Part 20

As the reader perceives, I am dealing in first impressions. They are all I have. Most of the scissor-tail’s tricks and manners, indeed, I have yet to witness. I have not seen him chase a crow, for instance, or a raven (he would have to travel a hundred miles, I suspect, to find either the one or the other), but give him half a chance, and I am sure he would do it. One thing I have seen him do: I have seen him fly before an English sparrow. The action seemed unworthy of him, but I dare say he did not so regard it. Perhaps it was all a joke. But apparently no bird considers it a disgrace to be put to rout by a smaller one. The shameful thing is to be afraid of one that is larger than yourself. This is not the human way of looking at such matters; but perhaps that does not prove it a false way. I seem to see that much might be said in defense of it.

It is surprising how common the scissor-tail is, and more surprising yet that nobody seems to notice him. I should have thought that all the passers-by would be stopping to stare at so half-absurd a prodigy. But when he performs his craziest evolutions here in the Alamo Plaza, in the very heart of the city, nobody appears to mind him. The truth is that to these people--to most of them, at least--he is an old story, while to me he is like a bird invented last week. Wherever you notice men, you will perceive that it is not the wonderful that attracts their attention, but the novel and the out-of-the-way. The moon and the stars they are used to, and quite properly look upon with indifference; but let a neighbor’s hencoop catch fire, and they cannot run fast enough to behold the spectacle.

Another and better thing I have accomplished during my present brief stay in San Antonio: I have heard and seen the Cassin sparrow. A Washington ornithologist, familiar with this Southwestern country, learning that I was on my way thither, wrote to me in January: “On no account return without hearing the Cassin sparrow.” To confess the truth, I had almost forgotten the injunction, emphatic as it was; but a few mornings ago, on my way back to the terminus of the street-car line after a jaunt into some old pecan woods, five or six miles out of the city, I stopped short at the sound of a few simple bird notes. What a gracious tune! And as novel as it was gracious! I had never heard the like: a long trill or shake, pitched at the top of the scale, and then, after a rest, a phrase of five notes in the sweetest of sparrow voices, ending with the truest and most unexpected of musical intervals. For mnemonic purposes, as my custom is (useful to me, if to no one else), I at once put words to the tune: “She” (this for the long trill), “pretty, pretty she.”

The birds were in some scattered mesquite bushes (very bright now, in their new yellow-green leafage), and I hastened to get through the fence and make up to them. They proved to be very small, and distressingly deficient in marks or “characters,” but I took such note of them as I could, in a poor light. The main thing, for the time being, was the song. That prolonged opening note, with its sound of an indrawn whistle, ought to be the work of a Pucæa, I told myself, remembering the Florida representative of that genus, and the singers should therefore be Cassin sparrows.

The next morning, having refreshed my memory by a reading of the handbook, I took the car immediately after breakfast for another visit to the place. This, I should have said, was in the rear grounds of an asylum for the insane. It was Sunday morning, and as I crawled through the fence and took up my position among the mesquites, I presently found myself under fire from the windows and balconies. The distance was too great for me to understand what was said, but there was no doubt that the inmates of the institution regarded me as a queer one. However, I believed in my own sanity (as things go in this world), and did not propose to be hindered. The birds were there, and that was enough.

And now, to my intense satisfaction, I found that they were doing just what the handbook described: springing into the air for a few feet, after the manner of long-billed marsh wrens, and with fluttering wings dropping slowly back to the perch, uttering their sweet, “She, pretty, pretty she,” as they descended. I secured somewhat fuller observations of their plumage, also, and became morally certain--which means something less than scientifically certain, though really, taking Mr. Attwater’s list of the birds of San Antonio as a guide, there is nothing else they can be--that the singers were Cassin sparrows.

And glad I am to have heard them. I cannot speak for others; judgment in such matters must always be largely a question of personal taste; but for myself I have heard few bird songs that satisfy me so well; so quaint and original, yet so true and simple. San Antonio mockingbirds are numberless, and their performances are wonderful; I think I should never tire of them; but somehow those six quiet notes of the sparrow seem to go deeper home.

A BUNCH OF BRIGHT BIRDS

Almost or quite the most brilliant bird that I saw in Arizona was the vermilion flycatcher. I had heard of it as sometimes appearing in the neighborhood of Tucson, but entertained small hope of meeting it there myself. A stranger, straitened for time, and that time in winter, blundering about by himself, with no pilot to show him the likely places, could hardly expect to find many besides the commoner things. So I reasoned with myself, aiming to be philosophical. Nevertheless, there is always the chance of green hand’s luck; I knew it by more than one happy experience; and who could tell what might happen? Possibly it was not for nothing that my eye, as by a kind of magnetic attraction, fell so often upon Mrs. Bailey’s opening sentence about this particular bird as day after day, on one hunt and another, I turned the leaves of her Handbook. “Of all the rare Mexican birds seen in southern Arizona and Texas,” so I read, “the vermilion flycatcher is the gem.”

One thing was certain: this famous Mexican rarity was not confusingly like anything else, as so many of its Northern relatives have the unhandsome trick of being. If I saw it, ever so hurriedly, I should recognize it.

Well, I did see it, and almost of course at a moment when I was least looking for it. This was on the 5th of February, my fifth day in Tucson. I had crossed the Santa Cruz Valley, west of the city, by one road, and after a stroll among the foothills opposite, was returning by another, when a bit of flashing red started up from the wire fence directly before me. I knew what it was, almost before I saw it, as it seemed, so eager was I, and so well prepared; and as the solitary’s companionable habit is, I spoke aloud. “There’s the vermilion flycatcher!” I heard myself saying.

The fellow was every whit as splendid as my fancy had painted him, and to my joy he seemed to be not in the least put out by my approach nor chary of displaying himself. He was too innocent and too busy; darting into the air to snatch a passing insect, and anon returning to his perch, which was now a fence-post, now the wire, and now, best of all, the topmost, tilting spray of a dwarf mesquite. Thus engaged, every motion a delight to the eye, he flitted along the road in advance of me, till finally, having reached the limit of his hunting-ground,--the roadside ditches filled with water from the overflow of irrigated barley fields,--he turned back by the way he had come.

I went home a happy man; I had added one of the choicest and most beautiful of American birds to my mental collection. One thing was still lacking, however: flycatchers are not song-birds, but the humblest of them has a voice, and having things to say is apt to say them; my new acquaintance had kept his thoughts to himself.

This was in the forenoon, and after luncheon I went back to walk again over that muddy road between those ditches of muddy water. The bird might still be there. And he was,--still catching insects, and still silent. But so handsome! At first sight most people, I suppose, would compare him, as I did, with the scarlet tanager. The red parts are of nearly or quite the same shade,--a little deeper and richer, if anything,--while the wings, tail, and back are dark brown, approaching black,--the wings and tail especially,--dark enough, at any rate, to afford a brilliant contrast. His scientific name is Pyrocephalus, which is admirable as far as it goes, but falls a long way short of telling the whole truth about him; for not only is his head of a fiery hue, but his whole body as well, with the exceptions already noted. In size he ranks between the least flycatcher and the wood pewee. In liveliness of action he is equal to the spryest of his family, with a flirt of the tail which to my eye is identical with that of the phœbe. His gorgeous color is the more effective because of his aerial habits. The tanager is bright sitting on the bough, but how much brighter he would look if every few minutes he were seen hovering in mid-air with the sunlight playing upon him!

Certainly I was in great luck, and I felt it the more as day after day I found the dashing beauty in the same place. I could not spend my whole winter vacation in visiting him, but I saw him there at odd times,--nearly as often as I passed,--until February 17. Then he disappeared; but a week later I discovered him, or another like him, in a different part of the valley, and on the 26th I saw two. The next day, for the first time, one of the birds was in voice, uttering a few fine, short notes, little remarkable in themselves, but thoroughly characteristic; not suggestive of any other flycatcher notes known to me; so that, from that time to the end of my stay in Tucson, I was never in doubt as to their authorship, no matter where I heard them.

All these earlier birds were males in full plumage. The first female--herself a beauty, with a modest tinge of red upon her lower parts, enough to mark the relationship--was noticed March 5. Males were now becoming common, and on the 9th, although my walks covered no very wide territory, I counted, of males and females together, seventeen. From first to last not one was met with on the creosote and cactus-covered desert, but after the first few days of March they were well distributed over the Santa Cruz and Rillito valleys and about the grounds of the university. I found no nest until March 27, although at least two weeks earlier than that a female was seen pulling shreds of dry bark from a cottonwood limb, while her mate flitted about the neighborhood, now here, now there, as if he were too happy to contain himself.

The prettiest performance of the male, witnessed almost daily, and sometimes many times a day, after the arrival of the other sex, was a surprisingly protracted ecstatic flight, half flying, half hovering, the wings being held unnaturally high above the back, as if on purpose to display the red body (a most peculiar action, by which the bird could be told as far as he could be seen), accompanied throughout by a rapid repetition of his simple call; all thoroughly in the flycatcher manner; exactly such a mad, lyrical outburst as one frequently sees indulged in by the chebec, for instance, and the different species of phœbe. In endurance, as well as in passion, Pyrocephalus is not behind the best of them, while his exceptional bravery of color gives him at such moments a glory altogether his own. Sometimes, indeed, he seems to be emulous of the skylark himself, he rises to such a height, beating his way upward, hovering for breath, and then pushing higher and still higher. Once I saw him and the large Arizona crested flycatcher in the air side by side, one as crazy as the other; but the big magister was an awkward hand at the business, compared with the tiny Pyrocephalus.

It was good to find so showy a bird so little disposed to shyness. At Old Camp Lowell, where I often rested for an hour at noon in the shade of one of the adobe buildings, the bachelor winter occupants of which were kind enough to give me food and shelter (together with pleasant company) whenever my walk took me so far from home, our siesta was constantly enlivened by his bright presence and engaging tricks. One day, as he perched at the top of a low mesquite, on a level with our eyes, I put my glass into the hand of the younger of my hosts. He broke out in a tone of wonder. “Well, now,” said he (he spoke to the bird), “you are a peach.” And so he is. It is exactly what, in my more old-fashioned and less collegiate English, I have been vainly endeavoring to say.

And to be a “peach” is a fine thing. A vivacious living essayist, it is true, who is probably a handsome man himself, at least in the looking-glass, declares that “male ugliness is an endearing quality.” The remark may be true--in a sense; by all means let us hope so, seeing how lavish Nature has been with the commodity in question; but I am confident that the female vermilion flycatcher would never admit it. As for her glorious dandy of a husband, there can be no doubt what opinion he would hold of such an impudent reflection upon feminine perspicacity and taste. “A plague upon paradoxes and aphorisms,” I hear him answer. “If fine feathers don’t make fine birds, what in Heaven’s name do they make?”

It was only two days after my discovery of the vermilion flycatcher (if I remember correctly I was at that moment on my way to enjoy a third or fourth look at him) that I first saw a very different but scarcely less interesting novelty. I was on the sidewalk of Main Street, in the busy part of the day, my thoughts running upon a batch of delayed letters just received, when suddenly I looked up (probably I had heard a voice without being conscious of it, for the confirmed hobby-rider is sometimes in the saddle unwittingly) and caught sight of a few swifts far overhead. People were passing, but it was now or never with me, and I whipped out my opera-glass. There were six of the birds, and their throats were white. So much I saw, having known what to look for, and then they were gone,--as if the heavens had opened and swallowed them up. It was a niggardly interview, at pretty long range, but a deal better than nothing; enough, at all events, for an identification. They were white-throated swifts,--Aëronautes melanoleucus.

Three days later a flock of at least seventeen birds of the same species were hawking over the Santa Cruz Valley, and now, as they swept this way and that at their feeding, there was leisure for the field-glass and something like a real examination. To my surprise (surprise is the compensation of ignorance) I discovered that they had not only white throats, as their name implies, but white breasts, and more noticeable still, white rumps. Those who are familiar with our common dingy, soot-colored chimney swift of the East will be able to form some idea of the distinguished appearance of this Westerner: a considerably larger bird, built on the same rakish lines, shooting about the sky in the same lightning-like zigzags, and marked in this striking and original manner with white. I saw the birds only four times afterward, the last time on the 17th of February. So I say, speaking after the manner of men; but in truth I can see them now, their white rumps lighting up as they wheel and catch the sun. It pleases me to learn that it is next to impossible to shoot them, and that they are scarce in collections. So may they continue. They were made for better things.

The most beautiful bird that I found in Arizona, though judgments of this kind are of necessity liable to revision as one’s mood changes, was the Arizona Pyrrhuloxia. I should be glad to give the reader, as well as to have for my own use, an English name for it, but so far as I am aware it has none. It has lived beyond the range of the vernacular. My delight in its beauty was less keen than naturally it would have been, because I had spent my first raptures upon its equally handsome Texas relative of the same name a few weeks before. This was at San Antonio, in the chaparral just outside the city. I had been listening to a flock of lark sparrows, I remember, and looking at sundry things, where almost everything was new, when all at once I saw before me at the foot of a bush the loveliest bunch of feathers that I had ever set eyes on. Without the least thought of what I was doing I began repeating to myself under my breath, “O my soul! O my soul!” And in sober truth the creature was deserving of all the admiration it excited: a bird of the cardinal’s size and build, dressed not in gaudy red, but in the most exquisite shade of gray, with a plentiful spilling of an equally exquisite rose color over its under-parts. Its bright orange bill was surrounded at the base by a double ring of black and rose, and on its head was a most distinguished-looking, divided crest, tipped with rose color of a deeper shade. It was loveliness to wonder at. I cannot profess that I was awe-struck (not being sure that I know just what that excellent word means), but it would hardly be too much to say that “as I passed, I worshiped.”

The Arizona bird, unhappily, was not often seen (the Texas bird treated me better), though when I did come upon it, it was generally in accessible places (in wayside hedgerows) not far from houses. It would be impossible to see either the Texas or the Arizona bird for the first time without comparing it with the cardinal, the two are so much alike, and yet so different. The cardinal is brighter, but for beauty give me Pyrrhuloxia. I do not expect the sight of any other bird ever to fill me with quite so rapturous a delight in pure color as that first unlooked-for Pyrrhuloxia did in the San Antonio chaparral. It was like the joy that comes from falling suddenly upon a stanza of magical verse, or catching from some unexpected quarter a strain of heavenly music.

If Pyrocephalus was the brightest and Pyrrhuloxia the most beautiful of my Arizona birds, Phainopepla must be called the most elegant, the most supremely graceful, if I may be pardoned such an application of the word, the most incomparably genteel. I saw it first at Old Camp Lowell, before mentioned, near the Rillito, at the base of the low foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains. At my first visit to the camp, which is six or seven miles from the city of Tucson, straight across the desert, I mistook my way at the last and approached the place from the farther end by a cross-cut through the creosote bushes. Just as I reached the adobe ruins, all that is left of the old camp, I descried a black bird balancing itself daintily at the tip of a mesquite. I lifted my glass, caught sight of the bird’s crest, and knew it for a Phainopepla. How good it is to find something you have greatly desired and little expected!

The Phainopepla (like the Pyrrhuloxia it has no vernacular appellation, living only in that sparsely settled, Spanish-speaking corner of the world) is ranked with the waxwings, though except for its crest there is little or nothing in its outward appearance to suggest such a relationship; and the crest itself bears but a moderate resemblance to the pointed topknot of our familiar cedar-bird. What I call the Phainopepla’s elegance comes partly from its form, which is the very perfection of shapeliness, having in the highest degree that elusive quality which in semi-slang phrase is designated as “style;” partly from its motions, all prettily conscious and in a pleasing sense affected, like the movements of a dancing-master; and partly from its color, which is black with the most exquisite bluish sheen, set off in the finest manner by broad wing-patches of white. These wing-patches are noticeable, furthermore, for being divided into a kind of network by black lines. It is for this reason, I suppose, that they have a peculiar gauzy look (I speak of their appearance while in action) such as I have never seen in the case of any other bird, and which often made me think of the ribbed, translucent wings of certain dragon flies.

Doubtless this peculiar appearance was heightened to my eyes, because of the mincing, wavering, over-buoyant method of flight (the wings being carried unusually high) to which I have alluded, and which always suggested to me the studied movements of a dance. I think I never saw one of the birds so far forget itself as to take a direct, straightforward course from one point to another. No matter where they might be going, though the flight were only a matter of a hundred yards, they progressed always in pretty zigzags, making so many little, unexpected, indecisive tacks and turns by the way, butterfly fashion, that you began to wonder where they would finally come to rest.

The two birds first seen--the female in lovely gray--were evidently at home about the camp. The berry-bearing parasitic plants in the mesquites seemed to furnish them with food, and no doubt they were settled there for the season; and at least two more were wintering out among the Chinese kitchen gardens, not far away. And some weeks afterward I came upon a third pair, also in a mesquite grove, on the Santa Cruz side of the desert. But though in the two river valleys I passed a good many hours in their society, I never once heard them sing, nor, so far as I can now recall, did they ever utter any sound save a mellow pip, almost exactly like a certain call of the robin; so like it, in fact, that to the very last I never heard it suddenly given, but my first thought was of that common Eastern bird, whose voice in those early spring days it would have been so natural and so pleasant to hear. I could have spared a dozen or two of thrashers, I thought (not brown thrashers), for a pair of robins and a pair of bluebirds. But southern Arizona is a kind of thrasher paradise, while robins and bluebirds desire a better country, and seemingly know where to find it.

In the last week of March, however, there took place, as well as I could judge, a concerted movement of Phainopeplas northward. They showed themselves in the Santa Cruz Valley, here and there a pair, until they became, not abundant, indeed, but a counted-upon, every-day sight. Those that I had heretofore seen, it appeared, were only a few winter “stay-overs.” Now the season had opened; and now the birds began singing. For curiosity’s sake it pleased me to hear them, but the brief measure, in a thin, squeaky voice, was nothing for any bird to be proud of. They sing best to the eye. “Birds of the shining robes,” their Greek name calls them; and worthily do they wear it, under that unclouded Arizona sun, perching, as they habitually do, at the tip of some tree or bush, where the man with birds in his eye can hardly fail to sight them and name them, across the widest barley field.