A Watcher in The Woods

by Dallas Lore Sharp

The nightingale, the dodo, and the ivorybill were not among these thirty-six. What then? If one can live on an electric-car line, inside the borders of a fine city, have his church across the road, his blacksmith on the corner, his neighbors within easy call, and, with all this, have any thirty-six species of birds nesting within ear-shot, ought he to ache for the Archæopteryx, or rail at civilization as a destroyer?

There is nothing remarkable about this bit of country. I could plant myself at the center of such a circle anywhere for miles around and find just as many birds. Perhaps the land is more rocky and hilly, the woods thicker, the gardens smaller here than is common elsewhere in eastern Massachusetts; otherwise, aside from a gem of a pond, this is a very ordinary New England "corner."

On the west side of my yard lies a cultivated field, beyond which stands an ancient apple orchard; on the east the yard is hedged by a tract of sprout-land which is watched over by a few large pines; at the north, behind the house and garden, runs a wall of chestnut and oak, which ten years ago would have been cut but for some fortunate legal complication. Such is the character of the whole neighborhood. Patches of wood and swamp, pastures, orchards, and gardens, cut in every direction by roads and paths, and crossed by one tiny stream—this is the circle of the thirty-six.

Not one of these nests is beyond a stone's throw from a house. Seven of them, indeed, are in houses or barns, or in boxes placed about the dooryards; sixteen of them are in orchard trees; and the others are distributed along the roads, over the fields, and in the woods.

Among the nearest of these feathered neighbors is a pair of bluebirds with a nest in one of the bird-boxes in the yard. The bluebirds are still untamed, building, as I have often found, in the wildest spots of the woods; but seen about the house, there is something so reserved, so gentle and refined in their voice and manner as to shed an atmosphere of good breeding about the whole yard. What a contrast they are to the English sparrows! What a rebuke to city manners!

"They are the first to return in the spring."

They are the first to return in the spring; the spring, rather, comes back with them. They are its wings. It could not come on any others. If it tried, say, the tanager's, would we believe and accept it? The bluebird is the only possible interpreter of those first dark signs of March; through him we have faith in the glint of the pussy-willows, in the half-thawed peep of the hylas, and in the northward flying of the geese. Except for his return, March would be the one month of all the twelve never looked at from the woods and waysides. He comes, else we should not know that the waters were falling, that a leaf could be plucked in all the bare, muddy world.

Our feelings for the bluebird are much mixed. His feathers are not the attraction. He is bright, but on the whole rather plainly dressed. Nor is it altogether his voice that draws us; the snowflakes could hardly melt into tones more mellow, nor flecks of the sky's April blue run into notes more limpid, yet the bluebird is no singer. The spell is in the spirit of the bird. He is the soul of this somber season, voicing its sadness and hope. What other bird can take his place and fill his mission in the heavy, hopeful days of March? We are in no mood for gaiety and show. Not until the morning stars quarrel together will the cat-bird or scarlet tanager herald the spring. The irreverent song of a cat-bird in the gray gloom of March would turn the spring back and draw the winter out of his uncovered grave. The bluebird comes and broods over this death and birth, until the old winter sleeps his long sleep, and the young spring wakes to her beautiful life.

Within my house is another very human little bird—the chimney-swallow. Sharing our very firesides as he does, he surely ought to have a warm place in our hearts; but where have I ever read one word expressing the affection for him that is universally shown the bluebird?