Florida trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusivePackard, Winthrop
History
Florida trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive
Packard, Winthrop
Florida -- Description and travel; Natural history -- Florida
When I left New York, I thought that I had said good-by to the smaller
migrating birds for three days. My steamer’s keel was to furrow nearly a
thousand miles of rough sea before it landed me in Florida, where among
live-oak and palmetto, bamboo and sugar cane, I might hope to meet tiny
friends that I had loved and lost a while. I rather expected flocks of
migrating sea birds, and in this I was disappointed. The usual gulls
whirled and cackled in our wake, kittiwakes and herring gulls, brown
backs and black backs, a horde that thinned with each steamer we met,
taking return tickets to port, seemingly loath to leave the fascinating
region of Coney Island.
The hundreds had dwindled to almost a lone specimen before, just off
Charleston, the pelicans came out to look us over. Not a duck did I see
till the pelicans had approved us. Then we began to drive out scattered
flocks. Perhaps the northwester that had chased us all the way had
something to do with it. For it was almost a blizzard out of New York.
Up in Central Park the English sparrow, like Keats’s St. Agnes’ Eve owl,
for all his feathers was a-cold. The little children of the rich,
parading the walks with bare knees, and nurse maids, were blue with the
chill and might well envy the little children of the poor for whom the
charitable provide stockings. Even out at sea the wind and cold seemed
to chill the water till it was made of blue shivers and gooseflesh
combers.
Yet I had reckoned without my host, so far as the little migrants are
concerned, for, waking the next morning some two hundred miles or more
farther south and far out of sight of any land, the first sound that I
heard was the tchip of a myrtle warbler. Verily, thought I, this is some
trick of the vibrating rigging, quivering under the thrust of the screw.
Then I looked up and saw the bird himself, sitting on the rail, whence
he flew serenely to a passenger’s hat. Then I was quite convinced that
it was high time that I had a change, found fresh woods and pastures
new. Too steady a pursuit of a subject is apt to end in hallucination,
as many a latter day theosophist ought to be able to testify.
However, this specimen of _Dendroica coronata_ was not materialized
through concentrated thought, but was a real myrtle warbler, and there
were a dozen, more or less, hopping about the ship. During the next
thirty-six hours the number of bird passengers carried, summed up,
would, I am sure, far exceed the paying passenger list. We identified
pine warblers, robins, song sparrows, chipping sparrows, fox sparrows,
Wilson’s warblers, juncos, golden-crowned kinglets, ruby-crowned
kinglets, bay-winged buntings and a white-bellied swallow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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