the full length of the line, describes a circle in high heaven, of
which the fisherman’s feet are the center, and drops in the grass, while
the fisherman, in marvelous defiance of all laws of gravity, brings his
two hundred and fifty pounds back to an upright position without losing
his footing. Golf may be all very well, but it does not equal this.
Small blame to the fisherman if he poises a moment like Ajax defying the
lightning.
Now, the boys have their innings. Somewhere in classic literature the
Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold. So the boys upon the eel
that flops mightily and wriggles in vain in the tall grass. He is dumped
in the deep basket; and hardly is he there before the fisherman has
swung another in that mighty circle. An eel is very canny, and often
escapes a hook even when well on. I never knew one to get away from a
bob. Sometimes the half-bushel basket would go back home nearly full of
them. And as for their size, I do not wish to say, except that no small
ones seem to bite at a bob. In that I will quote from Izaak Walton, who,
after giving excellent directions for dressing and cooking an eel, says:
“When I go to dress an Eel thus I wish he were as long and as big as
that which was caught in Peterborough River in the year 1667, which was
a yard and three-quarters long.” To which I can but add that I defy old
England to produce any bigger eels than we have in New England.
THE VANISHING NIGHT HERONS
It is a long time since I have set eyes, in broad daylight, upon the
black-crowned night heron, often known as “quawk,” and otherwise
derisively named by the impuritans. The scientists have also, it seems
to me, joined in this derision, for they have dubbed him _Nycticorax
nycticorax nævius_, which is a libel on his language. At any rate, it
sounds like it. The roots are evidently the same.
Yesterday, however, in broad daylight, I saw two pair sailing down out
of the sunlit sky to light on a tree by the border of the pond. Very
white they looked in the glare of day, and I wondered at first if four
snowy egrets had not escaped the plume hunters after all and fled north
for safety. Probably I shall never see snowy egrets again, though they
used to stray north as far as this on occasions. Now, even the night
heron, which used to nest hereabout in colonies of hundreds, is rarely
seen.
I suppose if bird species must become, one by one, extinct, we can as
well afford to lose the night heron as any. He is not a particularly
beautiful bird in appearance, though these four seemed handsome enough
as they sailed grandly down into the trees on the pond border. His voice
is unmelodious. Quawk is only a convenient handle for his one word. It
should rather be made up of the roughest consonants in the language,
thrown together with raucous vigor. It sounds more like “hwxzvck!” shot
into the mud out of a damp cloud. The voices of night herons, sailing
in companies over the marshes and ponds used to sound like echoes of a
convocation of witches, falling through damp gloom as broomstick flights
went over. Shakespeare named a witch Sycorax. He may have been making
game of herons.
To-day, having seen these four, I went down to the places which used to
be the old-time haunts of night herons, and looked carefully but in vain
for traces of their presence. It is their nesting time. There should be
eggs about to hatch, or young about to make prodigious and ungainly
growth in singularly flimsy nests that let you see the blue of the eggs
faintly visible through the loosely crossed twigs against the blue of
the sky. These I did not find, and the big cedars which used to be so
populous were lonely enough.
Once there would be a nest in every tree, two-thirds of the way up, and
a big heron sitting on guard at the top of the tree, or astride the
eggs on the nest itself. How the long legged mother bird could sit on
this loose nest and not resolve it into its component parts and drop the
two-inch long eggs to destruction on the peat-moss beneath is still a
mystery to me. But she could do it, and the young after they were
hatched did it, sometimes six of them, and the nests remained after they
were gone, in proof of it. Most birds’ nests are marvels of
construction; the black-crowned night heron’s seems a marvel of lack of
it, but I think few of us could make so ill a nest so well.
The night heron’s day begins at dusk and ends, as a rule, at daylight.
His eyes have all the night-seeing ability of those of the owl, and he
finds his way through fog and darkness, and his food as well. Yet the
bird seems to see well enough by day. The four that sailed down to the
pond yesterday in the full glare of the afternoon sun had no hesitation
about their flight. They swung the corner of the wood and lighted on
limbs of the trees with as much directness and certainty as a hawk
might. Indeed, when their voracious young are growing up they have to
fish night and day. It seems to me that fish must be becoming more
plentiful now that the black-crowned night herons are few in number, for
a single bird must consume yearly an enormous quantity.
I undertook the care and feeding of two once that I had taken from one
of those impossible nests. They were the most solemnly ridiculous young
creatures that were ever made. “Man,” says Plato, “is a featherless
biped.” So were these youthful night herons. They were pretty nearly as
naked as truth and might have passed for caricatures of the Puritan
conscience, for they were so erect they nearly fell over backward.
They would not stay in any nest made for them, but preferred to inhabit
the earth, usually just round the corner of something, whence they poked
weird heads with staring eyes that discountenanced all creatures that
they met. The family cat, notoriously fond of chicken, stalked them a
bit the first day that they occupied the yard. At the psychological
moment, when _Felis domesticatus_ was crouching, green eyed, for a
spring, the two gravely rose and faced her. She took one look at those
pods of bodies on stilts, those strange heads stretched high above on
attenuated necks, and faced the wooden severity of their stare for but a
second. Then she gave forth a yowl of terror and fled to her favorite
refuge beneath the barn, whence she was not known to emerge for a space
of twenty-four hours.
There was something so solemn, so “pokerish,” so preternaturally
dignified about these creatures that they seemed to be out of another,
eerier, world. If we ever get so advanced as to travel from planet to
planet I shall expect to find things like them peering round corners at
me on some of the out-of-the-way satellites, the moons of Neptune, for
instance.
Most young birds will eat what you bring them and clamor for more until
they are full. These young herons yawned at my approach as solemnly as
if they were made of wood and worked by the pulling of a string. Never a
sound did I know them to make during their brief stay with me, but they
would stand motionless and silent and gape unwinkingly till a piece of
fish was dropped within the yawn. Then it would close deliberately and
reopen, the fish having vanished. Fish were plentiful that year and so
seemed to be time and bait, and I became curious as to the actual
capacity of a growing night heron. I could feed either one till I could
see the last piece still in the back of his mouth because there was
standing room only. Yet if I went away but for a moment and came back,
there they stood, as prodigiously empty as ever. The thing became
interesting until I began to discover assorted piles of uneaten fish
about the yard, and watching soon showed what was happening.
Foot passengers out in the country have a motto which says, “never
refuse a ride; if you do not want it now you may need it next time.”
This seemed to be the idea which worked sap-wise in the cambium layers
of these wooden young scions of the family _Nycticorax nycticorax
nævius_. They never refused a fish. As long as I stood by, their beaks,
having closed as well as possible on the very last piece required to
stuff them to the tip, would remain closed. After they thought I had
gone away they would stalk gravely round a corner, look over the
shoulder with an innocence which was peculiarly blear-eyed, then,
believing the coast clear, yawn the whole feeding into obscurity in the
tall grass. Then they would stalk meditatively forth with hands clasped
behind the back, so to speak, and gape for some more.
This was positively the only thing they did except to wait patiently for
a chance to do it again, and I soon tired of them and took them back to
the rookery, where they were received and, so far as I could see, taken
care of, either by their own parents or as orphans at the public
expense. It all seemed a matter of supreme indifference to these
moon-hoax chicks. There is much controversy as to whether animals act
from reason or from instinct. I am convinced that these young night
herons contained spiral springs and basswood wheels and that thence came
their actions. Probably had I looked them over carefully enough I should
have found them inscribed with the motto, “Made in Switzerland.”
I fancy many people confound the night heron, known to them only by his
wildwitch cry, voiced as he flies over their canoe in the summer dusk,
with the great blue heron, which is nearly twice as big a bird. Perhaps
I would better say twice as long, in speaking of herons, for bigness has
little to do with them. I well remember my amazement as a small boy,
coming out of the woods onto the shore of the pond with a big
muzzle-loading army musket under my arm--my first hunting
expedition--and scaring up a great blue heron.
I had been reading the “Arabian Nights,” and knew that the roc was a
great bird that darkened the sun and carried off elephants in his
talons. Very well, here was the very bird in full flight before me,
darkening the entire cove with his wings. Es-Sindibad of the Sea might
be tied to the leg of this one for aught I knew. Mechanically the old
musket came to my shoulder and roared, and when I had picked myself up
and collected the musket and my senses, there lay the bird on the beach,
dead. But he was still an “Arabian Nights’” sort of a bird for one of
his dimensions had vanished, his bulk. He was all bill, neck, legs, and
feathers, the wonder being how so small a body could sustain such a
spread.
The great blue heron, in spite of his slenderness, which you can
interpret as grace or awkwardness, as you will, is a beautiful bird and
a welcome addition to the pond shore, the sheltered cove or the
sheltered brookside pool which he frequents. If you will come very
softly to his accustomed stand you may have a chance to see him sit,
erect and motionless, the personification of dignity and vigilance. The
very crown of his head is white, but you are more apt to notice the
black feathers which border it and draw together behind into a crest
which gives a thought of reserved alertness to his motionless pose.
The general impression of his coloring is that of a slaty gray, this
melting into brownish on his neck and being prettily
[Illustration: The wings arch in similar curves and lift him seemingly a
rod in air]
touched with rufous and black on other parts of the body. It is a
pleasure to watch his graven-image pose, but it is an even greater one
to see him take flight. His long legs bend under him, and he springs
forward into the air in a mighty parabola. The wings arch in similar
curves and lift him with the very first stroke seemingly a rod in air,
and as they arch forward for the second the long outstretched neck draws
back and the long legs trail in very faithful reproduction of the
ornamentation on a Japanese screen. You hardly feel that here is a
living creature, flying away from fear of you. It is rather as if a
skillful decorator had magically painted the great bird in on the drop
scene in front of you. But the flight of the great blue heron is strong
if his body is small in comparison with his other dimensions, and he
rapidly rises in the majesty of power and flaps out of sight over the
tree tops.
The great blue heron is not rare, but I think he, too, is much less
common than he used to be. Usually he does not summer with us, going
farther north, where he nests in colonies. I seem to find him most often
in late September or October, when he drops off for a few weeks, a
pleasant fishing trip interlude in his flight to winter quarters in the
south. But he is here now, and may be met with on most any May morning
if you will seek out his haunts.
Fully as common but by no means so noticeable is our little green heron,
the third species of the genus that one is apt to see hereabouts. You
will usually pass him unnoticed as he sits all day long in the shadow on
a limb near the shore. Nor will you be apt to see him until he becomes
convinced that you are about to approach too near. Then, with a little
frightened croak, that is more like a squeak, as if his hinges were
rusty, he springs into the air, flutters along shore a few rods and
disappears into the woods again.
The thought of this little fellow always brings to my mind the silent
drowse and quivering heat of August afternoons along a drought-dwindled
brook where cardinal flowers lift crimson plumes on the margin of the
still remaining pools. Here where deciduous trees shade the winding
reaches he loves to sit and wait for the cool of evening before dropping
to the margin and hunting his supper.
I always suspect him of being asleep there with his glossy black head
thrust under his green wing. That would give him an excuse for being
surprised at close quarters and account for his vast alarm when he does
see you. If not I think he would slip quietly away before you got too
near as so many birds do that see you in the woods before you see them.
But perhaps not; perhaps he trusts to luck and hopes till the very last
that you will pass on and leave him to watch his game preserves in peace
and decide which fishes and frogs he will find most appetizing. The
little green heron is a solitary bird, a very recluse in fact, and I do
not recall ever seeing two together. He is a nervous chap, after you
have once flushed him, however, and if you watch his flight with care
you may see him light, stretch his head high to see if you are following
him, meanwhile nervously twitching his apology for a tail.
HARBINGERS OF SUMMER
Out of the violet dusk of some June dawn you will see the summer coming
over the hills from the south and you will know her from the spring at
sight. I do not know how. I doubt if the whip-poor-will, who has a
jealous eye on the dawn and its signs, for its first appearance means
bedtime and surcease from labor for him, knows. Yet he feels her
presence, for he waits it as a sign to select the spot for his nest.
The whip-poor-will is hardly a home builder. He just occupies a flat for
the summer, a place that seems no more fit for a home than any other
flat. Just as I often wonder how apartment-house dwellers find their way
back at dinner-time, in spite of the bewildering sameness of the
surroundings, so it seems to me quite miraculous that the whip-poor-will
can find the way back to the eggs or young at daybreak. Nest there is
none. It is simply a spot picked, seemingly, at random, on the brown
last year’s leaves, or the bare rock of the pasture.
But the whip-poor-will has been here since early May, and till now has
not offered to take an apartment. Yesterday, without doubt, he saw the
summer coming and picked his site. By to-morrow or next day you might
find the two eggs there--if you are a wizard. It takes such to find a
whip-poor-will’s eggs. You might look at them and never see them, so
well do they match the ground on which they lie,--more like pebbles than
anything else, with their dull white obscurely marked with lilac and
brownish-gray spots. I sometimes think the mother bird herself fails to
find them and that may be one reason why whip-poor-wills do not seem to
increase in numbers.
Like the whip-poor-will the scarlet tanager waits sight of the coming of
summer before he begins his nest. It is odd that the two should have
even this habit in common, for otherwise they are far apart. The tanager
is essentially a bird of the daylight, his very colors born of the sun.
I rarely hear him or see his scarlet flame until the sunlight is on his
tree top to make him seem all the more vivid. Then as the day waxes, and
the robins one by one cease their singing, he takes up their song and
continues it, often until the robins return to the choir as the
afternoon shadows lengthen. The tanager’s song is singularly like that
of the robin, only more leisurely and refined. After you have become
familiar with it you begin to feel that the robin is a very huckster of
a soloist.
“Kill ’im, cure ’im, give ’im physic,” is what the early settlers
thought the robin sang to them. It always seems to me as if he sang,
“Cherries; berries; strawberries. Buy a box; buy a box.” You might
translate the scarlet tanager’s song into either set of words but you
would not. Instead, you would ponder long to find a phrase whose gentle
refinement should express just the quality of it. Then I think you would
give it up, as I always do, content to feel its pure serenity, which is
quite beyond words.
The tanager is just about beginning the weaving of his home, which is as
gentle and refined in structure as his song. You may see through it if
you get just the right position from below, yet it is well built and
strong, woven of slender selected twigs and tendrils, a delicate cup,
just big enough to hold the three or four eggs of tender blue with their
rufous-brown markings, and the olive-green mother bird. The tanager’s
life is as open as the day, and as he watches southward from his pine
tree top you may well mark the coming of summer by the beginning of that
nest well out on a lower pine bough.
And if you are not fortunate enough to have a tanager in your pine grove
you might well take the time from another bird, as different from the
scarlet flame of the tree top as the tanager is from the whip-poor-will;
that is the wood pewee. As the whip-poor-will loves the darkness and the
tanager the bright sun of the topmost boughs of the grove, so the wood
pewee loves the resinous depths of the pines, where in the hot twilight
of a summer midday he pipes his cheerful little three-note song. Like
the cicada, he seems to sing best when it is hottest, and the thought of
his song inevitably brings to mind the drone of the summer-loving
insect, the prattle of the brook at the foot of the hill, and the lazy
dappling of the sunlight as it falls perpendicularly to the feathery
fronds of the cinnamon ferns far below.
He who would find humming birds’ nests would do well to first take a
course in hunting those of the wood pewee. The two seem to have the same
type of mind when it comes to nest-building, though the wood pewee’s is
five times the size of the other and proportionally easy to find. Each
saddles his nest on a limb and covers it outside with gray lichens from
the trees nearby, so that from below it looks like merely a
lichen-covered knot. As the wood pewee loves to sing his song in the
shadows of the upper levels of the deep pine wood, so he loves to look
down as he sings upon his nest on a limb below, usually twenty or more
feet from the ground.
Such humming birds’ nests as I have found have been made of fern wool or
the pappus of the blooms of dandelions or other compositæ just compacted
together and lichen-covered. The wood pewee builds of moss and fine
fiber, grass and rootlets, using the lichen covering for the outside, as
does the humming bird. It is a beautiful nest, a rustic home which
perfectly fits the dead pine limb on which you often find it, and its
surroundings, a nest as rustic as the grove and the bird.
These two, the tanager and the wood pewee, I know are already picking
the limbs for their nests and having an eye out for available material,
for I know that they have had the first word that summer is here. I got
it myself from the southerly slope of Blue Hill, a spot to which I like
to climb as the lookout goes to the cross-trees, whence the southerly
outlook is far and you may sight the sails of spring or summer while yet
they are hull down below the horizon of the season.
All creatures love to climb. Here along the rocky path the young
gerardias have found a foothold, and put forth strange sinuate or
pinnatifid leaves that puzzle you to identify them until you note the
last year’s stalks and seed-pods, now empty but persistent. Exuberance
and young life often take frolicsome ways of expending their vitality.
When the gerardias are two months older, and have settled down to the
growing of those wonderful yellow bells which fill the woodland with
golden delight, their stem leaves will lose all this riot of outline and
coloration and settle down to plain, smooth-edged green. The blossoms
may need a foil, but will brook no rival on their own stem.
The path that I take to my southerly looking masthead soon leaves the
gerardias behind. They need alluvium and a certain fertility and
moisture, and the crevices of the rock are not for them. There as I
climb among the cedars I pass the withered stalks of the saxifrage that
a month ago made the crevices white. Now only an occasional belated
blossom, scraggly and worn as if with dissipation, seems hastening to
reach oblivion with its fellows.
But the wild columbine still holds horns of honey plenty for the sipping
of moth and butterfly, whose proboscides are long enough to reach the
ultimate tip where it is stored. You may have a mouthful of honey if
you will bite off the tiny bulbs at the very ends of these
cornucopias,--a honey that has a fragrant sweetness that is unsurpassed
in flavor. Nor are the bees behind you in knowledge. They may not reach
the honey through the mouth of the horn, but they, too, can bite, and
many a flower shows it, now that their season is passing. Their coral
red and yellow glows with a rich radiance in the dusk under the cedars,
and they have climbed far higher than the gerardias.
With the columbine, right up onto the very ledges themselves, have come
the barberry bushes. They must have seen the summer coming, and they
were the first to pass the hint on to me, for they have hung themselves
with all the gold in their jewel boxes, pendant racemes of exquisite
jewel work everywhere, their sprays of tender green grouping and
swaying in the wind, nodding and smiling, decked with earrings,
brooches, bracelets, and beads, all cunningly wrought of solid gold.
Barberry bushes love the rough pasture and even these rougher rocks, yet
they bring to them only grace and elegance and refinement, and receive
no hint of uncouthness or barbarity from their surroundings.
These and a score of other herbs and shrubs clamber blithely upward and
clothe the rocky hillside with beauty, but the queen of the place is the
flowering dogwood. No other shrub has such airy blitheness of decorative
beauty. There is something about the set of the leaves that suggests
green-clad sprites about to dance for joy, but now every dainty branch
is as if thronged with white butterflies, poising for flight. No other
plant shows such a spirituality of delight as this now that it knows
that the summer is here. On the plain below the poplars shimmer and
quiver translucent green in the ecstasy of young leaves all tremulous
with happiness and the tingle of surgent sap. Yet neither tree nor shrub
nor any flowering herb seems to so stand on tiptoe for a flight into the
blue heaven above, blossom and leaf and branch and trunk, as does this
dainty delight of the shady hillside, the flowering dogwood.
The summer does not explode as does the spring. The spring promises and
delays, approaches and withdraws, coquettes until we are in despair,
then suddenly swoops upon us and smothers in the delight of her full
presence. But the summer comes genially and graciously forward,
announced by a thousand heralds. To-day you could not find on hillside
or in lowland a spot that did not glow with the fact. On a bare ledge,
where the gnarled cedars have held the rim of the hill all winter long
against the gales and zero weather, I thought I might find a pause in
the universal story. Here should be only gray rock and a rim of brown
cedars, as much the furniture of winter as of summer. But I had
forgotten the outlook.