Chapter 9

Thinking over the matter, I began to ask myself--though I hesitate about making such a confession--whether it might not be the adult males who thus unseasonably went off to bed in a crowd, leaving their mates to care for eggs and little ones. At this very moment, as it happened, I was watching with lively sympathy the incessant activities of a female humming-bird, who appeared to be bringing up a family (two very hungry nestlings), with no husband to lift a finger for her assistance; and the sight, as I fear, put me into a cynical mood. Male robins were probably like males in general,--lovers of clubs and shirkers of home duties. Indeed, a friend who went into the roost with me, one evening, remarked upon the continual cackling in the treetops as "a very social sound;" and upon my saying something about a sewing circle, he answered, quite seriously, "No, it is rather like a gentleman's club." But it would have been unscientific, as well as unchristian, to entertain an hypothesis like this without putting its soundness to some kind of test. I adopted the only plan that occurred to me,--short of rising at half past two o'clock in the morning to see the birds disperse. I entered the wood just before the assemblage was due (this was on the 9th of July), and took a sheltered position on the eastern edge, where, as the robins flew by me, or alighted temporarily in the trees just across the brook, they would have the sunlight upon their breasts. Here, as often as one came sufficiently near and in a sufficiently favorable light, I noted whether it was an adult, or a streaked, spotted bird of the present season. As a matter of course, the number concerning which this point could be positively determined under such conditions was very small,--only fifty-seven altogether. Of these, forty-nine were surely birds of the present summer, and only eight unmistakable adult males. If any adult females came in, they passed among the unidentified and uncounted.[16] I was glad I had made the test. As a kind-hearted cynic (I confess to being nothing worse than this), I was relieved to find my misanthropic, or, to speak more exactly, my misornithic, notions ill founded. As for the sprinkling of adult males, they may have been, as a "friend and fellow woodlander" suggests, birds which, for one reason or another, had taken up with the detestable opinion that "marriage is a failure."

[16] A week later, my correspondent reported a similar state of things at the Belmont roost. "A very large proportion of the birds are spotted-breasted young of the year, but occasionally I have detected an adult male." He examined the birds at near range, and at rest, after they had come into the roost in the earlier part of the evening.

During the month of July, 1890, I made frequent counts of the entries at the eastern end of the roost, thinking thus to ascertain in a general way the rate at which its population increased. On the whole, the growth proved to be fairly steady, in spite of some mysterious fluctuations, as will be seen by the following table:--

July 3 247 " 5 383 " 6 356 " 10 765 " 12 970 " 14 1120 " 16 1064 " 17 1333 " 19 1584 " 22 1520 " 23 1453 " 27 2314

After July 6th all the enumerations were made with the help of another man, though we stood side by side, and covered no more ground than I had hitherto attempted to compass alone. The figures of the 27th were far in excess of any obtained in 1889, and for a day I was disposed to take seriously the suggestion of a friend that some other roost must have been broken up and its members turned into the Melrose gathering. But on the evening of the 28th I tried a count by myself, and made only 1517 birds! The conditions were favorable, and the robins came, as they had come the night before, in flocks, almost in continuous streams. The figures had fallen off, not because there were fewer birds, but because I was unable to count them. They were literally too many for me. The difficulties of the work, it should be explained, are greatly enhanced by the fact that at the very corner where the influx is largest none of the low-flying birds can be seen except for a second or two, as they dart across a bit of sky between the roost and an outlying wood. To secure anything like a complete census, this point must be watched continuously; and meantime birds are streaming in at the other corner and shooting over the distracted enumerator's head, and perhaps dropping out of the sky. I conclude, therefore, not that the roost had increased in population, but that my last year's reckoning was even more inadequate than I then supposed. Even with two pairs of eyes, it is inevitable that multitudes of birds should pass in unnoticed, especially during the latter half of the flight. I have never had an assistant or a looker-on to whom this was not perfectly apparent.

As I stood night after night watching the robins stream into this little wood,--no better, surely, than many they had passed on their way,--I asked myself again and again what could be the motive that drew them together. The flocking of birds for a long journey, or in the winter season, is less mysterious. In times of danger and distress there is no doubt a feeling of safety in a crowd. But robins cannot be afraid of the dark. Why, then, should not each sleep upon its own feeding grounds, alone, or with a few neighbors for company, instead of flying two or three miles, more or less, twice a day, simply for the sake of passing the night in a general roost?

Such questions we must perhaps be content to ask without expecting an answer. By nature the robin is strongly gregarious, and though his present mode of existence does not permit him to live during the summer in close communities,--as marsh wrens do, for example, and some of our swallows,--his ancestral passion for society still asserts itself at nightfall. Ten or twelve years ago, when I was bird-gazing in Boston, there were sometimes a hundred robins at once about the Common and Garden, in the time of the vernal migration. By day they were scattered over the lawns; but at sunset they gathered habitually in two or three contiguous trees, not far from the Frog Pond and the Beacon Street Mall (I wonder whether the same trees are still in use for the same purpose), where, after much noise and some singing, they retired to rest,--if going to sleep in a leafless treetop can be called retiring.

Whatever the origin and reason of this roosting habit, I have no doubt that it is universal. Middlesex County birds cannot be in any respect peculiar. Whoever will keep a close eye upon the robins in his neighborhood, in July and August, will find them at sunset flocking to some general sleeping-place.

It would be interesting to know how far they travel at such times. The fact that so many hundreds were to be seen at a point more than a mile away from the Belmont roost is significant; but I am not aware that any one has yet made a study of this part of the subject. My own birds seemed to come, as a rule, by easy stages. In the long narrow valley east of the roost, where I oftenest watched their approach, they followed habitually--not invariably--a zigzag route, crossing the meadow diagonally, and for the most part alighting for a little upon a certain wooded hill, whence they took a final flight to their nightly haven, perhaps a quarter of a mile beyond. Farther down the valley, a mile or more from the roost, birds were to be seen flying toward it, but I found no place at which a general movement could be observed and large numbers counted.

As to the size of these nightly gatherings, it seems wisest not to guess; though, treating the subject in this narrative manner, I have not scrupled to mention, simply as a part of the story, some of my temporary surmises. What I am told of the Belmont wood is true also of the one in Melrose: its shape and situation are such as to make an accurate census impossible, no matter how many "enumerators" might be employed. It could be surrounded easily enough, but it would be out of the question to divide the space among the different men so that no two of them should count the same birds. At present it can only be said that the robins are numbered by thousands; in some cases, perhaps, by tens of thousands.

THE PASSING OF THE BIRDS.

"The Bird of Time has but a little way To flutter--and the Bird is on the Wing." OMAR KHAYYAM.

By the first of August the bird-lover's year is already on the wane. In the chestnut grove, where a month ago the wood thrush, the rose-breasted grosbeak, and the scarlet tanager were singing, the loiterer now hears nothing but the wood pewee's pensive whistle and the sharp monotony of the red-eyed vireo. The thrasher is silent in the berry pasture, and the bobolink in the meadow. The season of jollity is over. Orioles, to be sure, after a month of silence, again have fits of merry fifing. The field sparrow and the song sparrow are still in tune, and the meadow lark whistles, though rarely. Catbirds still practice their feeble improvisations and mimicries in the thickets along the brooksides as evening comes on, and of the multitudes of robins a few are certain to be heard warbling before the day is over. Goldfinches have grown suddenly numerous, or so it seems, and not infrequently one of them breaks out in musical canary-like twitterings. On moonlight evenings the tremulous, haunting cry of the screech-owl comes to your ears, always from far away, and if you walk through the chestnut grove aforesaid in the daytime you may chance to catch his faint, vibratory, tree-frog whistle. For myself, I never enter the grove without glancing into the dry top of a certain tall tree, to see whether the little rascal is sitting in his open door. More than half the time he is there, and always with his eye on me. What an air he has!--like a judge on the bench! If I were half as wise as he looks, these essays of mine would never more be dull. For his and all other late summer music let us be thankful; but it is true, nevertheless, that the year is waning. How short it has been! Only the other day the concert opened, and already the performers are uneasy to be gone. They have crowded so much into so brief a space! The passion of a life-time into the quarter of a year! They are impatient to be gone, I say; but who knows how many of them are gone already? Where are the blue golden-winged warblers that sang daily on the edge of the wood opposite my windows, so that I listened to them at my work? I have heard nothing of their rough _dsee, dsee_ since the 21st of June, and in all that time have seen them but once--a single bird, a youngling of the present year, stumbled upon by accident while pushing my way through a troublesome thicket on the first day of August. Who knows, I say, how many such summer friends have already left us? An odd coincidence, however, warns me at this very moment that too much is not to be made of merely negative experiences; for even while I was penciling the foregoing sentence about the blue golden-wing there came through the open window the hoarse upward-sliding chant of his close neighbor, the prairie warbler. I have not heard that sound before since the 6th of July, and it is now the 22d of August. The singers had not gone, I knew; I saw several of them (and beautiful creatures they are!) a few days ago among the pitch pines; but why did that fellow, after being dumb for six or seven weeks, pipe up at that precise moment, as if to punctuate my ruminations with an interrogation point? Does he like this dog-day morning, with its alternate shower and sunshine, and its constant stickiness and heat? In any case I was glad to hear him, though I cannot in the spirit of veracity call him a good singer. Whist! There goes an oriole, a gorgeous creature, flashing from one elm to another, and piping in his happiest manner as he flies. It might be the middle of May, to judge from his behavior. _He_ likes dog-day weather, there can be no question of that, however the rest of the world may grumble.

This is a time when one sees many birds, but few species. Bluebirds are several times as abundant as in June. The air is sweet with their calls at this moment, and once in a while some father of the flock lets his happiness run over in song. One cannot go far now without finding the road full of chipping sparrows, springing up in their pretty, characteristic way, and letting the breeze catch them. The fences and wayside apple-trees are lively with kingbirds and phoebes. I am already watching the former with a kind of mournful interest. In ten days, or some such matter, we shall have seen the last of their saucy antics. Gay tyrants! They are among the first birds of whom I can confidently say, "They are gone;" and they seem as wide-awake when they go as when they come. Being a man, I regret their departure; but if I were a crow, I think I should be for observing the 31st of August as a day of annual jubilee.

A few years ago, in September, I saw the white-breasted swallows congregated in the Ipswich dunes,--a sight never to be forgotten. On the morning of the 9th, the fourth day of our visit, a considerable flock--but no more, perhaps, than we had been seeing daily--came skimming over the marshes and settled upon a sand-bar in the river, darkening it in patches. At eight o'clock, when we took the straggling road out of the hills, a good many--there might be a thousand, I guessed--sat, upon the fence wires, as if resting. We walked inland, and on our return, at noon, found, as my notes of the day express it, "an innumerable host, thousands upon thousands," about the landward side of the dunes. Fences and haycocks were covered. Multitudes were on the ground,--in the bed of the road, about the bare spots in the marsh, and on the gray faces of the hills. Other multitudes were in the bushes and low trees, literally loading them. Every few minutes a detachment would rise into the air like a cloud, and anon settle down again. As we stood gazing at the spectacle, my companion began chirping at a youngster who sat near him on a post, as one might chirp to a caged canary. The effect was magical. The bird at once started toward him, others followed, and in a few seconds hundreds were flying about our heads. Round and round they went, almost within reach, like a cloud of gnats. "Stop! stop!" cried my companion; "I am getting dizzy." We stopped our squeakings, and the cloud lifted; but I can see it yet. Day after day the great concourse remained about the hills, till on the 13th we came away and left them. The old lighthouse keeper told me that this was their annual rendezvous. He once saw them circle for a long time above the dunes, for several hours, if I remember right, till, as it seemed, all stragglers had been called in from the beach, the marsh, and the outlying grassy hills. Then they mounted into the sky in a great spiral till they passed out of sight; and for that year there were no more swallows. This, he insisted, took place in the afternoon, "from three to four o'clock." He was unquestionably telling a straightforward story of what he himself had seen, but his memory may have been at fault; for I find it to be the settled opinion of those who ought to know, that swallows migrate by day and not by night, while the setting out of a great flock late in the afternoon at such a height would seem to indicate a nocturnal journey. Morning or evening, I would give something to witness so imposing a start.

The recollection of this seaside gathering raises anew in my mind the question why, if swallows and swifts migrate exclusively in the daytime, we so rarely see anything of them on the passage. Our Ipswich birds were all tree swallows,--white-breasted martins,--and might fairly be supposed to have come together from a comparatively limited extent of country. But beside tree swallows there are purple martins, barn swallows, sand martins, cliff swallows, and chimney swifts, all of which breed to the northward of us in incalculable numbers. All of them go south between the middle of July and the first of October. But who in New England has ever seen any grand army of them actually on the wing? Do they straggle along so loosely as to escape particular notice? If so, what mean congregations like that in the Ipswich dunes? Or are their grand concerted flights taken at such an altitude as to be invisible?

On several afternoons of last September, this time in an inland country, I observed what might fairly be called a steady stream of tree swallows flying south. Twice, while gazing up at the loose procession, I suddenly became aware of a close bunch of birds at a prodigious height, barely visible, circling about in a way to put a count out of the question, but evidently some hundreds in number. On both occasions the flock vanished almost immediately, and, as I believed, by soaring out of sight. The second time I meant to assure myself upon this point, but my attention was distracted by the sudden appearance of several large hawks within the field of my glass, and when I looked again for the swallows they were nowhere to be seen. Were the stragglers which I had for some time been watching, flying high, but well within easy ken, and these dense, hardly discernible clusters--hirundine nebulae, as it were--were all these but parts of one innumerable host, the main body of which was passing far above me altogether unseen? The conjecture was one to gratify the imagination. It pleased me even to think that it _might_ be true. But it was only a conjecture, and meantime another question presented itself.

When this daily procession had been noticed for two or three afternoons, it came to me as something remarkable that I saw it always in the same place, or rather on the same north and south line, while no matter where else I walked, east or west, not a swallow was visible. Had I stumbled upon a regular route of swallow migration? It looked so, surely; but I made little account of the matter till a month afterward, when, in exactly the same place, I observed robins and bluebirds following the same course. The robins were seen October 26th, in four flocks, succeeding each other at intervals of a few minutes, and numbering in all about 130 birds. They flew directly south, at a moderate height, and were almost certainly detachments of one body. The bluebird movement was two days later, at about the same hour, the morning being cold, with a little snow falling. This time, too, as it happened, the flock was in four detachments. Three of these were too compact to be counted as they passed; the fourth and largest one was in looser order and contained a little more than a hundred individuals. In all, as well as I could guess, there might have been about three hundred birds. They kept a straight course southward, flying high, and with the usual calls, which, in autumn at least, always have to my ears a sound of farewell. Was it a mere coincidence that these swallows, bluebirds, and robins were all crossing the valley just at this point?

This question, too, I count it safer to ask than to answer, but all observers, I am sure, must have remarked so much as this,--that birds, even on their migrations, are subject to strong local preferences. An ornithologist of the highest repute assures me that his own experience has convinced him so strongly of this fact that if he shoots a rare migrant in a certain spot he makes it a rule to visit the place again a year afterward on the same day, and, if possible, at the same hour of the day. Another friend sends me a very pretty story bearing upon the same point. The bird of which he speaks, Wilson's black-cap warbler, is one of the less common of our regular Massachusetts migrants. I count myself fortunate if I see two or three specimens during its spring or autumn passage. My correspondent shall tell the story for himself.

"While I was making the drawings for the 'Silva,' at the old Dwight house, I was in the habit of taking a turn every pleasant day in the gardens after my scanty lunch. On the 18th of May, 1887, in my daily round I saw a Wilson's black-cap for the first time in my life. He was in a bush of _Spiraea media_, which grew in the midst of the rockery, and allowed me to examine him at near range with no appearance of fear. Naturally I made a note of the occurrence in my diary, and talked about it with my family when I got home. The seeing of a new bird always makes a red-letter day.

"The next spring, as I was looking over my notebook of the previous year, I came upon my entry of May 18th, and thought I would be on the lookout for a black-cap on that date. Several times during the morning I thought of the matter, and after my lunch I sauntered into the rockery just as I had done the year before. Imagine my start when there, in the very same bush, was the black-cap peering at me; and I found on looking at my watch that it was precisely the same hour,--half past one! I rubbed my eyes and pinched myself to make sure it was not a dream. No, it was all real. Of course, I thought the coincidence very singular, and talked about it, not only with my family, but also with other people. You must remember that I had never seen the bird elsewhere.

"Well, another spring came round. The 18th of May was fixed in my mind, and I thought many times of my black-cap (I called it _my_ black-cap now), and wondered if it would keep tryst again. On the morning of the 18th, the first thing I thought of when I awoke was my black-cap. That forenoon I actually felt nervous as the time approached, for I felt a sort of certainty (you smile) that I should see my bird again. My lunch was hastier than usual, and I was about to sally forth when it flashed across me--'Suppose the bird should be there again, who would believe my story? Hold! I will have a witness.' I called to Mr. J----, who was at work upstairs, and after explaining what I wanted, invited him to accompany me. We cautiously entered the rockery, and within a few minutes there flitted from a neighboring thicket into that very Spiraea bush my black-cap! I took out my watch. It was just half past one!"

My own experiences in this kind have been much less striking and dramatic than the foregoing, but I may add that a few years ago I witnessed the vernal migration in a new piece of country--ten miles or so from my old field--and found myself at a very considerable disadvantage. I had never realized till then how much accustomed I had grown to look for particular birds in particular places, and not in other places of a quite similar character.

I speak of witnessing a migration; but what we see for the most part (ducks and geese being excepted) is not the actual movement northward or southward. We see the stragglers, more or less numerous, that happen to have dropped out of the procession in our immediate neighborhood,--a flock of sandpipers about the edge of the pond, some sparrows by the roadside, a bevy of warblers in the wood,--and from these signs we infer the passing of the host.