When I walk now I bring home a harvest of burs and stick-tights on my trouser legs and socks. Even a brief walk at the roadside or in the pasture gathers half a dozen different kinds. Plucking them off, I marvel at the variety of ingenious ways a seed can hitch a ride.
Frost crisps the leaves, begins to break them down. Fall rain compacts them. Leafmold is in the making. The leaves provide a blanket for lesser woodland plants and the slow heat of decay warms them somewhat.
Muskrats are stocking Winter pantries with cattail roots. Frogs and turtles have already hibernated in the mud.
November
Hard frost by now, and virtually all the leaves have been brought down by rain and wind. Except on the oaks and the beeches, which sometimes hold their sere leaves until Spring is near.
Several of the handbooks indicate that the Catocala moths are not seen later than September. I find them in my woods in November, especially the birch moth, which at rest so closely resembles the color and marking of birch bark that I have stood and looked for five minutes and not seen one two feet in front of me. These moths are about the size of the common “miller” moths of Midsummer nights. Some members of the family have brightly colored hind wings, but they are covered by the grayish or brownish forewings when at rest. One night in late November, with the temperature near 20°, I was driving through a birch woods and a cloud of these moths appeared in my headlights. There were hundreds of them. When I go to the woods now at dusk I nearly always see a few of them on the wing.
Geese move south. When I hear them in the night, if there is strong moonlight I often get up to look; something about a flight of honkers against the moon touches me deep inside. One raw November day when I would have bet ten to one it would snow before dark I saw a flock of thirty Canadas on a pond not far from here. I thought they were daring fate, not migrating. But they knew the weather better than I did. It cleared in early afternoon and stayed clear almost a week. Then I heard them go over in the night, a brilliant moonlit night, and within thirty-six hours it really did storm.
Frosty nights now bring frosty dawns—dawns when every bush and twig and weed stem along the river is covered with hoarfrost. Until the sun is well up and the day has begun to warm, it is a fantastic world of filigree. The river mist was deposited in billions of frost particles in the night. I can enter this astonishing world a little way with my ten-power glass, which reveals the shape and arrangement of these frost particles. One heavily frosted morning many of the needles on the big Norway spruce had star-flakes at their tips, perfect six-pointed stars of frost, like snowflakes, none of them more than an eighth of an inch across.
Deer are rutting. Last Spring’s fawns have lost their spots and are almost as big as their mothers. They come down to eat windfall apples on quiet nights with a late moon. They usually are specially wary now, but one November morning just after 8:00 a big doe and her twin fawns came across my home pasture to an old apple tree and ate windfalls for twenty minutes, in broad daylight, until a farm truck came along the road and sent them bounding back to the woods.
Now I hear the owls almost every evening, sometimes just before dawn. I have heard barred owls in August and the great horned owl in April, but they as well as the little screech owl seem to be most vocal in frosty November.
The screech owls call at late dusk. The call isn’t really a screech. It is a quavery, lonely wail that starts high and slurs off and down, higher pitched than any other owl call. And with nothing in it that even resembles a hoot. The hooters in my area are the great horned owl and the barred owl.
The great horned owl’s call is a gruff, wooflike series of hoots, deep-pitched. Some call this owl the “three-hooter.” It often hoots four notes, however, and the call I most often hear consists of a three-hoot series, a slight pause, then a four-hoot series, seven in all: “Hoo, Hooo-hoo. Hoo, Hoo, Hooo-hooo.”
The barred owl is an “eight-hooter.” Its characteristic call might be interpreted as: “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?” with the final note, the “all,” slurred sharply downward. Sometimes several barred owls will call to each other and there will be an assortment of voices, bass, baritone, and very low tenor. The voice seems to vary with the individual.
December
It is easy enough to identify the trees when they are in full leaf, but it takes a bit of knowledge to sort them out in December. All trees carry their own fingerprints in their bark pattern, however. Learn that language and you can readily tell them apart. Shapes are important too, but not all elms are shaped like wineglasses, not all maples egg-shaped, not all oaks globe-shaped. The shapes are clues, however, and worth noting. Bark color is important, the brown of oaks, the dark gray of maples, the dull red-brown of black birches. And red oaks hold their acorns over the Winter, white oaks don’t. The conifers are easier to sort out than the deciduous trees, but the cedars can be confusing unless one remembers that red cedars look browner than white cedars in Winter. And red cedars have purple berries; white cedars have small cones, tiny ones, even smaller than hemlock cones.
If I find a green fern in the woods now I know it is a Christmas fern, the only evergreen fern in my area. But even those ferns whose fronds are frosted and fallen still show their spore heads, wood-brown and stiffly erect. Most interesting to me are those of the ostrich fern which look like brown leaf fronds. But each brown “leaflet” on them is a spore case. Pluck such a spore head and shake it and a mist of spores, finer than dust, drifts out, so light it hangs in the air like a dark mist.
Shrews have to eat, even in December, even when the ground is covered with snow. One December morning, with several inches of snow on the ground, I saw a short-tailed shrew, the most common species here, darting here and there in a bare patch under the big spruce. It was so hungry it dashed from one tuft of grass to another, diving into each, pawing at it, apparently finding some mite-size insect or larva to eat. I went out for a close look and it paid me little attention. Its fur was pewter-colored, looked soft as moleskin, and its eyes were like tiny black beads. It stayed there ten minutes, burning up energy in its frantic search, active as a frightened red squirrel. Then it hurried to a snowbank, plunged in, and was gone, probably to tunnel along at ground level and continue its driving search for food.
The river is frozen over now, the first freeze-up. The ice is crystal clear, for it was a quiet night when it froze. The ice is so clear it doesn’t look like ice, but I know it is ice from the way the sun glints on it and the absence of ripples in the morning breeze. A few more cold nights and the ice will turn gray, then white. As it deepens it will trap air bubbles from the water beneath, tiny bubbles that make it look gray and opaque. If I am sufficiently curious, as I am once in a while, I can stretch out on the clear ice and watch big air bubbles float past, like toy balloons. Sometimes fish come up and poke their heads into those bubbles. But most of the fish are down near the bottom. Once in a while “frost flowers” appear on the ice, clusters of white frost crystals sometimes in tufts two inches high, sometimes like complex stars flat on the ice.
The year’s shortest days come now, latest sunrise, earliest sunset—but not on the day of the Winter Solstice. These are perfect nights to study the stars, for the air is clean and clear. And cold.
January
The Solstice past, the year tends toward Spring. But you would never know it. The old saying, “Days lengthen, cold strengthens,” is proved in January. But it’s a good time to study snowflakes. I go out wearing a dark coat or carrying a piece of black cloth and catch a few flakes and examine them, first with the naked eye, then under the glass. Perhaps there are two alike, but those who have studied them most say they never have seen duplicates. The late W. A. Bentley, of Jericho, Vermont, who made thousands of snowflake photographs, said he never found two exactly alike. His snowflake pictures, incidentally, are classic.
It is a good time, too, to study window frost. Those intricate patterns that form on panes in a cold room where there is moisture in the ai
r are often unbelievably complex. They come in swirls and feathers and fronds and trees, fantastic in their elaboration and beauty. I have never seen two of these frost patterns alike, either.
Splitting fireplace wood one cold January day I was surprised at how easily tough oak billets popped open. I figured out why and now I leave the tough oak stacked green in the open, let the sap freeze and create inner tensions. Then when I swing the ax it starts a crack and the frost tensions pop it open.
Frost is the silent, powerful lever of erosion. A drop of moisture in a hairline crack in a rock becomes a tremendous force when deep cold turns the moisture to ice. Water expands when it freezes, and the expansion opens the crack. The ledges on my mountain are cracked and splintered every Winter by the frost, and when I go there in the Spring I am always wary of my footing because slabs have been loosened that way.
If I would see the wind, I go out after a windy snowstorm. There is the track of the wind in the drifted snow, the way it passed around even a weed stalk or a fence post, the way it went over a hummock or a rock. Snowdrifts are frozen motion of that most fluid of the elements, the wind. Even the curl at the lip of a snowdrift is the curl of the wind as it was sucked back by the drift. Last Winter the big drift left by one storm in my sideyard was marked by big scallops that baffled me until I looked at the contours of the lilac bushes and rosebushes just beyond. The wind had been shaped and guided by those bushes, and the scallops were in the same pattern as the height of the bushes.
January is a good time to look for animal tracks in the snow, but not if it is too cold. I went out in zero weather after one storm last Winter and found not one track, not even of a rabbit. It was two days before rabbits, foxes, and squirrels were hungry enough to come out in that bitter cold. Only the birds were out. They flocked to the feeders. Small birds can starve to death in thirty-six hours in such weather.
Some years the snowy owls appear about now, often as far south as New York City, sometimes as far down as Washington, D.C. These big birds are usually seen in daylight, perching on posts, poles, and other high places. They have good daylight vision. They are basically white but often look gray because of a scalloping of small, dark feathers. The notion that their appearance means an especially hard Winter has no basis. Arctic lemmings are a principal item in their diet, and lemmings follow a mysterious four-year population cycle. When they are scarce in the snowy owl’s Far Northern homeland, the owls come south to feed on rabbits, voles, and other small animals. We see them, because of that lemming cycle, about every four years. The snowy owl’s call is a deep, defiant, four-note sequence, khoog-go-go-gook.
February
Perhaps there are places where the woodchuck, or groundhog, comes out of hibernation on February 2, but not in my part of the country. Here the woodchucks sleep till late March or early April, then come out driven by two urgencies, hunger and the desire to mate. They are then short-tempered and truculent, often fight bloody battles among themselves. But on February 2 they are still deep in the sleep of hibernation, no matter what the day’s weather.
February brings snow-melt. Actually, snow will melt in zero weather, especially in February. It really evaporates, never going through the water stage, and is absorbed by dry air passing over it. I have seen a snowdrift shrink six inches in four days without the temperature getting above 20° Fahrenheit. But February almost invariably brings its own thaw, often a more authoritative one than the traditional one of January. The sun is warmer, daylight is longer, nights are shorter.
After a February thaw last Winter I walked in the pasture and saw how dry grass stems can pick up enough heat from the sun to melt holes in the snow. That day there was still two inches of snow on the ground, but every blade of grass, every weed stem, every twig, had melted its own hole. The snow looked like what the embroiderers of my mother’s day used to call “punch work”; it was an elaborate lacework. Even in hollows where there was two-inch ice the pattern was the same—a melt-hole around every stem.
On a sunny February day I can expect to hear the blue jays calling, a cheerful, almost musical two-note call quite unlike the raucous jeer characteristic of the jay most of the Winter. Tree sparrows begin to sing. Their songs are not in a class with those of the song sparrows, but they are sweet, high-pitched, and quite surprising after hearing nothing from them but a kind of pleasant tweet-twitter for so long. Even the nuthatches change their inflection if not their notes; they still yark, but more happily. Such sounds convince me that change is in the air and in the earth.
Gray squirrels began mating in January. They are still at it, chasing and scurrying in the trees, now so interested in each other that they sometimes forget me until I am almost upon them.
Some years I find the first tips of skunk cabbage up by now in the bog, brownish-green horns that at first glance seem to have no relation to plant life. Even if the bog is still iced over, they may be up. They generate enough warmth to melt a hole several inches in diameter.
We usually cut forsythia twigs during the February thaw and bring them indoors to force in a vase in a sunny window. Sometimes I cut twigs from the pussy willows and add them to the bouquet. A couple of weeks and we have forsythia gold and pussy-willow silver, which makes Spring and wildflowers seem closer than they really are. February is still Winter, often is full of snow, but its changing light marks the season unmistakably. By February’s end it is still daylight, though somewhat dim, at 6:00 in the evening. By then we know that March and April and Spring are just ahead.
Chapter 15
The Names and the Naming
There is folk poetry in the common names; but science, devoted to order and systematic knowledge, insists on classifying and defining. The poet’s buttercup is the botanist’s Ranunculus. If you would walk with scientist as well as poet, learn both languages.
I LIKE THE OLD NAMES for things, especially the common names for plants, even though they can be confusing and are frowned on by the specialist. With good reason, I know, since science must have specific, unmistakable terms. But the old names have a lot of folk poetry in them, and I am sure that is what appeals to so many of us.
In this book I have used the common names in the text for two reasons. First, because they are common, known to so many people even when they may be regional names. And, second, because the use of scientific names in such an informal book as this might confuse some readers and certainly would distract others. But because exactitude is desirable, and because the common names sometimes apply to several different plants, I am including in this chapter a list of the plants and animals mentioned in previous chapters and identifying them with their scientific terminology. Where there are several common names, I have given those most often used. I wish it were possible to include literal translations of the scientific names, which sometimes are baffling, sometimes amusing, and often picturesque. But there isn’t space or any urgent need for that.
Before we get to the list, however, I should like to discuss this whole matter of naming things.
In the Book of Genesis we are told that Adam named “every living creature.” Nothing is said about the plants and their names, but for a long time both plants and animals had the kind of names that Adam might have given them. Those names varied from place to place and from time to time, and they were what we today call the “common” names, that is the names the people generally used. They varied from country to country, which is to say from language to language; but there were also various names in the same language for the same plant or animal. For instance, we who speak English still speak of a cow, a bull, a steer, a heifer, a calf, all the same animal, differing only in age and sex.
In the early days this variety of names caused little confusion, because everyone used the common names and there was little travel from one country to another. But as the known world expanded and men tried to tell each other about the plants and animals they saw elsewhere, misunderstanding was inevitable. Probably the first attempt to bring order out of this chaos
was made by the Greeks. Aristotle, who is sometimes called the father of zoology, made a list of names for animals, all the animals in the world he knew. The names he used were those given to the various animals by hunters, fishermen, and occult priests who foretold events by examining freshly killed birds and animals. Aristotle’s list was classified by the uses made of the birds and animals, with no attempt to group them physiologically.
And Aristotle’s student, Theophrastus, “the father of botany,” compiled a similar list of plants. The Theophrastus list was based on the names used by herb gatherers who supplied roots and plants to those who practiced herbal medicines. And he, too, grouped the plants by their use, not by physical similarity.
After Aristotle and Theophrastus, as men traveled more and more and more, the bestiaries or animal lists and the herbals or plant lists were expanded. The Romans superseded the Greeks and, even as they took over other good things from Greece, they adopted and expanded the bestiaries and herbals. In Latin, of course. And as the Latin scholars tried to be more and more precise, the names themselves grew until in some instances a name, explicitly descriptive, became a whole paragraph. This led to a point of absurdity where nobody but the specialized scholars could understand them and the whole matter of naming things became academic. Meanwhile, ordinary people went right on using the common, everyday names and clung to essential simplicity. The common names of plants especially were those given them by down-to-earth herb users, most of whom couldn’t read Latin in any case.