Snow-Birds
If my memory serves me no tricks, I have never known an October without snow-birds. This year, they appeared as early as the second day; and as I have seen them daily since, it has been a source of wonder that they should ever have been called “snow-birds.” Peter Kalm, writing of them in 1749, remarks: “A small kind of birds which the Swedes call snow-bird and the English chuck-bird, came into the houses about this time (Jan. 21). At other times they sought their food along the roads. They are seldom seen but when it snows.” The same author, thirty pages further on, says the English called it “snow-bird,” and the reason is that it is only seen in winter, “when the fields are covered with snow.” This impression, which there is no reason to believe was correct when Kalm wrote, still prevails, and yet there is not a tittle of reason for associating the bird with snow, as there is with the snow-bunting, an Arctic bird that you may or may not see when the snow-storms come.
Neither Wilson nor Audubon gives any reason for such a name, and what has been written since is of little moment. Wilson’s reference to one phase of the bird’s habits would make the name “snow-bird” more appropriate, but Wilson repeated ill-considered hearsay in this case, for these birds care less about weather changes than many another. They enjoy a foul day, whether it rains or snows, and hunt for food wherever it is to be found. Being nearly black, of course they are very conspicuous against a white background, and not at all so when the ground is bare. Possibly this may have given rise to the name. Well, this miscalled bird is now here, and has been for three weeks; and to-day is twittering gayly over wilted asters, and so intent on seed-hunting that I can almost reach it with my hand. It has always seemed to me an autumn rather than a winter bird, and is one of several that is loved because of association rather than for any marked trait of its own. I never see them but I recall my first experience in trapping. One December day, forty years ago, it was snowing, and I murmured that I must remain indoors. As a recompense, I was allowed to trap. A sieve was tilted up and rested upon a stick, to which was tied a string reaching to the kitchen door. A few crumbs were sprinkled under the sieve. How I watched! How quickly the stormy morning passed! The snow-birds came and went, and at last, spying a crumb that had not been covered, a bird hopped beneath the sieve. I pulled the string at the right moment. For once there was a happy mortal upon earth. How impetuously I rushed out to the sieve and, raising it, saw the frightened snow-bird fly away! Oh, the bitterness of my grief! My bird had been fairly caught, but it would not stay a captive. And I have had such adventures since. Painfully often have I failed to make good my captures. A deal of labor and empty hands at last!
But let us back to our ornithology. October 20th was a perfect day. There were snow-birds in the gardens and the old maiden-blush apple tree was in bloom. Nutty October and flowery May, each a delight, and here commingled! There should have been music, but every bird was mute, and the hyla piped his one note at long-drawn intervals.
So undemonstrative in every way, so silent save the occasional faint twitterings, these birds of the summer-like afternoon might readily have been passed by unnoticed; but it will not be so later. They gather energy as the mercury falls, and when the next hoar-frost whitens the meadows and the uplands’ weedy fields, then will they shake tall grass and rattle the dry twigs as you approach. They are timid birds, and your shadow or that of a hawk creates a riot in their ranks; but they find their wits as soon as they lose them, and if you but stand quietly, orderly, seed-hunting is promptly resumed. What, then, is their peculiar merit, that attention should be asked to them? I am sure that I do not know, unless it be that I love them. This is merit enough in my eyes; and who that spent his youth in the country but recalls the birds of winter? It may be that there was too much work to be done at other times of the year to give heed to the summer songsters; but never in winter were the days too short to set a rabbit trap, to follow a covey of quails, or, less murderously inclined, to listen to the squirrel’s bark or the chirping of the sparrows in the hedge. Seldom, indeed, are the snow-birds alone. There are several other species of the same family (the finches) here in the same weedy pastures, and far oftener all are singing than that any are silent. Autumn, either early or late, is never a dismal season. As you wander in the woods or near them, you can not say —
“I walk as one
Who treads alone
Some banquet hall deserted.”
What Summer took away with her Autumn has replaced. There has been a shifting of scenes, but the actors are as numerous as before. The round of the seasons is a serio-comic drama with no heroes, or with every creature one, as you happen to view it.
In midwinter, when the deep snows come – if they come at all – how effectually the snow-birds enliven what might otherwise be a dreary outlook! On the projecting twigs above the huge drifts they gather, and, plunging down deeply into the snow, find seeds on many a sturdy weed that winter winds have not cast down. Their curious antics at such a time, so vividly described by Lockwood, make us forget that the day is cold, and, whatever the weather, I would rather be among the birds and see them close at hand – closer than is ever possible from my study windows.
Perhaps snow and snow-birds is too short a list of attractions for a winter-day outing. It is not for me; but I have never found it an all-inclusive list. There was never a snow yet, since the days of palæolithic man at least, that covered the tree-tops, and here the —
“Chic-chicadee dee! saucy note
Out of sound heart and merry throat”
is very sure to be heard, even with the mercury below zero. It accords well with the rippling twitter of the snow-birds, and completes the day’s attraction, or should do so. How tiresome our northern summers would be without a bit of winter, now and then, wherewith to contrast them. It is strange, but true, that when the occasional rambler takes an outing he must have a whole menagerie at his elbow or votes the woods in winter a dismal solitude. It is seldom that our snow-birds have only the titmouse for company. Given a blackberry thicket, and the white-throated sparrows will be there and how gloriously they whistle! Overstaying cat-birds, here in New Jersey, will be a surprise, and their midsummer drawling will sound strangely coming over snow-banks; but of late it is a feature of a winter walk. Winter, in fact, is overfull of sights and sounds.
October to March. For five months we have had snow-birds, and none the less a feature when the asters empurpled the hillsides than later when the fields were snow-bound. What of them, too, as summer comes on apace? Even above the wreckage of a wild winter, snow-birds can be cheerful. Never so tattered and torn the rank growths of the dead year but the snow-birds have reason to rejoice. If not at the present outlook, then they take a peep into futurity and sing of what will be. Probably our world looks its dreariest in March, as the darkest hour of night is just before the dawn, but happily the gloom does not weigh upon snow-birds, and to know how cheerfully they can sing one must hear them then. Their whole souls are in their utterances, and when a hundred or more ring out their gladness, March sunshine grows the brighter, the winds are tempered, and many a yellow leaf becomes a golden blossom.
Blue Jays
“What is the most characteristic feature of November?” asked a shivering friend from town, as we stood with our backs to the rain-laden winds. “Birds and blossoms,” I replied. Of course he thought me trifling with him, and I asked if he expected me to say “rheumatism.”
What have birds and blossoms to do with such a dreary outlook? This was evidently the tenor of my friend’s thought, although he said nothing more. To him, as it was raining hard, the world was unutterably dreary, and he longed for the crackling blaze upon the andirons which he knew awaited us. In a few moments, as we skirted a bit of woodland, I remarked: “Blue jays are a feature of this month. See! here are half a dozen.” They were very tame and full of merry ways. They hunted the leaf-strewed ground and played bo-peep among the lower branches of the oaks. They screamed, laughed, chattered, and at times uttered that peculiar flute-like note which sounds so strangely in the woods, particularly when the silence of midwinter broods over all. My friend forgot that it was a dull November day.
These dandies in their cerulean suits can do no mischief now, and I love them for their vivacity. Their cunning shows out continually, and it needs not the dictum of the naturalist to learn that they are cousins of the crow. That they lived so largely upon eggs during May and June told against them at the time, and they were then the incarnation of fiendishness. Let the dead past bury its dead. One can not be happy who is ever cherishing dislikes, and I find the blue jay of the present sufficient unto November days. For my part, he is right welcome to the woods as he finds them. While the six merry jays were before us, I picked a violet, a bluet, and a daisy, and offered them as proof that November blossoms were not a myth. There are, I assured my friend, more than a score of flowers to be found by a little careful searching. What, then, if Summer’s glory has departed; if her skies are no longer overhead; her songs no longer fill the air; the odor of her blossoms no longer scent the breeze; is it not a poor wheel that can not spare one spoke? Nature is not so niggardly with her gifts in November as summer tourists, for instance, are apt to suppose. November is comparatively bare, it is true, and positively ragged; but it is not always safe to judge a man by his coat.
A jay is something more than a bird with blue feathers. October 23, 1889, it snowed violently for three hours, and the ground was white. Masses of snow, too, clung to the limp foliage that remained, and gave a curious aspect to the wooded hillsides. It was then that the jays were moved to unwonted activity, and I saw them at their best. The snow puzzled them, and, being intent upon their own affairs, they paid no heed to my proximity. “What does this mean?” was the question I fancied each asked of his comrade, and then a dozen would attempt explanation at the same time. Such a chattering! Although the air was thick with snow, it did not muffle the harsh sounds – noises as distracting as cracked sleigh-bells. A great company of these birds had been for a week in the hillside woods, sociably inclined but not intimately associated. The snow brought them together, and after an hour of vain discussion, as a compact flock, they left the woods and flew in a direct line for a cluster of cedars half a mile away. It appeared to me that some one of these birds made the suggestion that the cedars were a better protection than half-leaved oak woods, and all took up with it. At any rate, that is where the birds went and remained until the snow-squall was over. Of course, it might have been a mere coincidence, and all their chattering mere meaningless noise, and so, to the end of the chapter; but I am not disposed to view bird-life from such a stupid standpoint. It may suit the “feather-splitters,” as Burroughs aptly calls them, to look upon birds as mere conveniences for their nomenclatorial skill, but he is happy who escapes them and seeks directly of each bird he sees to know what thoughts well up from its little but lively brain. Now, I have never seen, but upon this occasion, a large number of blue jays, a dozen or more, fly in a compact flock. Here, on the home hillside, and I know nothing of them elsewhere, they wander about during the autumn in companies, but always in an independent manner, as if a very general knowledge of the company’s whereabouts was quite sufficient; but to-day such a method would have been impracticable. The air was too thick with snow, and therefore, predetermining the direction, they gathered upon the same tree, and then, when closer together than ever I saw red-winged blackbirds, off they flew. To say that this simple occurrence does not prove beyond question a wide range of mental faculties is to deny that two and two make four. Probably the unhappy growler who descants upon the all-essential importance of “the element of accuracy,” which no one denies, will find this incident contrary to the officially recorded conditions of jay life, and insist that I saw red-winged blackbirds and mistook them.
An ornithologist once wrote to me, “Some of your birds in New Jersey have strange ways,” but this is not true in the sense he intended. Birds about home are simply, here as elsewhere, wide-awake, cunning, quick to scent danger, and wise enough to suit themselves to their surroundings. This latter fact goes far to explain many a point, for it must be remembered that it is the country that decides the bird’s habits, and not that the latter are a stereotyped feature of the country. The same people may dwell among the hills and upon the sea-coast, but how different are the mountaineer and the ’long-shore man! Concerning birds, the difficulty lies in the fact that so many people, even naturalists, are too little concerned with birds’ ways, and rest content with a mere knowledge of their names. I once attended, with a prominent naturalist, an ornithological meeting. There were a score of bird-men present, and very soon they fell to egg-measuring! My companion fell asleep!
But what of the flock of blue jays?
They had not long to wait for clearing weather. Soon the sun shone brilliantly, and Nature for a brief hour wore a strange garb. Many a tree was yet green, many were brilliant with gold and crimson, and all were flecked with masses of glistening snow. It was a splendid spectacle, a swiftly fading pageant, that, like a glowing sunset, is remembered long after it has passed away. And how the lively blue jays rejoiced at the return of the sunshine! “Now for the oak woods again!” I could hear them scream, even though so far away; and sure enough, one after the other came trooping back to the same trees whereon they had sported when the snow commenced. How different now was their every movement from the time that they counseled together and took refuge in the cedar! Now, again, they are the blue jays that every country lad well knows; when I saw them but a short time ago, they were almost as strangers to me. It is something to have an outing during an October snow-storm; when the next comes, let me have blue jays again for company.
It was two weeks later when I next saw the same birds, and under widely different circumstances. November had accomplished much in the way of marring the fair face of Nature. Scarcely a leaf was left upon any tree except the oaks, and the damp mist that veils the meadows during November was never denser, gloomier, and more forbidding than on the 8th of the month. Long before sunrise I was out of doors, and not a bird greeted me until I came to the creek-bank, when out from gloomy depths came the shrill scream that of itself is hideous, but at such a time almost musical. I tried in vain to locate the sound, but could not while the fog lasted; but this mattered little. All other birds seemed depressed and moody. Not a sparrow chirped until the sun made the world a little more distinct; not even a robin, if there were any about, cared to salute such a sunrise. It was something then to have one brave heart making merry, and I shall long thank the jays for cheering a lonely traveler.
An hour later, the birds thought better of the day, and every hedge-row rang with merry music, but the pleasure of the earliest sounds I had heard was not forgotten, when their continuing screams marred the melody of red-birds and foxy finches. But why were they so persistently noisy, and so confined to one spot? My curiosity was aroused and I threaded a tangled brake to my sorrow. In a cluster of sassafras sprouts were several jays and all intent upon an object upon the ground. I hurried on, held back by green briers that were really my friends, and finally reached the spot. By mere accident I escaped a serious encounter with our most treacherous if not dangerous mammal. A skunk had caught a blue jay and scattered its feathers far and near. The victim’s companions were bemoaning its fate or berating the murderer, I know not which, nor did I pause to determine. I assumed the former as more creditable to them and so score another point in favor of these maligned birds.
What though there are violets still in the meadows, Nature is rugged now; and, among the gnarly branches of the oaks, better the shrill cry of the jay, as the north wind sweeps by, than the soothing melody of summer’s tuneful thrushes. November needs all the help that she can get to escape our malediction; and the cry of the blue jay prompts me, at least, to be charitable.
The Growth of Trees
In the spring of 1835, a considerable number of white pines were planted about my residence. Of these fifteen are still standing, and are apparently in full vigor. My uncle, who planted these pines, states that they were of very uniform size, their trunks measuring about two and a half inches in diameter. At present the smallest of the series measures forty-three inches in circumference, four feet from the ground, and the largest seventy-nine inches. Nine of them vary from sixty-two to sixty-eight inches. The average circumference of the fifteen trees is sixty-two and a half inches.
These trees were not placed at uniform distances from each other, and some show the certain ill-effect of overcrowding. This is conspicuously the case with three of the pines, and these have suffered. Had the planting been done with greater reference to the future, and an equal chance given each tree, the average circumference would have been greater by at least three inches; the girth of the twelve largest being sixty-five inches. As it is, including the three somewhat stunted trees, the growth (circumferential measurement) has been sixty inches in fifty-four years; an annual increase of one and one ninth inches.1
These pines stand upon a bluff, composed of compact ferruginous sand of great depth, and are exposed to the full sweep of the western and northern winds. In the matter of soil and exposure they have had equal chances. It is not readily seen, if at all determinable, why more of these trees should not have reached the maximum size, and become stately trees, which, in a sadly deforested landscape, are commanding objects.
A year later two wild cherries were planted near the pines by the same person. “These trees were very small,” he writes me, “as I pulled them up with my hand and carried them to the yard, as one would a walking-stick. Probably neither was more than an inch in diameter.” These trees are in full vigor to-day, one measuring seventy-three inches and the other sixty-eight in circumference. The former is fully fifty feet in height, and the crop of fruit it bears annually is enormous.
In 1836 my grandfather found among a lot of peach-trees that he had purchased an elm (Ulmus Americana) which “was a mere switch.” It was planted in an out-of-the-way corner, and is now a splendid tree, with a spread of branches measuring seventy feet. The circumferential measurement, at a height of four feet from the ground, is one hundred and three inches.
Of the oaks, cedar, and beech, of which I have many fine specimens upon the farm, I have not been able to gather any definite data, but it would appear that the growth is exceedingly slow, after a certain term of years. My uncle is very positive that a black oak in the lane and a red cedar near by have not increased materially in growth in the past half-century. He believes the cedar to have “quite stood still,” and this may not be so strange, for it is known to be considerably over one hundred years old. It was a conspicuous roadside tree in 1802. It measures but eighteen inches in diameter.