Section 1 of Nature Near Home and Other Papers by John Burroughs. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Edith Fern. Nature Near Home and Other Papers by John Burroughs. Section 1, Nature Lore. Emerson in his journal says, All facts in nature interest us because they are deep and not accidental. Facts of nature are undoubtedly of interest to most persons. The whether or not Emerson gives a true reason may be questioned. I would sooner venture the explanation that it is because nature is a sort of outlying province of ourselves. We feel a kinship with her works, and in bird and beast, in tree and flower, we behold the workings of the same life principle that has brought us where we are and relates us to all living things. Explain the matter as we may. The facts and doings of nature interest us, and our interest is bound to grow as we enlarge our acquaintance with them, which is about like saying that our interest keeps pace with our interest. But so it is. Water does not taste good to us until we are thirsty. Before we ask questions we must have questions to ask, and before we have questions to ask we must feel an awakened interest or curiosity. Action and reaction go hand in hand. Interest begets interest, knowledge breeds knowledge. Once started in pursuit of nature, Lord, we are pretty sure to keep on. When people ask me, how should we teach our children to love nature? I reply, do not try to teach them at all. Just turn them loose in the country and trust to luck. It is time enough to answer children's questions when they are interested enough to ask them. Knowledge without love does not stick, but if love comes first, knowledge is pretty sure to follow. I do not know how I first got my own love for nature, but I suppose it was because I was born and passed my youth on the farm and reacted spontaneously to the natural objects about me. I felt a certain privacy and kinship with the woods and fields and streams long before the naturalist awoke to self-consciousness within me. A feeling of companionship with nature came long prior to any conscious desire for accurate and specific knowledge about her works. I loved the flowers and the wild creatures, as most healthy children do, long before I knew there was such a study as botany or natural history. And when I take a walk now, thoughts of natural history play only a secondary part. I suspect it is more to bathe the spirit in natural influences than to store the mind with natural facts. I think I know what Emerson means when he says elsewhere in his journal that a walk in the woods is one of the secrets for dodging old age. I understand what the poet meant when he sang, Sweet is the lore which nature brings. Nature, lore, that is it. Not so much a notebook full of notes of birds and trees and flowers as a heart warmed and refreshed by sympathetic intercourse and contact with these primal forces. When the press of one's foot to the earth springs a hundred affections, as Whitman says, then one gets something more precious than exact science. Nature, lore, is a mixture of love and knowledge, and it comes more by way of the heart than of the head. We absorb it with the air we breathe. It awaits us at the side of the spring when we stoop to drink. It drops upon us from the trees beneath which we fondly linger. It is written large on the rocks and ledges, whereas boys we proud about on Sundays, putting our hands in the niches, are on the rocky shelves older than thieves or Karnak. Touching carefully the Phoebe's mossy nest with its pearl white eggs or noting the spore of Coon or Fox, or coming face to face with the oldest inhabitant of the region who saw the foundations of the hills laid and the valleys scooped out, geologic time whose tent is the gray overhanging rocks. Many a walk I take in the fields and woods when I gather no new facts and make no new observations and yet I feel enriched. I have been for an hour or more on intimate turns with trees and rocks and grass and birds and with nature's primal sanities. The fragrance of the wild things lingers about my mind for days. Yet the close observation of nature, the training of the eye and mind to read her signals, to penetrate her screens, to disentangle her schemes, to catch her significant facts, add greatly to the pleasure of a walk and to life in the country. Natural history is on the wing and all about us on the foot. It hides in holes. It perches on trees. It runs to cover under the stones and into the stone walls. It soars. It sings. It drums. It calls by day. It barks and prowls and hoots by night. It eats her fruit. It plunders her garden. It raises her hen-roost. And may me disturbs your midnight slumbers. At Woodchuck Lodge the Woodchucks eat up my peas and melons and dig under the foundations of my house. The coons come down off the mountain for sweet apples in my orchard. I surprise the foxes among the cows on my early morning walks, where I am awakened in the dawn by the hue and cry of the crows over a fox passing near, a little late in getting back to the cover of the woods. All such things add interest to country life. No wild creature comes amiss even though it robs your hen-roost. I sometimes grow tender toward the Woodchuck, even though he raids my garden. He is such a characteristic bit of wild nature, creeping about the fields or sitting upon his haunches to see if danger is near. He is of the earth, earthy, its true offspring, steeped in its savers, hugging it close, harmonizing with its soil and rocks, almost as liquid as its fountains and as perennial as its grass. I even get reconciled to the unsavory but gentle-mannered skunk. He does not disturb me if I do not disturb him, and if he chances to get into a trap which I have set for some other animal, his composure is great, and he looks the injured innocent that he is. Only I must keep my eye upon that tail when it starts to rise over his back. There is a masked battery there, the noiseless shot of which is usually well-aimed, and is pretty sure to route the foe whether it hit the mark or not. Last summer the morning light revealed one held by the leg in a steel trap, which I had set for rats that were helping themselves too freely to my roasting ears. How sorry and deprecatory he looked as I approached, slowly straining to pull away from the cruel trap, and turning upon me a half-appealing, half-approachful look. By imitating his slow, gentle manners, I lifted him and the trap to the mouth of a woodchuck-hole, into which he quickly crept, leaving his trap held foot outside. To release him then was an easy matter. The skunk is an eye-prowler and subsists mainly on insects and small rodents, but I would not ensure the birds' eggs or the young birds that happen to be in his path, though Mr. Seton says his tame skunks do not know how to deal with hen's eggs. There is no prettier bit of natural history upon four legs than the red fox, especially when you surprise him in your morning walk, or he surprises you in his. He too is an eye-prowler, but often he does not get home till after sun-up. Early one October morning, as I stood in the road looking out over the landscape, a bladed fox jumped over the wall a few yards from me, and lobed unconcernedly along parallel with the road, then turned and scaled the fence and crossed the road, and went bounding up the hill toward the wood with the grace and ease impossible to describe. I suppose it was his massive tail held level with his body that helped give the idea of buoyancy. There was no apparent effort as when the farm dog climbs the hill, but the ease and lightness that goes with floating and winged things. It was indeed a pleasing spectacle, such as I had not seen for many years. This winter the fox-hunter with his hound will be trailing him from mount to mountain or from valley to valley, and he will drift along over the snow, pausing now and then to harken back along his trail and reluctantly expose himself to the eye of day in the broad open spaces. Unless the day is wet and his tail and fur get draggled, he will run from sun to sun without much apparent fatigue, but if his burden gets too great, he knows if holes in the rocks where he can take refuge. Any device that a plant or an animal has for getting on in the world interests us, it brings the lower orders nearer to us. We have our own devices and make shifts, and we like to know how it is with our near or distant kin among the humbler orders. They are ourselves not yet come to consciousness and to the elective franchise. When the burr of the burdock, reaching forth its arms for such a chance, seizes onto your coattail, take your pocket glass and examine the minute hooks that tip the ends of the seed scales. They fish for you and your dog and sheep and cow, and they catch you, not with one hook but with twenty or fifty all at the same time. But in this case it is not the fish that is caught but the fisherman. The plan of this fisherman is to go right along with his captor, the farther the better, and plant his progeny in a new territory. He lets go his hold upon the parent plant at a mere touch, but the touch gives him all the hold he wants. The hooks are fine and hard, like minute, sharp horns, not too much bent, that would defeat the end, and perfectly smooth and finished. Instead of hooks the weed called Bidens has the teeth or prongs, armed with barbs like a fish hook. Many of them on each prong. They are quite as sure a trap as the hooks of the burdock. Nature never fails to perfect her device. Natural selection attends to that. Her traps, her wings, her springs, her balloons always work. The wings of the maple keys, the ash, the linden are all different, but they all work. Nature seems partial to the burdock. What extra pains she seems to have taken to perpetuate this worse than useless plant. So far as I know, nothing wants it or profits by it, though I have heard that the pet-heels, when cooked, suggest salsify. It is an ishmaelite among plants. Every man's hand is against it, and nearly every animal has reason to detest it. Against their wheels they are engaged in sowing its seeds. The other day I found some birds matted on the tail of a woodchuck. Birds have been found trapped by its hooks. Apparently the only domestic animal that it does not see its hold of is the pig. The stiff, smooth bristles of the pig afford it a scanty hold. It possesses more original skin than any other plant I know. How it drives its roots into the ground to find your spading fork. How it seems to drive its burrs into your garments, or into the hair of animals, refusing to let go till it is fairly torn in pieces. See the dog biting them out of his hair with a kind of contemptuous fury. If you try to help him you must proceed very carefully and deliberately, or he will confound you with the burdock and threaten the hand that seeks to aid him. The burdock is vicious to the last. The old bird claims with the same dogged determination as the new. As a noxious weed it is a great success. Discourage it by cutting it down you cannot. By hook or by crook it is bound to persist. Its juice is bitter and its fiber coarse. What a pity that so much native grit and enterprise cannot be turned to some good account. The burrs are detached from the parent stem almost as easily as are the quills from the porcupine. Even while it is yet in bloom the hooks will seize your coat tails and the burr let go its hold upon the stalk. The hooks are not attached to the separate seeds but are for the burrs as a whole. I know of no plant so difficult to prevent seeding. Cut it down in July and in August it has new shoots loaded with burrs. Cut these off and in late September or early October it will evolve burrs directly from the stub of the old stalk often in clusters and bunches without a leaf to mother them. The plant if unhindered grows three or four feet high and burrs about five hundred burrs which usually have twelve seeds each or six thousand seeds to the plant. Before the seeds arrive they are nearly the size and color of rye or peeled oats. Later they shrink and turn dark. So far as I know nothing feeds upon them save the larvae of some insect. I have examined many burrs in October and found a small white grub in a single seed in each of them. Those good people who fancy that everything was made for some special service to man would have trouble I think to find the uses of the burdock. The advantage of that array of eager hooks to the burdock there are more than two hundred of them on each burr seems obvious and yet here is the yellow dock alongside of it a relative of our buckwheat that has no hooks or other devices that I can discover for scattering its seed and yet it appears to compete successfully with its more lusty neighbor. One is about as abundant and troublesome to the gardener as the other. The seeds of the yellow dock are like small brown polished buckwheat. I have never seen birds or squirrels eat them and what secret way they have of keeping up with the burdocks I do not know. The burdock plants itself deeper in the ground and defies your spading fork the more successfully. I have always been curious to know why the birch is the only one among our many forest trees that seems to have an ambition to plant itself upon a rock. Other trees do so occasionally but in the woods I am familiar with I see ten birches upon rocks to one of any other tree. They sit down upon the rock as if it were a chair and run their big roots off into the ground apparently entirely at home. How in the first place they get enough foothold in the thin coat of leaf mold that covers the rocks to develop their roots and send them across the barren places and down into the soil is a puzzle. I have seen a small birch sapling that had attained a foothold in a niche on the side of a cliff seen one large root diagonally down across the face of the bare rock two or more yards to the ground where it took hold and saved the situation. It was like a party going out from a starving camp for relief. To equip and provision the party required some resources. Yes you may say and to know where to send it required some wit but the roots of a tree always tend downward as the branches go upward. We are at the end of our tether when we say that such is the rule of nature. The winged seeds always find their proper habitat as if they had eyes to see the way. The seeds of the cattail flag find the ditches and marshes as unerringly as if they were convoyed but this intelligence or self-direction is only apparent. The wind carries the seeds in all directions and they fall everywhere just as it happens on the hills as well as in the ditches but only in the latter do they take root and flourish. Nature often resorts to this wholesale method. In scattering pollen and germs by the aid of the wind this is her method. Cover all the ground and you will be sure to hit your mark night or day. After one or more windy days in November I am sure to find huddled in the recess of my kitchen door the branching heads of a certain species of wild grass that grows somewhere on the hills west of me. These heads find their ways across fields and highways over fences past tree and bushy barriers down my steps into the storm house and lie there waiting on the door sill like things of life waiting to get in the house. Not one season alone but every season they come as punctually as the assessor. The watchful broom routes them but the next day or the next week there they are again and now in them one actually gets into the kitchen slipping in between your feet as you open the door. They bring word from over the hills and the word is sooner or later nature hits her mark, hits all marks because her aim is broadcast and her effort ceaseless. The wind finds every crack and corner. We started on our journey not for your door but for any door all doors any shelter where we could be at rest and here we are. The purple loose strife travels from marsh to marsh in the Hudson River Valley and as its seeds are not winged one may wonder how it gets about so easily. It travels by the aid of wings but not of its own. Darwin discovered that the seeds of marsh plants are often carried in the mud on the feet of marsh birds. Years ago the loose strife was in a large marsh six miles south of me. A few years later a few plants appeared in a pond near me and now this and nearby ponds and marshes are lakes of royal purple in August. The loose strife in late summer makes such a grand showing with its vast armies of tall stately plants that one welcomes it in our unsightly marshes. Only the present season did I observe a peculiar feature of our wild climates that a little close attention might have shown me at any time. Its conspicuous appearance in September after its flowers have faded which has earned for it the name of Old Man's Beard is owing to the fact that its seeds have long feathered tails to aid in their dissemination. It is the only seed I know of that the wind carries by the tail. For some obscure reason it does not carry it very far or at least does not plant it very successfully as the climatist is rare with me. Instead of being sown broadcast over the hills and along the fences it appears sparsely at wide intervals. It is such a beautiful vine both in flowering time and seeding time that one wishes it were more common. The plants that travel by runners above or below ground are many. The plants that travel by walking are few. I recall only the walking fern which now seems to have walked away from my neighborhood and the black raspberry. Both are slow travelers but they do reach out and take steps. Some trees can fight a much more successful battle against browsing animals than can others. The apple and the red thorn are notable examples. Trees like the linden which the cattle freely crop are easy victims. They put up no kind of fight. They sprout freely but they make no headway. Their new shoots are swept off every summer and they are the low stool of the tree remains. The beach does better amid grazing cattle but I doubt if it ever wins the fight. But the apple and the thorn, though the struggle is a long and hard one are sure to win in the end. After many years one central shoot gets a start from the top of the thorny mound of crop twigs, makes rapid strides upward and in due season stands there the perfected tree. It will now bear fruit for the short-sighted grazers that sought to destroy it. Our belief in the uniformity of nature or in the unchangeableness of natural law is fundamental. We act upon it every hour of our lives. Our bodies and minds are built upon that plan. Yet in detail and within narrow limits nature is unequal, capricious and calculable. Can the farmer always foretell his crops or forecast a wet season or dry? The problem is too complex or our wits are too shallow. Last season the hay crop over a large part of the country broke the record. The meadows everywhere and without any very obvious reason doubled their yield. The farmer's barns from Pennsylvania to Maine were bursting with plenty and at the end of hang a row of stacks encompassed or flanked most of them. The trees all seem to have had a super abundance of leaves. On my own grounds we raked up and put under cover for stable use, to double the usual quantity from the same number of trees. One important factor in this meadow and pasture and tree fertility was probably the continued deep snows of last winter. About 100 inches fell in the Hudson Valley and two feet at one fall in December. Snow warms and fertilizes, how it warmed up and quickened the mice beneath it. The meadows yielded double their usual number of meadow mice, never have I seen in the spring evidence of such a crop. Over a wide area, wherever I looked in meadow bottoms or grassy hillsides or shaving lawns, there were the runways, the grassy nests, the camping grounds of this vast army of meadow mice. They had evidently had a long picnic. They had had the world under their all to themselves. There had been nothing there to molest or to make them afraid. No fox, no cat, no owl, no weasel, no mink and they had reveled in their freedom and security. One could read it all in the record upon the ground. They saw villages, their round tunnels and sunken runways through the grass and the marks and refuse everywhere as of temporary social and holiday gatherings. Fast numbers of bushes and small trees, especially the apple order were stripped of their bark to a height of two or more feet from the ground. I even saw a thicket of small young locusts with stems as white as bleached corn stalks. Spring quickly put an end to these winter festivities of the mice and compelled them to take to their older treats and darken lives under the ground. Evidently the old mother in this part of the country at least took care of her children last winter from grass and tree roots to mice and insects. In her subtler physical forces nature often seems capricious and lawless probably on account of our limited vision. We see the lightning cleave the air and one blinding flash from the clouds through the earth often shattering a tree or a house on its way down. Hence it is always a surprise to see the evidence that the thunderbolt strikes upward as well as downward. During an electrical storm one summer night an enormous charge of electricity came up out of the earth under a maple tree at the foot of the hill below my study scattering the sod, the roots, and some small bushes like an explosion of powder or dynamite. Then it rooted around on the ground like a pig devouring or annihilating the turf making a wide ragged zigzag trench seven or eight feet long down the hill on the ground. When it dived beneath the wagon track five or six feet wide bursting out here and there on the surface then escaped out of the bank made by the plow on the edge of the vineyard. Here it seems to have leaped to the wire trellis of the grapevines running along at northward scorching the leaves here and there and finally vented its fury on a bird box that was fastened to a post at the end of the row. It completely demolished the box going a foot or more out of its way to do so. The box was not occupied so there was not the anticlimax of a bolt of jove slaughtering house rands or bluebirds maybe it was the nails that do the charge to the box but why it was rooting around down the hill when it came out of the ground instead of leaping upward is a puzzle. It acted like some blind crazy material body that did not know where to go. A cannon shot would have made a much smoother trench. Its course on the ground was about twelve or fourteen feet half above and half below ground and it sleep in the air about six feet. Strange that a thing of such incredible speed and power would yet have time to lorder about and do such full stunts. This space annihilator left a trail like a slow plotting thing. It burrowed like a mole. It delved like a plow. It leaped and ran like a squirrel and it struck like a hammer. A spectator would have been aware only of a blinding blaze of fire there on the edge of the vineyard and heard a crash that would have stunned him but probably could not have told whether the bolt came upward or downward. Lightning is much quicker than our special senses. On another occasion beside my path through the woods to slab sides I saw where a bolt had come up out of a chipmunk's hole at the root of a tree scattered the leaves and leaf mold about and apparently disappeared in the air. The lightning seems to have its favorite victims among the trees. I have never known it to strike a beech tree. Hamlocks and pines are its favorites in my woods. In other regions the oak and the ash receive its attention. An oak on my father's farm was struck twice in the course of many years the last bolt proving fatal. The hard or sugar maple is frequently struck but only in one instance have I known the tree to be injured. In this case a huge tree was simply demolished. Usually the bolt comes down on the outside of the tree making a mark as if a knife had clipped off the outer surfaces of the bark revealing the reddish-yellow interior. In several cases I have seen this effect but a few summers ago an unusually large and solid sugar maple in my neighbor's woods received a charge that simply reduced it to stove wood such a scene of utter destruction I have never before witnessed in the woods. The tree was blown to pieces as if it had been filled with dynamite. Over a radius of 50 or more feet the fragments of the huge trunk lay scattered. It was as if the bolt baffled so long by the rough coat of mail of the maple had at last penetrated it and had taken full satisfaction. The explosive force probably came from the instantaneous vaporization of the sap of the tree by the bolt. Some friends of mine were inoculated with curiosity about insects by watching the transformation of the larvae of one of the swallowtail butterflies probably the Papelio Osterias. As I was walking on their porch one morning in early April I chanced to see a black and green caterpillar about two inches long posed in a meditative attitude upon the side of the house a foot or more above the floor. The latter half of its body was attached to the board wall and the four part curved up from it with bowed head. The creature was motionless and apparently absorbed in deep meditation. I stooped down and examined it more closely. I saw that it was on the eve of a great change. The surface of the board immediately under the forward part of the body had been silvered over with a very fine silken web that was almost like a wash rather than something woven. Anchored to this on both sides as if grown out of the web ran a very fine thread or cord up over the caterpillar's back which served to hold it in place. It could lean against the thread as the sailor leans against a rope thrown around him and tied to the mast. With bowed head the future butterfly hung there and with bowed head I waited and watched. Presently convulsive movements began to transverse its body. Through segment after segment a wave of effort seemed to pass. It was the beginning of the travail pains of transformation. Then in a twinkling a slight rent appeared in the skin on the curve of the back revealing the new light green surface underneath. The first glimpse of the chrysalis the butterfly was being born. Slowly as the labor continued the split in the skin extended down the back and over toward the head till the outlines of the chrysalis became plainly visible. I was witnessing that marvelous transformation in nature of a worm into a creature of a much higher and more attractive order.  In a few minutes the head and forward part of the body were free and the latter half was fast becoming so. The fine-silken cord over the back served its purpose well holding the creature in place while it literally wriggled out of its skin and when this feat was accomplished holding it in position for its long winter sleep. The skin behaved as if it were an interested party in the enterprise much better I'm sure than one's garments would if one were to try to wriggle out of them without using one's limbs. It folded back, it drew together, it finally became a little pellet or pack of cast-off linen that clung to the tail end of the chrysalis. To affect the final detachment and not lose the grip which this end seemed to have on the board beneath it required a good deal of struggling probably a full minute of convulsive effort before the little bundle of cast-off habiliments let go and dropped a dark pellet the size of a small pea. Then our insect was at rest and seemed slowly to contract and stiffen. It had woven itself the silken loop to hold it to its support and it had struggled out of its old skin on its own initiative or without being mothered or helped as so many newborn creatures are. I did not have the pleasure of seeing it spin the cord over the back which plays an important part in the process of transformation mechanical part though it be but a few days later through the patient and clear-seeing eyes of my friend Miss Grace Humphrey I witnessed this operation also she wrote the day after you left we found another caterpillar a few feet away from yours we already made it saddle cord and shed its silken robe and we found it but we watched it change from grey-green to not greenish-brown at all but a grayness matching the concrete of the house for it was higher up than yours on the ledge below the window hanging from the ledge against the plaster wall its cord too apparently grew thicker just at the ends showing up more plainly for a bit then like yours it dried up and more perfectly matched its background and neither of them did the cord continue to look thicker the same day I found a third caterpillar under the pear tree the very same kind black with a wide green stripe marking off each segment and the rows of yellow buttons I carried it on a leaf up to the porch where we put it under a glass bowl but of course it thought that an unfavorable place for housing itself for the winter and it wouldn't start though we kept it there two days at noon when freed it climbed at the wall of the house rather near yours so they were photographed together and we held our breaths to see if it would start building operations there but no up the window ledge it warmed its way and then up and up by the side of the window leaving all the way along a silky thread and constantly going back and forth with its head Mr. R knocked it down once to keep it in the sunlight in order to photograph it and it immediately climbed up to the same spot all the time leaving the white silk thread it kept climbing up and up till I had to get on a chair to see it and once I lost my balance and jumped down drawing it so that I knocked it to the floor but up it got and climbed up and spent the rest of the afternoon alternately wriggling about to find just the right place and making a silken background in one spot the next day it was still on the window ledge about 11 o'clock it disappeared and I hunted and hunted before I found it on the other side of the porch railing it was busily making its network but it made far less than either of the others and most of the time it was staying quite still the following day about noon it made its cord anchoring that at one end then at the other and going back and forth to strengthen it when the cord was ready it put its head through the cord was made ahead of it and wriggled itself into the cord it wriggled fully as hard as when yours got itself out of its striped cover so slowly and carefully it made its way into place being most careful not to strain the cord we watched breathlessly we watched itself so far through that it was about half and half and then it had to wriggle backward until its head and a third of its body was through and two-thirds not through and wriggling back took far greater care than forward it stayed just that way all huddled up for nearly four days when about 8 o'clock in the morning it split and divested itself of its robe it is matching the brown woodwork like yours and there all three are the incomparable French natural historian and felicitous writer has witnessed what I never have he has seen the caterpillar build its case or cocoon in the instance which he describes it was the small grub of one of the psyches the first thing the creature did was to collect bits of felt or pith from the cast-off garment of its mother these it tied together with the thread of its own silk forming a band or girdle which it put around its own body uniting the ends this ring was the start and foundation of the sack in which it was to encase itself the band was placed well forward so that the inset could reach its edge by bending its head up and down and around in all directions it then proceeded to widen the girdle by attaching particles of down to its edges as the garment grew towards its head the weaver crept forward in it thus causing it to cover more and more of its body till in a few hours it covered all of it and the sack was complete a very simple process and it would seem the only possible one the head with the flexible neck which allowed it to swing through the circle was the loom that did the weaving the thread issuing from the spinner at on the lip did the silk issue from the other end of the body as we are likely to think it does the feet would be impossible I suppose a woman might knit herself into a sweater in the same way by holding the ball of yarn in her bosom and turning the web around and pulling it down instead of turning her body all but her arms here she would be bopped to understand how a grub weaves itself close fitting garment closed at both ends from its own hair or by what sleight of hand it attaches its cocoon to the end of a branch I suppose one would need to witness the process in October these preparations and transformations in the insect world are taking place all about us and we regard them not the caterpillars are getting ready for a sleep out of which they awaken in the spring totally different creatures they tuck themselves away under stones or into crevices they hang themselves on bushes they roll themselves up in dry leaves and braid the cold of winter in tough garments woolly or silky of their own weaving some of them, as certain of the large moths do what seems like an impossible stunt they shut themselves up inside a tough case or a septicle and attach it by a long strong bit of homemade tape to the end of a twig so that it swings freely in the wind I have seen the Downie Woodpecker trying to break into one of these sealed up living tombs without a veil its free, pendant position allows it to yield to the strokes of the bird and all efforts to penetrate the case or in vain how the big clumsy worm without help or hands wove itself into this bird-proof case and hung itself up at the end of a limb would be a problem or solving of course it had its material all within its own body so it was not encumbered with outside tools or refractory matter it was the result of a mechanical and a vital process combined the creature knew how to use the means which nature had given it for the purpose some of the caterpillars weave the Chrysalis case out of the hairs and mullet of their summer coats others out of silk developed from within on October mornings I have had great pleasure in turning over the stones by the roadside and lifting up those on the tops of the stone walls and noting the insect life preparing its winter quarters under them the caterpillars and spiders are busy one could gather enough of the white fine silk spider tints and cocoons to make a rope big enough to hang himself with the jumping spider may be found in his closely woven tent look at his head through a pocket glass and he looks like a miniature wood chip his smooth dark gray hairy and two bee-like eyes are very like but his broad blunt nose is unlike it seems studded with a row of five or six jewels but these jewels are eyes what extra bounty nature seems to episode upon some of these humble creatures are one pair of eyes precious think what three or four pairs would be if they added to our powers of vision proportionately but probably the many eyed spiders and the flies with their compound eyes see less than we do this multitude of eyes seems only an awkward device of natures to make up for the movable eye like our own and some of the spiders cocoons under the stones on the tops of the walls you will find masses of small pink eggs expected to survive the winter I suppose and hatch out in the spring the underside of the stone on the top of a stone wall seems like a very cold cradle and nursery but the caterpillars and their shrouds survive here and may not the spiders eggs in October you will find the caterpillars in all stages of making ready for winter they first cover a small space on the stone upon which they rest a very fine silk and web it looks like a delicate silver wash this is the foundation of the coming cocoon but I could never catch any of them in the act of weaving their cocoons I brought one to the house and kept it under observation for several days but it was always passive whenever I glimpsed it through the crack between the stones the nights were frosty and the days chilly but sometime during the 24 hours the creatures loom was at work one morning a thin veil of delicate silver threads through which I could dimly see the worm united the two stones it seemed to be in the midst of a little thicket of vertical shining silk and threads it was like some enchantment a little later the thicket or veil had developed into a thin cradle in which lay the chrysalis and the cast off skin of the worm this caterpillar had been disturbed a good deal and made to weigh some of its precious silk so that its cocoon was finally a thin poor one life under a stone forms a chapter in nature's infinite book of secrecy which most persons skip but which is well worth perusal and a section one recording by Edith Fern Southern California fall 2008 section two of nature near home and other papers by John Burroughs this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Edith Fern nature near home and other papers by John Burroughs section two new gleaning in old fields part one live natural history recently while reading Thoreau's journal I wondered why his natural history notes with which the journal abounds interested me so little on reflection I saw that it was because he contended himself with making only a bare statement of the fact he did not relate it to anything else or interpret its meaning there's a great deal of bald dry natural history of this kind in his journal which he never wove together into a living texture when he simply tells me I see a Downie Woodpecker tapping on an apple tree and here when I have passed his sharp metallic note he has not interested me in the Woodpecker he must string the bird on his thoughts in some way he must relate him to my life or experience the facts of natural history become interesting the moment they become facts of human history all the ways of the wild creatures and getting on in the world interest us because we have our ways of getting on in the world all their economies antagonisms failures devices appeal to us for the same reason Thoreau's description of the battle of the ants in Walden is intensely interesting because it is so human valor, heroism stir us in whatever field they appear as I write a little chippy comes among the vines on my porch looking for nesting material the old spring impulse to increase and multiply is strong upon her she tugs at the strings that tie the vines she scrutinizes every branch for some shred or bit that will serve her purpose she interests me and I lend her a hand by releasing some of the strings which she could not manage I am familiar with her problem as we all are the cliff swallows daintily gathering mud at the edges of a puddle in the road lifting their wings and standing on tiptoe as it were to guard against soiling their plumage is a sight I will always pause to witness yesterday I sat for an hour in the woods near a dead maple stub in which a flicker was excavating her nest at intervals the hammering would cease and the bird on her guard against the approach of stealthly enemies would appear at the opening and take a long look finally when she discovered me she came out and went off in the woods and seemed to have some conversation with her mate all the industries and ways and means among the animals are interesting a chipmunk carrying nuts and seeds to her den a red squirrel cutting off the chestnut burrs to impatient to wait for the frost to open them on the trees even a woodchuck carrying dry grass and stubble into his hole for a nest arrest the attention the currents of life everywhere the lamprees piling up the stones and the creek bottom for a nest the muskrat in the fall building his aquatic tent with mouthfuls of sedge grass excite our interest in May all the seed eating and nut eating creatures are hard put to it to obtain food the red squirrel comes in front of my door and eats the sterile catkins of the butternut and they evidently help tide him over this season of scarcity one morning a gray squirrel in his quest for breakfast invaded the tree the red squirrel soon spied him and hustled him out of it very spitefully the gray went underlating along the top of the stone wall the picture of grace and ease while the red with his tail canked was in hot pursuit to find an interest in natural history one must add something more than the fact one must see the meaning of the fact I feel no special interest in the king bird that alights on the telephone wire in front of me it climbs high up in the air and picks him invisible insect from out the apparently empty space and brings it back to his perch I am interested it was a characteristic act the fox is interesting for his cunning the skunk can porcupine for their stupidity we see in the last two how the weapons of defense which nature has so liberally bestowed upon them have left no room for the exigencies of life to develop their wits the novel the extraordinary, the characteristic the significant always interest us the human bore is a person who has no conception of what constitutes the interesting he or she pours out his own private experiences upon us as if they were of the same interest to us as to him how prone we are to think our special ailments are of universal interest but how rarely is this the case one afternoon two cuckoos flying side by side pass my door in the morning they passed again in the same way I became interested I said this means business following the course they took I went straight to a clump of red thorn trees a hundred yards distant and there was the nest with young more than half grown they were black bill cuckoos the mother bird chided me in that harsh guttural staccato note of hers and kept her place on a branch near the nest one of the three young got out of the rude nest and perched on a twig holding its head or neck nearly vertical its pronounced stubby quills and peculiar attitude gave it an un-bird-like look the cuckoos seemed to time their nesting with out of the tent caterpillars upon which they feed as the supply of these orchard pests and many other similar pests have been nearly exterminated by the cold wet may of the previous year, 1917 it would have been very interesting to know how the birds made up for the deficiency what was the substitute but I could not find out nearly every cuckoos nest I have happened to find has been on a thorn bush why do they choose this tree what special enemy are they on their guard against our cuckoos evidently lay their eggs at longer intervals than the other birds in the present case one of the young was clearly several days older than its fellows this fact, with the rude skeleton of a nest suggests some reminiscence of the habits of the European cuckoo a parasitical bird the wildlife around one becomes interesting the moment one gets into the current of it and sees its characteristics and bi-play the coons that come down off the mountain into my orchard for apples on the chill November nights the fox that prowls about near me awakens me by his wild, vulpine squall at two o'clock in the morning the woodchucks growing in my meadows and eating and tangling my clover and showing sudden terror when they spy me peeping over the stone wall or coming with my rifle the chipmunk leaving a mound of freshly dug earth conspicuous by the roadside while his entrance to his den is deftly concealed under the grass or strawberry vines a few yards away the red squirrel spinning along the stone wall his movements apparently controlled by the electric-like ways of energy that run along his tail and impart to it a new curb or kink every moment or chipping up my apples and pears for the seed and snickering and cashing-nating as if in derision when I appear upon the scene how much there is in the lives of all these creatures that we should find keenly interesting if we only knew how to get at it this rainy morning I saw two red squirrels make a wild dash through my garden one in hot pursuit of the other a woven wire fence was in the way the fleeing one cleared one of the meshes neatly but his pursuer intent on his enemy blundered and doubled up against the obstruction and was delayed a moment how much I wanted to know what the mad racing meant and how it resulted the red squirrel is a perky feather-edged creature the hottest and most peppery rodent we have in our woods and orchards every hair of him like a live wire and many of his movements are to me quite unaccountable the search for the elements of the interesting in nature and in life, in persons and in things well, is an interesting search End of Section 2 Recording by Edith Fern Southern California, Fall 2008 Section 3 of Nature in Your Home and Other Papers by John Burroughs This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain To learn more or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Edith Fern Nature in Your Home and Other Papers by John Burroughs Section 3, The Barn Swallow How winsome is the swallow how tender and pleasing all her notes is it boyhood that she brings back to us old men who were farm boys in our youth we saw the swallows play out and in the wide open barn doors and hang time their steel blue backs and ruddy throats glancing in the sun and their gentle, unctuous wing gossip falling on our ears their coarse nests, mud without but feathers within were plastered on the rafters in the peak and when the young were out we saw them perched in a row on the ridge board resting from their first flights now, as I sit within my barn door outlook the same swallows are playing before me untouched by the many long years that have passed giving the impression of perpetual youth the same tender confiding calls the same darting wayward flight the same swift coursings above the shorn meadows darlings of the ripe summer air aerial feeders creeping an invisible bounty above us touching the earth in quest of a straw or a feather or for clay for the nest tireless of wing and impotent of foot as of old the swallow has two words one for her friends and one for her foes wit wit wit uttered so confidingly for the friends and sleet sleet sleet uttered sharply for the foes instead of the ridge board of my youth the swallow now has a new perch the telephone and telegraph wire strung along the highway shall we look upon the swallow as the songster Virgil refers to him as such and when he perches upon the telephone wire in front of my barn door and fills and refills his mouth with a succession of those squeaking smacking, unctuous notes his throat swelling and throbbing his beak opening and shutting glancing now to the right, now to the left as if to see if his mate is near he looks, and we may say is the songster that Virgil called him the performance lacks resonance and the fluty quality of our regular songbirds it seems to be made in the cheeks or by the softer parts of the mouth the beak is too small and feeble to play much of a part in its production what a waxy, adhesive sort of sound it is I wonder if the swallow has the organ called the syrinx common to the regular songbirds if one may compare sound with substance I should say that the swallow strange seems viscous and turbid rather than liquid and translucent like that of the acknowledge songbirds it is less a musical performance for its own sake than a note of self-congratulation or of salutation to its fellows the bird does not lift up his head and pour out his strain as if for the joy of singing he delivers it as the speaker delivers his discourse looking about him and laying the emphasis here and there in a confident and reassuring tone the cliff swallows and the purple martins and bank swallows are much more social and gregarious than the barn swallows I do not remember ever to have seen more than one nest of the latter at a time in the peak of the barn although I am told that in New England they nest in colonies I do not know that they migrate in large flocks like the other swallows I only know that their season with ends ends about the 20th of August and that they pass the winter in South America where I hope they have as happy a time as they do here if anything preys upon them while they are here I do not know what it is they could laugh at the swiftest hawk they share the distrust of all birds toward the cat though I have never known Puss to catch one they will swoop down spitefully if she lingers about their haunts and I have seen her try to strike them with her paw but have never known her to succeed my swallows have a pretty habit when the day is chilly and cloudy or stormy of collecting their brood on the little edges or shelves above the windows on the south gable of the house and feeding them there the young sit there in a huddled row apparently looking off in the fields of air where their parents are coursing for insects when returning they break out in a happy and grateful chatter the old weather worn gable is for the moment the scene of a very pleasing and animated incident in Swallow Life End of Section 3 Recording by Edith Fern Southern California 16th of December 2008 Nature near home and other papers by John Burroughs This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain To learn more or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Nature near home and other papers by John Burroughs Section 4 Insects One reason why all truthful and well-written books upon insects interest us more than the subject would seem to warrant is that no creature is small in print or in a book print is the great equalizer it magnifies a little and it minimizes the big when Fabre focuses our attention upon a wasp or spider his account engrosses our minds as completely as an account of a lion or an elephant would the insect is singled out and separated from the thousand forms and entanglements that belittle it in field and wood it alone occupies the page the lion can do no more it is precisely like putting the flea under the microscope the wars, loves, industries, activities of Fabre's little people are described in terms and images which we use in giving an account of man and the greater beasts the words make them big a moment ago a minute red insect a mere moving point revealed itself to my eye crawling across the sheet of paper it was so frail and small that a bare touch of my finger as my pocket glass showed crushed it if I could give you its life history and show its relation to other insects it would stand out on my page as distinctly as if it had been a thousand times larger its travels, its adventures, its birth, its death would fill the mind's eye and nature would not have to grope for it on my page as my eye did when it discovered it there is no little and no big to nature and there is none to the mind we think of the whirling solar system as easily as of a whirling top the space that separates us from the fixed stars is no more to the mind than the space that separates us from our neighbors in like manner the atoms and the molecules of matter when we have once conceived of them are as easy of apprehension as are the rocks and the mountains their nature and activities figures as large in our minds as that of the planetary systems the stories of many of Fabre's flies and beetles interest us as much and are quite as significant as the story of Jack the Giant Killer or Robinson Crusoe his history of the tumblebug amuses and interests us as much as that of any of Plutarch's heroes but see the tumblebug there in the path or by the roadside struggling with his little black globe and he is little more than the microscopic spider on my sheet of paper his history must be written large magnified by printer's type before it comes fully within our can or has power to move us Fabre's excursions of field are as entertaining and suggestive as Roosevelt's excursions into the big amelands of Africa with the true artist size does not count the same is true with all the minutiae of nature flowers, insects, birds, fishes, frogs we are bound to magnify them by describing them in the terms of our experience with larger bodies a wasp will capture its prey paralyze it and leave it upon the ground and then go a few yards away and dig its hole then it will come back look its game over, take its measure and apparently conclude that the hole is too small then go back and enlarge it sometimes making several trips of this kind its attitudes and procedure would lead you to say that the wasp was thinking and calculating as a mechanic but under similar circumstances in another case the spex wasp has need to paralyze the mouth parts of the prey she is carrying so as she bestrides it and drags it also by its antenna it cannot grip her with its mandibles or impede her progress by seizing upon blades of grass by the way like a skillful surgeon the wasp knows just what to do knows in what part of the head to insert her sting to produce the desired effect to know everything and to know nothing says Fabre according as it acts under normal or exceptional conditions that is the strange antithesis presented by the insect race but we must never credit the insect with understanding as a result of cogitation it knows nothing its life is a series of acts fatally linked together the mind of the insect is the mind of nature it is action and not reflection the plant does not consciously select the elements in the soil or the air that it needs as we select the vital chemistry in the organism does the selecting but the moment we name what it is that does the selecting we are caught in a trap we want to know what prompted it to the act we cannot find the underside of these things because there is no underside or a perside either any more than there is to the earth end of section 4 recording by Edith Fern Southern California December 2008 Nature Near Home and Other Papers by John Burroughs this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain to learn more or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Nature Near Home and Other Papers by John Burroughs section 5 The Dog the most wonderful thing about the dog is not his intelligence but his capacity for loving we can call it by no other name the more you love your dog the more your dog loves you you can win your neighbor's dog anytime by loving him more than your neighbor does he will follow you to the ends of the earth if you love him enough he may become so attached to you that he fairly divides your thoughts not through his own power of thought but through his intense sympathy and the free masonry of love he is the ideal companion because he gives you a sense of companionship without disturbing your sense of solitude your mind is alone but your heart has company he is below your horizon but something comes up from his life that mingles with your own this friend walks with you and yet he does not come between you and your book or between you and the holiday spirit you went out to woo he is the visible embodiment of the holiday spirit he shows you how to leave dull care behind he goes forth with you in the spirit of eternal youth sure that something beautiful or curious or adventurous will happen at any turn of the road he finds no places dull he is alert with expectancy every moment in him you have good fellowships always on tap as it were say the word and he bows to your side or leads the way to the woods my dog enjoys a walk more than I do his nature study is quite as real as mine is though of a totally different kind the sense of smell that plays such a part in his excursions plays little or none in mine and the eye and the mind which contributes so much to my enjoyment are almost a blank with him he enjoys the open fire too and a warm soft bed and a good dinner all his purely animal enjoyments are as keen or keener than mine but has he any other how different his interest in cats is from mine and in dogs and in men he is not interested in the landscape as a whole I doubt very much if he sees it at all but he is interested in what the landscape holds for him the woodchuck hole or the squirrel's den or the fox's trail his life is entirely the life of the senses and on this ground we meet in our boon companions if he has any mind life or ideas if he ever looks back over the past or forward into the future I see no evidence of it when there is nothing doing he sleeps apparently he could sleep all the time if there were nothing better going on End of section 5 Recording by Edith Fern Southern California, January 11th, 2009 Nature Near Home and Other Papers by John Burroughs This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain To learn more or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Nature Near Home and Other Papers by John Burroughs Section 6 Wood Waves Those little waves from the woods chickadees, nut hatches, downy woodpeckers and brown creepers that come in winter and feed on the suet on the maple in front of my window how much company they are to me what thoughts and associations they bring with them what a pleasure to have them as my guests on the old tree the cold, naked, snow choked woods those little pilgrims get there I think the nut hatch touches me the most closely he is pretty to look upon and his voice is that of a child soft, confiding, contented and his ways are all ways of prettiness his sliding up and down around the tree his pose with head standing out at right angle to the body which enables him to see the approach of danger as readily as if he were perched on a horizontal limb his pretty habit of making a vice of a crevice in the bark to hold a nut all his notes and calls are pleasing he is incapable of a harsh sound his call in the spring woods when we made maple sugar in my boyhood yank, yank, yank how it comes back to me not a song but a token the spirit of the leafless maple woods finding a voice and now for two or three weeks I have had another guest at the free lunch table the prettiest of them all the red-breasted nut hatch from the north and he so appreciates my bounty that he has taken up his temporary abode here and runs box a few yards from the lunch table one cold day I saw him go into the box and remain for some time so at sundown I went and wrapped on his retreat and out he came he spends nearly half his time at the sweet lunch how pretty he is and as spry as a cricket about two-thirds the size of the white-breasted he is quicker in his movements he glides round the old tree like a spirit he does not seem to have the extra joint in his neck that his larger cousin has he does not point his bill straight out from the tree at right angles to it but turns his head more from side to side I call him my baby bird he is so suggestive of babyhood it is amusing to see him come down upon a fragment of hickory nut when he has wedged it into the bark each blow is seconded by a flash of his wings as if the tiny wings reinforce the head one day I put out a handful of cracked hickory nuts and he hustled them all away as fast as he could carry them hiding them here and there in the vineyard house on the wood pile whether with a view to hoarding them for future use or whether in obedience to some blind natural instinct I know not the white-breasted does the same thing but I never see either of them looking up their hidden stores two downy wood pickers male and female but evidently not made it this season come many times a day the male is a savage little despot no other bird shall die while he does he bosses the female the female bosses the big nut hatch bosses the red breast the red breast bosses the chickadees the chickadees boss the brown creeper and the junkos not one bird is hospitable to another each seems to look upon the suit as its special find the more inclement the season the more our sympathy goes out to our little wild neighbors who face it and survive it the tracks of the mice and the squirrels and the winter woods have an interest for one they could not possibly have in summer were they visible then oh frost and snow where is your victory the white and barren solitude there are not all potent how distinctly I remember where our scrollboat path through the woods crossed an old bush fence and the fresh prints in the snow of the feet of the red and grey squirrels to whom the old fence served as a highway those sharp nervous hurried tracks and the silent snow choked woods silent except when the frost pistol snapped now and then how vivid the picture of it all is in my memory the delicate tracks of the wood mice and their tunnels up through the snow beside our path they are still unfaded in my mind after a lapse of more than 70 years occasionally the stealthy track of a red fox would cross our trail both in field and wood never hurried like that of the mice and the squirrels and the hares but slow a watchful listening walker in the midnight winter solitude wildlife in winter is like black print on a white page he who runs may read in summer it is print on a green or brown or grey page the little waves from the woods that come to my door day after day in winter so active and cheery and brave-hearted heroic little figures that ask no favors of me or anyone yet who complacently help themselves to the proffered soot and nuts and go their way like a merry gypsy band they little know that they are my benefactors as much as I am theirs and of section 6 recording by Edith Fern Southern California January 11th 2009 Nature in Your Home and Other Papers by John Burroughs this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain to learn more or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Nature in Your Home and Other Papers by John Burroughs section 7 an interesting plant in our walks we note the most showy and beautiful flowers but not always the most interesting who for instance posits to consider that early species of everlasting called in the botany an area that grows nearly everywhere by the roadside and about poor fields it begins to be noticeable in May its whitish downy appearance its groups of slender stalks crowned with a corn of paper like buds contrasting with the fresh green of surrounding grass or weeds it is a member of a very large family the composite and does not attract one by its beauty but it is interesting because of its many curious traits and habits for instance it is diocese that is the two sexes are represented by separate plants and what is more curious these plants are usually found separated from each other and well-defined groups like the men and women in an old fashion country church always in groups here a group of females there are a few yards away a group of males the females may be known by their more slender and graceful appearance and as the season advances by their outstripping the males in growth indeed they become real amazons in comparison with their brothers the staminate or male plants grow but a few inches high the heads are round and have a more dusky or freckled appearance than do the pistolate and as soon as they have shed their pollen their work is done they are of no further use and by the middle of May or before their heads droop their stalks wither and their general claps that's in then the other sex or pistolate plants seem to have taken a new lease of life they whack strong they shoot up with a growing grass and keep their heads above it they are alert and active they bend in the breeze their long tapering flower heads take on a tinge of color and life seems full of purpose and enjoyment with them I have discovered too that they are real sun worshipers that they turn their faces to the east in the morning and follow the sun in his course across the sky till they all bend to the west at his going down on the other hand their brothers have stood stiff and stupid and unresponsive to any influence of sky or air so far as I could see till they drooped and died another curious thing is that the females seem vastly more numerous I should say almost ten times as abundant you have to hunt for the males the others you see afar off in my usual five minute morning walk to the post office I pass several groups or circles of females in the grass by the roadside I note how they grow and turn their faces onward I observe how alert and vigorous they are and what a purplish tinge comes over their man-made shaped flower heads as June approaches I look for the males to the east west south none could be found for hundreds of yards on the north about 200 feet away I found a small colony of meek and lonely males I wondered by what agency fertilization would take place by insects or by the wind I suspected it would not take place no insects seem to visit the flowers and the wind surely could not be at a point to hit the mark so far off and from such an unlikely corner too but by some means the vitalizing does seem to have been conveyed early in June the plants began to shed their down or seed bearing papas still carrying their heads at the top of the grass so that the breezes could have free access to them and so the seeds far and wide as the seeds are some broadcast by the wind I was at first puzzled to know how the two sexes were kept separate and always in little communities till I perceived what I might have read in the botany that the plant is perennial and spreads by offsets and runners like the strawberry this would of course keep the two kinds and groups by themselves end of section 7 recorded by Edith Fern Southern California February 4th 2009 section 8 of Nature in your home and other papers by John Burroughs this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain to learn more to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Nature in your home and other papers by John Burroughs section 8 Nature in your home after long experience I'm convinced that the best place to study Nature is at one's own home on the farm in the mountains on the plains by the sea no matter where that may be one has it all about him then the seasons bring to his door the great revolving cycle of wildlife and faunal and he deemed miss no part of the show at home one should see and hear with more fondness and sympathy Nature should touch him a little more closely there than anywhere else he is better attuned to it than to strange scenes the birds about his own door are his birds the flowers in his own fields and wood are his the rainbow springs its magic arch across his valley even the everlasting stars to which one lifts his eye night after night and year after year from his own doorstep have something private and personal about them the clouds and the sunsets one sees in strange lands move one the more they are like the clouds and sunsets one has become familiar with at home the wall creatures about you become known to you as they cannot be known to a passerby the traveler sees a little of Nature that is revealed to the homestayer you will find she has made her home where you have made yours an intimacy with her there becomes easy familiarity with things about one you should not dull the edge of curiosity or interest the walk you take today through the fields and woods or along the river bank is a walk you should take tomorrow and next day and next what you miss once you will hit upon next time the happenings are at intervals and are irregular the play of nature has no fixed program if she is not at home today or is in a noncommittal mood call tomorrow or next week it is only when the wild creatures are at home where their nests or dens are made that their characteristics come out if you would study the winter birds for instance you need not go to the winter woods to do so you can bring them to your own door a piece of suet on a tree in front of your window will bring chickadees nut hatches, downy wood pickers brown creepers and often junkos at one interest you will take in these little waves from the winter woods that daily or hourly seek the bounty you prepare for them it is not till they have visited you for weeks they begin to appreciate the bit of warmth and life they have added to your winter outlook the old tree trunk then wears a more friendly aspect the great inhospitable out of doors is relenting a little the cold and the snow have found their match and it warms your heart to think that you can help these brave little feathered people to win the fight not a bit daunted are they at the fearful odds against them the woods and groves seem as barren as deserts the earth is pawless snow the trees snap with the cold they do not form anywhere yet here are these atoms in full breath hurling defiance at vast death they are as cheery and active as if on a summer holiday the birds are sure to find the tidbit you put out for them on a tree in front of your window because sooner or later at this season they visit every tree the picking is very poor and they work their territory over and over thoroughly no tree in field or grove or orchard escapes them the wonder is that in such a desert as the trees appear to be in winter in both wood and field these little adventurers can subsist at all they reap a, to us, invisible harvest but the rough dry bark of the trees is not such a barren waste as it seems the amount of animal food in the shape of minute insects, eggs, and larva tucked away in cracks and crevices must be considerable and by dent of incessant peeping and prying into every seam and break in the bark they get fuel enough to keep their delicate machinery going the brown creeper with his long flender, decurved bill secures with the chickadee with his short straight bill fails to get the creeper works the trunk of the tree from the ground up and straight or in spiral lines disappearing quickly around the trunk if he sensed danger he is more assimilatively colored than any of his winter congeners being like a bit of animated bark itself in form and color hence his range and movements are more limited and rigid than those of the woodpeckers and chickadees the creeper is emphatically a tree trunk bird his enemies are shrikes and hawks and the quickness with which he will dart around the trunk or flash away to another trunk shows what the struggle for life has taught his race the range of the nut hatch is greater than that of the creeper in that he takes in more of the branches of the tree he is quite conspicuously colored in his suit of black, like gray, blue, and white and his power of movement is correspondingly varied his bill is straight and heavier and has an upwards land with the angle of the face that must serve him some useful purpose he navigates the tree trunks up and down and around always keeping an eye on every source of danger in the air about him I have never seen a nut hatch molested or threatened by any bird of prey but his habitual attitude of watchfulness while exploring the tree trunks with head bent back and beak pointed out at right angles shows clearly what the experience of his race has taught him danger evidently lurks in that direction and black and white and blue are revealing colors in the neutral woods but however much the nut hatch may be handicapped by its coloration it far outstrips the creeper in range and numbers its varied diet of nuts and insects no doubt gives it a more vigorous constitution and makes it more adaptive it is the vehicle of more natural life and energy how winter emphasizes the movements of wildlife the snow and the cold are the white paper upon which the print is revealed a track of a mouse a bird, a squirrel, or a fox shows us at a glance how the warm pulse of life defies the embargo of winter from cracks and rints in the frigid zone which creep down upon us at the season there issue tiny jets of warm life which play about here and there as if in the heyday of summer the wood snap and explode with the frost the ground is choked with snow no sign of food is there for bird or beast but here are these tiny bundles of sheer and contentment in feathers, the chickadees, the nut hatches and their fellows and a section 8 recorded by Edith Fern Southern California May 24th 2009 section 9 of Nature in Your Home and Other Papers by John Burroughs this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain to learn more or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Nature in Your Home and Other Papers by John Burroughs section 9 each after its kind how sharply most forms of life are differentiated the dye that stamps each of them is deeply and clearly cut as I sit here in my bush camp under the apple trees I see a chipmunk spinning up the stone wall a few yards away his alert eye spies me and he pauses sits up a few moments washes his face with that hurried movement of his paws over it while spinning back down the stone fence he seems to sniff danger in me he is living his life he has a distinct sphere of activity in this broad rolling landscape he is a little jet of vital energy that has a character and a purpose of its own it is unlike any other how unlike the woodchuck in the next field creeping about the meadow storing up his winter fuel as fat in its own flabby body or the woodpecker on the apple tree or the noisy crow flying by overhead each is a manifestation of the psychic principle in organic nature but each is an individual expression of it the chemistry and the physics of their lives are the same but how different the impressions they severally make upon us life is infinitely various in its forms and activities though living things all be made of one stuff soon after the chipmunk there appears a red squirrel going down the wall half brother to the chipmunk but keyed to a much higher degree of intensity he moves in spasms and sallies he is very risky and impish where the chipmunk is sedate and timid his arboreal life requires different qualities and powers he rushes to the treetops like a rocket he travels on bridges of air he is nearly as much at home amid the branches as are the birds much more so than as the flying squirrel which has but one trick while the red squirrel has a dozen that facile tail now a carcade, now a shield, now an air buoy that mocking dance those electric spurts and dashes what a character he is the very puck of the woods yesterday a grey squirrel came down the wall from the mountain a long softly underlating line of silver grey unhurried, alert, but not nervous pausing now and then but striking no attitudes silent as a shadow and graceful as a wave the very spirit of the tall, like uncovered birches and beaches at the mountainside when food is scarce in the woods he comes to the orchards and fields for insects fruit, and any chance bit of food he can pick up what a contrast he makes to the pampered town squirrel gross in form and heavy in movement the town squirrel is the real rustic while the denizen of the woods has the grace and refinement domestication or semi-domestication coarsens and vulgarizes the wild creatures only in the freedom of their native haunts do they keep the beauty and delicacy of form and color that belong to them a nut hatch comes upon the apple tree in front of me, uttering now and then a soft nasal call and runs up and down and round the trunk and branches his boat-shaped body navigating the rough surfaces and barely touching them every moment or two he stops and turns his head straight out from the tree as if he had an extra joint in his neck is he on the lookout for danger he pecks a little now and then but most of the food he is in quest of seems on the surface and is very minute a downy woodpecker comes upon the same tree his movements are not so free as those of the nut hatch he does not go head foremost down the tree his head is always pointed upward he braces and studies himself with his tail which has stiff spines at the end of the quills by a curious gymnastic feet he drops down the trunk inch by inch loosing his hold for a moment and instantly recovering it he cannot point his beak out at right angles to the tree as can the nut hatch in fact he is not a tree-creeper but a woodpecker and can penetrate fairly hard wood with his beak his voice has a harsh metallic ring compared with that of the soft childlike call of the nut hatch his only contribution to the music of the spring is his dry lamb drum with which he seeks to attract his mate when the love passion is upon him oh these wild creatures how clear-cut, how individual how definite they are while every individual of the species seems stamped with the same dye the species themselves, even in closely allied groups are as distinct and various in their lineaments and characteristics as we can well conceive behold the order of rodents including the squirrels, the hares the rabbits, the woodchucks the prairie dogs, the rats and mice the porcupines, the beavers what diversity amid the unity what unlikeness amid the sameness it makes one marvel anew at the ingenuity and inventiveness of nature some living above ground some below some depending upon the fleetness of foot some upon dens and burrows always near hand the porcupine upon an armor of barbed quills the beaver upon his dam and his sharpness of scents if they all descended from the same original type form how that form has branched like a tree in the fields dividing and dividing and dividing again but the likeness to the tree fails when we consider that no two branches are like in fact, that they are as unlike as pears and peaches and apples and berries and cherries would be on the same tree all of the same family but diverging wildly in the species the ground dwellers such as woodchucks and prairie dogs and gophers have many similar habits as have the tree dwellers and the hares and rabbits that any of these rodent groups will branch again and develop a new species is in harmony with the doctrine of evolution but these evolutionary processes are so slow that probably the whole span of human history would be inadequate to measure one of them nearly all the animal forms that we know are specialized forms like our tools and implements shaped for some particular line of activity man is the most generalized of animals his organization opens to him many fields of activity the woodpecker must peck for his food the kingfisher must dive the fly catcher must swoop the hawk must strike the squirrel must gnaw the cat must spring the woodcock must probe the barnyard fowls must scratch his hands are tools that can be turned to a thousand uses they are for love or war to crest or to smile to climb or to swim to hurl or to seize to delve or to build the organization of most animals has special reference to their mode of getting a living that is the most dominant need and stamps itself upon every organism man is a miscellaneous feeder and a worldwide traveler hence all climbs and conditions are his he is at home in the arctics or the tropics on the sea on the land and in the air a fruit eater a grain eater a flesh eater a nut eater an herb eater his generalized anatomy and his diversified mentality make the whole earth his willing place and all its thousands of treasure houses are made available for his needs what diversity and unity among the hawks contrast these two familiar species which are nearly of a size the marsh hawk and the hen or red-tailed hawk the marsh hawk has a longer tail and the back of the male is blueish gray we see it in summer beating up and down low over the fields and meadows its attention fixed upon the ground beneath it at the same time we may see the hen hawk soaring aloft sweeping leisurely around in great circles or climbing higher in easy spirals apparently abandoning itself to the joy of its aerial freedom the hen hawk is a bird of leisure and contrast with its brother of the marshes we rarely see it hunting it is either describing its great circles against the sky apparently in the same mood that the skater is in who cuts his circles and figures upon the eyes or else it sits perched like a statue high up on some dead branch in the edge of the forest or on some tree by the roadside and sees the summer hours go by solitude, contemplation a sense of freedom seem to be its chief delight while we rarely see the marsh hawk except when it is intent upon its game it haunts the fields and meadows over a wide area like a spirit up and down and around and across it goes only a few feet above the ground eyeing sharply every yard or surface beneath it now and then dropping down into the grass never swooping or striking savagely but halting and alighting rather deliberately evidently not in pursuit of a bird but probably attracted by field mice the eye follows its course with pleasure such industry, such ease of movement the eye follows its course with pleasure the eye follows its course with pleasure such industry, such ease of movement such deliberation, such a tireless quest over the summer fields all contribute to make a picture which we look upon with interest it is usually the female which we see on such occasions she is larger and darker in color than the male and apparently upon her falls the main support of the family said family is usually composed of three or four young in an est upon the ground in a marsh where it is not easy for the pedestrian to reach the hunting habits of the hen hawk are quite different it subsists largely not upon hens or poultry as its name would seem to indicate but upon field mice and other small rodents which it swoops down upon from a point in the air above them where it hovers a moment on beating wing or from the top of some old stub or dry branch in the meadow its nest is usually placed fifty or more feet from the ground in some large forestry and is made of dry twigs and branches I have found but one marsh hawk's nest and not more than once in twenty years do I find the nest of a hen hawk two species of our smaller hawk's present about a sharper contrast as do the two I have just described the sparrow hawk and the pigeon hawk it is very doubtful if the sparrow hawk ever kills sparrows its food being large in insects though the pigeon hawk is not above killing pigeons at least of pursuing them with murderous intent it is the terror of the smaller birds capturing robins, high holes blue birds, thrushes and almost any other it can get its cause upon if you see a small bird hotly pursued by a brown hawk the chances are that it is the song or fields sparrow making desperate efforts to reach the cover of some bush or tree on such occasions I have seen the pursued bird take refuge in a thorn bush the branches of which have been cropped by the cattle till they were so thick and thorny that you could hardly insert your hand among them in such cases the hawk is of course defeated but he will be about to bush spitefully making attempts to dislodge his game the sparrow hawk is the prettiest of our hawks and probably the most innocent one midsummer when I was a boy on the old farm we had a sudden visitation of sparrow hawks there must have been at least 50 about the old meadow at one time alighting upon the fence stakes or hovering on the wing above the grass and slipping down upon the big fat grasshoppers it was a pretty sight and unusual as I have witnessed it only once in my life our birds often differ in their habits much more than in their forms and colors we have two flycatchers singularly alike in general appearance namely the Phoebe bird and the wood Pee-wee which differ widely in their habits of life the Phoebe is the better known because she haunts our porches and sheds and bridges and not infrequently makes herself a nuisance from the vermin with which her nest, especially her midsummer nest often swarms she is an early spring bird in her late March or early April call repeating over and over the name by which she is known is the sound that every country boy delights in the wood Pee-wee is a little less in size but in form and color and manners is almost a duplicate of the Phoebe she is a much later arrival and need not be looked for till the trees begin to turn over their new leaves then you may hear her tender plaintive cry amid the forest branches also a repetition of her own name but with a silvan cadence and tenderness particularly its own it differs from the Phoebe's note just as the leafy solitudes of the woods differ from the strong open light and the fenced steaks and ridge boards where the Phoebe loves to perch it is the voice or cry of a lonely yearning spirit attuned to great sweetness and tenderness the Phoebe has not arrested the attention of any of our poets but the Pee-wee has inspired at least one fine woodsy poem I refer to Trial Bridges Pee-wee the nesting habits of the two birds differ as widely as do their songs the Phoebe is an architect who works with mud and moss using a ladder in a truly artistic way except when she is tempted as she so often is to desert the shelving rocks by the waterfalls or along the brows of the wooded slopes for the painted porches of our houses or the sod timbers of our outbuildings where her moss is incongruous and gives away the secret she so carefully seeks to guard you cannot buy any sleight of hand or of beak use moss on a mud nest is to blend it with a porch or timber background but in the niches of the mossy and lichen covered overhanging rocks of the gorgeous and mountain sides where her four bearers practice the art of nest building and where she still often sets up her procreant cradle what in the shape of a nest can be more pleasing and exquisite than her moss covered structure it is entirely fit it is nature's own handiwork and thoroughly in the spirit of the shelving rocks the Pee-wee uses no mud and no moss she uses lichens and other wild woodsy things and her nest is one of the most trim and artistic of wild bird structures it is as finished and symmetrical as an acorn cup it is cup shaped and sits on a horizontal branch of beech or maple as if it were a grown part of the tree not one loose end or superfluous stroke about it two other species of our fly catchers the king bird and the great crested differ in form and coloration as much as they do in life habits the king bird being rather showily clad in black, gray, and white with a peculiar affected tip wing flight and haunting the grows in orchards while the great crested fly catcher is rufous or copper colored with a tinge of saffron yellow haunting the woods and building its nest in a cavity in a tree occasionally in orchards nature repeats herself with variations in two of our sparrows the song sparrow and the vesper sparrow or grass finch the lighter is a trifle the larger model gray and brown color and has certain field habits such as skulking or running in the grass and running along the highway in front of your team it does not wear the little dark brown breast pin that the song sparrow does and it has two lateral white quills in its tail which are conspicuous when it flies its general color and these white quills suggest a skylark and it was doubtless these features that let a male lark which once came to me from overseas and which I liberated in a wild field near home to pay court to the vesper and to press his suit day after day to the obvious embarrassment of the sparrow the song sparrow is better known than the vesper to all country people because it lives near our dwellings it is an asset of every country garden and lawn and nearby roadside and it occasionally spends the winter in the Hudson river valley when you have carelessly or thoughtfully left a harvest of weed seeds for it to subsist upon it comes before the vesper in the spring and its simple song on a bright march before April morning is one of the most welcome of all vernal sounds in its manners it is more fussy and suspicious than the vesper and it worries a great deal about its nest if one comes anywhere in its vicinity it is one of the familiar half domesticated birds that suggest home to us wherever we see it the song sparrow is remarkable above any other bird I know for its repertoire of songs few of our birds have more than one song except in those cases when a flight song is added to the season as with the oven bird the purple finch, the gold finch, the meadowlark and a few others but every song sparrow has at least five distinct songs that differ from one another as much as any five lyrics by the same poet differ the bird from its perch on the bush or tree will repeat one song over and over usually five or six times a minute for two or three minutes then it will change to another string quite different in time and measure and repeat it for a dozen or more times still another and yet another and another each song standing out distinctly as a new combination in sequence of sparrow notes and a still greater wonder is that no two song sparrows have the same repertoire each bird has its own individual songs an endless and bewildering variety inside a general resemblance the song sparrow you hear in Maine or Canada differs widely from the one you hear in the Hudson River Valley or on the Potomac even in the same neighborhood two sparrows whose songs were exactly alike whereas two robins or meadowlocks or bluebirds or woodthrushes or vesper sparrows or goldfinches or indigo birds differ from one another in their songs as little as they do in their forms and manners and from one end of the country to the other there is little or no variation during ten days by the sea one July I was greatly entertained by a song sparrow which had a favorite perch on the top of a small red cedar that stood in front of the cottage where I was staying four fifths of the day at least it was perched upon this little cedar platform going through its repertoire of song over and over getting its living seemed entirely a secondary matter the primary matter was the song I estimated that it sang over two thousand times each day that I heard it it had probably been singing at the same rate since May or earlier and would probably keep it up till August or later the latter part of July and the whole of August of the same season I spent it with Chuck Lodge and the Catskills and across the road in front of the porch there on the top of an old plum tree a song sparrow sang throughout the greater part of each summer day as did the one by the sea going through its repertoire of five or six songs and happy iteration it too sang about three hundred times an hour and nearly always from the same perch and as most assuredly was the case with the seaside bird singing with an earshot of its brooding mate but its songs bore only the most remote general resemblance to those of its seaside brother when early in August the mowing machine laid low the grass and the meadow on the edge of which the old plum tree stood the singer behaved as if some calamity had befallen him as no doubt there had he disappeared from his favorite perch and I heard him no more except at long intervals below the hill in another field the vests per sparrow has a wilder and more pleasing song than the songs sparrow but has no variety it has only the one sweet plaintive strain in which it indulges while perched upon a stone or bowler or barren knoll in a hill pasture or by a remote roadside the charm of its song is greatly enhanced by the soft summer twilight in which it is so often uttered it sounds the vespers of the fields the vespers sparrow is invariably a ground builder placing its nest of dry grass in the open with rarely a weed or tuft of grass to mark its site hence its eggs were young and its small victims to the sharp-eyed all-devouring crows as they lead their clamorous broods about the summer pastures the song sparrow more frequently selects this nesting place in a grassy or mossy bank by the roadside or in the orchard when it does not leave the ground to take to a low bush or tangle of vines on the lawn as it so frequently does we have two other sparrows that are close to kin indeed almost like fruit on the same tree yet with clear-cut differences I refer to the chippy the social sparrow and the field or as I prefer to call it the bush sparrow two birds that come so near being duplicates of each other that in my boyhood I recognize only the one species the chippings sparrow so much at home in the orchard and around the door-yard few country persons I fancy discriminate the two species they are practically the same size and same manners but different color the bush sparrow is the more wreset has a wreset beak and feet and legs and its general appearance harmonizes more with country surroundings the two species differ in about the same way that the town dweller differs from his rustic brother but in the matter of song there is no comparison the strain of the bush sparrow being one of the most tender and musical of all our sparrow songs while that of the chippy or the hare-burn as it is often called is the shuffling repetition of a single un-musical note the wild scenes and field solitudes are reflected in the bush sparrow song while that of the chippy is more suggestive of the sights and sounds near the haunts of men the pure, plaintive, childlike strain of the bush sparrow a silver scroll of tender song heard in the prophetic solitude of the remote fields on a soft April or May morning is to me one of the most touching and pleasing bits of bird music to be heard in the whole round year the swarms of small sparrows that one sees in August and September in the vineyards and along the bushy highways are made up mostly of bush sparrows there is a little doubt but that these birds at time-peck and haggle the grapes, which chippy never does the bush sparrow builds a more compact and substantial nest using more dry grass and weedy gross and less horsehair it is the abundant use of hare that has given chippy the name of the hare-bird the hare-bird appears a more strikingly dressed of the two its black beak and legs the darker lines of its plumage the well-defined brick-red patch of its head easily separate it to the careful observer from the other species when you have learned quickly to discriminate these two kinds of sparrows you have made a good beginning in conquering the bird kingdom end of section 9 recorded by Edith Fern Southern California June 2009 section 10 of Nature in Her Home and Other Papers by John Burroughs this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain to learn more or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Nature in Her Home and Other Papers by John Burroughs section 10 Nature Leaves and War Blur Time this early May morning as I walked through the fields the west wind brought to me a sweet fresh odor like that of our little white sweet violet Viola Blanda it came probably from sugar maples just shaking out their fringe like blossoms and from the blooming elms for a few hours when these trees first bloom they shed a decided perfume it was the first breath of May and very welcome April has her odors too very delicate and suggestive but seldom is the wind perfumed with the breath of actual bloom before May I said it is warblur time the first arrivals of the pretty little migrants should be noted now hardly had my thought to find itself when before me in a little hemlock of a blue white barred wing then glimpses of a yellow breast and a yellow crown I approached cautiously and in a moment more had a full view of one of our rarer warblers the blue winged yellow warblur very pretty he was too the yellow cap, the yellow breast and the black streak through the eye being conspicuous features he would not stand to be looked at long but soon disappeared in a nearby tree the ruby crown kinglet was piping never green tree not far away but him I had been hearing for several days with me the kinglets come before the first warblurs and may be known to the attentive eye by their quick nervous movements and small olive gray forms and to the discerning ear by their hurried musical piping strains how soft how rapid how joyous and lyrical their songs are very few country people I imagine either see them or hear them the powers of observation of country people are seldom fine enough and trained enough they see and hear coarsely an object must be big and sound loud to attract their attention have you seen and heard the kinglet if not the finer inner world of nature is a sealed book to you when your senses take in the kinglet they will take in a thousand other objects that now escape you my first warblur in the spring is usually the yellow red pole which I see in April it is not a bird of the trees and woods, but of low bushes in the open often alighting upon the ground in quest of food I sometimes see it on the lawn the last one I saw was one April day when I went over to the creek to see if the suckers were yet running up the bird was splitting amid the low bushes now and then dropping down to the gravelly bank of the stream its chestnut crown and yellow underparts were noticeable the past season I saw for the first time the golden wing warblur a shy bird that eluded me a long time in an old clearing that had grown up with low bushes the song first attracted my attention it is so like informed to that of the black-throated greenback but in quality so inferior the first distant glimpse of the bird too suggested the greenback so for a time I deceived myself with the notion that it was the greenback with some defect in its vocal organs a day or two later I heard two of them and then concluded my inference was a hasty one following one of the birds up I caught sight of its yellow crown which is much more conspicuous than its yellow wingbars its song is like this nut nut d d d with a peculiar reedy quality but not at all musical following far short of the clear sweet lyrical song of the greenback narrowing season it a resemblance to that of the Maryland yellow throat but I failed to see any resemblance whatever one appreciates how bright and gay the plumage of many of our warblers is when he sees one of them ally up on the ground while passing along a wood road in June a male black-throated green came down out of the hemlocks and sat for a moment on the ground before me how out of place he looked like a bit of ribbon or millinery just dropped there this row of this warbler always suggest the finest black velvet not long after I saw the chestnut sight and warbler do the same thing we were trying to make it out the apple tree by the roadside when it dropped down quickly to the ground in pursuit of an insect and sat a moment upon the brown surface giving us a vivid sense of its bright new plumage when the leaves of the trees are just unfolding or as Tennyson says when all the woods stand in a mist of green and nothing perfect the tide of migrating warblers is at its height they come in the night and in the morning the trees are alive with them the apple trees are just showing the pink they expect them in their eager quest for insect food one cold rainy day at this season wilson's black cap a bird that is said to go north nearly to the arctic circle explored an apple tree in front of my window it came down within two feet of my face as I stood by the pain and paused a moment in its hurry and peering in at me giving me an admiral view of its form and markings it was wet and hungry and it had a long journey before it the black pole warbler which one may see about the same time is a much larger bird and a slower movement and is colored much like the black and white creeping warbler with a black cap on its head the song of this bird is the finest in volume and most insect like of any warbler known to me it is the song of the black and white creeper reduced high and swelling in the middle and low and faint at its beginning and ending when one has learned to know and discriminate the warblers he has made a good beginning in his ornithological studies and of section 10 recording by Edith Fern Southern California November 9th, 2009 section 11 of Nature Near Home and Other Papers by John Burroughs this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain to learn more or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Nature Near Home and Other Papers by John Burroughs one mid summer afternoon I went up to Scotland and prowled about amid the raspberry bushes finding a little fruit black and red here and there and letting my eyes wander to the distant farms and mountains the wild but familiar prospect dilated and rested me as I lingered near the torn edge of the woods and a tangle of raspberry bushes I caught a glimpse of some large bird dropping suddenly to the ground from a tall basswood that stood in the edge of the open from my view. Was it a crow or a hawk? a hawk I guessed from its manner of descent I threw a stone after waiting some moments for it to reappear but it made no sign then I moved slowly toward the spot and presently up spring a hand hawk and uttering its characteristic squeal circled around near me and then alighted not far off a young hawk I saw it was and quite unsophisticated presently as I made my way along the edge of the woods a cubby of nearly full grown partridges burst up out of the berry bushes ten or twelve of them and went humming up into the denser woods some of them alighting in the trees once they stretched their necks to watch me as I passed along the dust flew from their plumage as they jumped up as if they had been earthing their wings my next adventure was with a young but fully grown bluebird which crawled and fluttered away from my feet as I came upon it in the open it could not fly and I easily picked it up its plumage showed the mingle blue and speckled brown of the immature bird I looked it over but could see no mark or sign of injury to wing or body its plumage was unruffled and its eye bright but its movements were feebled was it ill or starved I could not tell which probably the latter it may have got lost from the brood and was not yet able to forge for itself I left it under the edge of a rock where the fresh blue of the ends of its wings and tail held my eye a moment as I turned to go farther along under some shelving rocks I came upon two empty Phoebe's nests a relic of bird life that always gives a touch to the rocks that I delight in I find none of these nests placed lower than three feet from the ground and always in places that seem to be carefully chosen with reference to enemies that can reach and climb two or three woodchucks which I bagged with my eye completed my afternoon's adventures and a section 11 recording by Edith Fern Southern California November 9th 2009 nature near home and other papers by John Burroughs this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain to learn more or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org nature near home and other papers by John Burroughs section 12 in field and wood intense observation the casual glances or the admiring glances that we cast upon nature do not go very far in making us acquainted with her real ways only long and close scrutiny can reveal these to us the look of appreciation is not enough the eye must become critical and analytical if we would know the exact truth close scrutiny of an object in nature will nearly always yield some significant fact that our admiring gaze did not take in I learned a new fact about the crystal the other day by scrutinizing it more closely than I had ever before done I discovered that the wave of bloom begins in the middle of the head and spreads both ways up and down whereas in all other plants known to me with flowering heads or spikes except the goldenrod and the steeple bush the wave of bloom begins at the bottom and creeps upward like a flame in the goldenrod it drops down from branch to branch in vervein in blue weed in venus's looking glass in the evening primrose and others the bloom creeps slowly upward from the bottom but with the teasle the flame of bloom is first kindled in the middle today you see the head with this purple zone or girdle about it and in a day or two you see two purple girdles with an open space between them and these move one up and the other down till the head stands with a purple base and a purple crown with a broad space of neutral green between them this is a sample of the small facts in nature that interest me exceptional facts that show how nature at times breaks away from a fixed habit a beaten path so to speak and tries a new course she does this in animal life too Huxley mentions a curious exception to the general plan of the circulation of the blood in all animals that have a circulation the blood takes one definite in a variable direction except in the case of one class of marine animals called asidians in them the heart after beating a certain number of times stops and begins to beat the opposite way so as to reverse the current then in a moment or two it changes again and drives the blood in the other direction all things are possible with nature and these unexpected possibilities or departures from the general plan are very interesting it is interesting to know that any creature can come into being without a father but with only a grandfather yet such is the case the drone in the hive has no father and this queen produces drones that is in producing males the male is dispensed with it is to produce the neuters or the workers that the service of the male is required the queen bee is developed for one of these neuter eggs hence her male offspring have only a grandfather the chipmuk is an old friend of my boyhood in my later years also but by scrutinizing his ways a little more closely than usual the past summer I learned things about this pretty little rodent that I did not before know I discovered for instance that he digs his new hole for his winter quarters in mid-summer in my strolls of field or along the road in july I frequently saw a fresh pile of earth upon the grass near a stone fence or in the orchard or on the edge of the woods usually a peck or two of bright new earth carefully put down in a pile upon the ground without any clue visible as to where it probably came from but a search in the grass or leaves usually disclosed its source a little round hole neatly cut through the turf and leading straight downward I came upon ten such mounds of earth upon a single farm and found the hole from which each came only one to six feet away in one case in a metal recently mowed I had to explore this stubble with my finger over several square yards of surface before I found the squirrel's hole so undisturbed was the grass around it not a grain of soil had this little delver drop near it and not the slightest vestige of a path made from the tunnel to the dump and this feature was noticeable in every case the hole had been dug several yards underground and several pecks of fresh earth removed to a distance of some feet without the least speck of soil or the least trace of the workmen's footsteps showing near the entrance such clean deft workmanship was remarkable all this half bushel or more of earth the squirrel must have carried out in his sheet pockets and he must have made hundreds of trips to and fro and yet if he had flown like a bird the turf could not have been freer from the marks of his going and coming and he had cut down through the turf as one might have done with an auger without bruising or disturbing in any way the grass about the edges it was a clean neat job in every case so much so that it was hard to believe that the delver did not come up from below and have a back door from what he carried his soil some yards away indeed I have heard this theory stated look under the pile of earth said a friend who is with me and who had observed the work of the pocket gopher in the west and you will find the back door there but it was not so I carefully removed four piles of earth and dug away the turf beneath them and no hole was to be found one day we found a pile of earth in a meadow and near it a hole less than two inches deep showing where the chipmunk had begun to dig and had struck a stone then he went a foot or more up the hill and began again here he soon struck stones as before then he went still farther up the hill and this time was successful in penetrating the soil this was conclusive proof that these round holes are cut from above and not from below as we often see in the case of the woodchuck hole the squirrel apparently nods through the turf instead of digging through and carries away the loosened material in his mouth never dropping or scattering a grain of it no home was ever built with less litter no cleaner door yard from first to last can be found the absence of anything like a trail or beaten way from the mound averse to the hole or anything suggesting passing feet I understood better when later in the season day after day I saw chipmunk carrying supplies into his den which was in the turf by the roadside about ten feet from a stone wall he covered the distance by a series of short jumps apparently striking each time upon his toes between the spears of grass and leaving no marks whatever by which his course could be traced this was also his manner of leaving the hole and doubtless it was his manner in carrying away the soil from his tunnel to the dumping pile he left no sign upon the grass he disturbed not one spear about the entrance there was a mystery about this den by the roadside of which I have just spoken the pile of earth could not be found unless the roadmaker had removed it it must have been hidden in or beneath the stone wall and there was a mystery about some of the other holes that was absolutely baffling to me in at least four mounds of fresh earth I found freshly dug stones that I could not by any manipulation get back into the hole out of which they had evidently come they were all covered with fresh earth and were in the pile of soil with many other smaller stones in one case a stone two inches long one and one half inches broad and one half inch thick was found in two other cases stones of about the same length and breadth but not so thick were found in another case could the stone be forced into the hole in still another case the entrance to the den was completely framed by the smaller roots of a beech tree and in the little mound of earth near it were two stones that could only be gotten back into the hole by springing one of these roots which required considerable force to do in two at least of these four cases it was a physical impossibility for the stones to have come out of the hole from whence the mound of earth and the lesser stones evidently came yet how happened they in the pile of earth freshly earth stained the squirrel could not have carried them in his cheek patches they were so large how then did he carry them the madder stood thus with me for some weeks I was up against a little problem in natural history that I could not solve late in November I visited the scene of the squirrel holes again and at last got the key to the mystery the cunning little delver cuts a groove in one side of the hole just large enough to let the stone through then packs it full of soil again by November visit it had been snowing and raining and freezing and thawing and the top of the ground was getting soft a red squirrel had visited the hole in the orchard where two of the largest stones were found in the pile of earth and had apparently tried to force his way into the chipmunk's den in doing so he had loosened the earth and the groove softened by the rains and it had dropped out the groove was large enough for me to lay my finger in and just adequate to admit the stones into the hole this then was the way the little engineer solved the problem and I experienced a sense of relief that I had solved mine I visited the second hole where the large stone was in the pile of earth and found that the same thing had happened there a red squirrel, bent on plunder had been trying to break in and had removed the soil in the groove I feel bound to report that the next season I found a pile of earth which a chipmunk had removed from his den containing a stone too large to go into the hole yet the most careful examination failed to reveal that there had ever been any groove cut in it or that it had ever been in any way enlarged to settle the point as to whether or not the chipmunk has a back door which in no case had I been able to find we dug out the one by the roadside whose mound of earth we could not discover we followed his torturous course through the soil three or four feet from the entrance and nearly three feet beneath the surface where we found him in his chamber warm in his nest of leaves he had no back door he came out, it was a male as a hand was thrust into his chamber and the same fearless strong hand seized him but did not hurt him his chamber was spacious enough to hold about four courts of winter stores and leave him considerable room to stir about in his supplies consisted of the seeds of the wild buckwheat polygonum, doomitorum and choked cherry pits and formed a very unpromising looking mess his buckwheat did not seem to have been properly cured for much of it was moldy but it had been carefully cleaned every kernel of it there were nearly four courts of seeds all together and over one half of it was wild buckwheat I was curious to know approximately the number of these seeds he had gathered and chucked I first found the number it took to fill a lady's thimble and then the number of thimbles full it took to fill a cup and so reached the number in the two courts and found that it amounted to the surprising figure of two hundred and fifty thousand think of the amount of patient labor required to clean two hundred and fifty thousand of the small seeds of the wild buckwheat the grains are hardly one third of the size of those of the cultivated kind and are jet black when the husk is removed probably every seed was husked with those deft little hands and teeth as it was gathered before it went into his cheek pockets but what a task it must have been poor little hermit it seemed pathetic to find him facing the coming winter there with such inferior stuff in his greenery not a nut not a kernel of corn or wheat why he had not availed himself of the oaths that grew just over the fence I should like to know of course the wild buckwheat must have been more tisliking how many hazardous trips along fences and into the bushes his stores represented the ball creatures all live in a savage country as did our earliest ancestors and the enemy of each is lying and wait for it at nearly every turn digging the little fellow out of course brought ruin upon his house and I think the muse of natural history contemplated the scene with many compunctions of conscience if she has any conscience which I am inclined to doubt but our human hearts prompted us to do all we could to give the provident little creature a fresh start we put his supplies carefully down beside the stone wall into which he had disappeared on being liberated and the next day he had carried a large part of them away he evidently began at once to hustle and I trust he found or made a new retreat in winter before it was too late I doubt if the chipmunk ever really hibernates the hibernating animals do not lay up winter stores but he no doubt indulges in many very long before dinner and after dinner naps it is blackest night there in his den three feet under the ground and this lasts about four months or until the premonitions of coming spring reach him in march and call him forth I am curious to know if the female chipmunk also digs a den for herself and picks up with one occupied by the male the previous winter one ought to be safe in generalizing upon the habits of chipmunks in digging their holes after observing ten of them yet one must go slow even then nine of the holes I observed had a pile of earth near them the tenth hole had no dumps that I could find then I found four holes with the soil hauled out and piled up about the entrance precisely after the manner of wood checks this was a striking exception to the general habit of the chipmunks in this manner is this the way the female digs her hole I asked myself, or is it the work of young chipmunks? I have in two cases found holes in the ground on the borders of swamps occupied by weasels but the holes were in all outward respects like those made by chipmunks with no soil near the entrance the wood chipmunks no attempt to conceal his hole by carrying away the soil neither does the prairie dog nor the pocket gopher the pile of tell-tale earth in each case may be seen from afar while seeing instead of notions of neatness and concealment that he rarely departs from the more I study his ways the more I see what a clever and foxy little rodent he is End of section 12 Recording by Edith Fern Southern California November 20th, 2009