A-Birding on a Bronco

by Florence Merriam Bailey

When one of the trunks fell, I had to hunt the sycamore over to find where it came from, not missing it in the massive framework that was left. The giant measured twenty-three feet and a half in circumference, three feet from the ground. Its enormous branches stretched out horizontally so far that, between the body of the tree and the tips that hung to the earth, there was a wide corridor where one could promenade on horseback. In fact, the tree spanned, from the tip of one branch to the tip of the other, one hundred and fifty-eight feet. In the photograph, the figure of a person is almost lost in the complicated network of the frame of the tree. The treetop was a grove in itself. A flock of blackbirds flying up into it was lost among the branches.

THE BIG SYCAMORE

The ranchman knew the sycamore as the 'swallow tree,' because in former years, before the valley was settled, swallows that have since taken to barns built there. Between three and four hundred of them plastered their nests on the underside of the big limbs, about half way up the tree, where the bark was rough. They built so close together that the nests made a solid mass of mud. For several seasons, it was said, "they had bad luck." They began building before the rainy season was over, and all but a few dozen nests which were in especially protected places were swept away. The number of nests was so enormous that the ground was covered several inches deep with mud.

Billy used to improve his time by nibbling barley while I watched birds in the sycamore corridor. We had not been there long before I discovered a bee's nest in the hollow of one of the trunks. The owners were busily flying in and out, and a pair of big bee-birds flew down from their nest in the treetop and saved themselves trouble by lunching at this convenient ground floor restaurant. As I sat on Billy, facing the nest, one of the pair swept down over the mouth of the hole, caught a bee and settled back on the branch to swallow it. This seemed to be the regular performance, and was kept up so continuously, even when we were standing close by, that if, as is supposed, the birds eat only drones, few but workers would be left in that hive.

The flycatchers seemed well suited to the sycamore; they were birds of large ideas and sweeping flights. Their nest was at the top of the tree; probably eighty feet from the ground, but when one of them flew down, instead of coming a branch at a time, he would set his wings and, giving a loud cry,—as a child shouts when pushing off his sled at the top of a steep hill,—he would sail obliquely down from the treetop to the foot of the hillside beyond. When looking for his material he would hover over the field like a phœbe. Then, on returning, unlike the other birds who lived in the tree and used the branches as ladders, he would start from the ground and with labored flights climb obliquely up the air to the treetop. Once his material dangled a foot behind him. The birds seemed to enjoy these great flights.

Their nest was not finished, and while one went for material, the other—presumably the male—guarded the nest. As there was nothing to guard as yet, it often seemed a matter of venting his own spleen! When not occupied in arranging his plumes, he would shoot down at every small bird that came upstairs; a cowardly proceeding, but perhaps he thought it necessary to keep his hand in against meeting bigger boys than he! When coming with material, one of the bee-birds got caught in a heavy rope of cobweb that dangled from the nest, and had to flutter hard to extricate itself. About their nests these birds seemed as home-loving as any others. Their domesticity quite surprised me; they had always seemed such harsh, scolding, aggressive birds! When one of them sat among the green leaves, pluming the soft sulphur yellow feathers of its breast, it looked so gentle and attractive that it was a shock when the familiar petulant screams again jarred the air. The birds often hunted from the fence beyond the sycamore, and flew from post to post with legs dangling, shaking their wings as they lit, with a shrill kit' r' r' r' r'.

The sycamore was a regular apartment house; so many birds were moving among the boughs it was impossible to tell where they all lived. One day I found a pair of doves sitting on a sunny branch above me. The one I took to be the male sat perched crosswise, while his mate sat facing him, lengthwise of the limb. He calmly fluffed out his feathers and preened himself, while his meek spouse watched him. She fluttered her wings, teasing him to feed her, but he kept on dressing out his plumes. Then she edged a little closer, and almost essayed to touch his majesty with her pretty blue bill, but he sat with lordly composure quite ignoring her existence till a blackbird bustled up, when they both started nervously, and turning, sat demurely side by side on the limb, the wind tilting their long tails.

A pair of bright orange orioles had a nest in the sycamore, though I never should have known it had I not seen them go to it to feed their young. It was a well shaded cradle surely, with its canopy of big green leaves.

There were a good many hints to be had, first and last. A song sparrow appeared and stood on a branch with its tail perked up in a business-like way as if it had been feeding a brood. A wren came to the tree,—a mere pinch of feathers in the giant sycamore,—and though I lost sight of it, many a hollow up in the fourteenth story might have afforded a home for the pretty dear without any one's being the wiser, unless it were the bee-bird in the attic. A family of bush-tits flew about in the sycamore top, looking like pin-heads in a grove of trees. A black phœbe sometimes lit on the fence posts under the branches—it wanted to find a nesting place about the windmill in the opposite field, I felt sure, though a boy had told me that the bird sometimes plastered its nest onto the branches of the big tree itself. Besides all the rest, rosy linnets and blue lazuli buntings made the old tree ring with their musical roundelays.