At the White House we are apt to stroll around the grounds for a few minutes after breakfast; and during the migrations, especially in spring, I often take a pair of field glasses so as to examine any bird as to the identity of which I am doubtful. From the end of April the warblers pass in troops—myrtle, magnolia, chestnut-sided, bay-breasted, blackburnian, black-throated blue, blue-winged, Canadian, and many others, with at the very end of the season the black-poll—all of them exquisite little birds, but not conspicuous as a rule, except perhaps the blackburnian, whose brilliant orange throat and breast flame when they catch the sunlight as he flits among the trees. The males in their dress of courtship are easily recognized by any one who has Chapman’s book on the warblers. On May 4, 1906, I saw a Cape May warbler, the first I had ever seen. It was in a small pine. It was fearless, allowing a close approach, and as it was a male in high plumage, it was unmistakable.
In 1907, after a very hot week in early March, we had an exceedingly late and cold spring. The first bird I heard sing in the White House grounds was a white-throated sparrow on March 1st, a song sparrow speedily following. The white-throats stayed with us until the middle of May, overlapping the arrival of the indigo buntings; but during the last week in April and first week in May their singing was drowned by the music of the purple finches, which I never before saw in such numbers around the White House. When we sat by the south fountain, under an apple tree then blossoming, sometimes three or four purple finches would be singing in the fragrant bloom overhead. In June a pair of wood thrushes and a pair of black-and-white creepers made their homes in the White House grounds, in addition to our ordinary homemakers, the flickers, redheads, robins, catbirds, song sparrows, chippies, summer yellow-birds, grackles, and, I am sorry to say, crows. A handsome sapsucker spent a week with us. In the same year five night herons spent January and February in a swampy tract by the Potomac, half a mile or so from the White House.
At Mount Vernon there are of course more birds than there are around the White House, for it is in the country. At present but one mocking-bird sings around the house itself, and in the gardens and the woods of the immediate neighborhood. Phœbe birds nest at the heads of the columns under the front portico; and a pair—or rather, doubtless, a succession of pairs—has nested in Washington’s tomb itself, for the twenty years since I have known it. The cardinals, beautiful in plumage, and with clear ringing voices, are characteristic of the place. I am glad to say that the woods still hold many gray—not red—foxes; the descendants of those which Washington so perseveringly hunted.
At Oyster Bay on a desolate winter afternoon many years ago I shot an Ipswich sparrow on a strip of ice-rimmed beach, where the long coarse grass waved in front of a growth of blue berries, beach plums and stunted pines. I think it was the same winter that we were visited not only by flocks of cross-bills, pine linnets, red-polls and pine grossbeaks, but by a number of snowy owls, which flitted to and fro in ghost-like fashion across the wintry landscape and showed themselves far more diurnal in their habits than our native owls. One fall about the same time a pair of duck-hawks appeared off the bay. It was early, before many ducks had come, and they caused havoc among the night herons, which were then very numerous in the marshes around Lloyd’s Neck, there being a big heronry in the woods near by. Once I saw a duck-hawk come around the bend of the shore, and dart into a loose gang of young night herons, still in the brown plumage, which had jumped from the marsh at my approach. The pirate struck down three herons in succession and sailed swiftly on without so much as looking back at his victims.[[8]] The herons, which are usually rather dull birds, showed every sign of terror whenever the duck-hawk appeared in the distance; whereas, they paid no heed to the fish-hawks as they sailed overhead. I found the carcass of a black-headed or Bonaparte’s gull which had probably been killed by one of these duck-hawks; these gulls appear in the early fall, before their bigger brothers, the herring gulls, have come for their winter stay. The spotted sand-pipers often build far away from water; while riding, early in July, 1907, near Cold Spring, my horse almost stepped on a little fellow that could only just have left the nest. It was in a dry road between upland fields; the parents were near by, and betrayed much agitation. The little fish-crows are not rare around Washington, though not so common as the ordinary crows; once I shot one at Oyster Bay. They are not so wary as their larger kinsfolk, but are quite as inveterate destroyers of the eggs and nestlings of more attractive birds. The soaring turkey buzzards, so beautiful on the wing and so loathsome near by, are seen everywhere around the Capital.
[8]. Dr. Lambert last fall, on a hunting trip in Northern Quebec, found a gyrfalcon on an island in a lake which had just killed a great blue heron; the heron’s feathers were scattered all over the lake. Lambert also shot a great horned owl in the dusk one evening, and found that it had a half-eaten duck in its claws.
Bird songs are often puzzling, and it is nearly impossible to write them down so that any one but the writer will recognize them. Moreover, as we ascribe to them qualities, such as plaintiveness or gladness, which really exist in our own minds and not in the songs themselves, two different observers, equally accurate, may ascribe widely different qualities to the same song. To me, for instance, the bush sparrow’s song is more attractive than the vesper sparrow’s; but I think most of my friends feel just the reverse way about the two songs. To most of us the bobolink’s song bubbles over with rollicking merriment, with the glad joy of mere living; whereas the thrushes, the meadow lark, the white-throated sparrow, all have a haunting strain of sadness or plaintiveness in their melody; but I am by no means sure that there is the slightest difference of this kind in the singers. Most of the songs of the common birds I recognize fairly well; but even with these birds there will now and then be a call, or a few bars, which I do not recognize; and if I hear a bird but seldom, I find much difficulty in recalling its song, unless it is very well marked indeed. Last spring I for a long time utterly failed to recognize the song of a water thrush by Rock Creek; and later in the season I on one occasion failed to make out the flight song of an oven-bird until in the middle of it the singer suddenly threw in two or three of the characteristic “teacher, teacher” notes. Even in neighborhoods with which I am familiar I continually hear songs and calls which I cannot place.
In Albemarle County, Virginia, we have a little place called Pine Knot, where we sometimes go, taking some or all of the children, for a three or four days’ outing. It is a mile from the big stock farm, Plain Dealing, belonging to an old friend, Mr. Joseph Wilmer. The trees and flowers are like those of Washington, but their general close resemblance to those of Long Island is set off by certain exceptions. There are osage orange hedges, and in spring many of the roads are bordered with bands of the brilliant yellow blossoms of the flowering broom, introduced by Jefferson. There are great willow oaks here and there in the woods or pastures, and occasional groves of noble tulip trees in the many stretches of forest; these tulip trees growing to a much larger size than on Long Island. As at Washington, among the most plentiful flowers are the demure little Quaker Ladies, which are not found at Sagamore Hill—where we also miss such northern forms as the wake robin and the other trilliums, which used to be among the characteristic marks of spring-time at Albany. At Pine Knot the red bug, dogwood and laurel are plentiful; though in the case of the last two no more so than at Sagamore Hill. The azalea—its Knickerbocker name in New York was pinkster—grows and flowers far more luxuriantly than on Long Island. The moccasin flower, the china-blue Virginia cowslip with its pale pink buds, the blood-red Indian pink, the painted columbine and many, many other flowers somewhat less showy carpet the woods.
The birds are, of course, for the most part the same as on Long Island, but with some differences. These differences are, in part, due to the more southern locality; but in part I cannot explain them, for birds will often be absent from one place seemingly without any real reason. Thus around us in Albemarle County song-sparrows are certainly rare and I have not seen savanna sparrows at all; but the other common sparrows, such as the chippy, field sparrow, vesper sparrow, and grasshopper sparrow abound; and in an open field where bind-weed morning glories and evening primroses grew among the broom sedge, I found some small grass-dwelling sparrows, which with the exercise of some little patience I was able to study at close quarters with the glasses; as I had no gun I could not be positive about their identification, though I was inclined to believe that they were Henslow’s sparrows. Of birds of brilliant color there are six species—the cardinal, the summer redbird and the scarlet tanager, in red, and the bluebird, indigo bunting, and blue grossbeak, in blue. I saw but one pair of blue grossbeaks; but the little indigo buntings abound, and bluebirds are exceedingly common, breeding in numbers. It has always been a puzzle to me why they do not breed around us at Sagamore Hill, where I only see them during the migrations. Neither the rosy summer redbirds nor the cardinals are quite as brilliant as the scarlet tanagers, which fairly burn like live flames; but the tanager is much less common than either of the others in Albemarle County, and it is much less common than it is at Sagamore Hill. Among the singers the wood thrush is not common, but the meadow lark abounds. The yellow-breasted chat is everywhere and in the spring its clucking, whistling and calling seem never to stop for a minute. The white-eyed vireo is found in the same thick undergrowth as the chat and among the smaller birds it is one of those most in evidence to the ear. In one or two places I came across parties of the long-tailed Bewick’s wren, as familiar as the house wren but with a very different song. There are gentle mourning doves; and black-billed cuckoos seem more common than the yellow-bills. The mocking-birds are, as always, most interesting. I was much amused to see one of them following two crows; when they lit in a plowed field the mocking-bird paraded alongside of them six feet off, and then fluttered around to the attack. The crows, however, were evidently less bothered by it than they would have been by a kingbird. At Plain Dealing many birds nest within a stone’s throw of the rambling attractive house, with its numerous outbuildings, old garden, orchard, and venerable locusts and catalpas. Among them are Baltimore and orchard orioles, purple grackles, flickers and red-headed woodpeckers, bluebirds, robins, kingbirds and indigo buntings. One observation which I made was of real interest. On May 18, 1907, I saw a small party of a dozen or so of passenger pigeons, birds I had not seen for a quarter of a century and never expected to see again. I saw them two or three times flying hither and thither with great rapidity, and once they perched in a tall dead pine on the edge of an old field. They were unmistakable; yet the sight was so unexpected that I almost doubted my eyes, and I welcomed a bit of corroborative evidence coming from Dick, the colored foreman at Plain Dealing. Dick is a frequent companion of mine in rambles around the country, and he is an unusually close and accurate observer of birds, and of wild things generally. Dick had mentioned to me having seen some “wild carrier pigeons,” as he called them; and, thinking over this remark of his, after I had returned to Washington, I began to wonder whether he too might not have seen passenger pigeons. Accordingly I wrote to Mr. Wilmer, asking him to question Dick and find out what the “carrier pigeons” looked like. His answering letter runs in part as follows:
“On May 12th last Dick saw a flock of about thirty wild pigeons, followed at a short distance by about half as many, flying in a circle very rapidly, between the Plain Dealing house and the woods, where they disappeared. They had pointed tails and resembled somewhat large doves—the breast and sides rather a brownish red. He had seen them before, but many years ago. I think it is unquestionably the passenger pigeon—Ectopistes migratorius—described on p. 25 of the 5th volume of Audubon. I remember the pigeon roosts as he describes them, on a smaller scale, but large flocks have not been seen in this part of Virginia for many years.”
I fear, by the way, that the true prairie chicken, one of the most characteristic American game birds, will soon follow the passenger pigeon. My two elder sons have now and then made trips for prairie chickens and ducks to the Dakotas. Last summer, 1907, the second boy returned from such a trip—which he had ended by a successful deer hunt in Wisconsin—with the melancholy information that the diminution in the ranks of the prairie fowl in the Dakotas was very evident.