Many travel altogether by night, resting and feeding in the daytime. It is pleasant to stand out of doors in the evening, and hear them calling to each other overhead as they hasten northward; for at this time of the year, I have forgotten to say, they are always traveling in a northerly direction.
The procession, as such, has no definite terminus. It breaks up gradually by the dropping out of its members here and there. Each of them knows pretty well where he is going. This one, who came perhaps from Cuba, means to stop in Massachusetts; that one, after a winter in Central America, has in view a certain swamp or meadow, or, it may be, some mountain-top, in New Hampshire; another will not be at home till he reaches the furthermost coast of Labrador or the banks of the Saskatchewan. The prospectus of which I spoke, and of which every reader ought to have a copy, tells, in a general way, whither each company is bound, but the members of the same company often scatter themselves over several degrees of latitude.
Some of the companies move compactly, and are only two or three days, more or less, in passing a given point. You must be in the woods, for example, on the 12th or 13th of May, or you will miss them altogether. Others straggle along for a whole month. You begin to think, perhaps, that they mean to stay with you all summer, but some morning you wake up to the fact that the last one has gone.
It is curious how few people see this army of travelers. They pass by thousands and hundreds of thousands. More than a hundred different companies go through every town in Massachusetts between March 1 and June 1. They dress gayly—not a few of them seem to have borrowed Joseph’s coat—and are full of music, yet somehow their advent excites little remark. Perhaps it is because, for the most part, they flit from bush to bush and from tree to tree, here one and there one. If some year they should form in line, and move in close order along the public streets, what a stir they would excite! For a day or two the newspapers would be full of the sensation, and possibly the baseball reporters would be compelled for once to shorten their accounts of Battum’s “wonderful left-hand catch” and Ketchum’s “phenomenal slide to the second base.” It is just as well, I dare say, that nothing of this kind should ever happen, for it is hard to see how the great reading public could bear even the temporary loss of such interesting and instructive narratives.
Meantime, though the greater part of the people pay no heed to these “birds of passage,” some of us are never tired of watching them. I myself used to be fond of gazing at military and political parades. In my time I have seen a good many real soldiers and a good many make-believes. But as age comes on, I find myself, rightly or wrongly, caring less and less for such spectacles. It will never be so, I think, with the procession of which I am now writing. I have never watched it with more enthusiasm than this very year. It is only just over, but I am already beginning to count upon its autumnal return, and by the middle of August shall be looking every day for its advance couriers.
Till then I shall please myself with observing the ways of such of the host as have happened to drop out of the procession in my immediate neighborhood. One of them I can hear singing at this very moment. He and his wife spent the winter in Mexico, as well as I can determine, and have been back with us since the 11th of May. They have pitched their tent for the summer in the top of a tall elm directly in front of my door, and just now are much occupied with household cares. The little husband (Vireo gilvus he is called in the official programme, but I have heard him spoken of, not inappropriately, as the warbling vireo) takes upon himself his full share of the family drudgery, and it is very pretty indeed to see him sitting in the tent and singing at his work. He sets us all, as I think, an excellent example.
XXI
SOUTHWARD BOUND
While walking through a piece of pine wood, three or four days ago, I was delighted to put my eye unexpectedly upon a hummingbird’s nest. The fairy structure was placed squarely upon the upper surface of a naked, horizontal branch, and looked so fresh, trimmed outwardly with bits of gray lichen, that I felt sure it must have been built this year. But where now were the birds that built it, and the nestlings that were hatched in it? Who could tell? In imagination I saw the mother sitting upon the tiny, snow-white eggs, and then upon the two little ones—little ones, indeed, no bigger than bumble-bees at first. I saw her feeding them day by day, as they grew larger and larger, till at last the cradle was getting too narrow for them, and they were ready to make a trial of their wings. But where were they now? Not here, certainly. For a fortnight I had been passing down this path almost daily, and not once had I seen a hummingbird.
No, they are not here, and even as I write I seem to see the little family on their way to the far south. They are making the journey by easy stages, I hope—flitting from flower-bed to flower-bed, now in Connecticut, now in New Jersey, and so on through Pennsylvania and the Southern States. Will they cross the water to the West Indies, as some of their kind are said to do? or, less adventurous, will they keep straight on to some mountain-side in Costa Rica, or even in Brazil? I should be sorry to believe that the parent birds took their departure first, leaving the twin children to find their way after them as best they could—as those who have paid most attention to such matters assure us that many of our birds are in the habit of doing. But however they go, and wherever they end their long journey, may wind and weather be favorable, and old and young alike return, after the winter is over, to build other nests here in their native New England.
This passing of birds back and forth, a grand semi-annual tide, is to me a thing of wonder. I think of the millions of sandpipers and plovers which for two months (it is now late in September) have been pouring southward along the sea-coast. Some of them passed here on their way north no longer ago than the last days of May. They went far up toward the Arctic circle, but before the end of July they were back again, hastening to the equator. The golden plover, we are told, travels from Greenland to Patagonia.