A Watcher in The Woods

They are the first to return in the spring; the spring, rather, comes back with them. They are its wings. It could not come on any others. If it tried, say, the tanager's, would we believe and accept it? The bluebird is the only possible interpreter of those first dark signs of March; through him we have faith in the glint of the pussy-willows, in the half-thawed peep of the hylas, and in the northward flying of the geese. Except for his return, March would be the one month of all the twelve never looked at from the woods and waysides. He comes, else we should not know that the waters were falling, that a leaf could be plucked in all the bare, muddy world.

Our feelings for the bluebird are much mixed. His feathers are not the attraction. He is bright, but on the whole rather plainly dressed. Nor is it altogether his voice that draws us; the snowflakes could hardly melt into tones more mellow, nor flecks of the sky's April blue run into notes more limpid, yet the bluebird is no singer. The spell is in the spirit of the bird. He is the soul of this somber season, voicing its sadness and hope. What other bird can take his place and fill his mission in the heavy, hopeful days of March? We are in no mood for gaiety and show. Not until the morning stars quarrel together will the cat-bird or scarlet tanager herald the spring. The irreverent song of a cat-bird in the gray gloom of March would turn the spring back and draw the winter out of his uncovered grave. The bluebird comes and broods over this death and birth, until the old winter sleeps his long sleep, and the young spring wakes to her beautiful life.

Within my house is another very human little bird – the chimney-swallow. Sharing our very firesides as he does, he surely ought to have a warm place in our hearts; but where have I ever read one word expressing the affection for him that is universally shown the bluebird?

I am thinking of our American swallow. We all know how Gilbert White loved his chimney-swallows – how he loved every creature that flew or crawled about the rectory. Was it an ancient tortoise in the garden? the sheep upon the downs? a brood of birds in the chimney? No matter. Let the creatures manifest never so slight a friendliness for him, let them claim never so little of his protection, and the good rector's heart went out toward them as it might toward children of his own.

But the swallows were White's fondest care. He and his hirundines were inseparable. He thought of them, especially those of the chimney, as members of his household. One can detect almost a father's interest and joy in his notes upon these little birds. Listen to the parent in this bit about the young in Letter XVIII. They are just out of the chimney.

"They play about near the place where the dams are hawking for flies; and when a mouthful is collected, at a certain signal given, the dam and the nestling advance, rising toward each other, and meeting at an angle; the young one all the while uttering such a little quick note of gratitude and complacency that a person must have paid very little regard to the wonders of nature that has not often remarked this feat."

Has anything been written about our swift showing as faithful and sympathetic observation as that? No. He comes and goes without any one, like Gilbert White, being cheered by his twitter or interested in his doings. Perhaps it is because we have so many brighter, sweeter birds about us here; or perhaps our chimneys are higher than those of Selborne Rectory; or maybe we have no Gilbert White over here.

Of course we have no Gilbert White. We have not had time to produce one. The union of man and nature which yields the naturalist of Selborne is a process of time. Our soil and our sympathy are centuries savager than England's. We still look at our lands with the spirit of the ax; we are yet largely concerned with the contents of the gizzards of our birds. Shall the crows and cherry-birds be exterminated? the sparrows transported? the owls and hawks put behind bars? Not until the collectors at Washington pronounce upon these first questions can we hope for a naturalist who will find White's wonders in the chimney-swallow.

These little swifts are not as attractive as song-sparrows. They are sooty – worse than sooty sometimes; their clothes are too tight for them; and they are less musical than a small boy with "clappers." Nevertheless I could ill spare them from my family. They were the first birds I knew, my earliest home being so generous in its chimneys as to afford lodgings to several pairs of them. This summer they again share my fireside, squeaking, scratching, and thundering in the flue as they used to when, real goblins, they came scrambling down to peek and spy at me. I should miss them from the chimney as I should the song-sparrows from the meadow. They are above the grate, to be sure, while I am in front of it; but we live in the same house, and there is only a wall between us.

If the chimney would be a dark, dead hole without the swifts, how empty the summer sky would be were they not skimming, darting, wiggling across every bright hour of it! They are tireless fliers, feeding, bathing, love-making, and even gathering the twigs for their nests on the wing, never alighting, in fact, after leaving the chimney until they return to it. They rest while flying. Every now and then you will see them throw their wings up over their heads till the tips almost touch, and, in twos or threes, scale along to the time of their jolly, tuneless rattle.

From May to September, is there a happier sight than a flock of chimney-swallows, just before or just after a shower, whizzing about the tops of the corn or coursing over the river, like so many streaks of black lightning, ridding the atmosphere of its overcharge of gnats! They cut across the rainbow and shoot into the rose- and pearl-washed sky, and drop – into the depths of a soot-clogged chimney!

These swallows used to build in caves and in clean, hollow trees; now they nest only in chimneys. So far have they advanced in civilization since the landing of the Pilgrims!

Upon the beams in the top of the barn the brown-breasted, fork-tailed barn-swallows have made their mud nests for years. These birds are wholly domesticated. We cannot think of them as wild. And what a place in our affections they have won! If it is the bluebirds that bring the spring, the barn-swallows fetch the summer. They take us back to the farm. We smell the hay, we see the cracks and knot-holes of light cutting through the fragrant gloom of the mows, we hear the munching horses and the summer rain upon the shingles, every time a barn-swallow slips past us.

For grace of form and poetry of motion there is no rival for the barn-swallow. When on wing, where else, between the point of a beak and the tips of a tail, are there so many marvelous curves, such beautiful balance of parts? On the wing, I say. Upon his feet he is as awkward as the latest Herreshoff yacht upon the stays. But he is the yacht of the air. Every line of him is drawn for racing. The narrow, wide-reaching wings and the long, forked tail are the perfection of lightness, swiftness, and power. A master designed him – saved every possible feather's weight, bent from stem to stern, and rigged him to outsail the very winds.

From the barn to the orchard is no great journey; but it is the distance between two bird-lands. One must cross the Mississippi basin, the Rocky Mountains, or the Pacific Ocean to find a greater change in bird life than he finds in leaping the bars between the yard and the orchard.

A bent, rheumatic, hoary old orchard is nature's smile in the agony of her civilization. Men may level the forests, clear the land and fence it; but as long as they plant orchards, bird life, at least, will survive and prosper.

Except for the warblers, one acre of apple-trees is richer in the variety of its birds than ten acres of woods. In the three unkempt, decrepit orchards hereabout, I found the robin, chippy, orchard-oriole, cherry-bird, king-bird, crow-blackbird, bluebird, chebec, tree-swallow, flicker, downy woodpecker, screech-owl, yellow warbler, redstart, and great-crested flycatcher – all nesting as rightful heirs and proprietors. This is no small share of the glory of the whole bird world.

I ought not to name redstart as a regular occupant of the orchard. He belongs to the woods, and must be reckoned a visitor to the apple-trees, only an occasional builder, at best. The orchard is too open for him. He is an actor, and needs a leafy setting for his stage. In the woods, against a dense background of green, he can play butterfly with charming effect, can spread himself and flit about like an autumn leaf or some wandering bit of paradise life, with wings of the grove's richest orange light and its deepest shadow.

When, however, he has a fancy for the orchard, this dainty little warbler shows us what the wood-birds can do in the way of friendship and sociability.

Across the road, in an apple-tree whose branches overhang a kitchen roof, built a pair of redstarts. No one discovered the birds till the young came; then both parents were seen about the yard the whole day long. They were as much at home as the chickens, even more familiar. Having a leisure moment one day, when a bicycle was being cleaned beneath the tree, the inquisitive pair dropped down, the female actually lighting upon the handle-bar to see how the dusting was done. On another occasion she attempted to settle upon the baby swinging under the tree in a hammock; and again, when I caught one of her own babies in my hands, she came, bringing a worm, and, without the slightest fear of me, tried to feed it. Yet she was somewhat daunted by the trap in which her infant was struggling; she would fan my hands with her wings, then withdraw, not able to muster quite enough courage to settle upon them.

Neither of these birds ever showed alarm at the people of the house. In fact, I never saw a redstart who seemed to know that we humans ought to be dreaded. These birds are now as innocent of suspicion as when they came up to Adam to be named. On two occasions, during severe summer storms, they have fluttered at my windows for shelter, and dried their feathers, as any way-worn traveler might, in safety beneath my roof.

From the window one morning I saw Chebec, the least flycatcher, light upon the clothes-line. She teetered a moment, balancing her big head by her loosely jointed tail, then leaped lightly into the air, turned, – as only a flycatcher can, – and, diving close to the ground, gathered half the gray hairs of a dandelion into her beak, and darted off. I followed instantly, and soon found her nest in one of the orchard trees. It was not quite finished; and while the bird was gone for more of the dandelion down, I climbed up and seated myself within three feet of the nest.

Back came Mrs. Chebec with a swoop, but, on seeing me, halted short of the nest. I was motionless. Hopping cautiously toward the nest, she took an anxious look inside; finding nothing disturbed, she concluded that there was no evil in me, and so went on with her interesting work. It was a pretty sight. In a quiet, capable, womanly way she laid the lining in, making the nest, in her infinite mother-love, fit for eggs with shells of foam.

The chebec is a finished architect. Better builders are few indeed. The humming-bird is slower, more painstaking, and excels Chebec in outside finish. But Chebec's nest is so deep, so soft, so round and hollow! There is the loveliness of pure curve in its walls. And small wonder! She bends them about the beautiful mold of her own breast. Whenever she entered with the dandelion cotton, she went round and round these walls, before leaving, pressing them fondly with her chin close against her breast. She could not make them sufficiently safe nor half lovely enough for the white, fragile treasures to be cradled there.

Artists though they be, the chebecs, nevertheless, are very tiresome birds. They think that they can sing – a sad, sorry, maddening mistake. Mr. Chapman says the day that song was distributed among the birds the chebecs sat on a back seat. Would they had been out catching flies! In the chatter of the English sparrow, no matter how much I may resent his impudence and swagger, there is something so bright and lively that I never find him really tiresome. But the chebecs come back very early in spring, and sit around for days and days, catching flies, and jerking their heads and calling, Chebec! chebec! chebec! till you wish their heads would snap off.

In the tree next to the chebec's was a brood of robins. The crude nest was wedged carelessly into the lowest fork of the tree, so that the cats and roving boys could help themselves without trouble. The mother sputtered and worried and scolded without let-up, trying to make good her foolishness in fixing upon such a site by abundance of anxiety and noise.

The fussiest, least sensible mother among the birds is the robin. Any place for her nest but a safe one! The number of young robins annually sacrificed to pure parental carelessness is appalling. The female chooses the site for the home, and her ability for blundering upon unattractive and exposed locations amounts to genius. She insists upon building on the sand. Usually the rain descends, the floods come, the winds blow, and there is a fall.

Here is a pair building upon a pile of boards under a cherry-tree; another pair plaster their nest to the rider of an old worm-fence; while a third couple, abandoning the woods near by, plant theirs, against all remonstrance, upon the top of a step-ladder that the brickmakers use daily in their drying-sheds.

It was the superlative stupidity of this robin that saved her family. The workmen at first knocked her nest off to the ground. She had plenty of clay at hand, however, and began her nest again, following the ladder as it moved about the shed. Such amazing persistence won, of course. Out of wonder, finally, the men gave the ladder over to her and stood aside till her family affairs were attended to. Everything was right in time. After infinite scolding, she at last came off in triumph, with her brood of four.

A striking illustration of this growing alliance between us and the birds is the nest of the great-crested flycatcher in the orchard. Great-crest has almost become an orchard-bird. At heart he is, and ever will be, a bird of the wilds. He is not tame – does not want to be tame; he is bold, and the dangers and advantages of orchard life attract him. His moving into an apple orchard is no less a wonder than would be an Apache chief's settling in New York or Boston.

Most observers still count Great-crest among the wild and unreclaimed. Florence A. Merriam, speaking of his return in spring, says: "Not many days pass, however, before he is so taken up with domestic matters that his voice is rarely heard outside the woods"; and in Stearns's "Birds" I find: "It does not court the society of man, but prefers to keep aloof in the depths of the forest, where it leads a wild, shy, and solitary life." This is not Great-crest as I know him. I have found many of his nests, and never one in any but orchard trees. Riding along a country road lately, I heard Great-crest's call far ahead of me. I soon spied him on the wires of a telegraph-pole. Under him was a pear-tree, and a hundred yards away a farm-house. In the pear-tree I found his nest – snake-skins and all.

I disagree, too, with most descriptions of this bird's cry. The authors I have read seem never to have heard him on a quiet May morning across a fifty-acre field. His voice is "harsh and discordant" when sounded into one's very ears. The sweetest-toned organ would be discordant to one inside the instrument. Give the bird the room he demands, – wide, early-morning fields, – and listen. A single shout, almost human it seems, wild, weird, and penetrating, yet clear and smooth as the blast of a bugle. One can never forget it, nor resist it; for it thrills like a resurrection call – the last, long summons to the spring waking. This solitary note is often repeated, but is never so rapid nor so long drawn out as the call of the flicker.

Great-crest is a character, one of the most individual of all our birds. What other bird lines his nest with snake-skins? or hangs such gruesome things out for latch-strings? He has taken up his residence among us, but he has given us pretty plainly to understand that we need not call, else I mistake the hint in the scaly skin that dangles from his door. The strong personality of the bird is stamped even upon its eggs. Where are any to match them for curious, crazy coloring? The artist had purple inks, shading all the way from the deepest chestnut-purple to the faintest lilac. With a sharp pen he scratched the shell from end to end with all his colors till it was covered, then finished it off with a few wild flourishes and crosswise scrawls.

Like the birds of the orchards and buildings, the field-birds also are yielding to human influences. We can almost say that we have an order of farm-birds, so many species seem to have become entirely dependent upon the pasture and grain-field.

"Where did Bobolink disport himself before there were meadows in the North and rice-fields in the South? Was he the same lithe, merry-hearted beau then as now?" I do not know. But I do know that, in the thirty and three years since Mr. Burroughs asked the question, Bobolink has lost none of his nimbleness, nor forgotten one bubbling, tinkling note of his song. Yet in his autumn journey South, from the day he reaches the ripe reeds of the Jersey marshes till he is lost in the wide rice-lands of Georgia, his passage is through a ceaseless, pitiless storm of lead. Dare he return to us in spring? and can he ever sing again? He will come if May comes – forgetting and forgiving, dressed in as gay a suit as ever, and just as full of song.

There is no marvel of nature's making equal to the miracle of her temper toward man. How gladly she yields to his masterful dominion! How sufferingly she waits for him to grow out of his spoiled, vicious childhood. The spirit of the bobolink ought to exorcise the savage out of us. It ought, and it does – slowly.

We are trying, for instance, to cow the savage in us by law, to restrain it while the birds are breeding; but we hardly succeed yet. The mating season is scarcely over, the young not yet grown, when the gunners about me go into the fields with their dogs and locate every covey of quail, even counting the number of birds in each. With the dawn of the first day of open season they are out, going from flock to flock, killing, till the last possible bird is in their bloody bags.

One of the most pathetic of all the wordless cries of the out-of-doors is the covey-call of the female quail at night, trying to gather the scattered flock together after the dogs are called off and the hunters have gone home.

It was nearly dark one December afternoon, the snow ankle-deep and falling swiftly, when, crossing a wide field, I heard this call from a piece of sprout-land ahead of me. Kneeling in the snow, I answered the whistle. Instantly came a reply. Back and forth we signaled till there was a whir of wings, and down in the soft snow within a few feet of me dropped the lonely, frightened quail. She was the only one left of a covey that the night before had roosted unbroken, snugly wedged, with their tails together, under a pile of brush.

Sharing the fields with the quails are the meadow-larks. They scale along the grass, rarely rising higher than the cedars, flapping rapidly for a short distance, then sailing a little in a cautious, breath-held manner, as though wings were a new invention and just a trifle dangerous yet. On they go to a fence-stake, and land with many congratulatory flirts of wings and tail. Has anybody observed the feat? They look around. Yes; here I sit, – a man on a fence across the field, – and the lark turns toward me and calls out: "Did you see me?"

He would be the best-bred, most elegant of our birds, were it not for his self-consciousness. He is consumed with it. There is too much gold and jet on his breast. But, in spite of all this, the plain, rich back and wings, the slender legs, the long, delicate beak, the erect carriage, the important air, the sleek, refined appearance, compel us to put him down an aristocrat.

In a closely cropped pasture near the house, in early June, I found the eggs of the night-hawk. There was no nest, of course: the eggs lay upon the grass, and, for safety, had been left directly under the fence. The cows might not step on them here, but nothing prevented their crushing the fragile things with their noses.

Lengthwise, upon one of the rails, slept the mother. She zigzagged off at my approach, dazzled and uncertain in the white light of the noon, making no outcry nor stopping an instant to watch the fate of her eggs. She acted like a huge bat, slinking and dodging, out of her element in the light, and anxious to be hid. She did not seem like a creature that had a voice, and the way she flew would make one think that she did not know the use of her wings. But what a circus flier she is at night! and with what an uncanny noise she haunts the twilight! She has made more hair stand on end, with her earthward plunge and its unearthly boom through the dusk, than all the owls together. It is a ghostly joke. And who would believe in the daylight that this limp, ragged lump, dozing upon the fence or the kitchen roof, could play the spook so cleverly in the dark?

III

On the 25th of April, before the trees were in leaf, I heard the first true wood-note of the spring. It came from the tall oaks beyond the garden. "Clear, clear, clear up!" it rang, pure, untamed, and quickening. The solitary vireo! It was his whistle, inimitable, unmistakable; and though I had not seen him since last July, I hurried out to the woods, sure he would greet me.

Solitary is the largest, rarest, tamest, and sweetest-voiced of the vireos. I soon found him high in the tops of the trees; but I wanted him nearer. He would not descend. So I chased him, stoning and mocking him even, till, at last, he came down to the bushes and showed me his big blue head, white eye-rings, wing-bars, and yellow-washed sides.

He did more than show himself: he sang for me. Within ten feet of me, he began a quiet little warble of a tenderness and contentment I never heard before. Such variety of notes, such sweetness of melody, such easy, unconscious rendering! It was a love-song, but sung all to himself, for he knew that there was no gentle heart to listen this side of Virginia. He sang to his own happy heart as pure and sweet a song as the very angels know.

Solitary disappeared from that day. I concluded he had gone to heavier, wilder woods to nest. It was late in June that, passing through this brush-land, I saw hanging from an oak sapling, just above my head, a soft, yellowish basket. It was a vireo's nest; but it was too large, too downy, too yellow for Red-eye. There were no bunches of white spider-webs upon it, such as Red-eye hangs all over his nest. I stepped aside for a better view, and had just caught the glint of a large, white-ringed eye peering over the nest's edge at me, when, off in the woods behind me, the noon hush was startled by Solitary's whistle – a round, pure, pearly note that broke the quiet as pearly teeth break through the smile of a beautiful face. He soon appeared, coming on, a tree at a time, looking and asking, in no hurry and in no alarm. When he reached the pine overhead, his mate left the nest to confer with him. They scolded me mildly while I climbed for a look at the four delicately spotted eggs; but as soon as I lay down upon the ground, the mother, without fuss or fear, slipped into the nest and cuddled down over the eggs till her head hardly showed above the rim. Had a few bushes been removed I could have seen the nest from my front door.

Why do the wood-birds so persistently build their nests along the paths and roads? I said that even the hermit-thrush prefers a wood with a road through it. If he possibly can he will build along that road. And what one of the birds will not? Is it mere stupidity? Is it curiosity to see what goes on? Is there some safety here from enemies worse than boys and cats and dogs? Or is it that these birds take this chance for human fellowship? If this last is the reason for their rejecting the deep tangles for limbs that overhang roads and tufts of grass in constantly traveled foot-paths, then they can be pardoned; otherwise they are foolish – fatally foolish.