A Walk With an Oven Bird
The broader aspects of the weather are more apparent to my kind of receptiveness, which is less mortally tuned to degrees than a grasshopper. There is still an abnormal amount of rain as the month goes on. Their sun blotted out, many tourists have left the Cape earlier than usual. I notice that the days are shorter and cooler. The prevailing wind, southwest in fair weather, southeast before a storm, blows gently, or in gusts when it rains. A big mud puddle on our wood road has collected a whole population of green frogs. At night there is great frog carnage on the wet highways. I have noticed in the past that this is their season for traveling, whether it is wet or dry, but heavy rains encourage their migration, sending them far and wide. There is a multitude of garden toads around the house. One night it cools down to about 50 degrees and in the dawn hour the leaves are bluish gray with dew. A hurricane, spawned in the Bahamas, is two hundred miles east of Florida, but beginning to turn slightly to the north, away from the eastern seaboard. High seas are predicted in three or four days’ time.
I feel as though we were hesitating on the brink of new necessities, swinging between one resolution and another not yet found. The season is beginning to join the winds. Some migrant birds have already flown away. Other birds fly through the leaf canopy feeding seriously and silently. A warbler, a female yellow-throat, skips lightly along a patch of briar and vines. A brilliant oriole jumps into a patch of oaks and moves on down sunlight-yellow ramps of leaves, and a black-billed cuckoo, a large brown bird with a handsome, long tail, stops in on a branch with a look of eagerness and seeking, then flashes off again. There is a change in their action and timing. The adults are long since through with the claiming and proclaiming that rang in the woods before they nested. The steady, constant business of feeding their young is about over for most species, though I see a flicker, or yellowhammer, come through the trees in diving, shooting flight, with a young one following loudly after it. There are many fledglings, but on the whole the birds, many of them starting to molt, are silent compared with spring and early summer.
This wood road of ours, where the birds fly through, is used every school-day morning by our children on their way to catch the bus. It is a kind of open line through change. It rides the side of a low ridge, and glacial hollows dip away from it. It once served as a wagon road for woodcutters, and is still shaded by the insistent, if none too “sturdy,” oaks, which come back again and again, no matter how many times they are cut. They make the road a green tunnel in summer, and their gray branches with knotted fingers rattle and sway above it in the wintertime. It receives many travelers by land and some by sea. (A few Januaries ago I found a dovekie there, a little sea bird with the black back, short black wings, and white breast of a penguin. It is one of the members of the auk family, breeding in Greenland and migrating down from the ice-locked waters of the Arctic Circle to feed in the Atlantic during the winter. Its short wings are meant for swimming, diving, and flying in and out of waves, so they are not very effective when blown inland by a storm. The dovekie I found was unable to take off, and in any case weak and hungry. So after a futile effort to feed it, I took it back to Cape Cod Bay, where it started to fly along the surface of the water, though weakly, in short, floundering dashes.)
With a half mile of concentrated road it is easier to take cognizance of friends and strangers than when you are trying to make California on the transcontinental highway. You can see how it is used by skunk, squirrel, deer, and the hunters of deer. I walk it in expectation. One of the animals that constantly move across the road and live in the woods beside it is that bird which looks like a tiny thrush but is classified as a wood warbler, the oven bird. Its “Teacher! Teacher!” rings out in spring and early summer. It was named after its leaf-hidden nest, made on the ground, with a hole going in at the side like a Dutch oven.
Here is an oven bird, tail bobbing slightly, perched on the lower branches of a red maple beside the road... a little more out in the open than usual, less concentrated on its earlier nesting territory. It flutters down to the road. This is one of those birds that have the distinction, if that is what it is, of being able to walk, rather than hop or run. So it starts walking, through the dappled shadows on the road, as I keep a respectable distance behind it. Or perhaps I walk and it attends to business. The oven bird goes back and forth, pecking insects, with a quick meandering, interrupted by an occasional little jump at the leaves of an overhanging shrub or plant. This is not a straight walker, no Indian with a destination, but its body moves constantly from left to right in purposeful flexibility.
“How well you see!” I think to myself. I can see nothing at my level but a tiny yellow caterpillar swinging through the air on a silken thread. But it is clear to me that the oven bird works the road with clear results. We keep going. We come to a stretch in full sunlight where the trees stand off to the side, and my companion keeps to the shadows with determination, pecking away at insects along the few inches of shaded bank to one side. A flicker bursts through, shouting: “Tawicka! Tawicka!” and the oven bird flies ahead a few feet and then goes on walking.
We have now traveled about an eighth of a mile. Under a heavy weave of leaves the bird moves to left and right over the road, pecking for insects, working, progressing. Olive brown; capped with an orange stripe; with speckled breast and pale pink legs... a shadow bird, a leaf litter bird; and now a fellow walker, that has made more use of this road than any of us and our omnivorous machines. At a sharp bend in the road where it leads up to the house, the oven bird finally flies off and disappears in the trees, in a southerly direction by coincidence. Our walk is over, but the flight of birds will leave all cars behind.