As the reader perceives, I am dealing in first impressions. They are all I have. Most of the scissor-tail’s tricks and manners, indeed, I have yet to witness. I have not seen him chase a crow, for instance, or a raven (he would have to travel a hundred miles, I suspect, to find either the one or the other), but give him half a chance, and I am sure he would do it. One thing I have seen him do: I have seen him fly before an English sparrow. The action seemed unworthy of him, but I dare say he did not so regard it. Perhaps it was all a joke. But apparently no bird considers it a disgrace to be put to rout by a smaller one. The shameful thing is to be afraid of one that is larger than yourself. This is not the human way of looking at such matters; but perhaps that does not prove it a false way. I seem to see that much might be said in defense of it.
It is surprising how common the scissor-tail is, and more surprising yet that nobody seems to notice him. I should have thought that all the passers-by would be stopping to stare at so half-absurd a prodigy. But when he performs his craziest evolutions here in the Alamo Plaza, in the very heart of the city, nobody appears to mind him. The truth is that to these people—to most of them, at least—he is an old story, while to me he is like a bird invented last week. Wherever you notice men, you will perceive that it is not the wonderful that attracts their attention, but the novel and the out-of-the-way. The moon and the stars they are used to, and quite properly look upon with indifference; but let a neighbor’s hencoop catch fire, and they cannot run fast enough to behold the spectacle.
Another and better thing I have accomplished during my present brief stay in San Antonio: I have heard and seen the Cassin sparrow. A Washington ornithologist, familiar with this Southwestern country, learning that I was on my way thither, wrote to me in January: “On no account return without hearing the Cassin sparrow.” To confess the truth, I had almost forgotten the injunction, emphatic as it was; but a few mornings ago, on my way back to the terminus of the street-car line after a jaunt into some old pecan woods, five or six miles out of the city, I stopped short at the sound of a few simple bird notes. What a gracious tune! And as novel as it was gracious! I had never heard the like: a long trill or shake, pitched at the top of the scale, and then, after a rest, a phrase of five notes in the sweetest of sparrow voices, ending with the truest and most unexpected of musical intervals. For mnemonic purposes, as my custom is (useful to me, if to no one else), I at once put words to the tune: “She” (this for the long trill), “pretty, pretty she.”
The birds were in some scattered mesquite bushes (very bright now, in their new yellow-green leafage), and I hastened to get through the fence and make up to them. They proved to be very small, and distressingly deficient in marks or “characters,” but I took such note of them as I could, in a poor light. The main thing, for the time being, was the song. That prolonged opening note, with its sound of an indrawn whistle, ought to be the work of a Pucæa, I told myself, remembering the Florida representative of that genus, and the singers should therefore be Cassin sparrows.
The next morning, having refreshed my memory by a reading of the handbook, I took the car immediately after breakfast for another visit to the place. This, I should have said, was in the rear grounds of an asylum for the insane. It was Sunday morning, and as I crawled through the fence and took up my position among the mesquites, I presently found myself under fire from the windows and balconies. The distance was too great for me to understand what was said, but there was no doubt that the inmates of the institution regarded me as a queer one. However, I believed in my own sanity (as things go in this world), and did not propose to be hindered. The birds were there, and that was enough.
And now, to my intense satisfaction, I found that they were doing just what the handbook described: springing into the air for a few feet, after the manner of long-billed marsh wrens, and with fluttering wings dropping slowly back to the perch, uttering their sweet, “She, pretty, pretty she,” as they descended. I secured somewhat fuller observations of their plumage, also, and became morally certain—which means something less than scientifically certain, though really, taking Mr. Attwater’s list of the birds of San Antonio as a guide, there is nothing else they can be—that the singers were Cassin sparrows.[19]
And glad I am to have heard them. I cannot speak for others; judgment in such matters must always be largely a question of personal taste; but for myself I have heard few bird songs that satisfy me so well; so quaint and original, yet so true and simple. San Antonio mockingbirds are numberless, and their performances are wonderful; I think I should never tire of them; but somehow those six quiet notes of the sparrow seem to go deeper home.
A BUNCH OF BRIGHT BIRDS
Almost or quite the most brilliant bird that I saw in Arizona was the vermilion flycatcher. I had heard of it as sometimes appearing in the neighborhood of Tucson, but entertained small hope of meeting it there myself. A stranger, straitened for time, and that time in winter, blundering about by himself, with no pilot to show him the likely places, could hardly expect to find many besides the commoner things. So I reasoned with myself, aiming to be philosophical. Nevertheless, there is always the chance of green hand’s luck; I knew it by more than one happy experience; and who could tell what might happen? Possibly it was not for nothing that my eye, as by a kind of magnetic attraction, fell so often upon Mrs. Bailey’s opening sentence about this particular bird as day after day, on one hunt and another, I turned the leaves of her Handbook. “Of all the rare Mexican birds seen in southern Arizona and Texas,” so I read, “the vermilion flycatcher is the gem.”
One thing was certain: this famous Mexican rarity was not confusingly like anything else, as so many of its Northern relatives have the unhandsome trick of being. If I saw it, ever so hurriedly, I should recognize it.