Part 1

Books by Mr. Torrey.

FRIENDS ON THE SHELF. 12mo, $1.25, _net_. Postage extra.

NATURE’S INVITATION. 16mo, $1.10, _net_. Postpaid, $1.21.

THE CLERK OF THE WOODS. 16mo, $1.10, _net_. Postpaid, $1.20.

FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA. 16mo, $1.10, _net_. Postpaid, $1.19.

EVERYDAY BIRDS. Elementary Studies. With twelve colored Illustrations reproduced from Audubon. Square 12mo, $1.00.

BIRDS IN THE BUSH. 16mo, $1.25.

A RAMBLER’S LEASE. 16mo, $1.25.

THE FOOT-PATH WAY. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25.

A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK. 16mo, $1.25.

SPRING NOTES FROM TENNESSEE. 16mo, $1.25.

A WORLD OF GREEN HILLS. 16mo, $1.25.

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. BOSTON AND NEW YORK.

EVERYDAY BIRDS

ELEMENTARY STUDIES

BY BRADFORD TORREY

_WITH TWELVE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLORS AFTER AUDUBON, AND TWO FROM PHOTOGRAPHS_

BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge

COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY BRADFORD TORREY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

FIFTH IMPRESSION

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. TWO LITTLE KINGS 1

II. THE CHICKADEE 7

III. THE BROWN CREEPER 10

IV. THE BROWN THRASHER 15

V. THE BUTCHER-BIRD 19

VI. THE SCARLET TANAGER 22

VII. THE SONG SPARROW 26

VIII. THE FIELD SPARROW AND THE CHIPPER 30

IX. SOME APRIL SPARROWS 35

X. THE ROSE-BREASTED GROSBEAK 40

XI. THE BLUE JAY 43

XII. THE KINGBIRD 47

XIII. THE HUMMINGBIRD 51

XIV. THE CHIMNEY SWIFT 56

XV. NIGHTHAWK AND WHIP-POOR-WILL 59

XVI. THE FLICKER 64

XVII. THE BITTERN 68

XVIII. BIRDS FOR EVERYBODY 82

XIX. WINTER PENSIONERS 87

XX. WATCHING THE PROCESSION 93

XXI. SOUTHWARD BOUND 99

INDEX 105

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

BLUE JAY (page 43) _Frontispiece_

GOLDEN-CROWNED KINGLET 2

CHICKADEE 8

BROWN CREEPER 12

BROWN THRASHER 16

SCARLET TANAGER 22

SONG SPARROW 26

ROSE-BREASTED GROSBEAK 40

RUBY-THROATED HUMMINGBIRD 52

NIGHTHAWK 60

WHIP-POOR-WILL 62

FLICKER 66

_The illustrations entitled A Downy Woodpecker and A Branch Establishment, facing page 88, are from photographs by Mr. Frank M. Chapman and were first printed in Bird-Lore._

EVERYDAY BIRDS

I

TWO LITTLE KINGS

The largest bird in the United States is the California vulture, or condor, which measures from tip to tip of its wings nine feet and a half. At the other end of the scale are the hummingbirds, one kind of which, at least, has wings that are less than an inch and a half in length. Next to these insect-like midgets come the birds which have been well named in Latin “Regulus,” and in English “kinglets,”--that is to say, little kings. The fitness of the title comes first from their tiny size,--the chickadee is almost a giant in comparison,--and next from the fact that they wear patches of bright color (crowns) on their heads.

Two species of kinglets are found at one season or another in nearly all parts of the United States, and are known respectively as the golden-crown--or goldcrest--and the ruby-crown. The golden-crown has on the top of its head an orange or yellow patch (sometimes one, sometimes the other) bordered with black; the ruby-crown wears a very bright red patch, though you may look at many specimens without finding it. Only part of the birds have it,--the adult males, perhaps,--and even those that have it do not always display it. The orange or yellow of the goldcrest, on the other hand, is worn by all the birds, and is never concealed. If you are a beginner in bird study, uncertain of your species, look for the black stripes on the crown. If they are not there, and the bird is really a kinglet, it must be a ruby-crown. You may know it, also,--from the goldcrest, I mean,--by what looks like a light-colored ring round the eye. In fact, one of the ruby-crown’s most noticeable peculiarities is a certain bareheaded, large-eyed appearance.

Unless your home is near or beyond the northern boundary of the United States, you need not look for either kinglet in summer. The ruby-crown is to be seen during its migrations in spring and fall, the goldcrest in fall, winter, and spring.

At any time of the year they are well worth knowing. Nobody could look at them without admiration; so pretty, so tiny, and so exceedingly quick and graceful in their motions. Both species are of a prevailing greenish or olive shade, with noticeable light-colored wing-bars, and light, unstreaked, unspotted under parts.

The ruby-crown is famous as a singer. A genuine music-box, we may call him. In spring, especially, he is often bubbling over with melody; a rapid, wren-like tune, with sundry quirks and turns that are all his own; on the whole decidedly original, with plenty of what musical people call accent and a strongly marked rhythm or swing. Over and over he goes with it, as if he could never have enough; beginning with quick, separate, almost guttural notes, and winding up with a _twittity, twittity, twittity_, which, once heard, is not likely to be soon forgotten.

A very pleasing vocalist he surely is; and when his extreme smallness is taken into account he is fairly to be esteemed a musical prodigy. Every one who has written about the song, from Audubon down, has found it hard to say enough about it. Audubon goes so far as to say that it is as powerful as a canary’s, and much more varied and pleasing. That I must think an exaggeration; natural enough, no doubt, under the circumstances (romantic surroundings count for a good deal in all questions of this kind), but still a stretching of the truth. However, I give but my own opinion. Let my readers hear the bird, and judge for themselves. They will enjoy him, whether or no. Every such new acquaintance that a man makes is a new source of lifelong happiness.

The enormous California vulture is said to be almost dumb, having “no vocal apparatus” and “emitting only a weak hissing sound.” What a contrast between him and the ruby-crown,--a mere speck of a bird, but with a musical nature and the voice of an artist. Precious stuff, they say, comes in small packages. Even the youngest of us may have noticed that it is always the smaller birds that sing.

But if all the singers are small birds, it is not true that all small birds are singers. The golden-crowned kinglet, for example, is hardly to be classed under that head. The gifts of Providence are various, and are somewhat sparingly dealt out. One creature receives one gift, another creature another,--just as is true of men, women, and children. This boy “has an ear,” as the saying goes. He is naturally musical. Give him a chance, and let him not be too much in love with something else, and he will make a singer, or a player on instruments, or possibly a composer. His brother has no ear; he can hardly tell Old Hundred from Yankee Doodle. It is useless for him to “take lessons.” He can paint, perhaps, or invent a machine, or make money, or edit a paper, or teach school, or preach sermons, or practice medicine; but he will never win a name in the concert room.

The case of the golden-crown is hardly so hopeless as that, I am glad to believe; for if he is not much of a musician now, as he surely is not, he is not without some signs of an undeveloped musical capacity. The root of the matter seems to be in him. He tries to sing, at any rate, and not unlikely, as time goes on,--say in a million or two of years,--he may become as capable a performer as the ruby-crown is at present. There is no telling what a creature may make of himself if his will is good, and he has astronomical time in which to work. The dullest of us might learn something with a thousand years of schooling.

What you will mostly hear from the goldcrest is no tune, but a hurried _zee, zee, zee_, repeated at intervals as he flits about the branches of a tree, or, less often, through the mazes of a piece of shrubbery. His activity is wonderful, and his motions are really as good as music. No dancing could be prettier to look at. All you need is eyes to see him. But you will have to “look sharp.” Now he is there for an instant, snatching a morsel or letting out a _zee, zee, zee_. Now he is yonder, resting upon the air, hovering against a tuft of pine needles, his wings all in a mist, they beat so swiftly. So through the tree he goes, and from one tree to another, till presently he is gone for good.

Once in a great while you may find him feeding among the dry leaves on the ground. Then you can really watch him, and had better make the most of your opportunity. Or you may catch him exploring bushes or low savins, which is a chance almost as favorable. The great thing is to become familiar with his voice. With that help you will find him ten times as often as without it. He is mostly a bird of the woods, and prefers evergreens, though he does not confine himself to them.

If you do not know him already, it will be a bright and memorable day--though it be the dead of winter--when you first see him and are able to call him by his regal name, _Regulus satrapa_. It is a great pity that so common and lovely a creature, one of the beauties of the world, should be unseen by so many good people. It is true, as we say so often about other things, that they do not know what they miss; but they miss a good deal, notwithstanding.

II

THE CHICKADEE

The chickadee, like many other birds, takes his name from his notes; from some of his notes, that is to say, for he has many others besides his best-known _chick-a-dee-dee-dee_. His most musical effort, regarded by many observers as his true song, sounds to most ears like the name Phœbe,--a clear, sweet whistle of two or three notes, with what musical people call a minor interval between them. It is so strictly a whistle that any boy can imitate it well enough to deceive not only another boy, but the bird himself.

In late winter and early spring, especially, when the chickadee is in a peculiarly cheerful frame of mind, it is very easy to draw him out by whistling these notes in his hearing. Sometimes, however, the sound seems to fret or anger him, and instead of answering in kind, he will fly near the intruder, scolding _dee-dee-dee_.

He remains with us both summer and winter, and wears the same colors at all seasons.

Perhaps no wild bird is more confiding. If a man is at work in the woods in cold weather, and at luncheon will take a little pains to feed the chickadees that are sure to be more or less about him, he will soon have them tame enough to pick up crumbs at his feet, and even to take them from his hand.

Better even than crumbs is a bit of mince pie, or a piece of suet. I have myself held out a piece of suet to a chickadee as I walked through the woods, and have had him fly down at once, perch on my finger like a tame canary, and fall to eating. But he was a bird that another man, a woodcutter of my acquaintance, had tamed in the manner above described.

The chickadee’s nest is built in a hole, generally in a decayed stump or branch. It is very pretty to watch the pair when they are digging out the hole. All the chips are carried away and dropped at a little distance from the tree, so that the sight of them littering the ground may not reveal the birds’ secret to an enemy.

Male and female dress alike. The top of the head is black--for which reason they are called black-capped chickadees, or black-capped titmice--and the chin is of the same color, while the cheeks are clear white. If you are not sure that you know the bird, stay near him till he pronounces his own name. He will be pretty certain to do it, sooner or later, especially if you excite him a little by squeaking or chirping to him.

Although the chickadee is small and delicate-looking, he seems not to mind the very coldest of weather. Give him enough to eat, and the wind may whistle. He picks his food, tiny insects, insects’ eggs, and the like, out of crevices in the bark of trees and about the ends of twigs, and so is seldom or never without resources. The deepest snows do not cover up his dinner-table. His worst days, no doubt, are those in which everything is covered with sleet.

One of his prettiest traits is his skill in hanging back downward from the tip of a swinging branch or from the under side of a leaf while in search of provender. As a small boy, who had probably been to the circus, once said, the chickadee is a “first-rate performer on the flying trapeze.”

III

THE BROWN CREEPER

In the midst of a Massachusetts winter, when a man with his eyes open may walk five miles over favorable country roads and see only ten or twelve kinds of birds, the brown creeper’s faint _zeep_ is a truly welcome sound. He is a very little fellow, very modestly dressed, without a bright feather on him, his lower parts being white and his upper parts a mottling of brown and white, such as a tailor might call a “pepper and salt mixture.”

The creeper’s life seems as quiet as his colors. You will find him by overhearing his note somewhere on one side of you as you pass. Now watch him. He is traveling rather quickly, with an alert, business-like air, up the trunk of a tree in a spiral course, hitching along inch by inch, hugging the bark, and every little while stopping to probe a crevice of it with his long, curved, sharply pointed bill. He is in search of food,--insects’ eggs, grubs, and what not; morsels so tiny that it need not surprise us to see him spending the whole day in satisfying his hunger.

There is one thing to be said for such a life: the bird is never without something to take up his mind. In fact, if he enjoys the pleasures of the table half as well as some human beings seem to do, his life ought to be one of the happiest imaginable.

How flat and thin he looks, and how perfectly his colors blend with the grays and browns of the mossy bark! No wonder it is easy for us to pass near him without knowing it. We understand now what learned people mean when they talk about the “protective coloration” of animals. A hawk flying overhead, on the lookout for game, must have hard work to see this bit of a bird clinging so closely to the bark as to be almost a part of it.

And if a hawk does pass, you may be pretty sure the creeper will see him, and will flatten himself still more tightly against the tree and stay as motionless as the bark itself. He needs neither to fight nor to run away. His strength, as the prophet said, is to sit still.

But look! As the creeper comes to the upper part of the tree, where the bark is less furrowed than it is below, and therefore less likely to conceal the scraps of provender that he is in search of, he suddenly lets go his hold and flies down to the foot of another tree, and begins again to creep upward. If you keep track of him, you will see him do this hour after hour. He never walks down. Up, up, he goes, and if you look sharply enough, you will see that whenever he pauses he makes use of his sharp, stiff tail-feathers as a rest--a kind of camp-stool, as it were, or, better still, a bracket. He is built for his work; color, bill, feet, tail-feathers--all were made on purpose for him.

He is a native of the northern country, and therefore to most readers of this book he is a winter bird only. If you know his voice, you will hear him twenty times for once that you see him. If you know neither him nor his voice, it will be worth your while to make his acquaintance.

When you come upon a little bunch of chickadees flitting through the woods, listen for a quick, lisping note that is something like theirs, but different. It may be the creeper’s, for although he seems an unsocial fellow, seldom flocking with birds of his own kind, he is fond of the chickadee’s cheerful companionship.

To see him and hear his _zeep_, you would never take him for a songster; but there is no telling by the looks of a bird how well he can sing. In fact, plainly dressed birds are, as a rule, the best musicians. The very handsome ones have no need to charm with the voice. And our modest little creeper has a song, and a fairly good one; one that answers his purpose, at all events, although it may never make him famous. In springtime it may be heard now and then even in a place like Boston Common; but of course you must go where the birds pair and nest if you would hear them at their finest; for birds, like other people, sing best when they feel happiest.

The brown creeper’s nest used to be something of a mystery. It was sought for in woodpeckers’ holes. Now it is known that as a general thing it is built behind a scale of loose bark on a dead tree, between the bark and the trunk. Ordinarily, if not always, it will be found under a flake that is loose at the bottom instead of at the top. Into such a place the female bird packs tightly a mass of twigs and strips of the soft inner bark of trees, and on the top of this prepares her nest and lays her eggs. Her mate flits to and fro, keeping her company, and once in a while cheering her with a song, but so far as has yet been discovered he takes no hand in the work itself. It is quite possible that the female, who is to occupy the nest, prefers to have her own way in the construction of it.

After the young ones are hatched, at all events, the father bird’s behavior leaves nothing to be complained of. He “comes to time,” as we say, in the most loyal manner. In and out of the nest he and the mother go, feeding their hungry charges, making their entry and exit always at the same point, through the merest crack of a door, between the overhanging bark and the tree, just above the nest. It is a very pretty bit of family life.

It would be hard to imagine a nest better concealed from a bird’s natural enemies, especially when, as is often the case, the tree stands in water on the edge of a stream or lake. And not only is the nest wonderfully well hidden, but it is perfectly sheltered from rain, as it would not be if it were built under a strip of bark that was peeled from above. All in all, we must respect the simple, demure-looking creeper as a very clever architect.

IV

THE BROWN THRASHER

The brown thrasher--called also the brown thrush--is a bird considerably longer than a robin, with a noticeably long tail and a long, curved bill. His upper parts are reddish brown or cinnamon color, and his lower parts white or whitish, boldly streaked with black. You will find him in hedgerows, in scrub-lands, and about the edges of woods, where he keeps mostly on or near the ground. His general manner is that of a creature who wishes nothing else so much as to escape notice. “Only let me alone,” he seems to say. If he sees you coming, as he pretty certainly will, he dodges into the nearest thicket or barberry-bush, and waits for you to pass.

Farmers know him as the “planting-bird.” In New England he makes his appearance with commendable punctuality between the twentieth of April and the first of May; and while the farmer is planting his garden, the thrasher encourages him with song. One man, who was planting beans, imagined that the bird said, “Drop it, drop it! Cover it up, cover it up!” Perhaps he did. It was good advice, anyhow.

In his own way the thrasher is one of the great singers of the world. He is own cousin to the famous mockingbird, and at the South, where he and the mocker may be heard singing side by side,--and so much alike that it is hard to tell one from the other,--he is known as the “brown mockingbird.” He would deserve the title but for one thing--he does not mock. In that respect he falls far short of his gray cousin, who not only has all the thrasher’s gift of original song, but a most amazing faculty of imitation, as every one knows who has heard even a caged mockingbird running over the medley of notes he has picked up here and there and carefully rehearsed and remembered. The thrasher’s song is a medley, but not a medley of imitations.

I have said that the thrasher keeps near the ground. Such is his habit; but there is one exception. When he sings he takes the very top of a tree, although usually it is not a tall one. There he stands by the half-hour together, head up and tail down, pouring out a flood of music; sounds of all sorts, high notes and low notes, smooth notes and rough notes, all jumbled together in the craziest fashion, as if the musician were really beside himself.

It is a performance worth buying a ticket for and going miles to hear; but it is to be heard without price on the outskirts of almost any village in the United States east of the Rocky Mountains and south of Maine. You must go out at the right time, however, for the bird sings but a few weeks in the year, although he remains in New England almost six months, or till the middle of October. He is one of the birds that every one should know, since it is perfectly easy to identify him; and once known, he is never to be forgotten, or to be confounded with anything else.

The thrasher’s nest is a rude, careless-looking structure, made of twigs, roots, and dry leaves, and is to be looked for on the ground, or in a bush not far above it. Often it has so much the appearance of a last year’s affair that one is tempted to pass it as unworthy of notice. I have been fooled in that way more than once.

The bird sits close, as the saying is, and as she stares at you with her yellow eyes, full at once of courage and fear, you will need a hard heart to disturb her. Sometimes she will really show fight, and she has been known to drive a small boy off the field. Her whistle after she has been frightened from her eggs or nestlings is one of the most pathetic sounds in nature. I should feel sorry for the boy who could hear it without pity.

Besides this mournful whistle, the thrasher has a note almost exactly like a smacking kiss,--very realistic,--and sometimes, especially at dusk, an uncanny, ghostly whisper, that seems meant expressly to suggest the presence of something unearthly and awful. So far as I am aware, there is no other bird-note like it. I have no doubt that many a superstitious person has taken to his heels on hearing it from the bushes along a lonesome roadside after nightfall.

Except in the spring, indeed, there is little about the thrasher’s appearance or behavior to suggest pleasant thoughts. To me, at any rate, he seems a creature of chronic low spirits. The world has used him badly, and he cannot get over it. He is almost the only bird I ever see without a little inspiration of cheerfulness. Perhaps I misjudge him.

Let my young readers make his acquaintance on their own account, if they have not already done so, and find him a livelier creature than I have described him, if they can.

V

THE BUTCHER-BIRD