Chapter XVIII: A Bird Anthology from Lowell 242 (6)

Although the young birds have the whole world for their larder, with victuals just to their taste constantly at their elbow, they must learn even the art of eating, and, until they do so, they demand that their parents be their caterers. For several weeks after they have passed the first term of school-life, they will still sit on a limb, open their mouths, twinkle their wings, and allow their patient victuallers to thrust morsel after morsel down their throats. My opinion is that the patience of their parents wears out after a time, and they leave the overgrown youngster to paddle for himself. How proud he must be of the exploit when he catches his first insect and successfully stows it away in his maw! In a deep, quiet glen I watched a family of young phœbes and their parents catching insects on the wing. It was amusing. The old birds evidently felt that it was about time for their pupils to learn to provide their own victuals, but the youngsters stoutly demanded that their luncheons be brought them in the accustomed manner. They must have noticed that the old birds would occasionally catch an insect and dispose of it themselves. Once when the parent bird darted out for a small cabbage butterfly, a young fellow swooped down at her with such force that she let the insect squirm out of her bill and flutter to the ground, and thus make good its escape before she could recover it. Both birds lost their dinner through the greed and rashness of the little gourmand. Another time an old bird caught a yellow butterfly, dashed to a limb, and quickly gulped it down, wings and all, before any of the presumptuous high-schoolers could reach him. The bearing of the bird was most laughable. Finally, several of the young birds darted out into the air for passing insects, proving that they were taking lessons in that fine art; but their gymnastics were far from perfect, and they hit the mark scarcely half the time.

With most young birds music is a part of their high-school curriculum. Perhaps you have thought that they learn their lessons in vocal music without special instruction, but this is not always the case. Observation proves that the old birds have them under tutelage, setting them lyrical copies, which they are expected to learn by frequent rehearsal. I have myself observed such a performance in the case of the wood-pewee, as described in the chapter on “Midsummer Melodies.” First attempts are crude and awkward, although the tones may be very fine. It requires frequent drill to bring the vocal organs under perfect control, just as is the case with human singers. If you have listened to the squeaking, chattering, twittering medley of young song-sparrows, you have realized how much practice is necessary before the would-be vocalists will be able to execute the wonderful trills of which they are master when they graduate from the musical conservatory.

I must tell you of a little bird high-school class over which I once assumed charge. It consisted of three wood-thrushes, two bluebirds, and a brown thrasher, all of which were taken from the nest before they were ready to fly, and confined in a large wire cage. Very soon they learned to take food from my hand. But in many things that are essential to bird life and bird weal they had no tutors and no drill-masters, and therefore had to learn them as best they could. Yet it was surprising how soon they gained proficiency. Without a single copy from adult birds, all of them were able to fly about from perch to perch in a few days. It was not more than a week before they began to pick in an awkward way, but after more than five weeks they would still open their mouths and take food from the hand. The mechanical act of eating was something they had to learn by slow degrees. While they could readily pick up a tidbit, it seemed to be a difficult task to get it back far enough into the mouth to swallow it. This was especially true of the thrasher, whose bill was long. How he would toss a morsel about, pinch it, fling it away, catch it up again, and pound it against a perch, before he could work it back into his capacious throat!

They were amusing pets, those feathered pupils of mine. From them I have gained an insight into bird character which could have been gained in no other way. The difficulty in observing birds in the wild state is, you cannot study them at close range, and hence cannot watch their development from day to day. None the less interesting were my little pupils because they had to depend on their own wits and learn their lessons without a pedagogue. How did they learn to bathe without being shown how! They learned it, that is sure; and they went through the exercise precisely as birds do in the wildwood. They would leap into the bath-dish, duck their heads into the water, flutter their wings and tails until thoroughly rinsed, and then fly up to a perch to preen their bedrenched plumage. But they made some mirth-provoking blunders. One day a wood-thrush got astride of the rim of his bath-tub, one leg outside and the other inside, and in that interesting position tried to take his ablution. He looked exceedingly droll, and seemingly could not understand why he did not succeed better. Another time the thrasher remained outside of the bath-dish, and thrust his head over the rim into the water, squatting on the sand and twinkling his pinions. But the time came when all the birds discovered of their own accord that the proper way was to leap right into the lavatory.

How early in life do juvenile birds begin to sing? That is a question, I venture to say, that very few students of bird life would be able to answer. It may be difficult to believe—if my own ears had not heard, I should be very skeptical of the accuracy of the assertion—but my wood-thrushes had not been in my care more than three or four weeks before one of them began to twitter a little song. He could not have been much more than five weeks old. This is all the more remarkable when it is remembered that there were no adult thrushes within a half-mile of the house. He seemed to discover that he had a voice, and thought he might as well use it.

Ah, yes, and sad to relate, my high-school pupils soon learned to quarrel, and that without the example of their elders. When I threw a billsome morsel on the floor of the cage, several of them would make a dive for it, and soon get into a wrangle. “It’s mine! it’s mine!” each would proclaim by his greedy behavior. Then perhaps two would seize it, and tug at it like boys fighting for an apple. Or if one contrived to get it first, the rest would try to wrench it from his beak, and thus they would pursue one another about in a wild chase. The thrasher, being younger than his fellows, was for a time cheated out of every choice morsel he secured; but he finally learned to help himself and swallow his victuals instanter. Two of the thrushes, probably males, seemed to have a mutual grudge. They would pursue each other until the fugitive would turn and stand at bay, snapping his mandibles in a savage manner, as if they were worked by steel springs. I regret being compelled to publish these pugnacious tendencies in my beloved pets; but I prefer giving a realistic rather than a fictitious or roseate sketch of the school-days of these pupils in plumes.

IV.
BIRD WORK.

“Life is real, life is earnest,” might be just as truly said of “our little brothers of the air” as of us, their big brothers of the soil. If you think that their whole career consists of nothing but play and song and bounding joy, you have seen very little of the bird life around you. For the mother bird, at least, the whole period of nesting, sometimes extending over several months, is a time of drudgery, anxiety, and, far too often, of disappointed hopes. I have heard a bird mother’s wail that went like iron into my soul, and told me all too plainly that it had come from a bereft and broken heart. When we remember how many tragedies occur in the feathered community, we scarcely care about singing, “I wish I were a little bird.” Had you witnessed the unutterable agony of a pair of yellow-breasted chats one spring, when their four pretty bairns were stolen by some heartless buccaneer, you would have thanked the Pleiades, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, and all your other lucky stars, that you were a man or woman and not a bird.

“Oh! it would be so pleasant to fly and tilt in the air, to dash from twig to twig, to make long aerial voyages to foreign countries!” Do I hear you say that? Wait a moment. Have you ever thought that even the long, bounding flight of the swallows and swifts, accomplished apparently without effort, may sometimes become a weariness to the flesh, especially when insects are scarce and their maws empty? Then, those long nocturnal journeys that birds make during the migrating season may often tax their strength to the utmost. Indeed, if you will listen to their feeble chirping, as they sweep overhead through the darkness, you will often detect a note of fatigue running through it, as much as to say, “Ah, I wish we were at our journey’s end!” No, bird life is not all roseate. It has its humdrum and drudgery, its wear and tear, its prose as well as its poetry, its hard realism as well as its romance.

One of the tasks of bird life is the building of nests. It is true, the birds always do this work with a zest that makes it seem half play; but, after spending a day in gathering material and weaving it into the nest, scarcely taking time to stop for meals, I have no doubt the little toilers are ready to retire when bedtime comes. Have you ever watched these little artists constructing their nests? They first lay the foundation, which is usually made of rather coarse material, and is more or less loosely woven; and then they proceed to build the superstructure. Some birds, like the robin and the bluebird, will have their mouths full of material every time they come to the nest; while others, such as the dainty warblers, will return with a single fibre. Usually the bird leaps into the cup of the nest, and deftly weaves in the new material with its bill; and then shifts around with a quivering motion of body and wings, to give the structure proper shape and size. The nest must be made to fit the body of the bird like a glove, so that she may rest easily in it during the long period of incubation. The robin and the wood-thrush bring mud and clay; this they mix, no doubt, with their own saliva, which gives it its viscid character. The dainty, blue-gray gnat-catcher collects lichens of various kinds, with which she decorates the high walls of her compact little cottage. Does this tiny artist sometimes build nests just for fun or æsthetic effect? I watched the building of two nests one spring that were never used. With what a graceful touch the feathered dots laid the lichen bricks in the walls!

The hatching of the eggs must be a severe tax on the patience of the mother bird, for the principal part of this work devolves upon her. Sitting hour by hour upon the nest, looking out upon the wide spaces of air waiting to be conquered by her active wings; with nothing except hope to feed her mind; with not even a book or a newspaper to read,—well, here is a chance to let patience have her perfect work. Then think of her uneasiness at the approach of every foe. It is work; it is not mere idleness. As for her lord, it may seem only like holiday sport to sit in the tree-top and sing all the livelong day, to beguile the weary hours of his sitting mate. But perhaps it often takes on the hue of work, too, when singing becomes a duty. Small wonder, if the choralist’s vocal chords often become jaded and sore, while there may be danger of bringing on throat or lung trouble. Besides, he must often carry a dainty morsel to his spouse when he would much prefer to eat it himself. Then, he must take his turn on the nest while his partner goes off for a “constitutional” to get the stiffness out of her joints, or gathers a relay of food and preens her ruffled plumes.

One of the most unpleasant tasks of the time of incubation and brood rearing is the warding off of enemies. And they are numerous. No feathered parents can feel sure that they shall be able to tide their little family safely over this perilous period. Have you ever seen the plucky wood-pewee engaging in a contest with that highwayman in feathers, the blue jay? How he dashes at the bloodthirsty villain, snapping his mandibles viciously at every onset, and sometimes pecking a feather from his enemy’s back! Nor will he give up the battle until the jay steals off with a hangdog expression on his face. The little warbling vireo is no less game when the jay comes too near his precincts.

One day in spring I was witness to a curious incident. A red-headed woodpecker had been flying several times in and out of a hole in a tree where he (or she) had a nest. At length, when he remained within the cavity for some minutes, I stepped to the tree and rapped on the trunk with my cane. The bird bolted like a small cannon-ball from the orifice, wheeled around the tree with a swiftness that the eye could scarcely follow, and then dashed up the lane to an orchard a short distance away. But he had only leaped out of the frying-pan into the fire. In the orchard he had unconsciously got too near a king-bird’s nest. The king-bird swooped toward him, and alighted on his back. The next moment the two birds, the king-bird on the woodpecker’s back, went racing across the meadow like a streak of zigzag lightning, making a clatter that frightened every echo from its hiding-place. That gamy flycatcher actually clung to the woodpecker’s back until he reached the other end of the meadow. I cannot be sure, but he seemed to be holding to the woodpecker’s dorsal feathers with his bill. Then, bantam fellow that he was, he dashed back to the orchard with a loud chippering of exultation. “Ah, ha!” he flung across to the blushing woodpecker; “stay away the next time, if you don’t fancy being converted into a beast of burden!”

A large part of a bird’s toil, after there are children in the nest, consists in providing victuals for them. For this purpose the whole country around must be scoured, and sometimes long journeys must be made. I have watched a kingfisher flying again and again from a winding creek in the valley to her nest on a hillside nearly a half-mile distant, with a minnow in her bill, while the sun was pouring a sweltering deluge upon the fields. It kept her busy every moment to supply the imperious demands of her hungry brood in the bank. A common field-bird, which I watched one day for a long while, would often return to her nest every minute with an insect. Many, many times have I obeyed Lowell’s injunction,—

“Come up and feel what health there is
In the frank Dawn’s delighted eyes,
As, bending with a pitying kiss,
The night-shed tears of Earth she dries.”

But even at that early hour the feathered toilers have always been ahead of the human wage-workers in beginning the labors of the day. The nestlings must have a twilight breakfast; and then, in the evening, as long as the gloaming lasts, they noisily demand just one more mouthful for supper.

Young birds are ravenous feeders. They seem to live to eat, and have no thought of eating to live. For an hour and a half, one August day, I kept watch of a nestful of bantlings, and during that time the parent birds were so shy that they fed their infants only twice. At last the little things became fairly desperate for food, springing up in the nest and opening their mouths with pitiful cries every time the breeze stirred the bushes about them. They were so famished that I hurried away lest they should go to preying on one another, for they would sometimes greedily seize one another by the bills or heads, and try to gobble one another down. Incidents like this prove that the old birds must be on the jump every moment to procure a sufficient supply of food for their young. Even after they have left the nest, the juvenile members of the family must be fed for several weeks. As long as mamma and papa will get their luncheons for them, they will make little effort to help themselves. I have seen the dainty little accentor feeding a great, overgrown mossback of a cow-bunting, which had to “juke” down to her like a giant to a dwarf to receive the morsel she offered him. What a drudgery it must have been to collect victuals enough to fill his capacious maw! Think of a toil-worn, care-fretted little mother feeding a strapping boy that will not work!

Moreover, adult birds often are kept busy for hours supplying their own craving for food. One April day a hooded warbler, natty little beau, near an old gravel-bank in the woods, was watched by me for an hour and a half. During that time he must have caught an insect almost every minute, and sometimes no sooner had he gulped down one than he made a swift dash for another. Had he not been so very, very handsome, I should have dubbed him a gourmand.

At certain seasons of the year what an active life the red-headed woodpeckers are compelled to lead, in order to satisfy the demands of their stomachs! With intervals of scarcely more than a few seconds, they bound out from a perch, seize an insect on the wing, and wheel back again. For hours this half work, half frolic is kept up. By the way, almost all birds sometimes engage in this flycatcher game of taking their prey on the wing. The Baltimore orioles, the bluebirds, the yellow-bellied woodpeckers, the crested tits, the chippies, the indigo-birds, and even the white-breasted nuthatches and English sparrows, to say nothing of many species of warblers, catch insects in this way.

Many birds have to “scratch for a living,” and that in a literal sense. There is the towhee bunting, for example. Instead of getting down on his breast, however, like the hen or the partridge, he stretches himself up on his legs as if they were stilts, and then bobs up and down in an amusing fashion, while he scatters leaves and dirt to side and rear. I do not know whether the robins scratch or not, but they often jerk the leaves from the ground with their bills, and hurl them away with a half-disdainful air. Several young wood-thrushes kept in a cage removed obstructions in the same way.

Even the merry bobolink, the Beau Brummel of our meadows and clover-fields, cannot spend every day

“Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony;”

for the time comes when he must do the work of a staid husband and father, and help to take care of the growing brood. With all his pirouetting in the air, he carries in his bosom an anxious heart, as you will quickly see if you go too near his snuggery in the grass. The wild scramble in which birds of all kinds often have to engage, in order to secure a refractory insect, proves that there is ample room for the play of their best energies. Thus we see that the birds have plenty to do besides rollicking, singing, enjoying gala-days, and taking excursions to gay watering-places. Like their human brothers and sisters, they must toil patiently on “through the every-dayness of this work-day world.” They, too, may have their literature—unwritten, however—on the “dignity of labor.”

V.
BIRD PLAY.

How strange it is that animals never laugh! If you watch a group of monkeys playing their antics, you will find their faces as sedate as a judge’s, save, perhaps, a merry twinkle of the eye. Comical as their gambols are, one would think they would break into convulsions of merriment. True, animals have various ways of giving vent to their exuberant feelings, but this is done very slightly by means of facial expression. Their risibles must be meagrely developed. What has been said in regard to animals in general is also true of birds, whose eyes often twinkle and are intensely expressive, but whose countenances proper reveal very little of the emotion swelling in their breasts.

Yet by the movements of their bodies you can easily read their feelings. You can tell at a glance by the conduct of a bird whether or not it is alarmed at your presence, or whether it is engaged in a frolic or in watching a wily foe. How different is the behavior of most birds in the breeding-season, with a nest near at hand, from their demeanor at other times! Look at that brown thrasher perched in a tree-top on a spring morning, singing his pæan to the surrounding woodland, and notice how fearless he appears. Contrast his manners two months later when he goes skulking through the tanglewood, afraid to be seen. Conceal their secret as they may, an expert student of birds can almost always tell if there is a nest in the neighborhood.

It is, therefore, by their conduct rather than by their facial expression that birds reveal their love of play. That they do have their frolics, no one can doubt. Much of their time is occupied in labor, and that often of the most serious, if not arduous, kind, and they frequently combine toil and play; but there are times when they seem to give themselves up to unmixed sportiveness. There is not much system in their games, so far as I have observed. They mostly engage in frolics of a rough-and-tumble kind, for the pure love of the fun, and perhaps with no thought of winning a prize.

It is possible, however, that the company of red-headed woodpeckers I watched one day in the woods were having a genuine flying-race. One tree was selected as a point of departure, from which they would start and fly around in a wide circle,—perhaps their race-track,—always returning to the same tree with loud chattering, which sounded like shouts of applause. This exercise they kept up for hours, always starting from the same tree and describing nearly the same circle. If it was not a contest of speed, I am at a loss to know what it was.

The woodpeckers, especially the youngsters, have another game that has a decidedly human flavor; it is the game of bo-peep among the trunks and branches of trees. A red-head will shy off from his companions, conceal himself somewhere behind a tree-trunk, and then peep from his hiding-place in an exquisitely comical way, until he is espied by some sharp-eyed fellow-frolicker. A vigorous chase will follow, as pursuer and pursued dash wildly away among the trees. Sometimes, when the fugitive is too hotly pursued, he will stop and keep his companion at bay by presenting his long, spearlike bill as a sort of bayonet.

Another tree-climber is the brown creeper. I have described many of his pranks in the first chapter of this volume. One November day I witnessed a performance that beats the record. Two creepers were hitching up the trunks of the trees in their characteristic manner, when one of them suddenly dropped straight down about fifteen feet, scarcely more than an inch from the trunk of the tree; then, instead of alighting, he darted straight up again the same distance, fluttered a moment uncertainly on the wing, and then dropped again to the foot of the tree, where he alighted, and resumed his upward march. But that was not all. Presently his companion, not to be outdone, began to whirl around and around the tree, descending in a spiral course until he reached the foot. There he tarried a moment to take breath, and then, much to my surprise, whirled himself up in the same way, a distance of perhaps twenty feet, accomplishing it in four or five revolutions. But, as if to distance all creepers’ pranks ever witnessed before, he descended again in the same spiral course. These performances can be interpreted only as ways in which to give vent to the spirit of frolic in the creeper nature.

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.

In a quiet retreat just beyond a steep-graded railway-track the black-throated green warblers were very abundant and unusually rollicksome. It was strange how they could dash about in the thorn-trees without impaling themselves on the terrible spears. One little fellow swung out of a tree after a miller, which dropped upon a fence-post near by. Why did the natty bird act so queerly? He danced about on the top of the post, tried to pick up something, but was baffled in all his efforts; then he scudded around the post a few inches below the top like a nuthatch, uttering his harsh little chirp. At length I stepped up, determined to solve the enigma. There was the solution; the miller had wriggled into a deep hole in the post, so that the bird could not reach it. With a slender stick I drew it out of its hiding-place, and placed it on the top of the post; but whether the bird ever went back and profited by my well-meant helpfulness I do not know. Begging the poor miller’s pardon, I felt happy in befriending the charming fairy of a bird. With gladness throbbing in every corpuscle, it was not in my place to question Nature’s economy in making the sacrifice of one life necessary to the sustenance of another.

Tramping on, I presently found myself in a marsh stretching back from the river-bank. As I stood in the tangle of tall grass and weeds, listening to the songs and twitters of various birds, the sentiment, if not the precise lines, of Lowell, came to mind like a draught of invigorating air,—

“Dear marshes! vain to him the gift of sight
Who cannot in their various incomes share,
From every season drawn, of shade and light,
Who sees in them but levels brown and bare.
Each change of storm or sunshine scatters free
On them its largess of variety,
For Nature with cheap means still works her wonders rare.”