their living! I hear their voices in the morning before sun-up,
sounding out from different points of the fields and woods, as if
every one of them were giving or receiving orders for the day:
"Here, Jim, you do this; here, Corvus, you go there, and put that
thing through"; and Jim caws back a response, and Corvus says,
"I'm off this minute." I get the impression that it is convention
day or general training day with them. There are voices in all
keys of masculinity and femininity. Here and there seems to be
one in authority who calls at intervals, "Haw-ah, haw, haw-ah!"
Others utter a strident "Haw!" still others a rapid, feminine
call. Some seem hurrying, others seem at rest, but the landscape
is apparently alive with crows carrying out some plan of
concerted action. How fond they must be of one another! What boon
companions they are! In constant communication, saluting one
another from the trees, the ground, the air, watchful of one
another's safety, sharing their plunder, uniting against a common
enemy, noisy, sportive, predacious, and open and aboveboard in
all their ways and doings--how much character our ebony friend
possesses, in how many ways he challenges our admiration!
What a contrast the crow presents to the silent, solitary hawk!
The hawks have but two occupations--hunting and soaring; they
have no social or tribal relations, and make no show of business
as does the crow. The crow does not hide; he seems to crave the
utmost publicity; his goings and comings are advertised with all
the effectiveness of his strident voice; but all our hawks are
silent and stealthy.
Let me return to the red squirrel, because he returns to me
hourly. He is the most frisky, diverting, and altogether impish
of all our wild creatures. He is a veritable Puck. All the other
wild folk that cross my field of vision, or look in upon me here
in my fragrant hay-barn study, seem to have but one feeling about
me: "What is it? Is it dangerous? Has it any designs upon me?"
But my appearance seems to awaken other feelings in the red
squirrel. He pauses on the fence or on the rail before me, and
goes through a series of antics and poses and hilarious gestures,
giving out the while a stream of snickering, staccato sounds that
suggest unmistakably that I am a source of mirth and ridicule to
him. His gestures and attitudes are all those of mingled mirth,
curiosity, defiance, and contempt--seldom those of fear. He comes
spinning along on the stone wall in front of me, with those
abrupt, nervous pauses every few yards that characterize all his
movements. On seeing me he checks his speed, and with depressed
tail impels himself along, a few inches at a time, in a series of
spasmodic starts and sallies; the hind part of his body
flattened, and his legs spread, his head erect and alert, his
tail full of kinks and quirks. How that tail undulates! Now its
end curls, now it is flattened to the stone, now it springs
straight up as if part of a trap, hind feet the while keeping
time in a sort of nervous dance with the shrill, strident
cackling and snickering. The next moment he is sitting erect with
fore paws pressed against his white chest, his tail rippling out
behind him or up his back, and his shrill, nasal tones still
pouring out. He hops to the next stone, he assumes a new
position, his tail palpitates and jerks more lively than ever;
now he is on all fours, with curved back; now he sits up at an
angle, his tail all the time charged with mingled suspicion and
mirth. Then he springs to a rail that runs out at right angles
from the wall toward me, and with hectoring snickers and shrill
trebles, pointed straight at me, keeps up his performance. What
an actor he is! What a furry embodiment of quick, nervous energy
and impertinence! Surely he has a sense of something like humor;
surely he is teasing and mocking me and telling me, both by
gesture and by word of mouth, that I present a very ridiculous
appearance.
A chipmunk comes hurrying along with stuffed cheek-pouches,
traveling more on the side of the wall than on the top, stopping
every few yards to see that the way is clear, but giving little
heed to me or to the performing squirrel. In comparison the
chipmunk is a demure, preoccupied, pretty little busybody who
often watches you curiously, but never mocks you or pokes fun at
you; while the gray squirrel has the manners of the best-bred
wood-folk, and he goes his way without fuss or bluster, a picture
of sylvan grace and buoyancy.
All the movements of the red squirrel are quick, sharp, jerky,
machine-like. He does nothing slowly or gently; everything with a
snap and a jerk. His progression is a series of interrupted
sallies. When he pauses on the stone wall he faces this way and
that with a sudden jerk; he turns round in two or three quick
leaps. So abrupt and automatic in his movements, so stiff and
angular in behavior, yet he is charged and overflowing with life
and energy. One thinks of him as a bundle of steel wires and
needles and coiled springs, all electrically charged. One of his
sounds or calls is like the buzz of a reel or the whirr of an
alarm-clock. Something seems to touch a spring there in the old
apple-tree, and out leaps this strident sound as of spinning
brass wheels.
When I speak sharply to him, in the midst of his antics, he
pauses a moment with uplifted paw, watching me intently, and then
with a snicker springs upon a branch of an apple-tree that hangs
down near the wall, and disappears amid the foliage. The red
squirrel is always actively saucy, aggressively impudent. He
peeps in at me through a broken pane in the window and snickers;
he strikes up a jig on the stone underpinning twenty feet away
and mocks; he darts in and out among the timbers and chatters and
giggles; he climbs up over the door, pokes his head in, and lets
off a volley; he moves by jerks along the sill a few feet from my
head and chirps derisively; he eyes me from points on the wall in
front, or from some coign of vantage in the barn, and flings his
anger or his contempt upon me.
No other of our wood-folk has such a facile, emotional tail as
the red squirrel. It seems as if an electric current were running
through it most of the time; it vibrates, it ripples, it curls,
it jerks, it arches, it flattens; now it is like a plume in his
cap; now it is a cloak around his shoulders; then it is an
instrument to point and emphasize his states of emotional
excitement; every movement of his body is seconded or reflected
in his tail. There seems to be some automatic adjustment between
his tail and his vocal machinery.
The tail of the gray squirrel shows to best advantage when he is
running over the ground in the woods--and a long, graceful,
undulating line of soft silver gray the creature makes! In my
part of the country the gray squirrel is more strictly a
wood-dweller than the red, and has the grace and elusiveness that
belong more especially to the sylvan creatures.
The red squirrel can play a tune and accompany himself.
Underneath his strident, nasal snicker you may hear a note in
another key, much finer and shriller. Or it is as if the volume
of sound was split up into two strains, one proceeding from his
throat and the other from his mouth.
If the red squirrels do not have an actual game of tag, they
have something so near it that I cannot tell the difference. Just
now I see one in hot pursuit of another on the stone wall; both
are apparently going at the top of their speed. They make a red
streak over the dark-gray stones. When the pursuer seems to
overtake the pursued and becomes "It," the race is reversed, and
away they go on the back track with the same fleetness of the
hunter and the hunted, till things are reversed again. I have
seen them engaged in the same game in tree-tops, each one having
his innings by turn.
The gray squirrel comes and goes, but the red squirrel we have
always with us. He will live where the gray will starve. He is a
true American; he has nearly all the national traits--nervous
energy, quickness, resourcefulness, pertness, not to say
impudence and conceit. He is not altogether lovely or blameless.
He makes war on the chipmunk, he is a robber of birds' nests, and
is destructive of the orchard fruits. Nearly every man's hand is
against him, yet he thrives, and long may he continue to do so!
One day I placed some over-ripe plums on the wall in front of me
to see what he would do with them. At first he fell eagerly to
releasing the pit, and then to cutting his way to the kernel in
the pit. After one of them had been disposed of in this way, he
proceeded to carry off the others and place them here and there
amid the branches of a plum-tree from which he had stolen every
plum long before they were ripe. A day or two later I noted that
they had all been removed from this tree, and I found some of
them in the forks of an apple-tree not far off.
A small butternut-tree standing near the wall had only a score or
so of butternuts upon it this year; the squirrels might be seen
almost any hour in the day darting about the branches of that
tree, hunting the green nuts, and in early September the last nut
was taken. They carried them away and placed them, one here and
one there, in the forks of the apple-trees. I noticed that they
did not depend upon the eye to find the nuts; they did not look
the branches over from some lower branch as you and I would have
done; they explored the branches one by one, running out to the
end, and, if the nut was there, seized it and came swiftly down.
I think the red squirrel rarely lays up any considerable store,
but hides his nuts here and there in the trees and upon the
ground. This habit makes him the planter of future trees, of
oaks, hickories, chestnuts, and butternuts. These heavy nuts get
widely scattered by this agency.
One morning I saw a chipmunk catch a flying grasshopper on the
wing. Little Striped-Back sat on the wall with stuffed pockets,
waiting for something, when along came the big grasshopper in a
hesitating, uncertain manner of flight. As it hovered above the
chipmunk, the latter by a quick, dexterous movement sprang or
reached up and caught it, and in less than one half-minute its
fanlike wings were opening out in front of the captor's mouth and
its body was being eagerly devoured. This same chipmunk, I think
it is, has his den under the barn near me. Often he comes from
the stone wall with distended cheek-pouches, and pauses fifteen
feet away, close by cover, and looks to see if any danger is
impending. To reach his hole he has to cross an open space a rod
or more wide, and the thought of it evidently agitates him a
little. I am sitting there looking over my desk upon him, and he
is skeptical about my being as harmless as I look. "Dare I cross
that ten feet of open there in front of him?" he seems to say. He
sits up with fore paws pressed so prettily to his white breast.
He is so near I can see the rapid throbbing of his chest as he
sniffs the air. A moment he sits and looks and sniffs, then in
hurried movements crosses the open, his cheek-pockets showing
full as he darts by me. He is like a baseball runner trying to
steal a base: danger lurks on all sides; he must not leave the
cover of one base till he sees the way is clear, and then--off
with a rush! Pray don't work yourself up to such a pitch, my
little neighbor; you shall make a home-run without the slightest
show of opposition from me.
One day a gray squirrel came along on the stone wall beside the
road. In front of the house he crossed an open barway, and then
paused to observe two men at work in full view near the house.
The men were a sculptor, pottering with clay, and his model. The
squirrel sprang up a near-by butternut-tree, sat down on a limb,
and had a good, long look. "Very suspicious," he seemed to think;
"maybe they are fixing a trap for me"; and he deliberately came
down the tree and returned the way he had come, spinning along
the top of the wall, his long, fine tail outlined by a narrow
band of silver as he sped off toward the woods.
VI
WILD LIFE IN WINTER
To many forms of life of our northern lands, winter means a long
sleep; to others it means what it means to many fortunate human
beings--travels in warm climes; to still others, who again have
their human prototypes, it means a struggle, more or less fierce,
to keep soul and body together; while to many insect forms it
means death.
Most of the flies and beetles, wasps and hornets, moths,
butterflies, and bumblebees die. The grasshoppers all die, with
eggs for next season's crop deposited in the ground. Some of the
butterflies winter over. The mourning cloak, the first butterfly
to be seen in spring, has passed the winter in my "Slabsides."
The monarch migrates, probably the only one of our butterflies
that does. It is a great flyer. I have seen it in the fall
sailing serenely along over the inferno of New York streets. It
has crossed the ocean and is spreading over the world. The yellow
and black hornets lose heart as autumn comes on, desert their
paper nests and die--all but the queen or mother hornet; she
hunts out a retreat in the ground and passes the winter beyond
the reach of frost. In the spring she comes forth and begins life
anew, starting a little cone-shaped paper nest, building a few
paper cells, laying an egg in each, and thus starting the new
colony.
The same is true of the bumblebees; they are the creatures of a
summer. In August, when the flowers fail, the colony breaks up,
they desert the nest and pick up a precarious subsistence on
asters and thistles till the frosts of October cut them off. You
may often see, in late September or early October, these tramp
bees passing the night or a cold rain-storm on the lee side of a
thistle-head. The queen bee alone survives. You never see her
playing the vagabond in the fall. At least I never have. She
hunts out a retreat in the ground and passes the winter there,
doubtless in a torpid state, as she stores no food against the
inclement season. Emerson has put this fact into his poem on "The
Humble-Bee":--
"When the fierce northwestern blast
Cools sea and land so far and fast,
Thou already slumberest deep;
Woe and want thou canst outsleep;
Want and woe, which torture us,
Thy sleep makes ridiculous."
In early August of the past year I saw a queen bumblebee quickly
enter a small hole on the edge of the road where there was no
nest. It was probably her winter quarters.
If one could take the cover off the ground in the fields and
woods in winter, or have some magic ointment put upon his eyes
that would enable him to see through opaque substances, how many
curious and interesting forms of life he would behold in the
ground beneath his feet as he took his winter walk--life with the
fires banked, so to speak, and just keeping till spring. He would
see the field crickets in their galleries in the ground in a
dormant state, all their machinery of life brought to a
standstill by the cold. He would see the ants in their hills and
in their tunnels in decaying trees and logs, as inert as the soil
or the wood they inhabit. I have chopped many a handful of the
big black ants out of a log upon my woodpile in winter, stiff,
but not dead, with the frost, and brought them in by the fire to
see their vital forces set going again by the heat. I have
brought in the grubs of borers and the big fat grubs of beetles,
turned out of their winter beds in old logs by my axe and frozen
like ice-cream, and have seen the spark of life rekindle in them
on the hearth.
With this added visual power, one would see the wood frogs and
the hylas in their winter beds but a few inches beneath the moss
and leaf-mould, one here and one there, cold, inert, biding their
time. I dug a wood frog out one December and found him not
frozen, though the soil around him was full of frost; he was
alive but not frisky. A friend of mine once found one in the
woods sitting upon the snow one day in early winter. She carried
him home with her, and he burrowed in the soil of her flower-pot
and came out all right in the spring. What brought him out upon
the snow in December one would like to know.
One would see the tree-frogs in the cavities of old trees,
wrapped in their winter sleep--which is yet not a sleep, but
suspended animation. When the day is warm, or the January thaw
comes, I fancy the little frog feels it and stirs in his bed. One
would see the warty toads squatted in the soil two or three feet
below the surface, in the same way. Probably not till April will
the spell which the winter has put upon them be broken. I have
seen a toad go into the ground in late fall. He literally elbows
his way into it, going down backwards.
Beneath rocks or in cavities at the end of some small hole in the
ground, one would see a ball or tangle of garter snakes, or black
snakes, or copperheads--dozens of individual snakes of that
locality entwined in one many-headed mass, conserving in this
united way their animal heat against the cold of winter. One
spring my neighbor in the woods discovered such a winter retreat
of the copperheads, and, visiting the place many times during the
warm April days, he killed about forty snakes, and since that
slaughter, the copperheads have been at a premium in our
neighborhood.
Here and there, near the fences and along the borders of the
wood, these X-ray eyes would see the chipmunk at the end of his
deep burrow with his store of nuts or grains, sleeping fitfully
but not dormant. The frost does not reach him and his stores are
at hand. One which we dug out in late October had nearly four
quarts of weed-seeds and cherry-pits. He will hardly be out
before March, and then, like his big brother rodent the
woodchuck, and other winter sleepers, his fancy will quickly
"turn to thoughts of love."
One would see the woodchuck asleep in his burrow, snugly rolled
up and living on his own fat. All the hibernating animals that
keep up respiration, must have sustenance of some sort--either a
store of food at hand or a store of fat in their own bodies. The
woodchuck, the bear, the coon, the skunk, the 'possum, lay up a
store of fuel in their own bodies, and they come out in the
spring lean and hungry. The squirrels are lean the year through,
and hence must have a store of food in their dens, as does the
chipmunk, or else be more or less active in their search all
winter, as is the case with the red and gray squirrels. The fox
puts on more or less fat in the fall, because he will need it
before spring. His food-supply is very precarious; he may go many
days without a morsel. I have known him to be so hungry that he
would eat frozen apples and corn which he could not digest. The
hare and the rabbit, on the other hand, do not store up fat
against a time of need; their food-supply of bark and twigs is
constant, no matter how deep the snows. The birds of prey that
pass the winter in the north take on a coat of fat in the fall,
because their food-supply is so uncertain; the coat of fat is
also a protection against the cold.
Of course, all the wild creatures are in better condition in the
fall than in the spring, but in many cases the fat is distinctly
a substitute for food.
The skunk is in his den also from December till February, living
on his own fat. Several of them often occupy the same den and
conserve their animal heat in that way. The coon, also, is in his
den in the rocks for a part of the winter, keeping warm on
home-made fuel. The same is true of the bear in our climate. The
bats are hibernating in the rocks or about buildings. The
muskrats are leading hidden lives in the upper chambers of their
snow-covered houses in the marshes and ponds or in the banks of
streams, feeding on lily-roots and mussels which they get under
the ice.
The lean, bloodthirsty minks and weasels are on the hunt all
winter. Our native mice are also active. That pretty stitching
upon the coverlet of the winter snow in the woods is made by our
white-footed mouse and by the little shrew mouse. The former
often has large stores of nuts hidden in some cavity in a tree;
what supply of food the latter has, if any, I do not know. In the
winter the short-tailed meadow or field mice come out of their
retreat in the ground and beneath stones and lead gay, fearless
lives beneath the snow-drifts. Their little villages, with their
runways and abandoned nests, may be seen when the snow disappears
in the spring. Their winter life beneath the snow, where no
wicked eye or murderous claw can reach them, is in sharp contrast
to their life in summer, when cats and hawks, owls and foxes,
pounce upon them day and night. It is only in times of deep snows
that they bark our fruit-trees.
We have in this latitude but one species of hibernating
mouse--the long-tailed jumping mouse, or kangaroo mouse, as it is
sometimes called from its mode of locomotion. Late one fall,
while making a road near "Slabsides," we dug one out from its
hibernation about two feet below the surface of the ground. It
was like a little ball of fur tied with a string. In my hand it
seemed as cold as if dead. Close scrutiny showed that it breathed
at intervals, very slowly. The embers of life were there, but
slumbering beneath the ashes. I put it in my pocket and went
about my work. After a little time, remembering my mouse, I put
my hand into my pocket and touched something very warm and
lively. The ember had been fanned into a flame, so to speak. I
kept my captive in a cage a day or two and then returned it to
the woods, where I trust it found a safe retreat against the
cold.
VII
BIRD LIFE IN WINTER
The distribution of our birds over the country in summer is like
that of the people, quite uniform. Every wood and field has its
quota, and no place so barren but it has some bird to visit it.
One knows where to look for sparrows and thrushes and bobolinks
and warblers and flycatchers. But the occupation of the country
by our winter residents is like the Indian occupation of the
land. They are found in little bands, a few here and there, with
large tracts quite untenanted.
One may walk for hours through the winter woods and not see or
hear a bird. Then he may come upon a troop of chickadees, with a
nuthatch or two in their wake, and maybe a downy woodpecker.
Birds not of a feather flock together at this inclement season.
The question of food is always an urgent one. Evidently the
nuthatch thinks there must be food where the chickadees flit and
call so cheerily, and the woodpecker is probably drawn to the
nuthatch for a similar reason.
Together they make a pretty thorough search,--fine, finer,
finest. The chickadee explores the twigs and smaller branches;
what he gets is on the surface, and so fine as to be almost
microscopic. The nuthatch explores the trunks and larger branches
of the trees; he goes a little deeper, into crevices of the bark
and under lichens. Then comes Downy, who goes deeper still. He
bores for larger game through the bark, and into the trunks and
branches themselves.
In late fall this band is often joined by the golden-crowned
kinglet and the brown creeper. The kinglet is finer-eyed and
finer-billed than even the chickadee, and no doubt gathers what
the latter overlooks, while the brown creeper, with his long,
slender, curved bill, takes what both the nuthatch and the
woodpecker miss. Working together, it seems as if they must make
a pretty clean sweep. But the trees are numerous and large, and
the birds are few. Only a mere fraction of tree surface is
searched over at any one time. In large forests probably only a
mere fraction of the trees are visited at all.
One cold day in midwinter, when I was walking through the
snowless woods, I saw chickadees, nuthatches, and woodpeckers
upon the ground, and upon roots and fallen branches. They were
looking for the game that had fallen, as a boy looks for apples
under the tree.
The winter wren is so called because he sometimes braves our
northern winters, but it is rarely that one sees him at this
season. I think I have seen him only two or three times in winter
in my life. The event of one long walk, recently, in February,
was seeing one of these birds. As I followed a byroad, beside a
little creek in the edge of a wood, my eye caught a glimpse of a
small brown bird darting under a stone bridge. I thought to
myself no bird but a wren would take refuge under so small a
bridge as that. I stepped down upon it and expected to see the
bird dart out at the upper end. As it did not appear, I
scrutinized the bank of the little run, covered with logs and
brush, a few rods farther up.