sat upon stakes in a patriotic, spread-eagle (American eagle) attitude,
as if drying their wings,--a curious sight till one became accustomed
to it. Snakebirds and buzzards resort to the same device, but I cannot
recall ever seeing any Northern bird thus engaged. From the south bridge
I one morning saw, to my great satisfaction, a couple of white pelicans,
the only ones that I found in Florida, though I was assured that within
twenty years they had been common along the Halifax and Hillsborough
rivers. My birds were flying up the river at a good height. The brown
pelicans, on the other hand, made their daily pilgrimages just above the
level of the water, as has been already described, and were never over
the river, but off the beach.
All in all, there are few pleasanter walks in Florida, I believe, than
the beach-round at Daytona, out by one bridge and back by the other.
An old hotel-keeper--a rural Yankee, if one could tell anything by his
look and speech--said to me in a burst of confidence, "Yes, we've got a
climate, and that's about all we have got,--climate and sand." I could
not entirely agree with him. For myself, I found not only fine days, but
fine prospects. But there was no denying the sand.
ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH.
Wherever a walker lives, he finds sooner or later one favorite road. So
it was with me at New Smyrna, where I lived for three weeks. I had gone
there for the sake of the river, and my first impulse was to take the
road that runs southerly along its bank. At the time I thought it the
most beautiful road I had found in Florida, nor have I seen any great
cause since to alter that opinion. With many pleasant windings (beautiful
roads are never straight, nor unnecessarily wide, which is perhaps the
reason why our rural authorities devote themselves so madly to the work
of straightening and widening),--with many pleasant windings, I say,
"The grace of God made manifest in curves,"
it follows the edge of the hammock, having the river on one side, and the
forest on the other. It was afternoon when I first saw it. Then it is
shaded from the sun, while the river and its opposite bank have on them
a light more beautiful than can be described or imagined; a light--with
reverence for the poet of nature be it spoken--a light that never was
_except_ on sea or land. The poet's dream was never equal to it.
In a flat country stretches of water are doubly welcome. They take the
place of hills, and give the eye what it craves,--distance; which softens
angles, conceals details, and heightens colors,--in short, transfigures
the world with its romancer's touch, and blesses us with illusion. So,
as I loitered along the south road, I never tired of looking across the
river to the long, wooded island, and over that to the line of sand-hills
that marked the eastern rim of the East Peninsula, beyond which was the
Atlantic. The white crests of the hills made the sharper points of the
horizon line. Elsewhere clumps of nearer pine-trees intervened, while
here and there a tall palmetto stood, or seemed to stand, on the highest
and farthest ridge looking seaward. But particulars mattered little.
The blue water, the pale, changeable grayish-green of the low island
woods, the deeper green of the pines, the unnameable hues of the sky,
the sunshine that flooded it all, these were beauty enough;--beauty all
the more keenly enjoyed because for much of the way it was seen only by
glimpses, through vistas of palmetto and live-oak. Sometimes the road
came quite out of the woods, as it rounded a turn of the hammock. Then I
stopped to gaze long at the scene. Elsewhere I pushed through the hedge
at favorable points, and sat, or stood, looking up and down the river.
A favorite seat was the prow of an old rowboat, which lay, falling to
pieces, high and dry upon the sand. It had made its last cruise, but I
found it still useful.
The river is shallow. At low tide sand-bars and oyster-beds occupy much
of its breadth; and even when it looked full, a great blue heron would
very likely be wading in the middle of it. That was a sight to which I
had grown accustomed in Florida, where this bird, familiarly known as
"the major," is apparently ubiquitous. Too big to be easily hidden, it
is also, as a general thing, too wary to be approached within gunshot. I
am not sure that I ever came within sight of one, no matter how suddenly
or how far away, that it did not give evidence of having seen me first.
Long legs, long wings, a long bill--and long sight and long patience:
such is the tall bird's dowry. Good and useful qualities, all of them.
Long may they avail to put off the day of their owner's extermination.
The major is scarcely a bird of which you can make a pet in your mind, as
you may of the chickadee, for instance, or the bluebird, or the hermit
thrush. He does not lend himself naturally to such imaginary endearments.
But it is pleasant to have him on one's daily beat. I should count it one
compensation for having to live in Florida instead of in Massachusetts
(but I might require a good many others) that I should see him a hundred
times as often. In walking down the river road I seldom saw less than
half a dozen; not together (the major, like fishermen in general, is of
an unsocial turn), but here one and there one,--on a sand-bar far out
in the river, or in some shallow bay, or on the submerged edge of an
oyster-flat. Wherever he was, he always looked as if he might be going to
do something presently; even now, perhaps, the matter was on his mind;
but at this moment--well, there are times when a heron's strength is to
stand still. Certainly he seemed in no danger of overeating. A cracker
told me that the major made an excellent dish if killed on the full of
the moon. I wondered at that qualification, but my informant explained
himself. The bird, he said, feeds mostly at night, and fares best with
the moon to help him. If the reader would dine off roast blue heron,
therefore, as I hope I never shall, let him mind the lunar phases. But
think of the gastronomic ups and downs of a bird that is fat and lean by
turns twelve times a year! Possibly my informant overstated the case; but
in any event I would trust the major to bear himself like a philosopher.
If there is any one of God's creatures that can wait for what he wants,
it must be the great blue heron.
I have spoken of his caution. If he was patrolling a shallow on one side
of an oyster-bar,--at the rate, let us say, of two steps a minute,--and
took it into his head (an inappropriate phrase, as conveying an idea of
something like suddenness) to try the water on the other side, he did
not spread his wings, as a matter of course, and fly over. First he put
up his head--an operation that makes another bird of him--and looked in
all directions. How could he tell what enemy might be lying in wait? And
having alighted on the other side (his manner of alighting is one of his
prettiest characteristics), he did not at once draw in his neck till his
bill protruded on a level with his body, and resume his labors, but first
he looked once more all about him. It was a good _habit_ to do that,
anyhow, and he meant to run no risks. If "the race of birds was created
out of innocent, light-minded men, whose thoughts were directed toward
heaven," according to the word of Plato, then _Ardea herodias_ must long
ago have fallen from grace. I imagine his state of mind to be always like
that of our pilgrim fathers in times of Indian massacres. When they went
after the cows or to hoe the corn, they took their guns with them, and
turned no corner without a sharp lookout against ambush. No doubt such a
condition of affairs has this advantage, that it makes ennui impossible.
There is always something to live for, if it be only to avoid getting
killed.
After this manner did the Hillsborough River majors all behave themselves
until my very last walk beside it. Then I found the exception,--the
exception that is as good as inevitable in the case of any bird, if the
observation be carried far enough. He (or she; there was no telling which
it was) stood on the sandy beach, a splendid creature in full nuptial
garb, two black plumes nodding jauntily from its crown, and masses of
soft elongated feathers draping its back and lower neck. Nearer and
nearer I approached, till I must have been within a hundred feet; but it
stood as if on dress parade, exulting to be looked at. Let us hope it
never carried itself thus gayly when the wrong man came along.
Near the major--not keeping him company, but feeding in the same shallows
and along the same oyster-bars--were constantly to be seen two smaller
relatives of his, the little blue heron and the Louisiana. The former is
what is called a dichromatic species; some of the birds are blue, and
others white. On the Hillsborough, it seemed to me that white specimens
predominated; but possibly that was because they were so much more
conspicuous. Sunlight favors the white feather; no other color shows so
quickly or so far. If you are on the beach and catch sight of a bird far
out at sea,--a gull or a tern, a gannet or a loon,--it is invariably the
white parts that are seen first. And so the little white heron might
stand never so closely against the grass or the bushes on the further
shore of the river, and the eye could not miss him. If he had been a blue
one, art that distance, ten to one he would have escaped me. Besides,
I was more on the alert for white ones, because I was always hoping to
find one of them with black legs. In other words, I was looking for the
little white egret, a bird concerning which, thanks to the murderous work
of plume-hunters,--thanks, also, to those good women who pay for having
the work done,--I must confess that I went to Florida and came home again
without certainly seeing it.
The heron with which I found myself especially taken was the Louisiana;
a bird of about the same size as the little blue, but with an air of
daintiness and lightness that is quite its own, and quite indescribable.
When it rose upon the wing, indeed, it seemed almost _too_ light, almost
unsteady, as if it lacked ballast, like a butterfly. It was the most
numerous bird of its tribe along the river, I think, and, with one
exception, the most approachable. That exception was the green heron,
which frequented the flats along the village front, and might well have
been mistaken for a domesticated bird; letting you walk across a plank
directly over its head while it squatted upon the mud, and when disturbed
flying into a fig-tree before the hotel piazza, just as the dear little
ground doves were in the habit of doing. To me, who had hitherto seen the
green heron in the wildest of places, this tameness was an astonishing
sight. It would be hard to say which surprised me more, the New Smyrna
green herons or the St. Augustine sparrow-hawks,--which latter treated me
very much as I am accustomed to being treated by village-bred robins in
Massachusetts.
The Louisiana heron was my favorite, as I say, but incomparably the
handsomest member of the family (I speak of such as I saw) was the great
white egret. In truth, the epithet "handsome" seems almost a vulgarism
as applied to a creature so superb, so utterly and transcendently
splendid. I saw it--in a way to be sure of it--only once. Then, on an
island in the Hillsborough, two birds stood in the dead tops of low
shrubby trees, fully exposed in the most favorable of lights, their
long dorsal trains drooping behind them and swaying gently in the wind.
I had never seen anything so magnificent. And when I returned, two or
three hours afterward, from a jaunt up the beach to Mosquito Inlet,
there they still were, as if they had not stirred in all that time. The
reader should understand that this egret is between four and five feet in
length, and measures nearly five feet from wing tip to wing tip, and that
its plumage throughout is of spotless white. It is pitiful to think how
constantly a bird of that size and color must be in danger of its life.
Happily, the lawmakers of the State have done something of recent years
for the protection of such defenseless beauties. Happily, too, shooting
from the river boats is no longer permitted,--on the regular lines, that
is. I myself saw a young gentleman stand on the deck of an excursion
steamer, with a rifle, and do his worst to kill or maim every living
thing that came in sight, from a spotted sandpiper to a turkey buzzard!
I call him a "gentleman;" he was in gentle company, and the fact that he
chewed gum industriously would, I fear, hardly invalidate his claim to
that title. The narrow river wound in and out between low, densely wooded
banks, and the beauty of the shifting scene was enough almost to take
one's breath away; but the crack of the rifle was not the less frequent
on that account. Perhaps the sportsman was a Southerner, to whom river
scenery of that enchanting kind was an old story. More likely he was a
Northerner, one of the men who thank Heaven they are "not sentimental."
In my rambles up and down the river road I saw few water birds beside the
herons. Two or three solitary cormorants would be shooting back and forth
at a furious rate, or swimming in midstream; and sometimes a few spotted
sandpipers and killdeer plovers were feeding along the shore. Once in a
great while a single gull or tern made its appearance,--just often enough
to keep me wondering why they were not there oftener,--and one day a
water-turkey went suddenly over my head and dropped into the river on the
farther side of the island, I was glad to see this interesting creature
for once in salt water; for the Hillsborough, like the Halifax and the
Indian rivers, is a river in name only,--a river by brevet, --being, in
fact, a salt-water lagoon or sound between the mainland and the eastern
peninsula.
Fish-hawks were always in sight, and bald eagles were seldom absent
altogether. Sometimes an eagle stood perched on a dead tree on an island.
Oftener I heard a scream, and looked up to see one sailing far overhead,
or chasing an osprey. On one such occasion, when the hawk seemed to be
making a losing fight, a third bird suddenly intervened, and the eagle,
as I thought, was driven away. "Good for the brotherhood of fish-hawks!"
I exclaimed. But at that moment I put my glass on the new-comer; and
behold, he was not a hawk, but another eagle. Meanwhile the hawk had
disappeared with his fish, and I was left to ponder the mystery.
As for the wood, the edge of the hammock, through which the road passes,
there were no birds in it. It was one of those places (I fancy every
bird-gazer must have had experience of such) where it is a waste of time
to seek them. I could walk down the road for two miles and back again,
and then sit in my room at the hotel for fifteen minutes, and see more
wood birds, and more kinds of them, in one small live-oak before the
window than I had seen in the whole four miles; and that not once and
by accident, but again and again. In affairs of this kind it is useless
to contend. The spot looks favorable, you say, and nobody can deny it;
there must be birds there, plenty of them; your missing them to-day was a
matter of chance; you will try again. And you try again--and again--and
yet again. But in the end you have to acknowledge that, for some reason
unknown to you, the birds have agreed to give that place the go-by.
One bird, it is true, I found in this hammock, and not elsewhere: a
single oven-bird, which, with one Northern water thrush and one Louisiana
water thrush, completed my set of Florida _Seiuri_. Besides him I
recall one hermit thrush, a few cedar-birds, a house wren, chattering
at a great rate among the "bootjacks" (leaf-stalks) of an overturned
palmetto-tree, with an occasional mocking-bird, cardinal grosbeak,
prairie warbler, yellow redpoll, myrtle bird, ruby-crowned kinglet,
phœbe, and flicker. In short, there were no birds at all, except now
and then an accidental straggler of a kind that could be found almost
anywhere else in indefinite numbers.
And as it was not the presence of birds that made the river road
attractive, so neither was it any unwonted display of blossoms. Beside a
similar road along the bank of the Halifax, in Daytona, grew multitudes
of violets, and goodly patches of purple verbena (garden plants gone
wild, perhaps), and a fine profusion of spiderwort,--a pretty flower,
the bluest of the blue, thrice welcome to me as having been one of the
treasures of the very first garden of which I have any remembrance.
"Indigo plant," we called it then. Here, however, on the way from
New Smyrna to Hawks Park, I recall no violets, nor any verbena or
spiderwort. Yellow wood-sorrel (oxalis) was here, of course, as it was
everywhere. It dotted the grass in Florida very much as five-fingers do
in Massachusetts, I sometimes thought. And the creeping, round-leaved
houstonia was here, with a superfluity of a weedy blue sage (_Salvia
lyrata_). Here, also, as in Daytona, I found a strikingly handsome
tufted plant, a highly varnished evergreen, which I persisted in taking
for a fern--the sterile fronds--in spite of repeated failures to find
it described by Dr. Chapman under that head, until at last an excellent
woman came to my help with the information that it was "coontie" (_Zamia
integrifolia_), famous as a plant out of which the Southern people
made bread in war time. This confession of botanical amateurishness
and incompetency will be taken, I hope, as rather to my credit than
otherwise; but it would be morally worthless if I did not add the story
of another plant, which, in this same New Smyrna hammock, I frequently
noticed hanging in loose bunches, like blades of flaccid deep green
grass, from the trunks of cabbage palmettos. The tufts were always out of
reach, and I gave them no particular thought; and it was not until I got
home to Massachusetts, and then almost by accident, that I learned what
they were. They, it turned out, _were_ ferns (_Vittaria lineata_--grass
fern), and my discomfiture was complete.
This comparative dearth of birds and flowers was not in all respects
a disadvantage. On the contrary, to a naturalist blessed now and then
with a supernaturalistic mood, it made the place, on occasion, a welcome
retreat. Thus, one afternoon, as I remember, I had been reading Keats,
the only book I had brought with me,--not counting manuals, of course,
which come under another head,--and by and by started once more for the
pine lands by the way of the cotton-shed hammock, "to see what I could
see." But poetry had spoiled me just then for anything like scientific
research, and as I waded through the ankle-deep sand I said to myself
all at once, "No, no! What do I care for another new bird? I want to see
the beauty of the world." With that I faced about, and, taking a side
track, made as directly as possible for the river road. There I should
have a mind at ease, with no unfamiliar, tantalizing bird note to set my
curiosity on edge, nor any sand through which to be picking my steps.
The river road is paved with oyster-shells. If any reader thinks
that statement prosaic or unimportant, then he has never lived in
southern Florida. In that part of the world all new-comers have to
take walking-lessons; unless, indeed, they have already served an
apprenticeship on Cape Cod, or in some other place equally arenarious. My
own lesson I got at second hand, and on a Sunday. It was at New Smyrna,
in the village. Two women were behind me, on their way home from church,
and one of them was complaining of the sand, to which she was not yet
used. "Yes," said the other, "I found it pretty hard walking at first,
but I learned after a while that the best way is to set the heel down
hard, as hard as you can; then the sand doesn't give under you so much,
and you get along more comfortably." I wonder whether she noticed, just
in front of her, a man who began forthwith to bury his boot heel at every
step?
In such a country (the soil is said to be good for orange-trees, but they
do not have to walk) roads of powdered shell are veritable luxuries, and
land agents are quite right in laying all stress upon them as inducements
to possible settlers. If the author of the Apocalypse had been raised in
Florida, we should never have had the streets of the New Jerusalem paved
with gold. His idea of heaven would have been different from that; more
personal and home-felt, we may be certain.
The river road, then, as I have said, and am glad to say again, was
shell-paved. And well it might be; for the hammock, along the edge of
which it meandered, seemed, in some places at least, to be little more
than a pile of oyster-shells, on which soil had somehow been deposited,
and over which a forest was growing. Florida Indians have left an evil
memory. I heard a philanthropic visitor lamenting that she had talked
with many of the people about them, and had yet to hear a single word
said in their favor. Somebody might have been good enough to say that,
with all their faults, they had given to eastern Florida a few hills,
such as they are, and at present are supplying it, indirectly, with
comfortable highways. How they must have feasted, to leave such heaps of
shells behind them! They came to the coast on purpose, we may suppose.
Well, the red-men are gone, but the oyster-beds remain; and if winter
refugees continue to pour in this direction, as doubtless they will,
they too will eat a "heap" of oysters (it is easy to see how the vulgar
Southern use of that word may have originated), and in the course of
time, probably, the shores of the Halifax and the Hillsborough will be a
fine mountainous country! And then, if this ancient, nineteenth-century
prediction is remembered, the highest peak of the range will perhaps be
named in a way which the innate modesty of the prophet restrains him from
specifying with greater particularity.
Meanwhile it is long to wait, and tourists and residents alike must
find what comfort they can in the lesser hills which, thanks to the
good appetite of their predecessors, are already theirs. For my own
part, there is one such eminence of which I cherish the most grateful
recollections. It stands (or stood; the road-makers had begun carting it
away) at a bend in the road just south of one of the Turnbull canals.
I climbed it often (it can hardly be less than fifteen or twenty feet
above the level of the sea), and spent more than one pleasant hour upon
its grassy summit. Northward was New Smyrna, a village in the woods, and
farther away towered the lighthouse of Mosquito Inlet. Along the eastern
sky stretched the long line of the peninsula sand-hills, between the
white crests of which could be seen the rude cottages of Coronado beach.
To the south and west was the forest, and in front, at my feet, lay the
river with its woody islands. Many times have I climbed a mountain and
felt myself abundantly repaid by an off-look less beautiful. This was
the spot to which I turned when I had been reading Keats, and wanted
to see the beauty of the world. Here were a grassy seat, the shadow of
orange-trees, and a wide prospect. In Florida, I found no better place in
which a man who wished to be both a naturalist and a nature-lover, who
felt himself heir to a double inheritance,
"The clear eye's moiety and the dear heart's part,"
could for the time sit still and be happy.