Three days later a flock of at least seventeen birds of the same species were hawking over the Santa Cruz Valley, and now, as they swept this way and that at their feeding, there was leisure for the field-glass and something like a real examination. To my surprise (surprise is the compensation of ignorance) I discovered that they had not only white throats, as their name implies, but white breasts, and more noticeable still, white rumps. Those who are familiar with our common dingy, soot-colored chimney swift of the East will be able to form some idea of the distinguished appearance of this Westerner: a considerably larger bird, built on the same rakish lines, shooting about the sky in the same lightning-like zigzags, and marked in this striking and original manner with white. I saw the birds only four times afterward, the last time on the 17th of February. So I say, speaking after the manner of men; but in truth I can see them now, their white rumps lighting up as they wheel and catch the sun. It pleases me to learn that it is next to impossible to shoot them, and that they are scarce in collections. So may they continue. They were made for better things.
The most beautiful bird that I found in Arizona, though judgments of this kind are of necessity liable to revision as one’s mood changes, was the Arizona Pyrrhuloxia. I should be glad to give the reader, as well as to have for my own use, an English name for it, but so far as I am aware it has none. It has lived beyond the range of the vernacular. My delight in its beauty was less keen than naturally it would have been, because I had spent my first raptures upon its equally handsome Texas relative of the same name a few weeks before. This was at San Antonio, in the chaparral just outside the city. I had been listening to a flock of lark sparrows, I remember, and looking at sundry things, where almost everything was new, when all at once I saw before me at the foot of a bush the loveliest bunch of feathers that I had ever set eyes on. Without the least thought of what I was doing I began repeating to myself under my breath, “O my soul! O my soul!” And in sober truth the creature was deserving of all the admiration it excited: a bird of the cardinal’s size and build, dressed not in gaudy red, but in the most exquisite shade of gray, with a plentiful spilling of an equally exquisite rose color over its under-parts. Its bright orange bill was surrounded at the base by a double ring of black and rose, and on its head was a most distinguished-looking, divided crest, tipped with rose color of a deeper shade. It was loveliness to wonder at. I cannot profess that I was awe-struck (not being sure that I know just what that excellent word means), but it would hardly be too much to say that “as I passed, I worshiped.”
The Arizona bird, unhappily, was not often seen (the Texas bird treated me better), though when I did come upon it, it was generally in accessible places (in wayside hedgerows) not far from houses. It would be impossible to see either the Texas or the Arizona bird for the first time without comparing it with the cardinal, the two are so much alike, and yet so different. The cardinal is brighter, but for beauty give me Pyrrhuloxia. I do not expect the sight of any other bird ever to fill me with quite so rapturous a delight in pure color as that first unlooked-for Pyrrhuloxia did in the San Antonio chaparral. It was like the joy that comes from falling suddenly upon a stanza of magical verse, or catching from some unexpected quarter a strain of heavenly music.
If Pyrocephalus was the brightest and Pyrrhuloxia the most beautiful of my Arizona birds, Phainopepla must be called the most elegant, the most supremely graceful, if I may be pardoned such an application of the word, the most incomparably genteel. I saw it first at Old Camp Lowell, before mentioned, near the Rillito, at the base of the low foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains. At my first visit to the camp, which is six or seven miles from the city of Tucson, straight across the desert, I mistook my way at the last and approached the place from the farther end by a cross-cut through the creosote bushes. Just as I reached the adobe ruins, all that is left of the old camp, I descried a black bird balancing itself daintily at the tip of a mesquite. I lifted my glass, caught sight of the bird’s crest, and knew it for a Phainopepla. How good it is to find something you have greatly desired and little expected!
The Phainopepla (like the Pyrrhuloxia it has no vernacular appellation, living only in that sparsely settled, Spanish-speaking corner of the world) is ranked with the waxwings, though except for its crest there is little or nothing in its outward appearance to suggest such a relationship; and the crest itself bears but a moderate resemblance to the pointed topknot of our familiar cedar-bird. What I call the Phainopepla’s elegance comes partly from its form, which is the very perfection of shapeliness, having in the highest degree that elusive quality which in semi-slang phrase is designated as “style;” partly from its motions, all prettily conscious and in a pleasing sense affected, like the movements of a dancing-master; and partly from its color, which is black with the most exquisite bluish sheen, set off in the finest manner by broad wing-patches of white. These wing-patches are noticeable, furthermore, for being divided into a kind of network by black lines. It is for this reason, I suppose, that they have a peculiar gauzy look (I speak of their appearance while in action) such as I have never seen in the case of any other bird, and which often made me think of the ribbed, translucent wings of certain dragon flies.
Doubtless this peculiar appearance was heightened to my eyes, because of the mincing, wavering, over-buoyant method of flight (the wings being carried unusually high) to which I have alluded, and which always suggested to me the studied movements of a dance. I think I never saw one of the birds so far forget itself as to take a direct, straightforward course from one point to another. No matter where they might be going, though the flight were only a matter of a hundred yards, they progressed always in pretty zigzags, making so many little, unexpected, indecisive tacks and turns by the way, butterfly fashion, that you began to wonder where they would finally come to rest.
The two birds first seen—the female in lovely gray—were evidently at home about the camp. The berry-bearing parasitic plants in the mesquites seemed to furnish them with food, and no doubt they were settled there for the season; and at least two more were wintering out among the Chinese kitchen gardens, not far away. And some weeks afterward I came upon a third pair, also in a mesquite grove, on the Santa Cruz side of the desert. But though in the two river valleys I passed a good many hours in their society, I never once heard them sing, nor, so far as I can now recall, did they ever utter any sound save a mellow pip, almost exactly like a certain call of the robin; so like it, in fact, that to the very last I never heard it suddenly given, but my first thought was of that common Eastern bird, whose voice in those early spring days it would have been so natural and so pleasant to hear. I could have spared a dozen or two of thrashers, I thought (not brown thrashers), for a pair of robins and a pair of bluebirds. But southern Arizona is a kind of thrasher paradise, while robins and bluebirds desire a better country, and seemingly know where to find it.[20]
In the last week of March, however, there took place, as well as I could judge, a concerted movement of Phainopeplas northward. They showed themselves in the Santa Cruz Valley, here and there a pair, until they became, not abundant, indeed, but a counted-upon, every-day sight. Those that I had heretofore seen, it appeared, were only a few winter “stay-overs.” Now the season had opened; and now the birds began singing. For curiosity’s sake it pleased me to hear them, but the brief measure, in a thin, squeaky voice, was nothing for any bird to be proud of. They sing best to the eye. “Birds of the shining robes,” their Greek name calls them; and worthily do they wear it, under that unclouded Arizona sun, perching, as they habitually do, at the tip of some tree or bush, where the man with birds in his eye can hardly fail to sight them and name them, across the widest barley field.
One of the birds whose acquaintance I chiefly wished to make on this my first Western journey was the famous canyon wren,—famous not for its beauty (beauty is not the wren family’s mark), but for its voice. Whether my wish would be gratified was of course a question, especially as my very modest itinerary included no exploration of canyons; but I was not without hope.
I had been in Tucson nearly a week, when one cool morning after a cold night (it was February 7) I went down into the Santa Cruz Valley and took the road that winds—where there is barely room for it—between the base of Tucson Mountain and the river. Steep, broken cliffs, perhaps a hundred feet high, were on my right hand, and the deep bed of the shallow river lay below me on my left. Here I was enjoying the sun, and keeping my eyes open, when a set of loud, clear bird notes in a descending scale fell upon my ears from overhead. I stopped, pulled myself together, and said, “A canyon wren.” I remembered a description of that descending scale. The next instant a small hawk took wing from the spot on the cliff whence the notes had seemed to fall. My mind wavered, but only for a moment. “No, no,” I said, “it is not in any hawk’s throat to produce sounds of that quality;” and I waited. A rock wren began calling, but rock wrens did not count with me at that moment. Then, in a very different voice, a wren, presumably the one I was in search of, began fretting, unseen, somewhere above my head; and then, silence. I waited and waited. Finally I tried an old trick—I started on. If the bird was watching me, as likely enough he was, a movement to leave his neighborhood would perhaps excite him pleasurably. And so it did; or so it seemed; for almost at once the song was given out and repeated: a hurried introductory phrase, and then the fuller, longer, more liquid notes, tripping in procession down the scale.