Wake-Robin

by John Burroughs

I first verified this observation some years ago. I had long been familiar with the song, but had only strongly suspected the author of it, when, as I was walking in the woods one evening, just as the leaves were putting out, I saw one of these birds but a few rods from me. I was saying to myself, half audibly, "Come, now, show off, if it is in you; I have come to the woods expressly to settle this point," when it began to ascend, by short hops and flights, through the branches, uttering a sharp, preliminary chirp. I followed it with my eye; saw it mount into the air and circle over the woods; and saw it sweep down again and dive through the trees, almost to the very perch from which it had started.

As the paramount question in the life of a bird is the question of food, perhaps the most serious troubles our feathered neighbors encounter are early in the spring, after the supply of fat with which Nature stores every corner and by-place of the system, thereby anticipating the scarcity of food, has been exhausted, and the sudden and severe changes in the weather which occur at this season make unusual demands upon their vitality. No doubt many of the earlier birds die from starvation and exposure at this season. Among a troop of Canada sparrows which I came upon one March day, all of them evidently much reduced, one was so feeble that I caught it in my hand.

During the present season, a very severe cold spell the first week in March drove the bluebirds to seek shelter about the houses and outbuildings. As night approached, and the winds and the cold increased, they seemed filled with apprehension and alarm, and in the outskirts of the city came about the windows and the doors, crept beneath the blinds, clung to the gutters and beneath the cornice, flitted from porch to porch, and from house to house, seeking in vain from some safe retreat from the cold. The street pump, which had a small opening just over the handle, was an attraction which they could not resist. And yet they seemed aware of the insecurity of the position; for no sooner would they stow themselves away into the interior of the pump, to the number of six or eight, than they would rush out again, as if apprehensive of some approaching danger. Time after time the cavity was filled and refilled, with blue and brown intermingled, and as often emptied. Presently they tarried longer than usual, when I made a sudden sally and captured three, that found a warmer and safer lodging for the night in the cellar.

In the fall, birds and fowls of all kinds become very fat. The squirrels and mice lay by a supply of food in their dens and retreats, but the birds, to a considerable extent, especially our winter residents, carry an equivalent in their own systems, in the form of adipose tissue. I killed a red-shouldered hawk one December, and on removing the skin found the body completely encased in a coating of fat one quarter of an inch in thickness. Not a particle of muscle was visible. This coating not only serves as a protection against the cold, but supplies the waste of the system when food is scarce or fails altogether.

The crows at this season are in the same condition. It is estimated that a crow needs at least half a pound of meat per day, but it is evident that for weeks and months during the winter and spring they must subsist on a mere fraction of that amount. I have no doubt that a crow or hawk, when in his fall condition, would live two weeks without a morsel of food passing his beak; a domestic fowl will do as much. One January I unwittingly shut a hen under the door of an outbuilding, where not a particle of food could be obtained, and where she was entirely unprotected from the severe cold. When the luckless Dominick was discovered, about eighteen days afterward, she was brisk and lively, but fearfully pinched up, and as light as a bunch of feathers. The slightest wind carried her before it. But by judicious feeding she was soon restored.

The circumstances of the bluebirds being emboldened by the cold suggests the fact that the fear of man, which by now seems like an instinct in the birds, is evidently an acquired trait, and foreign to them in a state of primitive nature. Every gunner has observed, to his chagrin, how wild the pigeons become after a few days of firing among them; and, to his delight, how easy it is to approach near his game in new or unfrequented woods. Professor Baird [footnote: Then at the head of the Smithsonian Institution] tells me that a correspondent of theirs visited a small island in the Pacific Ocean, situated about two hundred miles off Cape St. Lucas, to procure specimens. The island was but a few miles in extent, and had probably never been visited half a dozen times by human beings. The naturalist found the birds and water-fowls so tame that it was but a waste of ammunition to shoot them. Fixing a noose on the end of a long stick, he captured them by putting it over their necks and hauling them to him. In some cases not even this contrivance was needed. A species of mockingbird in particular, larger than ours and a splendid songster, made itself so familiar as to be almost a nuisance, hopping on the table where the collector was writing, and scattering the pens and paper. Eighteen species were found, twelve of them peculiar to the island.

Thoreau relates that in the woods of Maine the Canada jay will sometimes make its meal with the lumbermen, taking the food out of their hands.

Yet notwithstanding the birds have come to look upon man as their natural enemy, there can be little doubt that civilization is on the whole favorable to their increase and perpetuity, especially to the smaller species. With man comes flies and moths, and insects of all kinds in greater abundance; new plants and weeds are introduced, and, with the clearing up of the country, are sowed broadcast over the land.

The larks and snow buntings that come to us from the north subsist almost entirely upon the seeds of grasses and plants; and how many of our more common and abundant species are field-birds, and entire strangers to deep forests?

In Europe some birds have become almost domesticated, like the house sparrow; and in our own country the cliff swallow seems to have entirely abandoned ledges and shelving rocks, as a place to nest, for the eaves and projections of farm and other outbuildings.