Part 16

“Butchers and villains, bloody cannibals! How sweet a plant have you untimely cropped! You have no children, butchers! if you had, The thought of them would have stirred up remorse.”

The small boy with a sling or a spring-gun or an air-rifle is a source of much grief to the birds. He even kills the tiny kinglets that flit to and fro in the trees bordering our streets, and seems to think it sport. More senseless and wicked still was the fashion in vogue a few years ago, perhaps not yet quite obsolete, which compelled the massacre of thousands of bright-hued birds for feminine—I should say unfeminine—adornment. To say nothing of the “loudness” and bad taste of such a fashion, it is extremely unwise to put birds to death, for no one can compute the number of injurious insects they annually devour. A bird on the bonnet means so much less bread on the table. A bird in the orchard is a sort of scavenger and pomologist combined, and does his share in giving you a dish of fruit for dinner. The scarlet tanager looks like a living ruby in a green tree; but—I speak bluntly—it looks like a chunk of gore on a woman’s bonnet. In behalf of good taste and the birds, I enter my protest against this barbaric custom.

True, birds have elements of the Adamic nature in them. Many of them do relish forbidden fruit, and must be driven off, lest they rifle your cherry-tree; but it is seldom necessary to kill them, even then, especially those that live wholly on insects and fruit.

A correspondent once sent me a number of queries. How do birds come to their “last end”? Do none of them die natural deaths? If they do, why do we never, or at least very rarely, find dead or dying birds in the fields and woods? My response to these questions is: Very few birds die natural deaths,—that is, merely of sickness or old age,—though a few of them may. When a bird becomes feeble or is crippled, it falls an easy prey to a prowling hawk, owl, shrike, eagle, or cat. Should a bird escape all these enemies, and finally lie down and die in a natural way, it would doubtless soon be found and devoured by a carrion-eating fowl or quadruped, and thus its corpse would never be seen by human eyes. Sad indeed it is to think of the numberless ways in which birds meet “the last enemy.”

Be it far from me to use caustic speech against any man or set of men; but it makes me both indignant and sick at heart to read the bloody chronicles of most of the so-called “collectors.” How many embryo birds they slay merely to gratify their morbid craze for gathering “clutches,” as they suggestively call a set of eggs! Not long ago a collector narrated, in an ornithological journal, the harrowing story of his having rifled the nest of a hairy woodpecker five or six times in a single season, the poor bird laying a new deposit after each burglary, until at last she grew suspicious and sought a safer site for her nest. The writer described his part of the performance with apparent gusto, as if he had made a splendid contribution to science! If he must have a collection of hairy woodpecker’s eggs, why not take a single “clutch,” and then leave the bird to make her second deposit and rear her brood in peace?

To my mind, many “professionals” shoot a score of birds where they ought to shoot but one. The long record of slaughtered birds is sickening. The Newgate Calendar scarcely furnishes a parallel. Even our most scientific journals print many of these bloody annals. It is true, a reasonable number of specimens must be collected for scientific purposes, but surely no adequate excuse can be given for shooting hundreds of individuals of the same species merely to have the honor of saying that an astounding number of specimens were “taken.” If the cause of natural history cannot be promoted without destroying the humane instincts of the naturalist himself, the price is too great; it were better left unpaid. A bird in the bush is worth forty in the hand, especially if the forty are dead; worth more, too, I venture to add, to the cause of science itself.

XVI. THE SECRET OF APPRECIATION.

It is an open secret, and perhaps not a very profound one. I need not prolong the reader’s suspense, if mayhap he should feel any, by assuming a mysterious air, but may as well frankly divulge the secret at once. There are times when melodrama is sadly out of place—if, indeed, it is ever in place. What, then, is the secret of appreciation? It is simply being en rapport with the object or truth to be appreciated. No more patent fact was ever declared than that which Saint Paul wrote: “Spiritual things are spiritually discerned.” There must be mental kinship, or there cannot be true valuation. Bring a depressed or distracted mind to the most exhilarating service, and you will miss its pith and point, and go away unrewarded.

The same truth obtains in our commerce with Nature, which, it would seem, will not brook a rival in our hearts if we would win from her all her treasured sweets. “Give me your whole mind, your whole attention,” she says, “or I will close up every fountain of refreshment.” What benefit will that man whose mind is absorbed in the affairs of the market derive from a woodland stroll? What secret will the rustling leaves speak to him, or the opening flowers, or the chirping birds? He sees no transit of swift wings, and the sunshine dapples the leaf-carpeted ground in vain for eyes that see only the ledger and day-book in the sylvan haunt.

My own experience confirms the foregoing statements. For several months one summer I felt depressed and abstracted on account of several untoward circumstances which need not be described, for “every heart knoweth its own bitterness.” In this mood I sometimes sauntered out to my woodland haunts; but I saw very little, and what I did see bore the stamp of triteness, and seemed as dull and languid as myself. My heart was otherwhere. A secret, gnawing grief draws the thoughts inward, and breaks the spell of the outer world, charm she never so sweetly. The soul hopelessly hungering for the unattainable comes almost to despise the blessings within its grasp. A-lack-a-day, that anything should ever come between the heart and its gentle mistress, Nature! And so it was that even the birds, my precious intimates, became a weariness both to the flesh and the spirit.

Master Chickadee was nothing but a lump of flesh covered with mezzo-tinted feathers, all prose, no poetry; a creature that I had once invested with a rare charm (in my own mind), but now only a lout of a bird, a buffoon, whose noisy chatter broke harshly into my gloomy meditations. Once I had fairly revelled in the army of kaleidoscopic warblers, and had called them to their faces all kinds of endearing names, like a lover wooing a bride; but now, in my dejected frame of mind, they were prosaic enough, and provokingly shy, and I felt too indifferent even to ogle them with my glass as they tilted in the tree-tops. What a humdrum life was the life of the birds, anyway, and how indescribably humdrum my semi-frequent beat in the woods was becoming!

But by and by, in the autumn, an event occurred that transformed my inner world, dispelling the darkness, dissipating the clouds, bathing all in sunshine. Then I hied to the fields and woods, and, behold, a metamorphosis! The inner miracle had wrought an outer wonder. Never was there “such mutual recognition vaguely sweet” between the autumn woods and my appreciative heart. The ground, flecked with sunshine, filtering through the browning leaves, became a work of mosaic fit for a king to tread on, and the westerly breeze sang a pæan through the branches. And how many birds there were! A flock of robins were chirping in the grove, now and then breaking into song, as if they had forgotten that spring was past and that it was unconventional for robin redbreast to sing in the autumn; but they seemed to be willing to make a breach of the convenances to give me delight.

Numerous warblers chirped in the tree-tops, or swung out on the upbuoying air to catch some ill-fated insect on the wing; and although I could not identify many of them, I felt no annoyance, as I had at other times, for I could truly “rejoice with those that do rejoice,” because I had no sorrow of my own to distract my mind. I could have forgiven almost any trick a bird had seen fit to play me. The brown creeper, just from his haunt in some primeval forest of British America, went hitching up a tree-bole in his own quaint way without even the courtesy of a friendly how-d’-you-do; but I forgave the slight, and told him he was a poet,—there was rhythm in every movement, and his feathers rhymed each with its fellow.

Across the breezy hills to the river valley I made my way in lightsome mood, finding birds a-plenty wherever I went. More than once the song-sparrows broke into their autumnal twitter, aftermath of their springtime choruses when they were in full tone; and occasionally the Carolina wren uttered his stirring reveille, which, though perhaps not tuneful in itself, seemed tuneful to me that day, because there was music in my own mind. When you are in the right mood, even the distant caw of the crow or the plaintive cry of the blue jay sets the harp of your soul to melody; while the riotous piping of the cardinal grossbeak makes you feel as if you were “married to immortal verse.”

But, alas! when “loathed melancholy, of Cerberus and blackest midnight born,” is your unbidden companion, every overture of Nature is a burden, an intrusion into the privacy of your grief, and—

“Vainly morning spreads her lure Of a sky serene and pure.”

In a leaf-strewn arcade beneath the overarching bushes hard by the river, were the merry juncos, my companions of the winter, which had come back from their summer vacation in the north. How glad I was to salute them and welcome them home! Their trig little forms, sprightly motions, confident air of comradery, and merry trills were a joy to me. And then I could not help wondering if any of them might be the same birds I had met during the early summer on one of the green mountains of Canada, where I had spent a day of rapturous delight. In the same sequestered angle, autumn though it was, the phœbe bird brought back reminiscences of spring, with his cheery whistle; while farther down the valley his shy relative, the wood-pewee, complained dulcetly that winter was coming to drive him from his pleasant summer haunts. Every sound, whether joyful or sad, struck a responding chord in my heart, because Nature had my undivided thought.

When the mind is distracted by sorrows it cannot shake off, it boots little that the chirp of the chestnut-sided and cerulean warblers is sharp and penetrating; that the call of the black-throated green, black-throated blue and myrtle warblers is somewhat harsh; that the Maryland yellow-throat expresses his alarm or disapproval in a note still lower in the scale and quite rasping; that the Blackburnian and parula warblers tilt about far up in the tree-tops, as if they scorned the ground; that the black-throats and creepers dance airily about in the bushes or lower branches of the trees, come confidingly near you, a tiny interrogation point dangling from every eyelash, ask you what you are about, what you do when you are at home, whether you have just come from the hospital that you look so pale, and, having decided that you are a harmless monomaniac, to say the worst, go about their playful toil of capturing insects, apparently unmindful of your presence. But when your heart is jolly and full of nature love, all these simple facts, proving the large diversity of temperament in bird-land’s denizens, are a source of joy to you; you note them, are glad on account of them, though you scarcely know why.

In a quiet retreat just beyond a steep-graded railway-track the black-throated green warblers were very abundant and unusually rollicksome. It was strange how they could dash about in the thorn-trees without impaling themselves on the terrible spears. One little fellow swung out of a tree after a miller, which dropped upon a fence-post near by. Why did the natty bird act so queerly? He danced about on the top of the post, tried to pick up something, but was baffled in all his efforts; then he scudded around the post a few inches below the top like a nuthatch, uttering his harsh little chirp. At length I stepped up, determined to solve the enigma. There was the solution; the miller had wriggled into a deep hole in the post, so that the bird could not reach it. With a slender stick I drew it out of its hiding-place, and placed it on the top of the post; but whether the bird ever went back and profited by my well-meant helpfulness I do not know. Begging the poor miller’s pardon, I felt happy in befriending the charming fairy of a bird. With gladness throbbing in every corpuscle, it was not in my place to question Nature’s economy in making the sacrifice of one life necessary to the sustenance of another.

Tramping on, I presently found myself in a marsh stretching back from the river-bank. As I stood in the tangle of tall grass and weeds, listening to the songs and twitters of various birds, the sentiment, if not the precise lines, of Lowell, came to mind like a draught of invigorating air,—

“Dear marshes! vain to him the gift of sight Who cannot in their various incomes share, From every season drawn, of shade and light, Who sees in them but levels brown and bare. Each change of storm or sunshine scatters free On them its largess of variety, For Nature with cheap means still works her wonders rare.”

But what was that sharp chirp? It instantly drew my thoughts from the marsh itself and the poet’s tribute. Opera-glass in hand, I softly stole near the bushy clump from which the sound came. Ah! there the bird was, tilting uneasily on a slender twig. The swamp-sparrow! It was the first time I had positively identified this bird in my own neighborhood,—not, I suppose, because it had not been present often and again, but because I had been too dull of sight to see it. Then came a glad memory. I recalled the peculiar circumstances under which I had seen my first swamp-sparrow, hundreds of miles away. During a visit to Boston and vicinity, a year prior, I spent a never-to-be-forgotten afternoon with Bradford Torrey, who needs no introduction to intelligent readers. We walked out to some of his favorite haunts. It was an ideal October day, and the charming New England landscape threw a spell over me that gave me a kind of other-worldly feeling. My companion was all I had expected him to be, and more,—a good talker and an appreciative listener,—and even now, when I recall my saunter with this quiet, gentle bird-lover, it seems more like a dream than a reality.

The afternoon had slipped well by when we came to a bush-fringed brook and Mr. Torrey told me that there were swamp-sparrows in the thickets. “How much I should like to see one!” I cried. “The swamp-sparrow is a stranger to me.” “You shall have your wish gratified,” he replied; and forthwith he climbed the fence, stalked to the other side of the stream, and slowly, gently drove the chirping sparrows toward me, so that I could see their markings plainly with my glass. How lovingly I ogled them! I could not get my fill of the birds shown me by one whom I had loved so long at a distance. It was an epoch in my poor life,—an epoch in a double sense. Who will censure my feeling of gratified pride? In the evening, after our stroll, as we walked to and fro on the platform at the railway-station waiting for the train to start, I remarked: “Mr. Torrey, I shall never forget my first meeting with the swamp-sparrow.”

“No,” he responded innocently, as if my humble remembrance would confer an honor upon him; “whenever you see that bird hereafter, you will think of me, won’t you?” I told him I should; and that evening in the marsh, a year later, I kept my tryst with memory, while tears, half sad, half glad, dimmed my eyes.

But hark! A little farther on, from the sparse bushes of a grassy bank, came the swinging treble of a white-throated sparrow, like a votive offering. What enchantment possessed the birds that evening? Had Orpheus with his miracle-working harp come back to earth? I was half tempted to believe for the nonce in the transmigration of souls, for the notes drifted so sadly sweet on the still air, as if the fabled minstrel had indeed returned to mundane realms. Among the thick clusters of weeds and bushes that fringed a railway, which I pursued in my homeward walk, many birds were going to roost,—sparrows, warblers, red-winged blackbirds, and cardinal grossbeaks. My passing along alarmed them, and sent them dashing from their leafy couches.

Thus the afternoon passed. I had not, perhaps, learned as many new things about my kinsmen in plumes as on many other rambles, but I had discovered the secret of appreciation; that the mind must be unharassed by carking care or depressing sorrow to win the best from Nature. Give me a lightsome heart, and I will trudge with any pedestrian. Give me a heavy heart, and the weight clings to the soles of my feet like barnacles to a ship’s bottom. Given the proper mood, the lines of an American poet—no need to mention his name—have the ring of gospel truth,—

“Nature, the supplement of man, His hidden sense interpret can; What friend to friend cannot convey Shall the dumb bird instructed say.”

XVII. BROWSINGS IN OTHER FIELDS.