For two weeks I watched these “leasties” and their nests, taking every precaution not to disturb or alarm the setting birds. Yet I had but to pass anywhere between them and the tide to put them up, and when I walked south with coast guardsmen, I heard single cries of alarm in the starry and enormous night. Toward the end of June, a sudden northeaster came.
It was a night storm. I built a little fire, wrote a letter or two, and listened to the howling wind and the bursts of rain. All night long, and it was a wakeful, noisy night, I had the “leasties” on my mind. I felt them out there on the wild shelterless beach, with the black gale screaming over them and the rain pouring down. Opening my door, I looked for a moment into the drenching blackness and heard a great roaring of the sea.
The tide and the gale had ebbed together when I rose at five the next morning, but there was still wind and a grey drizzle. At the foot of big dune I found desolation. The tide had swept the beach. Not a nest remained or a sign of a nest, and the birds had gone. Later that day, just south of big dune, I saw bits of bluish-green eggshell in a lump of fresh weed. Where the birds went to, I never knew. Probably to a better place to try again.
Bless me! I thought, returning; what of the song sparrows?
Through the drenching grass, bare-legged, I hurried to the dusty-miller bush. The sand had been moving during the night; it had crept along the dunes, it had rained down with the drops of rain, and the bush was now well embedded. Indeed, it was a bush no more, but a thicket of separate stalks growing out of a deep, rain-soaked mound of sand. As I drew close to it, I saw through the rain the prudent eye of Madam Sparrow aglint in the leaves. The sand had risen to within an inch of her nest, the leaves which concealed it were awry with wind and choked with sand, but there sat the little bird, resolved and dutiful. She raised her brood—how well she deserved to—and some time in July the whole family moved out into the dunes.
I must now add a paragraph from my autumnal notes and tell of my last sight of the great summer throng of terns. It was an unforgettable experience. During August the birds thinned out, and as the month drew to a close, whole days passed without a sight or sign of their presence. By September 1st, I imagined that most of them had gone. Then came the unexpected. On Saturday, September 3d, friends came down the beach to see me, and at the close of their visit, as I opened the Fo’castle door, I found that the air above the dunes was snowy with young terns. The day had been mild, and the late afternoon light was mild and rosy golden—the sun was an hour from his setting—and high in space and golden light the myriads of birds drifted and whirled like leaves. North and south we saw them for miles along the dunes. For twenty minutes, perhaps, or half an hour, the swarming filled my sky, and during all that time I did not hear a single bird utter a single sound.
At the end of that period, withdrawing south and inland, the gathering melted away.
It was really a very curious thing. Apparently some impulse from heaven had suddenly seized upon the birds, entered into their feathered breasts, and led them into the air above the dunes. Whence came that spirit, whence its will, and how had it breathed its purpose into those thousand hearts? The whole performance reminded me very much of a swarming of bees. A migrational impulse, yes, and something more. The birds were flying high, higher than I had ever seen terns go, and as far as I could judge—or guess—the great majority of the fliers were young birds of the year. It was a rapture, a glory of the young. And this was the last of the terns.
A Cape Cod