A Gathering of Birds Read online

  A

  GATHERING

  OF BIRDS

  DONALD CULROSS PEATTIE LIBRARY

  PUBLISHED BY TRINITY UNIVERSITY PRESS

  An Almanac for Moderns

  A Book of Hours

  Cargoes and Harvests

  Diversions of the Field

  Flowering Earth

  A Gathering of Birds:

  An Anthology of the Best Ornithological Prose

  Green Laurels:

  The Lives and Achievements of the Great Naturalists

  A Natural History of North American Trees

  The Road of a Naturalist

  A GATHERING OF BIRDS

  AN ANTHOLOGY OF THE BEST ORNITHOLOGICAL PROSE

  Edited, with Biographical Sketches, by

  DONALD CULROSS PEATTIE

  Illustrated by

  EDWARD SHENTON

  TRINITY UNIVERSITY PRESS

  San Antonio, Texas

  Published by Trinity University Press

  San Antonio, Texas 78212

  Copyright © 2013 by the Estate of Donald Culross Peattie

  ISBN 978-1-59534-162-4 (paper)

  ISBN 978-1-59534-163-1 (ebook)

  Cover design by bookMatters, Berkeley

  Cover illustration: barsik/istockphoto.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Trinity university Press strives to produce its books using methods and materials in an environmentally sensitive manner. We favor working with manufacturers that practice sustainable management of all natural resources, produce paper using recycled stock, and manage forests with the best possible practices for people, biodiversity, and sustainability. the press is a member of the Green Press initiative, a nonprofit program dedicated to supporting publishers in their efforts to reduce their impacts on endangered forests, climate change, and forest-dependent communities.

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed library Materials, ansi 39.48-1992.

  CIP data on file at the Library of Congress.

  17 16 15 14 13 | 5 4 3 2 1

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE editor wishes gratefully to acknowledge the assistance of Dr. Barbour of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoölogy who has read the entire manuscript in order to assist the work of editing material so highly miscellaneous, of such different eras in the science of ornithology, and such varying styles. At the same time the editor assumes entire liability for all errors or inadequacies which may remain.

  Grateful acknowledgment for permission to reprint these selections is made to the following publishers:

  D. Appleton-Century Company: From “Camps and Cruises of an Ornithologist,” by Frank M. Chapman; from “The Mountains of California,” by John Muir. By permission of D. Appleton-Century Company, publishers.

  Curtis Brown Ltd.: From “The Island of Penguins,” by Cherry Kearton.

  Thomas Y. Crowell Company: From “Nature Near London” and “The Life of the Fields,” by Richard Jefferies. By permission of the publishers.

  E. P. Dutton Co., Inc.: From “A Hind in Richmond Park,” by W. H. Hudson. By permission of the publishers.

  Harper & Brothers: From “Canary,” by Gustav Eckstein. By permission of the publishers.

  Henry Holt and Company: From “Jungle Peace,” by William Beebe. By permission of the publishers.

  Houghton Mifflin Company: From the Journals of Henry David Thoreau: “Notes on New England Birds” and “Fresh Fields,” published by Houghton Mifflin Company.

  Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: From “Birds and Man,” by W. H. Hudson. By permission of and special arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., authorized publishers.

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons: From “Bird Islands of Peru,” by Robert C. Murphy. By permission of the publishers.

  A. P. Watt & Son: From “The Charm of Birds,” by Viscount Edward Grey. By permission of the publishers and special arrangement with Sir Cecil Graves, Executor of the Estate of Viscount Grey.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Foreword

  I

  W. H. HUDSON

  Migration on the Pampas

  Jackdaws

  II

  JOHN MUIR

  The Water-Ouzel

  III

  GILBERT WHITE

  The Swallow

  The Sand-Martin

  The Swift

  IV

  CHERRY KEARTON

  Penguins’ Nests

  Family Matters

  V

  GUSTAV ECKSTEIN

  Canary

  VI

  PETER KALM

  Ruby-Throated Hummingbird

  Purple Grackle

  Whippoorwill

  VII

  THE COUNT DE BUFFON

  The Nightingale

  VIII

  ROBERT CUSHMAN MURPHY

  The Guanay: “The Most Valuable Bird in the World"

  IX

  RICHARD JEFFERIES

  Round a London Copse

  Birds Climbing the Air

  X

  THOMAS NUTTALL

  Baltimore Oriole

  Mockingbird

  Snowflake

  Yellow-Legs

  XI

  WILLIAM BEEBE

  Hoatzins at Home

  XII

  PHILIP HENRY GOSSE

  Long-Tailed Hummingbird

  XIII

  ALEXANDER WILSON

  Carolina Parrot

  Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

  XIV

  ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE

  King Bird of Paradise

  Red Bird of Paradise

  The Great Bird of Paradise

  XV

  ELLIOTT COUES

  Plumbeous Bush-Tit

  Cliff Swallow

  Cow-Bird

  Burrowing Owl

  XVI

  FRANK M. CHAPMAN

  The Flamingo

  XVII

  SIR EDWARD GREY

  On Taming Birds

  XVIII

  HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  Loon

  Herring Gull

  Canada Goose

  Hen-Hawk

  Thrush

  XIX

  JOHN JAMES AUDUBON

  The Phoebe

  The Trumpeter Swan

  The Passenger Pigeon

  INDEX

  FOREWORD

  THIS anthology is offered only as a brief and selective collection gleaned from the works of those who have written admirably on birds. It is designed for the pleasure of people who enjoy birds, but it does not pretend to serve the professional ornithologist with facts he would not know. In the intention of this anthologist, these pieces, the most finished that he has found in the literature of ornithophily, were collected and set forth as if they were numbers upon a programme representing various composers of divers times and styles and some contrast of mood. So, for variety, are included the light or brief as well as the longer and more studied.

  Biographical material which I have added is not, of course, biography at all in the serious sense. It is, rather, in the nature of programme notes.

  The difficulty of selection has not been to find grist to my mill, but rather to omit. Instead of including short excerpts from a multitude of writers, as one might have done in preparing an anthology of poetry, I felt it more just to the prose writer to give each one enough space to get into his stride both in style and subject. This limited the number of my entries. So that if the reader should miss a favorite, he
must remember that one book cannot contain everything of merit. Moreover, selection was made according to a dual standard, as science and as literature. It is surprising how some otherwise meritorious work is excluded by these two principles. A well-loved popularizer of the past generation proved, upon a re-reading of every word he ever wrote on birds, to have really very little to contribute about them. Again, some noted scientists do not appear here because a sympathetic and interested examination of their work discovered nothing of any length which they themselves, I believe, would have cared to lay down for comparison beside the accomplished style of Hudson or the rugged narratives of Coues. Admittedly the literary gifts of the authors here gathered are unequal, as are their scientific attainments. But every one of them is in some sense an ornithologist and every one is a good writer. Not a few are two-fold geniuses.

  In the capacity of editor I have not disturbed the mannerisms of these diverse writers to attain consistency of punctuation, spelling, and capitalization. They wrote as they wrote, and I would not venture to begin changing them even to correct their grammar or to alter their scientific nomenclature with the current usage of taxonomy.

  I have, however, been obliged by space limitations to condense their essays. In doing this I have seldom abbreviated by cutting out individual words or phrases. Rather, I have omitted entire passages that were digressive or technical.

  The plan of the book has been to divide it somewhat equally between European birds, North American birds, and tropical or otherwise exotic species.

  The order of arrangement is not chronological or geographical but, rather, stylistic, that the book may be read with a sense of modulated variety in the suite. In this I am aware that it would not be possible to satisfy all tastes.

  D. C. P.

  I

  W. H. HUDSON

  IN THE eighties of the last century a small discriminating group was discussing a novel, The Purple Land, of remarkable originality and charm. Its setting—Uruguay—was a fresh one for a novel in English, and the author even less well known, a tall, bent, wounded sort of a man, like a chained and gloomy heron, endlessly writing and puffing cigars at the back of his wife’s London boarding-house.

  Of this man, William Henry Hudson, British ornithologists were still largely unaware until in 1888-9 he produced his Argentine Ornithology. The systematics and anatomy were contributed by the well-known museum scientist, Prof. Sclater (with whom Hudson got on rather badly). But the remarkable field notes and life histories were the work of this same indigent and obscure novelist. Again, the subject and setting were unfamiliar to most readers, refreshing, and exciting—the avifauna of the south temperate zone in the western hemisphere. Here, it seemed, was indeed a New World, one about which most British and North American naturalists knew little and thought seldom.

  When in 1892 Hudson published his Naturalist in La Plata, a remarkable piece of popularization, his fame spread beyond the technical ornithologists to Nature lovers generally. A new voice was heard, as startling as the call of some unknown bird. Other reminiscences of Argentina followed, and then lovely studies of the modest and endearing bird life of English countryside and village. And finally in 1904 Hudson returned, after lamentable failures in this line, to the novel form with Green Mansions, a book that slowly but surely made him famous and is today still widening in popularity. Of what other novels of that decade can as much be said?

  Possessed of unique powers as a narrator and stylist, Hudson came to Nature with a magnificent equipment to write of it. In the rôle of poet of Nature he has no rival save Thoreau, and Hudson was distinctly the better naturalist, though not so great and original a soul.

  Hudson’s life story has many obscurities and lacunæ. He deplored any biography, enjoined against one in his will, and carefully destroyed all documentary evidence he could find, insisting that his books speak for him. His personality too was an enigma. His brother said of him, “Of all the people I know, you are the only one I do not know.” This was precisely to Hudson’s taste. He so far created a mystery or even a deliberate legend about himself as to misrepresent his age and his nationality.

  William Henry Hudson was born an American. His mother came from Maine, his father Daniel from Marblehead. Daniel Hudson emigrated to Argentina to become a ranchero in the state of Rio de Plata, and there, at Quilmes, in 1841, was born the future naturalist.

  On his father’s hospitable and prodigal estancia, then on the very frontier of the untamed pampas, young Hudson grew up in a large and closely united family. What his life was, among the gauchos and the steers, the pioneering Spanish and English settlers, is known now to everyone from that fascinating book, Far Away and Long Ago, as well as in his History of My Early Life and A Little Boy Lost. Of his romantic childhood Hudson continued to write all his life; those are the only years of which he cared to speak. Even so, he tells less about himself than about others and about the birds of Argentina, the crested screamers and woodhewers, mockingbirds, hummingbirds, rheas and Magellanic eagle owls, and above all his favorite plovers. They filled the world for him, the heavens and the plain and the marsh and the shore, with their cries and the beat of their wings. They were for him the birds of home, and thirty years later he could still remember the forms and the flight and the songs and calls of some two hundred and fifty New World species—a larger number than was to be found in all Britain.

  Rheumatic fever fell early upon the boy, injuring his heart. A doctor informed his father that as the lad would only live a few years he might as well be allowed to do what he pleased. So Hudson never completed his education or sought a training in ornithology, but divided his time between devouring English literature and descriptions of rural life in Britain, and spurring across the Patagonian plains in pursuit of birds. He lived among the gauchos and as one of them. But he was a queer gaucho who was forever losing his rope or his knife or his horse; a gaucho who did not fight or wench; a gaucho with literary leanings and an obsessing desire for the England of Gilbert White and of Bloomfield the plowman poet, of Gray’s Elegy and Gay’s madrigals.

  Before Hudson left for England in 1869 he had seen sweeping changes cross the pampas. Just as in North America the prairie wilderness long held back human invasion, and then suddenly gave way before the plow and the gun, the railroad and the barbed wire fence, so under Hudson’s eyes began the pampas’ end. The great prodigal estancias gave place to small landholdings, and the “bird hating Italian race” began to swarm and spawn there, supplanting the earlier settlers with a lower standard of living and another attitude toward the virginity of the continent.

  Daniel Hudson’s fortunes had dwindled before he died suddenly. Young Hudson seems to have taken his father’s death as an irreparable calamity to his whole life. He left abruptly for England, never again to sit a horse, to know space, adventure, freedom from care. Yet, his life long, Argentina remcmbered, Argentina as it had been and could be again only in his memories, infused his greatest books with nostalgia.

  When he landed in England at Southampton, Hudson did not proceed at once to London but set forth determined to find the England of Jefferies and Constable. He took a carriage and, with a young lout of a coachman, drove out in the country. The month was May and the glad bird chorus at its height, but to Hudson every British songster was as unfamiliar and as much a foreign bird as to most Englishmen are mynas and bulbuls. So he continually cried, “What bird was that?” and, “I say, what song was that?” To all of this he received but oafish answers.

  It is a tribute to the power of poetry that the birds of Europe have exercised such a sway over the minds of Americans and English colonials. The avifauna of Britain is really small, both in variety of species and in respect to birds of impressive dimensions. It is in many ways modest, too, in plumage and utterance. Yet by the virtues of association, English bird life exerts a powerful pull even upon ornithologists of other lands justly proud of their avifauna. John Burroughs, for instance, and Dr. Frank Chapman, have both recorded their e
agerness to hear and see English birds, and journeyed across the seas for the sake of nightingales and cuckoos, robins and skylarks. The sweet and domestic charm of the European birds is something to which I can myself attest, and to the praise that better ornithologists have uttered of the robin I would add my own, just as I share their disappointment in the skylark.

  The new-come Hudson viewed nothing in British bird life with detachment. This was his adopted land, and he prepared to love every note and pinion. So he brought to his writings on European birds what no European can bring—a trained and adult capacity to understand and describe bird actions, coupled with an ear and eye fresh as that of a child. The result of Hudson’s unique approach was that, with his literary gift, he became the Englishman’s favorite ornithological writer, and justly so.

  It would be wrong to gather from these words that Hudson’s life as a naturalist was one of carefree happiness in communing with the small and tender aspects of English Nature. Or that his career was a progress of triumphs, a ready acceptance and a swiftly widening circle of fame. On the contrary, his life, which began well and ended well, was in its core years one of obscurity, hunger for a fame which would not come, of disillusion and disappointment and a withering at the wellsprings of many instincts whose gratification is essential to the whole soul. This period ate out the heart of his life from the age of twenty-eight until well into the fifties.

  Hudson found no regular employment in England; he held some desultory positions with small pay. In consequence he suffered a poverty which so humiliated him that he could not speak of those times and obliterated the evidence of them. He had perhaps expected some literary employment and probably sought it in vain. His essays and stories were rejected for years, and many of his novels were failures both in popularity and in artistic construction. Doubtless he hoped, too, for acceptance among the ornithologists, and this did indeed come, but not before Hudson had awaited it so long that his anticipation had soured. Consequently he was inclined to quarrel with ornithologists like John Gould and Alfred Newton, and to dispute that they knew birds at all in the sense that he knew them. His taste was rather for bird lovers of the stamp of Grey of Fallodon, his friend.