A Gathering of Birds

by Donald Culross Peattie

  Westward lies the great desert basin and here the lizard-eating road-runner scuttles, the stately Gambel’s quail paces and cries, the canyon wrens and the sage thrashers pour out their melodies. Pinyon jays and ravens scream; the silky fly-snapper or phainopepla dives from the bushes at sight of the passing horseman.

  Beyond, in Californian sunlight flash the hummingbirds; the mockers serenade the moon; the wren-tit bubbles forth his song, and in the coastal ranges wheel the condors. On the Pacific’s shore is met another oceanic bird life, where willets teeter and sanderlings feed at the lip of the wave, while out on the kelp beds fish the pelicans, and murrelets and puffins nest upon the islands.

  Here then is an avifauna as varied as that of the eastern region, related to it, but on the heroic scale. Yet aside from some lovely passages in Muir’s writings, elsewhere quoted, this world of birds has had no Homer worthy of its epic save only Elliott Coues.

  Elliott Coues is the commanding figure in the historical middle of American ornithology. He bestrides the great gap between the old heroic age of Audubon’s time and the modern era. He belongs to the moderns because he was a sound anatomist, systematist, critic and self-critic; he had the true scientific spirit. Yet he partakes of Audubon’s era because he too knew bird life in an almost primeval condition. Although in his day the birds of the eastern states were rather thoroughly known, Coues found a gloriously fresh field in the avifauna of the Far West and, widely exploring it, became its historian.

  Coues was born in 1842 in the seaport town of Portsmouth, New Hampshire (and how memorable its boy life has been made by Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s classic The Story of a Bad Boy!) When childhood was almost over, young Elliott was taken to live in Washington. The bird life of the Capital is peculiarly rich; it has left a deep impression upon many men—John Burroughs prominent among them. Here Coues, at the age of nineteen, published an important monograph on the genus of the sandpipers and came early to the attention of older naturalists at the Smithsonian.

  Meantime he was attending Columbia College (now George Washington University) and trained as a physician. He entered under age, as a medical cadet in the Civil War, and soon rose to be an assistant army surgeon, a rank he held actively from 1864 to 1881.

  In his army life Coues was stationed variously at Fort Whipple, Arizona, at Fort Macon, North Carolina, and Fort Randall in the Territory of Dakota. He was appointed naturalist and secretary to the Boundary Commission surveying the frontier with Canada from the Lake-of-the-Woods to the Pacific. Later he became secretary and naturalist for the Geological Survey of the Territories or what are now the western states.

  Coues made the most of his matchless opportunities. He collected constantly, adding many new species to our avifauna. But more important, he mastered the life histories of western birds, hitherto known at best as skins, skeletons and feathers.

  Ornithology at Fort Whipple in 1864 and 1865 must have been exciting. Coues was frequently, on account of the war with the Apache Indians, unable to go out of sight of the fort. It was not too much to imagine that while he watched the birds, Apaches watched him. Often when he wanted a specimen, it was unsafe to fire off his gun; when he might shoot, the birds were often too wary. Ornithology under these conditions “was sometimes too spicy for comfort.” His memories of the gentle little titmouse and the beautiful phainopepla or flysnapper were forever after colored by the discovery, made while following these birds, of the still bleeding naked bodies of soldiers from the fort.

  In 1874 he wrote his Birds of the Northwest which revealed him not only as a keen field worker and absolutely sound anatomist, but a writer of abilities in popularization which were astonishing in a man of such highly disciplined science. He followed this with Birds of the Colorado Valley (1878), and it is from these two books that my selections have been made.

  Hundreds of technical papers followed. Coues’ Key to North American Birds ran through many editions, and well into our century and is even now not really superseded. The introduction itself forms a concise treatise on ornithology, and the book has guided many careers. He also contributed forty thousand zoölogical definitions to the Century Dictionary, and taught anatomy at Columbia.

  Coues’ personality was hardly less influential. His enthusiasm was electrifying, his presence commanding and handsome. True, he was more than a slight eccentric; he was often unpredictable and emotional, but never a bore and seldom unjust. He had several marked aversions; one of them was Buffon as an ornithologist. His associates were endlessly delighted by his humor, which extended (most unusually for an impeccable scientist) to a keen sense of nonsense. Humor and much literary cultivation crop up delightfully and without warning in the soberest of his life histories.

  When well along in life Dr. Coues startled his scientific friends by joining and actively propagating Theosophy. On a European trip he had come under the sway of Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Orcott, and he returned to found the Gnostic Branch of the Theosophical Society in Washington. He was soon President of the American Board of Control of the Theosophical Society, and seemed scheduled, and ambitious, to become the acknowledged leader of the cult in America. This ambition clashed with that of William Juan Judge, while his refusal to accept the Mahatmic messages brought him into conflict with the whole society. In 1882 Coues could call Mme. Blavatsky “the greatest woman of this age, who is born to redeem her times.” Yet the next year he published an article titled “Mme. Blavatsky’s Famous Hoax,” and was promptly expelled from the society.

  To his scientific friends this was something in the nature of an honor. One cannot judge of others’ convictions of faiths or the motives behind either conversion or apostasy. Coues had a strong moral nature which drew him to what seemed for a time like a redeeming movement. He had also a strong scientific conscience, and quite evidently he discovered something which that conscience could not permit him to accept as veracious. Or else his persuasion was only under the magnetism of one woman, and when something broke the spell, the movement itself had no appeal to him.

  The last years of Coues’ life were spent in collecting, editing and annotating, with ethnological, zoölogical, botanical, and historical notes, the most famous documents of western exploration. He was particularly indignant over the wretched first editions of the Lewis and Clarke narrative, and undertook to restore and revise the whole great mass of material, with the result that Coues’ editions of the Lewis and Clarke and the Zebulon Pike narratives are far more valuable than the original issues.

  While on an arduous journey in Arizona and New Mexico, studying the trail of the old Spanish explorers, his health broke down. He returned to Washington and lingered some months in the year 1899. At the end, it is said, he sat up suddenly in his bed and cried, “Welcome, oh, welcome, beloved death!"

  In the following selections from Coues’ writings I have chosen birds famous in the annals of western life and exploration, birds about which Indian and Spanish and cowboy legends have grown by the natural accretion of all folk lore. Although three of them are not unknown in the eastern states, they reach the climax of their lives in the West.

  The cowbird of which Coues writes is, as he says, remarkable for sharing with the European cuckoo the parasitic habit in regard to raising its young, although it belongs to the New World family of the troupials, while our eastern cuckoos are not at all parasitic. Coues hardly touches upon the origin of the cowbird’s name, which is derived from the habit that these polygamous flocks once had of following the bison herds in order to feed upon their ticks. Today, on the prairies, they are often associated with domestic cows, having altered their habits slightly with their characteristic adaptability and intelligence.

  Far different from this association of a gregarious bird with a gregarious mammal is the apparent society formed by the burrowing owls, prairie dogs, and rattlesnakes. As Coues points out, bird, rodent, and reptile are bound together in a strange subterranean life in the pattern of the hunt or chase; there is a relationship bet
ween the three, but it is not a symbiosis, but what ecologists call a “food relation.”

  The cliff swallow whose pottery nests Coues describes so vividly, is one of the few western birds whose habits are almost affectionate toward man. Originally a cliff dweller like some of the western Indians, these swallows today come right into the cities to build. Their great colonies adorn the picturesque ruins of Capistrano Mission in California, and legend has adorned the birds in its turn—something unusual in New World Nature.

  The bush-tits of the West are related to no bird of the eastern states but rather to the long-tailed tits of Europe, and like them they build exquisitely artificed nests. One that I gathered on my own grounds here in California is before me as I write, all wrought of lichens, cunningly suspended, and furnished with an entrance on the side incapable of admitting anyone larger than its minute owner. For the bushtit is, in an avifauna of eagles and ravens, ibises and condors, an almost laughably small bird.

  PLUMBEOUS BUSH-TIT

  UP TO the present time, no one seems to have found the nest of the Plumbeous Bush-tit, though several naturalists besides myself have collected diligently in regions where the bird abounds. Not to pass over so extraordinary a specimen of bird-architecture as the genus Psaltriparus has invented and successfully introduced, I shall refer to the nests of P. minimus,* from which those of the scarcely distinct P. plumbeus cannot be presumed to differ. The order of architecture is thoroughly composite; in its execution, the qualities of skill, ingenuity, good taste and laborious perseverance are exhibited on the part of the builders; while the wee creatures seem possessed of no little ambition to make a monument, which, if not so lasting as brass, is infinitely more comfortable and convenient. This nest belongs in the category of pensile structures, being suspended from twigs of trees or bushes, but it is not a simple cup or basket, open at the top. It resembles the old-fashioned silken purse (which I recall from tradition rather than by actual memory) more than many of the nests called “purse-like” do, the entrance being a circular orifice at the side—nothing but the rings which slipped along these old purses being wanting to render the simile complete. One hardly knows which to admire most—the industry with which such a great feat is executed, or the cunning with which so curious a fabric is wrought—and no one certainly would suspect the owners of the nest to be such pygmies. As Dr. Cooper says, it seems as if it would take a whole flock to get up one such structure. The nest measures in length from six to eight or nine inches, with a diameter of three or three and a half; the general shape is cylindrical, not perfectly expressed however, for the ends are rounded and the top contracted. The orifice is about an inch in diameter. The substance is closely woven of lichens, mosses, very soft plant-fibre, or cottony vegetable matter, slender spears of grass and fibrous rootlets, and lined with the downiest, softest possible material, and a great mass of feathers, some of which may appear at the entrance, or be felted in the substance of the walls. The weaving is usually so well executed that the walls appear pretty firm and smooth from the outside; while their thickness reduces the cavity about one-half. The nest retains the greenish-gray color of the mosses and lichens of which it is principally composed, and the whole affair resembles a natural product. The reader will find, on Audubon’s plate already cited, an artistic representation of a nest presented to him by Mr. Nuttall, and as the birds are drawn alongside, in spirited attitudes, the striking disparity in size is illustrated. In this wonderfully elaborate structure, eggs are deposited to the number of six to nine—an egg to every inch of nest; they are pure white, without markings, and measure scarcely or not three-fifths of an inch in length.

  These queer little elfs were very numerous about Fort Whipple, where I saw them all the year round, and learned as much about them as any one seems to know. Though living in a coniferous region, they avoided the pine forests, keeping in the oak scrub of the hillsides, and the undergrowth along the creek bottoms and through the numerous ravines that make down the mountain sides. They endured, without apparent inconvenience, an extreme of cold which sometimes proved fatal to birds of much more seeming hardihood, like Ravens for instance; and were as active and sprightly in the depth of winter as at any other time. I used to wonder how they managed, in such tiny animal furnaces, to generate heat enough to stand such a climate, and speculated whether their incessant activity might not have something to do with it. They always seemed to me model store-houses of energy-conserved to a degree in cold weather, with consumption of no more than was needed to keep them a-going, and thus accumulated for the heavier draft required when, in the spring, the arduous duties of nest-building and rearing a numerous family devolve upon them. Their food at this season consists of various seeds that persist through the winter; during the rest of the year, different insects contribute to their subsistence, and foraging for the minute bugs, larvæ and eggs that lurk in the crevices of bark seems to be their principal business. They are very industrious in this pursuit, and too much absorbed in the exciting chances of the chase to pay attention to what may be going on around them. They are extremely sociable—the gregarious instinct common to the Titmice reaches its highest development in their case, and flocks of forty or fifty—some say even of a hundred—may be seen after the breeding season has passed, made up of numerous families, which, soon after leaving the nest, meet kindred spirits, and enter into intimate friendly relations. Often, in rambling through the shrubbery, I have been suddenly surrounded by a troop of the busy birds, perhaps unnoticed till the curious chirping they keep up attracted my attention; they seemed to pervade the bushes. If I stood still, they came close around me, as fearless as if I were a stump, ignoring me altogether. At such times, it was pleasant to see the earnestness with which they conducted affairs, and the energy they displayed in their own curious fashion, as if it were the easiest thing in the world to work hard, and quite proper to attend to serious matters with a thousand antics. They are droll folk, quite innocent of dignity, superior to the trammels of decorum, secure in the consciousness that their wit will carry off any extravagance. I used to call them my merry little philosophers—for they took the weather as it came, and evidently knew how much better it is to laugh at the world than cry with it. When fretted with the friction of garrison-life, I have often sought their society, and amused myself like another Gulliver among the Liliputians.

  * The Least Bush-tit. The nest of the plumbeous species is of course well known since Coues’ day. As he surmised, it does not differ from that of the Least. [Ed.]

  CLIFF SWALLOW

  THE Swallows, as a rule, are birds of local distribution in the breeding season, notwithstanding their preeminent migratory abilities; they tend to settle in particular places, and return year after year; and nothing is better known than that one town may be full of Swallows of several kinds unknown in another town hard by.

  A happy conjunction of circumstances is required to satisfy these birds. Not only are cliffs or their substitutes necessary, but these must be situated where clayey mud, possessing some degree of adhesiveness and plasticity, can be procured. The indication is met at large in the West, along unnumbered streams, where the birds most do congregate; and their very general dispersion in the West, as compared with their rather sporadic distribution in the East, is thus readily explained. The great veins of the West—the Missouri, the Columbia, and the Colorado,—and most of their venous tributaries, returning the humors from the clouds to their home in the sea, are supplied in profusion with animated congregations of the Swallows, often vastly more extensive than those gatherings of the feathered Sons of Temperance beneath our eaves, where the sign of the order,—a bottle, neck downward,—is set for our edification.

  It is generally understood that the most perfect nest, that is, a nest fully finished and furnished with a neck, resembling a decanter tilted over,—that such a “bottle-nosed” or “retort-shaped” nest, is the typical one, indicating the primitive fashion of building. It was probably not until they had served a long apprenti
ceship that they acquired the sufficient skill to stick a nest against a perfectly smooth, vertical support. Some kind of domed nest was still requisite, to carry out the idea of hole-breeding, a trait so thoroughly ingrained in Hirundine nature, and implying perfect covering for the eggs; and the indication is fully met in one of the very commonest forms of nests, namely, a hemispherical affair, quite a “breastwork” in fact, with a hole at the most protuberant part, or just below it. The running on of a neck to the nest, as seen in those nests we consider the most elaborate, seems to merely represent a surplusage of building energy, like that which induces a House Wren, for example, to accumulate a preposterous quantity of trash in its cubby-holes. Such architecture reminds me of the Irishman’s notion of how cannon are made—by taking a hole and pouring the melted metal around it. It is the rule, when the nest is built in any exposed situation. But since the Swallows have taken to building under eaves, or other projections affording a degree of shelter, the bottle-necked, even the simply globular nests, seem to be going out of fashion; and thousands of nests are now built as open as those of the Barn Swallow, being simply half-cups attached to the wall, and in fact chiefly distinguished from those of Barn Swallows by containing little or no hay.

  Considering how sedulously most birds strive to hide their nests, and screen themselves during incubation, it becomes a matter of curious speculation why these Swallows should ever build beneath our eaves, in the most conspicuous manner, and literally fly in the face of danger. Richardson * speaks of a colony that persisted in nesting just over a frequented promenade, where they had actually to graze people’s heads in passing to and from their nests, and were exposed to the curiosity and depredations of the children; yet they stuck to their first choice, even though there were equally eligible and far safer locations just at hand. I think such obstinacy is due to the bird’s reluctance to give up the much-needed shelter which the eaves provide against the weather—indeed, this may have had something to do with the change of habit in the beginning. The Cliff Swallow’s nest is built entirely of mud, which, when sun baked into ‘adobe,’ is secure enough in dry weather, but liable to be loosened or washed away during a storm. In fact, this accident is of continual occurrence, just as it is in the cases of the Chimney Swifts. The birds’ instinct—whatever that may mean; I despise the word as a label of our ignorance and conceit—say rather, their reason, teaches them to come in out of the rain. This may also have something to do with the clustering of nests, commonly observed when the birds build on the faces of cliffs, for obviously such a mass would withstand the weather better than a single edifice.