low temperature; for the mercury had been down to 10 deg. within a
fortnight, and a large snow-bank was still in sight against the wall.
Suddenly a close flock of eight or ten birds flew past us and
disappeared behind the hill. "Pigeons?" said my companion. I thought
not; they were sea-birds of some kind. Soon we heard killdeer cries from
the beach, and, looking up, saw the birds, three of them, alighting on
the sand. We started down the hill in haste, but just at that moment an
old woman, a miserable gatherer of drift rubbish, walked directly upon
them, and they made off. Then we saw that our "pigeons," or "sea-birds,"
had been nothing but killdeer plovers, which, like other long-winged
birds, look much larger in the air than when at rest. Returning towards
Lynn, later in the afternoon, we came upon the same three birds again;
this time feeding among the boulders at the end of the beach. We
remarked once more their curious, silly-looking custom of standing
stock-still with heads indrawn. But our own attitudes, as we also stood
stock-still with glasses raised, may have looked, in their eyes, even
more singular and meaningless. As we turned away--after flushing them
two or three times to get a view of their pretty cinnamon
rump-feathers--a sportsman came up, and proved to be the very man on
whose belt we had seen our first killdeers, a week before. We left him
doing his best to bag these three also. He will never read what I write,
and I need not scruple to confess that, seeing his approach, we
purposely startled the birds as badly as possible, hoping to see them
make off over the hill, out of harm's way. But the foolish creatures
could not take the hint, and alighted again within a few rods, at the
same time calling loudly enough to attract the attention of the gunner,
who up to this moment had not been aware of their presence. He fired
twice before we got out of sight, but, to judge from his motions,
without success. A man's happiness is perhaps of more value than a
plover's, though I do not see how we are to prove it; but my sympathies,
then as always, were with the birds.
Within a week or so I received a letter from Mrs. Celia Thaxter,
together with a wing, a foot, and one cinnamon feather. "By this wing
which I send you," she began, "can you tell me the name of the bird that
owned it?" Then after some description of the plumage, she continued:
"In the late tremendous tempest myriads of these birds settled on the
Isles of Shoals, filling the air with a harsh, shrill, incessant cry,
and not to be driven away by guns or any of man's inhospitable
treatment. Their number was so great as to be amazing, and they had
never been seen before by any of the present inhabitants of the Shoals.
They are plovers of some kind, I should judge, but I do not know." On
the 16th she wrote again: "All sorts of strange things were cast up by
the storm, and the plovers were busy devouring everything they could
find; always running, chasing each other, very quarrelsome, fighting
all the time. They were in poor condition, so lean that the men did not
shoot them after the first day, a fact which gives your correspondent
great satisfaction. They are still there! My brother came from the
Shoals yesterday, and says that the place is alive with them, all the
seven islands."
Similar facts were reported--as I began in one way and another to
learn--from different points along the coast; especially from Cape
Elizabeth, Maine, where hundreds of the birds were seen on the 28th and
29th of November. The reporter of this item[4] pertinently adds: "Such a
flight of killdeer in Maine--where the bird is well known to be
rare--has probably not occurred before within the memory of living
sportsmen." Here, as at the Isles of Shoals, the visitors were at first
easily shot (they are not counted among game birds where they are known,
on account of their habitual leanness, I suppose); but they had landed
upon inhospitable shores, and were not long in becoming aware of their
misfortune. In the middle of December one of our Cambridge
ornithologists went to Cape Cod on purpose to find them. He saw about
sixty birds, but by this time they were so wild that he succeeded in
getting only a single specimen. "Poor fellows!" he wrote me; "they
looked unhappy enough, that cold Friday, with the mercury at 12 deg. and
everything frozen stiff. Most of them were on hillsides and in the
hollows of pastures; a few were in the salt marshes, and one or two on
the beach." Nobody expected them to remain hereabouts, as they normally
winter in the West Indies and in Central and South America;[5] but every
little while Mrs. Thaxter wrote, "The killdeers are still here!" and on
the 21st of December, as I approached Marblehead Neck, I saw a bird
skimming over the ice that covered the small pond back of the beach. I
put up my glass and said to myself, "A killdeer plover!" There proved to
be two birds. They would not suffer me within gunshot,--though I carried
no gun,--but flew off into some ploughed ground, with their usual loud
vociferations. (The killdeer is aptly named _Aegialitis vocifera_.)
[4] Mr. N. C. Brown, in _The Auk_, January, 1889, page 69.
[5] It seems probable that the birds started from some point in the
Southern States for a long southward flight, or perhaps for the West
Indies, on the evening of November 24th, and on getting out to sea were
caught by the great gale, which whirled them northward over the
Atlantic, landing them--such of them, that is, as were not drowned on
the way--upon the coast of New England. The grounds for such an opinion
are set forth by Dr. Arthur P. Chadbourne in _The Auk_ for July, 1889,
page 255.
During the month with the history of which we are now especially
concerned, I saw nothing more of them; but by way of completing the
story I may add that on the 28th of January, in the same spot, I found a
flock of seven, and there they remained. I visited them four times in
February and once in March, and found them invariably in the same place.
Evidently they had no idea of making another attempt to reach the West
Indies for _this_ season; and if they were to remain in our latitude,
they could hardly have selected a more desirable location. The marsh, or
meadow, was sheltered and sunny, while the best protected corner was at
the same time one of those peculiarly springy spots in which the grass
keeps green the winter through. Here, then, these seven wayfarers
stayed week after week. Whenever I stole up cautiously and peeped over
the bank into their verdant hiding-place, I was sure to hear the
familiar cry; and directly one bird, and then another, and another,
would start up before me, disclosing the characteristic brown feathers
of the lower back. They commonly assembled in the middle of the marsh
upon the snow or ice, where they stood for a little, bobbing their heads
in mutual conference, and then flew off over the house and over the
orchard, calling as they flew.
Throughout December, and indeed throughout the winter, brown creepers
and red-bellied nuthatches were surprisingly abundant. Every pine wood
seemed to have its colony of them. Whether the extraordinary mildness of
the season had anything to do with this I cannot say; but their presence
was welcome, whatever the reason for it. Like the chickadee, with whom
they have the good taste to be fond of associating, they are always busy
and cheerful, appearing not to mind either snow-storm or low
temperature. No reasonable observer would ever tax them with effeminacy,
though the creeper, it must be owned, cannot speak without lisping.
Following my usual practice, I began a catalogue of the month's birds,
and at the end of a fortnight discovered, to my astonishment, that the
name of the downy woodpecker was missing. He had been common during
November, and is well known as one of our familiar winter residents. I
began forthwith to keep a sharp lookout for him, particularly whenever I
went near any apple orchard. A little later, I actually commenced making
excursions on purpose to find him. But the fates were against me, and go
where I would, he was not there. At last I gave him up. Then, on the
27th, as I sat at my desk, a chickadee chirped outside. Of course I
looked out to see him; and there, exploring the branches of an old
apple-tree, directly under my window, was the black-and-white woodpecker
for whom I had been searching in vain through five or six townships. The
saucy fellow! He rapped smartly three or four times; then he
straightened himself back, as woodpeckers do, and said: "Good-morning,
sir! Where have you been so long? If you wish to see _me_, you had
better stay at home." He might have spoken a little less pertly; for
after all, if a man would know what is going on, whether in summer or
winter, he must not keep too much in his own door-yard. Of the thirty
birds in my December list, I should have seen perhaps ten if I had sat
all the time at my window, and possibly twice that number had I confined
my walks within the limits of my own town.
While the migration is going on, to be sure, one may find birds in the
most unexpected places. Last May I glanced up from my book and espied an
olive-backed thrush in the back yard, foraging among the currant-bushes.
Raising a window quietly, I whistled something like an imitation of his
inimitable song; and the little traveler--always an easy dupe--pricked
up his ears, and presently responded with a strain which carried me
straight into the depths of a White Mountain forest. But in December,
with some exceptions, of course, birds must be sought after rather than
waited for. The 15th, for example, was a most uncomfortable day,--so
uncomfortable that I stayed indoors,--the mercury only two or three
degrees above zero, and a strong wind blowing. Such weather would drive
the birds under shelter. The next forenoon, therefore, I betook myself
to a hill covered thickly with pines and cedars. Here I soon ran upon
several robins, feeding upon the savin berries, and in a moment more was
surprised by a _tseep_ so loud and emphatic that I thought at once of a
fox sparrow. Then I looked for a song sparrow,--badly startled,
perhaps,--but found to my delight a white-throat. He was on the ground,
but at my approach flew into a cedar. Here he drew in his head and sat
perfectly still, the picture of discouragement. I could not blame him,
but was glad, an hour later, to find him again on the ground, picking up
his dinner. I leveled my glass at him and whistled his Peabody song (the
simplest of all bird songs to imitate), but he moved not a feather.
Apparently he had never heard it before! He was still there in the
afternoon, and I had hopes of his remaining through the winter; but I
never could find him afterwards. Ten days prior to this I had gone to
Longwood on a special hunt for this same sparrow, remembering a certain
peculiarly cozy hollow where, six or eight years before, a little
company of song sparrows and white-throats had passed a rather severe
winter. The song sparrows were there again, as I had expected, but no
white-throats. The song sparrows, by the way, treated me shabbily this
season. A year ago several of them took up their quarters in a roadside
garden patch, where I could look in upon them almost daily. This year
there were none to be discovered anywhere in this neighborhood. They
figure in my December list on four days only, and were found in four
different towns,--Brookline (Longwood), Marblehead, Nahant, and
Cohasset. Like some others of our land birds (notably the golden-winged
woodpecker and the meadow lark), they seem to have learned that winter
loses a little of its rigor along the sea-board.
Three kinds of land birds were met with at Nahant Beach, and nowhere
else: the Ipswich sparrow,--on the 3d and 26th,--the snow bunting, and
the horned lark. Of the last two species, both of them rather common in
November, I saw but one individual each. They were feeding side by
side, and, after a short separation,--under the fright into which my
sudden appearance put them,--one called to the other, and they flew off
in company towards Lynn. It was a pleasing display of sociability, but
nothing new; for in winter, as every observer knows, birds not of a
feather flock together. The Ipswich sparrow, a very retiring but not
peculiarly timid creature, I have now seen at Nahant in every one of our
seven colder months,--from October to April,--though it is
unquestionably rare upon the Massachusetts coast between the fall and
spring migrations. Besides the species already named, my monthly list
included the following: herring gull, great black-backed gull, ruffed
grouse, hairy woodpecker, flicker, goldfinch, tree sparrow, snowbird,
blue jay, crow, shrike, white-bellied nuthatch (only two or three
birds), golden-crowned kinglet, and one small hawk.[6]
[6] To this list my ornithological comrade before mentioned added seven
species, namely: white-winged scoter, barred owl, cowbird, purple finch,
white-winged crossbill, fox sparrow, and winter wren. Between us, as far
as land birds went, we did pretty well.
The only birds that sang during the month--unless we include the
red-bellied nuthatches, whose frequent quaint twitterings should,
perhaps, come under this head--were the chickadees and a single robin.
The former I have down as uttering their sweet phoebe whistle--which I
take to be certainly their song, as distinguished from all their
multifarious calls--on seven of the thirty-one days. They were more
tuneful in January, and still more so in February; so that the titmouse,
as becomes a creature so full of good humor and high spirits, may fairly
be said to sing all winter long. The robin's music was a pleasure quite
unexpected. I was out on Sunday, the 30th, for a few minutes' stroll
before breakfast, when the obliging stranger (I had not seen a robin for
a fortnight, and did not see another for nearly two months) broke into
song from a hill-top covered with pitch-pines. He was in excellent
voice, and sang again and again. The morning invited music,--warm and
cloudless, like an unusually fine morning in early April.
For an entire week, indeed, the weather had seemed to be trying to outdo
itself. I remember in particular the day before Christmas. I rose long
before daylight, crossed the Mystic River marshes as the dawn was
beginning to break, and shortly after sunrise was on my way down the
South Shore. Leaving the cars at Cohasset, I sauntered over the
Jerusalem Road to Nantasket, spent a little while on the beach, and
brought up at North Cohasset, where I was attracted by a
lonesome-looking road running into the woods all by itself, with a
guide-board marked "Turkey Hill." Why not accept the pleasing
invitation, which seemed meant on purpose for just such an idle
pedestrian as myself? As for Turkey Hill, I had never heard of it, and
presumed it to be some uninteresting outlying hamlet. My concern, as a
saunterer's ought always to be, was with the road itself, not with what
might lie at the end of it. I did not discover my mistake till I had
gone half a mile, more or less, when the road all at once turned sharply
to the right and commenced ascending. Then it dawned upon me that Turkey
Hill must be no other than the long, gradual, grassy slope at which I
had already been looking from the railway station. The prospect of sea
and land was beautiful; all the more so, perhaps, because of a thick
autumnal haze. It might be called excellent Christmas weather, I said to
myself, when a naturally prudent man, no longer young, could sit perched
upon a fence rail at the top of a hill, drinking in the beauties of the
landscape.
At the station, after my descent, I met a young man of the neighborhood.
"Do you know why they call that Turkey Hill?" said I. "No, sir, I
don't," he answered. I suggested that probably somebody had killed a
wild turkey up there at some time or other. He looked politely
incredulous. "I don't _think_ there are any wild turkeys up there," said
he; "_I_ never saw any." He was not more than twenty-five years old, and
the last Massachusetts turkey was killed on Mount Tom in 1847, so that I
had no doubt he spoke the truth. Probably he took me for a simple-minded
fellow, while I thought nothing worse of him than that he was one of
those people, so numerous and at the same time so much to be pitied, who
have never studied ornithology.
The 25th was warmer even than the 24th; and it, likewise, I spent upon
the South Shore, though at a point somewhat farther inland, and in a
town where I was not likely to lose myself, least of all in any
out-of-the-way woodland road. In short, I spent Christmas on my native
heath,--a not inappropriate word, by the bye, for a region so largely
grown up to huckleberry bushes. "Holbrook's meadows," and "Norton
pasture!"--the names are not to be found on any map, and will convey no
meaning to my readers; but in my ears they awaken memories of many and
many a sunny hour. On this holiday I revisited them both. Warm as it
was, boys and girls were skating on the meadows (in spite of their name,
these have been nothing but a pond for as long as I can remember), and I
stood awhile by the old Ross cellar, watching their evolutions. How
bright and cheery it was in the little sheltered clearing, with nothing
in sight but the leafless woods and the ice-covered pond! "Shan't I take
your coat?" the sun seemed to be asking. At my elbow stood a bunch of
lilac bushes ("laylocks" they were probably called by the man who set
them out[7]) that had blossomed freely in the summer. The house has
been gone for these thirty years or more (alas! my sun must be rapidly
declining when memory casts so long a shadow), but the bushes seem
likely to hold their own for at least a century. They might have
prompted a wise man to some wise reflections; but for myself, it must be
acknowledged, I fell instead to thinking how many half days I had
fished--and caught nothing, or next to nothing--along this same
pleasant, willow-bordered shore.
[7] So they were called, too, by that lover of flowers, Walter Savage
Landor, who, as his biographer says, followed a pronunciation
"traditional in many old English families."
In Norton pasture, an hour or two later, I made myself young again by
putting a few checkerberries into my mouth; and in a small new clearing
just over the brook ("Dyer's Run," this used to be called, but I fear
the name is falling into forgetfulness) I stumbled upon a patch of some
handsome evergreen shrub, which I saw at once to be a novelty. I took it
for a member of the heath family, but it proved to belong with the
hollies,--_Ilex glabra_, or ink-berry, a plant not to be found in the
county where it is my present lot to botanize. So, even on my native
heath, I had discovered something new.
The flora of a Massachusetts December is of necessity limited. Even in
the month under review, singularly favorable as it was, I found but
sixteen sorts of wild blossoms; a small number, surely, though perhaps
larger by sixteen than the average reader would have guessed. The names
of these hardy adventurers must by no means go unrecorded: shepherd's
purse, wild pepper-grass, pansy, common chickweed (_Stellaria media_),
mouse-ear chickweed (_Cerastium viscosum_), knawel, common mallow,
witch-hazel, cinque-foil (_Potentilla Norvegica_,--not _argentea_, as I
should certainly have expected), many-flowered aster, cone-flower,
yarrow, two kinds of groundsel, fall dandelion, and jointweed. Six of
these--mallow, cinque-foil, aster, cone-flower, fall dandelion, and
jointweed--were noticed only at Nahant; and it is further to be said
that the jointweed was found by a friend, not by myself, while the
cone-flower was not in strictness a blossom; that is to say, its rays
were well opened, making what in common parlance is called a flower, but
the true florets were not yet perfected. Such witch-hazel blossoms as
can be gathered in December are of course nothing but belated specimens.
I remarked a few on the 2d, and again on the 10th; and on the afternoon
of Christmas, happening to look into a hamamelis-tree, I saw what looked
like a flower near the top. The tree was too small for climbing and
almost too large for bending, but I managed to get it down; and sure
enough, the bit of yellow was indeed a perfectly fresh blossom. How did
it know I was to pass that way on Christmas afternoon, and by what sort
of freemasonry did it attract my attention? I loved it and left it on
the stalk, in the true Emersonian spirit, and here I do my little best
to embalm its memory.
One of the groundsels (_Senecio viscosus_) is a recent immigrant from
Europe, but has been thoroughly established in the Back Bay lands of
Boston--where I now found it, in perfect condition, December 4th--for at
least half a dozen years. In Gray's "Flora of North America" it is said
to grow there and in the vicinity of Providence; but since that account
was written it has made its appearance in Lowell, and probably in other
places. It is a coarse-looking little plant, delighting to grow in pure
gravel; but its blossoms are pretty, and now, with not another flower of
any sort near it, it looked, as the homely phrase is, "as handsome as a
picture." Its more generally distributed congener, _Senecio
vulgaris_,--also a foreigner--is, next to the common chickweed, I should
say, our very hardiest bloomer. At the beginning of the month it was in
flower in an old garden in Melrose; and at Marblehead Neck a
considerable patch of it was fairly yellow with blossoms all through
December and January, and I know not how much longer. I saw no
shepherd's purse after December 27th, but knawel was in flower as late
as January 18th. The golden-rods, it will be observed, are absent
altogether from my list; and the same would have been true of the
asters, but for a single plant. This, curiously enough, still bore five
heads of tolerably fresh blossoms, after all its numberless companions,
growing upon the same hillside, had succumbed to the frost.
Of my sixteen plants, exactly one half are species that have been
introduced from Europe; six are members of the composite family; and if
we omit the cone-flower, all but three of the entire number are simple
whites and yellows. Two red flowers, the clover and the pimpernel,
disappointed my search; but the blue hepatica would almost certainly
have been found, had it come in my way to look for it.
Prettier even than the flowers, however, was the December greenness,
especially of the humbler sorts: St. John's-wort, five-finger, the
creeping blackberries,--whose modest winter loveliness was never half
appreciated,--herb-robert, corydalis, partridge-berry, checkerberry,
wintergreen, rattlesnake-plantain, veronica, and linnaea, to say nothing
of the ferns and mosses. Most refreshing of all, perhaps, was an
occasional patch of bright green grass, like the one already spoken of,
at Marblehead, or like one even brighter and prettier, which I visited
more than once in Swampscott.
As I review what I have written, I am tempted to exclaim with
Tennyson:--
"And was the day of my delight
As pure and perfect as I say?"