Part 11

When he reached the hay, we held our breath. Would he actually mount it? Yes, that was undoubtedly his intention; but he meant to do it in such a way that no mortal eye should see him. All the time glancing furtively to left and right, as if the grass were full of enemies, he put one foot before the other with almost inconceivable slowness,--as the hour hand turns on the clock’s face. It was an admirable display of an art which this race of frog, mouse, and insect catchers has cultivated for untold generations--an art on which its livelihood depends, the art of invisible motion.

There was no resisting the ludicrousness of his manner. He was in full view, but so long as he kept still he seemed to think himself quite safe from detection. Like the hand of the clock, however, if he was slow he was sure, and in time he was fairly out of the grass, standing in plain sight upon his hay platform.

Once in position he fell to pumping in earnest, and kept it up for more than an hour, while two enthusiasts sat upon the railway embankment, twelve or thirteen rods distant, with opera-glasses and note-books, scrutinizing his every motion, and felicitating themselves again and again on seeing thus plainly what so few had ever seen at all. What would Thoreau have given for such an opportunity?

“The stake-driver is at it in his favorite meadow,” he writes in his journal, in 1852. “I followed the sound, and at last got within two rods, it seeming always to recede, and drawing you, like a will-o’-the-wisp, farther away into the meadows. When thus near, I heard some lower sounds at the beginning like striking on a stump or a stake, a dry, hard sound, and then followed the gurgling, pumping notes fit to come from a meadow.

“This was just within the blueberry and other bushes, and when the bird flew up, alarmed, I went to the place, but could see no water, which makes me doubt if water is necessary to it in making the sound. Perhaps it thrusts its bill so deep as to reach water where it is dry on the surface.”

This notion that water is employed in the production of the bittern’s notes has been generally entertained. The notes themselves are of a character to suggest such an hypothesis, and at least one witness has borne circumstantial testimony to its truth. In Thoreau’s essay on the “Natural History of Massachusetts,” he says:--

“On one occasion, the bird has been seen by one of my neighbors to thrust its bill into the water, and suck up as much as it could hold; then, raising its head, it pumped it out again with four or five heaves of the neck, throwing it two or three feet, and making the sound each time.”

Similar statements have been made as to the corresponding notes of the European bittern. None of our systematic writers upon American ornithology have ever witnessed the performance, as far as appears, and being too honest to draw upon their imaginations, they have left the matter a mystery. Now, on this auspicious May afternoon, if we learned nothing else, we could at all events make quite sure whether or not the bittern did really spout water from his beak.

My readers will have guessed already that our bird, at least, did nothing of the sort. His bill was never within reach of water. The operation is a queer one, hard to describe.

The bittern has been standing motionless, perhaps in the humpbacked attitude in which the artists, following Audubon’s plate, have commonly represented him; or quite as likely, he has been making a stick or a soldier of himself, standing bolt upright at full stretch, his long neck and bill pointed straight at the zenith.

Suddenly he lowers his head, and instantly raises it again and throws it forward with a quick, convulsive jerk. This movement is attended by an opening and shutting of the bill, which in turn is accompanied by a sound which has been well compared to a violent hiccough. The hiccough--with which, I think, the click of the big mandibles may sometimes be heard--is repeated a few times, each time a little louder than before; and then succeed the real pumping or stake-driving noises.

These are in sets of three syllables each, of which the first syllable is the longest, and somewhat separated from the others. The accent is strongly upon the middle syllable, and the whole, as oftenest heard, is an exact reproduction of the sound of a wooden pump, as I have already said, the voice having that peculiar hollow quality which is produced, not by the flow of the water, but by the suction of the air in the tube when the pump begins to work.

But the looker-on is likely to be quite as much impressed by what he sees as by what he hears. During the whole performance, but especially during the latter part of it, the bird is engaged in the most violent contortions, suggestive of nothing but a patient suffering from uncontrollable nausea. Moreover, as soon as the preliminary hiccoughs begin, the lower throat or breast is seen to be swelling; the dilatation grows larger and larger till the pumping is well under way, and so far as my companion and I could detect, does not subside in the least until the noises have ceased altogether.

How are the unique, outlandish notes produced? I cannot profess to know. Our opinion was that the bird swallowed air into his gullet, gulping it down with each snap of the beak. To all appearance it was necessary for him to inflate the crop in this way before he could pump, or boom. As to how much of the grand booming was connected with the swallowing of the air, and how much, if any, with the expulsion of it, my friend and I did not agree, and of course neither of us could do more than guess.

I made some experiments afterwards, by way of imitating the noises; and these experiments, together with the fact that the grand booming seemed to be really nothing more than a development of the preliminary hiccoughs, and the further fact that the swelling of the breast did not go down gradually during the course of the performance, but suddenly at the close,--all these incline me to believe that the notes are mainly if not entirely caused by the inhalation or swallowing of the air; and I am somewhat strengthened in this opinion by perceiving that when a man takes air into his stomach the act is attended by a sound not altogether unlike the bittern’s note in quality, while the expulsion of it gives rise to noises of an entirely dissimilar character.

That the sounds in question were not made entirely by any ordinary action of the vocal organs was the decided opinion of both my friend and myself.

As I have said, we watched the performance for more than an hour. We were sitting squarely upon the track, and once were compelled to get up to let a train pass; but the bittern evidently paid no attention to matters on the railway, being well used to thunder in that direction, and stood his ground without wincing.

When he had pumped long enough,--and the operation surely looked like pretty hard work,--he suddenly took wing and flew a little distance down the meadow. The moment he dropped into the grass he pumped, and on making another flight he again pumped immediately upon coming to the ground. This trick, which surprised me not a little in view of the severe exertion required, is perhaps akin to the habit of smaller birds, who in seasons of excitement will very often break into song at the moment of striking a perch.

As we came down the track on our way back to the station, three bitterns were in the air at once, while a fourth was booming on the opposite side of the road. One of the flying birds persistently dangled his legs instead of drawing them up in the usual fashion and letting the feet stick out behind, parallel with the tail. Probably he was “showing off,” as is the custom of many birds during the season of mating.

Our bird across the road, by the bye, was not pumping, but driving a stake. The middle syllable was truly a mighty whack with a mallet on the head of a post, so that I could easily enough credit Mr. Samuels’s statement that he once followed the sound for half a mile, expecting to find a farmer setting a fence.

In the midst of the hurly-burly we saw a boy coming toward us on the track.

“Let’s ask him about it,” said my companion.

So, with an air of inquisitive ignorance, he stopped the fellow, and inquired, “Do you know what it is we hear making that curious noise off there in the meadow?”

The boy evidently took us for a pair of ignoramuses from the city.

“I guess it’s a frog,” he answered. But when the sounds were repeated he shook his head and confessed honestly that he didn’t know what made them.

It was too bad, I thought, that he did not stick to his frog theory. It would have made so much better a story! He appeared to feel no curiosity about the matter, and we allowed him to pass on unenlightened.

Not all Wayland people are thus poorly informed, however, and we shortly learned, to our considerable satisfaction, that they have a most felicitous local name for the bird. They call him “plum-pudd’n’,” which is exactly what he himself says, only that his u is in both words somewhat long, like the vowel in “full.” To get the true effect of the words they should be spoken with the lips nearly closed, and in a deep voice.

A few days after this excursion I found a bittern in a large wet meadow somewhat nearer home. At the nearest he was a long way off, and as I went farther and farther away from him, I remarked the very unexpected fact that the last syllable to be lost was not the second, which bears so sharp an accent, but the long first syllable. It seemed contrary to reason, but such was unquestionably the truth, and later experiments confirmed it.