USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > The story of Essex County, Volume I > Part 14
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As for the animals, the wild geese still fly overhead, there are rattlesnakes in South Peabody and the Lynn Woods, and a few per- sons still living have netted passenger pigeons. This passenger pigeon, now extinct, was both a migrant and a common summer resi- dent. Even as late as 1872, it was still fairly abundant. Then it went suddenly. The last records for the county, both by C. W. Townsend, are a small female shot in some pine woods at Magnolia in 1877, and an adult male the next year, in a different pine grove in the same town.
Townsend, in his "Birds of Essex County," quotes Leonard's explanation of the name, Pigeon Cove, for the village in Rockport and the tiny bay which makes its harbor :
"In the long ago time, when the cove had no name, immense flocks of pigeons, coming over the sea from New Hampshire and Maine towards the Cape, were enveloped and overwhelmed by a storm, and becoming exhausted fell into the waves; so that after the storm had ceased, large numbers of dead birds were brought by the waves into the Cove, and thrown upon the rocks and beach. Hence the little indenta- tion became Pigeon Cove; and then the height ascending from it Pigeon Hill."
The great auk, called also "penguin" in old records, the only flightless North American bird, once bred in enormous numbers on Funk Island off Newfoundland and in one or two places nearby, and ranged southward as a migrant as far as Florida. Its bones occur in old Indian shell heaps along the coast. It was also found on the North Atlantic coast of Europe. Being flightless, and breeding in but a few places easily reached by man, it was rapidly exterminated by the crews of fishing vessels and the early inhabitants, who killed it for food and fish-bait and for its feathers or appropriated its eggs. Only a few mounted specimens, eggs, and skeletons remain of the
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thousands of birds that once inhabited the coasts of the North Atlan- tic. It was formerly a migrant in Essex County, but has been extinct since about 1840. The last specimen was killed by Eldey, off the southwest point of Iceland, in 1844, and the last living bird was seen in 1852.
The pied or Labrador duck has been extinct about fifty years, its disappearance probably caused by the shooting of nesting birds on the rocky islands off the Labrador coast. According to Elliot,
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LYNN-STORM SURF Courtesy of the Lynn Chamber of Commerce
they were sold in considerable numbers in the New York markets between 1860 and 1870. Two males were killed by Nicholas Pike at the mouth of the Ipswich River in 1844. The latest record for its capture anywhere was by Gregg at Elmira, New York, in 1878.
Snow geese, which are rare and accidental at the present day, were probably common in colonial times. Cormorants, both the double-crested and the European, common migrants still, were very abundant in the early days of the county and the latter possibly bred here.
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The Eskimo curlew, the "dough-bird" of the gunners, is probably now extinct. It was formerly a very abundant fall migrant along the coast. The last known specimen from the county was taken at New- buryport by A. B. Thomas, in 1908.
The wild turkey was common in the county a century ago, but information concerning it is meager. It was much hunted by the early inhabitants, and was considered better eating than the domesti- cated English turkey. The right bank of the Ipswich River, where it meets the sea below Ipswich town, is still known as "Turkey Shore." A height in Ipswich is Turkey Hill, and there is another Turkey Hill in Newbury. In fact, although the bird has long been extirpated, it has left its name all over New England. The last specimen actually known to have been captured in the State was shot on Mount Tom in the winter of IS50-51.
The unfortunate heath hen was once common in woods and pastures of the region, and under the name of pheasant, was a sub- stantial item in colonial food supply. So it went the way of other edible wild things, lingering longest at Marthas Vineyard, where every effort was made to keep the last remnant alive. But the flock gradually dwindled and the last known individual was trapped, banded, and set free in 1931. The bird is, however, not really extinct. The western race of the species, the greater prairie chicken, is still fairly abundant, but is not found east of Indiana.
To offset in some measure these vanished creatures, we have now an introduced species, the ring-necked pheasant. Originally, the birds were Chinese. They were imported into Oregon, and brought from the Pacific coast to Massachusetts in 1894. Local gunners did their best to kill them off, and for a time they disappeared about as fast as they were liberated. Lately, however, they have begun to hold their own, thanks in large measure to landowners who post their grounds against shooting. They have done especially well in Essex County, in part because of the number of public reservations and pri- vate estates where they are protected, but also because the district itself suits them well. So, now, they rank for the county as a local wild bird.
Of mammals that the colonists knew and we do not, the one which our forebears could best have spared is the common gray or timber wolf. So formidable was it and so numerous, that Lynn, as early as
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1631, offered a bounty, which by 1640, in Salem, had become forty shillings. During the seventeenth century, bounties commonly ran from twenty shillings down to five, according as the animals were more less numerous and troublesome; but as late as 1754 Gloucester was paying up to four pounds for grown wolves and two pounds for young ones. Since, roughly, a shilling in olden time took as long to earn as a dollar now and would buy as much, four pounds bounty points at serious trouble from wolves.
They are gone now from New England, the latest records being 1840 for Connecticut and about 1887 for the White Mountains. Essex County had an occasional specimen into the nineteenth century ; and the old "wolf-pits" are still to be seen in the Lynn Woods. These "wolf-pits" are supposed to have been dug by early settlers. They were probably covered with brush and had sharp stakes set in the bottom on which the wolf was impaled.
The black bears went without bounties. They still survive from the White Mountains northward and in northern Vermont, with rec- ords into the 1880's for Massachusetts. They were common at Salem and Lynn around 1700, and were seen and occasionally killed during the next sixty years. Bear Swamp in Ipswich seems to have harbored a few into the 1830's. The last known to have been killed in the county was at Essex in 1868.
Of the three cats native to the district, the Canada lynx is vir- tually extirpated from all New England; and though it probably occurred in Essex County, no actual record is known, and 1866 is the last record for the State. The Adirondack cougar is in much the same situation, but with two records for Essex County-a kitten taken in Lynn Woods in 1768, and an adult seen on Cape Ann.
Bay lynxes or bobcats have been much commoner; so that Box- ford, in 1770, put a bounty on them. The Peabody Museum has three mounted specimens, one taken in Danvers in 1821, one in Lynnfield in 1832, and the third in West Peabody in 1920. Individuals are reported from time to time on the west side of the county, and one mounted specimen was for some years exhibited in the Grange Hall at West Andover. The bay lynx is sly and nocturnal, it keeps to dense cover, and since it lives on wild game and does not molest farm animals, it is among the last creatures of its size to be seen of men. So there are probably many more left in the county than is generally supposed.
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As for the beaver, there are not a few in Maine and northern New Hampshire, there is a Beaver Pond in Beverly and a Beaver Dam Farm in Rockport, there are plenty of traditional accounts, and fragments of beaver-gnawed wood were found under four feet of swamp muck in a former beaver pond in Beverly, in 1925. But no actual specimen from Essex County has been preserved, and there seem to be almost no definite records.
Three mammals we have now, abundantly, which the early colo- nists lacked and we could very well spare. These are the common house mouse, which sometimes lives out in the fields; the European black rat, which is the old house rat of the British Isles; and the brown or Norway or wharf rat, which is newer in the English- speaking world and is superseding the older form.
Curiously, too, there is another introduced European species, not a mammal, which we have now in uncounted millions, which would have been eminently useful to the early settlers in lean times. This is the common brown periwinkle, widely eaten in Europe, which in spots, simply hides the rocks between tides. Somehow, apparently after the middle of the last century, it got across to Labrador or New- foundland, and started coming down the coast, helped by the south- running currents along the shore. By 1870 the advance guard had reached Portland. In 1872 a single specimen was taken in South Salem, this and another find at Danvers being the first reported for the county, though the snail had crossed the bay to Provincetown by the same year. By 1880 it was abundant all along the New England coast. It has now reached Delaware Bay.
When from the natural history of Essex County in the past we turn to certain aspects of its present-day animals and plants, we dis- cover a combination of circumstances and qualities that is almost unique.
Salem is, of course, older than Boston. Whether, on this account and for other reasons, it has been less Puritanic and more concerned with the things of this world is perhaps not altogether clear. But certainly, from early times, Salem has had wealth and high intelli- gence, and a wide acquaintance with the seven seas and the uttermost parts of the earth, while at the same time it has been somewhat with- drawn from the secular and church politics of the capital. The far- flung navies of the Salem district brought home curios of every sort
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from almost every port on earth. The result, combined with wealth and civic pride, has been a succession of museums, of which that of the East India Marine Society goes back into the eighteenth century. Naturally, the staffs of these museums worked also at the local natu- ral history and helped to build up a scientific tradition for the district.
On the whole, however, Essex County natural history probably owes most to individuals, for the most part natives of the region and predominantly botanists. Earliest of the group is Reverend Manasseh Cutler, of Hamilton, "the Father of American Botany," who, in 1785, brought out "An Account of Some Vegetable Productions Growing in this part of America, Botanically Arranged," describing therein some three hundred and fifty flowering plants. William Oakes, of Danvers and Ipswich, the most eminent botanist born in the county, who died in 1848, began the herbarium of the Peabody Museum of Salem and lent his name to the genus Oakesia. Dr. Charles Picker- ing, of Wenham, who was both botanist and conchologist, was one of the nine civilians that made up the scientific staff of the Wilkes Expe- dition to the Antarctic in 1838. John Robinson, who was born in 1846, at Salem, was a curator at the Essex Institute at seventeen, reported a fern new to New England before he was twenty, and at thirty was in charge of the herbarium at the Peabody Academy of Science. Incidentally, he invented the name "Christmas fern." His "Flora of Essex County," of 1880, lists seventeen hundred species and is consulted to this day.
But these are only a few leaders. Every village had its local natu- ralists; among them the poet Whittier. Every town had its organ- ized group, the Essex County Natural History Society alma mater to them all. With the founding of this society, a little more than a cen- tury ago, the great days of Essex County natural history began. From 1869 to 1875 the "American Naturalist" was published at Salem.
All this, however, might have happened anywhere along the coast. But Essex County is itself a remarkable district. It has great salt marshes and a vast stretch of dunes. It has rocky headlands, like many another New England county. It has beaches, also like many another. But few stretches of coast have so varied a combination of the two. Essex County also has one of the large rivers of New Eng- land, with the great mud-flat at its mouth; nor does it lack small rivers, lakes, ponds, meadows, and swamps. It has rock hills, and
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drift hills as well; and it has plenty of wild country. In short, Essex County has an uncommon variety of habitats. It has, in consequence, an uncommon variety of wild life.
Given, then, an interesting collecting ground, the museum staffs, and the amateurs, the county, especially on its east side, attracted the naturalists of the Cambridge-Boston district. The result is that this eastern side of the county is one of the most carefully studied and best known areas of its size in all North America. This is not true of its geology, which is obscure and difficult. It is true of its animals and plants, and especially of its shore life.
On the other hand, the west side of the county touches the long ridge which comes southward from the White Mountains between the Merrimac and Salmon Falls rivers and peters out in northern Mas- sachusetts. This ridge, north of the mountains, connects with the great wilderness south of the St. Lawrence, and thus becomes a sort of funnel by way of which wild creatures from the north seep down much nearer Boston than one would expect. But this district, equally removed from greater Boston and from greater Salem, has neither museums nor summer vistors nor retired navigators, has not so much attracted naturalists, and though its botany is well worked out, its animal life is less completely known. Essex County, in short, as to its natural history, splits into two quite different areas.
The larger geographical district to which Essex County belongs enjoys a rainfall well up toward the top of the optimum amount for plant growth, especially well distributed throughout the year. Win- ter precipitation is uncommonly heavy, so that the region starts the growing season with the ponds full and the soil wet. Only rarely and for short periods is there anything that approaches a real drought.
This good fortune is, however, due entirely to the periodic cyclones which about once a week come across North America, near the boundary between the United States and Canada, or else, starting as West Indies hurricanes, come up the coast, sometimes over the land and sometimes over the sea. Since the wind blows toward the storm center, these cyclones bring the damp Atlantic air inland to water the earth. Occasionally, in summer, the cyclones fail and the land goes dry. If ever they fail permanently, Essex County will be desert.
The geographers who locate the district in the temperate zone indulge themselves in a merry jest. Its climate is really most intem-
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perate. The average July thermometer reading is about seventy- the same as for southern California and northern Spain. The aver- age for January is twenty-colder than Iceland and about like south- ern Greenland. Sometimes the mercury beats the hundred mark. Oftener it scores twenty-five and thirty below. Vegetation and animal life are what one would expect in a district with this climate and almost no lime in its soil.
Such a district, left to itself, tends to be heavily wooded. The county is, moreover, in a transition belt between the Canadian zone on the north, with its characteristic plants and animals, and what is sometimes called the Austral zone on the south and west, with its special inhabitants.
Thus, for example, the shag-bark hickory and certain of the oaks grow anywhere from Texas up into Maine; and the coast white cedar, coming all the way from Mississippi, is just petering out at Massachu- setts. On the other hand, the white or Canada spruce is a northern tree, as is also the white, paper, or canoe birch. Both occur north- ward and upward on the mountains about to the limit of tree growth. But Essex County is just within the southern edge of the spruce country, and white birch, though it does occur, is outnumbered thou- sands to one by the gray. The county, then, tends to get more than a normal quota of species-black spruce and larch from the north; white elm, hickory, and sugar maple from the southwest. It is, how- ever, just about the middle of the north and south range of the white pine and red oak. It does not have wild the balsam fir, though the tree will grow in cultivation; but it does have wild some examples of another northern tree, the red or Norway pine. Curiously, there are still in the swamps of Gloucester a few of the small magnolias from which the settlement at Magnolia took its name, although the plant is southern and except for this does not occur beyond Long Island.
One the whole, with the cutting off of the woods and the draining of the swamps, Essex County, as least inland, seems to be warming up and becoming less Canadian and more Austral than in early days.
Canadian and Austral forms together, the county has something more than fifteen hundred species of flowering plants. Only fifteen of these are indigenous gymnosperms; but there are more than thirty wild orchids, and more than two hundred grasses, many of them, of course, introduced by the early colonists and under cultivation. From
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Europe came also, besides fruit trees that have gone wild, the uni- versal dandelions, buttercups, plantain, "pusley," yellow dock, yarrow, barberry, and four species of devil's paintbrush. The much too com- mon ox-eye daisy, which farmers still call "whiteweed," seems to have been brought to Salem in 1633 as a garden plant. The yellow- blossomed dyers' weed or woad, that in pastures of Salem and Swamp- scott almost covers the ground, was also purposely brought to Salem, the "woad-wax wherewith they dye many pretty colours" of Josselyn's "New England's Rarities Discovered." From Salem gardens has escaped the old maid's pink or "bouncing Bet."
Andover and Tewksbury have had a heather which seems to occur nowhere else in North America except "Down East" and beyond to Newfoundland. The county has a dozen violets, being just at the southern limit for V. rotundifolia, as it is also for the upland cranberry.
Seeds of foreign species from everywhere on earth where sheep abound come in with the wool, sprout, and maintain themselves for a year or two, sometimes a dozen species in one millyard. Flax, also, has brought in some exotics. "Ballast plants" have been entering Salem Harbor for three centuries. The cone-flower came in by rail from the West about 1850. The Merrimac has brought down the red or river birch into North Andover, Methuen, and Lawrence. Altogether, there are some two hundred introduced European species now established and growing wild, with another fifty from other parts of North America, and perhaps as many more from Asia and South America, among the last, the wild morning glory.
Of plants other than flowering, the county has some hundred and fifty mosses and probably two hundred lichens. But it has only about thirty ferns, and the limestone-loving sorts are quite wanting. The climbing fern, common in Connecticut and further south, is just at the northern limit of its range; and a water fern, marsilia or pepperwort, also from the south, has lately appeared in the ponds of Haverhill. There are upwards of one hundred and fifty species of the larger salt- water algæ. Of minute and simple plants, of fungi and the like, there is the usual equipment. Even the red snow of the arctic voyagers once appeared at Nahant. One with another, there are between two and three thousand species of the sorts of plants that anybody is likely to collect.
For animals, also, the county is betwixt and between. A single moose only is known to have strayed so far south, to be killed in Sal-
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isbury in 1733. But Lynnfield has the most northerly certain record, again and this time luckily a single individual, for the copperhead snake.
Among mammals, it is not easy to say just which whales shall rate as denizens of any spot. Most, however, that live anywhere in the North Atlantic have been sighted from Essex County shores; and in the early days of whaling the boats used to put out from the harbors when the whale appeared.
Of the really big whales, the humpback has been seen off Marble- head, and a sulphur-bottom, the largest whale there is, once came ashore on King's Beach, Lynn. Finbacks, in length up to forty and fifty feet, are not uncommon; and blackfish, that run up to fifteen feet over all, appear in schools of a dozen or two. For others of the smaller whales there are only single records. The harbor porpoise is common in small schools that travel in a series of queer rolling dives. Other porpoises, dolphins, and grampuses appear from time to time. Altogether, there are perhaps a dozen cetaceans that an inhabitant of Essex County may hope to see within the twelve-mile limit.
Common harbor seals can often be observed in some numbers, either swimming about or sunning themselves at low tide on rock islands and sand bars; gentle intelligent creatures that are shot at sight because they also like fish. The harp seal, on the other hand, has for the entire State only the Essex County record, and the hooded seal also has only a single record for both the county and the State. Both are migrants from the Far North.
Of the larger land mammals, the Virginia deer was common in the old days. Then, for much of the nineteenth century, it virtually disappeared. Now, in small numbers, it is coming back again.
There are a few raccoons, apparently no oppossums, and some- what rarely an otter in one of the streams near the sea or in the wild district on the West. Skunks are not so numerous relative to other creatures as they give one the impression of being. There are a good many muskrats, which seem to hold their own in spite of trapping. The porcupine, fairly common to the north, is sometimes reported for the county. There are abundant woodchucks.
Few persons realize how many foxes are left after three centuries of persistent hunting. Even before the days of wild life refuges, public and private, red foxes held their own against man by sheer cleverness. Now life is easier for them.
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Of the foxes' special prey, the southern cotton-tail rabbit is com- mon, though the county is toward the northern limit of its range. But the larger varying hare, with long hind legs, that turns white in win- ter, is at the southern limit of its range, and is very rare. The county has five species of wild mice; and also five squirrels, two of them fly- ing. Chipmunks and grays are, of course, much the commonest. The grays, protected by law and often half tame, are increasing their num- bers. There is a mink also, and two weasels. A larger mink, always rare, is now extinct.
Of the insectivora, interesting to us as man's nearest relatives among indigenous beasts, the county has, in spots, a considerable num- ber of long-tailed shrews. Few persons ever see these; for they are smaller than mice, protectively colored, and very cautious. Far com- moner is a larger short-tailed shrew, some five inches long, that is usually mistaken for a mole, and is, in fact, sometimes called the mole shrew. It has, however, mouse-like forefeet, not the diggers of the proper mole. Cats and foxes catch them. Besides these, there is the star-nosed mole, which is a true mole.
Two bats are common, both brown, one about three and a half inches long, the other about four and a half with a wing spread of a foot. There is, in addition, a less common red bat, that comes out early in the evening, and has an especial liking for electric lights. Four more bats are uncommon for the county or doubtful.
The same uncommon variety in habitations and food supply, the same overlapping of Canadian and Austral zones, and the same spe- cial interest in wild life already noted for land animals in Essex County affects also the denizens of the air. But many more amateurs, and probably more professionals, are interested in birds than are students of mammals, so that the birds of the county are minutely known. Sportsmen, naturalists and bird-lovers, both local and from the metropolitan district of Boston, have made the region their hunt- ing ground with gun or glass, until the county especially on its eastern side, has been, perhaps, as thoroughly worked over by students of bird life as any area in the United States of like size and human population. In addition, between the museums of the Boston dis- trict and of Salem, publication of everything observed has been espe- cially prompt and easy; and this in turn has reacted on the local observers.
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