Part 15

V. BIRD PLAY.

How strange it is that animals never laugh! If you watch a group of monkeys playing their antics, you will find their faces as sedate as a judge’s, save, perhaps, a merry twinkle of the eye. Comical as their gambols are, one would think they would break into convulsions of merriment. True, animals have various ways of giving vent to their exuberant feelings, but this is done very slightly by means of facial expression. Their risibles must be meagrely developed. What has been said in regard to animals in general is also true of birds, whose eyes often twinkle and are intensely expressive, but whose countenances proper reveal very little of the emotion swelling in their breasts.

Yet by the movements of their bodies you can easily read their feelings. You can tell at a glance by the conduct of a bird whether or not it is alarmed at your presence, or whether it is engaged in a frolic or in watching a wily foe. How different is the behavior of most birds in the breeding-season, with a nest near at hand, from their demeanor at other times! Look at that brown thrasher perched in a tree-top on a spring morning, singing his pæan to the surrounding woodland, and notice how fearless he appears. Contrast his manners two months later when he goes skulking through the tanglewood, afraid to be seen. Conceal their secret as they may, an expert student of birds can almost always tell if there is a nest in the neighborhood.

It is, therefore, by their conduct rather than by their facial expression that birds reveal their love of play. That they do have their frolics, no one can doubt. Much of their time is occupied in labor, and that often of the most serious, if not arduous, kind, and they frequently combine toil and play; but there are times when they seem to give themselves up to unmixed sportiveness. There is not much system in their games, so far as I have observed. They mostly engage in frolics of a rough-and-tumble kind, for the pure love of the fun, and perhaps with no thought of winning a prize.

It is possible, however, that the company of red-headed woodpeckers I watched one day in the woods were having a genuine flying-race. One tree was selected as a point of departure, from which they would start and fly around in a wide circle,—perhaps their race-track,—always returning to the same tree with loud chattering, which sounded like shouts of applause. This exercise they kept up for hours, always starting from the same tree and describing nearly the same circle. If it was not a contest of speed, I am at a loss to know what it was.

The woodpeckers, especially the youngsters, have another game that has a decidedly human flavor; it is the game of bo-peep among the trunks and branches of trees. A red-head will shy off from his companions, conceal himself somewhere behind a tree-trunk, and then peep from his hiding-place in an exquisitely comical way, until he is espied by some sharp-eyed fellow-frolicker. A vigorous chase will follow, as pursuer and pursued dash wildly away among the trees. Sometimes, when the fugitive is too hotly pursued, he will stop and keep his companion at bay by presenting his long, spearlike bill as a sort of bayonet.

Another tree-climber is the brown creeper. I have described many of his pranks in the first chapter of this volume. One November day I witnessed a performance that beats the record. Two creepers were hitching up the trunks of the trees in their characteristic manner, when one of them suddenly dropped straight down about fifteen feet, scarcely more than an inch from the trunk of the tree; then, instead of alighting, he darted straight up again the same distance, fluttered a moment uncertainly on the wing, and then dropped again to the foot of the tree, where he alighted, and resumed his upward march. But that was not all. Presently his companion, not to be outdone, began to whirl around and around the tree, descending in a spiral course until he reached the foot. There he tarried a moment to take breath, and then, much to my surprise, whirled himself up in the same way, a distance of perhaps twenty feet, accomplishing it in four or five revolutions. But, as if to distance all creepers’ pranks ever witnessed before, he descended again in the same spiral course. These performances can be interpreted only as ways in which to give vent to the spirit of frolic in the creeper nature.

On the same day my dancing dot in feathers, the golden-crowned kinglet, performed one of his favorite tricks, which is not often described in the books. You will remember that in the centre of the yellow crown-patch of the males, there is a gleaming golden speck, visible only when you look at him closely. But when the little beau is in a particularly rollicksome mood, or wants to display his gem to his mate or kindred, he elevates and spreads out the feathers of his crest, and lo! a transformation. The whole crown becomes golden! That gleaming speck expands until it completely hides the yellow and black of the crown. It has been my good fortune on several occasions to see the ruby-crowned kinglet transfigure himself in the same way, except, that his entire crown became ruby. Probably the little Chesterfield that can exhibit the most brilliant coronal wins the sweetest damsel in the kinglet community for a wifie.

Perhaps, as a rule, our winter birds find the season rather cold for play; yet they often frolic in the snow like children, even when they do not stalk through it in quest of food. This is especially true of the snow-birds and tree-sparrows. Birds are especially fond of splashing in water. Even in the winter-time, when it flows ice-cold into the stream or pond from the melting snow on the banks, certain birds will plunge into it, and enjoy their bath for many minutes. They do not seem to be satisfied with merely wetting their plumes, but remain in the water, twinkling their wings and tails, much longer than is actually necessary. Several times in the autumn I have seen a large company of warblers of different species taking a bath in a woodland pond. How they enjoyed their ablutions! Again and again they would return to the water, as if loath to quit it.

To my mind, the flicker is one of our most playful birds, spite of his staid looks. I have seen a half-dozen of these birds on a single tree, scudding about after one another and calling, Zwick-ah! zwick-ah! in their affectionate way. Not infrequently two of them will face each other, and begin bowing in a vigorous style, turning their heads dexterously from side to side to avoid collision. This is sometimes kept up for several minutes. It is very comical, the only drawback being that the birds themselves do not laugh. Why they should engage in so ridiculous a performance with so serious an air, is a problem that still belongs to the unknown.

A cut-throat finch, a pet, was, as a rule, a very sedate little body, but one day he had to come down from his pedestal to get rid of his surplus of feeling. This he did by dancing a sort of jig to his own music, swaying his body to and fro in a most laughable way. On another day an English sparrow flew upon his cage, which was hanging on the veranda, when “Pompey” turned his head toward his visitor, burst into song, and bobbed his head from side to side. No doubt the sparrow felt that he was receiving an ovation.

A most laughable incident occurred one day in my large cage of birds. “Flip,” a fine young wood-thrush, was rehearsing his song. A young thrasher leaped up beside him on the perch. The two birds turned their heads to each other, and looked into each other’s eyes a moment; then Flip opened his mouth at his visitor, and broke into song, the tones coming right out of his gold-lined throat. All the while he jerked his head from side to side or up and down in perfect time with his music, his eye gleaming intelligently, as if he enjoyed the fun. Even my loud outburst of laughter did not put a stop to the little farce. Flip was a bright bird. He afterward had a cage all to himself, and regaled his hosts with many a cheerful song, such as only the wood-thrush is master of. Occasionally he would leap to the end of his cage, open his mouth wide at “Brownie,” whose cage stood next to his, and sing a comic song; at least, it seemed comic.

These incidents, although they do not prove that birds have elaborate games, do prove that they possess the play spirit, and no doubt their pastimes and amusements are relished fully as much by them as ours are by us; perhaps more so.

VI. BIRD DEATHS.

If only some master dramatist could write the tragedies of bird land! They would be highly exciting, and would afford ample room for the play of genius; for there are adventures and disasters without number. Perhaps it is on account of the many reverses that there is so often a pensive strain in the songs of the birds,—a minor chord running like a shimmering silver line through the weft of the woodland music. Robert Burns, in his “Address to a Woodlark,” touched the very marrow of bird sadness, and pleaded with the little singer to cease its song, or he himself would go distracted,—

“Say, was thy little mate unkind, And heard thee as the careless wind? Oh! nocht but love and sorrow joined Sic notes o’ wae could wauken.

“Thou tells o’ never-ending care, O’ speechless grief and dark despair; For pity’s sake, sweet bird, nae mair! Or my poor heart is broken.”

If Coleridge had studied the birds more carefully, and acquainted himself with their griefs, he never would have written, in mockery of Milton’s “L’Allegro,”—

“A melancholy bird! O, idle thought! In nature there is nothing melancholy!”

I have seen a pair of birds whose little brood had just been cruelly slaughtered, and my heart bled for them when I saw that their anguish was too great for expression. Perhaps birds that have been bereaved soon forget their sorrow, and yet I doubt it; for if you listen to the minor treble of the black-capped chickadee, you cannot help feeling that he is singing a dirge for some long-lost love, or, if not that, may be recounting, by some occult law of heredity, the story of the many sorrows of his ancestors from the beginning down to his own generation. What ravishing sadness there is in the songs of the white-throated and white-crowned sparrows! The bluebird is always sighing as he shifts from post to post, and nothing could be more melancholy than the call of the jay in autumn. The crow at a distance complains of his disappointment, while the wood-thrush, in his evening and morning voluntaries, rehearses the sad memories of his life. Keats speaks of the “plaintive anthem” of the nightingale, and Thomson declares that even the merry linnets “lit on the dead tree, a dull, despondent flock.”

It would be difficult to arrange a “table of mortality” for the birds. However, as they know nothing about life insurance, there is no call for such a compilation; but even if the statistician could state the number of deaths, there is no arithmetic that could compute the heartaches and heartbreaks experienced by “our little brothers of the air.” “In the midst of life we are in death,” might well be put into the litany of the birds. If they had burial-grounds, there would be plenty of employment for the sexton and some grave “Old Mortality.”

The elements themselves sometimes play sad havoc with the birds. Mr. Eldridge E. Fish, of Buffalo, N. Y., tells of an October storm in which many golden-crowned kinglets were dashed to the ground, while others flew against windows of houses in which lights were left burning. The storm was so severe that the little voyagers, travelling southward by night, were compelled to alight, and thus many of them were destroyed. The same writer speaks of a cold rain which froze as it fell, coating everything with ice, and thus cutting off the birds’ supply of food, so that many bluebirds perished. To my certain knowledge, robins, which breed very early in the spring, sometimes are frozen to death while hugging their nests, when a cold wave swoops from the north. The same calamity sometimes overtakes the crossbill during the winter in the forests of Canada. Apparently even Nature herself is not always a tender mother to her offspring. Do not ask me why, for I am not writing a philosophical thesis.

Birds have many natural enemies. I can still hear the cries of a young bird that a sparrow-hawk had seized in his talons and was bearing overhead. What a savage cannibal he seemed to be! Not for anything would I cast undeserved odium on the reputation of any bird, but I fear very much that the blue jay is both a robber and a murderer. In the season when eggs and young birds are in the nest, he has a sly, hang-dog air, which, to my mind, proclaims not only a guilty conscience, but also a sinister purpose. At other seasons he seems to have an open, frank manner. It is true, I myself have never seen him in the very act of robbing a fellow-bird’s nest, but I have often seen pewees, vireos, sparrows, and goldfinches charge upon him with desperate fury when he came in the vicinity of their homesteads. Indeed, all the smaller birds seem to have a mortal terror of him, which can be accounted for only on the ground that he is known to be a highwayman.

A farmer friend, who loves the birds, and has none of the unreasoning prejudice against them sometimes displayed by country folk, told me that he once saw a blue jay pounce upon a chippie’s nest, snatch up a callow bantling in his bill, and fly off with it across the field to his nest. In a few moments he returned, and bore away another nestling. By this time the farmer’s ire was aroused, and he got his gun and put an end to the feathered brigand’s life on his return for the third mouthful. This is more than circumstantial evidence. Yet in defence of the handsome rascal it may be said that he does good in other directions, for he rids the earth of many pestiferous insects. Gladly would I acquit him of all blame if that were possible.

Mr. Burroughs thinks that birds which have suffered at the blue jay’s hands—or, rather, beak—often retaliate by destroying the jay’s eggs. He found a jay’s nest with five eggs, every one of which was punctured, apparently by the sharp bill of some bird, with the sole purpose of destroying them, for no part of their contents had been removed. He suggests that in the bird world the Mosaic law may be, “An egg for an egg,” instead of “An eye for an eye.”

The life of young birds hangs on a very brittle thread. A kind of Damocles’ sword seems to be dangling over them. What a “slaughter of innocents” in a single season! I think that of the many nests I found during the spring of 1892 fully half were raided. How often, on finding a nest, I have resolved to watch it until the young birds were ready to leave; but on going back a few days later, the cradle was rifled of its treasures. These frequent “tragedies of the nests” make the bird-lover sick at heart. It is no paradox to say that many birds are killed before they are born.

Birds often meet with fatal accidents. They sometimes impale themselves on a thorn, or creep into places in thorn-trees from which they cannot extricate themselves. A robin hung itself one spring by a kite-string that swung in a loop from the roof of my house,—a case of involuntary suicide. A nuthatch that I saw one day in the woods had its leg broken, and I could not help thinking of its lingering agony before it would starve to death. A pet nonpareil, a dear, bright-hued little fellow, was well and happy one evening; but the next morning he lay dead on the bottom of the cage, perhaps the victim of a convulsion. Another pet nonpareil was not in good health; so I thought a bath in tepid water might be good for him; but alas! the ablution proved too much for the little invalid, which, in spite of our utmost efforts to save his life, succumbed to the inevitable. A like fate befell a young turtle-dove which a neighbor found in the woods and brought me for a gift.

But the cause of a great deal of mortality among birds is man’s inhumanity to them. The thirst for blood seems to be inherent in many coarse natures, and as killing a fellow-man is illegal and almost sure to be summarily punished, many men gratify their greed for gore by slaying innocent birds and animals.