Part 19

No wonder his face shone. His condition was enviable. The fox sparrow is a noble bird, with a most musical voice, the prince of all sparrows. To hear him for the first time--if one does hear him--is a real event. A man might well walk a crowded city sidewalk the next day and smile to himself at the memory of such high fortune.

After all, happiness is a good thing. Not so desirable, perhaps, as a great office, or a mint of money, but a pretty good thing, nevertheless. It is encouraging, in these days of far-sought pleasures and prodigal expense, to see men get it at a low rate and on innocent terms.

For myself, I think I have never known fox sparrows more plentiful than for the past week. From our human point of view their present migration has been eminently favorable; from the birds’ point of view it has probably been in the highest degree unfavorable, the prolonged spell of cloudy and rainy weather having made night flights difficult, not to say impossible. The travelers have been obliged to stay where the storm had caught them, and we, at this intermediate station, have profited by their misfortune.

On the 7th I stood in the midst of as fine a flock as a man could wish to see. A thick cloud enveloped us; we might have been on a mountain-top; but for the minute it had ceased raining, and the birds were in a lively mood. Sometimes as many as five or six were singing together, while a chorus of snowbirds trilled the prettiest of accompaniments; a concert worthy of Easter or any other festival.

The weather has been of a kind to keep night-traveling migrants here, I say; which is as much as to say that it has been of a sort to prevent other such birds from arriving. There have been no bright nights, I think, since April came in. So it happens, according to my theory (which may be as sound or as unsound as the reader pleases), that although it is now the 10th of the month, there has been, for my eye, no sign of chipper, field sparrow, or vesper sparrow. How should there be? How should such creatures find their way, with the fog and the rain blinding them night after night? No doubt they are impatient to be at home again in the old dooryards, the old savin-dotted pastures, and the old hay-fields. By and by the clouds will vanish, and they will hasten northward in crowds. The night air will be full of them, and the next day all outdoor, bird-loving people will be in clover.

Unfavorable as the weather is, however, and against all probabilities, one cannot quite forego seasonable expectations. I pass the border of a grass field. A sparrow sings in the distance, and I stop to listen. Could that have been a vesper sparrow? The song comes again. No; it begins a little in the vesper’s manner; the opening measure is unusually smooth and unemphatic; but the bird is only a song sparrow. It is no shrewder than Peter. Its speech bewrayeth it.

One kingfisher I have seen, shooting through the misty air far aloft, his long wings making him look at that height like some seabird or wader. I remember when the sight--not uncommon in spring--was to me an insoluble mystery. As for calling the bird a kingfisher, such a thought never occurred to me. I knew the kingfisher well enough, or imagined that I did, but not at that altitude and flying in that strong, purposeful manner. Yet even at such times he commonly sounds his rattle before him, as if he wished his identity and his whereabouts to be known.

I have seen also a single marsh hawk. That was on the 9th, and the circumstances of the case were ludicrous. I had stopped to look down from a wooded hilltop into a swampy pool, where ducks sometimes alight, when I saw a white object moving rapidly along the farther side of the swamp, now visible, now hidden behind a veil of trees and shrubbery. A road runs along that border of the swamp, and I took this moving white object for a bundle which a boy was carrying upon a bicycle (making pretty quick time), till suddenly I perceived that it was only a marsh hawk’s rump! A redwing had given chase to the hawk--mostly for sport, I imagine, or just to keep his hand in; for I do not suppose he could have had any real grudge to settle. Probably this is the first case on record in which a hawk was ever mistaken for a wheelman.

Two evenings ago I made a solitary excursion to an extensive swamp and meadow, hoping to witness, or at least to hear, the aerial performance of the snipe. The air was full of a Scotch mist, and the sky cloudy. If the birds were there, and in a performing mood, they would be likely to get under way in good season. I waded across the meadow out of the sight of houses, and, having found what seemed to be a promising position, I took it and held it for perhaps an hour. But I heard none of those strange, ghostly, swishing noises that I was listening for. Perhaps the birds had not yet arrived. Perhaps this was not a snipe meadow.

For a time robins and song sparrows made music more or less remote, and an unseen fox sparrow, nearer at hand, amused me with excellent imitations of the brown thrasher’s smacking kiss. Then, as it grew really dark, I relinquished the hunt and started homeward. And then the real music began; for as I approached the highway I heard the whistle of a woodcock, and presently discovered that, for the first time in my life, I was walking through what might be called a veritable woodcock concert. Once three birds were vocal together; one was “bleating” on the right, another on the left, while a third was at the very height of his ecstasy overhead. For a mile or more I walked under a shower of this incomparable, indescribable music. It dropped into my ears like rain from heaven.

One bird was calling just over the roadside wall. I stole nearer and nearer, taking a few cautious steps after each bleat, till finally I could hear the water dropping into the hogshead. I wonder how many readers will know what I mean by that. After each call, as a kind of pendant to it, there comes, if you are very, very close, a curious small sound, exactly as if a drop of water (the comparison is not mine) had fallen into a hogshead already half full. I had not heard it for years. In fact, I had forgotten it, and heard it now for the first few times without recollecting what it was.

Then the bird rose--always invisible, of course, for by this time there was no thought of seeing anything--and went skyward in broad circles, till he was at the top of his flight, and when he descended he came to earth on the other side of the road, a good distance away. He had seen me, I suppose, with those big bull’s-eyes of his, which do so much to heighten the oddity of his personal appearance.

He was the last of his kind. For the rest of my walk I heard no music except the sweet whistling of hylas here and there, and once, in a woodland pool, the grating chorus of a set of wood frogs.

Butterflies are waiting for sunshine--like the rest of us; I have not seen so much as an Antiopa; and the only wild flowers I have yet picked are the pretty red blossoms (pistillate blossoms) of the hazel; tiny things, floral egrets, if you please to call them so, of a lively and beautiful color. Sunshine or no sunshine, they were in bloom for Easter.

FLYING SQUIRRELS AND SPADE-FOOT FROGS

It is pleasant to realize familiar truths anew; to have it brought freshly to mind, for example, how many forms of animal life there are about us of which we seldom get so much as a glimpse.

In all my tramping over eastern Massachusetts I have met with two foxes. One I saw for perhaps the tenth part of a second, the other for perhaps two or three seconds. And probably my experience has not been exceptional. In this one particular it would be safe to wager that not one in ten of those who read this article will be able to boast of any great advantage over the man who wrote it. Yet every raiser of poultry hereabout will certify that foxes are by no means uncommon, and I know a man living within fifteen miles of the State House who, last winter, by a kind of “still hunt”--without a dog--killed three foxes in as many successive days. Reynard has fine gifts of invisibility, but a man with foxes on his mind will be likely to find them.

This same near neighbor of mine takes now and then an otter; only three or four weeks ago he showed me the skin of one on its stretching-board; and the otter is an animal that I not only have never seen in this part of the world, but never expect to see. I haven’t that kind of an eye. As for muskrats, the trapper takes them almost without number; “rats,” he calls them; while to me it is something like an event if once or twice a year I happen to come upon one swimming in a brook.

Another of these seclusive races, that manage to live close about us unespied by all except the most inquisitive of their human neighbors, is the race of flying squirrels. Whether they are more or less common than red squirrels, gray squirrels, and chipmunks, it would be difficult to say; but while red squirrels, gray squirrels, and chipmunks flit before you wherever you go, you may haunt the woods from year’s end to year’s end without seeing hide or hair of their interesting cousin. Flying squirrels stir abroad after dark; not because their deeds are evil (though they are said to like small birds and birds’ eggs), but because--well, as the wise old nursery saw very conclusively puts it, because “it is their nature to.”

Several times during the past winter I made attempts to see them (the story of one of these attempts has been told in a previous chapter), but always without success, though twice I was taken to a nest that was known to be in use. The other day I went to the same place again, the friend who conducted me having found a squirrel there that very forenoon. He shook the tree, a small gray-birch, with a nest of leaves and twigs perched in its top, and out peeped the squirrel. “See him?” said my friend. “Yes.” Then he gave the tree a harder shake, and in a moment the creature spread his “wings” and sailed gracefully away, landing on the trunk of an oak not far off, at about the height of my head. There he clung, his large handsome eye, full of a startled emotion, fastened upon me. I wondered if he would let me put my hand on him; but as I approached within three or four yards he scrambled up the tree into the small branches at the top. He was going to take another flight, if the emergency seemed to call for it, and the higher he could get, the better. The oak was too big to be shaken, but a smaller tree stood near it. This my companion shook in the squirrel’s face, and again he took flight. This time he passed squarely over my head, showing a flat outspread surface sailing through the air, looking not the least in the world like a squirrel or any other quadruped. Again he struck against a trunk, and again he ran up into the treetop. And again he was shaken off.

Four times he flew, and then I protested that I had seen enough and would not have him molested further. We left him in a maple-top, surrounded by handsome red flower-clusters.

The flight, even under such unnatural conditions, is a really pretty performance, the surprising thing about it being the ease and grace with which the acrobat manages to take an upward turn toward the end of his course, so as always to alight head uppermost against the bole.

It would be fun to see such a carnival as Audubon describes, when two hundred or more of the squirrels were at play in the evening, near Philadelphia, running up the trees and sailing away, like boys at the old game of “swinging off birches.” “Scores of them,” he says, “would leave each tree at the same moment, and cross each other, gliding like spirits through the air, seeming to have no other object in view than to indulge a playful propensity.”

Compared with that, mine was a small show; but it was so much better than nothing.

Two mornings later (April 30) I was walking up the main street of our village, lounging along, waiting for an electric car to overtake me, when I heard loud batrachian voices from a field on my left hand. “Aha!” said I, “the spade-foots are out again.” It had occurred to me within a day or two that this should be their season, if, as is believed, their appearance above ground is conditioned upon an unusual rainfall.

Some years ago, when I was amusing myself for a little with the study of toads and frogs, checking Dr. J. A. Allen’s annotated list of the Massachusetts batrachia, I became very curious about this peculiar and little understood species, known scientifically as Scaphiopus holbrookii, or the solitary spade-foot. It was originally described from South Carolina, I read, and was first found in Massachusetts, near Salem, about 1810. Its cries were said to have been heard at a distance of half a mile, and were mistaken for those of young crows. For more than thirty years afterward the frogs were noticed at this place only three times. They were described as burrowing in the ground, coming forth only to spawn, and that, as far as could be ascertained, at very irregular intervals, sometimes many years in length.

This, as I say, I read in Dr. Allen’s catalogue, to the great sharpening of my curiosity. If I ever heard such noises, I should be prepared to guess at the author of them. Well, some years afterward (it was almost exactly eight years ago), fresh from a first visit to Florida, where my ears had grown expectant of strange sounds (a great use of travel), I stepped out of my door one evening in late April, and was hardly in the street before I heard somewhere ahead of me a chorus of stentorian frog-notes. “That should be the spade-foot’s voice,” I said to myself, with full conviction. I hastened forward, traced the tumult to a transient pool in a field, and as I neared the place picked up a board that lay in the grass, and with it, by good fortune, turned the first frog I came in sight of into a specimen. This I sent to the batrachian specialist at Cambridge, who answered me, as I knew he would, that it was Scaphiopus.

My spade-foots of yesterday morning were in the same spot. I could not stay then to look at them, for at that moment the car came along. I left it at a favorite place in the next township, and had gone a mile or so on foot when from another transient roadside pool I heard the spade-foot’s voice again. This was most interesting. I skirted the water, trying to get within reach of one of the performers. The attempt was unsuccessful; but in the course of it I saw for the first time the creature in the act of calling. And every time I saw him I laughed. He lay stretched out at full length upon the surface of the pool, floating high, as if he were somehow peculiarly buoyant. Then suddenly his hind parts dropped, his head flew up, his enormous white, or pinkish-white, vocal sac was instantaneously inflated (like a white ball on the water), and the grating call was given out; after which the creature’s head dropped, his hinder parts bobbed up into place (sometimes he was nearly overset by the violence of the action), and again he lay silent.