Roxana Robinson Journal

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Raccoon

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana Robinson) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:53:00 +0000

August 19, 2009. Maine.

Last night, around midnight, our lights were out, but I wasn't asleep.
The night was very quiet, there was no wind. So when I heard something outside on the deck it was very distinct. It was some kind of movement, soft but large. Not an insect, banging against the screen, something else. It sounded like something brushing against the shingles. I sat up, listening, and when I heard it again I got up and moved quietly across the room. I leaned down into the open window that overlooked the deck and switched on the outside light.

On the deck were two raccoons, one large, one small, both of them staring at me through their dark masks, like two robbers caught at the teller's window at the bank.

The mother was on her hind legs, her front paws neatly crooked in front of her, like a housewife's over her midriff. Her dark fur was full and bushy, standing out around her like a luxuriant halo. Her belly was pale, and her face and ears and paws were very dark. She stood up as tall as she could get, watching me. She craned her neck, moving her head very slightly from side to side. She gave a quiet, open-mouthed hiss: "Hahh." It was a small, precise sound. It was meant in defense, but it was not frightening. It seemed more like the chanting of a spell, like some kind of rune or wild magic. Standing upright, the mother looked like a strange, small, beautiful person, with her delicate curled hands, her elegant masked face, her graceful shifting movement.

The cub had slid sideways, moving underneath the bench on the outer edge of the deck. From there he peered out at me, his round innocent eyes shining in the light. The mother stood still, weaving slightly from side to side, like a Javanese dancer. We stared at each other and then she gave another quiet "Hahh," another small piece of raccoon magic. Then she dropped onto all fours and rumbled over to the bench, where she slid underneath it, next to the cub. Then the two of them moved like dark ripples over the edge of the deck, their thick cloudy fur lit up by the overhead light. The two of them moved quickly but noiselessly, in that digressive, indirect gait that raccoons have, a sort of purposeful but mystifying amble. They pattered up the mossy ledge and up into the trees, and after that they were lost in the darkness.

Pileated

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana Robinson) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 03:22:00 +0000

The trail around Witch Hole Pond swoops mildly up and down, along the pond, through the woods. I was on skis, making my way slowly up a little wooded rise. The wind had dropped, and deep snow lay everywhere, on the pond, the trees, the carriage road, muffling all sound. There was only the faint hiss beneath my skis. And something else: a modest tapping.

I looked up into the trees. At this time of year there isn't much motion or color in the woods, besides the snowy branches moving in the wind, the deep cerulean sky beyond.

So he was pretty obvious, despite his discretion. The pileated woodpecker is a huge bird, nearly two feet long, with spectacular plumage. He's mostly dull black, but he has bold white stripes down his neck, and a showy black stripe along his cheek. An absurdly long chisel-shaped beak: he looks like a bird drawn by a child. On top of his head is a flaming scarlet crest, high and sharply pointed, like a medieval jester's hat. And there is something slightly foolish about him: he's a bit gawky, clambering jerkily around the trunk of a tree, fluttering away furtively if you get too close. Pileateds live almost entirely under the forest cover, almost never flying out into the open. They're shy. Usually, if you stop during a hike, hearing the tap-tap, tap-tap, and if you look around for the big black and white bird, he'll slide quickly around to the other side of the trunk, peering out to see if you're still there. If you are, he'll flap away, ducking through the branches, looking too big to fly between them. Maybe he'll give his dry, tuneless, clucking call.

But this one was bold. Maybe it was the wintry silence, the glittering snow, the still, cold, electric air. The sense of deep frozen quiet that February brings. Anyway he ignored me. He was perched halfway up a white pine, making a modest tap-tap, tap-tap, his big angular head nodding. The movement seemed offhand, as though he were just thinking about something. But these little taps were serious: pileated woodpeckers are the superheroes. This modest tapping was like someone holding a pickax by the throat, thudding it over and over. Pileated woodpeckers can drum at a speed of fifteen miles an hour, twenty times a second, and they produce a hole the size of a shoe-box with ease.

The pileated likes ants, particularly carpenter ants. He hops along a tree trunk, leaning close to it, sniffing for formic acid and listening carefully for anty sounds. He's good at this. During the summer, ants run along the top of the bark, or just underneath it, and the woodpecker picks them off one at a time. During the winter, carpenter ants are dormant. The entire dozy swarm settles all together in the heart of a tree. There they lie until spring, when they will wake up and start consuming the tree, unless they're discovered first by a wily woodpecker.

My pileated was after a swarm. He was hammering away with his chisel-shaped bill, sending out messy showers of bark and chips, and opening up a huge gaping hole of pale pinewood. He turned often to look at me, then back at the tree to chip away some more. Finally he hit something, down in the center of the tree. He stuck his head deep into the cavity, making little jerky movements, nodding and nosing. He was using his incredibly long tongue, which is agile and muscular, sipping up one sleepy ant after another.

He paused, pecked, paused, listened. He cocked his showy wild-striped head, then thrust it in again greedily, deep inside the cavity, to feast. He tossed out chips, dove in again, then turned to look at me, gulping down his breakfast.

I watched him for a while, drumming, dipping, shifting. Finally I started on quietly, leaving him there to feast in peace. But my movement scared him, and the tiny crunch of my poles in the snow, the rustling of my jacket were too much for him.

He drew his head back and opened his big black wings and flew off, low, through the branches, like a clumsy bomber. Furtive and quick, he vanished among the trees, calling his harsh, brief note.

Then there was silence, just the faint whisper of wind against the snow.

Catbird

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana Robinson) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 14:35:00 +0000

Catbird

Up on the hillside, by the swimming pool there was a big summer border. It was about thirty feet long and eight feet deep, and there I put the plants I had never wanted – or dared – to put in the lower gardens by the house. Up in the summer border I put yellow plants – the buttery oenethera, and a sunny yarrow - and bright red plants – a tiny crimson potentilla – and once I even planted an apricot-colored David Austen rose, though I never went all the way to orange.

I also put huge plants up there, ones that would have overpowered the modest borders behind the house. I put in towering Joe Pye weeds, and a fancy statuesque silver plant - something argentea?? --- that soared majestically upwards for one season and then lay moping flatly in the bed until I threw it out. I planted a huge whispering clump of miscanthus in the far corner, and in the middle a colony of tall soft blurry filipendula rubrus, and a sprawling blue perovskia. Just beyond the border was a big purple buddleia.

The summer border was in full sun, and it came into bloom in July and August, after the sweeter pinks and blues of the June borders, which were down by the house. The summer border was bolder and wilder, out under the open sky, backed by our sloping meadow, facing, beyond the pool, the deep woods.

I liked working up there. It felt quite distant from civilisation; it was out of sight and out of sound of the house. I'd go up to work in the garden and listen to the birds. There were a lot of birds up there. Several families of house wrens lived nearby, one of them nesting in one of the little lanterns that hung on either side of the pool house door. That wren spent her days hunting insects in the summer border. She was incredibly conscientious. Whenever I arrived and walked over to the border, she would suddenly fly out of the tall plants at the back, the phlox or filipendula, scolding me at the top of her lungs for the interruption. She sat on the split-rail fence and complained, in a tiny, shrill, energetic, voluble stream. It didn’t really feel like abuse, it felt more like an exclamation. It felt as though we were sharing something, and as though she needed to express an opinion.

There were cardinals and robins, tree swallows, skimming over the meadow. Sometimes I saw the brilliant flash of a baltimore oriole, high in one of the hickory trees, but I never saw the nest.

The split-rail fence ran all the way around the pool. On the far side of the pool, beyond the fence, the ground sloped down through the woods, and down into a sort of boggy shrubby series of thickets. The thickets began just beyond the fence, huge overgrown wild honeysuckle bushes. Some of these had the usual cream-colored blossoms, but one of them, very large, was pink. I looked forward each spring for this to bloom, when the whole enormous rounded mass of the bush looked as though it was covered in delicate rosy-cream butterflies. It was a lovely presence, a sort of gift from the woods, as it never needed pruning or watering or feeding, and always blossomed in that spectacularly generous way.

A catbird nested in it. Or at least I think she did. I saw her slipping in and out of it, but by the time she built her nest the bush was too densely leafed-out for me to see the nest itself. In any case there were catbirds up there, around the summer border and the pool house. Sometimes they’d sit on the fence-posts and watch me; sometimes they’d sing their modest repertoire of other birds’ songs, from deep in the bushes. I knew it was them, singing.

I like catbirds, with their neat grey suits, their black trim, their elegant graphics. I like the way they move, which is quiet but confident, like someone on a diplomatic mission. And catbirds, oddly enough, like us. That catbird would come out of her honeysuckle bush when I came up to the border, and she would perch on a fencepost, watching. She was a curious, observant bird, though why she wanted to watch me pulling out weeds I don’t know. She had her own life, though, and her own thoughts.

Once I was walking through the little gate in the fence, toward the pool, and I felt something brush suddenly against the back of my head. I was thirty feet away from the house, and there was no vine or tree near. But something had made contact, something had swept deliberately against my hair, against my skull. It didn’t feel hostile, but it was startling, a tiny shock. Intimate. I turned around and saw the catbird sitting on the gatepost, her head cocked, watching me, her eye bright and black. She had her reasons for that swift, delicate encounter. I don’t know what they were.

I think about that sometimes, that soft brushing sweep against my hair. Turning to see her, surprised, and finding her vibrant eye upon me.

November 6, 2008

Disruption

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana Robinson) — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 14:17:00 +0000

It's nearly high tide, and the cove is glassy. The water is a flat silver mirror, smooth and still. It looks as though it's never been touched by the wind, or an oar, or by the daily churning surge of the tide. It's motionless.

The trees on the far shore - firs and pines, with a few bright-leaved hardwoods - are reflected with magical precision. They look like a doubled row, spreading both up into the air and down into the water, their trunks meeting seamlessly at the shoreline. It's perfectly, perfectly calm.

I've come out onto the deck. On the water below me, on this side of the cove, I become aware of a small disruption. Through the trees I can see a skein of fine lines on the water, like a web, radiating outward. It comes from the southeast corner - the opposite end from the cove's mouth, where it leads to the sea. There's no stream in that corner, and I wonder what could have started this disturbance. A tiny puff of air, turning the flat surface into a net of ripples? But why would it start in that wooded corner?

It doesn't stop, this mysterious rippling. It spreads out across the cove, and as I watch I think I see something on the water. My view is partly obscured, by trees and bushes, and I go down the steps and head quietly for the shore. The path through the woods is covered with a fresh fall of needles, already an autumnal reddish-buff, and they muffle my footsteps. I'm watching the water as I walk, and by now the whole cove is criss-crossed with a network of ripples. Who is doing this? How has someone shattered the smooth glassy surface so silently, so mysteriously, so completely? The upside down trees are now shattered into liquid shards, clashing loosely in the glimmering wash.

Heading down the slope I glimpse something moving toward the far side of the cove. When I reach the shore I stop, just inside the fringe of shoreline bushes, and lift my binoculars.

What's out there is a female merganser. Her head is rusty red, her body mostly grey, with a soft whitish streak along her waterline and a bright white patch near her tail.

She carries her rufous head high, her long red bill slanted slightly upward. On the crown of her head is a wild crest, and its long feathers stick out wildly, radiating like a ragged sunburst. She looks as though she's just gotten out of bed, as though she's trying out a Mohawk. She's steaming along in the water, paddling like mad. It's she, with her messy hair and ragged wake, who has unsettled the entire cove. Now all of it is rocking quietly, the fretwork of ripples sliding across the whole of the little inlet.

She's heading fast for the opposite side of the cove, getting further away every second. I step closer to the shore, my binoculars raised. I step past the big branches of a fir tree, to see better. I'm still beneath the tree, but I'm now out in the open, and fully visible. Suddenly the merganser takes off, flapping wildly, splashing and shattering the rocking water. She flies low over the surface, noisy and urgent, her wings wide and wild, the bright patch near her tail flashing. This is no slipping silently out of sight, this is an emrgency exit, panicky, cacaphonous, tumultuous.

In a few moments the cove is empty, and I step out of cover, onto the shoreline. By now the whole surface is distressed. Now it looks like ragged scumbled water anywhere - uneasy, unsettled and in flux, a zillion tiny shards of rocking reflection. And there's no-one here, no other birds, no ducks, no creatures. I stand, disappointed, at the edge of the water. It was that crazy merganser, with her wild messy hairdo, who did all this. That's who left the cove in such turmoil, and uninhabited.

But it was really me. I know that. If I hadn't been there, she wouldn't have left.

Maine, October 2008.

Busy

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana Robinson) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 03:13:00 +0000

Before it rises and turns onto the shoulder of the hill, Town Street meanders through overgrown meadowland, now woods. On the uphill side it's boggy. Actually it's more than boggy: it's a shallow pond, and in it is a handsome new home with a water view. Beavers have arrived.
The beaver (castor canadensis) is an engaging creature - all right, a rodent - with a sleek fur coat and a friendly, unthreatening manner. He has an inquisitive nose, a dextrous pair of forepaws, and a cool set of extra eyelids, transparent ones, like underwater goggles. Beavers are peaceful and intelligent, and they mate for life. In the animal world they are stars of cognitive behaviour: they reason, use tools, and build complex structures. They are remarkably adept and inventive engineers. In the winter, for example, they lower the water level so they can surface under the ice to breathe, without risk from predators. They are visionaries, and their projects are mighty: in northern Alberta there's a beaver dam 2,790 feet long.
They are wonderful animals on someone else's land, though on yours they might seem problematic. Beavers alter the landscape more than any other creature except man. They are unstoppable. Tireless, resourceful and determined, beavers want things their way, and that way is a big pond with a lodge in the middle and a dam along the downstream edge. It may not be what you had in mind, but before you consider eviction, consider the beaver's place in the world.
The beaver is a naturalist's dream: everything he does is good for the planet. Castor canadensis is a keystone species, creating rich habitat for fish, ducks, wading birds, turtles, amphibians and frogs. But beavers do more than that. They're like benevolent super-creatures, in charge of a system that sustains life on earth.
In natural hydrology, beavers are huge. Beaver dams, and the ponds' wide, absorbent edges, and the wetlands that surround them, provide natural flood protection. Beavers' quiet pondwaters allow young creatures of many species to thrive, and rich organic matter to settle. Their wetlands are portals to the aquifer, which provides us with groundwater. Beaver dams filter the streamwater that passes over them, producing bacteria which feed on the phosphates and nitrates from agricultural runoff. Miraculously, these bacteria devour pesticides and herbicides. And, as if all this were not enough, beavers have a sense of humor. They are known to enjoy playing practical jokes.
Okay, they cut down a lot of trees, and they put the pond where they want it, not where you do. If these are problems for you, help is available: get "Coexisting with Beavers," which offers solutions like the Beaver Deceiver and the Castor Master. Go on the web to www.beaversww.org
It's not in the Yankee spirit to let someone else move onto your land and develop it for his own purposes, but the beaver's purposes are admirable. He'll take down that scrubby woodlot and create a clean, glimmering, exquisite pond, filled with thriving wildlife. An earthly paradise on your property: isn't this an offer you can't refuse?
This region is rich in beavers. Recently, at their pond on Cream Hill Road, I noted mallards, Canada geese, a handsome grey heron and about a zillion spring peepers. Also a small dark head moving across the water, tugging a v-shaped wave, swimming steadily toward the rushes. Someone was hard at work, saving the planet.
May, 2008

Cattails

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana Robinson) — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 18:46:00 +0000

At the corner of Rattlesnake Road and Cream Hill Road lies a sweep of open water, surrounded by reedy marshland. Historically, this kind of place had a bad reputation: bogs, swamps and marshes are breeding grounds for mosquitoes, as everyone knows, and everyone hates mosquitoes. And bogs offer a kind of irritating passive resistance - they're too shallow to swim in, too deep to walk through. Difficult to navigate, they're murky and secretive, full of darting creatures, thick reedy foliage and fine clouds of mud. We've never liked them. For a thousand years marshes have been routinely drained to eliminate mosquitoes, and make arable land. Recently, though, we've begun to learn the value in the natural hydrology system: bogs are loamy sinks, that allow water to seep deep into the aquifers on which we all depend. Now we've become more tolerant of them. And now we know that they're good, we can see that they're beautiful, too. Tall standing grasses edging quiet, dreaming water, a wide sheet of sky: still water has its own appeal.
Something that has always liked bogs is the cattail, which grows with cheerful abandon along the water's edge beside Rattlesnake Road. The common cattail
Typha latifolia , is a handsome plant, with tall, flexible, sword-shaped leaves that bend casually away from the root. At the end of a stiff round stalk is a thick brown cigar-like club, surmounted by a bare spike. Cattails are monoeicious, so each plant contains both male and female parts, and is self-pollinating. The plushy brown cigar is the female part of the flower, the bare spike, the male part. The male flower ripens early to an insignificant pair of stamens that quickly disappear, but the female part is robust and long-lasting, and gives the plant its common name.
Now, in the fall, the stalk is dry and limber, and holding one is oddly satisfying. It feels like a scepter, the brown club a modest, sold weight. It's pleasant to wave it, as though it were a sparkler, inscribing its journey through the air.
Actually, it is a bit like a sparkler, dispersing pollinated seeds like tiny points of light. The slightest touch on that dry plush will make it yield a finely shredded white substance, like a pillow leaking down. Fine white filaments radiate from the tiny seeds, like a miniature starburst. Floating airily on the breeze, these will drift for miles. They'll settle anywhere, but what they need is bogland - quiet, shallow water - and sun.
Unlike the non-natives - purple loose-strife, and phragmites - that threaten them, cattails offer habitat for lots of native creatures. They're a favorite of another local favorite, the red-winged blackbird. Red-wings, with their handsome graphics (neat red, yellow and orange bars at the top of the glossy black wings, like the insignia for an Italian rcing club) arrive early in the spring, nesting in cattails when they can. Red-wings' cheerful buzzing whistle, their bold pale gold eyes and the vivid sheen of their plumage remind us each year that spring is back, and the landscape is waking up.
And, like the answer to another of the ingeniouis natural puzzles that surround us, it turns out that red-wings don't hate mosquitoes like everyone else. In fact, they love them. Boglands, cat-tails, red-wings, mosquitoes - there's no end to it. Can it be that eveyrthing is good?
November, 2007

Kingfishers

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana Robinson) — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 16:58:00 +0000

Down by the cove, late afternoon. The tide is running out, which means that each moment the water is shallower, and any hapless fish still in it has less and less room to hide. Low tide is a good time to fish, but not a good time to be fish.

Someone who's interested in this distinction is the belted kingfisher (Megaceryle alcyon) who lives in our cove with his mate. He's a biggish bird, about a foot long, from poll to tail. He has a thick neck and a rather comically big head, with a wild, rakish crest on top. Beneath his chin is a clean wide white collar, and below that a sort of blue jabot, over a spotless white shirt front. Everywhere else he's a steely blue, though his wife has chestnut markings on her breast. He has a long, thick, pointed no-nonsense beak, which my bird book calls "daggerlike."

The kingfisher's Greek name, Alcyon, refers to two things in English: "halcyon blue" a bright kingfisherish hue, and "halcyon days," a peaceful, cherished time. Both derive from a Greek legend about Alcyone, the daughter of Aeolus.

Alcyone was the wife of Ceyx, and they were very happy together - so happy that they called each other Hera and Zeus, in imitation of that most celebrated couple, the king and queen of the gods. The gods took offence at this, as always, and Zeus threw a thunderbolt to sink Ceyx's ship and drown him. Poor Alcyone, maddened by grief, threw herself into the sea. Having destroyed them, the gods (famously poor at making up their minds) took pity on the devoted couple, and transformed them into loyal pair-bonding birds who live along the shore. Traditionally, the female kingfisher laid her eggs during the seven day period around the winter solstice, a time when there were no storms: the calm, halcyon days.

Our kingfishers stay in the cove all summer, flying from tree to tree, never far apart. They're not hard to spot. Unlike the silent great blue heron, who achieves a zen-like invisibility while he hunts, the kingfisher seems to think that fish have no ears. He sounds like a typewriter, giving off a long, rapid, mechanical rattle, usually in flight. He perches near the water, watching for prey. When he sees an unwary fish, too close to the surface, the kingfisher descends in a swift bold swoop.

Just now I hear a loud splash and I look up to see him flying back to his perch on a scraggly white pine. Usually he sits still, but now he shifts back and forth, head twitching, his ragged crest sticking up in points like a punk-rocker's. Arcing from his beak is a long silvery curve: quite a big fish, held firmly in that dagger-like bill. The fish squirms, protesting. He feels a mistake has been made. He still has a chance, and if he can get the kingfisher to drop him now he'll fall straight into the water and swim away, safe. He twists violently, flashing in the sun. The kingfisher holds him still. He can't risk opening his beak to get a better grip because in that instant the fish might squirm away in a daring aerial escape. The fish struggles, the kingfisher shifts from foot to foot, his bill clamped shut. Every second the fish is out of water brings him closer to not moving at all, so the longer the kingfisher stays still, the better his chances. The fish moves a lot, bucking and glittering: the more he moves, the better his chances.

Suddenly the kingfisher stretches his neck out and bobs his head violently; the fish vanishes. The kingfisher bobs some more, his head jerking, at some interior turmoil. Then he shakes himself all over and twitches his tail. The silver fish is gone. He is now in a different place. If he is still protesting, it no longer matters.

The kingfisher sits upright, jerking his tail briskly as though proving a point. Then he leaves his branch, swooping down low across the water, toward another tree, trailing his long rattling cry.

Migrations

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana Robinson) — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 20:06:00 +0000

I'm in Maine now, and the garden at midseason poses all sorts of problems, as it always does.
What we have here is, for the most part, a native woodlands garden. By this I mean it's in the woods, and it's meant to be all native. But nowadays, staying native is kind of like swimming against a current.
When our house was built, twelve years ago, building codes required that barricade to be built around the construction site. This was made of hay bales, and it was intended to prevent the bare soil from eroding. It was a very sensible plan, but one of the unintended consequences of this was that the gulley below that barricade, which slopes down to our little salt-water cove, is now full of native - but not local, and certainly not appropriate - meadow grasses from those innocuous hay-bales. These include goldenrod, thistles and creeping brambles, and they have established themselves with characteristic weedy vigor in the little ravine. That area was particularly vulnerable to colonisation because some of the trees had come down during the building process, letting in new light. So there was disturbed earth, changes in the habitat, and then the arrival of this wild band of invasive marauders, charging into the new countryside like a band of nomadic terrorists, horticulturally shouting and swinging their swords. These guys are tough, they're determined and they're mean.
For the first few years I liked them.
One new presence along the little streambed is buttercup, which creates a vivid golden river in the spring. Also there are native sedges, big beautiful sprays of hardy green, with the characteristic biting edge - sedges have edges, in case you didn't know how to distinguish them from grasses - and their wonderful surrealistic interruptions along the leaf. I don't know sedges very well, so I can't name them, but some of them have lacy "tremblant" decorations along the top third of the leaf, which nod in the wind and catch the light, glittering like dangling earrings. Some of the sedges have rough burr-like interruptions on the stalk, stiff triangulated sculptural things like small art deco flowers. All these plants are native, hardy and handsome, and why would I want to see them go? But how am I to get rid of the goldenrod, the thistles, the brambles, which are shooting inappropriately up the pine-needled sides of the little ravine, even as I type this?
Being an all-organic gardener makes this sort of situation difficult. I asked the local landscaping service what they would charge to dig up the plants that are there and plant big swathes of native ferns - ostrich, sensitive and hay-scented, just for starters. He said it would cost $10,000 just to dig it up, and we could talk later about the cost of the ferns, and planting them.
I've thought about how this problem would have been solved twenty years ago, fifty, a hundred, two hundred years, before there were chemical sprays, or building codes that required me to truck in these big bales of invasive seeds. It seems that fossil fuels play a part in a lot of this. Without fossil fuels you didn't use non-natives without enormous expense. Imagine bringing a bale of hay from another state by horse-drawn carriage. Imagine bringing Chinese bittersweet, African lilies, kudzu, or any other non-native invasive from another continent, and then disseminating it all across our own, without the use of fossil fuels. Just getting to another county would be a real journey. Time moved slowly before the combustion engine.

There have always been migrations within the plant world, but they always moved slowly. There were seeds or plants that were carried by wind or water, or the fur of animals, or the bellies of birds. These forces were controlled by natural elements - birds digested seeds within a certain distance of where they'd eaten them, animals shed their fur within their own territories, wind and water were indifferent to the survival of seeds, and so most seeds perished. These movements were slow, and the force of inertia was against them. We're speeding up that process, as well as many others. It's hard to say what will happen.

Vixen

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana Robinson) — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 12:52:00 +0000

This afternoon I went out walking along the river. Coming back uphill by the road, I looked ahead and saw a young fox loping easily across the road. Just behind her was a kit, small and caramel-colored, thickly furred, and anxious. He was so small that at first I thought he was a squirrel, with his long dense tail. When she got to the far side, he stalled, turned, and bolted back to where he’d started, a small bluff covered with brush. He ran into the bushes and started yapping, high little haphazard barks that sounded as though he hadn’t quite figured out where the noise came from. He was still back up in there, complaining, but the vixen turned around and went on across the road, down the hill into a brushy ravine on the other side.
I walked up the road past both of them, now hidden. I was surprised that she’d let him go back up the bluff alone, and at the top of the hill I turned around to look back. Nothing. But I heard some barks way down in the ravine. I waited, and after awhile the vixen appeared, with another kit.
The vixen was young and light-colored, slightly brindled. She was slim and lithe and pretty, a hard-working single mom with dinner to make, trying to get her naughty son to behave. She trotted across the road toward the bluff and turned to look at him. He skittered wildly along the edge of the road, like a dustrag with pointed ears.
The vixen stood waiting, and then a car came up from the river, roaring toward us, and both foxes retreated into the brush. We all waited until the noise died down, and then they emerged. The vixen trotted across the road again to get her son. Foxes are too cool ever to look anxious, but her tongue was hanging out. She looked a bit harried.
Back on the ravine side, the kit came out of the brush and she trotted again across the road away from him, turning to look at him. He went right up to the edge of the road and then stalled, turned and started skittering alongside it, headed toward me, yapping like a high-pitched banging door. Yap, yap, yap, yap, he yelled. MA! MA! MA! MA!
Mom stood waiting on the other side. Another car came by, and everyone hid.
A huge SUV drove up behind me, and I waved it down. The tinted window came down, a big guy in sunglasses at the wheel. “What’s going on?”
“A mother fox is trying to get her kit across the road. See her by the telephone pole? If you could wait a minute, maybe she’ll do it.”
Pretty soon there were three stopped cars, everyone watching that kit.
The mom saw we were all waiting for her, and she headed back to the ravine side again. Once there she turned and looked at her son, ready to cross back. The kit skittered nervously up to the edge of the road. We all stood waiting. He stuck his nose in the air. MA!
No-one moved.
He put one paw on the pavement.
No-one moved.
He spread his legs out wide and lowered his belly as though he were climbing onto a rocking boat, and, very slowly, legs splayed, he moved out onto that tricksy, swaying pavement.
No-one moved.
Yelling his head off, his belly flat on the road, his legs out like a crab’s, he scrabbled all the way across. The mom jumped up to meet him and the two of them vanished into the brush, headed for the bluff, that baby still flapping his mouth.
MA!

Polar Bears

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana Robinson) — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 18:47:00 +0000

Op-Ed, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Polar bears are the largest land carnivores, reaching mythic proportions: twelve feet high, two thousand pounds. They have forty-two ivory teeth, and their paws are twelve inches wide, with curved, nonretractable, lethal claws. Polar bears have no animal enemies: nothing they meet is bigger or fiercer than they are. They are supreme.
Most of us will never see a polar bear in its native habitat, which adds to its glamour and mystery. Polar bears - ursus maritimus – are found throughout the circumpolar Arctic, ranging like ghostly shadows across the sea ice off the coastlines of Siberia, Greenland, Canada, Iceland and Alaska. Over a hundred thousand years or so they’ve adapted brilliantly to life in a punishing, icy moonscape, where temperatures drop to 90 below zero. Their soft, dense fur has turned to misty silver, for camouflage. The most pelagic (maritime) of their kind, polar bears are insulated by a thick layer of fat and a smooth, water-repellent coat. They swim for long distances through frigid seas; one was tracked swimming for 60 miles without stopping.
The polar bear preys on marine mammals, mostly seals. He hunts by stalking and by “still hunting” – waiting, poised and motionless, by an ice hole, for an unwary seal to surface. Sea ice is the bear’s habitat, a perforated platform on which to encounter his prey. It is the bear’s home territory, his own vast, shifting, unstable continent. Sea ice - thick, solid and plentiful – is essential to the bear’s survival.
But sea ice itself is endangered. As the planet warms, the rising temperatures are melting the tundra, the glaciers, and the ice caps, destroying the polar bear’s world. The whole arctic landscape, that misty, fantastical world of glaciers, icebergs, floes and pack ice, is vanishing. At summer’s end, the great white bears now find themselves far out to sea, trapped on melting ice floes. They set out to swim, but the distances are too great even for them: polar bears are drowning. In the last five years their population has dropped by twenty per cent, with no relief in sight. The melting arctic ice reduces the hunting range and puts the whole population at risk. Among reproductive females, body weight is dropping, reducing the ability to bear offspring.
Ursus maritimus may be doomed. Even if he’s classified as endangered, there’s no way to protect a portion of the landscape as a wildlife preserve for him. His habitat is ice and snow, and the entire frozen Arctic ocean is melting. So in our lifetimes we may lose him, that great pale shadow that has lived so vividly in the north of our imaginations - enormous, shimmering, powerful, at once fearsome and comforting - padding silently across the glittering wastes. The polar bear may soon be something we’ll tell our children about, like snow.
Global warming is no longer an ominous possibility but a reality: there is no longer substantive disagreement within the scientific community about its existence. The Bush administration’s own 2004 report stated that greenhouse gases are the “result of human activities and are now higher than they have been for about 400,000 years.” It’s happening, now, and because of us.
The United States is the leading producer of greenhouse gases. It’s also a model of energy policy for the developing world. Our resolute refusal to accept our own scientific counsel, our insistent denial of the consequences of our actions provide a dangerous example for the developing world. We may deeply regret setting such an example, since the developing world will soon outstrip us in greenhouse gas production.
In the meantime, the rest of the world is held hostage to our fossil-fuel fueled agenda, defenseless against US policies. Indigenous Arctic people and polar bears are helpless before our destruction of their way of life. Glaciers are melting worldwide, in Africa, the Andes, the Himalayas, and the Alps, but no-one can demand a change in US policy. Americans, too, are affected. Important aspects of our own economy – travel, communication, shipping, hotel, insurance and agriculture, not to mention public health – are increasingly affected by the severe, unseasonal and unpredictable weather that is increasingly common, and which has been identified as a result of global warming.
It’s not just the arctic that we’re losing, it’s the notion of the whole world as we first learned it: icy and blizzarding, cracking with cold, at the poles; deep and green and humid, lush with life, in the tropical rain forests; vivid and dense, teeming with birds and fish in the river deltas. Rich, gorgeous, strange, full of a life beyond our control: that was the world we were given; the world we understood was ours. How can we give it up? How can we knowingly destroy it?
Maybe the loss of that last, great, dreamlike animal will rouse us. Maybe now we’ll take a stand and insist on preventing these changes that threaten something so distant, so close, so essential.

Monarchs and Milkweed

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana Robinson) — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 17:45:00 +0000

Op-Ed, The Boston Globe, The International Herald Tribune

Near my back door is a tall, straggly plant with dull, nearly colorless flowers. After a heavy rain, the stalks collapse against each other. It’s a mess. If you saw it you’d think it was a weed, and you’d be right. I planted it.

* * *

Gardens are about beauty, and that’s how I choose my plants. I hope they’ll thrive. I hope they’ll bloom. I hope they won’t be shredded by insects.
Insects are a big presence in my garden, since I don’t use toxic chemicals. Each year it’s a race to see which comes first, the end of summer or the end of the garden. I’m tempted, of course, by chemicals. If beauty is the goal, chemicals seem the quickest way to reach it: a quick misting and the aphids are gone; a morning’s dousing and the brick walk is weed-free.
I don’t use them, though.
I’m not a chemist, and can’t follow the science, but I’m uneasy about their smooth eradicatory sweep. There’s nothing smooth and absolute about nature, which works in messy ebbs and flows. And I wonder about people who worked the soil before us - the wheat farmers of Sicily, breadbasket of the Roman Empire. How did they manage? Now it seems you can hardly grow a blade of grass without chemical assistance, but historically, people produced bounteous harvests without help from Ortho.
In my garden, (and many others), plants thrive without chemicals. They do fine on sun, water, compost and attention, as they have since the first human planted the first yam. Synthetic chemicals are new: it’s only about fifty years since they’ve been widely used by backyard gardeners like me. Now they’re everywhere. The labels look cheery but carry ominous small-print warnings: no-one knows their long-term consequences. On summer evenings children used to run alongside the DDT truck, letting its cool spray coat their arms and legs.
My English roses were attacked every year by small green defoliating caterpillars. I sprayed with Bt, or bacillus thuringiensis, a naturally occurring organism that attacks the digestive tracts of caterpillars. It doesn’t affect vertebrates and it breaks down without a trace. It took care of those caterpillars within minutes. If beauty is the end, Bt seemed a safe, easy means of reaching it.

* * *

I hope my homely back-door plant will thrive, but not that the insects will leave it alone. I want it ripped to shreds, big holes in the foliage, weighed down by visiting insects.
The homely plant is is asclepius syriaca, the common milkweed, and the destructive visitor I hope for is Danaus plexippus, the gorgeous monarch butterfly.
The monarch, with its ember-colored, black-edged wings, may be the most beautiful of all butterflies; certainly it’s the most famous. The Latin name refers to the ancient king Danaus, who is known for a long journey: so is the monarch.
Every fall, all monarchs in the Northern Hemisphere travel over a thousand miles. The West Coast monarchs head for Monterey, California, and the East Coast butterflies – including those by my back door in Maine – fly to central Mexico. No-one knows how they survive the vagaries of high-altitude travel, the buffeting thumps of airplane traffic, El Nino.
Most monarchs live for about six weeks. The single butterfly you think you see all summer may actually represent several generations. The last, hatching in the fall, is called Methuselah, and survives from six to nine months – long enough to reach the winter retreat and spend the season. No-one knows how the Methuselahs find it, since they’ve never been there.
* * *
Milkweeds, the asclepias family, are essential to monarchs. The butterflies only lay their eggs on milkweed. The eggs hatch into larvae - caterpillars – which eat the leaves; the caterpillar forms a chrysalis from which the butterfly emerges. Every monarch on the planet depends on the presence of milkweed.
* * *

I have two asclepia varieties: syriaca, the common one, and incarnata, prettier, more refined. Every morning I find an amber monarch near them. Brilliant, fire-colored, it alights, wings pulsing slowly, in, out. On the leaves are bright striped caterpillars, soft and plump, eating their way to splendor.

* * *

You used to see milkweed everywhere – ditches, fields, the backs of buildings, along parking lots – anywhere no one was looking. In the fall, milkweed produces a thick brown pod, tightly packed with seeds. Each has a filmy, fibrous kite to catch the wind. You see them seldom now.
* * *
We no longer tolerate milkweed. It produces a disagreeable substance called cardenolide alkaloid. Monarchs absorb this, which protects them from bird predation. Cardenolide alkaloids can be toxic to cattle, though, so cattle farmers dislike milkweed. Crop growers dislike it because it’s a weed. The traditional means of eliminating weeds is through tilling, which is probably what the Sicilian wheat-growers did. Tilling eliminates most weeds, though some always survived. Until now, it wasn’t possible to eradicate a plant altogether.
Most of monarch/milkweed habitat occurs in farmland, which is vanishing at nearly 3,000 acres a day. Most of the remaining habitat is owned by agribusiness, which increasingly grows corn and soybeans, our big commercial crops, from genetically modified (GM) seed. The GM crops can resist glyphosphate, which is the active ingredient in the herbicide RoundUp. Milkweed cannot: the GM switch has caused the loss of 80 million acres of monarch habitat. Roadside milkweeds, too, are being sprayed into extinction by our towns. Backyard gardeners are in on this – anyone who uses herbicides to tidy up. Even organic gardeners, like me – remember those tiny caterpillars, and the Bt?
* * *

The monarch and the milkweed will soon disappear. The decisions affecting this are economic, and everyone knows that economics come before beauty. Everyone knows that commerce comes before conservation. Everyone knows that anything legally available is safe for the next generation.
Or maybe everyone doesn’t know this. Maybe the idea of nature – its messy ebbs and flows, its annual race between plant and insect, its unchartable complexity - is valuable, too. Maybe we’re not sure that whole species should be eradicated because of economic decisions made by a few big companies. Companies last rarely more than fifty years; monarchs and milkweeds, more than fifty thousand. Maybe we’re not certain that genetically modified crops should take over, playing an unknown role in our children’s health.
We can write letters, sign petitions, send money. We can quit using herbicides, take a stand on GM crops. We can plant milkweed, and, for awhile, until the habitat is too diminished to support the population, monarchs will appear. These tawny, airborne jewels will drift across our yards, landing dreamily on our plants as though this place were the only one in the world they want to be.
Which it is.

Pigs

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana Robinson) — Sat, 15 Apr 2006 17:50:00 +0000

More news from the rural countryside.
I'm up here in this little house in seclusion, trying to finish a writing project. It's a perfect setting for writing, the landscape around me utterly silent. Woods, fields, stone walls, sky—that's it.
This afternoon I took a break and went out to walk the hour-long triangle. I started out past the big elegant Victorian farmhouse just opposite us, heading down the road past the dairy farm. As I walked past the Victorian house I glanced in past the white painted fence. There were some shadows on the other side I hadn't expected—I wondered if my neighbours had borrowed some sheep to graze the lawn down? I went closer, and heard an excited honk.

It was not sheep but a herd of energetic pigs, pink and brown and muscular, ears pricked and on the loose. What they were excited about was the garden—the perennial border, to be precise. There were ten of them, and they were hogs with a vision. The vision was of a perennial border without living inhabitants.

It was a lovely sight, if you were a hog—all that rich brown earth churned and rooted and turned up to the sky. If you were a gardener—well, it was a different sort of vision.

I walked down the road to the dairy farm, got in the pickup with the farmer and headed back up the hill with him. We spent the rest of the afternoon herding hogs. I don't know what we'll say to the neighbours. A visitation from outer space?

Holocaust

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana Robinson) — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 18:43:00 +0000

(Op-Ed, The Boston Globe, The International Herald Tribune)

It was shameful, everyone agreed afterwards, that no-one did anything at the time. Because people knew it was happening. There were reports, early on. People saw things, near where it was happening, they knew. Later, they said they hadn’t known, really; they hadn’t understood the scale of it. They explained their reasons for doing nothing. They said the government was responsible, there was nothing they could do. Certainly the government was determined to carry out its plans, and maybe people felt overwhelmed and helpless. Maybe this was a place where the curves of ignorance, courage and survival instinct intersected to exclude the possibility of action.

The affected population knew about it, of course, but they had no political power, no voice. As they diminished in number, they became increasingly less important, which seemed to validate what was happening. How could they be important if they were gone?

Even the people who were distanced from it, and not in danger, knew about it, but they did nothing either. Maybe they didn’t believe what they heard. Maybe they felt it did not threaten them, it was too far away and too terrible. There are things it is too terrible to consider. If you acknowledged their reality, you would be unable to function. And where would we all be, if we couldn’t function?

The news has actually been coming in for decades – from the field, from eyewitnesses, from relief organisations. We can even see the evidence ourselves – it’s happening near us, wherever we are - but we don’t believe these accounts, even our own. We don’t want to, because they are too terrible to consider. We’re afraid we won’t be able to function. The more tremendous a threat is, the harder it is to comprehend. As Raphael Lemkin said in 1944, “…reports which slip out from behind the frontiers…are very often labelled as untrustworthy atrocity stories, because they are so gruesome that people simply refuse to believe them.” What we’re hearing is too frightening to believe.

The evidence is still growing, and growing worse, but we’re still resisting it. When the scientists grew more serious and more impassioned about the situation, when they began giving numbers, offering proof, asking for action, we decided that we no longer believed in science. We distanced ourselves from the situation; we hoped we wouldn’t be affected. The population at risk is not our population, at least not right now, so we needn’t do anything right now. We might do something later. The government can do something if there’s a real crisis. We trust the government to take care of us, to act responsibly. Believing this is easier than taking drastic steps to stop what’s happening, particularly since this government is very much opposed to stopping it. The government is very much intent on pursuing its present course, which results, as a side-effect - though the government would not acknowledge this, or even comment on the fact that it is taking place – in the complete destruction of the affected population. The affected population is one half of all the species presently living on earth.

Fanaticism is a driving force here, as it often is behind great crimes. This is a crime against nature, and this fanaticism is economic - the belief that money and profit should outweigh all other considerations, including survival of the species. If we maintain our current rates of consumption and environmental strategies, by the end of this century, one half the species now alive on earth may be extinct. We don’t know what the specific effects will be, but we know they’ll be extreme. We’re in the middle of a holocaust. We’re presiding over the greatest extermination of living species since the end of the dinosaurs. We’re eliminating habitat, reliable climate, fresh water, clean air, and nourishment. We’re imposing intolerable living conditions on thousands of species. The current rate of extinctions is thought to be at least 1,000 times higher than the natural level. Right now, one quarter of all mammals are endangered with extinction; one third of all species, animal and vegetable, may be gone by 2050.

It may not be evident to us, as we sit in our cubicles, at our laptops, but we need these other species, even those that seem impossibly small and remote. We need the Northern lapwing, the Scottish crossbill, the king protea, (South Africa’s national flower), the albacore tuna, Boyd’s forest dragon (an Australian lizard) – all of which are in dire straits. We’re interconnected to everything. The scrawniest weed in Patagonia absorbs carbon dioxide, which poisons us, and produces oxygen, which we will breathe in New York or Houston. Plants provide air, food and medicine; every living being occupies a niche in the global mosaic. Birds transport seeds and pollen; they destroy insect pests; they clean our harbors and landscapes. All living species perform functions valuable to the ecosystem, to the planet, and to the people who live on it. But species everywhere are being systematically deprived of the possibility of life.

We know what we’re doing. We hear the reports, the gruesome stories, but we’ve decided just to wait and see. We think the scientists – all of them – could be wrong. Maybe we’ll just do nothing. Short-term self-interest suggests that we do nothing right now. Why should we drive slower cars because of the Scottish crossbill?

Cutting fossil fuels and reducing greenhouse gases would save many species from vanishing, but we’re not committing ourselves to that strategy. 182 nations ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity; the United States is the only industrial country that refused. We didn’t want to be subject to any regulation over our destruction of the air, the water, the habitat, and the voiceless inhabitants of the earth. Others agree. Many developing countries wanted nothing in the treaty that might limit their freedom to exploit - and destroy - their natural resources. So the treaty is neither very powerful or effective, since almost everyone involved places short-term economic goals ahead of the long-term health of the planet. Similar issues affect the Kyoto Agreement. It seems we’re all in this together, this destruction of species. It’s an international effort.

Do we not think we need a healthy planet? Do we think that the animals dying all around us means nothing? That this won’t affect us? Where are the birds, the most common and visible form of wildlife? Intensive agriculture destroys hedges, woods and wetlands that birds need for feeding and nesting; toxic chemicals poison the pests and the seed-bearing wild plants they need for food. Logging destroys whole regions of habitat; industry pollutes air around the globe. The birds can’t build nests, they can’t find food, they can’t feed their young. They’re dying off. Migrating birds used to move in flocks of thousands. Now they straggle through in groups of twenty or thirty. Remember the passenger pigeon? They used to darken the entire sky, across the prairies; we wiped them out in a few decades. We’re watching life being extinguished all around us.

The use of fossil fuels, and the resulting climate change, is wreaking havoc everywhere. Monster storms, temperature spikes and erratic, destructive weather all take their toll on agriculture, construction, transportation and communication, as well as wildlife. Do we still think we don’t belong to the affected population? What if the group we’re destroying turns out to include our own? Don’t we remember the canary in the coal mine? The canaries are dropping like flies. Why are we standing here, holding the cage?

Whom will we believe, if not these scientists – experts in the field – with their gruesome and alarmist facts? How long will we keep denying the evidence?What will we say to our children, and their children, when they learn about the beautiful, rich and varied life on earth that we were privileged to know? The rippling grasses, the graceful trees, the wild birds and animals? How will we explain that we stood by and watched it vanish? What kind of courage do we need, to respond to what’s happening? And this time, there’s no grim controlling overseer to blame. It’s us.

Osprey

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana Robinson) — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 17:46:00 +0000

Down by the cove, late afternoon, low tide. This tidal cove is ringed by sea grass, pink granite boulders and dark firs. The cove is small and secluded, with a shallow mud bottom. It’s dead low tide now, but the water is moving. Tidal water is always moving, there is never a moment of stillness, equilibrium. There’s always a tiny trickle of glitter, threading its way across the flats.
The tide has just turned, and the water is slowly filling up the cove, moving in across the flats and forming wide shallow pool. Erratic jets of water shoot up suddenly and sporadically from the mud, in syncopated rhthyms: buried clams, feeling suddenly festive, or greedy, or who knows what.
An osprey comes in, flying low over the water. They like low tide better than high: the prey is visible, and close to the surface. This one flaps up to the top of a dead tree on the far side of the cove. Ospreys flap their wings more often than gulls do. They have shorter necks, and they look down as they fly. This means that gulls, those loud, common scavengers of offal, actually are more stately in flight, with their long necks, high heads, and slow majestic movements.
The osprey (male, I think) settles onto the dead tree at the mouth of the cove. The tree is tall and silvery, stripped of all its bark. It shines in the afternoon light, and it makes a perfect camouflage for the osprey, whose white chest looks into the tree, and whose dark back blends into the dark firs behind him.
The osprey spreads his wings, revealing the pale undersides, showing off. He closes them again and settles down, moving about on his perch. He looks around at the cove, on the alert. He shifts from foot to foot, then suddenly leans forward, raising his tail high and releasing a white liquid ribbon from beneath it, which slides down through the dark air.
The osprey looks about boldly, his head now high. His eyes are fierce and piratical, with low intolerant brows. On his cheek is a black racing stripe. His chest is white, his wings and back mottled black. He lowers his head, reaching down to the branch he’s on. The top of his head is patterned with two white diamonds, side by side, meeting at the middle, surrounded by black. Very elegant, and rather Venetian.
He’s got something there, on the branch, or held in his claws. His head lowers to it, and then his head twists, neatly and precisely, as though he were opening a bottle. He raises his head again, looks around, then lowers it for another neat, ruthless swivel. There’s something at his feet, though it’s too far away to make out – something mauled and bloody. The osprey sits still, lowering his dominoed head for another twist, then raising it again to survey his territory with a fierce stare.
In the cove below, the water moves silently, swirling with the incoming tide, deepening the pools. A huge dragonfly, backlit by the lowering sun, rises suddenly and swiftly over the ater, then wheels, drops again, and vanishes into the glowing, transparent darkness.

Mergansers

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana Robinson) — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 17:44:00 +0000

One evening I saw something shimmering, down in the cove, and I went down to see who was there. It was a flock of ducks, very busy, paddling around by the little point near us. There were sixteen of them, I think, though it was hard to count, they moved so quickly. They were long and slim, with slightly reddish heads and long flat beaks. There was some blurry white around the neck, and a white patch on the back near the tail. They all seemed to be about the same color - reddish brown heads and greyish-brown backs. They kept moving, paddling fast, in and out of the little cove, and then went out again into the larger one. The water was very still and glassy, and the pines on the far shore were black, and the ducks were dark against that sheet of silver.
One of them suddenly opened her wings and rose up almost entirely out of the water, and slid rapidly across the surface in a straight line. She moved impossibly fast, and silently. Beneath the surface her feet must have been propelling her, but you could see nothing of that. You could see only the smooth beautiful glide across the silver water - sleek, elegant, economic. It looked like magic. As she streaked along, the others rose up, one after another, and did the same, gliding swiftly along in the same direction, like a volley of silver bullets, smooth and soundless. At the end of the run they each dove into the green water, as she had, and vanished. A few moments later they were up, then they ducked back under, busy, fast, intent.
It was a training session: a mother and her brood, who look very similar at this time of year. The mother was teaching the juveniles how to dive for their dinners, and the streak across the water was part of a herding operation. The leader rose up, shot fifty feet across the water and then dove rapidly down, to scare the fish. She was herding them, ahead of her, or back toward the babies, I couldn’t see which, but those fish were being harried. The flock spent a lot of time in the small inlet beyond us, where they could corner the schools of fish against the shore. The juveniles ducked and gulped and rose and glided, just as they were being shown to do.
In the natural world there are different methods of teaching survival. Some animal mothers give directions to their offspring, and remonstrate with them – horses and elephants, for example, who usually have only one infant at a time, will do this. Ducks and geese have a different system. Most ducks have big clutches of eggs – ten or twelve. The mother would be exhausted by giving directions and remonstrating with so many offspring: imprinting is used instead. Imprinting is the mysterious process by which newly-hatched ducks and geese will fix their obedient focus onto their mother. (Or whoever is taking care of them. It could be a scientist with a clipboard. ) Once imprinted, a duck will follow docilely behind his mother and imitate everything she does.
These mergansers showed how important imprinting would be. Life in the wild offers no time for correction or directives. If a predator appears, a baby duck can’t wait to be rounded up, or told where to go - he must do exactly as his mother does, at once. What the ducks were doing was imitation for survival, and it was working perfectly. The younger ducks were mimicking their mother - the smooth glides across the water, the sudden deep dives into the flurry of fish. This, the mother showed, with each fluid movement, is how you live.
A week later they were back.
The tide was very high, covering the long soft grasses along the shore. The water was calm and silvery again, and the pines were darkening across the cove. The ducks, though, were different. Now they all seemed the same size, in just a week the juveniles seemed adult. They were no longer given the benefit of herding. No-one rose up and made the long glittering glide. Instead they moved smoothly along in the water, fast and efficient, making long black lines against the silver, ducking their heads, diving silently, then reappearing.
There were two fewer, as far as I could tell. Maybe two of them were in a different cove, with a different group, or maybe something else had happened. But fourteen of them were still together, still part of that rapid, silent flock, each of them moving in strong straight lines against the quiet, darkening water.

Frogtime

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana Robinson) — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 14:09:00 +0000

September seems to be the time for frogs in the garden. All along the stone walls, in the Brick Path garden(1), there are little dark green leopard frogs, spotted with brown , and with two handsome gold lines down their backs. When I come near, these hop importantly out of the way, into the tangle of collapsing plants at the back of the beds. I like having them in the garden – they eat bugs – but there’s no way of letting them know that.

The best frog, though, this year, is an extremely small tree frog that has made his home on the Zephyrine Drouhin. This is the incredibly generous and forgiving rose-colored climber on the porch wall. It’s an awful spot, roots cramped between the porch foundations and the cellar door, on a wall that definitely faces north, but this rose, may her tribes increase, doesn’t seem to mind. This year she has sent a long, graceful shoot diagonally up the trellis, about ten feet long. A few days ago I examined her leaves, some of which were laced by a caterpillar, and I saw the tiny frog.

He’s small enough to fit very comfortably sideways on a rose leaf, and he sits with his front feet tucked neatly underneath him, as though he were carrying a muff. He’s a very pale greenish tan, nearly translucent, with dark eyes, each with a short dark stripe that goes directly through it. On his back is a vague dim pattern, like drowned islands seen from above. The first time, not knowing he was there, I scared him, and I watched him leap seven or eight inches – seven or eight times his length – to another leaf, stretching out his strange rubbery extra-terrestrial fingers and toes to clutch the next perch. I leaned down to look at him, and then he sat motionless, the fingers hidden beneath his belly, his dark striped eyes open, and his pale throat palpitating, very fast, a quick hurrying rhythm of pulse.

I watched him for a long time, to see if the rythym would slow when he was less alarmed, but watching a wild animal is like the physics principle (Heidegger’s?) : by watching them you change them, so I’ve never found out whether or not the pulse would slow.

He’s been there, somewhere on the rose trellis, each day when I come out, though sometimes it takes a little while to find him. Yesterday he was on the trellis itself, sitting completely still and composed, clamped ont o the perpendicular surface, his pale head facing straight up, the drowned islands on his back, his bright unnatural eyes slightly lidded.
I couldn’t see the pulse.

The Hummingbird Wars

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana Robinson) — Thu, 14 Jul 2005 17:44:00 +0000

Along the eastern edge of the meadow here I put in clumps of beautiful dark red beebalm, the native monarda. They’re upright plants, with tall stalks and dense moppy heads. In July and August these glow against the dark shadowy woods beyond.
I planted them for the hummingbirds. Hummingbirds love red flowers, and I love hummingbirds. We have native red beebalm, the red and pink native honeysuckle, lonicera, and the native trumpet vine, campsis radicans, though this takes ten years to bloom, we learned after planting it. We put it in seven years ago, and so far it has busily covered the walls of the garage in a thick green tapestry, but no more. It seems to be holding out for the decade.
My bird book describes the hummingbird family – Trochilidae – as the smallest birds. The only ones we get here in Maine are ruby-throated hummingbirds, Archilochus colubris. A learned friend told me that Archilocus was a Roman soldier famous for his retreats, during battle: apparently the hummingbird is the only bird who can fly backwards.
The shining blur of wings rotates in both directions. My learned friend told me, too, about sitting on a screened-in porch one afternoon, reading, when he heard the sound of a sudden small collision. He looked up to see a hummingbird, his long tiny beak stuck fast in the screen. He was momentarily impaled, the delicate proboscis caught in the minute metal grid. But it was only for a moment: the bird’s wings began to blur again, and he hummed rapidly backwards like the Roman and was gone. (The Archilocus incident explains those tiny mysterious gaps that appear in metal screens. I’d always wondered what produced them – very powerful mosquitoes, muscling their way inside?)
My bird book also describes the hummingbirds as “pugnacious,” and though it saddens me to say this about a friend, they are. They are ferocious. I will also admit, caught up by candor, that most of the ones I see around here are not males but females – throats a dull green, not ruby. It’s the females that fight. They are Amazons, fierce warrior queens with volcanic tempers and belligerent manners.
One afternoon I watched a hummer moving from blossom to blossom among the sorberias along the fence by the house. These graceful shrubs have long white plumy blossoms and lacy green leaves. It was a pretty sight, the tiny bird poised and motionless in the air, regal, perfectly erect, her wings shimmering magically, her green back glittering and iridescent. Focused and intent, her movements mysteriously abrupt, she moved from white plume to white plume. As she hovered and rose and dropped and hovered, I became aware of a noise, and of motion nearby. There was a tiny, shrill, “Chick, chick, chick,” and something swirled in the air over her. It was another hummer, small as a green bee, moving in sweeping arcs over the first bird’s head, each arc lower than the one before. She swooped over the head of the feeding bird, the arc dropping with each swing, like th ominous sweep of an executioner’s axe. “Chick, chick, chick,” she shrieked homicidally. The first bird slid sideways; she vibrated back and forth in alarm; finally she ducked under a wide branch of sorberia. She hovered there, assaulted by the wild cries of the invader, until she rose suddenly and zoomed off into the open spaces of the meadow, and she was gone.
They do this all the time.
They must have something else to do in the mornings, somewhere else to be, but in the late afternoons I find them at the edge of the meadow, by the beebalm. There’s a birch tree next to one stand of flowers, and a big mass of bay bushes behind it. The hummingbirds zoom in and out of the flowers, perching, suddenly still, on a branch, then shifting into motion again, as though they were casting a quick magic spell on themselves. They rise up among the flowers, heads raised, beaks poised, wings invisible. Then a new one arrives, instantly outraged, and they zoom at each other, buzzing furiously. They pursue each other at high speeds, from beebalm stand to beebalm stand. “Chick, chick, chick!” they scream, in high, tiny voices, wild with fury. They’re always in a state, those microscopic hearts always beating a frenzied tattoo of rage, faster than we can imagine.
Once last year I was standing on the porch, watching a hummingbird feeding on the tall plume poppies next to the fort door. He hung in midair among them, probing each flower delicately with his beak, his wings shimmering in the sunlight. I stood nearby, watching. Finishing, he moved on, from the flowers toward me. He hung in the air in front of my face, shifting slightly, a bright iridescent shimmer in the air. He was very close, no more than two feet from my face, and his bold dark gaze was fixed on me. Under his long fierce stare I began to feel odd, then faintly uneasy, as though this tiny, satiny feathered thing might contain – what? some threat? I stepped back instinctively. He peered at me a second longer, made an avian executive decision, then sped away. It wasn’t until I went back inside, past the mirror in the front hall, that I realised how I looked to a hummingbird: the frames of my glasses are bight red. In the dim light of the porch, it must hav seemed interestingly like two red rims of blossom. It was a flower he didn’t know, but one possibly worth investigating, worth piercing with his long pointed bill, drilling into it as though it were a metal screen. When the blossoms retreated nervously into the darkness he lost interest, though, and hummed swiftly off into the sunlight, looking for other realms to conquer. Much as I love hummingbirds, I was just as glad not to have gotten to know that particular one any better.
I still love them, though. I like having them around. I like finding them, in the late afternoons, perching among the beebalms, waiting for a fight to get into.

The Necklace

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana Robinson) — Wed, 13 Jul 2005 14:03:00 +0000

One of the great pleasures of the garden lies in its textures – the lace of ferns, the velvet of roses, the smooth fluted curves of hosta. Boxwood’s texture has a particular appeal, especially now – September - when everything else is in decline. Box is still dense and vigorous, the leaves bright dark green and shiny, the surface of the shrub dense and springy, somehow luxuriant.

My back door is flanked by two pyramidal boxes, five feet high (1). Every time I go in and out I pass this stout reliable presence, the dry green thicket of tiny leaves. There are tall willow trees nearby, and their pale narrow leaves and fine whippy twigs often drop into the dark green of the box, which is why I almost didn’t notice the casual strip of brown, flung across the shoulder of the box this morning. A long looped line, in smooth curves, like a necklace dropped by the gods.

It was a snake. Its body drew a narrow sinuous line through the leaves. It was dark grey, nearly black, with pale bold stripes running the length of it. I could see the narrow tapering tail, curled inward, but the head was invisible, inside the box. For long moments the snake was motionless among the leaves, and I began to wonder if it were dead. Then I saw a faint thickening swell, like a swell of water in the ocean, and then, magically, the long line of it moving without moving, slid inside the deep green interior of the box and was gone.

Later, when I came outside he was there again. His head was stretched out into the air. His jewelled, brilliant eyes were black against the clean stripes. We stared at each other without moving, and then his mouth flashed open. Flickering suddenly into the air like electricity was his narrow threadlike tongue. It was dark glistening carmine at the roots, glistening black at the forked end. The forked end snapped like a banner. He flicked it, flicked, flicked again, staring straight at me like a hypnotist. Then he stopped, still staring, and drew his head in and turned in on himself, collecting himself in loops. He slid away, deep inside the beautiful dense green plush of the boxwood.

Spring Again

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana Robinson) — Sun, 05 Dec 2004 15:00:00 +0000

It’s still cold, and in the late afternoons, when I go running, I’m still in my parka. The air is clean and chill, and I can see my breath. The woods, on either side of the road, are still brown and grey. Nothing is green. Spring is keeping herself dar – though I know she’s around: the bare grey branches are full of birdsong. The red-winged blackbirs have arrived, with their lovely liquid purling trills, and last week I saw a flock of robins in the field.

Down the road there’s a small pond – just a widening of the stream, really – a sheet of dark water, with a bottom of dead leaves. The pair of mallards is back, and every afternoon I see them busy there, the trim patterns of their feathers rich against the smooth water. They duck their heads into it, paddling about, feeding on something. I can taste the water: cold and clear and woodsy.

There’s something else, though, further evidence. In the boggy parts along the road, where the hillside starts to fall away into the woods, the aliens have arrived. Rising slowly from the dead browns of last year’s foliage are motionless spirals of leaves, twisting up through the swampy ground like unearthly corkscrews.

Why are spotted things so strange, so sinister? These leaves are otherworldly and alarming. They’re mottled and striped; they’re rotten-brown, electric-green, birthmark-purple, bruise-yellow. The flecks and spots are everywhere, tiny and dark, myriad and ominous, like insects. The leaves are wide and fleshy and tortuous. They curl, writhing slowly around their own thick center, roiling upwards to a sharp pointed tip: it’s the lowly and fabulous skunk cabbage.

First plant of the season, spring’s handwritten anouncement. Everything surrounding it is old, dry, cast-off, dead, but this doesn’t matter. These strange, spotted, twisted leaves have appeared again – rising up from the wintry earth, potent, vivid, thick with life, reminding us that there’s a lot we don’t know, theat beauty is more varied and foreign than we remembered – and so has spring.

April 5, 2004

Bracey's Cove

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana Robinson) — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 18:49:00 +0000

It’s just after sundown, and cold. The sky is perfectly clear, the air crystalline.
The tide is running out, and below the pebble beach the waves come lapping in, darkening the long sloping granite ledges. Sutton’s Island is a dim outline in the dusk. Close offshore, half a dozen ducks are rafting together for the night. It doesn’t look very comfortable or warm out there – it’s just below freezing – but the ducks, silhouetted against the pale water, form a ragged, close line, and rock peacefully as the waves follow each other in.
On the western side of the cove it’s sunset, all reds and fiery hues. Out at the point, the water meets a line of firs, densely black against the rose-colored sky. The sky is fiere and brilliant along the treetops, fading upward to paler hues. The water below it is glimmering red, softening to pink toward the east. The sky and water here are awash with sunset. They’ve been taken over by it, flooded by the great roseate streams of light.
On the eastern side of the cove, it’s night. The water here is silky black, and the entire curtain of sky has turned a deep endless mauve-gray. Halfway up the sky is half a moon, brilliant and huge. It’s never been so huge. It’s enormous, and radiant with a cold white light. Sometimes half a moon looks like its own shape, a sickle, or a crescent, but this like a full moon cut in half, a demisphere. The absent, darkened side of it is mysteriously present, felt, though not visible. Half of it’s lit up as though with a spotlight. All the markings are visible, and bold: there are the craters and mountains that we’ve always known, the lakes and valleys, all the mysterious lunar runes that have been in our nighttime minds for a million years.
Below this bright presence, on the black water, lies its rippling reflection, brilliant points of light, incandescent. A blanket of gleaming scintillae, rocking like the ducks on the lowering tide.
Strange that all of it – the rose-colored streams of light on the waves, the flaming sky behind the firs, the shocking cold brilliance of the half-moon, the glittering net on the inky water below – all of this is radiance borrowed from the vanished sun, which has gone, which has sunk soundlessly below the horizon, which has disappeared beyond the edge of the known world.

Breathing Partners

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana Robinson) — Mon, 15 Nov 2004 18:39:00 +0000

Op-Ed, The Boston Globe

From my desk I can see a line of trees, along the stone wall, that marks the edge of a sloping hillside pasture. The trees along the wall were probably not planted, but sprang up as sturdy wild seedlings missed by mowers. There are some sugar maples and hickories, but most are white ash, Fraxinus americana. This is common in our region – southeastern New York and New England – but it’s a robust and adaptable species, flourishing from Canada to Florida, with cousins in Britain and Europe.
Living here for thirty years, I’ve come to know the white ash well – its fine, pointed, feathery leaves, its high, graceful, branching shape, its ridged and furrowed grey bark. In the fall, ash leaves turn subtle hues of bronze and mauve, in counterpoint to the yellow radiance of the sugar maples, the scarlet of the swamp maples. The shape of a young ash, like the ones along the wall, is high and narrow, but an older ash spreads out, grand and monumental, becoming finally wider than it is tall. And it can be very tall: early European arrivals reported ash trees 175 feet high, and 300 years old.
When we first moved to this farmhouse a huge, majestic white ash stood near the barn, spreading its long swooping branches above our lawn for forty or fifty feet. It was, we were told, the largest white ash in the county, about two hundred years old. Its vast presence took up most of the aerial space between the house and the barn – towering, capacious and immensely calming. To lie on the lawn beneath its shade, gazing up into its airy open center, watching the silvery flutter of its narrow leaves, was to feel encompassed by peace.
The ash tree – and the others - are more than just beautiful, however. Trees provide us with very practical benefits. Their strengths are quiet ones: calming, cooling, moisturising and nourishing. They lower the temperature, cause condensation and increase precipitation – more rain will fall on a forest than on open land. Their fallen leaves enrich the soil, and their root systems help rainwater descend toward the aquifer.
More than that: trees are our lungs.
We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, and by some miraculous law of exchange, trees do exactly the opposite. When we inhale, they exhale: we’re breathing partners. Using the vast shifting surfaces of their leaves, trees absorb the carbon dioxide we produce from our lungs, our factories and our engines. By means of a marvelous alchemy they transform this waste – and not just carbon dioxide, but other noxious gases, dust and pollutants as well - into the sweet fresh air we need. A mature, leafy, healthy tree provides enough oxygen for a family of four. We need trees. And the more our population increases, and the more carbon dioxide we produce, the more trees we need.
* * *
The ashes on our hillside are dying. The upper branches are nearly bare, and the remaining leaves were already yellowish at midsummer. They’re suffering from ash die-back, a non-specific ailment which is more and more widespread. Die-back causes a gradual decline: the circulatory system becomes increasingly feeble. Insects and disease are more dangerous to a weakened tree, which can’t muster the resources to replace destroyed foliage, or fight off bacteria. Each year the tree has fewer leaves, and finally none at all, and the big skeleton stands grey and gaunt against the sky. Die-back is what killed our big ash, though we fed and coddled it for twenty years. It troubles me that it died under our watch.
The tree people don’t know exactly why die-back has become so prevalent; they shake their heads and suggest that you plant something else instead. Sugar maples, maybe – though those, too, aren’t as hardy as they used to be. It’s strange about ashes: they’ve been a vigorous part of the local landscape for at least two hundred years. And the ones along the stone walls are young, only fifty or sixty years old. They’re not dying of old age, but something else.
* * *
For decades we’ve been warned about global warming. Thirty years ago, scientists painted a picture of universal calamity, like a science fiction movie: floods, droughts, storms, fires. Since the scenarios were so dire, and since the remedy – mainly the reduction of oil and gas use – would so powerfully affect the American economy, the government urged caution. It was possible, we were told, that the risks were exaggerated. It was possible, we were told, that the buildup of greenhouse gases – mostly carbon dioxide and methane – was not caused by human activity. Scant encouragement was given to alternative energy sources: they were impractical, we were told. As the years have passed, the warnings have continued, and so has the burning of fossil fuels.
By now we know it’s happening. One effect of greenhouse gas buildup is the disruption of weather patterns. We’re aware that our weather has become uncertain, unreliable and often extreme. Sudden and unseasonal heat waves and cold snaps, torrential rains, floods, droughts, high winds and severe storms are all now common. To people this may be only an inconvenience, but in the natural world erratic weather wreaks havoc. Most living organisms have evolved, over millenia, in response to reliable weather patterns. When those are disrupted, the organism is at risk.
Take trees, for example, the white ash. Deciduous trees drop their leaves before the fierce storms of winter. This is part of an efficient natural engineering system: bare branches offer little resistance to high winds, and catch little snow. But if high winds occur in midsummer, or if there’s an early snowfall, when the leaves are still on the tree, the system fails. In high winds, the leaves act like sails, catching the wind, and they’re ripped from the tree. An early snowfall is worse: the leaves hold the snow, the limbs can’t support the weight, and they fall. Loss of limbs, and unseasonal loss of leaves, weaken the tree and put it at risk.
Temperature changes are important, too. Sap descends, in the fall, and spends the winter deep in the tree’s lower regions. An unseasonal warm spell in January signals the approach of spring, and the sap begins its long climb upward. A return of cold weather requires the system to reverse itself. Both mean the wasting of energy, which trees can’t afford. Good survival strategies save energy, not waste it. A tree under stress is susceptible to disease and death, and erratic weather places all trees under constant stress. The rise of die-back begins to make sense.
* * *
It seems that the debate is over about the causes of global warming. The recent government report on “Our Changing Planet” states with certainty that “Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane have been increasing for about two centuries as a result of human activities and are now higher than they have been for about 400,000 years.” Here “human activities” means, mostly, the combustion of fossil fuels, of which the United States is responsible for a disproportionately large amount.
The report contains ominous news about melanoma, (now officially an epidemic cancer), and certain plants, but perhaps the worst news is about trees. A study of fluctuating precipitation levels showed that old trees could withstand this, but young trees were not. Fluctuation interfered with the young trees’ ability to absorb nutrients, and increased their mortality rate. Erratic precipitation is already a result of our unreliable weather. If the weather of the future threatens the survival of young trees, how will the forest reproduce itself?
* * *
It’s good that the government is studying the climate crisis; it’s good that they’ve finally acknowledged the cause, but the response is baffling. The report suggests urgent action, but the Bush administration’s response is anything but urgent. Instead of reducing the use of fossil fuels, it’s encouraging an increase. The Bureau of Land Management plans to auction off parts of Yellowstone Park for oil and gas development; the US Forest Service is considering opening national forests to commercial logging; the Department of the Interior plans to accelerate oil and gas drilling, and the EPA is trying to protect Exxon and others from key provisions of the Clean Air Act.
Global warming affects everyone on the planet. All of us here are interconnected in subtle ways, but the most striking link may be that between our lungs and our forests. Our determined commitment to fossil fuels means the subjection of our generous silent partners to increasingly lethal conditions: pollution, erratic weather, clear-cut logging and acid rain. All these things are necessary for a healthy economy, we’re told.
But what about healthy lungs? What do we plan to breathe?
* * *
Four years ago the great ash died. I planted in its place a white oak,
Quercus alba. The white oak is a noble tree; no other has a broader reach, deeper roots, or more expansive possibilities. Its stout taproot runs so deep, and its innumerable rootlets spread so wide, that the underground tree is nearly a shadowy mirror image of the one above. A white oak can live for five centuries, towering peacefully over the landscape. Rugged, monumental, and unthinkably generous, it can provide cool shade to creatures below, shelter and food to birds in its midst, and pure, sweet air for generations - to my grandchildren’s children, wherever in the world they may live.
I want to see that young oak rising straight and tall against the red barn. I want to see a line of wild ashes along the stone wall, full and green against the sky. I want to see each high branch loaded and brimming with bright shimmery leaves. Then I’ll breathe easy.

Skunk Cabbage

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana Robinson) — Sun, 04 Apr 2004 17:46:00 +0000

It’s cold here, still. In the evenings I still go running in my parka. The air is clean and chill; I can see my breath. The woods on either side of the dirt road are still brown and grey. Nothing is green. Spring is keeping herself dark – though I know she’s around: the bare grey branches are full of birdsong. The red-winged blackbirds have arrived, with their liquid warbling calls, and a huge flock of robins were busy in the hillside meadow last week.

Down the road there’s a small pond. It’s just a widening of the stream, really – a narrow sheet of clear black water, with a bottom of dead leaves. The pair of mallards is back, and every afternoon I see them in the dark water, ducking their heads into it, paddling about in the current. I can taste it: cold and pure and woodsy. They’re getting ready to nest.

But that’s not all. In the boggy parts, where the hillside drops down from the road, the aliens have arrived. Rising slowly up from the dead browns of last year’s grasses are motionless spirals of leaves, twisting upward through the swampy ground like corkscrews.

What is it about spotted things that is so strange, so sinister? These leaves are otherworldly and unexpected – they’re brown, mottled, striped, and bruise-yellow, electric-green, birthmark-purple – and the flecks on them are everywhere, tiny and dark, myriad and ominous, like insects. The leaves are wide and fleshy and twisted. They curl sensuously around their own fat center, roiling upwards toward a sharp tip: skunk cabbage.

First plant of the season, spring’s handwritten announcement. Everything around it is old, dry, cast-off, dead, but it doesn’t matter. These strange, winding, spotted, twisted leaves have appeared (rising up from the wintry earth, potent, vivid, reminding us that there’s a lot we don’t know, that beauty is more varied and foreign than we remembered) and so has spring.

Spring

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana Robinson) — Thu, 04 Dec 2003 14:59:00 +0000

It’s still cool here, the temperature’s in the fifties, which is balmy for winter but rather chilly and spinsterish for spring. I’ve been wearing my jacket this afternoon, doing errands. Still, there are hints that things are on the move: the earth in the borders has darkened, it’s no longer the still dead grey of winter, but a richer brown, though it’s blank and empty. At the heart of the dead grey waterfall of the sprawling nepeta there are tiny pale heads, thrusting themselves upwards. And the lawn: the lawn has made a bold and sweeping declaration: emerald.
But it’s still chilly, and I’ve not yet been tempted to roll up my sleeves and start messing around in the garden, pruning things too early and stepping on new peony roots as I try to see if they’re there: it’s still too cold.
There are other ways, though, that the message is being delivered.
Tonight I went out running in the dark, along the dirt road and through the high bare trees, that moved faintly and mysteriously, though there was no wind. The air was sharp and fresh and damp. When I turned up Mt. Holly Road and went over the swampy part, coming over the bridge, it swept over me suddenly and for a moment I closed my eyes: peepers.
The whole hollow swelled with that high eerie hallelujah. I ran through it, feeling it shrilling around me in the darkness, lifting us all toward spring in a wild exalting rush.
And when I got home, still elated, and back to our barn driveway, beyond the sound of the chorus, I opened the gate and stepped into the pasture, and into another of spring’s announcements: the dense, heady, opulent perfume of skunk: wide awake, sociable, and very nearby.
Then I stopped, and took a long, ecstatic breath. I couldn’t get enough: it’s here.

Snowshoe Hare

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana Robinson) — Sat, 12 Apr 2003 17:41:00 +0000

Op-Ed, The Boston Globe

January, and twenty seven degrees. Down in the cove the water is emerald green, as though it were midsummer, but we know it’s not. In the garden , the shallow puddles from the last rain are frozen solid. We’ve had some mild weather lately, but now it’s over: the air tastes like iron, and the sky is low and grey. Snow is imminent. We’re all waiting for it.
The garden is ready, everything in it has been cut down clean. Only one clump of tall grasses is still standing, its pale dry stalks whispering and rustling in the wind. Everything else is gone, down to the ground. The short clipped stems are covered with pine boughs. The garden is bare, waiting for snow.
Also waiting for it is the snowshoe hare who’s sitting inside the walled garden, against the concrete base of the house. During the summer, he might easily be invisible there, at the back of the deep beds, shielded by the heavy foliage, the big curved hosta leaves, the dense clumps of ferns. He might be invisible there right now, if it were a little earlier, or later. But right at this moment he couldn’t be more glaringly visible, because he’s made the big mistake, not only of taking shelter against a bare wall, in a flat empty garden, but of disguising himself as a snowbank, in a brown landscape.
The snowshoe hare (lepus americanus) has a system that’s exquisitely attuned to lowering temperatures, diminishing light, and the arrival of winter. Some time in the late fall this hare’s summer-brown coat very sensibly turned white (it’s not his fault we have no snow). Hares don’t dig burrows, and in the winter, a hare may shelter beneath a log, or in the tunnels made by heavy brush covered with snow. But often he will snug himself up against something solid: a tree, a bank, a log, a weather break. Exposed in the open like that, a brown coat against a white field would be a dead giveaway. So, somewhere along the evolutionary time-line of lepus americanus, an ingenious color change system developed, for survival - the shaft of each hair changes, seasonally, from brown to white, and back again.
Our wall seems to be a safe place for this one. It’s sheltered by the surrounding fences, and it’s quiet. The hare sits completely still, against the concrete, as calm and secure as though his bold white coat blended perfectly with its scumbly brown surface. He’s near the front door, and we go in and out, peering discreetly at him.
Our hare sits bunched in a neat rounded dome, the curve of his back high. I expected a hare to be long and low, but he is short and plump, like a teapot. His dark rounded eyes are brown, with a faint tinge of red. His front paws, just visible beneath his snowy chest, are oddly brown, as though he’s got on someone else’s shoes. His narrow ears are velvet brown, and there is the sheen of the shadowy brown undercoat, beneath his snowy overcoat. His nose, too, is a blotch of neutral brown, and there are a few vague streaks of it on his shoulders: the broken lines of camouflage. He’s watching, his dark eye is on me, but he is completely, utterly, still, despite our comings and goings. His ears are tilted slightly up – he’s listening – but they don’t swivel: movement would give him away. Immobility is his protection, it’s movement that draws the eye. His stillness says simply that he’s not here; there’s nothing here.
His color-coding, too, is part of the hare’s survival strategy. But this weather is dangerous for him: he can’t adapt to unseasonal fluctuations, he can’t change color every time the temperature rises in January. The snowshoe hare, like most living organisms, has evolved over time in relation to a reliable weather cycle. Living things rely on a dependable climate, whether it’s temperate, desert or arctic. Deciduous trees, for example, cannot tolerate an early, unseasonal snowfall, while they still have their leaves. The weight of the snow on the leaves is too heavy for their branches to sustain, and they’ll break. The loss of large branches will compromise the tree’s health. Fruit trees, which flower in the spring, require calm, mild spring weather during their blossoming season. Bees won’t fly in high winds, which will rip the blossoms off the trees, so the chance for pollination – and a fruit harvest – will be lost. Warm weather in the middle of winter acts as a signal for plants to use their stored energy and send it upward, producing tender green shoots. A subsequent freeze will kill the shoots, and the plant will need to muster the energy to start over again, later. The energy spent on the winter shoot was wasted. The second or third try may produce a plant that’s small and stunted. Energy is the elixir of life in the natural world; no organism can afford to waste it. Successful survival strategies don’t include false starts.
Unseasonal storms and temperatures put stress on agriculture and fruticulture and silviculture, as well as on wildlife, and plants and animals under stress have a higher risk for disease and infestation. Historically, there have always been unseasonal weather events, but historically they were unusual – that’s why they were recorded. They weren’t the norm.
The emission of greenhouse gases disrupts the layer of atmosphere in which weather patterns are formed. Increasingly, we’re evolving a pattern of unreliable weather, one of unseasonal fluctuations, extreme storms, droughts and floods that threaten the vigor, reproduction and survival of plants and animals.
Our snowshoe hare waits, motionless, against the wall. If it snows again, as it normally would in January, he’ll have protective cover, and the chances will diminish of his being seen by the coyote who trots past, down by the cove, along the shoreline, in the late afternoons. But if we have another winter of fluctuating weather, alternating between hard freezing and unseasonal warmth, the snowshoe hare – and all the trees on the property – and on the island – and in the state - will be in trouble.