alertness of mind and quickness to take a hint. One's perceptive
faculties must be like a trap lightly and delicately set; a touch must
suffice to spring it. But how many people have I walked with, whose
perceptions were rusty and unpracticed,—nothing less than a bear would
spring their trap! All the finer play of nature, all the small deer,
they miss. The little dramas and tragedies that are being enacted by
the wild creatures in the fields and woods are more or less veiled
and withdrawn; and the actors all stop when a spectator appears upon
the scene. One must be able to interpret the signs, to penetrate the
scenes, to put this and that together.
Then nature speaks a different language from our own; the successful
observer translates this language into human speech. He knows the
meaning of every sound, movement, gesture, and gives the human
equivalent. Careless or hasty observers, on the other hand, make the
mistake of reading their own thoughts or mental and emotional processes
into nature; plans and purposes are attributed to the wild creatures
which are quite beyond them. Some people in town saw an English sparrow
tangled up in a horsehair, and suspended from a tree, with other
sparrows fluttering and chattering about it. They concluded at once
that the sparrows had executed one of their number, doubtless for some
crime. I have several times seen sparrows suspended in this way about
their nesting and roosting places. Accidents happen to birds as well as
to other folks. But they do not yet imitate us in the matter of capital
punishment.
One day I saw a little bush sparrow fluttering along in the grass,
disabled in some way, and a large number of its mates flitting and
calling about it. I captured the bird, and, in doing so, its struggles
in my hand broke the bond that held it—some kind of web or silken
insect thread that tied together the quills of one wing. When I let
it fly away, all its mates followed it as if wondering at the miracle
that had been wrought. They no doubt experienced some sort of emotion.
Birds sympathize with each other in their distress, and will make
common cause against an enemy. Crows will pursue and fight a tame crow.
They seem to look upon him as an alien and an enemy. He is never so
shapely and bright and polished as his wild brother. He is more or less
demoralized, and has lost caste. Probably a pack of wolves would in the
same way destroy a tame wolf, should such an one appear in their midst.
The wild creatures are human,—with a difference, a wide difference.
They have the keenest powers of perception,—what observers they are!
how quickly they take a hint—but they have little or no powers of
reflection. The crows do not meet in parliaments and caucuses, as has
been fancied, and try offenders, and discuss the tariff, or consider
ways and means. They are gregarious and social, and probably in the
fall have something like a reunion of the tribe. At least their vast
assemblages upon the hills at this season have a decidedly festive
appearance.
The crow has fine manners. He always has the walk and air of a lord of
the soil. One morning I put out some fresh meat upon the snow near my
study window. Presently a crow came and carried it off, and alighted
with it upon the ground in the vineyard. While he was eating of it,
another crow came, and, alighting a few yards away, slowly walked up
to within a few feet of this fellow and stopped. I expected to see
a struggle over the food, as would have been the case with domestic
fowls or animals. Nothing of the kind. The feeding crow stopped eating,
regarded the other for a moment, made a gesture or two, and flew away.
Then the second crow went up to the food, and proceeded to take his
share. Presently the first crow came back, when each seized a portion
of the food and flew away with it. Their mutual respect and good-will
seemed perfect. Whether it really was so in our human sense, or whether
it was simply an illustration of the instinct of mutual support which
seems to prevail among gregarious birds, I know not. Birds that are
solitary in their habits, like hawks or woodpeckers, behave quite
differently toward each other in the presence of their food.
The lives of the wild creatures revolve about two facts or emotions,
appetite and fear. Their keenness in discovering food and in
discovering danger are alike remarkable. But man can nearly always
outwit them, because, while his perceptions are not as sharp, his
power of reflection is so much greater. His cunning carries a great
deal farther. The crow will quickly discover anything that looks like
a trap or snare set to catch him, but it takes him a long time to see
through the simplest contrivance. As I have above stated, I sometimes
place meat on the snow in front of my study window to attract him. On
one occasion, after a couple of crows had come to expect something
there daily, I suspended a piece of meat by a string from a branch
of the tree just over the spot where I usually placed the food. A
crow soon discovered it, and came into the tree to see what it meant.
His suspicions were aroused. There was some design in that suspended
meat evidently. It was a trap to catch him. He surveyed it from every
near branch. He peeked and pried, and was bent on penetrating the
mystery. He flew to the ground, and walked about and surveyed it from
all sides. Then he took a long walk down about the vineyard as if
in hope of hitting upon some clew. Then he came to the tree again,
and tried first one eye, then the other, upon it; then to the ground
beneath; then he went away and came back; then his fellow came, and
they both squinted and investigated, and then disappeared. Chickadees
and woodpeckers would alight upon the meat and peck it swinging in the
wind, but the crows were fearful. Does this show reflection? Perhaps
it does, but I look upon it rather as that instinct of fear and
cunning so characteristic of the crow. Two days passed thus: every
morning the crows came and surveyed the suspended meat from all points
in the tree, and then went away. The third day I placed a large bone
on the snow beneath the suspended morsel. Presently one of the crows
appeared in the tree, and bent his eye upon the tempting bone. "The
mystery deepens," he seemed to say to himself. But after half an hour's
investigation, and after approaching several times within a few feet of
the food upon the ground, he seemed to conclude there was no connection
between it and the piece hanging by the string. So he finally walked
up to it and fell to pecking it, flickering his wings all the time, as
a sign of his watchfulness. He also turned up his eye, momentarily, to
the piece in the air above, as if it might be some disguised sword of
Damocles ready to fall upon him. Soon his mate came and alighted on a
low branch of the tree. The feeding crow regarded him a moment, and
then flew up to his side, as if to give him a turn at the meat. But he
refused to run the risk. He evidently looked upon the whole thing as a
delusion and a snare, and presently went away, and his mate followed
him. Then I placed the bone in one of the main forks of the tree, but
the crows kept at a safe distance from it. Then I put it back to the
ground, but they grew more and more suspicious; some evil intent in it
all, they thought. Finally a dog carried off the bone, and the crows
ceased to visit the tree.
III
A SPARROW'S MISTAKE
If one has always built one's nest upon the ground, and if one comes
of a race of ground-builders, it is a risky experiment to build in a
tree. The conditions are vastly different. One of my near neighbors,
a little song sparrow, learned this lesson the past season. She grew
ambitious; she departed from the traditions of her race, and placed her
nest in a tree. Such a pretty spot she chose, too—the pendent cradle
formed by the interlaced sprays of two parallel branches of a Norway
spruce. These branches shoot out almost horizontally; indeed, the lower
ones become quite so in spring, and the side shoots with which they
are clothed droop down, forming the slopes of miniature ridges; where
the slopes of two branches join, a little valley is formed which often
looks more stable than it really is. My sparrow selected one of these
little valleys about six feet from the ground, and quite near the walls
of the house. Here, she has thought, I will build my nest, and pass the
heat of June in a miniature Norway. This tree is the fir-clad mountain,
and this little vale on its side I select for my own. She carried
up a great quantity of coarse grass and straws for the foundation,
just as she would have done upon the ground. On the top of this mass
there gradually came into shape the delicate structure of her nest,
compacting and refining till its delicate carpet of hairs and threads
was reached. So sly as the little bird was about it, too,—every
moment on her guard lest you discover her secret! Five eggs were laid,
and incubation was far advanced, when the storms and winds came. The
cradle indeed did rock. The boughs did not break, but they swayed and
separated as you would part your two interlocked hands. The ground
of the little valley fairly gave way, the nest tilted over till its
contents fell into the chasm. It was like an earthquake that destroys a
hamlet.
No born tree-builder would have placed its nest in such a situation.
Birds that build at the end of the branch, like the oriole, tie the
nest fast; others, like the robin, build against the main trunk; still
others build securely in the fork. The sparrow, in her ignorance,
rested her house upon the spray of two branches, and when the tempest
came the branches parted company and the nest was engulfed.
Another sparrow friend of mine met with a curious mishap the past
season. It was the little social sparrow, or chippie. She built her
nest on the arm of a grapevine in the vineyard, a favorite place with
chippie. It had a fine canopy of leaves, and was firmly and securely
placed. Just above it hung a bunch of young grapes, which in the warm
July days grew very rapidly. The little bird had not foreseen the
calamity that threatened her. The grapes grew down into her nest and
completely filled it, so that, when I put my hand in, there were the
eggs sat upon by the grapes. The bird was crowded out, and had perforce
abandoned her nest, ejected by a bunch of grapes. How long she held
her ground I do not know; probably till the fruit began to press
heavily upon her.
IV
A POOR FOUNDATION
It is a curious habit the wood thrush has of starting its nest with a
fragment of newspaper or other paper. Except in remote woods, I think
it nearly always puts a piece of paper in the foundation of its nest.
Last spring I chanced to be sitting near a tree in which a wood thrush
had concluded to build. She came with a piece of paper nearly as large
as my hand, placed it upon the branch, stood upon it a moment, and
then flew down to the ground. A little puff of wind caused the paper
to leave the branch a moment afterward. The thrush watched it eddy
slowly down to the ground, when she seized it and carried it back. She
placed it in position as before, stood upon it again for a moment,
and then flew away. Again the paper left the branch, and sailed away
slowly to the ground. The bird seized it again, jerking it about rather
spitefully, I thought; she turned it around two or three times, then
labored back to the branch with it, upon which she shifted it about as
if to hit upon some position in which it would lie more securely. This
time she sat down upon it for a moment, and then went away, doubtless
with the thought in her head that she would bring something to hold
it down. The perverse paper followed her in a few seconds. She seized
it again, and hustled it about more than before. As she rose with
it toward the nest, it in some way impeded her flight, and she was
compelled to return to the ground with it. But she kept her temper
remarkably well. She turned the paper over and took it up in her beak
several times before she was satisfied with her hold, and then carried
it back to the branch, where, however, it would not stay. I saw her
make six trials of it, when I was called away. I think she finally
abandoned the restless fragment, probably a scrap that held some
"breezy" piece of writing, for later in the season I examined the nest
and found no paper in it.
V
A FRIGHTENED MINK
In walking through the woods one day in early winter, we read upon the
newly fallen snow the record of a mink's fright the night before. The
mink had been traveling through the woods post-haste, not along the
watercourses where one sees them by day, but over ridges and across
valleys. We followed his track some distance to see what adventures
he had met with. We tracked him through a bushy swamp, saw where he
had left it to explore a pile of rocks, then where he had taken to the
swamp again, then to the more open woods. Presently the track turned
sharply about, and doubled upon itself in long hurried strides. What
had caused the mink to change its mind so suddenly? We explored a few
paces ahead, and came upon a fox track. The mink had seen the fox
stalking stealthily through the woods, and the sight had probably
brought his heart into his mouth. I think he climbed a tree, and waited
till the fox passed. His track disappeared amid a clump of hemlocks,
and then reappeared again a little beyond them. It described a big
loop around, and then crossed the fox track only a few yards from the
point where its course was interrupted. Then it followed a little
watercourse, went under a rude bridge in a wood-road, then mingled with
squirrel tracks in a denser part of the thicket. If the mink met a
muskrat or a rabbit in his travels, or came upon a grouse, or quail, or
a farmer's hen-roost, he had the supper he was in quest of.
VI
A LEGLESS CLIMBER
The eye always sees what it wants to see, and the ear hears what it
wants to hear. If I am intent upon birds'-nests in my walk, I find
birds'-nests everywhere. Some people see four-leaved clovers wherever
they look in the grass. A friend of mine picks up Indian relics all
about the fields; he has Indian relics in his eye. I have seen him
turn out of the path at right angles, as a dog will when he scents
something, and walk straight away several rods, and pick up an Indian
pounding-stone. He saw it out of the corner of his eye. I find that
without conscious effort I see and hear birds with like ease. Eye and
ear are always on the alert.
One day in early June I was walking with some friends along a secluded
wood-road. Above the hum of the conversation I caught the distressed
cry of a pair of blue jays. My companions heard it also, but did not
heed it.
But to my ear the cry was peculiar. It was uttered in a tone of anguish
and alarm. I said, "Let us see what is the trouble with these jays."
I presently saw a nest twenty-five or thirty feet from the ground in
a small hemlock which I at once concluded belonged to the jays. The
birds were but a few yards away, hopping about amid the neighboring
branches, uttering now and then their despairing note. Looking more
intently at the nest, I became aware in the dim light of the tree of
something looped about it, or else there was a dark, very crooked limb
that partly held it. Suspecting the true nature of the case, I threw a
stone up through the branches, and then another and another, when the
dark loops and folds upon one side of the nest began to disappear, and
the head and neck of a black snake to slowly slide out on a horizontal
branch on the other; in a moment the snake had cleared the nest, and
stretched himself along the branch.
Another rock-fragment jarred his perch, when he slid cautiously along
toward the branch of a large pine-tree which came out and mingled its
spray with that of the hemlock. It was soon apparent that the snake
was going to take refuge in the pine. As he made the passage from one
tree to the other, we sought to dislodge him by a shower of sticks and
stones, but without success; he was soon upon a large branch of the
pine, and, stretched out on top of the limb, thought himself quite
hidden. And so he was; but we knew his hiding-place, and the stones
and clubs we hurled soon made him uneasy. Presently a club struck the
branch with such force that he was fairly dislodged, but saved himself
by quickly wrapping his tail about the limb. In this position he hung
for some moments, but the intervening branches shielded him pretty well
from our missiles, and he soon recovered himself and gained a still
higher branch that reached out over the road and nearly made a bridge
to the trees on the other side.
Seeing the monster was likely to escape us, unless we assailed him
at closer quarters, I determined to climb the tree. A smaller tree
growing near helped me up to the first branches, where the ascent
was not very difficult. I finally reached the branch upon which the
snake was carefully poised, and began shaking it. But he did not come
down; he wrapped his tail about it, and defied me. My own position was
precarious, and I was obliged to move with great circumspection.
After much manœuvring I succeeded in arming myself with a dry branch
eight or ten feet long, where I had the serpent at a disadvantage. He
kept his hold well. I clubbed him about from branch to branch, while my
friends, with cautions and directions, looked on from beneath. Neither
man nor snake will indulge in very lively antics in a treetop thirty or
forty feet from the ground. But at last I dislodged him, and, swinging
and looping like a piece of rubber hose, he went to the ground, where
my friends pounced upon him savagely and quickly made an end of him.
I worked my way carefully down the tree, and was about to drop upon the
ground from the lower branches, when I saw another black snake coiled
up at the foot of the tree, as if lying in wait for me. Had he started
to his mate's rescue, and, seeing the battle over, was he now waiting
to avenge himself upon the victor? But the odds were against him; my
friends soon had him stretched beside his comrade.
The first snake killed had swallowed two young jays just beginning to
feather out.
How the serpent discovered the nest would be very interesting to know.
What led him to search in this particular tree amid all these hundreds
of trees that surrounded it? It is probable that the snake watches like
a cat, or, having seen the parent birds about this tree, explored it.
Nests upon the ground and in low boughs are frequently rifled by black
snakes, but I have never before known one to climb to such a height in
a forest tree.
It would also be interesting to know if the other snake was in the
secret of this nest, and was waiting near to share in its contents.
One rarely has the patience to let these little dramas or tragedies be
played to the end; one cannot look quietly on, and see a snake devour
anything. Not even when it is snake eat snake. Only a few days later my
little boy called me to the garden to see a black snake in the act of
swallowing a garter snake. The little snake was holding back with all
his might and main, hooking his tail about the blackberry bushes, and
pulling desperately; still his black enemy was slowly engulfing him,
and had accomplished about eight or ten inches of him, when he suddenly
grew alarmed at some motion of ours, and ejected the little snake
from him with unexpected ease and quickness, and tried to escape. The
little snake's head was bleeding, but he did not seem otherwise to have
suffered from the adventure.
Still a few days later, the man who was mowing the lawn called to me to
come and witness a similar tragedy, but on a smaller scale,—a garter
snake swallowing a little green snake. Half the length of the green
snake had disappeared from sight, and it was quite dead. The process
had been a slow one, as the garter snake was only two or three inches
longer than his victim. There seems to be a sort of poetic justice in
snake swallowing snake, shark eating shark, and one can look on with
more composure than when a bird or frog is the victim. It is said that
in the deep sea there is a fish that will swallow another fish eight
or ten times its own size. It seizes its victim by the tail and slowly
sucks it in, stretching and expanding itself at the same time, and
probably digesting the big fish by inches, till, after many days, it is
completely engulfed. Would it be hard to find something analogous to
this in life, especially in American politics?
VII
A YOUNG MARSH HAWK
Most country boys, I fancy, know the marsh hawk. It is he you see
flying low over the fields, beating about bushes and marshes and
dipping over the fences, with his attention directed to the ground
beneath him. He is a cat on wings. He keeps so low that the birds and
mice do not see him till he is fairly upon them. The hen-hawk swoops
down upon the meadow-mouse from his position high in air, or from the
top of a dead tree; but the marsh hawk stalks him and comes suddenly
upon him from over the fence, or from behind a low bush or tuft of
grass. He is nearly as large as the hen-hawk, but has a much longer
tail. When I was a boy I used to call him the long-tailed hawk. The
male is a bluish slate color; the female a reddish brown, like the
hen-hawk, with a white rump.
Unlike the other hawks, they nest on the ground in low, thick marshy
places. For several seasons a pair have nested in a bushy marsh a few
miles back of me, near the house of a farmer friend of mine, who has
a keen eye for the wild life about him. Two years ago he found the
nest, but when I got over to see it the next week, it had been robbed,
probably by some boys in the neighborhood. The past season, in April
or May, by watching the mother bird, he found the nest again. It was in
a marshy place, several acres in extent, in the bottom of a valley, and
thickly grown with hardhack, prickly ash, smilax, and other low thorny
bushes. My friend brought me to the brink of a low hill, and pointed
out to me in the marsh below us, as nearly as he could, just where the
nest was located. Then we crossed the pasture, entered upon the marsh,
and made our way cautiously toward it. The wild thorny growths, waist
high, had to be carefully dealt with. As we neared the spot I used my
eyes the best I could, but I did not see the hawk till she sprang into
the air not ten yards away from us. She went screaming upward, and was
soon sailing in a circle far above us. There, on a coarse matting of
twigs and weeds, lay five snow-white eggs, a little more than half as
large as hens' eggs. My companion said the male hawk would probably
soon appear and join the female, but he did not. She kept drifting away
to the east, and was soon gone from our sight.
We soon withdrew and secreted ourselves behind the stone wall, in hopes
of seeing the mother hawk return. She appeared in the distance, but
seemed to know she was being watched, and kept away. About ten days
later we made another visit to the nest. An adventurous young Chicago
lady also wanted to see a hawk's nest, and so accompanied us. This
time three of the eggs were hatched, and as the mother hawk sprang
up, either by accident or intentionally, she threw two of the young
hawks some feet from the nest. She rose up and screamed angrily. Then,
turning toward us, she came like an arrow straight at the young lady, a
bright plume in whose hat probably drew her fire. The damsel gathered
up her skirts about her and beat a hasty retreat. Hawks were not so
pretty as she thought they were. A large hawk launched at one's face
from high in the air is calculated to make one a little nervous. It is
such a fearful incline down which the bird comes, and she is aiming
exactly toward your eye. When within about thirty feet of you, she
turns upward with a rushing sound, and, mounting higher falls toward
you again. She is only firing blank cartridges, as it were; but it
usually has the desired effect, and beats the enemy off.