“Hi! Hi! Hi!” he shouted. “Fellow citizens, there’s a man in the woods here. He is motionless, but he is only making believe dead. Look out for him!”
Far and near the cry rang and was taken up by others of his tribe who passed the word along. “There’s a man in the woods!” they shouted, “look out for him.” The birds singing near by ceased their songs for a moment that they might have a look at the man, for they understand the crow’s note of warning as well as if they too spoke his language.
The thrushes were singing now, and after a while the catbird, lazy reprobate, awoke. He too, like the crow, is a gossip, and more than that he is a tease. He shook his head a little to straighten the ruffled feathers of the neck, disturbed by their position for the night. He stretched one leg and the wing on that side simultaneously, then the other leg and the other wing, a bird yawn as expressive as the human one. Then he cocked his head on one side with a gesture of pleased surprise and excitement and said, “Mi-a-aw!” He too had seen the invader of the swamp.
The catbird is a good singer, that is, a good mimic. His taste is good, too, for he imitates only the best. Here in the North he imitates the brown thrush, no doubt, all things considered, our best vocalist. So well does he imitate him that you shall not say of a surety that this is the catbird singing and yonder is the thrush. In the South he imitates the mocking-bird with equal fidelity. You would say on casual acquaintance that he was our ablest singer and most exemplary bird as he masquerades in the voices of others, but let him once be frightened, or angered, or over-excited about anything and the reprobate part of him reasserts itself and he says “Mi-a-aw!” Hence his name, the catbird.
The catbird, however, has the courage of his convictions, and one of these convictions is that he has the right to the satisfaction of an ungovernable and enormous curiosity. Bait your bird trap in the woods with something which strikes a bird as a curiosity that courts immediate investigation and you will catch a catbird. Other birds might start for it but the catbird would distance them. So, after saying “Mi-a-aw!” a few times and drawing no response to his challenge, he flew up to a twig within a foot of my head, sat there a moment, motionless except his beady black eyes which traversed my form from foot to head, finally resting on my eyes. Inadvertently I winked; that was the only motion I made, but it was enough. With a flirt of his tail and a flip of his wings the catbird was through the thicket and out on the other side like a gray flash, scolding away at the top of his voice and seeming to shout as the crow had, “There’s a man in the wood! There’s a man in the wood! Look out for him!”
The crimson and gold of the dawn had softened and diffused into diaphanous mother-of-pearl mists of early day. The June morning miracle was complete and it was high time I allowed the oven bird to come back and be assured that her nest and eggs were safe.
STALKING THE WILD GRAPE
STALKING THE WILD GRAPE
IT was to be a moonlight night, yet the moon was on the wane and would not rise until eleven. It seemed as if the pasture birds missed the moon, or expected it, for beginning with the June dusk at eight o’clock one after another made brief queries from red cedar shelter or greenbrier thicket. One or two indeed insisted on pouring forth snatches of morning song, sending them questing through the darkness for several minutes, then ceasing as if ashamed of having been misled.
The cuckoo, of course, you may hear often on any warm night, springing his watchman’s rattle chuckle from the denser part of the thicket. But for the brown thrush to be announcing morning every half-hour through the darkness was an absurdity to be accounted for only on the theory that here was a gay young blood who was practising for a moonlight serenade. And when the moon did come, touching the tops of the pines first with a fine edging of gold, dropping a luminous benediction to the birches and diffusing it lower and lower till the whole pasture was gold and dusk, the ecstasy of the thrush knew no limit. He poured forth a perfect uproar of liquid melody, punctuated with such hurroos and whoops of delight that he made me wonder if his lady love would like such college-song methods of serenading.