Part 12

This was in the spring of 1888. In May of the next year, if all went well, we would see the show again. So we said to each other; but a veteran ornithologist remarked that we should probably be a good many years older before we had another such piece of good fortune.

It is a fact familiar to all naturalists, however, that when you have once found a new plant, or a new bird, or a new nest, the experience is likely to be soon repeated. You may have spent a dozen years in a vain search, but now, for some reason, the difficult has all at once become easy, and almost before you can believe your eyes the rarity has grown to be a drug in the market. Something like this proved to be true of the bittern’s boom.

On the afternoon of the 2d of May, 1889, I went to one of my favorite resorts, a large cat-tail swamp surrounded by woods. My particular errand was to see whether the least bittern had arrived,--a much smaller, and in this part of the country, at least, a much less common bird than his relative of whose vocal accomplishments I am here treating.

I threw myself down upon the cliff overhanging the edge of the swamp, to listen for the desired coo-coo-coo-coo, and had barely made myself comfortable when I heard the plum-pudd’n’ of the bittern himself, proceeding, as it seemed, from the reeds directly at my feet. Further listening satisfied me that the fellow was not far from the end of a rocky peninsula which juts into the swamp just at this point.

I slipped down the cliff as quietly as possible, picked my way across the narrow neck leading to the main peninsula, and by keeping behind rocks and trees managed to reach the very tip without disturbing the bird. Here I posted myself among the thick trees, and awaited a repetition of the boom. It was not long in coming, and plainly proceeded from a bunch of flags just across a little stretch of clear water.

I looked and looked, while the bittern continued to pump at rather protracted intervals; but I could see nothing whatever, till presto! there the creature stood in plain sight.

Whether he had moved into view, or had all the time been visible, I cannot tell. He soon pumped again, and then again, for perhaps six times. Then he stalked away out of sight, and I heard nothing more. He was much nearer than last year’s bird had been, but was still a pumper, not a stake-driver, and his action was in all respects the same as I had before witnessed.

There had been no bittern in this swamp the season previous, nor did any breed here this summer. I visited the place too often for him to have escaped my notice, had he been present. This bird, then, was a migrant, and his booming was of interest as showing that the bittern, like the song-birds, does not wait to get into summer quarters before beginning to rehearse his love music.

Two days after this my companion of the year before went with me again to Wayland, and, not to prolong a long story, we sat again upon the railway and watched a bittern pump for more than an hour. This time, to be sure, he was partially concealed by the grass, besides being farther away than we could have wished.

It was curious, and illustrated strikingly the utility of the bird’s habit of standing motionless, that my friend, who is certainly as sharp-eyed an observer as I have ever known, was once more completely taken in. As luck would have it, I caught sight of the bird first, and when I pointed him out to the other man he replied, “Why, of course I saw that, but it never occurred to me but that it was a stake.”

We returned from this excursion fairly well convinced that in the early part of the season, while the grass is still short, one may hope to see a bittern pump almost any day, if he will go to a suitable meadow which has a railroad running through it. The track answers a double purpose: it gives the observer an outlook, such as cannot be obtained from a boat, and furthermore, the birds are quite unsuspicious of things on the track, while the presence of a man in the grass or on the river would almost inevitably attract their attention.

XVIII

BIRDS FOR EVERYBODY

Some birds belong exclusively to specialists. They are so rare, or their manner of life is so seclusive, that people in general can never be expected to know them except from books. The latest list of the birds of Massachusetts includes about three hundred and fifty species and sub-species. Of these, seventy-five or more are so foreign to this part of the country as to have appeared here only by accident, while many others are so excessively rare that no individual observer can count upon seeing them, however close a lookout he may keep. Other species are present in goodly numbers, but only in certain portions of the State; and still others, though generally distributed and fairly numerous, live habitually in almost impenetrable swamps or in deep forests, and of necessity are seen only by those who make it their business to look for them.

It is something for which busy men and women may well be thankful, therefore, that so many of the most pleasing, or otherwise interesting, of all our birds are among those which may be called birds for everybody. Such are the robin, the bluebird, the Baltimore oriole,--or golden robin,--the blue jay, the crow, and the chickadee. Of all these we may say that they are common; they come in every one’s way, and, what is still more to the point, they cannot be mistaken for anything else. Others are equally common, and are easily enough seen, but their identity is not so much a matter of course.

The song sparrow, for example, is abundant in Massachusetts from the middle of March to the end of October. Outside of the forest it is almost ubiquitous; it sings beautifully and with the utmost freedom; it ought, one would say, to be universally known. But it is a sparrow, not the sparrow. In other words, it is only one of many, and so, common as it is, and freely as it sings (it is to be heard in every garden and by every roadside in the latter half of March, when few other birds are in tune), it passes unrecognized by the generality of people. They read in books of song sparrows, chipping sparrows, field sparrows, tree sparrows, swamp sparrows, vesper sparrows, white-throated sparrows, fox sparrows, yellow-winged sparrows, savanna sparrows, and the like, and when they see any little mottled brown bird, they say, “Oh, it’s a sparrow,” and seek to know nothing more.

The family of warblers--among the loveliest of all birds--are in a still worse case, and much the same may be said of swallows and blackbirds, thrushes and vireos. The number of species and their perplexing similarity, which are such an attraction to the student, prove an effectual bar to those who have time and money for newspapers and novels, but can spare neither for a manual of local ornithology.

I have named six birds which every one knows, or may know, but of course I do not mean that these are all. Why should not everybody know the goldfinch--a small, stout-billed, bright yellow, canary-like bird, with black wings and tail and a black cap? And the flicker--or golden-winged woodpecker--a little larger than the robin, with gold-lined wings, a black crescent on the breast, a red patch on the back of the head, and a white rump, conspicuous as the bird takes wing? The hummingbird, too--our only one; I should say that everybody ought to recognize it, only that I have found some who confuse it with sphinx moths, and will hardly believe me when I tell them of their mistake. The cedar-bird, likewise, known also as the cherry-bird and the waxwing, is a bird by itself; remarkably trim and sleek, its upper parts of a peculiarly warm cinnamon brown, its lower parts yellowish, its tail tipped handsomely with yellow, its head marked with black and adorned with a truly magnificent topknot; as great a lover of cherries as any schoolboy, and one of the first birds upon which the youthful taxidermist tries his hand. Just now--in early March--the waxwings are hereabout in great flocks (I saw more than a hundred, surely, three days ago), stuffing themselves, literally, with savin berries. These large flocks will after a while disappear, and some time later, in May, smaller companies will arrive from the South and settle with us for the summer, helping themselves to our cherries in return for the swarms of insects of whose presence they have relieved us. If we see them thus engaged, we shall do well to remember the Scripture text, “The laborer is worthy of his hire.”

This enumeration of birds, so strongly marked that even a wayfaring man may easily name them, might be extended indefinitely. It would be a strange Massachusetts boy who did not know the ruffed grouse (though he would probably call him the partridge) and the Bob White; the kingbird, with his black and white plumage, his aerial tumblings, and his dashing pursuit of the crow; the splendid scarlet tanager, fiery red, with black tail and wings; the bobolink; the red-winged blackbird, whose watery conkaree is so welcome a sound about the meadows in March; the slate-colored snowbird; the indigo-bird, small, deep blue throughout, and with a thick bill; the butcher-bird, a constant though not numerous winter visitor, sometimes flying against windows in which canaries are hung, as one did at our house only this winter--these surely may be known by any who will take even slight pains to form their acquaintance. And, beside these, there are two birds whom everybody does know, but whom I forgot to include with the six first mentioned,--the catbird and the brown thrasher, two overgrown, long-tailed wrens, near relatives of the mockingbird, both of them great singers in their way, and one of them--the catbird--decidedly familiar and a fairly good mimic.

XIX

WINTER PENSIONERS

Our northern winter is a lean time, ornithologically, though it brings us some choice birds of its own, and is not without many alleviations. When the redpolls come in crowds and the white-winged crossbills in good numbers, both of which things happened last year, the world is not half so bad with us as it might be. Still, winter is winter, a season to be tided over rather than doted upon, and anything which helps to make the time pass agreeably is matter for thankfulness. So I am asked to write something about the habit we are in at our house of feeding birds in cold weather, and thus keeping them under the windows. Really we have done nothing peculiar, nor has our success been beyond that of many of our neighbors; but such as it is, the work has given us much enjoyment, and the readers of “Bird-Lore” are welcome to the story.

Our method is to put out pieces of raw suet, mostly the trimmings of beefsteak. These we attach to branches of trees and to the veranda trellis, taking pains, of course, to have them beyond the cat’s reach (that the birds may feed safely), and at the same time well disposed for our own convenience as spectators. For myself, in addition, I generally nail pieces of the bait upon one or two of the outer sills of my study windows. I like, as I sit reading or writing, to hear now and then a nuthatch or a chickadee hammering just outside the pane. Often I rise to have a look at the visitor. There is nothing but the glass between us, and I can stand near enough to see his beady eyes, and, so to speak, the expression of his face. Sometimes two birds are there at once, one waiting for the other. Sometimes they have a bit of a set-to. Then, certainly, they are not without facial expression.

Once in a while, in severe weather, I have sprinkled crumbs (sweet or fatty crumbs are best--say bits of doughnut) on the inside ledge, and then, with the window raised a few inches, have awaited callers. If the weather is bad enough they are not long in coming. A chickadee alights on the outer sill, notices the open window, scolds a little (the thing looks like a trap--at all events it is something new, and birds are conservative), catches sight of the crumbs (well, now, that’s another story), ceases his dee, dee, dee, and the next minute hops inside.

The crumbs prove to be appetizing, and by the time he has swallowed a few of them he seems to forget how he came in, and instead of backing out, as a reasonable being like a chickadee might be expected to do, he flies to another light of the bay window. Then, lest he should injure himself, I must get up and catch him and show him to the door. By the time I have done this two or three times within half an hour, I begin to find it an interruption to other work, and put down the window. White-breasted nuthatches and downies come often to the outer sill, but only the chickadees ever venture inside.

These three are our daily pensioners. If they are all in the tree together, as they very often are, they take precedence at the larder according to their size. No nuthatch presumes to hurry a woodpecker, and no chickadee ever thinks of disturbing a nuthatch. He may fret audibly, calling the other fellow greedy, for aught I know, and asking him if he wants the earth; but he maintains a respectful distance. Birds, like wild things in general, have a natural reverence for size and weight.

The chickadees are much the most numerous with us, but taking the year together, the woodpeckers are the most constant. My notes record them as present in the middle of October, 1899, and now, in the middle of October, 1900, they are still in daily attendance. Perhaps there were a few weeks of midsummer when they stayed away, but I think not. One pair built a nest somewhere in the neighborhood and depended on us largely for supplies, much to their convenience and our pleasure. As soon as the red-capped young ones were able to fly, the parents brought them to the tree and fed them with the suet (it was a wonder how much of it they could eat), till they were old enough to help themselves. And they act, old and young alike, as if they owned the place. If a grocer’s wagon happens to stop under the tree they wax indignant, and remain so till it drives away. Even the black cat, Satan, has come to acknowledge their rights in the case, and no longer so much as thinks of them as possible game.

I have spoken, I see, as if these three species were all; but, not to mention the blue jays, whose continual visits are rather ineffectively frowned upon (they carry off too much at once), we had last winter, for all the latter half of it, a pair of red-bellied nuthatches. They dined with us daily (pretty creatures they are), and stayed so late in the spring that I began to hope the handy food-supply would induce them to tarry for the summer. They were mates, I think. At any rate, they preferred to eat from the same bit of fat, one on each side, in great contrast with all the rest of our company. Frequently, too, a brown creeper would be seen hitching up the trunk or over the larger limbs. He likes pleasant society, though he has little to say, and perhaps found scraps of suet in the crevices of the bark, where the chickadees, who are given to this kind of providence, may have packed it in store. Somewhat less frequently a goldcrest would come with the others, fluttering amid the branches like a sprite. One bird draws another, especially in hard times. And so it happened that our tree, or rather trees,--an elm and a maple,--were something like an aviary the whole winter through. It was worth more than all the trouble which the experiment cost us to lie in bed before sunrise, with the mercury below zero, and hear a chickadee just outside singing as sweetly as any thrush could sing in June. If he had been trying to thank us, he could not have done it more gracefully.