I woke last night just after two o’clock and found my larger room brimming with April moonlight and so still that I could hear the ticking of my watch. Unable and half unwilling to sleep again, I dressed and went out upon the dunes. When something wakes me thus at night, I often dress and go quietly forth on an exploring expedition. It was mildly cold in my ocean world, a light westerly breeze was flowing in fitful eddies close along the earth, the moon was full and high in a cloudless heaven, the surf was but a wash along the ebb. Staff in hand, I crossed the beach to the good footing along the water’s edge, and walked south at a slow pace toward big dune.
As I approached the shadow of the dune, I heard from behind it, and ever so faint and high and far away, a sound in the night. The sound began to approach and to increase in its wild music, and after what seemed a long minute, I heard it again from somewhere overhead and a little out to sea. I stared into the sky but could see nothing; the sound that I had heard died away. Again from behind the dune and to the west of south I heard the lovely, broken, chorusing, bell-like sound—the sound of a great flight of geese going north on a quiet night under the moon.
I climbed big dune then, the peak of these sand mountains; the moon shadow was dark upon its eastern slope, but the crest was lifted to the light and commanded both marsh and sea. The channels were still as moonlit forest lakes, the sea was a great deep surfaced with a thin moon splendour of golden green. I lingered there till the moon began to pale, listening to the wild music of the great birds, for a river of life was flowing that night across the sky. Over the elbow of the Cape came the flights, crossing Eastham marsh and the dunes on their way to the immensity of space above the waters. There were little flights and great flights, there were times when the sky seemed empty, there were times when it was filled with an immense clamour which died away slowly over ocean. Not unfrequently I heard the sound of wings, and once in a while I could see the birds—they were flying fast—but scarce had I marked them ere they dwindled into a dot of moonlit sky.
The Bay Side
An April morning follows, spring walks upon the dunes, but ocean lingers on the edge of winter. Day after day the April sun pours an increasing splendour on the ocean plain, a hard, bright splendour of light, but the Atlantic mirror drinks no warmth. A chance cloud upon the sun, a shadow, and the sea of an instant returns to February. No shadow of cloud may do the same upon the dunes. Under this April light the mound and landward slopes of the great wall have put on a strange and lovely colour which lies upon them with the delicacy of a reflection in a pool. This colour is a tint of palest olive, even such a ghost of it as one may see in spring on the hillsides of Provence, and it is born of the mingling of pale sand, blanched grass, and new grass spears of a certain eager green.
The birds of outer ocean, the “coots” or scoters, the old squaws, dipper ducks, eiders and widgeons, the auks and their kin, have practically all of them forsaken the Cape and returned to their breeding grounds in the North. After the fifteenth of April these sea peoples are rarely encountered on the Cape. The lakes of Manitoba are theirs, the glacial hillocks of Greenland and the matted grasses of the tundra. The spring migrations here do not fill the air and the hours with birds as do the autumnal visitations. Urged on by their own imperious instinct and Nature’s general will, the creatures have a hurried air, and night flights are more frequent with them than on the southward journeyings.
The first shore birds to pause here on their way back to the Northern country were “ringnecks”—the semipalmated plover, Charadrius semipalmatus—and even as the last shore birds I saw were strays, so were these first solitaries and adventurers. On April 2d, I saw a single ringneck running ahead of me along the upper beach; on the 5th I met with another stray; on the 8th I put up a flock of twelve. I have since encountered flocks on several occasions, and sent them wheeling off above the breakers, uttering their melodious and plaintive cry. The note is much like that of the piping plover, Charadrius melodus, but without the piping plover’s flutelike purity of tone.
Since April 5th a small company of gannets, Moris bassana, have been fishing just off the Fo’castle. Gannets have long been favourites of mine. The word “white,” applied to the plumage of birds, covers a multitude of minor tintings; some birds are yellowish white, some greyish white, some ivory white, some white with an undertone of rose. To my eye, the gannet wears as pure and as positive a white as one may find in nature, and, moreover, the black tips of his wings are a black past excelling. The bird is large—ornithologists grant him a length between thirty-three and forty inches—and he has a way of using his wings as if they were hinged fins. When sea and sky are a pleasant midday blue, it is a charming bit of life and decorative colour to see these creatures diving. They make a famous plunge. The birds off the Fo’castle, as far as I can judge, hover between forty and fifty feet above the sea and are fishing the shallows on a bar. On catching sight of fish, they fall on the prey like arrows from a cloud. The impact of each body strikes a tiny fountain from the sea. When fish are plentiful on the bar, these living plummets fall, climb, and fall again till the whole fishing ground is sown with darts of spray. Like the ringnecks, these gannets are on their way North to the breeding grounds.
Early in March, my friend Kenneth Young of Orleans brought me down a load of groceries in his Ford, and as we stood talking on the porch of the Fo’castle I called his attention to the ducks who were stirring about that morning in the channels and making an unusual noise. “Surely,” said I, “they are not beginning to mate so early in the year.” “Well, not exactly,” said my friend, “but they’re ‘choosing partners.’” Somehow or other, much of the etiquette, of the “tone” of courtship among gregarious birds has been caught in this phrase born of the older dance; it has a flavour of the bowings and noddings, the showing offs, the coy approaches, the coy escapes, the expected pursuits, the endless conversational whistlings, mewings, squawkings, and quackings which cover the primitive tensity under the politeness.