The Log of the Sun.
by William Beebe.
PREFACE
In the fifty-two short essays of this volume I have presented familiar objects from unusual points of view. Bird"s-eye glances and insect"s-eye glances, at the nature of our woods and fields, will reveal beauties which are wholly invisible from the usual human view-point, five feet or more above the ground.
Who follows the lines must expect to find moods as varying as the seasons; to face storm and night and cold, and all other delights of what wildness still remains to us upon the earth.
Emphasis has been laid upon the weak points in our knowledge of things about us, and the princ.i.p.al desire of the author is to inspire enthusiasm in those whose eyes are just opening to the wild beauties of G.o.d"s out-of-doors, to gather up and follow to the end some of these frayed-out threads of mystery.
Portions of the text have been published at various times in the pages of "Outing," "Recreation," "The Golden Age," "The New York Evening Post," and "The New York Tribune."
C. W. B.
BIRDS OF THE SNOW
No fact of natural history is more interesting, or more significant of the poetry of evolution, than the distribution of birds over the entire surface of the world. They have overcome countless obstacles, and adapted themselves to all conditions. The last faltering glance which the Arctic explorer sends toward his coveted goal, ere he admits defeat, shows flocks of snow buntings active with warm life; the storm-tossed mariner in the midst of the sea, is followed, encircled, by the steady, tireless flight of the albatross; the fever-stricken wanderer in tropical jungles listens to the sweet notes of birds amid the stagnant pools; while the thirsty traveller in the desert is ever watched by the distant buzzards. Finally when the intrepid climber, at the risk of life and limb, has painfully made his way to the summit of the most lofty peak, far, far above him, in the blue expanse of thin air, he can distinguish the form of a majestic eagle or condor.
At the approach of winter the flowers and insects about us die, but most of the birds take wing and fly to a more temperate climate, while their place is filled with others which have spent the summer farther to the north. Thus without stirring from our doorway we may become acquainted with many species whose summer homes are hundreds of miles away.
No time is more propitious or advisable for the amateur bird lover to begin his studies than the first of the year. Bird life is now reduced to its simplest terms in numbers and species, and the absence of concealing foliage, together with the usual tameness of winter birds, makes identification an easy matter.
In January and the succeeding month we have with us birds which are called permanent residents, which do not leave us throughout the entire year; and, in addition, the winter visitors which have come to us from the far north.
In the uplands we may flush ruffed grouse from their snug retreats in the snow; while in the weedy fields, many a fairy trail shows where bob-white has pa.s.sed, and often he will announce his own name from the top of a rail fence. The grouse at this season have a curious outgrowth of h.o.r.n.y scales along each side of the toes, which, acting as a tiny snowshoe, enables them to walk on soft snow with little danger of sinking through.
Few of our winter birds can boast of bright colours; their garbs are chiefly grays and browns, but all have some mark or habit or note by which they can be at once named. For example, if you see a mouse hitching spirally up a tree-trunk, a closer look will show that it is a brown creeper, seeking tiny insects and their eggs in the crevices of the trunk.
He looks like a small piece of the roughened bark which has suddenly become animated. His long tail props him up and his tiny feet never fail to find a foothold. Our winter birds go in flocks, and where we see a brown creeper we are almost sure to find other birds.
Nuthatches are those blue-backed, white or rufous breasted little climbers who spend their lives defying the law of gravity. They need no supporting tail, and have only the usual number of eight toes, but they traverse the bark, up or down, head often pointing toward the ground, as if their feet were small vacuum cups. Their note is an odd nasal _nyeh!_ _nyeh!_
In winter some one species of bird usually predominates, most often, perhaps, it is the black-capped chickadee. They seem to fill every grove, and, if you take your stand in the woods, flock after flock will pa.s.s in succession. What good luck must have come to the chickadee race during the preceding summer? Was some one of their enemies stricken with a plague, or did they show more than usual care in the selecting of their nesting holes? Whatever it was, during such a year, it seems certain that scores more of chickadee babies manage to live to grow up than is usually the case. These little fluffs are, in their way, as remarkable acrobats as are the nuthatches, and it is a marvel how the very thin legs, with their tiny sliver of bone and thread of tendon, can hold the body of the bird in almost any position, while the vainly hidden cl.u.s.ters of insect eggs are pried into. Without ceasing a moment in their busy search for food, the fluffy feathered members of the flock call to each other, "_Chick-a-chick-a-dee-dee!_" but now and then the heart of some little fellow bubbles over, and he rests an instant, sending out a sweet, tender, high call, a "_Phoe-be!_" love note, which warms our ears in the frosty air and makes us feel a real affection for the brave little mites.
Our song sparrow is, like the poor, always with us, at least near the coast, but we think none the less of him for that, and besides, that fact is true in only one sense. A ripple in a stream may be seen day after day, and yet the water forming it is never the same, it is continually flowing onward. This is usually the case with song sparrows and with most other birds which are present summer and winter. The individual sparrows which flit from bush to bush, or slip in and out of the brush piles in January, have doubtless come from some point north of us, while the song sparrows of our summer walks are now miles to the southward. Few birds remain the entire year in the locality in which they breed, although the southward movement may be a very limited one. When birds migrate so short a distance, they are liable to be affected in colour and size by the temperature and dampness of their respective areas; and so we find that in North America there are as many as twenty-two races of song sparrows, to each of which has been given a scientific name. When you wish to speak of our northeastern song sparrow in the latest scientific way, you must say _Melospiza cinerea melodia_, which tells us that it is a melodious song finch, ashy or brown in colour.
Our winter sparrows are easy to identify. The song sparrow may, of course, be known by the streaks of black and brown upon his breast and sides, and by the blotch which these form in the centre of the breast. The tree sparrow, which comes to us from Hudson Bay and Labrador, lacks the stripes, but has the centre spot. This is one of our commonest field birds in winter, notwithstanding his name.
The most omnipresent and abundant of all our winter visitors from the north are the juncos, or s...o...b..rds. Slate coloured above and white below, perfectly describes these birds, although their distinguishing mark, visible a long way off, is the white V in their tails, formed by several white outer feathers on each side. The sharp chirps of juncos are heard before the ice begins to form, and they stay with us all winter.
We have called the junco a s...o...b..rd, but this name should really be confined to a black and white bunting which comes south only with a mid-winter"s rush of snowflakes. Their warm little bodies nestle close to the white crystals, and they seek cheerfully for the seeds which nature has provided for them. Then a thaw comes, and they disappear as silently and mysteriously as if they had melted with the flakes; but doubtless they are far to the northward, hanging on the outskirts of the Arctic storms, and giving way only when every particle of food is frozen tight, the ground covered deep with snow, and the panicled seed cl.u.s.ters locked in crystal frames of ice.
The feathers of these Arctic wanderers are perfect non-conductors of heat and of cold, and never a chill reaches their little frames until hunger presses. Then they must find food and quickly, or they die. When these snowflakes first come to us they are tinged with gray and brown, but gradually through the winter their colours become more clear-cut and brilliant, until, when spring comes, they are garbed in contrasting black and white. With all this change, however, they leave never a feather with us, but only the minute brown tips of the feather vanes, which, by wearing away, leave exposed the clean new colours beneath.
Thus we find that there are problems innumerable to verify and to solve, even when the tide of the year"s life is at its lowest ebb.
From out the white and pulsing storm I hear the s...o...b..rds calling; The sheeted winds stalk o"er the hills, And fast the snow is falling.
On twinkling wings they eddy past, At home amid the drifting, Or seek the hills and weedy fields Where fast the snow is sifting.
Their coats are dappled white and brown Like fields in winter weather, But on the azure sky they float Like snowflakes knit together.
I"ve heard them on the spotless hills Where fox and hound were playing, The while I stood with eager ear Bent on the distant baying.
The unmown fields are their preserves, Where weeds and gra.s.s are seeding; They know the lure of distant stacks Where houseless herds are feeding.
JOHN BURROUGHS.
WINTER MARVELS
Let us suppose that a heavy snow has fallen and that we have been a-birding in vain. For once it seems as if all the birds had gone the way of the b.u.t.terflies. But we are not true bird-lovers unless we can subst.i.tute nature for bird whenever the occasion demands; specialisation is only for the ultra-scientist.
There is more to be learned in a snowy field than volumes could tell.
There is the tangle of footprints to unravel, the history of the pastimes and foragings and tragedies of the past night writ large and unmistakable.
Though the sun now shines brightly, we can well imagine the cold darkness of six hours ago; we can reconstruct the whole scene from those tiny tracks, showing frantic leaps, the indentation of two wing-tips,--a speck of blood. But let us take a bird"s-eye view of things, from a bird"s-head height; that is, lie flat upon a board or upon the clean, dry crystals and see what wonders we have pa.s.sed by all our lives.
Take twenty square feet of snow with a streamlet through the centre, and we have an epitome of geological processes and conditions. With chin upon mittens and mittens upon the crust, the eye opens upon a new world. The half-covered rivulet becomes a monster glacier-fed stream, rushing down through grand canyons and caves, hung with icy stalact.i.tes. Bit by bit the walls are undermined and ma.s.sive icebergs become detached and are whirled away. As for moraines, we have them in plenty; only the windrows of thousands upon thousands of tiny seeds of which they are composed, are not permanent, but change their form and position with every strong gust of wind. And with every gust too their numbers increase, the harvest of the weeds being garnered here, upon barren ground. No wonder the stream will be hidden from view next summer, when the myriad seeds sprout and begin to fight upward for light and air.
If we cannot hope for polar bears to complete our Arctic scene, we may thrill at the sight of a sinuous weasel, winding his way among the weeds; and if we look in vain for swans, we at least may rejoice in a whirling, white flock of snow buntings.
A few flakes fall gently upon our sleeve and another world opens before us. A small hand-lens will be of service, although sharp eyes may dispense with it. Gather a few recently fallen flakes upon a piece of black cloth, and the lens will reveal jewels more beautiful than any ever fashioned by the hand of man. Six-pointed crystals, always hexagonal, of a myriad patterns, leave us lost in wonderment when we look out over the white landscape and think of the hidden beauty of it all. The largest glacier of Greenland or Alaska is composed wholly of just such crystals whose points have melted and which have become ice.
We may draw or photograph scores of these beautiful crystals and never duplicate a figure. Some are almost solid and tabular, others are simple stars or fern-branched. Then we may detect compound forms, crystals within crystals, and, rarest of all, doubles, where two different forms appear as joined together by a tiny pillar. In all of these we have an epitome of the crystals of the rocks beneath our feet, only in their case the pressure has moulded them into straight columns, while the snow, forming unhindered in midair, resolves itself into these exquisite forms and floral designs. Flowers and rocks are not so very unlike after all.
Few of us can observe these wonderful forms without feeling the poetry of it all. Th.o.r.eau on the fifth day of January, 1856, writes as follows:...
"The thin snow now driving from the north and lodging on my coat consists of those beautiful star crystals, not cottony and chubby spokes as on the 13th of December, but thin and partly transparent crystals. They are about one tenth of an inch in diameter, perfect little wheels with six spokes, without a tire, or rather with six perfect little leaflets, fern-like, with a distinct, straight, slender midrib raying from the centre. On each side of each midrib there is a transparent, thin blade with a crenate edge. How full of the creative genius is the air in which these are generated! I should hardly admire more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat. Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity, so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand. Nothing is cheap and coa.r.s.e, neither dewdrops nor snowflakes. Soon the storm increases (it was already very severe to face), and the snow becomes finer, more white and powdery.
"Who knows but this is the original form of all snowflakes, but that, when I observe these crystal stars falling around me, they are only just generated in the low mist next the earth. I am nearer to the source of the snow, its primal auroral, and golden hour of infancy; commonly the flakes reach us travel-worn and agglomerated, comparatively, without order or beauty, far down in their fall, like men in their advanced age. As for the circ.u.mstances under which this occurs, it is quite cold, and the driving storm is bitter to face, though very little snow is falling. It comes almost horizontally from the north.... A divinity must have stirred within them, before the crystals did thus shoot and set: wheels of the storm chariots. The same law that shapes the earth and the stars shapes the snowflake. Call it rather snow star. As surely as the petals of a flower are numbered, each of these countless snow stars comes whirling to earth, p.r.o.nouncing thus with emphasis the number six, order, [Greek: cosmos].
This was the beginning of a storm which reached far and wide, and elsewhere was more severe than here. On the Saskatchewan, where no man of science is present to behold, still down they come, and not the less fulfil their destiny, perchance melt at once on the Indian"s face. What a world we live in, where myriads of these little discs, so beautiful to the most prying eye, are whirled down on every traveller"s coat, the observant and the un.o.bservant, on the restless squirrel"s fur, on the far-stretching fields and forests, the wooded dells and the mountain tops. Far, far away from the haunts of men, they roll down some little slope, fall over and come to their bearings, and melt or lose their beauty in the ma.s.s, ready anon to swell some little rill with their contribution, and so, at last, the universal ocean from which they came. There they lie, like the wreck of chariot wheels after a battle in the skies. Meanwhile the meadow mouse shoves them aside in his gallery, the schoolboy casts them in his ball, or the woodman"s sled glides smoothly over them, these glorious spangles, the sweepings of heaven"s floor. And they all sing, melting as they sing, of the mysteries of the number six; six, six, six. He takes up the waters of the sea in his hand, leaving the salt; he disperses it in mist through the skies; he re-collects and sprinkles it like grain in six-rayed snowy stars over the earth, there to lie till he dissolves its bonds again."
But here is a bit of snow which seems less pure, with grayish patches here and there. Down again to sparrow-level and bring the gla.s.s to bear. Your farmer friend will tell you that they are snow-fleas which are snowed down with the flakes; the entomologist will call them _Achorutes nivicola_ and he knows that they have prosaically wiggled their way from the crevices of bark on the nearest tree-trunk. One"s thrill of pleasure at this unexpected discovery will lead one to adopt sparrow-views whenever larger game is lacking.
I walked erstwhile upon thy frozen waves, And heard the streams amid thy ice-locked caves; I peered down thy creva.s.ses blue and dim, Standing in awe upon the dizzy rim.
Beyond me lay the inlet still and blue, Behind, the mountains loomed upon the view Like storm-wraiths gathered from the low-hung sky.
A gust of wind swept past with heavy sigh, And lo! I listened to the ice-stream"s song Of winter when the nights grow dark and long, And bright stars flash above thy fields of snow, The cold waste sparkling in the pallid glow.
Charles Keeler.