Wild Pastures

by Winthrop Packard

The worst of it is there is little I could do either in the way of prevention or revenge. I did get out my big old ten-bore duck gun, which I have not had the heart to use on a bird, even a coot, for a dozen years, and began cannonading the miscreants, but this was more disturbing to the neighbors than to the sparrows.

One of the gentlest nature lovers I ever knew, wise in bird ways and very fond of all birds, used to say that he wished all the English sparrows in the world had but one neck, and that he might have that neck in his hands. I wish he might, too.

So, after weeks of absence, the bluebirds have come back. Their speckle-breasted young, which they would have brought up among my apple trees and in the cloistered seclusion of the lilac bushes, have grown up in the pasture instead, and very likely their plans for next year will include the pasture wild-apple tree rather than my bird box, and they are far shyer and less responsive to my advances than they would have been. Their song has in it a plaint of autumnal regret. In the spring they sang, “Cheerily; cheerily.” Now they say, “Going away; going away.” It has in it something of the quality of “Lochaber no more.”

But it is not merely the bluebirds which have been silent for some weeks and are now beginning to sing again. The time between early July and mid-August is a period of retirement for all birddom. The mating season, with its soul-stirring ecstasies, the labor of nest building, the anxieties of brooding, have been followed by the tremendous exertion of caring for that nestful of young birds. A healthy fledgling will eat almost his own weight of food in a day, and by the time he is able to fly and chase the old birds around for more the father and mother are worn to a frazzle. I really believe the youngsters are weaned only when their demand for food becomes so enormous with their completed growth that the parents cease to supply it through sheer physical exhaustion.

I once reared a pair of young crows by hand, taking them from the home nest in a big pine, leaving three others—quite enough I afterward thought—for the parent birds. They were negroid, naked, pod-bodied creatures at the time, with long clutchy claws, ridiculous stubs of wings, and, ye gods, what mouths! When I fed them I used to clutch something with one hand lest I fall in. And I was incessantly feeding them. Anxious to treat them kindly and finding that frogs were a most acceptable diet to them I depopulated the township of Rana virescens and allied species. Then I found that fish would do about as well, and I fished until there began to be a shortage of angle-worms in the community. Yet still the creatures grew apace and demanded more food.

By and by they got big enough to use their wings and, recognizing me as their undoubted parent, came flapping and clawing after me wherever I went, yelling, “Caw, caw, ca-aw-aw,” in most heartrending crescendo. Then did I realize to the full the responsibility of being a father bird. Stuff those clamorous creatures as I might, they still pleaded in agonizing tones for more, and no one not cognizant of the facts would have believed that they were ever fed. The lamb that loved Mary so, and followed her also, was not a circumstance to the clamorous devotion of those two young crows toward me, their foster parent.

My one fear for weeks was that the resident agent for the S. P. C. A., who was a vigilant and tender-hearted lady of undoubted indiscretion, would hear their evidently unanswered appeals and proceed against me. She could have convicted me on the evidence in any district court in Norfolk County; and yet those young birds were eating everything there was in the place outside of cold storage.

Such is the appetite of the growing bird. Yet there comes a time in the passing of the summer when the youngsters are taught, or learn through necessity, to forage for themselves and cease their fritinancy. Then the thickets are strangely silent. The youngsters no longer yearn noisily and they have not yet learned to sing. The old birds have ceased singing. Indeed, there is nothing left of them but their bones and feathers, and that atmosphere of conscious rectitude which comes with successful completion of a noble and herculean task. And then even their feathers begin to go, for the moulting season is at hand.

No longer does the male scarlet tanager sit like a lambent flame in the top of a tree and warble, “Look-up, way-up, look-at-me, treetop,” His scarlet suit begins to fade, grow dingy, show signs of wear, and finally go all to pieces while he sits mute and dumpy in the shadow. By and by the scarlet will have changed completely to a dull olive-green, like that of his inconspicuous mate, and though he still retains the black of his wings and tail you would not know him.

So the bobolink who swung so conspicuously on the meadow grass in June in his black and white suit comes through the moulting season brown as a sparrow. The vivid blue of the indigo bunting falls from him in patches and is replaced by grayish brown in a large measure.