arrogant, royal, unapproachable by man or beast. “Stand back,” it says,
by every one of its thousand nettles; “this field is mine.” How savage
and how splendid it is! After the royal purple fades, the goldfinches
will dare to come and eat the plumed seeds and scatter them by the
million, but even the goldfinch has been known to perish upon the
poisoned spikes with which the plant is armed.
As persistent and successful as the thistle, though not as arrogant and
savage, grows the wild white carrot in the mowing fields. The courts
have called it names and set a price upon its life. It has been pulled
out, cut off and burned,—exterminated again and again by statute.
Life snaps her fingers at us in July; lays hold of us, even, as we
pass, and makes us carry her burs and beggar’s-ticks for a wider
planting. I am as useful as the tail of my cow. Neither the cow nor
I ever come home from the July fields without an abundant sowing of
stick-tights, tick-seeds, and burdock burs.
There is little beauty, fragrance, or even economic value in this wild,
overrunning host of thistles, docks, daisies, plantains, yarrows,
carrots, that now possess the earth; but when they crowd out along the
dusty roadsides and cover the sterile, neglected, and unsightly places,
we can sing, like the good gray poet, “the leaves and flowers of the
commonest weeds” in our “Song of Joys.”
There is certainly some praise due the chicory, or blue corn-flower,
for it is a waste transformer, a “slummer” among flowers, if ever there
was one. Like the daisy, it is a foreigner; but unlike the daisy, its
coming is wholly benevolent. It asks only the roadsides, and for these
along only the choked, deserted stretches; and where the summer dust
lies deepest. Coarse, common, weedy, it doubtless is; but it never
droops in the heat, and its blue shines through the smother like azure
through the mists of the sky.
The winds and the birds are the sowers of the wayside, and to them I am
indebted for this touch of midsummer color. But they miss certain spots
along the roads, or else these are the patches that have no deepness
of earth, where the seed of the winds’ sowing can get no hold, for I
have had to sow these myself. As I go up and down I carry a pocketful
of sweet clover seed,—melilotus,—and over every waste and sandy place
I scatter a few of the tiny seeds, when, lo! not two blades of grass
where one grew before, but a patch of tall white flowers, breathing
the sweetness of heaven into all the air, and humming in the July sun
with the joyous sound of my honey bees. All this, and for season after
season, where nothing grew before!
Along with melilotus in the gravelly cuts and burnt woodlands grows
the fireweed, a tall showy annual that waves its pink, plumed head
throughout July. Farther north and west, this striking flower, like
the melilotus, yields a heavy flow of delicious honey, but it does not
attract the bees in this locality. Neither do my bees get any nectar
from the fat little indigo-bush that takes possession of the unfarmed,
sandy fields in July, though the wild bumblebees are busy upon it as
long as it remains in bloom.
But this is not the native land of the honey bee, and it is sheer luck
that the white clover, the basswood, the goldenrod, and here in July,
the sumac, give down to these immigrant bees their honey-sweets.
High noon of the year! The laggard breeze comes to me now from the
maple swamp, slow and sleepy with the odor of the white azaleas; a
flock of chickadees stop and quiz me; the quivering click-clack of a
distant mowing-machine fills the air with a drowsy hum.
Up to this time I have not seen a black snake, but now one is watching
me with raised head from the edge of ferns among the rocks. One step
toward him and the lifted, rigid neck, a flashing streak of jet, glides
swiftly, evenly, mysteriously away, leaving me with an uncanny feeling
of chill.
It, too, is a creature of the sun, as is everything that seems to
belong especially to July. Smells, colors, sounds, shapes, are all
sun-born. The hum of the insects, the music of the mower, the clear,
strong hues of the flowers, the sweet breath of curing hay, the heavy
balsamic odors of the woods,—everything seems either a distillation, a
vibration, an essence, or some direct, immediate work of the sun.
Has your blood been work and winter faded until it runs thin? Would you
feel the pulse of a new life? Come, we will take a day out of July and
bask like the wood-lily and the snake; we will sleep for this one day
in the blazing, sleeping, living, midsummer sun.
[Illustration]
XII
The Palace in the Pig-pen
IT is certainly a humble environment. The delicious spring of water,
the plenty of wild, cool air, and the clean pavement of loose stones do
not surround this home as they did the home of Mr. Burroughs’s phœbes,
nor does this look “out upon some wild scene and overhung by beetling
crags.” Instead, this phœbe’s nest is stuck close up to the low board
roof in my pig-pen.
“You have taken a handful of my wooded acres,” says Nature, “and if you
have not improved them, you at least have changed them greatly. But
they are mine still. Be friendly now, go softly, and you shall have
them all,—and I shall have them all, too. We will share them together.”
And we do. Every part of the fourteen acres is mine, yielding some
kind of food or fuel or shelter. And every foot, yes, every _foot_,
is Nature’s; as entirely hers as when the thick primeval forest stood
here. The apple trees are hers as much as mine, and she has an average
of ten different bird families, living in them every spring. A pair of
crows and a pair of red-tailed hawks are nesting in the woodlot; there
are at least three families of chipmunks in as many of my stone piles;
a fine old tree toad (his fourth season now) sleeps on the porch under
the climbing rose; a hornet’s nest hangs in a corner of the eaves; a
small colony of swifts thunder in the chimney; swallows twitter in the
hayloft; a chipmunk and a half-tame gray squirrel feed in the barn;
and—to bring an end to this bare beginning—under the roof of the
pig-pen dwell this pair of phœbes.
To make a bird house of a pig-pen, to divide it between the pig and the
bird—this is as far as Nature can go, and this is certainly enough to
redeem the whole farm. For she has not sent an outcast or a scavenger
to dwell in the pen, but a bird of character, however much he may lack
in song or color. Phœbe does not make up well in a picture; neither
does he perform well as a singer; there is little to him, in fact, but
personality,—personality of a kind and quantity, sufficient to make
the pig-pen a decent and respectable neighborhood.
Phœbe is altogether more than his surroundings. Every time I go to feed
the pig, he lights upon a post near by and says to me: “It’s what you
are! Not what you do, but how you do it!”—with a launch into the air,
a whirl, an unerring snap at a cabbage butterfly, and an easy drop to
the post again, by way of illustration. “Not where you live, but how
you live there; not the feathers you wear, but how you wear them,—it
is what you are that counts!”
There is a difference between being a “character” and having one. “Jim”
Crow is a character, largely because he has so little. That is why he
is “Jim.” My phœbe lives over the pig, but he has no nickname like the
crow. I cannot feel familiar with a bird of his air and carriage, who
faces the world so squarely, who settles upon a stake as if he owned
it, who lives a prince in my pig-pen.
Look at him! How alert, able, free! Notice the limber drop of his tail,
the ready energy it suggests. By that one sign you would know the bird
had force. He is afraid of nothing, not even the cold, and he migrates
only because he is a flycatcher, and is thus compelled to. The earliest
spring day, however, that you find the flies buzzing in the sun, look
for phœbe. He is back. The first of my birds to return in the spring
is he, often beating the bluebird and robin by almost a week. It was a
fearful spring, the spring of 1904. How phœbe managed to exist those
miserable March days is a mystery. He came directly to the pen, as he
had come the year before, and his presence in that bleakest of Marches
made it almost spring.
The same force and promptness are manifest in the domestic affairs of
the bird. The first to arrive that spring, he was also the first to
build and bring off a brood,—or, perhaps, _She_ was. And the size of
the brood—of the broods, for the second one is now a-wing, and there
may yet be a third!
Phœbe appeared without his mate, and for nearly three weeks he hunted
in the vicinity of the pen, calling the day long, and, toward the end
of the second week, occasionally soaring into the air, flapping and
pouring forth a small, ecstatic song that seemed fairly forced from him.
These aerial bursts meant just one thing: _she_ was coming, was coming
soon! Was she coming, or was he getting ready to go for her? Here he
had been for nearly three weeks, his house-lot chosen, his mind at
rest, his heart beating faster with every sunrise. It was as plain as
day that he knew—was certain—just how and just when something lovely
was going to happen. I wished I knew. I was half in love with her
myself, half jealous of him, and I, too, watched for her.
But she was not for me. On the evening of April 14, he was alone as
usual. The next morning a pair of phœbes flitted in and out of the
windows of the pen. Here she was. Will some one tell me all about it?
Had she just come along and fallen instantly in love with him and his
fine pig-pen? There are foolish female birds; and there are records of
just such love affairs; but this was too early in the season. It is
pretty evident that he nested here last year. Was she his old mate,
as Wilson believes? Did they keep together all through the autumn and
winter, all the way from Massachusetts to Florida and back? Or was she
a new bride, who had promised him before he left Florida? If so, then
how did she know where to find him?
Here is a pretty story. But who will tell it to me?
What followed is a pretty story, too, had I a lover’s pen with which
to write it,—the story of his love, of their love, and of her love
especially, which was last and best.
For several days after she came the weather continued raw and wet, so
that nest-building was greatly delayed. The scar of an old, last year’s
nest still showed on a stringer, and I wondered if they had decided on
this or some other site for the new nest. They had not made up their
minds, for when they did start it was to make three beginnings.
Then I offered a suggestion. Out of a bit of stick, branching at
right angles, I made a little bracket and tacked it up on one of the
stringers, down near the lower end of the roof. It appealed to the
birds at once, and from that moment the building went steadily on.
Saddled upon this bracket, as well as mortared to the stringer, the
nest, when finished, was as safe as a castle. And how perfect a
thing! Few nests, indeed, combine the solidity, the softness, and the
exquisite curve of phœbe’s.
In placing the bracket, I had carelessly nailed it under one of the
cracks in the loose board roof. The nest was receiving its first
linings when there came a long, hard rain that beat through the crack
and soaked the little cradle. This was serious, for a great deal of mud
had been worked into the thick foundation, and here, in the constant
shade, the dampness would be long in drying out.
The builders saw the mistake, too, and with their great good sense
immediately began to remedy it. They built the bottom up thicker,
carried the wall over on a slant that brought the outermost point
within the crack, then raised the whole nest until the cup was as
round-rimmed and hollow as the mould of the bird’s breast could make it.
The outside of the nest, its base, is broad and rough and shapeless
enough; but nothing could be softer and lovelier than the inside, the
cradle, and nothing drier, for the slanting walls shed every drop from
the leaky crack.
Wet weather followed the heavy rain until long after the nest was
finished. The whole structure was as damp and cold as a newly plastered
house. It felt wet to my touch. Yet I noticed the birds were already
brooding. Every night, and often during the day, I would see one of
them in the nest, so deep in that only a head or a tail showed over
the round rim. After several days I looked to see the eggs, but to my
surprise found the nest empty. It had been robbed, I thought, yet by
what creature I could not imagine. Then down cuddled one of the birds
again,—and I understood. Instead of wet and cold, the nest to-day felt
warm to my hand; it was dry almost to the bottom. It had changed color,
too, all the upper part having turned a soft silver-gray. She (I am
sure it was she) had not been brooding her eggs at all; she had been
brooding her mother’s thought of them; and for them had been nestling
here these days and nights, drying and warming their damp cradle with
the fire of her life and love.
In due time the eggs came,—five of them, white, spotless, and shapely.
While the little hen was hatching them I gave my attention further to
the cock.
I am writing this with a black suspicion overhanging him. But of that
later. I hope it is unfounded, and I shall give him the benefit of
the doubt. A man is innocent until proved guilty. I have no positive
evidence of Mr. Phœbe’s wrong.
Our intimate friendship has revealed a most pleasing nature in phœbe.
Perhaps such close and continued association would show like qualities
in every bird, even in the kingbird. But I fear only a woman, like Mrs.
Olive Thorne Miller, could find them in him. Not much can be said of
this flycatcher family, except that it is useful,—a kind of virtue
that gets its chief reward in heaven. I am acquainted with only four of
the other nine members,—great-crest, kingbird, pewee, and chebec,—and
each of these has some redeeming attributes besides the habit of
catching flies.
They are all good nest-builders, good parents, and brave, independent
birds; but aside from phœbe and pewee—the latter in his small way
the sweetest voice of the oak woods—the whole family is an odd lot,
cross-grained, cross-looking, and about as musical as a family of
ducks. A duck seems to know that he cannot sing. A flycatcher knows
nothing of any shortcoming. He knows he can sing, and in time he will
prove it. If desire and effort count for anything, he certainly must
prove it in time. How long the family has already been training, no one
knows. Everybody knows, however, the success each flycatcher of them
has thus far attained. According to Mr. Chapman’s authority, the five
rarer members perform as follows: the olive-sided swoops from the tops
of the tallest trees uttering “pu-pu” or “pu-pip”; the yellow-bellied
sits upon the low twigs and sneezes a song, an abrupt “pse-ek,”
explosive and harsh, produced with a painful, convulsive jerk; the
Acadian by the help of his tail says “spee” or “peet,” now and then a
loud “pee-e-yúk,” meanwhile trembling violently; Trail’s flycatcher
jerks out his notes rapidly, doubling himself up and fairly vibrating
with the explosive effort to sing “ee-zee-e-up”; the gray kingbird says
a strong, simple “pitirri.”
It would make a good minstrel show, doubtless, if the family would
appear together. In chorus, surely, they would be far from a tuneful
choir.
I should hate to hear the flycatchers all together. Yet individually,
in the wide universal chorus of the out-of-doors, how much we should
miss the kingbird’s metallic twitter and the chebec’s insistent call!
There was little excitement for phœbe during this period of incubation.
He hunted in the neighborhood and occasionally called to his mate,
contented enough perhaps, but certainly sometimes appearing tired. One
rainy day he sat in the pig-pen window looking out at the gray wet
world. He was humped and silent and meditative, his whole attitude
speaking the extreme length of his day, the monotony of the drip, drip,
drip from the eaves, and the sitting, the ceaseless sitting, of his
brooding wife.
He might have hastened the time by catching a few flies for her or by
taking her place on the nest, but I never saw him do it.
Things were livelier when the eggs hatched, for it required a good many
flies a day to keep the five young ones growing. And how they grew!
Like bread sponge in a pan, they began to rise, pushing the mother up
so that she was forced to stand over them; then pushing her out until
she could cling only to the side of the nest at night; then pushing
her off altogether. By this time they were hanging to the outside
themselves, covering the nest from sight, almost, until finally they
spilled off upon their wings.
Out of the nest upon the air! Out of the pen and into a sweet, wide
world of green and blue and golden light! I saw the second brood take
their first flight, and it was thrilling.
The nest was placed back from and below the window, so that in leaving
it the young would have to drop, then turn and fly up to get out. Below
was the pig.
As they grew I began to fear that they might try their wings before
this feat could be accomplished, and so fall to the pig below. But
Nature, in this case, was careful of her pearls. Day after day they
clung to the nest, even after they might have flown; and when they did
go, it was with a sure and a long flight that carried them out and away
to the tops of the neighboring trees.
They left the nest one at a time, and were met in the air by their
mother, who darting to them, calling loudly, and, whirling about them,
helped them as high and as far away as they could go.
I wish the simple record of these family affairs could be closed
without one tragic entry. But that can rarely be of any family. Seven
days after the first brood were a-wing, I found the new eggs in the
nest. Soon after that the male bird disappeared. The second brood has
now been out a week, and in all this time no sight or sound has been
had of the father.
What happened? Was he killed? Caught by a cat or a hawk? It is
possible; and this is an easy and kindly way to think of him. Nor is
it impossible that he may have remained as leader and protector to
the first brood, or (perish the thought!) might he perhaps have grown
weary at sight of the second lot of five eggs, of the long days and the
neglect that they meant for him, and out of jealousy and fickleness
wickedly deserted?
I hope it was death, a stainless, even ignominious death by one of my
neighbor’s dozen cats.
Death or desertion, it involved a second tragedy. Five such young
ones at this time were too many for the mother. She fought nobly; no
mother could have done more. All five were brought within a few days of
flight; then, one day, I saw a little wing hanging listlessly over the
side of the nest. I went closer. One had died. It had starved to death.
There were none of the parasites in the nest that often kill these
birds. It was a plain case of sacrifice,—by the mother, perhaps; by
the other young, maybe,—one for the other four.
But she did well. Nine such young birds to her credit since April. Who
shall measure her actual use to the world? How does she compare in
value with the pig? Yesterday I saw several of her brood along the
meadow fence hawking for flies. They were not far from my cabbage patch.
I hope that a pair of them returns to me another spring, and that they
come early. Any bird that deigns to dwell under roof of mine commands
my friendship; but no other bird takes phœbe’s place in my affections,
there is so much in him to like and he speaks for so much of the
friendship of nature.
“Humble and inoffensive bird” he has been called by one of our leading
ornithologies—because he comes to my pig-pen! “Inoffensive”? this bird
with the cabbage butterfly in his beak? The faint and damning praise!
And “humble”? There is not a humble feather on his body. Humble to
those who see the pen and not the bird. But to me—why, the bird has
made a palace of my pig-pen.
The very pig seems less a pig because of this exquisite association;
and the lowly work of feeding the creature has been turned by phœbe
into an æsthetic course in bird study.
[Illustration]
XIII
An Account with Nature
THERE were chipmunks everywhere. The stone walls squeaked with them. At
every turn, from early spring to early autumn, a chipmunk was scurrying
away from you. Chipmunks were common. They did no particular harm, no
particular good; they did nothing in particular, being only chipmunks
and common, until one morning (it was June-bug time) I stopped and
watched a chipmunk that sat atop the stone wall down in the orchard. He
was eating, and the shells of his meal lay in a little pile upon the
big flat stone which served as his table.
They were acorn shells, I thought, yet June seemed rather early in the
season for acorns, and looking closer I discovered that the pile was
entirely composed of June-bug shells,—wings and hollow bodies of the
pestiferous beetles!
Well, well! I had never seen this before, never even heard of it.
Chipmunk, a _useful_ member of society! actually eating bugs in this
bug-ridden world of mine! This was interesting and important. Why, I
had really never known chipmunk, after all!
So I hadn’t. He had always been too common. Flying squirrels were more
worth while, because there were none on the farm. Now, however, I
determined to cultivate the acquaintance of chipmunk, for there might
be other discoveries awaiting me.
And there were. A narrow strip of grass separated the orchard and my
garden patch. It was on my way to the garden that I most often stopped
to watch this chipmunk, or rather the pair of them, in the orchard
wall. June advanced, the beetles disappeared, and my garden grew
apace. For the first time in four years there were prospects of good
strawberries. Most of my small patch was given over to a new berry, one
that I had originated, and I was waiting with an eagerness which was
almost anxiety for the earliest berries.
The two chipmunks in the wall were now seven, the young ones quite as
large as their parents, and both young and old on the best of terms
with me.
I had put a little stick beside each of the three big berries that were
reddening first (though I could have walked from the house blindfolded
and picked them). I might have had the biggest of the three on June
7th, but for the sake of the flavor I thought it best to wait another
day. On the 8th I went down with a box to get it. The big berry was
gone, and so was one of the others, while only half of the third was
left on the vine!
Gardening has its disappointments, its seasons of despair,—and wrath,
too. Had a toad showed himself at that moment he would have fared
badly. I snatched a stone and let it go at a robin flying over, for
more than likely it was he who had stolen my berries. On the garden
wall sat a friendly chipmunk eyeing me sympathetically.
Three days later several fine berries were ripe. On my way to the
garden I passed the chipmunks in the orchard. A shining red spot among
the vine-covered stones of their wall brought me to a stop, for I
thought, on the instant, that it was my rose-breasted grosbeak, and
that I was about to get a clue to its nest. Then up to the slab where
he ate the June-bugs scrambled the chipmunk, and the rose-red spot on
the breast of the grosbeak dissolved into a big scarlet-red strawberry.
And by its long wedge shape I knew it was one of my new variety.
I hurried across to the patch and found every berry gone, while a line
of bloody fragments led me back to the orchard wall, where a half dozen
fresh calyx crowns completed my second discovery.
No, it did not complete it. It took a little watching to find out that
the whole family—all seven!—were after berries. They were picking
them half ripe, even, and actually storing them away, canning them down
in the cavernous depths of the stone pile!
Alarmed? Yes, and I was wrathful, too. The taste for strawberries is
innate, original; you can’t be human without it. But joy in chipmunks
is a cultivated liking, æsthetic in its nature. What chance in such a
circumstance has the nature-lover with the human man? What shadow of
doubt as to his choice between the chipmunks and the strawberries?
I had no gun then and no time to go over to my neighbor’s to borrow
his. So I stationed myself near by with a fistful of stones, and
waited for the thieves to show themselves. I came so near to hitting
one of them once that the sweat started all over me. After that there
was no danger. I lost my nerve. The little scamps knew that war was
declared, and they hid and dodged and sighted me so far off that even
with a gun I should have been all summer killing the seven of them.