Photos – Page 55 – Via Negativa

May 2, 2007September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Down to earth

Trees in the Concrete, the 11th — and first themed — edition of the Festival of the Trees, appeared yesterday morning at Flatbush Gardener. Xris did a great job of finding articles and blog posts to fit his theme. Also, I and the Bird #48 — “A Field Guide to the Bird Posts” — is fresh this morning at Greg Laden’s blog. (The next edition of I and the Bird will be right here at Via Negativa on May 17! Those of you who know me personally can wipe the coffee off your computer screens now.)

And as long as I’m posting links: fans of my mother’s nature writing can find three new posts from her at the Marcia Bonta and Plummer’s Hollow sites — Saving the Future; Spring wildflowers: back on track; and April Journal Highlights (2).

Almost every morning I have a choice: stay inside and write, or go for a walk. Yesterday, I went for a walk. I was rewarded with a rare daytime sighting of a southern flying squirrel, supposedly our most abundant tree squirrel species here in Pennsylvania but seldom seen because of its nocturnal habits. This one was fleeing a pair of gray squirrels — it wasn’t clear how the altercation started — and landed on a big black locust tree right beside the road.

I didn’t get going until around 10:00 o’clock, but I did so with a great sense of accomplishment, having just solved a fairly complex coding problem on my own. This had to do with the way my recently revamped Shadow Cabinet site displayed in Internet Explorer. In essence, post titles were being messed up by the next page and previous page navigation links, and the fix involved pandering to a proprietary IE property known as “hasLayout,” which I’d never heard of until yesterday and still barely understand. But it occurred to me afterwards, as I started off through the woods, that the feeling of getting way in over my head is very similar to what I experience when I write a poem. In both cases, I really have no idea what I’m doing; I just keep trying different things until something works. The process (or stylesheet) may not be pretty, but as long as the product looks good, who cares?

WordPress has this dumb little slogan, “Code is Poetry.” No, it isn’t. The elegance and simplicity that WordPress coders pride themselves on may possess a certain kind of aesthetic appeal, but they are borne of an utter lack of nuance and ambiguity. Good poetry, by contrast, may or may not adhere to a minimalist aesthetic, but is almost always dedicated to exploring nuance and ambiguity, rather than eliminating it. Such devices as metaphors or puns have no equivalent in the necessarily literalist language of code (although there is a new form of poetry that depends on a detailed knowledge of scripting). All of this probably seems fairly obvious, but the slogan bothers me because it suggests that poetry is, in turn, a type of code — and in fact, I’ll bet that a sizable majority of people who state that they “just don’t understand poetry” are reacting to this very misperception. “Why can’t the poet just say what s/he means?”

Writing code and writing poetry may have a few things in common, though. In both, there’s almost always more than one way of saying something, and the trick is to find the best one. A concern of conscientious web designers these days is to “futureproof” their work: to try and anticipate which tags will fall out of favor as web standards evolve, and to avoid using them so that the page they’re working on will still render properly five or ten years down the road. For poets, something akin to futureproofing occurs when we weigh the extent to which the appreciation of our works depends on a knowledge of local conditions, ephemeral slang expressions, or current events. The anticipated shelf-life for poetry may be a bit longer than for software or web pages, but at some level we must realize that there are no true universals; even the concept of romantic love is a little over 800 years old, and might not be very well understood a millennium from now.

This realization ought to bring us down to earth, but somehow most poets — like many computer geeks — still tend to be rather full of themselves. The power of language at its most suggestive (poetry) and at its most tool-like (commands of any sort) is intoxicating, and power tends to turn people into assholes.

While stalking an ovenbird yesterday morning, I almost stepped on this box turtle. Both creatures are very well camouflaged for a lifetime spent on, near, or — as seems to have been the case with this turtle shortly before I found him — underneath the forest litter. Wildflowers and tree seedlings aren’t the only things pushing their way out of the ground these days.

April 30, 2007 by Dave Bonta

White flowers

Cold rain and fog on Friday, just as the Keiffer pear was coming into bloom. To my mind, blossoming fruit trees are always a little garish in the full light of sun; they look best in fog or moonlight. Then we can make believe that the blossoms are purely ornamental, that they have no connection with insect-assisted sex acts. We can pretend that they are faces full of mystery, however much they drip.

But our willful blindness is nothing compared to the pure ignorance of their faithful servants the hymenoptera. Saturday dawned clear but chilly, and it took this bumblebee half the morning to climb out of the white cup where it had spent the night and scale the daffodil’s warmer backside. Only the slight pulsing of its abdomen gave any indication that the bee was, in fact, readying its thoracic engine for takeoff. Bumblebees are uniquely gifted in being able to “warm up and keep warm while making no sounds whatsoever and while keeping their wings perfectly motionless,” according to Bernd Heinrich in his classic Bumblebee Economics.

Yesterday, like today, was windy, and down in the hollow the few small wasps and bee flies visiting the bank of rue anemones had to fight to stay on the flowers. I marveled as I always do that insects find such delicate things worth bothering about, when they could be visiting cornucopian sugar daddies like the pear tree. This is a flower so self-effacing that it scarcely seems to possess an identity of its own, bearing instead the names of two other plants to which it bears a superficial resemblance, meadow rue (for the leaves) and the genus anemone, also known as windflower. But something tells me that the nectar offered by such a blossom must make up in quality what it lacks in quantity — perhaps that sweetness one finds in the most captivating of faces, tempered by just a dash of acid. Enough to remind you that it has ideas of its own.

April 27, 2007September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Trees in the suburbs

Most Americans live in an in-between place, neither quite town nor country. Sometimes there are sidewalks, and sometimes there aren’t. Such places still tend to be called suburbs, but now that so many of their residents work as well as live there and don’t commute into a city at all, that term seems more than a little dated.

My South Jersey cousins referred to the place in these photos as “our development,” which I found interesting. They’ve lived there for ten years, in a house that was new when they bought it; the oldest parts of the subdivision go back twenty years, they told me. But they continue to think of it as a development: something new. Something without a history yet.

But the land has its own history, of course, suggested most visibly by the trees. Although many of the trees in front yards were planted when the houses were built, many backyards had larger trees that were obviously decades older than the houses. This particular development appears to have been built on top of a mosaic of farm fields, wooded hedgerows and small woodlots. The trees in the above photo marked one edge of the development, a beauty strip separating the community park from a commercial zone. The park is basically a sports field circled by a running track, with only a single clump of trees next to the swing sets. We’re looking across a muddy construction site toward a new Lowe’s — a mega-hardware store that includes an indoor lumber yard. To the right of the picture, a five-acre chestnut oak and mountain laurel woods is fiercely posted with “No Trespassing” signs. At its heart: a private residence of about the same age and design as those in the adjacent development. This is a graphic illustration of one factor driving the growth of suburbs: our love of privacy. And by “us,” I don’t just mean Anglo-Americans. The overwhelming majority of immigrant homeowners live in the ‘burbs, too.

One of the things that distinguishes many of the most recent housing developments, at least in this part of the United States, is the plethora of fences. Very few back yards were without a tall wooden fence separating them from their neighbors. Does this reflect a growing concern for the safety of children, I wonder? By contrast, older towns and suburbs tend to have, if anything, low fences that one can see through — the proverbial white picket fence.

Though my cousins’ development seems to qualify as a genuine neighborhood, where kids play in the street and residents of all ethnic backgrounds mingle easily, I think most activity still takes place either indoors or in backyards. I saw vestigial front porches on a few houses, but I don’t think people spend a lot of time sitting on them watching the cars go by and chatting with their neighbors, as they might in an archetypal small town like the one near me (Tyrone, PA).

The typical American home is becoming positively Arabic. In place of a courtyard or pergola we have the pressure-treated deck, but the spatial emphasis on a private walled garden (or lawn) inaccessible from the street is identical to what you’d find in old Damascus, from what I read.

Trees play a vital role in the modern exurban landscape. For one thing, they provide visual relief from the uniformity of lawns and fences. A small woods like the one at the end of this street can add several thousand dollars to the value of each adjoining lot. My cousins were more practical when they bought their house, though, realizing that the developer was making no promises about preserving any woods. They settled for a thin strip of pines in their backyard.

Trees are often signifiers of place, as well. Where small towns had Oak and Elm Streets, the suburbs have Maple Drives and Cherry Lanes. And it’s not uncommon for suburban subdivisions to bear names like The Pines, Park Forest Village, or Gray’s Woods.

Under the backyard pines, as in so many of the other yards that I could see into, my cousins put a playhouse for their kid. As a species, I think, we are drawn to the company of trees. The other thing fueling the spread of the suburbs, aside from our love of privacy, is our love of nature — or at least a certain vision of the bucolic. Natural habitat is disappearing not because we hate nature, but because we want to live in the middle of it. I include myself in that.

Front-yard trees are more for show. The cherries were in blossom when I visited in the middle of April, held for a couple of weeks by the unusually cold weather. For some, this might evoke New Jersey’s official nickname, the Garden State. But in fact that nickname dates back to when the sandy fields of South Jersey grew crops instead of houses. Before the invention of the refrigerated truck enabled California’s Central Valley to supply produce for the entire nation, New Jersey’s small farmers kept much of the northeast in fresh vegetables.

What will happen when the price of oil becomes too high to support the shipping of food across continents? At about the same time, if Peak Oil Theory predictions are correct, much of the suburbs will become uninhabitable, unless they are quickly reconfigured to put essential goods and services within walking distance of most residents, and unless the larger houses, increasingly expensive to heat and air-condition, are replaced with earth-sheltered, passive-solar structures. The big box stores will go out of business when their centralized supply chains collapse. So it doesn’t require any great stretch of the imagination to suppose that within our lifetimes, my cousins’ development — by then, if they’re lucky, a true town — may be ringed by farmers’ fields once again.

During the painful, forced transition to sustainability, most of the trees in these pictures will probably disappear, cut down for firewood. The lawns will be dug up for vegetable gardens. People will probably spend a lot more time outdoors, whether they want to or not, and will come together in ways we haven’t seen since at least the Second World War. The summers will be hotter and longer than anyone can remember. And because people will need plenty of shade in the absence of air conditioning, I predict they will lose no time in planting more trees.
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Don’t forget to send in tree-related blog posts for the next edition of the Festival of the Trees by April 29. See here for more details.

April 24, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Breaking news

Things are unfolding quickly with the onset of warm weather. By yesterday afternoon, there was already a blush of green on Sapsucker Ridge, which is dominated by wild black cherries. Unlike sweet cherries, they leaf out first, and then flower. They also exude globules of resin, appropriately amber-colored, with the consistency (though not quite the stickiness) of rubber cement. You can find them glistening among the forest litter: too brown to be an amphibian egg mass, too translucent to be excrement.

This morning, the flowering cherry beside my porch was in full bloom as I sat outside before sunrise listening to the birds. For the second morning in a row, I heard a new song for the year: Trees, trees, murmuring trees, one of the two calls of the black-throated green warbler. Like most warbler songs — and unlike, say, the song of the hermit thrush — it’s not exactly melodious. But there’s something very exciting about it all the same, an urgent, whispery summons to some great event.

After finishing my coffee, I went inside for a book of poetry and, as I do so often, picked up Tranströmer’s collected poems. I resumed my seat and opened the book at random to a poem called “Lament.”

Whistlings from the greenery — men or birds?
And cherry trees in bloom embrace the trucks that have come home.

A goldfinch still in its winter plumage darted through the cherry blossoms, snapping up a couple of insects and singing all the while. Warblers may not warble, but goldfinches certainly do!

A couple poems later, I was surprised by a pair of mallard ducks flying low over the yard in front of me. What the hell? I jumped up and ran to the edge of the porch to watch. They banked and circled the field, then came back a second time. Then a third. The fourth time they wheeled around and came in for a landing right below the house on the bank of the stream, about fifty feet from the porch. I stood stock-still, watching as the female explored the bottom of a log, then poked slowly along the stream. The male stood sentinel for a few minutes, then waddled off in pursuit, quacking authoritatively.

It wasn’t hard to guess what they were up to. Though we don’t have a real pond, just a couple of vernal pools, mallards have nested in the field at least twice before. I don’t think it’s a good spot for them, with many predators and no body of water to offer a refuge. But that didn’t stop me from hoping that we’d be found worthy. I guess nobody wants to feel like they’ve been rejected by a duck.
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See also the Dharma Bums’ latest report: clear on the other side of the continent, another seemingly unsuitable yard has just been adopted by a pair of mallards.

April 23, 2007 by Dave Bonta

The day after Earth Day

2:00 a.m. The first-quarter moon is down, and the sky — viewed without my glasses — is a smudge of dim, dinner plate-sized lights. I pee onto the driveway, careful not to splash my bare feet.

8:00 a.m. After a mostly sleepless night, I think at first I’m imagining things. I cup my hands to my ears, trying to hear over the roar of traffic from the interstate. Could that really be a hermit thrush? I walk quickly up into the woods and sit down on a log to listen.

How to describe it? The song of the hermit thrush is an elfin thing, full of crystal bells and moonlight and the kind of unanswerable questions most of us stopped asking after the first grade. The thrush must’ve flown all night, steering by the stars.

It’s a shame he wasn’t here yesterday morning, when it was so quiet. Now it’s Monday, and the people who know what Jesus thinks are eating Egg McMuffins while they drive, delivery trucks are making deliveries, and the schoolbuses are returning riderless to their barns.

10:30. The woods smell of heat. With the sun high over the leafless trees and the dying mountain laurel, there’s nothing to shield the ground from the shadows of hawks.

1:00 p.m. A red-bellied woodpecker trills and trills from the top of the tall locusts in the yard. I doze off with the window open, picturing the farm as seen from above: a green and brown bowl. A woodpecker’s paradise.

4:30. Camera in hand, I stand by the springhouse watching garter snakes circle the daffodils as if searching for something. Tongues flicker briefly as they pass each other. I can hear the whisper of their bodies, interlocking scales sliding over the dead leaves.

See also my mother’s post, Earth Day.

April 16, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Academy of Natural Sciences

In a museum full of dead things, the butterfly garden gets prominent billing: “Alive and Enchanting,” says the banner above the admissions desk.

But the skeletons still fascinate. Pointing and squealing, schoolchildren thunder through the hall of the “Mesozoic Monsters,” as the museum calls them. For millions of Americans under the age of seven or eight, dinosaurs and their relatives occupy the same niche in the imagination that will later be filled by pop stars and Hollywood celebrities.

In a slightly quieter part of the museum, a 3,000-year-old mummy lies half-naked in a replica of a tomb. Here disassembly rather than assembly was required. Small knots of schoolchildren pause before the exhibit long enough to express their bafflement at finding a dead man on display on a floor otherwise devoted to taxidermy mounts.

But one floor down, the cocoons are left unwrapped until they hatch. Here in this newest addition to the museum’s permanent exhibitions, nature is no less of a spectacle than in the more traditional exhibits, but now the visitors are permitted behind the glass.

And while we are still discouraged from touching the exhibits, we are given instructions in how to behave should the exhibits happen to touch us: “Just stand still and wait for them to fly off. And watch where you step.”

We were all eyes.

April 13, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Flies of the Lord

Meet Bombylius major, the greater bee fly (thanks, Bev!). Not only does it look superficially like a bee, but its larvae are parasitic on the larvae of certain solitary bees. The adults turn vegetarian, and imitate bees in feeding on nectar. The flowers, one supposes, are equally tickled to be pollinated by fly or by bee. But insect predators presumably prefer their flies not to look like bees, hence the mimicry.

Ordinarily these are fast-darting insects, but 45-degree temperatures on Wednesday morning made this one sluggish. Somewhere it must be finding nectar, though — perhaps in the maples? And just a day or two of warm weather will bring the shadbush out.

I remember the last warm day we had, over a week ago now: by late afternoon, the woods were buzzing, mostly with calliphoridae. That’s one of the great novelties of early spring, that one can actually feel warm and brotherly toward blow flies. A rare religious impulse even had me effusing from scripture —

Their land brought forth frogs in abundance, in the chambers of their kings.
He spake, and there came divers sorts of flies…

–which, taken out of context, actually sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

The blow flies’ metallic black or blue bodies made a pleasing contrast with the light-brown forest litter as they blundered about in search of something darker and smellier. The most successful in this search will likely have the easiest time eluding predation, given how they stand out against leaves or grass, and thus — one supposes — evolution favors dung- or carrion-colored blow flies the same way it favors bee mimics. There are a lot of hungry birds this time of year.

If there is a God, my friends, this is how she works, in never-ending Creation. The methods may seem random or cruel to our limited way of seeing, but “it is finished in beauty,” as the Navajo Night Chant puts it. In beauty, in harmony, in balance: all three have been offered as translations of the Navajo hozho, which expresses, I gather, the central moral and aesthetic value of a people whose own Creation story begins with the Air-Spirit People, whom we call insects.

April 12, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Trees in the concrete

On the About page for the Festival of Trees, we note that “We are interested in trees in the concrete rather than in the abstract.” Xris of Flatbush Gardener thought it would be fun to take that literally and have “Trees in the Concrete” as a theme for the next edition of the blog carnival. In his own words:

Yes, I am also interested in trees in the concrete […]. Urban trees and forestry. Street trees, park trees, weed trees. So, for the next Festival of the Trees, I’m especially looking for submissions on this theme. This is not a restrictive theme, so anything which fits the FotT submission guidelines is welcome. If you have a doubt, send it. You can submit entries via the Festival of the Trees Submission Form on BlogCarnival. You can also send an email to festival (dot) trees (at) gmail (dot) com with “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line.

The publication date will be May 1st, 2007. The deadline for submissions is April 29. It’s my first time hosting a Blog Carnival, so be gentle.

April 7, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Wintery thoughts in a time of resurrection

Bigger news than this Easter weekend snow and cold snap, for us, is a rare visitor at the bird feeder two days in a row: a swamp sparrow. Or so my mother determined — I’m no birder. She came back from a walk yesterday morning glowing with enthusiasm at all the birds in the hollow that were seemingly unfazed by two days of snow: migrant hermit thrushes, yellow-bellied sapsuckers, blue-headed vireos, and more. I had walked briskly down the hollow and back an hour earlier and saw nothing but the blowing ghosts of winter and the sharp contrasts between green barberry leaves or yellow spicebush blossoms and the new backdrop of white.

A purely aesthetic vision necessarily excludes as much as it admits, always seeking to impose some sort of frame. That may account for some of my blindness. Then, too, as a man, I am probably more inclined toward tunnel vision in the service of specific search images (in my case, certain kinds of photos). I’ve always agreed with Louis Leakey, who felt women make better naturalists than men because they tend to be more patient observers. That’s one reason why he recruited women — Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall, and Birute Galdikas — to do the long-term primate studies he thought were needed. He also felt women would have more compassion and empathy for their subjects, and unlike a lot of scientists at the time (and to this day), thought that that was a good thing.

It seems to me that the critical balance we need to strike is not so much between art and science, but beween dispassion and compassion. It is not enough simply to dissect a frog, or to capture its picturesque image on a lily pad, in order to understand what makes it work. We need to see the whole pond, and the ecological matrix of which it is a part. We need to understand why frogs are suddenly going extinct all over the planet. And we need to understand that when they go, a part of us goes with them — and that no purported salvation that is limited to the human realm can in fact save us.

Happy Easter.

April 4, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Bulleted list

Things seen today:

fog and rain
a map to the mythical land of Generica
18th-century engravings of human fetuses just before birth, looking very peaceful and wise inside their mothers’ cross-sectioned bodies
a dozen flickers hopping around on the lawn like robins while a hen turkey wandered across the field behind them and the sun broke though the clouds
mist rising from the springhouse roof
daffodils in bloom around the old dog statue, which is beginning to acquire the faintest tinge of green
a slow fly.

The photos, however, were both taken on Monday.