Part 19

But now, in Arizona, all this is done. I have no manual. This carpet of desert plants I walk over almost without curiosity, as I might walk over a flowery carpet in a parlor. Their names are nothing more to me than the jabberings of the Mexicans who pass me on the desert with loads of wood. Sometimes, indeed, I guess at a relationship, as now and then I catch a word of Spanish. This flower, I say, may be a Myosotis. But nine chances to one I do not so much as guess. It’s a pretty red flower, or a dainty white blossom, and there’s an end of it. As I said just now, the state of my mind is pre-primeric. I am too ignorant even to ask questions.

A sad case, certainly, but, like sad cases in general, it brings its own partial compensations. I have the more leisure for the birds, and for looking at the mountains. Two months ago it would not have seemed possible, but it has come true; I can sit upon the ground with half a dozen kinds of unknown flowers about me, and gaze upon the Catalinas or the snow-capped Santa Ritas as peacefully or rapturously as if I had never used a manual or a pocket-lens since I was born. Have I been converted, and become as a little child? Possibly; but I anticipate a speedy backsliding when conditions alter.

Yet I perceive that, like the prophet, I am waxing tropical, and using language that requires “interpretation.” There are at least three kinds of flowers in the desert that are not microscopic, and that I call by name. They are not very numerous; you may walk long distances without meeting them; but they are there. I mean the evening primrose, the lupine, and the California poppy. The primrose, which is much the commonest of the three, has no stalk, or none that is apparent; the large, handsome, lemon-colored flower opens directly from a tuft of leaves lying flat on the ground. As for the poppies, I should hardly speak of them as growing in the desert but for the fact that two or three days ago I stumbled upon a place (it would be like trying to find a spot in the ocean to look for it again) where the ground for the space of an acre or more was sparsely sprinkled with them. They were abnormally small, and very short in the stem; but they were bright as the sun, and being lighted upon thus unexpectedly they really made the spot a garden. As the prophet said, the place was “glad for them;” and so was I.

Both poppy and primrose (and the lupine as well) are much more at home on the foothills. There, too, are many flowers not to be seen at all on the desert. I cannot talk about them for lack of names. The brightest and showiest of them all is of a vivid, but, in my vocabulary, nameless shade of red; not scarlet, nor crimson, nor orange, nor pink, but red. The plant stands a foot or so in height and bears a dozen, more or less, of rather large cup-shaped blossoms, the lively color of which would attract notice in any garden.

A very different favorite of mine (I have been intimate with it for a week) is a low--inch-high--composite flower, of the size of a ten-cent piece, with seven or eight white rays and a yellow disk; a dwarf daisy, it looks to be, with soft, cottony stem and leaves. It grows in the driest and most barren places, and as I sit down here and there on the hillsides to rest (looking meanwhile at the green barley fields and the ever-glorious mountains) I am sensibly happier if I see this dainty bit of nature’s loveliness (a child, not a dwarf--I take back the word) within my hand’s reach. It is the very flower to make a pet of; prettier by far than if it were taller and showier. Cultivation would spoil it. It was made for the desert.

And this reminds me to say that, if the hills are to be counted as part of the desert, as in reason they may be, then the prophet’s word has been fulfilled, not partially but in all strictness. The desert has blossomed like the rose. For the slopes of the Tucson range are literally on fire with blossoms. Patches of sun-bright yellow, some of them to all appearance an acre or more in extent, can be seen clear across the plain. I saw them yesterday afternoon as I started homeward from Camp Lowell. The distance could hardly be less than eight miles, and probably they would have been visible had it been twice as far. That the flowers are poppies, and not blossoms of a smaller cruciferous plant that is very abundant and gregarious hereabout, I am confident, not only because I am assured so by residents of the city, but because the patches are much less conspicuous in the early forenoon, when poppies are not wide open, than later in the day. Some of the patches (I can see a dozen from my window as I write, fully five miles off) are well toward the tops of the mountains, which, needless to say, are not of great elevation, perhaps four thousand feet.

The poppy is the Tucson flower. Children go out upon the hills and bring back bunches to sell along the streets and from house to house. Their splendid color need not be praised. It is known to all Eastern people, who grow the plants in gardens (I seem to remember when they came in) under the name of Eschscholtzia. And here, on the mountain walls of this Arizona desert, are hanging-gardens so full of them as to form masses of color visible ten or fifteen miles away! “They shall blossom abundantly,” said the prophet; and who knows but he spoke of the Tucson Mountains in poppy time?

NESTS AND OTHER MATTERS

With the first of April approaching, the life of Arizona birds takes on a busier complexion. The idle season is over; now there are nests to be built (no small undertaking, in itself, as a man may easily find out by setting himself to build one), and a family to be watched over and defended. Now the human visitor begins to understand what cactuses were made for. As he walks among the whitish-green chollas, giving them elbow-room, he has only to glance to right and left to see what a considerable proportion of them are inhabited; this one by a pair of thrashers, the other by a pair of cactus wrens. In neither case is there any serious attempt at concealment; partly because the attempt would be useless; partly, we may guess, because concealment is unnecessary. If your safe is burglar proof, why be at the trouble to hide it? Neither squirrel nor snake is likely to climb a cholla cactus, and even a man knows enough to approach it with caution.

Of the two species of thrasher that live in the desert the larger one, known as Palmer’s, seems to be the earlier breeder. I found a nest with eggs on the first day of March; and on the ninth, I came upon a brood of young birds already out of the nest. They were still new to the world, acting as if they found it a strange, unintelligible place; but they were fully fledged, and when put to it, flew from one cholla to another without difficulty. Still, they had more faith in cactus thorns than in wing-power, and allowed me almost to lay hands on them before taking flight.

The two desert-inhabiting thrashers, by the by, Palmer’s and Bendire’s, are so much alike (the Palmer being somewhat longer and darker than its neighbor), that it was some time before I felt sure of myself in discriminating between them. As to the question of comparative length (one of the most uncertain points on which an observer can base a determination), I fell back upon an old method, which it seems worth while to mention here, because I have never seen it referred to in print. It has served one man well, and may do as much for another.

Two of our Eastern birds that are most troublesome to beginners in ornithology are the downy and the hairy woodpecker, the only difference between them--the only one that can ordinarily be seen in the field, I mean to say--being one of size. Well, I long ago discovered for myself that it was much easier to carry in my eye the comparative measurements of the two birds’ bills than the comparative measurements of the birds themselves. Let me see the head in profile, and I could name its owner almost beyond mistake.

This method, as I say, I resorted to in the case of my two desert thrashers, and little by little (time itself being of great service in such matters), I settled the question with myself. And still there remained a certain fact that cast a shade of doubt over my determination. In Mrs. Bailey’s Handbook, the only authority I had brought with me, Mr. Herbert Brown, after twenty years’ experience with Tucson birds, is quoted as saying that the Bendire thrasher almost never sings, whereas the birds that I was calling by that name were in song continually. What was I to think? It seemed a case for a gun. Without it, how could I ever be sure of my reckoning? I was in a box, as we say. But there was a way out. There almost always is. The two species lay eggs of different colors. I must find them; and with patience I did; first, the blue-green eggs of Palmer, and then (two sets in one day), the whitish eggs of Bendire; and my identification of the owners, made before the eggs were examined, turned out to be correct in all cases.

In the way of music, neither bird is equal to the brown thrasher of the East. In fact, if I am to be judge, one Massachusetts thrasher, in his cinnamon-colored suit (and in the top of a gray birch), could outsing any half-dozen of the birds in this Arizona desert. It is to be said, however, that there is a third species here (not on the face of the desert itself, but in the thickets along the Rillito River), the crissal thrasher so called, whose song I have yet to make sure of. He is larger even than the Palmer, and to look at him should have a fuller voice.

And this reminds me that I had been in Tucson more than a month before I saw a mockingbird; and even now, when I have been here almost two months, I have seen but three. The people generally seem to mistake the thrashers for mockers. If I speak to them about the strangeness of the mocker’s absence, they declare that mockers are common here. At least two persons have turned upon me with the assertion, “Why, there’s one singing out there at this minute.” And they point to a thrasher, a bird that wears not one of the mocker’s three colors,--gray, black, and white,--and for music is as much like him as a child’s tin whistle is like a master’s flute. And still it is true, at least the systematists tell us so, and I have no thought of questioning it, that the mockingbird is only a nobler kind of thrasher. And thrashers, the mocker included, are only larger kinds of wrens.

Arizona is the wrens’ country. During my short stay in Tucson I have seen ten species: the sage thrasher, the Western mockingbird, the Bendire thrasher, the Palmer thrasher, the crissal thrasher, the cactus wren, the rock wren, the canyon wren, the Baird wren, and the interior tule wren.

The sage thrashers, whose mysterious silence was commented upon in a previous article, are only now beginning to find their voices; for they are still (March 21) in the desert, though they will go elsewhere to breed. Two days ago, while returning from the Rillito Valley, I came upon a group of them, and to my great pleasure two or three were in song; not letting themselves out, to be sure, but running over a medley of a tune under their breath in a kind of dumb rehearsal. I could barely hear it, but I saw at once why the birds, for all their short bills and unthrasher-like ways, are called sometimes sage thrashers and sometimes mountain mockingbirds. I hope their sotto voce preludings will not outlast my stay among them.

One of my particular favorites here is the Say phœbe. From the first he took my fancy. All his ways please me. As the homely phrase is, I like the cut of his jib. His plaintive call is never wearisome, though he is exceedingly free with it. And I have grown to like him and his mate the better because they are fond of certain places where I myself am given to spending now and then an idle hour. There are four abandoned shanties in different parts of the desert, in the shade of which I often rest; and every one of them has its pair of Say phœbes. I saw the birds with building materials in their bills, and began by expecting to find the nest inside the open building; but by and by I discovered that they liked best of all a site down in a well! It seems a safe position to begin with--as long as the nest contains nothing but eggs; but I ask myself about the danger to the little ones when they become big enough to be uneasy. If they are anything like young robins, for example, a pitiful share of them must perish sixty feet underground. However, the birds may be presumed to understand their own business better than any outsider can teach it to them; and they unquestionably prefer the well. Of the four pairs just mentioned, three have built in that position (the wells, it should be understood, are not stoned), and the fourth would have done likewise, I dare say, only that the well in their case happens to be covered. As it is, the nest is on one of the joists of a shed, and an impertinent stranger has been known to clamber up and examine the eggs. “Oh, if that well had only been left open!” the birds probably thought, as they saw what he was doing.

One kind of nest that is common here is set so out in sight that none but a blind man could miss it, though from its color it might readily be passed as an old one, not worth investigation. I do not remember just how many I have seen,--half a dozen, it may be,--but I have never looked into one. They cannot be looked into, unless they are first torn to pieces.

I speak of the verdin’s nest. It is a marvel of workmanship: globular, or roughly so, with an entrance neatly roofed over well down on one side; constructed outwardly--I cannot speak beyond that, of course--of countless small thorny sticks, and in size and general color resembling a large paper-wasps’ nest. The bird, as I say, plants it in full sight, in a leafless cat’s-claw bush, by preference, though I have seen one beauty in a palo-verde tree.

My first one I was directed to by the outcries of the owner. The foolish thing--if she was foolish--actually went inside, and while there scolded me. She took it for granted, I suppose, that I had seen her go in, and was determined to let me know what she thought of such despicable espionage. As a matter of fact, I was busy just then with a rarer bird, and might have passed her pretty house unnoticed had she held her peace. But the verdin is a nervously loquacious body, and perhaps would rather talk than keep a secret. Such cases have been heard of. Whatever else we may say of her, she is an architect of something like genius.

A FLYCATCHER AND A SPARROW

I believe I have seen two of the oddest birds in Texas--the road-runner and the scissor-tailed flycatcher. The first was mentioned some time ago in these letters; the second I have but lately met with. When I was in San Antonio in January, he was absent for the winter. He would return, I was informed, shortly after the middle of March, and I have kept it fast in mind that I must stop here on my way home and make his acquaintance.

I knew he was odd, but he has turned out to be odder even than I supposed. Other places, other birds, as a matter of course, but surely this one, to use Emerson’s word, is the “otherest.” When I saw him first, in San Pedro Park (everything is saintly in the Southwest), I thought for an instant that I was looking at a bird which had seized a long string, or a strip of cloth, and was flying away with it to his nest. Seen more fully, he looked, I said to myself, like a Japanese kite, or some other outlandish plaything. Even now, when he has been in sight pretty constantly for five or six days, I can hardly say that he looks like a bird to me. His enormously long tail feathers are so fantastic, so almost grotesque! They render him a kind of monstrosity. One feels as if he had been made, not born; and some Oriental must have been the maker.

Yet if ever a bird was alive, he is. His spirits are effervescent and apparently inexhaustible. Few birds are noisier or more continually on the move. When six or eight scissor-tails meet for consultation in one small tree, even though it be in a cemetery, there are “great doings,” as the country phrase is. What the disturbance is all about, it is beyond me to tell, but it seems a reasonable assumption that it has to do somehow with questions of love and marriage. So far as I have noticed, such sessions do not last long. In the nature of things they cannot. The hubbub increases, the discussion, whatever its subject, waxes more and more animated, and then, of a sudden, the assembly breaks up (I was going to say explodes), and away fly the birds (and the birds’ tails), every one still contending for the last word.

But there is no need of six or eight to set the pot bubbling. Two are a plenty; and indeed I suspect that a single bird would have it out with himself rather than forego for an hour or two the excitement of a shindy. In temperament the scissor-tail, as well as I can determine, is own brother to the kingbird. As I said, he is brimming over with spirits. If he gave them no vent he would burst.

So after a few minutes of quietness, the calm that precedes the storm, he darts into the air, with vehement, mad gyrations, opening and shutting his tail feathers spasmodically, and uttering loud cries of one sort and another. Perhaps he flies straight upward, or as nearly so as possible (this is one of the kingbird’s tricks), and with tail outspread comes down headfirst like an arrow. He is like a creature full of wine, or like one beside himself. What he does, he has to do. There is no holding him in.

Sometimes, when there are two in the air together, and for anything I know at other times,--I tell what I have seen,--they utter most curious, hollow, throbbing, booming noises, such as one would never attribute to any bird of the flycatcher family. They utter them, I say, but I mean only that they make them. How they do it, whether with the throat, the wings, or the tail, is something I have yet to discover. The only book I have at hand makes no mention of such noises, and I was greatly taken aback when I heard them.