Everyday Birds: Elementary Studies - free ebook by Bradford Torrey

EVERYDAY BIRDS

ELEMENTARY STUDIES BY BRADFORD TORREY WITH TWELVE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLORS AFTER AUDUBON, AND TWO FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge...

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I TWO LITTLE KINGS

The largest bird in the United States is the California vulture, or condor, which measures from tip to tip of its wings nine feet and a half. At the other end of the scale are the hummingbirds, one kind of which, at least, has wings that are less than an inch and a half in length. Next to these insect-like midgets come the birds which have been well named in Latin “Regulus,” and in English “kinglets,”—that is to say, little kings. The fitness of the title comes first from their tiny size,—the ch

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II THE CHICKADEE

The chickadee, like many other birds, takes his name from his notes; from some of his notes, that is to say, for he has many others besides his best-known chick-a-dee-dee-dee . His most musical effort, regarded by many observers as his true song, sounds to most ears like the name Phœbe,—a clear, sweet whistle of two or three notes, with what musical people call a minor interval between them. It is so strictly a whistle that any boy can imitate it well enough to deceive not only another boy, but

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III THE BROWN CREEPER

In the midst of a Massachusetts winter, when a man with his eyes open may walk five miles over favorable country roads and see only ten or twelve kinds of birds, the brown creeper’s faint zeep is a truly welcome sound. He is a very little fellow, very modestly dressed, without a bright feather on him, his lower parts being white and his upper parts a mottling of brown and white, such as a tailor might call a “pepper and salt mixture.” The creeper’s life seems as quiet as his colors. You will fin

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IV THE BROWN THRASHER

The brown thrasher—called also the brown thrush—is a bird considerably longer than a robin, with a noticeably long tail and a long, curved bill. His upper parts are reddish brown or cinnamon color, and his lower parts white or whitish, boldly streaked with black. You will find him in hedgerows, in scrub-lands, and about the edges of woods, where he keeps mostly on or near the ground. His general manner is that of a creature who wishes nothing else so much as to escape notice. “Only let me alone,

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V THE BUTCHER-BIRD

“ Butcher-bird ” is not a very pretty name, but it is expressive and appropriate, and so is likely to stick quite as long as the more bookish word “shrike,” which is the bird’s other title. It comes from its owner’s habit of impaling the carcasses of its prey upon thorns, as a butcher hangs upon a hook the body of a pig or other animal that he has slaughtered. In a place like the Public Garden of Boston, if a shrike happens to make it his hunting-ground for a week or two, you may find here and t

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VI THE SCARLET TANAGER

When I began to learn the birds, I was living in a large city. One of the first things I did, after buying a book, was to visit a cabinet of mounted specimens—“stuffed birds,” as we often call them. Such a wonderful and confusing variety as there was to my ignorant eyes! Among them I remarked especially a gorgeous scarlet creature with black wings and a black tail. It was labeled the scarlet tanager. So far as I was concerned, it could not have looked more foreign if it had come from Borneo. My

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VII THE SONG SPARROW

Sparrows are of many kinds, and in a general way the different kinds look so much alike that the beginner in bird study is apt to find them confusing, if not discouraging. They will try his patience, no matter how sharp and clever he may think himself, and unless he is much cleverer than the common run of humanity, he will make a good many mistakes before he gets to the end of them. One of the best and commonest of them all is the song sparrow. His upper parts are mottled, of course, since he is

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VIII THE FIELD SPARROW AND THE CHIPPER

All beginners in bird study find the sparrow family a hard one. There are so many kinds of sparrows, and the different kinds look so confusingly alike. How shall I ever be able to tell them apart? the novice says to himself. Well, there is no royal road to such learning, it may as well be confessed. But there is a road, for all that, and a pretty good one,—the road of patience; and there is much pleasure to be had in following it. If you know one sparrow, be it only the so-called “English,” you

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IX SOME APRIL SPARROWS

For the first three weeks of April the ornithologist goes comparatively seldom into the woods. Millions of birds have come up from the South, but the forest is still almost deserted. May, with its hosts of warblers, will bring a grand change in this respect; meanwhile the sparrows are in the ascendant, and we shall do well to follow the road for the most part, though with frequent excursions across fields and into gardens and orchards. Of eighty-four species of birds seen by me in April, a year

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X THE ROSE-BREASTED GROSBEAK

There is never a May passes, of recent years, but some one comes to me, or writes to me, to inquire about a wonderfully beautiful bird that he has just seen for the first time. He does hope I can tell him what it is. It is a pretty large bird, he goes on to say,—but not so long as a robin, he thinks, if I question him,—mostly black and white, but with such a splendid rosy patch on his breast or throat! What can it be? He had no idea that anything so handsome was ever to be seen in these parts. I

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XI THE BLUE JAY

Some years ago, as the story comes to me, two collectors of birds met by accident in South America, one of them from Europe, the other from the United States. “There is one bird that I would rather see than any other in the world,” said the European. “It is the handsomest of all the birds that fly, to my thinking, although I know it only in the cabinet. You have it in North America, but I suppose you do not often see it. I mean the blue jay.” What the American answered in words, I do not know; b

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XII THE KINGBIRD

As a very small boy I spent much time in a certain piece of rather low ground partly grown up to bushes. Here in early spring I picked bunches of pretty pink and white flowers, which I now know to have been anemones. In the same place, a month or two later, I gathered splendid red lilies, and admired, without gathering it, a tiny blue flower with a yellow centre. This would not bear taking home, but was always an attraction to me. I should have liked it better still, I am sure, if some one had b

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XIII THE HUMMINGBIRD

Hummingbirds are found only in America and on the islands near it. They are of many kinds, but only one kind is ever seen in the eastern United States. This is known as the ruby-throated hummingbird, because of a splendid red throat-patch worn by the male. To speak more exactly, the patch is red only in some lights. You see it one instant as black as a coal, and the next instant it flashes like a coal on fire. This ornament,—a real jewel,—with the lovely shining green of the bird’s back, makes h

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XIV THE CHIMNEY SWIFT

Every kind of bird is adapted to get its living in a particular way. It is strong in some respects, and weak in others. Some birds have powerful legs, but can hardly fly; others live on the wing, and can hardly walk. Of these flying birds none is more common than the chimney swift, or, as he is improperly called, the chimney swallow. No one ever saw him sitting on a perch or walking on the ground. In fact, his wings are so long, and his legs so short and weak, that if he were to alight on the gr

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XV NIGHTHAWK AND WHIP-POOR-WILL

Rustic people are a little shy of theories and “book-learning.” Not long ago—it was early in March—I met an old man who lives by himself in a kind of hermitage in the woods, and who knows me in a general way as a bird student. We greeted each other, and I inquired whether he had seen any bluebirds yet. No, he said, it wasn’t time. “Oh, but they are here,” I answered. “I saw a flock of ten on the 26th of February.” Good-natured incredulity came out all over his face. “Did you hear them sing?” he

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XVI THE FLICKER

The flicker is the largest of our common American woodpeckers, being somewhat longer and stouter than the robin. It is known, by sight at least, to almost every one who notices birds at all, and perhaps for this reason it has received an unusual number of popular names. “Golden-winged woodpecker,” which is probably the best known of these, comes from the fact that the bird’s wings are yellow on the under side. “Harry Wicket,” “Highhole,”—because its nest is sometimes pretty far above the ground,

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XVII THE BITTERN

It was a great day for me when I first heard the so-called booming of the bittern. For more than ten years I had devoted the principal part of my spare hours to the study of birds, but though I had taken many an evening walk near the most promising meadows in my neighborhood, I could never hear those mysterious pumping or stake-driving noises of which I had read with so much interest, especially in the writings of Thoreau. The truth was, as I have since assured myself, that this representative o

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XVIII BIRDS FOR EVERYBODY

Some birds belong exclusively to specialists. They are so rare, or their manner of life is so seclusive, that people in general can never be expected to know them except from books. The latest list of the birds of Massachusetts includes about three hundred and fifty species and sub-species. Of these, seventy-five or more are so foreign to this part of the country as to have appeared here only by accident, while many others are so excessively rare that no individual observer can count upon seeing

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XIX WINTER PENSIONERS

Our northern winter is a lean time, ornithologically, though it brings us some choice birds of its own, and is not without many alleviations. When the redpolls come in crowds and the white-winged crossbills in good numbers, both of which things happened last year, the world is not half so bad with us as it might be. Still, winter is winter, a season to be tided over rather than doted upon, and anything which helps to make the time pass agreeably is matter for thankfulness. So I am asked to write

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XX WATCHING THE PROCESSION

It begins to go by my door about the first of March, and is three full months in passing. The participants are all in uniform, each after his kind, some in the brightest of colors, some in Quakerish grays and browns. They seem not to stand very strictly upon the order of their coming; red-coats and blue-coats travel side by side. Like the flowers, they have a calendar of their own, and in their own way are punctual, but their movements are not to be predicted with anything like mathematical nice

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XXI SOUTHWARD BOUND

While walking through a piece of pine wood, three or four days ago, I was delighted to put my eye unexpectedly upon a hummingbird’s nest. The fairy structure was placed squarely upon the upper surface of a naked, horizontal branch, and looked so fresh, trimmed outwardly with bits of gray lichen, that I felt sure it must have been built this year. But where now were the birds that built it, and the nestlings that were hatched in it? Who could tell? In imagination I saw the mother sitting upon the

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