The Northern Farm by Henry Beston

Author:Henry Beston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

XXIV

IT IS summer at last, and the world is alive again in the warm and pleasant air. Tree leaves are not yet fully out, but branches are again clothed in green, and once again do shadows of summer move with swaying bough and twig across the rustic unevenness of the farmhouse lawn. Within the earth, upon it, and above it, life stirs and would go on. All day long our flowering apples hum with the sound of honey bees, and late into the dusk one huge bumble bee prolongs the drowsy murmur, working at the top of the tree where the flowers catch the very last of the evening light.

Perhaps in all our country scene, nothing seems more eager and living than the birds. Because this is old forest country only here and there opened into farms, we have a rather large variety of species. Among them are birds of the northern woods, birds of the farm country, birds who like pond shores, water birds, and even strays from the neighboring Atlantic. You never can tell what you may see. Two years ago, for instance, that fantastic creature, the northern pileated woodpecker flew out of the woods and rested for awhile on the ridge pole of our disused icehouse, and only last fall, going down to the fields after a wild northeaster, I startled up a red-legged guillemot from between the blown, dishevelled rows of corn. It was a strange sight to see that ocean creature flying through inland Maine.

Certain birds we can count on as familiars. Robins are our songsters, cheerfully loquacious and musically talkative from the nearer trees, sociable heralds of the early light, and builders of nests in absurd places. Last year a robin who would have had difficulties with an intelligence test, built a nest under the big tank on a beam exposed to the deluges of the frequent overflows. The farm wondered if she planned to raise ducks! Chimney swifts have built in the chimney of my bedroom, and sometimes wake me in the early morning with the muffled and hollow roaring of their wings as they flutter up from their cavern of night and soot into the air of dawn.

The usual yellow warblers are at home in a sheltered apple tree whose branches shade the house, the usual catbirds are in their chokecherry thicket, and the tree swallows have again taken over the bird house which needs a coat of paint. The barn swallows, too, have come, and for the time being are hunting the air above and about the house, on tireless wings darting and glancing high above the old apple tree in flower, the red water tank, and the two tall, austere chimneys of the ell. In the quiet evenings after sundown we hear the thrushes calling from the woods.

If these are the familiars of the house, the hilltop, and the barn, the bobolink is the very spirit of the fields. These slopes rolling down to the pond are a bobolink paradise,

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