On this particular morning, I heard once more the wild dawn-song of the Carolina wren, full of liquid bell-like overtones. As I listened, my mind went back to another wren-song. I had been hunting for the nest of a yellow palm warbler in a little gully in the depths of a northern forest. The blood ran down my face from the fierce bites of the black-flies, and the mosquitoes stung like fire. Suddenly, from the side of the tiny ravine, began a song full of ringing, glassy notes such as one makes by running a wet finger rapidly on the inside of a thin glass finger-bowl. Listening, I forgot that I was wet and tired and hungry and bitten and stung. For the first time I listened to the song of the winter wren. For years I had met this little bird along the sides of brooks in the winter and running in and out of holes and under stones like a mouse; but to-day to me it was no longer a tiny bird. It was the voice of the untamed, unknown northern woods. It is hard to make any notation of the song. It flowed like some ethereal stream filled with little bubbles of music which broke in glassy tinkling sprays of sound over the under-current of the high vibrating melody itself. The song seemed to have two parts. The first ended in a contralto phrase, while the second soared like a fountain into a spray of tinkling trills. Through it all ran a strange unearthly dancing lilt, such as the fairy songs must have had, heard by wandering shepherds at the edge of the green fairy hills. At its very height the melody suddenly ceased, and once again I dropped back into a workaday, mosquito-ridden world, with ten miles between me and my camp.
On that day I found two of the almost unknown, feather-lined nests of the yellow palm warbler, and climbed up to the jewel-casket of a bay-breasted warbler, and was shown the cherished secret of a Nashville warbler’s nest deep hidden in the sphagnum moss of a little tussock in the middle of a pathless morass. Yet my great adventure was the song of the winter wren.
It was under quite different circumstances that I last heard the best winter singer of all. Never was there a more discouraging day for a collector of bird-songs. The year was dying of rheumy age. On the trees still hung a few dank, blotched leaves, while the sodden ground plashed under foot and a leaden mist of rain covered everything. Yet at the edge of the very first field that I started to cross, a strange call cut through the fog, and I glimpsed a large black-and-white bird crossing the meadow with the dipping up-and-down flight of a woodpecker. It was the hairy woodpecker, the big brother of the more common downy, and a bird that usually loves the depths of the woods. Hardly had it alighted on a wild-cherry tree, when an English sparrow flew up from a nearby ash-dump and attacked the new comer. The harassed woodpecker flew to the next tree and the next, but was driven on and away each time by the sparrow, until finally, with another rattling call, it flew back to the woods from whence it had come. A moment later a starling alighted on the same tree, unmolested by its compatriot.
THE JUNCO ON HIS WATCH TOWER
I followed the fields to a nearby patch of woods. It is small and bounded on all sides by crowded roads, but at all times of the year I find birds there. As I reached the edge of the trees white-skirted juncos flew up in front of me. Mingled with their sharp notes, like the clicking of pebbles, came the gentle whisper of the white-throated sparrow, and from a nearby thicket one of them gave its strange minor song. For its length I know of no minor strain in bird-music that is sweeter. Like the little silver flute-trill of the pink-beaked field sparrow, and the lovely contralto notes of the bluebird who from mid-sky calls down, “Faraway, faraway, faraway,” the song of the white-throated sparrow is tantalizingly brief and simple in its phrasing. Up in Canada the guides call the bird the “widow-woman.” Usually its song, except in the spring, is incomplete and apt to flatten a little on some of the notes; but today it rang through the rain as true and compelling as when it wakes me, from the syringa and lilac bushes outside my sleeping-porch, some May morning.
Through the dripping boughs I pressed far into the very centre of the wood. In a tangle of greenbrier sounded a series of sharp irritating chips, and a cardinal, blood-red against the leaden sky, perched himself on a bough of a hornbeam sapling. As I watched him sitting there in the cold rain, he seemed like some bird of the tropics which had flamed his way north and would soon go back to the blaze of sun and riot of color where he belonged. Yet the cardinal grosbeak stays with us all winter, and I have seen four of the vivid males at a time, all crimson against the white snow. To-day he looked down upon me, and without any warning suddenly began to sing his full song in a whisper. “Wheepl, wheepl, wheepl,” he whistled with a mellow and wood-wind note; and again, a full tone lower, “Wheepl, wheepl, wheepl.” Then he sang a lilting double-note song, “Chu-wee, chu-wee, chu-wee,” ending with a ringing whistle, “Whit, whit, whit, teu, teu, teu,” and then ran them together, “Whit-teu, whit-teu, whit-teu.” As his lovely dove-colored mate flitted jealously through the thicket, he tactfully and smackingly cried, “Kiss, kiss, kiss,” and dived into the bushes to join her. Again and again he ran through his little repertoire, so low that thirty feet away he could hardly be heard. Leaden clouds and dank mists might cover the earth, but life would always be worth the living so long as one could find snatches of jeweled songs like that sung to me by the cardinal. As I started homeward under the dripping sky, crimson against the dark green of a cedar tree, my friend called his good-bye to me in one last long ringing note.
Late that afternoon the rain stopped, the clouds rolled back, and in the west the sky was a mass of flame, with pools of sapphire-blue and rose-red cloud. Above, in a stretch of pure cool apple-green, floated the newest of new moons. As the after-glow ebbed, one by one all the wondrous tints merged into a great band of amber that barred the dark for long. Just before it faded in the last moments of the twilight, there shuddered across the evening air the sweetest, saddest note that can be heard in all winter music. It was a tremolo, wailing little cry that always makes me think of the children the pyxies stole, who can be heard now and again in the twilight, or before dawn, calling, calling vainly for one long gone. In the dim light in a nearby tree, I could see the ear-tufts of the little red-brown screech-owl. Like the beat of unseen wings, his voice trembled again and again through the air, and answering him, I called him up to within six feet of me. Around and around my head he flew like a great moth, his soft muffled wings making not the faintest breath of sound, until at last he drifted away into the dark.
That night the temperature rose, until the very breath of spring seemed to be in the air; and early the next morning, before even the faint glimmer of the dawn-dusk had shown, I was awakened by hearing a croon so soft and sweet that it ran for long through my dreams without waking me. Again and again it sounded, like the singing ripple of a trout brook or the happy little cradle-song that a mother ruffed grouse makes when she broods her leaf-brown chicks. I recognized the love-song of the little owl, months before its time—a song which belongs to the nights when the air is full of spring scents and hyla-calls.
Perhaps the singer was the same bird who visited Sergeant Henny-Penny one Christmas night. During the day the Band had taken a most successful bird-walk. We had seen and heard some twenty different kinds of birds; heard the white-breasted nuthatch sing his spring-song, “Quee-quee-quee,” as a Christmas carol for us; met a red fox trotting sedately through the snow, and altogether had a most adventurous day. That evening I was reading in front of the fire when from Sergeant Henny-Penny’s room came an S.O.S. “Fathie, come quick, there’s a nangel flyin’ around my room,” he called.