May
Declarations
The colder, and still relatively silent world of April is past. Warm sunlight runs across trees, sharp shadows, water and sand, with a penetrating radiance. The alewives now come up the inland stream day after day. Pale, sun laden, they move against the fast-rushing current, arousing great excitement in the gulls. The big white and gray birds hover over, then dive down in a flock where the fish crowd in shallow water on their way up. The valley is full of marauding and assemblies and crying out as the fish keep on, rushing and weaving with the stream flowing over their backs.
And now the shad blow blooms. Thousands and thousands of these little trees are laden, but lightly, with lacy white flowers, looking like standing clouds in open woods and valleys throughout the Cape. Pink and yellow and silvery-green colors begin to appear on the oaks. Anthers are hanging conspicuously from the pitch pines.
Fish, insects, plants, birds are all, if I can personify them so, in close and obedient relationship to nature. They count on strength and protection when they sing or flower out above the ground. They are in confident relationship to the general being. And so they act with confidence. They have come. They will be. They declare themselves. The birds make the dawns sound with a silvery rain of music. On the morning when a thrush wakes me up, its rippling and melodious peals lifting and diving through the air, I have an incalculable urge to migrate outward and claim new territory. Spring tells me I have not had enough.
The shore birds appear in new flocks all the time, skimming and crying along a once empty shore. Colorful little warblers populate the woods, each with so mature and particular a color and set of ways. Now, I think, they are all back from Mexico or Florida or Patagonia, to help us not only in our geography but to extend our senses.
Motion and change of place are a bird’s necessity. Wings insist on flight. Yet their recognition of that part of the land or length of shore they come to in spring seems as positive as that of any home builder on a numbered lot. When they arrive, a large majority claim a place with all the resources at their command. In the science of ornithology this is called “territorialism.” Male birds, which often arrive some days or weeks before the females, select an area of land as a nesting site, which they defend against all intruders. Most of the songs of spring are advertisements by male birds of the fact of land possession.
The towhees are more insistent and vociferous in their claiming than most. I hear two males, both perched on low trees, perhaps a hundred yards apart, that keep at their singing as if they had a rivalry that would never end. Each declares. Each holds its own, as if song is an anchor to the earth. They stop me in my tracks. A human being is a clumsy, noisy, obstreperous animal. When I walk down a slope or through the level fields, I find myself so involved with my own racket as to lose all sense of what it was I set out to look for. Where is peace if you yourself destroy it? These birds help me to command it. I stop and listen to them, squaring off the limits they declare.
“Airtree!” the towhees call, and “Tip-your-tree!” continually, inexhaustibly. There is probably little point in using words like pride, challenge, or anticipation in terms of these singers. Who in the nonhuman world knows but they? Our music is not theirs, however much we have borrowed from them. Still, what I catch at, and what starts in me, is feeling. Their songs are an expression of it. The towhees are here to establish themselves. Their future is in direct relation to the place they have chosen for it, which may also be the general area where they were born. Their voices measure place, a real and powerful thing to them. Song insists. Song makes known. Song is a self-assurance. Since this singing is done in collaboration with the arousing, fecund world of spring, it may in its own way be true awareness.
In the newly unfolding regions of delicate leaves a prairie warbler sings “Tsee-tsee-tsee-tsee-tsee-tsee” very rapidly, on an upward crescendo. A slim little bird, with a yellow breast streaked with black, its sharp trim beak opens wide as the notes swell out of its throat, and it seems to send song as far as it can. I think of constant effort, constant quick hearts. It picks up a light green caterpillar from the oak leaves and sings as it holds it in its beak. Then the warbler beats at the insect a little, pecks and shakes it, then swallows it down; and goes on singing.
An oven bird perches on the oaks and sings, with breast uplifted, tail shaking, making a glorious effort. How could I dare say that this bird or another down the road, which accompanies it, is only singing something that sounds to our ears like “Teacher-teacher-teacher”? No bird song is alike, even in members of the same species. Each individual has its variation and seems to derive strength and pleasure from it. And it seems to me that they not only declare their rights and titles but are expressing something on behalf of spring. It is as if they sang: “It is not I. It is not I” but rather, all flowering, crossing, taking or accumulating, all growth. The song is a part of earth.
Then there is that bird, a member of the family of mimics, the brown thrasher, which seems to make a mockery of the whole business. It is a cinnamon-winged, speckled-breasted, long-tailed bird, with a long bill and sharp, quick yellow eyes. The male thrasher is certainly as intense and serious about the duty of staking out his territory as any other species, but what issues loudly from his open bill seems like the most comical sort of parody. He may not be as good a mimic as the mocking bird—which has been known to imitate a flock of blue jays—but he manages a wonderful take-off on the whole race of birds. He is a master of a grab bag of trills, chatters, pips and cries, of rasps and sweetnesses, of sudden blurts, and obvious pauses as if for effect.
Translated into a rapid tempo of words, his song might sound like this: “Jeremy! Jeremy! Ready here. Right here. Wide awake. Wide awake. Chipper! Chipper! Shake a leg. Up! Up! Here’s a joker. This way. This way.” ... an interpretation which probably makes me as ridiculous as he intended, if he is a serious humorist. In the middle of this exhortation I hear a comic little “Cucaracha!” or quite a good imitation of a whippoorwill, as if he saved his more exact skills for a casual moment.
The thrasher may be just as conditioned in his joy and utterances as any other bird. His variations on the general bird theme may come out abstractly, without any attempt at parody, a limited kind of talent, and yet when I listen to it, it seems to me that the bounds of song are being just a bit extended. As compared with other birds, the blackpoll warbler for example, with only a thin, high note, reminiscent of insect sounds in the summer, the thrasher has range and repertoire. He is vocal and conversational, even to the extent of tempting at least one human animal into reading words and intentions into his performance; and this, from a bird’s point of view, might mean that I was extending my limits too.
Facets of Expression
I make a foolish game out of attaching words to a bird’s song. Perhaps it is a way of trying to bring the two of us together in familiarity, but to give nature its true respect, every song, color, and action is its own master. Understanding, the best human means of communicating with other lives, might be most effectively attained by keeping a certain distance.
That is the way I feel when I see the alert, tough little chickadees coming up to the house and picking up tufts of hair, rope, or wool, to use as nesting material. They set to work carding it so busily and self-sufficiently that I am restrained from an impulse to join in and look things over. I walk off to my own business.
A pair of tree swallows is trying out a birdhouse, and when I stay too long in the vicinity, they are given an extra reason for a negative decision as to its merits and fly into the distance. This is a time not to meddle, tease, interfere, or try to imitate what cannot be imitated.
From that point of view the life of May, free of human embrace, seems full of wonderful languages, still to be learned, and they are not confined to the uses of sound. Isn’t a flower or wing or new leaf articulate? I watch a mourning cloak butterfly that flits and floats overhead and then lands on a bare patch of ground in the sunlight. The broad wings fold and show their dark, woody, shadow side, with little white circles on them, their pattern and texture a blend of weather-beaten, drab forest floors, suggestive of niches and corners of leaf-decaying darkness. Then the wings spread out again. They are a light mahogany-red with shades of brown, bordered by black lines, and on their bottom edge they are rimmed with little round dashes of purplish blue, like small windows into the sky, and the body is green. The butterfly’s antennae have white tips. It has fine hairs on its back. Then, with a papery, fluttering sound, it is up with startling quickness from the ground; just out of reach, in the frequent manner of butterflies, as many a boy with a net has learned from hard experience.
What can we say about the American robin that has not already been said? All the same, I know him not. He still appears on the spring grass like a stranger. He lands there, then pauses, holding up his head for a long time. No worms? Then he runs off on his robin procedure, abandoning one area for another, where he pauses rigidly again, then cocks his head. The worm is found. This is assessable behavior. By this stiff pausing and then tripping ahead, a robin is apparently able to detect the slightest motion on the ground. We don’t need to look for the emotion or consciousness of a robin beyond the actions to which it is stimulated by the immediate need for food. Utility is all. Or so I have been told. But the robin, like other birds, expresses its relation to the earth in terms of a set of responses which come from a head I know nothing about. It is an organism with much higher bodily temperatures than ours, with a much faster heart beat, burning up energy at a faster rate. Its experiences are entirely different. Down there, on that bird level, what is happening? What kind of awareness does it have, what kind of close, felt proximity to the stirring ground, the shadows, the lightly running wind?
Even the flowers, as if they were special custodians of those fires of light that run through May, seem to express more than the value we have given them. Trim little violets, white, pale blue, or lilac in color, or pink lady’s-slippers blossom out and mark their separate places in the sun with beautiful emphasis. Each is significant. Each is inviolate. And, in a sense, are they not full of motion? In their growth, their seeding, their provision for continuity and change of place, are they not free to run away? They fly in the winds. They grow and they fight for life.
Tiny white chickweed flowers begin to mantle some of our barren areas, and the plants are so quick and strong in growth, establishing themselves as if they had too little time, that they seem to be partners with fish that school and spawn in the sea, or nesting birds.
All the new tumult and excitement combines in what we call spring. Each facet of it, each life in its own right contributes originality, and there are communications between them which surprise us—distant, true, and unerring. I bear witness to them, without quite understanding. One late evening on the shore, the tide pools stand out like mirrors along dark sands. The air is cool. Light sparkles over the receding tide. The distances there, as always, seem sparse and immeasurable. I hear a sharp, wild cry, and then another, perhaps a quarter of a mile farther on. Two yellowlegs, I should judge. Theirs are the only sounds, besides the continuous breathing of the sea. Did one respond to the other? Whether it did or not, they are linked. The curved coast line is their orientation, and the wide evening a plane for their cries, and in the play of spring’s advance it is a recognition, vibrant and unique.
Perhaps we come to some such realization of the greatness of nature’s expression in spite of ourselves. We measure natural phenomenon with marvelous accuracy. We are always busy at it, cropping or adding names, readjusting interpretations, adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. The miracle is still untouched. Why is the mindless flower less than ourselves and our assessments, or the bird’s reaction less remarkable? That which is without mind is not necessarily heedless. Perhaps spring is a manifestation of mind; and its lives, all those facets of motion and beauty, behave in its context as familiars. Each responds in terms of an alliance intrinsically known, as with the birds along their shore.
Travel
For all my wonder at it, spring brings me into direct and close enjoyment. Down the distance to blue water, the young oak leaves in delicate silvery greens and pinks, swing in the full south wind. There is a wave of baltimore orioles. They seem to have arrived all at once. They dive through the tree tops and chase each other, living jubilations in orange and black, shouting out what sounds to me like: “This is the birthday of the Lord, Oh Joy!” Then a scarlet tanager appears, silently perching on a pink-leaved oak. It has so blinding and brilliant a color as to make no sense in terms of camouflage, or environmental adaptation, unless like the oriole, it is a treetop, sun-high bird, fitted to the colors of the sun, half tropical. Now it seems like a gift of extravagance.
Crane flies and gnats are swarming. Moths crowd the windows at night. The ground stirs with beetles and spiders. I watch a bumblebee digging a tunnel. Every minute or so a tiny yellow pile of sand appears at the surface and then tumbles down, pushed back by the bee, which half emerges, giving a little whining buzz, like a grunt of exertion, and then disappears down its hole again.
Toward evening I see a red-wing blackbird on the far side of a cranberry bog, epaulets ablaze against the low sun. It is attacking two impervious crows sitting on a tree, who must have just made a meal of red-wing eggs. It flies over and around them, back and forth, vainly, hopelessly.
A few terns, newly arrived, are courting on the sand flats beyond the shore. With light, airy grace, a male flies above a female waiting on the sand, offering her a silvery fish. Then they both fly up and glide together across the blue and white reaches below them. Inland, two iridescent tree swallows go through similar formalities. A female perches on an oak post and the male constantly dips down and flutters above her, barely touching, performing a kind of aerial caress. Then he flies up and around her, with a chittering, trilling, clicking kind of sound. She flies down and pecks at the ground. Then both of them, in the growing darkness limber with new green and shimmering silver, wheel low together, in wide circles against the dying sun.
What I see, what becomes easy to see for any eyes, in the gentle month of May, is an approach to prodigality. We are not yet bitten, dulled, and pounded down by population, of insects or men. Blistering droughts have not come yet, nor excessive rain; but all the component parts of nature run ahead. Through the alternately warm and cool sweeps of weather, there is a steady pattern of growth. This is the season of progression, of fanning out, and as with the trees that have formed next year’s buds, of provision for the future. The oak leaves which are limp and tiny to begin with, develop gradually. They toughen and mature toward their summer function of receiving and storing. They stretch, darken, and shine, turning from tenderness to ability. So it is with the fish hatched from the egg, or nesting birds, or the grass in the ground. To have had a son born this month, as we did, is much in keeping.
Birth is now the rule. I smell a sweet salt air. White petals drop gently to the ground. Birds, trees, and plants, life in the ground below them, are sprung by a constructive light. To follow spring is to make use of yourself. Join and be. Here is as much expanding energy as the human spirit could desire. Aspiration meets its counterparts, on all sides. If, as man says, he represents a climax of sensitivity in the evolutionary sense, then let him now employ his consciousness for all it is worth, and not delay.
Spring is loud and rich in its coming, but it is exact too, with a sustained propriety. Each life is in its place, its shade or full light. Each, held in the general change and roaming, to its necessity. Fragile star flowers and wind flowers bloom in the shade of a wood of beech trees, while out on the open slopes and fields the beach plum bushes are heavy with fat white blossoms, inviting the sun’s full strength.
In that valley where the alewives run, a narrow cut between low hills once made by melt waters from a glacier, and joining fresh-water ponds to Cape Cod Bay, there is now such a variety of life in such a variety of places as to challenge travel in all the senses. It reaches from the fresh-water ponds with their muddy shallows where pickerel weed begins to put up its stalks, painted turtles sun themselves on rocks out of the water, and sunfish make their nests along the sandy edges—from the pond waters gently lapping and smooth surfaces skidded by the wind—all the way through tidal marshes to the sea whose massive motion stands beyond us. Each area, first the ponds, then the brook, as it cascades down rocky slopes, turning as it winds through valley reaches into a creek, and then a tidal estuary, meeting the sand flats on the bay shore, each definite part of land or shore, has its newly active, co-ordinated riches. In the upper end of the valley, just below the pond outlet where fish ladders are crowded with migrating alewives, there is a wild and loud screaming of gulls. They wheel constantly over the stream, and crowds of them settle down on the water, quarreling over feasts of fish. Below them, black-crowned night herons bob and stand tall in a grove of pitch pines. When startled, they cluck and squawk like so many women over a scandal. When one of them flies too close to the herring gulls, it is chased away.
Two upland plovers skim in fast, crying high. A black duck whirs up, showing the white under its wings. The land at the edge of the marsh is full of yellowthroats, warblers with a quick, slurred call: “Weewiticha, weewiticha, weewiticha,” as it sounds to me, and sometimes a softer “Chichibee, chichibee, chichibee.” I watch one of these trim birds. It has a yellow breast and yellow head masked distinctively with black. It lands in the leaves, whips around, flits, quick and alert. Its colors fit with shade and sunlight as though it had been conceived with them—a definite dash of light. In the stream, as it winds down toward salt water, subject to the rise and fall of the tide, small groups of alewives run quickly and persistently through the weaving currents, heading up toward gulls and then the nets and fishways beyond. I feel energy and motion demanding me. Seen or unseen, a flying, starting, striding, swimming, and inviting, makes of the present and its short lives an endlessness.
It is low tide where the channel meets the shore. Warm, hazy air rises over the bare landscape into an empty, chalky-blue sky. But the wide-ribbed sands are run over lightly by gold braided waters, light catchers full of motion, flexing and rippling. Crustaceans dart through them. Periwinkle tracks straggle across the sands, and the empty shells of razor clams litter the surface, along with the worm cases stuck with shells, seaweed and grains of sand, protruding above it; and there are black horseshoe crabs partly dug in, waiting for the tide to turn. The three-toed tracks of shore birds are everywhere, and farther out, through a light wind, a rushing sea sound, I can hear gulls calling low, muttering among themselves, and the unmistakable harsh cry of a tern.
Sanderlings, black-bellied plovers, ruddy turnstones, are dipping up and down, scuttling, or tripping ahead as they feed. In the distance the turnstones, mottled black and brown, with short red legs, look a little like quail.
Two herring gulls are pulling hard at a sand shark, stranded by a tide, or perhaps killed by some fishing boat when it was brought up in the nets. They work at it furiously, tugging and tearing from both sides, since the sand shark’s hide is like sandpaper and many times as thick and tough. When I come up, I can see that they have not managed to do much more than tear out some of the flesh from its head and neck. Judging by the tracks on the sand, they must have been hauling it around for some time.
Far far out, I thought I saw a man digging for clams on the flats, but after walking for half a mile in that direction, I am astonished to see a yearling deer starting in a leisurely way toward the land. It had probably browsed its way out, nibbling at bits of tender seaweed, licking salt, encountering no danger in the expansive room that borders land and sea. Now, with the motion of its long legs showing in all detail as I have never seen them in fields or woods, the deer starts to run slowly, with an almost loose loping. It stops, looks around uneasily, and then the legs unlimber again, but hesitantly. It looks suddenly in my direction; and bounds and bucks away, its legs now working with tense speed. Through my field glasses I find a man and a boy on the beach. Seeing them, the animal changes course, gathers more speed, and when it reaches the shore, dashes up the sloping beach and disappears into a green line of shrubs and low trees.
The separations on these sand flats are vast. Where the narrow inland water course issues out, nothing is so well defined as space. For the variety of action here and in thousands of miles of deep water beyond, range is the rule, and the brook leads to the sea as all things lead to each other. Our meetings have scarcely begun.