The winter wren is an amusing little migrant. He seems to have an underground railway of his own from the grim northern forest straight towards a milder clime. Like other underground ways, it has breathing holes, and out of these he occasionally pops his head and sputters at the observer. Sometimes he appears at an opening in a stone wall and scolds mankind for picking blackberries or plucking goldenrod; again he emerges from the darkness beneath a log in the swamp, and bustles about with the offensive energy of a special policeman. If he travels in company, the fact is not often made evident. He certainly seems too crusty for pleasant companionship on a long journey. One late September morning a winter wren flew into my hen-house and became my prisoner for a few hours. I placed him in a room and watched his efforts to escape. He flew with such speed that he made almost as much of a humming as a humming-bird. He clung to the woodwork, and hid in the curtains, but finally dropped to the floor and ran about like a mouse, hiding in corners or behind the legs of chairs. Once or twice I caught him and stroked his head and neck. He was quiet enough while I touched him, but the moment my fingers left him, he slipped away out of sight. When taken out of doors and set free, he darted into the nearest stone wall and was seen no more.
Birds of the upper air which feed on insects depart early. The eaves swallows and martins go while some mothers are still sitting on belated eggs. Bank swallows, barn swallows, night-hawks, and many of the tyrant flycatchers have vanished by the time the maples begin to flame upon the mountain-side. On the 3d of August, 1891, I saw about twenty martins in the dead tree. They were very noisy, and evidently excited. While watching them I saw in the zenith what looked like a cloud of insects. My glass showed it to be a large flock of birds, apparently swallows, moving in a great circle. After a time all but one of the martins in the tree flew away and were gone many minutes, the birds in the sky also disappearing. The martins returned, however, to the one which had not flown, and shortly after I again discovered the bird cluster in the sky. After fresh noise and flutterings of wings the martins finally flew, and no more were seen near the lake that season. Often in an August afternoon the lake will be apparently without birds, when in a twinkling the air will be full of graceful forms, and a flock of white-breasted swallows, barn swallows, or night-hawks will sweep over the blue water, rise, vanish over the meadow, reappear, fly towards the peak, wheel, return, and then perhaps speed away, not to greet the fair lake again until ice and snow have come and gone, and the number of their own light forms has been sadly diminished in the south.
A field of buckwheat or other small grain is a magnet in the days when the birds are wandering. To it come the song sparrows, chipping sparrows, white-throats, juncos, purple finches, field sparrows, goldfinches, and bay-winged buntings. They love to linger many days in the stubble; and when bird music is rare, their occasional songs are precious to the ear. If the field is approached softly there seems to be no life hidden in its midst, but suddenly wings whirr noisily, and bird after bird flies up into the neighboring trees and bushes. Sparrows love fences, stone walls, and their accompanying growths of berry-bushes and small trees. The latter are our New England substitutes for the hedgerows of the Old World, and I believe the sparrow tribe takes as much comfort in wall and briers as in hedge and ditch. The ditch is more than replaced by countless brooks, always clear and pure, and the wall gives shade, shelter, food, and many a comfortable perch. While driving along the narrow roads, bordered by many a mile of rough stone wall, the rattle of my wagon wheels startles the sparrows and finches from their cover. The bay-wing runs along the rut in front of the horse; the goldfinch undulates over the field, turns, and ripples back; the song sparrow mounts a bush-top and scolds; the white-throat appears for a moment in a gap between the bushes and then goes on with his scratching in the leaves. So they go southward along the dusty roads, or the borders of dry field and dryer pasture. They are thousands strong, yet they look to be but a few each day, and the careless eye might think them always the same individuals from mid-August until Indian summer.
Sometimes alone, but often with the field sparrows and bay-wings, or later with the juncos, flocks of bluebirds travel the autumnal way. This year, on August 28, I saw a flock of twelve working slowly along a moor-like pasture ridge in company with double their number of sparrows. I have seen them by dozens in early October mingle with juncos and white-throats in gleaning over the stubble just left bare by the melting of a first snowfall. As they fly from spot to spot, they prefer to alight on the upper curve of a boulder, the tip of a cedar, or some equally favorable point for seeing and being seen. They are comparatively silent, but now and then their sweet “cheruit” comes as a promise that after the long winter spring shall return, and with it their loveliness and courage. Many of the birds go south cheerfully, or indifferently, but the bluebirds seem to linger sadly and lovingly, and to feel that the migration is an enforced exile from the home they love best.
The Chocorua country is not a good one for starlings and blackbirds; in fact, I have never seen but one bobolink nearer than Fryeburg intervales, twenty-five miles away; and with all my watching, no crow blackbird or meadow lark has ever caught my eye in this region. The old residents say that years ago, when flax was cultivated hereabouts and grain-fields were broader, these birds were present in large numbers. The first flock of rusty grackles which I have ever seen here appeared this year on a hilltop, about the middle of the afternoon of September 22. The birds were either very tame or very weary, for they remained in the tops of some locust-trees, while I not only stood beneath them, but shook their tree, called to them, and clapped my hands. They maintained a steady flow of sotto voce music charming to the ear.
All migrants are not desirable visitors. An inroad of hawks is far from pleasant for the birds of a neighborhood, or for other migrants. All through the month of September hawks abound. They circle round the peak of Chocorua, seemingly for the pleasure of it. Often a dozen sharp-shinned and young Cooper’s hawks are in sight there at once. Sometimes great flocks of hawks pass across the sky, not circling, as the red-tailed and red-shouldered hawks are so fond of doing, but sailing straight before the wind like a fleet of mackerelmen running down the coast wing and wing. I once saw three hundred and thirty migrating hawks in one forenoon, most of them a thousand feet or less above the earth, but some so high that a powerful glass only just brought them into view. The stately progress of these birds, moving many miles an hour without a wing-beat visible to the observer, is one of the wonders of nature. The Dead Tree is a resting-place for migrating hawks, eagles, and ospreys. I doubt not that by night it is used by owls, when they too move southward as their food grows scarce.
In several different years I have seen my big blue heron sail away southward. In each instance it has been about four o’clock in the afternoon. Rising with slow and dignified flight, he makes two or three immense circles over the lakes, and then, as though partings were said, landmarks remembered, and bearings taken, he flies with strong and steady strokes towards the outlet of the Ossipee basin. This year, in August, ten night herons visited us at one time, remaining in the neighborhood two or three days. When disturbed by day, they rose, and, forming an orderly flock, flew away with military precision. The ducks and geese are, however, the best examples of well-drilled companies. Geese are not often seen here, although several were killed this spring in a small lake halfway between Chocorua and the Bearcamp. Wood duck and black duck begin to fly past us late in August, but their numbers are comparatively insignificant, a flock of ten being unusually large. In October and early November the wind-swept lakes are seldom without little companies of black ducks, sheldrakes, and their less common relatives.
One of the most interesting of migrants is the loon, or great northern diver. Loons are said to breed in this vicinity on Whitton Pond, and they are seen now and then during all the summer months. It is on the edge of a northeast storm in September, when mackerel clouds deck the sky and the hazy sunlight spreads gold upon the ripples, that the migrating loon comes with the force of a cannon-ball, and plunges into the lake’s waters. His shrill laughter is taken up by all the mocking forests, and his deep and prolonged diving carries consternation to bass and pickerel. Restlessly he plows the ruffled water with his broad breast, and now and then he pounds the waves with his wings, raising his head high above them. When he flies, the water is churned into foam for many yards before his unwieldy body is finally raised into the air and placed under the full control of his powerful wings. Then he rises little by little, his wings moving faster and faster, until, after progressing half a mile, he has risen two or three hundred feet. Turning, he comes back, still rising, and passes in review the lake and forests which he is to leave. Again and again he tacks, on each new line rising farther from the earth, until at last, seen against the sky, he is but a pair of swiftly whirling wings set strangely far back on the long black line of his head, neck, and body. It is said that hunters have been killed by being struck by falling loons shot by them on the wing.
Occasionally a stray sea-bird comes to the mountain lakes. Herring gulls have been seen on Chocorua Pond, a Wilson’s tern was shot on August 30, 1890, on Ossipee Lake, and a year earlier, on September 30, a black tern remained half a day on my lonely lake.
Late in September and in October there are days when the rush of migrating birds is like the stampede of a defeated army. I recall one such day, the 25th of September, 1891, when a torrent of migrants swept past my red-roofed cottage in the hour following sunrise. Before breakfast, and without going out of sight of my door, I saw over two hundred birds go by, including sixty pigeon woodpeckers, several sapsuckers, nuthatches, chickadees, crows, blue jays, robins, catbirds, seven kinds of warblers, solitary and red-eyed vireos, four kinds of sparrows, a tanager, pewees, and a flock of cedar-birds. Most of these birds were on the trees, bushes, or ground, busily feeding, yet restlessly progressing southwestward, as though haunted by some irresistible impulse to keep in motion. The day was hot and still, and my notes mention the fact that we heard the splash of an osprey as he plunged into the lake, more than a quarter of a mile away. That evening the whippoorwills were singing their farewells in the soft moonlight.