Nature's invitation: Notes of a bird-gazer, North and South

by Bradford Torrey

The singer could be no other than the canyon wren; but of course I must see him. At last, my patience outwearing his, he fell to scolding again, and glancing up in the direction of the sound, I saw him on the jutting top of the very highest stone, his white throat and breast flashing in the sun, and the dark, rich brown of his lower parts setting the whiteness off to marvelous advantage. There he stood, calling and bobbing, calling and bobbing, after the familiar wren manner, though why he should resent an innocent man’s presence so far below was more than any innocent man could imagine.

It would be an offense against the truth not to confess that the celebrated song fell at first a little short of my expectations. Perhaps I had heard it celebrated somewhat too loudly and too often. It was very pleasing; the voice beautifully clear and full, and the cadence of the sweetest; it had the grace of simplicity; indeed, there was nothing to be said against it, except that I had supposed it would be—well, I hardly know what, but somehow wilder and more telling.

Within a few days I discovered a second pair of the birds not far away, about an old, long-disused adobe mill. They were already building a nest somewhere inside, entering by a crack over one of the windows. The female appeared to be doing the greater part of the work, while her mate sat upon the edge of the flat roof and sang for her encouragement, or railed at me for my too assiduous lounging about the premises. The more I listened to the song, the better I enjoyed it; it is certainly a song by itself; I have never heard anything with which to compare it; and I was especially pleased to see how many variations the performer was able to introduce into his music, and yet leave it always the same.

The first pair, on the precipitous face of the mountain, had chosen the more romantic site, and I often stopped to admire their address in climbing about over the almost perpendicular surface of the rock; now disappearing for a few seconds, now popping into sight again a little further on; finding a foothold everywhere, no matter how smooth and steep the rock might look.

The canyon wren is a darling bird and a musical genius; and now that I have ceased to measure his song by my extravagant expectations concerning it, I do not wish it in any wise altered. His natural home is by the side of falling water (I have heard him since, where I should have heard him first, in a canyon), and his notes fall with it. I seem to hear them dropping one by one, every note by itself, as I write about them. If they are not of a kind to be ecstatic over at a first hearing (a little too simple for that), they are all the surer of a long welcome. Indeed, I am half ashamed to have so much as referred to my own early lack of appreciation of their excellence. Perhaps this was one of the times when the truth should not have been spoken.

My mention just now of the wren’s cleverness in traveling over the steep side of Tucson Mountain called to mind a similar performance on the part of a very different bird—a road-runner—in the same place; and though it was not in my plan to name that bird in this paper, I cannot deny myself the digression.

I had taken a friend, newly inoculated with ornithological fever, down to this mountain-side road to show him a black-chinned hummingbird. We had seen it, to his amazement, on the very mesquite where I had told him it would be (“Well!” he said,—and a most eloquent “well” it was,—when I pointed the bird out, scarcely more than a speck, as we came in sight of the bush), and were driving further, when I laid my hand on the reins and bade him look up. There, halfway up the precipitous, broken cliff, was the big, mottled, long-tailed bird, looking strangely out of place to both of us, who had never seen him before except in the lowlands, running along the road, or dodging among clumps of bushes. Then of a sudden, he began climbing, and almost in no time was on the very topmost stone, at the base of a stunted palo-verde. There he fell to cooing (like a dove, I said, forgetting at the moment that the road-runner is a kind of cuckoo), and by the time he had repeated the phrase three or four times we remarked that before doing so he invariably lowered his head. We sat and watched and listened (“There!” one or the other would say, as the head was ducked) for I know not how many minutes, commenting upon the droll appearance of the bird, perched thus above the world, and cooing in this (for him) ridiculous, lovelorn, gesticulatory manner.

Then, as we drove on, I recalled the strangely rapid and effortless gait with which he had gone up the mountain. “He didn’t use his wings, did he?” I asked; and my companion thought not. I was reminded of a bird of the same kind that I had seen a few days before cross a deep gully perhaps twenty feet in width. “He seemed to slide across,” said the man who was with me. That was exactly the word. He did not lift a wing, to the best of our noticing, nor rise so much as an inch into the air, but as it were stepped from one bank to the other. So this second bird went up the mountain-side almost without our seeing how he did it. A few steps, and he was there, as by the exercise of some special gift of specific levity. He did not fly; and yet it might have “seemed he flew, the way so easy was.” Take him how you will, the road-runner’s looks do not belie him: he is an odd one; and never odder, I should guess, than when he stands upon a mountain-top and with lowered head pours out his amorous soul in coos as gentle as a sucking dove’s. I count myself happy to have witnessed the moving spectacle.

I am running into superlatives, but no matter. The feeling against their use is largely prejudice. Let me suit myself with one or two more, therefore, and say that the rarest and most exciting bird seen by me in Arizona was a painted redstart, Setophaga picta. It was at the base of Tucson Mountain, close by the canyon wrens’ old mill. The vermilion flycatcher, rare as I considered it at first, became after a while almost excessively common. I believe it is no exaggeration to say that forty or fifty pairs must have been living in and about Tucson before the first of April. Unless you were out upon the desert, you could hardly turn round without seeing or hearing them. But there was no danger of the painted redstart’s cheapening itself after this fashion. I saw it twice, for perhaps ten minutes in all, and as long as I live I shall be thankful for the sight.

I was playing the spy upon a pair of what I took to be Arkansas goldfinches, and the question being a nice one, had got over a wire fence to have the sun at my back. There I had barely focused my eight-power glass upon a leafless willow beside an irrigation ditch, when all at once there moved into its field such a piece of absolute gorgeousness as I have no hope of making my reader see by means of any description: a small bird in three colors,—deep, velvety black, the snowiest white, and the most brilliant red. Its glory lay in the depth and purity of the three colors; its singularity lay in a point not mentioned in book descriptions, being inconspicuous, I suppose, in cabinet specimens: a line (almost literally a line) of white below the eye. From its position and its extreme tenuity I took it for the lower eyelid, but as to that I cannot speak with positiveness. It would hardly have showed, even in life, I dare say, but for its intensely black surroundings. As it was, it fairly stared at me. I cannot affirm that it added to the bird’s beauty. Apart from it the colors were all what I may call solid,—laid on in broad masses, that is: a red belly, a long white band (not a bar) on each wing, some white tail feathers, white lower tail coverts, and everything else black. It does not sound like anything so very extraordinary, I confess. But the reader should have seen it. Unless he is a very dry stick indeed, he would have let off an exclamation or two, I can warrant. There are cases in which the whole is a good deal more than the sum of all its parts.