Part 13

On the same day my dancing dot in feathers, the golden-crowned kinglet, performed one of his favorite tricks, which is not often described in the books. You will remember that in the centre of the yellow crown-patch of the males, there is a gleaming golden speck, visible only when you look at him closely. But when the little beau is in a particularly rollicksome mood, or wants to display his gem to his mate or kindred, he elevates and spreads out the feathers of his crest, and lo! a transformation. The whole crown becomes golden! That gleaming speck expands until it completely hides the yellow and black of the crown. It has been my good fortune on several occasions to see the ruby-crowned kinglet transfigure himself in the same way, except, that his entire crown became ruby. Probably the little Chesterfield that can exhibit the most brilliant coronal wins the sweetest damsel in the kinglet community for a wifie.

Perhaps, as a rule, our winter birds find the season rather cold for play; yet they often frolic in the snow like children, even when they do not stalk through it in quest of food. This is especially true of the snow-birds and tree-sparrows. Birds are especially fond of splashing in water. Even in the winter-time, when it flows ice-cold into the stream or pond from the melting snow on the banks, certain birds will plunge into it, and enjoy their bath for many minutes. They do not seem to be satisfied with merely wetting their plumes, but remain in the water, twinkling their wings and tails, much longer than is actually necessary. Several times in the autumn I have seen a large company of warblers of different species taking a bath in a woodland pond. How they enjoyed their ablutions! Again and again they would return to the water, as if loath to quit it.

To my mind, the flicker is one of our most playful birds, spite of his staid looks. I have seen a half-dozen of these birds on a single tree, scudding about after one another and calling, _Zwick-ah! zwick-ah!_ in their affectionate way. Not infrequently two of them will face each other, and begin bowing in a vigorous style, turning their heads dexterously from side to side to avoid collision. This is sometimes kept up for several minutes. It is very comical, the only drawback being that the birds themselves do not laugh. Why they should engage in so ridiculous a performance with so serious an air, is a problem that still belongs to the unknown.

A cut-throat finch, a pet, was, as a rule, a very sedate little body, but one day he had to come down from his pedestal to get rid of his surplus of feeling. This he did by dancing a sort of jig to his own music, swaying his body to and fro in a most laughable way. On another day an English sparrow flew upon his cage, which was hanging on the veranda, when “Pompey” turned his head toward his visitor, burst into song, and bobbed his head from side to side. No doubt the sparrow felt that he was receiving an ovation.

A most laughable incident occurred one day in my large cage of birds. “Flip,” a fine young wood-thrush, was rehearsing his song. A young thrasher leaped up beside him on the perch. The two birds turned their heads to each other, and looked into each other’s eyes a moment; then Flip opened his mouth at his visitor, and broke into song, the tones coming right out of his gold-lined throat. All the while he jerked his head from side to side or up and down in perfect time with his music, his eye gleaming intelligently, as if he enjoyed the fun. Even my loud outburst of laughter did not put a stop to the little farce. Flip was a bright bird. He afterward had a cage all to himself, and regaled his hosts with many a cheerful song, such as only the wood-thrush is master of. Occasionally he would leap to the end of his cage, open his mouth wide at “Brownie,” whose cage stood next to his, and sing a comic song; at least, it seemed comic.

These incidents, although they do not prove that birds have elaborate games, do prove that they possess the play spirit, and no doubt their pastimes and amusements are relished fully as much by them as ours are by us; perhaps more so.

VI. BIRD DEATHS.

If only some master dramatist could write the tragedies of bird land! They would be highly exciting, and would afford ample room for the play of genius; for there are adventures and disasters without number. Perhaps it is on account of the many reverses that there is so often a pensive strain in the songs of the birds,—a minor chord running like a shimmering silver line through the weft of the woodland music. Robert Burns, in his “Address to a Woodlark,” touched the very marrow of bird sadness, and pleaded with the little singer to cease its song, or he himself would go distracted,—

“Say, was thy little mate unkind, And heard thee as the careless wind? Oh! nocht but love and sorrow joined Sic notes o’ wae could wauken.

“Thou tells o’ never-ending care, O’ speechless grief and dark despair; For pity’s sake, sweet bird, nae mair! Or my poor heart is broken.”

If Coleridge had studied the birds more carefully, and acquainted himself with their griefs, he never would have written, in mockery of Milton’s “L’Allegro,”—

“A melancholy bird! O, idle thought! In nature there is nothing melancholy!”

I have seen a pair of birds whose little brood had just been cruelly slaughtered, and my heart bled for them when I saw that their anguish was too great for expression. Perhaps birds that have been bereaved soon forget their sorrow, and yet I doubt it; for if you listen to the minor treble of the black-capped chickadee, you cannot help feeling that he is singing a dirge for some long-lost love, or, if not that, may be recounting, by some occult law of heredity, the story of the many sorrows of his ancestors from the beginning down to his own generation. What ravishing sadness there is in the songs of the white-throated and white-crowned sparrows! The bluebird is always sighing as he shifts from post to post, and nothing could be more melancholy than the call of the jay in autumn. The crow at a distance complains of his disappointment, while the wood-thrush, in his evening and morning voluntaries, rehearses the sad memories of his life. Keats speaks of the “plaintive anthem” of the nightingale, and Thomson declares that even the merry linnets “lit on the dead tree, a dull, despondent flock.”

It would be difficult to arrange a “table of mortality” for the birds. However, as they know nothing about life insurance, there is no call for such a compilation; but even if the statistician could state the number of deaths, there is no arithmetic that could compute the heartaches and heartbreaks experienced by “our little brothers of the air.” “In the midst of life we are in death,” might well be put into the litany of the birds. If they had burial-grounds, there would be plenty of employment for the sexton and some grave “Old Mortality.”

The elements themselves sometimes play sad havoc with the birds. Mr. Eldridge E. Fish, of Buffalo, N. Y., tells of an October storm in which many golden-crowned kinglets were dashed to the ground, while others flew against windows of houses in which lights were left burning. The storm was so severe that the little voyagers, travelling southward by night, were compelled to alight, and thus many of them were destroyed. The same writer speaks of a cold rain which froze as it fell, coating everything with ice, and thus cutting off the birds’ supply of food, so that many bluebirds perished. To my certain knowledge, robins, which breed very early in the spring, sometimes are frozen to death while hugging their nests, when a cold wave swoops from the north. The same calamity sometimes overtakes the crossbill during the winter in the forests of Canada. Apparently even Nature herself is not always a tender mother to her offspring. Do not ask me why, for I am not writing a philosophical thesis.

Birds have many natural enemies. I can still hear the cries of a young bird that a sparrow-hawk had seized in his talons and was bearing overhead. What a savage cannibal he seemed to be! Not for anything would I cast undeserved odium on the reputation of any bird, but I fear very much that the blue jay is both a robber and a murderer. In the season when eggs and young birds are in the nest, he has a sly, hang-dog air, which, to my mind, proclaims not only a guilty conscience, but also a sinister purpose. At other seasons he seems to have an open, frank manner. It is true, I myself have never seen him in the very act of robbing a fellow-bird’s nest, but I have often seen pewees, vireos, sparrows, and goldfinches charge upon him with desperate fury when he came in the vicinity of their homesteads. Indeed, all the smaller birds seem to have a mortal terror of him, which can be accounted for only on the ground that he is known to be a highwayman.

A farmer friend, who loves the birds, and has none of the unreasoning prejudice against them sometimes displayed by country folk, told me that he once saw a blue jay pounce upon a chippie’s nest, snatch up a callow bantling in his bill, and fly off with it across the field to his nest. In a few moments he returned, and bore away another nestling. By this time the farmer’s ire was aroused, and he got his gun and put an end to the feathered brigand’s life on his return for the third mouthful. This is more than circumstantial evidence. Yet in defence of the handsome rascal it may be said that he does good in other directions, for he rids the earth of many pestiferous insects. Gladly would I acquit him of all blame if that were possible.

Mr. Burroughs thinks that birds which have suffered at the blue jay’s hands—or, rather, beak—often retaliate by destroying the jay’s eggs. He found a jay’s nest with five eggs, every one of which was punctured, apparently by the sharp bill of some bird, with the sole purpose of destroying them, for no part of their contents had been removed. He suggests that in the bird world the Mosaic law may be, “An egg for an egg,” instead of “An eye for an eye.”

The life of young birds hangs on a very brittle thread. A kind of Damocles’ sword seems to be dangling over them. What a “slaughter of innocents” in a single season! I think that of the many nests I found during the spring of 1892 fully half were raided. How often, on finding a nest, I have resolved to watch it until the young birds were ready to leave; but on going back a few days later, the cradle was rifled of its treasures. These frequent “tragedies of the nests” make the bird-lover sick at heart. It is no paradox to say that many birds are killed before they are born.

Birds often meet with fatal accidents. They sometimes impale themselves on a thorn, or creep into places in thorn-trees from which they cannot extricate themselves. A robin hung itself one spring by a kite-string that swung in a loop from the roof of my house,—a case of involuntary suicide. A nuthatch that I saw one day in the woods had its leg broken, and I could not help thinking of its lingering agony before it would starve to death. A pet nonpareil, a dear, bright-hued little fellow, was well and happy one evening; but the next morning he lay dead on the bottom of the cage, perhaps the victim of a convulsion. Another pet nonpareil was not in good health; so I thought a bath in tepid water might be good for him; but alas! the ablution proved too much for the little invalid, which, in spite of our utmost efforts to save his life, succumbed to the inevitable. A like fate befell a young turtle-dove which a neighbor found in the woods and brought me for a gift.

But the cause of a great deal of mortality among birds is man’s inhumanity to them. The thirst for blood seems to be inherent in many coarse natures, and as killing a fellow-man is illegal and almost sure to be summarily punished, many men gratify their greed for gore by slaying innocent birds and animals.

“Butchers and villains, bloody cannibals! How sweet a plant have you untimely cropped! You have no children, butchers! if you had, The thought of them would have stirred up remorse.”

The small boy with a sling or a spring-gun or an air-rifle is a source of much grief to the birds. He even kills the tiny kinglets that flit to and fro in the trees bordering our streets, and seems to think it sport. More senseless and wicked still was the fashion in vogue a few years ago, perhaps not yet quite obsolete, which compelled the massacre of thousands of bright-hued birds for feminine—I should say unfeminine—adornment. To say nothing of the “loudness” and bad taste of such a fashion, it is extremely unwise to put birds to death, for no one can compute the number of injurious insects they annually devour. A bird on the bonnet means so much less bread on the table. A bird in the orchard is a sort of scavenger and pomologist combined, and does his share in giving you a dish of fruit for dinner. The scarlet tanager looks like a living ruby in a green tree; but—I speak bluntly—it looks like a chunk of gore on a woman’s bonnet. In behalf of good taste and the birds, I enter my protest against this barbaric custom.

True, birds have elements of the Adamic nature in them. Many of them do relish forbidden fruit, and must be driven off, lest they rifle your cherry-tree; but it is seldom necessary to kill them, even then, especially those that live wholly on insects and fruit.

A correspondent once sent me a number of queries. How do birds come to their “last end”? Do none of them die natural deaths? If they do, why do we never, or at least very rarely, find dead or dying birds in the fields and woods? My response to these questions is: Very few birds die natural deaths,—that is, merely of sickness or old age,—though a few of them may. When a bird becomes feeble or is crippled, it falls an easy prey to a prowling hawk, owl, shrike, eagle, or cat. Should a bird escape all these enemies, and finally lie down and die in a natural way, it would doubtless soon be found and devoured by a carrion-eating fowl or quadruped, and thus its corpse would never be seen by human eyes. Sad indeed it is to think of the numberless ways in which birds meet “the last enemy.”

Be it far from me to use caustic speech against any man or set of men; but it makes me both indignant and sick at heart to read the bloody chronicles of most of the so-called “collectors.” How many embryo birds they slay merely to gratify their morbid craze for gathering “clutches,” as they suggestively call a set of eggs! Not long ago a collector narrated, in an ornithological journal, the harrowing story of his having rifled the nest of a hairy woodpecker five or six times in a single season, the poor bird laying a new deposit after each burglary, until at last she grew suspicious and sought a safer site for her nest. The writer described his part of the performance with apparent gusto, as if he had made a splendid contribution to science! If he must have a collection of hairy woodpecker’s eggs, why not take a single “clutch,” and then leave the bird to make her second deposit and rear her brood in peace?

To my mind, many “professionals” shoot a score of birds where they ought to shoot but one. The long record of slaughtered birds is sickening. The Newgate Calendar scarcely furnishes a parallel. Even our most scientific journals print many of these bloody annals. It is true, a reasonable number of specimens must be collected for scientific purposes, but surely no adequate excuse can be given for shooting hundreds of individuals of the same species merely to have the honor of saying that an astounding number of specimens were “taken.” If the cause of natural history cannot be promoted without destroying the humane instincts of the naturalist himself, the price is too great; it were better left unpaid. A bird in the bush is worth forty in the hand, especially if the forty are dead; worth more, too, I venture to add, to the cause of science itself.

XVI. THE SECRET OF APPRECIATION.

It is an open secret, and perhaps not a very profound one. I need not prolong the reader’s suspense, if mayhap he should feel any, by assuming a mysterious air, but may as well frankly divulge the secret at once. There are times when melodrama is sadly out of place—if, indeed, it is ever in place. What, then, is the secret of appreciation? It is simply being _en rapport_ with the object or truth to be appreciated. No more patent fact was ever declared than that which Saint Paul wrote: “Spiritual things are spiritually discerned.” There must be mental kinship, or there cannot be true valuation. Bring a depressed or distracted mind to the most exhilarating service, and you will miss its pith and point, and go away unrewarded.

The same truth obtains in our commerce with Nature, which, it would seem, will not brook a rival in our hearts if we would win from her all her treasured sweets. “Give me your whole mind, your whole attention,” she says, “or I will close up every fountain of refreshment.” What benefit will that man whose mind is absorbed in the affairs of the market derive from a woodland stroll? What secret will the rustling leaves speak to him, or the opening flowers, or the chirping birds? He sees no transit of swift wings, and the sunshine dapples the leaf-carpeted ground in vain for eyes that see only the ledger and day-book in the sylvan haunt.

My own experience confirms the foregoing statements. For several months one summer I felt depressed and abstracted on account of several untoward circumstances which need not be described, for “every heart knoweth its own bitterness.” In this mood I sometimes sauntered out to my woodland haunts; but I saw very little, and what I did see bore the stamp of triteness, and seemed as dull and languid as myself. My heart was otherwhere. A secret, gnawing grief draws the thoughts inward, and breaks the spell of the outer world, charm she never so sweetly. The soul hopelessly hungering for the unattainable comes almost to despise the blessings within its grasp. A-lack-a-day, that anything should ever come between the heart and its gentle mistress, Nature! And so it was that even the birds, my precious intimates, became a weariness both to the flesh and the spirit.

Master Chickadee was nothing but a lump of flesh covered with mezzo-tinted feathers, all prose, no poetry; a creature that I had once invested with a rare charm (in my own mind), but now only a lout of a bird, a buffoon, whose noisy chatter broke harshly into my gloomy meditations. Once I had fairly revelled in the army of kaleidoscopic warblers, and had called them to their faces all kinds of endearing names, like a lover wooing a bride; but now, in my dejected frame of mind, they were prosaic enough, and provokingly shy, and I felt too indifferent even to ogle them with my glass as they tilted in the tree-tops. What a humdrum life was the life of the birds, anyway, and how indescribably humdrum my semi-frequent beat in the woods was becoming!

But by and by, in the autumn, an event occurred that transformed my inner world, dispelling the darkness, dissipating the clouds, bathing all in sunshine. Then I hied to the fields and woods, and, behold, a metamorphosis! The inner miracle had wrought an outer wonder. Never was there “such mutual recognition vaguely sweet” between the autumn woods and my appreciative heart. The ground, flecked with sunshine, filtering through the browning leaves, became a work of mosaic fit for a king to tread on, and the westerly breeze sang a pæan through the branches. And how many birds there were! A flock of robins were chirping in the grove, now and then breaking into song, as if they had forgotten that spring was past and that it was unconventional for robin redbreast to sing in the autumn; but they seemed to be willing to make a breach of the _convenances_ to give me delight.

Numerous warblers chirped in the tree-tops, or swung out on the upbuoying air to catch some ill-fated insect on the wing; and although I could not identify many of them, I felt no annoyance, as I had at other times, for I could truly “rejoice with those that do rejoice,” because I had no sorrow of my own to distract my mind. I could have forgiven almost any trick a bird had seen fit to play me. The brown creeper, just from his haunt in some primeval forest of British America, went hitching up a tree-bole in his own quaint way without even the courtesy of a friendly how-d’-you-do; but I forgave the slight, and told him he was a poet,—there was rhythm in every movement, and his feathers rhymed each with its fellow.

Across the breezy hills to the river valley I made my way in lightsome mood, finding birds a-plenty wherever I went. More than once the song-sparrows broke into their autumnal twitter, aftermath of their springtime choruses when they were in full tone; and occasionally the Carolina wren uttered his stirring reveille, which, though perhaps not tuneful in itself, seemed tuneful to me that day, because there was music in my own mind. When you are in the right mood, even the distant caw of the crow or the plaintive cry of the blue jay sets the harp of your soul to melody; while the riotous piping of the cardinal grossbeak makes you feel as if you were “married to immortal verse.”

But, alas! when “loathed melancholy, of Cerberus and blackest midnight born,” is your unbidden companion, every overture of Nature is a burden, an intrusion into the privacy of your grief, and—

“Vainly morning spreads her lure Of a sky serene and pure.”

In a leaf-strewn arcade beneath the overarching bushes hard by the river, were the merry juncos, my companions of the winter, which had come back from their summer vacation in the north. How glad I was to salute them and welcome them home! Their trig little forms, sprightly motions, confident air of comradery, and merry trills were a joy to me. And then I could not help wondering if any of them might be the same birds I had met during the early summer on one of the green mountains of Canada, where I had spent a day of rapturous delight. In the same sequestered angle, autumn though it was, the phœbe bird brought back reminiscences of spring, with his cheery whistle; while farther down the valley his shy relative, the wood-pewee, complained dulcetly that winter was coming to drive him from his pleasant summer haunts. Every sound, whether joyful or sad, struck a responding chord in my heart, because Nature had my undivided thought.

When the mind is distracted by sorrows it cannot shake off, it boots little that the chirp of the chestnut-sided and cerulean warblers is sharp and penetrating; that the call of the black-throated green, black-throated blue and myrtle warblers is somewhat harsh; that the Maryland yellow-throat expresses his alarm or disapproval in a note still lower in the scale and quite rasping; that the Blackburnian and parula warblers tilt about far up in the tree-tops, as if they scorned the ground; that the black-throats and creepers dance airily about in the bushes or lower branches of the trees, come confidingly near you, a tiny interrogation point dangling from every eyelash, ask you what you are about, what you do when you are at home, whether you have just come from the hospital that you look so pale, and, having decided that you are a harmless monomaniac, to say the worst, go about their playful toil of capturing insects, apparently unmindful of your presence. But when your heart is jolly and full of nature love, all these simple facts, proving the large diversity of temperament in bird-land’s denizens, are a source of joy to you; you note them, are glad on account of them, though you scarcely know why.