Wildwood Ways

by Winthrop Packard

To-day I saw a sharp-shinned hawk, hunting noiselessly, no doubt for these same sparrows. He flitted among the treetops like a nervous flash of slaty gray, and was gone so quickly that had I not heard the welt of his wing tips on the resisting air as he turned a sharp corner I should never have seen him. Most of our hawks, though well known to take an occasional chicken, are mouse and grasshopper eaters. The sharp-shinned is the real chicken hawk, for he eats more birds than anything else, though the small songsters of the thicket form the greater part of his diet. I have rarely seen him here in winter, though his summer nest is common in the deep woods, with its cream-buff eggs heavily blotched with chocolate brown. Just as the plenitude of food of their kind kept the song sparrows with us to enjoy the mild weather, so I think the multitude of song sparrows and other succulent titbits made the sharp-shinned hawk willing to winter where he had summered.

All these birds which are wintering as far north as they dare seem to come out and cheer up in the April-like days, but in those which are distinctly January you may tramp the woods for days and not see one of them. The flicker is a rather common bird with us the winter through. In a warm January rain you will often surprise him wandering about in the thawed fields, looking for iced crickets and half concealed grubs and chrysalids among the stubble. Let the snow come deep and the wind blow out of the north and the flicker vanishes from the landscape. It is as if he had gone into a hole and pulled his thirty-six nicknames in after him, so completely has the flicker disappeared. He is a strong-winged bird and I have always been willing to think that at such times he simply whirled aloft on the northerly gale and never lighted till he was a few hundred miles to the south. He could do it easily enough. He would find bare ground and good feeding in the tidewater country of Virginia when New England is three feet under snow and the zero gales are drifting it deeper and freezing the heart out of the very trees in the wood.

The other day, though, I caught one of them sitting in the hollow of an ancient apple tree. There was an opening of some size facing the south into which the midday sun shone with refreshing warmth. Here, sheltered from the bite of the north wind the flicker had tucked himself away and was enjoying his sunny nook much as pigeons do in just the right angle of the city cornices. But he was better off than the pigeons for there were fat grubs in the decaying wood that formed his shelter and he could use his meal ticket without leaving his lodgings. Our woods are full of such hostelries and they shelter more of the woodland creatures than we know as we tramp carelessly by.

But if the bluebirds and flickers hide themselves securely through the coldest winter days and the song sparrows and even the crows are apt to be scarce and subdued, as is certainly the case in my woods, there are other feathered folk who seem to delight in the cold and be never so gay as when the sky is leaden, the wind bites, and the frost flakes of snow squalls let the sun struggle through the upper atmosphere because it is too bitter cold to really snow. Of these the chickadees lead. They seem to be never so merry as when they hear the sweet music of the tinkle of cold-tense snow crystals on the bare twigs.

In spite of the soft raiment in which the weather garbs itself to-day it is only three days ago that the great organ of the woods piped to the northerly wind as it breathed pedal notes through the pines and piped shrill in the chestnut twigs. And there was more than organ music. The white and red oaks, still holding fast to their brown leaves, gave forth the rattling of a million delicate castanets, and the wind drew like a soft bow across the finer strings of the birches so that all among slender twigs you heard this fine tone of a muted violin singing a little tender song of joy. For the trees were sadly weary of being frozen one day and thawed the next. They thought the real winter was at hand when the cold would

There are other feathered folk who seem to delight in the cold

be continuous and the snow deep. All we northern-bred folk love the real winter and feel defrauded of our birthright if we do not get it.

Strangest of all were the beeches. They have held the lower of their tan-pale leaves and with them have whispered of snow all winter long. Whatever the day, you had but to stand among them with closed eyes and you could hear the beech word for snow going tick, tick, tick, all about. It seemed as if flakes must be falling and hitting the leaves so plainly they spoke it. Now that the flakes were beginning the beeches never said a word, but just stood mute and watched it come and listened to the music of all the other trees. Or perhaps they listened to something finer yet. It was only in their enchanted silence that I thought I heard it. Now and then the wind held its breath and the oak leaf castanets ceased, and then for a second I would be sure of it; an elfin tinkle so crepuscular, so gossamer fine that it was less a sound than a thought, the ringing of snow crystal on snow crystal as the feathery flakes touched and separated in the frost-keen air. It surely was there and the beech trees heard it and stood breathless in solemn joy at the sound.