Birds and Nature, Vol 10 No. 2 [September 1901]

(Zonotrichia albicollis.)

“The sparrows are all meek and lowly birds.” They are not clothed in a plumage of gorgeous hues, but are endowed with melodious voices in harmony with their surroundings. “Theirs are the quaint lullaby songs of childhood.” Their plain coats are a means of protection, for they frequent the fields, the hedges and the low shrubs of the woodland borders. Some of their relatives, the grosbeaks, the goldfinch and the finches, are more brilliantly colored and are more arboreal in their habits.

The White-throated Sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis) is one of the handsomest of the sparrows. It is one of the exquisite parts of nature. Migratory in habits, its range covers all of Eastern North America, nesting from Michigan and Massachusetts northward and wintering from the latter state southward to Florida.

Its scientific name is descriptive of the marked color characteristics of its crown and throat. Zonotrichia means hair or crown bands, and albicollis is from the Latin meaning white-throated. It is sometimes called Peabody Bird, especially by the New Englanders, with whom Peabody is an important traditional name, and they hear the birds say in its song “I – I Pea-body, Pea-body, Pea-body.” This rendering of its plaintive song is a caricature, yet the name clings to the bird even in other parts of the country. The reserved manner of its movements would hardly lead one to expect that a beautiful song could flow from its white throat. This song is so well defined that the notation may be written on the musical staff. Mr. Chapman says: “In September, when the hedgerows and woodland undergrowths begin to rustle with sparrows, juncos and towhees, I watch eagerly for the arrival of these welcome fall songsters.” We cannot forbear quoting the words of that great student of bird life, Audubon, who says of the White-Throat’s habit in autumn, “How it comes and how it departs are quite unknown to me. I can only say that, all of a sudden, the edges of the fields bordering on creeks or swampy places and overgrown with different species of vines, sumac bushes, briers and the taller kinds of grasses, appear covered with birds. They form groups, sometimes containing from thirty to fifty individuals, and live together in harmony. They are constantly moving up and down among these recesses, with frequent jerkings of the tail, and uttering a note common to the tribe. From the hedges and thickets they issue one by one, in quick succession, and ramble to the distance of eight or ten yards, hopping and scratching, in quest of small seeds, and preserving the utmost silence. When the least noise is heard or alarm given, and frequently, as I thought, without any alarm at all, they all fly back to their covert, pushing directly into the thickest part of it. A moment elapses, when they become reassured, and ascending to the highest branches and twigs open a little concert, which, although of short duration, is extremely sweet. There is much plaintive softness in their note, which I wish, kind reader, I could describe to you; but this is impossible, although it is yet ringing in my ears, as if I were in those very fields where I have so often listened to it with delight. No sooner is their music over than they return to the field, and thus continue alternately sallying forth and retreating during the greater part of the day. At the approach of night they utter a sharper note, consisting of a single twit, repeated in a smart succession by the whole group, and continuing until the first hooting of some owl frightens them into silence. Yet, often during fine nights I have heard the little creatures emit, here and there, a twit, as if to assure each other that all’s well.”

The nest, too, is a neat creation of small roots, coarse grass, bark and moss and lined with a bedding of fine grass and moss. It is usually placed on the ground in fields or open woods, where it is protected by the taller grasses. Sometimes, however, low bushes or the lower branches of trees are selected. So careful is the White-Throat in the constructing of its nest not to disturb the surrounding vegetation, and so neutral is the color of the material used, that one may hunt for a long time without finding it unless he luckily stumbles upon it.

A PLANT THAT MELTS ICE

To say that a plant can melt ice is to assert a miracle seemingly too great for even Nature’s powers to compass, but a traveler lately returned from the Alps has witnessed this wonderful phenomenon, while Grant Allen and other authorities confirm the fact that the Alpine Soldanella melts for its blossom a passage through the ice by power of its own internal heat.

The majority of tourists visit the Alps in August; therefore they miss a rare sight, that of a daring little shrub opening its fringed blue buds in the very middle of the snow sheet, and often showing its slender head above a layer of ice, in the most incredible fashion.

We may regard the Alps as unpeopled solitudes, but to Alpine plants they are a veritable world of competing life types.

Those only fitted for the struggle survive.

The botanists tell us that the Soldanella is heavily handicapped in the race. In the first place, it is obliged to eke out a livelihood in the mountain belt just below the snow line; further, it is a very low growing variety, and is quickly obscured and overtopped by the dense and rapid growth of its taller rivals; hence its anxiety to seize its one chance in life at the earliest possible moment.

To attain the end of its being, the perpetuation of its species, it must steal a march upon its companions, as it were, and show itself while they are still locked in sleep, and when its insect fertilizers, fresh from their cocoons, can see and visit it.

To accomplish its purpose it has made ample preparations.

All through the previous summer its round leaves, admirably fitted to their purpose, have been spread to the mountain sun and gathered in the fuel to be burned later on.

When winter arrives the leaves had grown thick in rich material and so leathery that no amount of snow could injure them.

The first warmth of spring melting the edges of the snow sheet sends the moisture trickling down to the Soldanella’s roots. This, acting upon them as water upon malting barley, brings about germination.

The plant, absorbing the oxygen in the air under the ice and combining it with the fuel in its own substance, melts its way into the open air. A fragile flower forcing its way through a solid crust of ice. Literally, not metaphorically, a slow combustion store.

This novel feat is accomplished every season, yet comparatively few observers note it.

    Louise Jamison.

THE HUMMINGBIRDS

Maxime miranda in minimus!

Minutest of the feathered kind,
Possessing every charm combined,
Nature, in forming thee, designed
That thou shouldst be,
A proof within how little space
She can comprise such perfect grace,
Rendering the lovely, fairy race
Beauty’s epitome.

    – Charlotte Smith.
The discovery of

“The rare little bird of the bower,
Bird of the musical wing,”

being coincident with that of the New World, the ancients were denied the exhilarating shock of delight that has been vouchsafed to their descendants when that

“ – Quick feathered spangled shot,
Rapid as thought from spot to spot,
Showing the fairy humming-bird,”

and their writings lack the glamour of his “glossy, varying dyes;” for, according to Lesson, the first mention which is made of hummingbirds in the narratives of adventurers who proceeded to America, not with the design of studying its natural productions, but for the discovery of gold, dates from 1558.

Of the name hummingbird or hum-bird, Professor Newton says its earliest use, as yet discovered, is said to be by Thomas Morton in The New England Canaan, printed in 1632, while in 1646 Sir Thomas Browne wrote: “So have all Ages conceaved, and most are still ready to sweare, the Wren is the least of Birds, yet the discoveries of America, and even of our own Plantations, shewed us one farre lesse, that is the Hum-bird, not much exceeding a Beetle.” Mr. Ridgway cites the case of Mr. Benjamin Buttivant, writing from Boston in 1697, who told of a hum-bird that he fed with honey, that was “A Prospect to many Comers.”

“The earliest notice of the common Ruby-throat that I have been able to find,” Mr. Ridgway continues, “is an extract from a letter written from Boston in New England, October 26, 1670, by John Winthrop, Esq., governor of Connecticut, to Francis Willoughby, Esq., and published in the philosophical Transactions.” This letter reads as follows:

“I send you withal, a little Box, with a Curiosity in it, which perhaps will be counted a trifle, yet ’tis rarely to be met with, even here. It is the curiously contrived nest of the Humming-Bird, so called from the humming noise it maketh as it flies. ’Tis an exceeding little Bird, and only seen in Summer, and mostly in gardens, flying from flower, sucking Honey out of the flowers as the Bee doth; as it flieth not lighting on the flower, but hovering over it, sucking with its long Bill a sweet substance. There are in the same Nest two of that Bird’s eggs. Whether they used to have more at once I know not. I never saw but one of these Nests before, and that was sent over formerly with some other Rarities, but the vessel miscarrying, you received them not.”

Of the long bill with which it sucketh the sweet substance, the tongue is the essential feature, so far as sustenance is concerned; consisting of a long double cylinder, “like a double-barreled gun,” Goodrich thought – a most convenient instrument for imbibing nectar – flattened and sometimes barbed at the end, for the capture of the minute insects that constitute the less æsthetic portion of their nutriment – for it has been many times demonstrated that, airy and fairy as they are (the size of the stomach not exceeding the globe of the eye, and scarcely a sixth part as large as the heart, which, in turn, is remarkably large, nearly the size of the cranium), they cannot live by ambrosia alone, nor yet by love, but must vary both with an occasional relish of aphides and infinitesimal spiders.

Of “that Bird’s two eggs,” Mr. Chapman says: “As far as known, all hummingbirds lay two white eggs – frail, pearly ellipses – that after ten days’ incubation develop into a tangle of dark limbs and bodies, which no one could think of calling birds, much less winged gems.”

It has been a matter of doubt to many whether hummingbirds ever rested at all or spent their lives in the air exclusively, but Mr. Gould states authoritatively: “Although many short intermissions of rest are taken during the day, the bird may be said to live in the air – an element in which it performs every kind of evolution with the utmost ease, frequently rising perpendicularly, flying backwards, pirouetting or dancing off, as it were.”

It was the belief of the Duke of Argyle that no bird could fly backward, a theory that he stated with emphasis in his Reign of Law, but it has been proved that he reckoned without “the winglet of the fairy hummingbird,” which seems to be the exception to prove a reigning law of Nature.

Montgomery makes of the whole Trochilidæ family this inspired explanation:

“Art thou a bird, a bee, or butterfly?
‘Each and all three; – a bird
A bee collecting sweets from bloom to bloom,
A butterfly in brilliancy of plume.’”

The blooms from which he collects his sweets are of the tubular flowers almost exclusively, as a mark, possibly, of his appreciation of their invention for him and at his request, as told by Albert Bigelow Paine:

“The clover, said the humming-bird,
Was fashioned for the bee,
But ne’er a flower, as I have heard,
Was ever made for me.

A passing zephyr paused, and stirred
Some moonlit drops of dew
To earth; and for the humming-bird
The honeysuckle grew.”

Of his manner of hanging before his tubular flowers Goodrich says: “He poises or suspends himself on wing for the space of two or three seconds so steadily that his wings become invisible and you can plainly discern the pupil of his eye, looking round with great quickness and circumspection. The glossy green of his back and the fire of his throat, dazzling in the sun, form altogether a most interesting appearance.”