The day calls, the assembly, the retreat, the mess call and a score of others are left to other birds than the robins. The thrush may pipe them. Grosbeak, tanager or warbler may trill the familiar melodies for all these, and a host of others sing at any hour of the day in tree or shrub or in the pine woods that stand in a phalanx, like a company under arms, pressing close up to the brow of the hill. Sometimes I hear these in the sweet, flowing warble of the purple finch which is not rare hereabouts, but more often in the notes of the warbling vireos which frequent the tops of the shade trees. These are all-day buglers, piping clear for all occasions in firm, rich, continuous notes of whose meaning there can be no doubt, once you have learned the calls. Nearing these and seeing the white marble of the newer comers stretch far beyond the slate headstones, over hill and dale, it is not difficult to believe these indeed the tents of an army corps and to think I hear in response to the bugle the marching tread of feet that have been resting long. The tramp of the boys in blue on Memorial Day, as they march and countermarch, passing from station to station, the ringing call of the bugle that sang across Southern fields all through Grant’s campaign could not seem much more real.
When the busy day is ended it is the wood thrush that sings taps. The dropping sun reflected from polished white marble lights campfires from tent to tent, fires that shall burn low to glowworm embers presently, their smoke curling up in night mists from the dewy ground. It is then that the friendly forest seems to crowd closer as if to surround the camp with a host of faithful guards. Then out of its violet dusk rings the call of the wood thrush, a call full of gentle mystery, of faith and longing, at once so sad and so sweetly hopeful that it seems to voice all human sorrow for mortality and all human, wistful belief in immortality. “Come to me,” it pipes in tintinnabulating richness out of the deepening dusk. “Good night; good night; all’s well; good night.” No sweeter music than taps ever rang from bugle or from throat of wood thrush when deepening twilight falls upon this white-tented corner of fame’s eternal camping ground. The buttercups that stray lovingly among the graves of the pioneers give up their gold to the sky that sends its tears to dew their round eyes. All day the good gray earth and the brave blue sky have held memorial service, and as the last note of taps rings from the throat of the thrush deep in the sheltering wood the night takes up the service with wet eyes.
XIV
BIRDS OF CHOCORUA
Some May Songsters of the Frank Bolles Hinterland
To all who love the lore of woodland life the country up around Chocorua lake and mountain must always be haunted by the gentle spirit of Frank Bolles, whose books, all too few, breathe the very essence of its perennial charm. To nature lovers who come year after year to the place these books are a litany, and all the bird songs are echoes of the notes he loved. Nor need there be an hour of the twenty-four in this region, in May, in which the birds do not sing. No night is too dark for the wistful plaint of the whip-poor-wills, wandering voices that seem born of the loneliness of the bare places in the hills before man was. To the wakeful ear their sorrow hardly seems soothing, yet when drowsiness comes from long days in the mountain air the whip-poor-will’s plaint is a primal, preadamite lullaby that as surely sings to sleep as does the cadenced sorrow of the wind in the pines or the minor murmur of a mountain brook, intermittently tossed over the hill by the night breeze. Often at nightfall the “clackety clack, cow, cow, cow” of the yellow-billed cuckoo sounds through the Chocorua woods, as if a lanternless watchman were making his rounds and sounding the hour with his rattle. Often, too, some songbird will rouse from sleep as if he heard the cuckoo watchman, going his rounds, pipe him a sleepy bar or two of his day song, notes strangely vivid in the perfumed darkness, then drowse again with the melody half finished. But of all these the whip-poor-wills are most persistent and loudest. They greet the dusk with antiphonal chant, and when they finally follow the shadows to rest in the darkest wood the choir of day takes their silence for its matin bell.
“The farmhouse where Bolles lived and loved the woods and all that therein lived with him.”
See [page 197]
Something of Bolles’s purity of diction and sweet content in the gentle joy of life in the fields and woods, the sapphire cadences of distant mountain peaks and the chrysoprase tremolo of young leaves, seems to have come from the song of the white-throated sparrow that sings all day about Chocorua. “Peabody bird” we call the white-throat, from long custom, but to me his notes, clear, sweet and infinitely refreshing, seem to chant in accelerating diminuendo, “hap-pi-ness, hap-pi-ness, happiness,” till I lose the quivering cadences in an infinity of distance where sight and sound blend in the passing of dear dreams. The white-throated sparrow comes to the hills with the pink buds of the trailing arbutus, whose blooms are nowhere else so white and fair, and something of their fragrance seems always to come from his song. In little nooks where the early spring sunlight wells in pools of golden warmth the perfumes of the arbutus blooms and of the white-throat’s song come first, and they linger long into the summer where cool Northern hillsides hold the spring in their shadows. Sometimes the autumn, too, gives us a rare reblooming of the arbutus, and the white-throat sings his song of pure contentment well into the mellow haze of late September.
Now that May is in the mountains one may see the warblers budding from the twigs with the leaves, nor shall he at first know which dappling of living light has burgeoned from the wood or which flashed in from the sky above, so harmonious are the contrasts of rich color. Often it seems to be the leaves that sing, so well does the tiny songster fit upon his perch. All about the lake in beech and birch the young buds lisp and the half-open leaves trill with the tiny music of the parulas. As you pass from ridge to lowland and on to ridge again they lead you along the hillsides and on to the cool depths of remoter ranges where the ancient hemlocks still grow, their gray beards of usnea moss hanging sedately in the shadows among their dark trunks. The parulas feed and sing in the light of deciduous trees, but they nest in this moss in the shadows of the black growth. Here comes true the fairy tale of the birds that built their nests in beards, for as I rest in the cloistered seclusion of the hemlocks two parulas come and press aside the gray lace draperies of pendent moss and enter in. There is the beginning of the nest, this tiny cavern which they wedge with their bodies from the matted moss. The lower ends of this are to be turned up and interwoven, making the bottom more secure, and pendent there in her swinging cradle, safe from the eyes of owl or jay above, from four-footed prowlers below, the mother bird will brood her rufous-wreathed white eggs.
Many another warbler will lead the May visitor to Chocorua through these lakeside woodlands which Bolles loved. Some toll him cheerfully from one low thicket to another, where he may see the bird and the wood violet in the same glance or pluck painted and purple trilliums and not lose sight of his quest. Of these is the black-masked Maryland yellow-throat, whose song of “witchery, witchery, witchery,” always speaks for itself alone. No bird seems necessary for the production of this. It buds from the air as young leaves do from the twigs, impelled by a magic power within itself, nor, when you finally find the bird, demurely winding his masked way through the low growth, does the voice by any chance proceed from his throat. All warblers are ventriloquists, but I always think the Maryland yellow-throat of the Chocorua thickets the most demure magician of them all. Perhaps the black mask has something to do with it, lending to the eye the same thought which the puzzled ear conveys. The yellow-throats are building now, weaving their grass nests in tussocks of swamp grass down by the water’s edge, hiding them not so uniquely indeed as the parulas, but almost as well. The spikes of swamp grass grow tall about each nest, and its deep cup if seen at all from the outside is to the eye but a tangle of the last year’s grasses, matted down under this year’s growth. If I find these nests it is only by looking directly down into the heart of each tussock until I reach the right one. Yet this is not particularly difficult. It means only a little patience in inspection, after the probable neighborhood has been defined by the presence of the birds themselves. The yellow-throats are shy about their nests. If you inspect them too often they will leave them and begin all over again in a new locality. But, away from the nest, they are an easy bird to see much of. A man in their neighborhood is an object of insatiable curiosity to them, and you do not need to discover them if they are near. Instead they will come, creeping and peering through the bushes, to inspect you if you will but sit quietly in the region in which that “witchery” song is born out of the circumambient air.