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+Project Gutenberg's The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers, by John Burroughs
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers
+
+Author: John Burroughs
+
+Release Date: January 25, 2007 [EBook #20448]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WIT OF A DUCK AND OTHER PAPERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Joseph R. Hauser, Suzan Flanagan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: [Signature: John Burroughs]]
+
+
+
+
+The Riverside Literature Series
+
+
+       THE WIT OF A DUCK
+
+        AND OTHER PAPERS
+
+              BY
+
+         JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+
+
+ The Riverside Press Cambridge
+   HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+   BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+
+I. THE WIT OF A DUCK                5
+
+II. AN ASTONISHED PORCUPINE        10
+
+III. HUMAN TRAITS IN THE ANIMALS   14
+
+IV. THE DOWNY WOODPECKER           22
+
+V. A BARN-DOOR OUTLOOK             27
+
+VI. WILD LIFE IN WINTER            47
+
+VII. BIRD LIFE IN WINTER           54
+
+VIII. A BIRDS' FREE LUNCH          63
+
+IX. BIRD-NESTING TIME              70
+
+X. A BREATH OF APRIL               77
+
+XI. THE WOODCOCK'S EVENING HYMN    83
+
+XII. THE COMING OF SUMMER          89
+
+
+
+
+          COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY E. H. HARRIMAN
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1904, 1905, 1908, AND 1913 BY JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+                 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+                 The Riverside Press
+              CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
+                     U . S . A
+
+
+
+
+JOHN BURROUGHS
+
+
+John Burroughs was born April 3, 1837, in a little farmhouse
+among the Catskill Mountains. He was, like most other country
+boys, acquainted with all the hard work of farm life and enjoyed
+all the pleasures of the woods and streams. His family was poor,
+and he was forced at an early date to earn his own living, which
+he did by teaching school. At the age of twenty-five he chanced
+to read a volume of Audubon, and this proved the turning-point in
+his life, inspiring a new zeal for the study of birds and
+enabling him to see with keener eyes not only the birds
+themselves, but their nests and surroundings, and to hear with
+more discernment the peculiar calls and songs of each.
+
+About the time of the Civil War he accepted a clerkship in the
+Treasury Department at Washington, where he remained nine years.
+It was here that he wrote his first book, "Wake-Robin," and a
+part of the second, "Winter Sunshine." He says: "It enabled me to
+live over again the days I had passed with the birds and in the
+scenes of my youth. I wrote the book sitting at a desk in front
+of an iron wall. I was the keeper of a vault in which many
+millions of banknotes were stored. During my long periods of
+leisure I took refuge in my pen. How my mind reacted from the
+iron wall in front of me, and sought solace in memories of the
+birds and of summer fields and woods!" In 1873 he exchanged the
+iron wall in front of his desk for a large window overlooking the
+Hudson, and the vault for a vineyard. Since then he has lived on
+the banks of the Hudson in the midst of the woods and fields
+which he most enjoys, adding daily to his fund of information
+regarding the ways of nature. His close habit of observation,
+coupled with his rare gift of imparting to the reader something
+of his own interest and enthusiasm, has enabled him to interpret
+nature in a most delightfully fascinating way. He gives the key
+to his own success when he says, "If I name every bird I see in
+my walk, describe its color and ways, etc., give a lot of facts
+or details about the bird, it is doubtful if my reader is
+interested. But if I relate the bird in some way to human life,
+to my own life,--show what it is to me and what it is in the
+landscape and the season,--then do I give my reader a live bird
+and not a labeled specimen."
+
+Mr. Burroughs thoroughly enjoys the country life, and in his
+strolls through the woods or in the fields he is always ready to
+stop and investigate anything new or interesting that he may
+chance to see among the birds, or squirrels, or bees, or insects.
+His long life of observation and study has developed remarkably
+quick eyesight and a keen sense of hearing, which enable him to
+detect all the activities of nature and to place a correct
+interpretation upon them to an extent that few other naturalists
+have realized.
+
+When he writes he is simply living over again the experiences
+which have delighted him, and the best explanation of the rare
+pleasure that is imparted by his writings to every reader is
+given in his own words: "I cannot bring myself to think of my
+books as 'works,' because so little 'work' has gone to the making
+of them. It has all been play. I have gone a-fishing or camping
+or canoeing, and new literary material has been the result....
+The writing of the book was only a second and finer enjoyment of
+my holiday in the fields or woods; not till the writing did it
+really seem to strike in and become part of me"; and so the
+reader seems to participate in this "finer enjoyment" of a
+holiday in the fields or woods, walking arm-in-arm with the
+naturalist, feeling the influence of his poetic temperament,
+learning something new at every turn, and sharing the master's
+enthusiasm.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE WIT OF A DUCK
+
+
+The homing instinct in birds and animals is one of their most
+remarkable traits: their strong local attachments and their skill
+in finding their way back when removed to a distance. It seems
+at times as if they possessed some extra sense--the home
+sense--which operates unerringly. I saw this illustrated one
+spring in the case of a mallard drake.
+
+My son had two ducks, and to mate with them he procured a drake
+of a neighbor who lived two miles south of us. He brought the
+drake home in a bag. The bird had no opportunity to see the road
+along which it was carried, or to get the general direction,
+except at the time of starting, when the boy carried him a few
+rods openly.
+
+He was placed with the ducks in a spring run, under a tree in a
+secluded place on the river slope, about a hundred yards from the
+highway. The two ducks treated him very contemptuously. It was
+easy to see that the drake was homesick from the first hour, and
+he soon left the presence of the scornful ducks.
+
+Then we shut the three in the barn together, and kept them there
+a day and a night. Still the friendship did not ripen; the ducks
+and the drake separated the moment we let them out. Left to
+himself, the drake at once turned his head homeward, and started
+up the hill for the highway.
+
+Then we shut the trio up together again for a couple of days, but
+with the same results as before. There seemed to be but one
+thought in the mind of the drake, and that was home.
+
+Several times we headed him off and brought him back, till
+finally on the third or fourth day I said to my son, "If that
+drake is really bound to go home, he shall have an opportunity to
+make the trial, and I will go with him to see that he has fair
+play." We withdrew, and the homesick mallard started up through
+the currant patch, then through the vineyard toward the highway
+which he had never seen.
+
+When he reached the fence, he followed it south till he came to
+the open gate, where he took to the road as confidently as if he
+knew for a certainty that it would lead him straight to his mate.
+How eagerly he paddled along, glancing right and left, and
+increasing his speed at every step! I kept about fifty yards
+behind him. Presently he met a dog; he paused and eyed the animal
+for a moment, and then turned to the right along a road which
+diverged just at that point, and which led to the railroad
+station. I followed, thinking the drake would soon lose his
+bearings, and get hopelessly confused in the tangle of roads that
+converged at the station.
+
+But he seemed to have an exact map of the country in his mind; he
+soon left the station road, went around a house, through a
+vineyard, till he struck a stone fence that crossed his course at
+right angles; this he followed eastward till it was joined by a
+barbed wire fence, under which he passed and again entered the
+highway he had first taken. Then down the road he paddled with
+renewed confidence: under the trees, down a hill, through a
+grove, over a bridge, up the hill again toward home.
+
+Presently he found his clue cut in two by the railroad track;
+this was something he had never before seen; he paused, glanced
+up it, then down it, then at the highway across it, and quickly
+concluded this last was his course. On he went again, faster and
+faster.
+
+He had now gone half the distance, and was getting tired. A
+little pool of water by the roadside caught his eye. Into it he
+plunged, bathed, drank, preened his plumage for a few moments,
+and then started homeward again. He knew his home was on the
+upper side of the road, for he kept his eye bent in that
+direction, scanning the fields. Twice he stopped, stretched
+himself up, and scanned the landscape intently; then on again. It
+seemed as if an invisible cord was attached to him, and he was
+being pulled down the road.
+
+Just opposite a farm lane which led up to a group of farm
+buildings, and which did indeed look like his home lane, he
+paused and seemed to be debating with himself. Two women just
+then came along; they lifted and flirted their skirts, for it was
+raining, and this disturbed him again and decided him to take to
+the farm lane. Up the lane he went, rather doubtingly, I thought.
+
+In a few moments it brought him into a barnyard, where a group
+of hens caught his eye. Evidently he was on good terms with hens
+at home, for he made up to these eagerly as if to tell them his
+troubles; but the hens knew not ducks; they withdrew suspiciously,
+then assumed a threatening attitude, till one old "dominic" put up
+her feathers and charged upon him viciously.
+
+Again he tried to make up to them, quacking softly, and again he
+was repulsed. Then the cattle in the yard spied this strange
+creature and came sniffing toward it, full of curiosity.
+
+The drake quickly concluded he had got into the wrong place, and
+turned his face southward again. Through the fence he went into a
+plowed field. Presently another stone fence crossed his path;
+along this he again turned toward the highway. In a few minutes
+he found himself in a corner formed by the meeting of two stone
+fences. Then he turned appealingly to me, uttering the soft note
+of the mallard. To use his wings never seemed to cross his mind.
+
+Well, I am bound to confess that I helped the drake over the
+wall, but I sat him down in the road as impartially as I could.
+How well his pink feet knew the course! How they flew up the
+road! His green head and white throat fairly twinkled under the
+long avenue of oaks and chestnuts.
+
+At last we came in sight of the home lane, which led up to the
+farmhouse one hundred or more yards from the road. I was curious
+to see if he would recognize the place. At the gate leading into
+the lane he paused. He had just gone up a lane that looked like
+that and had been disappointed. What should he do now? Truth
+compels me to say that he overshot the mark: he kept on
+hesitatingly along the highway.
+
+It was now nearly night. I felt sure the duck would soon discover
+his mistake, but I had not time to watch the experiment further.
+I went around the drake and turned him back. As he neared the
+lane this time he seemed suddenly to see some familiar landmark,
+and he rushed up it at the top of his speed. His joy and
+eagerness were almost pathetic.
+
+I followed close. Into the house yard he rushed with uplifted
+wings, and fell down almost exhausted by the side of his mate. A
+half hour later the two were nipping the grass together in the
+pasture, and he, I have no doubt, was eagerly telling her the
+story of his adventures.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+AN ASTONISHED PORCUPINE
+
+
+One summer, while three young people and I were spending an
+afternoon upon a mountaintop, our dogs treed a porcupine. At my
+suggestion the young man climbed the tree--not a large one--to
+shake the animal down. I wished to see what the dogs would do
+with him, and what the "quill-pig" would do with the dogs. As the
+climber advanced the rodent went higher, till the limb he clung
+to was no larger than one's wrist. This the young man seized and
+shook vigorously. I expected to see the slow, stupid porcupine
+drop, but he did not. He only tightened his hold. The climber
+tightened his hold, too, and shook the harder. Still the bundle
+of quills did not come down, and no amount of shaking could bring
+it down. Then I handed a long pole up to the climber, and he
+tried to punch the animal down. This attack in the rear was
+evidently a surprise; it produced an impression different from
+that of the shaking. The porcupine struck the pole with his tail,
+put up the shield of quills upon his back, and assumed his best
+attitude of defense. Still the pole persisted in its persecution,
+regardless of the quills; evidently the animal was astonished: he
+had never had an experience like this before; he had now met a
+foe that despised his terrible quills. Then he began to back
+rapidly down the tree in the face of his enemy. The young man's
+sweetheart stood below, a highly interested spectator. "Look out,
+Sam, he's coming down!" "Be quick, he's gaining on you!" "Hurry,
+Sam!" Sam came as fast as he could, but he had to look out for
+his footing, and his antagonist did not. Still, he reached the
+ground first, and his sweetheart breathed more easily. It looked
+as if the porcupine reasoned thus: "My quills are useless against
+a foe so far away; I must come to close quarters with him." But,
+of course, the stupid creature had no such mental process, and
+formed no such purpose. He had found the tree unsafe, and his
+instinct now was to get to the ground as quickly as possible and
+take refuge among the rocks. As he came down I hit him a slight
+blow over the nose with a rotten stick, hoping only to confuse
+him a little, but much to my surprise and mortification he
+dropped to the ground and rolled down the hill dead, having
+succumbed to a blow that a woodchuck or a coon would hardly have
+regarded at all. Thus does the easy, passive mode of defense of
+the porcupine not only dull his wits, but it makes frail and
+brittle the thread of his life. He has had no struggles or
+battles to harden and toughen him.
+
+That blunt nose of his is as tender as a baby's, and he is
+snuffed out by a blow that would hardly bewilder for a moment any
+other forest animal, unless it be the skunk, another sluggish
+non-combatant of our woodlands. Immunity from foes, from effort,
+from struggle is always purchased with a price.
+
+Certain of our natural history romancers have taken liberties
+with the porcupine in one respect: they have shown him made up
+into a ball and rolling down a hill. One writer makes him do this
+in a sportive mood; he rolls down a long hill in the woods, and
+at the bottom he is a ragged mass of leaves which his quills have
+impaled--an apparition that nearly frightened a rabbit out of its
+wits. Let any one who knows the porcupine try to fancy it
+performing a feat like this!
+
+Another romancer makes his porcupine roll himself into a ball
+when attacked by a panther, and then on a nudge from his enemy
+roll down a snowy incline into the water. I believe the little
+European hedgehog can roll itself up into something like a ball,
+but our porcupine does not. I have tried all sorts of tricks with
+him, and made all sorts of assaults upon him, at different times,
+and I have never yet seen him assume the globular form. It would
+not be the best form for him to assume, because it would partly
+expose his vulnerable under side. The one thing the porcupine
+seems bent upon doing at all times is to keep right side up with
+care. His attitude of defense is crouching close to the ground,
+head drawn in and pressed down, the circular shield of large
+quills upon his back opened and extended as far as possible, and
+the tail stretched back rigid and held close upon the ground.
+"Now come on," he says, "if you want to." The tail is his weapon
+of active defense; with it he strikes upward like lightning, and
+drives the quills into whatever they touch. In his chapter called
+"In Panoply of Spears," Mr. Roberts paints the porcupine without
+taking any liberties with the creature's known habits. He
+portrays one characteristic of the porcupine very felicitously:
+"As the porcupine made his resolute way through the woods, the
+manner of his going differed from that of all the other kindreds
+of the wild. He went not furtively. He had no particular
+objection to making a noise. He did not consider it necessary to
+stop every little while, stiffen himself to a monument of
+immobility, cast wary glances about the gloom, and sniff the air
+for the taint of enemies. He did not care who knew of his coming,
+and he did not greatly care who came. Behind his panoply of
+biting spears he felt himself secure, and in that security he
+moved as if he held in fee the whole green, shadowy, perilous
+woodland world."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+HUMAN TRAITS IN THE ANIMALS
+
+
+That there is a deal of human nature in the lower animals is a
+very obvious fact; or we may turn the proposition around and say,
+with equal truth, that there is a deal of animal nature in us
+humans. If man is of animal origin, as we are now all coming to
+believe, how could this be otherwise? We are all made of one
+stuff, the functions of our bodies are practically the same, and
+the workings of our instincts and our emotional and involuntary
+natures are in many ways identical. I am not now thinking of any
+part or lot which the lower orders may have in our intellectual
+or moral life, a point upon which, as my reader may know, I
+diverge from the popular conception of these matters, but of the
+extent in which they share with us the ground or basement story
+of the house of life--certain fundamental traits, instincts, and
+blind gropings.
+
+Man is a bundle of instincts, impulses, predilections, race and
+family affinities, and antagonisms, supplemented by the gift of
+reason--a gift of which he sometimes makes use. The animal is a
+bundle of instincts, impulses, affinities, appetites, and race
+traits, without the extra gift of reason.
+
+The animal has sensation, perception, and power of association,
+and these suffice it. Man has sensation, perception, memory,
+comparison, ideality, judgment, and the like, which suffice him.
+
+There can be no dispute, I suppose, as to certain emotions and
+impulses being exclusively human, such as awe, veneration,
+humility, reverence, self-sacrifice, shame, modesty, and many
+others that are characteristic of what we call our moral nature.
+Then there are certain others that we share with our dumb
+neighbors--curiosity, jealousy, joy, anger, sex love, the
+maternal and paternal instinct, the instinct of fear, of
+self-preservation, and so forth.
+
+There is at least one instinct or faculty that the animals have
+far more fully developed than we have--the homing instinct, which
+seems to imply a sense of direction that we have not. We have
+lost it because we have other faculties to take its place, just
+as we have lost that acute sense of smell that is so marvelously
+developed in many of the four-footed creatures. It has long been
+a contention of mine that the animals all possess the knowledge
+and intelligence which is necessary to their self-preservation
+and the perpetuity of the species, and that is about all. This
+homing instinct seems to be one of the special powers that the
+animals cannot get along without. If the solitary wasp, for
+instance, could not find her way back to that minute spot in the
+field where her nest is made, a feat quite impossible to you or
+me, so indistinguishable to our eye is that square inch of ground
+in which her hole is made; or if the fur seal could not in spring
+retrace its course to the islands upon which it breeds, through a
+thousand leagues of pathless sea water, how soon the tribe of
+each would perish!
+
+The animal is, like the skater, a marvel of skill in one field
+or element, or in certain fixed conditions, while man's varied
+but less specialized powers make him at home in many fields. Some
+of the animals outsee man, outsmell him, outhear him, outrun him,
+outswim him, because their lives depend more upon these special
+powers than his does; but he can outwit them all because he has
+the resourcefulness of reason, and is at home in many different
+fields. The condor "houses herself with the sky" that she may
+have a high point of observation for the exercise of that
+marvelous power of vision. An object in the landscape beneath
+that would escape the human eye is revealed to the soaring
+buzzard. It stands these birds in hand to see thus sharply; their
+dinner depends upon it. If mine depended upon such powers of
+vision, in the course of time I might come to possess it. I am
+not certain but that we have lost another power that I suspect
+the lower animals possess--something analogous to, or identical
+with, what we call telepathy--power to communicate without words,
+or signs, or signals. There are many things in animal life, such
+as the precise concert of action among flocks of birds and fishes
+and insects, and, at times, the unity of impulse among land
+animals, that give support to the notion that the wild creatures
+in some way come to share one another's mental or emotional
+states to a degree and in a way that we know little or nothing
+of. It seems important to their well-being that they should have
+such a gift--something to make good to them the want of language
+and mental concepts, and insure unity of action in the tribe.
+Their seasonal migrations from one part of the country to another
+are no doubt the promptings of an inborn instinct called into
+action in all by the recurrence of the same outward conditions;
+but the movements of the flock or the school seem to imply a
+common impulse that is awakened on the instant in each member of
+the flock. The animals have no systems or methods in the sense
+that we have, but like conditions with them always awaken like
+impulses, and unity of action is reached without outward
+communication.
+
+The lower animals seem to have certain of our foibles, and
+antagonisms, and unreasoning petulancies. I was reminded of this
+in reading the story President Roosevelt tells of a Colorado bear
+he once watched at close quarters. The bear was fussing around a
+carcass of a deer, preparatory to burying it. "Once the bear lost
+his grip and rolled over during the course of some movement, and
+this made him angry and he struck the carcass a savage whack,
+just as a pettish child will strike a table against which it has
+knocked itself." Who does not recognize that trait in himself:
+the disposition to vent one's anger upon inanimate things--upon
+his hat, for instance, when the wind snatches it off his head and
+drops it in the mud or leads him a chase for it across the
+street; or upon the stick that tripped him up, or the beam
+against which he bumped his head? We do not all carry our anger
+so far as did a little three-year-old maiden I heard of, who, on
+tripping over the rockers of her chair, promptly picked herself
+up, and carrying the chair to a closet, pushed it in and
+spitefully shut the door on it, leaving it alone in the dark to
+repent its wrong-doing.
+
+Our blind, unreasoning animal anger is excited by whatever
+opposes or baffles us. Of course, when we yield to the anger, we
+do not act as reasonable beings, but as the unreasoning animals.
+It is hard for one to control this feeling when the opposition
+comes from some living creature, as a balky horse or a kicking
+cow, or a pig that will not be driven through the open gate. When
+I was a boy, I once saw one of my uncles kick a hive of bees off
+the stand and halfway across the yard, because the bees stung him
+when he was about to "take them up." I confess to a fair share of
+this petulant, unreasoning animal or human trait, whichever it
+may be, myself. It is difficult for me to refrain from jumping
+upon my hat when, in my pursuit of it across the street, it has
+escaped me two or three times just as I was about to put my hand
+upon it, and as for a balky horse or a kicking cow, I never could
+trust myself to deal reasonably with them. Follow this feeling
+back a few thousand years, and we reach the time when our
+forbears looked upon all the forces in nature as in league
+against them. The anger of the gods as shown in storms and winds
+and pestilence and defeat is a phase of the same feeling. A wild
+animal caught in a steel trap vents its wrath upon the bushes and
+sticks and trees and rocks within its reach. Something is to
+blame, something baffles it and gives it pain, and its teeth
+and claws seek every near object. Of course it is a blind
+manifestation of the instinct of self-defense, just as was my
+uncle's act when he kicked over his beehive, or as is the
+angler's impatience when his line gets tangled and his hook gets
+fast. If the Colorado bear caught his fish with a hook and line,
+how many times would he lose his temper during the day!
+
+I do not think many animals show their kinship to us by
+exhibiting the trait I am here discussing. Probably birds do not
+show it at all. I have seen a nest-building robin baffled and
+delayed, day after day, by the wind that swept away the straws
+and rubbish she carried to the top of a timber under my porch.
+But she did not seem to lose her temper. She did not spitefully
+reclaim the straws and strings that would persist in falling to
+the porch floors, but cheerfully went away in search of more. So
+I have seen a wood thrush time after time carrying the same piece
+of paper to a branch from which the breeze dislodged it, without
+any evidence of impatience. It is true that when a string or a
+horsehair which a bird is carrying to its nest gets caught in a
+branch, the bird tugs at it again and again to free it from
+entanglement, but I have never seen any evidence of impatience or
+spite against branch or string, as would be pretty sure to be the
+case did my string show such a spirit of perversity. Why your dog
+bites the stone which you roll for him when he has found it, or
+gnaws the stick you throw, is not quite clear, unless it be from
+the instinct of his primitive ancestors to bite and kill the game
+run down in the chase. Or is the dog trying to punish the stick
+or stone because it will not roll or fly for him? The dog is
+often quick to resent a kick, be it from man or beast, but I have
+never known him to show anger at the door that slammed to and hit
+him. Probably, if the door held him by his tail or his limb, it
+would quickly receive the imprint of his teeth.
+
+In reading Bostock on the "Training of Wild Animals," my
+attention was arrested by the remark that his performing lions
+and tigers are liable to suffer from "stage fright," like
+ordinary mortals, but that "once thoroughly accustomed to the
+stage, they seem to find in it a sort of intoxication well known
+to a species higher in the order of nature;" and furthermore,
+that "nearly all trainers assert that animals are affected by the
+attitude of an audience, that they are stimulated by the applause
+of an enthusiastic house, and perform indifferently before a cold
+audience." If all this is not mere fancy, but is really a fact
+capable of verification, it shows another human trait in animals
+that one would not expect to find there. Bears seem to show more
+human nature than most other animals. Bostock says that they
+evidently love to show off before an audience: "The conceit and
+good opinion of themselves, which some performing bears have, is
+absolutely ridiculous." A trainer once trained a young bear to
+climb a ladder and set free the American flag, and so proud did
+the bear become of his accomplishment, that whenever any one was
+looking on he would go through the whole performance by himself,
+"evidently simply for the pleasure of doing it." Of course there
+is room for much fancy here on the part of the spectator, but
+bears are in so many ways--in their play, in their boxing, in
+their walking--such grotesque parodies of man, that one is
+induced to accept the trainer's statements as containing a
+measure of truth.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE DOWNY WOODPECKER
+
+
+I
+
+It always gives me a little pleasurable emotion when I see in the
+autumn woods where the downy woodpecker has just been excavating
+his winter quarters in a dead limb or tree-trunk. I am walking
+along a trail or wood-road when I see something like coarse new
+sawdust scattered on the ground. I know at once what carpenter
+has been at work in the trees overhead, and I proceed to
+scrutinize the trunks and branches. Presently I am sure to detect
+a new round hole about an inch and a half in diameter on the
+under side of a dead limb, or in a small tree-trunk. This is
+Downy's cabin, where he expects to spend the winter nights, and a
+part of the stormy days, too.
+
+When he excavates it in an upright tree-trunk, he usually
+chooses a spot beneath a limb; the limb forms a sort of rude
+hood, and prevents the rainwater from running down into it. It is
+a snug and pretty retreat, and a very safe one, I think. I doubt
+whether the driving snow ever reaches him, and no predatory owl
+could hook him out with its claw. Near town or in town the
+English sparrow would probably drive him out; but in the woods, I
+think, he is rarely molested, though in one instance I knew him
+to be dispossessed by a flying squirrel.
+
+On stormy days I have known Downy to return to his chamber in
+mid-afternoon, and to lie abed there till ten in the morning.
+
+I have no knowledge that any other species of our woodpeckers
+excavate these winter quarters, but they probably do. The
+chickadee has too slender a beak for such work, and usually
+spends the winter nights in natural cavities or in the abandoned
+holes of Downy.
+
+
+II
+
+As I am writing here in my study these November days, a downy
+woodpecker is excavating a chamber in the top of a chestnut post
+in the vineyard a few yards below me, or rather, he is enlarging
+a chamber which he or one of his fellows excavated last fall; he
+is making it ready for his winter quarters. A few days ago I saw
+him enlarging the entrance and making it a more complete circle.
+Now he is in the chamber itself working away like a carpenter. I
+hear his muffled hammering as I approach cautiously on the grass.
+I make no sound and the hammering continues till I have stood for
+a moment beside the post, then it suddenly stops and Downy's head
+appears at the door. He glances at me suspiciously and then
+hurries away in much excitement.
+
+How did he know there was some one so near? As birds have no
+sense of smell it must have been by some other means. I return to
+my study and in about fifteen minutes Downy is back at work.
+Again I cautiously and silently approach, but he is now more
+alert, and when I am the width of three grape rows from him he
+rushes out of his den and lets off his sharp, metallic cry as he
+hurries away to some trees below the hill.
+
+He does not return to his work again that afternoon. But I feel
+certain that he will pass the night there and every night all
+winter unless he is disturbed. So when my son and I are passing
+along the path by his post with a lantern about eight o'clock in
+the evening, I pause and say, "Let's see if Downy is at home." A
+slight tap on the post and we hear Downy jump out of bed, as it
+were, and his head quickly fills the doorway. We pass hurriedly
+on and he does not take flight.
+
+A few days later, just at sundown, as I am walking on the
+terrace above, I see Downy come sweeping swiftly down through the
+air on that long galloping flight of his, and alight on the big
+maple on the brink of the hill above his retreat. He sits
+perfectly still for a few moments, surveying the surroundings,
+and, seeing that the coast is clear, drops quickly and silently
+down and disappears in the interior of his chestnut lodge. He
+will do this all winter long, coming home, when the days are
+stormy, by four o'clock, and not stirring out in the morning till
+nine or ten o'clock. Some very cold, blustering days he will
+probably not leave his retreat at all.
+
+He has no mate or fellow lodger, though there is room in his
+cabin for three birds at least. Where the female is I can only
+conjecture; maybe she is occupying a discarded last year's lodge,
+as I notice there are a good many new holes drilled in the trees
+every fall, though many of the old ones still seem intact.
+
+During the inclement season Downy is anything but chivalrous or
+even generous. He will not even share with the female the marrow
+bone or bit of suet that I fasten on the maple in front of my
+window, but drives her away rudely. Sometimes the hairy
+woodpecker, a much larger bird, routs Downy out and wrecks his
+house. Sometimes the English sparrows mob him and dispossess him.
+In the woods the flying squirrels often turn him out of doors and
+furnish his chamber cavity to suit themselves.
+
+
+III
+
+I am always content if I can bring home from my walks the least
+bit of live natural history, as when, the other day, I saw a
+red-headed woodpecker having a tilt with a red squirrel on the
+trunk of a tree.
+
+Doubtless the woodpecker had a nest near by, and had had some
+experience with this squirrel as a nest-robber. When I first saw
+them, the bird was chasing the squirrel around the trunk of an
+oak-tree, his bright colors of black and white and red making his
+every movement conspicuous. The squirrel avoided him by darting
+quickly to the other side of the tree.
+
+Then the woodpecker took up his stand on the trunk of a tree a
+few yards distant, and every time the squirrel ventured timidly
+around where he could be seen the woodpecker would swoop down at
+him, making another loop of bright color. The squirrel seemed to
+enjoy the fun and to tempt the bird to make this ineffectual
+swoop. Time and again he would poke his head round the tree and
+draw the fire of his red-headed enemy. Occasionally the bird made
+it pretty hot for him, and pressed him closely, but he could
+escape because he had the inside ring, and was so artful a
+dodger. As often as he showed himself on the woodpecker's side,
+the bird would make a vicious pass at him; and there would follow
+a moment of lively skurrying around the trunk of the old oak;
+then all would be quiet again.
+
+Finally the squirrel seemed to get tired of the sport, and ran
+swiftly to the top and off through the branches into the
+neighboring trees. As this was probably all the woodpecker was
+fighting for, he did not give chase.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+A BARN-DOOR OUTLOOK
+
+
+I have a barn-door outlook because I have a hay-barn study, and I
+chose a hay-barn study because I wanted a barn-door outlook--a
+wide, near view into fields and woods and orchards where I could
+be on intimate terms with the wild life about me, and with free,
+open-air nature.
+
+Usually there is nothing small or stingy about a barn door, and a
+farmer's hay-barn puts only a very thin partition between you and
+the outside world. Therefore, what could be a more fit place to
+thresh out dry philosophical subjects than a barn floor? I have a
+few such subjects to thresh out, and I thresh them here, turning
+them over as many times as we used to turn over the oat and rye
+sheaves in the old days when I wielded the hickory flail with my
+brothers on this same barn floor.
+
+What a pleasure it is to look back to those autumn days,
+generally in September or early October, when we used to thresh
+out a few bushels of the new crop of rye to be taken to the
+grist-mill for a fresh supply of flour! How often we paused in
+our work to munch apples that had been mellowing in the haymow by
+our side, and look out through the big doorway upon the sunlit
+meadows and hill-slopes! The sound of the flail is heard in the
+old barn no more, but in its stead the scratching of a pen and
+the uneasy stirring of a man seated there behind a big box,
+threshing out a harvest for a loaf of much less general value.
+
+As I sit here day after day, bending over my work, I get many
+glimpses of the little rills of wild life that circulate about
+me. The feature of it that impresses me most is the life of fear
+that most of the wild creatures lead. They are as alert and
+cautious as are the picket-lines of opposing armies. Just over
+the line of stone wall in the orchard a woodchuck comes
+hesitatingly out of his hole and goes nibbling in the grass not
+fifty feet away. How alert and watchful he is! Every few moments
+he sits upright and takes an observation, then resumes his
+feeding. When I make a slight noise he rushes to the cover of the
+stone wall. Then, as no danger appears, he climbs to the top of
+it and looks in my direction. As I move as if to get up, he drops
+back quietly to his hole.
+
+A chipmunk comes along on the stone wall, hurrying somewhere on
+an important errand, but changing his course every moment. He
+runs on the top of the wall, then along its side, then into it
+and through it and out on the other side, pausing every few
+seconds and looking and listening, careful not to expose himself
+long in any one position, really skulking and hiding all along
+his journey. His enemies are keen and watchful and likely to
+appear at any moment, and he knows it, not so much by experience
+as by instinct. His young are timid and watchful the first time
+they emerge from the den into the light of day.
+
+Then a red squirrel comes spinning along. By jerks and nervous,
+spasmodic spurts he rushes along from cover to cover like a
+soldier dodging the enemy's bullets. When he discovers me, he
+pauses, and with one paw on his heart appears to press a button,
+that lets off a flood of snickering, explosive sounds that seem
+like ridicule of me and my work. Failing to get any response from
+me, he presently turns, and, springing from the wall to the
+bending branch of a near apple-tree, he rushes up and disappears
+amid the foliage. Presently I see him on the end of a branch,
+where he seizes a green apple not yet a third grown, and, darting
+down to a large horizontal branch, sits up with the apple in his
+paws and proceeds to chip it up for the pale, unripe seeds at its
+core, all the time keenly alive to possible dangers that may
+surround him. What a nervous, hustling, highstrung creature he
+is--a live wire at all times and places! That pert curl of the
+end of his tail, as he sits chipping the apple or cutting through
+the shell of a nut, is expressive of his character. What a
+contrast his nervous and explosive activity presents to the more
+sedate and dignified life of the gray squirrel! One of these
+passed us only a few yards away on our walk in the woods the
+other day--a long, undulating line of soft gray, silent as a
+spirit and graceful as a wave on the beach.
+
+A little later, in the fine, slow-falling rain, a rabbit suddenly
+emerges into my field of vision fifty feet away. How timid and
+scared she looks! She pauses a moment amid the weeds, then hops
+a yard or two and pauses again, then passes under the bars
+and hesitates on the edge of a more open and exposed place
+immediately in front of me. Here she works her nose, feeling of
+every current of air, analyzing every scent to see if danger is
+near. Apparently detecting something suspicious in the currents
+that drift from my direction, she turns back, pauses again, works
+her nose as before, then hurries out of my sight.
+
+Yesterday I saw a rat stealing green peas from my garden in the
+open day. He darted out of the stone wall six or eight feet away
+to the row of peas, rushed about nervously among the vines; then,
+before I could seize my rifle, darted back to the cover of the
+wall. Once I cautiously approached his hiding-place in the wall
+and waited. Presently his head emerged from the line of weeds by
+the fence, his nose began working anxiously, he sifted and
+resifted the air with it, and then quickly withdrew; his nose had
+detected me, but his eye had not. The touchstone of most animals
+is the nose, and not the eye. The eye quickly detects objects in
+motion, but not those at rest; this is the function of the nose.
+
+A highhole alights on the ground in full view in the orchard
+twenty yards away, and, spying my motionless figure, pauses and
+regards me long and intently. His eye serves him, and not his
+nose. Finally concluding that I am not dangerous, he stoops to
+the turf for his beloved ants and other insects, but lifts his
+head every few seconds to see that no danger is imminent. Not one
+moment is he off his guard. A hawk may suddenly swoop from the
+air above, or a four-footed foe approach from any side. I have
+seen a sharp-shinned hawk pick up a highhole from the turf in a
+twinkling under just such conditions. What a contrast between the
+anxious behavior of these wild creatures and the ease and
+indifference of the grazing cattle!
+
+All the wild creatures evidently regard me with mingled feelings
+of curiosity and distrust. A song sparrow hops and flirts and
+attitudinizes and peers at me from the door-sill, wondering if
+there is any harm in me. A ph[oe]be-bird comes in and flits
+about, disturbed by my presence. For the third or fourth time
+this season, I think, she is planning a nest. In June she began
+one over a window on the porch where I sleep in the open air. She
+had the foundation laid when I appeared, and was not a little
+disturbed by my presence, especially in the early morning, when I
+wanted to sleep and she wanted to work. She let fall some of her
+mortar upon me, but at least I had no fear of a falling brick.
+She gradually got used to me, and her work was progressing into
+the moss stage when two women appeared and made their beds upon
+the porch, and in the morning went to and fro with brooms, of
+course. Then Ph[oe]be seemed to say to herself, "This is too
+much," and she left her unfinished nest and resorted to the empty
+hay-barn. Here she built a nest on one of the bark-covered end
+timbers halfway up the big mow, not being quite as used to barns
+and the exigencies of haying-times as swallows are, who build
+their mud nests against the rafters in the peak. She had
+deposited her eggs, when the haymakers began pitching hay into
+the space beneath her; sweating, hurrying haymakers do not see or
+regard the rights or wants of little birds. Like a rising tide
+the fragrant hay rose and covered the timber and the nest, and
+crept on up toward the swallow's unfledged family in the peak,
+but did not quite reach it.
+
+Ph[oe]be and her mate hung about the barn disconsolate for days,
+and now, ten days later, she is hovering about my open door on
+the floor below, evidently prospecting for another building-site.
+I hope she will find me so quiet and my air so friendly that she
+will choose a niche on the hewn timber over my head. Just this
+moment I saw her snap up a flying "miller" in the orchard a few
+rods away. She was compelled to swoop four times before she
+intercepted that little moth in its unsteady, zigzagging flight.
+She is an expert at this sort of thing; it is her business to
+take her game on the wing; but the moths are experts in zigzag
+flying, and Ph[oe]be missed her mark three times. I heard the
+snap of her beak at each swoop. It is almost impossible for any
+insectivorous bird except a flycatcher to take a moth or a
+butterfly on the wing.
+
+Last year in August the junco, or common snowbird, came into the
+big barn and built her nest in the side of the haymow, only a few
+feet from me. The clean, fragrant hay attracted her as it had
+attracted me. One would have thought that in a haymow she had
+nesting material near at hand. But no; her nest-building
+instincts had to take the old rut; she must bring her own
+material from without; the haymow was only the mossy bank or the
+wood-side turf where her species had hidden their nests for
+untold generations. She did not weave one spear of the farmer's
+hay into her nest, but brought in the usual bits of dry grass and
+weeds and horsehair and shaped the fabric after the old pattern,
+tucking it well in under the drooping locks of hay. As I sat
+morning after morning weaving my thoughts together and looking
+out of the great barn doorway into sunlit fields, the junco wove
+her straws and horsehairs, and deposited there on three
+successive days her three exquisite eggs.
+
+Why the bird departed so widely from the usual habits of
+nest-building of her species, who can tell? I had never before
+seen a junco's nest except on the ground in remote fields, or in
+mossy banks by the side of mountain roads. This nest is the
+finest to be found upon the ground, its usual lining of horsehair
+makes its interior especially smooth and shapely, and the nest in
+the haymow showed only a little falling-off, as is usually the
+case in the second nest of the season. The songs of the birds,
+the construction of their nests, and the number of their eggs
+taper off as the season wanes.
+
+The junco impresses me as a fidgety, emphatic, feather-edged sort
+of bird; the two white quills in its tail which flash out so
+suddenly on every movement seem to stamp in this impression. My
+junco was a little nervous at first and showed her white quills,
+but she soon grew used to my presence, and would alight upon the
+chair which I kept for callers, and upon my hammock-ropes.
+
+When an artist came to paint my portrait amid such rustic
+surroundings, the bird only eyed her a little suspiciously at
+first, and then went forward with her own affairs. One night the
+wind blew the easel with its canvas over against the haymow where
+the nest was placed, but the bird was there on her eggs in the
+morning. Her wild instincts did not desert her in one respect, at
+least: when I would flush her from the nest she would drop down
+to the floor and with spread plumage and fluttering movements
+seek for a moment to decoy me away from the nest, after the habit
+of most ground-builders. The male came about the barn frequently
+with three or four other juncos, which I suspect were the first or
+June brood of the pair, now able to take care of themselves, but
+still held together by the family instinct, as often happens in
+the case of some other birds, such as bluebirds and chickadees.
+
+My little mascot hatched all her eggs, and all went well with
+mother and young until, during my absence of three or four days,
+some night-prowler, probably a rat, plundered the nest, and the
+little summer idyl in the heart of the old barn abruptly ended. I
+saw the juncos no more.
+
+While I was so closely associated with the junco in the old barn
+I had a good chance to observe her incubating habits. I was
+surprised at the frequent and long recesses that she took during
+school-hours. Every hour during the warmest days she was off from
+ten to twelve minutes, either to take the air or to take a bite,
+or to let up on the temperature of her eggs, or to have a word
+with her other family; I am at a loss to know which. Toward the
+end of her term, which was twelve days, and as the days grew
+cooler, she was not gadding out and in so often, but kept her
+place three or four hours at a time.
+
+When the young were hatched they seemed mainly fed with
+insects--spiders or flies gathered off the timbers and clapboards
+of the inside of the barn. It was a pretty sight to see the
+mother-bird making the rounds of the barn, running along the
+timbers, jumping up here and there, and seizing some invisible
+object, showing the while her white petticoats--as a French girl
+called that display of white tail-feathers.
+
+Day after day and week after week as I look through the big,
+open barn door I see a marsh hawk beating about low over the
+fields. He, or rather she (for I see by the greater size and
+browner color that it is the female), moves very slowly and
+deliberately on level, flexible wing, now over the meadow, now
+over the oat or millet field, then above the pasture and the
+swamp, tacking and turning, her eye bent upon the ground, and no
+doubt sending fear or panic through the heart of many a nibbling
+mouse or sitting bird. She occasionally hesitates or stops in her
+flight and drops upon the ground, as if seeking insects or frogs
+or snakes. I have never yet seen her swoop or strike after the
+manner of other hawks. It is a pleasure to watch her through the
+glass and see her make these circuits of the fields on effortless
+wing, day after day, and strike no bird or other living thing, as
+if in quest of something she never finds. I never see the male.
+She has perhaps assigned him other territory to hunt over. He is
+smaller, with more blue in his plumage. One day she had a scrap
+or a game of some kind with three or four crows on the side of a
+rocky hill. I think the crows teased and annoyed her. I heard
+their cawing and saw them pursuing the hawk, and then saw her
+swoop upon them or turn over in the air beneath them, as if to
+show them what feats she could do on the wing that were beyond
+their powers. The crows often made a peculiar guttural cawing and
+cackling as if they enjoyed the sport, but they were clumsy and
+awkward enough on the wing compared to the hawk. Time after time
+she came down upon them from a point high in the air, like a
+thunderbolt, but never seemed to touch them. Twice I saw her
+swoop upon them as they sat upon the ground, and the crows called
+out in half sportive, half protesting tones, as if saying, "That
+was a little too close; beware, beware!" It was like a skillful
+swordsman flourishing his weapon about the head of a peasant; but
+not a feather was touched so far as I could see. It is the only
+time I ever saw this hawk in a sportive or aggressive mood. I
+have seen jays tease the sharp-shinned hawk in this way, and
+escape his retaliating blows by darting into a cedar-tree. All
+the crow tribe, I think, love to badger and mock some of their
+neighbors.
+
+How much business the crows seem to have apart from hunting
+their living! I hear their voices in the morning before sun-up,
+sounding out from different points of the fields and woods, as if
+every one of them were giving or receiving orders for the day:
+"Here, Jim, you do this; here, Corvus, you go there, and put that
+thing through"; and Jim caws back a response, and Corvus says,
+"I'm off this minute." I get the impression that it is convention
+day or general training day with them. There are voices in all
+keys of masculinity and femininity. Here and there seems to be
+one in authority who calls at intervals, "Haw-ah, haw, haw-ah!"
+Others utter a strident "Haw!" still others a rapid, feminine
+call. Some seem hurrying, others seem at rest, but the landscape
+is apparently alive with crows carrying out some plan of
+concerted action. How fond they must be of one another! What boon
+companions they are! In constant communication, saluting one
+another from the trees, the ground, the air, watchful of one
+another's safety, sharing their plunder, uniting against a common
+enemy, noisy, sportive, predacious, and open and aboveboard in
+all their ways and doings--how much character our ebony friend
+possesses, in how many ways he challenges our admiration!
+
+What a contrast the crow presents to the silent, solitary hawk!
+The hawks have but two occupations--hunting and soaring; they
+have no social or tribal relations, and make no show of business
+as does the crow. The crow does not hide; he seems to crave the
+utmost publicity; his goings and comings are advertised with all
+the effectiveness of his strident voice; but all our hawks are
+silent and stealthy.
+
+Let me return to the red squirrel, because he returns to me
+hourly. He is the most frisky, diverting, and altogether impish
+of all our wild creatures. He is a veritable Puck. All the other
+wild folk that cross my field of vision, or look in upon me here
+in my fragrant hay-barn study, seem to have but one feeling about
+me: "What is it? Is it dangerous? Has it any designs upon me?"
+But my appearance seems to awaken other feelings in the red
+squirrel. He pauses on the fence or on the rail before me, and
+goes through a series of antics and poses and hilarious gestures,
+giving out the while a stream of snickering, staccato sounds that
+suggest unmistakably that I am a source of mirth and ridicule to
+him. His gestures and attitudes are all those of mingled mirth,
+curiosity, defiance, and contempt--seldom those of fear. He comes
+spinning along on the stone wall in front of me, with those
+abrupt, nervous pauses every few yards that characterize all his
+movements. On seeing me he checks his speed, and with depressed
+tail impels himself along, a few inches at a time, in a series of
+spasmodic starts and sallies; the hind part of his body
+flattened, and his legs spread, his head erect and alert, his
+tail full of kinks and quirks. How that tail undulates! Now its
+end curls, now it is flattened to the stone, now it springs
+straight up as if part of a trap, hind feet the while keeping
+time in a sort of nervous dance with the shrill, strident
+cackling and snickering. The next moment he is sitting erect with
+fore paws pressed against his white chest, his tail rippling out
+behind him or up his back, and his shrill, nasal tones still
+pouring out. He hops to the next stone, he assumes a new
+position, his tail palpitates and jerks more lively than ever;
+now he is on all fours, with curved back; now he sits up at an
+angle, his tail all the time charged with mingled suspicion and
+mirth. Then he springs to a rail that runs out at right angles
+from the wall toward me, and with hectoring snickers and shrill
+trebles, pointed straight at me, keeps up his performance. What
+an actor he is! What a furry embodiment of quick, nervous energy
+and impertinence! Surely he has a sense of something like humor;
+surely he is teasing and mocking me and telling me, both by
+gesture and by word of mouth, that I present a very ridiculous
+appearance.
+
+A chipmunk comes hurrying along with stuffed cheek-pouches,
+traveling more on the side of the wall than on the top, stopping
+every few yards to see that the way is clear, but giving little
+heed to me or to the performing squirrel. In comparison the
+chipmunk is a demure, preoccupied, pretty little busybody who
+often watches you curiously, but never mocks you or pokes fun at
+you; while the gray squirrel has the manners of the best-bred
+wood-folk, and he goes his way without fuss or bluster, a picture
+of sylvan grace and buoyancy.
+
+All the movements of the red squirrel are quick, sharp, jerky,
+machine-like. He does nothing slowly or gently; everything with a
+snap and a jerk. His progression is a series of interrupted
+sallies. When he pauses on the stone wall he faces this way and
+that with a sudden jerk; he turns round in two or three quick
+leaps. So abrupt and automatic in his movements, so stiff and
+angular in behavior, yet he is charged and overflowing with life
+and energy. One thinks of him as a bundle of steel wires and
+needles and coiled springs, all electrically charged. One of his
+sounds or calls is like the buzz of a reel or the whirr of an
+alarm-clock. Something seems to touch a spring there in the old
+apple-tree, and out leaps this strident sound as of spinning
+brass wheels.
+
+When I speak sharply to him, in the midst of his antics, he
+pauses a moment with uplifted paw, watching me intently, and then
+with a snicker springs upon a branch of an apple-tree that hangs
+down near the wall, and disappears amid the foliage. The red
+squirrel is always actively saucy, aggressively impudent. He
+peeps in at me through a broken pane in the window and snickers;
+he strikes up a jig on the stone underpinning twenty feet away
+and mocks; he darts in and out among the timbers and chatters and
+giggles; he climbs up over the door, pokes his head in, and lets
+off a volley; he moves by jerks along the sill a few feet from my
+head and chirps derisively; he eyes me from points on the wall in
+front, or from some coign of vantage in the barn, and flings his
+anger or his contempt upon me.
+
+No other of our wood-folk has such a facile, emotional tail as
+the red squirrel. It seems as if an electric current were running
+through it most of the time; it vibrates, it ripples, it curls,
+it jerks, it arches, it flattens; now it is like a plume in his
+cap; now it is a cloak around his shoulders; then it is an
+instrument to point and emphasize his states of emotional
+excitement; every movement of his body is seconded or reflected
+in his tail. There seems to be some automatic adjustment between
+his tail and his vocal machinery.
+
+The tail of the gray squirrel shows to best advantage when he is
+running over the ground in the woods--and a long, graceful,
+undulating line of soft silver gray the creature makes! In my
+part of the country the gray squirrel is more strictly a
+wood-dweller than the red, and has the grace and elusiveness that
+belong more especially to the sylvan creatures.
+
+The red squirrel can play a tune and accompany himself.
+Underneath his strident, nasal snicker you may hear a note in
+another key, much finer and shriller. Or it is as if the volume
+of sound was split up into two strains, one proceeding from his
+throat and the other from his mouth.
+
+If the red squirrels do not have an actual game of tag, they
+have something so near it that I cannot tell the difference. Just
+now I see one in hot pursuit of another on the stone wall; both
+are apparently going at the top of their speed. They make a red
+streak over the dark-gray stones. When the pursuer seems to
+overtake the pursued and becomes "It," the race is reversed, and
+away they go on the back track with the same fleetness of the
+hunter and the hunted, till things are reversed again. I have
+seen them engaged in the same game in tree-tops, each one having
+his innings by turn.
+
+The gray squirrel comes and goes, but the red squirrel we have
+always with us. He will live where the gray will starve. He is a
+true American; he has nearly all the national traits--nervous
+energy, quickness, resourcefulness, pertness, not to say
+impudence and conceit. He is not altogether lovely or blameless.
+He makes war on the chipmunk, he is a robber of birds' nests, and
+is destructive of the orchard fruits. Nearly every man's hand is
+against him, yet he thrives, and long may he continue to do so!
+
+One day I placed some over-ripe plums on the wall in front of me
+to see what he would do with them. At first he fell eagerly to
+releasing the pit, and then to cutting his way to the kernel in
+the pit. After one of them had been disposed of in this way, he
+proceeded to carry off the others and place them here and there
+amid the branches of a plum-tree from which he had stolen every
+plum long before they were ripe. A day or two later I noted that
+they had all been removed from this tree, and I found some of
+them in the forks of an apple-tree not far off.
+
+A small butternut-tree standing near the wall had only a score or
+so of butternuts upon it this year; the squirrels might be seen
+almost any hour in the day darting about the branches of that
+tree, hunting the green nuts, and in early September the last nut
+was taken. They carried them away and placed them, one here and
+one there, in the forks of the apple-trees. I noticed that they
+did not depend upon the eye to find the nuts; they did not look
+the branches over from some lower branch as you and I would have
+done; they explored the branches one by one, running out to the
+end, and, if the nut was there, seized it and came swiftly down.
+I think the red squirrel rarely lays up any considerable store,
+but hides his nuts here and there in the trees and upon the
+ground. This habit makes him the planter of future trees, of
+oaks, hickories, chestnuts, and butternuts. These heavy nuts get
+widely scattered by this agency.
+
+One morning I saw a chipmunk catch a flying grasshopper on the
+wing. Little Striped-Back sat on the wall with stuffed pockets,
+waiting for something, when along came the big grasshopper in a
+hesitating, uncertain manner of flight. As it hovered above the
+chipmunk, the latter by a quick, dexterous movement sprang or
+reached up and caught it, and in less than one half-minute its
+fanlike wings were opening out in front of the captor's mouth and
+its body was being eagerly devoured. This same chipmunk, I think
+it is, has his den under the barn near me. Often he comes from
+the stone wall with distended cheek-pouches, and pauses fifteen
+feet away, close by cover, and looks to see if any danger is
+impending. To reach his hole he has to cross an open space a rod
+or more wide, and the thought of it evidently agitates him a
+little. I am sitting there looking over my desk upon him, and he
+is skeptical about my being as harmless as I look. "Dare I cross
+that ten feet of open there in front of him?" he seems to say. He
+sits up with fore paws pressed so prettily to his white breast.
+He is so near I can see the rapid throbbing of his chest as he
+sniffs the air. A moment he sits and looks and sniffs, then in
+hurried movements crosses the open, his cheek-pockets showing
+full as he darts by me. He is like a baseball runner trying to
+steal a base: danger lurks on all sides; he must not leave the
+cover of one base till he sees the way is clear, and then--off
+with a rush! Pray don't work yourself up to such a pitch, my
+little neighbor; you shall make a home-run without the slightest
+show of opposition from me.
+
+One day a gray squirrel came along on the stone wall beside the
+road. In front of the house he crossed an open barway, and then
+paused to observe two men at work in full view near the house.
+The men were a sculptor, pottering with clay, and his model. The
+squirrel sprang up a near-by butternut-tree, sat down on a limb,
+and had a good, long look. "Very suspicious," he seemed to think;
+"maybe they are fixing a trap for me"; and he deliberately came
+down the tree and returned the way he had come, spinning along
+the top of the wall, his long, fine tail outlined by a narrow
+band of silver as he sped off toward the woods.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+WILD LIFE IN WINTER
+
+
+To many forms of life of our northern lands, winter means a long
+sleep; to others it means what it means to many fortunate human
+beings--travels in warm climes; to still others, who again have
+their human prototypes, it means a struggle, more or less fierce,
+to keep soul and body together; while to many insect forms it
+means death.
+
+Most of the flies and beetles, wasps and hornets, moths,
+butterflies, and bumblebees die. The grasshoppers all die, with
+eggs for next season's crop deposited in the ground. Some of the
+butterflies winter over. The mourning cloak, the first butterfly
+to be seen in spring, has passed the winter in my "Slabsides."
+The monarch migrates, probably the only one of our butterflies
+that does. It is a great flyer. I have seen it in the fall
+sailing serenely along over the inferno of New York streets. It
+has crossed the ocean and is spreading over the world. The yellow
+and black hornets lose heart as autumn comes on, desert their
+paper nests and die--all but the queen or mother hornet; she
+hunts out a retreat in the ground and passes the winter beyond
+the reach of frost. In the spring she comes forth and begins life
+anew, starting a little cone-shaped paper nest, building a few
+paper cells, laying an egg in each, and thus starting the new
+colony.
+
+The same is true of the bumblebees; they are the creatures of a
+summer. In August, when the flowers fail, the colony breaks up,
+they desert the nest and pick up a precarious subsistence on
+asters and thistles till the frosts of October cut them off. You
+may often see, in late September or early October, these tramp
+bees passing the night or a cold rain-storm on the lee side of a
+thistle-head. The queen bee alone survives. You never see her
+playing the vagabond in the fall. At least I never have. She
+hunts out a retreat in the ground and passes the winter there,
+doubtless in a torpid state, as she stores no food against the
+inclement season. Emerson has put this fact into his poem on "The
+Humble-Bee":--
+
+    "When the fierce northwestern blast
+    Cools sea and land so far and fast,
+    Thou already slumberest deep;
+    Woe and want thou canst outsleep;
+    Want and woe, which torture us,
+    Thy sleep makes ridiculous."
+
+In early August of the past year I saw a queen bumblebee quickly
+enter a small hole on the edge of the road where there was no
+nest. It was probably her winter quarters.
+
+If one could take the cover off the ground in the fields and
+woods in winter, or have some magic ointment put upon his eyes
+that would enable him to see through opaque substances, how many
+curious and interesting forms of life he would behold in the
+ground beneath his feet as he took his winter walk--life with the
+fires banked, so to speak, and just keeping till spring. He would
+see the field crickets in their galleries in the ground in a
+dormant state, all their machinery of life brought to a
+standstill by the cold. He would see the ants in their hills and
+in their tunnels in decaying trees and logs, as inert as the soil
+or the wood they inhabit. I have chopped many a handful of the
+big black ants out of a log upon my woodpile in winter, stiff,
+but not dead, with the frost, and brought them in by the fire to
+see their vital forces set going again by the heat. I have
+brought in the grubs of borers and the big fat grubs of beetles,
+turned out of their winter beds in old logs by my axe and frozen
+like ice-cream, and have seen the spark of life rekindle in them
+on the hearth.
+
+With this added visual power, one would see the wood frogs and
+the hylas in their winter beds but a few inches beneath the moss
+and leaf-mould, one here and one there, cold, inert, biding their
+time. I dug a wood frog out one December and found him not
+frozen, though the soil around him was full of frost; he was
+alive but not frisky. A friend of mine once found one in the
+woods sitting upon the snow one day in early winter. She carried
+him home with her, and he burrowed in the soil of her flower-pot
+and came out all right in the spring. What brought him out upon
+the snow in December one would like to know.
+
+One would see the tree-frogs in the cavities of old trees,
+wrapped in their winter sleep--which is yet not a sleep, but
+suspended animation. When the day is warm, or the January thaw
+comes, I fancy the little frog feels it and stirs in his bed. One
+would see the warty toads squatted in the soil two or three feet
+below the surface, in the same way. Probably not till April will
+the spell which the winter has put upon them be broken. I have
+seen a toad go into the ground in late fall. He literally elbows
+his way into it, going down backwards.
+
+Beneath rocks or in cavities at the end of some small hole in the
+ground, one would see a ball or tangle of garter snakes, or black
+snakes, or copperheads--dozens of individual snakes of that
+locality entwined in one many-headed mass, conserving in this
+united way their animal heat against the cold of winter. One
+spring my neighbor in the woods discovered such a winter retreat
+of the copperheads, and, visiting the place many times during the
+warm April days, he killed about forty snakes, and since that
+slaughter, the copperheads have been at a premium in our
+neighborhood.
+
+Here and there, near the fences and along the borders of the
+wood, these X-ray eyes would see the chipmunk at the end of his
+deep burrow with his store of nuts or grains, sleeping fitfully
+but not dormant. The frost does not reach him and his stores are
+at hand. One which we dug out in late October had nearly four
+quarts of weed-seeds and cherry-pits. He will hardly be out
+before March, and then, like his big brother rodent the
+woodchuck, and other winter sleepers, his fancy will quickly
+"turn to thoughts of love."
+
+One would see the woodchuck asleep in his burrow, snugly rolled
+up and living on his own fat. All the hibernating animals that
+keep up respiration, must have sustenance of some sort--either a
+store of food at hand or a store of fat in their own bodies. The
+woodchuck, the bear, the coon, the skunk, the 'possum, lay up a
+store of fuel in their own bodies, and they come out in the
+spring lean and hungry. The squirrels are lean the year through,
+and hence must have a store of food in their dens, as does the
+chipmunk, or else be more or less active in their search all
+winter, as is the case with the red and gray squirrels. The fox
+puts on more or less fat in the fall, because he will need it
+before spring. His food-supply is very precarious; he may go many
+days without a morsel. I have known him to be so hungry that he
+would eat frozen apples and corn which he could not digest. The
+hare and the rabbit, on the other hand, do not store up fat
+against a time of need; their food-supply of bark and twigs is
+constant, no matter how deep the snows. The birds of prey that
+pass the winter in the north take on a coat of fat in the fall,
+because their food-supply is so uncertain; the coat of fat is
+also a protection against the cold.
+
+Of course, all the wild creatures are in better condition in the
+fall than in the spring, but in many cases the fat is distinctly
+a substitute for food.
+
+The skunk is in his den also from December till February, living
+on his own fat. Several of them often occupy the same den and
+conserve their animal heat in that way. The coon, also, is in his
+den in the rocks for a part of the winter, keeping warm on
+home-made fuel. The same is true of the bear in our climate. The
+bats are hibernating in the rocks or about buildings. The
+muskrats are leading hidden lives in the upper chambers of their
+snow-covered houses in the marshes and ponds or in the banks of
+streams, feeding on lily-roots and mussels which they get under
+the ice.
+
+The lean, bloodthirsty minks and weasels are on the hunt all
+winter. Our native mice are also active. That pretty stitching
+upon the coverlet of the winter snow in the woods is made by our
+white-footed mouse and by the little shrew mouse. The former
+often has large stores of nuts hidden in some cavity in a tree;
+what supply of food the latter has, if any, I do not know. In the
+winter the short-tailed meadow or field mice come out of their
+retreat in the ground and beneath stones and lead gay, fearless
+lives beneath the snow-drifts. Their little villages, with their
+runways and abandoned nests, may be seen when the snow disappears
+in the spring. Their winter life beneath the snow, where no
+wicked eye or murderous claw can reach them, is in sharp contrast
+to their life in summer, when cats and hawks, owls and foxes,
+pounce upon them day and night. It is only in times of deep snows
+that they bark our fruit-trees.
+
+We have in this latitude but one species of hibernating
+mouse--the long-tailed jumping mouse, or kangaroo mouse, as it is
+sometimes called from its mode of locomotion. Late one fall,
+while making a road near "Slabsides," we dug one out from its
+hibernation about two feet below the surface of the ground. It
+was like a little ball of fur tied with a string. In my hand it
+seemed as cold as if dead. Close scrutiny showed that it breathed
+at intervals, very slowly. The embers of life were there, but
+slumbering beneath the ashes. I put it in my pocket and went
+about my work. After a little time, remembering my mouse, I put
+my hand into my pocket and touched something very warm and
+lively. The ember had been fanned into a flame, so to speak. I
+kept my captive in a cage a day or two and then returned it to
+the woods, where I trust it found a safe retreat against the
+cold.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+BIRD LIFE IN WINTER
+
+
+The distribution of our birds over the country in summer is like
+that of the people, quite uniform. Every wood and field has its
+quota, and no place so barren but it has some bird to visit it.
+One knows where to look for sparrows and thrushes and bobolinks
+and warblers and flycatchers. But the occupation of the country
+by our winter residents is like the Indian occupation of the
+land. They are found in little bands, a few here and there, with
+large tracts quite untenanted.
+
+One may walk for hours through the winter woods and not see or
+hear a bird. Then he may come upon a troop of chickadees, with a
+nuthatch or two in their wake, and maybe a downy woodpecker.
+Birds not of a feather flock together at this inclement season.
+The question of food is always an urgent one. Evidently the
+nuthatch thinks there must be food where the chickadees flit and
+call so cheerily, and the woodpecker is probably drawn to the
+nuthatch for a similar reason.
+
+Together they make a pretty thorough search,--fine, finer,
+finest. The chickadee explores the twigs and smaller branches;
+what he gets is on the surface, and so fine as to be almost
+microscopic. The nuthatch explores the trunks and larger branches
+of the trees; he goes a little deeper, into crevices of the bark
+and under lichens. Then comes Downy, who goes deeper still. He
+bores for larger game through the bark, and into the trunks and
+branches themselves.
+
+In late fall this band is often joined by the golden-crowned
+kinglet and the brown creeper. The kinglet is finer-eyed and
+finer-billed than even the chickadee, and no doubt gathers what
+the latter overlooks, while the brown creeper, with his long,
+slender, curved bill, takes what both the nuthatch and the
+woodpecker miss. Working together, it seems as if they must make
+a pretty clean sweep. But the trees are numerous and large, and
+the birds are few. Only a mere fraction of tree surface is
+searched over at any one time. In large forests probably only a
+mere fraction of the trees are visited at all.
+
+One cold day in midwinter, when I was walking through the
+snowless woods, I saw chickadees, nuthatches, and woodpeckers
+upon the ground, and upon roots and fallen branches. They were
+looking for the game that had fallen, as a boy looks for apples
+under the tree.
+
+The winter wren is so called because he sometimes braves our
+northern winters, but it is rarely that one sees him at this
+season. I think I have seen him only two or three times in winter
+in my life. The event of one long walk, recently, in February,
+was seeing one of these birds. As I followed a byroad, beside a
+little creek in the edge of a wood, my eye caught a glimpse of a
+small brown bird darting under a stone bridge. I thought to
+myself no bird but a wren would take refuge under so small a
+bridge as that. I stepped down upon it and expected to see the
+bird dart out at the upper end. As it did not appear, I
+scrutinized the bank of the little run, covered with logs and
+brush, a few rods farther up.
+
+Presently I saw the wren curtsying and gesticulating beneath an
+old log. As I approached he disappeared beneath some loose stones
+in the bank, then came out again and took another peep at me,
+then fidgeted about for a moment and disappeared again, running
+in and out of the holes and recesses and beneath the rubbish like
+a mouse or a chipmunk. The winter wren may always be known by
+these squatting, bobbing-out-and-in habits.
+
+As I sought a still closer view of him, he flitted stealthily a
+few yards up the run and disappeared beneath a small plank bridge
+near a house.
+
+I wondered what he could feed upon at such a time. There was a
+light skim of snow upon the ground, and the weather was cold. The
+wren, so far as I know, is entirely an insect-feeder, and where
+can he find insects in midwinter in our climate? Probably by
+searching under bridges, under brush heaps, in holes and cavities
+in banks where the sun falls warm. In such places he may find
+dormant spiders and flies and other hibernating insects or their
+larvae. We have a tiny, mosquito-like creature that comes forth in
+March or in midwinter, as soon as the temperature is a little
+above freezing. One may see them performing their fantastic
+air-dances when the air is so chilly that one buttons his
+overcoat about him in his walk. They are darker than the
+mosquito,--a sort of dark water-color,--and are very frail to the
+touch. Maybe the wren knows the hiding-place of these insects.
+
+With food in abundance, no doubt many more of our birds would
+brave the rigors of our winters. I have known a pair of bluebirds
+to brave them on such poor rations as are afforded by the
+hardhack or sugarberry,--a drupe the size of a small pea, with a
+thin, sweet skin. Probably hardly one per cent. of the drupe is
+digestible food. Bluebirds in December will also eat the berries
+of the poison ivy, as will the downy woodpecker.
+
+Robins will pass the winter with us when the cover of a pine or
+hemlock forest can be had near a supply of red cedar berries. The
+cedar-bird probably finds little other food in the valley of the
+Hudson and in New England, yet I see occasional flocks of them
+every winter month.
+
+Sometimes the chickadees and nuthatches, hunting through the
+winter woods, make a discovery that brings every bird within
+hearing to the spot,--they spy out the screech owl hiding in the
+thick of a hemlock-tree. What an event it is in the day's
+experience! It sets the whole clan agog.
+
+While I was walking in the December woods, one day, my attention
+was attracted by a great hue and cry among these birds. I found
+them in and about a hemlock-tree,--eight or ten chickadees and
+four or five red-bellied nuthatches. Such a chiding chorus of
+tiny voices I had not heard for a long time. The tone was not
+that of alarm so much as it was that of trouble and displeasure.
+
+I gazed long and long up into the dark, dense green mass of the
+tree to make out the cause of all this excitement. The chickadees
+were clinging to the ends of the sprays, as usual, apparently
+very busy looking for food, and all the time uttering their
+shrill plaint. The nuthatches perched about upon the branches or
+ran up and down the tree trunks, incessantly piping their
+displeasure. At last I made out the cause of the disturbance,--a
+little owl on a limb, looking down in wide-eyed intentness upon
+me. How annoyed he must have felt at all this hullabaloo, this
+lover of privacy and quiet, to have his name cried from the
+treetops, and his retreat advertised to every passer-by!
+
+I have never known woodpeckers to show any excitement at the
+presence of hawk or owl, probably because they are rarely
+preyed upon by these marauders. In their nests and in their
+winter quarters, deeply excavated in trunk or branch of tree,
+woodpeckers are beyond the reach of both beak and claw.
+
+The day I saw the winter wren I saw two golden-crowned kinglets
+fly from one sycamore to another in an open field, uttering their
+fine call-notes. That so small a body can brave the giant cold of
+our winters seems remarkable enough. These are mainly birds of
+the evergreens, although at times they frequent the groves and
+the orchards.
+
+How does the ruby-crowned kinglet know he has a brilliant bit of
+color on his crown which he can uncover at will, and that this
+has great charms for the female? During the rivalries of the
+males in the mating season, and in the autumn also, they flash
+this brilliant ruby at each other. I witnessed what seemed to be
+a competitive display of this kind one evening in November. I was
+walking along the road, when my ear was attracted by the fine,
+shrill lisping and piping of a small band of these birds in an
+apple-tree. I paused to see what was the occasion of so much
+noise and bluster among these tiny bodies. There were four or
+five of them, all more or less excited, and two of them
+especially so. I think the excitement of the others was only a
+reflection of that of these two. These were hopping around each
+other, apparently peering down upon something beneath them. I
+suspected a cat concealed behind the wall, and so looked over,
+but there was nothing there. Observing them more closely, I saw
+that the two birds were entirely occupied with each other.
+
+They behaved exactly as if they were comparing crowns, and each
+extolling his own. Their heads were bent forward, the red crown
+patch uncovered and showing as a large, brilliant cap, their
+tails were spread, and the side feathers below the wings were
+fluffed out. They did not come to blows, but followed each other
+about amid the branches, uttering their thin, shrill notes and
+displaying their ruby crowns to the utmost. Evidently it was some
+sort of strife or dispute or rivalry that centred about this
+brilliant patch.
+
+Few persons seem aware that the goldfinch is also a winter
+bird,--it is so brilliant and familiar in summer and so neutral
+and withdrawn in winter. The call-note and manner of flight do
+not change, but the color of the males and their habits are very
+different from their color and habits in summer. In winter they
+congregate in small, loose flocks, both sexes of a dusky
+yellowish brown, and feed upon the seeds of grasses and weeds
+that stand above the snow in fields and along fences.
+
+Day after day I have observed a band of five or six of them
+feeding amid the dry stalks of the evening primrose by the
+roadside. They are adepts in extracting the seed from the pods.
+How pretty their call to each other at such times,--_paisley_ or
+_peasely_, with the rising inflection!
+
+The only one of our winter birds that really seems a part of
+the winter, that seems to be born of the whirling snow, and to
+be happiest when storms drive thickest and coldest, is the
+snow bunting, the real snowbird, with plumage copied from the
+fields where the drifts hide all but the tops of the tallest
+weeds,--large spaces of pure white touched here and there with
+black and gray and brown. Its twittering call and chirrup coming
+out of the white obscurity is the sweetest and happiest of all
+winter bird sounds. It is like the laughter of children. The
+fox-hunter hears it on the snowy hills, the farmer hears it when
+he goes to fodder his cattle from the distant stack, the country
+schoolboy hears it as he breaks his way through the drifts toward
+the school. It is ever a voice of good cheer and contentment.
+
+One March, during a deep snow, a large flock of buntings stayed
+about my vineyards for several days, feeding upon the seeds of
+redroot and other weeds that stood above the snow. What boyhood
+associations their soft and cheery calls brought up! How plump
+and well-fed and hardy they looked, and how alert and suspicious
+they were! They evidently had had experiences with hawks and
+shrikes. Every minute or two they would all spring into the air
+as one bird, circle about for a moment, then alight upon the snow
+again. Occasionally one would perch upon a wire or grapevine, as
+if to keep watch and ward.
+
+Presently, while I stood in front of my study looking at them, a
+larger and darker bird came swiftly by me, flying low and
+straight toward the buntings. He shot beneath the trellises, and
+evidently hoped to surprise the birds. It was a shrike, thirsting
+for blood or brains. But the buntings were on the alert, and were
+up in the air before the feathered assassin reached them. As the
+flock wheeled about, he joined them and flew along with them for
+some distance, but made no attempt to strike that I could see.
+
+Presently he left them and perched upon the top of a near maple.
+The birds did not seem to fear him now, but swept past the
+treetop where he sat as if to challenge him to a race, and then
+went their way. I have seen it stated that these birds, when
+suddenly surprised by a hawk, will dive beneath the snow to
+escape him. They doubtless roost upon the ground, as do most
+ground-builders, and hence must often be covered by the falling
+snow.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+A BIRDS' FREE LUNCH
+
+
+One winter, during four or five weeks of severe weather, several of
+our winter birds were pensioners upon my bounty,--three blue jays,
+two downy woodpeckers, three chickadees, and one kinglet,--and
+later a snowbird--junco--appeared.
+
+I fastened pieces of suet and marrow-bones upon the tree in front
+of my window, then, as I sat at my desk, watched the birds at their
+free lunch. The jays bossed the woodpeckers, the woodpeckers bossed
+the chickadees, and the chickadees bossed the kinglet.
+
+Sometimes in my absence a crow would swoop down and boss the
+whole crew and carry off the meat. The kinglet was the least of
+all,--a sort of "hop-o'-my-thumb" bird. He became quite tame, and
+one day alighted upon my arm as I stood leaning against the tree.
+I could have put my hand upon him several times. I wonder where
+the midget roosted. He was all alone. He liked the fare so well
+that he seemed disposed to stop till spring. During one terrible
+night of wind and snow and zero temperature I feared he would be
+swept away. I thought of him in the middle of the night, when the
+violence of the storm kept me from sleep. Imagine this solitary
+atom in feathers drifting about in the great arctic out-of-doors
+and managing to survive. I fancied him in one of my thick
+spruces, his head under his tiny wing, buffeted by wind and snow,
+his little black feet clinging to the perch, and wishing that
+morning would come.
+
+The fat meat is fuel for him; it keeps up the supply of animal
+heat. None of the birds will eat lean meat; they want the clear
+fat. The jays alight upon it and peck away with great vigor,
+almost standing on tiptoe to get the proper sweep. The woodpecker
+uses his head alone in pecking, but the jay's action involves the
+whole body. Yet his blows are softer, not so sharp and abrupt as
+those of the woodpecker. Pecking is not exactly his business.
+
+He swallows the morsel eagerly, watching all the time lest some
+enemy surprise him in the act. Indeed, one noticeable thing about
+all the birds is their nervousness while eating. The chickadee
+turns that bead-like eye of his in all directions incessantly,
+lest something seize him while he is not looking. He is not off
+his guard for a moment. It is almost painful to observe the state
+of fear in which he lives. He will not keep his place upon the
+bone longer than a few seconds at a time lest he become a mark
+for some enemy,--a hawk, a shrike, or a cat. One would not think
+the food would digest when taken in such haste and trepidation.
+
+While the jays are feeding, swallowing morsel after morsel very
+rapidly, the chickadees flit about in an anxious, peevish manner,
+lest there be none left for themselves.
+
+I suspect the jays carry the food off and hide it, as they
+certainly do corn when I put it out for the hens. The jay has a
+capacious throat; he will lodge half a dozen or more kernels of
+corn in it, stretching his neck up as he takes them, to give them
+room, and then fly away to an old bird's-nest or a caterpillar's
+nest and deposit them in it. But in this respect the little
+kettle cannot call the big pot black. The chickadee also will
+carry away what it cannot eat. One day I dug a dozen or more
+white grubs--the larvae of some beetle--out of a decayed maple on
+my woodpile and placed them upon my window-sill. The chickadees
+soon discovered them, and fell to carrying them off as fast as
+ever they could, distributing them among the branches of the
+Norway spruces. Among the grubs was one large white one half the
+size of one's little finger. One of the chickadees seized this;
+it was all he could carry, but he made off with it. The mate to
+this grub I found rolled up in a smooth cell in a mass of decayed
+wood at the heart of the old maple referred to; it was full of
+frost. I carried it in by the fire, and the next day it was alive
+and apparently wanted to know what had brought spring so
+suddenly.
+
+How rapidly birds live! Their demand for food is almost
+incessant. This colony of mine appear to feed every eight or ten
+minutes. Their little mills grind their grist very rapidly. Once
+in my walk upon the sea beach I encountered two small beach birds
+running up and down in the edge of the surf, keeping just in the
+thin, lace-like edging of the waves, and feeding upon the white,
+cricket-like hoppers that quickly buried themselves in the sand
+as the waters retreated. I kept company with the birds till they
+ceased to be afraid of me. They would feed eagerly for a few
+minutes and then stop, stand on one leg and put their heads under
+their wings for two or three minutes, and then resume their
+feeding, so rapidly did they digest their food. But all birds
+digest very rapidly.
+
+My two woodpeckers seldom leave the tree upon which the food is
+placed. One is a male, as is shown by his red plume, and the
+other a female. There is not a bit of kindness or amity between
+them. Indeed, there is open hostility. The male will not allow
+the female even to look at the meat while he is feeding. She will
+sidle around toward it, edging nearer and nearer, when he will
+suddenly dart at her, and often pursue her till she leaves the
+tree. Every hour in the day I see him trying to drive her from
+the neighborhood. She stands in perpetual dread of him, and gives
+way the instant he approaches. He is a tyrant and a bully. They
+both pass the night in snug chambers which they have excavated in
+the decayed branch of an old apple-tree, but not together.
+
+But in the spring what a change will come over the male. He will
+protest to the female that he was only in fun, that she took him
+far too seriously, that he had always cherished a liking for her.
+Last April I saw a male trying his blandishments upon a female in
+this way. It may have been the same pair I am now observing. The
+female was extremely shy and reluctant; evidently she was
+skeptical of the sincerity of so sudden a change on the part of
+the male. I saw him pursue her from tree to tree with the most
+flattering attention. The flight of the woodpecker is at all
+times undulating, but on such occasions this feature is so
+enhanced and the whole action so affected and studied on the part
+of the male that the scene becomes highly amusing. The female
+flew down upon a low stump in the currant-patch and was very busy
+about her own affairs; the male followed, alighted on something
+several rods distant, and appeared to be equally busy about his
+affairs. Presently the female made quite a long flight to a tree
+by the roadside. I could not tell how the male knew she had flown
+and what course she had taken, as he was hidden from her amid the
+thick currant-bushes; but he did know, and soon followed after in
+his curious exaggerated undulatory manner of flight. I have
+little doubt that his suit was finally successful.
+
+I watch these woodpeckers daily to see if I can solve the mystery
+as to how they hop up and down the trunks and branches without
+falling away from them when they let go their hold. They come
+down a limb or trunk backward by a series of little hops, moving
+both feet together. If the limb is at an angle to the tree and
+they are on the under side of it, they do not fall away from it
+to get a new hold an inch or half inch farther down. They are held
+to it as steel to a magnet. Both tail and head are involved in the
+feat. At the instant of making the hop the head is thrown in and
+the tail thrown out, but the exact mechanics of it I cannot
+penetrate. Philosophers do not yet know how a backward-falling cat
+turns in the air, but turn she does. It may be that the woodpecker
+never quite relaxes his hold, though to my eye he appears to do so.
+
+Birds nearly always pass the night in such places as they select
+for their nests,--ground-builders upon the ground, tree-builders
+upon trees. I have seen an oriole ensconce himself for the night
+amid the thick cluster of leaves on the end of a maple branch,
+where soon after his mate built her nest.
+
+My chickadees, true to this rule, pass the arctic winter nights
+in little cavities in the trunks of trees like the woodpeckers.
+One cold day, about four o'clock, while it was snowing and
+blowing, I heard, as I was unharnessing my horse near the old
+apple-tree, the sharp, chiding note of a chickadee. On looking
+for the bird I failed to see him. Suspecting the true cause of
+his sudden disappearance, I took a pole and touched a limb that
+had an opening in its end where the wrens had the past season had
+a nest. As I did so, out came the chickadee and scolded sharply.
+The storm and the cold had driven him early to his chamber. The
+snow buntings are said to plunge into the snow-banks and pass the
+night there. We know the ruffed grouse does this.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+BIRD-NESTING TIME
+
+
+The other day I sat for an hour watching a pair of wood thrushes
+engaged in building their nest near "Slabsides." I say a pair,
+though the female really did all the work. The male hung around
+and was evidently an interested spectator of the proceeding. The
+mother bird was very busy bringing and placing the material,
+consisting mainly of dry maple leaves which the winter had made
+thin and soft, and which were strewn over the ground all about.
+How pretty she looked, running over the ground, now in shade, now
+in sunshine, searching for the leaves that were just to her
+fancy! Sometimes she would seize two or more and with a quick,
+soft flight bear them to the fork of the little maple sapling.
+Every five or six minutes during her absence, the male would come
+and inspect her work. He would look it over, arrange a leaf or
+two with his beak, and then go his way. Twice he sat down in the
+nest and worked his feet and pressed it with his breast, as if
+shaping it. When the female found him there on her return, he
+quickly got out of her way.
+
+But he brought no material, he did no needful thing, he was a
+bird of leisure. The female did all the drudgery, and with what
+an air of grace and ease she did it! So soft of wing, so trim of
+form, so pretty of pose, and so gentle in every movement! It was
+evidently no drudgery to her; the material was handy, and the
+task one of love. All the behavior of the wood thrush affects one
+like music; it is melody to the eye as the song is to the ear; it
+is visible harmony. This bird cannot do an ungraceful thing. It
+has the bearing of a bird of fine breeding. Its cousin the robin
+is much more masculine and plebeian, harsher in voice, and ruder
+in manners. The wood thrush is urban and suggests sylvan halls
+and courtly companions. Softness, gentleness, composure,
+characterize every movement. In only a few instances among our
+birds does the male assist in nest-building. He is usually only a
+gratuitous superintendent of the work. The male oriole visits the
+half-finished structure of his mate, looks it over, tugs at the
+strings now and then as if to try them, and, I suppose, has his
+own opinion about the work, but I have never seen him actually
+lend a hand and bring a string or a hair. If I belonged to our
+sentimental school of nature writers I might say that he is too
+proud, that it is against the traditions of his race and family;
+but probably the truth is that he doesn't know how; that the
+nest-building instinct is less active in him than in his mate;
+that he is not impelled by the same necessity. It is easy to be
+seen how important it is that the nesting instinct should be
+strong in the female, whether it is or not in the male. The male
+may be cut off and yet the nest be built and the family reared.
+Among the rodents I fancy the nest is always built by the female.
+
+Whatever the explanation, the mother bird is really the head of
+the family; she is the most active in nest-building, and in most
+cases in the care of the young; and among birds of prey, as among
+insects, the female is the larger and the more powerful.
+
+The wood thrush whose nest-building I have just described, laid
+only one egg, and an abnormal-looking egg at that--very long and
+both ends of the same size. But to my surprise out of the
+abnormal-looking egg came in due time a normal-looking chick
+which grew to birdhood without any mishaps. The late, cold season
+and the consequent scarcity of food was undoubtedly the cause of
+so small a family.
+
+Another pair of wood thrushes built a nest on the low branch of
+a maple by the roadside, where I had it under daily observation.
+This nest presently held three eggs, two of which hatched in due
+time, and for a few days the young seemed to prosper. Then one
+morning, I noticed the mother bird sitting in a silent,
+meditative way on the edge of the nest. As she made no move
+during the minute or two while I watched her, I drew near to see
+what was the matter. I found one of the young birds in a state of
+utter collapse; it was cold and all but lifeless. The next
+morning I found the bird again sitting motionless on the rim of
+the nest and gazing into it. I found one of the birds dead and
+the other nearly so. What had brought about the disaster I could
+not tell; no cause was apparent. I at first suspected vermin, but
+could detect none. The silent, baffled look of the mother bird I
+shall not soon forget. There was no demonstration of grief or
+alarm; only a brooding, puzzled look.
+
+I once witnessed similar behavior on the part of a pair of
+bluebirds that were rearing a brood in a box on a grape post near
+my study. One day I chanced to observe one of the parent birds at
+the entrance of the nest, gazing long and intently in. In the
+course of the day I saw this act several times, and in no case
+did the bird enter the box with food as it had been doing. Then I
+investigated and found the nearly fledged birds all dead. On
+removing them I found the nest infested with many dark,
+tough-skinned, very active worms or grubs nearly an inch long,
+that had apparently sucked the blood out of the bodies of the
+fledglings. They were probably the larvae of some species of
+beetle unknown to me. The parent birds had looked on and seen
+their young destroyed, and made no effort to free the nest of
+their enemy. Or probably they had not suspected what was going
+on, or did not understand it if they beheld it. Their instincts
+were not on the alert for an enemy so subtle, and one springing
+up in the nest itself. Any visible danger from without alarmed
+them instantly, but here was a new foe that doubtless they had
+never before had to cope with.
+
+The oriole in her nest-building seems more fickle than most other
+birds. I have known orioles several times to begin a nest and
+then leave it and go elsewhere. Last year one started a nest in
+an oak near my study, then after a few days of hesitating labor
+left it and selected the traditional site of her race, the
+pendent branch of an elm by the roadside. This time she behaved
+like a wise bird and came back for some of the material of the
+abandoned nest. She had attached a single piece of twine to the
+oak branch, and this she could not leave behind; twine was too
+useful and too hard to get. So I saw her tugging at this string
+till she loosened it, then flew toward the elm with it trailing
+in the air behind her. I could but smile at her thrift. The
+second nest she completed and occupied and doubtless found her
+pendent-nest instinct fully satisfied by the high swaying elm
+branch.
+
+One of our prettiest nest-builders is the junco or snowbird; in
+fact, it builds the prettiest nest to be found upon the ground,
+I think--more massive and finely moulded and finished than that
+of the song sparrow. I find it only in the Catskills, or on
+their borders, often in a mossy bank by the roadside, in the woods,
+or on their threshold. With what delicate and consummate art it
+is insinuated into the wild scene, like some shy thing that grew
+there, visible, yet hidden by its perfect fitness and harmony with
+its surroundings. The mother bird darts out but a few yards from
+you as you drive or walk along, but your eye is baffled for some
+moments before you have her secret. Such a keen, feather-edged,
+not to say spiteful little body, with the emphasis of those two
+pairs of white quills in her tail given to every movement, and yet,
+a less crabbed, less hasty nest, softer and more suggestive of shy
+sylvan ways, than is hers, would be hard to find.
+
+One day I was walking along the grassy borders of a beech and
+maple wood with a friend when, as we came to a little low mound
+of moss and grass, scarcely a foot high, I said, "This is just
+the spot for a junco's nest," and as I stooped down to examine
+it, out flew the bird. I had divined better than I knew. What a
+pretty secret that little footstool of moss and grass-covered
+earth held! How exquisite the nest, how exquisite the place, how
+choice and harmonious the whole scene! How could these eggs long
+escape the prowling foxes, skunks, coons, the sharp-eyed crows,
+the searching mice and squirrels? They did not escape; in a day
+or two they were gone.
+
+Another junco's nest beside a Catskill trout stream sticks in my
+memory. It was in an open grassy place amid the trees and bushes
+near the highway. There were ladies in our trouting party and I
+called them to come and see the treasure I had found.
+
+"Where is it?" one of them said, as she stopped and looked around
+a few paces from me.
+
+"It is within six feet of you," I replied. She looked about,
+incredulous, as it seemed an unlikely place for a nest of any
+sort, so open was it, and so easily swept by the first glance.
+
+As she stepped along, perplexed, I said, "Now it is within one
+yard of you." She thought I was joking; but stooping down,
+determined not to be baffled, she espied it sheltered by a thin,
+mossy stone that stood up seven or eight inches above the turf,
+tilted at an angle of about that of one side of a house-roof.
+Under this the nest was tucked, sheltered from the sun and rain,
+and hidden from all but the sharpest eye.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+A BREATH OF APRIL
+
+
+I
+
+It would not be easy to say which is our finest or most beautiful
+wild flower, but certainly the most poetic and the best beloved
+is the arbutus. So early, so lowly, so secretive there in the
+moss and dry leaves, so fragrant, tinged with the hues of youth
+and health, so hardy and homelike, it touches the heart as no
+other does.
+
+April's flower offers the first honey to the bee and the first
+fragrance to the breeze. Modest, exquisite, loving the evergreens,
+loving the rocks, untamable, it is the very spirit and breath of
+the woods. Trailing, creeping over the ground, hiding its beauty
+under withered leaves, stiff and hard in foliage, but in flower
+like the cheek of a maiden.
+
+One may brush away the April snow and find this finer snow
+beneath it. Oh, the arbutus days, what memories and longings they
+awaken! In this latitude they can hardly be looked for before
+April, and some seasons not till the latter days of the month.
+The first real warmth, the first tender skies, the first fragrant
+showers--the woods are flooded with sunlight, and the dry leaves
+and the leaf-mould emit a pleasant odor. One kneels down or lies
+down beside a patch of the trailing vine, he brushes away the
+leaves, he lifts up the blossoming sprays and examines and
+admires them at leisure; some are white, some are white and pink,
+a few are deep pink. It is enough to bask there in the sunlight
+on the ground beside them, drinking in their odor, feasting the
+eye on their tints and forms, hearing the April breezes sigh and
+murmur in the pines or hemlocks near you, living in a present
+fragrant with the memory of other days. Lying there, half
+dreaming, half observing, if you are not in communion with the
+very soul of spring, then there is a want of soul in you. You may
+hear the first swallow twittering from the sky above you, or the
+first mellow drum of the grouse come up from the woods below or
+from the ridge opposite. The bee is abroad in the air, finding
+her first honey in the flower by your side and her first pollen
+in the pussy-willows by the watercourses below you. The tender,
+plaintive love-note of the chickadee is heard here and there in
+the woods. He utters it while busy on the catkins of the poplars,
+from which he seems to be extracting some kind of food. Hawks are
+screaming high in the air above the woods; the plow is just
+tasting the first earth in the rye or corn stubble (and it tastes
+good). The earth looks good, it smells good, it is good. By the
+creek in the woods you hear the first water-thrush--a short,
+bright, ringing, hurried song. If you approach, the bird flies
+swiftly up or down the creek, uttering an emphatic "chip, chip."
+
+In wild, delicate beauty we have flowers that far surpass the
+arbutus: the columbine, for instance, jetting out of a seam in a
+gray ledge of rock, its many crimson and flame-colored flowers
+shaking in the breeze; but it is mostly for the eye. The
+spring-beauty, the painted trillium, the fringed polygala, the
+showy lady's-slipper, are all more striking to look upon, but
+they do not quite touch the heart; they lack the soul that
+perfume suggests. Their charms do not abide with you as do those
+of the arbutus.
+
+
+II
+
+These still, hazy, brooding mid-April mornings, when the farmer
+first starts afield with his plow, when his boys gather the
+buckets in the sugar-bush, when the high-hole calls long and loud
+through the hazy distance, when the meadowlark sends up her
+clear, silvery shaft of sound from the meadow, when the bush
+sparrow trills in the orchard, when the soft maples look red
+against the wood, or their fallen bloom flecks the drying mud in
+the road,--such mornings are about the most exciting and
+suggestive of the whole year. How good the fields look, how good
+the freshly turned earth looks!--one could almost eat it as does
+the horse;--the stable manure just being drawn out and scattered
+looks good and smells good; every farmer's house and barn
+looks inviting; the children on the way to school with their
+dinner-pails in their hands--how they open a door into the past
+for you! Sometimes they have sprays of arbutus in their
+buttonholes, or bunches of hepatica. The partridge is drumming in
+the woods, and the woodpeckers are drumming on dry limbs.
+
+The day is veiled, but we catch such glimpses through the veil.
+The bees are getting pollen from the pussy-willows and soft
+maples, and the first honey from the arbutus.
+
+It is at this time that the fruit and seed catalogues are
+interesting reading, and that the cuts of farm implements have a
+new fascination. The soil calls to one. All over the country,
+people are responding to the call, and are buying farms and
+moving upon them. My father and mother moved upon their farm in
+the spring of 1828; I moved here upon mine in March, 1874.
+
+I see the farmers, now going along their stone fences and
+replacing the stones that the frost or the sheep and cattle have
+thrown off, and here and there laying up a bit of wall that has
+tumbled down.
+
+There is rare music now in the unmusical call of the
+ph[oe]be-bird--it is so suggestive.
+
+The drying road appeals to one as it never does at any other
+season. When I was a farm-boy, it was about this time that I used
+to get out of my boots for half an hour and let my bare feet feel
+the ground beneath them once more. There was a smooth, dry, level
+place in the road near home, and along this I used to run, and
+exult in that sense of lightfootedness which is so keen at such
+times. What a feeling of freedom, of emancipation, and of joy in
+the returning spring I used to experience in those warm April
+twilights!
+
+I think every man whose youth was spent on the farm, whatever his
+life since, must have moments at this season when he longs to go
+back to the soil. How its sounds, its odors, its occupations, its
+associations, come back to him! Would he not like to return again
+to help rake up the litter of straw and stalks about the barn, or
+about the stack on the hill where the grass is starting? Would he
+not like to help pick the stone from the meadow, or mend the
+brush fence on the mountain where the sheep roam, or hunt up old
+Brindle's calf in the woods, or gather oven-wood for his mother
+to start again the big brick oven with its dozen loaves of rye
+bread, or see the plow crowding the lingering snow-banks on the
+side-hill, or help his father break and swingle and hatchel the
+flax in the barnyard?
+
+When I see a farm advertised for rent or for sale in the spring,
+I want to go at once and look it over. All the particulars
+interest me--so many acres of meadow-land, so many of woodland,
+so many of pasture--the garden, the orchard, the outbuildings,
+the springs, the creek--I see them all, and am already half in
+possession.
+
+Even Thoreau felt this attraction, and recorded in his Journal:
+"I know of no more pleasing employment than to ride about the
+country with a companion very early in the spring, looking at
+farms with a view to purchasing, if not paying for them."
+
+Blessed is the man who loves the soil!
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+THE WOODCOCK'S EVENING HYMN
+
+
+The twilight flight song of the woodcock is one of the most
+curious and tantalizing yet interesting bird songs we have. I
+fancy that the persons who hear and recognize it in the April or
+May twilight are few and far between. I myself have heard it only
+on three occasions--one season in late March, one season in
+April, and the last time in the middle of May. It is a voice of
+ecstatic song coming down from the upper air and through the mist
+and the darkness--the spirit of the swamp and the marsh climbing
+heavenward and pouring out its joy in a wild burst of lyric
+melody; a haunter of the muck and a prober of the mud suddenly
+transformed into a bird that soars and circles and warbles like a
+lark hidden or half hidden in the depths of the twilight sky. The
+passion of the spring has few more pleasing exemplars. The
+madness of the season, the abandon of the mating instinct, is in
+every move and note. Ordinarily the woodcock is a very dull,
+stupid bird, with a look almost idiotic, and is seldom seen
+except by the sportsman or the tramper along marshy brooks. But
+for a brief season in his life he is an inspired creature, a
+winged song that baffles the eye and thrills the ear from the
+mystic regions of the upper air.
+
+When I last heard it, I was with a companion, and our attention
+was arrested, as we were skirting the edge of a sloping, rather
+marshy, bowlder-strewn field, by the "zeep," "zeep," which the
+bird utters on the ground, preliminary to its lark-like flight.
+We paused and listened. The light of day was fast failing; a
+faint murmur went up from the fields below us that defined itself
+now and then in the good-night song of some bird. Now it was the
+lullaby of the song sparrow or the swamp sparrow. Once the
+tender, ringing, infantile voice of the bush sparrow stood out
+vividly for a moment on that great background of silence. "Zeep,"
+"zeep," came out of the dimness six or eight rods away. Presently
+there was a faint, rapid whistling of wings, and my companion
+said: "There, he is up." The ear could trace his flight, but not
+the eye. In less than a minute the straining ear failed to catch
+any sound, and we knew he had reached his climax and was
+circling. Once we distinctly saw him whirling far above us. Then
+he was lost in the obscurity, and in a few seconds there rained
+down upon us the notes of his ecstatic song--a novel kind of
+hurried, chirping, smacking warble. It was very brief, and when
+it ceased, we knew the bird was dropping plummet-like to the
+earth. In half a minute or less his "zeep," "zeep," came up again
+from the ground. In two or three minutes he repeated his flight
+and song, and thus kept it up during the half-hour or more that
+we remained to listen: now a harsh plaint out of the obscurity
+upon the ground; then a jubilant strain from out the obscurity
+of the air above. His mate was probably somewhere within
+earshot, and we wondered just how much interest she took in the
+performance. Was it all for her benefit, or inspired by her
+presence? I think, rather, it was inspired by the May night, by
+the springing grass, by the unfolding leaves, by the apple bloom,
+by the passion of joy and love that thrills through nature at
+this season. An hour or two before, we had seen the bobolinks in
+the meadow beating the air with the same excited wing and
+overflowing with the same ecstasy of song, but their demure,
+retiring, and indifferent mates were nowhere to be seen. It would
+seem as if the male bird sang, not to win his mate, but to
+celebrate the winning, to invoke the young who are not yet born,
+and to express the joy of love which is at the heart of Nature.
+
+When I reached home, I went over the fourteen volumes of
+Thoreau's Journal to see if he had made any record of having
+heard the "woodcock's evening hymn," as Emerson calls it. He had
+not. Evidently he never heard it, which is the more surprising as
+he was abroad in the fields and marshes and woods at almost all
+hours in the twenty-four and in all seasons and weathers, making
+it the business of his life to see and record what was going on
+in nature.
+
+Thoreau's eye was much more reliable than his ear. He saw
+straight, but did not always hear straight. For instance, he
+seems always to have confounded the song of the hermit thrush
+with that of the wood thrush. He records having heard the latter
+even in April, but never the former. In the Maine woods and on
+Monadnock it is always the wood thrush which he hears, and never
+the hermit.
+
+But if Thoreau's ear was sometimes at fault, I do not recall that
+his eye ever was, while his mind was always honest. He had an
+instinct for the truth, and while we may admit that the truth he
+was in quest of in nature was not always scientific truth, or the
+truth of natural history, but was often the truth of the poet and
+the mystic, yet he was very careful about his facts; he liked to
+be able to make an exact statement, to clinch his observations by
+going again and again to the spot. He never taxes your credulity.
+He had never been bitten by the mad dog of sensationalism that
+has bitten certain of our later nature writers.
+
+Thoreau made no effort to humanize the animals. What he aimed
+mainly to do was to invest his account of them with literary
+charm, not by imputing to them impossible things, but by
+describing them in a way impossible to a less poetic nature. The
+novel and the surprising are not in the act of the bird or beast
+itself, but in Thoreau's way of telling what it did. To draw upon
+your imagination for your facts is one thing; to draw upon your
+imagination in describing what you see is quite another. The new
+school of nature writers will afford many samples of the former
+method; read Thoreau's description of the wood thrush's song or
+the bobolink's song, or his account of wild apples, or of his
+life at Walden Pond, or almost any other bit of his writing, for
+a sample of the latter. In his best work he uses language in the
+imaginative way of the poet.
+
+Literature and science do not differ in matters of fact, but in
+spirit and method. There is no live literature without a play of
+personality, and there is no exact science without the clear,
+white light of the understanding. What we want, and have a right
+to expect, of the literary naturalist is that his statement shall
+have both truth and charm, but we do not want the charm at the
+expense of the truth. I may invest the commonest fact I observe
+in the fields or by the roadside with the air of romance, if I
+can, but I am not to put the romance in place of the fact. If you
+romance about the animals, you must do so unequivocally, as
+Kipling does and as AEsop did; the fiction must declare itself at
+once, or the work is vicious. To make literature out of natural
+history observation is not to pervert or distort the facts, or to
+draw the long bow at all; it is to see the facts in their true
+relations and proportions and with honest emotion.
+
+Truth of seeing and truth of feeling are the main requisite: add
+truth of style, and the thing is done.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+THE COMING OF SUMMER
+
+
+Who shall say when one season ends and another begins? Only the
+almanac-makers can fix these dates. It is like saying when
+babyhood ends and childhood begins, or when childhood ends and
+youth begins. To me spring begins when the catkins on the alders
+and the pussy-willows begin to swell; when the ice breaks up on
+the river and the first sea-gulls come prospecting northward.
+Whatever the date--the first or the middle or the last of
+March--when these signs appear, then I know spring is at hand.
+Her first birds--the bluebird, the song sparrow, the robin, the
+red-shouldered starling--are here or soon will be. The crows have
+a more confident caw, the sap begins to start in the sugar maple,
+the tiny boom of the first bee is heard, the downy woodpecker
+begins his resonant tat, tat, tat, on the dry limbs, and the
+cattle in the barnyard low long and loud with wistful looks
+toward the fields.
+
+The first hint of summer comes when the trees are fully fledged
+and the nymph Shadow is born. See her cool circles again beneath
+the trees in the field, or her deeper and cooler retreats in the
+woods. On the slopes, on the opposite side of the river, there
+have been for months under the morning and noon sun only slight
+shadow tracings, a fretwork of shadow lines; but some morning in
+May I look across and see solid masses of shade falling from the
+trees athwart the sloping turf. How the eye revels in them! The
+trees are again clothed and in their right minds; myriad leaves
+rustle in promise of the coming festival. Now the trees are
+sentient beings; they have thoughts and fancies; they stir with
+emotion; they converse together; they whisper or dream in the
+twilight; they struggle and wrestle with the storm.
+
+    "Caught and cuff'd by the gale,"
+
+Tennyson says.
+
+Summer always comes in the person of June, with a bunch of
+daisies on her breast and clover blossoms in her hands. A new
+chapter in the season is opened when these flowers appear. One
+says to himself, "Well, I have lived to see the daisies again and
+to smell the red clover." One plucks the first blossoms tenderly
+and caressingly. What memories are stirred in the mind by the
+fragrance of the one and the youthful face of the other! There is
+nothing else like that smell of the clover: it is the maidenly
+breath of summer; it suggests all fresh, buxom, rural things. A
+field of ruddy, blooming clover, dashed or sprinkled here and
+there with the snow-white of the daisies; its breath drifts into
+the road when you are passing; you hear the boom of bees, the
+voice of bobolinks, the twitter of swallows, the whistle of
+woodchucks; you smell wild strawberries; you see the cattle upon
+the hills; you see your youth, the youth of a happy farm-boy,
+rise before you. In Kentucky I once saw two fields, of one
+hundred acres each, all ruddy with blooming clover--perfume for a
+whole county.
+
+The blooming orchards are the glory of May, the blooming
+clover-fields the distinction of June. Other characteristic June
+perfumes come from the honey-locusts and the blooming grapevines.
+At times and in certain localities the air at night and morning
+is heavy with the breath of the former, and along the lanes and
+roadsides we inhale the delicate fragrance of the wild grape. The
+early grasses, too, with their frostlike bloom, contribute
+something very welcome to the breath of June.
+
+Nearly every season I note what I call the bridal day of
+summer--a white, lucid, shining day, with a delicate veil of mist
+softening all outlines. How the river dances and sparkles; how
+the new leaves of all the trees shine under the sun; the air has
+a soft lustre; there is a haze, it is not blue, but a kind of
+shining, diffused nimbus. No clouds, the sky a bluish white, very
+soft and delicate. It is the nuptial day of the season; the sun
+fairly takes the earth to be his own, for better or for worse, on
+such a day, and what marriages there are going on all about us:
+the marriages of the flowers, of the bees, of the birds.
+Everything suggests life, love, fruition. These bridal days are
+often repeated; the serenity and equipoise of the elements
+combine. They were such days as these that the poet Lowell had in
+mind when he exclaimed, "What is so rare as a day in June?" Here
+is the record of such a day, June 1, 1883: "Day perfect in
+temper, in mood, in everything. Foliage all out except on
+button-balls and celtis, and putting on its dark green summer
+color, solid shadows under the trees, and stretching down the
+slopes. A few indolent summer clouds here and there. A day of
+gently rustling and curtsying leaves, when the breeze almost
+seems to blow upward. The fields of full-grown, nodding rye
+slowly stir and sway like vast assemblages of people. How the
+chimney swallows chipper as they sweep past! The vireo's cheerful
+warble echoes in the leafy maples; the branches of the Norway
+spruce and the hemlocks have gotten themselves new light green
+tips; the dandelion's spheres of ethereal down rise above the
+grass: and now and then one of them suddenly goes down: the
+little chippy, or social sparrow, has thrown itself upon the
+frail stalk and brought it to the ground, to feed upon its
+seeds; here it gets the first fruits of the season. The first red
+and white clover heads have just opened, the yellow rock-rose
+and the sweet viburnum are in bloom; the bird chorus is still
+full and animated; the keys of the red maple strew the ground,
+and the cotton of the early everlasting drifts upon the air."
+For several days there was but little change. "Getting toward
+the high tide of summer. The air well warmed up, Nature in her
+jocund mood, still, all leaf and sap. The days are idyllic. I lie
+on my back on the grass in the shade of the house, and look up
+to the soft, slowly moving clouds, and to the chimney swallows
+disporting themselves up there in the breezy depths. No hardening
+in vegetation yet. The moist, hot, fragrant breath of the
+fields--mingled odor of blossoming grasses, clover, daisies,
+rye--the locust blossoms, dropping. What a humming about the hives;
+what freshness in the shade of every tree; what contentment in the
+flocks and herds! The springs are yet full and cold; the shaded
+watercourses and pond margins begin to draw one." Go to the top
+of the hill on such a morning, say by nine o'clock, and see how
+unspeakably fresh and full the world looks. The morning shadows
+yet linger everywhere, even in the sunshine; a kind of blue
+coolness and freshness, the vapor of dew tinting the air.
+
+Heat and moisture, the father and mother of all that lives, when
+June has plenty of these, the increase is sure.
+
+Early in June the rye and wheat heads begin to nod; the
+motionless stalks have a reflective, meditative air. A little
+while ago, when their heads were empty or filled only with chaff
+and sap, how straight up they held them! Now that the grain is
+forming, they have a sober, thoughtful look. It is one of the
+most pleasing spectacles of June, a field of rye gently shaken by
+the wind. How the breezes are defined upon its surface--a surface
+as sensitive as that of water; how they trip along, little
+breezes and big breezes together! Just as this glaucous green
+surface of the rye-field bends beneath the light tread of the
+winds, so, we are told, the crust of the earth itself bends
+beneath the giant strides of the great atmospheric waves.
+
+There is one bird I seldom hear till June, and that is the
+cuckoo. Sometimes the last days of May bring him, but oftener it
+is June before I hear his note. The cuckoo is the true recluse
+among our birds. I doubt if there is any joy in his soul.
+"Rain-crow," he is called in some parts of the country. His call
+is supposed to bode rain. Why do other birds, the robin for
+instance, often make war upon the cuckoo, chasing it from the
+vicinity of their nests? There seems to be something about the
+cuckoo that makes its position among the birds rather anomalous.
+Is it at times a parasitical bird, dropping its eggs into other
+birds' nests? Or is there some suggestion of the hawk about our
+species as well as about the European? I do not know. I only know
+that it seems to be regarded with a suspicious eye by other
+birds, and that it wanders about at night in a way that no
+respectable bird should. The birds that come in March, as the
+bluebird, the robin, the song sparrow, the starling, build in
+April; the April birds, such as the brown thrasher, the barn
+swallow, the chewink, the water-thrush, the oven-bird, the
+chippy, the high-hole, the meadowlark, build in May, while the
+May birds, the kingbird, the wood thrush, the oriole, the orchard
+starling, and the warblers, build in June. The April nests are
+exposed to the most dangers: the storms, the crows, the
+squirrels, are all liable to cut them off. The midsummer nests,
+like that of the goldfinch and the waxwing, or cedar-bird, are
+the safest of all.
+
+In March the door of the seasons first stands ajar a little; in
+April it is opened much wider; in May the windows go up also; and
+in June the walls are fairly taken down and the genial currents
+have free play everywhere. The event of March in the country is
+the first good sap day, when the maples thrill with the kindling
+warmth; the event of April is the new furrow and the first
+seeding;--how ruddy and warm the soil looks just opened to the
+sun!--the event of May is the week of orchard bloom; with what
+sweet, pensive gladness one walks beneath the pink-white masses,
+while long, long thoughts descend upon him! See the impetuous
+orioles chase one another amid the branches, shaking down the
+fragrant snow. Here the rose-breasted grosbeak is in the blooming
+cherry tree, snipping off the blossoms with that heavy beak of
+his--a spot of crimson and black half hidden in masses of white
+petals. This orchard bloom travels like a wave. In March it is in
+the Carolinas; by the middle of April its crest has reached the
+Potomac; a week or ten days later it is in New Jersey; then in
+May it sweeps through New York and New England; and early in June
+it is breaking upon the orchards in Canada. Finally, the event of
+June is the fields ruddy with clover and milk-white with daisies.
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
+
+The "oe" ligature is represented as [oe].
+
+Title page: Changed typo "Cambridg" to "Cambridge."
+
+Table of Contents/Chapter VIII: Retained punctuation error in
+chapter title.
+
+Page 18: Added missing period to sentence: "The bear was fussing
+... to burying it."
+
+Page 30: Changed typo "sudddenly" to "suddenly."
+
+Pages 31, 79, 95: Retained inconsistent spellings of
+highhole/high-hole.
+
+Pages 32 & 58: Retained inconsistent spellings of
+treetops/tree-tops.
+
+Page 38: Changed single quote to double quote in sentence: "Here,
+Jim, you do this ... thing through".
+
+Chapter XII: Changed typo "IIX" to "XII."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers, by
+John Burroughs
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