It takes a poet to appreciate the desert. Those people who affect to despise the sage are the same to whom stones are stones instead of compacted histories of the world’s youth, and clouds are clouds instead of legions of angels. It is no mark of genius then to despise common things. The desert has cradled more of the world’s good men and great than ever were coddled in king’s palaces. Whistler used to paint “symphonies in gray” and men held back questioning, “Er—is this art?” A few, bolder than their fellows, pronounced favorably upon it, and it is allowable now to admit that Whistler was a great artist—that is, a great discoverer and revealer of Nature.
Nature has painted upon our eastern hills a symphony in gray greens, a canvas of artemisia, simple, ample, insistent. And still the people stand before it hesitating—it is so common—is it considered beautiful, pray? Well, at least a bird thinks so, a bird whose whole life has been spent in the sage. Listen! The hour is sunrise. As we face the east, heavy shadows still huddle about us and blend with the ill-defined realities. The stretching sage-tops tremble with oblation before the expectant sun. The pale dews are taking counsel for flight, but the opalescent haze, pregnant with sunfire, yet tender with cool greens and subtle azures, hovers over the altar waiting the concomitance of the morning hymn before ascent. Suddenly, from a distant sage-bush bursts a geyser of song, a torrent of tuneful waters, gushing, as it would seem, from the bowels of the wilderness in an ecstacy of greeting and gratitude and praise. It is from the throat of the Sage Thrasher, poet of the bitter weed, that the tumult comes. Himself but a gray shadow, scarce visible in the early light, he pours out his soul and the soul of the sage in a rhapsody of holy joy. Impetuous, impassioned, compelling, rises this matchless music of the desert. To the silence of the gray-green canvas, beautiful but incomplete, has come the throb and thrill of life,—life brimful, delirious, exultant. The freshness and the gladness of it touch the soul as with a magic. The heart of the listener glows, his veins tingle, his face beams. He cannot wait to analyze. He must dance and shout for joy. The wine of the wilderness is henceforth in his veins, and drunk with ecstacy he reels across the enchanted scene forever more.
And all this inspiration the bird draws from common sage and the rising of the common sun. How does he do it? I do not know. Ask Homer, Milton, Keats.
No. 124.
CATBIRD.
A. O. U. No. 704. Dumetella carolinensis (Linn.).
Description.—Adult: Slate-color, lightening almost imperceptibly below; black on top of head and on tail; under tail-coverts chestnut, sometimes spotted with slaty; bill and feet black. Length 8.00-9.35 (203.2-237.5); wing 3.59 (91.2); tail 3.65 (92.7); bill .62 (15.8).
Recognition Marks.—Chewink size; almost uniform slaty coloration with thicket-haunting habits distinctive; lithe and slender as compared with Water Ouzel.
Nesting.—Nest, of twigs, weed-stalks, vegetable fibers, and trash, carefully lined with fine rootlets, placed at indifferent heights in bushes or thickets. Eggs, 4-5, deep emerald-green, glossy. Av. size, .95 × .69 (24.1 × 17.5). Season, first two weeks in June; one brood.
General Range.—Eastern United States and British Provinces, west regularly to and including the Rocky Mountains, irregularly to the Pacific Coast from British Columbia to central California. Breeds from the Gulf States northward to the Saskatchewan. Winters in the southern states, Cuba, and middle America to Panama. Bermuda, resident. Accidental in Europe.
Range in Washington.—Summer resident; not uncommon but locally distributed in eastern and especially northeastern Washington; penetrates deepest mountain valleys on eastern slope of Cascades, and is regularly established in certain West-side valleys connected by low passes. Casual at Seattle, and elsewhere at sea-level.
Authorities.—Galeoscoptes carolinensis, Belding, Land Birds of the Pacific District (1890), p. 226 (Walla Walla by J. W. Williams, 1885). D¹. Ss¹. Ss². J.
Specimens.—U. of W. Prov. P. C.
Those who hold either a good or a bad opinion of the Catbird are one-sided in their judgment. Two, and not less than two, opinions are possible of one and the same bird. He is both imp and angel, a “feathered Mephistopheles” and “a heavenly singer.” But this is far from saying that the bird lives a double life in the sense ordinarily understood, for in the same minute he is grave, gay, pensive and clownish. Nature made him both a wag and a poet, and it is no wonder if the roguishness and high philosophy become inextricably entangled. One moment he steps forth before you as sleek as Beau Brummel, graceful, polished, equal-eyed; then he cocks his head to one side and squints at you like a thief; next he hangs his head, droops wings and tail, and looks like a dog being lectured for killing sheep;—Presto, change! the bird pulls himself up to an extravagant height and with exaggerated gruffness, croaks out, “Who are you?” Then without waiting for an answer to his impudent question, the rascal sneaks off thru the bushes, hugging every feather close to his body, delivering a running fire of cat-calls, squawks, and expressions of contempt. There is no accounting for him; he is an irrepressible—and a genius.
The Catbird is not common in Washington, save in the northeastern portion of the State, where it is well established. Miss Jennie V. Getty finds them regularly at North Bend, and there is a Seattle record; so that there is reason to believe that the Catbird is one of those few species which are extending their range by encroachment from neighboring territory. There can be no question that civilization is conducive to the bird’s welfare, primarily by increasing the quantity of its cover on the East-side, and, possibly, by reducing it on the West. Catbirds, when at home, are found in thickets and in loose shrubbery. River-banks are lined with them, and chaparral-covered hillsides have their share; but they also display a decided preference for the vicinage of man, and, if allowed to, will frequent the orchards and the raspberry bushes. They help themselves pretty freely to the fruit of the latter, but their services in insect-eating compensate for their keep, a hundred-fold. Nests are placed almost anywhere at moderate heights, but thickety places are preferred, and the wild rosebush is acknowledged to be the ideal spot. The birds exhibit the greatest distress when their nest is disturbed, and the entire neighborhood is aroused to expressions of sympathy by their pitiful cries.
My friend, Dr. James Ball Naylor, of Malta, Ohio, tells the following story in answer to the oft-repeated question, Do animals reason? The poet’s house nestles against the base of a wooded hill and looks out upon a spacious well-kept lawn which is studded with elm trees. The place is famous for birds and the neighborhood is equally famous for cats. Robins occasionally venture to glean angle worms upon the inviting expanses of this lawn, but for a bird to attempt to cross it unaided by wing would be to invite destruction as in the case of a lone soldier climbing San Juan hill. One day, however, a fledgling Catbird, overweening and disobedient, we fear, fell from its nest overhead and sat helpless on the dreaded slopes. The parents were beside themselves with anxiety. The birdie could not fly and would not flutter to any purpose. There was no enemy in sight but it was only by the sufferance of fate, and moments were precious. In the midst of it all the mother disappeared and returned presently with a fat green worm, which she held up to baby at a foot’s remove. Baby hopped and floundered forward to the juicy morsel, but when he had covered the first foot, the dainty was still six inches away. Mama promised it to him with a flood of encouragement for every effort, but as often as the infant advanced the mother retreated, renewing her blandishments. In this way she coaxed her baby across the lawn and up, twig by twig, to the top of an osage-orange hedge which bounded it. Here, according to Dr. Naylor, she fed her child the worm.
Comparing the scolding and call notes of the Catbird with the mewing of a cat has perhaps been a little overdone, but the likeness is strong enough to lodge in the mind and to fasten the bird’s “trivial name” upon it forever. Besides a mellow phut, phut in the bush, the bird has an aggravating mee-a-a, and a petulant call note which is nothing less than Ma-a-ry. Cautious to a degree and timid, the bird is oftener heard in the depth of the thicket than elsewhere, but he sometimes mounts the tree-top, and the opening “Phut, phut, coquillicot”—as Neltje Blanchan hears it—is the promise of a treat.
Generalizations are apt to be inadequate when applied to singers of such brilliant and varied gifts as the Catbird’s. It would be impertinent to say: Homo sapiens has a cultivated voice and produces music of the highest order. Some of us do and some of us do not. Similarly some Catbirds are “self-conscious and affected,” “pause after each phrase to mark its effect upon the audience,” etc. Some lack originality, feeling, are incapable of sustained effort, cannot imitate other birds, etc. But some Catbirds are among the most talented singers known. One such I remember, which, overcome by the charms of a May day sunset, mounted the tip of a pasture elm, and poured forth a hymn of praise in which every voice of woodland and field was laid under contribution. Yet all were suffused by the singer’s own emotion. Oh, how that voice rang out upon the still evening air! The bird sang with true feeling, an artist in every sense, and the delicacy and accuracy of his phrasing must have silenced a much more captious critic than I. Never at a loss for a note, never pausing to ask himself what he should sing next, he went steadily on, now with a phrase from Robin’s song, now with the shrill cry of the Red-headed Woodpecker, each softened and refined as his own infallible musical taste dictated; now and again he interspersed these with bits of his own no less beautiful. The carol of Vireo, the tender ditties of the Song and Vesper Sparrows, and the more pretentious efforts of Grosbeaks, had all impressed themselves upon this musician’s ear, and he repeated them, not slavishly, but with discernment and deep appreciation. As the sun sank lower in the west I left him there, a dull gray bird, with form scarcely outlined against the evening sky, but my soul had taken flight with his—up into that blest abode where all Nature’s voices are blended into one, and all music is praise.