The Lay of the Land

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.

XI

High Noon

Lazily sailing clouds, and between them, far away, the illimitable blue! And how blue! how cool! how far away! Never does the sky seem of so real azure, so fresh and new, but so mysteriously distant, as upon such a July day as this; and never does the earth seem so warm and near. I lie outstretched upon it as close as I ever lay upon my mother’s breast. I feel the crisp moss beneath me, the creeping of the beetle under my shoulder, the heat of the gray stone against my side. I throw out my hands, push my fingers into the hot soil and feel them take root. Mother earth! The clouds sail on; the bending blue recedes; and – heaven? It matters not. Here are my brothers, – the beetle, the moss, the gray stone; and here I lie in the arms of the mother who bore me.

I have questions to ask – to-morrow; dreams to dream – to-morrow; things to do – to-morrow. To-day I am free in the fields; to-day I am brother to the beetle and the stone; I am neighbor to this ancient white oak in whose shade I lie; I am child to the earth. It is enough to be to-day.

How warm is this mother breast, even here, under the tree! The sun is overhead. The summer is at its height. The flood-tide of life has come. It is high noon of the year.

The drowsy silence of the full, hot noon lies deep across the field. Stream and cattle and pasture-slope are quiet in repose. The eyes of the earth are heavy. The air is asleep. Yet the round shadow of my oak begins to shift. The cattle do not move; the pasture still sleeps under the wide, white glare. But already the noon is passing.

Of the four seasons summer is the shortest, and the one we are least acquainted with. Summer is only a pause between spring and autumn, only the hour of the year’s noon. But the hour is long enough were we able to stop, to lie down under a tree for the hour, unwearied, wide-awake, and still.

We can be glad with the spring, sad with the autumn, eager with the winter; but it is hard for us to go softly, to pause, to be still, complete, sufficient, full with the full, sufficient summer; to hang poised and expanded like the broad-winged hawk yonder far up in the wide sky.

But the hawk is not still. The shadow of my oak begins to lengthen. The hour is gone even while it comes, for wavering softly down the languid air falls a yellow leaf from a slender gray birch near by. I remember, too, that on my way through the woodlot I frightened a small flock of robins from a pine; and more than a week ago the swallows were gathering upon the telegraph wires. It was springtime even yesterday; to-day there are signs of autumn everywhere. Perhaps, after all, there is no such time as summer, – no pause, no rest, no quiet in the fields, no hour of noon.

Yet I get something out of the fields, these slumberous July days, that is neither of springtime nor of autumn, a ripening, mellowing, quieting something, that falls only when the leaves hang limp, when the earth warms in the shadows, when the wood-lily opens in the sun, and the whir of the cicada times the throbbing of the heat. And when that something falls, then I know it is summer.

This is a late July day, but its dawn was still of the springtime. At daybreak the birds were singing, fresh and full-throated as in May; then the sun burned through the mist and the chorus ceased. Now I do not hear even the chewink and the talkative vireo. Only the fiery notes of the scarlet tanager come to me through the dry white heat of the noon, and the resonant, reverberated song of the indigo bunting, a hot, metallic, quivering song, as out of a hot and copper sky.

There are nestlings still in the woods. This indigo bunting has eggs or young in the bushes up the hillside; the scarlet tanager but lately finished his nest in the tall oaks; I looked in upon some half-fledged cuckoos along the fence. But all of these are late. The year’s young are upon the wing. A few of the spring’s flowers are still opening. I noticed the bees upon some tardy raspberry blossoms; and yonder, amid the fixed shining colors of the wooded ridge, I see the top of a chestnut tree, misty and tender, with foamy white bloom. These are the last of the season. The July flowering of the chestnut always seems delayed and accidental. The season’s fruit has set, is already ripening. Spring is gone; the sun is overhead; the red wood-lily is open. To-day is summer, – noon of the year.

High noon! and the hour strikes in the red wood-lily aflame in the old fields and in the low thick tangles of sweet-fern and blackberry that border the upland woods.

This is a flower of fire, the worshiper of the sun, the very heart of the summer. How impossible it would be to kindle a wood-lily on the cold, damp soil of April! It can be lighted only on this kiln-dried soil of July. This old hilly pasture is baking in the sun; the mouldy moss that creeps over its thin breast crackles and crumbles under my feet; the patches of sweet-fern that blotch it here and there crisp in the heat and fill the smothered air with a spicy breath; but the wood-lily opens wide and full, lifting its spotted lips to the Sun, for it loves his scorching kiss. See it glow! Should the withered thicket burst suddenly into a blaze it would be no wonder, so little would it take to fan these glowing petals into flame.

The marsh marigolds of May spread the meadows with a glow of warmth, yet that was but a gilded fire beside the wilting, withering heat of this midsummer lily. That early flush has gone. There is hardly a fleck of spring’s freshness and delicacy on the fields, none of the tenderness of the bluets that touched everything in May, none even of the softness of the hardwood greens that lasted far into June. The colors are set now, dry and glistening, as if varnished over. The odors, too, have changed. They were moist and faint then, – the fragrance of the breath of things. Now they are strong, pungent, heavy, – the tried out smells of the sweat of things.

Life has grown lusty and lazy and rank. It stood no higher than the heads of the violets along my little river at the coming of June; to-day I cannot catch a glimpse of the water without breaking through a hedge of swamp milkweed, boneset, and peppermint. Here are turtle-head, joe-pye-weed, jewel-weed, the budding goldenrods, and the spreading, choking, rasping smartweed. The year is full grown. It is strong, rich, luxuriant.

And how erect and unblushing! The pointed spireas, the sumacs, the thistles, this crowd along the river, this red wood-lily, even the tall swaying spray of meadow-rue! Slender, dainty, airy, the meadow-rue falls just short of grace and delicacy. It feels the season’s pride of life. It is angled, rigid, rank. Were there the slightest bend to its branches, the merest suggestion of soul to the plant, then, from root to spreading panicles, there had been more grace, more misty, penciled delicacy wrought into the tall meadow-rue than into any flower-form of my summer.

But the suggestion of soul in the meadow-rue, as in the whole face of nature, is lost in flesh. It is the body, not the spirit, that is now present. She is well fed, well clothed, opulent, mature. She is conventional, – as conventional as a single, stiff spire of the steeple-bush, – turned to such a pointed nicety as to seem done by machine.

And yet the steeple-bush rarely grows as single spires, but by the meadow-full. We rarely see a single spire. We never gather summer flowers one by one, as we gather the arbutus and hepatica of spring. Life has lost its individuality. It is all massed, crowded, communal. The odors mingle now and drift wide on the winds, and as wide on the hillsides spread the colors, gold and green and white, and, where the rocky pasture runs down to the woods, the pink of the steeple-bush, like a flush of dawn.

Across my neighbor’s pasture lies this soft glory of the spireas all through July. It runs in irregular streams down to the brook, rising there into a low-hanging bank of mist where the clustering spires of pink are interspersed with the taller, whiter meadow-sweet, – the “willow-leaved spirea.”

There are shadowy rooms in the deep woods where the spring lingers until the leaves of autumn begin to fall. Here, in July, I can find the little twin flowers Linnea and Mitchella, blossoms that should have opened with the bloodroot and anemone. But Life has largely fled the woods and left them empty and still. She is out in the open, along the roadsides, rioting in the sun. The time of her maidenhood is gone. She is entirely maternal now, bent on replenishing the earth, on reseeding it against all possibility of death. She covers the ground with seed, and fills the very air with seed that the winds may sow. She has grown lusty, bold, almost defiant, no longer asking leave, but claiming for her own the pastures, gardens, waysides, even the dumps and waste places.

Yonder where the cattle feed stands the barbed purple thistle, arrogant, royal, unapproachable by man or beast. “Stand back,” it says, by every one of its thousand nettles; “this field is mine.” How savage and how splendid it is! After the royal purple fades, the goldfinches will dare to come and eat the plumed seeds and scatter them by the million, but even the goldfinch has been known to perish upon the poisoned spikes with which the plant is armed.

As persistent and successful as the thistle, though not as arrogant and savage, grows the wild white carrot in the mowing fields. The courts have called it names and set a price upon its life. It has been pulled out, cut off and burned, – exterminated again and again by statute.

Life snaps her fingers at us in July; lays hold of us, even, as we pass, and makes us carry her burs and beggar’s-ticks for a wider planting. I am as useful as the tail of my cow. Neither the cow nor I ever come home from the July fields without an abundant sowing of stick-tights, tick-seeds, and burdock burs.

There is little beauty, fragrance, or even economic value in this wild, overrunning host of thistles, docks, daisies, plantains, yarrows, carrots, that now possess the earth; but when they crowd out along the dusty roadsides and cover the sterile, neglected, and unsightly places, we can sing, like the good gray poet, “the leaves and flowers of the commonest weeds” in our “Song of Joys.”

There is certainly some praise due the chicory, or blue corn-flower, for it is a waste transformer, a “slummer” among flowers, if ever there was one. Like the daisy, it is a foreigner; but unlike the daisy, its coming is wholly benevolent. It asks only the roadsides, and for these along only the choked, deserted stretches; and where the summer dust lies deepest. Coarse, common, weedy, it doubtless is; but it never droops in the heat, and its blue shines through the smother like azure through the mists of the sky.

The winds and the birds are the sowers of the wayside, and to them I am indebted for this touch of midsummer color. But they miss certain spots along the roads, or else these are the patches that have no deepness of earth, where the seed of the winds’ sowing can get no hold, for I have had to sow these myself. As I go up and down I carry a pocketful of sweet clover seed, – melilotus, – and over every waste and sandy place I scatter a few of the tiny seeds, when, lo! not two blades of grass where one grew before, but a patch of tall white flowers, breathing the sweetness of heaven into all the air, and humming in the July sun with the joyous sound of my honey bees. All this, and for season after season, where nothing grew before!

Along with melilotus in the gravelly cuts and burnt woodlands grows the fireweed, a tall showy annual that waves its pink, plumed head throughout July. Farther north and west, this striking flower, like the melilotus, yields a heavy flow of delicious honey, but it does not attract the bees in this locality. Neither do my bees get any nectar from the fat little indigo-bush that takes possession of the unfarmed, sandy fields in July, though the wild bumblebees are busy upon it as long as it remains in bloom.

But this is not the native land of the honey bee, and it is sheer luck that the white clover, the basswood, the goldenrod, and here in July, the sumac, give down to these immigrant bees their honey-sweets.

High noon of the year! The laggard breeze comes to me now from the maple swamp, slow and sleepy with the odor of the white azaleas; a flock of chickadees stop and quiz me; the quivering click-clack of a distant mowing-machine fills the air with a drowsy hum.

Up to this time I have not seen a black snake, but now one is watching me with raised head from the edge of ferns among the rocks. One step toward him and the lifted, rigid neck, a flashing streak of jet, glides swiftly, evenly, mysteriously away, leaving me with an uncanny feeling of chill.