wind as it is deflected from the waves, or ride into it, hovering,
then gliding down, is symptomatic of the sailing skill of other birds
that travel far beyond the shore, the aerodynamics of the open sea.
They are masters of the art of air as no plane can ever be. I remember
watching some fulmars in the wake of a ship one wind-tossed day, the
great blue-green waves in rocking fullness shouldered with foam. They
glided between the crests and troughs of the waves with effortless
deliberation, and then lifted, curved away in a wide arc, and returned.
Back and forth, they seemed to tip the waters surface with their wings
and clip the waves, gliding and curving with them, expending no
excess energy at all. I felt them rise on the upward air in my lungs,
my admiration.
In birds you see pure action personified, an endless spontaneity
reacting to the air, the season, the light, and on clear nights the
constellations that may help them find their way. A flock of red-backed
sandpipers or sanderlings, all spinning, wheeling, and sun-reflecting
at once, have an ecstatic dash, a common brightness set going in them
which must carry them a long way. They are long-distance migrants
flitting from one end of the earth, one shore line to the next, and
judging by their actions it is hard to believe that they could ever
rest. Searching for crustaceans or sand worms along the beach, they
run on flickering black legs, bodies tilted forward, flitting, bobbing
in syncopation. When close to the surf they may fly up briefly when it
piles in and then drop down again when it retreats. With their quick,
automatic run, and heads constantly jerking forward and back they seem
to be endowed with an almost comic gift of hurrying.
Suddenly, with a sharp piping cry a sanderling flies off the beach and
then disappears like a gray chip over the water, a tide bird faster
than the tides, where there is no following it. This bird is quick and
sweet, and cleans the earth of too much hesitation.
Of all the birds that visit the beach during fall and winter I take
most delight in the snow buntings. They have such freshness in them,
skimming the cliffs, rushing by like bits of foam. The white in their
plumage is so pure, snow paths between markings of black and cinnamon,
like briers and weed stalks, with suggestions of greenish gray when the
sun shines on them. They are birds of the Arctic tundra, companions
of the musk ox. They fly up suddenly, as they are constantly doing at
the least disturbance, their whiteness dancing up above the beach or
along the faces of the cliffs, and then settle down again, pecking
away, at home in wastes and barren land, the lonely stretches of the
world, these are flowers, snowflakes, foam, fitted to a poverty and its
freedom.
They are seed eaters like sparrows, and may also eat such tiny
creatures as they find along the beach, and they are always flocking
and scattering out from one rise and level to the next. To me, the
fanciful difference between buntings and sparrows, sanderlings, gulls,
horned larks, and many other visitors to seaside lands is their trait
of invisibility. It is not only their whiteness--they look almost
entirely white seen from underneath, appearing and disappearing like
clouds--and a plumage which belongs to the accents of sunlight, grass
stalks, dune shadows, on the bare ground--but their actions. With a
motion reminiscent of the roller-coaster type of flight which the
goldfinches have, flocks of buntings will pour down onto the cliff top
or beach, spread out and then fly up again, with an inner billowing,
a dipping, and rising as they go. Twittering with a note of tinkling
bells in the high air beside the bowling sea, they swing and then burst
in gentle snow flights across the ground, through one opening, one neat
run, one clean escape to another. They turn the invisible into reality.
They have a continual lift, the agitation inherent in all life. They
fly up ahead of me as sparks out of the unseen rest and center of
things.
Another bird of the tundra, a specter from the far north which appears
irregularly over the years during wintertime to hunt for rodents and
occasional birds along the coast is the snowy owl. I remember seeing
a mounted specimen when I was a boy and thinking it was the most
desirable thing on earth to own, and since I never did own one, the
snowy owl stayed intangible and magnificent in my mind; and the first
live one I ever saw did nothing to disabuse me of my impression. They
migrate to beaches, salt marshes, and islands along the coast, choosing
elevations as a rule, hummocks, knolls, or dunes from which they can
survey the surrounding countryside during their hunting season,
watching the man or beach buggy arrive as well as evidence of prey.
The one I saw was way down the south end of North Beach, that stretch
of Nauset beach which ends at the straits separating it from Monomoy.
It was perched on a hummock, and at first was nearly indistinguishable
from the top of a white picket fence buried in sand, or the kind of
white marble marker, rounded at the top, which you might see on a
roadside in Vermont. We were driving toward it in a beach buggy and
when it flew off low with big, soft, bowed wings, its feathers, white
and flecked with gray, took on a blue-ash hue from the winter light
and the uneven shadowy land around it. The great owl lighted calmly
on another hummock further on. It stared straight at us out of fierce
yellow eyes, with inscrutable dignity, and when we turned and came at
it from another direction its head almost swiveled all the way around,
looking at us from over its back. It kept its place in center stage.
Many thousands of eider ducks winter in Cape Cod waters. During
October and November especially they can be seen shuttling back and
forth across the sea beyond the Outer Beach. Some feed, principally
on mussels, in the bay region or off Chatham and along other shallow
shores and inlets, but the majority--an estimated 500,000--spend the
winter over the shoals between Monomoy and Nantucket. Seen close to,
as they fly low over the water, they are as sturdy, clean shaped, and
of good design--the red-brown females, and males patterned in black
and white--as a coastal vessel, a dory, or a skiff. From the beach you
can see them fly over water in single lines, sometimes as much as a
half a mile or more in length, with a steady, throbbing flight, like a
suspended string of beads, alternately white and brown.
By contrast brant fly in longer, thicker lines, and sometimes show up
like shivering black specks high over the sea. Well into December the
gannets pass by over the sea surfaces too, flying singly for the most
part, their broad white backs and long black-tipped wings reflecting
the sunlight as they turn, to dive in their grand manner down, from
fifty feet or more in the air, hard and bold into the water, sending up
jets of spray.
Clutching at any aspect of nature is to seize a drop of water in your
hand. Ebb and flow passes the great beach, the eternally wide ebb and
flow of day and night passes the cliff tops, all earth’s shadows wave
across its seas, and yet this is the precise route of the birds, their
direction and their home. They know its guidelines inwardly. For us,
who put so much emphasis on outward instruments, this can be almost
impossible to understand.
Still, we can exaggerate the division between us. We are all at home
together, however we use the stars and seasons in our separate ways.
Men are as subject to mortality as birds, even though the latter can’t
dwell upon it. They in turn are vulnerable to chance, to disease,
to going astray and meeting with mishaps when confronted by the
freakishness and violence of the weather. Many a duck or sea bird,
caught on a lee shore or in a marshy inlet during a great storm may
be unable to rise into the wind and is exhausted or swept away and
seriously injured while trying. Life and death, joy and disaster, go
wing to wing. Birds have less capacity to deceive themselves than we,
being unable to avoid the perils of nature and at the same time its
protective power.
I had similar thoughts in mind one day in November during a violent
coastal storm while watching some gulls, ringed-bill and herring,
together with a few shore birds, that were gathered at the head of an
inlet along a relatively sheltered part of the Bay. The Outer Beach
was of a violence that day which could hardly be approached, either on
foot or in contemplation. Even here the storm winds were relentless,
hard and cold, flicking and driving the sands along the shore, whipping
the marsh waters behind it into a froth. Sanderlings made short, low,
flying hops back and forth, but were unable to do their usual free
hurrying and basket-swinging flights along the shore. The gulls stood
in shallow water facing the wind, water that was being whipped and
lashed, and sometimes they would drop down sideways a little before the
wind’s force, thrown slightly off balance, acting like a man who has
been cut across the face. Taking to the air just above the ground they
would find difficulty in maneuvering and were forced back, sometimes
fifty feet or more, to continue standing where they dropped back to the
ground; but even in this they showed a certain supple power, a control
aware of its limits, the sinewy economy of wings lifted in the wind,
the plain sky beauty of feathers gray and white. The storm was ending,
although the water was still being whiplashed into foam. The light was
very cold and the sky line was heaped with sunset fires.
Surely everything, everywhere, was vulnerable, and yet it was that bird
closeness to such primal powers as might seem to us bitter, alien, and
cruel--the gods of the north, of the waters and the winds--that gave
them an essential balance, a rightful place. That great sky of theirs
was unexplored. It came down to me that regardless of what he learns,
there is so much for a man to go on asking.
What can birds tell you, other than displaying those traits of
aggression, or fear, or mutual attraction, which we may recognize
when observing their behavior? We have a little fear in ourselves,
when looking on, that we may go too far in mixing up our own traits
and terms with theirs; but each will manage to keep his territory,
untransgressed by the other, and each takes part in the high order of
nature. Watching the birds, I have seen ceremony, ritual, love-making,
display, all worthy of admiration by the most glittering of human
cultures. The speech of men and the speech of birds do not divide us
altogether. In silence is unity.
Perhaps the most eloquent thing about birds is that which we will
probably never learn to decipher. In his study of puffins, R. M.
Lockeley refers to their “subtle, silent-gesture language.” That
language is part of a still more silent order, the dark realm of
existence where all their actions and necessities have their play.
Approach with patience and with care.
One day I had walked for several miles along the cliffs toward Eastham,
through thickets of scrub oak, and bayberry that smelled very pungently
in the fall of the year. The sky was full of shifting winds and the day
as I walked full of weather changes, from an edge of cold to warmth
and back again. An early sun began to be covered by pale-gray clouds
and there was a mauve light over the sea. I caught sight of a little
wren along the way, and there was a number of sparrows, both seen and
heard--song, chipping, seaside, and probably others. It was a low,
shifting thicket world full of potential surprise, bordered by oceanic
sound, rocking with light and air.
I retraced my steps a few hours later over a narrow sandy road, at
times no more than a track, and I saw a pigeon hawk flying off ahead
of me, stroking deliberately and quickly with its long wings. Then I
noticed another one roosting on a broken-off tree several hundred feet
back of the cliff just outside a wood of pitch pines. The first one
made off in that direction too, roosting not far from its companion on
a dead stump, and they both stayed absolutely still, like falcons on
an Egyptian frieze. I could hear a blue jay screaming somewhere in the
background.
I noticed feathers scattered on the path, gray and blue, blowing ahead
of me; and then, there it was, a blue jay freshly killed, its breast
bare of feathers and shining red like some rock wet with sea splash
in the crimson path of the setting sun. What kind of a game led up to
this? Could the two hawks, one tempting the jay by its distance, the
other scaring it by its proximity, have managed to send it out into the
open where it had no chance against their swift and effortless pursuit?
I walked ahead for a short distance and then waited, watching through
field glasses for the hawks to come back. The nearest one did, after a
few minutes, beating down tentatively over the kill, then rising again
and leaving with its supple flight. The other had moved a little closer
and roosted on an abandoned telephone pole, full of an ancient poise,
wonderfully still. After that, I am sure, they never went back to the
road until I had gone for good. The grace and tension, the space in
that formal scene stayed with me for a long time.
XIV
The Marsh
The Outer Beach is broken only at Nauset Inlet, where the tidal waters
pour through an opening that has frequently changed its width and
position, and at Chatham. The Chatham break leads in to the wide area
of Chatham Harbor and Pleasant Bay. In both places, but more especially
at Nauset, where the marshes and the inland shore behind them are
protected by the beach and a sandspit some two and three-quarter
miles in length, an unstable, but at the same time fairly constant
equilibrium is attained between sea and land. It does not seem obvious
that this should be so at all. The sandspit looks only too narrow and
fragile, and at intervals it does show evidence that the sea has broken
through. Driftwood logs lie on the cuts made between its hummocks,
headed as they were when the sea subsided, after it had lifted them in
toward the marsh.
Except for the great volume of the beach itself, which is maintained
in collaboration with the forces of the sea, it is hard at first to
understand why the marsh should not be inundated. Why does that lord
the sea not heave in and overwhelm this sandy barrier, flooding over
the marshy flats and islands, and wash up permanently against the
inland shore?
The shoulders of the low cedar-studded land slope down to the edge
of the marsh with a neat, trimmed look and neat houses, seemingly
confident of being in residence indefinitely, although I have heard
people who live there talking in ways that suggested they were not
sure of it. Once see those stormy waters heaving and rushing over the
sandspit and you cannot be sure of anything. Looking out at the sea,
even from a fairly safe distance, you can find eternal balance and
at the same time inundation and disaster. Now that the Outer Beach
stretches past the miles of cliffs and is no longer backed up by them,
becoming an outlying stretch of sand, its own “protective” power
might seem much less clear. On the other hand, when was this beach in
anything but a state of flux and change? There is protection in that,
even if it is hard to define. The fact is that the relationship between
the sea, the beach, and the sandspit, the marsh and inland shore, has
been maintained for ages in the past and probably ages to come. In
general the volume of sand that is packed along the shore balances what
is removed from it, but only in general, for the time being, because
erosion takes place consistently over the years and during its course
more sand is removed than delivered. Also a standing equilibrium
is kept between this deposition and taking away of sand and the
conditions offshore: the currents, drift, wave height and direction,
the changing shoals and bars. All these states and forces are involved
in an extremely complex kind of order, and it is certainly broken
and rearranged all the time. A season may show it, or the records of
history. In fact, changes occur from day to day.
When the young explorer Champlain visited the Cape in 1605 he sailed
into Nauset Harbor, and at that time, judging by old records, the inlet
was about halfway down the sandspit behind the beach. Since then it
apparently has moved about a mile south, but its entrances have changed
now and then, with long periods of relative stability in between, which
might be broken at any time and then followed by some new arrangement
of forces.
In his _Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States_,
Edward Howe Forbush pointed out that this long protective spit, or
“beach ridge” extending from Nauset to Monomoy had been pushed back
a considerable distance, perhaps a mile, since the early seventeenth
century. It used to lie far to the eastward, judging by early charts,
of where it is now, and took the form of a long narrow island some
twelve miles in length “with several small islands north of it and
outlets to the ocean at either end--the northern one at Eastham and
the southern lying between the end of this beach ridge and the Chatham
shore.”
“In 1854 during the great storm that wrecked the lighthouse on Minot’s
Ledge, the sea broke through the barrier into Orleans water at Nauset,
and afterwards much of Nauset Harbor near the entrance filled partially
with shifting sands.”
The recent Woods Hole beach studies report that: “The spits literally
broke into pieces and the inlet itself became quite complex in 1957.
Nauset Inlet has done this before. A study of coastal charts shows that
Nauset Inlet opened hard against the cliffs on the south side from
1856 (the first good chart available to us) until 1940. Charts of 1941
show that in a single year a spit grew from south to north against the
littoral drift and shifted the inlet a mile to the north.”
For some length of time, the storms of 1956 and 1957 resulted in two
entrances along the spit, one of which closed up subsequently. Other
temporary break-throughs can be seen along the spit, varying from 150
feet to a few yards across, extending down its length until it joins
a broad, high stretch--almost a long mount--of sand which ends at the
present inlet, with North Beach on the other side. This sand is subject
to storm flooding and to winds, to being removed and added to, recut
and carved by the waves, and except on the marsh edge of it, beach
grass is not able to gain a foothold. In recent years four or five
hundred pairs of terns have nested there, and are protected.
The volume of this sand is immense. It shelves down steeply toward
the water where it becomes part of the beach; and where the channel of
the inlet curves in, the ends of the beach on both sides keep changing
their lengths and relative position. The sea builds high shoals off and
around the incoming tidal channel during one season and it may level at
least parts of them off in another. During the summer of 1962 the ribs
and bottom of a boat at least thirty feet long was revealed on one bank
of the inlet at its mouth, and could be seen for months; but by the
winter of 1962-63 it had completely disappeared. A sandbank lay over it
which was at least five or six feet higher than sea level.
Aerial photographs taken when the spit broke up in 1957, and afterwards
in 1958, show a very elaborate and confusing pattern. Shoals and
separate spits began to drift, to join and separate, shift and
intermingle in curling, curving folds, an interwaving and repositioning
of sand materials that would seem to have no parallel in nature.
The Nauset Inlet is being driven into the marsh behind it at an average
rate of about 2.8 feet a year, except in years of extreme erosion.
This figure is about the same as that of the cliffs, and on the whole
it is probably somewhat less here than there, although the marsh area
is being very gradually diminished in extent. Its wide channels and
bays, its marshy edges, islands, and flats, are held in the balance of
great forces sweeping along the shore, or occasionally breaking through
in violence. Although it absorbs and releases the tidal waters with
ancient calm, it seems wide out, subject to the sea and a part of the
complex, barely understood forces that build and break along the shore.
The marsh is a refuge for ducks and geese, and gunners for centuries
have waited there for the “whistlers,” or goldeneyes, and the black
ducks to whir, swing in, and careen overhead under the wide light of
dawn while the cold wind ruffled the open water and stirred the matted
grass. Like the tides that flood in and fall, like the marsh grasses
that grow and wave, then die down and take on their matted winter
look, or the marine animals that swim in through the tidal channel and
go out again to sea, it is a place of flight and motion. The local
animals, crabs, clams, mussels, snails, the salt-water minnows in the
ditches, the marsh snails, and numerous others, must go through their
cycles of growth and death and decay here, the building of interlife
relationships, but the over-all feeling that I have had about the
marsh is a certain bare economy, as though it was more obligated to
migrant forces, to flooding in and flooding out, then to any enclosed
stability of its own. In a way it has the wide, flat isolated look of
the more sheltered and extensive marshes on the Bay shore, but it is an
isolation bound to the open waters of the sea which run through it and
sometimes threaten its borders.
After their green summer and early golden fall, the marsh plants and
grasses darken. In November the marshes are still russet, umber, and
yellow green, but by January they are dark brown with reddish tawny
tones in matted grasses having the coarse texture of a deer’s coat.
The saltwort plants, so fresh and green and full of salt juices in the
summer, have turned dry and white, curled over at their tips so that
they have the look of singed wool.
When you walk behind the sandspit the marsh flats seem to stretch far
off toward the shore and the channels between them are partly hidden.
Nauset from the landward side, on the other hand, looks as if it were
mostly composed of water, especially at high tide. It is both a good
country for low-grass lovers like sparrows and those that ride its
watery lanes and lakes like ducks and geese.
Low-flying, drab little seaside sparrows fly up off the grass for
short distances and then disappear again. Occasionally I have flushed
a meadowlark that planed up over the marsh. Horned larks peck in the
dunes, tripping forward with a stamping motion of their legs, and then
stop, to stand with a backward slant to their bodies. They fly up
suddenly with shrill lisping cries; and all the while the deep quacking
of black ducks sounds from far out in the middle of the marsh. There
are always gulls, far or near, with their slow gliders’ fall and rise
on the wind. The great blackbacks fly heavily overhead, sometimes
wheeling in circles over the inlet with a muted baying, or hoarse,
guttural calls; and with their necks and heads stretched way out and
their wide-spread wings they might be mistaken for gannets.
Red-breasted mergansers come in from the sea with their thin heads and
bills straight forward so that in flight they become throbbing arrows
sent from a bow. One evening I stood in the hummocks of the spit facing
the marsh while flock after flock of Canada geese flew in overhead,
bugling as they came, close enough so that I could hear the fine high
whistling of their wings, and even a rattle and rasp of air through
their feathers. Low-flying planes often start them up as they feed in
the marsh, along with the wary black ducks, whose cloudlike flocks
stray back and forth for a while before they settle down again. A black
duck’s wings show white underneath and they seem to spin as it flies up
high and fast and changes direction, like a weathervane.