receives the inland migration of alewives in the spring, and takes out
their young, hatched in early spring and summer, as they swim to salt
water. The alewife fry, two or three inches long, attract gulls and
terns. During the month there has been a migratory colony of terns in
the vicinity, principally common terns, both adult and immature.
In the general Cape Cod area there are two principal nesting places
every year, at Tern Island, Chatham, and in Plymouth. During the
season--the birds arrive about the end of April--both terneries have
populations which number in the thousands. There are in addition a few
small islands off the Cape and a few comparatively isolated areas where
smaller groups nest successfully, although terns are sociable birds,
and breed best in large numbers. In August, beginning with the arctic
tern, which, I am told, is the earliest to migrate, the birds begin to
leave their nesting sites in groups or small companies on their way
south. They spend the winter anywhere from Florida to the edge of the
Antarctic ice.
So the Paine’s Creek area, with its sand eels and alewife fry,
represents a way station, a stopping-off place, one leg of a migratory
journey ... the first for birds hatched during the late spring or early
summer. Terns reach flying age in a month, but their parents go on
feeding them for some time. They are slow to mature and do not breed
until they are about three years old.
The young are not much smaller than their parents, and without a close
watch it might be hard to tell the difference at first; but their
heads are gray, as compared with the jet-black napes and crowns on the
adults. They still spend most of the time waiting to be fed. Some
make inexperienced, practice flights over the water, plunging in and
out in an almost kittenish, hit-or-miss way, while their parents dive
like arrows, pinpointing the surface with little flashes of spray, from
which they rise up with silver quarries in their sharp bills. But as
many more of the young terns stand along the beach or on shoals at the
mouth of the inlet, crying, begging to be fed.
Terns are intensely active and brilliant in performance. They are
comparatively small birds, but they are capable of migrating over
thousands of miles of ocean waters, and their long, angled wings beat
deep, low, and strong. They are all black and white sharpness, flashing
as bright as the gold circlets of water around sharp grasses at the
mouth of the inlet. They swing. They dart. They winnow the air. Their
lovely white shuttlecock tails spread out and settle as they turn
against the wind, crying: “Kierr! Kierr!”
Two juveniles wait on a shoal, constantly calling in a high-pitched
tremolo, intensified when a parent bird flies over them. The trim
expert adult flies past, then swings back down the shore and circles
back, finally coming in to land between them. It has no food in its
bill, but stands there for a minute or so, and then begins to move away
from them, as they crouch and strut after it in an almost elderly way,
crying their protests. It signals departure with a slight lift of its
wings and in a few seconds flies up, the thwarted young ones taking off
behind it.
In this behavior I see the play of learning, the many repetitions that
precede a balanced natural art. Other adults swing in with sand eels or
fish in their bills and hover, or circle back, avoiding rivals, then
drop down next to a twittering, beak-gaping child, giving it the whole
fish, or holding on to it and flying away, which has the effect of
teasing the young one to follow after. In this way the fledgling terns,
some still crouching down in a submissive manner as they did in their
nests, learn to fly up, to chase, dive, and dodge, to breast the air,
and beat their wings for all the long voyages their lives may hold.
In a few weeks most of them will suddenly flock away and migrate. In
the meantime they practice the instinctive measures of growth, training
in the insistent, excitable ways of a tern, for air and open waters
over half the earth.
_September_
_Youth on the Move_
The tourists and the summer residents begin to leave the Cape. This is
a visible exodus, with many more cars going out than coming in. The
people in charge of commerce count our summer gains and our losses.
Those of us who are year-round residents can admit it in public, now
that the representatives of the humming, spreading urban world have
departed. Here now is a half-populated place, temporarily, perhaps
shamefully, consigned to a dull future. And yet, according to the
practice I have begun to learn by years of residence, I can now look
around, with room to spare. What fills this emptiness? What will I see
when I take off my dark glasses?
I notice, by the way, that some of us are now predicting the local
future with more assurance. I hear a real Cape Codder (meaning someone
born here, preferably before 1900) pronouncing that there will be a
frost around the sixteenth, and that “We’ll have a blow pretty soon.”
The night heaves with heat. A half-clouded, half-misted sky shows
occasional stars. Then an onshore wind begins to blow and the land
stirs and frets in the darkness. I feel that new revolutions are in
order, earth-honored, momentous changes.
In the morning the weather vane stands to the north. The sea is kicked
up, the trees are swaying, and the temperature has dropped into the
fifties. A new wind is getting in its licks, rolling and lunging
against us. The air above the sea meets the great air masses from the
land. Warm and cold, water and air, west and south, north and east,
join in a game of strength. The whole day is a trial for the future,
with the running clouds as its pawns. A child asks her father: “Can the
day blow away?”
When the wind dies down and the clouds clear off, the air has changed
from a hazy warmth to clarity. The sea turns dark blue, groined with
white caps. The land seems strict and clean, lifted into pure new skies
and a new silence, although at night the musical pulsing of the snowy
tree crickets is still as shrill and loud as spring peepers.
This is a marginal season like the spring. It is full of new
appearances, as well as late fruitions. The goldenrod, strong flower
of the sun, still plumes its store of light, and represents me well in
my country, in spite of congressional inclination to award some puffy,
manufactured rose with the title of national flower.
Asters, lilac and white, grow abundantly in the sandy soil. Their
little pin wheel flowers are as crisp and clean as the new dresses of
the girls when they go off for the first day of school. The novelty,
after the closed-in summer tempo, is an outwardness. There are many
immature birds that appear suddenly in various untried places, and not
necessarily because of the demands of a set migration. Because of these
fledglings the various bird populations have so increased that they are
pushed into looking for food beyond their nesting areas.
Immature hermit thrushes appear as if at random, and many robins
and towhees. The towhee, once called red-eyed, a name that seems to
have been changed to rufous-sided, is a handsome black, white, and
terra-cotta bird which likes scrubby areas, thickets, and open woods.
So we see it frequently. It has a black and white tail with which it
puts on a spectacular performance, flicking and flashing its feathers
like a gambler with a deck of cards; and it floats over the brush and
across the ground with its tail spread wide behind it.
Now the young towhees call “Twee! Twee!” not quite at adult strength
and clarity, but they are finding themselves. They are on the move.
A covey of young quail suddenly starts across the road, coming out of
a field still loud with insects. Heads and necks up, they run almost
trippingly forward with sweet, piping alarm.
A young red-tailed hawk is brought into school by a boy whose father
found it trapped in his chicken yard and killed it ignominiously
with a baseball bat. Red tails are big beauties with a thick supply
of feathers. Their backs are brown, their white bellies flecked with
brown. The usual place to find them is high up, wheeling around the sky
on a watch for rodents; and occasionally they fly out of pitch pine
woods where they roost. The dead one has lost its piercing cry and the
electric glare in its eyes, but its talons still look formidable. They
are black, and as sharp-tipped, as wildly curved, as hooks of steel,
joined in power and flexibility.
Bright days warm the surface of the inland ponds that have their outlet
in the waters of our local brook and estuary leading through marshes to
Cape Cod Bay. The sun’s radiance hurries up the alewife fry in their
ancient impulse to go down to salt water, from which they will return
in three or four years’ time to spawn like their elders, usually in the
same fresh-water system where they were hatched. These little silver
fish, with an unfathomed stare in their big eyes, run out on an ebb
tide from Paine’s Creek. They attract gulls and terns, which hover in
crowds against the west wind.
The plumage of the young terns still in the area now shows a more
definite contrast between black and white. They have become more adept
at flight. Many are still being fed ... almost continuously during
those hours of shallow water when fish are easier to catch, so that the
passivity of those still waiting on the sands looks like a consequence
of being overstuffed. I get the impression that less food is being
proffered by the parent birds, but they have certainly not relinquished
their responsibility. They bring in small fish and their large children
gulp them down and wait for more. Other young birds are now flying
readily--chasing after their parents, beseeching attention, but more
often trying to fish for themselves. Little by little, by rewards and
refusal, failure and success, they are progressing toward the perfected
action of mature birds. They are becoming more aggressive, fighting
for space over a crowded channel, or protecting their catch. The
adults, whose success in fishing they are beginning to approximate,
hover over the water, beaks pointing down, then dive suddenly, wings
partly folded back. They hit the water like small stones, then come up
again, flying away fast if they have a fish in their bills, chased by
other birds that cry “Karr! Karr!” with a slightly growling note. It
is not so much that the young terns are taught, in our sense of the
word, as that they become more and more a part of the communicable
rhythm of the whole race of terns. Their circling, diving, hovering, or
racing downwind are common proficiencies of motion, that fit the great
environment of air and sea. Growing up is rhythmic practice. There is
not such a gap between tutelage and its recipients as there might seem
to be among human beings.
Terns seem involved in a ritualistic performance throughout their
lives. Much of the behavior they show in getting food as nestlings and
fledgling birds has its parallels in adulthood. There is the “fish
flight,” for example, which has its origins in the begging, receiving,
and then hunting food of a growing bird. (A fish is a master image, a
center of recognition and attachment, with all the formality of action
it entails.)
The fish flight is a term which in its strict sense is applied to the
behavior of birds during pre-courtship. It involves emotional display
between pairs of birds, as distinct from their food-getting habits in
general. In detail it includes differences in calls, in the relative
positions of birds during flight, and in the way they carry a fish. A
fish in the bill not only represents the fulfillment of need. It may
also be an offering, a display, and perhaps the instrument for a mutual
awareness between male and female, even before sex recognition occurs.
But if the fish flight can be tied down to behavior at a particular
stage in their lives, the terns also show similar reactions before and
after it. Mated birds go on offering fish as they fly by one another,
or begging, so that feeding is used to maintain a bond between them.
And of course the fish is the basis of all the instinctive training
of the young. The process of begging and receiving, or offering for
the uses of recognition, continues on in many forms through their life
stages. They pursue a formality. Their flights show the grace in action
of a whole society.
At half tide, when the water recedes over the sand flats, the terns
flock there, preening and bathing in the tidal pools. Occasionally one
will lift its wings up beautifully into the wind, receiving the wash
of air. Some fly back to the inlet and drink the brackish water. The
community seems to gather more and more closely together as time goes
on. They all begin to roost densely in one area. At times they take to
the air, as if alarmed. They rise and circle, crowds of white, crying
shrilly, and then fly down again. Or they spin like a larger flock of
sandpipers, a white cloud dancing with dizzy perfection over some fish
weirs in the distance. Perhaps it could be called communal practice
for the next journey. In their rhythms they are self-sustained,
self-protective, like schools of fish, but at the same time bound out,
under the laws of the wild air. One day soon I will go down to watch
again, finding that most of them have flown away.
_An Open Shore_
We stay where we are, while the young migrant birds and the men of the
city leave us. But the days sharpen and change. The nights grow longer
and cooler. The westerly winds increase. There is a brilliance in the
air, and the sea makes a clean statement to our senses. “Adjust your
vision,” the sky seems to say, “to a turn in height and depth and in a
new area of relentless winds.”
Those migratory birds that are still with us feed actively, fly with
restless energy, and collect in flocks. In many undisturbed areas,
down by the barrier beaches and through the salt marshes, treeless,
open to the sun, you can see a great number using their special
physical advantages to feed or fly, hide or attack, in the patterns of
environment.
The U. S. Wildlife Refuge at Monomoy is on a long spit of barrier
beach and marsh extending south from the town of Chatham ten miles
into Nantucket Sound. It is wild, unadorned with tourist cabins, and
so an undisturbed refuge and resting place for migratory birds. At
first you find warblers, gnat-catchers, orioles, vireos, and other
land birds, working silently through low oaks, pines, and stunted,
salt-sprayed shrubbery. Then the marshland sweeps ahead with open
ground, and curving inlets behind a long beach where the surf pounds
endlessly, the sands inlaid with the debris of the sea--whelks, surf
clams, or scallops. Back in the marsh where mud snails stream slowly
ahead in a long procession, the shore birds race in, or turn quickly in
a shimmering flock, or settle among the hummocks, and along sandy rims.
Dowitchers stolidly probe the mud with their long bills. That mottled,
distinctive bird, the ruddy turnstone, pushes, or turns over, pebbles
and stones--thus proving its name--as it searches for the worms and
crustaceans underneath. Shy piping plovers, white as oyster shells,
stand by themselves behind a dune. Sanderlings hurry back and forth
with little twinkling legs. The yellowlegs fly up and over with short,
piercing cries, their wings curved like sickles. Or a solitary marbled
godwit flies by, handsomely patterned on its wings with black and
white. Least sandpipers, tiny animals with greenish legs, hurry and
flit along, feeding at the edge of the tide pools and the rim of inlets.
The terns--common, roseate, least--fly at a point where the tide comes
in through an opening in the beach. Sharp-cut divers, they swoop low,
dipping into the water again and again. A few ring-billed gulls move
among the shore birds. They are a little like a small herring gull, but
their heads are more rounded, like pigeons. They have a lighter flight,
and a softer look than their raucous, flat-headed relatives. And over
the ridge of the beach, against up-dune horizons, is a long belt of
great black-backed gulls, large, proud, and with a look of supreme
idleness and cruelty.
Here is “function” in all variety, each life to its place, filling a
niche, with the special form and manner by which it feeds and tries to
survive. And every bird is a bird of the sun, adapted to this treeless,
narrow shore that blazes with cutting light, the light of sand, or
rock turned to sand, of water, roaring and moaning in the sea, rushing
back through a tidal cut on the ebb, then trickling, evaporating,
and swelling in again at the flood. Each animal works an open coast,
across its burning days. The fliers with wings so sharp, energies of
light, fit the high or low wants of the wind, the curves and sweeps of
the open marsh, the glaring sands. And they hurry on stilts, or tiny
short legs. They bob up and down. They run trippingly along--all to
the rhythm of the watered, indefinite shore, looking for food that is
rhythmic in myriad ways. Here is a great tribe of searchers.
The human race, as it climbs laughingly into motor boats and roars
down an inlet, or sits soberly baiting fish hooks in a row boat, or
basks in the sun, is no less brought in, fitted to this region--for
all our autonomous great world of threats and shelters. There is some
compelling call, that springs its lives ahead, and will not be talked
away. Even the large, extraneous footmarks of seventy male and female
“birders”--a very special tribe--are evidence of an omnivorousness, a
searching, communicating, flocking together, from which no animals are
entirely exempt.
_Chipmunks_
As some of the inhabitants of sea and shore move on to the south,
inland life adjusts itself to local climate. The leaves on the trees
are still green, but the bracken, or dry land fern, has turned
brown, one of the early signs of autumn. My surroundings are full of
statements of this kind, an end result of preparation. I notice one of
them. I stop--pleased to be told--and then I wonder what was silently
going on in August to have placed us with such definition in September.
Plants and animals move into a new light, a new scene, when I am
merely groping with their names. Perhaps because I have read too many
newspapers, I am limited to what we call events. I see some outward
evidence, and am obliged to go backward in order to reconstruct what
might have been, when the real show is already over.
So all September’s reassociations and revolutions may just end up
for me as a clump of locust leaves tugged loose by the wind, or the
sudden opening in a milkweed pod, or a new chill in the air. One
day I notice that a milkweed pod--on the same plant where I saw the
butterflies--erect like a lamp on its bent stem, has developed a
dimpled line down the middle. The next day it has cracked apart, and
there in the sheath are the compact seeds, overlapping like fish
scales, making a kind of cone with a tail of soft silk made up of
myriads of threads. They are moist at first, in their womb, then
they dry out and each seed parachutes away, the silky rays darting,
swirling, racing high, subject to every turn and twist of air. There
will be new populations, out of old circumstances. What happened
to the milkweed before this culmination? How many hairstreak and
monarch butterflies paid it a visit? How did it change with change in
temperature and moisture and length of days? Where did it come from
originally? Next year, if I have not been sent ahead myself, I will
stand watch over the plant so as not to miss what might be the greatest
show on earth.
[Illustration]
We depend on all too occasional visits to understand other modes and
rhythms of existence with any depth, although there are times when a
chance sight goes deep enough to last. This season of the year the
chipmunks are very active, foraging for grains and nuts to store in
their hibernation chambers underground. Cats, of which there are far
too many loose on the Cape, kill so many chipmunks that it is sometimes
hard to see how the population keeps up. (For one thing, these little
“ground squirrels” only seem to have one brood a year.) Cats bring
them home almost daily, teased into a terrible dance, spinning around
like weary boxers on a revolving stage. A chipmunk’s alert curiosity,
or habit of freezing into attention, may well be its most vulnerable
point. Cats will get them when they are out in the open filling their
cheeks with food. They will also come out of the shelter of a hole, or
stone wall, to investigate the source of some unusual noise or light
tapping, or a whistle, or just stay fixed when a man approaches, in a
kind of actively questioning mood.
I hear a scattered dashing in the leaves, and there it is--a striped,
bright-looking little animal, tail twitching, arrested in motion,
quivering and throbbing, its throat pulsing at a furious rate. We watch
each other for three or four minutes. I too have my share of curiosity.
Gradually its quick pulsing dies down. It turns its head slightly away,
with those moist, black, intent little eyes. With a quick flip it is
around a tree, then drops down to run along the leaves again and jump
behind a boulder.
It was in no mortal danger that time, but our two lives were brought
together into relationship by another danger--the dark universe of
chance. I felt it as almost a kind of love between strangers, in which
my mental being was in no way divorced from what might lie behind a
chipmunk’s eye.
I remember another chipmunk, in Vermont this time, whose chosen ground
was a hillside pasture. I came on the animal when it was carrying
part of an apple up a slope toward its hole, located in the side of
a ridge some twenty feet above an old apple tree. When it saw me it
dropped the apple, which promptly rolled downhill. Then it watched me
with that silent waiting on chance, that throbbing look of expectation
which they have, one paw twitching slightly and clutched to its chest.
I was quiet, and at a respectable distance, so the chipmunk picked up
its food again and hurried back to the hole; but the apple was too big
to go in, and it rolled back downhill. This happened four times. The
apple rolled down. The chipmunk hauled it back up, turned it around,
put it up against the hole, a little like a man facing the problem of
moving a large bed through a narrow door. Finally it nibbled bits off
the edge, slipped sideways into the hole, and pulled the apple in after
it. I stole up as quietly as I could and saw that it was eating away
successfully with its food overhead. A problem had been solved, and
with a fair amount of intelligence.
The illumination we find in nature does not necessarily come from
comparing degrees of intelligence, in which man always finds himself
the winner. The light goes deeper. Our analytical ways, our methods of
order, imitate an order which is indefinitely resourceful. Sometimes
it shows itself past explanation. It is like this September evening
after rain. For a short time, ten minutes perhaps, not long before
dark, the earth is colored with magic, shadowless light. The grass is
intensely green. The sky turns gray and pink. Distant fields are red
and astonishingly bright. All colors are sure and strong, joining in
pure gradations. The evening is full of mystic peace. A kitten watches
the light, transfixed in the doorway (together, for all I know, with
some chipmunk by the stone wall outside), arrested by what I in my own
silence can only think of as an unmatchable glory, never to return in
quite the same measure.
_October_
_Where Is Home?_
The ordered days wheel on and fall into patterns consistently new.
On further acquaintance, the place I live in seems to extend its
boundaries and add to its store of lives. I struggle to understand.
The more I add to my list of things as time goes on, the less my crude
interpretations fit the circumstances. I started here with a tract
of land. I built a house. I have a family. I am not yet sure of my
location. The kingfisher says one thing, and the frog another. The
snake travels a few thousand feet of home area, and the tern thousands
of miles. They are both on Cape Cod. Then one leaves another. All
action blows hot and cold with endless variations. A little knowledge
makes my center rock with uncertainty.