A Florida Sketch Book - Bradford Torrey
My second stroll toward St. Augustine carried me perhaps three
miles,--say one sixty-sixth of the entire distance,--and none of my
subsequent excursions took me any farther; and having just now commended
a negro for his candor, I am moved to acknowledge that, between the sand
underfoot and the sun overhead, I found the six miles, which I spent at
least four hours in accomplishing, more fatiguing than twice that
distance would have been over New Hampshire hills. If I were to settle
in that country, I should probably fall into the way of riding more, and
walking less. I remember thinking how comfortable a certain ponderous
black mammy looked, whom I met on one of these same sunny and sandy
tramps. She sat in the very middle of a tipcart, with an old and truly
picturesque man's hat on her head (quite in the fashion, feminine
readers will notice), driving a one-horned ox with a pair of
clothes-line reins. She was traveling slowly, just as I like to travel;
and, as I say, I was impressed by her comfortable appearance. Why would
not an equipage like that be just the thing for a naturalistic idler?
Not far beyond my halting-place of two days before I came to a Cherokee
rosebush, one of the most beautiful of plants,--white, fragrant, single
roses (_real_ roses) set in the midst of the handsomest of glossy green
leaves. I was delighted to find it still in flower. A hundred miles
farther south I had seen it finishing its season a full month earlier. I
stopped, of course, to pluck a blossom. At that moment a female redbird
flew out of the bush. Her mate was beside her instantly, and a nameless
something in their manner told me they were trying to keep a secret. The
nest, built mainly of pine needles and other leaves, was in the middle
of the bush, a foot or two from the grass, and contained two bluish or
greenish eggs thickly spattered with dark brown. I meant to look into it
again (the owners seemed to have no great objection), but somehow missed
it every time I passed. From that point, as far as I went, the road was
lined with Cherokee roses,--not continuously, but with short
intermissions; and from the number of redbirds seen, almost invariably
in pairs, I feel safe in saying that the nest I had found was probably
one of fifteen or twenty scattered along the wayside. How gloriously the
birds sang! It was their day for singing. I was ready to christen the
road anew,--Redbird Road.
But the redbirds, many and conspicuous as they were, had no monopoly of
the road or of the day. House wrens were equally numerous and equally at
home, though they sang more out of sight. Red-eyed chewinks, still far
from their native berry pastures, hopped into a bush to cry, "Who's he?"
at the passing of a stranger, in whom, for aught I know, they may have
half recognized an old acquaintance. A bunch of quails ran across the
road a little in front of me, and in another place fifteen or twenty
red-winged blackbirds (not a red wing among them) sat gossiping in a
treetop. Elsewhere, even later than this (it was now April 7), I saw
flocks, every bird of which wore shoulder-straps,--like the traditional
militia company, all officers. _They_ did not gossip, of course (it is
the male that sports the red), but they made a lively noise.
As for the mocking-birds, they were at the front here, as they were
everywhere. During my fortnight in Tallahassee there were never many
consecutive five minutes of daylight in which, if I stopped to listen, I
could not hear at least one mocker. Oftener two or three were singing at
once in as many different directions. And, speaking of them, I must
speak also of their more northern cousin. From the day I entered Florida
I had been saying that the mocking-bird, save for his occasional mimicry
of other birds, sang so exactly like the thrasher that I did not believe
I could tell one from the other. Now, however, on this St. Augustine
road, I suddenly became aware of a bird singing somewhere in advance,
and as I listened again I said aloud, with full persuasion, "There!
that's a thrasher!" There was a something of difference: a shade of
coarseness in the voice, perhaps; a tendency to force the tone, as we
say of human singers,--a _something_, at all events, and the longer I
hearkened, the more confident I felt that the bird was a thrasher. And
so it was,--the first one I had heard in Florida, although I had seen
many. Probably the two birds have peculiarities of voice and method
that, with longer familiarity on the listener's part, would render them
easily distinguishable. On general principles, I must believe that to be
true of all birds. But the experience just described is not to be taken
as proving that _I_ have any such familiarity. Within a week afterward,
while walking along the railway, I came upon a thrasher and a
mocking-bird singing side by side; the mocker upon a telegraph pole, and
the thrasher on the wire, halfway between the mocker and the next pole.
They sang and sang, while I stood between them in the cut below and
listened; and if my life had depended on my seeing how one song differed
from the other, I could not have done it. With my eyes shut, the birds
might have changed places,--if they could have done it quickly
enough,--and I should have been none the wiser.
As I have said, I followed the road over the nearly level plateau for
what I guessed to be about three miles. Then I found myself in a bit of
hollow that seemed made for a stopping-place, with a plantation road
running off to the right, and a hillside cornfield of many acres on the
left. In the field were a few tall dead trees. At the tip of one sat a
sparrow-hawk, and to the trunk of another clung a red-bellied
woodpecker, who, with characteristic foolishness, sat beside his hole
calling persistently, and then, as if determined to publish what other
birds so carefully conceal, went inside, thrust out his head, and
resumed his clatter. Here, too, were a pair of bluebirds, noticeable for
their rarity, and for the wonderful color--a shade deeper than is ever
seen at the North, I think--of the male's blue coat. In a small thicket
in the hollow beside the road were noisy white-eyed vireos, a
ruby-crowned kinglet,--a tiny thing that within a month would be singing
in Canada, or beyond,--an unseen wood pewee, and (also unseen) a hermit
thrush, one of perhaps twenty solitary individuals that I found
scattered about the woods in the course of my journeyings. Not one of
them sang a note. Probably they did not know that there was a Yankee in
Florida who--in some moods, at least--would have given more for a dozen
bars of hermit thrush music than for a day and a night of the
mocking-bird's medley. Not that I mean to disparage the great Southern
performer; as a vocalist he is so far beyond the hermit thrush as to
render a comparison absurd; but what I love is a _singer_, a voice to
reach the soul. An old Tallahassee negro, near the "white Norman
school,"--so he called it,--hit off the mocking-bird pretty well. I had
called his attention to one singing in an adjacent dooryard. "Yes," he
said, "I love to hear 'em. They's very amusin', very amusin'." My own
feeling can hardly be a prejudice, conscious or unconscious, in favor of
what has grown dear to me through early and long-continued association.
The difference between the music of birds like the mocker, the thrasher,
and the catbird and that of birds like the hermit, the veery, and the
wood thrush is one of kind, not of degree; and I have heard music of the
mocking-bird's kind (the thrasher's, that is to say) as long as I have
heard music at all. The question is one of taste, it is true; but it is
not a question of familiarity or favoritism. All praise to the mocker
and the thrasher! May their tribe increase! But if we are to indulge in
comparisons, give me the wood thrush, the hermit, and the veery; with
tones that the mocking-bird can never imitate, and a simplicity which
the Fates--the wise Fates, who will have variety--have put forever
beyond his appreciation and his reach.
Florida as I saw it (let the qualification be noted) is no more a land
of flowers than New England. In some respects, indeed, it is less so.
Flowering shrubs and climbers there are in abundance. I rode in the cars
through miles on miles of flowering dogwood and pink azalea. Here, on
this Tallahassee road, were miles of Cherokee roses, with plenty of the
climbing scarlet honeysuckle (beloved of humming-birds, although I saw
none here), and nearer the city, as already described, masses of lantana
and white honeysuckle. In more than one place pink double roses
(vagrants from cultivated grounds, no doubt) offered buds and blooms to
all who would have them. The cross-vine (_Bignonia_), less freehanded,
hung its showy bells out of reach in the treetops. Thorn-bushes of
several kinds were in flower (a puzzling lot), and the treelike
blueberry (_Vaccinium arboreum_), loaded with its large, flaring white
corollas, was a real spectacle of beauty. Here, likewise, I found one
tiny crab-apple shrub, with a few blossoms, exquisitely tinted with
rose-color, and most exquisitely fragrant. But the New Englander, when
he talks of wild flowers, has in his eye something different from these.
He is not thinking of any bush, no matter how beautiful, but of trailing
arbutus, hepaticas, bloodroot, anemones, saxifrage, violets, dogtooth
violets, spring beauties, "cowslips," buttercups, corydalis, columbine,
Dutchman's breeches, clintonia, five-finger, and all the rest of that
bright and fragrant host which, ever since he can remember, he has seen
covering his native hills and valleys with the return of May.
It is not meant, of course, that plants like these are wholly wanting in
Florida. I remember an abundance of violets, blue and white, especially
in the flat-woods, where also I often found pretty butterworts of two or
three sorts. The smaller blue ones took very acceptably the place of
hepaticas, and indeed I heard them called by that name. But, as compared
with what one sees in New England, such "ground flowers," flowers which
it seems perfectly natural to pluck for a nosegay, were very little in
evidence. I heard Northern visitors remark the fact again and again. On
this pretty road out of Tallahassee--itself a city of flower gardens--I
can recall nothing of the kind except half a dozen strawberry blossoms,
and the oxalis and specularia before mentioned. Probably the
round-leaved houstonia grew here, as it did everywhere, in small
scattered patches. If there were violets as well, I can only say I have
forgotten them.
Be it added, however, that at the time I did not miss them. In a garden
of roses one does not begin by sighing for mignonette and lilies of the
valley. Violets or no violets, there was no lack of beauty. The Southern
highway surveyor, if such a personage exists, is evidently not consumed
by that distressing puritanical passion for "slicking up things" which
too often makes of his Northern brother something scarcely better than a
public nuisance. At the South you will not find a woman cultivating with
pain a few exotics beside the front door, while her husband is mowing
and burning the far more attractive wild garden that nature has planted
just outside the fence. The St. Augustine road, at any rate, after
climbing the hill and getting beyond the wood, runs between natural
hedges,--trees, vines, and shrubs carelessly intermingled,--not dense
enough to conceal the prospect or shut out the breeze ("straight from
the Gulf," as the Tallahassean is careful to inform you), but sufficient
to afford much welcome protection from the sun. Here it was good to find
the sassafras growing side by side with the persimmon, although when,
for old acquaintance' sake, I put a leaf into my mouth I was half glad
to fancy it a thought less savory than some I had tasted in Yankeeland.
I took a kind of foolish satisfaction, too, in the obvious fact that
certain plants--the sumach and the Virginia creeper, to mention no
others--were less at home here than a thousand miles farther north. With
the wild-cherry trees, I was obliged to confess, the case was reversed.
I had seen larger ones in Massachusetts, perhaps, but none that looked
half so clean and thrifty. In truth, their appearance was a puzzle,
rum-cherry trees as by all tokens they undoubtedly were, till of a
sudden it flashed upon me that there were no caterpillars' nests in
them! Then I ceased to wonder at their odd look. It spoke well for my
botanical acumen that I had recognized them at all.
Before I had been a week in Tallahassee I found that, without
forethought or plan, I had dropped into the habit (and how pleasant it
is to think that some good habits _can_ be dropped into!) of making the
St. Augustine road my after-dinner sauntering-place. The morning was for
a walk: to Lake Bradford, perhaps, in search of a mythical ivory-billed
woodpecker, or westward on the railway for a few miles, with a view to
rare migratory warblers. But in the afternoon I did not walk,--I
loitered; and though I still minded the birds and flowers, I for the
most part forgot my botany and ornithology. In the cool of the day, then
(the phrase is an innocent euphemism), I climbed the hill, and after an
hour or two on the plateau strolled back again, facing the sunset
through a vista of moss-covered live-oaks and sweet gums. Those quiet,
incurious hours are among the pleasantest of all my Florida memories. A
cuckoo would be cooing, perhaps; or a quail, with cheerful ambiguity,--
such as belongs to weather predictions in general,--would be prophesying
"more wet" and "no more wet" in alternate breaths; or two or three
night-hawks would be sweeping back and forth high above the valley; or a
marsh hawk would be quartering over the big oatfield. The martins would
be cackling, in any event, and the kingbirds practicing their aerial
mock somersaults; and the mocking-bird would be singing, and the redbird
whistling. On the western slope, just below the oatfield, the Northern
woman who owned the pretty cottage there (the only one on the road) was
sure to be at work among her flowers. A laughing colored boy who did
chores for her (without injury to his health, I could warrant) told me
that she was a Northerner. But I knew it already; I needed no witness
but her beds of petunias. In the valley, as I crossed the railroad
track, a loggerhead shrike sat, almost of course, on the telegraph wire
in dignified silence; and just beyond, among the cabins, I had my choice
of mocking-birds and orchard orioles. And so, admiring the roses and the
pomegranates, the lantanas and the honeysuckles, or chatting with some
dusky fellow-pilgrim, I mounted the hill to the city, and likely as not
saw before me a red-headed woodpecker sitting on the roof of the State
House, calling attention to his patriotic self--in his tri-colored
dress--by occasional vigorous tattoos on the tinned ridgepole. I never
saw him there without gladness. The legislature had begun its session in
an economical mood,--as is more or less the habit of legislatures, I
believe,--and was even considering a proposition to reduce the salary
and mileage of its members. Under such circumstances, it ought not to
have been a matter of surprise, perhaps, that no flag floated from the
cupola of the capitol. The people's money should not be wasted. And
possibly I should never have remarked the omission but for a certain
curiosity, natural, if not inevitable, on the part of a Northern
visitor, as to the real feeling of the South toward the national
government. Day after day I had seen a portly gentleman--with an air, or
with airs, as the spectator might choose to express it--going in and out
of the State House gate, dressed ostentatiously in a suit of Confederate
gray. He had worn nothing else since the war, I was told. But of course
the State of Florida was not to be judged by the freak of one man, and
he only a member of the "third house." And even when I went into the
governor's office, and saw the original "ordinance of secession" hanging
in a conspicuous place on the wall, as if it were an heirloom to be
proud of, I felt no stirring of sectional animosity, thorough-bred
Massachusetts Yankee and old-fashioned abolitionist as I am. A brave
people can hardly be expected or desired to forget its history,
especially when that history has to do with sacrifices and heroic deeds.
But these things, taken together, did no doubt prepare me to look upon
it as a happy coincidence when, one morning, I heard the familiar cry of
the red-headed woodpecker, for the first time in Florida, and looked up
to see him flying the national colors from the ridgepole of the State
House. I did not break out with "Three cheers for the red, white, and
blue!" I am naturally undemonstrative; but I said to myself that
_Melanerpes erythrocephalus_ was a very handsome bird.
ORNITHOLOGY ON A COTTON PLANTATION.
On one of my first jaunts into the suburbs of Tallahassee I noticed not
far from the road a bit of swamp,--shallow pools with muddy borders and
flats. It was a likely spot for "waders," and would be worth a visit. To
reach it, indeed, I must cross a planted field surrounded by a lofty
barbed-wire fence and placarded against trespassers; but there was no
one in sight, or no one who looked at all like a land-owner; and,
besides, it could hardly be accounted a trespass--defined by Blackstone
as an "_unwarranted_ entry on another's soil"--to step carefully over
the cotton rows on so legitimate an errand. Ordinarily I call myself a
simple bird-gazer, an amateur, a field naturalist, if you will; but on
occasions like the present I assume--with myself, that is--all the
rights and titles of an ornithologist proper, a man of science strictly
so called. In the interest of science, then, I climbed the fence and
picked my way across the field. True enough, about the edges of the
water were two or three solitary sandpipers, and at least half a dozen
of the smaller yellowlegs,--two additions to my Florida list,--not to
speak of a little blue heron and a green heron, the latter in most
uncommonly green plumage. It was well I had interpreted the placard a
little generously. "The letter killeth" is a pretty good text in
emergencies of this kind. So I said to myself. The herons, meanwhile,
had taken French leave, but the smaller birds were less suspicious; I
watched them at my leisure, and left them still feeding.
Two days later I was there again, but it must be acknowledged that this
time I tarried in the road till a man on horseback had disappeared round
the next turn. It would have been manlier, without doubt, to pay no
attention to him; but something told me that he was the cotton-planter
himself, and, for better or worse, prudence carried the day with me.
Finding nothing new, though the sandpipers and yellowlegs were still
present, with a very handsome little blue heron and plenty of
blackbirds, I took the road again and went further, and an hour or two
afterward, on getting back to the same place, was overtaken again by the
horseman. He pulled up his horse and bade me good-afternoon. Would I
lend him my opera-glass, which happened to be in my hand at the moment?
"I should like to see how my house looks from here," he said; and he
pointed across the field to a house on the hill some distance beyond.
"Ah," said I, glad to set myself right by a piece of frankness that
under the circumstances could hardly work to my disadvantage; "then it
is your land on which I have been trespassing." "How so?" he asked, with
a smile; and I explained that I had been across his cotton-field a
little while before. "That is no trespass," he answered (so the reader
will perceive that I had been quite correct in my understanding of the
law); and when I went on to explain my object in visiting his cane-swamp
(for such it was, he said, but an unexpected freshet had ruined the crop
when it was barely out of the ground), he assured me that I was welcome
to visit it as often as I wished. He himself was very fond of natural
history, and often regretted that he had not given time to it in his
youth. As it was, he protected the birds on his plantation, and the
place was full of them. I should find his woods interesting, he felt
sure. Florida was extremely rich in birds; he believed there were some
that had never been classified. "We have orioles here," he added; and so
far, at any rate, he was right; I had seen perhaps twenty that day
(orchard orioles, that is), and one sat in a tree before us at the
moment. His whole manner was most kindly and hospitable,--as was that of
every Tallahassean with whom I had occasion to speak,--and I told him
with sincere gratitude that I should certainly avail myself of his
courtesy and stroll through his woods.
I approached them, two mornings afterward, from the opposite side,
where, finding no other place of entrance, I climbed a six-barred,
tightly locked gate--feeling all the while like "a thief and a
robber"--in front of a deserted cabin. Then I had only to cross a grassy
field, in which meadow larks were singing, and I was in the woods. I
wandered through them without finding anything more unusual or
interesting than summer tanagers and yellow-throated warblers, which
were in song there, as they were in every such place, and after a while
came out into a pleasant glade, from which different parts of the
plantation could be seen, and through which ran a plantation road. Here
was a wooden fence,--a most unusual thing,--and I lost no time in
mounting it, to rest and look about me. It is one of the marks of a true
Yankee, I suspect, to like such a perch. My own weakness in that
direction is a frequent subject of mirth with chance fellow travelers.
The attitude is comfortable and conducive to meditation; and now that I
was seated and at my ease, I felt that this was one of the New England
luxuries which, almost without knowing it, I had missed ever since I
left home.
Of my meditations on this particular occasion I remember nothing; but
that is no sign they were valueless; as it is no sign that yesterday's
dinner did me no good because I have forgotten what it was. In the
latter case, indeed, and perhaps in the former as well, it would seem
more reasonable to draw an exactly opposite inference. But, quibbles
apart, one thing I do remember: I sat for some time on the fence, in the
shade of a tree, with an eye upon the cane-swamp and an ear open for
bird-voices. Yes, and it comes to me at this moment that here I heard
the first and only bull-frog that I heard anywhere in Florida. It was
like a voice from home, and belonged with the fence. Other frogs I had
heard in other places. One chorus brought me out of bed in Daytona--in
the evening--after a succession of February dog-day showers. "What is
that noise outside?" I inquired of the landlady as I hastened
downstairs. "That?" said she, with a look of amusement; "that's frogs."
"It _may_ be," I thought, but I followed the sounds till they led me in
the darkness to the edge of a swamp. No doubt the creatures were frogs,
but of some kind new to me, with voices more lugubrious and homesick
than I should have supposed could possibly belong to any batrachian. A
week or two later, in the New Smyrna flat-woods, I heard in the distance
a sound which I took for the grunting of pigs. I made a note of it,
mentally, as a cheerful token, indicative of a probable scarcity of
rattlesnakes; but by and by, as I drew nearer, the truth of the matter
began to break upon me. A man was approaching, and when we met I asked
him what was making that noise yonder. "Frogs," he said. At another
time, in the flat-woods of Port Orange (I hope I am not taxing my
reader's credulity too far, or making myself out a man of too
imaginative an ear), I heard the bleating of sheep. Busy with other
things, I did not stop to reflect that it was impossible there should be
sheep in that quarter, and the occurrence had quite passed out of my
mind when, one day, a cracker, talking about frogs, happened to say,
"Yes, and we have one kind that makes a noise exactly like the bleating
of sheep." That, without question, was what I had heard in the
flat-woods. But this frog in the sugar-cane swamp was the same fellow
that on summer evenings, ever and ever so many years ago, in sonorous
bass that could be heard a quarter of a mile away, used to call from
Reuben Loud's pond, "Pull him in! Pull him in!" or sometimes (the
inconsistent amphibian), "Jug o' rum! Jug o' rum!"
I dismounted from my perch at last, and was sauntering idly along the
path (idleness like this is often the best of ornithological industry),
when suddenly I had a vision! Before me, in the leafy top of an oak
sapling, sat a blue grosbeak. I knew him on the instant. But I could see
only his head and neck, the rest of his body being hidden by the leaves.
It was a moment of feverish excitement. Here was a new bird, a bird
about which I had felt fifteen years of curiosity; and, more than that,
a bird which here and now was quite unexpected, since it was not
included in either of the two Florida lists that I had brought with me
from home. For perhaps five seconds I had my opera-glass on the blue
head and the thick-set, dark bill, with its lighter-colored under
mandible. Then I heard the clatter of a horse's hoofs, and lifted my
eyes. My friend the owner of the plantation was coming down the road at
a gallop, straight upon me. If I was to see the grosbeak and make sure
of him, it must be done at once. I moved to bring him fully into view,
and he flew into the thick of a pine-tree out of sight. But the tree was
not far off, and if Mr. ---- would pass me with a nod, the case was
still far from hopeless. A bright thought came to me. I ran from the
path with a great show of eager absorption, leveled my glass upon the
pine-tree, and stood fixed. Perhaps Mr. ---- would take the hint. Alas!
he had too much courtesy to pass his own guest without speaking. "Still
after the birds?" he said, as he checked his horse. I responded, as I
hope, without any symptom of annoyance. Then, of course, he wished to
know what I was looking at, and I told him that a blue grosbeak had just
flown into that pine-tree, and that I was most distressingly anxious to
see more of him. He looked at the pine-tree. "I can't see him," he said.
No more could I. "It wasn't a blue jay, was it?" he asked. And then we
talked of one thing and another, I have no idea what, till he rode away
to another part of the plantation where a gang of women were at work. By
this time the grosbeak had disappeared utterly. Possibly he had gone to
a bit of wood on the opposite side of the cane-swamp. I scaled a
barbed-wire fence and made in that direction, but to no purpose. The
grosbeak was gone for good. Probably I should never see another. Could
the planter have read my thoughts just then he would perhaps have been
angry with himself, and pretty certainly he would have been angry with
me. That a Yankee should accept his hospitality, and then load him with
curses and call him all manner of names! How should he know that I was
so insane a hobbyist as to care more for the sight of a new bird than
for all the laws and customs of ordinary politeness? As my feelings
cooled, I saw that I was stepping over hills or rows of some
strange-looking plants just out of the ground. Peanuts, I guessed; but
to make sure I called to a colored woman who was hoeing not far off.
"What are these?" "Pinders," she answered. I knew she meant
peanuts,--otherwise "ground-peas" and "goobers,"--and now that I once
more have a dictionary at my elbow I learn that the word, like "goober,"
is, or is supposed to be, of African origin.