In Bird Land

by Leander S. Keyser

Taking it for the mother-bird.”

A nestful of half-callow younglings, standing on tiptoe, craning up their necks, wabbling from side to side, opening their mouths to the widest extent of their “gapes,” knocking heads and beaks together, and chirping at the top of their voices,—I confess it makes a picture more grotesque than attractive. By and by, as the pin-feathers begin to grow, the infant brood seem to feel an itching sensation, which causes them to pick the various parts of their bodies to remove the scaly substance that gathers on the skin and at the bases of the sprouting feathers. But how awkwardly they go about this exercise! Their heads seem to be too heavy for their long, slender necks, and go waggling and rolling from side to side, often missing the mark aimed at. However, the muscles of the nurslings are developing all the while. Soon they lift themselves to their full height, stretch themselves, jerk their tails higher than their heads in a most amusing way (you smile, but they don’t), and then squat down upon the floor of the nest again. A day or so later the most advanced youngster feels the flying impulse stirring in his veins, and so, after stretching himself as previously described, he extends his wings to their utmost reach, and flaps them in a joyous way over his cuddling companions, sometimes rapping them smartly on the head. Soon there comes a day when he hops to the edge of the nest, looks out upon the wide, beckoning world like a young satrap, and flaps his wings with a semi-conscious feeling of strength. Ere long, encouraged by his parents, he spreads his wings, and takes a header for the nearest twig. Why, his wings will bear him up on the buoyant air! He has graduated from the nursery and the grammar grade into the high school.

Every year has its eccentricities, so to speak; that is, the character of the weather and other modifying causes afford the faunal life an occasion for a development that is peculiar. Thus the observations made by the naturalist one year are not necessarily mere repetitions of those made other years. Nature is not often guilty of tautology. I yield therefore to the temptation to add a few chronicles made during the spring of 1893, which, I hope, will not destroy the unity of this article on bird nurseries. One day in June, while strolling through the woods, I heard the song of a red-eyed vireo. It was a kind of talking song, or recitative, as if the bird were discoursing on some favorite theme, and improvising his music as he went. His voice was so loud and clear that I could hear it far away, drifting through the green, embowered aisles of the woods. This vigorous chanson was a surprise, for I have never before known this vireo to remain in my neighborhood during the summer. He mostly hies farther north. But a still greater surprise lay in ambush for me a few days later, in one of my rambles through the woods. Suddenly there was a light flutter of wings near my head, and there hung a tiny nest on the low, swaying branches of a sapling.

That it was a vireo’s nest was evident, for it was fastened to the twigs by the rim, without any support below, swinging there like a dainty basket. Presently I got my glass on the bird herself, and found her to be a red-eyed vireo. That was my first nest of this species, and proud enough I was of the discovery. The outside of the little cot was prettily ornamented with tufts of spider-webs. As usual with this bird, a piece of white paper was wrought into the lower part of the nest. Three vireo’s eggs and one cow-bunting’s lay in the bottom of the cup.

Every few days I called on the bird, going close enough only to see her plainly, without driving her off the nest. She made a pretty picture sitting there, one fit for an artist’s brush, with her head and tail pointing almost straight up, her body gracefully curved to fit the deep little basket, and her eyes growing large and wild at her visitor’s approach. At length, one day, I felt sure there must be little ones in the nest, and so I went very close to her; yet she did not fly. Then I moved my hand toward her, and finally touched her back before she flitted away. A featherless cow-bunting lay in the hammock, but the vireo’s eggs were not yet hatched. A few days later the nest was robbed. Some heartless villain, probably a blue jay, had destroyed all the children. I could have wept, so keen was my sense of bereavement.

The cow-buntings imposed a great deal on other kind-hearted bird parents that spring. Almost every nest contained one or two of this interloper’s eggs, and, as if Nature abetted the designs of the parasite, these eggs were almost always hatched first. One wood-thrush’s nest contained two bunting and three thrush eggs. As soon as the bantlings had broken from the shell, the buntings could be readily distinguished from the thrushes, for the former feathered much more rapidly than the latter. When the youngsters were about half grown, they crowded one another considerably in their adobe apartment, but, to all intents and purposes, they lived together in beautiful domestic harmony. At all events, no unseemly family wrangles came under my eye. By and by, on one of my visits, I found that the buntings had left the maternal roof (to speak with a good deal of poetic license), while the thrush trio still sat contentedly on the nest, and did not display any fear when I caressingly stroked their brown backs, but looked up at me in a naïve, confiding way that was very gratifying. Quite different was the conduct of the inmates of a bush-sparrow’s nest, hidden in the grass at the woodland’s border. The baby sparrows rushed pell-mell from their pretty homestead when I came near, leaving a bunting, which had been hatched and reared with them, alone in the nest. He was not nearly so far developed as his brothers and sisters, and had no intention of being driven from home.

But here is an instance more like that of the bunting-wood-thrush episode just described. A pretty basket, woven of fine fibrous material, swung from the lower branches of an apple-tree in the orchard of one of my farmer friends, and contained three young orchard orioles and one cow-bunting. One day I procured a step-ladder and climbed up to the nest, when the bunting sprang out with a wild cry and toppled to the ground, while the young orioles, not yet half-fledged, merely pried open their mouths for food. Yet these birds, when grown, are fully as dexterous on the wing as their foster relatives, the buntings.

During the same spring some observations on youthful blackbirds were made. They may be of sufficient interest to register in this place. Did you know that a part of the heads of infant blackbirds remains bare a week or two after the other portions of their bodies are well feathered? This is true of the three species of my acquaintance,—the purple grackles, the red-winged blackbirds, and the cow-buntings. The bald portion includes the forehead, part of the crown, the chin, and throat, and extends behind and below the ears, which are covered with a tiny tuft of fuzz. Had this unfeathered portion been red instead of black, the youngsters would have looked quite like diminutive turkey-buzzards. One may be pardoned for being somewhat puzzled over the childish conundrum, Why young blackbirds, of all the birds in the circle of one’s acquaintance, must go bareheaded during the first few weeks of their life. By and by, however, the feathers grow out on this space as thickly as on the remainder of their bodies.

Strange that I have found so few black-capped titmice’s nests, familiar and abundant as they are in my neighborhood, both summer and winter; but my quest was rewarded in two instances during the spring of 1893,—the first nest being in the top of a truncated sassafras-tree. The snag was perhaps twenty feet high. On one of my visits the birds were hollowing out their little apartment. They would dart into the narrow opening, and presently emerge, carrying small fragments of partly decayed wood in their beaks and dropping them to the ground. Some weeks later, I climbed the tree (with much fear and trembling, be it said), but the birds had made the cavity so deep that I could not see the bottom, and break open their sylvan nursery I would not. The second titmouse nest was in a very slender branch of a sassafras-tree,—so slender, indeed, that it was a wonder the birds were able to make a hollow in it. At first it looked precisely like a black patch burned on the bough’s surface. When one of the feathered atoms stood in the tiny doorway and looked out, she made a pretty picture,—one that would have put a throb of joy into an artist’s bosom.

Yet there is another picture that I should prefer to have painted, not on account of its attractiveness, but on account of its quaintness; it was the nest, eggs, and young of a pair of green herons in an orchard. The nest was built high in an apple-tree, and was only a loose platform of sticks. Although anything but an expert climber, I contrived to scale that tree three times to satisfy my curiosity. The first time there were four eggs of a greenish-blue cast—not jewels by any means—in the nest. On my second visit four of the oddest birdlings I ever looked upon greeted me with wide-open eyes and mouths. They were covered with light yellowish down, and the space about the eyes was of a greenish hue,—one of the characteristic markings of the adult birds. When they opened their mouths, expecting to be fed, their throats puffed out somewhat like the throats of croaking frogs, making a good-sized pocket inside to receive chunks of food. The thought struck me that perhaps the pocket was designed as a sort of temporary storage place for victuals until the nestling was ready to swallow them. The birds made a low, quaint noise that cannot be represented phonetically. Indeed, the picture they made was slightly uncanny, so I did not linger about it overlong.