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URROUGHS'S

iture Near- Home
id Other Papers

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Central University Library

University of California, San Diego
Note: This item is subject to recall after two weeks.

Date Due

MAR 04 1992

CPR ?,s 199^

Cl 39 (1/91)

UCSDLib.

HibersiDe literature Aeries?

NATURE NEAE HOME
AND OTHER PAPERS

BY
JOHN BURROUGHS

HOTJGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO SAN FRANCISCO

•jC&e fltonsibc pecs? €umbnb0e

CONTENTS

NATURE LORE 1

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

I. Live Natural History 27

II. The Barn Swallow 32

HI. Insects 35

IV. The Dog 39

V. Wood Waifs 40

VI. An Interesting Plant 44

VII. Nature Near Home 47

EACH AFTER ITS KIND 52

NATURE LEAVES

I. In Warbler Time 68

II. A Short Walk 72

IN FIELD AND WOOD

I. Intensive Observation 74

II. From a Walker's Wallet 84

COPYRIGHT 1913, 1916, 1919 BY JOHN
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Vfe Ktbergfce $re««

.CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.

NATURE LORE

EMERSON in his Journal says, "All facts in
nature interest us because they are deep and
not accidental." Facts of nature are undoubtedly
of interest to most persons, though whether or not
Emerson gives the true reason may be questioned.
I would sooner venture the explanation that it is
because nature is a sort of outlying province of
ourselves. We feel a kinship with her works, and in
bird and beast, in tree and flower, we behold the
workings of the same life principle that has brought
us where we are and relates us to all living things.
Explain the matter as we may, the facts and do-
ings of nature interest us, and our interest is bound
to grow as we enlarge our acquaintance with them,
— which is about like saying that our interest keeps
pace with our interest. But so it is. Water does not
taste good to us until we are thirsty. Before we ask
questions we must have questions to ask, and be-
fore we have questions to ask we must feel an awak-
ened interest or curiosity. Action and reaction go
hand in hand; interest begets interest; knowledge
breeds knowledge. Once started in pursuit of nature
lore, we are pretty sure to keep on. When people
ask me, "How shall we teach our children to love
1

NATURE LORE

nature?" I reply: "Do not try to teach them at all.
Just turn them loose in the country and trust to
luck." It is time enough to answer children's ques-
tions when they are interested enough to ask them.
Knowledge without love does not stick; but if love
comes first, knowledge is pretty sure to follow. I do
not know how I first got my own love for nature,
but I suppose it was because I was born and passed
my youth on the farm, and reacted spontaneously
to the natural objects about me. I felt a certain
privacy and kinship with the woods and fields and
streams long before the naturalist awoke to self-
consciousness within me. A feeling of companion-
ship with Nature came long prior to any conscious
desire for accurate and specific knowledge about her
works. I loved the flowers and the wild creatures,
as most healthy children do, long before I knew
there was such a study as botany or natural history.
And when I take a walk now, thoughts of natural
history play only a secondary part; I suspect it is
more to bathe the spirit in natural influences than
to store the mind with natural facts. I think I know
what Emerson means when he says elsewhere in his
Journal that a walk in the woods is one of the secrets
for dodging old age. I understand what the poet
meant when he sang: —

"Sweet is the lore which Nature brings."

Nature lore — that is it. Not so much a notebook

2

NATURE LORE

full of notes of birds and trees and flowers as a heart
warmed and refreshed by sympathetic intercourse
and contact with these primal forces. When "the
press of one's foot to the earth springs a hundred
affections," as Whitman says, then one gets some-
thing more precious than exact science. Nature lore
is a mixture of love and knowledge, and it comes
more by way of the heart than of the head. We
absorb it with the air we breathe; it awaits us at
the side of the spring when we stoop to drink; it
drops upon us from the trees beneath which we
fondly linger; it is written large on the rocks and
ledges where as boys we prowled about on Sundays,
putting our hands in the niches or on the rocky
shelves older than Thebes or Karnak, touching care-
fully the phoebe's mossy nest, with its pearl-white
eggs, or noting the spoor of coon or fox, or coming
face to face with the oldest inhabitant of the region,
who saw the foundations of the hills laid and the
valleys scooped out — Geologic Time, whose tent
is the gray, overhanging rocks.

Many a walk I take in the fields and woods when
I gather no new facts and make no new observa-
tions; and yet I feel enriched. I have been for an
hour or more on intimate terms with trees and rocks
and grass and birds and with "Nature's primal
sanities"; the fragrance of the wild things lingers
about my mind for days.

Yet the close observation of nature, the training
3

NATURE LORE

of the eye and mind to read her signals, to penetrate
her screens, to disentangle her skeins, to catch her
significant facts, add greatly to the pleasure of a
walk and to life in the country. Natural history is
on the wing, and all about us on the foot. It hides
in holes, it perches on trees, it runs to cover under
the stones and into the stone walls; it soars, it sings,
it drums, it calls by day, it barks and prowls and
hoots by night. It eats your fruit, it plunders you?
garden, it raids your henroost, and maybe disturbs
your midnight slumbers.

At Woodchuck Lodge the woodchucks eat up my
peas and melons and dig under the foundations of
my house; the coons come down off the mountain
for sweet apples in my orchard. I surprise the foxes
among the cows on my early morning walks, or am
awakened in the dawn by the hue and cry of the
crows over a fox passing near, a little late in getting
back to the cover of the woods.

All such things add interest to country life. No
wild creature comes amiss, even though it rob your
henroost. I sometimes grow tender toward the wood-
chuck, even though he raids my garden; he is such
a characteristic bit of wild nature, creeping about
the fields, or sitting upon his haunches to see if
danger is near. He is of the earth, earthy, its true
offspring, steeped in its savors, hugging it close,
harmonizing with its soil and rocks, almost as liquid
as its fountains and as perennial as its grass.
4

NATURE LORE

I even get reconciled to the unsavory but gentle-
mannered skunk. He does not disturb me if I do
not disturb him, and if he chances to get into a trap
which I have set for some other animal, his compo-
sure is great, and he looks the injured innocent that
he is. Only I must keep my eye upon that tail when
it starts to rise over his back. There is a masked
battery there the noiseless shot of which is usually
well aimed, and is pretty sure to rout the foe whether
it hit the mark or not. Last summer the morning
light revealed one held by the leg in a steel trap
which I had set for rats that were helping them-
selves too freely to my roasting-ears. How sorry and
deprecatory he looked as I approached, slowly
straining to pull away from the cruel trap, and
turning upon me a half -appealing, half -reproachful
look ! By imitating his slow, gentle manners, I lifted
him and the trap to the mouth of a woodchuck hole,
into which he quickly crept, leaving his trap-held
foot outside. To release him then was an easy-
matter.

The skunk is a night prowler, and subsists mainly
upon insects and small rodents; but I would not
insure the birds' eggs or the young birds that hap-
pen to be in his path, though Mr. Seton says his
tame skunks do not know how to deal with hen's
eggs.

There is no prettier bit of natural history upon
four legs than the red fox, especially when you sur-
5

NATURE LORE

prise him in your morning walk, or he surprises you
in his. He, too, is a night prowler, but often he does
not get home till after sun-up. Early one October
morning, as I stood in the road looking out over the
landscape, a belated fox jumped over the wall a
few yards from me and loped unconcernedly along
parallel with the road, then turned and scaled the
fence, and crossed the road, and went bounding up
the hill toward the woods with a grace and ease im-
possible to describe. I suppose it was his massive
tail held level with his body that helped give the
idea of buoyancy. There was no apparent effort, as
when the farm dog climbs the hill, but the ease and
lightness that goes with floating and winged things.
It was indeed a pleasing spectacle, such as I had
not seen for many years. This winter the fox-hunter
with his hound will be trailing him from mountain
to mountain or from valley to valley, and he will
drift along over the snow, pausing now and then
to harken back along his trail, and reluctantly
expose himself to the eye of day in the broad open
spaces. Unless the day is wet and his tail and fur
get draggled, he will run from sun to sun without
much apparent fatigue. But if his burden gets too
great, he knows of holes in the rocks where he can
take refuge.

Any device that a plant or an animal has for get-
ting on in the world interests us; it brings the lower
orders nearer to us. We have our own devices and

NATURE LORE

makeshifts, and we like to know how it is with our
near or distant kin among the humbler orders. They
are ourselves not yet come to consciousness and to
the elective franchise. When the burr of the bur-
dock, reaching forth its arms for such a chance,
seizes on to your coat-tail, take your pocket-glass
and examine the minute hooks that tip the ends of
the seed-scales. They fish for you and your dog and
sheep and cow, and they catch you, not with one
hook, but with twenty or fifty, all at the same time.
But in this case it is not the fish that is caught, but
the fisherman. The plan of this fisherman is to go
right along with his captor, the farther the better,
and plant his progeny in a new territory. He lets go
his hold upon the parent plant at a mere touch, but
the touch gives him all the hold he wants. The
hooks are fine and hard, like minute, sharp horns,
not too much bent, — that would defeat the end, —
and perfectly smooth and finished. Instead of hooks,
the weed called "bidens" has the teeth or prongs
armed with barbs like a fish-hook, many of them on
each prong. They are quite as sure a trap as the
hooks of the burdock. Nature never fails to perfect
her device. Natural selection attends to that. Her
traps, her wings, her springs, her balloons, always
work. The wings of the maple keys, the ash, and the
linden are all different, but they all work.

Nature seems partial to the burdock. What extra
pains she seems to have taken to perpetuate this
7

NATURE LORE

worse than useless plant ! So far as I know, nothing
wants it or profits by it, though I have heard that
the petioles when cooked suggest salsify. It is
an Ishmaelite among plants. Every man's hand
is against it, and nearly every animal has reason
to detest it. Against their wills they are engaged
in sowing its seeds. The other day I found some
burrs matted on the tail of a woodchuck. Birds
have been found trapped by its hooks. Apparently
the only domestic animal that it does not seize hold
of is the pig; the stiff, smooth bristles of the pig
afford it a scant hold. It possesses more original sin
than any other plant I know. How it drives its roots
into the ground, defying your spading-f ork ! How it
seems to drive its burrs into your garments, or into
the hair of animals, refusing to let go till it is fairly
torn in pieces ! See the dog biting them out of his
hair with a kind of contemptuous fury. If you try
to help him, you must proceed very carefully and
deliberately or he will confound you with the bur-
dock and threaten the hand that seeks to aid him.
The burdock is vicious to the last, the old burr
clings with the same dogged determination as the
new. As a noxious weed it is a great success. Dis-
courage it by cutting it down you cannot. By hook
or by crook it is bound to persist. Its juice is bitter
and its fibre coarse. What a pity that so much na-
tive grit and enterprise cannot be turned to some
good account! The burrs are detached from the
8

NATURE LORE

parent stem almost as easily as are the quills from
the porcupine. Even while it is yet in bloom the
hooks will seize your coat-tails and the burr let go
its hold upon the stalk. The hooks are not attached
to the separate seeds, but are for the burrs as a
whole.

I know of no plant so difficult to prevent seeding.
Cut it down in July, and in August it has new shoots
loaded with burrs; cut these off, and in late Sep-
tember, or early October, it will evolve burrs di-
rectly from the stub of the old stalk, often in clusters
and bunches, without a leaf to mother them.

The plant if unhindered grows three or four feet
high and bears about five hundred burrs, which usu-
ally have twelve seeds each, or six thousand seeds
to the plant. Before the seeds are ripe they are
nearly the size and color of rye or peeled oats. Later
they shrink and turn dark. So far as I know, nothing
feeds upon them, save the larvae of some insect. I
have examined many burrs in October and found a
small white grub in a single seed in each of them.
Those good people who fancy that everything was
made 'for some special service to man, would have
trouble, I think, to find the uses of the burdock.

The advantage of that array of eager hooks to
the burdock (there are more than two hundred of
them on each burr) seems obvious, and yet here is
the yellow dock alongside of it, a relative of our
buckwheat, that has no hooks or other devices that
9

NATURE LORE

I can discover for scattering its seed, and yet it
appears to compete successfully with its more lusty
neighbor. One is about as abundant and trouble-
some to the gardener as the other. The seeds of the
yellow dock are like small, brown, polished buck-
wheat. I have never seen birds or squirrels eat them,
and what secret way they have of keeping up with
the burdocks I do not know. The burdock plants it-
self deeper in the ground, and defies your spading-
fork the more successfully.

I have always been curious to know why the birch
is the only one among our many forest-trees that
seems to have an ambition to plant itself upon a
rock. Other trees do so occasionally, but in the woods
I am familiar with I see ten birches upon rocks to
one of any other tree. They sit down upon the rock
as if it were a chair, and run their big roots off into
the ground, apparently entirely at home. How in
the first place they get enough foothold in the thin
coat of leaf mould that covers the rocks to develop
their roots and send them across the barren places
and down into the soil is a puzzle. I have seen a
small birch sapling that had obtained a foothold in
a niche on the side of a cliff send one large root
diagonally down across the face of the bare rock two
or more yards to the ground, where it took hold and
saved the situation. It was like a party going out
from a starving camp for relief. To equip and pro-
10

NATURE LORE

vision the party required some resources. "Yes,"
you may say, "and to know where to send it re-
quired some wit." But the roots of a tree always
tend downward, as the branches go upward. We are
at the end of our tether when we say that such is
the rule of nature.

The winged seeds always find their proper habi-
tat, as if they had eyes to see the way. The seeds of
the cat-tail flag find the ditches and marshes as un-
erringly as if they were convoyed. But this intelli-
gence, or self-direction, is only apparent. The wind
carries the seeds in all directions, and they fall every-
where, just as it happens, on the hills as well as in
the ditches, but only in the latter do they take root
and flourish. Nature often resorts to this wholesale
method. In scattering pollen and germs by the
aid of the wind, this is her method: cover all the
ground, and you will be sure to hit your mark
night or day.

After one or more windy days in November I am
sure to find huddled in the recess of my kitchen
door the branching heads of a certain species of wild
grass that grows somewhere on the hills west of me*
These heads find their ways across fields and high-
ways, over fences, past tree and bushy barriers,
down my steps, into the storm-house, and lie there,
waiting on the doorsill like things of life, waiting to
get into the house. Not one season alone, but every
season, they come as punctually as the assessor.
11

NATURE LORE

The watchful broom routs them; but the next day
or the next week there they are again, and now and
then one actually gets into the kitchen, slipping in
between your feet as you open the door. They bring
word from over the hills, and the word is: "Sooner
or later Nature hits her mark, hits all marks, be-
cause her aim is broadcast and her efforts ceaseless.
The wind finds every crack and corner. We started
on our journey not for your door, but for any door,
all doors, any shelter where we could be at rest; and
here we are!"

The purple loosestrife travels from marsh to
marsh in the Hudson River Valley, and as its seeds
are not winged, one may wonder how it gets about
so easily. It travels by the aid of wings, but not of
its own. Darwin discovered that the seeds of marsh
plants are often carried in the mud on the feet of
marsh birds. Years ago the loosestrife was in a large
marsh six miles south of me. A few years later a few
plants appeared in a pond near me, and now this
and near-by ponds and marshes are lakes of royal
purple in August. The loosestrife in late summer
makes such a grand showing with its vast armies of
tall, stately plants that one welcomes it to our un-
sightly marshes.

Only the present season did I observe a peculiar
feature of our wild clematis that a little close atten-
tion might have shown me at any time : its conspic-
uous appearance in September, after its flowers
19

NATURE LORE

have faded, which has earned for it the name of
"old-man's-beard," is owing to the fact that its
seeds have long, feathered tails to aid in their dis-
semination. It is the only seed I know of that the
wind carries by the tail. For some obscure reason
it does not carry it very far, or at least does not
plant it very successfully, as the clematis is rare
with me. Instead of being sown broadcast over the
hills and along the fences, it appears sparsely, at
wide intervals. It is such a beautiful vine both in
flowering-time and seeding-time that one wishes it
were more common.

The plants that travel by runners above or below-
ground are many; the plants that travel by walking
are few. I recall only the "walking fern," which
now seems to have walked away from my neighbor-
hood, and the black raspberry. Both are slow travel-
ers, but they do reach out and take steps.

Some trees can fight a much more successful
battle against browsing animals than can others.
The apple and the red thorn are notable examples.
Trees like the linden, which the cattle freely crop,
are easy victims; they put up no kind of fight. They
sprout freely, but they make no headway; their new
shoots are swept off every summer, and there the
low stool of the tree remains. The beech does better
amid grazing cattle, but I doubt if it ever wins the
fight. But the apple and the thorn, though the
13

NATURE LORE

struggle is a long and hard one, are sure to win in
the end; after many years one central shoot gets a
start from the top of the thorny mound of cropped
twigs, makes rapid strides upward, and in due sea-
son stands there the perfected tree. It will now bear
fruit for the short-sighted grazers that sought to
destroy it.

Our belief in the uniformity of nature, or in the
unchangeableness of natural law, is fundamental.
We act upon it every hour of our lives; our bodies
and minds are built upon that plan. Yet in detail,
and within narrow limits, nature is unequal, capri-
cious, incalculable. Can the farmer always foretell
his crops or forecast a wet season or a dry? The
problem is too complex, or our wits are too shallow.

Last season the hay- crop over a large part of the
country broke the record. The meadows everywhere,
and without any very obvious reason, doubled their
yield; the farmers' barns from Pennsylvania to
Maine were bursting with plenty, and at the end of
haying a row of stacks encompassed or flanked most
of them. The trees all seem to have had a super-
abundance of leaves. On my own grounds we raked
up and put under cover for stable use nearly double
the usual quantity from the same number of trees.
One important factor in this meadow and pasture
and tree fertility was probably the continued: deep
snows of last winter. About one hundred inches fell
in the Hudson Valley, and two feet at one fall in
14

NATURE LORE

December. Snow warms and fertilizes. How it
warmed up and quickened the mice beneath it! The
meadows yielded double their usual number of
meadow mice. Never have I seen in the spring evi-
dence of such a crop. Over a wide area, wherever 1
looked in meadow bottoms or grassy hillsides or
shaven lawns, there were the runways, the grassy
nests, the camping-grounds of this vast army of
meadow mice. They had evidently had a long
picnic. They had had the world under there all to
themselves. There had been nothing there to molest
or to make them afraid, — no fox, no cat, no owl,
no weasel, no mink, — and they had reveled in their
freedom and security. One could read it all in the
record upon the ground: their straw villages, their
round tunnels and sunken runways through the
grass, and the marks and refuse everywhere, as of
temporary social and holiday gatherings. Vast num-
bers of bushes and small trees, especially of the
apple order, were stripped of their bark to a height
of two or more feet from the ground. I even saw a
thicket of small young locusts with stems as white
as bleached cornstalks. Spring quickly put an end
to these winter festivities of the mice and compelled
them to take to their old retreats and darkened lives
under the ground. Evidently the old mother, in this
part of the country at least, took good care of her
children last winter, from grass and tree-roots to
mice and insects.

15

NATURE LORE

In her subtler physical forces, Nature often seems
capricious and lawless, probably on account of our
limited vision. We see the lightning cleave the air
in one blinding flash from the clouds to the earth,
often shattering a tree or a house on its way down.
Hence it is always a surprise to see the evidence
that the thunderbolt strikes upward as well as
downward. During an electric storm one summer
night an enormous charge of electricity came up
out of the earth under a maple- tree at the foot of
the hill below my study, scattering the sod, the
roots, and some small bushes like an explosion of
powder or dynamite; then it rooted around on the
ground like a pig, devouring or annihilating the
turf, making a wide, ragged, zigzag trench seven or
eight feet long down the hill in the ground, wrhen it
dived beneath the wagon track, five or six feet wide,
bursting out here and there on the surface, then
escaped out of the bank made by the plough on the
edge of the vineyard. Here it seems to have leaped
to the wire trellis of the grapevines, running along it
northward, scorching the leaves here and there,
and finally vented its fury on a bird-box that was
fastened to a post at the end of the row. It com-
pletely demolished the box, going a foot or more
out of its way to do so. The box was not occupied,
so there was not the anticlimax of a bolt of Jove
slaughtering house wrens or bluebirds. Maybe it
was the nails that drew the charge to the box. But
16

NATURE LORE

why it was rooting around down the hill when it
came out of the ground, instead of leaping upward,
is a puzzle. It acted like some blind, crazy material
body that did not know where to go. A cannon-shot
would have made a much smoother trench. Its
course en the ground was about twelve or fourteen
feet, half above and half below ground, and its leap
in the. air about six feet. Strange that a thing of
such incredible speed and power should yet have
time to loiter about and do such " fool stunts " !
This space-annihilator left a trail like a slow,
plodding thing. It burrowed like a mole, it delved
like a plough, it leaped and ran like a squirrel, and
it struck like a hammer. A spectator would have
been aware only of d blinding blaze of fire there
on the edge of the vineyard, and heard a crash that
would have stunned him; but probably could not
have told whether the bolt came upward or down-
ward. Lightning is much quicker than our special
senses.

On another occasion, beside my path through the
woods to Slabsides, I saw where a bolt had come up
out of a chipmunk's hole at the root of a tree, scat-
tered the leaves and leaf mould about, and appar-
ently disappeared in the air.

The lightning seems to have its favorite victims

among the trees. I have never known it to strike a

beech-tree. Hemlocks and pines are its favorites in

my woods. In other regions the oak and the ash re-

17

NATURE LOEE

ceive its attention. An oak on my father's farm wag
struck twice in the course of many years, the last
bolt proving fatal. The hard, or sugar, maple, is
frequently struck, but only in one instance have I
known the tree to be injured. In this case a huge
tree was simply demolished. Usually the bolt comes
down on the outside of the tree, making a mark as
if a knife had clipped off the outer surfaces of the
bark, revealing the reddish-yellow interior. In sev-
eral cases I have seen this effect. But a few summers
ago an unusually large and solid sugar maple in
my neighbor's woods received a charge that simply
reduced it to stovewood. Such a scene of utter de-
struction I have never before witnessed in the woods.
The tree was blown to pieces as if it had been filled
with dynamite. Over a radius of fifty or more feet
the fragments of the huge trunk lay scattered. It
was as if the bolt, baffled so long by the rough coat
of mail of the maple, had at last penetrated it and
had taken full satisfaction. The explosive force prob-
ably came from the instantaneous vaporization of
the sap of the tree by the bolt.

Some friends of mine were inoculated with curi-
osity about insects by watching the transformation
of the larvae of one of the swallow-tailed butterflies,
probably the Papilio asterias. As I was walking on
their porch one morning in early October I chanced
to see a black-and-green caterpillar about two inches
long posed in a meditative attitude upon the side
18

NATURE LORE

of the house a foot or more above the floor. The lat-
ter half of its body was attached to the board wall,
and the fore part curved up from it with bowed head.
The creature was motionless, and apparently ab-
sorbed in deep meditation. I stooped down and
examined it more closely. I saw that it was on the
eve of a great change. The surface of the board
immediately under the forward part of the body
had been silvered over with a very fine silken web
that was almost like a wash, rather than something
woven. Anchored to this on both sides, as if grown
out of the web,, ran a very fine thread or cord up
over the caterpillar's back, which served to hold it
in place; it could lean against the thread as a sailor
leans against a rope thrown around him and tied to
the mast. With bowed head the future butterfly
hung there, and with bowed head I waited and
watched. Presently convulsive movements began
to traverse its body; through segment after seg-
ment a wave of effort seemed to pass. It was a be-
ginning of the travail pains of transformation. Then
in a twinkling a slight rent appeared in the skin on
the curve of the back, revealing the new light-green
surface underneath, the first glimpse of the chrys-
alis. The butterfly was being born. Slowly, as labor
continued, the split in the skin extended down the
back and over toward the head till the outlines
of the chrysalis became plainly visible. I was wit-
nessing that marvelous transformation in nature of
19

NATURE LORE

a worm into a creature of a much higher and more
attractive order; the worm mask was being stripped
off, and an embryo butterfly revealed to view. In a
few minutes the head and forward part of the body
were free, and the latter half was fast becoming so.

The fine silken cord over the back served its pur-
pose well, holding the creature in place while it lit-
erally wriggled out of its skin, and when this feat
was accomplished, holding it hi position for its long
winter sleep. The skin behaved as if it were an in-
terested party in the enterprise; much better, I am
sure, than one's garments would if one were to try
to wriggle out of them without using one's limbs.
It folded back, it drew together, it finally became a
little pellet or pack of cast-off linen that clung to
the tail end of the chrysalis. To effect the final
detachment, and not lose the grip which this end
seemed to have on the board beneath it, required a
good deal of struggling, probably a full minute of
convulsive effort before the little bundle of cast-off
habiliments let go and dropped, a dark pellet the
size of a small pea. Then our insect was at rest, and
seemed slowly to contract and stiffen. It had woven
itself the silken loop to hold it to its support, and
it had struggled out of its old skin on its own initia-
tive or without being mothered or helped, as se
many newborn creatures are.

I did not have the pleasure of seeing it spin the
cord over the back which plays an important part

NATURE LORE

in the process of transformation, mechanical part
though it be; but a few days later, through the
patient and clear-seeing eyes of my friend Miss
Grace Humphrey, I witnessed this operation also.
She wrote: —

The day after you left we found another caterpillar,
a few feet away from yours. It had already made its
saddle-cord and shed its silken robe when we found it,
but we watched it change from gray-green to, not green-
ish-brown at all, but a grayness matching the concrete of
the house; for it was higher up than yours, on the ledge
below the window, hanging from the ledge against the
plaster wall. Its cord, too, apparently grew thicker just
at the ends, showing up more plainly for a bit; then like
yours it dried up and more perfectly matched its back-
ground. In neither of them did the cord continue to look
thicker.

The same day I found a third caterpillar under the
pear-tree, the very same kind, black with a wide green
stripe marking off each segment, and the rows of yellow
buttons. I carried it on a leaf up to the porch, where wo
put it under a glass bowl. But of course it thought that
an unfavorable place for housing itself for the winter, and
it would n't start, though we kept it there two days. At
noon, when freed, it climbed up the wall of the house
rather near yours (so they were photographed together),
and we held our breaths to see if it would start building
operations there. But no. Up the window-ledge it wormed
its way, and thence up and up, by the side of the window,
leaving all the way along a silky thread, and constantly
going back and forth with its head.

Mr. R knocked it down once to keep it in the sun-
light in order to photograph it, and it immediately climbed
21

NATURE LORE

up to the same spot, all the time leaving the white silk
thread. It kept climbing up and up till I had to get on a
chair to see it, and once I lost my balance and jumped
down, jarring it so that I knocked it to the floor. But up
it got, and climbed up, and spent the rest of the afternoon
alternately wriggling about to find just the right place
and making a silken background in one spot. The next
day it was still on the window-ledge. About eleven o'clock
it disappeared, and I hunted and hunted before I found
it on the under side of the porch railing! It was busily
making its network, but it made far less than either of the
others, and most of the time it was staying quite still.
The following day, about noon, it made its cord, anchor-
ing that at one end, then at the other, and going back
and forth to strengthen it. When the cord was ready, it
put its head through (the cord was made ahead of it) and
wriggled itself into the cord; it wriggled fully as hard as
when yours got itself out of its striped cover. So slowly
and carefully it made its way into place, being most
careful not to strain the cord. We watched breathlessly.
It pushed itself so far through that it was about half and
half, and then it had to wriggle backward till its head
and a third of its body was through, and two thirds not
through; and wriggling back took far greater care than
forward. It stayed just that way, all huddled up for
nearly four days, when about eight o'clock in the morn-
ing it split and divested itself of its robe. It is matching
the brown woodwork like yours, and there all three
are!

The incomparable French natural-historian and
felicitous writer Henri Fabre has witnessed what I
never have: he has seen the caterpillar build its case
or cocoon. In the instance which he describes it was

22

NATURE LORE

the small grub of one of the Psyches. The first thing
the creature did was to collect bits of felt or pith
from the cast-off garment of its mother. These it
tied together with a thread of its own silk, forming
a band, or girdle, which it put around its own body,
uniting the ends. This ring was the start and founda-
tion of the sack in which it was to incase itself.
The band was placed well forward, so that the in-
sect could reach its edge by bending its head up and
down and around in all directions. Then it proceeded
to widen the girdle by attaching particles of down
to its edges. As the garment grew toward its head,
the weaver crept forward in it, thus causing it to
cover more and more of its body till in a few hours
it covered all of it, and the sack was complete, a
very simple process, and, it would seem, the only-
possible one. The head, with the flexible neck,
which allowed it to swing through the circle, was
the loom that did the weaving, the thread issuing
from the spinneret on the lip. Did the silk issue from
the other end of the body, as we are likely to think
it does, the feat would be impossible. I suppose a
woman might knit herself into her sweater in the
same way by holding the ball of yarn in her bosom
and turning the web around and pulling it down
instead of turning her body — all but her arms;
here she would be balked. To understand how a
grub weaves itself a close-fitting garment, closed
at both ends, from its own hair, or by what sleight
23

NATURE LORE

of hand it attaches its cocoon to the end of a branch,
I suppose one would need to witness the process.

In October these preparations and transforma-
tions in the insect world are taking place all about
us, and we regard them not. The caterpillars are
getting ready for a sleep out of which they awaken
in the spring totally different creatures. They tuck
themselves away under stones or into crevices, they
hang themselves on bushes, they roll themselves up
in dry leaves, and brave the cold of winter in tough
garments, woolly or silky, of their own weaving.
Some of them, as certain of the large moths, do
what seems like an impossible stunt: they shut
themselves up inside a tough case, or receptacle,
and attach it by a long, strong bit of home-made
tape to the end of a twig, so that it swings freely in
the wind. I have seen the downy woodpecker trying
to break into one of these sealed-up, living tombs
without avail. Its free, pendent position allows it to
yield to the strokes of the bird, and all efforts to
penetrate the case are in vain.

How the big, clumsy worm, without help or hands,
wove itself into this bird-proof case, and hung itself
up at the end of a limb, would be a problem worth
solving. Of course it had its material all within its
own body, so is not encumbered with outside tools
or refractory matter. It was the result of a mechan-
ical and a vital process combined. The creature
knew how to use the means which Nature had given
24

NATURE LORE

it for the purpose. Some of the caterpillars weave the
chrysalis-case out of the hairs and wool of their sum-
mer coats, others out of silk developed from within.

On October mornings I have had great pleasure
in turning over the stones by the roadside and
lifting up those on the tops of the stone walls and
noting the insect-life preparing its winter quarters
under them. The caterpillars and spiders are busy.
One could gather enough of the white fine silk from
spider tents and cocoons to make a rope big enough
to hang himself with'. The jumping spider may be
found in his closely woven tent. Look at his head
through a pocket-glass, and he looks like a minia-
ture woodchuck. His smooth, dark-gray, hairy pate
and two beadlike eyes are very like; but his broad,
blunt nose is unlike. It seems studded with a row of
five or six jewels; but these jewels are eyes. What
extra bounty Nature seems to have bestowed upon
some of these humble creatures! We find our one
pair of eyes precious; think what three or four pairs
would be if they added to our powers of vision pro-
portionately! But probably the many-eyed spiders
and the flies with their compound eyes see less
than we do. This multitude of eyes seems only an
awkward device of Nature's to make up for the
movable eye like our own.

In some of the spiders' cocoons under the stones
on the tops of the walls you will find masses of small
pink eggs, expected to survive the winter, I suppose,
25

NATURE LORE

and hatch out in the spring. The under side of a
stone on the top of a stone wall seems like a very
cold cradle and nursery, but the caterpillars in their
shrouds survive here, and may not the spiders' eggs?
In October you will find the caterpillars in all
stages of making ready for winter. They first cover
a small space on the stone upon which they rest
with a very fine silken web; it looks like a delicate
silver wash. This is the foundation of the coming
cocoon, but I could never catch any of them in the
act of weaving their cocoons. I brought one to the
house and kept it under observation for several
days, but it was always passive whenever I glimpsed
it through the crack between the stones. The nights
were frosty and the days chilly, but some time dur-
ing the twenty-four hours the creature's loom was
at work. One morning a thin veil of delicate silver
threads, through which I could dimly see the worm^
united the two stones. It seemed to be in the midst
of a little thicket of vertical, shining silken threads.
It was like some enchantment. A little later the
thicket, or veil, had developed into a thin cradle in
which lay the chrysalis and the cast-off skin of the
worm. This caterpillar had been disturbed a good
deal and made to waste some of its precious silk,
so that its cocoon was finally a thin, poor one. "Life
under a stone " forms a chapter in Nature's infinite
book of secrecy which most persons skip, but which
is well worth perusal.

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

I. LIVE NATURAL HISTORY

RECENTLY, while reading Thoreau's Journal,
I wondered why his natural history notes, with
which the Journal abounds, interested me so little.
On reflection I saw that it was because he contented
himself with making only a bare statement of the
fact — he did not relate it to anything else or inter-
pret its meaning. There is a great deal of bald, dry,
natural history of this kind in his Journal which he
never wove together into a living texture.

When he simply tells me, " I see a downy wood-
pecker tapping on an apple-tree and hear when I
have passed his sharp, metallic note," he has not
interested me in the woodpecker. He must string
the bird on his thoughts in some way; he must re-
late him to my life or experience. The facts of nat-
ural history become interesting the moment they
become facts of human history. All the ways of the
wild creatures in getting on in the world interest us,
because we have our ways of getting on in the world.
All their economies, antagonisms, failures, devices,
appeal to us for the same reason.

Thoreau's description of the battle of the ants in
"Walden" is intensely interesting because it is so
27

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

human. Valor, heroism, stir us in whatever field
they appear.

As I write, a little chippie comes among the vines
on my porch looking for nesting-material. The old
spring impulse to increase and multiply is strong
upon her; she tugs at the strings that tie the vines,
she scrutinizes every branch for some shred or bit
that will serve her purpose. She interests me and I
lend her a hand by releasing some of the strings
which she could not manage. I am familiar with her
problem, as we all are. The cliff swallows daintily
gathering mud at the edges of a puddle in the road,
lifting their wings and standing on tip-toe as it
were, to guard against soiling their plumage, is a
sight I always pause to witness.

Yesterday I sat for an hour in the woods near a
dead maple-stub in which a flicker was excavating
her nest. At intervals the hammering would cease,
and the bird, on her guard against the approach of
stealthy enemies, would appear at the opening and
take a long look. Finally, when she discovered me,
she came out and went off in the woods, and seemed
to have some conversation with her mate.

All the industries and ways and means among the
animals are interesting. A chipmunk carrying nuts
and seeds to her den, a red squirrel cutting off the
chestnut burrs, too impatient to wait for the frost
to open them on the trees, even a woodchuck carry-
ing dry grass and stubble into his hole for a nest,

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

arrest the attention. The currents of life everywhere,
the lampreys piling up the stones in the creek-bot-
tom for a nest, the muskrat in the fall building his
aquatic tent with mouthfuls of sedge-grass, excite
our interest. In May all the seed-eating and nut-
eating creatures are hard put to it to obtain food.
The red squirrel comes in front of my door and eats
the sterile catkins of the butternut, and they evi-
dently help tide him over this season of scarcity.
One morning a gray squirrel in his quest for a break-
fast invaded the tree. The red squirrel soon spied
him and hustled him out of it very spitefully. The
gray went undulating along the top of the stone
wall, the picture of grace and ease, while the red,
with tail kinked, was in hot pursuit.

To find an interest in natural history one must
add something more than the fact, one must see the
meaning of the fact.

I feel no especial interest in the kingbird that
alights on the telephone-wire in front of me, but
when he climbs high up in the air and picks some
invisible insect from out the apparently empty
space, and brings it back to his perch, I am inter-
ested. It was a characteristic act. The fox is inter-
esting for his cunning, the skunk and porcupine
for their stupidity. We see in the last two how the
weapons of defense which Nature has so liberally
bestowed upon them have left no room for the exi-
gencies of life to develop their wits.
29

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

The novel, the extraordinary, the characteristic,
the significant, always interest us. The human bore
is a person who has no conception of what consti-
tutes the interesting; he or she pours out his own
private experiences upon us as if they were of the
same interest to us as to him. How prone we are to
think our special ailments are of universal interest,
but how rarely is this the case !

One afternoon two cuckoos, flying side by side,
passed my door. In the morning they passed again
in the same way and going in the same direction.
I became interested. I said, This means business.
Following the course they took, I went straight to
a clump of red-thorn trees a hundred yards distant,
and there was the nest, with young more than half-
grown. They were black-billed cuckoos. The mother
bird chided me in that harsh, guttural, staccato note
of hers, and kept her place on a branch near the
nest. One of the three young got out of the rude
nest and perched on a twig, holding its head or neck
nearly vertical. Its pronounced stubbly quills and
peculiar attitude gave it' an unbirdlike look. The
cuckoos seem to tune their nesting with that of the
tent-caterpillars upon which they feed. As the sup-
ply of these orchard pests, and many other similar
pests, had been nearly exterminated by the cold,
wet May of the previous year (1917), it would have
been very interesting to know how the birds made

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

up for the deficiency — what was the substitute.
But I could not find out.

Nearly every cuckoo's nest I have happened to
find has been on a thorn-bush. Why do they choose
this tree? What special enemy are they on their
guard against? Our cuckoos evidently lay their eggs
at longer intervals than the other birds. In the
present case one of the young was clearly several
days older than its fellows. This fact, with the rude
skeleton of a nest, suggests some reminiscence of
the habits of the European cuckoo, a parasitical
bird.

The wild life around one becomes interesting the
moment one gets into the current of it and sees its
characteristics and by-play. The coons that come
down off the mountain into my orchard for apples
on the chill November nights; the fox that prowls
about near me and wakens me by his wild, vulpine
squall at two o'clock in the morning; the woodchucks
burrowing in my meadows and eating and tangling
my clover, and showing sudden terror when they
spy me peeping over the stone wall or coming with
my rifle; the chipmunk leaving a mound of freshly
dug earth conspicuous by the roadside, while his
entrance to his den is deftly concealed under the
grass or strawberry-vines a few yards away; the red
squirrel spinning along the stone wall, his move-
ments apparently controlled by the electric-like
waves of energy that run along his tail and impart
31

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

to it a new curve or kink every moment, or chipping
up my apples and pears for the seed, and snickering
and cachinnating as if in derision when I appear
upon the scene — how much there is in the lives of
all these creatures that we should find keenly inter-
esting if we knew how to get at it !

This rainy morning I saw two red squirrels make
a wild dash through my garden, one in hot pursuit
of the other. A woven wire fence was in the way;
the fleeing one cleared one of the meshes neatly, but
his pursuer, intent on his enemy, blundered and
doubled up against the obstruction and was delayed
a moment — how much I wanted to know what the
mad racing meant, and how it resulted! The red
squirrel is a perky, feather-edged creature, the hot-
test and most peppery rodent we have in our woods
and orchards, every hair of him like a live wire,
and many of his movements are to me quite unac-
countable.

The search for the elements of the interesting in
nature and in life, in persons and in things — well,
is an interesting search.

II. THE BARN SWALLOW

How winsome is the swallow! How tender and
pleasing all her notes ! Is it boyhood that she brings
back to us old men who were farm boys in our
youth? We saw the swallows play out and in the
wide-open barn-doors in haying-time, their steel-

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

blue backs and ruddy throats glancing in the sun,
and their gentle, unctuous wing gossip falling on our
ears. Their coarse nests — mud without, but feath
ers within — were plastered on the rafters in the
peak, and when the young were out we saw them
perched in a row on the ridge-board, resting from
their first flights.

Now, as I sit within my barn-door outlook, the
same swallows are playing before me, untouched by
the many long years that have passed, giving the
impression of perpetual youth; the same tender,
confiding calls, the same darting, wayward flight,
the same swift coursings above the shorn meadows;
darlings of the ripe summer air, aerial feeders,
reaping an invisible bounty above us, touching the
earth in quest of a straw or a feather, or for clay
for the nest, tireless of wing, and impotent of foot,
as of old.

The swallow has two words, one for her friends,
and one for her foes, — "Wit, wit, wit," uttered so
confidingly for the friends, and "Sleet, sleet, sleet,"
uttered sharply for the foes.

Instead of the ridge-board of my youth, the swal-
low now has a new perch, the telephone and tele-
graph wires strung along the highway.

Shall we look upon the swallow as a songster?
Virgil refers to him as such, and when he perches
upon the telephone-wire in front of my barn-door
and fills and refills his mouth with a succession of

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

those squeaking, smacking, unctuous notes, his
throat swelling and throbbing, his beak opening and
shutting, glancing now to the right, now to the left,
as if to see if his mate is near, he looks, and we may
say is, the songster that Virgil called him. The
performance lacks resonance and the fluty quality
of our regular song-birds; it seems to be made in the
cheeks or by the softer parts of the mouth. The
beak is too small and feeble to play much of a part
in its production. What a waxy, adhesive sort of a
sound it is ! I wonder if the swallow has the organ
called the syrinx common to the regular song-birds.
If one may compare sound with substance I should
say that the swallow's strain seems viscous and
turbid rather than liquid and translucent like that
of the acknowledged song-birds. It is less a musical
performance for its own sake 'than a note of self-
congratulation, or of salutation to its fellows. The
bird does not lift up his head and pour out his strain
as if for the joy of singing; he delivers it as a
speaker delivers his discourse, looking about him
and laying the emphasis here and there in a con-
fident and reassuring tone.

The cliff swallows and the purple martins and bank
swallows are much more social and gregarious than
the barn swallows. I do not remember ever to have
seen more than one nest of the latter at a time in
the peak of the barn, though I am told that in New
England they nest in colonies. I do not know that
34

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

they migrate in large flocks like the other swallows.
I only know that their season with us ends about
the 20th of August, and that they pass the winter in
South America, where I hope they have as happy a
time as they do here. If anything preys upon them
while they are here I do not know what it is. They
could laugh at the swiftest hawk. They share the
distrust of all birds toward the cat, though I have
never known Puss to catch one. They will swoop
down spitefully if she lingers about their haunts,
and I have seen her try to strike them with her paw,
but have never known her to succeed.

My swallows have a pretty habit, when the day
is chilly and cloudy or stormy, of collecting their
brood on the little ledges or shelves above the win-
dows on the south gable of the house and feeding
them there. The young sit there in a huddled row,
apparently looking off in the fields of air where their
parents are coursing for insects, and when they see
them returning, they break out in a happy and
grateful chatter. The old weather-worn gable is for
the moment the scene of a very pleasing and ani-
mated incident in swallow life.

III. INSECTS

One reason why all truthful and well-written
books upon insects interest us more than the sub-
ject would seem to warrant is that no creature is
small in print, or in a book. Print is the great equal-
35

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

izer; it magnifies the little and it minimizes the big.
When Fabre focuses our attention upon a wasp or
a spider, his account engrosses our minds as com-
pletely as an account of a lion or an elephant would;
the insect is singled out and separated from the
thousand forms and entanglements that belittle it
in field and wood; it alone occupies the page. The
lion can do no more. It is precisely like putting the
flea under the microscope. The wars, loves, indus-
tries, activities of Fabre's little people are de-
scribed in terms and images which we use in giving
an account of man and the greater beasts. The
words make them big. A moment ago a minute red
insect, a mere moving point, revealed itself to my
eye, crawling across this sheet of paper. It was so
frail and small that a bare touch of my finger, as
my pocket-glass showed, crushed it. If I could give
you its life history, and show its relation to other
insects, it would stand out on my page as distinctly
as if it had been a thousand times larger: its travels,
its adventures, its birth, its death, would fill the
mind's eye; the reader would not have to grope for it
on my page, as my eye did when it discovered it.

There is no little and no big to nature, and there
is none to the mind. We think of the whirling solar
system as easily as of a whirling top. The space that
separates us from the fixed stars is no more to the
mind than the space that separates us from our
neighbors. In like manner the atoms and the mole-

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

cules of matter, when we have once conceived of
them, are as easy of apprehension as are the rocks
and the mountains. The theory of their nature and
activities figures as large in our minds as that of the
planetary systems. The stories of many of Fabre's
flies and beetles interest us as much, and are quite
as significant, as the story of Jack the Giant-Killer
or of Robinson Crusoe. His history of the tumble-
bug amuses and interests us as much as that of any
of Plutarch's heroes. But see the tumblebug there
in the path or by the roadside, struggling with his
little black globe, and he is little more than the
microscopic spider on my sheet of paper. His his-
tory must be written large, magnified by printer's
type, before it comes fully within our ken or has
power to move us.

Fabre's excursions afield are as entertaining and
suggestive as Roosevelt's excursions into the big-
game lands of Africa. With the true artist size does
not count. The same is true of all the minutiae of
nature — flowers, insects, birds, fishes, frogs. We
are bound to magnify them by describing them in
the terms of our experience with larger bodies.

A wasp will capture its prey, paralyze it, and leave
it upon the ground and then go a few yards away
and dig its hole. Then it will come back, look its
game over, take its measure, and apparently con-
clude that the hole is too small, then go back and
enlarge it, sometimes making several trips of this
37

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

kind. Its attitudes and procedure would lead you
to say that the wasp was thinking and calculating
as a mechanic would under similar circumstances.
In another case the Sphex wasp has need to para-
lyze the mouth-parts of the prey she is carrying, so,
as she bestrides it and drags it also by its antennae,
it cannot grip her with its mandibles or impede her
progress by seizing upon blades of grass by the way.
Like a skillful surgeon, the wasp knows just what
to do, knows in what part of the head to insert her
sting to produce the desired effect.

"To know everything and to know nothing,"
says Fabre, "according as it acts under normal or
exceptional conditions : that is the strange antithesis
presented by the insect race."

But we must never credit the insect with under-
standing as the result of cogitation; it knows noth-
ing; its life is a series of acts fatally linked together.
The mind of the insect is the mind of Nature; it is
action and not reflection. The plant does not con-
sciously select the elements in the soil or the air
that it needs, as we select; the vital chemistry in
the organism does the selecting. But the moment
we name what it is that does the selecting, we are
caught in a trap — we want to know what prompted
it to the act. We cannot find the under side of these
things, because there is no under side, or upper side
either, any more than there is to the earth.

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

IV. THE DOG

The most wonderful thing about the dog is not
his intelligence, but his capacity for loving. We can
call it by no other name. The more you love your
dog, the more your dog loves you. You can win your
neighbor's dog any time by loving him more than
your neighbor does. He will follow you to the ends
of the earth if you love him enough. He may become
so attached to you that he fairly divines your
thoughts, not through his own power of thought,
but through his intense sympathy and the free-
masonry of love.

He is the ideal companion because he gives you
a sense of companionship without disturbing your
sense of solitude. Your mind is alone, but your heart
has company. He is below your horizon, but some-
thing comes up from his life that mingles with your
own. This friend walks with you, or sits with you,
and yet he does not come between you and your
book, or between you and the holiday spirit you
went out to woo. He is the visible embodiment of
the holiday spirit; he shows you how to leave dull
care behind; he goes forth with you in the spirit of
eternal youth, sure that something beautiful or curi-
ous or adventurous will happen at any turn of the
road. He finds no places dull, he is alert with expect-
ancy every moment.

In him you have good-fellowship, always on tap,

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

as it were. Say the word, and he bounds to your
side, or leads the way to the woods.

My dog enjoys a walk more than I do; his nature-
study is quite as real as mine is, though of a totally
different kind; the sense of smell that plays such
a part in his excursions, plays little or none in mine,
and the eye and the mind, which contribute so much
to my enjoyment, are almost a blank with him.
He enjoys the open fire, too, and a warm, soft bed,
and a good dinner. All his purely animal enjoy-
ments are as keen or keener than mine, but has he
any other?

How different his interest in cats is from mine,
and in dogs, and in men ! He is not interested in the
landscape as a whole : I doubt very much if he sees
it at all; but he is interested hi what the landscape
holds for him — the woodchuck-hole, or the squir-
rel's den, or the fox's trail. His life is entirely the
life of the senses, and on this ground we meet and
are boon companions.

If he has any mind-life, and ideas, if he ever looks
back over the past, or forward into the future, I see
no evidence of it. When there is nothing doing he
sleeps; apparently he could sleep all the time, if
there were nothing better going on.

v. WOOD WAIFS

Those little waifs from the woods — chickadees,
nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, and brown creep-
40

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

ers — that come in winter and feed on the suet on
the maple in front of my window, how much com-
pany they are to me! What thoughts and associa-
tions they bring with them! What a pleasure to
have them as my guests on the old tree! The cold,
naked, snow-choked woods — what can those little
pilgrims get there? I think the nuthatch touches me
the most closely; he is pretty to look upon, and his
voice is that of a child, soft, confiding, contented, and
his ways are all ways of prettiness — his sliding up
and down and round the tree, his pose, with head
standing out at right angles to the body, which en-
ables him to see the approach of danger as readily
as if he were perched on a horizontal limb, his
pretty habit of making a vise of a crevice in the bark
to hold a nut. All his notes and calls are pleasing;
he is incapable of a harsh sound. His call in the
spring woods when we made maple sugar in my boy-
hood — "yank, yank, yank" — how it comes back
to me! Not a song, but a token — the spirit of the
leafless maple-woods finding a voice.

And now for two or three weeks I have had an-
other guest at the free-lunch table, the prettiest
of them all, the red-breasted nuthatch from the
North, and he so appreciates my bounty that he
has taken up his temporary abode here in a wren's
box a few yards from the lunch-table. One cold day
I saw him go into the box and remain for some time.
So at sundown I went and rapped on his retreat, and
41

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

out he came. He spends nearly half his time at the
suet lunch. How pretty he is! and as spry as a
cricket; about two thirds the size of the white-
breasted, he is quicker in his movements. He glides
round the old tree like a spirit. He does not seem
to have the extra joint in his neck that his larger
cousin has; he does not point his bill straight out
from the tree at right angles to it, but turns his head
more from side to side. I call him my baby bird, he
is so suggestive of babyhood. It is amusing to see
him come down upon a fragment of hickory-nut
when he has wedged it into the bark. Each blow is
seconded by a flash of his wings, as if the tiny wings
reinforced the head. One day I put out a handful of
cracked hickory-nuts, and he hustled them all away
as fast as he could carry them, hiding them here and
there, in the vineyard, in the summer-house, on the
woodpile, whether with a view to hoarding them for
future use, or whether in obedience to some blind
natural instinct, I know not. The white-breasted
does the same thing, but I never see either of them
looking up their hidden stores.

Two downy woodpeckers, male and female, but
evidently not mated at this season, come many
times a day. The male is a savage little despot; no
other bird shall dine while he does. He bosses the
female, the female bosses the big nuthatch, the nut-
hatch bosses the red-breast, the red-breast bosses
the chickadees, the chickadees boss the brown
42

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

creeper and the juncos. Not one bird is hospitable
to another. Each seems to look upon the suet as its
special find.

The more inclement the season, the more our
sympathy goes out to our little wild neighbors who
face it and survive it. The tracks of the mice and
the squirrels in the winter woods have an interest
for one they could not possibly have in summer were
they visible then. O frost and snow, where is your
victory? O white and barren solitude, thou art not
all-potent! How distinctly I remember where our
schoolboy path through the woods crossed an old
bush fence, and the fresh prints in the snow of the
feet of the red and gray squirrels to whom the old
fence served as a highway. Those sharp, nervous,
hurried tracks and the silent, snow-choked woods,
— silent except when the frost pistols snapped now
and then, — how vivid the picture of it all is in my
memory!

t The delicate tracks of the wood mice and their
tunnels up through the snow here and there beside
our path — they are still unfaded in my mind, after
a lapse of more than seventy years. Occasionally the
stealthy track of a red fox would cross our trail both
in field and wood — never hurried like that of the
mice and the squirrels and the hares, but slow —
a watchful, listening walker in the midnight winter
solitude.

Wild life in winter is like black print on a white
43

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

page — he who runs may read. In summer it is
print on a green or brown or gray page. The little
waifs from the woods that come to my door day
after day in winter, so active and cheery and brave-
hearted, — heroic little figures that ask no favors
of me or any one, yet who complacently help them-
selves to the proffered suet and nuts, and go their
way like a merry gypsy band, — they little know
that they are my benefactors as much as I am
theirs.

VI. AN INTERESTING PLANT

In our walks we note the most showy and beau-
tiful flowers, but not always the most interesting.
Who, for instance, pauses to consider that early
species of everlasting, called in the botany Anten-
naria, that grows nearly everywhere by the roadside
and about poor fields? It begins to be noticeable in
May, its whitish downy appearance, its groups of
slender stalks crowned with a corymb of paperlike
buds, contrasting with the fresh green of surround-
ing grass or weeds. It is a member of a very large
family, the Composite, and does not attract one
by its beauty, but it is interesting because of its
many curious traits and habits. For instance, it is
dioecious, that is the two sexes are represented by
separate plants; and what is more curious, these
plants are usually found separated from each other
in well-defined groups, like the men and women in
44

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

an old-fashioned country church. Always in groups,
here a group of females, there a few yards away a
group of males. The females may be known by their
more slender and graceful appearance and, as the
season advances, by their outstripping the males
in growth. Indeed, they become real amazons in
comparison with their brothers. The stanainate, or
male, plants grow but a few inches high; the heads
are round and have a more dusky or freckled ap-
pearance than do the pistillate; and as soon as they
have shed their pollen their work is done, they are of
no further use, and, by the middle of May or before,
their heads droop, their stalks wither, and their gen-
eral collapse sets in. Then the other sex, or pistillate
plants, seem to have taken a new lease of life; they
wax strong, they shoot up with the growing grass
and keep their heads above it; they are alert and
active, they bend in the breeze, their long, tapering
flower-heads take on a tinge of color, and life seems
full of purpose and enjoyment with them. I have
discovered, too, that they are real sun- worshipers;
that they turn their faces to the east in the morning
and follow the sun in his course across the sky till
they all bend to the west at his going down. On the
other hand, their brothers have stood stiff and
stupid and unresponsive to any influence of sky
or air so far as I could see, till they drooped and
died.

Another curious thing is that the females seem
•45

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

vastly more numerous — I should say almost ten
times as abundant. You have to hunt for the males;
the others you see afar off. In my usual five-minute
morning walk to the post-office I pass several
groups or circles of females in the grass by the road-
side. I note how they grow and turn their faces sun-
ward. I observe how alert and vigorous they are
and what a purplish tinge comes over their mammae-
shaped flower-heads, as June approaches. I looked
for the males; to the east, west, south, none could be
found for hundreds of yards. On the north, about
two hundred feet away, I found a small colony of
meek and lonely males. I wondered by what agency
fertilization would take place, by insects or by the
wind. I suspected it would not take place, no insects
seemed to visit the flowers, and the wind surely
could not be relied upon to hit the mark so far off,
and from such an unlikely corner too. But by some
means the vitalizing dust seemed to have been con-
veyed. Early in June the plants began to shed their
down, or seed-bearing pappus, still carrying their
heads at the top of the grass, so that the breezes
could have free access to them and sow the seeds
far and wide.

As the seeds are sown broadcast by the wind, I was
at first puzzled to know how the two sexes were
kept separate, and always in little communities,
till I perceived what I might have read in the bot-
any, that the plant is perennial and spreads by
46

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

offsets and runners like the strawberry. This would,
of course, keep the two kinds in groups by them-
selves.

VII. NATURE NEAR HOME

After long experience I am convinced that the
best place to study nature is at one's own home,
— on the farm, in the mountains, on the plains,
by the sea, — no matter where that may be. One
has it all about him then. The seasons bring to his
door the great revolving cycle of wild life, floral
and faunal, and he need miss no part of the show.

At home one should see and hear with more fond-
ness and sympathy. Nature should touch him a little
more closely there than anywhere else. He is better
attuned to it than to strange scenes. The birds
about his own door are his birds, the flowers in his
own fields and wood are his, the rainbow springs its
magic arch across his valley, even the everlasting
stars to which one lifts his eye, night after night,
and year after year, from his own doorstep, have
something private and personal about them. The
clouds and the sunsets one sees in strange lands
move one the more they are like the clouds and sun-
sets one has become familiar with at home. The
wild creatures about you become known to you as
they cannot be known to a passer-by. The traveler
sees little of Nature that is revealed to the home-
stayer. You will find she has made her home where
47

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

you have made yours, and intimacy with her there
becomes easy. Familiarity with things about one
should not dull the edge of curiosity or interest.
The walk you take to-day through the fields and
woods, or along the river-bank, is the walk you
should take to-morrow, and next day, and next.
What you miss once, you will hit upon next time.
The happenings are at intervals and are irregular.
The play of Nature has no fixed programme. If she
is not at home to-day, or is in a non-committal
mood, call to-morrow, or next week. It is only when
the wild creatures are at home, where their nests or
dens are made, that their characteristics come out.
If you would study the winter birds, for instance,
you need not go to the winter woods to do so; you
can bring them to your own door. A piece of suet
on a tree in front of your window will bring chicka-
dees, nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, brown creep-
ers, and often juncos. And what interest you will
take in these little waifs from the winter woods that
daily or hourly seek the bounty you prepare for
them ! It is not till they have visited you for weeks
that you begin to appreciate the bit of warmth and
life they have added to your winter outlook. The
old tree-trunk then wears a more friendly aspect.
The great inhospitable out-of-doors is relenting a
little; the cold and the snow have found their
match, and it warms your heart to think that you
can help these brave little feathered people to win
48

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

the fight. Not a bit daunted are they at the fearful
odds against them; the woods and groves seem as
barren as deserts, the earth is piled with snow, the
trees snap with the cold — no stores, no warmth
anywhere, yet here are

"these atoms in full breath
Hurling defiance at vast death."

They are as cheery and active as if on a summer
holiday.

The birds are sure to find the tidbit you put out
for them on the tree in front of your window, be-
cause, sooner or later, at this season, they visit
every tree. The picking is very poor and they work
their territory over and over thoroughly. No tree
in field or grove or orchard escapes them. The won-
der is that in such a desert as the trees appear to be
in winter, in both wood and field, these little adven-
turers can subsist at all. They reap a, to us, invisible
harvest, but the rough dry bark of the trees is not
such a barren waste as it seems. The amount of ani-
mal food in the shape of minute insects, eggs, and
larvae tucked away in cracks and crevices must be
considerable, and, by dint of incessant peeping and
prying into every seam and break in the bark, they
get fuel enough to keep their delicate machinery
going.

The brown creeper, with his long, slender, de-
curved bill, secures what the chickadee, with his
49

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

short, straight bill, fails to get. The creeper works
the trunk of the tree from the ground up in straight
or in spiral lines, disappearing quickly round the
trunk if he scents danger. He is more assimilatively
colored than any of his winter congeners, being like
a bit of animated bark itself in form and color, hence
his range and movements are more limited and rigid
than those of the woodpeckers and chickadees. The
creeper is emphatically a tree-trunk bird. His ene-
mies are shrikes and hawks, and the quickness with
which he will dart around the trunk or flash away
to another trunk shows what the struggle for life
has taught his race.

The range of the nuthatch is greater than that of
the creeper, in that he takes in more of the branches of
the tree. He is quite conspicuously colored in his suit
of black, light gray, blue, and white, and his power
of movement is correspondingly varied. His bill is
straight and heavier, and has an upward slant with
the angle of the face that must serve him some useful
purpose. He navigates the tree-trunks up and down
and around, always keeping an eye on every source
of danger in the air about him. I have never seen
a nuthatch molested or threatened by any bird of
prey, but his habitual attitude of watchfulness while
exploring the tree-trunks, with head bent back and
beak pointing out at right angles, shows clearly what
the experience of his race has taught him. Danger
evidently lurks in that direction, and black and
50

NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS

white and blue are revealing colors in the neutral
woods. But, however much the nuthatch may be
handicapped by its coloration, it far outstrips the
creeper in range and numbers. Its varied diet of nuts
and insects no doubt gives it a more vigorous con-
stitution, and makes it more adaptive. It is the
vehicle of more natural life and energy.

How winter emphasizes the movements of wild
life ! The snow and the cold are the white paper upon
which the print is revealed. A track of a mouse, a
bird, a squirrel, or a fox shows us at a glance how
the warm pulse of life defies the embargo of winter.
From cracks and rents in the frigid zone which
creep down upon us at this season there issue tiny
jets of warm life which play about here and there
as if in the heyday of summer. The woods snap and
explode with the frost, the ground is choked with
snow, no sign of food is there for bird or beast, and
yet here are these tiny bundles of cheer and con-
tentment in feathers — the chickadees, the nut-
hatches, and their fellows.

EACH AFTER ITS KIND

HOW sharply most forms of life are differenti-
ated! The die that stamps each of them is
deeply and clearly cut. As I sit here in my bush
camp under the apple-trees, I see a chipmunk spin-
ning up the stone wall a few yards away. His alert
eye spies me, and he pauses, sits up a few moments,
washes his face with that hurried movement of his
paws over it, then hesitates, turns, and goes spin-
ning back down the stone fence. He seems to sniff
danger in me. He is living his life, he has a distinct
sphere of activity; in this broad, rolling landscape
he is a little jet of vital energy that has a character
and a purpose of its own; it is unlike any other. How
unlike the woodchuck in the next field, creeping
about the meadow, storing up his winter fuel as fat
in his own flabby body, or the woodpecker on the
apple-tree, or the noisy crow flying by overhead!
Each is a manifestation of the psychic principle in
organic nature, but each is an individual expression
of it. The chemistry and the physics of their lives
are the same, but how different the impressions
they severally make upon us ! Life is infinitely vari-
ous in its forms and activities, though living things
all be made of one stuff.

52

EACH AFTER ITS KIND

Soon after the chipmunk there appears a red
squirrel going down the wall — half-brother to the
chipmunk but keyed to a much higher degree of
intensity. He moves in spasms and sallies and is
frisky and impish, where the chipmunk is sedate
and timid. His arboreal life requires different qual-
ities and powers; he rushes through the tree-tops
like a rocket ; he travels on bridges of air ; he is nearly
as much at home amid the branches as are the birds,
much more so than is the flying squirrel, which has
but one trick, while the red squirrel has a dozen.
That facile tail, now a cockade, now a shield, now an
air-buoy; that mocking dance, those derisive snick-
ers and explosions ; those electric spurts and dashes
— what a character he is — the very Puck of the
woods !

Yesterday a gray squirrel came down the wall
from the mountain — a long, softly undulating line
of silver-gray; unhurried, alert, but not nervous,
pausing now and then, but striking no attitudes;
silent as a shadow and graceful as a wave — the
very spirit of the tall, lichen-covered birches and
beeches of the mountain-side. When food is scarce
in the woods he comes to the orchards and fields for
insects and wild fruit, and any chance bit of food
he can pick up. What a contrast he makes to the
pampered town squirrel, gross in form and heavy
in movement! The town squirrel is the real rustic,
while the denizen of the woods has the grace and
53

EACH AFTER ITS KIND

refinement. Domestication, or semi-domestication,
coarsens and vulgarizes the wild creatures; only in
the freedom of their native haunts do they keep
the beauty and delicacy of form and color that
belong to them.

A nuthatch comes upon the apple-tree in front of
me, uttering now and then his soft nasal call, and
runs up and down and round the trunk and
branches, his boat-shaped body navigating the
rough surfaces and barely touching them. Every
moment or two he stops and turns his head straight
out from the tree as if he had an extra joint in his
neck. Is he on the lookout for danger? He pecks a
little now and then, but most of the food he is in
quest of seems on the surface and is very minute.
A downy woodpecker comes upon the same tree.
His movements are not so free as those of the nut-
hatch. He does not go head foremost down the tree;
his head is always pointed upward. He braces and
steadies himself with his tail, which has stiff spines
at the ends of the quills. By a curious gymnastic
feat he drops down the trunk inch by inch, loosing
his hold for a moment and instantly recovering it.
He cannot point his beak out at right angles to the
tree as can the nuthatch. In fact, he is not a tree-
creeper, but a wood-pecker, and can penetrate fairly
hard wood with his beak. His voice has a harsh,
metallic ring compared with that of the soft, child-
like call of the nuthatch. His only contribution to
54

EACH AFTER ITS KIND

the music of the spring is his dry-limb drum with
which he seeks to attract his mate when the love
passion is upon him.

Oh, these wild creatures! How clear-cut, how
individual, how definite they are! While every
individual of a species seems stamped with the
same die, the species themselves, even in closely
allied groups, are as distinct and various in their
lineaments and characteristics as we can well
conceive. Behold the order of rodents, including
the squirrels, the hares, the rabbits, the wood-
chucks, the prairie-dogs, the rats and mice, the
porcupines » the beavers — what diversity amid the
unity, what unlikeness amid the sameness ! It makes
one marvel anew at the ingenuity and inventive-
ness of Nature — some living above ground, some
below, some depending upon fleetness of foot and
keenness of eye for safety, some upon dens and
burrows always near at hand; the porcupine upon
an armor of barbed quills, the beaver upon his
dam and his sharpness of sense. If they all de-
scended from the same original type-form, how
that form has branched like a tree in the fields —
dividing and dividing and dividing again! But the
likeness to the tree fails when we consider that no
two branches are alike; in fact, that they are as
unlike as pears and peaches and apples and berries
and cherries would be on the same tree — all of the
same family, but diverging widely in the species.
55

EACH AFTER ITS KIND

The ground-dwellers, such as woodchucks and
prairie-dogs and gophers, have many similar habits,
as have the tree-dwellers and the hares and rabbits.
That any of these rodent groups will branch again
and develop a new species is in harmony with the
doctrine of evolution. But these evolutionary proc-
esses are so slow that probably the whole span of
human history would be inadequate to measure one
of them.

Nearly all the animal forms that we know are
specialized forms, like our tools and implements —
shaped for some particular line of activity. Man is
the most generalized of animals; his organization
opens to him many fields of activity. The wood-
pecker must peck for his food, the kingfisher must
dive, the flycatcher must swoop, the hawk must
strike, the squirrel must gnaw, the cat must spring,
the woodcock must probe, the barnyard fowls must
scratch, and so on, but man is not thus limited. His
hands are tools that can be turned to a thousand
uses. They are for love or war, to caress or to smite,
to climb or to swim, to hurl or to seize, to delve or
to build.

The organization of most animals has special
reference to their mode of getting a living. That is
the dominant need, and stamps itself upon every
organism.

Man is a miscellaneous feeder and a world-wide
traveler, hence all climes and conditions are his.
56

EACH AFTER ITS KIND

He is at home in the arctics or the tropics, on the
sea, on the land, and in the air; a fruit-eater, a
grain-eater, a flesh-eater, a nut-eater, an herb-
eater; his generalized anatomy and his diversified
mentality make the whole earth his dwelling-place,
and all its thousands of treasure-houses are made
available for his needs.

What diversity in unity among the hawks! Con-
trast these two familiar species which are nearly of
a size — the marsh hawk and the hen, or red-tailed,
hawk. The marsh hawk has the longer tail, and
the back of the male is bluish-gray. We see it in
summer beating up and down, low over the fields
and meadows, its attention fixed upon the ground
beneath it. At the same time we may see the hen-
hawk soaring aloft, sweeping leisurely around in
great circles, or climbing higher in easy spirals, ap-
parently abandoning itself to the joy of its aerial
freedom. The hen-hawk is a bird of leisure in con-
trast with its brother of the marshes. We rarely see
it hunting; it is either describing its great circles
against the sky, apparently in the same mood that
the skater is in who cuts his circles and figures upon
the ice; or else it sits perched like a statue high up
on some dead branch in the edge of the forest, or
on some tree by the roadside, and sees the sum-
mer hours go by. Solitude, contemplation, a sense
of freedom, seem to be its chief delight, while we
rarely see the marsh hawk except when it is intent
57

EACH AFTER ITS KIND

upon its game. It haunts the fields and meadows
over a wide area like a spirit, up and down and
around and across it goes, only a few feet above the
ground, eyeing sharply every yard of surface be-
neath it, now and then dropping down into the
grass, never swooping or striking savagely, but
halting and alighting rather deliberately, evidently
not in pursuit of a bird, but probably attracted
by field mice. The eye follows its course with pleas-
ure; such industry, such ease of movement, such
deliberation, such a tireless quest over the summer
fields — all contribute to make a picture which we
look upon with interest. It is usually the female
which we see on such occasions; she is larger and
darker in color than the male, and apparently upon
her falls the main support of the family. Said family
is usually composed of three or four young in a nest
upon the ground in a marsh, where it is not easy for
the pedestrian to reach. The hunting habits of the
hen-hawk are quite different. It subsists largely, not
upon hens or poultry as its name would seem to in-
dicate, but upon field mice and other small rodents,
which it swoops down upon from a point in the air
above them, where it hovers a moment on beating
wing, or from the top of some old stub or dry branch
in the meadow. Its nest is usually placed fifty or
more feet from the ground in some large forest tree,
and is made of dry twigs and branches. I have
found but one marsh hawk's nest, and not more
58

EACH AFTER ITS KIND

than once in twenty years do I find the nest of a
hen-hawk.

Two species of our smaller hawks present about
as sharp a contrast as do the two I have just de-
scribed — the sparrow hawk and the pigeon hawk.
It is very doubtful if the sparrow hawk ever kills
sparrows, its food being largely insects, though the
pigeon hawk is not above killing pigeons — at least
of pursuing them with murderous intent. It is the
terror of the smaller birds, capturing robins, high-
holes, bluebirds, thrushes, and almost any other
it can get its claws upon. If you see a small bird
hotly pursued by a brown hawk, the chances are
that it is the song or field sparrow making desperate
efforts to reach the cover of some bush or tree. On
such occasions I have seen the pursued bird take
refuge in a thorn-bush the branches of which had
been cropped by the cattle till they were so thick
and thorny that you could hardly insert your hand
among them. In such cases the hawk is, of course,
defeated, but he will beat about the bush spitefully
in his vain attempts to dislodge his game.

The sparrow hawk is the prettiest of our hawks,
and probably the most innocent. One midsummer
when I was a boy on the old farm we had a sudden
visitation of sparrow hawks; there must have been
at least fifty about the old meadow at one time,
alighting upon the fence-stakes or hovering on the
wing above the grass and swooping down upon the
59

EACH AFTER ITS KIND

big, fat grasshoppers. It was a pretty sight and un-
usual, as I have witnessed it only once in my life.

Our birds often differ in their habits much more
than in their forms and colors. We have two fly-
catchers singularly alike in general appearance —
namely, the phosbe-bird and the wood pewee — •
which differ widely in their habits of life. The phoebe
is the better known because she haunts our porches
and sheds and bridges, and not infrequently makes
herself a nuisance from the vermin with which her
nest, especially her midsummer nest, often swarms.
She is an early-spring bird, and her late March or
early April call, repeating over and over the name
by which she is known, is a sound that every coun-
try boy delights in. The wood pewee is a little less
in size, but in form and color and manners is almost
the duplicate of phoebe. She is a much later arrival,
and need not be looked for till the trees begin to
turn over their new leaves. Then you may hear her
tender, plaintive cry amid the forest branches —
also a repetition of her own name, but with a sylvan
cadence and tenderness peculiarly its own. It differs
from the phcebe's note just as the leafy solitudes of
the woods differ from the strong, open light and the
fence-stakes and ridge-boards where the phoebe
loves to perch. It is the voice or cry of a lonely,
yearning spirit, attuned to great sweetness and
tenderness. The phcebe has not arrested the atten-
tion of any of our poets, but the pewee has inspired
60

EACH AFTER ITS KIND

at least one fine woodsy poem. I refer to Trow-
bridge's "Pewee."

The nesting-habits of the two birds differ as
widely as do their songs. The phoebe is an architect
tvho works with mud and moss, using the latter in
a truly artistic way, except when she is tempted, as
she so often is, to desert the shelving rocks by the
waterfalls, or along the brows of the wooded slopes,
for the painted porches of our houses or the sawed
timbers of our outbuildings, where her moss is in-
congruous and gives away the secret she so care-
fully seeks to guard. You cannot by any sleight-of-
hand, or of beak, use moss on a mud nest so as to
blend it with a porch or timber background. But
in the niches of the mossy and lichen-covered over-
hanging rocks of the gorges and mountain-sides,
where her forbears practiced the art of nest-build-
ing, and where she still often sets up her "procre-
ant cradle," what in the shape of a nest can be
more pleasing and exquisite than her moss-covered
structure? It is entirely fit. It is Nature's own handi-
work, and thoroughly in the spirit of the shelving
rocks.

The pewee uses no mud and no moss. She uses
lichens and other wild, woodsy things, and her nest
is one of the most trim and artistic of wild-bird
structures; it is as finished and symmetrical as an
acorn-cup. It is cup-shaped, and sits upon a hori-
zontal branch of beech or maple as if it were a grown
61

EACH AFTER ITS KIND

part of the tree — not one loose end or superfluous
stroke about it.

Two other species of our flycatchers, the kingbird
and the great crested, differ in form and coloration
as much as they do in life-habits — the kingbird
being rather showily clad in black, gray, and white,
with a peculiar, affected, tip-wing flight, and haunt-
ing the groves and orchards, while the great crested
flycatcher is rufous or copper-colored, with a tinge
of saffron-yellow, haunting the woods and building
its nest in a cavity in a tree, occasionally in or-
chards.

Nature repeats herself with variations in two of
our sparrows — the song sparrow, and the vesper
sparrow, or grass finch. The latter is a trifle the
larger and of a lighter mottled gray-and-brown
color, and has certain field habits, such as skulking
or running in the grass and running along the high-
way in front of your team. It does not wear the
little dark-brown breastpin that the song sparrow
does, and it has two lateral white quills in its tail
which are conspicuous when it flies. Its general
color, and these white quills, suggest the skylark,
and it was doubtless these features that led a male
lark which once came to me from overseas, and
which I liberated in a wide field near home, to pay
court to the vesper and to press his suit day after
day, to the obvious embarrassment of the sparrow.

The song sparrow is better known than the vesper
62

EACH AFTER ITS KIND

to all country people, because it lives nearer our
dwellings. It is an asset of every country garden and
lawn and near-by roadside, and it occasionally
spends the winter in the Hudson River Valley when
you have, carelessly or thoughtfully, left a harvest
of weed-seeds for it to subsist upon. It comes before
the vesper in the spring, and its simple song on a
bright March or April morning is one of the most
welcome of all vernal sounds. In its manners it is
more fussy and suspicious than the vesper, and it
worries a great deal about its nest if one comes any-
where in its vicinity. It is one of the familiar, half-
domesticated birds that suggest home to us wher-
ever we see it.

The song sparrow is remarkable above any other
bird I know for its repertoire of songs. Few of our
birds have more than one song, except in those cases
when a flight song is added during the mating sea-
son, as with the oven-bird, the purple finch, the
goldfinch, the meadowlark, and a few others. But
every song sparrow has at least five distinct songs
that differ from one another as much as any five
lyrics by the same poet differ. The bird from its
perch on the bush or tree will repeat one song over
and over, usually five or six times a minute, for two
or three minutes, then it will change to another
strain quite different in time and measure, and re-
peat it for a dozen or more times; then it drops into
still another and yet another and another, each

EACH AFTER ITS KIND

song standing out distinctly as a new combination
and sequence of sparrow notes. And a still greater
wonder is that no two song sparrows have the same
repertoire. Each bird has his own individual songs,
an endless and bewildering variety inside a general
resemblance. The song sparrow you hear in Maine
or Canada differs widely from the one you hear in
the Hudson River Valley or on the Potomac. Even
in the same neighborhood I have never yet heard
two sparrows whose songs were exactly alike,
whereas two robins or meadowlarks or bluebirds
or wood thrushes or vesper sparrows or goldfinches
or indigo-birds differ from one another in their songs
as little as they do in their forms and manners, and
from one end of the country to the other there is
little or no variation.

During ten days by the sea one July I was greatly
entertained by a song sparrow which had a favorite
perch on the top of a small red cedar that stood in
front of the cottage where I was staying. Four fifths
of the day at least it was perched upon this little
cedar platform, going through its repertoire of song,
over and over. Getting its living seemed entirely a
secondary matter; the primary matter was the song.
I estimated that it sang over two thousand times
each day that I heard it. It had probably been sing-
ing at the same rate since May or earlier, and would
probably keep it up till August or later. The latter
part of July and the whole of August of the same
64

EACH AFTER ITS KIND

season I spent at Woodchuck Lodge in the Catskills,
and across the road in front of the porch there, on
the top of an old plum-tree, a song sparrow sang
throughout the greater part of each summer day,
as did the one by the sea, going through its reper-
toire of five or six songs in happy iteration. It, too,
sang about three hundred times an hour, and nearly
always from the same perch, and, as most assuredly
was the case with the seaside bird, singing within
earshot of its brooding mate. But its songs bore only
the most remote general resemblance to those of its
seaside brother. When, early in August, the mowing-
machine laid low the grass in the meadow on the
edge of which the old plum-tree stood, the singer be-
haved as if some calamity had befallen him, as no
doubt there had. He disappeared from his favorite
perch, and I heard him no more except at long
intervals below the hill in another field.

The vesper sparrow has a wilder and more pleas-
ing song than the song sparrow, but has no variety;
so far as my ear can judge, it has only the one sweet,
plaintive strain in which it indulges while perched
upon a stone or boulder or bare knoll in a hill pas-
ture or by a remote roadside. The charm of its song
is greatly enhanced by the soft summer twilight in
which it is so often uttered; it sounds the vespers of
the fields. The vesper sparrow is invariably a ground-
builder, placing its nest of dry grass in the open
with rarely a weed or tuft of grass to mark its site.

EACH AFTER ITS KIND

Hence its eggs or young often fall victims to the
sharp-eyed, all-devouring crows, as they lead their
clamorous broods about the summer pastures. The
song sparrow more frequently selects its nesting-
place in a grassy or mossy bank by the roadside or
in the orchard, when it does not leave the ground
to take to a low bush or tangle of vines on the lawn,
as it so frequently does.

We have two other sparrows that are close akin
— indeed, almost like fruit on the same tree — yet
with clear-cut differences. I refer to the "chippie,"
or social sparrow, and the field, or, as I prefer to
call it, the bush sparrow — two birds that come so
near being duplicates of each other that in my boy-
hood I recognized only the one species, the chip-
ping sparrow, so much at home in the orchard and
around the dooryard. Few country persons, I fancy,
discriminate the two species. They are practically
of the same size and same manners, but differ in
color. The bush sparrow is more russet, has a russet
beak and feet and legs, and its general appearance
harmonizes more with country surroundings. The
two species differ in about the same way that the
town-dweller differs from his rustic brother. But in
the matter of song there is no comparison — the
strain of the bush sparrow being one of the most
tender and musical of all our sparrow songs, while
that of the "chippie," or the hair-bird, as it is often
called, is a shuffling repetition of a single unmusical
66

EACH AFTER ITS KIND

note. The wild scenes and field solitudes are reflected
in the bush sparrow's song, while that of the chip-
pie is more suggestive of the sights and sounds
near the haunts of men. The pure, plaintive, child-
like strain of the bush sparrow — a silver scroll of
tender song — heard in the prophetic solitude of
the remote fields on a soft April or May morning is
to me one of the most touching and pleasing bits of
bird-music to be heard in the whole round year.

The swarms of small sparrows that one sees in
August and September in the vineyards and along
the bushy highways are made up mostly of bush
sparrows. There is a little doubt but that these
birds at times peck and haggle the grapes, which
" Chippie " never does. The bush sparrow builds the
more compact and substantial nest, using more dry
grass and weedy growths, and less horsehair. It is
the abundant use of hair that has given "Chippie"
the name of the hair-bird.

The hair-bird appears the more strikingly dressed
of the two. Its black beak and legs, the darker lines
on its plumage, the well-defined, brick-red patch
on its head easily separate it to the careful observer
from the other species. When you have learned
quickly to discriminate these two kinds of sparrows,
you have made a good beginning in conquering the
bird kingdom.

NATURE LEAVES

I. IN WARBLER TIME

FT1HIS early May morning, as I walked through
-I- the fields, the west wind brought to me a sweet,
fresh odor, like that of our little white sweet violet
(Viola blanda). It came probably from sugar maples,
just shaking out their fringelike blossoms, and from
the blooming elms. For a few hours, when these trees
first bloom, they shed a decided perfume. It was the
first breath of May, and very welcome. April has
her odors, too, very delicate and suggestive, but
seldom is the wind perfumed with the breath of
actual bloom before May. I said, It is warbler time;
the first arrivals of the pretty little migrants should
be noted now. Hardly had my thought defined itself,
when before me, in a little hemlock, I caught the
flash of a blue, white-barred wing; then glimpses of
a yellow breast and a yellow crown. I approached
cautiously, and in a moment more had a full view
of one of our rarer warblers, the blue-winged yellow
warbler. Very pretty he was, too, the yellow cap,
the yellow breast, and the black streak through the
eye being conspicuous features. He would not stand
to be looked at long, but soon disappeared in a
near-by tree.

NATURE LEAVES

The ruby-crowned kinglet was piping in an ever-
green tree not far away, but him I had been hearing
for several days. With me the kinglets come before
the first warblers, and may be known to the attentive
eye by their quick, nervous movements, and small,
oiive-gray forms, and to the discerning ear by their
hurried, musical, piping strains. How soft, how
rapid, how joyous and lyrical their songs are! Very
few country people, I imagine, either see them or
hear them. The powers of observation of country
people are seldom fine enough and trained enough.
They see and hear coarsely. An object must be big
and a sound loud, to attract their attention. Have
you seen and heard the kinglet? If not, the finer in-
ner world of nature is a sealed book to you. When
your senses take in the kinglet they will take in a
thousand other objects that now escape you.

My first warbler in the spring is usually the yel-
low redpoll, which I see in April. It is not a bird of
the trees and woods, but of low bushes in the open,
often alighting upon the ground in quest of food.
I sometimes see it on the lawn. The last one I saw
was one April day, when I went over to the creek to
see if the suckers were yet running up. The bird
was flitting amid the low bushes, now and then
dropping down to the gravelly bank of the stream.
Its chestnut crown and yellow under parts were
noticeable.

The past season I saw for the first time the golden-

NATURE LEAVES

winged warbler — a shy bird, that eluded me a
long time in an old clearing that had grown up with
low bushes. The song first attracted my attention,
it is so like in form to that of the black-throated
green-back, but in quality so inferior. The first dis-
tant glimpse of the bird, too, suggested the green-
back, so for a time I deceived myself with the notion
that it was the green-back with some defect in its
vocal organs. A day or two later I heard two of
them, and then concluded my inference was a hasty
one. Following one of the birds up, I caught sight of
its yellow crown, which is much more conspicuous
than its yellow wing-bars. Its song is like this, 'n-'n
de de de, with a peculiar reedy quality, but not at all
musical, falling far short of the clear, sweet, lyrical
song of the green-back. Nehrling sees in it a resem-
blance to that of the Maryland yellow-throat, but
I fail to see any resemblance whatever.

One appreciates how bright and gay the plumage
of many of our warblers is when he sees one of them
alight upon the ground. While passing along a wood
road in June, a male black-throated green came
down out of the hemlocks and sat for a moment on
the ground before me. How out of place he looked,
like a bit of ribbon or millinery just dropped there !
The throat of this warbler always suggests the finest
black velvet. Not long after I saw the chestnut-
sided warbler do the same thing. We were trying
to make it out in a tree by the roadside, when it
70

NATURE LEAVES

dropped down quickly to the ground in pursuit of
an insect, and sat a moment upon the brown surface,
giving us a vivid sense of its bright new plumage.

When the leaves of the trees are just unfolding,
or, as Tennyson says,

" When all the woods stand in a mist of green.
And nothing perfect,"

the tide of migrating warblers is at its height. They
come in the night, and in the morning the trees are
alive with them. The apple-trees are just showing
the pink, and how closely the birds inspect them in
their eager quest for insect food! One cold, rainy
day at this season Wilson's black-cap — a bird that
is said to go north nearly to the Arctic Circle —
explored an apple-tree in front of my window. It
came down within two feet of my face, as I stood by
the pane, and paused a moment in its hurry and
peered in at me, giving me an admirable view of its
form and markings. It was wet and hungry, and it
had a long journey before it. What a small body to
cover such a distance!

The black-poll warbler, which one may see about
the same time, is a much larger bird and of slower
movement, and is colored much like the black and
white creeping warbler with a black cap on its head.
The song of this bird is the finest in volume and most
insectlike of that of any warbler known to me. It
is the song of the black and white creeper reduced,
high and swelling in the middle and low and faint
71

NATURE LEAVES

at its beginning and ending. When one has learned
to note and discriminate the warblers, he has made a
good beginning in his ornithological studies.

II. A SHORT WALK

One midsummer afternoon I went up to "Scot-
land " and prowled about amid the raspberry-bushes,
finding a little fruit, black and red, here and there,
and letting my eyes wander to the distant farms and
mountains. The wild but familiar prospect dilated
and rested me. As I lingered near the torn edge of the
woods in a tangle of raspberry-bushes, I caught a
glimpse of some large bird dropping suddenly to the
ground from a tall basswood that stood in the edge
of the open, where it was hidden from my view.
Was it a crow or a hawk? A hawk, I guessed, from
its manner of descent. I threw a stone after waiting
some moments for it to reappear, but it made no
sign. Then I moved slowly toward the spot, and
presently up sprang a hen-hawk and, uttering its
characteristic squeal, circled around near me and
then alighted not far off. A young hawk, I saw it
was, and quite unsophisticated. Presently, as I
made my way along, just touching the edge of the
woods, a covey of nearly full-grown partridges burst
up out of the berry -bushes, ten or twelve of them,
and went humming up into the denser woods, some
of them alighting in the trees, whence they stretched
their necks to watch me as I passed along. The dust
72

NATURE LEAVES

flew from their plumage as they jumped up, as if
they had been earthing their wings.

My next adventure was with a young but fully
grown bluebird, which crawled and fluttered away
from my feet as I came upon it hi the open. It
could not fly, and I easily picked it up. Its plumage
showed the mingled blue and speckled brown of the
immature bird. I looked it over, but could see no
mark or sign of injury to wing or body. Its plum-
age was unruffled and its eye bright, but its move-
ments were feeble. Was it ill or starved? I could not
tell which, probably the latter. It may have got
lost from the brood and was not yet able to forage
for itself. I left it under the edge of a rock, where
the fresh blue of the ends of its wings and tail held
my eye a moment as I turned to go.

Farther along, under some shelving rocks, I came
upon two empty phcebes' nests — a relic of bird-life
that always gives a touch to the rocks that I delight
in. I find none of these nests placed lower than
three feet from the ground, and always in places
that seem to be carefully chosen with reference to
enemies that can reach and climb.

Two or three woodchucks, which I bagged with
my eye, completed my afternoon's adventures.

IN FIELD AND WOOD

I. INTENSIVE OBSERVATION

fllHE casual glances or the admiring glances that
JL we cast upon nature do not go very far in mak-
ing us acquainted with her real ways. Only long and
close scrutiny can reveal these to us. The look of
appreciation is not enough; the eye must become
critical and analytical if we would know the exact
truth.

Close scrutiny of an object in nature will nearly
always yield some significant fact that our admir-
ing gaze did not take in. I learned a new fact about
the teazel the other day by scrutinizing it more,
closely than I had ever before done; I discovered
that the wave of bloom begins in the middle of the
head and spreads both ways, up and down, whereas
in all other plants known to me with flowering
heads or spikes, except the goldenrod and the steeple-
bush, the wave of bloom begins at the bottom and
creeps upward like a flame. In the goldenrod it
drops down from branch to branch. In vervain, in
blueweed, in Venus' looking-glass, in the mullein,
in the evening-primrose, and others, the bloom
creeps slowly upward from the bottom.
74

IN FIELD AND WOOD

But with the teazel the flame of bloom is first kin-
dled in the middle; to-day you see the head with this
purple zone or girdle about it, and in a day or two
you see two purple girdles with an open space be-
tween them, and these move, the one up and the
other down, till the head stands with a purple base
and a purple crown with a broad space of neutral
green between them.

This is a sample of the small but significant facts
in nature that interest me — exceptional facts that
show how nature at times breaks away from a fixed
habit, a beaten path, so to speak, and tries a new
course. She does this in animal life too.

Huxley mentions a curious exception to the general
plan of the circulation of the blood. In all animals
that have a circulation the blood takes one definite
and invariable direction except in the case of one
class of marine animals, called ascidians; in them
the heart, after beating a certain number of times,
stops.and begins to beat the opposite way, so as to
reverse the current; then in a moment or two it
changes again and drives the blood in the other
direction.

All things are possible with nature, and these
unexpected possibilities or departures from the gen-
eral plan are very interesting. It is interesting to
know that any creature can come into being without
a father, but with only a grandfather, yet such is
the case. The drone in the hive has no father; the
75

IN FIELD AND WOOD

eggs of the unfertilized queen produce drones — that
is, in producing males, the male is dispensed with. It
is to produce the neuters or the workers that the
service of the male is required. The queen bee is
developed from one of these neuter eggs, hence her
male offspring have only a grandfather.

The chipmunk is an old friend of my boyhood and
my later years also, but by scrutinizing his ways a
little more closely than usual the past summer I
learned things about this pretty little rodent that
I did not before know. I discovered, for instance,
that he digs his new hole for his winter quarters in
midsummer.

In my strolls afield or along the road in July I
frequently saw a fresh pile of earth upon the grass
near a stone fence, or in the orchard, or on the edge
of the woods — usually a peck or two of bright,
new earth carefully put down in a pile upon the
ground without any clue visible as to where it prob-
ably came from. But a search in the grass or leaves
usually disclosed its source — a little round hole
neatly cut through the turf and leading straight
downward. I came upon ten such mounds of earth
upon a single farm, and found the hole from which
each came, from one to six feet away. In one case,
in a meadow recently mowed, I had to explore the
stubble with my finger over several square yards of
surface before I found the squirrel's hole, so undis-
turbed was the grass around it; not a grain of soil
76

IN FIELD AND WOOD

had the little delver dropped near it, and not the
slightest vestige of a path had he made from the
tunnel to the dump.

And this feature was noticeable in every case; the
hole had been dug several yards under ground and
several pecks of fresh earth removed to a distance of
some feet without the least speck of soil or the least
trace of the workman's footsteps showing near the
entrance; such clean, deft workmanship was remark-
able. All this half -bushel or more of earth the squir-
rel must have carried out in his cheek pockets, and
he must have made hundreds of trips to and fro from
his dump to his hole, and yet if he had flown like a
bird the turf could not have been freer from the
marks of his going and coming; and he had cut down
through the turf as one might have done with an au-
ger, without bruising or disturbing in any way the
grass about the edges. It was a clean, neat job in
every case, so much so that it was hard to believe
that the delver did not come up from below and
have a back door from whence he carried his soil
some yards away.

Indeed, I have heard this theory stated. " Look
under the pile of earth," said a friend who was with
me and who had observed the work of the pocket
gopher in the West, " and you will find the back door
there." But it was not so. I carefully removed four
piles of earth and dug away the turf beneath them,
and no hole was to be found.
77-

IN FIELD AND WOOD

One day we found a pile of earth in a meadow, and
near it a hole less than two inches deep, showing
where the chipmunk had begun to dig and had
struck a stone; then he went a foot or more up the
hill and began again; here he soon struck stones as
before, then he went still farther up the hill, and
this time was successful in penetrating the soil. This
was conclusive proof that these round holes are cut
from above and not from below, as we often see in
the case of the woodchuck-hole. The squirrel ap-
parently gnaws through the turf, instead of dig-
ging through, and carries away the loosened mate-
rial in his mouth, never dropping or scattering a
grain of it. No home was ever built with less lit-
ter, no cleaner dooryard from first to last can be
found.

The absence of anything like a trail or beaten
way from the mound of earth to the hole, or anything
suggesting passing feet, I understood better when,
later in the season, day after day I saw a chipmunk
carrying supplies into his den, which was in the turf
by the roadside about ten feet from a stone wall. He
covered the distance by a series of short jumps, ap-
parently striking each time upon his toes between
the spears of grass, and leaving no marks whatever
by which his course could be traced. This was also
his manner of leaving the hole, and doubtless it was
his manner in carrying away the soil, from his tun-
nel to the dumping-pile. He left no sign upon
78

IN FIELD AND WOOD

the grass, he disturbed not one spear about the en-
trance.

There was a mystery about this den by the road-
side of which I have just spoken — the pile of earth
could not be found; unless the roadmaker had re-
moved it, it must have been hidden in or beneath
the stone wall.

And there was a mystery about some of the other
holes that was absolutely baffling to me. In at least
four mounds of fresh earth I found freshly dug
stones that I could not by any manipulation get
back into the hole out of which they had evidently
come. They were all covered with fresh earth, and
were in the pile of soil with many other smaller
stones. In one case a stone two inches long, one
and one half inches broad, and one half inch thick
was found. In two other cases stones of about the
same length and breadth but not so thick were
found, and in neither case could the stone be forced
into the hole. In still another case the entrance to
the den was completely framed by the smaller roots
of a beech-tree, and in the little mound of earth near
it were two stones that could only be gotten back
into the hole by springing one of these roots, which
required considerable force to do. In two at least
of these four cases it was a physical impossibility for
the stones to have come out of the hole from whence
the mound of earth and the lesser stones evidently
came, yet how happened they in the pile of earth
79

IN FIELD AND WOOD

'freshly earth-stained? The squirrel could not have
carried them in his cheek pouches, they were so
large; how, then, did he carry them?

The matter stood thus with me for some weeks;
I was up against a little problem in natural history
that I could not solve. Late in November I visited
the scene of the squirrel-holes again, and at last got
the key to the mystery : the cunning little delver cuts
a groove in one side of the hole just large enough
to let the stone through, then packs it full of soil
again. When I made my November visit it had been
snowing and raining and freezing and thawing, and
the top of the ground was getting soft. A red squir-
rel had visited the hole in the orchard where two of
the largest stones were found in the pile of earth,
and had apparently tried to force his way into the
chipmunk's den. In doing so he had loosened the
earth in the groove, softened by the rains, and it
had dropped out. The groove was large enough for
me to lay my finger in and just adequate to admit
the stones into the hole. This, then, was the way the
little engineer solved the problem, and I experienced
a sense of relief that I had solved mine.

I visited the second hole where the large stone
was in the pile of earth, and found that the same
thing had happened there. A red squirrel, bent on
plunder, had been trying to break in, and had re-
moved the soil in the groove.1

1 I feel bound to report that the next season I found a pile
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IN FIELD AND WOOD

To settle the point as to whether or not the chip-
munk has a back door, which in no case had I been
able to find, we dug out the one by the roadside,
whose mound of earth we could not discover. We
followed his tortuous course through the soil three
or four feet from the entrance and nearly three feet
beneath the surface, where we found him in, his
chamber, warm in his nest of leaves, but not asleep.
He had no back door. He came out (it was a male)
as a hand was thrust into his chamber, and the same
fearless, strong hand seized him, but did not hurt
him. His chamber was spacious enough to hold about
four quarts of winter stores and leave him consider-
able room to stir about in. His supplies consisted of
the seeds of the wild buckwheat (Polygonum du-
metorum) and choke-cherry pits, and formed a very
unpromising looking mess. His buckwheat did
not seem to have been properly cured, for much of
it was mouldy, but it had been carefully cleaned,
every kernel of it. There were nearly four quarts of
seeds altogether, and over one half of it was wild
buckwheat. I was curious to know approximately
the number of these seeds he had gathered and
shucked. I first found the number it took to fill a
lady's thimble, and then the number of thimbles

of earth which a chipmunk had removed from his den, contain-
ing a stone too large to go into the hole, yet the most careful
examination failed to reveal that there had ever been any
groove cut in it, or that it had ever been in any way enlarged.

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full it took to fill a cup, and so reached the number
in the two quarts, and found that it amounted to
the surprising figure of 250,000.

Think of the amount of patient labor required
to clean 250,000 of the small seeds of the wild buck-
wheat ! The grains are hardly one third the size of
those of the cultivated kind and are jet black when
the husk is removed. Probably every seed was
husked with those deft little hands and teeth as it
was gathered, before it went into his cheek pockets,
but what a task it must have been!

Poor little hermit, it seemed pathetic to find him
facing the coming winter there with such inferior
stuff in his granary. Not a nut, not a kernel of corn
or wheat. Why he had not availed himself of the
oats that grew just over the fence I should like to
know. Of course, the wild buckwheat must have
been more to his liking. How many hazardous trips
along fences and into the bushes his stores repre-
sented ! The wild creatures all live in as savage a
country as did our earliest ancestors, and the enemy
of each is lying in wait for it at nearly every turn.

Digging the little fellow out, of course, brought
ruin upon his house, and I think the Muse of Natural
History contemplated the scene with many com-
punctions of conscience, — if she has any conscience,
which I am inclined to doubt. But our human
hearts prompted us to do all we could to give the
provident little creature a fresh start; we put his
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supplies carefully down beside the stone wall into
which he had disappeared on being liberated, and
the next day he had carried a large part of them
away. He evidently began at once to " hustle,"
and I trust he found or made a new retreat from
the winter before it was too late.

I doubt if the chipmunk ever really hibernates; the
hibernating animals do not lay up winter stores, but
he no doubt indulges in many very long before-din-
ner and after-dinner naps. It is blackest night there
in his den three feet under the ground, and this lasts
about four months, or until the premonitions of
coming spring reach him in March and call him
forth.

I am curious to know if the female chipmunk also
digs a den for herself, or takes up with one occupied
by the male the previous winter.

One ought to be safe in generalizing upon the habits
of chipmunks in digging their holes, after observing
ten of them, yet one must go slow even then. Nine
of the holes I observed had a pile of earth near them;
the tenth hole had no dump that I could find. Then
I found four holes with the soil hauled out and piled
up about the entrance precisely after the manner
of woodchucks. This was a striking exception to the
general habit of the chipmunk in this matter. " Is
this the way the female digs her hole," I asked my-
self, " or is it the work of young chipmunks?"

I have in two cases found holes in the ground on

IN FIELD AND WOOD

the borders of swamps, occupied by weasels, but the
holes were in all outward respects like those made by
chipmunks, with no soil near the entrance. The wood-
chuck makes no attempt to conceal his hole by carry-
ing away the soil; neither does the prairie-dog, nor
the pocket gopher. The pile of telltale earth in each
case may be seen from afar, but our little squirrel
seems to have notions of neatness and concealment
that he rarely departs from. The more I study his
ways, the more I see what a clever and foxy little
rodent he is.

II. FROM A WALKER'S WALLET

On the morning after our first hard frost in late
October or early November how rapidly the leaves
let go their hold upon their parent stems! I stood
for some minutes one such morning under a maple
by the roadside to witness the silent spectacle. The
leaves came down one by one like great golden flakes;
there was no motion in the air to loosen them; their
hour had come, and they gave up life easily and
gracefully.

What a gay company they had made on that tree
all summer, clapping their hands in gladness, and
joyously drinking in the air and the sunshine, whis-
pering, rustling, swayed by emotion, or stilled by the
night dews, and each and all doing their work ! Now
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their day is done, and one by one they let go their
hold upon the parent stem, and fall to the earth.

Some come hurrying and tumbling down; some
drop almost like clods; some come eddying and bal-
ancing down ; and now and then one comes down as
gracefully as a bird, sailing around in an easy spiral
like a dove alighting, its edges turned up like wings,
and its stems pointing downward like a head and
neck. One can hardly believe it is not a thing of life.
It reaches the ground as lightly as a snowflake. If
one could only finish his own career as gracefully*.

What a contrast to the falling of the leaves of some
other trees, say those of the mulberry! The leaves
of this tree fall, on such mornings, like soldiers slam
in battle with all their powers in full force. They
drop heavily and clumsily, apparently untouched
by the ripening process that so colors the maple and
other leaves. They are rank green and full of sap.
So with the locusts, and the apple and cherry leaves;
they all seem cut off prematurely.

But the leaves of most of our native trees — oak,
ash, hickory, maple — seem to fall in the fullness
of time. They have ripened like the grain and the
fruit; they are colored like the clouds at sunset; and
their demise seems a welcome event. They make the
woods and groves gay; they carpet the ground as
with sunset clouds; it is a funeral that is like a festi-
val; it is the golden age come back.

The falling of these gayly colored leaves seems to
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make a holiday in nature; it is like the fluttering of
ribbons and scarfs ; it does not suggest age and decay ;
it suggests some happy celebration. They seem to
augment the sunshine, to diffuse their own color
into it, or to give back to it the light they have been
so long absorbing. The day itself drops upon the
earth like a great golden leaf fallen from the tree
of Ygdrasyl.

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 walk-
ing 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 de-
tect 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 rain-water
from running down into it. It is a snug and pretty
retreat, and a very safe one, I think. I doubt whether

IN FIELD AND WOOD

the driving snow ever reaches him, and no preda-
tory 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.

in

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 cham-
ber 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
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IN FIELD AND WOOD

post, then it suddenly stops and Downy's head ap-
pears 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 after-
noon. But I feel certain that he will pass the night
there and every night all winter unless he is dis-
turbed. 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
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IN FIELD AND WOOD

silently down and disappears in the interior of his
chestnut lodge. He will do this all winter long, com-
ing 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, blustery days he will prob-
ably 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 occupy-
ing 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 win-
dow, 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.

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 hav-
ing a tilt with a red squirrel on the trunk of a tree.

Doubtless the woodpecker had a nest near by, and

IN FIELD AND WOOD

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.

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While I was watching the squirrel and the wood-
pecker, I discovered a crow's nest with nearly grown
young. The parent crow came low over the fence
into the grove, and flew to a branch of an oak, and
alighted only ten or twelve feet from the ground.
Then it flew to a higher branch in another tree, and
then to the top of a group of spruces, where I saw
one of the young crows rise and take the food. How
cautious and artful the whole proceeding was !

One of our latest nature writers pretends to see
what the crow brings her young at such times. Had
I had the most powerful opera-glasses on this occa-
sion, I could not have told the nature of the morsel
she brought in her beak. The thing is done very
quickly and deftly, and is not meant for the eye of
any onlooker there may chance to be about.

Thus all the little ways and doings of the birds
interest me. They are curiously human, while yet
they afford glimpses into a new and strange world.
We look on; we are interested; we understand; we
sympathize; we may lend a hand; we share much in
common; one nature mothers us all; our lives run
parallel in many respects; similar problems, similar
needs, similar fatalities, similar tribulations, come
home to us all; and yet we are separated by a gulf,
the gulf that lies between conscious, reasoning soul
and unconscious, unreasoning instinct. But I must
not plunge into the gulf, nor seek to clear it here.

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IN FIELD AND WOOD

It always amuses me to see in late May a " chippy'*
or a goldfinch ride down the dandelion stalk that
is carrying its frail globe of down high above the
grass. You are looking out over the lawn when you
see one of these silver balls suddenly go down. A
chippy or a goldfinch has thrown itself upon the
stalk and borne it to the ground for the seed.

The dandelion seeds are about the first that ripen,
and the seed-eating birds are hard put for food at
this time. Hence these globes are a godsend to them.
Not long before I had seen the goldfinches and the
purple finches pecking to pieces the button-balls of
the sycamore for the seeds they held, put up so com-
pactly.

In May the squirrels are hard put also. It is at
this season that the chipmunk pulls up the corn, and
that the red squirrel robs the birds' nests of both
eggs and young. Their last year's stores of nuts
and grains are exhausted, and the new crop is not
yet formed. I think that the chipmunk has learned
that there is something for him also in the dandelion
seed, but I doubt whether the red squirrel has.

The latter has found out that there is some-
thing for him in the seeds of the elm-tree, which
usually get fully developed in May. The elm affords
short commons, but it is better than nothing. The
chaff is big and the grain small, but probably sweet.
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IN FIELD AND WOOD

Morning, noon, and night I see the squirrels feeding
in the elms about my cabin, and see the road strewn
with the elm-flakes from which the germ in the
centre has been cut.

Do they know an elm-tree when they see it, or do
they explore all the trees in quest of food? If, again,
I belonged to the new school of nature writers, I
should say they know an elm as well as you or I, and
the date on which the seeds are edible, and that
they taught this wood-lore to their young. But, as it
is, I will only venture to say that at this season there
they are in the topmost branches of the scattered
elms, very busy with these green scales, reaching and
swaying and hanging by their hind feet, or sitting
up in that pretty way with tails over backs and
hands deftly submitting the samara to the teeth.

The red squirrel is much more of a " hustler "
than is the gray, and will make shift to live where
the latter will starve. The red squirrel abides, while
the gray seems to go and come with the seasons of
scarcity or of plenty. Yet I have seen the gray eating
the fruit of the poison-ivy and apparently relish-
ing it. But he rarely disturbs the birds, though
of this misdemeanor he is probably not entirely
innocent.

Small things, small doings, train our powers of
observation. 'The big things all can see. Who sees
the finer, shyer play of wild life that goes on about
us? Not all of nature's book is writ large; the fine

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print is quite as interesting, and it is this that trains
the eye.

A schoolgirl wrote me one day that she had seen
a hawk carrying a snake in its beak. Now, if she had
had a trained eye, she would have seen that the
hawk carried the snake in its talons. One of our
recent nature writers has made the same mistake
in his book. Birds of prey all carry their game in
their talons; other birds carry it in their beaks.

A recent magazine writer errs in the other di-
rection when he makes the crow carry in its claws
the corn it has pulled up, as the crow is one of the
birds that carries everything in its beak.

Emerson says, "The day does not seem wholly
profane in which we have given heed to some natural
object." It is such little incidents as I have been
relating that redeem many of my own days, and give
to my pastimes a touch of something I would not
willingly miss from them.

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