A CHAPTER OF THINGS TO HEAR THIS SPRING
I
The frogs! You can have no spring until you hear the frogs. The first
shrill notes, heard before the ice is fairly out of the marshes, will
be the waking call of the hylas, the tiny tree-frogs that later on in
the summer you will find in the woods. Then, as the spring advances
and this silvery sleigh-bell jingle tinkles faster, other voices will
join in--the soft croak of the spotted leopard frogs, the still softer
melancholy quaver of the common toad, and away down at the end of the
scale the deep, solemn bass of the great bullfrog saying, “Go round!
Better go round!”
II
You must hear, besides the first spring notes of the bluebird and the
robin, four bird songs this spring. First (1) the song of the wood
thrush or the hermit thrush, whichever one lives in your neighborhood.
No words can describe the purity, the peacefulness, the spiritual
quality of the wood thrush’s simple “Come to me.” It is the voice of
the tender twilight, the voice of the tranquil forest, speaking to
you. After the thrush (2) the brown thrasher, our finest, most gifted
songster, as great a singer, I think (and I have often heard them
both), as the Southern mockingbird. Then (3) the operatic catbird. She
sits lower down among the bushes than the brown thrasher, as if she
knew that, compared with him, she must take a back seat; but for
variety of notes and length of song, she has few rivals. I say _she_,
when really I ought to say _he_, for it is the males of most birds
that sing, but the catbird seems so long and slender, so dainty and
feminine, that I think of this singer as of some exquisite operatic
singer in a woman’s rôle. Then (4) the bobolink; for his song is just
like Bryant’s bubbling poem, only better! Go to the meadows in June
and listen as he comes lilting and singing over your head.
III
There are some birds that cannot sing: the belted kingfisher, for
instance; he can only rattle. You must hear him rattle. You can do as
well yourself if you will shake a “pair of bones” or heave an anchor
and let the chain run fast through the hawse-hole. You then must hear
the downy woodpecker doing his rattling _rat-ta-tat-tat-tat-tat_
(across the page and back again), as fast as _rat-ta-tat_ can _tat_.
How he makes the old dead limb or fence-post rattle as he drums upon
it with his chisel bill. He can be heard half a mile around.
Then high-hole, the flicker (or golden-winged woodpecker), you must
hear him yell, _Up-up-up-up-up up-up-up-up-up-up_,--a ringing,
rolling, rapid kind of yodel that echoes over the spring fields.
IV
You must hear the nighthawk and the whip-poor-will. Both birds are to
be heard at twilight, and the whip-poor-will far into the night. At
the very break of dawn is also a good time to listen to them.
At dusk you will see (I have seen him from the city roofs in Boston) a
bird about the size of a pigeon mounting up into the sky by short
flights, crying _peent_, until far over your head the creature will
suddenly turn and on half-closed wings dive headlong toward the
earth, when, just before hitting the ground, upward he swoops, at the
same instant making a weird booming sound, a kind of hollow groan with
his wings, as the wind rushes through their large feathers. This diver
through the dim ocean of air is the nighthawk. Let one of the birds
dive close to your head on a lonely dusky road, and your hair will try
to jump out from under your hat.
The whip-poor-will’s cry you all know. When you hear one this spring,
go out into the twilight and watch for him. See him spring into the
air, like a strange shadow, for flies; count his _whip-poor-wills_ (he
may call it more than a hundred times in as many seconds!). But hear a
circle of the birds, if possible, calling through the darkness of a
wood all around you!
V
There is one strange bird song that is half song and half dance that
perhaps most of you may never be able to hear and see; but as it is
worth going miles to hear, and nights of watching to witness, I am
going to set it here as one of your outdoor tasks or feats: you must
hear the mating song of the woodcock. I have described the song and
the dance in “Roof and Meadow,” in the chapter called “One Flew East
and One Flew West.” Mr. Bradford Torrey has an account of it in his
“Clerk of the Woods,” in the chapter named “Woodcock Vespers.” To hear
the song is a rare experience for the habitual watcher in the woods,
but one that you might have the first April evening that you are
abroad.
Go down to your nearest meadow--a meadow near a swampy piece of woods
is best--and here, along the bank of the meadow stream, wait in the
chilly twilight for the _speank_, _speank_, or the _peent_, _peent_,
from the grass--the signal that the song is about to begin.
VI
One of the dreadful--positively dreadful--sounds of the late spring
that I hear day in and day out is the gobbling, strangling, ghastly
cries of young crows feeding. You will surely think something is being
murdered. The crying of a hungry baby is musical in comparison. But it
is a good sound to hear, for it reminds one of the babes in the
woods--that a new generation of birds is being brought through from
babyhood to gladden the world. It is a tender sound! The year is still
young.
VII
You should hear the hum of the honey-bees on a fresh May day in an
apple tree that is just coming into perfect bloom. The enchanting
loveless of the pink and white world of blossoms is enough to make one
forget to listen to the _hum-hum-hum-humming-ing-ing-ing-ing_ of the
excited bees. But hear their myriad wings, fanning the perfume into
the air and filling the sunshine with the music of work. The whir, the
hum of labor--of a busy factory, of a great steamship dock--is always
music to those who know the blessedness of work; but it takes that
knowledge, and a good deal of imagination besides, to hear the music
in it. Not so with the bees. The season, the day, the colors, and
perfumes--they are the song; the wings are only the million-stringed
æolian upon which the song is played.
VIII
You should hear the grass grow. What! I repeat, you should hear the
grass grow. I have a friend, a sound and sensible man, but a lover of
the out-of-doors, who says he can hear it grow. But perhaps it is the
soft stir of the working earthworms that he hears. Try it. Go out
alone one of these April nights; select a green pasture with a slope
to the south, at least a mile from any house, or railroad; lay your
ear flat upon the grass, listen without a move for ten minutes. You
hear something--or do you feel it? Is it the reaching up of the grass?
is it the stir of the earthworms? is it the pulse of the throbbing
universe? or is it your own throbbing pulse? It is all of these, I
think; call it the heart of the grass beating in every tiny living
blade, if you wish to. You should listen to hear the grass grow.
IX
The fires have gone out on the open hearth. Listen early in the
morning and toward evening for the rumbling, the small, muffled
thunder, of the chimney swallows, as they come down from the open sky
on their wonderful wings. Don’t be frightened. It isn’t Santa Claus
this time of year; nor is it the Old Nick! The smothered thunder is
caused by the rapid beating of the swallows’ wings on the air in the
narrow chimney-flue, as the birds settle down from the top of the
chimney and hover over their nests. Stick your head into the fireplace
and look up! Don’t smoke the precious lodgers out, no matter how much
racket they make.
X
Hurry out while the last drops of your first May thunder-shower are
still falling and listen to the robins singing from the tops of the
trees. Their liquid songs are as fresh as the shower, as if the
raindrops in falling were running down from the trees in song--as
indeed they are in the overflowing trout-brook. Go out and listen, and
write a better poem than this one that I wrote the other afternoon
when listening to the birds in our first spring shower:--
The warm rain drops aslant the sun
And in the rain the robins sing;
Across the creek in twos and troops,
The hawking swifts and swallows wing.
The air is sweet with apple bloom,
And sweet the laid dust down the lane,
The meadow’s marge of calamus,
And sweet the robins in the rain.
O greening time of bloom and song!
O fragrant days of tender pain!
The wet, the warm, the sweet young days
With robins singing in the rain.