On the margins of the oak hammock where thickets slope to the swamps the wild smilax races with the grapes, and all among these the viburnums and the dogwoods have set cymes of softest white. Above these still climbs the wild sweet honeysuckle of the South, Lonicera grata, its fragrant white tubes turning yellow with age, and now and then a high wall of green foliage is all hung with bead-like decorations of the coral honeysuckle, giving it a curious, gem-like effect in red and yellow. Viewing these things, less obtrusive but equally beautiful, one is inclined to forget his regret for the vanished jasmine yellow and the pure white of the passing cherokee roses. Behind it all, looming toward the high sky line of the swamp in such places is the feathery softness of the new cypress leaves, delicately fluffed in the softest tints of pure spring green. Young cypress leaves are more like feathers than any other leaves I know. Collectively it seems as if they had as much right to be called plumage as foliage.
It is at this time of year that the frost weed slips shyly at first into sandy dooryards, and later makes them all gold of a morning with crowded heads of clear yellow flowers. With these two comes the phlox, almost unnoticed among low-growing herbs till it blooms. Then some morning the dooryard begins to blush and by night has grown all rosy with pink and purple flowers, a heterogeneous assortment of shades that blend nevertheless in a pleasing whole. Such marvels does April build out of sand and sun and rushing rain that has hardly time to fall so eager is the sun to be out and at it again.
More than flowers does this scorching midday sun bring out. It always seems as if under its potency the little green chameleons were drawn up as blisters from the herbage on which they like to rest. Once you get the shape of the motionless, finger-long creature in your eye you may note that it is that of an alligator whose tail fades indistinctly into the leaf or twig. But while the alligator is repellent his tiny, leaf-textured prototype fascinates, and it is easy to see how the desire to make pets of chameleons originated and grew till the law had to step in and put a stop to the wholesale cruelty which the practice engendered. He looks at you with such gentle, bird-like, bright eyes that you inadvertently reach out to stroke him. Then he gives you an example of his kind of thought transference. Surely the wee legs of the creature never could have moved him like that, but he has gone like the flashing of a thought to a place out of reach where he eyes you, as bright and immobile as before.
In Mark Twain’s heaven people wished themselves from one part to another, traversing limitless space in no time. So evidently it is with the chameleon.
This tiny lizard sleeps in pale green with an immaculately white under side, a most charming nymph’s nightdress. Pale green too is its fighting color, and when badly frightened the green suffuses its entire body. Often in bright sunlight this green changes to a rich, dark brown, a color which makes it look so much like a twig as to defy the eye to find it until it moves. Yet I doubt if this change of coloring is so much a matter of protective instinct as we have been taught to believe as it is a matter of temperament and emotion. The animal seems to sleep, fight and run away in pale green. When let alone, unsuspicious and basking in the full sun, this color is changed to the brown, and if you will watch the change take place you will see some interesting variations into golden yellow, slaty gray and even a peppering of white dots on the back. Gentle and lovable as these creatures seem, the males have tiny battles which are quite tempestuous within teapot limits. At such times they protrude queer, inflated neck pouches and bite and thrash about with great agility and vehemence, the combat often ending in the vanquished leaving his twisted-off tail in the mouth of the other while he wishes himself to safety in the crevice of some dead stump. Then the victor struts with the trophy in his mouth, his neck pouch distended and his brightest green showing more vividly than ever.
This loss of the tail does not seem to be a serious matter with chameleons and other small lizards, indeed the appendage seems to be a sort of customary final ransom paid for bodily safety. It twists off with comparative ease and the lizard merely goes without it until another, stubbier one grows in its place.
They are queer folk, these little Florida lizards. Another variety is known quite properly as the “five-lined skink” when young. Colloquially it is the “blue tail,” from the color of that part which is a bright and beautiful blue. The body is then black with five stripes of vivid yellow. This coloring fades, the blue last, as the creature grows old till finally you would not know the beast. In maturity it is the “red-headed lizard,” its olive brown, ten-inch whole including a big head which is quite brilliantly red. This lizard the neighbors call a “scorpion,” and assure me it is deadly poison, with the accent on the deadly, though I fail to find any record of injury coming from contact with it. Its blood-red head gives it a rather raw look and I fancy that is all there is to it. To be repulsive is to be dangerous; that is a common fallacy.
If I were to see a “red-head” coming toward me with his mouth open I am quite sure I should run, though where or why I cannot imagine, for the skinks can wish themselves from one place to another just as well as the chameleons. Like the chameleons they battle and lose their tails, and it is no uncommon thing to see a couple fighting, whirling and scrambling among the leaves like nothing in the world unless it is a snake in a fit, or a goblin pinwheel made of a blur of whizzing tails and a red blotch in the center.
But enough of these uncanny creatures. The woods are vibrant with bird voices, local and migrant. Vireos warble in the tree tops, white-bellied swallows twitter as they soar and swoop, red birds whistle till the very dogs run hither and thither, believing they have a hundred masters all calling them at once. Mocking birds mock, not so much their bird neighbors as me. I stalk them for this and for that old friend, for this and for that stranger, only to find half the time that it is just Mister Mocking Bird sitting on a twig on the other side of the orange tree and looking as soulful and demure as if he had not just finished cackling with elfin laughter at my mystification.
He is a rare old bird, this mocker, and you come to love him more and more as you know him better. Even now though he fools me and mocks me I am ready to swear that he never did it. He was just singing heavenly melodies without any thought outside of the pure and noble joy of living. As for imitating other birds, I am convinced that it is no such thing. They learned their notes from him. They tell me that mocking birds sing more and better in September than they do in April. This, I dare say, is true, though listening to them in April I do not see how it can be.