Nature/Ecology – Page 113

June 9, 2005 by Dave Bonta

A route of evanescence

A Route of Evanescence
With a revolving Wheel –
A Resonance of Emerald
A Rush of Cochineal –
And every Blossom on the Bush
Adjusts its tumbled Head –
The mail from Tunis – probably,
An easy Morning’s Ride –

EMILY DICKINSON

First light. From my chair on the front porch I can hear a ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris, the only hummingbird species we have here) just around the corner of the house. I get up and look: it’s a male, filling up on nectar from the comfrey flowers. Out of all the more showy flowers in my garden, it’s the nondescript, reddish-purple comfrey that’s drawing the hummers right now. Watching the crimson-throated male thrust the tiny sword of his bill into the flowers’ upside-down cups, I think of one of the Spanish words for hummingbird, picaflor.*

Contrary to popular belief, a hummingbird’s bill is nothing like a drinking straw. It opens just wide enough to allow the bird to lap up nectar with its brushy-tipped tongue, which zips in and out at the rate of thirteen times per second. The hummingbird tastes little of the flowers, other than their relative concentration of sugar, and he smells nothing at all. His vision, however, is acute. And anecdotal evidence suggests that hummingbirds have long memories, as well, in some cases appearing to form strong bonds with human benefactors and returning to visit them throughout the season and even in subsequent years.

A long memory would be a highly adaptive trait for a creature whose survival depends on being able to find reliable sources of nourishment from food sources that change by the day and even by the hour. One wonders how many details of his thousand-mile round-trip migrations he can recall from one year to the next. Imagine what the mental map of a hummingbird might look like: bright jewels of color like beads in a rosary stretching from Pennsylvania down through the Appalachians to Georgia, west along the Gulf Coast and then south through Mexico to Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, even Costa Rica.

The male rubythroat returns twice more to the comfrey during the half-hour I’m out on the porch. I recall what an ornithologist recently told a meeting of our Audubon chapter concerning hummingbirds: the males are smaller than the females, just barely above the energetic limit for warm-blooded creatures, below which it isn’t possible to eat quickly enough to stave off hypothermia. And they expend so much energy on their spectacular, U-shaped mating/territorial flights and in fighting with other males – chasing, jabbing with their bills, striking with their feet – that they have few fat stores left over to keep them alive during the cool spring nights. Many of them don’t make it. It’s not unusual for female hummingbirds to outnumber males four to one by the end of their first breeding season.

Hummingbirds are unique to the New World, and occupied a prominent position among the marvels described by the first European explorers. It occurs to me that the Aztecs were well justified in associating the hummingbird with their kamikaze-like warrior cult of death and flowers – especially that crimson flower in the chest, whose sacrifice they thought necessary to feed the sun. A ruby-throated hummingbird’s heart can beat 1,220 times a minute. It accounts for some 2.5 percent of the bird’s total body mass, which means that in proportion to its size, the hummingbird has the biggest heart of any member of the animal kingdom.

Ironically, for a creature still associated with male prowess in some parts of Latin America, the male hummingbird has no penis whatsoever. He fertilizes the female merely by touching the tip of his cloaca to hers for a fraction of a second; his relationship with flowers is vastly more prolonged and solicitous. During the non-breeding season, the sex organs of both the males and the females shrink to a tiny fraction of their active size to make the birds better fit for their lengthy migrations, like backpackers chucking every ounce of unneeded gear. For the same reason, the female makes do with a single ovary.

They leave for Central America when the nighttime temperatures here are barely above freezing, flying low to the ground to avoid cooler temperatures aloft. Just before and during migration, their diet becomes largely insectivorous as they stock up on fats and proteins, often doubling their body mass. In the tropics, rubythroats may continue to rely much more on insects than on nectar. But even here, a sizeable proportion of their ordinary diet consists of small insects found in, on or in the vicinity of flowers, as well as pollen, which they play a major role in spreading from plant to plant. Their ability to key in on bright spots in the landscape probably allows them to quickly locate their favorite kinds of insects during migration. Their breeding range maps closely to the range of eastern deciduous and mixed deciduous-coniferous forests – a fact which may also have direct dietary relevance, since they sometimes rely on tree sap when no suitable flowers are in bloom. Their arrival back north (late April to early May in Central Pennsylvania) seems to be timed to take advantage of sap flows in birch trees “tapped” by the yellow-bellied sapsucker, though doubtless the presence of small insects also plays a role.

It always boggles me a bit to think about pollination: one species relying on another, completely unrelated species to perform what is, for us, the most intimate of acts. The variously curved and elongated bills of hummingbirds are well adapted to flowers with deep throats; their co-evolution suggests an effort on the part of the flower to exclude insect pollinators, whose senses and memory may not be up to the task of properly cross-pollinating between widely scattered individuals or populations. At least nineteen species of plants in North America have co-evolved with hummingbirds as a primary pollinator, including trumpet creeper, beebalm and jewelweed. With their bright, iridescent colors, hummingbirds seem more than a little like flowers themselves – or rather, like a flower’s wet dream.

But it’s no surprise that birds with such highly developed visual cortexes would wear bright colors; the primary audience for a male hummingbird’s aerial display is, of course, another hummingbird. From where I sit here at my writing table, looking out my front door, I am often treated to a partial view of this display, probably from the very same bird I saw at the comfrey this morning. He hurtles back and forth along a hyperbolic arc like the pendulum for some invisible, mad clock, his metallic green plumage flashing in the sun.
__________

*The usual, more literary word – as in the first of the two Lorca poems I translated yesterday – is colibrí. But in my brother Mark’s Birding Honduras: A Checklist and Guide, there are neither picaflores nor colibrís, but gorriones and gorrioncitos – words otherwise applied to sparrows. In other Spanish-speaking countries, the term chupaflor – sucks-the-flower – may be used instead of picaflor (pecks-the-flower). And in Brazil, a hummingbird is beija-flor, kisses-the-flower – arguably the most appropriate name of all.

Primary sources for this essay included: T. R. Robinson, R. R. Sargent and M. B. Sargent, Ruby-throated Hummingbird, No. 204 in the monograph series The Birds of North America, edited by A. Poole and F. Gill, The Academy of Natural Sciences and American Ornithological Union, 1995; Alexander F. Skutch, The Life of the Hummingbird, Crown Publishers, 1973; and the terrific (if poorly designed) website for Operation RubyThroat: The Hummingbird Project.

June 6, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Legends of the Cherokees

These are legendary in the sense that they are my own, brash interpretations of sacred traditions, drawn mainly from material collected and interpreted in the late 19th century by the anthropologist James Mooney.

LONG MAN

Long Man dips his toes in the ocean and cracks his knuckles in the coves. He is the original “long drink of water;” when he climbs over the rocks, fish fall out of his hair. His skin is so translucent you can see the veins ticking beside each ear. Ball players always go to him for help, because weak as he sometimes appears, nothing in the world can hold out against him. He is never silent, though it takes a trained listener to distinguish his words from the ordinary drip & flow of events. Those are his wet footfalls just beyond the campfire’s circle of light.

WILDERNESS

To change into a bear or panther, go live among them & eat what they eat. Quite soon they start to look like people, how people would look if they weren’t so hairless & full of spite. Bear & panther can get everything they need with so little effort, who wouldn’t want to be like them? The name of their country is Always Enough. The only immigration requirement is a seven-day fast; it’s going back home that kills you, almost every time. The borders of our country & theirs make a perfect match, but here everything’s turned outside-in, like the fur in a hunter’s boots.

SHINING WOMAN

Shining Woman lives in the south & walks on a shining road. Her shining cloak opens wide, a house that expands to accommodate all visitors. She has the power to banish sorrows; she can exorcise despair. No one can travel her road & not lay down their burdens one by one, growing lighter with every step. Such happiness, they say, is contagious – the same as misery. But beware of her imitators here in the north, those with a small share of her magic who awaken only a restless itch to be elsewhere. Bar your door against these beautiful ones, unless you would turn as blue as a tree’s naked shadow on the snow.

THE GOOD PEOPLE

The Ní»ñní«’hí¯ – Immortals – hide in plain view. They are no different from us, except that the eye of envy never comes among them. Their farms are disguised as wild forests, their homes as holes or mounds. Their invisible towns leave footprints on the highest mountains: bare, open spots where no trees grow. Sometimes their young women show up for dances, strangers circling with uncommon grace, their hair sweeping the ground. Love-struck boys who try to follow them home watch them turn sideways into a shimmer of air among the trees, where the road deteriorates into a rabbit track & disappears into a thicket. Lost hunters tell of hearing drums & flutes, a bewildering music that leads them in circles, unwitting dancers at a never-ending feast. Free of the fear of death, who wouldn’t dance?

UNBIDDEN FRUIT

The very first married couple in the world have their very first fight. What do they do? There’s no one to arbitrate, no story or proverb to point the way. The only road is the sun’s road, so the woman starts out on it, aiming for the sunrise – a fresh start. The sun, too, is a woman, & she minds everyone’s business. Her verdict can burn, but with the exception of one memorable incident, she always strives for balance, turns each small death into fuel for new growth. Do you want her back? she asks the husband, who trails mournfully behind. Yes! The sun makes a patch of huckleberries spring up in front of the woman, hoping to tempt her, but she walks right through it without a pause. Next comes a blackberry tangle, loaded with fruit: she walks around it. Pawpaws, service berries, peaches, all manner of fruit: nothing works. At last the sun thinks strawberries. Strawberries! The woman stops, her concentration broken. What fruit is this, the color of sunrise, of life itself? She tastes one, then another. She can’t stop eating them, can’t think of anything else. Then suddenly she remembers her husband. He would love these berries! she thinks. And he does. And they do.

MOON MAGIC

Scoop the moon out of the river, mix it with red clay & your own saliva. Paint yourself red, red. Young women will see your skin & immediately feel an ache between their thighs. They will long for fullness, banishing the moon’s red cycle. The sun-living-in-the-night looks kindly on human beings, who never squint at him the way they do for the sun-living-in-the-day. Red & blue are the same to him. Everyone looks their best in his forgiving light.

BUSYBODIES

The council of birds appoints the wren to go live among human beings and report back. Every time a baby is born, she twitters the news. If it’s a boy, she cries more arrows, more wounds! If it’s a girl, she sings more fields & bigger harvests! The six-legged tribe sends the cricket to spy. When a girl is born, he rubs his hollow belly & hops for joy.

TRANSPARENT

The great horned serpent Uktena has a blazing diamond in the middle of his forehead, clear but for a red streak running through its heart. This jewel, called Ulí»ñsí»’tí® – Transparent – is the most valuable thing in the world, but also the most dangerous to obtain & the hardest to keep. The serpent uses it to hypnotize his prey. When a hunter sees it, he throws down his weapons & rushes forward to die. Only one hunter ever succeeded in killing an Uktena, and its Ulí»ñsí»’tí® still resides with the eastern band of the Cherokee, wrapped in a deerskin and hidden deep in a cave. It has the power to satisfy every desire – brings success in hunting, rain making, love – but if its owner forgets to feed it twice a year with fresh blood, it turns into a ball of fire, a vengeful meteor. Of all crystals it is the best at showing the shape of things to come, as clearly as reflections in still water. It sees the way a serpent sees: all warm-blooded beings are transparent except for the red streak running straight through their hearts.

CHEROKEE PRINCESS (ancient Anglo legend)

The Cherokee Princess lives in a wigwam palace & gives orders to an army of spirit helpers: friendly woodland creatures with sad brown eyes. Her buckskin gown reaches only partway down her dusky leg, & her cheek is in permanent blush. The Cherokee Princess never worries her pretty little head about war or diplomacy. She must come from a different stock entirely from the Beloved Women whose words used to carry so much weight among those who called themselves Tsalagi. She is such a slight thing, she might well be made of posterboard, or even celluloid. But a vast & clamorous tribe claims descent from those insubstantial hips. Her destiny reaches far into the Darkening Land. Side by side with her handsome blue soldier she rides into the sunset, shedding tears of joy.

May 24, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Martin’s Gap

We’re in Martin’s Gap, on the edge of the Rocky Ridge Natural Area in Central Pennsylvania’s Rothrock State Forest. We got lost for a while on the drive in, and now, wandering along the stream in search of the trail, we encounter showy orchids in full bloom. In the dim light of a rainy late afternoon, you almost expect flowers like these to begin speaking. It’s not as if they lack for tongues. I sprawl on my belly, trying to shoot their portrait in the gloom with my little snapshot camera. A pickup truck stops on the nearby gravel road: “Is everything all right?” “We’re fine, thank you!” That bland baldness that most speakers of the English language mistake for truth.

A few minutes later a barred owl calls from the ridge: Hu HU huhu, hu HU huHU-awl. He flies in to query us more closely; I’m not sure how to answer. Barred owls, like their close cousins the spotted owls, are quite unafraid of human beings and often seem curious about these strange, flightless birds trespassing in their woods. The traditional birders’ onomatopoeia has them asking, “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?”

In the forest, one cannot help hearing voices, I think. But a hundred feet down the road, we run into another group of wildflower enthusiasts. “Did you hear that barred owl?” “No! Where was he?” They seem like very nice people, but I’m reminded once again of why I shy away from large group hikes. A little while later, I find this crowd of open-mouthed puffballs on the end of a log.

Wild yam and maidenhair fern: two ways to spiral. When the dervishes whirl, they say, they’re searching for something they know they’ve never lost. Or for someone, all in green, variously known as Adonis, Elijah, Khidr or St. George. The tighter the whorl, the more earth his velvet coat takes in. For a double helix, add one dragon.

Narcissism is fine for the moon-faced narcissus. For orchids, we need another word: orchidism. You want mythic content? Surely the evolutionary tango of pollinator and blossom will suffice. If you’ve ever steeled your heart against jealousy and self-love and sought salvation in complete otherness, that was orchidian behavior – highly evolved.

The sky slowly clears. We climb out of the shadow at the crest of the ridge, which is capped with strange sandstone outcroppings: megaliths, stone heads carved solely by the weather. I’m reminded that more light doesn’t necessarily mean less mystery – especially if it comes from the sun, which has always struck me as being full of darkness. Try staring at the sun for more than a second and you’ll see what I mean. You’ll carry its smudgy thumbprints around on your retina for the rest of the day.

While my hiking partner relaxes on a flat rock to listen to the forest, I go clambering in search of still more images. Here’s a burl on a rotten rock oak, half-debarked: a coroner’s view of the brain. If you aren’t following a map, you find maps everywhere.

Below one of the largest outcroppings, I hear low murmurs and creep cautiously around, not especially enthusiastic about catching people in some intimate or illegal act. But there’s nobody there, just this young Hercules’ club, otherwise known as devil’s walking stick – a common native colonizer of forest gaps. In lieu of branches, it sports enormous compound leaves and has the odd habit of producing so much fruit in the fall as to bend and even break its brittle stalk, otherwise fiercely defended with collars of thorns. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, I’m sure. Its masses of berries rapidly ferment, making them all the more attractive to the songbirds it counts on to spread its seeds far and wide, shitting them out in drunken, erratic patterns – spirals, wheels.
__________

For previous portraits of Pennsylvania natural areas, see The Hook and Tow Hill.

May 16, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Weeds

Suddenly, beginning yesterday morning, my inbox is overflowing with German spam. Auslaender bevorzugt! Tuerkei in die EU! Deutsche werden kuenftig beim Arzt abgezockt! Graeberschaendung auf bundesdeutsche Anordnung! Vorbildliche Aktion! Volk wird nur zum zahlen gebraucht! Du wirst ausspioniert ….! And so on. The two that I open by accident contain no HTML, just Internet addresses. Clearly, the senders are “pharming,” trying to lure the curious or unwary into visiting a website where the seeds of malicious software lie waiting for new victims, new agents of dispersal. But why me? I don’t know a word of German. Whence this sudden invasion?

A few hours later I’m on a botanical field trip where one of the other participants is German and speaks authoritatively (albeit with a heavy accent) about plants and disturbance regimes, here and in Europe. We’re examining one of the few, tiny, remaining fragments of xeric limestone prairie in Pennsylvania. Why do European plants so easily out-compete ours? I ask. The German guy explains it’s because many of the northern European weeds have had a thousand years of intense cultivation to learn how to be aggressively weedy.

In North America, by contrast, the only really widespread form of anthropogenic landscape alteration was fire. Regular burning favors oak forests or savannas, depending on geology, exposure, moisture level, and other factors. This perpetuated openings that were originally natural, dating from a much warmer climatic period ending around 4,500 years ago in which wildfires were much commoner than they are today. Given fire, deep-rooted warm-season grasses can successfully out-compete cool-season grasses – mostly European imports. Large Pleistocene herbivores such as ground sloths and mastadons also played a role in originally creating these openings; in more recent times, the American bison helped spread prairie seeds between far-flung openings. Our trip leader describes an experiment with samples of different kinds of animal fur in order to find which would best transport the seeds of side-oats gramma grass, a prairie indicator species. Some pelts, such as deer and elk, shed the seeds immediately; the densely matted buffalo pelts picked up and retained side-oats gramma seeds like nothing else.

As with the wolf and panther, the wild bison still has a sort of ghostly presence in the Pennsylvania landscape, recalled by numerous toponymns: Buffalo Valley, Buffalo Creek, Buffalo Run. Run they did, but never fast enough. You can, however, still see them around – there’s a farmer who raises buffalo right on the other side of this hill, one of the local participants informs us. That really gets us talking!

We discuss spotted knapweed, a plant I only know from the railroad right-of way. Most of the invasive species in our hollow first appeared down along the tracks, hoboing in from god knows where. Spotted knapweed is that tall, rank stuff with the purple thistle-like flowers, but no spines. Turns out it doesn’t need them. It’s what they call allelopathic, poisoning the soil for other plants, and it’s potent enough to repel would-be grazers as well. Humans foolish enough to pull it out bare-handed may be susceptible to a nasty rash, but just as often it doesn’t leave a physical sign, going instead straight for the nervous system. You get recurring headaches, our trip leader says, and for a week or two, nothing will taste quite right.

Following local leads, we discover a previously unknown prairie remnant on the side of a hill above a plowed field; the owner mows it every few years because it’s a popular sledding hill in the winter. A number of indicator plants are intermixed with non-natives; the bright, orange-yellow patches of hoary pucoon are the most extensive we’ve seen all day. They intermingle with red columbine for a wonderful, natural garden effect.

One of the botanists shows us how to identify the planted pine trees: gather their long needles together in a sheaf and press them against the palm. If they bend readily, it’s red pine. If they threaten to go right through the hand, it’s Austrian pine. These are definitely Austrian, stout swords. We laugh nervously about possible ethnic parallels. Our erstwhile German participant has already bustled off to scout out other rare plants, convinced there was nothing more to be seen with us. Earlier, he had asked me to show him the location of another prairie remnant on the map. I explained how it was right across from the entrance to a very charming cave. “I have no interest in caves,” he said. It was impossible to tell from his intonation whether or not he meant that remark to sound friendly.

The strange thing about yesterday’s outing was that I had been to the first site we visited nine years before, but had absolutely no recollection of it. I figured something would eventually ring a bell, but nothing ever did.

Last night, I didn’t dream about either German botanists or Vorbildliche Aktion, as far as I can remember. In the last dream before I get up, a train I’m riding returns to the station so I can search for my boots. I had taken them off and left them somewhere without noticing how much harder and rougher the ground had become to my stockinged feet. In this dream – maybe in all dreams? – the surfaces of the world are as smooth as a lover’s thigh. But no true beloved could ever be half so innocuous.

The train travels backwards for one whole stop, disrupting service up and down the line. “We do this all the time,” the conductor says. “We’ve learned to accommodate the special needs of our passengers, who are uncommonly forgetful.” Everyone disembarks, and the other passengers wander off in search of coffee or newspapers. My companion helps me retrace my steps: over a metal bridge, through cobblestone alleys, into a slick-floored casino. Perhaps the boots were stolen right off my feet? I search through the Recent Acquisitions rack in a second-hand clothing store, and although I do find several pairs of army boots that look virtually identical to mine, none respond to my plaintive whisper. One large pair gleams, freshly spit-shined. They almost sneer. Their former owner couldn’t have made it through Day One of Basic Training.

In the very last place I look, there they are: old and comfortable, caked with limey mud, perhaps carrying a few seeds of side-oats gramma. Now I remember! But I had to swim upstream to the source, the very start of the dream. I take off the loaner pair of women’s boots – they’d been just a little tight – and step into my own with a sigh of pleasure. Read into this what you will. Me, I woke up. I lay in bed rehearsing the apologetic speech I would have to deliver to my fellow passengers. “From now on, I’ll always take the train,” I thought, “even if it never takes me where I want to go.”

This morning, a Baltimore oriole has begun persecuting his reflection in the window opposite my writing table. He’s not quite as aggressive as last year’s cardinal, preferring to sing rather than attempting a full-scale assault. From a perch two feet away he flutters up against the glass, singing loudly. It must confuse him the way his rival opens his beak at the same time he does, since his is the only song. He’s looking right in my direction as he does so. If I didn’t know better, I might think I was the intended target of his sharply worded messages.

May 14, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

The Hook

We’re in The Hook Natural Area in the Bald Eagle State Forest of Central Pennsylvania, 5,000 acres of silence and pollen. The 100-year-old forest is beginning to close in: open above, darker and denser below. Young hemlocks rising beneath the canopy of birch and oak resume their millennial project of bringing soil to the rock-strewn hillsides, needle by needle.

Black and yellow birch limbs torn down by January’s ice storm have one final flowering on the ground. Catkins long as fishing worms release clouds of yellow smoke as we clear the branches from the trail. I wonder if the parent trees can feel this reflex flowering of their dismembered parts, the way a human amputee is said to be bothered from time to time by the unscratchable itching of a ghostly foot? Pollen, like rain, falls equally on the just and the unjust. By the end of our two-mile walk, my boots have turned a gangrenous shade of green.

I kneel and crouch and lie on my belly, trying for an acceptable shot of an obvious subject. But the charms of painted trilliums aren’t as obvious as they first seem; these flowers are far more recondite than their large and showy cousins the wake-robins, for example. Given a better camera, would I see half as much? Each clump of trilliums tempts me with new possibilities, unique arrangements – redemption! But the picture taken in haste, with little thought, turns out the best.

For sheen, there’s shining club moss, rhododendren. Almost every other surface – living or dead, organic or inorganic – harbors some patina, colorful assemblages of moss, algae, fungi, lichen, monera. I think of all the orders of angels: so many different ways to feed on light and nourish shadows. The first-succession black birches and oaks will take years to rot, slowly releasing their sweetness back into the soil, long after this barely recognizable hemlock stump will have dissolved into the slightest pimple on the forest floor.

Hobblebush blooms at the bottom of a ravine, acres of ankle-breaking talus guarding it from its nemesis, the white-tailed deer. In the late afternoon sun, the blossoms glow as white as any warning meant to make a deer turn tail. A nearby waterfall already plays on night’s changes, oblivious to the drought that elsewhere cracks the moss. Why “hobblebush,” I wonder, for such a limber tree? Its shadow stretches skinny wet fingers over and under the stone.

May 11, 2005 by Dave Bonta

The double-take

I don’t recognize these photos that are allegedly of me, someone says on a listserve. That’s not who I am. Growing old never seems real. Childhood was real, and the people around us who were old then seemed as though they must have been that way forever. I remember how my grandma used to hum as she moved around the house, a mostly tuneless hum as far as I could tell. I never asked her about it, but I find I do the same thing now, living in the very same house where she and Grandpa spent their summers when I was a kid. Maybe it’s the same hum, too.

The Baltimore oriole has returned to the yard and the wood thrush to the woods, and it’s difficult to escape the impression that these are the very same individuals that have been coming back to sing every year for the past 35 years. The power of songs to outlive us: this is what makes them the true currency of warm-blooded life, the way they bind an aging pulse to an ageless but no less fragile place in the world.

But now it’s almost dark and the birds are still. It’s Monday evening, and I’m sitting on a stump at the bend of the old woods road, resting somewhere between daydream and meditation, too tired for either.

I find that sleep deprivation interferes with my ability to experience joy. It’s nothing for the body to support tension and irritation, but taking deep pleasure in things requires every faculty we possess and then some. Instead, I find myself increasingly abstracted from my body and all of its superstitious attractions and repulsions. I’m listening for the whip-poor-will rumored to be calling at the far end of the property, but all I hear are things rustling in the leaves, jets high overhead, dogs barking in the valley. One of the planets glimmers through the branches of an oak.

There have been some interesting goings-on lately. One of the turkey hunters told us about a wood duck nesting in a hollow oak tree some fifteen feet off the ground, right on the dry ridgetop. He had been sitting against a tree a short distance away, and the duck kept poking her head out to look at him, he said. The nearest pond of any size is a half-mile away at the base of the mountain. How the mother duck intends to lead her ducklings there is beyond me.

On top of the other ridge, there are a few very small vernal ponds, as I’ve mentioned before, but the last one is rapidly drying up in the drought. My mother was up there gazing at the little puddle that remains and wondering if any of the wood frog tadpoles would make it to maturity, when she heard a rustling in the leaves behind her. She turned around and there was the mother bear walking along with one, two, three small cubs bringing up the rear. This marks the fourth time this bear has raised a litter on our end of the mountain, presuming it’s the same mother each time, which would make her about ten years old. The bears paid my mother no mind, just kept going wherever they were going. It’s a rare privilege for a wildlife watcher to be so completely ignored.

The third sighting last weekend was my own: a pair of Cooper’s hawks that kept calling back and forth in an agitated fashion. As long as I stood still, the male was content to sit and watch me from a safe distance, preening his breast feathers, but as soon as I’d move he’d take off again, making a wide arc through the trees, disappearing completely and then reappearing from a different point of the compass. I examined every tree for hundreds of feet in all directions, but couldn’t see any sign of a nest. Like the black bear, these Cooper’s hawks have become regular breeders on the mountain, but only once in the past four years have we managed to find their nest.

The thing I like about nature in general is the sense of complete unpredictability and spontaneity within regular cycles of events. Over at Slow Reads, Peter reports on groundhogs that run unexpectedly straight toward him – and an eccentric neighbor who knows just what to do.

The farmer begins to prance in a circle, raising his hands and knees high and lowering them, and the groundhogs just follow him, prancing in their own way.

Or so his friend Michael told him. I have my doubts. But while Peter was photographing the back end of a rebuffed woodchuck, “Rurality” was face-to-face with a gray rat snake.

I tried to snap a shot when he was scoping me out with his tongue, but none of them turned out too well, and after a while he quit doing it…

I tried to prod him into leaving, but by that time he’d become too relaxed and didn’t want to leave.

The problem with wildlife-watching, it seems, is that the wildlife watches back. This elementary truth sometimes seems lost on those who want nature to resemble a made-for-television drama. I remember a visiting friend one time declining my offer for a guided tour of our woods: “I’ve seen trees before. Boring!” Indeed. Where’s the drama? Most animals spend most of their waking hours doing nothing, wildlife researchers tell us. They have plenty of time to sit and contemplate the frantic to-and-froing of human beings.

Night comes while I wait: I certainly can’t complain about the service! I’m sitting here not expecting anything to happen, and the closer I get to accepting that there is nothing that needs to happen, the straighter I sit. Even in my sleep-deprived state, I’m enjoying the stillness.

But it isn’t like that, really: my life, I mean, or yours either. Apparent stillness is simply an artifact of defective hearing; as I grow older, I should have many occasions to revel in the growing silence. Or maybe I’ll just a hum a little louder. And in all likelihood someone will come by here tonight – on four feet, perhaps, or on two wings – and in the darkness we will recognize each other, we will do what they call a double-take. Any moment now.

May 9, 2005February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Tow Hill

Yesterday I walked around the Tow Hill portion of State Game Land 176 in Centre County, PA with my friend L., who lives nearby. This is a geologically, botanically and historically unique area – a former iron mining town now reverted to woods and barrens. The Tow Hill portion is crossed by a large powerline and dotted with small ponds, some occupying former mine pits, others made by beavers. It was a spectacular day to be out in the woods.

The buds open on the oak trees: yellow-green flowers, yellow-green leaves the size of squirrels’ ears & equally full of buzzy warbler voices. Warblers sound like what they eat, hard on the outside, liquid on the inside, segmented, brief – sing it! – cerulean, black-throated green, black-throated blue.

Just as the leaves open, the caterpillars pitch their tents. Power lines whistle a thin & hungry tune from bare metal trees.

Moth and rust don’t corrupt, they beautify. Some hunter thought this slab of old metal was worth leaning against a tree beside the trail for others to see. It’s trying to become a window, perhaps, one corrosive raindrop at a time.

A window? No, more like the obverse of a periscope. The sun sits on the surface of the murky pond like a glass-bottomed boat.

Strange fruit: a dry, rusted-through bucket hangs in a tree. If this were the American Southwest, we’d know what to make of the bullet holes: it’s been killed, we’d say, so its dead owner won’t come looking for it. Who knows when you might need to carry a little more sky?

Skunk cabbages space themselves as if they’d been planted by some self-effacing green thumb. The drama of their blooming long over, they spread their sails for home in the rust-colored mud.

May 6, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Learning from the ivorybill

Drawing by Mark Bowers, from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service website
(link via The Daily Blatt)

1. Mr. Wile E.

A week ago, when I heard the news about the rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker, I was – as I mentioned – afflicted with a sudden and unaccustomed surge of joy and hopefulness about the state of the planet. After a couple hours of reading on-line articles and corresponding with my two birder-brothers about it (my parents being on vacation and out of e-mail reach), it occurred to me to send a message to the listserve of the Pennsylvania Biodiversity Partnership in my capacity as co-chair of the Public Lands Committee of the Pennsylvania Chapter of Sierra Club. After a link to the Cornell Lab and a few other remarks, I concluded, “The message for Pennsylvania is clear: Recover It (old-growth forest) And They Will Return.”

Yes, that’s right. Even in the midst of my jubilation, I couldn’t resist putting my own spin on things. And in fact, it bore satisfactory results: it sparked a good discussion of old-growth on the listserve, and my reaction against my own opportunism led to a half-decent poem two days later.

But Coyote wasn’t fooled. I neglected to mention this at the time, in part because I figured y’all might suspect me of making it up. But it’s true. It was about nine o’clock that evening, and I had been listening to some of my favorite country blues cassettes (remember cassette tapes?) while drinking three or four celebratory bottles of homebrew. (It was, unfortunately, too cold to sit outside.) Then I got hungry, and remembered some leftovers up at the other house, in my parents’ refrigerator. The night was dark. Just as I got to the top of the hill, a coyote let loose from the middle of the field – less than a hundred yards away. The hair stood straight up on the back of my neck. He or she howled a couple of times, then barked like a dog: Har! Har! Har! Har! Har! I scuttled inside, grabbed the highest-powered flashlight I could find, and shone it back and forth across the field, hoping to pick up the eye shine, but the animal had already slipped away.

Now, to appreciate this incident, especially if you’re from out west, you have to understand a couple of things. First, that eastern coyotes don’t vocalize nearly as often as their western counterparts. Second: the eastern coyote is, depending on which biologists you believe, either a brand-new animal here in the east, or a once-eradicated species that reintroduced itself in the latter half of the 20th century. The latter theory postulates that European settlers, being unfamiliar with the North American coyote, simply mis-identified it as the “brush wolf” – which they then proceeded to wipe out as quickly as they could. The problem with that theory is that coyotes are virtually impossible to eradicate. Since they have always played second fiddle to wolves, it makes sense that they would evolve an extremely flexible population ecology: the more you persecute them, the faster they reproduce. Gray wolves, having evolved (at least since the demise of the dire wolf) as top dogs, have no such resilience.

But canids speciate as much by culture as by genetics, which is to say that species boundaries are readily crossed, and only mutual hostility and fear of being eaten prevent interbreeding – 99 percent of the time. A DNA analysis of eastern coyotes did strongly suggest that interbreeding with timber wolves – the smaller subspecies of wolves inhabiting eastern Canada – had occurred in the recent past. But who knows? Perhaps there were a number of regional subspecies in 1600. Some biologists argue that the Pennsylvania “brush wolf” was neither gray nor timber wolf, but the red wolf of the southern Appalachians.

Does Coyote care about all this? I think not. This new/old wild canid has figured out that frequent howling in the densely populated east is not advantageous. Nearly every hunter in this state owns a powerful spotlight, and coyotes may be shot anytime as a varmit. The easiest way to do this, I’m told, is by playing tapes of their howls. Meanwhile – and very anecdotally – I hear from folks in Vermont and West Virginia that an even larger coyote is beginning to appear. It’s probably only a matter of time before wild canids in the northeast switch from opportunistic predation to direct reliance on our hugely over-abundant white-tailed deer herd. I hope.

Of more direct relevance to the ivorybill rediscovery is the fact that the presence of coyotes in the state was officially denied for years – decades, in fact. Even as sightings grew more frequent and the evidence more and more overwhelming, spokespeople for our state wildlife agency continued to deny the obvious. The name of this agency might tell you why: it’s the Pennsylvania Game Commission. It derives almost all its funding from the sale of hunting licenses, and all license increases must be approved by the state legislature. Game Commission folks knew that the interval between official acknowledgement of the coyote’s presence and demands for its eradication would be about two or three nanoseconds, so they stalled as long as they could. When it finally became impossible to deny the obvious – some fifteen years ago now – they announced it as a wonderful new addition to the state’s already impressive roster of legally trapable and shootable critters. They made it sound like such a good thing, in fact, that to this day they are regularly accused by more credulous members of the hunting fraternity of having deliberately introduced the animal, as part of vast and sinister conspiracy between anti-hunters, the Audubon Society, and the United Nations. These are, of course, the same anti-hunters who want to slaughter all the deer in the state. As Dave Berry would say, I swear I’m not making this up.

In fact, I know this guy who knows a guy who drives truck, and one time about fifteen years ago, after a couple beers, he says to my buddy, “You won’t believe what I got in the back of my truck…”

2. How much old-growth is enough?

One of the first two responses to my e-mail to the Biodiversity Partnership listserve raised some interesting questions:

I have been told the ivory-billed woodpecker has been seen by outdoorsmen in the Arkansas area for years. No one of any “authority” believed the people who saw them. Now that some upper-shelf person saw one, it is now for real. Great, but the same can be said for other animals in the eastern US: cougars, badgers, wolves, lynx, Allegheny wood rat etc. come to mind. It is time we get our heads out of the sand and put a little effort into documenting other animals in our midst.

The author, Gene Odato – chief of the Rural and Community Forestry section of the Pennnsylvania Bureau of Forestry – responded to my spin with some of his own. If some of these supposedly endangered or regionally extinct species are, in fact, present, then what do we have to worry about? If anything, we have too much old-growth – and not enough young forests.

I would like to know more about the nature of that forest in the Cache and White River bottoms: year last cut, degree/type of management, etc. That would be very instructive to us all.

I would also like to know more of the management details of the land the woodpecker inhabits. As for PA or any other state: How much old-growth is enough without damaging the lives of the people who depend on the wise use of the forest? The public land such as the national forest and in particular the state forest of PA already manage 30% to 50% of the forest as old-growth. How much more do we need without sacrificing the habitat needs of hundreds of wildlife and plant species that depend on early successional forest, poletimber-sized forest?

I asked my brother Mark to do some digging – something which, as a geographer, birder and conservationist, he didn’t have to be asked about twice. In fact, even before he headed over to Arkansas last Saturday, he fired off a preliminary e-mail in response to some of Gene’s concerns.

All I can say at this point is that Arkansas appears to be quite a bit more advanced than Pennsylvania – after all, its motto is “The Natural State” rather than the “Keystone State.” Arkansas parks are some of the most impressive I’ve seen. It takes some guts or gall to block a bridge across the Mississippi River from this county (Bolivar), the epicenter of cotton production in the US, across to Ark, but they did it years ago to avoid destroying the White River Refuge. Thanks to the White River National Wildlife Refuge, there is no unbroken road along the Mississippi River on the west side of the river through Arkansas. (Where this bird was rediscovered, however, is right off the Interstate, well north.)

I’m just not quite convinced that people up in the northeast can conceive of the size of some of the wildernesses down here, nor understand that the old-growth was logged as recently as the 1940s, and never really completely, at least in Arkansas and Louisiana (Mississippi is a different, sadder story, of course) – the Big Forest, like this side of the river, was mostly wilderness until the end of the 1800s, so analogous to the Big Thicket [in Texas]. There are still several million acres of flooded bottomland hardwood forest in the lower Mississippi River Valley, and probably the single highest biodiversity indices, as well as biomass production. The Mississippian civilizations arose here; Poverty Point mound civilization, living with and off the untold millions of waterfowl and fish and etc. and so forth.

The point is that the region has been all but forgotten by most conservationists – sort of like living in Brazil and forgetting the Pantanal or whatever. The Mississippi, White, Cache, Pearl and other rivers are still free-flowing and undammed. There are still virgin canebrakes (bamboo forests) on private land. I’m already getting a bit impatient at urbanites who pay attention to areas only when Audubon or the Conservancy make them into big destinations. I wrote about listening to local voices in my book on Honduras. Almost no one does that here.

3. Accomodating a “magnificent misanthrope”

The White River flows south, joining the Arkansas just above its junction with the Mississippi in the middle of a huge roadless area comprising some 125,000 acres, much of it still in private hands. The White River National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) stretches north along the river from there, joining with the Cache River and its attendant NWR just south and for many miles north of Interstate 40. It was to the latter location that Mark and family headed last Saturday after motoring up the fabled Highway 61, unable to simply cross the river at Rosedale due to the State of Arkansas’ atavistic dislike for Progress.

As his e-mail indicated, the verified ivorybill sightings reported in Science were all along the Cache River, within a very short distance of the interstate. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service folks at the Cache River NWR were very forthcoming and were able to answer all his questions, he said: he and his family were virtually the only visitors to arrive there all day. The wildlife refuge had designated special observation points beyond which it intends to restrict access – 5,000 of the refuge’s 60,000 acres have been closed. All the high officialdom were there, braced for an onslaught of crazed birders that never happened. It seems the word had gone out over birders’ listserves to stay home and leave the ivory-billed woodpecker in peace.

The only problem, Mark said, is that no one really knows what disturbs an ivory-billed woodpecker. Various theories are circulating about why the bird has proved so darned elusive for the last half-century. Perhaps, as my brother Steve suggested last week, it has learned and inculcated in its young an extreme wariness toward human beings – “a magnificent misanthrope,” he called it. Mark replied that this seemed plausible – at least based on his experience with some rare birds and mammals in Central America – but added that the White River area, which is now presumed to harbor a breeding population of ivorybills, is formidably remote and difficult of access. Ivory-billed woodpeckers don’t migrate, and the literature says that their breeding territories can be quite small for a bird of that size – no more than a couple square kilometers.

So presumably the male sighted up near I-40 is a dispersing juvenile looking for new territory. What makes this area attractive? It harbors the oldest known stand of bald cypresses in the United States, Mark said – trees over two thousand years old.

Mark went on to say that – contrary to the essay by John Fitzpatrick that I quoted here last week – the forests down there were never completely cut-over. According to the Cache River NWR managers, many patches of older forest remain, though none of them may be “virgin” – the oaks, pines and other valuable trees were, indeed, all taken at some point, but many stands of bald cypress and black gum were not. Thus, the ivorybill probably never ran out suitable nesting trees.

The limiting factor, then, back during the most severe bottleneck period following the end of the timber boom, would have been food. As a woodpecker, the ivorybill has a very high-protein diet (though it does eat lots of fruit, too). According to stomach-content analyses performed in the early 20th century, most of its protein was derived from one family of insects – longhorn beetles. The larvae of these beetles live in the wood of standing dead trees, including oaks and pines – the species that were high-graded out of the swamps some eighty years ago. There must have been some awfully lean years for an awfully small and secretive remnant population of ivory-billed woodpeckers.

Now these trees are recovering – and even better, they’re dying and being left to rot in place rather than being “salvaged,” as would probably happen if it were a Pennsylvania state park or forest. Mark noted that floods and beavers are part of the natural disturbance regime of Mississippi floodplain forests; high waters regularly kill pines and oaks without bothering the true swamp species – cypress and black gum. The NWR managers told him that they adopt a passive management approach to reforestation. The Cache River website lists “Protect and restore the bottomland hardwood resources of the basin” as one of the four, main Refuge Objectives. Management Tools include public hunting and “Water management for waterfowl, wading and shore birds.” In Dahomey NWR on the Mississippi side, Mark said, this includes the occasional dynamiting of beaver dams.

This area of Arkansas – the Big Woods – is wild. It’s home to a healthy population of black bear, and panthers are moving in. The human population is low and dropping at about ten percent a decade, Mark said. The Fish and Wildlife Service people told him that the local reaction to news of the ivorybill’s rediscovery seemed mostly positive, and this isn’t surprising – wildlife watching, hunting and fishing already make a substantial contribution to the local economy. It’s a myth that public opinion changes more slowly in rural areas than in supposedly more progressive urban and suburban areas, Mark said.

4. Disturbing conclusions

Lessons for conservation elsewhere may be more elusive than either Gene or I were originally willing to acknowledge. The fact is, every bioregion is unique; ecologists have learned the hard way that forest succession in the east, where most canopy replacement occurs as a result of single-tree or small stand mortality, is more the exception than the rule. The so-called edaphic climax model first developed in the northeast United States still seems to be a pretty good fit for our region. But in areas of complex physical geography like the Appalachians, natural disturbance regimes may change radically over very short distances – nothing like the broad, virtually flat and geologically uniform floodplain of the Mississippi. And while we do have a few possible old-growth obligate species, present or extirpated – northern flying squirrel, pine martin, sugar maple longhorn beetle – the list is much longer for species that simply do best in mature forests, or in forests with many old-growth characteristics. Features such as standing dead timber, downed woody debris, multiple age classes – including many 150-year-plus specimens – and a healthy humus layer provide optimal habitat for many of Penn’s Woods’ most treasured species, including: winter wren, Acadian flycatcher, black-throated green warbler, blackburnian warbler, magnolia warbler, Swainson’s thrush, brown creeper, blue-headed vireo, cerulean warbler, yellow-bellied flycatcher, brook trout, goshawk, barred owl, fisher and lynx; many slow-dispersing spring ephemeral wildflowers, such as painted trillium and dwarf ginseng; most lungless salamanders, which can take over a hundred years to re-colonize a clearcut; and unknown numbers of native ferns, mosses, liverworts, lichens, fungi and invertebrates.

Actually, this situation is not atypical of forest ecosystems anywhere in the world. At least among charismatic megafauna, the number of species completely intolerant to human disturbance is very small, but the number that depend on the continuation of something very like what they evolved in is – as one would expect – very large. Many advocates for the timber industry like to point to studies that show edge and early-succession species declining, but in some cases these are species native to the Midwest whose ranges have expanded only in recent times as the land was cleared. In other cases they are species that might have been naturally rare, dependent on natural clearings resulting from the occasional stand-clearing ice storm or tornado.

Concerns about balancing the needs of humans with those of other animals are very appropriate. By why should one species monopolize 90 percent of natural resources and dominate virtually every bioregion? There’s something awfully depressing about the idea that every species and natural community on the planet persists only because human beings have decided they can tolerate its presence. This is a far, far cry from the view of Creation expressed by the Voice out of the whirlwind in the Book of Job. To pretend that we can and should manage all of nature is sheer hubris. And a narrow, species-by-species approach to conservation not only misses the larger picture, it ignores the magnitude of what we have lost in terms of sheer plant and animal biomass. The forests of pre-Columbian North America – lightly managed by human beings for millennia, mostly through fire – teemed with wildlife. Seventeenth-century explorers and settlers were nearly unanimous in their astonishment at the great numbers and diversity of fish, foul and game, even though to some it seemed forbidding, a “waste and howling wilderness.” Somewhere along the line, the Biblical vision of wilderness as a place of testing and transformation had been replaced by a fear and hatred of the untamed that haunts us to this day.

Everyone likes nice, park-like woods with great big trees and very little messy understory. Pure stands of old-growth hemlock or spruce can certainly inspire reverence, but they don’t come close to satisfying the ecological definition of old-growth, which includes trees of all ages and conditions – and much more besides. Conservationists err in putting too much emphasis on protecting stands of big trees and not enough on the need to recover old-growth forested landscapes – the natural condition for at least ninety percent of Pennsylvania and most other eastern states.

How much old-growth does wildlife need? All it can get. We need to relearn humility and begin to heed that Voice out of the whirlwind. We need to welcome natural disturbances and recognize them as blessings in disguise rather than “natural disasters” ripe for “salvage.” Many more insect outbreaks and some wildfires on public land could be allowed to run their course. Public and private land managers could do a much better job at grouping and connecting stands of “legacy trees” within timbered areas. Herpetologists tell us that uncut buffers around wetlands of all kinds should be measured in the hundreds of yards rather than in the tens or hundreds of feet, as is currently the practice (if we’re lucky). Most forested headwater areas should never be cut to protect hydrology and downstream organisms, such as our increasingly beleaguered native mussels. And all this presumes success in controlling the biggest on-going scourges of Pennsylvania forests: white-tailed deer overbrowsing, air pollution (including acid rain), and fragmentation from roads and sprawl. I don’t think any of these problems are anywhere near as severe in the Big Woods of Arkansas. But unless and until we address them, biodiversity here will continue to decline.

One way or another, it’s almost a given that Coyote – patron of unforeseen consequences – will have the last laugh.
__________

UPDATE: Mark just e-mailed me with a couple corrections (which I have made), and added the following thought:

The geography of the lower Mississippi valley alluvial swamps (bottomland hardwood forests) is similar in character to the varzea of Amazonia, though of course with the leveeing of the Mississippi River and side rivers, flooding is not nearly as extreme as it once was. However, the geomorphology is very similar, and includes huge oxbow lakes – the largest in the Americas north of Amazonia are in the Delta.

My point is that humans have lived and farmed Amazonia, and seasonally the varzea forest, for millennia, using swidden rotation (slash and burn) which involves small clearcuts. This does not mean the Amazonia (or the Peten in Guatemala, for that matter) are “second-growth”; it means that human populations are low enough that human disturbance regimes are simply another form of forest modification. Indeed, swidden, the world’s oldest form of agriculture (or horticulture), is successful in that it mimics natural treefall dynamics, widely believed to be the disturbance regime that is most important in helping create the awesomely high biodiversity of the Amazon.

When human populations swell and elite/capitalist greed enter into the equation, forests are wiped out. It is all in the temporal and spatial scale at which the destruction is taking place, however: this can quite rapid, or over decades or even centuries. Essentially, does the local human population absolutely depend on a healthy ecosystem, or not? Economics and governance are at the heart of it.

May 5, 2005June 1, 2016 by Dave Bonta

The gatekeepers

It’s after-hours at the reptile zoo. The last echoes from the last child’s excited shrieks have died away and the endless loop of jungle music has been switched off, along with the softly hissing fluorescent lights. Imagine what sounds must populate the stygian darkness, as Edgar Rice Burroughs would’ve called it: a slow whispering of scales against scales, the creaking and shuffling of homesick tortoises still trying to locate the bole of some coconut palm. The leaf-tailed geckoes’ suction-cup feet make faint popping noises as they climb the walls. A cricket chirps once, twice. A sudden scrambling from the cages of live mice and three dozen forked tongues crackle like static. Something small and deadly plops into a pool. An alligator takes its once-a-minute breath.

“More sophisticated interpretations of Genesis regard the serpent as mediator of understanding: human beings must be expelled from the Garden, which they have enjoyed unconsciously, in order to return to it with conscious appreciation in a perfected state… It is notable that both Kundalini and Christian imagery represent the serpent as gatekeeper of extraordinary power – be that power conceived as energy or awareness. The two snakes intertwined around the caduceus, symbol of the medical profession, evoke the serpent as gateway to healing.”

Ellen Crist, “Serpentes, the Ultimate Other,” in Wild Earth special issue, “Facing the Serpent,” Summer/Fall 2003

“The [human] brain evolved into its present form over a period of about two million years, from the time of Homo habilis to the late Stone Age of Homo sapiens, during which people existed in hunter-gatherer bands in intimate contact with the natural environment. Snakes mattered. The smell of water, the hum of a bee, the directional bend of a stalk mattered. The naturalist’s trance was adaptive: the glimpse of one small animal hidden in the grass could make the difference between eating and going hungry in the evening. And a sweet sense of horror, the shivery fascination with monsters and creeping forms that so delights us today even in the sterile hearts of the cities, could keep you alive until the next morning. Organisms are the natural stuff of metaphor and ritual. Although the evidence is far from all in, the brain appears to have kept all its old capacities, its channeled quickness. We stay alert and alive in the vanished forests of the world.”

E.O. Wilson, “The Serpent,” in ibid.

“Although I’ve been taught that scientists are supposed to be dispassionate observers, I’ve had problems living up to that ideal. It is impossible for me to view nature as a collection of unfeeling objects. I’m not just interested in living organisms and curious about their lives – I really love them. I especially adore the eastern diamondback rattlesnake (Croatus adamanteus), the ‘king of rattlesnakes,’ as Manny Rubio calls it in his book, Rattlesnake. Just why I have an affinity for this creature I can’t say…

“My most memorable experience with a diamondback was a seemingly telepathic one. I was walking slowly along a transect in San Falesco Hammock, near Gainesville, conducting early morning bird surveys for my dissertation research. I was gazing up toward the treetops, listening for songs and calls, when suddenly the image of a diamondback came into my head, like a daydream. I glanced down, and right at my feet where I was about to step was a large diamondback in a resting coil. The strangest thing is that neither I not the diamondback were the slightest bit alarmed by this state of affairs. I sat down cross-legged about a foot from the snake, and for several minutes we silently communed, the snake slowly flicking its tongue and I just watching. I then stood up, stepped around the snake, and continued my survey.”

Reed F. Noss, “Another Dead Diamondback,” in ibid.

“Sadly, snakes are disappearing from many parts of the globe just when we are starting to understand their place in the world.”

Chris Mattison, Snake: The Essential Visual Guide to the World of Snakes, DK Publishing, 1999

“Green, how much I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches….”

(Verde, que te quiero verde.
Verde viento. Verdes ramas….)

Federico Garcia Lorca, “Romance Sonambulo” (Sleepwalker’s Ballad)

May 4, 2005June 1, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Of dragons and princesses

My five-year-old cousin Morgan has wanted to be a princess ever since she was old enough to talk. At the wedding reception, she’s agog: the bride was right there in the bathroom! Morgan circulates among the tables telling everyone she knows in what is presumably intended to be a hushed whisper.

The princess may seem capricious, but her whims are predictable: If it moves, make it stop. If it doesn’t move, poke at it with a stick. Try stepping on it. Not enough to really kill it – just so it stops moving. Then give it a new identity, complete with a sanitized version of events. “You shouldn’t be trying to sting people, Mr. Wasp!”

At Clyde Peeling’s Reptiland we get to watch the mangrove viper eat. The keeper removes the back wall of its small green world and dangles a white corpse – a pre-killed mouse – in front of its nose. The trick rope comes alive as quick as lightning. It tries in vain to swallow the mouse tail-first, works it around in its mouth for five minutes until it ends up pointing in the right direction. Then with a sudden gulp, the mouse turns into a lump that makes the blue-black and yellow scales ripple as it moves rapidly toward the stomach. Now the viper can’t stay still: even without legs it paces, impatient for Food #2. When the keeper opens the wall this time, the snake seems ready for larger prey. The mouse does a frantic dance of death at the end of the three-foot tongs.

After the viper feeding, Morgan tugs on her mother’s sweatshirt. “Can I have a mouse, too?” Who’d have thought that mealtimes could ever be anything but a dull game played with fork and spoon? They go into the gift shop, and she picks out a plush purple frog with legs as long and bendable as snakes.

No tawdry roadside menagerie, the zoo turns out to be a real class act, dedicated to endangered species conservation and environmental education. I can’t decide whether to be pleased or disappointed. No one will ever wrestle with these alligators. We’ll never get to place bets on a match-up between the eyelash viper and the poison arrow frog. I crouch in front of the chameleon exhibit, watching crickets trying to burrow into the bark chips. The chameleon rolls its gun-turret eyes – one at me, the other at a doomed cricket.

Adults don’t come to Reptiland, it seems, unless accompanied by children. School groups thunder through like wildebeests. So important to set a good example for the children, we tell ourselves as the handler holds the boa constrictor for everyone to pet. Morgan is delighted. Only one child refuses to touch, mute with terror or intransigence. While everyone around her admires the silky-smooth scales, she stares at the hand clamped over its mouth and keeps her fingers coiled tight against her chest.

An outdoor pen contains the only token birds at Reptiland: five emus, to illustrate the link with the dinosaurs. Victorian feather dusters never looked quite so vengeful, but still… “We are not emus!” I say severely as they eye us up.

That evening we watch two cartoon movies, the world twice saved from certain cataclysm. Morgan seems bored, starts to wander off. “Sit down, watch the movie, and be good!” her father commands. During the intermission, she finds a dead ladybug in the corner of the living room, sets it on top of a block of wood and pushes it back and forth with her index finger. “Be good, ladybug!” I hear her whispering.