which we see in the trunks and limbs of perfectly sound apple-trees
are made by woodpeckers in search of grubs and insects. This is a
hasty inference. These holes are made by woodpeckers, but the food
they obtain at the bottom of them is not the flesh of worm or insect,
but the flesh of the apple-tree—the soft, milky inner bark. The same
writer says these holes are not hurtful to the tree, but conducive
to its health. Yet I have seen the limbs of large apple-trees nearly
killed by being encompassed by numerous rings of large, deep holes made
by the yellow-bellied woodpecker. This bird drills holes in the sugar
maple in the spring for the sap. I have known him to spend the greater
part of a bright March day on the sunny side of a maple, indulging in
a tipple of maple sap every four or five minutes. As fast as his well
holes filled up he would sip them dry.
A lady told me that a woodpecker drilled holes in the boards that form
the eaves of her house, for the grubs of the carpenter bumblebee.
This also seemed to me a hasty conclusion, because the woodpeckers
made holes so large that the next season the bluebirds nested there.
The woodpeckers were probably drilling for a place to nest. A large
ice-house stands on the river bank near me, and every season the man
in charge has to shoot or drive away the high-holes that cut numerous
openings through the outer sheathing of hemlock boards into the
spaces filled with sawdust, where they find the digging easy and a
nesting-place safe and snug.
My neighbor caught a small hawk in his shad-net, and therefore
concluded the hawk ate fish. He put him in a cage, and offered him
fragments of shad. The little hawk was probably in pursuit of a bird
which took refuge under the net as it hung upon the drying-poles; or he
may have swooped down upon the net in the spirit of pure bluster and
bravado, and thus came to grief in a hurry. The fine, strong threads
of the net defied his murderous beak and talons. He was engulfed as
completely as is a fly in a spider's web, and the more he struggled the
more hopeless his case became. It was a pigeon hawk, and these little
marauders are very saucy.
My neighbor says that in the city of Brooklyn he has known kingbirds to
nest in boxes like martins and bluebirds. I question this observation,
though it may be true. The cousin of the kingbird, the great crested
flycatcher, builds in cavities in trees, and its relative, the
phœbe-bird, nests under bridges and hay-sheds. Hence there is this
fact to start with in favor of my neighbor's observation.
But when a lady from Pennsylvania writes me that she has seen "swallows
rolling and dabbling in the mud in early spring, their breasts so
covered with it that it would take but little stretch of imagination
to believe they had just emerged from the bottom of the pond beside
which they were playing," I am more than skeptical. The lady has not
seen straight. The swallows were not rolling in the mud; there was
probably not a speck of mud upon their plumage, but a little upon their
beaks and feet. The red of their breasts was their own proper color.
They were building their nests, as my correspondent knew, but they did
not carefully mix and knead the mud, as she thought they did; they had
selected mortar already of the proper sort.
The careful observer is not long in learning that there is truth in the
poet's remark, that "things are not what they seem." Everywhere on the
surface of nature things seem one thing, and mean quite another. The
hasty observer is misled by the seeming, and thus misses the real truth.
The little green snake that I saw among the "live-for-evers" the other
day, how nearly it escaped detection by the close resemblance of its
color to that of the plant! And when, a few days later, I saw one
carelessly disposed across the top of the bending grass and daisies,
but a few feet from where I sat, my eye again came near being baffled.
The little snake was probably lying in wait for some insect. Presently
it slid gently down into the grass, moving so slowly as to escape
any but the most watchful eye. After its head and a part of its body
were upon the ground, its tail still pointed straight up and exactly
resembled some fresh vegetable growth. The safeguard of this little
snake is in his protective coloring; hence his movements are slower and
more deliberate than those of the other snakes.
This simulation is very common in nature. Every creature has its enemy,
and pretends to be that which it is not, in order to escape detection.
The tree-frog pretends to be a piece of bark, or a lichen upon a tree;
the wood frog is the color of the dry leaves upon which it hops, though
when spawning in the little black pools and tarns in spring its color
is very dark, like the element it inhabits.
One day, in my walk in the woods, I disturbed a whip-poor-will where
she sat upon her eggs on the ground. When I returned to the spot some
hours afterward, and tried to make out the bird upon her nest, my eye
was baffled for some moments, so successful was she in pretending to be
only a mottled stick or piece of fallen bark.
Only the most practiced eye can detect the partridge (ruffed grouse)
when she sits or stands in full view upon the ground in the woods.
How well she plays her part, rarely moving, till she suddenly bursts
up before you, and is gone in a twinkling! How well her young are
disciplined always to take their cue from her! Not one will stir till
she gives the signal.
One day in my walk, as I paused on the side of a steep hill in the edge
of the woods, my eye chanced to fall upon a partridge, sitting upon
the leaves beside a stump scarcely three paces from me. "Can she have
a nest there?" was my first thought. Then I remembered it was late in
the summer, and she certainly could not be incubating. Then why is she
sitting there in that exposed manner? Keeping my eye upon her, I took
a step forward, when, quick as a flash, she sprang into the air and
went humming away. At the same moment, all about me, almost from under
my feet, her nearly grown young sprang up and went booming through the
woods after her. Not one of them had moved or showed fear till their
mother gave the word.
To observe Nature and know her secrets, one needs not only a sharp eye,
but a steady and patient eye. You must look again and again, and not
be misled by appearances. All the misinformation about the objects and
phenomena of nature afloat among country people is the result of hasty
and incomplete observation.
In parts of the country where wheat is grown there is quite a prevalent
belief among the farmers that if the land is poor or neglected the
wheat will turn into chess or cheat grass. Have they not seen it, have
they not known the wheat to disappear entirely, and the chess to be
there in its place?
But like so many strange notions that are current in the rural
districts, this notion is the result of incomplete observation. The
cheat grass was there all the while, feebler and inconspicuous, but
biding its time; when the wheat failed and gave up possession of the
soil, the grass sprang forward and took its place.
Nature always has a card to play in that way. There is no miracle nor
case of spontaneous generation about the curious succession of forest
trees—oak succeeding pine, or poplar succeeding birch or maple—if we
could get at the facts. Nature only lets loose germs which the winds or
the birds and animals have long since stored there, and which have only
been waiting their opportunity to grow.
A great many people are sure there is such a creature as a glass snake,
a snake which breaks up into pieces to escape its enemies, and then
when danger is past gets itself together again and goes its way.
Not long since a man published an account in a scientific journal of a
glass snake which he had encountered in a hay-field, and which, when
he attempted to break its head, had broken itself up into five or six
pieces. He carefully examined the pieces and found them of regular
lengths of three or four inches, and that they dovetailed together by a
nice and regular process. He left the fragments in the grass, and when
he returned from dinner they were all gone. He therefore inferred the
snake had reconstructed itself and traveled on. If he had waited to
see this process, his observation would have been complete. On another
occasion he cut one in two with his scythe, when the snake again
made small change of itself. Again he went to his dinner just at the
critical time, and when he returned the fragments of the reptile had
disappeared.
This will not do. We must see the play out before we can report upon
the last act.
There is, of course, a small basis of fact in the superstition of
the glass snake. The creature is no snake at all, but a species of
limbless lizard quite common in the West. And it has the curious
power of voluntarily breaking itself up into regular pieces when
disturbed, but it is only the tail which is so broken up; the body
part remains intact. Break this up and the snake is dead. The tail is
disproportionately long, and is severed at certain points, evidently to
mislead its enemies. It is the old trick of throwing a tub to a whale.
The creature sacrifices its tail to secure the safety of its body.
These fragments have no power to unite themselves again, but a new tail
is grown in place of the part lost. When a real observer encountered
the glass or joint snake, these facts were settled.
The superstition of the hair-snake is founded upon a like incomplete
observation. Everywhere may be found intelligent people who will tell
you they know that a horsehair, if put into the spring, will turn into
a snake, and that all hair-snakes have this origin. But a hair never
turns into a snake any more than wheat is transformed into chess. The
so-called hair-snake is a parasitical worm which lives in the bodies of
various insects, and which at maturity takes to the water to lay its
eggs.
What boy, while trout-fishing in July and August, and using
grasshoppers for bait, has not been vexed to find the body of the
insect, when snapped at by the trout, yielding a long, white, brittle
thread, which clogged his hook, and spoiled the attractiveness of the
bait? This thread is the hair-worm. How the germ first gets into the
body of the grasshopper I do not know. After the creature leaves the
insect, it becomes darker in color, and harder and firmer in texture,
and more closely resembles a large hair.
See what pains the trapper will take to outwit the fox; see what art
the angler will practice to deceive the wary trout. One must pursue the
truth with the like patience and diligence.
The farmers all think, or used to think, that the hen-hawk was their
enemy, but one spring the Agricultural Department procured three
hundred hen-hawks, and examined the craw of each of them, and made the
valuable discovery that this hawk subsisted almost entirely upon meadow
mice, thus proving it to be one of the farmer's best friends. The crow,
also, when our observations upon his food habits are complete, is found
to be a friend, and not an enemy. The smaller hawks do prey upon birds
and chickens, though the pretty little sparrow hawk lives largely upon
insects.
Gilbert White quotes the great Linnæus as saying that "hawks make a
truce with other birds as long as the cuckoo is heard." This is also
a superstition. Watch closely, and you will see the small hawks in
pursuit of birds at all seasons; and when a hawk pursues a bird, or
when one bird pursues another, it has the power to tack and turn, and
to time its movements to that of the bird pursued, which is quite
marvelous. The sparrow might as well dodge its own shadow as to dodge
the sharp-shinned hawk. It escapes, if at all, by rushing into a bush
or tree, where the movements of its enemy are impeded by the leaves and
branches.
Speaking of hawks, reminds me that I read the other day in one of
the magazines a very pretty poem, in which a hawk was represented
poised in mid-air, on motionless wing, during the calm of a midsummer
day. Now of a still day this is an impossible feat for a hawk or any
other bird. The poet had not observed quite closely enough. She had
noted (as who has not?) the hawk stationary in the air on motionless
wing, but she failed to note, or she had forgotten, that the wind was
blowing. He cannot do it on a calm day; the blowing wind furnishes the
power necessary to buoy him up. He so adjusts his wings to the moving
currents that he hangs stationary upon them. When the hawk hovers in
the air of a still day, he is compelled to beat his wings rapidly.
He must expend upon the air the power which, in the former case, is
expended upon him. Thus does hasty and incomplete observation mislead
one.
One day in early April as I was riding along the road I heard the song
of the brown thrasher. The thrasher is not due yet, I said to myself,
but there was its song, and no mistake, with all its quibs and quirks
and interludes, being chanted from some treetop a few yards in advance
of me. Let us have a view of the bird, I said, as I approached the tree
upon which I fancied he was perched. The song ceased and no thrasher
was visible, but there sat a robin, which, as I paused, flew to a
lower tree in a field at some distance from the road. Then I moved on,
thinking the songster had eluded me. On looking back I chanced to see
the robin fly back to the top of the tree where I had first disturbed
it, and in a moment or two more forth came the thrasher's song again.
Then I went cautiously back and caught the robin in the very act
of reproducing perfectly the song of the brown thrasher. A bolder
plagiarist I had never seen; not only had he got the words, as it were
correctly, but he delivered them in the same self-conscious manner. His
performance would probably have deceived the brown thrasher himself.
How did the robin come by this song? I can suggest no other explanation
than that he must have learned it from the brown thrasher. Probably the
latter bird sang near the nest of the robin, so that the young heard
this song and not that of their own kind. If so it would be interesting
to know if all the young males learned the song.
Close attention is the secret of learning from nature's book, as from
every other. Most persons only look at the pictures, but the real
student studies the text; he alone knows what the pictures really mean.
There is a great deal of by-play going on in the life of nature about
us, a great deal of variation and out-cropping of individual traits,
that we entirely miss unless we have our eyes and ears open.
It is not like the play at the theatre, where everything is made
conspicuous and aims to catch the eye, and where the story clearly and
fully unfolds itself. On nature's stage many dramas are being played
at once, and without any reference to the lookers-on, unless it be to
escape their notice. The actors rush or strut across the stage, the
curtain rises or falls, the significant thing happens, and we heed it
not, because our wits are dull, or else our minds are preoccupied. We
do not pay strict attention. Nature will not come to you; you must go
to her; that is, you must put yourself in communication with her; you
must open the correspondence; you must train your eye to pick out the
significant things. A quick open sense, and a lively curiosity like
that of a boy are necessary. Indeed, the sensitiveness and alertness
of youth and the care and patience of later years are what make the
successful observer.
The other morning my little boy and I set out to find the horse, who
had got out of the pasture and gone off. Had he gone up the road or
down? We did not know, but we imagined we could distinguish his track
going down the road, so we began our search in that direction. The road
presently led through a piece of woods. Suddenly my little boy stopped
me.
"Papa, see that spider's web stretched across the road: our horse has
not gone this way."
My face had nearly touched the web or cable of the little spider, which
stretched completely across the road, and which certainly would have
been swept away had the horse or any other creature passed along there
in the early morning. The boy's eye was sharper than my own. He had
been paying stricter attention to the signs and objects about him. We
turned back and soon found the horse in the opposite direction.
This same little boy, by looking closely, has discovered that there
are certain stingless wasps. When he sees one which bears the marks he
boldly catches him in his hand. The wasp goes through the motions of
stinging so perfectly, so works and thrusts with its flexible body,
that nearly every hand to which it is offered draws back. The mark by
which the boy is guided is the light color of the wasp's face. Most
country boys know that white-faced bumblebees are stingless, but I have
not before known a boy bold enough to follow the principle out and
apply it to wasps as well. These white-faces are the males, and answer
to the drones in the beehive; though the drones have not a white face.
We cannot all find the same things in Nature. She is all things to all
men. She is like the manna that came down from heaven. "He made manna
to descend for them, in which were all manner of tastes; and every
Israelite found in it what his palate was chiefly pleased with. If he
desired fat in it, he had it. In it the young men tasted bread; the old
men, honey; and the children, oil." But all found in it substance and
strength. So with Nature. In her are "all manner of tastes," science,
art, poetry, utility, and good in all. The botanist has one pleasure
in her, the ornithologist another, the explorer another, the walker
and sportsman another; what all may have is the refreshment and the
exhilaration which come from a loving and intelligent scrutiny of her
manifold works.
XVI
BIRD LIFE IN AN OLD APPLE-TREE
Near my study there used to stand several old apple-trees that bore
fair crops of apples, but better crops of birds. Every year these old
trees were the scenes of bird incidents and bird histories that were a
source of much interest and amusement. Young trees may be the best for
apples, but old trees are sure to bear the most birds. If they are very
decrepit, and full of dead and hollow branches, they will bear birds in
winter as well as summer. The downy woodpecker wants no better place
than the brittle, dozy trunk of an apple-tree in which to excavate his
winter home. My old apple-trees are all down but one, and this one is
probably an octogenarian, and I am afraid cannot stand another winter.
Its body is a mere shell not much over one inch thick, the heart and
main interior structure having turned to black mould long ago. An old
tree, unlike an old person, as long as it lives at all, always has a
young streak, or rather ring, in it. It wears a girdle of perpetual
youth.
My old tree has never yet failed to yield me a bushel or more of
gillyflowers, and it has turned out at least a dozen broods of the
great crested flycatcher, and robins and bluebirds in proportion. It
carries up one large decayed trunk which some one sawed off at the top
before my time, and in this a downy woodpecker is now, January 12,
making a home. Several years ago a downy woodpecker excavated a retreat
in this branch, which the following season was appropriated by the
bluebirds, and has been occupied by them nearly every season since.
When the bluebirds first examined the cavity in the spring, I suppose
they did not find the woodpecker at home, as he is a pretty early riser.
I happened to be passing near the tree when, on again surveying the
premises one afternoon, they found him in. The male bluebird was very
angry, and I suppose looked upon the innocent downy as an intruder. He
seized on him, and the two fell to the ground, the speckled woodpecker
quite covered by the blue coat of his antagonist. Downy screamed
vigorously, and got away as soon as he could, but not till the bluebird
had tweaked out a feather or two. He is evidently no fighter, though
one would think that a bird that had an instrument with which it could
drill a hole into a tree could defend itself against the soft-billed
bluebird.
Two seasons the English sparrows ejected the bluebirds and established
themselves in it, but were in turn ejected by myself, their furniture
of hens' feathers and straws pitched out, and the bluebirds invited to
return, which later in the season they did.
The new cavity which downy is now drilling is just above the old one
and near the top of the stub. Its wells are usually sunk to a depth
of six or eight inches, but in the present case it cannot be sunk more
than four inches without breaking through into the old cavity. Downy
seems to have considered the situation, and is proceeding cautiously.
As she passed last night in her new quarters I am inclined to think it
is about finished, and there must be at least one inch of wood beneath
her. She worked vigorously the greater part of the day, her yellow
chips strewing the snow beneath. I paused several times to observe her
proceedings. After her chips accumulate she stops her drilling and
throws them out. This she does with her beak, shaking them out very
rapidly with a flirt of her head. She did not disappear from sight each
time to load her beak, but withdrew her head and appeared to seize the
fragments as if from her feet. If she had had a companion I should have
thought he was handing them up to her from the bottom of the cavity.
Maybe she had them piled up near the doorway.
The woodpeckers, both the hairy and the downy, usually excavate these
winter retreats in the fall. They pass the nights and the stormy
days in them. So far as I have observed, they do not use them as
nesting-places the following season. Last night when I rapped on the
trunk of the old apple-tree near sundown, downy put out her head with a
surprised and inquiring look, and then withdrew it again as I passed on.
I have spoken of the broods of the great crested flycatchers that have
been reared in the old apple-tree. This is by no means a common bird,
and as it destroys many noxious insects I look upon it with a friendly
eye, though it is the most uncouth and unmusical of the flycatchers.
Indeed, among the other birds of the garden and orchard it seems quite
like a barbarian. It has a harsh, froglike scream, form and manners to
suit, and is clad in a suit of butternut brown. It seeks a cast-off
snakeskin to weave into its nest, and not finding one, will take an
onion skin, a piece of oiled paper, or large fish scales. It builds in
a cavity in a tree, rears one brood, and is off early in the season. I
never see or hear it after August 1st.
A pair have built in a large, hollow limb in my old apple-tree for many
years. Whether it is the same pair or not I do not know. Probably it
is, or else some of their descendants. I looked into the cavity one day
while the mother bird was upon the nest, but before she had laid any
eggs. A sudden explosive sound came up out of the dark depths of the
limb, much like that made by an alarmed cat. It made me jerk my head
back, when out came the bird and hurried off. For several days I saw no
more of the pair, and feared they had deserted the spot. But they had
not; they were only more sly than usual. I soon discovered an egg in
the nest, and then another and another.
One day, as I stood near by, a male bluebird came along with his mate,
prospecting for a spot for a second nest. He alighted at the entrance
of this hole and peeped in. Instantly the flycatcher was upon him. The
blue was enveloped by the butternut brown. The two fell to the ground,
where the bluebird got away, and in a moment more came back and looked
in the hole again, as much as to say, "I will look into that hole now
at all hazards." The barbarian made a dash for him again, but he was
now on his guard and avoided her.
Not long after, the bluebirds decided to occupy the old cavity of the
downy woodpecker from which I had earlier in the season expelled the
English sparrows. After they had established themselves here a kind of
border war broke out between the male bluebird and the flycatchers,
and was kept up for weeks. The bluebird is very jealous and very bold.
He will not even tolerate a house wren in the vicinity of his nest.
Every bird that builds in a cavity he looks upon as his natural rival
and enemy. The flycatchers did not seek any quarrel with him as long
as he kept to his own domicile, but he could not tolerate them in the
same tree. It was a pretty sight to see this little blue-coat charging
the butternut through the trees. The beak of the latter would click
like a gunlock, and its harsh, savage voice was full of anger, but the
bluebird never flinched, and was always ready to renew the fight.
The English sparrow will sometimes worst the bluebird by getting
possession of the box or cavity ahead of him. Once inside, the sparrow
can hold the fort, and the bluebird will soon give up the siege; but
in a fair field and no favor, the native bird will quickly rout the
foreigner.