Once more only I saw the Cape May. His claim to be accounted a summer resident of Franconia was by this time moderately well established; but on my last spare afternoon (June 3) I could not do less than pay him a farewell visit. After looking for him in vain for twenty years (I speak as a New Englander), it seemed the part of prudence to cultivate his acquaintance while I could. At the entrance to the swamp, therefore, I put on my gloves, tied a handkerchief about my neck, and broke a stem of meadow-sweet for use as a mosquito switch. The season was advancing, and field ornithology was becoming more and more a battle. I walked up the path for the usual distance (passing a few lady’s-slippers, one of them pure white) without hearing the voice for which I was listening. On the return, however, I caught it, or something like it. Then, as I went in pursuit (a slow process, for caution’s sake), the song turned, or seemed to turn, into something different,—louder, longer, and faster. Is that the same bird, I thought, or another? Whatever it was, it eluded my eye, and after a little the voice ceased. I retreated to the path, where I could look about me more readily and use my switch to better advantage, and anon the faint, lazy zee-zee-zee was heard again. This was the Cape May, at all events. I was sure of it. Still I wanted a look. Carefully I edged toward the sound, bending aside the branches, and all at once a bird flew into the spruce over my head. Then began again the quicker, four-syllabled zip-zip, I craned my neck and fanned away mosquitoes, all the while keeping my glass in position. A twig stirred. Still the bird sang unseen,—the same hurried phrase, not quite monotonous, since the pitch rose a little on the last couplet. That was a suspicious circumstance, and by this time I should not have been mightily astonished if a Blackburnian had disclosed himself. Another twig stirred. Still I could see nothing; and still I fought mosquitoes (a plague on them!) and kept my eye steady. Then the fellow did again what he had done so often,—stepped out upon a flat, horizontal branch, pretty well up, and posed there, singing and preening his feathers. I could see his yellow breast streaked with jet, his black crown, his reddish cheeks, with the yellow patch behind the rufous, and finally the big white blotch on the wing. We have lovelier birds, no doubt (the Cape May’s colors are a trifle “splashy” for a nice taste,—for my own taste, I mean to say), but few, if any, whose costume is more strikingly original.
I stayed by him till my patience failed, the mosquitoes helping to wear it out; and all the while he reiterated that comparatively lively zip-zip, so very different from the listless zee-zee, which I had seen him use on previous occasions, and had heard him use to-day. He was singing now, I said to myself, more like the bird at Natural Bridge, the only other one I had ever heard. It was pleasant to find that even this tenth-rate performer, one of the poorest of a poor family, had more than one tune in his music box.
My spring vacation was planned to be botanical rather than ornithological; but we are not the masters of our own fate, though we sometimes try to think so, and my sketch is turning out a bird piece, after all. The truth is, I was in the birds’ country, and it was the birds’ hour. They waked me every morning,—veeries, bobolinks, vireos, sparrows, and what not;[8] and as the day began, so it continued. I hope I was not blind to other things. I remember at this moment how rejoiced I was at coming all unexpectedly upon a little bunch of yellow lady’s-slippers,—nine blossoms, I believe; rare enough and pretty enough to excite the dullest man’s enthusiasm. But the fact remains, if comparisons are to be insisted upon, that a creature like the Cape May warbler has all the beauty of a flower, with the added charm of voice and motion and elusiveness. The lady’s-slippers would wait for me,—unless somebody else picked them,—but the warbler could be trusted to lead me a chase, and give me, as the saying is, a run for my money. In other words, he was more interesting, and goes better into a story.
My delight in him was the greater for a consideration yet to be specified. Twelve or thirteen years ago, when a party of us were in Franconia in June, we undertook a list of the birds of the township,—a list which the scientific ornithologist of the company afterward printed.[9] Now, returning to the place by myself, it became a point of honor with me to improve our work by the addition of at least a name or two. And the first candidate was the Cape May.
The second was of a widely different sort; one of my most familiar friends, though more surprising as a bird of the White Mountains than even the Cape May. I speak of the wood thrush, the most southern member of the noble group of singers to which it belongs,—the Hylocichlæ, so called. It is to be regretted that we have no collective English name for them, especially as their vocal quality—by which I mean something not quite the same as musical ability—is such as to set them beyond comparison above all other birds of North America, if not of the world.
My first knowledge of this piece of good fortune was on the 29th of May. I stood on the Notch railway, intent upon a mourning warbler, noting how fond of red-cherry trees he and his fellows seemingly were, when I was startled out of measure by a wood thrush’s voice from the dense maple woods above me. There was no time to look for him; and happily there was no need. He was one of the consummate artists of his race (among the members of which there is great unevenness in this regard), possessing all those unmistakable peculiarities which at once distinguish the wood thrush’s song from the hermit’s, with which alone a careless listener might confound it: the sudden drop to a deep contralto (the most glorious bit of vocalism to be heard in our woods), and the tinkle or spray of bell-like tones at the other extreme of the gamut. As with the Cape May, so with him, the question was, Will he stay?
Two days later I came down the track again. A hermit was in tune, and presently a wood thrush joined him. “His tone is fuller and louder than the hermit’s,” says my pencil,—flattered, no doubt, at finding itself in a position to speak a word of momentary positiveness touching a question of superiority long in dispute, and likely to remain in dispute while birds sing and men listen to them. A quarter of a mile farther, and I came to the sugar grove. Here a second bird was singing, just where I had heard him two days before. Him I sat down to enjoy; and at that moment, probably because he had seen me (and had seen me stop), he broke out with a volley of those quick, staccato, inimitably emphatic, whip-snapping calls,—pip-pip,—which are more characteristic of the species than even the song itself. So there were two male wood thrushes, and presumably two pairs, in this mountainside forest!
On the 1st of June I heard the song there again, though I was forced to wait for it; and three days afterward the story was the same. I ought to have looked for nests, but time failed me. To the best of my knowledge, the bird has never been reported before from the White Mountain region, though it is well known to breed in some parts of Canada, where I have myself seen it.
Here, then, were two notable accessions to our local catalogue. The only others (a few undoubted migrants—Wilson’s black-cap warbler, the white-crowned sparrow, and the solitary sandpiper—being omitted) were a single meadow lark and a single yellow-throated vireo. The lark seemed to be unknown to Franconia people, and my specimen may have been only a straggler. He sang again and again on May 22, but I heard nothing from him afterward, though I passed the place often. The vireo was singing in a sugar grove on the 3d of June,—a date on which, accidents apart, he should certainly have been at home for the summer.
Because I have had so much to say about the Cape May warbler and the wood thrush, it is not to be assumed that I mean to set them in the first place, nor even that I had in them the highest pleasure. They surprised me, and surprise is always more talkative than simple appreciation; but the birds that ministered most to my enjoyment were the hermit and the veery. The veery is not an every-day singer with me at home, and the hermit, for some years past, has made himself almost a stranger. I hardly know which of the two put me under the greater obligation. The veery sang almost continually, and a good veery is a singer almost out of competition. His voice lacks the ring of the wood thrush’s and the hermit’s; it never dominates the choir; but with the coppice to itself and the listener close by, it has sometimes a quality irresistible; I do not hesitate to characterize it as angelic. Of this kind was the voice of a bird that used to sing under my Franconia window at half past three o’clock, in the silence of the morning.