Everyday Adventures

Through the dripping boughs I pressed far into the very centre of the wood. In a tangle of greenbrier sounded a series of sharp irritating chips, and a cardinal, blood-red against the leaden sky, perched himself on a bough of a hornbeam sapling. As I watched him sitting there in the cold rain, he seemed like some bird of the tropics which had flamed his way north and would soon go back to the blaze of sun and riot of color where he belonged. Yet the cardinal grosbeak stays with us all winter, and I have seen four of the vivid males at a time, all crimson against the white snow. To-day he looked down upon me, and without any warning suddenly began to sing his full song in a whisper. “Wheepl, wheepl, wheepl,” he whistled with a mellow and wood-wind note; and again, a full tone lower, “Wheepl, wheepl, wheepl.” Then he sang a lilting double-note song, “Chu-wee, chu-wee, chu-wee,” ending with a ringing whistle, “Whit, whit, whit, teu, teu, teu,” and then ran them together, “Whit-teu, whit-teu, whit-teu.” As his lovely dove-colored mate flitted jealously through the thicket, he tactfully and smackingly cried, “Kiss, kiss, kiss,” and dived into the bushes to join her. Again and again he ran through his little repertoire, so low that thirty feet away he could hardly be heard. Leaden clouds and dank mists might cover the earth, but life would always be worth the living so long as one could find snatches of jeweled songs like that sung to me by the cardinal. As I started homeward under the dripping sky, crimson against the dark green of a cedar tree, my friend called his good-bye to me in one last long ringing note.

Late that afternoon the rain stopped, the clouds rolled back, and in the west the sky was a mass of flame, with pools of sapphire-blue and rose-red cloud. Above, in a stretch of pure cool apple-green, floated the newest of new moons. As the after-glow ebbed, one by one all the wondrous tints merged into a great band of amber that barred the dark for long. Just before it faded in the last moments of the twilight, there shuddered across the evening air the sweetest, saddest note that can be heard in all winter music. It was a tremolo, wailing little cry that always makes me think of the children the pyxies stole, who can be heard now and again in the twilight, or before dawn, calling, calling vainly for one long gone. In the dim light in a nearby tree, I could see the ear-tufts of the little red-brown screech-owl. Like the beat of unseen wings, his voice trembled again and again through the air, and answering him, I called him up to within six feet of me. Around and around my head he flew like a great moth, his soft muffled wings making not the faintest breath of sound, until at last he drifted away into the dark.

That night the temperature rose, until the very breath of spring seemed to be in the air; and early the next morning, before even the faint glimmer of the dawn-dusk had shown, I was awakened by hearing a croon so soft and sweet that it ran for long through my dreams without waking me. Again and again it sounded, like the singing ripple of a trout brook or the happy little cradle-song that a mother ruffed grouse makes when she broods her leaf-brown chicks. I recognized the love-song of the little owl, months before its time – a song which belongs to the nights when the air is full of spring scents and hyla-calls.

Perhaps the singer was the same bird who visited Sergeant Henny-Penny one Christmas night. During the day the Band had taken a most successful bird-walk. We had seen and heard some twenty different kinds of birds; heard the white-breasted nuthatch sing his spring-song, “Quee-quee-quee,” as a Christmas carol for us; met a red fox trotting sedately through the snow, and altogether had a most adventurous day. That evening I was reading in front of the fire when from Sergeant Henny-Penny’s room came an S.O.S. “Fathie, come quick, there’s a nangel flyin’ around my room,” he called.

I hurried, for angels flying or sitting are rarely scored on my bird-lists. When I reached the room, Henny-Penny had burrowed so far under the bedclothes that it seemed doubtful if he would ever reach the surface again. When I switched on the light, at first I could see nothing, and I began to be afraid that the “nangel” had escaped through the open window. Finally on the picture-moulding I spied the celestial visitor. It was a screech owl of the red phase, – they may be either red or gray, – and when I came near it snapped its beak fiercely, to the terror of the Sergeant under the clothes. With a quick jump I managed to catch it. At first it puffed up its feathers and pretended to be very fierce, but at last it snuggled into my hand and was with difficulty persuaded to fly out again into the cold night.

NO ADMITTANCE Per Order, Mr. SCREECH OWL

Another singer of the night is of course the whip-poor-will. When I lived farther out in the country than I do now, for two successive years I was awakened at two o’clock in the morning by a whip-poor-will passing north and singing in the nearby woods. The third year he broke all records by alighting on my lawn at sunset in late April. There, under a pink dogwood tree which stood like a statue of spring, he sang for ten minutes. Only once before have I ever heard a whip-poor-will sing in the daylight. Once at high noon in the pine-barrens, one burst out so loud and ringingly that the pine warbler stopped his trilling and the prairie warbler his seven wire-thin notes which run up the scale. It was as uncanny as when the Lone Wolf gave tongue to the midnight hunting chorus for Mowgli, at the edge of the jungle by day.

Now, when I live nearer civilization, and alas! farther from the birds, I have to travel far to hear

whip-poor-wills. One hour and eleven minutes from my office in time, thirty-seven miles in space, but a whole life away in peace and happiness and rest, I have a little cabin in the heart of the barrens. There in spring I sleep swinging in a hammock above a great bush of mountain-laurel, ghost-white against the smoky water of the stream.

Below me in the marsh, where the pitcher-plants bloom among the sweet pepper and blueberry bushes, is a pitch-pine sapling bent almost into a circle. Sometimes my friends cut exploration paths through the bush or, in the winter, search for firewood, but no one is ever allowed to touch that bent tree. There some spring night, as a little breeze, heavy with the scent of white azalea and creamy magnolia blossoms, sways me back and forth, from the bent tree showing dimly in the moonlight through the tree-trunks, the whip-poor-will perches himself, lengthwise always, and sings and sings. Through the dark rings his hurried stressed song, with the accent heavy on the first syllable. The singer is always afraid that some one may stop him before he finishes, and he hurries and hurries with a little click between the triads. At exactly eight o’clock, and again at just two in the morning, he sings there. Up in the mountains, where we once found the whip-poor-will’s two lustrous eggs lying like great spotted pearls on a naked bed of leaves, he sings at eight, at ten, and at three. Some people dislike the song. To me the wild lonely voice of the unseen singer pealing out in the dark has a strange fascination.

There are certain bird-notes that strike strange chords whose vibrations are lost in a mist of dreams. I remember a little runaway boy, who stood in a clover field in a gray twilight and heard the clanging calls of wild geese shouting down from mid-sky. Frightened, he ran home a vast distance – at least the width of two fields. As he ran, there seemed to come back to him the memory of a forgotten dream, if it were a dream, in which he lay in another land, on a chill hillside. Overhead in the darkness passed a burst of triumphant music, and the strong singing of voices not of this earth. From that day the trumpet-notes of the wild geese bring back through the fog of the drifting years that same dream to him who heard them first in that far-away, long-ago clover field. A few years ago there was a night of April storm. Until midnight the house creaked and rattled and clattered under a screaming gale. Then the wind died down, and a dense fog covered the streets of the little town. Suddenly overhead sounded the clang and clamor of a lost flock of geese that circled and quartered over the house back and forth through the mist. That night the dream came back so vividly that, even after the dreamer awoke, he seemed to feel the cold dew of that hillside and hear an echo of the singing voices.

It was only a few months ago that this same dreamer found himself on the shore of Delaware Bay, with the three friends who had gone adventuring with him for so many happy years. In the middle of a maze of woods and swamps shrouded in clouds of low-lying mist, they found at last the nest of the bald eagle for which they were searching. It was in the top of a towering sour-gum tree, and the great birds circled around, giving futile little cries that sounded like the squeaking of a slate pencil. As it was too misty to photograph the nest and the birds, the party started off exploring until the light became better.

Following the song of a fox sparrow, the dreamer became separated from the others in the mist, and after plashing through half-frozen morasses, found himself on the barren shore of the bay itself. As he stood there, with the white mist curling around him like smoke, from the sea came a clamor of voices. Nearer and nearer it swept, until a wild trumpeting sounded not thirty feet above his head. Around and around the clanging chorus swept, while, stare as he would, he could not spy even a feather of the flock so close above him. At the sound the years rolled back. Once again he was in the clover field in the gray twilight. Once again, on a far-away hillside, he heard that other chorus of his dreams. For a moment, in the lonely mist by the sea, he had a strange illusion that the life of which that cold hillside was a memory was the reality, and the present the dream.

It takes five years to understand Eskimo. It takes a long lifetime to learn bird-language. At any time, in any place, the collector of bird-notes may hear an unknown bird or a strange song from a known bird. Wherefore let no ornithologist vaunt himself. He may be able to distinguish between the song of the purple finch and the warbling vireo, or the chestnut-sided warbler, the redstart, and the yellow warbler, and then hear some common bird, like the Maryland yellow-throat, sing a song which he has never heard before and may never hear again; or an oven bird, or even a phœbe, rise to the ecstasy of a flight-song which no more resembles their everyday measure than water resembles wine.

Early in my experience as a bird-student, I learned to walk humbly. It happened on this wise. I had been invited to spend my summer at a Sanitarium for Deserted Husbands. Said retreat was maintained by a noble-hearted benefactor in a vast, rambling cool house, bordered on three sides by dense woods. The day of my arrival I was approached by one of the older inmates, who, with false and flattering tongue, praised my scanty knowledge of bird-ways, and made me promise to teach him the different bird-songs as he heard them from the house.

Early the next morning, as I lay in bed, there sounded a strange song. It seemed to come from a tree at the other end of the house and possessed a peculiar rippling, gurgling timbre. A minute or so later my new acquaintance rushed in and seemed much pained that I did not know the singer. Thereafter my life was burdened by that song. Occasionally it sounded in the early morning, when I wanted to sleep but was awakened by my enthusiastic disciple. Another time I would hear it in the evening. One day it would come from the house, and again from the edge of the woods. Yet, skulk and peer and listen as I would, I could never locate the singer or identify the song.

The revelation came one Sunday morning, as two of us were breakfasting on the terrace close to the house. Suddenly that vile song began. It seemed to come from near the top of a tree by the farther end of the house. I rushed to the place, my napkin flapping as I ran. By the time I reached the tree, the song came from the opposite side of the house. Back I hastened, only to find that the bird had once more flitted to the other side. I hurried there, but again that bird was gone, and a moment later sang from the farthest end of the house. Three separate times I circled the place, with the singer and the song always just ahead of me. It was only when I noticed that my companion at breakfast had fallen forward on the table overcome by emotion, that I began to suspect the worse. I hid behind a tree and waited. A moment later I saw the alleged bird-enthusiast, clothed in preposterous pink pajamas, and blowing false and fluting notes on a tin bird-whistle, the silly kind that children fill with water and blow through. I have not yet been able to live down that bird-song.

When I was a boy, there were four of us who always hunted and fished and tramped and explored together. We never supposed that anything could separate us. Yet the years have blown us apart, and we go adventuring together no more. Alone of that quartette I am left to follow the trail that seemed in those days to have no ending. The same years, however, have made me some amends. Once again there are four of us who spend all our holidays in the open. We collect orchids and bird-songs, and find new birds and nests, and quest far among the wild-folk in our search for secrets and adventures. Sometimes we go south, and become acquainted with blue-gray gnatcatchers and prothonotary warblers and summer tanagers and mocking-birds and blue grosbeaks, and other birds which we never see here. Sometimes we explore lonely islands hidden in a maze of sand-bars, and discover where the terns and the laughing gulls nest; or we find wonderful things waiting for us on mountain-tops or hidden among morasses and quaking bogs.

Two years ago we decided to follow Spring north. First we welcomed as usual the spring migrants and the spring flowers in April and May. When the sky-pilgrims had passed on, and the lush growth of summer began to show, we traveled northwards to the top of Mount Pocono, the highest mountain of our state, and found Spring waiting for us there. The apple blossoms were just coming out and the woods were sweet with trailing arbutus. There we found the nests of the yellow-bellied and alder fly-catchers, solitary vireos, and black-throated blue and Canada and Blackburnian warblers. As once more Summer followed hard on our heels, we took passage and traveled to a lonely camp in northern Canada. The second day of our trip we overtook Spring again, and were traveling through amethyst masses of rhodora and woods white with the shad-blow. At last the apple orchards were not yet in flower, and for the third time that year we found ourselves among the cherry blossoms.

We never stopped until we reached a lonely bay far to the north. The sun was westering well down the sky when at last we crowded into a creaking buckboard for a ten-mile drive. The air was full of strange bird-songs. From the fields came a little song that began like a feeble song sparrow and ended in a buzz. It was the Savannah sparrow, which I had seen every year in migration, but had never before heard sing. At the first bend in the road we came to a bit of marshland so full of unknown bird-notes that we stopped to explore. From the edge of the sphagnum bog came a loud explosive song – “Chip, chip, chippy, chippy, chippy, chippy!” The singer was a greenish-colored bird, light underneath, with a white line through the eye, and looked much like a red-eyed vireo except that it had a warbler beak, the which it opened to a surprising width as it sang. It was none other than the Tennessee warbler, so rare a bird in my part of the world that even to see one in migration was then an event. Here it was one of the commonest birds of that whole region.

Then I stalked a strange vireo-song, something like the monotonous notes of the red-eyed vireo, but softer and with a different cadence. I finally found the singer in a little thicket, and studied it for some ten minutes not six feet away. For the first time in my life I had seen and heard the smallest and rarest of all the six vireos, the Philadelphia, so named because it is never by any chance found in Philadelphia. Its tininess and the pale yellow upper breast shading into white were noticeable field-marks. To me it seemed a tame, dear, beautiful little bird.

Just at starlight we reached the camp, and I fell asleep to the weird notes of unknown water-birds passing down the river through the darkness. Followed a week of unalloyed happiness. Each day, from before dawn until long after dark, we met strange birds and found new nests and listened to unknown bird-songs. One morning we heard a loud yap from a dead maple-stub. On its side grew what seemed to be an orange-colored fungus. As we came nearer, it proved to be the head of a male Arctic three-toed woodpecker, who wears an orange patch on his forehead and shares with his undecorated spouse the pains and pleasures of incubation. As we came nearer, he flew out of the nest, showing his jet-black back and white throat, and fed unconcernedly up and down the tree, even when we climbed to where we could look down at the five ivory-white eggs he had been brooding.

Later on we were to learn how favored above all other ornithologists we had been, in that within one short week we had found such almost unknown nests as those of the Arctic three-toed woodpecker, the yellow palm, the bay-breasted, and the Tennessee warbler. We learned the jingling little song of the yellow palm warbler, who has a maroon-colored head, a yellow breast, and twitches his tail like a water thrush. Another new song was the “Swee, swee, swee” of the bay-breasted warbler, who wears a rich sombre suit of black and bay. Over on the shore we heard the plaintive piping of the brownish-gray-and-white piping plover, who ran ahead of us and was hard to see against the sand. Right beside my foot I found one of the nests, a little hollow in the warm sand, lined with broken shells, containing four eggs, the color of wet sand all spotted with black and gray.

All through the woods we heard a strange wild, ringing song much like that of the Carolina wren. “Chick-a-ree, chick-a-ree, chick-a-ree, chick” it sounded. Then between the songs the bird sang another like a rippling laugh, and then for variety had a note which went “Chu, chu, chu” like a fish-hawk. It was some time before we found that these three songs all came from the same bird, and it was much longer before we learned the singer’s name. For days and days we searched the woods without a glimpse of him. We found at last that he was none other than the ruby-crowned kinglet, that tiny bird with a concealed patch of flame-colored feathers on the top of his head, who sings so brilliantly as he passes through the Eastern states in the spring. Not once during that week did we hear the intricate warble which is the kinglet’s spring song. Evidently this talented performer has a different repertoire for his home engagement from that which he uses while on the road.

One of the most beautiful songs of that week I heard in the middle of a marsh, up to my knees in muck, water, and sphagnum moss. Around me grew wild callas, with their single curved dead-white petals and pussy-toes, grasses topped with what looked like little dabs of warm brown fur. I was painstakingly searching through the wet moss and tangled reeds for the little hidden jewel-caskets of the yellow-bellied flycatcher, Lincoln finch, Wilson, Tennessee, and yellow palm warblers. I had just found my fourth yellow palm warbler’s nest, all lined with feathers, and with its four eggs like flecked pink pearls, the nest itself so cunningly concealed in a mass of moss and marsh-grass that the discovery of each one seemed a miracle that would never happen again.

Suddenly, out of a corner of my eye, I caught sight of a tiny movement under the drooping boughs of a little spruce half hidden in a tangle of moss. There crouched a little brown rabbit, not even half-grown, but yet old enough to have learned that maxim of the rabbit-folk – when in danger sit still! Not a muscle of his taut little body quivered even when I touched him, save only his soft brown nose. That was covered with mosquitoes, and even to save his life Bunny could not keep from wrinkling it. It was this tiny movement that had betrayed him. I brushed away the mosquitoes and was watching him hop away gratefully to another cover, when down from mid-sky came a rippling whinnying note as if from some far-away aeolian harp. As I looked, a speck showed against the blue, which grew larger and larger, and into sight volplaned a Wilson snipe, the driven air whining and beating against its wings in little waves of music, and we had added to our collection of bird-music the famous wing-song of the Wilson snipe, even rarer than the strange flight-song of the woodcock.

A little later one of my friends found our first olive-backed thrush’s nest, lined with porcupine-hair and black rootlets, and containing blue eggs blotched with brown. Just beyond the nest I heard what I thought was a gold-finch singing “Per-chickery, per-chickery.” The song was so loud that I stopped to investigate, and to my delight found that the singer was a pine grosbeak, all rose-red against a dark green spruce. All around us magnificent olive-sided flycatchers shouted from their tree-tops, “Hip! three cheers! Hip! three cheers!” and we heard the listless song of the beautiful Cape May warbler, with its yellow and black under-parts and orange-brown eye-patch and black crown. “Zee, zee, zee, zip,” it sang, something like the song of the blackpoll warbler, but lacking the high, glassy, crystalline notes of that white-cheeked bird.

I was responsible for the last bird-song which appears on the lists of my three friends – but not on mine. We were to start back for civilization the next morning, and I was walking along the river-bank in the late twilight, while my more industrious and scientific companions were writing up their notes and compiling lists of everything seen and heard on our trip. Through the windows of the gun-room I could see their learned backs as they bent over their compilations. Suddenly the eerie little wail of a screech owl floated up from the river-bank. Curiously enough, it came from the very tree behind which I was crouching. Instantly I saw three backs straighten and three heads peer excitedly out into the darkness. When I at last strolled in half an hour later, they told me excitedly that they had scored the first screech owl ever heard in that particular part of Canada. I never told them. It is not safe to trifle with the feelings of a scientific ornithologist. Undoubtedly my reticence in regard to that particular bird-song is all that has saved me from occupying a lonely grave in upper Canada.

Sweetest of all the singers, the thrush-folk – what shall I say of them? of the veery, with its magic notes; of the hermit thrush whose song opens the portals of another world; of the dear wood thrush who sings at our door. While these three voices are left in the world, there are recurrent joys that nothing can take from us.

It was the veery song that I learned first. More years ago than I like to remember, I walked at sunrise by a thicket, listening to bird-songs and wondering whether there was any way by which I might come to learn the names of the singers. One song rippled out of that thicket that thrilled me with its strange unearthly harp-chords. “Ta-wheela, ta-wheela, ta-wheela,” it ran weirdly down the scale, and strangely enough, was at its best at a distance and in the dusk or the early moonlight. I was to learn later that the singer was the veery or Wilson thrush. That was many years ago, but I have loved the bird from that day. Once I found its nest set in the midst of a dark rhododendron swamp; and as the mother bird slipped like a tawny shadow from the wondrous blue eggs gleaming in the dusk, from nearby vibrated the whirling ringing notes of its mate. Again, on a tussock in Wolf Island Marsh I found another; and as both birds fluttered around me with the alarm note, “Pheu, pheu,” the father bird whispered a strain of his song, and it was as if the wind had rippled the music from the waving marsh-grasses.

In the dawn-dusk on the top of Mount Pocono I have listened to them singing in the rain, and their song was as dreamy sweet as the tinkling of the spring shower. The veery song is at its best by moonlight. I remember one late May twilight coming down to the round green circle of an old charcoal-pit, by the side of a little lake set deep in the hills and fringed with the tender green of the opening leaves. That day I had climbed Kent Mountain, and seen my first eagle, and visited a rattlesnake den, and found a dozen or so nests, and walked many dusty miles. It was nearly dark as I slipped off my clothes and swam through the motionless water. The still air was sweet with little elusive waves of perfume from the blossoms of the wild grape. Over the edge of Pond Hill the golden rim of a full moon made the faint green tracery of the opening leaves all show in a mist of soft moonlight. As I reached the centre of the lake, from both shores a veery chorus began. The hermit thrush will not sing after eight, but the veery sings well into the dark, if only the moon will shine. That night, as from the hidden springs of the lake the heart-blood of the hills pulsed against my tired body, the veery songs drifted across the water, all woven with moonshine and fragrance, until it seemed as if the moonlight and the perfume, the coolness and the song were all one.