II
ZERO BIRDS

It had been a strenuous night. All day the mercury had been flirting with the zero mark, and soon after sunset burrowed down into the bulb below all readings. My bed that night felt like a well-iced tomb. Probably daylight would have found me frozen to death if it had not been for a saving idea. Hurrying into the children’s room, I selected two of the warmest and chubbiest. Banking them on either side of me in my bed, I just survived the night. Of course it was hard on them; but then, any round, warm child of proper sentiments should welcome an opportunity to save the life of an aged parent.

In spite of my patent heating-plant I woke up toward morning shivering, and remembered with a terrible depression that I had boasted to Mrs. Naturalist and to various and sundry scoffing friends that I would cut down and cut up and haul in one forty-foot hickory tree before the glad New Year. For a while I decided that there was nothing on earth worth exchanging for that warm bed. Finally, however, my better nature conquered, and the dusk before the dawn found me in the woods in front of a dead hickory tree some forty feet high and a couple of rods through – at least that was how its flinty girth impressed me after I had chopped a while. The air was like iced wine. Every axe-stroke drove it tingling through my blood.

Before attacking the hickory, however, I began to cut down the brush surrounding the doomed tree, so as to gain clear space for the axe-swing. Almost immediately a vindictive spice-bush in falling knocked off my glasses, and they fell into the snow somewhere ahead of me. Without them I am in the same condition as a mole or a shrew, my sense of sight being only rudimentary. Down I plumped on my knees in the snow and fumbled in the half light with numbed fingers through the cold whiteness ahead.

As I groped and grumbled in this lowly position, suddenly I heard the prelude to one of the most beautiful of winter dawn-songs. It was a liquid loud note full of rolling r’s. Perhaps it can be best represented in print somewhat as follows: “Chip’r’r’r’r.” I forgot my lost glasses and my cold hands and my wet knees waiting for the song that I knew was coming. Another preliminary, rolling note or so, and there sounded from a low stump a wild, ringing song that could be heard for half a mile. “Wheedle-wheedle-wheedle,” it began full of liquid bell-like overtones. Then the singer added another syllable to his strain and sang, “Whee-udel, whee-udel, whee-udel.” Three times, with a short rest between, he sang the full double strain through, although it was so dark that only the ghostly, black tree-trunks could be seen against the white snow. I needed no sight of him, however, to recognize the singer. The song took me back to a bitter winter day in Philadelphia some seventeen years ago, when I was laboriously learning the birds. I was walking through a bit of waste-land encircled by trolley-tracks when I heard this same song. It was like nothing which I had ever heard in New England, where I had learned what little I knew about birds, and I searched everywhere for the singer, expecting to see a bird about the size of a robin.

Finally, in the underbrush just ahead of me, I saw an unmistakable wren singing so ecstatically that he shook and trembled all over with the outpouring of his song. It was my first sight and hearing of this southern bird, the Carolina wren, the largest of our five wrens, whose field-mark is a long white line over the eye. He is reddish-brown, while the house wren, which is half an inch shorter, is cinnamon-brown. The long-billed marsh wren also has a white line over the eye and is about the same size, but is never found away from the tall grass bordering on water, and has no such song as the Carolina. The winter wren and the short-billed marsh wren could neither of them be mistaken for the Carolina, as both are about an inch and a half shorter and lack the white line. The house wren and the long-billed marsh wren bubble when they sing, the Carolina wren and the winter wren ring, and the short-billed marsh wren, the rarest of all, clicks. Of them all only the Carolina wren sings in the winter.

That day the wren-song brought me good luck. It was no more than finished when I heard someone passing along a nearby wood-road, who turned out to be an early-rising workman from whom I borrowed some matches with which I finally discovered my missing eyes half buried in the snow. I attacked the pignut hickory with great energy to make up for lost time. Little by little the axe bit through the tough wood, until the kerf was well past the heart of the tree. As I chopped I could hear the quick strokes of a far better wood-cutter than I shall ever be. Suddenly he gave a loud, rattling call, and I recognized the hairy woodpecker. He is much larger than the downy, being nearly the size of a robin, while his call is wilder and louder and lacks the downward run of the downy’s note. We chopped on together, he at his tree and I at mine. Suddenly from my tree sounded a warning crack, and the trunk wavered for a moment. I stepped well off to one side, for it is dangerous to stand behind a falling tree. If it strikes anything as it falls the trunk may shoot backward. A venerable ancestor of mine, so the story runs, tried to celebrate his ninetieth birthday by chopping down a tree, and standing behind it, was killed by the back-lash of the falling trunk.

The tree swayed forward toward the crimson rim of the rising sun. One more stroke at its heart, and there was a loud series of cracks, followed by a roar like thunder as it crashed down. Almost immediately, as if awakened by the noise, I began to hear bird-notes. From over to my left sounded a series of sharp, irritating alarm-notes, and in the waxing light I caught a glimpse of a crested blood-red bird at the edge of a green-brier thicket. In that same place I had found his nest the spring before, made of twigs and strips of bark and lined with grass and roots and holding three speckled eggs. It was the cardinal grosbeak, another bird unknown to me in New England. No matter how often I meet this crimson-crested grosbeak, he will never become a common bird to me. Each time I see him I feel again something of the thrill which came over me when I first met this singer from the southland in a thicket on the edge of Philadelphia. With the Carolina wren and the tufted titmouse, the cardinal grosbeak completes a trio of birds that can never be commonplace to one born north of Central Park, New York, which is about the limit of their northern range.

To-day, as I watched my flaming cardinal, he suddenly dived stiffly into the heart of the thicket. A moment later from its midst sounded a clear, loud whistle, “Whit, whit, whit.” I answered him, for this is one of the few bird-calls I can imitate. Before long his dove-colored mate also appeared. Her wings and tail were of a duller red, while the upper-parts of her sleek body were of a brownish-ash tint. The throat and a patch by the base of the bill were black in both. As I watched, the singer in the thicket added to his whistle the word “Teu, teu, teu, teu” and then finally ran them together – “Whee-teu, whee-teu, whee-teu,” so rapidly whistled that it sounded almost like a single note.

On the way back to breakfast, as the sun came up and warmed a slope of the woods, a flock of slate-colored juncos burst out altogether in a chorus of soft little trills, with now and then sharp alarm-notes like the clicking of pebbles together, interspersed with tiny half-whispered notes best expressed by the same letters as those used in writing the grosbeak music – “Teu, teu, teu, teu.” Suddenly, from a farther corner of the sun-warmed slope, I heard a few tinkling notes followed by a tantalizing snatch of rich, sweet song shot through with canary-like trills and runs. I hurried over the snow and caught a glimpse of a little flock of birds with crowns of reddish-brown, and each wearing small black spots in the exact centre of their drab-colored waistcoats. They were tree-sparrows down from the far North, and I was fortunate to have heard the peculiarly gentle cadence of one of their rare winter songs.

Farther on, the caw of a passing crow drifted down from the cold sky, and before I left the woods I heard the pip of a downy woodpecker and the grunt of the white-breasted nuthatch, that tree-climber with the white cheeks which, unlike woodpeckers, can go both up and down trees head-foremost. In the early spring and sometimes on warm winter days, one may hear his spring song, which is “Quee-quee-quee.” It is not much of a song, but Mr. Nuthatch is very proud of it and usually pauses admiringly between each two strains. In my early bird-days I used to mistake this spring song for the note of an early flicker, and would scandalize better-educated ornithologists by reporting flickers several weeks before their time. The last bird I heard before I left the woods remarked solemnly, “Too-wheedle, too-wheedle, too-wheedle, too-wheedle,” like a creaking wheelbarrow, and then suddenly broke out into the flat, harsh “Djay, djay, djay” which has given the silver-and-blue jay its name.

By the time I had reached home, I decided that it was too cold a day to practise law safely. The state legislature in their wisdom had already made the day a half-holiday. Not to be outdone in generosity, I decided to donate my half and make the holiday a whole one. Anent this matter of holidays, the trouble with most of us is that we are obsessed with the importance of our daily work. There are many pleasant byways which we plan to come back and explore when we have reached the end of the straight, steep, and intensely narrow road that leads to achievement. The trouble is that there is no returning. Men die rich, famous, or successful, who have never taken the time to companion their children or to find their way into the world of the wild-folk which lies at their very doors. It was not always so. Read in Evelyn’s Diary how for sixty years a great man played a great part under three kings and the grim Protector, and yet never lost an opportunity to refresh his life with bird-songs, hilltops, flower-fields, and sky-air. We reach our goal to-day in a few desperate years, stripped to the buff like a Marathon runner. One can arrive later and not miss a thousand little happinesses along the way.

With similar arguments I convinced myself on that day, that it was my duty as an amateur naturalist to discover how many birds I could meet between dawn and dark with the thermometer below zero. Certain gentlemen-adventurers of my acquaintance aided and abetted me in this plan. They all held high office in a military organization known for short as the Band. There was First Lieutenant Trottie, Second Lieutenant Honey, Sergeant Henny-Penny, and Corporal Alice-Palace, while I had been honored with a captain’s commission in this regiment. To be sure, there was something of a dearth of privates; but with such a gallant array of officers their absence was not felt. At any hour of day or night, to the last man, every member of the Band was ready for the most desperate adventures by field and flood.

A CROW CHORUS

As we left the house the thermometer stood at four below, while the sky was of a frozen blue, without a cloud, and had a hard glitter as if streaked with frost. In a low tree by the roadside, we heard the metallic note of a downy woodpecker scurrying up the trunk and backing stiffly down. Farther on sounded a loud cawing, and we saw four ruffianly crows assaulting a respectable female broad-winged hawk. One after the other they would flap over her as closely as possible, aiming vicious pecks as they passed. The broad-winged beat the air frantically with her short, wide, fringed wings, and seemed to make no effort to defend herself against her black, jeering pursuers. Once she alighted on an exposed limb. Instantly the crows settled near her and used language which no respectable female hawk could listen to for a moment. She spread her wings and soared away, and as she passed out of sight they were still cawing on her trail.

If the hawk had been one of the swift Accipiters, such as the gray goshawk or the Cooper’s hawk, or any of the falcons, no crow would have ventured to take any liberties. One of my friends, who collects bird’s eggs instead of bird-notes, was once attempting feloniously to break and enter the home of a duck-hawk which was highly regarded in the community – about two hundred feet highly in fact. As my friend was swinging back and forth on a rope in front of the perpendicular cliff, said duck-hawk dashed at him at the rate of some ninety miles per hour. Being scared off by a blank cartridge, the enraged falcon towered. A passing crow flapping through the air made a peck at the hawk as it shot past. That was one of the last and most unfortunate acts in that crow’s whole life. The duck-hawk was fairly aching with the desire to attack someone or something which was not protected by thunder and lightning. With one flash of its wings it shot under that misguided crow, and, turning on its back in mid-air, slashed it with six talons like sharpened steel. The crow dropped, a dead mass of black and blood, to the brow of the cliff below.

Finally we reached the tall, stone chimney – all that is left of some long-forgotten house, which marks the entrance to old Darby Road, which was opened in 1701. At that point Wild-Folk Land begins. The hurrying feet of more than two centuries have sunk the road some ten feet below its banks, and the wild-folk use its hidden bed like one of their own trails. Foxes pad along its rain-washed course, and rabbits and squirrels hop and scurry across its narrow width, while in spring and summer wild ginger, ebony spleenwort, the blue-and-white porcelain petals of the hepatica, and a host of other flowers bloom on its banks. The birds too nest there, from the belted gray-blue and white kingfisher, which has bored a deep hole into the clay under an overhanging wild-cherry tree, down to the field sparrow, with its pink beak and flute-song, which watches four speckled eggs close-hidden in a tiny cup of woven grass.

To-day we followed the windings of the road, until we came to the vast black oak tree which marks the place where Darby Road, after running for nearly ten miles, stops to rest. Beyond stretched the unbroken expanse of Blacksnake Swamp, bounded by the windings of Darby Creek. The Band seated themselves on one of their favorite resting-places, a great log which lay under the trees. Above us a white-breasted nuthatch, with its white cheeks and black head, was rat-tat-tatting up and around a half-dead limb, picking out every insect egg in sight from the bark. As the bird came near the broken top of the bough, out of a hole popped a very angry red squirrel exactly like a jack-in-the-box. The red squirrel is the fastest of all the tree-folk among the animals, but a nuthatch on a limb is not afraid of anything that flies or crawls or climbs. He can run up and down around a branch, forward and backward, unlike the woodpeckers, which must always back down, or the brown creepers, which can go up a tree in long spirals but have to fly down.