Birds crowd in upon us, bull bat, chuck-wills-widow, turtle dove, gray-cheeked thrush and titlark come to see us, some to stop and add their own individual element to the local coloring, others after a few hours of rest to continue their way northward. Multitudes of sparrows, jays, thrashers, nuthatches, titmice, woodpeckers, etc., that have enjoyed our hospitality during the winter and part of the spring pack up their effects and leave, for summer is almost here.
The bird that to my mind is distinctly the advance agent of summer has well been called the summer tanager. He delays his coming until straw hats and linen suits appear; then what a dash of warm color he brings. Seated on the topmost bough of a tall oak, where the sun’s rays fall full upon him, he gives such intense, palpitating color that one’s eyes are almost blinded looking at him. Rich as is the red of the cardinal it appears soiled and tarnished beside the summer tanager.
With a sigh we realize that the spring migration is over for this year; but there is one consolation, only a part of its music is hushed—the soul of Southern bird life, the mocking bird, is left. Inconspicuous by reason of his Quaker-gray suit, he makes up in attractive manners and variety of musical gifts what he lacks in other respects. It is quite impossible to do justice to this bird either in describing his bubbling, effervescent life during the nesting season or in giving an adequate idea of the effect produced upon the senses by his exquisitely beautiful nocturnes. One March night some noise just outside my window awakened me. I arose and raising the window listened. The full moon, almost in the zenith, was flooding the landscape with a weird, soft light; the shadows of the cedar hedge a few yards away lay black as ink; the very air was heavy with the perfume of the jessamine abloom in a neighboring forest. In the cedars a mocking bird sang to himself a sweet, dreamy song, giving more complete expression to the mystery, the romance, the passion, the rapturous content of a Southern moonlit night than any poem that poet’s hand has ever written.
James Stephen Compton.
ANTICS OF A HUMMINGBIRD.
As the writer was standing one May morning near a clump of bushes in the suburbs of a city in Maine he witnessed, for the first time in a long experience of bird study, the courting antics of a male hummingbird. Two of the tiny creatures appeared, apparently evolved from mid-air, and one alighted in the bush. She was the female. The male immediately began to disport himself in the air in the following remarkable manner:
He dashed back and forth over the head of the female in long, curving swoops such as one describes in a swing, all the time giving utterance to a low, pleasing twitter. He thus swept back and forth ten times, rising at the ends of the curve to a height of perhaps fifteen feet, sustaining himself there a moment, with his ruby throat flashing in the sun, and then darting down the double toboggan slide and up to the other end. Though he flew very swiftly, yet his speed was not the usual flash and his movements could be plainly seen. I had never before seen a hummingbird fly so slowly nor heard from one of them such a prolonged vocal sound. Indeed, it is very rare that one hears the hummingbird’s voice, even if one is on the alert for it. After the tenth swoop there was a buzz of wings and both birds had vanished. A minute after I found the male in a cherry tree sipping honey from the blossoms.
There is evidently a rivalry between the bees and the hummingbirds in their quest for honey. This bird, with an angry dash, expressed its disapproval of the presence of a big bumblebee in the same tree. The usually pugnacious bee incontinently fled, but he did not leave the tree. He dashed back and forth among the branches and white blossoms, the hummingbird in close pursuit. Where will you find another pair that could dodge and turn and dart equal to these? They were like flashes of light, yet the pursuer followed in the track of the pursued, turning when the bee turned. There was no cutting across, for there was no time for that. In short, the bird and the bee controlled the movement of their bodies more quickly and more accurately than the writer could control the movement of his eyes. The chase was all over in half the time that it has taken to tell it, but the excitement of a pack of hounds after a fox is as nothing, in comparison. The bee escaped, the bird giving up the chase and alighting on a twig. It couldn’t have been chasing the bee for food, and there is no possible explanation of its unprovoked attack except that it wished to have all the honey itself. So even as little a body as a hummingbird can show selfishness in a marked degree. However, Mr. Bee continued to take his share of Nature’s bounty, though doubtless he had his weather eye open against another attack. Both scenes afforded me a delightful study and were a rare privilege.
George Bancroft Griffith.
