What a change the first night brings! Yet with unfailing instinct he squats on some twig, fluffs up his feathers, tucks his wee head behind his wing, and sleeps the sleep of his first adult birdhood as soundly as if this position of rest had been familiar to him since he broke through the shell.
We admire his aptitude for learning; how quickly his wings gain strength and skill; how soon he manages to catch his own dinner. But how all this pales before the accomplishment of a young brush turkey or moundbuilder of the antipodes. Hatched six or eight feet under ground, merely by the heat of decaying vegetation, no fond parents minister to his wants. Not only must he escape from the shell in the pressure and darkness of his underground prison (how we cannot tell), but he is then compelled to dig through six feet of leaves and mould before he reaches the sunlight. He finds himself well feathered, and at once spreads his small but perfect wings and goes humming off to seek his living alone and unattended.
It is September—the month of restlessness for the birds. Weeks ago the first migrants started on their southward journey, the more delicate insect-eaters going first, before the goldfinches and other late nesters had half finished housekeeping. The northern warblers drift past us southward—the magnolia, blackburnian, Canadian fly-catching, and others, bringing memories of spruce and balsam to those of us who have lived with them in the forests of the north.
“It’s getting too cold for the little fellows,” says the wiseacre, who sees you watching the smaller birds as they pass southward. Is it, though? What of the tiny winter wren which spends the zero weather with us? His coat is no warmer than those birds which have gone to the far tropics. And what of the flocks of birds which we occasionally come across in mid-winter, of species which generally migrate to Brazil? It is not the cold which deprives us of our summer friends, or at least the great majority of them; it is the decrease in food supply. Insects disappear, and only those birds which feed on seeds and buds, or are able to glean an insect diet from the crevices of fence and tree-trunk, can abide.
This is the month to climb out on the roof of your house, lie on your back and listen. He is a stolid person indeed who is not moved by the chirps and twitters which come down through the darkness. There is no better way to show what a wonderful power sound has upon our memories. There sounds a robin’s note, and spring seems here again; through the night comes a white-throat’s chirp, and we see again the fog-dimmed fields of a Nova Scotian upland; a sandpiper “peets” and the scene in our mind’s eye as instantly changes, and so on. What a revelation if we could see as in daylight for a few moments! The sky would be pitted with thousands and thousands of birds flying from a few hundred yards to as high as one or two miles above the earth.
It only adds to the interest of this phenomenon when we turn to our learned books on birds for an explanation of the origin of migration, the whence and whither of the long journeys by day and night, and find—no certain answer! This is one of the greatest of the many mysteries of the natural world, of which little is known, although much is guessed, and the bright September nights may reveal to us—we know not what undiscovered facts.
| I see my way as birds their trackless way. I shall arrive; what time, what circuit first, I ask not; but unless God sends his hail Of blinding fire-balls, sleet or driving snow, In sometime, his good time, I shall arrive; He guides me and the bird. In his good time. Robert Browning. |