For the Birds: “Little Brothers of the Air” by Olive Thorne Miller (1892)

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Jun 202022
 

The book that started me on this peculiar quest to resurrect long-dead obscure nature writers was In American Fields and Forests, published by Houghton-Mifflin in 1909. It was an anthology of six American nature writers. Two have retained their renown to this day — Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. One was quite famous at the time and, though largely forgotten today, still has several works in print — John Burroughs. (He will soon become a regular in this blog — more on that anon.) The remaining three are lost to the history of nature writing, though I hope to change that in some small way. They were Bradford Torrey, Dallas Lore Sharp, and Olive Thorne Miller. I have already read several books by Torrey and Sharp (with others waiting on my shelf). But I have been putting off Olive Thorne Miller, until now.

Harriet Mann Miller (1831-1918) published several books on birds under the pen name of Olive Thorne Miller. She had a fairly uneventful childhood (apart from moving every few years), then married Watts Todd Miller, bore and raised four children, and wrote several children’s books. She was introduced to ornithology by Sara Hubbard (director of the Illinois Audobon Society) in 1880 and quickly became an avid bird watcher. She wrote eleven bird books between 1885 and 1904. I have obtained four but have been putting them off for one simple reason: I hereby confess that I am not a birder. I appreciate birds — their colorful forms, fascinating behaviors, lovely songs (and raucous cries). I am particularly fond of American cranes, sandhill and whooping. Hawks and eagles are stunning, and the intelligence of crows gives me pause. But I cannot identify birds by call, and I have a minimal capacity for spotting birds calling in dense foliage. I know a dozen bird species — and a dozen more that are found along the Maine Coast, courtesy of a summer narrating puffin tours for Project Puffin many years back. But I am quite frankly intimidated by birders — their expensive cameras with telephoto lenses that look like they might have cost more than my house, their fascination with life lists, and their stunning capacities for identifying birds from faint calls or a momentary flash of color in a tree. OK, I admit it: they intimidate me. I will stick to insects and plants. I have yet to meet a botanist with special camera equipment to capture chestnut trees or May apples, bearing a life-list of plant species they have encountered or able to identify any plant from the merest fragment of a leaf.

So I have been putting off reading Miller’s work, even while I managed to accrue four of her titles, including her first and last bird books (Little Brothers of the Air was her second one.) I am doing my best to track down early women natural history writers, of which there were quite a few. So I didn’t want to ignore her completely. And Torrey was mostly an ornithologist, so I have already read books laden with passing bird descriptions. In an age before photography was readily available and easy to use in the field, ornithological writers provided rich text descriptions of the birds they saw — all of which fled my mind the moment I read them. Torrey’s books don’t have illustrations, and neither does this volume by Miller. So text is practically all there is to paint the scene and the feathered beings inhabiting it.

I am proud to say that I survived Little Brothers of the Air, though I am in no hurry to read the remaining three books of hers in my collection. She was a fine writer and notable for her independence and spirit of scientific inquiry. While some of her field outings were accompanied by a companion or two (usually female), many of her nature outings were solitary affairs. She was highly dedicated to closely observing birds, which might mean watching a nest through an opera-glass for one or two weeks at a time (or even, in one case, two months!). (“One must be an enthusiast to spy out the secrets of a bird’s life,” she remarks at one point.) Here she describes the privations she underwent in her nature studies:

Didst ever, dear reader, sit in one position on a camp-stool without a back, with head thrown back, and eyes fixed upon one small bird thirty feet from the ground, afraid to move or turn your eyes, lest you miss what you are waiting for, while the sun moves steadily on till his hottest rays pour through some opening directly upon you; while mosquitoes sing about your ears (would that they sang only!), and flies buzz noisily before your face; while birds flit past, and strange notes sound from behind; while rustling in the dead leaves at your feet suggests snakes, and a crawling on your neck proclaims spiders? If you have not, you can never appreciate the enthusiasms of a bird student, nor realize what neck-breaks and other discomforts one will cheerily endure to witness the first flight of a nestling.

The volume is a collection of vignettes of bird behavior, particularly nesting. Some chapters chronicle her observations of a particular nest, from construction through the fledging of the young — or not. She reported that, over a season, about half the nests she watched failed to produce young, often due to the depredations of chipmunks, other birds, or a couple of neighbor boys who stole eggs from nests. Other chapters are based on her travels in New England. She would stay in a friend’s cabin and set out every day to make her acquaintance with all the bird species in the area. Along the way, she might also describe the landscape and vegetation features, offering a delightful reprieve from all the feathers flying.

Occasionally, too, she would complain about something; I enjoyed this feisty side to her nature. She complained about farmers logging their wood lots, though she admitted that the lumber provided a valuable income from their point of view. She complained about farmers replacing old zig-zag stone walls with barbed wire fences: “Nature doesn’t take kindly to barbed wire.” She complained vigorously about the lack of nature knowledge among country folk: “A chapter might be written on the ignorance of country people of their own birds and plants. A chapter, did I say? A book, a dozen books, the country is full of material.” Finally, she also complained about how naturalists like to name everything (a bit ironic, given her own tendency to do so):

Why have we such a rage for labeling and cataloguing the beautiful things of Nature? Why can I not delight in a bird or flower, knowing it by what it is to me, without longing to know what it has been to some other person? What pleasure can it afford to one not making a scientific study of birds to see such names as “the blue and yellow-throated warbler,” “the chestnut-headed golden warbler,” “the yellow-bellied, red-poll warbler,” attached to the smallest and daintiest beauties of the woods?

Before I close the covers of this unassuming green cloth volume with gilt letters on the cover, I ought to say a few words about Miller’s descriptive style. Her careful observation of birds is evident on every page. However, she also frequently goes beyond mere action to interpretation — investing particular behaviors with motivations. Frequently, those motivations mirror human ones. Sometimes, the result is a bit disconcerting to the modern reader, used to reading about birds as non-human beings rather than as quasi-human persons. For example, she describes a male kingbird as singing to his mate while she is brooding her eggs to encourage her in the task. Elsewhere, she describes a young bluebird who “talked with himself for company, a very charming monologue in the inimitable bluebird tone. with modifications suggesting that a new and wonderful song was possible to him. He was evidently too full of joy to keep still.” On rare occasions, she endeavors to offer justification for her accounts. For example, in one of the last essays in the volume, she describes the behaviors of a pair of goldfinches. The female sat on the eggs, and the male would show up whenever she called to him. He would fly above her, trying to locate other birds that might be annoying her.

Sometimes that conduct did not reassure the uneasy bird, and she called again. Then he brought some tidbit in his beak, went to the edge of the nest, and fed her. Then she was pacified; but do not mistake her, it was not hunger that prompted her actions; when she was hungry, she openly left her nest and went for food. It was, as I am convinced. the longing desire to know that he was near her, that he was still anxious t serve her, that he had not forgotten her in her long absence from his side. This may sound a litle fanciful to one who has not studied birds closely, but she was so “human” in all her actions that I feel justified in judging of her motives exactly as I should judge had she measured five feet instead of five inches, and wore silk instead of feathers.”

Miller’s confidence in drawing such brazen parallels between bird behavior and human behavior does strike me as somewhat far-fetched at times. Of course, one could argue that this kind of personification of animals was common back then and would only become more pronounced by the time of the “nature faker” controversy a decade later. Furthermore, whatever the actual motives behind them, the birds’ actions themselves were painstakingly observed and (generally speaking) accurately described. I am confident, too, that her books encouraged many a reader to take up a notebook and opera-glass, and venture into the local woods and fields.

My copy of Little Brothers of the Air is in great condition for its age. The blank page after the flyleaf bears the signature of Lydia Bell Moscrif, June, ’97.

Nature Never Really Rests: “The Procession of the Flowers and Kindred Papers” by Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1897)

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Jun 192022
 

There is virtually no structure to this volume by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, unless you consider the frontispiece. That image depicts a moonglade, the path made by moonlight on the water. The term was first used by James Russell Lowell in the mid-1800s and commandeered by Higginson for an essay of the same name some years later. The Prefatory Note to this work teasingly remarks, “It may interest some readers to know that the designer of the frontispiece to this volume is identical with the child described in its closing pages.” (It also notes that the view in the frontispiece is in Newport, Rhode Island.) And thus, this image and its accompanying essay bookend the text. But who is the mysterious artist? Higginson only identifies her as “this little maiden who sits beside me in the shadow.” Fortunately, she placed her initials on the work; unfortunately, “MBM” has proven elusive. There was a writer of children’s fiction, Mary Bertha Toland, née MacKenzie (1825?-1875), but she would have been too close in age to Higginson to have been a child at the time he originally wrote the essay.

“Moonglade” is evocative of the esthetics of Ruskin mingled with a touch of Transcendentalism; as such, it makes as good a place as any for approaching this slender volume. Higginson opens the essay by remarking that “There is no Americanism more graceful than the word ‘moonglade.’ Later, he observes,

So calm are sometimes the summer evenings by this bay that all motion sees at an end, and the weary play of events to have stopped forever. But Nature never really rests, and the moon, which seems only an ornament for this quiet water, is in reality leading it along with restless progress, bidding it roll lazily over reefs, surge into sea caves, and sweep away with it any boat that is not moored.

This notion of nature as constant flux is a fine candidate for a theme of many of these essays, beginning with “The Procession of the Flowers.” As advertised, that essay considers the progression of blooms from spring until autumn in New England (more precisely, Worcester, Massachusetts, where Higginson served as minister of the Worcester Free Church). In a later essay on“April Days“, Higginson writes about how many flowering plants native to the Boston region have been displaced by human development. The result is an abundance of naturalized plants, including dandelion, buttercup, chickweed, celandine, mullein, burdock, and yarrow, among others. “Bigelow’s delightful book Florula Bostoniensis,” he keenly observes, “is becoming a series of epitaphs.” The result is two contrasting forms of change: Nature’s change across the seasons (always happening, but consistent year to year), and the landscape changes of Massachusetts (urbanization and suburbanization) with their radical impact on the local flora — and “the special insects who haunt them.” Do I detect a hint of woe in Higginson’s observation (quoting a letter from Dr. Thaddeus William Harris) that so many native plants have “disappeared from their former haunts, driven away, or exterminated perhaps, by the changes effected therein”? I cannot help but read Higginson in the light of the ongoing modern-day global climate disruption, where even the reliable progression of the flowers is being considerably impacted. “Fair is foul, foul is fair,” three witches once remarked.

Another theme in several pieces in this volume is the human need for Nature. Here, Higginson seems to presage recent research into the role of nature experiences in child development (including the intellect):

No man can measure what a single hour with Nature may have contributed to the moulding of his mind. The influence is self-renewing, and if for a long time it baffles expression by reason of its fineness, so much the better in the end.

The soul is like a musical instrument; it is not enough that it be framed for the most delicate vibration, but it must vibrate long and often before the fibres grow mellow to the finest waves of sympathy. I perceive that in the veery’s carolling, the clover’s scent, the glistening of the water, the waving wings of butterflies, the sunset tints, the floating clouds, there are attainable infinitely more subtile modulations of thought than I can yet reach the sensibility to discriminate, much less describe.

Cue applause from Ralph Waldo Emerson in the shadows.

Spending time in nature, Higginson argues, ought to be a vital part of healthy education for children. “The little I have gained from colleges and libraries,” he declares, “has certainly not worn as well as the little I learned in childhood of the habits of plant, bird, and insect.” Alas, schools at the time (and now) generally did not (do not) offer those opportunities to young people. “Under the present educational system we need grammars and languages far less than a more thorough out-door experience.”

By way of a miscellany (which reflects this book well), another thing I particularly noticed while reading it was the natural philosophy and science community in which HIgginson lived and wrote. At various points in the book, he quotes Humboldt; he refers to “so good an observer as Wilson Flagg”; he quotes Dr. Thaddeus William Harris, American entymologist; and he mentions Ralph Waldo Emerson. His greatest praise is reserved for Thoreau: “Thoreau camps down by Walden Pond, and show us that absolutely nothing in nature has every yet been described, — not a bird nor a berry of the woods, not a drop of water, nor a spicula of ice, nor summer, nor winter, nor sun, nor star.” Later, he refers to a conversation with Thoreau about local bird distributions in December, 1861, just five months before he died: “…he mentioned most remarkable facts in that department, which had fallen under his unerring eyes.”

Following my encounters with the Collector in Wild Honey by Samuel Scoville, Jr., I was refreshed to discover in Higginson a strong resistance to violence against birds. I think it is in keeping with his radical abolitionist spirit (he was one of Secret Six that backed John Brown’s Raid) and strong moral principles regarding freedom and basic rights for all that he extends similar care to the birds:

The small number of birds yet present in early April gives a better opportunity for careful study, — more especially if one goes armed with the best of fowling-pieces, a small spy-glass; the best, — since how valuable for purposes of observation is the bleeding, gasping, dying body, compared with the fresh and living creature, as it tilts, trembles, and warbles on the branch before you!

Before I close my book and place it next to all the others collecting in my bookshelf of completed texts, I offer up this lovely descriptive passage as evidence of the soaring, elegant prose Higginson sometimes achieved:

As I sat in my boat, one sunny afternoon of last September, beneath the shady western shore of our quiet lake, with the low sunset striking almost level across the wooded banks, it seemed as if the last hoarded drops of summer’s sweetness were being poured over all the world. The air was full of quiet sounds. Turtles rustled beside the brink and slithered into the water, — cows plashed in the shallows, — fishes leaped from the placid depths, — a squirrel sobbed and fretted on a neighboring stump, — a katydid across the lake maintained its hard, dry croak, — the crickets chirped pertinaciously, but with little, fatigued pauses, as if glad that their work was almost done, — the grasshoppers kept up their continual chant, which seemed thoroughly melted and amalgamated into the summer, as if it would go on indefinitely, though the body of the little creature were dried into dust. All this time the birds were silent and invisible, as if they would take no more part in the symphony of the year. Then, seemingly by preconcerted signal, they joined in: Crows cawed anxiously afar; Jays screamed in the woods; a Partridge clucked to its brood, like the gurgle of water from a bottle; a Kingfisher wound his rattle, more briefly than in spring, as if we now knew all about it and the merest hint ought to suffice; a Fish-Hawk flapped into the water, with a great, rude splash, and then flew heavily away; a flock of Wild Ducks went southward overhead, and a smaller party returned beneath them, flying low and anxiously, as if to pick up some lost baggage; and, at last, a Loon laughted loud from behind a distant island, and it was pleasant to people these woods and waters with that wild shouting, linking them with Katahdin Lake and Amperzand.

Next, a few words about Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911) and my copy of his book. According to Wikipedia, Higginson was a Unitarian minister, author, abolitionist, and soldier. During the Civil War, he served as Colonel of the first federally recognized black regiment. He was a correspondent and mentor to Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). His own books covered a range of topics, from his Civil War experiences to the rights of women. HIs few nature essays originally appeared in Outdoor Papers, published in 1889. In 1897, he extracted most of the nature essays, combining them with “Moonglade” to produce the present volume.

According to a signature inside the book, my copy was previously owned by Isabella L. Houghton of North Adams, Massachusetts; she obtained the book on March 17, 1900. The only thing I was able to learn about her online is that she also signed her name in a copy of Women and the Alphabet: A Series of Essays, also by Higginson, published in 1900. I assume that she passed the newspaper clipping with a poem by S.R. Smith of Kingston in the front. For the curious, S.R. Smith happens to be the name of the world’s leading manufacturer of pool deck equipment. Enough said. The back page of the book contains a passage from Paolo and Francesca that appears to have been copied in Isabella’s hand. The work was a tragedy in four acts (first performed in 1902) by the English poet and dramatist Steven Phillips (1864-1915). The particular copied bit was spoken by Franc (frankly?); the copyist took a bit of liberty with the first line. Here is the original:

And yet, Nita, and yet — can any tell

How sorrow forth doth come? Is there a step,

A light step, or a dreamy drip of oars?

Is there a stirring of leaves, or ruffle of wings?

For it seems to me that softly, without hand,

She touches me.

Their Nefarious Calling: “Wild Honey” by Samuel Scoville, Jr. (1929)

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Jun 172022
 

I have read nearly 50 “nature books” for this blog (with easily close to 100 to go), spanning the eighty years from 1861 to 1941. Yet this is the first time I can say that, while this work scarcely reads like a novel, it has an antagonist known as The Collector. While not present in every essay, he dominates the scene and dictates the “nefarious calling” that all other outing members, including the author, participate in: egg collecting, a.k.a., nest robbing. A host of other archetypal characters play bit roles in the drama: the Banker, the Naturalist, the Ornithologist, the Botanist, and the Native. Since Scoville does not elect to assign himself a persona, I will call him the Author. These lesser characters are enablers of the wanton destruction that repeatedly happens throughout this book’s pages. Indeed, the Author reports with pride his many successful ventures at locating birds’ nests to be plundered for the Collector’s collections. He even remarks at one point on how

some of the happiest days of my life have been spent with collectors of birds’ eggs — oölogists, they call themselves. They are all so eager and excited and happy over their hobby that it is a pleasure to be with them. They regard me rather pityingly, however, because I take no share of the findings; yet I think that I have chosen the better part. Boxes of blown eggs leave me cold, but I shall never forget the days and nights in the wilderness which I have had on bird-trips, and the excitement of discovering rare nests and the pleasure of learning secrets of bird life, unknown to me before.

And the Collector does not select one egg from each nest; he takes them all. On one outing to a New Jersey marsh, the Author discovers the first pileated woodpecker nest in the state. Despite its apparent rarity, “urged on by the Collector,” the Author attempts to rob it — without success, I am grateful to report. And when out of the Collector’s company — as in several other essays in the book — the Author generally behaves with greater reverence toward most animals. He does approach venomous snakes with repugnance, however. Pointing out a “very real menace” rattlesnakes supposedly posed to humans, he proposed that big game hunters capture them all for “various zoölogical gardens.” (Lest he appears to be advocating a live capture solution, however, it should be noted that the skins of at least two timber rattlesnakes dispatched by the Author hung on the walls of his cabin in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.)

Venting over. Beyond the domain of the Collector, there is some delightful descriptive prose in this book. He mentions John Burroughs several times, though he does not identify any other nature writers or scientists of the day. (The Naturalist and the Ornithologist and the Botanist are never named.) For his faults, the Author is a skilled ornithologist and botanist who also takes a keen interest in how many landscapes of the Eastern US are haunted by traces of the human past. An old track through the pines was once a busy road for glassmakers and ironmakers in the Pine Barrens, while an old mill site in Connecticut once hummed with industrial activity. In recognizing stories in the landscape, he ties natural history into human history in a way that few other writers of his day did.

While there is no lofty poetry here, no sweeping metaphors or cosmic sentiments, there are still passages like this one describing an encounter with a bluebird:

Once, among all these interesting strangers, we heard the “far-away, far-away” of a bluebird — those lovely contralto notes which fall from the sky like drops of molten silver. Looking up, we saw that dear, brave bird of the North flying toward the sunset with the sky color on his back and the color of the red clay of the South on his breast, and we watched him until he was lost in a mother-of-pearl cloud.

Here, he describes the sounds of the night at his cabin in the Pine Barrens:

The shadows of the waving trees made a fretted, magical pattern on the smooth surface of the water. A pine-barren pickerel frog, all emerald and gold and purple-black, snored, and some other frogs unknown to me gave a couple of loud, startling notes which sounded like the clapping of two boards together. Then suddenly, in the distance, the stressed, hurried notes of a whippoorwill pealed through the darkness, to be answered by one close to the cabin. Over and over and over again these birds of the night repeated their triple notes with a little click after each one, hurrying as if they feared to be interrupted before they could finish. As the wild, sweet melody thrilled through the darkness, it seemed to me as if the moonlight itself had been set to music.

I will close my review of Wild Honey with this lovely passage describing a December boat journey into Okefenokee Swamp:

In the ice-blue sky the moon showed in the afternoon light like a bowl of alabaster, fretted and carved in shadowy patterns. In front of me stretched a fourteen-mile canal. The wine-brown water reflected the deep green of the long-leaf pines on either side of the stream, with now and then gleams of dragon’s blood and carmine-lake as the leaves of the black and sweet gums stained by the frost reflected their clors in the water. Everywhere were towering cypresses silvered with festoons of Spanish moss. Above the setting sun the western sky was a sea of amber and dim gold with shoals of violet and heliotrope clouds in its depths.

A few words about Samuel Scoville, Jr. (1872-1950) and my book copy are in order. Above is a photograph of the Author, circa 1918. According to his terse Wikipedia entry, Scoville was an American writer, naturalist, and lawyer. From Wild Honey, I can gather a few details; he resided in Haverford, Pennsylvania at the time of this book and worked on the thirteenth floor of an office building in Philadelphia. His practice was apparently lucrative; he also owned a home in Cornwall, Connecticut; a cabin (“Faraway”) in the New Jersey Pine Barrens; and a small peninsula on the coast of Maine. He married Katharine Gallaudet Trumbull in Philadelphia and had four children (all boys). He wrote a dozen books, mostly for children and mostly about nature. Wild Honey appears to have been his last collection of nature essays, though clearly with an adult audience in mind.

By 1929, the golden age of the artistic book cover had ended. My volume (the first and only edition) looks like most hardcovers of today, with textured board instead of cloth. The front cover is blank save for a small image impressed into the center, pictured above. What Poseidon and his trident have to do with this book is a mystery. The closest connection I can find is that the guides on his excursions into Okefenokee Swamp all used a “three-pronged push poll peculiar to the Swamp” to navigate the boat through the various waterways and hidden channels in the depths of Okefenokee.

I have to wonder how well this book was received. Its timing was far from ideal. It was published in October of 1929; at the end of that month came the great Stock Market Crash. I wonder how many Americans were looking to buy a nature book then? Furthermore, the Nature Movement, as described by Dallas Lore Sharp, was well over by then; World War I and the passing of John Burroughs in 1921 marked its close.

The Author inscribed my particular copy of Wild Honey to “my best customer and kindest critic” E. Lawrence Dudley on December 4th, 1929. Dudley (1879-1947) was the author of at least five works of biography and fiction, one of which was turned into a movie (Voltaire, 1933).

Weeds and Winters: “The Lay of the Land” by Dallas Lore Sharp (1908)

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Jun 142022
 

Having revisited Bradford Torrey, it seemed only proper (and fair) that I do the same for Dallas Lore Sharp, another fairly renowned (relatively speaking) of the nature essayists of natural history’s golden age. Sharp is probably most known (again, in a relative sense) for his essay, “Turtle Eggs for Agassiz” (in another volume of his, still waiting on the shelf), in which he collects turtle eggs to send to the renowned biologist, Louis Agassiz. While Torrey (and so many others) were actively writing in the 1880s and 1890s, Sharp (1870-1929) was a “late bloomer” who published his first nature book in 1901. As such, he was positioned at the height of the Nature-Study Movement and was able to survey its origins, expression, and impacts on American culture. Indeed, some of his finest essays in The Lay of the Land explore this theme. (Most of the rest of the essays offer themes relating to the various seasons of the year, from “Christmas in the Woods” to “High Noon” (late summer). Although I naturally associate Sharp with Torrey, they are dramatically different as authors. Torrey rambles through the woods and fields, making discoveries along the way; the reader often joins him on his adventures without knowing where he might end up. Sharp has a central theme about which the essay is tightly constructed; though many animals and plants may appear along the way, the central image or idea is never far from view. The prose is composed of refreshingly simple sentences, the kind that would have been to Hemmingway’s liking. There are no thickets of convoluted text here. Each essay has a refreshing clarity that goes down like a dipperful of cool water from a mountain stream. Here, for instance, is Sharp’s closing paragraph from his opening essay, “The Muskrats Are Building”:

The muskrats are building; the last of the migrating geese have gone over; the wild mice have harvested their acorns; the bees have clustered; the woodchucks are asleep; and the sap in the big hickory by the side of the house has crept down out of reach of the fingers of the frost. I will put on the storm-doors and the double windows. Even now the logs are blazing cheerily on the wide, warm hearth.

There is no affectation here, no mystery as to the intended meaning. But there is still plenty of room left for wonder, joy, and poetry. “As I watch the changing seasons…across the changeless years,” Sharp observes in that same essay, “I seem to find a scheme, a plan, a purpose, and there are weeds and winters in it, and it seems divine.” Through observing and celebrating everyday events and phenomena, Sharp finds “something close akin to religion,” that

…is a inspiration, the kind of experience one has in living with the out-of-doors. It doen’t come from books, from laboratories, not even from an occasional tramp afield. It is out of companionship with nature that it comes; not often, perhaps, to any one, nor only to poets who write. I have had such experiences, such moments of quiet insight and uplift, while in the very narrowest of the paths of the woods.

As may already be evident to the reader, Sharp’s vision of nature study combines two elements: biological knowledge (science) and inspiration for the spirit (poetry). Both are essential to engaging meaningfully with the natural world. ” A botanist who is never a poet misses as much in the out-of-doors as a poet who is never botanist.” Elsewhere, Sharp declares that “Nature study is the out-of-door side of natural history, the unmeasured, unprinted side of poetry. It is joy in breathing the air of the fields; joy in seeing, hearing, living the life of the fields; joy in knowing and loving all that lives with you in your out-of-doors. The best nature-study books, therefore, “appeal to sentiment as well as to sense” and are “very unlike the earlier desiccated, unimaginative treatises.”

How does one become a student of nature? The pathway into nature study begins with close observation over time in a particular place. “Let us learn to see and name first. The inexperienced, the unknowing, the unthinking cannot love. One must live until tired, think until baffled, before he can know his need of Nature.”

The first necessity for interesting nature study is an intimate acquaintance with some locality. It does not matter how small, how commonplace, how near the city, — the nearer the better, provided there are trees, water, fences, and some seclusion. If your own roof-tree stands in the midst of it, then that is ideal.

The true nature student is literally at home in nature, cognizant of its many moods and aware of the comings and goings of all the creatures — neighbors — who share that space with him. He observes the daily development of seedlings and flower buds, watches birds building their nests, and notices the muskrats constructing their winter lodges. With close inspection of and engagement with nature over the long years, a beautiful pattern emerges, “and there are weeds and winters in it, and it seems divine.”

My copy of The Lay of the Land is nearly pristine; there are no marks of past ownership. There is a small bookseller stamp on the flyleaf’s lower left. This book was originally sold in Boston, by a company owned and operated by Charles Emelius Lauriat (1842-1920). HIs son (Charles Emelius Lauriat, Jr. — 1874-1937) was among the survivors of the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915, seven years after this book was published.

Science Will Never Fail Us: “The Foot-Path Way” by Bradford Torrey (1892)

 Birds, book review, Books, Native Plants, Spirituality  1 Response »
Jun 112022
 

I return to Torrey as an old friend of long acquaintance. The inspiration behind the blog was the discovery of an early compilation of nature writers, which included extensive work by Thoreau, several essays of Burroughs, and a few pieces each by Bradford Torrey, Dallas Lore Sharp, and Olive Thorne Miller. All three were fairly renowned in their day, publishing extensively in the nature essay genre, particularly ornithological pieces. And all three are nearly forgotten today — so they join the inevitable company of a host of other obscure authors who never managed to achieve much fame. Was I to read all the books the three together wrote, that would take me the better part of a year. Still, I have decided to explore several works by each to gain a richer sense of how they encountered the natural world.

According to the scanty lines on him in Wikipedia, Torrey lived from 1843 until 1912. He is known today mainly as an ornithologist. He frequently contributed to periodicals, compiling his published essays into nine books. The Foot-Path Way was his third work. The first half of the book is given over to travel essays — works where Torrey ventures afield and reports on all the birds he has seen (or not seen). His ramblings take him to Cape Cod, northern New Hampshire, and Mount Mansfield, Massachusetts. His descriptions are fairly dry, a point to which he alludes upon occasion. Here, Torrey laments how rare it is that he truly rhapsodizes on the beauty of nature:

So it is with our appreciation of natural beauty. We are always in its presence, but only on rare occasions are our eyes annointed to see it. Such ecstasies, it seems, are not for every day. Sometimes I fear they grow less frequent as we grow older.

We will hope for better things; but, should the gloomy prognostication fall true, we will but betake ourselves the more assiduously to lesser pleasures, — to warbers and willows, roses and strawberries. Science will never fail us. If worse comes to worst, we will not despise the moths.

In a later essay in the volume, on the passing of birds overhead during the autumn migration, Torrey remarks upon a screech-owl he has frequently observed sitting atop a tall tree: “More than half the time he is there, and always with his eye on me. What an air he has! — like a judge on the bench! If I were half as wise as he looks, these essays of mine would never more be dull.”

The second half of the book is predominantly bird studies: essays where Torrey seeks answers to questions about bird behavior through his detailed observations and occasional anecdotes from others. For example, he explores whether or not male ruby-throated hummingbirds assist the females with incubating the eggs or raising their young. (He concludes that he suspects not, but that he is not convinced one way or the other; scientists now know that males only remain with the females for courtship and mating.) He also explores roosting behavior among American robins (which appears to be limited to young birds and unmated males). He notes the seasonal passage of long numbers of songbirds overhead, many too high up to see with the naked eye — much larger numbers than we would likely experience today. He freely confesses his fascination with birds: “A happy man is the bird-lover; always another species to look for, another mystery to solve.” That said, Torrey attributes personhood to birds, asserting that “Birds and men are alike parts of nature, having many things in common not only with each other, but with every form of animate existence.” Studying birds, therefore, can ultimately teach us about ourselves: “To become acquainted with the peculiarities of plants or birds is to increase one’s knowledge of beings of his own sort.”

More, still, might be gleaned from plants if we only knew how to interpret them. In one essay, Torrey considered similarities between plants and people; alas, he restricted himself to analogous ones, such as how roses with thorns mirror lovely people with a few uncommendable qualities. If only he had wondered more about plant behavior, he might have been far ahead of his time. The last essay is a brief paean to the white pine (which Torrey prefers to call the Weymouth pine). In one of his most poetic passages in the book, he writes about the pine’s mysterious communications:

…the pine is a priest of the true religion. It speaks never of itself, never its own words. Silent it stands till the Spirit breathes upon it. Then all its innumerable leaves awake and speak as they are moved… …the pine tree, under the visitation of the heavenly influence, utters things incommunicable; it whispers to us of things we have never said and never can say, — things that lie deeper than words, deeper than thought. Blessed are our ears if we hear, for the message is not to be understood by every comer, nor, indeed, by any, except at happy moments. In this temple all hearing is given by inspiration, for which reason the pine-tree’s language is inarticulate, as Jesus spake in parables.

My well-worn copy of Torrey’s book has had quite a history. It appears to have been given to Mary Cornelia Dodd by Ella in 1894. I managed to locate information on several Mary C. Dodds, living and deceased, but none whose life trajectories quite fit this one. There was a Mary C. Dodd who was born in Arkansas in 1973, and would have been 21 in 1894; however, she married John Archie Fain in 1891 and would likely have taken his last name, in keeping with traditions at the time.

The book found its way into the possession of Clark L. Thayer of Amherst, Massachusetts, in September 1936. Here, I was surprised to find a likely owner: Clark Leonard Thayer, who graduated from UMass Amherst in 1913, with a degree in Floriculture. In World War I, Thayer served in the Infantry and Ammunition Train. After the war, he became an instructor in Floriculture at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. In 1928, he published Spring Flowering Bulbs: Hardy and Desirable Materials for Use in the Home Garden. At some point before 1936, Thayer relocated to Amherst, probably to teach there. He died in 1982 at the age of 91 in Amesbury, Massachusetts, and is buried in Quabbin Park Cemetery in Ware, Massachusetts.

The final “signature” is an herbal tea stain visible on Mary Dodd’s signature. That was the work of Evil Kitten, our mischievous black cat. By jumping at precisely the right angle onto a low bookshelf at the foot of the bed, he managed to knock a half-glass of tea onto the bed itself, where this book conveniently happened to be sitting a the time.

This Vision of Paradise: “Under the Trees” by Hamilton Wright Mabie (1891)

 book review, Books, Natural History, Spirituality  No Responses »
Jun 092022
 

“Our soul opens to the soul of Nature, and we discover anew that we are one.”

Hamilton Wright Mabie (1846-1916) published over two dozen volumes in his lifetime, many of which were compilations of legends, myths, and fairytales for children. He also wrote fiction and essays on nature and culture. Mabie stands apart from other writers I have read throughout this project in that he was clearly not a scientific naturalist; his inspiration came not from Thoreau, Burroughs, or even Muir, but rather, from Emerson. A transcendental tone infuses his fascinating volume, Under the Trees. Midway through, Mabie reminisces about his first encounter with Emerson’s writing:

As I write, the memory of a summer afternoon long ago comes back to me. The old orchard sleeps in the dreamy air, the birds are silent, a tranquil spirit broods over the whole earth. Under the wide-spreading braches a by is intently reading. He has fallen upon a bit of transcendental writing in a magazine, and for the first time has lerned that t some men the great silent world about him, that seems so real and changeless, is immaterial and unsubstantial — a vision projected by the soul upon illimitable space. On the instant that all things are written with unreality, the solid earth shrinks beneath him. He cannot understand, but he feels what Emerson meant when he said, “The Supreme Being does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves.” That which was fixed, stable, cast in permanent forms was suddenly annihilated by a revelation which spoke to the heart rather than the intellect, and laid bare at a glance the unseen spiritual foundations upon which all things rest at last. From that moment the boy saw with other eyes, and lived henceforth in things not made with hands.

The result of that experience is a book that is difficult to capture in words. On the one hand, it contains the dreamy utterings of an upper-class American male in the Gilded Age, extolling the virtues of an all-benevolent Nature deity that seems to collaborate with and smile upon Western civilization: “Face to face through all his history man has stood with Nature, and to each generation she has opened some new page of her inexhaustible story.” Missing from this worldview is any condemnation of the costs of progress, already becoming apparent in the midst of the Industrial Revolution. There is a passing reference or two to cities, which cannot compare to the bucolic countryside. But the sufferings of the urban poor and the subjugation of Native Americans have no space here. Nor does the book — unlike a handful of other works at the time — mention the wanton killing of birds and buffalo underway back then. This is a pastoral idyll in the manner of Virgil’s Georgics. Every glass is full (with wine, no doubt), and the writer spends many hours enraptured with visions of paradise. There is a naivete here that is at once both compelling and somewhat reprehensible.

And yet. And yet, there are some truly beautiful passages here where Mabie’s transcendental vision carries the reader away from the mundane world of the moment — a world filled with nouns that all seem so real and substantial — into a world of verbs, infused by forces of constant change. In flowing prose, Mabie makes the hydrologic cycle come alive as a Buddhist vision of cosmic transformation:

The rivers are the great channels through which the ceaseless interchange of the elements goes on; they unite the heart of the continents and the solitary places of the mountains with the universal sea which washes all shores and beats in melancholy refrain at each pole. Into their currents the hills and uplands pour their streams; to them the little rivulets come laughing and singing down from their sources in the forest depths. A drop falling from a passing shower into the lake of Delolo may be carried eastward, through the Zambezi, to the Indian Ocean, or westward, along the transcontinental course of the Congo, to the Atlantic. The mists that rise from great streams, separated by vast stretches of territory, commingle in the upper air, and are carried by vagrant winds to the wheat-fields of the far Northwest or the rice-fields of the South. The ocean ceaselessly makes the circuit of the globe, and summons its ributaris along all shores to itself. But it gives even more lavishly than it receives; day and night there rise over its vast expanse those invisible clouds of moisture which diffuse themselves through the atmosphere, and descend at last upon the earth to pour, sooner or later, into the rivers, and be returned from whence they came.

Endless flow. That is the underlying vision here. Everything we encounter is temporary- a book, a mountain, or a blooming rose. Nature is always at play, and by recognizing these transformations and how they point to one unified reality, we can transcend daily life’s mundane worries and demands and find lasting peace. Buddhism for the Gilded Age.

If I permit my thought to rest upon this fragrant flower, to touch petal and stem and root, and unite them with the vast world in which, by a universal contribution of force, they have come to maturity, I find myself face to face with the oldest and deepest questions men have ever sought to answer. Elements of earth and sea and sky are blended here in one of those forms of radiant and vanishing beauty with which the unseen life of Nature counts the years in endless and inexhaustable profusion. As it budded and opened into full flower in the garden, how complete it seemed in itself, and how isolated from all other visible things! But in reality how dependent it was, how entirely the creation of forces as far apart as earth and sky! The great tide from the Unseen cast it for a moment into my possession; for an hour it has filled a human home with its far-brought sweetness; to-morrow it will fall apart and return whence it came. As I look into its heart of passionate colour, the whole visible universe, that seems so fixed and stable, becomes immaterial, evanescent, vanishing; it is no longer a permanent order of seas and continents and rounded skies; it is a vision painted by an unseen hand against a background of mystery… It is the momentary creation of forces that stream through it in endless ebb and flow, that are to-day touching the sky with elusive splendour, and to-morrow springing in changeful loveliness from the depths of earth. The continents are transformed into the seas that encircle them; the seas rise into the skies that overarch them; the skies mingle with the arth, and send back from theuplifted faces of flowers greetings to the stars they have deserted…

In the unbroken vision of the centuries all things are plastic and in motion; a divine energy surges through all; substantial for a moment here as a rock, fragile and vanishing there as a flower; but everywhere the same, and always sweeping onward through its illimitable channel to its appointed end. It is this vital tide on which the universe gleams and floats like a mirage of immutability; ever the same for a single moment to the soul that contemplates it: a new creation every hour and to every eye that rests upon it.

The world is spinning, and I am dizzy with his prose. I pause, look down to earth (more precisely, the dust-infused carpet of my cluttered home office), and catch my breath. I think I may have reached my daily limit for cosmic rapture, and it is only 8 am.

Without a doubt, my favorite essay in this collection is “The Earliest Insights” in which Mabie turns his thoughts toward the mysteries of the childhood experience with nature. Here, in his flowery way, he reaches many of the same realizations I have held for years. Specifically, as Edith Cobb noted in her Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, for young children, the border between self and other has not yet developed, enabling the child to have a consciousness infused with nature — continuous with it, fully present with it. Amazingly, Mabie’s thoughts on the quest to rediscover that childhood way of being in nature (which I have pondered all my life) seem to presage T.S. Eliot’s vision in “Little Gidding” (published 51 years later) of returning to where we started our explorations and knowing the place for the first time. Could Eliot have encountered Mabie’s work? Unlikely though that may seem, Mabie also writes of children under an apple tree, just as children in an apple tree appear in the very next lines of “Little Gidding.” And did I mention that a rose bush appears in the essay, too? First, here is the extended passage from T.S. Eliot, published in 1942:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

And here is Mabie’s more labored yet still inspiring prose, originally published in 1891:

When I came across the field a few moments ago, a voice called me from under the apple trees, and a little figure, with a flush of joy on her face and the fadeless light of love in her eyes, came running with uneven pace to meet me. How slight and frail was that vision of childhood to the thought which saw the awful forces of nature at work, or rather at play, about her! And yet how serene was her look upon the great world dropping its fruit at her feet; how familiar and at ease her attitude in the presence of these sublime mysteries! She is at one with the hour and the scene; she has not begun to think of herself as apart from the things which surround her; that strange and sudden sense of unreality which makes me at times alien and a stranger in the presence of nature, “moving about in the world not realised,” is still far off. For her the sun shines and the winds blow, the flowers bloom and the stars glisten, the trees hold out their protecting arms and the grass waves its soft garment, and she accepts them without a thought of what is behind them or shall follow them; the painful process of thought, which is first to separate her from Nature and then to reunite her to it in a higher and more spiritual fellowship, has hardly begun. She still walks in the soft light of faith, and drinks in the immortal beauty, as the flower at her side drinks in the dew and the light. It is she, after all, who is right as she plays, joyously and at home, on the ground which the earthquake may rock, and under the sky which storms will darken and rend. The far-brought instince of childhood accepts without a question that great truth of unity and fellowship to which knowledge comes only after long and agonising quest. Between the innocent sleep of childhood in the arms of Nature and the calm repose of the old man in the same enfolding strength there stretches the long, sleepless day of question, search, and suffering; at the end the wisest returns to the goal from which he set out.

Mabie closes his essay with a call for regaining the sense of being in Nature that we knew in our earliest years, a way that perceived the flow of natural forces and participated in it: “If we could but revive the consciousness of childhood, if we could but look out once more through its unclouded eyes, what divinity would sow the universe with light and make it radiant with fadeless visions of beauty and truth!” This same quest to see nature anew “through the eyes of a child” has infused much of my thought and work, including doctoral research on sense of place in middle childhood.

But back to Mabie. Or Mabie not. I will leave the author there, with some of his most intriguing writing on nature and children. Plenty of other sections are tedious and overwrought; I will spare the reader those. But the words are not all that comprise the book I read. I consciously sought out the 1902 edition, rather than the first edition from a decade earlier, so that I could experience a truly classic volume (in more ways than one) ornamented in the art nouveau style of turn-of-the-century America by C.L Hinton. His work graces the cover and greets you on the title page:

Every page is bordered, on three sides, by scenes of rural nature, filled with youths and satyrs playing musical instruments. The reader is immersed in Hinton’s world.

There are also several full-page images in black and white, behind protective translucent pages, depicting barefoot female figures clad in white robes:

The result is a truly immersive reading experience — a paradisal world that the reader inhabits from the moment he pulls the book off the shelf. The words coalesce with the background images and the full-page artwork and the magnificent gilt cover. The reading experience is the entire work, not just the blocks of text. The book is an Object of Wonder and Mystery, a tribute to the craftsmanship of book design in 1902 America.

Arriving at No Particular Place: “Across Lots” by Horace Lunt (1888)

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Insects, Native Plants, Natural History, Reptiles  No Responses »
Jun 082022
 

According to Wikipedia (the font of all knowledge), Horace Lunt was a linguist in Slavic Studies who lived from 1918 until 2010. Unfortunately, that does not explain how he managed to publish a book of New Hampshire nature essays in 1888. Hence the problem. While trying to gain information about this author, every site I visited invariably led to the wrong Horace Lunt. Finally, I stumbled upon a scan of a book on the Lunt family of New England, which included a paragraph about the right Horace. What I learned only made him more mysterious to me. Horace was born on March 17, 1838. He worked as a house servant before joining a local militia company in 1861 and then a Maine infantry regiment a year and a half later. His regiment fought in many battles during the Civil War, including Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Wilderness, Cold Harbor, and Appomattox. He was one of the few members of his regiment to survive the war, although one of his legs was severely impaired due to the long marches and other hardships. After the war, he became a nature writer, publishing three books; Across Lots was the first. He died in 1911. I could not find an image of his grave, let alone of him.

So I fill in the blanks as best I can. What happened to him between 1865 and the publication of his first book? Did he try his hand at other careers along the way? Did he have the 19th Century equivalent of PTSD? (How could he have possibly endured so many horrific battles psychologically unscathed?) Did he perhaps seek solace in nature, a calming presence to soothe his troubled memories? I don’t know. I did notice the presence of his past, in terms of how frequently he would use military images to describe natural scenes in his essays. Here is how the first essay, “A March Ramble,” opens:

March, in New England, is the disputable month between the seasons spring and winter; the space, as it were, between the picket lines of both armies, where many battles are fought for the mastery and power of governing the land. Winter commands Boreas to station his wind batteries on the bleak northern hills to belch forth a storm of snow and hail, and a general frigid icicle charge is ordered along the whole line until not a vestige of spring is seen. Then the frost army, wearied with its fierce onslaught, sleeps, and the vernal force, driven far southward, turns again its face toward the foe, insidiously creeps along the flank, and takes the gray old general in his fancied stronghold by surprise… Winter wakes again and marshals his strength, but his front is not so vigorous. He sullenly retires before the genial commander of the other side, that moves slowly and steadily forward to the vernal equinox.

Equinox? Appomatox? They practically rhyme. Only, in this version of the story, the South ultimately wins (for the spring, at least).

I truly wanted to enjoy Lunt’s work. His essays are vivid, and his emulation of Thoreau is uncanny. He captures a couple of Thoreau’s mannerisms from his journals, including a tendency to interrupt description to declare something fervently and his frequent addition of questions without answers. However, he lavishes the most praise on John Burroughs, “whose writings have the true sylvan ring — to read them is next to walking in the woods.” And that, I suppose, is what Lunt is chiefly after in his book — using text to evoke a virtual reality through which the reader can travel, as if out of doors. Lunt keeps his own musings to a minimum and eschews references to literature and history. Reading his descriptive passages, I feel like I am there with him — roaming the woods, gazing down into a pond, following a half-tumbled-down wall. Consider this delightful passage on autumnal plants and how they disperse their seeds:

As I walk across-lots, I am struck with the varied and ingenious methods the different plants have used to scatter their seeds. Here is an army of goldenrods and asters, milk-weeds and epilobiums, holding aloft on their wand-like stems millions of seeds, to which are attached balloons, parachutes and wings, that the wind at the proper time may carry them miles away. I wave one of these wands when, as if by magic, hundreds of the winged grains go sailing through the air like the flight of insects. Here, too, are hooks, barbs, and prickles that cling to the dress of passers-by or to the hairs of cattle, and thus are carried away to be rubbed off and deposited in some other locality. Other seeds artfully hide themselves in lucious, brilliant wrappings that the birds may be attracted to them. Strawberries, raspberries, and the early drupes have scattered their seeds by this process; but the various cornels, honeysuckles, greenberries, rose and spice bushes, the bright red fruit clusters of the winter-berry, the purple panicles of the prim, that feast the eyes of the autumn rambler, are still waiting patiently for the snows to put an embargo on other supplies near the ground.

Here I chose a botanical passage. But Lunt’s observational skills were far-ranging. He emphasized birds the most (meticulously describing their color patterns, as if the poor reader could ever remember them in a book devoid of illustrations). But he also wrote about snakes, turtles, small mammals, insects, and even microscopic pond life. While his command of animal behavior was perhaps average for nature writers of the time, his skills in identifying and describing organisms were prodigious. And yet I struggled with feeling that the book was missing something vital — without which it simply could not stand alongside Thoreau. After reading one of the last passages from the final essay, “Cross-cut Views of Winter,” I finally figured it out.

I note the tracks of various prowlers in the woods. A rabbit has lately passed along, making indentations in the snow at regular intervals, as if he had been surveying or pacing off a certain portion of the lot for himself. Further on the lines appear more numerous; cross and re-cross each other, and are tangled in such a knot that it would be a hopeless task to find the creatures’ homes. They seem to have gone everywhere, and arrived at no particular place.

Thank you, Horace! That is precisely what I mean. Your book goes everywhere (within your New Hampshire woodland domain) and arrives at no particular place. There is no point to your essays — or rather, the point of your essays is the ramble itself. Unless I include your understandable fascination with war imagery, there are no connection to anything larger than the moment and the walk and the things you discover along the way. There is no destination. A reader could pick up the book and begin anywhere — could probably even read the paragraphs in backward order, and it wouldn’t matter. Across Lots is intended as a vehicle for virtual experience at a time long before the coffee-table photography book, video, and virtual reality headsets. And as such, it can end equally at any point, such as here.

A Peek at Effie Bignell’s “Woodland Intimates” (1903)

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Jun 062022
 
My Woodland Intimates (1903)

Effie Molt Bignell is one of those most unusual personages, an author who does not even have a Wikipedia page to her name. I was able to glean from a few bits and pieces online that she was born in 1855 in Burlington, Vermont. A member of the American Ornithological Union, she authored several books, including two with a nature focus: Mr. Chupes and Miss Jenny (about two robins) and this one. She married William J. Bignell. That is all that I know about her. I cannot even locate her picture. I might add that my information search was impeded a bit by the title of this book, which tended to yield Google results such as this one:

NOT My Woodland Intimates

No, this is not THAT kind of book! In fact, it is a flowing, charming romp through a wooded grove and adjacent gardens belonging to an obviously wealthy woman with abundant time on her hands. As she describes in the book, her home is quite large, with a carriage drive in the front, and employing at least one maid and gardener. Her aristocratic bearing is telegraphed to readers through her occasional cultured French phrases (untranslated, of course) such as feu-de-joie, haute société, and table d’hôte. With the exception of the last chapter (a trip to a rural community near the St. Lawrence River in Quebec), the book entirely takes place, over the course of a year, on Effie Bignell’s estate somewhere in eastern New Jersey. There, she entertains the reader as an honored guest, telling stories about the birds and squirrels of her domain, and pointing ut the various seasonal sights of her woods. I admit that I found her companionship in text quite affable, her descriptions vivid and poetic. There is no particular storyline or grand adventure. There is, though, a bit of escape into an affluent suburban yard of more than 100 years ago. Her hope, in writing this work, was that “to someone in sick room or city pent, these pages might carry restful little messages from “God’s out-of-doors,” or pleasing suggestions of woodland friends.” At the close of the volume, I confess that I was sorry to part company with the author, as she remarked on the journeys we had taken together:

Do you realize that nearly a twelvemonth had elapsed since you and I took our first stroll through the grove together? How rapidly the “mounds of years” heap themselves up! How quickly the cycles pass! Oh, for unlimited leisure, for unbounded opportunities for investigation, and the vision that penetrates to the heart of the mysteries by which we are surrounded.

In-between preface and closing line, seasons change, but otherwise precious little happens. There are no grand ecological discoveries, spectacular events, profound statements, or even “walks afield” (at least, until the final chapter). There is the house and the yard and the trees. Yet her flowing imagery carries the reader along, and her childlike delight in nature is quite enticing. Consider this lovely, languid description of a summer afternoon:

The noonday lull has already set in. No sound now save the bees’ drowsy droning and the rustling of wind-swayed leaves. In the wild garden daisies and buttercups are nodding to each other, and soft waves and ripples are playing over the tops of the tall grasses. How caressing, how soothing the fragrance-laden breeze as it fans one’s brow and lightly touches one’s hair, whispering all the time of beautiful, mystical things to which the heart responds though it but dimly understands.

The reader is overcome with this desire to pull up a lounge chair and take it all in. Heck, in her world, even decaying leaves are worthy of appreciation, as she relates below in her chapter Good-by to Summer:

Several bird families have already left us, and others are on the eve of departure. In this beautiful secluded corner a pair of wood-thrushes have held a perpetual At Home from early in the season. It is just the wild, unmolested spot to take the fancy of those ardent wood-lovers. Broken boughs have piled themselves up undisturbed under the interlocking branches from which they fell, and moist, rich leaf-mold, boasting of layers and layers, generaions and generations of decay, mats itself around the deeply shaded tree-bases. Think of the lucious larder this represents!

Along the way, Bignell gently nudges readers toward taking action on behalf of songbirds. She shares tips for feeding birds in the winter and reminds readers about how much plant and tree destruction by insects is prevented by the work of birds. Like many writers of the time, she is clearly quite taken with her avian visitors. At one point, she fervently declares,

What wonderful beings birds are! Earth, tree-tops, and sky are at their service, and, for some of their number, even surging waves make a safe resting-place and deep snows a warm covering. How pitiful and small and labored do even the swiftest and most extensive of our voyages seem in comparison with the free, untrammelled journeyings of these “brothers of the air”.

Apart from all the birds (lots and lots of them, calling from practically every page) and a few squirrels (named, of course), the only other character in Bignell’s book is her dog, “a vigilant little Chihuahuan” also known as “The Mexican”. A feisty protector of birds, she patrols the area where Bignell puts out seeds, nuts, and breadcrumbs for the birds, making sure that the birds can dine without putting their lives at risk. “Such is the power of valor,” Bignell declares, “that all the cats of the neighborhood flee in terror before the redoubtable little creature; three pounds and a half of dog!”

Reluctantly, I close the book. Another half-dozen titles arrived today, continuing to build my library of obscure American nature authors from 100 years ago or more. Other volumes and authors are jostling me for attention. Yet I hold this book — completely free of marks from past owners — in my hands for a moment longer. It feels light, smooth, and comfortable. Maybe I’ll visit again someday…

A Work of Dredgery: “Up and Down the Brooks” with Mary Bamford (1889)

 Backyard Nature, Books, Insects, Natural History, Snails  No Responses »
Jun 052022
 

For my latest book, I have chosen Volume 4 from The Riverside Library for Young People, Up and Down Brooks by Mary E. Bamford. At a bit smaller than five by seven inches, this little tome invites smaller hands or perhaps the pocket of a knapsack. The book itself is a carefree romp with a quirky, playful, scholarly “self-named “bug-hunter” as she makes her way up and down brooks, armed with a cloth dredger and a bucket, collecting water beetles and anything else she can find in the streams of Alameda County, California. Along the way, at an (and every) opportunity, she makes some sort of connection to classical or medieval history, culture, and literature. The result is, well, exhausting. Perhaps her literary allusions were common to readers at the time (maybe even younger ones), but most of them were entirely lost on me. As a guidebook for how to study streams, the book also fails. The reader is halfway through the text (of over 200 pages) before mention is made of how to make a dredger of one’s own. And there are few common names for insects; instead, Bamford resolutely names them by genera. Thus, a hellgrammite becomes “larva of horned Corydalus,” and the adult dobson-fly is simply “Horned Corydalus.” Who are her readers, then? How many children would have a clue what her various insect names signify? At the same time, some of her playful passages definitely seem best suited to a child (or childlike adult). Consider her experiences with a captive predacious water stick-insect, Ranatra (again, the genus name):

I think Ranatra had no music in his soul, and he probably never missed the bird-twitterings of his native brook. As a personal favor and a reminder of the days when he lived in the creek, I sometimes took a flute and played “Way down upon the Swanee River” close to his jar. But the calmness with which he received the serenade was only equal to that with which he usually surveyed the world when no music was going on. Neither the “growly” nor the “squeeky” parts of the piano affected his nerves, even when his bottle was placed touching the instrument next the keys.

A page later, Bamford reports on Ranatra’s unexpected death:

Peace to his ashes. I never did know how I loved him until he died. Never did I part from a bug with such regret… The jar looked lonely without him, he had lived in it so long, and I felt half inclined to that, in spite of his having dwelt with them so securely for so long a time, he had at last fallen a victim to those cowardly cousins of his, the scorpion-bugs. They rushed about as usual, evidently caring nothing for the death of the bug that was worth twenty of them.

As the reader can plainly observe, Bamford does not hold back on her feelings about the various organisms she encounters. There is a whimsy to her descriptions and even sometimes abject silliness. Her many failed attempts to raise a tiger beetle larva to adulthood in captivity included the following individuals (forever immortalized in her prose): Conqueror of Coffee-Pot-Lid Lake; Conqueror II; The Hesitator; Larva of Yeast-Powder-Lid Lake; Scarer of Soapdish-Lid-Lake; Triumpher of Tin-Pan Lake; Monarch of Mortar Lake; “The Last”; Oliver; Frightener of Flower-Pot Lake; and “The Last-But-One.” Yet beneath all the craziness and the random references to obscure etymologies and myths, there is also an observant and patient scientist noting the minutiae of lives mostly overlooked at the time. Consider her assessment of a snail’s lot:

Yet the fact of the matter is that there is not much character to a pond-snail. To slip out of a mass of jelly with one’s house on one’s back, to float on the surface of the pond, to dine on leaves or confervae, to rest when weary and to journey when so disposed, to retreat into one’s house when in danger, to pass along through life in a somewhat humdrum fashion with small spirit or vim in one, to cleanse the pool what little one may, and finally to drop down through the water and whiten with one’s lifeless shell the scum of the pond, to have that slime close at last over one’s shell and leave one buried in oblivion while all the pond-life goes on above one still, — this is the snail’s life. Devoid of fighting instincts, not gifted with ambition to soar like the beetles, or to be ever in sight like the skaters, treating all the pond-neighbors with quiet reserve, going one’s own way and doing much good in the world, such is the pond-snail. If he is not brilliant, he is good, and what more could be asked of him?

The respect Bamford grants many f the insects she encounters is not always expressed toward the many local residents, particularly children, who see her with dredger in hand and assume she is trying to catch fish. All too few of them, she complains more than once, have any interest in insects — like this teen who disrupts her work:

“What are you catching? Fish?” demands a voice, and I look up to see the yellow head of an inquisitive foureen-year-old youth peering over the bank.

“Water-beetles,” and I hold up my pail to show the contents.

“What are they good for?” proceeds the utilitarian.

I hesitate a moment. Shall I tell him of the decaying leaves that these numerous Hydrophilidae devour, assisted by these pond-snails; of the yearly plague of frogs from which we are delivered by the disappearance of the juices of the polliwogs through the proboscides of these water-boatmen; of the multitudes of mosquitoes who never have a chance to bite us, because as wigglers they have met their fates under the masks of these dragon-fly larvae? I excuse myself from this lesson on zoology, and make answer, “I take them home and keep them, and study their habits.”

What motivates Bamford to make such a study of stream life, especially insects? At one point in her ramblings, she shares this early memory with her readers, offering a window into her motivations:

I remember the day when the idea first entered my brain that other creatures than human have interesting lives. I must have been about eight or nine years old. I had been taking a walk in a little mining town among the Sierra Nevada foothills. A minister was with me, and he had a hand-microscope or glass in his pocket.

We sat down under the trees on a hill somewhere back of a church, and he showed me through the glass a multitude of little creatures living in the heart of a yellow flower… I remember that as a very wonderful day, one on which I did not see half enough through that glass to suit me, but still one on which I obtained a glimpse of a world very different from that in which I usually lived.

Indeed, it is a world with very different rules. Toward the book’s close, Bamford remarks on “how hard-hearted the insects are toward one another! In all the time I have watched them, I do not recollect ever having seen an act of compassion performed by any kind of insect for another.” She then proceeds to describe her experiences waiting for a caterpillar to pupate, only for many parasitic flies to emerge instead, having fed upon the caterpillar’s body. Yet through this all, she ultimately conveys a sense of wonder and delight in this foreign world beneath the water’s surface.

And so the traveler beside this brook and over these hills may learn, if he looks, that man is not the only creature who builds houses and is disappointed about living in them. There is material here for a fine sermon after all, take the brook through and through. Here are fightings and murders and thefts and trickeries, the semblance of death, the awakening from slumber, the rising to new life, the change from the grovelling on the earth to the soaring of wings in the sunshine.

And the ultimate point of the sermon? Here, Banford slips back into a comfortable corner within Nineteenth-Century American Christianity, declaring fervently that “The majority of people scarcely pause to realize that the different kinds of creatures represent so many of God’s different thoughts and that it might possibly be worth while to glance at the things that He has deigned to place on earth.”

Mary Bamford’s grave, Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland

And what of Mary Ellen Bamford? She was born to a pioneer settler couple in Healdsburg, California, in 1857. After attending public school in Oakland, she worked for four years as an assistant in the Oakland Free Public Library. After that, she became a full-time writer, producing over a dozen books, including several titles for the American Baptist Publishing Society. She was a prohibitionist and advocate for Asian immigration into the US. She died in 1946 at the age of 88.

My first (only) edition of this book was previously in the collections of the Reed Free Library in Surrey, New Hampshire.

Whole Earth’s a Sanctuary: “The Song of the Cardinal” by Gene Stratton Porter (1903)

 Agriculture and Husbandry, Birds, Books, Environmental conservation, Native Plants, Natural History  No Responses »
Jun 032022
 

Gene Stratton Porter (1863-1924) was 40 when The Song of the Cardinal was published. Her first book, it was the start of a long lineage of works, primarily fiction, extolling the wonders of the natural world. Though it tells a story (in a manner of speaking), along the way, The Song of the Cardinal offers a rich tapestry of Edenic landscapes, including both an orange grove in Florida and Limberlost Swamp and a farm along the banks of the Wabash River in Indiana. The 1912 edition that I read (a copy of which is housed in the collections of The Met in NYC) is graced by a truly magnificent art nouveau cover attributed to Margaret Armstrong. Armstrong (1867-1944) was one of the premier artists of the golden age of book design. A year after this book was published, Armstrong left the cover design field to write her own books: first an illustrated wildflower guide for the Western US, then biographies and mystery novels.

Most of the book is told from the viewpoint of a male Cardinal, as he returns north for the spring and struggles to attract a mate. Humans briefly appear on the scene — an old man and his daughter in the orange grove — then vanish from the story. Later, the reader meets 60-year-old Abram and his wife Maria, a farming couple growing corn and keeping chickens along the Wabash River in Indiana. From that point forward, the book alternates between their rustic dialogue and the viewpoint of the cardinal. Throughout the book, nature is really the central character. Early on, Porter introduces us to the glories of Limberlost Swamp:

Three thousands of acres of black marsh-much stretch under summers’ sun and winters’ snws. There are darksome pools of murky water, bits of swale and high morass. Giants of the forest reach skyward, or, coated with velvet slime, lie decaying in sun-flecked pools, while the underbrush is almost impenetrable.

The swamp resembles a big dining table for the birds. Wild grape vines clamber to the tops of the highest trees, spreading umbrella-like over the banches, and their festooned floating trailers wave like silken fringe in the play of the wind. The birds loll in the shade, peel bark, gather dried curlers for nest material, and feast on the pungent fruit. They chatter in swarms over the wild-cherry trees, and overload their crops with red haws, wild plums, pawpaws, blackberries and mandrake. The alders around the edge draw flocks in search of berries, and the marsh grasses and weeds are weighted with seed hunters. The muck is alive with worms; and the whole swamp ablaze with flowers, whose colors and perfumes attract myriads of insects and butterflies.

Although the male cardinal in this story fledged there and first returned there after his winter in the south, ultimately he abandons Limberlost for a bucolic farm and woodland along the Wabash River, home of Abram and Maria. “To my mind,” Abram declares to the cardinal (whom he greets as Mr. Redbird), “it’s jest as near Paradise as you’ll strike on earth.”

Old Wabash is a twister for curvin’ and windin’ round, an’ it’s limestone bed half the way, an’ the water’s as pretty an’ clear as in Maria’s springhouse. An’ as for trimmin’, why say, Mr. Redbird, I’ll just leave it t you if she ain’t all trimmed up like a woman’s spring bonnit. Look at that grass a-creepin’ right dwn till it’ a-trailin’ in the water! Did you ever see jest quite such fie frigy willers? An’ you wait a little, an’ the flowerin’ mallows ‘at grows long the shinin’ old river are fine as garden hollyhocks. Maria says ‘at they’d be purtier ‘an hurs if they wer eonly double; but, lord, Mr. Redbird, they are! See ’em once on the bak, an’ agin in the water! An’ back a little an’ there’s jest thickets of pawpaw, an’ thorns, an’ wild grapevines, an’ crab, an’ red an’ black haw, an’ dogwod, an’ sumac, an’ spicebush, an’ trees! Lord! Mr. Redbird, the sycamrs, an’ maples, an’ tulip, an’ ash, an’ elm rees are so bustin’ fine ‘long the old Wabash they put ’em in poetry books an’ sing songs about ’em. What do you think of that? Jest back o’ you a little there’s a sycamore split into five trunks, any one of them a famous big tree, tops up ‘mong the cluds, an’ roots diggin’ under the old river; an’ over a little further ‘s a maple ‘at’s eight big trees in one. Most anything you can name, you can find it ‘long the old Wabash, if you only know where to hunt for it.

To her credit, while Gene Stratton Porter describes her Indiana natural landscapes in Edenic terms, that does not mean that the wolf lies with the lamb and the leopard lays down with the kid. There is predation and death; for instance, a cardinal chick falling into the water is at once snatched up by a mackerel. And the birds, for all their lovely songs, do not all behave in considerate ways toward each other. Indeed, Porter uses a pair of woodpeckers nesting in a sycamore tree to portray domestic abuse, long before that was a topic for everyday conversation:

…the woodpecker had dressed his suit in finest style, and with dulcet tones and melting tenderness had gone a-courting. Sweet as the dove’s had been his wooing…yet scarcely had his plump, amiable little mate consented to his caresses and approved the sycamore, before he turned on her, pecked her severely, and pulled a tuft of plumage from her breast. There was not the least excuse for this tyrranical action; and the sight filled the Cardinal with rage. He fully expected to see Madam Woodpecker divorce herself and flee her new home, and he most earnestly hoped that she would; but she did no such thing. She meekly flattened her feathers, hurried work in a lively manner, and tried in every way to anticipate and avert her mate’s displeasure. Under this treatment he grew more abusive, and now Madam Woodpecker dodged every time she came within his reach.

The woodpecker is one of the exceptions, though. On the whole, the natural world in Porter’s tale tends to be filled largely with flowers and birdsong. The true serpent in this paradise is Man the Hunter. It is he who threatens to disrupt the pastoral tranquility, wantonly killing birds and other wildlife. Abram attempts to protect the cardinal and all the other birds on his farm by posting “No Hunting” signs, explaining that

…them town creatures…call themselves sportsmen, an’ kill a hummi’ bird to see if they can hit it. Time was when trees an’ underbrush were full o’ birds an’ squirrels, any amount o’ rabbits, an’ the fish fairly crowdin’ in the river. I used to kill all the quail an’ wild turkeys about here to make an appetizing change. It was always my plan to take a little an’ leave a little. But just look at it now. Surprise o’ my life if I get a two-pound bass. Wild turkey gobblin’ would scare me out o’ my senses, an’, as for the birds, there are just about a fourth what there used to be, an’ the crops eaten to pay for it.

Here, Abram’s complaints seem hauntingly familiar, as scientists continue to report on the decline of songbirds across the US. Of course, the signs prove insufficient. Abram observes a hunter walking down his lane and confronts him. The hunter claims to be merely passing through, and Abram lets him continue. Before Abram can stop him, the hunter has fired at the cardinal in a sumac tree, fortunately missing him completely. Abram arrives in time to prevent any killing, launching into a several-page impassioned tirade about needing to protect the natural world. I wonder if the entire book, with its minimal narrative, was intended primarily as a vehicle for sentiments such as these:

Sky over your head, earth under foot, trees around you, an’ river there, — all full o’ life ‘at you ain’t no mortal right to touch, ‘cos God made it, an’ it’s His! Course, I know ‘at he said distinct ‘at man was to have “dominion over the beasts o’ the field, an’ the fowls o’ the air.” An’ ‘at means ‘at you’re free to smash a copper-head instead of letting it sting you. Means at’ you better shoot a wolf than to let it carry off your lambs. Means ‘at its right to kill a hawk an’ save your chickens; but God knows ‘at shootin’ a redbird just to see the feathers fly isn’t having dominion over anything; it’s just makin’ a plumb beast o’ yourself.

Alas, Porter’s concern for wildlife included a number of exceptions that would make the modern-day environmentalist cringe. Still, Porter’s central argument stands: humans need to protect other beings, because they have a spiritual origin. Ultimately, caring for God’s creation is more than just a Biblical obligation in Porter’s mind; it is a profoundly religious act. As Abram explains (further along in the same tirade, while the hunter stands mute):

To my mind, ain’t no better way to love an’ worship God, ‘an to protect an’ ‘preciate these fine gifts he’s given for our joy an’ use. Worshippin’ that bird’s a kind o’ religion with me. Getting the beauty from the sky, an’ the trees, ‘an the grass, ‘an the water that God made, is nothin’ but doin’ him homage. Whole earth’s a sanctuary. You can worship from sky above to grass underfoot.

Finally, the hunter, reduced to jelly by the farmer’s words (either their intent, or merely their duration) pleads for forgiveness, abandons his gun to Abram’s keeping, and flees, declaring that “I’ll never kill another harmless thing.” Summer ends, and with the autumn, the cardinal and his brood take flight for the orange grove in Florida, bringing the book full circle.

As a work of literature, Porter’s Song of the Cardinal has faded into fitting obscurity; the story simply doesn’t manage to live up to its cover (at least, not the 1912 art nouveau one). Very little happens in the tale, and what does occur is either highly predictable or rather silly. Yet there is poetry in Porter’s rich descriptions, along with a wealth of firsthand knowledge of the plants and animals of her native state, gleaned from many years of fieldwork in the swamps, fields, and woods around her homes (she had a house on Sylvan Lake in Rome City, and a cabin on the edge of Limberlost Swamp). And the passionate call for better treatment of wildlife, so vital at the time, qualifies her as an early member of the American environmental movement. Her fascination with birds would continue long beyond this book, in her early wildlife photography efforts documented in non-fiction works published later in her life. She also wrote (and illustrated with photos) a guide to the moths of the Limberlost. I have secured copies of these books and will devote posts to them at some point in the future.

As I noted a the beginning of this post, I preferentially sought out the 1912 edition of this book (rather than a 1903 first edition) because of its spectacular cover. The artwork on this spine, though, is a bit, well, odd. Apparently the spine was stamped upside down. So rather than displaying the title with flowers above and below it, the title stands by itself at the top of the spine, with flowers bracketing bare cloth further down. From what I was able to find out online, the remaining copies of this edition appear equally split between the correct stamping of the spine and this alternative (accidental) one.

My book was previously the property of Mary S. Jones of Fairfield, Alabama; her name (printed in blue ink) and a return address sticker are found on the flyleaf. The sticker looks more recent than the actual book. I was unable to locate any information about Mary S. Jones, though the task was made difficult by her rather common last name.

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