Part 9
For life on land the power of the moment lies in a suspense which can kill. Another week of cold, with snow on the ground, and many more birds will die. Because this Temperate Zone, influenced by oceanic weather, attracts more land birds than otherwise might stay, there is a greater margin of arbitrary risk. The weaker individuals will die first, by a natural law, but all are subject to unusual violence. The comparatively mild coastal climate does not normally have a winter as bad as this one, although extreme conditions are no surprise in North America, and the risks vary for the lives exposed to them. One winter with exceptionally deep frost in the ground, hard winds, and little snow cover, is as dangerous to plants as a month of snow would be to the birds. And a mild winter may result in death or damage from belated storms and cold.
We talk of storms and the hazards of temperature as though nature were merely arbitrary, and inconvenience the essence of her plans. Being less self-sheltered, life subject to wild nature knows the extremes as standards of action. Living things are continually balanced between a bold summer and a demanding winter, where storms are the rule and risk is constant. They are unable to accept less. This terror has its pride.
_Death, Man Made_
Perhaps winter and death are complimentary, but the other seasons kill too, in their degrees of need and fulfillment. General association with death is so constant in nature that we could almost deny the validity of the word. Death, if it is essential to the consumption of energy, is at the least fuel for the fire of life and more likely an inseparable part of the fire itself. In the natural year it is all-pervasive and yet discreet and nearly invisible to us. We hardly pause on its behalf unless its presence becomes spectacular. To see a dead animal on the highway, whether or not it was killed by human agency, is not something most human beings care about, one way or another. This is not necessarily due to wanton disregard of life, or inhumane feelings, but because we retain an unconscious acceptance of death, as well as a natural ferocity--it is what is left of the animal predator in us that beats the stranded fish with a stick, or shoots at a bird simply because it is new to us. And yet, that death, which is so constant a part of the natural rhythm that we disregard it when we pass its evidence, may also become an obtrusive, isolated, and even obscene element when caused by human agency. Our technology does not represent such a mastery over nature that it is able to replace or assume nature’s ascendant ordering of things. We employ the methods of disaster with a heavier hand. Grace and accuracy of invention, abundance of means, are accompanied by an inordinate amount of plunder and pollution. In our power we are weak.
I think of the hundreds of water birds that I have seen this winter dying, starving, poisoned, or freezing to death, as a result of having their plumage soaked by waste oil from ships. Tankers, merchant vessels of all kinds, cause drifting oil slicks on the surface of the ocean waters when their bilges are dumped at sea, or when their tanks are washed out when approaching port. Oil wastes seem to have made serious inroads on some forms of marine life in some areas, not to mention their soiling of beaches and shore waters. The sea birds drift into oil slicks at night when sleeping, or may even seek them out, mistaking them for plankton slicks. Eiders, old squaws, scoters, loons, brant, auks, all birds of our winter waters, come by immemorial habit to these feeding grounds for fish, plankton, or water plants. And because of the enormous and growing human traffic in ships and machines they have become endangered by something for which nothing in evolution has ever prepared them. Their feathers are tarred by an enormous brush, wielded at random.
Almost any day that I visit the shore I find a victim. Out on the sand flats at low tide is a female eider duck, crouched down in such a way as to make me mistake her at first for a dark brown chunk of driftwood. When I walk up she stays there without moving, but her eyes are alive, out of an unknown depth of helplessness and misery. The bird is dying. Her feathers, which in the female eider, are a handsome reddish brown, are not naturally glossy any more, but they shine, sickeningly, with a heavy coating of oil.
Some black and white males, whose necks are beautifully tinted, or washed with green, as though they had taken it from some of the northern sunsets from which they came, are swimming out over the water. I see others, both male and female, scattered along the shore. They have come on land, pathetically enough, to get warmer, in the sunny but freezing winter air. Birds affected by oil pollution have their feathers so matted together that they no longer serve as insulation, and the cold strikes directly to their skins. Even a spot of oil no bigger than a fifty-cent piece may expose them and cause pneumonia. So the doomed sea birds huddle up against a sandbank, out of the wind, or they waddle into the water when I approach, or stand on rocks just offshore, vainly trying to preen dark smudges out of their feathers. Another effect of oil on plumage is to make the birds lose their buoyancy in the water, so that they swim half submerged, and when alarmed they are unable to take off but beat their wings and splash ahead with no result but further exhaustion. If the oil invades their digestive system, as they feed or preen, they are poisoned by it.
This winter the dying birds have been so conspicuous that many local residents have become aware of a situation which might otherwise escape their notice, although when it becomes really acute we may only recognize it by deduction, because some species of birds will be gone. It is reported that oil pollution has killed some 250,000 birds off Newfoundland this winter. The razor-billed auk is now thought to be virtually wiped out as a breeding bird in that area.
Some families in this area have tried to rescue a duck or an auk, having good feelings and a sense of responsibility. Success is none too frequent, since it depends on experience and great care in handling. It may take weeks to bring a bird back to normal vigor after it has been oiled. But the fact that a few individuals care enough to try is worth a thousand ships.
“Whoever deals you this death,” I think, looking at some shivering eider on the sands or finding its soiled remains, “cannot get by with saying: ‘This is just a bird.’” The bird retains that wild distance which always seems just beyond our grasp, and it is intrinsically wise. Nothing we do to it can alter its original kinship with nature. It is in harmonious balance with a complexity of which we are greatly in envy and to which our carelessness only makes us strangers.
_March_
_Restless Days_
Dormant vegetation is supposed to start awakening when the average mean temperature rises to 43 degrees, normally occurring in the northeast between April 1 and 15. Under unusually mild conditions, with the average minimum temperature lingering for some length of time above 32 degrees, growth begins sooner. This is of course a generality, a law of likelihood, which may be applied to an indefinite number of conditions. Spring may be spring, and winter winter, but March is a part of both February and April. During the warm days in February, the buds of the Mayflower or trailing arbutus begin to swell, while the skunk cabbage is steadily pushing up through frozen, marshy ground. Life does not recur after death so much as show its readiness; but in March the first obvious bursts of change begin to show, like those mountainous clouds coming up out of the west, with a fresh warm wind.
The huge clouds roll loose and fan upwards in the gold afternoon. Then the wind changes. A blowing, whispering snow comes out of the southeast, cruel to promise, blotting out the swelling buds, the feeling of release in the air, as if to say promise is nothing without what is not promised. Nothing is realized without the possibility of disaster.
“Ahh!” the indrawn breath of a storm, a swirling and seething to make life hide. The snow hisses incessantly into every corner and crevice. High-rolling, roaring tides push in. The storm rises to a mountainous capacity. The sea is fulsomely moaning, running under a white darkness. Comber after comber curls over, spills and plunges down, pounding the sands.
The wind seems to pause. It races violently as if to have another try at climactical energy. Then hail clicks down, spattering tree trunks and ground. The snow is turning to cold rain. We are getting “dirty weather.” I feel a load of anger and disgust in me that rivals the storm.
I am, to some degree, a subject of these changing days. I come out of a kind of hibernation of my own that might not be connected with the actual state of the weather, but it has its parallels. It is so with my own temper. I hold it for fear of being overwild, and then some outer wildness, a change of air, an adjustment to open sunlight, brings me to a free delight, a sense of opportunity that I thought was gone.
March may seem cold, raw, and gloomy for most of its duration, but it begins consistently to offer evidence of new things. A white moth flies up in the headlights of my car one night. A robin jumps down to the wet, matted grass of the lawn. I seem to catch a new note of triumph in a crow. The chickadees are playing, chasing, constantly flitting from tree to tree. They call and answer one another like so many bells. They have a call that is sometimes mistaken for a phoebe’s, but with three notes: “Fee-a-bee.” And their song has a single phrase: “Here pretty” with an occasional syncopated pause followed by: “Pretty, pretty.” Sometimes two of them sing at the same time, one on an upper and the other on a lower key.
A male blue bird, rare these days, perches on a wire, singing in sweet querulous tones, and I hear the continuous, talkative trill of a purple finch, a lovely casual song that comes from its throat like fast-dripping water.
Snow falls, or sleet, and the songs stop. The weather clears and the birds begin again, like chronometers of an underlying spring music. The sunlight glitters and I hear them again, just as I notice that the waters in the distance have changed from the hard blue of the winter and are streaked with green, as if filled with new veins of life. Color and music spring and change along with new numbers and demands, part of nature’s structure of love, a slowly increasing force, spreading out like a fan.
There is a reddening in knotty oak twigs. I notice the leaves on a dwarf clover plant, tentatively but surely uncurling. Small eels are dashing back and forth in an aquarium with a new excitement, nipping at their fellow inmates, a sunfish and a minnow.
This is the time of year that many animals start moving out of winter quarters, changing their range. On the highway I see dead muskrats that have been hit by cars, as well as some male gray squirrels. The squirrels sometimes dash back and forth across the road in a frantic kind of dance.
Frost still lies deep in the ground. As they have done throughout the winter, quail pipe high, across the swishing, roaring wind. But there is a new restlessness abroad. The air itself seems to change now and then to an easier, looser abandon. Cold days, arrestations, come, but in counterbalance to surges of allowance and release. Life is beginning to seek its opportunities.
I am impatient for spring, as raw, unseasonably cold weather continues, and then I see a dark little caterpillar on the road, or a mourning cloak butterfly, sprung out of hibernation. I hear a pair of mourning doves, cooing with slow measure and deliberation, long silences between. They seem to say something to me about attention. “What will come may not be, as yet. But we know when. And you might if you listened.”
If I listened, and if I watched, found each insect as it came out of hibernation, comprehended a tree as a living thing, beginning to stir and seek, followed the development of buds and roots, the unseen life that stirs in egg or chrysalis through every inch of ground.
There is, in common with the rest of the year’s revolutions, nothing neat or simple about the process of reawakening. It has started already. Raccoons in this area begin to breed in February and start foraging for their young in March. The great horned owl nests in January and February. During the dead of winter a few animals such as skates and barnacles start breeding in offshore waters. Variable reaction in this time of change is as complex as the order which controls it.
Hibernation itself, that mysterious state which is somewhere between death and sleep, differs in various species. Some mammals hibernate not because of outside conditions but because of internal changes in their blood stream, as if timed not to the weather but the year. Each life is cyclical, corresponding accurately to the circling of the globe, but in mode and terms it differs vastly. When the frogs begin to stir around a local pond, birds, independent of hibernation, move back from other climates. Late in March a few alewives swim into fresh water from the sea. Late in April large numbers begin to show up, at a time which only varies by a few days, year after year. Yet their arrival, like their growth and responses, is conditioned by any number of circumstances that are not only physically distant from us but may be remote as yet from scientific scrutiny. To realize that the slightest changes in temperature can affect whole worlds of life, and that this factor is only one of many, can make a man feel hopelessly inept.
So spring is not to come now, nor tomorrow, suddenly complete with shy warmth and flowers according to our expectations, but will take its periodic time, within a wide range and with enormous resources. By the same token, no spring comes pleasantly, without a certain amount of doom in its wake. A flock of male blue birds flies north too soon. They die during a severe snow storm or a week of extreme cold. Thawing takes place too suddenly for one form of life, and too quick a drop in temperature will kill another.
March is complex and March is in a rage, though I begin to feel a universal response, a gradual turn, in the ground, through the trees, down by the shore as the wind changes from tearing things loose to a peaceful low breathing. I smell salt things on the edge of motion, balanced on a tip of allowance. I hear what I am unable to see, stirring, tuning up across the land. The response may be hesitant or bold, delayed or premature, but it is coming. There is knowledge around me, even purpose, whether or not it is working in mindless ways. When I see sunlight playing on a blade of grass, I see the component parts of wisdom. Then the grass joins the squirrel in its dance. Eels join men in restlessness and speculation.
_An Extravagance_
We built a small concrete pool on our place, which is locally known as Dry Hill, and so brought the life of water a little closer to us. In the summertime the pool nurtures a migrant population of green frogs. I have put nothing in it except some sunfish that subsequently died, so that the occasional signs of new life it shows, like a water strider, or some nymph or larva of an insect that flew by and deposited its eggs, always strikes me as a dispensation from the sky. It is a proof of life’s pressing, inescapable need to drive into every opening.
Thinking of draining the pool and cleaning it out for the approach of spring, I find a life so surprising and sudden as to take all human propriety out of my system. There, on the brown, algae-fringed edge of the pool, something moves, telling me that this well of water is more than ornamental. Light olive-colored insects, scum-covered, goggle-eyed, stalk on the edge, or skate very slowly through the water--the strangest kind of revelation. What could I clean up now without a sense of shame?
The dragonfly larva, or nymph, which turns into an adult after a series of molts, is a fantastic-looking creature. I take one out of the pool and put it in a jar for observation. What I observe has no familiar meaning for me. It stays motionless, except when the jar is moved. I wonder again, as I did with a robber fly in the summer, what an insect is. Is it only a stereotyped pattern on the changing screen of nature? This one exhibits itself as a sort of embodied suspension, careless of death or time, like the process of evolution itself. There is no hurry.
The nymph lives for more than a week without food. Through a magnifying glass, I look at the flat-bottomed, skiff-shaped body made shaggy by algae-covered hair, the jointed legs, the upended tail. It is striped, and there are brown markings over and across its goggle eyes, and brown on its strange mouth part, which sits in front of its face like a catchers mask. This part, or device, is called the labrum. It is hinged, equipped with hooks, and can be shot forward rapidly to grab and hold the animal’s prey. In the nymph’s case, as with so many other things in nature, seemingly endless waiting and suspense precedes occasional spurts of lightning rapidity.
As I peer at it, greatly enlarged behind my magnifying glass, its jointed legs suddenly flail up in front of me, and I actually feel a tremor of alarm--which might be humorous, except for my sense that this small dragon is timeless in some awesome way.
As March is proving a seasonal release, at least in starting, so it also reveals an extravagance in the form of a dragonfly nymph, and what will come from that little insect shows that extravagance may have no end. After a series of molts, the number and duration of which depends on the species, a nymph will climb up on some green stalk spiking out of the water, the skin on its back will crack, and it will emerge from a sheath which it leaves behind, a dry, empty counterpart, and turn into a big, gauzy-winged dragonfly. It is given two worlds, water and air. Its embodied transformation from one into another is as rare a thing as the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly; and is evidence of a daring like the flight of Icarus toward the sun, but more successful.
Nature takes the nymph out of itself. It is no goggle-eyed inhabitant of some other planet, no knight doomed to expire by weight of armor. I see the fantastic in it and also a miraculous reality, which will not rest with own products. This water predator will turn into a brightly colored, great-eyed hunter, skimming everywhere over land and water, darting across the roaring traffic of a city, flying over the surface of the ocean miles from land. Time seems suspended in the nymph; and this may be appropriate enough. It is the result of ages; but its metamorphosis is fresh and new, a successful act of endless creativity.
_Interpretation_
It is in the nature of things to surprise, after temporary imprisonments. Surprise is what men look for. It is a need. And this puts us somewhat in the position of a dragonfly larva, suspended, until sprung out. Since we are not as rigidly and instinctively stuck as the insects, relief from our often unblessed condition may come simply because we get a chance to look around. Freshness of act, unfailing originality, is here, but it takes time to see. After an age of inattention it comes like a red squirrel, which I meet unexpectedly one raw March morning. Its whole body twitches and shakes. It jumps with an extraordinary series of halts and starts; then, like a boy playing Indian, it leaps behind a rock as I walk by.
If there is any spare time in a harried world, perhaps it should be used in cultivating habits of attention, learning how to keep open for possibility, instead of inventing distractions that provide for nothing. What is loosely called “nature study” requires discipline like any other area of knowledge, and acquaintance with its subjects, their names, their habits, their place and performance, may encourage extremes of refinement; but it is one good way to begin. It takes you out. It shows you what else can be done. By example it may spring you into a new mood of action. It provides new acquaintances, showing you life, the surprise, where there used to be a wall.
I, as well as my children, am still learning to read. I am still making a collection of terms, in order to attempt a rudimentary analysis of what I find. First in importance, though, comes an admission that what I am considering is not so strangled by human terminology that it does not have an identity, a sacredness even, of its own. Discovery gets its worth from what it pursues.
I see a pitch pine with different eyes, not because I have learned that its clusters have three needles, but because I recognize its independent existence. I know that it has needs, and a history, that it is not divorced from an infinity of circumstances just because I can identify it. We do not need to be vain about our name grubbing, our scientific nomenclature; it is only the beginning.
When I go to the edge of a pond I have a pleasurable sense of excitement, not only because I have been there before, finding the good old tadpoles and water striders, but because I know that I will find something unexplained, the same life perhaps, but in new relationships.
There is a swarm of thin little flies dancing in the warm sunlight on a March afternoon. They not only tell me something about the lengthening days, but the light seems to sit differently on their wings. They are a revelation, materializing out of a distance, hovering near.
In the game of identification we have to admit that nature is not an exclusively human province. Then we can be led by it, like this class of children, boys and girls on file through the woods, exploring new land, in expectation.
There has been a light fall of snow, and a cold wind blows off the tidal marshes on the north side of the woods, but a warm wind is out and it is only half-winter. There is a cover of unmelted snow in shaded slopes and hollows. The buds are glassy and on twigs and branches small ice capsules reflect the light. Snow blankets the tangles of briar where rabbits have their runs. Tiny upmounded tunnels show where mice scuttle through the snow’s protection. Pheasant tracks are found on the way, and then the odd, creaky, fowl-like call of a pheasant sounds in the near distance. Several myrtle warblers are seen in a clearing on the south side of the woods, a sheltered area bordering on a tidal creek. In a marsh beyond the creek, which is running backwards because of the tide, cattails stand with a half cap of snow on their brown shako heads, on the side facing away from the sun. There is an icy glaze on the buds of a pussy willow. We are between north and south, winter and spring, snow and melted snow, arrested in clear parallels of beauty, turned toward the willingness of spring. Something calls to a slow and gentle attention that has been waiting in us. I wonder whether it is the identification of a pheasant’s tracks, or of a myrtle warbler, that they will remember in the future, or the special character of this day.
It is hard to know what children perceive or retain. Suddenness, spontaneity, silence covers an untold number of impressions. Weeks, months, years later, they come out with something learned that a teacher could not have suspected. Occasionally they reveal an exactness which is innately theirs, quite apart from a classroom. I remember a little redheaded girl trying to tell us about a big white bird she had seen on the Chatham shore of the Cape. All description failed until she wagged her head back and forth in a special way, and we realized she had seen a snowy owl.