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Wild Pastures

Chapter 2: ILLUSTRATIONS
By Winthrop Packard
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Nature/Gardening/Animals

About This Book

A series of lyrical natural-history sketches moves through a New England pasture at different hours and seasons, tracing dawn light, bramble thickets, stone walls, and the shifting border between cultivated fields and encroaching woods. Each vignette concentrates on close observation of animals and plants—foxes, songbirds, frogs, butterflies, muskrats—and on the behaviors, calls, and movements that animate brooks, ponds, bogs, and hedgerows. The prose balances vivid sensory description with quiet reflection, highlighting seasonal rhythms, breeding and migration, and the persistent, gradual reclaiming of pasture by wild vegetation and wildlife.

ILLUSTRATIONS

He was still sitting on his perch greeting the gold of
the morning sun with melodious uproar		 Frontispiece
 OPPOSITE PAGE
The fox may slink for an hour unscared, waiting with
watchful eye on the neighboring chicken coop		 6
The mother bird, dancing and mincing along 38
Out from among the birches she sails gracefully, a
veritable queen of the fairies		 64
There was the swish of wings, the snip-snap of a
bird’s beak, and it was all over		 86
The way of the “kiver” is this. There is a single,
snappy, business-like bob, then another, then
three in quick succession		 96
That such things are not seen oftener is simply
because people are dull and go to bed instead
of sitting out under the witch-hazel at midnight
of a full moon		 114
Of a clear midsummer evening you may hear the
muskrat grubbing roots there ... and hear his
snort and splash when he dives at sudden sight
of you		 142
Every boy who knows the country in summer knows
him by his rich, red coloration, his strong, black-bordered
wings with their black veins		 160
The English sparrow has the true instincts of the
browbeating coward		 180
The skunk doesn’t know where he is going and he
isn’t even on his way		 198
My lone quail sat on a rock in the pasture, tipped
his head back a little, swelled his white throat,
and whistled		 222