Part 13

The worse the weather, the better we enjoyed the birds’ society; and the better, in general, they seemed to appreciate our efforts on their behalf. It was noticeable, however, that chickadees were with us comparatively little during high, cold winds. On the 18th of February, for example, we had a blizzard, with driving snow, the most inclement day of the winter. At seven o’clock, when I looked out, four downy woodpeckers were in the elm, all trying their best to eat, though the branches shook till it was hard work to hold on. They stayed much of the forenoon. At ten o’clock, when the storm showed signs of abating, though it was still wild enough, a chickadee made his appearance and whistled Phœbe again and again--“a long time,” my note says--in his cheeriest manner. Who can help loving a bird so courageous, “so frolic, stout, and self-possest”? Emerson did well to call him a “scrap of valor.” Yet I find from a later note that “there were nothing like the usual number of chickadees so long as the fury lasted.” Doubtless most of them stayed among the evergreens. It is an old saying of the chickadee’s, frequently quoted, “Be bold, be bold, but not too bold.” On the same day I saw a member of the household snowballing an English sparrow away from one branch, while a downy woodpecker continued to feed upon the next one. The woodpecker had got the right idea of things. Honest folk need not fear the constable.

WATCHING THE PROCESSION

It begins to go by my door about the first of March, and is three full months in passing. The participants are all in uniform, each after his kind, some in the brightest of colors, some in Quakerish grays and browns. They seem not to stand very strictly upon the order of their coming; red-coats and blue-coats travel side by side. Like the flowers, they have a calendar of their own, and in their own way are punctual, but their movements are not to be predicted with anything like mathematical nicety. Of some companies of them I am never certain which will precede the other, just as I can never tell whether, in a particular season, the anemone or the five-finger will come first into bloom. They need no bands of music, no drum-corps nor fifers. The whole procession, indeed, is itself a band of music, a grand army of singers and players on instruments. They sing many tunes; each uniform has a tune of its own, but, unlike what happens in military and masonic parades, there is never any jangling, no matter how near together the different bands may be marching.

As I said, the pageant lasts for three months. It is fortunate for me, perhaps, that it lasts no longer; for the truth is, I have grown so fond of watching it that I find it hard to attend to my daily work so long as the show continues. If I go inside for half a day, to read or to write, I am all the time thinking of what is going on outside. Who knows what I may be missing at this very minute? I keep by me a prospectus of the festival, a list of all who are expected to take part in it, and, like most watchers of such parades, I have my personal favorites for whom I am always on the lookout. One thing troubles me: there is never a year that I do not miss a good many (a bad many, I feel like saying) of those whose names appear in the announcements. Some of them, indeed, I have never seen. If they are really in the ranks, it must be that their numbers are very small; for the printed programme tells exactly how they will be dressed, and I am sure I should recognize them if they came within sight. Some of them, I fancy, do not keep their engagements.

I spoke, to begin with, of their passing my door. But I spoke figuratively. Some, it is true, do pass my door, and even tarry for a day or two under my windows, but to see others I have to go into the woods. Some I find only in deep, almost impenetrable swamps, dodging in and out among thick bushes and cat-tails. A good many follow the coast. I watch them running along the sea-beach on the edge of the surf, or walking sedately over muddy flats where I need rubber boots in which to follow them. Some are silent during the day, but as darkness comes on indulge in music and queer aerial dancing.

Many travel altogether by night, resting and feeding in the daytime. It is pleasant to stand out of doors in the evening, and hear them calling to each other overhead as they hasten northward; for at this time of the year, I have forgotten to say, they are always traveling in a northerly direction.

The procession, as such, has no definite terminus. It breaks up gradually by the dropping out of its members here and there. Each of them knows pretty well where he is going. This one, who came perhaps from Cuba, means to stop in Massachusetts; that one, after a winter in Central America, has in view a certain swamp or meadow, or, it may be, some mountain-top, in New Hampshire; another will not be at home till he reaches the furthermost coast of Labrador or the banks of the Saskatchewan. The prospectus of which I spoke, and of which every reader ought to have a copy, tells, in a general way, whither each company is bound, but the members of the same company often scatter themselves over several degrees of latitude.

Some of the companies move compactly, and are only two or three days, more or less, in passing a given point. You must be in the woods, for example, on the 12th or 13th of May, or you will miss them altogether. Others straggle along for a whole month. You begin to think, perhaps, that they mean to stay with you all summer, but some morning you wake up to the fact that the last one has gone.

It is curious how few people see this army of travelers. They pass by thousands and hundreds of thousands. More than a hundred different companies go through every town in Massachusetts between March 1 and June 1. They dress gayly--not a few of them seem to have borrowed Joseph’s coat--and are full of music, yet somehow their advent excites little remark. Perhaps it is because, for the most part, they flit from bush to bush and from tree to tree, here one and there one. If some year they should form in line, and move in close order along the public streets, what a stir they would excite! For a day or two the newspapers would be full of the sensation, and possibly the baseball reporters would be compelled for once to shorten their accounts of Battum’s “wonderful left-hand catch” and Ketchum’s “phenomenal slide to the second base.” It is just as well, I dare say, that nothing of this kind should ever happen, for it is hard to see how the great reading public could bear even the temporary loss of such interesting and instructive narratives.

Meantime, though the greater part of the people pay no heed to these “birds of passage,” some of us are never tired of watching them. I myself used to be fond of gazing at military and political parades. In my time I have seen a good many real soldiers and a good many make-believes. But as age comes on, I find myself, rightly or wrongly, caring less and less for such spectacles. It will never be so, I think, with the procession of which I am now writing. I have never watched it with more enthusiasm than this very year. It is only just over, but I am already beginning to count upon its autumnal return, and by the middle of August shall be looking every day for its advance couriers.

Till then I shall please myself with observing the ways of such of the host as have happened to drop out of the procession in my immediate neighborhood. One of them I can hear singing at this very moment. He and his wife spent the winter in Mexico, as well as I can determine, and have been back with us since the 11th of May. They have pitched their tent for the summer in the top of a tall elm directly in front of my door, and just now are much occupied with household cares. The little husband (Vireo gilvus he is called in the official programme, but I have heard him spoken of, not inappropriately, as the warbling vireo) takes upon himself his full share of the family drudgery, and it is very pretty indeed to see him sitting in the tent and singing at his work. He sets us all, as I think, an excellent example.

XXI

SOUTHWARD BOUND

While walking through a piece of pine wood, three or four days ago, I was delighted to put my eye unexpectedly upon a hummingbird’s nest. The fairy structure was placed squarely upon the upper surface of a naked, horizontal branch, and looked so fresh, trimmed outwardly with bits of gray lichen, that I felt sure it must have been built this year. But where now were the birds that built it, and the nestlings that were hatched in it? Who could tell? In imagination I saw the mother sitting upon the tiny, snow-white eggs, and then upon the two little ones--little ones, indeed, no bigger than bumble-bees at first. I saw her feeding them day by day, as they grew larger and larger, till at last the cradle was getting too narrow for them, and they were ready to make a trial of their wings. But where were they now? Not here, certainly. For a fortnight I had been passing down this path almost daily, and not once had I seen a hummingbird.

No, they are not here, and even as I write I seem to see the little family on their way to the far south. They are making the journey by easy stages, I hope--flitting from flower-bed to flower-bed, now in Connecticut, now in New Jersey, and so on through Pennsylvania and the Southern States. Will they cross the water to the West Indies, as some of their kind are said to do? or, less adventurous, will they keep straight on to some mountain-side in Costa Rica, or even in Brazil? I should be sorry to believe that the parent birds took their departure first, leaving the twin children to find their way after them as best they could--as those who have paid most attention to such matters assure us that many of our birds are in the habit of doing. But however they go, and wherever they end their long journey, may wind and weather be favorable, and old and young alike return, after the winter is over, to build other nests here in their native New England.

This passing of birds back and forth, a grand semi-annual tide, is to me a thing of wonder. I think of the millions of sandpipers and plovers which for two months (it is now late in September) have been pouring southward along the sea-coast. Some of them passed here on their way north no longer ago than the last days of May. They went far up toward the Arctic circle, but before the end of July they were back again, hastening to the equator. The golden plover, we are told, travels from Greenland to Patagonia.

All summer the golden warblers were singing within sound of my windows. As I walked I saw them flitting in and out of the roadside bushes, beautiful and delicate creatures. But before the first of September the last of them disappeared. I did not see them depart. They took wing in the night, and almost before I suspected it they were gone. They will winter in Central or South America, and, within a week of May-day, we shall have them here again, as much at home as if they had never left us.

They were gone before the first of September, I said. But I was thinking of those which had summered in Massachusetts. In point of fact, I saw a golden warbler only ten days ago. He was with a mixed flock of travelers, and, in all likelihood, had come from the extreme north; for this dainty, blue-eyed warbler is common in summer, not only throughout the greater part of the United States, but on the very shores of the Arctic Ocean. So he voyages back and forth, living his life from land to land, as Tennyson says, led by who knows what impulse?

“Sweet bird, thy bower is ever green, Thy sky is ever clear; Thou hast no sorrow in thy song, No winter in thy year.”

It is worth giving a little time daily to what is called ornithology to be able to greet such wanderers as they come and go. For some days now a few Western palm warblers have been paying us a visit, and, though the town has never commissioned me to that office, I have taken it upon myself to do them the honors. They have met me halfway, at least, as the everyday expression is; yielding readily to my enticements, and more than once coming near enough to show me their white lower eyelids, so that I might be quite sure of their identity. A little later the Eastern palm warbler will be due, and I hope to find him equally complaisant; for I wish to see his lower eyelid, also, which is yellow instead of white.

At this time of the year, indeed, there is no lack of such interesting and well-dressed strangers, no matter where we may go. The woods are alive with them by day, and the air by night. There are few evenings when you may not hear them calling overhead as they hasten southward. Men who have watched them through telescopes, pointed at the full moon, have calculated their height at one or two miles. One observer saw more than two hundred cross the moon’s disk in two hours. The greater part passed so swiftly as to make it impossible to say more than that they were birds; but others, flying at a greater altitude, and therefore traversing the field of vision less rapidly, were identified as blackbirds, rails, snipe, and ducks. Another observer plainly recognized swallows, warblers, goldfinches, and woodpeckers.

All over the northern hemisphere to-night, in America, Europe, and Asia, countless multitudes of these wayfarers will be coursing the regions of the upper air; and to-morrow, if we go out with our eyes open, we shall find, here and there, busy little flocks of stragglers that have stopped by the way to rest and feed: sparrows, snowbirds, kinglets, nuthatches, chickadees, thrushes, warblers, wrens, and what not, a few of them singing, and every one of them evidently in love with life, and full of happy expectations.

INDEX

Bittern:-- American, 68. least, 78.

Blackbird, red-winged, 86.

Bluebird, 44, 59, 83.

Bob White, 85.

Bobolink, 86.