A Gathering of Birds

by Donald Culross Peattie

  March 26, 1853. Saw about 10 a.m. a gaggle of geese, forty-three in number, in a very perfect harrow flying northeasterly. One side of the harrow was a little longer than the other. They appeared to be four or five feet apart. At first I heard faintly, as I stood by Minott’s gate, borne to me from the southwest through the confused sounds of the village, the indistinct honking of geese.

  March 20, 1855. Trying the other day to imitate the honking of geese, I found myself flapping my sides with my elbows, as with wings, and uttering something like the syllables mowack with a nasal twang and twist in my head; and I produced their note so perfectly in the opinion of the hearers that I thought I might possibly draw a flock down.

  Dec. 13, 1855. Sanborn* tells me that he was waked up a few nights ago in Boston, about midnight, by the sound of a flock of geese passing over the city, probably about the same night I heard them here. They go honking over cities where the arts flourish, waking the inhabitants; over State-houses and capitals, where legislatures sit; over harbors where fleets lie at anchor; mistaking the city, perhaps, for a swamp or the edge of a lake, about settling in it, not suspecting that greater geese than they have settled there.

  Nov. 8, 1857. A warm, cloudy, rain-threatening morning. I saw through my window some children looking up and pointing their tiny bows into the heavens, and I knew at once that the geese were in the air. The children, instinctively aware of its importance, rushed into the house to tell their parents. These travellers are revealed to you by the upward-turned gaze of men. And though these undulating lines are melting into the southwestern sky, the sound comes clear and distinct to you as the clank of a chain in a neighboring smithy. So they migrate, not flitting from hedge to hedge, but from latitude to latitude, from State to State, steering boldly out into the ocean of the air.

  March 31, 1858. Just after sundown I see a large flock of geese in a perfect harrow cleaving their way toward the northeast, with Napoleonic tactics splitting the forces of winter.

  * Mr. F. B. Sanborn of Concord, who was Thoreau’s biographer.

  HEN-HAWK

  June 8, 1853. As I stood by this pond, I heard a hawk scream, and, looking up, saw a pretty large one circling not far off and incessantly screaming, as I at first supposed to scare and so discover its prey, but its screaming was so incessant and it circled from time to time so near me, as I moved southward, that I began to think it had a nest near by and was angry at my intrusion into its domains. As I was looking up at it, thinking it the only living creature within view, I was singularly startled to behold, as my eye by chance penetrated deeper into the blue,—the abyss of blue above, which I had taken for a solitude,—its mate silently soaring at an immense height and seemingly indifferent to me. We are surprised to discover that there can be an eye on us on that side, and so little suspected,—that the heavens are full of eyes, though they look so blue and spotless. When I drew nearer to the tall trees where I suspected the nest to be, the female descended again, swept by screaming still nearer to me just over the tree-tops, and finally, while I was looking for the orchis in the swamp, alighted on a white pine twenty or thirty rods off. (The great fringed orchis just open.) At length I detected the nest about eighty feet from the ground, in a very large white pine by the edge of the swamp. It was about three feet in diameter, of dry sticks, and a young hawk, apparently as big as its mother, stood on the edge of the nest looking down at me, and only moving its head when I moved.

  June 9, 1853. I have come with a spy-glass to look at the hawks. They have detected me and are already screaming over my head more than half a mile from the nest. I find no difficulty in looking at the young hawk (there appears to be one only, standing on the edge of the nest), resting the glass in the crotch of a young oak. I can see every wink and the color of its iris. It watches me more steadily than I it, now looking straight down at me with both eyes and outstretched neck, now turning its head and looking with one eye. How its eye and its whole head express anger! Its anger is more in its eye than in its beak.

  June 13, 1853. 9 A.M.—To Orchis Swamp.

  Find that there are two young hawks; one has left the nest and is perched on a small maple seven or eight rods distant. Pratt, when I told him of this nest, said he would like to carry one of his rifles down there. But I told him that I should be sorry to have them killed. I would rather save one of these hawks than have a hundred hens and chickens. It was worth more to see them soar, especially now that they are so rare in the landscape. It is easy to buy eggs, but not to buy hen-hawks. My neighbors would not hesitate to shoot the last pair of hen-hawks in the town to save a few of their chickens! But such economy is narrow and grovelling. I would rather never taste chickens’ meat nor hens’ eggs than never to see a hawk sailing through the upper air again.

  THRUSH

  July 27, 1840. The wood thrush is a more modern philosopher than Plato and Aristotle. They are now a dogma, but he preaches the doctrine of this hour.

  May 31, 1850. There is a sweet wild world which lies along the strain of the wood thrush—the rich intervales which border the stream of its song—more thoroughly genial to my nature than any other.

  June 22, 1851. I hear around me, but never in sight, the many wood thrushes whetting their steel-like notes. Such keen singers! It takes a fiery heat, many dry pine leaves added to the furnace of the sun, to temper their strains! Always they are either rising or falling to a new strain. After what a moderate pause they deliver themselves again! saying ever a new thing, avoiding repetition, methinks answering one another. While most other birds take their siesta, the wood thrush discharges his song. It is delivered like a bolas, or a piece of jingling steel.

  April 30, 1852. I hear a wood thrush here, with a fine metallic ring to his note. This sound most adequately expresses the immortal beauty and wildness of the woods. I go in search of him. He sounds no nearer. On a low bough of a small maple near the brook in the swamp, he sits with ruffled feathers, singing more low or with less power, as it were ventriloquizing; for though I am scarcely more than a rod off, he seems further off than ever.

  July 5, 1852. Some birds are poets and sing all summer. They are the true singers. Any man can write verses during the love season. I am reminded of this while we rest in the shade on the Major Heywood road and listen to a wood thrush, now just before sunset. We are most interested in those birds who sing for the love of the music and not of their mates; who meditate their strains, and amuse themselves with singing; the birds, the strains, of deeper sentiment; not bobolinks, that lose their plumage, their bright colors, and their song so early. The robin, the red-eye, the veery, the wood thrush, etc., etc.

  The wood thrush’s is no opera music; it is not so much the composition as the strain, the tone,—cool bars of melody from the atmosphere of everlasting morning or evening. It is the quality of the song, not the sequence. In the peawai’s * note there is some sultriness, but in the thrush’s, though heard at noon, there is the liquid coolness of things that are just drawn from the bottom of springs. The thrush alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest. Here is a bird in whose strain the story is told, though Nature waited for the science of aesthetics to discover it to man. Whenever a man hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring. Wherever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him. Most other birds sing from the level of my ordinary cheerful hours—a carol; but this bird never fails to speak to me out of an ether purer than that I breathe, of immortal beauty and vigor. He deepens the significance of all things seen in the light of his strain. He sings to make men take higher and truer views of things. He sings to amend their institutions; to relieve the slave on the plantation and the prisoner in his dungeon, the slave in the house of luxury and the prisoner of his own low thoughts.

  July 27, 1852. How cool and assuaging the thrush’s note after the fever of the day! I doubt if they have anything so richly wild in Europe. So long a civilization must have banished it. It will only be he
ard in America, perchance, while our star is in the ascendant. I should be very much surprised if I were to hear in the strain of the nightingale such unexplored wildness and fertility, reaching to sundown, inciting to emigration. Such a bird must itself have emigrated long ago. Why, then, was I born in America? I might ask.

  June 22, 1853. As I come over the hill, I hear the wood thrush singing his evening lay. This is the only bird whose note affects me like music, affects the flow and tenor of my thought, my fancy and imagination. It lifts and exhilarates me. It is inspiring. It is a medicative draught to my soul. It is an elixir to my eyes and a fountain of youth to all my senses. It changes all hours to an eternal morning. It banishes all trivialness. It reinstates me in my dominion, makes me the lord of creation, is chief musician of my court. This minstrel sings in a time, a heroic age, with which no event in the village can be contemporary. How can they be contemporary when only the latter is temporary at all? How can the infinite and eternal be contemporary with the finite and temporal? So there is something in the music of the cow-bell, something sweeter and more nutritious, than in the milk which the farmers drink. This thrush’s song is a ranz des vaches to me. I long for wildness, a nature which I cannot put my foot through, woods where the wood thrush forever sings, where the hours are early morning ones, and there is dew on the grass, and the day is forever unproved, where I might have a fertile unknown for a soil about me. I would go after the cows, I would watch the flocks of Admetus there forever, only for my board and clothes. A New Hampshire everlasting and unfallen.

  All that was ripest and fairest in the wilderness and the wild man is preserved and transmitted to us in the strain of the wood thrush. It is the mediator between barbarism and civilization. It is unrepentant as Greece.

  April 27, 1854. The wood thrush afar,—so superior a strain to that of other birds. I was doubting if it would affect me as of yore, but it did measurably. I did not believe there could be such differences. This is the gospel according to the wood thrush.

  * The wood pewee.

  XIX

  JOHN JAMES AUDUBON

  THE best loved of all American ornithologists, Audubon raises up for himself in every generation new hosts of admirers who discover him with passion. Such is no less than a definition of immortality. Even Europeans, though they have never heard the name of another American ornithologist, know of Audubon. And that is world fame. About him has grown a body of legends (as most of them are affectionate, it is not necessary, except when writing serious biography, to set them aside). And this amounts to canonization.

  So that I can scarcely “introduce” an immortal genius, above all not to the likely readers of these words. I am under the obligation not so much to repeat the facts of his life as to avoid repeating too many of the well-known ones, and to discuss rather the place of his life work in science and in art (for his astounding genius bridged the wide gap between these two).

  John James Audubon, it is now definitely established, was born in Haiti in 1785, the son of Captain Jean Audubon of the French Royal Navy, by a woman named in the documents by what is possibly a pseudonym, “Mile. Rabin.” After the death of his mother, he was brought back to France, and reared at Nantes by his foster mother, the Captain’s wife. As a boy, he had a passion for birds, and nothing, not his schooling, not his father’s attempts to control his bent, not his business ventures, nor his responsibilities as a husband and father, nor the derision and criticism of the society in which he moved in wilderness America, nor the lack of training both in science and art, nor the hostility and spiteful intrigues of Alexander Wilson’s supporters, ever altered this passion. Very early he began to draw birds, as well as to watch, collect, and mount them. For years he annually tore up his drawings. His only formal training was a few months in the atelier of David in Paris. But Audubon’s was an unruly spirit; he would not learn anything in a formal or routine way, and presumably David was not interested in bird painting. Audubon’s only scientific training in early youth seems to have been a few months’ rambling in western France with the gifted ornithologist d’Orbigny.

  For lack of anything better to do with him, Captain Audubon packed the twenty-year-old lad off to America. Audubon proceeded to his father’s property “Mill Grove,” near Philadelphia, and there, not many miles from Wilson’s school, but entirely unknown to naturalists in the Quaker city, he made the bird-banding experiment which is mentioned in the present selection called “The Phoebe.” Technically the experiment was a failure, though Audubon does not seem to have realized this, but he was on the right track, and his attempt was made at a time when the whole question of migration was hazy. Migration was not even a thoroughly accepted fact, as my selections from Gilbert White prove. Wilson was trying to establish a system of correspondents to work out bird migration. But nobody other than Audubon devised the simple expedient of “ringing” a bird. By luck or intuition he chose a species that actually does return to the same nest. All he lacked was a modern aluminum band for the bird’s leg.

  At this time, however, Audubon’s chief interest in birds was that of a young gentleman of fortune and leisure—he wanted to shoot game. His sport led to his meeting with a neighbor, the Englishman Bakewell, and Bakewell introduced him to his fifteen-year-old daughter, Lucy, a heroine now so famous and loved that there is no need to stop and praise her or her part in making Audubon’s career.

  We have to reconstruct a vanished scene, to picture to ourselves the Middle West as it was when John and Lucy took their wedding journey down the Ohio to Kentucky. Probably never in historic times had a naturalist such unrivaled opportunities to study virgin wilderness in the temperate zone. Certainly those times will never be seen again. The vast Mississippi basin, between Appalachians and Rockies, was an Eden of birds. In the east it was magnificently timbered; in the west rolled unspoiled prairie or New World steppe. And up this flyway and back moved the feathered hosts of the continent—or two continents. For the North American avifauna consists of two elements, the permanent residents, oceanic birds, and winter visitants which belong to the great circumpolar life zone, and are hence close kin to European kinds, and secondly the tropical American species, belonging in part to families unknown in Europe; these last, of course, are summer visitants. And while, in aboriginal America, they spread out everywhere, there were never such numbers at any time as passed over Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi in the days when Audubon hunted, drew, and adventured there.

  Among all these birds none made so deep an impression on every European as the passenger pigeons, of which we shall soon hear Audubon speak. Wilson’s account of them is almost, but not quite, as stirring as Audubon’s. They have become, for the American, a symbol of a vanished virginal beauty, an abundance that can never return. They mean to him what the bison meant, or the unbroken prairie, and what the redwoods still mean. They are gone now, the passengers. Though still often reported, they are never seen by a single competent ornithologist. The last went thirty years ago. Their destruction must in part be blamed, and heavily blamed, not so much on sportsmen as on commercial bird catchers and the persons of wealth and presumable intelligence who bought them in the markets up to the last. But perhaps, like the bison, they were doomed anyway. For they depended on the mast of the great beech forests of the Middle West, and the rich soil under these forests was needed for agriculture, to feed a growing nation.

  The trumpeter swan, which is the subject of the second of these selections, is the largest of all North American wild fowl. It probably breeds nowhere now in the United States, except perhaps in the wilder portions of Montana and Wyoming. Even in Canada the Indians capture it in summer when its primaries have molted and it is unable to fly. Once its trumpetings were heard over the breadth of a continent, as it forged its powerful way from the tropics to the arctic. So Audubon heard it, as he tells, while encamped on the “Tawapatee Bottom” where ice had driven his merchant’s bark from the Mississippi.

  For a merchant he had become, and never was a ma
n less suited to trade. One disheartening failure after another broke his spirit and tried his brave wife’s. It was only when failure was complete, final, that they both realized that what had seemed like his truancy from responsibilities—his long excursions in the forest, his bird drawings, his overmastering passion—simply pointed to his proper destiny. So while Lucy gallantly undertook the support of the children, John set out to see the world of birds, and to paint them. He supported himself by painting portraits, teaching drawing, dancing, fencing, and French. And this is the period of his ebullient creation, the formative epoch of his genius. In this time he learned to draw birds as they live—not as, stuffed, they are wired to a perch. He drew them eating, fighting, soaring, dying, mating, hunting lice under their wings. He drew them amid their native scenes, surrounded by the food they prefer; he drew them in the most complex perspectives, catching them perpetually in action. His birds seem to leap off the page with a cry!

  As this is the manner we require of any good bird painting today, it is necessary to remember that it is Audubon’s own invention, his great contribution to scientific illustration. In his times the method had never been heard of. It roused positive rage among the academic, and still annoys some temperaments. There may be better drawings in existence today—but only because Audubon showed the way. And there are exactly none with Audubon’s strange and original genius. When we pass from the work of one of his polished modern successors to Audubon’s own, with all his faults and failures, it is like the change one senses in going back of Virgil to Homer. You have come to the father of them all.