But all my hopes of success were soon to be quashed; for after they had been in cage but a week, they began to die, sometimes two in a day; and in another week, but a solitary individual was left, which soon followed the others. I vainly endeavoured to replace them, by sending to the mountain; for where the species was so numerous two months before, they were now (beginning of June) scarcely to be seen at all. The cause of the death of my caged captives, I conjecture to have been the want of insect food; that, notwithstanding their frequent sipping at the syrup, they were really starved to death. I was led to this conclusion, by having found, on dissecting those which died, that they were excessively meagre in flesh, and that the stomach, which ordinarily is as large as a pea, and distended with insects, was, in these, shrunken to a minute collapsed membrane, with difficulty distinguished.
* Samuel Campbell, Gosse’s young negro collector, a boy of great talent for his work. [Ed.]
XIII
ALEXANDER WILSON
WHEN America was almost an unbroken wilderness from the Appalachians to the Pacific, when Daniel Boone was harrying the Indians of Kentucky, when passenger pigeons darkened the sky in their flights, and the whooping cranes shook the ground with their chorus, there met by sheerest chance in all that vast wilderness two who lived only for birds, who loved them with a love surpassing that of women. If there is Destiny, it guided Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon together in Louisville, Kentucky, that March day in 1810. They could have missed each other so easily; instead, with the fateful attraction of celestial bodies, these two lights of early American ornithology came swiftly together.
Audubon was then unknown to science, to art, or to his later glittering fame. Wilson took him for a country storekeeper with a French accent and a collection of bird drawings, but no science. Audubon says Wilson wore a perpetual surprised expression; he took the stranger for a peddler of some sort. And that is just what he was.
Born in 1776 near Glasgow, Alexander Wilson, after years of bitter slavery at the thrumming looms, betook himself to peddling cloth, to which, like a ballad singer of old, he added the sale of his verses. As a dialect poet Wilson is a sort of minor Burns, not without humor, bitterness, and heartiness; his poems were often mistaken for Burns’ by those who did not know genius or miss the lack of it. But minor though Wilson’s poetry, it must be mentioned for it had two profoundly important results. Just because Wilson was a poet he wrote a great deal better than an ornithologist could be expected to write. And because he was a poet with a democratic conscience he got himself into hot water with his rhymed attack on the master weavers; this resulted in his being thrown in jail and compelled to burn his poems in public; and the result of that, on his sensitive proud soul, was to drive him to America.
He was then just attaining manhood, and seems to have known nothing much about ornithology; he considered himself a poet and a journeyman weaver, and also, at times, he practised the trade of village dominie. There was some little of the pedant in his temperament, and even this had its value. It made him, later, a very precise ornithologist, eager to verify, to correct predecessor authorities. So he did not fall into the blunders of his rival Audubon, through exuberance of temperament and incautious utterance.
Wilson turned his attention to ornithology at the suggestion of the Philadelphia naturalists William Bartram, Benjamin Barton and George Ord. For they found Wilson despondent over the failure of his third love affair, and they persuaded him to lay down his melancholy flute and take up the inspiriting study of the Class of Aves. All this sounds like the setting for a thoroughly dilettante career. But the lovesick minor poet whose soul was daily ground by the drudgery of swingeing lessons into country children, had unsuspected stuff in him. Alexander Wilson was one of those rare poets who is also a scientist. In fact, he was a better scientist than poet, and he set himself with zeal to become the historian and the portraitist of all the birds in America. Travelling, bird-watching, collecting specimens, seeking subscribers for his volumes (to cost the unheard sum of one hundred dollars) he made himself past master of American bird life in its heroic age. Never again will there be fowl in the air such as flew and cried there then. Untrodden swamps, lakes never yet shot over, beech forests the size of a European kingdom, where the axe had not yet rung—this last hardwood wilderness of the temperate world awaited Alexander Wilson. He was not the first naturalist who ever set foot in it, by any means; but he was much the best so far.
And then his path crossed Audubon’s.
Their meeting was not wholly happy. Though they had never then heard of each other, each sensed in the other a dangerous rival. Both men were vain—Audubon with the undisguised child-like hearty vanity of the artist, Wilson vain as is the pedagogue and the self-educated man, with reserve, silence, touchiness. Audubon flourished his marvelous drawings, snatched from the very attitudes of wilderness life. Beside them Wilson’s drawings were wooden. Says one of Wilson’s biographers: “A man who has given his heart to the accomplishment of an object, believing that he has no rival, must be somewhat more than human, if he be delighted to find that another is engaged in the same purpose with equal energy and advantages far greater than his own.”
Wilson calls Audubon’s drawings “very good,” in his diary, and Audubon in his memoirs records that he showed Wilson birds (whooping cranes and others) he had never seen before, and that despite all he could do to cheer him, Wilson seemed despondent. Wilson remarks that here he parted to the landlord of the inn with his little wild parakeet which had accompanied him on all his travels perched on his shoulder. Not long after, Wilson died in his forty-eighth year, his frail frame worn away by prodigious efforts to find subscribers for his book, and by dysentery contracted, no doubt, in his wilderness travels.
The American Ornithology began to appear in 1808 and was still not completed when Wilson died. Prince Charles Lucien Bonaparte, the international ornithologist, brought it up to date in subsequent editions. Indeed these appeared in England just in time to do great damage to Audubon who was then in Britain seeking subscribers and seeing his work through the press.
Americans know Wilson as the father of American ornithology, just as they consider Audubon its “golden boy.” He was practically the first writer to do anything worthy of notice with the life histories of some four hundred North American birds. To have first-hand acquaintance with the lives of so great a number is well-nigh unsurpassed. Today if you want to spend a lifetime monographing the barred owl, there is a great literature on the owl to assist you; there are immense collections of specimens in museums; you can see motion picture films of owls, with accompanying sound tracks. Colleagues will help you. Wilson, untrained in any science, working alone, confronted by an immense fauna about which there was nothing worthy written or known, accomplished miracles.
It has seemed to me very appropriate that the first of our great bird writers should be permitted to speak for two species that are now almost extinct with us. The Carolina parrot, generally known now as the parakeet, was Wilson’s little familiar. He should certainly have known about it if anyone did. In his times it was still a common bird, popular with plume hunters, but not at all popular with farmers, who took no sentimental view of its harsh voice and lousy plumage. Its depredations among crops were so serious and persistent that the expansion of pioneer agriculture practically foredoomed it to banishment. Further, the stupidity of the bird in immediately settling on the same spot after being momentarily driven up by gun-fire, shows that this curious northern representative of a great tropical family was one without great survival value. One regrets its absence, but it is not the most precious creature that has ever suffered at the hands of man.
More keenly one feels the loss of ivory-billed woodpeckers. Here was one of those fabulous creatures in which we can hardly believe even with Audubon’s portrait and Wilson’s account before us. But these fierce, vasty, noisy hewers of wood belong in the class of creatures that, like buffalo, are out-size for present times. The ivory-bil
ls were like some species out of another geologic age—kings, but kings of an order that may not stay. Wilson’s experience with these woodpeckers sufficiently explains how this is so.
CAROLINA PARROT
OF ONE hundred and sixty-eight kinds of parrots, enumerated by European writers as inhabiting the various regions of the globe, this is the only species found native within the territory of the United States. The vast and luxuriant tracts lying within the torrid zone, seem to be the favourite residence of those noisy, numerous, and richly plumaged tribes. The Count de Buffon has, indeed, circumscribed the whole genus of parrots to a space not extending more than twenty-three degrees on each side of the equator: but later discoveries have shewn this statement to be incorrect, as these birds have been found on our continent as far south as the Straits of Magellan, and even on the remote shores of Van Diemen’s Land, in Terra Australasia. The species now under consideration is also known to inhabit the interior of Louisiana, and the shores of Mississippi and Ohio, and their tributary waters, even beyond the Illinois river, to the neighbourhood of Lake Michigan, in lat. 42 deg. north; and, contrary to the generally received opinion, is chiefly resident in all these places. Eastward, however, of the great range of the Alleghany, it is seldom seen farther north than the state of Maryland; though straggling parties have been occasionally observed among the valleys of the Juniata; and, according to some, even twenty-five miles to the northwest of Albany, in the state of New York.* But such accidental visits furnish no certain criteria, by which to judge of their usual extent of range; those aërial voyagers, as well as others who navigate the deep, being subject to be cast away, by the violence of the elements, on distant shores and unknown countries.
From these circumstances of the northern residence of this species, we might be justified in concluding it to be a very hardy bird, more capable of sustaining cold than nine-tenths of its tribe; and so I believe it is; having myself seen them, in the month of February, along the banks of the Ohio, in a snow-storm, flying about like pigeons, and in full cry.
The preference, however, which this bird gives to the western countries, lying in the same parallel of latitude with those eastward of the Alleghany mountains, which it rarely or never visits, is worthy of remark; and has been adduced, by different writers, as a proof of the superior mildness of climate in the former to that of the latter. But there are other reasons for this partiality equally powerful, though hitherto overlooked; namely, certain peculiar features of country to which these birds are particularly and strongly attached: these are, low rich alluvial bottoms, along the borders of creeks, covered with a gigantic growth of sycamore trees, or button-wood; deep, and almost impenetrable swamps, where the vast and towering cypress lift their still more majestic heads; and those singular salines, or, as they are usually called, licks, so generally interspersed over that country, and which are regularly and eagerly visited by the paroquets. A still greater inducement is the superior abundance of their favourite fruits. That food which the paroquet prefers to all others is the seeds of the cockle bur, a plant rarely found in the lower parts of Pennsylvania or New York; but which unfortunately grows in too great abundance along the shores of the Ohio and Mississippi, so much so as to render the wool of those sheep that pasture where it most abounds, scarcely worth the cleaning, covering them with one solid mass of burs, wrought up and imbedded into the fleece, to the great annoyance of this valuable animal. The seeds of the cypress tree and hackberry, as well as beech nuts, are also great favourites with these birds; the two former of which are not commonly found in Pennsylvania, and the latter by no means so general or so productive. Here, then, are several powerful reasons, more dependent on soil than climate, for the preference given by these birds to the luxuriant regions of the west. Pennsylvania, indeed, and also Maryland, abound with excellent apple orchards, on the ripe fruit of which the paroquets occasionally feed. But I have my doubts whether their depredations in the orchard be not as much the result of wanton play and mischief, as regard for the seeds of the fruit, which they are supposed to be in pursuit of. I have known a flock of these birds alight on an apple tree, and have myself seen them twist off the fruit, one by one, strewing it in every direction around the tree, without observing that any of the depredators descended to pick them up. To a paroquet, which I wounded and kept for some considerable time, I very often offered apples, which it uniformly rejected; but burs, or beech nuts, never. To another very beautiful one, which I brought from New Orleans, and which is now sitting in the room beside me, I have frequently offered this fruit, and also the seeds separately, which I never knew it to taste. Their local attachments, also, prove that food, more than climate, determines their choice of country. For even in the states of Ohio, Kentucky, and the Mississippi territory, unless in the neighbourhood of such places as have been described, it is rare to see them. The inhabitants of Lexington, as many of them assured me, scarcely ever observe them in that quarter. In passing from that place to Nashville, a distance of two hundred miles, I neither heard nor saw any, but at a place called Madison’s lick. In passing on, I next met with them on the banks and rich flats of the Tennessee river: after this, I saw no more till I reached Bayo St. Pierre, a distance of several hundred miles: from all which circumstances, I think we cannot, from the residence of these birds, establish with propriety any correct standard by which to judge of the comparative temperatures of different climates.
In descending the river Ohio, by myself, in the month of February, I met with the first flock of paroquets, at the mouth of the Little Sioto. I had been informed, by an old and respectable inhabitant of Marietta, that they were sometimes, though rarely, seen there. I observed flocks of them, afterwards, at the mouth of the Great and Little Miami, and in the neighbourhood of numerous creeks that discharge themselves into the Ohio. At Big Bone lick, thirty miles above the mouth of Kentucky river, I saw them in great numbers. They came screaming through the woods in the morning about an hour after sunrise, to drink the salt water, of which they, as well as the pigeons, are remarkably fond. When they alighted on the ground, it appeared at a distance as if covered with a carpet of the richest green, orange, and yellow: they afterwards settled, in one body, on a neighbouring tree, which stood detached from any other, covering almost every twig of it, and the sun, shining strongly on their gay and glossy plumage, produced a very beautiful and splendid appearance. Here I had an opportunity of observing some very particular traits of their character: having shot down a number, some of which were only wounded, the whole flock swept repeatedly around their prostrate companions, and again settled on a low tree, within twenty yards of the spot where I stood. At each successive discharge, though showers of them fell, yet the affection of the survivors seemed rather to increase; for, after a few circuits around the place, they again alighted near me, looking down on their slaughtered companions with such manifest symptoms of sympathy and concern, as entirely disarmed me. I could not but take notice of the remarkable contrast between their elegant manner of flight, and their lame crawling gait among the branches. They fly very much like the wild pigeon, in close compact bodies, and with great rapidity, making a loud and outrageous screaming, not unlike that of the red-headed woodpecker. Their flight is sometimes in a direct line; but most usually circuitous, making a great variety of elegant and easy serpentine meanders, as if for pleasure. They are particularly attached to the large sycamores, in the hollow of the trunks and branches of which they generally roost, thirty or forty, and sometimes more, entering at the same hole. Here they cling close to the sides of the tree, holding fast by the claws and also by the bills. They appear to be fond of sleep, and often retire to their holes during the day, probably to take their regular siesta. They are extremely sociable with, and fond of each other, often scratching each other’s heads and necks, and always, at night, nestling as close as possible to each other, preferring, at that time, a perpendicular position, supported by their bill and claws. In the fall, when their favourite cockle burs are ripe, they
swarm along the coast, or high grounds of the Mississippi, above New Orleans, for a great extent. At such times, they are killed and eaten by many of the inhabitants; though, I confess, I think their flesh very indifferent. I have several times dined on it from necessity, in the woods: but found it merely passable, with all the sauce of a keen appetite to recommend it.
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