The Lay of the Land

by Dallas Lore Sharp

Many of our happiest glimpses of nature are accidental. We stumble upon things, yet it happens usually when we are trying to find something. The finding of a hummingbird’s nest is always an accident; and such accidents are extremely rare, as will be seen from a statement by Mr. Burroughs in which he says he has come upon but three hummingbirds’ nests in all his life! He has doubtless found many more than three owls’ nests, but perhaps not one of such finds was an accident. He hunted for the owls.

Night after night, in the sweet silence through which our little river sings, we hear the whimpering of the small screech owls. They are beating for mice and frogs over the meadow. So much we get without watching; but the sight of them and their nest, that came only with my visiting every tree in the neighborhood having a cavity big enough to hold the birds.

At twilight, in the late spring and early summer, we frequently hear a gentle, tremulous call from the woods, or from below in the orchard. “What is it?” I had been asked a hundred times, and as many times had answered that it sounded like the hen partridge clucking to her brood; or that it made me think of the mate-call of a coon; or that I half inclined to believe it the cry of the woodchucks; or that possibly it might be made by the owls. In fact, I didn’t know the peculiar call, and year after year I kept waiting for an accident to reveal its maker and its meaning to me.

There were accidents and discoveries of many sorts during these years, but not this particular accident. The accident you wait for is slow in coming.

We were seated one evening on the porch listening to the whip-poor-wills, when some one said, “There’s your woodchuck singing again.” Sure enough, there sounded the tremulous woodchuck-partridge-coon-owl cry, and I slipped down through the birches determined to know that cry if I had to follow it all night.

The moon was high and full, the footing almost noiseless, and everything so quiet that I quickly located the clucking sounds as coming from the orchard. I came out of the birches into the wood road, and was crossing the open field to the orchard, when something dropped with a swish and a vicious clacking almost upon my head. I jumped from under,—I should say a part of my hair,—and saw a screech owl swoop softly up into the nearest apple tree. Instantly she turned toward me and uttered the gentle purring cluck that I had been guessing so hard at for at least three years. And even while I looked at her I saw in the tree beyond, silhouetted against the moonlit sky, two round bunches,—young owls evidently,—which were the interpretation of the calls. These two, and another young one, were found in the orchard the following day.

I rejoined the guessers on the porch, and gave them the satisfying facts. But let me say that this was very fast, even exceptional time, indeed, for the solving of an outdoor problem. I have questions enough for a big chapter upon which I have been working these more than three years. The point is this: I might have gone on guessing about the mother call of the screech owl to the end of time; whereas with a little searching and I must certainly have found out the cry in much less time than three years.

I had laughed at some good friends over on the other road who had bolted their front door and had gone out of the door at the side of the house for precisely twenty-one years because the key in the front door lock wouldn’t work. They kept intending to have it fixed, but the children were little and kept them busy; then they grew up, and of course kept them busy; got married at last and left home,—all but one daughter. Still the locksmith was not called to fix the front door. One day this unmarried daughter, in a fit of dire impatience, got at the door herself, and found that the key had been inserted just twenty-one years before—upside down!

So I had sat on the porch and guessed about it. I had left the key upside down in the lock of the front door, and had gone out by way of the kitchen.

The first necessity for interesting nature study is an intimate acquaintance with some locality. It does not matter how small, how commonplace, how near the city,—the nearer the better, provided there are trees, water, fences, and some seclusion. If your own roof-tree stands in the midst of it all, then that is ideal.