A Gathering of Birds Read online

  All nightingales are not equally gifted artists. Fanciers distinguish and avoid what are clearly mediocre talents. Some even believe that the nightingales of one country do not sing as well as another. The connoisseurs of England prefer those of Surrey, for instance, to those of Middlesex. But it were difficult to assign valid reasons to such differences, since they are no more than accidental.

  No sooner has June gone than the nightingale is finally silent. Of its voice there remains only a squawk, a sort of croaking in which none would recognize the melodious Philomel! It is not surprising that, in other days, in Italy they gave it another name, in this circumstance; it is withal another bird, an absolutely different bird, at least as to its voice, and a little in respect to the colors of its plumage.

  Among nightingales, as in the case of many another bird, there are found sometimes females who have enough of the male in them to be rated as singers. I saw one of these singing females which was tame. Her warbling was quite of the male order, though it was not quite so strong or varied. She kept this unnatural talent until spring. Then abruptly she subordinated the exercise of this talent which was so foreign to her, to the true functions of her sex. She then fell silent and devoted herself to constructing her nest and to egg laying, although she had no mate. It seems that in the hot countries such as Greece it is a matter of common occurrence to encounter these singing hen birds both in this species and in many others. That at least is what one infers from a passage in Aristotle.

  A musician, says Frisch, ought to study a nightingale’s song. This is just what a Jesuit named Kircher actually did in his Musurgia and the same project tempted Barrington. But in the opinion of the latter, no attempt has been successful. Though the melodies were carefully written out in musical notation and then executed by the most skillful flute player, the result did not in the least resemble a nightingale’s song.

  Barrington suspects that the difficulty arises from the circumstances that one can scarcely appreciate the relative duration or value of each note.

  It would scarcely be easy to determine the musical measure that the nightingale follows when it sings, or to capture the rhythm so varied in its movement, so delicately modulated in its transitions, so free in its progressions, so independent of all our conventional rules and thereby the more appropriate to this wild musician—in a word, a song made to be vividly felt by a delicate organ and not to be beaten out by a baton in an orchestral clash of sound. But it would seem to me to be even more difficult to imitate with any lifeless instrument the tones of a nightingale, its accents so full of soul and life, its warbled passages, its expressions and sighs.

  To reproduce a nightingale’s voice only some living instrument would serve, and that of a rare perfection, a ringing tone harmonious and light, a pure timbre, soft and yet brilliant; a vocal instrument of the utmost flexibility, and all this must be guided by a true ear supported by an infallible tact and an exquisite sensibility. Those, then, are the instruments with which one might render a nightingale’s song.

  I have encountered two persons who had never annotated a single passage, who were yet able to imitate it down to the last detail and in such a manner as to create the complete illusion. They were two men who whistled, rather than sang. One of them whistled so naturally that one could not distinguish from the lips, whether it was the performer or some neighbor to whom one was listening. The other whistled with more obvious effort, and was practically forced to take a constrained attitude, but as for the effect it was not less perfect. And not many years ago in London could be heard a man who, by his imitation, knew how to attract nightingales so that they came and perched on him and allowed him to take them in his hand.

  Since so few can make the nightingale’s song their own by such a faithful imitation, and since everyone is eager to enjoy that song, some have tried to possess it by the simpler expedient of making themselves masters of the bird itself in domesticating it. But as a domestic it is given to whimsical moods. It renders service only if its character is humored. Love and joy cannot be ordered at a command, still less the songs that they inspire. To make a captive nightingale sing, it must be accorded kind treatment in its prison; the walls must be painted the color of its thickets; the cage must be shaded by leaves, and moss spread beneath its feet. It must be sheltered from cold and importunate visitors, and given plenty of its preferred nourishment.

  In a word, its captivity must be disguised as far as possible. Under these conditions the nightingale will sing in its cage. If it be an older bird, taken early in the spring, it will begin to sing within eight days at the latest. Every year, in May and December, it will begin again its song. But if they are young, of the first laying, brought up with the feeding stick, they will commence to twitter as soon as they can feed themselves. By degrees their voices will rise and take form; they will be in full voice by the end of December, and will exercise their powers all year around save during the molt. These sing far better than the wild birds. They embellish their natural song with all the figures that please them in the songs of other birds that they are caused to hear and of all those that inspire them with a desire to surpass them. If one has the patience and the bad taste to teach them to whistle tunes played on the rossignolette * they will learn to sing definite airs. They will even come to sing alternatively with a chorus, repeating a phrase at the right time.

  One would scarcely suspect that a song so varied as the nightingale’s should be confined within the narrow limits of a single octave. Yet that is the conclusion of an observer of taste who combines with a true musical ear a delicate perception. True, he remarked certain piercing tones that mounted to the double octave, passing swift as a flash, but this happens but rarely, when the bird by a special exertion of the syrinx made the tone leap an octave as a flautist will do by forcing the breath.

  This bird is, after a time, capable of forming an attachment for the person who takes care of it. Once it has learned to know its keeper, it recognizes him by his step and salutes him in advance with a cry of joy, and if it is molting, it is seen to weary itself in useless efforts at singing, and to seek to supplement by the gaiety of its movements, by the soul that it puts into its glances, the expression which its vocal organs refuse to utter. If it loses its benefactor, it sometimes dies of sorrow. Should it survive, it is often long before it accustoms itself to another.

  Nightingales are solitary of habit; they travel alone, and arrive singly in April or May and still in their own company depart only in September. And when in the spring the male and female come together to make a home, this private union seems but to fortify still more their aversion to society in general.

  For they do not suffer any of their kind in the terrain which they have appropriated unto themselves. It is believed that only in this way may they possess hunting preserves wide enough to sustain their familial needs. And the proof of this is that nests are not far distant, the one from another, in those regions blessed with abundance of provision. Further, it would seem that jealousy does not enter into their motive, for we know that jealousy finds no distance great enough, and abundance of provender cannot diminish either the umbrage of jealousy nor its minute precautions.

  Each couple commences to make its nest toward the end of April or the beginning of May. These little creatures construct it of leaves and rushes, of twists of coarse grass on the outside; inwardly, of little fibres, rootlets, horse hair and a sort of woolly down. They settle it in a favorable exposure, one with somewhat of an aspect to the rising sun, and in the vicinage of waters. They place it either on the lowest branches of shrubs, such as gooseberry bushes, may, wild plums, or yoke-elms, etc., or else on a tuft of grass and even upon the earth at the foot of some bush, which results sometimes in the eggs, or even the mother and little ones, falling prey to coursing dogs, foxes, beech-martens and adders, etc.

  In our clime the dam lays, ordinarily, five eggs, these of a uniform greenish brown, save that the brown dominates at the smaller end. The dam sits the eggs a
lone; she does not leave her post but to search out provender, and then only by night and when pressed by hunger. At the end of eighteen or twenty days of incubation, the little ones begin eclosion. The number of males is commonly twice that of the females. Also, should one capture in the month of April some male with connubial attachments, he is soon replaced at the side of the bereaved widow by a successor, and that one, if need be, by a third. So that despite the ravishing away of three or four consorts in succession, the hatching does not come off less well.

  The mother bird disgorges the nutriment for her young ones, as the canary does. In this interesting function she is aided by the father. And it is from this cause that he abandons the art of music for the serious preoccupations of familial cares. It is said that beginning even from the incubation he seldom sings near the nest lest he discover its secret treasure. Yet should one approach the nest, paternal tenderness betrays him and he utters cries torn from him by anxiety for the clutch.

  In less than fifteen days the chicks are covered with feathers and it is then that one must dissever them from the parents if they are to be reared in domestication. As soon as they can fly alone, the mother and father commence another laying, and after this a second and third. But for the success of this last it is essential that frosts should not too early supervene. In hot countries nightingales lay up to four clutches and everywhere in general the progeny of the last are less numerous.

  Man, who does not feel himself truly in ownership until he can use and abuse that which he possesses, has devised means to lodge the nightingale in durance. The greatest obstacle to keeping these birds alive and content in captivity has ever been their love of liberty. But this natural sentiment their captors have understood how to counterbalance with other instincts as native—the need to gratify the passion of love, the love of geniture. So people take a mated pair and loose them in a great aviary or rather in a corner of a garden planted with yews, yoke-elms and other small trees through which is strung a wire netting. This is the gentlest and surest means of inducing them to propagate their race.

  There have been trials, too, in establishing nightingales where none existed. For this people try to take the parents, the nest, and eggs all together, transporting the nest to some site which has been selected for its resemblance to the locality from which it has been bereft. The two cages containing the mother and father being placed by the nest, these are invisibly opened as soon as the young begin to cry. Thereupon the parents fall at once to continuing all their care. It is claimed that in the following season the birds return to the selfsame place, and no doubt they do so if there be the proper nourishment, and the proper materials for the nest.

  As the male birds pass the whole night in singing, the ancients were persuaded that they never slept at this season, and from this erroneous idea arose that other, that their diet is an anti-soporific one, and that it were enough to put the heart and eyes of a nightingale under someone’s pillow to render him a miserable insomniac. Finally, these ideas gaining ground and passing into the arts, the nightingale has become the very symbol of vigilance. But moderns, who have most closely observed these birds, find that in the season of song they sleep by day, and that the onset of this diurnal somnolence, above all in winter, announces that they will soon be in voice. Not only do they sleep, but they dream, too, it is said in the Treatise upon the Nightingale, because they have been heard in their sleep to twitter and sing in a low voice.

  Nightingales hide them away in the thickest of coppices, where they nourish themselves upon aquatic and other insects, little worms, and ants and their eggs; they eat, also, figs and berries, but as it is a difficult thing to furnish them habitually with such fare when they are kept in cages, diverse little patties have been devised for them and on these they accommodate themselves full well.

  All sorts of traps are good for catching nightingales; they are but little suspicious though so timid. They admire everything and are duped by everything (says Monsieur Linnaeus). So that one can take them by a bird-caller, by the limed twig, in bird-traps for titmice or in bird nets spread on newly turned earth where the larvas of ants or meal worms have been scattered, or even morsels that resemble them, such as bits of the white of hard-boiled eggs. Sometimes they are found in such great numbers in a countryside, witnesses Belon, that in a village in the forest of Ardennes the little shepherd children took, each one, a score every day, along with many other small birds. It was a year of great drought “and all the pools,” says Belon, “were already dried, so that they betook themselves to the forest wherever were moist humours.” It is needful that the bird traps should be made of taffeta and not of wire, lest the captive should entangle his plumage in them and mayhap lose some pinions, which would retard his song.

  These birds are very good eating when they are fat, and rival ortolans. They are fattened in Gascony for the table, which recalls the fantasy of Heliogabalus who ate the tongues of nightingales and peacocks, and the famous dish of Aesopus, which was composed of a hundred birds all renowned for their talents of song or speech.

  * A reference, undoubtedly, to Barrington’s Observations on the Singing of Birds. [Ed.]

  * Evidently a little pipe crudely imitating bird song, such as is still sold to children and unwary persons at places of amusement. [Ed.]

  VIII

  ROBERT CUSHMAN MURPHY

  FIFTEEN years ago, attending a meeting of the A. American Association for the Advancement of Science, I found myself seated next to a young man whose personality and appearance so pleased me that I ventured to talk to him. Presently a mutual friend, Wilson Popenoe, the agricultural explorer, came along and introduced us. It was an introduction that would only be remembered by myself, but I placed Dr. Murphy instantly as a brilliant younger ornithologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and as the authority upon oceanic birds.

  Robert Cushman Murphy was born in Brooklyn Heights in 1887. Like so many of the modern naturalists, his interests were polarized by haunting museums and making the acquaintance of the curators. The Brooklyn Museum was the particular one in case, and Dr. F. A. Lucas was the curator. Their long talks were of whaling, polar faunas and deep sea life. And Dr. Lucas did not forget the dark-eyed youngster; when an opportunity came for the American Museum to place an able-bodied young naturalist on the whaler Daisy bound for the south polar seas, they settled upon Murphy, just graduated from Brown University. He declined the offer, having just become engaged to be married. But his fiancée who came from Providence, an old whaling town, telegraphed him, “Take that job. Letter follows.” The result was that the two were united at once, and had a honeymoon on the Daisy as far as the West Indies where Mrs. Murphy disbarked, while her young husband set off for South Georgia which is an island without women.

  Murphy returned after eleven months, having covered 17,000 miles, and began graduate work at Columbia. He was at once appointed curator of mammals and birds at the Brooklyn Museum, where once he used to press his nose against the show glass. In 1921 he became assistant curator of birds at the American Museum, for by this time, having led scientific expeditions into tropical and subantarctic waters of the Atlantic, into Lower California and Mexico after the remarkable sea-birds of those coasts, and to the coast of Peru, the greatest gathering ground of marine birds in the world, he was become an unsurpassed authority in his line. His honors include the award of the Brewster and John Burroughs medals for his splendid systematic work, Oceanic Birds of South America (1936) and he has been president of the National Association of Audubon Societies and a director of the Long Island Biological Association at Cold Spring Harbor.

  From his first book, Bird Islands of Peru (1925) I have selected for quotation here the chapter entitled “The Most Valuable Bird in the World.” Dr. Murphy refers thereby to the cormorant which has deposited through the ages its excreta or guano on the Chincha and many other islands off the coast of Peru. The cormorant is not the only bird that has contributed to the nitrate accumulations.
He says:

  “At the present time, four species, comprising one cormorant, one pelican and two gannets, belong in the category of important guano producers. One of the gannets is confined to the northern-most Peruvian islands, and is of much less value than any of the other three birds. In order of increasing economic importance, the members of this distinguished quartet, with their Peruvian and scientific names, are as follows:

  The camanay (Sula nebouxi), a tropical gannet or booby.

  The alcatraz (Pelecanus thagus), a pelican peculiar to the Humboldt Current.

  The piquero (Sula variegata), a booby peculiar to the Humboldt Current.

  The guanay (Phalacrocorax bougainvillei), a white-breasted cormorant peculiar to the Humboldt Current but of antarctic affinities.”

  Why the most valuable birds in the world should congregate on a group of bleak and rocky islands in a highly inaccessible quarter of the sea is no chance or accident, from a biological point of view. These birds wisely prefer to nest only on islands; they multiply in such incredible numbers only where there is an even more incredibly abundant fish life. And that fish life is dependent on smaller fry and invertebrates of the sea, which in turn live on microscopic animals, and the basic food of these, like that of all animals, must be plant life. The plant life which furnishes marine animals with nutriment is chiefly the microscopic diatoms. And diatoms, everywhere common in the ocean, reach a peak of their development where there is a cold current and an upwelling of waters from the deeps. Now all these conditions are perfectly exemplified where the Humboldt Current sweeps past the tropic islands of the Chinchas. So that, by a natural chain of biologic links, these lonely crags were predestined to draw the ships of the world, as if they were needles to a magnet.