by Hal Borland
While I am awaiting the robins I am watching for the red-wing blackbirds, which often get here ahead of the robins. They come, the more colorful males first, and stake out their claims in the bogland and along the riverbanks. Ten days or two weeks later their mates arrive, dressed much like sparrows, and prepare to set up housekeeping. By then I am watching for bluebirds, which I see first in the trees along the fence rows. By then, too, all the sparrows are singing. Some of the sparrows Winter here, chiefly tree and field sparrows, swamp sparrows, song sparrows, a few white-throats and fox sparrows, but they make little music before March. They find shelter in the brush and live on weed seed and dried berries.
All Winter long the little woodpeckers, the downies and their slightly larger cousins, the hairies, are at work not only in my dooryard trees but in all the fence rows and back in the woodland. Soon the flickers, the yellow-shafted woodpeckers which feed almost as much on the ground in the pastures as in the trees, will arrive. I hear them drumming on dead trees, I hear them calling, and then I see them in little flocks in the pasture, working the grass much as the robins do. Most woodpeckers fly in a series of swoops—goldfinches also fly that way, but are much smaller birds—so I can recognize a flicker in flight several hundred yards away. Flickers also reveal their identity by showing a whitish rump patch when they fly. To me they are the cottontails of birddom.
By the time the flickers are here I will have seen starlings, grackles, and cowbirds in the pasture. Starlings are dirty, noisy birds in the city, but they have their virtues in the country. They eat great quantities of insects, including Japanese beetles. One year they invaded my garage through a hole a woodpecker had carved in the cornice, and I had to replace the whole cornice to be rid of them. But as long as they nest elsewhere they are welcome on my land. Grackles, with richly iridescent tones on their black feathers, have rusty-hinge voices; but they are beautiful birds and they, too, eat many insects.
Cowbirds flock in the pastures and meadows where cattle graze. Last Summer there were at least 200 in one flock here on my place. They are small, brown-headed blackbirds, the males black-bodied, the females dark gray. They eat parasites and flies on the cattle and gorge on insects flushed from the grass by the cows as they move about. Domestically they are complete parasites, never nesting, never raising a chick. They lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and leave the whole responsibility of hatching them to someone else. I once found a song sparrow’s nest with a cowbird chick in it almost as big as the mother song sparrow. It had crowded out all but one of the sparrow’s own chicks and was starving that chick to death with its big-mouthed gluttony.
The open meadowland is choice area for meadowlarks and bobolinks. Both nest in the grass. The meadowlark, with its yellow vest and black “V” of a necktie, has a long beak, a fat body, and stubby wings. In flight it is sometimes mistaken for a quail by those who are not too well acquainted with either bird. The bobolink, unlike the meadowlark, likes to live in flocks and often chooses a meadow with a brook, for it likes damp places. The male bobolink is our only land bird that is marked with black below and white above. It sings in flight.
Woodland birds are often seen in the meadow but they are not really at home there. Hawks course the meadows in daylight and owls hunt there at night, both of them looking for field mice and rabbits. From time to time I see a turkey buzzard—a vulture in this area—looking for carrion. One Summer day one came to my home pasture and stayed almost an hour feasting on a dead woodchuck. It ate so big a meal it had difficulty taking flight again.
As for animals in the open meadow, the daylight visitor will be lucky to see more than a rabbit or two and, near the fence row or the stone walls, a few chipmunks and gray squirrels. Now and then one will see a woodchuck, but only if the woodchuck is too busy to see him first. The hidden life there appears mostly at dusk or in the night, when the fox, the skunk, the raccoon, the opossum, and various mice and voles do most of their foraging. The vole is commonly called a meadow mouse, but it is of a different species from the true mouse. Voles have short tails and small ears. And enormous appetites; a vole can eat its own weight in twenty-four hours. The meadow vole and the pine vole are the common ones in the East and Northeast. They are about the same size, three to five inches long, but the meadow vole, which prefers the open fields, is grayish-brown, and the pine vole, a woodland creature, is chestnut above and gray below. Voles are close kin to lemmings. They and bog lemmings, also found in the Northeast, are often mistaken for each other.
Also in the open meadowland but seldom seen are the shrews. A shrew looks like a small mouse with a long, tapered nose, tiny eyes, and almost invisible ears. The biggest of the shrew tribe, the short-tailed shrew, weighs only one ounce, and the smallest, the pigmy shrew, is only two inches long and weighs about the same as a dime. One species, the water shrew, has partly webbed, hairy feet and can literally run on the surface of water. In proportion to their size, shrews are more vicious than man-eating tigers. They will attack and kill a mouse several times their own weight. The short-tailed shrew’s saliva contains a venom as poisonous as that of a cobra; this poison, carried into a wound by the animal’s sharp, reddish-brown teeth, can paralyze a mouse in seconds. A short-tailed shrew’s bite can be painful to a man but not really dangerous. But if you ever catch one alive, don’t let a child play with it. As I said, however, shrews are seldom seen. In all my years of nature watching I have seen only four of them, and all of them scurried as soon as they were aware of me. They are so elusive that science still has much to learn about them except that they are very busy, very hungry little mites of life which must eat twice their own weight in food every day or they starve to death.
Deer sometimes come down to open meadows to feed, but almost always at dusk or in the night. I have seen deer in my pasture at 8 o’clock in the morning, but only on rare occasions. Those times when deer came down into the open in daylight, I have noted, were usually foggy or misty mornings, seldom when a clear, bright sun was shining. Perhaps the mist and fog give them a sense of security. I have found that deer are easier to approach in the woods on a misty or drizzly day, too, and I doubt that it is wholly because the dampness helps muffle the sound of a man’s approach in the leaf-littered underbrush.
A few times I have seen red foxes come down into the open pasture in daylight. One morning about 7:30, clear and sunny, one crossed the pasture within a hundred yards of the house, taking its time, wary but in no hurry. It apparently was going somewhere and took the short cut across the pasture, for it did not stop to hunt. It watched the house, alert, but otherwise showed no fear. A friend tells me of a fox that came down into the dooryard one morning and frolicked with a shelty pup for ten minutes before it went back to the woods. I have never seen this happen. But one sunny afternoon a red fox came down into the pasture and spent fifteen minutes catfooting from one grass clump to another, hunting mice. Its actions, even to the pounce, reminded me of a cat. I watched while it stalked several grass clumps, cautious step by step, then pounced, but I could not see that it caught anything. It did catch several insects, probably grasshoppers, which were big and fat in the pasture at that time. It startled them from the grass, leaped, and caught them in mid-air with a snap of its mouth.
But the meadow is primarily a place for the plant watcher and the bird watcher. And, of course, for the person who just likes to be out in the open on a lazy, blue-sky day.
Chapter 4
The Woodlands
Only the unobservant sees nothing but trees in a forest. Any woodland is a complex community of plant and animal life with its own laws of growth and survival. But if you would know strength and majesty and patience, welcome the company of trees.
FROM TIME TO TIME I hear someone say: “I wish I had known this country before the white man came, while it was still a vast, unbroken forest. It must have teemed with wild life.”
Actually, even the Northeast was not a vast, unbroken forest when the white man arrived. There were big
woods, yes, mainly oak in southern New England and white pine, hemlock, and maple in northern New England. But all the early explorers commented on the openings in the big woods, both their number and extent. Verrazano, who made an expedition from Narragansett Bay as far west as what is now central New York State in 1524, reported “open plains twenty-five or thirty leagues in extent, entirely free from trees or other hindrances.” Other sixteenth-century travelers told the same story.
The fact is that the pioneers didn’t have to hew their way, yard by yard, through unbroken woods all the way from the Massachusetts coast to the prairies of Iowa.
Furthermore, even the big woods had clearings. All the eastern Indians were farmers, in some degree, and they made clearings for their fields of corn, beans, and squash. As soon as they used up the natural fertility of one clearing they girdled and burned the trees and made a new cleared field. They also burned brushland to encourage grass, and they burned underbrush in the woods, partly to make hunting easier, partly to create more woods margin. The birds and animals they hunted all fed in the open or in the patches of grass and low underbrush that always grow in the edges of the big forests, not in their dark, shaded, grassless depths. All animal life depends, directly or indirectly, on grass and other green forage, and such plants thrive only in sunlight. The dense shade of the primeval forest tends to starve out lesser plant life.
I remember my first visit to the big redwood forests of California, where giant trees stood so tall it dizzied me to look at their crowns. They made a canopy so dense that the occasional shaft of sunlight reaching the forest floor danced with motes like a pinhole sunbeam in a dark room. The mat of needles was a foot thick. There was no underbrush, no blade of grass. No bird sang, no rabbit hopped, no squirrel scurried. Then I came to a place where one of those forest giants had fallen a few decades before, making a gap in the high canopy and admitting a burst of sunlight. In that little opening a score of plant species had sprung up, from oxalis to manzanita brush. Birds sang there, and squirrels were busy. Then I walked on, into the dark silence of the big woods again, and again it was a place of brown silence, a deserted cathedral of giants.
We have few such virgin woodlands left today, and most of them are in remote areas. The redwoods are an exception, but even they are in limited areas. The forests we know best, those accessible to most of us, are relatively young and full of clearings. In Connecticut, for example, a survey made in the mid-1940’s showed that 90 per cent of the forest was less than sixty years old. This is a cutover land. But it certainly is not without woods, young though they are. In 1860, only 27 per cent of Connecticut was wooded—probably less than half, perhaps only a third, of the wooded area in this state when the white man came. But by 1910 the Connecticut woodlands had expanded to cover 45 per cent of the land area. And by 1955, 63 per cent of the state was in forest again. This despite the vast increase in population and the sprawling spread of cities and their suburbs.
Other parts of New England never were as extensively cleared as Connecticut once was. Maine, for instance, never had more than 25 per cent of its area cleared. And today, despite all the tree-cutting of the past, three quarters of New England is in timber, probably not a great deal less than was wooded when the white men arrived.
I can read the human history of New England whenever I walk in the woods in my area. Nearly every woodland I explore, even on sharp mountainsides, has a network of old stone walls, most of them now tumbled into serpentine stone piles. Those walls were not laid up by woodcutters taking out saw logs or firewood or wood for charcoal. They were built by farmers who had cut the primeval trees and were waging New England’s endless war with the stony freight brought here by the ancient glaciers. They cleared the stones from their fields, year after year, and built them into walls, not only to mark boundaries but to clear the way for the plow. On my own mountainside are half a dozen such wall-enclosed fields, now grown up to trees forty or fifty years old, fields that haven’t been tilled since the days of oxen. Those fields were abandoned long ago. Now they are a part of the woodland which covers the whole mountainside.
My woods, like most of those of southern and central New England, is a mixture of trees, white pines, hemlocks, oaks, white ash, shagbark hickory, and birch primarily. There is little beech in my woods, and there aren’t as many maples up there as I would wish. And there is more gray birch and less white birch than I would choose to have. For the most part, it is an old-field tree stand that has been cut over several times and is still in the process of maturing as a woodland. It would provide a certain amount of saw-timber, I suppose, but not enough to tempt me to invite the loggers in. The farmer who owned this place fifty years ago did a certain amount of logging there, and he cut the lumber of the house I live in on that mountainside. I still find thirty-inch stumps of old chestnut up there, stubbornly defying time; beams, rafters, and the interior trim of the house came from the trees that grew there. The sheathing and other lumber for the house came from white pines whose stumps have now rotted and disappeared. But the pines are coming back, and with them the hemlocks. The chestnuts, of course, are gone.
The best stands of pines are in two old hay fields up there. In both of those fields there are several rugged old pines, patriarchs and parents, in all probability, of most of the pines on the mountainside. They probably were left standing, as was the custom, to provide shade and shelter for farm animals which were pastured in those fields. Look around in any stand of young pines and you probably will find such a parent tree or its stump.
Pines thrive on old pastureland and hay fields, areas with thick turf. Seeds from the parent tree work down through the grass, find a place to root, and shoot up quickly in the warmth of full sun. In a few years the seedlings are as tall as a man and have begun to shade and smother the grass and weeds. A mat of needles accumulates and makes it even more difficult for other plants to get started, and the thickening shade discourages those that manage a root-hold. Within fifteen years the old pasture is an almost pure stand of pine with little or no undergrowth.
As the pines grow, their dense shade kills their own lower limbs. More light and space appear beneath them. Storm and blight bring down a tree here and there and the sun can reach the ground again. Patches of brush spring up in such openings, and soon there is a determined growth of gray birch, ash, maple, fighting each other for space and growing room. But pine seedlings, which need a few years of light and elbowroom to get started, seldom make headway in such openings and almost never in the pine woods themselves. In the deep shade one finds only the lesser, shade-tolerant plants such as Christmas ferns, par-tridgeberry, lady-slipper, and such shade-demanding parasites as Indian pipe and false beechdrops. Out along the margins, where there is more sunlight and more room, one finds columbine and cranesbill and toothwort and Canada Mayflower, the false lily of the valley. Sometimes one finds carpets of ground pine and ground cedar there and reaching back into the deep shade; these are very ancient ones which have now declined to the status of creepers and must settle for the crumbs of woodland existence. More often, though, they are found in the hardwood forests where they have sunlight, weak though it is, from leaf-fall till opening-bud time in April and May.
As the pines approach maturity, in fifty to seventy-five years, their growth slows. Growth, of course, varies with the soil and conditions of climate, but in a favorable situation a white pine in thirty years will attain a trunk two feet in diameter and sixty feet in height. Under good conditions, a white pine fifty years old will be at least a hundred feet tall, and some very old pines run up to 150 or 175 feet in height. They are the giants of their kind, however, and few mature white-pine woodlands today run much over 125 feet.
By the time the pines have reached this stage of maturity, more and more of them will be victims of storm or disease, and more and more openings will appear in the woodland. The underbrush in these gaps spreads and the deciduous trees take firm hold. The pines begin to lose ground. The next phase will belong to t
he hardwoods, which are crowding them year by year. But meanwhile another pine woods has been springing up in another old pasture or meadow, seeded by some old patriarch, perhaps a tree in the doomed pine woods itself, since pine seeds are winged and can travel on the wind for a considerable distance. I am speaking now of the white pine and the pitch pine, principal pines of our woods in the Northeast; in the West and Southwest are pines with wingless, nutlike seeds, notably the piñon pines, whose seeds look like small brown beans and are the choice fare of squirrels and discriminating people.
I can spot the old meadows and pastures on my mountainside by the white pine woods, even though the walls have tumbled or been carted away. But the hardwood forests, which cover the greater part of these hills—and make October a particular glory of color—are less an index to the farmer’s tenure than to the activity of the woodcutter. The native woodlands here, and in much of the Northeast, were cut by successive generations to clear fields, for firewood and lumber, for charcoal, and to fuel the early wood-burning railroad locomotives. Often they cut every tree big enough to make a board or a stick of firewood. The devastated woodlands invited erosion. Contrary to common belief, most of New England’s barren hillsides were not farmed to death; they were robbed of their forest cover, left open to wind, rain, and frost, and their soil and fertility simply eroded away.
