A Florida Sketch Book - Bradford Torrey
[Transcriber's Note: The original scan for text page 142 is missing
This is noted where it occurs in the text.]
A FLORIDA SKETCH BOOK
By
BRADFORD TORREY
Books by Mr. Torrey.
BIRDS IN THE BUSH.
A RAMBLER'S LEASE.
THE FOOT-PATH WAY.
A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK.
1894
CONTENTS
IN THE FLAT-WOODS
BESIDE THE MARSH
ON THE BEACH AT DAYTONA
ALONG THE HILLSBOROUGH
A MORNING AT THE OLD SUGAR MILL
ON THE UPPER ST. JOHN'S
ON THE ST. AUGUSTINE ROAD
ORNITHOLOGY ON A COTTON PLANTATION
A FLORIDA SHRINE
WALKS ABOUT TALLAHASSEE
A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK.
IN THE FLAT-WOODS.
In approaching Jacksonville by rail, the traveler rides hour after
hour through seemingly endless pine barrens, otherwise known as low
pine-woods and flat-woods, till he wearies of the sight. It would be
hard, he thinks, to imagine a region more unwholesome looking and
uninteresting, more poverty-stricken and God-forsaken, in its entire
aspect. Surely, men who would risk life in behalf of such a country
deserved to win their cause.
Monotonous as the flat-woods were, however, and malarious as they
looked,--arid wastes and stretches of stagnant water flying past the car
window in perpetual alternation, I was impatient to get into them. They
were a world the like of which I had never seen; and wherever I went in
eastern Florida, I made it one of my earliest concerns to seek them out.
My first impression was one of disappointment, or perhaps I should
rather say, of bewilderment. In fact, I returned from my first visit to
the flat-woods under the delusion that I had not been into them at all.
This was at St. Augustine, whither I had gone after a night only in
Jacksonville. I looked about the quaint little city, of course, and went
to the South Beach, on St. Anastasia Island; then I wished to see the
pine lands. They were to be found, I was told, on the other side of the
San Sebastian. The sun was hot (or so it seemed to a man fresh from the
rigors of a New England winter), and the sand was deep; but I sauntered
through New Augustine, and pushed on up the road toward Moultrie (I
believe it was), till the last houses were passed and I came to the edge
of the pine-woods. Here, presently, the roads began to fork in a very
confusing manner. The first man I met--a kindly cracker--cautioned me
against getting lost; but I had no thought of taking the slightest risk
of that kind. I was not going to _explore_ the woods, but only to enter
them, sit down, look about me, and listen. The difficulty was to get
into them. As I advanced, they receded. It was still only the beginning
of a wood; the trees far apart and comparatively small, the ground
covered thickly with saw palmetto, interspersed here and there with
patches of brown grass or sedge.
In many places the roads were under water, and as I seemed to be making
little progress, I pretty soon sat down in a pleasantly shaded spot.
Wagons came along at intervals, all going toward the city, most of them
with loads of wood; ridiculously small loads, such as a Yankee boy would
put upon a wheelbarrow. "A fine day," said I to the driver of such a
cart. "Yes, sir," he answered, "it's a _pretty_ day." He spoke with an
emphasis which seemed to imply that he accepted my remark as well meant,
but hardly adequate to the occasion. Perhaps, if the day had been a few
shades brighter, he would have called it "handsome," or even "good
looking." Expressions of this kind, however, are matters of local or
individual taste, and as such are not to be disputed about. Thus, a man
stopped me in Tallahassee to inquire what time it was. I told him, and
he said, "Ah, a little sooner than I thought." And why not "sooner" as
well as "earlier"? But when, on the same road, two white girls in an
ox-cart hailed me with the question, "What time 't is?" I thought the
interrogative idiom a little queer; almost as queer, shall we say, as
"How do you do?" may have sounded to the first man who heard it,--if the
reader is able to imagine such a person.
Meanwhile, let the morning be "fine" or "pretty," it was all one to the
birds. The woods were vocal with the cackling of robins, the warble of
bluebirds, and the trills of pine warblers. Flickers were shouting--or
laughing, if one pleased to hear it so--with true flickerish prolixity,
and a single downy woodpecker called sharply again and again. A
mocking-bird near me (there is _always_ a mocking-bird near you, in
Florida) added his voice for a time, but soon relapsed into silence. The
fact was characteristic; for, wherever I went, I found it true that the
mocker grew less musical as the place grew wilder. By instinct he is a
public performer, he demands an audience; and it is only in cities, like
St. Augustine and Tallahassee, that he is heard at his freest and best.
A loggerhead shrike--now close at my elbow, now farther away--was
practicing his extensive vocabulary with perseverance, if not with
enthusiasm. Like his relative the "great northern," though perhaps in a
less degree, the loggerhead is commonly at an extreme, either loquacious
or dumb; as if he could not let his moderation be known unto any man.
Sometimes I fancied him possessed with an insane ambition to match the
mocking-bird in song as well as in personal appearance. If so, it is not
surprising that he should be subject to fits of discouragement and
silence. Aiming at the sun, though a good and virtuous exercise, as we
have all heard, is apt to prove dispiriting to sensible marksmen. Crows
(fish crows, in all probability, but at the time I did not know it)
uttered strange, hoarse, flat-sounding caws. Everv bird of them must
have been born without a palate, it seemed to me. White-eyed chewinks
were at home in the dense palmetto scrub, whence they announced
themselves unmistakably by sharp whistles. Now and then one of them
mounted a leaf, and allowed me to see his pale yellow iris. Except for
this mark, recognizable almost as far as the bird could be distinguished
at all, he looked exactly like our common New England towhee. Somewhere
behind me was a kingfisher's rattle, and from a savanna in the same
direction came the songs of meadow larks; familiar, but with something
unfamiliar about them at the same time, unless my ears deceived me.
More interesting than any of the birds yet named, because more strictly
characteristic of the place, as well as more strictly new to me, were
the brown-headed nuthatches. I was on the watch for them: they were one
of the three novelties which I knew were to be found in the pine lands,
and nowhere else,--the other two being the red-cockaded woodpecker and
the pine-wood sparrow; and being thus on the lookout, I did not expect
to be taken by surprise, if such a paradox (it is nothing worse) maybe
allowed to pass. But when I heard them twittering in the distance, as I
did almost immediately, I had no suspicion of what they were. The voice
had nothing of that nasal quality, that Yankee twang, as some people
would call it, which I had always associated with the nuthatch family.
On the contrary, it was decidedly finchlike,--so much so that some of
the notes, taken by themselves, would have been ascribed without
hesitation to the goldfinch or the pine finch, had I heard them in New
England; and even as things were, I was more than once deceived for the
moment. As for the birds themselves, they were evidently a cheerful and
thrifty race, much more numerous than the red-cockaded woodpeckers, and
much less easily overlooked than the pine-wood sparrows. I seldom
entered the flat-woods anywhere without finding them. They seek their
food largely about the leafy ends of the pine branches, resembling the
Canadian nuthatches in this respect, so that it is only on rare
occasions that one sees them creeping about the trunks or larger limbs.
Unlike their two Northern relatives, they are eminently social, often
traveling in small flocks, even in the breeding season, and keeping up
an almost incessant chorus of shrill twitters as they flit hither and
thither through the woods. The first one to come near me was full of
inquisitiveness; he flew back and forth past my head, exactly as
chickadees do in a similar mood, and once seemed almost ready to alight
on my hat. "Let us have a look at this stranger," he appeared to be
saying. Possibly his nest was not far off, but I made no search for it.
Afterwards I found two nests, one in a low stump, and one in the trunk
of a pine, fifteen or twenty feet from the ground. Both of them
contained young ones (March 31 and April 2), as I knew by the continual
goings-in-and-out of the fathers and mothers. In dress the brown-head is
dingy, with little or nothing of the neat and attractive appearance of
our New England nuthatches.
In this pine-wood on the road to Moultrie I found no sign of the new
woodpecker or the new sparrow. Nor was I greatly disappointed. The place
itself was a sufficient novelty,--the place and the summer weather. The
pines murmured overhead, and the palmettos rustled all about. Now a
butterfly fluttered past me, and now a dragonfly. More than one little
flock of tree swallows went over the wood, and once a pair of phoebes
amused me by an uncommonly pretty lover's quarrel. Truly it was a
pleasant hour. In the midst of it there came along a man in a cart, with
a load of wood. We exchanged the time of day, and I remarked upon the
smallness of his load. Yes, he said; but it was a pretty heavy load to
drag seven or eight miles over such roads. Possibly he understood me as
implying that he seemed to be in rather small business, although I had
no such purpose, for he went on to say: "In 1861, when this beautiful
war broke out between our countries, my father owned niggers. We didn't
have to do _this_. But I don't complain. If I hadn't got a bullet in me,
I should do pretty well."
"Then you were in the war?" I said.
"Oh, yes, yes, sir! I was in the Confederate service. Yes, sir, I'm a
Southerner to the backbone. My grandfather was a ----" (I missed the
patronymic), "and commanded St. Augustine."
The name had a foreign sound, and the man's complexion was swarthy, and
in all simplicity I asked if he was a Minorcan. I might as well have
touched a lighted match to powder. His eyes flashed, and he came round
the tail of the cart, gesticulating with his stick.
"Minorcan!" he broke out. "Spain and the island of Minorca are two
places, ain't they?" I admitted meekly that they were.
"You are English, ain't you?" he went on. "You are English,--Yankee
born,--ain't you?"
I owned it.
"Well, I'm Spanish. That ain't Minorcan. My grandfather was a ----, and
commanded St. Augustine. He couldn't have done that if he had been
Minorcan."
By this time he was quieting down a bit. His father remembered the
Indian war. The son had heard him tell about it.
"Those were dangerous times," he remarked. "You couldn't have been
standing out here in the woods then."
"There is no danger here now, is there?" said I.
"No, no, not now." But as he drove along he turned to say that _he_
wasn't afraid of _any_ thing; he wasn't that kind of a man. Then, with a
final turn, he added, what I could not dispute, "A man's life is always
in danger."
After he was gone, I regretted that I had offered no apology for my
unintentionally offensive question; but I was so taken by surprise, and
so much interested in the man as a specimen, that I quite forgot my
manners till it was too late. One thing I learned: that it is not
prudent, in these days, to judge a Southern man's blood, in either sense
of the word, by his dress or occupation. This man had brought seven or
eight miles a load of wood that might possibly be worth seventy-five
cents (I questioned the owner of what looked like just such a load
afterward, and found his asking price half a dollar), and for clothing
had on a pair of trousers and a blue cotton shirt, the latter full of
holes, through which the skin was visible; yet his father was a ---- and
had "owned niggers."
A still more picturesque figure in this procession of wood-carters was a
boy of perhaps ten or eleven. He rode his horse, and was barefooted and
barelegged; but he had a cigarette in his mouth, and to each brown heel
was fastened an enormous spur. Who was it that infected the world with
the foolish and disastrous notion that work and play are two different
things? And was it Emerson, or some other wise man, who said that a boy
was the true philosopher?
When it came time to think of returning to St. Augustine, for dinner, I
appreciated my cracker's friendly warning against losing my way; for
though I had hardly so much as entered the woods, and had taken, as I
thought, good heed to my steps, I was almost at once in a quandary as to
my road. There was no occasion for worry,--with the sun out, and my
general course perfectly plain; but here was a fork in the road, and
whether to bear to the left or to the right was a simple matter of
guess-work. I made the best guess I could, and guessed wrong, as was
apparent after a while, when I found the road under deep water for
several rods. I objected to wading, and there was no ready way of going
round, since the oak and palmetto scrub crowded close up to the
roadside, and just here was all but impenetrable. What was still more
conclusive, the road was the wrong one, as the inundation proved, and,
for aught I could tell, might carry me far out of my course. I turned
back, therefore, under the midday sun, and by good luck a second attempt
brought me out of the woods very near where I had entered them.
I visited this particular piece of country but once afterward, having in
the mean time discovered a better place of the same sort along the
railroad, in the direction of Palatka. There, on a Sunday morning, I
heard my first pine-wood sparrow. Time and tune could hardly have been
in truer accord. The hour was of the quietest, the strain was of the
simplest, and the bird sang as if he were dreaming. For a long time I
let him go on without attempting to make certain who he was. He seemed
to be rather far off: if I waited his pleasure, he would perhaps move
toward me; if I disturbed him, he would probably become silent. So I sat
on the end of a sleeper and listened. It was not great music. It made me
think of the swamp sparrow; and the swamp sparrow is far from being a
great singer. A single prolonged, drawling note (in that respect unlike
the swamp sparrow, of course), followed by a succession of softer and
sweeter ones,--that was all, when I came to analyze it; but that is no
fair description of what I heard. The quality of the song is not there;
and it was the quality, the feeling, the soul of it, if I may say what I
mean, that made it, in the true sense of a much-abused word, charming.
There could be little doubt that the bird was a pine-wood sparrow; but
such things are not to be taken for granted. Once or twice, indeed, the
thought of some unfamiliar warbler had crossed my mind. At last,
therefore, as the singer still kept out of sight, I leaped the ditch and
pushed into the scrub. Happily I had not far to go; he had been much
nearer than I thought. A small bird flew up before me, and dropped
almost immediately into a clump of palmetto. I edged toward the spot and
waited. Then the song began again, this time directly in front of me,
but still far-away-sounding and dreamy. I find that last word in my
hasty note penciled at the time, and can think of no other that
expresses the effect half so well. I looked and looked, and all at once
there sat the bird on a palmetto leaf. Once again he sang, putting up
his head. Then he dropped out of sight, and I heard nothing more. I had
seen only his head and neck,--enough to show him a sparrow, and almost
of necessity the pine-wood sparrow. No other strange member of the finch
family was to be looked for in such a place.
On further acquaintance, let me say at once, _Pucaea aestivalis_ proved
to be a more versatile singer than the performances of my first bird
would have led me to suppose. He varies his tune freely, but always
within a pretty narrow compass; as is true, also, of the field sparrow,
with whom, as I soon came to feel, he has not a little in common. It is
in musical form only that he suggests the swamp sparrow. In tone and
spirit, in the qualities of sweetness and expressiveness, he is nearly
akin to _Spizella pusilla_. One does for the Southern pine barren what
the other does for the Northern berry pasture. And this is high praise;
for though in New England we have many singers more brilliant than the
field sparrow, we have none that are sweeter, and few that in the long
run give more pleasure to sensitive hearers.
I found the pine-wood sparrow afterward in New Smyrna, Port Orange,
Sanford, and Tallahassee. So far as I could tell, it was always the same
bird; but I shot no specimens, and speak with no authority.[1] Living
always in the pine lands, and haunting the dense undergrowth, it is
heard a hundred times where it is seen once,--a point greatly in favor
of its effectiveness as a musician. Mr. Brewster speaks of it as singing
always from an elevated perch, while the birds that I saw in the act of
song, a very limited number, were invariably perched low. One that I
watched in New Smyrna (one of a small chorus, the others being
invisible) sang for a quarter of an hour from a stake or stump which
rose perhaps a foot above the dwarf palmetto. It was the same song that
I had heard in St. Augustine; only the birds here were in a livelier
mood, and sang _out_ instead of _sotto voce_. The long introductory note
sounded sometimes as if it were indrawn, and often, if not always, had a
considerable burr in it. Once in a while the strain was caught up at the
end and sung over again, after the manner of the field sparrow,--one of
that bird's prettiest tricks. At other times the song was delivered with
full voice, and then repeated almost under the singer's breath. This was
done beautifully in the Port Orange flat-woods, the bird being almost at
my feet. I had seen him a moment before, and saw him again half a minute
later, but at that instant he was out of sight in the scrub, and
seemingly on the ground. This feature of the song, one of its chief
merits and its most striking peculiarity, is well described by Mr.
Brewster. "Now," he says, "it has a full, bell-like ring that seems to
fill the air around; next it is soft and low and inexpressibly tender;
now it is clear again, but so modulated that the sound seems to come
from a great distance."[2]
[Footnote 1: Two races of the pine-wood sparrow are recognized by
ornithologists, _Pucaea aestivalis_ and _P. aestivalis bachmanii_, and
both of them have been found in Florida; but, if I understand the matter
right, _Pucaea aestivalis_ is the common and typical Florida bird.]
[Footnote 2: _Bulletin on the Nuttall Ornithological Club_, vol. vii. p.
98.]
Not many other birds, I think (I cannot recall any), habitually vary
their song in this manner. Other birds sing almost inaudibly at times,
especially in the autumnal season. Even the brown thrasher, whose
ordinary performance, is so full-voiced, not to say boisterous, will
sometimes soliloquize, or seem to soliloquize, in the faintest of
undertones. The formless autumnal warble of the song sparrow is familiar
to every one. And in this connection I remember, and am not likely ever
to forget, a winter wren who favored me with what I thought the most
bewitching bit of vocalism to which I had ever listened. He was in the
bushes close at my side, in the Franconia Notch, and delivered his whole
song, with all its customary length, intricacy, and speed, in a tone--a
whisper, I may almost say--that ran along the very edge of silence. The
unexpected proximity of a stranger may have had something to do with his
conduct, as it often appears to have with the thrasher's; but, however
that may be, the cases are not parallel with that of the pine-wood
sparrow, inasmuch as the latter bird not merely sings under his breath
on special occasions, whether on account of the nearness of a listener
or for any other reason, but in his ordinary singing uses louder and
softer tones interchangeably, almost exactly as human singers and
players do; as if, in the practice of his art, he had learned to
appreciate, consciously or unconsciously (and practice naturally goes
before theory), the expressive value of what I believe is called musical
dynamics.
I spent many half-days in the pine lands (how gladly now would I spend
another!), but never got far into them. ("Into their depths," my pen was
on the point of making me say; but that would have been a false note.
The flat-woods have no "depths.") Whether I followed the railway,--in
many respects a pretty satisfactory method,--or some roundabout, aimless
carriage road, a mile or two was generally enough. The country offers no
temptation to pedestrian feats, nor does the imagination find its
account in going farther and farther. For the reader is not to think of
the flat-woods as in the least resembling a Northern forest, which at
every turn opens before the visitor and beckons him forward. Beyond and
behind, and on either side, the pine-woods are ever the same. It is this
monotony, by the bye, this utter absence of landmarks, that makes it so
unsafe for the stranger to wander far from the beaten track. The sand is
deep, the sun is hot; one place is as good as another. What use, then,
to tire yourself? And so, unless the traveler is going somewhere, as I
seldom was, he is continually stopping by the way. Now a shady spot
entices him to put down his umbrella,--for there _is_ a shady spot, here
and there, even in a Florida pine-wood; or blossoms are to be plucked;
or a butterfly, some gorgeous and nameless creature, brightens the wood
as it passes; or a bird is singing; or an eagle is soaring far overhead,
and must be watched out of sight; or a buzzard, with upturned wings,
floats suspiciously near the wanderer, as if with sinister intent
(buzzard shadows are a regular feature of the flat-wood landscape, just
as cloud shadows are in a mountainous country); or a snake lies
stretched out in the sun,--a "whip snake," perhaps, that frightens the
unwary stroller by the amazing swiftness with which it runs away from
him; or some strange invisible insect is making uncanny noises in the
underbrush. One of my recollections of the railway woods at St.
Augustine is of a cricket, or locust, or something else,--I never saw
it,--that amused me often with a formless rattling or drumming sound. I
could think of nothing but a boy's first lesson upon the bones, the
rhythm of the beats was so comically mistimed and bungled.
One fine morning,--it was the 18th of February,--I had gone down the
railroad a little farther than usual, attracted by the encouraging
appearance of a swampy patch of rather large deciduous trees. Some of
them, I remember, were red maples, already full of handsome,
high-colored fruit. As I drew near, I heard indistinctly from among them
what might have been the song of a black-throated green warbler, a bird
that would have made a valued addition to my Florida list, especially at
that early date.[1] No sooner was the song repeated, however, than I saw
that I had been deceived; it was something I had never heard before. But
it certainly had much of the black-throated green's quality, and without
question was the note of a warbler of some kind. What a shame if the
bird should give me the slip! Meanwhile, it kept on singing at brief
intervals, and was not so far away but that, with my glass, I should be
well able to make it out, if only I could once get my eyes on it. That
was the difficulty. Something stirred among the branches. Yes, a
yellow-throated warbler (_Dendroica dominica_), a bird of which I had
seen my first specimens, all of them silent, during the last eight days.
Probably he was the singer. I hoped so, at any rate. That would be an
ideal case of a beautiful bird with a song to match. I kept him under my
glass, and presently the strain was repeated, but not by him. Then it
ceased, and I was none the wiser. Perhaps I never should be. It was
indeed a shame. Such a _taking_ song; so simple, and yet so pretty, and
so thoroughly distinctive. I wrote it down thus: _tee-koi,
tee-koo_,--two couplets, the first syllable of each a little emphasized
and dwelt upon, not drawled, and a little higher in pitch than its
fellow. Perhaps it might be expressed thus:--
[Illustration]
I cannot profess to be sure of that, however, nor have I unqualified
confidence in the adequacy of musical notation, no matter how skillfully
employed, to convey a truthful idea of any bird song.
[Footnote 1: As it was, I did not find _Dendroica virens_ in Florida. On
my way home, in Atlanta, April 20, I saw one bird in a dooryard
shade-tree.]
The affair remained a mystery till, in Daytona, nine days afterward, the
same notes were heard again, this time in lower trees that did not stand
in deep water. Then it transpired that my mysterious warbler was not a
warbler at all, but the Carolina chickadee. That was an outcome quite
unexpected, although I now remembered that chickadees were in or near
the St. Augustine swamp; and what was more to the purpose, I could now
discern some relationship between the _tee-koi, tee-koo_ (or, as I now
wrote it, _see-toi, see-too_), and the familiar so-called phoebe whistle
of the black-capped titmouse. The Southern bird, I am bound to
acknowledge, is much the more accomplished singer of the two. Sometimes
he repeats the second dissyllable, making six notes in all. At other
times he breaks out with a characteristic volley of fine chickadee
notes, and runs without a break into the _see-toi, see-too_, with a
highly pleasing effect. Then if, on the top of this, he doubles the
_see-too_, we have a really prolonged and elaborate musical effort,
quite putting into the shade our New England bird's _hear, hear me_,
sweet and welcome as that always is.