A Gathering of Birds

by Donald Culross Peattie

  One note used by robins is a very small, high sound, a note such as we might imagine to be made if a tiny bow were drawn across a single fine hair stretched on a tiny violin. This note expresses annoyance at the approach of another robin to the territory. It is a very inward note and seems to express the emotion of the bird that makes it, rather than to be a warning or a challenge. This note is often made when the bird is on the hunt.

  Another note is a short warble, a smaller sound than the full song; it is very sweet in tone, but is in fact a warning or a challenge to a robin in neighbouring territory, and is either in answer to or is answered by the robin to which it is addressed. This warble is frequently given when standing on the hand, and the intention and reason of it are always apparent.

  A fight between two robins is a serious affair. One cold January day “White Feather” came into the territory of another tame robin, when it was on my hand. A furious combat ensued at my feet, and when it was over there were pitiful-looking little dark feathers left strewn upon the snow. So many were they that had I found them without having seen how they came there, I should certainly have thought that some bird had been killed on the spot.

  With leisure in an uninterrupted country life much more might be done in taming wild birds. Indeed, I have known of one garden, though I never had the good fortune to see it, where the owner by patience and regular habits succeeded in keeping many wild birds of several varieties on terms of intimacy with him, more remarkable than any described here.

  More birds are to be seen, free and tame, in London than on any country estate. In London black-headed gulls, that are entirely wild birds, come in numbers in autumn and winter, and will feed, or at any rate snatch food from the hand. Several varieties of interesting waterfowl, especially pochards and tufted ducks, may be seen close to us, and yet free; and the sparrows and wood-pigeons positively invite attention. Now and then one comes across some one who is taking full advantage of the opportunities offered by the tameness of London birds. I met a man in Regent’s Park one day who was feeding sparrows on his hand. I stood beside him; a wood-pigeon was walking about a few yards away. “Can you get that wood-pigeon to come on to your hand?” “Oh, yes,” he said, and turning towards the bird held out his hand with a gesture, deliberate but smooth and quiet. The pigeon flew up, and fed with its pink feet planted on his hand. We had some conversation in which he gave me some information about grey and black squirrels, and made some interesting comments of his own upon them. When we parted I left with the inward assurance that here was some one who never lacked interest in his leisure, and who had one satisfaction that no one can have in the country—that of being completely trusted by a free wood-pigeon.

  Any unusual gesture or movement affronts or frightens tame birds, but otherwise they seem to recognise people by clothes more than by anything else. The robins, it is true, are indifferent to clothes; they will come to the meal-worm box, whatever the garb of the person who offers it. But the waterfowl are perceptibly less tame if I wear dark clothes, though my whistle and gestures are familiar to them. In the long days of summer time the sunset feed is not till after dinner, and it is desirable when visiting them to conceal evening clothes (if one has dressed for dinner) with a light-coloured over-coat.

  After the disappearance of the pair of robins in May 1926 six months passed without any sign of these or any tame robin. In November a new robin beyond the further pond began to show signs of intelligence. Its territory was out of sight of the greenhouse and distant about 300 yards.

  On 22nd November I started with the box of meal-worms in my pocket to continue the education of this bird, which was not yet hand-tame. I had just left the greenhouse, when a robin presented itself obtrusively and expectantly in the spiraea bush. The box was offered to it; the bird came at once on to my hand, stood there for some time eating meal-worms and occasionally warbling a challenge to another robin a little way off. It was very pleasant to feel once more, after an interval of six months, the confident clasp of the slender feet upon my fingers.

  XVIII

  HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  THERE had been a fresh fall of snow upon snow, when first I saw Walden woods and Walden pond, and it was the snow that drew us out. Five of us, at Harvard, went on the electric line to Belmont, and then began to slog the snowy road to Concord. It was a few moments after the early winter sunset when one who knew the road well sang out, “That’s Walden pond.” By the edge of the pond we stood a bit, asking each other whether the pines and the water and rocks had made the man or whether he had not, rather, made them what they are, famous around the world, loved by people who will never see them. We inquired into the nature of Transcendentalism. Someone decided that Transcendentalism had died, and the rest began to stray from the pond back to the road.

  But I lingered a moment, and it seemed to me that the man rose up, on the farther shore, and revealed himself. For the pines and the granite, the ice and the lichens, the green winter sunset and the cold tingling air, the lake and the silence are some of the clearest printing in the book of Nature. I had been reading it all my life, in different places, and had come to love it even more than I loved my sciences, or the arts. And this particular verse and chapter, Thoreau had loved. I looked at it a long minute, and beheld the man.

  I saw a man who was taller in the soul than others as an aspen is taller than the grey birch. I heard a man who knew more than he said, who expected you to understand him when he did not speak, and to love him when he was harsh. I knew a man who could run a straight surveyor’s line, and thought that way. A wintry and granite man, but granite that could laugh, and winter like pure snow driven upon the old. A religious man too but, most originally, a deist who sought communion and identity with the works of God, and heard the bellowing inside the walls of a church with horror. A man who prayed standing.

  It is my belief that Thoreau would have been the first to say that you could have read him by Walden pond in winter. If he had wanted the spotlight, if he had wanted only to preach, if he had loved words, and ink, and authorship, he would have written more books. As it is, he wrote chiefly in his diary and chiefly for himself. The Journals from which these extracts are taken saw publication only after his death. Thoreau never intended them for publication as they now stand. They were but his source books from which the materials were to be quarried for mature and polished end-products. What those books would have been like, we may judge from Walden, or Life in the Woods, a classic that is perfect. It was the first book of its kind in the world; there will never be another like it; it is utterly original, and it is inexhaustible.

  Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817 very near to Concord. His mother was Cynthia Dunbar, and from her he inherited the gift of self-expression, vivacity and the love of the outdoors. His father was a quiet, “small” merchant with a turn for doing things with his hands. Henry Thoreau had a typical New England boyhood of the times. He hunted and fished, roamed the fields, and acquired a wide wood-wisdom. He attended Harvard, where his passion was the library, and the Greek poets and philosophers. His essays were remarked by his teachers for their strength and purity.

  At the age of twenty-one Thoreau seems already to have begun his true career, which was what he called “sauntering,” though it was a very busy kind. He lived at home with his family, without apparently any inner need for having one of his own. On several occasions he dwelt with the Emersons, and mingled a little in the Brook Farm experiment of communistic life according to the principles of Fourier.

  The association with Emerson was crucial in his life, for through Emerson and his friends, Thoreau reached Oriental philosophy, Carlyle, the English Lake poets, and Goethe. The idea of owning no property he may have owed in part to Fourier. He New-Englandized this, as he did everything else, combining it with the pioneer tradition of self-reliance. He undoubtedly owed something to Bronson Alcott, who was in close touch with Goethe’s “Romantic Natural Philosophy” (which is a chapter in the history of Natural Hist
ory).

  But equally important, I think, was his inclination toward the society of people who never sat at Emerson’s feet, typical “Yankees” as the word is used in New England. These were farmers, hunters, fur-trappers, fishermen, loafers and whittlers with a fund of independence, little speech and all of that racy, native wit and a serene parochialism. They were protestants, in religion, or, if godless, in modes of life. They found their world good, and wide enough. Thoreau was born one of them; at Walden he lived rather like them. One can hardly say he enjoyed their society for they did not form a society. They were shy of each other and still more of strangers. So reserve and withdrawal were the keystones of Thoreau’s character and of his particular type of communion with Nature. He was a truant who had read his Anacreon.

  It was in 1845 that Thoreau built his hut on land belonging to Emerson, with an axe borrowed from Alcott. In the midst of the bluestocking gabble of Concord, Mr. Thoreau had chosen to go off and live by himself! Concord was agog. Everyone beat a path to his door, although he was the last man in the world who would have made a mousetrap. Absolute strangers snooped while he was out watching fox or nuthatch, and wrote articles about his unwashed pans and unmade bed. By quitting the world, he got himself bruited about in it. And here by the pond he lived the greatest moments of his life. What they were, how rapturously experienced, how he found himself completely, Walden has told for all time.

  As he walked into the village one day he was arrested for non-payment of his poll tax. This was due to no negligence on his part, but to his intention of refusing every support to a government that expended its moneys for the capture and return of negro slaves. A relative paid his fine, but he never returned to the hut by the pond.

  In early middle life Thoreau was stricken with tuberculosis, went to Minnesota (of all places for a cure) and when he saw he could not recover, returned home to die. He left the major portion of his work unfinished—something like a million words in his diaries.

  I think it will not be questioned that Thoreau was the noblest stylist who ever devoted himself to Nature. I will not say, however, that the unfinished Journals bear this out completely, since they were only sketches for some final picture. But, for purposes of a bird book, they are still the best source. To judge from Walden and works he himself completed, Thoreau would have reduced all passages concerning birds to about a twelfth of the space they occupied in the Journals, nor is it conceivable that he would ever have published a book solely about the birds of Concord, though just such a book has been delightfully assembled under the title, Notes on New England Birds, edited by Francis Allen. Birds served Thoreau in Walden as a text or a vehicle. In the Journals he recorded them partly for their own sakes. That makes the Journals precious to us.

  Thoreau early gave up the gun, and was long in acquiring a lens for bird study. In the interim, like any countryman, he relied on what he could see with the naked eye. When he did buy a glass, it was a telescope. This was an ideal instrument for watching waterfowl on the pond; it is quite impractical for birds of wood and field, and Thoreau is less successful with them. Though his manuals were Wilson and Nuttall, he never attained completely accurate field identification of birds. Thus, in his quoted passages on the thrush it is evident that he has confused the wood thrush and the hermit thrush, and never even distinguished the olive-backed. His ear for bird notes remained untrained. He has almost nothing to say of one of the commonest and most exquisite of singers, the whitethroat sparrow, and when he did hear it, sets the notes down sometimes to the myrtle warbler. A gull to Thoreau was a gull; a hawk was a hawk. Yet in matters botanical he was a nice systematist.

  All this is a way of saying that Thoreau relied a little too much on self-reliance, and had a bit too much poetic scorn for science. There were then in Boston naturalists who could have assisted him to a deeper understanding, but he employed them only occasionally.

  Yet Thoreau’s mistakes are pardonable and negligible. He was by intention a meticulously truthful reporter, which is more than can be said of a host of those who are Nature writers rather than naturalists. A man who could spend hours over finding the one right word, pruning out adjectives, and turning perfect paragraphs, naturally carried over his discipline to Nature. He might have observed birds more knowingly, but nobody could have described them in his continent language, or so linked them to our inmost thoughts.

  LOON

  1845-47 (no exact date). The loon comes in the fall to sail and bathe in the pond, making the woods ring with its wild laughter in the early morning, at rumor of whose arrival all Concord sportsmen are on the alert, in gigs, on foot, two by two, three by three, with patent rifles, patches, conical balls, spy-glass or open hole over the barrel. They seem already to hear the loon laugh; come rustling through the woods like October leaves, these on this side, those on that, for the poor loon cannot be omnipresent; if he dive here, must come up somewhere. The October wind rises, rustling the leaves, ruffling the pond water, so that no loon can be seen rippling the surface. Our sportsmen scour, sweep the pond with spyglass in vain, making the woods ring with rude[?] charges of powder, for the loon went off in that morning rain with one loud, long, hearty laugh, and our sportsmen must beat a retreat to town and stable and daily routine, shop work, unfinished jobs again.

  Or in the gray dawn the sleeper hears the long ducking gun explode over toward Goose Pond, and, hastening to the door, sees the remnant of a flock, black duck or teal, go whistling by with outstretched neck, with broken ranks, but in ranger order. And the silent hunter emerges into the carriage road with ruffled feathers at his belt, from the dark pond-side where he has lain in his bower since the stars went out.

  And for a week you hear the circling clamor, clangor, of some solitary goose through the fog, seeking its mate, peopling the woods with a larger life than they can hold.

  For hours in fall days you shall watch the ducks cunningly tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsmen on the shore,—tricks they have learned and practiced in far Canada lakes or in Louisiana bayous.

  The waves rise and dash, taking sides with all water-fowl.

  Oct. 8, 1852. p.m.—Walden. As I was paddling along the north shore, after having looked in vain over the pond for a loon, suddenly a loon, sailing toward the middle, a few rods in front, set up his wild laugh and betrayed himself. I pursued with a paddle and he dived, but when he came up I was nearer than before. He dived again, but I miscalculated the direction he would take, and we were fifty rods apart when he came up, and again he laughed long and loud. He managed very cunningly, and I could not get within half a dozen rods of him. Sometimes he would come up unexpectedly on the opposite side of me, as if he had passed directly under the boat. So long-winded was he, so unweariable, that he would immediately plunge again, and then no wit could divine where in the deep pond, beneath the smooth surface, he might be speeding his way like a fish. He had time and ability to visit the bottom of the pond in its deepest part. It was as well for me to rest on my oars and await his reappearing as to endeavor to calculate where he would come up. When I was straining my eyes over the surface, I would suddenly be startled by his unearthly laugh behind me. It was commonly a demoniac laughter, yet somewhat like a water-bird, but occasionally, when he had balked me most successfully and come up a long way off, he uttered a long-drawn unearthly howl, probably more like a wolf than any other bird. This was his looning. As when a beast puts his muzzle to the ground and deliberately howls; perhaps the wildest sound I ever heard, making the woods ring; and I concluded that he laughed in derision of my efforts, confident of his own resources. Though the sky was overcast, the pond was so smooth that I could see where he broke the surface if I did not hear him. His white breast, the stillness of the air, the smoothness of the water, were all against him. At length, having come up fifty rods off, he uttered one of those prolonged unearthly howls, as if calling on the god of loons to aid him, and immediately there came a wind from the east and rippled the surface, and fil
led the whole air with misty rain. I was impressed as if it were the prayer of the loon and his god was angry with me. How surprised must be the fishes to see this ungainly visitant from another sphere speeding his way amid their schools!

  HERRING GULL

  April 15, 1852. They come annually a-fishing here like royal hunters, to remind us of the sea and that our town, after all, lies but further up a creek of the universal sea, above the head of the tide. So ready is a deluge to overwhelm our lands, as the gulls to circle hither in the spring freshets. To see a gull beating high over our meadowy flood in chill and windy March is akin to seeing a mackerel schooner on the coast. It is the nearest approach to sailing vessels in our scenery. I never saw one at Walden. Oh, how it salts our fresh, our sweet-watered Fair Haven all at once to see this sharp-beaked, greedy sea-bird beating over it!

  CANADA GOOSE

  March 26, 1846. A flock of geese has just got in late, now in the dark flying low over the pond. They came on, indulging at last like weary travellers in complaint and consolation, or like some creaking evening mail late lumbering in with regular anserine clangor. I stood at my door and could hear their wings when they suddenly spied my light and, ceasing their noise, wheeled to the east and apparently settled in the pond.

  April 19, 1852. That last flock of geese yesterday is still in my eye. After hearing their clangor, looking southwest, we saw them just appearing over a dark pine wood, in an irregular waved line, one abreast of the other, as it were breasting the air and pushing it before them. They carry weight, such a weight of metal in the air. These stormy days they do not love to fly; they alight in some retired marsh or river. From their lofty pathway they can easily spy out the most extensive and retired swamp. How many there must be, that one or more flocks are seen to go over almost every farm in New England in the spring!