Footing it in Franconia

by Bradford Torrey

Spenser.

On the second day after our arrival in Franconia[11] we were following a dry, sandy stretch of valley road—on one of our favorite rounds—when a bird flew across it, just before us, and dropped into the barren, closely cropped cattle pasture on our left. Something indefinable in its manner or appearance excited my suspicions, and I stole up to the fence and looked over. The bird was a horned lark, the first one that I had ever set eyes on in the nesting season. He seemed to be very hungry, snapping up insects with the greatest avidity, and was not in the least disturbed by our somewhat eager attentions. It was plain at the first glance that he was of the Western variety,—a prairie horned lark, in other words,—for even in the best of lights the throat and sides of the head were white, or whitish, with no perceptible tinge of yellow.

The prairie lark is one of the birds that appear to be shifting or extending their breeding range. It was first described as a sub-species in 1884, and has since been found to be a summer resident of northern Vermont and New Hampshire, and, in smaller numbers, of western Massachusetts. It is not impossible, expansion being the order of the day, that some of us may live long enough to see it take up its abode within sight of the gilded State House dome.

My own previous acquaintance with it had been confined to the sight of a few migrants along the seashore in the autumn, although my companion on the present trip had seen it once about a certain upland farm here in Franconia. That was ten years ago, and we have again and again sought it there since, without avail.

Our bird of to-day interested me by displaying his “horns,”—curious adornments which I had never been able to make out before, except in pictures. They were not carried erect,—like an owl’s “ears,” let us say,—but projected backwards, and with the head at a certain angle showed with perfect distinctness. The bird would do nothing but eat, and as our own dinner awaited us we continued our tramp. We would try to see more of him and his mate at another time, we promised ourselves.

First, however, we paid a visit (that very afternoon) to the upland farm just now spoken of. “Mears’s,” we always call it. Perhaps the larks would be there also. But we found no sign of them, and the bachelor occupant of the house, who left his plough in the beanfield to offer greeting to a pair of strangers, assured us that nothing answering to our description had ever been seen there within his time; an assertion that might mean little or much, of course, though he seemed to be a man who had his eyes open.

This happened on May 17. Six days afterward, in company with an entomological collector, we were again in the dusty valley. I went into the larch swamp in search of a Cape May warbler—found here two years before—one of the very best of our Franconia birds; and the entomologist stayed near by with her net and bottles, while the second man kept on a mile farther up the valley to look for thorn-bush specimens. So we drove the sciences abreast, as it were. My own hunt was immediately rewarded, and when the botanist returned I thought to stir his envy by announcing my good fortune; but he answered with a smile that he too had seen something; he had seen the prairie lark soaring and singing. “Well done!” said I; “now you may look for the Cape May, and incidentally feed the mosquitoes, and the lady and I will get into the carriage and take our turn with Otocoris.” So said, so done. We drove to the spot, the driver stopped the horses opposite a strip of ploughed land, and behold, there was the bird at that very moment high in the air, hovering and singing. It was not much of a song, I thought, though the entomologist, hearing partly with the eye, no doubt, pronounced it beautiful. It was most interesting, whatever might be said of its musical quality, and as we drove homeward my companion and I agreed that we would take up our quarters for a day or two at the nearest house, and study it more at our leisure. Possibly we should happen upon a nest.

In the forenoon of May 25, therefore, we found ourselves comfortably settled in the very midst of a lark colony. The birds, of which there were at least five (besides two pairs found half a mile farther up the valley), were to be seen or heard at almost any minute; now in the road before the house, now in the ploughed land close by it, now in one of the cattle pastures, and now on the roofs of the buildings. One fellow spent a great part of his time upon the ridgepole of the barn (a pretty high structure), commonly standing not on the very angle or ridge, but an inch or two below it, so that very often only his head and shoulders would be visible. Once I saw one dusting himself in the rut of the road. He went about the work with great thoroughness and unmistakable enjoyment, cocking his head and rubbing first one cheek and then the other into the sand. “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” I thought I heard him saying.

So far as we could judge from our two days’ observation, the birds were most musical in the latter half of the afternoon, say from four o’clock to six. Contrary to what we should have expected, we saw absolutely no ascensions in the early morning or after sunset, although we did see more than one at high noon. It is most likely, I think, that the birds sing at all hours, as the spirit moves them, just as the nightingale does, and the hermit thrush and the vesper sparrow.

As for the quality and manner of the song, with all my listening and studying I could never hit upon a word with which to characterize it. The tone is dry, guttural, inexpressive; not exactly to be called harsh, perhaps, but certainly not in any true sense of the word musical. When we first heard it, in the distance (let the qualification be noted), the same thought came to both of us,—a kingbird’s formless, hurrying twitters. There is no rhythm, no melody, nothing to be called phrasing or modulation,—a mere jumble of “splutterings and chipperings.” Every note is by itself, having to my ear no relation to anything before or after. The most striking and distinguishing characteristic of it all is the manner in which it commonly hurries to a conclusion—as if the clock were running down. “The hand has slipped from the lever,” I more than once found myself saying. I was thinking of a motorman who tightens his brake, and tightens it again, and then all at once lets go his grip. At this point, this sudden acceleration and conclusion, my companion and I always laughed. The humor of it was irresistible. It stood in such ludicrous contrast with all that had gone before,—so halting and labored; like a man who stammers and stutters, and then, finding his tongue unexpectedly loosened, makes all speed to finish. Sometimes—most frequently, perhaps—the strain was very brief; but at other times a bird would sit on a stone, or a fence-post, or a ridgepole, and chatter almost continuously by the quarter-hour. Even then, however, this comical hurried phrase would come in at more or less regular intervals. I imagined that the larks looked upon it as the highest reach of their art and delivered it with special satisfaction. If they did, I could not blame them; to us it was by all odds the most interesting part of their very limited repertory.