The desert

by John C. Van Dyke

Habits of quail.

His strong legs.

Thanks to his capacity for travelling, the quail usually manages to get enough of small seeds and insects to keep himself alive. He is a great roamer—in the course of a day travelling over many miles of country—and his quest is always food. He likes to be among the great bowlders that lie along the bases of the mountains; and when disturbed he flies and jumps from rock to rock, much to the discouragement of the coyote that happens to be the disturber. When forced to rise he flies perhaps for a hundred yards or more and then drops and begins running. In the spring he mates, raises a brood, and teaches the young ones the gentle art of running. In the fall he and his family of a dozen or sixteen join with other families to make a great covey of several hundred, or in the old days before the market-hunters came, several thousand. And they all run. The bottom of the quail’s foot is always itching for the ground; and he seems never so happy as when leaving the enemy far behind him. His little legs take him through the brush so fast that you cannot keep up with him. Every muscle in him is as tough as a watch-spring. You may wound him, but you have not yet got him. He will creep into some cactus patch or crawl down a snake-hole—elude you in some way—and in the end die game just out of your reach.

Bush-birds.

The woodpeckers and cactus.

There are few trees upon the desert and few bushes of any size; yet there are birds of the tree and the bush here just as there are birds of the air and the ground. The most of them seem the same kind of linnets, sparrows, and thrushes that are seen along the California coast; though probably they have some peculiar desert characteristic. I cannot see any difference between the little woodpeckers here and the woodpeckers elsewhere; yet this desert variety flies from sahuaro to sahuaro, alights on the spiny trunk with a little thump, and immediately begins hitching himself up through the worst imaginable rows of needles just as though he were climbing a plain pine-tree. The ordinary turtle-dove with his red pigeon-feet alights on the top of the same sahuaro, the wren bores holes in it and makes a nest within the cylinder; and the dwarf thrush dashes in and out of tangled thickets of cholla all day long, and yet none of them suffers any injury. It seems incredible that birds not accustomed to the desert could do such things.

Finches and mocking-birds.

The humming-bird.

Possibly, too, these bush-birds—insect-devourers most of them—have some special faculty for catching their prey, though I have not been able to discover it. The fly-catchers, the mocking-birds, the finches, in a land of plenty are quick enough in breaking the back of a butterfly or beetle, and any extra energy would seem superfluous. Still there is no telling what fine extra stimulus lies in an empty crop. And crops are usually empty on the desert. Even the little humming-bird has difficulty in picking a living. In blossom time he is, of course, in fine condition, but I have seen him dashing about in the fall when nothing at all was in bloom, and evidently none the worse for some starvation. He is a swifter flyer than the ordinary bird and is also duller in coloring, but in other respects he seems not different. He breeds on the desert, building his nest in the pitahaya; and he and his mate then have a standing quarrel with their neighbors for the rest of the summer. There is not in the whole feathered tribe a more quarrelsome scrap of vivacity than the humming-bird.

Doves and grosbeaks.