temper toward man. How gladly she yields to his masterful dominion!
How sufferingly she waits for him to grow out of his spoiled, vicious
childhood. The spirit of the bobolink ought to exorcise the savage out
of us. It ought, and it does--slowly.
We are trying, for instance, to cow the savage in us by law, to
restrain it while the birds are breeding; but we hardly succeed yet.
The mating season is scarcely over, the young not yet grown, when the
gunners about me go into the fields with their dogs and locate every
covey of quail, even counting the number of birds in each. With the
dawn of the first day of open season they are out, going from flock to
flock, killing, till the last possible bird is in their bloody bags.
[Illustration: "He will come if May comes."]
One of the most pathetic of all the wordless cries of the out-of-doors
is the covey-call of the female quail at night, trying to gather the
scattered flock together after the dogs are called off and the hunters
have gone home.
[Illustration: "Within a few feet of me dropped the lonely frightened
quail."]
It was nearly dark one December afternoon, the snow ankle-deep and
falling swiftly, when, crossing a wide field, I heard this call from a
piece of sprout-land ahead of me. Kneeling in the snow, I answered the
whistle. Instantly came a reply. Back and forth we signaled till there
was a whir of wings, and down in the soft snow within a few feet of me
dropped the lonely, frightened quail. She was the only one left of a
covey that the night before had roosted unbroken, snugly wedged, with
their tails together, under a pile of brush.
Sharing the fields with the quails are the meadow-larks. They scale
along the grass, rarely rising higher than the cedars, flapping
rapidly for a short distance, then sailing a little in a cautious,
breath-held manner, as though wings were a new invention and just a
trifle dangerous yet. On they go to a fence-stake, and land with many
congratulatory flirts of wings and tail. Has anybody observed the
feat? They look around. Yes; here I sit,--a man on a fence across the
field,--and the lark turns toward me and calls out: "Did you see me?"
He would be the best-bred, most elegant of our birds, were it not for
his self-consciousness. He is consumed with it. There is too much gold
and jet on his breast. But, in spite of all this, the plain, rich back
and wings, the slender legs, the long, delicate beak, the erect
carriage, the important air, the sleek, refined appearance, compel us
to put him down an aristocrat.
In a closely cropped pasture near the house, in early June, I found
the eggs of the night-hawk. There was no nest, of course: the eggs
lay upon the grass, and, for safety, had been left directly under the
fence. The cows might not step on them here, but nothing prevented
their crushing the fragile things with their noses.
[Illustration: "On they go to a fence-stake."]
Lengthwise, upon one of the rails, slept the mother. She zigzagged off
at my approach, dazzled and uncertain in the white light of the noon,
making no outcry nor stopping an instant to watch the fate of her
eggs. She acted like a huge bat, slinking and dodging, out of her
element in the light, and anxious to be hid. She did not seem like a
creature that had a voice, and the way she flew would make one think
that she did not know the use of her wings. But what a circus flier
she is at night! and with what an uncanny noise she haunts the
twilight! She has made more hair stand on end, with her earthward
plunge and its unearthly boom through the dusk, than all the owls
together. It is a ghostly joke. And who would believe in the daylight
that this limp, ragged lump, dozing upon the fence or the kitchen
roof, could play the spook so cleverly in the dark?
III
On the 25th of April, before the trees were in leaf, I heard the first
true wood-note of the spring. It came from the tall oaks beyond the
garden. "_Clear, clear, clear up!_" it rang, pure, untamed, and
quickening. The solitary vireo! It was his whistle, inimitable,
unmistakable; and though I had not seen him since last July, I hurried
out to the woods, sure he would greet me.
Solitary is the largest, rarest, tamest, and sweetest-voiced of the
vireos. I soon found him high in the tops of the trees; but I wanted
him nearer. He would not descend. So I chased him, stoning and
mocking him even, till, at last, he came down to the bushes and showed
me his big blue head, white eye-rings, wing-bars, and yellow-washed
sides.
[Illustration: "It was a love-song."]
He did more than show himself: he sang for me. Within ten feet of me,
he began a quiet little warble of a tenderness and contentment I never
heard before. Such variety of notes, such sweetness of melody, such
easy, unconscious rendering! It was a love-song, but sung all to
himself, for he knew that there was no gentle heart to listen this
side of Virginia. He sang to his own happy heart as pure and sweet a
song as the very angels know.
Solitary disappeared from that day. I concluded he had gone to
heavier, wilder woods to nest. It was late in June that, passing
through this brush-land, I saw hanging from an oak sapling, just above
my head, a soft, yellowish basket. It was a vireo's nest; but it was
too large, too downy, too yellow for Red-eye. There were no bunches of
white spider-webs upon it, such as Red-eye hangs all over his nest. I
stepped aside for a better view, and had just caught the glint of a
large, white-ringed eye peering over the nest's edge at me, when, off
in the woods behind me, the noon hush was startled by Solitary's
whistle--a round, pure, pearly note that broke the quiet as pearly
teeth break through the smile of a beautiful face. He soon appeared,
coming on, a tree at a time, looking and asking, in no hurry and in no
alarm. When he reached the pine overhead, his mate left the nest to
confer with him. They scolded me mildly while I climbed for a look at
the four delicately spotted eggs; but as soon as I lay down upon the
ground, the mother, without fuss or fear, slipped into the nest and
cuddled down over the eggs till her head hardly showed above the rim.
Had a few bushes been removed I could have seen the nest from my front
door.
Why do the wood-birds so persistently build their nests along the
paths and roads? I said that even the hermit-thrush prefers a wood
with a road through it. If he possibly can he will build along that
road. And what one of the birds will not? Is it mere stupidity? Is it
curiosity to see what goes on? Is there some safety here from enemies
worse than boys and cats and dogs? Or is it that these birds take this
chance for human fellowship? If this last is the reason for their
rejecting the deep tangles for limbs that overhang roads and tufts of
grass in constantly traveled foot-paths, then they can be pardoned;
otherwise they are foolish--fatally foolish.
The first black-and-white warbler's nest I ever found was at the base
of a clump of bushes in a narrow wood-path not ten feet from a
highway. There were acres of bushes beyond, thick and pathless, all
theirs to choose from.
In the same piece of scrub-oak the summer after I found another
black-and-white warbler's nest. The loud talk of three of the birds
attracted me. Two of them were together, and just mated, evidently;
the third was a male, and just as plainly the luckless suitor. He was
trying to start a quarrel between the young couple, doing his best to
make the new bride break her vows. He flew just ahead of them, darting
to the ground, scuttling under the brush, and calling out, "See here!
Come here! Don't fool with him any longer! I have the place for a
nest!"
But the pair kept on together, chatting brightly as they ran up and
down the trees and hunted under the fallen limbs and leaves for a
home-site. The male led the way and found the places; the female
passed judgment. I followed them.
Every spot the cock peeped into was the finest in the woods; his
enthusiasm was constant and unbounded. "Any place is heaven," he kept
repeating, "any place, so long as I have you." But she was to do the
housekeeping, and the ecstasies of the honeymoon were not to turn her
head. She was house-hunting; and, like every woman, at her best. She
said "no," and "no," and "no." I began to think they never would find
the place, when the male darted far ahead and went out of sight
beneath some low huckleberry-bushes near a stone wall. This wall ran
between the woods and a pasture; and parallel with it, on the woods
side, was a foot-path.
Up came the little hen, and together they scratched about under the
leaves. Suddenly the cock flew away and fetched a strip of chestnut
bark. This he turned over to his wife. Then both birds flew out to the
chestnut limbs for bark, and brought their strips back. The home was
founded.
It was the merest cavity, pushed into the dead leaves, with three
shreds of bark for first timbers. In less than a week the structure
was finished and furnished--with a tiny white egg thickly sprinkled
with brown. I watched the spot daily, and finally saw the four young
warblers safely out into their new woods-world. But from the day the
first egg was laid until the nestlings left I constantly expected to
find everything crushed under the foot of some passer-by.
When free from household cares the chickadee is the most sociable of
the birds of the woods. But he takes family matters seriously, and
withdraws so quietly to the unfrequented parts of the woods during
nesting-time as to seem to have migrated. Yet of the four chickadees'
nests found about the house, one was in a dead yellow birch in a bit
of deep swamp, two others were in yellow birches along wood-roads, and
the fourth was in a rotten fence-post by the main road, a long way
from any trees.
[Illustration: "But the pair kept on together, chatting brightly."]
A workman while mending the fence discovered this last nest. The post
crumbled in his hands as he tried to pull it down, revealing the nest
of moss and rabbit hair, with its five brown-and-white eggs. He left
the old post, propped it up with a sound one, and, mending the broken
walls of the cavity the best he could, hurried along with his task,
that the birds might return. They came back, found the wreckage of
dust and chips covering the eggs, tried the flimsy walls--and went
away. It was a desecrated home, neither safe nor beautiful now; so
they forsook it.
There is no eagle's nest in this collection of thirty-six. But if Mr.
Burroughs is correct, there is the next thing to it--a humming-bird's
nest; three of them, indeed, one of which is within a stone's throw
of my door! This one is in the oaks behind my garden, but the other
two are even nearer to houses. One of these is upon the limb of a
pear-tree. The tip of this limb rubs against a woodshed connected with
a dwelling. The third nest is in a large apple orchard, in the tree
nearest the house, and saddled upon that branch of the tree which
reaches farthest toward the dwelling. So close is this nest that I can
look out of the garret window directly into it.
[Illustration: "In a dead yellow birch."]
I believe that Ruby-throat is so far domesticated that he rejoices
over every new flowergarden. There was nearly half an acre of gladioli
in the neighborhood one summer, where all the humming-birds gathered
from far and near. Here, for the only time in my life, I saw a _flock_
of humming-birds. I counted eight one day; and the gardener told me
that he had often seen a dozen of them among the spikes. They squeaked
like bats, and played--about as bullets might play. In fact, I think I
dodged when they whizzed past me, as a soldier does the first time he
is under fire.
[Illustration: "So close I can look directly into it."]
One of my friends had a cellar window abloom with geraniums. A
ruby-throat came often to this window. One day the mistress of the
flowers caught the wee chap in her hands. He knew at once that she
meant no harm and quietly submitted. A few days later he returned and
was captured again. He liked the honey, and evidently the fondling,
too, for he came very regularly after that for the nectar and the
lady's soft hands.
The nest behind my garden is in the top of a tall, slender maple, with
oaks and chestnuts surrounding and overshadowing it. Finding a nest
like this is inspiration for the rest of life. The only feat
comparable to it is the discovery of a bee-tree. Finding wild bees, I
think, would be good training for one intending to hunt humming-birds'
nests in the woods. But no one ever had such an intention. No one ever
deliberately started into the woods a-saying, "Go to, now; I'll find a
humming-bird's nest in here!"
Humming-birds' nests are the gifts of the gods--rewards for patience
and for gratitude because of commoner grants. My nests have invariably
come this way, or, if you choose, by accident. The nearest I ever came
to earning one was in the case of this one in the maple. I caught a
glimpse of a humming-bird flashing around the high limbs of a
chestnut, so far up that she looked no bigger than a hornet. I
suspected instantly that she was gathering lichens for a nest, and, as
she darted off, I threw my eyes ahead of her across her path. It was
just one chance in ten thousand if I even saw her speeding through the
limbs and leaves, if I got the line of her flight, to say nothing of a
clue to her nesting-place. It was little short of a miracle. I had
tried many times before to do it, but this is the only time I ever
succeeded: my line of vision fell directly upon the tiny builder as
she dropped to her nest in the sapling.
The structure was barely started. I might have stared at it with the
strongest glass and never made it out a nest; the sapling, too, was no
thicker at the butt than my wrist, and I should not have dreamed of
looking into its tall, spindling top for any kind of a nest.
Furthermore, as if to rob one of the last possibility of discovering
it, a stray bud, two years before, had pushed through the bark of the
limb about three inches behind where the nest was to be fixed, and
had grown, till now its leaves hung over the dainty house in an almost
perfect canopy and screen.
For three weeks the walls of this house were going up. Is it
astonishing that, when finished, they looked like a growth of the
limb, like part and parcel of the very tree? I made a daily visit to
the sapling until the young birds flew away; then I bent the tree to
the ground and brought the nest home. It now hangs above my desk, its
thick walls, its downy bed, its leafy canopy telling still of the
little mother's unwearied industry, of her infinite love and
foresight. So faultlessly formed, so safely saddled to the limb, so
exquisitely lichened into harmony with the green around, this tiniest
nest speaks for all of the birds. How needless, how sorry, would be
the loss of these beautiful neighbors of our copses and fields!
[Illustration: frog]
FROM RIVER-OOZE TO TREE-TOP
There are many lovers of the out-of-doors who court her in her robes
of roses and in her blithe and happy hours of bird-song only. Now a
lover that never sees her barefoot in the meadow, that never hears her
commonplace chatter at the frog-pond, that never finds her in her
lowly, humdrum life among the toads and snakes, has little genuine
love for his mistress.
To know the pixy when one sees it, to call the long Latin name of the
ragweed, to exclaim over the bobolink's song, to go into ecstasies at
a glorious sunset, is not, necessarily, to love nature at all. One who
does all this sincerely, but who stuffs his ears to the din of the
spring frogs, is in love with nature's pretty clothes, her dainty airs
and fine ways. Her warm, true heart lies deeper down. When one has
gone down to that, then a March without peepers will be as lonesome
as a crowd without friends; then an orchard without the weather-wise
hyla can never make good his place with mere apples; and the front
door without a solemn, philosophic toad beneath its step will lack
something quite as needful to its evening peace and homeness as it
lacks when the old-fashioned roses and the honeysuckle are gone.
We are not humble nor thoughtful out of doors. There is too much
sentiment in our passion for nature. We make colored plates and poems
to her. All honor to the poets! especially to those who look carefully
and see deeply, like Wordsworth and Emerson and Whitman. But what the
common run of us needs, when we go a-wooing nature, is not more
poetry, but a scientific course in biology. How a little study in
comparative anatomy, for instance, would reveal to us the fearful and
wonderful in the make-up of all animal forms! And the fearful and
wonderful have a meaning and a beauty which we ought to realize.
We all respond to the flowers and birds, for they demand no mental
effort. What about the snakes and frogs? Do we shiver at them? Do we
more than barely endure them? No one can help feeling the comfort and
sympathy of the bluebird. The very drifts soften as he appears. He
comes some March morning in a flurry of snow, or drops down out of a
cheerless, soaking sky, and assures us that he has just left the South
and has hurried ahead at considerable hazard to tell us that spring is
on the way. Yet, here is another voice, earlier than the bluebird's
often, with the bluebird's message, and with even more than the
bluebird's authority; but who will listen to a frog? A prophet is not
without honor save in his own country. One must needs have wings and
come from a foreign land to be received among us as a prophet of the
spring. Suppose a little frog noses his way up through the stiff, cold
mud, bumps against the ice, and pipes, _Spring! spring! spring!_ Has
he not as much claim upon our faith as a bird that drops down from no
one knows where, with the same message? The bluebird comes because he
has seen the spring; Hyla comes because he has the spring in his
heart. He that receives Hyla in the name of a prophet shall receive a
prophet's reward.
[Illustration: "'Spring! spring! spring!'"]
For me there is no clearer call in all the year than that of the
hylas' in the break-up days of March. The sap begins to start in my
roots at the first peep. There is something in their brave little
summons, as there is in the silvery light on the pussy-willows, that
takes hold on my hope and courage, and makes the March mud good to
tramp through. And this despite the fact that these early hylas so
aggravated my first attack of homesickness that I thought it was to be
fatal. The second night I ever spent away from home and my mother was
passed with old Mrs. Tribbet, who had a large orchard, behind which
was a frog-pond. In vain did she stay me with raisins and comfort me
with apples. I was sick for home. And those frogs! When the guineas
got quiet, how dreadful they made the long May twilight with their
shrieking, strangling, homesick cries! After all these years I cannot
listen to them in the evenings of early spring without catching an
echo from the back of that orchard, without just a throb of that pain
so near to breaking my heart.
Close by, in a corner lot between the two cross-roads of the village,
lies a wretched little puddle, the home of countless hylas until the
June suns dry it up. Among the hundred or more people who live in the
vicinity and who pass the pond almost daily, I think that I am the
only one who, until recently, was sure he had ever seen a peeper, and
knew that they were neither tadpoles, salamanders, nor turtles. As I
was standing by the puddle, one May day, a good neighbor came along
and stopped with me. The chorus was in full blast--cricket-frogs,
Pickering's frogs, spring frogs, and, leading them all, the melancholy
quaver of Bufo, the "hop-toad."
"What is it that makes the _dreadful_ noise?" my neighbor asked,
meaning, I knew, by "dreadful noise," the song of the toad. I handed
her my opera-glass, pointed out the minstrel with the doleful bagpipe
sprawling at the surface of the water, and, after sixty years of
wondering, she saw with immense satisfaction that one part in this
familiar spring medley was taken by the common toad.
Sixty springs are a good many springs to be finding out the author of
so well-known a sound as this woeful strain of the serenading toad;
but more than half a century might be spent in catching a
cricket-frog at his song. I tried to make my neighbor see one that was
clinging to a stick in the middle of the puddle; but her eyes were
dim. Deft hands have dressed these peepers. We have heard them by the
meadowful every spring of our life, and yet the fingers of one hand
number more than the peepers we have seen. One day I bent over three
lily-pads till nearly blind, trying to make out a cricket-frog that
was piping all the while somewhere near or upon them. At last, in
despair, I made a dash at the pads, only to see the wake as the peeper
sank to the bottom an instant before my net struck the surface.
[Illustration: "A wretched little puddle."]
The entire frog family is as protectively colored as this least
member, the cricket-frog. They all carry fern-seed in their pockets
and go invisible. Notice the wood-frog with his tan suit and black
cheeks. He is a mere sound as he hops about over the brown leaves. I
have had him jump out of the way of my feet and vanish while I stared
hard at him. He lands with legs extended, purposely simulating the
shape of the ragged, broken leaves, and offers, as the only clue for
one's baffled eyes, the moist glisten as his body dissolves against
the dead brown of the leaf-carpet. The tree-toad, _Hyla versicolor_,
still more strikingly blends with his surroundings, for, to a certain
extent, he can change color to match the bark upon which he sits. More
than once, in climbing apple-trees, I have put my hand upon a
tree-toad, not distinguishing it from the patches of gray-green lichen
upon the limbs. But there is less of wonder in the tree-toad's
ability to change his colors than in the way he has of changing his
clothes. He is never troubled with the getting of a new suit; his
labor comes in caring for his old ones. It is curious how he disposes
of his cast-off clothes.
One day late in autumn I picked up a tree-toad that was stiff and
nearly dead with cold. I put him in a wide-mouthed bottle to thaw, and
found by evening that he was quite alive, sitting with his toes turned
in, looking much surprised at his new quarters. He made himself at
home, however, and settled down comfortably, ready for what might
happen next.
The following day he climbed up the side of the bottle and slept
several hours, his tiny disked toes holding him as easily and
restfully as if he were stretched upon a feather-bed. I turned him
upside down; but he knew nothing of it until later when he awoke; then
he deliberately turned round with his head up and went to sleep again.
At night he was wide awake, winking and blinking at the lamp, and
watching me through his window of green glass.
A few nights after his rescue Hyla sat upon the bottom of his bottle
in a very queer attitude. His eyes were drawn in, his head was bent
down, his feet rolled up--his whole body huddled into a ball less than
half its normal size. After a time he began to kick and gasp as if in
pain, rolling and unrolling himself desperately. I thought he was
dying. He would double up into a bunch, then kick out suddenly and
stand up on his hind legs with his mouth wide open as if trying to
swallow something. He _was_ trying to swallow something, and the thing
had stuck on the way. It was a kind of cord, and ran out of each
corner of his mouth, passing over his front legs, thinning and
disappearing most strangely along his sides.
With the next gulp I saw the cord slip down a little, and, as it did
so, the skin along his sides rolled up. It was his old suit! He was
taking it off for a new one; and, instead of giving it to the poor, he
was trying to economize by eating it. What a meal! What a way to
undress! What curious economy!
Long ago the naturalists told us that the toads ate their skins--after
shedding them; but it was never made plain to me that they ate them
_while_ changing them--indeed, _swallowed_ them off! Three great
gulps more and the suit--shirt, shoes, stockings, and all--disappeared.
Then Hyla winked, drew his clean sleeve across his mouth, and settled
back with the very air of one who has magnificently sent away the waiter
with the change.