The Beech and the Pigeon

by DONALD CULROSS PEATTIE

1

A BEECH is, in almost any landscape where it appears, the finest tree to be seen. There are - many taller trees, and many that attain to moments of showier glory, like the Sugar Maple in autumnal coloration, or a Dogwood starred with snowy blossoms. But, taken in all seasons and judged by all that makes a tree noble — strength combined with grace, balance, longevity, hardiness, health — the Beech is all that we want a tree to be. And more besides, for it is a tree deep-rooted in the history of our people, in this new world and the old one, and figures beloved to us in both fable and fact move under its ancient boughs.

Far down the aisles of the forest the Beech is identifiable by the gleam of its wondrously smooth bark, not furrowed even by extreme old age. Here it will be free of branches for full half its length, the sturdy boughs then gracefully down-sweeping. The gray bole has a further beauty in the way it flutes out at the base into strong feet, to the shallow, wide-spreading roots. And the luxuriant growth of mosses on the north side of such a tree, together with the mottling of lichens, adds to the look it wears of wisdom and serenity.

The elegant clear gray of the bark extends from the trunk to the main mighty boughs, then to the hundreds of branches, and out to the thousands of branchlets. So that when the tree stands naked in winter it seems to shine through the forest, almost white in contrast with the dun colors all about it, or against the dark evergreen backgrounds of the Canadian Hemlock and White Pine with which it associates. In very early spring an unearthly pale pure green clothes the tree in a misty nimbus of light. As the foliage matures, it becomes a translucent blue-green through which the light, but not the heat, of the summer day comes clearly.

And in autumn these delicate leaves, borne chiefly on the ends of the branchlets and largely in one plane, in broad flat sprays, turn a soft clear yellow. Then is the Beech translated. As the sun of Indian summer bathes the great tree, it stands in a profound autumnal calm, enveloped in a golden light that hallows all about it.

As the leaves fall, late in the season, the twigs are revealed wearing a tinge of reddish brown, and the little triangular nuts can be seen, that with the first frost begin to drop. Fruit is abundant, in general, only every third year on any one tree, and commonly a heavy or a light harvest of the nuts prevails over a whole region.

In the days of America’s virgin grandeur, forests of this luminous and stately tree covered a large part of Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and central Michigan. But they bespoke their own destruction, for the pioneers soon learned that the Beech was a sign of good soil. It loves what the farmer loves — rich limestone overlain by deep, level, dark loams. So in the Ohio valley the axe soon felled the growth of centuries, followed swiftly by the plow. Today, speeding easily through that candid country, the Middle Westerner may marvel at a report written from southern Indiana in June of 1833 by that princely traveler, Maximilian of Wied: —

“We came to a tall, gloomy forest, consisting almost wholly of large Beech trees, which afforded a most refreshing shade. The forest continued without intermission, . . . the lofty crowns of the trees shut out the sky from our view. They were the most splendid forests I had yet seen in America.” He speaks of how the canals in Ohio ran through Beech forests, and even near Rochester, New York, finds them “wild and magnificent,” adding with, perhaps, a homesick sigh, “The dense Beech forests constantly reminded us of the scenery of Germany.”

For to the newcomer to this savage land the Beech tree had a kindly look of familiarity. Our species does not differ greatly from the Beech of Europe, Fagus sylvatica, which from time immemorial had already played a great role in human life. Beech nuts seem to have been a food of the New Stone Age man, just as they still are eaten by the peasants of central Europe. The most abundant tree in its wide range, Beech provided the principal fuel, both for keeping warm and for the charcoal used in the Old World’s iron smelters. It supplied much dimension timber, a vast quantity of furniture wood, handles of agricultural tools, wooden shoes, and too many other uses to number. Indeed, it was the general utility hardwood of Europe.

And on the Beech was written, probably, the first page of European literature. For, it is said, the earliest Sanskrit characters were carved on strips of Beech bark; the custom of inscribing the temptingly smooth boles of Beeches came to Europe with the Indo-European people who entered the continent from Asia. Indeed, our word book comes from the Anglo-Saxon boc, meaning a letter or character, which in turn derives from the AngloSaxon bece, for Beech. So if you find a big old Beech tree in the woods, hacked by some love-struck boy with the outline of a heart and his girl’s initials in it, forgive him. He is but following a custom older than Shakespeare, who also records it: —

And Virgil asks: —

An epic line in pure American vein might have been read by all who passed that way, until about 1880, on a Beech tree on Carroll Creek, in Washington County, Tennessee, on the old stage road between Blountville and Jonesboro: —

This tree fell in 1916, the scars of the inscription, but not the exact wording, still visible. It was 28 1/2 feet in girth, and 70 feet high, and its age was estimated by the Forest Service to be 365 years. So it began to grow in the year 1551, half a century before Orlando mooned about Rosalind in Arden, and was an ancient of two centuries when Daniel Boone inscribed his hunter’s triumph on it.

For such glory, and for its own beauty, is the Beech tree justly famous, not for more mundane usefulness today. Though in Europe the Beech was utilized in every part, by a wood-hungry civilization, as the best of available hardwoods, in America the early settlers soon found twenty hardwood trees better than Beech. Here it has never been more than a second-rate tree, at best, for service, when compared with Walnut’s beauty, Hickory’s strength, White Pine’s dimension timbers. Not as hard as Birch or Maple, it has the further disadvantage of being heavier than they, When green it is tough to split, yet it is all too apt to split when seasoned. It is knotty, and has but half the value of White Oak in resistance to atmospheric decay. So, though it has a long list of modern uses, they are most of them trivial, such as for boxes and crates, barrels and crossties, down to picnic plates and spoons, culminating — for humility — in the lowly clothespin.

2

LET other trees do the work of the world. Let the Beech stand, where still it holds its ground, a monument to past glories. Of these, none is more wholly vanished than the Passenger Pigeon, to which the Beech played lavish host. It was upon the mast of Beech nuts that the great flocks fed, and their seeming migration, Audubon writes, was more exactly a quest, by the million, for rich harvest of the Beech.

“As soon as the pigeons discover a sufficiency of food to entice them to alight, they fly around in circles, reviewing the country below. During their revolutions, on such occasions, the dense mass which they form exhibits a beautiful appearance, as it changes its direction, now displaying a glistening sheet of azure, when the backs of the birds come simultaneously into view, and anon, suddenly presenting a mass of rich deep purple. They then pass lower, over the woods, and for a moment are lost among the foliage, but again emerge and are seen gliding aloft. They now alight, but the next moment, as if suddenly alarmed, they take to wing, producing by the flapping of their wings a noise like the roar of distant thunder, and sweep through the forests to see if danger is near. Hunger, however, soon brings them to the ground. When alighted, they are seen industriously throwing up the withered leaves in quest of the fallen mast.”

Speaking of the night roosts of the pigeons in the Beech forests of Kentucky, he goes on to write: —

“It was ... in a portion of the forest where the trees were of great magnitude, and where there was little underwood. ... I arrived there nearly two hours before sunset. Few pigeons were then to be seen, but a great number of persons, with horses and wagons, guns and ammunition, had already established encampments on the borders.

“Two farmers . . . had driven upward of three hundred hogs to be fattened on the pigeons which were to be slaughtered. . . . Many trees two feet in diameter, I observed, were broken off at no great distance from the ground; and the branches of many of the largest and tallest had given way, as if the forest had been swept by a tornado. Everything proved to me that the number of birds resorting to this part of the forest must be immense beyond conception. . . . Suddenly there burst forth a general cry of ‘Here they come!’ The noise which they made, though yet distant, reminded me of a hard gale at sea, passing through the rigging of a close-reefed vessel. As the birds arrived and passed over me, I felt a current of air that surprised me.

. . . The fires were lighted, and a magnificent as well as wonderful and almost terrifying sight presented itself. The pigeons, arriving by thousands, alighted everywhere, one above another, until solid masses as large as hogsheads were formed on the branches all round. Here and there the perches gave way under the weight with a crash and, falling to the ground, destroyed hundreds of the birds beneath.”

So together they fell, bird and tree, from their supreme place in the history of American Nature. For after the Beech forests were swept away by the man with axe and plow, the fate of the Passenger Pigeon, the most marvelous bird on the North American continent, perhaps in the world, was scaled. Less by mass slaughter than by the disappearance of Beech mast were the shining flocks driven to extinction.

When Audubon was young, in Kentucky, in love with his young wife Lucy, he painted his “Passenger Pigeon” — a pair of them — and to some of us it is his greatest picture. The curve of the soft necks, the lift of shining wings, are eloquent, unconsciously, of a tenderness and passion not all theirs. It is on a Beech bough that he has perched his pigeon pair, and two withered beechen leaves tell us that the season is autumn when the mast is ripe. An autumn that will not come again but lingers, immortal, in those leaves that cannot fall.