Some Spring Days in Iowa | Page 9

And think of
what else he says of it: 'Ovary ovoid, stigma sessile, undulate, seeds
covering the lateral placenta, each enclosed in an aril.' Now it may be
safe for pigs and billy-goats to tackle such a compound as that, but we
boys all like to know what we are eating, and I cannot but feel that the
public health officials of every township should require this formula of
Dr. Gray's to be printed on every one of these big loaded pills, if that is
what they are really made of."
Another interesting plant is the trillium erectum, which with the
trillium recurvatum, is now to be found in the woods hereabouts. The
flowers of the trillium erectum are ill scented, carrion scented, if you
please. Now the botanists have found that this odor, which is so
unpleasant to the human nostrils, does the plant a real service by
attracting the common green flesh-flies, such as are seen in the
butchershops in the summer-time. They eat the pollen, which is

supposed to taste as it smells and thus as they go from flower to flower
they carry pollen from one blossom to another and so secure for the
plant cross-pollination.
So we may walk from one flower to another until the morning wears to
a bright noon and the afternoon wanes into a songful sunset.
* * * * *
In the swamp, where the red-winged blackbird is building her bulky
nest between the stems of the cat tail, and the prairie marsh wren is
making her second or third little globular nest in a similar place, there
is a blaze of yellow from the marsh marigolds which make masses of
succulent stems and leaves, crowned with pale gold, as far up the marsh
as the eye can reach. In Iowa, it is in May, rather than in June, that "the
cowslip startles the meadows green" and "the buttercup catches the sun
in its chalice." And it is in late April or early May that "the robin is
plastering his house hard by." By the way, ought not the poet to have
made it "her" house? It is the mother bird who seems to do the
plastering. Both birds work on the structure, but it appears to be the
female who carries most of the mud and who uses her faded red apron
for a trowel as she moves round in her nest pushing her breast against
the round wall of the adobe dwelling to spread the mud evenly. The
work on one particular nest was done in late April when there was
nothing on the elm but the seed fringes to screen the builder as she
worked. Then the four light greenish-blue eggs were laid. A red squirrel
got one of them one day. Disregarding the squeakings and scoldings of
the anxious robins, he sat on a limb holding the egg in his forepaws and
bit a hole in one side of it. Then he drained the contents, dropped the
shell to the ground and was about to get another egg when he was
driven off. Apparently he forgot the location of the nest after that, for
the other three eggs hatched out safely.
* * * * *
The air is filled with bird music. It began with the larks, closely
followed by the robins, and then the noise of the crows. No change in
the program since the days of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida

when:
"The busy day Wak'd by the lark, hath roused the ribald crows."
Then came the liquid notes of the cowbirds, like the pouring of mingled
molasses and olive oil. Three handsome fellows in ebony and dark
brown sit on the branch of a tall elm and just beneath them sit three
brownish gray females, all in a row. Cowbird No. 1 comes nearer the
end of the branch, ruffles out his head as if he were about to have a sick
spell and then emits that famous molasses and oil kind of whistle,
sufficient to identify the cowbird anywhere. The other males repeat his
example and meanwhile the females look on with approving eyes, as if
it was a vaudeville performance by amateurs in polite society. The
cowbirds, male and female, are all free lovers. There is no mating
among them. The female lays her eggs in some other bird's nest, like
the English cuckoo, as if she were too busy with the duties and
pleasures of society to care for her own children.
A diskcissel[TN-4] sits on a tree instead of a reed or a bush as usual
and sings "See, see, Dick Cissel, Cissel." Chewinks are down
scratching among the dry leaves with the white-throated sparrows, their
strong-muscled legs sending the leaves flying as if a barnyard hen were
doing the scratching.