Part 10
They are seed eaters like sparrows, and may also eat such tiny creatures as they find along the beach, and they are always flocking and scattering out from one rise and level to the next. To me, the fanciful difference between buntings and sparrows, sanderlings, gulls, horned larks, and many other visitors to seaside lands is their trait of invisibility. It is not only their whiteness--they look almost entirely white seen from underneath, appearing and disappearing like clouds--and a plumage which belongs to the accents of sunlight, grass stalks, dune shadows, on the bare ground--but their actions. With a motion reminiscent of the roller-coaster type of flight which the goldfinches have, flocks of buntings will pour down onto the cliff top or beach, spread out and then fly up again, with an inner billowing, a dipping, and rising as they go. Twittering with a note of tinkling bells in the high air beside the bowling sea, they swing and then burst in gentle snow flights across the ground, through one opening, one neat run, one clean escape to another. They turn the invisible into reality. They have a continual lift, the agitation inherent in all life. They fly up ahead of me as sparks out of the unseen rest and center of things.
Another bird of the tundra, a specter from the far north which appears irregularly over the years during wintertime to hunt for rodents and occasional birds along the coast is the snowy owl. I remember seeing a mounted specimen when I was a boy and thinking it was the most desirable thing on earth to own, and since I never did own one, the snowy owl stayed intangible and magnificent in my mind; and the first live one I ever saw did nothing to disabuse me of my impression. They migrate to beaches, salt marshes, and islands along the coast, choosing elevations as a rule, hummocks, knolls, or dunes from which they can survey the surrounding countryside during their hunting season, watching the man or beach buggy arrive as well as evidence of prey. The one I saw was way down the south end of North Beach, that stretch of Nauset beach which ends at the straits separating it from Monomoy. It was perched on a hummock, and at first was nearly indistinguishable from the top of a white picket fence buried in sand, or the kind of white marble marker, rounded at the top, which you might see on a roadside in Vermont. We were driving toward it in a beach buggy and when it flew off low with big, soft, bowed wings, its feathers, white and flecked with gray, took on a blue-ash hue from the winter light and the uneven shadowy land around it. The great owl lighted calmly on another hummock further on. It stared straight at us out of fierce yellow eyes, with inscrutable dignity, and when we turned and came at it from another direction its head almost swiveled all the way around, looking at us from over its back. It kept its place in center stage.
Many thousands of eider ducks winter in Cape Cod waters. During October and November especially they can be seen shuttling back and forth across the sea beyond the Outer Beach. Some feed, principally on mussels, in the bay region or off Chatham and along other shallow shores and inlets, but the majority--an estimated 500,000--spend the winter over the shoals between Monomoy and Nantucket. Seen close to, as they fly low over the water, they are as sturdy, clean shaped, and of good design--the red-brown females, and males patterned in black and white--as a coastal vessel, a dory, or a skiff. From the beach you can see them fly over water in single lines, sometimes as much as a half a mile or more in length, with a steady, throbbing flight, like a suspended string of beads, alternately white and brown.
By contrast brant fly in longer, thicker lines, and sometimes show up like shivering black specks high over the sea. Well into December the gannets pass by over the sea surfaces too, flying singly for the most part, their broad white backs and long black-tipped wings reflecting the sunlight as they turn, to dive in their grand manner down, from fifty feet or more in the air, hard and bold into the water, sending up jets of spray.
Clutching at any aspect of nature is to seize a drop of water in your hand. Ebb and flow passes the great beach, the eternally wide ebb and flow of day and night passes the cliff tops, all earth’s shadows wave across its seas, and yet this is the precise route of the birds, their direction and their home. They know its guidelines inwardly. For us, who put so much emphasis on outward instruments, this can be almost impossible to understand.
Still, we can exaggerate the division between us. We are all at home together, however we use the stars and seasons in our separate ways. Men are as subject to mortality as birds, even though the latter can’t dwell upon it. They in turn are vulnerable to chance, to disease, to going astray and meeting with mishaps when confronted by the freakishness and violence of the weather. Many a duck or sea bird, caught on a lee shore or in a marshy inlet during a great storm may be unable to rise into the wind and is exhausted or swept away and seriously injured while trying. Life and death, joy and disaster, go wing to wing. Birds have less capacity to deceive themselves than we, being unable to avoid the perils of nature and at the same time its protective power.
I had similar thoughts in mind one day in November during a violent coastal storm while watching some gulls, ringed-bill and herring, together with a few shore birds, that were gathered at the head of an inlet along a relatively sheltered part of the Bay. The Outer Beach was of a violence that day which could hardly be approached, either on foot or in contemplation. Even here the storm winds were relentless, hard and cold, flicking and driving the sands along the shore, whipping the marsh waters behind it into a froth. Sanderlings made short, low, flying hops back and forth, but were unable to do their usual free hurrying and basket-swinging flights along the shore. The gulls stood in shallow water facing the wind, water that was being whipped and lashed, and sometimes they would drop down sideways a little before the wind’s force, thrown slightly off balance, acting like a man who has been cut across the face. Taking to the air just above the ground they would find difficulty in maneuvering and were forced back, sometimes fifty feet or more, to continue standing where they dropped back to the ground; but even in this they showed a certain supple power, a control aware of its limits, the sinewy economy of wings lifted in the wind, the plain sky beauty of feathers gray and white. The storm was ending, although the water was still being whiplashed into foam. The light was very cold and the sky line was heaped with sunset fires.
Surely everything, everywhere, was vulnerable, and yet it was that bird closeness to such primal powers as might seem to us bitter, alien, and cruel--the gods of the north, of the waters and the winds--that gave them an essential balance, a rightful place. That great sky of theirs was unexplored. It came down to me that regardless of what he learns, there is so much for a man to go on asking.
What can birds tell you, other than displaying those traits of aggression, or fear, or mutual attraction, which we may recognize when observing their behavior? We have a little fear in ourselves, when looking on, that we may go too far in mixing up our own traits and terms with theirs; but each will manage to keep his territory, untransgressed by the other, and each takes part in the high order of nature. Watching the birds, I have seen ceremony, ritual, love-making, display, all worthy of admiration by the most glittering of human cultures. The speech of men and the speech of birds do not divide us altogether. In silence is unity.
Perhaps the most eloquent thing about birds is that which we will probably never learn to decipher. In his study of puffins, R. M. Lockeley refers to their “subtle, silent-gesture language.” That language is part of a still more silent order, the dark realm of existence where all their actions and necessities have their play. Approach with patience and with care.
One day I had walked for several miles along the cliffs toward Eastham, through thickets of scrub oak, and bayberry that smelled very pungently in the fall of the year. The sky was full of shifting winds and the day as I walked full of weather changes, from an edge of cold to warmth and back again. An early sun began to be covered by pale-gray clouds and there was a mauve light over the sea. I caught sight of a little wren along the way, and there was a number of sparrows, both seen and heard--song, chipping, seaside, and probably others. It was a low, shifting thicket world full of potential surprise, bordered by oceanic sound, rocking with light and air.
I retraced my steps a few hours later over a narrow sandy road, at times no more than a track, and I saw a pigeon hawk flying off ahead of me, stroking deliberately and quickly with its long wings. Then I noticed another one roosting on a broken-off tree several hundred feet back of the cliff just outside a wood of pitch pines. The first one made off in that direction too, roosting not far from its companion on a dead stump, and they both stayed absolutely still, like falcons on an Egyptian frieze. I could hear a blue jay screaming somewhere in the background.
I noticed feathers scattered on the path, gray and blue, blowing ahead of me; and then, there it was, a blue jay freshly killed, its breast bare of feathers and shining red like some rock wet with sea splash in the crimson path of the setting sun. What kind of a game led up to this? Could the two hawks, one tempting the jay by its distance, the other scaring it by its proximity, have managed to send it out into the open where it had no chance against their swift and effortless pursuit? I walked ahead for a short distance and then waited, watching through field glasses for the hawks to come back. The nearest one did, after a few minutes, beating down tentatively over the kill, then rising again and leaving with its supple flight. The other had moved a little closer and roosted on an abandoned telephone pole, full of an ancient poise, wonderfully still. After that, I am sure, they never went back to the road until I had gone for good. The grace and tension, the space in that formal scene stayed with me for a long time.
XIV
The Marsh
The Outer Beach is broken only at Nauset Inlet, where the tidal waters pour through an opening that has frequently changed its width and position, and at Chatham. The Chatham break leads in to the wide area of Chatham Harbor and Pleasant Bay. In both places, but more especially at Nauset, where the marshes and the inland shore behind them are protected by the beach and a sandspit some two and three-quarter miles in length, an unstable, but at the same time fairly constant equilibrium is attained between sea and land. It does not seem obvious that this should be so at all. The sandspit looks only too narrow and fragile, and at intervals it does show evidence that the sea has broken through. Driftwood logs lie on the cuts made between its hummocks, headed as they were when the sea subsided, after it had lifted them in toward the marsh.
Except for the great volume of the beach itself, which is maintained in collaboration with the forces of the sea, it is hard at first to understand why the marsh should not be inundated. Why does that lord the sea not heave in and overwhelm this sandy barrier, flooding over the marshy flats and islands, and wash up permanently against the inland shore?
The shoulders of the low cedar-studded land slope down to the edge of the marsh with a neat, trimmed look and neat houses, seemingly confident of being in residence indefinitely, although I have heard people who live there talking in ways that suggested they were not sure of it. Once see those stormy waters heaving and rushing over the sandspit and you cannot be sure of anything. Looking out at the sea, even from a fairly safe distance, you can find eternal balance and at the same time inundation and disaster. Now that the Outer Beach stretches past the miles of cliffs and is no longer backed up by them, becoming an outlying stretch of sand, its own “protective” power might seem much less clear. On the other hand, when was this beach in anything but a state of flux and change? There is protection in that, even if it is hard to define. The fact is that the relationship between the sea, the beach, and the sandspit, the marsh and inland shore, has been maintained for ages in the past and probably ages to come. In general the volume of sand that is packed along the shore balances what is removed from it, but only in general, for the time being, because erosion takes place consistently over the years and during its course more sand is removed than delivered. Also a standing equilibrium is kept between this deposition and taking away of sand and the conditions offshore: the currents, drift, wave height and direction, the changing shoals and bars. All these states and forces are involved in an extremely complex kind of order, and it is certainly broken and rearranged all the time. A season may show it, or the records of history. In fact, changes occur from day to day.
When the young explorer Champlain visited the Cape in 1605 he sailed into Nauset Harbor, and at that time, judging by old records, the inlet was about halfway down the sandspit behind the beach. Since then it apparently has moved about a mile south, but its entrances have changed now and then, with long periods of relative stability in between, which might be broken at any time and then followed by some new arrangement of forces.
In his _Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States_, Edward Howe Forbush pointed out that this long protective spit, or “beach ridge” extending from Nauset to Monomoy had been pushed back a considerable distance, perhaps a mile, since the early seventeenth century. It used to lie far to the eastward, judging by early charts, of where it is now, and took the form of a long narrow island some twelve miles in length “with several small islands north of it and outlets to the ocean at either end--the northern one at Eastham and the southern lying between the end of this beach ridge and the Chatham shore.”
“In 1854 during the great storm that wrecked the lighthouse on Minot’s Ledge, the sea broke through the barrier into Orleans water at Nauset, and afterwards much of Nauset Harbor near the entrance filled partially with shifting sands.”
The recent Woods Hole beach studies report that: “The spits literally broke into pieces and the inlet itself became quite complex in 1957. Nauset Inlet has done this before. A study of coastal charts shows that Nauset Inlet opened hard against the cliffs on the south side from 1856 (the first good chart available to us) until 1940. Charts of 1941 show that in a single year a spit grew from south to north against the littoral drift and shifted the inlet a mile to the north.”
For some length of time, the storms of 1956 and 1957 resulted in two entrances along the spit, one of which closed up subsequently. Other temporary break-throughs can be seen along the spit, varying from 150 feet to a few yards across, extending down its length until it joins a broad, high stretch--almost a long mount--of sand which ends at the present inlet, with North Beach on the other side. This sand is subject to storm flooding and to winds, to being removed and added to, recut and carved by the waves, and except on the marsh edge of it, beach grass is not able to gain a foothold. In recent years four or five hundred pairs of terns have nested there, and are protected.
The volume of this sand is immense. It shelves down steeply toward the water where it becomes part of the beach; and where the channel of the inlet curves in, the ends of the beach on both sides keep changing their lengths and relative position. The sea builds high shoals off and around the incoming tidal channel during one season and it may level at least parts of them off in another. During the summer of 1962 the ribs and bottom of a boat at least thirty feet long was revealed on one bank of the inlet at its mouth, and could be seen for months; but by the winter of 1962-63 it had completely disappeared. A sandbank lay over it which was at least five or six feet higher than sea level.
Aerial photographs taken when the spit broke up in 1957, and afterwards in 1958, show a very elaborate and confusing pattern. Shoals and separate spits began to drift, to join and separate, shift and intermingle in curling, curving folds, an interwaving and repositioning of sand materials that would seem to have no parallel in nature.
The Nauset Inlet is being driven into the marsh behind it at an average rate of about 2.8 feet a year, except in years of extreme erosion. This figure is about the same as that of the cliffs, and on the whole it is probably somewhat less here than there, although the marsh area is being very gradually diminished in extent. Its wide channels and bays, its marshy edges, islands, and flats, are held in the balance of great forces sweeping along the shore, or occasionally breaking through in violence. Although it absorbs and releases the tidal waters with ancient calm, it seems wide out, subject to the sea and a part of the complex, barely understood forces that build and break along the shore.
The marsh is a refuge for ducks and geese, and gunners for centuries have waited there for the “whistlers,” or goldeneyes, and the black ducks to whir, swing in, and careen overhead under the wide light of dawn while the cold wind ruffled the open water and stirred the matted grass. Like the tides that flood in and fall, like the marsh grasses that grow and wave, then die down and take on their matted winter look, or the marine animals that swim in through the tidal channel and go out again to sea, it is a place of flight and motion. The local animals, crabs, clams, mussels, snails, the salt-water minnows in the ditches, the marsh snails, and numerous others, must go through their cycles of growth and death and decay here, the building of interlife relationships, but the over-all feeling that I have had about the marsh is a certain bare economy, as though it was more obligated to migrant forces, to flooding in and flooding out, then to any enclosed stability of its own. In a way it has the wide, flat isolated look of the more sheltered and extensive marshes on the Bay shore, but it is an isolation bound to the open waters of the sea which run through it and sometimes threaten its borders.
After their green summer and early golden fall, the marsh plants and grasses darken. In November the marshes are still russet, umber, and yellow green, but by January they are dark brown with reddish tawny tones in matted grasses having the coarse texture of a deer’s coat. The saltwort plants, so fresh and green and full of salt juices in the summer, have turned dry and white, curled over at their tips so that they have the look of singed wool.
When you walk behind the sandspit the marsh flats seem to stretch far off toward the shore and the channels between them are partly hidden. Nauset from the landward side, on the other hand, looks as if it were mostly composed of water, especially at high tide. It is both a good country for low-grass lovers like sparrows and those that ride its watery lanes and lakes like ducks and geese.
Low-flying, drab little seaside sparrows fly up off the grass for short distances and then disappear again. Occasionally I have flushed a meadowlark that planed up over the marsh. Horned larks peck in the dunes, tripping forward with a stamping motion of their legs, and then stop, to stand with a backward slant to their bodies. They fly up suddenly with shrill lisping cries; and all the while the deep quacking of black ducks sounds from far out in the middle of the marsh. There are always gulls, far or near, with their slow gliders’ fall and rise on the wind. The great blackbacks fly heavily overhead, sometimes wheeling in circles over the inlet with a muted baying, or hoarse, guttural calls; and with their necks and heads stretched way out and their wide-spread wings they might be mistaken for gannets.
Red-breasted mergansers come in from the sea with their thin heads and bills straight forward so that in flight they become throbbing arrows sent from a bow. One evening I stood in the hummocks of the spit facing the marsh while flock after flock of Canada geese flew in overhead, bugling as they came, close enough so that I could hear the fine high whistling of their wings, and even a rattle and rasp of air through their feathers. Low-flying planes often start them up as they feed in the marsh, along with the wary black ducks, whose cloudlike flocks stray back and forth for a while before they settle down again. A black duck’s wings show white underneath and they seem to spin as it flies up high and fast and changes direction, like a weathervane.