il ta Pia teins —_— 4 ew : te eg th ink i Mou Hatt “Ht Pieifisat i ea i es aarte Seater tata! ty rs oe i PEER See Sa ons oe i i { ters! ey Sette se ycet es Syaterin eet Seerasace Leet BAe area Se ee" = Sees Scott iF fi be is ¥ De bi) 1 ay ye ae oi) i & f > Py § e Are y ; : ie yonyopoo4, buzwjnbuy up WILDLIFE of ORCHARD =:-: and FIELD & PAPERS ON AMERICAN We. ANIMAL LIFE BY e ~~ YS wy es as Lr ae aw > ERNEST INGERSOLL _AUTHOR OF “NATURE'S a sme * « A Friendly Chipmunk Wea Eh OP ORCHARD) AND! FIELD climb upon her friend’s knee, and often followed her some distance down the street, barking softly if the lady did not speak to her or stroke her back. The same squirrel brought her babies one day to show them to her host, although it cost her an hour of coaxing to persuade them to follow her from the brush-protected fence across the drive- way to the porch. Any one who has watched the patient, anxious way in which the squirrel- mothers (for the fathers are away at this time disporting themselves, heedless of domestic cares) encourage their youngsters to venture out upon the shaky limbs, and instruct them in general, can well understand the relief of this little mother when she had brought the kittens safely to the side of their protectress. How human it was! At another time several squirrels used to come to this lady’s window, where she fed them, and they had a habit, when climbing about her, of nibbling her ears. “It is never painful or rough,”’ J she writes, “ but is evidently a caress.’’? Such, no doubt, were their endearments to each other. The popular notion that squirrels of all sorts subsist wholly on nuts arises from limited, not to say careless, observation. Their food is widely varied in the course of a year, especially in the TE WILD LIWE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD spring and summer. Indian corn in the milk suffers more from squirrels than from raccoons or muskrats, which are proverbially so fond of it. In places on the Western frontier an expensive system of watching has had to be maintained at times against this pest. One dainty in late sum- mer is the mushroom, of several varieties of which they are fond; and this reminds me of a bit of un- expected sagacity in one of the Western chipmunks lately spoken of in my hearing by an observer of it. It appears that this chipmunk depends for its ordinary fall and winter fare upon the seeds of the pifion pine, which it preserves by storage in its holes in decayed stumps or underground. It happened lately, however, that in a certain area of the Northwest the pifion crop was a complete failure, and the ground-squirrels were compelled to find something else for their subsistence and winter stores. In this extremity they turned to the mush- rooms, everywhere abundant, and were busy during all the late autumn in gathering them. They were too wise, however, to store them under- ground, where they would soon have rotted, but instead deposited them in notches and crotches of the lower branches of the forest trees, where they dried in the open air and so kept in good condition 12 Pee hs Ob vORCIRARD’ AND. FIELD to be eaten. Their shrivelling up and the shak- ing of the branches by the winds caused many to fall, and these the squirrels industriously picked up and tried to fasten more securely to the branches. This method of providing themselves with winter food implied the necessity of their coming forth from their underground retreats, no matter how cold and snowy the weather, whenever they want- ed something to eat, instead of having their larder in-doors as is usual with them; and it would be interesting to know whether they actually did so, or whether they failed to profit, after all, by their seemingly sagacious prudence. The worst enemy of the squirrels, chipmunks, and all other “ small deer” in the Eastern woods is the weasel, of which naturalists distinguish two or three species, until lately confounded and even regarded as identical with the European ermine. To him day and night are alike, winter has no terrors, and all castles are unlocked. He does not need the opportunity offered by the farm- er’s poultry-yard to enable him to live merrily in the midst of civilization. The civilization of the country, indeed, has worked to the advantage rather than otherwise 13 WILD LLFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD of most of the lesser mammals, which are favored by man’s operations in various ways. For the raccoon he cultivates miles of rows of sweet corn, and for the woodchuck provides a vast expanse of erass-land and garden-patches. He has fought for the opossum and the skunk the battle of the weak against wildcat and wolf, and has enabled the former to extend its domain east of the Hudson River, where it was not primitively known—that great stream having proved an apparently in- surmountable barrier to the spread of our comical little marsupial; and for both of them he nurtures a vast increase of insect-food and sundry luxuries that the woodland bill of fare did not often afford. The porcupine he tolerates as an amusing com- panion of his woodcutting, sugar-making, and fishing camps, and for fox and weasel the farmer’s wife rears excellent poultry. It is for the mink and otter, among other beneficiaries, that govern- ments stock and restock their brooks and ponds with fish, while corporations dig canals and maintain reservoirs at great expense to make the most satisfactory of homes for the muskrats. Who shall say men are not kind to the lesser aninals! There are animals, as I am again reminded by 14 Wire Doh es) OF VORCIAR DD) AND) BIEL D the kindly critic looking over my shoulder, that everybody hears about and few see, and perhaps would not recognize when they did. But sure- ly every one would know a ’coon — that comical little rascal, weighing about as much as a house- cat, and, like him, wearing a long, grizzled fur, with the hairs standing out as if blown apart by the breeze, but having the round, fat, loose shape of a well-fed bear. Likea bear, too, it walks on the whole sole of its flat, black-stockinged feet, which brings its body close to the ground, and half the time it is sitting up on its broad stern like a portly squirrel. The long tail is marked by a succession of black rings, and the sharp nose and bright eyes, set in striped fur, give it the cute, intelligent look of a fox. Raccoons live in holes in trees (where they remain out of sight most of the daylight hours) and are properly arboreal animals, as we know from the veritable story of Colonel Davy Crockett; but at night they come down to raid the farmer’s corn- fields, and in wilder regions to steal along the banks of woodland streams in search of crabs and mussels, and (by the sea) of oysters. All these things they handle in their fore-paws with the clev- erness of a monkey, and, whenever they can, carry 15 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD. AND *“FIELD them to water and wash them well before eating them. : “‘TIt is pleasant,’’ says Rowland Robinson, “‘ to see the tracks of this midnight prowler, this de- spoiler of cornfields, imprinted in the mud of the lane or along the soft margin of the brook, to know that he survives, though he may not be fittest. When he has gone forever, those who outlive him will know whether it was his quavering note that jarred the still air of the early fall evenings, or if it was only the voice of the owl.” The opossum, too, is a woodland animal, rather less nocturnal than the ’coon, and, like him, fond of fruit and insects and crabs; but he has neither the strength nor cleverness that enable his larger companion to get so varied a fare. He is smaller than the ’coon, about twice as big as a rat, and shaped much like one, which he further resembles in having a long, naked tail. The prolonged, flexible nose and the tail, however, are pinkish white, and the latter has the prehensile quality of some monkeys’ and snakes’ tails, curling round any support at the tip so firmly that the creature can hang and swing by it, thus giving it a fifth hand. It is a queer, whitey-gray, antique-look- 16 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD ing little creature, not only largely nocturnal in its habits, but shy and quick to conceal itself on the farther side of a limb or tree, where its gray color enables it to escape observation. The muskrat, on the other hand, is a brown, aquatic rat, with a naked, scaly, somewhat flattened tail, adapted to scull him along in swimming and diving, and teeth almost as strong for gnawing as those of his cousin, the beaver. He thrives upon man’s bounty, in spite of the fact that he is per- secuted and chased by many persons with many motives. To some it is sufficient that he is a wild animal—game—something provided by Providence for boys to stone and shoot; to others his skin has a prospective value; and a third class tries to de- stroy him because he misuses human hospitality by undermining embankments, boring holes in dams and canal banks, and catching captive fish. Nevertheless, the muskrat maintains his tribe in every part of the country. He lives in a fine home underground, at the ex- tremity of a hall-way ten, twenty, or even thirty feet long, which opens upon a stream bank usually by two doors, one about the level of low water, and the other near high-water mark. Besides this there is usually an inland opening (for ven- 2 17 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD tilation or escape?) which the musquash, like the woodchuck, has learned to hide within a clump of bush or grass. Here, when the spring begins to grow warm, are born six or seven young, and here they stay until their mother thinks them strong enough to begin to go abroad and to learn to swim, an accomplishment they must be taught in spite of the aquatic habits of the species; but so must a seal, for that matter. This they cannot do until midsummer, when they are half grown. A Western gentleman of my acquaintance tells how once, early in July, at the time of a most un- usual flood, he saw a family of muskrats that had been driven from home attempting to reach a place of safety. There was a mother and five kittens, each about the size of a barn-rat, holding by the laboring mother’s fur with their teeth in evident fear and distress. She made her way slowly and cautiously along the shore, carefully avoiding obstructions and swift water. A fool of a boy hurled a stone which struck the poor creature and scattered her young, and it was with the utmost difficulty the kittens (who knew nothing of diving) were able to reach the near-by reeds, where they were easily captured. The only person I ever heard of catching a full-grown muskrat in that 18 A Muskrat’s Winter House NN tae at's ae ha Oar WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD, manner was that wonderful man Thoreau, who makes the following note in his diary under April 8, 1854: ‘‘ At Nut Meadow Brook I saw, or rather heard, a muskrat plunge into the brook before me, and saw him endeavoring in vain to bury himself in the sandy bottom. Looking like an amphibious animal, I stooped and, taking him by the tail, which projected, tossed him ashore.”’ That was a trick the sage of Walden seems to have been fond of, for we read that once he served a woodchuck in the same way. In addition to the snug all-the-year-round home, the muskrat usually makes for himself a winter lodge and storehouse combined. The burrow can be found ordinarily only by searching for it, trac- ing the subaqueous flight of the owner by the line of bubbles that rise as he speeds towards his shelter, or by falling into it when the roof is thin as you stroll along the bank. But the winter lodges are conspicuous, dotting the frozen marshes like miniature haystacks, sometimes six feet high— a vast heap of doing for a small diameter of being, as Thoreau piously observed. They are composed of whatever grows or les nearest—sticks, reeds, weeds, grass, etc.—and may be entangled among swamp brush or firmly set upon a foundation 19 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD carefully cleared of vegetation and loose mud. The interior is usually soft grass, but whether this is arranged as the building proceeds or is put into a chamber hollowed out from beneath after the mass has been heaped up I do not know. The houses are of various shapes and _ sizes, and doubt is thrown upon the present sagacity (to say nothing of the alleged foreknowledge) of the architects, when it is known that a large pro- portion of them are so placed that the first regular late fall rise in the water is sufficient to drown the denizens out and sweep the whole structure away. At any rate, the evidence scarcely justifies measuring muskrat lodges as a means of forecast- ing winter. It is better to get instruction by ob- serving their structure and uses, and amusement by contemplating them as interesting features of the landscape. ‘‘In the still sunny days,” to quote again from one of Rowland Robinson’s graceful New England essays, “ between the nights of its unseen building, the blue spikes of the pickerel weed and the white trinities of the arrow-head yet bloom beside it. Then in the golden and scarlet brightness of autumn the departing wood- drake rests on the roof to preen his plumage, and later the dusky duck swims on its watery lawn. 20 MWAED, LIPE OF (ORCHARD, AND. FIELD Above it the wild geese harry the low, cold arch of the sky, the last fleet of sere leaves drifts past it in the bleak wind, and then ice and snow draw the veil for the long winter twilight over the musk- rat’s home and haunts.”’ WED Cole Be GE TMORCHA RD: SAND oF TRE II THE WAY OF A WEASEL S I was hurrying down the path past my neighbor’s cabin at the edge of the rocky woods this morning, I heard a commotion in the brush, and an instant later saw, rushing across the road ahead of me, a pullet, closely followed by a ‘)weasel, the latter going very easily as compared with the chicken’s frantic haste. My neighbor happened to be stand- ing by his doorstep, and, run- ‘i ning forward to meet the pair, ‘Ss |he stamped his foot upon the weasel just an instant after it had leaped upon the poor hen, 22 Wi Pink OF \ORCHARD AND. FIELD whose feathers were already flying like thistle- down. Reaching down, my neighbor lifted the weasel by the nape of the neck between his thumb and forefinger, and held him out for us to view—an image of impotent rage. His head was like a round wedge, his ears lay flat back, his round, black eyes glowed like jet beads, and the long-whiskered white lips, flecked with blood, were drawn back from a jagged row of needle-pointed, ivory-white teeth, in a snarl that portrayed a bandit captured but not conquered. He writhed and squirmed in the man’s firm grasp, trying his best to get his teeth into the detaining fingers, and did succeed in scratching them with a pair of canines already smeared with blood from the wounded pullet. It would be hard to draw a finer picture of baffled fury than that little creature exhibited. He knew he was doomed, for he remembered other chickens he had caught and killed; and had he acted like a coward he would simply have been drowned in the horse- trough or had his brains dashed out against a rock. But his bold spirit against over- whelming odds—his unquenchable courage—won him a better fate, for, calling his dog, my friend 23 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD gave his captive a chance for a hero’s victory or death in honorable battle. The little weasel, not one-twentieth the weight of the big terrier, accepted the challenge without a glance of appeal or hesitation. The instant he was thrown down before the dog he faced his foe, with fur on end and feet braced and jaws wide open—never a thought of running away in his plucky little head. The terrier rushed in, only to have the weasel leap straight at his open mouth and fasten its teeth in his nose. This was disconcerting, and the dog squealed with surprise and pain; he, also, was courageous, and, shaking off his tormentor, seized it again, only to have it wriggle a second time out of his jaws and make a valiant effort to escape. The dog darted after it and got a new hold, but so did his undaunted and pertinacious foe, and Nip had now to whirl the weasel round and round his head before he could shake its grip loose and seize its limber body in an effective grasp. Even then, when, crushed at last, the weasel lay at the point of death among the bruised and bloody weeds, an indomitable spirit glared from the black eyes, the sharp teeth were bared as defiantly as ever, and he fell over on his side and died like a hero. 24 MILD LIne OF ORCHARD: AND. FIELD These weasels, whose coats turn pure white (except at the black tip of the tail) in winter in Northern countries, give us the ermine of the fur- riers, and are among the few wild quadrupeds that seem to maintain themselves against civilization, or even to profit by it. This they can do because of their small size, their clever wits, their fear- lessness and hardihood. Finding some cranny to their liking among the rocks, or within a stone wall, a weasel family will furnish it with bedding of dried grass and make a home as sung as it is secure. An exceedingly narrow door-way will serve them, for their loose and lithe bodies can creep through a very small and tortuous aperture, which can be defended against any enemy unable to tear the place to pleces. A snake, indeed, is the only hostile thing (bar- ring another weasel) that can get into such an in- tricate den. I believe a weasel would not hesitate an instant in attacking it if it came; and I guess he would overcome the worst snake of our woods. I have never seen a battle between a serpent and an ermine, but I have no doubt the mammal, small as he is, could avoid the reptile’s fangs by his leaping agility —for he is acrobat and contor- 25 WILD LIPE) OF) ORCHARD) AND EIZLD tionist in one—and destroy it by his lancet-like teeth. It is characteristic of so courageous a creature that it should be a faithful ally. A pair will stand affectionately and nobly by each other in danger, and a weasel mother will defend her young to the last gasp. I once met in the spring, in the woods, a family of minks—only another sort of weasel —consisting of a mother and four little ones, per- haps a quarter grown. In the first surprise the mother darted under a rock, whining a danger- signal to her children, one of which I knocked on the head to add as an instructive specimen to my collection of skins; while the others, too young to understand their danger, dodged about among the leaves. The instant I stooped to pick up the dead kitten the mother rushed at my hand, and I had to draw back quickly to escape her. She stopped at my feet and sat up on her haunches, her lips drawn back, her eyes gleaming, and every hair on end, whining and daring me tocome on. I stood perfect- ly still, and in a minute she dropped down on all fours, and, always keeping her eye upon me— a giant to her apprehensive view—coolly began to collect her babies, and carry them off, one by 26 WiLD LIbe OF) ORCHARD AND’ FIELD one, in her mouth, to a place of safety under a rock, where perhaps was their home. A lion could not have shown more clean courage and _ indif- ference to danger than that small mink mother. A relative of mine, a preacher and truthful, re- lates that he was sitting in an upper room of his house at Easthampton, Massachusetts, one after- noon, when he saw a weasel come up the stairs, enter the room and saunter about, examining every- thing within reach of his nose, including the par- son’s square-toed boots, with careful attention. Having completed this survey, he quietly with- drew, pattered softly down-stairs, and the dominie went on with his sermon. Whether his visitor also went to hear the sermon I do not know; and it is a pity, for then, perhaps, we should learn whether it really were possible to “‘ catch a weasel asleep.” Ferocity marks all that the weasel does. He constantly kills more than he can eat, seemingly just for the joy of seizing and killing, and a pair that make their residence near a poultry-yard will destroy the flock in a short time if not prevented. They are the terror of the wild birds—one of the worst of their daylight foes, especially for the ground-keeping birds; and here again they arouse 27 WILD LIFE OF (ORCHARD AND) FIELD the anger of the sportsman, whose wild poultry, the quails and grouse and woodcock, they kill before he himself can get a chance to do so with his gun. I have known one recently to kill a half- grown house-cat. Thus, between their coveting the value of his fur and their vexation at his depredations upon the farm-yard and the game-preserve, most men are at enmity with the weasel and compel him to be on his guard whenever he goes abroad. Yet so secretive and sly is he, so exceedingly alert, quick, and courageous, that he maintains himself in great numbers everywhere outside of towns. Civilization, indeed, has helped rather than hurt him and his tribe. His food does not consist al- together, or perhaps mainly, of birds, but, even if it did, he would be benefited by the human clear- ing and cultivation of the wilderness, because these bring about a multiplication of the total number of birds in a locality, in spite of the fact that a few species are lessened or extinguished. But man’s operations also tend to increase the total of small mammals, such as rabbits, gophers, squirrels, and mice, upon all of which the weasel preys with avidity, and none of which can wholly escape him, for he can race the swiftest of them 28 WibD: Line OF ORCHARD AND FIELD with success, can pursue the squirrels to the top- most tree-boughs, though he dare not follow them in lofty jumping, and can chase into their utmost burrows those creatures that seek safety in holes or by digging. Of mice he kills hundreds in the course of a year, no doubt, and thus repays the husbandman for the chickens and ducks he steals, and he will clear a barn of rats in a short time. It is believed that the household mouser of the Greeks in early classic days was a kind of weasel and not at all a cat. The chipmunk is a tidbit he is extremely fond of, and probably more of these pretty ground-squirrels fall beneath his teeth, es- pecially in winter, when snoozing in their under- ground chambers, than lose their lives in any other single way. Of what, indeed, is this bold little carnivore afraid?—for fear may honorably quicken the beating of a heart where cowardice finds no resi- dence. In the New England or Middle States almost nothing exists to alarm him, except man and his guns, dogs, and traps. Where wild-cats range the woods, he no doubt falls into their grasp now and then, and then sells his life as dearly as pos- sible; and that he would “‘ die game” even within 29 WILD LIFE OF 'ORCHARD *"AND FIELD the jaws of a wolf one may be sure who has seen his sturdy, undaunted struggle with a dog. I have read and have seen pictured accounts of birds of prey having seized weasels of one kind or another that in turn fastened upon the bird’s throat or body, and so were carried up into the air until they had gnawed the bird’s life away, and both came tumbling to earth locked in mutual murder. It is quite possible something of this sort may occasionally happen, but I have never seen it, nor can | find any evidence of a predatory bird in this country ever having seized a weasel, even by mistake, for something easier to handle. This animal’s endowment of especial valor seems, therefore, superlative, and tending to need- less slaughter and cruelty in nature. But this quality is probably an inheritance from the distant past, when the race of weasels dwelt in the midst of a world of fighting against conditions and en- emies which they have survived by means of these very virtues ; and it may be that here, as sometimes happens elsewhere, virtues have changed into vices through change of exterior circumstances. But this leads us into what is really a wrong and illogical position, for what we are calling vices—namely, the weasel’s acts of rapacity and 30 Vee oe he OR SORCHARD) AND: FIELD unnecessary slaughter—are only so from our point of view and in his relation to us. Apart from the fact that the excessive slaughter of which he ts “ guilty” may have a beneficent purpose and effect in keeping down the too rapid multiplication of mice and other noxious pests whose other natural enemies have been unduly diminished in cultivated regions, it must be re- membered that he is doing only what it is the busi- ness and need of his life to do; and that we hate him principally because he becomes a rival and interferes with our own plans in the same direc- tion. Hence the vengeful spirit in which my farmer-friend that morning hurled him down be- fore the dog was as illogical as it was unkind. On the whole, philosophically considered, the difference between the weasel’s acts and our own cannot be regarded as really great—to the victims! WILD: LIFE, OF) ORCHARD AND?) RIELD I] BIRD TRAITS AND QUALITIES O one of all the classes of animals is more worthy of attention, or more easily studied, than birds. ‘Including within their number every variety of costume and ishape; present everywhere, and at all times; making us their 'confidants by coming to our door-steps, or awaiting us with newer and newer surprises if we go to the remote woods, the pathless ocean, or snowy moun- Mis Rah tain; marshalling their ranks | Hox rw over our heads, coming and BU, i going with the seasons, and Goes ao defying our pursuit; surely, here is something for the poet 32 AAs ee own. | 7 r 9 A act vl iain Coover’s Hawk a PT rath, Sout ‘kG ie Sh cee pene tae ‘ Ae of Ce ze ful oS art, bie bal Phe Mi 2 mW) 4 - i y, ) i Oi Wit Dy bene. Of (ORCHARD AND, FIELD and artist, as well as the naturalist, to think upon. But a bird is something more than a flitting fairy, or an incarnation of song. It has sub- stance and form; it moves swiftly, mysteriously, from place to place, and looks out carefully for its own protection and subsistence; it cunningly builds a home, where it raises its young and teaches them to care for themselves. The how and why of some of these incidents of bird-life I want to tell you—I say some, for, after all, many of the ways of our familiar birds are unexplained. The most prominent fact about a bird is a faculty in which it differs from every other creature except the bat and insects—its power of flying. For this purpose, the bird’s arm ends in only one long, slender finger, instead of afull hand. To this are attached the quills and small feathers (coverts) on the upper side, which make up the wing. Ob- serve how light all this is: in the first place, the bones are hollow; then the shafts of the feathers are hollow; and, finally, the feathers themselves are made of the most delicate filaments, inter- locking and clinging to one another with little grasping hooks of microscopic fineness. Well, how does a bird fly? It seems simple enough to 3 33 WILD LIf®E OF ORCHARD AND FIELD describe, and yet it is a problem that the wisest in such matters have not yet worked out to every- body’s. satisfaction. This explanation, by the Duke of Argyle, appears to me among the best: An open wing forms a hollow on its underside like an inverted saucer; when the wing is forced down, the upward pressure of the air caught under this concavity lifts the bird up, much as you hoist yourself up between the parallel bars in a gym- nasium. But he could never in this way get ahead, and the hardest question is still to be answered. Now, the front edge of the wing, formed of the bones and muscles of the fore-arm, is rigid and unyielding, while the hinder margin is merely the soft, flexible ends of the feathers; so, when the wing is forced down, the air under it, finding this margin yielding the easier, would rush out here, and, in so doing, would bend up the ends of the quills, pushing them forward out of the way, which, of course, would tend to shove the bird ahead. This process, quickly repeated, results in the phe- nomenon of flight. The vigor and endurance that birds upon the wing display is astonishing. Nearly all the migratory species of Europe must cross the Medi- terranean without resting. Many take the direct 34 WILD LIFE @F ORCHARD AND FIELD course between Spain or Africa and England, which is still farther. Our little bluebird pays an annual visit to the Bermudas, six hundred miles from the continent, and Wilson estimated its ap- parently very moderate flight at much more than a mile a minute. Remarkable stories are told of the long flights tame falcons have been known to take—one going a thousand three hundred miles in a day. Yarrell mentions carrier-pigeons that flew from Rouen to Ghent, one hundred and fifty miles, in an hour and a half; and it is believed that a certain warbler must wing its way from Egypt to the Baltic, one thousand two hundred miles, in one night, and it is probable that martins endure equal exertion every long summer’s day, in their ceaseless pursuit of insects. Taking, then, one hundred miles per hour as the rate of flight dur- ing migrations, we need not be surprised that repre- sentatives of more than thirty species of our wood- birds have been shot in the British Isles, since they could well sustain the sixteen hundred miles between Newfoundland and Ireland. Many species habitually cross much broader spaces of ocean. “ A good ornithologist,’ says White, of Selborne, ‘‘should be able to distinguish birds by their air, as well as their colors and shape, on the ground 35 WILD LIKE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD as well as on the wing, and in the bush as well as in the hand.” Almost every family of birds has its peculiarities of manner. Thus, the kites and buzzards glide round in circles with wings expanded and motionless; marsh-hawks or har- riers fly low over meadows and _ stubble-fields, beating the ground regularly. Crows and jays lumber along as though it were hard work; and herons are still more clumsy, having their long necks and longer legs to encumber them. The woodpecker’s progress is in a series of long un- dulations, opening and closing the wings at every stroke. Our thistle-loving goldfinch also flies this way, but the most of the Fringillidae (finches, sparrows, etc.) have a short, jerking flight, ac- companied with many bobbings and _flirtings. Warblers and fly-catchers fly high up, smoothly and swiftly. Swallows and night-hawks seem to be mowing the air with cimeter wings, and move with surprising energy. On the ground, most small birds are hoppers, like the sparrows, but a few, like the dove and water-thrush, truly and gracefully walk, and the “shore-birds”’ are emphatically runners. Among all sorts, queer movements are assumed in the love season, not noticeable at other times. 36 Wl Ere OF) ORCHARD AND FIELD There is no part of the world where the feathered tribe is not represented; but no two quarters of the globe, and scarcely any two places a hun- dred miles apart, have precisely the same sort of birds, or in similar abundance. There are several reasons for this: first, the influence of climate. Birds provided with the means of resisting the extreme cold of northern regions would be very uncomfortable under a southern sun. The geo- graphical distribution of plants has long been recognized, but it is only recently that a like dis- tribution of birds has been proved to exist. More- over, oceans and high mountain chains limit the range of many kinds. Europe and America have scarcely any species in common, save of water- birds and large hawks. Those from the Pacific coast are essentially different from those found in the Mississippi Valley. Each district has a set of birds—and other animals as well—peculiar to its peculiar geography. Another great circum- stance, determining the presence or absence of certain birds in the breeding season, is the abun- dance or scarcity of suitable food, not only for themselves, but also for their young; as the food of birds at that time is often very different from their mdinary diet, it requires a close acquaintance with 37 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD them to prophesy confidently what birds would be likely to be found breeding at a given’ point. But few birds remain in the same region all the year round. Out of about two hundred and seventy-five species occurring in New England or New York in June, only twenty-five or so stay throughout the year; of these, forty or fifty come to us in winter only, leaving us two hundred and twenty-five species of spring birds, half of which number merely pass through to their Northern breeding-places. With this disparity, no wonder that we look for the return of the birds, and hail with delight the bluebird calling to us through clear March mornings, the velvet-coated robins, the battalions of soldierly cedar-birds, the ghostly turtle-doves sighing their surging refrain, the pewees, and thrushes, and golden orioles, till at last, amid the bursting foliage and quickness of May life, a full host of brilliant choristers holds jubilee in the sunny tree-tops. In a very few days, as suddenly and mysteriously as they came, half the gay company has passed us, going farther north to breed. Could we follow this army, we should find it thinning gradually, as one species after another found its appropriate station—a part in upper New England and Canada, 38 ‘ad WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD many about Hudson Bay; while not a few (water- birds especially) would lead us to the very shores of Arctic fjords. For them the summer is so short that ice and snow start them south before we have any thought of cold weather. On their way they pick up all the Labrador and Canada birds, re- inforced by their young, so that an even greater army invades our woods amid the splendor of October than made them ring in the exuberance of June. Then our own birds catch the infection, and singly, or in squads, companies, and regiments, join the great march to the savannas of the Gulf States, the table-lands of Central America, and on even to the jungles of the Orinoco. What a won- derful perception is that which teaches them to migrate; tells them just the day to set out, the proper course to take, and keeps them true to it over ocean and prairie, and monotonous forests, and often in the night! That the young, learning the route from the parents, remember it, is a general proposition attested by the fact that they are at the tail of the procession both ways, for, in proceeding northward, the old males go ahead of the females a week or so, and when returning in the fall, the males again take the lead and the young bring up the rear. ou) WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD All birds migrate more or less—even such, like the crow and song-sparrow, as stay with us through the year; for we probably do not see the same individuals both winter and summer. Even trop- ical birds move a little way from the equator, and back again with the season; and in mountain- ous regions most of the birds, and many small quadrupeds, have a vertical migration only, de- scending to the valleys in winter, and reascending to the summits in summer—difference of altitude accomplishing the same climatic results as a change in latitude. We can see various causes of these migrations, some of which have already been suggested, but one potent cause seems to be the necessity for an accustomed food. We find that those birds which make the longest and most complete migrations are insect and honey eaters; while the grami- nivorous and omnivorous birds, and such, like the titmouse and nuthatch, as subsist on the young of insects to be found about the bark of trees, go but a short distance to escape inclement weather, or do not migrate at all. Sportsmen recognize the fact that the snipe and woodcock have returned, not because the rigorous winter days are wholly passed, but because the frost is sufficiently out 40 WilD, LIbE (OF (ORCHARD AND FIELD of the ground to allow the worms to come to the surface; and know that in warm, springy meadows these birds may often be found all through the year. Man,no doubt, influences the migratory hab- its of birds. To many he offers inducements in the shelter, and in the abundance of insects which his industry occasions, to linger later in the fall than was their wont, and return earlier in the spring. While, on the contrary, the persecution which the shy wild-fowl have received has caused them generally to repair to secluded breeding-places, far north of their haunts of fifty years ago. But the migrations of most birds are somewhat irreg- ular, and we have so few reliable data that we can hardly yet determine the laws which govern their seasonal movements, much less assert the an- cient origin of the ‘‘migratory instinct,’’ so called, or state the varied influences that have led to the present powerful habit, and have pointed out the routes which the flocks now follow, spring and fall. The geologist must aid the zoological student in solving these problems. The true home of a bird, then, is where it rears its young, even though it be not there more than a third of the year, and everywhere else it is mere- ly a traveller or migrant. Should you then, after, 4I WILD LIKE .OF ORCHARD AND FIELD say, two years of observation, want to write down a list of the birds inhabiting your ‘district—and you would thus be doing a real service to science —it is important that you mention whether each bird breeds there, passes through spring and au- tumn, or is only a winter visitor. Perhaps there is no animal in the world that comes nearer to man’s heart and seems more akin than the bird, because of its beautiful home- life and the loving care with which it anticipates and provides for its brood. There is a charm about the nest of a bird that does not linger about the hive of the wild bees, the burrow of the wood- chuck, or the dome of the muskrat. It is more a home than any of them. The situation varies as much as the birds themselves. Trees, how- ever, form the most common support; among the tip-top branches of them warblers fix their tiny cradles; to the outer drooping twigs of them orioles and vireos can swing their hammocks; upon their stout horizontal limbs the thrushes and tanagers may come and build; against the trunk, and in the great forks, hawks and crows and jays will pile their rude structures; and in the cracks and crannies, titmice, nuthatches, and woodpeckers clean out old holes, or chisel new, 42 Wi Lire Ob ORCRARD' AND FIELD in which to deposit their eggs. But most of the large birds of prey inhabit lone crags, making an eyrie which they repair from year to year for the new brood. The ground, too, bears the less pretentious houses of sparrows and larks, and the scattered eggs of sand-pipers, gulls, and terns; the marshes are occupied by rails, herons, and ducks; the banks of rivers are burrowed into by kingfishers and sand-martins; so that almost every conceivable position 1s adopted by some bird or another, and its peculiar custom usually, though not by any means invariably, adhered to by that species. A curious instance of change in this respect is shown by the two barn-swallows and the chimney-swallow, which, before the civilization of this country, plastered their nests in caves, and in the inside of hollow trees, as indeed they yet do in the far Northwest. In the materials used, and the construction of the nest, birds adapt them- selves largely to circumstances. In the Northern States, for example, the Baltimore oriole uses hempen fibres, cotton twine, etc., for its nest; but in the heat of Louisiana the same pouch-shaped structure is woven of Spanish moss, and 1s light and cool. The intelligence and foresight that some birds exhibit in their architecture prove reason 43 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD rather than instinct, as we popularly use these words: while others are so stupid as to upset all our respect for their faculties of calculation. Both sexes usually help in building the nest, and work industriously at it till it is ready for the eggs— sometimes finishing it even after the female has begun to sit. The best-known birds probably are such famous songsters as the nightingale and the skylark; and because these and our canaries are foreign, most persons suppose that we have no equally fine songsters of our own. Let a doubter go into the June woods only once! June is _harvest- month for the ornithologist. Then the birds are dressed in their best, are showing off all their good points to their lady-loves, are building their nests, and—being very happy—are in full song. Morn- ing and evening there is such a chorus as makes the jubilant air fairly quiver with melody, while all day you catch the yeap of pygmies in the tree- tops, the chattering and twittering of garrulous sparrows and swallows, and the tintinnabulation of wood-thrushes. I cannot even name all these glorious singers. Perhaps the many-tongued mock- ing- bird stands at the head of the list; possibly the hermit-thrush, whose song is of ‘‘ serene re 44 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD ligious beatitude,’”’ or the blue grosbeak or winter wren. As you choose. The bird you think pre- eminent to-day will be excelled to-morrow, and you will refuse to distinguish between them for the love and admiration you bear them all. WILD LIFE: OF ORCHARD’ AND FIELD i ee IV OUK WINTER BIRDS JOT often in the genial days of early and late summer, or even in the torrid heat of its middle months, do we recall winter with pleasure, or wish ourselves sur- rounded by its scenes; while, on the contrary, the dark hours of the long winter evenings are often enlivened with reminis- cences of balmy weather, the fireplace is adorned with bou- Nag | quets of dried flowers, and every | indication of returning spring is eagerly welcomed. Nothing is more precious to the eye, weary of the desolation which snow and ice bring to the land- 46 Downy Woodpecker bau) ‘ 4 ‘ a Hanlevede P dha le 28 a WILD LIFE Of ORCHARD AND FIELD scape, than the winter birds, whose bright forms alone diversify the bare and colorless world, and whose cheery notes alone break the stillness and apparent immobility of Nature. They always carry a bit of the June sunshine about with them, and, dropping it from their wings, like seed,wherever they flit, seem thus to preserve the season through the ravages of winter, to which all else succumbs. Some words about them may, therefore, help to keep the sense of summer alive in our hearts through this midnight of the year. Most persons are surprised when told of the large number of these feathered friends which begin the new year with us; for in January, in the near neighborhood of New York city, over fifty species appear with more or less regularity. They comprise two classes: those which reside in our fields the year round, like the bluejay; and such, like the snow-flake, as are driven to our milder climate by the severity of a Northern winter that even their arctic-bred, hardy constitutions are unable to endure. The members of the latter class visit us in varying numbers, but are especially numerous in snowy Seasons. It is probably less a fear of the dreadful tem- perature, even in the frigid zones, which compels 47 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD the birds to seek our milder latitudes, than the inability to obtain food when snow buries the seed-bearing weeds and sends the smaller animals to their hibernacula, and the increasing darkness of the long arctic night shuts out from view what the snow has not covered. All birds—or almost all—on their southward migration, fly at night, resting during the day. We have the most abun- dant evidence of this; and it has occurred to me that possibly it is the deepening darkness of high latitudes which first warns them off; that the natural recurrence of night seems to them like being overtaken by the darkness which they thought they had left behind, but which they must again flee; that, therefore, they keep upon the wing until each morning’s light, supposing that they have thus again and again outstripped the pursuing gloom, until they reach a region of abun- dant food, and perhaps learn wisdom from its resident birds. 1 will confess, however, that this theory is more fanciful than philosophical. Whatever the motive, no sooner has the crowd of autumnal migrants, with rustling wings and faint voices, swept through our woods—-slowly during the long, mellow October days, when the earth seems to stand still and the seasons to be in 48 WiDr OF VORCHARD AND FIELD equipoise ; swiftly when the first blast of November sends them skurrying onward with the deadened leaves—than their places are taken by the brave little fellows whose fame I celebrate. Taking my way to the woods some bright, still morning in January, when the snow is crisp and the ice in the swamps firm, I shall find the sombre fields full of a life of their own well worth my while to see, even if the exhilaration of the walk does not prove reward enough. Here on this fence- rail is the track of a squirrel, and in the corner of the rail and rider is the half-eaten body of a chickadee which some butcher-bird has hung up. How the dry wood creaks as I climb over, and how resonant is that dead ash under the vigorous hammer of the little woodpecker whose red crest glows like a spark of fire against the white limb! Around this spice-bush the mice have been at work, nibbling the bark off up to the surface of the snow, and I can see the entrance to their tunnel. This path, trod bare by the cows, leads to the hilly brush- pasture where the southern sun shines all the afternoon, and thither let me follow. Sunny hill-sides, the wooded banks of creeks, the hedgerows and brier-grown fences along the country roads, are all favorite places for the winter ‘ 49 WILD “LIFE OF “ORCHARD AND FIELD birds. Here come the sparrows and finches, the winter wren and rare cardinal, skulking about the thickets, hopping through the dead fern-brakes, threading the mazy passages of the log-heaps and brush-piles ready to be burned in the spring, coming out upon the fence-post or way-side trees to sing their morning roundelay and take their daily airing in pleasant weather. In the open meadows are the grass-finches, snow-birds, and the few robins and medlarks that stay with us; in the edge of the woods the bluejay, flicker, and butcher-bird; in the orchards and evergreens the crossbills, the pine grossbeaks, red-polls, and cedar-bird; the deep woods shelter the tiny nut- hatches, titmice, and the little woodpeckers; the open sky affords space for the birds of prey, and the sea-shore harbors for the gulls, sea- ducks, and fish-hawk. Such are the chosen resorts of the different varieties, yet, of course, we shall occasionally meet all everywhere, and sometimes spots apparently most favorable will be totally uninhabited. In very severe weather the wildest birds are often compelled to come close to the house and barn in search of out-door relief from gentle hands. ‘“‘How do the birds manage at night and in 50 WiIDLDD LIFE. GF ORCHARD: AND FIELD tempestuous weather?’’ is a question often asked me. The time is not long passed when it was uni- versally believed that many of them hibernated —especially the swallows— burying themselves in the mud like frogs, or curling up in holes in rocks like the bats; and the common phenomenon of the appearance of a few summer birds during “warm spells” in winter was assumed to prove that they had been torpid, but had waked up under the genial warmth, as bats often do. It was not many years ago that I saw in an English news- paper a letter from a man who claimed to have found a hedge-sparrow (I think) torpid somewhere in the mud. But the search for proofs of this theory discovered that the birds supposed to hiber- nate migrated, while, of the birds which remained in this latitude through the cold months, we saw more in warm, fine weather, for the natural reason that then they forsook the sheltered hollows and cosey recesses of the woods where they had retreated during stormy days, and came out into the sun- light. Dense cedars and the close-set branches of small spruces and other evergreens afford them good shelter, and thickets of brambles are made 51 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD use of when these are not to be found; hollow trees are natural houses in which large numbers huddle, and the cave-like holes under the roots of trees growing on steep banks become favorite hospices. The grouse plunges through the snow down to the ground, where it scrapes a “‘ form,’ or crawls under the hemlock and spruce boughs that droop to the earth with the weight of snow, and allows the white mantle to drift over it, subsisting the while on the spruce-buds; when the storm ceases it can easily dig its way out, but sometimes a rain and hard frost follow, which make such a crust on the snow that it cannot break up through, and so it starves to death. The more domestic spar- rows, robins, and flickers burrow into the hay- mow, find a warm roost 1n the barn near the cattle, or, attracted by the warmth of the furnace, creep under the eaves or into a chink next the chim- ney of the greenhouse or country dwelling. The meadow-lark and quail seek out sunny nooks in the fields and crouch down out of the blast; while the woodcock hides among the moss and ferns of damp woods where only the very severest cold can chain the springs. Along the coast many birds go from the interior to the sea-shore in search of a milder climate. 52 WILD LIRE (OF) ORCHARD AND!) BIELD Nevertheless, in spite of all these resources in the way of shelter; in spite of their high degree of warmth and vitality, probably not exceeded by any other animal; in spite of the fact that they can draw themselves up into a perfect ball of feath- ers which are the best of clothing, and that they can shelter themselves from the driving storm, it appears that birds often perish from cold in large numbers. Ordinarily, birds seem able to foretell a change of weather, and prepare. The reports of the United States Weather Bureau show that — certainly during the fall and winter, and apparently generally—the ducks, geese, cranes, crows, and other notable species abandon their former haunts upon the approach of a cold wave or hard winter storm for more southern localities, often passing beyond the reach of the severity of such storms, though taking their departure only a few hours before the unfavorable change begins. Resident species, not caring, or not able, to run away to warmer latitudes, ought to know enough to hide away from the fury of the gale; and they do. But sometimes there come sudden, unpresaged changes—cold, icy tempests, that charge down upon us after thawing - days, converting the air, which was almost persuading the grass to revive, 93 WILD LIEE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD into an atmosphere that cuts the skin like the impinging of innumerable particles ‘of frost, and shrivels every object with cold or buries it under dry and drifting snow. Then it is that the small birds, caught unprepared, suffer. At first, such as are overcome seem unusually active, running about apparently in search of food, but taking little notice of one’s approach. ‘‘Should one attempt to fly,’’ writes a recent observer, ‘‘it im- mediately falls on its back as if shot. The legs and toes are stretched out to their farthest extent, and are quite rigid; the eyes protrude, are insen- sible to the touch, and the whole body quivers slightly. It remains in this state from one to two minutes, when it recovers suddenly, and seems as active as before. If taken in the hand, it will im- mediately go into convulsions, even if it has been in a warm room for several hours and has been supplied plentifully with food. Death usually puts an end to its suffering in a day or two.”’ Such catastrophes are more likely to occur, how- ever, in the spring, after the birds have begun to come northward, than in the steadier weather of January; and even the song-sparrows and snow- birds, which have successfully withstood the rig- ors of the lowest midwinter temperature, as often 54 WEED. Pie OR sORCHARD AND: FIELD succumb as the less inured songsters from the South. The favorite among our winter birds, perhaps because the most domestic, taking the place of England’s robin-red- breast, is the slate- colored snow-bird, which is one of the finches. It comes to us with the first frosts, and stays until the wake- robin and spring-beauty bloom. Even then some of them do not go far away to spend the summer, for they breed in the heights behind the Delaware Water Gap, and also in the Catskills. The main body, nevertheless, go to Canada and Labrador. In the Rocky Mountains I have seen them many times in midsummer as far south as the latitude of Cincinnati; but there the Canada jay also breeds, although in the East its nest is never found— ereat altitude in the West affording the same climate which eastward is only to be attained at high latitudes. The nest of the snow-bird is placed on the ground among the moss, or under the protection of the root of a tree, and is built of grass, weed stalks, and various fibres. The eggs are whitish, sprinkled with pale chocolate and dark reddish-brown. Several species besides our Funco hyemalis are found in the mountainous parts of the West and 55 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD Northwest, but they intergrade confusingly, and their nidification is essentially the samie. A snow- bird is a snow-bird from one end of the country to the other, and the sharp, metallic note is charac- teristic of the whole genus. Truer spirits of the driving snow—for the junco is a sort of fair-weather bird, after all—are the snow - buntings, or snow- flakes, or white snow- birds, or, absurdest of all, winter - geese, as the Nahant fishermen call them. Their systematic name is Plectrophanes nivalis, and their plumage is handsomely marked with white and chocolate- brown. Sometimes a flock of these buntings will whirl into our door-yard for a brief moment; but in general you must go to the upland fields and frozen marshes to find them, and the best time is just after a ‘‘cold snap” or a heavy snow. The Hackensack meadows are sometimes full of them, and I have seen flocks of hundreds pirouetting over the ice-covered, wind-swept shores of Lake Erie, or whirling down the bleak sands of Cape Cod. What attracted them to such exposed and dreary spots I could never divine. When they first come they seem unsuspicious of any special danger from man, yet are continually skurrying away from some imaginary cause of alarm. Never 56 WILD, LIVE OF ORCHARD AND: FIELD going far south of New York, we see few of them even here in mild seasons, and, as the close of the winter approaches, they are among the first to hasten to their home within the arctic circle. In every alternate flock of snow-flakes may perhaps be found one or two Lapland longspurs—another bird which builds its nest in the moss at the foot of Greenland glaciers. Its coat is white and black and chestnut, so that it is easily distinguishable from its lighter fellow, but it is very uncommon. Next to the diminutive humming-bird, the small- est bird on this continent is the golden-crested kinglet, on whose tiny brow rests a coronet of gold, fiery red and black, below which the jewelled eye 1s set in a soft, dusky background of olive- green. From tooth to tail he is not so long as your finger, yet this pygmy braves the fury and desolation of winter as cheerily as though soft skies arched overhead. I owe him many thanks for piping his nonchalant, contented little lecture into my ears when I have growled at the weather and the “foolishness” which dragged me out-of- doors on certain terrible days, only to see what such absurd fellows as he were about. He is the most independent, irrepressible little chap I know of, and for the life of me I never can be o/ WILD. ‘LIFZ: OF - ORCHARD AND FIELD downhearted when he is by. In summer the gold-crest (like his royal brother, the ruby-crown) is a fly-catcher, expertly seizing insects on the wing; and on warm days in winter he forages in the tree-tops for such moths and beetles as are abroad; but necessarily he must subsist chiefly on the larve which hibernate under the rotten bark, and upon insects’ eggs. Thus he is helped to many a meal by the sapsuckers and tomtits, whose stronger bills tear open the recesses where the larve lie. In summer the kinglets retreat to boreal regions to rear their young; but we know very little about their domestic life. Just before they leave us in the spring I may, perhaps, have the rare treat to hear a long way off the resonant song of this minute minstrel—bold and clear, carrying me away aloft like that of the English skylark. Another personification of “Contented wi’ little, and canty wi’ mair,” is the brown creeper, whose bill is curved and long and tender, so that he can do very little digging for himself, but follows in the track of the wood- peckers and nuthatches, and picks up the grubs which their vigorous beaks have dislodged, or 58 WILD LIFE QF ORCHARD AND FIELD searches carefully for such small insects and their eggs as are not well concealed. There is one now in the tree next my window, in the edge of the city, as I write. He flew from the neighboring horse- chestnut to the foot of the ai- lantus, and began a spiral march upward. I see him creep steadily round and round and round the trunk, with his tail pressed in against the tree to sustain him (like the pointed stick trailing behind a Pennsylvania wagon), peering into every crevice, poking his bill into all the knot-holes and scars where limbs have been shivered off, running out on each branch, here picking up half a dozen eggs that only a bird’s sharp eye could find, there transfixing with his pointed tongue some dormant beetle laid away on his bark shelf, or tearing open the pupa- case of some unlucky young moth, snugly dream- ing of a successful début in May. This creeper is always to be found in our winter woods and orchards, yet is nowhere abundant; its life is a solitary one, and, although not shy, it is so restless- ly active as easily to elude the eye. If, in the early spring, you have the rare fortune to hear its song, regard the privilege as precious. Another creeping bird, almost always moving head downward, more often seen in midwinter, 59 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD because then he approaches civilized life, while in summer he retires to the remote woods to rear his brood, is the familiar nuthatch, whose peculiar nee-nee-nee — the most indifferent, don’t-care-a-bit utterance in the world—is heard from every other tree-trunk. Like the brown creeper, the nuthatches | seek their food on the boles of trees, examining every part by a spiral survey—a sort of triangula- tion—and are not content till the top is reached, when they dive straight to the roots of the next tree, and begin a new exploration. There is no time wasted by these little engineers in foolish flying about or profitless research. Not allowing a cranny to go untouched, they drag out every un- happy grub it shelters before raiding the next hid- ing-place of insect life. Their feet are broad and strong for clinging; their bills are small pick-axes, their tongues harpoons, and their brains marine clocks, just as steady one side up as another. Thus they are able to search out the injurious borers and the like which pass through their met- amorphoses beneath the bark; and, except when everything is incased in ice, do not eat seed, or even alight on the ground. They are among the most active and serviceable of the fruit-grower’s benefactors, continuing, during the cold months, 60 White-breasted Nuthatch ra WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD the good work dropped in October by the summer birds, and finding in his insidious enemies their favorite food. The nuthatch 1s the leader of that ad- mirable little company composed of the chickadee, the crested titmouse, the downy woodpecker, and sometimes of the red- bellied nuthatch and spirit- uel creeper, which Wilson truthfully describes as “proceeding regularly from tree to tree through the woods like a corps of pioneers; while, in a calm day, the rattling of their bills, and the rapid mo- tions of their bodies, thrown like so many tumblers and rope-dancers into numberless positions, to- gether with the peculiar chatter of each, are alto- gether very amusing, conveying the idea of hungry diligence, bustle, and activity.” Every one knows the black-capped titmouse —our jolly little chickadee, and his jolly little chant: ““ Chick-chickadeedee! Saucy note, Out of sound heart and merry throat, As if it said: ‘ Good-day, good sir! Fine afternoon, old passenger! Happy to meet you in theserplaces, Where January brings few faces.’ ”’ He is the hero of the woods; there are courage and good-nature enough in that compact little body, 61 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD which you may hide in your fist, to supply a whole groveful of May songsters. He has the Spartan virtue of an eagle, the cheerfulness of a thrush, the nimbleness of Cock Sparrow, the endurance of the sea-birds condensed into his tiny frame, and there have been added a pertness and in- genuity all his own. His curiosity is immense, and his audacity equal to it; I have even had one alight upon the barrel of the gun over my shoulder as I sat quietly under his tree. The chickadees appear to come to us with the first frost, and keen eyes may discover them all the year round in the quieter orchards or woodlands, whither they retire to nest in some old wood- pecker’s hole. | There is a winter wren also, but, although con- siderably smaller, it is frequently mistaken for the inquisitive and saucy house-wren, which fled south in October. It is a species heard rather than seen, evading observation in the dense brush through which it moves more like a mouse than bird. Its prolonged and startling bugle-song is a wonder, and its whole history is charming, but I must pass it by. If you wish to become acquainted with it (and several of its midwinter associates) in more genial days, you have only to go to the 62 WD Eire OF ORCHARD AND FIELD depths of the Catskills or Adirondacks, where it spends its summer. The family of sparrows, finches, and buntings— the Fringillidae — supplies more of the winter woodland birds than any other single group, the list of those regularly present in January including the pine-grossbeak, the red and the white-winged crossbills, the two red-poll linnets, the pine, grass, and gold finches, the song, tree, and English sparrows, besides an occasional straggler like the purple finch, cardinal, and white-throat. The first six mentioned are polar bred, and return to their native heaths at the earliest intimation of spring. The pine-grossbeak is a_ big, clumsy looking bird, with a plumage reminding you of a blossoming clover-field—a mixture of red and dull green. It has found out what its thick, strong bill was made for, and crushes the scales of the tough pine-cones as though they were paper. The pine-grossbeaks often come into the village streets, hopping about in search of almost anything to eat, and are very tame and interesting. Their note is a cheery one, and when captured they thrive well in the cage, eat apple-seeds greedily, and become very entertaining. The pine- finch, or siskin, is its miniature, and seeks much the same 63 oa WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD sort of food, but must get it from softer cones, for its bill does not seem half as stout. ‘It is erratic in its visits, and its actions outside of the pine- trees are precisely like those of its cousin, the yellow-bird. All winter you may notice along the field-fences and in the grassy plats beside the railway, where weeds have gone to seed, active flocks of small, plainly attired little birds, as cheerful as can be. These are our thistle-loving goldfinches, or yellow- birds, whose simple, sweet song and billowy flight were part of the delight of last summer, but which now have exchanged their gay livery of canary- yellow and black for sober undress suits of Quaker drab. The goldfinches, as such, appear with the apple-blossoms, and are seen no later than the gathering of the fruit; but their seeming disap- pearance in autumn, and reappearance in spring, are only changes of plumage. Nevertheless, they are not so abundant in winter as in summer, many moving a little distance southward. The cross- bills are naturally so named, for the tips of their mandibles slide by one another instead of shutting squarely together. Whether or not this peculiarity has been gradually acquired to meet the necessity of a peculiar instrument to twist open the cones 64 WL D DIF E OF OCGRCHRARD AND) FIELD and other tough pericarps, upon the contents of which they feed; or whether it is an accident per- petuated and made the best of; or whether the crossed bill was ‘‘created” in that fashion in the beginning, with a definite intention towards pine- cones, we may theorize upon to suit our tastes; but certain it is that it answers the bird’s purpose most admirably. The red crossbill is the more common of the two, but the white-winged is not greatly different. They fly in small flocks, often coming among the gardens, where their odd ap- pearance never fails to attract attention. In ad- dition to pine-seeds, they feed on the seeds and buds of the cedar, birch, alder, mountain-ash, Virginia creeper, etc., and probably add apples, haws, and berries to their bill of fare, as does the grossbeak. They are wonderfully happy creat- ures, fluttering in and out of the evergreens, or passing swiftly from one to another, working away at a swinging cone “ teeth and toe-nail,’”’ heads or tails up—it doesn’t matter—till every kernel is extracted, then with one quick impulse launching into the air and departing—perhaps for the arctic circle—before you have had time to bid them good- bye. Both are irregular in their coming and num- bers. 5 65 hr WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD een GS One of the earliest and handsomest migrants from the frozen North is the little redpoll linnet, which is about the size of a stout canary. He is a dandy, changing his gay suit of black, brown, white, saffron, pink, red, and crimson several times a year, and—at least until he is three or four years old—never dressing twice alike. He is an exceedingly melodious if not a very versatile singer ; in England is often kept in cages and mated with the canary, and might be here. There would be no difficulty in catching him. Two other of the familiar friends who make our spring meadows vocal with an incessant concert, the song-sparrow and grass-finch, remain with us through the winter also; but more than half the song-sparrows are frightened southward by the first snow-storm. " a ; fing: it is worth while to examine = eA Bul. i in —==| how Nature spends her leisure. : The season is neutral-tinted. 78 WIED, EIFE. OF -ORCHARD AND) FIELD The distant hills, the low meadows, the fallow ridges and bushy pastures are all dull purples and browns; a grove of mixed hardwood trees at a distance appears greenish- white below, dusky among the branches, and reddish at the top, where the sunshine is reflected from the new growth of twigs and sprouting buds; and the shadowy side of a group of evergreens forms a mass of black. Under the trees the ground is carpeted with a layer of leather-covered old leaves and pine-needles, beaten flat by the flail of the rain and the pressure of snow; and where roily water has soaked into them we often see precise impressions in the mud, reminding us of, and explaining, the perfect casts of leaves common in some rocks, especially those of the coal-measures. The taller dead grass and reeds out in the meadow are less closely matted, and beneath their sheltering arches small animals have crept about all winter, finding plenty of seeds and small fruit, shaken to the ground for their provender. Here and there through the wet fields go mys- terious paths, without definite beginning or end, often so faint as hardly to be followed. When were they trodden? By what men or animals? Why were they deserted for the new, muddy ones, 79 WILD LIBRE: OF ORCHARD AND FLELD where the last ice is now melting, and left to be reclaimed by patient Nature, who never becomes discouraged when men destroy her work, but per- sistently seizes the first opportunity to repair the damage done and restore the uniform wildness? After a light snow in March these trails stand out with great distinctness and reveal themselves, where in summer they could hardly be traced. Now they offer the best footing, but lead nowhither. Whenever we step out of them we trip and stumble, our clothing is seized by innumerable detaining thorn-fingers, and the soil, left spongy by the frost, sinks elastic and oozy beneath our tread. Poking aside the leaves and grass on this warm hill- side, where spherical swarms of minute flies are going through a mazy dance in the air, many herbs may be found already green and making ready to flower in the earliest spring, such as the hepatica, the cinquefoil, violet, and strawberry; but most of the leaves and runners of the last are varnished with rich burnt-brown tints as though Japanned. In the swollen but crystal-clear brooks, flowing at the foot of the slope among the weeds with a gentle, tinkling sound, the aquatic ranunculus and the water-cress are glowing with emerald foliage, 80 WILD LIFE QF ORCHARD AND FIELD and we discover a few cylindrical cases of young caddis-flies anchored to the submerged stems of the plants. The mosses and little ferns on the ‘bank are green, and where the meadows have been overflowed the alders are so full of embryo blossoms that their branches seem loaded with purple fruit. Although the woods are so silent at this early season (whenever you are beyond hearing the frogs), echoing only occasionally the odd, jerky soliloquy of the scrambling little nuthatch, the cheery voice of the chickadee, and perhaps the boastful scream of a bluejay, there is a large aggre- gate of feathered life abroad in March, even before many migratory birds have come. Several of the birds of prey, and often the ravens and crows, are already breeding. The snowbirds and tree- sparrows linger in the pastures; the large, hand- some, fox-colored sparrows appear; the cedar-birds whirl in and out of the red cedars and eat their purple berries greedily ; a few song-sparrows dodge about the fence-rows, and little, woodpeckers are hammering here and there wherever they can find a dead limb that may possibly conceal some un- discovered grub, or will, at any rate, reward them with a cheerful tattoo. 6 8I WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD These, and the early migrants from the South, find an abundant harvest preserved for them in the meadows and wood-pastures, despite their desolate appearance; yet, considering the minute- ness of the grass-seeds upon which they mainly feed, it is appalling to think what an enormous number of bites a bird must take to make out a dinner! But larger mouthfuls have been kept for them. The bayberry, or false myrtle, gleams with dense clusters of greenish-white berries; the close, sombre foliage of the juniper, or savin, is enlivened by innumerable purplish berries, upon which all the birds nearly gorge themselves some- times; black alders, ‘‘ glowing with the brightest scarlet fruit, and resembling at a distance pyramids of flame,’’ are scattered about the lowlands, while on higher ground the stately mountain-ash repeats the scene, witches or no witches. Sometimes, after a considerable interval of warm weather has melted away all traces of winter, and we fondly think its forces have been permanently beaten back, a heavy snow-storm will return, and then a new scene presents itself to the rambler. On the night before, perhaps, mock-moons have been hung in the glowering sky, and next morn- ing the sunlight will struggle down, silver-gray, 82 WED: Dine OR ORCHARD: AND: FIELD through blustering winds and thickly flying snow. As, with bent head, I force my way into the fields, the air about me is full of light, and nearer objects are clear enough, but at a comparatively short distance little can be seen distinctly, although the white light seems continuous ; and the receding town becomes more and more a beautiful, shining ghost of architecture—washed-in flat, as painters would say, with luminous tints gradually fading away to nothing, yet never losing transparency. At first nothing is perceptible but the deafening gale and smothering snow, until presently I come to a ravine on the leeward side of a hill, where a grove of cedars is overgrown and tied together with squirrel-brier, while weeds and thorny bushes below are tangled into almost impenetrable thickets. Here is a hospice for the buffeted birds, and as soon as I step into its shelter, and catch my breath again, I begin to hear dozens of them, though not one is yet to be seen. Another plunge forward in the slippery drifts, and lo! a robin bursts out of a leafy covert at my elbow, scattering wingfuls of snow from the brittle old leaves, and springing a harsh alarm that instantly hushes the twittering gossip. What a queer, pretty picture it is that greets 83 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD me as I turn my back to the rushing flakes, and so get my eyes open to look at it! Beyond a wide swale, that yesterday was gold and green but now is glistening wintry white, rises a small eminence where a dissolving view of trees and buildings is momently formed, then hidden, then brought out again, mirage-like, in the most curious and dream- like unreality, yet always with singular beauty. Gray is the only color—a soft, purplish, silvery gray—and the silhouette the only style of draw- ing. By their outlines I guess that that wavering, slender spike amid the glistening haze is the church steeple—that squarish blur the belfry of the court- house—the next irregular smudge a certain collec- tion of house-roofs; but all seem as foreign and unsubstantial as shadows, so quaintly are they now clouded, now lightly revealed, by the swirling, satiny snow-flakes that fill the air with particles luminous in themselves yet obscuring the land- scape. Suddenly, dark midgets attract my attention, and, pulling my cap over my eyes, I wade out into the meadow where weeds and grasses stand thick above the snow. Tough and elastic are these thin old plant-stems that have kept their erectness all winter; and wild parsnips by the 84 S PM , U2 (dbOU goueyy Were to vi a iy A ey aa bere PV a era 4 U it ; ‘nt ors “ as ey i ie WitD 2? Etre. OF ‘ORCHARD: AND FIELD hundreds are holding up their hands with fin- gers clustered to catch fistfuls of this late cloud- bounty, as do children in the earliest autumn flurry, eager to welcome the coming of sliding and snow- balling. Gleaning merrily among these weeds, whose capsules still hold a treasure of seeds, romps a company of sparrows, amicable and industrious. The largest and most conspicuous, of course, are the juncos, whose notes have so metallic a clink that once or twice I am deceived into thinking the distant hammering in a blacksmith’s shop is their chatter in a new direction. Their slate- colored coats, buttoned high across the breast over white vests, like old-fashioned dress-suits, look positively black amid the purity of their surround- ings, and they trot about nimbly on top of the snow, dragging their tails so as to leave a well- marked trail. With them are active, chippering field-sparrows, so small and colorless as to be hard to follow in the murk of the storm; a single olive- hued goldfinch, silent and unhappy; and—phut ! —out from between my feet bursts a song-sparrow, scattering a fleecy spray like a torpedo. I stoop down and probe the hole. It is a well leading to a long tunnel beneath the bent grasses, and arched 85 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD by thick snow. Twenty birds could hide there, safe and warm; and at its farther end I find a half- made nest, soaked and sodden, yet well worth finishing, no doubt, after it has dried. This sub- mersion must be a frequent mishap to this and other early birds, which catch something besides worms in our mutable climate; but had the owner gone so far as to have been sitting on eggs, doubt- less she would have kept at her brooding and let the snow form a crystal canopy over her and her hopes. I followed those plucky meadow-birds that day perhaps two hundred yards, wading through the snow and matted herbage, and I thought it fun. It gave a new view of everything; and the rascals paid so little attention to the bad weather that I would have been ashamed to shirk it. Then up the hill I went, through briers and brush and laden trees, fairly floundering in the snow, hearing but not seeing a crow whose querulous tone be- trayed an almost despairing loneliness and dis- gust, and finally struggled across a bleak upland, where winter came and went at thirty miles an hour, to a road twisting down through a shady cutting to my copse. Here was shelter, and the birds knew it. I saw 86 WeDo yh en (OR ORCHARD AND) FIELD one fool of a robin (robins are mostly fools) hunched up, shivering and disconsolate, on an exposed twig where he could hardly keep his balance, as though he didn’t care whether he lived or died; but all the others had stowed themselves away in snug crannies under the overhanging crest of the bank, or were wading in a little runlet at its foot, seeking food, or roosting comfortably beneath the thatch of dense cedar-bushes, and they scolded vigorously when I dislodged them in my attempt to learn where they were and what they were about. Finches abounded, too, searching the bark of tree-trunks for hiding beetles or for insects’ eggs, plucking at old flower-heads for seeds, nibbling the dried purple fruit of the brier, chirping and chatting cheerily, but never singing—except one sort, which kept high up in the tree-tops. It sang a bright, sweet, warbler-like lay, not often repeated, but breathing the spirit of sunshine and summer and green leaves in a way wonderfully inspiriting in this whirl of cold and snow. The delicate notes fairly sparkled as they eddied away with the flakes, and probably were those of the Canada sparrow. During March the buds swell with sap and new energy; many forest trees begin to flower, to the delight of the kinglets and white-throated sparrows, 87 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD some even before they put forth their leaves; and patches of meadow and hill-side grow emerald- green with new grass, and are dotted with delicate blue and white and yellow flowers. The bluebird seeks its mate; the robin has already found one, and begun its nest; the song-sparrow is carolling to his love from every brush-pile; the swamp is vocal with the rollicking notes of the crow-black- bird and redwing, and marsh-hawks are again coursing low over the meadows in search of mice and the awakened frogs. Such vernal rejoicing is often interrupted, never- theless, by an ice-storm—one of the most disagree- able incidents of this month of many moods. A day of rain will come when the temperature is low enough to freeze most of the water as it falls, and the result is that the ground, the windward side of buildings, fences, tree-trunks, and all other exposed objects are soon perfectly glazed, and each leafless twig is incased in ice. When, as frequently hap- pens, such a day and night are succeeded by a clear morning, and the bright but feeble sunlight is reflected from thousands of burnished, crack- ling twigs, as from a forest of glass, the scene is a very striking and beautiful one; but the weight of the accumulated ice often causes vast damage 88 Wry Dire On ORCHARD: AND. FIELD to shade and orchard trees—one of Nature’s rudest methods of pruning. Such ice-storms occasionally happen as late as the last week of March, by which time all animal life has begun to stir about and many birds have arrived, so that widespread distress and death are likely to follow. The little birds can usually shelter themselves, though migrating hosts some- times become so soaked and chilled in such storms that they are unable to fly, tumble helpless to the ground, and may be caught in the hands. The larger birds fare even worse. Credible instances have come to my knowledge of eagles and swans —the strongest of land and aquatic birds respec- tively—becoming so plumage-soaked and loaded with ice that they could not spread their wings or rise into the air, and have thus suffered the humiliation of being taken alive or knocked over with sticks. I recall one such season when a tempest of freez- ing rain had raged for thirty-six hours, though it was quite time for winter’s savagery to cease, even in stern New England. Next morning it was hard times among the wild animals in the grove, and worse out in the country fields. Seeds and buds were locked in icy chests, 89 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD and the insect stores, packed away for safe-keep- ing under the bark and in various crannies, were sealed beyond the reach of the most persistent beaks. The field-mice found that their tunnels, bored just beneath the leaves while the snow cov- ered them, were battered down; and the squirrels dared not venture along their slippery runways in the tree-tops, nor risk a leap from branch to branch. The house at that time was surrounded with big trees, relics of ancient woods now almost en- gulfed in the growing town; these were inhabited by a large colony of gray squirrels, besides a few red ones. I could see, here and there, a head poked inquiringly out of a hole, or peering from the door of one of the little cabins lodged among the oak limbs; but not a single furry acrobat would trust himself to those glassy twigs, and I thought I could detect an anxious expression in their big, black eyes, as if they wondered how they were going to get any breakfast. The squirrels had to endure their fast, but for the birds something might be done. So we cracked a handful of nuts, broke some corn into grains, and threw these and the table-crumbs out by the door. I had actually seen no birds about, save a band of bluejays and a group of English sparrows gO Wr Tie) OF) ORCHARD: AND FIELD which had dwelt in the wood-pile all winter. But in a very few minutes a plentiful company came to our table, including some whose presence I had not noted before, evidently new - comers. There were song-sparrows with black ephods; the big- headed white-throats, and their brethren with the jaunty caps of black and white; the chestnut- crowned tree-sparrows; a goldfinch, still wearing his dull winter suit; a whole host of snow-birds, in white waistcoats with ivory bills and pink stock- ings; nuthatches, chickadees, and, most beautiful of all, the purple finch. This last is one of our most confiding and pret- ty birds, looking as if he had plunged his crested head deep into the juice of dead-ripe strawberries, the rich syrup of which had trickled down his breast, staining rosily the white feathers, and had poured over his back into a pool near his tail. How did all these little beggars learn so quickly that alms had been spread for them? Where had they been hiding? Whither did they disappear next day, when the sun had come out, the ice had melted, and not a bird visited my lunch-counter? WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD YI BIRDS OF PASSAGE OTHING is more characteristic of our seasons, and nothing is more interesting in ornithology, than the migratory flights of the birds. We welcome them when | they come North in the spring in tuneful companies as the most pleasing feature of a reviving world, this familiar acquaintance and that saluting us with well- remembered greetings. Many speedily disappear, to be sure, but most of them remain, to gladden our hearts and senses while we watch them cunningly contrive their homes and loving- ly rear their young in our gar- g2 WiED Lith OF ORCHARD AND FIELD dens and groves. Then, in the restful, medita- tive days of autumn, the story is reversed. Birds of which we caught a glimpse in spring grant us a second brief interview, our summer friends are assembling and departing, and presently only the faithful few who reside with us the year around, plus some winter visitors from boreal parts, will be seen in our woods and meadows. It appears, then, that we in temperate latitudes entertain two sets of annual visitors—one from the South and the other from the North. This is true, and it looks as though the custom of migra- tion had begun among birds—wanderers by nat- ure— by their annually leaving the overcrowded tropics for increasingly distant journeys, in the course of which they built their nests; and that after a while certain ones had got into the habit of staying in the new regions, or of making only short and partial migrations, which by-and-by will cease. It is significant that most of the pro- nounced migratory species are errant members of families mainly tropical. We have in the middle parts of the United States four classes of birds, regarded from this point of view : First—Those which do not migrate at all, and these are a goodly number. 93 WILD LIBPE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD Second—Winter visitors from the North, irregu- larly present south of the Great Lakes. Third—Those whose migrations, although regu- lar, rarely extend north of the Great Lakes in sum- mer or south of the Gulf States and Rio Grande in winter, so that they are always present in some part of the United States. Fourth—The true ‘birds of passage,”’ hastily crossing our territory back and forth between tropic and subarctic regions, and rarely residing within our boundaries. As a matter of fact, the extent of migration now varies from the longest possible distance to none at all, and from actuating a whole species to mov- ing only a part of its individuals. In point of num- bers, taking the whole world and all kinds of birds together, long-distance migrants are decidedly in the minority, and they belong almost wholly to the order of highest organization—the Oscines, or singing-birds. Another remarkable circumstance is that mem- bers of the same family and even of the same genus differ very widely in this matter. We have finches that come and go from the South, and others that come and go from the North, and others that do not come or go at all. Some of our hawks and 94 WED IPE: Or ORCHARD AND FIELD owls are migratory, but others are not. Two or three of our sand-pipers breed all over the country, and the woodcock hardly leaves us, yet many of their near relatives hasten each spring from the equator to far beyond the arctic circle, and back again in the fall; some going on, indeed, to Pata- gonia, while their European congeners may nestle in Siberia and spend their off-months in Cape Col- ony. A few of our wood-warblers reside continu- ously,in the Southern States, and several breed in the more northerly parts of the Union, yet other warblers winter only in the middle tropics and never breed south of Hudson Bay; and these are among the smallest and weakest of birds. Here let me note, in passing, that very few species of birds—indeed, perhaps less than a dozen in the whole world—are known to breed in their winter homes, during their absence from our latitudes; and they are included in the few which travel clear past the tropics to the south temperate zone; and there are none, unless it be that world-wide wan- derer, the golden plover and some of his cousins, which regularly migrate both north and south from the equator. The birds of the southern hem1- sphere are almost wholly different from those of the northern hemisphere, nor do they often meet 95 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD in the tropics, since when one set is staying there the other is absent, owing to the alteration of arc- tic and antarctic seasons. How do we account for the existence of this habit, with its strange anomalies? No one has been able to do it satisfactorily thus far, and I do not mean to add any guessing, but, instead, to try to give some idea of the method of bird-migration ; for, though we do not yet understand the why, we have learned a great deal as to the how. I. THE SPRING MIGRATION NORTHWARD. Observers in Central America and the West Indies, where most of our absent birds spend their winter, tell us that in March and early April they begin to find their voices and to gather in little bands which flit northward in an uncertain way until finally the movement grows steady. Now, this is just the time when the tropical resi- dents are mating and preparing to build their nests, so that whatever social force there may be in ex- ample is all towards influencing the restless emi- grants to settle down where they are; but it has no such effect. This is also the time, since the rainy season is at hand, when vegetation springs into flower and fruit after the long drought, in- 96 Wee Bee OF, ORCHARD AND FIELD sects’ eggs are hatching juicy grubs, and these changing into perfect insects by the million. Bird- food is, therefore, unusually varied and abundant, so that no one can believe that fear of starva- tion forces the migrants into exile. Nevertheless, away they go, always arousing the country and beating up recruits, always choosing the easy route along the two sea-coasts, avoiding the mountain- ous interior, whose valleys send down reinforce- ments as the hosts pass, until they pour like a river from the Mexican lowlands into the United States—like two streams, in fact, for one goes up west of the mountains to people the Pacific coast of the continent. That east of the Cordillera is the more important, however, and as it enters Tex- as it spreads out and jogs into motion the large number of kinds that have been wintering there and in the Gulf States, until a mighty army in feathers is mustered and pressing North. A few follow the Rocky Mountains, and some march straight across the plains, but the great body gath- ers about the Lower Mississippi and press north- ward up the valley of that water-trunk to diverge later along its various branches and so overspread the interior. A strong side-stream is deflected almost at the ? a7 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD start, however, which follows the Atlantic coast and the eastern foothills of the Alleghanies towards New York and New England. This last is aug- mented, perhaps doubled, by accessions that have come across the Caribbean Sea from South Amer- ica to Florida, picking up West Indian recruits on the way; or perhaps, as many do, going north from the Antilles by way of the Bahamas and Ber- muda, making nothing of the long water-jumps. Along these real highways of bird-travel the migratory army moves steadily northward and eastward, as the opening season advances, the same sorts of bird always in the lead, and other sorts uniformly at the rear. The arrival of each species at any given point is remarkably regular, varying only a day or two from the same date in average seasons; but the migrations as a whole are influenced by the weath- er, the birds coming earlier in a forward than in a backward season. This means that they have met with less climatic obstructions to their advance. The water-fowl and marsh-birds, winging their way up the coast, cannot make headway against a Hatteras gale, but must seek shelter until it blows over; if such gales are long or frequent, they will be considerably 98 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD delayed, although, like a late train on a clear track, they can ‘‘ make up time” very fast when the route is open. Similarly the inland birds may be halt- ed by chilling northerly storms, which now and then descend upon us after the migration has begun, and check it completely. Searching the woods and fields, you will find bird-life storm-bound, and not a new feather greets you as long as the bad weather lasts. Then some evening the wind changes, blows balmy from a southerly direction, and next morning the sunny woods will be full of birds—a choir of music—where the day before were almost silence and solitude. These are the avant courrters of the host that has been waiting, and which has come on in the night, perhaps from a long distance and at high speed. All the king- birds in the central Mississippi Valley were once known to make a rush forward of two hundred miles in a single night. Such sudden accessions of migratory birds are called ‘‘ waves,’’ and they follow one another irreg- ularly, coinciding with the alternating ‘‘ waves” of cold-wet and warm-dry weather that compose our spring climate. The actual travelling seems to be done mainly at night. Early risers by the sea will observe long lines 99 WILD: LIFHR OF ORCHARD’ AND: FIELD of ducks, and “‘ wisps” of snipe and the like, coming in from the offing at dawn and settling down to rest and feed. ‘They remain quiet during the day, but towards evening flocks are seen gathering and setting out anew to disappear in the dusk deepen- ing over the waters. Similarly inland, the wood- land and meadow birds show every sign of weari- ness and hunger as they drop into the fields and thickets at sunrise, and busy themselves in forag- ing. During the day our inland birds flit about, moving onward by short flights, perhaps, but without haste, loitering and feeding and playing as they go, until night comes, when you may see them rising into the air and moving with swift, steady strokes towards their goal. Hence a very dark and windy night impedes the advance of the migration more than a gloomy day; and warm, moon-lighted nights are followed by the greatest plenty of new arrivals; and hence, also, the birds are prone to follow the lines of valleys, be- cause these afford not only more shelter for the diurnal resting, but a larger amount of wayside food than bleak mountain-tops or dry, open plains. Professor Cooke has computed that the average advance in the spring is twenty-three miles a day; but this is never regularly maintained, the delays 100 WIE D VEIT RE Om: ORCHARD 'AND FIEED caused by bad weather being made up by days (or nights) of far more rapid travel. The general sense of haste increases as the birds proceed. They not only have less bad weather, but loiter less in May than they did in March, and those species late in migrating always show more haste than the early comers. Especially is this true of birds that are bound for Hudson Bay or the arctic shores, and which towards the last must greatly increase their speed, since their arrival there is reported on dates little in advance of their appearance in our Central States, and quite as soon as the coun- try is sufficiently free from ice and snow to permit them to obtain food. They feel that they need all the time the brief Northern summer affords, and must not be tardy; neither must they be too soon, or some backward blow from the retreating forces of winter may overwhelm them, as some- times happens in spite of this caution. Their eager- ness to advance into the extreme North, indeed, frequently leads them to brave storms and cold that are often fatal; while in the autumn the first frosts frighten them: southward. Even the smallest and shortest-winged birds are capable of extraordinary flights, impelled by their eagerness to reach home. Warblers, fly-catchers, Io. WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD thrushes, and seed-eating birds, as well as water- fowl, annually pass from island to island of the West Indies, and visit Bermuda, Newfoundland, and other places far from the American mainland. This implies not only a power of continuous loco- motion for hundreds of miles, but also a very swift pace, since a bird cannot take enough food into its stomach to supply its system for more than a few hours, on account of the celerity with which its highly active organization uses up nutriment. A bird is like a high-pressure engine with small furnaces, which must be constantly fed with fuel in order to keep up steam. The Mediterranean is not an obstacle to the semi-annual transfer of feathered population between Europe and Africa; Great Britain’s quota crosses both the Channel and the North Sea; Japan and the Philippines are stocked from China or distant islands, while the remotest parts of the Pacific archipelago are visited by small, migratory land-birds as well as wandering sea-fowl, at the expense of traversing, sometimes, two thousand miles of open ocean. What is possible over the sea may be easily un- dertaken above land, and some European ornithol- ogists assert that certain small warblers habitually make their spring journey in a single night of un- 102 WILD LIFE O# ORCHARD AND FIELD broken flight from the south side of the Mediterra- nean to the shores of the Baltic. These and many other facts go to show that if a warbler or sand- piper bound for the mouth of the Mackenzie or Boothia found itself late in reaching Manitoba or New Brunswick, it would be able to cover the re- maining distance in a very few days and arrive ‘fon time.” But these long - distance, persistent travellers, who are bidden by some strange, irresistible un- rest to go to the very ends of the earth, are com- paratively few, since most birds are able to satisfy themselves with a home well inside the temperate zone, and, fortunately for us, for the most part be- tween the thirtieth and forty-fifth parallels of lati- tude, or, more exactly, within the isotherms which these lines represent in the central United States. They drop out of the march as they arrive, and contentedly set about establishing a home with an air of satisfied ease that we think shows glad- ness of heart. Few are mated on their arrival. Family life has not been well preserved during their winter’s leisure in the tropics, and it appears likely that the older males lead off when they start northward in the spring. At any rate, in nearly all cases 103 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD it is the old males that first come, and it may be a week or more before any females are seen, and still later before the young born the previous year appear. The explanation of this probably is, that the old birds, being stronger and more seri- ously bent upon the object of their journey, travel more rapidly than the females and youngsters. All are in their newest and gayest coats. With one other pleasing feature I shall bring toa close this account of the first, or spring, half of the annual migration of our birds, and then be ready to say something of the second half, or their re turn southward in autumn; and this pleasing con- clusion is found in the fact that year after year, and perhaps generation after generation, birds return to the identical neighborhood in which they and their forefathers have been bred. There is abundant evidence of this in all parts of the world and for all kinds of birds, from the ocean fowl that punctually almost to a day have returned “since the time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary” to the familiar sea-cliffs of Iceland or Alaska, to the wrens and robins of our door-yards that come back year after year to nestle in the same bushes. Who does not know of nests of the phebe-bird, made every sea- 104 Wihre Eirh (GF ORCHARD, AND: FIELD son since they were children under the same bridge —of certain holes where a wren’s eggs may al- ways be found—of elms that never fail to swing the cradle of an oriole? This trait is not only a lovely one, but its ex- istence, as a strong influence in _ bird-character, may throw some light on the vexed problem of how it happens that this wonderful custom of bird- migration originated and has become so fixed. Il. THE AUTUMNAL FLIGHT SOUTHWARD The sole business of a migratory bird’s sojourn in the summer-land of his choice seems to be the rearing of a family. This is his errand, and he gets as much fun by the way as he can. As soon as he reaches the right place—and he well knows where that is—he persuades some admired one to mate with him, and together they build a home and are diligent at domestic duties until the eggs hatch and the young are ready to leave the nest. This accomplished, the thoughts of the birds seem to turn immediately to the South—to the warm, fruitful, indolent, inviting latitudes where harsh winds and chilling rains and fading leaves never benumb bright spirits. So strong is this longing that many of the older 105 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND: FIELD males, with a neglect of parental duties otherwise inexcusable, often forsake their homes long be- fore their offspring are able to accompany them, and begin to wend their way southward, loafing along by easy stages and enjoying life in bach- elor companies as if no such a thing as responsi- bility existed. This impulse does not seem to depend upon lat- itude or weather or the age of the young. Our own summer birds have largely left us long before mild weather ends, several species disappearing almost wholly from the Hudson Valley by the end of August, while their close relatives, or even breth- ren of the same species, are still lingering in the valley of the Yukon (where numbers begin their de- parture by descending to the warmer coast), and about Hudson Bay, until the first frosts remind them, in mid-September, that they must be off. Hence the arctic breeders are among the latest to pass by us in the fall, as they were among the earliest to go northward in the spring. These come at last with a rush, making our half-deserted woods populous again, at the end of September, with strangers hurrying south. Snipe, sand-pipers, and plovers gather in chat- tering bands and dart away in the dusk to feed- 106 WELD LIPE Or ORCHARD: AND FIELD ing-grounds not yet threatened by frost; the wood- land birds flit from willow-copse to birch-grove, and scud to the shelter of thick larches as they see following overhead the ominous forms of hawk and owl; the ducks and geese form into geometric angles and cleave their way through the air so swiftly that they can pause and rest almost in- definitely when some pleasant lake invites them to feast upon wild celery or rice, while slower trav- ellers “ catch up with them.” And as the migrants go on, tracing the Yukon, the Mackenzie, and other great rivers to their head- lakes, skirting the coasts of Hudson Bay, and re- ‘ viewing the sights of Labrador or Keewatin or the Canadian plains, they pass and leave behind them some hardy natives, like the ice-owl, the cross-bills, and the ptarmigans, who laugh at their haste; but they pick up and set a-going a constant- ly augmented multitude of birds who last spring stopped to make their nests in these less remote districts, until finally Canada has been swept clean of its summer birds and all are on the wing, southward bent. Again, too, as in spring, it is noticeable that the old males are leading the host of each species, and that only later—sometimes much later—come 107 WILD LIFE: OF “ORCHARD AND PTELCO females and young. I am carefulyto make this matter of the succession of ages clear, because of its notable significance in the problem: How do birds find their way? The old answer was short and easy: Instinct tells them. This means, if it means anything, that a bird is born with an intuitive knowledge of a road he has never seen, perhaps crossing the ocean. In some instances it would mean an intuitive knowledge of two roads, for one of the curiosities of American migrations, at least, is the fact that certain species follow one route in the spring and another quite different one on their return in the autumn. Moreover, migration routes are rarely straight lines north and south, to which the little creatures might be kept by some mysterious “‘ sense of polar direction,” but are usually somewhat roundabout, often crook- ed, and sometimes squarely east and west for a large part of the course. Then we encounter such curiosities as the behavior of that warbler common in summer in Alaska, which never migrates along the American coast with the other birds, but crosses to Siberia and comes and goes to the tropics by the far longer Asiatic road. Another curiosity, which may be mentioned here as well as anywhere, is this: Where birds have been led, by the influence 108 a aaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamamaammaa WILD) LIFE, OF (-ORCHARD AND, FIELD of civilization or otherwise, to settle in unaccus- tomed districts, they take in their migrations, both ways, the roundabout course they pursued in their gradual spread of colonization. Thus all the bobolinks, lately become numerous in Colorado, go straight east to the Mississippi Valley and then southward, in the autumn, instead of striking straight south across Texas on their way to their winter home in Central America. To call it “instinct” is only an attempt to dis- guise ignorance, but for a long time those who did so asserted that in this and that case the young of the year were the first to arrive from the North, and by doing so, and proceeding on their way without hesitation, showed intuitive knowledge. One by one, however, the alleged instances have been shown untrue; and it is safe to say that no species of migratory bird is now known whose young ha- bitually precede their parents either in the spring or the fall. Even if they occasionally did so, other birds are thronging in the same direction, and the innocents need only “go with the crowd” until they met some of their own race. There is, then, no more mystery as to the young: they are guided by their elders, or else they are likely to get lost. What does happen? This. The adult males 109 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD are first to respond and start off, because they are free of care ; and they keep well in advance, because strong of wing. It 1s often ten days or a fortnight after these jolly old fellows appear before the bulk of the species they represent passes through our fields, and these are mainly females and young —family or neighborhood parties that have kept in company; and the last that are seen are al- most invariably nestlings of the past season. There is, then, no mystery as to the young; they are guided by their elders or else they are lost. But how do the elders find their way? A full answer to that question might take us back to the beginning of things, and then not be satisfactory ; but we need not attempt so much. Let us say simply that they have been taught the route and remember it. If you care to believe that long in- heritance has given them a special aptness towards geography, I shall not object ; and this may amount almost to a faculty in some cases, as those of sea- crossing species. Such cases are not readily ex- plained; nor is the ability of the human natives of the South African veldt or the American forests to strike a straight course to camp through an unmarked wilderness. Nevertheless, I do not be- lieve that birds have any special or peculiar “‘sense 110 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD of direction”’ different from that possessed by other wild animals to a greater or less degree. Every continent shows certain main routes or highways of bird-travel, which, when sketched upon a map, are seen to bear definite relations to the coast-lines, mountain ranges, and great river systems of the globe. In North America, Europe, and eastern Asia, where we know the subject best, these mainly lie in a north-southerly direction. Such bodies of water as the Mediterra- nean Sea or our Great Lakes are crossed without deviation, but lofty mountains are avoided as far as possible. This is strikingly exemplified by the highlands of southeastern Europe. Siberia and northern Russia get their summer birds by way either of the Volga or of the Rhone-Rhine and Baltic Valley, and the Danube forms a regular migration-route of certain European species that never cross the Alps to Italy and Africa, but go east to Persia and India for the winter. Our own birds do not regularly cross either the Rocky or Appalachian mountain ranges. It is probably to get a wide outlook upon the landscape—spread it like a map beneath their glance—that birds fly at so great a height as they usually do during their migrations. The sight Lit WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD of wedges of geese winging their way through the sky, so far away that they seem no larger than sparrows, is familiar, but lately we have come to know that the little birds also rise to great alti- tudes before undertaking their long flights. Per- sons observing the moon through powerful tele- scopes have recognized flocks of song-birds rushing across its face, and have estimated them to be from fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred feet above the surface of the earth. In December, 1896, the meteorologists at Blue Hill, Massachusetts, while measuring the altitude of clouds by triangulation, made instrumental observations of flocks of ducks, and found them to be flying about one thousand feet above the valley, and at the rate of nearly forty-eight miles an hour. There seems no doubt that this altitude is often greatly exceeded, but even it would afford an immensely extensive out- look, and enable birds (which are remarkably far- sighted) to discover and recognize landmarks far in advance. This is nothing more than an ex- tension of the familiar performance of homing-pig- eons, which rise to about eighteen hundred feet, when liberated one hundred and twenty-five miles beyond any point familiar to them, before strik- ing out homeward, while those set free (as has 112 WEED Le OF ORCHARD AND FIELD been frequently done) over three hundred miles from any point they know, rise nearly out of sight in an effort to get their bearings. I must confess, however, that this goes only part way towards solving the mystery of how birds find their way over vast spaces of shoreless ocean, as they habitually do in various parts of the world. A large number of our land as well as water birds have been recorded in western Europe, and a sea- son rarely passes when some American songster is not heard of in Great Britain. These wanderers are evidently unfortunates that have been blown far off shore and then drifted before the wind until they struck the European coast; but the fact sheds light upon our problems by exhibiting the speed at which they must travel, since a bird’s endurance of famine is very limited. That European birds almost never come to our shores is due to the fact that the prevailing summer winds blow towards the east. Many regular migration routes, however, lead birds that follow them right across spaces of ocean nearly or quite as wide as the Atlantic. Shore- birds, such as plovers, sand-pipers, and curlews, fly straight from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland to the West Indies and South America; some will 8 TL WILD ‘LIFE OF ORCHARD AND ‘FIELD halt at the Bermudas, and some go right by, passing with utter scorn of rest over the Antilles. These are all long-winged, strong fliers, and prom- inent among them is the golden plover, which is world-wide in its distribution, and apparently afraid of nothing. It breeds only in the marshy plains within the arctic circle, unless possibly, as Mr. W. H. Hudson suspects, there may be a breeding colony on the antarctic continent, to which, with certain other birds, it seems to resort every year by way of Cape Horn and the Falkland Islands. The great majority of those in Patagonia and Ar- gentina, however, go all the way to Alaska and Greenland each year to lay their eggs. Similarly this plover returns annually from the Siberian tundras to India, Ceylon, the coasts of China and Malaya, and thence spreads over the East Indies to New Zealand. Still more remarkable, how- ever, is its performance in the northern Pacific region, where every season it appears at the proper time in Hawaii, the Ladrones, Fiji, Samoa, and the other island groups of that vast ocean, none of which is less than two thousand miles from the nearest mainland and hardly less from each other. It is not surprising to learn that when they arrive at Hawaii in September the plovers are very poor 114 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD and weak, but those which stay there through the winter fatten rapidly, and in March or April begin to prepare for departure. “T hey can be seen dur- ing the day, at this time,” says an authority, “‘tak- ing long or short flights out at sea and returning again to the island. This exercise is undoubtedly for the purpose of strengthening themselves for the final effort — their muscles, during their winter’s life of luxury and ease, having become flabby and feeble.’’ This scene is repeated every spring in the North Island of New Zealand, when the cur- lews gather in flocks on the utmost headlands at sunset, and with plaintive gathering cries rise into the air, circling higher and higher until at last they turn and speed away across the twelve hun- dred miles of restless waves that separate them from the nearest resting-place. But these feats of flight are by no means con- fined to sea-fowl. Land birds constantly travel between the mainland and such distant islands as Madagascar, the Canaries, and Bermuda— from the last-named even the ruby-throated hum- ming-bird goes and comes with the changing sea- sons. In Oceanica migration-habits are observa- ble that seem to have no part in the general equa- torial-polar movement—the case, for instance, of PLS WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD that local cuckoo which annually comes from the Fiji Islands to New Zealand to breed, ‘and then re- turns to Fiji. These islands are fifteen hundred miles apart, north and south, with nothing be- tween. It is useless to pretend to explain how these birds know and are able to keep their course over these wide and windy spaces of ocean. We must wait until we get more information before offering even a guess at it. Possibly the investigations and experiments now being pursued by such a stu- dent as Professor Jacques Loeb, of the University of Chicago, may some day solve the problem, by the finding of some sort of “‘tropism” to which migrating birds conform. Let us now go back to the more familiar and comprehensible ways of our own land birds. The travelling at night seems an odd thing until we study it. Then it becomes evident that, other- wise, birds could have no time to get sufficient sub- sistence. Their food comes to most of them in so small particles, and their digestion of it is so rapid, that it requires almost incessant effort to supply their needs. That this is the secret of the night journeys is shown by the fact that such birds as swallows, swifts, night-hawks, certain birds of 116 SS WetlD BIth OF ORCHARD AND FIELD rr prey, and others, that obtain their food on the wing, do not travel by night, but proceed wholly in the daytime, since they can forage as they fly. It is the birds that must hunt in the bushes for in- sects or fruit, must dig in old wood for grubs, or scratch the ground or probe in the mud or search the waters for their daily bread, that need daylight for this purpose more than for travelling. As evening approaches a careful observer at favorable points will see them gathering in little bands, or in great flocks, according to their habit, and then rising straight up to a considerable height before bearing away on their course. In clear nights, and especially in moonlit ones, they fly high and far, reading the map of their route beneath them almost as well as by day, and we see or hear little of them. But when the nights are dark and misty, yet not stormy enough to prevent them attempting to get forward, the birds skim low over the tree-tops and houses, feel- ing their way from point to point, and often getting so confused that they quit altogether, and, dropping down anywhere, wait for a better time. Such nights come more often in the fall than in the spring, and no one who is abroad in a quiet, rural place on a warm, cloudy evening of Septem- 117 WILD: LICE OF ‘ORCHARD AND’ FIEED ber, can fail to hear in the gloom above him the almost incessant voices of passing birds, calling to one another, and doing their best to find the way and to keep together. It is at such times especial- ly that birds are attracted by lights. The glow of illuminated towns allures them from afar, and the occupants of all tall buildings, such as nowa- days rise like monuments in our cities, will tell you that night after night in the migrating season little birds knock at their upper windows and can hardly be driven away. Nowhere, however, does this occur so plentifully as about lofty light-houses. On dark, quiet nights in the migrating season the great beams projected from these beacons will shine for hours together upon drifting, eddying hosts of birds of many sorts that flock about the lantern, rising and fall- ing and fluttering like moths about a candle or huge snowflakes whirling in a wintry gale. All seem dazed by the glare as they rush into the pow- erful rays shot forth by the lenses; and many a one, blinded or crazed, dashes headlong against the lantern and falls stunned or dead upon the balcony or the rocks beneath. Hundreds of poor little victims to this infatuation for the brilliant light perish every year in and about the electric 118 WILD LIFE ,OF ORCHARD AND FIELD torch of the statue of Liberty in New York Harbor and every other lofty light along the Northern coast. So they drift by us, journeying leisurely south- ward through the bright autumnal days, follow- ing the turning of the leaves till they lose the richly colored carpet of the Northern earth in the green velvet of the tropical lands, or hurrying along over our sleeping heads through the gloom of night, always fleeimg from the chill and desola- tion that follow hard after them. Is the habit of migrating on the increase, or is it diminishing? Do birds tend to become more vagrant or more sedentary? I am inclined to the latter view. Many species, no doubt, have in mod- ern times decidedly extended their range, owing to the opportunities afforded by spreading civiliza- tion, and in some cases this seems to have affected the migratory habit, enabling birds, perhaps by furnishing food or shelter, or both, to stay where formerly they were unwilling to remain from one season to another. This is likely to go on. It would seem as though this ought to be the tendency, and that the migratory habit ought, after a time, to disappear, because it is, on the whole, a burden and hardship, handicapping its 119 WILD LIKE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD followers in the struggle for existence. The exer- tion required, the time wasted, the perils encoun- tered in these immense journeys, seem the reverse of economical, and a logical view of the matter seems to suggest that they should cease, and that all birds should gradually become capable of living all the year round in substantially the same place, as the greater part of them now do. Such is the method of bird migration. You may speculate upon the origin and meaning of it to suit yourself, and have as good a chance as I, perhaps, of finding the true explanation; and if you do not arrive at a satisfactory answer to all its problems you will be lkely, at any rate, to perceive much of the romance, poetry, and moral suggestion that it contains, and so be largely re- warded for your study. And if in failure you need consolation, remember that it was the Wisest of Men who remarked, that of the three things that baffled him one was the way of an eagle in the air. WILD LIFE Gir” ORCHARD) (AND “FIELD VII FIRST-COMERS [HE lengthening of the days, \}as the year slowly advances, brings with it increased longing | for still balmier weather to every | one whose pleasure is not bound } within the narrow limits of the yy 4 opera and soirée. To the lover of long rambles in the woods and meadows, or of lazy boating along some placid stream, where s, “cy | the water-liles bow to let him 4 pass and buoyantly rise in his “wake, shaking, the drops from nN their shining fronds, every in- \WA ‘dication of approaching spring IS | is eagerly scanned, and is hailed _jwith delight. The slow decay of F2T WILD LAFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD the ice in the ponds, the vivid green of the aquatic plants disclosed by its melting, the delicate herbage hiding under the sodden leaves, the gummy and bursting buds, all presage the charms of reviving nature. Then the sounds awake. The frogs bid each other good-morning after their long sleep; the lowing of calves and the bleating of lambs resound from the hill-sides; the tender warble of the bluebird, the cheery call of the robin, and the gurgle of swollen brooks mingle in our ears as we pick our way along the muddy paths; until, some bright April morning, we discover that surly Winter is gone, and coy Spring is shyly waiting for us to bid her welcome. In this company of the heralds of this admirable change of the seasons, none have a better part than the birds, whose wings bear beauty and song. Half a dozen of these messengers—the bluebird, the wren, dove, blackbirds, and so forth —are especially first-comers, and to them I ask attention. The song-sparrow also belongs here, by good right, but he enjoys an essay all to himself elsewhere. Among the very earliest are the familiar blue- birds; indeed, they may occasionally be found all winter long in sunny fields. By All-fools-day 122 A Bluebird é ‘ 7 i. P 7 " in - PL he “6 oe I Wh Dp Lith OF ORCHARD: AND’ FIELD they have become common throughout the North, and are seeking their mates. Meanwhile, from every field, and about the yet desolate gardens, is heard the bluebird’s cheery voice. It is a hap- py, contented warble, and, though no great credit belongs to the singer as a musician, his tender melody is among the most delightful of vernal sounds. There is a ubiquity or ventriloquistic peculiarity about this song—whether due to its quality or to the capricious breeze upon which it is usually borne, [ do not know—which tends to make its source indefinite. You may hear the notes on a bright March morning, but cannot find their pretty author. He denies your eyes the welcome sight of him, until at last you give up the search only to discover him close behind you. To no American bird will better apply Words- worth’s questioning characterization of the English cuckoo: “Shall I call the Bird, Or but a wandering voice ?” This unintended ventriloquism may be in his favor, but his azure plumage is very conspicuous as he stands on a tall fence-post with the woods for a background, or reconnoitres the entrance to an old woodpecker’s hole in some white cottonwood, ‘a el WILD! LIiBE OF ORCHARD VAND Ibu and many bluebirds are killed by the small hawks. Thoreau said that he carried the sky on his back, to which John Burroughs added, “‘ and the earth on his breast.’’ This describes him perfectly. The bluebird is not ambitious 1n his flight, never emulating the lofty journeys of the pointed-winged birds, and is rarely seen sixty feet above the sur- face. He loiters about the outskirts of the woods, flitting from stump to stump; delights in a tract of newly cleared land; and looks no further when he discovers, not far from the farm-house, a group of charred and towering trunks—monuments of a long-passed fire in the forest. Next to that he loves an aged orchard. In both places the attrac- tion is mainly the grubs, worms, and insects that infest dead and decaying woods, and upon which he feeds. To such a spot he leads his mate, easily to be distinguished by her duller plumage. To- gether they go house-hunting. It isnot long, usu- ally, before they are suited; for the woodpeckers have been there years before them, chiselling out many holes for themselves which are now left va- cant; or the snapping off of some old limb has opened the way to a snug cavity in its hollow in- terior. Any kind of a cranny seems to serve in a pinch. I have known them to build in a broken 124 Wil bi, On ORCHARD: “AND: FTE D tin water-spout under the eaves of a house, for want of a better place; although, no doubt, the birds exercise a decided choice when they can. The tenement determined upon, the furnishing of it does not require much labor or contrivance. The birds bring enough of a peculiar kind of soft grass which turns reddish brown when it dries, some- times mix with it a little hair, and thus thickly carpet the bottom of the cavity. Thatisall. The eggs are laid by the second week in April, and the young are hatched about ten days after. The eggs are five in number, and are light blue, with- out spots. Once, in northern Ohio, I found a nest- ful of pearly white eggs, and other similar cases have come to my knowledge; they were just as well worth sitting on, however, as five blue eggs would have been. The bluebird is also a true bird of the garden, taking the place of England’s robin - redbreast more nearly than any other bird in America. It is no trouble to have them twittering about the house the whole summer through. The negroes at the South always have an abundance of differ- ent birds about their cabins by simply hanging up empty gourds; and a cigar-box with a hole in it is all-sufficient. But you must not be disap- 125 WILD LIBRE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD pointed if the house-wrens utterly dispossess the bluebirds of the houses you have put up, for the wrens are regular buccaneers, with no more heart or conscience than a walnut; nevertheless, the bluebirds are far better fighters than one would suspect them to be, as the English sparrow has learned at the cost of many a sore spot. This same house-wren is so well known that I need only to allude to him; and any further de- scription than to say that he is the wee brown bird, about as large as your thumb, which frequents the garden bird- boxes and the barn, is unnecessary. He comes early and stays late. He makes himself at home immediately, and is everywhere present, bustling about outhouses and barns, rapidly build- ing his nest in the most insecure and unfrequented places, like the sleeve of an old coat left in the barn, or a lantern hung against the woodshed; and, if it is repeatedly pulled down, as often rebuilding it; literally “‘ pitching into” other wrens and blue- birds and swallows, whom he considers trespass- ers on his right to the whole garden, and fighting so audaciously and persistently as nearly always to come off victor; squeaking in and out of every crevice, with his comical tail at half-cock ; inquiring into every other living thing’s business, yet not 126 WIELD LIFE) OF "ORCHARD AND FIELD neglecting his own, this little bobbing bunch of brown excitement is the very spirit of impudence. The wren does not confine himself altogether to the garden, however. You may find him every- where in the woods, and few species are equal to this in the number of individuals. An old stump that is too soft for the woodpeckers, or the hollow, broken limb of a tree that the winds have demol- ished, is his chosen home. Into a hole somewhere he stuffs a large quantity of twigs, some of them of astonishing size when we think how small a bird handles them. In the centre of this mass is a soft chamber, wherein six or seven brick-dust- colored eggs are hatched late in May. It is a nest which justifies his generic name, Tvoglodytes, and so fond of his queer den is he, and so restlessly active, that, when his proper home is finished, he packs full of rubbish half the crevices in the vicin- ity, out of a sheer want of some better way to oc- cupy his time and ease his energy. There is one component of this nest which is also used by the vireos and gnat-catchers — namely, round pellets of a white, cottony substance, the nature of which I was puzzled to determine. At last I caught the birds collecting it, and found it to be a minute fungus which covers dead twigs 127 Henne aaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamaacaaaaaaaaal WILD \LIZE: OF ORCHARD) AND ele i UT EIEN here and there with a living velvet of snowy white. It is elastic and somewhat viscous, and with gossa- mer serves an obvious purpose in such a nest as the vireo’s; but why the wrens scatter it through their brush-pile is not so clear. One of my pleasantest memories is of a spark- ling April morning in 1874, at Scott’s Landing, a little railway junction on the Ohio River. It was bright and cold, and the wheezy steamboats pass- ing up and down the river trailed from their tall and slender stacks great golden banners athwart the rising sun. The birds were up betimes. Crows from far and near were gathering to breakfast at the banks of the river, as is their custom at sea- sons of high water. The crow- blackbirds — re- dundancy of title!|-—were moving in small flocks about some newly ploughed ground, smacking their horny lips at one another over some luscious, luckless grub; and their cousins, the military red- wings, were in the highest glee. Cardinals are the natural bird-feature there ; and their bold whist- ling resounded from every hill-side. Out of the orchard came the sharp squeak of a black-and- white creeper, the noisy chatter of chipping-spar- rows, and the dee-dee-dee of the miniature Southern chickadees. One tree was the haunt of a single 128 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD robin—rara avis in that locality—and he sang loud and long, not minding his loneliness. Blue- birds were not numerous, but a pair, and perhaps two families, inhabited an old cherry-tree so near to the railway-track that the tops of the passing cars pushed aside the boughs. I have noticed so many nests of birds built in close proximity to rail- ways that I have thought the builders exercised a distinct preference for the situation, as making them safer from the attack of hawks. Not an uncommon bird, hopping down between the rails to pick up the grain dropped from the freight-trains, was the turtle-dove, which was an old acquaintance of mine in the West, but which is rare in New England. They were very wary, uttered no note, and came with the silence of ghosts. If I only stirred when they were near—whir! away went my doves, straight and swift as an arrow, spreading their white-edged tails. A portion of the following summer I spent on the Little Kanawha, and many a day was I| en- tertained by the notes of the turtle-dove floating down from a hill-top as I threaded my way through the woods. Among the most common of birds in West Virginia, the people yet regarded it with af- fection, and made as great a disturbance if one 9 129 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD was shot as they would at the shooting of a house- pigeon. They were jealous of the few purple mar- tins they had in the same degree. Why it is called the turtle-dove I do not know. Probably because of its kinship with the turtle-dove of Europe; but this only puts the difficulty one step further back. Its other name—mourning-dove—is more charac- teristic; for its song, if it may be called such, is a sobbing refrain, that, tolling from afar, recalls the echoing of a distant church-bell— “Swinging slow with sullen roar.” The cry is frequently mistaken for that of some owl; but the dove does not sing at night, or some nervous people would grow wild. If it did, it would take character as a banshee, and become a bird of evil omen. On the contrary, its coming in early spring 1s now welcomed as one of the first signs of the sure advance of the season, and its plaintive note is only a minor tone, mingling har- moniously with the livelier notes of other denizens of the woods. In well-settled districts, where it can find food, it is more and more staying through the winter, and becoming semi-domesticated about the house and barn. The mourning-doves pair very early, and are 130 WLiIED LIbE: OF -ORCHARD:: AND’ FIELD as affectionate in their attachments as are most of the doves and pigeons whose “billings and cooings”’ have become exaggerated into a proverb to express the first enthusiasm of young love. Their home is an indifferent affair, but perhaps its very scantiness may serve to benefit its owners by making it less conspicuous among the almost leafless branches, where it is likely to be placed early in the season. The nest is not by any means always in a tree, although a snug thorn-apple offers temptations that few doves can resist; but it may be put on the flat top of a stump, on the protruding end of a fence-rail, or the eggs may sometimes be laid on the ruins of a last year’s nest, as in a case I once noticed where three dove’s eggs were laid in an old cat-bird’s nest, around the ruins of which the snow was yet unmelted. On the plains I have seen many times how these birds scratch a few grass-stalks together on the ground, for want of a better place. It is not to be wondered at that pigeons have been easily domes- ticated, when they accommodate themselves so readily to any exigency in rearing their young. However placed, this nest is a slight platform of twigs, just sufficient to hold the two or three eggs; or, if the top of a stump, or the ground, be chosen 131 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD as the site, it is not uncommon to find simply a little rim, like a tinker’s dam, built around the eggs, which rest on the bare surface beneath. In such a situation their gray down renders the young safely inconspicuous. Another early and familiar visitor to the gardens is the chipping sparrow, or “chippy,” its delicate voice coming to us from among the first blossoms of the lilac. It is also called the “hair-bird,”’ because its nest 1s composed mainly of horse-hairs twined into a flat little basket of slender twigs and rootlets. But this is not a good name; the scientific designation—“ social sparrow ’’—fits the bird better, for it seeks to be social with man, and places its home where every boy and girl of the family may look in at the front door. The eggs are pea-green, scrawled, as though by a pen, with black lines and dots. The food of the chippy during the spring and summer consists largely of small insects, and he searches carefully through the blossoming trees for the minute bugs that infest the leaves and flowers, occasionally nipping off the sweet and tender stamens of the apple and cherry blos- soms, or taking bites out of the early currants, but, on the whole, doing great service in payment for 132 yeasesscsccceccecieatissasie® A Chipping Sparrow Mave D ELE E, OF ORCHARD AND FIELD his trifling harm. He flits quietly and busily all over the shrubbery, an image of a happy and contented little workman, tra-la-la-ing in a fine, trilling voice that would be shrill were it not so sweet, an aria from some bright bird-opera. The chippy is so easily watched that I do not pro- pose to tell all I have learned about it, and thus rob a reader of the pleasure of learning its beauti- ful ways for himself. You will not find it difficult to become acquainted with these pygmy sparrows after you have recognized their chestnut caps among your rose- bushes. You will see, also, that you may tame them and teach them to come to you for crumbs. They are almost the only birds that the insolent English sparrows will be friendly towards; and they are wonderfully de voted to their young: but I am forgetting that the reader was to find all this out for himself! I have in mind the delta of a river whose shores are so level that it is a constant struggle whether land or water shall prevail. The river finds its way to the broad harbor through a dozen or more channels, between which are low islands over- grown with great trees burdened and festooned with grape-vines and moss, and tangled with thickets and rank fern-brakes, or growths of wild 133 WILD’ ‘LIFE OF ORCHARD AND: FIELD rice and luxuriant water-weeds so dense and tall as to be impenetrable even to a canoe. Here blooms the magnificent lotus (Nelwmbium luteum), with its corolla as large as your hat and its leaf half a boat-length broad—great banks of it, giving out a faint, sweet, soporific, almost intoxicating odor. Curious sounds reach you as you thread the mazes of the swamp. The water boils up from the oozy bottom, and the bubbles break at the surface with a faint, lisping sound; the reeds softly rattle against one another like the rustle of heavy silks, and you can hear the lily-pads and deeply anchored stems of the water-weeds rubbing against one another. More articulate noises strike your ear—the sharp, clucking lectures on propriety of the mud-hen to its young; the brek-kek-kek, coaz-coaz of the frog; the splash of a tumbling turtle; the rushing of a flock of startled ducks rising on swift wings; the sprightly, contagious laughter of those little elves, the marsh-wrens, teetering on the elastic leaves of the cat’s-tails. Never absent from such a reedy picture are the blackbirds, especially the redwing, whose favorite resort 1s where the rushes grow most densely, among which he places his nest. The little swales 134 WILD LIFE QF ORCHARD AND FIELD in the meadows, also, where tufts of rank grass flourish upon islands formed by the roots of many previous years’ growth, and stunted alders and cranberry-bushes shade the black water, are nearly always sure to be the home of a few pairs, so that they become well known to everybody, whether inland or alongshore, as soon as the ice melts. Such extensive marshes as I have just described are, however, the great centres of blackbird pop- ulation, where they breed, where they collect in great hordes of young and old as the end of the season approaches, and whence they repair to the neighboring fields of Indian corn to tear open the husks and pick the succulent kernels. In September I have seen them literally in tens of thousands wheeling about the inundated wild- rice fields bounding the western end of Lake Erie, their black backs and gay red epaulets glistening in the sun “like an army with banners.”’ The Canadian fishermen call them “ officer-birds,’’ and the impression of an army before him is always strong upon the beholder as he gazes at these prodigious flocks in autumn. It is extremely interesting to watch the swift evolutions of their crowded ranks, and observe the regularity and concert of action which govern their movements. 39 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD They move as if animated by a common and in- stantaneous impulse, in which no single one takes the lead or makes any suggestion, but all act in- dependently yet absolutely simultaneously.* The redwings are among the earliest of our vernal visitors, and south of the Ohio River and Washington may be found all through the winter. Their loud and rollicking spring note is one of the most invigorating sounds in nature, and most typical of the reviving year. Conk-quirée ! conk- | quirée ! sings out the male, as though he knew a good story if only he had a mind to tell it; and then adds chuck! quite as if he thought it of no use to try to interest you in it, and that he had been indiscreet in betraying an enthusiasm be- neath his dignity over a matter beyond your ap- preciation. His plain brown mate immediately says chuck! too, quite agreeing with her lord and master that it is not best to waste their confidence upon ou. *This idea of a “common mind” in the flock has been present with me ever since, as a boy, I watched these black- birds and other flocks, and speculated upon their movements ; but it has always seemed too fanciful for serious considera- tion, Yet in a late book, Bird Watching, by Edmund Selous (London, rgor), it is propounded and discussed at length in reference to English birds. 136 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD The centre of all their interest is the compact, tight basket, woven of wet grass-blades and split rush-leaves, which is supported among the reeds or rests on a tussock of wire-grass surrounded by water. It is a model nest, and they understand so well the labor it cost that they are mightily jealous of harm coming to it. The eggs are five in number, of a faded blue tint, marbled, streaked and spotted with leather-color and black, in shape rather elongated and pointed. The fledglings are abroad about the Ist of June, when the parents pro- ceed to the production of another brood. These blackbirds have the bump of domesticity largely developed, and if their household is dis- turbed they make a terrible fuss, calling upon all nature to witness their sorrow and execrate the wretch that is violating their privacy. During all the spring season, and particularly while the young are being provided for, the red- wings subsist almost exclusively on worms, grubs, caterpillars, and a great variety of such sluggish insects, and their voracious larve, as do damage to the roots and early sprouts of whatever the farmer plants; nor do they abandon this diet until the ripening of the wild-rice and maize in the fall. “For these vermin,’”’ says Wilson, ‘‘the starlings 137 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD search with great diligence, in the ground, at the roots of plants, in orchards and meadows, as well as among buds, leaves, and blossoms; and from their known voracity the multitudes of these in- sects which they destroy must be immense. Let me illustrate this fact by a short computation: If we suppose each bird on an average to devour fifty of these larvee in a day (a very moderate al- lowance), a single pair in four months, the usual time such food is sought after, will devour upward of twelve thousand. It 1s believed that not less than a million pairs of these birds are distributed over the whole extent of the United States in summer, whose food, being nearly the same, would swell the amount of vermin destroyed to twelve billions. But the number of young birds may be fairly estimated at double that of their parents; and as these are constantly fed on larve for three weeks, making only the same allowance for them as for the older ones, their share would amount to 44 billions. making a grand total of 164 billions of noxious insects destroyed in the space of four months by this single species! The combined ravages of such a hideous host of vermin would be sufficient to spread famine and desolation over a wide extent of the richest, best-cultivated country on the earth.”’ 138 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD, AND FIELD The yellow - headed blackbird, a kinsman of larger size, belongs properly northwest of Lake Superior, but frequently gets into Michigan and Illinois. The bright-yellow head and neck make it very noticeable if seen. Its habits are essential- ly those of the redwing. We have another set of blackbirds in the Atlantic States, of greater size than the redwings, commonly known as “‘ crow ’’-blackbirds, but called “‘ grakles”’ in the books. There are several species, but none are greatly different from that too-common pest of our cornfields, the purple grakle. The real home of the grakles, although along the edges of the swamps, is not among the reeds where the redwing and bobolink sit and swing, but rather in the bushes and trees skirting the muddy shores. They build their nests in a variety of positions, but usually a convenient fork in an alder-bush is chosen, twenty or thirty pairs often dwelling within a radius of a hundred feet. The nest is a rude, strong affair of sticks and coarse grass-stalks lined with finer grass, and looks very bulky and rough beside the neat structure of the redwing; which illustrates how much better a re- sult can be produced by an artistic use of the same material. In the case of these, as well as the red- 139 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD winged blackbirds, however, the female does not wear the jetty, iridescent coat which adorns the head of the family, and reflects the sunlight in a thousand prismatic tints, but hides herself and the home she cares for by affecting a dull, brown- black, streaked suit, assimilating her closely with the surrounding objects. This protective colora- tion of plumage is possessed by the females of many species of birds, which would be very con- spicuous, and consequently greatly liable to danger while incubating their eggs, if they wore the bright tints of the males. The tanager and indigo-bird afford prominent examples. Sometimes the crow- blackbirds make their homes at a distance from the water, and occasionally they choose odd places, such as the tops of tall pine-trees, the spires of churches, martin-boxes in gardens, and holes in trees. Crow - blackbirds’ eggs are among the first on every boy’s string, and until he gains experience the young collector supposes he has almost as many different species represented as he has speci- mens, so much do they differ, even in the same nestful, in respect to color, shape, and size. Their length averages about 1.25 by .go of an inch, but some are long, slender, and pointed, while others 140 WIED: LIFE: QF /ORCHARD! AND: FIELD are round, fat, and blunt at both ends. The ground color may be any shade of dirty white, light blue, greenish, or olive brown; the markings consist of sharply defined spots and confused blotches, scratches, and straggling lines of obscure colors, from blue-black to lilac and rusty brown—some- times scantily and prettily marbled upon the sur- face of the egg, and sometimes painted on so thick- ly as wholly to conceal the ground color. The crow-blackbirds are in the advance-guard of the returning hosts of northward-bound mi- grants, making their appearance in small scat- tering flocks, and announcing their presence by loud smacks frequently repeated. They obtain most of their food from the ground, and walk about with great liveliness, scratching up the leaves, turning over chips, and poking about the pastures for insects and seeds softened by the spring rains. Their destruction of insects — especially during May, when their young are in the nest—is enor- mous; yet their forays upon the grain-fields in some parts of the country have made them a pest to be hated. “The depredations committed by these birds are almost wholly on Indian corn at different stages. As soon as its blades appear above the ground 141 WILD ‘LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD after it has been planted, the grakles descend upon the fields, pull up the tender plant, and devour the seeds, scattering the green blades around. It is of little use to attempt to drive them away with a gun: they only fly from one part of the field to an- other. And again, as soon as the tender corn has formed, these flocks, now replenished by the young of the year, once more swarm in the cornfields, tear off the husks, and devour the tender grains.’’ Wil- son saw fields in which more than half the corn was thus ruined. In view of this charge, the food of this blackbird was thoroughly investigated by Professor F. E. L. Beal, of the Department of Agriculture, and his report was published in the Year-book of the De- partment for 1894. His conclusion, after collect- ing a great amount of evidence, including an ex- amination of the contents of over two thousand stomachs, was that rather less than half of the food of the birds is of grain, and the remainder almost wholly insects, of which two-thirds are of noxious kinds. The conclusion is that they serve a very useful purpose in the general bird-work of keeping down the insect hordes, but that when they descend upon the young cornfields in crowds they must be driven off or killed, like any other 142 WEED Libs) @Ory ORCHARD AND) FIELD nuisance. This does not mean, however, that a general war of extermination on grakles is ad- visable—it would be distinctly unwise. These birds winter in immense numbers in the lower parts of Virginia, North and South Caro- lina, and Georgia, sometimes forming one con- gregated multitude of several hundred thousands. On one occasion Wilson met, on the banks of the Roanoke, on the 20th of January, one of these prodigious armies of crow-blackbirds. They arose, he states, from the surrounding fields with a noise like thunder, and, descending on the length of the road before him, they covered it and the fences completely with black; when they again rose, and after a few evolutions descended on the skirts of the high-timbered woods, they produced a most singular and striking effect. Whole trees, for a considerable extent, from the top to the lowest branches, seemed as if hung with mourning. Their notes and screaming, he adds, seemed all the while like the distant sounds of a great cataract, but in a musical cadence. WILD: ‘LIFE* OF ' ORCHARD AND /FIELD Vill THE SONG-SPAKROW HE American song-sparrow is a peculiar lover of old fields where Nature is fast reasserting herself after the temporary rule of man. The tumble-down, lichen-patch- ed stone fences; the gray cattle- paths diverging from the muddy Z, bar-way to those parts of the Des el! pasture where the grass is sweet- est; the weedy banks of the slug- gish brook winding indolently a - # “| among mossy bowlders and tan- DENe 4 gled thickets and patches of fra- grant herbage—are all congenial to it, and are its chosen resort. We; ~t Yet it is so common throughout most of the United States that 144 WILD LIFE ,OF ORCHARD AND FIELD you may find it almost anywhere—skulking about the currant and raspberry bushes in the village gardens; taking a riotous bath in some pool by the road-side, about whose rim, perhaps, the ice still lingers; hastening ta the top of a forest tree to plume its dripping feathers and shake off at once crystal water and a crystal song. Our favorite is the very first bird to greet us in the spring—in fact, many remain through the win- ter as far north even as Boston and Lake Erie. It is thought by ornithologists, however, that the winter song-sparrows are not the same individu- als that were with us in summer, and which have gone southward, but are inhabitants of more north- ern latitudes, that have come down with the snow- birds ; and it is said that these are far hardier birds, better and more versatile musicians. During the winter the song-sparrow remains, quiet and busy, along the edges of the woods on warm hill-sides in company with the spotted wood- peckers and snow-birds, or associates with the fowls in the barn-yard for a share of the house- wife’s bounty. But as the March snow melts, and the sun sends genial warmth to awaken the buds, he mounts the topmost twigs of the brush- pile whose labyrinths he has spent the winter in 10 145 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD exploring, and pours forth a rapturous welcome to the couriers of summer. Then through all the spring days, whether they be shady or sunny, from early morn till long after sunset, are heard the sweet and cheery cadences of his song, thrilled out over and over again like a canary’s. He starts off with a few low, rattling notes, makes a quick leap to a high strain, ascends through many a melodious variation to the key-note, and suddenly stops, leaving his song to sing itself through in your brain. To amplify another’s illustration, it is as though he said, ‘‘Press- press- PRESS, BY- TEEEE-RIAN-ian!’’ His clear tenor, the gur- gling, bubbling alto of the blackbirds, the slender purity of the bluebird’s soprano, and the solid basso-profundo of the frogs, with the accompani- ment of the April wind piping on the bare reeds of winter, or the drumming of rain-drops, form the naturalist’s spring quartette—as pleasing, if not as grand, as the full chorus of early June. The song of the sparrow varies in different in- dividuals, and often changes with the season. A single bird has been observed through several successive summers to sing nine or ten different sets of notes, usually uttering them one after an- other in the same order over and over. Careful 146 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD attention will show almost any of our songsters to vary their melodies from time to time, but none have greater individuality than our subject. In that interesting record of bird songs by the musician Cheney, entitled Wood Notes Wild, the author gives the notation of some twenty different melodies by a single performer; and offers the following distinct songs which he says he heard from a single song-sparrow within twenty minutes: -o- -& -g- # 3. BAS ee SSS Se 4 , “Last season,’ writes John Burroughs, “the whole summer through, one sang about my grounds like this: ‘Swee-e-t, swee-e-t, sweet, bitter.’ Day after day, from May to September, I heard 147 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD this strain, which I thought a simple but very pro- found summing-up of life, and wondered where the little bird had learned it so quickly. The present season I heard another with a song equally origi- nal, but not so easily worded. Among a large troop of them in April, my attention was attracted to one that was a master songster—some Shelley or Thomson among its kind. The strain was re- markably prolonged, intricate, and animated, and far surpassed anything I ever before heard from that source.”’ Occasionally the song - sparrow sings on the wing while dropping to the ground from the top of a high tree—a favorite perch in early spring; and during the mating season many strange modifications of his tune strike the ear. As the summer comes on, his song, in common with that of all other birds, is less often repeated until it almost ceases in the fall; yet it may be heard, by an observing listener, every month in the year. His call to his mate is a simple chuck or hwit. Rarely leaving his native copses until late in autumn, he has little need to exert large powers of flight, and moves from one low bush to another with a jerking, undulatory motion. His home is near the ground, and it is only the excitement 148 WILD LIFE #OF ORCHARD AND FIELD of love which in spring prompts the males to seek the tree-tops. His food is principally procured from the ground and among the branches and leaves of the wild shrubbery, and consists of blossoms, seeds, berries, and insects, varying according to the season and the age of its nestlings. Early in spring he is, as Mr. Gentry puts it, “a vegetarian,” living upon the blossoms of the red maple and other early- blooming forest trees, green ginger- berries, and the seeds of vegetables, in search of which it fre- quents the kitchen-gardens, and associates with the noble fox-sparrows and chattering goldfinches. As warm weather advances, the song - sparrow leaves the gardens, and seeks, in wilder spots, less of vegetable and more of animal food—eating straw- berries, wild cherries, raspberries, etc., now and then as a relish; but depending for regular fare upon the young of the insect world just hatching out. It would be quite impracticable to enumerate all the kinds eaten; probably everything palatable is welcome. I remember one June day watching one little fellow industriously picking very minute lice-like bugs from the under-side of the leaves of an apple-tree. He seemed inordinately fond of them, and swallowed twenty or thirty a minute, 149 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD uttering the while a quick, metallic chirp. Many kinds of caterpillars he likewise devours, among them clothes moths and the loathsome tent-cater- pillar, that stretches its canopied webs among the twigs of our orchard and shade trees, and drops down upon our heads in all its ugly nastiness; also ants, earthworms, and young beetles. When the insects mature, and betake themselves beyond his easy reach, small fruits still remain; and, as these gradually disappear, he gives him- self up more and more to a strictly graminivorous diet, breaking open the seed-vessels stored up by the wilderness of weeds growing in every field which the farmer has let ‘run to waste”’ for him- self, but has thus cultivated the more for the spar- rows. There is always enough of this material, either in the unbroken pods or fallen to the ground, to last through the winter such adventurous birds as brave our snows, screening themselves from the chilling blast in recesses of the dense thickets, or taking shelter under piles of logs and brush. During the latter part of April, in ordinary sea- sons, the song-sparrow finds himself married, and he and his wife begin to construct their home. The site chosen is the green bank of some meadow brook, a tussock beside a country road, a hollow 150 bunox day buipaay ma-omedg Buos it acts i ta il A i cate a F a ee fae e oe, WiGD LIB) OFT, ORCHARD): AND FIELD under some decaying log, where the nest shall be well secreted in a little thicket of grasses and flow- ers, or, IN Many cases, on bushes, vines, or even, as Mr. J. S. Howland assured me, in an old broken woodpecker’s hole in an apple-tree. A friend in mstona het, on: May | 8, 1877;)\found,a’) pair of these sparrows snugly ensconced in an ivy growing along the inner wall of a green-house. The birds had evidently watched their opportunity when the door was opened or the glass raised dur- ing the warm days, and constructed their nest and deposited three eggs before they were discov- ered. In 1875 they built a nest in the same place, and the year before on the ground against the wall just outside. A pair had been around there for a great while, a nest being found within a hun- dred feet of the spot for some six or seven years. Wherever placed, it is a model and poetic bird- dwelling. “What care the bird has taken not to disturb one straw or spear of grass or thread of moss! You cannot approach it and put your hand into it with- out violating the place more or less, and yet the little architect has wrought day after day and left no marks. There has been an excavation, and yet no grain of earth appears to have been 151 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD moved. If the nest had slowly and silently grown, like the grass and the moss, it could not have been more nicely adjusted to its place and surroundings. There is absolutely nothing to tell the eye it is there. Generally a few spears of dry grass fall down from the turf above, and form a slight screen before it. How commonly and coarsely it begins, blending with the débris that lies about, and how it refines and comes to the centre, which is mod- elled so perfectly and lined so softly!’ Grasses are the timbers of the house—coarse stalks upon the outside, fine stems and soft leaves twined within; the edge of the nest overcast. It seems to be well proved that the nests found on the ground are built by young birds, while older and more experienced sparrows place their houses in vines and small trees, finding that at a little height they are less liable to danger ; furthermore, these nests built at an elevation, being more ex- posed to the wind and less braced, are more com- pactly and skilfully constructed than those on the ground, the projecting ends of the straws being neatly interwoven, or tied down, so as to present a tolerably smooth exterior. The nests in the tussocks seem manufactured chiefly out of the dead stems of crab-grasses and other stuff with- 152 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD in easy reach; but a variety of substances enter into the composition of the elevated nests, such as flowering weeds, narrow leaves, paper, strips of bark, and raw cotton (which sometimes thatches the whole outside), with horse-hair and milk-weed silk to give additional softness to the lining. When circumstances favor, a sort of sheltering platform is arranged over the nest in the tree or vines; just as frequently the approach to the nest hidden in the meadow lies through a tunnel like a field-mouse’s path under the tall grasses. The labor of building occupies the eerie of the pair during the cool of the mornings and even- ings of four or five busy days. Both birds work diligently, the male bringing the materials and the female adjusting them. The day after the nest is done an egg is laid, and one more each succeed- ing day until there are five; and very hard to dis- tinguish from the eggs of several other ground- building sparrows they are. The ground-color runs through all intermediate tints from grayish or brownish white to decided green. The blotch- ing is generally profuse, and often confluent into a wreath about the large end, the colors being un- derlying purples and bright-brown surface paint- ing. They are inclined to be thick and blunt 153 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD rather than elongated, and will average about .g0 by .60 of an inch. I can find no variations worth stating between the eggs of the different varieties. Those from the Pacific coast appear to be the largest, and those from Southern locali- ties the smallest; but the variety in size, shape, ground-color, and pattern is almost limitless, and I repeat that the strongest identification is nec- essary to make sure between these eggs and those of the swamp-sparrow, the grass-finch, the white- throat, and several other members of the family. The female sits eleven or twelve days, occasion- ally relieved by the male while she takes a brief rest. He assiduously provides her with food from hour to hour, but spends all his leisure at home, ready to resist invasion or insult, and enlivening the tedium of her sitting with his love ditties. When the young are born, both parents are ex- ceedingly devoted to their wants, carefully re- moving every trace of the old egg-shells and all foul matter far from the nest, and working with great energy to keep the hungry mouths filled. The nestlings are fed upon the young of many small insects, and as they grow older are given larger larva, earthworms, house- flies, plant- lice, ants, and small night-flying moths. When twelve 154 WIED LIFE) OP; ORCHARD) AND’ FIELD or thirteen days old, the young birds leave the nest, and in ten days more have learned to care for themselves. Meanwhile the mother has abandon- ed them to the father’s guidance, and busies her- self in the construction of a new home for a sec- ond family. Although left strong and neat, the first nest rarely seems to be used again; but the new one is built in close proximity to it. As before, the male is dutiful and loving, and the second brood is brought out in July, or sometimes earlier, so that even a third brood may be raised; but ac- cidents or climate usually prevent this degree of SUCCESS. In autumn the song-sparrows are to be seen dodging about stone walls, road-side thickets, and old pastures, in little family companies of six or eight, no doubt consisting of parents with their second brood of young, which remain together in happy idleness, and move southward at their leis- ure. Here the younger sons appear to have an ad- vantage over their elder brethren of the first brood, who are early sent out to seek their fortunes, in that they enjoy the continued example and coun- sel of their parents during many weeks after they may be said to have “ come of age,”’ although pos- 155 WILD LIFE OF ‘ORCHARD AND FIELD sibly they may chafe under the restraints of pa- ternal guidance, not to say old-fogyism, from which the youngsters of the first brood are now gayly delivered; but it would not be wonderful if it could be shown that the next year this latter brood, profiting by distasteful discipline, excelled in nest-building and in general prosperity over the others, who have enjoyed less advantages in the way of home education. WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD IX COURTING FICKLE MAY “WAY in our Northern States is the neutral ground between win- ter and summer, the scene of their airy battles, to be followed by the flowery peace of June. lation to agriculture and work, it is a season of uncertainties, hopes, and disappointments, and aAof ups-and-downs not only in the thermometer, but in rural minds. The thrasher comes and bids the.farmer plant, but straightway clouds lower, the wind goes wrong, and he hesi- “ad tates. Then the finest of weather follows, and he regrets his inde- 157 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD cision only to rejoice when the re gale again brings a wasting storm. These are the moods and scenes the poets of tradition attribute to April, but they belong to May. The poets refuse to have their muse lo- calized or to range themselves with isothermal lines and records of meteorology. Probably they were right originally in Europe, but in the United States it is May when their “‘ April” doings really ~ happen. Somebody ought to make a corrected calendar for the use of American “ nature-poets.”’ Yet Lowell appreciated the facts, to wit: ‘“When oaken woods with buds are pink, And new-come birds each morning sing, When fickle May on summer’s brink Pauses and knows not which to fling, Whether fresh bud and bloom again Or hoar-frost silvering hill and plain.”’ But towards the end of this month—when the fatal 10th has been safely passed—May quits her coquetry, and, now sweet and sincere, smiles with the surpassing loveliness of youth. Steadily, hopefully, the leaves and buds have struggled against the waning but vicious enmity of winter, and day by day, though often hindered and checked by adverse weather, have struggled forward. The 158 dunjg e uo jsaxy SPR U2 YSN4YyJ-poop - aoe a _ te Wan Dp CIP bh @h ORCHARD) AND: FIELD grasses and weeds have made good headway, and the fruit-trees, the maples, the witch- hazel, and other adventurous trees and shrubs are in full leaf- age by the middle of the month, so that the road- sides and gardens and orchards seem finished. The woods, however, are still scantily apparelled, and, seen at a distance, have a gray, rusty as- pect that tells what a multitude of naked twigs still remain. The lengthening and more and more sunny days remedy this rapidly, and an exuberance of verdure soon clothes the earth, yet the realiza- 3 summer 1s a-comin’ in” is always sé tion that sudden. We are never quite prepared for long- anticipated events when at last they arrive. After a long southerly rain, ushered in by a thunder- storm and wearing itself out in drizzle and mist and gloom, we awake one morning to find the sun glorious again, the air washed almost to the clarity of a vacuum, and a delicious breeze flowing out of the west. Loudly to our ears, then, comes the roar of the little cataract half a mile away, swollen to a torrent that overflows the rocks with nut-brown water—not roiled, but stained by cedar and hemlock roots—and we think of out- door photography and of fishing. 159 Aalst be a ae WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD “Then weary seems the street parade, And weary books and weary trade: I’m only wishing to go a-fishing— For this the month of May was made.” We are struck by the new verdancy of the world as our eyes stray across the valley. The grass at our feet and the spruces close by are dark, with a tinge of bluish, perhaps, and the squares of young grain and pasture bounded by shadowy lines that mean stone walls are in varying tones of emerald; but all the wide forest-space elsewhere is softest, lightest leaf- green, almost yellow in the billowy high-lights, and having a luminous quality exceedingly refined and fresh. This is due to the thinness, and consequent translucency, of the young leaves, as we see when we look closely at those over our heads, which glow almost like flakes of greenish-yellow glass. Where chestnuts show themselves, the little, new, five-fingered leaves, fringing the twigs and sketching in what the tree will presently become, are as yellow as they will again be in October, and the unblemished sky beyond them takes a violet hue of royal richness. Let an indigo-bird flit through these flecks of gold and he becomes a veritable gem. The oaks are putting forth, as 160 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD yet, only little, wrinkled babies of leaves, each exquisitely browned and varnished along the edge, while the midrib remains a rich green, so that each is like some quaint Japanese device stamped out of their red bronze. The maples, too, are reddish at first, and thus the nearer thickets, where these two kinds of trees prevail, show an autumnal gloss of warm brown and dashes of crimson mingled with the pure verdure of their fellow-shrubs; but at a distance all this blends into the season’s broad effect of greenish yellow. What could be more fit amid such delicate leafage than the silky, olive-gray coats of that exquisite among our birds, the greenlet or vireo? One sits near me in the top of a black birch—a tree fraying out into hair-lines of fine twigs atop, like a pointed brush—and twitters a gay chanson over and over, careless whether I listen or not. It must be French, and very likely he picked it up last winter in some one of the Gallic Antilles from that loquacious race which has carried the art of saying pleasant things to its highest point. All the words I can recognize are chére amie and dix- huit —the latter very plain, and with the final ¢ rather too evident. Perhaps his little dear is just eighteen! A distant dog’s barking stops his 1 161 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD music, and he says keerie ?—cocking a red eye inquiringly, and then falls busily at picking minute insects off a sticky young hemlock cone, as if he thought he really must attend a little while to business, despite the charm of this soft morning, luring towards the “pleasant land of Idlesse.’’ But presently he begins again—‘‘ Chee, chee! ter whée! rit rit! cheery! pz’teét! cheery! terreé! chezer whée! ru-ru!’’ and so on, sweetly o’er and o’er. | May is the month of juvenescence. Infancy is passed. Nature, as a young giant, feels its strength. The seed-time and sprouting and prep- aration of winter and early spring are passed, and the gathered powers are now to be exercised that fruition may follow. There is a sturdy re- joicing at the putting forth of effort. The living, growing world seems eager and _ enthusiastic. It is this sense of arousing, and of beginning in earnest the activity of the year, that distinguishes this month out-of-doors, inspiring all who go abroad, and communicating to them the impulses of nature. Now is the era of yellow flowers, as was April of white ones. Dandelions still bejewel the lawn. Out of the lush meadow rise great, globular tufts 162 WleD) LIPS) "OR ORCHARD AND: FIELD of golden mustard, and lower down creeps the modest potentilla and yellow violet, hastening to get through their duty of blossoming before the vegetation shall smother them. Wild indigo and the polished buttercup and the marsh-marigold, beloved of the goldflies, with many another one, both garner and reflect the hue of the blessed new sunshine. Nevertheless, though otherwise the most energetic of months, May breeds indolence in men. The warm, languorous afternoons, damp with the odor- ous emanations of a moist earth and the exhala- tions of ever-increasing leaves, the debility of heat unprepared for and the accumulated weariness of busy months past, combine to depress our activity and to make lassitude welcome. Hence May is perhaps the most restful month for the man in need and in search of refreshment—rest is then so easily taken, so apt to his mood. The mind is gratefully recreated as well as the body. The delights of perfected spring appeal to the intellect and imagination as well as to the senses; the joy of ‘‘ seeing things grow,’ the daily, almost hourly change to be noted as nature’s brush rapidly and deftly puts its finishing touches on the landscape —all these are charming influences drawing tow- 163 WILD: LIFE. OF (ORCHARD AND” FPERELD ards the idleness which permits human regener- ation. I want no book nor companion to soothe me, then, when I go out and lie down in some wood- land nook to watch the warblers, for these are warbler days in the forest and by country roads and village gardens. Tiny creatures in brilliant and unfamiliar feathers illumine the fresh green of the newly leaved trees, and dart like glowing gems among the white and carmine apple-blos- soms, or scatter the paler bloom of cherry or dog- wood. There are dozens of kinds and hundreds of individuals. In the balmy stillness of this remote hill-side attentive ears detect a contin- ual murmur of faint, sweet bird-notes, some afar, somecloseat hand. Many are mere clicks, like the striking together of small pebbles—softly metallic exclamations by which the members of some little band of travellers are keeping in touch as they flit about in search of the small insects upon which they feed, yet ever anxious to move on north- ward, however leisurely. Probably they have been winging their way hither all night through the velvety darkness that palled the world while we slept, and will be off again when twilight once more slowly closes the eyes of day. 164 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD Into this soft medley comes from afar the pert questioning of a chewink, or the mocking laughter of some ribald flicker on the top of the ridge, the raucous cries of bluejay and crow, or perhaps even the sharp scream of a broad-winged hawk, hushing for a moment all the minor bird-voices in frightened apprehension. Down by the stream, where the muskrats are teaching their mouse-colored youngsters to swim, and showing them the beds of the clams and the edible roots of water-lilies, the warblers find their best feeding-ground. Sit down quietly here, and in a moment—be- fore you have finished watching that water-snake ingeniously getting possession of a bit of adead and stranded minnow he has found—one and another of the tiny singers will flit close to you, so that you may make sure of their plumage, learn their pretty ways of life, and memorize somewhat of the burst of song with which, more and more as the season advances, they salute their approaching happiness. Here you will see, perhaps, in quick succession, the two black-throats—the green and the blue. The latter is habited in cadet-gray, but his lower parts are brilliant white and his throat velvety 165 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD black, extending up around his eyes: He has lit- tle to say, but is a diligent hunter, and it is most amusing to watch him carefully searching a bush from top to bottom before darting to the next one and giving it the same painstaking inspection. He is elegant rather than beautiful; but the black- throated green warbler is a real dandy. | His throat, too, is an arrow-head of pure black, with the point under his bill and the barbs reaching back to his wings, leaving the sides of the head clear yellow; the back is olive-green and the under parts are al- most white, while the tail has a conspicuous white patch on each side. This is an exceedingly striking costume; nor is the song one to escape notice. Bradford Torrey says it means Trees, trees, murmuring trees—but you must pitch your voice high in repeating it, with a sudden drop on the long word. Another note is a rapid rattle, a perfect imitation in miniature of the er-r-r-r-r of the kingfisher. Nearly all the warblers give a zeee-ing call, very confusing to the beginner in ornithology, but after a while he learns that each species has a little song of its own, uttered in a nonchalant way, and pres- ently he becomes able to recognize them apart. Yet there always remain some that are doubtful 166 Wie Gene) Of ORCHARD: AND) FIELD to the ear. Thus the myrtle-bird, always common in the spring in the North, has such a nondescript prattle that no one can be quite sure of the singer till he sees it. This is the bluish, golden-backed warbler that often assembles in huge flocks along the Gulf coast in early winter. The chestnut-sided is another exquisite pas- senger through the May woods, known at a glance, not only by his bright-yellow cap, but by the splash- es of rich chestnut red on his streaked sides. He is an active fellow, working away on his own hook, while most of his rivals associate in loose companies of friends, and he stops now and then to utter clear whistles that remind you of the self-satisfied gar- den gossip of the summer yellow-bird. The chest- nut-sided’s voice is more often heard, nevertheless, in an eager ‘“‘ Wichity, wichity, wee-wee-wee-n,’’ finally running up into a thin squeak. The shrillest, keenest note of the woods, how- ever, as fine as a cambric needle, as sharp as the rays of light that penetrate the leafy roof and gild the forest carpet, is that of the redstart, seen every- where during May and June, in the forest as well as along the road-side or about house and park. Its shriek—‘‘ Sree, sree, sree, sréeah’’—pierces the hot silence of the early summer days from bush and 167 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD tree-top alike, and its motley of red} orange, and black is as brilliant and conspicuous as are the co- lumbine blossoms nodding against these gray rocks. Here comes one now, tossing himself upon a low branch of the hornbeam near me, then looking carefully around, as if to learn whether anybody noticed him. Suddenly he leaps out, circles a foot or two, turns a sommersault, and returns to his perch. An instant later he flits to another, but has hardly alighted before he dives headlong to the ground, makes a quick sideways dash, and I hear the snap of the bill which closes premature- ly the brief career of some mite of the sunbeam. Hardly has it left, when a scarlet tanager dashes past like a volant ruby, and then I hear a sound like the clicking of a gunlock, with a curious kz ending, and turn to see a fly-catcher sitting bolt upright in a tree beside my mossy couch. The bird jerks up its head violently every time he speaks, just as if hiccoughing the notes out. Poor tipsy little chebec ! Smaller objects engage one’s attention as he rolls lazily over and turns his eyes to the ground. A wonderful liliputian world is the grass. Lie still some day upon your elbows, make a circle of your arms, and try to count all the different plants and 168 ee) Lie On, ORCHARD? AND FIELD busy creatures you have corralled. Watch the minute insects and creeping things attending to their business among the chrysoprase columns of the grass-stems, and beneath the umbrage of clover and sorrel and violet. You shall see what you shall see, and it will be worth your while! But this is too much effort now. I want to do nothing—to pay attention nowhere, by effort. That gleaming scarlet wriggler is a timid, helpless, baby salamander, defying every law of protective coloration by glowing like a coal of fire, whether he crawls among the fresh herbage or over the sod- den old matting worn out beneath winter’s feet. I need but turn my head to see his elder brother in dusky green swimming along the shallow bight, where an eddy of brook-water rests quietly for a moment. This gaudy youngster, if he live another year or two, will tire of his travels ashore and go into the water and turn green also. Salamanders are not like men. They are greenest when they are adult. It is upon the cards of their youth in- stead of on the grave-stones of their old age that they write: ‘As you are now So once was I; As I am now So you must be.” 169 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD The country people say that the clear, sweetly whistled call so often heard in wet woods these days is the cry of this tiny red innocent, but it is not. That flutelike note is the call of the toad, who is late in his wooing. Here comes hopping that exquisite of his race, the wood-frog, dressed in buff and black. He is done with his honeymoon and its troubles, and, a bachelor again for the nonce, is travelling con- tentedly back to the dry uplands, free of responsi- bility and the pricks of either love-longing or con- science. A blue butterfly flutters near him, and then a larger one, chestnut and black, wavers down from somewhere, whereupon the blue one rises and drifts away sidewise before an invisible breeze, showing hauteur in every motion. The light is just right to be reflected from the bottom of the creek, where it is perhaps eighteen inches deep near shore, and | see a pair of perch at work upon their nests. They— But here! This won’t do. It is not my day for observation. I don’t want to study. I want only to feel, and—bless me! it is lunch-time, and —I must really have been asleep half an hour! Wi D Lib Of ORCHARD) (AND FIELD X WILD MICE THEN every stream in its pent- | house Goes gurgling on its way, And in his gallery the mouse Nibbleth the meadow hay ; ‘‘Methinks the summer still is nigh, And lurketh underneath, As that same meadow - mouse doth le Snug in that last year’s heath.’’—THOREAU. WALKING about the fields, ‘W’] T come upon tiny pathways as | plain as Indian trails, which _| lead in and out among the grass and weed-stalks, like roads for the tiny chariots of Queen Mab. r7i WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD These curious little paths, branching here and there, and crossing one another in all directions, are the runways of the field- mice, along which they go, mostly after sunset, to visit one another or bring home their plunder; for the thieving little gray-coats of our cupboards, whose bright eyes glance at us from behind the cheese-box, recall in their now naughty tricks the natural and innocent stratagems of their wild ancestors. This plague of the neat housekeeper was originally a native of some Eastern country, but has now spread all over the world and made himself altogether too much at home wherever civilized men have established themselves. In this country, moreover, he has taken to the fields in many places, and dwells there, under stacks of corn and in similar places, like a wild mouse; but he is rarely if ever seen in the woods. In this wild life he is changing and devel- oping local varieties of great interest to the thought- ful naturalist. As for our native American wild wood-mice, a catalogue of all the different kinds known in the whole of the United States would be a long one; and there are, perhaps, a score or more species and subspecies east of the Mississippi River. They are comprised in two families, the Zapo- 172 An Observing Gopher et Pas ae ‘ yi 0 ‘ wet pe ‘ \ , ! : ‘ 7 > 2 Md . ee r ~ . wn ® > y . - ' ‘ ' : 4 4 a ‘i P| : ; Rr 7 7 . b/ bs a » Aa v Ay is Wiley LIFE: OF ,ORCHARD: AND. FIELD didae, or jumping-mice, and the Muridae, or fam- ily of the true rats and mice. The former tribe contains two species, Zapus hudsonius and Zapus insignis—the latter being somewhat larger than the former, and inclining more to the woods than its relative, which is main- ly a mouse of the valleys and meadows. Both these species have cheek- pouches and are classi- fied near the gophers. These jumping-mice are the prettiest of all the Eastern wild species. If you should look at a kan- garoo through the wrong end of a telescope, you would have a very fair idea of our little friend’s form, with hind legs and feet very long and slender, and fore-legs very short; so that when he sits up they seem like little paws held before him in a co- quettish way. His tail is often twice the length of his body, and is tipped with a brush of long hairs. He has a knowing look in his face, with its upright, furry ears and bright eyes. Being dark brown above, yellowish brown on the sides, and white underneath, with white stockings, he makes a gay figure among his more soberly dressed companions; yet his fur is notably coarse and rough. Various names are given him, such as the wood-mouse, kangaroo-mouse, and others. 173 WILD LFFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD Of the Muridae we have in the eastern half of the United States the muskrat; the large nest- building wood-rat (Southerly) ; the queer lemming- mouse (Synaptomys) of the West; the diminutive gray harvest-mouse (Ochetodon) of the prairies and westward; the long-eared red-backed mouse (Evotomys), which is mostly Canadian; and the two genera Microtus and Peromyscus, whose rep- resentatives are our most common field-mice. The genus Microtus includes a great tribe of voles scattered over most parts of the world, of which no less than seventy different species and varieties are recognized in North America alone by the latest monographer; which simply shows how numerous and widespread they are and how each lo- cality impresses the voles that dwell there with some more or less noticeable peculiarity of color or pro- portion of parts. Thus the voles that dwell on Gull Island, at the entrance to Long Island Sound, and those on little Muskeget Island, near Nantucket, are each given specific names to mark the differ- ences that their isolated life has brought about in the course of time. With these fine distinctions the reader need not disturb his mind, but content himself with remembering that in the East all the voles, or meadow-mice, are more or less varieties of 174 WIED LEE, Ge ORCHARD AND. FIELD either the common meadow-mouse (Microtus penn- sylvanicus) or of the Southerly pine- mouse (Mz- crotus pinetorum); and that in the Mississippi Valley he may find the “ peppery-gray,’’ yellow- bellied prairie vole (Microtus austerus). These meadow-mice are the “ homeliest”’ of their tribe. Their coats are coarse in texture and dull in hue, the pine-mouse alone showing anything in the way of decided color—a warm chestnut. Their bodies are heavy, heads large, noses bluntly rounded, eyes and ears small, and feet and tail short—the latter hardly touching the ground. The common species is five and one-half inches long, including the tail (one and one-quarter inches), and the pine-mouse is four and three-quarter inches in total length. They are, indeed, like diminutive muskrats, and it is not surprising to find their favorite haunts to be swampy places and lowlands bordering streams. Closely related to these, but more creatures of the forest, are the red-backed mice (Evotomys gappert) of the northern tier of the States and Canada. Its form and size are those of the mead- ow vole, but the back is distinctly chestnut red and the sides are yellowish, while the ears and whiskers are much longer. Its habitat is among 175 WILD LIPE OF ORCHARD: AND. FIELD forest trees, where it dwells in and about old stumps and hollow trees, and does not fear to go about by daylight. In the Alleghanies it extends along the ridges southward through Pennsylvania, and it also dwells in the swamps and hemlock woods of the Catskills and the Hudson Highlands. Far more active and pleasing than these voles are the deer-mice (Peromyscus) frequenting the woods of the East and prairies of the West, where the soil is dry. The rice-field mouse of the South and two or three species of the Middle West belong in this genus, but the most familiar one is the widely distributed and everywhere plentiful white-footed deer-mouse (Peromyscus americanus), which we used to call Hesperomys leucopus. This white-foot is somewhat larger than a house- mouse, measuring about three and one-quarter inches from the tip of the nose to the root of the tail, and the tail itself, which is thinly haired, black on top and ashy white beneath, is almost or quite as long as the body. The hind-feet measure three- quarters of an inch in length, but the fore-feet are not half so large. This mouse has a lithe, slender form and quick movement, and is an agile climber. Its eyes are large and prominent, its nose sharp, and ears high, 176 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD round, and thin, giving a most alert expression to its countenance. The fur is soft, dense, and glossy, reddish-brown above and white below, sharply demarcated, while the feet are all white, so that its name of “deer-mouse,”’ in allusion to both colors and speed, is very apt. The half- grown young, however, are mainly bluish-gray, and may easily be mistaken for house-mice. In general habits all these are pretty much alike, though some prefer dry, while others choose wet, ground; some keep chiefly in the woods, others on the prairies, and so on. All the species bur- row more or less, and some build elaborate nests. Their voices are fine, low, and squeaking, but the meadow-mouse is a great chatterbox, and the white-foot has been known more than once really to sing tunes of his own very nicely.* Each one manifests immense courage in defending its young against harm; but I believe only the meadow- mice are accused of being really ferocious, and * Whether or not this ‘‘singing”’ of mice, which has been observed in several species, including the house-mouse, is not really a kind of wheezing due to bronchial disease, is not yet decided. Any one who cares to look up the question should read the extensive accounts of such musical mice published in The American Naturalist for 1871, and also for 1889, p. 481. "2 177 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD of waging battles constantly among themselves. Their food is the tender stems of young grasses and herbs, seeds, nuts, roots, and bark, and they lay up stores of food for the winter, since none become torpid at that season except the jumping- mouse. They also eat insects and worms, par- ticularly such kinds as are hatched under ground or in the loose wood of rotten stumps; but their main subsistence is vegetal. The field-mice make snug beds in old stumps, under logs, inside stacks of corn and bundles of straw; dig out galleries below the grass-roots; occupy nests of birds and the holes made by other mammals; and even weave nests of their own in weeds and bushes. Crevices of broken rocks are a favorite resort of the jumping-mouse. This species is, perhaps, the most active of them all; and is found in a greater variety of situations, for it is equally fond of the fields and of the forest, where it creeps about in the dusk, or, if alarmed, bounds away with almost incredible agility. Its long and muscular hind-legs lift its body like pow- erful springs, and it will make leap after leap with a speed the eye can hardly follow. At first these jumps will be ten feet—some forty times its own length!—but if no covert enables it to stop and con- 178 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD ceal itself, as it is clever in doing, this amazing series of flights 1s gradually reduced to a bound- ing gallop. Moreover, it can dodge and double with a quickness which eludes the eye and must often baffle even the agility of a hawk or weasel. This is the only one of our mice to hibernate. As cold weather approaches he digs his way sev- eral inches under ground, or finds some equally snug cranny, where he provides himself with warm blankets of shredded bark, fine grass, or the like, wraps his long tail tightly about him, and becomes dead to all outward things until the warmth of spring revives him. This is certainly an easy and economical way to get through the cold season when we remember the hard task set the other species to provide extensive stores for winter con- sumption. The most numerous and ubiquitous of all our field-mice, probably, are the meadow-mice, voles, or arvicolines, especially Microtus pennsylvanicus. In summer these little creatures inhabit meadows and the weedy edges of fields, where they may be near their food, which consists mainly of green herbage and roots. An immense amount of tim- othy grass is annually destroyed by their eating the roots and young shoots. 179 WILD, LIFE OF ORCHARD ANDERIELD These mice are extremely abundant on the IIli- nois prairies, especially in those places that are wet and low; and Kennicott gave an excellent ac- count many years ago of their habits there. When the heavy rains of autumn drive them out, they move to higher and drier ground, and look for some hillock, or old ant-hill, under which to dig their home. In digging they scratch rapidly with the fore-feet a few times, and then throw back the earth to a great distance with the hind-feet, fre- quently loosening the dirt with their teeth, and pushing it aside with their noses. As the hole grows deeper (horizontally) they will le on their backs and dig overhead, every little while backing slowly out and shoving the loose earth to the en- trance. These winter burrows are only five or six inches below the surface, and sometimes are sim- ply hollowed out under a great stone, but are re- markable for the numerous and complicated cham- bers and side passages of which they are composed. In one of the largest rooms of this subterranean house is placed their winter bed, formed of fine, dry grasses. Its shape and size are about that of a football, with only a small cavity in the centre, entered through a hole in the side, and they creep in as do Arctic travellers into their fur-bags. 180 Wired Lire, OF ORCHARD AND FIELD “Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste, An’ weary winter comin’ fast, An’, cosey here, beneath the blast Thou thought to dwell.” From their tunnels, nests, and granaries, in- numerable runways traverse the neighborhood, crossing those from other burrows, and forming a complete net-work all over the region. The mice do not flock together like the prairie -dogs, yet, where food is plenty, many nests will often be found closely adjacent. They are sociable little folk, and no doubt enjoy visiting and gossiping with one another. The little paths are their road- ways from one burrow to another, and from the place where the tenderest grasses grow to their storehouses. These tiny roads are formed by gnawing clean away the grass stubble, and tread- ing the earth down smooth; while the heads of the grasses arching over on each side conceal the scam- pering travellers from the prying eyes of hawks, owls, and butcher-birds, ever on the watch for them. The mice seem fully to understand their danger, cautiously going under a tuft of grass or large leaf instead of over it, and avoiding bare places. More- over, they choose the twilight hours for their ex- cursions rather than the glare of broad daylight 181 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD or the blackness of midnight. In winter their paths are tunnelled under the snow, so that they are out of sight; and they always have several means of escape from their burrows, for, as the old song says, ‘““The mouse that always trusts to one poor hole, Can never be a mouse of any soul.”’ The Western meadow-mice seem always to lay by considerable stores of winter food. Kennicott says that if you were to uncover one of these little granaries in November, before the owners have made much use of it, you might find five or six quarts of seeds, roots, and small nuts. Out on the prairie this store would consist chiefly of the spike- flower and various other bulbous roots. If a patch of wheat or rye were near, there would be quanti- ties of grain; and if you should open a store (as of the red-backed mouse) under a log or stump in the woods, you might discover a hundred or so chest- nuts, beech-nuts, and acorns, nicely shelled. Nev- ertheless, these mice are out a good deal even in the coldest months, travelling about beneath the snow by means of tunnels, and feeding largely throughout the winter on bark, whereby great dam- age is sometimes done, especially in nurseries. 182 WEED) LIPE. Om ORCHARD’ AND’ FIELD Their habits seem somewhat different in the East, where they appear to lay up less stores, and to depend more upon winter foraging; nor do they live at that season in burrows, according to Merriam’s careful observations in northern New Work. In summer, he says, the Microtus feeds mainly upon the roots of grasses, and dwells in burrows in the meadows, which are cut up by its deeply worn runways, which it rarely leaves, even to mount a log. “In the beginning of winter, when the ground is frozen for some distance below the surface, it abandons its burrows and lives entirely above ground. Its nests of dry grass then lie flat upon the surface, without attempt at concealment, and are soon buried in the snow. As winter advances and the snow becomes deeper, the meadow-mice regularly betake themselves to their nests for rest. The heat from their bodies soon melts the snow in contact with and immediately adjoining their nests, .. . . which come to be surrounded by slow- ly growing, dome-shaped chambers. These in- crease in size until the spring thaws, in March and April, melt away their roofs, thus admitting light and cold. They are then deserted. . . . From the 183 WILD" LIFE QF ORCHARD: AND. SPILLED bottom of each chamber numerous runways pene- trated the snow in all directions.”’ It is by means of these tunnels that they reach the trunks of small trees to feed upon the bark, which constitutes a large part of their winter food, and thus vast damage is sometimes done to young orchards; and they are fond of taking up their quarters under shocks of grain or corn left stand- ing in the fields, of which they devour enormous quantities. When a well-settled, but carelessly farmed region offers them such opportunities, it is not surprising that they do not find it necessary to lay up large stores. Our field-mice eat a good many worms and in- sects, and will even spring into the air and catch flies, but none of them seem to have the habit of the British voles of raiding the nests of bumble- bees to get the comb and honey, which gave oc- casion for that famous illustration of the processes of natural selection in which the intimate connec- tion is shown between the clover crop of a district and the relative number of maiden ladies who in- habit it! The deer- mice (Peromyscus) do not dig much, but prefer to make their homes above ground after the manner of squirrels. In prairie regions, to be 184 WiLD( LIP Gf ORCHARD) AND. FIELD sure, they make burrows for lack of other suita- ble retreats ; but where they dwell, as is more usual, in woodland, they seek hollows in stumps and trees, sometimes many feet above the ground (for they are most excellent climbers), and there construct warm nests of various soft materials. One of their favorite methods is to take posses- sion of a deep old bird’s-nest, such as those of the red - winged blackbird, wood - thrush, or red- eyed vireo, and fill it with their own furniture. I find a pretty example described in one of the essays of the Rev. Dallas Love Sharp, who found a mouse inhabiting a refurnished wood-thrush’s nest in snowy Massachusetts : “In spite of the exposure,” he says, “this must be a warm bed. The walls are thick and well plastered with mud, and are packed inside with fine, shredded bark which the mouse himself has pulled from the dead chestnut limbs, or, more like- ly, has taken from a deserted crow’s nest. The whole is thatched with a roof of shredded bark, so neatly laid that it sheds the water perfectly. The entrance is on the side, just over the edge of the original structure, but so shielded by the ex- tended roof that the rain and snow never beat in. The thrushes did their work well; the nest is se- 185 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD curely mortised into the forking branches; and whitefoot can sleep without a tremor through the wildest winter gale.”’ Not long ago I received a pleasant letter from Mr. John Burroughs, in which he said: “ The other day I found the nest of the white-footed mouse. Going through the woods, I paused by a red cedar, the top of which had been broken off and lopped over till it touched the ground. It was dry, and formed a very dense mass. I touched a match to it to see it burn, when, just as the flames were creep- ing up into it, out jumped or tumbled two white- footed mice, and made off in opposite directions. I was just in time to see the nest before the flames caught it—a mass of fine, dry grass, about five feet from the ground, in the thickest part of the cedar top.”” This was in the Cats- kills. In such nests litters of from two to four young are born early in the spring, and perhaps two more are produced before the coming of the next winter, for, like all the rest, this species is exceedingly prolific. The mothers are tenderly careful of their little ones and courageous in their defence. Often when a nest is disturbed you will see the mother struggling to get away by dragging three or four 186 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD young ones hanging to her body. Once when we went to open our summer cabin, in the woods, in May, we found a family of white-footed mice en- sconced between the folds of some blankets, whence a great quantity of wool had been plucked to form a nest. We took a double handful of this wool, containing four gray mouslings, and placed it in an empty water- pail on the porch. The mother watched us, followed after, and then climbed into the bucket and carried off her darlings to a new hiding-place, regardless of our presence. A gentleman in Illinois once saw a garter-snake pass rapidly by with a young meadow-mouse in its mouth. Presently an old meadow-mouse came out of the tall grass in pursuit of the snake, which she finally overtook and instantly attacked. The snake stopped, disgorged its prey, and defended itself by striking at its assailant, which stood its ground so firmly that the man was able to approach to kill both before his presence was noticed by the duellists. This white-footed mouse constantly comes into houses near woods, yet it does not seem anywhere to become domesticated, like the house-mouse, but only to be a casual guest from time to time. Tho- reau tells pleasantly how he had such visitors 187 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD when he lived all alone in the woods by Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts: “The mice which haunted my house were not the common ones, which are said to have been introduced into the country, but a wild, native kind not found in the village. I sent one to a distin- guished naturalist, and it interested him much. When I was building, one of these had its nest underneath the house, and, before I had laid the second floor and swept out the shavings, would come out regularly at lunch-time and pick up the crumbs at my feet. It probably had never seen a man before; and it soon became quite familiar, and would run over my shoes and up my clothes. It could readily ascend the sides of the room by short impulses, like a squirrel, which it resembled in its motions. At length, as I leaned my elbow on the bench one day, it ran up my clothes and along my sleeve, and around and around the table which held my dinner, while I kept the latter close, and dodged and played at bo-peep with it; and when at last I held still a piece of cheese between my thumb and finger, it came and nibbled it, sitting in my hand, and afterwards cleaned its face and paws like a fly and walked away.”’ Mice are full of such curiosity. They poke 188 WE De Dikhit Of) ORCHARD) AND) FIELD their noses into all sorts of places where there is a prospect of something to eat, and sometimes, failing to find so good a friend as Mr. Thoreau, meet the fate which ought to be the end of all pok- ing of noses into other people’s affairs. But the life of a field-mouse is not all frisking about under the fragrant flowers, or digging chan- nels through shining sand and crystal snow. He has his labor and trials and trouble like the rest of us. Ifa “man must be either a man or a mouse,”’ it would be hard choosing between them, so far as an easy time is concerned. The gathering of his food and the building of his house cost him “ mony a weary nibble,’’ and he must constantly be on the alert, for dangers haunt him on every side. One of his enemies is the snake, all the larger sorts of which pounce upon him in the grass, lie in wait for him in his highway, or steal] into his burrow and seize his helpless young, in spite of the frantic fighting of the father and the stout attempts of the mother to drag her little ones away into safety. Probably our snakes depend more upon catch- ing mice than upon any other resource for their daily food, and they hunt for them incessantly. Most of the mice have the bad habit of being abroad mainly at night; so have the snakes; and the mice 189 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD thus encounter more foes, and fall an easier prey, than if they deferred their ramblings until day- light. Being out nights is a bad practice! The prairie rattlesnakes are especially fond of mice; minks, weasels, skunks, and badgers eat as many as they can catch, and this probably is not a few; domestic cats hunt them eagerly, seeming to pre- fer them to house-mice—no doubt they are more sweet and delicate; foxes also enjoy them; dogs and wolves dig them out of their burrows and de- vour them; prairie fires burn multitudes of them, and farmer boys trap them. But, after all, perhaps their chief foes are the flesh-eating birds. We have in this country two black, white, and gray birds called shrikes, or butcher-birds, which are only about the size of robins, but are very strong, brave, and noble in appearance. These shrikes have the curious habit of killing more game than they need, and hanging it up on thorns, or lodging it in a crack in the fence or the crotch of a tree. They seem to hunt just for the fun of it, and kill for the sake of killing. Now their chief game is the unhappy field-mouse; and in Illinois they are known as “mouse-birds.”’ They never seem to eat much of the flesh of their victims, generally only pecking their brains out, but murder an enor- 190 A Garter Snake Wie Dy LIke Of }ORCHARD: AND, FIELD mous number, and keep up the slaughter through the whole year; for when the loggerhead-shrike retreats southward in the autumn, the great North- ern shrike comes from British America to supply his place through the winter. Then all the hawks, from the nimble little sharp-shinned to the great swooping buzzard, prey upon mice, and in winter hover day after day over the knolls where they have been driven by floods in the surrounding lowlands, pouncing upon every one that is imprudent enough to show his black eyes above ground. As for the marsh-hawk, it regularly quarters the low fields like a harrier, and eats little but mice. The owls, too, are constantly after them, hunting them day and night, on the prairies and in the woods, es- teeming them fine food for the four owlets in the hollow tree hard by; while the sand-hill crane and some of the herons make a regular business of seeking the underground homes and digging out the timorous fugitives with their pick-axe beaks. In addition to all the rest, the farmer everywhere persecutes the mouse as a pest to his orchards and crops. Has the poor little animal, then, no friends what- ever? Very few, except his own endurance and cunning; yet he is already so numerous, and in- 191 WILD: LIFE OF (ORCHARD ANDY FIEL®S creases so rapidly, that all his enemies have not been able to rid the earth of him, but only keep him in check, and thus preserve that nice balance of nature in which consists the welfare of all. An important part of the history of these pretty wild mice would be untold if I were to say nothing about the mischief they do to the farmer’s fields and fruit-trees. From what has been said of their underground stores, you may guess how they make the grain-fields suffer. They really spoil more grain than they consume, for they have a way of biting off the stalk to get at the head, and so waste a larger amount than they eat or carry off in their capacious cheeks. It is done so quietly and adroitly, too, that few are ever caught at it, and much of the blame is put on the moles, squir- rels, and woodchucks, that have enough sins of their own to answer for. The meadow-mouse of Europe, which is very like our own, forty or fifty years ago came near causing a famine in parts of England, ruining the crops before they could get fairly started, and killing almost all the young trees in the orchards and woods. More than thirty thousand of the little rascals were trapped in one month in a single piece of forest, besides all those killed by animals. About 1875, again, a similar 192 WIELD, LIFE OF ORCHARD AND, FIELD disaster was threatened in Scotland, where millions of mice appeared, and gnawed off the young grass at the root just when it should have been in prime condition for the sheep; and when that was all gone they attacked the garden vegetables. The people lost vast numbers of sheep and lambs from starvation, and thousands of dollars’ worth of growing food; but, finally, by all together waging war upon them, the pests were partially killed off. The mice did not in either case come suddenly, but had been increasing steadily for years previ- ous, because the game-keepers had killed so many of the “vermin” (as owls, hawks, weasels, snakes, etc., are wrongly called) which are the natural en- emies of the mice and keep their numbers down. Farmers are slow to learn that it doesn’t pay to kill the birds or rob their nests; but the boys and girls ought to understand this truth and remem- ber it. In this country the greatest mischief done by the field-mice is the gnawing of bark from the fruit- trees, so that in some of the Western States this is the most serious difficulty the orchardist has to contend with. Whole rows of young trees in nurs- eries are stripped of their bark, and of course die; and, where apple-seeds are planted, the mice are 3 193 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD sure to dig half of them up to eat the kernels. This mischief is mainly done in the winter, when the trees are packed away from the frost; or if they are growing, because then the mice can move about concealed under the snow, and nibble all the bark away up to the surface. Rabbits get much of the credit of this naughty work, for they do a good deal of it on their own account. The gardener has the same trouble, often finding, when he un- covers a rare and costly plant in the spring, that the mice have enjoyed good winter-quarters in his straw covering, and have been gnawing to death his choice roses. Millions of dollars, perhaps, would not pay for all the damage these small creat- ures thus accomplish each year in the United States, and I fear they will become more and more of a plague if we continue to kill off the harmless hawks, owls, butcher-birds, and snakes, which are the policemen appointed by Nature to look after the mice and protect us against them. In captivity the wild mice, especially the white- footed deer-mouse, make very pretty pets; and one can easily study all their ways by giving them earth in which to burrow and the various sorts of food in which they delight. 194 WilLD; LIPS OF ORCHARD AND: FIELD XI FLYING SQUIRRELS OULD it be far wrong to call the flying-squirrel the most | beautiful, the most lovable of American mammals? None other seems so attractive to both the eye and the imagi- nation, and this impression 1s confirmed when we come to know the little creature as a Aq pet, for its gentleness and ca- ressing trust in us are wholly SJ charming. Flying- squirrels are to be found all over the country, braving even a Canadian win- }ter, yet are not commonly seen, for no animal is more strictly 195 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD nocturnal among the many which go abroad after dark. He who quietly wanders through our groves and forests during the warm, still nights of summer, remarks an observer of these things, marks a myriad of sounds that betoken the presence and activity of animal life during the hours of darkness. The faint rustling of leaves, the pattering of light footsteps on the ground, the constant dropping of something from the trees, the sharp squeaking of unseen creatures, the lone- some note of a wakeful bird, “the bustle and chip- per of something chasing something else up the trunk of a neighboring tree, the cry of distress as some bird or beast of prey seizes its unhappy vic- tim’’—these and numberless other noises tell of life, active and abounding. To this confusing cho- rus of the night the flying-squirrels contribute not a little, for from twilight until dawn they are abroad, hunting and hunted, working and play- ing, their big, black eyes expanded to catch what- ever thin rays of light illumine the leafy recesses. Quietly watching in some moonlit glade, you may perhaps see their singular and graceful movements. In these glidings they cannot change their di- rection to any extent, nor acquire a new impulse, nor go beyond their power to sail down an inclined 196 A Flying Sguirrel A ed (. ro we \ ? mo ‘ Li te : okt | Nie oe ee { eel 4 7 ‘ vk 1p ‘ie 4 (au ea Furs " Weep! Tine On ORCHARD (AND) FIELD plane upon the parachute formed by the loose skin of their sides, which reaches to the feet and is ex- tended by their outstretched legs. Some hollow of an old tree-trunk gives them a home—preferably the snug chamber cut years be- fore by a woodpecker; but sometimes they choose a cranny among rocks, or, more often nowadays, take possession of a garden bird-box or a nook be- neath the eaves or inside the garret of a house. They will, indeed, make themselves exceedingly at home anywhere about the premises when en- couraged, a privilege careful housekeepers are chary of granting after a little experience of the mischief their inquisitive teeth may do to furni- ture, upholstery, and hangings, not to speak of the cheerful racket they keep up when a lot of them become colonized in the attic and walls, just at the time when other folks like to have the house quiet. They do drive away all the mice, however. Flying -squirrels feed mainly on thin- shelled nuts, acorns, seeds, and small fruits, such as they can gather without leaving the tree-tops, and seem to drop about three for every one they secure. In- sects attract them, and, sad to say, they also eat the eggs and young of birds, for they have a liking for meat, and often plague fur-trappers by devour- 197 WILD. LIFE OF ORCHARD AND, FIELD ing their baits, while tame ones corisume greedily any raw flesh offered them. Nuts, acorns, and corn grains they store in large quantities in hol- lows near their winter - quarters, where sometimes a dozen dwell in one hole; and they draw rations from these larders pretty regularly through the winter, except in storms and very “cold snaps,” when they remain in-doors, curled up and crowded together, sluggish with sleep, until the weather moderates. If you want a pet flying-squirrel, it is well to get it when young, as you can usually do in May or June; but an adult will respond to gentle treat- ment with ready docility, never biting, and becom- ing in a day or two perfectly tame. If you do not know where a family is living, go about tapping on the woodpecker-riddled dead stubs at the edge of the woods until a furry head pops out to inves- tigate, and then the capture is very easy, for it cannot be denied that this little animal seems to be fearless and confiding largely through lack of wits. And sometimes they make a summer nest of leaves, and carry the youngsters to it to grow up in cooler quarters. They are, indeed, exceedingly fond and careful of their little ones. Audubon relates that once he 198 eee Dp) eR EO) OR CM AR D AND FIELD brought home a flying-squirrel family, and, hav- ing no cage handy, put them into a bureau-drawer for the night. In the morning the old one was gone, and the kindly naturalist was left to nurse the kittens as best he could. They lived and seemed to thrive, although surprisingly little of the milk he gave them was consumed ; but the mystery was presently solved. “A few evenings afterwards,”’ he says, “we were surprised and delighted to see the mother glide through the open window and enter the still open drawer; in a moment she was nestled with her young. She had not forsaken them, but visited them nightly.” Nothing can be prettier as pets, when restrained from becoming a nuisance by multiplication and mischief. All day they remain quiet and usually sleep—in your pocket, if you are willing. It is amusing to watch one preparing for a doze by plac- ing its head between its fore-feet, and then delib- erately kneeling over until its head is back be- tween its thighs and its limbs are enwrapped in cloak and tail, so that it is nothing but a soft, round ball of mouse-colored and creamy fur. When dusk falls, however, it wakes up, and all the even- ing is exceedingly active and playful. Dr. Mer- riam tells of one which, when placed upon a table, 199 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD would come to the edge nearest him‘and cry to be taken up. “If I extended my arm and approached it, the little creature, trembling with delight, would stand on its hind-legs and leap upon my hand, thence running either up my sleeve or down my neck.”’ Every one who has kept these squirrels has a similar story to tell; and an escape from the cage at night is always known, for they will go straight to where their master is sleeping and crawl into bed with him, to cuddle as close to his body as they can. The common flying-squirrel of the eastern United States is about ten inches in total length, Cana- dian specimens running somewhat larger. The color is yellowish brown above and creamy white below; but Northern specimens are likely to be gray and “cold” in tone as compared with the brighter colors of Southern examples. “Its eyes are unusually large and prominent and perfectly black, and its fur is of much the same quality as chinchilla, and of even softer tints. The flying membrane consists of a thin strip of skin stretched between the fore and hind legs and furred above and below. A slight cartilaginous support runs back from the wrist, assisting to extend the mem- 200 WELD, UIPE OF ORCHARD: AND)’ FIELD brane when the fore-legs are spread apart as in flying. The tail probably serves both as para- chute and rudder, since it is thin and flat, but of such a close, silky texture as to catch the wind like a sail.” “T should imagine,” says Mr. William E. Cram, from whose excellent writings I have quoted the paragraph preceding this, “that from their noc- turnal habits these squirrels would fall frequent victims to the different kinds of owls, although I cannot recall ever having found any evidence of this having been the case, either about the nests or in the stomachs of such owls as I have exam- ined. But in all probability they are frequently snapped up by them, as well as by foxes, weasels, and the like, just as they are occasionally by do- mestic cats.” WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD Xl] CIVILIZING INFLUENCES O say that the settlement of North America has produced a marked effect upon the animal life of the continent, and upon the birds as a part of the fauna, “may seem too much of a truism g es Fa 1to be worth discussion. Yet the un ae G at degree to which this effect has wal Y4¥d been felt, and the various ways AW in which man’s influence has ay Wy J been exerted upon animals, may Rea A still be objects of interesting in- i quiry. I confine myself alone to the effects produced by the white man, because the Indian seems to have caused hardly an appreciable change, either for 202 Wire ELE Ey) On ORCHARD AND) PLE LD good or evil, in the comparative plenitude, or in the habits, of the creatures dwelling about him. He himself was really as wild and indigenous as they, hunting, like the carnivores, purely for food, and, with the osprey, fishing only when his wants were urgent; his mind was too grim to entertain the idea of pursuing animals for sport, and his civilization too limited to cause much disturbance of natural conditions. During the last two and a half centuries white men have spread everywhere, and in almost every part of the continent their machinery has replaced the original simplicity of nature. Thousands of square miles of forest have been cleared, marshes have been drained, rivers obstructed and tormented with mill-wheels, and cities have sprung up as swiftly as the second growth of scrub pines follows the levelling of an oak wood. The inevitable result must follow that all our an- imals, birds included, would have been so harassed by their changed surroundings and the persecu- tions of human foes that they would have rapidly disappeared. With the vast majority of the quadru- peds this has actually been the case. “ Wild beasts’”’ no longer haunt our forests, to the terror of the traveller ; nor can the hunter now find game 203 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD that a few decades ago was abundant almost at his door. It has been much the same with wild fowl and game birds. They have deserted their ancient nesting-places within our borders for the safer arctic heaths, or old and young have been all but exterminated by gun and snare. Neverthe- less, a large number of the smaller birds of our woodlands and prairies, as I hope to show, have been decidedly benefited by the advent of white men. It is commonly observed that scarcely any small birds are seen in the depths of a forest, but they become abundant as one approaches the neighbor- hood of settlements. Travellers through Siberia know that they are coming near a village when they begin to hear the voices of birds, which are absent from the intervening solitudes. Every ornithol- ogist has proved these facts in his own experience, and explorers who go to uninhabited and primeval regions have learned not to expect there the chorus that greets their ears from the great army of song- sters thronging the fields in populous countries. The song birds—the small denizens of our sum- mer groves, pastures, and meadows—seem, then, ~ to recognize the presence of man’s civilization as a blessing, and have taken advantage of it, both 204 MikD, LIFE OF /ORCHARD AND’ FIELD from love of human society and for more solid and prosaic reasons. The settlement of a country implies the felling of forests, the letting in upon the ground of light and warmth, the propagation of seed-bearing cere- als, weeds, and grasses enormously in excess of a natural state of things, the destruction of noxious quadrupeds and reptiles, and the introduction of horses and cattle. Each of these alterations of nature (except in some few cases, like that of the relation of the woodpecker to the cutting away of timber) 1s a direct benefit to the little birds. It is not difficult to demonstrate this. Birds naturally choose sunny spots in which to build their nests, such as some little glade on the bank of a stream; when roads were cut and fields levelled in the midst of sombre woods, the area suitable for nesting was, of course, greatly added to, and a better chance thus afforded for successfully hatching and rearing broods of young. The way in which the wood-roads cut by the hemlock bark- peelers through the dense forests that clothe the remote Catskills have become the haunt of birds and insects is a capital example in urging this point. One of the largest avine families—that of the sparrows, finches, and buntings—subsists 205 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD almost exclusively on seeds of weeds and grasses; and the members of a large proportion of other families depend somewhat for their daily supply on this sort of food. Under the universal shade of trees weeds can grow only sparingly, and on prairies the crop is often killed by drought or is burned in the autumn; but the cultivation of im- mense fields of grain and hay, and the making of broad pastures and half-worn roads, which almost immediately become filled with weeds, have fur- nished the birds with an inexhaustible and un- failing harvest. Birds suffer much harm from many quadrupeds —foxes, weasels, skunks, rats, etc.—which catch them on their roosts, suck their eggs, and kill their fledglings. Snakes also are fond of them, and destroy many nests every season—in early sum- mer subsisting almost alone on eggs. All these animals, particularly foxes, skunks, and serpents, are greatly reduced in number by settlements, al- though it must be confessed that their absence is somewhat compensated for by the introduction of domestic cats, which go foraging through the woods, to the grief of all their feathered inhabitants. No longer in fear of their natural enemies, and learn- ing that there is little reason to be apprehensive 206 WiDr LIP, (OR WwORCHARD)) AND) FIELD of harm from mankind, the small birds forsake their silent, shy manners, come out of the thickets where they have been hiding, and let their voices be heard in ringing tones, easily interpreted as rejoicing at deliverance from fear and_ thanks- giving for liberty to sing as loud as pleases them. All small birds are more or less completely in- sectivorous (even the cone-billed seed-eaters hav- ing to feed their young with larve at first), and naturally congregate where this food is most abun- dantly supplied. There would seem to be enough anywhere; but the ploughing and manuring of the soil facilitates the growth and increase of such insects as go through their metamorphoses in the ground; and the culture of orchards furnishes an excellent resort for many boring and fruit-loving moths, beetles, and the like, which find the best possible circumstances for their multiplication in the diseased trunks and juicy fruit of the apple, plum, cherry, and peach. No part of the farm has so many winged citizens as the orchard. The presence of horses, cattle, and sheep offers to flies and other insect tribes excellent oppor- tunities for the safe rearing of their eggs in the dunghills and heaps of wet straw always lying about barns, and attracts a great colony of those 207 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD minute beetles upon which the fly-eatching birds principally maintain themselves. The cattle-yard, therefore, forms a sort of game preserve for such birds, and many species flock thither. Swallows are hardly ever found except in the vicinity of _barns; the cow-bunting receives its name from its habit of constantly associating with cattle; and the king - bird finds the stable- yard his most profita- ble hunting-ground. Near the habitations of men, small birds also enjoy protection from hawks and owls, which hesitate to venture away from the shelter of the woods, and whose numbers are re- duced, unwisely perhaps, by incessant persecu- tion.” The logic of the case is simple: birds will as- semble chiefly where food for themselves and their young is in greatest abundance, and where they are least exposed to enemies. These two prime conditions of prosperity, with many favorable concomitants, man’s art supplies to the insessorial birds, which, on the other hand, suffer little direct injury from his contact. Yet some species seem * In several States of the Union bounties are offered, some- times by county authorities, sometimes by game-protective associations, and hundreds of hawks and owls are killed annually. 208 WILD LIFE OF) ORCHARD AND” FIELD little affected by the civilizing of the country, either in numbers or habits, while others increase rapid- ly on the first settlement of a region, and then de- crease again. Of this class are the prairie-hen and other game, and the mallard. ‘They find abundance of food in the corn and wheat fields; while the population is sparse and larger game so abundant, they are hunted very little; but as the population increases they are gradually thinned out, and become in some cases exterminated. Other birds, as the quail, are wholly unknown beyond the frontier, and only appear after the country has been settled a short time. Still others, wood- land species, appear in regions where they were never known before, as groves of trees are plant- ed, and thick woods spring up on the prairies as soon as the ravages of the fires are checked.”’ Striking examples of how some of our birds have accepted this tacit invitation to make men their confidants occur in the history of the Amer- ican swallows and swifts. Our purple martins spread themselves in summer all over North Amer- ica, but are becoming rare in the New England States, whence they seem to have been driven by the white-bellied swallows, which have gradually grown more numerous, and which, preceding the 14 209 WILD: LIFE OF ORCHARD AND’ FIELD martins in the spring, take possession of all the boxes put up for the accommodation of the mar- tins, and exclude the rightful tenants v1 et armis. Their natural nesting-places were hollow trees and cavities in rocks; but now, throughout the whole breadth of the land, it is rare to find martins re- sorting to such quarters, except in the most remote parts of the Rocky Mountains. They have every- where abandoned the woods, and come into the villages, towns, and even cities, choosing to nest in communities about the eaves of houses and barns, and in sheltered portions of piazzas, or to take pos- session of garden bird - boxes, where their social, confiding dispositions have rendered them general favorites. | A very similar case is presented in the case of our chimney-swift, which finds a chimney a far more desirable residence than a hollow tree in the woods. Latterly, indeed, this bird has gone fur- ther, for in such old-settled regions as the maritime provinces of Canada it is constantly forsaking chimneys and placing its nest in sheds and attics, where there is light and air and safer and more cleanly surroundings. This shows, among other things, great confidence in its human friends. Other species of American swallows afford still 210 WiDr Lite OP ORCHARD: AND) DIE LD more striking illustrations of a change in the man- ner of life effected by association with men. Per- haps the most curious example is the case of the eave-swallow (Petrochelidon lunifrons). This bird remained undiscovered until 1820, when it was met with by the celebrated Thomas Say when nat- uralist to Major Long’s expedition to the Rocky Mountains, a memento of which remains in the name of one of the loftiest heights of the snowy range—Long’s Peak. In 1825, however, the bird suddenly appeared at Fort Chippewa, in the fur country, and contentedly built its nest under the eaves. Even earlier it had been seen on the Ohio River, at Whitehall, New York, and very soon after was found breeding in the Green Mountains, in Maine, in New Brunswick, and among the high limestone cliffs of the islands along that precipitous coast. It occurs also westward to the Pacific coast. It is hardly to be supposed that these swallows were indigenous to some restricted locality in the West, whence they suddenly made such a startling exodus; but rather it is believed that they always had existed in isolated spots all over the coun- try, but so far apart and so uncommonly that they were overlooked. The experience of the barn-swallow (Chelidon 2.1 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD erythrogaster) has been much the same; and the Rocky Mountain swallow (Tachycineta thalassina), which breeds in far-separated colonies throughout the mountainous West, is fast following its exam- ple in scraping acquaintance with mankind. The natural breeding-place of all the three spe- cies I have mentioned is in caves and crevices of rock, the irregularities and hollows of limestone crags affording them the best chances. “Swal- J lows’ Cave,’”’ at Nahant, is remembered as one of their hospices. I have seen all three species breed- ing together among the ragged ledges of Middle Park, Colorado; but considerable differences were noticeable between the houses of these uncivilized builders and those of their educated brethren at the East, who now, perhaps, would find it rather hard to rough it as did their ancestors. Under the shelter of warm barns, and with such an abundance of food at hand that they have plenty of leisure between meals to cultivate their tastes and give scope to their ingenuity, our barn and eave swallows have shown a wondrous improve- ment in architecture. The nests of the barn-swal- lows that I saw at the hot sulphur springs in Col- orado consisted only of a loose bed of straw and feathers, for the hollow floors of the niches in which 212 Nests of the Wild Cliff-swallow WED TIPE) OF (ORCHARD): AND, FIELD they were placed formed cavity and barrier for the safety of the eggs. Some nests, resting on more exposed ledges, had a rude foundation and rim of mud, but did not compare with the elaborate half- bowls, lined with hay and feathers, that are plas- tered by the same species so firmly against the raf- ters of our barns, or with the large nest that is balanced on the beam, with its edges built up so high that the callow young can hardly climb, much less tumble, out until quite ready to fly. Never- theless, the general character of the nest is the same; the Eastern, civilized swallows have only made use of their superior advantages to perfect the inherited idea. In the case of the barn-swal- low, its civilization results in an addition to its pains (is it not a natural consequence?), in that its nest now is required to be much larger, more carefully, and hence more laboriously, made. On the other hand, its neighbor, the eave-swallow, has contrived to save itself labor by the change from wild life. This latter species 1s sometimes called the re- publican swallow, because at the breeding-season it gathers in extensive colonies, where its homes are crowded together as closely as the cells in a honey-comb, one wall often serving for two 213 WILD ‘LIFE OF \ ORCHARD: AND. FIELD or more contiguous structures. The nests are gourd-shaped, or like a chemist’s retort, and are fastened by the bulb to the cliff, generally where it overhangs, with the curving necks opening out- ward and affording an entrance just large enough to admit the owner. This retort is constructed of pellets of mud, well compacted in the little ma- son’s beak, and made adhesive by mixture with the gluelike saliva with which all swallows are provided. In this snug receptacle the pretty eggs are laid upon a bed of soft straw and feathers. Such was the elaborate structure deemed necessary by the swallows so long as they nested in exposed places, where they had to guard against the weath- er and crafty enemies. “But since these birds have placed themselves under the protection of man, they have found that there is no longer any need of all this superfluous architecture, and the shape of their nests has been gradually simplified and improved. In 1857, on one of the islands in the Bay of Fundy, Dr. T. M. Brewer met with a large colony whose nests, on the side of the barn, were placed between two projecting boards put up for them by the friendly proprietor. The very first year they occupied these convenient quar- ters, every one of these sensible swallows built 214 WILD LIFE "OF ORCHARD, AND FIELD nests open at the top, discarding the old patri- archal domes and narrow entrances of their fore- fathers.”’ This is not an isolated case, but one that may frequently be matched wherever there is a roof over them, so far as my own observation goes. The purple martin and white-bellied swallow both accept of houses ready made, saving them- selves all trouble except in furnishing them; and even the burrowing bank and rough-winged swal- lows are learning that it is cheaper to build in a snug cranny in an old wall than laboriously to dig a deep crypt in a sand-bank wherein to lay their pearly eggs. Men’s industries have supplied the birds with some new and exceedingly useful building ma- terials, such as furnishing those weavers, the orioles and vireos, with strings and yarn for the warp of their fabrications, and the yellow-bird with cotton and wool to make her already downy bed still softer. Instances of abnormally late and early breeding seem to be very common in England, and are com- ing to be more and more frequently recorded on this side of the Atlantic. This is not to be won- dered at, since our operations insure to the birds a continued supply of suitable food, and thus en- 215 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD able them to rear their young at seasons when in a wild state it would not be possible to do so. The English sparrows, breeding all the year round, or nearly so, in the parks of our coast cities, area case in point. That civilization has to some extent governed the migrations and geographical distribution of many species of our birds not directly warred upon as pot game, for amusement, or because they are obnoxious to crops, could easily be shown had I space at command to bring forward illustrations ; and when another two centuries have rolled around the effect will be very striking. The mocking and Bewick’s wrens, the rose-breasted grossbeak, chest- nut-sided warbler, and other species, have spread northward and become more abundant since the time of Wilson and Audubon; the bobolink has kept pace with the widening cultivation of rice and grain fields; the red-headed woodpecker has retreated from New England; the Arkansas fly- catcher has multiplied and spread as a town bird through all the cities and villages from Council Bluffs to Denver; the raven has gradually retired before the wood-cutter, until it has almost ceased to exist; while year by year the crow has extend- ed its range, without seeming in the least to di- 216 WILD LIFE OF) ORCHARD, AND FIELD —————$ minish its force in the older districts, but crowding the wild and refractory raven farther and farther beyond the western frontier. Although none have abandoned their old way of life so completely as the swallows, many other birds have profited by the constructions and friend- ship of the human race. The bluebird and house- wren, chickadees and nuthatches dig holes in the fence-posts conveniently rotting for their use; and even such wild species as the Western fly-catcher, great-crested kingbird, and Bewick’s wren occa- sionally attach themselves to mankind, and hatch their young under his roof for greater security. Even the whippoorwill and nighthawk, asleep all day in the swamp, are glad to come to the farmer’s house in the evening, and now and then to deposit their eggs on a flat roof. In the Rocky Moun- tains I have seen flocks of white ptarmigans nim- bly hopping around the door-steps of miners who were seeking silver far above timber-line, picking up the crumbs thrown to them, as tame as pet chickens. In not a few instances, here as well as abroad, superstition brings profit to our birds. An honest old Pennsylvania Dutchman, around whose barn clouds of swallows hovered, told Wilson that he 217 WILD LIFE’ OF: ORCHARD AND FIELD must on no account shoot any, for ifone was killed his cows would give bloody milk, and that so long as the swallows inhabited the barns his buildings were in no danger of being struck by lightning. The arrival of the fish-hawk or osprey on the New Jersey coast, at the vernal equinox, notes the be- ginning of the fishing-season. In some parts of New England the appearance of the golden-winged woodpecker means the same thing, for the bird is known as the “shad-spirit.”” The coming of both is therefore hailed with satisfaction, and it 1s considered so “lucky” to have an osprey nesting upon one’s farm that proprietors cherish its huge house in the lone tree with uncommon care, recall- ing the reverent fostering that a family of storks will enjoy from the peasant of the Netherlands on whose roof their nest has been placed. The result of all these circumstances, as it seems to me, is that the aggregate army of singing birds in the United States, east of the Mississippi, has been very considerably enlarged during the last two centuries, and is still on the increase. This can be owing only to the fact that by cutting down the forests, etc., civilized man has multiplied the sources of bird food, has increased the number of places suitable for nesting and rearing the young, 218 WILD) LIFE" O8 ORCHARD AND: FIELD and has enabled more fledglings to be brought to maturity by reducing the ranks of the enemies of the birds. This has not only augmented their number, and very appreciably modified their hab- its of nesting and migration, but probably has somewhat changed even their physical and men- tal characteristics. There is little doubt in my mind, for instance, that in making their lives less laborious, apprehensive, and solitary, man has left the birds time and opportunity for far more sing- ing than their hard-worked, scantily fed, and tim- orous ancestors ever enjoyed —a privilege a bird would not be slow to avail itself of. Another noticeable effect is also of a mental order. No longer worried, our song-birds have become better minstrels—more copious and more tuneful; and I believe that the delicious prattle of the bluebird; the careless fluting of the oriole, whistling like a boy on his way to the circus; the cheerful roundelay of the thrasher ; the more serious melody of wood-thrush and vireo; the gay shouting of flicker and jay—these and other voices of field and grove are far more often heard to-day, and are more musical, than when first they fell upon the ears of the Puritan and trader of the North, or of Cavalier and planter in the South. It is my 219 Ne EEE aaa WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD opinion that such birds as come familiarly about our gardens have not only increased in numbers since the settlement of the continent, but that they are livelier, more entertaining, and happier than were their untamed ancestors. ey WILD LIBE (OF) ORCHARD AND FIELD ere XI HOW ANIMALS GET HOME NE of the most striking powers possessed by animals is that of finding their way home from a great distance, and over a road with which they are supposed to be unacquainted. It has long been a question whether we are to attribute these remarkable per- formances to a purely intuitive perception by the animal of the di- rection and the practicable route m to his home, or whether they are acu. | the results of a conscious study of || the situation and a definite car- rying-out of well-judged plans. Probably the most prominent example of this wonderful power 221 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD is the case of homing-pigeons. These pigeons are very strong of wing, and their intelligence is cul- tivated to a high degree; for their peculiar “ gift” has been made use of since time immemorial. The principle of heredity, therefore, now acts with much force; nevertheless, each young bird must be sub- jected to severe training in order to fit it for those arduous competitions which annually take place among first-rate birds. As soon as the fledgling is fairly strong on its wings, it is taken a few miles from the cot and released. It rises into the air, looks about, and starts straightaway for home. There is no mystery about this at all; when it has attained the height of a few yards the bird can see its cot, and full of that strong love of home which is so characteristic of its wild ancestors, the blue- rocks, it hastens back to the society of its mates. The next day the trial distance is doubled, and the third day is still further increased, until in a few weeks it will return from a distance of seventy miles, which is all that a bird-of-the-year is “fit” to do; and when two years old will return from two hun- dred miles, longer distances being left to more mature birds. But all this training must be in a continuous direction ; if the first lesson was towards the east, subsequent lessons must also be; nor can eae WitD LIPEY OF}; ORCHARD (AND) FIELD the added distance each time exceed a certain lim- it, for then, after trying this way and that, and failing to recognize any landmark, the bird will sim- ply come back to where it was thrown up. More- ever, it must always be clear weather. Homing- pigeons will make no attempt to start in a fog, or if they do get away, a hundred chances to one they will be lost. Nor do they travel at night, but set- tle down at dusk and renew their journey in the morning. When snow disguises the landscape, also, many pigeons go astray. None of these circumstances seriously hampers the semiannual migrations of swallows or geese. They journey at night, as well as by day, straight over vast bod- ies of water and flat deserts, true to the north or south. Homing - pigeons fly northward or south- ward, east or west, equally well, and it is evident that their course is guided only by observation. Watch one tossed. On strong pinions it mounts straight up into the air a hundred feet. Then it begins to sweep around in great circles, rising higher and higher, until—if the locality is seventy- five or one hundred miles beyond where it has ever been before—it will go almost out of sight. Then suddenly you will see it strike off upon a straight course, and that course is homeward. But take 223 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD the same bird there a second time and none of these aérial revolutions will occur—its time is too pressing, its homesickness too intense for that; instantly it turns its face towards its owner’s dove-cot. These facts mean something. They show that two definite intellectual processes serve to decide for the bird the direction he is to take—observation and memory. He gets high enough, and turns about times enough, to catch sight of some famil- iar object, and he makes for it; arrived there, an- other known feature catches his eye, and thus by ever narrowing stages he is guided home. Few persons have any idea of the distance one can see at great elevations. More than once I have stood on the Rocky Mountains, where, had I been a pig- eon, I could have steered my flight by another moun- tain more than one hundred miles distant. Bal- loonists say that at the height of half a mile the whole course of the Thames or the Seine, from end to end, is spread out as plain as a map beneath their eyes. There is no doubt that a pigeon may rise to where he can recognize, in clear weather, a landscape one hundred and fifty miles away; it has been done repeatedly, though only by the best birds, specially trained for that particular line of 224 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD flight. There is no greater error than to suppose that carrier-pigeons sent a long distance from home in any direction will always return, as though at- tracted by a load-stone. The benevolent lady re- ceived only a good-natured laugh for her pains when she offered to equip one of the British arctic expeditions with these winged messengers, who, she supposed, could be despatched from any point with tidings, and have a fair chance of get- ting straight back to England. A pigeon’s power of memory is really wonderful. Beginning with short stages, perhaps of not more than a dozen miles, the final stage of a match- flight of five hundred miles will be more than one hundred. The country has been seen but once, yet the bird remembers it, and not only for the three or four days of a match, but for months. In June, 1877, birds trained from Bath to London were twice flown. On June IIth of 1878 they re- peated the trip at good speed. Such feats are not uncommon with Belgian birds—the best of all— and there have been several authenticated instances of their going off-handed from England to Bel- gium after having been kept in confinement many months. But the homing intelligence of pigeons is subject to much irregularity of action, and this 15 225 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD very circumstance insists that it shall not be con- sidered an unvarying, unreasoning instinct. Enough has now been said, perhaps, to enable one to see that, however much the bird may be aided by an acute sense of direction—a capability, I mean, of preserving a straight course, once ascer- tained, which sense some may prefer to speak of as an “instinct’’—the homing faculty of the hom- ing-pigeon is the result of education, and is not a matter of intuition at all. The bee pursues a truly similar course. When he is loaded with nectar, you will note him cease humming about the heads of the flowers and spring up in a swift, vertical spiral, and, after circling about a moment, shoot homeward “in a bee-line.”’ Evidently he has “got his bearings.’’ Had you watched him the first time he ever left his hive you would have observed precisely similar conduct to acquaint himself with the surroundings. How a bird like the albatross, the man-of-war- hawk, or the petrel, swinging on tireless pinions in apparently aimless flight over the tossing and objectless ocean, suddenly rouses its reserve of strength to traverse in a day or two the hundreds of miles between it and the rocky shores where it builds its nest, or how it finds the lone islet which 226 The Northern Gray Squirrel Wi Di) VIPER: Oh ORCHARD AND. FIELD these winged wanderers of the sea alone render populous, is not easily explained. Nor can we readily understand how once a year the salmon comes back (from conjecture only guesses where), not to the coast alone, for that would be no more than an ordinary case of migration, but to the identical stream where it was born; and to prove that it was not a blind emotion that led it would be harder than in the case of the pigeon, the bee, or even the frigate-bird. Yet who knows that the fishes may not be able to perceive the dif- ferences in the water which we designate “ vari- I ations of temperature and density,” or still more delicate properties, and thus distinguish the fluid of their native place from the outside element? It is a question, however, whether this phe- nomenon comes properly within the scope of this article. Many domestic animals show a true homing faculty, and often in a degree which excites our surprise. One of the most remarkable cases I knew was that of two of the mules of a pack-train which, plainly by concerted action, left our camp one morning without cause or provocation. We were in southwestern Wyoming, about seventy- five miles northwest of Rawlins Station, where we 227 WILD >) LIFE OF “ORCHARD AND FPIELD had begun our march. Our course, however, had been an exceedingly roundabout one, including a great deal of very bad country, where no road or trail existed. These mules made no attempt to trace it back, but struck straight across the coun- try. They were chased many miles, and showed not the least hesitancy in choosing their way, keeping straight on across the rolling plain, with a haste which seems not to have diminished until Rawlins was almost reached, when they were caught by some prospectors. For weeks they had to be kept carefully hobbled to prevent a repetition of the experiment. How did these animals know the direction with such certainty? Mules frequently follow a very obscure trail backward for many miles, and, even more than horses, may be trusted to find the way home in the dark; but this is only when they have been over the road before, and is quite as fully due to their superior eyesight as to their strong sense of locality. I have also seen mules following the trail of a pack-train a few hours in advance, al- most wholly by scenting; but the two runaways before mentioned had no other conceivable help in laying their course than some distant mountain- tops north and east of (and hence behind) them, 228 WIDD: LIFE OF ORCHARD AND’ FIELD and to profit by these would have required a sort of mental triangulation. But the most common instances of homing ability are presented by our domestic pets, which often come back to us when we have parted with them in a way quite unaccountable at first thought. An extremely instructive series of authentic ex- amples of this were published in successive num- bers of that excellent London newspaper, The Field. The discussion was begun by a somewhat aggres- sive article by Mr. Tegetmeier, in which he ex- pressed the opinion that most of such stories cur- rent were and cordially assigned to the regions of the fabulous those narratives which seemed to attribute this power toa special faculty possessed by the animal, instancing himself two cases where a dog and a cat found their way home, as he very justly supposes, by using their mem- ories. The distance was not great; they obtained a knowledge of the routes, and took their depart- ure. “Very interesting,” replied a correspondent, “but no argument against another cat or dog home- returning twenty or thirty miles across a strange district by means of instinct.” And as evidence of his conclusion that “there is an attribute of animals, neither scent, sight, nor memory, which 229 c I “nonsense,” WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD enables them to perform the home-returning jour- neys,” this gentleman said: “When I resided at Selhurst, on the Brighton & South Coast Railway, a friend living at Sut- ton gave me an Irish retriever bitch. She came over to him about a month previously from the County Limerick, where she was bred; and during her stay at Sutton she was on chain the whole time, with the exception of two walks my friend gave her in the direction of Cheam, which is in an opposite quarter to Selhurst from Sutton. She came to me per rail in a covered van, and the dis- tance from home to home is about nine miles. She was out for exercise next morning, ran away, and turned up at her previous home the same afternoon. ”’ But this proved to be a mild instance of such performances. A fox-hound was taken by train in a covered van forty miles from the kennels of one hunt to those of another in Ireland. The hound was tied up for a week, and then she was taken out with the pack. She hunted with them for the day, and returned in the evening to within a hun- dred yards of the kennel. “Here,” relates the narrator, “I noticed her go into a field, sit down, and look about her. I called out to the young gen- tleman who hunts the hounds, whose way home 230 Wie Dy CEPE), OM ORCHARD "AND FIELD was the same as mine: ‘ J., Precious is not going on with you.’ ‘Oh, there’s no fear of her,’ was the reply. “As she came so far, she will come the rest of the way.’ So we went on to the kennel close by, but Precious did not appear, and we came back at once to the spot, sounded the horn, and searched everywhere. That was at six o’clock in the evening. On the following morning at six o'clock, when the messman went to the kennel door at Doneraile, Precious was there.”’ An officer took a pointer, which certainly had never been in Ireland before, direct from Liverpool to Belfast, where he was kept for six months at the barracks. He was then sent by train and cart, in a dog-box, thirty-four miles into the country, and tied up for three days. Being let out on the morn- ing of the fourth, he at once ran away, and was found that same evening at the barracks at Belfast. A sheep-dog was sent by rail and express wagon from the city of Birmingham to Wolverton, but, escaping from confinement the next Saturday at noon, on Sunday morning reappeared in Birming- ham, having travelled sixty miles in twenty-four hours. Says one writer: “I was stopping with a friend about eighteen miles from Orange, New South Wales. My host brought a half-grown kit- 231 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD ten sixteen miles by a cross-bush track, tied in a flour-bag at the bottom of a buggy. She was fed that night; in the morning she had disappeared. She was home again in rather less than four days.” The same person owned a horse in the interior of Australia, which, after two years of quiet residence on his run, suddenly departed, and was next heard of one hundred miles away, at the run of the old master from whom it had been stolen years before. A rough-coated cur was taken by a gentleman to whom he had been given from Manchester to Liverpool by train, thence to Bangor, North Wales, by steamboat; but on landing at Bangor the dog ran away, and the fourth day afterwards, fatigued and foot-sore, was back in his home kennel, hav- ing undoubtedly travelled straight overland the whole distance. The same gentleman knew of a kitten that was carried in a covered basket six miles from one side of Manchester to the other, and found its way back the next day through the tur- bulent streets. Similarly, a fox-hound transported in a close box between points one hundred and fifty miles distant, and part of the way through the city of London, came back as soon as let loose. A retriever bitch did the same thing from Hudders- field to Stroud, a fortnight after being taken to 232 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD the former place by rail; and a fox-hound returned from Kent to Northamptonshire, which are on op- posite sides of the Thames; finally a dog came back to Liverpool from a distant point, whither he had been forwarded by rail in the night. So many such instances are recorded that I re- frain from mentioning more, except a couple of very illustrative ones which I find vouched for in the Rev. J. G. Wood’s valuable little book, Man and Beast. A mechanic who worked in Man- chester, but lived in Holywell, Wales, having been home on a visit, was given a dog to take back with him. “He led the animal from Holywell to Bagill by road, a distance of about two miles. Thence he took the market-boat to Chester, a distance of about twelve miles, if I remember right. Then he walked through Chester, and took rail for Birk- enhead. From that station he walked to the land- ing-stage, and crossed the Mersey to Liverpool. He then walked through Liverpool to the station in Lime Street. Then he took rail to Manchester, and then had to walk a distance of a mile and a half to his home. This was on Wednesday. He tied the dog up, and went to his work on Thursday as usual; and on the Sunday following, thinking that the dog was accustomed to the place, he set 233 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD it at liberty. He soon lost sight of it, and on the Wednesday following he received a letter from his mother, stating that the dog had returned to her. Now you will see that the dog went first by road, then by market-boat, then through streets, then by rail, then by steamer, then through streets again, then by rail again, then through streets again, it being dark at the time.’’ Whether the animal really did follow the back-track with all this exact- ness or not, one thing is certain, he had sagacity enough to find his way, and (as is noteworthy in all these incidents) did so with astonishing speed. The second instance is still more striking, and illustrates very forcibly the strong love of home in the dog, which is the motive in all these extraor- dinary and difficult journeys. “A gentleman in Calcutta wrote to a friend living near Inverkeith- ing, on the shore of the Frith of Forth, requesting him to send a good Scotch collie dog. This was done in due course, and the arrival of the dog was duly acknowledged. But the next mail brought accounts of the dog having disappeared, and that nothing could be seen or heard of him. Imagine the astonishment of the gentleman in Inverkeith- ing when, a few weeks later, friend Collie bounced into his house, wagging his tail, barking furiously, 234 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD and exhibiting, as only a dog can, his great joy at finding his master.’’ Inquiry showed that the dog had come aboard a Dundee collier from a ship hailing from Calcutta. Comparing all these examples and many others —for hundreds, almost, of similar cases with vari- ous animals might be cited—certain general facts appear. First, incidentally, brutes equally with men be- come homesick. Those that stay away, as well as those that return to their former homes, show this very plainly, and often pitiably. This feeling is the motive which leads them to undergo perils and hardships that no other emotion would prompt them to undertake or enable them to endure. But it is the most thoroughly domesticated and most in- telligent breeds of animals that this homesickness attacks the most severely; while, correlatively, the most difficult feats of finding their way home are manifested by the same class. It is the finely bred horses, the carefully reared pigeons, the highly educated pointers, fox-hounds, and collies that re- turn from the longest distances and over the great- est obstacles. This would seem to indicate that the homing ability is largely the result of education; whatever 235 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD foundation there may have been in the wild brute, it has been fostered under civilizing influences, until it has developed to an astonishing degree. I would like to ask any one who believes that this ability is wholly a matter of intuition—an innate faculty—why such an instinct should have been planted in the breast of animals like dogs and horses in their wild condition? They had no homes to which they could become attached as they do now in their artificial life; or when they did settle dur- ing the breeding season in any one spot, either they did not quit it at all, wandered only for a short distance, or else the females alone remained sta- tionary, while the males roved as widely as usual. There would seem to be no call, therefore, for such an instinct in the wild animal. That they may always have had, and do now possess, a very acute sense of direction, enabling them to keep the points of the compass straight in their minds far better than we can, I am willing to admit; but I doubt whether the evidence proves a nearer approach to a homing “instinct” than this. On the contrary, I believe, as I have already hinted, that beyond this the performances of animals in the line of our inquiry are the result of accurate observation and very retentive memory. That all these animals 236 Wel Litt) OF \ORCHARD AND FIELD now and then do miss their bearings, get “turned around” and wholly lost, is true, and is a fact to be remembered in this discussion. In the case of the birds, observation by sight is sufficient. They rise to a height whence they can detect a landmark, and, flying thither, catch sight of another. The experience of pigeon-trainers shows this satisfactorily, and that of the falconers supports it. The far-reaching eyesight of birds is well known. Kill a goat on the Andes, and in half an hour flocks of condors will be disputing over the remains, though when the shot was fired not a single sable wing blotted the vast blue arch. The same is true of the vultures of the Hima- layas and elsewhere. Gulls drop unerringly upon a morsel of food in the surf, and hawks pounce from enormous heights upon insignificant mice crouching in fancied security among the meadow stubble, while an arctic owl will perceive a hare upon the snow (scarcely more white than himself) three times as far as the keenest-eyed Chippewa who ever trapped along Hudson Bay. The eye- sight, then, of pigeons and falcons is amply power- ful to show them the way in a country they have seen before, even though the points they are ac- quainted with be a hundred miles apart. 237 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD In the cases of horses, dogs, and’ cats the ex- planation may be more difficult, and not always possible to arrive at. Horses and mules are ex- tremely observant animals, and quick to remember places; everybody who has ever had anything to do with them must know this. Their recollection is astonishing. The Rev. J. G. Wood tells of a horse which knew its old master after sixteen years, though he had grown from a boy to a man, and was, of course, much changed in both voice and appearance. It is probable that, where horses come back, they do so mainly by sight and memory. As for dogs, they not only can see well, but they have the additional help of their intelligent noses. The proficiency to which some breeds of dogs have brought their smelling powers—the precision with which they will analyze and detect different scents —is surprising. I have lately seen trustworthy ac- counts of two hunting-dogs, one of which pointed a partridge on the farther side of a stone wall, much to the surprise of his master, who thought his dog was an idiot; and the other similarly indicated a bird sitting in the midst of a decaying carcass, the effuvium of which was disgustingly strong, yet not sufficiently so to disguise the scent of the bird to the dog’s delicate nostrils. Fox- hounds will 238 WILD,’ LIBE)) OF ORCHARD ‘AND FIELD trace for miles, at full speed and with heads high, the step of a Mercury-footed fox, simply by the faint odor with which his lightly touching pad has tainted the fallen leaves. There are few cases where a dog is taken from one home to another when he could not see most of the time where he was going. In that compli- cated journey of the Holywell workman’s pet from northern Wales to Manchester, the little fellow had his eyes open the whole distance, we may be sure, and if he could speak he would no doubt tell us that he remembered his previous journey pretty well. But many times, especially where transported by rail, it is unquestionable that dogs rely upon their noses to get them back. Finding that they are being kidnapped, carried off from home and friends in this confined, alarming fashion, unable to see out of the tight box of the close car, they do just what you or I would do under similar circumstances —exert every possible means left them of discover- ing whither they are going, and take as many notes as possible of the route, intending to escape at the very first opportunity. One means of in- vestigation remaining is the scent, and_ this they would use to great advantage, examining the dif- ferent smells as their journey progressed, and stow- 239 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD ing them away in their memory to be followed back in inverse order when they have a chance to re- turn. Granting to these animals the discriminating sense of smell which experience shows to be pos- sessed by them, I do not see any reason why they should not be able to remember a journey by its succession of odors just as well as they would by its successive landmarks to the eye. Even we, with our comparatively useless noses, can smell the sea from afar; can scent the sweetness of the green fields as well as the smokiness of black towns ; and can distinguish these general and continuous odors from special or concentrated odors, which lat- ter would change direction as the smeller changed position. How far this sense really has been de- veloped in the human subject, perhaps few know; but in the history of Julia Grace, the deaf and blind mute of Boston, for whom the late Dr. Howe accomplished so much, occurs a striking example. In her blindness and stillness, Julia’s main occu- pation was the exercise of her remaining senses of touch, taste, and smell. It was upon the last, we are told, that she seemed most to rely to obtain a knowledge of what was going on around her, and she came finally to perceive odors utterly insensi- 240 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD ble to other persons. When she met a person whom she had met before, she instantly recognized him by the odor of his hand or glove. If it wasa stranger, she smelt his hand, and the impres- sion remained so strong that she could recognize him long after by again smelling his hand, or even his glove, if he had just taken it off; and if, of half a dozen strangers, each one should throw his glove into a hat, she would take one, smell it, then smell the hand of each person, and unerringly assign each glove to its owner. She would pick out the gloves of a brother and sister by the similarity of odor, but could not distinguish between them. Similar cases might be produced, though hardly one of superior education in this respect; and in the light of it, it is not difficult to suppose that a sharp dog should be able to follow back a train of odors that he had experienced shortly before. But there is another way by which anxious ani- mals may learn their route both going and coming, and that is by listening and inquiring. It is re- markable how much of what is said by their mas- ters all dogs understand. The books and period- icals of natural history and sport abound with il- lustrations of this, and one lately occurred within my own experience. A very good-natured and 16 241 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD amusing, but utterly unthoroughbred little dog was a member of a family which I was visiting. The dog and I became very good friends at once, and remained so until the second day, when I cas- ually began to joke his master upon owning such a miserable cur. At once the little dog pricked up his ears, and, noticing this, I continued my dis- paragements in a quiet, off-hand tone, his master meanwhile defending and condoling with him, until at last the dog could stand it no longer, but, without any provocation beyond my language, which was not addressed to him at all, sprang up and softly bit at my heel, as though to give me warning of what might happen if the joke went any further; and after that he utterly broke off our friendship. I mention this incident to call attention to the alertness of our household pets in hearing and comprehending what is being said. Could not a dog on a railway remember the names of the towns through which he passed as they were called out by the attendants and spoken by travellers, and so be able to judge something of his way in return? The Rev. Mr. Wood suggested that the collie which returned from India was enabled to find the right vessel at Calcutta by hearing the well-known lan- 242 WitD> LIFE) CF (ORCHARD) AND) FIELD guage and accent of the Scotch sailors; and again picked out from among many others the right collier in which to finish the journey, partly by remem- brance of the rig, but also by recognizing the still more familiar and homelike dialect of the Dundee men. In a country where dialects are so marked as in Great Britain, this sort of observation would no doubt be a great help to an intelligent animal. Take the case of the Helywell workman’s dog. It is quite possible that he discovered the right route from Liverpool, whither it would not be so difficult to make his way from Manchester, by following some rough-tongued Welshmen until he found himself among his own hills again. But there is still more to be said about this part of a homesick animal’s resources and ingenuity. I am firm in my belief that animals have a language of signs and utterances by which they communi- cate with each other, and that their vocabulary, so to speak, is much larger than it has generally been considered to be. Dupont de Nemours de- clared that he understood fourteen words of the cat tongue. I am perfectly convinced that those two wicked little mules of ours, which ran away so disgracefully from our camp in Wyoming, had planned the whole thing out beforehand, and thus 243 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD very likely had made up their minds as to the road. They had been bitter enemies, biting and kicking each other, contesting for coveted places in the line, and quarrelling the whole trip. But the evening before they ran away they were observed to be very amicable. It attracted our notice, and the last that was seen of them in the morning, just before they bolted, they stood apart from the rest with their heads together, and their ears erect, waiting the right moment to dart away together. Tell a mountain mule-driver that the little beasts do not talk among themselves (chiefly in planning cun- ning mischief), and he will laugh in your face. Cats, we know, consult a great deal together, and two street dogs often become great cronies. Why should not these dogs and cats be able to tell stray companions something which should help them on their way? I believe they do—just how, I don’t pretend to say. It seems to me, therefore, that the examples cited above, and a host of others like them, show that all domestic animals have a very strong love of places and persons. In many cases this home- sickness is so strong as to lead them to desert a new abode, when transferred to it, and attempt to return to their former home; but they rarely or 244 Wai D)- LIKE OF } ORCHARD) AND’ FIELD never do so without having a definite 1dea in their minds as to the route, although it is often very long and circuitous, and hence they almost invariably succeed ; otherwise, they do not try. It is not every animal, by a long list, that deserts a new home the moment the chain is loosed; only one, now and then. In regard to the method used by them to find their way, it appears that they have nospecial instinct to guide them, but depend upon their mem- ory of the route, the knowledge of which was ac- quired by an attentive study through the senses of sight, smell, and hearing, and that their search may possibly be aided by communication with other animals. The phenomenon, as a whole, affords another very striking example of animal intelligence. WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD XIV A MIDSUMMER PRINCE ECILIUS CALVERT, second Baron of Baltimore, has a hold upon the recollections of man- kind far surpassing that secured by any monument in the noble town which he founded, in the ART se GUESEP) tact that the most charming bird eee “~@ the parks of our cities bears his jname. That bird is the Balti- | more oriole—Icterus baltimore of yLinneus. Its plumage is pat- A terned in orange and black, the baronial colors of the noble lord’s livery; and Linnzus only paid an appropriate compliment to the source to which he owed his 246 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD specimen of the new species, when, in 1766, he rec- ognized the coincidence in the name. Then, as now, the orioles were among the most beautiful and conspicuous of woodland birds. From their winter retreat under the tropics they return northward as the warm weather advances, arriv- ing in Maryland during the latter part of April, and reaching central New England by the middle of May. The males come in advance, and instant- ly announce their presence by a loud and joyous song, continually emulating one another during the week or more that elapses before the arrival of the females. But this emulation does not end with vying in song; they have many pitched bat- tles, chasing each other from tree to tree and through the branches with angry notes. The coming of the females offers some diversion to these pugna- cious cavaliers, or at least furnishes a new casus belli ; for, while they devote themselves with great ardor to wooing and winning their coy mistresses, their jealousy is easily aroused, and their fighting is often resumed. Even the lady-loves sometimes forget themselves so far as to attack their fancied rivals savagely, or to drive out of sight the chosen mate of some male bird whom they want for them- selves. This is not all fancy, but lamentable fact. 247 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD Mademoiselle Oriole is not so showy as her gay beau. Persuade the pair to keep quiet a moment, and compare them. They are in size between a bluebird and a robin, but rather more slender than either. The plumage of the male is of a rich but varying orange upon all the lower parts, under- neath the wings, upon the lower part of the back, and the outer edges of the tail; the throat, head, neck, the part between the shoulders, wing quills, and middle tail feathers are velvety black; the bill and feet are bluish; there is a white ring around the eye, and the lesser wing quills are edged with white. In the female the pattern of color is the same, but the tints are duller. The jet of the male’s head and neck is rusty in his mate, and each feath- er is margined with olive. The orange part of the plumage is more like yellow in the female, and wing and tail quills are spotted and dirty. Three years are required for the orioles to receive their complete plumage, the gradual change of which is beautifully represented in one of Audubon’s gigantic plates. ‘Sometimes the whole tail of a [young| male individual in spring is yellow, some- times only the two middle feathers are black, and frequently the black on the back is skirted with orange, and the tail tipped with the same color.”’ 248 Wee Dy LIE OF j/ORCHARD AND? FIELD Much confusion arose among the earlier natural- ists from this circumstance, though not quite so much as ensued upon the discovery of the cousin of this species—the orchard oriole—which bears the specific name spurius to this day as a memory of the time when ornithologists called it a “bas- tard.”’ The singing of the males is at its height now that the females have come, and they are to be heard, not only from field and grove and country way-side, but in the streets of villages, and even in the parks of cities, where they are recognized by every school-boy, who calls them fire-birds, golden-robins, hang-nests, and Baltimore birds. The parks and avenues of Philadelphia, the elm- embowered precincts of New Haven, the sacred trees of Boston Common, the classic shades of Har- vard Square, and the malls of Central Park all echo to their spring-time music. The song of the oriole is indescribable, as to me are the tunes of most of the songsters. Nuttall’s ingenious syllables are totally useless for express- ing the pure and versatile fluting which floats from the elm-tops. Wilson catches its spirit when he says that “there is in it a certain wild plaintive- ness and naiveté extremely interesting,” and that 249 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD it is uttered “ with the pleasing tranquillity of a careless plough-boy whistling for his own amuse- ment.” It is a joyous, contented song, standing out from the chorus that greets our half-awakened ears at daylight as brightly as its author shines against the dewy foliage. T. W. Higginson ex- claims, “ Yonder oriole fills with light and melody the thousand branches of a neighborhood.”’ It is a song varying with the time and circumstances, and, as among all birds, some orioles are better performers than others. Dr. Brewer thought that when they first arrived, and were awaiting the females, the voices of the males were loud and some- what shrill, as though in lamentation, and that this song changed into a “richer, lower, and more pleasing refrain’? when they were joined by their partners. The quality of their music is certainly different in different parts of the country, seeming, for example, to be more subdued towards the north- ern limit of their range. A writer in an old number of Putnam’s Maga- zine (Mr. C. A. Munger, June, 1869), describes two orioles with which he had been acquainted for sev- eral summers. These birds had taken up their residences within about a quarter of a mile of each other, one in a public park, and the other 250 fee DE Be OR ORC TT ARID: AND! ETS h Dp in an orchard. “And often,” says the narrator, “have I heard the chief musician of the orchard, on the topmost bough of an ancient apple-tree, sing, to which the chorister of the park, from the summit of a maple, would respond, in the same key, and, for the life of me, I never was able to tell wheth- er their songs were those of rivalry or of greet- ing and friendly intercourse. And now if you will strike these notes on the piano, or, which is better, breathe them from the flute, you will know the song of the oriole, or rather obtain an idea of its general characteristics, for no two that I have ever heard sang the same melody.”’ The female also has a pretty song, which mingles with the brilliant tenor of the male during all the season of love-making; but as May merges into June, and the business of the summer begins, both cease their exalted strains, and only the mellow, ringing whistle is heard; then, as family cares Bay WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD increase, they lay aside even this, and, except at dawn, are rarely heard at all. But, after all, the chief interest about our oriole is its wonderful home, which hangs upon the out- most branches of the elms along the street or in the grove, and is completed by June 10. The nest is never found in the deep woods. Its maker is a bird of the sunlight, and is sociable with man. The haunts of the orioles are those grand trees which the farmer leaves here and there in his field as shade for his cattle, to lean over the brier-tangled fence of the lane, or droop towards the dancing waters of some rural river. “There is,” says Thomas Nut- tall, “nothing more remarkable in the whole in- stinct of our golden-robin than the ingenuity dis- played in the fabrication of its nest, which is, in fact, a pendulous, cylindric pouch of five to seven inches in depth, usually suspended from near the extremities of the high, drooping branches of trees (such as the elm, the pear, or apple tree, wild- cherry, weeping-willow, tulip-tree, or button-wood).”’ These words might in a general way apply to all the Ictert, most of which inhabit North or South America, have brilliant plumages, and build nests of matchless workmanship, woven and entwined in such a way as would defy the skill of the most 252 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD expert seamstress, and unite dryness, safety, and warmth. They are mostly pendulous from the ends of branches, and form thus a security from snakes and other robbers, which could easily reach them if placed on a more solid foundation; they also hold eggs and young safely in storms that wreck or overthrow most other bird-houses. They are formed of the different grasses, dry roots, lich- ens, long and slender mosses, and other advan- tageous materials often supplied by man’s art. Among different species the structures vary in shape from resembling a compact ball to nearly every bottle-shaped gradation of form, until they exceed three or four feet in length. Many species being gregarious, they breed numerously in the same vicinity or on the same tree, resembling in this and other respects the weaver-birds, to which they are partly allied. But for us our Baltimore’s nest possesses the most attractions; and as IJ shall have much to say concerning this fine example of a bird’s architecture, I cannot begin better than by quoting Nuttall’s description of it. It would be im- possible for me to say anything different and as well: “It is begun by firmly fastening natural strings of the flax of the silk-weed, or swamp hollyhock, 253 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD or stout artificial threads, around two or more forked twigs, corresponding to the intended width and depth of the nest. With the same materials, willow down, or any accidental ravellings, strings, thread, sewing-silk, tow, or wool that may be lying near the neighboring houses or around grafts of trees, they interweave and fabricate a sort of coarse cloth into the form intended, towards the bottom of which they place the real nest, made chiefly of lint, wiry grass, horse and cow hair; sometimes, in de- fect of hair, lining the interior with a mixture of slender strips of smooth vine bark, and rarely with a few feathers; the whole being of a considerable thickness and more or less attached to the external pouch. Over the top the leaves, as they grow out, form a verdant and agreeable canopy, defending the young from the sun and rain. There is some- times a considerable difference in the manufacture of these nests, as well as in the materials which enter into their composition. Both sexes seem to be equally adepts at this sort of labor; and I have seen the female alone perform the whole without any assistance, and the male also complete this laborious task nearly without the aid of his con- sort, who, however, in general, is the principal worker. ”’ 254 Wit URE On) ORCHARD! “AND. FIELD Many persons believe that there is a constant tendency in birds to vary their architecture to suit their surroundings, in accordance with climate, greater or less readiness of certain materials, and security. The Baltimore oriole affords a good il- lustration of this tendency. Like the swallows, robin, bluebird, pewit, and others, the oriole has abandoned the wilds for the proximity to man’s settlements, doing it chiefly for two reasons—the greater abundance of insect food and protection from hawks, owls, and crows, which are fewer in number and less bold in the clearings. In the swamps of the Gulf States, the Baltimore, finding no necessity for great warmth or shelter from chilling winds, fabricates an airy nest of Spanish moss (Twllandsia usneoides). Audubon described and figured such a one, but the exact truth of Audubon’s description was rather doubted until the Boston Society of Natural History re- ceived other similar nests from Florida. In these cases the bird chose material both easily obtainable and perfectly suited to the temperature, in pref- erence to the flax and felt which it would have used in the North. We may suppose that the oriole, having learned that the place for its home safest from all maurad- 259 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD ing animals and reptiles was out upon the tips of the swaying twigs, which would not bear the ma- rauder’s weight, would also have learned the shape best adapted to that situation; and that if it knew enough to choose the lesser danger from man in order to escape a greater one from hawks when it came out of the deep woods, it would also have reason enough to alter its style of building in such a way as should best hide the sitting bird from the prying eyes of its winged enemies, and at the same time afford dryness and warmth to the interior. Both of these were secured in the thick branches of the primeval forest by the leaves overhead and around. Itis hence found that in the same climate the more exposed a nest is the denser its compo- sition, the deeper the pouch, and the smaller its mouth. Pennant and others of the earlier writers on American birds described the orioles’ nests as having only a hole near the top for entrance and exit, like those of some of the South American species. Wilson, who was the first real critic of our ornithology, said this was certainly an error, adding, “I have never met with anything of the kind.’’ Both authors seem to have made too sweep- ing assertions, and, as usual, there is a golden mean of fact. 256 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD Our hang-nest has enough discernment to select the safest and best site for a nest ever chosen by a tree-building bird. He has sufficient discretion to inhabit trees where his young will be least exposed to birds of prey. He has sense and skill enough to build a warm or cool house to suit the climate— a deep and tight one where the sun shines brightly, and sharp eyes might see the orange coat of him- self or his mate within, and a loose and (in labor) less expensive one where deep shadows hide it. Surely, then, this consummate workman has in- genuity enough to put a roof over his dwelling to shed the rain and the hawk’s glances, leaving only a little door in the side. Both of these things the hang-nest actually does. I myself have seen a nest of his making, over the open top of which a broad leaf had been bent down and tied by glu- tinous threads in such a way as to make a good portico. Mr. Thomas Gentry found a much more complete example at Germantown (Philadelphia), Pennsylvania, where the orioles “ were constrained to erect a permanent roof to their dwelling by in- terwoven strings through the deprivation of the verdant and agreeable canopy which the leaves would naturally afford. ... So nicely is the roof adjusted that even the most critical investigation "7 257 WILD LIFE .OF ORCHARD AND FIELD cannot discern the union. The entrance is a cir- cular opening situated in the superior third of the nest, facing southwardly.’ this the latest improvement upon a nest which in , Mr. Gentry considers the beginning was simply a hammock in the fork of a tree, like a vireo’s, but which has been made more and more pendulous, until what was at first the whole nest is now only the lining at the bottom of a deep, enclosing bag. With the idea of testing Wallace’s theory that birds of bright colors, easily detected by birds of prey, are always found to occupy concealing nests, Dr. C. C. Abbott, of Trenton, New Jersey, made ex- tensive notes upon the nests of our subject. In every instance those nests which fully concealed the sitting bird were at a considerable distance from any house in uncultivated parts. In all such localities sparrow-hawks were seen frequently, as compared with the neighborhoods selected for building the shallower open-topped nests, all of which were in willow or elm trees in the yards of farm-houses. The conclusion drawn was that the orioles knew where danger from hawks was to be apprehended, and constructed accordingly—the less elaborate nest in the farmer’s yard answering every purpose for incubation. Dr. Abbott says, 258 Wee Behe OR VORCHARD: AND! KIBED however, that of the nests that did conceal the sit- ting bird, every one was really open at the top, and the bird entered from above. Its weight, when in the nest, appeared to draw the edges of the rim to- gether sufficiently to shut out all view of the occu- pant. It is his opinion, however, that years ago, when its enemies were more numerous, the nest of this oriole was perfectly closed at the top, and with a side opening; but he finds none so now. The question why this species alone among our birds is supposed to have learned by dear experi- ence to take such precautions against its foes has already been answered: it is because the Baltimore oriole is almost the only species in which the fe- male is not protected from observation by her neu- tral and dull colors. Nuttall thought both sexes equally expert at nest-building, although the labor principally de- volved upon the female; the latter clause in par- ticular others have confirmed, and the rule is that the male occupies himself only in*collecting materi- als for his mate. They labor very steadily, but a week’s work is necessary for the completion of their home. It seems strange that domiciles construct- ed with so much pains should not be occupied suc- cessive seasons, but this seems never to be the case. 259 WILD (LIFE OF | ORCHARD, AND YFIELD It sometimes happens, however, that orioles will pick to pieces an old nest to get materials for a new one, just as the Indians of Peru often construct their huts of the cut-stone blocks of the ancient palaces of the Incas. These birds are very know- ing in gathering stuff for the frame-work of their homes, and perceive the adaptability to their needs of the housewife’s yarn and laces, hung out to dry, much sooner than they perceive the immorality of stealing them. White cotton strings are rarely absent from their nests, which are sometimes al- most entirely composed of them. Some curious anecdotes have been related of this economical propensity and its results; Nuttall tells the follow- ing: “A female, which I observed attentively, carried off to her nest a piece of lamp-wick ten or twelve feet long. This long string and many other shorter ones were left hanging out for about a week before both ends were wattled into the sides of the nest. Some other little birds, making use of similar materials, at times twitched these flow- ing ends, and generally brought out the busy Bal- timore from her occupation in great anger.” A gentleman in Pennsylvania, observing an ori- ole beginning to build, hung out “skeins of many- colored zephyr yarn, which the eager artist readily 260 Wit Dp! LIE OR -ORCHARKD AND FIELD appropriated. He managed it so that the bird used nearly equal quantities of various high, bright colors. The nest was made unusually deep and capacious, and it may be questioned if sucha thing of beauty was ever before woven by the cun- ning of a bird.’ A few experiments have been made to learn whether this bird would exercise any preference as to color in selecting materials of this kind. They have not yielded very satisfactory results, and should be repeated. This is easily done by any one who observes an oriole beginning its structure, and will lay varicolored wools, separately, in view of the bird and note whether any color is preferred. An accumulation of such observations might de- termine something as to color sense. The nest being done, the female begins to de- posit her eggs, and continues laying one each day until four or five are laid. The eggs are pointed oval, .go by .60 of an inch in dimensions, gray- ish white, with a roseate tinge in fresh and trans- parent specimens, and variously marked with blotches and irregular lines, like pen-scratches, of purplish brown. On the day following, incuba- tion begins, and the eggs hatch at the end of about fifteen days, usually in the middle of June. 261 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD The courage and devotion of the parents in de- fence of their nests are known to every ornitholo- gist. They expose themselves fearlessly to danger rather than desert their charge, and call upon heaven and earth to witness their persecution. I remember one such instance. I discovered a nest with eggs in a sycamore on the banks of the Yantic River, in Connecticut. In trying to examine it I roused the ire of the owners, who showed the most intense anger and dismay. Enjoying this little exhibition, I did all I could to terrify the fond parents without harming them at all, and then quietly watched the result. The birds flew close about the nest, screaming and uttering a loud roll- ing cry like a watchman’s rattle, which very soon brought plenty of sympathetic and curious friends. A cat-bird ventured too near, and was pounced upon by the Baltimore with a fierceness not to be resisted. But when the cat-bird found he was not pursued beyond the shade of the tree, he perched upon a neighboring post, and by hissing, strutting up and down, and every provoking gesture known to birds, challenged the oriole, who paid no atten- tion to his empty braggadocio. Next Mrs. Oriole did something distasteful to her lord, and received prompt chastisement. A confident kingbird dashed 262 Wit DD, Dink: "OF, ;ORCHARD AND) RIELD up, and was beautifully whipped in half a minute. Vireos, pewits, warblers were attracted to the scene, but kept at a safe distance. There was no ap- peasing the anxiety of the parents until I left, and probably they spent the whole afternoon 1n recover- ing their equanimity. The study of the expressions and dialects of ani- mals and birds under such circumstances 1s ex- tremely entertaining and instructive. Though you should happen upon a Baltimore’s nest when the female is sitting, and the male is out of sight, the female will sit quietly until the very last mo- ment; and Mr. Ridgway mentions an instance where the female even entered her nest while he was severing it from the branch, and remained there until carried into the house. The young birds, before they can fly, Dr. Brewer says, climb to the edge of the nest, and are liable in sudden tempests to be thrown out. If uninjured, they are good climbers, and by means of wings, bill, and claws are often able to reach places of safety. In one instance a fledgling which had broken both legs, and had been placed in a basket to be fed by its parents, managed by wings and bill to raise itself to the rim, and in a few days took its depart- ure. To this dexterity in the use of the bill as a 263 WILD LIFE) OF (ORCHARD: AND STELD prehensile organ the birds may owe their skill in weaving. The young are fed upon an insect diet, and main- ly upon caterpillars, which are disgorged after hav- ing been partially swallowed by the parents. They leave the nest after a fortnight, but are attended by the parent birds ten days longer before being turned off to take care of themselves. The food of the Baltimore oriole, old and young, consists almost entirely of insects, but it 1s varied, in civil- ized regions at any rate, by depredations upon the garden. Succulent young peas appeal to him par- ticularly ; and he has the curious and mischievous habit of robbing the cherry and plum blossoms of their stamens and pistils, scattering, but not eat- ing, the petals. These are small matters; but he becomes a real pest to the vine-growers of the Hud- son Valley, at least, by his apparently wanton forays upon the ripening grapes. It does not ap- pear that he eats these to any extent, but seems simply to delight to thrust his beak into the biggest and ripest berries of each cluster, tearing them open, taking, perhaps, a sip of the juice, and then attacking the next one. Thus he spoils for market hundreds of clusters in a morning; and, as the grapes are raised and sold principally for table 264 Wri) (EP Or ORCHARD - AND FIELD use, his depredations in the vineyards have be- come a serious matter. But, after all, these robberies, annoying as they may be locally, are but a slight compensation for the invaluable services he renders the gardener in the destruction of hosts of noxious insects. At first beetles and hymenopterous insects form his diet, and he seeks them with restless agility among the opening buds. As the season progresses, and the caterpillars begin to appear, he forsakes the tough beetles, and rejoices in their juicy bodies, being among the few birds that will eat the hairy and disgusting tent-caterpillar of the apple-trees. About the middle of September the Baltimore orioles begin to disappear, and by the last of the month all have left the northern States for their winter -quarters in Mexico, Central America, or the West Indies. WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD XV A GENTLEMAN OF THE ORCHARD EHIND the old farm - house, |/stretching from the barn on one diside to the lane that leads back to the hill wood-lot on the other, 4] stands the ancient orchard. It was planted perhaps a cen- tury ago, when this old farm was one of the outposts of civ- Jilization, and owes its origin to -}seeds brought from Rhode Isl- Pe #4} and or Vermont, or possibly speede from England itself. The trees have grown to their full stature, “|and interlocking boughs now | form a continuous canopy of shade, except where here and there one has fallen under some 266 We Dy Ee Er On ORC BA ROD CAIN Dy BE EXE fierce blast and has been removed for fuel. The stumps of these unfortunates soon became nuclei for thickets of briers sown by the wind from the raspberry and blackberry bushes along the fence; their rotting roots were quickly honey-combed by the galleries of termites, ants, and wood-boring grubs, and the dense coverts now form a place of refuge for mice and chipmunks, small ground- birds, grass-snakes, and an occasional blacksnake that creeps up from the brook to spread conster- nation throughout these verdant precincts. Only the wood-pile, the vegetable patch, and a line of currant and gooseberry bushes intervene between the back porch of the house and the gnarled and leaning apple and pear trunks. No part of the farm is more delightful than this ancient orchard. It 1s the first feature to attract the admiring attention of the visitor from the city, and it is the favorite lounging - place of the rustic in his leisure moments. In April he watches the earliest opening of the foliage, greets the first red- dening flower-buds, and gazes with joyful antici- pation upon the whitening blossoms that soon make a vast bouquet of each aged tree and rejuve- nate it. Afterwards, as the flowers carpet the sward with their rosy petals, and the tiny seed- 267 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD vessels, left behind, grow larger and greener day by day, he observes with interest the fattening of the little apples (beloved also of many insects), speculates on the prospect of a good yield, and by August tries his teeth on a yellowish one that has fallen, and perhaps finds a palatable bit on that side next the sun. Then how the red and yellow and russet apples lie in bright, redolent heaps on the grass, forming zones about each trunk that reflect the afternoon sunlight as it glints ruddily among the branches and shimmers through the September haze in a soft glory; and what suggestions stir the mind of cider and winter-evening cheer to come! This orchard is beloved of all birds, but with some it is a chosen and constant home. Here may be heard the disconsolate plaint of the wood-pewee, whose nest is a prize for sharp eyes—a tiny cup of bark shreds saddled upon a bough and covered with lichens, looking just like an old knot or scar; but the downy cup of the humming-bird will be an even greater prize. Of course, the robin, the brown thrush, the cat-bird, and that busybody the wren, are to be seen there every day, and now and then a bluejay or cuckoo. Here, too, reside the king- bird and his less familiar cousin, the great-crested 268 Nest of the Ruby-throated Hummung-bird ee Sr N 4 ‘e . i WIED: LIFE QF \ORCHARD (AND, FIELD fly-catcher, the latter attracting attention by his piercing yet not unmelodious whistle, and by his brave appearance, as, with crest erect, he perches upon some topmost twig and scorns the world— a very D’Artignan among birds. There is another brown and crested bird in the orchard—the cedar-bird, or cherry wax-wing; but it wears a sleek, Quakerish dress of drab-brown, with blackish wings and a short tail tipped with yellow, and it has scarlet waxen tips on the ends of the smaller quills of the wing and sometimes of the tail. It is not likely to be confounded, there- fore, with the dashing fly-catcher; moreover, it is the most silent bird in the list. Many small warblers, vireos, and fly-catchers are likely to be seen here, because the decaying trees harbor hosts of insects—nuthatches, striped zebra-warblers, agile brown-creepers, small wood- peckers, and, most conspicuous of all, the purple finch, whose song has delightful sweetness and gayety. The word “purple” conveys to my mind a strong sense of blue; but here it alludes to the crimson which tints the feathers of the bird’s head and breast, as though he had dived to the shoul- ders into ripe strawberries. But there is one bird whose preference for the 269 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD place is so manifest that it takes its name from the circumstance; I speak of the orchard oriole, Icte- rus spurius of Linnzeus, which is well known all over the middle parts of the United States, and which is one of the very few species that have man- aged to retain the technical name given it by its great sponsor. Although by no means a dandy, like the Balti- more oriole, he is every inch a gentleman, and wears his neat dress of chestnut and black with an aristo- cratic air. Yet he is not above work. No bird is more ceaselessly active, and none is a better ser- vitor of the agriculturist; for, from his first arrival in May until he joins small companies of his fel- lows for the southward journey in October, he is untiring in his pursuit of just those insects that the orchardist most dreads. A quarter of an hour’s watching of one will sat- isfy any one of his rightful claim to our admira- tion and thanks. He flies to a branch, moves his head from side to side, spies an inch-worm trust- ing—vain hope!—to its color to hide it on the green surface of a leaf, and pounces upon it in an instant. Then a nest of tent-caterpillars catches his eye, and he attacks it furiously, tearing apart the shreds of silk, and greedily devouring every one of the 270 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD writhing and horrid mass of worms—a meal few other birds will undertake. Even that does not satiate him, and he restlessly renews the search for those creeping larve of insects so desirable to him and his family, and many of which are so hate- ful to the farmer. He seems to revel in his work, and hurries about it with a busy and gleeful air, heedless of your espionage, his velvety coat gleam- ing among the glossy leaves or contrasting sharply with the aromatic blossoms. The gayety that marks all his actions charac- terizes his song. He whistles a clear, full tone— not the reiterated bugle-call of the Baltimore, but a sprightly, impromptu air, hastening from note to note as though singing against time, and yet under protest at the speed he is forced to assume, causing an embarrassed feeling that he is not doing his best. This remarkable song is thus quite in- describable, and is not much heard after the early part of June, when family cares begin to curb the singer’s exuberant spirits. Finding its pleasure and profit in familiarity with men, this oriole makes its home almost ex- clusively in orchards, and is found breeding from the Rio Grande to Lake Erie, but rarely eastward of the Hudson River. Its migratory journeys in 271 WILD (LIFE OF ‘ORCHARD, AND: FIELD winter carry it to the West Indies and Central Amer- ica. It shows a slight tendency to gregariousness, even in breeding; for several nests may frequently be seen in adjoining trees, all the proprietors keep- ing upon the most neighborly terms with each other and with other birds. ) The nest is ordinarily suspended only a few feet from the ground, between the gnarled twigs near the end of an apple bough, to which it is strongly bound, and beneath which it is essentially pensile, although by no means so freely swinging a pouch as the structure of the Baltimore oriole. Never- theless, it is sometimes hung (much after the pen- dulous manner of its cousin’s) among the pendent tips of drooping willow branches, several of which will be found woven into the sides in such a way as to serve as upright ribs or stays. Such nests are likely to prove of neater workmanship and perhaps a trifle greater in depth than others. In both cases, however, the shape and proportions are nearly the same, the cavity being about as large as a coffee-cup. The walls are rather thin, par- ticularly in nests built at the South, where a cir- culation of air is so desirable. The material of which this beautiful and easily recognized structure is composed consists usually 272 WILD LIFE? OF ORCHARD AND FIELD of pliant stems and blades of yellowish-green grass, often with the ripe heads left on, giving a some- what rough appearance in many cases to the out- side of the nest. This grass is woven into a firm basket, the stems being as closely interlaced as if done with a needle. Sometimes there is a lining of thistle and cottonwood blossoms, the downy breast feathers of ducks, etc., forming a soft mat at the bottom. The leaves growing about the nest are often carefully arranged—apparently by the provident skill of the bird—to shed the rain, shade the sitting mother, and conceal the domicile. The last in- tention certainly is so well accomplished that the nest is difficult to discover, no matter how familiar you may be with the orchard or grove in which you are certain it must be situated, since its color harmonizes closely with its surroundings. While this is the customary type of nest in the interior of the country, and one remarkable for its uniformity over a wide region, interesting varia- tions occur on the seaboard. “Thus, in the pine woods of southern New Jersey these birds build homes of a quite different character, placing at the extremities of upper branches of pine-trees nests which are not pensile in any sense, but are sup- : 273 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD ported in the midst of a cluster of twigs, and con- sist largely of pine-needles. I know a certain group of pines upon a farm near Trenton, where a sociable colony constructed and inhabited such un- typical nests year after year for half a century. Again, in the northern part of New Jersey, less than a hundred miles distant, the orchard orioles never fix upon pine branches as a site, but inhabit fruit-trees exclusively, making a nest of the usual interwoven grasses, without any admixture of pine-needles, but not pensile, it being upheld as before in the midst of a clump of twigs, to which it is securely fastened. Moreover, a competent ob- server in this district tells me he has never known the orioles there to use the same nest twice, whereas at Trenton not only do they return to the ancestral tree season after season, but always tear the old nest to pieces with amusing vehemence to obtain material for the construction of a new one, which is occasionally erected upon the foundation of the earlier structure. Such traits of individuality, here amounting to an alteration in the very type of the nest structure, are always extremely interesting in bird life; and the variations of practice and product to which they tend are highly suggestive when we lift our 274 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD study from a single pair to the species they rep- resent. The elongated eggs are pure white, marbled with irregular streaks of black and leather brown, much after the pattern of those of the Baltimore and other American orioles. Wilson says this songster may be easily reared from the nest, and in confinement becomes very tame and familiar. WILD. LIFE. OF ORCHARD: AND LFIELO XVI BANK-SWALLOWS HE bird which is the subject of this sketch is familiar to all who walk in green pastures and _ be- side still waters; for in such haunts do the bank-swallows congregate in merry companies, <~'|making up for their want of companionship with man, which is so characteristic of the other hirundines, by a large sociabil- , ity among themselves. Conser- vile vator of ancient ways, it is al- tp Se most the only swallow which ec . has not attached itself to hu- | manity as soon as it had oppor- tunity, and changed from a sav- age to a civilized bird. Per- 276 WilD: LIFE: OF ‘ORCHARD AND) FIELD haps it, too, has tried it long ago, and voluntarily returned to the fields; for our bank-swallow is a cosmopolite, and has watched the rise and fall of all the dynasties and nationalities that have grouped the centuries into eras. Even now it is an inhabi- tant of all Europe and eastward to China; of a large part of Africa, especially in winter; and through- out North America, the West Indies, Central Amer- ica, and the northern Andean countries. On both continents its wanderings extend to the extreme north, where, in Alaska, it is one of the common- est summer visitors. So this modest little bird, smallest of its kind, is entitled to our respect as a traveller at least; and, to compare the habits and appearance of the representatives in different portions of the globe of so widely distributed a species, becomes a most interesting study. Cotyle riparia, the bank-swallow, sand-martin, sand-swallow, river-swallow, Vhirondelle de rivage, or back-svala, is generally diffused over the north- ern hemisphere, though very unequally, avoiding those spots unfavorable to it. In this distribu- tion it seems to have been somewhat influenced by man, though owing him no other favors than the incidental help of railroad cuttings and sand- pits, which have increased the sites suitable for 277 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD its nests, and thus enabled the speeies to spread inland. It is one of the earliest birds to arrive in the spring, appearing in Old England during the last week in March, and in New England early in May— many passing on to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, where Richardson, at the mouth of the Mackenzie, and Dall, on the Yukon, found them breeding in immense numbers. In these high latitudes its summer is necessarily a brief one, and September finds it back again, picking up congeners for com- pany on the southward journey. Where these and other swallows spend the winter was a hotly debated question among ornithologists at the beginning of the nineteenth century; some affirming that they migrate with the sun, while others, believing it impossible that such small and delicate birds could endure the great fatigue and temperatures incident to such a migration, held that they regularly hibernated during the cold weather, sinking into the mud at the bottom of ponds, like frogs, or curling up in deep, warm cran- nies, like bats, and remaining torpid until revived by the warmth of spring. Of this latter opinion was White, of Selborne, who alludes to it again and again; and Sir Thomas Forster wrote a Mono- 278 WIED) LIFE, MOF ORCHARD AND FIELD graph of British Swallows, apparently with no other object than to present the arguments for and against the theory of their annual submersion and torpidity. One of the difficulties which the sub- mersionists put in the way of the migrationists was the frequent accidental and isolated appearance of the swallow before its usual time—a fact which has occasioned a proverb in almost every language. The French have, “Une hirondelle ne fait pas le printemps’’; the Germans, “ Eine Schwalbe macht keinen Sommer’’; the Dutch, “ Ken zwaluw maak geen zomer’’; the Italians, “Una rodine non fa primavera’’; the Swedes, “ En svala gor ingen com- mar’’; which all mean, “ One swallow doth not make a summer.”’ The story is well known of a thin brass plate having been fixed on a house-swallow with this inscription: “ Prithee, swallow, whither goest thou in winter?’ The bird returned next spring with the answer subjoined: “To Anthony, of Athens. Why dost thou inquire?” Out of this controversy evidence of their sudden autumnal adjournment to Africa accumulated in England. Wilson, in this country, showed that their advance could be traced in the spring from New Orleans to Lake Superior and back again, and their regular migration soon came to be ac- 279 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD knowledged. Then attention was turned to the season, manner, and limits of their migrations, and it was found that, taking advantage of favor- able winds, immense flocks of swallows—and many other birds of passage as well—flying very high, passed each fall from the coast of England to the coast of Africa, and from Continental Europe across the Mediterranean direct, whence they spread southward almost to the Cape of Good Hope. No sooner had the spring fairly opened than they were suddenly back again, very much exhausted at first with their long-sustained effort, but speedily recuperated and “diligent in business.’’ Our own migrants, as I have mentioned, winter in Central America and the West Indies, or still farther south. Their flight is rapid but unsteady, “with odd jerks and vacillations not unlike the motions of a butterfly,’’ as White describes it; and continues: “Doubtless the flight of all hirundines is influenced by and adapted to the peculiar sort of insects which furnish their food. Hence it would be worth in- quiry to examine what particular genus of in- sects affords the principal food of each respective species of swallow.”’ They are constantly on the wing, skimming low over land and loch, pausing not even to drink or bathe, but simply dropping 280 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD into some limpid lake as they sweep by to sip a taste of water or cleanse their dirty coats. It seems strange, then, that birds who sustain the unremit- ting exertion of a flight scarcely less than one hun- dred miles an hour in speed, during the whole of a long summer’s day, should not be thought ca- pable of the transition from England to Africa. However, at that time it was not well understood what long-continued flight small birds actually do make, as, for instance, from our coast to Ireland, or from Alaska to Hawaii. The bank-swallow is not a musical bird, a faint, squeaking chirrup being all its voice can accom- plish; nor is it a handsome hird—simply sooty brown above, white beneath, with a brown breast. To its grace of motion and charming home life we attribute that in it which attracts us. Although probably the least numerous of all the swallows, they do not seem so, because of the great companies which are to be seen together wherever they are to be found at all; and because, lead- ing a more sequestered life, they are not usually brought into direct comparison with house-martins and chimney-swifts. Eminently social in their habits, they congregate not only at the time of migration (then, indeed, least of all), and in the 281 WILD LIME OF ORCHARD AND (“FIELD construction of their homes, but sometimes, like other species, they alight in great flocks on the reeds by the river-side and on the beach. The secret of the local distribution of the bank- swallows lies in the presence or absence of vertical exposures of soil suitable for them to penetrate for the burrows at the inner end of which the nest is placed. Firm sand, with no admixture of peb- bles, is preferred, and in such an exposure, be it sea-shore, river-bank, sand-pit, or railway cutting, the face will often be fairly honey-combed with burrows, so that we can readily believe that Mr. Dall counted over seven hundred holes in one bluff in Alaska. These are usually very close together, and the wonder is how the birds can distinguish their own doors. If mistakes do occur, I imagine they are all very polite about it, for I know of no more peaceable neighbors among birds than they. The mode in which this perforation is performed, requiring an amount of labor rare with animals, is well described by Mr. Rennie in his Architect- ure of Birds: “The beak is hard and sharp, and admirably adapted for digging; it is small, we admit, but its shortness adds to its strength, and the bird works . with its bill shut. This fact our readers may 282 Nest of a Bank-swallow - he by he * Ly a a ¥ WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD verify by observing their operations early in the morning through an opera-glass, when they begin in the spring to form their excavations. In this way we have seen one of these birds cling with its sharp claws to the face of a sand-bank, and peg in its bill as a miner would his pickaxe, till it had loosened a considerable portion of the hard sand, and tumbled it down among the rubbish below. In these preliminary operations it never makes use of its claws for digging; indeed, it is impossible that it could, for they are indispensable in main- taining its position, at least when it is beginning its hole. We have further remarked that some of these martins’ holes are nearly as circular as if they had been planned out with a pair of compass- es, while others are more irregular in form; but this seems to depend more on the sand crumbling away than upon any deficiency in its original workmanship. The bird, in fact, always uses its own body to determine the proportions of the gal- lery, the part from the thigh to the head forming the radius of the circle. It does not trace this out as we should do, by fixing a point for the centre around which to draw the circumference; on the contrary, it perches on the circumference with its claws, and works with its bill from the centre out- 283 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD ward; . . . the bird consequently assumes all po- sitions while at work in the interior, hanging from the roof of the gallery with its back downward as often as standing on the floor. We have more than once, indeed, seen a bank-martin wheeling slowly round in this manner on the face of a sand- bank when it was just breaking ground to begin its gallery. “This manner of working, however, from the circumference to the centre unavoidably leads to irregularities in the direction. . . . Accordingly, all the galleries are found to be more or less tortu- ous to their termination, which is at the depth of from two to three feet, where a bed of loose hay and a few of the smaller breast-feathers of geese, ducks, or fowls is spread with little art for the re- ception of the four to six white eggs. It may not be unimportant to remark, also, that it always scrapes out with its feet the sand detached by the bill; but so carefully is this performed that it never scratches up the unmined sand, or disturbs the plane of the floor, which rather slopes upward, and of course the lodgment of rain is thereby prevented.”’ An exceedingly interesting chapter in Edmund Selous’s Bird Watching is given to this bird, from which I wish to quote a few lines as to its work: 284 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD “Tt is interesting to watch the sand-martins building their nests, or, rather, excavating the tunnels in which they will afterwards be built. To see one enter one of these whilst it is yet but a few inches long, and then to see the dust powdering out at the aperture, as from the mouth of an en- sconced cannon, is pretty. The sand is scattered out backward with the feet, but the bird also uses its bill as a pickaxe, often making a series of rapid little blows with it, almost like a woodpecker, the wings, which quite cover the body, quivering at the same time. Both sexes work at the hole, and both often fly together to it, one remaining cling- ing at the edge whilst the other scratches out the sand from the inside. . . . Sometimes three or four will descend upon the same hole and cling there without quarrelling ; but once I saw a bird in a hole attacked by another, who flew suddenly upon it with a little twittering scream. “Though each pair of birds excavate their own tunnel, yet the whole community, or, at any rate, a large proportion of it, will sometimes work to- gether, sweeping on to the pit’s face in a body, clinging there and burrowing, with a constant twittering, then darting off silently in a crowd and sailing and circling round in the pit’s amphitheatre, 285 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND \FIELD making, when the sky is blue and the sun bright, a warm and delicious picture such as the Greeks must have loved to gaze on. “ As each bird, however, only works at his own and his partner’s hole, it is evident that this kind of social working is not the same as that of ants or bees and other such insect communities, though it has something of that appearance. Sometimes, for a short time, all the birds will keep fluttering round in small circles that only extend a little be- yond the face of the cliff, not rising to a greater height than their own tunnels in it, which they almost touch each time as they come round. They look like eddies in a stream beneath the bank, but are not so silent, for all are twittering excitedly. This is an interesting thing to see—a kind of aérial manceuvres, the special cause of which, if there be one, is not obvious.”’ Sometimes the nest is carried to a far greater depth than two or three feet, as in a case observed by Mr. Fowler, in Beverly, Massachusetts, where, in order to get free of a stony soil, where pebbles might be dislodged and crush the eggs, the tunnel was carried in nine feet, while neighboring birds in better soil only went a third as far. In one place the burrows will be close to the top of the bluff; in 286 Wits LIne OR ORCHARD AND \FIELD another near the bottom, according as fancy dic- tates or the birds have reason to fear this or that enemy. English writers agree that occasionally their bank-swallows do not dig holes, but lay in the crannies of old walls and in hollows of trees. This is never done, that I am aware of, in the United States; but in California a closely allied species, 6 the rough-winged swallow, “sometimes resorts to natural clefts in the banks or adobe buildings, and occasionally to knot-holes.’’ On the great plains, however, our Cotyle burrows in the slight em- bankments thrown up for a railway-bed, in lieu of a better place; and at St. Paul, Minnesota, I have seen them penetrating solid but soft sand- rock, “How long does it take a bird to dig his cavern under ordinary circumstances ?”’ is a question which it would seem hard to answer, considering the cryp- tic character of his work. Mr. W. H. Dall says four days suffice to excavate the nest. Mr. Morris, a close observer of British birds, says, per contra, a fortnight, and that the bird removes twenty ounces of sand a day. When the female is sitting you may thrust your arm in and grasp her, and, notwithstanding the noise and violence attending the enlargement of 287 WILD .LIFE. OF ORCHARD’ AND, FIELD the aperture of her nest-hole, she will sit resolutely on, and allow herself to be taken in the hand with scarcely a struggle or sign of resistance—even of life, sometimes. The young are fed with large insects caught by the parents, particularly those sub-aquatic sorts which hover near the surface of still water; and White mentions instances where young swallows were fed with dragon-flies nearly as long as themselves. So are young purple mar- tins. The young do not leave the nest until they are about ready to take full care of themselves. Finally, they are pushed off by the parents to make way for a second brood, and, inexperienced in the use of their wings, many fall a prey to crows and small hawks that lie in wait ready to pounce upon the first poor little fellow that launches upon the untried air. Those that manage to run the gant- let of the hawks collect in small companies by them- selves, and have a good time hunting by day and roosting at night among the river-reeds, until the autumn migration. “At this time, Salerne ob- serves,’ says Latham, “that the young are very fat, and in flavor scarcely inferior to the ortolan”’ —a European suggestion rather shocking to Amer- ican ears. Sometimes the parents forsake their progeny in the nest, and seem generally to care 288 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD less for them than is usually the case among swal- lows. But not the young alone are exposed to enemies. It would seem as though the situation of the nest precluded invasion, yet, if they are near the haunts of the house-sparrow, they are sure to be dispos- sessed of their homes by that buccaneer. Snakes, too, can sometimes reach their holes; weasels, like that one Mr. Hewitson tells us of, are often sharp enough to make their entrée from above: school- boys regard the pink-white eggs a fine prize; and, last and worst of all, the bank-swallows are many times utterly worried out of their galleries by fleas and young horse-flies, which swarm and increase in their nests until the bird finds endurance no longer a virtue, and digs a new latebra. 19 WILD LIFE OF ORCHARD AND FIELD XVII IN A SNAILERY WO-THIRDS of the persons to whom I show the little land and fresh-water mollusks 1n my snail- ery either start back with an “Oh! the horrid things!’’ which causes me some amusement, or else gaze straight out of the win- dow, saying languidly, “ How interesting!’ which hurts my ‘