Some Winter Days in Iowa Part 2

There goes a squirrel, angling away from you, his red bushy tail high in the air as he runs through the deep snow down the side of the ridge to a big, corky-barked oak, up which he goes to wait in his hollow up there until you have pa.s.sed by. He did not seem to be going very fast but when you walk over to his tracks you find they are farther apart than you can step. The groups of four are about as broad as your hand, and they are deep where the snow lies thick. But on the firmer snow at the crest of the ridge, before the squirrel became alarmed, they did not break through the crust, and the marks of the dainty toes are plainly seen. There are also the remains of a sweet acorn which the squirrel dug out of the deep snow under a white oak. Back to the river where the stream from the spring makes open water you find some queer tracks on the fresh snow; there is a round spot as big as a quarter in each one, faint radiating lines in front ending with the marks of sharp toes; these were made by the soft-padded foot and webbed toes of the mink.

Most of the insect life is snugly hidden, but much is in plain sight.

A clump of p.u.s.s.y willows bears many queer-shaped cl.u.s.ters which the entomologist calls pine cone galls; in the center of each one a larva dwells in his silken case. On the red oaks over head are other galls,--the oak apples. The b.u.t.tonbush has the ash-colored coc.o.o.n of the giant silkworm, made out of a rolled leaf, the petiole of which is fastened to the branch with silk. Many others are to be found for the looking. All tell the story of Nature's abundant life,--even the morning after a February snow storm. All speak

_"Of one maternal spirit bringing forth And cherishing with ever constant love, That tires not, nor betrays."_

But snowstorms will soon be over. The nature-lover's spring begins near the end of the month, sometimes just before, sometimes just after. The snow and the ice will be honeycombed by the sun and we shall begin to look for the sap trickling from the maple, and to strain our ears for the first note of the wild goose and the blue-bird,

_"While winter, slumbering in the open air Wears on his smiling face a dream of spring."_

The frequent rambler through the winter woods can scarcely fail to become acquainted with all the winter birds. The different species are not numerous, few of them are very shy, they are easily seen because of the bare trees, and their habits tend to call attention to them; especially is this true of the woodp.e.c.k.e.rs. It is true, of course, that one may sometimes walk in the woods for hours, scarcely seeing a single bird. But it is also true that if he starts out some sunny morning, and seeks a tract of heavy timber near a river, he will be very likely to see and hear nearly all of them.

Such a ramble was enjoyed during the halcyon days we had this year (1907) in February. By 10 o'clock the woods were fairly ringing with bird-calls. Over a meadow, near the entrance to the woods, a red-tailed hawk was circling about twenty-five feet from the ground, as if in search of meadow mice. The field gla.s.s showed the black band on his breast and tail, which, with his bright red tail, sufficiently established his ident.i.ty.

The first bird seen in the woods was a white-breasted nuthatch, working on the trunk of a red birch on the river bottom. Next to the chickadee, he is the tamest bird of the woodlands. One may easily get within six feet of him, as was done on this occasion, and admire his beautiful ashy-blue coat, his white vest and white cheeks, with his black cap and nape. He pulled a fat white grub from the birch with his long, slender bill and ate it with evident relish. Then he uttered his soft "quank, quank" and gently flew to another tree.

Sometimes these "quank, quanks" come in a loud and rapid series and may easily be heard a quarter of a mile on a still day.

A flock of juncos were busy among the dead leaves and the snow. They are sparrow-size, like the nuthatch, and their faint chirpings are much like those of the chickadee. The slate gray of their head, throat, back and breast is an interesting color, and is relieved from somberness by the white under parts and the yellow bills. The white outer tailfeathers show plainly as they fly. They frequent the road through the timber and have some of the habits of the English sparrow.

The winter woods would miss them.

Chickadees were busy in the birches. Surely the chickadee is one of the dearest little fellows that fly. He has four modes of expression:

1. The well-known "Chick-a-dee-dee-dee."

2. The "pe-ho," which ought to be written "la sol," pitched at about upper D and C, above the soprano staff, and timed like two quarter notes.

3. The faint chirpings as he works.

4. A happy little gurgling song, which can hardly be translated into words.

The chickadee wears a black cap with a white vest and a blue-gray coat, completing his costume with a black necktie, and he is perfectly willing to sit for you and have his picture taken.

Mr. Blue Jay sat in a clump of dogwood, doing nothing. He was not so tame as the others and yet he permitted a twenty-foot view of his blue-gray coat, his aristocratic crest, his dusky white vest, his white-tipped tail and the black band across the back of his head, down the neck and across the breast--like a black collar worn very low down. It was a spring-like morning, the thermometer rapidly rising toward forty-five, and Mr. Blue Jay was in one of his imitative moods.

There is hardly a limit to his vocabulary, and it would not be surprising if some of his imitative stunts should be mistaken for the call of an early robin. Among these calls is a liquid gurgle, like hard cider coming out of the neck of a big brown jug. Another, and a common one, is two slurred eighth notes, repeated, "sol te, sol te"--upper G and B in the key of C.

Meanwhile the woods had been resounding with the lively tattoo of the woodp.e.c.k.e.r, and finally Downy was found at the top of a dead dry elm, busily doing this reveille, fast and loud as the roll of a snare drum.

His head was going so fast that it looked like a quick series of heads and the tree rattled so it could be heard afar. Most writers regard this as the woodp.e.c.k.e.r's love call, a sign of spring, as it were--but Downy is usually heard and seen doing it on warm days every month in the winter. The females are seen at it almost as often as the males; the latter are known by the scarlet band at the back of the head.

Perhaps it is not a love call after all; it may be only the exuberance of spirits caused by a fine breakfast and a warm morning.

Downy kept it up, heedless of the human observer. But when a red squirrel ran up the tree to within four feet of the spot chosen for a sounding board, Downy suddenly left. The squirrel sat in the sunshine and smoothed his fur with his nose and his paws, like a cat.

Two big hairy woodp.e.c.k.e.rs were on a neighboring tree, but they were not so fearless. One can hardly get nearer than thirty feet. The field gla.s.s is a great help in such cases, and no one should go to the woods without one, or at least a good opera gla.s.s. These two were both males. That could be easily told by the bright scarlet band on the back of their heads. The rest of the plumage is much like the downy woodp.e.c.k.e.r. Both have beautiful black wings, spotted and striped with white and a broad white stripe down the back. Downy's white outer tail-feathers are barred with black; the Hairy's are all white. Downy is sparrow-size; Hairy is robin-size. Downy is usually a gentle creature; Hairy is aggressive and militant. Downy is a little Lord Fauntleroy; Hairy is a Robin Hood.

One other woodp.e.c.k.e.r was seen on this lucky bird-day. It was the red-bellied woodp.e.c.k.e.r, more rare and more shy than either of the others. His breast is a grayish white tinged with red, and his back is barred white and black like a ladder; but the black is not so deep and vivid as that of the other woodp.e.c.k.e.rs. He has no white stripe down the middle of his back. His nape and crest are both scarlet and he utters a hoa.r.s.er squeak than either the downy or the hairy.

One of the events of the day was the sight of the winter wren, the first time he had been seen this winter. He was working among the stumps of trees at the brink of the river, under the ice which had been left clinging to the trees when the high water receded. There was no mistaking his beautiful coat of cinnamon brown, his pert manner, his tail which was a little more than straight up, pointing towards his head; a little mite of a bird, how does he keep his little body from freezing in the furious winter storms? He seemed perfectly happy, with his two sharp, shrill, impatient "quip quaps," much shriller than the "pleeks" of downy woodp.e.c.k.e.r.

A flock of tree sparrows were busy in and around a big thicket of wild gooseberry bushes on the upland. You may easily get within a rod of them, but hardly closer, and a field gla.s.s is almost a necessity to careful study. He is a grayish, graceful sparrow, with streaks of reddish brown, chestnut caps, and a small black spot in the middle of the brownish breast. One white wing bar is a distinguishing characteristic, and a better one is the difference in color of the two mandibles; the upper one is black and the lower one yellow. The tinkling notes of the tree sparrows sound like the music a pipe organist makes when he uses the sweet organ and the flute stop.

A sharp watch was kept for goldfinches and the evening grosbeak during the day, but neither was seen. This was something of a disappointment. But it was forgotten in the thrill of joy that came late in the afternoon. There was a wide stretch of river bottom, walled in on the west by a high and forest-crowned ridge; on the east was the river, with a hundred foot fringe of n.o.ble trees, not yet sacrificed to the axe of the woodsman. The sun was just above the tops of the trees on the western ridge and long rays of slanting light came pink across the river flood-plain, investing the tree-tops by the sh.o.r.e with a soft and radiant light. Suddenly there came a plaintive little note from the bottom of a near-by tree, instantly recognized as a new note in the winter woods. Then another, and another, leading the eyes to the foot of a big ba.s.s-wood, where a graceful bird, with a beautiful blue back and a reddish brown breast, as if his coat had been made of the bright blue sky and his vest of the shining red sand, was hopping. The field gla.s.s brought him within ten feet. A bluebird, sure enough! The first real, tangible sign of the spring that is to be, the first voice from the southland telling us that spring is coming up the valleys. There is no mistaking the brilliant blue, the most beautiful blue in the Iowa year, unless it be the blue of the fringed gentian in the fall; and the soft reddish, earthy breast enhances the beauty of the brilliant back.

Another hopped into view; the female, doubtless, for both the blue and the reddish brown were less brilliant. Every well-regulated bluebird ought to be seen in the top of a tall elm or maple; but these seemed to have no high-flying inclinations. Maybe they could read in the clouds beneath the setting sun a prediction of the snow which came that night. They stayed a few moments and then slowly hopped away and were lost among the tree trunks. A further search only frightened a prairie chicken from beneath a hawthorne bush, where he had meant to pa.s.s the night; and the bluebirds were not seen again. But the sight of bluebirds in Iowa on the nineteenth day of February is glory enough for one day.

III. MARCH--AND A SPRING BOUQUET

Every pilgrim to the mystic land of spring knows hallowed places in sunny valleys where the tender G.o.ddess first reveals herself at Nature's living altars. Yet he can scarcely tell at which shrine she will first appear. She delights in surprising her votaries. Th.o.r.eau was right in saying that no man was ever alert enough to behold the first manifestation of spring. Sometimes as we walk toward the mossy bank in the glen where the fresh green leaves of the haircap mosses were last year's first signs of vernal verdure, the bluebird calls to us from the torch-like top of the smooth sumac and shyly tells us that, if we please, spring is here. Sometimes we thrill with the "honk, honk" of the Canada goose and think the A-shaped band of migrants is surely this year's messenger, crying in the wilderness to prepare the way of the G.o.ddess and make her paths straight; but a little later we pa.s.s through a shadowy ravine where the white oaks have held their leaves all winter, and find that the great horned owl has already appropriated a last year's hawk's nest and deposited therein her two white eggs. At the foot of the sunny hill where the spring has freely flowed all winter long, we tramp around the swamp in the vain hope of finding the purplish monk's-hood of the skunk's cabbage; but look up to see, instead, the many "mouse ears," shining like bits of silvery fur, along the slender stems of the p.u.s.s.y willow.

Or we tramp through a hazel thicket, where the squirrels have been festive among the nuts all winter, in the hope of finding, among the myriads of short, stiff catkins, one which has lengthened and softened until it is ready to pour its golden pollen into our palms. We find neither this nor the crimson stars of the fertile flowers, but the chirp of a white-throated sparrow directs our eyes to a young aspen tree from whose every flower-bud spring is peeping.

Nature's first flowers are those of the amentaceous trees, and the earliest of these are the p.u.s.s.y willow, the quaking asp, and the hazel. All of them are quick to respond to the kindly influences of a vase of water and a sunny window and we may have all three of these first blossoms in a spring bouquet at home by the first of March.

Towards the last of February the catkins of the p.u.s.s.y willows and the aspens are creeping from beneath their budscales to meet the G.o.ddess of spring half way, and every warm day in March coaxes them a little farther. Meanwhile the staminate catkins of the hazel are lengthening and the pistillate buds are swelling, as the sun presses farther northward at the dawn and the dusk of each day, pushing back the gray walls of the canon of night, that the river of day may flow full and free.

This year some of the aspens heralded the spring. They grew at the head of a little creek which traversed a long, sunny, sheltered swamp.

Their gray green trunks were in the foreground of the Master Planter's color design, the darker and taller background being a mixture of wild cherry, red oak, linden, and white ash. The high notes were given by the rose purple of the raspberry, the dark maroon of the blackberry, and the orange varnished budscales of the aspens themselves,--Nature never forgets her color accents. In the earliest warm days of February the catkins of the aspens were peeping from their imprisoning scales, and by the first of March they were half out, their white silken fringes and tiny cl.u.s.ters of rose-pink stamens glistening in the sunlight as if spring's pink cheeks were sheltered by soft, gray fur.

We look up at these fleecy cl.u.s.ters, freed from the brownish budscales, with a far background of bluest sky, and think that it must have been such a grove as this to which the Princess Nausicca sent Ulysses to wait for her, described by Homer as "a beautiful grove of aspen poplars, a fountain and a meadow."

Only an aspen tree in an Iowa slough! Yes, but more than that. This is the first sign of the resurrection which we call spring. When the pilgrims to the Eleusinian mysteries were ridiculed because of the commonplace nature of their symbols, they rightly replied that more than that which met the eye existed in the sacred things; that whosoever entered the temple of Lindus, to do honor to Demeter, the productive and nourishing power of the earth, must be pure in heart if he would gain reward. The square, the flag, the cross, the swelling bud of spring, what are they all but symbols of the realities?

We shall forget these first humble flowers of spring by-and-by when we find a brilliant cardinal flower, or a showy lady's slipper, just as we forget the timid, tender tones of the bluebird when the grand song of the grosbeak floods the evening air, or the exquisite melody of the hermit thrush spiritualizes the leafy woods; just as many a man forgets the ministrations of his humbler friends in early life when he has climbed into the society of those whom earth calls great. But the aspens will neither grieve nor murmur. They will continue to make delightful color contrasts with their smooth white trunks at the gateways of the dark woods in winter and whisper to every lightest breeze with their delicate leaves in summer. The aspen, like the gra.s.s, hastens to cover every wound and burn on the face of nature. It follows the willow in reclaiming the sandy river bottoms and replaces the pines which fire has swept from the Rocky Mountain slopes. It has a record in the rocks and a richer story in literature. Its trembling leaves have caught the attention of all the poets from Homer until now. The Scottish legend says they tremble because the cross of Calvary was made from an aspen tree. The German legend says the trembling is a punishment because the aspen refused to bow when the Lord of Life walked in the forest. But the Hebrew chronicler says that the Lord once made his presence upon the earth heard in the movement of the aspen leaves. "And it shall be, when thou shalt hear a sound of going in the tops of the aspen [wrongly translated mulberry] trees, that then thou shalt go forth to battle; for G.o.d is gone before thee to smite the host of the Philistines." What a fine conception of the nearness of the Omnipresent and the gentleness of the Almighty! No sound or sign from the larger trees! Only the whisper of the lightest leaves in the aspen tops when the Maker of the world went by!

The aspen was made the chief tree in the groves of Proserpine. And Homer, in describing the Cyclops' country, speaks of it as a land of soft marshy meadows, good rich crumbling plow land, and beautiful clear springs, with aspens all around them. How much that sounds like a description of Iowa!

The willow is equally distinguished. The roots of its "family tree"

are in the cretaceous rocks and its branches spread through the waters of Babylon, the Latin eclogues, the wondrous fire in the Knightes'

Tale, Shakespeare's plays, the love songs of Herrick and Moore, and across the ocean to the New World, adorning the sermons of Cotton Mather, the humor of Hosea Bigelow, and the nature poems of Whittier.

_"For ages, on our river borders, These ta.s.sels in their tawny bloom And willowy studs of downy silver Have prophesied of spring to come.

"Thanks, Mary, for this wildwood token Of Freya's footsteps drawing near; Almost, as in the rune of Asgard, The growing of the gra.s.s I hear."_

Nor must the hazel in this earliest spring bouquet be forgotten. The crimson stars of its fertile flowers, ten or a dozen little rays at the ends of the scaly buds on the bare stems, are the most richly colored flowers of the earliest spring. Some years they are formed as early as the twentieth of March. When you find them then look for the re-appearance of the mud-turtles down in the valleys and listen for the first feeble croaks of the frogs. The old Greeks watched the tiny inner scales of these fertile flowers grow into the husk of the nut, fancied its resemblance to a helmet, and called the bush _corys_; whence its botanic name _corylus_. Its English name comes from the Saxon _haesle_, a cap. The growing hazel nuts gladdened the children of most of the early civilized world. One of the shepherds in Vergil's fifth eclogue invites the other to "sit beneath the grateful shade, which hazels interlaced with elms have made;" but this hazel of which Menelaus spoke was a tree. The Romans regarded the hazel as an emblem of peace and a means of reconciling those who had been estranged. When the G.o.ds made Mercury their messenger they gave him a hazel rod to be used in restoring harmony among the human race. Later he added the twisted serpents at the top of this caduceus. The caduceus also had the power of producing sleep, hence Milton calls it "the opiate rod."

When the crimson threads appear in the scaly buds the staminate catkins are lengthening, and soon the high wind shakes the golden pollen over all the copse. These flowers which appear before the leaves all depend upon the wind for their fertilization. That is why they come before the leaves. And there is always wind enough to meet all their needs.

March is a masculine month. It was named after the war G.o.d and it always lives up to its traditions. It has had scant courtesy from the literary men.

_"Ah, pa.s.sing few are they who speak, Wild, stormy month, in praise of thee."_

'Twas a night in March when little Gavroche took his infant proteges into the old elephant which stood in the Place de la Bastile to shelter them from the cruel wind. It was in the twilight of a day in March, when the wind howled dismally, that Boniface Willet, in _Barnaby Rudge_, flattened his fat nose against the window pane and made one of his famous predictions. It must have been a March freshet when the Knight Huldebrand put Bertalda into Kuhleborn's wagon and the gentle Undine saved them both. And we fancy that it was a cold night in March when Peter stood by the fire and warmed himself.