for a minute’s chat. He, too, was in the secret, and had been for a
good while. “Pretty nice birds,” his verdict was. And at a later visit
a man with his dog suddenly appeared. “Handsome, aren’t they?” he
began, by way of good-morning. He had seen one of them as long ago as
when snow was on the ground, but he didn’t discover the nest. He was
looking in the wrong place. Since then he had spent hours in watching
the birds, and believed that he could tell the female’s voice from the
male’s. “There!” said he; “that’s the mother’s call.” He was acquainted
with all the birds, and could name them all, he said, simply by their
notes; and he told me many things about them. There were grosbeaks
here. Did I know them? And tanagers, also. Did I know them? And another
bird that he was especially fond of; a beautiful singer, though it
never sang after the early part of the season; the indigo-bird, its
name was. Did I know that?
As will readily be imagined, we had a good session (one doesn’t fall
in with so congenial a spirit every day in the week), though it ran a
little too exclusively to questions and answers, perhaps; for I, too,
am a Yankee. He was the man who told me about the throngs of sightseers
that came here. The very publicity of the thing had been the birds’
salvation, he was inclined to believe. The entire community had taken
them under its protection, and with so many windows overlooking the
place, and the police on the alert (I had noticed a placard near by,
signed by the chief, laying down the law and calling upon all good
citizens to help him enforce it), it would have been hard for anybody
to meddle with the nest without coming to grief. At all events, the
birds had so far escaped molestation, and the young, as I have said,
would soon be on the wing. One of them was thrusting its full-grown,
wide-awake, eager-looking, mouse-colored head out of the aperture as we
talked.
“But why so much excitement over a family of woodpeckers?” some reader
may be asking. Rarity, my friend; rarity and brilliant feathers. So
far as appears from the latest catalogue of Massachusetts birds, this
Newton nest is one of a very small number ever found in the State, and
the very first one ever recorded from the eastern half of it.[2] Put
that fact with the further one that the birds are among the showiest
in North America, real marvels of beauty,--splendid colors, splendidly
laid on,--and it is plain to see why a city full of nature lovers
should have welcomed this pair with open arms and watched over their
welfare as one watches over the most honored of guests. For my part, I
should not think it inappropriate if the mayor were to order the firing
of a salute and the ringing of bells on the happy morning when the
young birds take wing. Tons of gunpowder have been burnt, before now,
with less reason.
LATE SUMMER NOTES
On this bright morning I am passing fields and kitchen gardens that
I have not seen since a month ago. Then the fields were newly mown
stubble-fields, such as all men who knew anything of the luxury of a
bare-footed boyhood must have in vivid remembrance. (How gingerly,
with what a sudden slackening of the pace, we walked over them, if
circumstances made such a venture necessary,--in pursuit of a lost
ball, or on our way to the swimming-hole,--setting the foot down softly
and stepping high! I can see the action at this minute, as plainly as
I see yonder fence-post.) Now the first thing that strikes the eye is
the lively green of the aftermath. It looks as soft as a velvet carpet.
I remember what I used to hear in haying time, that cattle like the
second crop best. I should think they would.
Grass is man’s patient friend. Directly or indirectly, we may say, he
subsists upon it. Nay, the Scripture itself declares as much, in one
of its most familiar texts. It is good to see it so quick to recover
from the cruel work of the scythe, so responsive to the midsummer
rains, its color so deep, its leaves so full of sap. It is this spirit
of hopefulness, this patience under injury, that makes shaven lawns
possible.
As to the beauty of grass, no man appreciates it, I suppose, unless he
has lived where grass does not grow. “When I go back to New England,”
said an exile in Florida, “I will ask for no garden. Let me have grass
about the house, and I can do without roses.”
The century ends with an apple year; and every tree is in the fashion.
The old, the decrepit, the solitary, not one of them all but got the
word in season; as there is no woman in Christendom but learns somehow,
before it is too late, whether sleeves are to be worn loose or tight.
Along the roadside, in the swamp, in the orchard, everywhere the story
is the same. Apple trees are all freemasons. This hollow shell of a
trunk, with one last battered limb keeping it alive, received its cue
with the rest.
In the orchard, where the trees are younger and more pliable, a man
would hardly know them for the same he saw there in May and June;
so altered are they in shape, so smoothly rounded at the top, so
like Babylonian willows in the droop of the branches. Baldwins are
turning red--greenish red--and russets are already rusty. “Yes,” says
the owner of the orchard, “and much good will it do me.” Apples are
an “aggravating crop,” he declares. “First there are none; and then
there are so many that you cannot sell them.” Human nature is never
satisfied; and, for one, I think it seldom has reason to be.
A bobolink, which seems to be somewhere overhead, drops a few notes
in passing. “I am off,” he says. “Sorry to go, but I know where there
is a rice-field.” From the orchard come the voices of bluebirds and
kingbirds. Not a bird is in song; and what is more melancholy, the road
and the fields are thick with English sparrows.
Now I stop at the smell of growing corn, which is only another kind of
grass, though the farmer may not suspect the fact, and perhaps would
not believe you if you told him of it; more than he would believe you
if you told him that clover is _not_ grass. He and his cow know better.
A queer set these botanists, who get their notions from books! Corn or
grass, here grow some acres of it, well tasseled (“all tosselled out”),
with the wind stirring the leaves to make them shine. Does the odor,
with which the breeze is loaded, come from the blossoms, or from the
substance of the plant itself? A new question for me. I climb the fence
and put my nose to one of the tassels. No, it is not in them, I think.
It must be in the stalk and leaves; and I adopt this opinion the more
readily because the odor itself--the memory of which is part of every
country boy’s inheritance--is like that of a vegetable rather than of a
flower, a smell rather than a perfume. I seem to recall that the stalk
smelled just so when we cut it into lengths for cornstalk fiddles; and
the nose, as everyone must have remarked, has a good memory, for the
reason, probably, that it is so near the brain.
I turn the corner, and go from the garden to the wild. First, however,
I rest for a few minutes under a wide-branching oak opposite the site
of a vanished house. You would know there had been a house here at some
time, even if you did not see the cellar-hole, by the old-maid’s pinks
along the fence. How fresh they look! And how becomingly they blush!
They are worthy of their name. Age cannot wither them. Less handsome
than carnations, if you will, but faithful, home-loving souls; not
requiring to be waited upon, but given rather to waiting upon others.
Like mayweed and catnip, they are what I have heard called “folksy
plants;” though on second thought I should rather say “homey.” There
is something of the cat about them; a kind of local constancy; they
stay by the old place, let the people go where they will. Probably
they would grow in front of a new house,--even a Queen Anne cottage,
so-called,--if necessity were laid upon them, but who could imagine
it? It would be shameful to subject them to such indignity. They are
survivals, livers in the past, lovers of things as they were, charter
members, I should say, of the Society of Colonial Dames.
As I come to the edge of the swamp I see a leaf move, and by squeaking
draw into sight a redstart. The pretty creature peeps at me furtively,
wondering what new sort of man it can be that makes noises of that
kind. To all appearance she is very desirous not to be seen; yet
she spreads her tail every few seconds so as to display its bright
markings. Probably the action has grown to be habitual and, as it were,
automatic. A bird may be unconsciously coquettish, I suppose, as well
as a woman or a man. It is a handsome tail, anyhow.
Somewhere just behind me a red-eyed vireo is singing in a peculiar
manner; repeating his hackneyed measure with all his customary
speed,--forty or fifty times a minute,--but with no more than half his
customary voice, as if his thoughts were elsewhere. I wish he would
sing so always. It would be an easy way of increasing his popularity.
Not far down the road are three roughly dressed men,--of the genus
tramp, if I read the signs aright,--coming toward me; and I notice with
pleasure that when they reach the narrow wooden bridge over the brook
they turn aside, as by a common impulse, to lean over the rail and look
down into the water. When I get there I shall do the same thing. So
will every man that comes along, unless he happens to be on “business.”
Running water is one of the universal parables, appealing to something
primitive and ineradicable in human nature. Day and night it
preaches--sermons without words. It is every man’s friend. The most
stolid find it good company. For that reason, largely, men love to
fish. They are poets without knowing it. They have never read a line of
verse since they outgrew Mother Goose; they never consciously admire a
landscape; they care nothing for a picture, unless it is a caricature,
or tells a story; but they cannot cross moving water without feeling
its charm.
Well, in that sense of the word, I too am a poet. The tramps and I
have met and passed each other, and I am on the bridge. The current is
almost imperceptible (like the passage of time), and the black water
is all a tangle of cresses and other plants. Lucky bugs dart hither
and thither upon its surface, quick to start and quick to stop (quick
to quarrel, also,--like butterflies,--so that two of them can hardly
meet without a momentary set-to), full of life, and, for anything that
I know, full of thought; true poets, perhaps, in ways of their own;
for why should man be so narrow-minded as to assume that his way is of
necessity the only one?
On either side of the brook, as it winds through the swamp, are acres
of the stately Joe Pye weed, or purple boneset, one of the tallest
of herbs. I am beginning to think well of its color,--which is
something like what ladies know as “crushed strawberry,” if I mistake
not,--though I used to look upon it rather disdainfully and call it
faded. The plant would be better esteemed in that regard, I dare say,
if it did not so often invite comparison with the cardinal flower. I
note it as one of the favorites of the milk-weed butterfly.
Here on the very edge of the brook is the swamp loosestrife, its
curving stems all reaching for the water, set with rosy bloom. My
attention is drawn to it by the humming of bees, a busy, contented,
content-producing sound. How different from the hum of the factory
that I passed an hour ago, through the open windows of which I saw
men hurrying over “piece-work,” every stroke like every other, every
man a machine, or part of a machine, rather, for doing one thing. I
wonder whether the dreariness of the modern “factory system” may not
have had something to do with the origin and rapid development of our
nineteenth-century breed of peripatetic thieves and beggars.
Above the music of the bees I hear, of a sudden, a louder hum. “A
hummingbird,” I say, and turn to look at a jewel-weed. Yes, the bird is
there, trying the blossoms one after another. Then she drops to rest
upon an alder twig (always a dead one) directly under my nose, where I
see her darting out her long tongue, which flashes in the sunlight. I
say “she.” She has a whitish throat, and is either a female or a male
of the present season. Did any one ever see a hummingbird without a
thrill of pleasure? Not I.
As I go on I note, half sadly, half gladly, some tokens of waning
summer; especially a few first blossoms of two of the handsomest of our
blue asters, _lævis_ and _patens_. Soon the dusty goldenrod will be
out, and then, whatever the almanac-makers may say, autumn will have
come. Every dry roadside will publish the fact.
WOOD SILENCE
The scarcity of birds and bird music, of which I spoke a week
ago, still continues. The ear begins to feel starved. A tanager’s
_chip-cherr_, or the prattle of a company of chickadees, is listened
to more eagerly than the wood thrush’s most brilliant measures were
in June and July. Since September came in (it is now the 8th) I have
heard the following birds in song: robins, half a dozen times, perhaps,
in snatches only; a Maryland yellow-throat, once; warbling vireos,
occasionally, in village elms; yellow-throated vireos, rarely, but more
frequently than the last; a song sparrow (only one!), amusing himself
with a low-voiced, inarticulate warble, rather humming than singing;
an oriole, blowing a few whistles, on the 4th; a phœbe, on a single
occasion; wood pewees, almost daily, oftener than all the foregoing
species together.
Except a single water thrush, on the first day of the month, I have
seen no land bird that could be set down with certainty as a migrant,
and in the eight days I have listed but thirty-seven species. And of
this number twelve are represented in my notes by a single individual
only. My walks have been short, it is fair to say, but they have taken
me into good places. I could spin a long chapter on the birds I have
not seen; but perhaps the best thing I could do, writing merely as an
ornithologist, would be to make the week’s record in two words: “No
quorum.”
My last hummingbird (but I hope for others before the month ends) was
seen on the 2d. He was about a bed of tall cannas in a neighbor’s
dooryard, thrusting his tongue into the flowers, one after another, and
I went near and focused my opera-glass upon him, taking my fill of his
pretty feathers and prettier movements. It was really the best music of
the week. The sun was on his emerald back and wings, making them shine.
One thing that pleased me, as it always does, was his address in flying
backwards. Into the flower he would dart, stay a longer or shorter
time, as he found occasion, and then like a flash draw out and back
away, his wings all the while beating themselves to a film of light.
I wonder if any other of our common hovering birds--the kingbird, for
example, or the kingfisher--can match the hummer in this regard.
A second thing that interested me was his choice of blossoms. My
neighbor’s canna bed is made up in about equal parts of two kinds of
plants, one with red blossoms, the other with yellow. The hummer went
to the red flowers only. He must have probed a hundred, I should say.
As for the yellow ones, he seemed not to know they were there. Now, was
not this a plain case of color preference? It looked so, surely; but
I remembered that hummingbirds are persistent haunters of the yellow
blossoms of the jewel-weed, and concluded that something besides a
difference of color must account for what appeared to be this fellow’s
well-considered line of conduct. It is hard work, but as far as
possible, let us abstain from hasty generalizations.
There is no music sweeter than wood silence. I am enjoying it now. It
is not strictly silence, though it is what we call by that name. There
is no song. No one speaks. The wind is not heard in the branches. But
there is a nameless something in the air, an inaudible noise, or an
audible stillness, of which you become conscious if you listen for it;
a union of fine sounds, some of which, as you grow inwardly quiet,
you can separate from the rest--beats of distant crickets, few and
faint, and a hum as of tiny wings. Now an insect passes near, leaving a
buzz behind him, but for a second only. Then, before you can hear it,
almost, a frog out in the swamp yonder has let slip a quick, gulping,
or string-snapping syllable. Once a small bird’s wings are heard, just
heard and no more. Far overhead a goldfinch passes, with rhythmic
calls, smooth and soft, not so much sounds as a more musical kind of
silence.
The morning sun strikes aslant through the wood, illuminating the
trunks of the trees, especially a cluster of white birches. A lovely
sisterhood! I can hardly take my eyes from them. In general all the
leaves are motionless, but now and then a tree, or it may be a group of
two or three at once, is jostled for an instant by a touch too soft for
my coarser human apprehension. “_Dee-dee_,” says a titmouse; “Here,”
answers a flicker. But both speak under their breath, as if they felt
the spell of the hour. Listen! was that a hyla or a bird? There is no
telling, so elusive and so distant-seeming was the sound. And anon it
has ceased altogether.
Now, for the smallest fraction of a second, I see the flash of a moving
shadow. The flicker’s, perhaps. Yes, for presently he calls as in
spring, but only for four or five notes. If it were April, with the
vernal inspiration in his throat, there would be four or five times as
many, and all the woods would be ringing. And now the breeze freshens,
and the leaves make a chorus. No thrush’s song could be sweeter. It is
not a rustle. There is no word for it, unless we call it a murmur, a
rumor. Even while we are trying to name it, it is gone. Leaves are true
Friends, they speak only as the spirit moves. “_Wicker, wicker_,” says
the woodpecker, and his voice is in perfect tune with the silence.
How still and happy the boulders look, with friendly bushes and ferns
gathered about them, and parti-colored lichens giving them tones of
beauty! Men call them dead. “Dead as a stone,” has even passed into a
proverb. “Stone dead,” we say. But I doubt. They would smile, inwardly,
I think to hear us. We have small idea, the wisest of us, what we mean
by life and death. Men who hurry to and fro, scraping money together
or chasing a ball, consider themselves alive. The trees, and even the
stones, know better.
Yes, that is a crow, cawing; but far, far off. Distance softens sound
as it softens the landscape, and as time, which is only another kind
of distance, softens grief. A cricket at my elbow plays his tune,
irregularly and slowly. The low temperature slackens his _tempo_. Now
he is done. There is only the stirring of leaves. Some of the birch
leaves, I see, are already turning yellow, and once in a while, as the
wind whispers to one of them, it lets go its hold and drops. “Good-by,”
I seem to hear it say; “my summer is done.” How tenderly the air lets
it down, as loving arms lower a child to its burial. Yet the trees are
still happy. And so am I. The wood has blessed me. I have sensations,
but no thoughts. It is for this that I have been sitting here at this
silent concert. I wish for nothing. The best that such an hour can
do for us is to put us into a mood of desirelessness, of complete
passivity; such a mood as mystics covet for a permanent possession; a
state of surrender, selflessness, absorption in the infinite. I love
the feeling. All the trees have it, I think.
So I sit in their shadow, my eyes returning again and again to those
dazzling white birch boles, where loose shreds of filmy bark twinkle
as the breeze and the sunlight play upon them. Once two or three
chickadees come into the branches over my head and whisper things to
each other. Very simple their utterances sound, but perhaps if I could
understand them I should know more than all the mystics.
SOUTHWARD BOUND
Although it is the 20th of September, the autumnal migration of birds,
as seen in this neighborhood, is still very light. Robins are scattered
throughout the woods in loose flocks--a state of things not to be
witnessed in summer or winter; the birds rising singly from the ground
as the walker disturbs them, sometimes all silent, at other times all
cackling noisily. Chickadees, too, are in flocks, cheerful companies,
good to meet in any weather; behaving just as they will continue to
do until the nesting season again breaks the happy assembly up into
happier pairs.
My wood pewee--a particular bird in a grove near by--whistled pretty
constantly till the 17th, and a warbling vireo was still true to his
name on the 19th. I have heard no yellow-throated vireos since the
6th, and conclude that they must have taken their departure. May joy
go with them. This morning, for the first time in several weeks, a
pine warbler was trilling. Song sparrows have grown numerous within a
few days, but are almost entirely silent. One fellow sang his regular
song--not his confused autumnal warble--on the 19th. I had not heard it
before since the month opened.
No blackpoll warblers showed themselves with me till the 18th, though
I had word of their presence elsewhere a few days earlier. On that day
I saw three; yesterday and to-day have shown but one bird each. The
movement is barely begun.
I should like to know how common it is for blackpolls to sing on their
southward migration. Eleven years ago, in September, 1889, they came
very early,--or I had the good fortune to see them very early,--and on
the 4th and 5th of the month a few were “in full song,” so my notes
record, “quite as long and full as in May.” I had never heard them sing
before in autumn, nor have I ever had that pleasure since. Neither have
I ever again seen them so early. Probably the two things--the song and
the exceptional date--were somehow connected. At the time, I took the
circumstance as an indication that the adult males migrate in advance
of the great body of the species; and I fancied that, having detected
them once thus early and thus musical, I should be likely to repeat the
experience. If I am ever to do so, however, I must be about it. Eleven
years is a large slice out of an adult man’s remaining allowance.
On the 18th I found a single olive-backed thrush, silent, in company
with a flock of robins, or in the same grove with them--a White
Mountain bird, thrice welcome; and this morning a few white-throated
sparrows appeared. The first one that I saw--the only one, in fact--was
a young fellow, and as I caught sight of him facing me, with his clear
white throat, and his breast prettily streaked, with a wash of color
across it, I was half in doubt what to call him. While I was taking
observations upon his plumage, trying to make him look like himself, he
began to _chip_, as if to help me out, and a second one unseen fell to
singing near by; a very feeble and imperfect rendering of the dear old
tune, but well marked by the “Peabody” triplets. It was a true touch of
autumn, a voice from the hills.
Shortly before this I had spent a long time in watching the actions
of a Lincoln finch. He was feeding upon Roman worm-wood seeds by the
roadside, in company with two or three chipping sparrows; very meek
and quiet in his demeanor, and happily not disposed to resent my
inquisitiveness, which I took pains to render as little offensive as
possible. I had not seen the like of him since May, and have seen so
few of his race at any time that every new one still makes for me an
hour of agreeable excitement.
In the same neighborhood an indigo-bird surprised me with a song. He
was as badly out of voice as the white-throat, but his spirit was good,
and he sang several times over. One would never have expected music
from him, to look at his plumage. The indigo color was largely moulted
away--only the rags of it left. It was really pitiful to see him; so
handsome a coat, now nothing but shreds and patches. Most likely he was
not a traveler from farther north, but a lingering summer resident of
our own, as I remember to have seen three birds of his name in the same
spot fifteen days ago. It would be interesting to know whether bright
creatures of this kind do not feel humiliated and generally unhappy
when they find their beauty dropping away from them, like leaves from
the branch, as the summer wanes.