Nature/Ecology – Page 116

June 27, 2005 by Dave Bonta

The mother

Last night, just as it was getting dark, I heard a noise outside that I couldn’t immediately place. I went out into the garden, then around to the front porch. The sounds were coming from right inside the woods’ edge, and hard as I looked, I couldn’t see anything. But as I listened, it became increasingly obvious what I was listening to: bears. Probably the mother with three cubs that my mom saw up by the vernal ponds last month.

We’ve had this same mother bear around for about six years now, but she has yet to become habituated to us, which is probably a good thing. People are bad news. She might well be the same bear who, as a yearling cub, alerted us to the death of her sibling with her loud bawling one beautiful October morning around 10:00 o’clock. It was throatier than the bleat of a fawn, with an uncanny keening edge to it. We looked down from the front porch of my parents’ house and saw two black shapes in the springhouse lawn, not more than twenty feet away from where these bears were now.

The one that had been bawling retreated into the woods when we approached to examine the carcass – a half-grown black bear with the shaft of an arrow protruding from the middle of its back. Someone had shot it from a tree stand down in the valley, most likely, and it had gotten this far before giving up the ghost. We posted a $500 reward for any information leading to the apprehension of the would-be poacher, but nothing ever came of that – people just don’t like to rat on their neighbors. Still, the local paper picked up the story and the word went out: leave the bears the hell alone in Plummer’s Hollow.

The surviving cub was obviously pretty traumatized, but if this is the same bear, she must’ve found our end of the mountain to be a relatively hospitable place to raise a family, with three litters in the years since. I briefly considered walking over with my camera and trying to get a flash picture of a charging bear, but decided I wasn’t quite ready to risk a mauling just to get a good blog post. I stayed on the porch listening until the mosquitoes drove me back inside.

Right at dusk the mother bear
leads her cubs down to
the edge of the woods
& stops, hearing a screen door
ease open, smelling trouble.

My grossly unequal nose picks up
nothing of her musk or
the sweet milk oozing
from well-bit nipples.
My primate eyes are made for
the colors of day, not shades
of darkness. I peer
into every shadow between the trees,
each clot of night.

The space between us fills
with explosions of breath:
HUH. HUH.
I hear claws on tree trunks
& small things running through the brush.
When the mother clacks her teeth,
I hear the dangerous size of her
in that hollow TOCK
TOCK
TOCK.

I lean out over the porch rail, listening,
naked from the waist up.
A mosquito whines in my ear.
The fireflies, as usual,
illuminate nothing.

The next morning, when I go to look,
every rock on the hillside
has been moved from its bed.

June 15, 2005February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

What happens

Coyote says: We shit, as we dream – alone.

Turkey says: We shit in an old chaos of the sun.

Deer says: Not love thy shit, nor hate; but what thou shit’st, shit well.

Gray fox says: Only connect! Shit in fragments no longer.

Horse says: No other penalty than to shit in desire without hope, a fate appropriate to noble souls with a clear vision of shit.

Bear says: I went to the woods to shit deliberately.
___________

With apologies to Conrad, Stevens, Milton, E. M. Forster, Santayana and Thoreau.

June 10, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Illuminating the limpid nude

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Late morning, the day before yesterday: As I’m putting the finishing touches on my Lorca translations, I hear something moving through the cattails and rushes at the edge of the little marsh on the other side of the driveway. I go out to investigate and discover a porcupine drinking from the ditch. She rears up and faces me briefly, chattering her teeth in a hostile fashion, before turning around, exposing her backside and pushing out her quills. An admirable reaction, I think; I’ve always regarded the porcupine as something of a kindred spirit. In the strong sunlight her pale skin is visible underneath the black and dark-brown fur and the forest of spears. When I go back in, some lines I had been puzzling over suddenly make a bit more sense:

But don’t illuminate this limpid nude of yours
like some black cactus open in the bulrushes.

That evening, as we’re finishing up supper on the front porch of my parents’ house, my mother spots two pairs of blue jays moving around at the top of a tall locust tree above the driveway. “Seems a little late for mating activity,” she says, but perhaps the heat makes them frisky. The males are hopping and fluttering around the females, as if at a dance. One pair flies off to the west while the other pair continues to dance. With birds, it’s almost all foreplay: after two blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em copulations, the female takes flight with the male in pursuit – or in tow, as the case may be. It’s important to avoid letting our own preconceptions influence what we see.

I’ve been slightly obsessed with trying to get the perfect peony photograph. And why not? Almost every other year since they first flowered back in 1998, their entire blooming period has been rained out. These are the old-fashioned, off-white, double-blossomed peonies with a strong scent very much like a woman’s perfume. I transplanted them from the yard of our erstwhile neighbor’s derelict house into my herb garden (as I then considered it), for no better reason than that I liked them. But I was delighted to learn somewhat after the fact that peonies do have a well-established place in herbal tradition. Last winter I quoted a bit from Gerard, who describes a number of folk beliefs about the peony, for example that the plant

is not plucked up without danger; and that it is reported how he that first touched it, not knowing the nature thereof, perished. Therefore a string must be fastened to it in the night, and a hungrie dog tied thereto, who being allured by the smell of rotting flesh set towards him, may plucke it up by the rootes.

The superstitious fear was not entirely misplaced. According to John Lust (The Herb Book, Bantam, 1974), “The entire plant is poisonous, the flowers especially so. A tea made from flowers can be fatal.” It’s the root one uses, of course. And while I don’t fear personal injury from digging it up – I did it once and survived – it is true that peonies very much resent being disturbed. As any nurseryman will tell you, they can take a couple of years to recover after being divided. So if I ever contract jaundice, kidney or bladder problems, or the gout, I think I might look for other remedies first. And I hope I never have occasion to treat myself for “spasms, and various nervous affections,” as King’s American Dispensatory puts it.

But I was intrigued by Gerard’s descriptions of how it appeared at night: the seeds of one variety “shine in the night time like a candle,” and another “doth shine in the evening like the day star.” So I go out after dark with my camera to try and take some flash pictures. I don’t detect any bioluminescence, but I wonder if these legends might have originated from people with synaesthesia? The fragrance is almost overpowering. The camera’s viewfinder shows nothing but blackness; I simply point the camera toward the perfume’s epicenter and click.

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The flash illuminates the flowers and helps me get a better position for two subsequent shots, but I feel very much like a voyeur. Reviewing the pictures in the display window, I’m reminded of a couple we caught in the act one time down at the gate. We had driven home around 10:00 o’clock one night to find a car blocking the entrance to our driveway. Dad put the high beams on and waited while a pair of startled faces popped up and went back down, to be replaced by hands reaching frantically for articles of clothing – piles of white on the dashboard, in the back window.

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Incidentally, King’s – which contemporary herbalists still regard as fairly reliable – does give credence to Gerard’s claims for the effectiveness of peony seeds in driving away nighmares: “The seeds, taken night and morning, have been successfully used in removing nightmare attendant upon dropsical persons.”

Standing outside in the dark, breathing in the mingled odors of peonies and dame’s rocket, I hear something chewing – some small rodent – in the walls of my house.

A frustrated e-mail correspondent challenged me to prove that I am still alive. I had three reactions:
1) He obviously hasn’t been reading my blog.
2) On the other hand, maybe he has been reading my blog.
3) Far greater minds than my own have foundered on this very question. For my part, I will continue to insist that Blogito, ergo sum.

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.