Part 4

Then, indeed, panic fear seemed to

strike the flock at one blow, and they whirred into the dense green of some tender, motherly firs, whose arms closed about them and hid them from all rude intrusion. These birds are smaller than the ruffed grouse, though they are plump and beautiful creatures, and, because they feed on the spruce tips, are said to have flesh too strongly spiced to be palatable. I am glad of that. After the friendly way in which they received me into their community, to shoot and eat them would be a good deal like going out and bagging the neighborhood children on their way to primary school.

You soon get to feel that way about the deer up here in the Macwahoc woods. All along the lumber roads you may see their tracks, their keen hoofs cutting pointed marks in the soft mold of the wayside. If you have come silently and the wind is right you may swing a curve and be in time to hear a buck stamp and blow before he sees you and flips his flag and bounds off into the brush. Or you may see a slender doe pirouette like a ballet-dancing wood nymph and float away, with a stiff-legged, dappled fawn prancing after.

The creatures of the wilderness, when startled, seem to have a singular scorn of earth. You hardly note that they spurn it from beneath them as they depart. The coyote and jack-rabbit of the western plains do not seem to run; they simply float over the sage-brush, to your following vision much as a hawk does, only far swifter. So I have seen a fox sail along, seemingly about three feet in the air all the time, over a Massachusetts pasture. It is amazingly like flight. A startled Macwahoc deer in the same way seems to unconsciously acquire the true principle of the aeroplane.

In among the hackmatacks and arbor vitæ in the lower land the golden-winged woodpeckers are gathering in numbers in preparation for their fall migration southward. You may hear the vigorous note of the approaching single bird as he stops for a moment on a spruce top. “Kee-yer, kee-yer, kee-yer,” he shouts, with the accent on the yer. It has all the loud nasal twang of the stage Yankee, and the bird is as ludicrously awkward in his ways, sometimes.

If you step softly through the swamp you may find a group of them going through a grotesque dance, seemingly for their own amusement. They spread their tails stiffly, walk along limbs with mincingly awkward gait, and bob and bow to one another, saying, meanwhile, “Wee tew, wee tew, wee tew.” It is an amusing performance, and is apt to be interrupted by your guffaw of laughter, at which, whirls of white, gold, and black, with a dash of red, they fly away to repeat the performance in some undiscovered retreat.

The flicker, which is another of the fifty-seven varieties of alias under which the golden-winged woodpecker sometimes travels, is, I believe, the most brainy of the woodpecker tribe. Having brains he has also humor, and from the time he takes his first flight from the high hole in some woodland stub till pigeon hawk or barred owl cuts short his flickering, he is making a joke of things.

Like the flickers, the crows of northern Maine migrate southward in winter. The deep, long-remaining snows cover their sources of food too deep, and they find the clam flats of the coast a sure refuge and a well-stocked larder. Just now they are waxing fat on grasshoppers, marching in long lines across the open fields, lines from which no careless hopper may escape, and croaking contentment as they go.

They will stay until the snows drive them, however, and even in winter an occasional scout makes a quick flight north just to see how the land lies. It is but a half-day’s trip up and back. I wish I might, too, be able to reach the land of the mother firs as easily when I feel the need of them. However, the aeroplane is in the incubator, and, unless the Wrights go wrong, perhaps next year or the year after I shall.

BIRDS OF THE NOR’EASTER

Our weather here in eastern Massachusetts comes from the southwest. Whirling storms, little or big, move up from the Gulf coast and pass on, headed for Spitzbergen by way of Newfoundland. Knowing the habits of these whirling winds, the watchers of the weather bureau are able to say, as a rule quite accurately, when the storm will reach us, from what direction the winds will blow, and what they will bring with them and after them,--rain, gale, or fair weather.

One exception to this rule of accuracy is when the storm center, instead of reasonably and politely following the usual route, skips suddenly out to sea by way of Hatteras and goes roaring up the easterly edge of the Gulf Stream. That is when the weather signs that you find on the southeast corner of the front page, evening edition, fail, for that is when we catch our unexpected northeaster.

“Back to the wind in the northern hemisphere,” says the rule, “and the storm center is on your left.” So, with the wind whirling its thousand-mile circuit about this mysterious center halfway across the Atlantic, we get it from the northeast, and it brings whiffs of mid-ocean spume to our nostrils that are weary of the summer’s heat, and clothes all the land with the gray mists out of which grew the Norse sagas.

On days when the northeaster sings along the Gloucester shore, tears white wraiths off the red rocks of Marblehead and Nahant, and spins them in beaten spume along the gray sands of Nantasket, we of the inland country tread our heat-browned pastures with lifted heads, watching mysterious vapors wrap the land in legend, breathing the same air as the stormy petrel, and knowing that in our hearts the strong pulse beats with the blood of vikings.

On such days I love to watch the pond shore and the reedy stretches of the meadow marsh, for to them come the first of the wild migrants of autumn, and in the northeaster you may exchange greetings with the winter yellow-legs, just down from the Arctic shore. To-day I heard them, high in the invisible realms of the upper mists, whirling down to me,--gray forms out of a gray sky that seemed to loose them as it later will loose snowflakes.

Their staccato whistle in its minor chromatics shrills forth four notes over and over again,--notes lonesome with the heartache of northern barrens, wild as the echoes of ice cliffs that never rang responsive to voices other than those of the eerie birds of Arctic seas; a high-pitched plaint that might well be the shrilling of a little lost wind crying for its mother. You may imitate this whistle well enough to deceive the birds and bring them swirling within range of your gun if you will, though you can never put into it the wild plaint that echoes of far-off, lonely spaces.

The yellow-legs do not come as often as they used, and it is some years since I have seen even a small flock of the beautiful little blue-winged teal that were once so plentiful that the rustle of their wings was a familiar thing at daybreak on the marsh. I miss them both. It is worth a tramp to pond or marsh to hobnob even for a brief moment of interchange of friendly greetings with such travelers. The winter yellow-legs may summer in the extreme Arctic and winter in Patagonia. The teal’s range is less, though he may breed in Alaska and winter in South America. Their loss, here in the east, is the price we pay for civilization of our present sort. I daresay it is worth it, but I believe there is a better sort that does not come so high in the loss of wilderness friends.

Along the pond shore, after the yellow-legs have dashed in upon us, whistled the wind full of loneliness and heartache, and dashed away again like ghosts of gray snow-flurries yet to be, it is a pleasure to watch the homely antics of the spotted sandpipers. Of these you may find a pair or two about the pond all summer long, no doubt having a nest in some grassy meadow nearby. By the time the equinoctial northeaster is due, this pair or two has become oftentimes a dozen, preparing for their flight to the shores of the Caribbean Sea, where they will spend the winter, yet loth to leave New England.

These birds are never much afraid of me. If I approach too near they sing out peevishly, “Peet-weet, peet-weet,” and half-circle in a short level flight out over the water and back again to the shore. Indeed, I strongly suspect their attitude toward my intrusion is one of humorous scorn. They are apt to face me as I come quite near, and bow low with what seems the exaggeration of politeness, only they immediately turn about and bow just as politely the other way, which flips their white tail feathers in my direction with a gesture which is certainly one of ill-bred contempt.

Then they fly away, leaving me in doubt as to whether they mean it or not. Probably, however, there is nothing distinctly personal in it. The legs of the spotted sandpiper are hitched to the body with muscles that seem to act like springs, and he can’t help teetering when he attempts to stand still, hence his popular names of teeter, teeter-tail, etc.

Along with the spotted sandpipers at this time of year I am apt to find the ring-necked or piping plover, these already on their autumnal migration, for they breed from Labrador northward. They differ little from the sandpiper in size, but you will readily know them by the white collar which encircles the neck, with a little black vest partly defined just below it. Modest, busy little chaps they are, running about on the sands, picking up insects and minute crustaceæ, continually twittering “Peep, peep,” and caring little for your approach until, finally frightened, they rise as one bird and fly away in a compact flock.

I have never seen these birds swim, though their half-webbed feet would seem to indicate that they can. Though, for that matter, birds that have no webbing at all between the toes sometimes swim well when forced to it. The common barn-yard hen, thrown into the water, will sit erect and swim as a duck might until her feathers are wet through.

To the pond with the autumnal northeaster usually comes a pied-billed grebe or two. If you are sharp eyed and fortunate you may see one beating his way down the wind with rapid strokes of his ludicrously short wings. His flight is something like that of a duck, though I think he makes harder work of it, more wing strokes to the minute; but you will know him as he nears you, for no duck ever stretched his head so eagerly forward or carried his legs dangling so far astern.

The bird should be at ease on land, for he has a bill like a hen, and his toes are lobed merely, not connected with webbing. But he is not. On foot he is slow, clumsy, and ludicrously ungainly. Probably for this reason the grebe does not go near land when he can help it. Even his nest is built on the water, sometimes actually floating, a mass of rotten sedge and mud, and the chicks swim and dive like old birds as soon as hatched. But if the land gait of the grebe is ludicrous and his flight laborious, in the water he is the personification of grace, ease, and agility.

Well does he merit one of his familiar names,--that of water-witch. When the hunters go forth to the marsh I am sorry for my innocent friends, the blue-winged teal. I know how few fly now where once the air would seem full of them. When I hear the quacking of live decoys my heart misgives me for the fate of the black duck, for I know how their fellow-feeling and sociable instinct will bring them in to the blind where the gunners are hidden.

Neither decoys nor dead shots give me any qualms of uneasiness where the pied-billed grebe is concerned. The decoys may split their throats in calling to him when they see him swim by just out of gunshot. He will not even turn his head. It may be that he has a voice; I have never heard him use it. When it is in the open with fair play, grebe against gun, my sympathies are with the gunner, for I know how great cry and little wool will result.

I have seen a pied-billed grebe cornered in a narrow, shallow river by gunners on each bank. He dove at the flash of the first gun, and though it was point-blank range, he was under water before the shot could reach him. He was up again and under a dozen times, to be followed by a dozen shots, only wasted. No wonder the hunters call him “hell-diver.” I have seen it stated in nature books that this name is given him because of the extreme depth to which he is supposed to go. No doubt the grebe goes deep when he wishes to, but the gunners haven’t taken that into consideration. The name is one symptom of the profanity which his exceptional skill necessitates.

At the end of a dozen shots the grebe cornered in the river decided in his slow way that he was being hunted while above water, so he simply failed to come up. A grebe has been known to stay under five minutes when loosening water-weeds for its nest or when pursuing fish for its supper. This one was seen no more by the gunners, and after waiting half an hour or so they went away, firm in the belief that the last shot had really reached him, but that he had in his death throes become entangled in water-weeds and remained there. Comforting for the gunners, no doubt, and very satisfactory to the grebe. Ten minutes after they had disappeared the bird reappeared and went on feeding as before.