It caught at the insects in the air"It caught at the insects in the air."
"It caught at the insects in the air."
The bird was flitting about the small platform upon which I stood. I remained as stiff as the pump, for which, evidently, it had mistaken me. It was not still a moment, but tossed back and forth on wings that were absolutely silent, and caught at the insects in the air and uttered its piercing cry. It leaped rather than flew, sometimes calling on the wing, and always upon touching the ground.
This is as good a view of the bird as I ever got at night. The darkness was too thick tosee what the food was it caught, or how it caught it. I could not make out a pose or a motion more than the general movements about the pump. The one other time that I have had a good look at the bird, when not asleep, showed him at play.
It was an early August morning, between two and three o'clock. The only doctor in the village had been out all night at a little town about five miles away. He was wanted at once, and I volunteered to get him.
Five miles is pure fun to a boy who has run barefoot every one of his fifteen summers; so I rolled up my trousers, tightened my belt, and bent away for Shiloh at an easy dog-trot that, even yet, I believe I could keep up for half a day.
There was not a glimmer in the east when I started. I had covered three miles, and was entering a long stretch of sprout-land when the dawn began. The road was dusty, and the dew-laid powder puffed beneath the soft, swift pats of my feet. Things began to stand out with some distinctness now as the pale light brightened. No wagons had been along, andevery mark of the night was plain. Here and there were broad, ragged-edged bands across the road—the trails of the wandering box-turtles. I saw the smooth, waving channel left by a snake that had just gone across. Here and there were bunches of rabbit tracks, and every little while appeared large spots in the road, where some bird had been dusting itself.
Suddenly I made a sharp turn, and almost ran over a whippoorwill concealed in a very cloud of dust which she was flirting up with her wings. This explained the spots back along the road. The bird flew up and settled a few yards ahead of me, and took another hasty dip. This she kept up for nearly a quarter of a mile.
The road was alive with whippoorwills. It was their bathing-hour, and playtime, too. The serious business of the night was done; they had hunted through the first hours, and now it was time to be social. The light was coming rapidly, and so was bedtime; but they called and capered about me, playing away the narrowing night to the very edge of day.
On my return, an hour later, the sun was looking over the tops of the "cut-offs," but hedid not see a whippoorwill. They were all roosting lengthwise upon the logs and stumps back among the bushes.
These unnatural, unbirdlike habits of the whippoorwill are matched by the appearance of the bird. The first time one sees a whippoorwill he questions whether its shape and color are the result of its nocturnal life or whether it took to the night to hide its unbeautiful self from the gaze of the day.
It has ridiculously short legs, a mere point of a bill, and a bristled, head-dividing gap that would shame a frog. Looked at in the daylight, its color, too, is a meaninglessmixture, as unreal and half done as the rest of the creature. But we should not be so hasty in our judgment. There is design in all things in nature; utility is the first law of creation: and the discovery of plan and purpose is the highest appreciation of beauty.
The whippoorwill's dress must be criticized from the view-point of its usefulness to the bird; then it becomes one of the most exquisitely artistic garments worn. Compare it with that of any other bird, and your wonder at it grows. Another such blending of light and shadow cannot be found. The night herself seems to have woven this robe out of warp from the strands of early dawn and of woof spun from the twilight.
The whippoorwill cannot change the color of its dress with the passing clouds, nor match it with the light green of unfolding leaves and the deep bronze of old tree-trunks, as the chameleon can. But the bird has no need of such control. It is always in harmony with its surroundings. In the falling twilight it seems a shadow among the shadows; in the breaking dawn it melts into the gray half-light, a phantom; at midnight it is only an echo in the dark; and at noontime youwould pass the creature for a mossy knot, as it squats close to a limb or rail, sitting lengthwise, unlike any bird of the light.
We need not expect a bird of such irregular habits as the whippoorwill to have the normal instincts of birds, even with regard to its offspring. A bird given to roaming about at night, the companion of toads and bats and spooks, is not one that can be trusted to bring up young. You cannot count much on the domesticity of a bird that flits around with the shadows and fills the night with doleful, spellbinding cries.
The nest of the whippoorwill is the bare ground, together with whatever leaves, pebbles, or bits of wood happen to be under the eggs when they are laid. I found a nest once by the side of a log in the woods, and by rarest good fortune missed putting my foot upon the eggs. Here there was no attempt at nest-building, not even a depression in the earth. There were two of the eggs,—the usual number,—long and creamy white, with mingled markings of lavender and reddish brown. Here, upon the log, one of the birds dozed away the day, while the mate on the nest brooded and slept till the gloaming.
The effect of this erratic life in the forest glooms and under the cover of night has been to make the whippoorwill careless of her home and negligent of her young. She has become a creature of omen, weird and wakeful, lingering behind the time of superstition to keep myths moving in our scanty groves and mystery still stirring through the dark rooms of the night.
Unlike any bird of the light"Unlike any bird of the light."
"Unlike any bird of the light."
THE PINE-TREE SWIFT
In any large museum you may see the fossil skeletons, or the casts of the skeletons, of those mammoth saurians of the Mesozoic Age. But you can go into the pine barrens any bright summer day and capture for yourself a real live saurian. The gloom of the pines is the lingering twilight of that far-off time, and the pine-tree lizard, or swift, is the lineal descendant of those reptile monsters who ruled the seas and the dry land before man was.
Throughout southern New Jersey the pine-tree swifts abound. The worm-fences, rail-piles, bridges, stone-heaps, and, above all, the pine-trees are alive with them. They are the truechildren of the pines, looking so like a very part of the trees that it seems they must have been made by snipping off the pitch-pines' scaly twigs and giving legs to them. They are the aborigines, the primitive people of the barrens; and it is to the lean, sandy barrens you must go if you would see the swifts at home.
In these wide, silent wastes, where there are miles of scrub-pine without a clearing, where the blue, hazy air is laden with the odor of resin, where the soft glooms are mingled with softer, shyer lights, the swifts seem what they actually are—creatures of another, earlier world. When one darts over your foot and scurries up a tree to watch you, it is easy to imagine other antediluvian shapes moving in the deeper shadows beyond. How they rustle the leaves and scratch the rough pine bark! They hurry from under your feet and peek around the tree-trunks into your face, their nails and scales scraping, while they themselves remain almost invisible on the deep browns of the pines; and if you are inclined to be at all nervous, you will start and shiver.
The uncanny name "lizard" is partly accountablefor our unpleasant feelings toward this really intelligent and interesting little beast. If he were more widely known as "swift,"Sceloporuswould be less detested. Thezin "lizard" adds a creepy, crawly, sinister something to the name which even the wretched word "snake" does not suggest. "Swift," the common name in some localities, is certainly more pleasing, and, at the same time, quite accurately descriptive.
They peek around the tree-trunks"They peek around the tree-trunks."
"They peek around the tree-trunks."
There is nothing deadly nor vicious, nor yet unlovely, about the swift, unless some may hate his reptile form and his scales. But he is strangely dreaded. The mere mention of him is enough to stampede a Sunday-school picnic. I know good people who kill every swift they meet, under the queer religious delusion that they are lopping off a limb of Satan. "All reptiles are cursed," one such zealot declared tome, "and man is to bruise their heads." The good book of nature was not much read, evidently, by this student of the other Good Book.
The swift is absolutely harmless. He is without fang, sting, or evil charm. He is not exactly orthodox, for he has a third eye in the top of his head, the scientists tell us; but that eye is entirely hidden. It cannot bind nor leer, like Medusa. Otherwise the swift is a perfectly normal little creature, about six inches long from tip to tip, quick of foot, scaly, friendly, wonderfully colored in undulating browns and blues, and looking, on the whole, like a pretty little Noah's-ark alligator.
On the south side of the clump of pines beyond Cubby Hollow is a pile of decaying rails where I have watched the swifts, and they me, for so many seasons that I fancy they know me. Dewberry-vines and Virginia creeper clamber over the pile, and at one end, flaming all through July, burns a splendid bush of butterfly-weed. The orange-red blossoms shine like a beacon against the dark of the pines, and lure a constant stream of insect visitors, who makeliving for the swifts of this particular place rich and easy while the attraction lasts.
Any hot day I can find several swifts here, and they are so tame that I can tickle them all off to sleep without the slightest trouble. They will look up quickly as I approach, fearless but alert, with head tilted and eyes snapping; but not one stirs. With a long spear of Indian grass I reach out gently and stroke the nearest one. Shut go his eyes; down drops his head; he sleeps—at least, he pretends to. This is my peace greeting. Now I may sit down, and life upon the rail-pile will go normally on.
Upon the end of a rail, so close to a cluster of the butterfly-weed blossoms that he can pick the honey-gatherers from it,—as you would pick olives from a dish on the table,—lies a big male swift without a tail. He lost that member in an encounter with me several weeks ago. A new one has started, but it is a mere bud yet. I know his sex by the brilliant blue stripe down each side, which is a favor not granted the females. The sun is high and hot. "Fearfully, hot," I say under my wide straw hat. "Delightfully warm," says the lizard, sprawling overthe rail, his legs hanging, eyes half shut, every possible scale exposed to the blistering rays, and his bud of a tail twitching with the small spasms of exquisite comfort that shoot to the very ends of his being.
The little Caliban! How he loves the sun! It cannot shine too hot nor too long upon him. He stiffens and has aches when it is cold, so he is a late riser, and appears not at all on dark, drizzly days.
His nose is resting upon the rail like a drowsy scholar's upon the desk; but he is not asleep: he sees every wasp and yellow-jacket that lights upon the luring flowers. He has learned some things about the wasp tribe; and if any of them want honey from his butterfly-weed, they may have it. These come and go with the butterflies and hard-backed bugs, no notice being taken. But I hear the booming of a bluebottle-fly.Sceloporushears him, too, and gathers his legs under him, alert. The fly has settled upon one of the flower-clusters. He fumbles among the blossoms, and pretty soon blunders upon those watched by the swift. Fatal blunder! There is a quick scratching on the rail, a flash of brownacross the orange flowers, and the next thing I see is the swift, back in his place, throwing his head about in the air, licking down the stupid bluebottle-fly.
A spider crawls over the rail behind him. He turns and snaps it up. A fly buzzes about his head, but he will not jump with all four feet, and so loses it. A humming-bird is fanning the butterfly-weed, and he looks on with interest not unmixed with fear. Now the bugs, butterflies, hornets, and wasps make up the motley crowd of visitants to his garden, andSceloporusstretches out in the warmth again. He is hardly asleep when a bird's shadow passes across the rails. The sharp scratch of scales and claws is heard at half a dozen places on the pile at once, and every swift has ducked around his rail out of sight.
An enemy! The shadow sweeps on across the melon-field, and above in the sky I see a turkey-buzzard wheeling. This is no enemy. Evidently the swifts mistook the buzzard's shadow for that of the sharp-shinned hawk. Had it been the hawk, my little bobtailed friend might have been taking a dizzy ride through the air to some dead tree-top at thatmoment, instead of peeking over his rail to see if the coast were clear.
The sparrow-hawk searching the fences for them"The sparrow-hawk searching the fences for them."
"The sparrow-hawk searching the fences for them."
All the lesser hawks feed upon the swifts. I have often seen the sparrow-hawk perched upon a tall stake searching the fences for them. Cats eat them also. But they do not agree with puss. They make a cat thin and morbid and unhappy. We can tell when the lizard-catching disease is upon Tom by his loss of appetite, his lankness, and his melancholy expression.
All fear of the hawk is passed, and the lizards come out into the light again. Presently one leaves the rails, runs over my foot, and dashes by short stages into the field. He is after a nest of ants, or is chasing a long-legged spider. It is worth while to follow them when they take to the fields, for they may let you into a secret, as they once did me.
About a hundred feet into the melon-patch stands an old and very terrible scarecrow. It is quite without terrors for the swifts, however. Around this monster's feet the soil is bare and open to the sun. One day I discovered a lizard making her way thither, and I followed. She did not stop for ants or spiders, but whisked under the vines and hastened on as if bound on some urgent business. And so she was.
When she reached the warm, open sand at the scarecrow's feet, she dug out a little hollow, and, to my utter amazement, deposited therein seven tough, yellowish, pea-like eggs, covered them with sand, and raced back to the rail-pile. That was all. Her maternal duties were done, her cares over. She had been a faithful mother to the last degree,—even to the covering up ofher eggs,—and now she left them to the kindly skies. About the middle of July they hatched, and, in finding their way to the rail-pile, they stopped at the first mound on the road, and began life in earnest upon a fiery dinner of red ants.
It looks as if nature were partial in the care she takes of her children. How long she bothers and fusses over us, for instance, and how, without one touch of parental care or interest, she tosses the lizard out, even before he is hatched, to shift for himself. If, however, we could eat red ants the day we are born and thrive on them, I suppose that our mothers, too, without much concern, might let us run.
The day-old babies join their elders upon the rails, and are received with great good humor—with pleasure, indeed; for the old ones seem to enjoy the play of the youngsters, and allow them to climb over their backs and claw and scratch them without remonstrance. The swifts are gentle, peaceable, and sweet-tempered. They rarely fight among themselves. The only time that I ever found one out of humor was when she was anxiously hunting for a place in whichto leave her eggs. The trouble of it all made her cross, and as I picked her up she tried to bite me. And I ought to have been bitten.
Ordinarily, however, the swifts are remarkably docile and friendly. If treated kindly, they will allow you to stroke them and handle them freely within a few minutes after capture. I have sometimes had them cling to my coat of their own will as I tramped about the woods. They hiss and open their mouths when first taken; but their teeth could not prick one's skin if they did strike.
They are clean, pretty, interesting pets to have about the house and yard. They are easily tamed, and, in spite of their agility, they are no trouble at all to capture. I have often caught them with my unaided hand; but an almost sure way is to take a long culm of green grass, strip off the plume, and make a snood of the wire-like end.
A swift is sunning himself upon a rail. He rises upon his front legs, as you approach, to watch you. Carefully now! Don't try to get too near. You can just reach him. Now your snood is slipping over his nose; it tickles him;he enjoys it, and shuts his eyes. The grass loop is about his neck; he discovers it, and—pull! for he leaps. If the snood does not break you have him dangling in the air. Bring him to your coat now, and touch him lightly till his fear is dispelled, then loose him, and he will stay with you for hours.
When upon a tree you may seize him with your bare hand by coming up from behind. But never try to catch him by the tail; for lizards' tails were not made for that purpose, though, from their length and convenience to grasp, and from the careless way their owners have of leaving them sticking out, it seems as if nature intended them merely for handles.
In my haste to catch the bobtailed lizard of the rail-pile, I carelessly clapped my hand upon his long, scaly tail, when, by a quick turn, he mysteriously unjointed himself from it, leaving the appendage with me, while he scampered off along the rails. He is now growing another tail for some future emergency.
Between eating, sleeping, and dodging shadows, the lizards spend their day, and about the middle of the afternoon disappear. Where dothey spend their night? They go somewhere from the dew and cold; but where?
There is a space about two inches deep between the window-sash and the net-frames in my room. Some time ago I put a number of swifts upon the netting, covered the window-sill with sand, and thus improvised an ideal lizard-cage. All I had to do to feed them was to raise the window, drive the flies from the room on to the netting, and close the sash. The lizards then caught them at their leisure.
Two days after they were transferred here, and had begun to feel at home and fearless of me, I noticed, as night came on, that they descended from the netting and disappeared in the sand. I put my finger in and took one out, and found that the sand was much warmer than the dewy night air.
This was their bed, and this explained the sleeping habits of the free, wild ones. The sand remains warm long after the sun sets and makes them a comfortable bed. Into the sand they go also to escape the winter. They must get down a foot or more to be rid of the frost; and being poor diggers, they hunt up the hole of someother creature, or work their way among the decayed roots of some old stump until below the danger-line. By the middle of September they have made their beds, and when they wake up, the melons will be started and the May sunshine warm upon the rails.
IN THE OCTOBER MOON
An October night, calm, crisp, and moonlit! There is a delicate aroma from the falling leaves in the air, as sweet as the scent of fresh-filled haymows. The woods are silent, shadowy, and sleepful, lighted dimly by the moon, as a vague, happy dream lights the dark valley of our sleep. Dreamful is this night world, but yet not dreaming. When, in the highest noon, did every leaf, every breeze, seem so much a self, so full of ready life? The very twigs that lie brittle and dead beneath our feet seem wakeful now and on the alert. In this silence we feel myriad movings everywhere; and we know that this sleepis but the sleep of the bivouac fires, that an army is breaking camp to move under cover of the night. Every wild thing that knows the dark will be stirring to-night. And what softest foot can fall without waking the woods?
Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread.
Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread.
Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread.
Not a mouse can scurry, not a chestnut drop, not a wind whisper among these new-fallen leaves without discovery; even a weasel cannot dart across the moon-washed path and not leave a streak of brown upon the silver, plain enough to follow.
A morning in May is best of all the year to be afield with the birds; but to watch for the wild four-footed things, a moonlight night in October is the choice of the seasons. May-time is bird-time. That is their spring of mate-winning and nest-building, and it bubbles over with life and song. The birds are ardent lovers; they sometimes fight in their wooing: but fighting or singing, they are frank, happy creatures, and always willing to see you. The mammals are just asardent lovers as the birds, and infinitely more serious. But they are not poets; they are not in the show business; and they want no outsider to come and listen to their pretty story of woe. Their spring, their courting-time, is not a time of song and play. The love-affairs of a timid, soulful-eyed rabbit are so charged and intense as not always to be free from tragedy. Don't expect any attention in the spring, even from that bunch of consuming curiosity, the red squirrel; he has something in hand, for once, more to his mind than quizzing you. Life with the animals then, and through the summer, has too much of love and fight and fury, is too terribly earnest, to admit of any frolic.
But autumn brings release from most of these struggles. There is surcease of love; there is abundance of food; and now the only passions of the furry breasts are such gentle desires as abide with the curious and the lovers of peace and plenty. The animals are now engrossed with the task of growing fat and furry. Troubled with no higher ambitions, curiosity, sociability, and a thirst for adventure begin to work within them these long autumn nights,and not one of them, however wild and fearful, can resist his bent to prowl in the light of the October moon.
To know much of the wild animals at home one must live near their haunts, with eyes and ears open, forever on the watch. For you must wait their pleasure. You cannot entreat them for the sake of science, nor force them in the name of the law. You cannot set up your easel in the meadow, and hire a mink or muskrat to pose for you any time you wish; neither can you call, when you like, at the hollow gum in the swamp and interview a coon. The animals flatly refuse to sit for their pictures, and to see reporters and assessors. But carry your sketchbook and pad with you, and, after a while, in the most unlikely times and places, the wariest will give you sittings for a finished picture, and the most reticent will tell you nearly all that he knows.
At no time of the year are the animals so loquacious, so easy of approach, as along in the October nights. There is little to be seen of them by day. They are cautious folk. By nature most of them are nocturnal; and when thishabit is not inherited, fear has led to its acquisition. But protected by the dark, the shy and suspicious creep out of their hiding-places; they travel along the foot-paths, they play in the wagon-roads, they feed in our gardens, and I have known them to help themselves from our chicken-coops. If one has never haunted the fields and woods at night he little knows their multitude of wild life. Many a hollow stump and uninteresting hole in the ground—tombs by day—give up their dead at night, and something more than ghostly shades come forth.
If one's pulse quickens at the sight and sound of wild things stirring, and he has never seen, in the deepening dusk, a long, sniffling snout poked slowly out of a hollow chestnut, the glint of black, beady eyes, the twitch of papery ears, then a heavy-bodied possum issue from the hole, clasping the edge with its tail, to gaze calmly about before lumbering off among the shadows—then he still has something to go into the woods for.
Our forests by daylight are rapidly being thinned into picnic groves; the bears and panthers have disappeared, and by day there isnothing to fear, nothing to give our imaginations exercise. But the night remains, and if we hunger for adventure, why, besides the night, here is the skunk; and the two offer a pretty sure chance for excitement. Never to have stood face to face in a narrow path at night with a full-grown, leisurely skunk is to have missed excitement and suspense second only to the staring out of countenance of a green-eyed wildcat. It is surely worth while, in these days of parks and chipmunks, when all stir and adventure has fled the woods, to sally out at night for the mere sake of meeting a skunk, for the shock of standing before a beast that will not give you the path. As you back away from him you feel as if you were really escaping. If there is any genuine adventure left for us in this age of suburbs, we must be helped to it by the dark.
Who ever had a good look at a muskrat in the glare of day? I was drifting noiselessly down the river, recently, when one started to cross just ahead of my boat. He got near midstream, recognized me, and went under like a flash. Even a glimpse like this cannot be hadevery summer; but in the autumn nights you cannot hide about their houses and fail to see them. In October they are building their winter lodges, and the clumsiest watcher may spy them glistening in the moonlight as they climb with loads of sedge and mud to the roofs of their sugar-loaf houses. They are readily seen, too, making short excursions into the meadows; and occasionally the desire to rove and see the world will take such hold upon one as to drive him a mile from water, and he will slink along in the shadow of the fences and explore your dooryardand premises. Frequently, in the late winter, I have followed their tracks on these night journeys through the snow between ponds more than a mile apart.
In October they are building their winter lodges"In October they are building their winter lodges."
"In October they are building their winter lodges."
But there is larger game abroad than muskrats and possums. These October nights the quail are in covey, the mice are alive in the dry grass, and the foxes are abroad. Lying along the favorite run of Reynard, youmaysee him. There are many sections of the country where the rocks and mountains and wide areas of sterile pine-land still afford the foxes safe homes; but in most localities Reynard is rapidly becoming a name, a creature of fables and folk-lore only. The rare sight of his clean, sharp track in the dust, or in the mud along the margin of the pond, adds flavor to a whole day's tramping; and the glimpse of one in the moonlight, trotting along a cow-path or lying low for Br'er Rabbit, is worth many nights of watching.
I wish the game-laws could be amended to cover every wild animal left to us. In spite of laws they are destined to disappear; but if the fox, weasel, mink, and skunk, the hawks andowls, were protected as the quail and deer are, they might be preserved a long time to our meadows and woods. How irreparable the loss to our landscape is the extinction of the great golden eagle! How much less of spirit, daring, courage, and life come to us since we no longer mark the majestic creature soaring among the clouds, the monarch of the skies! A dreary world it will be out of doors when we can hear no more the scream of the hawks, can no longer find the tracks of the coon, nor follow a fox to den. We can well afford to part with a turnip, a chicken, and even with a suit of clothes, now and then, for the sake of this wild flavor to our fenced pastures and close-cut meadows.
I ought to have named the crow in the list deserving protection. He steals. So did Falstaff. But I should miss Falstaff had Shakspere left him out; yet no more than I should miss the crow were he driven from the pines. They are both very human. Jim Crow is the humanest bird in feathers. The skunk I did include in the list. It was not by mistake. The skunk has a good and safe side to him, when we know how to approach him. The skunk wants a champion. Some one ought to spend an entire October moon with him and give us the better side of his character. If some one would take the trouble to get well acquainted with him at home, it might transpire that we have grievously abused and avoided him.
The glimpse of Reynard in the moonlight"The glimpse of Reynard in the moonlight."
"The glimpse of Reynard in the moonlight."
There is promise of a future for the birds in their friendship for us and in our interest and sentiment for them. Everybody is interested in birds; everybody loves them. There are bird-books and bird-books and bird-books—new volumes in every publisher's spring announcements. Every one with wood ways knows the songs and nests of the more common species. But this is not so with the four-footed animals. They are fewer, shyer, more difficult of study. Only a few of us are enthusiastic enough to back into a hole in a sand-bank and watch all night for the "beasts" with dear old Tam Edwards.
But such nights of watching, when every fallen leaf is a sentinel and every moonbeam a spy, will let us into some secrets about the ponds and fields that the sun, old and all-seeing as he is, will never know. Our eyes were made for daylight;but I think if the anatomists tried they might find the rudiments of a third, a night eye, behind the other two. From my boyhood I certainly have seen more things at night than the brightest day ever knew of. If our eyes were intended for day use, our other senses seem to work best by night. Do we not take the deepest impressions when the plates of these sharpened senses are exposed in the dark? Even in moonlight our eyes are blundering things; but our hearing, smell, and touch are so quickened by the alertness of night that, with a little training, the imagination quite takes the place of sight—a new sense, swift and vivid, that adds an excitement and freshness to the pleasure of out-of-door study, impossible to get through our two straightforward, honest day eyes.
Albeit, let us stay at home and sleep when there is no moon; and even when she climbs up big and round and bright, there is no surety of a fruitful excursion before the frosts fall. In the summer the animals are worn with home cares and doubly wary for their young; the grass is high, the trees dark, and the yielding green is silent under even so clumsy a crawler as the box-turtle.But by October the hum of insects is stilled, the meadows are mown, the trees and bushes are getting bare, the moon pours in unhindered, and the crisp leaves crackle and rustle under the softest-padded foot.
FEATHERED NEIGHBORS
The electric cars run past my door, with a switch almost in front of the house. I can hear a car rumbling in the woods on the west, and another pounding through the valley on the east, till, shrieking, groaning, crunching, crashing, they dash into view, pause a moment on the switch, and thunder on to east and west till out of hearing. Then, for thirty minutes, a silence settles as deep as it lay here a centuryago. Dogs bark; an anvil rings; wagons rattle by; and children shout about the cross-roads. But these sounds have become the natural voices of the neighborhood—mother-tongues like the chat of the brook, the talk of the leaves, and the caw of the crows. And these voices, instead of disturbing, seem rather to lull the stillness.
But the noise of the cars has hardly died away, and the quiet come, when a long, wild cry breaks in upon it.Yarup! yarup! yarup-up-up-up-up!in quick succession sounds the call, followed instantly by a rapid, rolling beat that rings through the morning hush like a reveille with bugle and drum.
It is the cry of the "flicker," the "high-hole." He is propped against a pole along the street railroad, nearly a quarter of a mile away. He has a hole in this pole, almost under the iron arm that holds the polished, pulsing wire for the trolley. It is a new house, which the bird has been working at for more than a week, and it must be finished now, for this lusty call is an invitation to the warming. I shall go, and, between the passing of the cars, witnessthe bowing, the squeaking, the palaver. A high-hole warming is the most utterly polite function in birddom.
Some of my friends were talking of birds, not long ago, when one of them turned to me and said hopelessly:
"'Tis no use. We can't save them even if we do stop wearing them upon our hats. Civilization is bound to sweep them away. We shall be in a birdless world pretty soon, in spite of laws and Audubon societies."
I made no reply, but, for an answer, led the way to the street and down the track to this pole which High-hole had appropriated. I pointed out his hole, and asked them to watch. Then I knocked. Instantly a red head appeared at the opening. High-hole was mad enough to eat us; but he changed his mind, and, with a bored, testy flip, dived into the woods. He had served my purpose, however, for his red head sticking out of a hole in a street-railway pole was as a rising sun in the east of my friends' ornithological world. New light broke over this question of birds and men. The cars drive High-hole away? Not solong as cars run by overhead wires on wooden poles.
High-hole is a civilized bird. Perhaps "domesticated" would better describe him; though domesticated implies the purposeful effort of man to change character and habits, while the changes which have come over High-hole—and over most of the wild birds—are the result of High-hole's own free choosing.
If we should let the birds have their way they would voluntarily fall into civilized, if not into domesticated, habits. They have no deep-seated hostility toward us; they have not been the aggressors in the long, bitter war of extermination; they have ever sued for peace. Instead of feeling an instinctive enmity, the birds are drawn toward us by the strongest of interests. If nature anywhere shows us her friendship, and her determination, against all odds, to make that friendship strong, she shows it through the birds. The way they forgive and forget, their endless efforts at reconciliation, and their sense of obligation, ought to shame us. They sing over every acre that we reclaim, as if we had saved it for them only;and in return they probe the lawns most diligently for worms, they girdle the apple-trees for grubs, and gallop over the whole wide sky for gnats and flies—squaring their account, if may be, for cherries, orchards, and chimneys.
They probe the lawns most diligently for worms"They probe the lawns most diligently for worms."
"They probe the lawns most diligently for worms."
The very crows, in spite of certain well-founded fears, look upon a new farm—not upon the farmer, perhaps—as a godsend. In the cold and poverty of winter, not only the crows, but the jays, quails, buntings, and sparrows, help themselves, as by right, from our shocks and cribs. Summer and winter the birds find food so much more plentiful about the farm and village, find living in all respects so much easier and happier here than in remote, wild regions, that,as a whole, they have become a suburban people.
But life is more than meat for the birds. There is a subtle yet real attraction for them in human society. They like its stir and change, its attention and admiration. The shyest and most modest of the birds pines for appreciation. The cardinal grosbeak, retiring as he is, cannot believe that he was born to blush unseen—to the tip of his beautiful crest. And the hermit-thrush, meditative, spiritual, and free as the heart of the swamp from worldliness—even he loves a listener, and would not waste his sweetness any longer on desert forest air. I do not know a single bird who does not prefer a wood with a wagon-road through it.
Even he loves a listener"Even he loves a listener."
"Even he loves a listener."
My friends had smiled at such assertions before their introduction to the bird in the pole. They knew just enough of woodpeckers to expect High-hole to build in the woods, and, when driven from there, to disappear, to extinguish himself, rather than stoop to an existence within walls of hardly the dignity and privacy of a hitching-post.
He is a proud bird and a wild bird, but apractical, sensible bird withal. Strong of wing and mighty of voice, he was intended for a vigorous, untamed life, and even yet there is the naked savage in his bound and his whoop. But electric cars have come, with smooth-barked poles, and these are better than rotten trees, despite the jangle and hum of wires and the racket of grinding wheels. Like the rest of us, he has not put off his savagery: he has simply put on civilization. Street cars are a convenience and a diversion. He has wings and wildest freedom any moment, and so, even though heavy timber skirts the track and shadows his pole, and though across the road opposite stands a house where there are children, dogs, and cats, nevertheless, High-hole follows his fancy, and instead of building back in the seclusion and safety of the woods, comes out to the street, the railroad, the children, and the cats, and digs him a modern house in this sounding cedar pole.
Perhaps it is imagination, but I think that I can actually see High-hole changing his wood ways for the ways of the village. He grows tamer and more trustful every summer.
She flew across the pasture"She flew across the pasture."
"She flew across the pasture."
A pair have their nest in a telegraph-pole near the school-house, where they are constantly mauled by the boys. I was passing one day when two youngsters rushed to the pole and dragged out the poor harassed hen for my edification. She was seized by one wing, and came out flapping, her feathers pulled and splintered. She had already lost all but two quills from her tail through previous exhibitions. I opened my hands, and she flew across the pasture to the top of a tree, and waited patiently till we went away. She then returned, knowing, apparently, that we were boys and a necessary evil of village life.
But this pole-life marks only half the distance that these birds have come from the woods.
One warm Sunday of a recent March, in the middle of my morning sermon, a ghostly rapping was heard through the meeting-house. I paused.Tap, tap, tap!hollow and ominous it echoed. Every soul was awake in an instant. Was it a summons from—? But two of the small boys grinned; some one whispered "flicker"; and I gathered my ornithological wits together in time to save the pause and proceed with the service.
After the people went home I found three flicker-holes in the latticework over the north windows. One of last year's tenants had got back that morning from the South, and had gone to work cleaning up and putting things to rights in his house, regardless of Sabbath and sermon.