As spring comes on, the flicker becomes numerous and very noisy. His best-known vocal effort is a prolonged hi-hi-hi, very loud and ringing, and kept up until the listener wonders where the author of it gets his wind. This, I think, is the bird’s substitute for a song. He has at all times a loud, unmusical yawp,—a signal, I suppose,—and in the mating season especially he utters a very affectionate, conversational wicker or flicker. Every country boy should be familiar with these three notes.
FLICKER
1. Male. 2. Females
But besides being a vocalist,—we can hardly call him a singer,—the flicker is a player upon instruments. He is a great drummer; and if any one imagines that woodpeckers do not enjoy the sound of their own music, he should watch a flicker drumming with his long bill on a battered tin pan in the middle of a pasture. Morning after morning I have seen one thus engaged, drumming lustily, and then cocking his head to listen for an answer; and Paderewski at his daily practice upon the piano could not have looked more in earnest. At other times the flicker contents himself with a piece of resonant loose bark or a dry limb.
One proof that this drumming—which is indulged in by woodpeckers generally—is a true musical performance, and not a mere drilling for grubs, is the fact that we never hear it in winter. It begins as the weather grows mild, and is as much a sign of spring as the peeping of the little tree-frogs—hylas—in the meadow.
The flicker’s nest, as I have said, is built in a hole in a tree, often an apple-tree. Very noisy in his natural disposition, he keeps a wise silence while near the spot where his mate is sitting, and will rear a brood under the orchard-owner’s nose without betraying himself. The young birds are fed from the parent’s crop, as young pigeons and young hummingbirds are. The old bird thrusts its bill down the throat of the nestling and gives it a meal of partially digested food by what scientific people call a process of regurgitation. Farmers’ boys, who have watched pigeons feeding their squabs, will know precisely what is meant.
XVII
THE BITTERN
It was a great day for me when I first heard the so-called booming of the bittern. For more than ten years I had devoted the principal part of my spare hours to the study of birds, but though I had taken many an evening walk near the most promising meadows in my neighborhood, I could never hear those mysterious pumping or stake-driving noises of which I had read with so much interest, especially in the writings of Thoreau.
The truth was, as I have since assured myself, that this representative of the heron family was not a resident within the limits of my everyday rambles, none of the meadows thereabout being extensive and secluded enough to suit his whim.
There came a day, however, when with a friend I made an afternoon excursion to Wayland, Massachusetts, on purpose to form the stake-driver’s acquaintance. We walked up the railway track across the river toward Sudbury, and were hardly seated on the edge of the meadow, facing the beautiful Nobscot Hill, before my comrade said, “Hark! There he is!”