Stalking the horned fungus beast

Last Thursday, after I re-found the blister beetles for my brother Steve, we walked back through the flowering oak woods. It was a sunny day, and the woods were filled with butterflies.

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Juvenal’s duskywing (Erynnis juvenalis) – not to be confused with the very similar Horace’s duskywing, which emerges later on in the summer – almost disappears when it lands on the forest floor. It’s strongly associated with dry, upland oak habitat, emerging from the chrysalis just as the oaks are bursting their buds. We were probably seeing males patrolling for females; each seemed to circle a fairly small area.

After mating, the female duskywing will lay her eggs singly on scattered oak leaves. The caterpillar will munch away on its oak leaf in splendid isolation – unlike, say, tent caterpillars – and will roll the leaf around itself like a sleeping bag whenever it rests. To each his own method of camping out, I guess. The adults feed on nectar from a number of species, including blueberry, which is the main ground cover here. They are said to sleep “with wings folded rooflike over the back, in the manner of a moth.”

A brilliant green six-spotted tiger beetle lands on the trail in front of me, and I go into the photographer’s crouch (see the photo in Friday’s post). This is quite possibly the most-photographed beetle species in the world, Steve says. He adds that when he was a kid, he used to have to go to the Scotia Barrens near State College to find any tiger beetles, but thirty years later, Cicindela sexguttata has become a common resident here on the mountain. I wonder if that might not be due to an increase in available prey. As a forest matures, it becomes structurally more diverse, with more forest openings and fallen woody debris, and insect numbers and diversity increase correspondingly.

Tiger beetles are famous for their ferocity, but there’s more to them than that. After six-spotted tiger beetles mate, the male rides around on the female’s back for a while to make sure nobody else gets a chance at her. Or at least, that’s how the scientists explain it. I suppose it might just be a prolonged afterglow.

We pass a fallen scarlet oak log, and Steve gets his knife out. “Oak logs like this are a gold mine – you never know what you’re going to find,” he says happily as he begins ripping off pieces of bark. Grubs and spiders go scurrying.

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Daylight crashes rudely in on a scarab beetle larva, which squirms and burrows deeper into the rot as I snap its picture. It somehow manages to be both beautiful and repulsive at the same time.

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A brilliant green halictid bee pauses in front of a slug. Perhaps we’ve just interrupted something important; we’ll never know. “Halictid” means “salt-loving,” Steve informs me. “There are a huge number of species, including those little sweat bees that like to sting after they’re finished drinking your sweat. But most of them are harmless, like this one.”

We spot two tiny snails, barely a millimeter across. Snails were one of the earliest animals to colonize land, and they’ve been doing quite well in the 350 million years since. By some estimates, one acre of moist temperate woods might harbor 1.5 million snails; a montane forest in Panama was estimated to hold 7.5 million snails. I guess if you know what you’re doing, you’d never have to go hungry. But one can only eat so much escargot.

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Our most spectacular find was an orange-red larva of an elaterid, or click beetle. Some click beetle larvae – smaller than this one – are known as wireworms, and arouse fear and loathing in many gardeners. But adult click beetles are every kid’s favorite insect, especially the huge eyed elators with false eye spots on the back of the thorax. Click beetles are so called because of their unique, two-step defensive strategy. First, they roll over on their backs and play possum, without the grin. If that doesn’t work and the predator – or a finger – actually makes contact, they flex the head and thorax backward, then suddenly straighten out with an audible click that fires their bodies several inches into the air.

“Not too much is known about beetle larvae in general – they’ve hardly been studied at all,” Steve notes. Most of what we think we know is based on what we can most easily see, so even for relatively charismatic insect species like tiger beetles and click beetles, we have few notions about their behavior during the 90-some percent of their lives spent in the juvenile form.

The limitations of our current method of investigation – rapid roof removal – for learning anything about insect behavior are obvious. In one crevasse, we surprise a pair of cave crickets, side by side but not mating. They sweep their amazingly long and sensitive antennae back and forth like a blind person feeling for the curb. I can’t resist quoting from a Japanese website:

Many of cave crickets have the round back, it has the form of having been the thickset, and there is no wing. Hind legs and an antenna are very long and detect existence of a surrounding situation and a foreign enemy in darkness by shaking and moving this antenna from back to a front. In the color of the body, it is brown, an eye degenerates, and, as for gray or the thing which was adapted for the cave, the body is soft. It lives by preference under the damp places in a cave etc., and a stone and the fallen tree.

Cave crickets are omnivorous, and can go for a long time without food. To stave off starvation, they will eat their own legs, one by one.

“Oak logs are the best,” Steve says as we make our way down to the stream. “You won’t find anywhere near the same level of biodiversity under the bark of a pine log, for example.” I feel another piece of the ecological puzzle snapping into place. I knew that oaks were keystone species in the Appalachian forest, but I had always thought in terms of acorns and den trees – the scale I’m familiar with. From what Steve is saying, it sounds as if, prior to the death of an oak, its contribution to the food web has barely begun. And doubtless a wood so prized by invertebrates must furnish more than its fair share of nutrients for soil microorganisms, as well.

We pass a beech log, and Steve pulls back a strip of bark to show me a smooth, unpopulated surface. But then he spots an old bracket fungus, A.K.A. artist’s conk. “This is where you find stuff on a beech log,” he says. He pulls it off and shows me the underside, which is pocked with small craters.

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“These are the exit holes of Bolitotherus cornutus, whose name translates as ‘horned fungus beast’! Here, let’s find one so you can get a picture of it.” He starts digging into the rotten conk with his fingers. “A-ha!”

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That’s an insect?”

“Yup. I’ll put it on my hand so you can get a better look.”

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“It’s a type of tenebrionid, or darkling beetle,” Steve explains. Most tenebrionids are desert dwellers, but this species has adapted to life inside rotten shelf fungi. It isn’t so much camouflaged as thoroughly imbued with its environment, which is caked between the ridges of blunt, tuber-shaped projections on its back. A much better picture of a clean female fungus beast can be seen here. The accompanying photo of a male shows the horns for which it was named. It looks like nothing so much as a miniature Triceratops.

According an abstract of a paper I found online, B. cornutus has well-developed wings, but has never been observed to actually use them, preferring, apparently, to walk. In a mark-and-recapture study, a few individuals were found at distances greater than those predicted from observations of its regular style of locomotion. Perhaps they did short sprints when no one was watching.

Epithalamium, with images from the Brothers Grimm

The French woman who received the world’s first partial face transplant has complete feeling in the new tissue five months after the operation, she told a Sunday newspaper.

Isabelle Dinoire, 38, also told the newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche that the hardest part of her recovery appears to be getting to know herself again. When asked if she has accepted her new face, she responded: “It’s too difficult to explain.”
AP

1. Prince Charming
A bad week. She swallowed
pills, eight
little erasers

& while she lay on
the floor with her mind
elsewhere, the golden Lab

brought his famished
tongue across her face.
Unclipped toe-

nails click
on the cold linoleum
as the dog goes

to his bed, comes back
for another lick, & finally begins
to nibble.

He starts with the lips,
like any faithful lover.
That faint half-smile.

2. Mirror, mirror
The only mirror she kept
in her apartment
lies face-down when not in use.

Every day she checks
a small flag of skin that
the doctors implanted

right above her navel: white
or gray would signal
surrender. Every day

when she pulls up
her blouse, she feels
something turn over inside,

some phantom embryo
forming without nose
or chin, the mouth

a permanent wound
no lips can ever hope
to zipper shut.

3. Cinderella story
The organ
donor’s face comes
slowly back to life.

Too young
to have had laugh lines
or crows’ feet,

it was smooth
& as firm at first
as a glass slipper.

Now, after
the delicate diplomacy
of scalpel and suture,

the awkward wedding over,
it slowly fills
once again with feeling,

softens
in the heat
of an unfamiliar dance.
__________

An epithalamium is a wedding poem. For a brief history of the form, see here.

Incidentally, submissions are still open for the current qarrtsiluni theme, “an opening in the body.”

May Day

What a pleasure to see International Worker’s Day return to the U.S., the country that gave it birth! Arise ye workers from your slumbers, I said to myself this morning as I watched the bread yeast bubbling up in the bowl. Bread and roses, I muttered an hour later as I introduced the glutinous “sponge” to the mix of oil, salt, ten-grain cereal and blackstrap molasses. Rise up!

International Workers’ Day (a name used interchangeably with May Day) is the commemoration of the Haymarket Riot of 1886 in Chicago, Illinois, and a celebration of the social and economic achievements of the international labor movement. The 1 May date is used because in 1884 the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, inspired by labor’s 1872 success in Canada, demanded an eight-hour workday in the United States to come in effect as of May 1, 1886. This resulted in a general strike and the riot in Chicago of 1886, but eventually also in the official sanction of the eight-hour workday. The May Day Riots of 1894 and May Day Riots of 1919 occurred subsequently. […]
The Red Scare periods ended May Day as a mass holiday in the United States, a phenomenon which can be seen as somewhat ironic given that May Day originated in Chicago. Meanwhile, in countries other than the United States and United Kingdom, resident working classes fought hard to make May Day an official governmentally-sanctioned holiday, efforts which eventually largely succeeded. For this reason, May Day in most of the world today is marked by huge street rallies of workers led by their trade unions and various large socialist and communist parties — a phenomenon not generally seen in the U.S. (which has a history of strong anti-communism) or the UK. [Refer to the Wikipedia article for links.]

So today’s nationwide, one-day strike by Hispanic immigrant workers – condemned equally by George W. Bush and liberal icon Ted Kennedy – is an historic event, and augurs well for the future of organized labor. Already, over the past decade and a half, American workers have seen a bit of life return to the moribund labor movement as Mexican immigrants, in particular, have begun to organize. Immigrants are becoming as important to the U.S. economy as they were in the late 19th century, and are bringing similarly radical values – such as the idea that food, clothing and shelter are rights, not privileges, and the conviction that authorities are never to be completely trusted. This seems only appropriate, since the dominance of corporations and the gap between rich and poor are returning to levels not seen since the age of the robber barons.

This time around, though, we’ll need to organize whole communities, not just workplaces, and we’ll have to organize by ecoregion, not just by industry. The labor and environmental movements will have to work together. You may wonder why someone working for his parents ‘way out in the country should be so concerned about all this. But here in the Appalachians, we can’t afford not to care. Ridgetop forests are dying hundreds of miles to the east of the massive coal-burning power plants of the Ohio Valley – to say nothing of the terrible and irreversible destruction visited upon those mountains and mountain people unlucky enough to have coal under them. The mine wars of the 1920s and 30s in Kentucky and West Virginia were as brutal as any struggles in the long, bloody history of the American labor movement. The United Mine Workers won – but for what? So they could help perpetuate an inherently exploitative industry? So their descendents would be deprived of clean air, potable water, soil, wildlife, the very horizon – and would ultimately lose their jobs to mechanization anyway? They should’ve heeded the message of those idealistic young female textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, who – according to James Oppenheimer, who wrote their song – “battle[d] too for men.” I would go so far as to say that an overwhelming focus on bread, to the exclusion of roses, has been the downfall of the American labor movement.

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient song of Bread;
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew–
Yes, bread we fight for–but we fight for Roses, too.
[Search itunes for recorded versions by Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Ani DiFranco]

I thought of taking the day off to show solidarity with international workers, but I already dodged work yesterday to finish reading a novel I’d gotten sucked into (fiction being my personal – and very occasional – opiate). So I still have to plant fifty pine trees. Plus, we’re all out of bread.

Hot off the presses

Two bloggers I read have new books out. Rachel Barenblat of Velveteen Rabbi has published a 24-page chapbook of her chaplain poems, chaplainbook, under the new Laupe House imprint. And Fred First of Fragments from Floyd has published Slow Road Home: A Blue Ridge Book of Days with his Goose Creek Press imprint. Congratulations to both authors! I take inspiration not only from their well-crafted words, but also from their example. Self-published, cooperatively published and print-on-demand books seem like a natural extension of the blogging ethos.

*

Speaking of natural extensions, I’ve just adapted Smorgasblog to fit my sidebar – scroll down past the Archives. The sidebar template had no problem with the HTML; it was a simple copy-and-paste job, sparing me the trouble of actually learning the language the blog template is written in (PHP), at least for now.

Links added since my last Smorgasblog update include: Numenius of Feathers of Hope on Vandana Shiva; Dick Jones on friendships between bloggers; Rachel Barenblatt on coming to terms with Jewish concepts of “purity” and “impurity”; Jarrett Walker on Jane Jacobs; a Nigerian commenter at the cassandra pages on Wole Soyinka; Patry Francis on equanimity; and Rexroth’s Daughter on being crabby. Check it out!

The way things are

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It’s right there in front of you, that Shangri-La, that eternal spring.

I mean, how else would it keep finding its way into your camera? You click the shutter thinking that you’re taking a picture of one thing, and hours later when you look at the results, you see something more, like those double-exposed pictures that the Victorians tried to pass off as photographs of ghosts.

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“I have a similar train of thought at peak of each season,” says the sylph, “a desire to stop the world for a geologic minute, a general sadness that it will pass.” Me too.

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But the passage itself is so beautiful: that way-making, that semi-conscious inscription of memories in nerve-map and neural net, in slowly fraying muscle, in thinning bone. Heraclitus’ river, the one you can’t step into twice? Why not say that it is reborn each moment, like any stream or spring? The Indians of La Florida – the flowering land – didn’t lie when they told Ponce de Leon about a fountain of eternal youth. They couldn’t know that he would put a self-centered spin on it.

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six-spotted tiger beetle

In my camera’s Shangri-La, green tigers stalk the numerous descendents of those wasps who long ago fell to earth and lost their wings. Birth alternates with death and joy with suffering, as in any divine comedy; only those for whom all distinction between individual and tribal existence is meaningless can escape death. And these immortals – too small to be glimpsed except through the finest optics – are running the show.

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Welcome to planet Earth.

Anti-spring

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black-and-white warbler

“The descent beckons,” wrote Dr. Williams in his great poem about the Paterson Falls. Why do I think of this now, in spring – the very name of which conjures up such images of upwelling and resurrection? Persephone has returned from the underworld, and in spring the young man’s fancy turns lightly, they say, to thoughts of love. But then why do we hear about so many boys with guns and bombs, their resentments turned to rage? As the earth thaws, it gaps open, and many find their gaze drawn downward.

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Solomon’s seal

Many of the most emblematic wildflowers open toward the ground, a posture presumably intended to attract insect pollinators. Solomon’s seal is famous for its dangling row of blossoms, but even the first sprouts have a certain air of ascetic contemplation – a kind of inwardness. One of my favorite wildflowers – which unfortunately doesn’t grow here in the hollow – is wild ginger, which buries its reddish-brown flower in the leaf duff. I’ve come to prize the spicy flavor of its dried roots even more than Asian ginger for flavoring homebrewed ale and mead.

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wild oats

With the onset of summer, rayed and umbeliferous flowers will abound. But in the light-drenched woods of spring, flowers nod sleepily. If – as the botanical term campanulate suggests – they resemble bells, they are bells without clappers. Others hide their sexual faces inside tubes, under hoods, or in mute trumpets.

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Sit near a patch of blossoming lowbush blueberries, and you’ll soon see the attraction they have for wasps and bees, which swarm in to drink from their over-turned cups. These bells may not ring, but they certainly can buzz!

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The blueberries grow in a small powerline right-of-way that’s almost a hundred years old. The human-maintained scrub oak barren there is a unique habitat for our end of the mountain, and we often wonder whether it harbors any rare species. I was busy snapping pictures of the rasta-like flowers of scrub oak the other day when I spotted this meloid, or blister beetle. I showed the picture to my brother Steve, and he immediately got excited. In over thirty years of collecting beetles on the mountain, he said, he’d never seen this species.

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Of course, that may simply be because he doesn’t tend to do a lot of collecting this time of year; the real insect biodiversity bonanza doesn’t begin for at least another month. It may also be that these beetles are common in the canopies of other oaks also flowering now, 80-100 feet off the ground. But this morning, we combed the scrub oaks on the powerline and only found two individuals from this species. Even more surprising, Steve couldn’t find it in his favorite beetle guide. Sure, beetle species are much too numerous to include more than a representative sample in any given book, but it seems odd that something so large and showy wouldn’t have made the cut.

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As I watched, this one eventually turned head-down to match the inflorescence. Steve told me that many meloids are naturally uncommon, and some are quite interesting. As is often the case with brightly colored critters, blister beetles can be quite toxic. They secrete an oily substance from their joints called catharidin, which does cause blisters for some people. Nevertheless, when disturbed, this beetle’s reaction was to drop like a stone and disappear into the leaf litter. “That’s not an uncommon reaction among pollinating beetles,” Steve said.

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So clearly, there are all kinds of practical reasons to be geotropic. The danger with spring, as I mentioned the day before yesterday, is that the real heart of it will be overlooked in our feverish anticipation of more sun. “The descent / made up of despairs / and without accomplishment / realizes a new awakening : / which is a reversal / of despair,” wrote Williams. “For what we cannot accomplish, what / is denied to love, / what we have lost in the anticipation – / a descent follows, endless and indestructible .”

This website under attack by the U.S. Congress

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If the telecommunications companies and their allies in the U.S. Congress have their way, the bum’s cynical prophecy could soon come true. “The wide and unbounded Internet could soon be fenced in by cable and phone firms. Higher prices and less choice may lie ahead under a misguided bill moving forward in Congress,” says the San Francisco Chronicle. The New Yorker spells it out:

Until recently, companies that provided Internet access followed a de-facto commoncarriage rule, usually called “network neutrality,” which meant that all Web sites got equal treatment. Network neutrality was considered so fundamental to the success of the Net that Michael Powell, when he was chairman of the F.C.C., described it as one of the basic rules of “Internet freedom.” In the past few months, though, companies like A.T. & T. and BellSouth have been trying to scuttle it. In the future, Web sites that pay extra to providers could receive what BellSouth recently called “special treatment,” and those that don’t could end up in the slow lane. One day, BellSouth customers may find that, say, NBC.com loads a lot faster than YouTube.com, and that the sites BellSouth favors just seem to run more smoothly. Tiered access will turn the providers into Internet gatekeepers.

Fortunately, big Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo are being joined by political advocacy groups from across the political spectrum in opposing this assault on network neutrality. Here’s what’s at stake, according to MoveOn.org:

If Congress abandons Network Neutrality, who will be affected?

  • Advocacy groups like MoveOn–Political organizing could be slowed by a handful of dominant Internet providers who ask advocacy groups to pay “protection money” for their websites and online features to work correctly.
  • Nonprofits–A charity’s website could open at snail-speed, and online contributions could grind to a halt, if nonprofits can’t pay dominant Internet providers for access to “the fast lane” of Internet service.
  • Google users–Another search engine could pay dominant Internet providers like AT&T to guarantee the competing search engine opens faster than Google on your computer.
  • Innovators with the “next big idea”–Startups and entrepreneurs will be muscled out of the marketplace by big corporations that pay Internet providers for dominant placing on the Web. The little guy will be left in the “slow lane” with inferior Internet service, unable to compete.
  • Ipod listeners–A company like Comcast could slow access to iTunes, steering you to a higher-priced music service that it owned.
  • Online purchasers–Companies could pay Internet providers to guarantee their online sales process faster than competitors with lower prices–distorting your choice as a consumer.
  • Small businesses and tele-commuters–When Internet companies like AT&T favor their own services, you won’t be able to choose more affordable providers for online video, teleconferencing, Internet phone calls, and software that connects your home computer to your office.
  • Parents and retirees–Your choices as a consumer could be controlled by your Internet provider, steering you to their preferred services for online banking, health care information, sending photos, planning vacations, etc.
  • Bloggers–Costs will skyrocket to post and share video and audio clips–silencing citizen journalists and putting more power in the hands of a few corporate-owned media outlets.

I’ve been blogging at least six days a week for two and a half years now, and I have never asked my readers for a penny. But now I’m asking all Via Negativa readers who are U.S. citizens to please sign the MoveOn petition.

For maximum impact, call or write your congresscritter directly (find his/her contact information here). I’ll share my own letter to my Republican congressman as soon as I receive his response. Note that the automatic email page also displays the contact information for your representative’s local office(s), if you want to save money on a toll call. Thanks!

UPDATE (8:00 p.m.): To stay abreast of developments on this issue, bookmark Save the Internet.com. Despite losing the committee vote to preserve network neutrality today, they report that

There’s a white hot firestorm on the issue on Capitol Hill. No one wants to see the telcos make a radical change to the internet and screw this medium up, except, well, the telcos. And now members of Congress are listening to us. The telcos have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and many years lobbying for their position; we launched four days ago, and have closed a lot of ground. Over the next few months, as the public wakes up, we’ll close the rest of it.

High spring

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New growth sprouts from an old nest, signaling as well as anything can that we’ve entered that magic time I call high spring. The daffodils are fading, the banks of forsythia are in the last throes of blooming, and the first cohort of wild blossoms – shadbush, spicebush, coltsfoot, hepatica – are shedding their petals. The leaves of birches and black cherries are just beginning to open, turning the ridge to the west a pale green, while the oaks are in blossom all up and down the ridge above my house, giving it a yellow-green wash. Red maples, sugar maples and tulip poplars provide pastel splashes of red and green.

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Wild sweet cherry trees – legacy of a long-gone orchard – glow white along the edge of the field in the early morning sun. Down in the hollow, purple trillium (A.K.A. wake robin) is in bloom, and Solomon’s seal and yellow mandarin are just at the point of flowering. Black cohosh, wild sarsaparilla, and a host of ferns unclench their insurrectionary green fists.

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wild sarsaparilla

Almost every day brings a new birdsong: last Thursday, the black-throated green warblers were back in force. Friday afternoon, I heard weeza-weeza-weeza from inside at my writing desk and bounded out the door with my camera, but was too slow with the focus to get a shot of the first black-and-white warbler calling among the last blossoms of the ornamental cherry next to my porch. Yesterday morning, at around quarter to six, I heard a whippoorwill sing a few phrases of its namesake song from about a quarter-mile away (which is just about the distance and duration I prefer, actually). Later in the day, I watched a pair of Louisiana waterthrushes courting in the branches of a black birch above the now-roaring Plummer’s Hollow Run.

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rue anemone

A weekend of hard rain has eased the fire danger I alluded to last week. Water streams from the mountain’s every pore, and it’s a real pleasure to sit outside at first light and listen to the birds tune up against a background of running water. This morning, one of those songs made my heart leap: wood thrush! But not, I’m sorry to say, an especially gifted member of the tribe. I don’t know if he grew up next to a busy highway, and thus was unable to learn the full nuances of his species’ song (a documented phenomenon, by the way), or was simply too tired from the migration to give it his all, but this was a bare-bones version of that famous thrush call.

But I’m sure there will be more thrushes – possibly as early as this evening. And it served as a reminder to me to get out more often and listen for the other thrush species, which sometimes sing on migration. In past years, I’ve been lucky enough to hear both veerys and hermit thrushes, and once, about five years ago, a Swainson’s thrush – far outside its normal breeding range – sang through most of June at one spot down in the hollow.

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rattlesnake fern

I was happy when temperatures got cooler over the weekend. To my mind, spring is best when it is long and slow, though I know a lot of people who seem to regard the season primarily as foreplay to summer. Some years, it stays cold through late April, and then an early heat wave makes the flowers leap into bloom, the trees leaf out and the songbirds return from the tropics all in a rush – a southern spring. My parents traveled to Arkansas last month, and were confounded to see hepaticas blooming alongside wild geraniums. I’m sure it’s all in what you’re used to, but to them, it just didn’t seem right. Spring should come gradually, almost imperceptibly at first. Not for nothing did Aaron Copland set his ballet Appalachian Spring in Western Pennsylvania; there’s a kind of choreography to spring arrivals and blooming dates here in the north, a certain order and cadence that’s practically synonymous with spring in the minds of most northeasterners. As in any dance composition, there are many high points along the way, as buds burst in mid-air and flowers relax into nascent fruit. High spring, as I conceive of it, climaxes in mid to late May, when the pink and yellow lady’s-slippers bloom. By then, all the trees except for walnuts and locusts have fully leafed out, but insects and air pollution have yet to diminish that first, fresh, startling green.

Introducing Smorgasblog

Via Negativa just had a baby: Smorgasblog. Go look.

I’ll be updating Smorgasblog on a weekly basis, and posting reminders here. It will have its own archives, but no comments feature. I strongly encourage readers to click through and read the original posts, and leave comments there if they feel so moved.

In a nutshell

An empty half-walnut shell lay
upturned on the verandah.
The wren fluttered down
& poked at it with his bill,
hopping all around it
in his big clown feet.

The black walnut half
had two large openings
like holes in a round kayak.
The wren probed one
& then the other, leaving nothing
to chance.

It was time for tea on the verandah,
but nobody came.
The wren flew off.
The walnut shell rocked a few times
& was still, riding high
without ballast
through the long afternoon.

__________

Black walnut (Juglans nigra) produces much harder nuts than the familiar white or English walnut. Its nutmeat is also much tangier – an acquired taste.

The wren here is the Carolina wren (Thryothorus ludovicianus). The poem came out of direct observation, but was also influenced by the poem “The Hollow Walnut,” by the great Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral (translated by Maria Giachetti in Gabriela Mistral: A Reader, White Pine Press, 1993).