shrubbery, sneaking about the eaves and making sallies in small numbers
from around the barn. The English sparrow has been called pugnacious.
He is nothing of the kind. He does not love a fight. Bird to bird,
there is nothing too small to whip him. I have seen a chipping sparrow,
which is the least among the pasture sparrows, send the poltroon
scurrying to shelter with all his feathers standing on end. A cock
bluebird, fighting like a gentleman, and like a gentleman fighting
only when he must, will drive a half-dozen of them. The English sparrow
has the true instincts of the browbeating coward, and loves to fight
only when in overwhelming numbers he may attack a lone pasture bird
without danger to himself.
So trouble began with the building, and for a week or so the warfare
raged from box to box, the cock bluebird boldly defeating superior
numbers again and again, only to have his gentle wife annoyed by other
villains while he drove the first away, and his nesting material
stolen in spite of him. Finally he resorted to what looked to me like
well-planned and carefully executed strategy, though it may have
been merely that fortune which favors the brave and persistent. The
pair abandoned the box in the pear tree and started building in the
one nailed against the side of the barn. The sparrows followed, of
course. Then the bluebirds went back to the pear-tree box. The sparrows
followed. The bluebirds then started building in the third box and
daily brought material to each of the three, though ostensibly, I
thought, to the second and third. At any rate the sparrows seemed
to concentrate their attention more on these boxes. Meanwhile the
bluebirds quietly completed the nest in the pear tree and later laid
their eggs there, in comparative peace.
The sparrows did not build in either of the other boxes. They did not
want to. Neither did they care particularly about the material which
they stole, for they did not continue to take it after the bluebirds
had finished the pear-tree nest and were in a position to defend it.
Their action was simply hoodlumism of the lowest and most despicable
kind.
[Illustration: The English sparrow has the true instincts of the
browbeating coward]
This was bad enough, yet it was merely petty annoyance compared to
the deed without a name of which they were later to be guilty. The
two young birds in the bluebird box were more than half grown. The
blue was beginning to show in their wings along with the white of
the conspicuous, growing quills, and the fuscous margin was already
touching the breast feathers. The old birds, working with tremendous
energy to feed these hearty youngsters, were both busy and often away
from the nest together.
At one such time the English sparrows descended upon this nest,
entered, drove the young birds out to die upon the ground, unnoticed in
the long grass, and started to take full possession. The bluebirds,
returning too late, drove them away with more than usual despatch. This
first called the affair to my attention. But I was too late.
The young birds were dead and the sparrows were chattering in raucous
jubilation over it, now and then giving a squeak of fright or pain as
the male bluebird singled out an individual and attacked him with a
fury of which I had not believed him capable. Soon, however, he ceased,
and the two twittered mournfully about the tree for hours, again and
again poising in fluttering flight before the door of their despoiled
home and looking eagerly in, as if they could not believe that the
young were indeed gone. Later they went silently away. No doubt they
found another home in some hollow tree of the remote pasture and raised
another brood. But my boxes have stood tenantless ever since.
The worst of it is there is little I could do either in the way of
prevention or revenge. I did get out my big old ten-bore duck gun,
which I have not had the heart to use on a bird, even a coot, for a
dozen years, and began cannonading the miscreants, but this was more
disturbing to the neighbors than to the sparrows.
One of the gentlest nature lovers I ever knew, wise in bird ways and
very fond of all birds, used to say that he wished all the English
sparrows in the world had but one neck, and that he might have that
neck in his hands. I wish he might, too.
So, after weeks of absence, the bluebirds have come back. Their
speckle-breasted young, which they would have brought up among my
apple trees and in the cloistered seclusion of the lilac bushes, have
grown up in the pasture instead, and very likely their plans for next
year will include the pasture wild-apple tree rather than my bird box,
and they are far shyer and less responsive to my advances than they
would have been. Their song has in it a plaint of autumnal regret. In
the spring they sang, “Cheerily; cheerily.” Now they say, “Going away;
going away.” It has in it something of the quality of “Lochaber no
more.”
But it is not merely the bluebirds which have been silent for some
weeks and are now beginning to sing again. The time between early July
and mid-August is a period of retirement for all birddom. The mating
season, with its soul-stirring ecstasies, the labor of nest building,
the anxieties of brooding, have been followed by the tremendous
exertion of caring for that nestful of young birds. A healthy fledgling
will eat almost his own weight of food in a day, and by the time he
is able to fly and chase the old birds around for more the father and
mother are worn to a frazzle. I really believe the youngsters are
weaned only when their demand for food becomes so enormous with their
completed growth that the parents cease to supply it through sheer
physical exhaustion.
I once reared a pair of young crows by hand, taking them from the home
nest in a big pine, leaving three others--quite enough I afterward
thought--for the parent birds. They were negroid, naked, pod-bodied
creatures at the time, with long clutchy claws, ridiculous stubs of
wings, and, ye gods, what mouths! When I fed them I used to clutch
something with one hand lest I fall in. And I was incessantly feeding
them. Anxious to treat them kindly and finding that frogs were a most
acceptable diet to them I depopulated the township of _Rana virescens_
and allied species. Then I found that fish would do about as well,
and I fished until there began to be a shortage of angle-worms in the
community. Yet still the creatures grew apace and demanded more food.
By and by they got big enough to use their wings and, recognizing me
as their undoubted parent, came flapping and clawing after me wherever
I went, yelling, “Caw, caw, ca-aw-aw,” in most heartrending crescendo.
Then did I realize to the full the responsibility of being a father
bird. Stuff those clamorous creatures as I might, they still pleaded
in agonizing tones for more, and no one not cognizant of the facts
would have believed that they were ever fed. The lamb that loved Mary
so, and followed her also, was not a circumstance to the clamorous
devotion of those two young crows toward me, their foster parent.
My one fear for weeks was that the resident agent for the S. P. C. A.,
who was a vigilant and tender-hearted lady of undoubted indiscretion,
would hear their evidently unanswered appeals and proceed against me.
She could have convicted me on the evidence in any district court in
Norfolk County; and yet those young birds were eating everything there
was in the place outside of cold storage.
Such is the appetite of the growing bird. Yet there comes a time in
the passing of the summer when the youngsters are taught, or learn
through necessity, to forage for themselves and cease their fritinancy.
Then the thickets are strangely silent. The youngsters no longer yearn
noisily and they have not yet learned to sing. The old birds have
ceased singing. Indeed, there is nothing left of them but their bones
and feathers, and that atmosphere of conscious rectitude which comes
with successful completion of a noble and herculean task. And then even
their feathers begin to go, for the moulting season is at hand.
No longer does the male scarlet tanager sit like a lambent flame in
the top of a tree and warble, “Look-up, way-up, look-at-me, treetop,”
His scarlet suit begins to fade, grow dingy, show signs of wear, and
finally go all to pieces while he sits mute and dumpy in the shadow. By
and by the scarlet will have changed completely to a dull olive-green,
like that of his inconspicuous mate, and though he still retains the
black of his wings and tail you would not know him.
So the bobolink who swung so conspicuously on the meadow grass in June
in his black and white suit comes through the moulting season brown
as a sparrow. The vivid blue of the indigo bunting falls from him in
patches and is replaced by grayish brown in a large measure.
No wonder that, utterly tired out and their brilliant plumage scattered
and changed to dull and rusty colors, the birds are silent for a time,
waiting for strength to recuperate. Some of them seem to retain enough
courage and vitality to sing mornings through the moulting season,
notably the robins. I suspect, though, that these faithful few--for the
robin singers of the morning of the first day of August will be as one
to twenty to those of the first day of June--are gay young sports who
did not care to marry, or who, disappointed in love, still sing to keep
their courage up. It is the best singers who are most strangely silent
now, as they have been for weeks; nor will most of them be heard until
next spring, hereabouts.
My catbird was so sorrowfully unseen and unheard that I began to think
the cat had got him, till I hunted him up, down the hill among the
scrub oaks. He was as dilapidated and passé-looking as his nest in the
lilacs; as if, like it, the young birds had kicked him pretty nearly
to pieces before they got through with him. But he perked up a bit
when he saw me, flipped an apology for a tail, and miaued in a manner
that was humorously unlike him, it was so deprecatory. But that was a
week or ten days ago. Yesterday I heard some bird cooing a little song
to himself out in the arbor-vitæ trees at the foot of the garden, and
slipping quietly up found that it was the catbird again. He was quite
sleek in his new coat, and he was practising his song in a delightful
undertone, as if to be sure that he should not forget it altogether.
In four or five weeks more he will begin to flip saucily across the
miles of country that separate him from his winter home in Southern
Florida, or perhaps farther yet in some stretch of primeval forest that
I myself have seen and loved in the heart of Santo Domingo. He will
not sing his song there, high on some giant ceiba or swinging on the
plume of some royal palm. He may not sing it again here on the tip of
the tallest white lilac bush, but I know that, there or here, he will
practise it now and then in that soft, sweet undertone which you would
not believe of a catbird, and be ready to send it forth in jubilant
peals when his strong wings bring him back again next May. My bluebirds
may winter with him; and if they do I have hopes that he may persuade
them to try my pear-tree box once more next spring.
THE POND AT LOW TIDE
THE POND AT LOW TIDE
All about the pond the woodland folk are enjoying shore dinners, for
it is the time of ebb tide, and a wonderfully low ebb at that. Not
for a score of years do I recall such low water. Where, on the ebb of
ordinary years, the crow has been able to find one fresh-water clam, he
may now feed till he can hold no more, for the drought has been long
and severe, and the pond has been drained to the very dregs.
I say fresh-water clams, for that is the name commonly applied to
the creatures, though I know that I might more properly call them
river mussels, and if I wished to be severely scientific I should
say _Unio margaritifera_, though it is difficult to be sure of your
margaritifera, as there are about fifteen hundred species of unios
known to people who classify creatures, and most of these are found in
the rivers of this country.
Little do the crows care for that. In the sunny coves they have their
clam-bakes, and as I slip slyly up I fancy I hear them smack their
mandibles. As I round the screen of shore-loving button bushes, I know
I shall come upon them, and I expect to find them seated in riotous
fellowship, with napkins spread across broad waistcoats, dipping
delicious mouthfuls in melted butter and tucking them away behind
the white napkins. I have always missed the napkins and the butter
dishes, but the shells are proof enough of what has been going on. If
the mother crow carries the table furnishings away with her when she
flies, that is no more than human picnickers do when driven from the
sea beach.
The pond when full is ten feet deeper than it is now. In May the water
lapped the forest roots on its edges; now from the forest to the mud
of the very bottom where still the water lingers a strip of slanting
beach stretches for a hundred yards. The crows are not the only
creatures which have made tracks on this. Close by the edge in the soft
mud the heron has walked with dignity, leaving footmarks that proceed
precisely. The heron may not have large ambitions, but he is purposeful
and does not turn aside. The crows gurgled and ha-haed over their
clambake; the heron takes his fish course as solemnly as if he were
taking the pledge.
All along you will see where the squirrels have come down to drink,
skipping vivaciously, taking a sip here, bouncing away to examine
something there, remembering that they came for a drink after all and
taking a good one, then hurrying back with long leaps in a straight
line for the trees. The squirrel is not solemn, far from it, but he
is business-like, and though there is humorous good fellowship in his
every hop, he nevertheless does not linger long from his work.
[Illustration: The skunk doesn’t know where he is going and he isn’t
even on his way]
Very different from this is the track of mister skunk. He wanders
aimlessly along, often as much sidewise as straight ahead. The skunk
doesn’t know where he is going and he isn’t even on his way. I never
see his tracks, whether on the pond shore or elsewhere, but I renew my
doubts as to his habits. He is out much too late at night. His tracks
show it. I think he had his drink before he came to the water.
Probably he too knows how toothsome are the unios and is searching for
them in his maudlin fashion.
Then there are the muskrats. They do not have to wait for their clam
banquets till the water is low. They are expert divers and gather the
unios at such times as suit their fancy. You will see their tracks in
regular runways in the shallow water of the muddy coves, whence they
are apt to follow some trickling streamlet to the bank where the summer
burrows are at high water.
Later, along the marshy edges you will find their winter teepees, piled
to conical heights with sods and roots, with a warm refuge above the
ice and an exit below, whence they may swim in search of food. The
tracks of the muskrats show every mark of the industrious villager.
They stick close to well-traveled paths, and though the muskrats are
out nights no one would for a moment question their temperance and
industry. Their characters are excellent ones, beyond suspicion, and
their tracks show it.
On the pond shore at ebb tide the glaciers, too, have left their
tracks, though it is probably several hundred thousand years since any
have been this way. Where there are granite ledges you may know that
these were here before even the glaciers stalked solemnly by, for they
show where the ice in grumbling grandeur ground small stones against
them and gradually wore out ruts in the enduring granite by force of
attrition.
The track of the glacier is like the trail of the serpent,--it leaves
no toe-marks, but its sliding progress is unmistakable. Side by side
with the ledge which shows these striæ you may see on the soft mud
imprints of this year’s leaves, dropped a moment there by the wind,
then whirled away again, but leaving their tracks behind them. This
mark of the season may be obliterated by a breath, or it may be covered
with sifting silt and finally harden into sandstone and bear the trail
of the leaf as far down the ages as has come that of the glacier. Here
are moments and æons elbowing one another for place.
Other interesting records of past time may be read in Stumpy Cove,
which is still the wildest and most secluded of spots, though the
trolley tripper has found the pond and builds his bungalows on its
shore, sinks his tin cans in its waters, and scares the bullfrogs
with his phonograph. The tin cans will not last long, however. Fresh
water in motion is continually giving up oxygen, and this with the
humic acid of the mud bottom will soon scatter these disfigurations in
scales of brown oxide. But all these solvent forces, acting through two
centuries, have had little effect on the stumps of Stumpy Cove.
The heart-wood is still sound, their interlaced roots tell the story
of what happened on the spot in the rich muck of the swamp, as Stumpy
Cove was then, before Myles Standish had set foot on Plymouth Rock or
the first white man had spied inland from the summit of Blue Hill. For
the pond as it is now is only about a hundred years old. For a hundred
years before that it was a meadow, flowed occasionally by the farmers
of the region about it.
Before that Stumpy Cove was a great white-cedar swamp and the great
white cedars stood in it, two feet in diameter, their clean straight
trunks running up fifty feet or more without a knob or limb. This
natural meadow with hay for their cattle for the cutting, these cedar
swamps with their century-old growth, were what attracted the first
settlers to this region, and hardly had the dawn of the sixteenth
century come over the Blue Hills before their axes were at work in
Stumpy Cove and similar swamps all about, getting out shingle stuff for
the Boston market. But whereas in all the other swamps the young cedars
were allowed to grow in again for succeeding generations of woodsmen,
here new conditions arose.
The meadow was flowed intermittently for a century; then the pond grew
out of it. Not only might no seedlings find roothold there, but the
very black muck in which they might grow was washed away from the
roots of the great stumps. These, in the main, have endured, losing
their bark and sap-wood, but with the heart-wood still firm after the
lapse of two centuries.
Here at this ebb tide I read the record of growth of trees that had
their beginnings more than three centuries ago. These roots so twine
and intertwine that the original sap, drawn from the tender tips, must
have nourished any one of several trees indifferently, for heart-wood
joins heart-wood in scores of places near the stump and far from it,
showing that each tree stood not only on its own roots, but on those
of its neighbors all about it; not only was it nourished by its own
rootlets, but by those of trees near by. No gale could uproot these
swamp cedars. United they stood and divided they might not fall. It is
a curious method of growth, and I dare say it obtains in many swamps
where the white cedars stand close, but under no other circumstances
could it have been revealed to me, casually strolling that way three
centuries after it happened.
At high water all these curious roots are submerged and you see only
the butts of the trees, numerous miniature islands on which many an
alien growth has made port. Here in June the dour and melancholy
cassandra disputes the footing of the wild rose, and the huckleberry
and sweet-fern twine in loving companionship, afloat as ashore. Here
intertwine the sheep laurel and the hard-hack, the meadow-sweet and the
marsh St. John’s-wort, garlanding the white skeletons of the ancient
trees and making them young again with the odorous promises of spring.
In midsummer, among patches of green and gray moss, you will find tiny,
diamond-like globules glistening. These are the clear, dew-like drops
of glutinous liquid which gem the leaves of the _Drosera_, northern
representative of the Venus’s fly-trap. This, the _Dionaea_, catches
flies by means of a steel-trap leaf which closes on them when they
light on it. This other, the _Drosera_, is not so active. It attracts
insects with its honey dew, holds them with sticky glands, and grips
them, little by little, with bristles. It is a curious and beautiful
little plant, and one would hardly think it carnivorous to see it
adding its diamond ornaments to the floral decorations which beautify
the ancient stumps all summer long.
Yet of all the life histories revealed by the pond at low tide I still
think that of the _Unionidæ_ the most interesting. You find them all
along above and below the margin of the shallow water, their shells
most wonderfully streaked with olive-green and pale-yellow in alternate
bands, till one might think he had found nodules of malachite which
the long-ago glacier had culled from some Labrador ledge and ground
to unsymmetrical ovoids before it dropped them on the old-time meadow
marge. In certain individuals and certain lights the shells of these
obscure creatures send out gleams of green and gold, like gems that
have soft fires within them. It is as if an opalescent soul dwelt
within, and the thin shell which a crow with his bill may puncture
with a blow was so constructed as to hold in the reds and blues of the
opalescence, but transmit the greens and gold.
You find many with only the backs of their shells sticking out of the
mud. This may be the creature’s natural position, but I find far more
of them lying quietly on their sides in the shallow water, rocking
gently to and fro in the placid undulations as if they were there but
to show me their shining colors. But if you watch one intently for a
time you will see him open his shell cautiously and put out one foot.
This is his best, for it is all he has and he puts it foremost. It is
very white and clean, and it might as well be called his tongue, for
with it he licks his food. It is half as long as he is, and when he has
put it out as far as he can, or as far as he dares, a fine white fringe
grows on its outer margin. Thus he gathers in minute animalculæ or
refuse matter from the surface of the mud, for his stomach’s sake.
It is a rather interesting thing to stand by and watch a _Unio
margaritifera_ daintily putting away his own particular brand of little
necks and mock turtle. At the least untoward sign of interest in the
affair, however, he shuts up like a clam, and you will need your
pocket-knife if you wish to see more of him.
Where the water is only an inch deep or so over the soft ooze of the
bottom you will see where the unio has used this so-called foot as
a foot should be used, for he not only stands on it, but walks with
its help. These signs are curiously erratic marks drawn as with a
sharpened stick for a distance sometimes of yards. If you will inspect
the seaward end of this trail you will find a unio in it, generally
a young one, for it is he that has left the mark behind him in his
travels. For the unio at a certain age is a great traveller; that is,
when he is very young. The adults foot it, but the young before they
reach their full growth ride, some of them by what you might call the
lightning expresses of the pond world.
If you will split a big one at this time of year you will be likely to
find within an astonishing number of eggs. These are carried in brood
pouches that seem to occupy pretty nearly all the space between the
shells. In seeing them you wonder vaguely where there was room for
the bearer of this amazing progeny. Just where they are these young
unios grow to maturity of a certain sort, forming minute shells which
have hooks, forming also peculiar organs of sense. The hooks and the
sense organs are provided that they may not miss that free ride which
is the privilege of every young unio if he is to reach the period of
adolescence.
At the moment of being sent forth from the home shell the golchidium,
for that is what the scientific men call the unio at this stage
of the affair, begins to hunt, aided by his sense organs, for a
thoroughfare. Here he takes the first conveyance, whether the slow
coach of the sluggish horn-pout, the bream automobile, or the pickerel
flying-machine. To the first fish that comes by he attaches himself,
oftentimes to the gills, and there he rides and, like most travelers,
continues to develop.