Chapter V

Nature never tires of repeating and multiplying the same species. She makes a million bees, a million birds, a million mice or rats, or other animals, so nearly alike that no eye can tell one from another; but it is rarely that she issues a small and a large edition, as it were, of the same species. Yet she has done it in a few cases among the birds with hardly more difference than a foot-note added or omitted. The cedar-bird, for instance, is the Bohemian waxwing or chatterer in smaller type, copied even to the minute, wax-like appendages that bedeck the ends of the wing-quills. It is about one third smaller, and a little lighter in color, owing perhaps to the fact that it is confined to a warmer latitude, its northward range seeming to end about where that of its larger brother begins. Its flight, its note, its manners, its general character and habits, are almost identical with those of its prototype. It is confined exclusively to this continent, while the chatterer is an Old World bird as well, and ranges the northern parts of both continents. The latter comes to us from the hyperborean regions, brought down occasionally by the great cold waves that originate in those high latitudes. It is a bird of Siberian and Alaskan evergreens, and passes its life for the most part far beyond the haunts of man. I have never seen the bird, but small bands of them make excursions every winter down into our territory from British America. Audubon, I believe, saw them in Maine; other observers have seen them in Minnesota. It has the crest of the cedar-bird, the same yellow border to its tail, but is marked with white on its wings, as if a snowflake or two had adhered to it from the northern cedars and pines. If you see about the evergreens in the coldest, snowiest weather what appear to be a number of very large cherry-birds, observe them well, for the chances are that visitants from the circumpolar regions are before your door. It is a sign, also, that the frost legions of the north are out in great force and carrying all before them.

Our cedar or cherry bird is the most silent bird we have. Our neutral-tinted birds, like him, as a rule are our finest songsters; but he has no song or call, uttering only a fine bead-like note on taking flight. This note is the cedar-berry rendered back in sound. When the ox-heart cherries, which he has only recently become acquainted with, have had time to enlarge his pipe and warm his heart, I shall expect more music from him. But in lieu of music, what a pretty compensation are those minute, almost artificial-like, plumes of orange and vermilion that tip the ends of his wing quills! Nature could not give him these and a song too. She has given the hummingbird a jewel upon his throat, but no song, save the hum of his wings.

Another bird that is occasionally borne to us on the crest of the cold waves from the frozen zone, and that is repeated on a smaller scale in a permanent resident, is the pine grosbeak; his _alter ego,_ reduced in size, is the purple finch, which abounds in the higher latitudes of the temperate zone. The color and form of the two birds are again essentially the same. The females and young males of both species are of a grayish brown like the sparrow, while in the old males this tint is imperfectly hidden beneath a coat of carmine, as if the color had been poured upon their heads, where it is strongest, and so oozed down and through the rest of the plumage. Their tails are considerably forked, their beaks cone-shaped and heavy, and their flight undulating. Those who have heard the grosbeak describe its song as similar to that of the finch, though no doubt it is louder and stronger. The finch's instrument is a fife tuned to love and not to war. He blows a clear, round note, rapid and intricate, but full of sweetness and melody. His hardier relative with that larger beak and deeper chest must fill the woods with sounds. Audubon describes its song as exceedingly rich and full.

As in the case of the Bohemian waxwing, this bird is also common to both worlds, being found through Northern Europe and Asia and the northern parts of this continent. It is the pet of the pine-tree, and one of its brightest denizens. Its visits to the States are irregular and somewhat mysterious. A great flight of them occurred in the winter of 1874-75. They attracted attention all over the country. Several other flights of them have occurred during the century. When this bird comes, it is so unacquainted with man that its tameness is delightful to behold. It thrives remarkably well in captivity, and in a couple of weeks will become so tame that it will hop down and feed out of its master's or mistress's hand. It comes from far beyond the region of the apple, yet it takes at once to this fruit, or rather to the seeds, which it is quick to divine, at its core.

Close akin to these two birds, and standing in the same relation to each other, are two other birds that come to us from the opposite zone,--the torrid,--namely, the blue grosbeak and his petit duplicate, the indigo-bird. The latter is a common summer resident with us,--a bird of the groves and bushy fields, where his bright song may be heard all through the long summer day. I hear it in the dry and parched August when most birds are silent, sometimes delivered on the wing and sometimes from the perch. Indeed, with me its song is as much a midsummer sound as is the brassy crescendo of the cicada. The memory of its note calls to mind the flame-like quiver of the heated atmosphere and the bright glare of the meridian sun. Its color is much more intense than that of the common bluebird, as summer skies are deeper than those of April, but its note is less mellow and tender. Its original, the blue grosbeak, is an uncertain wanderer from the south, as the pine grosbeak is from the north. I have never seen it north of the District of Columbia. It has a loud, vivacious song, of which it is not stingy, and which is a large and free rendering of the indigo's, and belongs to summer more than to spring. The bird is colored the same as its lesser brother, the males being a deep blue and the females a modest drab. Its nest is usually placed low down, as is the indigo's, and the male carols from the tops of the trees in its vicinity in the same manner. Indeed, the two birds are strikingly alike in every respect except in size and in habitat, and, as in each of the other cases, the lesser bird is, as it were, the point, the continuation, of the larger, carrying its form and voice forward as the reverberation carries the sound.

I know the ornithologists, with their hair-splittings, or rather feather-splittings, point out many differences, but they are unimportant. The fractions may not agree, but the whole numbers are the same.