

E-text prepared by Robin Monks, Joseph Cooper, Leonard Johnson, and the
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BIRDS IN THE BUSH

by

BRADFORD TORREY

Sixth Edition







Boston
Houghton, Mifflin and Company
New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1893

Copyright, 1885,
by Bradford Torrey
All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company.




Wherefore, let me intreat you to read it with favour and attention, and
to pardon us, wherein we may seem to come short of some words, which we
have laboured to interpret.

_The Prologue of the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach._




CONTENTS


                             PAGE

   ON BOSTON COMMON             1

   BIRD-SONGS                  31

   CHARACTER IN FEATHERS       53

   IN THE WHITE MOUNTAINS      75

   PHILLIDA AND CORIDON       103

   SCRAPING ACQUAINTANCE      129

   MINOR SONGSTERS            155

   WINTER BIRDS ABOUT BOSTON  185

   A BIRD-LOVER'S APRIL       211

   AN OWL'S HEAD HOLIDAY      243

   A MONTH'S MUSIC            277




                           ON BOSTON COMMON.

    Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room;
    And hermits are contented with their cells;
    And students with their pensive citadels:
    Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
    Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
    High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
    Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
    In truth, the prison unto which we doom
    Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
    In sundry moods 't was pastime to be bound
    Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground;
    Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
    Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
    Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

                                         WORDSWORTH.


                           ON BOSTON COMMON.


Our Common and Garden are not an ideal field of operations for the
student of birds. No doubt they are rather straitened and public. Other
things being equal, a modest ornithologist would prefer a place where he
could stand still and look up without becoming himself a gazing-stock.
But "it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps;" and if we are
appointed to take our daily exercise in a city park, we shall very
likely find its narrow limits not destitute of some partial
compensations. This, at least, may be depended upon,--our
disappointments will be on the right side of the account; we shall see
more than we have anticipated rather than less, and so our pleasures
will, as it were, come to us double. I recall, for example, the
heightened interest with which I beheld my first Boston cat-bird;
standing on the back of one of the seats in the Garden, steadying
himself with oscillations of his tail,--a conveniently long
balance-pole,--while he peeped curiously down into a geranium bed,
within the leafy seclusion of which he presently disappeared. He was
nothing but a cat-bird; if I had seen him in the country I should have
passed him by without a second glance; but here, at the base of the
Everett statue, he looked, somehow, like a bird of another feather.
Since then, it is true, I have learned that his occasional presence with
us in the season of the semi-annual migration is not a matter for
astonishment. At that time, however, I was happily more ignorant; and
therefore, as I say, my pleasure was twofold,--the pleasure, that is, of
the bird's society and of the surprise.

There are plenty of people, I am aware, who assert that there are no
longer any native birds in our city grounds,--or, at the most, only a
few robins. Formerly things were different, they have heard, but now the
abominable English sparrows monopolize every nook and corner. These wise
persons speak with an air of positiveness, and doubtless ought to know
whereof they affirm. Hath not a Bostonian eyes? And doth he not cross
the Common every day? But it is proverbially hard to prove a negative;
and some of us, with no thought of being cynical, have ceased to put
unqualified trust in other people's eyesight,--especially since we have
found our own to fall a little short of absolute infallibility. My own
vision, by the way, is reasonably good, if I may say so; at any rate I
am not stone-blind. Yet here have I been perambulating the Public Garden
for an indefinite period, without seeing the first trace of a
field-mouse or a shrew. I should have been in excellent company had I
begun long ago to maintain that no such animals exist within our
precincts. But the other day a butcher-bird made us a flying call, and
almost the first thing he did was to catch one of these same furry
dainties and spit it upon a thorn, where anon I found him devouring it.
I would not appear to boast; but really, when I saw what Collurio had
done, it did not so much as occur to me to quarrel with him because he
had discovered in half an hour what I had overlooked for ten years. On
the contrary I hastened to pay him a heart-felt compliment upon his
indisputable sagacity and keenness as a natural historian;--a measure of
magnanimity easily enough afforded, since however the shrike might excel
me at one point, there could be no question on the whole of my
immeasurable superiority. And I cherish the hope that my fellow
townsmen, who, as they insist, never themselves see any birds whatever
in the Garden and Common (their attention being taken up with matters
more important), may be disposed to exercise a similar forbearance
toward me, when I modestly profess that within the last seven or eight
years I have watched there some thousands of specimens, representing not
far from seventy species.

Of course the principal part of all the birds to be found in such a
place are transient visitors merely. In the long spring and autumn
journeys it will all the time be happening that more or less of the
travelers alight here for rest and refreshment. Now it is only a
straggler or two; now a considerable flock of some one species; and now
a miscellaneous collection of perhaps a dozen sorts.

One of the first things to strike the observer is the uniformity with
which such pilgrims arrive during the night. He goes his rounds late in
the afternoon, and there is, no sign of anything unusual; but the next
morning the grounds are populous,--thrushes, finches, warblers, and what
not. And as they come in the dark, so also do they go away again. With
rare exceptions you may follow them up never so closely, and they will
do nothing more than fly from tree to tree, or out of one clump of
shrubbery into another. Once in a great while, under some special
provocation, they threaten a longer flight; but on getting high enough
to see the unbroken array of roofs, on every side they speedily grow
confused, and after a few shiftings of their course dive hurriedly into
the nearest tree. It was a mistake their stopping here in the first
place; but once here, there is nothing for it save to put up with the
discomforts of the situation till after sunset. Then, please heaven,
they will be off, praying never to find themselves again in such a
Babel.

That most of our smaller birds migrate by night is by this time too well
established to need corroboration; but if the student wishes to assure
himself of the fact at first hand, he may easily do it by one or two
seasons' observations in our Common,--or, I suppose, in any like
inclosure. And if he be blest with an ornithologically educated ear, he
may still further confirm his faith by standing on Beacon Hill in the
evening--as I myself have often done--and listening to the _chips_ of
warblers, or the _tseeps_ of sparrows, as these little wanderers, hour
after hour, pass through the darkness over the city. Why the birds
follow this plan, what advantages they gain or what perils they avoid by
making their flight nocturnal, is a question with which our inquisitive
friend will perhaps find greater difficulty. I should be glad, for one,
to hear his explanation.

As a rule, our visitors tarry with us for two or three days; at least I
have noticed that to be true in many cases where their numbers, or
size, or rarity made it possible to be reasonably certain when the
arrival and departure took place; and in so very limited a field it is
of course comparatively easy to keep track of the same individual during
his stay, and, so to speak, become acquainted with him. I remember with
interest several such acquaintanceships.

One of these was with a yellow-bellied woodpecker, the first I had ever
seen. He made his appearance one morning in October, along with a
company of chickadees and other birds, and at once took up his quarters
on a maple-tree near the Ether monument. I watched his movements for
some time