Part 1
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Transcriber’s note:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
THE CLERK OF THE WOODS
* * * * * *
Books by Mr. Torrey.
THE CLERK OF THE WOODS. 16mo, $1.10, _net._ Postpaid, $1.20.
FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA. 16mo, $1.10, _net._ Postpaid, $1.19.
EVERYDAY BIRDS. Elementary Studies. With twelve colored Illustrations reproduced from Audubon. Square 12mo, $1.00.
BIRDS IN THE BUSH. 16mo, $1.25.
A RAMBLER’S LEASE. 16mo, $1.25.
THE FOOT-PATH WAY. 16mo, gilt top, $1.25.
A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK. 16mo, $1.25.
SPRING NOTES FROM TENNESSEE. 16mo, $1.25.
A WORLD OF GREEN HILLS. 16mo, $1.25.
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. BOSTON AND NEW YORK.
* * * * * *
THE CLERK OF THE WOODS
by
BRADFORD TORREY
“News of birds and blossoming.”
SHELLEY.
Boston and New York Houghton, Mifflin and Company The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1904
Copyright 1903 by Bradford Torrey All Rights Reserved
Published September, 1903
PREFATORY NOTE
The chapters of this book were written week by week for simultaneous publication in the “Evening Transcript” of Boston and the “Mail and Express” of New York, and were intended to be a kind of weekly chronicle of the course of events out-of-doors, as witnessed by a natural-historical observer. The title of the volume is the running title under which the articles were printed in the “Evening Transcript.” It was chosen as expressive of the modest purpose of the writer, whose business was not to be witty or wise, but simply to “keep the records.”
CONTENTS
PAGE
A SHORT MONTH 1
A FULL MIGRATION 9
A FAVORITE ROUND 17
IN THE CAMBRIDGE SWAMP 25
A QUIET AFTERNOON 34
POPULAR WOODPECKERS 42
LATE SUMMER NOTES 50
WOOD SILENCE 60
SOUTHWARD BOUND 67
FOUR DREAMERS 74
A DAY IN FRANCONIA 82
WITH THE WADERS 91
ON THE NORTH SHORE AGAIN 104
AUTUMNAL MORALITIES 117
A TEXT FROM THOREAU 127
THE PLEASURES OF MELANCHOLY 135
IN THE OLD PATHS 142
THE PROSPERITY OF A WALK 152
SIGNS OF SPRING 159
OLD COLONY BERRY PASTURES 168
SQUIRRELS, FOXES, AND OTHERS 177
WINTER AS IT WAS 186
“DOWN AT THE STORE” 194
BIRDS AT THE WINDOW 203
A GOOD-BY TO WINTER 212
BIRD SONGS AND BIRD TALK 219
CHIPMUNKS, BLUEBIRDS, AND ROBINS 226
MARCH SWALLOWS 233
WOODCOCK VESPERS 242
UNDER APRIL CLOUDS 250
FLYING SQUIRRELS AND SPADE-FOOT FROGS 258
THE WARBLERS ARE COMING 267
INDEX 275
THE CLERK OF THE WOODS
THE CLERK OF THE WOODS
A SHORT MONTH
May is the shortest month in the year. February is at least twice as long. For a month is like a movement of a symphony; and when we speak of the length of a piece of music we are not thinking of the number of notes in it, but of the time it takes to play them. May is a scherzo, and goes like the wind. Yesterday it was just beginning, and to-day it is almost done. “If we could only hold it back!” an outdoor friend of mine used to say. And I say so, too. At the most generous calculation I cannot have more than a hundred more of such months to hope for, and I wish the Master’s _baton_ would not hurry the _tempo_. But who knows? Perhaps there will be another series of concerts, in a better music hall.
The world hereabout will never be more beautiful than it was eight or ten days ago, with the sugar maples and the Norway maples in bloom and the tall valley willows in young yellow-green leaf. And now forsythia is having its turn. How thick it is! I should not have believed it half so common. Every dooryard is bright with its sunny splendor. “Sunshine bush,” it deserves to be called, with no thought of disrespect for Mr. Forsyth, whoever he may have been. I look at the show while it lasts. In a week or two the bushes will all have gone out of commission, so to speak, till the year comes round again. Shrubs are much in the case of men and women; the amount of attention they receive depends mainly on the dress they happen to have on at the moment. In my next-door neighbor’s yard there is a forsythia bush, not exceptionally large or handsome, that gives me as much pleasure as one of those wonderful tulip beds of which the Boston city gardeners make so much account. Are a million tulips, all of one color, crowded tightly together and bordered by a row of other tulips, all of another color, really so much more beautiful than a hundred or two, of various tints, loosely and naturally disposed? I ask the question without answering it, though I could answer it easily enough, so far as my own taste is concerned.
Already there is much to admire in the wild garden. Spice-bush blossoms have come and gone, and now the misty shad-blow is beginning to whiten all the hedges and the borders of the wood, while sassafras trees have put forth pretty clusters of yellowish flowers for the few that will come out to see them. Sun-bright, cold-footed cowslips still hold their color along shaded brooks. “Marsh marigolds,” some critical people tell us we must call them. That is a good name, too; but the flowers are no more marigolds than cowslips, and with or without reason (partly, it may be, because my unregenerate nature resents the “must”), I like the word I was brought up with. Anemones and violets are becoming plentiful, and the first columbines already swing from the clefts of outcropping ledges. With them one is almost certain to find the saxifrage. The two are fast friends, though very unlike; the columbine drooping and swaying so gracefully, its honey-jars upside down, the saxifrage holding upright its cluster of tiny white cups, like so many wine-glasses on a tray. Both are children’s flowers,--an honorable class,--and have in themselves, to my apprehension, a kind of childish innocence and sweetness. If we picked no other blossoms, down in the Old Colony, we always picked these two--these and the nodding anemone and the pink lady’s-slipper.
This showy orchid, by the way, I was pleased a year ago to see in bloom side by side with the trailing arbutus. One was near the end of its flowering season, the other just at the beginning, but there they stood, within a few yards of each other. This was in the Franconia Notch, at the foot of Echo Lake, where plants bloom when they can, rather than according to any calendar known to down-country people; where within the space of a dozen yards you may see the dwarf cornel, for example, in all stages of growth; here, where a snowbank stayed late, just peeping out of the ground, and there, in a sunnier spot, already in full bloom.
In May the birds come home. This is really what makes the month so short. There is no time to see half that is going on. In this town alone it would take a score of good walkers, good lookers, and good listeners to welcome all the pretty creatures that will this month return from their winter’s exile. Some came in March, of course, and more in April; but now they are coming in troops. It is great fun to see them; a pleasure inexpressible to wake in the morning, as I did this morning (May 8), and still lying in bed, to hear the first breezy fifing of a Baltimore oriole, just back over night after an eight months’ absence. Birds must be lovers of home to continue living in a climate where life is possible to them only four months of the year.
Six days ago (May 2) a rose-breasted grosbeak gladdened the morning in a similar manner, though he was a little farther away, so that I did not hear him until I stepped out upon the piazza. I stood still a minute or two, listening to the sweet “rolling” warble, and then crossed the street to have a look at the rose color. It was just as bright as I remembered it.
Golden warblers (summer yellow-birds) made their appearance on the last day of April. The next morning one had dropped into an ideal summering place, a bit of thicket beside a pond and a lively brook,--good shelter, good bathing, and plenty of insects,--and from the first moment seemed to have no thought of looking farther. I see and hear him every time I pass the spot. The same leafless thicket (but it will be leafy enough by and by) is now inhabited by a catbird. I found him on the 6th, already much at home, feeding, singing, and mewing. Between him and his small, high-colored neighbor there is no sign of rivalry or ill-feeling; but if another catbird or a second warbler should propose settlement in that clump of shrubbery, I have no doubt there would be trouble.
May-day brought me the yellow-throated vireo, the parula warbler, the white-throated sparrow, and the least flycatcher, the last two pretty late, by my reckoning. On the 2d came the warbling vireo, the veery,--a single silent bird, the only one I have yet seen,--the kingbird, the Maryland yellow-throat, the oven-bird, and the chestnut-sided warbler, in addition to the grosbeak before mentioned. Then followed a spell of cold, unfavorable weather, and nothing more was listed until the 6th. That day I saw a Nashville warbler,--several days tardy,--a catbird, and a Swainson thrush. On May 7, I heard my first prairie warbler, and to-day has brought the oriole, the wood thrush, one silent red-eyed vireo (it is good to know that this voluble “preacher” _can_ be silent), and the redstart. It never happened to me before, I think, to see the Swainson thrush earlier than the wood. That I have done so this season is doubtless the result of some accident, on one side or the other. The Swainson was a little ahead of his regular schedule, I feel sure; but on the other hand, it may almost be taken for granted that a few wood thrushes have been in the neighborhood for several days. The probability that any single observer will light upon the very first silent bird of a given species that drops into a township must be slight indeed. What we see, we tell of; but that is only the smallest part of what happens.
Some of our winter birds still go about in flocks, notably the waxwings, the goldfinches, and the purple finches. Two days ago I noticed a goldfinch that was almost in full nuptial dress; as bright as he ever would be, I should say, but with the black and the yellow still running together a little here and there. Purple finches are living high--in two senses--just at present; feeding on the pendent flower-buds of tall beech trees. A bunch of six or eight that I watched the other day were literally stuffing themselves, till I thought of turkeys stuffed with chestnuts. Their capacity was marvelous, and I left them still feasting. All the while one of them kept up a happy musical chatter. There is no reason, I suppose, why a poet should not be a good feeder.
A FULL MIGRATION
One of my friends, a bird lover like myself, used to complain that by the end of May he was worn out with much walking. His days were consumed at a desk,--“the cruel wood,” as Charles Lamb called it,--but so long as migrants were passing his door he could not help trying to see them. Morning and night, therefore, he was on foot, now in the woods, now in the fields, now in shaded by-roads, now in bogs and swamps. To see all kinds of birds, a man must go to all kinds of places. Sometimes he trudged miles to visit a particular spot, in which he hoped to find a particular species. Before the end of the month he must have one hundred and twenty or one hundred and twenty-five names in his “monthly list;” and to accomplish this, much leg-work was necessary.
I knew how to sympathize with him. Short as May is,--too short by half,--I have before now felt something like relief at its conclusion. Now, then, I have said, the birds that are here will stay for at least a month or two, and life may be lived a little more at leisure.
This year,[1] by all the accounts that reach me, the migration has been of extraordinary fullness. Only last night a man took a seat by me in an electric car and said, what for substance I have heard from many others, that he and his family, who live in a desirably secluded, woody spot, had never before seen so many birds, especially so many warblers.
How wiser men than myself explain this unusual state of things I do not know. To me it seems likely that the unseasonable cold weather caught the first large influx of May birds in our latitude, and held them here while succeeding waves came falling in behind them. The current was dammed, so to speak, and of course the waters rose.
Some persons, I hear, had strange experiences. I am told of one man who picked a black-throated blue warbler from a bush, as he might have picked a berry. I myself noted in New Hampshire, what many noted hereabouts, the continual presence of warblers on the ground. ’Tis an ill wind that blows nobody good, and our multitude of young bird students--for, thank Heaven, they _are_ a multitude--had the opportunity of many years to make new acquaintances. A warbler in the grass is a comparatively easy subject.
After all, the beginners have the best of it. No knowledge is so interesting as new knowledge. It may be plentifully mixed with ignorance and error. Much of it may need to be unlearned. Young people living about me began to find scarlet tanagers early in April; one boy or girl has seen a scissor-tailed flycatcher, and orchard orioles seem to be fairly common; but at least new knowledge has the charm of freshness. And what a charm that is!--a morning rose, with the dew on it. The old hand may almost envy the raw recruit--the young woman or the boy, to whom the sight of a rose-breasted grosbeak, for instance, is like the sight of an angel from heaven, so strange, so new-created, so incredibly bright and handsome.
I love to come upon a group or a pair of such enthusiasts at work in the field, as I not seldom do; all eyes fastened upon a bush or a branch, one eager, low voice trying to make the rest of the company see some wonderful object of which the lucky speaker has caught sight. “There, it has moved to that lower limb! Right through there! Don’t you see it? Oh, what a beauty!”
I was down by the river the other afternoon. Many canoes were out, and presently I came to an empty one drawn up against the bank. A few steps more and I saw, kneeling behind a clump of shrubbery, a young man and a young woman, each with an opera-glass, and the lady with an open notebook. “It’s a redstart, isn’t it?” I heard one of them say.
It was too bad to disturb them, but I hope they forgave a sympathetic elderly stranger, who, after starting toward them and then sidling off, finally approached near enough to suggest, with a word of apology, that perhaps they would like to see a pretty bunch of water thrushes just across the way, about the edges of the pool under yonder big willow. They seemed grateful, however they may have felt. “Water thrushes!” the young lady exclaimed, and with hasty “Thank you’s,” very politely expressed, they started in the direction indicated. It is to be hoped that they found also the furtive swamp sparrow, of whose presence the bashful intruder, in the perturbation of his spirits, forgot to inform them. If they did find it, however, they were sharp-eyed, or were playing in good luck.
I went on down the river a little way, and soon met three Irish-American boys coming out of a thicket at the water’s edge. One of them lifted his cap. “Seen any good birds to-day?” he inquired. I answered in the affirmative, and turned the question upon its asker. Yes, he said, he had just seen a catbird and an oriole. I remarked that there were other people out on the same errand. “Yes,” said he, pointing toward the brier thicket, “there’s a couple down there now looking at ’em.” Then I noticed a second empty canoe with its nose against the bank.
This was on a Saturday. Saturday afternoon and Sunday are busy people’s days in the woods. For their sakes I am always glad to meet them there--bird students, flower pickers, or simple strollers; yet I have learned to look upon those times as my poorest, and to choose others so far as I can. One does not enjoy nature to great advantage at a picnic. There are woods and swamps of which on all ordinary occasions I almost feel myself the owner, but of which on Saturday and Sunday I have scarcely so much as a rambler’s lease. This I have learned, however,--and I pass the secret on,--that the Sunday picnic does not usually begin till after nine o’clock in the forenoon.
When bird study becomes more general than it is now, as it ought to do, the community will perhaps find means--or, to speak more correctly, will use means, since there is no need of finding them--to restrain the present enormous overproduction of English sparrows, and so to give certain of our American beauties a chance to live.
Two days ago I was walking through a tract of woodland, following the highway, when I noticed, to my surprise, a white-breasted martin (tree swallow) just over my head. The next moment he fluttered before a hole in one of the big telegraph poles. His mate came out, and he alighted in the entrance, facing outward. And there he sat, while I in my turn took a seat upon the opposite bank and fell to watching him. The light struck him squarely, and it was good to see his blue-purple crown and his bright black eye shining in the sun. He had nothing to do inside, it appeared, but was simply on guard in his mate’s absence. Once he yawned. “She’s gone a good while,” he seemed to say. But he kept his post till she returned. Then, with a chirrup, he was off, and she dropped into the cavity out of sight.
All this was nothing of itself. But why should a pair of white-breasted martins, farm-loving, village-loving, house-haunting birds, a delight to the eye, and as innocent as they are beautiful--why should such birds be driven to seek a home in a telegraph pole in the woods? The answer was ready. I walked on, and by and by came to a village, young and I dare say thriving, but overrun from end to end with English sparrows, whose incessant clatter--
Soul-desolating strains--alas! too many--
filled my ears. Not a bluebird, not a tree swallow, nor, to all appearance, any place for one.
And so it is generally. One of my fellow townsmen, however, has an estate which forms a bright exception. There one sees bluebirds and martins. Year after year, punctual as the spring itself, they are back in their old places. And why? Because the owner of the estate, by a little shooting, mercifully persistent and therefore seldom necessary, keeps the English sparrows out. My thanks to him. His is the only colony of martins anywhere in my neighborhood.
A FAVORITE ROUND
After three days of heat, a cool morning. I take an electric car, leave it at a point five miles away, and in a semicircular course come round to the track again a mile or two nearer home. This is one of my favorite walks, such as every stroller finds for himself, affording a pleasant variety within comfortable distance.
First I come to a plain on which are hay-fields, gardens, and apple orchards; an open, sunny place where, in the season, one may hope to find the first bluebird, the first vesper sparrow, or the first bobolink. A spot where things like these have happened to one has henceforth a charm of its own. Memory walks beside us, as it were, and makes good all present deficiencies.
I am hardly here this morning before the tiny, rough voice of a yellow-winged sparrow reaches me from a field in which the new-mown grass lies in windrows. Grass or stubble, he can still be happy, it appears. The grasshopper sparrow--to give him his better name--is one of the quaintest of songsters, his musical effort being more like an insect’s than a bird’s; yet he is as fully inspired, as completely absorbed in his work, to look at him, as any mockingbird or thrush. I watched one a few days ago as he sat at the top of a dwarf pear tree. How seriously he took himself! No “minor poet” of a human sort ever surpassed him in that respect; head thrown back, and bill most amazingly wide open, all for that ragged thread of a tune, which nevertheless was decidedly emphatic and could be heard a surprisingly long distance. I smiled at him, but he did not mind. When minor poets cease writing, then, we may guess, the grasshopper sparrow will quit singing. Far be the day. To be a poet is to be a poet, and distinctions of major and minor are of trifling consequence. The yellow-wing counts with the savanna, but is smaller and has even less of a voice. Impoverished grass fields are his favorite breeding-places, and he is generally a colonist.
This morning (it is July 10) the vesper sparrow is singing here also, with the song sparrow and the chipper. And while I am listening to them--but mainly to the vesper--the sickle stroke (as I believe Mr. Burroughs calls it) of a meadow lark cuts the air. It is a good concert, vesper sparrow and lark going most harmoniously together; and to make it better still, a bobolink pours out one copious strain. Him I am especially glad to hear. After the grass is cut one feels as if bobolink days were over.
However, the grass is not all cut yet. I hear the rattle of a distant mowing-machine as I walk, and by and by come in sight of a man swinging a scythe. That is the poetry of farming--from the spectator’s point of view; and I think from the mower’s also, when he is cutting his own grass and is his own master. I like to watch him, at all events. Every motion he makes is as familiar to me as the swaying of branches in the wind. How long will it be, I wonder, before young people will be asking their seniors what a scythe was like, and how a man used it? Pictures of it will look odd enough, we may be sure, after the thing itself is forgotten.
While I am watching the mower (now he pauses a moment, and with the blade of his scythe tosses a troublesome tangle of grass out of his way, with exactly the motion that I have seen other mowers use a thousand times; but I look in vain for him to put the end of the snathe to the ground, pick up a handful of grass, and wipe down the blade)--while I am watching him a bluebird breaks into song, and a kingbird flutters away from his perch on a fence-wire. After all, the glory of a bird is his wings; and the kingbird knows it. In another field men are spreading hay--with pitchforks, I mean; and that, too, is poetry. In truth, by the old processes, hay could not be made except with graceful motions, unless it were by a novice, some man from the city or out of a shop. A green hand with a rake, it must be confessed, is a subject for laughter rather than for rhymes. The secret of graceful raking is like the secret of graceful writing,--a light touch.
Raspberries and thimbleberries are getting ripe (they do not need to be “_dead_ ripe,” thimbleberries especially, for an old country boy), and meadow-sweet and mullein are in bloom. Hardback, standing near them, has not begun to show the pink.