I
There is a new sound on the beach, and a greater sound. Slowly, and
day by day, the surf grows heavier, and down the long miles of the
beach, at the lonely stations, men hear the coming winter in the roar.
Mornings and evenings grow cold, the northwest wind grows cold; the
last crescent of the month’s moon, discovered by chance in a pale
morning sky, stands north of the sun. Autumn ripens faster on the
beach than on the marshes and the dunes. Westward and landward there
is colour; seaward, bright space and austerity. Lifted to the sky, the
dying grasses on the dune tops’ rim tremble and lean seaward in the
wind, wraiths of sand course flat along the beach, the hiss of sand
mingles its thin stridency with the new thunder of the sea.
I have been spending my afternoons gathering driftwood and observing
birds. The skies being clear, noonday suns take something of the bite
out of the wind, and now and then a warmish west-sou’westerly finds its
way back into the world. Into the bright, vast days I go, shouldering
home my sticks and broken boards and driving shore birds on ahead
of me, putting up sanderlings and sandpipers, ringnecks and knots,
plovers and killdeer, coveys of a dozen, little flocks, great flocks,
compact assemblies with a regimented air. For a fortnight past, October
9th to October 23d, an enormous population of the migrants has been
“stopping over” on my Eastham sands, gathering, resting, feeding, and
commingling. They come, they go, they melt away, they gather again; for
actual miles the intricate and inter-crisscross pattern of their feet
runs unbroken along the tide rim of Cape Cod.
Yet it is no confused and careless horde through which I go, but
an army. Some spirit of discipline and unity has passed over these
countless little brains, waking in each flock a conscious sense of its
collective self and giving each bird a sense of himself as a member of
some migrant company. Lone fliers are rare, and when seen have an air
of being in pursuit of some flock which has overlooked them and gone
on. Swift as the wind they fly, speeding along the breakers with the
directness of a runner down a course, and I read fear in their speed.
Sometimes I see them find their own and settle down beside them half
a mile ahead, sometimes they melt away into a vista of surf and sky,
still speeding on, still seeking.
The general multitude, it would seem, consists of birds who have spent
the summer somewhere on the outer Cape and of autumn reinforcements
from the north.
I see the flocks best when they are feeding on the edge of a tide which
rises to its flood in the later afternoon. No summer blur of breaker
mist or glassiness of heat now obscures these outer distances, and as
on I stride, keeping to the lower beach when returning with a load,
I can see birds and more birds and ever more birds ahead. Every last
advance of a dissolved breaker, coursing on, flat and seething, has
those who run away before it, turning its flank or fluttering up when
too closely pursued; every retreating in-sucked slide has those who
follow it back, eagerly dipping and gleaning. Having fed, the birds
fly up to the upper beach and sit there for hours in the luke-cold
wind, flock by flock, assembly by assembly. The ocean thunders, pale
wisps and windy tatters of wintry cloud sail over the dunes, and the
sandpipers stand on one leg and dream, their heads tousled deep into
their feathers.
I wonder where these thousands spend the night. Waking the other
morning just before sunrise, I hurried into my clothes and went down to
the beach. North and then south I strolled, along an ebbing tide, and
north and south the great beach was as empty of bird life as the sky.
Far to the south, I remember now, a frightened pair of semipalmated
sandpipers did rise from somewhere on the upper beach and fly toward me
swift and voiceless, pass me on the flank, and settle by the water’s
edge a hundred yards or so behind. They instantly began to run about
and feed, and as I watched them an orange sun floated up over the
horizon with the speed and solemnity of an Olympian balloon.
The tide being high these days late in the afternoon, the birds begin
to muster on the beach about ten o’clock in the morning. Some fly
over from the salt meadows, some arrive flying along the beach, some
drop from the sky. I startle up a first group on turning from the
upper beach to the lower. I walk directly at the birds--a general
apprehension, a rally, a scutter ahead, and the birds are gone.
Standing on the beach, fresh claw marks at my feet, I watch the lovely
sight of the group instantly turned into a constellation of birds, into
a fugitive pleiades whose living stars keep their chance positions; I
watch the spiralling flight, the momentary tilts of the white bellies,
the alternate shows of the clustered, grayish backs. The group next
ahead, though wary from the first, continues feeding. I draw nearer;
a few run ahead as if to escape me afoot, others stop and prepare to
fly; nearer still, the birds can stand no more; another rally, another
scutter, and they are following their kin along the surges.
No aspect of nature on this beach is more mysterious to me than the
flights of these shore-bird constellations. The constellation forms,
as I have hinted, in an instant of time, and in that same instant
develops its own will. Birds which have been feeding yards away from
each other, each one individually busy for his individual body’s
sake, suddenly fuse into this new volition and, flying, rise as one,
coast as one, tilt their dozen bodies as one, and as one wheel off on
the course which the new group will has determined. There is no such
thing, I may add, as a lead bird or guide. Had I more space I should
like nothing better than to discuss this new will and its instant of
origin, but I do not want to crowd this part of my chapter, and must
therefore leave the problem to all who study the psychic relations
between the individual and a surrounding many. My special interest is
rather the instant and synchronous obedience of each speeding body to
the new volition. By what means, by what methods of communication does
this will so suffuse the living constellation that its dozen or more
tiny brains know it and obey it in such an instancy of time? Are we
to believe that these birds, all of them, are _machina_, as Descartes
long ago insisted, mere mechanisms of flesh and bone so exquisitely
alike that each cogwheel brain, encountering the same environmental
forces, synchronously lets slip the same mechanic ratchet? or is there
some psychic relation between these creatures? Does some current flow
through them and between them as they fly? Schools of fish, I am told,
make similar mass changes of direction. I saw such a thing once, but of
that more anon.
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of
animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated
artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of
his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image
in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their
tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein
we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man.
In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and
complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never
attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren,
they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves
in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and
travail of the earth.
The afternoon sun sinks red as fire; the tide climbs the beach, its
foam a strange crimson; miles out, a freighter goes north, emerging
from the shoals.