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III NATURE WITH CLOSED
DOORS DECEMBER in our climate is the month when Nature finally shuts up house and turns the key. She has been slowly packing up and putting away her things and closing a door and a window here and there all the fall. Now she completes the work and puts up the last bar. She is ready for winter. The leaves are all off the trees, except that here and there a beech or an oak or a hickory still clings to a remnant of its withered foliage. Her streams are full, her new growths of wood are ripened, her saps and juices are quiescent. The muskrat has completed his house in the shallow pond or stream, the beaver in the northern woods has completed his. The wild mice and the chipmunk have laid up their winter stores of nuts and grains in their dens in the ground and in the cavities of trees. The woodchuck is rolled up in his burrow in the hillside, sleeping his long winter sleep. The coon has deserted his chamber in the old tree and gone into winter quarters in his den in the rocks. The winter birds have taken on a good coat of fat against the coming cold and a possible scarcity of food. The frogs and toads are all in their hibernaculums in the ground. I saw it stated the
other day, in a paper read before some scientific body, that the wood frogs
retreat two feet into the ground beyond the reach of frost. In two instances I
have found the wood frog in December with a covering of less than two inches
of leaves and moss. It had buried itself in the soil and leaf mould only to the
depth of the thickness of its own body, and for covering had only the ordinary
coat of dry leaves and pine needles to be found in the wood. It was evidently
counting upon the snow for its main protection. In one case I marked the spot,
and returned there in early spring to see how the frog had wintered. I found it
all right. Evidently it had some charm against the cold, for while the earth
around and beneath it was yet frozen solid, there was no frost in the frog. It
was not a brisk frog, but it was well, and when I came again on a warm day a
week later, it had come forth from its retreat and was headed for the near-by
marsh, where in April, with its kith and kin, it helped make the air vocal with
its love-calls. A friend of mine, one mild day late in December, found a wood
frog sitting upon the snow in the woods. She took it home and put it to bed in
the soil of one of her flower-pots in the cellar. In the spring she found it in
good condition, and in April carried it back to the woods. The hyla, or little
piping frog, passes the winter in the ground like the wood frog. I have seen
the toad go into the ground in the late fall. It is an interesting proceeding.
It literally elbows its way into the soil. It sits on end, and works and
presses with the sharp joints of its folded legs until it has sunk itself at a
sufficient depth, which is only a few inches beneath the surface. The water
frogs appear to pass the winter in the mud at the bottom of ponds and marshes.
The queen bumblebee and the queen hornet, I think, seek out their winter
quarters in holes in the ground in September, while the drones and the workers
perish. The honey-bees do not hibernate: they must have food all winter; but
our native wild bees are dormant during the cold months, and survive the
winter only in the person of the queen mother. In the spring these queens set
up housekeeping alone, and found new families. Insects in all
stages of their growth are creatures of the warmth; the heat is the motive
power that makes them go; when this fails, they are still. The katydids rasp
away in the fall as long as there is warmth enough to keep them going; as the
heat fails, they fail, till from the emphatic “Katy did it” of August they
dwindle to a hoarse, dying, “Kate, Kate,” in October. Think of the stillness
that falls upon the myriad wood-borers in the dry trees and stumps in the
forest as the chill of autumn comes on. All summer have they worked incessantly
in oak and hickory and birch and chestnut and spruce, some of them making a
sound exactly like that of the old-fashioned hand augur, others a fine, snapping,
and splintering sound; but as the cold comes on, they go slower and slower,
till they finally cease to move. A warm day starts them again, slowly or
briskly according to the degree of heat, but in December they are finally
stilled for the season. These creatures, like the big fat grubs of the June
beetles which one sometimes finds in the ground or in decayed wood, are full of
frost in winter; cut one of the big grubs in two, and it looks like a lump of
ice cream. Some time in
October the crows begin to collect together in large flocks and establish their
winter quarters. They choose some secluded wood for a roosting-place, and
thither all the crows for many square miles of country betake themselves at
night, and thence they disperse in all directions again in the early morning.
The crow is a social bird, a true American; no hermit or recluse is he. The
winter probably brings them together in these large colonies for purposes of
sociability and for greater warmth. By roosting close together and quite
filling a treetop, there must result some economy of heat. I have seen it
stated in a rhetorical flight of some writer that the new buds crowd the old
leaves off. But this is not true as a rule. The new bud is formed in the axil
of the old leaf long before the leaves are ready to fall. With only two species
of our trees known to me might the swelling bud push off the old leaf. In the
sumach and button-ball or plane-tree the new bud is formed immediately under
the base of the old leaf-stalk, by which it is covered like a cap. Examine the
fallen leaves of these trees, and you will see the cavity in the base of each
where the new bud was cradled. Why the beech, the oak, and the hickory cling to
their old leaves is not clear. It may be simply a slovenly trait — inability to
finish and have done with a thing — a fault of so many people. Some oaks and
beeches appear to lack decision of character. It requires strength and vitality,
it seems, simply to let go. Kill a tree suddenly, and the leaves wither upon
the branches. How neatly and thoroughly the maples, the ashes, the birches, the
elm clean up. They are tidy, energetic trees, and can turn over a new leaf
without hesitation. A correspondent,
writing to me from one of the colleges, suggests that our spring really begins
in December, because the “annual cycle of vegetable life” seems to start then.
At this time he finds that many of our wild flowers — the bloodroot, hepatica,
columbine, shinleaf, maidenhair fern, etc. -- have all made quite a start
toward the next season’s growth, in some cases the new shoot being an inch
high. But the real start of the next season’s vegetable life in this sense is
long before December. It is in late summer, when the new buds are formed on the
trees. Nature looks ahead, and makes ready for the new season in the midst of
the old. Cut open the terminal hickory buds in the late fall and you will find
the new growth of the coming season all snugly packed away there, many times
folded up and wrapped about by protecting scales. The catkins of the birches,
alders, and hazel are fully formed, and as in the case of the buds, are like
eggs to be hatched by the warmth of spring. The present season is always the
mother of the next, and the inception takes place long before the sun loses his
power. The eggs that hold the coming crop of insect life are mostly laid in the
late summer or early fall, and an analogous start is made in the vegetable
world. The egg, the seed, the bud, are all alike in many ways, and look to the
future. Our earliest spring flower, the skunk-cabbage, may be found with its
round green spear-point an inch or two above the mould in December. It is ready
to welcome and make the most of the first fitful March warmth. Look at the
elms, too, and see how they swarm with buds. In early April they suggest a
swarm of bees. In all cases, before Nature closes her house in the fall, she makes ready for its spring opening. |