Our first excursion—I speak of the four who traveled on foot—was to the Franconia Notch. It could not well have been otherwise; at all events, there was one of the four whose feet would not willingly have carried him in any other direction. The mountains drew us, and there was no thought of resisting their attraction.
Love and curiosity are different, if not incompatible, sentiments; and the birds that are dearest to the man are, for that very reason, not most interesting to the ornithologist. When on a journey, I am almost without eyes or ears for bluebirds and robins, song sparrows and chickadees. Now is my opportunity for extending my acquaintance, and such every-day favorites must get along for the time as best they can without my attention. So it was here in Franconia. The [vesper sparrow], the veery, and a host of other friends were singing about the hotel and along the roadside, but we heeded them not. Our case was like the boy's who declined gingerbread, when on a visit: he had plenty of that at home.
When we were nearly at the edge of the mountain woods, however, we heard across the field a few notes that brought all four of us to an instant standstill. What [warbler] could that be? Nobody could tell. In fact, nobody could guess. But, before the youngest of us could surmount the wall, the singer took wing, flew over our heads far into the woods, and all was silent. It was too bad; but there would be another day to-morrow. Meantime, we kept on up the hill, and soon were in the old forest, listening to [bay-breasted warblers], [Blackburnians], [black-polls], and so on, while the noise of the mountain brook on our right, a better singer than any of them, was never out of our ears. "You are going up," it said. "I wish you joy. But you see how it is; you will soon have to come down again."
I took leave of my companions at Profile Lake, they having planned an all-day excursion beyond, and started homeward by myself. Slowly, and with many stops, I sauntered down the long hill, through the forest (the stops, I need not say, are commonly the major part of a naturalist's ramble,—the golden beads, as it were, the walk itself being only the string), till I reached the spot where we had been serenaded in the morning by our [mysterious stranger]. Yes, he was again singing, this time not far from the road, in a moderately thick growth of small trees, under which the ground was carpeted with club-mosses, dog-tooth violets, clintonia, linnæa, and similar plants. He continued to sing, and I continued to edge my way nearer and nearer, till finally I was near enough, and went down on my knees. Then I saw him, facing me, showing white under parts. A Tennessee warbler! Here was good luck indeed. I ogled him for a long time ("Shoot it," says Mr. Burroughs, authoritatively, "not ogle it with a glass;" but a man must follow his own method), impatient to see his back, and especially the top of his head. What a precious frenzy we fall into at such moments! My knees were fairly upon nettles. He flew, and I followed. Once more he was under the glass, but still facing me. How like a vireo he looked! For one instant I thought, Can it be the Philadelphia vireo? But, though I had never seen that bird, I knew its song to be as different as possible from the notes to which I was listening. After a long time the fellow turned to feeding, and now I obtained a look at his upper parts,—the back olive, the head ashy, like the Nashville warbler. That was enough. It was indeed the Tennessee (Helminthophila peregrina), a bird for which I had been ten years on the watch.
The song, which has not often been described, is more suggestive of the [Nashville's] than of any other, but so decidedly different as never for a moment to be confounded with it. "When you hear it," a friend had said to me several years before, "you will know it for something new." It is long (I speak comparatively, of course), very sprightly, and peculiarly staccato, and is made up of two parts, the second quicker in movement and higher in pitch than the first. I speak of it as in two parts, though when my companions came to hear it, as they did the next day, they reported it as in three. We visited the place together afterwards, and the discrepancy was readily explained. As to pitch, the song is in three parts, but as to rhythm and character, it is in two; the first half being composed of double notes, the second of single notes. The resemblance to the Nashville's song lies entirely in the first part; the notes of the concluding portion are not run together or jumbled, after the Nashville's manner, but are quite as distinct as those of the opening measure.
As there were at least two pairs of the birds, and they were unmistakably at home, we naturally had hope of finding one of the nests. We made several random attempts, and one day I devoted an hour or more to a really methodical search; but the wily singer gave me not the slightest clue, behaving as if there were no such thing as a bird's nest within a thousand miles, and all my endeavors went for nothing.
As might have been foreseen, Franconia proved to be an excellent place in which to study the difficult family of flycatchers. All our common eastern Massachusetts species were present,—the [kingbird], the [phœbe], the [wood pewee], and the [least flycatcher],—and with them the [crested flycatcher] (not common), the [olive-sided], the [traill], and the [yellow-bellied]. The phœbe-like cry of the traill was to be heard constantly from the hotel piazza. The yellow-bellied seemed to be confined to deep and rather swampy woods in the valley, and to the mountain-side forests; being most numerous on Mount Lafayette, where it ran well up toward the limit of trees. In his notes, the yellow-belly may be said to take after both the least flycatcher and the wood pewee. His killic (so written in the books, and I do not know how to improve upon it) resembles the chebec of the least flycatcher, though much less emphatic, as well as much less frequently uttered, while his twee, or tuwee, is quite in the voice and manner of the wood pewee's clear, plaintive whistle; usually a monosyllable, but at other times almost or quite dissyllabic. The [olive-sided], on the other hand, imitates nobody; or, if he does, it must be some bird with which I have yet to make acquaintance. Que-qúe-o he vociferates, with a strong emphasis and drawl upon the middle syllable. This is his song, or what answers to a song, but I have seen him when he would do nothing but repeat incessantly a quick trisyllabic call, whit, whit, whit; corresponding, I suppose, to the well-known whit with which the [phœbe] sometimes busies himself in a similar manner.
Of more interest than any flycatcher—of more interest even than the Tennessee warbler—was a bird found by the roadside in the village, after we had been for several days in the place. Three of us were walking together, talking by the way, when all at once we halted, as by a common impulse, at the sound of a vireo song; a [red-eye's] song, as it seemed, with the faintest touch of something unfamiliar about it. The singer was in a small butternut-tree close upon the sidewalk, and at once afforded us perfectly satisfactory observations, perching on a low limb within fifteen feet of our eyes, and singing again and again, while we scrutinized every feather through our glasses. As one of my companions said, it was like having the bird in your hand. There was no room for a question as to its identity. At last we had before us the rare and long-desired [Philadelphia greenlet]. As its song is little known, I here transcribe my notes about it, made at two different times, between which there appears to have been some discussion among us as to just how it should be characterized:—
"The song is very pretty, and is curiously compounded of the red-eye's and the [solitary's], both as to phrase and quality. The measures are all brief; with fewer syllables, that is to say, than the red-eye commonly uses. Some of them are exactly like the red-eye's, while others have the peculiar sweet upward inflection of the solitary's. To hear some of the measures, you would pass the bird for a red-eye; to hear others of them, you might pass him for a solitary. At the same time, he has not the most highly characteristic of the solitary's phrases. His voice is less sharp and his accent less emphatic than the red-eye's, and, so far as we heard, he observes decidedly longer rests between the measures."