Wood Wanderings

It is a pity Wordsworth could not have been born in Cumberland County, Maine, instead of Cumberland County, England, and have tramped the hills of, say, West Mansfield, instead of Westmoreland, that our rich autumn ripening might have fruited in his verse. I wonder that the English do not plant our maples and our red oaks in their parks. It would be an interesting experiment to watch for fifty years or a hundred and see whether the trees changed to the English habit and lost their gorgeous hues, and whether, if they retained them, some English poet did not rise to the occasion and make them immortal in splendid verse.

Perhaps it would all be a failure. Our American men and women, transplanted, so soon lose their native characteristics and ripen, over-ripen in fact, into English men and women that there lurks with us an underlying fear that the trees might suffer from the insidious blight also. Perhaps it has been tried with the trees; it would be interesting to know.

I think the leaves were afraid to go home to earth in the dark last night, because it is rarely the custom of leaves to part from the tree in the night time. On still nights you may camp beneath a maple whose leaves have long glowed red and seemingly been ready to fall, and not hear a single spirit-rapping of falling leaf against limb. The frost may be white upon them in the morning, but not until the rising sun touches them will they loose their hold and fall to the waiting earth. Then with the kindly light upon them you may hear, if you listen intently, the little chirp of contentment with which they let go and flutter quietly down to their winter’s rest. On a still frosty morning when the sun has first touched the trees these faint clucks make an infinitesimal chorus that is as sprightly as the morning light.

The xylophone ghost-march of last night was a far different thing. It came with little puffs of south wind after a bright, still day,—puffs that died out as soon as they had done the work, and left the night white and still under the gibbous moon. On all the leaves that had not scurried into shelter a white frost fell that filled them with ice-needles until they were crisp, and then sprouted miniature ghost-ferns all along their stems and upper sides.

Thus they lay stark until the white of the night gloomed into the gray of a daybreak fog that seemed to scatter all life in a formless void. After leaves have once been thoroughly frozen they dance about in the breeze no more. The forming and melting of ice crystals breaks up their cells and leaves them sodden and no longer elastic. They sag and sink and the chemic forces of the earth soon begin to work on them and resolve them into salts and humus that will go the rounds and form and nourish new leaves for another year.

You may see the ghost of autumn go up, these last mornings of October, in this dense white fog that often lingers late into the day. Last night was breathless with frost, after the leaves had done their ghost dancing, until the wan moon had begun to cushion down in the velvety blackness of the west and the gray of false dawn had stopped the winking of low-hung eastern stars.

The world was blank with silence. Until now, no matter how dark the night or how still, you had but to listen outdoors to hear the pulse of nature beat rhythmically, to hear the blood surging and singing through all her arteries. In that last hour before dawn the pulse had ceased and the blood stood stagnant. Then some outside presence held the mirror of the universe down close to the lips of the earth to see if she breathed. At first it was unclouded.

Then little wraiths of white mist shuddered up from meadowy hollows and others danced in bog tangle as will-o’-the-wisps might have done two months ago. These quivered together in soft gray masses that shut out the meadows and swamps, absorbing them and numbing them into a white nothingness. It was neither a rising tide nor a growth, but a sort of absorption. From my hilltop, in spite of the gathering darkness that seemed to be crowded together by advancing day, I could see the world gradually slipping back through chaos into the white glimmering nothingness of the nebular hypothesis.

On such mornings, even after the white light of dawn has filtered through this gray darkness and made its opaqueness visible, the world stays chloroformed. The keen frost chill which has endured until the coming of the fog is merged in the dense damp cold of this which goes deep. The frost chill just touches the surface and does not penetrate. It numbs your fingers or tingles your ears maybe, but it gives the blood a fillip that makes it dance merrily, and you are warm though it is cold. The fog chill works in your marrow and you are cold inside first.

I think the birds know the night before when one of these marrow-numbing fogs that wrap all the ghosts of autumn in their folds are coming on, for they seem to seek closer shelter than usual in the heart of the evergreens, and even when the cold, gray light of dawn filters through the opaqueness they still resolutely hold their heads under their wings. There is no song on a morning like this, no cheery chirping even. They all know that they will get bronchitis if they try it.

The red squirrels are a little hoarse already; they have been caught by a little one earlier in the season and they have no mind to add to it. So they stay snug. They have made their winter nests now, often in the close, crinkly limbs of a large birch, often in a good-sized cedar that stands well among other trees, that they may have easy access to the squirrel highway. Some of them are in hollow trees and others still have taken a crow’s nest for their foundation and have built a dome over it.

Wherever it is placed the material and architecture is the same,—a soft, silky lining of the finest shreds of the loose-hanging outer bark of the red cedar, wound round and round with coarser fiber of the same material, the whole making a round ball as big as a derby hat, or bigger, the walls being several inches thick. Entrance to this is by a round hole, just big enough for the slender animal to squeeze in from a convenient limb. The elasticity of the cedar fiber practically closes this hole after the squirrel has passed, and the family may cuddle together there snug through the coldest snap.

On a bright frosty morning you may hear the shrill pæan of the red squirrel ringing through the wood as soon as he can see. Then he is out and alert. On mornings like this when the chill fog hangs dense I never hear him, and I am quite sure he sticks close to his family, cuddled up in comfort in the middle of that warm nest.

The morning light breaks through such a vast cold cloud with difficulty, indeed we may not truthfully say that the morning breaks. Rather, it oozes, coming so slowly that without a watch in the pocket you would not know the lateness of the hour. By-and-by, if you watch the east carefully, you will be surprised to see how high the pale image of a morning sun is riding.

On such a morning few leaves fall. The chill dampness seems to revive their waning energies and they apply them to clinging just where they are. Perhaps the chill reminds them dimly that they still are protectors of next year’s leaf buds that nestle close under most leafstalks and may be injured if the leaf is torn away too soon. These are well wrapped in tiny fur overcoats or resinous wrappers, to be sure, but I think, as the leaves seem to, that if anything could penetrate these clever coverings it would be one of these morning fogs which mark the passing of October.

But, though to us who stand at the bottom of the fog that ghostly image of a morning sun looks pale and impotent, its work is really vigorous and aggressive. Looking down on it from a sufficiently high hill we may see it shredding the upper surface into breakfast food and eating its way so rapidly downward that the rolling billows of mist ebb before its rays like a Bay of Fundy tide.

Long before mid-forenoon it has finished its repast. From below the fog seems to gradually grow warmer and to be dissolved in its own moisture. The frost that crisped underfoot before the mists began to shiver together in the lowlands now glistens as dew under the yellow sun. The day warms toward the noon and we note with satisfaction what a perfect one it is. But not till the little winds of afternoon begin to bustle in among the trees do the leaves again begin to fall. The moisture is again dried out of their petioles and the xylophone solo tattoos once more the elfin tune to which they march on.

But now they do not go shuddering and in superstitious terror. Instead, there is a lilt to the music and they dance their way down. Some jig it alone. Others waltz cosily; but by far the larger number like best the sociable square dance and foot it in groups to the merry-go-round of the Portland Fancy. It is in such mood that we like best to say good-by to them.

NOVEMBER WOODS

November is the month in which she counts up the gain or loss and is happy or disconsolate, according to the tally. Why else these wonderful clear days on which you may see without a spyglass clear to the other end of your universe? On some of these days Nature smiles in delight over her success, and we say, this is the real Indian summer. She is pleased with the perfection and profuseness of the product. On others you will see her eyes cloud with tears, and sometimes a perfect passion of northeast tempest blots the landscape and drowns the world in a flood of rain. In this case she has discovered that the workers in some special department have been lazy or hampered by some unfortunate condition and their output is a failure.

There are years when the nuts do not mature and the squirrels must migrate or starve. On others the drought so dries the upland grasses that those of next year may not sprout as usual from the roots but must be propagated by seed, which of itself is scarce also because of the dryness. Or excessive rains so flood the lowlands that a thousand swamp and meadow products rot and write the word failure large over a whole department.

For Nature’s successes are by no means easily won. She lays such plans for a hickory tree that if all the blossoms which open in May were to produce fruit the trees’ tough limbs would be torn from their sockets with the weight of it long before maturity. Some years, because of storm or frost, the tree’s crop is a total failure, but the resourceful mother, the moment she notes the death of the embryos, sets the wood to making a more vigorous growth than would have been possible in a fruiting season. Then, though she may weep in November over the loss of nuts, she will be able to smile through her tears at the thought that next year the tree will have far more ripe twigs for the bearing of nuts. Or the tree may produce a thousand nuts and the squirrels be too busy to plant more than a dozen of them. What is true of the hickory tree is true of all other creatures of the vegetable and animal world. Death stalks close upon the heels of birth, and a million fragile lives pass out unnoticed to one that greets our eyes in maturity. No wonder some years November is a month of wailing and Nature lets the storms of December blot the tally sheet with the white forgiveness of the snow before the almanac will agree that the month is half over.

The boundaries of the real month are thus not half so firmly set as that which the calendar proclaims. October may on the one end and December on the other so overlap it, some years, that Nature has hardly time for her bookkeeping. This year I think November came a day or two earlier than the calendar figures it, for the last days of the calendar month of October went out with a perfect paroxysm of weeping.

Nature, even before she fairly got her tablets out for the tally, had a terrible pet about something. I think her grief must be because of the carelessness of man during the summer’s and autumn’s unprecedented drought whereby he has killed with his fires so much of the woodland growth. For other than this it seems to me that the year’s work has been very successful. Never were wild fruits more plentiful. Only on the driest of the upland pastures was there failure. There the fruit set in more than the usual quantity, but in some cases shrivelled before coming to maturity.

There was a tremendous crop of chestnuts this year, with enough hickory and hazel nuts to make the squirrels smile and work overtime in laying them up for the winter. From the June berries which purpled the shad bush to the wild apples that still hang on the woodland trees, gleaming pale-yellow among the rugged tracery of bare branches, production has been plentiful and picking peaceful. Hardly a rainy night, never a rough storm, did we have from the first of May until the end of September. All those trees whose fruiting depends upon windborne pollen which can only float in dry weather had perfect conditions for fertilization. So with those plants, whether shrub or tree or annual or perennial herbs, that depend on insects for the same service. There was no time lost on account of rain.

As it was in the vegetable world, so it has been with animal life, and particularly with those birds which nest on the ground. The mother bird may conceal her nest so carefully that neither skunk nor fox nor predatory boys can find it. She cannot conceal it from the rapidly-rising water of a June flood which will drown her nestlings or so chill her eggs that they will fail to hatch. A long heavy rain at just about hatching time may almost wipe out the young birds of a season among certain varieties. I read recently a report from Maine stating that the partridges are particularly plentiful in that State this year. This, the report went on to say, was because the hedgehog bounty of some years ago had made a scarcity of hedgehogs. Therefore, as the hedgehogs no longer ate the partridge eggs, partridges were increasing in number.

The State of Maine porcupine, commonly called hedgehog, though purists decry the custom, will eat the handle off your canoe paddle, the floor off your camp, or the boots off your feet. I dare say he eats partridge eggs when in his short-sighted, clumsy wanderings he happens to find them, but I doubt if he does enough of this to make him responsible for a shortage in the partridge crop. I believe the partridges are particularly plentiful Down East this year because there was never a cloud in the sky nor a drenching rain from the time the eggs were laid until the young birds were fully fledged. I know that is what happened here in Massachusetts and, as a consequence, the young of ground-nesting birds have had more than their usual opportunity to grow up.

This is true of partridges, and the application is apt, for the partridge is not a migrating bird, nor even a wanderer. He clings to the particular section of woodland where he was brought up with a faithfulness which is apt to prevent his reaching a green old age. You may drive him from his covert with all the racket you are able to make. He may leave with vigor and directness that would seem to prove that he has through tickets for Seattle. Yet, if you sit quietly by in a position which commands a good view of the approaches, you will before long see the flip of a brown wing that is bearing him back again. He has gone no farther than the dense shelter of a neighboring pine grove, whence he watches out until he thinks it safe to come home.

I take it that the same reason holds good for the plentifulness of woodcock this fall in certain swamps which I frequent. You may know that woodcock are plentiful in a place, even if you do not see them, by the numbers of little round holes in moist, soft ground, usually where the swamp begins to give way to sandy upland. Here the bird goes jabbing for angleworms, which are his chief diet. I have never been able to catch them at it, though I have often noticed the borings in the spot whence I have just flushed the bird. In fact, I have never seen a live woodcock on the ground anyway.

The bird is so built that I and other predatory creatures will not be able to do it. His coloring is well adapted to blend with the dusky-browns and black of the low ground which he frequents. He does not have to look for his food. He feels for it. Given the proper piece of ground to contain angleworms, he has but to probe with that long, sensitive bill and haul them out when the sense of touch tells him that one is there. For

this purpose the end of the upper mandible is somewhat flexible and moves so as to nip the worm when he feels it.

If we could see him thus engaged I think we would understand clearly why a woodcock is so peculiarly built. His eyes are set so far back in his head that the bird has a grotesque appearance. But in this very fact lies a large factor of his safety. Wild animals that hunt woodcock may not slip up on them unseen while they are feeding. The woodcock’s nose may be in the mud, but his eyes, set absurdly far back on his head, are then just right for seeing all that is going on. Let there be but the slightest hint of danger near by and the bird goes straight up in the air in a tremendous burst of speed.

Woodcock hunters claim that this speed is so great that the bird is invisible till he reaches a height of four or five feet. I am inclined to believe them for I have never yet seen a flushed bird till he got shoulder high, though he may have come up right in front of my nose. So vigorous are the strokes of his wings during this flight that the stiff wing feathers make a shrill whistling which is peculiar to the bird. Rapidity of flight seems to be in the main exhausted by this effort, however, for after they get fairly launched they seem to go rather slowly and clumsily. In the case of the woodcock, as in that of the partridge, the rainless spring and early summer seem to have given the birds a chance to bring their full complement of young through to maturity.

So, looking over the result of harvest and round-up in pasture and woodland, I can see no reason why Nature should shed many tears or go into any tantrums over the results of her busy season. These seem to me to be above the average, and I look forward to a bright and sunny November, during which she will count up the finished product with all good cheer.

The tally of young brought to successful maturity is all that the animal world has to show for the success of its department during the season of growth. But nuts and fruit and ripe seeds are only part of the work of the trees and shrubs. All the time that they are busy producing that two feet or less of woody growth, all the time the growing and ripening of seeds is going on, there is a further and very important labor to be attended to. That is the production of next year’s buds. This is no haphazard matter, nor is it left until the other things are out of the way, but is carefully begun and patiently carried on through the summer, early autumn seeing everything complete.

The falling of leaves and ripe fruit shows these hopes for future foliage and flower revealed for the first time. Stand on a knoll in the pasture and look over the tops of shrubs and trees on these keen and clear November days and you will see that the most beautiful colors of the year are there waiting your eye after you thought that all color had flamed to its climax and died in the dead ashes of autumn memories. Grays that are incredibly soft and coot in the vigorous young limbs of the maples warm into tender reds on the twig tips where the next year’s buds sit snug.

All this year’s shoots of the swamp blueberry bushes are a restful green, but at the tips these, too, ripen into red, while on the higher ground the black huckleberries and the birches show the same color till the landscape rolls away from you in a warm and cuddley glow that takes the nip out of the wind. Looking on these you know that the pasture cannot be cold, however deep the snows to come or however low the mercury in the thermometer may fall. As the winter comes on this blanket of warm red, spread all over the bare trees and shrubs, will deepen in hue and with the first promise of spring flush into a lively pink that melts again into slender green with the passing of frost from the roots and the first soft rains of April. Herein is the better half of the harvest of the year,—a harvest not of fruition but of promise. The out-door world ripens hope in the same crop that has given us fulfilment.

How full of hope, of promises, of matured plans and energy these rosy buds are you may not know till you step down among them and test their virility and perfection. Here is the azalia, its pinky twigs tipped with swollen, soft green buds as big as your little finger tip. Till the leaves fell nobody thought the azalia had been doing anything since its rich-scented white flowers fell last July. Here is the proof of its labors and foresight. In the hearts of these buds are next July’s blossoms, in miniature it is true, but perfect in every appointment.

About them are the green young leaves, vividly colored already, both only waiting for the mysterious thrill of spring sap to push forward to maturity, promising the leaves softly green, the blossoms vividly white, sticky with sweetness, and adorably fragrant. If you will pull one of the larger of the azalia buds apart you may easily see all this, and as you do it, be haunted by the ghost of a perfume, an infinitesimally faint promise of the rich odor yet to be.

So, in large or small, it is with all the shrubs and trees. Each is loaded and primed and waits but the touch of the match in the crescent warmth of the spring sun. Then will come the yearly explosion. It is hard to say which of these next-year promises shows most vigor, yet I think on the whole I would give the prize to the sapling pines. Each central shoot of these will go up in the season from fifteen to thirty inches, and send out four or five laterals. Yet each young tree has from eight to a dozen brown buds prepared for this, at least two centrals which you will recognize as being larger and standing more erect. One of these will get the start and continue the main trunk of the tree. The other will fall back and be a lateral branch. Yet if, as often happens, the central shoot is disabled the next strongest will take its place and so on, if need be, till the last of the dozen buds has stepped into the place of the lost leader.

Sometimes, though rarely with the white pine, more often with the fir and spruce, two will compete with equal success for this lost leadership and you have a tree with twin tops. Usually, however, one fails in the race and the stronger goes ahead alone.

So, going abroad these keen November days, looking upon the world stripped of the glamour of summer and the glory of autumn fruitage, we see it by no means a dead and pulseless thing to be wept over and buried. Instead, we wonder at and delight in the riot of life laid bare by the passing of leaf and fruit. The woodland is more beautiful, the pasture more enticing than ever. Beauty thus unadorned is adorned the most, and we forget to sorrow over the ceasing of this year’s growth in our joy in the promise of that for the year to be.

WINTER BIRDS’-NESTING

The landscape passed like an elder saint from this world to the next, you could scarce tell when, only that you were awed and soothed with the soft serenity of the going. In the hush that followed the soft blue mists changed their draperies for black, in mourning for the passing of the twilight saint, and thus night came.

Last summer night on this hilltop was filled with voices. A million insects chirped and sang. Tree toads trilled, amorous toads played bagpipes all along the margin of the swamp below, and in deeper water a thousand frogs shouted one to another in guttural diapason. A little screech owl used to sit in the darker corner of the pines and ululate all to himself far into the night, and here and there a songbird, stirring in his sleep, would pipe a mellow note. A coon would whinny or a fox would yap, and there were many other sounds whose source you might not surely define. The forefathers who wait serenely beneath their slate headstones all along the brow of the hill had much and pleasant company when the year was in its prime. Now their nights are as silent as if the world itself were dead, their company ghosts of mist as tenuous as their own.

The morning after such a night does not break from above; it grows. It rises out of the earth like a soft tide, as if the mists that went to sleep in it last night were the first of all creatures up, making all things gray again. These tiptoe up, tangling their soft garments in the trees and roof tops till they slip from them and pass on into the upper spaces, where their unclothed spirits become the morning light. The garments, clinging still to all things, remain behind as hoar frost.

That is the way it was this morning. All the trees had white baby leaves of infinite daintiness and ghosts of blossoms that were not real enough for a promise. I might better call them remembrance, touched with hope. Hardly was the touch of hope there at the earliest light. It was just white and delicate remembrance. Then, with the thought of the sun, only the thought for the sun himself was not to come for long, there came a slender opalescence welling through these white garments, an iridescent presence that you felt rather than saw, till I knew without looking to the east that the dawn had grown out of the earth into the high heavens and the miracle was complete.

Out of this miracle of the birth of morning light came two pleasant things. One was the red sun, peeping robustly in among the pines, adding his glow to the warmth of their shelter; the other was a bustle of merry company heralded by a salvo of elfin trumpets. A company of chickadees came breakfasting, and with them were nuthatches. I think no one has ever see the trumpet which the nuthatch blows, but its tiny, tin toot is a familiar sound in the pine woods at this time of year.

If some fay of the fairy orchestra, returning in haste from revels which lasted till the gray of the morning, did not drop it, I cannot tell where the nuthatch did pick it up. Its note is certainly more elfin than bird-like and always seems to add a tiny touch of romantic mystery to the day.

Such a November morning is fine for birds’-nesting. You may go hunting birds’ nests in June if you wish to, but you will not find very many, half so many in a day as I can find now almost in a glance. Down stream there is a little island crowded with alder and elder, milkweed and joe-pye weed, and garlanded with virgin’s bower, where I called many days last summer to watch the insect life that rioted about it. A bed of milkweed bloom was each day a busy and cosmopolitan community.

Right at my elbow as I stood in July watching this was a blackbird’s nest. I must have brushed it more than once, but I never saw it until to-day. To be sure, when I first went there the young blackbirds were grown up and gone, for the nesting season with these birds is short, and by July the young are flying about with the flock, learning to sing “tchk, tchk, conkaree.” Had there been young or eggs in the nest the distress of the parent birds would have warned me of its presence. Lacking that, so cleverly was it placed for safety and concealment, I never noticed it till the passing of the leaves left it bare.

Ten feet away was another, a replica of the first. Among blackbirds good form in house-building has but one accepted style. The nest is rather deep, loosely woven of rough grass, lined with finer grasses. Standing on the little island to-day I could not help seeing these two nests which before I had passed a score of times without seeing, for if June is the time of year to hunt for birds’ nests, this is the time of year to find them.

The birds can give you, and I really think they are right about it, many reasons why you should not hunt for their nests in June. Looking at a nestful of young birds, with the mother fluttering solicitously about, I always feel as I think I should if I went into a town where I was not acquainted and went about peeping in at the nursery windows of peoples’ houses. My motives might be the best in the world. I might be making a study of nestlings and nests of the human family for scientific purposes; in fact, I might be a veritable “friendly visitor,” but I should be fortunate if I did not fall under suspicion, become the object of dislike, and eventually land in the police court.

The mere too frequent inspection of the nests and eggs of some birds will cause abandonment, and those parents who stand by do so with such evident distress that after the briefest possible satisfactory inspection we ought to apologize for the intrusion and step away. Many birds will even attempt to hasten this departure by pretty vigorous means.

None of these objections obtains now. There are no birds in this year’s nests, and you may gather them or tear them to pieces in analytical mood without doing harm, at least to the birds. Down stream, ten feet from my second blackbird’s nest, was a catbird’s. The catbird builds a better nest than the blackbird, at least so far as strength is concerned. Before the winter is over the grasses of the latter’s structure will be broken and blown away by the wind or washed back to earth by rain and snow.

The catbird’s will surely stand until next fall, and remnants of it may be sometimes seen in the bush the year after that. For the catbird’s material is of more rugged quality. His foundation is often of pliant twigs or tough bark of the wild grapevine, though the nest I have before me as I write—the one which I could not see last summer when I passed it at the foot of the little island—has strong, coarse grasses loosely interwoven for its foundation. Then, within this loose, rough cup is a layer of tough oak leaves, the dry ones of the year before, wind-proofing the bottom of the structure. Then comes a layer of fine black roots, I think those of alder, taken where the stream had washed them bare. Then more oak leaves, and finally an inner lining of finer black roots from the same source as those already used.

The whole is firm, sanitary, wind-proof, but not air-proof, and sufficiently cup-shaped to hold the young securely, though not so deep as that of the blackbird. One kick would smash a blackbird’s nest to a handful of straw. You might kick a catbird’s all about the meadow, and I am quite sure the inner structure would remain interwoven.

I think the reason for the difference in the two is this. Though both often build over water and in similar situations, the blackbird has but one brood a season, and even a frail nest will do for this. The

catbird hardly has his first brood off the nest before preparations are in hand for a second; and the nest which can stand two broods of riotous youngsters in succession, even if fixed up a bit, must needs be of fairly firm texture.

The strength of the catbird’s nest often serves another purpose, though I doubt if this is taken into the calculations when it is planned and built. I found one of the half-dozen which line the brook conspicuously, now that they may be seen at all, half full of wild cherry stones. Evidently a field mouse had appropriated this nest for an autumn storehouse, perhaps planning, before the weather got too cold, to roof it over with a dome of soft grasses, this work of the field mouse being not so very different from that of the red squirrel, only on a smaller scale.

Farther down stream in a rough portion of the pasture, brambly but beautiful with barberries, is the chosen habitat of the yellow warblers of my neighborhood. Always they build in the barberry bushes here, nor have I ever found them anywhere else or in other bushes. It is not difficult to find them when the pasture is in the full leafage of late May, for you have but to go from one barberry bush to another till you have succeeded. But the yellow warbler is a shy bird, and I have known them to desert nest and eggs when these were too often visited.

It is much better to hunt them now, when you have but to stand on a little hillock and count, then pluck the nest that you prefer and take it home with you without abraiding anybody’s feelings. The yellow warbler mother bird seems to have a great love for the tender buff wool of the young shoots of the cinnamon fern, which are just about ready to shed these delicate overcoats when nesting begins with the yellow warblers. In fact, her color scheme is perfect.

The nest, when finished, is a symphony of pale buff and silvery grays that shade imperceptibly toward the buff touches on the under parts of the warbler and are lighted as with a gleam of sunlight by the bright yellow of the remaining plumage. Yet this bright yellow has a greenish tint that is deepened in the tender green of the young shoots of the barberry, while the yellow itself is again reproduced in the blossoms. No wonder this lovely little singing-bird loves a barberry bush for its nest. It finds protection and an artistically satisfying color scheme in the same bush.

The silvery grays of the nest are the fine, silky, fibrous inner bark of the milkweed, whose last year’s stems are shredded by wind and storm in time for the nest-building. These barberry-bush-building yellow warblers with whom I have been more or less acquainted for a quarter of a century seem to care for little else for material, though sometimes they make the fern fuzz more adhesive with caterpillars’ silk and line with a few horsehairs and soft feathers.

Yet though these nests have been invariable in material they have varied otherwise. Some have been so firmly woven and the material so stoutly packed as to defy the storms of a winter or two. Others have been so frail as hardly to be found when the leaves are off. Perhaps these slight nests are made by birds that were nestlings of the previous year and have not yet learned the complete art of nest-building.

Once I found one whose makers were skilled indeed. Instead of placing it firmly in a crotch and building up with the fern wool within a netting of fiber wound from twig to twig, as is the usual method, these had launched boldly into a new architecture. Perhaps they had neighbored the year before with a vireo. Anyway, they took the vireo’s plans and built a yellow warbler’s nest on them, hanging it from a nearly horizontal barberry fork, and finishing a fine, firm, pensile nest, vireo style, out of yellow warbler material. I never found this nest’s successor, and I am not sure whether, having found they could do it, they abandoned the type for the old home style, or whether something happened to the birds, and thus the warbler world lost budding genius.

Only one other nest have I found that seemed to be in any way abnormal, and this, unlike the pensile nest, seems to have had a very definite reason for its abnormality. The hollow part which had contained the eggs and young was in no wise different from that of all other warblers’ nests. It was the depth and firmness of the foundation which surprised me. This was built up to the height of an ordinary yellow warbler’s nest before the real nest began at all, and (the young had flown) I promptly took it home and dissected it.

Then the murder was out. The extra height had been added to the structure to circumvent the villainy of a cowbird. The cowbird lays her eggs in nests of birds that are smaller than herself and there leaves them to be hatched. She is partial to yellow warblers’ nests because the eggs that belong there are much like hers in coloring, though smaller, and the fraud is less likely to be detected. When hatched the young cowbird is so much larger and stronger that it starves out the other nestlings or crowds them out. The nest-builders in the main are foolish enough to bring up this murderous changeling; hence cowbirds are perpetuated. Perhaps these warblers had had one experience.

Anyway, finding the cowbird’s egg in their nest, they had promptly roofed it over with fern wool and fiber, built up the sides to correspond to the addition, and gone on with their housekeeping. Here was evidence of prompt action in an emergency in nest-building. I do not think it possible for the birds to have lifted the cowbird’s egg over the side of their nest and to have dropped it on the ground, which would have been the quickest way of getting rid of it. A yellow warbler’s nest “tumbles home” a bit at the top, as does the hull of a yacht, and I do not think their slender claws could grasp the egg and get it over that lip. Instead, they had done what they could,—imprisoned the intruder egg where it could not hatch.

I found it there, addled and nearly dried up within, and I rejoiced. The cowbird is a light-o’-love and abandons children on other people’s doorsteps. All such should be put in a pie. Since English sparrows became so plentiful the cowbird has shown a decided partiality for their nests for its abandoned offspring. I found a cowbird’s egg with those of an English sparrow that nested in a crevice right over my front door last spring. If cowbirds must behave in this nefarious manner it is not so bad to find them choosing the English sparrows for their dupes. The surprising part of it is to find the cowbird with sufficient courage to come in under the porch.

I’d like to watch a young cowbird growing up in a nestful of young English sparrows. The tender nestlings of the yellow warbler have no show, but I have an idea that here Greek would meet Greek, and after the tug-of-war the cowbird would be among those not present. Perhaps in the falling out both would fall out, at which most of us who love birds would not grumble.

SOME CROWS I HAVE KNOWN

But not all of them. Yesterday, at sunset, I heard one that had not joined the innumerable throng. Instead, he lingers to take his Christmas dinner in New England, his holly the red-berried alder, his mistletoe black instead of white, with the crowded fruit of the buckthorn. Like his mates, a thousand miles away, he, too, sang a faint little winter song that was like an echo of his summer jubilate, a triumphant, light-hearted tune indeed, but not heartily sung. Twilight gloomed the deep pine growth where we were, and though the fires of a November sunset burned red and angry in the sky, they warmed the grove only to the eye, while the keen north wind that had blowzed the sky with clouds all day seemed to be seeking shelter there with us. He, too, whistled in such keen sibillation that the faint oak-leaf rustle from the hillside sounded like chattering teeth.

The robin’s faint song may have been one of contentment with his lot, or one of evening praise for as many mercies as he had received, but it sounded far more, in that light and that biting air, like the boy who whistles at night on the long and lonesome road to keep his courage up. Then the song died away in his throat, for across the angry crimson of the west flitted silhouetted black wings, and a pair of crows lighted among the thick boughs of the higher pines to roost for the night.

The robin muttered “tut, tut!” somewhat hysterically and slipped away to safer shelter deep among the low boughs and denser shadow of a tree on the edge of the open pasture. No doubt he recognized hereditary enemies of his race, and though he was tough enough to dare a northern winter, was unwilling to take chances with the strong black bills of these reckless freebooters of the wilderness. And he was right. Crows rarely eat grown robins, for they cannot catch them, but the tender, half-fledged nestlings are the mainstay of many a crow saturnalia.

Only too well do I remember an orgy of this sort. It was late May and the scent of the apple blossoms filled all the orchard with delight, just as the robins, morning and evening, filled it with song. They sang for every cloud that crossed the sky and piped up now and then in the full sunshine. How they found time for it all it is hard to tell, for every nest was full of young birds that eat almost their weight in hearty food each day.

One day the tunes changed. Coming into the farthest corner from a woodland trip I heard from some ancient, neglected trees, such as the robins always love and in which were grouped three or four nests, wild shrieks of anger and dismay from a whole chorus of robins. Coming nearer I could hear crow voices in guttural undertones, croaking ghoulishly.