Chapter 2

But better than either--better and more than a hundred pages--is Shakespeare's simple line,--

"Hark, hark, the lark at heaven's gate sings,"

or John Lyly's, his contemporary,--

"Who is't now we hear? None but the lark so shrill and clear; Now at heaven's gate she claps her wings, The morn not waking till she sings."

We have no well-known pastoral bird in the Eastern States that answers to the skylark. The American pipit or titlark and the shore lark, both birds of the far north, and seen in the States only in fall and winter, are said to sing on the wing in a similar strain. Common enough in our woods are two birds that have many of the habits and manners of the lark--the water-thrush and the golden-crowned thrush, or oven-bird. They are both walkers, and the latter frequently sings on the wing up aloft after the manner of the lark. Starting from its low perch, it rises in a spiral flight far above the tallest trees, and breaks out in a clear, ringing, ecstatic song, sweeter and more richly modulated than the skylark's, but brief, ceasing almost before you have noticed it; whereas the skylark goes singing away after you have forgotten him and returned to him half a dozen times.

But on the Great Plains, of the West there; is a bird whose song resembles the skylark's quite closely and is said to be not at all inferior. This is Sprague's pipit, sometimes called the Missouri skylark, an excelsior songster, which from far up in the transparent blue rains down its notes for many minutes together. It is, no doubt, destined to figure in the future poetical literature of the West.

Throughout the northern and eastern parts of the Union the lark would find a dangerous rival in the bobolink, a bird that has no European prototype, and no near relatives anywhere, standing quite alone, unique, and, in the qualities of hilarity and musical tintinnabulation, with a song unequaled. He has already a secure place in general literature, having been laureated by no less a poet than Bryant, and invested with a lasting human charm in the sunny page of Irving, and is the only one of our songsters, I believe, that the mockingbird cannot parody or imitate. He affords the most marked example of exuberant pride, and a glad, rollicking, holiday spirit, that can be seen among our birds. Every note expresses complacency and glee. He is a beau of the first pattern, and, unlike any other bird of my acquaintance, pushes his gallantry to the point of wheeling gayly into the train of every female that comes along, even after the season of courtship is over and the matches are all settled; and when she leads him on too wild a chase, he turns, lightly about and breaks out with a song is precisely analogous to a burst of gay and self-satisfied laughter, as much as to say, _"Ha! ha! ha! I must have my fun, Miss Silverthimble, thimble, thimble, if I break every heart in the meadow, see, see, see!"_

At the approach of the breeding season the bobolink undergoes a complete change; his form changes, his color changes, his flight changes. From mottled brown or brindle he becomes black and white, earning, in some localities, the shocking name of "skunk bird;" his small, compact form becomes broad and conspicuous, and his ordinary flight is laid aside for a mincing, affected gait, in which he seems to use only the very tips of his wings. It is very noticeable what a contrast he presents to his mate at this season, not only in color but in manners, she being as shy and retiring as he is forward and hilarious. Indeed, she seems disagreeably serious and indisposed to any fun or jollity, scurrying away at his approach, and apparently annoyed at every endearing word and look. It is surprising that all this parade of plumage and tinkling of cymbals should be gone through with and persisted in to please a creature so coldly indifferent as she really seems to be. If Robert O'Lincoln has been stimulated into acquiring this holiday uniform and this musical gift by the approbation of Mrs. Robert, as Darwin, with his sexual selection principle, would have us believe, then there must have been a time when the females of this tribe were not quite so chary of their favors as they are now. Indeed, I never knew a female bird of any kind that did not appear utterly indifferent to the charms of voice and plumage that the male birds are so fond of displaying. But I am inclined to believe that the males think only of themselves and of outshining each other, and not at all of the approbation of their mates, as, in an analogous case in a higher species, it is well known whom the females dress for, and whom they want to kill with envy!

I know of no other song-bird that expresses so much self-consciousness and vanity, and comes so near being an ornithological coxcomb. The red-bird, the yellowbird, the indigo-bird, the oriole, the cardinal grosbeak, and others, all birds of brilliant plumage and musical ability, seem quite unconscious of self, and neither by tone nor act challenge the admiration of the beholder.

By the time the bobolink reaches the Potomac, in September, he has degenerated into a game-bird that is slaughtered by tens of thousands in the marshes. I think the prospects now are of his gradual extermination, as gunners and sportsmen are clearly on the increase, while the limit of the bird's productivity in the North has no doubt been reached long ago. There are no more meadows to be added to his domain there, while he is being waylaid and cut off more and more on his return to the South. It is gourmand eat gourmand, until in half a century more I expect the blithest and merriest of our meadow songsters will have disappeared before the rapacity of human throats.

But the poets have had a shot at him in good time, and have preserved some of his traits. Bryant's poem on this subject does not compare with his lines "To a Water-Fowl,"--a subject so well suited to the peculiar, simple, and deliberate motion of his mind; at the same time it is fit that the poet who sings of "The Planting of the Apple-Tree" should render into words the song of "Robert of Lincoln." I subjoin a few stanzas:--

ROBERT OF LINCOLN

Merrily swinging on brier and weed, Near to the nest of his little dame, Over the mountain-side or mead, Robert of Lincoln is telling his name: Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link, Spink, spank, spink: Snug and safe is that nest of ours, Hidden among the summer flowers. Chee, chee, chee.

Robert of Lincoln is gayly drest, Wearing a bright black wedding-coat, White are his shoulders and white his crest, Hear him call in his merry note: Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link, Spink, spank, spink: Look what a nice new coat is mine, Sure there was never a bird so fine. Chee, chee, chee.

Robert of Lincoln's Quaker wife, Pretty and quiet, with plain brown wings, Passing at home a patient life, Broods in the grass while her husband sings. Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link, Spink, spank, spink: Brood, kind creature; you need not fear Thieves and robbers while I am here. Chee, chee, chee.

But it has been reserved for a practical ornithologist, Mr. Wilson Flagg, to write by far the best poem on the bobolink that I have yet seen. It is much more in the mood and spirit of the actual song than Bryant's poem:--

THE O'LINCOLN FAMILY

A flock of merry singing-birds were sporting in the grove; Some were warbling cheerily, and some were making love: There were Bobolincon, Wadolincon, Winterseeble, Conquedle,-- A livelier set was never led by tabor, pipe, or fiddle,-- Crying, "Phew, shew, Wadolincon, see, see, Bobolincon, Down among the tickletops, hiding in the buttercups! I know the saucy chap, I see his shining cap Bobbing in the clover there--see, see, see!"

Up flies Bobolincon, perching on an apple-tree, Startled by his rival's song, quickened by his raillery. Soon he spies the rogue afloat, curveting in the air, And merrily he turns about, and warns him to beware! "'T is you that would a-wooing go, down among the rushes O! But wait a week, till flowers are cheery,--wait a week,and, ere you marry, Be sure of a house wherein to tarry! Wadolink, Whiskodink, Tom Denny, wait, wait, wait!"

Every one's a funny fellow; every one's a little mellow; Follow, follow, follow, follow, o'er the hill and in the hollow! Merrily, merrily, there they hie; now they rise and now they fly; They cross and turn, and in and out, and down in the middle, and wheel about,-- With a "Phew, shew, Wadolincon! listen to me, Bobolincon!-- Happy's the wooing that's speedily doing, that's speedily doing, That's merry and over with the bloom of the clover! Bobolincon, Wadolincon, Winterseeble, follow, follow me!"

Many persons, I presume, have admired Wordsworth's poem on the cuckoo, without recognizing its truthfulness, or how thoroughly, in the main, the description applies to our own species. If the poem had been written in New England or New York, it could not have suited our case better:--

"O blithe New-comer! I have heard, I hear thee and rejoice, O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird, Or but a wandering Voice?

"While I am lying on the grass, Thy twofold shout I hear, From hill to hill it seems to pass, At once far off, and near.

"Though babbling only to the Vale, Of sunshine and of flowers, Thou bringest unto me a tale Of visionary hours.

"Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring! Even yet thou art to me No bird, but an invisible thing, A voice, a mystery;

"The same whom in my schoolboy days I listened to; that Cry Which made me look a thousand ways In bush, and tree, and sky.

"To seek thee did I often rove Through woods and on the green; And thou wert still a hope, a love; Still longed for, never seen.

"And I can listen to thee yet; Can lie upon the plain And listen, till I do beget That golden time again.

"O blessed Bird! the earth we pace Again appears to be An unsubstantial, faery place; That is fit home for thee!"

Logan's stanzas, "To the Cuckoo," have less merit both as poetry and natural history, but they are older, and doubtless the latter poet benefited by them. Burke admired them so much that, while on a visit to Edinburgh, he sought the author out to compliment him:--

"Hail, beauteous stranger of the grove! Thou messenger of spring! Now Heaven repairs thy rural seat, And woods thy welcome sing.

"What time the daisy decks the green, Thy certain voice we hear; Hast thou a star to guide thy path, Or mark the rolling year?

. . . . . . . .

"The schoolboy, wandering through the wood To pull the primrose gay, Starts, the new voice of spring to hear, And imitates thy lay.

. . . . . . . .

"Sweet bird! thy bower is ever green, Thy sky is ever clear; Thou hast no sorrow in thy song, No winter in thy year."

The European cuckoo is evidently a much gayer bird than ours, and much more noticeable.

"Hark, how the jolly cuckoos sing 'Cuckoo!' to welcome in the spring,"

says John Lyly three hundred years agone. Its note is easily imitated, and boys will render it so perfectly as to deceive any but the shrewdest ear. An English lady tells me its voice reminds one of children at play, and is full of gayety and happiness. It is a persistent songster, and keeps up its call from morning to night. Indeed, certain parts of Wordsworth's poem--those that refer to the bird as a mystery, a wandering, solitary voice--seem to fit our bird better than the European species. Our cuckoo is in fact a solitary wanderer, repeating its loud, guttural call in the depths of the forest, and well calculated to arrest the attention of a poet like Wordsworth, who was himself a kind of cuckoo, a solitary voice, syllabling the loneliness that broods over streams and woods,--

"And once far off, and near."

Our cuckoo is not a spring bird, being seldom seen or heard in the North before late in May. He is a great devourer of canker-worms, and, when these pests appear, he comes out of his forest seclusion and makes excursions through the orchards stealthily and quietly, regaling himself upon those pulpy, fuzzy titbits. His coat of deep cinnamon brown has a silky gloss and is very beautiful. His note or call is not musical but loud, and has in a remarkable degree the quality of remoteness and introvertedness. It is like a vocal legend, and to the farmer bodes rain.

It is worthy of note, and illustrates some things said farther back, that birds not strictly denominated songsters, but criers like the cuckoo, have been quite as great favorites with the poets, and have received as affectionate treatment at their hands, as have the song-birds. One readily recalls Emerson's "Titmouse," Trowbridge's "Pewee," Celia Thaxter's "Sandpiper," and others of a like character.

It is also worthy of note that the owl appears to be a greater favorite with the poets than the proud, soaring hawk. The owl is doubtless the more human and picturesque bird; then he belongs to the night and its weird effects. Bird of the silent wing and expansive eye, grimalkin in feathers, feline, mousing, haunting ruins" and towers, and mocking the midnight stillness with thy uncanny cry! The owl is the great bugaboo of the feathered tribes. His appearance by day is hailed by shouts of alarm and derision from nearly every bird that flies, from crows down to sparrows. They swarm about him like flies, and literally mob him back into his dusky retreat. Silence is as the breath of his nostrils to him, and the uproar that greets him when he emerges into the open day seems to alarm and confuse him as it does the pickpocket when everybody cries Thief.

But the poets, I say, have not despised him:--

"The lark is but a bumpkin fowl; He sleeps in his nest till morn; But my blessing upon the jolly owl That all night blows his horn."

Both Shakespeare and Tennyson have made songs about him. This is Shakespeare's, from "Love's Labor's Lost," and perhaps has reference to the white or snowy owl:--

"When icicles hang by the wall, And Dick the shepherd blows his nail, And Tom bears logs into the hall, And milk comes frozen home in pail; When blood is nipped and ways be foul, Then nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whoo! Tu-whit! tu-whoo! a merry note, While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

"When all aloud the wind doth blow, And coughing drowns the parson's saw, And birds sit brooding in the snow, And Marian's nose looks red and raw; When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl, Then nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whoo! Tu-whit! Tu-whoo! a merry note, While greasy Joan doth keel the pot."

There is, perhaps, a slight reminiscence of this song in Tennyson's "Owl:"--

"When cats run home and light is come, And dew is cold upon the ground, And the far-off stream is dumb, And the whirring sail goes round, And the whirring sail goes round; Alone and warming his five wits, The white owl in the belfry sits.

"When merry milkmaids click the latch, And rarely smells the new-mown hay, And the cock hath sung beneath the thatch Twice or thrice his roundelay, Twice or thrice his roundelay; Alone and warming his five wits, The white owl in the belfry sits."

Tennyson has not directly celebrated any of the more famous birds, but his poems contain frequent allusions to them. The

"Wild bird, whose warble, liquid sweet, Rings Eden through the budded quicks, Oh, tell me where the senses mix, Oh, tell me where the passions meet,"

of "In Memoriam," is doubtless the nightingale. And here we have the lark:--

"Now sings the woodland loud and long, And distance takes a lovelier hue, And drowned in yonder living blue The lark becomes a sightless song."

And again in this from "A Dream of Fair Women:"--

"Then I heard A noise of some one coming through the lawn, And singing clearer than the crested bird That claps his wings at dawn."

The swallow is a favorite bird with Tennyson, and is frequently mentioned, beside being the principal figure in one of those charming love-songs in "The Princess." His allusions to the birds, as to any other natural feature, show him to be a careful observer, as when he speaks of

"The swamp, where hums the dropping snipe."

His single bird-poem, aside from the song I have quoted, is "The Blackbird," the Old World prototype of our robin, as if our bird had doffed the aristocratic black for a more democratic suit on reaching these shores. In curious contrast to the color of its plumage is its beak, which is as yellow as a kernel of Indian corn. The following are the two middle stanzas of the poem:--

"Yet, though I spared thee all the spring, Thy sole delight is, sitting still, With that gold dagger of thy bill To fret the summer jenneting.

"A golden bill! the silver tongue Cold February loved is dry; Plenty corrupts the melody That made thee famous once, when young."

Shakespeare, in one of his songs, alludes to the blackbird as the ouzel-cock; indeed, he puts quite a flock of birds in this song:--

"The ouzel-cock so black of hue, With orange tawny bill; The throstle with his note so true, The wren with little quill; The finch, the sparrow, and the lark, The plain song cuckoo gray, Whose note full many a man doth mark, And dares not answer nay."

So far as external appearances are concerned,--form, plumage, grace of manner,--no one ever had a less promising subject than had Trowbridge in the "Pewee." This bird, if not the plainest dressed, is the most unshapely in the woods. It is stiff and abrupt in its manners and sedentary in its habits, sitting around all day, in the dark recesses of the woods, on the dry twigs and branches, uttering now and then its plaintive cry, and "with many a flirt and flutter" snapping up its insect game.

The pewee belongs to quite a large family of birds, all of whom have strong family traits, and who are not the most peaceable and harmonious of the sylvan folk. They are pugnacious, harsh-voiced, angular in form and movement, with flexible tails and broad, flat, bristling beaks that stand to the face at the angle of a turn-up nose, and most of them wear a black cap pulled well down over their eyes. Their heads are large, neck and legs short, and elbows sharp. The wild Irishman of them all is the great crested flycatcher, a large, leather-colored or sandy-complexioned bird that prowls through the woods, uttering its harsh, uncanny note and waging fierce warfare upon its fellows. The exquisite of the family, and the braggart of the orchard, is the kingbird, a bully that loves to strip the feathers off its more timid neighbors such as the bluebird, that feeds on the stingless bees of the hive, the drones, and earns the reputation of great boldness by teasing large hawks, while it gives a wide berth to little ones.

The best beloved of them all is the phoebe-bird, one of the firstlings of the spring, of whom so many of our poets have made affectionate mention.

The wood pewee is the sweetest voiced, and, notwithstanding the ungracious things I have said of it and of its relations, merits to the full all Trowbridge's pleasant fancies. His poem is indeed a very careful study of the bird and its haunts, and is good poetry as well as good ornithology:--

"The listening Dryads hushed the woods; The boughs were thick, and thin and few The golden ribbons fluttering through; Their sun-embroidered, leafy hoods The lindens lifted to the blue; Only a little forest-brook The farthest hem of silence shook; When in the hollow shades I heard-- Was it a spirit or a bird? Or, strayed from Eden, desolate, Some Peri calling to her mate, Whom nevermore her mate would cheer? 'Pe-ri! pe-ri! peer!'

. . . . . . . .

"To trace it in its green retreat I sought among the boughs in vain; And followed still the wandering strain, So melancholy and so sweet, The dim-eyed violets yearned with pain. 'T was now a sorrow in the air, Some nymph's immortalized despair Haunting the woods and waterfalls; And now, at long, sad intervals, Sitting unseen in dusky shade, His plaintive pipe some fairy played, With long-drawn cadence thin and clear,-- 'Pe-wee! pe-wee! peer!'

"Long-drawn and clear its closes were-- As if the hand of Music through The sombre robe of Silence drew A thread of golden gossamer; So pure a flute the fairy blew. Like beggared princes of the wood, In silver rags the birches stood; The hemlocks, lordly counselors, Were dumb; the sturdy servitors, In beechen jackets patched and gray, Seemed waiting spellbound all the day That low, entrancing note to hear,-- 'Pe-wee! pe-wee! peer!'

"I quit the search, and sat me down Beside the brook, irresolute, And watched a little bird in suit Of sober olive, soft and brown, Perched in the maple branches, mute; With greenish gold its vest was fringed, Its tiny cap was ebon-tinged, With ivory pale its wings were barred, And its dark eyes were tender-starred. "Dear bird," I said, "what is thy name?" And thrice the mournful answer came, So faint and far, and yet so near,-- 'Pe-wee! pe-wee! peer!'

"For so I found my forest bird,-- The pewee of the loneliest woods, Sole singer in these solitudes, Which never robin's whistle stirred, Where never bluebird's plume intrudes. Quick darting through the dewy morn, The redstart trilled his twittering horn And vanished in thick boughs; at even, Like liquid pearls fresh showered from heaven, The high notes of the lone wood thrush Fell on the forest's holy hush; But thou all day complainest here,-- 'Pe-wee! pe-wee! peer!'"

Emerson's best natural history poem is the "Humble-Bee,"--a poem as good in its way as Burns's poem on the mouse; but his later poem, "The Titmouse," has many of the same qualities, and cannot fail to be acceptable to both poet and naturalist.