yielding to human influences. We can almost say that we have an order
of farm-birds, so many species seem to have become entirely dependent
upon the pasture and grain-field.
"Where did Bobolink disport himself before there were meadows in
the North and rice-fields in the South? Was he the same lithe,
merry-hearted beau then as now?" I do not know. But I do know that,
in the thirty and three years since Mr. Burroughs asked the question,
Bobolink has lost none of his nimbleness, nor forgotten one bubbling,
tinkling note of his song. Yet in his autumn journey South, from the
day he reaches the ripe reeds of the Jersey marshes till he is lost in
the wide rice-lands of Georgia, his passage is through a ceaseless,
pitiless storm of lead. Dare he return to us in spring? and can he
ever sing again? He will come if May comes--forgetting and forgiving,
dressed in as gay a suit as ever, and just as full of song.
There is no marvel of nature's making equal to the miracle of her
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.
[Illustration: "But the pair kept on together, chatting brightly."]
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.
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 flower-garden. 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!
"MUS'RATTIN'"
[Illustration: "Uncle Jethro limbered his stiffened knees and went
chuckling down the bank."]
"MUS'RATTIN'"
One November afternoon I found Uncle Jethro back of the woodshed,
drawing a chalk-mark along the barrel of his old musket, from the
hammer to the sight.
"What are you doing that for, Uncle Jeth?" I asked.
"What fo'? Fo' mus'rats, boy."
"Muskrats! Do you think they'll walk up and toe that mark, while you
knock 'em over with a stick?"
"G'way fum yhere! What I take yo' possumin' des dozen winters fo', en
yo' dunno how to sight a gun in de moon yit? I's gwine mus'rattin' by
de moon to-night, en I won't take yo' nohow."
Of course he took me. We went out about nine o'clock, and entering
the zigzag lane behind the barn, followed the cow-paths down to the
pasture, then cut across the fields to Lupton's Pond, the little
wood-walled lake which falls over a dam into the wide meadows along
Cohansey Creek.
It is a wild, secluded spot, so removed that a pair of black ducks
built their nest for several springs in the deep moss about the upper
shore.
It is shallow and deeply crusted over with lily-pads and
pickerel-weed, except for a small area about the dam, where the water
is deep and clear. There are many stumps in the upper end; and here,
in the shallows, built upon the hummocks or anchored to the submerged
roots, are the muskrats' houses.
The big moon was rising over the meadows as we tucked ourselves snugly
out of sight in a clump of small cedars on the bank, within easy range
of the dam and commanding a view of the whole pond. The domed houses
of the muskrats--the village numbered six homes--showed plainly as
the moon came up; and when the full flood of light fell on the still
surface of the pond, we could see the "roads" of the muskrats, like
narrow channels, leading down through the pads to the open space about
the dam.
[Illustration: "The big moon was rising over the meadows."]
A muskrat's domestic life is erratic. Sometimes there will be a large
village in the pond, and, again, an autumn will pass without a single
new house being built. It may be that some of the old houses will
be fitted up anew and occupied; but I have known years when there
was not a house in the pond. At no time do all of the muskrats build
winter houses. The walls of the meadow ditches just under the dam are
honeycombed with subterranean passages, in which many of the muskrats
live the year round. Neither food nor weather, so far as I have found,
influence them at all in the choice of their winter quarters. In low,
wet meadows where there are no ditches, the muskrats, of course, live
altogether in mud and reed houses above ground, for the water would
flood the ordinary burrow. These structures are placed on the tussocks
along a water-hole, so that the dwellers can dive out and escape under
water when danger approaches. But here in the tide-meadows, where
the ditches are deep, the muskrats rear their families almost wholly
in underground rooms. It is only when winter comes, and family ties
dissolve, that a few of the more sociable or more adventurous club
together, come up to the pond, and while away the cold weather in
these haystack lodges.
[Illustration: Section of muskrat's house.]
These houses are very simple, but entirely adequate. If you will lift
the top off an ordinary meadow lodge you will find a single room, with
a bed in the middle, and at least one entrance and one exit which are
always closed to outsiders by water.
The meadow lodge is built thus: The muskrat first chooses a large
tussock of sedge that stands well out of the water for his bedstead.
Now, from a foundation below the water, thick walls of mud and grass
are erected inclosing the tussock; a thatch of excessive thickness
is piled on; the channels leading away from the doors are dug out if
necessary; a bunch of soaking grass is brought in and made into a bed
on the tussock--and the muskrat takes possession.
The pond lodges at the head of Lupton's are made after this fashion,
only they are much larger, and instead of being raised about a
tussock of sedge, they are built upon, and inclose, a part of a log
or stump.
This lodge life is surely a cozy, jolly way of passing the winter. The
possums are inclined to club together whenever they can find stumps
that are roomy enough; but the muskrats habitually live together
through the winter. Here, in the single room of their house, one after
another will come, until the walls can hold no more; and, curling
up after their night of foraging, they will spend the frigid days
blissfully rolled into one warm ball of dreamful sleep. Let it blow
and snow and freeze outside; there are six inches of mud-and-reed wall
around them, and, wrapped deep in rich, warm fur, they hear nothing of
the blizzard and care nothing for the cold.
Nor are they prisoners of the cold here. The snow has drifted over
their house till only a tiny mound appears; the ice has sealed the
pond and locked their home against the storm and desolation without:
but the main roadway from the house is below the drifting snow, and
they know where, among the stumps and button-bushes, the warm-nosed
watchers have kept breathing-holes open. The ice-maker never finds
their inner stair; its secret door opens into deep, under-water paths,
which run all over the bottom of the unfrozen pond-world.
[Illustration: "The snow has drifted over their house till only a tiny
mound appears."]
Unless roused by the sharp thrust of a spear, the muskrats will sleep
till nightfall. You may skate around the lodge and even sit down upon
it without waking the sleepers; but plunge your polo-stick through
the top, and you will hear a smothered _plunk, plunk, plunk_, as one
after another dives out of bed into the water below.
The moon climbed higher up the sky and the minutes ran on to ten
o'clock. We waited. The night was calm and still, and the keen, alert
air brought every movement of the wild life about us to our ears.
The soft, cottony footfalls of a rabbit, hopping leisurely down the
moonlit path, seemed not unlike the echoing steps on silent, sleeping
streets, as some traveler passes beneath your window; a wedge of wild
geese _honked_ far over our heads, holding their mysterious way to the
South; white-footed mice scurried among the dried leaves; and our ears
were so sharpened by the frosty air that we caught their thin, wiry
squeaks.
Presently there was a faint plash among the muskrat houses. The
village was waking up. Uncle Jethro poked the long nose of his gun
cautiously through the bushes, and watched. Soon there was a wake
in one of the silvery roads, then a parting of waves, and stemming
silently and evenly toward us, we saw the round, black head of a
muskrat.
It was a pretty sight and a pretty shot; but I would not have had
the stillness and the moonlit picture spoiled by the blare of that
murderous musket for the pelts of fifty muskrats, and as the gun was
coming to Uncle Jethro's shoulder, I slipped my hand under the lifted
hammer.
With just an audible grunt of impatience the old negro understood,--it
was not the first good shot that my love of wild things had spoiled
for him,--and the unsuspecting muskrat swam on to the dam.
[Illustration: "They rubbed noses."]
A plank had drifted against the bank, and upon this the little
creature scrambled out, as dry as the cat at home under the roaring
kitchen stove. Down another road came a second muskrat, and, swimming
across the open water at the dam, joined the first-comer on the
plank. They rubbed noses softly--the sweetest of all wild-animal
greetings--and a moment afterward began to play together.
[Illustration: "Two little brown creatures washing calamus."]
They were out for a frolic, and the night was splendid. Keeping one
eye open for owls, they threw off all other caution, and swam and
dived and chased each other through the water, with all the fun of
boys in swimming.
On the bottom of the pond about the dam, in ten or twelve feet of
water, was a bed of unios. I knew that they were there, for I had cut
my feet upon them; and the muskrats knew they were there, for they
had had many a moonlight lunch of them. These mussels the muskrats
reckon sweetmeats. They are hard to get, hard to crack, but worth all
the cost. I was not surprised, then, when one of the muskrats sleekly
disappeared beneath the surface, and came up directly with a mussel.