means March, the arbutus April, the shad-bush May, and the red
wood-lily July. I cannot think of single blossoms, or of here and there
a spot of rare flowers, in June, but only of pastures drifted white,
meadows purple-misted, and rolling hillsides billowy pink,—of laurel,
forget-me-nots, daisies, viburnums, and buttercups. This is no time
to botanize. Leave the collecting can at home, for one day at least,
and wander forth, not to hunt, but to drift and float, or, if you run
aground, to wade knee-deep in June. A botanist who is never poet misses
as much in the out-of-doors as the poet who is never botanist.
If there were no other flower in the month but the white water-lily,
June would still be June. “Who can contemplate it,” exclaims Mr.
Burroughs, “as it opens in the morning sun, and distills such perfume,
such purity, such snow of petal, and such gold of anther, from the dark
water and still darker ooze! How feminine it seems beside its coarser
and more robust congeners, how shy, how pliant, how fine in texture and
starlike in form!”
How the water-lily and spatter-dock can grow from the same mud is past
understanding. One has every grace, the other none. But the dock can
live in stagnant water, which perhaps is a sort of compensation.
And these two, for me, are always associated with magnolias,—_Magnolia
glauca_,—and magnolias are associated with “old, forgotten, far-off
things.” Their absence from my swamps here is part of the price I pay
for my transplanting to these New England fields.
If that were all, it were price enough. But think of June in New
Jersey, with buzzards soaring, cardinals whistling, and turtle doves
cooing; with swamps magnolia-scented, and woods astir with box-turtles,
pine snakes, pine-tree lizards, and ’possums! Then think of June in
Massachusetts with none of these,—at least in my neighborhood!
What then? I could scarcely strain the magnolia’s breath from the
mingling odors if it were here, for the common air I breathe is the
breath of blossoming clover, wild grape, elder, blackberry, rose,
and azalea. I must almost smell them by _families_. For here are six
wild roses perfuming my air, five viburnums, six dogwoods (these last
quite lacking in perfume, be it said), and wild blackberries that I
have never dared to number. Who wants to number them? to spend his
June with a “plant analysis,” dissecting and keeping tally? It is
enough now to be alive and out of doors among the flowers. Nor is
it all of June to find thirty-six species of birds nesting within a
radius of five hundred and fifty-five and one half feet from your
_front_ door. I do not cite these figures in order to startle, but to
suggest, if I might, the joyous medley of life in June, its variety
and abundance. You may not be able to name all the warblers; you have
never yet made out which is which among the dogwoods and viburnums; the
dogwood flowers are all four-pointed stars, while the viburnums are
all five-pointed. But what of it,—four or five, dogwood or viburnum!
Here they are, banked in soft, snowy fragrance along the margin of the
pond. A tiny nest swings from a fork among them, a tiny bird with a
white ring around her eye broods and watches you drift past. You have a
fish-pole, and all about you and within you is the June.
[Illustration]
X
A Broken Feather
ONE of the pair of crows that nest in my woodlot has been flying
over all winter long with a gap in his right wing. Three at least of
the large wing feathers are missing, and the result is a perceptible
limp. The bird moves through the air with the list of a boat that has
shifted or lost its ballast. Were he set upon in the air by a hawk,
as might happen if he were smaller, the race would be short. He is
plainly disabled by the loss of these three feathers, and has been for
months. Just how and when the loss occurred I don’t know. It is likely,
however, that the feathers were shot away in June,—in corn-stealing
time. Now for nearly a year he has been hobbling about on one whole and
one half wing, trusting to luck to escape his enemies, until he can get
three new feathers to take the places of these that are missing.
Well, why, in all this time, if these three feathers are so necessary,
has he not gotten them? He might reply, “Which of you by taking thought
can add as much as one cubit to your stature, to say nothing of three
hairs to the top of your head?” By taking time (which is a fine human
phrase for giving Nature time), and with the right conditions, you may
add the cubit. So the crow may get his feathers. It is not an affair
between the crow and his feathers, nor between the crow and Nature. It
is wholly Nature’s affair with the crow’s feathers, and so seriously
does Nature take it, so careful is she, so systematic, so almost
arbitrary about it, that the feathers of crows, like the hairs of our
heads, can truly be said to be numbered.
Nothing could look more haphazard, certainly, than the way a hen’s
feathers seem to drop off at moulting time. The most forlorn, undone,
abject creature about the farm is the half-moulted hen. There is one
in the chicken yard now, so nearly naked that she really is ashamed
of herself, and so miserably helpless that she squats in a corner all
night, unable to reach the low poles of the roost. It is a critical
experience with the hen, this moulting of her feathers, and were it not
for the protection of the yard it might be a fatal experience. Nature
seems to have no hand in the business at all; if she has, then what a
mess she is making of it!
But pick up the hen, study the falling of the feathers carefully, and
lo! here is law and order, system and sequence, as if every feather
were a star, every quill a planet, and the old white hen the round
sphere of the universe. You will put her down reverently, awfully, this
hen that you took up with such compassion, and you will say, “Such
knowledge is too wonderful for me.”
So it is, for the moult means a great deal more than the mere renewal
of feathers, just how much more no one seems to know. This much is
plain, that once a year, usually after the nesting season, it seems a
physical necessity for most birds to renew their plumage.
We get a new suit (some of us) because our old one wears out. That is
the most apparent cause for the new annual suit of the birds. Yet with
them, as with some of the favored of us humans, the feathers go out of
fashion, and the change, the moult, is a mere matter of style.
But the annual moult, first of all, is Nature’s wise provision for
the safety and warmth of the bird. Feathers are not only covering,
as our clothes, but also means of locomotion, and, hence, the bird’s
very means of life. A year of use leaves many of the feathers worn and
broken, some of them through accident entirely lost (as with my crow),
and while they might last for two years, or even longer, Nature has
found it necessary to provide a new plumage as often as once a year, in
order to keep the race of birds at its best.
But there are other reasons, at least there are advantages taken of the
moult for other ends: such as the adaptation of the feathers to the
varying temperatures of the seasons,—heavier in winter and lighter in
summer; also the adaptation of the color of the plumage to the changing
colors of the environment,—as the change from the dark summer color
of the ptarmigan to its snow-white winter plumage to match the snows
of its far northern home; then, and perhaps most interesting of all,
is the advantage taken of the moult, for the adorning of the bird for
the mating season. Indeed, Nature goes so far, in some cases, as to
cause a special moult to meet the exigencies of the wedding,—as if
fine feathers _do_ make a fine bird. All this to meet the fancy of the
bride! so, at least, the scientists tell us. Whether or not her fancy
is the cause, it is a fact that among the birds it is the bridegroom
who is adorned for his wife, and sometimes the fine feathers come by a
special moult.
Not far from my house is a nest of black-crowned night herons, or
“quawks.” Preparatory to the mating of the pair there started from
the crown of the male (and female, also, in this case,) two or three
white, rounded plumes, which now hang eight inches in length, waving
gracefully to his shoulders. They are the special glory of the wedding
time; but soon after the nesting season is over they will drop out,
not to come again until he goes a-wooing Mrs. Quawk once more. In the
white American egret, and in the snowy egret, the plumes number about
fifty, and occur upon the back close to the tail. They are straight in
the American, recurved in the snowy, and make the famous “aigrette”
plumes of the milliner. The birds are shot in their nuptial dress, and
so great has been the heartless demand that both species, once very
abundant, are now almost extinct.
Bobolink is another special case. He has two complete moults a year.
Now, as I write, I hear him singing over the meadow,—a jet black,
white, and cream-buff lover, most strikingly adorned. His wife, down
in the grass, looks as little like him as a sparrow looks like a
blackbird. After the breeding season he moults, changing color so
completely that he and his wife and children all look alike, all like
sparrows. They even lose their name now, flying south under the assumed
name of “reedbirds.”
Bobolink passes the winter in Brazil, and at the coming of spring,
just before the long northward journey begins, he moults again; but
you would hardly know it to look at him, for, strangely enough, he is
not black and white, but still colored like a sparrow as he was in the
fall. _Apparently_ he is. Look at him more closely, however, and you
will find the brownish yellow color is all caused by a veil of fine
fringes hanging from the edges of the feathers. Underneath are the
black and white and cream-buff. He starts northward, and by the time he
reaches Massachusetts the fringe veil is worn off and the black and
white bobolink appears. Specimens taken after their arrival here still
show traces of the yellow veil.
Many birds do not have this spring moult at all, and with most of
those that do, the great wing feathers are not then renewed as are
bobolink’s, but only at the annual moult after the nesting is done.
In fact, the moulting of the remiges, or wing feathers, seems to be a
_family_ affair, the process differing with different families; for
these are the bird’s most important feathers, and their loss is so
serious a matter that Nature has come to make the change according to
the habits and needs of the birds.
With all birds the order is for the body feathers to begin to go
first, then the wings, and last the tail. But the shedding of the
wing feathers is a very slow and carefully regulated process. In the
wild geese and other water birds the wing feathers drop out with the
feathers of the body, and all go so simultaneously that the birds
cannot fly. On land you could catch them with your hands, but they keep
near or on the water and thus escape, though times have been when it
was necessary to protect them from their human enemies at this season
by special laws.
The necessity for the moult entails many risks, for it exposes the
bird to peculiar dangers; yet no single bird is abandoned during this
period, none left without a way of escape. The geese, as we have seen,
moult most rapidly and hence are most helpless, but there are few of
their enemies that they cannot avoid by keeping to the water and grassy
marshes; the hawks, that hunt by wing, moult so slowly that they do not
feel a loss of power; while such birds as the quail and grouse, that
always depend in part for protection upon the blending of their colors
with the colors of their environment, seem especially so protected
during the moulting season. A grouse blotched with light patches, where
the dark-tipped feathers have fallen away, may so melt into the mottled
color scheme of its background as to escape the sharpest eye.
Such a rapid, wholesale moult as in the case of the geese would be
fatal to land birds. Instead, their primaries, or large wing feathers,
drop out one or two at a time and symmetrically from the two wings.
Oftentimes it is the two inner primaries that go first, then the others
following one at a time, the outermost last. This order varies, as in
the kingfisher. In the snow bunting all but two of the old primaries
are gone before any new ones have grown as large as the secondaries. In
the hawks, again, birds that must use their wings and must have them
always at their best, the moulting of the wing feathers is very slow,
lasting nearly the whole year. The homing pigeon, another great flier,
but not of the same kind as the hawks, begins about May to moult his
wing feathers, losing the tenth primary first, a month later the ninth,
then the others at intervals of from eight to fifteen days.
It is quite enough to make one pause, to make one even wonder, when he
finds that this seemingly insignificant matter is taken so seriously by
nature, and that even here there is that perfect adaptation of means
to end. The gosling, to cite another instance, goes six weeks in down,
then gets its first feathers, which it sheds in the fall. The young
quail, on the other hand, is born with quills so far advanced that
it is able to fly almost as soon as it is hatched. These are mature
feathers; but the bird is still young and growing, and soon outgrows
these first flight feathers, so that they are quickly lost and new
ones come. This goes on till fall, several moults occurring the first
summer to meet the increasing weight of the growing body.
Where there are peculiar uses made of the tail, as with the chimney
swifts and woodpeckers, there is a peculiar order of moulting. In most
birds the tail is a kind of balance or steering-gear, and not of equal
importance with the wings. Nature, consequently, seems to have attached
less importance to the feathers of the tail. They are not so firmly
set, and they are hardly of the same quality or kind; for if a wing
feather is once broken or lost, after the moult, it must go unmended
until the annual moulting time comes round again; whereas, if a tail
feather is lost through accident, it is made good, no matter when.
How do you explain that? I know that old theory of the birds roosting
with their tails out, and so, through generations of lost tails, those
feathers now grow, expecting to be plucked by some enemy, and so have
only a temporary hold. Perhaps.
The normal, natural way, of course, is to replace a lost feather with
a new one as soon as possible; but in order to give extra strength to
the wing feathers nature has found it necessary to check their frequent
change, and so complete is the check that the annual moult is required
to replace one of them. The Japanese have discovered the secret of
this check, and are able by it to keep certain feathers in the tails
of their cocks growing until they reach the enormous length of ten to
twelve feet.
My crow, it seems, lost his three feathers just after his annual moult;
the three broken shafts he carries still in his wing, and must continue
to carry, as the stars must continue their courses. These three
feathers must round out their cycle to the annual moult. The universe
of worlds and feathers is a universe of law, of order, and of reason.
[Illustration]
XI
High Noon
LAZILY sailing clouds, and between them, far away, the illimitable
blue! And how blue! how cool! how far away! Never does the sky seem
of so real azure, so fresh and new, but so mysteriously distant, as
upon such a July day as this; and never does the earth seem so warm
and near. I lie outstretched upon it as close as I ever lay upon my
mother’s breast. I feel the crisp moss beneath me, the creeping of the
beetle under my shoulder, the heat of the gray stone against my side.
I throw out my hands, push my fingers into the hot soil and feel them
take root. Mother earth! The clouds sail on; the bending blue recedes;
and—heaven? It matters not. Here are my brothers,—the beetle, the
moss, the gray stone; and here I lie in the arms of the mother who bore
me.
I have questions to ask—to-morrow; dreams to dream—to-morrow; things
to do—to-morrow. To-day I am free in the fields; to-day I am brother
to the beetle and the stone; I am neighbor to this ancient white oak in
whose shade I lie; I am child to the earth. It is enough to be to-day.
How warm is this mother breast, even here, under the tree! The sun is
overhead. The summer is at its height. The flood-tide of life has come.
It is high noon of the year.
The drowsy silence of the full, hot noon lies deep across the field.
Stream and cattle and pasture-slope are quiet in repose. The eyes of
the earth are heavy. The air is asleep. Yet the round shadow of my oak
begins to shift. The cattle do not move; the pasture still sleeps under
the wide, white glare. But already the noon is passing.
Of the four seasons summer is the shortest, and the one we are least
acquainted with. Summer is only a pause between spring and autumn, only
the hour of the year’s noon. But the hour is long enough were we able
to stop, to lie down under a tree for the hour, unwearied, wide-awake,
and still.
We can be glad with the spring, sad with the autumn, eager with the
winter; but it is hard for us to go softly, to pause, to be still,
complete, sufficient, full with the full, sufficient summer; to hang
poised and expanded like the broad-winged hawk yonder far up in the
wide sky.
But the hawk is not still. The shadow of my oak begins to lengthen.
The hour is gone even while it comes, for wavering softly down the
languid air falls a yellow leaf from a slender gray birch near by. I
remember, too, that on my way through the woodlot I frightened a small
flock of robins from a pine; and more than a week ago the swallows were
gathering upon the telegraph wires. It was springtime even yesterday;
to-day there are signs of autumn everywhere. Perhaps, after all, there
is no such time as summer,—no pause, no rest, no quiet in the fields,
no hour of noon.
Yet I get something out of the fields, these slumberous July days, that
is neither of springtime nor of autumn, a ripening, mellowing, quieting
something, that falls only when the leaves hang limp, when the earth
warms in the shadows, when the wood-lily opens in the sun, and the whir
of the cicada times the throbbing of the heat. And when that something
falls, then I know it is summer.
This is a late July day, but its dawn was still of the springtime. At
daybreak the birds were singing, fresh and full-throated as in May;
then the sun burned through the mist and the chorus ceased. Now I do
not hear even the chewink and the talkative vireo. Only the fiery notes
of the scarlet tanager come to me through the dry white heat of the
noon, and the resonant, reverberated song of the indigo bunting, a hot,
metallic, quivering song, as out of a hot and copper sky.
There are nestlings still in the woods. This indigo bunting has eggs
or young in the bushes up the hillside; the scarlet tanager but lately
finished his nest in the tall oaks; I looked in upon some half-fledged
cuckoos along the fence. But all of these are late. The year’s young
are upon the wing. A few of the spring’s flowers are still opening.
I noticed the bees upon some tardy raspberry blossoms; and yonder,
amid the fixed shining colors of the wooded ridge, I see the top of
a chestnut tree, misty and tender, with foamy white bloom. These are
the last of the season. The July flowering of the chestnut always
seems delayed and accidental. The season’s fruit has set, is already
ripening. Spring is gone; the sun is overhead; the red wood-lily is
open. To-day is summer,—noon of the year.
High noon! and the hour strikes in the red wood-lily aflame in the old
fields and in the low thick tangles of sweet-fern and blackberry that
border the upland woods.
This is a flower of fire, the worshiper of the sun, the very heart of
the summer. How impossible it would be to kindle a wood-lily on the
cold, damp soil of April! It can be lighted only on this kiln-dried
soil of July. This old hilly pasture is baking in the sun; the mouldy
moss that creeps over its thin breast crackles and crumbles under my
feet; the patches of sweet-fern that blotch it here and there crisp
in the heat and fill the smothered air with a spicy breath; but the
wood-lily opens wide and full, lifting its spotted lips to the Sun, for
it loves his scorching kiss. See it glow! Should the withered thicket
burst suddenly into a blaze it would be no wonder, so little would it
take to fan these glowing petals into flame.
The marsh marigolds of May spread the meadows with a glow of warmth,
yet that was but a gilded fire beside the wilting, withering heat of
this midsummer lily. That early flush has gone. There is hardly a
fleck of spring’s freshness and delicacy on the fields, none of the
tenderness of the bluets that touched everything in May, none even
of the softness of the hardwood greens that lasted far into June.
The colors are set now, dry and glistening, as if varnished over.
The odors, too, have changed. They were moist and faint then,—the
fragrance of the breath of things. Now they are strong, pungent,
heavy,—the tried out smells of the sweat of things.
Life has grown lusty and lazy and rank. It stood no higher than the
heads of the violets along my little river at the coming of June;
to-day I cannot catch a glimpse of the water without breaking through a
hedge of swamp milkweed, boneset, and peppermint. Here are turtle-head,
joe-pye-weed, jewel-weed, the budding goldenrods, and the spreading,
choking, rasping smartweed. The year is full grown. It is strong, rich,
luxuriant.
And how erect and unblushing! The pointed spireas, the sumacs, the
thistles, this crowd along the river, this red wood-lily, even the tall
swaying spray of meadow-rue! Slender, dainty, airy, the meadow-rue
falls just short of grace and delicacy. It feels the season’s pride of
life. It is angled, rigid, rank. Were there the slightest bend to its
branches, the merest suggestion of soul to the plant, then, from root
to spreading panicles, there had been more grace, more misty, penciled
delicacy wrought into the tall meadow-rue than into any flower-form of
my summer.
But the suggestion of soul in the meadow-rue, as in the whole face
of nature, is lost in flesh. It is the body, not the spirit, that
is now present. She is well fed, well clothed, opulent, mature. She
is conventional,—as conventional as a single, stiff spire of the
steeple-bush,—turned to such a pointed nicety as to seem done by
machine.
And yet the steeple-bush rarely grows as single spires, but by the
meadow-full. We rarely see a single spire. We never gather summer
flowers one by one, as we gather the arbutus and hepatica of spring.
Life has lost its individuality. It is all massed, crowded, communal.
The odors mingle now and drift wide on the winds, and as wide on the
hillsides spread the colors, gold and green and white, and, where the
rocky pasture runs down to the woods, the pink of the steeple-bush,
like a flush of dawn.
Across my neighbor’s pasture lies this soft glory of the spireas all
through July. It runs in irregular streams down to the brook, rising
there into a low-hanging bank of mist where the clustering spires
of pink are interspersed with the taller, whiter meadow-sweet,—the
“willow-leaved spirea.”
There are shadowy rooms in the deep woods where the spring lingers
until the leaves of autumn begin to fall. Here, in July, I can find the
little twin flowers Linnea and Mitchella, blossoms that should have
opened with the bloodroot and anemone. But Life has largely fled the
woods and left them empty and still. She is out in the open, along the
roadsides, rioting in the sun. The time of her maidenhood is gone. She
is entirely maternal now, bent on replenishing the earth, on reseeding
it against all possibility of death. She covers the ground with seed,
and fills the very air with seed that the winds may sow. She has grown
lusty, bold, almost defiant, no longer asking leave, but claiming
for her own the pastures, gardens, waysides, even the dumps and waste
places.