In Bird Land

by Leander S. Keyser

It was in the depth of the woods that my saucy black-cap, the titmouse, clambered straight up the vertical hole of an oak sapling, as if he had learned the trick from the brown creeper or the white-breasted nuthatch. No less interesting was the conduct of the downy woodpecker, that little drum-major of the woods. He is the tilter par excellence of the woodpecker family. He flings himself in the most reckless manner from trunk to branch, and from branch to twig, often alighting back-downward on the slenderest stems. Shall I describe one of his odd tricks? I had often seen him clinging to the slender withes of the willows at the border of the swamp, and had wondered how he could hold himself with his claws to so meagre a support. It was a problem. How much I longed to solve it! However, for a long time the bird so completely baffled me that I felt like another Tantalus. One winter day, however, he happened to be quite near the ground as I stood beneath the willows, so that I could see just how he accomplished the mysterious feat. Imagine my surprise! He did not cling to the withes with his claws at all, as he clings to a tree-trunk or a large bough, but grasped the slender perches with his feet, precisely as if they were hands, flinging his long toes, like fingers, clear around the stems, one foot above the other. In ascending, he would go foot over foot; in descending, he would simply loosen his hold slightly and slip down. Sir Isaac Newton may have made more important discoveries, but he did not feel prouder or happier when he solved the binomial theorem than did I when my little avian problem was solved. I am not aware that any one else has ever described this performance, and am strongly tempted to announce it as an original discovery. Yet a certain writer once declared, patronizingly, that there are some writers—himself excepted, of course—on natural history themes who proclaim as original discoveries many facts that are perfectly familiar to every tyro in science. Spite of the scornful reflection, however, it is my modest opinion that there are very few observers who have seen a woodpecker ascending a willow-withe foot over foot.

Many, many a cunning bird prank would have been missed had I kept, like the majority of pedestrians, to the beaten track. There, for example, is that odd little genius in mottled robes, the brown creeper, who has performed a sufficient number of quaint gambols to repay me for all the time and effort expended in pursuing my wayside rambles. He is always sui generis, apparently priding himself on his eccentricities, like some people you may know. A genuine arboreal creeper, he almost invariably coasts up hill. Unlike his congeners, the nuthatch and the creeping warbler, he never goes head-downward. Dear me, no! Whether it is because it makes him light-headed, or he regards it as bad form, I am unable to say. He does not even hitch down backward after the manner of the woodpeckers, but marches up, up, up, until he thinks it time to descend, which he does by taking to wing, bounding around in an arc as if he were an animated rubber ball. You may almost imagine him saying: “Pah! such vulgar sport as creeping head-downward may be well enough for mere plebeians like the nuthatches and the striped creepers, but it is quite beneath the caste of a patrician like myself! Tseem! tseem!” At rare intervals he will slip down sidewise for a short distance, in a slightly oblique direction, especially when he comes to a fork of the branches.

However, he does not think it beneath his dignity to take a promenade on the under side of a horizontal bough. One day as I watched him doing this, he reached a point where the limb made an obtuse angle by bending obliquely downward. Now what would he do? Would he really hitch down that branch head-foremost, only for once? By no means. Catch him committing such a breach of creeper decorum! He suddenly spread his wings and hurled himself to the lower end of that oblique section of the branch, and then ambled up to the angle in regular orthodox fashion. You will never find him doing anything to give employment to the heresy hunters![1]

Have any of my fellow-observers ever seen this merry-andrew convert himself into a whirligig? I once witnessed this droll performance, which seemed almost like a vagary. A creeper was clinging to a large oak-tree near the base, when he took it into his crazy little pate, for what earthly—or unearthly—reason I know not, to wheel around like a top several times in quick succession. He rested a moment, and then repeated the comedy.

On another occasion a creeper was preening his ruffled feathers, having evidently just taken a bath; and how do you suppose he went about it? In quite a characteristic fashion, you may rest assured. Instead of sitting crosswise on a perch, as most birds would have done, he clung to the vertical bole of a large oak-tree, holding himself firmly against the shaggy bark, and daintily straightening out every feather from his breast to his flexible tail. Growing tired of this position—apparently so, at least—he shuffled up to a fork made by the trunk and a large limb, where he found a more comfortable slanting perch on which to complete his toilet. Once, afterward, I saw a creeper arranging his plumes in the same way.

But the quaintest exploit of this bird still remains to be described. One autumn day, while rambling along the foot of a range of steep cliffs, I caught sight of one of these birds darting from a tree toward the perpendicular wall of rock. For a few moments I lost him, but followed post-haste, muttering to myself, “What if I should find the little clown climbing up the face of the cliff! That would be a performance worth describing to my bird-loving friends, wouldn’t it?” (Surely a monomaniac may talk aloud to himself.) I could scarcely believe my eyes, for the next moment my happy presentiment was realized; there was the creeper scaling the vertical face of the cliff, with as much ease and aplomb, apparently, as a fly creeping up the smooth surface of a window-pane! Then he flew ahead a short distance, and began mounting the cliff where its face was quite smooth and hard. Presently he encountered a bulging protuberance, and tried to creep along the oblique under side of it; but that feat proved to be beyond his skill, agile as he was, and so he abandoned the attempt, and swung away to another part of the vertical wall. I have never seen, in any of the manuals which I have consulted, a description of a similar performance; and if any of my readers have ever witnessed such a “coruscation” of creeper genius, I should be glad to hear from them.

In one’s out-of-the-way saunterings, one dashes up against many a faunal problem that defies, even while it challenges, solution. On a cold day of early winter I was strolling along the bare, windswept banks of a river, keeping my eyes alert, as usual, for bird curios. In the small bushes that fringed the bank were some cunningly placed nests. In the bottom of one of them lay many seeds of dogwood berries, with the kernels bored out,—the work, no doubt, of the crested tits. But there were no dogwood-trees within twenty-five rods of the place! Why had the birds carried the shells to this nest, and dropped them into it? This is all the more curious because it was not a tit’s nest, but very likely a cat-bird’s. One can only surmise that the tits had gathered these seeds in the fall, and stowed them away in the nest for winter use, and then had eaten out the kernels when hunger drove them to it. That would be in perfect keeping with the habits of these thrifty little providers for the morrow.

During the winter of 1892-1893 a red-bellied woodpecker, often called the zebra-bird, took up his residence in my woodland. (I call it mine by a sort of usufruct, because I ramble through its pleasant archways or sit in its quiet boudoirs at all hours and in all seasons.) With the exception of several brief absences, for which I could not account, the woodpecker remained until the following spring, giving me some delightful surprises. It was the first winter he had shown the good grace to keep me company. Perhaps he was lazy; or he may have been a clumsy flier; or perchance he got separated from his fellows by accident, and so was left behind in the autumn when the southward pilgrimage began.

He was, by all odds, the handsomest woodpecker I had ever seen. His entire crown and hind-neck were brilliant crimson, which fairly shimmered like a flambeau when the sun peeped through a rift in the clouds and shone upon it; and then his back was beautifully mottled and striped with black and white, while his tail was bordered with a broad band of deep black. What a splendid picture he made, too, whenever he spread his wings and bolted from one tree to another! I wish an artist could have caught him on the wing, and transferred him to canvas. He performed a trick that was new to me, and did it several times. He would dash to some twigs, balance before them a moment on the wing, pick a nit or a worm from a dead leaf-clump, and then swing back to his upright perch. Once he found a grain of corn in a pocket of the bark, placed there, perhaps, by a nuthatch; but he did not seem to care for johnny-cake, and so he dropped it back into the pocket. How cunningly he canted his head and peered into the crannies of the bark for grubs, calling, Chack! chack!

During the entire winter he uttered only this harsh, stirring note, half jocose, half spiteful; but, greatly to my surprise, when spring arrived, especially if the weather happened to be pleasant, he began to call, K-t-r-r! k-t-r-r! precisely like a red-headed woodpecker; indeed, at first I laid siege to every tree, looking in vain for a red-head come prematurely northward, until I discovered the trick of my winter intimate, the red-bellied wood-chopper. Why it should have been so I cannot explain; but whenever a cold wave struck this latitude during the spring, he would invariably revert to his harsh Chack! chack! and then when the breezes grew balmy again, he would resume his other reveille, making the woods echo. I also discovered—it was a discovery to myself, at least—that the red-bellied is a drummer, like most of his relatives; but not once did he thrum his merry ra-ta-ta before spring arrived,—another avian conundrum for the naturalist to beat his brains against.