THE SLOW WALKER

Dan North, a retired journalist who lives in Jersey City, has been a member of URWA since 1996. He discovered Fairview Farm in that year while bicycling past on Larger Cross Road. When he rode down to explore, he loved what he saw and has been coming back to wander around ever since. We are pleased to feature his essays here on our web site and in “Headwaters,” our quarterly newsletter.

THE TRICKSTERS

As I cross a wintry hilltop field, a dozen large black birds flap up into the wind from their roosts in the edge oaks. Crows, I assume, but then I hear a guttural croak that is definitely not a caw. Looking for a distinctive diamond-like tail, I confirm that among the black shapes is a pair of ravens. The crows re-settle, but the ravens have decided to put on a show. They soar in giant circles, then close their wings and arrow down to tree-top height. They level themselves and go into 90-degree tilts that result in abrupt U-turns. They tumble and grapple as though in play. Standing delighted in mid-field, I begin to imagine the acrobatic display is for my benefit, and I’m flattered. After all, these are ravens, worshipped or feared around the world for their superior intelligence. Back in the woods, the crows are complaining noisily. The ravens, which are slightly larger and have sturdier beaks than crows, occasionally muster up halfhearted rasps in return. They definitely don’t feel threatened. Comparing the two sets of birds, I remember reading of an experiment in which crows and ravens were caged on roosts from which meat hung on strings. Though the crows used their beaks to pull the strings partially up to the roost, they could never raise the meat high enough to get it. Each time, they dropped the string to try again. But the ravens, realizing that after each pull they could secure the shortened string with a talon while getting a new beak hold on it, were successful. At home, I leaf through Richard Nelson’s wonderful book “The Island Within.” Nelson tells of the Koyukon people of central Alaska who believe ravens lead hunters to prey knowing that after a kill the abandoned carcass will provide leftovers. For the Koyukons, as for many Native Americans, the raven was the ancestral trickster god. And in a refreshing alternative to our human-centric view of the world, Nelson says, the Koyukons believe the raven god “created humans to be most like himself.”

Copyright Dan North, 2008

Archived Essays

January - WISE OLD OWLS

It’s still dark on a January morning when a pair of great horned owls wakes me. Who-whooo, who-whooo, who-who-who-whooo. One owl seems right outside my window, the other further back in the woods. They’ve been courting since November and the female is near egg-laying time. White-splotched droppings sometimes give away owl roosts, but I’ve never looked for these owls. I’m just as happy hearing anonymous hootings and letting my imagination make the pictures. Maybe it’s the big eyes, or the judicious, sweeping gaze, or the flat, near-human face. Maybe it’s the mysterious night vision or the silent flight muted by unique down-fringed feathers. Perhaps it’s the uncanny hearing caused by asymmetrical placement of the ears that helps the owl judge where faint rustlings come from. Whatever the cause, owls fascinate humans. In “One Man’s Owl,” the naturalist Bernd Heinrich tells how he rescued a great horned owlet when its mother was shot. The little bird bonded with him and, when full grown, attacked humans it saw as rivals for his affection. When the owl raked Heinrich’s wife with its fierce talons, she warned him it was her or the bird. The owl stayed and the marriage ended. Recently, my wife and I wandered into the Belvedere Hotel in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon district. In the Owl Bar, a former speakeasy once frequented by the writer H.L. Mencken, three illustrated stained glass panels above the back-bar contain these verses: “A wise old owl sat on an oak. The more he saw the less he spoke. The less he spoke the more he heard.” We asked the bartender if there had been a fourth panel. He said it had been planned but never constructed. But, he added, the poem ends, “Now wasn’t that a wise old bird.”

December - A BALLET OF SWANS

Up ahead, a many-gabled McMansion the size of a small hotel looms out of the overcast morning. Its close-cropped lawn resembles a golf course. Other nearly identical houses line the road beyond. Their mailboxes have numbers but no names. No humans are in sight. I walk on, wondering where the people are and whether any have come outside this morning to sniff the damp unsettled air. From afar comes the hoarse finger-pointing caw of a crow. Then many more join in. A congress of crows, I think, musing over how rich our language is in collective nouns for birds. Later, at home, I look up some of them: a convocation of eagles, a parliament of owls, a conspiracy of ravens. A quarrel of sparrows, a mustering of storks, a squadron of pelicans. A ballet of swans, a charm of goldfinches, a bouquet of pheasants. Whoever dreamed these up had to have spent time outdoors absorbing the essence of the creatures they shared the world with. Language is archeological, containing layers deposited by long obsolete ways of life. Will phrases like a trouble of hummingbirds or a murmuration of starlings vanish as the current younger generation continues its indoor love affair with the electrical outlet? I read further and come across some recent fanciful additions from current birders who, I like to think, may have made bird collectives into a parlor game: A deck of cardinals, a gulp of swallows, a hangover of red-eyed vireos, even an incontinence of yellowlegs. These may never appear in the Oxford English Dictionary. But at least they suggest someone’s left the TV and computer behind and tramped past the McMansions into the woods. Re-reading this and detecting a holier-than-thou tone, I have a disclosure: The phrases used here came from the Internet. If you’re interested, Google “collective nouns for birds.”

November - DANCE OF THE DEAD

On this clear, crisp November day, there’s a cathedral feeling to the park-like oak grove I’m sitting in. The leaves still on the branches form a brown ceiling in the canopy high above. The lower branches are already nude, and some combination of shade, browsing deer and acidic oak soil has eliminated almost all the customary understory. The result is a vast amphitheater of open sightlines. Mature white, red and pin oak trunks stripped of their greenery can no longer hide the truth: they are blemished by dead branches, lightning gashes and woodpecker holes. But while time has taken its toll, these tall trees endure with a stolid dignity. A light breeze comes up, and single leaves start down from the high canopy. Each makes its own acrobatic path. Here’s a diagonal swoop, a dizzy spiral, a corkscrew. There’s a lazy zigzag, a stutter step, a curlicue. Some leaves do a brazen flounce or a rhythmic figure-skating weave. Others, caught temporarily by intervening twigs, do a hesitation tease. One leaf plummets straight down as though in a rush to meet its fallen sisters and brothers on the forest floor. If a trail were left visible of each falling leaf pathway, these woods would be decorated with a tangled tapestry of energy. And that intertwined tapestry would document thousands upon thousands of last dances – dances of death. Certainly, life in its current form has ended for each descending leaf. But as I inhale the rich, dried apricot smell of damp dead leaf duff around me, and as I look around at the flawed but noble oak trunks that feed on this decay, the dance I’ve been watching seems not a sad ending but a seamless and continuing celebration.

October - GREAT GODDESS OF DECAY

I’m on my knees at the base of a large white oak. Morning rays of sunlight slant through the hillside forest, dappling the huge fungus before me. In English it’s a hen of the woods, in French poule des bois. But its Japanese name is best: maitake, or dancing butterfly. Perhaps the name comes from the shimmering, rippling look of the edges of the bushy cluster’s overlapping fronds. The fungus in front of me is two feet wide, bug free, and a creamy white on the underside of its yellow-brown caps. It smells mildly of the earth. With my pocket knife, I carefully cut leaf-like pieces and clean away specks of soil and bark. Fresh or frozen, this is going to make many omelets and soups in the cold months ahead. Chinese and Japanese herbalists have long sought maitake for what they believe are its immune-enhancing and cancer-preventing properties. I look for it out of a mixture of greed and reverence. Few other mushrooms provide such tasty abundance. And kneeling before this specimen, I feel I’ve been given a gift from the earth. Finding it was a pure, child-like pleasure, and eating it will feel almost a sacrament. Of course, the wrong mushroom can kill you, but over the years I’ve stuck safely to a few edible varieties about which I’m certain. These include maitake, boletus, oyster mushrooms, sulfur shelf, puffballs and black trumpets. A couple of walks with the New York Mycological Society broadened my repertoire. My co-walkers were a generous bunch, eager to share their knowledge and not given to self-importance. I used to brand serious mushroomers as dour, furtive and territorial. But I was wrong. Here’s a stanza from a song written for the Society’s 1965 annual banquet and reported in a recent Society newsletter:
“Deep, deep in the murky shadows, there where the slime most creeps With joy the stout mycologist his pallid harvest reaps. Mycology! Mycology! Great Goddess of decay!”

September - FATE

Shafts of morning sunlight penetrate to the laurel and striped maple understory beside the path, creating a glistening, shimmering maze that stops me in my tracks. Looking more closely, I see a dozen dew-laden spider webs reflecting the golden sunshine as they undulate in barely perceptible air currents. A moth comes flittering through the glitter, then a mosquito. I feel like applauding them for having run such a sparkling gauntlet. Looking closer at one of the webs, I see it’s vertical, about four inches in diameter, and fixed to adjoining twigs by a dozen structural rays. Each of these structural members is connected to its neighbor by about 20 concentric cross-pieces. The result is a series of pie-shaped wedges emanating from a dense center occupied by a motionless brown spider. Its body is less than an inch across, most of it consisting of eight arched legs. As I edge closer the spider retreats, finally flattening itself on the underside of a laurel branch a couple of feet away. We wait. Presently a fly the size of a grain of rice lands on a twig an inch from the web and begins preening. First it cleans its rear legs, then its front ones. I feel a strange affinity with the spider. We’re aware of death’s proximity, while the fly seems oblivious. The spider creeps back to within a few inches of the web. We wait again. I feel a tension building within me. The actors here are smaller than me, but the theme is universal and deadly serious. I admire the spider and its magnificent silken web. The hunter deserves its reward. On the other hand, I’m not sure I want to see the fly die. All I seem able to do is watch, fascinated. After 10 minutes, the end comes. It’s an anti-climax. The fly simply turns its back on the web and flies away. I follow it with my eyes. When I look back, the spider is gone. The drama is over. I move on. Only after a few minutes of brisk walking does the tension within me dissipate and the sparkling, dewy spider webs again become simply beautiful.

August - LIVE AND LET LIVE

The August woods have become a green jungle. On this still, hot day it seems like all the universe is thrusting upward, jostling for a share of the sun. Pausing next to a small brook, I notice a pin oak festooned with vines. Two strands of wild grape, each a couple of inches thick, hang out of the canopy 10 feet above my head. Bittersweet vines climb up one of them while Virginia creeper twines around the other. On the oak itself, hairy tendrils of poison ivy cling to the bark while their bushy, shiny leaves advance skyward. Everything is writhing, twisting, squirming up, up, up. But despite their similarities, I notice myself placing the climbers in judgmental categories. I like wild grape because of the tart jelly I make from its fall fruit. I approve of Virginia creeper because I anticipate with pleasure its autumnal crimson. But I regard bittersweet as a difficult to eradicate garden pest, and harsh childhood lessons have taught me to shrink from poison ivy. Somehow, as I rank all this rising vegetation on my little scoreboard, the folksong “Barbara Allen” comes to mind. In it, Sweet William, spurned by hard-hearted Barbara, sickens and dies. Stricken with remorse, Barbara soon afterward falls ill and follows him into the churchyard cemetery. “From his heart grew a red, red rose, And from her heart, a brier.” There it is, our harsh rush to judgment enshrined in folk memory. But the song doesn’t end there. Something grander takes over: “They grew and grew by the churchyard wall, Till they could grow no higher Until they tied a true lovers’ knot The red rose and the brier.” A higher morality here. Higher than judgment, higher than condemnation, higher than punishment. The old sweet melody, the blue, blue sky, and the implacable, upthrusting, wriggling, amoral vines are sending a message. They’re saying all we want to do, all of us, is to survive and have our moment in the sun.

July - FRAMES

At the edge of a high pasture, a hole through the down-sloping July foliage reveals the Hudson River curling, U-shaped, around the base of Storm King Mountain. If I want the center of my view to be a church steeple poking through the greenery in the village of Cold Spring or the horizontal cut of old Route 9W across the face of Storm King, I move two steps to the left. If I want the curving river leading to the promised infinity of Dutchess and Ulster County farmland, I take two steps to my right. For a focus on the bold majesty of the mountain itself, two steps back. I possess the ability to frame the view I want. This point was driven home even more precisely in a recent outdoor art exhibit in these very fields. On this spot, a two-dimensional house wall was erected with a picture window facing the river view through the trees. Visitors looking through the window could choose what aspect of the view they preferred just by where they stood. Framing the issue – politicians and debaters do it all the time. Turning my back on the view up the Hudson, I cup my hands into a rectangle and take a new look through them at the meadow I just crossed. There’s a perfectly symmetrical pin oak in its center. Raising my frame, I see oak leaves rustling gently against a peaceful blue sky with puffy cumulus clouds drifting by. Comfort and harmony. Lowering my frame and moving it to the right, I include a large dead white ash tree, its bare branches speaking of death and decay. Moving my frame to the left, my pin oak and its shadow create a counterpoint of light and dark that somehow incorporates both previous images. Each vision is real. Every moment of every day, I get to frame which of them I choose.

June - STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN

“We are none of us good enough for the sweet earth we have, and yet we dream of heaven.” - Edward Abbey

Last night’s thunderstorm has left an early morning mist across the highlands. I wander through the oaks and mountain laurel, passing through slanting columns of light from the rising sun. Some look solid enough to invite me to climb on and shinny up to their source. Our language is rich in images inspired by this illusion. Just in the realm of song, think of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” Glenn Miller’s “Stairway to the Stars,” and George Gershwin’s “Stairway to Paradise.” Along my path, one bright diagonal ray illuminates a white cloud of laurel blossoms. These June marvels, now at their apex, dot the highlands in huge virginal patches. Heavy after last night’s storm, the flowers droop and glisten with a fresh purity. Violent rain and hail have knocked some blossoms to the ground, where, crumpled amongst the leaf litter, they resemble dropped popcorn on a movie theater floor. But most of the blossoms remain on the tall shrubs, as dense and beckoning as the Milky Way. I examine a large one at eye level. It’s an inch across with a yellow-tipped female pistil stalk waving high above a ring of 10 arched brown pollen-tipped male stamens. A perfect ring of tiny purple dots circles the base of the stamens at the throat of the white blossom. Stepping back, the effect of millions of these lovely flowers is like a field of June snowdrifts. For a moment, I wonder whether our songs directing us up the sunny staircase have it wrong. Instead of gazing skyward, we can find the stuff of dreams right here on Mother Earth.

May - TOLSTOY’S OAK

The temperature dipped last night into the high thirties, but this morning the May sun is warm. As I walk through an upland meadow I inhale the sweet spring smell of bruised grass. The sky is blue and cloudless, the air pure and clear. Birdsong surrounds me. Towhees, ovenbirds, red-eyed vireos. The upward trill of a prairie warbler. The burble of nesting bobolinks. From above, I hear the staccato kekekeke of a surprisingly high-flying male marsh hawk. I reach a rocky hilltop and lie on my back. Above me is the spreading branch of a chestnut oak, its catkins and half-grown leaves a kaleidoscope of flickering breeze-tossed colors. In direct sunlight, the toothed young leaves are a bright yellowish-green. Shadowed, they turn olive. The branch is in constant motion, a jangling sparkle against the pale blue backdrop of the huge sky. I watch as though the whole world is concentrated right here. Eventually I remember a favorite sequence from “War and Peace” that begins when a bitter and disillusioned Prince Andrei passes a battered and gnarled old oak in early spring. The big, dour tree is bare, its scarred bark an apparent rebuke to the hopeful young birches that are already leafing out. “The oak is right, a thousand times right,” thinks Prince Andrei. But six weeks later, after overhearing teenaged Natasha exult over the beauty of the moonlight, he encounters the same oak on his way home. It’s transfigured by green new foliage, the scars and imperfections hidden like forgotten old doubts and sorrows. “Seized by an unreasoning spring-time feeling of joy and renewal,” he remembers all the best moments of his past. “No, life is not over,” he decides.

April - Purple Martin Palace

Leslie Christofferson loved purple martins. He loved them so much that in 1935 he built a six-foot high, 500-pound, 112-apartment, 14-sided, cypress and tin, red-domed, green and white purple martin birdhouse. He set the birdhouse atop an 18-foot pole on his blueberry farm in the Pine Barrens of South Jersey. When Christofferson’s neighbors weren’t decoy carving, mistletoe gathering, quilting, oystering, cranberry farming, charcoal making, mossing, boat building or harvesting salt hay, many of them also made purple martin houses. They did so because in those days before widespread use of chemical pesticides, they welcomed birds who ate insects. Purple martins, the largest of the swallow family, are voracious eaters of insects and were believed to be especially fond of mosquitoes. But none of Christofferson’s neighbors built with the part-time carpenter’s elaborate ardor. In a 1985 newspaper interview, Christofferson recalled waiting for his purple martins to return each spring from their wintering grounds in Brazil to the verandas he’d built in front of each of their 112 doorways: “You’d have the same ones year after year on the same date. I could look out April the fifteenth and not see a bird. …After a bit you’d see way up there, maybe one or two birds. Way up in the air. Then the next day, half a dozen. Next day 25 would come in. See, they’d go back and give the sign, ay – all’s clear. They’d bring their families with them. You’d be surprised what personality they’ve got. The males sit out on them porches on a hot night. They were never in the houses, you know. You’d go out there, say, in the evening when the moon was bright. And they’d lean over and talk to you. Oh, beautiful songs they have.” Leslie Christofferson’s Purple Martin Palace is part of the permanent exhibit at the Noyes Museum of Art on Lily Lake Rd. in Oceanville, N.J. The museum abuts the Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge.

March - BULLETIN FROM THE FRONT

On this pond deep in the woods the rotten March ice is still thick. Its surface is cratered with dark brown oak leaves that for months have absorbed the sun’s rays and settled into mirrored depressions. At the shore several feet of open water tell of the odd power of darkness to augment sunlight. The murky, shallow bottom at lake’s edge has captured enough pale sunshine to liberate this narrow moat. But it’s the edge of the ice I’m watching. That’s the front, the battleground, and today spring is winning. Every few seconds a silver bubble, lighter than water, scurries along the ice’s underside and pops free at the open border. Trapped air, caught in pockets as the pond froze in November, now released as the surrounding ice melts. I see a bubble keep its shape for 20 seconds on the pond’s surface, then shatter. The tiny percussion radiates ripples that in turn are reflected in larger shimmering shadows on a small patch of sandy bottom a foot below. For nearly half a year these bubbles waited. Now what? There’s a light southerly breeze. Did it catch the content of my bubble and strain it through the high blueberry bushes that ring the pond? Sun on the ice must be sending thermals high into the cloudless blue sky. After my bubble is swept up into the high winds, where will its components be tonight? Hackettstown? Port Jervis? Maybe Albany or Montreal? And what of its five-month entrapment? A bit of breeze, incarcerated until sunny emancipation. Did it offer a long-imprisoned odor? Burning fall leaves or rotting mushrooms? In Paul Bunyan’s camps in the North Woods the winters were said to be so cold that the loggers’ curses froze upon utterance and were not heard until spring thaw. Maybe if I listen hard enough the next popping bubble will release the honk of last fall’s south-flying geese.

February - THE GIFT OF MENTORS

A foot of new snow covers the ground this crisp February morning, and breaking a trail on my path through the woods is hard going. But the path joins a wood road and my way is made easier by a trail left by cross-country skiers. Grateful for my now-unencumbered footsteps, I find my mind roaming backward to those who, like the now-departed skiers, have made my outdoors road easier. There were crouching skaters and gliding skiers I tried to mimic. Birders who let me stare through their spotting scopes at Eurasian widgeons and harlequin ducks. Hunters whose reverence for their quarry reversed my judgmental preconceptions. Fishermen who changed to dry flies just as the mackerel were making the identical decision. There were important mentors. Nelson, my first managing editor, took me snowshoeing up New Hampshire mountains, pulling a toboggan laden with ice-fishing gear to remote ponds full of perch and pickerel. I still remember the smell of wet wool and broken hemlock branches from my first such outing. On another venture one bright October day 50 years ago, Nelson and I entered the woods prepared to catch trout and shoot ruffed grouse, or as it’s pronounced in that part of northern New England, paa-trich. We made a fire and ate trout for lunch and returned home for a supper of partridge garnished with boletus mushrooms picked en route, apples from the abandoned orchard where Nelson shot the bird, and beechnuts extracted from its crop. After that, it was hard to keep me out of the woods. I soon realized that without my mentor present I had to keep my eyes and ears open. In the end, how much I saw and enjoyed was up to me. Or, as my birder son Dave told me when I asked him how to tell immature herons apart: “There’s a sure-fire way, Dad.” He paused as I leaned in for the secret. “Go birding more often.”

January - STORIES IN THE SNOW

There are stories in the snow, but too often I can’t read them. I’m thinking this as I perch on a boulder in a cathedral-still hemlock grove. Under the snow-drooped branches, the new, powdery surface is crisscrossed by rabbit and squirrel tracks. Here and there something has dug down to the leaf litter, scattering it around the narrow excavations. Hemlock cones and bits of bark pepper the snow’s surface. Occasional smaller tracks suggest mice. Who was looking for what? Did they find it? Are they watching me now? Nearby stands a 30-foot upright pole, a dead maple riddled with woodpecker holes. On the snow in a five-foot radius around the tree lie tufts of tan dead grass, obviously wafted down from above. Was a squirrel or bird nest raided? Was the raider a hawk, or an owl, or a weasel? What was the outcome? The stubby-tailed winter wren I watched a few moments ago, hopping like a wind-up toy from rock to rock in a rushing hillside stream. What was it hunting? And the acorn I saw fitted snugly into a fresh woodpecker hole in a nearby red oak. Who put it there? A red-breasted woodpecker? A hairy? A pileated? The hermit thrush I just saw in a tangled low marsh. Why did it winter over? Was it too old and weak to migrate? Or just lucky to have found a nice sheltered larder? If I stayed here long enough, I’d have some answers. But I rarely do. I get cold or hungry or late for an appointment. I want to feel part of this scene, but today everything reminds me that, except for the occasional transcendent moment, I’m a visitor.

December - A DISTANT SHINING CITY

A freezing rain two nights ago coated the trees at the higher elevations with ice. It’s a still gray day, and I walk a gradually ascending wood road into a cross-hatched filigree of dull silver. Below, the bare trees are ice-free. They have the vertical feel of snowy winter woods dominated by up-thrusting black trunks. Here, the feel is more horizontal as ice-drooped twigs and branches spread laterally. At eye level the shrub and sapling branches wear frozen stalactites up to an inch long. Each represents an interrupted water flow to be resumed when sunshine rewinds moisture’s stopped clock. I sit in a forest opening listening to the dee-dee-dee of chickadees and the furry cluck of nuthatches. How long can these little tree gleaners go without access to their food source? In the brooding stillness, I imagine the wild tinkling if a wind were to blow up. Or the dazzle if the sun broke through. A red-bellied woodpecker taps. A cylindrical ice casing drops from an overhanging twig. Its fragments on the ground look like transparent cinnamon sticks. Suddenly, a vagrant ray of sunlight bores through the gloom and illuminates a lacy patch of trees far up the hillside. The effect in these muted woods is electrifying, like a distant shining Camelot beckoning me forward. I imagine swampy moats and snorting dragons, winged horses and omniscient dwarfs, dreamy knights besotted by ruby-naveled princesses. To poets and mystics the extraordinary is part of everyday reality, and here and now it’s not hard to agree. Then clouds return to cover the sun and my turreted, sparkling kingdom vanishes. It becomes one again with the infinite icy patterns that stretch to the gray horizon.

November - HIGH WIND IN NOVEMBER

Leafy chestnut oak limbs below me billow and plummet in the roaring November wind like kelp in frenzied surf. Gusts reach furious crescendos that rattle dead branches. I look up uneasily for those that might blow off and hit me. It’s cold. I pull my hood over my wool watch cap and zip up my jacket. From my rocky outcropping 500 feet over the fields and streams below, the view is big. I see barns and silos, housing tracts and auto junkyards, a wooded, hill-scalloped horizon and a big blue sky crossed by fast-moving white and grey clouds. Occasionally the wind lapses into a murmur rippling through the ferns around the lichened boulder I’m sitting on. But peace lasts only a moment before the blowing cranks up again to howling, bellowing full force. Now and then a turkey vulture or a pair of crows coasts swiftly down the torrent below. I see no other birds. They’re wisely laying low. Each May I climb this hill looking for an annual clump of columbine. Two years ago here in January I was surprised by a tiny golden-crowned kinglet sitting in a cedar and issuing its thin, wiry call. The two of us listened to the cold breeze together. But there’s no columbine or kinglet today. Just the gale and the crows and the racing clouds. I’m not dressed warmly enough, and after a while I clamber carefully back down the jumbled rocky slope. Soon I’m back in the beeches, red oaks, ash and sassafras of the lower forest. The wind down here is just a mild breeze. Around me nuthatches, chickadees, juncos and an occasional bluebird go about their business, comfortable in the calm, filtered sunshine, oblivious to the turmoil and allure of the harsh and beautiful zone above.

October - SPLISH, SPLASH, I WAS TAKIN’ A BATH

From the little bridge over the brook I’m crossing I notice a lot of splashing and fluttering upstream. Through my binoculars, I see 20 or 30 cedar waxwings tightly packed into a few square feet at the muddy edge of the shallow water. A few are half-submerged, bathing in the cramped space allowed by other birds swarming around and over them. On the shore and in the air, would-be bathers are trying to usurp the spot occupied by the bathers at the center. Up and downstream, the placid water meanders beneath the fall foliage, undisturbed by waxwings. Why are they all clustered so tightly together, I wonder. At home I find an item in “The Birder’s Handbook” about “the selfish herd effect.” According to this theory, flocking together offers two advantages: safety in numbers and natural selection. Large flocks clearly reduce an individual’s exposure to predators. And just as little fish fight toward the middle of their school when big fish approach, and as sheep butt toward the herd’s center when harried by sheepdogs, so birds often compete for positions at the center of migrating flocks. Predators attack those on the fringes, thus eliminating the weakest and leaving the strongest to survive. At first glance, the squabbling waxwings, jammed together with no predator in sight, seemed almost pathetically ridiculous. But predators exist, and even if waxwings lack our notions of grace or generosity, it’s understandable that they remain vigilant against the unpredictable moment when talons, claws or fangs seek their flesh. Our own species’ version of the “selfish herd effect” is social Darwinism. And while we generally frown upon naked and unrestrained short-term self interest (butting into a supermarket line or deceiving a mortgage applicant, for instance), some believe that that frown masks our true – and species-enhancing – competitive nature. Those among us who live by this ethic might feel right at home as bathing cedar waxwings.

September - Goldfinches and Thistles

The shadows of the rolled hay on the new-mown hilltop are as sharp as the creases in pressed trousers. The air is still and clear, and in the bright September sun the purple flowers of a stand of roadside thistle look fixed in time, like they’ll never move again. But, of course, they will. A flash of brilliant yellow, and three goldfinches light on one of the domed flowers. Their yellow and black patterning is stunning against the thistle’s rich and vivid purple. I think of regal robes worn by popes and cardinals. I try to imagine the kinetic splashes in Kandinsky paintings. But the human hand can only mimic, never surpass, the clarity of the colors before me. The warm air stirs and I smell the tart odor of wild grapes from the vines behind the thistles. My senses on overload, I creep to within 10 feet of the gluttony-obsessed finches. With sideways flicks of their thick beaks, they tear through the blossoms to get to the thistledown beneath. They’re here to gobble the seeds buried in the fluffy white down. They finally notice me and burst up into the blue sky uttering their flight call, a rapid “ti DEE di di, ti DEE di di.” This sound has a practical purpose - it keeps undulating airborne groups of goldfinches together. But to my ear it’s the music of sheer exuberance. Shelley, addressing a skylark, says, “from thy presence showers a rain of melody.” Then, observing that human joy is always tempered with sadness, he asks, “Teach me half the gladness that thy brain must know.”

August - Blankets of Peace

As the crickets' soft autumn hum
Is to us
So are we to the trees
As they are
To the rocks and the hills
- Gary Snyder

Sitting on a shaded rock in an old pasture, I hear persistent high whistles coming from the field’s edge. I look up and, sure enough, there’s a pewee on a dead branch, preening itself. But some of the liquid, bending notes seem to be coming from the bird’s right. I can’t find a second pewee and decide to wait until it comes into view. It’s a sunny late-summer day. Thin cloud layers are driven north across a blue sky by a gentle breeze that rustles the oak leaves above me. The rolling, recently-mown field I’m in dips and billows like an ocean swell. Barn swallows swoop over it like shooting stars. I probe at the circling lichen on my rock, inspect my pants for ticks, watch a redtail catch a thermal. I drink from my water bottle, reflect on the shallow roots of the leaf-drooped bittersweet around me, admire the saucy red-orange of nearby fox grass. Soon I become aware of a steady multi-toned fly-bee-cricket drone. With surprising clarity, I remember the listless melancholy this timeless chorus could evoke when I was small. On certain days back then, its chords taunted me, announcing hot and lonely afternoons stretching monotonously on and on. I’d try to dispel my lethargy by hunting for raspberries, or racing twigs in a brook, or bouncing a ball against the side of the house. I needed activity to banish the voice of an indifferent world that seemed too big for me. Today, the insect buzzings are comforting blankets of peace, sent for me to rest among. The pewee conversation continues. I still don’t see a second whistler, but decide to trust that it’s there.

July - Black Vultures

BLACK VULTURES Picking blueberries in a high meadow, I happen to look up at just the right moment. Overhead pass three large black birds. They look like big crows with long necks. I know they aren’t turkey vultures – they’re too small and they’re doing too much flapping. Also, when gliding, their wings are flatter than the familiar V-shape of the turkey vulture. It crosses my mind that these might be black vultures, birds I’ve never seen before. But all that wing action seems inconsistent with being a vulture. I open my Peterson Guide at black vulture and bingo: “Note the quick labored flapping.” The larger turkey vulture, Peterson adds, “flaps wings less, soars more.” At home, I open my “Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior”. Bingo again. The three vultures I saw were flying high at mid-day. Black vultures, Sibley says, have an unfavorable wing area-to-bodyweight ratio and thus take to the air late in the morning, waiting for thermals to develop. While turkey vultures fly relatively low and locate carrion by smell, groups of gregarious black vultures fly higher and locate their next meal by sight – often the sight of feeding turkey vultures. Once again, bird books have given me that comforting feeling of reliable permanence I get when their descriptions match what I’ve seen. Cat-tails and hemlocks may be disappearing. Supermarket tomatoes no longer resemble the real item. Constitutional rights like habeas corpus apparently aren’t written in stone. And human activity threatens bird diversity in multiple ways. But if Peterson says the wood thrush sings a flutelike ee-o-lay, you can bet the farm that the ee-o-lay you just heard comes from a thrush with a rust-colored head. The nation and its wildlife may be on shaky ground, but at least on the level of Peterson, there’s still a small measure of order left in the universe.

June - BOBOLINKS AND US

As hayfields and cow pastures vanish around us, so do birds that nest in them. But late this spring I discovered a couple of pastures busy with nesting bobolinks. And I found myself fascinated by what seems to be a flaw in the design of these medium-sized songbirds. Breeding male bobolinks are the only American birds I know of that are dark below and light above. The camouflage of survival would seem to dictate that a bird blend into the sky from below and the ground from above. Breeding male bobolinks don’t. As I stood the other day by a fence row hawthorn and admired the white-striped back, black belly and yellow nape of a male bobolink above me, I came up with several possibilities. First, this color scheme is the way female bobolinks like it, and that’s that. Second, maybe there’s another payoff for the bobolink that I haven’t figured out. But finally, and most interesting to me, maybe nature just screwed up. It’s nice to think of the earth as a profoundly intricate web of relationships evolved over millions of years into a smoothly running perfection. But if that’s true, how do we explain how our species drives during rush hour? Or our consumption and environmental habits? Not to mention our politics. I know that certain seashells or ungulate horns have intricate, apparently random shapes that seem to serve no purpose and are perhaps even counter-productive. Continuing along those lines, maybe we and the bobolinks are simply ecological blunders. It’s a humbling thought, but as I listened to my hawthorn-top bobolink’s burbling song and watched him fly clumsily to his mid-field nest, I felt an odd complicity with him.

May - THE FLOWERS OF MAY

As I leave the highway and enter the trail, a patch of purple trillium displays its broad triple petals. Opposite is a big bed of columbine, its scarlet and yellow flowers hanging from delicate stalks. I pass between these spectacular displays and move through the laurel highlands. Ovenbirds, towhees, goldfinches and vireos sing. Chipmunks scold. But it’s the May flowers, with their perfumed message of desire and renewal, that command my attention. High blueberry bushes are covered with oval white blossoms that resemble tiny Tiffany lampshades. A nectar-seeking bumblebee clambers through a blossom’s fringed opening. It’s headed toward a cluster of yellow pollen-laden male stamens surrounding a white female pistil. As Barbara Kingsolver says, this time of year in the vegetable kingdom is all about getting pollen from the plants’ boy parts rubbed against the plants’ girl parts, and bees have quite a lot to do with it. In an opening ahead is a prickly barberry bush, its creamy red-veined blossoms and green leaves punctuated by occasional wizened red berries that have over-wintered. The old berries remind me of wrinkled chaperones urging caution on frisky girls, advice which will be joyously disregarded. And then, sure enough, I see a naked white barberry pistil, its ovaries already fertilized, its gaudy petals and once-insistent stamens dropped away. The undefended pistil is swelling gently on its patient path from fragrant flower to ripe, seed-laden fruit. In the distance I hear the cluck of a robin, now searching for protein-laden worms for its young, but destined along with catbirds, waxwings, cardinals and others to feast in the fall on berries just like this pistil will become. The naked, swelling pistil’s vulnerable dignity seems brave and determined to me. Its message seems to be that despite future dangers, it has a life-giving purpose from which it will not swerve. As I walk on I find myself remembering the first time I felt my first-born child kicking in his mother’s womb.
Copyright Dan North, 2008

April - SIXTH SENSE

On this foggy April morning the woods have a painterly three-dimensional feel. Black tree trunks up close loom large, but as they recede in the near-distance mist renders them grayer, paler, then finally invisible. The fog also heightens a sense of the vertical. Because flimsier surrounding twigs and shrubs are partially whited out, the upward thrust of thick black tree trunks dominates the scene. The tall trees remind me of heaven-pointing church steeples. As I walk through a world made fuzzy and smaller, I wonder how well my other senses might supplement today’s impaired sight. Passing a marsh, I sniff unmistakable early skunk cabbage. I scratch the bark of a black birch and its aroma transports me back to long-defunct drive-ins serving mugs of birch beer. Spring peepers are singing in the marsh, and I hear the two-note call of phoebes there to court and feed on the early insect hatch. If I couldn’t see at all, the music of the peepers and these little gray-brown flycatchers would lead me to water. I reach up for a cluster of hemlock needles. Remembering early experiments with hemlock tea, I pop the needles in my mouth, chew, and get an astringent taste that’s at first pleasant but quickly becomes too strong. A stream emerging from the edge of the marsh tumbles down a ten-foot white water cascade. The bare ledge on my side of the waterfall is inscribed with a foot wide channel, about six inches deep, that clearly is an overflow conduit for high water. Unlike the rest of the ledge, the channel is lichen free. Its shape is a rough semi-circle. I squat and touch the cold, hard rock. It’s grainy in the channel, but not as coarsely pebbled as the surrounding ledge. At the trough’s end, there’s a vertical drop back to the mainstream. Icy run-off must have plunged intermittently over this edge ever since the last glaciers receded. Above the clatter of the falling water, I hear the phoebe once again. Suddenly I feel sure that the ancestors of this very bird sang here 12,000 years ago when the miniature Yosemite Valley before me was first carved out.
Copyright Dan North, 2008