BIRDS IN A CITY
We frequently hear people say that if only they lived in the country they would take up the study of birds with great interest, but that a city life prevented any nature study. To show how untrue this is, I once made a census of wild birds which were nesting in the New York Zoological Park, which is situated within the limits of New York City. Part of the Park is wooded, while much space is given up to the collections of birds and animals. Throughout the year thousands of people crowd the walks and penetrate to every portion of the grounds; yet in spite of this lack of seclusion no fewer than sixty-one species build their nests here and successfully rear their young. The list was made without shooting a single bird and in each instance the identification was absolute. This shows what a little protection will accomplish, while many places of equal area in the country which are harried by boys and cats are tenanted by a bare dozen species.
Let us see what a walk in late June, or especially in July, will show of these bold invaders of our very city. Wild wood ducks frequently decoy to the flocks of pinioned birds and sometimes mate with some of them. One year a wild bird chose as its mate a little brown female, a pinioned bird, and refused to desert her even when the brood of summer ducklings was being caught and pinioned. Such devotion is rare indeed.
In the top of one of the most inaccessible trees in the Park a great rough nest of sticks shows where a pair of black-crowned night herons have made their home for years, and from the pale green eggs hatch the most awkward of nestling herons, which squawk and grow to their prime, on a diet of small fish. When they are able to fly they pay frequent visits to their relations in the great flying cage, perching on the top and gazing with longing eyes at the abundant feasts of fish which are daily brought by the keepers to their charges. This duck and heron are the only ones of their orders thus to honour the Park by nesting, although a number of other species are not uncommon during the season of migration.
Of the waders which in the spring and fall teeter along the bank of the Bronx River, only a pair or two of spotted sandpipers remain throughout the nesting period, content to lay their eggs in some retired spot in the corner of a field, where there is the least danger to them and to the fluffy balls of long-legged down which later appear and scurry about. The great horned owl and the red-tailed hawk formerly nested in the park, but the frequent noise of blasting and the building operations have driven them to more isolated places, and of their relatives there remain only the little screech owls and the sparrow hawks. The latter feed chiefly upon English sparrows and hence are worthy of the most careful protection.
These birds should be encouraged to build near our homes, and if not killed or driven away sometimes choose the eaves of our houses as their domiciles and thus, by invading the very haunts of the sparrows, they would speedily lessen their numbers. A brood of five young hawks was recently taken from a nest under the eaves of a school-house in this city. I immediately took this as a text addressed to the pupils, and the principal was surprised to learn that these birds were so valuable. In the Park the sparrow hawks nest in a hollow tree, as do the screech owls.
Other most valuable birds which nest in the Park are the black-billed and yellow-billed cuckoos, whose depredations among the hairy and spiny caterpillars should arouse our gratitude. For these insects are refused by almost all other birds, and were it not for these slim, graceful creatures they would increase to prodigious numbers. Their two or three light blue eggs are always laid on the frailest of frail platforms made of a few sticks. The belted kingfisher bores into the bank of the river and rears his family of six or eight in the dark, ill-odoured chamber at the end. Young cuckoos and kingfishers are the quaintest of young birds. Their plumage does not come out a little at a time, as in other nestlings, but the sheaths which surround the growing feathers remain until they are an inch or more in length; then one day, in the space of only an hour or so, the overlapping armour of bluish tiles bursts and the plumage assumes a normal appearance.
The little black-and-white downy and the flicker are the two woodpeckers which make the Park their home. Both nest in hollows bored out by their strong beaks, but although full of splinters and sawdust, such a habitation is far superior to the sooty chimneys in which the young chimney swifts break from their snow-white eggs and twitter for food. How impatiently they must look up at the blue sky, and one would think that they must long for the time when they can spread their sickle-shaped wings and dash about from dawn to dark! Is it not wonderful that one of them should live to grow up when we think of the fragile little cup which is their home?—a mosaic of delicate twigs held together only by the sticky saliva of the parent birds.
A relation of theirs—though we should never guess it—is sitting upon her tiny air castle high up in an apple tree not far away,—a ruby-throated hummingbird. If we take a peep into the nest when the young hummingbirds are only partly grown, we shall see that their bills are broad and stubby, like those of the swifts. Their home, however, is indeed a different affair,—a pinch of plant-down tied together with cobwebs and stuccoed with lichens, like those which are growing all about upon the tree. If we do not watch the female when she settles to her young or eggs we may search in vain for this tiniest of homes, so closely does it resemble an ordinary knot on a branch.
The flycatchers are well represented in the Park, there being no fewer than five species; the least flycatcher, wood pewee, phœbe, crested flycatcher, and kingbird. The first two prefer the woods, the phœbe generally selects a mossy rock or a bridge beam, the fourth nests in a hollow tree and often decorates its home with a snake-skin. The kingbird builds an untidy nest in an apple tree. Our American crow is, of course, a member of this little community of birds, and that in spite of persecution, for in the spring one or two are apt to contract a taste for young ducklings and hence have to be put out of the way. The fish crow, a smaller cousin of the big black fellow, also nests here, easily known by his shriller, higher caw. A single pair of blue jays nest in the Park, but the English starling occupies every box which is put up and bids fair to be as great or a greater nuisance than the sparrow. It is a handsome bird and a fine whistler, but when we remember how this foreigner is slowly but surely elbowing our native birds out of their rightful haunts, we find ourselves losing sight of its beauties. The cowbird, of course, imposes her eggs upon many of the smaller species of birds, while our beautiful purple grackle, meadow lark, red-winged blackbird, and the Baltimore and orchard orioles rear their young in safety. The cardinal, scarlet tanager, indigo bunting, and rose-breasted grosbeak form a quartet of which even a tropical land might well be proud, and the two latter species have, in addition to brilliant plumage, very pleasing songs. Such wealth of æsthetic characteristics are unusual in any one species, the wide-spread law of compensation decreeing otherwise. More sombre hued seed-eaters which live their lives in the Park are towhees, swamp, song, field, and chipping sparrows. The bank and barn swallows skim over field and pond all through the summer, gleaning their insect harvest from the air, and building their nests in the places from which they have taken their names. The rare rough-winged swallow deigns to linger and nest in the Park as well as do his more common brethren.
The dainty pensile nests which become visible when the leaves fall in the autumn are swung by four species of vireos, the white-eyed, red-eyed, warbling, and yellow-throated. Of the interesting and typically North American family of wood warblers I have numbered no fewer than eight which nest in the Park; these are the redstart, the yellow-breasted chat, northern yellow-throat, oven-bird, the yellow warbler, blue-winged, black-and-white creeping warblers, and one other to be mentioned later.
Injurious insects find their doom when the young house and Carolina wrens are on the wing. Catbirds and robins are among the most abundant breeders, while chickadees and white-breasted nuthatches are less often seen. The bluebird haunts the hollow apple trees, and of the thrushes proper the veery or Wilson’s and the splendid wood thrush sing to their mates on the nests among the saplings.
The rarest of all the birds which I have found nesting in the Park is a little yellow and green warbler, with a black throat and sides of the face, known as the Lawrence warbler. Only a few of his kind have ever been seen, and strange to say his mate was none other than a demure blue-winged warbler. His nest was on the ground and from it six young birds flew to safety and not to museum drawers.