The chickadees were very happy that day. Little groups of half a dozen flipped gaily from tree to tree, bustling awkwardly and jovially about picking up food continually, though it is rarely possible to see what they get as they glean from limb to limb. Winter is the time for sociability, say the chickadees, and they welcome to their number the red-breasted nuthatches that have followed the season down from the Maine woods. The chickadee in his cheery endeavors to take his own in the way of food where he finds it does some surprising acrobatic feats, but they are almost always clumsy and you expect him momentarily to break his neck. Not so the nuthatch. He runs along the under side of a limb with his back to the ground as easily as he would run along the upper side. He comes down the smooth trunk of a pine head down, just as a squirrel does, his feet seeming to be reversible and to stick like clamps wherever he cares to put them. All the time his busy little head is poking here and there with sinuous agility and his slim, pointed bill is gathering in the same invisible food, no doubt, that the chickadee is after. And as he eats he talks, a quaint high-pitched, nasal drawl of yna, yna, yna, that gets on your nerves after a while and you are glad to see him let go his upside-down hold, turn a flip-flap in the air, and light on another tree some distance away. I think Stockton got his idea of negative gravity from watching the nuthatches. If I were mean enough to shoot one I should as soon expect to see him fall up into the sky as down to the earth, so usually regardless and defiant is he toward the proper and accepted force of gravity.
Quite prim and upright as compared with these shifty wrigglers is the third boon companion of these winter day expeditions, the downy woodpecker. You are not so apt to find him as the other two, for his work is deeper and more laborious and they are likely to flit flightily away while he still drills and ogles. Yet you can hear him much farther away than the others, and it is not difficult to slip quietly up and see him at his work. Prim and erect he stands on some rotten stub, his stiff tail-feathers jabbing it to hold him steady, his head now driving his nail-like bill with taps like those of a busy carpenter’s hammer, anon speeding up till it has almost the effect of an electric buzzer. Then he looks solemnly with one eye in at the hole that he has made, prods again eagerly and pulls out a fat white grub, gulps it, and goes hop-toading up the stub looking for more probe possibilities. Or perhaps he writes scrawly Ms. in the atmosphere as he flits jerkily over to the next tree that pleases him.
Thus though not of a feather these three flock together in the biting cold of winter days and seem to be cheery and courageous if not exactly contented. They are all hole-born and hole-building birds and when night overtakes them they know well where to find wind-proof hollow trunks where they may snuggle, round and warm in their fluffed out feathers till dawn calls them to work again.
Yet, with all the yearning of the trees and the joy of the woodland creatures in the prospect of snow it ended in no snow storm. All day long the sun shone palely through a frost fog and the frost crystals sprang out of it at the touch of the icy wind and tinkled into snowflakes right before your eyes. The wind swept a feathery fluff together in corners but at nightfall when the moon shone through a clearer air and a near-zero temperature the crystals had begun to evaporate, and by morning hardly a trace of them was left. To-day it is April-like; to-morrow we may have zero weather again and before these words get into print perhaps the yearned-for snow will have come and with its kindly shelter covered the succulent green things of pasture and woodland that need it so badly.
It is wonderful, though, how they stand freezing and thawing and yet remain green, firm in texture, and wholesome. The birds of the air have feathers which they can fluff out and make into a down puff for a winter night covering. Here in the pine grove is the pipsissewa starring the ground with its rich green clumps. It is as full of color and sap, seemingly, as it was in July when its fragrant wax-like blossoms starred its green with pink. No cell of the fleshy texture of its green leaves is broken nor is there a tarnish in their gloss. Its seedpod stands dry on a dry scape in place of its flower, but that alone shows the difference between summer and winter. Yet it stands naked to the north wind protected by neither feathers nor fur. Who can tell me by what principle it remains so? Why is the thin-leaved pyrola and the partridge berry, puny creeping vine that it is, still green and unharmed by frost when the tough, leathery leaves of the great oak tree not far off are withered and brown?
Chlorophyl, and cellular structure, and fibro-vascular bundles in the one plant wither and lose color and turn brown at a touch of frost. In another not ten feet away they stand the rigors of our northern winters and come out in the spring, seemingly unharmed and fit to carry on the internal economy of the plant’s life until it shall produce new leaves to take their places. Then in the mild air of early summer these winter darers fade and die. Here in the swamp the tough and woody cat-o’-nine-tails is brown and papery to the tip of its six-foot stalk. The blue flag that was a foot high is brown and withered alongside it, yet the tender young leaves of the Ranunculus repens growing between the two and not having a tenth of their strength are tender and young and green and unharmed still. The first two died at a touch of the frost. The buttercup leaves have been frozen and thawed a score of times without hurt.
You might guess that the swamp water has an elixir in it that saves the life of the repens; but how about the Ranunculus bulbosus, European cousin of the repens? That grows on the sandy hillside, and even the root tips that extend below its little white bulb have been frozen stiff a score of times since the woody stemmed goldenrod beside it dropped dead, sere and brown, at the first good freeze. Yet to-day in the smiling sun I found the young leaves of the Ranunculus bulbosus green and succulent and unharmed of their cellular structure, and so I am sure they will remain, under the snow or bare, as the case may be when the first yellow bud pushes upward from that white bulb where it is now patiently waiting the word. Our botanists who study heroically to find some minute variation in form that they may add another Latin name to their text-books might study these variations in habit and result and tell me the reason for them. I’d be glad to buy some more books on botany; but none that I have seen have so far within their pages any explanation of this puzzle.