September
Youth on the Move
The tourists and the summer residents begin to leave the Cape. This is a visible exodus, with many more cars going out than coming in. The people in charge of commerce count our summer gains and our losses. Those of us who are year-round residents can admit it in public, now that the representatives of the humming, spreading urban world have departed. Here now is a half-populated place, temporarily, perhaps shamefully, consigned to a dull future. And yet, according to the practice I have begun to learn by years of residence, I can now look around, with room to spare. What fills this emptiness? What will I see when I take off my dark glasses?
I notice, by the way, that some of us are now predicting the local future with more assurance. I hear a real Cape Codder (meaning someone born here, preferably before 1900) pronouncing that there will be a frost around the sixteenth, and that “We’ll have a blow pretty soon.”
The night heaves with heat. A half-clouded, half-misted sky shows occasional stars. Then an onshore wind begins to blow and the land stirs and frets in the darkness. I feel that new revolutions are in order, earth-honored, momentous changes.
In the morning the weather vane stands to the north. The sea is kicked up, the trees are swaying, and the temperature has dropped into the fifties. A new wind is getting in its licks, rolling and lunging against us. The air above the sea meets the great air masses from the land. Warm and cold, water and air, west and south, north and east, join in a game of strength. The whole day is a trial for the future, with the running clouds as its pawns. A child asks her father: “Can the day blow away?”
When the wind dies down and the clouds clear off, the air has changed from a hazy warmth to clarity. The sea turns dark blue, groined with white caps. The land seems strict and clean, lifted into pure new skies and a new silence, although at night the musical pulsing of the snowy tree crickets is still as shrill and loud as spring peepers.
This is a marginal season like the spring. It is full of new appearances, as well as late fruitions. The goldenrod, strong flower of the sun, still plumes its store of light, and represents me well in my country, in spite of congressional inclination to award some puffy, manufactured rose with the title of national flower.
Asters, lilac and white, grow abundantly in the sandy soil. Their little pin wheel flowers are as crisp and clean as the new dresses of the girls when they go off for the first day of school. The novelty, after the closed-in summer tempo, is an outwardness. There are many immature birds that appear suddenly in various untried places, and not necessarily because of the demands of a set migration. Because of these fledglings the various bird populations have so increased that they are pushed into looking for food beyond their nesting areas.
Immature hermit thrushes appear as if at random, and many robins and towhees. The towhee, once called red-eyed, a name that seems to have been changed to rufous-sided, is a handsome black, white, and terra-cotta bird which likes scrubby areas, thickets, and open woods. So we see it frequently. It has a black and white tail with which it puts on a spectacular performance, flicking and flashing its feathers like a gambler with a deck of cards; and it floats over the brush and across the ground with its tail spread wide behind it.
Now the young towhees call “Twee! Twee!” not quite at adult strength and clarity, but they are finding themselves. They are on the move.
A covey of young quail suddenly starts across the road, coming out of a field still loud with insects. Heads and necks up, they run almost trippingly forward with sweet, piping alarm.
A young red-tailed hawk is brought into school by a boy whose father found it trapped in his chicken yard and killed it ignominiously with a baseball bat. Red tails are big beauties with a thick supply of feathers. Their backs are brown, their white bellies flecked with brown. The usual place to find them is high up, wheeling around the sky on a watch for rodents; and occasionally they fly out of pitch pine woods where they roost. The dead one has lost its piercing cry and the electric glare in its eyes, but its talons still look formidable. They are black, and as sharp-tipped, as wildly curved, as hooks of steel, joined in power and flexibility.
Bright days warm the surface of the inland ponds that have their outlet in the waters of our local brook and estuary leading through marshes to Cape Cod Bay. The sun’s radiance hurries up the alewife fry in their ancient impulse to go down to salt water, from which they will return in three or four years’ time to spawn like their elders, usually in the same fresh-water system where they were hatched. These little silver fish, with an unfathomed stare in their big eyes, run out on an ebb tide from Paine’s Creek. They attract gulls and terns, which hover in crowds against the west wind.
The plumage of the young terns still in the area now shows a more definite contrast between black and white. They have become more adept at flight. Many are still being fed ... almost continuously during those hours of shallow water when fish are easier to catch, so that the passivity of those still waiting on the sands looks like a consequence of being overstuffed. I get the impression that less food is being proffered by the parent birds, but they have certainly not relinquished their responsibility. They bring in small fish and their large children gulp them down and wait for more. Other young birds are now flying readily—chasing after their parents, beseeching attention, but more often trying to fish for themselves. Little by little, by rewards and refusal, failure and success, they are progressing toward the perfected action of mature birds. They are becoming more aggressive, fighting for space over a crowded channel, or protecting their catch. The adults, whose success in fishing they are beginning to approximate, hover over the water, beaks pointing down, then dive suddenly, wings partly folded back. They hit the water like small stones, then come up again, flying away fast if they have a fish in their bills, chased by other birds that cry “Karr! Karr!” with a slightly growling note. It is not so much that the young terns are taught, in our sense of the word, as that they become more and more a part of the communicable rhythm of the whole race of terns. Their circling, diving, hovering, or racing downwind are common proficiencies of motion, that fit the great environment of air and sea. Growing up is rhythmic practice. There is not such a gap between tutelage and its recipients as there might seem to be among human beings.
Terns seem involved in a ritualistic performance throughout their lives. Much of the behavior they show in getting food as nestlings and fledgling birds has its parallels in adulthood. There is the “fish flight,” for example, which has its origins in the begging, receiving, and then hunting food of a growing bird. (A fish is a master image, a center of recognition and attachment, with all the formality of action it entails.)
The fish flight is a term which in its strict sense is applied to the behavior of birds during pre-courtship. It involves emotional display between pairs of birds, as distinct from their food-getting habits in general. In detail it includes differences in calls, in the relative positions of birds during flight, and in the way they carry a fish. A fish in the bill not only represents the fulfillment of need. It may also be an offering, a display, and perhaps the instrument for a mutual awareness between male and female, even before sex recognition occurs. But if the fish flight can be tied down to behavior at a particular stage in their lives, the terns also show similar reactions before and after it. Mated birds go on offering fish as they fly by one another, or begging, so that feeding is used to maintain a bond between them. And of course the fish is the basis of all the instinctive training of the young. The process of begging and receiving, or offering for the uses of recognition, continues on in many forms through their life stages. They pursue a formality. Their flights show the grace in action of a whole society.
At half tide, when the water recedes over the sand flats, the terns flock there, preening and bathing in the tidal pools. Occasionally one will lift its wings up beautifully into the wind, receiving the wash of air. Some fly back to the inlet and drink the brackish water. The community seems to gather more and more closely together as time goes on. They all begin to roost densely in one area. At times they take to the air, as if alarmed. They rise and circle, crowds of white, crying shrilly, and then fly down again. Or they spin like a larger flock of sandpipers, a white cloud dancing with dizzy perfection over some fish weirs in the distance. Perhaps it could be called communal practice for the next journey. In their rhythms they are self-sustained, self-protective, like schools of fish, but at the same time bound out, under the laws of the wild air. One day soon I will go down to watch again, finding that most of them have flown away.
An Open Shore
We stay where we are, while the young migrant birds and the men of the city leave us. But the days sharpen and change. The nights grow longer and cooler. The westerly winds increase. There is a brilliance in the air, and the sea makes a clean statement to our senses. “Adjust your vision,” the sky seems to say, “to a turn in height and depth and in a new area of relentless winds.”
Those migratory birds that are still with us feed actively, fly with restless energy, and collect in flocks. In many undisturbed areas, down by the barrier beaches and through the salt marshes, treeless, open to the sun, you can see a great number using their special physical advantages to feed or fly, hide or attack, in the patterns of environment.
The U. S. Wildlife Refuge at Monomoy is on a long spit of barrier beach and marsh extending south from the town of Chatham ten miles into Nantucket Sound. It is wild, unadorned with tourist cabins, and so an undisturbed refuge and resting place for migratory birds. At first you find warblers, gnat-catchers, orioles, vireos, and other land birds, working silently through low oaks, pines, and stunted, salt-sprayed shrubbery. Then the marshland sweeps ahead with open ground, and curving inlets behind a long beach where the surf pounds endlessly, the sands inlaid with the debris of the sea—whelks, surf clams, or scallops. Back in the marsh where mud snails stream slowly ahead in a long procession, the shore birds race in, or turn quickly in a shimmering flock, or settle among the hummocks, and along sandy rims.
Dowitchers stolidly probe the mud with their long bills. That mottled, distinctive bird, the ruddy turnstone, pushes, or turns over, pebbles and stones—thus proving its name—as it searches for the worms and crustaceans underneath. Shy piping plovers, white as oyster shells, stand by themselves behind a dune. Sanderlings hurry back and forth with little twinkling legs. The yellowlegs fly up and over with short, piercing cries, their wings curved like sickles. Or a solitary marbled godwit flies by, handsomely patterned on its wings with black and white. Least sandpipers, tiny animals with greenish legs, hurry and flit along, feeding at the edge of the tide pools and the rim of inlets.
The terns—common, roseate, least—fly at a point where the tide comes in through an opening in the beach. Sharp-cut divers, they swoop low, dipping into the water again and again. A few ring-billed gulls move among the shore birds. They are a little like a small herring gull, but their heads are more rounded, like pigeons. They have a lighter flight, and a softer look than their raucous, flat-headed relatives. And over the ridge of the beach, against up-dune horizons, is a long belt of great black-backed gulls, large, proud, and with a look of supreme idleness and cruelty.
Here is “function” in all variety, each life to its place, filling a niche, with the special form and manner by which it feeds and tries to survive. And every bird is a bird of the sun, adapted to this treeless, narrow shore that blazes with cutting light, the light of sand, or rock turned to sand, of water, roaring and moaning in the sea, rushing back through a tidal cut on the ebb, then trickling, evaporating, and swelling in again at the flood. Each animal works an open coast, across its burning days. The fliers with wings so sharp, energies of light, fit the high or low wants of the wind, the curves and sweeps of the open marsh, the glaring sands. And they hurry on stilts, or tiny short legs. They bob up and down. They run trippingly along—all to the rhythm of the watered, indefinite shore, looking for food that is rhythmic in myriad ways. Here is a great tribe of searchers.
The human race, as it climbs laughingly into motor boats and roars down an inlet, or sits soberly baiting fish hooks in a row boat, or basks in the sun, is no less brought in, fitted to this region—for all our autonomous great world of threats and shelters. There is some compelling call, that springs its lives ahead, and will not be talked away. Even the large, extraneous footmarks of seventy male and female “birders”—a very special tribe—are evidence of an omnivorousness, a searching, communicating, flocking together, from which no animals are entirely exempt.
Chipmunks
As some of the inhabitants of sea and shore move on to the south, inland life adjusts itself to local climate. The leaves on the trees are still green, but the bracken, or dry land fern, has turned brown, one of the early signs of autumn. My surroundings are full of statements of this kind, an end result of preparation. I notice one of them. I stop—pleased to be told—and then I wonder what was silently going on in August to have placed us with such definition in September. Plants and animals move into a new light, a new scene, when I am merely groping with their names. Perhaps because I have read too many newspapers, I am limited to what we call events. I see some outward evidence, and am obliged to go backward in order to reconstruct what might have been, when the real show is already over.
So all September’s reassociations and revolutions may just end up for me as a clump of locust leaves tugged loose by the wind, or the sudden opening in a milkweed pod, or a new chill in the air. One day I notice that a milkweed pod—on the same plant where I saw the butterflies—erect like a lamp on its bent stem, has developed a dimpled line down the middle. The next day it has cracked apart, and there in the sheath are the compact seeds, overlapping like fish scales, making a kind of cone with a tail of soft silk made up of myriads of threads. They are moist at first, in their womb, then they dry out and each seed parachutes away, the silky rays darting, swirling, racing high, subject to every turn and twist of air. There will be new populations, out of old circumstances. What happened to the milkweed before this culmination? How many hairstreak and monarch butterflies paid it a visit? How did it change with change in temperature and moisture and length of days? Where did it come from originally? Next year, if I have not been sent ahead myself, I will stand watch over the plant so as not to miss what might be the greatest show on earth.
We depend on all too occasional visits to understand other modes and rhythms of existence with any depth, although there are times when a chance sight goes deep enough to last. This season of the year the chipmunks are very active, foraging for grains and nuts to store in their hibernation chambers underground. Cats, of which there are far too many loose on the Cape, kill so many chipmunks that it is sometimes hard to see how the population keeps up. (For one thing, these little “ground squirrels” only seem to have one brood a year.) Cats bring them home almost daily, teased into a terrible dance, spinning around like weary boxers on a revolving stage. A chipmunk’s alert curiosity, or habit of freezing into attention, may well be its most vulnerable point. Cats will get them when they are out in the open filling their cheeks with food. They will also come out of the shelter of a hole, or stone wall, to investigate the source of some unusual noise or light tapping, or a whistle, or just stay fixed when a man approaches, in a kind of actively questioning mood.
I hear a scattered dashing in the leaves, and there it is—a striped, bright-looking little animal, tail twitching, arrested in motion, quivering and throbbing, its throat pulsing at a furious rate. We watch each other for three or four minutes. I too have my share of curiosity. Gradually its quick pulsing dies down. It turns its head slightly away, with those moist, black, intent little eyes. With a quick flip it is around a tree, then drops down to run along the leaves again and jump behind a boulder.
It was in no mortal danger that time, but our two lives were brought together into relationship by another danger—the dark universe of chance. I felt it as almost a kind of love between strangers, in which my mental being was in no way divorced from what might lie behind a chipmunk’s eye.
I remember another chipmunk, in Vermont this time, whose chosen ground was a hillside pasture. I came on the animal when it was carrying part of an apple up a slope toward its hole, located in the side of a ridge some twenty feet above an old apple tree. When it saw me it dropped the apple, which promptly rolled downhill. Then it watched me with that silent waiting on chance, that throbbing look of expectation which they have, one paw twitching slightly and clutched to its chest. I was quiet, and at a respectable distance, so the chipmunk picked up its food again and hurried back to the hole; but the apple was too big to go in, and it rolled back downhill. This happened four times. The apple rolled down. The chipmunk hauled it back up, turned it around, put it up against the hole, a little like a man facing the problem of moving a large bed through a narrow door. Finally it nibbled bits off the edge, slipped sideways into the hole, and pulled the apple in after it. I stole up as quietly as I could and saw that it was eating away successfully with its food overhead. A problem had been solved, and with a fair amount of intelligence.
The illumination we find in nature does not necessarily come from comparing degrees of intelligence, in which man always finds himself the winner. The light goes deeper. Our analytical ways, our methods of order, imitate an order which is indefinitely resourceful. Sometimes it shows itself past explanation. It is like this September evening after rain. For a short time, ten minutes perhaps, not long before dark, the earth is colored with magic, shadowless light. The grass is intensely green. The sky turns gray and pink. Distant fields are red and astonishingly bright. All colors are sure and strong, joining in pure gradations. The evening is full of mystic peace. A kitten watches the light, transfixed in the doorway (together, for all I know, with some chipmunk by the stone wall outside), arrested by what I in my own silence can only think of as an unmatchable glory, never to return in quite the same measure.