Woodland Paths

THE night was dark and bitter cold, though it was early March. Over in the dismal depths of Pigeon Swamp, where no pigeons have nested for nearly a half century though it is as wild and lone to-day as it was when they flocked there by thousands, a deep-toned, lonely cry resounded. It was like the fitful baying of a dog in the distance, only that it was too wild and eerie for that. Then there was silence for a space and an eldritch screech rang out.

It was blood-curdling to a human listener, but it was reassuring to the great horned owl snuggling down on her two great blotched eggs to keep them secure from the cold, for it was the voice of her mate hunting. Sailing silently on bat-like wings he was beating the open spaces of the wood, hoping to find a partridge at roost, and I fancy the deep “whoo; hoo, hoo, hoo; whoo, whoo,” all on the same note, was a grumble that trained dogs and pump-guns are making the game birds so scarce. Perhaps that blood-curdling screech was one of triumph over the sudden death of a rabbit, for Bubo virginiana is tremendously rapacious and will eat any living thing which he can carry away in his claws.

It might, too, have been his method of expressing ecstasy over the nest and the promise of spring which the horned owl alone has the courage to anticipate with nest-building in these raw and barren days, when winter seemingly still has his grip firmly set on us. Oftentimes his housekeeping arrangements are completed by late February. No other bird does that in Massachusetts, though farther north the Canada jay also lays eggs about that time, way up near the Arctic Circle where the thermometer registers zero or below and the snow is deep on the ground.

On what trees he cuts the notches of the passing days I do not know, but surely the horned owl’s almanac is as reliable as the Old Farmer’s, and he knows the nearness of the spring. I dare say the other birds which winter with us know it too, though not being so big and husky they do not venture to give hostages to the enemy quite so early in the season. The barred owls will build in late March, and soon after April fool’s day the woodcock will be stealing north and placing queer, pointed, blotched eggs in some little hollow just above high water in the swamp.

The crows are cannier still. You will hardly find eggs in their nests hereabouts before the fifteenth of April, and you will do well to postpone your hunting till the twenty-fifth. Yet they all know, as well as I do, when the spring is near, and I think I have the secret of the message which has come to them. It is not the fact that a south wind has blown, for this may happen at any time during the winter, but it is something that reaches them on the wings of this same south wind.