Missing the narrow fellow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.