A Florida Sketch Book - Bradford Torrey
The river is shallow. At low tide sandbars and oyster-beds occupy much
of its breadth; and even when it looked full, a great blue heron would
very likely be wading in the middle of it. That was a sight to which I
had grown accustomed in Florida, where this bird, familiarly known as
"the major," is apparently ubiquitous. Too big to be easily hidden, it
is also, as a general thing, too wary to be approached within gunshot. I
am not sure that I ever came within sight of one, no matter how suddenly
or how far away, that it did not give evidence of having seen me first.
Long legs, long wings, a long bill--and long sight and long patience:
such is the tall bird's dowry. Good and useful qualities, all of them.
Long may they avail to put off the day of their owner's extermination.
The major is scarcely a bird of which you can make a pet in your mind,
as you may of the chickadee, for instance, or the bluebird, or the
hermit thrush. He does not lend himself naturally to such imaginary
endearments. But it is pleasant to have him on one's daily beat. I
should count it one compensation for having to live in Florida instead
of in Massachusetts (but I might require a good many others) that I
should see him a hundred times as often. In walking down the river road
I seldom saw less than half a dozen; not together (the major, like
fishermen in general, is of an unsocial turn), but here one and there
one,--on a sand-bar far out in the river, or in some shallow bay, or on
the submerged edge of an oyster-flat. Wherever he was, he always looked
as if he might be going to do something presently; even now, perhaps,
the matter was on his mind; but at this moment--well, there are times
when a heron's strength is to stand still. Certainly he seemed in no
danger of overeating. A cracker told me that the major made an excellent
dish if killed on the full of the moon. I wondered at that
qualification, but my informant explained himself. The bird, he said,
feeds mostly at night, and fares best with the moon to help him. If the
reader would dine off roast blue heron, therefore, as I hope I never
shall, let him mind the lunar phases. But think of the gastronomic ups
and downs of a bird that is fat and lean by turns twelve times a year!
Possibly my informant overstated the case; but in any event I would
trust the major to bear himself like a philosopher. If there is any one
of God's creatures that can wait for what he wants, it must be the great
blue heron.
I have spoken of his caution. If he was patrolling a shallow on one side
of an oyster-bar,--at the rate, let us say, of two steps a minute,--and
took it into his head (an inappropriate phrase, as conveying an idea of
something like suddenness) to try the water on the other side, he did
not spread his wings, as a matter of course, and fly over. First he put
up his head--an operation that makes another bird of him--and looked in
all directions. How could he tell what enemy might be lying in wait? And
having alighted on the other side (his manner of alighting is one of his
prettiest characteristics), he did not at once draw in his neck till his
bill protruded on a level with his body, and resume his labors, but
first he looked once more all about him. It was a good _habit_ to do
that, anyhow, and he meant to run no risks. If "the race of birds was
created out of innocent, light-minded men, whose thoughts were directed
toward heaven," according to the word of Plato, then _Ardea herodias_
must long ago have fallen from grace. I imagine his state of mind to be
always like that of our pilgrim fathers in times of Indian massacres.
When they went after the cows or to hoe the corn, they took their guns
with them, and turned no corner without a sharp lookout against ambush.
No doubt such a condition of affairs has this advantage, that it makes
ennui impossible. There is always something to live for, if it be only
to avoid getting killed.
After this manner did the Hillsborough River majors all behave
themselves until my very last walk beside it. Then I found the
exception,--the exception that is as good as inevitable in the case of
any bird, if the observation be carried far enough. He (or she; there
was no telling which it was) stood on the sandy beach, a splendid
creature in full nuptial garb, two black plumes nodding jauntily from
its crown, and masses of soft elongated feathers draping its back and
lower neck. Nearer and nearer I approached, till I must have been within
a hundred feet; but it stood as if on dress parade, exulting to be
looked at. Let us hope it never carried itself thus gayly when the wrong
man came along.
Near the major--not keeping him company, but feeding in the same
shallows and along the same oyster-bars--were constantly to be seen two
smaller relatives of his, the little blue heron and the Louisiana. The
former is what is called a dichromatic species; some of the birds are
blue, and others white. On the Hillsborough, it seemed to me that white
specimens predominated; but possibly that was because they were so much
more conspicuous. Sunlight favors the white feather; no other color
shows so quickly or so far. If you are on the beach and catch sight of a
bird far out at sea,--a gull or a tern, a gannet or a loon,--it is
invariably the white parts that are seen first. And so the little white
heron might stand never so closely against the grass or the bushes on
the further shore of the river, and the eye could not miss him. If he
had been a blue one, at that distance, ten to one he would have escaped
me. Besides, I was more on the alert for white ones, because I was
always hoping to find one of them with black legs. In other words, I was
looking for the little white egret, a bird concerning which, thanks to
the murderous work of plume-hunters,--thanks, also, to those good women
who pay for having the work done,--I must confess that I went to Florida
and came home again without certainly seeing it.
The heron with which I found myself especially taken was the Louisiana;
a bird of about the same size as the little blue, but with an air of
daintiness and lightness that is quite its own, and quite indescribable.
When it rose upon the wing, indeed, it seemed almost _too_ light, almost
unsteady, as if it lacked ballast, like a butterfly. It was the most
numerous bird of its tribe along the river, I think, and, with one
exception, the most approachable. That exception was the green heron,
which frequented the flats along the village front, and might well have
been mistaken for a domesticated bird; letting you walk across a plank
directly over its head while it squatted upon the mud, and when
disturbed flying into a fig-tree before the hotel piazza, just as the
dear little ground doves were in the habit of doing. To me, who had
hitherto seen the green heron in the wildest of places, this tameness
was an astonishing sight. It would be hard to say which surprised me
more, the New Smyrna green herons or the St. Augustine sparrow-hawks,
--which latter treated me very much as I am accustomed to being treated
by village-bred robins in Massachusetts.
The Louisiana heron was my favorite, as I say, but incomparably the
handsomest member of the family (I speak of such as I saw) was the great
white egret. In truth, the epithet "handsome" seems almost a vulgarism
as applied to a creature so superb, so utterly and transcendently
splendid. I saw it--in a way to be sure of it--only once. Then, on an
island in the Hillsborough, two birds stood in the dead tops of low
shrubby trees, fully exposed in the most favorable of lights, their long
dorsal trains drooping behind them and swaying gently in the wind. I had
never seen anything so magnificent. And when I returned, two or three
hours afterward, from a jaunt up the beach to Mosquito Inlet, there they
still were, as if they had not stirred in all that time. The reader
should understand that this egret is between four and five feet in
length, and measures nearly five feet from wing tip to wing tip, and
that its plumage throughout is of spotless white. It is pitiful to think
how constantly a bird of that size and color must be in danger of its
life.
Happily, the lawmakers of the State have done something of recent years
for the protection of such defenseless beauties. Happily, too, shooting
from the river boats is no longer permitted,--on the regular lines, that
is. I myself saw a young gentleman stand on the deck of an excursion
steamer, with a rifle, and do his worst to kill or maim every living
thing that came in sight, from a spotted sandpiper to a turkey buzzard!
I call him a "gentleman;" he was in gentle company, and the fact that he
chewed gum industriously would, I fear, hardly invalidate his claim to
that title. The narrow river wound in and out between low, densely
wooded banks, and the beauty of the shifting scene was enough almost to
take one's breath away; but the crack of the rifle was not the less
frequent on that account. Perhaps the sportsman was a Southerner, to
whom river scenery of that enchanting kind was an old story. More likely
he was a Northerner, one of the men who thank Heaven they are "not
sentimental."
In my rambles up and down the river road I saw few water birds beside
the herons. Two or three solitary cormorants would be shooting back and
forth at a furious rate, or swimming in midstream; and sometimes a few
spotted sandpipers and killdeer plovers were feeding along the shore.
Once in a great while a single gull or tern made its appearance,--just
often enough to keep me wondering why they were not there oftener,--and
one day a water turkey went suddenly over my head and dropped into the
river on the farther side of the island. I was glad to see this
interesting creature for once in salt water; for the Hillsborough, like
the Halifax and the Indian rivers, is a river in name only,--a river by
brevet,--being, in fact, a salt-water lagoon or sound between the
mainland and the eastern peninsula.
Fish-hawks were always in sight, and bald eagles were seldom absent
altogether. Sometimes an eagle stood perched on a dead tree on an
island. Oftener I heard a scream, and looked up to see one sailing far
overhead, or chasing an osprey. On one such occasion, when the hawk
seemed to be making a losing fight, a third bird suddenly intervened,
and the eagle, as I thought, was driven away. "Good for the brotherhood
of fish-hawks!" I exclaimed. But at that moment I put my glass on the
new-comer; and behold, he was not a hawk, but another eagle. Meanwhile
the hawk had disappeared with his fish, and I was left to ponder the
mystery.
As for the wood, the edge of the hammock, through which the road passes,
there were no birds in it. It was one of those places (I fancy every
bird-gazer must have had experience of such) where it is a waste of time
to seek them. I could walk down the road for two miles and back again,
and then sit in my room at the hotel for fifteen minutes, and see more
wood birds, and more kinds of them, in one small live-oak before the
window than I had seen in the whole four miles; and that not once and by
accident, but again and again. In affairs of this kind it is useless to
contend. The spot looks favorable, you say, and nobody can deny it;
there must be birds there, plenty of them; your missing them to-day was
a matter of chance; you will try again. And you try again--and
again--and yet again. But in the end you have to acknowledge that, for
some reason unknown to you, the birds have agreed to give that place the
go-by.
One bird, it is true, I found in this hammock, and not elsewhere: a
single oven-bird, which, with one Northern water thrush and one
Louisiana water thrush, completed my set of Florida _Seiuri_. Besides
him I recall one hermit thrush, a few cedar-birds, a house wren,
chattering at a great rate among the "bootjacks" (leaf-stalks) of an
overturned palmetto-tree, with an occasional mocking-bird, cardinal
grosbeak, prairie warbler, yellow redpoll, myrtle bird, ruby-crowned
kinglet, phoebe, and flicker. In short, there were no birds at all,
except now and then an accidental straggler of a kind that could be
found almost anywhere else in indefinite numbers.
And as it was not the presence of birds that made the river road
attractive, so neither was it any unwonted display of blossoms. Beside a
similar road along the bank of the Halifax, in Daytona, grew multitudes
of violets, and goodly patches of purple verbena (garden plants gone
wild, perhaps), and a fine profusion of spiderwort,--a pretty flower,
the bluest of the blue, thrice welcome to me as having been one of the
treasures of the very first garden of which I have any remembrance.
"Indigo plant," we called it then. Here, however, on the way from New
Smyrna to Hawks Park, I recall no violets, nor any verbena or
spiderwort. Yellow wood-sorrel (oxalis) was here, of course, as it was
everywhere. It dotted the grass in Florida very much as five-fingers do
in Massachusetts, I sometimes thought. And the creeping, round-leaved
houstonia was here, with a superfluity of a weedy blue sage (_Salvia
lyrata_). Here, also, as in Daytona, I found a strikingly handsome
tufted plant, a highly varnished evergreen, which I persisted in taking
for a fern--the sterile fronds--in spite of repeated failures to find it
described by Dr. Chapman under that head, until at last an excellent
woman came to my help with the information that it was "coontie" (_Zamia
integrifolia_), famous as a plant out of which the Southern people made
bread in war time. This confession of botanical amateurishness and
incompetency will be taken, I hope, as rather to my credit than
otherwise; but it would be morally worthless if I did not add the story
of another plant, which, in this same New Smyrna hammock, I frequently
noticed hanging in loose bunches, like blades of flaccid deep green
grass, from the trunks of cabbage palmettos. The tufts were always out
of reach, and I gave them no particular thought; and it was not until I
got home to Massachusetts, and then almost by accident, that I learned
what they were. They, it turned out, _were_ ferns (_Vittaria
lineata_--grass fern), and my discomfiture was complete.
This comparative dearth of birds and flowers was not in all respects a
disadvantage. On the contrary, to a naturalist blessed now and then with
a supernaturalistic mood, it made the place, on occasion, a welcome
retreat. Thus, one afternoon, as I remember, I had been reading Keats,
the only book I had brought with me,--not counting manuals, of course,
which come under another head,--and by and by started once more for the
pine lands by the way of the cotton-shed hammock, "to see what I could
see." But poetry had spoiled me just then for anything like scientific
research, and as I waded through the ankle-deep sand I said to myself
all at once, "No, no! What do I care for another new bird? I want to see
the beauty of the world." With that I faced about, and, taking a side
track, made as directly as possible for the river road. There I should
have a mind at ease, with no unfamiliar, tantalizing bird note to set my
curiosity on edge, nor any sand through which to be picking my steps.
The river road is paved with oyster-shells. If any reader thinks that
statement prosaic or unimportant, then he has never lived in southern
Florida. In that part of the world all new-comers have to take
walking-lessons; unless, indeed, they have already served an
apprenticeship on Cape Cod, or in some other place equally arenarious.
My own lesson I got at second hand, and on a Sunday. It was at New
Smyrna, in the village. Two women were behind me, on their way home from
church, and one of them was complaining of the sand, to which she was
not yet used. "Yes," said the other, "I found it pretty hard walking at
first, but I learned after a while that the best way is to set the heel
down hard, as hard as you can; then the sand doesn't give under you so
much, and you get along more comfortably." I wonder whether she noticed,
just in front of her, a man who began forthwith to bury his boot heel at
every step?
In such a country (the soil is said to be good for orange-trees, but
they do not have to walk) roads of powdered shell are veritable
luxuries, and land agents are quite right in laying all stress upon them
as inducements to possible settlers. If the author of the Apocalypse had
been raised in Florida, we should never have had the streets of the New
Jerusalem paved with gold. His idea of heaven, would have been different
from that; more personal and home-felt, we may be certain.
The river road, then, as I have said, and am glad to say again, was
shell-paved. And well it might be; for the hammock, along the edge of
which it meandered, seemed, in some places at least, to be little more
than a pile of oyster-shells, on which soil had somehow been deposited,
and over which a forest was growing. Florida Indians have left an evil
memory. I heard a philanthropic visitor lamenting that she had talked
with many of the people about them, and had yet to hear a single word
said in their favor. Somebody might have been good enough to say that,
with all their faults, they had given to eastern Florida a few hills,
such as they are, and at present are supplying it, indirectly, with
comfortable highways. How they must have feasted, to leave such heaps of
shells behind them! They came to the coast on purpose, we may suppose.
Well, the red-men are gone, but the oyster-beds remain; and if winter
refugees continue to pour in this direction, as doubtless they will,
they too will eat a "heap" of oysters (it is easy to see how the vulgar
Southern use of that word may have originated), and in the course of
time, probably, the shores of the Halifax and the Hillsborough will be a
fine mountainous country! And then, if this ancient, nineteenth-century
prediction is remembered, the highest peak of the range will perhaps be
named in a way which the innate modesty of the prophet restrains him
from specifying with greater particularity.
Meanwhile it is long to wait, and tourists and residents alike must find
what comfort they can in the lesser hills which, thanks to the good
appetite of their predecessors, are already theirs. For my own part,
there is one such eminence of which I cherish the most grateful
recollections. It stands (or stood; the road-makers had begun carting it
away) at a bend in the road just south of one of the Turnbull canals. I
climbed it often (it can hardly be less than fifteen or twenty feet
above the level of the sea), and spent more than one pleasant hour upon
its grassy summit. Northward was New Smyrna, a village in the woods, and
farther away towered the lighthouse of Mosquito Inlet. Along the eastern
sky stretched the long line of the peninsula sand-hills, between the
white crests of which could be seen the rude cottages of Coronado beach.
To the south and west was the forest, and in front, at my feet, lay the
river with its woody islands. Many times have I climbed a mountain and
felt myself abundantly repaid by an off-look less beautiful. This was
the spot to which I turned when I had been reading Keats, and wanted to
see the beauty of the world. Here were a grassy seat, the shadow of
orange-trees, and a wide prospect. In Florida, I found no better place
in which a man who wished to be both a naturalist and a nature-lover,
who felt himself heir to a double inheritance,
"The clear eye's moiety and the dear heart's part,"
could for the time sit still and be happy.
The orange-trees yielded other things beside shadow, though perhaps
nothing better than that. They were resplendent with fruit, and on my
earlier visits were also in bloom. One did not need to climb the hill to
learn the fact. For an out-of-door sweetness it would be hard, I think,
to improve upon the scent of orange blossoms. As for the oranges
themselves, they seemed to be in little demand, large and handsome as
they were. Southern people in general, I fancy, look upon wild fruit of
this kind as not exactly edible. I remember asking two colored men in
Tallahassee whether the oranges still hanging conspicuously from a tree
just over the wall (a sight not so very common in that part of the
State) were sweet or sour. I have forgotten just what they said, but I
remember how they _looked_. I meant the inquiry as a mild bit of humor,
but to them it was a thousandfold better than that: it was wit
ineffable. What Shakespeare said about the prosperity of a jest was
never more strikingly exemplified. In New Smyrna, with orange groves on
every hand, the wild fruit went begging with natives and tourists alike;
so that I feel a little hesitancy about confessing my own relish for it,
lest I should be accused of affectation. Not that I devoured wild
oranges by the dozen, or in place of sweet ones; one sour orange goes a
good way, as the common saying is; but I ate them, nevertheless, or
rather drank them, and found them, in a thirsty hour, decidedly
refreshing.
The unusual coldness of the past season (Florida winters, from what I
heard about them, must have fallen of late into a queer habit of being
regularly exceptional) had made it difficult to buy sweet oranges that
were not dry and "punky"[1] toward the stem; but the hardier wild fruit
had weathered the frost, and was so juicy that, as I say, you did not so
much eat one as drink it. As for the taste, it was a wholesome
bitter-sour, as if a lemon had been flavored with quinine; not quite so
sour as a lemon, perhaps, nor _quite_ so bitter as Peruvian bark, but,
as it were, an agreeable compromise between the two. When I drank one, I
not only quenched my thirst, but felt that I had taken an infallible
prophylactic against the malarial fever. Better still, I had surprised
myself. For one who had felt a lifelong distaste, unsocial and almost
unmanly, for the bitter drinks which humanity in general esteems so
essential to its health and comfort, I was developing new and unexpected
capabilities; than which few things can be more encouraging as years
increase upon a man's head, and the world seems to be closing in about
him.
[Footnote 1: I have heard this useful word all my life, and now am
surprised to find it wanting in the dictionaries.]
Later in the season, on this same shell mound, I might have regaled
myself with fresh figs. Here, at any rate, was a thrifty-looking
fig-tree, though its crop, if it bore one, would perhaps not have waited
my coming so patiently as the oranges had done. Here, too, was a red
cedar; and to me, who, in my ignorance, had always thought of this tough
little evergreen as especially at home on my own bleak and stony
hillsides, it seemed an incongruous trio,--fig-tree, orange-tree, and
savin. In truth, the cedars of Florida were one of my liveliest
surprises. At first I refused to believe that they were red cedars, so
strangely exuberant were they, so disdainful of the set, cone-shaped,
toy-tree pattern on which I had been used to seeing red cedars built.
And when at last a study of the flora compelled me to admit their
identity,[1] I turned about and protested that I had never seen red
cedars before. One, in St. Augustine, near San Marco Avenue, I had the
curiosity to measure. The girth of the trunk at the smallest place was
six feet five inches, and the spread of the branches was not less than
fifty feet.
[Footnote 1: I speak as if I had accepted my own study of the manual as
conclusive. I did for the time being, but while writing this paragraph I
bethought myself that I might be in error, after all. I referred the
question, therefore, to a friend, a botanist of authority. "No wonder
the red cedars of Florida puzzled you," he replied. "No one would
suppose at first that they were of the same species as our New England
savins. The habit is entirely different; but botanists have found no
characters by which to separate them, and you are safe in considering
them as _Juniperus Virginiana_."]
The stroller in this road suffered few distractions. The houses, two or
three to the mile, stood well back in the woods, with little or no
cleared land about them. Picnic establishments they seemed to a Northern
eye, rather than permanent dwellings. At one point, in the hammock, a
rude camp was occupied by a group of rough-looking men and several small
children, who seemed to be getting on as best they could--none too well,
to judge from appearances--without feminine ministrations. What they
were there for I never made out. They fished, I think, but whether by
way of amusement or as a serious occupation I did not learn. Perhaps,
like the Indians of old, they had come to the river for the oyster
season. They might have done worse. They never paid the slightest
attention to me, nor once gave me any decent excuse for engaging them in
talk. The best thing I remember about them was a tableau caught in
passing. A "norther" had descended upon us unexpectedly (Florida is not
a whit behind the rest of the world in sudden changes of temperature),
and while hastening homeward, toward nightfall, hugging myself to keep
warm, I saw, in the woods, this group of campers disposed about a lively
blaze.