Wild Life Near Home

by Dallas Lore Sharp

I

Take it the year round, the deadest trees in the woods are the livest and fullest of fruit—for the naturalist. Dr. Holmes had a passion for big trees; the camera-carriers hunt up historic trees; boys with deep pockets take to fruit-trees: but dead trees, since I developed a curiosity for dark holes, have yielded me the most and largest crops.

An ardor for decayed trees is not from any perversity of nature. There is nothing unreasonable in it, as in—bibliomania, for instance. I discover a gaunt, punky old pine, bored full of holes, and standing among acres of green, characterless companions, with the held breath, the jumping pulse, the bulging eyes of a collector stumbling upon a Caxton in a latest-publication book-store. But my excitement is really with some cause; for—sh! look! In that round hole up there, just under the broken limb, the flame of the red-headed woodpecker—a light in one of the windows of the woods. Peep through it. What rooms! What people! No; I never paid ten cents extra for a volume because it was full of years and mildew and rare errata (I sometimes buy books at a reduction for these accidents); but I have walked miles, and passed forests of green, good-looking trees, to wait in the slim shade of some tottering, limbless old stump.

Within the reach of my landscape four of these ancient derelicts hold their stark arms against the horizon, while every wood-path, pasture-lane, and meadow-road leads past hollow apples, gums, or chestnuts, where there are sure to be happenings as the seasons come and go. Sooner or later, every dead tree in the neighborhood finds a place in my note-book. They are all named and mentioned, some over and over,—my list of Immortals,—all very dead or very hollow, ranging from a big sweet-gum in the swamp along the creek to an old pump-tree, stuck for a post within fifty feet of my window. The gum is the hollowest, the pump the deadest, tree of the lot.

The nozle-hole of the one-time pump stares hard at my study window like the empty socket of a Cyclops. There is a small bird-house nailed just above the window, which gazes back with its single eye at the staring pump. For some time one April the sputtering sparrows held this box above the window against the attacks of two tree-swallows. The sparrows had been on the ground all winter, and had staked their claim with a nest that had already outgrown the house when the swallows arrived. In love of fair play, and remembering more than one winter day made alive and cheerful by the sparrows, I could not interfere and oust them, though it grieved me to lose the pretty pair of swallows as summer neighbors.

The swallows disappeared. All was quiet for a few days, when, one morning, I saw the flutter of steel-blue wings at the hole in the pump, and there, propped hard with his tail over the hole, hung my tree-swallow. I should have that pair as tenants yet, and in a house where I could see everything they did. He peered quickly around, then peeped cautiously into the opening, and slipped out of sight through the dark, round hole.

"I knew it suited exactly."

I knew it suited exactly by the glad, excited way he came out and darted off. He soon returned with the little shining wife; and through a whole week there was a constant passing of blue backs and white breasts as the joyous pair fitted up the inside of that pump with grass and feathers fit for the cradle of a fairy queen.

By the rarest fortune I was on hand when one of the sparrows discovered what had happened in the pump. There is not a single microbe of Anglophobia in my system. But need one's love for things English include this pestiferous sparrow? Anyhow, I feel just a mite of satisfaction when I recall how that sparrow, with the colonizing instinct of his race, dropping down upon the pump with the notion that he "had a duty to the world," dropped off that pump straightway, concluding that his "duty" did not relate to that particular pump any longer. The sparrows had built everywhere about the place, but that that pump—a post, and a post to a pair of bars at that—was worth settling had not dawned on them. When they saw that the swallows had taken it, one of them lighted there instantly, with tail up, head cocked, very much amazed, and commenting vociferously. He looked into the hole from every possible point, and was about to enter, when there came a whizz of wings, a flash of blue, and a slap that sent him spinning. When the indignant swallow swooped back, like a boomerang, the sparrow had scuttled off to an apple-tree.

"With tail up, head cocked, very much amazed, and commenting vociferously."

That was a coup de grâce. Peace reigned after that; and along in July the five white eggs had found wings and were skimming about the fly-filled air or counting and preening themselves demurely in a solemn row upon the wire fence.

Between two pastures, easily seen from the same study window, stands a wild apple-tree, pathetically diseased and rheumatic, which like one of Mr. Burroughs's trees, never bore very good crops of apples, but four seasons a year is marvelously full of animals. It is chiefly noted for a strange collection I once took out of its maw-like cavity.

It was a keen January morning, and I stopped at the tree, as usual, and thumped. No lodgers there that day, it seemed. I mounted the rail fence and looked in. Darkness. No; there at the bottom was a patch of gray, and—I pulled out a snapping, blinking screech-owl. Down went my hand again, and a second owl came blinking to the light—this one in rich brown plumage. When I turned him up, his clenched claws held fistfuls of possum hair. Once more I pushed my hand down the hole, gingerly, and up to the shoulder. No mistake. Mr. Possum was in there, and after a little manœuvering I seized him by the collar, and out he came grinning, hissing, and winking at the hard, white winter day.

And how exactly like a possum! "There is a time for all things," comes near an incarnation in him. There is a time for eating owls—at night, of course, if owls can then be had. But day is the time to sleep; and if owls want to share his bed and roost upon him, all right. He will sleep on till nightfall, in spite of owls. And he would sleep on here till dusk, in spite of my rude awakening, if I gave him leave. I dropped him back to the bottom of the hole, then put the two owls back upon him, and went my way, knowing I should find the three still sleeping on my return. And it was so. The owls were just as surprised and just as sleepy when I disturbed them the second time that day. I left them to finish their nap. But the possum was served for dinner the following evening—for this, too, is strictly in accord with his time-for-all-things philosophy.

This pair of owls were most persistent in their attachment to the apple-tree. Several times in the course of the winter I found them sleeping soundly in this same deep cavity, making their winter lodgings in the bent, tumble-down shanty which, standing not far from the woods and between the uplands and meadows, has been home, hotel, post-office, city of refuge, and lookout for many of the wild folk about the fields.

"In a solemn row upon the wire fence."

A worn-out, gone-to-holes orchard is a very city of hollows-loving animals. Not far away is one such orchard with a side bordering an extensive copse. Where the orchard and copse meet is an apple-tree that has been the ancestral home of unnumbered generations of flying-squirrels. The cavity was first hollowed out by flickers. The squirrels were interlopers. When the young come in April the large opening is stuffed with shredded chestnut bark, leaving barely room enough for the parents to squeeze through. The sharpest-eyed hawk awing would never dream of waiting outside that insignificant door for a meal of squirrel.

"Young flying-squirrels."

But such precautions are not always proof against boys. I robbed that home one spring of its entire batch of babies (no one with any love of wild things could resist the temptation to kidnap young flying-squirrels), and tried to bring them up in domestic ways. But somehow I never succeeded with pets. Something always happened. One of these four squirrels was rocked on, a second was squeezed in a door, a third fell before he could fly, and the fourth I took to college with me. He had perfect liberty, for I had no other room-mate. I set aside one hour a day to putting corks, pens, photographs, and knives back in their places, for him to tuck away the next day in one of my shoes or under my pillow. More than once I have awakened to find him curled up in my neck or up my sleeve, the dearest little bedfellow alive. But it was three stories from my window to the street; and one day he tried his wings. They were not equal to the flight. Since then I have left my wild pets in the woods.

If one wants to know what birds are about, especially the larger, more cautious species, let him get under cover near a tall dead oak or walnut, standing alone in the middle of open fields. Such a tree is the natural rest and lookout for every passer. Here come the hawks to wait and watch; here the sentinel crows are posted while the flock pilfers corn and plugs melons; here the flickers and woodpeckers light for a quick lunch of grubs, to call for company or telegraph across the fields on one of the resonant limbs; here the flocking blackbirds swoop and settle, making the old tree look as if it had suddenly leaved out in mourning—leaves black and crackling; and here the turkey-buzzards halt heavily in their gruesomely glorious flight.

With good field-glasses there is no other vantage-ground for bird study equal to this. Not in a day's tramp will one see so many birds, and have such chances to observe them, as in a single hour, when the sun is rising or setting, in the neighborhood of some great, gaunt tree that has died of years or lonesomeness, or been smitten by a bolt from the summer clouds.

"The sentinel crows are posted."