The moral of all this is, go bird’s-nesting. This past summer, practising what I preach, I spent all my spare holidays in May, June, and July hunting rare nests. Let me say in preface that I collect only with a note-book and a camera. Personally, I prefer to have memories and notes and pictures of my bird’s-nests rather than cabinets full of pierced and empty eggs; for I believe that a human who visits his brethren of the air as their friend will find out more about them than he who follows them about like a weasel, only to rob their nests.
The first of my bird-holidays was on May 20th. Four of us were to meet at Mount Pocono, the highest mountain in Pennsylvania, on a hunt for the rare nest of that tiny bird, the golden-crowned kinglet. Late that evening we reached the camp near the top of the mountain, where we were to make our headquarters. Up there the weather had harked back to March, and the water froze on the porch that night. We pooled our blankets and curled up together for warmth.
At one a.m. a whip-poor-will began his loud night-song. He always sings as if he were wound up, and in a great hurry to finish his song before the mechanism runs down. Later, in the darkness, we heard the drumming like distant thunder of the ruffed grouse. One of our party claims that on this mountain the grouse always drum at four-thirty in the morning; and his stock as an accurate ornithologist went above par when we examined our watches and found that it was just half-past four. As the darkness turned to the dusk of dawn, the first day-song was the beautiful minor strain of the white-throated sparrow. “O Canada, Canada, Canada,” he fluted. Then came a snatch of the wheezing strain of the song sparrow. Finally, sweetest of all, sounded two or three tantalizing notes of the hermit thrush, pure, single, prolonged notes of wonderful sweetness, followed by two arpeggio chords.
We were up and out before sunrise; for he who would find rare nests must look for them while the birds are laying or brooding. Four hours distant, back in Philadelphia, summer had come. Here the trees showed the green tracery of early spring, and the apple trees were still in blossom, while everywhere the woods were white with the long pure snow-petals of the shadblow. Some day we four are going to follow Spring north, bird’s-nesting all the way, until within the Arctic Circle we find her in mid-July.
To-day the first nest discovered was that of the junco, or slate-colored snowbird, whose jingling little song and the flutter of whose white skirts were everywhere throughout the woods. This one was close to the camp, hollowed out of the side of a bank of pine-needles, and held four white eggs sparsely spotted with reddish-brown. The little mother-bird chipped frantically, with a clicking note which the Architect said always made him think that she carried pebbles in her throat.
There were trillions of trilliums, as the Artist remarked epigrammatically. Some were the common trilliums, of a dark garnet-red. Besides these we found many of the rarer painted trilliums—a pure white triangle with a stained crimson reversed triangle in the centre. All of the trilliums are studies in triangles. The painted trillium has the crimson triangle in the centre, set on the white triangle made up of three petals which, in their turn, are fixed in a reversed triangle of green sepals, and the whole blossom is set in a still larger triangle made up of three green leaves. Everywhere the woods were full of purple-pink rhodora, the earliest of the azaleas. Its blossoms were silver flecked with deeper-colored spots.
The next nest found was to me the most eventful one of the day, although not an especially rare one on that mountain. The Architect was walking beside one of the strange hummocks which are thought to have been formed by buried tree-trunks in the path of some old-time cyclone. Suddenly his eye was caught by the gleam of four sky-blue eggs shining like turquoises from a nest directly on the ground, lined neatly with red-brown pine-needles and with dry dark green moss on the outside, the hall-mark of the nest of the hermit thrush. In front of it was a cushion of partridge-berry vines, with their green leaves and red berries, while blueberry fronds, covered with tender green leaves, arched over the nest, and sprays of ground-pine sheltered its sides. It was a fitting home for the beautiful twilight singer. The eggs of a hermit thrush actually seem to gleam from the ground, unlike the mottled and speckled and clouded eggs of most ground-nesters.
As the sun came up, the whole mountain-side rang with bird-songs. There was the abrupt strain of the magnolia warbler, who to my ears says, “Wheedle, wheedle, whee-chee.” The black-and-white warbler sang like a tiny, creaking wheel, as he ran up and down tree-trunks. Down in the meadows beyond the lake, the long-tailed brown thrasher said, “Hello, hello! Come over here, come over here. There he goes, there he goes. Whoa, whoa, ha-ha, ha-ha.” If you do not believe my reading of his song, listen the next time one sings to you, and see if these are not his exact words. Overhead we often heard the squeal of the red-shouldered hawk, sounding almost like the cry of the blue jay. Then there was the loud yet gentle warble of the purple finch; and once we saw a beautiful rose-red male and his gray-brown wife feeding each other on a limb like a pair of lovebirds. Another song which was interesting to me, because almost new, was that of the solitary or blue-headed vireo, who sang, “See, see me-e. See me, you! you!” His whole song is in couplets. The Artist said that my rendering was too imaginative, and that what the bird really said was “Che-wee—che-woo, che-wee—chu, chu,” which perhaps is more accurate.
