Or east, it smells like a clover-farm;
Or west, no thunder fear.”
In one of the loneliest parts of the ravine there appeared on the scene my first Louisiana water-thrush, often called the large-billed wagtail. There it stood “teetering” on a spray or a rock, or skimming through the shallow water, its speckled breast and olive back harmonizing—I had almost said rhyming—with the gray of the creek’s bed, the crystal of the water, and the green of the thicket-fringed banks. It was part and parcel of the scene,—a lone bird in a lone place. But, hold! not lone, after all. Presently a young wagtail, the image of its mamma, emerged from somewhere or nowhere, and ran toward the old bird with open mouth, twinkling wings, and a pretty, coaxing call. She thrust something into its mouth; but still the bantling coaxed for more, when she dashed away a few feet, picked up another tidbit from the water, ran back to her little charge, and fed it again. But now, when it still pursued her, she seemed to lose her patience, for she rushed threateningly toward it, causing it to scamper away, and then she flew off. Yet after that she fed either the same or another youngster a number of times. Once a water-thrush went swinging down the gorge, the very poetry of graceful poise and movement, looking more like a naiad than a real flesh-and-blood birdlet.
On a horizontal branch extending out over the rippling stream, a wood-thrush sat on her mud cottage; but whether she appreciated the romantic character of the situation or not, she did not say. There were many other interesting feathered folk in the gorge and on its wooded steeps, each “a brother of the dancing leaves;” but to describe them all would take too long, and merely to name them would be too much like reciting a dry catalogue.
XV.
VARIOUS PHASES OF BIRD LIFE.[7]
I.
BIRD COURTSHIP.
No one who has studied the birds can deny that there is genuine sexual love among them. Many species act on the principle that “a pure life for two” is the only kind of life to live, and therefore a match once made is a match that lasts until death does them part. There may be fickleness, divorce, and downright unfaithfulness among birds sometimes, and there certainly is polygamy among some species; but such examples of irregularity are rather the exception than the rule. Monogamy largely prevails, and I have no doubt that any departure from the regular connubial relation creates a scandal in bird circles.
As in the human world, so in the bird world a period of courtship precedes the celebration of the nuptials. But the mode differs in different kingdoms of creation. Many lovers in feathers conduct their wooing in a somewhat rudely persistent and obtrusive fashion. Society would soon ostracize the human suitor having such manners, and might even consider him amenable to the civil courts, and put him in jail as a character unfit to be abroad. However, if hot pursuit, brazen manners, and half-coercive measures are considered “good form” in bird land, we of the human genus are the last who have a right to find fault, for are we not the most conventional beings on the face of the earth? You might almost as well be in limbo or inferno as out of style. Was there not a time when even the flaming sunflower was regarded as the highest emblem of the beautiful, merely because it was the “fad,” and not because anybody really felt that it possessed special æsthetic qualities? “People who live in glass houses ought not to throw stones,” is the saucy challenge of the merry chickadee to his human critic, as he dashes, like an animated “nigger-chaser,” after the little Dulcinea whom he has marked for his bride. Then he stops, and, balancing on a spray, whistles his sweetest minor tune, Pe-e-w-e-e, pe-e-e-w-e-e; which, being interpreted, probably means,—
“Does not all the blood within me
Leap to meet thee, leap to meet thee,