Riverby

John Burroughs

• Publisher: Becker Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781444637861
• eBook ISBN: 9781473346734
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Natural History
• Index: Biological Sciences

"Riverby" is a book written by American naturalist John Burroughs, first published in 1904. It was written at Burroughs' estate of the same name, which is located on the west bank of the Hudson river, in Ulster County, New York. There, he also wrote "Fresh Fields" (1884), "Signs and Seasons" (1886), and "Indoor Studies" (1889). This fantastic volume constitutes a must-read for fans and lovers of nature writing, and it is not to be missed by collectors of Burroughs' seminal work. John Burroughs (1837 - 1921) was an American naturalist, essayist, and active member of the U.S. conservation movement. Burroughs' work was incredibly popular during his lifetime, and his legacy has lived on in the form of twelve U.S. Schools named after him, Burroughs Mountain, and the John Burroughs Association-which publicly recognizes well-written and illustrated natural history publications. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.

XVIII.
TALKS WITH YOUNG OBSERVERS

I

To teach young people or old people how to observe nature is a good deal like trying to teach them how to eat their dinner. The first thing necessary in the latter case is a good appetite; this given, the rest follows very easily. And in observing nature, unless you have the appetite, the love, the spontaneous desire, you will get little satisfaction. It is the heart that sees more than the mind. To love Nature is the first step in observing her. If a boy had to learn fishing as a task, what slow progress he would make; but as his heart is in it, how soon he becomes an adept.

The eye sees quickly and easily those things in which we are interested. A man interested in horses sees every fine horse in the country he passes through; the dairyman notes the cattle; the bee culturist counts the skips of bees; the sheep-grower notes the flocks, etc. Is it any effort for the ladies to note the new bonnets and the new cloaks upon the street? We all see and observe easily in the line of our business, our tasks, our desires.

If one is a lover of the birds, he sees birds everywhere, plenty of them. I think I seldom miss a bird in my walk if he is within eye or ear shot, even though my mind be not intent upon that subject. Walking along the road this very day, feeling a cold, driving snow-storm, I saw some large birds in the top of a maple as I passed by. I do not know how I came to see them, for I was not in an ornithological frame of mind. But I did. There were three of them feeding upon the buds of the maple. They were nearly as large as robins, of a dark ash-color, very plump, with tails much forked. What were they? My neighbor did not know; had never seen such birds before. I instantly knew them to be pine grosbeaks from the far north. I had not seen them before for ten years. A few days previously I had heard one call from the air as it passed over; I recognized the note, and hence knew that the birds were about. They come down from the north at irregular intervals, and are seen in flocks in various parts of the States. They seem just as likely to come mild winters as severe ones. Later in the day the birds came about my study. I sat reading with my back to the window when I was advised of their presence by catching a glimpse of one reflected in my eye-glasses as it flew up from the ground to the branch of an apple-tree only a few feet away. I only mention the circumstance to show how quick an observer is to take the hint. I was absorbed in my reading, but the moment that little shadow flitted athwart that luminous reflection of the window in the corner of my glasses, something said "that was a bird." Approaching the window, I saw several of them sitting not five feet away. I could inspect them perfectly. They were a slate-color, with a tinge of bronze upon the head and rump. In full plumage the old males are a dusky red. Hence these were all either young males or females. Occasionally among these flocks an old male may be seen. It would seem as if only a very few of the older and wiser birds accompanied these younger birds in their excursions into more southern climes.

Presently the birds left the apple-bough that nearly brushed my window, and, with a dozen or more of their fellows that I had not seen, settled in a Norway spruce a few yards away, and began to feed upon the buds. They looked very pretty there amid the driving snow. I was flattered that these visitants from the far north should find entertainment on my premises. How plump, contented, and entirely at home they looked. But they made such havoc with the spruce buds that after a while I began to fear not a bud would be left upon the trees; the spruces would be checked in their growth the next year. So I presently went out to remonstrate with them and ask them to move on. I approached them very slowly, and when beside the tree within a few feet of several of them, they heeded me not. One bird kept its position and went on snipping off the buds till I raised my hand ready to seize it, before it moved a yard or two higher up. I think it was only my white, uncovered hand that disturbed it. Indeed,

"They were so unacquainted with man,

Their tameness was shocking to me."

The snow was covered with the yellow chaffy scales of the buds and still the birds sifted them down, till I was compelled to "shoo" them away, when they moved to a tree nearer the house beneath which they left more yellow chaff upon the snow.

The mind of an observer is like a gun with a hair trigger—it goes at a touch, while the minds of most persons require very vigorous nudging. You must take the hint and take it quickly if you would get up any profitable intimacy with nature. Above all, don't jump to conclusions; look again and again; verify your observations. Be sure the crow is pulling corn, and not probing for grubs, before you kill him. Be sure it is the oriole purloining your grapes, and not the sparrows, before you declare him your enemy. I one day saw hummingbirds apparently probing the ripe yellow cheeks of my finest peaches, but I was not certain till I saw a bird hovering over a particular peach, and then mounting upon a ladder I examined it, when sure enough, the golden cheek was full of pin-holes. The orioles destroy many of my earliest pears, but it required much watching to catch them in the very act. I once saw a phœbe-bird swoop down upon a raspberry bush and carry a berry to a rail on a near fence, but I did not therefore jump to the conclusion that the phœbe was a berry-eater. What it wanted was the worm in the berry. How do I know? Because I saw it extract something from the berry and fly away.

A French missionary, said to have been a good naturalist, writing in this country in 1634, makes this curious statement about our hummingbird: "This bird, as one might say, dies, or, to speak more correctly, puts itself to sleep in the month of October, living fastened to some little branchlet of a tree by the feet, and wakes up in the month of April when the flowers are in abundance, and sometimes later, and for that cause is called in the Mexican tongue the 'Revived.'" How could the good missionary ever have been led to make such a statement? The actual finding of the bird wintering in that way would have been the proof science demands, and nothing short of that.

A boy in the interior of the State wrote to me the other day that while in the field looking after Indian arrow-heads he had seen a brown and gray bird with a black mark running through the eye, and that the bird walked instead of hopped. He said it had a high, shrill whistle and flew like a meadowlark. This boy is a natural observer; he noted that the bird was a walker. Most of the birds hop or jump, keeping both feet together. This boy heard his bird afterward in the edge of the evening, and "followed it quite a ways, but could not get a glimpse of it." He had failed to note the crest on its head and the black spot on its breast, for doubtless his strange bird was the shore lark, a northern bird, that comes to us in flocks in the late fall or early winter, and in recent years has become a permanent resident of certain parts of New York State. I have heard it in full song above the hills in Delaware County, after the manner of the English skylark, but its song was a crude, feeble, broken affair compared with that of the skylark. These birds thrive well in confinement. I had one seven months in a cage while living in Washington. It was disabled in the wing by a gunner, who brought it to me. Its wound soon healed; it took food readily; it soon became tame, and was an object of much interest and amusement. The cage in which I had hastily put it was formerly a case filled with stuffed birds. Its front was glass. As it was left out upon the porch over night, a strange cat discovered the bird through this glass, and through the glass she plunged and captured the bird. In the morning there was the large hole in this glass, and the pretty lark was gone. I have always indulged a faint hope that the glass was such a surprise to the cat, and made such a racket about her eyes and ears as she sprang against it, that she beat a hasty retreat, and that the bird escaped through the break.

II

In May two boys in town wrote to me to explain to them the meaning of the egg-shells, mostly those of robins, that were to be seen lying about on the ground here and there. I supposed every boy knew where most of these egg-shells came from. As soon as the young birds are out, the mother bird removes the fragments of shells from the nest, carrying them in her beak some distance, and dropping them here and there. All our song-birds, so far as I know, do this.

Sometimes, however, these shells are dropped by blue jays after their contents have been swallowed. The jay will seize a robin's egg by thrusting his beak into it, and hurry off lest he be caught in the act by the owner. At a safe distance he will devour the contents at his leisure, and drop the shell.

The robins, however, have more than once caught the jay in the act. He has the reputation among them of being a sneak thief. Many and many a time during the nesting season you may see a lot of robins mob a jay. The jay comes slyly prowling through the trees, looking for his favorite morsel, when he is discovered by a vigilant robin, who instantly rushes at him crying, "Thief! thief!" at the top of his voice. All the robins that have nests within hearing gather to the spot and join in the pursuit of the jay, screaming and scolding.

The jay is hustled out of the tree in a hurry, and goes sneaking away with the robins at his heels. He is usually silent, like other thieves, but sometimes the birds make it so hot for him that he screams in anger and disgust.

Of the smaller birds, like the vireos and warblers, the jay will devour the young. My little boy one day saw a jay sitting beside a nest in a tree, probably that of the red-eyed vireo, and coolly swallowing the just hatched young, while the parent birds were powerless to prevent him. They flew at him and snapped their beaks in his face, but he heeded them not. A robin would have knocked him off his feet at her first dive.

One is sometimes puzzled by seeing a punctured egg lying upon the ground. One day I came near stepping upon one that was lying in the path that leads to the spring—a fresh egg with a little hole in it carefully placed upon the gravel. I suspected it to be the work of the cowbird, and a few days later I had convincing proof that the cowbird is up to this sort of thing. I was sitting in my summer house with a book, when I had a glimpse of a bird darting quickly down from the branches of the maple just above me toward the vineyard, with something in its beak. Following up my first glance with more deliberate scrutiny, I saw a female cowbird alight upon the ground and carefully deposit some small object there, and then, moving a few inches away, remain quite motionless. Without taking my eyes from the spot, I walked straight down there. The bird flew away, and I found the object she had dropped to be a little speckled bird's egg still warm. I saw that it was the egg of the red-eyed vireo. It was punctured with two holes where the bird had seized it; otherwise it had been very carefully handled. For some days I had been convinced that a pair of vireos had a nest in my maple, but much scrutiny had failed to reveal it to me.

Only a few moments before the cowbird appeared I had seen the happy pair leave the tree together, flying to a clump of trees lower down the slope of the hill. The female had evidently just deposited her egg, the cowbird had probably been watching near by, and had seized it the moment the nest was vacated. Her plan was of course to deposit one of her own in its place.

I now made a more thorough search for the nest, and soon found it, but it was beyond my reach on an outer branch, and whether or not the cowbird dropped one of her own eggs in place of the one she had removed I do not know. Certain am I that the vireos soon abandoned the nest, though they do not always do this when hoodwinked in this way.

I once met a gentleman on the train who told me about a brood of quails that had hatched out under his observation. He was convinced that the mother quail had broken the shells for the young birds. He sent me one of the shells to convince me that it had been broken from the outside. At first glance it did appear so. It had been cut around near the large end, with the exception of a small space, as if by regular thrusts or taps from a bird's beak, so that this end opened like the lid of a box on a hinge, and let the imprisoned bird escape. What convinced the gentleman that the force had been applied from the outside was that the edges of the cut or break were bent in.

If we wish rightly to interpret nature, to get at the exact truth of her ways and doings, we must cultivate what is called the critical habit of mind; that is, the habit of mind that does not rest with mere appearances. One must sift the evidence, must cross-question the facts. This gentleman was a lawyer, but he laid aside the cunning of his craft in dealing with this question of these egg-shells.

The bending in, or the indented appearance of the edge of the shells was owing to the fact that the thin paper-like skin that lines the interior of the shell had dried and shrunken, and had thus drawn the edges of the shell inward. The cut was made by the beak of the young bird, probably by turning its head from right to left; one little point it could not reach, and this formed the hinge of the lid I have spoken of. Is it at all probable that if the mother bird had done this work she would have left this hinge, and left it upon every...

Table of contents

• John Burroughs
• PREFATORY NOTE
• I. AMONG THE WILD FLOWERS
• II. THE HEART OF THE SOUTHERN CATSKILLS
• III. BIRDS' EGGS
• IV. BIRD COURTSHIP
• V. NOTES FROM THE PRAIRIE
• VI. EYE-BEAMS
• VII. A YOUNG MARSH HAWK
• VIII. THE CHIPMUNK
• IX. SPRING JOTTINGS
• X. GLIMPSES OF WILD LIFE
• XI. A LIFE OF FEAR
• XII. LOVERS OF NATURE
• XIII. A TASTE OF KENTUCKY BLUE-GRASS
• XIV. IN MAMMOTH CAVE
• XV. HASTY OBSERVATION
• XVI. BIRD LIFE IN AN OLD APPLE-TREE
• XVII. THE WAYS OF SPORTSMEN
• XVIII. TALKS WITH YOUNG OBSERVERS