ground was measured and entirely wooden. None of the creatures on the
fence showed any haste to fall to feeding. After alighting they would
go through the long process of folding up their wings and packing
them against their sides; then they would sit awhile as if trying to
remember why they had come here rather than gone to any other place.
Occasionally one would unfold his long wings by sections, as you would
open a jointed rule, pause a moment with them outstretched, and, with
a few ponderous flaps, sail off into the sky without having tasted
the banquet. Then another upon the ground, having feasted, would
run a few steps to get spring, and bounding heavily into the air,
would smite the earth with his too long wings, and go swinging up
above the trees. As these grew small and disappeared in the distance,
others came into view, mere specks among the clouds, descending in
ever-diminishing circles until they settled, without word or greeting,
with their fellows at the banquet.
The fence was black with them. Evidently there is news that spreads
even among these incommunicative ghouls. Soon one settled upon the
fence-stake directly over me. To dive from the clouds at the frightful
rate of a mile a minute, and, with those mighty wings, catch the body
in the invisible net of air about the top of a fence-stake, is a feat
that stops one's breath to see. No matter if, here within my reach,
his suit of black looked rusty; no matter if his beak was a sickly,
milky white, his eyes big and watery, and wrinkled about his small
head and snaky neck was red, bald skin, making a visage as ugly as
could be made without human assistance. In spite of all this, I looked
upon him with wonder; for I had seen him mark this slender pole from
the clouds, and hurl himself toward it as though to drive it through
him, and then, between these powerful wings, light as softly upon the
point as a sleeping babe is laid upon a pillow from its mother's arms.
Perhaps half a hundred now were gathered in a writhing heap upon the
ground. A banquet this _sans_ toasts and cheer--the very soul of the
unconvivial. It was a strange dumb-show in serious reality, rather
than a banquet. In the stir of their scuffling, the dry clashing of
their wings, and the noise of their tumbling and pulling and pecking
as they moved together, I could hear low, serpent-like hisses. Except
for a sort of half-heard guttural croak at rare intervals, these
hisses were the only utterances that broke the silence. So far as I
know, this sibilant, batrachio-reptilian language is the meager limit
of the buzzard's faculty of vocal expression. With croak and hiss he
warns and woos. And what tender emotion has a buzzard too subtle for
expression by a croak or hiss? And if he hates, what need has he of
words--with such a countenance?
But he does not hate, for he does not love. To be able to hate
implies a soul; and the buzzard has no soul. Laziness, gluttony,
uncleanness, have destroyed everything spiritual in him. He has almost
lost his language, so that now, even among his own kind, except when
surprised, he is silent. But he needs no language, for he is not
companionable; there is no trace of companionableness in his nature.
He seems entirely devoid of affection and fellow-feeling, showing no
interest whatever in any one or anything save his stomach. The seven
evil spirits of the dyspeptic possess him, body and soul.
It must be added, however, that the buzzards are to some extent
gregarious. They often fly together, roost together, and nest in
communities. In this latter fact some naturalists would find evidence
of sociability; but this manner of nesting is not their habit. They
more generally nest a single pair to a swamp. When they nest in
communities, it is rather because the locality is suitable than from
any desire to be together. Yet they frequently choose the same dead
tree, or clump of trees, for a roost, which may mean that even in a
buzzard's bosom there is something that calls for companionship.
[Illustration: "A banquet this _sans_ toasts and cheer."]
For a nesting-place the buzzard selects a swamp or remote and
heavy timber where there is slight chance of molestation. Here, in a
rough nest of sticks and leaves, upon the ground, in a hollow log,
upon a stump, or sometimes upon the bare earth, are laid the two long,
brown-blotched eggs that constitute the complement.
"I once found a nest," a correspondent writes, "in a low, thick mat
of briers and grape-vines. The female was brooding her eggs when I
came upon the nest, and the moment she caught sight of me, instead of
trying to defend her treasures as any normal mother would have done,
she turned like a demon upon her nest, thrust her beak into one of her
eggs, and devoured it before I could scare her off."
This unnatural act is thus far without parallel in my observation
of bird life. But it is only testimony of what one may read in the
appearance of the buzzard. The indolent habits, the unnamable tastes,
have demoralized and unmothered the creature.
I cannot think that the buzzard was so depraved back in the Beautiful
Garden. The curse of Adam is on him; but instead of sweating like the
rest of us and so redeeming himself, he is content to be cursed. The
bird has degenerated. You can see in his countenance that originally
he was not so vicious in taste and habit. If, when this office of
scavenger was created, the buzzard was installed, it was because he
was too lazy and too indifferent to refuse. He may have protested and
sulked; he even continues to protest and sulk: but he has been engaged
so long in the business now that he is utterly incapable of earning a
living in any other way.
I saw all this in the face and attitude of the buzzard on the stake
above me. He sat there as if conscious that a scavenger's life was
beneath a bird of his parts; he looked mad with himself for submitting
to a trade so degrading, mad with his position among the birds: but
long ago he recognized the difficulty of changing his place and manner
of life, and, rather than make the effort, he sank into this state of
soured silence.
That this is the way to read his personal record and the history of
his clan is clear to my mind, because the bird is still armed with the
great talons and beak of the eagles. He was once a hunter. Through
generations of disuse these weapons have become dulled, weakened,
and unfit for the hunt; and the buzzard, instead of struggling for
his quarry, is driven to eat a dinner that every other predatory bird
would refuse.
Another proof of his fall is that at this late day he has a decided
preference for fresh food. This was doubtless the unspoiled taste of
his ancestors, given with the beak and talons. He is a glutton and a
coward, else he would be an eagle still.
We associate the turkey-buzzard with carrion, and naturally attribute
his marvelous power of finding food to his sense of smell. Let a dead
animal be dragged into the field, and in less than an hour there will
be scores of these somber creatures gathered about it, when, in all
the reach of the horizon for perhaps a week past, not more than one or
two have been seen at any one time. Did they detect an odor miles away
and follow the scent hither? Possibly. But yonder you spy a buzzard
sailing so far up that he appears no larger than a swallow. He is
descending. Watch where he settles. Lo! he is eating the garter-snake
that you killed in the path a few minutes ago. How did the bird from
that altitude discover so tiny a thing? He could not have smelled
it, for it had no odor. He saw it. It is not by scent, but by his
astonishing powers of sight, that the buzzard finds his food.
[Illustration: "Floating without effort among the clouds."]
One day I carried a freshly killed chicken into the field, and tying
a long string to it, hid myself near by in a corn-shock. Soon a
buzzard passing overhead began to circle about me; and I knew that
he had discovered the chicken. Down he came, leisurely at first,
spirally winding, as though descending some aërial stairway from the
clouds, till, just above the tree-tops, he began to swing like a
great pendulum through the air, turning his head from side to side
as he passed over the chicken, watching to see if it were alive. He
was about to settle when I pulled the string. Up he darted in great
fright. Again and again I repeated the experiment; and each time,
at the least sign of life, the buzzard hurried off--afraid of so
inoffensive a thing as a chicken!
Quite a different story comes to me from Pennsylvania. My
correspondent writes: "Years ago, while I was at school in De Kalb,
Mississippi, all the children had their attention called to a great
commotion in a chicken-yard next the school-house. It appeared that
a large hawk had settled down and was doing battle with a hen. My
brother left the school-house and ran to the yard, cautiously opened
the gate, slipped up behind, and caught the 'hawk'--which proved to be
a large and almost famished turkey-buzzard. He kept it four or five
days, when it died." Extreme hunger might drive a buzzard to attack
a hen; but rare indeed is such boldness nowadays.
There were by this time fully a hundred buzzards about me, some
coming, some going, some sitting moody and disgusted, while others
picked hungrily among the bones. They had no suspicion of my presence,
but I had grown tired of them, and springing suddenly from the leaves,
I stood in their midst. There was consternation and hissing for an
instant, then a violent flapping of wings, and away they flew in every
direction. Their heavy bodies were quickly swung above the trees, and
soon they were all sailing away beyond the reach of straining eyes.
Presently one came over far up in the blue, floating without effort
among the clouds, now wheeling in great circles, now swinging through
immense arcs, sailing with stately grandeur on motionless wings in
flight that was sublime.
UP HERRING RUN
[Illustration]
UP HERRING RUN
The habit of migrating is not confined to birds. To some extent it is
common to all animals that have to move about for food, whether they
live in the water or upon the land. The warm south wind that sweeps
northward in successive waves of bluebirds and violets, of warblers
and buttercups, moves with a like magic power over the sea. It touches
the ocean with the same soft hand that wakes the flowers and brings
the birds, and as these return to upland and meadow, the waters stir
and the rivers and streams become alive with fish. Waves of sturgeon,
shad, and herring come in from unknown regions of the ocean, and pass
up toward the head waters of the rivers and through the smaller
streams inland to the fresh-water lakes.
Waves of herring, did I say? It is a torrent of herring that rushes up
Herring Run, a spring freshet from the loosened sources of the life of
the sea.
This movement of the fish is mysterious; no more so than the migration
of the birds, perhaps, but it seems more wonderful to me. Bobolink's
yearly round trip from Cuba to Canada may be, and doubtless is, a
longer and a more perilous journey than that made by the herring or by
any other migrant of the sea; but Bobolink's road and his reasons for
traveling are not altogether hidden. He has the cold winds and failing
food to drive him, and the older birds to pilot him on his first
journey South, and the love of home to draw him back when the spring
comes North again. Food and weather were the first and are still the
principal causes of his unrest. The case of the herring seems to be
different. Neither food nor weather influences them. They come from
the deep sea to the shallow water of the shore to find lodgment for
their eggs and protection for their young; but what brings them
from the salt into fresh water, and what drives these particular
herring up Herring Run instead of up some other stream? Will some one
please explain?
[Illustration: "From unknown regions of the ocean."]
Herring Run is the natural outlet of Whitman's Pond. It runs down
through Weymouth about three fourths of a mile to Weymouth Back River,
thence to the bay and on to the sea. It is a crooked, fretful little
stream, not over twenty feet wide at the most, very stony and very
shallow.
[Illustration: "A crooked, fretful little stream."]
About a hundred years ago, as near as the oldest inhabitants can
remember, a few men of Weymouth went down to Taunton with their
ox-teams, and caught several barrels of herring as they came up the
Taunton River to spawn. These fish they brought alive to Weymouth
and liberated in Whitman's Pond; and these became the ancestors of
the herring which have been returning to Whitman's Pond for the last
century of Aprils.
As soon as the weather warms in the spring the herring make their
appearance in the Run. A south wind along in April is sure to fetch
them; and from the first day of their arrival, for about a month,
they continue to come, on their way to the pond. But they may be
delayed for weeks by cold or storms. Their sensitiveness to changes of
temperature is quite as delicate as a thermometer's. On a favorable
day--clear and sunny with a soft south wind--they can be seen stemming
up-stream by hundreds. Suddenly the wind shifts, blowing up cold from
the east, and long before the nicest instrument registers a fraction
of change in the temperature of the Run, the herring have turned tail
to and scurried off down-stream to the salt water.
They seem to mind nothing so much as this particular change of the
wind and the cold that follows. It may blow or cloud over, and even
rain, without affecting them, if only the storms are from the right
quarter and it stays warm. A cold east wind always hurries them back
to deep water, where they remain until the weather warms up again.
Late in May, however, when they must lay their eggs, they ascend the
stream, and nothing short of a four-foot dam will effectually stop
their progress to the pond.
They are great swimmers. It is a live fish indeed that makes Whitman's
Pond. There are flying-fish and climbing-fish, fish that walk over
land and fish that burrow through the mud; but in an obstacle race,
with a swift stream to stem, with rocks, logs, shallows, and dams to
get over, you may look for a winner in the herring.
He will get up somehow--right side up or bottom side up, on his head
or on his tail, swimming, jumping, flopping, climbing, up he comes!
A herring can almost walk on his tail. I have watched them swim up
Herring Run with their backs half out of water; and when it became too
shallow to swim at all, they would keel over on their sides and flop
for yards across stones so bare and dry that a mud-minnow might easily
have drowned upon them for lack of water.
[Illustration: "Swimming, jumping, flopping, climbing, up he comes!"]
They are strong, graceful, athletic fish, quite the ideal fish type,
well balanced and bewilderingly bony. The herring's bones are his
Samson hair--they make his strength and agility possible; and besides
that, they are vast protection against the frying-pan.
When the herring are once possessed of the notion that it is high
time to get back to the ancestral pond and there leave their eggs,
they are completely mastered by it. They are not to be stopped nor
turned aside. Like Mussulmans toward Mecca they struggle on, until an
impassable dam intervenes or the pond is reached. They seem to feel
neither hunger, fear, nor fatigue, and, like the salmon of Columbia
River, often arrive at their spawning-grounds so battered and bruised
that they die of their wounds. They become frantic when opposed. In
Herring Run I have seen them rush at a dam four feet high, over which
tons of water were pouring, and, by sheer force, rise over two feet
in the perpendicular fall before being carried back. They would dart
from the foam into the great sheet of falling water, strike it like
an arrow, rise straight up through it, hang an instant in mid-fall,
and be hurled back, and killed often, on the rocks beneath. Had
there been volume enough of the falling water to have allowed them a
fair swimming chance, I believe that they could have climbed the dam
through the perpendicular column.
Under the dam, and a little to one side, a "rest," or pen, has been
constructed into which the herring swim and are caught. The water in
this pen is backed up by a gate a foot high. The whole volume of the
stream pours over this gate and tears down a two-foot sluiceway with
velocity enough to whirl along a ten-pound rock that I dropped into
the box. The herring run this sluice and jump the gate with perfect
ease. Twelve thousand of them have leaped the gate in a single hour;
and sixty thousand of them went over it in one day and were scooped
from the pen. The fish always keep their heads up-stream, and will
crowd into the pen until the shallow water is packed with them. When
no more can squeeze in, a wire gate is put into the sluice, the
large gates of the dam are closed, and the fish are ladled out with
scoop-nets.
The town sold the right to a manufacturing company to build this
dam in the Run, together with the sole right to catch the herring, on
condition that yearly a certain number of the fish be carted alive
to the pond in order to spawn; and with this further condition, that
every Weymouth householder be allowed to buy four hundred herring at
twenty-five cents per hundred.
A century ago four hundred herring to a household might not have been
many herring; but things have changed in a hundred years. To-day no
householder, saving the keeper of the town house, avails himself of
this generous offer. I believe that a man with four hundred pickled
herring about his premises to-day would be mobbed. Pickled herring,
scaly, shrunken, wrinkled, discolored, and strung on a stick in the
woodshed, undoes every other rank and bilious preserve that I happen
to know. One can easily credit the saying, still current in the town,
that if a native once eats a Weymouth herring he will never after
leave the place.
Usually the fish first to arrive in the spring are males. These
precede the females, or come along with them in the early season,
while the fish to arrive last are nearly all females. The few that
are taken alive to the pond deposit their eggs within a few days, and,
after a little stay, descend the Run, leap the dam, and again pass
out into the ocean. The eggs are placed along the shallow edges of
the pond, among the reeds and sedges. At first they float around in a
thin, viscid slime, or jelly, which finally acts as a glue to fasten
them to the grass. Here, left without parental care, the eggs hatch
and the fry wiggle off and begin at once to shift for themselves.
How hard they fare! In her sacrifice of young fish, nature seems
little better than a bloody Aztec. I happened to be at Bay Side, a
sturgeon fishery on the Delaware Bay, when a sturgeon was landed whose
roe weighed ninety pounds. I took a quarter of an ounce of these eggs,
counted them, and reckoned that the entire roe numbered 3,168,000
eggs. Yet, had these eggs been laid, not more than one to a million
would have developed to maturity. So it is with the herring. Millions
of their eggs are devoured by turtles, frogs, pickerel, and eels.
Indeed, young herring are so important a food-supply for fresh-water
fish that the damming of streams and the indiscriminate slaughter of
the spawners now seriously threatens certain inland fishing interests.
Many waters have been re-stocked with herring as a source of food for
more valuable fish.
August comes, and the youngsters, now about the length of your finger,
grown tired of the fresh water and the close margins of the pond, find
their way to the Run, and follow their parents down its rough bed to
a larger life in the sea. Here again hungry enemies await them. In
untold numbers they fall a prey to sharks, cod, and swordfish. Yet
immense schools survive, and thousands will escape even the fearful
steam nets of the menhaden-fishermen and see Herring Run again.
[Illustration: "Here again hungry enemies await them."]
If only we could conjure one of them to talk! What a deep-sea story
he could tell! What sights, what wanderings, what adventures! But
the sea keeps all her tales. We do not know even if the herring from
Whitman's Pond live together as an individual clan or school during
their ocean life. There are certain indications that they do. There
is not much about a Whitman's Pond herring to distinguish it from a
Taunton River or a Mystic Pond herring,--the Weymouth people declare
they can tell the difference with their eyes shut,--though I believe
the fish themselves know one another, and that those of each pond keep
together. At least, when the inland running begins, the schools are
united, for then no Whitman's Pond herring is found with a Taunton
River band.
In late summer the fry go down-stream; but whether it is they that
return the next spring, or whether it is only the older fish, is
not certain. It is certain that no immature fish ever appear in the
spring. The naturalists are almost agreed that the herring reach
maturity in eighteen months. In that case it will be two years before
the young appear in the Run. The Weymouth fishermen declare, however,
that they do not seek the pond until the third spring; for they say
that when the pond was first stocked, it was three years before any
herring, of their own accord, made their way back to spawn.
Meantime where and how do they live? All the ocean is theirs to roam
through, though even the ocean has its belts and zones, its barriers
which the strongest swimmers cannot pass. The herring are among the
nomads of the sea; but let them wander never so far through the deep,
you may go to the Run in April and expect to see them. Here, over the
stones and shallows by which they found their way to the sea, they
will come struggling back. No mistake is evermade, no variation,
no question as to the path. On their way up the river from the bay
they will pass other fresh-water streams, as large, even larger, than
Herring Run. But their instinct is true. They never turn aside until
they taste the Run, and though myriads enter, a half-mile farther up
the river not a herring will be found.
It is easy to see how the ox might know his owner, and the ass his
master's crib; but how a herring, after a year of roving through the
sea, knows its way up Herring Run to the pond, is past finding out.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Transcriber's Notes
Retained original spelling except for changing two oe ligatures to
"oe" in "amoeba" and "manoeuvering."
Moved some illustrations to paragraph breaks.
The original page numbers are displayed in the List of Illustrations.
The HTML version links the numbers to the illustrations rather than
the page numbers.
End of Project Gutenberg's Wild Life Near Home, by Dallas Lore Sharp