WOOD WANDERINGS
THE WORKS OF WINTHROP PACKARD
WOODLAND PATHS
WILD PASTURES
WOOD WANDERINGS
WILDWOOD WAYS
_Each illustrated by Charles Copeland_
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SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS BOSTON
[Illustration: You may see a slender doe pirouette like a ballet-dancing
wood nymph
[_Page 38_]
]
WOOD WANDERINGS
BY
WINTHROP PACKARD
ILLUSTRATED BY
CHARLES COPELAND
[Illustration]
BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1910
BY SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY
(INCORPORATED)
_Entered at Stationers’ Hall_
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
The author wishes to express his thanks to the “Boston Transcript” for
permission to reprint in this volume matter which was originally
contributed to its columns.
CONTENTS
PAGE
FAIRY FRUIT 1
THE LAND OF SPRUCE 21
BIRDS OF THE NOR’EASTER 43
THE SQUIRREL HARVEST 65
AMONG AUTUMN LEAVES 85
THE DAY THAT SUMMER CAME BACK 107
WHEN AUTUMN PASSES 129
NOVEMBER WOODS 149
WINTER BIRDS’-NESTING 171
SOME CROWS I HAVE KNOWN 193
INDEX 217
ILLUSTRATIONS
You may see a slender doe pirouette like a ballet-dancing
wood nymph _Frontispiece_
OPPOSITE PAGE
The woodchuck is the very mark and origin of the
paunchy gnome 8
Seems to think himself secure there 36
The red squirrel gets the burs after the fashion of
the real sport 68
He does not have to look for his food 160
A field mouse had appropriated this nest for an
autumn storehouse 182
Across the angry crimson of the west flitted silhouetted
black wings 198
FAIRY FRUIT
To-day the September west winds have begun the fall house-cleaning by
sweeping the tops of the pine woods. All the morning the little brown
scales which nestle close to the base of each pine leaf as it grows,
protecting it from the withering force of the midsummer sun, have been
soaring and spinning in high glee, curiously lighting up with brown
glimmers the solemn sanctuaries beneath.
It is the first prophecy of winter under the sheltering boughs where
still lingers the midsummer warmth. The chickadees, going their forenoon
rounds, scold about it in a brisk fashion that is in tune with the
briskness of the wind itself. In the languor of the south wind the
chickadee has a little lazy song which he sings often, “Sleepee,
sleepee,” a tuneful little ditty that makes you want to stretch out on
the brown carpet with a mound of green moss for a pillow and let the
resinous odors lull you to sleep. I always feel that the bird himself
murmurs it with one eye closed and himself in danger of falling off the
perch in slumber.
None of that song to-day. It’s “chick-chickachick, chick-a-chicadee dee
dee,” with a snap in it like the crack of a whip. Yet the flock soon
passes on, and in the dreamy warmth of the grove you know little of the
vivid touch in the wind. Only enough of it comes through to set the
little brown pine motes to whirling merrily as they fall, vanishing from
sight like flitting elves as they touch the brown carpet below.
There was another elf-like transformation, an appearing and a
disappearing, in the woods this morning. That was a _Pyrameis atalanta_
that kept vanishing into the trunk of a big pitch pine. This, the red
admiral, own cousin to the familiar _Pyrameis carduii_, the painted
lady, is a butterfly whose movements are as snappy as those of the west
wind on these house-cleaning days. Rich red, white and black are the
colors on the upper side of its wings, but when these are closed there
is exposed only the under side, which makes the creature so exactly like
a rough chip of the pitch-pine bark that when he lights on the trunk the
vanishing is complete. Out of nothing he sprang, a vivid flash of
darting red and white flipping before your eyes, then he darted up to
the pine trunk that seemed to open and let him go in, so completely did
he transform his bright colors into a bit of brown bark.
The more I see of woodland glades and sun-dappled depths and the
creatures that inhabit them the less I am inclined to smile at the elder
races of the world that peopled them with fairies, sprites, and goblins.
Why should they not believe in these things? It is hard sometimes for us
to forego all lingering remnants of faith in such inhabitants of field
and wood.
This morning on my way to the grove I seemed to meet with more than the
usual number of woodchucks, though you would hardly call it meeting, for
our paths never crossed. But in three different parts of the big
mowing-field a woodchuck bobbed out of nowhere in particular. No doubt
he was feeding on the clover of the farmer’s aftermath, but I saw no
more of that than the cropped herbage after the woodchuck was gone. My
first sight each time was when the animal began to roll in a straight
line across the field. I say roll, for woodchucks at this time of year
are so fat that they do not seem to run, but undulate over the grass as
does the deep sea wave over the shallows.
I never can help chasing them, though I know well what is about to
happen. Nor do I expect to catch one, for, fat as they are, they move
with surprising rapidity. Even if I happen to know where his hole is by
the pile of dirt at the door and rush between him and it, I am no nearer
getting my game. I always fancy that the fat shoulders of the woodchuck
jiggle with laughter and his little pig eyes twinkle, for that is just
what he expects and is prepared for. He keeps right on in his straight
line, then psst! he vanishes. You don’t see him dive or turn or hide. He
just goes out of sight. You may poke about in the grass for a long time
before you find the secret entrance by which he has returned to his
burrow. Sometimes he has two of them. They are dug from within outward
and no tell-tale trace of dirt is left to mark their location. This has
all been carried down with infinite pains, then up, and left at the
public door, where all may see it. The woodchuck is the very mark and
origin of the paunchy gnome, which is said to guard buried treasures,
and which bobs out of the earth, frightens Hob from his intended mining,
then bobs back into the earth to guard the gold.
So you have but to go into the pine grove to-day with inquiring eye and
[Illustration: The woodchuck is the very mark and origin of the paunchy
gnome]
acquiescent mind and all the beautiful old superstitions that always
plead to be taken into the belief will come trooping along, to your
supreme delectation. Well might the great and good Wordsworth say, he
who knew the open wold and the bosky dell as few of us are privileged to
know them, and wrote about them as none of us can:
“Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.”
Here in the pine grove is the riding-school of sylphs
innumerable,--those fragile fairies who float in slender grace on the
passing breeze. Their launching stands are the flat-topped receptacles
of the blooms of _Erechthites hieracifolium_, the coarse and homely
fireweed. All summer it has stood in the open spaces of the wood with
its tall stalks bearing blossoms that look like green druggists’
pestles, with no beauty of petal or sepal to entice, no fragrance to
call the wandering bee. Indeed, these surly blooms seem like buds that
were too cross to open. Now it is different. The green bonds of guardian
bracts are reflexed, and you may now see that this unattractive flower
has held close pressed within its homely heart companies of sylphs.
White and slender and soft, they stand until the right wind comes along,
then they spring fearlessly to his invisible shoulders and are borne
whither they list. Not mortal things are these thistledown fairies that
are so transparent white that you may look through them as they float by
and see the sun. If it pleases them to touch your hand or your cheek as
they pass, you may note an ethereality of sensation which is thought
rather than feeling, so light it is.
The _Epilobium angustifolium_, sometimes called willow herb, is another
fireweed, as beautiful of bloom as _Erechthites_ is homely. Like this,
it grows in waste places in the wood, flaunting its long raceme of
showy, pink-purple flowers all summer. Like the _Erechthites_, too, when
September has tamed its exuberance, it is more beautiful still as the
abode of white sylphs which cling in whorls to its stem. Yet, mark you
the difference. The sylphs, reared by the dour and homely fireweed,
stand erect and prim in close communion as stately and correct and
dignified as sylphs may be. Those born of the flaunting _Epilobium_
cling to it in graceful, almost voluptuous abandon, assuming such poses
as nymphs might in wooing a satyr. Equally beautiful, the first are like
prim New England schoolmarms diaphanously gowned for a Greek play; the
second suggest artists’ models frolicking in the woodland before being
called to pose.
Along with these two fireweeds, breeders of sylphs, in my pine wood
grows the pokeweed, a villainous name for a wonderfully vigorous and
beautiful plant. Just now its close-set racemes of purple-black berries
are ripening, their color a vivid contrast with the smooth rich green of
its ovate-oblong leaves and the wine color of its stems. It is really a
royal plant, and so great is its vigor that its dark berries threaten to
burst their skins and scatter their rich crimson lifeblood. If you will
look closely at the berries you will see that the fairies have stitched
them neatly across the top to prevent this. The marks of the needle
show, and the tiny puckering made by drawing the thread very tight.
It is so workmanlike a performance that I suspect the _leprachauns_, who
are shoemakers, of having been called in to do it,--called in, for the
_leprachauns_, without doubt, have all they can do conveniently, making
and mending the fairy shoon. No doubt the brownies, who are domestic
fairies and who would be keeping watch of the woodland fruits anent the
preserving season, had them attend to this, lest the preserving be a
failure. The poke berries look so rich and luscious that I have tried
them; but I cannot say that I like the flavor, which is rich indeed, but
peculiar. But then, I remember my first olive. They don’t taste half so
bad as that did, and compared with pickled limes, which school-girls
eat with avidity, they are nectar and ambrosia in one package.
All the under-pine world is spread just now with beautiful berries, for
which neither we nor the birds seem to have a taste. There are the
partridge berries, which, by the way, I have never seen a partridge eat,
nor have I found them in the crops of partridges, which I have been mean
enough to shoot. Yet these are, to my mind, the most edible of all,
though they are insipidly sweet, and their flavor is so finely pleasant
that it is not for the coarse palate of most mortals. Their vines carpet
the wood in places, and the soft, pure red of the berries would catch
the eye of bird or beast from afar. These stay ripe and sound all
winter, and you may see their red shining softly among the evergreen
leaves when the bare ground responds, dull and sleepy still, to the
resurrection trump of spring. They have not been gobbled whole,
therefore the larger animals and birds of the wood do not care for them;
but in the spring you will often find them with a tiny bite taken out of
one side. This can have been done by no other than the fairy urchins,
too young to eat fruit with safety, and forbidden by their mothers, they
yet slip out and take a bite before they can be hindered.
Equally beautiful and conspicuous, and equally insipid to the human
taste, are the great blue berries of the _Clintonia borealis_, which
grows sparingly under the pines hereabouts. These are as large as the
end of your finger, and a wonderful clear shade of prussian blue. If you
know the leaf of the lady’s slipper,--the moccasin-flowered orchid which
is so common in June under all pines,--you might, thinking of the leaf
only, call this the fruit of the lady’s slipper, where, as sometimes
happens, but one berry grows on a stem. Yet if you look further you will
not long labor under the mistake, for you will find many stalks with
several berries, whereas the single blossom of the _Cypripedium acaule_
could leave behind it but one. The fruit of the lady’s slipper is at
this time of the year a dry brown pod, whence all the little dry seeds
have long ago dropped; indeed, it is only occasionally that you will
find the pod left so long.
I do not know but birds eat the beautiful fruit of the _Clintonia_,
though I have never seen them do it, and I fancy it is too insipid to
creatures that love wild blackberries, raspberries, and cherries. Yet,
as in the case of the partridge berries, I have often seen the fruit
with a tiny mouthful taken out of it as it stands on the stalk. This is
a bigger mouthful than the marks left in the partridge berries, so I
know that it is not fairy urchins which have done it, even if I thought
they could climb these tall, slippery stalks. I have a fancy that Queen
Mab herself, who, as you very well know, is the fairy midwife as well as
queen, flitting home in the dusk of morning from motherly service, has
stopped for a brief refreshment on the _Clintonia_ stalk. I even have a
notion that I can see in the bitten berries the prints of the wee pearls
that are her teeth.
Every little starry bloom of the _Smilacina bifolia_, which vies with
the _Mitchella_ in carpeting the pine wood, leaves behind it a lovely
tiny berry that is like a pinhead currant. These, now, are in little
groups at the top of the withering stalks. Fairy currants I have heard
them called, and I think the name a good one, for they are red and juicy
like currants and taste not unlike them, though, like all these fruits,
the flavoring is more insipid. They are a lovelier berry before ripening
than after, for when young they are a slender sage green, through which
the red shows more and more in dappling spots as they ripen, making them
a most beautiful warm gray.
I am quite sure that the fairies make jam of these, stowing it away in
wild-cherry stone jars, built for them by the stone-mason wood mice, who
are very busy with the wild-cherry stones about this time. They drill a
little round hole in each and extract the kernel, then put the stones
away in their storehouses for sale to the fairies. I have often found
these storehouses with the stones put away in them, but have never been
fortunate enough to find the fairy larder with the jam in the jars.
I often wonder what the fairies think of the fruit of the nodding
_trillium_, which you will find in the wood now with the others. I fancy
they look upon it with wonder and amazement as a miracle of agriculture,
just as we, about this time, wonder at the vast pumpkin exhibited at the
county fair. It is sometimes almost an inch in diameter, roundish, with
six angles or flutings on it, and a very vivid crimson in color.
To the fairies they must seem to grow, like cocoanuts, on palm trees,
for the _trillium’s_ erect stem, bearing its spreading palm-like leaves
only at the top, is a foot or so high. I imagine they gather these as
they fall with great glee, and stow them away for winter use in making
fairy pumpkin pies. Often in autumn, along woodland paths in the night,
I have seen a faint glow where I was about to set my foot. Always I step
aside carefully, for I have been told that this soft, greenish light
comes from glowworms.
Yet it is more than likely that sometimes the fairy urchins have been
allowed to make jack-o’-lanterns from the smaller of these _trillium_
pumpkins, and this faint glow is the fairy candle within these. After
stepping aside you should bend your head and listen. If you hear faint,
tinkling laughter, inexpressibly sweet and fine, it is the urchins out
with their jack-o’-lanterns, and laughing in glee that they have
succeeded in scaring someone.
THE LAND OF SPRUCE
The seamed and wrinkled face of Katahdin, brown and weather-beaten,
looks over twenty-five miles of unbroken forest eastward to “Number One”
plantation, through which runs the fine gray line of the Patten road.
Southward for miles upon miles, northward for miles upon other miles it
stretches, taut and straight as a bowstring, narrow as a creed, and as
inexorable.
On either side of it, here and there, the hand of man has hewn an open
space for a farm. Yet you may stand on the summit of the ridge at Number
One and look eastward for forty miles and see only the unbroken green of
the forest, with the black lances of the firs and spruce stabbing the
sky. The thin gray road seems about to be crushed and wiped off the
world by these green eastern and western millstones which press upon it.
They smooth off the boundaries of the farm spaces, roll over fences, and
crush them into the black earth beneath. The lone farmer fights
valiantly against this, but sooner or later old age gets him, or a fire
burns his buildings; then the forest rolls majestically on and over him.
That is what it has done up on Number One. On the long white line of the
Patten road a single house and farm buildings remain. These mark General
Winfield Scott’s farthest north during the Aroostook war, three-quarters
of a century ago, when Maine and New Brunswick quarreled over boundary
lines. I can but fancy that the general, who had traveled that long,
thin line of straight road, from Bangor to Lincoln, to Mattawamkeag,
and thence to Number One, up hill and down dale, with never a curve to
rest the eye or avoid a hill, sighed thankfully when he learned that he
need not reach his journey’s end.
Along this road in his day, and for fifty years after, trailed the tote
teams laden with goods for northern Aroostook, returning weighted with
the products of the forest. Four and six-horse teams they were, and they
traveled sometimes a dozen in a procession, doubling hitches at some
steep pitch and hauling the wagons over, one by one. The road was a busy
one then, and the old taverns strung along at intervals of a dozen miles
or so rang with life. To-day those that remain are bleak and deserted,
and only a few remain. The others have been burned at one time or
another.
Along this road came Thoreau on his trip into the Maine woods, and you
may yet see the doorstone on which he stood and looked across to the
store across the street, which was so diminutive that the stout
proprietor, as he said, had to come out to let a customer in. Thoreau
might well have been surprised could he have known the volume of
business done in this diminutive store, which was really only the office
of the big barn behind, which held the goods in bulk. No wonder a
proprietor waxes fat when people hitch up and drive fifteen or twenty
miles to trade at his store, the only one within that distance.
To-day of South Moluncus not much more than the thresholds remains, the
whole village having been wiped out by fire. But the glory of the place
had departed long since. The railroad which brings civilization and
prosperity to some places takes it away from others; and Mattawamkeag
and Kingman thrive, while South Moluncus and other once busy little
centers in the virgin forest along the old Patten road are like the
cities of old Greece, but memories and ash heaps. The porcupine noses
unmolested in many a cellar along the narrow way, the deer browse
undisturbed on the apple trees, and over the once prosperous farms
passes the resistless, majestic march of the forest.
It cannot subdue that thin gray line of road, because the hand of man is
set to the keeping of it open; but it crowds to the wheelruts, and in
places where the pitch is steep and later builders have deviated from
the straight line and made a curve so that the hill might be climbed
more easily, it has swooped upon this untraveled bit and made forest of
it again with amazing celerity.
That is the one astounding thing in this whole region of northern
Maine,--the regenerative power of the forest. What could stand before
the surgent growth of its young trees? Men with axes have been hacking
at the giants of the wood up here for two centuries and more. The
goliaths have been laid low indeed, yet for one tree that stood on a
given space along the hillsides and in the valleys of Number One a
century ago five stand to-day.
They are giants no more, it is true, but they are splendid trees; and
just as the Liliputians might prevail where Gulliver was bound, so these
trees hold their own against man and even press in on his clearings and
wipe them out. There must be many more lumbermen with axes along the
Macwahoc, the Moluncus, and the Mattawamkeag before this beautiful
region will fail of its forest.
Over on the ridge, some miles to the westward of the Macwahoc-Kingman
road, stands a sole survivor of the old-time pumpkin pines. Forty and
fifty feet from the earth toward its limbs the birches and beeches lift
whispering leaves. Timber and cat-spruce and resinous fir spire higher
yet and fling incense toward him. Sixty and seventy feet they reach,
growing tenuous to the tip of nothingness, yet the stately column of his
trunk soars half a hundred feet beyond their tops, lonely and
unapproachable.
It was to forests of such trees as these that our great-grandfathers
brought their axes,--a forest that we unlucky moderns may see here in
our dreams only. We are fortunate in having the stumps left, for they
still stand along the Moluncus in much the same form that they stood
when the lumberman’s axe was yet pitchy with their chips. The roots are
still sound wood, and it may be another half-century before they decay
and add to the richness of the dense forest mold about them.
The stumps, five or six feet in diameter, and often as high as your
head, showing in what depth of snow our ancestors worked at their
logging, hold their shape in many instances. Around the base is a
circular ring of dark rich mold which was once the bark on the stump.
This has in every case fallen off and crumbled to humus, leaving the
heart-wood exposed. Mosses gray and green cling to this and cover it,
and because it retains its shape you might almost think it sound, but a
kick or a stab with your walking-stick will prove the opposite. It is
but punk, standing in the breathless, windless silence of the wood, mute
monument to a glory that is departed, waiting itself to pass on at a
touch.
What the glory and solemnity of the Maine forest must have been when
these giants were the columns to the temple of the woods we can but
dream. In the dense shade of their dark, interlocking boughs no
deciduous growth could thrive, and their own lower branches died for
lack of sunlight and passed in time, leaving behind no scars to mar the
splendid columns that rose fifty or sixty feet clear without knob or
limb.
Out of these lofty, silent spaces must have stepped the tall gods of the
red men, nor can one imagine the Indians themselves traversing them in
other than silent reverence. Nor yet can we of a stronger race stand
among their moss-grown stumps to-day without feeling the worshipful awe
of the forest strong upon us. The gods are gone indeed, but the demigods
remain. The spruces and firs, foster children of the great pines, stand
close-set upon the ground that they once occupied and rear again the
temple toward heaven in pinnacles and spires where once were
darkly-vaulted domes.
You may worship here still, as I feel that you might have worshiped
under the great pines, and I can but feel, too, that among the firs the
wood gods are nearer and more gently kind than they may have been among
the elder trees. The giant on the ridge, looming so high in cold
reserve, seems too lonely and far away for human companionship. The
spruces and firs are your friends, while yet the deep wood which they
make loses no whit of its solemn nobility.
The timber-spruce, as it is commonly called, seems to drop its lower
limbs a little more readily than its darker boughed brother, which goes
by the name of cat-spruce among the local lumbermen, to thus prepare
itself for the lumberman’s axe as yielding a timber in which at a given
age are fewer knots. White and black spruce, the botanists call them,
they and the lumbermen definitely distinguishing between the two by
minute differences, which to the new-comer in the big wood are not so
easily appreciable.
You may know the fir more readily. It seems to me a tree of a finer,
sweeter soul than any other evergreen. George Kimball, the novelist, who
wrote “Piney Home” about the people who dwell among the quaint farms and
silent stretches of interminable forests along the Moluncus and
Macwahoc, puts it pithily and prettily when he says: “The spruces wear
their hair pompadour; the firs part theirs in the middle.”
The fir, indeed, is a Quaker lady among evergreen trees, with her hair
so smoothly parted, her dark, unassuming, yet beautiful garb, and that
soothing, alluring, healing fragrance which floats ever about her like
an atmosphere of sincerity and loveliness. It seems as if all the wounds
of all the other denizens of the wood might be brought to her to heal,
so loving is her presence, so benign the soothing influence that floats
from her amber tears.
The sap of all trees has something of goodness and delight in it. The
maples bear sugar that is more than sweetness; it has in it some Attic
salt that makes the imagination smack its lips. The brew of the birch is
more than beer; it is the embodiment of a flavor that bears dreams of
rosy mornings on woody ridges that look down on the golden glory of the
primeval world. So the faint fragrance of the fir floats like a divine
presence from a loving heart that would fain clasp to itself the wounded
and stricken of the world and dress their wounds and make them whole
again. No wonder custom has adopted the fir for the Christmas tree.
There is no tree so fit to bear loving gifts to all the world.
The spruce partridge, as he is commonly called up here, the Canada
grouse (_Dendragapus canadensis_) of the scientists, is a bird that I
find very common and amazingly unafraid under the spruce and fir in
these northern woods. He is a smaller, grayer, darker bird than the
ruffed grouse which is the familiar bird of our home woods. Up here they
call the latter “birch partridge,” because he feeds on birch buds,
while the spruce partridge feeds on the tips of the spruce. The birch
partridge is more wary. As at home, he thunders up from the underbrush
and shoots himself across space and into the shelter of the farther wood
like an indignant cannonball.
The spruce partridge winds along the brakes and undergrowth just ahead
of you, or in the more open space under the dense evergreens flutters up
into the lower branches, and seems to think himself secure there. I have
stood among a flock of these beautiful creatures while they called
faintly and reassuringly to one another,--so near that I might see every
minute detail of plumage. Then, before they flew, I stepped quietly up
and touched the soft feathers of the one on the lowest branch.
Then, indeed, panic fear seemed to
[Illustration: Seems to think himself secure there]
strike the flock at one blow, and they whirred into the dense green of
some tender, motherly firs, whose arms closed about them and hid them
from all rude intrusion. These birds are smaller than the ruffed grouse,
though they are plump and beautiful creatures, and, because they feed on
the spruce tips, are said to have flesh too strongly spiced to be
palatable. I am glad of that. After the friendly way in which they
received me into their community, to shoot and eat them would be a good
deal like going out and bagging the neighborhood children on their way
to primary school.
You soon get to feel that way about the deer up here in the Macwahoc
woods. All along the lumber roads you may see their tracks, their keen
hoofs cutting pointed marks in the soft mold of the wayside. If you have
come silently and the wind is right you may swing a curve and be in
time to hear a buck stamp and blow before he sees you and flips his flag
and bounds off into the brush. Or you may see a slender doe pirouette
like a ballet-dancing wood nymph and float away, with a stiff-legged,
dappled fawn prancing after.
The creatures of the wilderness, when startled, seem to have a singular
scorn of earth. You hardly note that they spurn it from beneath them as
they depart. The coyote and jack-rabbit of the western plains do not
seem to run; they simply float over the sage-brush, to your following
vision much as a hawk does, only far swifter. So I have seen a fox sail
along, seemingly about three feet in the air all the time, over a
Massachusetts pasture. It is amazingly like flight. A startled Macwahoc
deer in the same way seems to unconsciously acquire the true principle
of the aeroplane.
In among the hackmatacks and arbor vitæ in the lower land the
golden-winged woodpeckers are gathering in numbers in preparation for
their fall migration southward. You may hear the vigorous note of the
approaching single bird as he stops for a moment on a spruce top.
“Kee-yer, kee-yer, kee-yer,” he shouts, with the accent on the yer. It
has all the loud nasal twang of the stage Yankee, and the bird is as
ludicrously awkward in his ways, sometimes.
If you step softly through the swamp you may find a group of them going
through a grotesque dance, seemingly for their own amusement. They
spread their tails stiffly, walk along limbs with mincingly awkward
gait, and bob and bow to one another, saying, meanwhile, “Wee tew, wee
tew, wee tew.” It is an amusing performance, and is apt to be
interrupted by your guffaw of laughter, at which, whirls of white, gold,
and black, with a dash of red, they fly away to repeat the performance
in some undiscovered retreat.
The flicker, which is another of the fifty-seven varieties of alias
under which the golden-winged woodpecker sometimes travels, is, I
believe, the most brainy of the woodpecker tribe. Having brains he has
also humor, and from the time he takes his first flight from the high
hole in some woodland stub till pigeon hawk or barred owl cuts short his
flickering, he is making a joke of things.
Like the flickers, the crows of northern Maine migrate southward in
winter. The deep, long-remaining snows cover their sources of food too
deep, and they find the clam flats of the coast a sure refuge and a
well-stocked larder. Just now they are waxing fat on grasshoppers,
marching in long lines across the open fields, lines from which no
careless hopper may escape, and croaking contentment as they go.
They will stay until the snows drive them, however, and even in winter
an occasional scout makes a quick flight north just to see how the land
lies. It is but a half-day’s trip up and back. I wish I might, too, be
able to reach the land of the mother firs as easily when I feel the need
of them. However, the aeroplane is in the incubator, and, unless the
Wrights go wrong, perhaps next year or the year after I shall.
BIRDS OF THE NOR’EASTER
Our weather here in eastern Massachusetts comes from the southwest.
Whirling storms, little or big, move up from the Gulf coast and pass on,
headed for Spitzbergen by way of Newfoundland. Knowing the habits of
these whirling winds, the watchers of the weather bureau are able to
say, as a rule quite accurately, when the storm will reach us, from what
direction the winds will blow, and what they will bring with them and
after them,--rain, gale, or fair weather.
One exception to this rule of accuracy is when the storm center, instead
of reasonably and politely following the usual route, skips suddenly out
to sea by way of Hatteras and goes roaring up the easterly edge of the
Gulf Stream. That is when the weather signs that you find on the
southeast corner of the front page, evening edition, fail, for that is
when we catch our unexpected northeaster.
“Back to the wind in the northern hemisphere,” says the rule, “and the
storm center is on your left.” So, with the wind whirling its
thousand-mile circuit about this mysterious center halfway across the
Atlantic, we get it from the northeast, and it brings whiffs of
mid-ocean spume to our nostrils that are weary of the summer’s heat, and
clothes all the land with the gray mists out of which grew the Norse
sagas.
On days when the northeaster sings along the Gloucester shore, tears
white wraiths off the red rocks of Marblehead and Nahant, and spins them
in beaten spume along the gray sands of Nantasket, we of the inland
country tread our heat-browned pastures with lifted heads, watching
mysterious vapors wrap the land in legend, breathing the same air as the
stormy petrel, and knowing that in our hearts the strong pulse beats
with the blood of vikings.
On such days I love to watch the pond shore and the reedy stretches of
the meadow marsh, for to them come the first of the wild migrants of
autumn, and in the northeaster you may exchange greetings with the
winter yellow-legs, just down from the Arctic shore. To-day I heard
them, high in the invisible realms of the upper mists, whirling down to
me,--gray forms out of a gray sky that seemed to loose them as it later
will loose snowflakes.
Their staccato whistle in its minor chromatics shrills forth four notes
over and over again,--notes lonesome with the heartache of northern
barrens, wild as the echoes of ice cliffs that never rang responsive to
voices other than those of the eerie birds of Arctic seas; a
high-pitched plaint that might well be the shrilling of a little lost
wind crying for its mother. You may imitate this whistle well enough to
deceive the birds and bring them swirling within range of your gun if
you will, though you can never put into it the wild plaint that echoes
of far-off, lonely spaces.
The yellow-legs do not come as often as they used, and it is some years
since I have seen even a small flock of the beautiful little blue-winged
teal that were once so plentiful that the rustle of their wings was a
familiar thing at daybreak on the marsh. I miss them both. It is worth a
tramp to pond or marsh to hobnob even for a brief moment of interchange
of friendly greetings with such travelers. The winter yellow-legs may
summer in the extreme Arctic and winter in Patagonia. The teal’s range
is less, though he may breed in Alaska and winter in South America.
Their loss, here in the east, is the price we pay for civilization of
our present sort. I daresay it is worth it, but I believe there is a
better sort that does not come so high in the loss of wilderness
friends.
Along the pond shore, after the yellow-legs have dashed in upon us,
whistled the wind full of loneliness and heartache, and dashed away
again like ghosts of gray snow-flurries yet to be, it is a pleasure to
watch the homely antics of the spotted sandpipers. Of these you may find
a pair or two about the pond all summer long, no doubt having a nest in
some grassy meadow nearby. By the time the equinoctial northeaster is
due, this pair or two has become oftentimes a dozen, preparing for their
flight to the shores of the Caribbean Sea, where they will spend the
winter, yet loth to leave New England.
These birds are never much afraid of me. If I approach too near they
sing out peevishly, “Peet-weet, peet-weet,” and half-circle in a short
level flight out over the water and back again to the shore. Indeed, I
strongly suspect their attitude toward my intrusion is one of humorous
scorn. They are apt to face me as I come quite near, and bow low with
what seems the exaggeration of politeness, only they immediately turn
about and bow just as politely the other way, which flips their white
tail feathers in my direction with a gesture which is certainly one of
ill-bred contempt.
Then they fly away, leaving me in doubt as to whether they mean it or
not. Probably, however, there is nothing distinctly personal in it. The
legs of the spotted sandpiper are hitched to the body with muscles that
seem to act like springs, and he can’t help teetering when he attempts
to stand still, hence his popular names of teeter, teeter-tail, etc.
Along with the spotted sandpipers at this time of year I am apt to find
the ring-necked or piping plover, these already on their autumnal
migration, for they breed from Labrador northward. They differ little
from the sandpiper in size, but you will readily know them by the white
collar which encircles the neck, with a little black vest partly defined
just below it. Modest, busy little chaps they are, running about on the
sands, picking up insects and minute _crustaceæ_, continually
twittering “Peep, peep,” and caring little for your approach until,
finally frightened, they rise as one bird and fly away in a compact
flock.
I have never seen these birds swim, though their half-webbed feet would
seem to indicate that they can. Though, for that matter, birds that have
no webbing at all between the toes sometimes swim well when forced to
it. The common barn-yard hen, thrown into the water, will sit erect and
swim as a duck might until her feathers are wet through.
To the pond with the autumnal northeaster usually comes a pied-billed
grebe or two. If you are sharp eyed and fortunate you may see one
beating his way down the wind with rapid strokes of his ludicrously
short wings. His flight is something like that of a duck, though I think
he makes harder work of it, more wing strokes to the minute; but you
will know him as he nears you, for no duck ever stretched his head so
eagerly forward or carried his legs dangling so far astern.
The bird should be at ease on land, for he has a bill like a hen, and
his toes are lobed merely, not connected with webbing. But he is not. On
foot he is slow, clumsy, and ludicrously ungainly. Probably for this
reason the grebe does not go near land when he can help it. Even his
nest is built on the water, sometimes actually floating, a mass of
rotten sedge and mud, and the chicks swim and dive like old birds as
soon as hatched. But if the land gait of the grebe is ludicrous and his
flight laborious, in the water he is the personification of grace, ease,
and agility.
Well does he merit one of his familiar names,--that of water-witch.
When the hunters go forth to the marsh I am sorry for my innocent
friends, the blue-winged teal. I know how few fly now where once the air
would seem full of them. When I hear the quacking of live decoys my
heart misgives me for the fate of the black duck, for I know how their
fellow-feeling and sociable instinct will bring them in to the blind
where the gunners are hidden.
Neither decoys nor dead shots give me any qualms of uneasiness where the
pied-billed grebe is concerned. The decoys may split their throats in
calling to him when they see him swim by just out of gunshot. He will
not even turn his head. It may be that he has a voice; I have never
heard him use it. When it is in the open with fair play, grebe against
gun, my sympathies are with the gunner, for I know how great cry and
little wool will result.
I have seen a pied-billed grebe cornered in a narrow, shallow river by
gunners on each bank. He dove at the flash of the first gun, and though
it was point-blank range, he was under water before the shot could reach
him. He was up again and under a dozen times, to be followed by a dozen
shots, only wasted. No wonder the hunters call him “hell-diver.” I have
seen it stated in nature books that this name is given him because of
the extreme depth to which he is supposed to go. No doubt the grebe goes
deep when he wishes to, but the gunners haven’t taken that into
consideration. The name is one symptom of the profanity which his
exceptional skill necessitates.
At the end of a dozen shots the grebe cornered in the river decided in
his slow way that he was being hunted while above water, so he simply
failed to come up. A grebe has been known to stay under five minutes
when loosening water-weeds for its nest or when pursuing fish for its
supper. This one was seen no more by the gunners, and after waiting half
an hour or so they went away, firm in the belief that the last shot had
really reached him, but that he had in his death throes become entangled
in water-weeds and remained there. Comforting for the gunners, no doubt,
and very satisfactory to the grebe. Ten minutes after they had
disappeared the bird reappeared and went on feeding as before.
He had simply been floating along, under water all but the tip of its
bill, which protruded as far as the nostrils and gave him ample
opportunity to breathe. All these are clever feats, of course, but are
explicable. The grebe has to live, either on or in the water, and he has
learned how to do it even with the hand of man against him. He has one
other trick, however, the mechanism of which I have never been able to
understand. Swimming along on the surface he will, if he cares to,
suddenly sink as if made of lead, feet first. How does he do this? One
moment he is as buoyant as a cork; the next he goes down like a
flatiron. “Spirit duck” is another name of his. He deserves it.
Another bird that is always linked, in my mind, with the sea wind
beating the long marsh grasses into panicled waves and the fine rain of
the equinoctial hanging the sheltered culms with strung pearls, is the
Carolina rail. Some of them breed hereabouts, but the greater number of
them are on their way from Labrador, where they have brought up the
season’s young, to the banks of the Orinoco or the steaming swamps that
border the Amazon.
How they ever make the flight back and forth each year is one of those
mysteries of which the wilderness world is fascinatingly full. Hardly
with threats and beating of bushes can you drive them out of the marsh
grass. When one of them does take to the wing it is with reluctance and
apology for his awkwardness oozing from every pore. If you will put some
brown feathers, a pair of dangling legs, and two short, inadequate wings
on a misshapen bottle and send it fluttering through the air over the
grass tops for a rod or two, you will have a good imitation of a
Carolina rail protesting at being kicked out of the _Poa serotina_.
Once is always enough for him. You may go to the exact spot where he
dropped into the grass again and raise all the hullabaloo you wish. Only
with a dog can you start him out again, and the third time he will not
flush even for the dog. Yet with this equipment _Porzana carolina_
leaves Labrador in the latter part of August and arrives in Venezuela
during November! Perhaps he does part of the journey on foot, for he is
certainly better equipped for walking than for flight.
The rail is the incarnation of timidity, and you may look long even when
the marsh is full of them before you see one. The best way is to slip
your canoe quietly up some narrow creek where the tall grass waves far
above your head and lie silent in it where you may scan either bank.
Trampling through the grass it seems thick almost to impenetrability,
but with your head on a level with its roots rather than the tops, you
will see that it is full of Gothic-arched aisles, sometimes widening
into under-grass cathedrals with nave and transept, sometimes narrowing
into invisibility, though there is always a secret door through which
the initiated may pass.
Down the widest of these aisles comes the runway of the muskrat. Through
the tallest of them may stalk the bittern with his long neck stretched
straight out before him, and his sharp bill pointing the way. These are
the broad highways of the marsh, but the rail does not travel them much.
Even their seclusion is too public for him. He prefers the narrowing
passages that lead him to close-pressed grass culms. These cannot bar
his way, for that peculiar wedge-shaped build which makes him so
ridiculous on the wing is just what he needs here. It allows him to
follow the point of his bill and slip through the thickest growth of
culms without a rustle and without disturbing the tops. Hence if you are
fortunate enough to see him, he is just as likely to step forth from a
solid wall of grass as from one of the pointed arches of the openings
along the way.
You will not hear the grass rustle nor see it move, but the rail will be
there, intent and preternaturally solemn. His head is thrust downward
and forward, his tail is cocked nervously high behind, and he walks
gingerly, as if apologizing to the mud for making tracks in it. You may
see him climb a rush by clutching it with his toes, and feed on the
seeds above; you may see him swim deftly across the creek, for he is a
good swimmer. But the least motion on your part will send him into the
thick grass again so quickly that he seems to dematerialize.
Old gunners tell me that a rail will slip under water and cling to a
reed with only his bill above the surface, thus imitating the grebe in
his methods of concealment. They say that when hard pushed by dogs and
guns they go entirely beneath the surface and sometimes cling there
until drowned; also that they have known rails to go into fits and
finally swoon from fright. I cannot vouch for these things myself, but I
believe that if any bird ever swooned from fright it was a Carolina
rail.
Duck, grebe, plover, and rail may come to us storm-driven by the stress
of the equinoctial. Not so the loon. He rides the northeaster, and you
may hear him whooping in wild glee as he slides down the gale. His gray
breast is brave to buffet gray crests of Arctic seas and his mighty
thighs are built to drive the broad webbing of his agile feet till he
whirls through icy waters like a spirit. Alert, defiant, mighty, he is a
familiar figure of the wild gale that has spun a thousand miles across
turbulent seas, and when he lights in our inland waters he comes not for
refuge, but because the restless joy of storm riding has happened to
bring him hither.
Shoot at him if you will. He is under, unharmed at the flash of your
gun, and he may swim a half-mile, if he cares to, before coming up
again. Then you may hear him laugh in scornful good humor, “Hoo, hoo,
hoo, hoo,” for little he cares for you. He knows enough to keep out of
your way, but you cannot feel that he is afraid of you. When he goes out
again, welting the gale with his strong wings and boring straight into
the wild heart of the northeaster, the pond is lonely, the marsh flat
and insipid, and it is time for dry clothes and the comfort of glowing
logs in the wide fireplace.
THE SQUIRREL HARVEST
The red squirrel is a good deal like me,--he never can wait for the
chestnuts to open. As long ago as early September I used to see him
going up and down the trunks of trees neighboring the chestnuts,
sputtering and exploding his way along in a jerky unrhythm. He would go
up the trunk as a light-weight, motor-skipping runabout goes up a steep
hill, trembling all over as he fizzed along with barking explosions.
He had his eye on the closed burs, densely set with green spines, and he
was angry because he was liable to get his tongue pierced in getting
them open. But it did not matter. The milk-white pulp in the brown
shells was too tempting. All this last month he has been going to the
very tips of the limbs of the highest trees, clinging there as only a
red squirrel can, and gnawing the burs loose. When a sufficient number
of these were strewn on the ground beneath he would motor down there,
and with the piston still chugging occasionally, just to prove to
himself that he could start his car at a second’s notice, cut
expeditiously through the defiant prickles and smack his wounded lips
over the kernels within.
Meanwhile, in common with most of the boys in town, I, too, have been
having my troubles with the chestnut burs. A boy understands that the
red squirrel gets the burs after the fashion of the real sport, and so
far as he can he is willing to do the same. But the smaller limbs of the
chestnut are brittle, and under the best of circumstances it is a
[Illustration: The red squirrel gets the burs after the fashion of the
real sport]
dangerous thing to go far enough out on them to reach the tips.
Light-weight, daring boys sometimes do this, and often fall in the
attempt, as accident records show. Sometimes the squirrel falls too,
though this is of comparatively rare occurrence.
The wild creatures of the wood are as liable to accident as you and I,
but they are not so prone to it. That severe pruning which wild life
gives all who are robust enough to live it lops off all the clumsy
branches of the squirrel family tree. Few but the cool-headed and
skillful live to reproduce many of their kind.