A-Birding on a Bronco

by Florence Merriam Bailey

The yellowbird's nest came to an untimely end, too, although its start was such a bright one. It was a disappointment, for the goldfinches are such trustful birds and so affectionate and tender in their family relations that they always win one's warm interest. At first, when this mother bird went to the nest, her mate stationed himself on the nest tree, leaning over and looking down anxiously at Billy and me; but before their home was broken up the watchful guardian fed his pretty mate at her brooding when we were below.

We had a great many visitors while waiting for the wrens: neighbors came to sit in our green shade, young housekeepers came looking for rooms to rent, and old birds who were leading around their noisy families came to dine with us. Once a pair of flickers started to light in the tree, but they gave a glance over the shoulder at me and fled. Later I found their secret—down inside an old charred stump up the canyon. Occasionally I got sight of gay liveries in the green sycamore tops. A Louisiana tanager in his coat of many colors stopped one day, and another time, when looking up for dull green vireos, my eye was startled by a flaming golden oriole. The color was a keen pleasure. Lazuli buntings, relatives of our eastern indigo-bird, sang so much within hearing that I felt sure they were nesting in the weeds outside the line of sycamores—I did find a pair building in the malvas beyond; a pair of bush-tits, cousins of the chickadees, came with one of their big families; California towhees often appeared sitting quietly on the branches; linnets were always stopping to discuss something in their emphatic way; clamorous blue jays rushed in and set the small birds in a panic, but seeing me quickly took themselves off; and a pair of wary woodpeckers hunted over the sycamore trunks and worked so cautiously that they had finished excavating a nest only just out of my sight on the other side of the wren tree trunk before I seriously suspected them of domestic intentions.

One day, when watching at the tree, a great brown and black lizard that the children of the valley call the 'Jerusalem overtaker' came worming down the side of an oak that I often leaned against. The rough bark seemed such a help to it that I imagined the wrens had done wisely in choosing a smooth sycamore to build in. I looked narrowly at their nest hole with the thought in mind and saw that the birds had another point of vantage in the way the trunk bulged at the hole—it did not seem as if a large lizard could work itself up the smooth slippery rounding surface, however much given to eggs for breakfast. But in the West Indies lizards walk freely up and down the marble slabs, so it is dangerous to say what they cannot do.

Billy had a surprise one day greater than mine over the lizard. He was grazing quietly near where I sat under the wren tree, when he suddenly threw up his head. His ears pointed forward, his eyes grew excited, and as he gazed his head rose higher and higher. I jumped from the ground and put my hand on the pommel ready to spring into the saddle. As I did so, across the field I caught a glimpse of a great fawn-colored animal with a white tip to its tail, bounding through the brush—a deer! Then I heard voices through the trees and saw the red shawl of a woman in a wagon rumbling up the road the deer must have crossed.

When Mountain Billy and I pulled ourselves together and started after the deer, the poor horse was so unstrung he made snakes of all the sticks he saw and shied at all imaginable bugaboos along the way. We were too late to see the deer again, but found the marks of its hoofs where it had jumped a ditch and sunk so deep in the fine sand on the other side that it had to take a great leap to recover itself.

The sight of the deer made Billy as nervous as a witch for days. Every time we went to visit the wrens he would stand with eyes glued to the spot where it had appeared, and when a jack-rabbit came out of the brush with his long ears up, Billy started as if he thought it would devour him. I was perplexed by his nervousness at first, but after much pondering reasoned it out, to my own satisfaction at least. His name was Mountain Billy, and in the days when he had been a wayward bucking mustang he lived in the Sierra. Now, even in the hills surrounding our valley, colts were killed by mountain lions. How much more in the Sierra. Mountain lions are large fawn-colored animals: that was it: Mountain Billy was suffering from an acute attack of association of ideas. The sight of the deer had awakened memories of the nightmare of his colthood days.

We made frequent visits to the wren tree, and both my nervous little horse and I had a start one morning, for as we rode in, a covey of quail flew up with a whirr from under the tree in front of us.

When the wren had become reconciled to us she worked rapidly, flying back and forth with material, followed by her mate, who sang while she was on the nest and chased away with her afterwards. Often when she appeared in the doorway ready to go, his song, which had been just a merry round before, at sight of her would suddenly change to a most ecstatic love song. He would sit with drooping tail, his wings sometimes shaking at his sides, at others raised till they almost met over his back, trembling with the excitement of his joy. This peculiar tremulous motion of the wings was marked in both wrens; their emotions seemed too large for their small bodies.

I found the wrens building, the last of April. The third week in May the little lover was singing as hard as ever. I wrote in my note-book—"Wrens do not take life with proper seriousness, their duties certainly do not tie them down." When the eggs were in the nest, if her mate sang at her door, the mother bird would fly out to him and away they would go together; for it never seemed to occur to the care-free lover that he might brood the eggs in her absence.

When the young hatched, however, affairs took a more serious turn. Mother wren at least was kept busy looking for spiders, and later, when both were working together, if not hunting among the green treetops, the pretty little brown birds often flew to the ground and ran about under the weeds to search for insects. Once when the mother bird had flown up with her bill full, she suddenly stopped at the twig in front of the nest, looking down, her tail over her back wren fashion, the sun on her brown sides, and her bill bristling with spiders' legs.