Undoubtedly you will find Jack-in-the-pulpit in some damp spot at the roadside in early Spring. You probably will notice that the spathe, the “pulpit,” is all green on some plants and striped with dark purplish brown on others. They are not of different species. I have been told that the dark-striped ones are male blossoms, the all-green ones female, and this may be true sometimes. But not always. The Jack-in-the-pulpit blossom is basically bisexual but apparently is evolving slowly toward unisexuality because on some blossoms the stamens are abortive; on others the pistils are abortive. And, to further complicate matters, some plants bear both male and female blossoms, both in the same-colored spathes.
I have a theory about such blossom colors. Quite a few flowering plants have lighter-colored blossoms when they grow in full sun than when they grow in the shade. Cranesbill, for instance, and anemones. Both usually are darker when they grow in the shade, the anemones with pink veining in their white petals. Bluets show the same tendency—clear white in full sun, tinged with lavender in the shade. I always find the darker violets in deep shade. Research has shown that most plants run a slight temperature when they come to bloom and start to form seed, perhaps a parallel to the periods of “heat” in mammals. I suspect that color variations have something to do with this fertility “fever” in flowers. Darker colors absorb more warmth from the sunlight and perhaps compensate for growing in the shade. I doubt that any flower’s color is there to attract insects, which apparently have little or no color vision. If attraction of insects were the purpose, why would Jack-in-the-pulpit have such striking color variations? And why would it coincide so often, both in Jacks and in other flowers, with the sun or shade in which they grow? There are still a good many botanical secrets to be learned.
Even if you could take a complete census of your roadside plants today or this year, I am sure it would be incomplete next Summer. The plants come, and they go. I have no trilliums at my roadside, for instance, though I can find them only a few miles away. One of these Springs I undoubtedly will find them here. I have no May apples, which some call mandrakes, though they too grow in my area. One of these days I probably will find them here, just as I undoubtedly will find Dutchman’s-breeches and squirrel corn, lesser cousin of Dutchman’s-breeches, both of which should be here. I really shouldn’t say they aren’t here. What I should say is that I haven’t yet found them.
Every country road I know of has vines of one kind or another, and most of them have poison ivy. The beginner must learn to recognize this obnoxious plant, which I shall discuss at some length in a later chapter. Most roadsides also have Virginia creeper, which belongs to the grape family although its compound leaves are quite different from grape leaves. Some people know this vine as woodbine, but since at least four other common vines are sometimes called woodbine, I prefer the name Virginia creeper, which is its alone. It is a beautiful vine, a glory at the roadside in October with its scarlet leaves.
Wild clematis also grows at most roadsides. You will find it twining on fences and bushes, flowering in June with bright sprays of tiny white blossoms which give it another common name, virgin’s bower. And bittersweet, that cruel climber with inconspicuous greenish white flowers and beautiful berrylike orange fruit, will catch your eye in the Fall. I call it cruel because of the way it chokes any tree it chooses to climb. Here in my study is a length of sapling birch with spiral grooves an inch deep caused by the hug of a bittersweet vine. You probably will also find deadly nightshade, which is known in some places as bittersweet, in the usual overlapping confusion of common names. This nightshade is a cousin of the potato and the tomato, grows both as a vine and a sprawling bush, and has small, bright purple flowers with golden-yellow centers. The flowers mature into berries that look like small, oval cherries, ruby-red and almost translucent. These berries are poisonous. Don’t eat them.
If your road is bordered by a brook or river it undoubtedly will have wild grapes sprawling along the ground and climbing among the trees. Foxes love wild grapes. So do opossums. One October evening, just up the road from my house in a roadside tangle of wild grapes just come to full ripeness, I came upon a ’possum whose silvery fur was purple with grape juice from the tip of its pink snout right down to its paws. It had not only eaten its fill of grapes; it apparently had wallowed in them. Many birds like those grapes, too—robins, catbirds, jays, even flickers. They plant many grapevines in their droppings at the roadside.
Your road’s trees and bushes will be typical of your area, the kind you will find in the woodlot or at the edge of the meadows. As I said earlier, I can take a sampling of any countryside’s natural population by spending half an hour walking along a rural road. The newcomer to any area can profitably spend the leisure of his first week exploring the roadsides, which will give reliable clues of what to look for in the hills beyond—and without the possibility of getting lost in unfamiliar woodlands or bewildered and muddy to the knees in a strange bogland. No matter how far you wander along a country road, you can always follow it back to where you started. Or stop at a farmhouse and ask directions.
The roadside’s plants, bushes, and trees also offer a sampling of your area’s more common birds and small animals, since they provide both food and shelter for many of them. If you are a bird watcher, certain back roads will certainly be on your regular beat. My bird-watcher friends patrol my own road almost every day during warbler season, both Spring and Fall.
In the Spring, all kinds of birds will be nesting at your roadside—robins, catbirds, kingbirds, orioles, flycatchers, vireos, bluebirds, brown thrashers, even red-wing blackbirds where a brook flows nearby or the road borders a bog. Crows congregate in roadside poplars and loudly discuss everything under the sun. Kingbirds nesting nearby challenge the crows. Some of the best kingbird-crow aerial fights I ever saw were those I watched from the roadside. One afternoon I watched two truculent kingbirds drive a whole tribe of crows across the valley and into the shelter of the pine woods. Then, probably exhilarated by those easy victories, the kingbirds climbed high to do combat with a red-tail hawk riding a thermal up the valley. I watched for ten minutes as the kingbirds climbed and dive-bombed the big hawk, and as the hawk sideslipped and maneuvered without flapping a wing. The kingbirds didn’t land a blow. Then the hawk tired of the game, flew swiftly to the next higher level, and soared in circles, disdainful of the kingbirds, which gave up and came back to watch for more crows.
In the Fall you will find the flocking flickers at the roadside, restless but putting on pre-migration fat and energy in the grapevines and berry bushes. You may even find ruffed grouse, come down from the wooded hills to feast on grapes; you are almost sure to find them if barberry bushes grow wild beside the road. If the road is bordered by a cornfield, watch for mourning doves. A flock in my area Winters in the roadside cornfields where they find a good cafeteria stocked with nubbins and other waste grain.
When the first freezing rain or sleet storm has brought out the sander trucks you will find it worth a walk along the road just to watch the birds flock in to get the sand they need in their crops to help grind their food. Sparrows and other seed-eaters are among the first patrons after the sanders have gone along my road, but I see chickadees and juncos there too, and now and then a blue jay, making it look as though he had to steal that sand. I don’t know why a jay can make the most harmless action look like a felony, but he can. I have also seen whole flocks of evening grosbeaks descend on a freshly sanded Winter road and eat sand as eagerly as though it were sunflower seeds.
Some woodchucks, for reasons I shall never understand, prefer to den, or at least feed, close beside the road. Among them are individuals that have the suicidal impulse to cross the road just ahead of a hurrying car. Despite the high mortality rate, the roadside tribe of woodchucks seems to maintain its numbers. Maybe cars, in the long run, are no more lethal to them than foxes and bobcats are to their more timorous kinfolk. Chipmunks, which often live in roadside stone walls, also are too often traffic vi
ctims. And so are rabbits, especially at night when they are blinded by the lights. And skunks, which probably are lured to the roads at night to catch the mice and insects and snakes that find the lingering warmth of a macadam or concrete surface a comfort in the cool darkness. But I may say that any driver who fails to slow down for a skunk in the road will regret it. It takes weeks to sweeten a car that has run over a live skunk.
In the Fall you may see opossums traveling along the road at night, undoubtedly also lured there by the surface warmth. I see several dead opossums, traffic victims, along my road every year. The only reason fewer ’possums than rabbits die on the roads is that rabbits far outnumber ’possums, especially in the Northeast. Now and then you may see a raccoon in the road, but usually it will be at night since coons are essentially night prowlers. If they have half a chance, coons will get out of the way of a car. Last Spring, however, I found three coon kits about the size of half-grown house cats wandering at my roadside in mid-morning. They probably had been orphaned, undoubtedly were hungry, and hadn’t yet learned fear of cars or human beings. I stopped the car, got out, and shooed them off the roadside, into a pasture, and over to a clump of cedars where they had a chance of survival.
Baby coons are cute as kittens and people sometimes are tempted to try to make pets of them. It can be done, though they are difficult to raise and of unpredictable temper. Their teeth are needle-sharp and they can be vicious. If they survive to full growth they still have to be watched for truculent inclinations. A female coon in heat can be harder to handle than an angry tomcat. But some people do tame them and consider them desirable pets. Some people tame skunks, too.
Squirrels, mostly grays, will be racing through the roadside trees in late Winter, especially active during mating season which in my area occurs in February. In the Fall they will always be found at any roadside that has oaks or nut trees, often so intent on the harvest that they forget the hazards of traffic. Every October I find that heedless drivers have killed two or three gray squirrels near a big hickory just down the road. This always seems unnecessary to me, for a squirrel will get out of the way of any car if given a chance.
Now and then you may see a fox at the roadside, usually in early morning or at dusk. Foxes also prowl the roadside at night, especially in chilly weather, undoubtedly because mice and other small fox-food animals are lured there by the warmth. One late May night when I was driving down a main highway not far from here my lights picked up two fox kits trying to cross the road. They were very young, not much bigger than cats, their tails still scrawny and their heads and ears looking much too big for their bodies. Probably on their first trip away from the den. They dodged the car ahead of me, then scurried safely on across. I was so intent on them that I almost hit a third one that had lagged behind till the last minute. I hit the brakes and he, too, got across in safety. I didn’t see the mother, who may have been ahead, leading the family. But if she had taken them out to learn the facts of life on a highway she almost lost her whole family.
Although deer are not normally roadside animals, I see them from time to time, usually at dusk, on their way from the hemlock thickets on the mountain where they lie up for the day down to the open fields in the valley. This happens most often in early Spring and late Fall, before the leaves which provide their Summer browse have opened or after they have fallen. Then they come down to the meadows to graze.
Since deer often use the same “run” or trail, even when crossing well-traveled roads, you will see “Deer Crossing” signs even on main highways, especially in wooded areas where deer abound. Such signs mark the places where deer habitually cross the road and they should not be ignored, night or day. At night, deer are blinded by a car’s lights and may lunge directly into its path. In the daytime deer may be confused by an approaching car and jump the wrong way at the wrong time. Not long ago a friend of mine driving a high-speed throughway in a wooded area suddenly saw a deer in mid-leap in front of him. The next thing that deer was right in the car, in the front-seat passenger’s lap, and only good luck and skill kept the car from a disastrous crash into the ditch. The deer had come out of nowhere, it seemed, tried to leap over the speeding car, and succeeded only in clearing the hood in time to crash through the windshield. The deer’s neck was broken by the impact, and the windshield was shattered.
The strangest sight of a deer I ever had on the road was one afternoon when I was on my way to the village in the car. A young doe had come down the hillside for some reason, and I had surprised her at the roadside. Instead of taking to the woods, as any sensible deer would have done, she chose to run down the road ahead of me. In the woods or open fields or topping a fence or a brushy hedge, deer are the most graceful animals I know except possibly otters and foxes; but that young doe, galloping down the hard-topped road, was as awkward as a cow, at least from behind. I idled the car and drifted along behind her, laughing, for almost half a mile before she finally had a flash of common sense. She quit the road, turned off into a meadow, and leaped the fence, her graceful self again. And I was glad that, if she had to make such a spectacle of herself, she chose to do it on a country road and ahead of a driver who wasn’t hurrying.
Country roads weren’t meant for swift passage. They were laid out originally for leisurely travel from farm to farm and from farm to village, and they conformed to the land itself, not to an engineer’s ruler laid on a map. There is a tendency nowadays to convert too many of them into minor speedways by straightening out their curves and cutting every tree that a haphazard driver might run into. This tendency is to be deplored and resisted. We need the byways just as much as, possibly more than, the superhighways. We need the winding back roads where the driver is warned by the road itself to slow down, take it easy. We need them as a relief from the haste and tensions of the big highways where everyone seems intent on getting somewhere much too fast so he can turn around and hurry back. We need country roads where the leisurely travelers can stop and look, where the countryman can go safely on foot and know the feel of his own land. Country roads are for enjoying, and the best of that enjoyment comes to him who walks.
Chapter 3
Pastures and Meadows
The farmer likes to think he is master of his grasslands, but if he turns his back for a season nature quietly makes them her own again. The patient explorer will find even the meadow alive with the untamed and the insistently untamable.
MANY COUNTRY PLACES, AND practically all the farmhouses I know, are either on the edge or in the midst of meadows and pastureland. Ever since man emerged from the caves to build a shelter for his family he has chosen to live in a clearing. This must have been at least in part because it is easier there to see the approach of enemies; but it also, undoubtedly, is because the clearing has long been the symbol of man’s mastery of the land. Today we rationalize these matters by saying that a farmstead set in open fields gives a sense of space and air, and if we are being practical we note that it is a convenient arrangement for the farmer. Pastureland near the barn saves time and energy for man and beast. The farmer works in his fields of corn and oats only during growing and harvest season, and what work he does in his woodlot is done in the off-season. His pastures are in use a good part of the year.
The cultivated meadow or pasture is not the most profitable place to look for wild life because it is supposed to be a field of tame grass and clover, tended and renewed by reseeding every few years. Wild plants are not welcome there, and even such wild animals as rabbits and wood-chucks, which eat forage grown for domestic animals, are not encouraged. But most pastures and meadows have fence rows, difficult to trim and impossible to cultivate. In my part of the country many meadows are bordered by woodland, and the underbrush constantly tries to creep in, thus creating a brushy margin. Here and in most of New England we also have old stone walls, laid up long ago and now often fallen into disorderly rows of stones, which defy the plow and the mower. All these places are havens for wild plants and offer shelter for sma
ll animals. Their seeds and berries encourage the birds. As a nature watcher I cherish these margins and old walls, though as a landowner I know that they are constantly warning me that my sovereignty over the land can be maintained only by unending work.
My pastures are all bordered by woodland and brush. A few years ago we spent several sweaty weeks reclaiming a border strip with ax and brush hook. We cut the brush, opened the soil to the sun, and encouraged the pasture grass to grow and spread. But only a few days ago I noticed that the brush is coming back, thicker than ever. Young sumac and birch and ash seedlings are as high as my head, and there is quite a stand of seedling pasture cedars and vigorous young barberry bushes. That strip should be cleaned off again. But I also noticed that meadowlarks are nesting there, and brown thrashers, and I flushed three partridges and several cottontails. The partridges were there to get the barberry berries or the birch buds, both of which are important items in their diet. I like partridges and try to encourage them. But if I fail to brush off that strip soon, that whole side of the pasture will go back to nature.
Down the road a mile or so is a field which should be an example to me as a farm owner. It is an old meadow that has been untended for about five years, as ragged-looking a plot as I know; but every time I pass there I want to stop and spend an hour just loafing and looking. A few times each season I go there and spend a few hours, and I always find something new.
It is only a small field, five or six acres, an odd tract left over in a series of farm sales some years back. Before we came here to live it had been a small pasture, but when I first saw it it was a second-rate hay field mowed every June by a farmer half a mile away. Between annual mowings it had no care; daisies, asters, and goldenrod multiplied and the original grass diminished. After a few years the farmer stopped mowing it. The hay wasn’t worth his time and labor. It has lain untended since.