For the present, nevertheless, the birds are all in high spirits, warbling, twittering, feeding, chasing each other playfully about, as if life were nothing but holiday. Little they know of the future. And almost as little know we. Blessed ignorance! It gives us all, birds and men alike, many a good hour. If my playmate of long ago had foreseen that he was to die at twenty, he would never have been the happy boy that I remember. Those few bright years he had, though he had no more. So much was saved from the wreck.
Thoughts of this kind come to me as I recall an exhilarating half-hour of our recent stay in Franconia. It was on the first morning, immediately after breakfast. We were barely out of the hotel yard before we turned into a bit of larch and alder swamp by the shore of Gale River. We could do nothing else. The air was full of chirps and twitters, while the swaying, feathery tops of the larches were alive with flocks of whispering waxwings, the greater part of them birds of the present year, still wearing the stripes which in the case of so many species are marks of juvenility. If individual animals still pass through a development answering to that which the race as a whole has undergone—if young animals, in other words, resemble their remote ancestors—then the evolution of birds’ plumage must have gone pretty steadily in the direction of plainness. Robins, we must believe, once had spotted breasts, as most of their more immediate relatives have to this day, and chipping sparrows and white-throats were streaked like our present song sparrows and baywings. If the world lasts long enough (who knows?) all birds may become monochromatic. Wing-bars and all such convenient marks of distinction will have vanished. Then, surely, amateurish ornithologists will have their hands full to name all the birds without a gun. Then if, by any miraculous chance, a copy of some nineteenth century manual of ornithology shall be discovered, and some great linguist shall succeed in translating it, what a book of riddles it will prove! Savants will form theories without number concerning it, settling down, perhaps, after a thousand years of controversy, upon the belief that the author of the ancient work was a man afflicted with color blindness. If not, how came he to describe the scarlet tanager as having black wings and tail, and the brown thrasher a streaked breast?
These are afterthoughts. At the moment we were busy, eyes and ears, taking a census of the swamp. Besides the waxwings, which were much the most numerous, as well as the most in sight—“tree-toppers,” one of my word-making friends calls them—there were robins, song sparrows, white-throats, field sparrows, goldfinches, myrtle warblers, a Maryland yellow-throat, a black-throated green, a Nashville warbler, a Philadelphia vireo, two or three solitary vireos, one or more catbirds, as many olive-backed thrushes, a white-breasted nuthatch, and a sapsucker. Others, in all likelihood, escaped us.
In and out among the bushes we made our way, one calling to the other softly at each new development.
“What was that?” said I. “Wasn’t that a bobolink?”
“It sounded like it,” answered the other listener.
“But it can’t be. Hark!”
The quick, musical drop of sound—a “stillicidious” note, my friend called it—was heard again. No; it was not from the sky, as we had thought at first, but from a thicket of alders just behind us. Then we recognized it, and laughed at ourselves. It was the staccato whistle of an olive-backed thrush, a sweet familiarity, over which I should have supposed it impossible for either of us to be puzzled.
The star of the flock, as some readers will not need to be told, having marked the unexpected name in the foregoing list, was the Philadelphia vireo. What a bright minute it is in a man’s vacation when such a stranger suddenly hops upon a branch before his eyes! He feels almost like quoting Keats. “Then felt I,” he might say, not with full seriousness, perhaps,—
“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies