other interests, we need it most. By this time there are few of the
birds and flowers left, though the woods are far from destitute of
sound and color. The chickadees were never friendlier; and when, since
last autumn, have so many flocks of goldfinches glittered along our
paths? Some of the late asters and goldenrods are still in bloom, and
here and there a lagging joepye-weed, a hoary head of boneset, and a
brilliant tuft of ironweed show above the stretches of brown.
October is not the month of flowers, even if it does claim the
witch-hazel for its own. It is the month of mushrooms. There is
something unnatural and uncanny about the witch-hazel, blossoming
with sear leaf and limbs half bare. I never come upon it without a
start. The sedges are dead, the maples leafless, the robins gone, the
muskrats starting their winter lodges; and here, in the yellow
autumn sun, straggles this witch-hazel, naked like the willows and
alders, but spangled thick with yellow blossoms! Blossoms, indeed, but
not flowers. Hydras they look like, from the dying lily-pads, crawling
over the bush to yellow and die with the rest of the dying world.
[Illustration: Witch-hazel.]
No natural, well-ordered plant ought to be in flower when its leaves
are falling; but if stumps and dead trees are to blossom, of course
leaf-falling time would seem a proper enough season. And what can we
call it but blossoming, when an old oak-stump, dead and rotten these
ten years, wakes up after a soaking rain, some October morning, a very
mound of delicate, glistening, brick-red mushrooms? It is as great a
wonder and quite as beautiful a mystery as the bursting into flower
of the marsh-marigolds in May. But no deeper mystery, for--"dead,"
did I call these stumps? Rotten they may be, but not dead. There is
nothing dead out of doors. There is change and decay in all things;
but if birds and bugs, if mosses and mushrooms, can give life, then
the deadest tree in the woods is the very fullest of life.
SECOND CROPS
[Illustration]
SECOND CROPS
I
Take it the year round, the deadest trees in the woods are the livest
and fullest of fruit--for the naturalist. Dr. Holmes had a passion
for big trees; the camera-carriers hunt up historic trees; boys with
deep pockets take to fruit-trees: but dead trees, since I developed a
curiosity for dark holes, have yielded me the most and largest crops.
An ardor for decayed trees is not from any perversity of nature. There
is nothing unreasonable in it, as in--bibliomania, for instance. I
discover a gaunt, punky old pine, bored full of holes, and standing
among acres of green, characterless companions, with the held breath,
the jumping pulse, the bulging eyes of a collector stumbling upon a
Caxton in a latest-publication book-store. But my excitement is really
with some cause; for--sh! look! In that round hole up there, just
under the broken limb, the flame of the red-headed woodpecker--a light
in one of the windows of the woods. Peep through it. What rooms! What
people! No; I never paid ten cents extra for a volume because it was
full of years and mildew and rare errata (I sometimes buy books at a
reduction for these accidents); but I have walked miles, and passed
forests of green, good-looking trees, to wait in the slim shade of
some tottering, limbless old stump.
Within the reach of my landscape four of these ancient derelicts
hold their stark arms against the horizon, while every wood-path,
pasture-lane, and meadow-road leads past hollow apples, gums, or
chestnuts, where there are sure to be happenings as the seasons come
and go. Sooner or later, every dead tree in the neighborhood finds a
place in my note-book. They are all named and mentioned, some over and
over,--my list of Immortals,--all very dead or very hollow, ranging
from a big sweet-gum in the swamp along the creek to an old pump-tree,
stuck for a post within fifty feet of my window. The gum is the
hollowest, the pump the deadest, tree of the lot.
The nozle-hole of the one-time pump stares hard at my study window
like the empty socket of a Cyclops. There is a small bird-house nailed
just above the window, which gazes back with its single eye at the
staring pump. For some time one April the sputtering sparrows held
this box above the window against the attacks of two tree-swallows.
The sparrows had been on the ground all winter, and had staked their
claim with a nest that had already outgrown the house when the
swallows arrived. In love of fair play, and remembering more than
one winter day made alive and cheerful by the sparrows, I could not
interfere and oust them, though it grieved me to lose the pretty pair
of swallows as summer neighbors.
The swallows disappeared. All was quiet for a few days, when, one
morning, I saw the flutter of steel-blue wings at the hole in the
pump, and there, propped hard with his tail over the hole, hung my
tree-swallow. I should have that pair as tenants yet, and in a house
where I could see everything they did. He peered quickly around, then
peeped cautiously into the opening, and slipped out of sight through
the dark, round hole.
[Illustration: "I knew it suited exactly."]
I knew it suited exactly by the glad, excited way he came out and
darted off. He soon returned with the little shining wife; and through
a whole week there was a constant passing of blue backs and white
breasts as the joyous pair fitted up the inside of that pump with
grass and feathers fit for the cradle of a fairy queen.
By the rarest fortune I was on hand when one of the sparrows
discovered what had happened in the pump. There is not a single
microbe of Anglophobia in my system. But need one's love for things
English include this pestiferous sparrow? Anyhow, I feel just a mite
of satisfaction when I recall how that sparrow, with the colonizing
instinct of his race, dropping down upon the pump with the notion
that he "had a duty to the world," dropped off that pump straightway,
concluding that his "duty" did not relate to that particular pump any
longer. The sparrows had built everywhere about the place, but that
that pump--a post, and a post to a pair of bars at that--was worth
settling had not dawned on them. When they saw that the swallows had
taken it, one of them lighted there instantly, with tail up, head
cocked, very much amazed, and commenting vociferously. He looked
into the hole from every possible point, and was about to enter, when
there came a whizz of wings, a flash of blue, and a slap that sent him
spinning. When the indignant swallow swooped back, like a boomerang,
the sparrow had scuttled off to an apple-tree.
[Illustration: "With tail up, head cocked, very much amazed, and
commenting vociferously."]
That was a _coup de grâce_. Peace reigned after that; and along in
July the five white eggs had found wings and were skimming about the
fly-filled air or counting and preening themselves demurely in a
solemn row upon the wire fence.
Between two pastures, easily seen from the same study window, stands a
wild apple-tree, pathetically diseased and rheumatic, which like one
of Mr. Burroughs's trees, never bore very good crops of apples, but
four seasons a year is marvelously full of animals. It is chiefly
noted for a strange collection I once took out of its maw-like cavity.
It was a keen January morning, and I stopped at the tree, as usual,
and thumped. No lodgers there that day, it seemed. I mounted the rail
fence and looked in. Darkness. No; there at the bottom was a patch of
gray, and--I pulled out a snapping, blinking screech-owl. Down went
my hand again, and a second owl came blinking to the light--this one
in rich brown plumage. When I turned him up, his clenched claws held
fistfuls of possum hair. Once more I pushed my hand down the hole,
gingerly, and up to the shoulder. No mistake. Mr. Possum was in there,
and after a little manoeuvering I seized him by the collar, and out
he came grinning, hissing, and winking at the hard, white winter day.
And how exactly like a possum! "There is a time for all things," comes
near an incarnation in him. There is a time for eating owls--at night,
of course, if owls can then be had. But day is the time to sleep; and
if owls want to share his bed and roost upon him, all right. He
_will_ sleep on till nightfall, in spite of owls. And he would sleep
on here till dusk, in spite of my rude awakening, if I gave him leave.
I dropped him back to the bottom of the hole, then put the two owls
back upon him, and went my way, knowing I should find the three still
sleeping on my return. And it was so. The owls were just as surprised
and just as sleepy when I disturbed them the second time that day. I
left them to finish their nap. But the possum was served for dinner
the following evening--for this, too, is strictly in accord with his
time-for-all-things philosophy.
This pair of owls were most persistent in their attachment to the
apple-tree. Several times in the course of the winter I found them
sleeping soundly in this same deep cavity, making their winter
lodgings in the bent, tumble-down shanty which, standing not far from
the woods and between the uplands and meadows, has been home, hotel,
post-office, city of refuge, and lookout for many of the wild folk
about the fields.
[Illustration: "In a solemn row upon the wire fence."]
A worn-out, gone-to-holes orchard is a very city of hollows-loving
animals. Not far away is one such orchard with a side bordering an
extensive copse. Where the orchard and copse meet is an apple-tree
that has been the ancestral home of unnumbered generations of
flying-squirrels. The cavity was first hollowed out by flickers. The
squirrels were interlopers. When the young come in April the large
opening is stuffed with shredded chestnut bark, leaving barely room
enough for the parents to squeeze through. The sharpest-eyed hawk
awing would never dream of waiting outside that insignificant door for
a meal of squirrel.
[Illustration: "Young flying-squirrels."]
But such precautions are not always proof against boys. I robbed
that home one spring of its entire batch of babies (no one with any
love of wild things could resist the temptation to kidnap young
flying-squirrels), and tried to bring them up in domestic ways. But
somehow I never succeeded with pets. Something always happened.
One of these four squirrels was rocked on, a second was squeezed in
a door, a third fell before he could fly, and the fourth I took to
college with me. He had perfect liberty, for I had no other room-mate.
I set aside one hour a day to putting corks, pens, photographs, and
knives back in their places, for him to tuck away the next day in one
of my shoes or under my pillow. More than once I have awakened to find
him curled up in my neck or up my sleeve, the dearest little bedfellow
alive. But it was three stories from my window to the street; and one
day he tried his wings. They were not equal to the flight. Since then
I have left my wild pets in the woods.
If one wants to know what birds are about, especially the larger,
more cautious species, let him get under cover near a tall dead oak
or walnut, standing alone in the middle of open fields. Such a tree
is the natural rest and lookout for every passer. Here come the hawks
to wait and watch; here the sentinel crows are posted while the flock
pilfers corn and plugs melons; here the flickers and woodpeckers
light for a quick lunch of grubs, to call for company or telegraph
across the fields on one of the resonant limbs; here the flocking
blackbirds swoop and settle, making the old tree look as if it had
suddenly leaved out in mourning--leaves black and crackling; and here
the turkey-buzzards halt heavily in their gruesomely glorious flight.
With good field-glasses there is no other vantage-ground for bird
study equal to this. Not in a day's tramp will one see so many birds,
and have such chances to observe them, as in a single hour, when the
sun is rising or setting, in the neighborhood of some great, gaunt
tree that has died of years or lonesomeness, or been smitten by a bolt
from the summer clouds.
[Illustration: "The sentinel crows are posted."]
II
Nature's prodigality and parsimony are extremes farther apart than
her east and west. Why should she be so lavish of interstellar space,
and crowd a drop of stagnant water so? Why give the wide sea surface
to the petrels, and screw the sea-urchins into the rocks on Grand
Manan? Why scatter in Delaware Bay a million sturgeon eggs for every
one hatched, while each mite of a paramecium is cut in two, and wholes
made of the halves? Why leave an entire forest of green, live pines
for a lonesome crow hermitage, and convert the rottenest old stump
into a submerged-tenth tenement?
Part of the answer, at least, is found in nature's hatred and horror
of death. She fiercely refuses to have any dead. An empty heaven,
a lifeless sea, an uninhabited rock, a dead drop of water, a dying
paramecium, are intolerable and impossible. She hastens always to give
them life. The succession of strange dwellers to the decaying trees
is an instance of her universal and endless effort at making matter
live.
Such vigilance over the ever-dying is very comforting--and marvelous
too. Let any indifferent apple-tree begin to have holes, and the
tree-toads, the bluebirds, and the red squirrels move in, to fill the
empty trunk with new life and the sapless limbs with fresh fruit.
Let any tall, stray oak along the river start to die at the top, and
straightway a pair of fish-hawks will load new life upon it. And these
other, engrafted lives, like the graft of a greening upon wild wood,
yield crops more valuable often, and always more interesting, than
come from the native stock.
Perhaps there is no more useless fruit or timber grown than that of
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.
[Illustration: "She turned and fixed her big black eyes hard on me."]
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.
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.