A Chapter of Things To Hear This Spring

II

You must hear, besides the first spring notes of the bluebird and the robin, four bird songs this spring. First (1) the song of the wood thrush or the hermit thrush, whichever one lives in your neighborhood. No words can describe the purity, the peacefulness, the spiritual quality of the wood thrush's simple "Come to me."

It is the voice of the tender twilight, the voice of the tranquil forest, speaking to you. After the thrush (2) the brown thrasher, our finest, most gifted songster, as great a singer, I think (and I have often heard them both), as the Southern mockingbird.

III

There are some birds that cannot sing: the belted kingfisher, for instance; he can only rattle. You must hear him rattle. You can do as well yourself if you will shake a "pair of bones" or heave an anchor and let the chain run fast through the hawse-hole. You then must hear the downy woodpecker doing his rattling rat-ta-tat-tat-tat-tat  (across the page and back again), as fast as rat-ta-tat  can tat.  How he makes the old dead limb or fence-post rattle as he drums upon it with his chisel bill. He can be heard half a mile around.

IV

You must hear the nighthawk and the whip-poor-will. Both birds are to be heard at twilight, and the whip-poor-will far into the night. At the very break of dawn is also a good time to listen to them.

V

There is one strange bird song that is half song and half dance that perhaps most of you may never be able to hear and see; but as it is worth going miles to hear, and nights of watching to witness, I am going to set it here as one of your outdoor tasks or feats: you must hear the mating song of the woodcock. I have described the song and the dance in Roof and Meadow,  in the chapter called "One Flew East and One Flew West." Mr. Bradford Torrey has an account of it in his Clerk of the Woods,  in the chapter named "Woodcock Vespers." To hear the song is a rare experience for the habitual watcher in the woods, but one that you might have the first April evening that you are abroad.

VI

One of the dreadful—positively dreadful—sounds of the late spring that I hear day in and day out is the gobbling, strangling, ghastly cries of young crows feeding. You will surely think something is being murdered. The crying of a hungry baby is musical in comparison. But it is a good sound to hear, for it reminds one of the babes in the woods—that a new generation of birds is being brought through from babyhood to gladden the world. It is a tender sound! The year is still young.

VII

You should hear the hum of the honey-bees on a fresh May day in an apple tree that is just coming into perfect bloom. The enchanting loveliness of the pink and white world of blossoms is enough to make one forget to listen to the hum-hum-hum-humming-ing-ing-ing-ing  of the excited bees. But hear their myriad wings, fanning the perfume into the air and filling the sunshine with the music of work. The whir, the hum of labor—of a busy factory, of a great steamship dock—is always music to those who know the blessedness of work; but it takes that knowledge, and a good deal of imagination besides, to hear the music in it. Not so with the bees. The season, the day, the colors, and perfumes—they are the song; the wings are only the million-stringed æolian upon which the song is played.

VIII

You should hear the grass grow. What! I repeat, you should hear the grass grow. I have a friend, a sound and sensible man, but a lover of the out-of-doors, who says he can hear it grow. But perhaps it is the soft stir of the working earthworms that he hears. Try it. Go out alone one of these April nights; select a green pasture with a slope to the south, at least a mile from any house, or railroad; lay your ear flat upon the grass, listen without a move for ten minutes. You hear something—or do you feel it? Is it the reaching up of the grass? is it the stir of the earthworms? is it the pulse of the throbbing universe? or is it your own throbbing pulse? It is all of these, I think; call it the heart of the grass beating in every tiny living blade, if you wish to. You should listen to hear the grass grow.

IX

The fires have gone out on the open hearth. Listen early in the morning and toward evening for the rumbling, the small, muffled thunder, of the chimney swallows, as they come down from the open sky on their wonderful wings. Don't be frightened. It isn't Santa Claus this time of year; nor is it the Old Nick! The smothered thunder is caused by the rapid beating of the swallows' wings on the air in the narrow chimney-flue, as the birds settle down from the top of the chimney and hover over their nests. Stick your head into the fireplace and look up! Don't smoke the precious lodgers out, no matter how much racket they make.

X

Hurry out while the last drops of your first May thunder-shower are still falling and listen to the robins singing from the tops of the trees. Their liquid songs are as fresh as the shower, as if the raindrops in falling were running down from the trees in song—as indeed they are in the overflowing trout-brook. Go out and listen, and write a better poem than this one that I wrote the other afternoon when listening to the birds in our first spring shower:—