The bird was on one of the larger branches, over which it moved in something of the black-and-white creeper’s manner, turning its head to one side and the other alternately as it progressed. Then it sat still a long time (a long time for a warbler), so near me that the glass brought it almost into my hand, while I devoured its beauty; and then, of a sudden, it took flight into the dense, leafy top of a tall cottonwood, and I saw it no more. No more for that time, that is to say. In my mind, indeed, I bade it good-by forever. It was not to be thought of that such a bit of splendor (I had read of it as a mountain bird) should happen in my way more than once. But eight days afterward (March 28), in nearly the same place, it appeared again, straight over my head; and I was almost as much astonished as before. It was exploring the bare branches of a row of roadside ash trees, and I followed it, or rather preceded it, backing away as it flitted from one tree to the next, keeping the sun behind me. It carried itself now much like the common redstart; a little more inclined to moments of inactivity, perhaps, but at short intervals darting into the air after a passing insect with all conceivable quickness.
And such colors! Such an unspeakable red, so intense a black, and so pure a white! If I said that the vermilion flycatcher was the brightest bird I saw in Arizona, I was like the Hebrew psalmist. I said it in my haste.
This time the redstart was in a singing mood. On the previous occasion it had kept silence, and I had thought I was glad to have it so, feeling that no voice could be good enough to go with such feathers. In its way the feeling was justified; but, after all, it would have been too bad to miss the song. Curiosity has its claims, no less than sentiment. And happily the song proved to be a very pretty one; similar to that of the Eastern bird, to be sure, but less hurried (so it seemed to me), less over-emphatic, and in a voice less sharp and thin; a very pretty song (for a warbler), though, as is true of the Phainopepla and most other brilliantly handsome birds (and all good children), the redstart’s proper appeal is to the eye. So far as human appreciation is concerned, it need make no other.
I have heard a canyon wren in a canyon, I said. It was a glorious day in a glorious place,—Sabino Canyon, it is called, in the Santa Catalina Mountains. And it was there, where the ground was all a flower garden, and the dashing brook a doubly delightful sight and sound after so much wandering over the desert and so many crossings of dry, sandy river-beds,—it was there, amid a cluster of leafy oaks (strange oak leaves they were) and leafless hackberry trees, that I saw my first and only solitaire,—Myadestes townsendii. I have praised other birds for their brightness and song; this one I must praise for a certain nameless dignity and, as the present-day word is, distinction. He did not deign to break silence, or to notice in any manner, unless it were by an added touch of patrician reserve, the presence of three human intruders. I stared at him,—exercising a cat’s privilege,—for all his hauteur, admiring his gray colors, his conspicuous white eye-ring, and his manner. I say “manner,” not “manners.” You would never liken him to a dancing-master.
He was the solitaire, I somehow felt certain (certain with a lingering of uncertainty), though I had forgotten all description of that bird’s appearance. It was the place for him, and his looks went with the name. Moreover, to confess a more prosaic consideration, there was nothing else he could be.
“Myadestes,” I said to my two companions, both unacquainted with such matters; “I think it is Myadestes, though I can’t exactly tell why I think so.”
We must go into the canyon a little way, gazing up at the walls, picking a few of the more beautiful flowers, feeling the place itself (the best thing one can do, whether in a canyon or on a mountain-top); then we came back to the hackberry trees, but the solitaire was no longer in them. I had had my opportunity, and perhaps had made too little of it. It is altogether likely that I shall never see another bird of his kind.
For now those cloudless Arizona days, the creosote-covered desert, and the mountain ranges standing round about it, are all for me as things past and done; a bright memory, and no more. One event conspired with another to put a sudden end to my visit (which was already longer than I had planned), and on the last day of March I walked for the last time under that row of “leafless ash trees,”—no longer quite leafless, and no longer with a painted redstart in them,—and over that piece of winding road between the craggy hill and the river. Now I courted not the sun, but the shade; it was the sun, more than anything else, that was hurrying me away, when I would gladly have stayed longer; but sunny or shady, I stopped a bit in each of the more familiar places. Nobody knew or cared that I was taking leave. All things remained as they had been. The same rock wrens were practicing endless vocal variations here and there upon the stony hillside; the same fretful verdin was talking about something, it was beyond me to tell what, with the old emphatic monotony; the hummingbird stood on the tip of his mesquite bush, still turning his head eagerly from side to side, as if he expected her, and wondered why on earth she was so long in coming; the mocker across the field (one of no more than half a dozen that I saw about Tucson!) was bringing out of his treasury things new and old (a great bird that, always with another shot in his locker); the Lucy warbler, daintiest of the dainty, sang softly amid the willow catkins, a chorus of bees accompanying; the black cap of the pileolated warbler was not in the blossoming quince-bush hedge (that was a pity); the desert-loving sparrow hawk sat at the top of a giant cactus, as if its thorns were nothing but a cushion; the happy little Mexican boy, who lived in one corner of the old mill, came down the road with his usual smile of welcome (we were almost old friends by this time) and a glance into the trees, meaning to say, what he could not express in English, nor I understand in Spanish, “I know what you are doing;” and then, as I rounded the bend, under the beetling crags, the same canyon wren, my first one, not dreaming what a favor he was conferring upon the man he had so often chided as a trespasser, let fall a few measures of his lovely song. How sweet and cool the notes were! Unless it was the sound of the brook in the Sabino Canyon, I believe I heard nothing else so good in Arizona.
But at San Antonio, on my way homeward, I heard notes not to be called musical, in the smaller and more ordinary sense of the word; as unlike as possible, certainly, to the classic sweetness of the canyon wren’s tune; but to me even more exciting and memorable. On a sultry, indolent afternoon (April 9) I had betaken myself to Cemetery Hill for a lazy stroll, and had barely alighted from the electric car, when I heard strange noises somewhere near at hand. In my confusion I thought for an instant of the scissor-tailed flycatchers, with whose various outlandish outcries and antics I had been for several days amusing myself. Then I discovered that the sound came from above, and looking up, saw straight over my head, between the hilltop and the clouds, a wedge-shaped flock of large birds. Long slender necks and bills, feet drawn up and projecting out behind the tails, wing-action moderate (after the manner of geese rather than ducks), color dark,—so much, and no more, the glass showed me, while the birds, sixty or more in number, as I guessed, were fast receding northward. They should be cranes, I said to myself, since they were surely not herons, and then, like a flash, it came over me that I knew the voice. By good luck I had lived the winter before where I heard continually the lusty shouts of a captive sandhill crane; and it was to a chorus of sandhill cranes that I was now listening.
The flock disappeared, the tumult lessened and ceased, and I passed on. But fifteen minutes afterward, as I was retracing my steps over the hill, suddenly I heard the same resounding chorus again. A second flock of cranes was passing. This, too, was in a V-shaped line, though for some reason it fell into disorder almost immediately. Now I essayed a count, and had just concluded that there were some eighty of the birds, when a commotion behind me caused me to turn my head. To my amazement, a third and much larger flock was following close behind the second. There was no numbering it with exactness, but I ran my glass down the long, wavering line, as best I could, and counted one hundred and fifteen.