But hold! I might go rambling on in this way forever, like Tennyson’s brook,—or, possibly, like Ixion revolving on his wheel,—describing the odd pranks witnessed in my wayside rambles. It is high time, however, to call a halt; yet, after a brief breathing-space, these miscellanies will be resumed in the next chapter, which may, with some degree of propriety, be entitled “Bird Curios.”
II.
BIRD CURIOS.
Every observer of birds and animals has doubtless amassed many facts of intense interest—at all events, of intense interest to himself—which he has not been able to adjust to any systematic arrangement he may have made of his material. That is true of the incidents described in this chapter. It will, therefore, necessarily partake of the nature of bric-à-brac. If it were not so self-complimentary, I should dub it bird mosaic, and have done. The reader will perhaps be more disposed to trace a resemblance to an eccentric old woman’s “crazy quilt;” and if he prefers the homelier and less poetical title, I shall not complain.
But even a bit of patchwork must be begun somewhere, and so I shall plunge at once in medias res.
The day was one of the fairest of early spring. How shall I describe it? No sky could have been bluer, no fields greener. The earth smiled under the favoritism of the radiant heavens in happy recognition. My steps were bent along the green banks of a winding creek in northern Indiana. Suddenly a loud, varied bird song fell on my ear and brought me to a full stop. It swept down liltingly from a high, bushy bank some rods back from the stream, and at once proclaimed itself as the rhapsody of the cat-bird. Anxious to watch the brilliant vocalist in his singing attitudes, I approached the acclivity, and soon espied him in the midst of the dense copse, which was not yet covered with foliage. He redoubled his efforts when he saw an appreciative auditor standing near. Presently a quaint impulse seized his throbbing, music-filled bosom. He swung gracefully to the ground, picked up a fragment of newspaper, leaped up to his perch again, and then, holding the paper harp in his beak, resumed his song with more vigor than before. All the while his beady eyes sparkled with good-natured raillery, as if he expected me to laugh at his unique performance; and, of course, I was able to accommodate him without half an effort. An errant gust of wind suddenly wrenched the bit of paper from his bill and bore it to the ground. The minstrel darted after, and straightway recovered his elusive prize, flew up to his perch, and again roused the echoes of woodland and vale with his rollicking song, the paper harp imparting a peculiar resonance to his tones; while his air of banter seemed to challenge me to a musical contest. I laughingly declined in the interest of my own reputation.
He was one of the choicest minstrels of bird land I have ever heard,—barring the sex, a Jenny Lind or an Adelina Patti,—his voice being of excellent timbre, his tones pure and liquid, and his technical execution almost perfect. Ever since that day I have been the avowed friend of the catbird,—in truth, his champion, ready at any moment, in season and out, to take up the glove in his defence against every assailant. Some very self-conscious human performers—people who themselves live in glass houses—have accused him of singing to be heard, making him out vain and ambitious. Well, what if he does? Why do his human compeers sing or speak or write? Certainly not purely for their own delectation, but also, in part at least, to catch the appreciative ear and eye of the public, and win a bit of applause. “Let him that is without sin among you first cast a stone.” He who scoffs at my plumbeous-hued choralist makes me his enemy,—not the choralist’s, but the scoffer’s. So let the latter beware!
I leave the cat-bird, however, to his own resources—he is well able to take care of himself—to tell what the birds were doing during a recent spring, which fought in a very desultory manner its battle with the north winds. Special attention is called to the laggard character of the season because a tardy spring is a sore ordeal to the student of bird life, postponing many of his most longed-for investigations. The spring to which I refer (1892) was provokingly slow in its approach, and yet it developed some traits of bird character that were interesting. For instance, the first week in April was a seducer, being quite bland, starting the buds on many trees, and putting the migrating fever into the veins of a number of species of birds. But the snow-storms and fierce northern blasts that came later were very hard on both birds and buds. Many a chorus was sung during the pleasant weather, but on more than one day afterward the cheerful voices of the feathered choir were hushed, while the songsters themselves sought refuge from the storm in every available nook, where they sat shivering. One cannot always repress the interrogatory why Nature so frequently stirs hopes only to blast them; but it is not the business of the empirical observer to question her motives or her manners,—rather to study her as she is, without asking why.
Cold as April was, some birds were hardy enough to go to nest-building. Among these were the robins, whose blushing bosoms could be seen everywhere in grove and field. On the seventh of the month a robin was carrying grass fibres to a half-finished nest in the woodland near my house. A week later she was sitting on the nest, hugging her eggs close beneath her warm bosom, while the tempests howled mercilessly about her roofless homestead. It seemed to me, one cold morning after a snow-storm, that her body shivered as she sat there, and I feared more than once that she would freeze to death; but no such fatality befell her, and she resolutely kept her seat in her adobe cottage.
And this reminds me of a bird tragedy described to me by a professor in the college located in my town. He said that a number of years ago a robin built a nest in a tree not far from the site on which some workmen were erecting a new college building. In May a very fierce snow-storm came. One day the workmen noticed a half-dozen robins darting about the nest on which the hatching bird sat, flying at her with sharp cries, striking her with their wings, and making use of various other devices to dislodge her from the nest. They seemed to realize that she was in peril of her life through long inactivity and exposure to the cold. But their efforts were unsuccessful: she would not leave her nest; her eggs or young must have her care at whatever cost. However, the poor bird paid dearly for her devotion. The next morning—the night had been very cold—the workmen found her dead upon the nest. My informant vouches for the truthfulness of the story, and says that he himself saw the faithful mother on the nest after she had been frozen stiff.
On the twentieth of April I saw another robin sitting close on her nest, which was built on a horizontal branch of a willow-tree, not more than eight feet from the ground. The raw east wind lifted the feathers on her back, as if determined to creep through her thick clothing to the sensitive skin. A few days earlier a blue jay was seen carrying lumber to her partly erected nursery in the crotch of an oak-tree. A pair of bluebirds, sighing out their sorrows and joys, began building in one of my bird-boxes during the pleasant early April weather; but when the cold spell came, they wisely suspended operations until the storms were overpast and they could proceed with safety. A killdeer plover’s nest was found by my farmer neighbor on the ninth of April. It was on the ground in an open field, with not so much as a spear of grass for protection.