The mystery of the Fox Sparrow clears a little as we move northward on Puget Sound, and may even resolve itself one day as we spend a lazy July in camp on one of the San Juan islands. We are puzzled, as the tent pegs are being driven, by certain sprightly songs bursting out now here, now there, from the copse. We labor under a sense of avian surveillance as we gather fuel from the beach, but the songs are too joyous and limpid to make precise connections with anything in previous experience. It is not till the cool of the evening, when we seek the spring, back in the depths of the thicket, that we come upon a fair birdmaiden slyly regaling herself upon a luscious salmon-berry, flushed to the wine-red of perfection, while three of her suitors peal invitations to separate bowers in the neighboring tangles. She flees guiltily on detection, but the secret is out; we know now where these shy wood nymphs keep themselves in summer.
The male bird is sometimes emboldened by the moment of song to venture into the tops of willows or alders, but even here he hugs the screen of leaves and is ready in a trice to dive into the more familiar element of bushes. Once under cover of the protecting salal, or among the crowding ferns, the Fox Sparrows are excelled by none in their ability to get about with a modicum of disturbance; and the longest journeys, such as are made necessary in the time of clamoring young, appear to be made by slipping and sliding thru the maze of intersecting stems. The song is varied and vivacious; but, save for the opening notes, is neither very strong nor very brilliant. The opening phrase, however, Pewit, heu, comes as a tiny bugle call into which is distilled the essence of all dank hollows, of all rustling leaves, of all murmuring tides, and of all free-blowing breezes. It is the authentic voice of the little wild.
From a Photograph Copyright, 1907, by W. L. Dawson.
CARROLL ISLET—SOUTH EXPOSURE.
WHERE THE FIRST NEST OF THE SOOTY FOX SPARROW WAS FOUND.
On a July day a trio of Indian boys, Quillayutes, were showing the bird-man a round of belated nesters, while he was looking for opportunities to photograph eggs, and also recording Quillayutan bird names in passing. A Rusty Song Sparrow’s nest held only weanlings, mildly hideous, and the leader, a lad of ten, expressed regret that he could not show me the nest of another kind of Song Sparrow. With excess of Caucasian pride I assured him that there was only one species of Song Sparrow to be found locally, but my learned statements drew forth only puzzled and unconvicted glances. Some days later when I had taken a set of Sooty Fox Sparrow’s eggs from a neighboring islet, the boys clamored in triumph, “That’s it; those are the eggs of Tahbahlilchteh, the other Song Sparrow we told you about.” The boys were near enough right; the Fox Sparrow is for all the ordinary world like a Song Sparrow; and I venture that not a dozen white boys in Washington ever saw the bird itself, let alone distinguishing it by name.
Taken on Carroll Islet. Photo by the Author.
NEST OF SOOTY FOX SPARROW IN FERN CLUMP.
THE NEST ITSELF IS ALMOST INVISIBLE BECAUSE BURIED IN MOSS AND FERN LEAVES.
The eggs referred to were found amid most romantic surroundings, on a sea-girt islet a mile or two out from the Pacific shore. The island is given over to sea-birds, and these nest upon its precipitous sides to the number of thousands; but the center of the rock is crowned with a grove of spruce trees, which overshadow a dense growth of salmon-berry bushes. In a clump of the latter at a height of six feet was placed a very bulky but unusually handsome nest, which held, in the really tiny cup which occupies the upper center of the structure, three eggs of a greenish blue color heavily spotted and marbled with warm browns. The nest measures externally eight and ten inches in width, internally two; in depth four inches outside and only one and a half inside. It is composed chiefly of green mosses set in dead spruce twigs with a few twisted weed stalks; while the lining is of a light-colored, fine, dead grass, very loosely arranged, and a few breast-feathers of the Glaucous-winged Gull. A nest full of young Peregrine Falcons were conversing in screams with their doting parents in the spruce trees overhead, and terrorizing the island thereby; but the Sooty Fox Sparrows stepped forward modestly to claim ownership in the nest which “Science” unfortunately required. The date was July 21, 1906, and the eggs were nearly upon the point of hatching.
Thus, the north and west slopes of the Olympic Mountains, together with the islands of lower Puget Sound, appear to mark the southern breeding range of the coastal Fox Sparrows. This form has not been reported breeding upon the mainland east of Puget Sound, but it is difficult to see why it should not do so. It is rather the commonest form during the spring and fall migrations, and there is no evidence as yet that it tarries with us in winter.