desk; but he is not asleep: he sees every wasp and yellow-jacket that
lights upon the luring flowers. He has learned some things about the
wasp tribe; and if any of them want honey from his butterfly-weed,
they may have it. These come and go with the butterflies and
hard-backed bugs, no notice being taken. But I hear the booming of
a bluebottle-fly. _Sceloporus_ hears him, too, and gathers his legs
under him, alert. The fly has settled upon one of the flower-clusters.
He fumbles among the blossoms, and pretty soon blunders upon those
watched by the swift. Fatal blunder! There is a quick scratching on
the rail, a flash of brown across the orange flowers, and the next
thing I see is the swift, back in his place, throwing his head about
in the air, licking down the stupid bluebottle-fly.
A spider crawls over the rail behind him. He turns and snaps it up.
A fly buzzes about his head, but he will not jump with all four
feet, and so loses it. A humming-bird is fanning the butterfly-weed,
and he looks on with interest not unmixed with fear. Now the bugs,
butterflies, hornets, and wasps make up the motley crowd of visitants
to his garden, and _Sceloporus_ stretches out in the warmth again. He
is hardly asleep when a bird's shadow passes across the rails. The
sharp scratch of scales and claws is heard at half a dozen places on
the pile at once, and every swift has ducked around his rail out of
sight.
An enemy! The shadow sweeps on across the melon-field, and above in
the sky I see a turkey-buzzard wheeling. This is no enemy. Evidently
the swifts mistook the buzzard's shadow for that of the sharp-shinned
hawk. Had it been the hawk, my little bobtailed friend might have been
taking a dizzy ride through the air to some dead tree-top at that
moment, instead of peeking over his rail to see if the coast were
clear.
[Illustration: "The sparrow-hawk searching the fences for them."]
All the lesser hawks feed upon the swifts. I have often seen the
sparrow-hawk perched upon a tall stake searching the fences for them.
Cats eat them also. But they do not agree with puss. They make a cat
thin and morbid and unhappy. We can tell when the lizard-catching
disease is upon Tom by his loss of appetite, his lankness, and his
melancholy expression.
All fear of the hawk is passed, and the lizards come out into the
light again. Presently one leaves the rails, runs over my foot, and
dashes by short stages into the field. He is after a nest of ants, or
is chasing a long-legged spider. It is worth while to follow them when
they take to the fields, for they may let you into a secret, as they
once did me.
About a hundred feet into the melon-patch stands an old and very
terrible scarecrow. It is quite without terrors for the swifts,
however. Around this monster's feet the soil is bare and open to the
sun. One day I discovered a lizard making her way thither, and I
followed. She did not stop for ants or spiders, but whisked under the
vines and hastened on as if bound on some urgent business. And so she
was.
When she reached the warm, open sand at the scarecrow's feet, she dug
out a little hollow, and, to my utter amazement, deposited therein
seven tough, yellowish, pea-like eggs, covered them with sand, and
raced back to the rail-pile. That was all. Her maternal duties were
done, her cares over. She had been a faithful mother to the last
degree,--even to the covering up of her eggs,--and now she left them
to the kindly skies. About the middle of July they hatched, and, in
finding their way to the rail-pile, they stopped at the first mound on
the road, and began life in earnest upon a fiery dinner of red ants.
It looks as if nature were partial in the care she takes of her
children. How long she bothers and fusses over us, for instance, and
how, without one touch of parental care or interest, she tosses the
lizard out, even before he is hatched, to shift for himself. If,
however, we could eat red ants the day we are born and thrive on them,
I suppose that our mothers, too, without much concern, might let us
run.
The day-old babies join their elders upon the rails, and are received
with great good humor--with pleasure, indeed; for the old ones seem
to enjoy the play of the youngsters, and allow them to climb over
their backs and claw and scratch them without remonstrance. The swifts
are gentle, peaceable, and sweet-tempered. They rarely fight among
themselves. The only time that I ever found one out of humor was when
she was anxiously hunting for a place in which to leave her eggs. The
trouble of it all made her cross, and as I picked her up she tried to
bite me. And I ought to have been bitten.
Ordinarily, however, the swifts are remarkably docile and friendly.
If treated kindly, they will allow you to stroke them and handle them
freely within a few minutes after capture. I have sometimes had them
cling to my coat of their own will as I tramped about the woods. They
hiss and open their mouths when first taken; but their teeth could not
prick one's skin if they did strike.
They are clean, pretty, interesting pets to have about the house and
yard. They are easily tamed, and, in spite of their agility, they are
no trouble at all to capture. I have often caught them with my unaided
hand; but an almost sure way is to take a long culm of green grass,
strip off the plume, and make a snood of the wire-like end.
A swift is sunning himself upon a rail. He rises upon his front legs,
as you approach, to watch you. Carefully now! Don't try to get too
near. You can just reach him. Now your snood is slipping over his
nose; it tickles him; he enjoys it, and shuts his eyes. The grass
loop is about his neck; he discovers it, and--pull! for he leaps. If
the snood does not break you have him dangling in the air. Bring him
to your coat now, and touch him lightly till his fear is dispelled,
then loose him, and he will stay with you for hours.
When upon a tree you may seize him with your bare hand by coming up
from behind. But never try to catch him by the tail; for lizards'
tails were not made for that purpose, though, from their length and
convenience to grasp, and from the careless way their owners have of
leaving them sticking out, it seems as if nature intended them merely
for handles.
In my haste to catch the bobtailed lizard of the rail-pile, I
carelessly clapped my hand upon his long, scaly tail, when, by a quick
turn, he mysteriously unjointed himself from it, leaving the appendage
with me, while he scampered off along the rails. He is now growing
another tail for some future emergency.
Between eating, sleeping, and dodging shadows, the lizards spend their
day, and about the middle of the afternoon disappear. Where do they
spend their night? They go somewhere from the dew and cold; but where?
There is a space about two inches deep between the window-sash and the
net-frames in my room. Some time ago I put a number of swifts upon
the netting, covered the window-sill with sand, and thus improvised
an ideal lizard-cage. All I had to do to feed them was to raise the
window, drive the flies from the room on to the netting, and close the
sash. The lizards then caught them at their leisure.
Two days after they were transferred here, and had begun to feel
at home and fearless of me, I noticed, as night came on, that they
descended from the netting and disappeared in the sand. I put my
finger in and took one out, and found that the sand was much warmer
than the dewy night air.
This was their bed, and this explained the sleeping habits of the
free, wild ones. The sand remains warm long after the sun sets and
makes them a comfortable bed. Into the sand they go also to escape the
winter. They must get down a foot or more to be rid of the frost; and
being poor diggers, they hunt up the hole of some other creature, or
work their way among the decayed roots of some old stump until below
the danger-line. By the middle of September they have made their beds,
and when they wake up, the melons will be started and the May sunshine
warm upon the rails.
[Illustration]
IN THE OCTOBER MOON
[Illustration]
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
sketchbook 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.
Albeit, let us stay at home and sleep when there is no moon; and even
when she climbs up big and round and bright, there is no surety of a
fruitful excursion before the frosts fall. In the summer the animals
are worn with home cares and doubly wary for their young; the grass is
high, the trees dark, and the yielding green is silent under even so
clumsy a crawler as the box-turtle. But by October the hum of insects
is stilled, the meadows are mown, the trees and bushes are getting
bare, the moon pours in unhindered, and the crisp leaves crackle and
rustle under the softest-padded foot.
[Illustration]
FEATHERED NEIGHBORS
[Illustration]
FEATHERED NEIGHBORS
I
The electric cars run past my door, with a switch almost in front of
the house. I can hear a car rumbling in the woods on the west, and
another pounding through the valley on the east, till, shrieking,
groaning, crunching, crashing, they dash into view, pause a moment
on the switch, and thunder on to east and west till out of hearing.
Then, for thirty minutes, a silence settles as deep as it lay here
a century ago. Dogs bark; an anvil rings; wagons rattle by; and
children shout about the cross-roads. But these sounds have become the
natural voices of the neighborhood--mother-tongues like the chat of
the brook, the talk of the leaves, and the caw of the crows. And these
voices, instead of disturbing, seem rather to lull the stillness.
But the noise of the cars has hardly died away, and the quiet
come, when a long, wild cry breaks in upon it. _Yarup! yarup!
yarup-up-up-up-up!_ in quick succession sounds the call, followed
instantly by a rapid, rolling beat that rings through the morning hush
like a reveille with bugle and drum.
It is the cry of the "flicker," the "high-hole." He is propped against
a pole along the street railroad, nearly a quarter of a mile away.
He has a hole in this pole, almost under the iron arm that holds the
polished, pulsing wire for the trolley. It is a new house, which the
bird has been working at for more than a week, and it must be finished
now, for this lusty call is an invitation to the warming. I shall
go, and, between the passing of the cars, witness the bowing, the
squeaking, the palaver. A high-hole warming is the most utterly polite
function in birddom.
Some of my friends were talking of birds, not long ago, when one of
them turned to me and said hopelessly:
"'Tis no use. We can't save them even if we do stop wearing them upon
our hats. Civilization is bound to sweep them away. We shall be in a
birdless world pretty soon, in spite of laws and Audubon societies."
I made no reply, but, for an answer, led the way to the street
and down the track to this pole which High-hole had appropriated.
I pointed out his hole, and asked them to watch. Then I knocked.
Instantly a red head appeared at the opening. High-hole was mad enough
to eat us; but he changed his mind, and, with a bored, testy flip,
dived into the woods. He had served my purpose, however, for his red
head sticking out of a hole in a street-railway pole was as a rising
sun in the east of my friends' ornithological world. New light broke
over this question of birds and men. The cars drive High-hole away?
Not so long as cars run by overhead wires on wooden poles.
High-hole is a civilized bird. Perhaps "domesticated" would better
describe him; though domesticated implies the purposeful effort of
man to change character and habits, while the changes which have come
over High-hole--and over most of the wild birds--are the result of
High-hole's own free choosing.
If we should let the birds have their way they would voluntarily
fall into civilized, if not into domesticated, habits. They have no
deep-seated hostility toward us; they have not been the aggressors
in the long, bitter war of extermination; they have ever sued for
peace. Instead of feeling an instinctive enmity, the birds are drawn
toward us by the strongest of interests. If nature anywhere shows
us her friendship, and her determination, against all odds, to make
that friendship strong, she shows it through the birds. The way they
forgive and forget, their endless efforts at reconciliation, and
their sense of obligation, ought to shame us. They sing over every
acre that we reclaim, as if we had saved it for them only; and in
return they probe the lawns most diligently for worms, they girdle the
apple-trees for grubs, and gallop over the whole wide sky for gnats
and flies--squaring their account, if may be, for cherries, orchards,
and chimneys.
[Illustration: "They probe the lawns most diligently for worms."]
The very crows, in spite of certain well-founded fears, look upon a
new farm--not upon the farmer, perhaps--as a godsend. In the cold and
poverty of winter, not only the crows, but the jays, quails, buntings,
and sparrows, help themselves, as by right, from our shocks and cribs.
Summer and winter the birds find food so much more plentiful about
the farm and village, find living in all respects so much easier and
happier here than in remote, wild regions, that, as a whole, they
have become a suburban people.
But life is more than meat for the birds. There is a subtle yet real
attraction for them in human society. They like its stir and change,
its attention and admiration. The shyest and most modest of the
birds pines for appreciation. The cardinal grosbeak, retiring as he
is, cannot believe that he was born to blush unseen--to the tip of
his beautiful crest. And the hermit-thrush, meditative, spiritual,
and free as the heart of the swamp from worldliness--even he loves
a listener, and would not waste his sweetness any longer on desert
forest air. I do not know a single bird who does not prefer a wood
with a wagon-road through it.