Well, I did see it, and almost of course at a moment when I was least looking for it. This was on the 5th of February, my fifth day in Tucson. I had crossed the Santa Cruz Valley, west of the city, by one road, and after a stroll among the foothills opposite, was returning by another, when a bit of flashing red started up from the wire fence directly before me. I knew what it was, almost before I saw it, as it seemed, so eager was I, and so well prepared; and as the solitary’s companionable habit is, I spoke aloud. “There’s the vermilion flycatcher!” I heard myself saying.
The fellow was every whit as splendid as my fancy had painted him, and to my joy he seemed to be not in the least put out by my approach nor chary of displaying himself. He was too innocent and too busy; darting into the air to snatch a passing insect, and anon returning to his perch, which was now a fence-post, now the wire, and now, best of all, the topmost, tilting spray of a dwarf mesquite. Thus engaged, every motion a delight to the eye, he flitted along the road in advance of me, till finally, having reached the limit of his hunting-ground,—the roadside ditches filled with water from the overflow of irrigated barley fields,—he turned back by the way he had come.
I went home a happy man; I had added one of the choicest and most beautiful of American birds to my mental collection. One thing was still lacking, however: flycatchers are not song-birds, but the humblest of them has a voice, and having things to say is apt to say them; my new acquaintance had kept his thoughts to himself.
This was in the forenoon, and after luncheon I went back to walk again over that muddy road between those ditches of muddy water. The bird might still be there. And he was,—still catching insects, and still silent. But so handsome! At first sight most people, I suppose, would compare him, as I did, with the scarlet tanager. The red parts are of nearly or quite the same shade,—a little deeper and richer, if anything,—while the wings, tail, and back are dark brown, approaching black,—the wings and tail especially,—dark enough, at any rate, to afford a brilliant contrast. His scientific name is Pyrocephalus, which is admirable as far as it goes, but falls a long way short of telling the whole truth about him; for not only is his head of a fiery hue, but his whole body as well, with the exceptions already noted. In size he ranks between the least flycatcher and the wood pewee. In liveliness of action he is equal to the spryest of his family, with a flirt of the tail which to my eye is identical with that of the phœbe. His gorgeous color is the more effective because of his aerial habits. The tanager is bright sitting on the bough, but how much brighter he would look if every few minutes he were seen hovering in mid-air with the sunlight playing upon him!
Certainly I was in great luck, and I felt it the more as day after day I found the dashing beauty in the same place. I could not spend my whole winter vacation in visiting him, but I saw him there at odd times,—nearly as often as I passed,—until February 17. Then he disappeared; but a week later I discovered him, or another like him, in a different part of the valley, and on the 26th I saw two. The next day, for the first time, one of the birds was in voice, uttering a few fine, short notes, little remarkable in themselves, but thoroughly characteristic; not suggestive of any other flycatcher notes known to me; so that, from that time to the end of my stay in Tucson, I was never in doubt as to their authorship, no matter where I heard them.
All these earlier birds were males in full plumage. The first female—herself a beauty, with a modest tinge of red upon her lower parts, enough to mark the relationship—was noticed March 5. Males were now becoming common, and on the 9th, although my walks covered no very wide territory, I counted, of males and females together, seventeen. From first to last not one was met with on the creosote and cactus-covered desert, but after the first few days of March they were well distributed over the Santa Cruz and Rillito valleys and about the grounds of the university. I found no nest until March 27, although at least two weeks earlier than that a female was seen pulling shreds of dry bark from a cottonwood limb, while her mate flitted about the neighborhood, now here, now there, as if he were too happy to contain himself.
The prettiest performance of the male, witnessed almost daily, and sometimes many times a day, after the arrival of the other sex, was a surprisingly protracted ecstatic flight, half flying, half hovering, the wings being held unnaturally high above the back, as if on purpose to display the red body (a most peculiar action, by which the bird could be told as far as he could be seen), accompanied throughout by a rapid repetition of his simple call; all thoroughly in the flycatcher manner; exactly such a mad, lyrical outburst as one frequently sees indulged in by the chebec, for instance, and the different species of phœbe. In endurance, as well as in passion, Pyrocephalus is not behind the best of them, while his exceptional bravery of color gives him at such moments a glory altogether his own. Sometimes, indeed, he seems to be emulous of the skylark himself, he rises to such a height, beating his way upward, hovering for breath, and then pushing higher and still higher. Once I saw him and the large Arizona crested flycatcher in the air side by side, one as crazy as the other; but the big magister was an awkward hand at the business, compared with the tiny Pyrocephalus.
It was good to find so showy a bird so little disposed to shyness. At Old Camp Lowell, where I often rested for an hour at noon in the shade of one of the adobe buildings, the bachelor winter occupants of which were kind enough to give me food and shelter (together with pleasant company) whenever my walk took me so far from home, our siesta was constantly enlivened by his bright presence and engaging tricks. One day, as he perched at the top of a low mesquite, on a level with our eyes, I put my glass into the hand of the younger of my hosts. He broke out in a tone of wonder. “Well, now,” said he (he spoke to the bird), “you are a peach.” And so he is. It is exactly what, in my more old-fashioned and less collegiate English, I have been vainly endeavoring to say.
And to be a “peach” is a fine thing. A vivacious living essayist, it is true, who is probably a handsome man himself, at least in the looking-glass, declares that “male ugliness is an endearing quality.” The remark may be true—in a sense; by all means let us hope so, seeing how lavish Nature has been with the commodity in question; but I am confident that the female vermilion flycatcher would never admit it. As for her glorious dandy of a husband, there can be no doubt what opinion he would hold of such an impudent reflection upon feminine perspicacity and taste. “A plague upon paradoxes and aphorisms,” I hear him answer. “If fine feathers don’t make fine birds, what in Heaven’s name do they make?”
It was only two days after my discovery of the vermilion flycatcher (if I remember correctly I was at that moment on my way to enjoy a third or fourth look at him) that I first saw a very different but scarcely less interesting novelty. I was on the sidewalk of Main Street, in the busy part of the day, my thoughts running upon a batch of delayed letters just received, when suddenly I looked up (probably I had heard a voice without being conscious of it, for the confirmed hobby-rider is sometimes in the saddle unwittingly) and caught sight of a few swifts far overhead. People were passing, but it was now or never with me, and I whipped out my opera-glass. There were six of the birds, and their throats were white. So much I saw, having known what to look for, and then they were gone,—as if the heavens had opened and swallowed them up. It was a niggardly interview, at pretty long range, but a deal better than nothing; enough, at all events, for an identification. They were white-throated swifts,—Aëronautes melanoleucus.