To see the water birds at home one should take a boat in the early morning or toward nightfall, and float silently on the open bosom of the lake. Then you may watch the black terns wheeling and turning in the blue sky, like beautiful great swallows. They are easily distinguished even at a considerable height by their white wing bars. A loon paddles slowly across the bay with tantalizing unconcern. It is of no use to follow him, however, even with muffled oars. He knows a trick worth any two of yours. Huge fellow as he is, he dives beneath the surface, leaving not a ripple behind him. After five minutes of puzzled waiting you may see him—or is it his double?—pop up from the water many rods away, as serene and still as if he had not just executed a submarine maneuver hardly to be excelled by the latest torpedo boat. Quite as expert a performer is the pied-billed grebe, who swims long distances with body submerged and only the tip of the bill out of the water. Unobserving gunners conclude that he has gone to the bottom of the lake, and call him the hell-diver. The grebe spends half of his life in or on the water. His nest is a raft buoyed upon a clump of decaying vegetation, and looks like a floating island moored to a reed. Birds of the lake, too, seem the swallows—tree swallows, rough-winged and barn swallows. They skim the water hither and yon in mad pursuit of prey. No degree of familiarity with their mud nests avails to deprive these winged atoms of their halo of spring and romance.
Birds of high degree occasionally visit our humble lakelet. A bald eagle has been seen on the lightning-scarred branch of its tallest oak. Blue herons flap their majestic way from shore to shore. If you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth you may even be so lucky as to see a snowy heron passing through to some heronry in the wilds of Canada. The night herons come every spring to their ancient rookery in a swamp hard by. As the shadows fall the birds may be heard calling, "squawk, squawk," while they make their way down the creek to their fishing grounds in the lake.
For the better part of our bird neighbors the summer sojourn is no dolce far niente. They come north that their babies may have wholesome air and suitable food. A gay young husband, like the ruby-throated humming bird, shirks domestic responsibilities, but he expects only two wee nestlings. A brood of five or six requires the assiduous attention of both parents. Baby blue jays, for example, seem to have an unlimited appetite. Their scolding, snarling cries begin with the early dawn and only cease with nightfall. Even after the rascals are flown one may find an anxious mother vainly striving to satisfy her clamoring darlings, as she hurries from one to another with some choice tidbit. A great hulking fellow, as big as his parents and as gayly feathered, will stand crying like an infant, with wings a-tremble and mouth a-gape, waiting for the food to be thrust down his throat. Young robins are hardly less rapacious but far more tractable. I was one day watching the début of a family that lived in a neighboring cedar tree. The mother bird was having an anxious time, for each young one, as he spread his wings, made but a flap or two and fell sprawling into the network of branches beneath the nest. One young hopeful essayed a more ambitious flight and came down to the ground. He had no thought of fear and, being of an inquiring turn of mind, came hopping through the grass to see what I was like. Such a dear little man, in polka dot pinafore and white ruffles! But "chuck, chuck," mother robin called a warning note, and like a flash he turned tail and bolted into the bushes. I found him later perched on a branch within easy grasp of my hand. He gazed at me for some minutes with eyes full of baby wonder; then, remembering the maternal admonitions, he fled to a higher branch. Of all feathered mothers the catbird is the noisiest. She flits restlessly about, eying from every point of vantage the intruder who dares to show an interest in her housekeeping. I determined to sit it out one morning, pitting my patience against her sympathy for the hungry young ones. After two hours of flutter and meow the mother heart could no longer resist the appeal of the gaping yellow mouths. With sudden resolution she dashed straight to Farmer Black's gooseberry patch, seized a berry and returned in a flash. The luscious morsel once divided among the small fry, however, she flew back to her post of observation.
The turtledoves seem a sentimental lot. During the courting season an enamored swain will sit for hours in silent contemplation of his own graceful pose, or chanting softly, "I am alone—alone—alone." The nest once built and the young ones hatched, he hovers about in tender constancy, bringing food to the mother as well as to the babies, and perching alongside of the nest as close as circumstances will allow. The little people are carefully tended until they are well-nigh grown, though they look most uninteresting objects. A young dove will sit silent and motionless for hours at a stretch, the only sign of life the glitter in his bright, bead-like eyes. Decide that he has gone daft, however, and venture a step too near,—presto! With flutter and whirr he takes to wings, and is off as if flying was as simple a feat as the traditional "falling off a log." The jaunty kingfisher, too, makes a devoted parent. One day we saw a fledgling fly straight out over the lake. The mother bird followed close, uttering cries of alarm. But, alas! she could not lend him wings. His young muscles were unequal to his ambition, and the little body dropped into the water. Both parents dashed madly back and forth over the still, shining surface, and then wandered disconsolately from tree to tree along the shore, voicing their grief in wild, rattling cries.
Bird families hold together long after the nest is abandoned. They may be seen toward nightfall making their way by twos and threes to the tamarack swamp across the lake. The close-set, symmetrical branches provide the best of perches for inexperienced feet. "Birds of a feather flock together" when it comes to a question of lodging houses. One evening I counted one hundred and fifteen kingbirds roosting in the tapering spires of the tamarack trees.
September days are heralded by the return of the birds who have summered in Canada. Fox sparrows stop with us a week or so on their southward journey. The evening grosbeaks have come down from far Saskatchewan, and are thinking of spending the winter here. Wild geese wake one o' nights, with their hoarse "honk, honk." They have stopped for a taste of our tender frogs, but will soon re-form their triangular caravans and push on to the South. Ducks, mallards and canvasbacks, feed and fatten in the shallow water among the reeds. The gunners arrive as soon as they, however, and will soon frighten them away. Everybody is getting ready for the great migration. Troops of young birds flutter through the trees, like autumn leaves blown by a gust of wind. They are taking their first lessons in migration and in food supply.
The natives look on at these preparations with cynical unconcern. Blue jays chatter and scream with a daily extension of their marvelous vocabulary. Crows come proudly out from the deep woods, leading black, ungainly broods, and direct their flight to the ripening cornfields. Nuthatches, the white-bellied and the Canadian, bustle about the tree trunks, bent on making the most of their time while Jack Frost spares the insect life. The chickadees, nature's acrobats, turn somersaults among the branches in sheer defiance of the law of gravitation. The cares of summer are over and done with. The woes of winter do not terrify this morsel of india rubber and compressed air. The English sparrow pursues his ubiquitous search for food with insular disdain of everything he does not understand. He has penetrated our sylvan retreats and secured a foothold here by the most impudent of squatter claims. He lives and multiplies by dint of a systematic disregard of everybody's rights. The manners and the morals of the great city cling to him. He will have nothing in common with our country ways. He brings with him the blight of civilization.
THE JESTER
Myths from earth's childhood tell