OUR BIRDS.

A TALK IN THE WAY OF ORNITHOLOGY.

PART III.

"Now launch the boat upon the wave;" valete sylva;—in plain English, look out for sea-fowl. The mighty ocean, "the dark illimitable ocean," offers us its rolling billow and dashing surf, peopled with a thousand winged inhabitants. The rocky cliffs and wide-spread wastes of sand, where the stormy waters run battling in their strength, and the driving breath of the tempest sears all to barrenness-these have their dwellers and visitants. The beach and the billow are alive with a feathered multitude. The voice of many waters cannot drown the joyous cry of the sea-bird, as he dashes, half flying, half swimming, through the foamy crest of the wave, or sports with his brethren upon the back of the long and ridgy sand-bar, with the white breakers sparkling around him. The broad bay offers its bosom to a hundred tribes of fleeting visiters; the marsh and the fen; the sedgy pool and grassy river's brink, are the home of many a class, who find a congenial dwelling and plenteous food in spots untenanted by man. Nature, with liberal hand, has dispensed to them, too, of her bounties, and guided each species by its proper instinct to partake of the abundance of the streams, and the "fat things of the sea and sand."

Well, good reader, as you must by this time be in a concatenation accordingly," we will go on with our "bird's egging"-Yankee phrase, that; and whom shall we first call into court? Why none other, of course, deserves that honor, but our reverend cousin and old crony, the WILD GOOSE, "unclaimed of any man," in his individual capacity, but a native citizen of our continent; now and then straying by accident, or driven by storm, to the shore of Northern Europe, where, of course, he is held a rara avis. He is exclusively an American bird, Shakspeare's wild goose being "another guess sort" of a thing! When the populous North pours from her frozen loins the myriads of winged guests who seek their summer residence in the unexplored recesses of the polar regions, and the cloudy skies of the late autumn warn them to speed to a more genial clime, then are our shores visited by innumerable flights of the wild geese on their passage to the South. In November, as the changing condition of the air indicates the coming blasts of winter; and when a week or two of fair weather and westerly wind, is succeeded by a cold, cloudy, northeasterly turn, you may be sure of being awakened in the morning by the well known cronk, cronk, cronk, overhead, and to see the long files of your old acquaintance streaming away across the sky, each battalion with a veteran gander at the head, marshaling and manoeuvring his flying squad according to the regular system of goosarian tactics, namely, in double echelon, each able-bodied goose covering half his file leader; and, to do the creatures justice, I must confess that I have seen them perform evolutions not to be paralleled by any troops that I am acquainted with, except the Massachusetts militia.

Never shall I forget the delightful sensations, with which the coming of the wild geese inspired me when a boy. On the first mention of

their arrival, every musket and fowling piece of the neighborhood is put in commission to greet their approach. Every house-top is manned by some eager sportsman, gun in hand, waiting with impatience for the well known cry. At length the far-off report of a musket is heard, and then cronk, cronk, and "they 're coming, they 're coming!" vociferated from a hundred throats. Now they heave in sight," warping on the eastern wind," a dozen regiments, an hundred strong each; and then begins a general cracking of musketry; the winged vanguard sweep off to the right, but our infantry pour in a heavy fire from that quarter, and drive them back. Now they countermarch to the left, but "bang's the word," too, that way; they wheel back to the centre, under a running fire, for now begins warm work.

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But stop-do n't be a goose yourself, and throw away your fire;— wait till they have so far come up that you can take them in flank or rear, for to fire at geese when they are heading right on toward you is, for all the world, a thing of nought." Their coat of feathers is sufficiently thick to turn the shot when it strikes them in front, where each feather overlapping the other, receives the lead in a lateral direction, and causes it to slip by without effect. So, unless you are positively sure of shooting straight down their throats, you will find all the peppering you can bestow upon them in the face will do about as much execution as Doctor Slop's volley of "small curses," or Uncle Toby's comparison of the same-" sparrow shot fired against a bastion." We will let those ninnies yonder bang away till they have driven them a sufficiently roundabout course to invite us to the charge in good earnest. Ah! they begin to zig-zag it a little ;-now they wheel and tergiversate, and the whole main body comes upon their rear, crowding onward in glorious confusion! Now we blaze away right and left; the battle grows hotter and hotter; two or three drop; others lag behind, winged and straggling. The whole army of geese are now squalling most desperately with all the strength of their lungs, for they find they have got into an awkward scrape. Presently an old gander falls ;no, he rises again,—he flutters,—two or three shot have struck him about the head and shoulders; but he is no chicken; a veteran of three score and ten campaigns does not mind a scratch. Shot after shot rattles away at him, till at last down he comes with "twenty mortal murders on his crown." Straightway the whole flock are in confusion and scatter pell-mell in all directions; and now in the midst of all this hurry skurry is the time to see what execution we will do. The fragments of the routed army fly up and down, hither and thither, round and round; at every shot one or two fall, but they still keep hovering low, what more could you expect of a goose?—and, finally, we so thin their ranks, that only some half dozen stragglers save themselves by fairly blundering out of harm's way, and scramble off to the nearest flock, in such a prodigious fright and bouleversement of their intellects, that it is to be feared the unfortunate animals will not get the better of it for the rest of their lives.

Notwithstanding all the hair-breadth scapes they encounter in their migrations, yet they continue to pass the same route year after year. Their favorite direction is along the sea-coast, and they occasionally stop to feed or rest upon the marshy spots near the shore; but their stay is very short. Cloudy weather they always prefer; but when the

clouds fly low, I have known the geese to lose their way by flying into them; upon which occasions they would set up a squalling that made the welkin ring again. A more serious disaster befel an army of them about Newburyport, many years ago. A heavy snow storm happened in wild goose time; it came on suddenly, and the wayfarers were overtaken in transitu before they could snuff its approach. The snow fell thick and damp, and, taking the geese upon the wing, it so clogged their feathers that their flight was stopped, and they were snowed down to the ground in flocks. On Plum Island, at the mouth of the Merrimac, they were pulled by dozens out of the snow banks, alive and kicking!

In what queer corner of the northern regions they nestle in summer, we shall never know. There are no accounts of the extent of their journey that way, which can be relied upon; but many are the marvelous tales I have listened to from the Labrador fishermen,-those incorrigible yarn-spinners,—about the rocky shores of the North, covered with birds' eggs so thickly, that not a step could be taken without treading upon them. But that is neither here nor there; the wild geese go much farther toward the pole than any ship has hitherto been able to penetrate. Food must exist abundantly in that quarter, and in a manner altogether unknown to us. Some species of birds feed with particular relish upon the catkins of the birch, a tree which abounds in the polar regions, and which indeed grows farther north than any other native of the forest.

Another of our regular visiters from the North is the EIDER DUCK, which furnishes the fine down that is so valuable an article of commerce. On our coast this bird is commonly known by the name of the SEA DRAKE. There are seldom any great numbers of them seen in these parts, but there is no year in which, at the season, more or less of them are not brought to the Boston market. The beautiful plumage in which it is clad, a contrast of deep black and snowy white on the outside, covering the soft bluish feathers underneath which compose the down, causes this bird to be little less esteemed for its elegance than for its usefulness, and many are bought to stuff and preserve for ornament. The female, however, is far less striking in external appearance, than the male; she being of a uniform reddish brown plumage. They breed in Iceland, Greenland and the parts thereabout, making their nest among sticks and stones; the ducks pluck the down from their breasts to make a bed for the eggs and young. The Icelanders plunder the nests of the down, and the ducks strip themselves a second time. Again the down is stolen, and again Mrs. Duck must "off with her lendings," till, in the end, she finds herself plucked as clean and close in front, as any client ever went away from Courtstreet. Gaffer Drake now comes to the scratch, and offers to slash his jacket for litter; thus, by hook and by crook, the pair succeed in raising a brood, at the cost of their feathers. All the eider down brought from Iceland is obtained in this manner; the natives refrain from killing the birds, which, in consequence, become so tame, as to nestle about their houses.

In their passage through this part of the United States, they seldom fly any distance inland, but keep close to the sea, lingering in spots here and there along the coast to feed upon the shell-fish, which,

Upon the Isles of
This little cluster

here at least, appear to constitute their only food. Shoals they may be sure to be found every season. of islands lies about a dozen miles out at sea, between Portsmouth and Newburyport. They are mere heaps of rocks and sand, with hardly a green sod upon them, and are tenanted by a race of strapping, longsided barbarians, who seem to have sprung out of the bosom of the crags which they inhabit. A generation of men, who have swallowed more hard northwesters, or stood more buffeting from the rough waves, are not to be found upon the rugged shores of New-England. Their constant occupation is to draw, from the surrounding deep, the sustenance which their inhospitable soil has denied them; and they are all day tossing about in their cockle-shell boats, bits of wherries, miles out in the wide ocean, when the sea is "brewing like barm wi' yestreen's wind," caring for wave or tempest no more than their fellow citizens, the porpoise and seal, and richly rewarded for their toils if they can return to their barren shores with a few codfish. These "oxless isles" did, nevertheless, in ancient time, maintain two cows, the property of an old woman of ninety, the Shoalers never die,-who supported them in winter upon the hay she mowed with a case-knife,— three blades of grass at a time,―among the rocks. A British ship of war carried off these cows at the beginning of the revolution, the first and last of their kind in this little world.

Upon these islands the Eider Ducks make their regular sojourn every season, and may be seen straying about the coves and inlets, in company with hundreds of other sea-fowl which make these shores their home. Possibly they mistake the natives here, for their old friends, the Esquimaux, to whom, indeed, they bear a very strong resemblance. The spot is a favorable one for their resort; the islands being mostly uninhabited, and lying too far out at sea for the visits of sportsmen. The natives shoot one or two occasionally, but as they are not much addicted to the use of fire arms, the birds live comparatively unmolested,

But we must not dismiss our chapter of ducks, without mentioning that prince of all the tribe, the American WOOD DUCK, although it does not strictly come within the class of sea-fowl. This individual, called also the Summer Duck, is the most beautiful bird of its kind in the world, displaying a plumage diversified with rich tints of golden glossy green and dark red, intermixed with various dark and light shades; a plume of long feathers adorns its head, falling gracefully back on the top of the neck. This singular crest was fancifully compared by Linnæus, to the wedding head-dress of the Swedish peasant women, from which suggestion he gave this bird the name of Sponsa, or the bride. These brilliant colors, it must be remarked, are confined to the male alone. The wood ducks are not to be found upon the sea shore, but live about the streams and lakes of the interior. At Fresh Pond, Horn Pond, and many other of those beautiful sheets of water around Boston, they may be found all summer long. Their favorite places for nestling are in the hollow trunks of old trees. They are most expert climbers, and, unlike all other web-footed fowl, are as well fitted for perching as for paddling, having long sharp claws at their toes. They are sometimes caught by the country people and tamed; they are not at all difficult of domestication.

As to the common WILD DUCK, COOT, TEAL, BRANT, et idgenus omne, great would be my delectation, gentle reader, to discourse to you anent all and singular of the foregoing, gun in hand, upon Cohasset Rocks or the marshes of Plum Island, where much practical example might verify the matters which I attempt to shadow forth by dint of prosing. These birds stay very late in the season, but the best time for them is about the middle of autumn; the Coot lingers somewhat later than the rest. Toward the south end of Nantasket beach they are abundant, and the craggy isolated rocks, scattered along the shore in that quarter, are good stations for the sportsmen to bring them down as they skim along at a little distance from the land; for these birds are shy and in common cases only to be taken on the wing, although by good luck you may at times surprise them dabbling in some shallow pool near the shore, among the weeds and salt grass. But the best subject to which I can refer you, in order to try your hand at a quick shot, is the DIPPER, who has the most notable" alacrity in sinking" of all the feathered tribe. Along the sea beach a few rods from the shore, you may behold, peradventure, some fifteen or twenty of them in a bunch, bobbing up and down with the waves, and totally regardless of the land. "Dead for a ducat" is your exclamation in petto; because, forsooth, you have them within point blank shot; of course they are within reach; of course they cannot fly away quick enough to escape; of course you hit them; of course you kill them-thus, in the plenitude of your wisdom, you reason with all logical precision, and nobody denies it to be a clear case. Slowly, cautiously, and with a coolness and deliberation that do you infinite credit, you drop on one knee, and accomplish a most capital "take aim!" Crack!-but bless us! who would have thought it? with the first flash of the pan they are darting fathoms deep under the water, and by the time the noble echo of your musketry has died away along the shore, you have the immense satisfaction of seeing their black noddles come popping above the surface, something less than a mile off. Whether you look passing wise, or prodigiously silly, on such an occasion, I will not pronounce, not being metaphysical; but I dare assert you will abstain from all supererogatory use of powder and shot when you meet your old friends in future. To despatch one of these birds is no easy matter, although it must be confessed it was no lucky day for the Dippers when percussion locks were invented. Most of the fowl above mentioned may, by expert gunners, be approached while swimming upon the rivers and inlets near the sea. For this purpose, a small skiff, built expressly for the purpose, is chosen, and manned by a single individual, who propels his boat by the practice of sculling, as any dashing of the water with a paddle would inevitably give the alarm. On the broad river or sound, extending from the harbor of Newburyport to Ipswich, are vast numbers of sea-fowl that are pursued by the gunners in this way. In winter the skiffs are painted white, to resemble cakes of drift ice, and at other times they are dressed fore and aft on the outside with eel-grass and sea-weed, by which they are mistaken for floating patches of weeds. Under this disguise an experienced gunner has little difficulty in making his way into the midst of numerous flocks as they stray along the marshy shores, and pouring in slaughter among their ranks. There

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