Essays of E. B. White

by E. B. White

  Mr. Forbush’s Friends

  As a boy, Edward Howe Forbush, the ornithologist, was up and away at daybreak every fine spring morning, exploring the woods and fields of West Roxbury. At thirteen, he stuffed a song sparrow—his first attempt at taxidermy. At fifteen, he gave up school in favor of birds. At sixteen, he was appointed Curator of Ornithology of the Worcester Natural History Society’s museum—undoubtedly one of the youngest curators anywhere about. He began “collecting,” which means shooting birds to get a closer look at them, and he continued to experiment with taxidermy after reading a book on it. “Such mummies,” he wrote of his mounted birds, “have their uses, but later I came to see that life, not death, would solve all riddles; that an examination of the dead was merely a preliminary to a study of the living, and that it was more essential to preserve the living than the dead.”

  Even when he ate a bird (he was a hungry man and ate his share of birds), Mr. Forbush always saved the skin to further his scientific researches. His life was bound up with everything on wings, and his career culminated in the great Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States, a three-volume summation of the avian scene. Mr. Forbush died in 1929, aged seventy-one, when the work was within a few pages of completion.

  When I am out of joint, from bad weather or a poor run of thoughts, I like to sit and think about Edward Howe Forbush. I like to think of him on that June morning in 1908 when, marooned on a sandy islet near the elbow of Cape Cod, his stranded skiff awash, his oars carried to sea, a stiff sou’wester blowing, drifting sand cutting his face, sea rising, he allowed himself to become utterly absorbed in “an immense concourse of birds” resting on the sands, most of them common terns. I see him, again, concealed in the lowest branches of a spruce on a small island off the Maine coast—a soft, balmy night. He is observing the arrival of Leach’s petrels, whose burrows are underneath the tree—eerie, strange birds, whose chucklings and formless sounds might have been the conversation of elves. Or on that night when he visited a heronry among the sand dunes of Sandy Neck, Barnstable: “The windless air was stagnant and fetid; swarms of stinging midges, deerflies, and mosquitoes attacked at will; and vicious wood-ticks, hanging from the vegetation, reached for me with their clinging claws, and crawled upon my limbs, seeking an opening to bury their heads in my flesh.” In such uncomfortable situations, birds being near, Mr. Forbush found the purest delight.

  I managed to acquire a set of Birds of Massachusetts about twenty years ago, and have been reading around in the books ever since, for refreshment and instruction. The first entry in Volume I is Holbœll’s grebe (grebes seem to rank nearest to the reptiles from which birds sprang). The last entry in Volume III is the golden-crowned sparrow, an accidental visitor to New England. In between these two entries are descriptive accounts and anecdotal reports of all the species known to visit New England, whether on business or on pleasure or through the accident of great storms. Although not a student of birds, I am thrown with them a good bit. It is much the same sort of experience as being thrown with people in the subway: I gaze at a female, and am filled with curiosity and a wish to know more than I do about her nesting site, breeding habits, measurements, voice, and range. In the subway, gazing at an interesting face, I have nothing to help me but my imagination. But among birds, when I encounter a new face or renew my acquaintance with an old one, I turn to Forbush for help in comprehending what I have been looking at. The information he imparts is, of course, reliable and often fascinating, but for the casual reader his great gift is his immense enthusiasm for anything that has feathers. I suppose all ornithologists rather approve of birds or they wouldn’t pursue the thing, but Edward Howe Forbush during his long and busy life was obviously enchanted with them. He was the champion of birds as well as their interpreter.

  A certain tidiness infects Birds of Massachusetts. The arrangement is calming to the nerves. You always know what you are going to get and the order in which you will get it. Let us say you wish to satisfy an idle curiosity about the barn owl and you take out Volume II and turn to page 189. First, the Latin name. Then the common name. Then the “other” name (or names)—in this case, monkey-faced owl. Then comes a section in small type: description, measurements, molts, field marks, voice, breeding, range, distribution in New England, and season in Massachusetts. This fine-print section goes into great detail. The barn owl, for instance, is such an infrequent visitor to New England that Mr. Forbush lists the names of the persons who have observed him or taken him, and the dates (“Lexington, June 10, 1915, female taken by Chas. Fowle,” and so on). When it comes to describing the sounds a bird makes, Mr. Forbush is seldom content with giving his own rendition; instead, he assembles a company of listeners and lets each one do an imitation. The voice of the barn owl, depending on who is trying to get it on paper, is “a weird scream; a nasal snore; a loud, prolonged rasping sksck; a series of notes click, click, click, click, click, resembling in character the notes of a Katydid, but delivered with diminishing emphasis and shortening intervals during the end of the series.” The song of the black-throated green warbler: Bradford Torrey translates it as “trees, trees, murmuring trees,” a pleasing, dreamy, drawling, reedlike lay; others change it to “cheese, cheese, a little more cheese”; and Dr. C. W. Townsend sets it down as “Hear me, Saint Theresa,” (Mrs. M. M. Nice recorded two hundred and seventy-four repetitions of the song in one hour.) If you have any questions about nesting sites, eggs, period of incubation, breeding habits, breeding dates, appearance of young in juvenile plumage, range, or distribution, the answers will almost certainly be here in this section.

  But when he’s all through with the monumental task of delineating his bird in fine print, Mr. Forbush cuts loose with larger type and wider thoughts. Under the heading “Haunts and Habits” he writes an essay about the bird, dropping his tight scientific detachment and indulging himself as stylist, enthusiast, and footloose reporter. It is in these free-swinging essays that the fun is—for me, anyway. The style of the pieces is peculiarly the author’s own—a rich prose occasionally touched with purple but never with dullness or disenchantment. A devotee of the periodic sentence, he often begins his report by setting the stage, leaving the bird out of it for a few moments, as in the very first entry (Holbœll’s grebe): “A bright clear day in January, a gentle breeze, a river mouth where the rippling flood flows into the sparkling sea, a lazy swell washing gently on the bar where a herd of mottled seals is basking in the sun, Old-squaws and Golden-eyes in small parties—such a scene at Ipswich is a fit setting for the great Grebe that winters on our coasts.” Or the entry for the ivory gull: “In spring dawns, fair and rosy, when the sun rising over the blue Arctic, magnificent with floating ice, reveals scene of gorgeous splendor; where ice lies in innumerable shapes, some sparkling like gems and prisms, others rearing vast, white, phantasmal forms; on the edge of the ice pack where the wind opens vast sealanes; where the mirage shows towering mountains that never were on land or sea; in summer or winter, in storm or sunshine, there dwells the white Gull, bird of the ice and snow.”

  Sometimes, ignoring the scene, he leaps to the side of his bird and launches an attack on its detractors, as with the barn owl: “Since the dawn of history, owls have been the pitiable victims of ignorance and superstition. Hated, despised, and feared by many peoples, only their nocturnal habits have enabled them to survive in company with civilized man. In the minds of mankind they have been leagued with witches and malignant evil spirits, or even have been believed to personify the Evil One. They have been regarded as precursors of sorrow and death, and some savage tribes have been so fixed in the belief that a man will die if an owl alights on the roof of his dwelling that, it is said, some Indians having actually seen the owl on the roof-tree have pined away and died. Among all these eerie birds, the Barn Owl has been the victim of the greatest share of obloquy and persecution, owing to its sinister appearance, its weird night cries, its habit of haunting dismal swamps and dank quagmires, where an incautious
step may precipitate the investigator into malodorous filth or sucking quicksands, and its tendency to frequent the neighborhood of man’s dwellings, especially unoccupied buildings and ghostly ruins. Doubtless the Barn Owl is responsible for some of the stories of haunted houses which have been current through the centuries. When divested by science of its atmosphere of malign mystery, however, this owl is seen to be not only harmless but a benefactor to mankind and a very interesting fowl that will well repay close study.”

  Sometimes Mr. Forbush devotes most of his essay to some peculiarity of the bird: how the bittern produces its famous sounds of pumping and of stake-driving; whether the night heron really can throw out a light from its breast, as some believe; whether the cedar waxwing’s dizzy spells are caused by its drinking too much fermented juice or by plain gluttony. Sometimes he starts his essay off with a bit of plain talk, straight from the shoulder, to clear up any misconception about the subject: “Cowbirds are free lovers. They are neither polygamous nor polyandrous—just promiscuous. They have no demesne and no domicile; they are entirely unattached. Their courting is brief and to the point. In this pleasant pastime the male usually takes the lead.”

  When he has finished with one of these rambling essays, Mr. Forbush winds up his study of the species with a short, businesslike paragraph headed “Economic Status.” Here he weighs the bird’s usefulness against its crimes, and it is in these concluding paragraphs, in which the bird is usually subjected to the ordeal of having the contents of its stomach examined, that you see Mr. Forbush the partisan wrestling with Mr. Forbush the scientist. The two are evenly matched, and they struggle manfully. Not all birds are popular in this world, and a number of them have police records. The crow is a cornpatch vandal. The jay is a common thief. The cormorant poses a threat to the salmon fishery. The shrike catches other birds and impales them in a thornbush for future reference. The bobolink knocks the spots out of a rice harvest. The owl presages death. The herring gull annoys commercial fishermen and befouls the decks of yachts at anchor. And so on—a long list of crimes and misdeeds. Edward Howe Forbush, however, during his long life of studying birds, managed to see more good in them than bad, and the dark chapters in the avian book are deeply challenging to him. Of the cruel shrike he says that “though we may deplore his attack on the smaller birds, we can but admire his self-reliance, audacity and courage,” and that “all economic ornithologists who have investigated the food of this species regard it as a useful bird.” Yet the author is scrupulously fair—he ends his defense by quoting Mr. W. L. Dawson, author of Birds of Ohio, who finds the shrike’s offenses hard to forgive, and who says he keeps his gun loaded.

  Of the mischievous crow Mr. Forbush says, “Its habit of eating eggs and young of other birds should not count too heavily against it, as the birds thus molested usually have an opportunity to raise young later in the season, when the young Crows have been reared, and natural enemies of birds are necessary to keep their numbers within bounds.” Mr. Forbush also recalls with relish the case of a sheepman who annihilated the crows in his region because they killed newborn lambs, only to discover that the grass in his pastures was dying from white grubs, which had increased rapidly following the destruction of the crows. You can feel his heart rise up at this bit of ecological justice.

  In his role as defense attorney for the birds, Mr. Forbush is not merely spirited, he is wonderfully resourceful. He thinks of everything. After listing the obvious benefactions of gulls (they destroy grasshoppers and locusts, dispose of dead fish and garbage, eat field mice and other pests, and in foggy weather enable mariners to locate dangerous rocks and ledges by their shrill cries), he springs a surprise. “In war time,” he says triumphantly, “gulls show the location of drifting mines by perching upon them.” What jury would convict a seagull after that piece of testimony?

  The common tern: “It never east marketable fish.”

  The blue jay: “Jays bury nuts and seeds in the ground, thus planting forests. They also regurgitate smaller seeds and so distribute them.”

  The cedar waxwing: “If the cherry grower, when planting an orchard, would first set out a row of soft early cherries or early mulberries around his orchard, and allow the birds to take the fruit from those trees, he might thereby save the main crop of later, harder, and more marketable fruit.”

  The sharp-shinned hawk: “It is not a bird for the farmer to tolerate about his chicken coops nor is it desirable about a bird preserve. Nevertheless, in the eternal scheme of the universe, its existence serves to check the undue increase of small birds and to prevent the propagation of unfitness and disease among them.”

  When Mr. Forbush came to the economic status of the brown pelican, which not only loves fish but boldly advertises the fact by carrying a pouch to hold them in, he knew he was in a tough spot. Without hesitation, he called to his assistance Mr. T. Gilbert Pearson, onetime president of the National Association of Audubon Societies, who, in the spring of 1918, had investigated the pelican’s criminal record and reported on it to the Federal Food Administrator. Mr. Pearson proved every bit as slippery in arguing a case as Mr. Forbush himself. He first testified that the stomachs of pelicans contained no trout, mackerel, or pompano; instead, they were loaded with mullet, pigfish, Gulf menhaden, pinfish, and thread herring. Then he introduced an exciting new theme. “These large, grotesque-looking birds,” he wrote, “afford winter tourists much interest as they flop about the docks . . . and many postcards bearing pictures of pelicans are sent north every year. It is quite possible that the profits made on pelican postcards at Florida newsstands exceed in value the total quantity of food fish captured by the pelicans in the waters along its charming coast.”

  A wanderer in the pages of Forbush is rewarded with many delights and surprises, not the least of which are the peerless illustrations by Louis Agassiz Fuertes and Allan Brooks. To me, one of the chief amusements of the work is the presence of Mr. For-bush’s large company of informers, or tipsters: people who at one time or another wrote him or phoned him to tell of an encounter with a bird—a strange doing, an odd fact, a bizarre occurrence. By paying heed to these people and giving them house-room, Mr. Forbush adds greatly to his own abundant store of knowledge besides livening things up for the reader. He welcomes tipsters just as a newspaper columnist welcomes them. Some of his are professional bird people, known to him. Some are contributors of articles to nature publications, from which Mr. F. has lifted a juicy passage. But scattered through the three volumes are the names of hundreds of amateurs and strangers, who by reporting some oddity of bird behavior or recording an unlikely arrival have achieved immortality; their names are embedded in the text of Birds of Massachusetts as firmly as a bottle cap in a city pavement, and they are for the ages. Their lives, from the evidence, appear to be wonderfully haphazard and fortuitous. One of them will be “sharpening a sickle” when he looks up to see a girl attacked by an eagle; one of them will “happen to be” in a little outbuilding at precisely the right moment to witness the courtship of whip-poorwills; one of them will chance to step from a clump of small pines facing an alder run, and there, right before his eyes, will be the nest of a least flycatcher. The reader has hardly got started on Volume I before the first of these tipsters pops up: “Mr. Wilbur F. Smith, of South Norwalk, Connecticut, wrote to me March 27, 1916, that he had observed Holbœll’s Grebes fishing near an anchored boat on which a fisherman lived. . . . Mr. Smith noted that when a bird had swallowed a particularly large fish, it put its head on its back and went to sleep.”

  Well, there you are. It’ll be fifty years next month that Smith of South Norwalk discovered that a grebe grabs a little shut-eye after a heavy fish dinner, but the news comes as fresh today as when the letter was dropped in the mail. (I called the informant “Smith” just now, but Mr. Forbush was a courtly man and always used the polite “Mr.” or “Miss” or “Mrs.” or “Dr.” in introducing his people.)

  I have taken it on myself to bring a few of Forbush’s friends
together—a sort of convention of tipsters, pros and amateurs alike—and will here summarize their findings about birds. My fist is necessarily selective; out of perhaps a thousand I’ve chosen a handful. And I have shortened their tales, giving merely the gist of the observations. Here they are, a goodly company, bright of eye, quick to take pen in hand:

  Mr. Sidney Chase, of Nantucket. Saw loon rinse mouth after repast. May 3, 1922.

  Mr. Harold Cooke, of Kingston. Found puffin in garage, offered it spaghetti. Spaghetti was accepted. February 1, 1922.

  Mrs. Lidian E. Bridge, of Rockport. While standing on rock overlooking sea, saw two dovekies meet underwater. As they met, they uttered “an absurd little screech.” No date.

  Mr. Horace Bearse, of Chatham. Saw starving crow attack starving herring gull after clash at garbage heap. Winter of 1919-20, a hard winter.

  Mr. J. A. Farley. In the Gulf of St. Lawrence saw ring-billed gull scratch its face with its claw as it flew. Insouciance. No date.

  Mr. Allan Keniston. While visiting Muskeget Island saw young laughing gulls eject the remains of cicadas. Insects had been flown twenty miles from Cape Cod by the gulls’ parents. 1923.

  Captain B. F. Goss. Saw Caspian terns dive on their own eggs, break them. Terns apparently did not want eggs to fall into hands of intruders. No date.

  Mr. David Gould. At Nauset, watched newly hatched common terns during windstorm. Blowing sand adhered to wet plumage, many babies buried alive. No date.

  Dr. L. B. Bishop. At Stump Lake, North Dakota, saw terns strike and kill young ring-billed gulls in retaliation for adult gulls’ eating terns’ eggs. No date.