I have spoken in another chapter of the melting away of bird life
from this region during April and May. There was a time when the
all-the-year-round herring gulls seemed the only birds left to me,
and many of these were immature birds or birds whose plumage was then
changing from immature brown to adult white and grey. One cold, foggy
morning late in May, I woke to find the beach in front of the Fo’castle
crowded with these gulls, for a number of hake had stranded during the
night, and the birds had discovered them and come to feed. Some fed on
the fresh fish, findings being keepings--I saw various birds defend
their individual repasts from late arrivals and would-be sharers with a
show of wings and a hostile cry--others stood on the top of the beach
in a long, senatorial row facing the sea. The maturing birds were of
all tones of white and brown; some were chalky and brown, some were
speckled like hens, others were a curious brown-mottled chalky grey.
The moults of herring gulls are complicated affairs. There are spring
moults and autumn moults, partial moults and second nuptial plumages.
Not until the third year or later does the bird seem to assume its full
nuptial and adult coloration.
When I first open my eyes on a bright midsummer morning, the first
sound that becomes part of my waking consciousness is the recurrent
rush and spill of the summer sea; then do I hear a patter of tiny feet
on the roof over my head and the cheerful notes of a song sparrow’s
home-spun tune. These sparrows are the songbirds of the dunes. I hear
them all day long, for I have a pair nesting on the seaward slope of
this dune in a clump of dusty miller. My building of the Fo’castle
has given them something to sit on, something they can see the world
from, and on its ridgepole they perch, singing at life in general with
a praiseworthy persistence. The bird really has two songs, one the
nuptial aria, the other the domestic tune; it sings the first in the
nest-building, egg-laying season, and the second from the close of the
honeymoon to the silence in the fall. I was amazed this year at the
suddenness of the change. On the afternoon of July 1st I heard the
birds on my roof singing aria number one; on the morning of July 2d
they had turned the page to aria number two. The songs are alike; they
resemble each other in musical “shape,” but the first is much more of a
warble than the second.
On throwing open my door on the dunes, the morning sea, and the vast
empty beach with its coast guard paths, I find the house being stormed
by swallows--they are picking up the half-torpid flies that have
spent the night on the shingles and just buzzed off--and on looking
north and south along the dunes I see swallows everywhere. The grass
glistens in the early morning light, the slant of the sun picks out the
ripening spears, the graceful birds swim close above the green. Most
of these birds are bank swallows, _Riparia riparia_, but I often see
barn swallows, _Hirundo erythrogastra_, and tree swallows, _Iridoprocne
bicolor_, scattered in among them. A little after seven o’clock they
melt away. Through the day stray birds come foraging, but the swarm is
a morning affair. The bank swallows (the bird with whitish underparts
and a dark band across the breast) have nests north of Nauset Station
in a clay stratum of the great bank; the tree swallows and the barn
swallows live farther inland near the farms. Some say that the bank
swallows nest in these dunes. I have never found their nests in this
living sand, but the swallows may manage it, after all. Time and again
have I been astounded at the manner in which animals use this sand as
if it were ordinary earth. Not long ago, on the top of big dune, I
found that moles had tunnelled a surface of live sand for six or
seven feet.
[Illustration: _Tern Coming to Full Stop Head-on into the Wind_]
The common tern, _Sterna hirundo_, here called the mackerel gull,
dominates both the beach and the summer day. Three or four thousand of
these birds are nesting in the region; there are nests on the dunes,
and whole colonies on certain gravelly areas in the marsh islands near
Orleans. All day long I watch them flying to and fro past my windows,
now sailing with a favouring wind, now battling into an opposing
breeze; I see them going along the breakers long before sunrise, white
birds flying past a rosiness of eastern sky and an ocean still blue and
dark with night; I see them pass like spiritual creatures in the dusk.
There are crowded days when I live in a cloud of their wings and the
clamour of their cries.
_Sterna hirundo_, the common tern--Wilson’s tern, some call him--is
indeed a lovely bird. His dominant colours are pearl-grey and white,
his wings are bent, he is from thirteen to sixteen inches long, and he
is marked by a black hood, an orange-coral bill tipped with black, and
bright vermilion-orange legs and feet. To my ear, the bird’s call has
a cawing quality; it is, indeed, a cawing screech with an “e” sound and
a high pitch. Harsh though it is, it is not disagreeable; moreover, it
is capable of wide emotional variations. Going south on a recent day
along the dunes, I arrived at the place where the parent terns, homing
from the sea, were crossing the sand bar on their way to their nests,
and as the birds came in sight of their mates and their fledglings,
their cry changed its quality, and took on a kind of wild, harsh
tenderness that was touching to hear.
On Monday morning last, as I sat writing at my west windows, I heard
a tern give a strange cry, and on looking out and up I saw a bird
harrying the female marsh hawk, of whose visits to the dunes I have
already told. The sea bird’s battle cry was entirely new to my ear.
“_Ke’ke’ke’aow!_” he cried; there was warning in the harsh, horny cry,
danger and anger. The greater bird, flapping her wings as if they were
spreads of paper--the winging of this hawk, near earth, is sometimes
curiously like the winging of a butterfly--made no answer, but sank to
earth slowly, wings outspread, and rested for a long half minute on
the shell-strewn floor of the sand pit forty feet back from my house.
Thus perched motionless, she might have been a willing mark. Scolding
without pause, the tern, who had followed the enemy down into the pit,
then rose and dived on her as he might have dived on a fish. The hawk
continued to sit motionless. It was an extraordinary scene. Regaining
level wing just above the hawk’s head, the tern instantly climbed and
dived again. At his third dive, the hawk took off, flying ahead and low
across the sand pit. The battle then moved into the dunes, and the last
I saw of the affair was the hawk abandoning the hills and flying south
unpursued far out over the marsh.
Watching the hawk thus a-squat on the sand in a summer intensity of
light, with the grey sea bird angrily assailing her, there came into my
mind a thought of the ancient Egyptian representations of animals and
birds. For this hawk in the pit was the Horus Hawk of the Egyptians,
the same poise, the same dark blood-fierceness, the same authority. The
longer I live here and the more I see of birds and animals, the greater
my admiration becomes for those artists who worked in Egypt so many
long thousand years ago, drawing, painting, carving in the stifling
quiet of the royal tombs, putting here ducks frightened out of the Nile
marshes, here cattle being herded down a village street, here the great
sun vulture, the jackal, and the snake. To my mind, no representations
of animals equal these Egyptian renderings. I do not write in praise of
faithful delineation or pictorial usage--though the Egyptian drew from
his model with care--but of the unique power to reach, understand, and
portray the very psyche of animals. The power is particularly notable
in Egyptian representations of birds. A hawk of stone carved in hardest
granite on a temple wall will have the soul of all hawks in his eyes.
Moreover, there is nothing human about these Egyptian creatures. They
are self-contained and aloof as becomes folk of a first and intenser
world.
So completely do the thronging terns dominate the beach that they will
often gather to chivvy off a human intruder. I am often chased all the
way to Nauset. Three made for me yesterday afternoon as I was going
north at two o’clock, trudging the hot and heavy sand.
It is an odd, a rather amusing experience to be thus barked at and
chivvied along by birds. Down the beach they followed me, keeping pace
with me and stopping when I stopped, their swallow-like tail feathers
fish-tailing out as they manœuvred close above my head. About once
every half minute one of the three would climb twenty or thirty feet
above me and behind, tread air for a second or two, and then swoop
directly down at me with a scolding cry, the rush ending in an up-lane
scarce a foot above my head. So soundly was I scolded, and so constant
was the sharp clamour, that one might have thought that the birds had
found me pirating eggs and nestlings. As a matter of fact, I was miles
away from any nest or nesting place. Those who disturb terns actually
on their nests are chivvied by dozens in just such a manner, and are
even struck, and struck vigorously, by the birds.
I suspect the marsh hawk of being on her way to raid these nests. Madam
Hawk has probably been sitting on eggs of her own, for I have seen
little of her since she gave up her daily forays sometime in the spring.
From mid-June to mid-July, the terns are at their best. Their eggs are
hatching, the fish are running, and all day long the parent birds are
going back and forth between their nests and the sea. When I open my
door at sunrise, the terns are already passing my house, flying twenty
or thirty feet above the curling, oncoming seas. Hour by hour they pass
in two endless streams, one going fishing, the other bringing home
the catch; hour after hour they pass--thousands of birds an hour when
the fishing is good and near at hand. Returning birds, almost without
exception, hold silvery fish crosswise in their bills, and, unlike the
crow in the fable, a tern can cry out without dropping his prize.
The great majority of these birds are males bringing food to their
mates and the new-born young. The catch usually consists of three- and
four-inch sand eels, but I occasionally see birds flying bow-down with
tinker mackerel. Sometimes a bird passes carrying two “eels,” holding
the pair as best he can.
A week ago, just after two o’clock on a bright afternoon, the birds
suddenly came streaming from everywhere to the surf along the dunes.
Skates had again driven in a people of “eels.” It was high tide; the
seas gathered and broke, the heaviest shaking the beach. Into the
curling baroque crests of the waves, into the advancing slopes of
the gathering green swells, into the race and flow of white seethe
and yellow sand, the bright air rained down birds on the now doubly
imperilled and darting prey. The air was cut with wings and pierced
with eager, hungry, and continuous cries. The birds make plummet dives
and strike up jets of water from the surf. The harassed fish moving
south, the terns followed after them; an hour later, through field
glasses, I could see the thing still going on just north and seaward of
the shoals.
Piratic jaegers, _Stercorarius pomarinus_, _Stercorarius parasiticus_,
apparently never trouble these Eastham birds. I have seen but one
jaeger on this beach, and that a solitary bird who chanced to pass the
house one morning last September. Cape Cod neighbours, however, tell me
that jaegers are numerous in the bay, and that they harry the terns who
fish the shoals off Billingsgate.
Almost every day, in the full heat of noontide, I go down to the lower
beach and lie down for a while on the hot sand, an arm over my eyes.
The other day, in a spirit of fun, I raised my arm toward a passing
tern--the returning birds fly scarce thirty feet above the beach--and
to my amusement the creature paused, sank, and hovered above me for a
few seconds scarce ten feet from my hand. I saw then that its under
plumage, instead of being white, was a lovely faint rose; I had halted
a roseate tern, _Sterna dougalli_. I wriggled my fingers; the bird
responded with a cry in which I read bewildered indignation; then on it
flew, and the incident ended.
This year a number of laughing gulls, _Larus atricilla_, accompany the
terns fishing, the dozen or so gulls keeping to themselves while flying
with their neighbours.
The most interesting adventure with birds I have had this summer I
had with a flock of least terns, _Sterna antillarum_. It came to pass
that early one morning in June, as I happened to be passing big dune,
a covey of small terns unexpectedly sailed out at me and hovered about
me, scolding and complaining. To my great delight, I saw that they were
least terns or “tit gulls,” rare creatures on our coast, and perhaps
the prettiest and most graceful of summer’s ocean birds. A miniature
tern, the “leastie,” scarce larger than a swallow, and you may know him
by the lighter grey of his plumage, his bright lemon-yellow bill, and
his delicate orange-yellow feet.
The birds were nesting at the foot of big dune, and I had disturbed
their peace. In the splendour of morning they hung above me, now
uttering a single alarmed cheep, now a series of staccato cries.
[Illustration: _The Tern Chick_]