Part 14

Between two pastures, easily seen from the same study window, stands a wild apple-tree, pathetically diseased and rheumatic, which, like one of Mr. Burroughs's trees, never bore very good crops of apples, but four seasons a year is marvelously full of animals. It is chiefly noted for a strange collection I once took out of its maw-like cavity.

It was a keen January morning, and I stopped at the tree, as usual, and thumped. No lodgers there that day, it seemed. I mounted the rail fence and looked in. Darkness. No; there at the bottom was a patch of gray, and--I pulled out a snapping, blinking screech-owl. Down went my hand again, and a second owl came blinking to the light--this one in rich brown plumage. When I turned him up, his clenched claws held fistfuls of possum hair. Once more I pushed my hand down the hole, gingerly, and up to the shoulder. No mistake. Mr. Possum was in there, and after a little manoeuvering I seized him by the collar, and out he came grinning, hissing, and winking at the hard, white winter day.

And how exactly like a possum! "There is a time for all things," comes near an incarnation in him. There is a time for eating owls--at night, of course, if owls can then be had. But day is the time to sleep; and if owls want to share his bed and roost upon him, all right. He will sleep on till nightfall, in spite of owls. And he would sleep on here till dusk, in spite of my rude awakening, if I gave him leave. I dropped him back to the bottom of the hole, then put the two owls back upon him, and went my way, knowing I should find the three still sleeping on my return. And it was so. The owls were just as surprised and just as sleepy when I disturbed them the second time that day. I left them to finish their nap. But the possum was served for dinner the following evening--for this, too, is strictly in accord with his time-for-all-things philosophy.

This pair of owls were most persistent in their attachment to the apple-tree. Several times in the course of the winter I found them sleeping soundly in this same deep cavity, making their winter lodgings in the bent, tumble-down shanty which, standing not far from the woods and between the uplands and meadows, has been home, hotel, post-office, city of refuge, and lookout for many of the wild folk about the fields.

A worn-out, gone-to-holes orchard is a very city of hollows-loving animals. Not far away is one such orchard with a side bordering an extensive copse. Where the orchard and copse meet is an apple-tree that has been the ancestral home of unnumbered generations of flying-squirrels. The cavity was first hollowed out by flickers. The squirrels were interlopers. When the young come in April the large opening is stuffed with shredded chestnut bark, leaving barely room enough for the parents to squeeze through. The sharpest-eyed hawk awing would never dream of waiting outside that insignificant door for a meal of squirrel.

But such precautions are not always proof against boys. I robbed that home one spring of its entire batch of babies (no one with any love of wild things could resist the temptation to kidnap young flying-squirrels), and tried to bring them up in domestic ways. But somehow I never succeeded with pets. Something always happened. One of these four squirrels was rocked on, a second was squeezed in a door, a third fell before he could fly, and the fourth I took to college with me. He had perfect liberty, for I had no other room-mate. I set aside one hour a day to putting corks, pens, photographs, and knives back in their places, for him to tuck away the next day in one of my shoes or under my pillow. More than once I have awakened to find him curled up in my neck or up my sleeve, the dearest little bedfellow alive. But it was three stories from my window to the street; and one day he tried his wings. They were not equal to the flight. Since then I have left my wild pets in the woods.

If one wants to know what birds are about, especially the larger, more cautious species, let him get under cover near a tall dead oak or walnut, standing alone in the middle of open fields. Such a tree is the natural rest and lookout for every passer. Here come the hawks to wait and watch; here the sentinel crows are posted while the flock pilfers corn and plugs melons; here the flickers and woodpeckers light for a quick lunch of grubs, to call for company or telegraph across the fields on one of the resonant limbs; here the flocking blackbirds swoop and settle, making the old tree look as if it had suddenly leaved out in mourning--leaves black and crackling; and here the turkey-buzzards halt heavily in their gruesomely glorious flight.

With good field-glasses there is no other vantage-ground for bird study equal to this. Not in a day's tramp will one see so many birds, and have such chances to observe them, as in a single hour, when the sun is rising or setting, in the neighborhood of some great, gaunt tree that has died of years or lonesomeness, or been smitten by a bolt from the summer clouds.

Nature's prodigality and parsimony are extremes farther apart than her east and west. Why should she be so lavish of interstellar space, and crowd a drop of stagnant water so? Why give the wide sea surface to the petrels, and screw the sea-urchins into the rocks on Grand Manan? Why scatter in Delaware Bay a million sturgeon eggs for every one hatched, while each mite of a paramecium is cut in two, and wholes made of the halves? Why leave an entire forest of green, live pines for a lonesome crow hermitage, and convert the rottenest old stump into a submerged-tenth tenement?

Part of the answer, at least, is found in nature's hatred and horror of death. She fiercely refuses to have any dead. An empty heaven, a lifeless sea, an uninhabited rock, a dead drop of water, a dying paramecium, are intolerable and impossible. She hastens always to give them life. The succession of strange dwellers to the decaying trees is an instance of her universal and endless effort at making matter live.

Such vigilance over the ever-dying is very comforting--and marvelous too. Let any indifferent apple-tree begin to have holes, and the tree-toads, the bluebirds, and the red squirrels move in, to fill the empty trunk with new life and the sapless limbs with fresh fruit. Let any tall, stray oak along the river start to die at the top, and straightway a pair of fish-hawks will load new life upon it. And these other, engrafted lives, like the graft of a greening upon wild wood, yield crops more valuable often, and always more interesting, than come from the native stock.

Perhaps there is no more useless fruit or timber grown than that of the swamp-gums (Nyssa uniflora) of the Jersey bottoms. But if we value trees according to their capacity for cavities,--the naturalist has a right to such a scale of valuation,--then these gums rank first. The deliberate purpose of a swamp-gum, through its hundred years of life, is to grow as big as possible, that it may hollow out accordingly. They are the natural home-makers of the swamps that border the rivers and creeks in southern New Jersey. What would the coons, the turkey-buzzards, and the owls do without them? The wild bees believe the gums are especially built for them. No white-painted hive, with its disappearing squares, offers half as much safety to these free-booters of the summer seas as the gums, open-hearted, thick-walled, and impregnable.

When these trees alone make up the swamp, there is a roomy, empty, echo-y effect among the great gray boles, with their high, horizontal limbs spanned like rafters above, produced by no other trees I know. It is worth a trip across the continent to listen, under a clear autumn moon, to the cry of a coon-dog far away in the empty halls of such a swamp. To get the true effect of a barred owl's hooting, one wants to find the home of a pair in an ancient gum-swamp. I know such a home, along Cohansey Creek, where, the neighboring farmer tells me, he has heard the owls hoot in spring and autumn since he remembers hearing anything.

I cannot reach around the butt of the tree that holds the nest. Tapering just a trifle and a little on the lean, it runs up smooth and round for twenty feet, where a big bulge occurs, just above which is the capacious opening to the owls' cave. There was design in the bulge, or foresight in the owls' choice; for that excrescence is the hardest thing to get beyond I ever climbed up to. But it must be mounted, or the queerest pair of little dragons ever hatched will go unseen.

The owls themselves first guided me to the spot. I was picking my way through this piece of woods, one April day, when a shadowy something swung from one high limb to another overhead, following me. It was the female owl. Every time she lighted she turned and fixed her big black eyes hard on me, silent, somber, and watchful. As I pushed deeper among the gums, she began to snap her beak and drop closer. Her excitement grew every moment. I looked about for the likely tree. The instant I spied the hole above the bulge, the owl caught the direction of my eyes, and made a swoop at me that I thought meant total blindness.

I began to climb. With this the bird lapsed into the quiet of despair, perched almost in reach of me, and began to hoot mournfully: Woo-hoo, woo-hoo, woo-hoo, oo-oo-a! And faint and far away came back a timid Woo-hoo, woo-a! from her mate, safely hid across the creek.

The weird, uncanny cry rolled round under the roof of limbs, and seemed to wake a ghost-owl in every hollow bole, echoing and reëchoing as it called from tree to tree, to die away down the dim, deep vistas of the swamp. The silent wings, the snapping beaks, the eery hoots in the soft gloom of the great trees, needed the help of but little imagination to carry one back to the threshold of an unhacked world, and embolden its nymphs and satyrs, that these centuries of science have hunted into hiding.

I wiggled above the bulge at the risk of life, and was greeted at the mouth of the cavern with hisses and beak-snappings from within. It was a raw spring day; snow still lingered in shady spots. But here, backed against the farther wall of the cavity, were two young owls, scarcely a week old, wrapped up like little Eskimos--tiny bundles of down that the whitest-toothed frost could never bite through.

Very green babies of all kinds are queer, uncertain, indescribable creations--faith generators. But the greenest, homeliest, unlikeliest, babiest babes I ever encountered were these two in the hole. I wish Walt Whitman had seen them. He would have written a poem. They defy my powers of portrayal, for they challenge the whole mob of my normal instincts.

But quite as astonishing as the appearance of the young owls was the presence beneath their feet of the head of a half-grown muskrat, the hind quarters of two frogs, one large meadow-vole, and parts of four mice, with many other pieces too small to identify. These all were fresh--the crumbs of one night's dinner, the leavings of one night's catch. If these were the fragments only, what would be a conservative estimate of the night's entire catch?

Gilbert White tells of a pair of owls that built under the eaves of Selborne Church, that he "minuted" with his "watch for an hour together," and found that they returned to the nest, the one or the other, "about once in every five minutes" with a mouse or some little beast for the young. Twelve mice an hour! Suppose they hunted only two evening hours a day? The record at the summer's end is almost beyond belief.

Not counting what the two old owls ate, and leaving out of the count the two frogs, it is within limits to reckon not less than six small animals brought to the hollow gum every night of the three weeks that these young owls were dependent for food--a riddance in this short time of not less than one hundred and twenty-five muskrats, mice, and voles. What four boys in the same time could clear the meadows of half that number? And these animals are all harmful, the muskrats exceedingly so, where the meadows are made by dikes and embankments.

Not a tree in South Jersey that spring bore a more profitable crop. When fruit-growing in Jersey is done for pleasure, the altruistic farmer with a love for natural history will find large reward in his orchards of gums, that now are only swamps.

Just as useful as the crop of owls, and beyond all calculation in its sweetening effects upon our village life, is the annual yield of swallows by the piles in the river. Years ago a high spring tide carried away the south wing of the old bridge, but left the piles, green and grown over with moss, standing with their heads just above flood-tide mark. In the tops of the piles are holes, bored to pass lines through, or left by rusted bolts, and eaten wide by waves and wind. Besides these there are a few genuine excavations made by erratic woodpeckers. This whole clump of water-logged piles has been colonized by blue-backed tree-swallows, every crack and cranny wide enough and deep enough to hold a nest being appropriated for domestic uses by a pair of the dainty people. It is no longer a sorry forest of battered, sunken stumps; it is a swallow-Venice. And no gayer gondoliers ever glided over wave-paved streets than these swallows on the river. When the days are longest the village does its whittling on the new bridge in the midst of this twittering bird life, watching the swallows in the sunset skim and flash among the rotting timbers over the golden-flowing tide.

If I turn from the river toward the woods again, I find that the fences all the way are green with vines and a-hum with bumblebees. Even the finger-board at the cross-roads is a living pillar of ivy. All is life. There are no dead, no graveyards anywhere. A nature-made cemetery does not exist in my locality. Yonder, where the forest-fire came down and drank of the river, is a stretch of charred stumps; but every one is alive with some sort of a tenant. Not one of these stumps is a tombstone. We have graves and slabs and names in our burial-place, and nothing more. But there is not so much as a slab in the fields and woods. When the telegraph-poles and the piles are cut, the stumps are immediately prepared for new life, and soon begin blossoming into successive beds of mosses and mushrooms, while the birds are directed to follow the bare poles and make them live again.

A double line of these pole-specters stretches along the road in front of my door, holding hands around the world. I have grown accustomed to the hum of the wires, and no longer notice the sound. But one May morning recently there was a new note in the pole just outside the yard. I laid my ear to the wood. Pick--pick--pick; then all was still. Again, after a moment's pause, I heard pick--pick--pick on the inside. At my feet was a scattering of tiny yellow chips. Backing off a little, I discovered the hole, about the size of my fist, away up near the cross-bars. It was not the first time I had found High-hole laying claim to the property of the telegraph companies. I stole back and thumped. Instantly a dangerous bill and a flashing eye appeared, and High-hole, with his miner's lamp burning red in the top of his cap lunged off across the fields in some ill humor, no doubt.

Throughout the summer there was telegraphing with and without wires on that dry, resonant pole. And meantime, if there was anything unintelligible in the ciphers at Glasgow or Washington, it was high-hole talk. For there was reared inside that pole as large, as noisy, and as red-headed a family of flickers as ever hatched. What a brood they were! They must have snarled the wires and Babelized their talk terribly.

While this robust and uncultured family of flickers were growing up, only three doors away (counting by poles) a modest and soft-voiced pair of bluebirds, with a decently numbered family of four, were living in a hole so near the ground that I could look in upon the meek but brave little mother.