Part 13

I saw a strange warbler the other day. That is to say, I thought I saw one. I had been wandering for a whole forenoon amid the chaparral just outside the city of San Antonio, and had enjoyed a good number of novel sensations, when suddenly (such things always come suddenly, but it seems necessary to repeat the word) a tiny bird moved in a low bush directly before me. “A gray warbler with no wing-marks,” I said; and the next instant I saw that its crown was light yellow. It moved again, and the forward parts came into view. Its throat also was yellow. At that moment it was eating a yellow berry. Its ground color was near the shade worn by a juvenile chestnut-sided warbler, and the yellow of the crown and throat was very lightly laid on over the gray, so to express it, just as it is in the chestnut-side’s case.

Now what kind of warbler can this be? I asked myself: a gray warbler with a yellow crown and a yellow throat, and no other adornments. And with the question there came into my mind, as by the effect of immediate inspiration, the word Calaveras. Whether it was Calaveras or something else, there could be no doubt of my being able to clear up the question, once I should have a book in my hand.

I resumed my peregrinations, therefore, the bird having moved on, as birds do, being provided with wings for that very purpose, and by and by, walking at a venture round one clump of bushes after another, I came again upon the stranger, who, it should be said, was of a peculiarly unsuspicious disposition, and this time was swallowing piecemeal what seemed to my New England mind a very unseasonable caterpillar. And now I made a further discovery: the shoulder of the bird’s wing was edged with a line of pretty bright red, of a shade between chestnut and carmine! Surely, it was only a matter of surviving to reach the hotel and the mystery would be solved. Calaveras or what not, it was impossible that there should be two warblers marked in this singular manner.

Well, I got back to my room, and sure enough, not only were there not two warblers thus marked, there was not even one. Calaveras was nothing to the purpose. My inspiration must have come from the wrong place. At any rate, it was unprofitable for instruction. It wasn’t far to go, you may say, but I was at my wits’ end.

That evening I had occasion to answer a letter from an eminent ornithologist, who has herself worked much in the Southwest, and besides has at her elbow the best of American bird collections. She would be able to help me out of my difficulty. In all innocence, therefore, I stated my case. It was possible, I admitted (thrice lucky admission--it is always politic to seem modest, however one may feel), that the bird was not a warbler, after all, though, if it were not, I had no idea what it could be.

Well, the next day I was out in the country again, this time in a pecan grove, with tall seed-bearing weeds standing by the acre under the tall, leafless trees (a paradise for sparrows), when I heard a chickadee whistling his four notes in the distance. “How closely his music resembles that of his relative as we hear it in Florida,” I said to myself. And this reflection set me asking, “Where is that odd little titmouse, the verdin, that was said to be common about San Antonio at all seasons?” And then, like a flash, came the answer: “Why, man, that was a verdin you saw yesterday, out in the chaparral, and mistook for a warbler.” And so it turned out. Red shoulder-strap and all, everything suited. The verdin, by the by, is a distinctively Southwestern species, not Parus, but Auriparus. My bird had been a female, I suppose, showing less yellow than her mate would have done. Perhaps if I had seen him instead of her, I should not have been so befooled.

No sooner was the puzzle thus satisfactorily solved, than I began to meditate, with something less of satisfaction, upon the letter I had written the evening before. I thought, too, of the many more or less foolish letters that I had myself received (and sometimes smiled at, I fear) in the past twenty years, letters in which eager searchers after ornithological knowledge had confided to me marvelous accounts of the wonders they had seen afield, and by an unhappy fate could find no description of when they returned to the study. Not many of these correspondents, as well as I could now remember, had ever mistaken a titmouse for a warbler! I must dispatch a postscript to my letter by the earliest mail. And so I did, ostensibly, of course, to save my friend the trouble of a reply, but really to prove to her that, though I was capable of blundering, I was also capable of a second thought.

And now, having made my confession, I am bound to add that some who may laugh at me would possibly have been little wiser than I, had they stood in my shoes; for the verdin does not look the least in the world like anything that goes by the name of titmouse or chickadee up in our Northern country. I hope to see more of it, and especially to hear its song, which is said to be of surprising volume.

Really (and this is why I have told this not very exciting tale at such length), it is the chief delight of bird-gazing in a strange country that one has to begin, as it were, all one’s studies over again; as I have seen a professor of botany in similar circumstances fingering the leaves of the manual like the veriest schoolboy, as for the time being he was. It is not the proudest way of renewing one’s youth, but it will answer. And conditions being as they are, nothing else will answer.

Such is my present case here in Texas. Even now, in the dead of winter, with the number of species greatly reduced, the novelties seen in one walk are so many that the man who uses no gun, and so can take no specimens home with him for inspection, is often put to his trumps when he comes to run over his day’s notes. Though he may have done his best, he is certain to have overlooked or forgotten some detail which, with the book before him, turns out to be all important. What a pity he did not note with more exactness the proportion of white on the tail feathers, or the position of a certain black spot on the side of the head! He must go out again, and--if he is fortunate enough to find the bird--secure a stricter and more intelligent observation. It is plaguing fun, but it is fun, nevertheless, and good practice, besides; and withal, it leaves work for to-morrow.

It must be admitted, moreover, if the truth is to be told,--and it is sometimes better to tell it,--that no amount of observation in the field will be likely, in a month or two, at any rate, to settle all the nice questions that confront the student in a new region in these latter days; especially if the region happens to be, like this about San Antonio, one in which Eastern and Western forms of the same species are to be found overlapping each other. It was very well for Emerson to speak, poetically, of naming all the birds without a gun. He lived before the day of trinomials; or if that be not quite true, before our younger brood of ambitious closet ornithologists had set themselves so zealously at the work of dividing and subdividing. Time was when a song sparrow was a song sparrow, and there was an end of it. Now to call a bird by that name is only the beginning of sorrows. What kind of song sparrow is it? My Western handbook enumerates about fifteen sub-species, and the differences, I suspect, are many of them almost too fine for opera-glass determination. For what I know, a microscope might be more to the purpose.

The man who refuses a gun must accept the limitations that go with that refusal. Time and repeated observation will do much; a good ear will help--in some cases it will do the larger half of the work; but he must not expect to accomplish with a glass and patience exactly what another man accomplishes with powder and shot and a pair of dividers. In the study of ornithology, as elsewhere, there are diversities of operations, and possibly not the same spirit.

If I cannot be certain whether the vesper sparrows I saw to-day were light-colored enough to pass for Poœcetes gramineus confinis, or were probably nothing but plain Poœcetes gramineus, I must put up with my ignorance, distressing as it is. Possibly, if I were to see species and sub-species side by side, even in the field, I could tell them apart; possibly I could not. Whether their songs differ, is a point concerning which my book, after the manner of books, has nothing to offer; and as the birds are now dumb, there is nothing for me to do but to call them vesper sparrows, and await developments.

And some things can be settled, even in Texas, with no weapon but a field-glass. I know, for example, that I have to-day seen Mexican goldfinches, and Arctic towhees, and red-shafted flickers. That is more than half a loaf, by a good deal, and several times better than no bread.

LUCK ON THE PRAIRIE

A well-groomed hobby will carry its rider comfortably over many a slough.

I was on my way westward to El Paso, and knowing that the train was due there before daylight, I left my berth early, and had gone out upon the porch of the observation car to catch a bite of fresh air and enjoy the first faint flushes of the dawn, when a train-hand, passing in the semi-darkness, informed me that the wreck of a freight train was on the track in front of us, and that we should probably not be able to move for eight or nine hours. I had noticed that we were standing still upon a “siding,” but such halts are not infrequent on a single-track road, and having my mind upon pleasanter themes, I had passed the circumstance by without further thought.

The news of our trouble spread, as one passenger after another made his unhandsome, half-civilized appearance from behind the curtains, and though we proved to be a pretty philosophical company, as transcontinental travelers have need to be, the general run of comment was not hilarious.

A turn outside, as it grew lighter, showed that we were at a station called San Elizario (a pleasing name, surely), some three thousand two hundred feet above sea-level. The westerly breeze was a refreshment, and three or four ranges of jagged mountains glorified the horizon. If we must be delayed, the Fates had chosen a favorable place for us.

I, for one, soon began to feel reconciled to the turn affairs had taken, and went back to the car for an opera-glass. It must be a dull day in Texas when a tender-footed bird-gazer cannot find at least one novelty, and till the “first call for breakfast” I would be out trying my luck.

An adobe building, windowless and unoccupied, stood not far off, and near it was a cottonwood tree, still holding, in spite of all those Texas winds, part of its last season’s crop of dry leaves. I walked in that direction, and at the moment three birds, with musical, goldfinch-like twitters, flew into the tree. A glance showed them to be not goldfinches, but small birds of the purple finch group, very bright and rosy (the two males), and thickly streaked underneath. “The house finch!” I exclaimed.

This is a Western beauty, greatly beloved for its color, its music, and its engaging familiarity, by all to whom it is a neighbor. I had read of its charms, and had freshly in mind an enthusiastic eulogy of it by an old friend, now a resident of Colorado, whom I had chanced to fall in with a fortnight before in a railway car. With those three lovely creatures talking to me, I felt that the day was saved.

A Say’s phœbe was near by, in a pear orchard (for the piece of prairie land on which we so unexpectedly found ourselves was under irrigation), and as I had met it first only forty-eight hours before--at Del Rio--I was glad to see more of its very demure and pretty habits, especially of its clever trick of hovering at considerable length just over the grass. The rather bright buff of its under-parts is one of its striking characteristics, and now, when I caught sight of it in the distance, I had for a moment thoughts of some unfamiliar kind of oriole.

There was barely time to pay my respects to the phœbe before a flash of blue wings made me aware of something more interesting still, a bevy of bluebirds. It would be good fortune, surely, if they should turn out to be of one of the several Western forms that I had never seen. I drew near, therefore, with all carefulness, and needed but one look to assure myself that such was indeed the case. Their backs were not blue, but of a chestnut shade. The blue of the wings, moreover, was not quite the same as that of our common Eastern Sialia.

Whatever they were, the color of the backs would probably be enough to name them, and I returned to the car for breakfast and, first of all, to make sure of my new birds’ identity. A consultation of the handbook showed it to be reasonably certain that they were of the sub-species Sialia mexicana bairdi, the chestnut-backed bluebird; but I had failed to observe one important mark: the throat should have been “purplish blue.” I wished very much to see them again, but they had disappeared. Doubtless they were migrants or stragglers, and by this time were far away. A pity I had not been more painstaking while I had the opportunity. The one safe rule is to note everything, though it is a rule more easily laid down than lived up to, to be sure, especially in a new place, with many distractions. Anyhow, the birds must be of the chestnut-backed sub-species, I reassured myself, for the sufficient reason that it was impossible, here in western Texas, that they should be anything else.

Allaying my scruples thus, I started across a field toward a farmhouse, and on the way noticed a crow flying over. It was the first one I had seen since reaching San Antonio,--the chaparral country not favoring birds of the crow-jay tribe,--and I remarked it with pleasure. And then, remembering something I had lately read of Arizona, I thought, “But is it a crow, after all? Isn’t it one of the white-necked ravens that are set down as so common and familiar in this part of the world?” And, in fact, it was; for the next moment it began calling in a voice that put the possibility of its being a common American crow, the only one that could possibly be met with in all this region, quite out of the account. Another new bird! The third within half an hour! Surely this was better than getting into El Paso on schedule time. Let El Paso wait. It would probably last the day out.

But the story was not yet done, for after a little the meadow larks, of which there were many in the fields (with large flocks of horned larks, also), began singing. I was disappointed in the song, of the beauty of which I had formed the most exalted expectations, but consoled myself with believing that the birds were not Western meadow larks proper, but the Texan sub-species; otherwise I must conclude that their voices were still somewhat winter-bound, or at least, not yet keyed up to concert pitch.

A sparrow hawk beside the farmhouse before mentioned allowed me to stand almost under his low tree before he took wing, and when at last he did so I had a feeling that he was rather surprisingly long. I thought nothing more of the matter at the moment, but later, discovering by a reference to the handbook that a variety of Falco sparverius, somewhat larger and with a longer tail, had been described from this region, I concluded it probable, not to say certain, that my impression had been correct, and that the bird was not my old acquaintance of the East, but Falco sparverius deserticola. That would make the new birds of the morning four instead of three.