We have become well known in the valley, after many years; so that, although we are almost the only walkers there, our ambulatory eccentricity has mostly ceased to provoke comment. At all events, the people no longer look upon us as men broken out of Bedlam. Time, we may say, has established our innocence. If a recent comer expresses concern as we go past, some older resident reassures him. “They are harmless,” he says. “There used to be three of them. They pull weeds, as you see; the older one has his hands full of them now. Yes, they are branches of thorn-bushes. They always carry opera-glasses, too. We used to think they were looking for land to buy. Old ——, up on the hill in Lisbon, tried to sell them his farm at a fancy figure, but they didn’t bite. I reckon they know a thing or two, for all their queer ways. One of ’em knows how to write, anyhow; he is always taking out pencil and paper. There! you see how he does. He sets down a word or two, and away he goes again.”
It is all true. We looked at plants, and sometimes gathered them. The botanist had thorn-bushes on his mind, the genus Cratægus being a hard one, and, as I judged, newly under revision. I professed no knowledge upon so recondite a subject, but was proud to serve the cause of science by pointing out a bush here and there. One hot afternoon, too, after a pretty long forenoon jaunt, I nearly walked my legs off, as the strong old saying is, following my leader far up the Landaff Valley (“down Easton way”) to visit a bush of which some one had brought him word. It was an excellent specimen, the best we had yet seen; but it was nothing new, and by no means so handsome or so interesting as one found afterward by accident on our way to Bethlehem. That was indeed a beauty, and its abundant fruit a miracle of color.
Once I detected an aster which the botanist had passed by and yet, upon a second look, thought worth taking home; it was probably Lindleyanus, he said, and the event proved it; and at another time my eye caught by the wayside a bunch of chokecherry shrubs hung with yellow clusters. We were in a carriage at the time, four old Franconians, and not one of us had ever seen such a thing here before. Three of us had never seen such a thing anywhere; for my own part, I was in a state of something like excitement; but the Cratægus collector, who knows American trees if anybody does, said: “Yes, the yellow variety is growing in the Arnold Arboretum, and is mentioned in the latest edition of Gray’s Manual.” Bushes have been found at Dedham, Massachusetts, it appears. The maker of the Manual seems not to have been aware of their having been noticed anywhere else; but since my return home I have been informed that they are not uncommon in the neighborhood of Montreal, where yellow chokecherries are “found with the ordinary form in the markets”!
That last statement is bewildering. Is there anything that somebody, somewhere, does not find edible? I have heard of eaters of arsenic and of slate pencils; but chokecherries for sale in a market! If the reader’s mouth does not pucker at the words he must be wanting in imagination.
In Franconia even the birds seemed to refuse such a tongue-tying diet. The shrubs loaded with fruit, some of it red (wine color), some of it black,—the latter color predominating, I think,—stood along the roadside mile upon mile. Sooner or later, I dare say, the birds must have recourse to them; how else do the bushes get planted so universally? But at the time of our visit there was a sufficiency of better fare. Rum cherries were still plentiful, and birds, like boys in an apple orchard, and like sensible people anywhere, take the best first.
It surprised me, while I was here some years ago, to discover how fond woodpeckers of all kinds are of rum cherries. Even the pileated could not keep away from the trees, but came close about the house to frequent them. One unfortunate fellow, I regret to say, came once too often. The sapsuckers, it was noticed, went about the business after a method of their own. Each cherry was carried to the trunk of a tree or to a telegraph pole, where it was wedged into a crevice, and eaten with all the regular woodpeckerish attitudes and motions. Doubtless it tasted better so. And the bird might well enough have said that he was behaving no differently from human beings, who for the most part do not swallow fruit under the branches, but take it indoors and feast upon it at leisure, and with something like ceremony. The trunk of a tree is a woodpecker’s table.
And for all that, Franconia woodpeckers are not so conservative as not to be able to take up with substantial improvements. They know a good thing when they see it. These same sapsuckers, or one of them, was not slow to discover that one of our crew, an entomological collector, had set up here and there pieces of board besmeared with a mixture of rum and sugar. And having made the discovery, he was not backward about improving it. He went the round of the boards with as much regularity as the moth collector himself, and with even greater frequency. And no wonder. Here was a feast indeed; victuals and drink together; insects preserved in rum. Happy bird! As the most famous of sentimental travelers said on a very different occasion, “How I envied him his feelings!” For there seems to be no doubt that sapsuckers love a liquid sweetness, and take means of their own to secure it.
On our present trip my walking mate and I stopped to examine a hemlock trunk, the bark of which a woodpecker of some kind, almost certainly a sapsucker, had riddled with holes till it looked like a nutmeg grater; and the most noticeable thing about it was that the punctures—past counting—were all on the south side of the tree, where the sap may be presumed to run earliest and most freely. Why this particular tree was chosen and the others left is a different question, to which I attempt no answer, though I have little doubt that the maker of the holes could have given one. To vary a half-true Bible text, “All the labor of a woodpecker is for his mouth;” and labor so prolonged as that which had been expended upon this hemlock was very unlikely to have been laid out without a reason. Every judge of rum cherries knows that some trees bear incomparably better fruit than others growing close beside them; and why should a woodpecker, a specialist of specialists, be less intelligent touching hemlock trees and the varying quality of their juices? A creature who is beholden to nobody from the time he is three weeks old is not to be looked down upon by beings who live, half of them, in danger of starvation or the poorhouse.
The end of summer is the top of the year with the birds. Their numbers are then at the full. After that, for six months and more, the tide ebbs. Winter and the long migratory journeys waste them like the plagues of Egypt. Not more than half of all that start southward ever live to come back again.
Of this every bird-lover takes sorrowful account. It is part of his autumnal feeling. If he sees a flock of bobolinks or of red-winged blackbirds, he thinks of the Southern rice fields, where myriads of both species—“rice-birds,” one as much as the other—will be shot without mercy. A sky full of swallows calls up a picture of thousands lying dead at once, in Florida or elsewhere, after a winter storm. A September humming-bird leaves him wondering over its approaching flight to Central America or to Cuba. Will the tiny thing ever accomplish that amazing passage and find its way home again to New England? Perhaps it will; but more likely not.