(AUGUST) 'Till he came unto a streamlet
In the middle of the forest
To a streamlet still and tranquil
That had overflowed its margin,
To a dam made by the beavers,
To a pond of quiet water,
Where knee-deep the trees were standing,
Where the water-lilies floated,
Where the rushes waved and whispered.
—Longfellow: "Hiawatha." WATER FARMERS WHO HELP MAKE LAND As we all spend more or less time in the water in August I thought it would be a good idea to take as the subject of this chapter the lives of the water farmers. Some of these—the crayfish and the turtle, for example—you know well, and everybody has heard of the beaver family, but they will all bear closer acquaintance. I know, for I've spent a good deal of time among them. I. The Turtle People Every boy who has tramped along creeks and ponds knows the mud-turtle. We ought to call him a tortoise, perhaps, but the name turtle is more common. I don't know why; perhaps because it's a little easier to say. Strictly speaking, the name "turtle" is applied to the members of the family that have flippers, and spend nearly all their time in the water; while the tortoises are the ones that have feet and put in much of their time on land. (And then, of course, there are the tortoises of fables that run races with hares, and so teach us not to be too confident of ourselves because we think we are cleverer than some other people.) The common box-turtle of the United States you'll meet in the woods in the evening and early morning, wandering about looking for something to eat. He spends practically all his time on land in Summer; and in the Winter, all his time in bed. As soon as cold weather comes on he digs a hole in the ground, or scoops out a place under some brush, and turns in. But the box-turtle—he's really a tortoise—is what some of his relatives would call a "landlubber," no doubt, for many of the tortoises who live in the sea rarely leave it; as if they had half a mind to go back and be only flipper people, as the ancestors of both the turtles and the tortoises must have been; since all life is supposed to have begun in the sea. All the tortoises of temperate regions dig in for the Winter, but one Southern member of the family makes his home in a dugout throughout the year. He's called the "gopher" turtle. The gopher turtles are natives of Florida, and live in pairs in burrows. Other members of the turtle tribe do not pair, but there's one time in their lives when both land and water turtles dig into the soil and that's when they are laying their eggs. The females scoop out hollows with their hind legs, kicking up the dirt, first with one leg and then with the other. But they're as careful of the dirt they dig out as a beaver is when he digs a canal. They scrape it up in a little ridge all around the hole. What for? Just watch. HOW MOTHER TURTLE "TAMPS" HER NEST As soon as she has finished laying her eggs, Mother Turtle carefully scrapes this dirt back over them and tamps it down, much as a foundryman tamps the sand in a mould. You can guess what she uses for a tamper—the under side of her shell, raising and lowering herself on her legs like a Boy Scout taking his morning setting-up exercises in a Summer camp. After that she doesn't pay any more attention to her eggs. She leaves the sun to do her hatching for her. Both land and sea turtles—or, more properly speaking, the tortoises and the turtles—hatch their young in this way. The sea-turtles scramble up out of the water on their flippers, much as a seal does in climbing on a rock, and make their way back from the shore, great crowds of them, at nesting-time, to some stretch of sand, and there lay their eggs. This march of the mother turtles always takes place at night. When the young are hatched they dig their way up through the sand and make for the sea. II. The Crab Family Another one of the water people who help make land and one that everybody knows, is the crayfish. Every small boy is afraid Mr. Crayfish will catch his little big toe sooner or later, when he goes swimming; although I never heard of a crayfish that did. But they never worry about their toes—the crayfish don't. When they lose a whole foot even—as they often do—it grows right out again. The science people say this is because they belong to a low order in the animal world, but I think it would come in right handy for any of us—this way of regrowing not toe-nails alone, but toes and all—don't you? The crayfish, as you may know, love to burrow in the mud, for you are always coming across their little mud towers along the margins of the brooks. Related to the crayfish are the crabs. Mother Nature seems to have been very fond of crabs—she has made them after so many different patterns and scattered them all over the world; in the deep sea, along the shallows of its shores, and on land. Those you are most apt to meet must have more or less business on land, for the shape of their legs shows that they are formed for walking rather than swimming. But go far out to sea and you'll find crabs with paddles on all four pairs of legs, like banks of oars; while others, living on the borders of the sea, have paddles only on the last pair. SOUTH SEA ISLAND AND COCOANUT COLUMBUS Here we are on an island of the Southern Seas—the home of a colony of cocoanut crabs. One of the members of the colony is climbing a tree to get a nut. "And who has a better right?" says he. "This tree," he might continue, "is the descendant of a nut that some of my ancestors sailed upon to this island; for a cocoanut, dropping into the water from a tree near some far shore, often carries on it the crab who had started to eat it. Then a current of the sea carries the nut and its passenger to some other island. Later cocoanut Santa Marias and their Columbuses reach the island in the same way, and so it becomes populated with both cocoanuts and crabs—which makes it very nice for the crabs!" One of the big families of crabs live on land most of the time and make burrows in which they live. These have legs specially fitted for digging. Like most of the crab family, the land-crab earns its living at night and, except in rainy weather, seldom leaves its burrow by day. Like small boys, these crabs seem to love to play in the rain. The fact is they do this to keep their gills wet; for, although they spend most of their time on land, crabs breathe with their gills, like fish; and while some of them—as the mountain crab of the West Indies—live quite a distance back from the sea, they must have some moisture for their gills, and this they get, in part, in their damp cellars—the burrows. But it's queer, isn't it, what different ways people have of looking at things? Take land crabs and turtles, for example. Turtles, when they lay their eggs, think the only thing is to get clear away from the water and put their eggs in an incubator, as we saw them do a few pages back. The land-crabs evidently think just the opposite; for no matter how far they may live away from the sea—one, two, even three miles sometimes—nothing will do but they must go to the water to lay their eggs. In April and May you'll see them swarming down by hundreds and thousands. And they'll climb right over you if you don't get out of their way! "This is my busy day and I can't stop for anything," says Mrs. Crab. Besides the work they do for the soil in grinding and mixing it, the crab people, like all the crustaceans, help a lot by adding lime to it, and that's one of the very best things you can do to soil, you know. They add this lime when they change their clothes; that is, when they moult or cast their shells. The shell they take off as if it were indeed a dress. They "unbutton" it down the back. Sometimes, in trying to get out of the legs of the suit, they leave not only the leg covering but the leg itself. That leg is good for the soil, too, of course, and the loss of a leg doesn't bother a crab so very much. He just grows a new one, that's all! These shells—particularly the shells of the largest species of crabs—not only contain a great deal of lime but carbon and phosphorus, also, and these are splendid soil stuff, too. In the smaller kinds of crabs—of crustaceans, generally—these shells are mostly chitin, the stuff that the coverings of insects is made of. The crustaceans, by the way, are closely related to the insects. You may suspect this by comparing their shapes, but then you'll see there isn't any doubt about it when I tell you that in getting born from the egg, the crabs and their kin don't come out dressed in their final shape, but change after they are born, first into one shape and then into another, just as insects do. Each shape, as it comes along, looks funnier than the rest; that is, it looks funny to us, but not, naturally, to the crabs. It must seem just the thing to them, for they always dress the same way and look as solemn about it as a man does when he wears a monocle. In fact, they do something almost as funny as wearing a monocle. For many of them carry their eyes about, not on the end of a cord, to be sure, but on the end of a stick. These "sticks" are called foot stalks. And they're not a bad idea either—for a crab. By moving them around the crabs can keep much better posted on what is going on about them than they could otherwise; particularly as a crab always moves sidewise or backward. What good a monocle does, though, nobody knows. III. The Stranger That Made London Laugh But if we can hardly look a crab in the eye and keep a straight face, what would we do if we met a duck-billed mole? We'd laugh right out! I'm sure of it, for that's what even the men of science did when they saw the first one that came to England. This strange foreigner—it came to London all the way from Australia—had a body like a mole. But you couldn't call it a mole. For one thing, it had a bill like a duck. Yet no more could you call it a duck; for, besides having a body like a mole, it had a tail like a beaver. Still I'm afraid the beavers wouldn't have owned it—hospitable as they are—even if they could have overlooked that bill. For—can you believe it?—this duck-billed, mole-bodied, beaver-tailed creature lays eggs! THE ANIMAL X FROM THE ANTIPODES A mole's body, a duck's bill, a beaver's tail, this strange citizen of that land of strange animals, Australia, lays eggs like a bird and suckles its young like a pussy-cat! Do you wonder that the wise men of London laughed at the idea that there is any such creature—even when they were looking right at one? Yet the ducks just couldn't take it into their families either, for what else do you think it does? It suckles its young, like a pussy-cat! Talk about your sensations; it made the hit of the season—this Animal X from the Antipodes. The learned men of London town, they looked him up and they looked him down, and they came to the same conclusion, at first, that the old gentleman did when he saw the dromedary. They said: "They ain't no such animal!" (Only, of course, being learned men, they used good grammar.) They really did say that in effect, and you can't blame them; for, as if to complete the joke, the first member of the duck-billed mole family to move in scientific society came in like a Christmas turkey; in other words, he was a stuffed specimen. So the men of science said he wasn't real at all; that he was just made up of the parts of other animals. But being true men of science, after all, they finally began looking up the stranger's record among his neighbors back in Australia, and they found there actually are living creatures in that land of strange creatures, just like that specimen, and that they live in burrows which they dig in the banks of the streams. COUSIN ECHIDNA The echidna—you can see one in the New York Zoo—is closely related to our duck-billed friend and is also a native of Australia. It uses that long, tapering nose and those claws to burrow for the ants on which it lives. Still the scientists didn't know what to call this paradox of the animal kingdom; so they named him just that—paradoxicus, Ornythoryncus paradoxicus. A little Greek boy, without having to look it up in a dictionary, would have told us that "ornythoryncus" means "bird-billed"; for it's like those Greek picture words that always told their own story to the little Greeks. As for "paradox" if you don't know what that means, look it up in the dictionary and then look at the Ornythoryncus paradoxicus, and you'll understand. IV. The Beavers Of course you wouldn't like to be a duck-billed mole—nobody would, but I always thought it would be rather nice to be a beaver. The beaver is, in many ways, the most remarkable of all the water people that help make the lands that give us bread. BEAVERS AT WORK AND AT PLAY Whether he's working because he is more industrious than those beavers in the water or because it's recess time with them, the young beaver gnawing the tree seems to be having quite as good a time practising his profession as the others do in playing about. But it is not alone for the amount of work he does that I admire Mr. Beaver so much; it is for his intelligent, not to say brilliant, way of doing it. Suppose, for instance, you had to build a house out in the water, the way our great, great-grandparents, the lake-dwellers, did, to protect yourself from enemies and for other reasons. And then suppose you didn't have any tools; nothing but a pair of paws and a set of teeth. Could you do it? Another thing: The lake-dwellers had plenty of water to build in; plenty, but not too much. The beavers don't have this advantage. They usually build in the water of flowing streams, and they have to make their own lakes. How would you do it; even if you had tools? But remember, being a beaver, you've got nothing to use but two honest paws and a set of teeth. It was with these Mr. Beaver did it all—with his teeth, his paws, and his head; the inside of his head, I mean—his brain. Take the matter of water arrangements. He gets the water to lie quietly and at just the right depth by building his dam across the stream. This dam not only provides him with water of just the right depth to protect his front door from enemies and to keep rushing torrents from carrying his house away, but the spreading out of the original stream bed into a pond helps in gathering the Fall harvest of trees, since it brings the trees nearer to the water's edge, and water transportation among beavers, as among men, is always cheapest. Although dams are usually built of trees which the beavers cut down themselves, they also use cobblestones where trees are scarce; for Mr. Beaver is a very thrifty soul; he doesn't waste material nor time nor effort. Many books about beavers say they cut the trees so they will fall across the stream, but Mills says, in his book on the beaver, written after many years of patient observation, that beavers don't seem to care how the tree falls, just so it doesn't fall on them! Not but what they could cut trees to fall in the water if they thought best; for just watch them build a dam and see how clever they are; cleverer, possibly, than some of us. BEAVERS AT WORK ON A DAM See how many of the features of the building of a beaver dam, as described in our story of these wise little people, you can make out in this picture. Let's see. Say you've got your trees up to where the dam is to be; now how are you going to set them in building the dam? SEE IF YOU'RE AS CLEVER AS MR. BEAVER "Right across the dam," you would say, wouldn't you? That is what most people have said when I have asked them that question; for that is the way men do it. But remember, if you built the dam as men build dams you would have to drive stakes or do something to keep the logs from washing away. Years ago, when writers used to theorize a great deal on how things were done, instead of getting outdoors and watching patiently to see how they actually were done, it was said that Mr. Beaver in building his dam did really drive stakes and that he did it with that big tail of his. But what Mr. Mills found was that the beaver lays his trees lengthwise of the stream. You see why that is, don't you? When the trees are laid lengthwise, the water, instead of striking them broadside, strikes only the end and so there is less likelihood of their being carried away. Another thing, two things, about the trees in the dam—in fact four: 1. It wouldn't do, you see, to lay the trees broadside to the stream, but what position could we give them that would help still further in keeping the water from carrying them away? 2. Shall we use trees with the branches still on them or trees trimmed down like sticks of cord-wood? (What kind do you see in the picture of the beaver dam?) 3. Or shall we use both trimmed and untrimmed trees? If so, why? And how? 4. If we use untrimmed trees, which end shall we put up-stream? The butt or the tip? SECTION OF A BEAVER DAM You can see that there was a sufficient flow of water in the stream from which this sketch of a section of a beaver dam was taken; otherwise the dam would have been plastered with mud to conserve the supply. The longest slope, of course, was up-stream—a fundamental principle in beaver bridge engineering. In building his dam the beaver uses, for the most part, slender green poles trimmed and cut in lengths; but mixed with these are small untrimmed trees which he places with the butt end up-stream, and propped with mud and sticks so that the up end will be a foot or so higher than the down end. In this way, you see, the branches are made to resist the push of the waters against the butt end; while, if they were placed the other way, the current would have a pulling purchase on the butt end. The raising of the ends also lessens the pushing force of the water as it doesn't strike the butt of the tree "full on," as it would otherwise do. And the branches not only help to hold the trees in place, but, together, form a kind of foundation on which to pile and intermix the trimmed poles. The timbers, being cut green, become water-soaked. This makes them heavier and so causes them to sink and helps to hold them in place; while the branches and twigs of the untrimmed trees form a kind of basketwork that catches the sediment and drift of the stream, and so the dam lets less and less water through. The upside stream is plastered by the beavers with mud in cases where the flow of water in the stream is meagre. Otherwise it is left unplastered. You see Mr. Beaver's idea is not to make the dam absolutely water-tight, for then it would be running over all the time and so be worn away. What he wants is a dam that will let the water through slowly and at the same time keep a proper level. BEAVER HOME WITHOUT TIME LOCK Here is a beaver home as it looks before the time lock is put on in the Fall. Mr. Beaver's chief purpose in building these dams seems to be to keep his front-door yard full of water. This may look like a funny idea at first, but in this, as in other things, Mr. Beaver shows he has a very wise head on his shoulders; for one peculiarity of his life is that he is obliged to come and go through the cellar door. As he doesn't want any of his enemies—the wolf, the coyote, and all that class of people—to use this door, he keeps it under water. And in winter-time, when he goes out to the wood-pile to get something to eat, the water must be deep enough so that the pond doesn't freeze solid to the bottom. A BEAVER HOME WITH TIME LOCK Here, as it looks after being made secure against hungry wolves and the Winter winds. As for those professional highwaymen, the wolves and coyotes, that are so much bigger than he is, Mr. Beaver keeps out of their way in Summer, when they don't bother much about him, anyway, as he sticks so close to the water and is hard to catch. In the Winter, when they get hungry and desperate and would break into his house, if they could, he makes it practically burglar-proof, by putting on a time lock; a lock that just won't open, even to a wolf's sharp claws, until Spring. And in the simplest way. Just before Winter sets in Mr. Beaver plasters the outside of his house with mud, and the mud freezes as hard as a stone. But sometimes, even among the beavers, there are shiftless characters, like that Arkansas man who just wouldn't look after his roof. These careless beavers don't plaster their roofs. But then, just see what happens! Some hungry wolf comes along and breaks through and has a nice fat beaver for supper, maybe. And maybe not; for, even in that case, if Mr. Beaver wakes up in time, he dives down through the cellar door and into the tunnel and out under the ice. "Aha! You got fooled that time, didn't you? You mean old thing!" (Can't you almost hear him say it?) In putting the mud coating on their houses or dams the beavers carry it in their fore paws. Sometimes, in a very steep place, they climb up the roof with three feet and hold the mud with one. When they have delivered the mud they use these same little paws to pat it down—not their trowel-like tails, as one would naturally suppose. THAT MYSTERY ABOUT THE BEAVER'S TAIL Then what do they do with those tails? Well, for one thing, they sometimes use them to carry mud by curling them between their legs and holding the mud against their bodies. Perhaps they resort to this way of carrying mud where they have such a steep climb up the roof they need all four legs to climb with; or it may be just an individual fancy of some beavers. For, being really thinkers and not mere machines, acting entirely on what is called instinct, different beavers have different ways of doing things. The beaver's tail is also very useful in swimming, and Mr. Beaver is a great swimmer. You should see him. He swims mostly with his hind feet and tail, holding his fore paws against his breast as a squirrel does when he's sitting up looking at you. His tail he uses as one uses an oar in sculling, turning it slightly on edge as he works it back and forth. But he has two other important uses for this big tail, as we shall now see; for the beavers of this colony we are watching, having put up their dam and built their big house, are now ready for the Fall harvest that is to provide for the long Winter. The beavers are strict vegetarians. Their diet consists of the tender bark of young trees and roots dug from the bottom and along the banks of the ponds in which they live. "But, for mercy's sake, where are they going to get the tender bark of trees in the dead of Winter, when all the trees are frozen solid and the beavers can't get from under the ice anyhow?" Well, Mr. Beaver has thought out just how to do it and we didn't. That's the beauty of being a beaver. What he does is to cut down small trees, trim them, divide them into lengths, and then heap them up in a great pile at his door, under the water. By the time they are three years old beavers feel grown-up; as, indeed, they are in size, although, like certain other young people I could name, they have a great deal yet to learn. At this age they choose their mates and either settle down in the home colony or go away somewhere else. School takes up with the beavers in September. All through September and October the harvest is gathered and preparations made for the long Winter. The baby beavers of the Spring, who by this time are four or five months old, take part in the harvesting; at least they play at it. They don't do much, but they learn a great deal. Now let's all be little beavers for a few minutes and see what we can learn. We are out in the harvest-field—the woods—with father, and he's going to cut down a tree for the Winter food-pile. Watch him. He picks out a young tree something less than six inches thick. Then he looks up as if he wanted to see what kind of a day it was going to be; although the fact is he never bothers his head about the weather. What he is really looking up for is to see if the top of the tree he is going to chop down is likely to get tangled in the tops of other trees when it falls. (All beavers, I should add, don't take this precaution; only the older and wiser ones.) After this inspection he either cuts the tree in two with his long sharp chisel teeth so that it will fall clear of the tangling branches of other trees, or, if he sees he can't prevent this, he moves away to another tree. Just before the tree is ready to fall he thumps the ground several times with his tail to warn other beavers working near by. They all scamper as fast as their fat bodies and short legs will let them. If they are near water, as they usually are—they "plunk" into it. After the tree falls the limbs are cut off, the trunk gnawed into sections four to six feet long, depending on the size of the trunk, the distance from the water, and the number of beavers that are going to help move it. Although, as a rule, only one beaver works on a tree in cutting it down, they all pitch in and help in getting the sections home; dragging them across the ground and into the pond or into one of their wonderful canals. THE BEAVERS AND THEIR PANAMA CANALS The beavers knew all about digging canals long before the days of Colonel Goethals. They dug them for much the same reason we dug the great Panama Canal, to save time and expense in moving freight and for protection from possible enemies. On land the beaver is easy prey for wolves and such, but once in the water he can laugh at them. These canals not only enable him to haul his wood easily and safely, but are just the things to dive into when somebody is after you. Another purpose of the canals is to fill ponds where water is getting low; or to make a pond where there isn't any at all, as in a dry ravine. Whether you look at them from the standpoint of their intelligence and good habits, or their usefulness, beavers are the most interesting of all our little four-legged brothers of field or wood, and it is pleasing to know that many States have passed laws to protect them. SUN BATH AFTER THE SWIM Boys, after an hour or so in the "ole swimmin' hole," like to take a sun bath. That's what these young beavers are doing on a nice grassy spot by the pond. And besides he is such a good fellow, Mr. Beaver is; peaceable, industrious, dependable, and with the best heart in the world! Why, do you know what they do—the beavers—when neighbors get burned out by forest-fires or their houses broken into by a mean old wolf or coyote or anything? Take them right in, children and all! If you were a little beaver you'd have from two to four twin brothers and sisters to start with, and then two to four more for each of the remaining two years before you left home to make your own way in the world. You'd be born with your eyes open and not like a puppy or kitten. And, what do you think, in less than two weeks you could go swimming. Mother would be right with you in case anything happened. Then when you were tired swimming you'd climb up on top of the house and rest and doze in the sun; take your afternoon nap just like any other baby. LITTLE BEAVERS IN THEIR HOME But maybe it wouldn't be your own mamma that would be with you; for lots of sad things happen to beaver people, and when one little beaver's mother dies another mother beaver will take care of him, and all his brothers and sisters besides! Mr. Mills tells in that most interesting book of his about how one day a mother beaver was killed by a hunter who thought he didn't have anything better to do than kill poor little beavers; and the very next evening a lady beaver, who already had four babies of her own, travelled a quarter of a mile with them to the house of her dead neighbor and stayed there and brought all the little orphans up! HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY The crayfish is a thing you've got to take seriously if you want to get the most out of it. Huxley says that a thorough study of a crayfish is almost a whole course in zoology. Think of going to school to a crayfish! But you'd enjoy it, I'm sure. For just look—and these are only a few of the interesting things you will find in Huxley's famous book on "The Crayfish": How they swim backward (no doubt you know this already), and how they walk on the bottom of the water. Why they seem to know the points of the compass—for they prefer rivers that run north and south. Why they are most active toward evening. Where they spend the winter. Why they eat their old clothes. How early in the spring you may expect to find them. When they hatch their eggs and how the mother crayfish uses her tail for a nursery. In what respect they resemble moths. How they chew their meals with their feet and work their jaws like a camel from side to side—only more so! How they grow by fits and starts, and what this has to do with the way they change their clothes. How you can tell the age of a crayfish. (You don't do it by looking at its teeth. You couldn't see its teeth anyway, because they are in its stomach.) And all this in less than the first fifty pages of a book, which has more than 350. One of the most famous of the crab family, not only on account of his part in agriculture, but because of his funny ways, is the robber-crab. You should read about the wild life of adventure some of these crabs lead—regular Robinson Crusoes who get wrecked on islands far away from home and build houses there and shift for themselves in many ingenious ways, just as the human Robinson Crusoe did. Kingsley's "Madam How and Lady Why" has some interesting pages about them; and so has Darwin's "Voyage Around the World." Of the many things that have been written about beavers the following are among the most interesting: The story of the beaver in "Stories of Adventure," edited by Edward Everett Hale; "The Forest Engineer," by T. W. Higginson, in Johonnott's "Glimpses of the Animal World"; "How the Beaver Builds His House," in "The Animal Story Book," edited by Lang; "The Builders," in Lang's "Ways of Wood Folks"; and "The House in the Water," by Roberts. The most interesting book of all on beavers, however, is "The Beaver World," by Mills, referred to in this chapter. I have not told you one-half of the remarkable things you will find about them in this book. One of the most curious is about how a beaver sometimes gets his breath in the winter time. He may have to travel quite a distance under the ice, and one good breath has to last him to the end of the journey. "But does he hold his breath all this time? How can he?" He can't. He just uses the same breath over again. See how he does it. The Mills book tells. Look up the muskrat and compare his ways with those of the beaver. In the "Country Life Reader" you will find a graphic description of one of the perils of life for the beavers and their cousins the muskrats; namely in attacks by the great horned owl.
CITY LIFE AMONG THE FLAMINGOES We don't have to go to Florida to get this bird's-eye view of a flamingo city. It is one of the habitat groups in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and reproduces perfectly the architecture and the social life of these interesting people.
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