creature. Of a clear midsummer evening you may hear the muskrat
grubbing roots there, see, perhaps, the moonlight glint on the long
V-shaped ripple which he makes as he swims, and hear his snort and
splash when he dives at sudden sight of you. You may chance upon a
disconsolate bittern sitting clumsily in dumpy patience as he waits for
food to splash up to him, and you may even hear him work his wheezy,
dislocated wooden pump, a cry as awkward and disconsolate as the bird.
[Illustration: Of a clear midsummer evening you may hear the muskrat
grubbing roots there ... and hear his snort and splash when he dives
at sudden sight of you]
The muskrats breed in the bog, the bittern had his grassy nest there,
and a myriad blackbirds have made the low bushes vocal with their
cheery whistles all summer. They are flocking now, getting the young
birds in training for the long flight south, but they still hang about
the bog and they still whistle merrily. Surely it is not environment
that makes temperament. Bittern and blackbird both frequent bogs, yet
the bittern is a lonely misanthrope, whom I more than half suspect of
being melancholy mad, while the blackbird is as cheery and as fond of
his fellows as a candidate. When you hear his whistle you half expect
him to light on a thwart, hand you a cigar, and ask after the baby.
But the blackbird’s election is sure anyway.
Another loved and lovely denizen of these bogs is the wood duck. These
breed in the swamp, the mother bird building a grassy nest in a hollow
tree, where she lays from eight to fourteen buff-white eggs, and leads
her yellow fluffy ducklings to a nearby secluded pool for their first
swim. Later they come out into the bog, and ultimately make the pond,
where they learn to forage for themselves. By the first of August the
mother bird has sent them adrift, in the main, to paddle and flap their
way about as best they may. They are “flappers,” as the boys call them.
That is, they can make good speed along the surface by half running and
flapping vigorously, but they cannot yet fly enough to rise into the
air.
One of these young wood ducks came out of the bog the other morning,
just at the gray of dawn, and swam over toward the boat landing. He
was quite near the shore when I took ship and rowed to seaward of
him, thus shutting him off from the open pond and from the bog. Then
for an hour or two followed what was to me the most interesting duck
hunting I have done for a long time. I could row as fast as he could
swim, and I continually edged him along the south shore, getting
nearer every minute. I have read much of the marvelous intelligence of
wild creatures. Yet I saw little of it in this chase. The duck knew
me for an enemy, on general principles, for I was a man, and I was
evidently coming after him. Even rudimentary intelligence should have
told him to flap for the bog as fast as he could. He did nothing of
the sort. He just edged along down the shore, evidently hoping that I
was light-minded, and would forget all about him in a minute or two
if let alone. But I kept at it until I was so near I could see every
one of his already handsome feathers and note the coloring of those
parts which had not yet reached the beauty of maturity. I could see the
yellow rim of his eye, and still he swam east and swam west but made no
real move to escape.
Two things I wished to learn from my wood duck. One was how much
general intelligence and real quickness of wit he would show in
escaping. The other was how he carried his wings under water if, by
any fortunate chance, I should be able to see him swim after he went
down to escape me. But at first he was so irresolute that he neither
dived nor made any vigorous attempt to escape. I got so near, that to
avoid driving him up the bank into the woods I had to ease away a bit.
Finally, at my second approach, he did try to flap by the end of the
boat, but I spurted and headed him off.
It was a long time, and it took much manœuvring to make him dive, but
it finally entered his head that he might avoid being cornered and
badgered by going under water. This he did, going on a slant just a
very little below the surface, probably because he was in too shallow
water to go much deeper, and coming up well to seaward. There he
preened his feathers, took a sip or two of water and, seemingly, waited
to be surrounded a second time.
I rowed out, got on the off-shore side of him, and again began boating
him in toward the shore. He showed less uneasiness this time, but
dived and swam out again after considerable more pressing. Again and
again I repeated this, sometimes getting no sight of him under water,
again seeing him move along very plainly. At no time did I notice any
motion of the wings under water. I have been told that wild ducks when
swimming beneath the surface make most of their progress with their
wings, quite literally flying under water. This may be, but I have no
evidence of it in the under-water action of this one.
Again, it has been sagely impressed upon me by old duck hunters that
you could tell in what direction from your boat a bird would rise by
noting the way in which his bill pointed when he went under. I think
it was Adirondack Murray in that famous loon-hunting chapter who
first made the point, and it has been insisted upon by many another
successor. But, bless you, my half-grown wood duck made no difficulty
of going down with his head toward the morning and coming up in
the sunset portion of the view. He took slants under water and cut
semicircles at will. But I couldn’t see him use his wings while beneath
the wave.
Little by little he got over being excited by my presence. He began to
eat bugs off the lily pads as he went by, and now and then tip up for
an under-water search. Thus we coquetted with one another all along the
southern shore of the pond, and when I finally cornered him for a last
time in behind Loon Island he dove without embarrassment and began his
feeding as soon as he had again reached the surface. The chase was no
longer exciting, and I turned my attention to something else. Then he
swam out quite a little further into the pond, preened his feathers
carefully, tucked his head under his wing and went to sleep!
Evidently he had decided that I was eccentric, but harmless, and the
best way to escape my attentions would be to leave me severely alone.
And there you have it. I think the wood duck is beautiful, but not
very bright. Yet it occurs to me that some Sherlock Holmes of the
woods may prove, to the satisfaction of Dr. Watson anyway, that he is
preternaturally clever, in that this one, though still young, was keen
enough to see that from the first I had no evil intentions toward him.
SOME BUTTERFLY FRIENDS
SOME BUTTERFLY FRIENDS
At dusk all the edges of the pond are lighted with the white candles
of the clethra. Its fragrance has in it that fine essence which goes
to the making of the nectar and ambrosia of the gods. He who would sup
with them may do so by taking canoe of an early August twilight when
the purple arras of the coves glow softly golden with the reflected
light of the sunset’s afterglow. Then the coarser air seems to have
let the light slip from between its clumsy particles, leaving its more
ethereal essence still clinging to a more subtle interatomic fluid.
The fragrance of the clethra seems always to me as fine as this spirit
of light in the ambrosial twilight of the ripened summer. It is no
air-borne delight like the resinous scent of the forest pines or the
pasture sweet-fern when the hot sun of midday distills them and the hot
wind of midday sends them far to you across the quivering fields. It is
something finer, softer, more silkily subtle, which, like the rose gold
of the afterglow of the sunset, tints the dusk of the cove between the
air atoms, not by way of them.
Then, as the gold glimmers and fades and the pink faints in the cooling
purple of the dusk, and the outline of the cove shore slips from the
front of your eye to the chambers of memory behind it, so that you else
might see it best with the eyes shut, the white candles are lighted
and the eager moth sees by them to sup with you and me and the gods on
this essence of ambrosia, to tipple on this spirit of nectar which the
night reserves for those that love it.
I do not know why the clethra which gleams so white in the dusk should
need anything more than its own white beauty to call the moth to its
wooing. Perhaps it does not need more. Perhaps all this fine fragrance
is but the overflow of its soul’s delight at being young and chastely
beautiful, and trembling in the ultra violet darkness on that delicious
verge of life that waits the wooer. I half fancy that this is true of
all perfume of flowers, that it is less a call to butterfly or bee to
come to their winning than it is a radiation of delight from their own
pure hearts at the dawning of the full joy of living. I am not always
willing to take the word of the scientific investigator on these points
as final. The scientists of the not very remote past have known so
much that is not so!
It is possible that, just as a hunting-dog picks up a scent that is
strong in his nostrils and has no power in ours, so the flowers that we
call scentless send out an odor too faintly fine for our senses, yet
one that the antennæ of moth or bee may entangle as it passes and hold
for a certain clue. Perhaps the scents that are only faint to us carry
far for the butterfly, but if so, and if flower perfumes are made only
for the calling of insects, why need they be made so intoxicating to
the human senses? The scent of carnations is as pleasing to the soul
as a strain of beautiful music, and equally arouses high aspirations
and noble longings. So to me the odor of the clethra at nightfall is
a tenuous thread of ethereality that reaches far toward a realm of
spiritual ideals. It ought to go with a ritual and a vested choir.
I do not find the odor of the pasture milkweed speaking thus to any
inner sense. It is just a gentle, lovable, stay-at-home smell that
surely does not float farther than the pasture bars. Yet of all the
plants that have bloomed within my world of garden and pasture this
summer it has been by far the most popular among insects. It is not
that it is the most attractive to the eye, in any of its forms, for
there are many flowers of colors more vivid and to be seen farther,
as well as of much stronger scent. Yet all day long you will find
it besieged by bees, from the aristocratic Italian worker from the
farmer’s best hive down to those scallawag bees that make no honey for
themselves but lead a vagabond life and lay their eggs in other bees’
nests, leaving their young to grow up in unendowed orphan asylums.
Many varieties of ants seek the milkweed blooms, and you shall find
about a large clump more sorts of wasps than you would believe existed,
yet it is the butterflies who most of all make it their rallying place.
Every butterfly in the whole region makes it his business to know each
large clump of milkweed, and to make the rounds at least daily.
There, if you watch, you may see the pretty little pearl crescent,
whose range is from Labrador to Texas. The shy meadow browns flit
out from the shadow of the brook alders and feed for a moment before
they take fright at the fact that they are out in society and flit
desperately back again. The angle wings flip about like animated
question-marks, and fulvous fritillaries soar sedately, now and then
lighting to feed and fold their wings that you may see the big silver
spots of the under parts. And so you might name them all, almost every
butterfly of early August, all besieging the milkweed so eagerly that
you may hardly drive them away.
The fact is they come neither for scent nor sight; they come for good
taste--which they find in the honey glands of the peculiarly shaped
bloom, which are obvious and sticky and within reach of all. I do not
think it is half so much the odor of the flower which draws them, be
it never so sweet or so strong, but memory of the honey dew sipped
there yesterday or last week. No doubt the love of the milkweed bloom
is an inherited tendency, also, bred in the bones from a line of
milkweed-frequenting ancestors infinitely long.
Indeed, one of our most splendid butterflies is the _Anosia plexippus_,
otherwise known as the milkweed butterfly, rightly named also the
monarch. Every boy who knows the country in summer knows him by his
rich, red coloration, his strong, black-bordered wings with their black
veins. Every bird knows him too and lets him alone. On the first median
nervule of the hind wings of the butterfly is a scent bag whence he
dispenses an odor so disagreeable to the bird who would eat him that he
goes free, and is not afterward troubled.
[Illustration: Every boy who knows the country in summer knows him by
his rich, red coloration, his strong, black-bordered wings with their
black veins]
Along with the monarch sipping honey with eager industry from the
meadow milkweed, you will often see the viceroy, who, as a viceroy
should, closely imitates, but does not equal, the monarch. He
has neither the monarch’s vigor of flight nor his means of defence
from predatory birds, but his safety--so the students tell us--lies
in looking so much like his superior that he also is let alone. The
students go on to say that his is a good example of the imitative power
of insects whereby they escape destruction by seeming to the casual eye
to be something else.
The viceroy, which is a _Basilarchia disippus_, thus looks not the
least like other members of his family, but consciously mimics the
coloring of the monarch for safety. Thus many tropical beetles contrive
to look like wasps that they may not be molested, and some insects look
like brown leaves and others like green ones.
But do they contrive, imitate, mimic? It is no doubt true that because
of the resemblance they escape, but to say that they imitate or
contrive or mimic seems to me to be to assume a knowledge of the
workings of the inner consciousness of an insect that not even the
most careful student can have. I am more inclined to believe that the
so-called mimics are fortunate in an accidental resemblance and so
escape the destruction of their species which has fallen upon many a
less fortunate type.
Yet no butterfly, however exquisite his coloring, or however strong
and graceful his flight, twangs with his fluttering wings the fine
heartstrings of romance as does the monarch. The first one that came
dancing down the sunlight to the sweet rocket in bloom in my garden
this spring brought to me a spicy odor of tropic isles. The beating of
his wings shed, as he passed, faint fragrance of Mexican jasmine, and
I thought I saw slip from them the infinitesimal dust of the pollen
of stephanotis lately blooming in the glades of Panama. Three months
before he floated serenely beneath my cherry tree he may well have
soared through the tropic glades where crumble the ruins of the palaces
of the Incas.
His flight, seemingly as frail as that of a red autumn leaf sliding
down the October zephyr to carpet the nearby field with rustling
fragrance, has matched that of that rifle-ball of bird life, the
ruby-throated humming-bird. Together they sip the sweets of my sweet
rocket in the spring. Together they wing their way south to the region
of perpetual summer when the winds of late September promise frost.
Sometimes in this annual flight the monarchs pass the sandy stretches
of the New Jersey coast in swarms that, stopping at nightfall for rest,
refoliate with their folded wings the shrubs left bare by the autumn
gales.
It may be that, like the birds, the knowledge of the route they must
follow is bred in the marrow of their butterfly bones by the constant
use of a million generations. It may be that they simply drift away
from the cool wind from the North toward the Southern sun that shines
so serenely in the bright autumn days. But whether through the
guiding hand of Providence, or inherited wisdom, or a fortunate tact
that acting from day to day produces the happy result, this Southern
movement in winter is the sole salvation of the species here in the
North.
If they did not make these long flights we should have no Anosias with
us each summer, for unlike other butterflies the frost kills them in
whatever form they remain to brave it. All summer long their long, red
wings bear them bravely from one clump of milkweed to another. They
sip the honey which each floret of the umbels holds forth, the sticky
mass the size of a pinhead. They lay their eggs upon its leaves and the
black and yellow caterpillars hatch and feed there. Then they hang in a
green and gold chrysalis from a nearby twig till the imago, the perfect
butterfly, bursts its bonds and sails away to find more milkweed. There
may be several broods of a summer, but the frost stops all that. The
monarch may not winter here, nor may his eggs or chrysalids survive the
cold.
Many butterflies, frail though they seem, do pass the New England
winter successfully. The _Antiopa vanessa_, otherwise known as
mourning-cloak or Camberwell beauty, a handsome brown fellow with blue
spots and a pale-yellow margin, well known to every one, flits joyously
through the woods with the very first warm days of spring. He has been
snugged up in some dry crevice, numbed and torpid, but very much alive,
all winter. The first genial warmth sets him free, and later I always
find his children browsing on the willow twigs over in the cove. They
are rough chaps, horrid with bristling black spines and with dull
red spots relieving their otherwise plain black hides. But they grow
fast, and by and by go out upon a twig and hang themselves, head down,
by a little silken rope, swinging there in the wind, simply a dead
caterpillar that has imitated Judas.
One day the caterpillar part sloughs off. It is a fairly sudden
process. You may paddle by the willows in the morning and see all
your little Judases hanging in a row. Paddle back at noon and their
skins have shrivelled and slipped off, and you have chrysalids, queer,
impish-looking things, swinging there still, head down. You know they
are alive; indeed, if you poke them they will wiggle impatiently, but
they swing in the wind and give no other sign for a week or ten days.
Then they cast a second skin, and pop out full-grown butterflies that
stretch their wings for a time leisurely, then suddenly dash into the
air and go off over the hill like mad. The whole thing is so sudden!
The change, when it does come, is as if some woodland magician had
waved a willow wand and said “Abra-ca-dabra; presto, change!” Time and
again I have watched to see that caterpillar skin fall off, and again
to see the vanessa step forth from the domino in which it has been
masquerading, but they have always been too quick for me.
Other butterflies survive in the chrysalis all winter and come forth
full-grown and fit in the spring. Such may speak to your listening
imagination through their beauty, which is often great, or through
their resurrection from seeming death, though if you will observe
them closely in the chrysalid form you will see that they are not
even seemingly dead. Evangelists who have held up the butterfly to us
as a prototype of that resurrection which we may expect if we are
good, evidently never closely observed the chrysalis of a good healthy
butterfly, else they had not been so sure of their corpse.
Lately I have had chrysalids of the _Papilio asterias_, the common
eastern swallowtail, in my study. I found the fat black and yellow
worms on my parsley and caged them. They soon hitched themselves to the
wire netting by their tails, hanging from overhead on a slant, their
shoulders (so to speak) being supported by a single loop of silk. If
you did but tap on the wire netting or scratch it these chrysalids
would wiggle and jerk quite angrily, their action saying plainly,
“Can’t you let me alone? I’m just having a nap!” No; it is plainly
no death and resurrection which makes a butterfly. It is merely a
caterpillar who was dressed for the fancy ball all the time. He came
to the woodland hall in his greatcoat. This he sheds for a domino, in
which he masquerades for a time. Then he bursts forth for the final
festivities in a robe of princely beauty.
My chrysalids did this only the other day. Wonderful creatures of
black and yellow came forth, stretched their wings till I could see
the dainty shading of blue and the peacock-feather eye of red and
black on the lower part of the secondary wings; then, as I opened the
window they dashed madly away as the vanessas do from willow twigs
in the cove. The butterfly has been held up to us as an example of
lazy dalliance. I have never watched one that was not as busy as a
politician on election day. Especially do those just wakened from the
chrysalis form rush away as if they knew all their work was before
them and they longed to be at it.
Of them all the monarch is not the most beautiful, but I rank him as
surely the ablest. His annual migration shows him to have wonderful
strength of wing, and either much wisdom or an extraordinarily
developed instinct. Very likely he has both. Further, through accident
pure and simple, or else a spirit of adventure fostered by the joys of
long annual journey, he is steadily extending his habitat to embrace
the known world. Originally of North America only, he has within the
last dozen years taken ship for Australia, where he has multiplied
greatly in the warmer regions, and has wandered again over sea to
Java, Sumatra, and followed the flag into the Philippines. He is well
established at the Cape de Verde Islands, and is doing his best to be
happy in the pale sunshine of the south of England, whence specimens
are reported yearly.
THE RESTING TIME OF THE BIRDS
THE RESTING TIME OF THE BIRDS
This morning I heard the bluebirds again for the first time for weeks.
They came up from the pasture to the apple trees and sang their modest
little snatches of song in that shyly sweet, reserved yet fond, manner
which makes the bluebird the best loved of all our pasture birds. There
have been no bluebirds about my garden since the yegg raid of late May
and its resulting tragedy. Now they are back, but there is in their
call a note of sadness which indeed comes into the voice of every
bluebird as autumn approaches, though I think it is accentuated in mine
this year.
When I say yegg I mean English sparrow, and if I could think of a worse
name, equally descriptive of him, I would give it. This is the story
of the foul deed, only one of many, no doubt, perpetrated by this
cowardly crew. In late March I put out in my garden three bird boxes
such as bluebirds love to inhabit. These were immediately inspected
by the neighborhood flock of English sparrows, just beginning to pair
off, and finally decided upon as undesirable, perhaps because I had
intentionally placed no perch before the door.
The English sparrow will build his nest in any impossible place to
which he takes a fancy, but he greatly prefers, in choosing a new
site, one that has a convenient perch close by the entrance. So these
undesirable citizens decided that they did not care for my bird boxes
and let them alone, much to my delight. Then came the bluebirds,
bringing to our cold, raw spring their flashes of blue like bits of
a heaven that is fairer than ours, a blue that is hope and dreams of
happiness and all things noble yet gentle. There is no color like it as
it glints across pale April skies and blooms on trees that have been
bare and gray so long. So, too, no bird song is so dear as theirs. It
is but a wee, melodious phrase which says again and again, “Cheerily;
cheerily.” Yet it voices hope and contentment, and is so purely the
expression of the joy of gentle, kindly lives that it touches all that
is fond and kindly in the listener.
Bluebirds will nest in the hollow of the pasture apple tree or in a
last year’s flicker’s abandoned hole in a decayed stump, but of all
places they most love a bird box near a dwelling, and, as I had hoped,
a pair came early in April to inspect mine. They looked them all over
appreciatively, seeming with delightful courtesy to the builder to find
it hard to choose, but finally settled upon one in the pear tree, and
began to build.