Beyond Your Doorstep
The red pine is sometimes called the Norway pine, though it is native to America. Its five-inch needles are as soft and flexible as those of the white pine but they occur in pairs. Its cones also come in pairs, without stems, on opposite sides of the branch, and have no prickles. The red pine is essentially a North-woods tree, but it grows as far south as central Pennsylvania and west into Minnesota.
The beginner sometimes confuses the red pine and the jack pine, which is sometimes called scrub or gray pine. I don’t know why. The jack pine is a smaller tree to start with, and often grows in sandy soil and rocky places. Its needles also grow in pairs, but they are short and stiff, less than two inches long. Its cones are egg-shaped and persist on the branches for years, but they stand upright, never in clusters or on the sides of the branches. The scrub pine of Long Island and the New Jersey “barrens” resembles the jack pine of my area in many ways but is a different species botanically.
Many Americans know spruces and firs only as Christmas trees, since those two species provide the bulk of small, cut trees marketed every holiday season. Both are essentially northern trees, uncommon in my area and from here south. Spruce needles are square in cross-section and grow all around the twig, giving it a bottle-brush effect. Fir needles are flattened and grow on the sides of the twig, giving it the look of a feather. Spruce cones hang down from the branch and fir cones stand erect. When I see a stand of balsam firs in northern New England, with their dark green color, their symmetrical shapes, and their pungent fragrance, I think they are the most beautiful of all conifers. But some people give the award to the spruces. I wouldn’t quarrel with them; all evergreens are beautiful.
I am also partial to the hemlock, perhaps because it likes my mountainside’s soil, thrives here. The hemlock’s needles grow like those of the fir, on opposite sides of the branch, and the whole effect is feathery. But hemlock cones are small, only about half an inch long, light brown, and papery to the touch. If you are uncertain whether a tree is a fir or a hemlock, drill a hole in the bark of the trunk with a pocket knife. If it is a hemlock you will strike a vivid red layer close beneath the brown outer bark. If the red layer is missing, the tree is a fir.
We have two common cedars here in the Northeast, the red and the white. We call the red cedar “pasture cedar” and use it for fence posts. It is the common one, the one that sprouts in pasture margins everywhere. But in the woods I also find white cedars, which are supposed to grow only down on the coastal plain. How the white cedars got here, I don’t know, but they are unmistakable. All cedars have green, flakelike overlapping leaves, but the red cedar also has tiny, needle-sharp thorns along the twigs, and the white cedars have no thorns. And in the Fall the red cedars bear purple-blue berries a quarter of an inch in diameter, while the white cedar bears tiny, tan, papery cones like miniature hemlock cones. In gathering Christmas greens we always choose white cedar boughs rather than those from red cedar; the green is fresher and they have none of those tiny, pestery thorns to annoy the fingers.
But I had no intention of taking a census of the woodland. I went wandering among the trees and found a host of friends, as any woodland wanderer will after a few excursions. And I have scarcely mentioned the birds and animals of the woods.
As I said earlier, birds and animals usually prefer the margins of the woodlands rather than the depths of the forests. They live where they can find food and even those we call predators, the flesh-eaters, subsist on the grass-eaters and the leaf-eaters. The bear, the lynx, and the bobcat follow the deer, the rabbit, and the mouse, and deer, rabbits, and mice usually feed where there is grass and brushy browse, along the margins of the woodland. In Winter the deer retreat to the evergreen thickets for both shelter and food. I find them among the cedars and hemlocks when the snow lies deep. Squirrels probably outnumber all other woodland creatures except mice and voles. Squirrels prefer oak woods, with their wealth of acorns, or mixed hardwood forests with the varied nuts; but they also patronize the pine woods and feast on the seeds in the cones.
Porcupines have become a woodland nuisance and a forester’s problem since we killed off the fisher, the porcupine’s principal enemy, and put a bounty on the bobcat, another of its persistent foes. In Spring and Summer the porcupine feeds on lesser vegetation at the woodland margin, but in Winter it eats bark, the vital cambium layer, and destroys valuable timber. The problem of the porcupine, one of the least prolific of all animals—it bears only one young a year—is an eloquent example of man’s persistent shortsightedness in many matters of conservation.
Foxes seldom prowl the big woods except in passing; the mice and rabbits that make up most of their fare live in the margins and open meadows. Skunks, too, are primarily margin and meadow foragers, though they may den in the woods. Raccoons usually den in big, hollow trees, but most of their hunting and foraging is done in the more open areas and along the banks of brooks and streams. Coons usually, but by no means always, wash their food before they eat it. I’ve known them to spend a whole night in a cornfield half a mile from the nearest water, eating like mad and never drinking a drop or washing a mouthful.
I find relatively few birds in the big, deep woods. Big owls live there, and now and then a colony of crows. Jays often live in an oak woods and compete with the squirrels for acorns. Woodpeckers nest and feed in the woods. I find that hairy and downy woodpeckers and flickers prefer to nest in dead hardwood trees, but that the big pileated woodpecker will nest in either hardwoods or pines, and in dead trees or live ones, wherever he can find an opening and start chiseling.
The smaller woodpeckers enlarge old knotholes in dead trees or cut round holes, but the crimson-crested pileated fellow, big as a crow and with the power of a small jackhammer in his neck and beak, cuts oblong holes, sometimes three inches across and five or six inches long. They are so big that owls and wood ducks sometimes appropriate them for nesting places. Last year a pileated woodpecker spent several weeks cutting big, oblong cavities in a ten-inch birch just over the hill from my house. He cut eight such holes, for some reason I never understood, and so weakened the tree that a windy rainstorm took down its whole top. Then the big woodpecker went to work on the tall stump, as though he wanted to destroy it right down to the roots. But usually the pileated bird works on dead trees. It even uses certain dead trees as signal posts. For several weeks this past Summer two pileated woodpeckers perched in dead popples just across the river from my house and hammered out echoing messages, or maybe challenges, to each other several times a day.
The thrushes, of course, are birds of the woodland. Some of them, notably the wood thrush, will come down into the open and even nest near an occupied house; and the robin seems to think suburban lawns and tree-lined streets were deeded to him long ago. But the hermit thrush and the veery, and the olive-backed thrush in northern areas, are die-hards who cling to the depths of the woods, nest there, feed there, and sing their wonderful melodies there. I hear the wood thrush from my house, morning and evening, all Summer, and now and then I hear a veery; but if I would hear the hermit thrush or see any of them I must get well back from the road and into the solitude of the forest, and even then I must keep my eyes and ears alert to find them.
In the Summer I always find chickadees in the thin woods, and when I go up to the thickets of hemlock and cedar in the Winter they fly around me, twitter as though welcoming a visitor, and accompany me on my walk. I often find Wintering-over robins there, following their thrush habits of woodland life and feeding on the cedar berries. And the cardinals, which came and stayed this far north only in the past five or six years, whistle and flash their brilliant color at me in the tallest of the hardwood trees.
Always, Summer and Winter, I find ruffed grouse in the woods, most often in the hardwoods where berries are more plentiful than among the pines, but occasionally feeding on wintergreen or partridgeberry under the thick canopy of the conifers. If I visit a stand of wild barberry I usually flush partridges, and often I find them in black birch
es or wild apple trees, where they feed on the leaf buds.
All birds, as all animals, can be found where they can find food. Learn what they eat, seek out the places where it grows, and you will usually find the birds there.
The woods are both pleasant and interesting in Summer, but they are a challenge in the Winter if one would know one tree from another. A black oak is not difficult to tell from a white oak when they are in leaf, but the test of knowledge comes in bare-limbed December. It is easy to distinguish a sugar maple from a red maple in April or October, but they are hard to distinguish when all the leaves have fallen.
I have found that I need some knowledge of what I call tree fingerprints in the Winter—the color, texture, and pattern of the bark. There are obvious ones. Shagbark hickory has loose, shaggy strips on its bark. Beech bark is sleek and gray. Sugar maple’s bark has flakes and plates, and swamp maple bark is somewhat smoother. But I have been baffled for a time by the resemblance of a bird cherry’s bark to that of a black birch, and black oak and white oak both have bark with similar marks and ridges. I have even been puzzled by the similarity of the bark on a white ash, a slippery elm, and a box elder. The shape of the tree, the way it branches, and the place it grows often help in Winter identification. But just to make a Winter walk interesting, the bark on a sapling never looks like the bark on an older tree of the same species. Trees, like children, need a few years for their features to consolidate.
One could spend a lifetime in the woods and not know all there is to learn. I have spent ten years with my own woods and still know only its outlines, its simpler identities and relationships and truths.
Chapter 5
The Bog and the Swamp
The ponds and the wetlands are a world unto themselves. The adventurer there, be he novice or veteran, will be aware of ancient beginnings and insistent change. There he will see those subtle interrelationships of life which the specialist calls ecology.
I SHALL NEVER GET over the feeling that bogs and swamps are primitive places, a vestige of prehistoric ages. Swamp muck has the feel and look, even the smell, of land and life evolving; and the life I find in the bogland, both plant and animal, has an ancient and faraway look, like life from another age.
This is not wholly imaginary. When land first appeared on this earth it was marshland newly lifted from the depths of the primeval seas. Those marshes were the refuge of the first amphibians and the cradle of the first animals that learned to walk the earth. In much more recent times, when the great ice sheets were melting back whence they came, vast swamps were created by the melt, to simmer under a perennial blanket of mist and grow up into jungles of plant life creeping northward again after the icebound centuries. Life has always gained its first foothold in the wetlands, which even today mark land and life in transition.
In late Winter I walk down my road to a bogland area and look for skunk cabbage, the earliest sign of Spring. There are older plants and more primitive ones even in my area—ground cedar, running pine, scouring rushes, for example—but when I see the big purple-striped green horns of skunk cabbage thrusting up through the frozen muck, often through ice and snow as well, I have the feeling that they are the grandfathers of all time. Those horn-shaped hoods are close kin to the spathe of Jack-in-the-pulpit, also one of the arum family, but they have a far more ancient look about them. And the clublike spadix set with small flesh-colored flowers, which will be revealed inside as soon as the hood begins to open, exudes no honeyed, sweet-scented bid for the attention of bees. The bees are still Winter-bound, so the skunk cabbage flowers have the odor of carrion, to attract the hardy flies that have been living on the decaying flesh of animals that were Winter-killed. In every way, the skunk cabbage is far different from the swamp violet that will eventually come to blossom nearby. To me it is a primitive.
As Spring moves in, at this small bogland, the big cabbagelike leaves will unfurl, sometimes two feet across, in vivid green display. Break a stem or crush a leaf and the juice is rank with the skunky, oniony odor that gives the plant its common name. By then I will begin to see in the murky water the young blades of cattail and sweet flag and the various bur reeds, all like giant, primitive grasses. When the cattail comes to blossom in June, that blossom will be strange, too—a long, cylindrical spike set at the top of a tall stem, the upper half all stamens which spill a wealth of yellow pollen on the lower half, all pistils and ovaries. And this lower half will mature by September into a fat frankfurter of tightly packed brown fluff and minute seeds. The sweet flag will come to bloom with a slim thumb of yellowish-green florets, and the bur reeds will put forth brownish-white tufts of fuzzy bloom that eventually mature into thorny little seed balls like miniature pineapples. Ancient-looking and exotic, all of them.
Here and there tussocks lift their heads out of the water and on them grow Jacks-in-the-pulpit and arrow-leafed Sagittaria and water plantain. And, if I search for them, properly booted against the muck and murky water, I can find several varieties of orchid, from the little snake-mouth Pogonia to the beautiful yellow lady-slipper. Ancients all, and strange ones in root or leaf or blossom, or in all three.
It is in the bog that the Spring peepers, the Hylas, come out of muddy hibernation and creep up the bush stems and cry their Spring song, one of the oldest songs on earth. The peepers, only about one inch across, smaller than a twenty-five-cent piece, are actually tree toads, and the tip of each toe has a tiny adhesive disc with which the peeper can cling to bushes, reeds, even to a windowpane, as one did here at my house one April evening. The peepers usually begin to call soon after the first red-wing blackbirds arrive. I have never seen one in daylight, but when they are calling in the dusk it is quite easy to find one on the margin of a bog by using a flashlight and following the sound to its maker. This has its difficulties, of course, for the peeper’s call often has a ventriloquous effect; but peepers congregate in large numbers and the searcher needs only be patient and persistent to find one.
Not long after the peepers begin to call they, as well as the dry-land toads and the sleek-skinned frogs, lay their eggs, making the water slimy with the gelatinous egg masses. By May that water will teem with tadpoles hatched from those eggs. And by then it will also teem with hungry minnows that eat tadpoles; and water snakes will be there to eat tadpoles and minnows without discrimination. These northern water snakes are harmless, but in the Deep South such bogs and swamps are the home of the cottonmouth, a pit viper and virulently poisonous.
Frogs, toads, serpents, turtles—ancients, every one of them. And ancient too are the occasional salamander I see there and the sluggish mud puppy, so primitive it can breathe through its gills, its mouth, or its skin.
Even the insects of the wetland have a primitive look: Dragonflies, lineal descendants of fossils a hundred million years old and possibly among the earliest flying creatures; and damsel flies, their close cousins—at rest, the dragonfly holds its wings outspread but the damsel fly folds its wings over its back. Giant moths which, like all their kind, are in turn egg and worm and encased mummy and moth again. Fireflies, with their still mysterious inner fire. Caddis flies and mosquitoes, whose larvae are as committed to life in the water as are fish. Water striders, which skate on the water as easily as long-legged children skate on ice. And all the strange aquatic insects such as back swimmers and water boatmen and water scorpions.
And the swampland birds—show me a more primitive-looking bird than the heron, with its stilt legs, its long, serpentine neck, its darting head and stiletto beak. Or the kingfisher, with stubby wings, rackety voice, truculent crest, and fantastic bifocal eyes for seeing under water as well as in the air. Or the fat, uptilted bittern, a veritable caricature of a bird; or the woodcock, all beak and no tail. Even the angry-looking coot, with its long legs and paddle-fitted toes.
One late Spring evening I sat on a grassy bank of this small bogland for an hour at dusk, hoping to see a water shrew. The water shrew is smaller than a mouse and, because it is so tiny an
d has feet covered with long, buoyant hairs, can literally walk on water. Violets were in bloom on the dry bank where I sat, and red-wing blackbirds were making their evening clamor. A great blue heron had dropped in from the sky and stood four feet tall in a shallow spot, staring at me suspiciously, the black plumes on his white head like grotesque ears. An American bittern had come out of the cattail tangle onto a tussock and alternately stared at me with beady eyes and thrust his long beak at the sky where the first stars would soon be out. I hoped to hear the bittern utter that “plum puddin’” sound characteristic of his kind, but he just stood there, silent, not even probing the muck for food.
No water shrew appeared. A muskrat swam out of the tangle into open water, his wake like long, silvery whiskers V-ing out from his nose, and either saw me or got a whiff of my scent. He dived in panic. But the water was shallow. He stood on his head in the mud, hind feet frantic, for a long moment before he completed a wet somersault and swam madly back into the swamp.
Dusk crept in, and the mucky smell, the deepening shadows, the eerie look of the stilt-legged heron, made my skin prickle. I was sitting beside an ancient swamp, not a little pasture-margin bogland, and it was two hundred million years ago. If I sat there just ten minutes longer a sixty-foot brontosaurus right out of the Jurassic Age would come lumbering into sight.
Swamps do that to me, particularly at dusk.
Actually, the bogland is a fascinating place, whether it is a backwater left when a river changes its course, as is that little swamp I know best, or one of those big lowland swamps once typical of the Midwest and still typical of the Deep South. Beavers made a good many of the swamps in the Northeast, to begin with; but the beavers vanished and where they have come back they are now either a novelty or a nuisance to most people. And swamps today are too commonly considered wasteland, to be drained and “reclaimed.” In our passion for “reclamation” we do all kinds of ultimately foolish things. We drain the swamps, lower the water table, create floods, rob waterfowl of their natural habitat, and glibly call it progress. But that’s not a battle to be waged in this book. There are better arenas.