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BIRDS AND
BRIGHT LEAVES AFTER the
red maple trees and the yellow birches are mostly bare, and the greater part of
the sugar groves have passed the zenith of their brilliancy, then the poplars
come to the rescue. The hills are all at once bright again with a second crop
of color, an aftermath of splendid sun-bright yellow. I knew nothing about this
beforehand, and am delighted over the discovery. From my Franconia window I am
looking at as pretty an autumnal wood as any man need wish to see, and it is a
wood the seasonable glories of which were ended, I thought, more than a week
ago. As I look at it I feel sorry for my last week’s companion, who went home
too soon. Since his departure the days have been outdoing one another in the
softness of their airs and the beauty of their lights. Mother Earth has been in
her most amiable mood. Nothing is too good for her children. I have never seen
fairer weather; though some, I dare say, might criticise it as a few degrees
too warm. It is hard, I admit, for a walker to keep a coat on his back, far
along as the season is getting, when the sun wrestles with him for it. An
interesting thing to me has been the tardy brightening of individual maple
trees. It is one more manifestation, I assume, of Nature’s gift of versatility,
her faculty of variation, to which, all but universal as it is, scientific men
attribute so much potency in the evolving of so-called species. What I notice just
now is that, as some bushes and trees mature their fruit later than others of
the same kind, living apparently under the same conditions, so some maple trees
are a week or two behind their immediate neighbors in ripening their foliage. I
have passed within a day or two both sugar maples and red maples that were just
donning their gay robes. Well done, I am moved to say, as my eye lights on
them. They and the poplars, together with certain extensive maple groves on the
higher levels, still keep the world arrayed in a really barbaric splendor. Two
weeks ago I should have prophesied that before this time the landscape would be
stripped for winter; and so it would have been, perhaps, if a cold storm had
supervened instead of this period of summery brightness and calm. Great is
weather. There is nothing like it. It makes a man — and a tree, too, for aught
I know — glad to be alive. That it
makes the birds happy is beyond dispute. You can see it with half an eye. Many
of them are gone, it is true, but many others are left; and wherever you take
your walk you may have joy of them. You will need to be blind and deaf, or of a
hopelessly sour temper, not to catch a little of their cheeriness. Three days
ago (it was an anniversary with me, and I was early abroad) I went into the
kitchen garden before breakfast, as I have been doing frequently of late, to
see what birds might be there. For a month and more, as the coarse grasses and
weeds have ripened their crop (the garden, luckily for me, having been allowed
to go untended), the place has been a favorite resort of sparrows. There I saw
the Lincoln finches in their time, — on September 5 and subsequently, — and
there for a fortnight past I have always been able to begin the day with a few
white-crowns. Well, on
the morning in question one of the first things I heard was a brief,
uncharacteristic, autumnal-sounding ditty which, being too short for a song
sparrow’s work, I at once credited to a white-crown; and, to be sure, when I
looked that way, there the bird stood on a top stone of the wall, a young
fellow, not yet “crowned,” practicing his first musical exercises. The morning
was cool, — the ground had stiffened overnight, — and every time he opened his
mouth to sing, a tiny cloud of vapor could be seen rising from it. It was
visible music. Again and again I watched him. The dear little chorister!
Nobody’s birthday was ever more prettily honored. He “sang to my eye” indeed—
in a daintily literal sense such as the poet never thought of. I wonder if any
one, anywhere, ever saw and heard the like. The
white-crowns have been surprisingly musical (the weather, no doubt, being a
provocation), but I have not once heard their spring song, or anything which to
my ear — none too well accustomed to it — has seemed to bear any relation
thereto. Song sparrows, on the other hand, while mostly contenting themselves
with incoherent, sotto-voce twitterings, have now and then — almost
daily, I think — varied the programme with more or less successful attempts at
a fuller-voiced and more formal melody. As for the vesper sparrows, they have
mainly kept silence, but on one or two bright mornings have sung as sweetly as
ever they do in May. Indeed, I might truthfully say more than that; for at this
season, when all bright things are taking leave, a strain of wild music is more
grateful to the ear than by any possibility it can be when every newly green
bush is part of the universal choir gallery. To us who
have been in the habit of coming to this valley in bright-leaf time nothing is
more characteristic, as nothing is more welcome, than the continual familiar
presence of bluebirds. This year, because I have stayed later than usual, it
may be, they have seemed uncommonly abundant. Their voices are sure to be among
the first to be heard as I step out of the door in the morning, and wherever I
walk — in the open country — I find myself surrounded at frequent intervals by
a larger or smaller flock. Two days ago I counted forty in sight at once; and a
bunch of forty bluebirds — well, there may be pleasanter sights for a
bird-lover (a flock of sixty, for example), but it is a sight to raise low
spirits, especially for a man who remembers the time — after a cruel winter —
when the vision of a single bird was accepted by all of us as an event to talk about.
Myrtle
warblers (yellow-rumps) are still more numerous, and if a bluebird quits a
perch and takes wing it is almost an even chance that a yellow-rump, who has
been sitting near at hand, waiting for this to happen, will be seen dashing in
pursuit. You may go down the village street and watch the trick repeated half a
dozen times within half a mile. To my walking companion and myself the sight
has come to be part of a Franconia autumn. If you are pretty close to the birds
you may hear a bill snapping (the warbler’s, I think), as if in anger, but on
the whole I am inclined to believe that the thing is no more than an innocent,
though one-sided, game of tag. All young creatures must have something to play
with, somebody to make game of. So it is with yellow-rumps, I dare say; but why
should they so universally pitch upon the inoffensive bluebird, I should like
to know. It is to be added, however, to make the story truthful, that if there
are no bluebirds handy, the warblers take it out by a free chasing of each
other. To watch them, one would think that life, by their apprehension of it,
were all a holiday. And while I am talking of bluebirds I ought to mention their habit of
hanging about bird boxes in these last days of their Northern season. Only this
forenoon, since the foregoing paragraphs were written, I passed a box perched
upon a pole beside a house, and at least six bluebirds were sitting upon its
platform, or investigating its different apartments. Sometimes a pair (so they
looked, one bright colored, the other dull) sat side by side before a door,
like married lovers. Sometimes one would go inside, sometimes both, while out
of the next door another bird would be peeping. The box was very unlikely to
have been their home; the countryside is overrun with bluebirds, too many by
half to have summered hereabout; but evidently the sight of it had suggested
family pleasures. Perhaps they were living over the past, perhaps forecasting
the future. Bluebirds have their full share of sentiment, or both voice and
behavior are rank deceivers. Concerning this aspect of the case, however, the
frivolous yellow-rumps cared not a farthing. They sat in a small apple tree
conveniently near, and as often as a bluebird ventured upon the wing, one or
two of them started instantly in pursuit. If he alighted upon a fence post,
down they dropped upon the next rail and waited for him to make another sally.
Once I heard a bluebird utter a pretty sharp note of remonstrance, but that, we
may guess, only made the fun the greater. Birds will be birds. My morning
stroll (it is October 13, my last day in Franconia) showed me, in addition to
the birds already named, one lonesome-mannered hermit thrush, a few robins, two
or three ruby-crowned kinglets, one of them running over with his musical twittity,
twittity, twittity, a single yellow palm warbler (this and the myrtle have
been the only warblers of the month), a red cross-bill, going somewhere, as
usual, and leaving word behind him as he went, a small flock of pine siskins, a
strangely few song sparrows, one vesper sparrow, one white-crown, a multitude
of snowbirds, a purple finch or two, a goldfinch, and a grouse, with the
inevitable crows, jays, chickadees, and red-breasted nuthatches. Had my walk
been longer and into a more varied country, I should have found gold-crested
kinglets, winter wrens, brown creepers, titlarks (perhaps), white-throated
sparrows, field sparrows, chippers, tree sparrows (probably), and three or four
kinds of woodpeckers. And
speaking of woodpeckers, I must allow myself to boast that within the last few
days I have had exceptional luck with the big fellow of them all, known in
books as the pileated. On the 9th I saw one and heard the halloo of another,
and on the 11th I saw two (together) and heard a third. One of those seen on
the 11th shouted at full length, and at the top of his voice while flying. The
pileated woodpecker is a splendid bird. A pity he cannot find himself at home
in our Massachusetts country. To see him here in New Hampshire one might imagine
that he belonged with the mountains and would be homesick in other company; but
if you would see him oftener than anywhere else, you may go to a land where
there is scarcely so much as a hillock — to the peninsula of Florida. There or
here, he is a great bird. The brightest maple leaf that ever took color was not
so bright as his crest. |
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