nature-lover, of the boy with the baffling silences along the starlit
lake. He is sentimental, certainly, yet not ignorant, nor merely
vapid. He does not always wander along the lake by night. He is a
nature-student, as well as a nature-lover, and he does a great deal
more than hoot at the owls. This, though, is as near as he comes to
anything scientific, and so worth while, according to the professor.
II
And it is as near as he ought to come to reality and facts—according
to the philosopher.
“We want only the facts of nature,” says the scientist. “Nothing in
nature is worth while,” says the philosopher, “but mood, background,
atmosphere.”
“Nor can I recollect that my mind,” says one of our philosophers, “in
these walks, was much called away from contemplation by the petty
curiosities of the herbalist or birdlorist, for I am not one zealously
addicted to scrutinizing into the minuter secrets of nature. It never
seemed to me that a flower was made sweeter by knowing the construction
of its ovaries.... The wood thrush and the veery sing as melodiously to
the uninformed as to the subtly curious. Indeed, I sometimes think a
little ignorance is wholesome in our communion with nature.”
So it is. Certainly if ignorance, a great deal of ignorance, were
unwholesome, then nature-study would be a very unhealthy course,
indeed. For, when the most curious of the herbalists and birdlorists
(Mr. Burroughs, say) has made his last prying peep into the private
life of a ten-acre woodlot, he will still be wholesomely ignorant of
the ways of nature. Is the horizon just back of the brook that marks
the terminus of our philosopher’s path? Let him leap across, walk on,
on, out of his woods to the grassy knoll in the next pasture, and
there look! Lo! far yonder the horizon! beyond a vaster forest than he
has known, behind a range of higher rolling hills, within a shroud of
wider, deeper mystery.
There isn’t the slightest danger of walking off the earth; nor of
unlearning our modicum of wholesome ignorance concerning the universe.
The nature-lover may turn nature-student and have no fear of losing
nature. The vision will not fade.
Let him go softly through the May twilight and wait at the edge of
the swamp. A voice serene and pure, a hymn, a prayer, fills all the
dusk with peace. Let him watch and see the singer, a brown-winged wood
thrush, with full, spotted breast. Let him be glad that it is not a
white-winged spirit, or a disembodied voice. And let him wonder the
more that so plain a singer knows so divine a song.
Our philosopher mistakes his own dominant mood for the constant mood of
nature. But nature has no constant mood. No more have we. Dawn and dusk
are different moods. The roll of the prairie is unlike the temper of a
winding cowpath in a New England pasture. Nature is not always sublime,
awful, and mysterious; and no one but a philosopher is persistently
contemplative. Indeed, at four o’clock on a June morning in some old
apple orchard, even the philosopher would shout,—
“Hence, loathèd melancholy!”
He is in no mind for meditation; and it is just possible, before the
day is done, that the capture of a drifting seed of the dandelion and
the study of its fairy wings might so add to the wonder, if not to the
sweetness, of the flower, as to give him thought for a sermon.
There are times when the companionship of your library is enough; there
are other times when you want a single book, a chapter, a particular
poem. It is good at times just to know that you are turning with the
earth under the blue of the sky; and just as good again to puzzle over
the size of the spots in the breasts of our several thrushes. For I
believe you can hear more in the song when you know it is the veery and
not the wood thrush singing. Indeed, I am acquainted with persons who
had lived neighbors to the veery since childhood, and never had heard
its song until the bird was pointed out to them. Then they could not
help but hear.
No amount of familiarity will breed contempt for your fields. Is the
summer’s longest, brightest day long enough and bright enough, to
dispel the brooding mystery of the briefest of its nights? And tell me,
what of the vastness and terror of the sea will the deep dredges ever
bring to the surface, or all the circumnavigating drive to shore? The
nature-lover is a man in a particular mood; the nature-student is the
same man in another mood, as the fading shadows of the morning are the
same that lengthen and deepen in the afternoon. There are times when
he will go apart into the desert places to pray. Most of the time,
however, he will live contentedly within sound of the dinner horn, glad
of the companionship of his bluebirds, chipmunks, and pine trees.
This is best. And the question most frequently asked me is, How can I
come by a real love for my pine trees, chipmunks, and bluebirds? How
can I know real companionship with nature?
How did the boy along the starlit lake come by it,—a companionship so
real and intimate that the very cliffs knew him, that the owls answered
him, that even the silences spoke to him, and the imagery of his rocks
and skies became a part of the inner world in which he dwelt? Simply
by living along Winander and hallooing so often to the owls that they
learned to halloo in reply. You may need to be born again before you
can talk the language of the owls; but if there is in you any hankering
for the soil, then all you need for companionship with nature is a
Winander of your own, a range, a haunt, that you can visit, walk
around, and get home from in a day’s time. If this region can be the
pastures, woodlots, and meadows that make your own door-yard, then that
is good; especially if you buy the land and live on it, for then Nature
knows that you are not making believe. She will accept you as she
does the peas you plant, and she will cherish you as she does them.
This farm, or haunt, or range, you will come to know intimately: its
flowers, birds, walls, streams, trees,—its features large and small,
as they appear in June, and as they look in July and in January.
For the first you will need the how-to-know books,—these while you are
getting acquainted; but soon acquaintance grows into friendship. You
are done naming things. The meanings of things now begin to come home
to you. Nature is taking you slowly back to herself. Companionship has
begun.
Many persons of the right mind never know this friendship, because
they never realize the necessity of being friendly. They walk through
a field as they walk through a crowded street; they go into the
country as they go abroad. And the result is that all this talk of the
herbalist and birdlorist, to quote the philosopher again, seems “little
better than cant and self-deception.”
But let the philosopher cease philosophizing (he was also a hermit),
and leave off hermiting; let him live at home with his wife and
children, like the rest of us; let him work in the city for his living,
hoe in his garden for his recreation; and then (I don’t care by
what prompting) let him study the lay of his neighbor fields, woods,
and orchards until he knows every bird and beast, every tree-hole,
earth-hole, even the times and places of the things that grow in
the ground; let him do this through the seasons of the year,—for
two or three years,—and he will know how to enjoy a woodchuck; he
will understand many of the family affairs of his chipmunks; he will
recognize and welcome back his bluebirds; he will love and often listen
to the solemn talk of his pines.
All of this may be petty prying, not communion at all; it may be
all moonshine and sentiment, not science. But it is not cant and
self-deception,—in the hearts of thousands of simple, sufficient folk,
who know a wood thrush when they hear him, and whose woodpaths are of
their own wearing. And if it is not communion with nature, I know that
it is at least real pleasure, and rest, peace, contentment, red blood,
sound sleep, and, at times, it seems to me, something close akin to
religion.
[Illustration]
V
Chickadee
ONCE (it was a good while ago, when I was a boy), I tried to write a
poem. The first stanza ran:—
I heard him when the reeds were young
Along a clover sea;
Above the purple waves he hung,
And o’er the fragrant waters flung
His storm of ecstasy;
and the last stanza ran:—
He’s left the meadows burnt and hot,
He’s left me lone and drear;
But still within the white-birch lot
Cheeps Chickadee—whom I forgot
While Bobolink was here;
which means in plainer prose that chickadee does not sing a while in
June and then fly away and leave us. He stays the year around; he is
constant and faithful in his friendship, though I sometimes forget.
He cannot sing with bobolink. But suppose I could have only one of
the birds? As it is, I get along for more than half the year without
bobolink, but what would my out-of-doors be without chickadee? There is
not a single day in the year that I cannot find him, no matter how hot,
or cold, how hard it rains or snows. Often he is the only voice in all
the silent woods, the only spark of life aglow in all my frozen winter
world.
I was crunching along through the January dusk toward home. The cold
was bitter. A half-starved partridge had just risen from the road and
fluttered off among the naked bushes,—a moment of sound, a bit of life
vanishing in the winter night of the woods. I knew the very hemlock
in which he would roost; but what were the thick, snow-bent boughs of
his hemlock, and what were all his winter feathers in such a night as
this?—this vast of sweeping winds and frozen snow!
The road dipped from the woods into a meadow, where the winds were
free. The cold was driving, numbing here with a power for death that
the thermometer could not mark. I backed into the wind and hastened on
toward the double line of elms that arched the road in front of the
house. Already I could hear them creak and rattle like things of glass.
It was not the sound of life. Nothing was alive; for what could live in
this long darkness and fearful cold?
Could live? The question was hardly thought, when an answer was whirled
past me into the nearest of the naked elms. A chickadee! He caught for
an instant on a dead limb over the road, scrambled along to its broken
tip, and whisked over into a hole that ran straight down the centre of
the stub, down, for I don’t know how far.
I stopped. The stub lay out upon the wind, with only an eddy of the
gale sucking at the little round hole in the broken end, while far down
in its hollow heart, huddling himself into a downy, dozy ball for the
night, was the chickadee. I know by the very way he struck the limb and
turned in that he had been there before. He knew whither, across the
sweeping meadows, he was being blown. He had even helped the winds as
they whirled him, for he had tarried along the roads till late. But he
was safe for the night now, in the very bed, it may be, where he was
hatched last summer, and where at this moment, who knows, were half a
dozen other chickadees, the rest of that last summer’s brood, unscathed
still, and still sharing the old home hollow, as snug and warm this
bitter night as in the soft May days when they were nestlings here
together.
The cold drove me on; but the chickadee had warmed me and all my naked
world of night and death. And so he ever does. The winter has yet to be
that drives him seeking shelter to the south. I never knew it colder
than in January and February of 1904. During both of those months,
morning and evening, I drove through a long mile of empty, snow-buried
woods. For days at a time I would not see even a crow, but morning and
evening, at a certain dip in the road, two chickadees would fly from
bush to bush across the hollow and cheer me on the way. They came out
to the road, really, to pick up whatever scanty crumbs were to be found
in my wake. They came also to hear me, to see me pass,—to escape for a
moment, I think, the silence, desertion, and death of the woods. They
helped me to escape, too.
Four other chickadees, all winter long, ate with us, sharing, as far
as the double windows would allow, the cheer of our dining-room. We
served them on the lilac bush outside the window, tying their suet on
so that they could see us and we them during meal time. Perhaps it was
mere suet, no feast of soul at all, that they got; but constantly, when
our pie was opened, the birds began to sing,—a dainty dish indeed,
savory, wholesome, and good for our souls.
There are states in the far Northwest where the porcupine is protected
by law, as a last food resource for men lost and starving in the
forests. Perhaps the porcupine was not designed by nature for any such
purpose. Perhaps chickadee was not left behind by summer to feed our
lost and starving hope through the cheerless months. But that is the
use I make of him. He is summer’s pledge to me. The woods are hollow,
the winds chill, the earth cold and stiff, but there flits chickadee,
and—I cannot lose faith, nor feel that this procession of bleak white
days is all a funeral!
He is the only bird in my little world that I can find without fail
three hundred and sixty-five days in the year. From December to the end
of March he comes daily to my lilac bush for suet; from April to early
July he is busy with domestic cares in the gray birches of the woodlot;
from August to December he and his family come hunting quietly and
sociably as a little flock among the trees and bushes of the farm; and
from then on he is back for his winter meals at “The Lilac.”
Is it any wonder that he was the first bird I ever felt personally
acquainted with, and the first bird my children knew? That early
acquaintance, however, was not due to his abundance and intrusion, as
it might be with the English sparrow, but rather due to the cheerful,
confiding, sociable spirit of the little bird. He drops down and peeps
under your hat-brim to see what manner of boy you are, and if you
are really fit to be abroad in this world, so altogether good—for
chickadees.
He has a mission to perform besides the eating of eggs and grubs of
the pestiferous insects. This destruction he does that the balance of
things may be maintained out of doors. He has quite another work to
do, which is not economic, and which, in nowise, is a matter of fine
feathers or sweet voice, but simply a matter of sweet nature, vigor,
and concentrated cheerfulness.
I said he is summer’s pledge, the token of hope to me. He is a lesson
also. I don’t often find sermons in stones, because, no doubt, I
look so little for the sermons, so little for the very stones. But I
cannot help seeing chickadee,—and chickadee is all sermon. I hear
him on a joyous May morning calling _Chick-a-dee! dee! Chick-a-dee!
dee!_—brisk, bright, and cheery; or, soft and gentle as a caress, he
whistles, _Phœ-ee-bee! Phœ-ee-bee!_ I meet him again on the edge of
a bleak, midwinter night. He is hungry and cold, and he calls, as I
hasten along, _Chick-a-dee! dee! Chick-a-dee! dee!_—brisk, bright,
and cheery; or, soft and gentle as a caress, he whistles, _Phœ-ee-bee!
Phœ-ee-bee!_
Will you lend me your wings, chickadee, those invisible wings on which
you ride the winds of life so evenly? For I would hang my ill-balanced
soul between them, as your bird soul hangs, and fly as you fly.
The abundant summer, the lean and wolfish winter, find chickadee
cheerful and gentle. He is busier at some seasons than at others, with
fewer chances for friendship. He almost disappears in the early summer.
But this is because of family cares; and because the bigger, louder
birds have come back, and the big leaves have come out and hidden him.
A little searching, and you will discover him, in one of your old
decayed fence posts, maybe, or else deep in the swamp, foraging for a
family so numerous that they spill over at the door of their home.
Here about the farm, this is sure to be a gray birch home. Other trees
will do—on a pinch. I have found chickadee nesting in live white oaks,
maples, upturned roots, and tumbling fence posts. These were shifts,
however, mere houses, not real homes. The only good homelike trees are
old gray birches dead these many years and gone to punk,—mere shells
of tough circular bark walls.
Why has chickadee this very decided preference? Is it a case of
protective coloration,—the little gray and black bird choosing to nest
in this little gray and black tree because bird and tree so exactly
match each other in size and color? Or (and there are many instances
in nature) is there a subtle strain of poetry in chickadee’s soul,
something æsthetic, that leads him into this exquisite harmony,—into
this little gray house for his little gray self?
Explain it as you may, it is a fact that this little bird shows a
marked preference, makes deliberate choice, and in his choice is
protection, and poetry, too. Doubtless he follows the guidance of a
sure and watchful instinct (whatever instinct be), but who shall deny
to him a share of the higher, finer things of the imagination? a share
of real æsthetic taste?
His life inside the birch is of a piece with the artistic exterior.
It is all gentle and sweet and idyllic. There is no happier spot in
the summer woods than that about the birch of the chickadees; and none
whose happiness you will be so little liable to disturb.
Before the woods were in leaf one spring I found a pair of chickadees
building in a birch along the edge of the swamp. They had just begun,
having dug out only an inch of cavity. It was very interesting to
discover them doing the work themselves, for usually they refit some
abandoned chamber or adapt a ready-made hole.
The birch was a long, limbless cylinder of bark, broken off about
fourteen feet up, and utterly rotten, the mere skin of a tree stuffed
with dust. I could push my finger into it at any point. It was so weak
that every time the birds lighted upon the top the whole stub wobbled
and reeled. Surely they were building their house upon the sand. Any
creature without wings would have known that. Birds, however, seem to
have lost the sense of such insecurity, often placing their nests as if
they expected them also to take wings and fly to safety when the rains
descend and the winds come.
This shaking stub of the chickadees was standing directly beneath a
great overshadowing pine, where, if no partridge bumped into it, if two
squirrels did not scamper up it together, if the crows nesting overhead
did not discover it, if no strong wind bore down upon it from the
meadow side, it might totter out the nesting season. But it didn’t. The
birds were leaving too much to luck. I knew it, and should have pushed
their card house down, then and there, and saved the greater ruin
later. Perhaps so, but I was too interested in their labor.
Both birds were working when I discovered them, and so busily that my
coming up did not delay them for a single billful. It was not hard
digging, but it was very slow, for chickadee is neither carpenter nor
mason. He has difficulty in killing a hard-backed beetle. So, whenever
you find him occupying a clean-walled cavity, with a neat, freshly
clipped doorway, you may be sure that some woodpecker built the house,
not this short-billed, soft-tailed little tit. He lacks both the
bill-chisel and the tail-brace. Perhaps the explanation of his fondness
for birch trees lies here: they die young and soon decay.
The birds were going down through the top, not by a hole in the
leathery rind of the sides, for the bark would have been too tough for
their beaks. They would drop into the top of the stub, pick up a wad
of decayed wood, and fly off to the dead limb of the pine. Here, with
a jerk and a snap of their bills, they would scatter the stuff in a
shower so thin and far around that I could neither hear it fall nor
find a trace of it upon the dead leaves of the ground. This nest would
never be betrayed by the workmen’s chips.
Between the pair there averaged three beakfuls of excavating every two
minutes, one of the birds regularly shoveling twice to the other’s
once. They looked so exactly alike that I could not tell which bird was
pushing the enterprise; but I have my suspicions.
There is nothing so superior about his voice or appearance that he
should thus shirk. He was doing part of his duty, apparently, but it
was half-hearted work. Hers was the real interest, the real anxiety;
and hers the initiative. To be a male and show off! That’s the thing.
To be a male and let your wife carry the baby! The final distinctive
difference between a truly humanized, civilized man and all other males
of every order, is a willingness to push the baby carriage.
The finer the feathers or the song among male birds the less use they
are in practical, domestic ways. Fine beaux, captivating lovers, they
become little else than a nuisance as husbands. One of my friends has
been watching a pair of bluebirds building. The male sat around for
a week without bringing in a feather. Then one day he was seen to
enter the hole, after his busy mate had just left it, and carry out a
beakful of grass which he scattered to the winds in pure perversity,
criticising her bungling work, maybe! More likely he was jealous.
Chickadee was no such precious fool as that. He was doing something;
trying to drown his regret for the departing honeymoon in hard labor,
not, however, to the danger of his health.
I sat a long time watching the work. It went on in perfect silence, not
a chirp, not the sound of a fluttering wing. The swamp along whose
margin the birds were building had not a joyous atmosphere. Damp,
dim-shadowed, and secret, it seemed to have laid its spell upon the
birds. Their very gray and black was as if mixed of the dusk, and of
the gray, half-light of the swamp; their noiseless coming and going was
like the slipping to and fro of shadows. They were a part of it all,
and that sharing was their defense, the best defense they knew.
It didn’t save their nest, however. They felt and obeyed the spirit of
the swamp in their own conduct, but the swamp did not tell them where
to build. It was about three weeks later that I stopped again under the
pine and found the birch stub in pieces upon the ground. Some robber
had been after the eggs and had brought the whole house tumbling down.
This is not the fate of all such birch-bark houses. Now and again they
escape; but it is always a matter for wonder.
I was following an old disused wood road once when I scared a robin
from her nest. Her mate joined her, and together they raised a great
hubbub. Immediately a chewink, a pair of vireos, and two black and
white warblers joined the robins in their din. Then a chickadee
appeared. He (I say “he” knowingly; and here he quite redeems himself)
had a worm in his beak. His anxiety seemed so real that I began to
watch him, when, looking down among the stones for a place to step,
what should I see but his mate emerging from the end of a birch stump
at my very feet. She had heard the din and had come out to see what it
was all about. At sight of her, he hastened with his worm, brushing my
face, almost, as he darted to her side. She took it sweetly, for she
knew he had intended it for her. But how do I know that? Perhaps he
meant it for the young! There were no young in the nest, only eight
eggs. Even after the young came (there were eight of them!), and when
life, from daylight to dark, was one ceaseless, hurried hunt for worms,
I saw him over and over again fly to her side caressingly and tempt her
to eat.
The house of this pair did not fall. How could it when it stood
precisely two and a half feet from the ground! But that it wasn’t
looted is due to the sheer audacity of its situation. It stood alone,
against the road, so close that the hub of a low wheel in passing might
have knocked it down. Perhaps a hundred persons had brushed it in going
by. How many dogs and cats had overlooked it no one can say, nor how
many skunks and snakes and squirrels. The accident that discovered it
to me happened apparently to no one else, and I was friendly.
Cutting a tiny window in the bark just above the eggs, I looked in upon
the little people every day. I watched them grow and fill the cavity
and hang over at the top. I was there the day they forced my window
open, the day when there was no more room at the top, and when, at the
call of their parents, one after another of this largest and sweetest
of bird families found his wings and flew away through the woods.
[Illustration]
VI
The Missing Tooth