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LUCK ON
THE PRAIRIE A
WELL-GROOMED hobby will carry its rider comfortably over many a slough. I was on
my way westward to El Paso, and knowing that the train was due there before
daylight, I left my berth early, and had gone out upon the porch of the
observation car to catch a bite of fresh air and enjoy the first faint flushes
of the dawn, when a train-hand, passing in the semidarkness, informed me that
the wreck of a freight train was on the track in front of us, and that we
should probably not be able to move for eight or nine hours. I had noticed that
we were standing still upon a “siding,” but such halts are not infrequent on a
single-track road, and having my mind upon pleasanter themes, I had passed the
circumstance by without further thought. The news
of our trouble spread, as one passenger after another made his unhandsome,
half-civilized appearance from behind the curtains, and though we proved to be
a pretty philosophical company, as transcontinental travelers have need to be,
the general run of comment was not hilarious. A turn
outside, as it grew lighter, showed that we were at a station called San
Elizario (a pleasing name, surely), some three thousand two hundred feet above
sea-level. The westerly breeze was a refreshment, and three or four ranges of
jagged mountains glorified the horizon. If we must be delayed, the Fates had
chosen a favorable place for us. I, for
one, soon began to feel reconciled to the turn affairs had taken, and went back
to the car for an opera-glass. It must be a dull day in Texas when a
tender-footed bird-gazer cannot find at least one novelty, and till the “first
call for breakfast” I would be out trying my luck. An adobe
building, windowless and unoccupied, stood not far off, and near it was a
cottonwood tree, still holding, in spite of all those Texas winds, part of its
last season’s crop of dry leaves. I walked in that direction, and at the moment
three birds, with musical, goldfinch-like twitters, flew into the tree. A
glance showed them to be not goldfinches, but small birds of the purple finch
group, very bright and rosy (the two males), and thickly streaked underneath.
“The house finch!” I exclaimed. This is a
Western beauty, greatly beloved for its color, its music, and its engaging
familiarity, by all to whom it is a neighbor. I had read of its charms, and had
freshly in mind an enthusiastic eulogy of it by an old friend, now a resident
of Colorado, whom I had chanced to fall in with a fortnight before in a railway
car. With those three lovely creatures talking to me, I felt that the day was
saved. A Say’s
phoebe was near by, in a pear orchard (for the piece of prairie land on which
we so unexpectedly found ourselves was under irrigation), and as I had met it
first only forty-eight hours before — at Del Rio — I was glad to see more of
its very demure and pretty habits, especially of its clever trick of hovering
at considerable length just over the grass. The rather bright buff of its
under-parts is one of its striking characteristics, and now, when I caught
sight of it in the distance, I had for a moment thoughts of some unfamiliar
kind of oriole. There was
barely time to pay my respects to the phoebe before a flash of blue wings made
me aware of something more interesting still, a bevy of bluebirds. It would be
good fortune, surely, if they should turn out to be of one of the several
Western forms that I had never seen. I drew near, therefore, with all
carefulness, and needed but one look to assure myself that such was indeed the case.
Their backs were not blue, but of a chestnut shade. The blue of the wings,
moreover, was not quite the same as that of our common Eastern Sialia. Whatever
they were, the color of the backs would probably be enough to name them, and I
returned to the car for breakfast and, first of all, to make sure of my new
birds’ identity. A consultation of the handbook showed it to be reasonably
certain that they were of the subspecies Sialia mexicana bairdi, the
chestnut-backed bluebird; but I had failed to observe one important mark: the throat
should have been “purplish blue.” I wished very much to see them again, but
they had disappeared. Doubtless they were migrants or stragglers, and by this
time were far away. A pity I had not been more painstaking while I had the
opportunity. The one safe rule is to note everything, though it is a rule more
easily laid down than lived up to, to be sure, especially in a new place, with
many distractions. Anyhow, the birds must be of the chestnut-backed
sub-species, I reassured myself, for the sufficient reason that it was
impossible, here in western Texas, that they should be anything else. Allaying
my scruples thus, I started across a field toward a farmhouse, and on the way
noticed a crow flying over. It was the first one I had seen since reaching San
Antonio, — the chaparral country not favoring birds of the crow-jay tribe,1
— and I remarked it with pleasure. And then, remembering something I had lately
read of Arizona, I thought, “But is it a crow, after all? Isn’t it one of the
white-necked ravens that are set down as so common and familiar in this part of
the world?” And, in fact, it was; for the next moment it began calling in a
voice that put the possibility of its being a common American crow, the only
one that could possibly be met with in all this region, quite out of the
account. Another new bird! The third within half an hour! Surely this was
better than getting into El Paso on schedule time. Let El Paso wait. It would
probably last the day out. But the
story was not yet done, for after a little the meadow larks, of which there
were many in the fields (with large flocks of horned larks, also), began
singing. I was disappointed in the song, of the beauty of which I had formed
the most exalted expectations, but consoled myself with believing that the
birds were not Western meadow larks proper, but the Texan sub-species;
otherwise I must conclude that their voices were still somewhat winter-bound,
or at least, not yet keyed up to concert pitch. A sparrow
hawk beside the farmhouse before mentioned allowed me to stand almost under his
low tree before he took wing, and when at last he did so I had a feeling that
he was rather surprisingly long. I thought nothing more of the matter at the
moment, but later, discovering by a reference to the handbook that a variety of
Falco sparverius, somewhat larger and with a longer tail, had been
described from this region, I concluded it probable, not to say certain, that
my impression had been correct, and that the bird was not my old acquaintance
of the East, but Falco sparverius deserticola. That would make the new
birds of the morning four instead of three. All this
while, it must be understood, there was always the possibility that the train
might start at any moment, no positive information upon that point being
obtainable, so that I could move about only within a narrowly limited area. For
a man thus tethered I was doing pretty well, whatever my unornithological
fellow-travelers might think of my peculiar movements and attitudes. And to
increase my enthusiasm, as I turned to go back to the train for dinner, in
crossing an irrigation ditch (now dry), bordered with a dense thicket of low
shrubs, I caught the tinkle of junco voices and presently a glimpse of white
tail feathers. Now, then, since luck was the order of the day, it was as likely
as not that these were not simple Junco hyemalis, such as I had found at
San Antonio, but one of several Western kinds that might, for aught I was
aware, be looked for hereabout. And so it
proved. The birds were amazingly shy and secretive, but with patience I had
three or four of them under my glass one after another; and they were
noticeably different from our Eastern junco, and belonged, as the book’s
description made clear, to the variety Junco hyemalis connectens, the
intermediate junco, so (not very poetically) called. I went to
dinner with an excellent appetite, and afterward, the delay of the train still
continuing, though with rumors that its end was near, I took one more turn in
the field, and this time happened upon still another stranger, the handsomest
of the day, so wonderfully handsome, though “handsome” is too cheap a word,
that a man would have to go far to beat it — an Arizona Pyrrhuloxia; a
bird — related to the cardinal grosbeak group — having no representative in the
East. It would be a shame to attempt a description of it here at the end of a
hurried sketch, but it made a glorious sixth in my list of the day’s findings.
I shall see more of it, I trust, when I reach the territory to which it more
distinctively belongs. One other
piece of good fortune I must not fail to chronicle, though I have omitted to do
so in its proper place. Late in the forenoon, after I had given the bluebirds
up for lost, I discovered them sitting, the six together, a lovely company,
among the leaves of a cottonwood tree, as if they had taken shelter from the
wind; and the book’s description was borne out: their throats were “purplish
blue.” The nine hours—for so long the embargo lasted — passed all too soon. If
I could have had two or three hours of free wandering, who knows what other
bright names I might have brought back? I went so far, indeed, as to inquire of
the postmaster and variety storekeeper — a genial, smiling German — whether
there was any place in the neighborhood where a stranger could be put up for
the night; but he thought not, and advised me, not at all inhospitably, to
stick to the train. And possibly, after all, I had found more rather than less
for being compelled to beat a small space over again and again, instead of
ranging farther afield. At all events, I had discovered a new use for
ornithological enthusiasm, and I might almost add for railway accidents. I do
not expect to find many birdier places, no matter where my wanderings take me,
than that piece of dry, winter-bleached prairie about San Elizario. 1 I could
hardly believe it anything but an accidental omission when I noticed the total
absence of jays, crows, and ravens from Mr. Attwater’s list of the birds of San
Antonio and vicinity. See The Auk, vol. ix, p. 229. |
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