Part 7 (1/2)
There are, however, a few of the seed-eating birds, like the quail, and some of the insect-eaters, like the chickadee, who are so well provided for that they can stay and survive the winter. But the great majority of the birds, because they have no storehouse nor barn, must take wing and fly away from the lean and hungry cold.
And I am glad to see them go. The thrilling honk of the flying wild geese out of the November sky tells me that the hollow forests and closing bays of the vast desolate North are empty now, except for the few creatures that find food and shelter in the snow.
Here in my own small woods and marshes there is much getting ready, much comforting a.s.surance that Nature is quite equal to herself, that winter is not approaching unawares. There will be great lack, no doubt, before there is plenty again; there will be suffering and death. But what with the building, the strange deep sleeping, and the harvesting, there will be also much comfortable, much joyous and sociable, living.
Long before the muskrats began to build, even before the swallows commenced to flock, my chipmunks started their winter stores. I don't know which began his work first, which kept harder at it, Chipmunk or the provident ant. The ant has a great reputation for thrift, and verses have been written about her. But Chipmunk is just as thrifty.
So is the busy bee.
It is the thought of approaching winter that keeps the bee busy far beyond her summer needs. Much of her labor is entirely for the winter.
By the first of August she has filled the brood chamber of the hive with honey--forty pounds of it, enough for the hatching bees and for the whole colony until the willows ta.s.sel again. But who knows what the winter may be? how cold and long drawn out into the coming May? So the harvesting is pushed with vigor on, until the frosts kill the last of the autumn asters--on, until fifty, a hundred, or even three hundred pounds of honey are sealed in the combs, and the colony is safe should the sun not s.h.i.+ne again for a year and a day.
The last of the asters have long since gone; so have the witch-hazels.
All is quiet about the hives. The bees have formed into their warm winter cl.u.s.ters upon the combs; and except ”when come the calm, mild days,” they will fly no more until March or April. I will half close their entrances--and so help them to put on their storm-doors.
The whole out of doors around me is like a great beehive, stored and sealed for the winter, its swarming life close-cl.u.s.tered, and safe and warm against the coming cold.
I stand along the edge of the hillside here and look down the length of its frozen slope. There is no sign of life. The brown leaves have drifted into the mouths of the woodchuck holes, as if every burrow were forsaken; sand and sticks have washed in, too, littering and choking the doorways. A stranger would find it hard to believe that all of my forty-six woodchucks are gently snoring at the bottoms of these old uninteresting holes. Yet here they are, and quite out of danger, sleeping the sleep of the furry, the fat, and the forgetful.
The woodchuck's manner of providing for winter is very curious. Winter spreads far and fast, and Woodchuck, in order to keep ahead, out of danger, would need wings. But wings weren't given him. Must he perish then? Winter spreads far, but it does not go deep--down only about four feet; and Woodchuck, if he cannot escape overland, can, perhaps, escape _under_land. So down he goes _through_ the winter, down into a mild and even temperature, _five feet away_--only five feet, but as far away from the snow and the cold as Bobolink among the reeds of the distant Orinoco.
Indeed, Woodchuck's is a farther journey and even more wonderful than Bobolink's; for these five feet carry him to the very gates of death.
That he will return with Bobolink, that he will come up alive with the spring out of this dark way, is pa.s.sing strange.
Muskrat built him a house, and under the spreading ice turned all the meadow into a well-stocked cellar. Beaver built him a dam, cut and anch.o.r.ed under water a plenty of green sticks near his lodge, so that he too would be under cover when the ice formed, with an abundance of tender bark at hand. Chipmunk spent half of his summer laying up food near his underground nest. But Woodchuck simply digged him a hole,--a grave,--then ate until no particle more of fat could be got within his baggy hide, then crawled into his bed to sleep until the dawn of spring!
This is his s.h.i.+ft! This is the length to which he goes, because he has no wings, and because he cannot cut, cure, and store away, in the depths of the stony hillside, clover hay enough to last him through the winter. The beaver cans his fresh food in cold water; the chipmunk selects long-keeping things and buries them; but the woodchuck simply fattens himself, then buries himself, and sleeps--and lives!
”The north wind doth blow, And we shall have snow,”
but what good reason is there for our being daunted at the prospect?
Robin and all the others are well prepared. Even the wingless frog, who is also without fur or feathers or fat, even he has no fear at the sound of the cold winds. Nature provides for him, too, in her own motherly way. All he has to do is to dig into the mud at the bottom of the ditch and sleep--and sometimes freeze!
No matter. If the cold works down and freezes him into the mud, he never knows. He will thaw out as good as new; he will sing again for joy and love as soon as his heart warms up enough to beat. I have seen frogs frozen into the middle of solid lumps of ice. Drop the lump on the floor, and the frog would break out like a fragment of the ice itself. And this has happened more than once to the same frog without causing him the least ache or pain. He would gradually limber up, and croak, and look as wise as ever.
The north wind _may_ blow, for it is by no means a cheerless prospect, this wood-and-meadow world of mine in the gray November light. The gra.s.s-blades are wilting, the old leaves are falling; but no square foot of greensward will the winter kill, nor a single tree perhaps in all my wood-lot. There will be little less of life next April because of this winter. The winter birds will suffer most, and a few may die.
Last February, I came upon two partridges in the snow, dead of hunger and cold. It was after an extremely long ”severe spell”; but this was not the only cause. These two birds since fall had been feeding regularly in the dried fodder corn that stood shocked over the field.
One day all the corn was carted away. The birds found their supply of food suddenly cut off, and, unused to foraging the fence-rows and tangles for wild seeds, they seem to have given up the struggle at once, although within easy reach of plenty.
Hardly a minute's flight away was a great thicket of dwarf sumac covered with berries. There were bayberries, rosehips, greenbrier, bittersweet, black alder, and checkerberries that they might have found. These berries would have been hard fare, doubtless, after an unstinted supply of sweet corn; but still they were plentiful and would have been sufficient had the birds made use of them.
The smaller birds that stay through the winter, like the tree sparrow and the junco, feed upon the weeds and gra.s.ses that ripen unmolested along the roadsides and in the waste places. A mixed flock of these small birds lived several days last winter upon the seeds of the ragweed in my mowing-field.
The weeds came up in the early fall after the field was sowed to clover and timothy. They threatened to choke out the gra.s.s. I looked at them and thought with dismay of how they would cover the field by another fall. After a time the snow came, a foot and a half of it, till only the tops of the seedy ragweeds showed above the level white.