ABSTRACT
In a journal entry for 10 June, 1825, the English poet John Clare describes the appearance of a rarely seen migratory bird, which he knows to be a flycatcher but distinguishes by its colloquial name, “Egypt Bird,” because its call, as he notes, “resemble[s] the sound of the word ‘Egypt’ ” ( Prose 152-3). He mentions it once more in his Natural History Letters from the same period, where it is described as “a bird of passage & rather a scarce one for I dont see a pair of them for 3 or 4 years together” ( Prose 167). 1 Three decades later, on 15 May, 1855, Henry David Thoreau records in his Journal his first glimpse of a flycatcher, which is to him also an uncommon species. 2 Like Clare, he identifies the bird initially by its peculiar song – “ ter-phe-ee ” – before it darts into view, snatches an insect, and returns to its perch on top of a pitch pine. He sees it only once in this flurry of movement yet manages to take note of its white throat, darker body and hints of bright yellow within the bill (7: 379). These two isolated moments of humanavian encounter offer insight not only into the remarkable migratory journeys of flycatchers – a family of passerine birds more common to continental Europe and northern Africa, where, as Thomas Bewick notes in his 1797 A History of British Birds , “they are of infinite use in destroying those numerous swarms of noxious insects” (206) – but also into the men who recorded them, one gathering materials for a proposed volume of natural history, its contents drawn exclusively from the environs of Helpston, Northamptonshire, and the other chronicling the flora and fauna in the Concord River valley of Massachusetts in a rather more desultory quest “to meet the facts of life – the vital facts” ( Journal 1: 362). For the sake of a compelling narrative, let us imagine that Clare and Thoreau saw a similar species of flycatcher, perhaps the spotted, the olivaceous or the rarer dusky-blue ( Muscicapa comitata ).
