Part 14

The night heron’s day begins at dusk and ends, as a rule, at daylight. His eyes have all the night-seeing ability of those of the owl, and he finds his way through fog and darkness, and his food as well. Yet the bird seems to see well enough by day. The four that sailed down to the pond yesterday in the full glare of the afternoon sun had no hesitation about their flight. They swung the corner of the wood and lighted on limbs of the trees with as much directness and certainty as a hawk might. Indeed, when their voracious young are growing up they have to fish night and day. It seems to me that fish must be becoming more plentiful now that the black-crowned night herons are few in number, for a single bird must consume yearly an enormous quantity.

I undertook the care and feeding of two once that I had taken from one of those impossible nests. They were the most solemnly ridiculous young creatures that were ever made. “Man,” says Plato, “is a featherless biped.” So were these youthful night herons. They were pretty nearly as naked as truth and might have passed for caricatures of the Puritan conscience, for they were so erect they nearly fell over backward.

They would not stay in any nest made for them, but preferred to inhabit the earth, usually just round the corner of something, whence they poked weird heads with staring eyes that discountenanced all creatures that they met. The family cat, notoriously fond of chicken, stalked them a bit the first day that they occupied the yard. At the psychological moment, when Felis domesticatus was crouching, green eyed, for a spring, the two gravely rose and faced her. She took one look at those pods of bodies on stilts, those strange heads stretched high above on attenuated necks, and faced the wooden severity of their stare for but a second. Then she gave forth a yowl of terror and fled to her favorite refuge beneath the barn, whence she was not known to emerge for a space of twenty-four hours.

There was something so solemn, so “pokerish,” so preternaturally dignified about these creatures that they seemed to be out of another, eerier, world. If we ever get so advanced as to travel from planet to planet I shall expect to find things like them peering round corners at me on some of the out-of-the-way satellites, the moons of Neptune, for instance.

Most young birds will eat what you bring them and clamor for more until they are full. These young herons yawned at my approach as solemnly as if they were made of wood and worked by the pulling of a string. Never a sound did I know them to make during their brief stay with me, but they would stand motionless and silent and gape unwinkingly till a piece of fish was dropped within the yawn. Then it would close deliberately and reopen, the fish having vanished. Fish were plentiful that year and so seemed to be time and bait, and I became curious as to the actual capacity of a growing night heron. I could feed either one till I could see the last piece still in the back of his mouth because there was standing room only. Yet if I went away but for a moment and came back, there they stood, as prodigiously empty as ever. The thing became interesting until I began to discover assorted piles of uneaten fish about the yard, and watching soon showed what was happening.

Foot passengers out in the country have a motto which says, “never refuse a ride; if you do not want it now you may need it next time.” This seemed to be the idea which worked sap-wise in the cambium layers of these wooden young scions of the family Nycticorax nycticorax nævius. They never refused a fish. As long as I stood by, their beaks, having closed as well as possible on the very last piece required to stuff them to the tip, would remain closed. After they thought I had gone away they would stalk gravely round a corner, look over the shoulder with an innocence which was peculiarly blear-eyed, then, believing the coast clear, yawn the whole feeding into obscurity in the tall grass. Then they would stalk meditatively forth with hands clasped behind the back, so to speak, and gape for some more.

This was positively the only thing they did except to wait patiently for a chance to do it again, and I soon tired of them and took them back to the rookery, where they were received and, so far as I could see, taken care of, either by their own parents or as orphans at the public expense. It all seemed a matter of supreme indifference to these moon-hoax chicks. There is much controversy as to whether animals act from reason or from instinct. I am convinced that these young night herons contained spiral springs and basswood wheels and that thence came their actions. Probably had I looked them over carefully enough I should have found them inscribed with the motto, “Made in Switzerland.”

I fancy many people confound the night heron, known to them only by his wildwitch cry, voiced as he flies over their canoe in the summer dusk, with the great blue heron, which is nearly twice as big a bird. Perhaps I would better say twice as long, in speaking of herons, for bigness has little to do with them. I well remember my amazement as a small boy, coming out of the woods onto the shore of the pond with a big muzzle-loading army musket under my arm--my first hunting expedition--and scaring up a great blue heron.

I had been reading the “Arabian Nights,” and knew that the roc was a great bird that darkened the sun and carried off elephants in his talons. Very well, here was the very bird in full flight before me, darkening the entire cove with his wings. Es-Sindibad of the Sea might be tied to the leg of this one for aught I knew. Mechanically the old musket came to my shoulder and roared, and when I had picked myself up and collected the musket and my senses, there lay the bird on the beach, dead. But he was still an “Arabian Nights’” sort of a bird for one of his dimensions had vanished, his bulk. He was all bill, neck, legs, and feathers, the wonder being how so small a body could sustain such a spread.

The great blue heron, in spite of his slenderness, which you can interpret as grace or awkwardness, as you will, is a beautiful bird and a welcome addition to the pond shore, the sheltered cove or the sheltered brookside pool which he frequents. If you will come very softly to his accustomed stand you may have a chance to see him sit, erect and motionless, the personification of dignity and vigilance. The very crown of his head is white, but you are more apt to notice the black feathers which border it and draw together behind into a crest which gives a thought of reserved alertness to his motionless pose.

The general impression of his coloring is that of a slaty gray, this melting into brownish on his neck and being prettily

touched with rufous and black on other parts of the body. It is a pleasure to watch his graven-image pose, but it is an even greater one to see him take flight. His long legs bend under him, and he springs forward into the air in a mighty parabola. The wings arch in similar curves and lift him with the very first stroke seemingly a rod in air, and as they arch forward for the second the long outstretched neck draws back and the long legs trail in very faithful reproduction of the ornamentation on a Japanese screen. You hardly feel that here is a living creature, flying away from fear of you. It is rather as if a skillful decorator had magically painted the great bird in on the drop scene in front of you. But the flight of the great blue heron is strong if his body is small in comparison with his other dimensions, and he rapidly rises in the majesty of power and flaps out of sight over the tree tops.

The great blue heron is not rare, but I think he, too, is much less common than he used to be. Usually he does not summer with us, going farther north, where he nests in colonies. I seem to find him most often in late September or October, when he drops off for a few weeks, a pleasant fishing trip interlude in his flight to winter quarters in the south. But he is here now, and may be met with on most any May morning if you will seek out his haunts.

Fully as common but by no means so noticeable is our little green heron, the third species of the genus that one is apt to see hereabouts. You will usually pass him unnoticed as he sits all day long in the shadow on a limb near the shore. Nor will you be apt to see him until he becomes convinced that you are about to approach too near. Then, with a little frightened croak, that is more like a squeak, as if his hinges were rusty, he springs into the air, flutters along shore a few rods and disappears into the woods again.

The thought of this little fellow always brings to my mind the silent drowse and quivering heat of August afternoons along a drought-dwindled brook where cardinal flowers lift crimson plumes on the margin of the still remaining pools. Here where deciduous trees shade the winding reaches he loves to sit and wait for the cool of evening before dropping to the margin and hunting his supper.

I always suspect him of being asleep there with his glossy black head thrust under his green wing. That would give him an excuse for being surprised at close quarters and account for his vast alarm when he does see you. If not I think he would slip quietly away before you got too near as so many birds do that see you in the woods before you see them. But perhaps not; perhaps he trusts to luck and hopes till the very last that you will pass on and leave him to watch his game preserves in peace and decide which fishes and frogs he will find most appetizing. The little green heron is a solitary bird, a very recluse in fact, and I do not recall ever seeing two together. He is a nervous chap, after you have once flushed him, however, and if you watch his flight with care you may see him light, stretch his head high to see if you are following him, meanwhile nervously twitching his apology for a tail.

HARBINGERS OF SUMMER

Out of the violet dusk of some June dawn you will see the summer coming over the hills from the south and you will know her from the spring at sight. I do not know how. I doubt if the whip-poor-will, who has a jealous eye on the dawn and its signs, for its first appearance means bedtime and surcease from labor for him, knows. Yet he feels her presence, for he waits it as a sign to select the spot for his nest.

The whip-poor-will is hardly a home builder. He just occupies a flat for the summer, a place that seems no more fit for a home than any other flat. Just as I often wonder how apartment-house dwellers find their way back at dinner-time, in spite of the bewildering sameness of the surroundings, so it seems to me quite miraculous that the whip-poor-will can find the way back to the eggs or young at daybreak. Nest there is none. It is simply a spot picked, seemingly, at random, on the brown last year’s leaves, or the bare rock of the pasture.

But the whip-poor-will has been here since early May, and till now has not offered to take an apartment. Yesterday, without doubt, he saw the summer coming and picked his site. By to-morrow or next day you might find the two eggs there--if you are a wizard. It takes such to find a whip-poor-will’s eggs. You might look at them and never see them, so well do they match the ground on which they lie,--more like pebbles than anything else, with their dull white obscurely marked with lilac and brownish-gray spots. I sometimes think the mother bird herself fails to find them and that may be one reason why whip-poor-wills do not seem to increase in numbers.

Like the whip-poor-will the scarlet tanager waits sight of the coming of summer before he begins his nest. It is odd that the two should have even this habit in common, for otherwise they are far apart. The tanager is essentially a bird of the daylight, his very colors born of the sun. I rarely hear him or see his scarlet flame until the sunlight is on his tree top to make him seem all the more vivid. Then as the day waxes, and the robins one by one cease their singing, he takes up their song and continues it, often until the robins return to the choir as the afternoon shadows lengthen. The tanager’s song is singularly like that of the robin, only more leisurely and refined. After you have become familiar with it you begin to feel that the robin is a very huckster of a soloist.

“Kill ’im, cure ’im, give ’im physic,” is what the early settlers thought the robin sang to them. It always seems to me as if he sang, “Cherries; berries; strawberries. Buy a box; buy a box.” You might translate the scarlet tanager’s song into either set of words but you would not. Instead, you would ponder long to find a phrase whose gentle refinement should express just the quality of it. Then I think you would give it up, as I always do, content to feel its pure serenity, which is quite beyond words.

The tanager is just about beginning the weaving of his home, which is as gentle and refined in structure as his song. You may see through it if you get just the right position from below, yet it is well built and strong, woven of slender selected twigs and tendrils, a delicate cup, just big enough to hold the three or four eggs of tender blue with their rufous-brown markings, and the olive-green mother bird. The tanager’s life is as open as the day, and as he watches southward from his pine tree top you may well mark the coming of summer by the beginning of that nest well out on a lower pine bough.

And if you are not fortunate enough to have a tanager in your pine grove you might well take the time from another bird, as different from the scarlet flame of the tree top as the tanager is from the whip-poor-will; that is the wood pewee. As the whip-poor-will loves the darkness and the tanager the bright sun of the topmost boughs of the grove, so the wood pewee loves the resinous depths of the pines, where in the hot twilight of a summer midday he pipes his cheerful little three-note song. Like the cicada, he seems to sing best when it is hottest, and the thought of his song inevitably brings to mind the drone of the summer-loving insect, the prattle of the brook at the foot of the hill, and the lazy dappling of the sunlight as it falls perpendicularly to the feathery fronds of the cinnamon ferns far below.

He who would find humming birds’ nests would do well to first take a course in hunting those of the wood pewee. The two seem to have the same type of mind when it comes to nest-building, though the wood pewee’s is five times the size of the other and proportionally easy to find. Each saddles his nest on a limb and covers it outside with gray lichens from the trees nearby, so that from below it looks like merely a lichen-covered knot. As the wood pewee loves to sing his song in the shadows of the upper levels of the deep pine wood, so he loves to look down as he sings upon his nest on a limb below, usually twenty or more feet from the ground.

Such humming birds’ nests as I have found have been made of fern wool or the pappus of the blooms of dandelions or other compositæ just compacted together and lichen-covered. The wood pewee builds of moss and fine fiber, grass and rootlets, using the lichen covering for the outside, as does the humming bird. It is a beautiful nest, a rustic home which perfectly fits the dead pine limb on which you often find it, and its surroundings, a nest as rustic as the grove and the bird.

These two, the tanager and the wood pewee, I know are already picking the limbs for their nests and having an eye out for available material, for I know that they have had the first word that summer is here. I got it myself from the southerly slope of Blue Hill, a spot to which I like to climb as the lookout goes to the cross-trees, whence the southerly outlook is far and you may sight the sails of spring or summer while yet they are hull down below the horizon of the season.

All creatures love to climb. Here along the rocky path the young gerardias have found a foothold, and put forth strange sinuate or pinnatifid leaves that puzzle you to identify them until you note the last year’s stalks and seed-pods, now empty but persistent. Exuberance and young life often take frolicsome ways of expending their vitality. When the gerardias are two months older, and have settled down to the growing of those wonderful yellow bells which fill the woodland with golden delight, their stem leaves will lose all this riot of outline and coloration and settle down to plain, smooth-edged green. The blossoms may need a foil, but will brook no rival on their own stem.