Bradford Torrey

The Foot-path Way

EAN 8596547143871

DigiCat, 2022

Contact: DigiCat@okpublishing.info

Table of Contents

DECEMBER OUT-OF-DOORS.

DYER'S HOLLOW.

FIVE DAYS ON MOUNT MANSFIELD.

A WIDOW AND TWINS.

THE MALE RUBY-THROAT.

ROBIN ROOSTS.

THE PASSING OF THE BIRDS.

A GREAT BLUE HERON.

FLOWERS AND FOLKS.

IN PRAISE OF THE WEYMOUTH PINE.

INDEX.

OUT-DOOR BOOKS

"Herbs, fruits, and flowers,

Walks, and the melody of birds."

MILTON.

There were six of us, and we had the entire hotel, I may almost say the entire valley, to ourselves. If the verdict of the villagers could have been taken, we should, perhaps, have been voted a queer set, familiar as dwellers in Franconia are with the sight of idle tourists—

"Rapid and gay, as if the earth were air,

And they were butterflies to wheel about

Long as the summer lasted."

We were neither rapid nor gay, and it was still only the first week of June; if we were summer boarders, therefore, we must be of some unusual early-blooming variety.

First came a lady, in excellent repute among the savants of Europe and America as an entomologist, but better known to the general public as a writer of stories. With her, as companion and assistant, was a doctor of laws, who is also a newspaper proprietor, a voluminous author, an art connoisseur, and many things beside. They had turned their backs thus unseasonably upon the metropolis, and in this pleasant out-of-the-way corner were devoting themselves to one absorbing pursuit—the pursuit of moths. On their daily drives, two or three insect nets dangled conspicuously from the carriage—the footman, thrifty soul, was never backward to take a hand—and evening after evening the hotel piazza was illuminated till midnight with lamps and lanterns, while these enthusiasts waved the same white nets about, gathering in geometries, noctuids, sphinges, and Heaven knows what else, all of them to perish painlessly in numerous cyanide bottles, which bestrewed the piazza by night, and (happy thought!) the closed piano by day. In this noble occupation I sometimes played at helping; but with only meagre success, my most brilliant catch being nothing more important than a beautiful Io. The kind-hearted lepidopterist lingered with gracious emphasis upon the adjective, and assured me that the specimen would be all the more valuable because of a finger-mark which my awkwardness had left upon one of its wings. So—to the credit of human nature be it spoken—so does amiability sometimes get the better of the feminine scientific spirit. To the credit of human nature, I say; for, though her practice of the romancer's art may doubtless have given to this good lady some peculiar flexibility of mind, some special, individual facility in subordinating a lower truth to a higher, it surely may be affirmed, also, of humanity in general, that few things become it better than its inconsistencies.

Of the four remaining members of the company, two were botanists, and two—for the time—ornithologists. But the botanists were lovers of birds, also, and went nowhere without opera-glasses; while the ornithologists, in turn, did not hold themselves above some elementary knowledge of plants, and amused themselves with now and then pointing out some rarity—sedges and willows were the special desiderata—which the professional collectors seemed in danger of passing without notice. All in all, we were a queer set. How the Latin and Greek polysyllables flew about the dining-room, as we recounted our forenoon's or afternoon's discoveries! Somebody remarked once that the waiters' heads appeared to be more or less in danger; but if the waiters trembled at all, it was probably not for their own heads, but for ours.[1]

[1] Just how far the cause of science was advanced by all this activity I am not prepared to say. The first ornithologist of the party published some time ago (in The Auk, vol. v. p. 151) a list of our Franconia birds, and the results of the botanists' researches among the willows have appeared, in part at least, in different numbers of the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club. As for the lepidopterist, I have an indistinct recollection that she once wrote to me of having made some highly interesting discoveries among her Franconia collections—several undescribed species, as well as I can now remember; but she added that it would be useless to go into particulars with a correspondent entomologically so ignorant.

Our first excursion—I speak of the four who traveled on foot—was to the Franconia Notch. It could not well have been otherwise; at all events, there was one of the four whose feet would not willingly have carried him in any other direction. The mountains drew us, and there was no thought of resisting their attraction.

Love and curiosity are different, if not incompatible, sentiments; and the birds that are dearest to the man are, for that very reason, not most interesting to the ornithologist. When on a journey, I am almost without eyes or ears for bluebirds and robins, song sparrows and chickadees. Now is my opportunity for extending my acquaintance, and such every-day favorites must get along for the time as best they can without my attention. So it was here in Franconia. The vesper sparrow, the veery, and a host of other friends were singing about the hotel and along the roadside, but we heeded them not. Our case was like the boy's who declined gingerbread, when on a visit: he had plenty of that at home.

When we were nearly at the edge of the mountain woods, however, we heard across the field a few notes that brought all four of us to an instant standstill. What warbler could that be? Nobody could tell. In fact, nobody could guess. But, before the youngest of us could surmount the wall, the singer took wing, flew over our heads far into the woods, and all was silent. It was too bad; but there would be another day to-morrow. Meantime, we kept on up the hill, and soon were in the old forest, listening to bay-breasted warblers, Blackburnians, black-polls, and so on, while the noise of the mountain brook on our right, a better singer than any of them, was never out of our ears. You are going up, it said. I wish you joy. But you see how it is; you will soon have to come down again.

I took leave of my companions at Profile Lake, they having planned an all-day excursion beyond, and started homeward by myself. Slowly, and with many stops, I sauntered down the long hill, through the forest (the stops, I need not say, are commonly the major part of a naturalist's ramble—the golden beads, as it were, the walk itself being only the string), till I reached the spot where we had been serenaded in the morning by our mysterious stranger. Yes, he was again singing, this time not far from the road, in a moderately thick growth of small trees, under which the ground was carpeted with club-mosses, dog-tooth violets, clintonia, linnæa, and similar plants. He continued to sing, and I continued to edge my way nearer and nearer, till finally I was near enough, and went down on my knees. Then I saw him, facing me, showing white under parts. A Tennessee warbler! Here was good luck indeed. I ogled him for a long time (Shoot it, says Mr. Burroughs, authoritatively, not ogle it with a glass; but a man must follow his own method), impatient to see his back, and especially the top of his head. What a precious frenzy we fall into at such moments! My knees were fairly upon nettles. He flew, and I followed. Once more he was under the glass, but still facing me. How like a vireo he looked! For one instant I thought, Can it be the Philadelphia vireo? But, though I had never seen that bird, I knew its song to be as different as possible from the notes to which I was listening. After a long time the fellow turned to feeding, and now I obtained a look at his upper parts—the back olive, the head ashy, like the Nashville warbler. That was enough. It was indeed the Tennessee (Helminthophila peregrina), a bird for which I had been ten years on the watch.

The song, which has not often been described, is more suggestive of the Nashville's than of any other, but so decidedly different as never for a moment to be confounded with it. When you hear it, a friend had said to me several years before, you will know it for something new. It is long (I speak comparatively, of course), very sprightly, and peculiarly staccato, and is made up of two parts, the second quicker in movement and higher in pitch than the first. I speak of it as in two parts, though when my companions came to hear it, as they did the next day, they reported it as in three. We visited the place together afterwards, and the discrepancy was readily explained. As to pitch, the song is in three parts, but as to rhythm and character, it is in two; the first half being composed of double notes, the second of single notes. The resemblance to the Nashville's song lies entirely in the first part; the notes of the concluding portion are not run together or jumbled, after the Nashville's manner, but are quite as distinct as those of the opening measure.

As there were at least two pairs of the birds, and they were unmistakably at home, we naturally had hope of finding one of the nests. We made several random attempts, and one day I devoted an hour or more to a really methodical search; but the wily singer gave me not the slightest clue, behaving as if there were no such thing as a bird's nest within a thousand miles, and all my endeavors went for nothing.

As might have been foreseen, Franconia proved to be an excellent place in which to study the difficult family of flycatchers. All our common eastern Massachusetts species were present—the kingbird, the phoebe, the wood pewee, and the least flycatcher—and with them the crested flycatcher (not common), the olive-sided, the traill, and the yellow-bellied. The phoebe-like cry of the traill was to be heard constantly from the hotel piazza. The yellow-bellied seemed to be confined to deep and rather swampy woods in the valley, and to the mountain-side forests; being most numerous on Mount Lafayette, where it ran well up toward the limit of trees. In his notes, the yellow-belly may be said to take after both the least flycatcher and the wood pewee. His killic (so written in the books, and I do not know how to improve upon it) resembles the chebec of the least flycatcher, though much less emphatic, as well as much less frequently uttered, while his twee, or tuwee, is quite in the voice and manner of the wood pewee's clear, plaintive whistle; usually a monosyllable, but at other times almost or quite dissyllabic. The olive-sided, on the other hand, imitates nobody; or, if he does, it must be some bird with which I have yet to make acquaintance. Que-qúe-o he vociferates, with a strong emphasis and drawl upon the middle syllable. This is his song, or what answers to a song, but I have seen him when he would do nothing but repeat incessantly a quick trisyllabic call, whit, whit, whit; corresponding, I suppose, to the well-known whit with which the phoebe sometimes busies himself in a similar manner.

Of more interest than any flycatcher—of more interest even than the Tennessee warbler—was a bird found by the roadside in the village, after we had been for several days in the place. Three of us were walking together, talking by the way, when all at once we halted, as by a common impulse, at the sound of a vireo song; a red-eye's song, as it seemed, with the faintest touch of something unfamiliar about it. The singer was in a small butternut-tree close upon the sidewalk, and at once afforded us perfectly satisfactory observations, perching on a low limb within fifteen feet of our eyes, and singing again and again, while we scrutinized every feather through our glasses. As one of my companions said, it was like having the bird in your hand. There was no room for a question as to its identity. At last we had before us the rare and long-desired Philadelphia greenlet. As its song is little known, I here transcribe my notes about it, made at two different times, between which there appears to have been some discussion among us as to just how it should be characterized:—

The song is very pretty, and is curiously compounded of the red-eye's and the solitary's, both as to phrase and quality. The measures are all brief; with fewer syllables, that is to say, than the red-eye commonly uses. Some of them are exactly like the red-eye's, while others have the peculiar sweet upward inflection of the solitary's. To hear some of the measures, you would pass the bird for a red-eye; to hear others of them, you might pass him for a solitary. At the same time, he has not the most highly characteristic of the solitary's phrases. His voice is less sharp and his accent less emphatic than the red-eye's, and, so far as we heard, he observes decidedly longer rests between the measures.

This is under date of June 16th. On the following day I made another entry:—

The song is, I think, less varied than either the solitary's or the red-eye's, but it grows more distinct from both as it is longer heard. Acquaintance will probably make it as characteristic and unmistakable as any of our four other vireo songs. But I do not withdraw what I said yesterday about its resemblance to the red-eye's and the solitary's. The bird seems quite fearless, and keeps much of the time in the lower branches. In this latter respect his habit is in contrast with that of the warbling vireo.

On the whole, then, the song of the Philadelphia vireo comes nearest to the red-eye's, differing from it mainly in tone and inflection rather than in form. In these two respects it suggests the solitary vireo, though it never reproduces the indescribably sweet cadence, the real dying fall, of that most delightful songster.