Puffball

“ Every cloud from a ripe puffball consists of thousands of spores started on the wings of the wind for an unknown journey. Their habits are not past finding out, but to examine them a person needs a good microscope. ”

“ In the huckleberry pasture, by the fence of old barn boards, I notice many little pale-brown, dome-shaped puffballs puckered to a centre beneath. When you pinch them, a smoke-like, brown, snuff-colored dust rises from the orifice at their top, just like smoke from a chimney. It is so fine and light that it rises into the air, and is wafted away like smoke from a chimney. ”

“ In spite of the annoyance of their tiresome shrill piping, almost incessant from dawn until sunset, silent only from necessity when their throats are being stuffed with the hard-earned food, they are a funny sight as they sit perched in a row upon a fence-rail, with their tiny feathers fluffed out until the little fellows resemble soft, gray puffballs. ”

“ The puff-balls are white and look like fine cream cheese when they first appear. Their business is to ripen their spores, scatter them, and disappear. The brown smoke or dust of the ripe puff-ball is blown about by the wind and finds its way into the earth in time; each tiny spore or grain of dust can start a new mat of threads down underground. When you puff the devil's snuff-box you are doing the plant just the kindness it was waiting for. When a cow steps on a ripe giant puff-ball a great smoke goes up, and the breeze catches the dust. ”

“ When one of these large puff-balls is seen, scrape the dirt away carefully about it, and the secret of its appearance will be discovered; for a mass of fine white threads spread away from it in every direction. This spawn takes the place of the roots of a tree, absorbing food from the decaying leaf mold, or whatever there may be of the same nature in the ground. All of its food is obtained in this way; so that the delicate spawn-threads may spend a long time in feeding and storing up food before they give any evidence of their existence. But at last a puff-ball begins to grow ”

“ At the extreme left of the territory of the puffins, where the rocks broke abruptly, a tiny cleft-full of earth made room for just one nest. The pair of puffins who had their burrow here were comparatively isolated, being some eight or ten feet apart from the crowded ranks of their kin. Their one big egg had been safely hatched. The ridiculous chick, all gaping beak and naked belly, the one object of their passionate solicitude, was thriving and hungry according to the finest traditions of infant puffinhood. ”

“ The soil, too, is honeycombed with their burrows, and in each of these, as well as in the nooks and chambers of rocks that lie closely together, there is a young fluffy black puffin, which increases the population by about a third, to say nothing of those parent birds which may also be underground. A million of puffins, I should think, must be standing, flying, or swimming in the more or less immediate vicinity; the air, especially, if it be a sunny day—or, rather, for a sunny minute or so—is like one great sunbeam full of little dancing bird-motes. ”

“ The plants grow on the ground, on wood and on leaves.
LYCOPERDON CYATHIFORME = cup-shape.
The Cup-shaped Puff-ball.
This species of puff-ball is round with a contracted base. It is 4 to 10 inches across, a white or pinkish-brown color, afterward becoming a darker brown and covered with small patches. When the spores mature the upper part of the covering (peridium) becomes torn and only the lower part remains. It looks like a dark-colored cup with a ragged margin, and may be seen by the excursionist in the spring on the roadside. It has survived the winter frosts and storms. ”

“ PEAR-SHAPED PUFF-BALL.
Another very good edible puff-ball is the little lead-colored species (Bovista plumbea) , about as large as a marble, that is very common in hilly pastures. When it is young and white, it is even more delicious than the large species. With these I think I should let my bill-of-fare rest.
A few other common puff-balls are the exquisite earth-stars (Geaster) , that are commonest in sandy places and under evergreens; the studded puff-ball (Lycoperdon gemmatum) , very abundant on the ground in woods; the fleecy white puff-ball (L. Wrightii) that grows along paths in meadows ”

“ One group of fungi in particular—the puff-balls—has a great deal of interest for me. It is a very difficult group to study, and if the sharp-eyed boys of the Agassiz Chapters all over the country will be on the lookout for puff-balls this summer and fall, they can be of assistance in some work that there is much need of doing with these plants.
Every boy who lives in the country must have seen the giant puff-ball (Lycoperdon bovista) that grows in pastures, looking like a great white egg, sometimes nearly two feet high, set up on its small end. ”

“ For a puff-ball is nothing more nor less than the fruit of the underground mycelium, or spawn; and the dusty mass that it dries into is composed of myriads of spores, which take the place of the seeds of flowering plants. How many puff-balls there would be if every one of these microscopic spores developed! In a puff-ball sixteen inches in diameter, if they occupy only one-third of the space, there are no less than 300,000,000,000,000,000 spores,—an inconceivable number. ”

“ The puffins kept darting down from the ledges, with beaks pointed, web feet stretched out behind, and short wings fluttering so rapidly that they were almost invisible, while the singular birds looked like so many animated triangles darting down diagonally to the sea, and gliding over it for some distance before touching the water, into which they plunged like arrow-heads, to disappear and continue their flight under water till they emerged far away with some silvery fish in their beaks. ”

“ To have a dozen or twenty of these little painted puffins on a rock within three paces of you, in full view, with nothing whatever intervening, some standing up, others couched on their breasts, some preening, some shaking their wings, most of them unconscious of your presence, a few just looking at you, from time to time, with an expression of mild curiosity unmixed with fear, seeming to say "And who may you be, sir?" is almost a new sensation. ”

“ After this we come to bigger birds—ducks and puffins. Puffins have beaks like poll parrots, and are about the size of a rook; they have neat white shirt-fronts, and their beaks are red and yellow and blue, but they have silly faces, as if they thought of nothing but their own fine clothes. They live near water on cliffs, and sometimes use an old rabbit burrow for a nest, in which they lay one pure white egg, and one only. When the young one is hatched the parent birds feed it on tiny fish and minnows. You can see here the puffin bringing up a minnow in his beak for supper. ”

“ I thought most everyone knew the rolling mushroom. It’s called that because it rolls along the ground.”
[212]
“Rolls along the ground!” exclaimed Kendall. “I don’t believe it!”
Ned smiled kindly on his ignorance. “The mobilis,” he explained, “is one of the puff-balls, a small, round puff-ball. It is found on hillsides. Most puff-balls disseminate their pores—I mean spores—by the aid of the wind, remaining where they grow. But the mobilis as soon as it attains maturity detaches itself from its stalk and begins to roll. As I have said, they always grow on the sides of hills. ”

“ The parents have the strongest affection for them; and if layed hold of by the wings will give themselves most cruel bites on any part of the body they can reach, as if actuated by despair." Now the puffin, which possesses a brightly coloured and very powerful beak, certainly can bite when "layed hold of," but it generally manages to seize the hand or clothes of the aggressor, and leaves its mark. ”

“ Handsome—or, at any rate, outré—as the puffin's beak is, it is hardly, if at all, more striking to the eye than is this vivid gleam of one bright colour, revealed suddenly in a flash-light by this distension of the mandibles. It is like the sword gleaming out of the scabbard, whose brightness comes as a surprise, whereas the latter, however rich and ornate, is a permanent quantity, and so lacks the charm of novelty. The fact that the puffin's beak is a superlative ornament does not, in my opinion, render it unlikely that there should be another one lying within it. ”

“ The puffin, like others of the same genus, takes wing with great difficulty, and walks upon the whole length of the leg and foot, with a wriggling awkward gait. In tempestuous weather it takes shelter in caverns and holes in the nearest rocks, or in those made by the rabbit on the beach among the bent grass, in which it sits dozing, in snug security, till the return of the calm weather; for these birds cannot brave the storm, and it is not uncommon, when they have been overtaken by it, to find them drowned and cast on shore. ”

“ When fishing to supply its young the parent puffin has the curious habit and faculty of keeping the small fishes it catches in its beak, where they may be seen as the bird swims on the sea, their tails and a portion of their bodies protruding at the sides of the beak and mouth. How it manages to hold several little fishes in this way and go on diving and catching others is a puzzle. On arriving at the burrow the fishes are placed on the floor inside, or at the entrance, where the young bird sits waiting for its parent, and are then picked up one by one and put into the open, hungry mouth. ”

“ Ravens have bred on Puffin, and a pair still nests in the neighbourhood; I have often seen the fine birds passing the island; they have not all been drowned! But the ferocious puffin has foes, very dangerous ones, nesting near by, for there are, as a rule, a fair number of disembowelled puffin corpses on the grass; the lesser black-backed gull could explain, no doubt, and, if not, we can guess that a pair of great black-backs, visitors if not occasional residents, know something about the slaughter. ”

“ Puffins are everywhere. They dot all the steep, green slopes, and cluster on the flat surfaces or salient angles of half the grey boulders that pierce the soil, or lie scattered all about it. Great crowds of them float on the sea, and other crowds oppress the air with constant, fast-beating pinions, passing continually from land to sea and from sea to land again, whilst many, on the latter journey, even though laden with fish, circle many times round, in a wide circumference, before finally settling. ”

“ And silent, ever at the heel of each, is a familiar spirit, an eerie human hedgehog, all set about with walking-sticks, a thing like a cylindrical umbrella-stand with a hat and boots and a certain suggestion of leg. And so they pass and are gone.
Rising, the amateur nature-lover finds he has been reclining on a puff-ball. These puff-balls are certainly the most remarkable example of adaptation to circumstances known to English botanists. They grow abundantly on golf grounds, and are exactly like golf-balls in external appearance. ”

“ I have sometimes wondered if the fish which the puffin catches so deftly, and then carries home, a dozen at a time, are paralysed at the sight of it. If a shoal of sand-eels fainted, and lay strewed about the bottom of the sea, it would then be easy for their enemy to pick them up one after the other, pack them securely, and get a firm grip on all of them before they began to revive and wriggle. At least, it ought to be easier; but how the bird chases and catches each in succession, without losing those it has already caught, and which lie in a row across its beak, it is not so easy to see. ”

“ The puffins found on the east coasts of England and Scotland during the winter months are probably migrants from more northern latitudes. Puffins are found in summer in most localities on our coasts where razorbills and guillemots collect; on the south coast they are rare, but increase as we go north, until at St. Kilda they are found gathered in incalculable numbers. As a cliff-breeder the puffin deposits its egg in a hole or cranny in the rocks like the razorbill, but never on an exposed ledge, as the guillemot always, and the razorbill sometimes, does. ”

“ I may be mistaken, but I hope that it is so; no one can become intimate with the puffin without wishing him well. It is most interesting to see things in their beginnings, and to speculate on what, if they continue, they are likely, in time, to become.
The puffin has other and far more fatal enemies than the skua. ”

“ The puffin, like the partridge and other birds that progress by a succession of quick strokes with the wings, flies with great rapidity. He is so small and light that perhaps one ought not to be surprised at this, so I reserve my wonder for the guillemot. How this solid and weighty-looking bird can, with wings that are small out of all proportion to its bulk, narrow to a degree, and by no means long, get through the air at the rate it does, how it can even stay in it at all and not come plump down like the wooden bird that it looks, is to me a mystery. ”

“ According to Pennant, who is quoted by Blackwall, the puffin is in like case also. The parental instincts of the puffin are strong, and the first young, which appear early in July, are guarded with the utmost care. But strong also is the instinct of migration, and when this emerges punctually at about the eleventh day of August, any young puffins which can not fly are left to the tender mercies of the peregrine falcon. ”

“ But he had them out when they had been in about twenty minutes; and as soon as they were dressed, the collecting of specimens went on. At the mouth of one little inlet they found a dead puffin—a singular little bird that makes its home on the rocky shores further north, and remarkable for its curious wedge-shaped bill, looking like the point of an old Roman sword, and to all appearance a rather formidable weapon. There were plenty of gulls and kittywakes running about at the edge of the waves, picking up the little insects and small crustaceans that abounded upon the sands. ”