Part 5

Let my young readers make his acquaintance on their own account, if they have not already done so, and find him a livelier creature than I have described him, if they can.

THE BUTCHER-BIRD

“Butcher-bird” is not a very pretty name, but it is expressive and appropriate, and so is likely to stick quite as long as the more bookish word “shrike,” which is the bird’s other title. It comes from its owner’s habit of impaling the carcasses of its prey upon thorns, as a butcher hangs upon a hook the body of a pig or other animal that he has slaughtered.

In a place like the Public Garden of Boston, if a shrike happens to make it his hunting-ground for a week or two, you may find here and there in the hawthorn-trees the body of a mouse or the headless trunk of an English sparrow spitted upon a thorn. Grasshoppers are said to be treated in a similar manner, but I have never met with the bird’s work in the grasshopper season.

The shrike commonly seen in the Northern States is a native of the far north, and comes down to our latitude only in cold weather. He travels singly, and if he finds a place to suit him, a place where the living is good, he will often remain almost in the same spot for weeks together.

In size and appearance he resembles the mockingbird. His colors are gray, black, and white, his tail is long, and his bill is hooked like a hawk’s.

He likes a perch from which he can see a good distance about him. A telegraph wire answers his purpose very well, but his commonest seat is the very tip of a tallish tree. If you look across a field in winter and descry a medium-sized bird swaying on the topmost twig of a lonesome tree, balancing himself by continual tiltings of his long tail, you may set him down as most likely a butcher-bird.

His flight is generally not far from the ground, but as he draws near the tree in which he means to alight, he turns suddenly upward. It would be surprising to see him alight on one of the lower branches, or anywhere, indeed, except at the topmost point.

Small birds are all at once scarce and silent when the shrike appears. Sometimes in his hunger he will attack a bird heavier than himself. I had once stopped to look at a flicker in a roadside apple-tree, when I suddenly noticed a butcher-bird not far off. At the same moment, as it seemed, the butcher-bird caught sight of the flicker, and made a swoop toward him. The flicker, somewhat to my surprise, showed no sign of panic, or even of fear. He simply moved aside, as much as to say, “Oh, stop that! Don’t bother me!” How the affair would have resulted, I cannot tell. To my regret, the shrike at that moment seemed to become aware of a man’s presence, and flew away, leaving the woodpecker to pursue his exploration of the apple-tree at his leisure.

The shrike has a very curious habit of singing, or of trying to sing, in the disjointed manner of a catbird. I have many times heard him thus engaged, and can bear witness that some of his tones are really musical. Some people have supposed that at such times he is trying to decoy small birds, but to me the performance has always seemed like music, or an attempt at music, rather than strategy.

Southern readers may be presumed to be familiar with another shrike, known as the loggerhead. As I have seen him in Florida he is a very tame, unsuspicious creature, nesting in the shade-trees of towns. The “French mockingbird,” a planter told me he was called. Mr. Chapman has seen one fly fifty yards to catch a grasshopper which, to all appearance, he had sighted before quitting his perch. The power of flight is not the only point as to which birds have the advantage of human beings.

THE SCARLET TANAGER

When I began to learn the birds, I was living in a large city. One of the first things I did, after buying a book, was to visit a cabinet of mounted specimens--“stuffed birds,” as we often call them. Such a wonderful and confusing variety as there was to my ignorant eyes! Among them I remarked especially a gorgeous scarlet creature with black wings and a black tail. It was labeled the scarlet tanager. So far as I was concerned, it could not have looked more foreign if it had come from Borneo. My book told me that it was common in Massachusetts. It might be, I thought, but I had never seen it there. And a bird so splendid as that! Bright enough to set the woods on fire! How could I have missed it?

1. Male. 2. Female]

Well, there came a Saturday, with its half-holiday for clerks, and I went into the country, where I betook myself to the woods of my native village, the woods wherein I had rambled all the years of my boyhood. And that afternoon, before I came out of them, I put my opera-glass on two of those wonderful scarlet and black birds. It was a day to be remembered.

Since that time, of course, I have seen many like them. In one sense, their beauty has become to me an old story; but I hope that I have set here and there a reader on a hunt that has been as happily rewarded as mine was on that bright summer afternoon. In one respect, the beginner has a great advantage over an old hand. He has the pleasure of more excitement and surprise.

The bird to be looked for is a little longer than a bluebird, of a superb scarlet color except for its wings and tail, which, as I have said, are jet black. I speak of the male in full spring costume. His mate does not show so much as a red feather, but is greenish yellow, or yellowish green, with dark--not black--wings and tail.

You may see the tanager once in a while in the neighborhood of your house, if the grounds are set with shade-trees, but for the most part he lives in woods, especially in hard woods of a fairly old growth.

One of the first things for you to do, with him as with all birds, is to acquaint yourself with his call-notes and his song. The call is of two syllables, and sounds like chip-chirr. It is easily remembered after you have once seen the bird in the act of uttering it. The song is much in the manner of the robin’s, but less smooth and flowing. I have often thought, and sometimes said, that it is just such a song as the robin might give us if he were afflicted with what people call a “hoarse cold.” The bird sings as if his whole heart were engaged, but at the same time in a noticeably broken and short-winded style.

The oftener you hear him, the easier you will find it to distinguish him from a robin, although at first you may find yourself badly at a loss. A boy that can tell any one of twenty playmates by the tones of his voice alone will need nothing but practice and attention to do the same for a great part of the sixty or seventy kinds of common birds living in the woods and fields about him.

The tanager’s nest is built in a tree, on the flat of a level branch, so to speak, generally toward the end. Sometimes, at any rate, it is a surprisingly loose, carelessly constructed thing, through the bottom of which one can see the blue or bluish eggs while standing on the ground underneath.

It must be plain to any one that the mother bird, in her dull greenish dress, is much less easily seen, and therefore much less in danger, as she sits brooding, than she would be if she wore the flaming scarlet feathers that render her mate so handsome.

Southern readers will know also another kind of tanager, not red and black, but red all over. He, too, is a great beauty, although if the question were left to me, I could not give him the palm over his more northern relative. The red of the southern bird is of a different shade--“rose-red” or “vermilion,” the books call it. He sings like the scarlet tanager, but in a smoother voice. Although he is a red bird, he is not to be confounded with the southern red-bird. The latter, better known as the cardinal grosbeak, is a thick-billed bird of the sparrow and finch family. He is frequently seen in cages, and is a royal whistler.

The scarlet tanager--the male in red and black plumage--is not to be mistaken for anything else in the Eastern States. Once see him, and you will always know him. For that reason he is an excellent subject for the beginner. He passes the winter in Central or South America, and returns to New England in the second week of May. He makes his appearance in full dress, but later in the season changes it for one resembling pretty closely the duller plumage of his mate.

VII

THE SONG SPARROW

Sparrows are of many kinds, and in a general way the different kinds look so much alike that the beginner in bird study is apt to find them confusing, if not discouraging. They will try his patience, no matter how sharp and clever he may think himself, and unless he is much cleverer than the common run of humanity, he will make a good many mistakes before he gets to the end of them.

One of the best and commonest of them all is the song sparrow. His upper parts are mottled, of course, since he is a sparrow. His light-colored breast is sharply streaked, and in the middle of it the streaks usually run together and form a blotch. His outer tail-feathers are not white, and there is no yellow on the wings or about the head. These last points are mentioned in order to distinguish him from two other sparrows with streaked breasts--the vesper sparrow and the savanna.