Under the Maples. John Burroughs

was phenomenally still, not a leaf stirred, and the hawk was compelled to beat his wings vigorously. No soaring now, no mounting heavenward, as I have seen him mount till his petty persecutor grew dizzy with the height and returned to earth. But the next day, with a fairly good breeze blowing, I watched two hawks for many minutes climbing their spiral stairway to the skies, till they became very small objects against the clouds, and not once did they flap their wings! Then one of them turned toward the mountain-top and sailed straight into the face of the wind, till he was probably over his mate or young, when, with half-folded wings, he shot down into the tree-tops like an arrow.

      In regard to powers of flight, the birds of the air may be divided into three grand classes: those which use their wings simply to transport themselves from one place to another, – the same use we put our legs to, – those which climb the heavens to attain a wide lookout, either for the pleasure of soaring, or to gain a vantage-point from which to scan a wide territory in search of food or prey, and those which feed as they fly. Most of our common birds are examples of the first class. Our hawks and buzzards are examples of the second class. Swallows, nighthawks, and some sea-birds are examples of the third class. A few of our birds use their wings to gain an elevation from which to deliver their songs – as the larks, and some of the finches; but the robins and the sparrows and the warblers and the woodpeckers are always going somewhere. The hawks and the buzzards are, comparatively speaking, birds of leisure.

      Every bird and beast is a master in the use of its own tools and weapons. We who look on from the outside marvel at their skill. Here is the carpenter bumble-bee hovering and darting about the verge-board of my porch-roof as I write this. It darts swiftly this way and that, and now and then pauses in midair, surrounded by a blur of whirring wings, as often does the hummingbird. How it does it, I do not know. I cannot count or distinguish the separate stroke of its wings. At the same time, the chimney swifts sweep by me like black arrows, on wings apparently as stiff as if made of tin or sheet-iron, now beating the air, now sailing. In some way they suggest winged gimlets. How thin and scimitar-like their wings are! They are certainly masters of their own craft.

      In general, birds in flight bring the wings as far below the body as they do above it. Note the crow flapping his way through the air. He is a heavy flyer, but can face a pretty strong wind. His wings probably move through an arc of about ninety degrees. The ph[oe]be flies with a peculiar snappy, jerky flight; its relative the kingbird, with a mincing and hovering flight; it tiptoes through the air. The woodpeckers gallop, alternately closing and spreading their wings. The ordinary flight of the goldfinch is a very marked undulatory flight; a section of it, the rise and the fall, would probably measure fifty feet. The bird goes half that distance or more with wings closed. This is the flight the male indulges in within hearing distance of his brooding mate. During the love season he occasionally gives way to an ecstatic flight. This is a level flight, performed on round, open wings, which beat the air vertically. This flight of ecstasy during the song season is common to many of our birds. I have seen even the song sparrow indulge in it, rising fifty feet or more and delivering its simple song with obvious excitement. The idiotic-looking woodcock, inspired by the grand passion, rises upon whistling wings in the early spring twilight, and floats and circles at an altitude of a hundred feet or more, and in rapid smackering and chippering notes unburdens his soul. The song of ecstasy with our meadowlark is delivered in a level flight and is sharp and hurried, both flight and song differing radically from its everyday performance. One thinks of the bobolink as singing almost habitually on the wing. He is the most rollicking and song-drunk of all our singing birds. His season is brief but hilarious. In his level flight he seems to use only the tips of his wings, and we see them always below the level of his back. Our common birds that have no flight-song, so far as I have observed, are the bluebird, the robin, the ph[oe]be, the social sparrow, the tanager, the grosbeak, the pewee, the wood warblers, and most of the ground warblers.

      Over thirty years ago a writer on flying-machines had this to say about the flight of sea-gulls: "Sweeping around in circles, occasionally elevating themselves by a few flaps of the wings, they glide down and up the aerial inclines without apparently any effort whatever. But a close observation will show that at every turn the angle of inclination of the wings is changed to meet the new conditions. There is continual movement with power – by the bird it is done instinctively, by our machine only through mechanism obeying a mind not nearly so well instructed."

      The albatross will follow a ship at sea, sailing round and round, in a brisk breeze, on unbending wing, only now and then righting itself with a single flap of its great pinions. It literally rides upon the storm.

      IV

      BIRD INTIMACIES

      When, as sometimes happens, I feel an inclination to seek out new lands in my own country, or in other countries, to see what Nature is doing there, and what guise she wears, something prompts me to pause, and after a while to say to myself: "Look a little closer into the nature right at your own door; do a little intensive observation at home, and see what that yields you. The enticement of the far-away is mostly in your imagination; let your eyes and your imagination play once more on the old familiar birds and objects."

      One season in my walks to the woods I was on the lookout for a natural bracket among the tree-branches, to be used in supporting a book-shelf. I did not find it; but one day in a shad-blow tree, within a few feet from the corner of my own house, I found what I was searching for, perfect in every particular – the right angle and the supporting brace, or hypothenuse. It gave me a hint I have not forgotten.

      I find that one has only to overcome a little of his obtuseness and indifference and look a little more closely upon the play of wild life about him to realize how much interesting natural history is being enacted every day before his very eyes – in his own garden and dooryard and apple-orchard and vineyard. If one's mind were only alert and sensitive enough to take it all in! Whether one rides or walks or sits under the trees, or loiters about the fields or woods, the play of wild life is going on about him, and, if he happens to be blessed with the seeing eye and the hearing ear, is available for his instruction and entertainment. On every farm in the land a volume of live natural history goes to waste every year because there is no historian to note the happenings.

      The drama of wild life goes on more or less behind screens – a screen of leaves or of grass, or of vines, or of tree-trunks, and only the alert and sympathetic eye penetrates it. The keenest of us see only a mere fraction of it. If one saw one tenth of the significant happenings that take place on his few acres of orchard, lawn, and vineyard in the course of the season, or even of a single week, what a harvest he would have! The drama of wild life is played rapidly; the actors are on and off the stage before we fairly know it, and the play shifts to other stages.

      I wonder how many of the scores of persons passing along the road between my place and the railway station one early May day became aware that a rare bird incident was being enacted in the trees over their heads. It was the annual sängerfest of the goldfinches – one of the prettiest episodes in the lives of any of our birds, a real musical reunion of the goldfinch tribe, apparently a whole township, many hundreds of them, filling scores of the tree-tops along the road and in the groves with a fine, sibilant chorus which the ear refers vaguely to the surrounding tree-tops, but which the eye fails adequately to account for. It comes from everywhere, but from nowhere in particular. The birds sit singly here and there amid the branches, and it is difficult to identify the singers. It is a minor strain, but multitudinous, and fills all the air. The males are just donning their golden uniforms, as if to celebrate the blooming of the dandelions, which, with the elm-trees, afford them their earliest food-supply. While they are singing they are busy cutting out the green germs of the elm flakes, and going down to the ground and tearing open the closed dandelion-heads that have shut up to ripen their seeds, preparatory to their second and ethereal flowering when they become spheres of fragile silver down.

      Whether this annual reunion of the goldfinches should be called a dandelion festival, or a new-coat festival, or whether it is to bring the sexes together preliminary to the mating-season, I am at a loss to decide. It usually lasts a week or more, and continues on wet days as well as on fair. It all has a decidedly festive air, like the fête-days of humans. I know of nothing like it among other birds. It is the manifestation of something different from the flocking instinct; it is the social and holiday instinct,