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A BUNCH OF
BRIGHT BIRDS ALMOST or
quite the most brilliant bird that I saw in Arizona was the vermilion
flycatcher. I had heard of it as sometimes appearing in the neighborhood of
Tucson, but entertained small hope of meeting it there myself. A stranger,
straitened for time, and that time in winter, blundering about by himself, with
no pilot to show him the likely places, could hardly expect to find many
besides the commoner things. So I reasoned with myself, aiming to be
philosophical. Nevertheless, there is always the chance of green hand’s luck; I
knew it by more than one happy experience; and who could tell what might
happen? Possibly it was not for nothing that my eye, as by a kind of magnetic
attraction, fell so often upon Mrs. Bailey’s opening sentence about this
particular bird as day after day, on one hunt and another, I turned the leaves
of her Handbook. “Of all the rare Mexican birds seen in southern Arizona and
Texas,” so I read, “the vermilion flycatcher is the gem.” One thing
was certain: this famous Mexican rarity was not confusingly like anything else,
as so many of its Northern relatives have the unhandsome trick of being. If I
saw it, ever so hurriedly, I should recognize it. Well, I
did see it, and almost of course at a moment when I was least looking for it.
This was on the 5th of February, my fifth day in Tucson. I had crossed the
Santa Cruz Valley, west of the city, by one road, and after a stroll among the
foothills opposite, was returning by another, when a bit of flashing red
started up from the wire fence directly before me. I knew what it was, almost
before I saw it, as it seemed, so eager was I, and so well prepared; and as the
solitary’s companionable habit is, I spoke aloud. “There’s the vermilion
flycatcher!” I heard myself saying. The fellow
was every whit as splendid as my fancy had painted him, and to my joy he seemed
to be not in the least put out by my approach nor chary of displaying himself.
He was too innocent and too busy; darting into the air to snatch a passing
insect, and anon returning to his perch, which was now a fence-post, now the
wire, and now, best of all, the topmost, tilting spray of a dwarf mesquite.
Thus engaged, every motion a delight to the eye, he flitted along the road in
advance of me, till finally, having reached the limit of his hunting-ground, —
the roadside ditches filled with water from the overflow of irrigated barley
fields, — he turned back by the way he had come. I went
home a happy man; I had added one of the choicest and most beautiful of
American birds to my mental collection. One thing was still lacking, however:
flycatchers are not songbirds, but the humblest of them has a voice, and having
things to say is apt to say them; my new acquaintance had kept his thoughts to
himself. This was
in the forenoon, and after luncheon I went back to walk again over that muddy
road between those ditches of muddy water. The bird might still be there. And
he was, — still catching insects, and still silent. But so handsome! At first
sight most people, I suppose, would compare him, as I did, with the scarlet
tanager. The red parts are of nearly or quite the same shade, — a little deeper
and richer, if anything, — while the wings, tail, and back are dark brown,
approaching black, — the wings and tail especially, — dark enough, at any rate,
to afford a brilliant contrast. His scientific name is Pyrocephalus, which is
admirable as far as it goes, but falls a long way short of telling the whole
truth about him; for not only is his head of a fiery hue, but his whole body as
well, with the exceptions already noted. In size he ranks between the least
flycatcher and the wood pewee. In liveliness of action he is equal to the
spryest of his family, with a flirt of the tail which to my eye is identical
with that of the phoebe. His gorgeous color is the more effective because of
his aerial habits. The tanager is bright sitting on the bough, but how much
brighter he would look if every few minutes he were seen hovering in mid-air
with the sunlight playing upon him! Certainly
I was in great luck, and I felt it the more as day after day I found the
dashing beauty in the same place. I could not spend my whole winter vacation in
visiting him, but I saw him there at odd times, — nearly as often as I passed,
— until February 17. Then he disappeared; but a week later I discovered him, or
another like him, in a different part of the valley, and on the 26th I saw two.
The next day, for the first time, one of the birds was in voice, uttering a few
fine, short notes, little remarkable in themselves, but thoroughly
characteristic; not suggestive of any other flycatcher notes known to me; so
that, from that time to the end of my stay in Tucson, I was never in doubt as
to their authorship, no matter where I heard them. All these
earlier birds were males in full plumage. The first female — herself a beauty,
with a modest tinge of red upon her lower parts, enough to mark the
relationship — was noticed March 5. Males were now becoming common, and on the
9th, although my walks covered no very wide territory, I counted, of males and
females together, seventeen. From first to last not one was met with on the
creosote and cactus-covered desert, but after the first few days of March they
were well distributed over the Santa Cruz and Rillito valleys and about the
grounds of the university. I found no nest until March 27, although at least
two weeks earlier than that a female was seen pulling shreds of dry bark from a
cottonwood limb, while her mate flitted about the neighborhood, now here, now
there, as if he were too happy to contain himself. The
prettiest performance of the male, witnessed almost daily, and sometimes many
times a day, after the arrival of the other sex, was a surprisingly protracted
ecstatic flight, half flying, half hovering, the wings being held unnaturally
high above the back, as if on purpose to display the red body (a most peculiar
action, by which the bird could be told as far as he could be seen),
accompanied throughout by a rapid repetition of his simple call; all thoroughly
in the flycatcher manner; exactly such a mad, lyrical outburst as one
frequently sees indulged in by the chebec, for instance, and the different
species of phoebe. In endurance, as well as in passion, Pyrocephalus is not
behind the best of them, while his exceptional bravery of color gives him at
such moments a glory altogether his own. Sometimes, indeed, he seems to be
emulous of the skylark himself, he rises to such a height, beating his way upward,
hovering for breath, and then pushing higher and still higher. Once I saw him
and the large Arizona crested flycatcher in the air side by side, one as crazy
as the other; but the big magister was an awkward hand at the business,
compared with the tiny Pyrocephalus. It was
good to find so showy a bird so little disposed to shyness. At Old Camp Lowell,
where I often rested for an hour at noon in the shade of one of the adobe
buildings, the bachelor winter occupants of which were kind enough to give me
food and shelter (together with pleasant company) whenever my walk took me so
far from home, our siesta was constantly enlivened by his bright presence and
engaging tricks. One day, as he perched at the top of a low mesquite, on a
level with our eyes, I put my glass into the hand of the younger of my hosts.
He broke out in a tone of wonder. “Well, now,” said he (he spoke to the bird),
“you are a peach.” And so he is. It is exactly what, in my more old-fashioned
and less collegiate English, I have been vainly endeavoring to say. And to be
a “peach” is a fine thing. A vivacious living essayist, it is true, who is
probably a handsome man himself, at least in the looking-glass, declares that
“male ugliness is an endearing quality.” The remark may be true — in a sense;
by all means let us hope so, seeing how lavish Nature has been with the
commodity in question; but I am confident that the female vermilion flycatcher
would never admit it. As for her glorious dandy of a husband, there can be no
doubt what opinion he would hold of such an impudent reflection upon feminine
perspicacity and taste. “A plague upon paradoxes and aphorisms,” I hear him
answer. “If fine feathers don’t make fine birds, what in Heaven’s name do they
make?” It was only two days after my discovery of the vermilion flycatcher (if
I remember correctly I was at that moment on my way to enjoy a third or fourth
look at him) that I first saw a very different but scarcely less interesting
novelty. I was on the sidewalk of Main Street, in the busy part of the day, my
thoughts running upon a batch of delayed letters just received, when suddenly I
looked up (probably I had heard a voice without being conscious of it, for the
confirmed hobby-rider is sometimes in the saddle unwittingly) and caught sight
of a few swifts far overhead. People were passing, but it was now or never with
me, and I whipped out my opera-glass. There were six of the birds, and their
throats were white. So much I saw, having known what to look for, and then they
were gone, — as if the heavens had opened and swallowed them up. It was a
niggardly interview, at pretty long range, but a deal better than nothing;
enough, at all events, for an identification. They were white-throated swifts,
— Aëronautes melanoleucus. Three days later a flock of at least seventeen birds of the same
species were hawking over the Santa Cruz Valley, and now, as they swept this
way and that at their feeding, there was leisure for the field-glass and
something like a real examination. To my surprise (surprise is the compensation
of ignorance) I discovered that they had not only white throats, as their name
implies, but white breasts, and more noticeable still, white rumps. Those who
are familiar with our common dingy, soot-colored chimney swift of the East will
be able to form some idea of the distinguished appearance of this Westerner: a
considerably larger bird, built on the same rakish lines, shooting about the
sky in the same lightning-like zigzags, and marked in this striking and
original manner with white. I saw the birds only four times afterward, the last
time on the 17th of February. So I say, speaking after the manner of men; but
in truth I can see them now, their white rumps lighting up as they wheel and
catch the sun. It pleases me to learn that it is next to impossible to shoot
them, and that they are scarce in collections. So may they continue. They were
made for better things. The most beautiful
bird that I found in Arizona, though judgments of this kind are of necessity
liable to revision as one’s mood changes, was the Arizona Pyrrhuloxia. I should
be glad to give the reader, as well as to have for my own use, an English name
for it, but so far as I am aware it has none. It has lived beyond the range of
the vernacular. My delight in its beauty was less keen than naturally it would
have been, because I had spent my first raptures upon its equally handsome
Texas relative of the same name a few weeks before. This was at San Antonio, in
the chaparral just outside the city. I had been listening to a flock of lark
sparrows, I remember, and looking at sundry things, where almost everything was
new, when all at once I saw before me at the foot of a bush the loveliest bunch
of feathers that I had ever set eyes on. Without the least thought of what I
was doing I began repeating to myself under my breath, “O my soul! O my soul!”
And in sober truth the creature was deserving of all the admiration it excited:
a bird of the cardinal’s size and build, dressed not in gaudy red, but in the
most exquisite shade of gray, with a plentiful spilling of an equally exquisite
rose color over its under parts. Its bright orange bill was surrounded at the
base by a double ring of black and rose, and on its head was a most
distinguished-looking, divided crest, tipped with rose color of a deeper shade.
It was loveliness to wonder at. I cannot profess that I was awe-struck (not
being sure that I know just what that excellent word means), but it would
hardly be too much to say that “as I passed, I worshiped.” The
Arizona bird, unhappily, was not often seen (the Texas bird treated me better),
though when I did come upon it, it was generally in accessible places (in
wayside hedgerows) not far from houses. It would be impossible to see either
the Texas or the Arizona bird for the first time without comparing it with the
cardinal, the two are so much alike, and yet so different. The cardinal is
brighter, but for beauty give me Pyrrhuloxia. I do not expect the sight of any
other bird ever to fill me with quite so rapturous a delight in pure color as
that first unlooked-for Pyrrhuloxia did in the San Antonio chaparral. It was
like the joy that comes from falling suddenly upon a stanza of magical verse,
or catching from some unexpected quarter a strain of heavenly music. If
Pyrocephalus was the brightest and Pyrrhuloxia the most beautiful of my Arizona
birds, Phainopepla must be called the most elegant, the most supremely
graceful, if I may be pardoned such an application of the word, the most
incomparably genteel. I saw it first at Old Camp Lowell, before mentioned, near
the Rillito, at the base of the low foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains.
At my first visit to the camp, which is six or seven miles from the city of
Tucson, straight across the desert, I mistook my way at the last and approached
the place from the farther end by a cross-cut through the creosote bushes. Just
as I reached the adobe ruins, all that is left of the old camp, I descried a
black bird balancing itself daintily at the tip of a mesquite. I lifted my
glass, caught sight of the bird’s crest, and knew it for a Phainopepla. How
good it is to find something you have greatly desired and little expected! The
Phainopepla (like the Pyrrhuloxia it has no vernacular appellation, living only
in that sparsely settled, Spanish-speaking corner of the world) is ranked with
the waxwings, though except for its crest there is little or nothing in its
outward appearance to suggest such a relationship; and the crest itself bears
but a moderate resemblance to the pointed topknot of our familiar cedar-bird.
What I call the Phainopepla’s elegance comes partly from its form, which is the
very perfection of shapeliness, having in the highest degree that elusive
quality which in semi-slang phrase is designated as “style;” partly from its
motions, all prettily conscious and in a pleasing sense affected, like the
movements of a dancing-master; and partly from its color, which is black with
the most exquisite bluish sheen, set off in the finest manner by broad
wing-patches of white. These wing-patches are noticeable, furthermore, for
being divided into a kind of network by black lines. It is for this reason, I
suppose, that they have a peculiar gauzy look (I speak of their appearance
while in action) such as I have never seen in the case of any other bird, and
which often made me think of the ribbed, translucent wings of certain dragon
flies. Doubtless
this peculiar appearance was heightened to my eyes, because of the mincing,
wavering, over-buoyant method of flight (the wings being carried unusually
high) to which I have alluded, and which always suggested to me the studied
movements of a dance. I think I never saw one of the birds so far forget itself
as to take a direct, straightforward course from one point to another. No
matter where they might be going, though the flight were only a matter of a
hundred yards, they progressed always in pretty zigzags, making so many little,
unexpected, indecisive tacks and turns by the way, butterfly fashion, that you
began to wonder where they would finally come to rest. The two
birds first seen — the female in lovely gray — were evidently at home about the
camp. The berry-bearing parasitic plants in the mesquites seemed to furnish
them with food, and no doubt they were settled there for the season; and at
least two more were wintering out among the Chinese kitchen gardens, not far
away. And some weeks afterward I came upon a third pair, also in a mesquite
grove, on the Santa Cruz side of the desert. But though in the two river
valleys I passed a good many hours in their society, I never once heard them
sing, nor, so far as I can now recall, did they ever utter any sound save a
mellow pip, almost exactly like a certain call of the robin; so like it, in
fact, that to the very last I never heard it suddenly given, but my first
thought was of that common Eastern bird, whose voice in those early spring days
it would have been so natural and so pleasant to hear. I could have spared a
dozen or two of thrashers, I thought (not brown thrashers), for a pair of
robins and a pair of bluebirds. But southern Arizona is a kind of thrasher
paradise, while robins and bluebirds desire a better country, and seemingly
know where to find. it.1 In the
last week of March, however, there took place, as well as I could judge, a
concerted movement of Phainopeplas northward. They showed themselves in the
Santa Cruz Valley, here and there a pair, until they became, not abundant,
indeed, but a counted-upon, every-day sight. Those that I had heretofore seen,
it appeared, were only a few winter “stay-overs.” Now the season had opened;
and now the birds began singing. For curiosity’s sake it pleased me to hear
them, but the brief measure, in a thin, squeaky voice, was nothing for any bird
to be proud of. They sing best to the eye. “Birds of the shining robes,” their
Greek name calls them; and worthily do they wear it, under that unclouded
Arizona sun, perching, as they habitually do, at the tip of some tree or bush,
where the man with birds in his eye can hardly fail to sight them and name
them, across the widest barley field. One of the
birds whose acquaintance I chiefly wished to make on this my first Western
journey was the famous canyon wren, — famous not for its beauty (beauty is not
the wren family’s mark), but for its voice. Whether my wish would be gratified
was of course a question, especially as my very modest itinerary included no
exploration of canyons; but I was not without hope. I had been
in Tucson nearly a week, when one cool morning after a cold night (it was
February 7) I went down into the Santa Cruz Valley and took the road that winds
— where there is barely room for it — between the base of Tucson Mountain and
the river. Steep, broken cliffs, perhaps a hundred feet high, were on my right
hand, and the deep bed of the shallow river lay below me on my left. Here I was
enjoying the sun, and keeping my eyes open, when a set of loud, clear bird
notes in a descending scale fell upon my ears from overhead. I stopped, pulled
myself together, and said, “A canyon wren.” I remembered a description of that
descending scale. The next instant a small hawk took wing from the spot on the
cliff whence the notes had seemed to fall. My mind wavered, but only for a
moment. “No, no,” I said, “it is not in any hawk’s throat to produce sounds of
that quality;” and I waited. A rock wren began calling, but rock wrens did not
count with me at that moment. Then, in a very different voice, a wren,
presumably the one I was in search of, began fretting, unseen, somewhere above
my head; and then, silence. I waited and waited. Finally I tried an old trick —
I started on. If the bird was watching me, as likely enough he was, a movement
to leave his neighborhood would perhaps excite him pleasurably. And so it did;
or so it seemed; for almost at once the song was given out and repeated: a
hurried introductory phrase, and then the fuller, longer, more liquid notes,
tripping in procession down the scale. The singer
could be no other than the canyon wren; but of course I must see him. At last,
my patience outwearing his, he fell to scolding again, and glancing up in the
direction of the sound, I saw him on the jutting top of the very highest stone,
his white throat and breast flashing in the sun, and the dark, rich brown of
his lower parts setting the whiteness off to marvelous advantage. There he
stood, calling and bobbing, calling and bobbing, after the familiar wren
manner, though why he should resent an innocent man’s presence so far below was
more than any innocent man could imagine. It would
be an offense against the truth not to confess that the celebrated song fell at
first a little short of my expectations. Perhaps I had heard it celebrated
somewhat too loudly and too often. It was very pleasing; the voice beautifully
clear and full, and the cadence of the sweetest; it had the grace of
simplicity; indeed, there was nothing to be said against it, except that I had
supposed it would be — well, I hardly know what, but somehow wilder and more
telling. Within a
few days I discovered a second pair of the birds not far away, about an old,
long-disused adobe mill. They were already building a nest somewhere inside,
entering by a crack over one of the windows. The female appeared to be doing
the greater part of the work, while her mate sat upon the edge of the flat roof
and sang for her encouragement, or railed at me for my too assiduous lounging
about the premises. The more I listened to the song, the better I enjoyed it;
it is certainly a song by itself; I have never heard anything with which to
compare it; and I was especially pleased to see how many variations the
performer was able to introduce into his music, and yet leave it always the
same. The first
pair, on the precipitous face of the mountain, had chosen the more romantic
site, and I often stopped to admire their address in climbing about over the
almost perpendicular surface of the rock; now disappearing for a few seconds,
now popping into sight again a little further on; finding a foothold
everywhere, no matter how smooth and steep the rock might look. The canyon
wren is a darling bird and a musical genius; and now that I have ceased to
measure his song by my extravagant expectations concerning it, I do not wish it
in any wise altered. His natural home is by the side of falling water (I have
heard him since, where I should have heard him first, in a canyon), and his
notes fall with it. I seem to hear them dropping one by one, every note by
itself, as I write about them. If they are not of a kind to be ecstatic over at
a first hearing (a little too simple for that), they are all the surer of a
long welcome. Indeed, I am half ashamed to have so much as referred to my own
early lack of appreciation of their excellence. Perhaps this was one of the
times when the truth should not have been spoken. My mention
just now of the wren’s cleverness in traveling over the steep side of Tucson
Mountain called to mind a similar performance on the part of a very different
bird — a road-runner — in the same place; and though it was not in my plan to
name that bird in this paper, I cannot deny myself the digression. I had
taken a friend, newly inoculated with ornithological fever, down to this
mountain-side road to show him a black-chinned hummingbird. We had seen it, to
his amazement, on the very mesquite where I had told him it would be (“Well!”
he said, — and a most eloquent “well” it was, — when I pointed the bird out,
scarcely more than a speck, as we came in sight of the bush), and were driving
further, when I laid my hand on the reins and bade him look up. There, halfway
up the precipitous, broken cliff, was the big, mottled, long-tailed bird,
looking strangely out of place to both of us, who had never seen him before
except in the lowlands, running along the road, or dodging among clumps of
bushes. Then of a sudden, he began climbing, and almost in no time was on the
very topmost stone, at the base of a stunted palo-verde. There he fell to
cooing (like a dove, I said, forgetting at the moment that the road-runner is a
kind of cuckoo), and by the time he had repeated the phrase three or four times
we remarked that before doing so he invariably lowered his head. We sat and
watched and listened (“There!” one or the other would say, as the head was
ducked) for I know not how many minutes, commenting upon the droll appearance
of the bird, perched thus above the world, and cooing in this (for him)
ridiculous, lovelorn, gesticulatory manner. Then, as
we drove on, I recalled the strangely rapid and effortless gait with which he
had gone up the mountain. “He didn’t use his wings, did he?” I asked; and my
companion thought not. I was reminded of a bird of the same kind that I had
seen a few days before cross a deep gully perhaps twenty feet in width. “He
seemed to slide across,” said the man who was with me. That was exactly the
word. He did not lift a wing, to the best of our noticing, nor rise so much as
an inch into the air, but as it were stepped from one bank to the other. So
this second bird went up the mountain-side almost without our seeing how he did
it. A few steps, and he was there, as by the exercise of some special gift of
specific levity. He did not fly; and yet it might have “seemed he flew, the way
so easy was.” Take him how you will, the road-runner’s looks do not belie him:
he is an odd one; and never odder, I should guess, than when he stands upon a
mountain-top and with lowered head pours out his amorous soul in coos as gentle
as a sucking dove’s. I count myself happy to have witnessed the moving
spectacle. I am
running into superlatives, but no matter. The feeling against their use is
largely prejudice. Let me suit myself with one or two more, therefore, and say
that the rarest and most exciting bird seen by me in Arizona was a painted
redstart, Setophaga picta. It was at the base of Tucson Mountain, close
by the canyon wrens’ old mill. The vermilion flycatcher, rare as I considered
it at first, became after a while almost excessively common. I believe it is no
exaggeration to say that forty or fifty pairs must have been living in and
about Tucson before the first of April. Unless you were out upon the desert,
you could hardly turn round without seeing or hearing them. But there was no
danger of the painted redstart’s cheapening itself after this fashion. I saw it
twice, for perhaps ten minutes in all, and as long as I live I shall be
thankful for the sight. I was
playing the spy upon a pair of what I took to be Arkansas goldfinches, and the
question being a nice one, had got over a wire fence to have the sun at my
back. There I had barely focused my eight-power glass upon a leafless willow
beside an irrigation ditch, when all at once there moved into its field such a
piece of absolute gorgeousness as I have no hope of making my reader see by
means of any description: a small bird in three colors, — deep, velvety black,
the snowiest white, and the most brilliant red. Its glory lay in the depth and
purity of the three colors; its singularity lay in a point not mentioned in
book descriptions, being inconspicuous, I suppose, in cabinet specimens: a line
(almost literally a line) of white below the eye. From its position and its
extreme tenuity I took it for the lower eyelid, but as to that I cannot speak
with positiveness. It would hardly have showed, even in life, I dare say, but
for its intensely black surroundings. As it was, it fairly stared at me. I
cannot affirm that it added to the bird’s beauty. Apart from it the colors were
all what I may call solid, — laid on in broad masses, that is: a red belly, a
long white band (not a bar) on each wing, some white tail feathers, white lower
tail coverts, and everything else black. It does not sound like anything so
very extraordinary, I confess. But the reader should have seen it. Unless he is
a very dry stick indeed, he would have let off an exclamation or two, I can
warrant. There are cases in which the whole is a good deal more than the sum of
all its parts. The bird
was on one of the larger branches, over which it moved in something of the
black-and-white creeper’s manner, turning its head to one side and the other
alternately as it progressed. Then it sat still a long time (a long time for a
warbler), so near me that the glass brought it almost into my hand, while I
devoured its beauty; and then, of a sudden, it took flight into the dense,
leafy top of a tall cottonwood, and I saw it no more. No more for that time,
that is to say. In my mind, indeed, I bade it good-by forever. It was not to be
thought of that such a bit of splendor (I had read of it as a mountain bird)
should happen in my way more than once. But eight days afterward (March 28), in
nearly the same place, it appeared again, straight over my head; and I was
almost as much astonished as before. It was exploring the bare branches of a
row of roadside ash trees, and I followed it, or rather preceded it, backing
away as it flitted from one tree to the next, keeping the sun behind me. It
carried itself now much like the common redstart; a little more inclined to
moments of inactivity, perhaps, but at short intervals darting into the air
after a passing insect with all conceivable quickness. And such
colors! Such an unspeakable red, so intense a black, and so pure a white! If I
said that the vermilion flycatcher was the brightest bird I saw in Arizona, I
was like the Hebrew psalmist. I said it in my haste. This time the redstart was in a singing mood. On the previous occasion
it had kept silence, and I had thought I was glad to have it so, feeling that
no voice could be good enough to go with such feathers. In its way the feeling
was justified; but, after all, it would have been too bad to miss the song.
Curiosity has its claims, no less than sentiment. And happily the song proved
to be a very pretty one; similar to that of the Eastern bird, to be sure, but
less hurried (so it seemed to me), less over-emphatic, and in a voice less
sharp and thin; a very pretty song (for a warbler), though, as is true of the
Phainopepla and most other brilliantly handsome birds (and all good children),
the redstart’s proper appeal is to the eye. So far as human appreciation is
concerned, it need make no other. I have
heard a canyon wren in a canyon, I said. It was a glorious day in a glorious
place, — Sabino Canyon, it is called, in the Santa Catalina Mountains. And it
was there, where the ground was all a flower garden, and the dashing brook a doubly
delightful sight and sound after so much wandering over the desert and so many
crossings of dry, sandy river-beds, — it was there, amid a cluster of leafy
oaks (strange oak leaves they were) and leafless hackberry trees, that I saw my
first and only solitaire, — Myadestes townsendii. I have praised other
birds for their brightness and song; this one I must praise for a certain
nameless dignity and, as the present-day word is, distinction. He did not deign
to break silence, or to notice in any manner, unless it were by an added touch
of patrician reserve, the presence of three human intruders. I stared at him, —
exercising a cat’s privilege, — for all his hauteur, admiring his gray colors,
his conspicuous white eye-ring, and his manner. I say “manner,” not “manners.”
You would never liken him to a dancing-master. He was the
solitaire, I somehow felt certain (certain with a lingering of uncertainty),
though I had forgotten all description of that bird’s appearance. It was the
place for him, and his looks went with the name. Moreover, to confess a more
prosaic consideration, there was nothing else he could be. “Myadestes,” I said to my two companions, both unacquainted with such
matters; I think it is Myadestes, though I can’t exactly tell why I think so.” We must go
into the canyon a little way, gazing up at the walls, picking a few of the more
beautiful flowers, feeling the place itself (the best thing one can do,
whether in a canyon or on a mountain-top); then we came back to the hackberry
trees, but the solitaire was no longer in them. I had had my opportunity, and
perhaps had made too little of it. It is altogether likely that I shall never
see another bird of his kind. For now
those cloudless Arizona days, the creosote-covered desert, and the mountain
ranges standing round about it, are all for me as things past and done; a
bright memory, and no more. One event conspired with another to put a sudden
end to my visit (which was already longer than I had planned), and on the last
day of March I walked for the last time under that row of “leafless ash trees,”
— no longer quite leafless, and no longer with a painted redstart in them, —
and over that piece of winding road between the craggy hill and the river. Now
I courted not the sun, but the shade; it was the sun, more than anything else,
that was hurrying me away, when I would gladly have stayed longer; but sunny or
shady, I stopped a bit in each of the more familiar places. Nobody knew or
cared that I was taking leave. All things remained as they had been. The same
rock wrens were practicing endless vocal variations here and there upon the
stony hillside; the same fretful verdin was talking about something, it was
beyond me to tell what, with the old emphatic monotony; the hummingbird stood
on the tip of his mesquite bush, still turning his head eagerly from side to
side, as if he expected her, and wondered why on earth she was so long in
coming; the mocker across the field (one of no more than half a dozen that I
saw about Tucson!) was bringing out of his treasury things new and old (a great
bird that, always with another shot in his locker); the Lucy warbler, daintiest
of the dainty, sang softly amid the willow catkins, a chorus of bees
accompanying; the black cap of the pileolated warbler was not in the
blossoming quince-bush hedge (that was a pity); the desert-loving sparrow hawk
sat at the top of a giant cactus, as if its thorns were nothing but a cushion;
the happy little Mexican boy, who lived in one corner of the old mill, came
down the road with his usual smile of welcome (we were almost old friends by
this time) and a glance into the trees, meaning to say, what he could not
express in English, nor I understand in Spanish, “I know what you are doing;”
and then, as I rounded the bend, under the beetling crags, the same canyon
wren, my first one, not dreaming what a favor he was conferring upon the man he
had so often chided as a trespasser, let fall a few measures of his lovely
song. How sweet and cool the notes were! Unless it was the sound of the brook
in the Sabino Canyon, I believe I heard nothing else so good in Arizona. But at San
Antonio, on my way homeward, I heard notes not to be called musical, in the
smaller and more ordinary sense of the word; as unlike as possible, certainly,
to the classic sweetness of the canyon wren’s tune; but to me even more
exciting and memorable. On a sultry, indolent afternoon (April 9) I had betaken
myself to Cemetery Hill for a lazy stroll, and had barely alighted from the
electric car, when I heard strange noises somewhere near at hand. In my
confusion I thought for an instant of the scissor-tailed flycatchers, with
whose various outlandish outcries and antics I had been for several days
amusing myself. Then I discovered that the sound came from above, and looking
up, saw straight over my head, between the hilltop and the clouds, a
wedge-shaped flock of large birds. Long slender necks and bills, feet drawn up
and projecting out behind the tails, wing-action moderate (after the manner of
geese rather than ducks), color dark, — so much, and no more, the glass showed
me, while the birds, sixty or more in number, as I guessed, were fast receding
northward. They should be cranes, I said to myself, since they were surely not
herons, and then, like a flash, it came over me that I knew the voice. By good
luck I had lived the winter before where I heard continually the lusty shouts
of a captive sandhill crane; and it was to a chorus of sand-hill cranes that I
was now listening. The flock
disappeared, the tumult lessened and ceased, and I passed on. But fifteen
minutes afterward, as I was retracing my steps over the hill, suddenly I heard
the same resounding chorus again. A second flock of cranes was passing. This,
too, was in a V-shaped line, though for some reason it fell into disorder
almost immediately. Now I essayed a count, and had just concluded that there
were some eighty of the birds, when a commotion behind me caused me to turn my
head. To my amazement, a third and much larger flock was following close behind
the second. There was no numbering it with exactness, but I ran my glass down
the long, wavering line, as best I could, and counted one hundred and fifteen. An hour
before I had never seen a sandhill crane in its native wildness (a creature
nearly or quite as tall as myself), and behold, here was the sky full of them.
And what a judgment-day trumpeting they made! Angels and archangels, cherubim
and seraphim! Perhaps I did not enjoy it, — there, with the white gravestones
standing all about me. After all, there is something in mere volume of sound.
If it does not feed the soul, at least it stirs the blood. And that is a good
thing, also. I wonder if Michelangelo did not at some time or other see and
hear the like. 1 It should be said, nevertheless, that straggling flocks of Western bluebirds — lovely creatures — were met with on the desert on rare occasions, and once, at Old Camp Lowell, three robins — Westerners, no doubt — passed over my head, flying toward the mountains, in which they are said to winter. |
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