A Barn-Door Outlook

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Title:     A Barn-Door Outlook
Author: John Burroughs [More Titles by Burroughs]

I have a barn-door outlook because I have a hay-barn study, and I chose a hay-barn study because I wanted a barn-door outlook--a wide, near view into fields and woods and orchards where I could be on intimate terms with the wild life about me, and with free, open-air nature.

Usually there is nothing small or stingy about a barn door, and a farmer's hay-barn puts only a very thin partition between you and the outside world. Therefore, what could be a more fit place to thresh out dry philosophical subjects than a barn floor? I have a few such subjects to thresh out, and I thresh them here, turning them over as many times as we used to turn over the oat and rye sheaves in the old days when I wielded the hickory flail with my brothers on this same barn floor.

What a pleasure it is to look back to those autumn days, generally in September or early October, when we used to thresh out a few bushels of the new crop of rye to be taken to the grist-mill for a fresh supply of flour! How often we paused in our work to munch apples that had been mellowing in the haymow by our side, and look out through the big doorway upon the sunlit meadows and hill-slopes! The sound of the flail is heard in the old barn no more, but in its stead the scratching of a pen and the uneasy stirring of a man seated there behind a big box, threshing out a harvest for a loaf of much less general value.

As I sit here day after day, bending over my work, I get many glimpses of the little rills of wild life that circulate about me. The feature of it that impresses me most is the life of fear that most of the wild creatures lead. They are as alert and cautious as are the picket-lines of opposing armies. Just over the line of stone wall in the orchard a woodchuck comes hesitatingly out of his hole and goes nibbling in the grass not fifty feet away. How alert and watchful he is! Every few moments he sits upright and takes an observation, then resumes his feeding. When I make a slight noise he rushes to the cover of the stone wall. Then, as no danger appears, he climbs to the top of it and looks in my direction. As I move as if to get up, he drops back quietly to his hole.

A chipmunk comes along on the stone wall, hurrying somewhere on an important errand, but changing his course every moment. He runs on the top of the wall, then along its side, then into it and through it and out on the other side, pausing every few seconds and looking and listening, careful not to expose himself long in any one position, really skulking and hiding all along his journey. His enemies are keen and watchful and likely to appear at any moment, and he knows it, not so much by experience as by instinct. His young are timid and watchful the first time they emerge from the den into the light of day.

Then a red squirrel comes spinning along. By jerks and nervous, spasmodic spurts he rushes along from cover to cover like a soldier dodging the enemy's bullets. When he discovers me, he pauses, and with one paw on his heart appears to press a button, that lets off a flood of snickering, explosive sounds that seem like ridicule of me and my work. Failing to get any response from me, he presently turns, and, springing from the wall to the bending branch of a near apple-tree, he rushes up and disappears amid the foliage. Presently I see him on the end of a branch, where he seizes a green apple not yet a third grown, and, darting down to a large horizontal branch, sits up with the apple in his paws and proceeds to chip it up for the pale, unripe seeds at its core, all the time keenly alive to possible dangers that may surround him. What a nervous, hustling, highstrung creature he is--a live wire at all times and places! That pert curl of the end of his tail, as he sits chipping the apple or cutting through the shell of a nut, is expressive of his character. What a contrast his nervous and explosive activity presents to the more sedate and dignified life of the gray squirrel! One of these passed us only a few yards away on our walk in the woods the other day--a long, undulating line of soft gray, silent as a spirit and graceful as a wave on the beach.

A little later, in the fine, slow-falling rain, a rabbit suddenly emerges into my field of vision fifty feet away. How timid and scared she looks! She pauses a moment amid the weeds, then hops a yard or two and pauses again, then passes under the bars and hesitates on the edge of a more open and exposed place immediately in front of me. Here she works her nose, feeling of every current of air, analyzing every scent to see if danger is near. Apparently detecting something suspicious in the currents that drift from my direction, she turns back, pauses again, works her nose as before, then hurries out of my sight.

Yesterday I saw a rat stealing green peas from my garden in the open day. He darted out of the stone wall six or eight feet away to the row of peas, rushed about nervously among the vines; then, before I could seize my rifle, darted back to the cover of the wall. Once I cautiously approached his hiding-place in the wall and waited. Presently his head emerged from the line of weeds by the fence, his nose began working anxiously, he sifted and resifted the air with it, and then quickly withdrew; his nose had detected me, but his eye had not. The touchstone of most animals is the nose, and not the eye. The eye quickly detects objects in motion, but not those at rest; this is the function of the nose.

A highhole alights on the ground in full view in the orchard twenty yards away, and, spying my motionless figure, pauses and regards me long and intently. His eye serves him, and not his nose. Finally concluding that I am not dangerous, he stoops to the turf for his beloved ants and other insects, but lifts his head every few seconds to see that no danger is imminent. Not one moment is he off his guard. A hawk may suddenly swoop from the air above, or a four-footed foe approach from any side. I have seen a sharp-shinned hawk pick up a highhole from the turf in a twinkling under just such conditions. What a contrast between the anxious behavior of these wild creatures and the ease and indifference of the grazing cattle!

All the wild creatures evidently regard me with mingled feelings of curiosity and distrust. A song sparrow hops and flirts and attitudinizes and peers at me from the door-sill, wondering if there is any harm in me. A ph[oe]be-bird comes in and flits about, disturbed by my presence. For the third or fourth time this season, I think, she is planning a nest. In June she began one over a window on the porch where I sleep in the open air. She had the foundation laid when I appeared, and was not a little disturbed by my presence, especially in the early morning, when I wanted to sleep and she wanted to work. She let fall some of her mortar upon me, but at least I had no fear of a falling brick. She gradually got used to me, and her work was progressing into the moss stage when two women appeared and made their beds upon the porch, and in the morning went to and fro with brooms, of course. Then Ph[oe]be seemed to say to herself, "This is too much," and she left her unfinished nest and resorted to the empty hay-barn. Here she built a nest on one of the bark-covered end timbers halfway up the big mow, not being quite as used to barns and the exigencies of haying-times as swallows are, who build their mud nests against the rafters in the peak. She had deposited her eggs, when the haymakers began pitching hay into the space beneath her; sweating, hurrying haymakers do not see or regard the rights or wants of little birds. Like a rising tide the fragrant hay rose and covered the timber and the nest, and crept on up toward the swallow's unfledged family in the peak, but did not quite reach it.

Ph[oe]be and her mate hung about the barn disconsolate for days, and now, ten days later, she is hovering about my open door on the floor below, evidently prospecting for another building-site. I hope she will find me so quiet and my air so friendly that she will choose a niche on the hewn timber over my head. Just this moment I saw her snap up a flying "miller" in the orchard a few rods away. She was compelled to swoop four times before she intercepted that little moth in its unsteady, zigzagging flight. She is an expert at this sort of thing; it is her business to take her game on the wing; but the moths are experts in zigzag flying, and Ph[oe]be missed her mark three times. I heard the snap of her beak at each swoop. It is almost impossible for any insectivorous bird except a flycatcher to take a moth or a butterfly on the wing.

Last year in August the junco, or common snowbird, came into the big barn and built her nest in the side of the haymow, only a few feet from me. The clean, fragrant hay attracted her as it had attracted me. One would have thought that in a haymow she had nesting material near at hand. But no; her nest-building instincts had to take the old rut; she must bring her own material from without; the haymow was only the mossy bank or the wood-side turf where her species had hidden their nests for untold generations. She did not weave one spear of the farmer's hay into her nest, but brought in the usual bits of dry grass and weeds and horsehair and shaped the fabric after the old pattern, tucking it well in under the drooping locks of hay. As I sat morning after morning weaving my thoughts together and looking out of the great barn doorway into sunlit fields, the junco wove her straws and horsehairs, and deposited there on three successive days her three exquisite eggs.

Why the bird departed so widely from the usual habits of nest-building of her species, who can tell? I had never before seen a junco's nest except on the ground in remote fields, or in mossy banks by the side of mountain roads. This nest is the finest to be found upon the ground, its usual lining of horsehair makes its interior especially smooth and shapely, and the nest in the haymow showed only a little falling-off, as is usually the case in the second nest of the season. The songs of the birds, the construction of their nests, and the number of their eggs taper off as the season wanes.

The junco impresses me as a fidgety, emphatic, feather-edged sort of bird; the two white quills in its tail which flash out so suddenly on every movement seem to stamp in this impression. My junco was a little nervous at first and showed her white quills, but she soon grew used to my presence, and would alight upon the chair which I kept for callers, and upon my hammock-ropes.

When an artist came to paint my portrait amid such rustic surroundings, the bird only eyed her a little suspiciously at first, and then went forward with her own affairs. One night the wind blew the easel with its canvas over against the haymow where the nest was placed, but the bird was there on her eggs in the morning. Her wild instincts did not desert her in one respect, at least: when I would flush her from the nest she would drop down to the floor and with spread plumage and fluttering movements seek for a moment to decoy me away from the nest, after the habit of most ground-builders. The male came about the barn frequently with three or four other juncos, which I suspect were the first or June brood of the pair, now able to take care of themselves, but still held together by the family instinct, as often happens in the case of some other birds, such as bluebirds and chickadees.

My little mascot hatched all her eggs, and all went well with mother and young until, during my absence of three or four days, some night-prowler, probably a rat, plundered the nest, and the little summer idyl in the heart of the old barn abruptly ended. I saw the juncos no more.

While I was so closely associated with the junco in the old barn I had a good chance to observe her incubating habits. I was surprised at the frequent and long recesses that she took during school-hours. Every hour during the warmest days she was off from ten to twelve minutes, either to take the air or to take a bite, or to let up on the temperature of her eggs, or to have a word with her other family; I am at a loss to know which. Toward the end of her term, which was twelve days, and as the days grew cooler, she was not gadding out and in so often, but kept her place three or four hours at a time.

When the young were hatched they seemed mainly fed with insects--spiders or flies gathered off the timbers and clapboards of the inside of the barn. It was a pretty sight to see the mother-bird making the rounds of the barn, running along the timbers, jumping up here and there, and seizing some invisible object, showing the while her white petticoats--as a French girl called that display of white tail-feathers.

Day after day and week after week as I look through the big, open barn door I see a marsh hawk beating about low over the fields. He, or rather she (for I see by the greater size and browner color that it is the female), moves very slowly and deliberately on level, flexible wing, now over the meadow, now over the oat or millet field, then above the pasture and the swamp, tacking and turning, her eye bent upon the ground, and no doubt sending fear or panic through the heart of many a nibbling mouse or sitting bird. She occasionally hesitates or stops in her flight and drops upon the ground, as if seeking insects or frogs or snakes. I have never yet seen her swoop or strike after the manner of other hawks. It is a pleasure to watch her through the glass and see her make these circuits of the fields on effortless wing, day after day, and strike no bird or other living thing, as if in quest of something she never finds. I never see the male. She has perhaps assigned him other territory to hunt over. He is smaller, with more blue in his plumage. One day she had a scrap or a game of some kind with three or four crows on the side of a rocky hill. I think the crows teased and annoyed her. I heard their cawing and saw them pursuing the hawk, and then saw her swoop upon them or turn over in the air beneath them, as if to show them what feats she could do on the wing that were beyond their powers. The crows often made a peculiar guttural cawing and cackling as if they enjoyed the sport, but they were clumsy and awkward enough on the wing compared to the hawk. Time after time she came down upon them from a point high in the air, like a thunderbolt, but never seemed to touch them. Twice I saw her swoop upon them as they sat upon the ground, and the crows called out in half sportive, half protesting tones, as if saying, "That was a little too close; beware, beware!" It was like a skillful swordsman flourishing his weapon about the head of a peasant; but not a feather was touched so far as I could see. It is the only time I ever saw this hawk in a sportive or aggressive mood. I have seen jays tease the sharp-shinned hawk in this way, and escape his retaliating blows by darting into a cedar-tree. All the crow tribe, I think, love to badger and mock some of their neighbors.

How much business the crows seem to have apart from hunting their living! I hear their voices in the morning before sun-up, sounding out from different points of the fields and woods, as if every one of them were giving or receiving orders for the day: "Here, Jim, you do this; here, Corvus, you go there, and put that thing through"; and Jim caws back a response, and Corvus says, "I'm off this minute." I get the impression that it is convention day or general training day with them. There are voices in all keys of masculinity and femininity. Here and there seems to be one in authority who calls at intervals, "Haw-ah, haw, haw-ah!" Others utter a strident "Haw!" still others a rapid, feminine call. Some seem hurrying, others seem at rest, but the landscape is apparently alive with crows carrying out some plan of concerted action. How fond they must be of one another! What boon companions they are! In constant communication, saluting one another from the trees, the ground, the air, watchful of one another's safety, sharing their plunder, uniting against a common enemy, noisy, sportive, predacious, and open and aboveboard in all their ways and doings--how much character our ebony friend possesses, in how many ways he challenges our admiration!

What a contrast the crow presents to the silent, solitary hawk! The hawks have but two occupations--hunting and soaring; they have no social or tribal relations, and make no show of business as does the crow. The crow does not hide; he seems to crave the utmost publicity; his goings and comings are advertised with all the effectiveness of his strident voice; but all our hawks are silent and stealthy.

Let me return to the red squirrel, because he returns to me hourly. He is the most frisky, diverting, and altogether impish of all our wild creatures. He is a veritable Puck. All the other wild folk that cross my field of vision, or look in upon me here in my fragrant hay-barn study, seem to have but one feeling about me: "What is it? Is it dangerous? Has it any designs upon me?" But my appearance seems to awaken other feelings in the red squirrel. He pauses on the fence or on the rail before me, and goes through a series of antics and poses and hilarious gestures, giving out the while a stream of snickering, staccato sounds that suggest unmistakably that I am a source of mirth and ridicule to him. His gestures and attitudes are all those of mingled mirth, curiosity, defiance, and contempt--seldom those of fear. He comes spinning along on the stone wall in front of me, with those abrupt, nervous pauses every few yards that characterize all his movements. On seeing me he checks his speed, and with depressed tail impels himself along, a few inches at a time, in a series of spasmodic starts and sallies; the hind part of his body flattened, and his legs spread, his head erect and alert, his tail full of kinks and quirks. How that tail undulates! Now its end curls, now it is flattened to the stone, now it springs straight up as if part of a trap, hind feet the while keeping time in a sort of nervous dance with the shrill, strident cackling and snickering. The next moment he is sitting erect with fore paws pressed against his white chest, his tail rippling out behind him or up his back, and his shrill, nasal tones still pouring out. He hops to the next stone, he assumes a new position, his tail palpitates and jerks more lively than ever; now he is on all fours, with curved back; now he sits up at an angle, his tail all the time charged with mingled suspicion and mirth. Then he springs to a rail that runs out at right angles from the wall toward me, and with hectoring snickers and shrill trebles, pointed straight at me, keeps up his performance. What an actor he is! What a furry embodiment of quick, nervous energy and impertinence! Surely he has a sense of something like humor; surely he is teasing and mocking me and telling me, both by gesture and by word of mouth, that I present a very ridiculous appearance.

A chipmunk comes hurrying along with stuffed cheek-pouches, traveling more on the side of the wall than on the top, stopping every few yards to see that the way is clear, but giving little heed to me or to the performing squirrel. In comparison the chipmunk is a demure, preoccupied, pretty little busybody who often watches you curiously, but never mocks you or pokes fun at you; while the gray squirrel has the manners of the best-bred wood-folk, and he goes his way without fuss or bluster, a picture of sylvan grace and buoyancy.

All the movements of the red squirrel are quick, sharp, jerky, machine-like. He does nothing slowly or gently; everything with a snap and a jerk. His progression is a series of interrupted sallies. When he pauses on the stone wall he faces this way and that with a sudden jerk; he turns round in two or three quick leaps. So abrupt and automatic in his movements, so stiff and angular in behavior, yet he is charged and overflowing with life and energy. One thinks of him as a bundle of steel wires and needles and coiled springs, all electrically charged. One of his sounds or calls is like the buzz of a reel or the whirr of an alarm-clock. Something seems to touch a spring there in the old apple-tree, and out leaps this strident sound as of spinning brass wheels.

When I speak sharply to him, in the midst of his antics, he pauses a moment with uplifted paw, watching me intently, and then with a snicker springs upon a branch of an apple-tree that hangs down near the wall, and disappears amid the foliage. The red squirrel is always actively saucy, aggressively impudent. He peeps in at me through a broken pane in the window and snickers; he strikes up a jig on the stone underpinning twenty feet away and mocks; he darts in and out among the timbers and chatters and giggles; he climbs up over the door, pokes his head in, and lets off a volley; he moves by jerks along the sill a few feet from my head and chirps derisively; he eyes me from points on the wall in front, or from some coign of vantage in the barn, and flings his anger or his contempt upon me.

No other of our wood-folk has such a facile, emotional tail as the red squirrel. It seems as if an electric current were running through it most of the time; it vibrates, it ripples, it curls, it jerks, it arches, it flattens; now it is like a plume in his cap; now it is a cloak around his shoulders; then it is an instrument to point and emphasize his states of emotional excitement; every movement of his body is seconded or reflected in his tail. There seems to be some automatic adjustment between his tail and his vocal machinery.

The tail of the gray squirrel shows to best advantage when he is running over the ground in the woods--and a long, graceful, undulating line of soft silver gray the creature makes! In my part of the country the gray squirrel is more strictly a wood-dweller than the red, and has the grace and elusiveness that belong more especially to the sylvan creatures.

The red squirrel can play a tune and accompany himself. Underneath his strident, nasal snicker you may hear a note in another key, much finer and shriller. Or it is as if the volume of sound was split up into two strains, one proceeding from his throat and the other from his mouth.

If the red squirrels do not have an actual game of tag, they have something so near it that I cannot tell the difference. Just now I see one in hot pursuit of another on the stone wall; both are apparently going at the top of their speed. They make a red streak over the dark-gray stones. When the pursuer seems to overtake the pursued and becomes "It," the race is reversed, and away they go on the back track with the same fleetness of the hunter and the hunted, till things are reversed again. I have seen them engaged in the same game in tree-tops, each one having his innings by turn.

The gray squirrel comes and goes, but the red squirrel we have always with us. He will live where the gray will starve. He is a true American; he has nearly all the national traits--nervous energy, quickness, resourcefulness, pertness, not to say impudence and conceit. He is not altogether lovely or blameless. He makes war on the chipmunk, he is a robber of birds' nests, and is destructive of the orchard fruits. Nearly every man's hand is against him, yet he thrives, and long may he continue to do so!

One day I placed some over-ripe plums on the wall in front of me to see what he would do with them. At first he fell eagerly to releasing the pit, and then to cutting his way to the kernel in the pit. After one of them had been disposed of in this way, he proceeded to carry off the others and place them here and there amid the branches of a plum-tree from which he had stolen every plum long before they were ripe. A day or two later I noted that they had all been removed from this tree, and I found some of them in the forks of an apple-tree not far off.

A small butternut-tree standing near the wall had only a score or so of butternuts upon it this year; the squirrels might be seen almost any hour in the day darting about the branches of that tree, hunting the green nuts, and in early September the last nut was taken. They carried them away and placed them, one here and one there, in the forks of the apple-trees. I noticed that they did not depend upon the eye to find the nuts; they did not look the branches over from some lower branch as you and I would have done; they explored the branches one by one, running out to the end, and, if the nut was there, seized it and came swiftly down. I think the red squirrel rarely lays up any considerable store, but hides his nuts here and there in the trees and upon the ground. This habit makes him the planter of future trees, of oaks, hickories, chestnuts, and butternuts. These heavy nuts get widely scattered by this agency.

One morning I saw a chipmunk catch a flying grasshopper on the wing. Little Striped-Back sat on the wall with stuffed pockets, waiting for something, when along came the big grasshopper in a hesitating, uncertain manner of flight. As it hovered above the chipmunk, the latter by a quick, dexterous movement sprang or reached up and caught it, and in less than one half-minute its fanlike wings were opening out in front of the captor's mouth and its body was being eagerly devoured. This same chipmunk, I think it is, has his den under the barn near me. Often he comes from the stone wall with distended cheek-pouches, and pauses fifteen feet away, close by cover, and looks to see if any danger is impending. To reach his hole he has to cross an open space a rod or more wide, and the thought of it evidently agitates him a little. I am sitting there looking over my desk upon him, and he is skeptical about my being as harmless as I look. "Dare I cross that ten feet of open there in front of him?" he seems to say. He sits up with fore paws pressed so prettily to his white breast. He is so near I can see the rapid throbbing of his chest as he sniffs the air. A moment he sits and looks and sniffs, then in hurried movements crosses the open, his cheek-pockets showing full as he darts by me. He is like a baseball runner trying to steal a base: danger lurks on all sides; he must not leave the cover of one base till he sees the way is clear, and then--off with a rush! Pray don't work yourself up to such a pitch, my little neighbor; you shall make a home-run without the slightest show of opposition from me.

One day a gray squirrel came along on the stone wall beside the road. In front of the house he crossed an open barway, and then paused to observe two men at work in full view near the house. The men were a sculptor, pottering with clay, and his model. The squirrel sprang up a near-by butternut-tree, sat down on a limb, and had a good, long look. "Very suspicious," he seemed to think; "maybe they are fixing a trap for me"; and he deliberately came down the tree and returned the way he had come, spinning along the top of the wall, his long, fine tail outlined by a narrow band of silver as he sped off toward the woods.

[The end]
John Burroughs's short story: Barn-Door Outlook

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