Any bogland, as I was saying, is a fascinating place primarily because it is essentially primitive and because it inevitably resists the taming hand of man. The plow cannot reach its soil and the man with an ax can reach its trees and brush only when Winter and ice have given him footing. Usually there is better timberland elsewhere for his harvest, anyway. The result is a natural tangle, marsh and muck and brush and undergrowth, humid and mosquito-infested in Summer, blazing with color in the Fall, full of competing life in the Spring.
If I want to know which birds are Wintering over in my area, I go to the bogland. There, in the shelter of the brush, I will find the robins and the occasional bluebird that didn’t go South. If there is food to be had anywhere, they will find it in the depths of the swamp. I have even found a flock of cowbirds in the alder thickets there in January, though I had thought they were provident enough to migrate. There I have seen flocks of goldfinches, looking deceptively like sparrows in their Winter plumage. The goldfinches find thistles and ironweed and dozens of other food plants in the Winter swamp. The robins feed there on sumac berries, among other things, and may find a few worms and larvae in the frosty muck. And when the first breath of Spring touches the land, I always find the outriders of the great migration of blackbirds, rusties and redwings primarily, in the bogland.
In Midwinter I often go to the swamp to see the ice, which takes forms there that I find nowhere else. The thick muck, in a deep freeze, heaves and almost seems to writhe, and when I look beneath a mat of dead leaves I usually find a mass of ice crystals like stalagmites in a limestone cave. They sometimes stand six inches tall, ice spikes big as lead pencils. I lift the ice from a little hollow, an old footstep perhaps. It is glassy smooth on the upper surface, but its under side is a mass of icy stalactites, crystalline spikes pointed downward. Then, perhaps during the January thaw, comes a mild day or two, and the bogland is full of puddles, the air over it steamy. The warmth is not only from the sun; it is from the earth as well, where the dead vegetation is simmering in the heat of its own decay. The whole bog is a kind of elemental hotbed. I think that if I were a frog I should choose the mud of such a place for my place of hibernation. It is not what I would call a warm Winter bed, but it is certainly warmer than a wind-swept hillside.
Warmth of this degree, however, is of little concern to the hibernators there, the frogs, the toads, the turtles, and the snakes. They are all cold-blooded, primitive in our lexicon. The frogs, the toads, and the turtles burrow into the mud to hibernate. The snakes crawl into holes or sometimes into mud or loose soil, often a number of them together. Wherever they go, they escape the Winter cold of the open air. Their bodily processes slow down. Body temperature diminishes to a few degrees above that of the surrounding earth. Breathing almost ceases, the heartbeat falls to so deliberate a rate that it is hard to find, and the inert body lives on its stored fat. The human problem of maintaining body heat in the high 90’s in the face of zero weather is completely avoided.
Another kind of hibernation occurs here, too—the hibernation of the tree, the bush, the vine, and the bulb or tuber. We seldom think of plant life as hibernating in this way, but the process is much the same as with the hibernating animal. Life processes are slowed down or almost suspended. The plant has withdrawn its vital juices into the root or bulb. On tree and bush the latent buds, formed during the mild days of Autumn, are there on the branch and twig, somewhat protected by scales and wax but otherwise taking the weather as it comes. By late February or early March, as soon as the days turn faintly mild and the daylight approaches the length of night, sap begins to rise, especially in the trees of the maple family. Buds begin to quicken imperceptibly. I see this change in the swampland in the color particularly of the red-osier dogwood. This bush’s smooth-barked stems are of a ruddy color the year around, but when this quickening begins those stems glow almost blood-red. It is as though red and living blood were rising just there beneath their bark. The sap which actually is rising is as colorless as the maple sap from which syrup and sugar are made, faintly amber, but its presence does something quite wonderful to the color of those red-osier dogwood stems. The same thing is happening in the willows of the swampland, but the result is amber, not red. Willow stems, both of the brush and of the bigger trees, liven and brighten and glow with the color of late Summer honey. The big weeping willow out beside my garage becomes a towering amber fountain, every long, slim withe aglow. The dead look of Winter is gone.
And then Spring comes to the swamp.
I have said that the skunk cabbage is the earliest sign of Spring there, and that is true. But skunk cabbage is really a promise of Spring rather than Spring itself. The Spring peepers are the voice of Spring, the absolute certainty that Winter has lost its grip, though I have known a six-inch snowfall after the first peepers began to call. But when I go to the swamp and see the first pussy willow out of its bud scales, I know that the turn has come.
I often find pussy willow in bloom in March. Willows are unisexual trees, bearing either male or female blossoms but not both on the same tree. The “pussy” is the male catkin and, like most willow blossoms, it appears before the leaves appear. The tree is small, relatively, actually a shrub and seldom as much as twenty-five feet high. March comes and I begin to watch the willows on the margin of the swamp. One mild day I see that the brownish scales on the fat buds have begun to part, and if the mildness continues the silvery gray catkins appear in another day or two. The twigs are covered with them and glow in the sunlight. At first the “pussies” are smaller around than a lead pencil, but they grow quickly. If the weather turns chill they simply wait, as though protected by their fur coats. That “fur” is as soft to the touch as a real kitten’s fur. In botanical fact, however, it consists of fine, hairlike stamens. As soon as the rather inconspicuous catkins open on the female trees, these male stamens produce pollen. The silver “pussies” turn gold with the pollen, then lose their silvery look and become bristly and yellowish green. Before all the pollen has drifted away, the first of the leaf buds have begun to open. The “pussies” are all through.
Even before the willows are in full leaf, the marsh marigolds are leafed out and showing flower buds. The marsh marigold is really a big buttercup that likes wet feet. In New England marsh marigolds are often called cowslips, probably because careless observers long ago thought they saw a resemblance to English cowslips, which really are primulas.
By mid-May the swamp is full of flowers and bees. Violets are everywhere, especially on the moist margins. Dogtooth violets, those lovely yellow, star-shaped lilies which went into every rural May basket in my youth, are absent from my swamp, but they are common forty miles south of here. Wild forget-me-nots do bloom here, on leggy stems, their roots in the edge of the water. I am always surprised to see how many bees patronize those tiny, sky-blue blossoms, which would seem too small to merit much attention. Also at the water’s edge grows the wild blue phlox. This phlox also grows in the woodland where the shade is thin and there is moisture for the roots. And before May is out I find the larger blue flag, a wild iris, in bloom. I had thought this iris demanded muck and water over its roots, but when I transplanted one into my dry-land flower garden it throve. In the bog, this iris grows quite tall, sometimes almost three feet. A lesser iris, the slender blue flag, with narrower leaves and smaller flowers, also grows there, but sparsely. While the iris are in bloom, cranesbill (the wild geranium) dapples the drier banks with its rose-colored blossoms, and sweet fern and sensitive fern grow lush.
By early June the trees and shrubs of the bogland are in bloom. The dogwood shrubs, especially the red-osier which was so conspicuous when Spring was getting a first foothold, have flattened clusters of dull white blossoms that make you think of miniature clusters of elderberry bloom, which comes a few weeks later. And while the dogwood is in bloom the chokecherries open their fuzzy, fat, drooping clusters of white flowers. You can always tell when chokecherry is in bloom by listening for the bee-hum. Bees l
ove it, swarm to it.
Meanwhile most of the water plants have come to blossom without attracting the attention of anyone except bees and other flying insects. Their blossoms, for the most part, are inconspicuous, often pale green or yellowish white. The more colorful swamp blossoms come later in the season, Midsummer or even August. But I always watch for the vervain, especially the so-called blue vervain, which is not blue at all, but deep purple. And for the great lobelia, which is truly blue and spectacular with a showy stalk of flowers sometimes three feet tall. It completely overshadows the water lobelia, which comes to bloom about the same time but whose flowers are small and sparse and their color disappointing after one has seen the great lobelia. Water lobelia grows in the water, not on the moist bank, and its thick, straplike leaves are at the base of the stem, submerged. Only the flower stalk appears above the water.
As the season pushes toward Fall, the vervain begins to fade and the composites take over. Ironweed shoots up with its tall, weedy stems and long, lance-shaped leaves, and heads into a cluster of purple flowers that look like the bachelor’s buttons in my garden except that the ironweed flowers have no outer petals, just that central tuft. Boneset and Joe Pye weed have also grown tall and rank. A youngster who helped me measure one stalk of boneset announced its height as six feet and thirty-two inches. Boneset blooms in terminal tufts of small, white, fuzzy flowers. Joe Pye’s blossoms, also at the tip of the stalk, are much like those of boneset except that they are a warm magenta-pink, something like the color of field thistle heads but a shade redder. I always find all these flowers on the damp margins, never in the water itself. And on those damp margins I always find an assortment of dry-land plants grown to unusual size in the rich fertility of the mucky soil—asters, goldenrods, milkweeds, dogbane. And the ubiquitous bouncing Bet, which flowers early and persists late, well after the first light frost.
By mid-September almost any swampland will begin to show signs of the season’s end. The bur-reed seed balls lose their green, the cattails are turning a rich red-brown, the conelike seed cases of the alder brush are ripening. The chokecherries show a first flush of color in their leaves; their cherries ripened in late August and flocks of birds have been gorging on them for days, birds from the meadow and woodland as well as those which were at home in the swamp all Summer. Robins are there in flocks, and I see more flickers than I would have expected. Catbirds make a noisy holiday of it, quarreling among themselves as well as with everyone else.
The Jacks-in-the-pulpit, out of sight in the tall grass all Summer, are revealed now by their clusters of red berries. The false spikenard, which grew four feet high, now droops, borne down by the weight of its terminal cluster of berries, just a bit smaller than peas, which were yellowish white speckled with brown, then turned ruby-red. Those berries are edible, rather sweet to the taste, and aromatic. Solomon’s-seal, the species called “great,” has its berries too, twin berries that look like small Concord grapes both in shape and color, at the base of each leaf. The Solomon’s-seal grows as much as eight feet tall in the swamp, with long, lance-shaped, wavy green leaves, a beautiful plant.
The color touches the chokecherry leaves. Then it begins to mark the leaves of the dogwood brush, not as vivid as the deep wine color of the flowering dogwood of the hillside but a warm red just the same. The red-osier dogwood berries ripened in August, first to dull white, then to lead gray, and the birds ate most of them. The stems of the fruit clusters still are on the bushes, stiff-fingered little hands pointing upward, red as cherries.
My swamp has no tamaracks, but many New England swamps do have them. The tamarack is the only conifer that sheds all its needles in the Fall. It is a beautiful tree, tall and tapering, and in the Spring its dress of brand-new needles is a delicate light green, almost misty in effect. The color deepens into Summer, but by late September it begins to change to tan, a special golden tan that has a kind of glow. A grove of tamaracks in full Fall color is like a cluster of giant candle flames without the red of fire, only that warm yellow-gold color. Then the needles fall and the trees stand stark all Winter.
My swamp does have swamp maples, which were all crimson when they came to bloom in late April and which in October are crimson again. There are few colors in the woodland that can equal the reds of the swamp maples. At a certain stage, the swamp is like a gigantic red bonfire, magnificent. The swamp also is host to the ash-leafed maple, the box elder. This tree makes no great Autumn show, its leaves crisping into a lifeless tan and soon drifting down; but its seed tufts give it special distinction. It bears keys, like other maples, except that on the box elder those keys are borne in generous clusters, like coarse tassels. They have been inconspicuous, the color of the leaves, all Summer. Now they turn a warm tan, a better color than the leaves ever achieve, and when the leaves fall the tree is still decked out in those tassels of seed keys. Several box elders in my swamp were still full of those tufts of keys last December. Winter birds appreciate them, and I have seen squirrels harvesting them, for their small but meaty kernels.
The leaves turn. Then the Fall rains come, and the wind. The leaves come down. The swamp water is covered with the color that shaded it, and for a few days the swamp is like a great, variegated patchwork quilt. Then the water begins to leach the color and the leaves slowly sink to the mucky bottom. The grass has been sered by the first hard frosts. The cattails stand for a little while, their brittle leaves making a papery rustle in the wind, their tall stalks top-heavy with the fat fluff-heads. Then the wind whips the leaves, bends them down, and the cattail beds are a stark forest of those seed stalks. Muskrats harvest roots and bring down the stalks here and there; field mice and chipmunks, leaping from dry tussock to tussock, gather the fluff for their Winter nests, and late birds open other heads, still standing, and leave them in tatters to the Winter wind.
The swamp falls quiet. The frogs have hibernated, burrowed into the muck. The turtles have made their own Winter quarters in the muck. When the last of the asters and goldenrod were gone, the bees quit coming, their season’s work completed. The water snakes, robbed of energy by the Autumn chill, have burrowed in for the Winter’s sleep. Last November, however, I saw a four-foot water snake in a pool at the swamp, still more or less active. The air temperature that day was in the 20’s, and I thought every snake for miles around would have been safely hibernated. But this one was active enough to note my presence and swim swiftly away, back into the cattail tangle, when I tossed a stick at him to prove that he really was alive.
By November there will be scums of ice on the pools in the swamp. The muskrats will have their Winter quarters completed and most of the harvest in. I probably won’t see a muskrat, though I have on occasion seen one swimming under the clear ice on a bitter day in January. The ice, of course, seals most of the cold away from the water and the muck of the swamp’s bottom. And the muskrat is well dressed for Winter weather. But muskrats usually stay close to home through the Winter months. They build three types of structures besides a burrow in the bank. The biggest is the lodge, used as living quarters in Winter and as birthing room and nursery in Spring. It is a dome sometimes five feet across, built of roots, reeds, and mud in water two feet or so deep. It has an inner chamber well above water level, no outside exit except into the water, and when its foot-thick walls freeze it is a fortress. Nearby will be several feeding shelters, each like a miniature lodge and built largely of edible material with a thick mud coating overhead. The muskrats can take food there to eat or eat the roots that went into the walls. And along the muskrat’s everyday travelways under water there will be a number of push-ups, built after the bog freezes over. Natural bubble holes are enlarged to about four inches in diameter and the muskrats bring roots and other vegetation and thrust it through the ice, upward, building heaps as big as a man’s hat on the ice. These are breathing holes, where a rat can come up for air and, if he chooses, climb out onto the ice and have a snack while safely hidden from danger overhead. The muskrat is a prac
tical fellow; he makes his shelters edible.
The cold will deepen. The ice will thicken. Snow will come. When I go to the swamp in January I shall see only the leafless trees and bushes, the brown and graceful curve of the goldenrod stems, the stiff ranks of dead cattail stems. The tussocks will be like big warts on the swamp’s white face and the muskrat structures will be smooth, symmetrical mounds in the snow. In the snow I will see only a few tracks, mostly of animals that seldom visit the swamp except in Winter. The muskrats, wise and provident, have no need to be abroad, and the other swamp folk are asleep.
There probably will be the tracks of a fox, come down from the hills in search of a meal, perhaps at one of the muskrats’ push-ups, if some muskrat is less than usually wary. There will be the lacy track of a field mouse, probably a white-foot, out for air and a bite of breakfast. There will be the seemingly aimless track of a rabbit, a cottontail just wandering but alert for the first sign of fox or hungry owl. If the rabbit has been unwary for a few moments, I will find the notice of his death written in the snow—a few spatters of blood, a few tufts of gray fur, the mark of an owl’s wings as it struck from the air or the prints of a fox stalking, then pouncing. The story of life and death, written on that blank sheet of Winter.
Chickadees may speak to me from a brush patch. There probably will be a flock of juncos, to go winging away on a gusty wind. There certainly will be tree sparrows and goldfinches, harvesting goldenrod seed and shriveled berries. If I am fortunate I may see the flock of robins that Winters here in the valley. And if I am particularly favored a cardinal will whistle from the wooded hillside. I will answer him. We will whistle back and forth, and soon I will see a flash of red coming my way. He will come and perch high in a Winter-naked swamp maple and gladden my heart.