A-Birding on a Bronco

by Florence Merriam Bailey

It looked easy enough, but it wasn't. The nest was about twelve feet above the ground. The sycamore was so big the boy could not reach around it, and so smooth and slippery he could not get up it, though he had always been a good climber. He clambered up a drooping branch on the back of the tree,—the nest was in front,—but could not swing himself around when he got up. Then he tried the hollow burned at the foot of the tree. The charred wood crumbled beneath his feet, but at last, by stretching up and clinging to a knothole, he managed to reach the nest.

As his fingers went down the hole, the young birds grabbed them, probably mistaking them for their parents' bills. "Their throats seem hot," the boy exclaimed; "poor hungry little things!" His fingers would go through the nest hole, but not his knuckles, and the knothole where he steadied himself was too slippery to stand on while he enlarged the hole. It was getting late, and as he had his chores to do before dark I suggested that we feed the birds and leave them in the tree till morning; but the rescuer exclaimed resolutely, "We'll get them out to-night!" and hurried off to the ranch-house for a step-ladder and axe.

The ladder did not reach up to the first knothole, four or five feet below the nest; but the boy cut a notch in the top of the knot and stood in it, practically on one foot, and held on to a small branch with his right hand—the first limb he trusted to broke off as he caught it—while with the left hand he hacked away at the nest hole. It was a ticklish position and genuine work, for the wood was hard and the hatchet dull.

I stood below holding the carving-knife,—we hadn't many tools on the ranch,—and as the boy worked he entertained me with an account of an accident that happened years before, when his brother had chopped off a branch and the axe head had glanced off, striking the head of the boy who was watching below. I stood from under as he finished his story, and inquired with interest if he were sure his axe head was tight! Before the lad had made much impression on the hard sycamore, he got so tired and looked so white around the mouth that I insisted on his getting down to rest, and tried to divert him by calling his attention to the sunset and the voices of the quail calling from the vineyard. When he went up again I handed him the carving-knife to slice off the thinner wood on the edge of the nest hole, warning him not to cut off the heads of the young birds.

At last the hole was big enough, and, sticking the hatchet and knife into the bark, the lad threw one arm around the trunk to hold on while he thrust his hand down into the nest. "My, what a deep hole!" he exclaimed. "I don't know as I can reach them now. They've gone to the bottom, they're so afraid." Nearly a foot down he had to squeeze, but at last got hold of one bird and brought it out. "Drop him down," I cried, "I'll catch him," and held up my hands. The little bird came fluttering through the air. The second bird clung frightened to the boy's coat, but he loosened its claws and dropped it down to me. What would the poor old mother woodpecker have thought had she seen these first flights of her nestlings!

I hurried the little scared brothers under my jacket, my best substitute for a hollow tree, and called chuck'-ah to them in the most woodpecker-like tones I could muster. Then the boy shouldered the ladder, and I took the carving-knife, and we trudged home triumphant; we had rescued the little prisoners from the tower!

When we had taken them into the house the woodpeckers called out, and the cats looked up so savagely that I asked the boy to take the birds home to his sister to keep till they were able to care for themselves. On examining them I understood what the difference in their voices had meant. One of them poked his head out of the opening in my jacket where he was riding, while the other kept hidden away in the dark; and when they were put into my cap for the boy to carry home, the one with the weak voice disclosed a whitish bill—a bad sign with a bird—and its feeble head bent under it so weakly that I was afraid it would die.

Three days later, when I went up to the lad's house, it was to be greeted by loud cries from the little birds. Though they were in a box with a towel over it, they heard all that was going on. Their voices were as sharp as their ears, and they screamed at me so imperatively that I hurried out to the kitchen and rummaged through the cupboards till I found some food for them. They opened their bills and gulped it down as if starving, although their guardian told me afterwards that she had fed them two or three hours before.

When held up where the air could blow on them, they grew excited; and one of them flew down to the floor and hid away in a dark closet, sitting there as contentedly as if it reminded him of his tree trunk home.

I took the two brothers out into the sitting-room and kept them on my lap for some time, watching their interesting ways. The weak one I dubbed Jacob, which is the name the people of the valley had given the woodpeckers from the sound of their cries; the stronger bird I called Bairdi, as 'short' for Melanerpes formicivorus bairdi—the name the ornithologists had given them.