SPARROW HAWK
XIII
TREE-TRUNK BIRDS
Woodpeckers—Nuthatches and the Brown Creepers
By the time November came in but few birds were to be seen about the schoolhouse at Foxes Corners. For until Gray Lady came, no one had taken an interest either in the appearance of the schoolbuilding itself or the ragged bit of ground upon which it stood. Now four sugar-maples had been transplanted from the near-by woods, and set where they would shade the windows in the warm days of early summer and fall and yet not interfere with winter sunshine; and Gray Lady had promised that by spring there should be some benches along the north fence, where there was shade from the white birches in the wood-lot beyond. That is, she had promised the wood for the benches and Jacob’s aid in their planning; for the rest, the boys were to do the work themselves, for after Thanksgiving four or five large boys would come to school,—Tommy Todd’s brother Everett, who was sixteen, and the two Judds, his cousins,—Walter, also sixteen, and Irving, fourteen,—being among them.
All of these boys knew something about the handling of tools, and, if they chose to join the Kind Hearts’ Club, would be valuable allies. Sometimes, however, big boys, even though they are not cruel, laugh at such societies, and so Gray Lady had made up her mind to let them ask to come to the class in the workroom as if it was a privilege they desired rather than as a favour to herself.
One bit of carpentry she asked Jacob to undertake, that no time should be lost, and that was the bird lunch-counter for the school grounds. As the flagpole was fastened to the schoolhouse, Jacob had utilized the gnarled stump of a half-dead wild-apple tree, the bark of which was seamed and scarred by the initials cut on it by many generations of scholars. Above the platform, to hold the crumbs and grain, he had fastened, between the two remaining branches, a slanting roof made of some old mossy shingles, and at the edge of this he had stuck half a dozen crooked spikes to hold bacon rind or suet or anything, like chicken bones, that might be left from the dinner-pails, as many of the children, owing to distance from home, always brought their lunch to school during the winter and spring terms.
This lunch-counter was in place when Gray Lady went to the school the first Friday afternoon in November, and she brought an additional surprise with her,—two pictures or charts that could be unrolled and hung on the wall like the great map.[[2]] Each of these charts held the pictures of some twenty-five birds done in colours and of natural size, and with each there was a little book telling about the birds.
The charts were to be lent to the five other schools in the township in turn, but the children at Foxes Corners were so delighted with them that they resolved that the first money that the Kind Hearts’ Club earned should go to buy other pairs of the charts, so that they could not only have some for their very own, but that the other schools, who had no Gray Lady for their fairy god-mother, could have them also.
After the first few weeks, Gray Lady found that it would be best, on the Fridays when she visited the school, simply to read to the children stories of the birds that they had either seen at Birdland or that they already knew by sight, from various books and magazines; as she had at her house so many books, pictures of birds, and the mounted birds themselves, that it was much easier for them to name unknown birds there than at school.