I have not up to this time said much about the birds in my collection that were usually most remarked by strangers. They were the Japanese robins, or Peking nightingales.
I had heard of these red-billed, orange-breasted little birds with their large black eyes, and shortly after I began keeping birds had one sent to me. He was indeed a beauty, and in excellent condition, and had traveled as comfortably as a bird can travel in a good-sized cage with plenty of food and a sponge in his drinking-cup, so that if the water were spilt, he could suck the moisture from it.
I took him into my study, and in trying to slip him from his traveling-cage into a larger one, for I always like to keep new arrivals in quarantine for a few days, he escaped from me.
Now I was to see some of the lightning-like movements that the bird books spoke of. I closed the doors and he went around the room like a streak of light. I thoroughly believed what I had heard—that no cat can catch this robin, unless he chooses to be caught, and that he can clear a room of flies in a few minutes. Now he was this side of me, now the other. I had to keep turning my head to follow the swift motions of this little acrobat. As I watched him I admired more and more the red and orange of his costume, and the ring of white around his wonderful eyes that gave him a distinguished and foreign appearance. I had read of his rich, throaty song, his mellow calls, and listened anxiously for the first sounds to issue from his pretty throat.
To my dismay he suddenly began to scold me, uttering hoarse, chattering, grating noises. I saw that he was excited and angry. This was not singing. It was scolding. I put him in the aviary the next day, and stopped staring at him. He hid for some time in a fir tree, then he came out, began to be at home, never acted shy or strange again, and sang nearly all day long a song that was all my fancy had imagined it.
I was intensely interested in this foreigner that never for an instant lost his foreign look, his foreign ways, and yet who seemed more at home than any native bird in my aviary. He kept up his inconceivably yet gracefully rapid movements. He would start at one end of the aviary, snatch a morsel from a food-dish, peck at a bit of fruit, turn a kind of somersault in the air, and land in a water-pan, where he would take a partial bath, and then dart off again. I never saw him take a complete bath, though he would be in the tub forty times a day. He was always in too much of a hurry to finish.
He seemed to have quite a talent for mischief, and one day I could not help smiling as I saw him play a roguish trick on my robin Bob. He watched her leave her nest and get out of sight, then he darted to the eggs, settled down on them with a blissful expression of countenance and shut his eyes, as if to say, “How lovely to have something to care for!” Another flash of thought then struck him. He sprang up, gave one of the eggs a good sharp peck that made a hole in it, and scampered off to avoid reprisals from the wrathful Bob who screamed if any one meddled with her eggs.
Nearly all the time this robin flew about the aviary he kept up a gurgling, blissful song, and so fascinated was I with him that I sent away for a mate. She soon came. I had found a bird-dealer who really seemed to love his birds, and who never sent me a poor one or a sick one. When Mrs. Jap arrived, my friend, the first bird, nearly lost his head. I have said that when I got him he went around the room like a streak of lightning. If it were possible for one to see two streaks in one I now was the favored individual.
He, the enterprising happy bird, had been living as a stranger in a strange land. Here now was a beloved little sister, right from his own dear land. What was he to do about it? Intense joy so urged him on that he could not stop long enough to speak to her. The fastidious, exquisite little female, in the intervals of cleaning her plumage, disarranged by travel, kept calling to him in a voice as rich as his own, “Where, oh where, oh where are you, my dear, oh!
“Here I am, oh! here I am, oh! here I am, oh!” he would respond like a melodious flashlight, and finally he sobered down and she, having finished her toilet, began to fly with him. From that day to this they have been inseparable companions, chasing each other’s bright wings about the aviary, bathing, eating, drinking—not together usually, but one after the other in a hurried, graceful fashion. One amusing trick they had was to fly swiftly by my head and brush my ears with the tips of their wings.
When tired of playing, singing, and eating, they occasionally settled down for a nap. I used to think they were fast asleep, when lo! the male would wake up with a start, as if he had forgotten something, and would begin to rub his companion’s head with his red bill. The female also woke up, turning her head round and round for him to shampoo every part of it, then after he had finished she did her duty by going over his head.
At night they used to sleep close beside each other, and always raised their pretty heads when I went near them with my lantern. They were never afraid of being captured, for I did not have to doctor them or handle them in any way. They had excellent appetites, and the immense amount of exercise they took kept them in fine condition.
They were never vicious birds, but sometimes they exhibited a mischievous inclination to chase the smaller inhabitants of the aviary. I never knew them to kill a bird, except the aggravating yellow warbler.
When I left home this autumn I pondered long over my duty toward these two beauties. I had had them for some years, and they had thoroughly explored my aviary, darting about the lower one, soaring up the elevator, around the roof-veranda, and down again. They liked me, but had no real love for me as some of my birds seemed to have. So, knowing that they could be happy elsewhere, and knowing also that I could not leave too many birds at home, I chose these two happy, debonair creatures for exile.
I sent them to the kind curator of a large aviary, where I hear they are perfectly well and happy, as I knew they would be. Long may they live! No brighter, smarter little bird exists than the Japanese robin.
A very dear little bird that I had in my aviary was a bobolink. He was a sober-looking bird when I got him, for he was in his winter dress—yellowish brown with dusky wings and tail. When spring came he blossomed out into a new suit with trimmings of cream and white—and how he sang! I never had a bird that took more pleasure in his own society. He would get by himself in a corner, safely out of the way of quarrels, and sing a captivating tangle of song, till he was exhausted and had to refresh himself by a hearty meal.
He ate and drank and sang, and every time I think of him I call up a picture of a pretty bird leaning forward with distended throat from which issues a flood of melody.
I loved my dear Bob o’Lincoln, and found out all I could about him. I was delighted to hear that there was a law against the capture of this gayest of songsters, and was interested to know that his kind has quite a wide range—from Utah to Nova Scotia, and from Manitoba to the Amazon. Bobolinks like the North in summer, but sensibly prefer the South in winter, where they have the name of reedbirds or ricebirds. Exasperated farmers down South shoot poor Bob because he and his numerous progeny stuff themselves in fields of rice and oats. However, if it were not for Bob and other insectivorous birds, the grain might never ripen, for in the spring and summer they must subsist largely on the insects that are worse enemies of man than are the birds.
I kept Bob a year or two. The second summer I had him on my farm I listened one day to the wild bobolinks down in the meadow, pouring out their bird hearts in delicious harmonies, then I opened the door of the room where Bob was and recommended him to join those merry fellows in the alders by the river. He sat for an hour or two as if deliberating, then he flew off in a leisurely way, and I saw him no more, but I know quite well that he would join his wild cousins, and when the autumn came, would fly south with them.
I have several other birds in mind that I should like to write about, but I think the story of my pets is already long enough. I shall be satisfied if I have made birds a little more interesting to persons who already love them, and if I cause a few to become interested, who have cared nothing for them. They are exquisite creatures, and the more one studies them the more he finds to admire in them, and the greater number of points of resemblance are there discovered between them and human beings.
There are cruel birds and kind birds, intelligent birds and stupid birds—birds that perhaps do not converse, but that certainly communicate to each other impressions and sensations in a kind of language of their own, and birds that scarcely converse at all. Yet after all, their intelligence is not our intelligence. One gets birds to a certain point, and they go no farther. However, they are eminently suitable as friends and companions for man.
Why is it that we have been so cruel to them? Why is it that the first thought of a bird in the mind of a boy is usually associated with the thought of a gun? Our little brothers and sisters of the air were created for us. They ask only for the privilege of toiling unremittingly for us. Their busy little beaks are from morning till night at the service of their brother man.
We have got to learn better how to appreciate their services. If we do not, there are dark days in store for this nation, for if the birds perish from the face of the earth naturalists tell us that man will perish too.
There are three things we must do—we must take energetic measures to protect, first, our children; secondly, our birds; and thirdly, our forests.
Statisticians tell us that industrial slavery is ruining many children who should become healthy mothers and fathers of families. They also tell us that the lack of protection of insect-eating birds is taking from the pockets of this nation every year the almost inconceivable sum of eight hundred millions of dollars, and that the present frightful waste of wood if not checked, will cause us to be without timber, outside the national forests, in from twenty to forty years.
What are we going to do about it?
Are we to sink still further into the gross, short-sighted materialism of our age, or are we to wish for an awakening and quickening of the old American spirit—the spirit of one small shipload of persons that was, however, strong enough at one time to dominate this continent?
“We are our brothers’ keepers,” said our stern and honest Pilgrim ancestors. “We are our brothers’ keepers,” we, their children, must learn to echo—keepers even to the beasts of the field and to our little brothers and sisters of the air, that have a right to exist and to lead their own lives, and to demand from us created beings of a higher order protection, sympathy, and goodfellowship.