A Bird-Lover in the West Part 15

Sometimes the daily visit was made under difficulties, and I was unpleasantly surprised when I stepped upon the gra.s.s of the little lawn that I was obliged to cross. The gra.s.s looked as usual; the evening before we had been sitting upon it. But all night a stream had been silently spreading itself upon it, and my hasty step was into water two or three inches deep, which swished up in a small fountain and filled a low shoe in an instant.

This is one of the idiosyncrasies of irrigation, which it seemed I should never get accustomed to, and several times I was obliged to turn back for overshoes before I could pay my usual call. A lawn asoak is a curious sight, and always reminds me of Lanier's verses,

"A thousand rivulets run 'Twixt the roots of the soil; the blades of the marsh gra.s.s stir; ... and the currents cease to run, And the sea and the marsh are one."

The morning the lazulis were ten days old, before I came out of the house, that happened which so often puts an end to a study of bird life,--the nest was torn out of place and destroyed, and the little family had disappeared. The particulars will never be known. Whether a nest-robbing boy or a hungry cat was the transgressor, and whether the nestlings were carried off or eaten, or had happily escaped, who can tell? I could only judge by the conduct of the birds themselves, and as they did not appear disturbed, and continued to carry food, it is to be presumed that part, if not all, of the brood was saved from the wreck of their home.

Happily, to console me in my sorrow for this catastrophe, the lazuli was not the only bird to be seen on the lawn, though his was the only nest.

I had for some time been greatly interested in the daily visits of a humming-bird, a little dame in green and white, who had taken possession of a honeysuckle vine beside the door, claiming the whole as her own, and driving away, with squeaky but fierce cries, any other of her race who ventured to sip from the coral cups so profusely offered.

The season for humming-birds opened with the locust blossoms next door, which were for days a ma.s.s of blooms and buzzings, of birds and bees.

But when the fragrant flowers began to fall and the ground was white with them, one bird settled herself on our honeysuckle, and there took her daily meals for a month. Being not six feet from where I sat for hours every day, I had the first good opportunity of my life to learn the ways of one of these queer little creatures in feathers.

After long searching and much overhauling of the books, I made her out to be the female broad-tailed humming-bird, who is somewhat larger than the familiar ruby-throat of the East. Her mate, if she had one, never came to the vine; but whether she drove him away and discouraged him, or whether he had an independent source of supply, I never knew. She was the only one whose acquaintance I made, and in a month's watching I came to know her pretty well.

In one way she differed strikingly from any humming-bird I have seen: she alighted, and rested frequently and for long periods. Droll enough it looked to see such an atom, such a mere pinch of feathers, conduct herself after the fashion of a big bird; to see her wipe that needle-like beak, and dress those infinitesimal feathers, combing out her head plumage with her minute black claws, running the same useful appendages through her long, gauzy-looking wings, and carefully removing the yellow pollen of the honeysuckle blooms which stuck to her face and throat. Her favorite perch was a tiny dead twig on the lowest branch of a poplar-tree, near the honeysuckle. There she spent a long time each day, sitting usually, though sometimes she stood on her little wiry legs.

But though my humming friend might sit down, there was no repose about her; she was continually in motion. Her head turned from side to side, as regularly, and apparently as mechanically, as an elephant weaves his great head and trunk. Sometimes she turned her attention to me, and leaned far over, with her large, dark eyes fixed upon me with interest or curiosity. But never was there the least fear in her bearing; she evidently considered herself mistress of the place, and reproved me if I made the slightest movement, or spoke too much to a neighbor. If she happened to be engaged among her honey-pots when a movement was made, she instantly jerked herself back a foot or more from the vine, and stood upon nothing, as it were, motionless, except the wings, while she looked into the cause of the disturbance, and often expressed her disapproval of our behavior in squeaky cries.

The toilet of this lilliputian in feathers, performed on her chosen twig as it often was, interested me greatly. As carefully as though she were a foot or two, instead of an inch or two long, did she clean and put in order every plume on her little body, and the work of polishing her beak was the great performance of the day. This member was plainly her pride and her joy; every part of it, down to the very tip, was sc.r.a.ped and rubbed by her claws, with the leg thrown over the wing, exactly as big birds do. It was astonishing to see what she could do with her leg. I have even seen her pause in mid-air and thrust one over her vibrating wing to scratch her head.

Then when the pretty creature was all in beautiful order, her emerald-green back and white breast immaculate, when she had shaken herself out, and darted out and drawn back many times her long bristle-like tongue, she would sometimes hover along before the tips of the fence-stakes, which were like laths, held an inch apart by wires,--collecting, I suppose, the tiny spiders which were to be found there. She always returned to the honeysuckle, however, to finish her repast, opening and closing her tail as one flirts a fan, while the breeze made by her wings agitated the leaves for two feet around her.

Should a blossom just ready to fall come off on her beak like a coral case, as it sometimes did, she was indignant indeed; she jerked herself back and flung it off with an air that was comical to see.

When the hot wind blew, the little creature seemed to feel the discomfort that bigger ones did: she sat with open beak as though panting for breath; she flew around with legs hanging, and even alighted on a convenient leaf or cl.u.s.ter of flowers, while she rifled a blossom, standing with st.u.r.dy little legs far apart, while stretching up to reach the bloom she desired.

Two statements of the books were not true in the case of this bird: she did not sit on a twig upright like an owl or a hawk, but held her body exactly as does a robin or sparrow; and she did fly backward and sideways, as well as forward.

Toward the end of June my tiny visitor began to make longer intervals between her calls, and when she did appear she was always in too great haste to stop; she pa.s.sed rapidly over half a dozen blossoms, and then flitted away. Past were the days of loitering about on poplar twigs or preening herself on the peach-tree. It was plain that she had set up a home for herself, and the mussy state of her once nicely kept breast feathers told the tale,--she had a nest somewhere. Vainly, however, did I try to track her home: she either took her way like an arrow across the garden to a row of very tall locusts, where a hundred humming-birds'

nests might have been hidden, or turned the other way over a neighbor's field to a cl.u.s.ter of thickly grown apple-trees, equally impossible to search. If she had always gone one way I might have tried to follow, but to look for her infinitesimal nest at opposite poles of the earth was too discouraging, even if the weather had been cool enough for such exertion.

When at last I could endure the wind and the dust and the heat no longer, and stood one morning on the porch, waiting for the most deliberate of drivers with his carriage to drive me to the station, that I might leave Utah altogether, the humming-bird appeared on the scene, took a sip or two out of her red cups, flirted her feathers saucily in my very face, then darted over the top of the cottage and disappeared; and that was the very last glimpse I had of the little dame in green.