Part 7

Once more only I saw the Cape May. His claim to be accounted a summer resident of Franconia was by this time moderately well established; but on my last spare afternoon (June 3) I could not do less than pay him a farewell visit. After looking for him in vain for twenty years (I speak as a New Englander), it seemed the part of prudence to cultivate his acquaintance while I could. At the entrance to the swamp, therefore, I put on my gloves, tied a handkerchief about my neck, and broke a stem of meadow-sweet for use as a mosquito switch. The season was advancing, and field ornithology was becoming more and more a battle. I walked up the path for the usual distance (passing a few lady’s-slippers, one of them pure white) without hearing the voice for which I was listening. On the return, however, I caught it, or something like it. Then, as I went in pursuit (a slow process, for caution’s sake), the song turned, or seemed to turn, into something different,--louder, longer, and faster. Is that the same bird, I thought, or another? Whatever it was, it eluded my eye, and after a little the voice ceased. I retreated to the path, where I could look about me more readily and use my switch to better advantage, and anon the faint, lazy zee-zee-zee was heard again. This was the Cape May, at all events. I was sure of it. Still I wanted a look. Carefully I edged toward the sound, bending aside the branches, and all at once a bird flew into the spruce over my head. Then began again the quicker, four-syllabled zip-zip, I craned my neck and fanned away mosquitoes, all the while keeping my glass in position. A twig stirred. Still the bird sang unseen,--the same hurried phrase, not quite monotonous, since the pitch rose a little on the last couplet. That was a suspicious circumstance, and by this time I should not have been mightily astonished if a Blackburnian had disclosed himself. Another twig stirred. Still I could see nothing; and still I fought mosquitoes (a plague on them!) and kept my eye steady. Then the fellow did again what he had done so often,--stepped out upon a flat, horizontal branch, pretty well up, and posed there, singing and preening his feathers. I could see his yellow breast streaked with jet, his black crown, his reddish cheeks, with the yellow patch behind the rufous, and finally the big white blotch on the wing. We have lovelier birds, no doubt (the Cape May’s colors are a trifle “splashy” for a nice taste,--for my own taste, I mean to say), but few, if any, whose costume is more strikingly original.

I stayed by him till my patience failed, the mosquitoes helping to wear it out; and all the while he reiterated that comparatively lively zip-zip, so very different from the listless zee-zee, which I had seen him use on previous occasions, and had heard him use to-day. He was singing now, I said to myself, more like the bird at Natural Bridge, the only other one I had ever heard. It was pleasant to find that even this tenth-rate performer, one of the poorest of a poor family, had more than one tune in his music box.

My spring vacation was planned to be botanical rather than ornithological; but we are not the masters of our own fate, though we sometimes try to think so, and my sketch is turning out a bird piece, after all. The truth is, I was in the birds’ country, and it was the birds’ hour. They waked me every morning,--veeries, bobolinks, vireos, sparrows, and what not; and as the day began, so it continued. I hope I was not blind to other things. I remember at this moment how rejoiced I was at coming all unexpectedly upon a little bunch of yellow lady’s-slippers,--nine blossoms, I believe; rare enough and pretty enough to excite the dullest man’s enthusiasm. But the fact remains, if comparisons are to be insisted upon, that a creature like the Cape May warbler has all the beauty of a flower, with the added charm of voice and motion and elusiveness. The lady’s-slippers would wait for me,--unless somebody else picked them,--but the warbler could be trusted to lead me a chase, and give me, as the saying is, a run for my money. In other words, he was more interesting, and goes better into a story.

My delight in him was the greater for a consideration yet to be specified. Twelve or thirteen years ago, when a party of us were in Franconia in June, we undertook a list of the birds of the township,--a list which the scientific ornithologist of the company afterward printed. Now, returning to the place by myself, it became a point of honor with me to improve our work by the addition of at least a name or two. And the first candidate was the Cape May.

The second was of a widely different sort; one of my most familiar friends, though more surprising as a bird of the White Mountains than even the Cape May. I speak of the wood thrush, the most southern member of the noble group of singers to which it belongs,--the Hylocichlæ, so called. It is to be regretted that we have no collective English name for them, especially as their vocal quality--by which I mean something not quite the same as musical ability--is such as to set them beyond comparison above all other birds of North America, if not of the world.

My first knowledge of this piece of good fortune was on the 29th of May. I stood on the Notch railway, intent upon a mourning warbler, noting how fond of red-cherry trees he and his fellows seemingly were, when I was startled out of measure by a wood thrush’s voice from the dense maple woods above me. There was no time to look for him; and happily there was no need. He was one of the consummate artists of his race (among the members of which there is great unevenness in this regard), possessing all those unmistakable peculiarities which at once distinguish the wood thrush’s song from the hermit’s, with which alone a careless listener might confound it: the sudden drop to a deep contralto (the most glorious bit of vocalism to be heard in our woods), and the tinkle or spray of bell-like tones at the other extreme of the gamut. As with the Cape May, so with him, the question was, Will he stay?

Two days later I came down the track again. A hermit was in tune, and presently a wood thrush joined him. “His tone is fuller and louder than the hermit’s,” says my pencil,--flattered, no doubt, at finding itself in a position to speak a word of momentary positiveness touching a question of superiority long in dispute, and likely to remain in dispute while birds sing and men listen to them. A quarter of a mile farther, and I came to the sugar grove. Here a second bird was singing, just where I had heard him two days before. Him I sat down to enjoy; and at that moment, probably because he had seen me (and had seen me stop), he broke out with a volley of those quick, staccato, inimitably emphatic, whip-snapping calls,--pip-pip,--which are more characteristic of the species than even the song itself. So there were two male wood thrushes, and presumably two pairs, in this mountainside forest!

On the 1st of June I heard the song there again, though I was forced to wait for it; and three days afterward the story was the same. I ought to have looked for nests, but time failed me. To the best of my knowledge, the bird has never been reported before from the White Mountain region, though it is well known to breed in some parts of Canada, where I have myself seen it.

Here, then, were two notable accessions to our local catalogue. The only others (a few undoubted migrants--Wilson’s black-cap warbler, the white-crowned sparrow, and the solitary sandpiper--being omitted) were a single meadow lark and a single yellow-throated vireo. The lark seemed to be unknown to Franconia people, and my specimen may have been only a straggler. He sang again and again on May 22, but I heard nothing from him afterward, though I passed the place often. The vireo was singing in a sugar grove on the 3d of June,--a date on which, accidents apart, he should certainly have been at home for the summer.

Because I have had so much to say about the Cape May warbler and the wood thrush, it is not to be assumed that I mean to set them in the first place, nor even that I had in them the highest pleasure. They surprised me, and surprise is always more talkative than simple appreciation; but the birds that ministered most to my enjoyment were the hermit and the veery. The veery is not an every-day singer with me at home, and the hermit, for some years past, has made himself almost a stranger. I hardly know which of the two put me under the greater obligation. The veery sang almost continually, and a good veery is a singer almost out of competition. His voice lacks the ring of the wood thrush’s and the hermit’s; it never dominates the choir; but with the coppice to itself and the listener close by, it has sometimes a quality irresistible; I do not hesitate to characterize it as angelic. Of this kind was the voice of a bird that used to sing under my Franconia window at half past three o’clock, in the silence of the morning.

The surpassing glory of the veery’s song, as all lovers of American bird music may be presumed by this time to know, lies in its harmonic, double-stopping effect,--an effect, or quality, as beautiful as it is peculiar. One day, while I stood listening to it under the best of conditions, admiring the wonderful arpeggio (I know no less technical word for it), my pencil suddenly grew poetic. “The veery’s fingers are quick on the harp-strings,” it wrote. His is perfect Sunday music,--and the hermit’s no less so. And in the same class I should put the simple chants of the field sparrow and the vesper. The so-called “preaching” of the red-eyed vireo is utter worldliness in the comparison.

Happy Franconia! This year, if never before, it had all five of our New England Hylocichlæ singing in its woods: the veery and the hermit everywhere in the lower country, the wood thrush in the maple forest before mentioned, the olive-back throughout the Notch and its neighborhood, and the gray-cheek on Lafayette; a quintette hard to match, I venture to think, anywhere on the footstool. And after them--I do not say with them--were winter wrens, bobolinks, rose-breasted grosbeaks, purple finches, solitary vireos, vesper sparrows, field sparrows, white-throated sparrows, song sparrows, catbirds, robins, orioles, tanagers, and a score or two beside.

One other bright circumstance I am bound in honor to speak of,--the abundance of swallows; a state of affairs greatly unlike anything to be met with in my part of Massachusetts: cliff swallows and barn swallows in crowds, and sand martins and tree swallows by no means uncommon. But for the absence of black martins,--a famous colony of which the tourist may see at Concord, while the train waits,--here would have been a second quintette worthy to rank with the thrushes; the flight of one set being as beautiful, not to say as musical, as the songs of the other. As it was, the universal presence of these aerial birds was a continual delight to any man with eyes to notice it. They glorified the open valley as the thrushes glorified the woods.

We shall never again see the like of this, I fear, in our prosier Boston neighborhood. Within my time--within twenty years, indeed--barn swallows summered freely on Beacon Hill, plastering their nests against the walls of the State House and the Athenæum, and even under the busy portico of the Tremont House. I have remembrance, too, of a pair that dwelt, for one season at least, above the door of the old Ticknor mansion, at the head of Park Street. Those days are gone. Now, alas, even in the suburban districts, we may almost say that one swallow makes a summer. An evil change it is, for which not even the warblings of English sparrows will ever quite console me. Yet the present state of things, the reoccupation of Boston by the British, if you please to call it so, is not without its grain of compensation. It makes me fonder of “old Francony.” Skeptic or man of faith, naturalist or supernaturalist, who does not like to feel that there is somewhere a “better country” than the one he lives in?

A DAY IN JUNE

THE FORENOON

“The air that floated by me seem’d to say, ‘Write! thou wilt never have a better day,’ And so I did.”

KEATS.

All signs threatened a day of midsummer heat, though it was only the 2d of June. Before breakfast, even, the news seemed to have got abroad; so that there was something like a dearth of music under my windows, where heretofore there had been almost a surfeit. The warbling vireo in the poplar, which had teased my ear morning after morning, getting shamelessly in the way of his betters, had for once fallen silent; unless, indeed, he had sung his stint before I woke, or had gone elsewhere to practice. The comparative stillness enabled me to hear voices from the hillside across the meadow, while I turned over in my mind a thought concerning the nature of those sounds--a class by themselves, some of them by no means unmusical--which are particularly enjoyable when borne to us from a distance: crow voices, the baying of hounds, cowbell tinkles, and the like. The nasal, high-pitched, penetrating call of the little Canadian nuthatch is one of the best examples of what I mean. Ank, ank: the sounds issue from the depths of trackless woods, miles and miles away as it seems, just reaching us, without a breath to spare; dying upon the very tympanum, like a spent runner who drops exhausted at the goal, touching it only with his finger tips. Yet the ear is not fretted. It makes no attempt to hear more. Ank, ank: that is the whole story, and we see the bird as plainly as if he hung from a cone at the top of the next fir tree.

“No tramping to-day,” said my friends from the cottage as we met at table. They had been reading the thermometer, which is the modern equivalent for observing the wind and regarding the clouds. But my vacation, unlike theirs, was not an all-summer affair. It was fast running out, and there were still many things to be seen and done. Immediately after breakfast, therefore, with an umbrella and a luncheon, I started for the Notch. I would reverse the usual route, going by way of the railroad--reached by a woodland trail above “Chase’s”--and returning by the highway. Of itself this is only a forenoon’s jaunt, but I meant to piece it out by numerous waits--for coolness and listening--and sundry by-excursions, especially by a search for Selkirk’s violet and an hour or two on Bald Mountain. If the black flies and the mosquitoes would let me choose my own gait, I would risk the danger of sunstroke.

As I come out upon the grassy plain, after the first bit of sharp ascent, a pleasant breeze is stirring, and with the umbrella over my head, and a halt as often as the shade of a tree, the sight of a flower, or the sound of music invites me, I go on with great comfort. Now I am detained by a close bed of dwarf cornel, every face looking straight upward, the waxen white “flowers” inclosing each a bunch of dark pin-points. Now a lovely clear-winged moth hovers over a dandelion head; and a pleasing sight it is, to see his transparent wings beating themselves into a haze about his brown body. And now, by way of contrast, one of our tiny sky-blue butterflies rises from the ground and with a pretty unsteadiness flits carelessly before me, twinkling over the sand.

A bluebird drops into the white birch under which I am standing, and lets fall a few notes of his contralto warble. A delicious voice. For purity and a certain affectionateness it would be hard to name its superior. A vesper sparrow sings from the grass land; and from the woods beyond a jay is screaming. His, by the bye, is another of the voices that are bettered by distance, although, for my own part, I like the ring of it, near or far. Now a song sparrow breaks out in his breezy, characteristically abrupt manner. He is a bird with fine gifts of cheeriness and versatility; but when he sets himself against the vesper, as now, it is like prose against poetry, plain talk against music. So it seems to me at this moment, I mean to say. At another time, in another mood, I might tone down the comparison, though I could never say less than that the vesper is my favorite. His gifts are sweetness and perfection.

So I cross the level fields to Chase’s, where I stand a few minutes before the little front-yard flower-garden, always with many pretty things in it. One of those natural gardeners, the good woman must be, who have a knack of making plants blossom. And just beyond, in the shelter of the first tree, I stop again to take off my hat, put down my umbrella, and speak coaxingly to a suspicious pointer (being a friend of all dogs except surly ones), which after much backing and filling gets his cool nose into my palm. We are on excellent terms, I flatter myself, but at that moment some notion strikes me and I take out my notebook and pencil. Instantly he starts away and sets up a furious bark, looking first at me, then toward the house, circling about me all the while, at a rod’s distance, in a quiver of excitement. “Help! help!” he cries. “Here’s a villain of some sort. I’ve never seen the like. A spy at the very least.” And though he quiets down when I put up the book, there is no more friendliness for this time. Man writing, as Carlyle would have said, is a doubtful character.

Another stage, to the edge of the woods, and I rest again, the breeze encouraging me. A second bluebird is caroling. Every additional one is cause for thankfulness. Imagine a place where bluebirds should be as thick as English sparrows are in our American cities! Imagine heaven! A crested flycatcher screams, an olive-side calls pip, pip, a robin cackles, an oven-bird recites his piece with schoolboy emphasis, an alder flycatcher queeps, and a vesper sparrow sings. And at the end, as if for good measure, a Maryland yellow-throat adds his witchery, witchery. The breeze comes to me over broad beds of hay-scented fern, and at my feet are bunchberry blossoms and the white star-flower. At this moment, nevertheless, the cooling, insect-dispersing wind is better than all things else. Such is one effect of hot weather, setting comfort above poetry.

I leave the wind behind, and take my way into the wood, where there is nothing in particular to delay me except an occasional windfall, which must be clambered over or beaten about. Half an hour, more or less, of lazy traveling, and I come out upon the railroad at the big sugar-maple grove. This is one of the sights of the country in the bright-leaf season, say the first week of October; something, I have never concluded what, giving to its colors a most remarkable depth and richness. Putting times together, I must have spent hours in admiring it, now from different points on the Butter Hill round, now from Bald Mountain. At present every leaf of it is freshly green, and somewhere within it dwells a wood thrush, for whose golden voice I sit down in the shade to listen. He is in no haste, and no more am I. Let him take his time. Other birds also are a little under the weather, as it appears; but the silence cannot last. A scarlet tanager’s voice is the first to break it. High as the temperature is, he is still hoarse. And so is the black-throated blue warbler that follows him. A pine siskin passes overhead on some errand, announcing himself as he goes. There is no need for him to speak twice. Then come three warblers,--a Nashville, a magnolia, and a blue yellow-back; and after them a piece of larger game, a smallish hawk. He breaks out of the dense wood behind me, perches for half a minute in an open maple, where I can see that he has prey of some kind in his talons, and then, taking wing, ascends in circles into the sky, and so disappears. That is locomotion of a sort to make a man and his umbrella envious.

A rose-breasted grosbeak, invisible (but I can see him), is warbling not far off. He has taken the tanager’s tune--which is the robin’s as well--and smoothed it and smoothed it, and sweetened it and sweetened it, till it is smoother than oil and sweeter than honey. I admire it for what it is, a miracle of mellifluency; if you call it perfect, I can only acquiesce; but I cannot say that it stirs or kindles me. Perhaps I haven’t a sweet ear. And hark! the wood thrush gives voice: only a few strains, but enough to show him still present. Now I am free to trudge along up the railroad track, pondering as I go upon the old question why railway sleepers are always too far apart for one step and not far enough for two. At short intervals I pause at the sound of a mourning warbler’s brief song, pretty in itself, and noticeable for its trick of a rolled r. Some of the birds add a concluding measure of quick notes, like wit, wit, wit. It is long since I have seen so many at once. In truth, I have never seen so many except on one occasion, on the side of Mount Washington. That was ten years ago. One a year, on the average, shows itself to me during the spring passage--none in autumn. Well I remember my first one. Twenty years have elapsed since that late May morning, but I could go to the very spot, I think, though I have not been near it for more than half that time. A good thing it is that we can still enjoy the good things of past years, or of what we call past years.

And a good thing is a railroad, though the sleepers be spaced on purpose for a foot-passenger’s discomfort. Without this one, over which at this early date no trains are running, I should hardly be traversing these miles of rough mountain country on a day of tropical sultriness. The clear line of the track gives me not only passage and a breeze, but an opening into the sky, and at least twice as many bird sights and bird sounds as the unbroken forest would furnish. I drink at the section men’s well--an ice-cold spring inclosed in a bottomless barrel--cross the brook which, gloriously alive and beautiful, comes dashing over its boulders down the White-cross Ravine, fifty feet below me as I guess, and stop in the burning on the other side to listen for woodpeckers and brown creepers. The latter are strangely rare hereabout, and this seems an ideal spot in which to look for them. So I cannot help thinking as I see from how many of the trunks--burned to death and left standing--the bark has warped in long, loose flakes, as if to provide nesting sites for a whole colony of creepers. But the birds are not here; or, if they are, they do not mean that an inquisitive stranger shall know it. An olive-sided flycatcher calls, rather far off, making me suspicious for an instant of a red crossbill, and a white-throated sparrow whistles out of the gulch below me; but I listen in vain for the quick tseep which would put an eighty-seventh name into my vacation catalogue.

Here is the round-leaved violet, one pale-bright, shy blossom. How pleased I am to see it! Hobble-bush and wild red cherry are still in bloom. White Mountain dogwood, we might almost call the hobble-bush; so well it fills the place, in flowering time, of Cornus florida in the Alleghanies. In the twilight of the woods, as in the darkness of evening, no color shows so far as white; which, for aught I know, may be one of the reasons why, relatively speaking, white flowers are so much more common in the forest than in the open country. In my eyes, nevertheless, the leaves of the hobble-bush--leaves and leaf-buds--are, if anything, prettier than the blossoms. Such beauty of shape, such expansiveness, such elegance of crimpling, and such exceeding richness of hue, whether in youth or age! If the bush refuses transplantation, as I have read that it does, I am glad of it. My sympathies are with all things, plants, animals, and men, that insist upon their native freedom, in their native country, with a touch, or more than a touch, of native savagery. Civilization is well enough, within limits; but why be in haste to have all the world a garden? It will be some time yet, I hope, before every valley is exalted.