Wild Life Near Home

Sixty springs are a good many springs to be finding out the author of so well-known a sound as this woeful strain of the serenading toad; but more than half a century might be spent in catching a cricket-frog at his song. I tried to make my neighbor see one that was clinging to a stick in the middle of the puddle; but her eyes were dim. Deft hands have dressed these peepers. We have heard them by the meadowful every spring of our life, and yet the fingers of one hand number more than the peepers we have seen. One day I bent over three lily-pads till nearly blind, trying to make out a cricket-frog that was piping all the while somewhere near or upon them. At last, in despair, I made a dash at the pads, only to see the wake as the peeper sank to the bottom an instant before my net struck the surface.

The entire frog family is as protectively colored as this least member, the cricket-frog. They all carry fern-seed in their pockets and go invisible. Notice the wood-frog with his tan suit and black cheeks. He is a mere sound as he hops about over the brown leaves. I have had him jump out of the way of my feet and vanish while I stared hard at him. He lands with legs extended, purposely simulating the shape of the ragged, broken leaves, and offers, as the only clue for one's baffled eyes, the moist glisten as his body dissolves against the dead brown of the leaf-carpet. The tree-toad, Hyla versicolor, still more strikingly blends with his surroundings, for, to a certain extent, he can change color to match the bark upon which he sits. More than once, in climbing apple-trees, I have put my hand upon a tree-toad, not distinguishing it from the patches of gray-green lichen upon the limbs. But there is less of wonder in the tree-toad's ability to change his colors than in the way he has of changing his clothes. He is never troubled with the getting of a new suit; his labor comes in caring for his old ones. It is curious how he disposes of his cast-off clothes.

One day late in autumn I picked up a tree-toad that was stiff and nearly dead with cold. I put him in a wide-mouthed bottle to thaw, and found by evening that he was quite alive, sitting with his toes turned in, looking much surprised at his new quarters. He made himself at home, however, and settled down comfortably, ready for what might happen next.

The following day he climbed up the side of the bottle and slept several hours, his tiny disked toes holding him as easily and restfully as if he were stretched upon a feather-bed. I turned him upside down; but he knew nothing of it until later when he awoke; then he deliberately turned round with his head up and went to sleep again. At night he was wide awake, winking and blinking at the lamp, and watching me through his window of green glass.

A few nights after his rescue Hyla sat upon the bottom of his bottle in a very queer attitude. His eyes were drawn in, his head was bent down, his feet rolled up – his whole body huddled into a ball less than half its normal size. After a time he began to kick and gasp as if in pain, rolling and unrolling himself desperately. I thought he was dying. He would double up into a bunch, then kick out suddenly and stand up on his hind legs with his mouth wide open as if trying to swallow something. He was trying to swallow something, and the thing had stuck on the way. It was a kind of cord, and ran out of each corner of his mouth, passing over his front legs, thinning and disappearing most strangely along his sides.

With the next gulp I saw the cord slip down a little, and, as it did so, the skin along his sides rolled up. It was his old suit! He was taking it off for a new one; and, instead of giving it to the poor, he was trying to economize by eating it. What a meal! What a way to undress! What curious economy!

Long ago the naturalists told us that the toads ate their skins – after shedding them; but it was never made plain to me that they ate them while changing them – indeed, swallowed them off! Three great gulps more and the suit – shirt, shoes, stockings, and all – disappeared. Then Hyla winked, drew his clean sleeve across his mouth, and settled back with the very air of one who has magnificently sent away the waiter with the change.

Four days later Hyla ate up this new suit. I saw the entire operation this time. It was almost a case of surgery. He pulled the skin over his head and neck with his fore feet as if it were a shirt, then crammed it into his mouth; kicked it over his back next; worked out his feet and legs; then ate it off as before. The act was accomplished with difficulty, and would have been quite impossible had not Hyla found the most extraordinary of tongues in his head. Next to the ability to speak Russian with the tongue comes the power to skin one's self with it. The tree-toad cannot quite croak Russian, but he can skin himself with his tongue. Unlike ours, his tongue is hung at the front end, with the free end forked and pointing toward his stomach. When my little captive had crammed his mouth full of skin, he stuck this fork of a tongue into it and forced it down his throat and held it down while he kicked and squirmed out of it.

Though less beautifully clothed than Hyla, our common toad, Bufo, is just as carefully clothed. Where the rain drips from the eaves, clean, narrow lines of pebbles have been washed out of the lawn. On one side of the house the shade lies all day long and the grass is cool and damp. Here, in the shade, a large toad has lived for two summers. I rarely pass that way without seeing him, well hidden in the grass. For several days lately he had been missing, when, searching more closely one morning, I found him sunk to the level of his back in the line of pebbles, his spots and the glands upon his neck so mingling with the varied collection of gravel about him that only a practised eye, and that sharp with expectation, could have made him out.

In a newly plowed field, with some of the fresh soil sticking to him, what thing could look more like a clod than this brown, shapeless lump of a toad? But there is a beauty even in this unlovely form; for here is perfect adaptability.

Our canons of the beautiful are false if they do not in some way include the toad. Shall we measure all the out-of-doors by the linnet's song, the cardinal-flower's flame, and the hay-field's odor? Deeper, wider, more fundamental and abiding than these standards, lie the intellectual principles of plan and purpose and the intellectual quality of perfect execution. We shall love not alone with all our heart, but with all our mind as well. If we judge the world beautiful by the superficial standard of what happens to please our eye, we shall see no more of the world than we do of the new moon. Whole classes of animals and wide regions of the earth's surface must, by this test, be excluded. The only way the batrachians could possibly come in would be by rolling the frogs in bread-crumbs and frying them. Treated thus, they look good and taste good, but this is all that can be said for the entire family. Studied, however, from the single view-point of protective coloring, or again, as illustrating the ease with which the clumsiest forms can be fitted to the widest variety of conditions, the toads do not suffer by any comparison. In the light of such study, Bufo loses his repulsiveness and comes to have a place quite as unique as the duckbill's, and a personality not less fascinating than the swallow's or the gray squirrel's.

However, the toad to the most of us is anything but a poem. What, indeed, looks less lovely, less nimble and buoyant, more chained to the earth, than a toad? But stretch the least web between his toes, lengthen his hind legs, and – over he goes, the leopard-frog, champion high diver of the marsh! Or, instead of the web, tip his toes with the tiniest disks, and – there he swings, Pickering's little hyla, clinging as easily to the under surface of that oak-leaf high in the tree as a fly clings to the kitchen ceiling.

When a boy I climbed to the top of the flagpole on one of the State geological survey stations. The pole rose far above the surrounding pines – the highest point for miles around. As I clinched the top of the staff, gripping my fingers into the socket for the flag-stick, I felt something cold, and drawing myself up, found a tree-toad asleep in the hole. Under him was a second toad, and under the second a third – all dozing up here on the very topmost tip of all the region.

From the river-ooze to the tree-top, nature carries this toad-form simply by a thin web between the toes, or by tiny disks at their tips. And mixing her greens and browns with just a dash of yellow, she paints them all so skilfully that, upon a lily-pad, beside a lump of clay, or against the lichened limb of an old apple-tree, each sits as securely as Perseus in the charmed helmet that made him invisible.

The frogs have innumerable enemies among the water-birds, the fish, the snakes, and such animals as the fisher, coon, possum, and mink. The toads fortunately are supplied with glands behind their heads whose secretion is hateful to most of their foes, though it seems to be no offense whatever to the snakes. A toad's only chance, when a snake is after him, lies in hiding. I once saw a race between a toad and an adder snake, however, in which the hopper won.

One bright May morning I was listening to the music of the church bells, as it floated out from the city and called softly over the fields, when my reverie was interrupted by a sharp squeak and a thud beside the log on which I sat; something dashed over my foot; and I turned to catch sight of a toad bouncing past the log, making hard for the brush along the fence. He scarcely seemed to touch the ground, but skimmed over the grass as if transformed into a midget jack-rabbit. His case was urgent; and little wonder! At the opposite end of the log, raised four or five inches from the grass, her eyes hard glittering, her nose tilted in the air, and astonishment all over her face, swayed the flat, ugly head of a hognose-adder. Evidently she, too, had never seen a toad get away in any such time before; and after staring a moment, she turned under the log and withdrew from the race, beaten.

Hungry snakes and hot, dusty days are death to the toads. Bufo would almost as soon find himself at the bottom of a well as upon a dusty road in blazing sunshine. His day is the night. He is not particular about the moon. All he asks is that the night be warm, that the dew lay the dust and dampen the grass, and that the insects be out in numbers. At night the snakes are asleep, and so are most of those ugly, creaking beasts with rolling iron feet that come crushing along their paths. There is no foe abroad at night, and life, during these dark, quiet hours, has even for a toad something like a dash of gaiety.

In one of the large pastures not far away stands a pump. It is shaded by an ancient apple-tree, under which, when the days are hottest, the cattle gather to doze and dream. They have worn away the grass about the mossy trough, and the water, slopping over, keeps the spot cool and muddy the summer through. Here the toads congregate from every quarter of the great field. I stretched myself out flat on the grass one night and watched them in the moonlight. There must have been fifty here that night, hopping about over the wet place – as grotesque a band as ever met by woods or waters.

We need no "second sight," no pipe of Pan, no hills of Latmos with a flock to feed, to find ourselves back in that enchanted world of the kelpies and satyrs. All we need to do is to use the eyes and ears we have, and haunt our hills by morning and by moonlight. Here in the moonlight around the old pump I saw goblins, if ever goblins were seen in the light of our moon.

There was not a croak, not a squeak, not the slightest sound, save the small pit-pat, pit-pat, made by their hopping. There may have been some kind of toad talk among them, but listen never so closely, I could not catch a syllable of it.

Where did they all come from? How did they find their way to this wet spot over the hills and across the acres of this wide pasture? You could walk over the field in the daytime and have difficulty in finding a single toad; but here at night, as I lay watching, every few minutes one would hop past me in the grass; or coming down the narrow cow-paths in the faint light I could see a wee black bunch bobbing leisurely along with a hop and a stop, moving slowly toward the pump to join the band of his silent friends under the trough.

Not because there was more food at the pump, nor for the joy of gossip, did the toads meet here. The one thing necessary to their existence is water, and doubtless many of these toads had crossed this pasture of fifteen acres simply to get a drink. I have known a toad to live a year without food, and another to die in three days for lack of water. And yet this thirsty little beast never knows the pleasure of a real drink, because he does not know how to drink.

I have kept toads confined in cages for weeks at a time, never allowing them water when I could not watch them closely, and I never saw one drink. Instead, they would sprawl out in the saucer on their big, expansive bellies, and soak themselves full, as they did here on the damp sand about the pump.

Just after sunset, when the fireflies light up and the crickets and katydids begin to chirp, the toad that sleeps under my front step hops out of bed, kicks the sand off his back, and takes a long look at the weather. He seems to think as he sits here on the gravel walk, sober and still, with his face turned skyward. What does he think about? Is he listening to the chorus of the crickets, to the whippoorwills, or is it for supper he is planning? It may be of the vicissitudes of toad life, and of the mutability of all sublunary things, that he meditates. Who knows? Some day perhaps we shall have a batrachian psychology, and I shall understand what it is that my door-step lodger turns over and over in his mind as he watches the coming of the stars. All I can do now is to minute his cogitations, and I remember one evening when he sat thinking and winking a full hour without making a single hop.

As the darkness comes down he makes off for a night of bug-hunting. At the first peep of dawn, bulging plump at the sides, he turns back for home. Home to a toad usually means any place that offers sleep and safety for the day; but if undisturbed, like the one under the step, he will return to the same spot throughout the summer. This chosen spot may be the door-step, the cracks between the bricks of a well, or the dense leaves of a strawberry-bed.

In the spring of 1899 so very little rain fell between March and June that I had to water my cucumber-hills. There was scarcely a morning during this dry spell that I did not find several toads tucked away for the day in these moist hills. These individuals had no regular home, like the one under the step, but hunted up the coolest, shadiest places in the soft soil and made new beds for themselves every morning.

Their bed-making is very funny, but not likely to meet the approval of the housewife. Wearied with the night's hunting, a toad comes to the cool cucumber-vines and proceeds at once to kick himself into bed. He backs and kicks and elbows into the loose sand as far as he can, then screws and twists till he is worked out of sight beneath the soil, hind end foremost. Here he lies, with only his big pop-eyes sticking out, half asleep, half awake. If a hungry adder crawls along, he simply pulls in his eyes, the loose sand falls over them, and the snake passes on.

When the nights begin to grow chilly and there are threatenings of frost, the toads hunt up winter quarters, and hide deep down in some warm burrow – till to-morrow if the sun comes out hot, or, it may be, not to wake until next April. Sometimes an unexpected frost catches them, when any shelter must do, when even their snake-fear is put aside or forgotten. "Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows," said Trinculo, as he crawled in with Caliban from the storm. So might the toad say in an early frost.

The workmen in a sandstone-quarry near by dug out a bunch of toads one winter, all mixed up with a bunch of adders. They were wriggled and squirmed together in a perfect jumble of legs, heads, and tails – all in their dead winter sleep. Their common enemy, the frost, had taken them unawares, and driven them like friends into the crevice of the rocks, where they would have slept together until the spring had not the quarrymen unearthed them.

There is much mystery shrouding this humble batrachian. Somewhere in everybody's imagination is a dark cell harboring a toad. Reading down through literature, it is astonishing how often the little monster has hopped into it. There is chance for some one to make a big book of the fable and folk-lore that has been gathering through the ages about the toads. The stories of the jewels in their heads, of their age-long entombments in the rocks, of the warts and spells they induce, of their eating fire and dropping from the clouds, are legion.

And there seems to be some basis of fact for all these tales. No one has yet written for us the life-history of the toad. After having watched the tadpole miracle, one is thoroughly prepared to see toads jump out of the fire, tumble from broken marble mantles, and fall from the clouds. I never caught them in my hat during a shower; but I have stood on Mauricetown Bridge, when the big drops came pelting down, and seen those drops apparently turn into tiny toads as they struck the planks, until the bridge was alive with them! Perhaps they had been hiding from the heat between the cracks of the planks – but there are people who believe that they came down from the clouds.

How, again, shall I explain this bit of observation? More than six years I lived near a mud-hole that dried up in July. I passed it almost daily. One spring there was a strange toad-call in the hole, a call that I had never heard anything like before – a deafening, agonizing roar, hoarse and woeful. I found on investigation that the water was moving with spade-foot toads. Two days later the hole was still; every toad was gone. They disappeared; and though I kept that little puddle under watch for several seasons after that, I have not known a spade-foot to appear there since.

The water was almost jellied with their spawn, and a little later was swarming with spade-foot tadpoles. Then it began to dry up, and some of the tadpoles were left stranded in the deep foot-prints of the cows along the edge of the hole. Just as fast as the water disappeared in these foot-prints, the tails of the tadpoles were absorbed and legs formed, and they hopped away – some of them a week before their brothers, that were hatched at the same time, but who had stayed in the middle of the pond, where the deeper water allowed them a longer babyhood for the use of their tails. So swiftly, under pressure, can nature work with this adaptable body of the toad!

Long before the sun-baked mud began to crack these young ones had gone – where? And whence came their parents, and whither went they? When will they return?

A BUZZARDS' BANQUET

Is there anything ugly out of doors? Can the ardent, sympathetic lover of nature ever find her unlovely? We know that she is supremely utilitarian, and we have only wonder and worship for her prodigal and perfect economy. But does she always couple beauty with her utility?

To her real lover nature is never tiresome nor uninteresting; but often she is most fascinating when veiled. She has moods and tempers and habits, even physical blemishes, that are frequently discovered to the too pressing suitor; and though these may quicken his interest and faith, they often dissipate that halo of perfection with which first fancy clothed her. This intimacy, this "seeing the very pulse of the machine," is what spoils poets like Burroughs and Thoreau: spoils them for poets to make them the truer philosophers.

Like the spots on the sun, all of nature's other blemishes disappear in the bright blaze of her loveliness when viewed through a veil, whether of shadows, or mists, or distance. This is half the secret of the spell of the night, of the mystery of the sea, and the enchantment of an ancient forest. From the depths of a bed in the meadow-grass there is perfection of motion, the very soul of poetry, in the flight of a buzzard far up under the blue dome of the sky; but look at the same bald-headed, snaky-necked creature upon a fence-stake, and you wonder how leagues into the clouds ever hid his ugly visage from you. Melrose must be seen by moonlight. The light to see the buzzard in has never been on land or sea, has come no nearer than the high white clouds that drift far away in the summer sky.

From an economic point of view the buzzard is an admirable creation. So are the robin, the oriole, and most other birds; but these are admirable also from the esthetic point of view. Not so the buzzard. He has the wings of Gabriel – the wings only; for, truly, his neck and head are Lucifer's. If ugliness be an attribute of nature, then this bird is its expression incarnate. Not that he is wicked, but worse than wicked – repulsive. Now the jackal is a mean, sordid scamp, a miserable half-dog beast, a degenerate that has not fallen far, since he was never up very high. The buzzard, on the other hand, was a bird. What he is now is unnamable. He has fallen back below the reptiles, into a harpy with snake's head and bird's body – a vulture more horrid than any mythical monster.

Having once seen a turkey-buzzard feeding, one has no difficulty in accounting for the origin of those "angry creations of the gods" that defiled the banquets of King Phineus. If there is any holiness of beauty, surely the turkey-buzzard with clipped wing is the most unholy, the most utterly lost soul in the world.

One bright, warm day in January – a frog-waking day in southern New Jersey – I saw the buzzards in unusual numbers sailing over the pines beyond Cubby Hollow. Hoping for a glimpse of something social in the silent, unemotional solitaries, I hurried over to the pines, and passing through the wood, found a score of the birds feasting just beyond the fence in an open field.

Creeping up close to the scene, I quietly hid in a big drift of leaves and corn-blades that the winds had piled in a corner of the worm-fence, and became an uninvited guest at the strangest, gruesomest assemblage ever gathered – a buzzards' banquet.

The silence of the nether world wrapped this festive scene. Like ugly shades from across the Styx came the birds, deepening the stillness with their swishing wings. It was an unearthly picture: the bare, stub-stuck corn-field, the gloomy pines, the silent, sullen buzzards in the yellow winter sunlight!

The buzzards were stalking about when I arrived, all deliberately fighting for a place and a share of the spoil. They made no noise; and this dumb semblance of battle heightened the unearthliness of the scene. As they lunged awkwardly about, the ends of their over-long wings dragged the ground, and they tripped and staggered like drunken sailors on shore. The hobbling hitch of seals on land could not be less graceful than the strut of these fighting buzzards. They scuffled as long as there was a scrap to fight for, wordless and bloodless, not even a feather being disturbed, except those that rose with anger, as the hair rises on a dog's back. But the fight was terrible in its uncanniness.

Upon the fence and in the top of a dead oak near by others settled, and passed immediately into a state of semi-consciousness that was almost a stupor. Gloomy and indifferent they sat, hunched up with their heads between their shoulders, perfectly oblivious of all mundane things. There was no sign of recognition between the birds until they dropped upon the ground and began fighting. Let a crow join a feeding group of its fellows, and there will be considerable cawing; even a sparrow, coming into a flock, will create some chirping: but there was not so much as the twist of a neck when a new buzzard joined or left this assemblage. Each bird sat as if he were at the center of the Sahara Desert, as though he existed alone, with no other buzzard on the earth.

There was no hurry, no excitement anywhere; even the struggle on the ground was measured and entirely wooden. None of the creatures on the fence showed any haste to fall to feeding. After alighting they would go through the long process of folding up their wings and packing them against their sides; then they would sit awhile as if trying to remember why they had come here rather than gone to any other place. Occasionally one would unfold his long wings by sections, as you would open a jointed rule, pause a moment with them outstretched, and, with a few ponderous flaps, sail off into the sky without having tasted the banquet. Then another upon the ground, having feasted, would run a few steps to get spring, and bounding heavily into the air, would smite the earth with his too long wings, and go swinging up above the trees. As these grew small and disappeared in the distance, others came into view, mere specks among the clouds, descending in ever-diminishing circles until they settled, without word or greeting, with their fellows at the banquet.