A BRANCH ESTABLISHMENT
The crumbs prove to be appetizing, and by the time he has swallowed a few of them he seems to forget how he came in, and instead of backing out, as a reasonable being like a chickadee might be expected to do, he flies to another light of the bay window. Then, lest he should injure himself, I must get up and catch him and show him to the door. By the time I have done this two or three times within half an hour, I begin to find it an interruption to other work, and put down the window. White-breasted nuthatches and downies come often to the outer sill, but only the chickadees ever venture inside.
These three are our daily pensioners. If they are all in the tree together, as they very often are, they take precedence at the larder according to their size. No nuthatch presumes to hurry a woodpecker, and no chickadee ever thinks of disturbing a nuthatch. He may fret audibly, calling the other fellow greedy, for aught I know, and asking him if he wants the earth; but he maintains a respectful distance. Birds, like wild things in general, have a natural reverence for size and weight.
The chickadees are much the most numerous with us, but taking the year together, the woodpeckers are the most constant. My notes record them as present in the middle of October, 1899, and now, in the middle of October, 1900, they are still in daily attendance. Perhaps there were a few weeks of midsummer when they stayed away, but I think not. One pair built a nest somewhere in the neighborhood and depended on us largely for supplies, much to their convenience and our pleasure. As soon as the red-capped young ones were able to fly, the parents brought them to the tree and fed them with the suet (it was a wonder how much of it they could eat), till they were old enough to help themselves. And they act, old and young alike, as if they owned the place. If a grocer’s wagon happens to stop under the tree they wax indignant, and remain so till it drives away. Even the black cat, Satan, has come to acknowledge their rights in the case, and no longer so much as thinks of them as possible game.
I have spoken, I see, as if these three species were all; but, not to mention the blue jays, whose continual visits are rather ineffectively frowned upon (they carry off too much at once), we had last winter, for all the latter half of it, a pair of red-bellied nuthatches. They dined with us daily (pretty creatures they are), and stayed so late in the spring that I began to hope the handy food-supply would induce them to tarry for the summer. They were mates, I think. At any rate, they preferred to eat from the same bit of fat, one on each side, in great contrast with all the rest of our company. Frequently, too, a brown creeper would be seen hitching up the trunk or over the larger limbs. He likes pleasant society, though he has little to say, and perhaps found scraps of suet in the crevices of the bark, where the chickadees, who are given to this kind of providence, may have packed it in store. Somewhat less frequently a goldcrest would come with the others, fluttering amid the branches like a sprite. One bird draws another, especially in hard times. And so it happened that our tree, or rather trees,—an elm and a maple,—were something like an aviary the whole winter through. It was worth more than all the trouble which the experiment cost us to lie in bed before sunrise, with the mercury below zero, and hear a chickadee just outside singing as sweetly as any thrush could sing in June. If he had been trying to thank us, he could not have done it more gracefully.
The worse the weather, the better we enjoyed the birds’ society; and the better, in general, they seemed to appreciate our efforts on their behalf. It was noticeable, however, that chickadees were with us comparatively little during high, cold winds. On the 18th of February, for example, we had a blizzard, with driving snow, the most inclement day of the winter. At seven o’clock, when I looked out, four downy woodpeckers were in the elm, all trying their best to eat, though the branches shook till it was hard work to hold on. They stayed much of the forenoon. At ten o’clock, when the storm showed signs of abating, though it was still wild enough, a chickadee made his appearance and whistled Phœbe again and again—“a long time,” my note says—in his cheeriest manner. Who can help loving a bird so courageous, “so frolic, stout, and self-possest”? Emerson did well to call him a “scrap of valor.” Yet I find from a later note that “there were nothing like the usual number of chickadees so long as the fury lasted.” Doubtless most of them stayed among the evergreens. It is an old saying of the chickadee’s, frequently quoted, “Be bold, be bold, but not too bold.” On the same day I saw a member of the household snowballing an English sparrow away from one branch, while a downy woodpecker continued to feed upon the next one. The woodpecker had got the right idea of things. Honest folk need not fear the constable.
XX
WATCHING THE PROCESSION
It begins to go by my door about the first of March, and is three full months in passing. The participants are all in uniform, each after his kind, some in the brightest of colors, some in Quakerish grays and browns. They seem not to stand very strictly upon the order of their coming; red-coats and blue-coats travel side by side. Like the flowers, they have a calendar of their own, and in their own way are punctual, but their movements are not to be predicted with anything like mathematical nicety. Of some companies of them I am never certain which will precede the other, just as I can never tell whether, in a particular season, the anemone or the five-finger will come first into bloom. They need no bands of music, no drum-corps nor fifers. The whole procession, indeed, is itself a band of music, a grand army of singers and players on instruments. They sing many tunes; each uniform has a tune of its own, but, unlike what happens in military and masonic parades, there is never any jangling, no matter how near together the different bands may be marching.
As I said, the pageant lasts for three months. It is fortunate for me, perhaps, that it lasts no longer; for the truth is, I have grown so fond of watching it that I find it hard to attend to my daily work so long as the show continues. If I go inside for half a day, to read or to write, I am all the time thinking of what is going on outside. Who knows what I may be missing at this very minute? I keep by me a prospectus of the festival, a list of all who are expected to take part in it, and, like most watchers of such parades, I have my personal favorites for whom I am always on the lookout. One thing troubles me: there is never a year that I do not miss a good many (a bad many, I feel like saying) of those whose names appear in the announcements. Some of them, indeed, I have never seen. If they are really in the ranks, it must be that their numbers are very small; for the printed programme tells exactly how they will be dressed, and I am sure I should recognize them if they came within sight. Some of them, I fancy, do not keep their engagements.
I spoke, to begin with, of their passing my door. But I spoke figuratively. Some, it is true, do pass my door, and even tarry for a day or two under my windows, but to see others I have to go into the woods. Some I find only in deep, almost impenetrable swamps, dodging in and out among thick bushes and cat-tails. A good many follow the coast. I watch them running along the sea-beach on the edge of the surf, or walking sedately over muddy flats where I need rubber boots in which to follow them. Some are silent during the day, but as darkness comes on indulge in music and queer aerial dancing.