PLAINS AND FOOTHILLS

The foregoing chapters contain a recital of observations made in the neighborhood of Colorado Springs and in trips on the plains and among the mountains in that latitude. Two years later—that is, in 1901—the rambler's good angel again smiled upon him and made possible another tour among the Colorado mountains. This time he made Denver, instead of Colorado Springs, the centre of operations; nor did he go alone, his companion being an active boy of fourteen who has a penchant for Butterflies, while that of the writer, as need scarcely be said, is for the Birds—in our estimation, the two cardinal B's of the English language. Imagine two inveterate ramblers, then, with two such enchanting hobbies, set loose on the Colorado plains and in the mountains, with the prospect of a month of uninterrupted indulgence in their manias!

In the account of my first visit, most of the species met with were described in detail both as to their habits and personal appearance. In the present record no such minutiÆ will be necessary so far as the same species were observed, and therefore the chief objects of the following chapters will be, first, to note the diversities in the avian fauna of the two regions; second, to give special attention to such birds as either were not seen in my first visit or were for some cause partly overlooked; and, third, to trace the peculiar transitions in bird life in passing from the plains about Denver to the crest of Gray's Peak, including jaunts to several other localities.

In my rambles in the neighborhood of Denver only a few species not previously described were observed, and yet there were some noteworthy points of difference in the avi-fauna of the two latitudes, which are only about seventy-five miles apart. It will perhaps be remembered that, in the vicinity of Colorado Springs and Manitou, the pretty lazuli buntings were quite rare and exceedingly shy, only two or three individuals having been seen. The reverse was the case in the suburbs of Denver and on the irrigated plains between that city and the mountains, and also in the neighborhood of Boulder, where in all suitable haunts the lazulis were constantly at my elbow, lavish enough of their pert little melodies to satisfy the most exacting, and almost as familiar and approachable as the indigo-birds of the East. It is possible that, for the most part, the blue-coated beauties prefer a more northern latitude than Colorado Springs for the breeding season.

At the latter place I failed to find the burrowing owl, although there can be little doubt of his presence there, especially out on the plains. Not far from Denver one of these uncanny, sepulchral birds was seen, having been frightened from her tunnel as I came stalking near it. She flew over the brow of the hill in her smooth, silent way, and uttered no syllable of protest as I examined her domicile—or, rather, the outside of it. Scattered about the dark doorway were a number of bones, feathers, and the skin of a frog, telling the story of the table d'hÔte set by this underground dweller before her nestlings. She might have put up the crossbones and skull as a sign at the entrance to her burrow, or even placed there the well-known Dantean legend, "All hope abandon, ye who enter here," neither of which would have been more suggestive than the telltale litter piled up before her door. When I chased her from her hiding-place, she flew down the hill and alighted on a fence-post in the neighborhood of her nest, uttering several screechy notes as I came near her again, as if she meant to say that I was carrying the joke a little too far in pursuing her about. Presently she circled away on oily wings, and I saw her no more.

So little enthusiasm does such a bird stir within me that I felt too lazy to follow her about on the arid plain. It may be interesting as a matter of scientific information to know that the burrowing owl breeds in a hole in the ground, and keeps company with the prairie dog and the rattlesnake, but a bird that lives in a gloomy, malodorous cave, whose manners are far from attractive, and whose voice sounds as strident as a buzz-saw—surely such a bird can cast no spell upon the observer who is interested in the Æsthetic side of bird nature. A recent writer, in describing "A Buzzards' Banquet," asks a couple of pregnant questions: "Is there anything ugly out of doors? Can the ardent, sympathetic lover of nature ever find her unlovely?" To the present writer these questions present no Chinese puzzle. He simply brushes all speculation and theorizing aside by responding "Yes," to both interrogatories, on the principle that it is sometimes just as well to cut the Gordian knot as to waste precious time trying to untie it. The burrowing owl makes me think of a denizen of the other side of the river Styx, and why should one try to love that which nature has made unattractive, especially when one cannot help one's feeling?

In the preceding chronicles no mention, I believe, has been made of one little bird that deserves more than a mere obiter dictum. My first meeting with the blithesome house-finch of the West occurred in the city of Denver, in 1899. It could not properly be called a formal presentment, but was none the less welcome on that account. I had scarcely stepped out upon the busy street before my ear was accosted by a kind of half twitter and half song that was new to me. "Surely that is not the racket of the English sparrow; it is too musical," I remarked to a friend walking by my side.

Peering among the trees and houses, I presently focussed my field-glass upon a small, finch-like bird whose coat was striped with gray and brown, and whose face, crown, breast, and rump were beautifully tinged or washed with crimson, giving him quite a dressy appearance. What could this chipper little city chap be, with his trig form and well-bred manners, in such marked contrast with those of the swaggering English sparrow? Afterwards he was identified as the house-finch, which rejoices in the high-sounding Latin name of Carpodacus mexicanus frontalis. His distribution is restricted to the Rocky Mountain district chiefly south of the fortieth parallel of north latitude.

He is certainly an attractive species, and I wish we could offer sufficient inducements to bring him east. A bird like him is a boon and an ornament to the streets and parks of any city that he graces with his presence and enlivens with his songs. No selfish recluse is he; no, indeed! In no dark gulch or wilderness, far from human neighborhood, does he sulkily take up his abode, but prefers the companionship of man to the solitudes of nature, declaring in all his conduct that he likes to be where there are "folks." In this respect he bears likeness to the English sparrow; but let it be remembered that there the analogy stops. Even his chirruping is musical as he flies overhead, or makes his caveat from a tree or a telegraph wire against your ill-bred espionage. He and his plainly clad little spouse build a neat cottage for their bairns about the houses, but do not clog the spouting and make themselves a nuisance otherwise, as is the habit of their English cousins.

This finch is a minstrel, not of the first class, still one that merits a high place among the minor songsters; and, withal, he is generous with his music. You might call him a kind of urban Arion, for there is real melody in his little score. As he is an early riser, his matin voluntaries often mingled with my half-waking dreams in the morning at dawn's peeping, and I loved to hear it too well to be angry for being aroused at an unseasonable hour. The song is quite a complicated performance at its best, considerably prolonged and varied, running up and down the chromatic scale with a swing and gallop, and delivered with great rapidity, as if the lyrist were in a hurry to have done, so that he could get at something else.

In my rambles he was found not only in the cities of the plains (Denver, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo), but also in many of the mountain towns and villages visited, Leadville, over ten thousand feet skyward, being, I believe, one of the exceptions, while Silver Plume and Graymont were others. He does not fancy altitudes, I take it, much over eight thousand feet. In the villages of Red Cliff and Glenwood, both beyond the continental divide, he was the same sprightly citizen, making himself very much at home.

Much as this finch cherishes the society of man, he is quite wary and suspicious, and does not fancy being watched. As long as you go on your way without seeming to notice him, he also goes his way, coming into plain sight and chirping and singing; but just stop to watch him with your binocular, and see how quickly he will take alarm, dart away, and ensconce himself behind a clump of foliage, uttering a protest which seems to say, "Why doesn't that old fellow go about his own business?" If in some way the American house-finch could be persuaded to come east, and the English sparrow could be given papers of extradition, the exchange would be a relief and a benefit to the whole country.

Some idyllic days were spent in sauntering about Golden, which keeps guard at the entrance of Clear Creek CaÑon, and has tucked itself in a beautiful valley among the foothills, which in turn stand sentinel over it. In the village itself and along the bush-fringed border of the creek below, as well as in the little park at its border, there were many birds, nearly all of which have been described in the previous chapters. However, several exceptions are worthy of note. A matted copse a mile and a half below the town afforded a hiding-place for three young or female redstarts, which were "playing butterfly," as usual, and chanting their vivacious little tunes. These and several near Boulder were the only redstarts seen in my Colorado wanderings, although Professor Cooke says they breed sparingly on the plains, and a little more commonly in the mountains to an altitude of eight thousand feet, while one observer saw a female in July at the timber-line, which is three thousand feet above the normal range of the species. Why did not this birdlet remain within the bounds set by the scientific guild? Suit for contempt of court should be brought against it. Redstarts must have been very scarce in the regions over which I rambled, else I certainly should have noticed birds that are so fearless and so lavish of song.

One day my companion and I clambered up the steep side of a mesa some distance below Golden—that is, the base of the mesa was below the village, while its top towered far above it. A mesa was a structural portion of Colorado topography that neither of the two ramblers had yet explored, and we were anxious to know something about its resources from a natural history point of view. It was hard climbing on account of the steepness of the acclivity, its rocky character, and the thick network of bushes and brambles in many places; but "excelsior" was our motto in all our mountaineering, and we allowed no surmountable difficulties to daunt us. What birds select such steep places for a habitat? Here lived in happy domesticity the lyrical green-tailed towhee, the bird of the liquid voice, the poet laureate of the steep, bushy mountain sides, just as the water-ousel is the poet of the cascades far down in the caÑons and gulches; here also thrived the spurred towhees, one of which had tucked a nest beneath a bush cradling three speckled eggs. This was the second nest of this species I had found, albeit not the last. Here also dwelt the rock wren, a little bird that was new to me and that I had not found in the latitude of Colorado Springs either east or west of the continental divide. A description of this anchorite of the rocks will be given in a later chapter. I simply pause here to remark that he has a sort of "monarch-of-all-I-survey" air as he sits on a tall sandstone rock and blows the music from his Huon's horn on the messenger breezes. His wild melodies, often sounding like a blast from a bugle, are in perfect concord with the wild and rugged acclivities which he haunts, from which he can command many a prospect that pleases, whether he glances down into the valleys or up to the silver-capped mountain peaks. One cannot help feeling—at least, after one has left his rock-strewn dwelling-place—that a kind of glamour hangs about it and him.

The loud hurly-burly of the long-tailed chat reached us from a bushy hollow not far away. So far as I could determine, this fellow is as garrulous a churl and bully as his yellow-breasted cousin so well known in the East. (Afterwards I found the chats quite numerous at Boulder.) At length we scaled the cliffs, and presently stood on the edge of the mesa, which we found to be a somewhat rolling plateau, looking much like the plains themselves in general features, with here and there a hint of verdure, on which a herd of cattle were grazing. The pasture was the buffalo grass. Does the bird-lover ask what species dwell on a treeless mesa like this? It was the home of western grassfinches, western meadow-larks, turtle doves, desert horned larks, and a little bird that was new to me, evidently Brewer's sparrow. Its favorite resort was in the low bushes growing on the border of the mesa and along the edge of the cliff. Its song was unique, the opening syllable running low on the alto clef, while the closing notes constituted a very respectable soprano. A few extremely shy sparrows flitted about in the thickets of a hollow as we began our descent, and I have no doubt they were Lincoln's sparrows.

The valley and the irrigated plain were the birds' elysium. Here we first saw and heard that captivating bird, the lark bunting, as will be fully set forth in the closing chapter. This was one of the birds that had escaped me in my first visit to Colorado, save as I had caught tantalizing glimpses of him from the car-window on the plain beyond Denver, and when I went south to Colorado Springs, I utterly failed to find him. It has been a sort of riddle to me that not one could be discovered in that vicinity, while two years later these birds were abundant on the plains both east and west of Denver. If Colorado Springs is a little too far south for them in the summer, Denver is obviously just to their liking. No less abundant were the western meadow-larks, which flew and sang with a kind of lyrical intoxication over the green alfalfa fields.

One morning we decided to walk some distance up Clear Creek CaÑon. At the opening of the caÑon, Brewer's blackbirds were scuttling about in the bushes that broidered the steep banks of the tumultuous stream, and a short distance up in the gorge a lazuli bunting sat on a telegraph wire and piped his merry lay. Soon the caÑon narrowed, grew dark and forbidding, and the steep walls rose high on both sides, compelling the railway to creep like a half-imprisoned serpent along the foot of the cliffs; then the birds disappeared, not caring to dwell in such dark, more than half-immured places. Occasionally a magpie could be seen sailing overhead at an immense height, crossing over from one hillside to the other, turning his head as he made the transit, to get a view of the two peripatetics in the gulch below, anxious to discover whether they were bent on brigandage of any kind.

At length we reached a point where the mountain side did not look so steep as elsewhere, and we decided to scale it. From the railway it looked like a short climb, even if a little difficult, and we began it with only a slight idea of the magnitude of our undertaking. The fact is, mountain climbing is a good deal more than pastime; it amounts to work, downright hard work. In the present instance, no sooner had we gained one height than another loomed steep and challenging above us, so that we climbed the mountain by a series of immense steps or terraces. At places the acclivity was so steep that we were compelled to scramble over the rocks on all fours, and were glad to stop frequently and draw breath and rest our tired limbs. My boy comrade, having fewer things than I to lure him by the way, and being, perhaps, a little more agile as well, went far on ahead of me, often standing on a dizzy pinnacle of rock, and waving his butterfly-net or his cap in the air, and shouting at the top of his voice to encourage his lagging parent and announce his triumph as a mountaineer.

However, the birdman can never forget his hobby. There were a few birds on that precipitous mountain side, and that lent it its chief attraction. At one place a spurred towhee flitted about in a bushy clump and called much like a catbird—an almost certain proof of a nest on the steep, rocky wall far up from the roaring torrent in the gorge below. On a stony ridge still farther up, a rock wren was ringing his peculiar score, which sounds so much like a challenge, while still farther up, in a cluster of stunted pines, a long-crested jay lilted about and called petulantly, until I came near, when he swung across the caÑon, and I saw him no more.

After a couple of hours of hard climbing, we reached the summit, from which we were afforded a magnificent view of the foothills, the mesas, and the stretching plains below us, while above us to the west hills rose on hills until they culminated in mighty snow-capped peaks and ridges. It must not be supposed, because the snow-mantled summits in the west loomed far above our present station, that this mountain which we had ascended was a comparatively insignificant affair. The fact is, it was of huge bulk and great height measured from its base in the caÑon; almost as much of a mountain, in itself considered, as Gray's Peak. It must be borne in mind that the snowy peaks were from thirty to forty miles away, and that there is a gradual ascent the entire distance to the upper valleys and gorges which creep about the bases of the loftiest peaks and ridges. A mountain rising from the foothills may be almost as bulky and high and precipitous as one of the alpine peaks covered with eternal snow. Its actual altitude above sea-level may be less by many thousand feet, while its height from the surrounding caÑons and valleys may be almost, if not quite, as great. The alpine peaks have the advantage of majesty of situation, because the general level of the country from which they rise is very high. There we stood at a sort of outdoor halfway house between the plains and the towering ridges, and I can only say that the view was superb.

There were certain kinds of birds which had brought their household gods to the mountain's crest. Lewis's woodpeckers ambled about over the summit and rocky ridges, catching insects on the wing, as is their wont. Some distance below the summit a pair of them had a nest in a dead pine snag, from the orifice of which one was seen to issue. A mother hawk was feeding a couple of youngsters on the snarly branch of a dead pine. Almost on the summit a western nighthawk sprang up from my feet. On the bare ground, without the faintest sign of a nest, lay her two speckled eggs, which she had been brooding. She swept around above the summit in immense zigzag spirals while I examined her roofless dwelling-place. It was interesting to one bird-lover, at least, to know that the nighthawk breeds in such places. Like their eastern congeners, the western nighthawks are fond of "booming." At intervals a magpie would swing across the caÑon, looking from side to side, the impersonation of cautious shyness. A few rods below the crest a couple of rock wrens were flitting about some large rocks, creeping in and out among the crevices like gray mice, and at length one of them slyly fed a well-fledged youngster. This proves that these birds, like many of their congeners, are partial to a commanding lookout for a nesting site. These were the only occupants of the mountain's brow at the time of our visit, although in one of the hollows below us the spurred and green-tailed towhees were rendering a selection from Haydn's "Creation," probably "The heavens are telling."

No water was to be found from the bottom of the caÑon to the summit of the mountain; all was as dry as the plain itself. The feathered tenants of the dizzy height were doubtless compelled to fly down into the gorge for drinking and bathing purposes, and then wing up again to the summit—certainly no light task for such birds as the wrens and towhees.

Before daybreak one morning I made my way to a small park on the outskirts of the village to listen to the birds' matutinal concert. The earliest singers were the western robins, which began their carols at the first hint of the coming dawn; the next to break the silence were the western wood-pewees; then the summer warblers chimed in, followed by the western grassfinches, Bullock's orioles, meadow-larks, and lark sparrows, in the order named. Before daylight had fully come a family of mountain bluebirds were taking their breakfast at the border of the park, while their human relatives were still snoring in bed. The bluebirds are governed by old-fashioned rules even in this very "modern" age, among their maxims being,—

Just now I came across a pretty conceit of John B. Tabb, which more aptly sets off the mountain blue than it does his eastern relative, and which I cannot forbear quoting:

And there is Eben E. Rexford, who almost loses himself in a tangle of metaphors in his efforts to express his admiration of this bird with the cerulean plumes. Hark to his rhapsody:

On our return to the plains from a two weeks' trip to Georgetown and Gray's Peak, we spent several days at Arvada, a village about halfway between Denver and Golden. The place was rife with birds, all of which are described in other chapters of this volume.[10] Mention need be made here only of the song-sparrows, which were seen in a bushy place through which a purling stream wound its way. Of course, they were Melospiza fasciata montana, but their clear, bell-like trills were precise copies of those of the merry lowland minstrels of the East. Special attention is called to the fact that, in my first visit to Colorado, the only place in which mountain song-sparrows were met with was Buena Vista, quite a distance up among the mountains, while in the visit now being described they were not found anywhere in the mountains, save in the vale below Cassels. They were breeding at Arvada, for a female was seen carrying a worm in her bill, and I am sure a nest might easily have been found had I not been so busily occupied in the study of other and rarer species. However, the recollection of the merry lyrists with the speckled breasts and silvery voices, brings to mind Mr. Ernest Thompson Seton's "Myth of the Song-Sparrow," from which it will be seen that this attractive bird has had something of an adventurous career: