Sharp Dallas Lore
The Lay of the Land
IX
June
A reference to one of my notebooks shows that in June, 1895, there were thirty-six species of birds nesting within singing distance of my study windows; in 1907 there were thirty-two, the most distant nest being less than five minutes’ walk from my door.
This is not a modern natural history story, – an extraordinary discovery that only I am capable of making. Start your own June list, and I warrant you will find as many. For there is nothing peculiarly birdy about my small farm. Any place as uncongenial to English sparrows and one that offers a fair chance to the native birds will keep you busy counting nests in June.
In the chimney built the swifts (three or four families of them); in the barn loft a small colony of barn swallows; and under the roof of the pig-pen a pair of phœbes, my earliest spring birds and often the latest with a brood.
A bushy hillside drops from the porch to the old orchard, and along this steep southern slope nested a pair of indigo buntings and a pair of rose-breasted grosbeaks (my rarest neighbors); also, here in the thick underbrush were found chewinks, thrashers, black and white warblers, song sparrows, and a pair of partridges.
In the orchard there were half a dozen chippies’ nests, even more robins’, two nests of bluebirds, and one each of the tree swallow, flicker, yellow warbler, chebec, downy woodpecker, kingbird, great crested flycatcher, redstart, and screech owl.
Baltimore orioles nested in the elms along the road; close to the little river were the nests of catbirds and red-winged blackbirds; a nest of swamp sparrows and of Maryland yellow-throats in the meadow, and in the woodlot a pewee’s nest, a crow’s nest, and three nests of ovenbirds.
All these I found; but besides these I know that a pair of yellow-billed cuckoos built somewhere near the house, as did a pair of blue jays, wood thrushes, and chestnut-sided warblers. These I am still waiting for. I need another June.
Not one of all these birds is rare or even shy, unless it be the swamp sparrow; none of them that the veriest beginner should not come to know in the course of one June. For these are almost domesticated, our near neighbors and friends, who desire and who will return our friendly, neighborly calls.
There are other birds, like the hawks, the owls, the herons, the rarer thrushes, sparrows, warblers, and marsh birds, that require time and tramping for their discovery. I know the very log in which I could find young turkey buzzards in June; the clump of dog-roses where a least bittern will build; the old gum that for years has harbored a pair of barred owls; the little cove where, spring after spring, a black duck nests. But I should need a vacation to visit these.
I watch the others between times, – between five o’clock in the morning and breakfast, between breakfast and train time and church time, and on Saturdays to and from the garden. If you are your own gardener, you can carry not only a hoe, but along with it a pair of field glasses. I even combine the care of my pig and the study of the phœbes that share his pen. Occasionally I drop everything and hunt for a nest, as if life depended upon my finding it. But life doesn’t, the more’s the pity, for me. Life depends on the finding of things that are very different from birds’ nests, things that require a deal of hunting the whole year around. Yet I take the time to hunt birds’ nests, too, for life is more than meat (I raise a good many vegetables), and, after all, my life does depend, in no small measure, upon my finding a few birds’ nests in June.
I remember a June when I tried to get life out of a grocery store, and the sickness of it comes over me even yet at times. I sold kerosene oil, brown sugar, coffee, salt mackerel, and plug tobacco. I breathed the mingled breath of kerosene oil, brown sugar, coffee, salt mackerel, and plug tobacco, – the odor of mere money, – when I knew the fox grapes were in blossom, the magnolias and the azaleas; when I knew the fields were green and the birds were in song! I have longed for many things, but never as I longed that June for the farm, for the long, long day, yes, and for the long, long row. It was that kerosened, salt-mackereled, plug-tobaccoed – moneyed – June that took me back to sweet poverty and the farm.
I do not wish to think of living where the birds and wild flowers do not live with me. A city flat is convenient, and city life is exciting; but convenience and excitement plus meat and raiment are not the sum of life; neither, on the other hand, are pure air, sunshine, birds, flowers, a garden, quiet, and time to think, the whole of life. No; but when you consider the matter, there appears very little still needing to make life whole that you cannot have along with your birds, thoughts, and garden.
Whether you love the country or not, whether you know the difference between a kingbird and a kingcrab or not, you owe it to your body and your soul to get out into the open fields in June, – not to collect bird skins or birds’ eggs or to make a herbarium or a nature diary, but to live a while where the birds and flowers live. The city may be heaven enough for you all the rest of the year; but God didn’t make the city. There are seasons – March and February, usually – when it seems as if some one else has a hand in making the country. In June, however, the country is all and more than the poets say, – if it is poetry that you come out into the country for to feel.
Take my meadow, for instance, all aglow in June with buttercups, as if spread with a sheet of beaten gold! But now, if it is only hay that I am after (alas, too often it is), then my gold turns all to brass, and worse than brass, for buttercups, as my dairyman neighbor tells me, make the poorest kind of hay. I should keep no cow, perhaps. She gives nice milk, to be sure, but she eats up my beaten gold, she kills my buttercup poetry. Maybe I am too rich, I own too much: one cow, one horse, two pigs, thirty hens, fourteen acres of hills and trees. For it is the truth that I do not enjoy the foxes now as I did before I kept hens, nor the buttercups as I did before I got the cow. Suppose, now, besides all of this, I had money, – a lot of it! – several thousand dollars! You never get money along with a farm, and that is one reason why a farm is such a safe and sure investment for the soul. It is not the cow nor the chores, but money in or out of the bank, that robs life of its June.
Nor is owning one cow like having a dairy farm. The average man had better keep his money in the bank than invest in more than one cow. A single cow cannot eat all the gold out of one’s meadow. I am still glad for the buttercups; and where the meadow passes into the upland, where the buttercups give place to the daisies, my gold runs into silver; which means certainly that I am not making the farm pay, for on a paying farm a daisy – weed that it is, and not a native weed at that – is more like a spot of leprosy than of silver. Our daisies are not even those sung by the poets, I understand. What of it? A ten-acre field of them lies snow-white in my memory, fresh with the freshness of early June and the sweeter freshness of boyhood. And as for poetry, I have my own for them, – the poetry of boyhood, of Commencement days at the Institute, and of girls in white frocks.
There is no particular flower that means June to me as the hepatica means March, the arbutus April, the shad-bush May, and the red wood-lily July. I cannot think of single blossoms, or of here and there a spot of rare flowers, in June, but only of pastures drifted white, meadows purple-misted, and rolling hillsides billowy pink, – of laurel, forget-me-nots, daisies, viburnums, and buttercups. This is no time to botanize. Leave the collecting can at home, for one day at least, and wander forth, not to hunt, but to drift and float, or, if you run aground, to wade knee-deep in June. A botanist who is never poet misses as much in the out-of-doors as the poet who is never botanist.
If there were no other flower in the month but the white water-lily, June would still be June. “Who can contemplate it,” exclaims Mr. Burroughs, “as it opens in the morning sun, and distills such perfume, such purity, such snow of petal, and such gold of anther, from the dark water and still darker ooze! How feminine it seems beside its coarser and more robust congeners, how shy, how pliant, how fine in texture and starlike in form!”
How the water-lily and spatter-dock can grow from the same mud is past understanding. One has every grace, the other none. But the dock can live in stagnant water, which perhaps is a sort of compensation.
And these two, for me, are always associated with magnolias, —Magnolia glauca, – and magnolias are associated with “old, forgotten, far-off things.” Their absence from my swamps here is part of the price I pay for my transplanting to these New England fields.
If that were all, it were price enough. But think of June in New Jersey, with buzzards soaring, cardinals whistling, and turtle doves cooing; with swamps magnolia-scented, and woods astir with box-turtles, pine snakes, pine-tree lizards, and ’possums! Then think of June in Massachusetts with none of these, – at least in my neighborhood!
What then? I could scarcely strain the magnolia’s breath from the mingling odors if it were here, for the common air I breathe is the breath of blossoming clover, wild grape, elder, blackberry, rose, and azalea. I must almost smell them by families. For here are six wild roses perfuming my air, five viburnums, six dogwoods (these last quite lacking in perfume, be it said), and wild blackberries that I have never dared to number. Who wants to number them? to spend his June with a “plant analysis,” dissecting and keeping tally? It is enough now to be alive and out of doors among the flowers. Nor is it all of June to find thirty-six species of birds nesting within a radius of five hundred and fifty-five and one half feet from your front door. I do not cite these figures in order to startle, but to suggest, if I might, the joyous medley of life in June, its variety and abundance. You may not be able to name all the warblers; you have never yet made out which is which among the dogwoods and viburnums; the dogwood flowers are all four-pointed stars, while the viburnums are all five-pointed. But what of it, – four or five, dogwood or viburnum! Here they are, banked in soft, snowy fragrance along the margin of the pond. A tiny nest swings from a fork among them, a tiny bird with a white ring around her eye broods and watches you drift past. You have a fish-pole, and all about you and within you is the June.
X
A Broken Feather
One of the pair of crows that nest in my woodlot has been flying over all winter long with a gap in his right wing. Three at least of the large wing feathers are missing, and the result is a perceptible limp. The bird moves through the air with the list of a boat that has shifted or lost its ballast. Were he set upon in the air by a hawk, as might happen if he were smaller, the race would be short. He is plainly disabled by the loss of these three feathers, and has been for months. Just how and when the loss occurred I don’t know. It is likely, however, that the feathers were shot away in June, – in corn-stealing time. Now for nearly a year he has been hobbling about on one whole and one half wing, trusting to luck to escape his enemies, until he can get three new feathers to take the places of these that are missing.
Well, why, in all this time, if these three feathers are so necessary, has he not gotten them? He might reply, “Which of you by taking thought can add as much as one cubit to your stature, to say nothing of three hairs to the top of your head?” By taking time (which is a fine human phrase for giving Nature time), and with the right conditions, you may add the cubit. So the crow may get his feathers. It is not an affair between the crow and his feathers, nor between the crow and Nature. It is wholly Nature’s affair with the crow’s feathers, and so seriously does Nature take it, so careful is she, so systematic, so almost arbitrary about it, that the feathers of crows, like the hairs of our heads, can truly be said to be numbered.
Nothing could look more haphazard, certainly, than the way a hen’s feathers seem to drop off at moulting time. The most forlorn, undone, abject creature about the farm is the half-moulted hen. There is one in the chicken yard now, so nearly naked that she really is ashamed of herself, and so miserably helpless that she squats in a corner all night, unable to reach the low poles of the roost. It is a critical experience with the hen, this moulting of her feathers, and were it not for the protection of the yard it might be a fatal experience. Nature seems to have no hand in the business at all; if she has, then what a mess she is making of it!
But pick up the hen, study the falling of the feathers carefully, and lo! here is law and order, system and sequence, as if every feather were a star, every quill a planet, and the old white hen the round sphere of the universe. You will put her down reverently, awfully, this hen that you took up with such compassion, and you will say, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me.”
So it is, for the moult means a great deal more than the mere renewal of feathers, just how much more no one seems to know. This much is plain, that once a year, usually after the nesting season, it seems a physical necessity for most birds to renew their plumage.
We get a new suit (some of us) because our old one wears out. That is the most apparent cause for the new annual suit of the birds. Yet with them, as with some of the favored of us humans, the feathers go out of fashion, and the change, the moult, is a mere matter of style.
But the annual moult, first of all, is Nature’s wise provision for the safety and warmth of the bird. Feathers are not only covering, as our clothes, but also means of locomotion, and, hence, the bird’s very means of life. A year of use leaves many of the feathers worn and broken, some of them through accident entirely lost (as with my crow), and while they might last for two years, or even longer, Nature has found it necessary to provide a new plumage as often as once a year, in order to keep the race of birds at its best.
But there are other reasons, at least there are advantages taken of the moult for other ends: such as the adaptation of the feathers to the varying temperatures of the seasons, – heavier in winter and lighter in summer; also the adaptation of the color of the plumage to the changing colors of the environment, – as the change from the dark summer color of the ptarmigan to its snow-white winter plumage to match the snows of its far northern home; then, and perhaps most interesting of all, is the advantage taken of the moult, for the adorning of the bird for the mating season. Indeed, Nature goes so far, in some cases, as to cause a special moult to meet the exigencies of the wedding, – as if fine feathers do make a fine bird. All this to meet the fancy of the bride! so, at least, the scientists tell us. Whether or not her fancy is the cause, it is a fact that among the birds it is the bridegroom who is adorned for his wife, and sometimes the fine feathers come by a special moult.
Not far from my house is a nest of black-crowned night herons, or “quawks.” Preparatory to the mating of the pair there started from the crown of the male (and female, also, in this case,) two or three white, rounded plumes, which now hang eight inches in length, waving gracefully to his shoulders. They are the special glory of the wedding time; but soon after the nesting season is over they will drop out, not to come again until he goes a-wooing Mrs. Quawk once more. In the white American egret, and in the snowy egret, the plumes number about fifty, and occur upon the back close to the tail. They are straight in the American, recurved in the snowy, and make the famous “aigrette” plumes of the milliner. The birds are shot in their nuptial dress, and so great has been the heartless demand that both species, once very abundant, are now almost extinct.
Bobolink is another special case. He has two complete moults a year. Now, as I write, I hear him singing over the meadow, – a jet black, white, and cream-buff lover, most strikingly adorned. His wife, down in the grass, looks as little like him as a sparrow looks like a blackbird. After the breeding season he moults, changing color so completely that he and his wife and children all look alike, all like sparrows. They even lose their name now, flying south under the assumed name of “reedbirds.”
Bobolink passes the winter in Brazil, and at the coming of spring, just before the long northward journey begins, he moults again; but you would hardly know it to look at him, for, strangely enough, he is not black and white, but still colored like a sparrow as he was in the fall. Apparently he is. Look at him more closely, however, and you will find the brownish yellow color is all caused by a veil of fine fringes hanging from the edges of the feathers. Underneath are the black and white and cream-buff. He starts northward, and by the time he reaches Massachusetts the fringe veil is worn off and the black and white bobolink appears. Specimens taken after their arrival here still show traces of the yellow veil.
Many birds do not have this spring moult at all, and with most of those that do, the great wing feathers are not then renewed as are bobolink’s, but only at the annual moult after the nesting is done. In fact, the moulting of the remiges, or wing feathers, seems to be a family affair, the process differing with different families; for these are the bird’s most important feathers, and their loss is so serious a matter that Nature has come to make the change according to the habits and needs of the birds.
With all birds the order is for the body feathers to begin to go first, then the wings, and last the tail. But the shedding of the wing feathers is a very slow and carefully regulated process. In the wild geese and other water birds the wing feathers drop out with the feathers of the body, and all go so simultaneously that the birds cannot fly. On land you could catch them with your hands, but they keep near or on the water and thus escape, though times have been when it was necessary to protect them from their human enemies at this season by special laws.
The necessity for the moult entails many risks, for it exposes the bird to peculiar dangers; yet no single bird is abandoned during this period, none left without a way of escape. The geese, as we have seen, moult most rapidly and hence are most helpless, but there are few of their enemies that they cannot avoid by keeping to the water and grassy marshes; the hawks, that hunt by wing, moult so slowly that they do not feel a loss of power; while such birds as the quail and grouse, that always depend in part for protection upon the blending of their colors with the colors of their environment, seem especially so protected during the moulting season. A grouse blotched with light patches, where the dark-tipped feathers have fallen away, may so melt into the mottled color scheme of its background as to escape the sharpest eye.
Such a rapid, wholesale moult as in the case of the geese would be fatal to land birds. Instead, their primaries, or large wing feathers, drop out one or two at a time and symmetrically from the two wings. Oftentimes it is the two inner primaries that go first, then the others following one at a time, the outermost last. This order varies, as in the kingfisher. In the snow bunting all but two of the old primaries are gone before any new ones have grown as large as the secondaries. In the hawks, again, birds that must use their wings and must have them always at their best, the moulting of the wing feathers is very slow, lasting nearly the whole year. The homing pigeon, another great flier, but not of the same kind as the hawks, begins about May to moult his wing feathers, losing the tenth primary first, a month later the ninth, then the others at intervals of from eight to fifteen days.
It is quite enough to make one pause, to make one even wonder, when he finds that this seemingly insignificant matter is taken so seriously by nature, and that even here there is that perfect adaptation of means to end. The gosling, to cite another instance, goes six weeks in down, then gets its first feathers, which it sheds in the fall. The young quail, on the other hand, is born with quills so far advanced that it is able to fly almost as soon as it is hatched. These are mature feathers; but the bird is still young and growing, and soon outgrows these first flight feathers, so that they are quickly lost and new ones come. This goes on till fall, several moults occurring the first summer to meet the increasing weight of the growing body.
Where there are peculiar uses made of the tail, as with the chimney swifts and woodpeckers, there is a peculiar order of moulting. In most birds the tail is a kind of balance or steering-gear, and not of equal importance with the wings. Nature, consequently, seems to have attached less importance to the feathers of the tail. They are not so firmly set, and they are hardly of the same quality or kind; for if a wing feather is once broken or lost, after the moult, it must go unmended until the annual moulting time comes round again; whereas, if a tail feather is lost through accident, it is made good, no matter when. How do you explain that? I know that old theory of the birds roosting with their tails out, and so, through generations of lost tails, those feathers now grow, expecting to be plucked by some enemy, and so have only a temporary hold. Perhaps.
The normal, natural way, of course, is to replace a lost feather with a new one as soon as possible; but in order to give extra strength to the wing feathers nature has found it necessary to check their frequent change, and so complete is the check that the annual moult is required to replace one of them. The Japanese have discovered the secret of this check, and are able by it to keep certain feathers in the tails of their cocks growing until they reach the enormous length of ten to twelve feet.
My crow, it seems, lost his three feathers just after his annual moult; the three broken shafts he carries still in his wing, and must continue to carry, as the stars must continue their courses. These three feathers must round out their cycle to the annual moult. The universe of worlds and feathers is a universe of law, of order, and of reason.
