MIGRATION.
For he led us, he said, to a joyous land,
· · · · · · ·
Where waters gushed and fruit-trees grew,
And flowers put on a fairer hue,
And everything was strange and new.
The quaint story of Noah’s gathering the animals into the ark is always linked in my mind with the Pied Piper, and with that strange turn in the tide of bird life which is called migration. The marvelous music which charmed the rats and children of Hamelin town must have been used by Noah to call his creatures into the ark of safety, and it is still to be heard in the winds of autumn sighing through the Chocorua forests and calling the birds away to other lands. One day all is calm and serene; the next, though the sky is just as blue and the sunlight just as warm, something of unrest is in the air, and the birds are telling each other the story of the great journey. Songs are forgotten or sung only to greet the dawn and bless the night; nestlings are trained to flight and led silent journeys through field, forest, or ether after food; new scenes are visited, and the weak separated from the strong and left to die. Then, sometimes by day, sometimes by night, the hosts meet, drawn together by a force as irresistible and mysterious as magnetism, and finally the story of the great journey is written in fact once more.
MOUNT CHOCORUA AND CHOCORUA LAKE IN SUMMER
In the August mornings I hear the Swainson’s thrush by the lake. He was not there a few days before, he was on the mountain-side. He is drifting southward, slowly at first, but feeling the thrill of the Pied Piper’s music in his wings. All through the summer I have listened in vain for the nasal “quank, quank, quank,” of the red nuthatch. Suddenly, in mid-August, I hear it on the mountain, and an hour or two later every flock of chickadees brings the northern migrant’s call along with the jolly chorus of “dee, dee, dee.” These chickadees, alert, courageous, tireless, and generous, are the convoys of the warbler fleets. For an hour the silence of the forest will be broken only by the tiresome platitudes of the red-eyed vireo, the dry staccato of the harvest-fly, and the occasional whistle of a hyla. Then, far away, will be heard the faint “dee-dee” of the titmouse. It comes nearer, and presently a dozen or twenty little birds are seen hovering, darting, flitting, but steadily advancing, tree by tree, through the woods. Perhaps not more than one in ten will be a chickadee, yet it is the chickadee which gives character and direction to the body. The guided flock of easy-going warblers and vireos, nuthatches and kinglets, drift on, feeding and frolicking, heedless of what it passes.
If the observer “squeaks,” or if an owl draws the attention of the passing birds, the chickadee comes to the front at once, with his sharp reproving iterations, and his beady eyes snapping indignantly. Along with him come red-eyed and solitary vireos, nuthatches, golden-crested kinglets, black-throated blue warblers, Wilson’s blackcaps, young chestnut-sided warblers, looking puzzlingly unlike their parents. Blackburnians, with throats aflame; black-throated greens, rich in spring tints of yellow and tender green; black and white creepers, the tidiest of birds; the gay magnolias, redstarts, Canadians, and sober myrtle warblers. Sometimes a single flock contains nearly all of these courtiers of the woods, while others are composed almost entirely of a single species, as, for example, the black-throated greens, or the magnolias.
In these same late August and early September days the cherry and berry eaters gather together and travel in flocks. Robins by scores, sometimes by hundreds, combine with the cedar-birds and flickers and range over the country in search of food. The flickers feed much of the time upon the ground among the berry-bushes, casting aside woodpecker habits and seeming more like starlings. The robins are sometimes with them upon the ground, but oftener in the wild cherry-trees with the cedar-birds, stripping bough after bough of its dark fruit. When the flock moves, the cedar-birds mass themselves and fly for a while as though linked together. Then, without apparent cause, part or the whole turn about and fly first this way, then that, perhaps coming back, after a few minutes, to the point of departure. When a flock of red crossbills do this, they sprinkle the air and the earth with sweet notes; but the cedar-birds have no joy in their one chilly whistle, and there is more of aimless, witless indecision in their flights than there is of romping. Whenever I come near one of their flocks, I scan them carefully, hoping to detect the white wing-bars of a Bohemian waxwing among them, yet it is more than likely that I may watch a lifetime without having the fortune to see in the flesh one of those rare vagabonds of the north. The roving habits of these birds and of the crossbills contrast strangely with the simple steadfastness of the grouse, and the clock-like punctuality of many of the migrants. Something in that cold past with its glaciers and ice-crushed continents could explain the present temperaments of the wandering birds, but we may never know what that something is. Whether we are to know it or not, it is natural to have a feeling akin to pity for birds so lacking in home life.
The winter wren is an amusing little migrant. He seems to have an underground railway of his own from the grim northern forest straight towards a milder clime. Like other underground ways, it has breathing holes, and out of these he occasionally pops his head and sputters at the observer. Sometimes he appears at an opening in a stone wall and scolds mankind for picking blackberries or plucking goldenrod; again he emerges from the darkness beneath a log in the swamp, and bustles about with the offensive energy of a special policeman. If he travels in company, the fact is not often made evident. He certainly seems too crusty for pleasant companionship on a long journey. One late September morning a winter wren flew into my hen-house and became my prisoner for a few hours. I placed him in a room and watched his efforts to escape. He flew with such speed that he made almost as much of a humming as a humming-bird. He clung to the woodwork, and hid in the curtains, but finally dropped to the floor and ran about like a mouse, hiding in corners or behind the legs of chairs. Once or twice I caught him and stroked his head and neck. He was quiet enough while I touched him, but the moment my fingers left him, he slipped away out of sight. When taken out of doors and set free, he darted into the nearest stone wall and was seen no more.
Birds of the upper air which feed on insects depart early. The eaves swallows and martins go while some mothers are still sitting on belated eggs. Bank swallows, barn swallows, night-hawks, and many of the tyrant flycatchers have vanished by the time the maples begin to flame upon the mountain-side. On the 3d of August, 1891, I saw about twenty martins in the dead tree. They were very noisy, and evidently excited. While watching them I saw in the zenith what looked like a cloud of insects. My glass showed it to be a large flock of birds, apparently swallows, moving in a great circle. After a time all but one of the martins in the tree flew away and were gone many minutes, the birds in the sky also disappearing. The martins returned, however, to the one which had not flown, and shortly after I again discovered the bird cluster in the sky. After fresh noise and flutterings of wings the martins finally flew, and no more were seen near the lake that season. Often in an August afternoon the lake will be apparently without birds, when in a twinkling the air will be full of graceful forms, and a flock of white-breasted swallows, barn swallows, or night-hawks will sweep over the blue water, rise, vanish over the meadow, reappear, fly towards the peak, wheel, return, and then perhaps speed away, not to greet the fair lake again until ice and snow have come and gone, and the number of their own light forms has been sadly diminished in the south.
A field of buckwheat or other small grain is a magnet in the days when the birds are wandering. To it come the song sparrows, chipping sparrows, white-throats, juncos, purple finches, field sparrows, goldfinches, and bay-winged buntings. They love to linger many days in the stubble; and when bird music is rare, their occasional songs are precious to the ear. If the field is approached softly there seems to be no life hidden in its midst, but suddenly wings whirr noisily, and bird after bird flies up into the neighboring trees and bushes. Sparrows love fences, stone walls, and their accompanying growths of berry-bushes and small trees. The latter are our New England substitutes for the hedgerows of the Old World, and I believe the sparrow tribe takes as much comfort in wall and briers as in hedge and ditch. The ditch is more than replaced by countless brooks, always clear and pure, and the wall gives shade, shelter, food, and many a comfortable perch. While driving along the narrow roads, bordered by many a mile of rough stone wall, the rattle of my wagon wheels startles the sparrows and finches from their cover. The bay-wing runs along the rut in front of the horse; the goldfinch undulates over the field, turns, and ripples back; the song sparrow mounts a bush-top and scolds; the white-throat appears for a moment in a gap between the bushes and then goes on with his scratching in the leaves. So they go southward along the dusty roads, or the borders of dry field and dryer pasture. They are thousands strong, yet they look to be but a few each day, and the careless eye might think them always the same individuals from mid-August until Indian summer.
Sometimes alone, but often with the field sparrows and bay-wings, or later with the juncos, flocks of bluebirds travel the autumnal way. This year, on August 28, I saw a flock of twelve working slowly along a moor-like pasture ridge in company with double their number of sparrows. I have seen them by dozens in early October mingle with juncos and white-throats in gleaning over the stubble just left bare by the melting of a first snowfall. As they fly from spot to spot, they prefer to alight on the upper curve of a boulder, the tip of a cedar, or some equally favorable point for seeing and being seen. They are comparatively silent, but now and then their sweet “cheruit” comes as a promise that after the long winter spring shall return, and with it their loveliness and courage. Many of the birds go south cheerfully, or indifferently, but the bluebirds seem to linger sadly and lovingly, and to feel that the migration is an enforced exile from the home they love best.
The Chocorua country is not a good one for starlings and blackbirds; in fact, I have never seen but one bobolink nearer than Fryeburg intervales, twenty-five miles away; and with all my watching, no crow blackbird or meadow lark has ever caught my eye in this region. The old residents say that years ago, when flax was cultivated hereabouts and grain-fields were broader, these birds were present in large numbers. The first flock of rusty grackles which I have ever seen here appeared this year on a hilltop, about the middle of the afternoon of September 22. The birds were either very tame or very weary, for they remained in the tops of some locust-trees, while I not only stood beneath them, but shook their tree, called to them, and clapped my hands. They maintained a steady flow of sotto voce music charming to the ear.
All migrants are not desirable visitors. An inroad of hawks is far from pleasant for the birds of a neighborhood, or for other migrants. All through the month of September hawks abound. They circle round the peak of Chocorua, seemingly for the pleasure of it. Often a dozen sharp-shinned and young Cooper’s hawks are in sight there at once. Sometimes great flocks of hawks pass across the sky, not circling, as the red-tailed and red-shouldered hawks are so fond of doing, but sailing straight before the wind like a fleet of mackerelmen running down the coast wing and wing. I once saw three hundred and thirty migrating hawks in one forenoon, most of them a thousand feet or less above the earth, but some so high that a powerful glass only just brought them into view. The stately progress of these birds, moving many miles an hour without a wing-beat visible to the observer, is one of the wonders of nature. The Dead Tree is a resting-place for migrating hawks, eagles, and ospreys. I doubt not that by night it is used by owls, when they too move southward as their food grows scarce.
In several different years I have seen my big blue heron sail away southward. In each instance it has been about four o’clock in the afternoon. Rising with slow and dignified flight, he makes two or three immense circles over the lakes, and then, as though partings were said, landmarks remembered, and bearings taken, he flies with strong and steady strokes towards the outlet of the Ossipee basin. This year, in August, ten night herons visited us at one time, remaining in the neighborhood two or three days. When disturbed by day, they rose, and, forming an orderly flock, flew away with military precision. The ducks and geese are, however, the best examples of well-drilled companies. Geese are not often seen here, although several were killed this spring in a small lake halfway between Chocorua and the Bearcamp. Wood duck and black duck begin to fly past us late in August, but their numbers are comparatively insignificant, a flock of ten being unusually large. In October and early November the wind-swept lakes are seldom without little companies of black ducks, sheldrakes, and their less common relatives.
One of the most interesting of migrants is the loon, or great northern diver. Loons are said to breed in this vicinity on Whitton Pond, and they are seen now and then during all the summer months. It is on the edge of a northeast storm in September, when mackerel clouds deck the sky and the hazy sunlight spreads gold upon the ripples, that the migrating loon comes with the force of a cannon-ball, and plunges into the lake’s waters. His shrill laughter is taken up by all the mocking forests, and his deep and prolonged diving carries consternation to bass and pickerel. Restlessly he plows the ruffled water with his broad breast, and now and then he pounds the waves with his wings, raising his head high above them. When he flies, the water is churned into foam for many yards before his unwieldy body is finally raised into the air and placed under the full control of his powerful wings. Then he rises little by little, his wings moving faster and faster, until, after progressing half a mile, he has risen two or three hundred feet. Turning, he comes back, still rising, and passes in review the lake and forests which he is to leave. Again and again he tacks, on each new line rising farther from the earth, until at last, seen against the sky, he is but a pair of swiftly whirling wings set strangely far back on the long black line of his head, neck, and body. It is said that hunters have been killed by being struck by falling loons shot by them on the wing.
Occasionally a stray sea-bird comes to the mountain lakes. Herring gulls have been seen on Chocorua Pond, a Wilson’s tern was shot on August 30, 1890, on Ossipee Lake, and a year earlier, on September 30, a black tern remained half a day on my lonely lake.
Late in September and in October there are days when the rush of migrating birds is like the stampede of a defeated army. I recall one such day, the 25th of September, 1891, when a torrent of migrants swept past my red-roofed cottage in the hour following sunrise. Before breakfast, and without going out of sight of my door, I saw over two hundred birds go by, including sixty pigeon woodpeckers, several sapsuckers, nuthatches, chickadees, crows, blue jays, robins, catbirds, seven kinds of warblers, solitary and red-eyed vireos, four kinds of sparrows, a tanager, pewees, and a flock of cedar-birds. Most of these birds were on the trees, bushes, or ground, busily feeding, yet restlessly progressing southwestward, as though haunted by some irresistible impulse to keep in motion. The day was hot and still, and my notes mention the fact that we heard the splash of an osprey as he plunged into the lake, more than a quarter of a mile away. That evening the whippoorwills were singing their farewells in the soft moonlight.
As the early October days glide by, these waves of migration come faster and faster, their acceleration seeming, as one looks back upon it, like the ever quicker throbbing of the air under the wing-beats of the grouse. Even as the drumming suddenly ceases and the summer air seems still and heavy in the silence which follows, so the migration suddenly ends, and the woods and fields become very still in the late Indian summer. Now and then the scream of a blue jay falls upon the ear, or a faint note of a tree sparrow comes from the weeds by the roadside; but as a rule nature is dumb, and the leaves fall like tears. All the beauty of sky and autumn foliage cannot bring the birds back to the silent forest. Warm though the sun may be, and soft the haze on the cheek of Passaconaway, these charms cannot woo back the birds from their migration. The music of the Pied Piper has bewitched them, they are dreaming of gushing waters and flowers of fairest hue; and many a frosty, starlit night will pass before their wings beat once more in the clear Chocorua air.