Little Brothers of the Air Part 8

A small family in dark slate-color and white, with a curious taste for the antique cave-dwelling, was next on our list. The home was an excavation in the soft earth, held together by the roots of an overturned tree, and everything was quiet when we arrived--the two well-grown infants sound asleep on their hair mattress. We sat down to wait, and in a moment we heard the anxious "pip" of the returning parents. They had been attending to their regular morning work, and both brought food for those youngsters, who woke inopportunely--as babies will--and demanded it instantly.

Junco--for he was the head of this household--paused on a twig near by, opened and shut his beautiful white-bordered tail, in the embarra.s.sing consideration whether he should go in before our eyes and take the risk of our intentions, or let his evidently starving offspring suffer. He "eyed us over;" he waited till his modest little spouse, acting from feeling rather than from judgment (as was to be expected from one of her unreasoning s.e.x), had slipped in from below, administered her morsel to those precious babies, and escaped unharmed. Then he plucked up courage, boldly entered his door, gave a poke behind it, and flew away.

A week later, after we had called as usual one morning and found the house empty, he brought his pretty snow-birdlings in their tidy striped bibs up to the grove at the back door, where we often heard his sharp trilling little song, and saw him working like some bigger papas to keep the dear clamorous mouths filled.

The Junco neighborhood was a populous part of our calling district.

Behind his cave, in a high tree, lived a family of golden-winged woodp.e.c.k.e.rs, who "laughed" and talked as loud as they liked, scorning to look upon the two spies so far below them. Not quite so self-possessed and bold were they a little later, when madam came up to the gra.s.s by the farmhouse with her young son to teach him to dig, for that is what she did. He was a canny youngster, though he was shy, and had no notion of being left in the lurch for a moment. If mamma flew to the fence, he instantly followed; did she return to the ground, baby was in a second at her side demanding attention. On one occasion while I was watching them behind my blind, the mother managed to slip away from him and disappear. In a moment he realized his deserted condition, stretched up, like a lost chicken, looking about on every side, and calling, in a most plaintive tone, "pe-au! au!" and then, "au! au! pe-au!" When at length he saw his mother, he burst into a loud cry of delight, and flew into a locust-tree, where I heard for a long time low complaining cries, as if he reproached her for leaving her baby alone on the fence.

On the right of the home of the golden wings, in a sapling not more than five feet from the ground, was the residence of a gay little redstart, which we had watched almost from the laying of the foundations. We made our visit. Yesterday there were two pearls of promise within; to-day, alas! nothing.

Squirrels, we said; for those beasts were the bugaboo of the woods to its feathered inhabitants. Hardly a nest was so high, so well hidden, or so closely watched, but some unlucky day a little fellow--sportsman, would you call him?--- in gray or red fur, would find his chance, and make his breakfast on next year's song birds.

Musing on this and other tragedies among our friends, we silently turned to the next neighbor. At this door we could knock, and we always did.

(We desired to be civil when circ.u.mstances permitted.) A rap or two on the dead trunk brought hastily to the door, twenty-five feet high, a small head, with a bright red cap and necktie, and eager, questioning eyes. Observing that he had guests, he came out, showing his black and white coat. But one glance was usually enough; he declined to entertain us, and instantly took his leave. We knew him well, however--the yellow-bellied woodp.e.c.k.e.r, or "sapsucker," as he was called in the vicinity. This morning we did not need to knock, for one of the family was already outside,--a young woodp.e.c.k.e.r, clinging to the bark, and dressing his nest-ruffled plumage for the grand performance, his first flight. We resolved at once to a.s.sist at the debut, secured reserved seats with a good view, and seated ourselves to wait.

Didst ever, dear reader, sit in one position on a camp-stool without a back, with head thrown back, and eyes fixed upon one small bird thirty feet from the ground, afraid to move or turn your eyes, lest you miss what you are waiting for, while the sun moves steadily on till his hottest rays pour through some opening directly upon you; while mosquitoes sing about your ears (would that they sang only!), and flies buzz noisily before your face; while birds flit past, and strange notes sound from behind; while rustling in the dead leaves at your feet suggests snakes, and a crawling on your neck proclaims spiders? If you have not, you can never appreciate the enthusiasms of a bird student, nor realize what neck-breaks and other discomforts one will cheerfully endure to witness the first flight of a nestling.

This affair turned out, however, as in many another case of great expectations, to be no remarkable performance. When the debutant had made his toilet, he flew, as if he had done it all his life, to the next tree, where he began at once to call for refreshment, after his exertion.

Disappointed, we dropped our eyes, whisked away our insect tormentors, gathered up our properties, and pa.s.sed on our way.

This was the farthest point of our wanderings. The way back was through a narrow path beside the oven-bird's pretty domed nest, then between the tangle of wild-berry bushes and saplings, where a cuckoo had set up housekeeping, and where veeries and warblers had successfully hidden their nests, tantalizing us with calls and songs from morning till night; from thence through the garden, past the kitchen door, home.

XIV.

A BOBOLINK RHAPSODY.

Can anything be more lovely than a meadow in June, its tall gra.s.s overtopped by daisies, whose open faces,

"Candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free, Publish themselves to the sky"?

One such I knew, despised of men as a meadow, no doubt, but glorious to the eye with its unbroken stretch of white bowing before the summer breeze like the waves of the sea, and charming as well to pewee and kingbird who hovered over it, ever and anon diving and bringing up food for the nestlings. When, to a meadow not so completely abandoned to daisies, where b.u.t.tercups and red clover flourish among the gra.s.s, is added the music of the meadow's poet, the bobolink, surely nothing is lacking to its perfection.

Pa.s.sing such a field one evening, I noted the babble of bobolinks, too far off to hear well, and the next day I set out down another path which pa.s.sed through the meadow, to cultivate the acquaintance of the birds.

It was a warm summer morning, near the middle of June, and when I reached the spot not a bobolink was in sight; but I sought a convenient bank under an old apple-tree, made myself as inconspicuous as possible, and waited. With these birds, however, as I soon found out, my precautions were unnecessary. They are not chary of their music; on the contrary, they appear to sing directly to a spectator, and they are too confident of the security of the nest to be disturbed about that. In a moment a black head with its buff cap appeared at the top of a gra.s.s stem, and instantly the black body, with its grotesque white decoration, followed. The bird flew half a dozen feet, singing as he went, as if the movement of the wings set the music going, alighted a little nearer, sang again, and finally, concluding that here was something to be looked after, a human being, such as he was accustomed to see pa.s.s by, taking possession of a part of the bobolink domain, he flew boldly to a small tree a few yards from me. He alighted on the top twig, in plain sight, and proceeded to "look me over," a performance which I returned with interest. He was silent only a few seconds, but the sound that came from his beak amazed me; it was a "mew." If the cat-bird cry resembles that of a cat, this was a perfect copy of a kitten's weak wail. It was always uttered twice in close succession, and sometimes followed by a harsh note that proclaimed his blackbird strain, a "chack!"

His utterance was thus: "mew, mew (quickly), chack!" and I interpreted it into a warning to me to leave the premises. I did not go, however, and after several repet.i.tions his vigilance began to relax. He was really so full of sweet summer madness that it was impossible to keep up the role of stern guardian of the nests under the veil of b.u.t.tercups and daisies, which he knew all the time I could never find. So, when he opened his mouth to say "chack," a note or two would irresistibly bubble out beside it, as if he said, "You really must go away, my big friend.

We cannot have you in our fields;--but, after all, isn't the morning delicious?"

After a long conflict between desire to sing and his conviction of duty as special policeman, which ludicrously suggested Mr. d.i.c.k in his struggle between longing to be foolish with David Copperfield and to be grave to please Miss Betsy, he fairly gave in and did sing--and such a burst! Everybody has tried his hand at characterizing this bird's incomparable song, but no one has fully expressed it, for words are not capable of it. Perhaps Mrs. Spofford has caught the spirit as well as any one:--

"Last year methinks the bobolinks Filled the low fields with vagrant tune, The sweetest songs of sweetest June-- Wild spurts of frolic, always gladly Bubbling, doubling, brightly troubling, Bubbling rapturously, madly."

Expressing himself was so great a relief to my bobolink, after his unnatural gravity of demeanor, that he repeated the performance again and again. I say repeated it; I found that he had two ways of beginning, but after he got into his ecstasy I could think of nothing but how marvelous it was, so that whether the two differed all through I am not sure. It was every time a new rapture to me as well as to him. One of his beginnings that I had time to note before I was lost in the flood of melody was of two notes, the second a fifth higher than the first, with a "grace-note," very low indeed, before each one. The other beginning was also two notes, the second at least a fifth lower than the first, with an indescribable jerk between, and uttered so softly that if I had been a little further away I could not have heard it. It sounded like "tut, now."

Seeing that I remained motionless, the bird forgot altogether his uncongenial occupation of watchman, and launched himself into the air toward me, soaring round and round me, letting fall such a flood, such a torrent, of liquid notes that I thought half a dozen were singing,--and then dropped into the gra.s.s. Soon others appeared here and there, and sang it mattered not how or where,--soaring or beating the wings, on a gra.s.s stem, the top of a tree, hidden in the gra.s.s, or rudely rocked by the wind, they "sang and sang and sang."

Then for a while all was still. A turkey leading her fuzzy little brood about in the gra.s.s thrust her scrawny neck and anxious head above the daisies, said "quit! quit!" to me, and returned to the brooding mother-tones that kept her family around her. Tiring of my position while waiting for the concert to resume, I laid my head back among the ferns, letting the daisies and b.u.t.tercups tower above my face,--strangely enough, by this simple act realizing as never before the real motherhood of the earth.

While I lay musing, lo, a sudden burst of music above my head! A bobolink sailed over my face, not three feet from it, singing his merriest, and then dropped into the gra.s.s behind me. Oh, never did I so much wish for eyes in the back of my head! He must be almost within touch, yet I dared not move; doubtless I was under inspection by that keen dark eye, for the first movement sent him away with a whir.

My next visitors were a small flock of six or eight cedar-birds, who were seriously disturbed by my choice of a couch. Evidently the green tent above my head was their chosen tree, and they could not give it up.

Finding me perfectly silent, they would come, perch in various parts of the branches, and turn their wise-looking black spectacles down to look at me, keeping up an animated conversation the while. We call the cedar-bird silent because he has, as generally supposed, but one low note; but he can put into that one an almost infinite variety of expressions. If I so much as moved a hand, instantly my Quaker-clad friends dived off the tree below the bank across the road, as if, in their despair, they had flung themselves madly into the brook at the bottom. But I did not suspect them of so rash an act, and, indeed, in a few minutes the apple-tree again resounded with their cries.

Meanwhile the sun marched relentlessly on, and the shadows without and the feelings within alike pointed to the dinner hour (12 M.). I rose, and thereby created a panic in my small world. Six cedar-birds disappeared over the bank, a song sparrow flew shrieking across the field, a squirrel interrupted in his investigations fled madly along the rail fence, every few steps stopping an instant, with hindquarters laid flat and tail resting on the rail, to see if his head was still safe on his shoulders.

I gathered up my belongings and sauntered off toward home, musing, as I went, upon the bobolink family. I had not once seen or heard the little mates. Were they busy in the gra.s.s with bobolink babies? and did they enjoy the music as keenly as I did? How much I "wanted to know"! How I should like to see the nests and the nestlings! What sort of a father is the gay singer? (Some of the blackbird family are exemplary in this relation.) Does he drop his part of poet, of reveler of the meadows, I wonder, and come down to the sober prose of stuffing baby mouths? Are bobolinks always this jolly, delightful crowd? Are they never quarrelsome? Alas! it would take much more than one day, however sunny and however long, to tell all these things.

At the edge of the meadow I sat down again, hoping for one more song, and then came the crown of the whole morning, the choicest reserved for the last. A bird sailed out from behind the daisies, pa.s.sed over my head, and delivered the most bewitching rhapsody I had yet heard. Not merely once did he honor me, but again and again without pausing, as if he intended to fill me as full of bobolink rapture as he was himself.

His voice was peculiarly rich and full, and, what amazed me, his first three notes were an exact reproduction of the wood-thrush's (though more rapidly sung), including the marvelous organ-like quality of that bird's voice. I could have listened forever.

"Oh, what have I to do with time?

For this the day was made."

But when he had uttered his message he sank back into the gra.s.s, and I tore myself away from the bobolink meadow, and came home far richer and far happier than when I set out.

XV.

THE BOBOLINK'S NEST.

My acquaintance with the bobolink was resumed a year later in the lovely summer home of a friend in the Black River Country, within sight of the Adirondack hills. We had found many nests in the woods and orchards, but the meadow had been safe from our feet, partly because of the rich crops that covered it, but more, perhaps, because of the hopelessness of the search over the broad fields for anything so easily hidden as a ground nest.

One evening, however, our host with a triumphant air invited us to walk, declaring that he could show us a nest more interesting than we had found.

The gentleman was a joker, and his statements were apt to be somewhat embellished by his vivid imagination, so that we accepted them with caution; but now he looked exultant, and we believed him, especially as he took his hat and stick and started off.

Down the road we went, a single carriage-way between two banks of gra.s.s a yard high. After carefully taking his bearings by certain small elm-trees, and searching diligently about for an inconspicuous dead twig he had planted as a guide-post, our leader confidently waded into the green depths, parted the stalks in a certain spot, and bade us look.

We did. In a cosy cup, almost under our feet, were cuddled together three bird-babies.

"Bobolinks?" we cried in a breath.

"Yes, bobolinks," said our guide; "and you had to wait for an old half-blind man to find them for you."

We were too much delighted to be annoyed by his teasing; a bobolink's nest we never hoped to see.

Nor should we, but for a discovery of mine that very morning. Walking down that same road, I had noticed in the deep gra.s.s near the path a clump of exquisite wild flowers. They were of gorgeous coloring, shaded from deep orange to rich yellow, full petaled like an English daisy, and about the size of that flower, with the edge of every tiny petal cut in fairy-like fringe. I admired them for some minutes as they grew, and then gathered a handful to grace my room. As I came up to the house, my host stood on the steps; his eyes fell at once upon my nosegay, and a look of horror came into his face.

My heart sank. Had I unwittingly picked some of his special treasures, some rare exotic which he had cultivated with care?