Chapter II
AUTUMN, OCEAN, AND BIRDS
I
There is a new sound on the beach, and a greater sound. Slowly, and day by day, the surf grows heavier, and down the long miles of the beach, at the lonely stations, men hear the coming winter in the roar. Mornings and evenings grow cold, the northwest wind grows cold; the last crescent of the month’s moon, discovered by chance in a pale morning sky, stands north of the sun. Autumn ripens faster on the beach than on the marshes and the dunes. Westward and landward there is colour; seaward, bright space and austerity. Lifted to the sky, the dying grasses on the dune tops’ rim tremble and lean seaward in the wind, wraiths of sand course flat along the beach, the hiss of sand mingles its thin stridency with the new thunder of the sea.
I have been spending my afternoons gathering driftwood and observing birds. The skies being clear, noonday suns take something of the bite out of the wind, and now and then a warmish west-sou’westerly finds its way back into the world. Into the bright, vast days I go, shouldering home my sticks and broken boards and driving shore birds on ahead of me, putting up sanderlings and sandpipers, ringnecks and knots, plovers and killdeer, coveys of a dozen, little flocks, great flocks, compact assemblies with a regimented air. For a fortnight past, October 9th to October 23d, an enormous population of the migrants has been “stopping over” on my Eastham sands, gathering, resting, feeding, and commingling. They come, they go, they melt away, they gather again; for actual miles the intricate and inter-crisscross pattern of their feet runs unbroken along the tide rim of Cape Cod.
Yet it is no confused and careless horde through which I go, but an army. Some spirit of discipline and unity has passed over these countless little brains, waking in each flock a conscious sense of its collective self and giving each bird a sense of himself as a member of some migrant company. Lone fliers are rare, and when seen have an air of being in pursuit of some flock which has overlooked them and gone on. Swift as the wind they fly, speeding along the breakers with the directness of a runner down a course, and I read fear in their speed. Sometimes I see them find their own and settle down beside them half a mile ahead, sometimes they melt away into a vista of surf and sky, still speeding on, still seeking.
The general multitude, it would seem, consists of birds who have spent the summer somewhere on the outer Cape and of autumn reinforcements from the north.
I see the flocks best when they are feeding on the edge of a tide which rises to its flood in the later afternoon. No summer blur of breaker mist or glassiness of heat now obscures these outer distances, and as on I stride, keeping to the lower beach when returning with a load, I can see birds and more birds and ever more birds ahead. Every last advance of a dissolved breaker, coursing on, flat and seething, has those who run away before it, turning its flank or fluttering up when too closely pursued; every retreating in-sucked slide has those who follow it back, eagerly dipping and gleaning. Having fed, the birds fly up to the upper beach and sit there for hours in the luke-cold wind, flock by flock, assembly by assembly. The ocean thunders, pale wisps and windy tatters of wintry cloud sail over the dunes, and the sandpipers stand on one leg and dream, their heads tousled deep into their feathers.
I wonder where these thousands spend the night. Waking the other morning just before sunrise, I hurried into my clothes and went down to the beach. North and then south I strolled, along an ebbing tide, and north and south the great beach was as empty of bird life as the sky. Far to the south, I remember now, a frightened pair of semipalmated sandpipers did rise from somewhere on the upper beach and fly toward me swift and voiceless, pass me on the flank, and settle by the water’s edge a hundred yards or so behind. They instantly began to run about and feed, and as I watched them an orange sun floated up over the horizon with the speed and solemnity of an Olympian balloon.
The tide being high these days late in the afternoon, the birds begin to muster on the beach about ten o’clock in the morning. Some fly over from the salt meadows, some arrive flying along the beach, some drop from the sky. I startle up a first group on turning from the upper beach to the lower. I walk directly at the birds—a general apprehension, a rally, a scutter ahead, and the birds are gone. Standing on the beach, fresh claw marks at my feet, I watch the lovely sight of the group instantly turned into a constellation of birds, into a fugitive pleiades whose living stars keep their chance positions; I watch the spiralling flight, the momentary tilts of the white bellies, the alternate shows of the clustered, grayish backs. The group next ahead, though wary from the first, continues feeding. I draw nearer; a few run ahead as if to escape me afoot, others stop and prepare to fly; nearer still, the birds can stand no more; another rally, another scutter, and they are following their kin along the surges.
No aspect of nature on this beach is more mysterious to me than the flights of these shore-bird constellations. The constellation forms, as I have hinted, in an instant of time, and in that same instant develops its own will. Birds which have been feeding yards away from each other, each one individually busy for his individual body’s sake, suddenly fuse into this new volition and, flying, rise as one, coast as one, tilt their dozen bodies as one, and as one wheel off on the course which the new group will has determined. There is no such thing, I may add, as a lead bird or guide. Had I more space I should like nothing better than to discuss this new will and its instant of origin, but I do not want to crowd this part of my chapter, and must therefore leave the problem to all who study the psychic relations between the individual and a surrounding many. My special interest is rather the instant and synchronous obedience of each speeding body to the new volition. By what means, by what methods of communication does this will so suffuse the living constellation that its dozen or more tiny brains know it and obey it in such an instancy of time? Are we to believe that these birds, all of them, are machina, as Descartes long ago insisted, mere mechanisms of flesh and bone so exquisitely alike that each cogwheel brain, encountering the same environmental forces, synchronously lets slip the same mechanic ratchet? or is there some psychic relation between these creatures? Does some current flow through them and between them as they fly? Schools of fish, I am told, make similar mass changes of direction. I saw such a thing once, but of that more anon.
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
The afternoon sun sinks red as fire; the tide climbs the beach, its foam a strange crimson; miles out, a freighter goes north, emerging from the shoals.
II
It chanced that on a mild September morning, as I was standing a moment at a window looking west over the marshes and the blue autumnal creeks, an alarm of some kind began to spread among the gulls. The incoming tide had already crowded the birds back on the higher gravel banks and bars, and from these isles, silvery cloud by cloud, I saw the gulls rise and stream away to the southward in a long, fugitive storm of wings. They were flying, I noticed, unusually low. Interested to see what had thus disturbed them, I stepped out a moment to the pinnacle of my dune. As I stood there staring after the vanishing gulls and questioning the sky, I saw far above the birds, and well behind them, an eagle advancing through the heavens. He had just emerged from a plume of hovering cloud into the open blue, and when I saw him first was sailing south and seaward on motionless wings, seeming to follow in the great sky the blue course of a channel far below.
There are sand bars at the mouth of Nauset harbour; many gulls feed there between the tides, and the gulls from the marsh joined forces with this gathering. As the eagle approached the bars, I looked to see if he would descend or fly out to sea. But no; at the harbour’s entrance he turned south, aligned his flight with the coast line, and disappeared.
During the autumn I saw this same bird half a dozen different times. I could tell when he was about by the terror of the gulls. Yet this eagle—for a bald eagle, Haliætus leucocephalus leucocephalus, I believe him to have been—is, as Mr. Forbush says, “by nature a fish eater.” I never saw him pay the slightest attention to the fugitives; nevertheless, he may well have a fancy for gulls when they are plump and he is hungry. At any rate, they fear him. There are always a few black-backed or “minister” gulls mingled in with the herring gulls upon these flats, and these burly giants, I noticed, sought refuge with the rest.
Eagles are by no means rare upon Cape Cod. The birds arrive here as coast-wise visitors, find the region to their liking, and establish themselves in various favourite domains. They fish in our sandy bays and inlets; they have rather a fancy for the more isolated Cape Cod ponds. Seen at close range, the bald eagle is a dusky brownish bird with a pure-white head, neck, and tail. I never had a near view of this Eastham visitor, but one of the coast guardsmen roused him up one day from a thicket close by the head of a creek running up into the moors—he heard a sudden noise of brush and great wings, he said, and, turning round, he saw the eagle rising free of the scrub and the bright leaves.
Ever since I came to live here on Cape Cod, I have been amazed at the number of land-bird migrants I have encountered on the dunes. I expected to see sandpipers on the beach and scoters in the surf, for they are coast-wise folk, but I did not expect to see the red-breasted nuthatch rise out of the September dunes, or find the charming black-and-yellow warbler sitting on the ridgepole of the Fo’castle, his black-tipped tail feathers turned to the Atlantic. But perhaps I had best begin at the beginning and tell how the sparrows and the warblers came down to us this autumn by the coast.
Various new sparrows were the first strangers to arrive. There are summer sparrows here, a great abundance of them, for the marsh and meadow land west of the dunes is the natural habitat of many species. Walk through these grass-lands on a summer’s day, and you will see singles and flocks break from the sunburned stubble ahead, some to drop and hide again farther on, others to watch you from the coastguard wires. Song sparrows are notably abundant, for these pleasant singers frequent both the marshes and the dunes; but the seaside sparrow keeps more to the marsh rim and the salt-hay mowings, the sharp-tailed sparrow fancies the wheel ruts of the hay carts, and the odd little grasshopper sparrow, Coturniculus savannarum passerinus, trills into the burning sundowns the two faint notes of his curious and poignant insect song.
Early in September Hudsonian curlews arrived in Eastham marsh, and to see them I began going to Nauset through the meadows instead of by the beach. High September tides were then covering both marsh and meadow land, and, as I pushed on each afternoon, the curlews rose from close beside the inundated road, and, circling, called to other curlews; I could hear, when I listened, the clear reply. And then there would be silence, and I would hear the sound of autumn and the world, and perhaps the faint withdrawing roar of ocean beyond the dunes. When I reached the wider meadows on these days, I found the stubble mobbed with sparrows; the population had doubled in a week.
Flocks of fox sparrows were feeding everywhere; I whirred up groups of savannah sparrows and families of white-throats; a solitary white-headed sparrow watched me from the concealment of a bush. It was a silent throng. I heard faint “tsips” and “chips” of alarm as I passed—nothing more. Love-making was over and done, and all were importantly busy with the importance of their lives.
On the 24th and the 25th there was wind and rain, and on the 27th I saw the first of the warblers.
The weather had cleared, and I had risen early and begun to get breakfast. It is my custom here to sit facing the sea, and I was moving over my table when I noticed a small bird of some kind foraging about in the grass before the house. I could not see him well at first, for he had entered into the grass as into a thicket, but presently out he came, pushing through the stalks, and I watched him from the window unsuspected. This first arrival was a Canadian warbler. Steely ash-gray above, yellow below, and with a broad band of black spots between his yellow throat and yellow belly, he was a charming bit of life. Over the pale sand, in and out of the tawny-white roots, in and out of the variegations of morning light he moved, picking up seeds while a sea wind shook the tops of the dying grass above his head. Presently, in search of still more food, he turned the corner of the house, and when I went out after breakfast he had gone.
Then came, all in one week, a Wilson’s warbler (a female, probably), the black-and-yellow warbler, and a chestnut-sided warbler. The birds were singles, they travelled along the dunes, they fed on the fallen seeds. In October I saw in one day five myrtle warblers; a pair of these lingered a week near Fo’castle dune. Then came juncos and a raid of pigeon hawks. The juncos, like the warblers, foraged on the dunes, and the hawks hunted them there for an hour or so before the dawn. I went exploring one morning while Nauset was still flashing into a sullen, cold, and overclouded world, and saw a pigeon hawk rise unexpectedly out of the cut to the north with a wretched junco gripped beneath him. Flying seaward through the cut, the hawk carried his captive to the beach, found himself a sheltered nook close along the dune wall, stood at attention for a moment, and then unbent and ate.
I saw various other migrant land birds as well, but I shall not dwell upon them, for the listing and cataloguing of species seems to me of less interest than their arrival by sea. This outer arm of Cape Cod, as I have already explained, stands thirty miles or so out from the continental main, yet there are land birds, little birds, going south along it as casually as so many arctic geese. Writing here this cloudy morning, with a great confused roaring of breakers in my ears, I call to mind the Wilson’s warbler, the female, I saw a fortnight ago, and I wonder where it was that she forsook her familiar earth for the grey ocean, an ocean she perhaps had never seen. What a gesture of ancient faith and present courage such a flight is, what a defiance of circumstance and death—land wing and hostile sea, the fading land behind, the unknown and the distant articulate and imperious in the bright, aërial blood.
But who shall say by what sea routes these landsmen reach the Cape? Some species, I imagine, cross Massachusetts Bay, their jumping-off place being north of Boston (Cape Ann or Ipswich perhaps); some may cross over from the South Shore at a point well north of Cape Cod Bay, others undoubtedly come directly down from Maine. The wooded archipelago of Maine is a famous place for warblers. It is quite possible that the species I have mentioned may have followed some great river to the sea, the Kennebec or the Penobscot, perhaps, and crossed from the river mouth directly over to Cape Cod. The Highland Light bears south ¾ west (true) from Seguin at the mouth of the Kennebec, and is separated from it by only 101 miles of open water. The birds could manage this easily.
All over the world land migrants go great distances over open water. Numbers of birds, for instance, migrating back and forth between Europe and North Africa cross the Mediterranean twice a year, and in our own hemisphere there are flights across the Gulf of Mexico and movements between the West Indies and our south Atlantic states.
Late in October there came an easterly gale, and in the afternoon, when the tide was high, I put on oilskins and went out to see the surf. About a mile to the north of the Fo’castle, as I was trudging on across the rain, I saw just ahead and close over the breakers a flying speck sailing landward out of the wrack, and even as I stared, it fell to the beach in danger of the waves. I ran ahead, then, and picked the thing up just as a slide of foam was about to overflow it, and found it to be an autumn leaf, a maple leaf flat and drenched and red.
Mid-October and the land birds have gone. A few sparrows linger in the marshes. The plum bushes have lost their leaves. Walking the beach, I read winter in the new shapes of the clouds.
III
Western cloud, dark substance of cloud, gathered at the wintry horizon of the short-lived days making them even shorter with the false sundown of its rim. Now come the sea fowl and the wild fowl to the beach from the lonely and darkening north, from the Arctic Ocean and the advancing pack, from the continental fragments and great empty islands that lie between the continent and the pole, from the tundra and the barrens, from the forests, from the bright lakes, from the nest-strewn crevices and ledges of Atlantic rocks no man has ever named or scaled. Over the round of earth, down from the flattened summit, pour the living streams, bearing south the tribes and gathered nations, the peoples and flocks, the clans and families, the young and the old. And the dying grasslands, the October snows, and the forests fall behind, and presently the nations behold a first far glint of the sea.
There are many streams, and it is said that two of the greatest bear down upon Cape Cod. A first river, rising in the interior of Alaska, flows southeast across Canada to the Atlantic; on this stream move birds from the north woods and the Canadian lakes together with birds from the north barrens and the arctic isles and half lands; a second stream, rising in the shadow of the pole, flows south along the coast past Greenland and the bays of Labrador—on this move the hardy arctic folk who get their living from the tides. Many species are common to both streams. Somewhere north of the Cape, perhaps round and about the mouth of the St. Lawrence, these streams immix their multitudes, and south to New England moves the great united flood, peopling with primeval life the seacoasts and the sky.
Ducks enter the channels, some flying in from the bay, others from the outer ocean, geese settle at sundown in the golden skin of the western coves, coveys of winter yellow-legs circle in the gloom, and hide when disturbed in the taller salt grasses between the meadows and the creeks. At nightfall and at daybreak I hear birds talking. Strangers in rubber boots and khaki uniforms now visit my domain, and every Saturday afternoon I look with philosophy through my western windows to a number of tufts of grass disguised as gunners.
Now that I have settled down here for the winter, I find myself becoming something of a beach comber. Every once in a while, when I chance to look seaward, I spy an unknown something or other rising and falling, appearing and disappearing in the offshore surges, and at this sight the beach comber in me wakes. All kinds of things “come ashore” on these vast sands, and even the most valueless have an air of being treasure trove. The mysterious something moving from the swells into the breakers may be nothing but a smelly bait tub washed overboard from some Gloucester fisherman, or a lobster pot, or a packing case stencilled with a liner’s name; but in the sea or on the beach a mile ahead it is something for nothing, it is the unknown, it is hope springing eternal in the human breast. The other day I found myself thoughtfully examining a U. S. Navy blue undress jumper which lay flat and soggy and solitary on the lower beach. It was not, in its day, an unfamiliar garment, and I have an old friend in the village who occasionally dons a rather good one he found just south of the light. Alas, the cloth was rotted and the jumper much too small. But I cut off and saved the buttons.
Now, while I stood there slicing off the buttons, I chanced to look up a moment at the southern sky, and there for the first and still the only time in my life, I saw a flight of swans. The birds were passing along the coast well out to sea; they were flying almost cloud high and travelling very fast, and their course was as direct as an arrow’s from a bow. Glorious white birds in the blue October heights over the solemn unrest of ocean—their passing was more than music, and from their wings descended the old loveliness of earth which both affirms and heals.
IV
The last two weeks in October see the peak of the autumnal visitations. In November and December the stream from the inland shrinks, but the coast-wise stream, continuing to flow, brings us down a rare and curious world. Of this I shall write at greater length, for I found it of enormous interest.
Here, approaching the end of my notes on birds and autumn, I chance to remember that one of the strangest and most beautiful of the migrations over the dunes was not a movement of birds at all but of butterflies. There came a morning early in October which ripened, as the sun rose higher, into a rather mild and September-like day; the wind was autumnal, I recall, and from the north by west, but the current was both mildly warm and light. As it was a day to be spent out-of-doors, soon after ten o’clock I went out round the back of the Fo’castle into the sunlight and began to work there on a bin I was putting together out of driftage. I looked about, as I always do, but nothing in the landscape chanced to take my eye. Sawing and hammering, I worked for about three quarters of an hour, and then downed tools to take a moment’s rest.
During the hour, a flight of twenty or more large orange-and-black butterflies had arrived in the region of the dunes. It was a flight, yet were the individuals far apart. There was at least an eighth of a mile between any two; some were on the dunes, some were on the salt meadows, three were on the beach. Their movements were casual as the wind, yet there was an unmistakable southerly pull drawing them on. I tried to catch one of the travellers on the beach, and though I count myself a fair runner, it was no easy work keeping up with his turns and erratic doublings. I wished him no ill; I simply wanted to have a better look at him, but he escaped me by rising and disappearing over the top of a dune. When I reached the same top after a scramble up a steep of sand, the fugitive was already a good eighth of a mile away. I went back to my carpentry with an increased respect for butterflies as fliers.
An entomologist with whom I have been in correspondence tells me that my visitors were undoubtedly specimens of the monarch or milkweed butterfly, Anosia plexippus. In early autumn adults gather in great swarms and move in a generally southward direction, and it is believed (but not proved) that New England specimens go as far as Florida. The following spring individuals (not swarms) appear in the North apparently coming from the South. We do not know—I am quoting this paragraph almost verbatim—whether these are returning migrants or whether they are individuals that had not previously been in the North. We do know that none of the fall migrants had previously been in the South.
The butterflies of Eastham remained upon the dunes the rest of the morning. I imagine that they were in search of food. Between half-past twelve and half-past one they melted away as mysteriously as they had come, and with them went the last echo of summer and the high sun from the dunes. And that day I finished my bin and filled it and began to build a wall of seaweed round the foundation of my house. A cricket sang as I worked in the mild afternoon, alive and hardy in his cave under my driftwood mountain, and beyond this little familiar sound of earth I heard the roar of ocean filling the hollow space of day with its inexorable warning.