Turn Outward

The music of January

2012-01-11T17:41:00.002-06:00

The months of the year, from January up to June, are a geometric progression in the abundance of distractions. In January one may follow a skunk track, or search for bands on the chickadees, or see what young pines the deer have browsed, or what muskrat houses the mink have dug, with only an occasional and mild digression into other doings. January observation can be almost as simple and peaceful as snow, and almost as continuous as cold. There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why.**

~ Aldo Leopold, from the first pages of A Sand County Almanac

That passage is from a chapter titled "January Thaw." We don't have enough frigid weather here in Tennessee to experience a real thaw, but we are presently in the midst of a warm, wet spell that hints deceptively at spring. My walk this morning felt more like April than January, with a mild breeze that -- thanks to last night's heavy rain -- carried multiple voices of water in motion. The creeks burbled energetically, fat drops spattered as they fell from the trees, and I could hear the moisture perking into the soil beneath. I stopped for a while to listen to the layers of sound, a veritable concert of water.

The woods are filled with the noise of life in winter. I seem to forget that noise from one year to the next, so it's always a fresh pleasure. The trilling birdsong of summer is absent, but there is constant chatter from titmice and chickadees, and the woodpeckers are their usual rowdy selves. The wild turkeys gather in large flocks this time of year, and though they don't vocalize much, they make quite a racket kicking up the leaf litter as they march together through the trees. Groups of deer make the same loud rustling -- I often can't tell which animal I'm hearing until I see a flash of white tail or catch of glimpse of the birds. (How is it that wild turkeys always manage to seem simultaneously dazed and panic-stricken?)

There are quieter beings about, of course. The coyotes are not calling much as yet (it's the start of their breeding season), but they're leaving a lot of scat on the trail, the coyote equivalent of graffiti: I WUZ HERE. I got a strong whiff of skunk yesterday, and this morning a raccoon had left dainty wet tracks on one of the wooden footbridges. I suspect they're all enjoying the warm spell as much as I am. The snow expected tomorrow is natural and welcome, but this touch of spring is very nice while it lasts.

**The 125th anniversary of Aldo Leopold's birth seems like a good occasion to resurrect this blog, which I abandoned more than a year ago. I didn't stop posting because I stopped walking. I just found that there were too many demands on my talking self elsewhere for me to summon words for this blog. The relative quiet of this time of year, as Leopold says, nurtures a slower and more thoughtful existence, and I'm feeling lately that I might have the mental room to comment on my wandering life again. I don't expect to write a post here daily, or even weekly, but I am at least going to share photographs and the occasional poem or passage.

Photo by BitterGrace. Share freely

Faint voices

2010-09-12T21:26:00.000-05:00

Through the deep woods, the slanting sunlight
Casts motley patterns on the jade-green mosses.
No glimpse of man in this lonely mountain,
Yet faint voices drift on the air.*

Wang Wei, 8th century

The woods are getting quieter these days. The concert of bird families with hungry babies has faded away. No one's talking except the crows, and even they keep quiet most of the time. As I walked along the trail this morning, a silent flock of geese flew overhead, so low I could hear the whispering beat of their wings. A pileated woodpecker dropped down onto the ground not far from me, hunting for food and making not a sound except for a faint rustling of leaves. Pileateds seem to spend a lot of time earthbound in autumn. They're a curious sight--big, redheaded birds toddling belly-to-the-ground like foraging squirrels. A wren complained when I walked by, but there was no fury in her rasp. On my way out of the park I moved a box turtle from the road to the treeline. He hissed softly, then pulled into his shell with nothing more to say.

*To read a slew of different translations of this same verse, go here.

Forest in the Morning Light, Asher Brown Durand, c. 1855

The exquisite withering

2010-08-25T19:09:00.001-05:00

Chill early morning air. Dawn light glowing through the mist that lingers around the trees. Damp spider webs draped like curtains across the trail. Wild turkeys everywhere.

Oh, yes, the season is about to change. We may be killing the earth but so far it shows no inclination to stop waltzing around the sun. Soon the trees will commence their exquisite withering. The box turtle that wanted to fight me this morning over a delectable toadstool will go to ground, and the last hummingbird will depart.

In fall, nature shimmers with an aura of good death--transformative, liberating death. Life ends so that it can begin again. Collapse is renewal. That's the mystery and the resolution.

Though the black swan’s arched neck is like

A question-mark on the lake,

The swan outlaws all possible questioning:

A thing in itself, like love, like submarine

Disaster, or the first sound when we wake;

And the swan-song it sings

Is the huge silence of the swan.

Illusion: the black swan knows how to break

Through expectation, beak

Aimed now at its own breast, now at its image,

And move across our lives, if the lake is life,

And by the gentlest turning of its neck

Transform, in time, time’s damage;

To less than a black plume, time’s grief.

From "The Black Swan" by James Merrill--a poem that has always evoked for me the beautiful face of death. You can read a very different interpretation from Charles Simic here.

Autumn landscape with a flock of turkeys, Jean-Francois Millet, c.1873

Promising visitor

2010-07-27T19:07:00.000-05:00

The hummingbird feeders outside my kitchen window hang above a firethorn bush so neglected and overgrown that it's a menace. The branches flame out in every direction, just waiting to snag clothes or flesh. The reason I don't try to get it under control--aside from the fact that every time I go near it with a trimming implement it fights back until it tastes my blood--is that nearly every species of bird seems to love it. Flocks of cedar waxwings descend on it in winter to strip the berries, and every summer the latest crop of mockingbirds trains for future mating violence by using it as a launching platform for practice assaults. Yesterday it drew one of the most welcome avian visitors I've had in a long time--a male orchard oriole.

Even though orchard orioles are common summer residents here, they have always shunned my yard as a nesting site. I get one or two females passing through every year on their way south for the winter, but I've never once seen a male until yesterday. He lingered for quite a while, hopping delicately around those vicious thorns in search of bugs, stopping periodically to ponder the antics of the mob of hummingbirds overhead. I hope he was scoping out a location for next summer's housing. I'm keeping my fingers crossed--and leaving that firethorn alone.

Illustration by Alexander Wilson, 1808.

Oh, it's you

2010-07-18T18:35:00.000-05:00

One of the trails I frequent has a resident pair of coyotes this summer. I see them once or twice a week. They must have a den in the area but I haven’t seen any sign of pups, though there is a third adult that joins them sometimes, possibly their offspring from last year. They fled the first few times I came across them, as coyotes generally do hereabouts. Ours are not bold, suburban coyotes—not yet, anyway. But I’ve become a routine presence to this little family now. When I walk by they look up, check me out, and then go back to the business of ferreting around under the trees in search of snacks. Coyotes will eat nearly anything, from lizards to persimmons. Right now the wild black cherries are falling in abundance, so I’m sure they’re eating a share of those. I eat a few myself.

The coyotes have stopped taking much notice of me but I always take notice of them. Encountering them has become the highlight of the day. I love that they don’t run from me anymore, though I wouldn't attempt to approach them. That would be a breach of etiquette that they’d never forgive, and on the off chance they decided they didn’t mind me getting closer, it would be a bad thing. If they failed to avoid other hikers they’d be doomed.

I'm a little embarrassed my sentimental attachment to these critters. Coyotes are really nuisance animals. They are aliens in this part of the country, 20th century invaders who arrived and thrive thanks to land-clearing development. Aside from their bad habits of killing livestock and munching on house cats, they wreak havoc on the native wildlife, especially foxes. Wherever coyotes move in, the fox population declines. Bobcats, too, suffer by the presence of coyotes, which is a particular shame because the bobcat is the only wild cat we’ve got here anymore and they have enough problems dealing with the destruction of their habitat.

Still, I can’t resist this particular little group, so tolerant of me invading their space. (They occasionally leave a pile of scat right in the middle of the trail, just so there won’t be any doubt about ownership of the territory.) When the sun shines through the trees and dapples their fur they are breathtakingly pretty, and no other animal moves with the slinking grace of a coyote.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

In the bramble

2010-06-30T13:04:00.001-05:00

This morning I stood a while and watched a pair of wrens play in a bramble of vines that had colonized the corpse of a fallen poplar. There’s a special grace in the way some birds can navigate dense brush—more impressive, really, than the stunt of soaring through the air. The open sky seems easy compared to the treacherous nets the earth casts across itself. Imagine yourself inside one of those tangles. It would be torture, wouldn’t it? Thorns tearing skin, snatching ferociously at hair and clothes, the rough web of creepers holding fast against all attempts to escape—just thinking about it makes me feel a little panicky. But the birds are very happy inside the trap. They fly around fast and unhindered, no matter how tight the web may be. That dark, convoluted realm is home to them and they don't long for anything different.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Crawdad

2010-06-13T19:26:00.000-05:00

It was so hot and sticky at 6 this morning that I worked up a sweat just walking in the shade. Good weather for things that sting and buzz, not so good for charging along the trail, so I decided to take it easy and hang out by the creek. The water was flowing slow and clear, and I could see the crawdads scuttering between the rocks. There's something profoundly strange about crawdads--mostly due, I think, to that weird, sidelong way they move. They always look like bits of trash tumbling along the creek bed until they are suddenly seized with intention and dive under a sheltering stone. They seem to inhabit a special category somewhere between living things and inanimate objects. They disturb me, because if there's one spiritual duty I really believe in, it's endeavoring to see myself in all of nature, and I cannot see myself in the crawdad. I'm pretty sure crawdads can't see themselves in me either, but I have enough human arrogance to think they don't have the same spiritual obligations I do. I don't want to consider the other possibility. I don't mind if the deer or the crows contemplate their kinship with me, but I don't want those arthropods having deep thoughts. (See "Sandkings.") I left the crawdads to their business and ambled back up the path, where I met a barn owl on his way to bed. He perched in a tall poplar and studied me with a doubtful look.

Hawk and dragonfly

2010-06-08T09:11:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I came upon a small Cooper’s hawk that had taken down a flicker right in the middle of the road. He was so absorbed in strangling the life out of his victim that he didn’t budge as I pulled up next to them. The flicker was lying on its side with its pretty speckled breast toward me. The hawk was perched on top of it and a little blood seeped out where talons met flesh. I stopped the car and studied the drama for a moment. Exasperated by my intrusion, the hawk lifted the flicker—which nearly matched him in size—and flew away into the trees.

At the lake a startled turkey startled me by suddenly rising out of the tall grass and taking off over the lake, weighed down by his own bulk as the hawk had been by the flicker. I walked into the woods, where a box turtle hissed at me when I passed him on the trail. Apparently, it was my day to be a nuisance.

By the time I got back to the lake the sun was high enough to start warming the water and the dragonflies were out in force. There were dozens of them buzzing delicately around me, diving for their morning feast of gnats and mosquitoes. They didn’t seem to mind my presence. Maybe they thought of me as a useful lure.

Photo by Kuribo at Wikimedia Commons

Briefly noted

2010-05-19T20:00:00.000-05:00

The woods are full of mosquitoes and hummingbirds. The sound of the hummers' sweet chatter rains down on me from the treetops as I trudge along slapping away the bugs. I curse the little bloodsuckers, but try to think of them as nourishment for the dainty birds. Actually, the bloodsuckers make me nourishment for the dainty birds, which is a delightful notion...sort of.

Ruby-throated hummingbirds by Chester A. Reed, from The Bird Book, 1915.

The snapping turtles...

2010-05-10T21:02:00.001-05:00

...do not understand why everybody is so upset about the flood. I made my first trip back to the lake this morning since the big rain, and saw three large specimens, all apparently delighted with the mud and high water. Insofar as it is possible for reptiles to have facial expressions, they looked very smug. One of them was lolling next to the beaver lodge, which seemed to be vacant. The lodge is intact, but it's clear that the lake rose well above the top of it during the flood, and I didn't hear the usual early morning trilling from inside. No sign of the colony in the water or on the shore, either. Hope they survived. As I stood by the lodge, a little phoebe perched in a cedar tree right next to me and sang like mad, as if to fill the silence.

Photo by Matt Reinbold from Wikimedia commons.

Turtle conjuring

2010-05-01T16:49:00.000-05:00

I’ve been noticing the scarcity of box turtles on my walks lately, even beginning to wonder if the population is declining for some reason. Last night I went to bed with turtles on my mind—and this morning, as if I had conjured them, scads of turtles, thanks to the heavy rain that set in a round 4 AM. Turtles love the rain, especially in the spring. For some reason they like to mate during wet weather. (Sound familiar? I posted about this last year.)

I was delighted with the turtles, and with the soggy walk. I love hiking in the rain. There’s always an initial resistance to getting wet, but once I surrender to the experience I realize that I like that sensation of the water slowly soaking through my shoes, droplets running down my arms. There’s a wonderful loss of boundaries when you’re out in the rain. It doesn’t respect your personal space.

Unfortunately, the morning showers have turned into a daylong deluge with tornadoes and heavy storms south of here, and flooding everywhere. It looks to continue all day tomorrow. Too much of a good thing. I take no responsibility. I only wished for turtles.

Charmeur de tortues, L. Crépon, 1869

The end

2010-04-11T21:39:00.002-05:00

Isn't this image beautiful? I love the clots of color, and the graceful pale shapes in the center. I find it a soothing image, even though I know what it is: a micrograph of brain tissue damaged by rabies.

When I arrived at the trailhead this morning I saw an adult raccoon curled up on the ground in the middle of a clearing. Not a good sign. Nothing wild ever settles down for a nap on a lawn. The raccoon was lying perfectly still and I assumed it was dead, but I resisted the urge to get a closer look to make sure. Rabies is always a concern here, and that's a natural phenomenon I'd just as soon not learn about firsthand.

As I started down the trail I saw a ranger's truck pulling up next to the clearing. A couple of minutes later I heard a shot behind me. I guess the ranger didn't want to take any chances either. When I came back down the trail there was no sign at all of ranger or raccoon.

Who knows what was wrong with the raccoon--it may have just crawled out there to die after being hit by a car. Whatever the cause, it's sad to think of it struggling, instinct lost, helpless under the open sky.

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

In the presence of animals

2010-04-04T16:08:00.000-05:00

After posting that beautiful Levertov poem, I went walking in the woods Easter morning and encountered some less spiritual wildlife. It was clear and sunny, and couple of days of warm weather have the redbuds blooming. A cardinal was singing his heart out somewhere. I was just thinking how perfectly beautiful it was when I heard a scrabbling sound followed by ferocious snarling. I looked around for the source and discovered it about 10 feet up the trunk of a tree. It took me a second to figure out that I was looking at the rear end of a weasel, pushing his way into a cavity that looked much too small for him. Judging from the contortions of the weasel, his snarling, and the pitiful cries coming from inside the tree, I'd say he was making breakfast out of a chipmunk, or possibly a nesting squirrel. Whatever it was it put up a pretty good fight, but the weasel won. He somehow got his whole bulk into the tree and shortly thereafter the cries stopped. He growled a bit more and then fell silent, too. Busy eating, I assume.

The rest of my hike was serene. As I approached the lake two great blue herons took off toward the rising sun, casting their shadows behind them. A pair of Canada geese flew low over the water in the opposite direction, murmuring to each other in that perfect harmony they have. I came upon a flicker and a pileated woodpecker that were perched on adjoining tree stumps, apparently enjoying each other's company until the woodpecker answered her calling mate and left to join him on the other side of the lake.

Weasel with chaffinch, Bruno Liljefors, 1888

Housekeeping

2010-03-28T18:25:00.000-05:00

What Blogger really needs is a dead link alert, so bad housekeepers like me don't have to discover by accident that they're sending folks on a snipe hunt. I just discovered that my link to "Sign-Post" above has been sending readers to a blank page at the Poetry Foundation. Dang. I love that poem. If you were disappointed by the old link, try this one. Hope it lasts a while.

La Récureuse, André Bouys, 1737

Unsettled

2010-03-28T14:25:00.000-05:00

I frightened a duck this morning. She was tucked up in the weeds at the edge of the lake and I never saw her before she let out a squawk and scuttered out onto the water, wings spread, feet slapping the surface. She got 20 feet from the shore and instantly settled down, paddling serenely as if she had completely forgotten fleeing for her life 2 seconds before.

The weather is wonderfully unsettled here--storms and heavy rain last night, fitful rays of sun after dawn, then the descent of a pregnant black cloud as I hiked around the perimeter of the lake. Sunlight leaked around the cloud’s edges as it dropped fat drops of rain. The wind rose up and spread sheets of silver over the water. It carried a red-tailed hawk’s call to me from the opposite shore. The bird was perched in the crook of a tall tree, hollering in hope or anger. He took off and flew in wide circles over the lake, defying the rain, which promptly stopped.

Photos of Red-tailed Hawk courtship

The scent of spring, after the rain, Ma Lin (Song Dynasty), 13th century

Tracking

2010-02-14T20:30:00.000-06:00

It’s not terribly cold here, but it’s gloomy and there’s been snow on the ground for days. I haven’t had much company on my hikes. On Thursday morning I listened to a long concert from a pair of coyotes who were very riled up about something, and Saturday morning a great blue heron flew over the lake. I’ve heard a woodpecker or two knocking around the woods. That’s about it. The rest of the birds are mostly silent and even the squirrels are scarce. I’d think all the critters were hibernating, waiting for winter to end, but the snow tells me otherwise. There are lots of dainty deer prints going from the tree line down to the lake. The turkeys leave scribbled evidence of their chronic confusion as they wander in circles among the trees. The feet of skunks and rabbits mark the trails for short distances before their owners think better of it and veer off toward safe cover. Raccoons don’t travel along the trails much at all, but they clearly go out of their way to use the footbridges—raccoons hate wet feet, apparently. Coyotes rarely leave tracks on the bridges, although they like to walk the trails for long distances. So do bobcats. I followed a bobcat track for at least half a mile yesterday. The cat had traipsed right along the trail, as if on a hike of its own. Walking beside the line of footprints, I felt I had a ghost companion, a feline familiar. As we came to a place where the trail crossed a road, the bobcat’s track abruptly turned away, back into the woods. I paused for a moment to say goodbye and then headed on my way.

Photo of mouse tracks in the snow from the National Park Service via Wikimedia Commons

"...stretched out upon Mother Earth"

2010-01-31T14:45:00.003-06:00

I’ve spent a good portion of my Sunday reading The Book by Alan Watts—the sort of philosophical meringue that seems delightful as you consume it but leaves you hungry for something more substantial. Watts walks the thin line between expressing ideas simply and reducing them to something simple-minded. The Book’s considerable wisdom shares the page with a certain amount of 60s-style spiritual claptrap, which is kinda fun but doesn’t help me take the whole enterprise seriously. I thought about giving up on it a couple of times today, but I hung in there and was rewarded with Watts' quote of this passage from Schrödinger’s My View of the World:

“Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering. And not merely ‘some day’: now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once but thousands upon thousands of time, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.”

Alrighty then. That was worth wading through 100 pages of The Book to reach. I’ve seen the last sentence of that quote before, but never the bit that precedes it. Schrödinger expresses in a few elegant words the joyful intuition that lures me into the woods. I can grasp that sense of being continually brought forth only when I literally throw myself on Mother Earth. This blog is all about dancing around Schrödinger’s insight, seeking the eternal now of union and metamorphosis.

The Carrot, Willem Frederik van Royen, 1699

"One must have a mind of winter"

2010-01-11T17:10:00.004-06:00

Yesterday we woke up to an Arctic freeze, and today we're back to an ordinary Tennessee chill. When you live where the winters are mild it's easy to forget the special beauty that bitter cold creates. An ice-blue sky, glittering snow, the perfect silence that falls when it's so cold that no animals stir--these are rare pleasures for us.

The Snow Man

by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Text from Poets.org
Jay Keyser analyzes the poem here.

Garden under Snow, Paul Gauguin, 1879

Focused

2009-12-10T14:21:00.004-06:00

A red-tailed hawk swooped low over my car as I drove out of the park this morning. She was diving for some unfortunate something cowering in the ditch along the road. I didn’t stop to see if she succeeded—but only because I was in a hurry. I don’t mind the bloodshed. I love watching hawks kill things. I get queasy at the sight of a cat dispatching a mouse, and I even feel a little sorry for the bugs that get caught in spider webs, but the bloodlust of raptors is beautiful to me. I think it is the hawk’s single-mindedness I like. Mammalian predators are so unfocused by comparison. Even when they (we) are actively stalking something, distraction comes easily. Not so for the hawk. Once she zeroes in on her victim, she never waivers. She’s pure killing machine. I aspire to her perfect sense of purpose.

Into the changes of autumn brush
the doe walked, and the hide, head, and ears
were the tinsel browns. They made her.
I could not see her. She reappeared, stuffed with apples,
and I shot her. Into the pines she ran,
and I ran after. I might have lost her,
seeing no sign of blood or scuffle,
but felt myself part of the woods,
a woman with a doe’s ears, and heard her
dying, counted her last breaths like a song
of dying, and found her dying. ...

From "To Kill a Deer" by Carol Frost. The complete poem is here.

Photo by John Harrison from Wikimedia Commons.

An unexpected bird

2009-11-29T08:52:00.000-06:00

I got to the park early Saturday morning and headed down toward the lake, hoping I'd see the big flock of juncos that usually feed in the tall weeds near the water. The juncos continue to boycott my feeders, but at least they let me enjoy them on neutral territory. As I got near the lake I saw something moving in the grass up ahead. It was white with a vivid spot of red. My first thought was Oh my god, that's a chicken, but I immediately contradicted myself. It couldn't possibly be a chicken. What the hell would a chicken be doing miles from the nearest house? It was probably a bag of trash some lazy fisherman left behind.

But no, it was, in fact, a chicken--a white Leghorn rooster, to be precise. He was pecking around in the grass, but he seemed a little uncomfortable and disoriented. He fled when I approached, but didn't go far, just hunkered down about 20 feet away. I doubt he made his way to the lake by himself. Domestic ducks and guinea fowl will wander far from home, but as far as I know, chickens generally don't. If I'd seen him closer to town, I'd assume he had escaped from one of the Mennonite farmers who sell chickens on the roadside, but somebody must have deliberately carried him to such a remote place. Most likely, he was nabbed out of someone's yard and dumped, either as a prank, or maybe by an irate neighbor who was tired of his crowing.

I was certain he'd be a coyote's dinner last night, but this morning he was still there, in almost exactly the same spot. He seemed even more freaked out than yesterday. He was hunched down in the grass and kept absolutely still until I was almost on him, then he ran a good distance. I noticed he'd lost his tail feathers, so maybe he had encountered a predator and escaped.

It's a sad predicament for the bird. He's pretty much doomed. Even if I could catch him, which is doubtful, he'd be no safer at my house than in the park. There are coyotes all around my place, not to mention the free-roaming neighborhood dogs. If he's still there in the morning, I may ask the park staff if they can rescue him, though I don't know how interested they'll be. A stray chicken doesn't rate very high on the sympathy meter.

(The photo is a Leghorn hen--wrong gender, but I like her attitude. You can see some Leghorn cocks at My Pet Chicken.com.)

The air was still and cool...

2009-11-22T12:48:00.003-06:00

The air was still and cool this morning, the sky gray. The deep green cedars and leafless oaks were perfectly reflected on the glassy surface of the lake. As I came around a curve in the shore, a beaver greeted my appearance with a tail slap that produced a 5-foot plume of water. The sound echoed off the ridge above the opposite shore. I stopped to watch the expanding ripples. The chill subdued the little waves, so they moved outward gently, without breaking the mirror. A couple of does bounded away from the water as I approached, and flashes of white through the trees told me I had also startled some of their companions.

I followed the trail away from the lake, into dense woods. The moss along the path was vivid green, as bright as grass. Otherwise, the world was brown and gray. The only sounds were the burble of the creek a few yards away and the occasional rasp of a wren. A large buck with a spectacular rack of antlers stepped onto the trail ahead of me. He faced me down for a moment, but when I kept coming he thought better of it and departed in a few effortless leaps.

I came to a thick bramble that had shaped itself around the root clump of a long-ago fallen tree. A female downy woodpecker was skittering up and down the trunk of living tree nearby. Pausing to watch her, I became aware of the many little lives inhabiting the darkness of the bramble. Most were just unidentifiable shadows, but a few came out to show themselves: a squirrel, a pair of titmice, a solitary female cardinal. I wondered what might be burrowed in the earth beneath the natural shelter, sleeping the winter away while the birds were busy overhead.

As I backtracked up the trail on my way to the road, the quiet gave way to a persistent rustle that grew louder. Something was coming my way through the deep carpet of leaves. I thought it must be more deer. But no, it was a flock of wild turkeys—a huge flock, several dozen birds, marching in single file through the trees. They kept their column in perfect order, absolutely silent except for the sound their scrawny feet made. The birds passed by without noticing me, focused on a destination only they knew.

Photo of cave art at Lascaux. (Click on the link for a virtual tour of the cave.)

Sleepy time

2009-11-17T20:19:00.005-06:00

Why, you ask, is this sleeping princess adorning a Turn Outward post? Because sleep is on my mind, and I had no desire to go looking for a not-too-cute image of sleeping critters. I love this beauty in all her finery, and the lure of sleep this time of year is as powerful for palace-dwelling humans as it is for the inhabitants of the woods.

It's hibernation time, and I'm missing the creatures of summer. A few weeks ago I saw a pretty box turtle who was hanging out at the base of a tree. It was a rainy day, and he was nestled under a mushroom that was easily three times his size. I immediately felt sad when I saw him, because somehow I knew he would be my last turtle friend of the season. There's always something poignant about the annual disappearance of the reptiles, even though I know they will return when the time is right. Same for my resident woodchuck, who disappeared sometime in October. I mourn the loss of her companionship, and look forward to the happiness I'll feel when she emerges in the spring.

Much as I miss the hibernators, though, I like to think of them curled up in their safe and restorative sleep. I long for sleep myself when the days get short, and sometimes I think the man-made world ought to accommodate that desire a little more. We toy with the clocks, but we don't change our lives much to suit the somnolent season. On the contrary, most of us are busier and work harder in winter. I'm not sure who decided we'd arrange things this way, but personally, I think they were misguided. I protest. I'm going to bed. Good night.

The Sleeping Princess, Frances MacDonald McNair, 1910

Go here to read about bad things that happen to turtles who don't get their beauty rest.

Time

2009-11-01T13:12:00.004-06:00

The deer have begun to gather into their wintertime herds. It amazes me to see them collectively decide to do this every fall. One day they’re grazing alone or in small groups of three or four, and then the next day a threshold is crossed. The daylight diminishes to a precise point that cues them to form gangs of a dozen or more. I disturbed three sizable mobs as I walked along the trail this morning. I don’t like to distress them, but it is fun to watch their white tails flashing through the trees as they scatter.

I arrived at the park at the same time I always do—right at sunrise—but since Daylight Saving Time ended last night, the clock said it was an hour earlier. Consequently, the access road to one of the trails I really enjoy hiking was still gated. Park rangers are sticklers for schedules, so I had to choose another route. I envied the deer their subtle, sun-ruled sense of time. The clock is such a crude substitute. It is a shame to live under the tyranny of an abstraction.

I'd write more about time but my body is telling me it's an hour later than the clock claims. I'm weary. Go here if you're in the mood to think a little more about time.

Deer in the Wood, Paulus Potter, 1647.

Sight and sound

2009-10-24T09:24:00.008-05:00

Remember the Dude? Well, he's back, and as solitary as ever. I thought he'd gotten himself a girlfriend last summer, because I kept seeing a pair on the lake near his usual spot. I tried to photograph them for the blog but could never get close enough for a good shot. It's possible the Dude did find a mate and now he's lost her, but I'm more inclined to think I mistook another bird for him. (Just between you and me, Canada geese look a lot alike.) Still, I feel pretty certain the bird I met this morning was, indeed, the Dude. There's something about his melancholy haughtiness that distinguishes him. A beaver was swimming close by and gave a loud tail slap when I appeared, but the Dude never moved from his place, as if he wouldn't deign to heed a warning from a rodent. It'll be interesting to see if he spends another winter alone here.

Aside from my encounter with the beaver and the Dude, it was pretty quiet on the trail this morning. It was cloudy and chilly, and the woods were damp from all the rain we've been having. The moist air carried scent well, so I got wonderful whiffs of decaying leaves, pine needles and wood smoke from someone's campfire. Most of the leaves have turned but some are still green, so a walk along the trail created a kaleidoscope effect. The world was bright gold, scarlet, green and amber by turns as I passed beneath different clusters of trees. The streams were all running just high enough to create a pleasing babble. There was no other sound except for a few churring wrens, and off in the distance, a red-bellied woodpecker's sharp complaint.

Autumn Rain, Julian Alden Weir, 1890. (I love this painting. Click on the image to see a larger version.)

The crows

2009-10-18T19:41:00.000-05:00

There was frost on the kudzu this morning but at least the sun was bright. The birds all slept in, except for a flock of crows that commenced an exceptional racket when I was about halfway through my walk. I tried to follow the sound, hoping I could see what had them so excited, but they kept moving just ahead of me. In fact, I never actually saw a single crow. They were like noisy spirits in the treetops.

Le corbeau et le renard, Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard, 19th century. (If you don't remember the fable, it's here.)

"...what gathered in the gloom?"

2009-10-06T20:14:00.006-05:00

A lot of the trees are still green and we're a long way from first frost, but the darkness of autumn has really begun to close in. It's about 8 o'clock in the evening here, and it's been raining lightly since before dawn. The day never got bright. It was utterly gloomy. I find myself exaggerating the sound of that word in my mind: gloomy. The gloom is pervasive, as if gloom were the existential state of the world, the essence of being--everything we can know arises from the gloom, rests on the gloom.

The autumn gloom is not to be confused the dark states of the human mind. It's not a reflection or a source of sadness. It's the life-giving darkness, primordial. As I walked through the woods this morning, the deer stared at me through the darkness. Their coats have taken on the shadowy gray of winter, they are part of the gloom. The bright mushrooms are rotting into the fallen leaves, darkening and returning to the decay that produced them.

O gardener of strange flowers, what bud, what bloom,
Hast thou found sown, what gathered in the gloom?
What of despair, of rapture, of derision,
What of life is there, what of ill or good?
Are the fruits grey like dust or bright like blood?

From "Ave Atque Vale" by Algernon Charles Swinburne. The complete poem is here.

Mushrooms, Jan Fyt (1611-1661)

In case you were wondering...

2009-09-27T18:37:00.004-05:00

...about the lack of posts at Turn Outward, the reasons are partly practical, partly spiritual. I've been very busy lately with writing assignments and the general business of life. I still find time to hike almost every day, but not much time to write about it, or even hunt down fun links about the flora, fauna and natural phenomena hereabouts.

The spiritual difficulty is hard to explain, but let's just say that a trail I thought was true and beautiful hit a dead end. It happens. Finding a new trail takes a lot of hunting and hacking through the brush. I have to do that psychic grunt work before I can let my mind wander and make up words.

Fortunately, the woods still offer me beauty and comfort, and I hope to get back to sharing them with you soon. Meanwhile, in honor of the orb weaver who's currently living in my car, I suggest you go here to see an amazing collaboration between people and spiders.

John the Baptist in the Wilderness, Geertgen tot Sint Jans, 1490-95

(J the B is not one of my heroes, but I love this image.)

No fight zone

2009-09-01T19:01:00.007-05:00

As I type this, a brown thrasher, a cardinal and a goldfinch are hanging out together atop the chain link fence in my back yard. I've been watching them for a few minutes now, and they have been perfectly serene companions. Normally, the thrasher would make it his business to chase away any bird within chasing range, but he's just looking at the other two as if he's curious about what they might do. The cardinal seems happily tranquilized, like a guy halfway through his third beer after a long day. The goldfinch is rocking back and forth on the fence. He looks as if he's considering whether to make a comment on the weather.

I don't know if it's the unusual cool snap or some happy alignment of the stars, but for some reason, peace has broken out among the feathered residents here. No more mockingbird wars, no feeder raids--even the hummingbirds are making nice. I like it. I know potential conflict is always lurking in the background, as in Hicks' painting (click the image to enlarge it), but even a brief season of harmony is beautiful.

Peaceable Kingdom, Edward Hicks, c.1834.

Disappearances

2009-08-20T14:48:00.001-05:00

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been admiring a large flock of Canada geese that have taken up residence at a house near mine. The place is a mini-farm with a pasture and a pond, so it’s an ideal stop for migrating waterfowl. I haven’t noticed it attracting many birds in the past, but this year it’s goose central. There are always at least three dozen geese strutting around the property when I drive by in the morning. Occasionally they go for a group nibble on the grass across the road, forcing drivers to slow down and edge through the crowd. The folks who own the house seem to be the tolerant type. I haven’t seen any sign of them trying to evict the birds—but as it turns out, they didn’t need to. I drove by yesterday morning on my way to the park, and there was not a goose in sight, nor any sign that they’d been there. Same story today. Apparently, the anserine rapture arrived.

The absence of the geese made me feel a little sad, so I was happy to encounter a woodchuck when I got to the park. I love woodchucks. This one was standing up in a grassy area near a picnic shelter. He let me get within about 30 feet of him, then he turned around and ran toward the trees in that loping, faster-than-you’d-expect woodchuck way. He came to a narrow sidewalk beside the shelter and abruptly disappeared—just vanished, like Alice down the rabbit hole.

Woodchucks are burrowers, but they like to make their homes in sheltered places, usually along the tree line. I couldn’t believe this one had dug his hole right out in the open. When I got to the spot where he disappeared, I couldn’t even see a hole. I hunted a while and finally discovered a tiny opening under the sidewalk, clearly a rodent excavation. It seemed way too small for a fat woodchuck, but he had to be in there. I peeked inside carefully (woodchucks bite!), but it was too dark to see him, and he didn’t stir. I marveled at his brilliance. A concrete bunker might lack the charm of a burrow under the trees, but no coyote or bobcat will ever successfully invade his space.

As I type this, I can see “my” woodchuck rooting around under the bird feeders in the back yard. I worry about her safety, but I doubt she’d make use of a concrete bunker if I provided it. I suspect it’s hard to impose innovation on a woodchuck.

Groundhog photo by EIC from Wikimedia Commons.

Battle ready

2009-08-03T20:00:00.000-05:00

I just looked at my Blogger home page and realized it's been a full week since I posted anything here. That's pure neglect on my part, since it's certainly not for lack of things to report. Mid-to-late summer is the best time of year for critter watching. In the past few days I've encountered 4 spotted fawns with their mamas, a half dozen turkey families (baby ducks and geese have nothing on turkey chicks for cuteness), and one glorious summer tanager that defeated all my efforts to photograph him.

All those sightings were in the park, but the best show has actually been going on outside my kitchen window, where the adolescent mockingbirds are learning how to do what mockingbirds do best--and no, it's not singing. Mockingbirds do sing a lot, but like many humans who are eager to sing, they don't do it very well. Anyone who has ever been unlucky enough to have a male MB park himself nearby during mating season can tell you that "pleasing" is not the proper adjective for the mockingbird voice.

What mockingbirds do best is fight. They're particularly feisty during the nesting season, but they remain ready to rumble all year long. They love to fight each other, but they will happily fight other birds, squirrels, dogs, and occasionally people. Even felines are not safe. A few years ago we had a gray warrior at the house who would dive and snatch at cats whenever they made the mistake of wandering into his territory. You'd think a cat with any self-respect at all would have made short work of him. But no, the kitties invariably ran away, looking very put upon. Don't mess with the mockingbird.

All the teenage birds in my backyard these days are flexing their muscles and figuring out how much fun it is to win. They bully for the sheer joy of it. Jays and starlings will stage a feeder raid so they can hog the food, the mockingbirds will swoop down to terrorize the sparrows and finches just so they can perch on the post and spread their wings in victory. Yesterday I saw a mockingbird chasing a slow-moving black vulture across my neighbor's field. As far as I know, vultures present absolutely no threat to mockingbirds. I think Junior was just getting a kick out of harrassing a bird so much bigger than himself.

Of course, there's no blood shed during these encounters, and not even a meal at stake. Still, it strikes me as a little odd that I find all this violent behavior so charming in the mockingbirds. I'd despise it in a human being, or even a dog.

Photo of Northern Mockingbird from Wikimedia Commons.

'Shroom crazy

2009-07-27T17:27:00.005-05:00

What, another mushroom post? Sorry I can't resist. There seems to be an interesting specimen everywhere I look lately. We're having a milder, wetter summer than usual, which I suspect is the reason for the abundant fungus. I took all these pictures in the past two days.

This dainty white mushroom was nestled in a heavily shaded spot near a little-used trail. Please don't take my word for it, but I think this is a parasol mushroom, an edible species.

This red beauty was standing all alone in a mowed strip along the road. It was very small, just about 2.5 inches high. The photo doesn't fully capture the sheen on the cap. I though this was a very sexy little 'shroom.

There are a lot of these freckled, gray mushrooms under the tree canopy, mostly in very damp places. I think they may be a more mature form of parasol mushroom. The ghostly color is beautiful against the brown weeds.

This variety of cup-shaped mushroom is big and showy, with a cap about six inches across. The gills give it the look of something that belongs on the floor of the ocean.

And in case you're interested in an update on the magical 'shroom garden, I documented its fate. After a few days of maturing and a heavy rain, the "petals" softened and spread, almost as if the mushrooms had melted.

And then something--probably a hungry deer--demolished them. All things must pass. I hope the deer enjoyed them.

All photos by me, and you're welcome to share them freely. In case this post hasn't sated your desire for mushroom pictures, check out David Fischer's American Mushroom Gallery.

Just me and the crows

2009-07-23T16:18:00.007-05:00

I was in a section of the park this morning that is so desolate I think of it as "the dark wood." These dead toadstools I came across seemed like a good image for documenting my visit. I've never been able to figure out what makes the area so grim and deserted. It has the same terrain as the rest of the park, the same canopy of trees, and there’s water nearby; yet most of the animals seem to avoid it. I never see deer there, never a turtle or a turkey. Not even a squirrel. The only creatures that seem to like it are the crows, and they don’t congregate there in the ordinary way. I never hear a noisy mob of them, just the random cawing of two or three. Otherwise, it's oddly quiet.

There are days I wouldn't dream of walking in this dreary place, and other days when it lures me. I loved being there this morning. I take joy in all the beauty the park offers, but sometimes beauty can be unbearably sad. Joy always carries a promise of grief. When the moment comes to make peace with that promise, it is comforting to walk in a dark place.

'Shroom garden

2009-07-20T18:37:00.003-05:00

We've had a few cool, clear days here, very unusual for July. The low temperatures keep the irksome bugs quiet, but the spiders still build their webs every night. The heavy dew and the light of the rising sun make jewels of their intricate death traps. A thin mist lingers among the trees in the early morning, and the birds are much noisier than they usually are in the heat of late summer.

All these little shifts from routine give the woods a hint of enchantment, a promise of the unexpected, so I was delighted but not surprised to come across a beautiful fungus bloom this morning. It had popped up under a tree not far from the road, out in the open as if it were a perfectly ordinary thing. My photos, as usual, don't do it justice.

Close encounter

2009-07-11T14:08:00.006-05:00

I can feel the Dog Days coming on here. The leaves have lost the lush, green color of early summer. The woods seem a little dusty and worn. The air is muggy, and the yellow jackets are out. This morning, I heard a fierce buzzing in the leaves that turned out to be a yellow jacket locked in a death embrace with a winged beetle. Yellow jackets are primarily scavengers, but they also hunt. It looked as if the beetle was destined to become larvae food, but he was putting up a pretty good fight. He was quite a bit bigger than the wasp and kept trying to get airborne despite the predator locked onto his belly. He finally surrendered and lay still. I could see the yellow jacket gnawing into the area around the beetle's head, legs kneading his prey's torso in a sensual way that made me think of human lovers, or a nursing baby. It was beautiful and revolting at the same time. I couldn't resist trying to get a closer look. I moved some of the leaves aside, and as I did the yellow jacket lost his grip. The beetle, his body damaged but his survival instinct intact, suddenly returned to life, broke free and flew away. The yellow jacket was left crawling over the ground, disoriented, groping for his victim.

Photo by Hartmut Witsch from Wikimedia Commons.

Two chases and a rescue

2009-07-08T20:26:00.003-05:00

On Monday, my walk in the woods couldn’t have been more peaceful. The big event was watching a group of eight sliders hang out together in the middle of the lake. I love those little monsters, but nobody could accuse them of being exciting. They floated motionless in the water with their heads just above the surface. When they made a collective decision to dive, they did it slowly, reluctantly, as if it they were pretty sure the effort wouldn’t be worth it.

Tuesday was a different story. I wandered down a narrow trail I’d never been on before. I wasn’t sure where it would take me, but I had plenty of time and I like getting lost. I had just entered a pretty, dark hollow where the hummingbirds chattered in the trees when I was startled by a loud bleat from a buck. He was about 30 feet away, and his initial outburst was followed by a full-out hissy fit. He snorted and stomped and wheezed for all he was worth, and since I couldn’t see another buck around, I assumed all that aggression was directed at me. Chill out, buddy, nobody’s bothering you, I thought. But I was wrong, because a few seconds later two more deer came bounding out of nowhere, pursued by a hefty coyote. The buck ran off in another direction. The coyote seemed to hesitate, then resumed chasing his initial victims. I hollered at him—pointlessly—as they all disappeared through the trees. It’s very unlikely that a solitary coyote could make a meal of an adult deer. It’s possible that they had a fawn with them that I couldn’t see, or maybe they were trying to lead the predator away from one.

When I finally made it back up to the main road, I found another pursuit in progress. Some of the park rangers were in a huddle near the trailhead, talking to a group of sheriff’s deputies and some other species of cop in an unmarked car. As I walked up, one of the rangers stopped me to ask if I’d seen “a couple of teenage boys wearing black” wandering around. I said no, I’d seen no one except for a group of runners who are park regulars. I wondered what two teenage boys could have done to merit so much law enforcement attention. I decided I probably didn’t want to know the answer to that question, so I didn't ask it.

On my way home, there was a box turtle crossing the busy highway. The oncoming traffic prevented me from swerving to miss him. I had to straddle him with my car—a maneuver that always makes me hold my breath, for fear I’ll miscalculate and hit the little guy. He was fine when I looked in my rear view mirror, and the driver behind me succeeded in missing him, too. I usually leave the welfare of road-crossing turtles to the hands of fate, but not this time. Maybe it was my failure to stop the coyote, but I felt an urgent need to save him. He was crossing near a little restaurant, so I parked the car there and jumped out. Lucky for the turtle and me, there was enough of a lull in the traffic for me to run out and pick him up. He seemed like a surprisingly old turtle to be taking such a jaunt. His shell was worn and his skin markings were faded. I carried him to the side of the road and set him down in the grass. He was completely unperturbed, didn’t even withdraw into his shell. As I hurried back to my car, I realized there was a group of people standing outside the restaurant watching the whole thing. I’m sure they’re still laughing about the crazy lady who dodged morning traffic to rescue a box turtle.

Coyote photo from Wikimedia Commons

Wealth

2009-07-08T17:11:00.002-05:00

It's sunny and warm. The mimosa tree we planted a decade ago is 25 feet tall now. It's covered with pink blooms and butterflies, and the hummingbirds are zooming through the branches. The sunflowers are luring a crowd of goldfinches. The blackberries are plentiful and sweet. I have to fight the hornets for them, but I don't mind. I love summer.

Summer Landscape, Pieter Gijsels (1621-1690)

After the rain...

2009-07-05T20:56:00.002-05:00

...the bats come out in force. There were six cavorting in the back yard this evening. The hummingbirds were flitting around, too, which made for a lot of aerial action. There was a crowd of lightning bugs floating just above the ground. I could hear mockingbirds squabbling even as the darkness came on. I sat on the swing and marveled. Summer is a gift.

Go here to see an adorable bat on Flickr.

Long time, no see

2009-07-03T16:43:00.003-05:00

I saw a kingbird perched on the power line behind the house today. They used to be regular visitors here, but disappeared a few years ago for reasons unknown. Their name is apt--they're such regal little birds. They'll sit motionless until a tasty bug comes along, swoop up instantly to catch it, and return to the perch as if nothing happened. It's adorable to watch. I'm glad they're back.

Illustration by Louis Agassiz Fuertes, 1901. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Even though...

2009-06-26T10:37:00.006-05:00

...the air is too humid to breathe, the ticks and poison ivy are everywhere, and the flies are as annoying as the perfume SAs at Macy's, today was still a glorious day to walk in the woods.

Wendell Berry explains why.

Photo of a surviving segment of the Natchez Trace from Wikimedia Commons.

The new woodchuck

2009-06-24T04:50:00.000-05:00

There's a wild cherry tree behind our house that always produces a lot of fruit. The same woodchuck used come every summer to snarf up the cherries. He was a big, fat guy, and it was touching to see him get a little slower as each year passed. All the sources I've checked say that 5 years is the average lifespan for a woodchuck. If so, our chubby friend was exceptionally long-lived, because I watched him for at least 4 summers, and he was no cub when he first appeared.

Chuck went missing a couple of years ago. We were having a terrible drought at the time, and it may have been too much for an elderly woodchuck. Or he may have fallen less peacefully, to the coyotes or our gardening, gun-loving neighbors. I've missed him, so I was very happy a few weeks ago when I saw a cat come flying out of the brush under the treeline, pursued by an angry woodchuck. Kitty was probably after the woodchuck's babies. This new Marmota monax is a much more petite specimen than her predecessor, but she scared the shit out of that cat.

I've seen her several times since then. She's currently out there every day, getting her fill of cherries, so I feel as if we've definitely got a replacement groundhog-in-residence. I just hope she steers clear of coyotes and armed humans.

Maxine Kumin wrote a very fine poem about woodchucks. You can listen to her read it here. I should warn you, it's a sad poem. The hungry heart of the woodchuck is no match for human selfishness.

Groundhog photo by April M. King from Wikimedia Commons

The owl children

2009-06-11T17:15:00.007-05:00

I'm pretty much back to my regular hiking habits after my little Memorial Day mishap. It feels great to be spending hours rather than minutes outdoors. Aside from the contemplative benefits, clocking more time in the woods increases the chance of encountering something interesting, charming or just plain weird. Today I found charm, in the form of three juvenile barred owls. They were huddled together on a fallen tree just off the trail. They were making a lot of noise, squabbling and pleading for food. I could hear Mama but she didn't let herself be seen. The chicks spotted me and flew off to separate perches a short distance away. I watched them for a while, and they watched me watching them. They had such wonderful expressions, exactly like curious children.

Click here for a fine, poignant poem about some 18th century owlets. The video below is part of a series on barred owls, which you can see here.

Weed eating

2009-06-08T18:04:00.002-05:00

Not much time for blogging today, but I thought I'd share this article on why it's better to eat your garden weeds than poison them. I love all the greens mentioned, especially sorrel, but I was surprised that the author said nothing about dandelions. The leaves are delicious cooked, and the flowers are a great salad ingredient. Happy gathering.

The featherweights

2009-06-05T19:49:00.004-05:00

Our resident hummingbirds have arrived. We've had a steady stream of transients since April, but I can always tell when the nesting birds are here, because that's when the fighting starts. The hummers' aerial combat puts the best wire-fu epic to shame, and they're always eager to mix it up. Males fight males, as you'd expect, but the battles often involve both sexes. Hummingbirds have no sense of chivalry. Unlike many other birds, the male hummers don't court prospective girlfriends with gifts of food. They'll drive their mates, and even their own offspring, away from a feeder. It's a little hard to understand how this dedication to selfishness promotes the survival of the species, but the little guys seem to be doing just fine.

Photo by Joe Schneid from Wikimedia Commons.

Conditional love

2009-05-24T12:10:00.005-05:00

This week I moved my walks from the rural state park near my home to a nature preserve in Nashville. This was not a happy choice, since I really prefer the big park. The paths there are rougher, there's more wildlife, and during the week I rarely meet another person on the trail. Unfortunately, the heavy rains we've had lately have created perfect breeding conditions for mosquitoes, and being the lone hiker for miles around makes me absolutely irresistible to them. Why should they bother tormenting the deer and the birds, with all that troublesome fur and plumage, when they can chow down on a thin-skinned human? They nearly drained me dry on a couple of outings early this week.

So for now I'm getting in my car and driving 35 environmentally irresponsible miles to the city green space, where there are precious few mosquitoes. Nashville has had as much rain as my home town and ought to have just as many of the tiny bloodsuckers, but since the first West Nile scare a few years back, the city has been spraying and using larvicide to keep the population down. The program is actually pretty moderate in its use of pesticides, but it seems to have had a dramatic cumulative effect.

My home county doesn't have the money to spray for mosquitoes, and it's the sort of thing that paranoid anti-government types (we have a few of those) would be quick to protest. Actually, I've got a little of that anti-government paranoia myself, not to mention an opinionated inner tree hugger who disapproves of poisoning a creature that happens to be an essential food for bats, dragonflies, and other delightful beings. Nevertheless, I am literally voting with my feet in favor of a more controlled--and more toxic--environment. I fear this makes me a fickle and neurotically demanding nature lover. I do not want to share my blood with Mother Earth's pesky children, even if it's only natural for them to desire it.

If you're wondering why there's a picture of a firefly on this post about mosquitoes, it's because last night, as I watched the fireflies float around my front yard, it occurred to me that these pretty glowbugs always appear around the same time each year as those miniature vampires. That's the justice of nature for you. All the pleasure in the world is tied, in one way or another, to a curse. You can't have one without the other, and most attempts to make it otherwise cost us dearly. Firefly populations appear to be dropping dramatically in many places around the world, mostly because of our distortion of the environment with artificial light, deforestation, and yes, pesticides. You can read more about the issue here and here.

Firefly photo by 6th Happiness at Wikimedia Commons.

Missing the narrow fellow

2009-05-19T19:27:00.002-05:00

The whole purpose of walking in the woods is to leave longing behind. I walk to take pleasure in what the world offers, not make demands or chase fantasy. I try to avoid making my time outdoors a hunt for interesting specimens or experiences. My task is simply to be there and accept whatever gifts come my way.

And yet, lately I find myself yearning for an encounter with a snake. I investigate every rustle in the grass with a little hopeful flutter in my chest. Any snake would do. A 4-inch ringsnake crawling across the trail would satisfy me. It seems unfair that I haven't met one. They've been out and about for weeks. I see them along the highway nearly every day, and a good-sized black rat snake turned up in our front yard (dead, alas), but they've been AWOL in what should be their proper habitat. One will probably appear as soon as I stop looking, but I can't seem to banish the craving in the meantime.

A narrow Fellow in the Grass

by Emily Dickinson

A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides –
You may have met Him - Did you not
His notice sudden is –

The Grass divides as with a Comb –
A spotted Shaft is seen,
And then it closes at your Feet
And opens further on –

He likes a Boggy Acre
A Floor too cool for Corn –
But when a Boy, and Barefoot
I more than once at Noon
Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled, and was gone –

Several of Nature’s People
I know and they know me –
I feel for them a transport
Of Cordiality –

But never met this Fellow
Attended or alone
Without a tighter Breathing
And Zero at the Bone.

Text from Poetry Foundation

Snake Charmer, Henri Rousseau, 1907

A morning with the turtles

2009-05-10T20:46:00.001-05:00

There had been a storm with heavy rain before dawn last Wednesday, and it was still drizzling when I got to the park around 6:00 a.m. The air was warm and the trail was a soggy mess, which made conditions perfect for the box turtles. I came across one every fifty yards or so, and they were all moving along at a pretty brisk pace by turtle standards, heads up, looking alert.

I was really enjoying the turtle parade, thinking how nice it was to see so many emerge at once, and then I came across the star-crossed lovers. Boy had succeeded in meeting girl, but something had gone haywire with the consummation. Normally, the male mounts and enters the female from behind, and hooks his rear claws into the edge her shell. Sometimes he flips over on his back, which looks like this. They can stay that way for hours.

The necessary contortions of love seem a little challenging for a turtle under the best circumstances, but this particular pair had failed completely. When I found them, the female was on her back, completely withdrawn into her shell, and the male was upright with one foot hooked into her leg opening--on the wrong side, no less. Worse yet, they had fallen down into a little crevice along the side of the trail, and were wedged next a 2 X 4 that had been pushed into the hillside as a support.

I’m not sure whether the trouble was male incompetence or female recalcitrance—probably a bit of both. In any case, things weren’t looking good for baby turtle production, and I wasn’t entirely sure they would be able to get themselves out of their predicament. The male’s foot was twisted at such an odd angle I wondered if he could let go even if he wanted to, and it seemed unlikely that the female could right herself if he remained attached.

So, with some reservations about violating the Prime Directive, I picked them up as a unit and set them down on the path. I gently prodded the male’s foot, trying to get him to release the female, but he hung on tight and didn’t even retreat into his shell. He had found his woman, and he was damn well going to keep hold of her. There were at least two other males nearby ready to move in if he surrendered the field, so I suppose his determination was understandable.

Hoping they’d work things out on their own, I moved about 10 feet away, to a spot where neither of them could see me. And waited. A long time. He didn’t budge a millimeter. She never made any attempt to turn over, or even poke her head out. As I stood there, it dawned on me that a) it was still raining and I was getting extremely wet; and b) if turtles can fuck for hours, there was no reason to think they’d be in any particular hurry to abandon a troubled attempt.

So I gave up and went home, feeling stupid for interfering, but also frustrated that I lacked the patience necessary to witness the resolution. Did she finally relent and give him a second chance? Did he give up and let his competition take over? Whatever happened, the uncooperative female survived it just fine. I recognized her unique shell markings when I saw her at the same spot on the trail yesterday. She was calmly munching on some delicacy she'd found in the leaf litter. Her determined boyfriend was nowhere in sight.

Illustration by John Edwards Holbrook, 1842. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Passing season

2009-05-02T20:40:00.006-05:00

May arrived here with heavy rain that knocked the last of the blossoms off the dogwoods. The woods are littered with fallen petals. The photo above is one of our trees at its peak, around the 3rd week in April. It's always a little sad to see all that beauty disappear, but the fading spring has some special pleasures of its own.

The rose-breasted grosbeaks have been showing up at our feeders for the past couple of weeks. There were 4 gorgeous males squabbling over the sunflower seeds today. The grosbeaks are late migrants through these parts. They don't stay to nest, and since they don't breed here, we rarely get to hear them sing. Their too-brief appearance is a sure sign that summer is not far away.

I always look forward to the reappearance of the box turtles. They don't get out and about until the weather is reliably warm. I saw my first lovable monster of the season last week. It was a large male (I think), parked right in the middle of the trail as if he owned it. He didn't even bother to retreat into his shell when I stepped over him.

And of course, one of the sweetest things about the passage from spring to summer is the arrival of the first babies. This morning as I walked the trail along the creek, a tiny, fluttering creature dropped out of the trees ahead of me. I thought it was a butterfly, which seemed bizarre since butterflies don't generally cavort in the rain. It turned out to be a chickadee fledgling, just out of the nest. He landed on a tree root sticking up from the path and perched there, slightly dazed.

Chickadee youngsters look like smaller versions of their parents, but this one still had a couple of wispy bits of down sticking out of his black cap. I tried gently to encourage him to move off the trail, where he'd be less likely to get stepped on or attract the attention of some hiker's dog, but he refused to budge. I considered moving him myself, but in my experience a chick that is picked up and relocated will immediately head straight back to the spot he chose. So I left him there to get on with his confused but determined navigation of the world.

(Click here to see some photos of chickadees in the nest.)

Photo of dogwood flowers by BitterGrace. Grosbeak photo by John Harrison from Wikimedia Commons. Chickadee photo by Ken Thomas at Wikimedia Commons, and box turtle photo by the US Fish & Wildlife Service.

The beautiful natives

2009-04-27T10:04:00.002-05:00

There are often beautiful surprises lurking in the woods, but the dwarf crested iris is one of the loveliest. It has just begun to bloom here in the past couple of days.

This tiny one managed to struggle out from under the leaves. I had to push aside a mess of poison ivy to get a good look at it.

This one is much larger, and has a number of companions nearby that will be blooming soon. If you click on the image to enlarge it, you can see the spider clinging to a petal. I didn't even know she was there when I took the photo.

The wrong will

2009-04-25T09:28:00.004-05:00

Last night, Dave and Nio were sitting out on the deck having a beer. Nio doesn’t actually get a beer, though I’m sure he would enjoy one. He just hangs out and chews his Nylabone while Dave does the drinking. They do this every evening when Dave’s in town. It’s their special man time. I was puttering around in the kitchen. Dave hollered at me to come outside—“Come listen to this bird.”

I was a little annoyed because I assumed he was summoning me to listen to the vocal antics of a mockingbird. We have scads of them and they never shut up this time of year. Dave has a tendency to find novelty where I don’t. But when I got out there I discovered that it really was something a bit novel. A bird somewhere along the tree line behind the house was repeating a sharp, loud call.

“Is that a whip-poor-will?’ Dave asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard one.”

Whip-poor-wills aren’t rare, but we’ve never had them in our yard. They’re ground-nesters, so they tend to prefer more heavily wooded areas where there aren’t a lot of people (or roaming cats.) I agreed with Dave that we were listening to a whip-poor-will, but something about its call was not quite right. I have a pretty poor ear for birdcalls, and I thought maybe this whip-poor-will was just a little eccentric.

Just to be sure, I hunted up an online whip-poor-will call. Yep, it was slightly different from our bird. I kept hunting, and discovered that we were actually being serenaded by a chuck-will’s-widow. They’re as common as whip-poor-wills, and I’m sure I’ve heard them many times without knowing it. It would be nice if this one would stick around so I can get a good look at him. He’s welcome to eat all the insects he wants while he’s here, though I hope he leaves our bats alone.

Watercolor of a male chuck-will's-widow (Caprimulgus carolinensis) by Louis Agassiz Fuertes, from Bird Lore, 1926. Image from Wikimedia Commons

Voices

2009-04-16T21:01:00.003-05:00

The best thing about walking in the woods is that there aren’t any ghosts there. Most of the world is filled with ghostly chatter. Disembodied voices speak to us everywhere we go. Tinny singing haunts the marketplace. Belligerent spirits shout at us through the radio. Giggles and screams of pain come from the TV. People who aren’t really on the other end of the line—sometimes computer-generated people who never existed at all—cajole us on the telephone. The familiar voices of people we know are set free to race around the planet and speak intimately in our ears, even though their owners are thousands of miles away.

No matter how sophisticated we think we are about technology, I suspect our brains cannot quite credit the reality of a voice with no immediate source. When we can’t make eye contact with the speaker, can’t touch or smile at him, all that ethereal gab becomes pretty much indistinguishable from our own internal dialogue. Ghost voices, even though they fill the air around us, actually pull us away from our environment. They make us draw inward. We hear the sound, but we hear as we do in dreams. It all seems to be our creation, and the only awareness that counts is our own.

Listening to the voices of the forest is like waking from the dream. Every bird song or frog call comes from a creature who is right there, enjoying the same sunrise or being drenched by the same storm. Maybe your companion does a good job of staying out of sight, or maybe he’s equipped to speak his mind from a couple hundred yards away; nevertheless, you know he lives. His heart is beating along with yours, he’s gathering his breath from the same air that carries the scent of pine and wet leaves to your nose. Every sound he makes defies the power of the ghosts.

Mockingbird photo from Wikimedia Commons

Resentment, and other fine feelings

2009-04-08T12:32:00.001-05:00

The warm spring weather is back now, but winter returned for a couple of days earlier this week. It even snowed a little. The pretty dwarf larkspur, which is very plentiful here, has gone a little droopy and sad as a result, but the blooms have survived. Wildflowers are tough.

No matter how many times I remind myself that it’s absurd to resent the weather, I can’t stop feeling irritated when I have to haul the winter coat back out after I thought I had put it away for the season. It seems unfair to be given a taste of warmth and light, only to have them snatched away. I assume most people feel the same way, since everybody whines about the cold. It’s a craziness we all share, this grudge against nature. Sometimes I think peevishness was our principal reason for inventing God--not so we’d have an explanation for consciousness or what happens when we die, but so we could feel that someone is responsible for all the annoying glitches in earthly life. The faithful like to praise God for creating a beautiful world, but somewhere in the back of their minds they’re ranting at him about late freezes and fire ants.

The cold snap silenced the birdsong and the frogs went back to sleep. The squirrels stayed out, along with the deer, and I saw a quartet of turkeys marching single file through the trees on the morning it snowed. I wonder how they felt about the cold. I know they suffer from it, but do they ever resent it? Do they think the day should be warmer, or even conceive that it could be? It seems ridiculous to suggest that they might, but animals certainly make qualitative judgments about their environment. One of my dogs hates the wind. If you make her stay outside on a breezy day she gets very crabby and snaps at the other dogs. How is she different from me, when I get in a snit about the unseasonable chill?

Even after the thousands of studies of animal behavior, the emotional lives of animals are still opaque to us. We don’t know anything about their passions, about their interior experience of life. One morning before the temps dropped, I watched a mating triangle being worked out among downy woodpeckers. The trio flew from one tree to another, chasing and chattering with the intensity you always see in courtship rivalries. Even when the intruding male tried to retreat, the other two kept chasing him, not wanting to let go of the fight. It certainly looked as if they were feeling all the fury and anxiety humans feel in the same situation. I wonder if they were. And if they weren’t, I wonder what that says about us.

Photo of dwarf larkspur from Virginia Tech Weed Identification Guide.

Photo of downy woodpecker from Wikimedia Commons.

"To be free and be close to god"

2009-03-30T11:18:00.006-05:00

I said those words, years ago, to a shrink who asked me what I wanted most in life. Reading it now, I realize it must have sounded very pompous or just phony, but it was what popped into my head at that moment and it was—is—the truth.

I suspect the phrase is one I read somewhere, a philosophy of life acquired secondhand from a poem or some self-help bible, but Googling it just now only got me a slew of instances of “close to god”—or rather, “close to God,” since most of the discourse on the ‘net concerns that god. Freedom never seems to appear in conjunction with him.

Wherever it comes from, my credo isn’t useful or warmhearted. It doesn’t preclude action or caring, but it doesn’t demand them either. I know I feel closest to fulfilling it when I am ambling along the trail and spot something beautiful and ordinary, like the little foamflowers in the picture above. They have just started opening up here in the past few days. The blooms are tiny and intricate, so perfect they are a little shocking.

The moment of perceiving common beauty is a sacred moment, and creates a sense of liberation I never know any other time. I stop feeling stranded in the psychic hinterlands, resenting the limitations of my flesh-and-bone prison, yearning for a knowledge that is beyond me. Every possibility condenses to the form and matter of a plant, a bird; and all of those possibilities are fulfilled. The experience of immanence contains flawless love of crude existence--a thrilling paradox.

For a virtual stroll through Tennessee wildflowers, go here and click on the "Wild Flowers" tab.

Photo of Tiarella cordifolia from Wikimedia Commons.

They're back!

2009-03-26T19:42:00.003-05:00

The frogs, that is. We often hear the little peepers in February, but I haven't heard the real springtime frogs until today. Judging from the Herping with Dylan video below, I think I was hearing primarily chorus frogs. Whatever they were, their calls made a beautiful counterpoint to the birds' chatter. All the racket disturbed the serenity of the lake in the best possible way.

This clip runs a bit long, but I can never get enough of Dylan, and the end credits are cute. The frogs he's cataloging are in Illinois, but we have many of the same species in Tennessee. (You'll find a nice page devoted to Tennessee's frogs here.)

Click here to see all the HWD videos.

Looking

2009-03-23T19:10:00.005-05:00

I expressed my inner ferret this morning. I had decided to do a little off-trail exploring before the ticks and poison ivy take back the woods for the season. I was trudging up a leaf-covered hillside and stopped to look at some sort of orange fungus that had sprouted on a fallen tree. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a patch of leaves move. At first I thought they were just being shifted by the breeze, but then they moved again. Something was definitely under there.

I generally try not to harass the creatures I come across on my daily walks, but I felt an uncontrollable desire to go after that mysterious, quivering bump. I grabbed a strip of bark and pushed aside the dry top layer, but the thing—Vole? Lizard? Mega-sized wood roach?—moved away from me, down into the damp, rotting leaves. I kept digging, thinking C’mon, I just want to see what you are. I’m not going to eat you or anything. The object of my desire, however, recognized my predatory compulsion for what it was. It kept moving, and soon it was clear that I had lost my quarry.

I got a nice little consolation prize, though. As I was headed back down the trail I saw a veery perched on the bare branch of a dogwood tree. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a veery before, but I recognized it immediately, thanks to all the time I’ve wasted poring over bird books. The veery is a migrant here, and never comes to feeders, as far as I know. This one was a birdwatcher’s dream. She posed prettily for me, turning around a couple of times as if to say, Get a good look, lady. I’m just passing through.

Ferret drawing from Het Leven der Dieren, A.E. Brehm (1829-1884) via Wikimedia Commons

Veery photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Shy and secretive

2009-03-19T20:36:00.003-05:00

The trail is like a progressive peep show right now. The squirrels are especially busy--playing their erotic chasing games, chattering dirty to each other. I keep wondering when one of them is going to fall on my head as they leap from tree to tree. It’s all very sweet. One of the charms of spring is all the procreative energy it sets loose.

So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised recently when I saw a used condom draped over a rock. It was lying next to the trail along the lake shore, a delicate remnant of transient shared frenzy. (I hope there was shared frenzy. I hate to think of some poor woman hiking all the way out there for nothing.)

It was only after I thought about it for a while that I realized I’ve never seen a discarded rubber in the park before, and how odd it is that I haven’t. This park is in a rural area, not many miles from the little town where I grew up, and anyone around here can tell you it has always been a favorite refuge for horny teenagers, or any couple looking for an alfresco tryst. Virginity loss, infidelity, casual prostitution, not to mention good ol’ recreational sex—it’s all going on in those woods.

And yet, in spite of all the hours I spend out there, wandering down side trails and exploring the secluded spots along the creeks, I never saw any direct evidence of human sex until a couple of days ago. It’s not as if people are disinclined to leave other signs of their presence. They leave beer cans and cigarette butts, fast food wrappers and used Kleenex. Anglers are the terrible about dumping bait tubs and tangled line. But the fornicators are a tidy bunch. If they were as careless as everybody else, the park would be fairly littered with condoms, their wrappers, forgotten thongs, etc.

For all the complaints about our porn-soaked, hypersexualized culture, we’re still very secretive when it comes to the real thing. Unlike those skunks I blogged about a while back, and the squirrels cavorting through the treetops, we crave privacy for coupling, and even hide anything that might give us away after the fact. What a shy, quaint species we are.

Angélique et Médor, Agostino Carracci (1557-1602). Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Tuning

2009-03-15T21:07:00.005-05:00

It’s been wet and gloomy here for several days. We’ve had enough rain to push all the creeks up a few inches. Streams meander throughout the park where I’ve been walking lately, and the sound of rushing water can be heard everywhere, accompanied by a steady drip from the trees. While the water’s voice fills the air, moisture softens the carpet of leaves and stifles the usual rustle of wind and wildlife. Twice in the past two days I have startled large groups of white-tailed deer, and they’ve bounded away like ghosts, their hooves silent against the soaked ground.

The sounds in the woods shift constantly as the weather and the seasons change. Listening to them is a big part of the pleasure of hiking for me. The birds’ songs are pretty, of course, and their drumming, rasping, crying and honking engage the ear; but I think what I enjoy most are the more subtle noises. It’s easy to miss the skittering of a squirrel’s tiny feet, or the faint burbling pop of ice along the lake’s edge in midwinter. Even on a fairly windless day, there is always a delicate creaking in the high branches of the trees. I find I have to make a conscious effort to tune my hearing toward the small sounds, but when I do, they fill the aural space as completely as the din of the crows or the woodpecker’s laugh. I feel a little like a spy at those moments, listening in on a hidden conversation.

Mountain Brook, Albert Bierstadt, 1863

The seamless world

2009-02-27T20:17:00.002-06:00

I am always astonished by the connectedness of things. Nothing is discrete. Every action, thought or sensation is embedded with all others. The work of consciousness is selecting which connections to value, which to ignore.

Today I went hiking after a heavy rain, and when I returned to my car I found that a wolf spider had taken up residence in the cup holder of my car. I suppose she was looking for a dry spot. I like wolf spiders, so I let her stay and she rode around with me all day. I went to a violin lesson, made a grocery run, met Dave for coffee, drove the 40+ miles back to my house--and the spider stayed right there in my cup holder. A couple of times she climbed up to the edge and waved a leg in my direction, but mostly she just hung out at the bottom of the well, happy with her new home. I won't be surprised if she's still there in the morning.

My new buddy seemed to beg for a blog post, so I went looking for a spider poem, but couldn't find a good one that seemed appropriate. The way she hitched a ride made me think of hitchhikers, so I switched to searching for hitchhiker themes, and found the outstanding Diane Wakoski work below. One of the reasons it caught my attention is its recurring image of the mountain ash tree. I recently had an exchange about the fruit of the mountain ash--also known as the rowan tree--with Olfacta at her blog.

I love that perfect circle of event, art and memory.

They burn you
like the berries of mountain ash in August,
standing by the road,
clearly defined,
Autumnal brilliant, heads
scorched from waiting
in the sun.
How can
you pass them up?
But you do,
and dream each night of a hell,
where you are a hitchhiker,
and no one will ever stop to pick you up....(more)

From "The Hitchhikers" by Diane Wakoski, 1977. Complete text at Poetry Foundation.

Photo of wolf spider carrying her young on her back by Clinton and Charles Robertson, from Wikimedia Commons.

Measured resistance

2009-02-26T20:17:00.004-06:00

Fights between hawks and crows are usually noisy and brutal. Crows generally gang up to attack a lone hawk, and I find it disturbing to watch, even though I know the crows are only defending themselves. I can't help identifying with the predatory hawk, just trying to survive, all alone against the mob.

But today I saw a squabble between a Cooper's hawk and a solitary crow that made me think about the beauty of restraint, and the intimacy of conflict. It was early morning and overcast--prime hunting conditions for the hawk, since everyone is out in search of breakfast, and the clouds mean he casts no warning shadow. I heard the familiar battle cry of the crows, and looked up to see a half dozen of them chasing the hawk along the tree line.

Normally, they would all have stayed on him until they drove him out of their territory or onto the ground, but that didn't happen. Once they had him safely away from their roosting spot, all the crows but one turned back. Then the hawk and the sole defender flew in a wide circle for several minutes, the crow diving, the hawk smoothly dodging him. Cooper's hawks are not much bigger than crows, and the pair's movements were so unhurried and graceful, a casual observer might have thought he was seeing two crows at play.

The crow was persistent and the hawk did eventually retreat, but the crow didn't seem victorious, nor the hawk vanquished. They both left the field of battle slowly, calmly. I got the sense that they had simply agreed to cease hostilities. Members of enemy species, they had colluded in peace.

Photo of Cooper's hawk by Mdf from Wikimedia Commons.

Hawk watching

2009-02-19T19:08:00.004-06:00

It's been a good week for hawk watching. Like the rest of the birds, they're pairing off and getting ready to nest, so they're out and about a lot. The thing that always impresses me about hawks is their incredible agility in flight. They do wild contortions as they swoop down on their prey--wings askew, legs splayed, head tucked and turned; and yet, if the intended victim evades them, they effortlessly recover and fly off. How do they stay airborne? I've never seen one crash, though it must happen occasionally.

As I was driving along the highway a couple of days ago, I saw a flock of black vultures congregating on the railroad tracks. There were about ten of them, grim and homely, jostling each other. A huge red-tailed hawk appeared and descended among them like a rust-colored goddess, no doubt planning to claim whatever tasty dead thing had drawn them there. Hawks and vultures occasionally face off over carrion, and the hawks usually win. This hawk was badly outnumbered, but something about the force of her arrival made me think she would get her way.

The little sharp-shinned hawks are as fiercely acrobatic as the big guys. Today--again in my car--I saw a sharp-shinned, talons extended, plummeting toward the grass at the edge of the road. He touched down for a split second and took off again, having failed to get the vole or small bird he was going for. He barely cleared my windshield as he rose up and then veered off ahead of me, flying fast, a pale blur against the blue sky.

From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through
Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds,
Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding
The last tumultuous avalanche of
Light above pines and the guttural gorge,
The hawk comes.
His wing
Scythes down another day, his motion
Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear
The crashless fall of stalks of Time.

From "Evening Hawk" by Robert Penn Warren. Read the complete poem at Poets.org.

Photo of a juvenile sharp-shinned hawk from Wikimedia Commons.

Two eccentrics

2009-02-10T19:41:00.007-06:00

At one of the parks where I walk there are bluebirds that hang out year-round in the woods at the edge of the parking lot. There's a single nest box there, but I often see as many as three couples sharing the area. It must be a good feeding spot. They were all out this morning, and I stopped to watch them on my way back to my car. It's still winter-drab here, no flowers or new grass yet, so the males looked especially pretty as they flashed their bright blue feathers.

For months, one of the females in the group has had a love-hate relationship with my car. She swoops down on it and perches on the rubber strip along the driver's window, so she can see herself in the side mirror. She doesn't peck at her reflection but it seems to agitate her. After she looks at herself she'll hop from the roof, to the hood, to the trunk--anointing the car at every stop. The car is dark blue, and her deposits create vivid white trails and smears. Since I am not the fastidious type, I don't mind. In fact, I think it gives the contraption some character.

I can't figure out what she thinks she's doing. Females don't usually do a lot of territorial battling unless they have a brood to protect. She might just be an exceptionally pugnacious bird, but if that's the case, why does she tolerate the other bluebirds in the same territory? Whatever she's got in mind, the rest of the birds couldn't be less interested. They never go near the cars.

Charles Bukowski's poem "Bluebird," read by Harry Dean Stanton.

Bluebird photo by Ken Thomas from Wikimedia Commons

The grief

2009-02-06T20:51:00.004-06:00

I have a favorite shortcut in west Nashville, a winding little road nestled between a pair of steep ridges. There are apartment complexes on one side of the road but the other side is heavily wooded. It’s always a nice route to take, especially in the summer when the trees provide pretty, dappled shade. I’ve often driven along there and thought about all the living things that have found sanctuary in the woods, a place of safety away from the highways and vast expanses of concrete.

I drove that way today for the first time in weeks. I wish I hadn’t. I rounded the first curve to see that the wooded hillside had been scoured. All the lovely trees were gone, nothing left but pitiful stumps. The sweet oasis is now a wasteland. Soon the bulldozers will come to scrape away the earth, and then the ridge will be blasted into submission. A few weeks from now the land will be irrevocably defaced. The usual warren of tacky apartment buildings will go up. In a couple of years it will be impossible to remember the beauty of the place.

I should be used to this by now. I’ve been watching it go on ever since we moved back to Tennessee in 1998. I’ve lost count of the number of beautiful spaces I’ve seen destroyed this way. But no matter how many times I see it, I always feel the same grief. I think of the terror of the animals as their homes are destroyed. I think about the wildflowers that will never bloom there again, and of the migrating songbirds that have lost a way station. If I let myself, I can hear the Earth crying in agony as her body is tortured.

I had a silly idea that the fucked-up economy might put a stop to the destruction, at least temporarily, but of course it hasn’t. If anything, the process is accelerated by people who need to unload land for ready cash, and I’m sure there are plenty of desperate contractors who will sign on with any project, no matter how dubious its financing, since taking a risk beats closing down their businesses. The roadside along the property was dotted with signs announcing a zoning hearing--what a joke. With the recession growing worse by the day, no one in government would dare to block a development that will provide dozens of jobs. You could offer to build a nuclear waste dump or a halfway house for pedophiles and you’d still get a green light with no trouble.

Sometimes I wonder how the people who get rich off this endless rape of the land live with themselves. Do they ever think about the ultimate cost of what they do? Was no piece of ground ever precious to them?

A Forest Floor Still-Life, Otto Marseus van Schrieck, 1666.

Mystery date

2009-02-03T19:23:00.005-06:00

If you're checking back for the Temple Grandin post, I swear it's coming--Friday, probably. Meanwhile, I'd like to talk about woodpeckers; specifically, the quartet of pileated woodpeckers I watched in the park on Sunday. Their courtship season is underway, so the woods are filled with the sound of territorial drumming. There's plenty of calling and chasing, too, inspired by anger as well as desire. Pileateds, like most woodpeckers, are very contentious when they're mating and nesting.

Everybody gets in on the fighting, but males really mix it up, and will go on battling for a long time. It's fun to watch. When a male flew over my head on Sunday, repeating a loud, aggressive squawk, I thought I was about to see a serious woodpecker smackdown, but it was a female--clearly his mate--who answered his call and followed him to the oak tree where he had settled. He commenced calling again after she joined him, and then, strangely, a second mated pair showed up. They both answered him and went to the same tree. He took flight again, and the whole process was repeated. His own female followed him, then was followed in turn by the second pair. They kept this up for at least ten minutes, changing trees five or six times.

I've never seen mated woodpeckers behave that way. Each couple usually has a territory that they defend vigorously. Outsiders are regarded as threats to monogamy and are not tolerated. Woodpeckers do feed together in family groups, but I feel sure that these were all mature birds. I went hunting through my bird books and the Internet, looking for an explanation, but couldn't find anything really definitive. One ornithologist (see below) did describe something similar, which he interpreted as a border skirmish; i.e., birds confronting each other in an area that didn't really belong to any of them. He's the expert, but what I saw didn't look like a dispute of any kind. It looked distinctly friendly. It seemed like a form of socializing, a sort of double date.

I like the fact that I can't be sure what they were doing. I always get a lot of pleasure out of encountering odd behavior in animals. I like the ambiguity, the uncertainty--which I suppose means I'm not much of a naturalist. I don't have that scientist's compulsion to decipher the world down to its last detail. Mystery delights me.

Still, there's something to be said for delving into the details and making careful observations. Here's an account by the same ornithologist of woodpecker love. For some reason I find it completely charming.

"At 8:40 a.m. on the following day I had a more complete view of copulation when the female alighted near the male. An exchange of woicks followed. She was again crouching crosswise on a limb when he flew over and mounted her back firmly. He then fell backward and over to the left in a gradual and awkward fashion in what appeared to be close cloacal contact. This process took an appreciable time. The female presented an odd spectacle after he had left, for her head and tail were drooping limply over either side of the limb and her body was flattened closely against it."

From "Behavior and Methods of Communication of Pileated Woodpeckers," Lawrence Kilham, The Condor, v.61, n.6 (Nov.-Dec., 1959), p.380. [You can find this article at SORA Searchable Ornithological Research Archive.]

Woodpecker tapestry by William Morris (detail), image from Wikimedia Commons. (I know this is an unseasonable picture, and I don't even know what kind of woodpecker it is, but it was too pretty not to post.)

Sturnus vulgaris

2009-01-25T14:00:00.002-06:00

I watched a European starling hop around a supermarket parking lot today. His iridescent feathers glistened in the sun and he was puffed up a little from the cold. He was about as pretty as it is possible for a starling to be. I don't think any passerine has a more ungainly walk than a European starling, and the relative lack of a tail is a pretty serious fashion handicap, but when they're standing still, giving a full frontal view like the guy in the photo, they can be handsome birds.

Looks aren't everything, though, and I don't think there's any bird Americans hate more than starlings. My grandmother, who was not generally prone to violence, used to go after them with a pellet pistol. We'd be sitting in the kitchen having breakfast, and Granny would spy them through the window. She'd jump out of her chair, a woman on a mission. Starlings at my feeder! she'd say with fury, then she'd commence shooting at them out the back door.

I've never known anybody else who took up arms against the starlings, but a lot of serious birders do advocate killing them, which is perfectly legal. Along with the house sparrows, they're officially designated as alien nuisances. Homeowners are free to kill them and/or destroy their eggs and nests. If you've ever kept feeders or tried to draw bluebirds to your yard you can understand why. Gangs of starlings will bully every other species away from a feeder and then gorge like a busload of tourists at a buffet. They are just as greedy when it comes to housing. They're brutal about driving other cavity-nesters away from desirable homes. I won't inflict a link on you, but there are plenty of sites online with pictures of what starlings and house sparrows will do to bluebirds they wish to evict. It's not pretty.

Oddly for such aggressive nesters, they are neglectful parents. It's always a little sad to see fledgling starlings begging for food from oblivious adults, while the woodpeckers and bluebirds are feeding their offspring so lovingly. Starlings nurture their young very briefly and then junior is on his own. A lot of the babies don't make it, but most females lay a clutch at least twice in a season, so the infant mortality rate is clearly not a problem.

Even though there have been times I've felt like getting a pellet gun of my own, I don't think I could ever kill a starling. There's something tragic about them. They're so awkward and friendless. They didn't ask to be brought here, after all. They can't help being so freaking adaptable. It's ironic that we love least the creatures who are most able to thrive in the face of our rapacious ways.

Looking at that bird in the parking lot today, I thought about another starling encounter I had years ago. It was an unusually chilly late spring night, and as I walked back to my car after paying for my gas, I saw a pair of chicks huddled together on the cold concrete. They seemed to have just left the nest, and the glare of the station lights probably confused them. One of the chicks looked like a goner, but the other was pretty vigorous. If no one ran over him--a big if--he might survive. It made about as much sense as cheering on fire ants or Formosan termites, but I couldn't help rooting for him: You hang in there, little guy. I hope he made it.

European Starling page at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Photo by Mark Skipper from Wikimedia Commons

Winter comfort

2009-01-22T20:09:00.000-06:00

There's plenty of light pollution hereabouts, with more creeping in all the time, but our nights are still dark enough that we sometimes get a really spectacular sky full of stars, and a clear view of the Milky Way. It happens mostly in winter, the only time the air is dry enough to be completely clear. As much as I hate the cold, I love standing outside on a January night, putting a crick in my neck as I try to pick out the constellations. That was one of the things I missed most during my city-dwelling years.

I grew up during the height of our national space mania. There was constant blather on television and in school about exploring the vast distances of the universe. The emphasis was always on "vast." This seemed to be the one aspect of space that teachers and NASA propagandists figured would sell: It's big, children. Seriously--big.

In spite of all that early brainwashing, I almost never think of the enormity of space when I look up at the stars. A dark, clouded sky on a moonless night--now that does make me feel like a tiny speck floating alone in an immense universe. But a night filled with twinkling lights makes the earth seem cozy to me, and complete in itself. The fact that those stars are very far away is something I can only register as an abstraction. My fanciful self says they are right here with me, like a crowd of slightly giddy friends who've shown up to celebrate something.

NASA photo of the Milky Way, taken with the Spitzer Space Telescope, from Wikimedia Commons.

A little romance

2009-01-17T20:55:00.002-06:00

We've been getting just a taste of the intensely cold weather the rest of the country's having. Thursday was extremely chilly here, with enough wind to make walking outdoors less than blissful. I hiked about half my usual distance and decided that was enough. At one point on the trail--which was completely deserted except for me and one scrambling chipmunk--I encountered an overpowering odor of skunk. That seemed a little odd. Cold weather generally encourages skunks to stay huddled in their dens. I figured some unlucky guy had ventured out in search of a snack and become one. Skunks are a favorite food of great horned owls.

Friday morning's temp was around 3 degrees Fahrenheit, which was cold enough to keep me inside, but I was out again today, happy to get some exercise and fresh air--until I ran into another skunk stink, in almost exactly the same spot where it had been before. I kept an eye out and walked on for about 50 yards, then I heard a critter noise up ahead I couldn't quite identify. It was a sort of squealing trill, accompanied by the sound of rustling leaves.

I had to stop and look around for a while before I spotted them: A pair of beautiful, silky skunks locked in an amorous clutch, rolling and romping like porn stars. They were about 40 feet ahead of me, right next to the trail. The noise was mostly coming from the female, who appeared much more enthusiastic about the encounter than her feline and canine counterparts usually do. The male was very busy and intent. He kept changing position. The boy had technique.

The boy had stamina, too. I thought they'd soon finish their procreative business and I could walk on, but no. Fifteen minutes passed and they were still hard at it. I did something I almost never do when I'm out hiking. I pulled out my cell phone and called Dave--"Hey, guess what I'm doing? I'm watching skunks have sex." For some reason I just felt the need to share. He was suitably amused.

Interspecies voyeurism only has so much entertainment value, and I was starting to get cold, so I finally decided to turn back and leave the devoted couple alone. I felt happy. The world doesn't especially need more skunks, but it's always delightful to see life beget life, especially when everyone involved is having fun.

Photo from birdphotos.com via Wikimedia Commons.

Living color

2009-01-13T09:41:00.000-06:00

Sunday morning was a study in gray. A flat, dove-color sky was reflected in the lake, which was perfectly still. Staring at the water gave me a sense of being suspended in a void. Not an unpleasant sensation, but it had the odd effect of snatching my thoughts. I felt as I sometimes do just before I fall asleep--that my brain was still ticking away, cataloging perceptions, but none of the data was making its way to consciousness. I just stood a while and let myself not think. There was no sound except a crow complaining in the distance, and a little rustling of leaves by the squirrels, who never seem to take a break.

Olfacta commented on another post about the minimalist beauty of the Southern winter landscape, with its “million variations on neutral grays and browns”—a perfect description. I was thinking about her phrase as I walked along the trail away from the lake, when a poppy-bright cardinal flitted by me. A little further on I walked by a patch of moss, brilliant green. Those islands of color against the drab forest thrilled me. I don’t mean that they were merely pleasant or pretty—they thrilled me. A little jolt of happiness hit me. My heart beat faster, and I could feel my shoulders relax, my face soften into a slight smile.

I don’t usually think of myself as someone who is acutely sensitive to color. Nature seems to have blessed me with better than average senses of smell and hearing, and evened the score by giving me very weak eyes. My sense of sight started letting me down in childhood, so I have always tended to be a little less emotionally attached to visual pleasures, compared to the ones that come by other routes.

So when I encountered the bird and the moss, it was a mild shock to feel the joy of color so strongly. For just an instant I forgot myself, overwhelmed by the power of sensation. It mirrored the reverie by the gray lake, when the emptiness sucked away my thoughts. The color filled me with itself.

Some fun links:

An explanation of how color vision works

An interesting article about the consequences of color vision

A little visual trick

Concert of Birds, Frans Snyders (1579-1657)

Do not disturb

2009-01-04T20:06:00.001-06:00

The temperature last Wednesday morning was above freezing, but a brutal north wind made it feel much colder. I kept putting down the hood of my jacket, thinking, Oh, it’s not that cold, and then a gust would hit me and I’d put it back up again. My eyes were streaming before I’d walked a quarter mile, so I was continually debating whether it was worth pulling one of my hands out of its warm pocket to wipe them.

It was especially windy at the lake, so I headed around to the little lagoon that’s sheltered by low ridges on two sides. The wind was whipping through the top branches of the trees but down at the bank the air was fairly still. I could stand there and enjoy the reflections on the rippling water, a natural kaleidoscope enhanced by the light of the rising sun.

I was strolling along the water’s edge, enjoying the respite from the cold and noting that all the birds seemed to have decided that this was not a day for early rising, when suddenly a great blue heron rose up out of the lagoon and flew silently out over the main body of the lake. He had only been about 25 or 30 feet away from me, but I never saw him until he took off.

Great blue herons are always a pleasure to see—they’re so big, and they fly so gracefully—but I immediately felt guilty for disturbing him. He had obviously been looking for a place of shelter himself, and my appearance had destroyed his temporary refuge. Of course, he was probably engaged in making life less happy for the little fish in the shallows, but I still pitied him as he disappeared into the cold, and I wished I could give him back his peace.

If there’s one lesson I keep relearning on my walks in the woods, it’s that life is a continual search for the lagoon. Everything alive seeks comfort, peace, a sense of safety. Those things are as necessary to survival as food and water. To steal sanctuary from another creature, even if we do it innocently or inadvertently, is a crime against him.

Video uploaded by mcnod at Youtube

Howl

2008-12-26T19:57:00.002-06:00

The human noises that intrude on my woodland walks are usually something I resent. Traffic sounds, the rumble of trains, the growl of distant machinery--and above all, the sinister whine of chainsaws--make me grit my teeth. I have to discipline myself to ignore them, and not let them distract me from the singing of the birds or the rustle of a vole in the fallen leaves.

But human noises are animal noises, too, and sometimes our species harmonizes with others in delightful ways. This morning I was near the edge of the park when a siren sounded at the nearby fire station. Then the fire trucks began to scream, and somewhere in the distance a cop car chimed in, growing louder as it approached. A pack of dogs, probably penned hunting hounds at one of the houses just outside the park, began to yelp and sing. All together they made quite a concert, and I smiled because my own dogs like to sing duets with sirens. Then from the top of a ridge perhaps a hundred yards away, a solitary coyote cut loose with a full-throated howl, as if to say, You guys are pathetic, let me show you how it's done.

Photo of a gray wolf by Retron from Wikimedia Commons.

Hibernation

2008-12-22T10:47:00.000-06:00

Maybe you're wondering why this guy is making an appearance in the dead of winter. Well, it's not because I saw one of his kind in the woods recently. It was 9 degrees Fahrenheit here this morning, so all our snakes are snuggled deep in hibernation--and I realized yesterday, as I walked toward the Solstice sunrise, I'm in hibernation, too.

Not physically, of course. I've been out hunting and gathering in typical 21st century human fashion, but spiritually I am half-awake, dozing and waiting for spring to rouse me. That's why the posts on this blog have gotten so sparse. My body is taking me along for our daily walk, but I don't feel inspired to interpret the sights and sounds along the way. My brain, for once, is silent.

I've been a little troubled by that internal silence, wondering if maybe this walking meditation is becoming a dead ritual or a chore, instead of the blissful practice it's always been. But it dawned on me--literally--as I did my Yule observance that it is inevitable that my talking self would retreat during this time of the year. A friend appeared for a moment with the rising sun and explained it to me.

A long time ago, when I first began to understand that there might be something of value in my intuitive connection to the earth, the snake became my totem. It was not a conscious choice, and I didn't do any ritual or dream work to determine it. The serpent just declared himself my companion and that was that. It made perfect sense, because the snake is associated with healing and with the power of transformation, both things I desperately needed at the time. As the years have passed I've come to see that I always had an affinity for the special energy of snakes, and that their particular forms of wisdom--decisiveness, resilience, the ability to change--are gifts I will always lack.

And so, as the earthly serpent goes underground and sleeps during the dark season, so does the spiritual serpent inside me. My own energy is inextricably tied to his. Nothing's wrong, we just need to be a little quieter now.

Photo of a black rat snake by Patrick Coin from Wikimedia Commons.

Missing the juncos

2008-12-08T20:27:00.002-06:00

The Dude returneth. He was back in his corner of the lake yesterday--alone, as usual. Actually, not entirely alone, because a flock of dark-eyed juncos were hiding in the tall grass along the bank. They took flight as I walked toward them, buzzing the Dude’s head like low-flying aircraft. He didn’t seem to mind at all. Apparently, he’s fine with avian companions as long as they are not his own kind.

The juncos were so pretty they made me sigh. I’m too lazy to go looking for the post, but I know I’ve blogged at BitterGrace Notes about how the juncos abandoned my feeders a few winters ago, never to return. I still miss them.

I’ve never been a scorekeeping sort of birdwatcher. You know, the type who keeps a careful record of exactly how many species she’s seen, and always has a hit list of birds she hopes to add to the tally. I do get excited about seeing a rare bird, and I’m sure at some point I’ve gone through my Peterson’s guide to see who I’ve missed, but I never feel any sense of accomplishment or failure. My birdwatching is pretty much a goal-free activity. I do it solely because it gives me joy to look at birds, to know they’re alive. That’s the reason I feed them, too. I might make noises about promoting their survival or whatever, but really, I haul those bags of seed home for purely selfish reasons. If I put out food, more birds will come and entertain me.

What is so enthralling about these creatures, especially the little ordinary feeder birds like the juncos? Isn’t it amazing that human beings all over the world, if they have the resources to spare, will feed birds just for the pleasure of watching them eat? Let’s face it, birds, taken objectively, are not especially appealing. They fight constantly, they prey on each other’s young, they carry any number of human diseases; and yet, most people are completely charmed by the sight of them.

Not everyone, of course. My brother lived for a while with a young woman who seemed sort of vacuous but basically harmless. The first (and I think only) time she came to my house, she saw my bird feeders in the back yard.

“I hate birds,” she said.

I didn’t know what to say in reply. It’s funny now, but at the time it actually shocked me a little. What sort of person hates birds? I felt a sudden, visceral dislike for her, as if she’d insulted my religion--which, in a way, she had. My encounters with the birds are sacred to me. They are, pompous as it sounds, moments of mystery and higher consciousness. I look at those delicate beings and see myself in what is not myself. It’s a kind of ecstasy.

Video of dark-eyed junco uploaded by Midhue at Youtube.

Two flocks

2008-12-04T15:15:00.005-06:00

Except for our few days in New York, I've done my usual tromp through the woods every morning. I haven't been doing Turn Outward posts primarily because nature has been so damned peaceful. Winter is a still season here. It gets chilly enough that a lot the wildlife semi-hibernate, or at least wait for the warmth of the day to get out and about; yet we rarely have any dramatic winter storms or brutal cold to report. Our winter, for the most part, is just a lull between the brisk, busy fall and the budding of spring.

I was thinking about the quiet yesterday as I walked toward the lake. We'd had some rain, and there were perfect frozen droplets resting on the fallen leaves. They crunched underfoot, and that was about the only sound I could hear. A couple of woodpeckers were hammering away somewhere in the distance, but no one was singing, no deer or squirrels were rustling the leaves. I found myself looking around for some sign of a vole, or even a cricket. Nothing.

The lake has a little thumb, almost a lagoon, that presses into a shaded hollow. It's prime catfish territory, so there's often someone fishing there, but I found it as deserted as the rest of the park. I stood staring down at the dark water, feeling a perfect solitude, so zoned out that I didn't hear them coming: Blackbirds, that is--one of those enormous winter flocks that seem to come from nowhere; grim, noisy flash mobs that suddenly fill the world, and then just as suddenly disappear.

They landed heavily in the trees on the opposite bank, and the air vibrated with their chatter. It's thrilling and slightly creepy to be in the presence of all that combined avian energy. I was happy to have my reverie disturbed, but I felt sort of surrounded--then I realized I was surrounded: A second large flock, a mixed group of finches, had quietly taken over the trees on my side of the lake. Their twittering was a gentle counterpoint to the loudmouth blackbirds, and they flitted between the branches as lightly as the leaves they sent falling.

Wheat Field with Crows, Vincent van Gogh, 1890.

Solitude

2008-11-24T19:27:00.004-06:00

It rained all day today--one of those cold, steady rains that come in the late fall. Rain has its beauty. It's pleasant to sit in a cozy house on a day like this, looking out the window at the dripping trees and dreary sky, but it takes an act of will for me to get myself outdoors. A half hour into my hike, after the wet starts to seep through my boots and mud is spattered up the leg of my jeans, I'm able to make friends with the rain, but the beginning of our relationship is always rough.

It started really pouring when I was about halfway to the lake. I considered cutting the walk short, but I decided to keep going because I was curious to see if the Dude would be out. The Dude is a solitary Canada goose who has been loitering at the lake for the past few weeks. Flocks of Canada geese often rest at the lake, and for a long time I assumed he was just a mildly antisocial member of one of them, the kind of guy who sits alone in a corner with his drink at a party. But I've come to the conclusion that the Dude is entirely unattached--no wife, no buddies, nobody. I can't find any mention in my bird books of anserine hermits, but that's what he seems to be.

He's a very laid back bird, which I suppose is why I call him the Dude. He's aware of me, he turns to look at me as I approach, but otherwise he doesn't react at all. Geese can be very territorial, but he doesn't show any sign of resenting my presence. He just eyes me indifferently and goes back to paddling slowly around the lake.

I like his blasé attitude, but I can't help feeling a little sorry for him. Geese are such social birds, surely he would be better off attached to a flock. It was very cold last week, and as he swam away from me I could that there was thick frost over his back. Somehow that seemed a little tragic.

I don't know why I have this notion that he's lonely. After all, I'm out there all by myself, and I'm not lonely. On the contrary, I'm so thrilled with solitude that I'll tramp miles in the rain for the privilege of being alone by the lake as the day begins.

But this day, I didn't make the hike to be alone. I made it to see the Dude. He wasn't there. No sign of him. Perhaps he finally hooked up with a flock, but it's possible that he actually likes solitude more than I do.

Photo by Thegreenj from Wikimedia Commons.

Frost flowers

2008-11-21T20:53:00.003-06:00

Nights have turned very cold here and dawn reveals frost flowers everywhere. They're wonderful to examine close up, always so weird, and each one unique. Frost flowers are the antithesis of everything flowers are supposed to be. It's in the nature of actual flowers to be regimented in form. As part of the machinery of reproducing the species, they have to match the blueprint. Evolution does require the occasional freak, but day to day survival is all about lack of originality. Frost flowers are all freaks, absolutely lacking pattern. Utterly ephemeral, they beget nothing, and as far as I know, abet nothing in the life cycle of the plant. They're like the creation of some alien god, who wants to please us with a familiar gift, but doesn't get it quite right.

Photo by Josiah Johnston from Wikipedia.

Charmers

2008-11-20T20:19:00.005-06:00

There is no downside to wrens. They are all charm: pretty, petite, peaceable and chatty. They mate for life. This time of year they flit among the fallen leaves, so light and quick in their movements that they seem barely real, like fairies of the autumn woods. It’s impossible not to love them.

"Dismembers large insects by hammering with its bill and shaking it until small pieces break off."**

Of course, if I were a bug, a failure of love might be possible.

**From the Carolina Wren page at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Photo by Ken Thomas from Wikimedia Commons.

Home sweet home

2008-11-16T11:57:00.005-06:00

It’s been nice and quiet in the woods this week. The chilly, wet weather has kept a lot of the other hikers at home and encouraged the birds to sleep in. Gun season for deer doesn’t start until tomorrow, and muzzleloader season ended last weekend, so there hasn’t even been the sound of distant gunfire. The only commotion I’ve encountered on the trail was a squirrel that decided to bless me out this morning. I didn’t do a thing to bother him, but he still squawked at me and gave me the propeller tail. I think he was bored.

Here at our place things have not been so serene. Twice, my morning loll in the bathtub has been disrupted by the yowl of triumphant coyotes within a stone’s throw of the house. Hard to know just what they killed, but I’m pretty sure I heard the scream of a cat on one occasion. That made me cringe, of course, but really, it’s not a bad thing. They’re just thinning the herd. Our sweet, elderly neighbor has gone from feeding one or two feral cats to maintaining a 24-hour buffet for a horde of felines, some homeless and some not. I’m not sure how she can afford to buy enough food to keep them all coming, but it’s not unusual to see a dozen or more hanging around her house, which is about 50 yards from mine.

The cats are pretty helpless against the coyotes, but they administer justice down the food chain. I recently moved my bird feeders to an open area nearer the house, in part to make my own birdwatching easier, but also in hopes of discouraging predatory felines. Silly me. The day after I moved the feeders, I looked out the window and saw an obese gray tabby underneath them, happily chewing the innards out of a cardinal.

Later that same afternoon I was startled by a tremendous thump outside my office window, which opens onto the roof of a carport. Birds like to peck around on the flat metal surface to see if anything tasty has landed there. A couple of big maple trees loom above the roof, and a clever cat had hidden in their branches in order to leap down on his prey. Score another one for the carnivores.

So, that’s life chez BitterGrace: a steady parade of murderous canids, and bloodthirsty fur balls falling from the sky. No wonder I flee to the woods.

A Dog and a Cat Fighting, Alexandre-François Desportes, 1710. Image from Web Gallery of Art.

Odocoileus sniffapaloozus*

2008-11-08T20:42:00.009-06:00

Last week was muzzleloader season for deer, and as I walked along the trail Saturday morning I heard a few shots in the distance. There's no hunting in the park, but there's private land nearby where people are free to blast away, provided they have a permit. Sometimes I get the impression that the deer are aware of the two-legged predators. I seem to see a lot more of them in the park, as if they are taking refuge there. But that's probably just my imagination. It's clear from watching them that they're not especially nervous or easily spooked.

The little doe I met as I headed back to my car on Saturday certainly wasn't hiding from anybody. She was nibbling on something near the trail, and when I came up she moved just a few feet away and stared me down. Deer always do the same thing when they decide to hold their ground instead of running away: They stand at an angle to you, giving a 3/4 profile. This gives the appearance of confrontation, yet makes it possible for them to take off for a quick getaway if necessary. They raise their heads to look as big and authoritative as possible, then they lift a skinny leg and stomp the ground as if to say, "You, scat!" When big bucks do this, it is slightly menacing; from does, with their soft eyes and dainty bodies, it is just ridiculous and endearing.

It was especially funny from this girl, because she was so tiny. She was bold, though. She gave a couple of extra stomps, and when I still didn't retreat, she actually moved toward me. Then she stopped and sniffed the air in my direction. That's another typical gesture, but instead of just taking the usual quick whiff, she really gave me an olfactory going over. She thrust her head forward and flared her nostrils, then withdrew for a second, looking thoughtful. She seemed a little perturbed, as if she was unable to place my scent--What are you? I stood still, and she sniffed at me again, twitching her nose and even opening her mouth a little. She seemed very curious, and took yet another step in my direction.

I wondered what about me could possibly be so intriguing, and then I remembered that I was doused in vintage Jolie Madame perfume. It's pretty potent stuff, and I think it must have been what inspired her reaction. Deer are very sensitive to scent, and I'm sure she had never smelled anything quite like me. The notes of vintage JM include musk, castoreum and civet. I have no idea if any of those were still naturally sourced when this juice was made, but if they were, I must have seemed like a remarkable beast to her: Funny, you don't look like a beaver.

Whatever she took me for, I was obviously the most interesting thing that had happened to her that day. She eventually turned her attention back to feeding, but she stayed very close, keeping an eye on me. Her nose twitched from time to time. When I decided to move on, she raised her head but didn't run. About 40 yards down the trail I looked back. She was still there watching me, and I couldn't help thinking that she seemed a little sad to see me go.

Original photo by Dori from Wikimedia Commons.

*A completely unauthorized but admiring reference to the fine folks at Sniffapalooza.

The tunneling vole

2008-11-05T19:52:00.011-06:00

I startled a little vole this morning, and it scrambled to hide itself in the fallen leaves. A rustling trail above it revealed its escape route as it tunneled away. Watching it, I felt a pang of sympathy. Seems like a tough break, being born a vole. A vole's life is one long horror movie of being pursued and eaten. There's not much in the way of compensation for that curse. Maybe voles have delightful social lives, or they spend their unharassed hours engaged in deep philosophical inquiry, but somehow I doubt it. A vole's pleasures, assuming voles feel pleasure, consist of little more than eating and fucking.

It's an awfully limited life from a human point of view--and yet, the little critters cling to it ferociously. They use up most of their energy and all their intelligence struggling to survive, even though they are doomed. That's the ironic miracle of life. Individual beings are so fragile, their existence destroyed and forgotten from one day to the next, but the instinct to stay alive and perpetuate life never wavers. Without faith or aspiration, or even any awareness of a future, they continually seek the next moment.

Turkeys, leaves, etc.

2008-10-29T20:12:00.004-05:00

I came across a flock of turkeys this morning, feeding in a little hollow filled with pine trees. They were scattered across the trail, so I actually waded right in among them. In typical dim-witted turkey fashion, they were very slow to react to my presence. If I’d been a hungry coyote, I probably could have taken one down before they even had the sense to start running. I felt sentimental about them as I watched them flee. There’s something endearing in the awkward stupidity of a panicked turkey. But the predator was alive in me, too, and thought about giving chase.

It’s cold here for this time of year. The temperature was just above freezing, and I was reminded how the winter chill subtly changes the texture of everything. The surface of the lake is glassy, reflecting the sky and the trees with a clarity never seen in the summer. The dirt along the trail is denser, not dusty even in dry weather. The bark of the trees always feels a little damp under your hand, and the moss doesn’t crumble the way it does in the heat.

A steady breeze was knocking the leaves loose from the treetops, and as they fell they skittered off the branches, making a delicate rustle. I stopped to listen and thought That’s the voice of death. Death has a beautiful aspect, as well as a sad one. It's the joy of something set free, released from the confinement of its living form. The random, dry whisper of falling leaves is the sound of that unshackling.

Tree-Man, Hieronymus Bosch (c.1450-1516)

Little wonders like this

2008-10-26T19:49:00.004-05:00

...are the reason I haul myself out of bed every morning and go tromping through the woods, even when it's cold, or pouring rain, or I'm so tired I'm dizzy. I came across this spectacular fungus yesterday. It had popped up through the wet leaves after a heavy rain, like a surprise lily on steroids. It's about 5 inches across, and the cap--if that's the right word for such a blossom-like structure--is very thick. I didn't have a camera with me when I first saw it, and the shriveling process was already beginning when I took the photo this morning. Yesterday it was a more brilliant orange, and the flesh was so full of moisture, it glistened.

I get such joy out of a little unexpected beauty like this. I understand the thrill naturalists feel when they find a long-sought rare plant or animal, but I get as much pleasure from the things I stumble upon. There's a delicious mystery about a living thing that just appears, makes itself known, and departs. It's proof of the roiling life that surrounds us, unseen, all the time.

Speaking of mysteries, I have no idea exactly what this baby is. I don't recall ever seeing anything quite like it, and a fungi ID search has turned up nothing--though I did find this great site, which has dozens of beautiful photos. If there are any mycologists out there who can put a name to my little friend, please email or leave a comment.

Cruelty and life

2008-10-23T20:13:00.005-05:00

Sometimes I marvel at the earth's unending cruelty. I realize I'm wallowing in cliché--"Nature, red in tooth and claw," etc.--but the observation still strikes with a lot of power if you spend time wandering around the world with your eyes open. You could stop every war, pacify every violent home, reform every Michael Vick or Sarah Palin, and the planet would still writhe continually with the suffering necessary to life.

A few days ago, Dave told me that a friend's little dog had been taken by a coyote. The dog was a cossetted pet, completely unprepared to battle for his life against a canine cousin. He had no experience of predators. I wonder what his diminished instinct told him in the moment the coyote struck.

Yesterday I saw a little dead vole along the trail. It had been bitten cleanly in half, probably by an owl. The head and upper body were missing. The remaining back end had been invaded by ants, which were frantically excavating the innards, leaving the hide, feet and tail intact. The little guy had been preyed upon twice.

When I got home, I looked out the window to check on my spider. She had captured a fat moth, and was sucking out his life with the usual arachnidian concentration. I watched a while and wondered what death is to a moth.

Kingfisher photo by Marek Szczepanek from Wikimedia Commons.

Finally, California pics

2008-10-20T17:45:00.007-05:00

We took these shots of the coast from Trinidad Head, which has a nice trail going all the way from the beach to the summit. It was a pretty good climb, but well worth it--gorgeous all the way, with interesting vegetation and lots of places to stop and enjoy the view. It's windy as hell, and cold, but that only made the climb more fun.

When we sat down for a few minutes to watch the surf, we were lucky enough to see a pair of whales at play. Apparently, Trinidad is quite the whale watching spot, though we didn't know that. The good thing about being lazy tourists who never bother researching our destinations ahead of time is that we're often pleasantly surprised, and never disappointed. If we'd trudged up that cliff expecting to see whales and hadn't, we'd have been irritated and let down. Since we weren't looking for them, the whales were like a little miracle just for us.

This is a view in Redwood National Park, along the the road that leads to the Tall Trees Grove. My photo, as usual, doesn't do it justice. It's an amazing vista. You feel as if you are floating above the ocean on a carpet of trees. I kept hoping to see a raptor soaring below us, since the late morning air was warming up, creating the updrafts they like to glide along. None appeared, though there were lots of passerines and butterflies, as well as little lizards crawling over the rocks nearby.

The park is heavily managed, not really remote or wild, but they don't make it very easy for you to get to the grove where the biggest redwoods are. You have to get a permit at the park station, which provides the combination for a gate that blocks access to an unpaved road. You drive several miles, dodging the ruts, to get to a trail where you hike down to the tall trees--"down" being the operative word. The trailhead is 800 feet above the grove, so the 1.5 mile walk is all downhill. There's a loop through the grove that's about a mile long, and then you get to hike back up the same way you came. For someone in decent shape, it's just a pleasant, slightly demanding hike, but I'm sure there are people who get down there and have trouble getting back up. Although it was a beautiful Sunday morning, we only met a handful of other visitors.

The top and bottom photos below were taken in the Tall Trees Grove, the other two along the trail leading down to it. I wish they gave a better sense of the beauty of the place. The redwoods are stunning, but there are all kinds of other flora, especially ferns, and probably a dozen varieties of moss. There's a beautiful clover that is colored brilliant fuschia on the underside of its leaves. And the smell is incredible. Imagine the most exquisite fougere, with a touch of cold ocean air. It was very strange to come back to the heavy, slightly dank air of the Tennessee woods after breathing the crystalline air along the coast.

We spent a very happy few hours among the redwoods, though I came away feeling the same grief I always do when I visit the little bits of nature we've caged for our enjoyment. I feel the same way in the parks here at home. They're beautiful in exactly the same way a tiger in a zoo is beautiful. And tragic in the same way, too.

Guests

2008-10-07T18:37:00.005-05:00

This beautiful yellow garden spider (Argiope aurantia) has built herself a spectacular web outside one of my kitchen windows. She's a big girl, at least 3 inches from leg tip to leg tip. You're looking at her belly. I'd have to climb up on a ladder to get a picture of her other side, and I'm way too lazy for that. You can see what she'd look like from another angle on her Wikipedia page here. The web stabilimentum they describe is clearly visible in this pic.

One of the pleasures of fall is that I nearly always have a gorgeous spider take up residence somewhere around the south side of my house. Often I get one on the southeast corner, which means there are at least a few opportunities for me to watch the moon rise through her web.

Another regular fall resident is the straggling hummingbird. This year I seem to have two. All the others departed around October 1, right on schedule, but this pair--both females--have decided to hang out for a while. I've never had any stay past mid-November, but I keep hoping one will eventually overwinter with me. Maybe one of these will do me the honor.

The weather was unsettled this morning--rain clouds moved in from the west opposite a pink sunrise, and there was a steady wind that kept the trees rustling all through my walk. It was a little warmer than it has been lately, and the breeze kept the lake free of mist. I had trudged up an old logging road, away from the water, when I heard a flock of Canada geese arriving. You can always tell whether the geese are just passing through or planning to land by the amount of racket they make. Migrating flocks do a sedate honk-and-answer routine, but if a rest stop is on the agenda, everybody talks at once. They sound like a busload of kids on a school trip.

By the time I got back down to the lake they were all on the water, swimming sedately and just giving out the occasional squawk. There were 9 or 10 of them, and they had perfect ownership of the lake. I know these birds can be a huge nuisance in suburban spaces, but that's our fault, not theirs. In their natural habitat they are exquisite creatures.

Canada goose from John James Audubon's The Birds of America (1840)

What the owl said

2008-10-05T09:11:00.004-05:00

I was in the park early yesterday, well before dawn. It was chilly, and not much was stirring. I was trudging along in the quiet darkness, keeping an eye out for wandering skunks, when I heard the ululation of a screech owl close by. It's such an exquisite sound, I can't help wondering about the mind of the creature who makes it. Owl calls are so complex and varied, even to our ears, that they must be expressive of the individual bird. Whatever he feels in that moment--hungry, happy, frightened, content--he's surely conveying it with his voice, displaying a consciousness as powerful and unique as any human's.

My response when I heard him was a brief, distinctive pang of joy, the fleeting transcendence that draws me to the woods. I never find it anywhere else.

Slow

2008-09-30T19:18:00.006-05:00

Every season has its particular stillness. For instance, the spring has a damp, heavy silence, with great energy humming just beneath it. Standing in the woods on a cool April morning feels like hovering over a sleeping toddler--feeling his breath, admiring the peaceful little body that you know is going to wake up and wreak happy havoc any minute.

The autumn stillness has none of that tension. It’s a meditative stillness, a sense that the world is calm yet focused, waiting for something that is absolutely certain to come. That was the feeling in the park this morning. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion, reluctant to disturb the trance. There was no mist on the lake, just a soft reflection of the cloudy sky and the trees turning red and gold along the shore. A great blue heron flew over with even more unhurried stateliness than usual. Herons often mutter as they fly along, as if they are talking to themselves, but this one was silent. All the other birds were quiet, too. The woodpeckers tapped halfheartedly, and the crows were cawing sotto voce.

As I walked away from the lake it started to rain, just a light sprinkle that was barely audible as it hit the tops of the trees. I stopped and looked around, listening. Everything was listening. Waiting, and wide-awake.

The Hearing Forest and the Seeing Field, Hieronymous Bosch (1450-1516)

Druidic morning

2008-09-25T19:26:00.006-05:00

It was chilly enough this morning for the cold to tickle my lungs as I trudged up the hilly parts of the trail. I love that feeling. It's like consuming a living spirit from the air.

I was moving at a faster pace than usual because I wanted to reach the lake in time to watch the sunrise. If I stand on the western side of the lake this time of year, I can see the sun come up in a notch between a pair of ridges. It's a sort of natural Stonehenge, and on a clear morning it creates a beautiful, dramatic birth of the day. The mist from the lake softens the pink glow of dawn, and all movement seems suspended for a moment just before the sun tops the horizon. I feel a little pang of anticipation until, finally, the bright edge appears, nestled between the two dark hills. Then it almost bursts into full view, and light warms the world.

Once the sun was well up, I wandered back onto the trail and came across a pair of dueling white-tail deer. Actually, I couldn't see them--they were on the other side of a little rise--but I could hear the distinctive wheezing snort of competitive bucks facing off, and the rustling of the leaves as they moved around each other. It was just a scrimmage, I think, since I never heard anything that sounded like contact, and it's a still a little early for mating. As I walked on I met a young doe who was loitering on the trail. She stood her ground and gazed at me, perched on her exquisite little legs, and seemed to say, Admire me. I'm as beautiful as the sunrise.

Photo by Fir0002 from Wikimedia Commons.

Can we talk?

2008-09-23T19:42:00.007-05:00

There haven't been any more freaky phenomena at the park since my last report, but the woods are damn noisy in normal ways. I keep running into mixed flocks of nuthatches and chickadees feeding together, and those tiny guys make a hell of a racket. I always think of the nuthatch chatter as laughter--rude laughter, like guys who've had a little too much to drink telling dirty jokes. There's a crude quality to their voices. The chickadees, on the other hand, have dry, transparent voices. They make themselves heard, but with the restraint of a librarian on hush patrol.

According to the Cornell page for the nuthatches, it's common for the two species to gang up this way, though I've never noticed it before. It's a little surprising, since they're fond of the same foods, which makes them natural competitors. The Cornell description suggests that they cooperate to look out for predators, but of course they are also helping each other find food. They certainly find plenty to talk about, in any case. I wonder whether they understand each other's vocalizations, or if each bird is just talking to its own species. It seems remarkable to think that they could be, in a sense, bilingual. But then again, domestic animals can often understand human speech in a limited way. All my dogs can comprehend at least a half dozen words or phrases from us, and they can definitely decipher our language with more nuance than we can theirs.

Speaking of dogs and speech, one of my dogs has decided to open a dialogue with the coyotes. Nio is a big dog with a big voice, and an awesome ability to howl. He has a basso profondo bark he employs to warn of intruders, and the coyotes that come yipping around the house have always qualified as intruders of a particularly unwelcome kind until now. The last few times they've visited, usually in the early morning before sunrise, Nio has sung them one of his more beautiful songs--a throaty, thin howl that creates a mellow counterpoint to their hysterical yelping. He actually seems to enjoy their presence. His howl has a note of longing, as if to say, I wish I coud be out there with you.

Coyote sounds

Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Encounters

2008-09-21T19:16:00.002-05:00

I passed by the beaver lodge today, and saw that the big male was helping out for a change by providing breakfast for the family. He swam to the opposite side of the lake to get what he wanted, and waddled up to one tree after another, being very persnickety about his choice of fare. It was amazing to see how fast he could harvest a branch as big around as my arm. It took him just a second or two to bring it down, and then he swam easily back with it, even though it was heavy with foliage that made the load four times his size. He disappeared with his prize at the entrance to the lodge, leaving nothing but a few bubbles to disturb the surface of the water. Shortly thereafter I could hear Mom and the kids inside, trilling and chomping away. He came back out and did the tail slap, as he often does when I hang around for any length of time. I don’t think he’s really alarmed at my presence, he’s just making a point: This is my territory, no loitering.

Everyone was being very chatty and active this morning. The geese were flying, the crows were arguing, and the ground was alive with crickets. Nature is moody, and today the mood was happy, buoyant—so it was especially surprising when something happened that was so weird I’m not sure I can fully describe it. I was walking along a narrow, shaded portion of the trail when a big horsefly buzzed me. Nothing unusual about that, but then a moment later I was surrounded by the hum of a huge swarm of flies. The noise blocked out all the other sounds around me, and created a vibration that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

But ... there wasn’t any swarm of flies. Just the one guy, who circled my head and flew away. I kept walking and the sound stopped as abruptly as it started. It was as if I had stepped on the other side of a curtain, and whatever I had just encountered was now hidden behind it. I stopped walking and looked all around, trying to see what it might have been, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. I considered backtracking to see if I would hear and feel it again, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. I wasn’t really frightened, just a little unnerved, and the experience was unpleasant enough that I didn’t especially want to repeat it.

My grandmother would have said I met a haint. My 21st century media-soaked brain immediately categorized it as an X-Files moment. The rational me is trying to figure out whether it was some obscure natural phenomenon or simply a fleeting hallucination. I think I’ll walk that trail again tomorrow and see what happens. If I run into Mulder and Scully, I’ll let you know.

Photo by Marcin Klapczynski from Wikimedia Commons.

Diospyros virginiana

2008-09-18T17:49:00.004-05:00

I've been craving the rich, gooey pulp of persimmons ever since I whined about all the "deceptively ripe-looking" ones in my picture post last Sunday. (Wild American persimmons are somewhat different from the Asian persimmons you find in the grocery store. If you are not familiar with them, you can read about them here.) Wild persimmons turn color and look tempting in early fall, but you'll get a nasty surprise if you bite into one. The flesh, especially right next to the skin, is so tannic it will pucker your mouth. If you eat more than a bite or two it will make you ill. It doesn't become fit to eat until it's more or less rotted, or after a freeze softens it. Then it becomes luscious and sweet as candy.

When I was out walking on Wednesday--in the big park where there are more critters than people--I kept coming across little piles of scat that were full of persimmon seeds. I don't know what sort of beastie left it there, since I'm not skilled at the art of scat reading. It might have been a skunk or a raccoon, or even a fox. Whatever it was, it had found some edible persimmons and I figured I could find some, too.

It didn't take me long to find a tree that had dropped a lot fruit. Most of it was unripe, and the pieces that were sufficiently decayed were generally too dirty to eat. I did manage to find a small handful of good ones, though, and I ate them right there, leaning up against the tree that produced them.

The skins were still treacherous with tannin. I split the fruit open from the stem and turned out the halves like an orange to expose the tasty part. I dug out the seeds with my fingers so I could enjoy the velvety pulp without having to spit them out. (I'm willing to follow shit to find food, but spitting just seems like bad manners, even out in the woods.)

Those few bites of persimmon tasted so good I smiled. I said a silent thanks to the mother persimmon tree, and to the filthy varmint who led me to her.

Photo from Vanderbilt University Bioimages page.

A familiar thrill

2008-09-16T18:32:00.004-05:00

It's finally turned cool here, which feels like a gift. The late summer heat had gotten so tedious, and that warm, damp air from Hurricane Ike was enervating, in spite of all the wind.

Bright weather like this brings a lot of extra people out to the parks. The trails are much busier than usual, even in the early morning. It's nice to see folks out enjoying the world but I prefer my solitude. I tend to follow less popular routes on days like these, and I'll stop a while beside the trail to let groups of hikers pass by so I don't have to listen to them chatting behind me. I was doing that this morning, watching the birds flit around in the brush, when I saw a fallen leaf caught in a spider web. A light breeze was blowing and the web was invisible, so the leaf seemed to be floating in the air, as if brandished by a ghost.

I felt a familiar thrill, looking at the archetypal fall image: the decaying leaf, the web, the suggestion of something otherworldly. Autumn is the season of memento mori, and yet it's not a quiet season, not still. There's a powerful energy that shimmers through the natural world as it surrenders the life and productivity of summer. Fall is not a time of death, but of dying, a process of transformation. I grieve to see so many beauties and pleasures disappear, but it's exhilarating to feel the force that has lifted up every green thing reverse course and rush back toward the earth.

Photo by James K. Lindsey from Wikimedia Commons

Picture post

2008-09-14T15:16:00.006-05:00

The remnants of Hurricane Ike blew through here today. We got a little rain, but it was mostly a wind event. As I walked the trail this morning, the trees were crashing against each other, littering the ground with pecans and hickory nuts still in their husks, green acorns and deceptively ripe-looking persimmons. I've always wondered why the wild foods that appear in autumn--the time of year when everybody needs to pack on some weight--require the most patience and work to eat. There's nothing I like better than hickory nuts, but when I think of the effort involved in gathering and shelling them, the packages of pecans and black walnuts in the supermarket start to look a lot more appealing.

I love mushrooms, too, but I never gather those wild, either--not so much out of laziness as fear. Even knowledgeable 'shroomers make mistakes sometimes, and I'm just not willing to risk agony or death for the sake of a taste experience. Seeing these tree ears almost tempted me to try it, though. As far as I know, they're the same as the tree ears that show up in Chinese food--"as far as I know" being the key qualifier.

That's another irony of the fall harvest: Not only are the good things difficult to get at, so much that looks pretty--from the colorful toadstool to the pokeberry--is poisonous. This fruit of this firethorn bush, which sits just off my carport, is no exception, despite what Wikipedia says. My dog Pearl, a great forager, snarfed down a few one day and was very sick for the next 24 hours. I thought about cutting the bush down after that, but the birds can eat the berries without harm, and they love them. The plant holds its fruit all winter and it's so nice to watch a mockingbird or cardinal chow down on an icy day, I decided the dogs and the firethorn would have to coexist.

This pretty flower is a wingstem, and it's not food for anything except butterfly larvae. It's in abundant bloom right now, along with the equally beautiful--but also poisonous--white snakeroot. Both plants are tall, standing 3-4 feet off the ground, and they create a soft border of yellow and white at the edge of the treeline.

All photos by me, for a change, taken at my house and at Edwin Warner Park in Nashville.

Resurrection

2008-09-09T18:59:00.003-05:00

I went out on the back porch yesterday afternoon to fill a hummingbird feeder, and I noticed a dead grasshopper floating in one of the dogs' water bowls. I let it float. The two big dogs, Nio and Kobi, inhabit the back yard, and the 5 gallon tubs of water I put out for them tend to collect a lot of debris: shed fur, bird poop, stray spiders, pollen, etc. Plus, Kobi is very fond of bathing her feet after she's been digging. If I was hung up about them getting pristine water, I'd be throwing out a bathtub's worth every day, so I restrict them to a fresh supply each morning unless things get truly nasty.

I went back out several hours later, and of course the grasshopper was still floating. It was a pretty little bug. I wanted to get a closer look at it, so I grabbed one of the dogs' nylon chew toys and fished it out--and damn if it didn't start moving. I laid the toy on a ledge and watched the little guy bring himself back to life.

He gave a small shake of each limb, then commenced rubbing his face and the base of his antennae with his front legs. He was very thorough. He'd pause for a second and then start rubbing again, as if he realized his styling job was not quite done. When he was groomed to his satisfaction, he flexed his torso a little, and then extended each hind leg, pointing it like a dancer warming up. At that point he seemed to realize he was precariously situated on the end of the fake bone, so he slowly moved himself off it onto the ledge.

The late afternoon sun was shining directly on him. The black and yellow stripes on his legs were beautiful. I leaned down to admire him, and just as I did he shook his wings and flung water in my face--Go away, kid, you bother me. So much for gratitude.

He settled himself along the outer corner of the ledge, clearly enjoying the warmth of the sun. If a bug can be happy, he was. I went back out to check on him an hour later and he had flown away.

Photo by Gothika from Wikimedia Commons,

Becoming the pokeberry

2008-09-04T20:50:00.002-05:00

One of the things I love about escaping the pavement is the loss of a sense of being separated from the world--you know, the "I'm in here, looking at everything out there" sensation that we live with most of the time. I don't mean the complete loss of self that I described in an earlier post. That's a rare event. I mean something much more subtle, so subtle I'm often barely aware of it except as a small, instinctive pleasure.

For instance, today I had been climbing a hill and the muscles in my legs were very tight, so I stopped at a big, dead cedar tree to stretch. I threw one leg onto a low branch that had been stripped and worn smooth by some combination of critters and the elements. I looked at the bare skin of my leg against the surface of the branch, and I felt an intuitive understanding that I was made of the same stuff as the wood--sort of a bonding moment with all carbon-based life.

A little later I came across a stand of mature pokeweed, and I couldn't resist pulling off some berries and crushing them in my hands, just to see the bright magenta stain. Sometimes I think the practice of painting the body was originally inspired by the desire to explore the source of the color, as much as to make a display of oneself for other people. Smearing that pokeberry juice over my hands was a real sensual pleasure--the feel of it, the sight of it, and the scent, too. Pokeberry juice has an alluring smell; a perfumer would say it's a bittersweet accord of hay, cucumber and orris. Sniffing it, I felt that moment of communion again. I didn't make it a literal communion by taking a taste, of course--I know better--but I admired my painted hands for the rest of my walk.

Photo of pokeberries by Rei at Wikimedia Commons.

My, it's quiet around here

2008-09-02T19:37:00.004-05:00

On the blog, I mean, not here in Tennessee. It's actually pretty noisy here with the sound of cicadas. This is the time of year when the birds love to feast on them. In addition to their usual non-stop song, you'll often hear the cackling protest of a cicada as it's carried away to its death.

The other sound around my house is the eerie buzz of the blue dirt daubers as they build their mud nests around our windows. I welcome the noise--it's strangely musical, and it means more of the venomous spiders that plague us will be wasp food.

I've been somewhat out of commission for a few days, hence the scarcity of posts. My time on the trail has mostly consisted of leaning up against trees, trying to summon the energy to get back to my car. I'll rally shortly, I'm sure. Autumn is almost here, and there's no better time to be out in the woods.

Photo by Nickaleck from Wikimedia Commons.

Mystery dance

2008-08-28T17:28:00.006-05:00

I got felt up by a daddy longlegs this morning.

I was standing in a little glade that's surrounded by pine trees. It's one of my favorite places to stop and just be when I'm out walking. The scent of the trees and the feel of all the pine needles underfoot is so soothing. I was lost in my bliss when I felt something tickling my ankle. I looked down expecting to see a tick, but it was a daddy longlegs parked on the tongue of my shoe, reaching up to feel my bare skin with his one of his fragile limbs.

He'd tap in one spot, then shift a little and tap in another, always touching my flesh, never the top of my sock. He was so absorbed in trying to figure me out that I didn't have the heart to brush him off. I just stood there and allowed myself to be examined. He kept at it for a minute or two, then seemed to come to a conclusion and abruptly departed.

I wonder what I was to him: Predator? Potential meal? Unusual plant? Impossible to know. I can't even say what he was to me.

Photo by Danny Steaven from Wikimedia Commons.

Castor canadensis

2008-08-25T19:46:00.004-05:00

I spent a little time watching the beavers this morning. (No snickering. If you can't keep your mind out of the gutter, go to the other blog.) There's a good-sized lodge in the shallow end of the lake that I've passed by many times, but the inhabitants have always been hidden away. This morning they were out--or rather, one of them was out, cruising around the lake and climbing up on his house to give me a suspicious stare. The other was inside the lodge. I could hear her in there, scratching around furiously and making querulous beaver noises. She sounded a lot like my mother in housework mode. Mr. Beaver appeared to be offering no domestic assistance at all. He was just enjoying a nice swim, and occasionally paddling over to irritate a lone Canada goose.

When I was a kid we had a family friend who trapped beavers to sell the pelts. I guess there's still a market for wild beaver fur, or at least there was then. I remember him driving by the house one day to show my dad a particularly large one he'd just caught. He lifted it up by the leathery tail and I touched the fur, which was incredibly soft and smooth. I was in my first hardcore vegetarian phase, so I was appalled that he was trapping (actually, it would appall me now)--still, I couldn't resist the touch of that fur. It wasn't just the sensual pleasure of feeling it. There was also a faint atavistic thrill of admiring the kill. I always think of that moment whenever I see a beaver or one of its construction projects.

The beavers weren't the only ones out and about this morning. A little ringneck snake--pretty and utterly harmless--slithered by my foot on its way to the water's edge. I saw a great blue heron take off just as I got to the lake, and there were a couple of very noisy turkeys playing some sort of game in the trees. They were perched maybe 12 feet up on different trees, and they'd alternate choppering down to the ground, then quickly swooping back up. The whirring of their wings was very loud, and they were taking down the maximum amount of foliage on their descents. All this was punctuated with brief outbursts of turkey chuckling. They kept at it longer than I was willing to stand there and watch. If they'd been humans I would have sworn they were high.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Intruders

2008-08-22T19:13:00.005-05:00

House cats are not a welcome sight in parks and nature preserves, and for good reason. They are rapacious alien predators that wreak havoc on the songbird population. I've certainly done my share of preaching to people about not letting their cats run loose and not feeding feral cats--and yet, I have to admit, I always smile when I see a somebody's spoiled tabby creeping around in the woods enjoying an unauthorized adventure.

A couple of weeks ago I came across a fat orange kitty on a pretty isolated trail. It was very early in the morning and he was clearly in search of something small, furry and delicious. He was crouched in a hunting posture with his back to me, about to go after some unlucky varmint hiding in the leaf litter. He heard me and turned around with an expression of absolute outrage on his face. Then he lumbered off through the trees projecting that particular air of disgust for the human race that only cats possess.

In all the time I've spent hiking, I don't think I've ever seen a dog wandering through the woods on its own. Dogs, whether they're strays, escaped pets or truly feral, just aren't interested in getting away from it all. Left to their own devices, they seek people, garbage and other dogs--not necessarily in that order. Cats, on the other hand, are in the woods to escape from people and to kill things. In other words, they're there for the same reasons we usually are. Personally, I leave the hunting to my gun-toting neighbors, but I completely understand the cat's desire to be where humans aren't. I always feel a little sorry when I intrude on a prowling cat's solitude. We're kindred spirits, unable to resist the lure of a place that would be better off without us.

Photo by רוליג from Wikimedia Commons.

Going nocturnal

2008-08-19T19:55:00.006-05:00

As the days grow shorter, I sometimes find myself out on the trail before sunrise. This morning I got an especially early start, so it was quite dark in the woods. Some of the places I walk are pretty heavily traveled and there are plenty of other early risers around, but today I was someplace a little more remote. There wasn't a soul around but me...and whatever it was that went crashing through the trees at the sound of my approach.

I love the little thrill of uncertainty the darkness brings: Was that a squirrel? A deer? A skunk? A person? It could be anything, and the fact that there's no way of knowing presents a small challenge. I can decide to be uneasy, possibly even retreat to the safety of my car until the sun's up--or I can let go of my attachment to clarity and try to join the murky current of the night.

Moving through the darkness is much like being in the water. You're in another element, one that's less familiar but not unnatural. Consciousness shifts to accommodate the different sensations, the different requirements for navigating the environment. You feel the earth, roots and rocks underfoot more distinctly than you ever do in the light--you have to if you don't want to wind up sprawled on the ground. Your visual field is reduced to a few feet, so distance gives you only sound. Curiously, that makes both sight and hearing more acute.

There's a wonderful feeling of being awake that happens only in the dark. It's a kind of exaltation, a transformed sense of possibility that is unavailable in the well lit world.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
(Companion post at BitterGrace Notes)

The curse of Eve

2008-08-17T19:29:00.003-05:00

This is a photo of our apple tree. She's dying in childbirth. She stands right behind our house, so we can look out the kitchen window and enjoy the blooms in the spring, and watch the birds and deer that come to feast in late summer. The first few years we lived here she bore a tremendous amount of fruit and we were careful to keep her pruned. She was already an aging tree and her trunk was dotted with sapsucker holes, but she was basically healthy. She did well even in drought years, since she had the good fortune to be placed near the field line.

Unfortunately, our second apple tree fell to the borers seven years ago, and since apple trees have to cross-pollinate, the elderly survivor went barren. She still had gorgeous flowers every year, but produced just a handful of apples. Our neighbors planted a few apple trees near her and we hoped for more offspring, but even when theirs got big enough to flower, ours didn't conceive. We figured she just didn't have it in her any more, and we didn't bother with pruning because it seemed like a pointless expense.

This spring she flowered more spectacularly than she ever has. I posted a picture over at BitterGrace Notes, which you can see here. The bees were swarming over her like mad, but we still didn't expect any results. How wrong we were. As if to make up for all the barren years, she's produced an especially abundant crop of apples. Every branch is laden with big clusters of fruit--and that's the problem.

The old branches can't take all that weight, and the tree is literally falling apart under the burden. She's lost 4 big branches--one took down the phone line--and she may lose yet more. Dave has been out there cutting and trying to forestall more damage, but it looks as if it's too late. The core of the tree is weakened and it's not likely she'll just bounce back from this. Plus, all these openings in the bark invite pests, which will only weaken her further. We could spray for that, but I worry about the birds.

So, it's a sad situation--partly our fault, of course, but as I said, she was already old, and fruit trees never seem to last long in this part of the world. If she goes, when she goes, I'll miss her. One of the best memories I have of living here is seeing a dozen bright cardinals perched on her snow-covered branches one January morning.

Being and moss

2008-08-13T20:37:00.002-05:00

I was doing my “signal to noise” exercise at the lake this morning, trying to pick out all the voices I could hear: cicadas, crows, wrens, jays, squirrels, woodpeckers, etc. It’s actually harder than you might expect. The critter sounds meld together like the instruments in an orchestra. Your ear gets hooked on a particular pitch and deafens you to the others. I had probably been listening carefully for more than a minute before I heard a cricket which had actually been chirping like mad the whole time.

While my ears and brain were engaged with listening, I saw a pretty patch of moss, and I crouched down to run my hand over it. I did it absent-mindendly, the same way you might finger the fabric of your clothes, or pet the cat when it rubs against you. Somehow my intense awareness of sound shifted itself to the sight and feel of the moss, and I experienced one of those moments of pure consciousness. There was no sense of separation between me and the thing I perceived. There was no sense of “me.” There was just the event of perception.

I’ve had those moments before, but usually after meditating or doing ritual. Ordinary life doesn’t produce them very often—at least, mine doesn’t. It’s such a joyous thing, a little glimpse of perfect freedom.

The spell was broken by the arrival of a solitary duck on the lake. He flew in and commenced diving for his breakfast. I started counting off how long he stayed submerged with each dive—One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi. He averaged 25 seconds. Try holding your breath for 25 seconds. It’s a nice little stretch of time. I always marvel at the way waterfowl move between the elements.

Photo by Dick Mudde from Wikimedia Commons

Where have all our hummers gone?

2008-08-12T20:17:00.003-05:00

Well, not all the hummers. I do have perhaps a dozen who are visiting my feeders, and the dry spell we've had has encouraged them to spend a lot of time squabbling over the food. Most years, though, I'd have at least 2 or 3 times that many. By mid-August I'm usually measuring my weekly nectar production in gallons, not quarts. The population does vary from year to year, but we've been in this house for a decade, and this is the slowest hummer season by far. This afternoon I finally got around to doing a quick Web search to see what other folks are saying, and sure enough, lots of people are noticing a dearth of hummingbirds.

This kind of population drop-off happens with a lot of bird species. A few years ago everyone was concerned about the reduced numbers of bobwhites, and I have certainly seen fewer of them here. The reasons for a species' decline are hard to determine, but it seems likely that the hummers are victims of last year's drought. I had a reasonable number of hummingbirds come through here during migration in 2007, but they had to get through a lot of drought-stricken territory on their way south, and there simply may not have been enough food along the way to sustain them all.

One consolation is that the hummingbirds I do have this year are very pushy and entertaining. The other day I was reading a book on the porch and two flew right up to me and hovered in front of my face. Another one harassed me while I was picking tomatoes. I love that. I hope they're all feisty enough to make it through their long journey, and come bug me again next year.

Photo of rufous hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus) from Wikimedia Commons.

(The rufous hummer is not considered native to Tennessee, but it does stray here pretty often. One was banded in my yard several years ago. Click here for this guy's page at the Cornell Ornithology Lab.)