on the wires"I soon spied him on the wires of a telegraph-pole."
Great-crest is a character, one of the most individual of all our birds. What other bird lines his nest with snake-skins? or hangs such gruesome things out for latch-strings? He has taken up his residence among us, but he has given us pretty plainly to understand that we need not call, else I mistake the hint in the scaly skin that dangles from his door. The strong personality of the bird is stamped even upon its eggs. Where are any to match them for curious, crazy coloring? The artist had purple inks, shading all the way from the deepest chestnut-purple to the faintest lilac. With a sharp pen he scratched the shell from end to end with all his colors till it was covered, then finished it off with a few wild flourishes and crosswise scrawls.
Like the birds of the orchards and buildings, the field-birds also are yielding to human influences. We can almost say that we have an order of farm-birds, so many species seem to have become entirely dependent upon the pasture and grain-field.
"Where did Bobolink disport himself before there were meadows in the North and rice-fieldsin the South? Was he the same lithe, merry-hearted beau then as now?" I do not know. But I do know that, in the thirty and three years since Mr. Burroughs asked the question, Bobolink has lost none of his nimbleness, nor forgotten one bubbling, tinkling note of his song. Yet in his autumn journey South, from the day he reaches the ripe reeds of the Jersey marshes till he is lost in the wide rice-lands of Georgia, his passage is through a ceaseless, pitiless storm of lead. Dare he return to us in spring? and can he ever sing again? He will come if May comes—forgetting and forgiving, dressed in as gay a suit as ever, and just as full of song.
There is no marvel of nature's making equal to the miracle of her temper toward man. How gladly she yields to his masterful dominion! How sufferingly she waits for him to grow out of his spoiled, vicious childhood. The spirit of the bobolink ought to exorcise the savage out of us. It ought, and it does—slowly.
We are trying, for instance, to cow the savage in us by law, to restrain it while the birds are breeding; but we hardly succeed yet. Themating season is scarcely over, the young not yet grown, when the gunners about me go into the fields with their dogs and locate every covey of quail, even counting the number of birds in each. With the dawn of the first day of open season they are out, going from flock to flock, killing, till the last possible bird is in their bloody bags.
birds flying"He will come if May comes."
One of the most pathetic of all the wordless cries of the out-of-doors is the covey-call of the female quail at night, trying to gather the scattered flock together after the dogs are called off and the hunters have gone home.
lonely frightened quail"Within a few feet of me dropped the lonely frightened quail."
It was nearly dark one December afternoon, the snow ankle-deep and falling swiftly, when, crossing a wide field, I heard this call from a piece of sprout-land ahead of me. Kneeling in the snow, I answered the whistle. Instantly came a reply. Back and forth we signaled till there was a whir of wings, and down in the soft snow within a few feet of me dropped the lonely, frightened quail. She was the only one left of a covey that the night before had roosted unbroken,snugly wedged, with their tails together, under a pile of brush.
Sharing the fields with the quails are the meadow-larks. They scale along the grass, rarely rising higher than the cedars, flapping rapidly for a short distance, then sailing a little in a cautious, breath-held manner, as though wings were a new invention and just a trifle dangerous yet. On they go to a fence-stake, and land with many congratulatory flirts of wings and tail. Has anybody observed the feat? They look around. Yes; here I sit,—a man on a fence across the field,—and the lark turns toward me and calls out: "Did you see me?"
He would be the best-bred, most elegant of our birds, were it not for his self-consciousness. He is consumed with it. There is too much gold and jet on his breast. But, in spite of all this, the plain, rich back and wings, the slender legs, the long, delicate beak, the erect carriage, the important air, the sleek, refined appearance, compel us to put him down an aristocrat.
In a closely cropped pasture near the house, in early June, I found the eggs of the night-hawk. There was no nest, of course: the eggslay upon the grass, and, for safety, had been left directly under the fence. The cows might not step on them here, but nothing prevented their crushing the fragile things with their noses.
on a fence-stake"On they go to a fence-stake."
Lengthwise, upon one of the rails, slept the mother. She zigzagged off at my approach, dazzled and uncertain in the white light of the noon, making no outcry nor stopping an instant to watch the fate of her eggs. She acted like a huge bat, slinking and dodging, out of her element in the light, and anxious to be hid. She did not seem like a creature that had a voice,and the way she flew would make one think that she did not know the use of her wings. But what a circus flier she is at night! and with what an uncanny noise she haunts the twilight! She has made more hair stand on end, with her earthward plunge and its unearthly boom through the dusk, than all the owls together. It is a ghostly joke. And who would believe in the daylight that this limp, ragged lump, dozing upon the fence or the kitchen roof, could play the spook so cleverly in the dark?
III
On the 25th of April, before the trees were in leaf, I heard the first true wood-note of the spring. It came from the tall oaks beyond the garden. "Clear, clear, clear up!" it rang, pure, untamed, and quickening. The solitary vireo! It was his whistle, inimitable, unmistakable; and though I had not seen him since last July, I hurried out to the woods, sure he would greet me.
Solitary is the largest, rarest, tamest, and sweetest-voiced of the vireos. I soon found him high in the tops of the trees; but I wanted himnearer. He would not descend. So I chased him, stoning and mocking him even, till, at last, he came down to the bushes and showed me his big blue head, white eye-rings, wing-bars, and yellow-washed sides.
singing"It was a love-song."
He did more than show himself: he sang for me. Within ten feet of me, he began a quiet little warble of a tenderness and contentment I never heard before. Such variety of notes, such sweetness of melody, such easy, unconscious rendering! It was a love-song, but sung all to himself, for he knew that there was no gentle heart to listen this side of Virginia. He sang tohis own happy heart as pure and sweet a song as the very angels know.
Solitary disappeared from that day. I concluded he had gone to heavier, wilder woods to nest. It was late in June that, passing through this brush-land, I saw hanging from an oak sapling, just above my head, a soft, yellowish basket. It was a vireo's nest; but it was too large, too downy, too yellow for Red-eye. There were no bunches of white spider-webs upon it, such as Red-eye hangs all over his nest. I stepped aside for a better view, and had just caught the glint of a large, white-ringed eye peering over the nest's edge at me, when, off in the woods behind me, the noon hush was startled by Solitary's whistle—a round, pure, pearly note that broke the quiet as pearly teeth break through the smile of a beautiful face. He soon appeared, coming on, a tree at a time, looking and asking, in no hurry and in no alarm. When he reached the pine overhead, his mate left the nest to confer with him. They scolded me mildly while I climbed for a look at the four delicately spotted eggs; but as soon as I lay down upon the ground, the mother, without fuss or fear, slipped into thenest and cuddled down over the eggs till her head hardly showed above the rim. Had a few bushes been removed I could have seen the nest from my front door.
Why do the wood-birds so persistently build their nests along the paths and roads? I said that even the hermit-thrush prefers a wood with a road through it. If he possibly can he will build along that road. And what one of the birds will not? Is it mere stupidity? Is it curiosity to see what goes on? Is there some safety here from enemies worse than boys and cats and dogs? Or is it that these birds take this chance for human fellowship? If this last is the reason for their rejecting the deep tangles for limbs that overhang roads and tufts of grass in constantly traveled foot-paths, then they can be pardoned; otherwise they are foolish—fatally foolish.
The first black-and-white warbler's nest I ever found was at the base of a clump of bushes in a narrow wood-path not ten feet from a highway. There were acres of bushes beyond, thick and pathless, all theirs to choose from.
In the same piece of scrub-oak the summer after I found another black-and-white warbler'snest. The loud talk of three of the birds attracted me. Two of them were together, and just mated, evidently; the third was a male, and just as plainly the luckless suitor. He was trying to start a quarrel between the young couple, doing his best to make the new bride break her vows. He flew just ahead of them, darting to the ground, scuttling under the brush, and calling out, "See here! Come here! Don't fool with him any longer! I have the place for a nest!"
But the pair kept on together, chatting brightly as they ran up and down the trees and hunted under the fallen limbs and leaves for a home-site. The male led the way and found the places; the female passed judgment. I followed them.
Every spot the cock peeped into was the finest in the woods; his enthusiasm was constant and unbounded. "Any place is heaven," he kept repeating, "any place, so long as I have you." But she was to do the housekeeping, and the ecstasies of the honeymoon were not to turn her head. She was house-hunting; and, like every woman, at her best. She said "no," and "no,"and "no." I began to think they never would find the place, when the male darted far ahead and went out of sight beneath some low huckleberry-bushes near a stone wall. This wall ran between the woods and a pasture; and parallel with it, on the woods side, was a foot-path.
Up came the little hen, and together they scratched about under the leaves. Suddenly the cock flew away and fetched a strip of chestnut bark. This he turned over to his wife. Then both birds flew out to the chestnut limbs for bark, and brought their strips back. The home was founded.
It was the merest cavity, pushed into the dead leaves, with three shreds of bark for first timbers. In less than a week the structure was finished and furnished—with a tiny white egg thickly sprinkled with brown. I watched the spot daily, and finally saw the four young warblers safely out into their new woods-world. But from the day the first egg was laid until the nestlings left I constantly expected to find everything crushed under the foot of some passer-by.
When free from household cares the chickadee is the most sociable of the birds of the woods.But he takes family matters seriously, and withdraws so quietly to the unfrequented parts of the woods during nesting-time as to seem to have migrated. Yet of the four chickadees' nests found about the house, one was in a dead yellow birch in a bit of deep swamp, two others were in yellow birches along wood-roads, and the fourth was in a rotten fence-post by the main road, a long way from any trees.
pair chatting"But the pair kept on together, chatting brightly."
A workman while mending the fence discovered this last nest. The post crumbled in his hands as he tried to pull it down, revealing the nest of moss and rabbit hair, with its five brown-and-white eggs. He left the old post, propped it up with a sound one, and, mending the broken walls of the cavity the best he could, hurried along with his task, that the birds might return. They came back, found the wreckage of dust and chips covering the eggs, tried the flimsy walls—and went away. It was a desecrated home, neither safe nor beautiful now; so they forsook it.
There is no eagle's nest in this collection of thirty-six. But if Mr. Burroughs is correct, there is the next thing to it—a humming-bird's nest; three of them, indeed, one of which iswithin a stone's throw of my door! This one is in the oaks behind my garden, but the other two are even nearer to houses. One of these is upon the limb of a pear-tree. The tip of this limb rubs against a woodshed connected with a dwelling. The third nest is in a large apple orchard, in the tree nearest the house, and saddled upon that branch of the tree which reaches farthest toward the dwelling. So close is this nest that I can look out of the garret window directly into it.
in a birch"In a dead yellow birch."
I believe that Ruby-throat is so far domesticatedthat he rejoices over every new flowergarden. There was nearly half an acre of gladioli in the neighborhood one summer, where all the humming-birds gathered from far and near. Here, for the only time in my life, I saw aflockof humming-birds. I counted eight one day; and the gardener told me that he had often seen a dozen of them among the spikes. They squeaked like bats, and played—about as bullets might play. In fact, I think I dodged when they whizzed past me, as a soldier does the first time he is under fire.
bird in nest"So close I can look directly into it."
One of my friends had a cellar window abloomwith geraniums. A ruby-throat came often to this window. One day the mistress of the flowers caught the wee chap in her hands. He knew at once that she meant no harm and quietly submitted. A few days later he returned and was captured again. He liked the honey, and evidently the fondling, too, for he came very regularly after that for the nectar and the lady's soft hands.
The nest behind my garden is in the top of a tall, slender maple, with oaks and chestnuts surrounding and overshadowing it. Finding a nest like this is inspiration for the rest of life. The only feat comparable to it is the discovery of a bee-tree. Finding wild bees, I think, would be good training for one intending to hunt humming-birds' nests in the woods. But no one ever had such an intention. No one ever deliberately started into the woods a-saying, "Go to, now; I'll find a humming-bird's nest in here!"
Humming-birds' nests are the gifts of the gods—rewards for patience and for gratitude because of commoner grants. My nests have invariably come this way, or, if you choose, by accident. The nearest I ever came to earning one was inthe case of this one in the maple. I caught a glimpse of a humming-bird flashing around the high limbs of a chestnut, so far up that she looked no bigger than a hornet. I suspected instantly that she was gathering lichens for a nest, and, as she darted off, I threw my eyes ahead of her across her path. It was just one chance in ten thousand if I even saw her speeding through the limbs and leaves, if I got the line of her flight, to say nothing of a clue to her nesting-place. It was little short of a miracle. I had tried many times before to do it, but this is the only time I ever succeeded: my line of vision fell directly upon the tiny builder as she dropped to her nest in the sapling.
The structure was barely started. I might have stared at it with the strongest glass and never made it out a nest; the sapling, too, was no thicker at the butt than my wrist, and I should not have dreamed of looking into its tall, spindling top for any kind of a nest. Furthermore, as if to rob one of the last possibility of discovering it, a stray bud, two years before, had pushed through the bark of the limb about three inches behind where the nest was to be fixed, andhad grown, till now its leaves hung over the dainty house in an almost perfect canopy and screen.
For three weeks the walls of this house were going up. Is it astonishing that, when finished, they looked like a growth of the limb, like part and parcel of the very tree? I made a daily visit to the sapling until the young birds flew away; then I bent the tree to the ground and brought the nest home. It now hangs above my desk, its thick walls, its downy bed, its leafy canopy telling still of the little mother's unwearied industry, of her infinite love and foresight. So faultlessly formed, so safely saddled to the limb, so exquisitely lichened into harmony with the green around, this tiniest nest speaks for all of the birds. How needless, how sorry, would be the loss of these beautiful neighbors of our copses and fields!
frog
There are many lovers of the out-of-doors who court her in her robes of roses and in her blithe and happy hours of bird-song only. Now a lover that never sees her barefoot in the meadow, that never hears her commonplace chatter at the frog-pond, that never finds her in her lowly, humdrum life among the toads and snakes, has little genuine love for his mistress.
To know the pixy when one sees it, to call the long Latin name of the ragweed, to exclaim over the bobolink's song, to go into ecstasies at a glorious sunset, is not, necessarily, to love nature at all. One who does all this sincerely, but who stuffs his ears to the din of the spring frogs, is in love with nature's pretty clothes, her dainty airs and fine ways. Her warm, true heart lies deeper down. When one has gone down to that, then a March without peepers will be as lonesomeas a crowd without friends; then an orchard without the weather-wise hyla can never make good his place with mere apples; and the front door without a solemn, philosophic toad beneath its step will lack something quite as needful to its evening peace and homeness as it lacks when the old-fashioned roses and the honeysuckle are gone.
We are not humble nor thoughtful out of doors. There is too much sentiment in our passion for nature. We make colored plates and poems to her. All honor to the poets! especially to those who look carefully and see deeply, like Wordsworth and Emerson and Whitman. But what the common run of us needs, when we go a-wooing nature, is not more poetry, but a scientific course in biology. How a little study in comparative anatomy, for instance, would reveal to us the fearful and wonderful in the make-up of all animal forms! And the fearful and wonderful have a meaning and a beauty which we ought to realize.
We all respond to the flowers and birds, for they demand no mental effort. What about the snakes and frogs? Do we shiver at them? Dowe more than barely endure them? No one can help feeling the comfort and sympathy of the bluebird. The very drifts soften as he appears. He comes some March morning in a flurry of snow, or drops down out of a cheerless, soaking sky, and assures us that he has just left the South and has hurried ahead at considerable hazard to tell us that spring is on the way. Yet, here is another voice, earlier than the bluebird's often, with the bluebird's message, and with even more than the bluebird's authority; but who will listen to a frog? A prophet is not without honor save in his own country. One must needs have wings and come from a foreign land to be received among us as a prophet of the spring. Suppose a little frog noses his way up through the stiff, cold mud, bumps against the ice, and pipes,Spring! spring! spring!Has he not as much claim upon our faith as a bird that drops down from no one knows where, with the same message? The bluebird comes because he has seen the spring; Hyla comes because he has the spring in his heart. He that receives Hyla in the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet's reward.
melting snow"'Spring! spring! spring!'"
For me there is no clearer call in all the year than that of the hylas' in the break-up days of March. The sap begins to start in my roots at the first peep. There is something in their brave little summons, as there is in the silvery light on the pussy-willows, that takes hold on my hope and courage, and makes the March mud good to tramp through. And this despite the fact that these early hylas so aggravated my first attack of homesickness that I thought it was to be fatal. The second night I ever spent away from home and my mother was passed with old Mrs. Tribbet, who had a large orchard, behind which was a frog-pond. In vain did she stay me with raisins and comfort me with apples. I was sick for home. And those frogs! When the guineas got quiet, how dreadful they made the long May twilight with their shrieking, strangling, homesick cries! After all these years I cannot listen to them in the evenings of early spring without catching an echo from the back of that orchard, without just a throb of that pain so near to breaking my heart.
Close by, in a corner lot between the two cross-roads of the village, lies a wretched littlepuddle, the home of countless hylas until the June suns dry it up. Among the hundred or more people who live in the vicinity and who pass the pond almost daily, I think that I am the only one who, until recently, was sure he had ever seen a peeper, and knew that they were neither tadpoles, salamanders, nor turtles. As I was standing by the puddle, one May day, a good neighbor came along and stopped with me. The chorus was in full blast—cricket-frogs, Pickering's frogs, spring frogs, and, leading them all, the melancholy quaver of Bufo, the "hop-toad."
"What is it that makes thedreadfulnoise?" my neighbor asked, meaning, I knew, by "dreadful noise," the song of the toad. I handed her my opera-glass, pointed out the minstrel with the doleful bagpipe sprawling at the surface of the water, and, after sixty years of wondering, she saw with immense satisfaction that one part in this familiar spring medley was taken by the common toad.
Sixty springs are a good many springs to be finding out the author of so well-known a sound as this woeful strain of the serenading toad; but more than half a century might be spent incatching a cricket-frog at his song. I tried to make my neighbor see one that was clinging to a stick in the middle of the puddle; but her eyes were dim. Deft hands have dressed these peepers. We have heard them by the meadowful every spring of our life, and yet the fingers of one hand number more than the peepers we have seen. One day I bent over three lily-pads tillnearly blind, trying to make out a cricket-frog that was piping all the while somewhere near or upon them. At last, in despair, I made a dash at the pads, only to see the wake as the peeper sank to the bottom an instant before my net struck the surface.
puddle"A wretched little puddle."
The entire frog family is as protectively colored as this least member, the cricket-frog. They all carry fern-seed in their pockets and go invisible. Notice the wood-frog with his tan suit and black cheeks. He is a mere sound as he hops about over the brown leaves. I have had him jump out of the way of my feet and vanish while I stared hard at him. He lands with legs extended, purposely simulating the shape of the ragged, broken leaves, and offers, as the only clue for one's baffled eyes, the moist glisten as his body dissolves against the dead brown of the leaf-carpet. The tree-toad,Hyla versicolor, still more strikingly blends with his surroundings, for, to a certain extent, he can change color to match the bark upon which he sits. More than once, in climbing apple-trees, I have put my hand upon a tree-toad, not distinguishing it from the patches of gray-green lichen upon the limbs. But thereis less of wonder in the tree-toad's ability to change his colors than in the way he has of changing his clothes. He is never troubled with the getting of a new suit; his labor comes in caring for his old ones. It is curious how he disposes of his cast-off clothes.
One day late in autumn I picked up a tree-toad that was stiff and nearly dead with cold. I put him in a wide-mouthed bottle to thaw, and found by evening that he was quite alive, sitting with his toes turned in, looking much surprised at his new quarters. He made himself at home, however, and settled down comfortably, ready for what might happen next.
The following day he climbed up the side of the bottle and slept several hours, his tiny disked toes holding him as easily and restfully as if he were stretched upon a feather-bed. I turned him upside down; but he knew nothing of it until later when he awoke; then he deliberately turned round with his head up and went to sleep again. At night he was wide awake, winking and blinking at the lamp, and watching me through his window of green glass.
A few nights after his rescue Hyla sat upon thebottom of his bottle in a very queer attitude. His eyes were drawn in, his head was bent down, his feet rolled up—his whole body huddled into a ball less than half its normal size. After a time he began to kick and gasp as if in pain, rolling and unrolling himself desperately. I thought he was dying. He would double up into a bunch, then kick out suddenly and stand up on his hind legs with his mouth wide open as if trying to swallow something. Hewastrying to swallow something, and the thing had stuck on the way. It was a kind of cord, and ran out of each corner of his mouth, passing over his front legs, thinning and disappearing most strangely along his sides.
With the next gulp I saw the cord slip down a little, and, as it did so, the skin along his sides rolled up. It was his old suit! He was taking it off for a new one; and, instead of giving it to the poor, he was trying to economize by eating it. What a meal! What a way to undress! What curious economy!
Long ago the naturalists told us that the toads ate their skins—after shedding them; but it was never made plain to me that they ate themwhilechanging them—indeed,swallowedthem off! Three great gulps more and the suit—shirt, shoes, stockings, and all—disappeared. Then Hyla winked, drew his clean sleeve across his mouth, and settled back with the very air of one who has magnificently sent away the waiter with the change.
Four days later Hyla ate up this new suit. I saw the entire operation this time. It was almost a case of surgery. He pulled the skin over his head and neck with his fore feet as if it were a shirt, then crammed it into his mouth; kicked it over his back next; worked out his feet and legs, then ate it off as before. The act was accomplished with difficulty, and would have been quite impossible had not Hyla found the most extraordinary of tongues in his head. Next to the ability to speak Russian with the tongue comes the power to skin one's self with it. The tree-toad cannot quite croak Russian, but he can skin himself with his tongue. Unlike ours, his tongue is hung at the front end, with the free end forked and pointing toward his stomach. When my little captive had crammed his mouth full of skin, he stuck this fork of a tongue into itand forced it down his throat and held it down while he kicked and squirmed out of it.
Though less beautifully clothed than Hyla, our common toad, Bufo, is just as carefully clothed. Where the rain drips from the eaves, clean, narrow lines of pebbles have been washed out of the lawn. On one side of the house the shade lies all day long and the grass is cool and damp. Here, in the shade, a large toad has lived for two summers. I rarely pass that way without seeing him, well hidden in the grass. For several days lately he had been missing, when, searching more closely one morning, I found him sunk to the level of his back in the line of pebbles, his spots and the glands upon his neck so mingling with the varied collection of gravel about him that only a practised eye, and that sharp with expectation, could have made him out.
In a newly plowed field, with some of the fresh soil sticking to him, what thing could look more like a clod than this brown, shapeless lump of a toad? But there is a beauty even in this unlovely form; for here is perfect adaptability.
Our canons of the beautiful are false if they do not in some way include the toad. Shall wemeasure all the out-of-doors by the linnet's song, the cardinal-flower's flame, and the hay-field's odor? Deeper, wider, more fundamental and abiding than these standards, lie the intellectual principles of plan and purpose and the intellectual quality of perfect execution. We shall love not alone with all our heart, but with all our mind as well. If we judge the world beautiful by the superficial standard of what happens to please our eye, we shall see no more of the world than we do of the new moon. Whole classes of animals and wide regions of the earth's surface must, by this test, be excluded. The only way the batrachians could possibly come in would be by rolling the frogs in bread-crumbs and frying them. Treated thus, they look good and taste good, but this is all that can be said for the entire family. Studied, however, from the single view-point of protective coloring, or again, as illustrating the ease with which the clumsiest forms can be fitted to the widest variety of conditions, the toads do not suffer by any comparison. In the light of such study, Bufo loses his repulsiveness and comes to have a place quite as unique as the duckbill's, and a personality notless fascinating than the swallow's or the gray squirrel's.
However, the toad to the most of us is anything but a poem. What, indeed, looks less lovely, less nimble and buoyant, more chained to the earth, than a toad? But stretch the least web between his toes, lengthen his hind legs, and—over he goes, the leopard-frog, champion high diver of the marsh! Or, instead of the web, tip his toes with the tiniest disks, and—there he swings, Pickering's little hyla, clinging as easily to the under surface of that oak-leaf high in the tree as a fly clings to the kitchen ceiling.
When a boy I climbed to the top of the flagpole on one of the State geological survey stations. The pole rose far above the surrounding pines—the highest point for miles around. As I clinched the top of the staff, gripping my fingers into the socket for the flag-stick, I felt something cold, and drawing myself up, found a tree-toad asleep in the hole. Under him was a second toad, and under the second a third—all dozing up here on the very topmost tip of all the region.
From the river-ooze to the tree-top, naturecarries this toad-form simply by a thin web between the toes, or by tiny disks at their tips. And mixing her greens and browns with just a dash of yellow, she paints them all so skilfully that, upon a lily-pad, beside a lump of clay, or against the lichened limb of an old apple-tree, each sits as securely as Perseus in the charmed helmet that made him invisible.
The frogs have innumerable enemies among the water-birds, the fish, the snakes, and such animals as the fisher, coon, possum, and mink. The toads fortunately are supplied with glands behind their heads whose secretion is hateful to most of their foes, though it seems to be no offense whatever to the snakes. A toad's only chance, when a snake is after him, lies in hiding. I once saw a race between a toad and an adder snake, however, in which the hopper won.
One bright May morning I was listening to the music of the church bells, as it floated out from the city and called softly over the fields, when my reverie was interrupted by a sharp squeak and a thud beside the log on which I sat; something dashed over my foot; and I turned to catch sight of a toad bouncing past the log, makinghard for the brush along the fence. He scarcely seemed to touch the ground, but skimmed over the grass as if transformed into a midget jack-rabbit. His case was urgent; and little wonder! At the opposite end of the log, raised four or five inches from the grass, her eyes hard glittering, her nose tilted in the air, and astonishment all over her face, swayed the flat, ugly head of a hognose-adder. Evidently she, too, had never seen a toad get away in any such time before; and after staring a moment, she turned under the log and withdrew from the race, beaten.
Hungry snakes and hot, dusty days are death to the toads. Bufo would almost as soon find himself at the bottom of a well as upon a dusty road in blazing sunshine. His day is the night. He is not particular about the moon. All he asks is that the night be warm, that the dew lay the dust and dampen the grass, and that the insects be out in numbers. At night the snakes are asleep, and so are most of those ugly, creaking beasts with rolling iron feet that come crushing along their paths. There is no foe abroad at night, and life, during these dark, quiet hours,has even for a toad something like a dash of gaiety.
In one of the large pastures not far away stands a pump. It is shaded by an ancient apple-tree, under which, when the days are hottest, the cattle gather to doze and dream. They have worn away the grass about the mossy trough, and the water, slopping over, keeps the spot cool and muddy the summer through. Here the toads congregate from every quarter of the great field. I stretched myself out flat on the grass one night and watched them in the moonlight. There must have been fifty here that night, hopping about over the wet place—as grotesque a band as ever met by woods or waters.
We need no "second sight," no pipe of Pan, no hills of Latmos with a flock to feed, to find ourselves back in that enchanted world of the kelpies and satyrs. All we need to do is to use the eyes and ears we have, and haunt our hills by morning and by moonlight. Here in the moonlight around the old pump I saw goblins, if ever goblins were seen in the light of our moon.
There was not a croak, not a squeak, not theslightest sound, save the smallpit-pat, pit-pat, made by their hopping. There may have been some kind of toad talk among them, but listen never so closely, I could not catch a syllable of it.
Where did they all come from? How did they find their way to this wet spot over the hills and across the acres of this wide pasture? You could walk over the field in the daytime and have difficulty in finding a single toad; but here at night, as I lay watching, every few minutes one would hop past me in the grass; or coming down the narrow cow-paths in the faint light I could see a wee black bunch bobbing leisurely along with a hop and a stop, moving slowly toward the pump to join the band of his silent friends under the trough.
Not because there was more food at the pump, nor for the joy of gossip, did the toads meet here. The one thing necessary to their existence is water, and doubtless many of these toads had crossed this pasture of fifteen acres simply to get a drink. I have known a toad to live a year without food, and another to die in three days for lack of water. And yet this thirsty littlebeast never knows the pleasure of a real drink, because he does not know how to drink.
I have kept toads confined in cages for weeks at a time, never allowing them water when I could not watch them closely, and I never saw one drink. Instead, they would sprawl out in the saucer on their big, expansive bellies, andsoakthemselves full, as they did here on the damp sand about the pump.
Just after sunset, when the fireflies light up and the crickets and katydids begin to chirp, the toad that sleeps under my front step hops out of bed, kicks the sand off his back, and takes a long look at the weather. He seems tothinkas he sits here on the gravel walk, sober and still, with his face turned skyward. What does he think about? Is he listening to the chorus of the crickets, to the whippoorwills, or is it for supper he is planning? It may be of the vicissitudes of toad life, and of the mutability of all sublunary things, that he meditates. Who knows? Some day perhaps we shall have a batrachian psychology, and I shall understand what it is that my door-step lodger turns over and over in his mind as he watches the coming of the stars. All I cando now is to minute his cogitations, and I remember one evening when he sat thinking and winking a full hour without making a single hop.
As the darkness comes down he makes off for a night of bug-hunting. At the first peep of dawn, bulging plump at the sides, he turns back for home. Home to a toad usually means any place that offers sleep and safety for the day; but if undisturbed, like the one under the step, he will return to the same spot throughout the summer. This chosen spot may be the door-step, the cracks between the bricks of a well, or the dense leaves of a strawberry bed.
In the spring of 1899 so very little rain fell between March and June that I had to water my cucumber-hills. There was scarcely a morning during this dry spell that I did not find several toads tucked away for the day in these moist hills. These individuals had no regular home, like the one under the step, but hunted up the coolest, shadiest places in the soft soil and made new beds for themselves every morning.
Their bed-making is very funny, but not likely to meet the approval of the housewife. Wearied with the night's hunting, a toad comesto the cool cucumber-vines and proceeds at once to kick himself into bed. He backs and kicks and elbows into the loose sand as far as he can, then screws and twists till he is worked out of sight beneath the soil, hind end foremost. Here he lies, with only his big pop-eyes sticking out, half asleep, half awake. If a hungry adder crawls along, he simply pulls in his eyes, the loose sand falls over them, and the snake passes on.
When the nights begin to grow chilly and there are threatenings of frost, the toads hunt up winter quarters, and hide deep down in some warm burrow—till to-morrow if the sun comes out hot, or, it may be, not to wake until next April. Sometimes an unexpected frost catches them, when any shelter must do, when even their snake-fear is put aside or forgotten. "Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows," said Trinculo, as he crawled in with Caliban from the storm. So might the toad say in an early frost.
The workmen in a sandstone-quarry near by dug out a bunch of toads one winter, all mixed up with a bunch of adders. They were wriggled and squirmed together in a perfect jumble oflegs, heads, and tails—all in their dead winter sleep. Their common enemy, the frost, had taken them unawares, and driven them like friends into the crevice of the rocks, where they would have slept together until the spring had not the quarrymen unearthed them.
There is much mystery shrouding this humble batrachian. Somewhere in everybody's imagination is a dark cell harboring a toad. Reading down through literature, it is astonishing how often the little monster has hopped into it. There is chance for some one to make a big book of the fable and folk-lore that has been gathering through the ages about the toads. The stories of the jewels in their heads, of their age-long entombments in the rocks, of the warts and spells they induce, of their eating fire and dropping from the clouds, are legion.
And there seems to be some basis of fact for all these tales. No one has yet written for us the life-history of the toad. After having watched the tadpole miracle, one is thoroughly prepared to see toads jump out of the fire, tumble from broken marble mantles, and fall from the clouds. I never caught them in my hat duringa shower; but I have stood on Mauricetown Bridge, when the big drops came pelting down, and seen those drops apparently turn into tiny toads as they struck the planks, until the bridge was alive with them! Perhaps they had been hiding from the heat between the cracks of the planks—but there are people who believe that they came down from the clouds.
How, again, shall I explain this bit of observation? More than six years I lived near a mudhole that dried up in July. I passed it almost daily. One spring there was a strange toad-call in the hole, a call that I had never heard anything like before—a deafening, agonizing roar, hoarse and woeful. I found on investigation that the water was moving with spade-foot toads. Two days later the hole was still; every toad was gone. They disappeared; and though I kept that little puddle under watch for several seasons after that, I have not known a spade-foot to appear there since.
The water was almost jellied with their spawn, and a little later was swarming with spade-foot tadpoles. Then it began to dry up, and some of the tadpoles were left stranded in the deep foot-printsof the cows along the edge of the hole. Just as fast as the water disappeared in these foot-prints, the tails of the tadpoles were absorbed and legs formed, and they hopped away—some of them a week before their brothers, that were hatched at the same time, but who had stayed in the middle of the pond, where the deeper water allowed them a longer babyhood for the use of their tails. So swiftly, under pressure, can nature work with this adaptable body of the toad!
Long before the sun-baked mud began to crack these young ones had gone—where? And whence came their parents, and whither went they? When will they return?