Sun Bird

“ Now over ice-bound river or lake, or rushing past a myriad dark spires of spruce, then hovering wonderingly over a multitude of lights from the streets of some town, the strong Arctic bird forges southward, until one night, if we only knew, we might open our window and, looking upward, see two great yellow eyes apparently hanging in space, the body and wings of the bird in 298 snow-white plumage lost amidst the flakes. We thrill in admiration at the grand bird, so fearless of the raging elements. ”

“ Why, then, does the youth's heart tremble—what secret sorrow preys upon him?
God's little bird knows neither care nor labour, [Pg 271] Why should it strive to build a lasting nest? The night is long, but a branch suffices for its sleeping place. When the sun comes in his glory, birdie hears the voice of God, flutters his plumage, and sings his song. After spring, Nature's fairest time, comes hot summer. Late autumn follows, bringing mist and cold. Poor men and women are sad and dismal. To distant lands, to warmer climes beyond the blue sea, flies birdie to the spring. ”

“ When the sun goes down and as the gloaming deepens, the bird's activity increases, and it begins its nightly duties, emitting from time to time, like a sentry on his post or a watchman of the night, the doleful call which has given the bird its common name. ”

“ No, my boy; but there is a tribe of tiny birds there that we know as sun-birds, almost as beautiful in their plumage, and of very similar habit. I hope to make a long study of their ways, and to get a good collection. I know nothing, however, more attractive to a man who loves nature than to lie down beneath some great plant of convolvulus, or any trumpet-shaped blossom, and watch the humming-birds flashing to and fro in the sunlight. Their scale-like feathers on throat and head reflect the sun rays like so many gems, and their colours are the most gorgeous that it is possible to conceive. ”

“ Here, too, close to the river, I frequently saw the bird called sun-bird by the English colonists and tirana by the Spaniards in the Oroonoque. It is very elegant, and in its outward appearance approaches near to the heron tribe; still, it does not live upon fish. Flies and insects are its food, and it takes them just as the heron takes fish, by approaching near and then striking with its beak at its prey so quick that it has no chance to escape. ”

“ The eagle or a raptorial bird is the sun bird; the sun fertilizes the earth, and the ceremonial acts of the Bird-man at the Winter Solstice dramatize fertilization. In short, the conclusion to which studies of the ceremonial acts of the Bird-man, reinforced by those of comparative symbolism, have led me, is that the Bird-man personates the sun or a solar deity.
Ceremony with the Alósaka Screen
After the bird personator had retired, a short interval elapsed, all the spectators of the previous rites remaining seated. ”

“ Even as the plant unalterably follows the day and the sun, even as the mollusc (to use a previous illustration) rises towards and prefers to live in the brighter regions—even so the bird, with its sensitive [Pg 186] eye, grows melancholy in the shortened days and gathering mists of autumn. That decline of light, which is sometimes dear to us for moral causes, is for the bird a grief, a death. Light! more light! Let us rather die than see the day no more! This is the true purport of its last autumnal strain, its last cry on its departure in October. ”

“ Perhaps the most lovely and interesting of all, however, are the sun-birds, which are here in the East the representatives of the true humming-birds of the Western tropics. “They are ethereal, gay, and sprightly in their movements, flitting briskly from flower to flower, and assuming a thousand lovely and agreeable attitudes. ”

“ The sun-birds are fully aware of this fact, for no sooner have they relinquished the flowers than they become exceedingly wary and rapid in flight, darting arrow-like through the air and seldom remaining in exposed situations. ”

“ In the cold and stormy North, however, where the sun is a source of comfort rather than of terror, and movements of the atmosphere are more often feared than blessed, the similar conception of a gigantic sky-bird is far more definite. ”

“ One time, Effie wanted to be dressed up in her best clothes to go up in the tree and see the sun-birds. She thinks that the tops of the trees are close up to the place where the sun is, and that makes her call birds sun-birds. ”

“ She loved birds so truly that she would not be angry when spring after spring they picked her seeds out of her 'Island Garden.'"
"Have you any special magnetic power over birds, so that they will come at your call or rest on your outstretched finger?"
"Not in the least. I just like them, and love to get acquainted with them. Each bird whose acquaintance I make is as truly a discovery to me as if he were totally unknown to the world."
We were sitting by a southern window that looks out on a wide-spreading and ancient elm, my glory and pride. ”

“ We'll be growing scales and tails presently.... Did you ever hear of a Southern bird—a sort of hawk, I think—that almost never alights; that lives and eats and sleeps its whole life away on the wing? and even its courtship, and its honeymoon? Grace Ferrall pointed one out to me last winter, near Palm Beach—a slender bird, part black, part snowy white, with long, pointed, delicate wings like an enormous swallow; and all day, all night, it floats and soars and drifts in the upper air, never resting, never alighting except during its brief nesting season.... ”

“ Day after day, as the snow melts away and the sunshine grows hotter, more birds will come. One day a catbird or two, another day an oriole in black and gold, and another day a pert little wren. So it will go on, till by the time June comes in, all our birds will be back with us, very busy, hopping around in our bushes and trees, making their nests all about, and singing the whole day long.
Almost the first thing every bird thinks of, when he comes to us, is making the nest. For summer is the only time in his life that a bird has a home. ”

“ The bell-like tinkling strain he utters when soaring up and dropping to earth is for summer only: it is that faint fairy-like aerial music which you hear on wide moors and commons and lonely hillsides. In winter he has no language but that one sharp sorrowful little call, or complaint, the most anxious sound uttered by any small bird in these islands. ”

“ The moon set, and still in the dark sang the bird, and the grey light came, and the bird ceased; and when it was white day they saw that all the ground and every stalk of bracken was hoary with frost, and every ivy-leaf was crusted white round the edge, but within the edge it was all glossy green.
"What bird is this that sings so sweet before day in the bitter cold?" said the Abbot. "Surely no bird at all, but an Angel from heaven waking us from the death of sleep." ”

“ Not until the morning stars quarrel together will the cat-bird or scarlet tanager herald the spring. The irreverent song of a cat-bird in the gray gloom of March would turn the spring back and draw the winter out of his uncovered grave. The bluebird comes and broods over this death and birth, until the old winter sleeps his long sleep, and the young spring wakes to her beautiful life.
Within my house is another very human little bird—the chimney-swallow. Sharing our very firesides as he does, he surely ought to have a warm place in our hearts ”

“ I felt myself a stranger indeed when I reached this pleasant spot, and found that even the birds were unfamiliar. No robin or bluebird greeted me on my arrival; no cheerful song-sparrow tuned his little pipe for my benefit; no phœbe shouted the beloved name from the peak of the barn. Everything was strange. One accustomed to the birds of our Eastern States can hardly conceive of the country without robins in plenty; but in this unnatural corner of Uncle Sam's dominion I found but one pair.
The most common song from morning till night was that of the summer yellow-bird, or yellow warbler. ”

“ At night, when it is feeding, coursing up and down above the heather and the brackens, it has a beautiful flight, and should an owl suddenly drop over the birches and begin to beat their ground, the evolutions of the nightjars in silent protest are as exquisite as any sea-bird’s. ”

“ To quote Aitken, “between whiles they skip about, slapping their sides with their tiny wings, spreading their tails like fans, and ringing out their cheery refrain. As they pass from one tree to another they traverse the air in a succession of bounds and sportive spirals.” Verily the existence of a sunbird is a happy one! ”

“ Now they were all thin little strokes of blue, and now one and now a multitude would heel and catch the sun and become short flashes of light. They came rising and falling and growing larger, like some huge flight of gulls or rooks, or such-like birds moving with a marvellous uniformity, and ever as they drew nearer they spread over a greater width of sky. The southward wing flung itself in an arrow-headed cloud athwart the sun. And then suddenly they swept round to the eastward and streamed eastward, growing smaller and smaller and clearer and clearer again until they vanished from the sky. ”

“ All the cock sunbirds (Arachnechthra asiatica) are now in the full glory of their nuptial plumage. Here and there an energetic little hen is busily constructing her wonderful pendent nest. Great is the variety of building material used by the sunbird. Fibres, slender roots, pliable stems, pieces of decayed wood, lichen, thorns and even paper, cotton and rags, are pressed into service. All are held together by cobweb, which is the favourite cement of bird masons. The general shape of the nest is that of a pear. ”

“ While yet the bluebird smoothed in leafless trees
His feathers ruffled by the chill sea-breeze,
⁠And snow-drifts lingering under April skies.
As, pausing o'er the lonely flower I bent,
I thought of lives thus lowly, clogged and pent,
⁠Which yet find room,
Through care and cumber, coldness and decay,
To lend a sweetness to the ungenial day,
⁠And make the sad earth happier for their bloom. ”

“ It is a place abounding in every kind of sea-bird, and it is almost impossible to describe the weird, uncanny effect which the long endless twilight of the summer, the silence broken by hootings of owls, by the scream of a sea-gull, produce on one. ”

“ Now and then the western clouds after the sunset assume a shape resembling that of a vast extended wing, as of a gigantic bird in full flight—the extreme tip nearly reaching the zenith, the body of the bird just below the horizon. The resemblance is sometimes so perfect that the layers of feathers are traceable by an imaginative eye. ”

“ With the first note of the bluebird, under the brief flush of an April sky, her alluring invitation goes forth to the world; day by day she deepens the blue of her summer skies and fills them with those buoyant clouds that float like dreams across the vision of the waking day; night after night she touches the stars with a softer radiance, and breathes upon her roses so that they are eager for the dawn, that they may lay their hearts open to her gaze; the forests take on more and more the lavish mood of the summer, until they have buried their great trunks in perpetual shade. ”

“ It is monotonous as a frog chorus, but there is a merry thrill in the notes of the amphibian which are entirely wanting in the song. If it were not for the light-hearted tremolo of the chewink thrown in now and then, and the loud, cheery ditty of the summer yellow-bird, who begins soon after the pewee, one would be almost superstitious about so unnatural a greeting to the new day. The evening call of the bird is different. ”

“ The Sky-Bird II was flying as steady as a rock. All the bracing wires were tuned to a nicety, the wind humming through them and along the smooth sides of the great creature's body with a whistling monotone which arose and fell with bewitching rhythm as the force fluctuated. The varnish and fire-proofing compound glistened brightly in the sunshine, attracting the attention of numerous seabirds, mostly gulls and ospreys, which followed them at times for short distances, only to be outdistanced. ”

“ Our wild-birds never had a finer nesting season, and they are now literally as merry as the day is long, for with the first flush of dawn in the east they begin their rich and varied song, which, with a short interval of quiescence and repose about mid-day, is continued without interruption until long after the sun has set and the earlier stars are already twinkling through the twilight gloom. ”

“ In the spring and summer, you go to field and garden, and you hear and see many birds. As you walk about the woods, you may see a dozen kinds of birds in [Pg 187] a few minutes. There will go a yellow-bird, looking like a canary. There, all splendid in black and gold, an oriole is busy building his curious nest. There flies from the swamp a red-wing blackbird. A big woodpecker drums on the nearest tree. A bluebird with a russet breast sits singing on the top rail of a fence. Sparrows, swallows, crows, are everywhere. ”

“ On the earth dead leaves make a russet warmth, brighter by contrast with the young green round about, and brilliant where sunlight winnows through. There, in the direct beam, flash little flies, which hang suspended upon the light like golden beads; while through the glades, young fern is spread for pleasant resting-places. Pigeons murmur aloft unseen, and many a grey-bird and black-bird sing beside their hidden homes. ”

“ Bird of Paradise whose feathers are really and truly blue, and I am quite sure that there is no other one—at least that we know of—which has so much blue about it, that you would think of it as a blue bird, or that has blue feather-fountains—those wonderful long silky plumes that grow out of each side under the wings.
That is what is most wonderful in the Blue Bird of Paradise. There is no other Bird of Paradise that can sit under a blue fountain or look out of a blue sunset. ”