Feathers to Burn

You who have stood in the fresh air of morning out in the middle of some vast golfing course; who have seen and felt and smelled all that can be conveyed to the soul by a perfect patch of putting green, every blade barbered, and doused with dew, and breathing the heady fragrance of fertility; who have seen Washington bent grass woven into a smooth green rug the size of a farm, and have promised yourself that some day, regardless of expense, you would sow a piece of this same sort of carpeting — you will know what I mean when I say that what I wished to achieve around my house was grass. Not anything ostentatious or extravagantly turfy, to be handed down from eldest son to eldest son, but something that I could cut, and clip, and refer to casually as ‘the grass’ without seeming to exaggerate.

‘What this place needs is nitrogen,’ I declared to Amelia one fine spring morning. ‘That will not only stimulate the grass, but it will help solve the dandelion question.’ And she agreed with me that, if anything would do that, we ought to get some.

I had looked into the dandelion question at odd times, after spending several seasons in the vain delusion that I could fight the weeds one at a time, and I had found that the most accredited line of attack is to make the grass so live and lusty that it simply crowds the dandelions out. That looked like good doctrine; it proceeds on a formula that Shakespeare himself frequently speaks of: ‘One fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail.’ And again, ‘One nail by strength drives out another.’ This is one solution of the weed question in general, and it is the whole secret, I verily believe, by which the English have been enabled to build up and establish such wonderful surfaces of turf. It is not that they have fought the weeds so incessantly in time past, as their head gardeners will tell you, but that they have known how to make use of the powers of nature.

For something less than a century the sea craft of England — brigs, barks, and barkentines — have plied back and forth to Chile and Peru, and they have come back loaded with guano from the islands off the coast, and with saltpetre from the mainland. It is a strange thought that the principal ingredients of success in both war and peace — the main elements of gunpowder and of fertilizer — are the products of birds. To birds we have been indebted for any great access of free force by which one nation gets ahead of another. At least it was the product of birds up to the time when we managed, by such superpower as we have at Niagara Falls, and such a plant as we built at Muscle Shoals, to get our nitrogen direct from the atmosphere.

And all this guano the English have put on their soil — in addition to what they conserved by their raising of live stock. They have, indeed, ‘surveyed mankind from China to Peru’; and in Peru they found mines of manure greater in true value than all that Pizarro ever dreamed of. At one time they even brought shiploads of mummies from Egypt and turned them into the fertilizer account, it being a simple scientific fact that all flesh is grass. As our own Emerson says, ‘The German and Irish millions, like the Negro, have a great deal of guano in their destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic, and carted over America, to ditch and to drudge, to make corn cheap, and then to lie down prematurely to make a green spot of grass on the prairie.’

There are many facts like these that are strictly to the point — namely, nitrogen; and the way I came to know them all is that I left no leaf unturned in my efforts to get grass and start a garden.

It was while I was in this general state of mind that I made my great discovery in a henhouse. An aged farmer of the neighborhood, who had been slowly and surely declining in vitality until finally the sources of ambition had almost ceased to tick, had recently left his place and gone to the city to live. Upon opening the door of the deserted henhouse one day shortly after, I was amazed to find what a legacy of fertility his long negligence had been piling up. Guano! Unleached nitrogen of a quality that would have been worth transporting all the way from Callao to Liverpool. For five or ten years, I should say, it had been accreting under conditions identical with those of the Peruvian coast; by which I mean that the roof was in perfect condition and had not leaked a drop. It is this condition of rainlessness that distinguishes the coast of Peru; and especially those outlying islands where the unnumbered greedy sea birds, casting about over the ocean and feeding on fish, come in to find a footing and spend a crowded night. The guano, even where it has gathered for centuries and filled up the valleys a hundred feet in depth, has not lost an atom of its nitrogen by leaching.

The business transaction that now lay before me proved an easy one. It was not hard to get the owners to accept money for a commodity so little valued by them, especially as I was to get a man and pay the charge of hauling. This latter I attended to without delay, and that afternoon I had the pleasure of seeing the whole rich cargo unloading here and there and spreading a magic carpet on the ground. And now all that was needed was rain.

This too arrived with no great delay — a gentle, warm, deliquescing rain that entered right into the chemistry of the situation, melting the guano down and carrying it slowly into the earth. That night I lay awake through several pleasant periods, entering in imagination into the stirring forces of nature. I was not so inexperienced as to expect any great results in a day or two, much less in one night. But on the following morning, when the sun came out with new power after the rain, I was astonished at the whole new scene about me. Every part of the yard was now covered, not with grass, but with feathers.

The scintillating R. G. Ingersoll once said of an oversanguine and visionary man, ‘Show him an egg and at once the air is full of feathers.’ This saying came to mind as I gazed upon the scene; and it seemed as if all the optimists on earth had been using my place for a camp ground.

There is something very inappropriate, and hence unsatisfying, about having your lawn covered with feathers. People have a way of asking questions, and you are always telling the same story over and over — to their evident amusement. The grocer’s delivery man, coming out with some supplies, immediately took occasion to remark that the place looked ‘as if there had been an explosion in a feather foundry.’ A neighbor, whom we had usually found helpful and considerate, studied the problem for a while and then merely said, ’I see you folks have been feathering your nest.’ Our American sense of humor, which too often consists in taking other people’s troubles lightly, needs but a situation like this to feather the barbed shaft of wit or rig up a ridiculous little flight of fancy.

For these reasons I would have got rid of the feathers at once had the thing been possible. But, after giving the subject considerable attention, I was unable to think of a way to do it. When you consider that chicken feathers pass right through a rake, and that a broom only causes each little quill to dig into the dirt or weave its way more intricately into the short grass, the matter becomes no small problem. I should hate to have to pluck even one chicken by the process of picking one feather at a time; and when you consider how these feathers were scattered about the place, how was a man to pick two or more at once?

Of the several varieties of Herculean labors, the most baffling are not those that have to do with weight, or size, or hardness, but those that cope with numerosity. That is how we came to have African slavery in this country. It was not because we had great burdens to lift — a thing that jacks and rollers and pulleys will easily do; or because we had any powerful pushing or pulling to be done — a matter of small concern in an age of steam and coal. It was because we had cotton to pick. Tons and tons of textile material to be gathered in, one light little tuft at a time!

I do not know how long those feathers would have lain there, gradually mixing with the soil, had I not had a new and original idea.

It so happened that at this time I had been greatly annoyed by some English sparrows that had decided to build somewhere about the house and kept finding some new place to set to work in as fast as I routed them out of the old. I had learned a great deal about sparrows during my years of residence in old Chicago — and by old Chicago I mean the Chicago of pre-automobile days. There are human beings living in the big cities to-day who hardly know what a sparrow or a fly is, so great has been the biological revolution effected by the automobile; but in those days the millions of dirty little sparrows mingled on the sidewalks with the metropolitan crowds, and so used to city life were they that they never stepped aside farther than the curbstone or the gutter. The sparrow was the only bird that I had had an opportunity to study to any extent; and there were two things that I had learned about the species. One is that an English sparrow will not, under any circumstances, go off and build a nest in a tree like other birds. He has no use for nature, and insists on attaching himself to mankind. The other is that a sparrow has no mechanical notion of constructing a nest; he simply gathers a great quantity of rubbish and lays it down as a sort of loose mattress. No time is lost in building; it is all going and coming.

I had learned to dislike sparrows as being too persistent. And when I moved out into the country expecting to see nothing but the birds of nature, I was decidedly displeased to find that the sparrows had now moved out where the horses were. They were about everywhere, defying the farmer’s shotgun; and, being driven from one place to another, they had decided to come and live with me.

I routed them out of one place after another, closing all nooks and openings till finally I had a house that proved to be sparrowproof. But later I built a combination laundry and garage in which an enterprising pair soon discovered an opportunity. In building the bottom of an overhanging cornice, the last board to go in proved to be a foot short of the required length. As the hole was not conspicuous, nor very vital in its effects, I let the matter go until a more convenient time. But it was hardly two days before a couple of sparrows found this entrance to a beautiful covered hallway, and began to fill it with trash. I at once went to town and bought a square foot of lumber. And I came home and closed that hole and carefully painted over it.

It was shortly after this incident that I was confronted with the problem arising out of my effort to improve the grass. Lying in bed one night and thinking upon the general subject of feathers, I had an idea. While it might seem bizarre, I felt it would prove practical.

Intent upon trying it out, I arose early the next morning; and, having equipped myself with claw hammer, cold chisel, and a small wrecking bar, I set to work opening up the hole in the cornice — not without splitting the new board and making many splinters. So that Amelia, noting my strange doings, came out to inquire why I was tearing down the garage.

‘I am going,’ said I, ‘to let that pair of sparrows come back here again. You know sparrows are very fond of chicken feathers. All the trash that I tore out of those tile ventilators, before I closed them up, had a large proportion of feathers in it. The sparrows had to go half a mile for those feathers. Now I am going to let this couple come back and use these feathers right on the place.’

‘But do you suppose they could ever use all the feathers we have here?’

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘A pair of sparrows can do a lot between daylight and dark. And if I take what they have collected every evening and burn it up, they will naturally set to work and gather more. You can’t stop a sparrow. They are persistent. And, that being the case, I am going to let them work for me by the day.’

As I do not wish to waste any of the reader’s time analyzing and explaining my own pleasant reaction during the days that followed, let me state at once that the scheme worked. It was perfectly practical. I had at last found some use for a sparrow. All I had to do was to sit in my study, engaged in my usual work; and whenever a sparrow flew past with a feather I would reflect upon the beauties and benefits of the study of nature. The sociable little chipping sparrow, our native species, always lines its neat nest with horsehair. The goldfinch uses thistledown. The shrike values a certain proportion of soft little feathers in building. The pewee and the ruby-throated humming bird construct their nests outwardly of lichens. If you come across a nest lined with nothing but discarded snake skins, and occasionally a piece of onion skin, you may know that it is the work of the great-crested flycatcher. As for the English sparrow, one may say that he is a glutton for chicken feathers, as well as almost any sort of trash. I even knew of an English sparrow picking up a nice soft cigarette that had been cast aside; and as the cigarette was not fully extinguished when it reached the nest, the fire department had to cope with a conflagration that had got a beautiful start.

Professional naturalists say that English sparrows ‘line’ their nests with feathers; but as a sparrow does not really shape anything that could be properly lined, I consider this a poor use of English. The sparrow piles on chicken feathers — the more he can get the better; and I do not doubt that he would prefer a feather bed.

At the regular evening rite of burning the feathers, Amelia would hover about, on the windward side of the incense, and express her sympathy for the hard-working little couple for whose efforts to raise a family I had so little feeling. But I kept on burning — though one cannot say in strict truth that feathers burn. They shrink and shrivel and curl and writhe as if they felt the fire; one may say that he burns them at the stake. But still I kept on burning.

I got about two quarts at a crop. When all were gone from the whole surrounding lawn, except a few wing feathers that I had to pick up myself, I got another board at the lumber yard and carefully closed the hole and painted over it. And from that day to this I have not had an English sparrow around the place.