Part 10

The falling of leaves and ripe fruit shows these hopes for future foliage and flower revealed for the first time. Stand on a knoll in the pasture and look over the tops of shrubs and trees on these keen and clear November days and you will see that the most beautiful colors of the year are there waiting your eye after you thought that all color had flamed to its climax and died in the dead ashes of autumn memories. Grays that are incredibly soft and coot in the vigorous young limbs of the maples warm into tender reds on the twig tips where the next year’s buds sit snug.

All this year’s shoots of the swamp blueberry bushes are a restful green, but at the tips these, too, ripen into red, while on the higher ground the black huckleberries and the birches show the same color till the landscape rolls away from you in a warm and cuddley glow that takes the nip out of the wind. Looking on these you know that the pasture cannot be cold, however deep the snows to come or however low the mercury in the thermometer may fall. As the winter comes on this blanket of warm red, spread all over the bare trees and shrubs, will deepen in hue and with the first promise of spring flush into a lively pink that melts again into slender green with the passing of frost from the roots and the first soft rains of April. Herein is the better half of the harvest of the year,--a harvest not of fruition but of promise. The out-door world ripens hope in the same crop that has given us fulfilment.

How full of hope, of promises, of matured plans and energy these rosy buds are you may not know till you step down among them and test their virility and perfection. Here is the azalia, its pinky twigs tipped with swollen, soft green buds as big as your little finger tip. Till the leaves fell nobody thought the azalia had been doing anything since its rich-scented white flowers fell last July. Here is the proof of its labors and foresight. In the hearts of these buds are next July’s blossoms, in miniature it is true, but perfect in every appointment.

About them are the green young leaves, vividly colored already, both only waiting for the mysterious thrill of spring sap to push forward to maturity, promising the leaves softly green, the blossoms vividly white, sticky with sweetness, and adorably fragrant. If you will pull one of the larger of the azalia buds apart you may easily see all this, and as you do it, be haunted by the ghost of a perfume, an infinitesimally faint promise of the rich odor yet to be.

So, in large or small, it is with all the shrubs and trees. Each is loaded and primed and waits but the touch of the match in the crescent warmth of the spring sun. Then will come the yearly explosion. It is hard to say which of these next-year promises shows most vigor, yet I think on the whole I would give the prize to the sapling pines. Each central shoot of these will go up in the season from fifteen to thirty inches, and send out four or five laterals. Yet each young tree has from eight to a dozen brown buds prepared for this, at least two centrals which you will recognize as being larger and standing more erect. One of these will get the start and continue the main trunk of the tree. The other will fall back and be a lateral branch. Yet if, as often happens, the central shoot is disabled the next strongest will take its place and so on, if need be, till the last of the dozen buds has stepped into the place of the lost leader.

Sometimes, though rarely with the white pine, more often with the fir and spruce, two will compete with equal success for this lost leadership and you have a tree with twin tops. Usually, however, one fails in the race and the stronger goes ahead alone.

So, going abroad these keen November days, looking upon the world stripped of the glamour of summer and the glory of autumn fruitage, we see it by no means a dead and pulseless thing to be wept over and buried. Instead, we wonder at and delight in the riot of life laid bare by the passing of leaf and fruit. The woodland is more beautiful, the pasture more enticing than ever. Beauty thus unadorned is adorned the most, and we forget to sorrow over the ceasing of this year’s growth in our joy in the promise of that for the year to be.

WINTER BIRDS’-NESTING

Last night the world was all soft with mist. Over on the brow of Cemetery Hill you looked off into an illimitable distance of it. Horizon after horizon loomed over the shoulder of its fellows as the gray-draped hills rose one beyond the other and tiptoed softly away into the yonder world,--so softly that you could not tell where the earth ended and the heavens began.

The landscape passed like an elder saint from this world to the next, you could scarce tell when, only that you were awed and soothed with the soft serenity of the going. In the hush that followed the soft blue mists changed their draperies for black, in mourning for the passing of the twilight saint, and thus night came.

Last summer night on this hilltop was filled with voices. A million insects chirped and sang. Tree toads trilled, amorous toads played bagpipes all along the margin of the swamp below, and in deeper water a thousand frogs shouted one to another in guttural diapason. A little screech owl used to sit in the darker corner of the pines and ululate all to himself far into the night, and here and there a songbird, stirring in his sleep, would pipe a mellow note. A coon would whinny or a fox would yap, and there were many other sounds whose source you might not surely define. The forefathers who wait serenely beneath their slate headstones all along the brow of the hill had much and pleasant company when the year was in its prime. Now their nights are as silent as if the world itself were dead, their company ghosts of mist as tenuous as their own.

The morning after such a night does not break from above; it grows. It rises out of the earth like a soft tide, as if the mists that went to sleep in it last night were the first of all creatures up, making all things gray again. These tiptoe up, tangling their soft garments in the trees and roof tops till they slip from them and pass on into the upper spaces, where their unclothed spirits become the morning light. The garments, clinging still to all things, remain behind as hoar frost.

That is the way it was this morning. All the trees had white baby leaves of infinite daintiness and ghosts of blossoms that were not real enough for a promise. I might better call them remembrance, touched with hope. Hardly was the touch of hope there at the earliest light. It was just white and delicate remembrance. Then, with the thought of the sun, only the thought for the sun himself was not to come for long, there came a slender opalescence welling through these white garments, an iridescent presence that you felt rather than saw, till I knew without looking to the east that the dawn had grown out of the earth into the high heavens and the miracle was complete.

Out of this miracle of the birth of morning light came two pleasant things. One was the red sun, peeping robustly in among the pines, adding his glow to the warmth of their shelter; the other was a bustle of merry company heralded by a salvo of elfin trumpets. A company of chickadees came breakfasting, and with them were nuthatches. I think no one has ever see the trumpet which the nuthatch blows, but its tiny, tin toot is a familiar sound in the pine woods at this time of year.

If some fay of the fairy orchestra, returning in haste from revels which lasted till the gray of the morning, did not drop it, I cannot tell where the nuthatch did pick it up. Its note is certainly more elfin than bird-like and always seems to add a tiny touch of romantic mystery to the day.

Such a November morning is fine for birds’-nesting. You may go hunting birds’ nests in June if you wish to, but you will not find very many, half so many in a day as I can find now almost in a glance. Down stream there is a little island crowded with alder and elder, milkweed and joe-pye weed, and garlanded with virgin’s bower, where I called many days last summer to watch the insect life that rioted about it. A bed of milkweed bloom was each day a busy and cosmopolitan community.

Right at my elbow as I stood in July watching this was a blackbird’s nest. I must have brushed it more than once, but I never saw it until to-day. To be sure, when I first went there the young blackbirds were grown up and gone, for the nesting season with these birds is short, and by July the young are flying about with the flock, learning to sing “tchk, tchk, conkaree.” Had there been young or eggs in the nest the distress of the parent birds would have warned me of its presence. Lacking that, so cleverly was it placed for safety and concealment, I never noticed it till the passing of the leaves left it bare.

Ten feet away was another, a replica of the first. Among blackbirds good form in house-building has but one accepted style. The nest is rather deep, loosely woven of rough grass, lined with finer grasses. Standing on the little island to-day I could not help seeing these two nests which before I had passed a score of times without seeing, for if June is the time of year to hunt for birds’ nests, this is the time of year to find them.

The birds can give you, and I really think they are right about it, many reasons why you should not hunt for their nests in June. Looking at a nestful of young birds, with the mother fluttering solicitously about, I always feel as I think I should if I went into a town where I was not acquainted and went about peeping in at the nursery windows of peoples’ houses. My motives might be the best in the world. I might be making a study of nestlings and nests of the human family for scientific purposes; in fact, I might be a veritable “friendly visitor,” but I should be fortunate if I did not fall under suspicion, become the object of dislike, and eventually land in the police court.

The mere too frequent inspection of the nests and eggs of some birds will cause abandonment, and those parents who stand by do so with such evident distress that after the briefest possible satisfactory inspection we ought to apologize for the intrusion and step away. Many birds will even attempt to hasten this departure by pretty vigorous means.

None of these objections obtains now. There are no birds in this year’s nests, and you may gather them or tear them to pieces in analytical mood without doing harm, at least to the birds. Down stream, ten feet from my second blackbird’s nest, was a catbird’s. The catbird builds a better nest than the blackbird, at least so far as strength is concerned. Before the winter is over the grasses of the latter’s structure will be broken and blown away by the wind or washed back to earth by rain and snow.

The catbird’s will surely stand until next fall, and remnants of it may be sometimes seen in the bush the year after that. For the catbird’s material is of more rugged quality. His foundation is often of pliant twigs or tough bark of the wild grapevine, though the nest I have before me as I write--the one which I could not see last summer when I passed it at the foot of the little island--has strong, coarse grasses loosely interwoven for its foundation. Then, within this loose, rough cup is a layer of tough oak leaves, the dry ones of the year before, wind-proofing the bottom of the structure. Then comes a layer of fine black roots, I think those of alder, taken where the stream had washed them bare. Then more oak leaves, and finally an inner lining of finer black roots from the same source as those already used.

The whole is firm, sanitary, wind-proof, but not air-proof, and sufficiently cup-shaped to hold the young securely, though not so deep as that of the blackbird. One kick would smash a blackbird’s nest to a handful of straw. You might kick a catbird’s all about the meadow, and I am quite sure the inner structure would remain interwoven.

I think the reason for the difference in the two is this. Though both often build over water and in similar situations, the blackbird has but one brood a season, and even a frail nest will do for this. The

catbird hardly has his first brood off the nest before preparations are in hand for a second; and the nest which can stand two broods of riotous youngsters in succession, even if fixed up a bit, must needs be of fairly firm texture.

The strength of the catbird’s nest often serves another purpose, though I doubt if this is taken into the calculations when it is planned and built. I found one of the half-dozen which line the brook conspicuously, now that they may be seen at all, half full of wild cherry stones. Evidently a field mouse had appropriated this nest for an autumn storehouse, perhaps planning, before the weather got too cold, to roof it over with a dome of soft grasses, this work of the field mouse being not so very different from that of the red squirrel, only on a smaller scale.

Farther down stream in a rough portion of the pasture, brambly but beautiful with barberries, is the chosen habitat of the yellow warblers of my neighborhood. Always they build in the barberry bushes here, nor have I ever found them anywhere else or in other bushes. It is not difficult to find them when the pasture is in the full leafage of late May, for you have but to go from one barberry bush to another till you have succeeded. But the yellow warbler is a shy bird, and I have known them to desert nest and eggs when these were too often visited.

It is much better to hunt them now, when you have but to stand on a little hillock and count, then pluck the nest that you prefer and take it home with you without abraiding anybody’s feelings. The yellow warbler mother bird seems to have a great love for the tender buff wool of the young shoots of the cinnamon fern, which are just about ready to shed these delicate overcoats when nesting begins with the yellow warblers. In fact, her color scheme is perfect.