be rid of her load. No sooner did she alight in the tree than she began to crane her neck, staring this way and that, and _chipping_ nervously; then she shifted her perch; then out of the tree she went altogether; then back again; then off once more; then back within a yard of the nest; then away again, till at last my patience gave out, and I left her mistress of the field. All this while the male was in sight, flitting restlessly from tree to tree at a safe distance. I have never witnessed a prettier display of connubial felicity than this pair afforded me during the minute or two which elapsed between my discovery of them and their discovery of me. I felt almost guilty for intruding upon such a scene; but, if they could only have believed it, I intended no harm, nor have I now any thought of profaning their innocent mysteries by attempting to describe what I saw.

The male tanager, with his glory of jet black and flaming scarlet, is in curious contrast with his mate, with whose personal appearance, nevertheless, he seems to be abundantly satisfied. Possibly he looks upon a dirty greenish-yellow as the loveliest of tints, and regards his own dress as nothing better than commonplace, in comparison. Like the rose-breasted grosbeak and the wood thrush, however, he is brought up with the notion that it belongs to the female to be the carpenter of the family; a belief in which, happily for his domestic peace, the female herself fully concurs.

As a general thing, handsomely dressed people live in handsome houses (emphasis should perhaps be laid on the word _dressed_), and it would seem natural that a like congruity should hold in the case of birds.

But, if such be the rule, there are at least some glaring exceptions. I have alluded to the rude structure of the rose-breast, and might have used nearly the same language concerning the tanager's, which latter is often fabricated so loosely that one can see the sky through it. Yet these two are among the most gorgeously attired of all our birds. On the other hand, while the wood pewee is one of the very plainest, there are few, if any, that excel her as an architect. During the season under review I had the good fortune to light upon my first nest of this fly-catcher; and, as is apt to be true, having found one, I immediately and without effort found two others. The first two were in oaks, the third in a hornbeam; and all were set upon the upper side of a horizontal bough ("saddled" upon it, as the manuals say), at the junction of an offshoot with the main branch. Two of them were but partially done when discovered, and I was glad to see one pair of the birds in something very like a frolic, such a state as would hardly be predicted of these peculiarly sober-seeming creatures. The builder of the second nest was remarkably confiding, and proceeded with her labors, quite undisturbed by my proximity and undisguised interest. It was to be remarked that she had trimmed the outside of her nest with lichens before finishing the interior; and I especially admired the very clever manner in which she hovered against the dead pine-trunk, from which she was gathering strips of bark. Concerning her unsuspiciousness, however, it should be said that the word applies only to her treatment of myself. When a thrasher had the impertinence to alight in her oak she ordered him off in high dudgeon, dashing back and forth above him, and snapping spitefully as she passed. She knew her rights, and, knowing, dared maintain. When a bird builds her nest in any part of a tree she claims every twig of it as her own. I have even seen the gentle-hearted chickadee resent the intrusion of a chipping sparrow, though it appeared impossible that the latter could be suspected of any predatory or sinister design.

The shallowness of the wood pewee's saucer-shaped nest, its position upon the branch, and especially its external dress of lichens, all conspire to render it inconspicuous. It is an interesting question whether the owner herself appreciates this, or has merely inherited the fashion, without thought of the reasons for it. The latter supposition, I reluctantly confess, looks to me the more probable. It must often be true of other animals, as it is of men, that they build better than they know. Their wisdom is not their own, but belongs to a power back of them,--a power which works, if you will, in accordance with what we designate as the law of natural selection, and which, so to speak, enlightens the race rather than the individual.

After all, it is the ground birds that puzzle the human oölogist. Crossing a brook, I saw what I regarded as almost infallible signs that a pair of Maryland yellow-throats had begun to build beside it. Unless I was entirely at fault, the nest must be within a certain two or three square yards, and I devoted half an hour, more or less, to ransacking the grass and bushes, till I thought every inch of the ground had been gone over; but all to no purpose. Continuing my walk, I noticed after a while that the male warbler was accompanying me up the hillside, apparently determined to see me safely out of the way. Coming to the same brook again the next morning, I halted for another search; and lo! all in a moment my eye fell upon the coveted nest, not on the ground, but perhaps eight inches from it, in a little clump of young golden-rods, which would soon overgrow it completely. The female proprietor was present, and manifested so much concern that I would not tarry, but made rather as if I had seen nothing, and passed on. It was some time before I observed that she was keeping along beside me, precisely as her mate had done the day before. The innocent creatures, sorely pestered as they were, could hardly be blamed for such precautions; yet it is not pleasant to be "shadowed" as a suspicious character, even by Maryland yellow-throats.

This was my first nest of a very common warbler, and I felt particularly solicitous for its safety; but alas! no sooner was the first egg laid than something or somebody carried it off, and the afflicted couple deserted the house on which they had expended so much labor and anxiety.

Not far beyond the yellow-throats' brook, and almost directly under one of the pewees' oaks, was a nest which pretty certainly had belonged to a pair of chewinks, but which was already forsaken when I found it, though I had then no inkling of the fact. It contained four eggs, and everything was in perfect order. The mother had gone away, and had never come back; having fallen a victim, probably, to some collector, human or inhuman. The tragedy was peculiar; and the tragical effect of it was heightened as day after day, for nearly a fortnight at least (I cannot say for how much longer), the beautiful eggs lay there entirely uncovered, and yet no skunk, squirrel, or other devourer of such dainties happened to spy them. It seemed doubly sad that so many precious nests should be robbed, while this set of worthless eggs was left to spoil.

I have already mentioned the housekeeping of a couple of chickadees in a low birch stump. Theirs was one of three titmouse nests just then claiming my attention. I visited it frequently, from the time when the pair were hard at work making the cavity up to the time when the brood were nearly ready to shift for themselves. Both birds took their share of the digging, and on several occasions I saw one feeding the other. After the eggs were deposited, the mother (or the sitter) displayed admirable courage, refusing again and again to quit her post when I peered in upon her, and even when with my cane I rapped smartly upon the stump. If I put my fingers into the hole, however, she followed them out in hot haste. Even when most seriously disturbed by my attentions the pair made use of no other notes than the common _chickadee, dee_, but these they sometimes delivered in an unnaturally sharp, fault-finding tone.

My two other titmouse nests were both in apple-trees, and one of them was in my own door-yard, though beyond convenient reach without the help of a ladder. The owners of this last were interesting for a very decided change in their behavior after the young were hatched, and especially as the time for the little ones' exodus drew near. At first, notwithstanding their door opened right upon the street, as it were, within a rod or two of passing horse-cars, the father and mother went in and out without the least apparent concern as to who might be watching them; but when they came to be feeding their hungry offspring, it was almost laughable to witness the little craftinesses to which they resorted. They would perch on one of the outer branches, call _chickadee, dee_, fly a little nearer, then likely enough go further off, till finally, after a variety of such "false motions," into the hole they would duck, as if nobody for the world must be allowed to know where they had gone. It was really wonderful how expert they grew at entering quickly. I pondered a good deal over their continual calling on such occasions. It seemed foolish and inconsistent; half the time I should have failed to notice their approach, had they only kept still. Toward the end, however, when the chicks inside the trunk could be heard articulating _chickadee, dee_ with perfect distinctness, it occurred to me that possibly all this persistent repetition of the phrase by the old birds had been only or mainly in the way of tuition. At all events, the youngsters had this part of the chickadese vocabulary right at their tongues' end, as we say, before making their _début_ in the great world.

But it was reserved for my third pair of tits to give me a genuine surprise. I had been so constant a visitor at their house that I had come to feel myself quite on terms of intimacy with them. So, after their brood was hatched, I one day climbed into the tree (as I had done more than once before), the better to overlook their parental labors. I had hardly placed myself in a comfortable seat before the couple returned from one of their foraging expeditions. The male--or the one that I took for such--had a black morsel of some kind in his bill, which, on reaching the tree, he passed over to his mate, who forthwith carried it into the hollow stub, in the depths of which the hungry little ones were. Then the male flew off again, and presently came back with another beakful, which his helpmeet took from him at the door, where she had been awaiting his arrival. After this performance had been repeated two or three times, curiosity led me to stand up against the stub, with my hand resting upon it; at which the female (who was just inside the mouth of the cavity) slipped out, and set up an anxious _chickadee, dee, dee_. When her mate appeared,--which he did almost immediately,--he flew into what looked like a downright paroxysm of rage, not against me, but against the mother bird, shaking his wings and scolding violently. I came to the unhappy lady's relief as best I could by dropping to the ground, and within a few minutes the pair again approached the stub in company; but when the female made a motion to take the food from her husband's bill, as before, he pounced upon her spitefully, drove her away, and dived into the hole himself. Apparently he had not yet forgiven what he accounted her pusillanimous desertion of her charge. All in all, the scene was a revelation to me, a chickadee family quarrel being something the like of which I had never dreamed of. Perhaps no titmouse ever before had so timorous a wife. But however that might be, I sincerely hoped that they would not be long in making up their difference. I had enjoyed the sight of their loving intercourse for so many weeks that I should have been sorry indeed to believe that it could end in strife. Nor could I regard it as so unpardonable a weakness for a bird to move off, even from her young, when a man put his fingers within a few inches of her. Possibly she ought to have known that I meant no mischief. Possibly, too, her doughty lord would have behaved more commendably in the same circumstances; but of that I am by no means certain. To borrow a theological term, my conception of bird nature is decidedly anthropomorphic, and I incline to believe that chickadees as well as men find it easier to blame others than to do better themselves.

Here these reminiscences must come to an end, though the greater part of my season's experiences are still untouched. First, however, let me relieve my conscience by putting on record the bravery of a black-billed cuckoo, whom I was obliged fairly to drive from her post of duty. Her nest was a sorry enough spectacle,--a flat, unwalled platform, carpeted with willow catkins and littered with egg-shells, in the midst of which latter lay a single callow nestling, nearly as black as a crow. But as I looked at the parent bird, while she sat within ten feet of me, eying my every movement intently, and uttering her wrath in various cries (some catlike mewings among them), my heart reproached me that I had ever written of the cuckoo as a coward and a sneak. Truth will not allow me to take the words back entirely, even now; but I felt at that moment, and do still, that I might have been better employed mending my own faults than in holding up to scorn the foibles of a creature who, when worst came to worst, could set me such a shining example of courageous fidelity. It is always in order to be charitable; and I ought to have remembered that, for those who are themselves subject to imperfection, generosity is the best kind of justice.

FOOTNOTES:

[71:1] The birds at once became quiet, and I went back complacently to my book under the linden-tree. Who knows, however, whether there may not have been another side to the story? Who shall say what were the emotions of the snake, as he wriggled painfully homeward after such an assault? Myself no vegetarian, by what right had I belabored him for liking the taste of chicken? It were well, perhaps, not to pry too curiously into questions of this kind. Most likely it would not flatter our human self-esteem to know what some of our "poor relations" think of us.

A GREEN MOUNTAIN CORN-FIELD.

Thus, without theft, I reap another's field.--SIDNEY LANIER.

I was passing some days of idleness in a shallow Vermont valley, situated at an elevation of fifteen or sixteen hundred feet, circled by wooded hills, and intersected by an old turnpike, which connects the towns near Lake Champlain with the region beyond the mountains. Small farmhouses stood here and there along the highway, while others were scattered at wide intervals over the lower slopes of the outlying hills.

With all the brightness and freshness of early summer upon it, it was indeed an enchanting picture; but even so, one could not altogether put aside a feeling of something like commiseration for the people who, year in and year out, from babyhood to old age, found in this narrow vale, with its severity of weather, and its scarcity of social comforts and opportunities, their only experience of what we fondly call this wide, wide world.

From my inn I had walked eastward for perhaps a mile; then at the little school-house had taken a cross-road, which presently began to climb. Here I passed two or three cottages (one of them boasting the singularity of paint), and after a while came to another, which appeared to be the last, as the road not far beyond struck into the ancient forest. First, however, it ran up to a small plateau, where, out of sight from the house, lay a scanty quarter of an acre, in which the old parable, "First the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear," was in the primary stage of its fresh annual fulfillment. The ground was but newly cleared, and the brambles still felt themselves its true and rightful possessors. Who was this puny-looking, good-for-nothing foreigner, that they should be turned out of house and home for his accommodation? So they seemed to be asking among themselves, as they lifted up their heads here and there in the midst of the pale-green shoots. The crows, on the other hand, bade the newcomer welcome,--as the wolf welcomes the lamb. Against these hungry lovers of his crop (who loved not unwisely, but too well), the farmer had fenced his field with a single string, stretched from corner to corner. He must put extraordinary faith in the considerateness of the birds, a looker-on might think; such a barrier as this could be, at the most, nothing more than a polite hint of ownership, a delicate reminder against thoughtless trespassing, a courteously indirect suggestion to such as needed not a physical, but only a moral, restraint. Or one might take it as an appeal to some known or fancied superstitiousness on the crows' part; as if the white cord were a kind of fetich, with which they would never presume to meddle. But the rustic would have laughed at all such far-fetched cockneyish inferences. This strange-seeming device of his was simply an attempt to take the suspicious in their own suspiciousness; to set before Corvus a hindrance so unmistakably insufficient that he would mistrust it as a cover for some deep-laid and deadly plot. Probably the scheme had not been crowned with complete success in the present instance, for from a pole in the middle of the inclosure a dead crow was dangling in the breeze. This was a more business-like signal than the other; even a cockney could hardly be in doubt as to its meaning; and the farmer, when I afterwards met him, assured me that it had answered its purpose to perfection. The crow is nobody's fool. "Live and learn" is his motto; and he does both, but especially the former, in a way to excite the admiration of all disinterested observers. In the long struggle between human ingenuity and corvine sagacity, it is doubtful which has thus far obtained the upper hand. Nor have I ever quite convinced myself which of the contestants has the better case. "The crow is a thief," the planter declares; "he should confine himself to a wild diet, or else sow his own garden." "Yes, yes," Corvus makes reply; "but if I steal your corn, you first stole my land." Unlike his cousin the raven,--who, along with the Indian, has retreated before the pale-face,--the crow is no ultra-conservative. Civilization and modern ideas are not in the least distasteful to him. He has an unfeigned respect for agriculture, and in fact may be said himself to have set up as gentleman-farmer, letting out his land on shares, and seldom failing to get his full half of the crop; and, like the shrewd manager that he is, he insures himself against drought and other mischances by taking his moiety early in the season. As I plant no acres myself, I perhaps find it easier than some of my fellow-citizens to bear with the faults and appreciate the virtues of this sable aboriginal. Long may he live, I say, this true lover of his native land, to try the patience and sharpen the wits of his would-be exterminators.

The crow's is only the common lot. The whole earth is one field of war. Every creature's place upon it is coveted by some other creature. Plants and animals alike subsist by elbowing their rivals out of the way. Man, if he plants a corn-field, puts in no more grains than will probably have room to grow and thrive. But Nature, in her abhorrence of a vacuum, stands at no waste. She believes in competition, and feels no qualms at seeing the weak go to the wall.

"The good old rule Sufficeth her, the simple plan, That they should take who have the power, And they should keep who can."

If she wishes a single oak, she drops acorns without number. Her recklessness equals that of some ambitious military despot, to whom ten thousand or a hundred thousand dead soldiers count as nothing, if only the campaign be fought through to victory.