Chapter XII: To the Teacher

Notice again that in the three chapters on things to see and do
and hear a few of the _characteristic_ sights and sounds and
doings have been mentioned. Let the whole teaching of these
three chapters be to quicken the pupil to look for and listen
for the dominant, characteristic sights and sounds of the
season, as he must be trained to look for and listen for the
characteristic notes and actions of individual things--birds,
animals, flowers. If, for instance, his eye catches the
galloping, waving motion of the woodpecker’s flight, if his ear
is trained to distinguish the rappings of the same bird on a
hollow limb or resonant rail, then the pupil _knows_ that bird
and has clues to what is strange in his plumage, his anatomy,
his habits, his family traits.

The world outdoors is all a confusion until we know how to
separate and distinguish things; and there is no better
training for this than to get in the way of looking and
listening for what is characteristic.

Each locality differs, however, to some extent in its wild
life; so that some of the _sounds_ in this chapter may need to
have others substituted to meet those differences. Remember
that _you_ are the teacher, not the book. The book is but a
suggestion. You begin where it leaves off; you fill out where
it is lacking. A good book is a very good thing; but a good
teacher is a very much better thing.

FOR THE PUPIL

Now do not stuff cotton in your ears as soon as you have heard
these ten sounds; or, what amounts to the same thing, do not
stop listening. If you do only what the book says and nothing
else, learn just the day’s lesson and nothing more, your teacher
may think you a very “good scholar,” but I will tell you that
you are a poor student of nature. The woods are full of
sounds--voices, songs, whisperings--that are to be heard when
none of these ten are speaking.

PAGES 88 AND 90

_hear their piercing whistle: the husky yap, yap, yap of the
fox_: It is usually the young hawks in the fall that whistle, as
it is usually the young foxes in the summer and fall that bark.

PAGE 91

“Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie
dead; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit’s
tread.”

“The robin and the wren are flown, but from the shrub the jay,
And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy
day.”

Study this whole poem (“The Death of the Flowers,” by Bryant)
for its excellent natural history. Could the poet have written
it had he been ignorant of nature? Can you appreciate it all
unless you, too, have heard these sounds, so that the poem can
sound them again to you as you read? Nature is not only
interesting for herself; but also absolutely necessary for you
to know if you would know and love poetry.

_the one with a kind of warning in its shrill, half-plaintive
cry; the other with a message slow and solemn_: What is the
warning, would you say, in the scream of the jay? the solemn
message in the caw of the crow?

PAGE 94

_cave days_: Cave days mean those prehistoric times in the
history of man, when he lived in caves and subsisted almost
wholly upon the flesh of wild animals killed with his rude stone
weapons.

PAGE 95

_to the deep tangled jungles of the Amazon_: Some of the birds
go even farther south--away into Patagonia at the end of the
southern hemisphere. There is no more interesting problem, no
more thrilling sight in all nature, than this of the migrating
birds--the little warblers flying from Brazil to Labrador for
the few weeks of summer, there to rear their young and start
back again on the long, perilous journey!