The Lay of the Land

by Dallas Lore Sharp

Look at him! How alert, able, free! Notice the limber drop of his tail, the ready energy it suggests. By that one sign you would know the bird had force. He is afraid of nothing, not even the cold, and he migrates only because he is a flycatcher, and is thus compelled to. The earliest spring day, however, that you find the flies buzzing in the sun, look for phœbe. He is back. The first of my birds to return in the spring is he, often beating the bluebird and robin by almost a week. It was a fearful spring, the spring of 1904. How phœbe managed to exist those miserable March days is a mystery. He came directly to the pen, as he had come the year before, and his presence in that bleakest of Marches made it almost spring.

The same force and promptness are manifest in the domestic affairs of the bird. The first to arrive that spring, he was also the first to build and bring off a brood,—or, perhaps, She was. And the size of the brood—of the broods, for the second one is now a-wing, and there may yet be a third!

Phœbe appeared without his mate, and for nearly three weeks he hunted in the vicinity of the pen, calling the day long, and, toward the end of the second week, occasionally soaring into the air, flapping and pouring forth a small, ecstatic song that seemed fairly forced from him.

These aerial bursts meant just one thing: she was coming, was coming soon! Was she coming, or was he getting ready to go for her? Here he had been for nearly three weeks, his house-lot chosen, his mind at rest, his heart beating faster with every sunrise. It was as plain as day that he knew—was certain—just how and just when something lovely was going to happen. I wished I knew. I was half in love with her myself, half jealous of him, and I, too, watched for her.

But she was not for me. On the evening of April 14, he was alone as usual. The next morning a pair of phœbes flitted in and out of the windows of the pen. Here she was. Will some one tell me all about it? Had she just come along and fallen instantly in love with him and his fine pig-pen? There are foolish female birds; and there are records of just such love affairs; but this was too early in the season. It is pretty evident that he nested here last year. Was she his old mate, as Wilson believes? Did they keep together all through the autumn and winter, all the way from Massachusetts to Florida and back? Or was she a new bride, who had promised him before he left Florida? If so, then how did she know where to find him?

Here is a pretty story. But who will tell it to me?

What followed is a pretty story, too, had I a lover’s pen with which to write it,—the story of his love, of their love, and of her love especially, which was last and best.

For several days after she came the weather continued raw and wet, so that nest-building was greatly delayed. The scar of an old, last year’s nest still showed on a stringer, and I wondered if they had decided on this or some other site for the new nest. They had not made up their minds, for when they did start it was to make three beginnings.

Then I offered a suggestion. Out of a bit of stick, branching at right angles, I made a little bracket and tacked it up on one of the stringers, down near the lower end of the roof. It appealed to the birds at once, and from that moment the building went steadily on.