Part 7 (2/2)
ROBINS
Recently in a letter to the Burroughs' Nature Study Clubs of a Southern state John Burroughs wrote:
”If your club can help to send back the robin to us in the spring with his breast unstained with his own blood, but glowing with the warmth of your s.h.i.+ning and hospitable land, I shall rejoice that it bears my name.”
The people in the Northern United States have courted favor with the robin and in every way possible protect him, and are always ready to welcome him back after the winter is over, and in fact, the robin is to be praised for his summer popularity as much as he is to be pitied for his winter treatment in the south. One writer says his return to the north 'is announced by the newspapers like that of eminent or notorious people to a watering place, as the first authentic notification of spring.' There, where robins are appreciated, they become quite tame and build and raise their young in the orchards and about the houses. Birds are not altogether unlike people in that they never forget favors. They always know in what sections of country they are welcomed.
When robin redbreast returns south, he comes driven by the chilly blasts of the Ice King of the north, and I regret to say has to face the Southern people with fear and trembling. Parents allow boys to take guns and go out and kill anything legally or illegally, and such boys always develop the brutal and barbarous instinct of murder--taking innocent blood. The following I clipped from the locals of a weekly newspaper in the Southern part of Georgia:
”They have about succeeded in killing all the robins out at 'Robin's Roost,' near Robert's Mill. Thousands of these birds had been flying to a ford near there to roost, and they offered fine sport for those who like shooting.”
The reporter of the above seemed to count it a success to kill all the robins. Moreover he affirms that killing them is fine sport. This spirit of slaughter is no doubt born in us, but it does seem that we could teach the young how to love, to protect, and to enjoy rather than to kill! kill! kill! Some boys I know can hardly bear to see a live bird of any kind, but are perfectly at ease if they can kill something. They take some weapon with them as religiously as they take their books to school, in order that nothing escape them. They are always hoping to see some form of bird life to persecute or slaughter. Our public schools are beginning to interest themselves in bird protection, and I am glad to say, have accomplished great good wherever they have tried to teach simple lessons of bird life to school children.
The robin is too valuable to exterminate as he feeds upon noxious weed seeds and injurious insects, and usually has a good appet.i.te and certainly never eats useful plants in the south. His practical value to Orchards and Agriculture generally, should be impressed upon parents and a love for him impressed upon the younger minds. When we cannot appeal through either of these channels, we should arouse the sympathy of the public. Robins ordinarily come south to spend the winter, as the weather is much warmer and they get a greater food supply. But in 1905, a small flock of them wintered near Lake Forest, Illinois. This I think was due to the fact that the birds did not care to face their enemies of the South. In that section of country from Lake Forest to Waukegan, Illinois, not a robin had been shot for several years past. The birds knew their friends and preferred to brave the Northern winter with them, rather than come down south where our youths are forever running through the woods with gun on shoulder ready to take life.
Burroughs says: ”Robin is one of our most native and democratic birds; he is one of the family (in the north) and seems much more to us than those rare exotic visitors with their distant and high-bred ways.” The carol of the robin is very inspiring as you hear him:
”Heavenward lift his evening hymn,”
or perhaps when you first wake in the morning at early dawn, and listen to his love song, as he perches on some treetop in the edge of a nearby woods. How rich his red breast looks from such a perch just as the sun comes above the horizon and reflects its first rays against him! Just one experience like this in the whole year, how much it would add to life's pleasures! ”With this pleasing a.s.sociation with the opening season, amidst the fragrance of flowers and the improving verdure of the fields, we listen with peculiar pleasure to the simple song of the robin. The confidence he reposes in us by making his abode in our gardens and orchards, the frankness and innocence of his manners, besides his vocal powers to please, inspire respect and attachment, even in the truant schoolboy, and his exposed nest is but rarely molested,”
says Nuttall, who writes eloquently of the robin.
The robin sings in autumn as well as in spring, and his autumn song is by no means inferior to his spring song, and I have always loved the old song, _Good-bye to Summer_, because of the special tribute to the robin's song, the chorus of which goes,
”O, Robin, Robin, redbreast!
O, Robin, Robin, dear!
O, Robin, sing so sweetly, In the falling of the year!”
It is rather interesting to note, however, that they usually sing in concert when they return south in the autumn. You can hear them in great numbers singing while feeding around a patch of _Ilex glabra_, the berries of which afford them considerable food in mid-winter. I love to welcome them back to the south in the autumn, and to hear their beautiful concert song.
BLACKBIRDS
It is rather remarkable to note how easy it is to cultivate the friends.h.i.+p of birds, even birds that are ordinarily quite wild. When I used to go to my office in the early morning, I always scattered a few handfuls of grits around the back window that I might accommodate some of my special friends to a breakfast, and it required only a short time for me to win the confidence of so many birds that I had to limit them to quite a short breakfast. At first no blackbirds came near me or my place of business. Soon they would sit on nearby trees and return to the grounds immediately after I returned from the yard back into the house.
I had among my daily visitors not less than three or four hundred of these welcome friends. They would play around in the yard very amusingly and pick at each other much like children and afforded me much amus.e.m.e.nt and many pleasant moments in the course of a week.
Blackbirds have very little music in them or rather get very little out of themselves. John Burroughs has this to say of their music: ”Their voices always sound as if they were laboring under a severe attack of influenza, though a large flock of them heard at a distance on a bright afternoon of early spring produce an effect not unpleasing. The air is filled with crackling, splintering, spurting semi-musical sounds, which are like pepper and salt to the ear.” I really enjoy the mingled sounds produced by a great congregation of them, and often follow a flock of them down the creek side to their favorite resting place, just to hear them. They are always in great flocks here during the winter, and sometimes when feeding along on a hillside, the rear ranks marching over the bulk to the front in rapid succession, present an appearance somewhat like heavy waves of the sea, and one a short distance looks on with admiration and even surprise, to see such symmetry and uniformity in their movement.
One cannot fail to appreciate how much good a great flock of them do in a day as they move across a field covered with noxious gra.s.s and weed seeds. They seem to form an army in order to co-operate with man in every possible way to balance up the powers of nature. Weeds prevent crops from growing. Every seed that germinates in the soil and is allowed to grow, if only for a short while, tends to exhaust the soil.
If the birds get these seeds in winter before germination begins, the useful plants will have a much larger fund of food from which to draw.
Once in a while our blackbirds get a little grain and the farmer condemns them and looks upon them only with a murderer's eye. The birds do a hundred times more good than evil, and should not be condemned on such slight provocation. Their hard fare during the winter makes them rush into the fields sometimes in spring and get a taste of grains useful to man, but surely they should be pitied rather than censured, and so long as I can get them to depend on me for help, I am going to put out a mite for their breakfast. With sorrow I bid them good-bye each spring, but with renewed delight I hail with joy their return in autumn with their young.
THE NUTHATCH
Could I ever be satisfied were I located in some nook of this old earth where the voice of the nuthatch is not heard once in a while! His simple song--I speak of the white-breasted nuthatch--beats time to my daily routine of laboratory and field work and its very simplicity adds dignity to my little friend's life. All will easily recognize this useful little neighbor. His coat is of light blueish gray above, with a crown, nap, and upper back black. His tail and wings have black markings, while his lower parts and sides of head are white in the main.
It is remarkable to find the nuthatch so ready to make friends with us, when he is generally considered a forest bird in this part of the country.
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