Part 16

The earliest comers are the blue jays. They anticipate the first call for breakfast, appearing before sunrise. Jays are a shrewd set. They can put two and two together with the sharpest of us. Man, they have discovered, is a laggard in the morning. Then is their time. In very bad weather, indeed, they come at all hours; but they are always wary. If I raise the window an inch or two and set it down with a slam, away they go; though, likely as not, I look out again five minutes later to find them still there. In times of dearth one may reasonably risk something for a good piece of suet.

The jays take what they can, somewhat against our will. The table is spread for smaller people: for downy woodpeckers, white-breasted nuthatches, and chickadees, with whom appears now and then, always welcome, a brown creeper. The table is set for them, I say; and they seem to know it. They come not as thieves, but as invited guests, or, better still, as members of the family. No opening and shutting of windows puts them to flight. Why should it? There are at least a dozen baiting-places about the house, and they know every one of them. Though the fare is everywhere the same, they seem to find a spice of variety in taking a bite at one table after another.

My own principal enjoyment of the business, at present, is connected with a new toy, if I may call it so: a small, loosely knit, or crocheted, bag--made of knitting-cotton, I think I was told--sent to me by a correspondent in Vermont. Into this, following the donor’s instructions, I have put nutmeats and hung it out of a window of my working-room, throwing a cord over the top of the upper sash, and allowing the bag to dangle against the pane.

At first I broke the nuts into small pieces, but I soon learned better than that. Now I divide the filbert once, and for the most part the birds (chickadees only, thus far) have to stay on the bag and eat, instead of pulling out the pieces whole and making off with them. The sight is a pretty one--as good as a play. I am careful not to fill the bag, and the feeder is compelled to hang bottom side up under it, and strike upward. The position is graceful and not in the least inconvenient, and possesses, moreover, a great economical advantage: the crumbs, some of which are of necessity spilled, drop on the eater’s breast, instead of to the ground. I see him stop continually to pick them off. “Gather up the fragments,” he says, “that nothing be lost.”

When one of the pieces in the bag is so far nibbled away that a corner of it can be pulled through one of the interstices, matters become exciting. Then comes the tug of war. The eater, who knows that his time is limited, grows almost frantic. He braces himself and pulls, twitching upward and downward and sidewise (“Come out, there, will you?”), while the wind blows him to and fro across the pane, and one or two of his mates sit upon the nearest branch of the elm, eyeing him reproachfully. “You greedy thing!” they say. “Are you going to stay there forever?” Often their patience gives out (I do not wonder), and one after another they swoop down past the window, not to strike the offender, but to offer him a hint in the way of moral suasion. Sometimes one alights, with more or less difficulty, on the narrow middle sash just below, and talks to him; or one hovers near the bag, or even perches sidewise on the string, just above, as much as to say, “Look out!” Then I hear a burst of little, hurried, sweet-sounding, angry notes--always the same, or so nearly the same that my ear is unable to detect the difference.

Generally these manœuvres are successful; but now and then the feeder is so persistently greedy that I am tempted to assert a landlord’s prerogative and tell him to begone. Only once have I ever seen two birds clinging to the bag together, although so far as I can make out, there is nothing to hinder their doing so; and even then they were not eating, but waiting to see which should give place to the other.

All in all, it is a very pleasing show. It is good to see the innocent creatures so happy. Nobody could look at them, their black eyes shining, their black bills striking into the meats, all their motions so expressive of eager enjoyment, without feeling glad on their account. And with all the rest, it may be said that an ease-loving man, with a meddlesome New England conscience, is not always sorry to have a decent, or better than decent, excuse for dropping work once in a while to look out of the window. Who says we are idle while we are taking a lesson in natural history? I do not know how many times I have broken off (seeing a bird’s shadow in the room, or hearing a tap on the pane) while writing these few paragraphs.

Once, indeed, I saw something like actual belligerency. Two birds reached the bag at the same instant, and neither was inclined to withdraw. They came together, bill to bill, each with a volley of those fine, spitfire notes of which I spoke just now, and in the course of the set-to, which was over almost before it began, one of them struck beak-first against the window, as if he were coming through. Then both flew to the elm branches, fifteen feet away, and in a moment more one of them came back and took a turn at feeding. I am not going to take in the bag for fear of the immoral effects of excessive competition. Competition--among customers--is the life of trade. I am glad to see my table so popular.

The nuthatches, of which we have at least two, male and female, as I know by the different color of their crowns, have not yet discovered the nuts, but come regularly to the suet in the trees, and pretty often to a piece that is nailed upon one of my window-sills. I hear the fellow’s pleasant, contented, guttural, grunting notes, and rise to look at him, liking especially to watch the tidbits as they travel one after another between his long mandibles. Even if he does not call out, I know that it is he, and not a chickadee, by the louder noise he makes in driving his bill into the fat.

I have fancied, all winter, that the birds--these two nuthatches, I mean--were mated, seeing them so often together; and perhaps they are; but the other day I witnessed a little performance that seemed to put another complexion upon the case. I was leaving the yard when I heard bird notes, repeated again and again, which I did not recognize. To the best of my recollection they were quite new. I looked up into a tree, and there were the two nuthatches, one chasing the other from branch to branch, with that peculiarly dainty, fluttering, mincing action of the wings, a sort of will-you-be-mine motion, which birds are given to using in the excitement of courtship. There could be no doubt of it, though it was only the 10th of February: Corydon was already “paying attentions” to Phyllis. Success to him! I notice, also, that chickadees are beginning to whistle a “Phœbe” with considerable frequency, though there is nothing in the weather to encourage them. Birds have an almanac of their own. Spring is coming.

A GOOD-BY TO WINTER

Winter is not quite done, but it will be by the time this “Clerk” is printed. That is to say, my winter will be done. In this respect, as in many others, I am a conservative. My calendar is of the old school. “There are four seasons in the year--spring, summer, autumn or fall, and winter.” So we began our school compositions; and by “spring” we meant the spring months--March, April, and May. The temperature might belie the almanac; there might be “six weeks’ sledding in March;” but when March began, spring began.

And by the way, what a capital subject that was--“The Seasons”! A theme without beginning and without end; a theme to be taken seriously or humorously, in prose or verse; a theme of universal interest. Best of all, there was no difficulty about the first sentence. No need to sit for half an hour chewing the end of one’s pencil and waiting for inspiration. Down it went: “There are four seasons in the year--spring, summer, autumn or fall, and winter.” We never omitted to say “autumn or fall;” the synonymy helped out the page, and gave us the more time in which to consider what we should say next. That is the great difficulty in authorship. On that shoal many a good ship has struck. A man who always has something to say next is bound to get on--as a “space writer,” if as nothing else.

Our opening remark was not strictly original, but we did not mind. It was true, if it wasn’t new; and without being told, I think we had discovered--by intuition, I suppose--what older heads seem to have learned by rule, that it is good rhetoric, so to speak, to begin with a quotation. I was pleased, the other day, to see a brilliant essayist commending it as an excellent and becoming practice to leapfrog into one’s subject over the back of some famous predecessor. Such was our custom, for better or worse, till a certain master (I am tempted to name him, but forbear) announced just before the fatal day, that compositions on “The Seasons” would no longer be accepted. That was cruelty to authors. He spoke with a smile, but it was a smile of malice. I have never forgiven him. He is living still, a preacher of the gospel. When Saturday night comes, and he finds himself hard put to it for the morrow’s sermon (as I have no doubt he often does--I hope so, at all events), does he never remember the day when with the word of his mouth he deprived thirty or forty young innocents of their easiest and best appreciated text? He is righteously punished. Let him preach to himself, some Sunday, from Numbers xxxii. 23, “Be sure your sin will find you out.”

Why shouldn’t one write about the seasons, I wonder. There is scarcely anything more important, or more universally interesting, than the weather. Ten to one it was the first thing we all thought of this morning. And the seasons are nothing but weather in large packages--weather at wholesale. Their changes are our epochs, our date-points. But for them, all days being alike, there would be no calendar. It is well known that people who live in the tropics seldom know their own age. How should they, with nothing to distinguish one time of year from another? Young or old, they have never learned that “there are four seasons in the year.”

We are better off. Life with us is not all in the present tense. As Hamlet said, we look before and after. (Hence it is, I suppose, that we have “such large discourse,” and continue, some of us, to write compositions.) We live by expectation. “Behold,” says the weather, “I make all things new.” Every day is another one, and every season also. At this very minute a miraculous change is at hand. A great and effectual door is about to swing on its hinges, and I, for one, wish to be awake to see it; not to wake up by and by and find the door wide open.

So far from wearying of the seasons as an old story, I am more intensely interested in them than ever. If any of my fellow citizens are not just now thinking daily of the passing of winter and the advent of spring, I should like to know what they are made of. For myself, I am like a man in jail. My term is about to expire, and I am notching off the days one by one on a stick. “Three more,” say I; “two more.” “Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.” And I am ready to hang my cap on the horns of the moon.

“You are too much in haste,” some man will say; the same that said, “How are the dead raised up?” But I know better. It is one happy effect of ornithological habits that they shorten the winter. There will be no spring flowers for a good while yet, but there will be spring birds within a fortnight, perhaps within a week; nay, there may be some before night. Indeed, I have just come in from a two-hour jaunt, and at almost every step my ears were open for the first vernal note. I have seen bluebirds, before now, earlier than this; and what has happened once may happen again. So, while the wind blew softly from the southwest, and all the hills were mantled with a dreamy haze, I chose a course that would take me past one apple orchard after another; and, as I say, my ears (which I often think are better ornithologists than their owner,--if he is their owner) kept themselves wide awake. If that sweet voice, “Purity, purity” (with all bird lovers I thank Mr. Burroughs for the word)--if that heavenly voice, the gentlest of prophets, was on the breeze, they meant to hear it.

They heard nothing, but that is not to say that they listened to no purpose. They heard nothing, and they heard much; for there is an ear within the ear, and the new year’s voice--which is the bluebird’s--was in the deepest and truest sense already audible. The ornithologist failed to catch it; for him Sialia sialis is still to look for; but the other man was in better luck.

The “new year’s voice,” I say; for the year begins with spring. We had the seasons in their true order when we were school-children--“spring, summer, autumn or fall, and winter.” It must have been some very old and prosy chronologist that arranged their progression as our almanacs now give it. The young are better instructed. Does not the Scripture say, “The last shall be first”?

And within three days--I can hardly believe it--the old year will be done. So let it be. Its passing brings us so much nearer the grave; worse yet, perhaps, it leaves us with our winter’s work half accomplished; but our eyes are forward. After all, our work is not important. We are twice too busy; living as our neighbors do, rather than according to the law of our own being; playing the fool (there is no fool like the busy one); selling our birthright for a mess of pottage. The great thing, especially in springtime, is to lie wide open to the life that enfolds us, while the “gentle deities” show us, for our delight,--

“The lore of colors and of sounds, The innumerable tenements of beauty.”

Yes, that is the wisdom we should pray for. The youngest of us will not see many springs. Let us see the most that we can of this one. So much there will be to look at! Now, of all times, we may say with one of old, “Lord, that I might receive my sight.” What a new world we should find ourselves living in! I can hardly imagine it.

BIRD SONGS AND BIRD TALK

I mentioned a fortnight ago a flock of half a dozen purple finches (linnets) seen and heard conversing softly among themselves in some roadside savin trees on the 29th of January. They must be passing the winter somewhere not far away, I ventured to guess. “Within a month,” I added, “they will be singing, taking the winds of March with music.”

This forenoon (March 5) I had walked up the same pleasant by-road, meaning to follow it for a mile or two, but finding myself insufficiently shod for so deep a slush, I turned back after going only a little way. It was too bad I should have been so improvident, I said to myself; but accident is often better than the best-laid plan, and so it was now. As I neared the bunch of cedars--which I have looked into day after day as I have passed, hoping to find the linnets again there--I descried some smallish bird in one of the topmost branches of a tall old poplar across the field. My opera-glass brought him nearer, but still not near enough, till presently he turned and took an attitude. “Ah, yes,” said I; “a purple finch.” Attitude and gait, though there may be nothing definable about them, are often almost as good as color and feature for purposes of identification. I had barely named the bird before he commenced singing, and as he moved into a slightly better light (the sky being clouded) I saw that he was a red one. He seemed to be not yet in full voice; perhaps he was not in full spirits; but he ran through with his long, rapid, intricate, sweetly modulated warble with perfect fluency, and very much to my pleasure. It was the first song of spring. The linnet is of the true way of thinking; spring, with him, begins with the turn of the month.

Purple finches, by the bye, are among the birds of which it has been said--by Minot, and perhaps by others--that both sexes sing. I hope the statement is true; I could never see any reason in the nature of things why female birds should not have musical susceptibilities and musical accomplishments; but I am constrained to doubt. It is most likely, I think, that the opinion has arisen from the fact that adult males--a year or more old, and fathers of families--sometimes continue to wear the gray, sparrow-like costume of the gentler sex.

My bird of this morning dropped from his perch while I was trying to get nearer to him, and could not be found again. I still suppose that the flock is spending the season somewhere not far off. I have lived with myself too long to imagine that birds must be absent because I fail to discover them.