The club held a special exhibition of that nest, and at Thanksgiving time one of the home-coming guests, who was an enthusiastic kindergartener in the city, persuaded those generous nature students to let her take their treasure to the poor children who seldom saw the commonest kind of a hang-bird’s nest, and in that kindergarten it may be seen today.
Another entry in the club book was this: “Birds building on the ground, especially Vesper Sparrows, locate if possible where they have a fine outlook, and give great attention to the arrangement of the front yard.”
This was discovered when Emily Clymer took her small brother Jo up in the “side hill pasture” to see the finest mountain view in all the county, and to find wild strawberries; while picking the berries they found what was afterward called the juniper house; this was a Vesper Sparrow’s home, roofed by green growing juniper.
Everybody knows that the prophet Elijah could never have sat and wept under a New England juniper tree; no tree is less high or more nearly horizontal than this; in fact, we call it a bush – where it is big – this one was not larger than Emily Clymer’s two hands, and growing straight out from descending ground, it formed a flat, green roof to the Sparrow homestead; then, while my lady sat upon her nest, she looked out of her tiny front door, across a gently sloping lawn, upon a whole range of mountains. But most remarkable of all were the ornamental shade trees, for just ten inches from the door, on either side, waved two big brakes, symmetrical in size and shape; they gracefully arched across the entrance, and were to the Sparrow domicile as the giant elms to the big Clymer homestead. A sketch of this beautiful residence was made by a member of the club – for cameras were not common in Cloverdale then – the picture cannot be taken from the club book, but I think we can see it all with our mind’s eye.
Here is one of the most astounding statements in that book of many observations: “Some Phoebes are like the Golden Eagle in three ways – first, they build on rocky and inaccessible cliffs, second, they build in the same place for one hundred years; and, third, when the young are big enough to fly, they know how, and just go up without any practicing.” All this can be proved to any one who will go in nesting time to a cliff overhanging the river just below Cloverdale, and who will accept the testimony of some of the most reliable and respectable men who have honored that place in the past century.
You must go in a boat and hug the shore; of course you need a member of the club for guide; at an unexpected moment you are told to look over your head, and there, glued to a shelf of rock so small as to be entirely covered by the same, is the nest! No porch, or even doorstep, beyond its wall – an overhanging roof of rock above, a shoreless expanse of water below; now, if some one can keep the boat steady, and you have the nerve to stand at the highest point of the bow, then by reaching over your head you can gently touch some fuzzy bits of life in the nest. Now you know the first and last of the facts recorded are correct: there is the nest on the inaccessible cliff; there are the birds, and if they did not fly up and out into the world the first time they stood on the edge of the nest, would they not be in the dark water below, instead of coming back to the old home for a hundred years?
The evidence of successive occupation for a century is this: The present family of Walkers – father and children – have watched that nest, never finding it empty a summer for twenty years. Old Deacon Walker, grandfather of our club members – who, of course, initiated their father – proved that Phoebes had hatched in the cliff nest during eighty years previous, in this wise: After he had stood guard forty years, as the deacon loved to relate, didn’t his Uncle Israel – who had been spending just those two-score years in the South – come home one spring evening, and the very next morning that ancient worthy demanded a boat and a boy to take him under the old Phoebe’s nest on the ledge, which he affirmed had never been without tenants during the forty years before he left Cloverdale?
So there are the figures and facts showing how not only the nest, but bird love and bird lore had come down through the century, and with such an inheritance, no wonder the Walkers are on the best of terms with feathered folk, or that they, with their confidential friends, the Clymers, are still adding to their bird book things not generally known.
THE BLACKBIRD’S SONG
The bee is asleep in the heart of the rose,
The lark’s nestled soft in the cloud,
The swallow lies snug close under the eaves —
But the blackbird’s fluting is loud;
He pipes as no hermit would or should,
Half a mile deep in the heart of the wood,
In the green dark heart of the wood.
The raven’s asleep in the thick of the oak,
His head close under his wing;
The lark’s come down to his home on the earth —
But the blackbird still will sing,
Making the heart of the dark wood thrill
With the notes that come from his golden bill,
That flow from his golden bill.
A GOLDEN EAGLE
In January, 1900, I had given me a Golden Eagle. He had been picked up in a stunned condition in the foot-hills, having received a shock from the electric wires, on which he had probably alighted for a moment or struck in his flight. There is an electric power-house in the Sierras opposite Fresno, from which pole lines carry the strong current down to be used for power and light in the valley, and this was by no means the first record of eagles and other large birds being stunned or killed by them.
The person who found him had brought him down with the idea of having him stuffed, but as he showed a good deal of life, I begged to keep him alive, and he was handed over to me. He was evidently a young bird of the previous season, though nearly full grown. From tip to tip of his wings he was over five feet, and his wonderful black talons measured one and one-half to two inches beyond the feathers. His legs were handsomely feathered down to the claws, and his proud head, with its strong beak, large, piercing eyes, and red and yellow-brown feathers, was a thing of beauty. The rest of his body was dark, almost black, with the exception of three or four white diamonds showing on the upper tail feathers.
I kept him in a big box open on one side. When I first brought him home and had put him into the box, a neighbor’s poodle came sniffing around for the meat I had brought for the eagle. He was on the back side of the box, and so could not see that there was anything in it, nor did he hear anything, but all at once the scent of the bird must have struck his nostrils, for with a squall of fear he disappeared from the yard and never afterward would venture near the cage.
During the time I kept the eagle, some two months, he never showed any desire to attack me, though his claws would have gone through my hand like a knife, nor did he display any fear of me. He never made any attempt to get out while anyone was in sight of him, nor did I catch him in any such attempt, but sometimes at night I would hear him, and every morning his wings, beak and feathers showed he never gave up the hope of getting free.
I never fed him to the full extent of his capacity, but gave him from a pound to a pound and a half of meat daily at noon, which he devoured in a very short time, sticking his claws through the toughest beef and tearing it like ribbons with his beak. It was wonderful to see how clean he could pick a bone with his clumsy-looking great beak. I never knew him to touch any kind of food but raw meat. When anything was handed in to him, no matter how high up, he never accepted it in his bill, but struck at it with a lightning-like movement of his claws, scarcely ever missing it.
One day he snapped in two one of the bars across his cage, pried off another and got out. I was telephoned that my eagle was out, and hurried home to find all the children in the neighborhood blockaded indoors. The eagle was perched on the grape-arbor easily surveying the lay of things. A cat had crawled into the wood-pile and under the doorsteps the venerable cock of the yard was congratulating himself on his safety, but feeling rather undignified. I procured a rope and took my first lessons