the swamp-gums (_Nyssa uniflora_) of the Jersey bottoms. But if we
value trees according to their capacity for cavities,--the naturalist
has a right to such a scale of valuation,--then these gums rank first.
The deliberate purpose of a swamp-gum, through its hundred years of
life, is to grow as big as possible, that it may hollow out
accordingly. They are the natural home-makers of the swamps that
border the rivers and creeks in southern New Jersey. What would the
coons, the turkey-buzzards, and the owls do without them? The wild
bees believe the gums are especially built for them. No white-painted
hive, with its disappearing squares, offers half as much safety to
these free-booters of the summer seas as the gums, open-hearted,
thick-walled, and impregnable.
When these trees alone make up the swamp, there is a roomy, empty,
echo-y effect among the great gray boles, with their high, horizontal
limbs spanned like rafters above, produced by no other trees I know.
It is worth a trip across the continent to listen, under a clear
autumn moon, to the cry of a coon-dog far away in the empty halls of
such a swamp. To get the true effect of a barred owl's hooting, one
wants to find the home of a pair in an ancient gum-swamp. I know such
a home, along Cohansey Creek, where, the neighboring farmer tells me,
he has heard the owls hoot in spring and autumn since he remembers
hearing anything.
I cannot reach around the butt of the tree that holds the nest.
Tapering just a trifle and a little on the lean, it runs up smooth and
round for twenty feet, where a big bulge occurs, just above which is
the capacious opening to the owls' cave. There was design in the
bulge, or foresight in the owls' choice; for that excrescence is the
hardest thing to get beyond I ever climbed up to. But it must be
mounted, or the queerest pair of little dragons ever hatched will go
unseen.
The owls themselves first guided me to the spot. I was picking my way
through this piece of woods, one April day, when a shadowy something
swung from one high limb to another overhead, following me. It was the
female owl. Every time she lighted she turned and fixed her big black
eyes hard on me, silent, somber, and watchful. As I pushed deeper
among the gums, she began to snap her beak and drop closer. Her
excitement grew every moment. I looked about for the likely tree. The
instant I spied the hole above the bulge, the owl caught the direction
of my eyes, and made a swoop at me that I thought meant total
blindness.
I began to climb. With this the bird lapsed into the quiet of despair,
perched almost in reach of me, and began to hoot mournfully: _Woo-hoo,
woo-hoo, woo-hoo, oo-oo-a!_ And faint and far away came back a timid
_Woo-hoo, woo-a!_ from her mate, safely hid across the creek.
The weird, uncanny cry rolled round under the roof of limbs, and
seemed to wake a ghost-owl in every hollow bole, echoing and reëchoing
as it called from tree to tree, to die away down the dim, deep vistas
of the swamp. The silent wings, the snapping beaks, the eery hoots in
the soft gloom of the great trees, needed the help of but little
imagination to carry one back to the threshold of an unhacked world,
and embolden its nymphs and satyrs, that these centuries of science
have hunted into hiding.
[Illustration: "She turned and fixed her big black eyes hard on me."]
I wiggled above the bulge at the risk of life, and was greeted at the
mouth of the cavern with hisses and beak-snappings from within. It
was a raw spring day; snow still lingered in shady spots. But here,
backed against the farther wall of the cavity, were two young owls,
scarcely a week old, wrapped up like little Eskimos--tiny bundles of
down that the whitest-toothed frost could never bite through.
[Illustration: "Wrapped up like little Eskimos."]
Very green babies of all kinds are queer, uncertain, indescribable
creations--faith generators. But the greenest, homeliest, unlikeliest,
babiest babes I ever encountered were these two in the hole. I wish
Walt Whitman had seen them. He would have written a poem. They defy my
powers of portrayal, for they challenge the whole mob of my normal
instincts.
But quite as astonishing as the appearance of the young owls was the
presence beneath their feet of the head of a half-grown muskrat, the
hind quarters of two frogs, one large meadow-vole, and parts of four
mice, with many other pieces too small to identify. These all were
fresh--the _crumbs_ of one night's dinner, the leavings of _one_
night's catch. If these were the fragments only, what would be a
conservative estimate of the night's entire catch?
Gilbert White tells of a pair of owls that built under the eaves of
Selborne Church, that he "minuted" with his "watch for an hour
together," and found that they returned to the nest, the one or the
other, "about once in every five minutes" with a mouse or some little
beast for the young. Twelve mice an hour! Suppose they hunted only two
evening hours a day? The record at the summer's end is almost beyond
belief.
Not counting what the two old owls ate, and leaving out of the count
the two frogs, it is within limits to reckon not less than six small
animals brought to the hollow gum every night of the three weeks that
these young owls were dependent for food--a riddance in this short
time of not less than one hundred and twenty-five muskrats, mice, and
voles. What four boys in the same time could clear the meadows of half
that number? And these animals are all harmful, the muskrats
exceedingly so, where the meadows are made by dikes and embankments.
Not a tree in South Jersey that spring bore a more profitable crop.
When fruit-growing in Jersey is done for pleasure, the altruistic
farmer with a love for natural history will find large reward in his
orchards of gums, that now are only swamps.
Just as useful as the crop of owls, and beyond all calculation in its
sweetening effects upon our village life, is the annual yield of
swallows by the piles in the river. Years ago a high spring tide
carried away the south wing of the old bridge, but left the piles,
green and grown over with moss, standing with their heads just above
flood-tide mark. In the tops of the piles are holes, bored to pass
lines through, or left by rusted bolts, and eaten wide by waves and
wind. Besides these there are a few genuine excavations made by
erratic woodpeckers. This whole clump of water-logged piles has been
colonized by blue-backed tree-swallows, every crack and cranny wide
enough and deep enough to hold a nest being appropriated for domestic
uses by a pair of the dainty people. It is no longer a sorry forest of
battered, sunken stumps; it is a swallow-Venice. And no gayer
gondoliers ever glided over wave-paved streets than these swallows on
the river. When the days are longest the village does its whittling on
the new bridge in the midst of this twittering bird life, watching the
swallows in the sunset skim and flash among the rotting timbers over
the golden-flowing tide.
[Illustration: "It is no longer a sorry forest of battered, sunken
stumps."]
If I turn from the river toward the woods again, I find that the
fences all the way are green with vines and a-hum with bumblebees.
Even the finger-board at the cross-roads is a living pillar of ivy.
All is life. There are no dead, no graveyards anywhere. A nature-made
cemetery does not exist in my locality. Yonder, where the forest-fire
came down and drank of the river, is a stretch of charred stumps; but
every one is alive with some sort of a tenant. Not one of these stumps
is a tombstone. We have graves and slabs and names in our
burial-place, and nothing more. But there is not so much as a slab in
the fields and woods. When the telegraph-poles and the piles are cut,
the stumps are immediately prepared for new life, and soon begin
blossoming into successive beds of mosses and mushrooms, while the
birds are directed to follow the bare poles and make them live again.
A double line of these pole-specters stretches along the road in front
of my door, holding hands around the world. I have grown accustomed to
the hum of the wires, and no longer notice the sound. But one May
morning recently there was a new note in the pole just outside the
yard. I laid my ear to the wood. _Pick--pick--pick_; then all was
still. Again, after a moment's pause, I heard _pick--pick--pick_ on
the inside. At my feet was a scattering of tiny yellow chips. Backing
off a little, I discovered the hole, about the size of my fist, away
up near the cross-bars. It was not the first time I had found
High-hole laying claim to the property of the telegraph companies. I
stole back and thumped. Instantly a dangerous bill and a flashing eye
appeared, and High-hole, with his miner's lamp burning red in the top
of his cap lunged off across the fields in some ill humor, no doubt.
[Illustration: "Even the finger-board is a living pillar of ivy."]
Throughout the summer there was telegraphing with and without wires on
that dry, resonant pole. And meantime, if there was anything
unintelligible in the ciphers at Glasgow or Washington, it was
high-hole talk. For there was reared inside that pole as large, as
noisy, and as red-headed a family of flickers as ever hatched. What a
brood they were! They must have snarled the wires and Babelized their
talk terribly.
While this robust and uncultured family of flickers were growing up,
only three doors away (counting by poles) a modest and soft-voiced
pair of bluebirds, with a decently numbered family of four, were
living in a hole so near the ground that I could look in upon the meek
but brave little mother.
There is still another dead-tree crop that the average bird-lover and
summer naturalist rarely gathers--I mean the white-footed mice. They
are the jolliest little beasts in all the tree hollows. It is when the
woods are bare and deep with snow, when the cold, dead winter makes
outside living impossible, that one really appreciates the coziness
and protection of the life in these deep rooms, sunk like wells into
the hearts of the trees. With what unconcern the mice await nightfall
and the coming of the storms! They can know nothing of the anxiety and
dread of the crows; they can share little of the crows' suffering in
the bitter nights of winter. A warm, safe bed is a large item in
out-of-doors living when it is cold; and I have seen where these mice
tuck themselves away from the dark and storm in beds so snug and warm
that I wished to be an elf myself, with white feet and a long tail,
to creep in with them.
I had some wood-choppers near the house on the lookout for mice, but,
though they often marked the stumps where they had cut into nests, the
winter nearly passed before I secured a single white-foot. Coming up
from the pond one day with a clerical friend, after a vain attempt to
skate, we lost our way in the knee-deep snow, and while floundering
about happened upon a large dead pine that was new to me. It was as
stark, as naked, and as dead a tree, apparently, as ever went to dust.
The limbs were broken off a foot or more from the trunk, and stuck out
like stumps of arms; the top had been drilled through and through by
woodpeckers, and now lay several feet away, buried in the snow; and
the hole, like the limbs, was without a shred of bark, but covered
instead with a thin coating of slime. This slime was marked with fine
scratches, as would be made by the nails of very small animals. I
almost rudely interrupted my learned friend's discussion of the
documentary hypothesis with the irreverent exclamation that there were
mice in the old corpse. The Hebrew scholar stared at the tree. Then
he stared at me. Had I gone daft so suddenly? But I was dropping off
my overcoat and ordering him away to borrow the ax of a man we heard
chopping. He looked utterly undone, but thought it best to humor me,
though I know he dreaded putting an ax in my hands just then, and
would infinitely rather have substituted his skates. I insisted,
however, and he disappeared for the ax.
The snow was deep, the pine was punky and would easily fall; and now
was the chance to get my mice. They were in there, I knew, for those
fine, fresh scratches told of scramblers gone up to the woodpecker
holes since the last storm.
The preacher appeared with the ax. Off came his coat. He was as eager
now as though this tottering pine were an altar of Baal. He was
anxious, also, to know if I had an extra sense--a kind of X-ray organ
that saw mice at the centers of trees. And, priest though he was
(shame on the human animal!), he had grown excited at the prospect of
the chase of--mice!
I tramped away the snow about the tree. The ax was swinging swiftly
through the air; the preacher was repeating between strokes:
"_I'm--truly--sorry--man's--dominion--has--_" when suddenly there was
a crunch, a crash, and the axman leaped aside with the yell of a
fiend; for, as the tree struck, three tiny, brown-backed, white-footed
creatures were dashed into the soft snow. "The prettiest thing I ever
saw," he declared enthusiastically, as I put into his hand the only
mouse captured.
We traced the chambers up and down the tree as they wound,
stairway-like, just inside the hard outer shell. Here and there we
came upon garners of acorns and bunches of bird feathers and shredded
bark--a complete fortress against the siege of winter.
That pine had not borne a green needle for a decade. It was too long
dead and too much decayed to have even a fat knot left. Yet there was
not a livelier, more interesting tree in the region that winter, nor
one half so full of goings on, as this same old shell of a pine, with
scarcely heart enough to stand.
[Illustration: moon]
IN THE OCTOBER MOON
An October night, calm, crisp, and moonlit! There is a delicate aroma
from the falling leaves in the air, as sweet as the scent of
fresh-filled haymows. The woods are silent, shadowy, and sleepful,
lighted dimly by the moon, as a vague, happy dream lights the dark
valley of our sleep. Dreamful is this night world, but yet not
dreaming. When, in the highest noon, did every leaf, every breeze,
seem so much a self, so full of ready life? The very twigs that lie
brittle and dead beneath our feet seem wakeful now and on the alert.
In this silence we feel myriad movings everywhere; and we know that
this sleep is but the sleep of the bivouac fires, that an army is
breaking camp to move under cover of the night. Every wild thing that
knows the dark will be stirring to-night. And what softest foot can
fall without waking the woods?
Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;
They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread.
Not a mouse can scurry, not a chestnut drop, not a wind whisper among
these new-fallen leaves without discovery; even a weasel cannot dart
across the moon-washed path and not leave a streak of brown upon the
silver, plain enough to follow.
A morning in May is best of all the year to be afield with the birds;
but to watch for the wild four-footed things, a moonlight night in
October is the choice of the seasons. May-time is bird-time. That is
their spring of mate-winning and nest-building, and it bubbles over
with life and song. The birds are ardent lovers; they sometimes fight
in their wooing: but fighting or singing, they are frank, happy
creatures, and always willing to see you. The mammals are just as
ardent lovers as the birds, and infinitely more serious. But they are
not poets; they are not in the show business; and they want no
outsider to come and listen to their pretty story of woe. Their
spring, their courting-time, is not a time of song and play. The
love-affairs of a timid, soulful-eyed rabbit are so charged and
intense as not always to be free from tragedy. Don't expect any
attention in the spring, even from that bunch of consuming curiosity,
the red squirrel; he has something in hand, for once, more to his mind
than quizzing you. Life with the animals then, and through the summer,
has too much of love and fight and fury, is too terribly earnest, to
admit of any frolic.
But autumn brings release from most of these struggles. There is
surcease of love; there is abundance of food; and now the only
passions of the furry breasts are such gentle desires as abide with
the curious and the lovers of peace and plenty. The animals are now
engrossed with the task of growing fat and furry. Troubled with no
higher ambitions, curiosity, sociability, and a thirst for adventure
begin to work within them these long autumn nights, and not one of
them, however wild and fearful, can resist his bent to prowl in the
light of the October moon.
To know much of the wild animals at home one must live near their
haunts, with eyes and ears open, forever on the watch. For you must
wait their pleasure. You cannot entreat them for the sake of science,
nor force them in the name of the law. You cannot set up your easel in
the meadow, and hire a mink or muskrat to pose for you any time you
wish; neither can you call, when you like, at the hollow gum in the
swamp and interview a coon. The animals flatly refuse to sit for their
pictures, and to see reporters and assessors. But carry your
sketch-book and pad with you, and, after a while, in the most unlikely
times and places, the wariest will give you sittings for a finished
picture, and the most reticent will tell you nearly all that he knows.
At no time of the year are the animals so loquacious, so easy of
approach, as along in the October nights. There is little to be seen
of them by day. They are cautious folk. By nature most of them are
nocturnal; and when this habit is not inherited, fear has led to its
acquisition. But protected by the dark, the shy and suspicious creep
out of their hiding-places; they travel along the foot-paths, they
play in the wagon-roads, they feed in our gardens, and I have known
them to help themselves from our chicken-coops. If one has never
haunted the fields and woods at night he little knows their multitude
of wild life. Many a hollow stump and uninteresting hole in the
ground--tombs by day--give up their dead at night, and something more
than ghostly shades come forth.
If one's pulse quickens at the sight and sound of wild things
stirring, and he has never seen, in the deepening dusk, a long,
sniffling snout poked slowly out of a hollow chestnut, the glint of
black, beady eyes, the twitch of papery ears, then a heavy-bodied
possum issue from the hole, clasping the edge with its tail, to gaze
calmly about before lumbering off among the shadows--then he still has
something to go into the woods for.
Our forests by daylight are rapidly being thinned into picnic groves;
the bears and panthers have disappeared, and by day there is nothing
to fear, nothing to give our imaginations exercise. But the night
remains, and if we hunger for adventure, why, besides the night, here
is the skunk; and the two offer a pretty sure chance for excitement.
Never to have stood face to face in a narrow path at night with a
full-grown, leisurely skunk is to have missed excitement and suspense
second only to the staring out of countenance of a green-eyed wildcat.
It is surely worth while, in these days of parks and chipmunks, when
all stir and adventure has fled the woods, to sally out at night for
the mere sake of meeting a skunk, for the shock of standing before a
beast that will not give you the path. As you back away from him you
feel as if you were really escaping. If there is any genuine adventure
left for us in this age of suburbs, we must be helped to it by the
dark.
Who ever had a good look at a muskrat in the glare of day? I was
drifting noiselessly down the river, recently, when one started to
cross just ahead of my boat. He got near midstream, recognized me, and
went under like a flash. Even a glimpse like this cannot be had every
summer; but in the autumn nights you cannot hide about their houses
and fail to see them. In October they are building their winter
lodges, and the clumsiest watcher may spy them glistening in the
moonlight as they climb with loads of sedge and mud to the roofs of
their sugar-loaf houses. They are readily seen, too, making short
excursions into the meadows; and occasionally the desire to rove and
see the world will take such hold upon one as to drive him a mile from
water, and he will slink along in the shadow of the fences and explore
your dooryard and premises. Frequently, in the late winter, I have
followed their tracks on these night journeys through the snow between
ponds more than a mile apart.
[Illustration: "In October they are building their winter lodges."]
But there is larger game abroad than muskrats and possums. These
October nights the quail are in covey, the mice are alive in the dry
grass, and the foxes are abroad. Lying along the favorite run of
Reynard, you _may_ see him. There are many sections of the country
where the rocks and mountains and wide areas of sterile pine-land
still afford the foxes safe homes; but in most localities Reynard is
rapidly becoming a name, a creature of fables and folk-lore only. The
rare sight of his clean, sharp track in the dust, or in the mud along
the margin of the pond, adds flavor to a whole day's tramping; and the
glimpse of one in the moonlight, trotting along a cow-path or lying
low for Br'er Rabbit, is worth many nights of watching.
I wish the game-laws could be amended to cover every wild animal left
to us. In spite of laws they are destined to disappear; but if the
fox, weasel, mink, and skunk, the hawks and owls, were protected as
the quail and deer are, they might be preserved a long time to our
meadows and woods. How irreparable the loss to our landscape is the
extinction of the great golden eagle! How much less of spirit, daring,
courage, and life come to us since we no longer mark the majestic
creature soaring among the clouds, the monarch of the skies! A dreary
world it will be out of doors when we can hear no more the scream of
the hawks, can no longer find the tracks of the coon, nor follow a fox
to den. We can well afford to part with a turnip, a chicken, and even
with a suit of clothes, now and then, for the sake of this wild flavor
to our fenced pastures and close-cut meadows.
I ought to have named the crow in the list deserving protection. He
steals. So did Falstaff. But I should miss Falstaff had Shakspere left
him out; yet no more than I should miss the crow were he driven from
the pines. They are both very human. Jim Crow is the humanest bird in
feathers. The skunk I did include in the list. It was not by mistake.
The skunk has a good and safe side to him, when we know how to
approach him. The skunk wants a champion. Some one ought to spend an
entire October moon with him and give us the better side of his
character. If some one would take the trouble to get well acquainted
with him at home, it might transpire that we have grievously abused
and avoided him.
[Illustration: "The glimpse of Reynard in the moonlight."]
There is promise of a future for the birds in their friendship for us
and in our interest and sentiment for them. Everybody is interested in
birds; everybody loves them. There are bird-books and bird-books and
bird-books--new volumes in every publisher's spring announcements.
Every one with wood ways knows the songs and nests of the more common
species. But this is not so with the four-footed animals. They are
fewer, shyer, more difficult of study. Only a few of us are
enthusiastic enough to back into a hole in a sand-bank and watch all
night for the "beasts" with dear old Tam Edwards.
But such nights of watching, when every fallen leaf is a sentinel and
every moonbeam a spy, will let us into some secrets about the ponds
and fields that the sun, old and all-seeing as he is, will never know.
Our eyes were made for daylight; but I think if the anatomists tried
they might find the rudiments of a third, a night eye, behind the
other two. From my boyhood I certainly have seen more things at night
than the brightest day ever knew of. If our eyes were intended for day
use, our other senses seem to work best by night. Do we not take the
deepest impressions when the plates of these sharpened senses are
exposed in the dark? Even in moonlight our eyes are blundering things;
but our hearing, smell, and touch are so quickened by the alertness of
night that, with a little training, the imagination quite takes the
place of sight--a new sense, swift and vivid, that adds an excitement
and freshness to the pleasure of out-of-door study, impossible to get
through our two straightforward, honest day eyes.