The common tern, Sterna hirundo, here called the mackerel gull, dominates both the beach and the summer day. Three or four thousand of these birds are nesting in the region; there are nests on the dunes, and whole colonies on certain gravelly areas in the marsh islands near Orleans. All day long I watch them flying to and fro past my windows, now sailing with a favouring wind, now battling into an opposing breeze; I see them going along the breakers long before sunrise, white birds flying past a rosiness of eastern sky and an ocean still blue and dark with night; I see them pass like spiritual creatures in the dusk. There are crowded days when I live in a cloud of their wings and the clamour of their cries.
Sterna hirundo, the common tern—Wilson’s tern, some call him—is indeed a lovely bird. His dominant colours are pearl-grey and white, his wings are bent, he is from thirteen to sixteen inches long, and he is marked by a black hood, an orange-coral bill tipped with black, and bright vermilion-orange legs and feet. To my ear, the bird’s call has a cawing quality; it is, indeed, a cawing screech with an “e” sound and a high pitch. Harsh though it is, it is not disagreeable; moreover, it is capable of wide emotional variations. Going south on a recent day along the dunes, I arrived at the place where the parent terns, homing from the sea, were crossing the sand bar on their way to their nests, and as the birds came in sight of their mates and their fledglings, their cry changed its quality, and took on a kind of wild, harsh tenderness that was touching to hear.
On Monday morning last, as I sat writing at my west windows, I heard a tern give a strange cry, and on looking out and up I saw a bird harrying the female marsh hawk, of whose visits to the dunes I have already told. The sea bird’s battle cry was entirely new to my ear. “Ke’ke’ke’aow!” he cried; there was warning in the harsh, horny cry, danger and anger. The greater bird, flapping her wings as if they were spreads of paper—the winging of this hawk, near earth, is sometimes curiously like the winging of a butterfly—made no answer, but sank to earth slowly, wings outspread, and rested for a long half minute on the shell-strewn floor of the sand pit forty feet back from my house. Thus perched motionless, she might have been a willing mark. Scolding without pause, the tern, who had followed the enemy down into the pit, then rose and dived on her as he might have dived on a fish. The hawk continued to sit motionless. It was an extraordinary scene. Regaining level wing just above the hawk’s head, the tern instantly climbed and dived again. At his third dive, the hawk took off, flying ahead and low across the sand pit. The battle then moved into the dunes, and the last I saw of the affair was the hawk abandoning the hills and flying south unpursued far out over the marsh.
Watching the hawk thus a-squat on the sand in a summer intensity of light, with the grey sea bird angrily assailing her, there came into my mind a thought of the ancient Egyptian representations of animals and birds. For this hawk in the pit was the Horus Hawk of the Egyptians, the same poise, the same dark blood-fierceness, the same authority. The longer I live here and the more I see of birds and animals, the greater my admiration becomes for those artists who worked in Egypt so many long thousand years ago, drawing, painting, carving in the stifling quiet of the royal tombs, putting here ducks frightened out of the Nile marshes, here cattle being herded down a village street, here the great sun vulture, the jackal, and the snake. To my mind, no representations of animals equal these Egyptian renderings. I do not write in praise of faithful delineation or pictorial usage—though the Egyptian drew from his model with care—but of the unique power to reach, understand, and portray the very psyche of animals. The power is particularly notable in Egyptian representations of birds. A hawk of stone carved in hardest granite on a temple wall will have the soul of all hawks in his eyes. Moreover, there is nothing human about these Egyptian creatures. They are self-contained and aloof as becomes folk of a first and intenser world.
So completely do the thronging terns dominate the beach that they will often gather to chivvy off a human intruder. I am often chased all the way to Nauset. Three made for me yesterday afternoon as I was going north at two o’clock, trudging the hot and heavy sand.
It is an odd, a rather amusing experience to be thus barked at and chivvied along by birds. Down the beach they followed me, keeping pace with me and stopping when I stopped, their swallow-like tail feathers fish-tailing out as they manœuvred close above my head. About once every half minute one of the three would climb twenty or thirty feet above me and behind, tread air for a second or two, and then swoop directly down at me with a scolding cry, the rush ending in an up-lane scarce a foot above my head. So soundly was I scolded, and so constant was the sharp clamour, that one might have thought that the birds had found me pirating eggs and nestlings. As a matter of fact, I was miles away from any nest or nesting place. Those who disturb terns actually on their nests are chivvied by dozens in just such a manner, and are even struck, and struck vigorously, by the birds.
I suspect the marsh hawk of being on her way to raid these nests. Madam Hawk has probably been sitting on eggs of her own, for I have seen little of her since she gave up her daily forays sometime in the spring.
From mid-June to mid-July, the terns are at their best. Their eggs are hatching, the fish are running, and all day long the parent birds are going back and forth between their nests and the sea. When I open my door at sunrise, the terns are already passing my house, flying twenty or thirty feet above the curling, oncoming seas. Hour by hour they pass in two endless streams, one going fishing, the other bringing home the catch; hour after hour they pass—thousands of birds an hour when the fishing is good and near at hand. Returning birds, almost without exception, hold silvery fish crosswise in their bills, and, unlike the crow in the fable, a tern can cry out without dropping his prize.
The great majority of these birds are males bringing food to their mates and the new-born young. The catch usually consists of three- and four-inch sand eels, but I occasionally see birds flying bow-down with tinker mackerel. Sometimes a bird passes carrying two “eels,” holding the pair as best he can.
A week ago, just after two o’clock on a bright afternoon, the birds suddenly came streaming from everywhere to the surf along the dunes. Skates had again driven in a people of “eels.” It was high tide; the seas gathered and broke, the heaviest shaking the beach. Into the curling baroque crests of the waves, into the advancing slopes of the gathering green swells, into the race and flow of white seethe and yellow sand, the bright air rained down birds on the now doubly imperilled and darting prey. The air was cut with wings and pierced with eager, hungry, and continuous cries. The birds make plummet dives and strike up jets of water from the surf. The harassed fish moving south, the terns followed after them; an hour later, through field glasses, I could see the thing still going on just north and seaward of the shoals.