Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

So vigorous was the sortie and so well did they hold their ground that you may trace the farmer’s wide ditch to-day only as a causeway down which the swamp has come to build a great wooded area in the midst of the bog, accomplishing in half a century what it might not have done in five times that had it not been for human aid. Thus, slowly as you and I count time, only an inch or two a year perhaps, yet all too rapidly for the joy of future generations, the bog encroaches upon the pond and the swamp follows towards complete possession, which as the centuries go by will make the quaking sphagnum firm meadow land.

For all you and I know, the Metropolitan Park Commission of the year 3908 will be fixing up a second Franklin Field here for the camping ground of visiting Pythians. Meanwhile let us hasten to enjoy our bog and its reedy borders.

It is the home and the occasional resting place of many a wild free creature. Of a clear midsummer evening you may hear the muskrat grubbing roots there, see, perhaps, the moonlight glint on the long V-shaped ripple which he makes as he swims, and hear his snort and splash when he dives at sudden sight of you. You may chance upon a disconsolate bittern sitting clumsily in dumpy patience as he waits for food to splash up to him, and you may even hear him work his wheezy, dislocated wooden pump, a cry as awkward and disconsolate as the bird.

The muskrats breed in the bog, the bittern had his grassy nest there, and a myriad blackbirds have made the low bushes vocal with their cheery whistles all summer. They are flocking now, getting the young birds in training for the long flight south, but they still hang about the bog and they still whistle merrily. Surely it is not environment that makes temperament. Bittern and blackbird both frequent bogs, yet the bittern is a lonely misanthrope, whom I more than half suspect of being melancholy mad, while the blackbird is as cheery and as fond of his fellows as a candidate. When you hear his whistle you half expect him to light on a thwart, hand you a cigar, and ask after the baby. But the blackbird’s election is sure anyway.

Another loved and lovely denizen of these bogs is the wood duck. These breed in the swamp, the mother bird building a grassy nest in a hollow tree, where she lays from eight to fourteen buff-white eggs, and leads her yellow fluffy ducklings to a nearby secluded pool for their first swim. Later they come out into the bog, and ultimately make the pond, where they learn to forage for themselves. By the first of August the mother bird has sent them adrift, in the main, to paddle and flap their way about as best they may. They are “flappers,” as the boys call them. That is, they can make good speed along the surface by half running and flapping vigorously, but they cannot yet fly enough to rise into the air.

One of these young wood ducks came out of the bog the other morning, just at the gray of dawn, and swam over toward the boat landing. He was quite near the shore when I took ship and rowed to seaward of him, thus shutting him off from the open pond and from the bog. Then for an hour or two followed what was to me the most interesting duck hunting I have done for a long time. I could row as fast as he could swim, and I continually edged him along the south shore, getting nearer every minute. I have read much of the marvelous intelligence of wild creatures. Yet I saw little of it in this chase. The duck knew me for an enemy, on general principles, for I was a man, and I was evidently coming after him. Even rudimentary intelligence should have told him to flap for the bog as fast as he could. He did nothing of the sort. He just edged along down the shore, evidently hoping that I was light-minded, and would forget all about him in a minute or two if let alone. But I kept at it until I was so near I could see every one of his already handsome feathers and note the coloring of those parts which had not yet reached the beauty of maturity. I could see the yellow rim of his eye, and still he swam east and swam west but made no real move to escape.

Two things I wished to learn from my wood duck. One was how much general intelligence and real quickness of wit he would show in escaping. The other was how he carried his wings under water if, by any fortunate chance, I should be able to see him swim after he went down to escape me. But at first he was so irresolute that he neither dived nor made any vigorous attempt to escape. I got so near, that to avoid driving him up the bank into the woods I had to ease away a bit. Finally, at my second approach, he did try to flap by the end of the boat, but I spurted and headed him off.

It was a long time, and it took much manœuvring to make him dive, but it finally entered his head that he might avoid being cornered and badgered by going under water. This he did, going on a slant just a very little below the surface, probably because he was in too shallow water to go much deeper, and coming up well to seaward. There he preened his feathers, took a sip or two of water and, seemingly, waited to be surrounded a second time.

I rowed out, got on the off-shore side of him, and again began boating him in toward the shore. He showed less uneasiness this time, but dived and swam out again after considerable more pressing. Again and again I repeated this, sometimes getting no sight of him under water, again seeing him move along very plainly. At no time did I notice any motion of the wings under water. I have been told that wild ducks when swimming beneath the surface make most of their progress with their wings, quite literally flying under water. This may be, but I have no evidence of it in the under-water action of this one.

Again, it has been sagely impressed upon me by old duck hunters that you could tell in what direction from your boat a bird would rise by noting the way in which his bill pointed when he went under. I think it was Adirondack Murray in that famous loon-hunting chapter who first made the point, and it has been insisted upon by many another successor. But, bless you, my half-grown wood duck made no difficulty of going down with his head toward the morning and coming up in the sunset portion of the view. He took slants under water and cut semicircles at will. But I couldn’t see him use his wings while beneath the wave.

Little by little he got over being excited by my presence. He began to eat bugs off the lily pads as he went by, and now and then tip up for an under-water search. Thus we coquetted with one another all along the southern shore of the pond, and when I finally cornered him for a last time in behind Loon Island he dove without embarrassment and began his feeding as soon as he had again reached the surface. The chase was no longer exciting, and I turned my attention to something else. Then he swam out quite a little further into the pond, preened his feathers carefully, tucked his head under his wing and went to sleep!

Evidently he had decided that I was eccentric, but harmless, and the best way to escape my attentions would be to leave me severely alone.

And there you have it. I think the wood duck is beautiful, but not very bright. Yet it occurs to me that some Sherlock Holmes of the woods may prove, to the satisfaction of Dr. Watson anyway, that he is preternaturally clever, in that this one, though still young, was keen enough to see that from the first I had no evil intentions toward him.

SOME BUTTERFLY FRIENDS

SOME BUTTERFLY FRIENDS

At dusk all the edges of the pond are lighted with the white candles of the clethra. Its fragrance has in it that fine essence which goes to the making of the nectar and ambrosia of the gods. He who would sup with them may do so by taking canoe of an early August twilight when the purple arras of the coves glow softly golden with the reflected light of the sunset’s afterglow. Then the coarser air seems to have let the light slip from between its clumsy particles, leaving its more ethereal essence still clinging to a more subtle interatomic fluid.

The fragrance of the clethra seems always to me as fine as this spirit of light in the ambrosial twilight of the ripened summer. It is no air-borne delight like the resinous scent of the forest pines or the pasture sweet-fern when the hot sun of midday distills them and the hot wind of midday sends them far to you across the quivering fields. It is something finer, softer, more silkily subtle, which, like the rose gold of the afterglow of the sunset, tints the dusk of the cove between the air atoms, not by way of them.

Then, as the gold glimmers and fades and the pink faints in the cooling purple of the dusk, and the outline of the cove shore slips from the front of your eye to the chambers of memory behind it, so that you else might see it best with the eyes shut, the white candles are lighted and the eager moth sees by them to sup with you and me and the gods on this essence of ambrosia, to tipple on this spirit of nectar which the night reserves for those that love it.

I do not know why the clethra which gleams so white in the dusk should need anything more than its own white beauty to call the moth to its wooing. Perhaps it does not need more. Perhaps all this fine fragrance is but the overflow of its soul’s delight at being young and chastely beautiful, and trembling in the ultra violet darkness on that delicious verge of life that waits the wooer. I half fancy that this is true of all perfume of flowers, that it is less a call to butterfly or bee to come to their winning than it is a radiation of delight from their own pure hearts at the dawning of the full joy of living. I am not always willing to take the word of the scientific investigator on these points as final. The scientists of the not very remote past have known so much that is not so!

It is possible that, just as a hunting-dog picks up a scent that is strong in his nostrils and has no power in ours, so the flowers that we call scentless send out an odor too faintly fine for our senses, yet one that the antennæ of moth or bee may entangle as it passes and hold for a certain clue. Perhaps the scents that are only faint to us carry far for the butterfly, but if so, and if flower perfumes are made only for the calling of insects, why need they be made so intoxicating to the human senses? The scent of carnations is as pleasing to the soul as a strain of beautiful music, and equally arouses high aspirations and noble longings. So to me the odor of the clethra at nightfall is a tenuous thread of ethereality that reaches far toward a realm of spiritual ideals. It ought to go with a ritual and a vested choir.

I do not find the odor of the pasture milkweed speaking thus to any inner sense. It is just a gentle, lovable, stay-at-home smell that surely does not float farther than the pasture bars. Yet of all the plants that have bloomed within my world of garden and pasture this summer it has been by far the most popular among insects. It is not that it is the most attractive to the eye, in any of its forms, for there are many flowers of colors more vivid and to be seen farther, as well as of much stronger scent. Yet all day long you will find it besieged by bees, from the aristocratic Italian worker from the farmer’s best hive down to those scallawag bees that make no honey for themselves but lead a vagabond life and lay their eggs in other bees’ nests, leaving their young to grow up in unendowed orphan asylums.

Many varieties of ants seek the milkweed blooms, and you shall find about a large clump more sorts of wasps than you would believe existed, yet it is the butterflies who most of all make it their rallying place. Every butterfly in the whole region makes it his business to know each large clump of milkweed, and to make the rounds at least daily.

There, if you watch, you may see the pretty little pearl crescent, whose range is from Labrador to Texas. The shy meadow browns flit out from the shadow of the brook alders and feed for a moment before they take fright at the fact that they are out in society and flit desperately back again. The angle wings flip about like animated question-marks, and fulvous fritillaries soar sedately, now and then lighting to feed and fold their wings that you may see the big silver spots of the under parts. And so you might name them all, almost every butterfly of early August, all besieging the milkweed so eagerly that you may hardly drive them away.

The fact is they come neither for scent nor sight; they come for good taste--which they find in the honey glands of the peculiarly shaped bloom, which are obvious and sticky and within reach of all. I do not think it is half so much the odor of the flower which draws them, be it never so sweet or so strong, but memory of the honey dew sipped there yesterday or last week. No doubt the love of the milkweed bloom is an inherited tendency, also, bred in the bones from a line of milkweed-frequenting ancestors infinitely long.

Indeed, one of our most splendid butterflies is the _Anosia plexippus_, otherwise known as the milkweed butterfly, rightly named also the monarch. Every boy who knows the country in summer knows him by his rich, red coloration, his strong, black-bordered wings with their black veins. Every bird knows him too and lets him alone. On the first median nervule of the hind wings of the butterfly is a scent bag whence he dispenses an odor so disagreeable to the bird who would eat him that he goes free, and is not afterward troubled.

Along with the monarch sipping honey with eager industry from the meadow milkweed, you will often see the viceroy, who, as a viceroy should, closely imitates, but does not equal, the monarch. He has neither the monarch’s vigor of flight nor his means of defence from predatory birds, but his safety--so the students tell us--lies in looking so much like his superior that he also is let alone. The students go on to say that his is a good example of the imitative power of insects whereby they escape destruction by seeming to the casual eye to be something else.

The viceroy, which is a _Basilarchia disippus_, thus looks not the least like other members of his family, but consciously mimics the coloring of the monarch for safety. Thus many tropical beetles contrive to look like wasps that they may not be molested, and some insects look like brown leaves and others like green ones.

But do they contrive, imitate, mimic? It is no doubt true that because of the resemblance they escape, but to say that they imitate or contrive or mimic seems to me to be to assume a knowledge of the workings of the inner consciousness of an insect that not even the most careful student can have. I am more inclined to believe that the so-called mimics are fortunate in an accidental resemblance and so escape the destruction of their species which has fallen upon many a less fortunate type.

Yet no butterfly, however exquisite his coloring, or however strong and graceful his flight, twangs with his fluttering wings the fine heartstrings of romance as does the monarch. The first one that came dancing down the sunlight to the sweet rocket in bloom in my garden this spring brought to me a spicy odor of tropic isles. The beating of his wings shed, as he passed, faint fragrance of Mexican jasmine, and I thought I saw slip from them the infinitesimal dust of the pollen of stephanotis lately blooming in the glades of Panama. Three months before he floated serenely beneath my cherry tree he may well have soared through the tropic glades where crumble the ruins of the palaces of the Incas.

His flight, seemingly as frail as that of a red autumn leaf sliding down the October zephyr to carpet the nearby field with rustling fragrance, has matched that of that rifle-ball of bird life, the ruby-throated humming-bird. Together they sip the sweets of my sweet rocket in the spring. Together they wing their way south to the region of perpetual summer when the winds of late September promise frost. Sometimes in this annual flight the monarchs pass the sandy stretches of the New Jersey coast in swarms that, stopping at nightfall for rest, refoliate with their folded wings the shrubs left bare by the autumn gales.

It may be that, like the birds, the knowledge of the route they must follow is bred in the marrow of their butterfly bones by the constant use of a million generations. It may be that they simply drift away from the cool wind from the North toward the Southern sun that shines so serenely in the bright autumn days. But whether through the guiding hand of Providence, or inherited wisdom, or a fortunate tact that acting from day to day produces the happy result, this Southern movement in winter is the sole salvation of the species here in the North.

If they did not make these long flights we should have no Anosias with us each summer, for unlike other butterflies the frost kills them in whatever form they remain to brave it. All summer long their long, red wings bear them bravely from one clump of milkweed to another. They sip the honey which each floret of the umbels holds forth, the sticky mass the size of a pinhead. They lay their eggs upon its leaves and the black and yellow caterpillars hatch and feed there. Then they hang in a green and gold chrysalis from a nearby twig till the imago, the perfect butterfly, bursts its bonds and sails away to find more milkweed. There may be several broods of a summer, but the frost stops all that. The monarch may not winter here, nor may his eggs or chrysalids survive the cold.

Many butterflies, frail though they seem, do pass the New England winter successfully. The _Antiopa vanessa_, otherwise known as mourning-cloak or Camberwell beauty, a handsome brown fellow with blue spots and a pale-yellow margin, well known to every one, flits joyously through the woods with the very first warm days of spring. He has been snugged up in some dry crevice, numbed and torpid, but very much alive, all winter. The first genial warmth sets him free, and later I always find his children browsing on the willow twigs over in the cove. They are rough chaps, horrid with bristling black spines and with dull red spots relieving their otherwise plain black hides. But they grow fast, and by and by go out upon a twig and hang themselves, head down, by a little silken rope, swinging there in the wind, simply a dead caterpillar that has imitated Judas.

One day the caterpillar part sloughs off. It is a fairly sudden process. You may paddle by the willows in the morning and see all your little Judases hanging in a row. Paddle back at noon and their skins have shrivelled and slipped off, and you have chrysalids, queer, impish-looking things, swinging there still, head down. You know they are alive; indeed, if you poke them they will wiggle impatiently, but they swing in the wind and give no other sign for a week or ten days. Then they cast a second skin, and pop out full-grown butterflies that stretch their wings for a time leisurely, then suddenly dash into the air and go off over the hill like mad. The whole thing is so sudden! The change, when it does come, is as if some woodland magician had waved a willow wand and said “Abra-ca-dabra; presto, change!” Time and again I have watched to see that caterpillar skin fall off, and again to see the vanessa step forth from the domino in which it has been masquerading, but they have always been too quick for me.

Other butterflies survive in the chrysalis all winter and come forth full-grown and fit in the spring. Such may speak to your listening imagination through their beauty, which is often great, or through their resurrection from seeming death, though if you will observe them closely in the chrysalid form you will see that they are not even seemingly dead. Evangelists who have held up the butterfly to us as a prototype of that resurrection which we may expect if we are good, evidently never closely observed the chrysalis of a good healthy butterfly, else they had not been so sure of their corpse.

Lately I have had chrysalids of the _Papilio asterias_, the common eastern swallowtail, in my study. I found the fat black and yellow worms on my parsley and caged them. They soon hitched themselves to the wire netting by their tails, hanging from overhead on a slant, their shoulders (so to speak) being supported by a single loop of silk. If you did but tap on the wire netting or scratch it these chrysalids would wiggle and jerk quite angrily, their action saying plainly, “Can’t you let me alone? I’m just having a nap!” No; it is plainly no death and resurrection which makes a butterfly. It is merely a caterpillar who was dressed for the fancy ball all the time. He came to the woodland hall in his greatcoat. This he sheds for a domino, in which he masquerades for a time. Then he bursts forth for the final festivities in a robe of princely beauty.

My chrysalids did this only the other day. Wonderful creatures of black and yellow came forth, stretched their wings till I could see the dainty shading of blue and the peacock-feather eye of red and black on the lower part of the secondary wings; then, as I opened the window they dashed madly away as the vanessas do from willow twigs in the cove. The butterfly has been held up to us as an example of lazy dalliance. I have never watched one that was not as busy as a politician on election day. Especially do those just wakened from the chrysalis form rush away as if they knew all their work was before them and they longed to be at it.

Of them all the monarch is not the most beautiful, but I rank him as surely the ablest. His annual migration shows him to have wonderful strength of wing, and either much wisdom or an extraordinarily developed instinct. Very likely he has both. Further, through accident pure and simple, or else a spirit of adventure fostered by the joys of long annual journey, he is steadily extending his habitat to embrace the known world. Originally of North America only, he has within the last dozen years taken ship for Australia, where he has multiplied greatly in the warmer regions, and has wandered again over sea to Java, Sumatra, and followed the flag into the Philippines. He is well established at the Cape de Verde Islands, and is doing his best to be happy in the pale sunshine of the south of England, whence specimens are reported yearly.

THE RESTING TIME OF THE BIRDS

THE RESTING TIME OF THE BIRDS

This morning I heard the bluebirds again for the first time for weeks. They came up from the pasture to the apple trees and sang their modest little snatches of song in that shyly sweet, reserved yet fond, manner which makes the bluebird the best loved of all our pasture birds. There have been no bluebirds about my garden since the yegg raid of late May and its resulting tragedy. Now they are back, but there is in their call a note of sadness which indeed comes into the voice of every bluebird as autumn approaches, though I think it is accentuated in mine this year.

When I say yegg I mean English sparrow, and if I could think of a worse name, equally descriptive of him, I would give it. This is the story of the foul deed, only one of many, no doubt, perpetrated by this cowardly crew. In late March I put out in my garden three bird boxes such as bluebirds love to inhabit. These were immediately inspected by the neighborhood flock of English sparrows, just beginning to pair off, and finally decided upon as undesirable, perhaps because I had intentionally placed no perch before the door.

The English sparrow will build his nest in any impossible place to which he takes a fancy, but he greatly prefers, in choosing a new site, one that has a convenient perch close by the entrance. So these undesirable citizens decided that they did not care for my bird boxes and let them alone, much to my delight. Then came the bluebirds, bringing to our cold, raw spring their flashes of blue like bits of a heaven that is fairer than ours, a blue that is hope and dreams of happiness and all things noble yet gentle. There is no color like it as it glints across pale April skies and blooms on trees that have been bare and gray so long. So, too, no bird song is so dear as theirs. It is but a wee, melodious phrase which says again and again, “Cheerily; cheerily.” Yet it voices hope and contentment, and is so purely the expression of the joy of gentle, kindly lives that it touches all that is fond and kindly in the listener.

Bluebirds will nest in the hollow of the pasture apple tree or in a last year’s flicker’s abandoned hole in a decayed stump, but of all places they most love a bird box near a dwelling, and, as I had hoped, a pair came early in April to inspect mine. They looked them all over appreciatively, seeming with delightful courtesy to the builder to find it hard to choose, but finally settled upon one in the pear tree, and began to build.

Meanwhile the yeggs had been watching with jealous eyes, lurking in the shrubbery, sneaking about the eaves and making sallies in small numbers from around the barn. The English sparrow has been called pugnacious. He is nothing of the kind. He does not love a fight. Bird to bird, there is nothing too small to whip him. I have seen a chipping sparrow, which is the least among the pasture sparrows, send the poltroon scurrying to shelter with all his feathers standing on end. A cock bluebird, fighting like a gentleman, and like a gentleman fighting only when he must, will drive a half-dozen of them. The English sparrow has the true instincts of the browbeating coward, and loves to fight only when in overwhelming numbers he may attack a lone pasture bird without danger to himself.

So trouble began with the building, and for a week or so the warfare raged from box to box, the cock bluebird boldly defeating superior numbers again and again, only to have his gentle wife annoyed by other villains while he drove the first away, and his nesting material stolen in spite of him. Finally he resorted to what looked to me like well-planned and carefully executed strategy, though it may have been merely that fortune which favors the brave and persistent. The pair abandoned the box in the pear tree and started building in the one nailed against the side of the barn. The sparrows followed, of course. Then the bluebirds went back to the pear-tree box. The sparrows followed. The bluebirds then started building in the third box and daily brought material to each of the three, though ostensibly, I thought, to the second and third. At any rate the sparrows seemed to concentrate their attention more on these boxes. Meanwhile the bluebirds quietly completed the nest in the pear tree and later laid their eggs there, in comparative peace.

The sparrows did not build in either of the other boxes. They did not want to. Neither did they care particularly about the material which they stole, for they did not continue to take it after the bluebirds had finished the pear-tree nest and were in a position to defend it. Their action was simply hoodlumism of the lowest and most despicable kind.

This was bad enough, yet it was merely petty annoyance compared to the deed without a name of which they were later to be guilty. The two young birds in the bluebird box were more than half grown. The blue was beginning to show in their wings along with the white of the conspicuous, growing quills, and the fuscous margin was already touching the breast feathers. The old birds, working with tremendous energy to feed these hearty youngsters, were both busy and often away from the nest together.

At one such time the English sparrows descended upon this nest, entered, drove the young birds out to die upon the ground, unnoticed in the long grass, and started to take full possession. The bluebirds, returning too late, drove them away with more than usual despatch. This first called the affair to my attention. But I was too late.

The young birds were dead and the sparrows were chattering in raucous jubilation over it, now and then giving a squeak of fright or pain as the male bluebird singled out an individual and attacked him with a fury of which I had not believed him capable. Soon, however, he ceased, and the two twittered mournfully about the tree for hours, again and again poising in fluttering flight before the door of their despoiled home and looking eagerly in, as if they could not believe that the young were indeed gone. Later they went silently away. No doubt they found another home in some hollow tree of the remote pasture and raised another brood. But my boxes have stood tenantless ever since.

The worst of it is there is little I could do either in the way of prevention or revenge. I did get out my big old ten-bore duck gun, which I have not had the heart to use on a bird, even a coot, for a dozen years, and began cannonading the miscreants, but this was more disturbing to the neighbors than to the sparrows.

One of the gentlest nature lovers I ever knew, wise in bird ways and very fond of all birds, used to say that he wished all the English sparrows in the world had but one neck, and that he might have that neck in his hands. I wish he might, too.

So, after weeks of absence, the bluebirds have come back. Their speckle-breasted young, which they would have brought up among my apple trees and in the cloistered seclusion of the lilac bushes, have grown up in the pasture instead, and very likely their plans for next year will include the pasture wild-apple tree rather than my bird box, and they are far shyer and less responsive to my advances than they would have been. Their song has in it a plaint of autumnal regret. In the spring they sang, “Cheerily; cheerily.” Now they say, “Going away; going away.” It has in it something of the quality of “Lochaber no more.”

But it is not merely the bluebirds which have been silent for some weeks and are now beginning to sing again. The time between early July and mid-August is a period of retirement for all birddom. The mating season, with its soul-stirring ecstasies, the labor of nest building, the anxieties of brooding, have been followed by the tremendous exertion of caring for that nestful of young birds. A healthy fledgling will eat almost his own weight of food in a day, and by the time he is able to fly and chase the old birds around for more the father and mother are worn to a frazzle. I really believe the youngsters are weaned only when their demand for food becomes so enormous with their completed growth that the parents cease to supply it through sheer physical exhaustion.

I once reared a pair of young crows by hand, taking them from the home nest in a big pine, leaving three others--quite enough I afterward thought--for the parent birds. They were negroid, naked, pod-bodied creatures at the time, with long clutchy claws, ridiculous stubs of wings, and, ye gods, what mouths! When I fed them I used to clutch something with one hand lest I fall in. And I was incessantly feeding them. Anxious to treat them kindly and finding that frogs were a most acceptable diet to them I depopulated the township of _Rana virescens_ and allied species. Then I found that fish would do about as well, and I fished until there began to be a shortage of angle-worms in the community. Yet still the creatures grew apace and demanded more food.

By and by they got big enough to use their wings and, recognizing me as their undoubted parent, came flapping and clawing after me wherever I went, yelling, “Caw, caw, ca-aw-aw,” in most heartrending crescendo. Then did I realize to the full the responsibility of being a father bird. Stuff those clamorous creatures as I might, they still pleaded in agonizing tones for more, and no one not cognizant of the facts would have believed that they were ever fed. The lamb that loved Mary so, and followed her also, was not a circumstance to the clamorous devotion of those two young crows toward me, their foster parent.

My one fear for weeks was that the resident agent for the S. P. C. A., who was a vigilant and tender-hearted lady of undoubted indiscretion, would hear their evidently unanswered appeals and proceed against me. She could have convicted me on the evidence in any district court in Norfolk County; and yet those young birds were eating everything there was in the place outside of cold storage.

Such is the appetite of the growing bird. Yet there comes a time in the passing of the summer when the youngsters are taught, or learn through necessity, to forage for themselves and cease their fritinancy. Then the thickets are strangely silent. The youngsters no longer yearn noisily and they have not yet learned to sing. The old birds have ceased singing. Indeed, there is nothing left of them but their bones and feathers, and that atmosphere of conscious rectitude which comes with successful completion of a noble and herculean task. And then even their feathers begin to go, for the moulting season is at hand.

No longer does the male scarlet tanager sit like a lambent flame in the top of a tree and warble, “Look-up, way-up, look-at-me, treetop,” His scarlet suit begins to fade, grow dingy, show signs of wear, and finally go all to pieces while he sits mute and dumpy in the shadow. By and by the scarlet will have changed completely to a dull olive-green, like that of his inconspicuous mate, and though he still retains the black of his wings and tail you would not know him.

So the bobolink who swung so conspicuously on the meadow grass in June in his black and white suit comes through the moulting season brown as a sparrow. The vivid blue of the indigo bunting falls from him in patches and is replaced by grayish brown in a large measure.

No wonder that, utterly tired out and their brilliant plumage scattered and changed to dull and rusty colors, the birds are silent for a time, waiting for strength to recuperate. Some of them seem to retain enough courage and vitality to sing mornings through the moulting season, notably the robins. I suspect, though, that these faithful few--for the robin singers of the morning of the first day of August will be as one to twenty to those of the first day of June--are gay young sports who did not care to marry, or who, disappointed in love, still sing to keep their courage up. It is the best singers who are most strangely silent now, as they have been for weeks; nor will most of them be heard until next spring, hereabouts.

My catbird was so sorrowfully unseen and unheard that I began to think the cat had got him, till I hunted him up, down the hill among the scrub oaks. He was as dilapidated and passé-looking as his nest in the lilacs; as if, like it, the young birds had kicked him pretty nearly to pieces before they got through with him. But he perked up a bit when he saw me, flipped an apology for a tail, and miaued in a manner that was humorously unlike him, it was so deprecatory. But that was a week or ten days ago. Yesterday I heard some bird cooing a little song to himself out in the arbor-vitæ trees at the foot of the garden, and slipping quietly up found that it was the catbird again. He was quite sleek in his new coat, and he was practising his song in a delightful undertone, as if to be sure that he should not forget it altogether.

In four or five weeks more he will begin to flip saucily across the miles of country that separate him from his winter home in Southern Florida, or perhaps farther yet in some stretch of primeval forest that I myself have seen and loved in the heart of Santo Domingo. He will not sing his song there, high on some giant ceiba or swinging on the plume of some royal palm. He may not sing it again here on the tip of the tallest white lilac bush, but I know that, there or here, he will practise it now and then in that soft, sweet undertone which you would not believe of a catbird, and be ready to send it forth in jubilant peals when his strong wings bring him back again next May. My bluebirds may winter with him; and if they do I have hopes that he may persuade them to try my pear-tree box once more next spring.

THE POND AT LOW TIDE

THE POND AT LOW TIDE

All about the pond the woodland folk are enjoying shore dinners, for it is the time of ebb tide, and a wonderfully low ebb at that. Not for a score of years do I recall such low water. Where, on the ebb of ordinary years, the crow has been able to find one fresh-water clam, he may now feed till he can hold no more, for the drought has been long and severe, and the pond has been drained to the very dregs.

I say fresh-water clams, for that is the name commonly applied to the creatures, though I know that I might more properly call them river mussels, and if I wished to be severely scientific I should say _Unio margaritifera_, though it is difficult to be sure of your margaritifera, as there are about fifteen hundred species of unios known to people who classify creatures, and most of these are found in the rivers of this country.

Little do the crows care for that. In the sunny coves they have their clam-bakes, and as I slip slyly up I fancy I hear them smack their mandibles. As I round the screen of shore-loving button bushes, I know I shall come upon them, and I expect to find them seated in riotous fellowship, with napkins spread across broad waistcoats, dipping delicious mouthfuls in melted butter and tucking them away behind the white napkins. I have always missed the napkins and the butter dishes, but the shells are proof enough of what has been going on. If the mother crow carries the table furnishings away with her when she flies, that is no more than human picnickers do when driven from the sea beach.

The pond when full is ten feet deeper than it is now. In May the water lapped the forest roots on its edges; now from the forest to the mud of the very bottom where still the water lingers a strip of slanting beach stretches for a hundred yards. The crows are not the only creatures which have made tracks on this. Close by the edge in the soft mud the heron has walked with dignity, leaving footmarks that proceed precisely. The heron may not have large ambitions, but he is purposeful and does not turn aside. The crows gurgled and ha-haed over their clambake; the heron takes his fish course as solemnly as if he were taking the pledge.

All along you will see where the squirrels have come down to drink, skipping vivaciously, taking a sip here, bouncing away to examine something there, remembering that they came for a drink after all and taking a good one, then hurrying back with long leaps in a straight line for the trees. The squirrel is not solemn, far from it, but he is business-like, and though there is humorous good fellowship in his every hop, he nevertheless does not linger long from his work.

Very different from this is the track of mister skunk. He wanders aimlessly along, often as much sidewise as straight ahead. The skunk doesn’t know where he is going and he isn’t even on his way. I never see his tracks, whether on the pond shore or elsewhere, but I renew my doubts as to his habits. He is out much too late at night. His tracks show it. I think he had his drink before he came to the water. Probably he too knows how toothsome are the unios and is searching for them in his maudlin fashion.

Then there are the muskrats. They do not have to wait for their clam banquets till the water is low. They are expert divers and gather the unios at such times as suit their fancy. You will see their tracks in regular runways in the shallow water of the muddy coves, whence they are apt to follow some trickling streamlet to the bank where the summer burrows are at high water.

Later, along the marshy edges you will find their winter teepees, piled to conical heights with sods and roots, with a warm refuge above the ice and an exit below, whence they may swim in search of food. The tracks of the muskrats show every mark of the industrious villager. They stick close to well-traveled paths, and though the muskrats are out nights no one would for a moment question their temperance and industry. Their characters are excellent ones, beyond suspicion, and their tracks show it.

On the pond shore at ebb tide the glaciers, too, have left their tracks, though it is probably several hundred thousand years since any have been this way. Where there are granite ledges you may know that these were here before even the glaciers stalked solemnly by, for they show where the ice in grumbling grandeur ground small stones against them and gradually wore out ruts in the enduring granite by force of attrition.

The track of the glacier is like the trail of the serpent,--it leaves no toe-marks, but its sliding progress is unmistakable. Side by side with the ledge which shows these striæ you may see on the soft mud imprints of this year’s leaves, dropped a moment there by the wind, then whirled away again, but leaving their tracks behind them. This mark of the season may be obliterated by a breath, or it may be covered with sifting silt and finally harden into sandstone and bear the trail of the leaf as far down the ages as has come that of the glacier. Here are moments and æons elbowing one another for place.

Other interesting records of past time may be read in Stumpy Cove, which is still the wildest and most secluded of spots, though the trolley tripper has found the pond and builds his bungalows on its shore, sinks his tin cans in its waters, and scares the bullfrogs with his phonograph. The tin cans will not last long, however. Fresh water in motion is continually giving up oxygen, and this with the humic acid of the mud bottom will soon scatter these disfigurations in scales of brown oxide. But all these solvent forces, acting through two centuries, have had little effect on the stumps of Stumpy Cove.

The heart-wood is still sound, their interlaced roots tell the story of what happened on the spot in the rich muck of the swamp, as Stumpy Cove was then, before Myles Standish had set foot on Plymouth Rock or the first white man had spied inland from the summit of Blue Hill. For the pond as it is now is only about a hundred years old. For a hundred years before that it was a meadow, flowed occasionally by the farmers of the region about it.

Before that Stumpy Cove was a great white-cedar swamp and the great white cedars stood in it, two feet in diameter, their clean straight trunks running up fifty feet or more without a knob or limb. This natural meadow with hay for their cattle for the cutting, these cedar swamps with their century-old growth, were what attracted the first settlers to this region, and hardly had the dawn of the sixteenth century come over the Blue Hills before their axes were at work in Stumpy Cove and similar swamps all about, getting out shingle stuff for the Boston market. But whereas in all the other swamps the young cedars were allowed to grow in again for succeeding generations of woodsmen, here new conditions arose.

The meadow was flowed intermittently for a century; then the pond grew out of it. Not only might no seedlings find roothold there, but the very black muck in which they might grow was washed away from the roots of the great stumps. These, in the main, have endured, losing their bark and sap-wood, but with the heart-wood still firm after the lapse of two centuries.

Here at this ebb tide I read the record of growth of trees that had their beginnings more than three centuries ago. These roots so twine and intertwine that the original sap, drawn from the tender tips, must have nourished any one of several trees indifferently, for heart-wood joins heart-wood in scores of places near the stump and far from it, showing that each tree stood not only on its own roots, but on those of its neighbors all about it; not only was it nourished by its own rootlets, but by those of trees near by. No gale could uproot these swamp cedars. United they stood and divided they might not fall. It is a curious method of growth, and I dare say it obtains in many swamps where the white cedars stand close, but under no other circumstances could it have been revealed to me, casually strolling that way three centuries after it happened.

At high water all these curious roots are submerged and you see only the butts of the trees, numerous miniature islands on which many an alien growth has made port. Here in June the dour and melancholy cassandra disputes the footing of the wild rose, and the huckleberry and sweet-fern twine in loving companionship, afloat as ashore. Here intertwine the sheep laurel and the hard-hack, the meadow-sweet and the marsh St. John’s-wort, garlanding the white skeletons of the ancient trees and making them young again with the odorous promises of spring.

In midsummer, among patches of green and gray moss, you will find tiny, diamond-like globules glistening. These are the clear, dew-like drops of glutinous liquid which gem the leaves of the _Drosera_, northern representative of the Venus’s fly-trap. This, the _Dionaea_, catches flies by means of a steel-trap leaf which closes on them when they light on it. This other, the _Drosera_, is not so active. It attracts insects with its honey dew, holds them with sticky glands, and grips them, little by little, with bristles. It is a curious and beautiful little plant, and one would hardly think it carnivorous to see it adding its diamond ornaments to the floral decorations which beautify the ancient stumps all summer long.

Yet of all the life histories revealed by the pond at low tide I still think that of the _Unionidæ_ the most interesting. You find them all along above and below the margin of the shallow water, their shells most wonderfully streaked with olive-green and pale-yellow in alternate bands, till one might think he had found nodules of malachite which the long-ago glacier had culled from some Labrador ledge and ground to unsymmetrical ovoids before it dropped them on the old-time meadow marge. In certain individuals and certain lights the shells of these obscure creatures send out gleams of green and gold, like gems that have soft fires within them. It is as if an opalescent soul dwelt within, and the thin shell which a crow with his bill may puncture with a blow was so constructed as to hold in the reds and blues of the opalescence, but transmit the greens and gold.

You find many with only the backs of their shells sticking out of the mud. This may be the creature’s natural position, but I find far more of them lying quietly on their sides in the shallow water, rocking gently to and fro in the placid undulations as if they were there but to show me their shining colors. But if you watch one intently for a time you will see him open his shell cautiously and put out one foot. This is his best, for it is all he has and he puts it foremost. It is very white and clean, and it might as well be called his tongue, for with it he licks his food. It is half as long as he is, and when he has put it out as far as he can, or as far as he dares, a fine white fringe grows on its outer margin. Thus he gathers in minute animalculæ or refuse matter from the surface of the mud, for his stomach’s sake.

It is a rather interesting thing to stand by and watch a _Unio margaritifera_ daintily putting away his own particular brand of little necks and mock turtle. At the least untoward sign of interest in the affair, however, he shuts up like a clam, and you will need your pocket-knife if you wish to see more of him.

Where the water is only an inch deep or so over the soft ooze of the bottom you will see where the unio has used this so-called foot as a foot should be used, for he not only stands on it, but walks with its help. These signs are curiously erratic marks drawn as with a sharpened stick for a distance sometimes of yards. If you will inspect the seaward end of this trail you will find a unio in it, generally a young one, for it is he that has left the mark behind him in his travels. For the unio at a certain age is a great traveller; that is, when he is very young. The adults foot it, but the young before they reach their full growth ride, some of them by what you might call the lightning expresses of the pond world.

If you will split a big one at this time of year you will be likely to find within an astonishing number of eggs. These are carried in brood pouches that seem to occupy pretty nearly all the space between the shells. In seeing them you wonder vaguely where there was room for the bearer of this amazing progeny. Just where they are these young unios grow to maturity of a certain sort, forming minute shells which have hooks, forming also peculiar organs of sense. The hooks and the sense organs are provided that they may not miss that free ride which is the privilege of every young unio if he is to reach the period of adolescence.