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THE CLERK OF THE WOODS
* * * * * *
Books by Mr. Torrey.
THE CLERK OF THE WOODS. 16mo, $1.10, _net._ Postpaid, $1.20.
FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA. 16mo, $1.10, _net._ Postpaid, $1.19.
EVERYDAY BIRDS. Elementary Studies. With twelve colored Illustrations
reproduced from Audubon. Square 12mo, $1.00.
BIRDS IN THE BUSH. 16mo, $1.25.
A RAMBLER’S LEASE. 16mo, $1.25.
THE FOOT-PATH WAY. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25.
A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK. 16mo, $1.25.
SPRING NOTES FROM TENNESSEE. 16mo, $1.25.
A WORLD OF GREEN HILLS. 16mo, $1.25.
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK.
* * * * * *
THE CLERK OF THE WOODS
by
BRADFORD TORREY
“News of birds and blossoming.”
SHELLEY.
[Illustration: The Riverside Press]
Boston and New York
Houghton, Mifflin and Company
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1904
Copyright 1903 by Bradford Torrey
All Rights Reserved
Published September, 1903
PREFATORY NOTE
The chapters of this book were written week by week for simultaneous
publication in the “Evening Transcript” of Boston and the “Mail
and Express” of New York, and were intended to be a kind of weekly
chronicle of the course of events out-of-doors, as witnessed by
a natural-historical observer. The title of the volume is the
running title under which the articles were printed in the “Evening
Transcript.” It was chosen as expressive of the modest purpose of the
writer, whose business was not to be witty or wise, but simply to
“keep the records.”
CONTENTS
PAGE
A SHORT MONTH 1
A FULL MIGRATION 9
A FAVORITE ROUND 17
IN THE CAMBRIDGE SWAMP 25
A QUIET AFTERNOON 34
POPULAR WOODPECKERS 42
LATE SUMMER NOTES 50
WOOD SILENCE 60
SOUTHWARD BOUND 67
FOUR DREAMERS 74
A DAY IN FRANCONIA 82
WITH THE WADERS 91
ON THE NORTH SHORE AGAIN 104
AUTUMNAL MORALITIES 117
A TEXT FROM THOREAU 127
THE PLEASURES OF MELANCHOLY 135
IN THE OLD PATHS 142
THE PROSPERITY OF A WALK 152
SIGNS OF SPRING 159
OLD COLONY BERRY PASTURES 168
SQUIRRELS, FOXES, AND OTHERS 177
WINTER AS IT WAS 186
“DOWN AT THE STORE” 194
BIRDS AT THE WINDOW 203
A GOOD-BY TO WINTER 212
BIRD SONGS AND BIRD TALK 219
CHIPMUNKS, BLUEBIRDS, AND ROBINS 226
MARCH SWALLOWS 233
WOODCOCK VESPERS 242
UNDER APRIL CLOUDS 250
FLYING SQUIRRELS AND SPADE-FOOT FROGS 258
THE WARBLERS ARE COMING 267
INDEX 275
THE CLERK OF THE WOODS
THE CLERK OF THE WOODS
A SHORT MONTH
May is the shortest month in the year. February is at least twice as
long. For a month is like a movement of a symphony; and when we speak
of the length of a piece of music we are not thinking of the number of
notes in it, but of the time it takes to play them. May is a scherzo,
and goes like the wind. Yesterday it was just beginning, and to-day it
is almost done. “If we could only hold it back!” an outdoor friend of
mine used to say. And I say so, too. At the most generous calculation I
cannot have more than a hundred more of such months to hope for, and I
wish the Master’s _baton_ would not hurry the _tempo_. But who knows?
Perhaps there will be another series of concerts, in a better music
hall.
The world hereabout will never be more beautiful than it was eight or
ten days ago, with the sugar maples and the Norway maples in bloom and
the tall valley willows in young yellow-green leaf. And now forsythia
is having its turn. How thick it is! I should not have believed it half
so common. Every dooryard is bright with its sunny splendor. “Sunshine
bush,” it deserves to be called, with no thought of disrespect for Mr.
Forsyth, whoever he may have been. I look at the show while it lasts.
In a week or two the bushes will all have gone out of commission, so
to speak, till the year comes round again. Shrubs are much in the case
of men and women; the amount of attention they receive depends mainly
on the dress they happen to have on at the moment. In my next-door
neighbor’s yard there is a forsythia bush, not exceptionally large or
handsome, that gives me as much pleasure as one of those wonderful
tulip beds of which the Boston city gardeners make so much account.
Are a million tulips, all of one color, crowded tightly together and
bordered by a row of other tulips, all of another color, really so much
more beautiful than a hundred or two, of various tints, loosely and
naturally disposed? I ask the question without answering it, though I
could answer it easily enough, so far as my own taste is concerned.
Already there is much to admire in the wild garden. Spice-bush blossoms
have come and gone, and now the misty shad-blow is beginning to whiten
all the hedges and the borders of the wood, while sassafras trees have
put forth pretty clusters of yellowish flowers for the few that will
come out to see them. Sun-bright, cold-footed cowslips still hold their
color along shaded brooks. “Marsh marigolds,” some critical people tell
us we must call them. That is a good name, too; but the flowers are
no more marigolds than cowslips, and with or without reason (partly,
it may be, because my unregenerate nature resents the “must”), I like
the word I was brought up with. Anemones and violets are becoming
plentiful, and the first columbines already swing from the clefts
of outcropping ledges. With them one is almost certain to find the
saxifrage. The two are fast friends, though very unlike; the columbine
drooping and swaying so gracefully, its honey-jars upside down, the
saxifrage holding upright its cluster of tiny white cups, like so many
wine-glasses on a tray. Both are children’s flowers,--an honorable
class,--and have in themselves, to my apprehension, a kind of childish
innocence and sweetness. If we picked no other blossoms, down in the
Old Colony, we always picked these two--these and the nodding anemone
and the pink lady’s-slipper.
This showy orchid, by the way, I was pleased a year ago to see in
bloom side by side with the trailing arbutus. One was near the end of
its flowering season, the other just at the beginning, but there they
stood, within a few yards of each other. This was in the Franconia
Notch, at the foot of Echo Lake, where plants bloom when they can,
rather than according to any calendar known to down-country people;
where within the space of a dozen yards you may see the dwarf cornel,
for example, in all stages of growth; here, where a snowbank stayed
late, just peeping out of the ground, and there, in a sunnier spot,
already in full bloom.
In May the birds come home. This is really what makes the month so
short. There is no time to see half that is going on. In this town
alone it would take a score of good walkers, good lookers, and good
listeners to welcome all the pretty creatures that will this month
return from their winter’s exile. Some came in March, of course, and
more in April; but now they are coming in troops. It is great fun to
see them; a pleasure inexpressible to wake in the morning, as I did
this morning (May 8), and still lying in bed, to hear the first breezy
fifing of a Baltimore oriole, just back over night after an eight
months’ absence. Birds must be lovers of home to continue living in a
climate where life is possible to them only four months of the year.
Six days ago (May 2) a rose-breasted grosbeak gladdened the morning
in a similar manner, though he was a little farther away, so that I
did not hear him until I stepped out upon the piazza. I stood still
a minute or two, listening to the sweet “rolling” warble, and then
crossed the street to have a look at the rose color. It was just as
bright as I remembered it.
Golden warblers (summer yellow-birds) made their appearance on the last
day of April. The next morning one had dropped into an ideal summering
place, a bit of thicket beside a pond and a lively brook,--good
shelter, good bathing, and plenty of insects,--and from the first
moment seemed to have no thought of looking farther. I see and hear him
every time I pass the spot. The same leafless thicket (but it will be
leafy enough by and by) is now inhabited by a catbird. I found him on
the 6th, already much at home, feeding, singing, and mewing. Between
him and his small, high-colored neighbor there is no sign of rivalry or
ill-feeling; but if another catbird or a second warbler should propose
settlement in that clump of shrubbery, I have no doubt there would be
trouble.
May-day brought me the yellow-throated vireo, the parula warbler, the
white-throated sparrow, and the least flycatcher, the last two pretty
late, by my reckoning. On the 2d came the warbling vireo, the veery,--a
single silent bird, the only one I have yet seen,--the kingbird,
the Maryland yellow-throat, the oven-bird, and the chestnut-sided
warbler, in addition to the grosbeak before mentioned. Then followed a
spell of cold, unfavorable weather, and nothing more was listed until
the 6th. That day I saw a Nashville warbler,--several days tardy,--a
catbird, and a Swainson thrush. On May 7, I heard my first prairie
warbler, and to-day has brought the oriole, the wood thrush, one silent
red-eyed vireo (it is good to know that this voluble “preacher” _can_
be silent), and the redstart. It never happened to me before, I think,
to see the Swainson thrush earlier than the wood. That I have done so
this season is doubtless the result of some accident, on one side or
the other. The Swainson was a little ahead of his regular schedule, I
feel sure; but on the other hand, it may almost be taken for granted
that a few wood thrushes have been in the neighborhood for several
days. The probability that any single observer will light upon the very
first silent bird of a given species that drops into a township must be
slight indeed. What we see, we tell of; but that is only the smallest
part of what happens.
Some of our winter birds still go about in flocks, notably the
waxwings, the goldfinches, and the purple finches. Two days ago I
noticed a goldfinch that was almost in full nuptial dress; as bright
as he ever would be, I should say, but with the black and the yellow
still running together a little here and there. Purple finches are
living high--in two senses--just at present; feeding on the pendent
flower-buds of tall beech trees. A bunch of six or eight that I watched
the other day were literally stuffing themselves, till I thought of
turkeys stuffed with chestnuts. Their capacity was marvelous, and I
left them still feasting. All the while one of them kept up a happy
musical chatter. There is no reason, I suppose, why a poet should not
be a good feeder.
A FULL MIGRATION
One of my friends, a bird lover like myself, used to complain that
by the end of May he was worn out with much walking. His days were
consumed at a desk,--“the cruel wood,” as Charles Lamb called it,--but
so long as migrants were passing his door he could not help trying
to see them. Morning and night, therefore, he was on foot, now in
the woods, now in the fields, now in shaded by-roads, now in bogs
and swamps. To see all kinds of birds, a man must go to all kinds of
places. Sometimes he trudged miles to visit a particular spot, in which
he hoped to find a particular species. Before the end of the month
he must have one hundred and twenty or one hundred and twenty-five
names in his “monthly list;” and to accomplish this, much leg-work was
necessary.
I knew how to sympathize with him. Short as May is,--too short by
half,--I have before now felt something like relief at its conclusion.
Now, then, I have said, the birds that are here will stay for at least
a month or two, and life may be lived a little more at leisure.
This year,[1] by all the accounts that reach me, the migration has been
of extraordinary fullness. Only last night a man took a seat by me in
an electric car and said, what for substance I have heard from many
others, that he and his family, who live in a desirably secluded, woody
spot, had never before seen so many birds, especially so many warblers.
How wiser men than myself explain this unusual state of things I do not
know. To me it seems likely that the unseasonable cold weather caught
the first large influx of May birds in our latitude, and held them here
while succeeding waves came falling in behind them. The current was
dammed, so to speak, and of course the waters rose.
Some persons, I hear, had strange experiences. I am told of one man
who picked a black-throated blue warbler from a bush, as he might
have picked a berry. I myself noted in New Hampshire, what many
noted hereabouts, the continual presence of warblers on the ground.
’Tis an ill wind that blows nobody good, and our multitude of young
bird students--for, thank Heaven, they _are_ a multitude--had the
opportunity of many years to make new acquaintances. A warbler in the
grass is a comparatively easy subject.
After all, the beginners have the best of it. No knowledge is so
interesting as new knowledge. It may be plentifully mixed with
ignorance and error. Much of it may need to be unlearned. Young people
living about me began to find scarlet tanagers early in April; one
boy or girl has seen a scissor-tailed flycatcher, and orchard orioles
seem to be fairly common; but at least new knowledge has the charm of
freshness. And what a charm that is!--a morning rose, with the dew on
it. The old hand may almost envy the raw recruit--the young woman or
the boy, to whom the sight of a rose-breasted grosbeak, for instance,
is like the sight of an angel from heaven, so strange, so new-created,
so incredibly bright and handsome.
I love to come upon a group or a pair of such enthusiasts at work in
the field, as I not seldom do; all eyes fastened upon a bush or a
branch, one eager, low voice trying to make the rest of the company
see some wonderful object of which the lucky speaker has caught sight.
“There, it has moved to that lower limb! Right through there! Don’t you
see it? Oh, what a beauty!”
I was down by the river the other afternoon. Many canoes were out, and
presently I came to an empty one drawn up against the bank. A few steps
more and I saw, kneeling behind a clump of shrubbery, a young man and
a young woman, each with an opera-glass, and the lady with an open
notebook. “It’s a redstart, isn’t it?” I heard one of them say.
It was too bad to disturb them, but I hope they forgave a sympathetic
elderly stranger, who, after starting toward them and then sidling off,
finally approached near enough to suggest, with a word of apology, that
perhaps they would like to see a pretty bunch of water thrushes just
across the way, about the edges of the pool under yonder big willow.
They seemed grateful, however they may have felt. “Water thrushes!”
the young lady exclaimed, and with hasty “Thank you’s,” very politely
expressed, they started in the direction indicated. It is to be hoped
that they found also the furtive swamp sparrow, of whose presence the
bashful intruder, in the perturbation of his spirits, forgot to inform
them. If they did find it, however, they were sharp-eyed, or were
playing in good luck.
I went on down the river a little way, and soon met three
Irish-American boys coming out of a thicket at the water’s edge. One
of them lifted his cap. “Seen any good birds to-day?” he inquired. I
answered in the affirmative, and turned the question upon its asker.
Yes, he said, he had just seen a catbird and an oriole. I remarked
that there were other people out on the same errand. “Yes,” said he,
pointing toward the brier thicket, “there’s a couple down there now
looking at ’em.” Then I noticed a second empty canoe with its nose
against the bank.
This was on a Saturday. Saturday afternoon and Sunday are busy people’s
days in the woods. For their sakes I am always glad to meet them
there--bird students, flower pickers, or simple strollers; yet I have
learned to look upon those times as my poorest, and to choose others
so far as I can. One does not enjoy nature to great advantage at a
picnic. There are woods and swamps of which on all ordinary occasions
I almost feel myself the owner, but of which on Saturday and Sunday
I have scarcely so much as a rambler’s lease. This I have learned,
however,--and I pass the secret on,--that the Sunday picnic does not
usually begin till after nine o’clock in the forenoon.
When bird study becomes more general than it is now, as it ought to do,
the community will perhaps find means--or, to speak more correctly,
will use means, since there is no need of finding them--to restrain the
present enormous overproduction of English sparrows, and so to give
certain of our American beauties a chance to live.
Two days ago I was walking through a tract of woodland, following the
highway, when I noticed, to my surprise, a white-breasted martin (tree
swallow) just over my head. The next moment he fluttered before a hole
in one of the big telegraph poles. His mate came out, and he alighted
in the entrance, facing outward. And there he sat, while I in my turn
took a seat upon the opposite bank and fell to watching him. The light
struck him squarely, and it was good to see his blue-purple crown and
his bright black eye shining in the sun. He had nothing to do inside,
it appeared, but was simply on guard in his mate’s absence. Once he
yawned. “She’s gone a good while,” he seemed to say. But he kept his
post till she returned. Then, with a chirrup, he was off, and she
dropped into the cavity out of sight.
All this was nothing of itself. But why should a pair of white-breasted
martins, farm-loving, village-loving, house-haunting birds, a delight
to the eye, and as innocent as they are beautiful--why should such
birds be driven to seek a home in a telegraph pole in the woods? The
answer was ready. I walked on, and by and by came to a village, young
and I dare say thriving, but overrun from end to end with English
sparrows, whose incessant clatter--
Soul-desolating strains--alas! too many--
filled my ears. Not a bluebird, not a tree swallow, nor, to all
appearance, any place for one.
And so it is generally. One of my fellow townsmen, however, has an
estate which forms a bright exception. There one sees bluebirds and
martins. Year after year, punctual as the spring itself, they are back
in their old places. And why? Because the owner of the estate, by a
little shooting, mercifully persistent and therefore seldom necessary,
keeps the English sparrows out. My thanks to him. His is the only
colony of martins anywhere in my neighborhood.
A FAVORITE ROUND
After three days of heat, a cool morning. I take an electric car,
leave it at a point five miles away, and in a semicircular course come
round to the track again a mile or two nearer home. This is one of my
favorite walks, such as every stroller finds for himself, affording a
pleasant variety within comfortable distance.
First I come to a plain on which are hay-fields, gardens, and apple
orchards; an open, sunny place where, in the season, one may hope
to find the first bluebird, the first vesper sparrow, or the first
bobolink. A spot where things like these have happened to one has
henceforth a charm of its own. Memory walks beside us, as it were, and
makes good all present deficiencies.
I am hardly here this morning before the tiny, rough voice of a
yellow-winged sparrow reaches me from a field in which the new-mown
grass lies in windrows. Grass or stubble, he can still be happy, it
appears. The grasshopper sparrow--to give him his better name--is one
of the quaintest of songsters, his musical effort being more like an
insect’s than a bird’s; yet he is as fully inspired, as completely
absorbed in his work, to look at him, as any mockingbird or thrush.
I watched one a few days ago as he sat at the top of a dwarf pear
tree. How seriously he took himself! No “minor poet” of a human sort
ever surpassed him in that respect; head thrown back, and bill most
amazingly wide open, all for that ragged thread of a tune, which
nevertheless was decidedly emphatic and could be heard a surprisingly
long distance. I smiled at him, but he did not mind. When minor poets
cease writing, then, we may guess, the grasshopper sparrow will quit
singing. Far be the day. To be a poet is to be a poet, and distinctions
of major and minor are of trifling consequence. The yellow-wing
counts with the savanna, but is smaller and has even less of a voice.
Impoverished grass fields are his favorite breeding-places, and he is
generally a colonist.
This morning (it is July 10) the vesper sparrow is singing here also,
with the song sparrow and the chipper. And while I am listening to
them--but mainly to the vesper--the sickle stroke (as I believe Mr.
Burroughs calls it) of a meadow lark cuts the air. It is a good
concert, vesper sparrow and lark going most harmoniously together; and
to make it better still, a bobolink pours out one copious strain. Him
I am especially glad to hear. After the grass is cut one feels as if
bobolink days were over.
However, the grass is not all cut yet. I hear the rattle of a distant
mowing-machine as I walk, and by and by come in sight of a man swinging
a scythe. That is the poetry of farming--from the spectator’s point of
view; and I think from the mower’s also, when he is cutting his own
grass and is his own master. I like to watch him, at all events. Every
motion he makes is as familiar to me as the swaying of branches in the
wind. How long will it be, I wonder, before young people will be asking
their seniors what a scythe was like, and how a man used it? Pictures
of it will look odd enough, we may be sure, after the thing itself is
forgotten.
While I am watching the mower (now he pauses a moment, and with the
blade of his scythe tosses a troublesome tangle of grass out of his
way, with exactly the motion that I have seen other mowers use a
thousand times; but I look in vain for him to put the end of the
snathe to the ground, pick up a handful of grass, and wipe down the
blade)--while I am watching him a bluebird breaks into song, and a
kingbird flutters away from his perch on a fence-wire. After all, the
glory of a bird is his wings; and the kingbird knows it. In another
field men are spreading hay--with pitchforks, I mean; and that, too, is
poetry. In truth, by the old processes, hay could not be made except
with graceful motions, unless it were by a novice, some man from the
city or out of a shop. A green hand with a rake, it must be confessed,
is a subject for laughter rather than for rhymes. The secret of
graceful raking is like the secret of graceful writing,--a light touch.
Raspberries and thimbleberries are getting ripe (they do not need to be
“_dead_ ripe,” thimbleberries especially, for an old country boy), and
meadow-sweet and mullein are in bloom. Hardback, standing near them,
has not begun to show the pink.
Now I turn the corner, leaving the farms behind, and as I do so I
bethink myself of a bed of yellow galium just beyond. It ought to be
in blossom. And so it is--the prettiest sight of the morning, and of
many mornings. I stand beside it, admiring its beauty and inhaling its
faint, wholesomely sweet odor. Bedstraw, it is called. If it will keep
that fragrance, why should mattresses ever be filled with anything
else? This is the only patch of the kind that I know, and I felicitate
myself upon having happened along at just the right minute to see it
in all its sweetness and beauty. Year after year it blooms here on
this roadside, and nowhere else; millions of tiny flowers of a really
exquisite color, yellow with much of green in it, a shade for which in
my ignorance I have no name.
The road soon runs into a swamp, and I stop on the bridge. Swamp
sparrows are trilling on either side of me--a spontaneous, effortless
kind of music, like water running down-hill. A phœbe chides me gently;
passengers are expected to use the bridge to cross the brook upon,
she intimates, not as a lounging-place, especially as her nest is
underneath. Yellow bladderworts lift their pretty hoods above the
slimy, black water, and among them lies a turtle, thrusting his head
out to enjoy the sun. Once I see him raise a foreclaw and scratch the
underside of his neck. The most sluggish and cold-blooded animal that
ever lived must now and then be taken with an itching, I suppose.
Beyond the bridge the woods are full of white azalea (they are full
of it _now_, that is to say, so long as the bushes are in blossom),
but I listen in vain for the song of a Canadian warbler, whom I know
to be living somewhere in its shadow. A chickadee, looking as if she
had been through the wars, her plumage all blackened and bedraggled,
makes remarks to me as I pass. The cares of maternity have spoiled her
beauty, and perhaps ruffled her temper, for the time being. A veery
snarls, and a thrasher’s resonant kiss makes me smile. If he knew it,
he would smile in his turn, perhaps, at my “pathetic fallacy.” The
absence of music here, just where I expected it most confidently,
is disappointing, but I do not stay to grieve over the loss. As the
road climbs to dry ground again, I remark how close to its edge the
rabbit-foot clover is growing. It is at its prettiest now, the grayish
green heads tipped with pink. If it were as uncommon as the yellow
bedstraw, perhaps I should think it quite as beautiful. I have known
it since I have known anything (“pussies,” we called it), but I never
dreamed of its being a clover till I began to use a botany book. All
the way along I notice how it cleaves to the very edge of the track.
“Let me have the poorest place,” it says. And it thrives there. Such is
the inheritance of the meek.
Here in the pine woods a black-throated green warbler is dreaming
audibly, and, better still, a solitary vireo, the only one I have heard
for a month or more, sings a few strains, with that sweet, falling
cadence of which he alone has the secret. From a bushy tract, where
fire has blackened everything, a chewink speaks his name, and then
falls to repeating a peculiarly jaunty variation of the family tune.
Dignity is hardly the chewink’s strong point. Now a field sparrow gives
out a measure. There is an artist! Few can excel him, though many can
make more show. Like the vesper sparrow, he has a gift of sweet and
holy simplicity. And what can be better than that? Overhead, hurrying
with might and main toward the woods, flies a crow, with four kingbirds
after him. Perhaps he suffers for his own misdeeds; perhaps for those
of his race. All crows look alike to kingbirds, I suspect.
This, and much beside, while I rest in the shade of a pine, taking the
beauty of the clouds and listening to the wind in the treetops. The
best part of every ramble is the part that escapes the notebook.
IN THE CAMBRIDGE SWAMP
Once a year, at least, I must visit the great swamp in Cambridge, one
of the institutions of the city, as distinctive, not to say as famous,
as the university itself. It is sure to show me something out of the
ordinary run (its courses in ornithology are said to be better than any
the university offers); and even if I were disappointed on that score,
I should still find the visit worth while for the sake of old times,
and old friends, and the good things I remember. At the present minute
I am thinking especially of that enthusiastic, wise-hearted, finely
gifted, greatly lamented nature lover, Frank Bolles, whom I met here
for the first time one evening when it was too dark to see his face. We
had come on the same errand, to watch the strange aerial evolutions of
the April snipe. Who could have supposed then that he would be dead so
soon, and the world so much the poorer?
Now it is July. The tall swamp rosebushes are in full flower, here
and there a clump, the morning sun heightening their beauty, though
for the most part there is no getting near them without wading
to the knees. More accessible, as well as more numerous, are the
trailing morning-glory vines (_Convolvulus sepium_), with showy,
trumpet-shaped, pink-and-white blossoms; and in one place I stop to
notice a watery-stemmed touch-me-not, or jewel-weed, from which a
solitary frail-looking, orange-colored flower is hanging--the first of
the year. What thousands on thousands will follow it; no meadow’s edge
or boggy spot will be without them. The pendent jewel makes me think
of hummingbirds, which is another reason for liking to look at it.
Years ago I used to plant some of its red and white congeners (balsams,
we called them) in a child’s garden. I wish I were a botanist; I am
always wishing so; but I am thankful to know enough of the science to
be able to recognize a few such relationships between native “weeds”
and cultivated exotics. Somehow the weeds look less weedy for that
knowledge; as the most commonplace of mortals becomes interesting to
average humanity if it is whispered about that he is fourth cousin to
the king. The world is not yet so democratic that anything, even a
plant, can be rated altogether by itself.
The gravelly banks of the railroad, on which I go dry-shod through
the swamp, are covered with a forest of chicory; a thrifty immigrant,
tall, coarse, scraggy, awkward, homely, anything you will, but a great
brightener of our American waysides on sunny midsummer forenoons. It
attracts much notice, and presumably gives much pleasure, to judge by
the number of persons who ask me its name. May the town fathers spare
it! The bees and the goldfinches will thank them, if nobody else. Here
I am interested to see that a goodly number of the plants--but not more
than one in fifty, perhaps--bear full crops of pure white flowers; a
rarity to me, though I am well used to pink ones. Gray’s Manual by the
by, a Cambridge book, makes no mention of white flowers, while Britton
and Brown’s Illustrated Flora says nothing about a pink variety. In a
multitude of books there is safety, or, if not quite that, something
less of danger. The pink and the white flowers are reversions to former
less highly developed states, I suppose, if certain modern theories are
to be trusted. I have read somewhere that the acid of ants turns the
blue of chicory blossoms to a bright red, and that European children
are accustomed to throw the flowers into ant hills to watch the
transformation. Perhaps some young American reader will be moved to try
the experiment.
The best plants, however, those that I enjoy most for to-day, at all
events, are the cat-tails. How they flourish!--“like a tree planted by
the rivers of water.” And how straight they grow! They must be among
the righteous. We may almost say that they make the swamp. Certainly,
when they are gone the swamp will be gone. Both kinds are here, the
broad-leaved and the narrow-leaved, equally rank, though _angustifolia_
has perhaps a little the better of the other in point of height. The
two can be distinguished at a glance, and afar off, by a difference
in color, if by nothing else. “Cat-tails” and “cat-tail flags,” the
Manual and the Illustrated Flora call them; but I was brought up to
say “cat-o’-nine-tails,” with strong emphasis on the numeral, and am
glad to find that more romantic-sounding name recognized by the latest
big dictionary. Not that the name has any particular appropriateness;
but like my fellows, I have been trained to venerate a dictionary,
especially an “unabridged,” as hardly less sacred than the Bible, and
am still much relieved whenever my own usage, past or present, happens
to be supported by such authority.
Rankness is the swamp’s note, we may say. Look at the spatter-dock
leaves and the pickerel-weed! The tropics themselves could hardly do
better. And what a maze and tangle of vegetation!--as if the earth
could produce more than the air could find room for. So much for
plenty of water and a wholesome depth of black mud. One thinks of the
scriptural phrase about paths that “drop fatness.”
Ever since I arrived, the short, hurried, gurgling trill of the
long-billed marsh wren has been in my ears. If I have been here an
hour, I must have heard that sound five hundred times. Once only, and
only for an instant, I saw one of the singers. I have not been on the
watch for them, to be sure; but if it had been earlier in the season I
should have seen them whether I tried to do so or not. It must be that
the little aerial song-flights, then so common and so cheerful to look
at, are now mostly over.
In such a place, however, populous as it is, one does not expect to
_see_ many birds--blackbirds being left out of the reckoning--at any
time. Swamp ornithology is mainly a matter of “earsight.” Birds that
live in cat-tail beds and button-bush thickets are very little on the
wing. Here a least bittern may coo day after day, and season after
season, and it will be half a lifetime before you see him do it. I
have made inquiries far and near in the likeliest quarters, and have
yet to learn, even at second hand, of any man who has ever had that
good fortune. Once, for five minutes, I entertained a lively hope of
accomplishing the feat myself, but the bird was too wary for me; and a
miss is as good as a mile. No doubt I shall die without the sight.
So the Carolina rail will whistle and the Virginia rail call the pigs,
but it will be a memorable hour when you detect either of them in
the act. You will hear the sounds often enough; I hear them to-day;
and much less frequently you will see the birds stepping with dainty
caution along a favorite runway, or feeding about the edges of their
cover. But to see them utter the familiar notes, that is another story.
This morning I see on the wing a night heron (so I call him, without
professing absolute certainty), a bittern (flying from one side of the
railroad tracks to the other), and a little green heron, but no rail
of either species, although I sit still in favorable places--where at
other times I have seen them--with exemplary patience. In hunting of
this kind, patience must be mixed with luck. It pleases my imagination
to think what numbers of birds there are all about me, each busy with
its day’s work, and not one of them visible for an instant, even by
chance.
I go to the top of a grassy mound, and seat myself where I have a
lengthwise view of a ditch. Here, ten years ago, more or less, I saw
my first gallinule. We had heard his outcries for some days (I speak
of myself and two better men), and a visiting New York ornithologist
had told us that they were probably the work of a gallinule. They came
always from the most inaccessible parts of the swamp, where it seemed
hopeless to wade in pursuit of the bird, since we wished to see him
alive; but turning the question over in my mind, I bethought myself of
this low hilltop, with its command of an open stretch of water between
a broad expanse of cat-tails and a wood. Hither I came, therefore. If
there was any virtue in waiting, the thing should be done. And sure
enough, in no very long time out paddled the bird, with those queer
bobbing motions which I was to grow familiar with afterward--a Florida
gallinule, with a red plate on his forehead. Again and again I saw him
(patience was easy now), and when I had seen enough--for that time--and
was on my way back to the railway station, I met the foremost of New
England, ornithologists coming down the track. He was on the same hunt,
and together we returned to the place I had left; and together we saw
the bird. A week or two later he found the nest, and a Massachusetts
record was established.
This, I say, was ten years ago. To-day there is no gallinule, or none
for me. The best thing I hear, the most characteristically swampy, is
the odd _diminuendo_ whistle of a Carolina rail. “We are all here,” he
says; “you ought to come oftener.” And I think I will.
A QUIET AFTERNOON
After running hither and thither in search of beauty or novelty, try a
turn in the nearest wood. So my good genius whispered to me just now;
and here I am. I believe it was good advice.
This venerable chestnut tree, with its deeply furrowed, shadow-haunted,
lichen-covered bark of soft, lovely grays and grayish greens, is as
stately and handsome as ever. How often I have stopped to admire
it, summer and winter, especially in late afternoon, when the level
sunlight gives it a beauty beyond the reach of words. Many a time I
have gone out of my way to see it, as I would have gone to see some
remembered landscape by a great painter.
There is no feeling proud in such company. Anything that can stand
still and grow, filling its allotted place and contented to fill it,
is enough to put our futile human restlessness to the blush. The wind
has long ago blown away some of its branches, but it does not mind. It
is busy with its year’s work. I see the young burrs, no bigger than
the end of my little finger. When the nuts are ripe the tree will let
them fall and think no more about them. How different from a man! When
he does a good thing, if by chance he ever does, he must put his hands
behind his ears in hopes to hear somebody praising him. Mountains and
trees make me humble. I feel like a poor relation.
The pitch-pines are no longer at their best estate. They are brightest
when we need their brightness most, in late winter and early spring.
This year, at least, the summer sun has faded them badly; but their
fragrance is like an elixir. It is one of the glories of pine needles,
one of the things in which they excel the rest of us, that they smell
sweet, not “in the dust” exactly, but after they are dead.
A nuthatch in one of the trees calls “Tut, tut, tut,” and is so near
me that I hear his claws scratching over the dry bark. A busy and
cheerful body. Just beyond him a scarlet tanager is posed on a low,
leafless twig. Like the pine leaves, he looks out of condition. I am
sure I have seen brighter ones. He is silent, but his mate, somewhere
in the oak branches over my head, keeps up an emphatic _chip-cherr,
chip-cherr_. Yes, I see her now, and the red one has gone up to perch
at her side. She cocks her head, looking at me first out of one eye and
then out of the other, and repeats the operation two or three times,
like a puzzled microscopist squinting at a doubtful specimen; and all
the while she continues to call, though I know nothing of what she
means. Once her mate approaches too near, and she opens her bill at him
in silence. He understands the sign and keeps his distance. I admire
his spirit. It is better than taking a city.
The earliest of the yellow gerardias is in bloom, and a pretty
desmodium, also (_D. nudiflorum_), with a loose raceme of small pink
flowers, like miniature sweet-pea blossoms, on a slender leafless
stalk. These are in the wood, amidst the underbrush. As I come out
into a dry, grassy field I find the meadow-beauty; an odd creature,
with a tangle of long stamens; bright-colored, showy in its intention,
so to speak, but rather curious than beautiful, in spite of its name;
especially because the petals have not the grace to fall when they are
done, but hang, withered and discolored, to spoil the grace of later
comers. The prettiest thing about it all, after the freshly opened
first flower, is the urn-shaped capsule. That, to me, is of really
classic elegance.
Now I have crossed the road and am seated on a chestnut stump, with my
back against a tree, on the edge of a broad, rolling, closely cropped
cattle pasture, a piece of genuine New England. Scattered loosely over
it are young, straight, slender-waisted, shoulder-high cedars, and on
my right hand is a big patch of hardhack, growing in tufts of a dozen
stalks each, every one tipped with an arrow-head of pink blossoms. The
whole pasture is full of sunshine. Down at the lower end is a long,
narrow, irregular-shaped pond. I cannot see it because of a natural
hedge against the fence-row on my left; but somehow the landscape takes
an added beauty from the water’s presence. The truth is, perhaps, that
I do see it.
High overhead a few barn swallows and chimney swifts are scaling,
each with happy-sounding twitters after its kind. A jay screams, but
so far off as merely to emphasize the stillness. Once in a while a
song sparrow pipes; a cheerful, honest voice. When there is nothing
better to do I look at the hardhack. The spiræas are a fine set; many
of them are honored in gardens; but few are more to my liking, after
all, than this old friend (and enemy) of my boyhood. Whether it is
really useful as an herb out of which to make medicinal “tea” I feel
no competency to say, though I have drunk my share of the decoction.
It is not a virulent poison: so much I feel reasonably sure of.
Hardhack, thoroughwort, and pennyroyal,--with the _o_ left out,--these
were the family herbalist’s trinity in my day. Now, in these better
times of pellets and homœopathic allopathy, children hardly know what
medicine-taking means. We remember, we of an older generation. “Pinch
your nose and swallow it, and I will give you a cent.” Does that sound
vulgar in the nice ears of modern readers? Well, we earned our money.
Now an oriole’s clear August fife is heard. A short month, and he
will be gone. And hark! A most exquisite strain by one of the best of
field sparrows. I have never found an adjective quite good enough for
that bit of common music. I believe there _is_ none. Nor can I think
of any at this moment with which to express the beauty of this summer
afternoon. Fairer weather was never seen in any corner of the world.
Four crows fly over the field in company. The hindmost of them has a
hard time with a redwing, which strikes again and again. “Give it to
him!” say I. Between crow and man I am for the crow; but between the
crow and the smaller bird I am always for the smaller bird. Whether
I am right or wrong is not the question here. This is not my day for
arguing, but for feeling.
How pretty the hardhack is! Though it stands up rather stiff, it feels
every breath of wind. Its beauty grows on me as I look, which is enough
of itself to make this a profitable afternoon. There is no beauty so
welcome as new beauty in an old friend.
A kingbird, one of two or three hereabout, comes to sit on a branch
over my head. He is full of twitters, which sound as if they might be
full of meaning; but there is no interpreter. He, too, like the oriole,
is on his last month. I have great respect for kingbirds. A phœbe shows
herself in the hedge, flirting her tail airily as she alights. “Pretty
well, I thank you,” she might be saying. Every kind of bird has motions
of its own, no doubt, if we look sharply enough. The phœbe’s may be
seen of all men.
I had meant to go out and sit awhile under the spreading white oak
yonder, on the upper side of the pasture, near the huckleberry patches;
but why should I? Well enough is well enough, I say to myself; and it
sounds like good philosophy, in weather like this. It may never set the
millpond on fire; but then, I don’t wish to set it on fire.
And although I go on mentioning particulars, a flower, a bird, a bird’s
note, it is none of these that I am really enjoying. It is the day--the
brightness and the quiet, and the comfort of a perfect temperature.
Great is weather. No man is to blame for talking about it, unless his
talk is twaddle. Out-of-door people know that few things are more
important. A quail’s whistle, a thought too strenuous, perhaps, for
such an hour,--a breezy _quoit_,--breaks my disquisition none too soon;
else I might have been brought in guilty under my own ruling.
As I get over the fence, on my start homeward, I notice a thrifty
clump of chokecherry shrubs on the other side of the way, hung with
ripening clusters, every cherry a jewel as the sun strikes it. They may
hang “for all me,” as schoolboys say. My country-bred taste is pretty
catholic in matters of this kind, but it extends not to chokecherries.
They should be eaten by campaign orators as a check upon fluency.
POPULAR WOODPECKERS
There are two birds in Newton, the present summer, that have perhaps
attracted more attention than any pair of Massachusetts birds ever
attracted before; more, by a good deal, I imagine, than was paid to
a pair of crows that, for some inexplicable reason, built a nest and
reared a brood of young a year ago in a back yard on Beacon Hill, in
Boston. I refer to a pair of red-headed woodpeckers that have a nest
(at this moment containing young birds nearly ready to fly) in a tall
dead stump standing on the very edge of the sidewalk, like a lamp-post.
The road, it should be said, is technically unfinished; one of those
“private ways,” not yet “accepted” by the city and therefore legally
“dangerous,” though in excellent condition and freely traveled. If
the birds had intended to hold public receptions daily,--as they have
done without intending it,--they could hardly have chosen a more
convenient spot. The stump, which is about twenty-five feet in height,
stands quite by itself in the middle of a small open space, with a
wooded amphitheatrical knoll at its back, while on the other side it is
overlooked by the windows of several houses, the nearest almost within
stone’s throw. So conspicuous is it, indeed, that whenever I go there,
as I do once in two or three days, to see how matters are coming on, I
am almost sure to see the birds far in advance of my arrival.
They are always there. I heard of them through the kindness of a
stranger, on the 26th of June. His letter reached me (in Boston) at two
o’clock in the afternoon, and at half-past three I was admiring the
birds. It cannot be said that they welcomed my attentions. From that
day to this they have treated me as an intruder. “You have stayed long
enough.” “We are not at home to-day.” “Come now, old inquisitive, go
about your business.” Things like these they repeat to me by the half
hour. Then, in audible asides, they confide to each other what they
think of me. “Watch him,” says one at last. “I must be off now after
a few grubs.” And away she goes, while her mate continues to inform
me that I am a busybody, a meddler in other birds’ matters, a common
nuisance, a duffer, and everything else that is disreputable. All this
is unpleasant. I feel as I imagine a baseball umpire feels when the
players call him a “gump” and the crowd yells “robber;” but like the
umpire, I bear it meekly and hold my ground. A good conscience is a
strong support.
In sober truth I have been scrupulously careful of the birds’ feelings;
or, if not of their feelings, at least of their safety. I began,
indeed, by being almost ludicrously careful. The nest was a precious
secret, I thought. I must guard it as a miser guards his treasure. So,
whenever a foot-passenger happened along the highway at my back, I made
pretense of being concerned with anything in the world rather than with
that lamp-post of a stump. What was Hecuba to me, or I to Hecuba? I
pretty soon learned, however, that such precautions were unnecessary.
The whole town, or at least the whole neighborhood, was aware of the
birds’ presence. Every school-teacher in the city, one man told me,
had been there with his or her pupils to see them. So popular is
ornithology in these modern days. He had seen thirty or forty persons
about the place at once, he said, all on the same errand. “Look at the
bank there,” he added. “They have worn it smooth by sitting on it.”
I have not been fortunate enough to assist at any such interesting
“function,” but I have had plenty of evidence to prove the truth of
what I said just now--that the birds and their nest have become matters
of common knowledge. On my third visit, just as I was ready to come
away, a boy turned the corner on a bicycle, holding his younger sister
in front of him.
“Are they here?” he inquired as he dismounted.
“Who?” said I.
“The red-headed woodpeckers,” he answered.
He had known about the nest for some weeks. Oh, yes, everybody knew
it. So-and-so found it (I forget the name), and pretty soon it was
all over Newtonville. A certain boy, whose wretched name also I have
forgotten, had talked about shooting one of the birds; he could get
a dollar and a half for it, he professed; but policeman Blank had
said that a dollar and a half wouldn’t do a boy much good if he got
hold of him. He--my informant, a bright-faced, manly fellow of eleven
or twelve--had brought his younger sister down to see the birds. He
thought they were very handsome. “There!” said he, as one of them
perched on a dead tree near by, “look!” and he knelt behind the little
girl and pointed over her shoulder till she got the direction. After
all, I thought, a boy is almost as pretty as a woodpecker. His father
and mother were Canadians, and had told him that birds of this kind
were common where they used to live. Then he lifted his sister upon the
wheel, jumped up behind her, and away they trundled.