It is a little remarkable how regularly severe and mild winters
alternate in our climate for a series of years,--a feminine and a
masculine one, as it were, almost invariably following each other.
Every other season now for ten years the ice-gatherers on the river
have been disappointed of a full harvest, and every other season the
ice has formed from fifteen to twenty inches thick. From 1873 to 1884
there was no marked exception to this rule. But in the last-named
year, when, according to the succession, a mild winter was due, the
breed seemed to have got crossed, and a sort of mongrel winter was the
result; neither mild nor severe, but very stormy, capricious, and
disagreeable, with ice a foot thick on the river. The winter which
followed, that of 1884-85, though slow and hesitating at first, fully
proved itself as belonging to the masculine order. The present winter
of 1885-86 shows a marked return to the type of two years ago--less
hail and snow, but by no means the mild season that was due. By and
by, probably, the meteorological influences will get back into the old
ruts again, and we shall have once more the regular alternation of
mild and severe winters. During very open winters, like that of
1879-80, nature in my latitude, eighty miles north of New York, hardly
shuts up house at all. That season I heard a little piping frog on the
7th of December, and on the 18th of January, in a spring run, I saw
the common bullfrog out of his hibernaculum, evidently thinking it was
spring. A copperhead snake was killed here about the same date;
caterpillars did not seem to retire, as they usually do, but came
forth every warm day. The note of the bluebird was heard nearly every
week all winter, and occasionally that of the robin. Such open winters
make one fear that his appetite for spring will be blunted when spring
really does come; but he usually finds that the April days have the
old relish. April is that part of the season that never cloys upon the
palate. It does not surfeit one with good things, but provokes and
stimulates the curiosity. One is on the alert; there are hints and
suggestions on every hand. Something has just passed, or stirred, or
called, or breathed, in the open air or in the ground about, that we
would fain know more of. May is sweet, but April is pungent. There is
frost enough in it to make it sharp, and heat enough in it to make it
quick.
[Illustration: AN EVENING IN SPRING]
In my walks in April, I am on the lookout for watercresses. It is a
plant that has the pungent April flavor. In many parts of the country
the watercress seems to have become completely naturalized, and is
essentially a wild plant. I found it one day in a springy place, on
the top of a high, wooded mountain, far from human habitation. We
gathered it and ate it with our sandwiches. Where the walker cannot
find this salad, a good substitute may be had in our native spring
cress, which is also in perfection in April. Crossing a wooded hill in
the regions of the Catskills on the 15th of the month, I found a
purple variety of the plant, on the margin of a spring that issued
from beneath a ledge of rocks, just ready to bloom. I gathered the
little white tubers, that are clustered like miniature potatoes at the
root, and ate them, and they were a surprise and a challenge to the
tongue; on the table they would well fill the place of mustard, and
horseradish, and other appetizers. When I was a schoolboy, we used to
gather, in a piece of woods on our way to school, the roots of a
closely allied species to eat with our lunch. But we generally ate it
up before lunch-time. Our name for this plant was "Crinkle-root." The
botanists call it the toothwort (_Dentaria_), also pepper-root.
From what fact or event shall one really date the beginning of spring?
The little piping frogs usually furnish a good starting-point. One
spring I heard the first note on the 6th of April; the next on the
27th of February; but in reality the latter season was only two weeks
earlier than the former. When the bees carry in their first pollen,
one would think spring had come; yet this fact does not always
correspond with the real stage of the season. Before there is any
bloom anywhere, bees will bring pollen to the hive. Where do they get
it?
I have seen them gathering it on the fresh sawdust in the woodyard,
especially on that of hickory or maple. They wallow amid the dust,
working it over and over, and searching it like diamond-hunters, and
after a time their baskets are filled with the precious flour, which
is probably only a certain part of the wood, doubtless the soft,
nutritious inner bark.
In fact, all signs and phases of life in the early season are very
capricious, and are earlier or later just as some local or exceptional
circumstance favors or hinders. It is only such birds as arrive after
about the 20th of April that are at all "punctual" according to the
almanac. I have never known the arrival of the barn swallow to vary
much from that date in this latitude, no matter how early or late the
season might be. Another punctual bird is the yellow redpoll warbler,
the first of his class that appears. Year after year, between the 20th
and the 25th, I am sure to see this little bird about my place for a
day or two only, now on the ground, now on the fences, now on the
small trees and shrubs, and closely examining the buds or just-opening
leaves of the apple-trees. He is a small olive-colored bird, with a
dark-red or maroon-colored patch on the top of his head. His ordinary
note is a smart "chirp." His movements are very characteristic,
especially that vertical, oscillating movement of the hind part of his
body, like that of the wagtails. There are many birds that do not come
here till May, be the season never so early. The spring of 1878 was
very forward, and on the 27th of April I made this entry in my
notebook: "In nature it is the middle of May, and, judging from
vegetation alone, one would expect to find many of the later birds, as
the oriole, the wood thrush, the kingbird, the catbird, the tanager,
the indigo-bird, the vireos, and many of the warblers, but they have
not arrived. The May birds, it seems, will not come in April, no
matter how the season favors."
Some birds passing north in the spring are provokingly silent. Every
April I see the hermit thrush hopping about the woods, and in case of
a sudden snow-storm seeking shelter about the outbuildings; but I
never hear even a fragment of his wild, silvery strain. The
white-crowned sparrow also passes in silence. I see the bird for a few
days about the same date each year, but he will not reveal to me his
song. On the other hand, his congener, the white-throated sparrow, is
decidedly musical in passing, both spring and fall. His sweet,
wavering whistle is at times quite as full and perfect as when heard
in June or July in the Canadian woods. The latter bird is much more
numerous than the white-crowned, and its stay with us more protracted,
which may in a measure account for the greater frequency of its song.
The fox sparrow, who passes earlier (sometimes in March), is also
chary of the music with which he is so richly endowed. It is not every
season that I hear him, though my ear is on the alert for his strong,
finely-modulated whistle.
Nearly all the warblers sing in passing. I hear them in the orchards,
in the groves, in the woods, as they pause to feed in their northward
journey, their brief, lisping, shuffling, insect-like notes requiring
to be searched for by the ear, as their forms by the eye. But the ear
is not tasked to identify the songs of the kinglets, as they tarry
briefly with us in spring. In fact, there is generally a week in April
or early May,--
"On such a time as goes before the leaf,
When all the woods stand in a mist of green
And nothing perfect,"--
during which the piping, voluble, rapid, intricate, and delicious
warble of the ruby-crowned kinglet is the most noticeable strain to be
heard, especially among the evergreens.
I notice that during the mating season of the birds the rivalries and
jealousies are not all confined to the males. Indeed, the most
spiteful and furious battles, as among the domestic fowls, are
frequently between females. I have seen two hen robins scratch and
pull feathers in a manner that contrasted strongly with the courtly
and dignified sparring usual between the males. One March a pair of
bluebirds decided to set up housekeeping in the trunk of an old
apple-tree near my house. Not long after, an unwedded female appeared,
and probably tried to supplant the lawful wife. I did not see what
arts she used, but I saw her being very roughly handled by the jealous
bride. The battle continued nearly all day about the orchard and
grounds, and was a battle at very close quarters. The two birds would
clinch in the air or on a tree, and fall to the ground with beaks and
claws locked. The male followed them about, and warbled and called,
but whether deprecatingly or encouragingly, I could not tell.
Occasionally he would take a hand, but whether to separate them or
whether to fan the flames, that I could not tell. So far as I could
see, he was highly amused, and culpably indifferent to the issue of
the battle.
The English spring begins much earlier than ours in New England and
New York, yet an exceptionally early April with us must be nearly, if
not quite, abreast with April as it usually appears in England. The
blackthorn sometimes blooms in Britain in February, but the swallow
does not appear till about the 20th of April, nor the anemone bloom
ordinarily till that date. The nightingale comes about the same time,
and the cuckoo follows close. Our cuckoo does not come till near June;
but the water-thrush, which Audubon thought nearly equal to the
nightingale as a songster (though it certainly is not), I have known
to come by the 21st. I have seen the sweet English violet, escaped
from the garden, and growing wild by the roadside, in bloom on the
25th of March, which is about, its date of flowering at home. During
the same season, the first of our native flowers to appear was the
hepatica, which I found on April 4. The arbutus and the dicentra
appeared on the 10th, and the coltsfoot--which, however, is an
importation--about the same time. The bloodroot, claytonia, saxifrage,
and anemone were in bloom on the 17th, and I found the first blue
violet and the great spurred violet on the 19th (saw the little
violet-colored butterfly, dancing about the woods the same day). I
plucked my first dandelion on a meadow slope on the 23d, and in the
woods, protected by a high ledge, my first trillium. During the month
at least twenty native shrubs and wild flowers bloomed in my vicinity,
which is an unusual showing for April.
[Illustration: AT THE STUDY DOOR]
There are many things left for May, but nothing fairer, if as fair, as
the first flower, the hepatica. I find I have never admired this
little firstling half enough. When at the maturity of its charms, it
is certainly the gem of the woods. What an individuality it has! No
two clusters alike; all shades and sizes; some are snow-white, some
pale pink, with just a tinge of violet, some deep purple, others the
purest blue, others blue touched with lilac. A solitary blue-purple
one, fully expanded and rising over the brown leaves or the green
moss, its cluster of minute anthers showing like a group of pale stars
on its little firmament, is enough to arrest and hold the dullest eye.
Then, as I have elsewhere stated, there are individual hepaticas, or
individual families among them, that are sweet-scented. The gift seems
as capricious as the gift of genius in families. You cannot tell which
the fragrant ones are till you try them. Sometimes it is the large
white ones, sometimes the large purple ones, sometimes the small pink
ones. The odor is faint, and recalls that of the sweet violets. A
correspondent, who seems to have carefully observed these fragrant
hepaticas, writes me that this gift of odor is constant in the same
plant; that the plant which bears sweet-scented flowers this year will
bear them next.
There is a brief period in our spring when I like more than at any
other time to drive along the country roads, or even to be shot along
by steam and have the landscape presented to me like a map. It is at
that period, usually late in April, when we behold the first
quickening of the earth. The waters have subsided, the roads have
become dry, the sunshine has grown strong and its warmth has
penetrated the sod; there is a stir of preparation about the farm and
all through the country. One does not care to see things very closely:
his interest in nature is not special but general. The earth is coming
to life again. All the genial and more fertile places in the landscape
are brought out; the earth is quickened in spots and streaks; you can
see at a glance where man and nature have dealt the most kindly with
it. The warm, moist places, the places that have had the wash of some
building or of the road, or have been subjected to some special
mellowing influence, how quickly the turf awakens there and shows the
tender green! See what the landscape would be, how much earlier spring
would come to it, if every square yard of it was alike moist and
fertile. As the later snows lay in patches here and there, so now the
earliest verdure is irregularly spread over the landscape, and is
especially marked on certain slopes, as if it had blown over from the
other side and lodged there.
A little earlier the homesteads looked cold and naked; the old
farmhouse was bleak and unattractive; now Nature seems especially to
smile upon it; her genial influences crowd up around it; the turf
awakens all about as if in the spirit of friendliness. See the old
barn on the meadow slope; the green seems to have oozed out from it,
and to have flowed slowly down the hill; at a little distance it is
lost in the sere stubble. One can see where every spring lies buried
about the fields; its influence is felt at the surface, and the turf
is early quickened there. Where the cattle have loved to lie and
ruminate in the warm summer twilight, there the April sunshine loves
to linger too, till the sod thrills to new life.
The home, the domestic feeling in nature, is brought out and enhanced
at this time; what man has done tells, especially what he has done
well. Our interest centres in the farmhouses, and in the influence
that seems to radiate from there. The older the home, the more genial
nature looks about it. The new architectural palace of the rich
citizen, with the barns and outbuildings concealed or disguised as
much as possible,--spring is in no hurry about it; the sweat of long
years of honest labor has not yet fattened the soil it stands upon.
The full charm of this April landscape is not brought out till the
afternoon. It seems to need the slanting rays of the evening sun to
give it the right mellowness and tenderness, or the right perspective.
It is, perhaps, a little too bald in the strong white light of the
earlier part of the day; but when the faint four-o'clock shadows begin
to come out, and we look through the green vistas and along the farm
lanes toward the west, or out across long stretches of fields above
which spring seems fairly hovering, just ready to alight, and note the
teams slowly plowing, the brightened mould-board gleaming in the sun
now and then,--it is at such times we feel its fresh, delicate
attraction the most. There is no foliage on the trees yet; only here
and there the red bloom of the soft maple, illuminated by the
declining sun shows vividly against the tender green of a slope
beyond, or a willow, like a thin veil, stands out against a leafless
wood. Here and there a little meadow watercourse is golden with marsh
marigolds, or some fence border, or rocky streak of neglected pasture
land is thickly starred with the white flowers of the bloodroot. The
eye can devour a succession of landscapes at such a time; there is
nothing that sates or entirely fills it, but every spring token
stimulates it, and makes it more on the alert.
April, too, is the time to go budding. A swelling bud is food for the
fancy, and often food for the eye. Some buds begin to glow as they
begin to swell. The bud scales change color and become a delicate rose
pink. I note this especially in the European maple. The bud scales
flush as if the effort to "keep in" brought the blood into their
faces. The scales of the willow do not flush, but shine like ebony,
and each one presses like a hand upon the catkin that will escape from
beneath it.
When spring pushes pretty hard, many buds begin to sweat as well as to
glow; they exude a brown, fragrant, gummy substance that affords the
honey-bee her first cement and hive varnish. The hickory, the
horse-chestnut, the plane-tree, the poplars, are all coated with this
April myrrh. That of certain poplars, like the Balm of Gilead, is the
most noticeable and fragrant,--no spring incense more agreeable. Its
perfume is often upon the April breeze. I pick up the bud scales of
the poplars along the road, long brown scales like the beaks of birds,
and they leave a rich gummy odor in my hand that lasts for hours. I
frequently detect the same odor about my hives when the bees are
making all snug against the rains, or against the millers. When used
by the bees, we call it propolis. Virgil refers to it as a "glue more
adhesive than bird-lime and the pitch of Phrygian Ida." Pliny says it
is extracted from the tears of the elm, the willow, and the reed. The
bees often have serious work to detach it from their leg-baskets, and
make it stick only where they want it to.
The bud scales begin to drop in April, and by May Day the scales have
fallen from the eyes of every branch in the forest. In most cases the
bud has an inner wrapping that does not fall so soon. In the hickory
this inner wrapping is like a great livid membrane, an inch or more in
length, thick, fleshy, and shining. It clasps the tender leaves about
as if both protecting and nursing them. As the leaves develop, these
membranous wrappings curl back, and finally wither and fall. In the
plane-tree, or sycamore, this inner wrapping of the bud is a little
pelisse of soft yellow or tawny fur. When it is cast off, it is the
size of one's thumb nail, and suggests the delicate skin of some
golden-haired mole. The young sycamore balls lay aside their fur
wrappings early in May. The flower tassels of the European maple, too,
come packed in a slightly furry covering. The long and fleshy inner
scales that enfold the flowers and leaves are of a clear olive green,
thinly covered with silken hairs like the young of some animals. Our
sugar maple is less striking and beautiful in the bud, but the flowers
are more graceful and fringelike.
Some trees have no bud scales. The sumac presents in early spring a
mere fuzzy knot, from which, by and by, there emerges a soft, furry,
tawny-colored kitten's paw. I know of nothing in vegetable nature that
seems so really to be _born_ as the ferns. They emerge from the ground
rolled up, with a rudimentary and "touch-me-not" look, and appear to
need a maternal tongue to lick them into shape. The sun plays the
wet-nurse to them, and very soon they are out of that uncanny covering
in which they come swathed, and take their places with other green
things.
The bud scales strew the ground in spring as the leaves do in the
fall, though they are so small that we hardly notice them. All
growth, all development, is a casting off, a leaving of something
behind. First the bud scales drop, then the flower drops, then the
fruit drops, then the leaf drops. The first two are preparatory and
stand for spring; the last two are the crown and stand for autumn.
Nearly the same thing happens with the seed in the ground. First the
shell, or outer husk, is dropped or cast off; then the cotyledons,
those nurse leaves of the young plant; then the fruit falls, and at
last the stalk and leaf. A bud is a kind of seed planted in the branch
instead of in the soil. It bursts and grows like a germ. In the
absence of seeds and fruit, many birds and animals feed upon buds. The
pine grosbeaks from the north are the most destructive budders that
come among us. The snow beneath the maples they frequent is often
covered with bud scales. The ruffed grouse sometimes buds in an
orchard near the woods, and thus takes the farmer's apple crop a year
in advance. Grafting is but a planting of buds. The seed is a
complete, independent bud; it has the nutriment of the young plant
within itself, as the egg holds several good lunches for the young
chick. When the spider, or the wasp, or the carpenter bee, or the sand
hornet lays an egg in a cell, and deposits food near it for the young
when hatched, it does just what nature does in every kernel of corn or
wheat, or bean, or nut. Around or within the chit or germ, she stores
food for the young plant. Upon this it feeds till the root takes hold
of the soil and draws sustenance from thence. The bud is rooted in the
branch, and draws its sustenance from the milk of the pulpy cambium
layer beneath the bark.
Another pleasant feature of spring, which I have not mentioned, is the
full streams. Riding across the country one bright day in March, I saw
and felt, as if for the first time, what an addition to the
satisfaction one has in the open air at this season are the clear,
full watercourses. They come to the front, as it were, and lure and
hold the eye. There are no weeds, or grasses, or foliage to hide them;
they are full to the brim, and fuller; they catch and reflect the
sunbeams, and are about the only objects of life and motion in nature.
The trees stand so still, the fields are so hushed and naked, the
mountains so exposed and rigid, that the eye falls upon the blue,
sparkling, undulating watercourses with a peculiar satisfaction. By
and by the grass and trees will be waving, and the streams will be
shrunken and hidden, and our delight will not be in them. The still
ponds and lakelets will then please us more.
The little brown brooks,--how swift and full they ran! One fancied
something gleeful and hilarious in them. And the large creeks,--how
steadily they rolled on, trailing their ample skirts along the edges
of the fields and marshes, and leaving ragged patches of water here
and there! Many a gentle slope spread, as it were, a turfy apron in
which reposed a little pool or lakelet. Many a stream sent little
detachments across lots, the sparkling water seeming to trip lightly
over the unbroken turf. Here and there an oak or an elm stood
knee-deep in a clear pool, as if rising from its bath. It gives one a
fresh, genial feeling to see such a bountiful supply of pure, running
water. One's desires and affinities go out toward the full streams.
How many a parched place they reach and lap in one's memory! How many
a vision of naked pebbles and sun-baked banks they cover and blot
out! They give eyes to the fields; they give dimples and laughter;
they give light and motion. _Running water!_ What a delightful
suggestion the words always convey! One's thoughts and sympathies are
set flowing by them; they unlock a fountain of pleasant fancies and
associations in one's memory; the imagination is touched and
refreshed.
March water is usually clean, sweet water; every brook is a
trout-brook, a mountain brook; the cold and the snow have supplied the
condition of a high latitude; no stagnation, no corruption, comes
downstream now as on a summer freshet. Winter comes down, liquid and
repentant. Indeed, it is more than water that runs then: it is frost
subdued; it is spring triumphant. No obsolete watercourses now. The
larger creeks seek out their abandoned beds, return to the haunts of
their youth, and linger fondly there. The muskrat is adrift, but not
homeless; his range is vastly extended, and he evidently rejoices in
full streams. Through the tunnel of the meadow-mouse the water rushes
as through a pipe; and that nest of his, that was so warm and cosy
beneath the snowbank in the meadow-bottom, is sodden or afloat. But
meadow-mice are not afraid of water. On various occasions I have seen
them swimming about the spring pools like muskrats, and, when alarmed,
diving beneath the water. Add the golden willows to the full streams,
with the red-shouldered starlings perched amid their branches, sending
forth their strong, liquid, gurgling notes, and the picture is
complete. The willow branches appear to have taken on a deeper yellow
in spring; perhaps it is the effect of the stronger sunshine, perhaps
it is the effect of the swift, vital water laving their roots. The
epaulettes of the starlings, too, are brighter than when they left us
in the fall, and they appear to get brighter daily until the nesting
begins. The males arrive many days before the females, and, perched
along the marshes and watercourses, send forth their liquid, musical
notes, passing the call from one to the other, as if to guide and
hurry their mates forward.
[Illustration: A WOODLAND BROOK]
The noise of a brook, you may observe, is by no means in proportion to
its volume. The full March streams make far less noise relatively to
their size than the shallower streams of summer, because the rocks and
pebbles that cause the sound in summer are deeply buried beneath the
current. "Still waters run deep" is not so true as "deep waters run
still." I rode for half a day along the upper Delaware, and my
thoughts almost unconsciously faced toward the full, clear river. Both
the Delaware and the Susquehanna have a starved, impoverished look in
summer,--unsightly stretches of naked drift and bare, bleaching rocks.
But behold them in March, after the frost has turned over to them the
moisture it has held back and stored up as the primitive forests used
to hold the summer rains. Then they have an easy, ample, triumphant
look, that is a feast to the eye. A plump, well-fed stream is as
satisfying to behold as a well-fed animal or a thrifty tree. One
source of charm in the English landscape is the full, placid stream
the season through; no desiccated watercourses will you see there, nor
any feeble, decrepit brooks, hardly able to get over the ground.
This condition of our streams and rivers in spring is evidently but a
faint reminiscence of their condition during what we may call the
geological springtime, the March or April of the earth's history,
when the annual rainfall appears to have been vastly greater than at
present, and when the watercourses were consequently vastly larger and
fuller. In pleistocene days the earth's climate was evidently much
damper than at present. It was the rainiest of March weather. On no
other theory can we account for the enormous erosion of the earth's
surface, and the plowing of the great valleys. Professor Newberry
finds abundant evidence that the Hudson was, in former times, a much
larger river than now. Professor Zittel reaches the same conclusion
concerning the Nile, and Humboldt was impressed with the same fact
while examining the Orinoco and the tributaries of the Amazon. All
these rivers appear to be but mere fractions of their former selves.
The same is true of all the great lakes. If not Noah's flood, then
evidently some other very wet spell, of which this is a tradition,
lies far behind us. Something like the drought of summer is beginning
upon the earth; the great floods have dried up; the rivers are slowly
shrinking; the water is penetrating farther and farther into the
cooling crust of the earth; and what was ample to drench and cover its
surface, even to make a Noah's flood, will be but a drop in the bucket
to the vast interior of the cooled sphere.