“A swarm of bees in May
Is worth a load of hay;
A swarm of bees in June
Is worth a silver spoon;
But a swarm in July
Is not worth a fly.”
A swarm in May is indeed a treasure; it is, like an April baby, sure to
thrive, and will very likely itself send out a swarm a month or two
later: but a swarm in July is not to be despised; it will store no
clover or linden honey for the “grand seignior and the ladies of his
seraglio,” but plenty of the rank and wholesome poor man’s nectar, the
sun-tanned product of the plebeian buckwheat. Buckwheat honey is the
black sheep in this white flock, but there is spirit and character in
it. It lays hold of the taste in no equivocal manner, especially when
at a winter breakfast it meets its fellow, the russet buckwheat cake.
Bread with honey to cover it from the same stalk is double good
fortune. It is not black, either, but nut-brown, and belongs to the
same class of goods as Herrick’s
“Nut-brown mirth and russet wit.”
How the bees love it, and they bring the delicious odor of the blooming
plant to the hive with them, so that in the moist warm twilight the
apiary is redolent with the perfume of buckwheat.
Yet evidently it is not the perfume of any flower that attracts the
bees; they pay no attention to the sweet-scented lilac, or to
heliotrope, but work upon sumach, silkweed, and the hateful snapdragon.
In September they are hard pressed, and do well if they pick up enough
sweet to pay the running expenses of their establishment. The purple
asters and the goldenrod are about all that remain to them.
Bees will go three or four miles in quest of honey, but it is a great
advantage to move the hive near the good pasturage, as has been the
custom from the earliest times in the Old World. Some enterprising
person, taking a hint perhaps from the ancient Egyptians, who had
floating apiaries on the Nile, has tried the experiment of floating
several hundred colonies north on the Mississippi, starting from New
Orleans and following the opening season up, thus realizing a sort of
perpetual May or June, the chief attraction being the blossoms of the
river willow, which yield honey of rare excellence. Some of the bees
were no doubt left behind, but the amount of virgin honey secured must
have been very great. In September they should have begun the return
trip, following the retreating summer south.
It is the making of wax that costs with the bee. As with the poet, the
form, the receptacle, gives him more trouble than the sweet that fills
it, though, to be sure, there is always more or less empty comb in both
cases. The honey he can have for the gathering, but the wax he must
make himself,—must evolve from his own inner consciousness. When wax is
to be made, the wax-makers fill themselves with honey and retire into
their chamber for private meditation; it is like some solemn religious
rite: they take hold of hands, or hook themselves together in long
lines that hang in festoons from the top of the hive, and wait for the
miracle to transpire. After about twenty-four hours their patience is
rewarded, the honey is turned into wax, minute scales of which are
secreted from between the rings of the abdomen of each bee; this is
taken off and from it the comb is built up. It is calculated that about
twenty-five pounds of honey are used in elaborating one pound of comb,
to say nothing of the time that is lost. Hence the importance, in an
economical point of view, of a recent device by which the honey is
extracted and the comb returned intact to the bees. But honey without
the comb is the perfume without the rose,—it is sweet merely, and soon
degenerates into candy. Half the delectableness is in breaking down
these frail and exquisite walls yourself, and tasting the nectar before
it has lost its freshness by contact with the air. Then the comb is a
sort of shield or foil that prevents the tongue from being overwhelmed
by the first shock of the sweet.
The drones have the least enviable time of it. Their foothold in the
hive is very precarious. They look like the giants, the lords of the
swarm, but they are really the tools. Their loud, threatening hum has
no sting to back it up, and their size and noise make them only the
more conspicuous marks for the birds. They are all candidates for the
favors of the queen, a fatal felicity that is vouchsafed to but one.
Fatal, I say, for it is a singular fact in the history of bees that the
fecundation of the queen costs the male his life. Yet day after day the
drones go forth, threading the mazes of the air in hopes of meeting her
whom to meet is death. The queen only leaves the hive once, except when
she leads away the swarm, and as she makes no appointment with the
male, but wanders here and there, drones enough are provided to meet
all the contingencies of the case.
One advantage, at least, results from this system of things: there is
no incontinence among the males in this republic!
Toward the close of the season, say in July or August, the fiat goes
forth that the drones must die; there is no further use for them. Then
the poor creatures, how they are huddled and hustled about, trying to
hide in corners and byways! There is no loud, defiant humming now, but
abject fear seizes them. They cower like hunted criminals. I have seen
a dozen or more of them wedge themselves into a small space between the
glass and the comb, where the bees could not get hold of them, or where
they seemed to be overlooked in the general slaughter. They will also
crawl outside and hide under the edges of the hive. But sooner or later
they are all killed or kicked out. The drone makes no resistance,
except to pull back and try to get away; but (putting yourself in his
place) with one bee a-hold of your collar or the hair of your head, and
another a-hold of each arm or leg, and still another feeling for your
waistbands with his sting, the odds are greatly against you.
It is a singular fact, also, that the queen is made, not born. If the
entire population of Spain or Great Britain were the offspring of one
mother, it might be found necessary to hit upon some device by which a
royal baby could be manufactured out of an ordinary one, or else give
up the fashion of royalty. All the bees in the hive have a common
parentage, and the queen and the worker are the same in the egg and in
the chick; the patent of royalty is in the cell and in the food; the
cell being much larger, and the food a peculiar stimulating kind of
jelly. In certain contingencies, such as the loss of the queen with no
eggs in the royal cells, the workers take the larva of an ordinary bee,
enlarge the cell by taking in the two adjoining ones, and nurse it and
stuff it and coddle it, till at the end of sixteen days it comes out a
queen. But ordinarily, in the natural course of events, the young queen
is kept a prisoner in her cell till the old queen has left with the
swarm. Later on, the unhatched queen is guarded against the reigning
queen, who only wants an opportunity to murder every royal scion in the
hive. At this time both the queens, the one a prisoner and the other at
large, pipe defiance at each other, a shrill, fine, trumpet-like note
that any ear will at once recognize. This challenge, not being allowed
to be accepted by either party, is followed, in a day or two, by the
abdication of the reigning queen; she leads out the swarm, and her
successor is liberated by her keepers, who, in her time, abdicates in
favor of the next younger. When the bees have decided that no more
swarms can issue, the reigning queen is allowed to use her stiletto
upon her unhatched sisters. Cases have been known where two queens
issued at the same time, when a mortal combat ensued, encouraged by the
workers, who formed a ring about them, but showed no preference, and
recognized the victor as the lawful sovereign. For these and many other
curious facts we are indebted to the blind Huber.
It is worthy of note that the position of the queen cells is always
vertical, while that of the drones and workers is horizontal; majesty
stands on its head, which fact may be a part of the secret.
The notion has always very generally prevailed that the queen of the
bees is an absolute ruler, and issues her royal orders to willing
subjects. Hence Napoleon the First sprinkled the symbolic bees over the
imperial mantle that bore the arms of his dynasty; and in the country
of the Pharaohs the bee was used as the emblem of a people sweetly
submissive to the orders of its king. But the fact is, a swarm of bees
is an absolute democracy, and kings and despots can find no warrant in
their example. The power and authority are entirely vested in the great
mass, the workers. They furnish all the brains and foresight of the
colony, and administer its affairs. Their word is law, and both king
and queen must obey. They regulate the swarming, and give the signal
for the swarm to issue from the hive; they select and make ready the
tree in the woods and conduct the queen to it.
The peculiar office and sacredness of the queen consists in the fact
that she is the mother of the swarm, and the bees love and cherish her
as a mother and not as a sovereign. She is the sole female bee in the
hive, and the swarm clings to her because she is their life. Deprived
of their queen, and of all brood from which to rear one, the swarm
loses all heart and soon dies, though there be an abundance of honey in
the hive.
The common bees will never use their sting upon the queen; if she is to
be disposed of, they starve her to death; and the queen herself will
sting nothing but royalty,—nothing but a rival queen.
The queen, I say, is the mother bee; it is undoubtedly complimenting
her to call her a queen and invest her with regal authority, yet she is
a superb creature, and looks every inch a queen. It is an event to
distinguish her amid the mass of bees when the swarm alights; it
awakens a thrill Before you have seen a queen, you wonder if this or
that bee, which seems a little larger than its fellows, is not she, but
when you once really set eyes upon her you do not doubt for a moment.
You know _that_ is the queen. That long, elegant, shining,
feminine-looking creature can be none less than royalty. How
beautifully her body tapers, how distinguished she looks, how
deliberate her movements! The bees do not fall down before her, but
caress her and touch her person. The drones, or males, are large bees,
too, but coarse, blunt, broad-shouldered, masculine-looking. There is
but one fact or incident in the life of the queen that looks imperial
and authoritative: Huber relates that when the old queen is restrained
in her movements by the workers, and prevented from destroying the
young queens in their cells, she assumes a peculiar attitude and utters
a note that strikes every bee motionless and makes every head bow;
while this sound lasts, not a bee stirs, but all look abashed and
humbled: yet whether the emotion is one of fear, or reverence, or of
sympathy with the distress of the queen mother, is hard to determine.
The moment it ceases and she advances again toward the royal cells, the
bees bite and pull and insult her as before.
I always feel that I have missed some good fortune if I am away from
home when my bees swarm. What a delightful summer sound it is! how they
come pouring out of the hive, twenty or thirty thousand bees, each
striving to get out first! It is as when the dam gives way and lets the
waters loose; it is a flood of bees which breaks upward into the air,
and becomes a maze of whirling black lines to the eye, and a soft
chorus of myriad musical sounds to the ear. This way and that way they
drift, now contracting, now expanding, rising, sinking, growing thick
about some branch or bush, then dispersing and massing at some other
point, till finally they begin to alight in earnest, when in a few
moments the whole swarm is collected upon the branch, forming a bunch
perhaps as large as a two-gallon measure. Here they will hang from one
to three or four hours or until a suitable tree in the woods is looked
up, when, if they have not been offered a hive in the mean time, they
are up and off. In hiving them, if any accident happens to the queen
the enterprise miscarries at once. One day I shook a swarm from a small
pear-tree into a tin pan, set the pan down on a shawl spread beneath
the tree, and put the hive over it. The bees presently all crawled up
into it, and all seemed to go well for ten or fifteen minutes, when I
observed that something was wrong; the bees began to buzz excitedly and
to rush about in a bewildered manner, then they took to the wing and
all returned to the parent stock. On lifting up the pan, I found
beneath it the queen with three or four other bees. She had been one of
the first to fall, had missed the pan in her descent, and I had set it
upon her. I conveyed her tenderly back to the hive, but either the
accident terminated fatally with her, or else the young queen had been
liberated in the interim, and one of them had fallen in combat, for it
was ten days before the swarm issued a second time.
No one, to my knowledge, has ever seen the bees house-hunting in the
woods. Yet there can be no doubt that they look up new quarters either
before or on the day the swarm issues. For all bees are wild bees and
incapable of domestication; that is, the instinct to go back to nature
and take up again their wild abodes in the trees is never eradicated.
Years upon years of life in the apiary seem to have no appreciable
effect towards their final, permanent domestication. That every new
swarm contemplates migrating to the woods, seems confirmed by the fact
that they will only come out when the weather is favorable to such an
enterprise, and that a passing cloud, or a sudden wind, after the bees
are in the air, will usually drive them back into the parent hive. Or
an attack upon them with sand or gravel, or loose earth or water, will
quickly cause them to change their plans. I would not even say but
that, when the bees are going off, the apparently absurd practice, now
entirely discredited by regular bee keepers but still resorted to by
unscientific folk, of beating upon tin pans, blowing horns, and
creating an uproar generally, might not be without good results.
Certainly not by drowning the “orders” of the queen, but by impressing
the bees, as with some unusual commotion in nature. Bees are easily
alarmed and disconcerted, and I have known runaway swarms to be brought
down by a farmer plowing in the field who showered them with handfuls
of loose soil.
I love to see a swarm go off—if it is not mine, and, if mine must go, I
want to be on hand to see the fun. It is a return to first principles
again by a very direct route. The past season I witnessed two such
escapes. One swarm had come out the day before, and, without alighting,
had returned to the parent hive,—some hitch in the plan, perhaps, or
may be the queen had found her wings too weak. The next day they came
out again and were hived. But something offended them, or else the tree
in the woods—perhaps some royal old maple or birch, holding its head
high above all others, with snug, spacious, irregular chambers and
galleries—had too many attractions; for they were presently discovered
filling the air over the garden, and whirling excitedly around.
Gradually they began to drift over the street; a moment more, and they
had become separated from the other bees, and, drawing together in a
more compact mass or cloud, away they went, a humming, flying vortex of
bees, the queen in the centre, and the swarm revolving around her as a
pivot,—over meadows, across creeks and swamps, straight for the heart
of the mountain, about a mile distant,—slow at first, so that the youth
who gave chase kept up with them, but increasing their speed till only
a foxhound could have kept them in sight. I saw their pursuer laboring
up the side of the mountain; saw his white shirtsleeves gleam as he
entered the woods; but he returned a few hours afterward without any
clue as to the particular tree in which they had taken refuge out of
the ten thousand that covered the side of the mountain.
The other swarm came out about one o’clock of a hot July day, and at
once showed symptoms that alarmed the keeper, who, however, threw
neither dirt nor water. The house was situated on a steep side-hill.
Behind it the ground rose, for a hundred rods or so, at an angle of
nearly forty-five degrees, and the prospect of having to chase them up
this hill, if chase them we should, promised a good trial of wind at
least; for it soon became evident that their course lay in this
direction. Determined to have a hand, or rather a foot, in the chase, I
threw off my coat and hurried on, before the swarm was yet fairly
organized and under way. The route soon led me into a field of standing
rye, every spear of which held its head above my own. Plunging
recklessly forward, my course marked to those watching from below by
the agitated and wriggling grain, I emerged from the miniature forest
just in time to see the runaways disappearing over the top of the hill,
some fifty rods in advance of me. Lining them as well as I could, I
soon reached the hilltop, my breath utterly gone and the perspiration
streaming from every pore of my skin. On the other side the country
opened deep and wide. A large valley swept around to the north, heavily
wooded at its head and on its sides. It became evident at once that the
bees had made good their escape, and that whether they had stopped on
one side of the valley or the other, or had indeed cleared the opposite
mountain and gone into some unknown forest beyond, was entirely
problematical. I turned back, therefore, thinking of the honey-laden
tree that some of these forests would hold before the falling of the
leaf.
I heard of a youth in the neighborhood more lucky than myself on a like
occasion. It seems that he had got well in advance of the swarm, whose
route lay over a hill, as in my case, and as he neared the summit, hat
in hand, the bees had just come up and were all about him. Presently he
noticed them hovering about his straw hat, and alighting on his arm;
and in almost as brief a time as it takes to relate it, the whole swarm
had followed the queen into his hat. Being near a stone wall, he coolly
deposited his prize upon it, quickly disengaged himself from the
accommodating bees, and returned for a hive. The explanation of this
singular circumstance no doubt is, that the queen, unused to such long
and heavy flights, was obliged to alight from very exhaustion. It is
not very unusual for swarms to be thus found in remote fields,
collected upon a bush or branch of a tree.
When a swarm migrates to the woods in this manner, the individual bees,
as I have intimated, do not move in right lines or straight forward,
like a flock of birds, but round and round, like chaff in a whirlwind.
Unitedly they form a humming, revolving, nebulous mass, ten or fifteen
feet across, which keeps just high enough to clear all obstacles,
except in crossing deep valleys, when, of course, it may be very high.
The swarm seems to be guided by a line of couriers, which may be seen
(at least at the outset) constantly going and coming. As they take a
direct course, there is always some chance of following them to the
tree, unless they go a long distance, and some obstruction, like a wood
or a swamp or a high hill, intervenes,—enough chance, at any rate, to
stimulate the lookers-on to give vigorous chase as long as their wind
holds out. If the bees are successfully followed to their retreat, two
plans are feasible,—either to fell the tree at once, and seek to hive
them, perhaps bring them home in the section of the tree that contains
the cavity; or to leave the tree till fall, then invite your neighbors
and go and cut it, and see the ground flow with honey. The former
course is more business-like; but the latter is the one usually
recommended by one’s friends and neighbors.
Perhaps nearly one third of all the runaway swarms leave when no one is
about, and hence are unseen and unheard, save, perchance, by some
distant laborers in the field, or by some youth plowing on the side of
the mountain, who hears an unusual humming noise, and sees the swarm
dimly whirling by overhead, and, maybe, gives chase; or he may simply
catch the sound, when he pauses, looks quickly around, but sees
nothing. When he comes in at night he tells how he heard or saw a swarm
of bees go over; and perhaps from beneath one of the hives in the
garden a black mass of bees has disappeared during the day.
They are not partial as to the kind of tree,—pine, hemlock, elm, birch,
maple, hickory,—any tree with a good cavity high up or low down. A
swarm of mine ran away from the new patent hive I gave them, and took
up their quarters in the hollow trunk of an old apple-tree across an
adjoining field. The entrance was a mouse-hole near the ground. Another
swarm in the neighborhood deserted their keeper, and went into the
cornice of an out-house that stood amid evergreens in the rear of a
large mansion. But there is no accounting for the taste of bees, as
Samson found when he discovered the swarm in the carcass, or more
probably the skeleton, of the lion he had slain.
In any given locality, especially in the more wooded and mountainous
districts, the number of swarms that thus assert their independence
forms quite a large per cent. In the Northern States these swarms very
often perish before spring; but in such a country as Florida they seem
to multiply, till bee-trees are very common. In the West, also, wild
honey is often gathered in large quantities. I noticed, not long since,
that some wood-choppers on the west slope of the Coast Range felled a
tree that had several pailfuls in it.
One night on the Potomac a party of us unwittingly made our camp near
the foot of a bee-tree, which next day the winds of heaven blew down,
for our special delectation, at least so we read the sign. Another
time, while sitting by a waterfall in the leafless April woods, I
discovered a swarm in the top of a large hickory. I had the season
before remarked the tree as a likely place for bees, but the screen of
leaves concealed them from me. This time my former presentiment
occurred to me, and, looking sharply, sure enough there were the bees,
going out and in a large, irregular opening. In June a violent tempest
of wind and rain demolished the tree, and the honey was all lost in the
creek into which it fell. I happened along that way two or three days
after the tornado, when I saw a remnant of the swarm, those, doubtless,
that escaped the flood and those that were away when the disaster came,
hanging in a small black mass to a branch high up near where their home
used to be. They looked forlorn enough. If the queen was saved, the
remnant probably sought another tree; otherwise the bees soon died.
I have seen bees desert their hive in the spring when it was infested
with worms, or when the honey was exhausted; at such times the swarm
seems to wander aimlessly, alighting here and there, and perhaps in the
end uniting with some other colony. In case of such union, it would be
curious to know if negotiations were first opened between the parties,
and if the houseless bees are admitted at once to all the rights and
franchises of their benefactors. It would be very like the bees to have
some preliminary plan and understanding about the matter on both sides.
Bees will accommodate themselves to almost any quarters, yet no hive
seems to please them so well as a section of a hollow tree,—“gums,” as
they are called in the South and West where the sweet gum grows. In
some European countries the hive is always made from the trunk of a
tree, a suitable cavity being formed by boring. The old-fashioned straw
hive is picturesque, and a great favorite with the bees also.
The life of a swarm of bees is like an active and hazardous campaign of
an army; the ranks are being continually depleted, and continually
recruited. What adventures they have by flood and field, and what
hairbreadth escapes! A strong swarm during the honey season loses, on
an average, about four or five thousand a month, or one hundred and
fifty a day. They are overwhelmed by wind and rain, caught by spiders,
benumbed by cold, crushed by cattle, drowned in rivers and ponds, and
in many nameless ways cut off or disabled. In the spring the principal
mortality is from the cold. As the sun declines they get chilled before
they can reach home. Many fall down outside the hive, unable to get in
with their burden. One may see them come utterly spent and drop
hopelessly into the grass in front of their very doors. Before they can
rest the cold has stiffened them. I go out in April and May and pick
them up by the handfuls, their baskets loaded with pollen, and warm
them in the sun or in the house, or by the simple warmth of my hand,
until they can crawl into the hive. Heat is their life, and an
apparently lifeless bee may be revived by warming him. I have also
picked them up while rowing on the river and seen them safely to shore.
It is amusing to see them come hurrying home when there is a
thunder-storm approaching. They come piling in till the rain is upon
them. Those that are overtaken by the storm doubtless weather it as
best they can in the sheltering trees or grass. It is not probable that
a bee ever gets lost by wandering into strange and unknown parts. With
their myriad eyes they see everything; and then their sense of locality
is very acute, is, indeed, one of their ruling traits. When a bee marks
the place of his hive, or of a bit of good pasturage in the fields or
swamps, or of the bee-hunter’s box of honey on the hills or in the
woods, he returns to it as unerringly as fate.
Honey was a much more important article of food with the ancients than
it is with us. As they appear to have been unacquainted with sugar,
honey, no doubt, stood them instead. It is too rank and pungent for the
modern taste; it soon cloys upon the palate. It demands the appetite of
youth, and the strong, robust digestion of people who live much in the
open air. It is a more wholesome food than sugar, and modern
confectionery is poison beside it. Besides grape sugar, honey contains
manna, mucilage, pollen, acid, and other vegetable odoriferous
substances and juices. It is a sugar with a kind of wild natural bread
added. The manna of itself is both food and medicine, and the pungent
vegetable extracts have rare virtues. Honey promotes the excretions,
and dissolves the glutinous and starchy impedimenta of the system.
Hence it is not without reason that with the ancients a land flowing
with milk and honey should mean a land abounding in all good things;
and the queen in the nursery rhyme, who lingered in the kitchen to eat
“bread and honey” while the “king was in the parlor counting out his
money,” was doing a very sensible thing. Epaminondas is said to have
rarely eaten anything but bread and honey. The Emperor Augustus one day
inquired of a centenarian how he had kept his vigor of mind and body so
long; to which the veteran replied that it was by “oil without and
honey within.” Cicero, in his “Old Age,” classes honey with meat and
milk and cheese as among the staple articles with which a well-kept
farmhouse will be supplied.
Italy and Greece, in fact all the Mediterranean countries, appear to
have been famous lands for honey. Mount Hymettus, Mount Hybla, and
Mount Ida produced what may be called the classic honey of antiquity,
an article doubtless in no wise superior to our best products. Leigh
Hunt’s “Jar of Honey” is mainly distilled from Sicilian history and
literature, Theocritus furnishing the best yield. Sicily has always
been rich in bees. Swinburne (the traveler of a hundred years ago) says
the woods on this island abounded in wild honey, and that the people
also had many hives near their houses. The idyls of Theocritus are
native to the island in this respect, and abound in bees—“flat-nosed
bees,” as he calls them in the Seventh Idyl—and comparisons in which
comb-honey is the standard of the most delectable of this world’s
goods. His goatherds can think of no greater bliss than that the mouth
be filled with honeycombs, or to be inclosed in a chest like Daphnis
and fed on the combs of bees; and among the delectables with which
Arsinoë cherishes Adonis are “honey-cakes,” and other tidbits made of
“sweet honey.” In the country of Theocritus this custom is said still
to prevail: when a couple are married, the attendants place honey in
their mouths, by which they would symbolize the hope that their love
may be as sweet to their souls as honey to the palate.
It was fabled that Homer was suckled by a priestess whose breasts
distilled honey; and that once, when Pindar lay asleep, the bees
dropped honey upon his lips. In the Old Testament the food of the
promised Immanuel was to be butter and honey (there is much doubt about
the butter in the original), that he might know good from evil; and
Jonathan’s eyes were enlightened by partaking of some wood or wild
honey: “See, I pray you, how mine eyes have been enlightened, because I
tasted a little of this honey.” So far as this part of his diet was
concerned, therefore, John the Baptist, during his sojourn in the
wilderness, his divinity-school days in the mountains and plains of
Judea, fared extremely well. About the other part, the locusts, or, not
to put too fine a point on it, the grasshoppers, as much cannot be
said, though they were among the creeping and leaping things the
children of Israel were permitted to eat. They were probably not eaten
raw, but roasted in that most primitive of ovens, a hole in the ground
made hot by building a fire in it. The locusts and honey may have been
served together, as the Bedas of Ceylon are said to season their meat
with honey. At any rate, as the locust is often a great plague in
Palestine, the prophet in eating them found his account in the general
weal, and in the profit of the pastoral bees; the fewer locusts, the
more flowers. Owing to its numerous wild-flowers, and flowering shrubs,
Palestine has always been a famous country for bees. They deposit their
honey in hollow trees, as our bees do when they escape from the hive,
and in holes in the rocks, as ours do not. In a tropical or
semi-tropical climate, bees are quite apt to take refuge in the rocks;
but where ice and snow prevail, as with us, they are much safer high up
in the trunk of a forest tree.
The best honey is the product of the milder parts of the temperate
zone. There are too many rank and poisonous plants in the tropics.
Honey from certain districts of Turkey produces headache and vomiting,
and that from Brazil is used chiefly as medicine. The honey of Mount
Hymettus owes its fine quality to wild thyme. The best honey in Persia
and in Florida is collected from the orange blossom. The celebrated
honey of Narbonne in the south of France is obtained from a species of
rosemary. In Scotland good honey is made from the blossoming heather.
California honey is white and delicate and highly perfumed, and now
takes the lead in the market. But honey is honey the world over; and
the bee is the bee still. “Men may degenerate,” says an old traveler,
“may forget the arts by which they acquired renown; manufactures may
fail, and commodities be debased; but the sweets of the wild-flowers of
the wilderness, the industry and natural mechanics of the bee, will
continue without change or derogation.”
II
SHARP EYES
Noting how one eye seconds and reinforces the other, I have often
amused myself by wondering what the effect would be if one could go on
opening eye after eye to the number say of a dozen or more. What would
he see? Perhaps not the invisible,—not the odors of flowers or the
fever germs in the air,—not the infinitely small of the microscope or
the infinitely distant of the telescope. This would require, not more
eyes so much as an eye constructed with more and different lenses; but
would he not see with augmented power within the natural limits of
vision? At any rate, some persons seem to have opened more eyes than
others, they see with such force and distinctness; their vision
penetrates the tangle and obscurity where that of others fails like a
spent or impotent bullet. How many eyes did Gilbert White open? how
many did Henry Thoreau? how many did Audubon? how many does the hunter,
matching his sight against the keen and alert sense of a deer or a
moose, or fox or a wolf? Not outward eyes, but inward. We open another
eye whenever we see beyond the first general features or outlines of
things,—whenever we grasp the special details and characteristic
markings that this mask covers. Science confers new powers of vision.
Whenever you have learned to discriminate the birds, or the plants, or
the geological features of a country, it is as if new and keener eyes
were added.
Of course one must not only see sharply, but read aright what he sees.
The facts in the life of Nature that are transpiring about us are like
written words that the observer is to arrange into sentences. Or the
writing is in cipher and he must furnish the key. A female oriole was
one day observed very much preoccupied under a shed where the refuse
from the horse stable was thrown. She hopped about among the barn
fowls, scolding them sharply when they came too near her. The stable,
dark and cavernous, was just beyond. The bird, not finding what she
wanted outside, boldly ventured into the stable, and was presently
captured by the farmer. What did she want? was the query. What but a
horsehair for her nest which was in an apple-tree near by? and she was
so bent on having one that I have no doubt she would have tweaked one
out of the horse’s tail had he been in the stable. Later in the season
I examined her nest, and found it sewed through and through with
several long horsehairs, so that the bird persisted in her search till
the hair was found.
Little dramas and tragedies and comedies, little characteristic scenes,
are always being enacted in the lives of the birds, if our eyes are
sharp enough to see them. Some clever observer saw this little comedy
played among some English sparrows, and wrote an account of it in his
newspaper; it is too good not to be true: A male bird brought to his
box a large, fine goose feather, which is a great find for a sparrow
and much coveted. After he had deposited his prize and chattered his
gratulations over it, he went away in quest of his mate. His next-door
neighbor, a female bird, seeing her chance, quickly slipped in and
seized the feather; and here the wit of the bird came out, for instead
of carrying it into her own box she flew with it to a near tree and hid
it in a fork of the branches, then went home, and when her neighbor
returned with his mate was innocently employed about her own affairs.
The proud male, finding his feather gone, came out of his box in a high
state of excitement, and, with wrath in his manner and accusation on
his tongue, rushed into the cote of the female. Not finding his goods
and chattels there as he had expected, he stormed around awhile,
abusing everybody in general and his neighbor in particular, then went
away as if to repair the loss. As soon as he was out of sight, the
shrewd thief went and brought the feather home and lined her own
domicile with it.
I was much amused one summer day in seeing a bluebird feeding her young
one in the shaded street of a large town. She had captured a cicada or
harvest-fly, and, after bruising it awhile on the ground, flew with it
to a tree and placed it in the beak of the young bird. It was a large
morsel, and the mother seemed to have doubts of her chick’s ability to
dispose of it, for she stood near and watched its efforts with great
solicitude. The young bird struggled valiantly with the cicada, but
made no headway in swallowing it, when the mother took it from him and
flew to the sidewalk, and proceeded to break and bruise it more
thoroughly. Then she again placed it in his beak, and seemed to say,
“There, try it now,” and sympathized so thoroughly with his efforts
that she repeated many of his motions and contortions. But the great
fly was unyielding, and, indeed, seemed ridiculously disproportioned to
the beak that held it. The young bird fluttered and fluttered, and
screamed, “I’m stuck, I’m stuck!” till the anxious parent again seized
the morsel and carried it to an iron railing, where she came down upon
it for the space of a minute with all the force and momentum her beak
could command. Then she offered it to her young a third time, but with
the same result as before, except that this time the bird dropped it;
but she reached the ground as soon as the cicada did, and taking it in
her beak flew some distance to a high board fence, where she sat
motionless for some moments. While pondering the problem how that fly
should be broken, the male bluebird approached her, and said very
plainly, and I thought rather curtly, “Give me that bug,” but she
quickly resented his interference and flew farther away, where she sat
apparently quite discouraged when I last saw her.
The bluebird is a home bird, and I am never tired of recurring to him.
His coming or reappearance in the spring marks a new chapter in the
progress of the season; things are never quite the same after one has
heard that note. The past spring the males came about a week in advance
of the females. A fine male lingered about my grounds and orchard all
that time, apparently waiting the arrival of his mate. He called and
warbled every day, as if he felt sure she was within ear-shot and could
be hurried up. Now he warbled half-angrily or upbraidingly, then
coaxingly, then cheerily and confidently, the next moment in a
plaintive, far-away manner. He would half open his wings, and twinkle
them caressingly, as if beckoning his mate to his heart. One morning
she had come, but was shy and reserved. The fond male flew to a
knothole in an old apple-tree, and coaxed her to his side. I heard a
fine confidential warble,—the old, old story. But the female flew to a
near tree, and uttered her plaintive, homesick note. The male went and
got some dry grass or bark in his beak, and flew again to the hole in
the old tree, and promised unremitting devotion, but the other said,
“Nay,” and flew away in the distance. When he saw her going, or rather
heard her distant note, he dropped his stuff, and cried out in a tone
that said plainly enough, “Wait a minute. One word, please,” and flew
swiftly in pursuit. He won her before long, however, and early in April
the pair were established in one of the four or five boxes I had put up
for them, but not until they had changed their minds several times. As
soon as the first brood had flown, and while they were yet under their
parents’ care, they began another nest in one of the other boxes, the
female, as usual, doing all the work, and the male all the
complimenting. A source of occasional great distress to the mother bird
was a white cat that sometimes followed me about. The cat had never
been known to catch a bird, but she had a way of watching them that was
very embarrassing to the bird. Whenever she appeared, the mother
bluebird would set up that pitiful melodious plaint. One morning the
cat was standing by me, when the bird came with her beak loaded with
building material, and alighted above me to survey the place before
going into the box. When she saw the cat she was greatly disturbed, and
in her agitation could not keep her hold upon all her material. Straw
after straw came eddying down, till not half her original burden
remained. After the cat had gone away the bird’s alarm subsided, till
presently, seeing the coast clear, she flew quickly to the box and
pitched in her remaining straws with the greatest precipitation, and,
without going in to arrange them, as was her wont, flew away in evident
relief.
In the cavity of an apple-tree but a few yards off, and much nearer the
house than they usually build, a pair of high-holes, or golden-shafted
woodpeckers, took up their abode. A knothole which led to the decayed
interior was enlarged, the live wood being cut away as clean as a
squirrel would have done it. The inside preparations I could not
witness, but day after day, as I passed near, I heard the bird
hammering away, evidently beating down obstructions and shaping and
enlarging the cavity. The chips were not brought out, but were used
rather to floor the interior. The woodpeckers are not nest-builders,
but rather nest-carvers.
The time seemed very short before the voices of the young were heard in
the heart of the old tree,—at first feebly, but waxing stronger day by
day until they could be heard many rods distant. When I put my hand
upon the trunk of the tree, they would set up an eager, expectant
chattering; but if I climbed up it toward the opening, they soon
detected the unusual sound and would hush quickly, only now and then
uttering a warning note. Long before they were fully fledged they
clambered up to the orifice to receive their food. As but one could
stand in the opening at a time, there was a good deal of elbowing and
struggling for this position. It was a very desirable one aside from
the advantages it had when food was served; it looked out upon the
great, shining world, into which the young birds seemed never tired of
gazing. The fresh air must have been a consideration also, for the
interior of a high-hole’s dwelling is not sweet. When the parent birds
came with food, the young one in the opening did not get it all, but
after he had received a portion, either on his own motion or on a hint
from the old one, he would give place to the one behind him. Still, one
bird evidently outstripped his fellows, and in the race of life was two
or three days in advance of them. His voice was loudest and his head
oftenest at the window. But I noticed that, when he had kept the
position too long, the others evidently made it uncomfortable in his
rear, and, after “fidgeting” about awhile, he would be compelled to
“back down.” But retaliation was then easy, and I fear his mates spent
few easy moments at that lookout. They would close their eyes and slide
back into the cavity as if the world had suddenly lost all its charms
for them.
This bird was, of course, the first to leave the nest. For two days
before that event he kept his position in the opening most of the time
and sent forth his strong voice incessantly. The old ones abstained
from feeding him almost entirely, no doubt to encourage his exit. As I
stood looking at him one afternoon and noting his progress, he suddenly
reached a resolution,—seconded, I have no doubt, from the rear,—and
launched forth upon his untried wings. They served him well, and
carried him about fifty yards up-hill the first heat. The second day
after, the next in size and spirit left in the same manner; then
another, till only one remained. The parent birds ceased their visits
to him, and for one day he called and called till our ears were tired
of the sound. His was the faintest heart of all. Then he had none to
encourage him from behind. He left the nest and clung to the outer bole
of the tree, and yelped and piped for an hour longer; then he committed
himself to his wings and went his way like the rest.
A young farmer in the western part of New York, who has a sharp,
discriminating eye, sends me some interesting notes about a tame
high-hole he once had.
“Did you ever notice,” says he, “that the high-hole never eats anything
that he cannot pick up with his tongue? At least this was the case with
a young one I took from the nest and tamed. He could thrust out his
tongue two or three inches, and it was amusing to see his efforts to
eat currants from the hand. He would run out his tongue and try to
stick it to the currant; failing in that, he would bend his tongue
around it like a hook and try to raise it by a sudden jerk. But he
never succeeded, the round fruit would roll and slip away every time.
He never seemed to think of taking it in his beak. His tongue was in
constant use to find out the nature of everything he saw; a nail-hole
in a board or any similar hole was carefully explored. If he was held
near the face he would soon be attracted by the eye and thrust his
tongue into it. In this way he gained the respect of a number of
half-grown cats that were around the house. I wished to make them
familiar to each other, so there would be less danger of their killing
him. So I would take them both on my knee, when the bird would soon
notice the kitten’s eyes, and, leveling his bill as carefully as a
marksman levels his rifle, he would remain so a minute, when he would
dart his tongue into the cat’s eye. This was held by the cats to be
very mysterious: being struck in the eye by something invisible to
them. They soon acquired such a terror of him that they would avoid him
and run away whenever they saw his bill turned in their direction. He
never would swallow a grasshopper even when it was placed in his
throat; he would shake himself until he had thrown it out of his mouth.
His ‘best hold’ was ants. He never was surprised at anything, and never
was afraid of anything. He would drive the turkey gobbler and the
rooster. He would advance upon them holding one wing up as high as
possible, as if to strike with it, and shuffle along the ground toward
them, scolding all the while in a harsh voice. I feared at first that
they might kill him, but I soon found that he was able to take care of
himself. I would turn over stones and dig into ant-hills for him, and
he would lick up the ants so fast that a stream of them seemed going
into his mouth unceasingly. I kept him till late in the fall, when he
disappeared, probably going south, and I never saw him again.” My
correspondent also sends me some interesting observations about the
cuckoo. He says a large gooseberry-bush standing in the border of an
old hedge-row, in the midst of open fields, and not far from his house,
was occupied by a pair of cuckoos for two seasons in succession, and,
after an interval of a year, for two seasons more. This gave him a good
chance to observe them. He says the mother bird lays a single egg, and
sits upon it a number of days before laying the second, so that he has
seen one young bird nearly grown, a second just hatched, and a whole
egg, all in the nest at once. “So far as I have seen, this is the
settled practice,—the young leaving the nest one at a time to the
number of six or eight. The young have quite the look of the young of
the dove in many respects. When nearly grown they are covered with long
blue pin-feathers as long as darning-needles, without a bit of plumage
on them. They part on the back and hang down on each side by their own
weight. With its curious feathers and misshapen body, the young bird is
anything but handsome. They never open their mouths when approached, as
many young birds do, but sit perfectly still, hardly moving when
touched.” He also notes the unnatural indifference of the mother bird
when her nest and young are approached. She makes no sound, but sits
quietly on a near branch in apparent perfect unconcern.
These observations, together with the fact that the egg of the cuckoo
is occasionally found in the nests of other birds, raise the inquiry
whether our bird is slowly relapsing into the habit of the European
species, which always foists its egg upon other birds; or whether, on
the other hand, it is not mending its manners in this respect. It has
but little to unlearn or to forget in the one case, but great progress
to make in the other. How far is its rudimentary nest—a mere platform
of coarse twigs and dry stalks of weeds—from the deep, compact, finely
woven and finely modeled nest of the goldfinch or the kingbird, and
what a gulf between its indifference toward its young and their
solicitude! Its irregular manner of laying also seems better suited to
a parasite like our cowbird, or the European cuckoo, than to a regular
nest-builder.
This observer, like most sharp-eyed persons, sees plenty of interesting
things as he goes about his work. He one day saw a white swallow, which
is of rare occurrence. He saw a bird, a sparrow he thinks, fly against
the side of a horse and fill his beak with hair from the loosened coat
of the animal. He saw a shrike pursue a chickadee, when the latter
escaped by taking refuge in a small hole in a tree. One day in early
spring he saw two hen-hawks, that were circling and screaming high in
air, approach each other, extend a claw, and, clasping them together,
fall toward the earth, flapping and struggling as if they were tied
together; on nearing the ground they separated and soared aloft again.
He supposed that it was not a passage of war but of love, and that the
hawks were toying fondly with each other.
He further relates a curious circumstance of finding a hummingbird in
the upper part of a barn with its bill stuck fast in a crack of one of
the large timbers, dead, of course, with wings extended, and as dry as
a chip. The bird seems to have died, as it had lived, on the wing, and
its last act was indeed a ghastly parody of its living career. Fancy
this nimble, flashing sprite, whose life was passed probing the honeyed
depths of flowers, at last thrusting its bill into a crack in a dry
timber in a hay-loft, and, with spread wings, ending its existence!
When the air is damp and heavy, swallows frequently hawk for insects
about cattle and moving herds in the field. My farmer describes how
they attended him one foggy day, as he was mowing in the meadow with a
mowing-machine. It had been foggy for two days, and the swallows were
very hungry, and the insects stupid and inert. When the sound of his
machine was heard, the swallows appeared and attended him like a brood
of hungry chickens. He says there was a continued rush of purple wings
over the “cut-bar,” and just where it was causing the grass to tremble
and fall. Without his assistance the swallows would doubtless have gone
hungry yet another day.
Of the hen-hawk, he has observed that both male and female take part in
incubation. “I was rather surprised,” he says, “on one occasion, to see
how quickly they change places on the nest. The nest was in a tall
beech, and the leaves were not yet fully out. I could see the head and
neck of the hawk over the edge of the nest, when I saw the other hawk
coming down through the air at full speed. I expected he would alight
near by, but instead of that he struck directly upon the nest, his mate
getting out of the way barely in time to avoid being hit; it seemed
almost as if he had knocked her off the nest. I hardly see how they can
make such a rush on the nest without danger to the eggs.”
The kingbird will worry the hawk as a whiffet dog will worry a bear. It
is by his persistence and audacity, not by any injury he is capable of
dealing his great antagonist. The kingbird seldom more than dogs the
hawk, keeping above and between his wings, and making a great ado; but
my correspondent says he once “saw a kingbird riding on a hawk’s back.
The hawk flew as fast as possible, and the kingbird sat upon his
shoulders in triumph until they had passed out of sight,”—tweaking his
feathers, no doubt, and threatening to scalp him the next moment.
That near relative of the kingbird, the great crested flycatcher, has
one well-known peculiarity: he appears never to consider his nest
finished until it contains a cast-off snake-skin. My alert
correspondent one day saw him eagerly catch up an onion skin and make
off with it, either deceived by it or else thinking it a good
substitute for the coveted material.
One day in May, walking in the woods, I came upon the nest of a
whip-poor-will, or rather its eggs, for it builds no nest,—two
elliptical whitish spotted eggs lying upon the dry leaves. My foot was
within a yard of the mother bird before she flew. I wondered what a
sharp eye would detect curious or characteristic in the ways of the
bird, so I came to the place many times and had a look. It was always a
task to separate the bird from her surroundings, though I stood within
a few feet of her, and knew exactly where to look. One had to bear on
with his eye, as it were, and refuse to be baffled. The sticks and
leaves, and bits of black or dark brown bark, were all exactly copied
in the bird’s plumage. And then she did sit so close, and simulate so
well a shapeless, decaying piece of wood or bark! Twice I brought a
companion, and, guiding his eye to the spot, noted how difficult it was
for him to make out there, in full view upon the dry leaves, any
semblance to a bird. When the bird returned after being disturbed, she
would alight within a few inches of her eggs, and then, after a
moment’s pause, hobble awkwardly upon them.
After the young had appeared, all the wit of the bird came into play. I
was on hand the next day, I think. The mother bird sprang up when I was
within a pace of her, and in doing so fanned the leaves with her wings
till they sprang up, too; as the leaves started the young started, and,
being of the same color, to tell which was the leaf and which the bird
was a trying task to any eye. I came the next day, when the same
tactics were repeated. Once a leaf fell upon one of the young birds and
nearly hid it. The young are covered with a reddish down, like a young
partridge, and soon follow their mother about. When disturbed, they
gave but one leap, then settled down, perfectly motionless and stupid,
with eyes closed. The parent bird, on these occasions, made frantic
efforts to decoy me away from her young. She would fly a few paces and
fall upon her breast, and a spasm, like that of death, would run
through her tremulous outstretched wings and prostrate body. She kept a
sharp eye out the meanwhile to see if the ruse took, and, if it did
not, she was quickly cured, and, moving about to some other point,
tried to draw my attention as before. When followed she always alighted
upon the ground, dropping down in a sudden peculiar way. The second or
third day both old and young had disappeared.
[Illustration: Whip-poor-will]
The whip-poor-will walks as awkwardly as a swallow, which is as awkward
as a man in a bag, and yet she manages to lead her young about the
woods. The latter, I think, move by leaps and sudden spurts, their
protective coloring shielding them most effectively. Wilson once came
upon the mother bird and her brood in the woods, and, though they were
at his very feet, was so baffled by the concealment of the young that
he was about to give up the search, much disappointed, when he
perceived something “like a slight mouldiness among the withered
leaves, and, on stooping down, discovered it to be a young
whip-poor-will, seemingly asleep.” Wilson’s description of the young is
very accurate, as its downy covering does look precisely like a “slight
mouldiness.” Returning a few moments afterward to the spot to get a
pencil he had forgotten, he could find neither old nor young.
It takes an eye to see a partridge in the woods, motionless upon the
leaves; this sense needs to be as sharp as that of smell in hounds and
pointers, and yet I know an unkempt youth that seldom fails to see the
bird and to shoot it before it takes wing. I think he sees it as soon
as it sees him, and before it suspects itself seen. What a training to
the eye is hunting! to pick out the game from its surroundings, the
grouse from the leaves, the gray squirrel from the mossy oak limb it
hugs so closely, the red fox from the ruddy or brown or gray field, the
rabbit from the stubble, or the white hare from the snow, requires the
best powers of this sense. A woodchuck motionless in the fields or upon
a rock looks very much like a large stone or boulder, yet a keen eye
knows the difference at a glance, a quarter of a mile away.
A man has a sharper eye than a dog, or a fox, or than any of the wild
creatures, but not so sharp an ear or nose. But in the birds he finds
his match. How quickly the old turkey discovers the hawk, a mere speck
against the sky, and how quickly the hawk discovers you if you happen
to be secreted in the bushes, or behind the fence near which he
alights! One advantage the bird surely has, and that is, owing to the
form, structure, and position of the eye, it has a much larger field of
vision,—indeed, can probably see in nearly every direction at the same
instant, behind as well as before. Man’s field of vision embraces less
than half a circle horizontally, and still less vertically; his brow
and brain prevent him from seeing within many degrees of the zenith
without a movement of the head; the bird, on the other hand, takes in
nearly the whole sphere at a glance.
I find I see, almost without effort, nearly every bird within sight in
the field or wood I pass through (a flit of the wing, a flirt of the
tail are enough, though the flickering leaves do all conspire to hide
them), and that with like ease the birds see me, though unquestionably
the chances are immensely in their favor. The eye sees what it has the
means of seeing, truly. You must have the bird in your heart before you
can find it in the bush. The eye must have purpose and aim. No one ever
yet found the walking fern who did not have the walking fern in his
mind. A person whose eye is full of Indian relics picks them up in
every field he walks through.
One season I was interested in the tree-frogs, especially the tiny
piper that one hears about the woods and brushy fields,—the hyla of the
swamps become a denizen of the trees; I had never seen him in this new
role. But this season, having hylas in mind, or rather being ripe for
them, I several times came across them. One Sunday, walking amid some
bushes, I captured two. They leaped before me, as doubtless they had
done many times before; but though not looking for or thinking of them,
yet they were quickly recognized, because the eye had been commissioned
to find them. On another occasion, not long afterward, I was hurriedly
loading my gun in the October woods in hopes of overtaking a gray
squirrel that was fast escaping through the treetops, when one of these
lilliput frogs, the color of the fast-yellowing leaves, leaped near me.
I saw him only out of the corner of my eye and yet bagged him, because
I had already made him my own.
Nevertheless the habit of observation is the habit of clear and
decisive gazing: not by a first casual glance, but by a steady,
deliberate aim of the eye, are the rare and characteristic things
discovered. You must look intently, and hold your eye firmly to the
spot, to see more than do the rank and file of mankind. The
sharpshooter picks out his man, and knows him with fatal certainty from
a stump, or a rock, or a cap on a pole. The phrenologists do well to
locate, not only form, color, and weight, in the region of the eye, but
also a faculty which they call individuality,—that which separates,
discriminates, and sees in every object its essential character. This
is just as necessary to the naturalist as to the artist or the poet.
The sharp eye notes specific points and differences,—it seizes upon and
preserves the individuality of the thing.
Persons frequently describe to me some bird they have seen or heard,
and ask me to name it, but in most cases the bird might be any one of a
dozen, or else it is totally unlike any bird found on this continent.
They have either seen falsely or else vaguely. Not so the farm youth
who wrote me one winter day that he had seen a single pair of strange
birds, which he describes as follows: “They were about the size of the
‘chippie;’ the tops of their heads were red, and the breast of the male
was of the same color, while that of the female was much lighter; their
rumps were also faintly tinged with red. If I have described them so
that you would know them, please write me their names.” There can be
little doubt but the young observer had, seen a pair of redpolls,—a
bird related to the goldfinch, and that occasionally comes down to us
in the winter from the far north. Another time, the same youth wrote
that he had seen a strange bird, the color of a sparrow, that alighted
on fences and buildings as well as upon the ground, and that walked.
This last fact showed the youth’s discriminating eye and settled the
case. From this and the season, and the size and color of the bird, I
knew he had seen the pipit or titlark. But how many persons would have
observed that the bird walked instead of hopped?
Some friends of mine who lived in the country tried to describe to me a
bird that built a nest in a tree within a few feet of the house. As it
was a brown bird, I should have taken it for a wood thrush, had not the
nest been described as so thin and loose that from beneath the eggs
could be distinctly seen. The most pronounced feature in the
description was the barred appearance of the under side of the bird’s
tail. I was quite at sea, until one day, when we were driving out, a
cuckoo flew across the road in front of us, when my friends exclaimed,
“There is our bird!” I had never known a cuckoo to build near a house,
and I had never noted the appearance the tail presents when viewed from
beneath; but if the bird had been described in its most obvious
features, as slender, with a long tail, cinnamon brown above and white
beneath, with a curved bill, any one who knew the bird would have
recognized the portrait.
We think we have looked at a thing sharply until we are asked for its
specific features. I thought I knew exactly the form of the leaf of the
tulip-tree, until one day a lady asked me to draw the outlines of one.
A good observer is quick to take a hint and to follow it up. Most of
the facts of nature, especially in the life of the birds and animals,
are well screened. We do not see the play because we do not look
intently enough. The other day I was sitting with a friend upon a high
rock in the woods, near a small stream, when we saw a water-snake
swimming across a pool toward the opposite bank. Any eye would have
noted it, perhaps nothing more. A little closer and sharper gaze
revealed the fact that the snake bore something in its mouth, which, as
we went down to investigate, proved to be a small catfish, three or
four inches long. The snake had captured it in the pool, and, like any
other fisherman, wanted to get its prey to dry land, although it itself
lived mostly in the water. Here, we said, is being enacted a little
tragedy that would have escaped any but sharp eyes. The snake, which
was itself small, had the fish by the throat, the hold of vantage among
all creatures, and clung to it with great tenacity. The snake knew that
its best tactics was to get upon dry land as soon as possible. It could
not swallow its victim alive, and it could not strangle it in the
water. For a while it tried to kill its game by holding it up out of
the water, but the fish grew heavy, and every few moments its struggles
brought down the snake’s head. This would not do. Compressing the
fish’s throat would not shut off its breath under such circumstances,
so the wily serpent tried to get ashore with it, and after several
attempts succeeded in effecting a landing on a flat rock. But the fish
died hard. Catfish do not give up the ghost in a hurry. Its throat was
becoming congested, but the snake’s distended jaws must have ached. It
was like a petrified gape. Then the spectators became very curious and
close in their scrutiny, and the snake determined to withdraw from the
public gaze and finish the business in hand to its own notions. But,
when gently but firmly remonstrated with by my friend with his
walking-stick, it dropped the fish and retreated in high dudgeon
beneath a stone in the bed of the creek. The fish, with a swollen and
angry throat, went its way also.
Birds, I say, have wonderfully keen eyes. Throw a fresh bone or a piece
of meat upon the snow in winter, and see how soon the crows will
discover it and be on hand. If it be near the house or barn, the crow
that first discovers it will alight near it, to make sure he is not
deceived; then he will go away, and soon return with a companion. The
two alight a few yards from the bone, and after some delay, during
which the vicinity is sharply scrutinized, one of the crows advances
boldly to within a few feet of the coveted prize. Here he pauses, and
if no trick is discovered, and the meat be indeed meat, he seizes it
and makes off.
One midwinter I cleared away the snow under an apple-tree near the
house and scattered some corn there. I had not seen a blue jay for
weeks, yet that very day one found my corn, and after that several came
daily and partook of it, holding the kernels under their feet upon the
limbs of the trees and pecking them vigorously.
Of course the woodpecker and his kind have sharp eyes, still I was
surprised to see how quickly Downy found out some bones that were
placed in a convenient place under the shed to be pounded up for the
hens. In going out to the barn I often disturbed him making a meal off
the bits of meat that still adhered to them.
“Look intently enough at anything,” said a poet to me one day, “and you
will see something that would otherwise escape you.” I thought of the
remark as I sat on a stump in an opening of the woods one spring day. I
saw a small hawk approaching; he flew to a tall tulip-tree, and
alighted on a large limb near the top. He eyed me and I eyed him. Then
the bird disclosed a trait that was new to me: he hopped along the limb
to a small cavity near the trunk, when he thrust in his head and pulled
out some small object and fell to eating it. After he had partaken of
it for some minutes he put the remainder back in his larder and flew
away. I had seen something like feathers eddying slowly down as the
hawk ate, and on approaching the spot found the feathers of a sparrow
here and there clinging to the bushes beneath the tree. The hawk,
then,—commonly called the chicken hawk,—is as provident as a mouse or a
squirrel, and lays by a store against a time of need, but I should not
have discovered the fact had I not held my eye on him.
An observer of the birds is attracted by any unusual sound or commotion
among them. In May or June, when other birds are most vocal, the jay is
a silent bird; he goes sneaking about the orchards and the groves as
silent as a pickpocket; he is robbing birds’-nests, and he is very
anxious that nothing should be said about it, but in the fall none so
quick and loud to cry “Thief, thief!” as he. One December morning a
troop of jays discovered a little screech owl secreted in the hollow
trunk of an old apple-tree near my house. How they found the owl out is
a mystery, since it never ventures forth in the light of day; but they
did, and proclaimed the fact with great emphasis. I suspect the
bluebirds first told them, for these birds are constantly peeping into
holes and crannies both spring and fall. Some unsuspecting bird had
probably entered the cavity prospecting for a place for next year’s
nest, or else looking out a likely place to pass a cold night, and then
had rushed out with important news. A boy who should unwittingly
venture into a bear’s den when Bruin was at home could not be more
astonished and alarmed than a bluebird would be on finding itself in a
cavity of a decayed tree with an owl. At any rate, the bluebirds joined
the jays in calling the attention of all whom it might concern to the
fact that a culprit of some sort was hiding from the light of day in
the old apple-tree. I heard the notes of warning and alarm and
approached to within eyeshot. The bluebirds were cautious and hovered
about uttering their peculiar twittering calls; but the jays were
bolder and took turns looking in at the cavity, and deriding the poor,
shrinking owl. A jay would alight in the entrance of the hole, and
flirt and peer and attitudinize, and then fly away crying “Thief,
thief, thief!” at the top of his voice.
I climbed up and peered into the opening, and could just descry the owl
clinging to the inside of the tree. I reached in and took him out,
giving little heed to the threatening snapping of his beak. He was as
red as a fox and as yellow-eyed as a cat. He made no effort to escape,
but planted his claws in my forefinger and clung there with a grip that
soon grew uncomfortable. I placed him in the loft of an outhouse, in
hopes of getting better acquainted with him. By day he was a very
willing prisoner, scarcely moving at all, even when approached and
touched with the hand, but looking out upon the world with half-closed,
sleepy eyes. But at night what a change! how alert, how wild, how
active! He was like another bird; he darted about with wide, fearful
eyes, and regarded me like a cornered cat. I opened the window, and
swiftly, but as silent as a shadow, he glided out into the congenial
darkness, and perhaps, ere this, has revenged himself upon the sleeping
jay or bluebird that first betrayed his hiding-place.
III
STRAWBERRIES