The Lay of the Land

by Dallas Lore Sharp

My buzzard now was hardly more than half a mile away, and plainly seen through the rifts in the lofty timbered roof above me. As I was nearing the top of a large fallen pine that lay in my course, I was startled by the burrh! burrh! burrh! of three partridges taking flight just beyond, near the foot of the tree. Their exploding seemed all the more real when three little clouds of dust-smoke rose out of the low, wet bottom and drifted up against the green.

Then I saw an interesting sight. In falling, the pine with its wide-reaching, multitudinous roots had snatched at the shallow, sandy bottom and torn out a giant fistful, leaving a hole about two feet deep and more than a dozen feet wide. The sand thus lifted into the air had gradually washed down into a mound on each side of the butt, where it lay high and dry above the level of the swamp. This the swamp birds had turned into a great dust-bath. It was in constant use, surely, for not a spear of grass had sprouted in it, and all over it were pits and craters of various sizes, showing that not only the partridges, but also the quails, and such small things as the warblers, washed here,—though I can’t recall ever having seen a warbler bathe in the dust. A dry bath in the swamp was something of a luxury, evidently. I wonder if the buzzards used it?

I went forward cautiously now, and expectantly, for I was close enough to see the white beak and red wattled neck of my guide. It saw me, too, and began to twist its head as I shifted, and to twitch its wing tips nervously. Suddenly its long, black wings opened, and with a heavy lurch that left the stub rocking, it dropped and was soon soaring high up in the blue.

This was the right locality; now where should I find the nest? Apparently I was to have no further help from the old bird. The underbrush was so thick that I could see hardly farther than my nose. A half-rotten tree trunk lay near, the top end resting across the backs of several saplings which it had borne down in its fall. I crept up on this for a look around, and almost tumbled off at finding myself staring directly into the dark, cavernous hollow of an immense log lying on a slight rise of ground a few feet ahead of me.

It was a yawning hole, which at a glance I knew belonged to the buzzard. The log, a mere shell of a mighty white oak, had been girdled and felled with an axe, by coon hunters, probably, and still lay with one side resting upon the rim of the stump. As I stood looking, something white stirred vaguely in the hole and disappeared.

Leaping from my perch, I scrambled forward to the mouth of the hollow and was greeted with hisses from far back in the dark. Then came a thumping of bare feet, more hisses, and a sound of snapping beaks. I had found my buzzard’s nest.

Hardly that, either, for there was not a feather, stick, or chip as evidence of a nest. The eggs had been laid upon the sloping cavern floor, and in the course of their incubation must have rolled clear down to the opposite end, where the opening was so narrow that the buzzard could not have brooded them until she had rolled them back. The wonder is that they ever hatched.

But they had, and what they hatched was another wonder. It was a right instinct which led the mother to seek the middle of the Bear Swamp and there hide her young in a hollow log. My sense of the fitness of things should have equaled hers, certainly, and I should have allowed her the privacy of the swamp. It was unfair of me and rude. Nature never intended a young buzzard for any eye but its mother’s, and she hates the sight of it. Elsewhere I have told of a buzzard that devoured her eggs at the approach of an enemy, so delicately balanced are her unnamable appetites and her maternal affections!

The two freaks in the log must have been three weeks old, I should say, the larger weighing about four pounds. They were covered, as young owls are, with deep, snow-white down, out of which protruded their legs, long, black, scaly, snaky legs. They stood braced on these, their receding heads drawn back, their shoulders thrust forward, their bodies humped between the featherless wings like challenging tomcats.

In order to examine them, I crawled into the den;—not a difficult act, for the opening measured four feet and a half at the mouth. The air was musty inside, yet surprisingly free from odor. The floor was absolutely clean, but on the top and sides of the cavity was a thick coating of live mosquitoes, most of them gorged, hanging like a red-beaded tapestry over the walls.