On the morning of March 26, in an ante-breakfast stroll, I found among the pines immediately in the rear of the hotel the first summer tanager of the season. The splendid creature, bright red throughout, was flitting from tree to tree, singing a measure or two from each. He acted as if he were happy to be back in Ormond, and I did not wonder. A red-eyed vireo was singing on the 15th, and since then birds of the same kind have become moderately common. Considering that the red-eye is not supposed to winter anywhere in the United States (I saw nothing of it at Miami), and arrives so late in New England, it seems to have reached Ormond surprisingly early.
For some time the woods have been alive in spots with busy crowds of warblers. Parulas especially have been present in enormous force, and have sung literally in chorus. I have seen many yellow-throated warblers also, and many myrtles, with a fair sprinkling of prairies and black-and-white creepers. But the birds that have sung best—after the mocker and the thrasher, perhaps—are not spring comers, but our faithful winter friends, the cardinal grosbeak and the Carolina wren. Indeed, of all Southern songsters I believe that the cardinal stands first in my affections. Sweetness, tenderness, affectionateness, and variety, these are his gifts, and they are good ones, even if they are not the highest.
Out in the flatwoods, a few days ago, we suddenly heard, coming from a thicket of dwarf palmetto on the edge of water, a quite unexpected strain, a loud, short trill. “What was that?” asked my companions, as we looked at one another; for there were three pairs of field-glasses in the carriage. “It sounded like a swamp sparrow,” said I, with doubt in my voice. At that moment the measure was given out again, prefaced this time by a peculiar indrawn whistle. Then the truth flashed upon me. It was the song of a pine-wood sparrow. I had not heard it for many years. In the same place meadow larks were in tune, bluebirds warbled, and pine warblers and brown-headed nuthatches were in voice among the pine trees. Here, too, I was glad to hear, for the first time in Florida, the caw of a real crow, a bird with a roof to his mouth and a voice that sounded like home.
Such are some of a bird-loving man’s early spring pleasures in this Southern country. I do not mean to praise the season unduly. New England can beat it when the time comes; at least, I know one New Englander who thinks so; but not in March.
TEXAS AND ARIZONA
IN OLD SAN ANTONIO
After three days and four nights in a sleeping-car it is good to breathe air again. Not that I mean to speak ill of the modern necessity known in railway offices as a “sleeper”; it has done me too many a service; but, for all that,—though it is a bridge that has carried me over,—well, as I said, it is a luxury to breathe air again.
So I thought this January afternoon as I sat upon the top rail (a pretty thin board) of a tall fence at the summit of what I take to be one of the highest elevations (it would be exceeding the truth, perhaps, to call it a hill) in the immediate neighborhood of this venerable but young and vigorous Texas city, known in geographies and gazetteers as San Antonio, but among railroad men, with whom time and breath are precious, as “San Antone.”
The city itself lay all before me, and an excellent showing it made, with its many stately and handsome buildings and its general air of prosperity; but for the most part my eyes traveled beyond it, or in other directions. The landscape was wide, whichever way I turned, and the transparency of the atmosphere, of a kind never enjoyed in New England except on some half-dozen days in a year, made it the wider and more alluring. It surprised me to see imposing public buildings scattered about over the country. The nearest must have been several miles from the town, and each, so far as I could see, stood entirely by itself. Here and there, also, miles apart, were fine dwelling-houses, with outbuildings and windmills; each, like the public institutions just mentioned, standing alone, as if its proprietor were also the proprietor of the entire tract of country roundabout. Rich men’s ranches, they should perhaps be called. All these, or most of them, would have been invisible from my fence-rail perch, but for the fact, which really made the strangeness of the whole spectacle to a New England man’s eyes, that the rolling land is all unwooded—a broad landscape, stretching away and away, north, south, east, and west, and no forest! The slopes look, at a little distance,—just as the one on which I was now sitting had looked to me half a mile back,—as if they might be planted with young peach orchards. They are really covered loosely with wild shrubs ten or fifteen feet high, now budded and in pale green leaf (Huisache, I understand their Mexican name to be,[9] though I may err in the spelling), with lower shrubs of different sorts, mostly thorny, scattered loosely among them, the whole constituting (or so I suppose) what is known in this part of the world as chaparral; which is very like what in our Northern country we speak of, less respectfully, as “scrub.”
It is a godsend to a man on my errand, that chaparral, as it grows about San Antonio, at all events, is not a dense thicket. It can be walked through or ridden through in all directions with perfect ease, though one cannot keep a straight course for more than a rod or two together.