Chapter 14

Oft ha'e I roved by bonnie Doon, To see the rose and woodbine twine; And ilka bird sang o' its luve, And fondly sae did I o' mine. Wi' lightsome heart I pu'd a rose, Fu' sweet upon its thorny tree; And my fause lover stole my rose, But ah! he left the thorn wi' me.

JOHN BURROUGHS

(1837-)

John Burroughs was born in Roxbury, New York, April 3d, 1837, and like many other American youths who later in life became distinguished, he went to school winters and worked on the farm in summer. He grew up among people who neither read books nor cared for them, and he considers this circumstance best suited to his development. Early intercourse with literary men would, he believes, have dwarfed his original faculty.

He began to write essays at the age of fourteen, but these early literary efforts give little hint of his later work, of that faculty for seeing, and commenting on all that he saw in nature, which became his chief characteristic. He was especially fond of essays; one of his first purchases with his own money was a full set of Dr. Johnson, and for a whole year he lived on 'The Idler' and 'The Rambler' and tried to imitate their ponderous prose. His first contributions to literature, modeled on these essays, were promptly returned. By chance he picked up a volume of Emerson, the master who was to revolutionize his whole manner of thinking; and as he had fed on Dr. Johnson he fed on the 'Essays and Miscellanies,' until a paper he wrote at nineteen on 'Expressions' was accepted by the editor of the Atlantic, with a lurking doubt whether it had not come to him on false pretenses, as it was very much like an early essay of Emerson.

Mr. Burroughs ascribes to Emerson, who stimulated his religious nature, his improved literary expression; while Whitman was to him a great humanizing power, and Matthew Arnold taught him clear thinking and clean writing. He had passed through these different influences by the time he was twenty-one or twenty-two; had taught for a while; and from 1863 to 1873 was vault-keeper and afterwards chief of the organization division of the Bureau of National Banks, in the Treasury Department. For several years afterward he was a special national bank examiner.

The literary quality of his writings from the first captivates the reader. He has the interpretive power which makes us see what he sees and invites us to share his enjoyment in his strange adventures. The stories of the wary trout and the pastoral bee, the ways of sylvan folk, their quarrels and their love-making, are so many character sketches on paper, showing a most intimate acquaintance with nature.

He is a born naturalist. He tells us that from childhood he was familiar with the homely facts of the barn, the cattle and the horses, the sugar-making and the work of the corn-field, the hay-field, the threshing, the planting, the burning of fallows. He "loved nature in those material examples and subtle expressions, with a love passing all the books in the world." But he also loved and knew books, and this other love gives to his works their literary charm.

His account of a bird, a flower, or an open-air incident, however painstaking and minute the record, teems with literary memories. The sight of the Scotch hills recalls Shakespeare's line,

"The tufty mountains where lie the nibbling sheep."

The plane-tree vocal with birds' voices recalls Tennyson,--"The pillared dusk of sounding sycamores"; he hears the English chaffinch, and remembers with keen delight that Drayton calls it "the throstle with sharp thrills," and Ben Jonson "the lusty throstle." After much wondering, he finds out why Shakespeare wrote

"The murmuring surge That on the unnumbered idle pebbles chafes,"

his own experience being that sea-shores are sandy; but the pebbled cliffs of Folkestone, with not a grain of sand on the chalk foundation, justified the poet.

This lover of nature loves not only the beautiful things he sees, but he loves what they suggest, what they remind him of, what they bid him aspire to. Like Wordsworth, he "looks on the hills with tenderness, and makes deep friendship with the streams and groves." He notes what he divines by observation. And what an observer he is! He discovers that the bobolink goes south in the night. He scraped an acquaintance with a yellow rumpled warbler who, taking the reflection of the clouds and blue sky in a pond for a short cut to the tropics, tried to cross it; with the result of his clinging for a day and night to a twig that hung down in the water.

Burroughs has found that whatever bait you use in a trout stream,--grasshopper, grub, or fly,--there is one thing you must always put on your hook; namely, your heart. It is a morsel they love above everything else. He tells us that man has sharper eyes than a dog, a fox, or any of the wild creatures except the birds, but not so sharp an ear or a nose; he says that a certain quality of youth is indispensable in the angler, a certain unworldliness and readiness to invest in an enterprise that does not pay in current coin. He says that nature loves to enter a door another hand has opened: a mountain view never looks better than when one has been warmed up by the capture of a big trout. Like certain wary game, she is best taken by seeming to pass her by, intent on other matters. What he does not find out for himself, people tell him. From a hedge-cutter he learns that some of the birds take an earth-bath and some a water-bath, while a few take both; a farmer boy confided to him that the reason we never see any small turtles is because for two or three years the young turtles bury themselves in the ground and keep hidden from observation. From a Maine farmer he heard that both male and female hawks take part in incubation. A barefooted New Jersey boy told him that "lampers" die as soon as they have built their nests and laid their eggs. How apt he is in similes! The pastoral fields of Scotland are "stall-fed," and the hill-sides "wrinkled and dimpled, like the forms of fatted sheep."

And what other bird-lover has such charming fancies about birds, in whom he finds a hundred human significances? "The song of the bobolink," he says, "expresses hilarity; the sparrow sings faith, the bluebird love, the catbirds pride, the white-eyed fly-catchers self-consciousness, that of the hermit thrush spiritual serenity, while there is something military in the call of the robin." Mr. Burroughs has been compared with Thoreau, but he seems closer to White of Selborne, whom he has commemorated in one of his most charming essays. Like White, he is a literary man who is a born naturalist in close intimacy with his brute neighbors and "rural nature's varied shows." In both, the moral element is back of nature and the source of her value and charm. Never nature for her own sake, but for the sake of the soul that is above all and over all. Like White, too, though by nature solitary, Burroughs is on cordial terms with his kind. He is an accurate observer, and he takes Bryant to task for giving an odor to the yellow violet, and Coleridge for making a lark perch on the stalk of a foxglove. He gloats over a felicitous expression, like Arnold's "blond meadow-sweet" and Tennyson's "little speedwell's darling blue"; though in commenting on another poet he waives the question of accuracy, and says "his happy literary talent makes up for the poverty of his observation."

And again as with White, he walks through life slowly and in a ruminating fashion, as though he had leisure to linger with the impression of the moment. Incident he uses with reserve, but with picturesque effects; figures do not dominate his landscape but humanize it.

As a critic Mr. Burroughs most fully reveals his personality. In his sketches of nature we see what he sees; in his critiques, what he feels and thinks. The cry of discovery he made when 'Leaves of Grass' fell into his hands found response in England and was re-echoed in this country till Burroughs's strange delight in Whitman seemed no longer strange, but an accepted fact in the history of poetry. The essay on Emerson, his master, shows the same discriminating mind. But as a revelation of both author and subject there are few more delightful papers than Burroughs's essay on Thoreau. In manner it is as pungent and as racy as Thoreau's writings, and as epigrammatic as Emerson's; and his defense of Thoreau against the English reviewer who dubbed him a "skulker" has the sound of the trumpet and the martial tread of soldiers marching to battle.

SHARP EYES

From 'Locusts and Wild Honey'

Noting how one eye seconds and reinforces the other, I have often amused myself by wondering what the effect would be if one could go on opening eye after eye, to the number, say, of a dozen or more. What would he see? Perhaps not the invisible--not the odors of flowers or the fever germs in the air--not the infinitely small of the microscope or the infinitely distant of the telescope. This would require not so much more eyes as an eye constructed with more and different lenses; but would he not see with augmented power within the natural limits of vision? At any rate, some persons seem to have opened more eyes than others, they see with such force and distinctness; their vision penetrates the tangle and obscurity where that of others fails, like a spent or impotent bullet. How many eyes did Gilbert White open? how many did Henry Thoreau? how many did Audubon? how many does the hunter, matching his sight against the keen and alert senses of a deer, or a moose, or a fox, or a wolf? Not outward eyes, but inward. We open another eye whenever we see beyond the first general features or outlines of things--whenever we grasp the special details and characteristic markings that this mask covers. Science confers new powers of vision. Whenever you have learned to discriminate the birds, or the plants, or the geological features of a country, it is as if new and keener eyes were added.

Of course one must not only see sharply, but read aright what he sees. The facts in the life of nature that are transpiring about us are like written words that the observer is to arrange into sentences. Or, the writing is a cipher and he must furnish the key. A female oriole was one day observed very much preoccupied under a shed where the refuse from the horse stable was thrown. She hopped about among the barn fowls, scolding them sharply when they came too near her. The stable, dark and cavernous, was just beyond. The bird, not finding what she wanted outside, boldly ventured into the stable, and was presently captured by the farmer. What did she want? was the query. What but a horse-hair for her nest, which was in an apple-tree near by? and she was so bent on having one that I have no doubt she would have tweaked one out of the horse's tail had he been in the stable. Later in the season I examined her nest, and found it sewed through and through with several long horse-hairs, so that the bird persisted in her search till the hair was found.

Little dramas and tragedies and comedies, little characteristic scenes, are always being enacted in the lives of the birds, if our eyes are sharp enough to see them. Some clever observer saw this little comedy played among some English sparrows, and wrote an account of it in his newspaper. It is too good not to be true: A male bird brought to his box a large, fine goose-feather, which is a great find for a sparrow and much coveted. After he had deposited his prize and chattered his gratulations over it, he went away in quest of his mate. His next-door neighbor, a female bird, seeing her chance, quickly slipped in and seized the feather,--and here the wit of the bird came out, for instead of carrying it into her own box she flew with it to a near tree and hid it in a fork of the branches, then went home, and when her neighbor returned with his mate, was innocently employed about her own affairs. The proud male, finding his feather gone, came out of his box in a high state of excitement, and with wrath in his manner and accusation on his tongue, rushed into the cot of the female. Not finding his goods and chattels there as he had expected, he stormed around awhile, abusing everybody in general and his neighbor in particular, and then went away as if to repair the loss. As soon as he was out of sight, the shrewd thief went and brought the feather home and lined her own domicile with it....

The bluebird is a home bird, and I am never tired of recurring to him. His coming or reappearance in the spring marks a new chapter in the progress of the season; things are never quite the same after one has heard that note. The past spring the males came about a week in advance of the females. A fine male lingered about my grounds and orchard all that time, apparently awaiting the arrival of his mate. He called and warbled every day, as if he felt sure she was within earshot and could be hurried up. Now he warbled half angrily or upbraidingly; then coaxingly; then cheerily and confidently, the next moment in a plaintive and far-away manner. He would half open his wings, and twinkle them caressingly as if beckoning his mate to his heart. One morning she had come, but was shy and reserved. The fond male flew to a knot-hole in an old apple-tree and coaxed her to his side. I heard a fine confidential warble--the old, old story. But the female flew to a near tree and uttered her plaintive, homesick note. The male went and got some dry grass or bark in his beak and flew again to the hole in the old tree, and promised unremitting devotion; but the other said "Nay," and flew away in the distance. When he saw her going, or rather heard her distant note, he dropped his stuff and cried out in a tone that said plainly enough, "Wait a minute: one word, please!" and flew swiftly in pursuit. He won her before long, however, and early in April the pair were established in one of the four or five boxes I had put up for them, but not until they had changed their minds several times. As soon as the first brood had flown, and while they were yet under their parents' care, they began to nest in one of the other boxes, the female as usual doing all the work and the male all the complimenting. A source of occasional great distress to the mother-bird was a white cat that sometimes followed me about. The cat had never been known to catch a bird, but she had a way of watching them that was very embarrassing to the bird. Whenever she appeared, the mother bluebird set up that pitiful melodious plaint. One morning the cat was standing by me, when the bird came with her beak loaded with building material, and alighted above me to survey the place before going into the box. When she saw the cat she was greatly disturbed, and in her agitation could not keep her hold upon all her material. Straw after straw came eddying down, till not half her original burden remained. After the cat had gone away the bird's alarm subsided; till presently, seeing the coast clear, she flew quickly to the box and pitched in her remaining straws with the greatest precipitation, and without going in to arrange them as was her wont, flew away in evident relief.

In the cavity of an apple-tree but a few yards off, and much nearer the house than they usually build, a pair of high-holes, or golden-shafted woodpeckers, took up their abode. A knot-hole which led to the decayed interior was enlarged, the live wood being cut away as clean as a squirrel would have done it. The inside preparations I could not witness, but day after day as I passed near I heard the bird hammering away, evidently beating down obstructions and shaping and enlarging the cavity. The chips were not brought out, but were used rather to floor the interior. The woodpeckers are not nest-builders, but rather nest-carvers.

The time seemed very short before the voices of the young were heard in the heart of the old tree,--at first feebly, but waxing stronger day by day, until they could be heard many rods distant. When I put my hand upon the trunk of the tree they would set up an eager, expectant chattering; but if I climbed up it toward the opening, they soon detected the unusual sound and would hush quickly, only now and then uttering a warning note. Long before they were fully fledged they clambered up to the orifice to receive their food. As but one could stand in the opening at a time, there was a good deal of elbowing and struggling for this position. It was a very desirable one, aside from the advantages it had when food was served; it looked out upon the great shining world, into which the young birds seemed never tired of gazing. The fresh air must have been a consideration also, for the interior of a high-hole's dwelling is not sweet. When the parent birds came with food, the young one in the opening did not get it all; but after he had received a portion, either on his own motion or on a hint from the old one, he would give place to the one behind him. Still, one bird evidently outstripped his fellows, and in the race of life was two or three days in advance of them. His voice was the loudest and his head oftenest at the window. But I noticed that when he had kept the position too long, the others evidently made it uncomfortable in his rear, and after "fidgeting" about awhile he would be compelled to "back down." But retaliation was then easy, and I fear his mates spent few easy moments at the outlook. They would close their eyes and slide back into the cavity as if the world had suddenly lost all its charms for them.

This bird was of course the first to leave the nest. For two days before that event he kept his position in the opening most of the time, and sent forth his strong voice incessantly. The old ones abstained from feeding him almost entirely, no doubt to encourage his exit. As I stood looking at him one afternoon and noticing his progress, he suddenly reached a resolution,--seconded, I have no doubt, from the rear,--and launched forth upon his untried wings. They served him well, and carried him about fifty yards up-hill the first heat. The second day after, the next in size and spirit left in the same manner; then another, till only one remained. The parent birds ceased their visits to him, and for one day he called and called till our ears were tired of the sound. His was the faintest heart of all: then he had none to encourage him from behind. He left the nest and clung to the outer hole of the tree, and yelped and piped for an hour longer; then he committed himself to his wings and went his way like the rest.

A young farmer in the western part of New York sends me ... some interesting observations about the cuckoo. He says a large gooseberry-bush, standing in the border of an old hedge-row in the midst of the open fields, and not far from his house, was occupied by a pair of cuckoos for two seasons in succession; and after an interval of a year, for two seasons more. This gave him a good chance to observe them. He says the mother-bird lays a single egg and sits upon it a number of days before laying the second, so that he has seen one young bird nearly grown, a second just hatched, and a whole egg all in the nest at once. "So far as I have seen, this is the settled practice,--the young leaving the nest one at a time, to the number of six or eight. The young have quite the look of the young of the dove in many respects. When nearly grown they are covered with long blue pin-feathers as long as darning needles, without a bit of plumage on them. They part on the back and hang down on each side by their own weight. With its curious feathers and misshapen body the young bird is anything but handsome. They never open their mouths when approached, as many young birds do, but sit perfectly still, hardly moving when touched." He also notes the unnatural indifference of the mother-bird when her nest and young are approached. She makes no sound, but sits quietly on a near branch in apparent perfect unconcern.

These observations, together with the fact that the egg of the cuckoo is occasionally found in the nest of other birds, raise the inquiry whether our bird is slowly relapsing into the habit of the European species, which always foists its egg upon other birds; or whether on the other hand it be not mending its manners in this respect. It has but little to unlearn or forget in the one case, but great progress to make in the other. How far is its rudimentary nest--a mere platform of coarse twigs and dry stalks of weeds--from the deep, compact, finely woven and finely modeled nest of the goldfinch or kingbird, and what a gulf between its indifference toward its young and their solicitude! Its irregular manner of laying also seems better suited to a parasite like our cow-bird, or the European cuckoo, than to a regular nest-builder.

This observer, like most sharp-eyed persons, sees plenty of interesting things as he goes about his work. He one day saw a white swallow, which is of rare occurrence. He saw a bird, a sparrow, he thinks, fly against the side of a horse and fill his beak with hair from the loosened coat of the animal. He saw a shrike pursue a chickadee, when the latter escaped by taking refuge in a small hole in a tree. One day in early spring he saw two hen-hawks that were circling and screaming high in air, approach each other, extend a claw, and grasping them together, fall toward the earth flapping and struggling as if they were tied together; on nearing the ground they separated and soared aloft again. He supposed that it was not a passage of war but of love, and that the hawks were toying fondly with each other.

* * * * *

When the air is damp and heavy, swallows frequently hawk for insects about cattle and moving herds in the field. My farmer describes how they attended him one foggy day, as he was mowing in the meadow with a mowing-machine. It had been foggy for two days, and the swallows were very hungry and the insects stupid and inert. When the sound of his machine was heard, the swallows appeared and attended him like a brood of hungry chickens. He says there was a continual rush of purple wings over the "cutter-bar," and just where it was causing the grass to tremble and fall. Without his assistance the swallows would have gone hungry yet another day.

Of the hen-hawk he has observed that both the male and female take part in incubation. "I was rather surprised," he says, "on one occasion, to see how quickly they change places on the nest. The nest was in a tall beech, and the leaves were not yet fully out. I could see the head and neck of the hawk over the edge of the nest, when I saw the other hawk coming down through the air at full speed. I expected he would alight near by, but instead of that he struck directly upon the nest, his mate getting out of the way barely in time to avoid being hit; it seemed almost as if he had knocked her off the nest. I hardly see how they can make such a rush on the nest without danger to the eggs."

The kingbird will worry the hawk as a whiffet dog will worry a bear. It is by his persistence and audacity, not by any injury he is capable of dealing his great antagonist. The kingbird seldom more than dogs the hawk, keeping above and between his wings and making a great ado; but my correspondent says he once "saw a kingbird riding on a hawk's back. The hawk flew as fast as possible, and the kingbird sat upon his shoulders in triumph until they had passed out of sight,"--tweaking his feathers, no doubt, and threatening to scalp him the next moment.