Nature/Ecology – Page 115

August 15, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Raising the tank

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It’s been over thirty years since the thousand-gallon oil tank was buried in the lawn, and we figured it was only a matter of time before it rusted through. This would be an environmental catastrophe, since it sits right above the stream, near the head of the hollow. We were planning to replace the old guest house furnace with a new, more efficient model anyway, so it seemed like a good time to put in an above-ground, fiberglass-lined tank, as well.

Thus, Saturday morning found us – my dad, my brother Steve and I – helping to free an aging, submersible craft from a shallow sea of soil. I say “helping,” because in fact the diesel-powered farm tractor did most of the work. The backhoe arm had no trouble moving earth that had been broken up by the original excavation in 1973, but as soon as it tried to bite into virgin ground, it ran a cropper of the bedrock, which is little over 18 inches down in some spots. Dad sat at the controls while Steve and I leaned on our shovels, or climbed up behind him for a better view. From the front porch, looking straight down as dirt and boulders tumbled onto a growing pile, I really did begin to feel as if I were watching a kind of semi liquid, like the stuff that spills out of a field-dressed deer. But when the hole got below four feet in depth, we saw water for real: even in this drought, the bottom of the tank sat a foot below the water table.

Of course, the air itself was saturated with moisture. The thermometer was climbing past 90 and we were sweating buckets just standing still. But Dad was afraid of undermining the guest house front porch, which he and I had spent considerable time and effort shoring up a few summers back, so Steve and I did have to jump down into the hole at one point and do a bit of digging around that side. Standing on top of the emerging tank, Steve discovered a metal ring or handle poking up. Without that discovery, we might’ve spent all day trying to get a chain under and around the tank.

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Using the tractor’s front loader, Dad was able to lift and carry the tank up to the barnyard. I had already gone up to the main house to begin preparing that evening’s supper – we eat almost nothing but cold dishes in this kind of weather, so I have to work well ahead. But Steve buzzed me on the intercom so I wouldn’t miss it, and I ran back down and joined Karylee and Elanor on the porch. As the tank lurched free of the earth, it swung dangerously close to the nearest porch column, and we all moved down to the far end.

Once in the barnyard, we lowered the tank onto concrete blocks, stacked so it would sit an angle. I pulled over the steel drip pan from underneath the bulldozer, and Dad and Steve proceeded to cut a small hole in the bottom with a sawzall in order to drain out the last of the oil. When it was finished draining, Dad gave the end of the tank a kick and discovered that it had amazing acoustic properties: a booming bass that went on and on almost as long as a Japanese temple bell. After supper, on my way back down to the guest house, I grabbed a sledgehammer from the barn and tried it out, striking the end as hard as I could. From a foot away, I could hear all kinds of overtones. Dad joined me in the barnyard after dumping the kitchen scraps in the compost pit. “Bet they can hear that all the way from Tyrone,” he said. I tried an accelerating rhythm: BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOMBOOMBOOM, like the world’s largest ruffed grouse. My dad’s never been to a rock concert. “You can feel the sound right in your chest,” he marveled.

July 30, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Doubting against doubt: finding the grail bird

Here’s a book review to wrap up Summer Book Week. Thanks are due to my father for posting (and copyediting) in my absence, and to him, my mom and my brother for sharing their expertise in “favorite books” posts.

I try hard to avoid anything topical at Via Negativa, but as regular readers will remember, I made an exception for the rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker, announced late last April. In company with a lot of other folks, I saw it as a real emblem of hope – maybe ecocide can still be averted. Maybe there’s still time.

Since then, one of the most pivotal re-discoverers, Tim Gallagher, has had his book published by Houghton Mifflin, The Grail Bird: Hot on the Trail of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. This was no instant book, but had been in the works for some time; an epilogue gives an update as of February 2005. And Gallagher, the editor of Living Bird magazine, is no slouch as a writer.

Mostly, The Grail Bird is just a good yarn, filled with engaging portraits of the various characters who have stalked the bird for science, from the 18th century to the present. I hadn’t realized the extent to which scientists had helped decimate the last surviving populations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through their insatiable urge to collect. The attitude of ornithologists toward birds was strikingly similar to the attitude of early anthropologists toward the “primitive” people they studied: gather all the hard evidence possible, including corpses, because of course their continued existence is incompatible with human progress. The role of the scientist was to document the march of rare species and indigenous peoples toward extinction. But while the mainstream of anthropology has long since repudiated this truly primitive mindset, evidence suggests that ornithologists are having a great deal of trouble accommodating any other storyline.

The real hero of the book is Gallagher’s good friend and fellow ivorybill fanatic Bobby Harrison, a roly-poly Southerner with an insatiable hunger for Snickers bars and Dinty Moore beef stew and an uncanny penchant for taking the long way around, whether on foot in snake-infested swamps or traveling cross-county in his beater of a van. It’s Harrison, along with Arkansas natives David Luneau and Gene Sparling, who maintains a constant vigil in the swamp. Wave after wave of crack birders from Cornell and elsewhere spend varying lengths of time in the area trying to collect solid documentary evidence of the Ivorybill’s existence, but in the end it’s the fanatical Harrison and Luneau who come up with the brief, blurry videos that remain the most solid evidence to date (if one discounts the excellent audio recordings of ivorybill calls from several locations).

The Grail Bird ought to appeal to a much wider audience than just birders. The story of the ivorybill’s repeated rediscovery and subsequent dismissal by legions of skeptics throughout the latter half of the 20th Century left me pondering the nature of doubt. Ever since the so-called Enlightenment of the 18th Century, we have been accustomed to regarding unquestioning faith as problematic; I can’t remember ever hearing a critique of “blind doubt.” But following the crushing loss of the Singer Tract in the 1940s, the American ornithological community has fallen prey to a fey kind of fatalism in regards to the ivorybill. No proof is good enough, and any ornithologist so foolhardy as to claim to have seen it – or even to believe in the veracity of a sighting – risks irreparable damage to his reputation.

That was the case with John Dennis, who had taken what was generally acknowledged as the last irrefutable photo of an ivorybill in Cuba in 1948. His claim to a sighting in the Big Thicket of East Texas in 1966 was roundly ridiculed. With Harrison’s help, Gallagher is able to relocate a sound recording Dennis had made, and the analysis of the sonogram convinced audio technicians that the call on the tape could only have been made by an ivorybill.

In another coup of investigative journalism, Gallgher tracked down the previously unknown individual who took the controversial snapshots of an ivory-billed woodpecker in Louisiana in 1971. The then-head of the Louisiana State Museum of Natural Science, George Lowery, had presented the snapshots at the annual meeting of the American Ornithological Union that year and was astonished at his colleagues’ reactions.

Lowery’s pictures were met with immediate withering skepticism by most of the other ornithologists. The photos showed two different trees, but the posture of the bird in them was too similar. You couldn’t see its bill or feet. Somehow, it just didn’t look right. And yet the question remained: why would someone go to all the trouble of climbing fifty or sixty feet up two different trees to fake these pictures – particularly since the man who took them wished to remain anonymous?

In this case, the skeptical reaction appears especially unscientific. Not only did the skeptics’ explanation fail to satisfy Occam’s razor, but their refusal to even entertain the possibility that a population of ivorybills persisted in an area with extensive tracts of suitable habitat, as attested to by a well-respected biologist, was the very opposite of the open-minded search for truth that is the supposed hallmark of Western science.

Gallagher and Harrison are among the dedicated few who never allowed themselves to believe that the ivorybill had gone extinct. It’s not that they were ever fully convinced that the bird still existed, simply that they refused to dismiss what struck them as convincing accounts by credible witnesses. They dared to “doubt against doubt,” as it were. Significantly, neither is a professional ornithologist. Each is an amateur in the best sense of the word: etymologically, a lover, someone passionately dedicated to a pursuit. Of course, plenty of scientists are also passionate advocates for the natural world: one thinks of E. O. Wilson, Reed Noss, Michael Soulé. Without true passion to burn off the choking thickets of fatalism, I wonder, can the mind ever find room for dispassionate analysis?

It’s not that Gallagher doesn’t understand where the skeptics are coming from. He gives a very sympathetic portrait of one of his colleagues at the Lab, Kevin McGowan, whom he describes as “the resident skeptic.” For McGowan, it seems, a bird in the hand is worth a hundred in the bush.

He wants to see empirical evidence for everything. This may be because he was the curator of Cornell’s bird collection for a long time and is used to dealing with evidence that you can see or touch, such as bird specimens. He is careful and precise, and if he says he saw something, there is little doubt that he did. …[H]e has less than perfect vision. He is obsessed with visual clarity to such an extent that he insists on only real glass lenses in his eyeglasses, not plastic, despite the extra weight.

After seeing Luneau’s video, McGowan is finally convinced.

“I wanted to believe before,” he told me. “But it’s in my nature to be skeptical. I just couldn’t help but have doubts, even though I trusted the abilities of some of the people who’d had sightings. It wasn’t until I saw David Luneau’s video that I really accepted the existence of this bird.”

Seeing, as they say, is believing; everything else is hearsay, even the best audio recordings. This attitude is especially curious in a field where identification by human or electronic ear is more and more heavily relied upon to verify the presence of breeding or migrating birds. Cornell Lab has taken a leading role in promoting this kind of research, as well as enlisting legions of amateur birders as so-called citizen scientists for all kinds of studies, so it is only appropriate that the Lab should’ve led the ivorybill rediscovery effort. But even the Lab’s best people are not immune to the debilitating influence of irrational disbelief. Gallagher recalls interviewing one of the searchers, woodpecker expert Dr. Mindy LeBranche, on the evening of the day when she had a good, clear sighting.

I was annoyed that so many people were throwing out percentages about how sure they were that they had seen an ivory-bill. Ron and David were maybe 85 percent sure; Jim Fitzpatrick was 98.5 percent sure; now here was Mindy saying she was 99 percent sure of her sighting.

“What’s all this crap I keep hearing about people being 90 percent sure, 95 percent sure that they saw an ivory-bill?” I said. “What is it about your sighting that gives you that one percent of doubt?”

Mindy shot right back: “Because the bird is freaking extinct! For years I’ve been convinced of that. And that’s why I can’t be a hundred percent sure.”

As we spoke, I left the camcorder running, and it was still taping for a while after the interview was over. When I played it back later, it was interesting to watch the expressions on her face while conversations went on all around her. People were laughing and joking nearby, and she would occasionally laugh along with them, throwing out a comment or two. But every time she stopped talking, she would withdraw into herself. Her face at times looked almost horror-struck, almost like that of a person in shock – or perhaps like someone who has…well, seen a ghost.

Just in the past week, the news media have gleefully seized upon reports that a number of prominent birders and ornithologists are increasingly willing to air their doubts about the rediscovery. An article challenging the evidence is scheduled to appear in an as-yet unnamed journal, with rebuttals and counter-rebuttals. The New York Times quotes two prominent birders, David Allen Sibley and Kenn Kaufman, questioning the reliability of the evidence collected to date. Both have recently authored best-selling bird guides, and both took the unprecedented step of excluding the ivory-billed woodpecker. So for the damned bird to reappear just after they had literally written it off is a bit of an embarrassment, to say the least. (Sibley subsequently uploaded a PDF file of an insertable ivorybill page at his website.) As for the scientists,

“The people who originally announced this thoroughly believe they got an ivory-billed woodpecker,” said Mark B. Robbins of the University of Kansas, one of the three scientists preparing the challenge to the Science report. “They believe one thing, we believe another. This is how science plays out, the fabric of science getting at the truth.”

Except that in this case, the fabric of science appears to be a funeral shroud. As my brother Steve recently remarked, when did it become unscientific to assume that a species is still present until the last acre of suitable habitat is completely eliminated? There’s a kind of arrogance at work here that says that since we can’t find something, it must not be there. But do we really know where and how to look? Considering that the Cuban subspecies depends on pine forests rather than bottomland swamps, it’s clear that our knowledge of the ivorybill’s habitat preferences and adaptability is miniscule.

Sibley reviewed The Grail Bird for the Boston Globe last month. Though he says he liked the book otherwise, he takes strong exception to Gallagher’s critique of the scientific community. “[T]rue science, objective and unbiased, has to be based on concrete, testable evidence. Since 1944 there has been no conclusive evidence to go along with the sightings,” Sibley intones. At this point, though, I wonder if the doubters would be satisfied with anything less than a corpse.
__________

See also Learning from the ivorybill, The finding and The thing with feathers.

July 29, 2005August 1, 2015 by Marcia Bonta

A dozen natural history books for summer reading

It’s Summer Book Week at Via Negativa. Since I’ll be gone part of the week on vacation myself, I decided it would be an ideal time to consider what constitutes the perfect summer read. I’ve enlisted the help of my family to put up posts while I’m gone, and also do a little guest-blogging.

As you might guess, my mother has a large library of nature and natural history books. It includes all the expected authors – Abbey, Thoreau, Dillard, Lopez – and many more besides. I’ve been wanting for some time to get her to supply a list of her all-time favorite nature books, because I figured it would include a number of non-standard authors and even a few obscure ones. This past weekend, Mom graciously complied. Here’s her list, and what she had to say about it.

These twelve books represent only a fraction of the wonderful natural history books that I have enjoyed over the years. Most are now out of print, but all are available through Amazon.com except for one (Crip, Come Home), and that is available through Bookfinder.com – another good, online source for used books. My choices are colored by my interests over the years and by, in a few cases, authors who are or were friends. In alphabetical order by author:

Twelve Moons of the Year, by Hal Borland. Any book by Hal Borland is good reading. Most are based on his nature editorials for the New York Times. As the dust jacket tells us, “Here…is that familiar, comfortable voice, gentle wit, occasional crankiness, and dry, countryman’s wisdom that made him one of Americas’s best-loved writers about nature.” He died in 1978 and immediately fell off the radar screen in collections of best nature writers. But for anyone who loves celebrations of the daily events in country living, Borland’s work is worth reading.

The Appalachians, by Maurice Brooks. Written back in 1965, this beautifully illustrated book is a primer on the Appalachians by a man known as “Dr. Appalachia” in his lifetime. I was enchanted by it because it captures the uniqueness and beauty of this old chain of mountains stretching from Canada’s Gaspe Peninsula to southern Georgia, with such chapters as “Orchids That Aren’t in the Tropics,” “Lungless Salamanders,” and “The Wood Warblers.”

Life on a Little Known Planet, by Howard Ensign Evans. The “planet” is that of the insect world. Evans has written many wonderful books and this is just his best known. How can you not embrace the work of an author who has chapters called (for example) “The Cricket as Poet and Pugilist,” “Bedbugs, Cone-nosed Bugs, and Other Cuddly Animals,” and “The Intellectual and Emotional World of the Cockroach”? In his concluding chapter, “Is Nature Necessary?” Evans writes, “The fact that there are literally millions of species of plants and animals on this little-known planet of ours is to me overwhelmingly exciting,” and he conveys this excitement throughout his book.

Spring in Washington, by Louis J. Halle. I’ve probably recommended this book to more people than any other I’ve read. Written in 1945, Halle visits, on bicycle, all the natural places in and around Washington, D.C. When we lived there, 20 years later, we still found and visited all the places he wrote about. This is not a guidebook. Instead, Halle “undertook to be monitor of the Washington seasons, when the government was not looking. Though it was only for my own good, that is how the poorest of us may benefit the world.” I must admit that I took his words to heart.

The Long-Shadowed Forest, by Helen Hoover. Helen and her artist husband Adrian lived on the shores of a lake on the Canadian border of Minnesota during the middle of the twentieth century. Best known for herGift of the Deer, I like this book even more, maybe because of her poetic title that evokes our own forest. Hoover snowshoes in the winter and walks the other months of the year, describing what she sees in the rugged wilderness where she and her husband chose to build their primitive cabin without the amenities of modern life. She feeds a three-legged mink, watches bull moose battle, records the antics of chickadees and gray jays, and sees wolves crossing the frozen lake. But she too has a message. “When we poison and bulldoze and pollute, let us remember that we are not the owners of the earth, but its dependents. Let us look to the earth, to its wealth and beauty, and be proud that we are a part of it. Let us respect it, and time and space, the forces of creation and life itself. As we hold the future in our hands, let us not destroy it.”

A Naturalist on a Tropical Farm, by Alexander F. Skutch. For more than 60 years, before his death just a few weeks shy of his 100th birthday, Skutch, a native of Maryland, lived on a tropical farm in Costa Rica where he studied and wrote about tropical birds in dozens of books. My husband and I visited him back in 1989, when he was 85, and ate lunch with him and his wife while his tropical birds flew in, out, and around his unscreened home. Throughout his life he watched his tropical farm become an island in a sea of agriculture. In this book he writes about his life on the farm and the wildlife he observes, including leaf-cutting ants, cichlid fishes, and a potpouri of plants, birds, and mammals.

Driftwood Valley, by Theodora Stanwell-Fletcher. A bestseller after its publication in 1948, it has remained a timeless adventure book. Teddy and her husband John overcome a series of near-disasters in their attempt to live in harmony with nature. Living in the wilds of British Columbia where no white people had ever lived, they homesteaded during the latter part of the 1930s. They also collected the plants and animals of the region for the British Columbia Provincial Museum to provide a source of income. But mostly Teddy writes about the natural world and its inhabitants, including an enlightened defense of the wolves they see. “Utter silence, a deathlike hush over the land, and then, from somewhere below, came a sound that made our hearts stand still. Like a breath of wind, rising slowly, softly, clearly to a high, lovely note of sadness and longing; dying down on two distinct notes so low that our human ears could scarcely catch them. It rose and died, again and again.” Many years later I visited Teddy in her northern Pennsylvania home and heard of her years in British Columbia and of her life afterwards. During our visit, she, too, was in her late eighties, and still enjoyed snowshoeing every winter.

Iceland Summer: Adventures of a Bird Painter, by George Miksch Sutton. Sutton was the Pennsylvania Ornithologist for the Pennsylvania Game Commission back in the 1920s. Then he went on to some fame as a bird artist, in my estimation the best of all of them, and as an ornithologist adventurer in such places as Mexico and the Arctic. His books are fun to read and a joy to look at because his delicate paintings always illustrate them. Iceland Summer recounts his summer quest, along with fellow ornithologist Olin Sewall Pettingill, Jr. and his wife Eleanor, for birds in the wilds of Iceland. Not only did this book receive the coveted John Burroughs Medal for nature-writing in 1962, but he was knighted by Iceland for his contributions to that country. His painting of an Iceland gyrfalcon, which appears in this book, was used by the Iceland government in a postage stamp.

Wandering Through Winter, by Edwin Way Teale. The concluding book in Teale’s American Seasons series, it was an inspiration and goad to me, as were all the many books Teale wrote in his lifetime. From his early books on insects, especially Near Horizons, to his late books about his farm in Connecticut, Teale never wrote a bad book. His knowledge of the natural world was vast and he shared it in a most appealing way. In my opinion he was, and remains, the dean of American nature writing. In Wandering Through Winter, as he travels from the Silver Strand below San Diego to Caribou, Maine, he writes about whooping cranes, migrating whales, pupfish in Death Valley, and the eagles of a Mississippi ice jam. Teale also spends a day with a witch hazel gatherer, camps in the desert, and visits a snowshoe maker in Maine.

Crip, Come Home: The Story of a Bird Who Came to Stay, by Ruth Thomas. The bird is a brown thrasher with a broken wing who lived on the Arkansas farm of Thomas and her husband, and was able to make his living on his own despite his broken wing. For eleven and a half years Thomas meticulously observes him. She also watches her husband Stan lose his battle with cancer. “All the months of Stan’s illness, the old thrasher was a joy and a care beyond ourselves,” she writes. “Stan’s love and the old cripple thrasher, somehow they seemed one, and when I faltered, gave me strength. ‘Do not walk and weep and brood by the fire. Somewhere is another need, another pattern. Have courage to seek,'” she concludes. I included Thomas in my book American Women Afield: Writings by Pioneering Women Naturalists, and my editor said that the excerpt from Crip, Come Home brought tears to her eyes.

Mountains of the Heart: A Natural History of the Appalachians, by Scott Weidensaul. An update of the Brooks book, Weidensaul follows the Appalachians from Georgia to Newfoundland, and “we see how geology, climate, evolution and five hundred years of history have shaped one of the continent’s greatest landscape features into a mountain range of unmatched diversity and beauty.” My friend Scott has written other, more praised books such as Living on the Wind, but this is my favorite, probably because of its subject and its lyrical title, since they are the mountains of my heart too. And unlike Brooks’ book, which doesn’t say much about Pennsylvania, Weidensaul, who lives in the shadow of Hawk Mountain, writes at length about his Pennsylvania Appalachian roots.

Naturalist, by Edward O Wilson. As a great fan of Wilson’s writing, I was especially pleased when he published this autobiographical book, beginning with his childhood on the Gulf Coast of Alabama and Florida. He describes both his growth as a scientist and the evolution of the science he has helped define. As he succinctly writes, “Most children have a bug period. I never grew out of mine,” going on to specialize in ants. Unlike many scientists, Wilson has spoken out and continues to speak out about the loss of biodiversity. “The great majority of species of organisms – possibly in excess of 90 percent – remain unknown to science. They live out there somewhere, still untouched, lacking even a name, waiting for their Linnaeus, their Darwin, their Pasteur…Earth, in the dazzling variety of its life, is still a little-known planet…A lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree.” He may be a famous scientist, but he has never lost his awe for the incredible earth we inhabit.

– Marcia Bonta

July 25, 2005 by Dave Bonta

A cure for summertime depression

I can’t very well review my own mother’s book. Who would trust such obvious nepotism? On the other hand, Mom has included poems of mine in the front matter of three out of four books in her popular Appalachian Seasons series, so I think it’s high time I return the nepotistic favor. Since the books are blog-like journals anyway, the obvious thing to do here is simply to reproduce an entry from Appalachian Summer as a substitute blog post. Enjoy.

JULY 25. Most of the field wildflowers provide food for other creatures. This morning I watched a male American goldfinch feed on dame’s rocket seed. Bouncing bet attracted silver-spotted skippers and a black swallowtail butterfly while Joe Pye weed appealed to great-spangled fritillaries.

Then I encountered a patch of golden-yellow, common St. John’s wort (Hypericum perfolatum), an immigrant species that thrives in fields. It seemed to be devoid of feeding insects. Most insects avoid St. John’s wort because it emits a toxic chemical called hypericin, hence its genus name. Hypericin is made and stored in the leaves, flowers, and stem glands of St. John’s wort and slowly poisons a predator.

However, it depends on sunlight to activate it so some insects can avoid its toxicity by clever ruses. Butterfly of moth larvae that roll or fold a leaf and bind it with silk to cover themselves or sew leaves to form a shelter can eat St. John’s wort from within because they are shielded from sunlight. Stem borers and leaf miners are also protected from the sun. The tough outer layer of several adult beetles in the genus Chrysolina screen out sunlight. The soft-bodied larvae of Chrysolina hyperici can eat inside the leaf buds of St. John’s wort or feed openly on the plants only at dawn. In addition, they contain a large amount of beta carotene that combats phototoxicity. So, no matter how much a plant evolves to resist predators, there are always a few that can circumvent their prey’s resistance.

Humans have recently been taking St. John’s wort to fight mild depression. They too must stay out of the sun to avoid triggering hypericin. This seems counterproductive to me. I would become even more depressed if I were forced to stay inside. It is the bright sunshine that continually elevates my spirits. After a succession of gloomy, overcast days, my mood matches the weather. Only sunshine cures my depression. Yet so many people spend most of their lives inside under artificial light even in the summer. Perhaps those with mild depression would benefit from frequent walks in the sunlight, especially on such a spectacular day as this one.

– Marcia Bonta, Appalachian Summer

July 18, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Raincrow

Yesterday around noon and again this morning early, a black-billed cuckoo has been calling from the woods’ edge. He sounds like the spirit-world counterpart of his commoner cousin the yellow-billed.

Cuckoos of either species are mysterious birds, so oftener heard than seen, skulking in the thickest parts of the forest canopy where they wait motionless for long periods before rocketing into action, ambushing their caterpillar prey. “Cuckoos eat many spiny caterpillars and the spines stick in the lining of the stomach,” the webpage for the black-billed cuckoo informs us. “The stomach lining is periodically shed to remove the spines.”

The first time I got a good look at one, I realized suddenly where those long, narrow-bodied birds in Pennsylvania German folk art came from. Messenger of love, said Europeans about the cuckoo’s old-world namesake, which lays its eggs in the nests of other birds so it can spend all its time in courtship. Raincrow, the Indians called both the yellow- and black-billed cuckoos for their tendency to call more frequently before storms. They also typically return at the same time as the early-summer rains.

The cuckoo is one of the last neotropical migrants to arrive in North America and has very little time to build a nest, find a mate, lay its eggs and raise its young. To do so, it has evolved a unique nesting strategy. It is able to time its egg laying with outbreaks of insects (especially caterpillars) so that it has a rich food source for itself and its young. Its incubation/nestling period is the shortest of any known bird. Its egg develops rapidly, and at hatching is one the heaviest of all North American songbirds. This is because the chick will have very little rearing time before embarking on its transcontinental migration – it must complete much of its development while still in the egg and come out ready to go. The nestlings are fledged from the nest 6-7 days after hatching, and are off to South America at three or four weeks of age.

Thus the Center for Biological Diversity, based in the western U.S. where the yellow-billed cuckoo is nearly extinct as a result of habitat destruction.

This morning at first light a thrush flies past the porch on loud wings, like a fast smack of oars against the surface of a pond. A bat loops and dives, half-visible against the darker trees. It has been astonishingly humid, with daily and sometimes hourly thunderstorms. The raincrows call almost without a pause. Walking in the woods has become, for me, a misery of sweat and deerflies. If the air were any thicker, we would need periscopes to find our way.

GROWTH

Mind poised at
the tipping point
in a fantasy of perpetual motion
like an old-fashioned toy,
wooden bird hinged
at the hips that bends
again & again into
the undiminished fuel
of its reflection.
Last week, I saw
the sun in the surface
of a bog: it bubbled.
It trilled like a toad.
The alchemists
would be pleased, mercury
now lurks nearly everywhere.
Its needle threads the eye
of mother’s milk, quick-
silver fin & feather, legs
of a heron. Extract
of death, let us dance.
Let our bones be honey-
combed with light.
Bulbous, wedded
to our rituals,
we take turns bending
at the hips.

July 16, 2005February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Home economics

Sometimes you need to live with other people in order to learn deep truths about yourself. Until last week, when my brother and his family moved in for an extended stay, I had no way of knowing that I had turned into this fussy old person who shuffles around the house turning off lights that others have left on.

In other words, someone with a strong resemblance to my old man.

(In many other ways, of course, Dad and I remain strikingly different people. For example, while Dad keeps two pens and a stack of 3×5 index cards in his left-hand shirt pocket to serve as a kind of retro PDA, I use a small, spiral-bound memo pad and get by with just one pen. And while he reads travel books right before bed, I read blogs.)

The other week, I decided on a sudden whim to trample a path through the weeds to the electric meter on the side of my house. An hour later, as luck would have it, the meter man showed up. Seeing a new face, I walked out to introduce myself and make sure he found the box for my parents’ house, as well. Sizing up the house and grounds, he said, “You’re a bachelor, aren’t you?”

This last recollection was sparked by a post on bungalows at not native fruit, which includes some photos of cottages half-swallowed by gardens nearly as wild as mine. Karen writes,

[A] small house is like a spiritual master. It teaches you to be disciplined, to minimize your possessions, to keep things clean and neat, to respect other people’s needs for space. You get organized, living in a small house, or you go bananas.

My spiritual master has porcupines under the dining room, groundhogs under the guest bedroom and black snakes over the kitchen. Small as this house is, it was built haphazardly in stages over the course of 150 years, with the result that it now encloses an inordinate amount of climate-controlled wildlife habitat – spaces over, under and between rooms that are virtually inaccessible to humans. Thus, even during the long stretches when I have no guests or family members sharing my space, I am never really alone. Plus, I almost never have to set traps for the white-footed mice in my kitchen. I think there’s an important spiritual lesson there.

“A small house can be comfortable and incredibly COZY,” Karen adds. Presumably, this is the experience of the shy woodland creatures who have chosen to live among us. I’m quite certain it’s true for Steve, Karylee and baby Elanor, who almost always seems pretty comfortable, as long as her diapers are dry. And sharing a rather small space with several other people instills invaluable spiritual lessons in consideration, conflict avoidance strategies and mutual respect.

Another spiritual service provided by my house is that, in really hot and humid weather such as we have been enjoying here off and on for much of the past month, it doubles as a sweat lodge. I can go upstairs for a siesta and emerge an hour later feeling relaxed and peaceful to the point of stupefaction.

Does living in a small house force me to minimize my possessions? No. Living without a steady income forces me to minimize my possessions. Yesterday, I walked all around the sidewalk sale of a local summer arts festival and admired many, diverse displays of craft-like objects without feeling any urge to pull out my wallet – except briefly for the hanging pink flamingo planters made from recycled tires. Then we went into a nearby bookstore and I dropped $30 bucks. Hey, it was a sale. I saved at least ten dollars. And, small as my house is, there’s always plenty of room for more books.

July 15, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Some birds

DRYOCOPUS

Why do they call it drumming, what pileateds do? Why not knocking? A tree is more door than drum. Bark bears little resemblance to skin or cured hide. But the hammered beats of a pileated woodpecker are far more rapid than any rap of a knuckle – too fast, in fact, for a casual listener to count. Can we imagine being summoned by such a sound? What winged visitant bears a blazing crest & is given to such bouts of maniacal laughter? What door opens downward, into the earth?

BLAZON

Wet from its bath, a scarlet tanager lands on a dead branch in the midday heat like a hallucinated fruit. This is that hoarse singer, I think, that robin with a frog in its throat. I watch from the porch as he pivots twice, then darts up out of sight: less an exotic morsel than the rampant tongue.

MNEMONIC

“Oh, that?” I said – & thus the otherwise unremarkable, two-syllable song of the Acadian flycatcher might as well be committed to memory.

IN THE TEXAS HILL COUNTRY

Making oneself at home in a bone-dry thorn scrub no one else could love & hailing all visitors: this is the golden-cheeked warbler’s perilous way.

TROUBLE IN MIND

A pair of starlings up under the eaves is for us, out here in the hills, a novel occurrence. Though with my gaze drawn so often lately toward the northeast, my thoughts circling that high bog set in a ring of mountains & the nearby hollow full of ancient hemlocks – blank spaces bristling with arrows on the highway engineer’s map – with all that on my mind, it takes me a while to notice these two new tenants, noisy as they are.

But the male starling’s a ventriloquist, I swear he can throw his voice. And his range – odd rasping cries, hollow knocks with thrush-like runs dubbed in… I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t caught him in the act, beak ajar. Black wings flopped & rattled with each convulsive ripple of the nape, spilling iridescence in the noonday sun. As if he’d swallowed some dark rainbow & was trying to bring it back up.

The journal I’m always meaning to keep could well carry the title Year of the Starlings, were it not for this other thing that’s been robbing me of sleep: nothing but an engineer’s wet dream, an impossible outcome, I try & tell myself, even as night after restless night fixes it more & more firmly in my mind’s eye. Yesterday morning we all heard, quite distinctly, an infant wailing from somewhere in the middle of the sky. I run around the house & there sits the starling on the ridge of the roof, head cocked to one side like a diabolical robin, waiting for some untimely nightcrawler to make a move.

(Originally written in 2002. Proposed routes for a highway bypass through Rothrock State Forest, east of State College, PA, were eventually removed from consideration after intense public pressure.)

FREE BIRD

In every flock of blue jays, there’s one who learns to impersonate a red-tailed hawk, does a spot-on rendition of that piercing shred of sky. You’ve heard it, whether you know it or not: on TV & in the movies, it’s the literal call of the wild, regardless of geography.

One can understand how a mob of jays might respond to the shriek of a police whistle. But humans hear fierce defiance & thrill to images of freedom: straight through the wilderness, a highway traveled by a lone SUV while some generic eagle-like bird circles a nearby peak.

The real redtail picks at carrion by the side of the interstate or chases pigeons in Central Park, alternately aped & persecuted by the brazen jays.

July 11, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Time-tested

In the dark midsummer woods, the few things blooming now are white: rhododendron & wild hydrangea; teaberry & the so-called fairy candles of black cohosh; clusters of Indian pipes pushing through the leaf duff. The umbels of one hydrangea bush near the bottom of the hollow are dotted with blossoms ten times larger than the rest. Such sterile anomalies were long ago seized upon by nurserymen, who crossed & crossed until they bred a bush whose every inflorescence was a blind enormity.

I sift through a sandbar – legacy of last fall’s flood – with berry-stained fingers. Why should it amaze me that so small a stream can still tumble stones to perfect smoothness? I think of anchorites in their cells, each with his or her time-tested word: It was said of Abbot Agatho that for three years he carried a stone in his mouth until he learned to be silent. But was it silence he learned, or conformity with a larger music? The Verba Seniorum, polished to a perfect terseness, does not say.

Our eyes at birth are just about as big as they’ll ever be; the appealing contrast with small, bald heads guarantees a ready nest in the arms of anyone available. My five-month-old niece Elanor is wide-eyed & mostly silent, though at mealtimes she likes to strike her high chair with the flat of her hand. She reaches for everything: a new development in the last few days since moving here, my brother says. Put down on the carpet, unable yet to crawl, she rolls toward the objects of her inchoate desire – mostly things to put in her mouth, the firmer the better. I try to imagine what that must feel like, the pressure of milk teeth trying to sprout through the gums. Her cries of – what? Anxiety? Frustration? – often modulate into warbles, as if phrases of speech or music were just beginning to coalesce.

On the green plain of the maple leaf, wasps have pitched their tent-shaped galls. A scarlet tanager plucks his single string over & over. I’m composing a letter in my head, a greeting card message written in one, continuous line without lifting the pen. I have been picking black raspberries & letting the straight thorns hook my shirt; gaining release is a simple manner of leaning in. But once, just as I felt myself caught, a blue darner landed a foot away & I froze. Its eyes were the exact size & color of the individual components of a raspberry’s compound fruit, those tiny black pebbles. Angled above its metallic blue abdomen, the wings fit together like the covers of a leaf-shaped book.

Happy birthday to my parents, born 364 days apart, yesterday & today.

July 5, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Full (2)

My brother Steve and his family are moving in with me on Thursday. “We’d better get the septic tanks pumped,” my father said.

The man who operates the pumping truck was more than happy to come out. Troy is one of the best hunters in Plummer’s Hollow and spends as much time up here as he can. And he had time to stand around and shoot the you-know-what, too. “July is the slowest month of the year,” Troy said.

The sky was entirely clouded over – in fact, we had a brief rain just as Troy came up the driveway – but for some reason its reflection in the sewage appeared blue. The vacuum made short work of the liquid portion, but the solids at the bottom – which were not as high a proportion of the total as some of this blog’s readers might suspect – took a bit more time. Troy has been doing this work at least part-time for several years now. “This is the first time anyone’s taken pictures,” he said.

A series of very solid things made a rattling noise as they went up the hose. “Boy, I don’t remember passing those,” I said.

When it was done, we stood around the empty tank jawing for a few more minutes while the hose sucked on air. Troy told us he likes the job – it’s much less stressful and easier on his back than his previous job doing maintenance work on 18-wheelers. When the truck is full, he takes it to the Altoona Sewage Treatment Plant, where another one of our hunter friends works. Merely by taking a crap, it seems, I am contributing to the local economy and helping my friends put food on the table. There’s a certain rightness to that, even if we don’t do the ecologically correct thing and switch to composting toilets.
__________

See also my post from last February, also entitled Full.

June 29, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

A brief gallery of hideous things

Live out your life in a lonesome hollow. The unattainable horizon comes to crush you all the same.

The real pity – says the benignly neglectful gardener – is that the flea beetles are too busy ever to stop and admire their handiwork.

Slime molds always remind me of the late Emperor of Japan. Imprisoned by protocol, worshipped as a living god, Hirohito made an infinitesimal progress around the grounds of the Chrysanthemum Palace, magnifying glass at the ready for these otherworldly creatures that evade every category humans can invent.

Like the proverbial army that travels on its stomach, the bulldozer chews up the earth with its caterpillar feet.

Some merely stoop to conquer. Japanese stilt grass falls all over itself.

Put out to pasture, the rotting muscle car gives its last joy ride to a multiflora rose.

The sun oozes into view. Seven-thirty and already I’m bathed in sweat. On a brief walk around the field, I spot my father hanging out laundry. He’s whistling “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” as he pins up the underwear.

UPDATE: My father insists that he was in fact whistling “God Save the Queen.” Could’ve fooled me.