Part 3
A changing light, a shifting wind, calls me out to meet more of this earth than I know. Habit stifles me. My round needs to be recharged. So I take a walk, like the oven bird, though not to gather any more food than my senses and my spirit need. There is a lobe of land a mile away, through the oaks, over the shore road, and across to sea level, called the Crow Pasture. It is bordered by a tidal inlet and marsh on one side and the sands of Cape Cod Bay on the other. It is covered with low, wind-topped growth, blueberry bushes, beach plums, stands of pitch pine, and stunted oak; and it is flushed with moving light and shadow, hovered over and hunted by great clouds. The Crow Pasture is without houses so far, and it is a bare recipient of high events, the range of storms, the distances that come in and declare themselves by wind or flight, the summer vaunting of the sun, the cold appeal of the moon. Narrow, rutted dirt roads lead into it and take you on.
This land, once used for pasturing cows, now domesticated only by sparrows, robins, and chickadees, has final summer abundance in it. Locusts bound from dry land grasses with rattling wings. Green head flies buzz in savage haste. A yellow and black goldfinch flies over, bouncing along.
There are ebony-beaded blackberries on the ground, and a few dark berries left on high bush blueberries. A stiff wind from the south shakes up the thickets and the wild indigo, a compact, light bouquet of a plant with cloverlike leaves and yellow pea flowers. Pointed cedars stir and writhe. The air rushes through the bayberries with their glossy leaves, and it sweeps down across the marshland ahead through purple and yellow grasses that plume and sway, off to the white sands beyond.
Open land, wild air, lead ahead until salt water appears, the blue barrens that curve beyond sight. Stiff, stunted bushes are backed up at the edge of the marsh, hideaways for sparrows, then marsh rosemary, or sea lavender, shows in occasional clumps through the eddying stalks of grass. One area is thick with mosquitoes, sounding a low melody of harassment. In the bed of a ditch, dotted with holes made by fiddler crabs, are the tracks of a skunk. All that lives here permanently, not foraging like a skunk, or migratory like most of the birds, has to stand strong light, harsh winds, and salt spray, that dry, abrase, and burn.
The marsh merges with the sand, back of low dunes covered with stiff, sharp-tipped beach grass and seaside goldenrod, thick stalked, with broad soft leaves, a succulent, related to cacti, made to hold and retain moisture. The beach shelves down from the dunes and meets the exposed tidal ground, ledges of dark peat which is pitted like volcanic rock, and very slippery to walk on. Beyond it at low tide the sand flats ease out, stretch and flow, with aisles and purple fingers of water rippling, writhing, and probing across them.
Further along the shore a group of gray and white herring gulls stand into the wind. Hiding in a clump of peat-rooted grasses a few hundred feet from them is a gull in its first year. One of its wings is broken, with the primary feathers dragging on the ground. The bird stalks slowly along, tripping a little, isolated, a picture of shame and loss. When I approach, it moves reluctantly toward the other gulls, then stands into the wind slightly behind and to the side of them. Suddenly the flock takes to the air, and the young gull stays down, crippled, unable to forage for its food, and ultimately doomed. There are various kinds of mutual assistance in nature. Some species, like Canada geese, may help, or try to help a fallen mate; but there are no hospitals. I am told that a sick bee rolls out of a hive if it can, or is pushed out by the others. Animals must be deeply aware of death, and they die alone, perhaps with an instinctive understanding that they have to pay the price of a health which nature ultimately requires.
The landscape slopes on and out from life to life, swept by the air, an earth, sand, water, run of interchanging light. Clouds of white terns are hovering and diving over the waters of the bay. Suddenly a dark-plumaged marsh hawk flies into the midst of them. They harry it in the blue, heat-clouded sky. The hawk circles, dodges, flaps on, while they dive on it continually. It twists and rises higher and higher trying to shake them off, until it plummets down and flies low over the surface of the water, making a great round turn back to the shore.
The crippled gull stands and waits with hurt patience. The hawk flies back to the marsh behind the beach and begins to beat slowly over it, covering the ground methodically, hunting the unwary shrew, mouse, or sparrow. The terns dive for fish. The tide waters begin to slip in over the sand. Measure for measure. Necessity keeps its component parts in order, as the light changes, and the south wind keeps blowing.
* * * * *
Down the shore to the east is an inlet called Paine’s Creek, which receives the inland migration of alewives in the spring, and takes out their young, hatched in early spring and summer, as they swim to salt water. The alewife fry, two or three inches long, attract gulls and terns. During the month there has been a migratory colony of terns in the vicinity, principally common terns, both adult and immature.
In the general Cape Cod area there are two principal nesting places every year, at Tern Island, Chatham, and in Plymouth. During the season--the birds arrive about the end of April--both terneries have populations which number in the thousands. There are in addition a few small islands off the Cape and a few comparatively isolated areas where smaller groups nest successfully, although terns are sociable birds, and breed best in large numbers. In August, beginning with the arctic tern, which, I am told, is the earliest to migrate, the birds begin to leave their nesting sites in groups or small companies on their way south. They spend the winter anywhere from Florida to the edge of the Antarctic ice.
So the Paine’s Creek area, with its sand eels and alewife fry, represents a way station, a stopping-off place, one leg of a migratory journey ... the first for birds hatched during the late spring or early summer. Terns reach flying age in a month, but their parents go on feeding them for some time. They are slow to mature and do not breed until they are about three years old.
The young are not much smaller than their parents, and without a close watch it might be hard to tell the difference at first; but their heads are gray, as compared with the jet-black napes and crowns on the adults. They still spend most of the time waiting to be fed. Some make inexperienced, practice flights over the water, plunging in and out in an almost kittenish, hit-or-miss way, while their parents dive like arrows, pinpointing the surface with little flashes of spray, from which they rise up with silver quarries in their sharp bills. But as many more of the young terns stand along the beach or on shoals at the mouth of the inlet, crying, begging to be fed.
Terns are intensely active and brilliant in performance. They are comparatively small birds, but they are capable of migrating over thousands of miles of ocean waters, and their long, angled wings beat deep, low, and strong. They are all black and white sharpness, flashing as bright as the gold circlets of water around sharp grasses at the mouth of the inlet. They swing. They dart. They winnow the air. Their lovely white shuttlecock tails spread out and settle as they turn against the wind, crying: “Kierr! Kierr!”
Two juveniles wait on a shoal, constantly calling in a high-pitched tremolo, intensified when a parent bird flies over them. The trim expert adult flies past, then swings back down the shore and circles back, finally coming in to land between them. It has no food in its bill, but stands there for a minute or so, and then begins to move away from them, as they crouch and strut after it in an almost elderly way, crying their protests. It signals departure with a slight lift of its wings and in a few seconds flies up, the thwarted young ones taking off behind it.
In this behavior I see the play of learning, the many repetitions that precede a balanced natural art. Other adults swing in with sand eels or fish in their bills and hover, or circle back, avoiding rivals, then drop down next to a twittering, beak-gaping child, giving it the whole fish, or holding on to it and flying away, which has the effect of teasing the young one to follow after. In this way the fledgling terns, some still crouching down in a submissive manner as they did in their nests, learn to fly up, to chase, dive, and dodge, to breast the air, and beat their wings for all the long voyages their lives may hold.
In a few weeks most of them will suddenly flock away and migrate. In the meantime they practice the instinctive measures of growth, training in the insistent, excitable ways of a tern, for air and open waters over half the earth.
_September_
_Youth on the Move_
The tourists and the summer residents begin to leave the Cape. This is a visible exodus, with many more cars going out than coming in. The people in charge of commerce count our summer gains and our losses. Those of us who are year-round residents can admit it in public, now that the representatives of the humming, spreading urban world have departed. Here now is a half-populated place, temporarily, perhaps shamefully, consigned to a dull future. And yet, according to the practice I have begun to learn by years of residence, I can now look around, with room to spare. What fills this emptiness? What will I see when I take off my dark glasses?
I notice, by the way, that some of us are now predicting the local future with more assurance. I hear a real Cape Codder (meaning someone born here, preferably before 1900) pronouncing that there will be a frost around the sixteenth, and that “We’ll have a blow pretty soon.”
The night heaves with heat. A half-clouded, half-misted sky shows occasional stars. Then an onshore wind begins to blow and the land stirs and frets in the darkness. I feel that new revolutions are in order, earth-honored, momentous changes.
In the morning the weather vane stands to the north. The sea is kicked up, the trees are swaying, and the temperature has dropped into the fifties. A new wind is getting in its licks, rolling and lunging against us. The air above the sea meets the great air masses from the land. Warm and cold, water and air, west and south, north and east, join in a game of strength. The whole day is a trial for the future, with the running clouds as its pawns. A child asks her father: “Can the day blow away?”
When the wind dies down and the clouds clear off, the air has changed from a hazy warmth to clarity. The sea turns dark blue, groined with white caps. The land seems strict and clean, lifted into pure new skies and a new silence, although at night the musical pulsing of the snowy tree crickets is still as shrill and loud as spring peepers.
This is a marginal season like the spring. It is full of new appearances, as well as late fruitions. The goldenrod, strong flower of the sun, still plumes its store of light, and represents me well in my country, in spite of congressional inclination to award some puffy, manufactured rose with the title of national flower.
Asters, lilac and white, grow abundantly in the sandy soil. Their little pin wheel flowers are as crisp and clean as the new dresses of the girls when they go off for the first day of school. The novelty, after the closed-in summer tempo, is an outwardness. There are many immature birds that appear suddenly in various untried places, and not necessarily because of the demands of a set migration. Because of these fledglings the various bird populations have so increased that they are pushed into looking for food beyond their nesting areas.
Immature hermit thrushes appear as if at random, and many robins and towhees. The towhee, once called red-eyed, a name that seems to have been changed to rufous-sided, is a handsome black, white, and terra-cotta bird which likes scrubby areas, thickets, and open woods. So we see it frequently. It has a black and white tail with which it puts on a spectacular performance, flicking and flashing its feathers like a gambler with a deck of cards; and it floats over the brush and across the ground with its tail spread wide behind it.
Now the young towhees call “Twee! Twee!” not quite at adult strength and clarity, but they are finding themselves. They are on the move.
A covey of young quail suddenly starts across the road, coming out of a field still loud with insects. Heads and necks up, they run almost trippingly forward with sweet, piping alarm.
A young red-tailed hawk is brought into school by a boy whose father found it trapped in his chicken yard and killed it ignominiously with a baseball bat. Red tails are big beauties with a thick supply of feathers. Their backs are brown, their white bellies flecked with brown. The usual place to find them is high up, wheeling around the sky on a watch for rodents; and occasionally they fly out of pitch pine woods where they roost. The dead one has lost its piercing cry and the electric glare in its eyes, but its talons still look formidable. They are black, and as sharp-tipped, as wildly curved, as hooks of steel, joined in power and flexibility.
Bright days warm the surface of the inland ponds that have their outlet in the waters of our local brook and estuary leading through marshes to Cape Cod Bay. The sun’s radiance hurries up the alewife fry in their ancient impulse to go down to salt water, from which they will return in three or four years’ time to spawn like their elders, usually in the same fresh-water system where they were hatched. These little silver fish, with an unfathomed stare in their big eyes, run out on an ebb tide from Paine’s Creek. They attract gulls and terns, which hover in crowds against the west wind.
The plumage of the young terns still in the area now shows a more definite contrast between black and white. They have become more adept at flight. Many are still being fed ... almost continuously during those hours of shallow water when fish are easier to catch, so that the passivity of those still waiting on the sands looks like a consequence of being overstuffed. I get the impression that less food is being proffered by the parent birds, but they have certainly not relinquished their responsibility. They bring in small fish and their large children gulp them down and wait for more. Other young birds are now flying readily--chasing after their parents, beseeching attention, but more often trying to fish for themselves. Little by little, by rewards and refusal, failure and success, they are progressing toward the perfected action of mature birds. They are becoming more aggressive, fighting for space over a crowded channel, or protecting their catch. The adults, whose success in fishing they are beginning to approximate, hover over the water, beaks pointing down, then dive suddenly, wings partly folded back. They hit the water like small stones, then come up again, flying away fast if they have a fish in their bills, chased by other birds that cry “Karr! Karr!” with a slightly growling note. It is not so much that the young terns are taught, in our sense of the word, as that they become more and more a part of the communicable rhythm of the whole race of terns. Their circling, diving, hovering, or racing downwind are common proficiencies of motion, that fit the great environment of air and sea. Growing up is rhythmic practice. There is not such a gap between tutelage and its recipients as there might seem to be among human beings.
Terns seem involved in a ritualistic performance throughout their lives. Much of the behavior they show in getting food as nestlings and fledgling birds has its parallels in adulthood. There is the “fish flight,” for example, which has its origins in the begging, receiving, and then hunting food of a growing bird. (A fish is a master image, a center of recognition and attachment, with all the formality of action it entails.)
The fish flight is a term which in its strict sense is applied to the behavior of birds during pre-courtship. It involves emotional display between pairs of birds, as distinct from their food-getting habits in general. In detail it includes differences in calls, in the relative positions of birds during flight, and in the way they carry a fish. A fish in the bill not only represents the fulfillment of need. It may also be an offering, a display, and perhaps the instrument for a mutual awareness between male and female, even before sex recognition occurs. But if the fish flight can be tied down to behavior at a particular stage in their lives, the terns also show similar reactions before and after it. Mated birds go on offering fish as they fly by one another, or begging, so that feeding is used to maintain a bond between them. And of course the fish is the basis of all the instinctive training of the young. The process of begging and receiving, or offering for the uses of recognition, continues on in many forms through their life stages. They pursue a formality. Their flights show the grace in action of a whole society.
At half tide, when the water recedes over the sand flats, the terns flock there, preening and bathing in the tidal pools. Occasionally one will lift its wings up beautifully into the wind, receiving the wash of air. Some fly back to the inlet and drink the brackish water. The community seems to gather more and more closely together as time goes on. They all begin to roost densely in one area. At times they take to the air, as if alarmed. They rise and circle, crowds of white, crying shrilly, and then fly down again. Or they spin like a larger flock of sandpipers, a white cloud dancing with dizzy perfection over some fish weirs in the distance. Perhaps it could be called communal practice for the next journey. In their rhythms they are self-sustained, self-protective, like schools of fish, but at the same time bound out, under the laws of the wild air. One day soon I will go down to watch again, finding that most of them have flown away.
_An Open Shore_
We stay where we are, while the young migrant birds and the men of the city leave us. But the days sharpen and change. The nights grow longer and cooler. The westerly winds increase. There is a brilliance in the air, and the sea makes a clean statement to our senses. “Adjust your vision,” the sky seems to say, “to a turn in height and depth and in a new area of relentless winds.”
Those migratory birds that are still with us feed actively, fly with restless energy, and collect in flocks. In many undisturbed areas, down by the barrier beaches and through the salt marshes, treeless, open to the sun, you can see a great number using their special physical advantages to feed or fly, hide or attack, in the patterns of environment.
The U. S. Wildlife Refuge at Monomoy is on a long spit of barrier beach and marsh extending south from the town of Chatham ten miles into Nantucket Sound. It is wild, unadorned with tourist cabins, and so an undisturbed refuge and resting place for migratory birds. At first you find warblers, gnat-catchers, orioles, vireos, and other land birds, working silently through low oaks, pines, and stunted, salt-sprayed shrubbery. Then the marshland sweeps ahead with open ground, and curving inlets behind a long beach where the surf pounds endlessly, the sands inlaid with the debris of the sea--whelks, surf clams, or scallops. Back in the marsh where mud snails stream slowly ahead in a long procession, the shore birds race in, or turn quickly in a shimmering flock, or settle among the hummocks, and along sandy rims.
Dowitchers stolidly probe the mud with their long bills. That mottled, distinctive bird, the ruddy turnstone, pushes, or turns over, pebbles and stones--thus proving its name--as it searches for the worms and crustaceans underneath. Shy piping plovers, white as oyster shells, stand by themselves behind a dune. Sanderlings hurry back and forth with little twinkling legs. The yellowlegs fly up and over with short, piercing cries, their wings curved like sickles. Or a solitary marbled godwit flies by, handsomely patterned on its wings with black and white. Least sandpipers, tiny animals with greenish legs, hurry and flit along, feeding at the edge of the tide pools and the rim of inlets.
The terns--common, roseate, least--fly at a point where the tide comes in through an opening in the beach. Sharp-cut divers, they swoop low, dipping into the water again and again. A few ring-billed gulls move among the shore birds. They are a little like a small herring gull, but their heads are more rounded, like pigeons. They have a lighter flight, and a softer look than their raucous, flat-headed relatives. And over the ridge of the beach, against up-dune horizons, is a long belt of great black-backed gulls, large, proud, and with a look of supreme idleness and cruelty.
Here is “function” in all variety, each life to its place, filling a niche, with the special form and manner by which it feeds and tries to survive. And every bird is a bird of the sun, adapted to this treeless, narrow shore that blazes with cutting light, the light of sand, or rock turned to sand, of water, roaring and moaning in the sea, rushing back through a tidal cut on the ebb, then trickling, evaporating, and swelling in again at the flood. Each animal works an open coast, across its burning days. The fliers with wings so sharp, energies of light, fit the high or low wants of the wind, the curves and sweeps of the open marsh, the glaring sands. And they hurry on stilts, or tiny short legs. They bob up and down. They run trippingly along--all to the rhythm of the watered, indefinite shore, looking for food that is rhythmic in myriad ways. Here is a great tribe of searchers.