spot--not having visited it on this errand for several years--to see
whether the bird would still be true to his old tryst. I believed that
he would be, in spite of the skepticism of a wide-awake man who lives
almost within stone’s throw of the place; for though woodcock are
said to be growing less and less common, I have strong faith in the
conservative disposition of all such creatures. Once they have a place
to their mind, they are likely to hold it.
Fox sparrows were singing in their best manner as I passed on my way,
and I would gladly have stayed to listen; their season, also, is a
short one; but I kept to my point.
And after all, I arrived a few minutes ahead of time. Up and down the
road I paced (no one in sight, nor any danger of any one), with an
ear always awake for a certain note, the “bleat,” so called, of the
woodcock. Should I hear it? It was fast getting dark, the western sky
covered with black clouds (a great disadvantage), with only scattered
gleams of bright color, very narrow, just on the horizon. Hark! Yes;
that was it--_Spneak_. There is no putting the sound into letters, but
those who know the call of the nighthawk may understand sufficiently
well what I am trying to express, for the two notes are almost
identical.
With this note, single, repeated for a considerable time at intervals
of perhaps half a minute,--the bird still on the ground, and turning
about, so that some of his utterances sound three or four times as
far away as others,--with this strange, unmusical, almost ridiculous
overture the woodcock invariably introduces his evening recital. I
wait, therefore, leaning against the heavy stone wall, costly and
unromantic, with which the rich new owner of the land has lately fenced
his possession, till all at once the silence is broken by the familiar
whistling noises made by the heavy bird as he leaves the ground. This
time they are unusually faint, and are lost almost immediately. Only
for my acquaintance with the matter I should assume that the bird had
flown away, and that my evening was lost. As it is, I continue to
listen. Once and again I catch the sounds. The fellow is still rising.
I can see him, but only in my mind’s eye. Those black clouds hide him
quite as effectually as if he were behind them. Still I can see him.
I know he has gone up in a broad spiral--up, up, up, as on a winding
staircase.
Now, after silence, begins a different sound, more musical, more
clearly vocal; breathless, broken, eager, passionate, ecstatic. And
now, far aloft in the sky, where the clouds are of a lighter color, I
suddenly catch sight of the bird, a dark speck, shooting this way and
that, descending in sharp zigzags, whistling with his last gasps. And
now, as if exhausted,--and well he may be,--he drops to earth (I see
him come down) very near me, much nearer than I had thought.
_Spneak_, he calls. I know exactly what is coming. At intervals, just
as before, he repeats the sound, till suddenly he is on the wing
again, whistling as he goes. He flies straight from me,--for this time,
by good luck, I see him as he starts,--and mounts and mounts. Then,
far, far up, he whistles, _zip, zip_, and then, when he can stay no
longer, comes down in crazy zigzags.
A wonderful display. If a man could be as truly enraptured as the
woodcock seems to be, he would know the joys of the blest. I wonder
how many thousand Aprils this cumbrous-looking, gross-looking,
unpoetical-looking bird has been disporting himself thus at heaven’s
gate. There must be a real soul in a creature, no matter what his
appearance, who is capable of such transports and ravishments, such
marvelous upliftings, such mad reaches after the infinite.
I listen and wonder, and then come away, meditating on what I have seen
and heard. The last of the small birds have fallen silent. Only a few
hylas are peeping as I pass a cranberry meadow. Then, halfway home, as
the road traverses a piece of woods, with a brook singing on one side,
and the moon peeping through fleecy clouds, suddenly I halt. That was
a screech owl’s voice, was it not? Yes; faint, tremulous, sweet, a
mere breath, the falling, quavering strain again reaches my ear. The
bird is somewhere beyond the brook. I wonder how far. Well up on the
wooded hillside, I think it likely. I put my hands behind my ears and
hearken. Again and again I hear it; true music! music and poetry in
one; the voice of the night. But look! What is that dark object just
before me on a low branch not two rods away? There is no light with
which to be sure of its outlines; a tuft of dead leaves, perhaps; but
it is of a screech owl’s size. Another phrase. Yes, it comes from that
spot, or I am tricked. And now the bird moves, and the next instant
takes wing. But he goes only a few feet, and alights even nearer to me
than before. How soft his voice is! Almost as soft as his flight. How
different from the woodcock’s panting, breathless whistle! Though I can
see him, and could almost touch him, the tremulous measure might still
be coming from the depths of the wood. I listen with all my ears, till
an approaching carriage turns a corner in the road below. I hope the
owl will not mind; but as the wheels come near he leaves his perch,
flies directly before my face (with no more noise than if a feather
were falling through the air), and disappears in the forest opposite.
Two good birds I have listened to. The evening has been kind to me. Two
birds? nay, two poets: a poet in a frenzy, and a poet dreaming.
UNDER APRIL CLOUDS
“Good-morning.”
“Ah, good-morning. How are you?”
I was on what I suppose is habitually the most crowded sidewalk in
Boston, where men in haste are always to be seen betaking themselves to
the street as the only means of making headway. A hand was laid on my
shoulder. A business man, one of the busiest, I should think he must
be, had come up behind me. He was looking happy. Yes, he said, he was
very well. “And yesterday,” he continued, “I had a great pleasure. I
saw my first fox-colored sparrow, and heard him sing.”
No wonder his face shone. His condition was enviable. The fox sparrow
is a noble bird, with a most musical voice, the prince of all sparrows.
To hear him for the first time--if one does hear him--is a real event.
A man might well walk a crowded city sidewalk the next day and smile
to himself at the memory of such high fortune.
After all, happiness is a good thing. Not so desirable, perhaps,
as a great office, or a mint of money, but a pretty good thing,
nevertheless. It is encouraging, in these days of far-sought pleasures
and prodigal expense, to see men get it at a low rate and on innocent
terms.
For myself, I think I have never known fox sparrows more plentiful than
for the past week. From our human point of view their present migration
has been eminently favorable; from the birds’ point of view it has
probably been in the highest degree unfavorable, the prolonged spell of
cloudy and rainy weather having made night flights difficult, not to
say impossible. The travelers have been obliged to stay where the storm
had caught them, and we, at this intermediate station, have profited by
their misfortune.
On the 7th I stood in the midst of as fine a flock as a man could
wish to see. A thick cloud enveloped us; we might have been on a
mountain-top; but for the minute it had ceased raining, and the
birds were in a lively mood. Sometimes as many as five or six were
singing together, while a chorus of snowbirds trilled the prettiest of
accompaniments; a concert worthy of Easter or any other festival.
The weather has been of a kind to keep night-traveling migrants here, I
say; which is as much as to say that it has been of a sort to prevent
other such birds from arriving. There have been no bright nights, I
think, since April came in. So it happens, according to my theory
(which may be as sound or as unsound as the reader pleases), that
although it is now the 10th of the month, there has been, for my eye,
no sign of chipper, field sparrow, or vesper sparrow. How should there
be? How should such creatures find their way, with the fog and the rain
blinding them night after night? No doubt they are impatient to be at
home again in the old dooryards, the old savin-dotted pastures, and the
old hay-fields. By and by the clouds will vanish, and they will hasten
northward in crowds. The night air will be full of them, and the next
day all outdoor, bird-loving people will be in clover.
Unfavorable as the weather is, however, and against all probabilities,
one cannot quite forego seasonable expectations. I pass the border
of a grass field. A sparrow sings in the distance, and I stop to
listen. Could that have been a vesper sparrow? The song comes again.
No; it begins a little in the vesper’s manner; the opening measure is
unusually smooth and unemphatic; but the bird is only a song sparrow.
It is no shrewder than Peter. Its speech bewrayeth it.
One kingfisher I have seen, shooting through the misty air far aloft,
his long wings making him look at that height like some seabird or
wader. I remember when the sight--not uncommon in spring--was to me an
insoluble mystery. As for calling the bird a kingfisher, such a thought
never occurred to me. I knew the kingfisher well enough, or imagined
that I did, but not at that altitude and flying in that strong,
purposeful manner. Yet even at such times he commonly sounds his rattle
before him, as if he wished his identity and his whereabouts to be
known.
I have seen also a single marsh hawk. That was on the 9th, and the
circumstances of the case were ludicrous. I had stopped to look down
from a wooded hilltop into a swampy pool, where ducks sometimes alight,
when I saw a white object moving rapidly along the farther side of the
swamp, now visible, now hidden behind a veil of trees and shrubbery. A
road runs along that border of the swamp, and I took this moving white
object for a bundle which a boy was carrying upon a bicycle (making
pretty quick time), till suddenly I perceived that it was only a marsh
hawk’s rump! A redwing had given chase to the hawk--mostly for sport,
I imagine, or just to keep his hand in; for I do not suppose he could
have had any real grudge to settle. Probably this is the first case on
record in which a hawk was ever mistaken for a wheelman.
Two evenings ago I made a solitary excursion to an extensive swamp and
meadow, hoping to witness, or at least to hear, the aerial performance
of the snipe. The air was full of a Scotch mist, and the sky cloudy. If
the birds were there, and in a performing mood, they would be likely
to get under way in good season. I waded across the meadow out of
the sight of houses, and, having found what seemed to be a promising
position, I took it and held it for perhaps an hour. But I heard none
of those strange, ghostly, swishing noises that I was listening for.
Perhaps the birds had not yet arrived. Perhaps this was not a snipe
meadow.
For a time robins and song sparrows made music more or less remote,
and an unseen fox sparrow, nearer at hand, amused me with excellent
imitations of the brown thrasher’s smacking kiss. Then, as it grew
really dark, I relinquished the hunt and started homeward. And then the
real music began; for as I approached the highway I heard the whistle
of a woodcock, and presently discovered that, for the first time in my
life, I was walking through what might be called a veritable woodcock
concert. Once three birds were vocal together; one was “bleating” on
the right, another on the left, while a third was at the very height
of his ecstasy overhead. For a mile or more I walked under a shower of
this incomparable, indescribable music. It dropped into my ears like
rain from heaven.
One bird was calling just over the roadside wall. I stole nearer and
nearer, taking a few cautious steps after each bleat, till finally I
could hear the water dropping into the hogshead. I wonder how many
readers will know what I mean by that. After each call, as a kind of
pendant to it, there comes, if you are very, very close, a curious
small sound, exactly as if a drop of water (the comparison is not mine)
had fallen into a hogshead already half full. I had not heard it for
years. In fact, I had forgotten it, and heard it now for the first few
times without recollecting what it was.
Then the bird rose--always invisible, of course, for by this time there
was no thought of seeing anything--and went skyward in broad circles,
till he was at the top of his flight, and when he descended he came to
earth on the other side of the road, a good distance away. He had seen
me, I suppose, with those big bull’s-eyes of his, which do so much to
heighten the oddity of his personal appearance.
He was the last of his kind. For the rest of my walk I heard no music
except the sweet whistling of hylas here and there, and once, in a
woodland pool, the grating chorus of a set of wood frogs.
Butterflies are waiting for sunshine--like the rest of us; I have
not seen so much as an Antiopa; and the only wild flowers I have yet
picked are the pretty red blossoms (pistillate blossoms) of the hazel;
tiny things, floral egrets, if you please to call them so, of a lively
and beautiful color. Sunshine or no sunshine, they were in bloom for
Easter.
FLYING SQUIRRELS AND SPADE-FOOT FROGS
It is pleasant to realize familiar truths anew; to have it brought
freshly to mind, for example, how many forms of animal life there are
about us of which we seldom get so much as a glimpse.
In all my tramping over eastern Massachusetts I have met with two
foxes. One I saw for perhaps the tenth part of a second, the other for
perhaps two or three seconds. And probably my experience has not been
exceptional. In this one particular it would be safe to wager that not
one in ten of those who read this article will be able to boast of any
great advantage over the man who wrote it. Yet every raiser of poultry
hereabout will certify that foxes are by no means uncommon, and I know
a man living within fifteen miles of the State House who, last winter,
by a kind of “still hunt”--without a dog--killed three foxes in as
many successive days. Reynard has fine gifts of invisibility, but a man
with foxes on his mind will be likely to find them.
This same near neighbor of mine takes now and then an otter; only three
or four weeks ago he showed me the skin of one on its stretching-board;
and the otter is an animal that I not only have never seen in this part
of the world, but never expect to see. I haven’t that kind of an eye.
As for muskrats, the trapper takes them almost without number; “rats,”
he calls them; while to me it is something like an event if once or
twice a year I happen to come upon one swimming in a brook.
Another of these seclusive races, that manage to live close about us
unespied by all except the most inquisitive of their human neighbors,
is the race of flying squirrels. Whether they are more or less
common than red squirrels, gray squirrels, and chipmunks, it would
be difficult to say; but while red squirrels, gray squirrels, and
chipmunks flit before you wherever you go, you may haunt the woods
from year’s end to year’s end without seeing hide or hair of their
interesting cousin. Flying squirrels stir abroad after dark; not
because their deeds are evil (though they are said to like small birds
and birds’ eggs), but because--well, as the wise old nursery saw very
conclusively puts it, because “it is their nature to.”
Several times during the past winter I made attempts to see them (the
story of one of these attempts has been told in a previous chapter),
but always without success, though twice I was taken to a nest that
was known to be in use. The other day I went to the same place again,
the friend who conducted me having found a squirrel there that very
forenoon. He shook the tree, a small gray-birch, with a nest of leaves
and twigs perched in its top, and out peeped the squirrel. “See him?”
said my friend. “Yes.” Then he gave the tree a harder shake, and in
a moment the creature spread his “wings” and sailed gracefully away,
landing on the trunk of an oak not far off, at about the height of
my head. There he clung, his large handsome eye, full of a startled
emotion, fastened upon me. I wondered if he would let me put my hand
on him; but as I approached within three or four yards he scrambled
up the tree into the small branches at the top. He was going to take
another flight, if the emergency seemed to call for it, and the higher
he could get, the better. The oak was too big to be shaken, but a
smaller tree stood near it. This my companion shook in the squirrel’s
face, and again he took flight. This time he passed squarely over my
head, showing a flat outspread surface sailing through the air, looking
not the least in the world like a squirrel or any other quadruped.
Again he struck against a trunk, and again he ran up into the treetop.
And again he was shaken off.
Four times he flew, and then I protested that I had seen enough and
would not have him molested further. We left him in a maple-top,
surrounded by handsome red flower-clusters.
The flight, even under such unnatural conditions, is a really pretty
performance, the surprising thing about it being the ease and grace
with which the acrobat manages to take an upward turn toward the end of
his course, so as always to alight head uppermost against the bole.
It would be fun to see such a carnival as Audubon describes, when two
hundred or more of the squirrels were at play in the evening, near
Philadelphia, running up the trees and sailing away, like boys at the
old game of “swinging off birches.” “Scores of them,” he says, “would
leave each tree at the same moment, and cross each other, gliding like
spirits through the air, seeming to have no other object in view than
to indulge a playful propensity.”
Compared with that, mine was a small show; but it was so much better
than nothing.
Two mornings later (April 30) I was walking up the main street of our
village, lounging along, waiting for an electric car to overtake me,
when I heard loud batrachian voices from a field on my left hand.
“Aha!” said I, “the spade-foots are out again.” It had occurred to
me within a day or two that this should be their season, if, as is
believed, their appearance above ground is conditioned upon an unusual
rainfall.
Some years ago, when I was amusing myself for a little with the study
of toads and frogs, checking Dr. J. A. Allen’s annotated list of the
Massachusetts batrachia, I became very curious about this peculiar
and little understood species, known scientifically as _Scaphiopus
holbrookii_, or the solitary spade-foot. It was originally described
from South Carolina, I read, and was first found in Massachusetts, near
Salem, about 1810. Its cries were said to have been heard at a distance
of half a mile, and were mistaken for those of young crows. For more
than thirty years afterward the frogs were noticed at this place only
three times. They were described as burrowing in the ground, coming
forth only to spawn, and that, as far as could be ascertained, at very
irregular intervals, sometimes many years in length.
This, as I say, I read in Dr. Allen’s catalogue, to the great
sharpening of my curiosity. If I ever heard such noises, I should be
prepared to guess at the author of them. Well, some years afterward
(it was almost exactly eight years ago), fresh from a first visit to
Florida, where my ears had grown expectant of strange sounds (a great
use of travel), I stepped out of my door one evening in late April, and
was hardly in the street before I heard somewhere ahead of me a chorus
of stentorian frog-notes. “That should be the spade-foot’s voice,” I
said to myself, with full conviction. I hastened forward, traced the
tumult to a transient pool in a field, and as I neared the place picked
up a board that lay in the grass, and with it, by good fortune, turned
the first frog I came in sight of into a specimen. This I sent to the
batrachian specialist at Cambridge, who answered me, as I knew he
would, that it was Scaphiopus.
My spade-foots of yesterday morning were in the same spot. I could not
stay then to look at them, for at that moment the car came along. I
left it at a favorite place in the next township, and had gone a mile
or so on foot when from another transient roadside pool I heard the
spade-foot’s voice again. This was most interesting. I skirted the
water, trying to get within reach of one of the performers. The attempt
was unsuccessful; but in the course of it I saw for the first time the
creature in the act of calling. And every time I saw him I laughed. He
lay stretched out at full length upon the surface of the pool, floating
high, as if he were somehow peculiarly buoyant. Then suddenly his hind
parts dropped, his head flew up, his enormous white, or pinkish-white,
vocal sac was instantaneously inflated (like a white ball on the
water), and the grating call was given out; after which the creature’s
head dropped, his hinder parts bobbed up into place (sometimes he was
nearly overset by the violence of the action), and again he lay silent.
This same ludicrous performance--which by the watch was repeated every
three or four seconds--I observed more at length in the other pool
after my return. It seems to be indulged in only so long as the frogs
are unmated. I took it for the call of the male, the “lusty bachelor.”
At the same moment couples lay here and there upon the water, all
silent as dead men.
That was yesterday afternoon. At night, as had been true the evening
previous (the neighbors in at least four of the nearer houses having
noticed the uproar), the chorus was loud. I could hear it from my
window, perhaps a quarter of a mile distant. This morning there is no
sign of batrachian life about the place. Within a very short time--long
before the tadpoles, which will be hatched in two or three days, can
possibly have matured--the pool will in the ordinary course of nature
have dried up, and all those eggs will have gone to waste.
A strange life it seems. What do the frogs live on underground? Why do
they omit, year after year, to come forth and lay their eggs? Do they
wait to be drowned out, and then (like thrifty farmers, who improve a
wet season in which to marry) proceed to perpetuate the species?
These and many other questions it would be easy to ask. Especially one
would like to read from the inside the story of the life and adventures
of the young, which grow from the egg to maturity--through tadpole to
frog--without seeing father or mother. What a little we know! And how
few are the things we see!
THE WARBLERS ARE COMING
They are a grand army. The Campbells are nowhere in the comparison,
whether for numbers or looks. And this is their month. Let us all go
out to see them and cry them welcome.
They are late, most exceptionally so. I have never known anything to
match it. Brave travelers as they are (some of them, yes, many of them,
are on a three or four thousand mile journey; and a long flight it is
for a five-inch bird, from South America to the arctic circle)--brave
travelers as they are, they cannot contend against the inevitable,
and our April weather, this year, was too much even for a bird’s
punctuality.
The yellow warbler, for example, one of the prettiest of the tribe,
is by habit one of the truest to his schedule. In any ordinary season
he may be confidently expected to arrive in our Boston country on
the first day of May. If conditions favor his passage, he may even
anticipate the date, perhaps by forty-eight hours. This year not a
yellow warbler was to be seen up to May 6. Then, between the evening
of the 6th and the morning of the 7th, the birds dropped into their
accustomed places, and in the early forenoon, when I went out to look
for them, they were singing as cheerily as if they had never been away.
With nothing but their wits and their wings to depend upon, I thought
they had done exceedingly well. To me, on such terms, South America
would seem a very long way off.
The same night brought the Nashville warblers. On the 6th not one was
visible, for I made it my business to look. On the morning of the 7th
I had no need to search for them. In all the old haunts, among the
pitch-pines and the gray-birches, they were flitting about and singing,
as fresh as larks and as lively as crickets. They, too, have come from
the tropics, and will go as far north, some of them, as “Labrador and
the fur countries.” A bold spirit may live under a few feathers.