But "I speak as a fool." Our happiness, if we are bird-lovers indeed, waits not upon novelties and rarities. All such exceptional bits of private good fortune let the Fates send or withhold as they will. The grand spectacle itself will not fail us. Even now, through all the northern country, the procession is getting under way. For the next three months it will be passing,—millions upon millions: warblers, sparrows, thrushes, vireos, blackbirds, flycatchers, wrens, kinglets, woodpeckers, swallows, humming-birds, hawks; with sandpipers, plovers, ducks and geese, gulls, and who knows how many more? Night and day, week days and Sundays, they will be flying: now singly or in little groups, and flitting from one wood or pasture to another; now in great companies, and with protracted all-day or all-night flights. Who could ask a better stimulus for his imagination than the annual southing of this mighty host? Each member of it knows his own time and his own course. On such a day the snipe will be in such a meadow, and the golden plover in such a field. Some, no doubt, will lose their way. Numbers uncounted will perish by storm and flood; numbers more, alas, by human agency. As I write, with the sad note of a bluebird in my ear, I can see the sea-beaches and the marshes lined with guns. But the army will push on; they will come to their desired haven; for there is a spirit in birds, also, "and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding."
A GREAT BLUE HERON.
"Why appear you with this ridiculous boldness?"
Shakespeare.
The watcher of birds in the bush soon discovers that they have individual as well as race characteristics. They are not things, but persons,—beings with intellect, affections, and will,—and a strong specific resemblance is found to be consistent with no small measure of personal variation. All robins, we say, look and act alike. But so do all Yankees; yet it is part of every Yankee's birthright to be different from every other Yankee. Nature abhors a copy, it would seem, almost as badly as she abhors a vacuum. Perhaps, if the truth were known, a copy is a vacuum.
I walked down the bay shore of Cape Cod one summer morning, and at a certain point climbed the steep cliff to the railway track, meaning to look into a large cranberry meadow where, on previous visits, I had found a few sandpipers and plovers. Near one end of the perfectly level, sand-covered meadow was a little pool, and my first glance in that direction showed me a great blue heron wading about its edge. With as much quietness as possible I stole out of sight, and then hastened up the railway through a cut, till I had the sun at my back and a hill between me and the bird. Then I began a stealthy approach, keeping behind one object after another, and finally going down flat upon the ground (to roll in the soil is an excellent method of cleansing one's garments on Cape Cod) and crawling up to a patch of bayberry bushes, the last practicable cover.
Here let me say that the great blue heron is, as its name implies, a big bird, standing almost as high as an ordinary man, and spreading its wings for nearly or quite six feet. Its character for suspiciousness may be gathered from what different writers have said about it. "He is most jealously vigilant and watchful of man," says Wilson, "so that those who wish to succeed in shooting the heron must approach him entirely unseen, and by stratagem." "Extremely suspicious and shy," says Audubon. "Unless under very favorable circumstances, it is almost hopeless to attempt to approach it. To walk up towards one would be a fruitless adventure." Dr. Brewer's language is to the same effect,—"At all times very vigilant and difficult of approach."
This, then, was the bird which I now had under my field-glass, as I lay at full length behind the friendly bayberry bushes. Up to this point, for aught that appeared, he was quite unaware of my espionage. Like all the members of his family that I have ever seen, he possessed so much patience that it required much patience to watch him. For minutes together he stood perfectly still, and his movements, as a rule, were either so slow as to be all but imperceptible, or so rapid as almost to elude the eye. Boys who have killed frogs—which was pretty certainly my heron's present employment—will need no explanation of his behavior. They know very well that, if the fatal club is to do its work, the slowest kind of preliminary motion must be followed by something like a flash of lightning.