Quite a good deal has happened since the last entry. The storm windows are down and the screens are up. The ice has left the pond and the frogs have begun their song of songs, deep in the heart of wetness. Sugaring is over with and the trees plugged. Eel traps have been set and have been entered by eels. The field behind the barn has been top-dressed and the upper piece across the road sowed to grass. Each afternoon three patrol planes go over and are mistaken for hawks by the young chickens. The blueberry piece has been burned. Smelts are running in the brooks, tree swallows are nesting in their house on the pole, and the dogs have killed a skunk under the old shed behind the icehouse.
In February I registered in the third draft and from now on will do as I am told, cheerfully I trust. Lambs came in March and also a new electric brooder stove, the latter by express. Tails have been docked, bushes pruned, flower borders uncovered, bank boughs taken away; peas and radishes and spinach and carrots are in. Rhubarb is beginning to show. Mayflowers have been reported fifteen miles away in the mayflower country. Blackout curtains are up at the kitchen windows, wild cucumber up at the kitchen door. Two spring pigs, a sow and a barrow, are working the dressing in the barn cellar. Both geese have laid and set, and all twenty-two eggs have been proved infertile. The gander’s face is bright orange. He is on the skids.
Sugar rationing begins next week. Hen wire is hard to get, egg cases harder. Production in the henpens is up, and prices of other things will soon be stabilized but not the price of eggs, which, like the hens themselves, will remain flighty. Spring recess is over and measles are almost over. I have built sideboards and a headboard for the truck, and in a day or two I will receive a siren to be mounted on the truck for notifying people on my stretch of road about air raids. The scow has been painted and launched. Counterweights have been rigged on the windows of the cold frame, for easier operation and smooth, effortless control. The junk-heap in the alders has been ransacked and the metal put back into circulation. Newspapers, magazines, and cardboard have been dispatched to the war. Apple trees have been sprayed, and the north field has been limed.
The last jar of 1941 peas was broached yesterday at lunch, and the preserve closet in the cellar begins to look bare. A new fielder’s glove has arrived from Sears and with it the early morning sound of a ball rolling off the barn roof and landing back up there again with a sharp plunk. This week we have had two visits from a great blue heron and one from the superintendent of schools. It has been an early spring and an eerie one. Already we have had evenings which have seemed more like July than April, as though summer were born prematurely and needed special care. Tonight is such a night. The warmth of afternoon held over through suppertime, and now the air has grown still. In the barnyard, among the wisps of dry straw that make a pattern on the brown earth, the sheep lie motionless and as yet unshorn, their great ruffs giving them a regal appearance, their placidity seemingly induced by the steady crying of the frogs. The unseasonable warmth invests the night with a quality of mystery and magnitude. And in the east beyond the lilac and beyond the barn and beyond the bay and behind the deepening hills, in slow and splendid surprise, rises the bomber’s moon.
Spring is a rush season on any farm. On this farm of ours spring becomes an almost impossible season because of the songbirds, which arrive just as everything else is getting under way and which have to be identified. They couldn’t pick a more inconvenient time.
I say they have to be identified—we never used to identify songbirds, we used to lump them and listen to them sing. But my wife, through a stroke of ill fortune, somehow got hold of a book called A Field Guide to the Birds—Including All Species Found in Eastern North America, by Roger Tory Peterson, and now we can’t settle down to any piece of work without being interrupted by a warbler trying to look like another warbler and succeeding admirably.
The birds have been here a couple of weeks now, and we are getting farther and farther behind with everything. I simply haven’t time to stop what I am doing every fifteen seconds to report a white eye-ring and a yellow rump-patch, and neither has my wife. Take this morning, for instance. Our home roars and boils and seethes with activity. Upstairs is German measles. In the cellar is a water pump that has gone into a running fit. Outside, a truck is noisily trying to back up to the woodshed door to deliver a couple of cords of dry wood for us to spring out on. In the shop somebody is hammering away, making a blackout frame for the next raid. In the back kitchen the set tubs are in operation, coping with a week’s wash. In the front study my wife’s typewriter is going like the devil, trying to catch a mail with something or other of an editorial nature. Overhead a plane grumbles and threatens and heads out to sea. Here in the living room, where I choose to work because it is the nerve center of the whole place and thus enables me to keep in touch with life without moving out of my chair, I am busy with the electric literary life of a pent-up agriculturist, such as it is. Lambs jump and dance in the barnyard, waiting for the gate to swing open so they can get at the lambkill; tiny broccoli and tomato and cabbage and lettuce plants struggle desperately upward in flats in the south window waiting to be transplanted into the cold frame; two hundred and seventy-two chicks romp in the brooder house in search of trouble; the wind blows, the bushes creak against the shutters, the sun shines, the radio plays for the measles, and the whole place has the eleventh-hour pulsation of a defense factory. On top of everything there are these indistinguishable little birds crying for our attention, flaunting an olive-green spot that looks yellow, a yellow stripe that looks gray, a gray breast that looks cinnamon, a cinnamon tail that looks brown.
This morning at breakfast my wife seemed tired and discouraged. I thought perhaps it was the measles upstairs (which we had wrongly identified, at first, as a boil in the ear). “Do you know,” she said after a while, “that the fox sparrow can easily be mistaken for the hermit thrush? They are about the same size, and they both have a red tail in flight.”
“They don’t if you look the other way,” I replied, wittily. But she was not comforted. She thumbed restlessly through A Field Guide (she carries it with her from room to room at this season) and settled down among the grosbeaks, finches, sparrows, and buntings while I went back among the smoked bacon, blackberry jam, toast, and coffee.
“My real trouble is,” she continued, “that I learn the birds pretty well one year, but then the next year comes and I have to learn them all again. I think probably the only way really to learn them is to go out with a bird person. That would be the only way.”
“You wouldn’t like a bird person,” I replied.
“I mean a sympathetic bird person.”
“You don’t know a sympathetic bird person.”
“I knew a Mr. Knollenberg once,” said my wife wistfully, “who was always looking for a difficult finch.”
She admitted, however, that the problem of the birds was virtually insoluble. Even the chickadee, it turns out, plays a dirty trick on us all. Everybody knows a chickadee, and in winter the chickadees are our constant companions. For nine months of the year the chickadee announces himself plainly, so that any simpleton can tell him; but in spring the fraudulent little devil gives a phony name. In spring, when love hits him, he goes around introducing himself as Phoebe. According to the author of the Field Guide he whistles the name Phoebe, whereas the Phoebe doesn’t whistle it but simply says it. Still, it’s a dishonest trick, and I resent it when I’m busy.
Mr. Peterson, the author of the Guide, has made a manly attempt to enable us to identify birds, but the attempt (in my case) is pitiful. He says of the Eastern Winter Wren (Nannus hiemalis hiemalis): it “frequents mossy tangles, ravines, brushpiles.” That, I don’t doubt, is true of the Eastern Winter Wren; but it is also true of practically every bird here except the chimney swift and the herring gull. Our whole country is just one big mossy tangle. Any bird you meet is suspect, but they can’t all be Eastern Winter Wrens.
The titmice, the wrens, the thrushes, the nuthatches, the finches are bad enough, but when Mr. Peterson comes to helping me, or even my wife, with the warblers his efforts are indeed laughable. There are dozens of warblers, many of them barely visible to the naked eye. To distinguish them one from another is like trying to distinguish between two bits of dust dancing in a shaft of sunlight. Of the Chestnut-sided Warbler Mr. Peterson says: “Adults in spring:—Easily identified by the yellow crown and the chestnut sides. The only other bird with chestnut sides, the Bay-breast, has a chestnut throat and a dark crown, thus appearing quite dark-headed. Autumn birds are quite different—greenish above and white below, with a white eye-ring and two wing-bars. Adults usually retain some of the chestnut. The lemon-colored shade of green, in connection with the white under parts, is sufficient for recognition.” Well, it is sufficient for recognition if you happen to be standing, or lying, directly under a Chestnut-sided Warbler in the fall of the year and can remember not to confuse the issue with “adults in spring” or with the Bay-breast at any season—specially the female Bay-breast in spring, which is rather dim and indistinct, the way all birds look to me when they are in a hurry (which they almost always are) or when I am. A hurried man trying to identify a hurried bird is palpably a ridiculous situation.
Even the author of the Guide admits, in places, that a bird spotter is in for real trouble. The Sycamore Warbler, he says, is almost identical with the Yellow-throated Warbler, but might be distinguished “at extremely short range” by the lack of any yellow between the eye and the bill. It helps some though if you can remember which side of the Alleghenies you are on. I try to keep that in mind always.
The thing that amuses me about songbirds in our amazing springtime is the way my wife takes her troubles out on the birds themselves, who are, in a sense, innocent enough. She is puzzled and annoyed at her inability to master, in a few crowded weeks, the amazing intricacies of bird markings—made even more difficult because we sent our binoculars to England year before last to help in the defense of the British Isles. A little while ago I saw her pause for a fleeting moment at a window as she was passing by and heard her mutter peevishly: “There goes one of those damned little Yellow Palm Warblers.” Then she added, in a barely audible whisper, “I guess.”
Songbirds can be ruinous as well as hard to tell apart. A few days ago I seeded last year’s garden piece to grass. Next morning a great flock of juncos came in, wave after wave, white-bellied evil-minded juncos, slate-colored hungry juncos, smaller-than-a-house-sparrow-something-like-a-Vesper-sparrow juncos. They swarmed into the field and ate up all the seeds. It was the first time I had ever sprung after a songbird with a foul oath.
When we first came here to live, the road in front of our house was a dirt road. But after a while they tarred it. Now, in war, with the automobile on the wane and the horse returning, I think probably they will have to throw some dirt back on the road, the surface being too hard on the feet of animals. Moral: men should settle their differences before they improve their roads.
Our county had its first blackout the other evening, on Palm Sunday. It was considered a success, although no bomb fell. It was a lovely day for a raid—one of those quiet days full of a deceptive peace. When I looked out at daybreak the ground was white with frost, but you could tell it was going to be a fine day. I got up promptly to tend some new chicks and was busy with them for a half hour before breakfast, thinking of palms and Christ and bombs and dry litter. After breakfast a new lamb turned up with a sore eye, which I bathed with boric acid so it could see well for the blackout, and then was summoned to help a scholar with his grammar but with no success. When I could not think of a pronoun used with conjunctive force and did not know what an adjectival complement was he grew restless and discouraged.
“You really don’t know anything about grammar, do you?” he said.
“No, I don’t,” I replied, with only a trace of regret.
Only three or four cars passed, the whole morning long. We saw no palm leaves and did not go to church. After his homework was done the boy left to dam a stream, and from the kitchen came the drowsy sound of something being chopped in a bowl. Mostly we just lay around, waiting for the blackout.
A little after nine o’clock in the evening, our phone began ringing the numbers on the party line (we are on a line with seven other subscribers and each has his own distinctive ring, almost as hard to tell apart as the warblers). I sat by the phone waiting, with my jacket and cap on and my gloves handy. When our call came, I picked up the phone and the voice of our chief air raid warden said: “The yellow has just come through.”
Outside, the truck stood ready, trembling, its engine running, its headlights on (we were instructed to drive with lights for this first raid). I hung up the phone, ran outside, and jumped in. My assignment was to give the alarm on a stretch of road between our house and the center of the village two and a half miles away. The signal was to be a continuous blowing of the horn.
As I turned out of the drive into the highway and jammed the horn button down, trying to shift gears, blow a horn, and make a turn, all with only two hands, the thing seemed entirely real to me—just as the first second or two of the fire drill in grammar school used to seem real, when the gong sounded suddenly and you had to guess whether the fire was a hot one or an imaginary one. To race through the countryside at night, blowing your horn steadily, stirs the blood up. For a few minutes I was brother to Paul Revere.
The villagers had been reading about the blackout for a week in the newspaper and were prepared, some with blackout curtains, others with the simpler defense mechanism—blowing out the lamp. As I passed farmhouse after farmhouse, making my horrible racket, shades were quickly drawn and lights went out. I drove as fast as I could considering the condition of the road, which was full of holes where the frost had heaved the tar. The horn button proved treacherous; it would make contact only if held in a certain position, and occasionally I’d lose the horn and have to worry it on again.
As I drew in to the village I heard the church bell ringing. The church was black, the two stores were black, and the four or five houses at the corner were black. I peered into the church and tried to see the sexton at the bell rope but couldn’t. For a minute or two my horn and the church bell quarreled, the sacred and the profane, riling the Sabbath evening. Then I turned the truck round and started back home—no horn this time. One house still showed lights. I stopped and tooted peremptorily. The lights were quickly extinguished. I glanced in at the house where the old lady lived who had said that she was so far off the road she wouldn’t be able to hear the signal but that it wouldn’t make any difference because she always went to bed before nine o’clock anyway. Everything was dark at her house.
I was back home about twenty-five past nine, and at nine-thirty the phone rang again and the warden announced: “Red light.” The raid was on.
Sitting by the radio in the dark living room (our own curtains hadn’t been installed) we turned on Fred Allen for the duration of the raid. When the all-clear came through I repeated the trip to town, sounding the horn again, but the bloom was off the rose: the second trip was anti-climactic. The church bell was ringing again, and this time the sexton was visible in the vestibule.
One of the things I had to do, to get ready to black out our farm, was to devise a blackout hood for the pilot light on my electric brooder stove, which goes on and off as the thermostat switch operates. I found an old tin cup and inverted this over the bulb, a simple precaution involving two hundred and seventy-two lives, not counting our own.