Birds and Nature, Vol 10 No. 2 [September 1901]

A PLANT THAT MELTS ICE

To say that a plant can melt ice is to assert a miracle seemingly too great for even Nature’s powers to compass, but a traveler lately returned from the Alps has witnessed this wonderful phenomenon, while Grant Allen and other authorities confirm the fact that the Alpine Soldanella melts for its blossom a passage through the ice by power of its own internal heat.

The majority of tourists visit the Alps in August; therefore they miss a rare sight, that of a daring little shrub opening its fringed blue buds in the very middle of the snow sheet, and often showing its slender head above a layer of ice, in the most incredible fashion.

We may regard the Alps as unpeopled solitudes, but to Alpine plants they are a veritable world of competing life types.

Those only fitted for the struggle survive.

The botanists tell us that the Soldanella is heavily handicapped in the race. In the first place, it is obliged to eke out a livelihood in the mountain belt just below the snow line; further, it is a very low growing variety, and is quickly obscured and overtopped by the dense and rapid growth of its taller rivals; hence its anxiety to seize its one chance in life at the earliest possible moment.

To attain the end of its being, the perpetuation of its species, it must steal a march upon its companions, as it were, and show itself while they are still locked in sleep, and when its insect fertilizers, fresh from their cocoons, can see and visit it.

To accomplish its purpose it has made ample preparations.

All through the previous summer its round leaves, admirably fitted to their purpose, have been spread to the mountain sun and gathered in the fuel to be burned later on.

When winter arrives the leaves had grown thick in rich material and so leathery that no amount of snow could injure them.

The first warmth of spring melting the edges of the snow sheet sends the moisture trickling down to the Soldanella’s roots. This, acting upon them as water upon malting barley, brings about germination.

The plant, absorbing the oxygen in the air under the ice and combining it with the fuel in its own substance, melts its way into the open air. A fragile flower forcing its way through a solid crust of ice. Literally, not metaphorically, a slow combustion store.

This novel feat is accomplished every season, yet comparatively few observers note it.

Louise Jamison.

THE HUMMINGBIRDS
Maxime miranda in minimus!

 
Minutest of the feathered kind,
Possessing every charm combined,
Nature, in forming thee, designed
That thou shouldst be,
A proof within how little space
She can comprise such perfect grace,
Rendering the lovely, fairy race
Beauty’s epitome.
 

– Charlotte Smith.

The discovery of

 
“The rare little bird of the bower,
Bird of the musical wing,”
 

being coincident with that of the New World, the ancients were denied the exhilarating shock of delight that has been vouchsafed to their descendants when that

 
“ – Quick feathered spangled shot,
Rapid as thought from spot to spot,
Showing the fairy humming-bird,”
 

and their writings lack the glamour of his “glossy, varying dyes;” for, according to Lesson, the first mention which is made of hummingbirds in the narratives of adventurers who proceeded to America, not with the design of studying its natural productions, but for the discovery of gold, dates from 1558.

Of the name hummingbird or hum-bird, Professor Newton says its earliest use, as yet discovered, is said to be by Thomas Morton in The New England Canaan, printed in 1632, while in 1646 Sir Thomas Browne wrote: “So have all Ages conceaved, and most are still ready to sweare, the Wren is the least of Birds, yet the discoveries of America, and even of our own Plantations, shewed us one farre lesse, that is the Hum-bird, not much exceeding a Beetle.” Mr. Ridgway cites the case of Mr. Benjamin Buttivant, writing from Boston in 1697, who told of a hum-bird that he fed with honey, that was “A Prospect to many Comers.”

“The earliest notice of the common Ruby-throat that I have been able to find,” Mr. Ridgway continues, “is an extract from a letter written from Boston in New England, October 26, 1670, by John Winthrop, Esq., governor of Connecticut, to Francis Willoughby, Esq., and published in the philosophical Transactions.” This letter reads as follows:

“I send you withal, a little Box, with a Curiosity in it, which perhaps will be counted a trifle, yet ’tis rarely to be met with, even here. It is the curiously contrived nest of the Humming-Bird, so called from the humming noise it maketh as it flies. ’Tis an exceeding little Bird, and only seen in Summer, and mostly in gardens, flying from flower, sucking Honey out of the flowers as the Bee doth; as it flieth not lighting on the flower, but hovering over it, sucking with its long Bill a sweet substance. There are in the same Nest two of that Bird’s eggs. Whether they used to have more at once I know not. I never saw but one of these Nests before, and that was sent over formerly with some other Rarities, but the vessel miscarrying, you received them not.”

Of the long bill with which it sucketh the sweet substance, the tongue is the essential feature, so far as sustenance is concerned; consisting of a long double cylinder, “like a double-barreled gun,” Goodrich thought – a most convenient instrument for imbibing nectar – flattened and sometimes barbed at the end, for the capture of the minute insects that constitute the less æsthetic portion of their nutriment – for it has been many times demonstrated that, airy and fairy as they are (the size of the stomach not exceeding the globe of the eye, and scarcely a sixth part as large as the heart, which, in turn, is remarkably large, nearly the size of the cranium), they cannot live by ambrosia alone, nor yet by love, but must vary both with an occasional relish of aphides and infinitesimal spiders.

Of “that Bird’s two eggs,” Mr. Chapman says: “As far as known, all hummingbirds lay two white eggs – frail, pearly ellipses – that after ten days’ incubation develop into a tangle of dark limbs and bodies, which no one could think of calling birds, much less winged gems.”

It has been a matter of doubt to many whether hummingbirds ever rested at all or spent their lives in the air exclusively, but Mr. Gould states authoritatively: “Although many short intermissions of rest are taken during the day, the bird may be said to live in the air – an element in which it performs every kind of evolution with the utmost ease, frequently rising perpendicularly, flying backwards, pirouetting or dancing off, as it were.”

It was the belief of the Duke of Argyle that no bird could fly backward, a theory that he stated with emphasis in his Reign of Law, but it has been proved that he reckoned without “the winglet of the fairy hummingbird,” which seems to be the exception to prove a reigning law of Nature.

Montgomery makes of the whole Trochilidæ family this inspired explanation:

 
“Art thou a bird, a bee, or butterfly?
‘Each and all three; – a bird
A bee collecting sweets from bloom to bloom,
A butterfly in brilliancy of plume.’”
 

The blooms from which he collects his sweets are of the tubular flowers almost exclusively, as a mark, possibly, of his appreciation of their invention for him and at his request, as told by Albert Bigelow Paine:

 
“The clover, said the humming-bird,
Was fashioned for the bee,
But ne’er a flower, as I have heard,
Was ever made for me.
 
 
A passing zephyr paused, and stirred
Some moonlit drops of dew
To earth; and for the humming-bird
The honeysuckle grew.”
 

Of his manner of hanging before his tubular flowers Goodrich says: “He poises or suspends himself on wing for the space of two or three seconds so steadily that his wings become invisible and you can plainly discern the pupil of his eye, looking round with great quickness and circumspection. The glossy green of his back and the fire of his throat, dazzling in the sun, form altogether a most interesting appearance.”

This appearance Alexander Wilson pictures thus:

 
“While richest roses though in crimson drest,
Spring from the splendors of his gorgeous breast.
What heavenly tints in mingling radiance fly!
Each rapid movement gives a different dye;
Like scales of burnished gold they dazzling show,
Now sink to shade, now like a furnace glow!”
 

It is little wonder that Buffon exclaimed, “Nature has loaded it with all the gifts of which she has only given other birds a share!” Yet Mr. Ridgway considers the Count de Buffon’s laudation as excessive because the “absence of melodious voice is, as a rule, a conspicuous deficiency of the tribe”; and in 1693 Mr. Hammersley of Coventry stated, “God, in many of his creatures, is bountiful, but not lavish, for I did observe the hummingbirds for several years, and never heard them sing.”

Goldsmith says that all travelers agree that they have a little interrupted chirrup, but Labat asserts that they have a most pleasing melancholly melody in their voices, though small and proportioned to the organs that produce it.

It is known that a few of the more robust species of Jamaica and Mexico warble a pigmy melody, and Mr. Gosse says that the Vervain hummingbird of Jamaica is the only one known to him that has a real song, warbling in a very weak but very sweet tone a continuous melody for ten minutes at a time.

But the poet Rogers apprehended something more than is perceptible to the scientific consciousness, for he exclaims in The Voyage of Columbus:

 
“ – There quivering rise
Wings that reflect the glow of evening skies!
Half bird, half fly, the fairy king of flowers
Reigns there, and revels through the fragrant hours;
Gem full of life and joy and song divine!”
 

Could the compressed, intense, vehement little sprite be expanded to the dimensions of the ordinary folk of air, would the magnified musical and physical representation be as entrancing as are the fleeting glimpses of the fairy and the elusive hints of melody that so nearly escape us now?

For this electric spark, like an erratic meteorite of topaz and ruby and gold,

 
“As if inlaid
With brilliants from the mine, or made
Of tearless rainbows, such as span
Th’ unclouded skies of Peristan,”
 

hovering between heaven and earth in a mist created by its own prismatic wings, might almost be believed an exemplification of light itself as scientifically defined, “a form of radiant energy,” and it is the nearest approach to a disembodied spirit that lies within the range of mortal vision. So while it is believed that its song is but a feeble twittering, it may yet be as much musician as it is bird, and emit strains of melody too exquisite and finely drawn for human apprehension, and of which the notes that reach us are but the deeper tones of a delicate and etherial ariose.

Juliette A. Owen

EACH IN ITS OWN WAY

 
There’s never a rose in all the world
But makes some green spray sweeter;
There’s never a wind in all the sky
But makes some bird-wing fleeter;
There’s never a star but brings to heaven
Some silver radiance tender;
And never a rosy cloud but helps
To crown the sunset splendor;
No robin but may thrill some heart
His dawnlight gladness voicing;
God gives us all some small, sweet way
To set the world rejoicing.
 

– Selected.

THE PARULA WARBLER
(Compsothlypis americana.)

 
Hither the busy birds shall flutter,
With the light timber for their nests,
And, pausing from their labor, utter
The morning sunshine in their breasts.
 

– James Russell Lowell.

The Parula or Blue Yellow-backed Warbler, as it is sometimes called, is one of the smallest and daintiest representatives of the family of wood warblers. Like the other species of warblers it is one of the last spring migrants to reach its Northern summer home. Retiring and unobtrusive in its habits, it is to be admired for its “plain and modest beauty.” Though delicately colored, its plumage is not nearly so striking as that of many of the other species of the family. It enjoys the higher branches of its woodland retreat, and here it seeks its food. Graceful in all its motions, it flits from branch to branch; hanging by its feet, it peers under the leaves and along the twigs.

In the summer the Parula is a resident of Eastern North America, but in the winter it seeks the warmer climate of Florida and southward. While migrating it is well distributed over its range, and may frequently be seen flying from shrub to shrub. Like the other warblers its flights are short and most of the time it is hidden by the foliage. The longer flights are by night. The days are spent in seeking insects, upon which it feeds almost exclusively. This, the habit of all the warblers, explains the Parula’s sudden disappearance from a locality where it may have been common for a single day.

Near the end of May it retires to the swampy woodlands where the gray Spanish moss hangs pendant from the branches and shrubs. Here the Parula makes its nest, a globular or pencil home, usually in bunches of the festooned moss. The four or five white eggs are marked near the larger end with specks of light brown and lilac. Its song is neither interesting nor striking, but is peculiarly in harmony with the voices of spring and as Mr. Chapman says: “When the cypresses are enveloped in a haze of lace-like blossoms and the woods are fragrant with the delicious odor of yellow jasmine, the dreamy softness of the air is voiced by the Parula’s drowsy song.”

Neltje Blanchan has most charmingly written about this dainty bird. She says: “A number of such airy, tiny beauties flitting about among the blossoms of the shrubbery on a bright May morning and swaying on the slenderest branches with their inimitable grace, is a sight that the memory should retain into old age. They seem the very embodiment of life, joy, beauty, grace; of everything lovely that birds by any possibility could be. Apparently they are wafted about the garden; they fly with no more effort than a dainty lifting of the wings, as if to catch the breeze that seems to lift them as it might a bunch of thistledown. They go through a great variety of charming posturings as they hunt for their food upon the blossoms and tender, fresh twigs, now creeping like a nuthatch along the bark and peering into the crevices, now gracefully swaying and balancing like a goldfinch upon a slender, pendant stem. One little sprite pauses in its hunt for insects to raise its pretty head and trill a short and wiry song.”