Penn's Woods: A Romantic View

By Bernard Charles Barnick

Inspired by Walden and by the nature writings of Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, and John Muir, and influenced by the poetry of William Wordsworth, William Cullen Bryant, and other Romantic poets, Bernard Charles Barnick sought to write about nature with feeling and with imagination. In a book designed to make one feel at home in nature, Mr. Barnick shares many of his own observations of birds and other wildlife dating back to his childhood, proceeding through his numerous outdoor excursions in the Wyoming Valley of Northeastern Pennsylvania, and including many of his travels throughout the state. He has combined his love of birds with a love of nature, astronomy, literature, and history to form a uniquely poetic or Romantic view of "Penn's Woods"—a state that is rich both in natural history and in human history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781644628140

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Tamerac

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

—William Wordsworth

Home is not just a building; it is also an area. Whenever I have traveled home by bus or by airplane and have gotten into a conversation with the person next to me, one of us has usually asked the other, Where ya from? (This is almost a standard question between two strangers engaged in polite conversation.) The answer to this question, however, was never a specific address; invariably, it was but the name of a certain city, town, or area. If, by chance, we both happened to be from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania (which is my hometown), the next question would go something like, Whereabouts in Wilkes-Barre do you live? Although Wilkes-Barre covers a fairly large area, each of us would assume that the other was somewhat familiar with the entire city. Normally, the reason anyone is familiar with a large urban or rural area is that he has lived and traveled within it a great deal, and he has had time to learn how the streets run, where the centers of activity are, and who some of the people are who live there.

Because a writer and a reader are like two strangers meeting for the first time, I would like to start out by describing the area I am from, even to those who may now be living there, since many locations are not at all the same in appearance as they once were. I wish to describe several places that, in effect, no longer exist, except in the minds of a small number of people, before even in memory, they cease to exist also. The thought has occurred to me that perhaps no one may care to hear about these places, so I must presume on the reader’s kind indulgence in this regard.

It was my good fortune to have been born at a time when the uneven, ever-changing boundary between the urban world and the natural world passed through the section of Wilkes-Barre known as Miners Mills. Near my home was a profound division. On one side lay the city, with its houses, paved streets, and fences; on the other side lay the woods, with its green hills, streams, and mountains. Had I been born ten years later (in 1954 instead of 1944), I would have grown up well within the suburbs, which are always extending their borders and encroaching on the domain of nature; but instead, I was able to spend many hours of my childhood exploring the woods nearby.

A favorite place of mine was a shallow ravine through which diminutive railroad trains (known in the coal regions as lōkies) would pass while hauling coal from mines up in the mountains down to the breaker, where the large chunks of coal would be crushed into smaller, more combustible pieces. On the sides of this ravine were several dense thickets of hawthorns, locust trees, and birches, which served as home to a variety of birds. First, there was a least flycatcher, whose emphatic call of che-beck! che-beck! could often be heard coming from somewhere in one of the thickets. Next, there was a yellow warbler, whose brief line of song (written in Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds as tsee-tsee-tsee-tsee-titi-wee) seemed equally as frequent. Occasionally, both birds could be heard in the same thicket, at which times they sounded like two proponents of conflicting views engaged in a perpetual disagreement, the one denying what the other asserted, and neither reconsidering his own position. Then there was a house wren, whose restless curiosity and repetitious chattering song had all the manner of a typical neighborhood gossip. But there were a few more versatile singers also: a catbird, a brown thrasher, and a wood thrush. These birds were all good improvisers, and seemed to enjoy displaying their skills. The wood thrush, in particular, had refined his song to a high degree of excellence. Although he sang only two or three notes at a time, he delivered each phrase in solemn, melodious tones, usually ending in a soft trill.

A frequent visitor to the ravine was a yellow-shafted flicker, one bird that always seemed to have a good time, if his apparent laughter were any indication. His loud rollicking song was in marked contrast to the low, snicker-like call of a yellow-billed cuckoo, another visitor to the ravine that I often heard though rarely saw. Once, by accident, I happened to spot this bird perched at the edge of a thicket, but whenever I pursued his strange, almost cynical voice, I could never catch more than a glimpse of him. He seemed every bit as elusive as his more famous European counterpart, so aptly characterized by William Wordsworth in his poem, To the Cuckoo:

Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring!

Even yet thou art to me

No bird, but an invisible thing,

A voice, a mystery;

The same whom in my schoolboy days

I listened to; that Cry

Which made me look a thousand ways

In bush, and tree, and sky.

To seek thee did I often rove

Through woods and on the green;

And thou wert still a hope, a love;

Still longed for, never seen.

(13–24)

Other regular visitors to the ravine were a downy woodpecker, a Baltimore oriole, a rufous-sided towhee, and a cedar waxwing. But if I had to pick the lord or proprietor of this shady estate, I would have to name the cardinal. This beautiful bird was the only one to remain near the ravine all winter long. Often I would see him darting in and out of the thickets, when all the trees were bare and the abandoned nests of summer lay scattered among the branches.

These then were some of my neighbors, and I enjoyed listening to them sing, especially on warm summer evenings just before the sun went down. It was on such an evening that I first heard the song of a cardinal. I was sitting under a birch tree, in the deepening shadows, when suddenly I heard several clear whistles, followed by a short series of chirps. The song was loud, yet it retained an exceptional mellowness of tone. I listened in delight again and again while my eyes searched vainly among the treetops for its source. Finally, in the glow of twilight, I saw a blur of red drop down from a high branch into the darkness below. His performance was over, as was the day itself, but I was to hear his song again on many another occasion.

This cardinal and his mate often came looking for seeds in the weedy field near our house. One winter, I mounted a homemade bird feeder (made from an empty orange-crate) on the top of our picket fence and placed some sunflower seeds inside. Shortly after the first snowfall, the male cardinal discovered it. All the smaller house or English sparrows, apparently flustered by the arrival of such an imposing figure, fluttered nervously about at first, but then slowly gathered around him while he consumed the better part of the meal. In his regal red plumage and stately crest, he stood out like a prince among a drab company of paupers.

By the end of February, the male cardinal begins to sing very early in the morning. Along with the blooming of the pussy willow and the rising of the bright star, Arcturus (in late evening), it is a sure sign that spring is near. I remember waking up one frosty morning in March and hearing his familiar voice in the hush of twilight. As the sun began to rise, I saw him perched on a high branch, facing to the east and becoming like a flame of red himself. It was a moment to inspire anyone with the least aspiration of writing poetry to try capturing in verse. Would that I were able to sing the praises of this bird as ably as a Shelley or Keats, but I must offer this brief observation instead. How little thought we give each morning to enjoying the new day before us. Soon upon awakening, we anticipate whatever duties or problems that await us during the day. We quickly reassume all our customary worries, fears, desires, and ambitions, while barely paying the slightest attention to the natural world. Perhaps the birds differ most from human beings in this respect: they always seem to spend at least a few minutes each morning in welcoming another day.

Beyond the ravine lay a field of blueberry bushes, which was heavily grown in with clumps of birch trees, aspens, and hawthorns. There I spent many hours of my childhood picking blueberries, and I must say that I cannot think of a more pleasant occupation. At what other job can one sit down in the shade on a hot summer day, while listening to the music of the towhee and the field sparrow, and partake of the fruits of his labor at any moment he so desires. Nevertheless, as in any occupation, there is a certain knack to berry picking that is acquired through experience. The biggest and ripest berries do not always grow on top of the bushes; often, they are hidden in tight clusters on the insides, and can best be extracted by pushing aside the leaves and stems with one hand, while using the other to pull off several clusters together. A few leaves may come off with the berries, but these can either be sifted through one’s fingers or else poured into the jar to be separated later. Using the latter technique, I would be able to pick a quart of these delicious fruits in about twenty minutes. Such time, though, was well spent, for not only were the berries free for the taking, but they also had a tangier taste (probably due to the high acidity of the soil) than the commercially grown blueberries sold in stores.

Past the field of blueberries, a denser woods began, which consisted mainly of tall oak trees and of low shrubby thickets of scrub oak. There was a path through these woods leading to a small pond, widely known in the area as the Tamerac; but how it received this name, I have never been able to determine. Tamarack, or larch, is a northern conifer that sheds its needles during the winter, and although there were some European larch trees fairly close to the pond, I do not remember seeing any around the pond itself.

The Tamerac had neither an inlet nor an outlet; it was merely a low-lying spot where water collected. Its shape was generally oval, being about twice as long as it was wide, but during the summer months, it would often shrink considerably, becoming almost circular. At no time of the year, however, did it exceed more than about a hundred yards in width. Lengthwise, both ends tapered off into moist, swampy depressions. One of these was filled with deep slimy mud, while the other was grown in with tall reeds and cattails that extended out into the shallow water. The margin of the pond was lined with rushes, sedges, and dense brush, except at the end of the woodland path, where there was a grove of red oaks overlooking the water. These trees had attained a height of about seventy feet, and may have been well over a hundred years old. In the morning, their reflections covered almost the entire pond, lending the color of the seasons to the water, while the surface of the pond provided the only mirror large enough to catch their lofty crowns.

Throughout the year, the Tamerac was a natural haven for birds. Red-winged blackbirds, blue jays, flickers, downy woodpeckers, hairy woodpeckers, chickadees, white-breasted nuthatches, wood thrushes, brown thrashers, mourning doves, ring-necked pheasants, redstarts, black-and-white warblers, chestnut-sided warblers, yellow warblers, and yellowthroats lived in the surrounding woods. Barn swallows constantly flitted through the air, catching insects over the pond; and two of nature’s most able fishermen, a belted kingfisher and a green heron, were frequent visitors to the water’s edge, for somehow, the pond contained a stock of catfish and other small fish to be had. It was during the migration seasons, however, that the Tamerac became a real mecca of bird activity. In early spring, when the pond would attain its greatest size, small numbers of ducks, geese, and grebes would stop there on their way north; and in the fall, although the pond would usually be much smaller then, the woods around the Tamerac would teem with hordes of young warblers, vireos, blackbirds, thrushes, sparrows, flycatchers, and other small birds, all heading south for the winter.

During high school, I often visited the pond on Saturday mornings or on other days off from school. Several such days stand out in my mind particularly. One was a day in late February, on which I visited the Tamerac about midway through the morning. The weather was quite cold, and the pond seemed to be frozen solidly. While walking across the ice, however, I heard two sharp cracking sounds, which greatly startled me for a moment, but I continued safely to the other side. Except for these internal movements within the pond itself, a deep silence encompassed the Tamerac, as if every spark of life around it had long been extinguished. But just as I was about to leave, I heard a solitary black-capped chickadee calling from somewhere in the snow-covered woods. His short plaintive call, which can easily be imitated, consisted of one high pitched whistle followed by two shorter ones on a slightly lower pitch (often written as fee-bee-ee). It was melancholy, but with a measure of hope. Somehow, it seemed to require an answer, as if addressed to any living thing and not just to another stray member of some hardy flock. I tried to return his calls as best I could, and for a few minutes, his voice grew louder; but then it became more and more distant again until it was too faint to be heard. He had vanished in the silent woods to a place as unbeknown as that from which he had emerged. Nevertheless, I could not help wondering if this bird had heard me or not and, if so, whether his spirit had been as uplifted as mine had been.

It was on a morning in March that I next visited the pond. The sky was clear, and the sun was reflecting brightly off the snow. On such days, because one’s clothing absorbs the reflected heat, it always seems much warmer than it is; although the temperature was near the freezing point, it felt almost like a summer day. The going was slow, however, because of a weak frozen crust to the snow that gave way at every step. While I was still some distance from the pond, I could hear the voices of numerous red-winged blackbirds combined in elated song: a hint of the basic change that had taken place at the Tamerac since my previous visit. On arriving at the pond, I saw that its shell of ice had been broken and that the water was breathing freely again in the sunshine. I then noticed about a dozen ducks grouped together near the middle of the pond. They had seen me also and had begun swimming toward the opposite shore. But a male and female mallard, which were separate from the rest of the flock, sprang into flight, and before flying off together, made several wide circles over the woods, during which their wings whistled softly above the treetops. Shortly afterward, a plover rose into the air from the opposite side of the pond. It made a few circles of its own over the water while repeating its name in rapid cadence (killdeér, killdeér, killdeér, killdeér); having thus identified itself sufficiently, it landed in almost