Part 11

It is wholesome to be the good Samaritan to a meadow mouse, to pour out, even waste, a little of the oil and wine of sympathy on the humblest of our needy neighbors.

Here are the chimney swallows. One can look with complacency, with gratitude, indeed, upon the swallows of other chimneys, as they hawk in the sky; yet, when the little creatures, so useful, but so uncombed and unfumigated, set up their establishments in your chimney, to the jeopardy of the whole house, then you need an experience like mine.

I had had a like experience years before, when the house did not belong to me. Now, however, the house was mine, and if it became infested because of the swallows, I could not move away; so I felt like burning them in the chimney, bag and baggage. There were four nests, as nearly as I could make out, and, from the frequent squeakings, I knew they were all filled with young. Then one day, when the birds were feathered and nearly ready to fly, there came a rain that ran wet far down the sooty chimney, loosened the mortar of the nests, and sent them crashing into the fireplace.

Some of the young birds were killed outright; the others were at my mercy, flung upon me,—helpless, wailing infants! Of course I made it comfortable for them on the back-log, and let their mothers flutter down unhindered to feed them. Had I understood the trick, I would have hawked for them and helped feed them myself.

They made a great thunder in the chimney; they rattled down into the living-room a little soot; but nothing further came of it. We were not quarantined. On the contrary, we had our reward, according to promise; for it was an extremely interesting event to us all. It dispelled some silly qualms, it gave us intimate part in a strange small life, so foreign, yet so closely linked to our own, and it made us pause with wonder that even our empty, sooty chimney could be made use of by Nature to our great benefit.

I wonder if the nests of the chimney swallows came tumbling down when the birds used to build in caves and hollow trees? It is a most extraordinary change, this change from the trees to the chimneys, and it does not seem to have been accompanied by an increase of architectural wisdom necessary to meet all the contingencies of the new hollow. The mortar or glue, which, I imagine, held firmly in the empty trees, will not mix with the chimney soot, so that the nest, especially when crowded with young, is easily loosened by the rain, and is sometimes even broken away by the slight wing-stroke of a descending swallow, or by the added weight of a parent bird as it settles with food.

We little realize how frequent fear is among the birds and animals, nor how often it proves fatal. A situation which would have caused no trouble ordinarily, becomes through sudden fright a tangle or a trap. I have known many a quail to bolt into a fast express train and fall dead. Last winter I left the large door of the barn open, so that my flock of juncos could feed inside upon the floor. They found their way into the hayloft, and went up and down freely. On two or three occasions I happened in so suddenly that they were thoroughly frightened, and flew madly into the cupola to escape through the windows. They beat against the glass until utterly dazed, and would have perished there, had I not climbed up later and brought them down. So thousands of the migrating birds perish yearly by flying wildly against the dazzling lanterns of the lighthouses, and thousands more lose their way in the thick darkness of the stormy nights, or are blown out of their course, and drift away to sea.

Hasty, careless, miscalculated movements are not as frequent among the careful wild folk as among us, perhaps; but there is abundant evidence of their occasional occurrence and of their sometimes fatal results.

Several instances are recorded of birds that have been tangled in the threads of their nests; and one case of a bluebird that was caught in the flying meshes of an oriole’s nest into which it had been spying.

I once found the mummied body of a chippy twisting and swinging in the leafless branches of a peach tree. The little creature was suspended in a web of horsehair about two inches below the nest. It looked as if she had brought a snarled bunch of the hair and left it loose in the twigs. Later on, a careless step and her foot was fast, when every frantic effort for freedom only tangled her the worse. In the nest above were four other tiny mummies,—a double tragedy that might with care have been averted.

A similar fate befell a song sparrow that I discovered hanging dead upon a barbed-wire fence. By some chance it had slipped a foot through an open place between the two twisted strands, and then, fluttering along, had wedged the leg and broken it in the struggle to escape.

We have all held our breath at the hazardous traveling of the squirrels in the treetops. What other animals take such risks,—leaping at dizzy heights from bending limbs to catch the tips of limbs still smaller, saving themselves again and again by the merest chance.

But luck sometimes fails. My brother, a careful watcher in the woods, was hunting on one occasion, when he saw a gray squirrel miss its footing in a tree and fall, breaking its neck upon a log beneath.

I have frequently known them to fall short distances, and once I saw a red squirrel come to grief like the gray squirrel above. He was scurrying through the tops of some lofty pitch pines, a little hurried and flustered at sight of me, and nearing the end of a high branch was in the act of springing, when the dead tip cracked under him and he came tumbling headlong. The height must have been forty feet, so that before he reached the ground he had righted himself,—his tail out and legs spread,—but the fall was too great. He hit the earth with a dull thud, and before I could reach him lay dead upon the needles, with blood oozing from his eyes and nostrils.

Unhoused and often unsheltered, the wild things suffer as we hardly yet understand. No one can estimate the deaths of a year from severe cold, heavy storms, high winds and tides. I have known the nests of a whole colony of gulls and terns to be swept away in a great storm; and I have seen the tides, over and over, flood the inlet marshes, and drown out the nests in the grass,—those of the clapper-rails by thousands.

I remember a late spring storm that came with the returning redstarts and, in my neighborhood, killed many of them. Toward evening of that day one of the little black and orange voyageurs fluttered against the window and we let him in, wet, chilled, and so exhausted that for a moment he lay on his back in my open palm. Soon after there was another soft tapping at the window,—and two little redstarts were sharing our cheer and drying their butterfly wings in our warmth.

During the summer of 1903 one of the commonest of the bird calls about the farm was the whistle of the quails. A covey roosted down the hillside within fifty yards of the house. Then came the winter,—such a winter as the birds had never known. Since then, just once have we heard the whistle of a quail, and that, perhaps, was the call of one which a game protective association had liberated in the woods about two miles away.

The birds and animals are not as weather-wise as we; they cannot foretell as far ahead nor provide as certainly against need, despite the popular notion to the contrary.

We point to the migrating birds, to the muskrat houses, and the hoards of the squirrels, and say, “How wise and far-sighted these nature-taught children are!” True, they are, but only for conditions that are normal. Their wisdom does not cover the exceptional. The gray squirrels did not provide for the unusually hard weather of the winter of 1904. Three of them from the woodlot came begging of me, and lived on my wisdom, not on their own.

Consider the ravens, that neither sow nor reap, that have neither storehouse nor barn, yet they are fed,—but not always. Indeed, there are few of our winter birds that go hungry so often, and that die in so great numbers for lack of food and shelter, as the crows.

After severe and protracted cold, with a snow-covered ground, a crow-roost looks like a battlefield, so thick lie the dead and wounded. Morning after morning the flock goes over to forage in the frozen fields, and night after night returns hungrier, weaker, and less able to resist the cold. Now, as the darkness falls, a bitter wind breaks loose and sweeps down upon the pines.

List’ning the doors an’ winnocks rattle, I thought me on the owrie cattle,

and how often I have thought me on the crows biding the night yonder in the moaning pines! So often, as a boy, and with so real an awe, have I watched them returning at night, that the crows will never cease flying through my wintry sky,—an endless line of wavering black figures, weary, retreating figures, beating over in the early dusk.

To-night another wild storm sweeps across the January fields. All the afternoon the crows have been going over, and at five o’clock are still passing though the darkness settles rapidly. Now it is eight, and the long night is but just begun. The storm is increasing. The wind shrieks about the house, whirling the fine snow in hissing eddies past the corners and driving it on into long, curling crests across the fields. I can hear the roar as the wind strikes the shoal of pines where the fields roll into the woods,—a vast surf sound, but softer and higher, with a wail like the wail of some vast heart in pain.

I can see the tall trees rock and sway with their burden of dark forms. As close together as they can crowd on the bending limbs cling the crows, their breasts turned all to the storm. With crops empty and bodies weak, they rise and fall in the cutting, ice-filled wind for thirteen hours of night!

Is it a wonder that the life fires burn low? that the small flames flicker and go out?

VII

The Sign of the Shad-bush