Birds and Nature Vol. 9 No. 4 [April 1901]

APRIL

 
No days such honored days as these! While yet
Fair Aphrodite reigned, men seeking wide
For some fair thing which should forever bide
On earth, her beauteous memory to set
In fitting frame that no age could forget,
Her name in lovely April’s name did hide,
And leave it there, eternally allied
To all the fairest flowers Spring did beget.
And when fair Aphrodite passed from earth,
Her shrines forgotten and her feasts of mirth,
A holier symbol still in seal and sign,
Sweet April took, of kingdom most divine,
When Christ ascended, in the time of birth
Of spring anemones, in Palestine.
 

– Helen Hunt Jackson.

 
I come, like a hope to a gloomy breast,
With comforting smiles, and tears
Of sympathy for the earth’s unrest;
And news that the summer nears,
For the feet of the young year every day
Patter and patter and patter away.
 
 
I thrill the world with a strange delight;
The birds sing out with a will,
And the herb-lorn lea is swift bedight
With cowslip and daffodil;
While the rain for an hour or two every day
Patters and patters and patters away.
 

– Bernard Malcolm Ramsay, in the Pall Mall Magazine.

THE CURASSOW

An interesting race of birds, known as the Curassows, has its range throughout that part of South America, east of the Andes Mountain range and north of Paraguay. All the species are confined to this region except one, which is found in Central America and Mexico. This is the bird of our illustration (Crax globicera).

The Curassows belong to the order of Gallinaceous birds and bear the same relation to South America that the pheasants and grouse bear to the Old World. They are in every respect the most important and the most perfect game birds of the district which they inhabit. In all there are twelve species placed under four genera. As the hind toes of the feet are placed on a level with the others they resemble the pigeon and are unlike many of the other gallinaceous birds.

The Curassows are very large and rather heavy birds and some of them are larger than our turkey. They have short wings and a strong bill. At the base of the upper mandible and on the upper side there is a large tubercle-like excrescence which is of a yellow color and quite hard. Upon the head there is a gracefully arched crest of feathers which is made of curled feathers, the tips of which are white in some of the species. This crest can be lowered or raised at the will of the bird. The plumage of the species illustrated is a beautiful and velvety black, except the white on the lower portion of the body. It is said that their motions are much more graceful than are those of our common domestic turkey. “They live in small flocks, and are arboreal in their habits, only occasionally descending to the ground, while roosting and building their nests on the branches of trees.” The nests are large and made of twigs and willowy branches held in place by the stems of grasses, which are neatly interwoven between them. The nest is lined with down, feathers and leaves.

It is said that they are easily domesticated and that in some parts of South America they may be found in tame flocks around the homes of the planters. One authority states that at about the beginning of the present century a large number of Curassows were taken from Dutch Guiana to Holland, where they became thoroughly domesticated, breeding as readily as any other kind of domestic poultry. Though a tropical bird, it would seem that they might be acclimatized. They would certainly form a valuable addition to the list of our farm fowls, for their flesh is said to be “exceedingly white and delicate.”

The female is not as large as the male and is usually reddish in color. Their food consists almost entirely of fruit and insects.

About the middle of the eighteenth century Eleazar Albin wrote “A Natural History of Birds,” in which he gives a very interesting account of the Curassow and an excellent illustration of the bird. He says: “I took a pourtray of this bird at Chelmsford in Essex; it was very tame and sociable, eating and drinking with any company. The Cock I had of a man from the West Indies. They are generally brought from Carasow, from whence they take their Name. They are called by the Indians Tecuecholi, Mountain-Bird or American Pheasant.”

SOME NOTABLE NESTS

The Clymer boys and girls, of Cloverdale, New England, belonged to a Bird Club; they were proposed to membership by their neighbors, the Walkers; in fact, the two families composed the club, and it partook of the nature of a secret society.

All this was before the young people of Cloverdale knew of Clark University, and Dr. Hodges’ “Ten to One Clubs,” wherein the members pledged themselves to strive by all imaginable means – provided they were also practical – to induce ten song birds to live and sing each year, where only one was found the year before.

It was not necessary for the Cloverdale Club to put up carefully constructed and artistic bird houses, or to hang cotton and the like fine nest-building materials in choicest ornamental shade trees – not at all. The English Sparrow had not found the village in those days; the song birds were there, they knew all the good locations and just where to find the best stuffs for constructing, furnishing and decorating their homes; the work of the club was to find these homes, to study them, with the ways and habits of their occupants, and to record their discoveries in a big book labeled, “Things Not Generally Known.”

Many of the statements in this book were as broad and conclusive as scientific dogmas, but the Cloverdale Club did not waste its time searching for hundreds of instances to establish a single truth; one was enough to be worthy of record; then, if some time the big book should be given to the public, and some naturalist or investigator should choose to confirm its statements by patient research, of course he would be welcome so to do. The club had the distinction of discovery, that was enough.

One interesting item recorded was this: “Birds – such as Orioles – who build in conspicuous places, like to decorate the outside of their nests, and in so doing are known to use manufactured materials and patterns.” Strange statement, but of course thereby hangs a tale, and here it is.

At the spring house-cleaning time, Mrs. Clymer had the big, bright sitting-room carpet taken out under one of the old colonial elms, at the east of the house, to be cleaned. Mrs. Baltimore Oriole was up in the elm that morning looking for a building spot that should be a bit superior to the old one; she had spent three summers in that tree, was familiar with the ways of the club, and habits of the family; like the birds of Eugene Field’s boyhood, “she knew her business when she built the old fire-hang-bird’s nest.”

No one was near when Mrs. Oriole fixed her eyes on the great red, green and white ingrain carpet, and admired it; what she thought we know not, but when she glanced at the hitching post under the tree, she instantly descended from high, waving branch, to lowly square post, for exactly covering the top of the same was a miniature carpet, a piece just six by six inches which Patrick should have left indoors; not having done so, he laid it on the inviting post for safe-keeping. That bit of wool fabric was very valuable, it exactly filled a jog right by the fireplace, in which, alas! ever after was seen an ugly piece of oil cloth!

All summer long the club girls and boys gazed with wonder at the gay nest in the elm, hanging like a solitary blossom among the leaves; their speculations about it would fill a long chapter; but after the birds were flown far to the south, and the leaves were gone, that nest was finally cut down and told its story: thread by thread, just as pulled from the bit of carpet, had been woven into a decoration for the outer wall of that hanging house, till a rude reproduction of the original tiny rug was under the feet of the birdlings, and over the heads of the boys.

The club held a special exhibition of that nest, and at Thanksgiving time one of the home-coming guests, who was an enthusiastic kindergartener in the city, persuaded those generous nature students to let her take their treasure to the poor children who seldom saw the commonest kind of a hang-bird’s nest, and in that kindergarten it may be seen today.

Another entry in the club book was this: “Birds building on the ground, especially Vesper Sparrows, locate if possible where they have a fine outlook, and give great attention to the arrangement of the front yard.”

This was discovered when Emily Clymer took her small brother Jo up in the “side hill pasture” to see the finest mountain view in all the county, and to find wild strawberries; while picking the berries they found what was afterward called the juniper house; this was a Vesper Sparrow’s home, roofed by green growing juniper.

Everybody knows that the prophet Elijah could never have sat and wept under a New England juniper tree; no tree is less high or more nearly horizontal than this; in fact, we call it a bush – where it is big – this one was not larger than Emily Clymer’s two hands, and growing straight out from descending ground, it formed a flat, green roof to the Sparrow homestead; then, while my lady sat upon her nest, she looked out of her tiny front door, across a gently sloping lawn, upon a whole range of mountains. But most remarkable of all were the ornamental shade trees, for just ten inches from the door, on either side, waved two big brakes, symmetrical in size and shape; they gracefully arched across the entrance, and were to the Sparrow domicile as the giant elms to the big Clymer homestead. A sketch of this beautiful residence was made by a member of the club – for cameras were not common in Cloverdale then – the picture cannot be taken from the club book, but I think we can see it all with our mind’s eye.

Here is one of the most astounding statements in that book of many observations: “Some Phoebes are like the Golden Eagle in three ways – first, they build on rocky and inaccessible cliffs, second, they build in the same place for one hundred years; and, third, when the young are big enough to fly, they know how, and just go up without any practicing.” All this can be proved to any one who will go in nesting time to a cliff overhanging the river just below Cloverdale, and who will accept the testimony of some of the most reliable and respectable men who have honored that place in the past century.

You must go in a boat and hug the shore; of course you need a member of the club for guide; at an unexpected moment you are told to look over your head, and there, glued to a shelf of rock so small as to be entirely covered by the same, is the nest! No porch, or even doorstep, beyond its wall – an overhanging roof of rock above, a shoreless expanse of water below; now, if some one can keep the boat steady, and you have the nerve to stand at the highest point of the bow, then by reaching over your head you can gently touch some fuzzy bits of life in the nest. Now you know the first and last of the facts recorded are correct: there is the nest on the inaccessible cliff; there are the birds, and if they did not fly up and out into the world the first time they stood on the edge of the nest, would they not be in the dark water below, instead of coming back to the old home for a hundred years?

The evidence of successive occupation for a century is this: The present family of Walkers – father and children – have watched that nest, never finding it empty a summer for twenty years. Old Deacon Walker, grandfather of our club members – who, of course, initiated their father – proved that Phoebes had hatched in the cliff nest during eighty years previous, in this wise: After he had stood guard forty years, as the deacon loved to relate, didn’t his Uncle Israel – who had been spending just those two-score years in the South – come home one spring evening, and the very next morning that ancient worthy demanded a boat and a boy to take him under the old Phoebe’s nest on the ledge, which he affirmed had never been without tenants during the forty years before he left Cloverdale?

So there are the figures and facts showing how not only the nest, but bird love and bird lore had come down through the century, and with such an inheritance, no wonder the Walkers are on the best of terms with feathered folk, or that they, with their confidential friends, the Clymers, are still adding to their bird book things not generally known.

Elizabeth Reed Brownell.

THE BLACKBIRD’S SONG

 
The bee is asleep in the heart of the rose,
The lark’s nestled soft in the cloud,
The swallow lies snug close under the eaves —
But the blackbird’s fluting is loud;
He pipes as no hermit would or should,
Half a mile deep in the heart of the wood,
In the green dark heart of the wood.
 
 
The raven’s asleep in the thick of the oak,
His head close under his wing;
The lark’s come down to his home on the earth —
But the blackbird still will sing,
Making the heart of the dark wood thrill
With the notes that come from his golden bill,
That flow from his golden bill.
 

– Walter Thornbury.