Wild Life in a City Garden

LYING in bed early one cool March morning, before the hush that hung over the sleeping city had been broken by the first of those multitudinous noises that the young day would bring, I saw a compact black body shoot with the speed of a comet across the square of blue sky framed like a picture in the open window. In an instant I was on my feet; and in another instant, freed from the coverlet that wrapped itself around me and almost threw me to the floor, I was leaning far out across the sill. Yonder it was, a hundred feet above the wet, glistening roofs to the northwest, cleaving the still, fresh air like some aerial torpedo. I gazed at it until it was gone, and doubtless my disappointment was writ large upon my sleepy face. After all, it was only a loon — and I had hoped to see a wild goose!

Only a loon, bound, perhaps, for some cold glassy lake within the Arctic Circle — only a great Northern diver, obeying the call of the North. What was a loon that it should lure a sane man from his warm bed two hours too soon on a chilly morning in March? I asked myself the question as I stood by the window, looking across my neighbor’s lot at the houses beyond, and at the broad steel-blue river to the south. A cardinal, half-hidden in the vivid new foliage of a sugarberry tree, glowed in the sunlight like a great drop of blood; and on a tall chimney farther away a slim gray mocking-bird sang of the joys that April never failed to bring. Overhead, nineteen black vultures passed in procession, coming into town from their sleeping-place across the river, to spend the day feasting with their fellows at the butcher-stalls and slaughter-pens. A large flock of satiny waxwings, lisping monotonously and all at once, settled among the branches of the sugarberry where the cardinal perched; and in the brown grasses beneath h the window half a dozen white-throated sparrows, too busy or too hungry for song, searched industriously for the breakfast that is unlikely to reward the sluggard.

My gaze roved from cardinal to mocking-bird, from waxwing to sparrow; and my thoughts rushed northward with the vanished loon, over house-tops and fields and woods and marshes, on a journey that would not end until he slanted down at last to a lake that he remembered — a lake perhaps two thousand miles away. And then, of a sudden, the old wonder swept over me, the exultation that had thrilled me so often as I stood by that west window or under the garden elms. What if the loon were a common bird on the river in winter? It was, nevertheless, one of the wildest of the wild things; and from my bed in the midst of a busy city I had seen it! Strangely it may seem at first, but in reality naturally enough, I thought of an old friend who had died one hundred and fifteen years before — Reverend Gilbert White of Selborne Parish, Hampshire, England.

Gilbert White is my precedent — my apology for these pages — my excuse for many attacks of what my neighbors probably regard as harmless insanity; and I am bold enough to believe that if he could revisit the earth for a little while he would take back with him on his return a copy of this issue of the Atlantic to show to his friends Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington. Gilbert White loved his home with a love that never weakened. He would have reveled in the forests of wild America, for there he would have found many strange beasts and birds to watch and study; but he preferred to spend his time, when he was not engaged with his clerical duties, studying the familiar creatures of his native parish. The birds of Selborne interested him more than those of any other place, because Selborne was his home; and before he died he wrote a simple little book about these birds and beasts of his home — a book that is now a classic.

So, in part, it has been with me. It will not be my fortune to write a book that will live, nor, probably, a book of any kind; but, nevertheless, I have followed the example of Gilbert White. As he studied the wild life of his parish, so I have studied the wild life of my garden; and as he learned in his circumscribed field many a bit of bird-lore unknown to more sophisticated naturalists who had traveled far and wide, so I have seen in and above my garden

— which is not in the open country where birds abound, but in one of the oldest parts of the old city of Charleston

— a larger number of different species of the wild feathered kindred than any other man has seen in any other city garden in the world.

He boasts, says some one; but no, it is not boasting; it is a simple statement of what I believe to be a fact. ‘Wild Life in a City Garden’ — some will smile when they read the title; for is it not common knowledge that wild life does not exist in city gardens — that because the city is the stronghold of man, it is avoided by those timorous creatures of the woods and marshes who fear man as they fear no other enemy? There was never a greater mistake, nor a more popular fallacy; and as evidence I will submit the record of my garden.

It is not a large place: a plot of ground two hundred feet square would contain it. Houses surround it on three sides, while to the southwest, beyond the open lot of a neighbor, is the Ashley River. To reach the nearest woodland I must either traverse some two or three miles of city blocks, or else cross the river, which is here more than a mile wide. Actually in, and directly above, this garden I have seen one hundred and fourteen different species of birds. If, as is perfectly fair, I include those that I have seen from the windows of the house, the number of species is one hundred and thirty-two — more than one third of the total number to be found in the entire state of South Carolina. This fact, I think, would interest the parsonnaturalist of Selborne. ‘All nature is so full,’ he wrote in his imperishable book, ‘that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined.’ What better proof of the truth of his statement could he ask than the record of this little plot of muchexamined city land, where, in a period of ten years, more than live-score different kinds of birds have been seen by one observer?

I have studied the birds of my garden at odd moments in the short intervals between working hours, yet I have data enough to enable me to write a book about them. I know when to expect each of those species that come regularly each spring or fall, where those that breed in my bushes and trees are likely to build their nests, when each songster is apt to begin singing, how they feed and what they eat, and a thousand and one other details that would suffice to fill this magazine from cover to cover. Nevertheless I have not learned all that there is to learn about the wild life of this small city lot. Scarcely a month passes that does not teach something new, and now and again there comes some great surprise. Not long ago, I looked out of the window one morning and saw in one of the sugarberry trees behind the kitchen a bird that no one, so far as is known, had ever seen in Charleston before. It was a yellow-crowned night heron, in the dark-brown, whitespotted plumage that every bird of that species wears during the first year or so of its life — a yellow-crowned night heron within fifty feet of my bedroom window!

That was a red-letter day; for although the yellow-crowned heron breeds along this coast, it is one of the shyest of its tribe, and you must go to the deep swamps or lonely marshes far from the homes of men if you would see it — unless you come to my garden. Since that memorable morning, this heron and I have become well acquainted with each other. This afternoon, as I write, he — in reality I do not know whether he is a gentleman or a lady — is standing on one long leg on a mulberry branch ten feet from my northwindow. I can stare at him as rudely and as boldly as I please, and he will not trouble to untwist his snaky neck or even open wide his half-closed yellow eyes. He knows the sweetness of idleness, and apparently he delights in the warm languorous September sunshine. He will stand on one thin, greenish leg on that mulberry limb, dozing placidly or preening his feathers with his long, stout bill, until the light begins to fade. Then he will sweep on his wide wings down to the lower end of my neighbor’s lot, where the soil is wet and salty and where many little fiddler-crabs dwell; and there, in the dusk and darkness, he will eat his supper.

Yesterday I had some fun with this solemn recluse of the swamps who has violated all the traditions of his kind by taking up his abode in town. For hours the rain had been falling steadily, and when the clouds broke in midafternoon, the ground was soggy and covered in low places with shallow pools. On the fence of the duck-yard, utterly oblivious to the perturbation with which the wondering ducks viewed his fantastic, melancholy figure, stood my long-legged friend, his narrow shoulders humped most unbecomingly, his thin neck looped like a moccasin hanging from a bush. Presently his neck lengthened, and spreading his wings, he skimmed along the ground past the wood-shed to a shady alley underneath some elms. Here, in a large puddle some twenty feet long and half as wide, he began to stride slowly up and down as complacently as though he were in the heart of a cypress swamp where the foot of man never trod.

For fifteen minutes I leaned against the corner of the wood-shed and watched him, wondering now and then whether any other city man had ever seen a wild yellow-crowned heron fishing in a pool of rain-water in his back yard. The heron saw me, but he ignored me in a manner that was almost humiliating. He did not hesitate to approach within a dozen feet of where I stood in plain view; while a pair of Grinnell’s water-thrushes, who were reaping a plentiful harvest of tiny insects among the dead leaves in the shallow water, were even bolder. They walked swiftly back and forth — for the water-thrush is a walker, not a hopper — so close to me that I could have put my foot upon one of them, apparently ignorant of the fact that in the books they are called shy and timorous. Their food was so minute that I could not distinguish what it was, but the heron was after larger game. He was angling for angle-worms — surely a strange proceeding, since normally an angler angles not at all until he has his angle-worms with which to tempt the victim for which he angles. But my heron was angling after a fashion of his own, and he knew how to go about it. Now and again, as he stalked noiselessly through the water, his long beak flashed down to right or left; and each time death, as sudden as thought, claimed one of the little brown burrowers in the mould. I left him at last, walking about under the fig trees near the piazza, with all the nonchalance of a rooster hatched and reared in the yard, while the colored cook stood by the kitchen door and protested ' befo’ de Lawd ’ that she had never seen so strange a sight ‘sence de day she was bawn.’

It is pleasant to recall some of the other great surprises — some of the other red-letter days in the history of the garden, each one of them rendered unforgettable by the coming of some unlooked-for feathered stranger. Such a day was that third of May four years and a half ago, when I looked up from my book to find a gorgeous male scarlet tanager in the elm sapling beside the piazza. So rare is this bird in the lowlands of South Carolina that, in spite of the careful studies of Audubon, Bachman, and Wayne, there are but four authentic records of its occurrence in this region; and of these four two were made in my city garden —surely a matter of curious interest, to say the least.

Another day that will not soon be forgotten was February 14, 1899, when a woodcock — perhaps the very shyest of all American game birds — stood on the flat top of a tall stump not twenty feet from the piazza, driven into the city by the great blizzard that swept the South on that date, freezing to death thousands of birds of many kinds and almost wiping out of existence the bluebird and the beautiful ground dove. On January 1, 1910, a bitterly cold day, a live woodcock was picked up in the garden. The bird died after two days. So also October 29, 1906, was made memorable by the arrival of two visitors from the North, of a species that few observers have ever seen on this coast — a pair of redbreasted nuthatches; while April 18, 1909, will stand always among the greatest of the great days of the garden, because on that morning I found in my elms a band of eight or ten pine siskins — a bird almost if not quite as rare in this part of the world as the scarlet tanager. I have seen the blackand-white warbler in the garden on December 1 — at least a month later than the latest record made in this state by any other man; and the cedar waxwing has feasted on my mulberries on May 21, long after the last waxwing should have passed from the flat coast country, where the great flocks gather in winter and early spring, to the hills and mountains of the interior, where they disperse and build their nests.

After all, however, it is not in the chance visit of some rare member of the feathered tribes, nor in the occurrence at an unwonted time of a species common enough in its appointed season, that the charm of garden ornithology chiefly lies. I mention these matters merely to show that in a few instances, of interest to the professional naturalist rather than to the dilettante bird-gazer, this tiny area of city real estate is able to contribute its mite to the sum of what is known about the seasonal distribution and migrational movements of the birds of a great continent. For me, the fascination of the study — or diversion, as I should more modestly call it — is found, first, in the wonderful fact that even here amid the streets and houses of a modern city I see from time to time — in some cases, regularly each year — some of the feathered kindred that are thought to be most fearful of man and most characteristic of the wilderness; and secondly, in the continued presence, throughout the year, or during certain periods, of other birds, common and familiar, perhaps, and known by name to every country boy, yet possessing and sometimes betraying secrets that cannot be learned from the books of the wisest of those who have gone before us.

There is a sequestered corner of the garden where a few tall elms and bushy privet trees cast so dark a shade that even in midsummer the moist black soil is bare of weeds and grass. Here, in April, August, and September, I see the hooded warbler, resplendent in yellow and sable, gleaning the good things to be found in the thick foliage to the right, and in the trumpetvines that clamber up the wooden fence to the left. Hither in April and August comes sometimes the gorgeous prothonotary, whose flame-colored breast is like a fragment of glowing cloud stolen from an autumn sunset and whose simple song rings just as clear and bold here amid the houses as in the sombre swamps that I must penetrate to find him when I go birdhunting elsewhere than in the garden. The damp ground under the elms feels each autumn the dainty tread of the water-thrush, and more rarely of the oven-bird — members, although there is nothing in their English names to indicate the relationship, of that same numerous family, the Warblers or Mniotiltidæ, to which the prothonotary and the hooded warbler belong.

The clump of fig-bushes hiding the angle formed by the fence and the back of a neighbor’s cow-shed seems to possess a strange attraction for the sedate black-and-white warblers that visit it in spring and autumn; and it was in these same bushes that I saw the only black-and-white warbler ever seen by any man — so far as is known to science — in South Carolina in the month of December. When the first cool wave of autumn freshens the sultry air of September, many red-starts — with most of the ‘red’ washed out of them — wage war on the slender pale-green larvæ that hide, all in vain, under the small saw-edged leaves of the terminal twiglets of the elms. In April, September, and October I sometimes see the handsome black-throated blue warbler, solemn with a most unwarblerlike solemnity, moving in silence from branch to branch where the shadow is darkest; while the parula, the prairie, the summer yellow-bird, and, in the depth of winter, the hardy little yellow-rump, are among the other warblers that are more or less familiar visitors to the spot. It is a wonderful place, this ‘warbler corner,’ as I call it, with its ugly fence, its funereal gloom, and its bare black soil where hundreds of earthworms work in their humble way the miracle of which the world knew nothing until a man named Darwin wrote a matter-of-fact book on the unromantic subject of vegetable mould. I wonder what Gilbert White would say if he knew that of the thirtytwo species of Mniotiltidæ known to occur in this state—and some of them have been recorded only once or twice — I have seen fourteen species in a single tiny nook of my little garden in Charleston.

Yet it is not the fragile warbler, child of the forest and swamp though he be, that brings the wilderness to me here in the city. Rather it is the lordly eagle that I sometimes see looking down at me, scornfully it seems, as he sweeps over, his snowy head glancing in the sun. It is the phalanx of wild geese rushing northward in a long wedge across the clear April sky. It is the wide-winged black-and-white woodibis, sailing ‘in those blue tracts above the thunder,’ with outstretched neck, trailing legs, and stiff-spread, motionless pinions. It is the sharp-shinned hawk that smashes, like a miniature thunderbolt, into the rose-tangle where the English sparrows hold noisy conclave, and in an instant is up and away with his limp prize. It is the hurrying loon bound for the far boreal lake whose lonely shores will ring ere long with his weird laughter. And most of all, it is the noise of invisible myriads passing in the night.

Sitting on the piazza on cool evenings in late September, I hear the voices of feathered hosts that I cannot see. In hundreds and thousands and, it may be, in hundreds of thousands, they are streaming over my head, up yonder in the black infinity that lies between earth and stars. The whole vast air is full of them; now here, now there, nowelsewhere, their various voices call to me out of the darkness. Some of the sounds I know well — the guttural ‘quok’ of the black-crowned night heron, the high pitched ‘skeow’ of the green heron, the metallic chirp of the ricebird that travels in company with the larger wayfarers in the gloom. Others are sounds that I have never heard at any other time — that probably I shall never hear except on these autumnal nights when the far-called armies of the migrating birds are fleeing southward before the intangible, irresistible might of approaching winter.

Whence come these myriads and whither are they bound? By what strange sense do they guide their certain flight through the uncharted spaces of the air? Where were they yesterday, and where will they hide themselves when daylight comes to-morrow? How many out of all that host will live to complete the long journey, escaping the innumerable perils that threaten them by land and sea? A month from now, perhaps, the small voice that spoke so plaintively a moment ago out of the dark void above my neighbor’s stable may be heard by some huge jaguar gliding like a ghost through the dim aisles of the Amazonian forest. A month from now, for aught I know, the little wings that fan the breeze above my garden to-night may be battling bravely but in vain in one of the furious hurricanes that sweep the Caribbean. Out of the unknown they come, and into the unknown they depart — these unseen aerial regiments, pressing on blindly yet unerringly through the black waste of air, toward strange, far lands where winter is but a name.

From the vague dome-like mass of a fig tree near the piazza — a darker shadow among dark shadows — comes a clear flute-like whistle repeated again and again. It is a cardinal singing in the gloom — singing perhaps to the yellow moon that peeps now and then from behind the scurrying drifts of cloud. I am ashamed. I have written page after page about the birds of my garden, and scarcely a word have I written about those that should occupy the most exalted place. Tempted by the unusual, I have ignored the ordinary, which in all our affairs is generally the most important. I have sought to imprison in a few paragraphs some idea of the wild life that exists in my city garden; and because they are somewhat less wild than the others, I have passed over those more familiar birds that are most characteristic of the place. I do not know what the garden would be like if its cardinals and its mocking-birds were taken away. In sunshine and in rain, in the dream-like calm of breathless summer noons, and in the gray desolation of bleak December dawns, they are my comrades, these two. Better than the weather god himself, the red-coated cardinal knows when spring is coming; and the bold, free song that he sings outside the window on the first sunny morning in January is the sweetest sound that I hear in all the year. He is the guardian spirit of the garden, my honest, stouthearted Redcoat; and for him and his fair dove-colored wife a goodly portion of cracked corn is placed each day on the feeding-stump under the graceful elm in which, years ago when it was a slender sapling, I saw the scarlet tanager.

Redcoat’s life is an open book that he who runs may read. In the North he is called shy, secretive, skulking; but if the charge be true, this Yankee cardinal is not akin to the gallant-feathered gentleman that I know. I have yet to see him do anything of which I might disapprove. True, he does not help in the making of the three nests that his mate builds each year in the garden; but is it not possible that the lady prefers to fashion the cradle of her prospective brood according to her own whims and with her own capable bill? Certainly, in all other respects, his treatment of his spouse is beautiful to behold, and in all nature you will not find a father more loving or less lazy. Morally — if there be such a thing as morality or its opposite among the wild creatures — he is the superior of ‘the Mocking-bird, Dawn’s gay and jocund Priest,’ though he lacks the genius of that slim Shakespeare, as Lanier called the mocker, and the marvelous vocal technique to which the latter owes his fame.

The mocking-bird’s character is not without its defects. As his supremely beautiful song is marred at times by strange discordant notes, so in the commonplace, prosaic affairs of everyday life he strays now and then from the strait path of rectitude that Redcoat follows faithfully to the end of his days. The mocking-bird is one of the bravest creatures that breathe the air. He will lay down his life in defense of his nest, and I have seen him actually put a fair-sized dog to flight; but at the same time he is as shameless and incorrigible a bully as the kingbird or the crested flycatcher. Often have I heaped abuse upon his head because in utterly causeless fury he has smitten hip and thigh some unusual visitor to the garden; and as often have I granted him forgiveness of his sin when, after routing the inoffensive object of his wrath and pursuing it far beyond the confines of his domain, he has mounted light as air to the topmost twig of the tallest elm and poured forth to the calm sky above such music as no other bird can make.

In the drawer of my desk is the unfinished manuscript of a history of the garden’s birds — dry, concise (I hope), and matter-of-fact, treating each species separately and in order. Perhaps it would interest Gilbert White more than this rambling story; but of the people that I know many would judge its author a fool for burning the midnight oil in work so bizarre and so barren of material profit. Yet in this little garden there is matter for a century of study; and for him whose spirit is attuned to the simpler notes of life’s music, there is enjoyment and something that approaches happiness — something that no one can take away save him whom the old Arabians were wont to call the Destroyer of Delights and the Sunderer of Companies. Outside, in the world of fiercer passions and graver problems, there may be perplexity and defeat; but in the privet hedge under the elms Redcoat still sings his song, while his mate still eats my corn — and, I believe, gives me thanks.

Within the boundary of these fences I have learned a few things that have been worth learning, and I have found much to wonder at. I am a hobbyist, I suppose, but surely my hobby has features that commend it. I have discovered that my garden is a whole country in itself — a country possessing an astonishingly large and varied avifauna: and it is pleasant to me to reflect that I have rendered my garden unique; for I doubt if there is, anywhere on this planet, another plot of ground of the same size where so many different species of birds have been recorded. A poor achievement this, perhaps, and small cause for pride; yet the sage of Selborne would forgive me, I think, if he should find a certain conceit between these lines.