I
During the winter the world of the dunes and the great beach was
entirely my own, and I lived at the Fo’castle as undisturbed as Crusoe
on his island. Man disappeared from the world of nature in which I
lived almost as if he, too, were a kind of migratory bird. It is true
that I could see the houses of Eastham village on the uplands across
the marsh, and the passing ships and fishing boats, but these were the
works of man rather than man himself. By the middle of February the
sight of an unknown someone walking on the beach near the Fo’castle
would have been a historical event. Should any ask how I endured this
isolation in so wild a place and in the depth of winter, I can only
answer that I enjoyed every moment to the full. To be able to see
and study undisturbed the processes of nature--I like better the old
Biblical phrase “mighty works”--is an opportunity for which any man
might well feel reverent gratitude, and here at last, in this silence
and isolation of winter, a whole region was mine whose innermost
natural life might shape itself to its ancient courses without the
hindrance and interferences of man. No one came to kill, no one came
to explore, no one even came to see. Earth, ocean, and sky, the triune
unity of this coast, pursued each one their vast and mingled purposes
as untroubled by man as a planet on its course about the sun.
It is not good to be too much alone, even as it is unwise to be always
with and in a crowd, but, solitary as I was, I had few opportunities
for moods or to “lose and neglect the creeping hours of time.” From
the moment that I rose in the morning and threw open my door looking
toward the sea to the moment when the spurt of a match sounded in the
evening quiet of my solitary house, there was always something to
do, something to observe, something to record, something to study,
something to put aside in a corner of the mind. There was the ocean in
all weathers and at all tides, now grey and lonely and veiled in winter
rain, now sun-bright, coldly green, and marbled with dissolving foam;
there was the marsh with its great congresses, its little companies,
its wandering groups, and little family gatherings of winter birds;
there was the glory of the winter sky rolling out of the ocean over and
across the dunes, constellation by constellation, lonely star by star.
To see the night sky in all its divinity of beauty, the world beneath
it should be lovely, too, else the great picture is split in halves
which no mind can ever really weld into a unity of reverence. I think
the nights on which I felt most alone (if I paused to indulge myself
in such an emotion) were the nights when southeasterly rains were at
work in the dark, immense world outside my door dissolving in rain and
fog such ice and snow as lingered on after a snowfall or a cold spell
had become history. On such southeasterly nights, the fog lay thick on
marsh and ocean, the distant lights of Eastham vanished in a universal
dark, and on the invisible beach below the dune, great breakers born of
fog swell and the wind rolled up the sands with the slow, mournful pace
of stately victims destined to immolation, and toppled over, each one,
in a heavy, awesome roar that faded to silence before a fellow victim
followed on out of the darkness on the sea. Only one sense impression
lingered to remind me of the vanished world of man, and that the long,
long complaints and melancholy bellowings of vessels feeling their way
about miles offshore.
[Illustration: _Dovekies or Little Auks_]
But I was not entirely alone. My friends the coast guards at Nauset
Station, patrolling the beach every night and in all weathers, often
came in to see how I was faring, to hand me on a letter, or to tell me
the news of the Cape. My pleasure in such visits was very real, and
between half after seven and eight o’clock I always hoped for a step.
When one has not spoken to another human being for twenty-four hours,
a little conversation is pleasant exercise, though to the speaker the
simplest phrases, even the simple idiom, “Come in,” may take on a
quaint air of being breathless and voluble. Sometimes no one came, and
I spent the evening by my fire reading quietly, going over my notes,
and wondering who it was who walked the beach.
It is not easy to live alone, for man is a gregarious creature;
especially in his youth, powerful instincts offer battle to such a
way of life, and in utter solitude odd things may happen to the mind.
I lived as a solitary, yes, but I made no pretence of acting the
conventional hermit of the pious tract and the Eighteenth Century
romance. With my weekly trips to Orleans to buy fresh bread and
butter, my frequent visits to the Overlook, and my conversations with
the men on night patrol, a mediæval anchorite would have probably
regarded me as a dweller in the market place. It was not this touch
with my fellows, however, which alone sustained me. Dwelling thus
upon the dunes, I lived in the midst of an abundance of natural life
which manifested itself every hour of the day, and from being thus
surrounded, thus enclosed within a great whirl of what one may call
the life force, I felt that I drew a secret and sustaining energy.
There were times, on the threshold of spring, when the force seemed
as real as heat from the sun. A sceptic may smile and ask me to come
to his laboratory and demonstrate; he may talk as he will of the
secret workings of my own isolated and uninfluenced flesh and blood,
but I think that those who have lived in nature, and tried to open
their doors rather than close them on her energies, will understand
well enough what I mean. Life is as much a force in the universe as
electricity or gravitational pull, and the presence of life sustains
life. Individuals may destroy individuals, but the life force may
mingle with the individual life as a billow of fire may mingle for a
moment with a candle flame.
But now I must begin to tell of the birds who are wintering on the
coast, of the exchange of species which takes place here, and of how
all manage to live.
As I walk the beach on a bright and blustery January morning, my first
impression is one of space, beauty, and loneliness. The summer bird
life of the beach has completely disappeared, and at the moment of
which I tell, not a single beach bird or sea bird, not even a resident
gull, is to be seen on the beach along all these empty miles. I walk,
and no terns come swooping down at me out of the dunes, scolding me
for my intrusion on their immense and ancient privacy; no sandpipers
rise at my approach, wheel over the inner breakers, and settle down
again a hundred yards ahead. Summer residents and autumn migrants of
the beach, sandpipers, plovers, yellow-legs, “knots,” and sanderlings,
all have gone south with the sun and are now to be found anywhere from
the Carolinas south to Patagonia. The familiar sanderlings--it is of
_Crocethia alba_ that I write--lingered surprisingly late; they seemed
almost as numerous in October as in August, there were plenty to be
seen in November, but in December flocks were rare, and by Christmas,
there were only a few strays and cripples left behind.
New Year’s Day, on the deserted beach, I surprised a little flock of
ruddy turnstones, _Arenaria interpres morinella_, who took wing on my
approach and flew south close along the seaward face of the dunes. I
shall always remember this picture as one of the most beautiful touches
of colour I have ever seen in nature, for the three dominant colours of
this bird--who is a little larger than the semipalmated sandpiper--are
black, white, and glowing chestnut red; and these colours are
interestingly displayed in patches and bold stripes seen at their best
when the bird is flying. The great dunes behind them and the long vista
of the beach were cold silver overlaid with that faint, loveliest
violet which is the overtone colour of the coast.
As I watched these decorative birds flying away ahead of me into that
vast ocean world, I began thinking of how little has ever been written
or said about the loveliness of our North Atlantic birds. There are
plenty of books about them, there are a world of kind people who
cherish and love them as birds, but there is a lack of printed material
and discussion celebrating their qualities of beauty. Such æsthetic
appreciation of our shore birds as we have had seems to have reached
that showy and unfortunate creature, the wood duck, _Aix sponsa_, and
been permanently overcome. Now, the turnstone is a lovely little bird,
the least tern is another; the king eider is a magnificent creature,
and there are many more whose beauty deserves comment and attention.
A second notion, too, came into my head as I saw the turnstones fly
away--that no one really knows a bird until he has seen it in flight.
Since my year upon the dunes, spent in a world of magnificent fliers, I
have been tempted to believe that the relation of the living bird with
its wings folded to the living bird in flight is almost that of the
living bird to the same bird stuffed. In certain cases, the difference
between the bird on the wing and the bird at rest is so great that one
might be watching two different creatures. Not only do colours and new
arrangements of colours appear in flight, there is also a revelation of
personality. Study your birds on the ground as you will, but once you
have thus observed them and studied their loveliness, do not be afraid
to clap your hands and send them off into the air. They will take no
real alarm and will soon forgive you. Watch birds flying.
The tide is going out, and the breakers are shallowing to chiding
curls of foam along the edge of the ebb. Gone are the thin-footed,
light-winged peoples, the industrious waders, the busy pickup,
runabout, and scurry-along folk. South, south with the sun, along
bright beaches and across wide bays, south with the sun along the edge
of a continent, with heaven knows what ancient mysteries stirring in
their tiny minds and what ancient instincts waking in their veins. As I
think of the tropical lands to which these birds have flown, I remember
walking one night along a tropical beach in Central America. It was
late at night, no one was about, the warm, endless, pouring wind shook
a sound like rain out of endlessly agitated palms, and a magnificent
full moon sailed through the wind over an ocean and a surf that might
have been a liquid and greener moonlight. Suddenly, a flock of little
birds rose up on the beach from nowhere, wheeled, fell off a little
with the wind, and then disappeared completely into the turbulent
splendour. I wonder now if you were by any chance Cape Cod sandpipers,
little birds!
But now to return to the North Atlantic, the Eastham dunes, and the
exchange of species I mentioned earlier in the chapter. As the smaller
birds have flown south to their tropics, birds from the arctic north,
following the same migrational impulse of the ebbing year, have moved
south along the New England coast, and found in the open, deserted Cape
a region which is to them a Florida. These birds are the arctic sea
ducks, many of them big, heavy, powerful birds, all of them built to
stand icy water and icy weather, all of them enclosed in a water-tight
pack of feathers which is almost a kind of feather fur. These ducks
belong to the subfamily _Fuligulinæ_, the people of the outermost
waters, but there are still other arctic visitors, auks, murres, and
even guillemots. The region which these birds prefer is the region
south of Cape Cod, where the currents of warmer water swirl over the
great south shoals. I have for neighbours the three varieties of
“scoters,” or more familiarly and wrongly “coots,” the black-winged
coot _Oidemia americana_, the white-winged coot _Oidemia deglandi_,
the skunk coot, _Oidemia perspicillata_; I have scaups or blue-billed
widgeons, _Marila marila_, dipper ducks, _Charitonetta albeola_, old
squaws, _Harelda hyemalis_, eiders, _Somateria dresseri_, king eiders,
_Somateria spectabilis_, and others. It is possible that, before the
coming of the white man, the number of these winter outer-sea birds in
the Cape Cod region exceeded that of the summer birds, but now, alas!
the shotgun and the killer had their fun, the winter peoples have been
wasted away, and some even exterminated. To-day, the summer birds
outnumber their winter kin.
A new danger, moreover, now threatens the birds at sea. An irreducible
residue of crude oil, called by refiners “slop,” remains in stills
after oil distillation, and this is pumped into southbound tankers
and emptied far offshore. This wretched pollution floats over large
areas, and the birds alight in it and get it on their feathers. They
inevitably die. Just how they perish is still something of a question.
Some die of cold, for the gluey oil so mats and swabs the thick arctic
feathering that creases open through it to the skin above the vitals;
others die of hunger as well. Captain George Nickerson of Nauset
tells me that he saw an oil-covered eider trying to dive for food off
Monomoy, and that the bird was unable to plunge. I am glad to be able
to write that the situation is better than it was. Five years ago, the
shores of Monomoy peninsula were strewn with hundreds, even thousands,
of dead sea fowl, for the tankers pumped out slop as they were passing
the shoals--into the very waters, indeed, on which the birds have lived
since time began! To-day oil is more the chance fate of the unfortunate
individual. But let us hope that all such pollution will presently end.
My beach is empty, but not the ocean beyond. Between the coast guard
station and Nauset Light, a “raft” of skunk coots is spending the
winter. Patches of white on the forehead and the hind neck of the
glossy black head of the male are responsible for this local name. The
birds sit in the ocean, just seaward of the surf--the coast guardsmen
say there is a shallow close by and shellfish--and the whole raft rises
and falls unconcernedly as the swells roll under it. Sometimes a bird
will dive through the oncoming ridge of a breaker and emerge casually
on the other side; sometimes a bird will stand up in the water, flap
its wings, and settle down again unconcernedly. There are perhaps
thirty birds in this flock. In Thoreau’s time, these rafts of coots
formed a flock which was practically continuous the whole length of
the outer Cape, but to-day such rafts, though not at all rare, are but
occasional.
Standing at the door of my house, I watch these winter birds pass and
repass, flying well offshore. Now a company of a hundred or more old
squaws pass, now a tribe of one of the scoter folk; now a pair of
eiders come to rest in the ocean directly in front of the Fo’castle.
These birds practically never come ashore during the winter. They
eat, sleep, live, and meet together at sea. When you see a sea duck
on the beach, you can be sure something is the matter with him, so
runs a saying of the Cape which I had from Captain Nickerson. The
only way in which I can observe these winter folk is by using a good
glass or by catching a specimen who has got into some kind of trouble
and taken refuge on the beach. All these creatures are at a great
disadvantage when ashore, and have a world of difficulty trying to
launch themselves into the air; they make unwieldy jump after jump,
the auks being practically unable to rise at all upon their wings. It
was thrilling to walk the beach, and catch sight of a bird sitting
solitary on the sands. What might it be? What had led it ashore? Could
I possibly catch it and give it a careful looking over? The keynote of
my strategy lay in the attempt to prevent the birds from getting back
into the water, so between them and the surf I would rush--for the
birds would begin to move down the slope to the surf the instant they
saw or heard or felt me--and I soon learned that a brisk countercharge
was worth all the ruse and the patient stalking in the world. Then
began a furious game of tag, the alarmed bird skittering all over the
beach, being gradually driven by me toward the dunes, till I manœuvred
him into the angle between the beach and the sandy wall.
My first prisoners were three unhappy little auks, _Alle alle_, who
had dipped themselves in oil somewhere on their way down from the
arctic--odd little browny-black and white birds about the size of a
pigeon, who stood up on queer little auk feet, faced me, and beat
little bent wings with a penguin look to them; indeed, the bird
has much of an Adelie penguin air. On the Cape, these auks are known
as “pine knots”--a term said to be derived from the creature’s tough
compactness--or as “dovekies.” They have always been “aukies” to me. At
the Fo’castle I gave them a generous corner floored with newspaper and
walled in with boards and a chair. I tried to clean off what I could
of the oil; I gave them what I could find of sea victuals, but all in
vain; they would not eat, and I let them go just as soon as I saw that
I could not possibly help them and that Nature had best deal with the
problem in her own way.
[Illustration: _Razor-billed Auk_]
When they stood up almost perpendicularly and tried to walk about on
their little legs set far aft--they are _pygopodes_--it was much as if
an acrobat, standing on his head, were trying to patter about, using
the length between his elbow and his finger tips as feet. These little
birds used both wings and feet when trying to escape me on the beach.
They ran and _rowed_ the sand with their wings; the verb gives the
precise motion. Moreover, what had taken place was beautifully marked
upon the _tabula rasa_ of the sand--little webbed feet running in a
close chain, wing tips nicking the sand once in each stroke. Coming
south from their distant arctic, these little auks do not fly above the
ocean as do the more advanced birds; they “skitter” along just over the
surface of the waves and keep well out to sea, even well out of sight
of land.
One aukie I caught at night. I was on the beach walking north to meet
the man coming south from Nauset, and, as I flashed my searchlight
to see who the surfman might be, I saw an aukie coming toward me,
fluttering along the very edge of surf, all sticky and a-glisten
with fuel oil. Strange little fragment of life on the edge of that
mysterious immensity! I picked him up; he struggled and then kept
still, and I carried him back to the Fo’castle. The bird was small
enough to be carried in one hand, and as I held him, his duck feet
rested on my palm and his head and neck emerged from the fork between
my thumb and index finger. At the Fo’castle he opened his beak,
“chattered” with it (there is no word for that motion without sound),
transformed his short neck into a surprisingly long one, and looked at
me with a kind of “all is well but anything may be expected” expression
in his eyes. Every now and then he rather solemnly winked, showing the
delicate tan-coloured feathering on his lid. I put him in a corner by
himself, and when I went to bed he had given up trying to pick himself
free of the oil with his pointed, sparrowy bill, and was standing in
his corner of shadow, facing the angle of the walls, for all the world
like a small boy who has been naughty at school. The next morning I let
him go at his own insistent request.
I found a razor-billed auk, _Alca torda_, cornered him, looked him
over while he threatened me with a bill held open and motionless, and
then left him to his own devices. I did the same with a Brünnich’s
murre, and I might have had an eider, too, had I wanted one, for Alvin
Newcomb, surfman No. 1 at Nauset, captured a male one night while on
north patrol. The eider, however, is a huge bird, and I was not quite
prepared to turn the Fo’castle into a kind of ocean hen yard. So the
eider at Nauset, after having most unconcernedly listened to the
station radio for a little while, was returned that same evening to
the North Atlantic. I had one chance at a rare bird. On the first day
of the great northeast storm, as I was wandering about at noontime
through the sleet, I found in the mouth of a cut the body of a murre.
The bird had been dead but a short time, for it was still limp when
I picked it up, and as I held it I could even feel a faint vanishing
warmth in its exhausted flesh. This bird was the rarer murre, _Uria
troile troile_, he of the sharper beak whom men have almost erased from
the list of living things. It had apparently died of being caught and
battered about for long hours by the gale. After the storm, I tried to
find the creature again, but the tide and the storm had poured through
the cut and swept everything before them into a confusion of sand and
ruin.
These ocean peoples live on such little fish as they can seize; they
pick up shellfish on shallow areas; they eat certain marine growths.
Some have a taste for the local mussel, _Mytilus edulis_. Unless the
winter is an exceptionally severe one, the birds seem to fare well
enough. Many stay late, and May is usually at hand before the long
lines of scoters fly north again under the command of their feathered
admirals. Such is the history of the migrant seafarers of the Cape. A
word remains to be said about the residents and the migrants in the
marsh.