Part 4

This was on a Saturday. Saturday afternoon and Sunday are busy people’s days in the woods. For their sakes I am always glad to meet them there--bird students, flower pickers, or simple strollers; yet I have learned to look upon those times as my poorest, and to choose others so far as I can. One does not enjoy nature to great advantage at a picnic. There are woods and swamps of which on all ordinary occasions I almost feel myself the owner, but of which on Saturday and Sunday I have scarcely so much as a rambler’s lease. This I have learned, however,--and I pass the secret on,--that the Sunday picnic does not usually begin till after nine o’clock in the forenoon.

When bird study becomes more general than it is now, as it ought to do, the community will perhaps find means--or, to speak more correctly, will use means, since there is no need of finding them--to restrain the present enormous overproduction of English sparrows, and so to give certain of our American beauties a chance to live.

Two days ago I was walking through a tract of woodland, following the highway, when I noticed, to my surprise, a white-breasted martin (tree swallow) just over my head. The next moment he fluttered before a hole in one of the big telegraph poles. His mate came out, and he alighted in the entrance, facing outward. And there he sat, while I in my turn took a seat upon the opposite bank and fell to watching him. The light struck him squarely, and it was good to see his blue-purple crown and his bright black eye shining in the sun. He had nothing to do inside, it appeared, but was simply on guard in his mate’s absence. Once he yawned. “She’s gone a good while,” he seemed to say. But he kept his post till she returned. Then, with a chirrup, he was off, and she dropped into the cavity out of sight.

All this was nothing of itself. But why should a pair of white-breasted martins, farm-loving, village-loving, house-haunting birds, a delight to the eye, and as innocent as they are beautiful--why should such birds be driven to seek a home in a telegraph pole in the woods? The answer was ready. I walked on, and by and by came to a village, young and I dare say thriving, but overrun from end to end with English sparrows, whose incessant clatter--

Soul-desolating strains--alas! too many--

filled my ears. Not a bluebird, not a tree swallow, nor, to all appearance, any place for one.

And so it is generally. One of my fellow townsmen, however, has an estate which forms a bright exception. There one sees bluebirds and martins. Year after year, punctual as the spring itself, they are back in their old places. And why? Because the owner of the estate, by a little shooting, mercifully persistent and therefore seldom necessary, keeps the English sparrows out. My thanks to him. His is the only colony of martins anywhere in my neighborhood.

A FAVORITE ROUND

After three days of heat, a cool morning. I take an electric car, leave it at a point five miles away, and in a semicircular course come round to the track again a mile or two nearer home. This is one of my favorite walks, such as every stroller finds for himself, affording a pleasant variety within comfortable distance.

First I come to a plain on which are hay-fields, gardens, and apple orchards; an open, sunny place where, in the season, one may hope to find the first bluebird, the first vesper sparrow, or the first bobolink. A spot where things like these have happened to one has henceforth a charm of its own. Memory walks beside us, as it were, and makes good all present deficiencies.

I am hardly here this morning before the tiny, rough voice of a yellow-winged sparrow reaches me from a field in which the new-mown grass lies in windrows. Grass or stubble, he can still be happy, it appears. The grasshopper sparrow--to give him his better name--is one of the quaintest of songsters, his musical effort being more like an insect’s than a bird’s; yet he is as fully inspired, as completely absorbed in his work, to look at him, as any mockingbird or thrush. I watched one a few days ago as he sat at the top of a dwarf pear tree. How seriously he took himself! No “minor poet” of a human sort ever surpassed him in that respect; head thrown back, and bill most amazingly wide open, all for that ragged thread of a tune, which nevertheless was decidedly emphatic and could be heard a surprisingly long distance. I smiled at him, but he did not mind. When minor poets cease writing, then, we may guess, the grasshopper sparrow will quit singing. Far be the day. To be a poet is to be a poet, and distinctions of major and minor are of trifling consequence. The yellow-wing counts with the savanna, but is smaller and has even less of a voice. Impoverished grass fields are his favorite breeding-places, and he is generally a colonist.

This morning (it is July 10) the vesper sparrow is singing here also, with the song sparrow and the chipper. And while I am listening to them--but mainly to the vesper--the sickle stroke (as I believe Mr. Burroughs calls it) of a meadow lark cuts the air. It is a good concert, vesper sparrow and lark going most harmoniously together; and to make it better still, a bobolink pours out one copious strain. Him I am especially glad to hear. After the grass is cut one feels as if bobolink days were over.

However, the grass is not all cut yet. I hear the rattle of a distant mowing-machine as I walk, and by and by come in sight of a man swinging a scythe. That is the poetry of farming--from the spectator’s point of view; and I think from the mower’s also, when he is cutting his own grass and is his own master. I like to watch him, at all events. Every motion he makes is as familiar to me as the swaying of branches in the wind. How long will it be, I wonder, before young people will be asking their seniors what a scythe was like, and how a man used it? Pictures of it will look odd enough, we may be sure, after the thing itself is forgotten.

While I am watching the mower (now he pauses a moment, and with the blade of his scythe tosses a troublesome tangle of grass out of his way, with exactly the motion that I have seen other mowers use a thousand times; but I look in vain for him to put the end of the snathe to the ground, pick up a handful of grass, and wipe down the blade)--while I am watching him a bluebird breaks into song, and a kingbird flutters away from his perch on a fence-wire. After all, the glory of a bird is his wings; and the kingbird knows it. In another field men are spreading hay--with pitchforks, I mean; and that, too, is poetry. In truth, by the old processes, hay could not be made except with graceful motions, unless it were by a novice, some man from the city or out of a shop. A green hand with a rake, it must be confessed, is a subject for laughter rather than for rhymes. The secret of graceful raking is like the secret of graceful writing,--a light touch.

Raspberries and thimbleberries are getting ripe (they do not need to be “dead ripe,” thimbleberries especially, for an old country boy), and meadow-sweet and mullein are in bloom. Hardback, standing near them, has not begun to show the pink.

Now I turn the corner, leaving the farms behind, and as I do so I bethink myself of a bed of yellow galium just beyond. It ought to be in blossom. And so it is--the prettiest sight of the morning, and of many mornings. I stand beside it, admiring its beauty and inhaling its faint, wholesomely sweet odor. Bedstraw, it is called. If it will keep that fragrance, why should mattresses ever be filled with anything else? This is the only patch of the kind that I know, and I felicitate myself upon having happened along at just the right minute to see it in all its sweetness and beauty. Year after year it blooms here on this roadside, and nowhere else; millions of tiny flowers of a really exquisite color, yellow with much of green in it, a shade for which in my ignorance I have no name.

The road soon runs into a swamp, and I stop on the bridge. Swamp sparrows are trilling on either side of me--a spontaneous, effortless kind of music, like water running down-hill. A phœbe chides me gently; passengers are expected to use the bridge to cross the brook upon, she intimates, not as a lounging-place, especially as her nest is underneath. Yellow bladderworts lift their pretty hoods above the slimy, black water, and among them lies a turtle, thrusting his head out to enjoy the sun. Once I see him raise a foreclaw and scratch the underside of his neck. The most sluggish and cold-blooded animal that ever lived must now and then be taken with an itching, I suppose.

Beyond the bridge the woods are full of white azalea (they are full of it now, that is to say, so long as the bushes are in blossom), but I listen in vain for the song of a Canadian warbler, whom I know to be living somewhere in its shadow. A chickadee, looking as if she had been through the wars, her plumage all blackened and bedraggled, makes remarks to me as I pass. The cares of maternity have spoiled her beauty, and perhaps ruffled her temper, for the time being. A veery snarls, and a thrasher’s resonant kiss makes me smile. If he knew it, he would smile in his turn, perhaps, at my “pathetic fallacy.” The absence of music here, just where I expected it most confidently, is disappointing, but I do not stay to grieve over the loss. As the road climbs to dry ground again, I remark how close to its edge the rabbit-foot clover is growing. It is at its prettiest now, the grayish green heads tipped with pink. If it were as uncommon as the yellow bedstraw, perhaps I should think it quite as beautiful. I have known it since I have known anything (“pussies,” we called it), but I never dreamed of its being a clover till I began to use a botany book. All the way along I notice how it cleaves to the very edge of the track. “Let me have the poorest place,” it says. And it thrives there. Such is the inheritance of the meek.

Here in the pine woods a black-throated green warbler is dreaming audibly, and, better still, a solitary vireo, the only one I have heard for a month or more, sings a few strains, with that sweet, falling cadence of which he alone has the secret. From a bushy tract, where fire has blackened everything, a chewink speaks his name, and then falls to repeating a peculiarly jaunty variation of the family tune. Dignity is hardly the chewink’s strong point. Now a field sparrow gives out a measure. There is an artist! Few can excel him, though many can make more show. Like the vesper sparrow, he has a gift of sweet and holy simplicity. And what can be better than that? Overhead, hurrying with might and main toward the woods, flies a crow, with four kingbirds after him. Perhaps he suffers for his own misdeeds; perhaps for those of his race. All crows look alike to kingbirds, I suspect.

This, and much beside, while I rest in the shade of a pine, taking the beauty of the clouds and listening to the wind in the treetops. The best part of every ramble is the part that escapes the notebook.

IN THE CAMBRIDGE SWAMP

Once a year, at least, I must visit the great swamp in Cambridge, one of the institutions of the city, as distinctive, not to say as famous, as the university itself. It is sure to show me something out of the ordinary run (its courses in ornithology are said to be better than any the university offers); and even if I were disappointed on that score, I should still find the visit worth while for the sake of old times, and old friends, and the good things I remember. At the present minute I am thinking especially of that enthusiastic, wise-hearted, finely gifted, greatly lamented nature lover, Frank Bolles, whom I met here for the first time one evening when it was too dark to see his face. We had come on the same errand, to watch the strange aerial evolutions of the April snipe. Who could have supposed then that he would be dead so soon, and the world so much the poorer?

Now it is July. The tall swamp rosebushes are in full flower, here and there a clump, the morning sun heightening their beauty, though for the most part there is no getting near them without wading to the knees. More accessible, as well as more numerous, are the trailing morning-glory vines (Convolvulus sepium), with showy, trumpet-shaped, pink-and-white blossoms; and in one place I stop to notice a watery-stemmed touch-me-not, or jewel-weed, from which a solitary frail-looking, orange-colored flower is hanging--the first of the year. What thousands on thousands will follow it; no meadow’s edge or boggy spot will be without them. The pendent jewel makes me think of hummingbirds, which is another reason for liking to look at it. Years ago I used to plant some of its red and white congeners (balsams, we called them) in a child’s garden. I wish I were a botanist; I am always wishing so; but I am thankful to know enough of the science to be able to recognize a few such relationships between native “weeds” and cultivated exotics. Somehow the weeds look less weedy for that knowledge; as the most commonplace of mortals becomes interesting to average humanity if it is whispered about that he is fourth cousin to the king. The world is not yet so democratic that anything, even a plant, can be rated altogether by itself.

The gravelly banks of the railroad, on which I go dry-shod through the swamp, are covered with a forest of chicory; a thrifty immigrant, tall, coarse, scraggy, awkward, homely, anything you will, but a great brightener of our American waysides on sunny midsummer forenoons. It attracts much notice, and presumably gives much pleasure, to judge by the number of persons who ask me its name. May the town fathers spare it! The bees and the goldfinches will thank them, if nobody else. Here I am interested to see that a goodly number of the plants--but not more than one in fifty, perhaps--bear full crops of pure white flowers; a rarity to me, though I am well used to pink ones. Gray’s Manual by the by, a Cambridge book, makes no mention of white flowers, while Britton and Brown’s Illustrated Flora says nothing about a pink variety. In a multitude of books there is safety, or, if not quite that, something less of danger. The pink and the white flowers are reversions to former less highly developed states, I suppose, if certain modern theories are to be trusted. I have read somewhere that the acid of ants turns the blue of chicory blossoms to a bright red, and that European children are accustomed to throw the flowers into ant hills to watch the transformation. Perhaps some young American reader will be moved to try the experiment.

The best plants, however, those that I enjoy most for to-day, at all events, are the cat-tails. How they flourish!--“like a tree planted by the rivers of water.” And how straight they grow! They must be among the righteous. We may almost say that they make the swamp. Certainly, when they are gone the swamp will be gone. Both kinds are here, the broad-leaved and the narrow-leaved, equally rank, though angustifolia has perhaps a little the better of the other in point of height. The two can be distinguished at a glance, and afar off, by a difference in color, if by nothing else. “Cat-tails” and “cat-tail flags,” the Manual and the Illustrated Flora call them; but I was brought up to say “cat-o’-nine-tails,” with strong emphasis on the numeral, and am glad to find that more romantic-sounding name recognized by the latest big dictionary. Not that the name has any particular appropriateness; but like my fellows, I have been trained to venerate a dictionary, especially an “unabridged,” as hardly less sacred than the Bible, and am still much relieved whenever my own usage, past or present, happens to be supported by such authority.

Rankness is the swamp’s note, we may say. Look at the spatter-dock leaves and the pickerel-weed! The tropics themselves could hardly do better. And what a maze and tangle of vegetation!--as if the earth could produce more than the air could find room for. So much for plenty of water and a wholesome depth of black mud. One thinks of the scriptural phrase about paths that “drop fatness.”

Ever since I arrived, the short, hurried, gurgling trill of the long-billed marsh wren has been in my ears. If I have been here an hour, I must have heard that sound five hundred times. Once only, and only for an instant, I saw one of the singers. I have not been on the watch for them, to be sure; but if it had been earlier in the season I should have seen them whether I tried to do so or not. It must be that the little aerial song-flights, then so common and so cheerful to look at, are now mostly over.

In such a place, however, populous as it is, one does not expect to see many birds--blackbirds being left out of the reckoning--at any time. Swamp ornithology is mainly a matter of “earsight.” Birds that live in cat-tail beds and button-bush thickets are very little on the wing. Here a least bittern may coo day after day, and season after season, and it will be half a lifetime before you see him do it. I have made inquiries far and near in the likeliest quarters, and have yet to learn, even at second hand, of any man who has ever had that good fortune. Once, for five minutes, I entertained a lively hope of accomplishing the feat myself, but the bird was too wary for me; and a miss is as good as a mile. No doubt I shall die without the sight.