Part 8

Using my home for a center, you may describe a circle of a quarter-mile radius and all the way round find that radius intersecting either a house, a dooryard, or an orchard. Yet within this small and settled area I found one summer thirty-six species of birds nesting. Can any cabin in the Adirondacks open its window to more voices--any square mile of solid, unhacked forest on the globe show richer, gayer variety of bird life?

The nightingale, the dodo, and the ivorybill were not among these thirty-six. What then? If one can live on an electric-car line, inside the borders of a fine city, have his church across the road, his blacksmith on the corner, his neighbors within easy call, and, with all this, have any thirty-six species of birds nesting within ear-shot, ought he to ache for the Archæopteryx, or rail at civilization as a destroyer?

There is nothing remarkable about this bit of country. I could plant myself at the center of such a circle anywhere for miles around and find just as many birds. Perhaps the land is more rocky and hilly, the woods thicker, the gardens smaller here than is common elsewhere in eastern Massachusetts; otherwise, aside from a gem of a pond, this is a very ordinary New England "corner."

On the west side of my yard lies a cultivated field, beyond which stands an ancient apple orchard; on the east the yard is hedged by a tract of sprout-land which is watched over by a few large pines; at the north, behind the house and garden, runs a wall of chestnut and oak, which ten years ago would have been cut but for some fortunate legal complication. Such is the character of the whole neighborhood. Patches of wood and swamp, pastures, orchards, and gardens, cut in every direction by roads and paths, and crossed by one tiny stream--this is the circle of the thirty-six.

Not one of these nests is beyond a stone's throw from a house. Seven of them, indeed, are in houses or barns, or in boxes placed about the dooryards; sixteen of them are in orchard trees; and the others are distributed along the roads, over the fields, and in the woods.

Among the nearest of these feathered neighbors is a pair of bluebirds with a nest in one of the bird-boxes in the yard. The bluebirds are still untamed, building, as I have often found, in the wildest spots of the woods; but seen about the house, there is something so reserved, so gentle and refined in their voice and manner as to shed an atmosphere of good breeding about the whole yard. What a contrast they are to the English sparrows! What a rebuke to city manners!

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.