Florida trails as seen from Jacksonville to Key West and from November to April inclusive

by Winthrop Packard

To be sure, March came blustering, but it blew in out of a succession of moon-flooded nights, soft and brilliant, in which the ineffable love of the heavens for the earth was so great that the humblest might know it. The moon did not rise in distant eastern heavens beyond the limit of human ken. In the pink afterglow of the sunset it was born from the Indian River, a new golden Venus rising from the silver foam of a sapphire sea that save for the path of moon-silver was as clear as the brooding truthful sky.

For nights the trade winds were lulled and sighed in across the savannas in little whispered words of peace, whispers that were like the touch of rose petals on the cheek, as warm as the breath of a sleeping child. It was as if the fond sky leaned upon the loving shoulder of the world and was content to dream there. In this nearness and intimacy, this warmth and peace, wee creatures of the tropic night woke and sang for very joy of living. The moonlit nights of the very last days of January had been beautiful, but silent and with a chill in them that hushed all vibrant life and one did not wonder when the morning sun glinted on hoar frost on all the long grass. There was no frost under this moon of the last days of February, only a gentle warmth and softness that seemed to woo all things to life and love. In Massachusetts we are wont to take the statement that on the fourteenth of February the birds choose their mates with a somewhat grim smile of forgiving disbelief. In Florida we know that these are days for all nature to go a wooing, and the voices that come beneath the late February moon and echo along the winds of blustering March mornings prove it true.

It is a wiser man than I that knows the source of all these songs of love that thrill through the amorous, perfumed air of night. The fragile, green beauty of the long-horned grasshoppers seems to be reflected in their night songs that differ in tone from those which they sing under the searching vigor of the Southern sun. I fancy they needs must sing differently, and that it is a physical difference rather than a change of feeling that changes their tune. The soft coolness of the nights must slack the texture of their wing cases, as damp air changes the tension of the strings of one’s violin, and they seem to play a reedier, less strident tune. The Southern cricket that vies with the long-horned grasshoppers must be larger than the Northern cricket which chirps so cozily by the October hearth, if one may judge by voices. Nor is his cry the same, though it has a resemblance. It is rounder, fuller, and has something of the tinkling resonance of a metallic instrument.

The songs that came from the grass under the full light of the February moon were those of an orchestra that sang with silver throats to an accompaniment played upon bell metal. Yet the sonorous staccato of each was so blended with the many that the whole melted into a dreamy haze of harmony that seemed merely to give a clearer expression of the moonlight of which it was a part. So when Melba sings, the exquisite harmony of the hundred quivering strings of the orchestra is but the vocal expression of the hush of the hearts that wait her voice.

There were other voices under the moon that ushered in March that made no harmony with the moonlight, but cut across it with a clear individuality of their own. The frogs that seemed some weeks ago to be playing tiny xylophones have given up the wooden bars and now play by night on pebbles which they strike together, making a quaint, penetrating shrilling which could be done on no other instruments. Where they get the pebbles, which are not to be found by man in any part of the State which I have yet visited, I cannot say. Moonlight is rarely helpful to too literal inquiry. The sound is very musical with a fairy-like quality. It is as if elves played musical glasses in this orchestra in which the grasshoppers and crickets are masters of the stringed instruments.

Another frog voice is that of the Southern bullfrog, which might better be named pigfrog, if voices are to count. The Northern bullfrog is a hoarse-voiced toper who bellows most sonorously for his favorite liquor. “Ah-hr-u-m!” he roars. “Ah-hr-u-m!” with the accent on the rum. This is wicked, of course, but there is a rough virility about it which bends one’s mind towards forgiveness. Here is Jack Falstaff roaring for sack; Falstaff, the embodiment of coarse wickedness, and yet the best-loved rogue in the whole catalogue. No such engaging roisterer is the Southern bullfrog. His voice is but a grunt out of the fairyland which the moon makes over the misty savanna with its shallow lakes gleaming with roughened silver. Cased in this silver sits the Southern bullfrog, with his nose just out, and grunting like a young razorback. The similarity is startling, or rather it is not a similarity, but the same thing.

None of these pigfrogs grunted till the full moon of late February had brought the requisite warmth. Then, one night I heard them, and went out in search of the drove of pigs that I was convinced was rooting in the bean patch of my neighbor across the road. The bean patch was empty, and the voices lured me on, for then I thought them to be young alligators, which grunt in similar fashion. The alligator hunter when he wishes to call the big ones sits motionless in the bow of his boat, under the gleam of his bull’s-eye lantern, shuts his mouth tight, and with a peculiar motion of the throat makes a ventriloquial grunt that is much like this, the difference being that the cracker-alligator grunt is a mournful one that seems to speak of an internal pain, that of the pigfrog is a three-syllable grunt of porcine content.

No wonder I thought them young razorbacks eating beans at seven dollars a half-bushel crate. But I was wrong. It was merely the love calls of Southern bullfrogs happy in the witchery of glorious moonlight, and the full warmth of late February which was jumping joy into all vegetation and into the hearts of all wild things.

On nights like this the little screech owl likes to sit up in the palmettos by the house and sing his little murmurous, quavering song. It is hard to hear anything mournful or foreboding in this, rather it seems to voice contentment with perhaps just a note of longing when it is a call for the mate. Sometimes this is answered, the two qualities of inquiry and reply being distinctly audible though difficult to define. I think it is the difference between the rise and fall of an inflection. Another owl voice of the full moonlight is that of the Florida barred owl.

The first sound of his “hoo, hoo, hu-hu” is a disquieting one, especially when near-by. My first hearing of it was near an unoccupied house, miles from any other, on the bank of the river. Murder had been done on the place years before and my companion had just finished telling me about it when in the deep shade of the palmettos, almost over our heads, a barred owl shouted with his weird, inquiring laugh. It came the nearest to a materialization of anything I have seen lately. Up on a stub we soon discovered this big, dark spook of a bird with human-like, big brown eyes and this disquieting laugh. Soon he sailed on bat-like wings across the river, where we heard him laughing to himself again and again in this deep, cynical tone.