THE BUZZARD OF THE BEAR SWAMP
No, I do not believe that any one of you ever went into a swamp to
find a turkey buzzard’s nest. Still, if you had been born on the edge
of a great swamp, as I was, and if the great-winged buzzards had been
soaring, soaring up in your sky, as all through my boyhood they were
soaring up in mine, then why should you not have gone some time into
the swamp to see where they make their nests--these strange
cloud-winged creatures?
Boys are boys, and girls are girls, the world over; and I am pretty
sure that little Jack Horner and myself were not the only two boys in
all the world to do great and wonderful deeds. Any boy with a love for
birds and a longing for the deep woods, living close to the edge of
the Bear Swamp, would have searched out that buzzard’s nest.
Although I was born within the shadows of the Bear Swamp, close enough
to smell the magnolias along its margin, and lived my first ten years
only a little farther off, yet it was not until after twice ten years
of absence that I stood again within sight of it, ready for the first
time to cross its dark borders and find the buzzard’s nest.
Now here at last I found myself, looking down over the largest, least
trod, deepest-tangled swamp in southern New Jersey--wide, gloomy,
silent, and to me,--for I still thought of it as I used to when a
child,--to me, a mysterious realm of black streams, hollow trees,
animal trails, and haunting shapes, presided over by this great bird,
the turkey buzzard.
For he was never mere bird to me, but some kind of spirit. He stood to
me for what was far off, mysterious, secret, and unapproachable in the
deep, dark swamp; and, in the sky, so wide were his wings, so majestic
the sweep of his flight, he had always stirred me, caused me to hold
my breath and wish myself to fly.
No other bird did I so much miss from my New England skies when I came
here to live. Only the other day, standing in the heart of Boston, I
glanced up and saw, sailing at a far height against the billowy
clouds, an aeroplane; and what should I think of but the flight of the
vulture, so like the steady wings of the great bird seemed the steady
wings of this great monoplane far off against the sky.
And so you begin to understand why I had come back after so many years
to the swamp, and why I wanted to see the nest of this strange bird
that had been flying, flying forever in my imagination and in my sky.
But my good uncle, whom I was visiting, when I mentioned my quest,
merely exclaimed, “What in thunderation!”
You will find a good many uncles and other folk who won’t understand a
good many things that you want to do. Never mind. If you want to see a
buzzard’s nest, let all your relations exclaim while you go quietly
off alone and see it.
I wanted to find a buzzard’s nest--the nest of the Bear Swamp buzzard;
and here at last I stood; and yonder on the clouds, a mere mote in the
distance, floated the bird. It was coming toward me over the wide
reach of the swamp.
Silent, inscrutable, and alien lay the swamp, and untouched by human
hands. Over it spread a quiet and reserve as real as twilight. Like a
mask it was worn, and was slipped on, I know, at my approach. I could
feel the silent spirit of the place drawing back away from me. But I
should have at least a guide to lead me through the shadow land, for
out of the lower living green towered a line of limbless stubs, like a
line of telegraph-poles, their bleached bones gleaming white, or
showing dark and gaunt against the horizon, and marking for me a path
far out across the swamp. Besides, here came the buzzard winding
slowly down the clouds. Soon its spiral changed to a long
pendulum-swing, till just above the skeleton trees the great bird
wheeled and, bracing itself with its flapping wings, dropped heavily
upon one of the headless tree-trunks.
It had come leisurely, yet I could see that it had come with a
directness and purpose that was unmistakable and also meaningful. It
had discovered me in the distance, and, while still invisible to my
eyes, had started down to perch upon that giant stub in order to watch
me. It was suspicious, and had come to watch me, because somewhere
beneath its perch, I felt sure, lay a hollow log, the creature’s den,
holding its two eggs or its young. A buzzard has something like a
soul.
Marking the direction of the stub, and its probable distance, I waded
into the deep underbrush, the buzzard perched against the sky for my
guide, and, for my quest, the stump or hollow log that held the
creature’s nest.
The rank ferns and ropy vines swallowed me up, and shut out at times
even the sight of the sky and the buzzard. It was not until half an
hour’s struggle that, climbing a pine-crested swell in the low bottom,
I sighted the bird again. It had not moved.
I was now in the real swamp, the old uncut forest. It was a land of
tree giants: huge tulip poplar and swamp white oak, so old that they
had become solitary, their comrades having fallen one by one; while
some of them, unable to loose their grip upon the soil, which had
widened and tightened through centuries, were still standing, though
long since dead. It was upon one of these that the buzzard sat humped.
Directly in my path stood an ancient swamp white oak, the greatest
tree, I think, that I have ever seen. It was not the highest, nor the
largest round, perhaps, but in years and looks the greatest. Hoary,
hollow, and broken-limbed, his huge bole seemed encircled with the
centuries.
“For it had bene an auncient tree,
Sacred with many a mysteree.”
Above him to twice his height loomed a tulip poplar, clean-boled for
thirty feet and in the top all green and gold with blossoms. It was a
resplendent thing beside the oak, yet how unmistakably the gnarled old
monarch wore the crown! His girth more than balanced the poplar’s
greater height; and, as for blossoms, he had his tiny-flowered
catkins; but nature knows the beauty of strength and inward majesty,
and has pinned no boutonnière upon the oak.
My buzzard now was hardly more than half a mile away, and plainly seen
through the rifts in the lofty timbered roof above me. As I was
nearing the top of a large fallen pine that lay in my course, I was
startled by the _burrh! burrh! burrh!_ of three partridges taking wing
just beyond, near the foot of the tree. Their exploding flight seemed
all the more like a real explosion when three little clouds of
dust-smoke rose out of the low, _wet_ bottom of the swamp and drifted
up against the green.
Then I saw an interesting sight. The pine, in its fall, had snatched
with its wide-reaching, multitudinous roots at the shallow bottom and
torn out a giant fistful of earth, leaving a hole about two feet deep
and more than a dozen feet wide. The sand thus lifted into the air had
gradually washed down into a mound on each side of the butt, where it
lay high and dry above the level of the wet swamp. This the swamp
birds had turned into a great dust-bath. It was in constant use,
evidently. Not a spear of grass had sprouted in it, and all over it
were pits and craters of various sizes, showing that not only the
partridges but also the quail and such small things as the warblers
bathed here,--though I can’t recall ever having seen a warbler bathe
in the dust. A dry bath in the swamp was something of a luxury,
evidently. I wonder if the buzzards used it?
I went forward cautiously now, and expectantly, for I was close enough
to see the white beak and red wattled neck of my buzzard guide. The
buzzard saw me, too, and began to twist its head and to twitch its
wing-tips nervously. Then the long, black wings began to open, as you
would open a two-foot rule, and, with a heavy lurch that left the dead
stub rocking, the bird dropped and was soon soaring high up in the
blue.
This was the locality of the nest; now where should I find it?
Evidently I was to have no further help from the old bird. The
underbrush was so thick that I could hardly see farther than my nose.
A half-rotten tree-trunk lay near, the top end resting across the
backs of several saplings that it had borne down in its fall. I crept
up on this for a look around, and almost tumbled off at finding myself
staring directly into the dark, cavernous hollow of an immense log
lying on a slight rise of ground a few feet ahead of me.
It was a yawning hole, which at a glance I knew belonged to the
buzzard. The log, a mere shell of a mighty white oak, had been girdled
and felled with an axe, by coon-hunters probably, and still lay with
one side resting upon the rim of the stump. As I stood looking,
something white stirred vaguely in the hole and disappeared.
Leaping from my perch, I scrambled forward to the mouth of the hollow
log and was greeted with hisses from far back in the dark. Then came a
thumping of bare feet, more hisses, and a sound of snapping beaks. I
had found my buzzard’s nest!
[Illustration: YOUNG TURKEY BUZZARD]
Hardly that, either, for there was not a feather, stick, or chip as
evidence of a nest. The eggs had been laid upon the sloping cavern
floor, and in the course of their incubation must have rolled clear
down to the opposite end, where the opening was so narrow that the
buzzard could not have brooded them until she had rolled them back.
The wonder is that they had ever hatched.
But they had, and what they hatched was another wonder. Nature never
intended a young buzzard for any eye but his mother’s, and _she_ hates
the sight of him. Elsewhere I have told of a buzzard that devoured her
eggs at the approach of an enemy, so delicately balanced are her
unnamable appetites and her maternal affections!
The two strange nestlings in the log must have been three weeks old, I
should say, the larger weighing about four pounds. They were covered,
as young owls are, with deep snow-white down, out of which protruded
their black scaly, snaky legs. They stood braced on these long black
legs, their receding heads drawn back, shoulders thrust forward, and
bodies humped between the featherless wings like challenging tom-cats.
In order to examine them, I crawled into the den--not a difficult act,
for the opening measured four feet and a half across at the mouth. The
air was musty inside, yet surprisingly free from odor. The floor was
absolutely clean, but on the top and sides of the cavity was a thick
coating of live mosquitoes, most of them gorged, hanging like a
red-beaded tapestry over the walls.
I had taken pains that the flying buzzard should not see me enter, for
I hoped she would descend to look after her young. But she would take
no chances with herself. I sat near the mouth of the hollow, where I
could catch the fresh breeze that pulled across the end, and where I
had a view of a far-away bit of sky. Suddenly, across this field of
blue, there swept a meteor of black--the buzzard! and evidently in
that instant of passage, at a distance certainly of half a mile, she
spied me in the log.
I waited more than an hour longer, and when I tumbled out with a dozen
kinds of cramps, the unworried mother was soaring serenely far up in
the clear, cool sky.