A TERMITE BLIZZARD
At the woods' edge suddenly the air was sparkling. I'd been looking for mushrooms and just hadn't noticed that around me thousands of small insects with fluttering wings glistening in the sunlight were gathering. It was the biggest swarm of this type I'd ever seen.
The first thing to do when coming upon such a swarm is to figure out whether they are termites or winged ants. This was easy because dozens were entangled in the hairs on my arms and naturally I was carrying my handlens. A quick glance at one, which had just left its wings suspended in my arm hairs and was ticklingly climbing toward my hand, confirmed its termiteness. Winged ants have "wasp waists" -- very narrow constrictions in the middle of their bodies -- and bent antennae, while termites are about the same width their entire length, and their antennae are straight.
What a perfect snowstorm of termites! Green Anoles in the trees ran from one meal to the next hardly paying attention to my presence. Carolina Chickadees continually laughed their nasal calls while darting from branch to branch snatching all they could. A Squirrel Treefrog gave the impression of having eaten so much that his stomach hurt. He curled onto his side making a comma-shape, squinted his eyes and gaped, but when a termite landed right before his nose he lunged at it and swallowed it in a flash. Spiders scrambled about carrying termites mummified in silk cocoons, or squirming in their fangs.
When the termites landed, their wings broke off and the insects ran away looking like black ants. No small number took the chance to mate, so it was normal to see couples stuck together by their rear ends, one pulling the other along. In places the ground was silvery with discarded wings.
After the deluge of termites subsided, a breeze came along stirring up brief whirlwinds of silvery, broken-off termite wings. Spiderwebs, so covered with sparkling wings that they drooped, looked like sequined necklaces.
*****
THE MIDDLE PATH
I have grown accustomed to people referring to my views as extreme. They assume that even I accept that I am an extremist. However, I think of myself as a true disciple of the Middle Path.
It is a matter of perspective. I am taking the long view.
Humans have been around for 5-7 million years. Until only about 300 years ago when the Industrial Revolution began, people were not spending most of their waking hours doing repetitive, often unfulfilling jobs for businesses and institutions. The manner of life we now accept as normal and inevitable has occupied us during only about 1/500,000ths of our existence. Our society's priorities of attaining mostly unnecessary material wealth, and our obsessions with individual personal liberty and self gratification instead of the maintenance of a healthy and just society, constitute a very recent phenomenon.
Our society's present consumption-oriented manner of living must be and will be replaced by a different system, if only because it is unsustainable. The most obvious reason it is unsustainable is that maintaining the kind of lifestyle we live consumes resources faster than they can be replaced, if they can be replaced at all. Unsustainable behaviors either change or go extinct. To my mind, to persist in indulging in unsustainable living patterns is extreme. It is not extreme to try to live sustainably.
The life I live is hardly an extreme case of "going back to nature." I buy cornmeal and wheat flour milled from grain grown in other states, wear clothing sowed together on the opposite side of the planet, ride a bicycle that is a marvel of engineering, and use very sophisticated technology to learn about the world and keep in touch with others. I take what I need from the outside world and in the process produce more pollution as a consequence of my purchasing than I like. Very much of what enriches and gladdens my life comes from far beyond the gardens, forests and fields around me. If anything, in seeking the Middle Path I err too much toward consumerism myself.
In my view, average US consumers are extremists. As they gather so much needless clutter around them and focus on their own hungers, their own comfort and their own status in an unsustainable social system, they are abandoning sustainable living patterns pioneered by many kinds of living organisms during 3.5 billion years of life on Earth.
In contrast to this extreme behavior, I am truly the most mild-mannered, hard-nosedly conservative, middle-of-the-road person I know. Moreover, for the future, I aspire to orient myself even more directly upon the sustainable Middle Path.
*****
PILEATED WOODPECKER ON A ROTTEN LOG
Sometimes I use my binoculars as a sense-focuser. It's like when you're sitting with your eyes closed and listen to the sounds you normally ignore. You find that you've been ignoring whole rainbows of overlapping sound-textures, playful harmonic interplays, subtle and interesting modulations and resonances, crescendos and decrescendos...
Reality is usually like that: When you focus narrowly on something, instead of finding less, there's more, and it's finer and richer stuff than what you're used to, no matter what you're dealing with.
So, I was sitting beside a forest pool scanning the opposite bank with my binoculars, mostly watching dragonfly-wing sun-glitter slitting the deep shadows across from me, and brown Mosquitofish hovering near the water's surface, their fins fanning calmly like the tails of contented grazing cattle. But then a crow-size Pileated Woodpecker rampaged right into my field of vision, not 20 feet from me, and plopped onto the trunk of a large tree that long ago fell from the bank into the water, and now lay there rotting.
It just happened that at that moment my elbows rested nicely on my knees, so I didn't need to readjust my position to keep my arms from getting tired holding the binoculars. For half an hour I watched that woodpecker, never moving a hair, and he never knew I was there.
In my sense-focused mode I tingled with pleasure when the big bird's bright red crest for a moment traversed a ray of brilliant sunlight. I watched him awkwardly hop backwards as he worked along the fallen trunk, and I laughed at the surprised look on his face when he disturbed a large centipede that ran toward him, causing him to jump upward and flutter his wings like a kid who almost steps on a gartersnake. I laughed again when a chipmunk emerged from beneath his log and he jumped and fluttered the same way. I saw him go to the pond's edge, daintily douse his gangly body with water, then fly onto a nearby trunk and preen himself luxuriously.
He pecked and chiseled back and forth atop the fallen log and along its sides for a long time, finally settling on one spot where he began pecking with obvious concentration. Within five minutes he withdrew from his hole a white grub the size of which made me gasp, one as large as my whole thumb. He set the grub on the trunk and beat it with his bill until it stopped squirming. It was a succulent grub, so its body fluids splattered through rays of sunlight. Then the bird took up the grub, positioned it just right in his beak, and made several attempts before finally gulping it down. I hadn't been sure he could do that, for the grub was longer than his entire beak, and thicker, too.
The woodpecker then flew away, leaving in my field of vision dragonfly-wing sun-glitter and hovering Mosquitofish.
I went to see the hole from which the grub had been be extracted. It was a typical Pileated-Woodpecker hole, rectangular, about two inches long and an inch wide, and some two inches deep. A spot next to the hole was greasy, where the grub had been worked over prior to being swallowed. A dozen or so very small black ants fed in the greasy spot, and I marveled that they had found the spot so quickly, and that they so meticulously gathered up whatever of the undone grub they could find, even if it was only pulpy wood soaked in the grub's nutrient-rich juices.
A beetle grub, a Pileated Woodpecker, a tribe of ants, and me, all feeding in our various ways on a rotting log next to a seldom visited forest pond...
*****
A WEEK FOR PROCREATION
Weeks ago I told you of the Carolina Wrens building nests in my outside kitchen. Finally they built in my toilet, produced a brood there, and as I type this I hear all kinds of squeaking and peeping from at least five Carolina Wrens. This family-making came early in the season. Other species are just getting started.
One morning a couple of White-footed Mice engaged in a prolonged chase around my feet as I sat at the morning campfire. One afternoon I noticed a fuss in a Sweetgum and got to see two Northern Parula warblers enthusiastically going at it. The female lost her grip and fell to the ground with the male hanging on. They fluttered in the grass for a good three seconds before disengaging and getting back into the trees like decent birds.
High in a Pecan tree a female Yellow-billed Cuckoo was flicking her long tail in a strange manner. She'd cock the tail skyward then flip it down again, then repeat the motion, each time the tail going higher. Suddenly a male came out of nowhere, landed atop her, grabbed some feathers atop her head with his beak, and went through an exercise looking like a complete botch of a mating. He didn't seem to know what to do. Finally he just flew off and the female looked after him in a way that could only be described as "complete disgust," then turned to the side and scratched her head. Now I understood that her tail flicking had been a sign to the male that she was ready to mate. She had cocked her tail exactly as she does when she's actually mating, to allow access. I can't imagine a more suggestive come-on for a female Yellow-billed Cuckoo.
You almost have to pity the male cuckoo. Not only are there no traditions among adolescent Yellow-billed Cuckoos during which they can get together and pool their knowledge about this sex matter, but the plain fact is that they don't even have penises. Therefore, cuckoos, like most birds, can't copulate in the manner humans understand it. When a male of most bird species mounts a female, all he can do is to press his cloaca (anal opening) against that of the female. In delicate company this action is termed a "cloacal kiss." It does get the job done, however, and sperm are transferred, as all the birds outside my door testify. Some swifts do it while flying!
Oddly, a few male birds do have penis-like appendages -- most familiarly, certain ducks, geese, ostriches, and swans.
*****
BELTED KINGFISHER IN THE WILLOWS
About an hour before dusk on Tuesday I was sitting on my plank inside the multi-trunked Black Willow at the Field Pond when I heard the neighborhood Belted Kingfisher flying across the field calling its harsh clatter-rattle.
When the bird arrived at the pond I already had my binoculars in place, for I didn't want movement to reveal my presence. My stillness worked, for the bird landed on a willow branch not 15 feet away and never did discover me. It was a female, easy to know because a broad, blue-gray band ran across the upper chest, plus a second chestnut-colored one ran below the blue-gray one. Males have only the blue-gray band.
This bird was back-lighted by intense, late-afternoon sunlight slanting in low from the west. Every few seconds she'd pump her tail, fan her crest and call, and when her crest went up sunlight caught in her silhouetted feathers like fire in the night. As she eyed the pond's surface, she held her massive, black beak open and I could see her slender, stiff tongue lolling up and down in anticipation. The sharp rims of her beak were so thin that they glowed translucently. Around her the willow's slender leaves fluttered in the late afternoon breeze, translating the crystalline sunlight into animated, mellow, yellow-green twinkle-shimmer. The bird was theater in which light, movement, sound and the struggle for existence interplayed. I'd seldom seen a creature so totally alert and alive. This bird looked and acted hungry not only for fish but also for anything and everything the next moment might provide.
Twice during her 20-minute visit she dove toward the pond's surface but broke away before hitting the water. On the third attempt she kept going, for half a second completely disappearing beneath the surface, her splash like a slow-motion explosion of a crystal chandelier. She emerged with her beak open and empty. Then she flew into the air, gave a shake that sent sparkling water droplets cascading to the pond's surface, and flew away.
*****
THIS WEEK'S MIGRATING BIRDS
Here's this week's list, my last this season, compiled on Friday, May 7th, on a calm, partly cloudy spring morning:
WINTER RESIDENTS PREPARING TO LEAVE
none
SUMMER RESIDENTS JUST ARRIVED
1 Green-backed Heron
1 Yellow-billed Cuckoo
3 Ruby-throated Hummingbird
8 Acadian Flycatcher
3 Great Crested Flycatcher
3 Brown Thrasher
4 Wood Thrush
10 Red-eyed Vireo
11 White-eyed Vireo
3 Yellow-throated Vireo
2 Black-and-white Warbler
7 Hooded Warbler
1 Kentucky Warbler
2 Prairie Warbler
3 Yellowthroat
3 Northern Parula
8 Yellow-breasted Chat
6 Orchard Oriole
5 Summer Tanager
3 Indigo Bunting
2 Blue Grosbeak
TRANSIENTS (just passing through)
1 Veery
PERMANENT RESIDENTS (individual birds may migrate)
1 Turkey Vulture
1 Red-shouldered Hawk
1 Red-tailed Hawk
2 Mourning Dove
1 Belted Kingfisher
3 Eastern Bluebird
1 Red-winged Blackbird
2 Brown-headed Cowbird
8 Eastern Towhee
*****
BIRDS MUGGING ONE ANOTHER
The most interesting observation made during Friday's birding walk occurred at the very end, as I approached the barn. The female bluebird who has succeeded in hatching her eggs in the second nest box I put up was on the telephone wire looking hard into the grass. She spotted something, dropped from the wire, and the very moment she began tugging at her prey, presumably an earthworm, a much larger Blue Jay, with a startling flurry of wings, descended almost atop her, driving her off. The jay then began pecking furiously where the bluebird had been pulling on her worm, but got nothing.
This Sunday morning I was watching two Brown Thrashers foraging in the same area, and when one began pecking at something, once again the Blue Jay flew at the couple driving them away, and once again the Blue Jay pecked where the thrashers had been pecking, but to no avail. A few minutes later I noticed a Yellow-breasted Chat uncharacteristically drop onto something in the grass, but before he could wrest it from the ground, this time one of the Brown Thrashers flew at him, driving him away. Neither did the thrasher get what the chat had been tugging on.
Blue Jays have other ways of causing mischief as well. On Friday in the forest I spotted a jay carrying something in its beak. He landed on a tree branch, positioned the object between his feet, and then pounded it with his beak. The binoculars showed the object to be an egg. The jay had just robbed a nest and now was breaking the egg and gulping down what didn't drip to the forest floor. The egg was rather large, and later I heard a crow in the vicinity piteously issuing its distress call, so I'll bet the jay had robbed a crow's nest. The crow's crying was tremendously expressive and heartrending.
*****
WHY DESTRUCTION MIGHT BE SO MUCH FUN
The neighbor continues "neatening up the landscape." Day after day the bulldozer has its way and during each morning jog I see the consequences. One day a line of trees has vanished, the next a big tree. It's especially painful now when so many creatures are nesting. On the other hand, maybe it's best to destroy the nests and kill the young now, for without habitat there will be nothing to sustain them later.
One unsettling thing about jogging by a spot where a hedgerow or large tree stood before, but now there's nothing but flat, bare dirt, is that nothing is left screaming about what is missing. It's not like the empty feeling left by an extracted molar, where you can insert the tip of your tongue and feel the weirdness of the tooth's absence, the unnaturalness of it, the awful loss. You just jog by and wonder if maybe you were wrong about that hedgerow or tree having been there in the first place. In the morning fog, the emptiness looks perfectly natural, totally at ease with itself.
This phenomenon of natural things going missing, and their absence not being a screaming affair, fits neatly with similar situations. How simple it is to walk up to a wildflower that has been developing for months, and stomp it in a second. How easy to drain and fill a wetland that has needed centuries to develop.
It seems that reality is structured so that destruction is quick and easy, while creation is always a painful and difficult thing. The only reason I can figure out that the Creator would fix things this way is that She so much enjoys the process of creation. After all, a glimpse into the Universe shows that everything is evolving, so surely creation is the Creator's main passion. With such an obsession with the process of change, and with eternity and the whole Universe as the context, why should the Creator be especially fond of what we think of as static, stable ecosystems, ephemeral as they are on our relatively evanescent Earth?
Surely with each shove of the bulldozer's blade, the Creator smiles anticipating the fun eventually She'll have starting over, blossoming life and order where the bulldozer today destroys it.
*****
RED MULBERRY
Biking the rough dirt track through the woods at the back of the plantation and watching the ground closely to avoid thorns and spoke-bending sticks I spotted penny-sized black smudges on the trail. A quick glance upward fulfilled my most optimistic hopes: Here stood a magnificent Red Mulberry tree, Morus rubra, with limbs heavy with immature green fruits, half-mature red fruits, and perfectly ripe, purplish-black, glossy, succulent, ready-to-eat mulberries.
We have lots of mulberry trees here but the birds, especially Cedar Waxwings, usually devour them the moment they begin ripening. Maybe fruits on the tree had escaped being eaten because of the tree's isolation deep in the woods, its anonymity among close-packed trees of other species.
This was the first time in my life that I'd been able to eat all the mulberries I wanted. I ate until my belly developed that certain you-better-watch-out cramp and my hands were comically stained dark purple, and probably my lips were, too. As I was pulling down the branches so I could reach the fruit it occurred to me that maybe this was why fibers of the inner bark of mulberry trees are famous for being so strong and stringy -- to keep limbs from snapping when large mammals graze the fruit, pulling down the limbs exactly as I was. I have read that Indians made clothing from fiber of the mulberry's inner bark. The Natchez Indians honored the mulberry by naming their sixth month, between the Month of Fishes and the Month of Great Corn, The Month of Mulberries.
It should be no surprise that mulberries are so delicious, for they belong to an aristocratic family famous for serving up fine food. Mulberries are in the Fig Family, which also provides us with the wondrous tropical Breadfruit, Jackfruit, about 2,000 fig species, hops of beer-brewing fame, and cannabis hemp, the ground seeds of which make a fine, black substance like peanut butter.
*****
THE MEANING OF LIFE
I've always mistrusted that phrase, "The meaning of life." It's because the word "meaning" carries with it an implied context of rationality. Yet, it seems to me that anyone who asks that question should be expecting a reply that is spiritual, if not mystical, not rational.
The Red Mulberry with its sweet, purple-staining fruits got me thinking about this. There I was in cool twilight beneath the tree looking up through those big, sun-speckled mulberry leaves, seeing the pretty green, red and almost-black fruits, my sunburned, wrinkled, veiny hands among them plucking mulberries and getting purple-stained, and hearing the wind in the tree, and birds singing, seeing the animation of leaves in the wind, experiencing a kaleidoscopic, shimmering, wholly unexpectedly beautiful and perfect moment, and this thought came to me:
This tree's task was simply to create reproductive propagules (seeds) and to get them dispersed into new areas where its offspring might prosper. There were so many ways this goal could have been accomplished, yet the Red Mulberry's approach was to create a strategy involving all this sunlight, wind, birdsong and sweet fruit. How elegant! How original! How generous of the Creator to have settled on things this way!
If someone were to propose that "the meaning of the fruit is that the tree may reproduce itself," then all that was most meaningful to me that day as I myself became the Red Mulberry's dispersal agent would be eliminated from the discussion. The word "meaning" is too narrow to use when considering something as wonderful as ripe mulberries.
In the same way, any statement beginning "The meaning of life is that... " automatically declares itself as an analysis too arid to listen to.
*****
HUNGRY SQUIRREL
Earlier this week I was sitting invisibly (unmoving) next to a woods pond when a young squirrel came near, quite oblivious to me just 15 feet away. He was sniffing and test-biting all kinds of things, the way young squirrels do when learning how to survive. Don't forget that a first-year squirrel doesn't have pecan caches from last fall to dig up.
This squirrel seemed almost frantic in his efforts to find something. He'd take last year's Honeylocust pod in his mouth, black and crumbly, and appear to be eating it, but then before swallowing he'd let the pod fall from his mouth, and then you knew that there was more hope than food in that pod. Then he found a fallen log that was a little moist on top, and crumbly. He actually bit into the soft wood, seeming to gag sometimes, maybe hoping to expose a fungus or insect larva. But I couldn't see that he got anything. He put all kinds of things into his mouth but eventually everything was dropped again, and nothing swallowed.
Gradually it dawned on me that this can be a hungry season for squirrels. Their nuts, acorns, maple samaras, hornbeam fruits and pine nuts belong to fall, not spring. Now most of those fruits are either sprouted and the sprouts are charged with bitter elements that keep animals from eating them, or else they're decayed. A squirrel can eat caterpillars, cocoons, beetles and even ants, birds' eggs and nestlings in this season, but these can be hard to find.
In a way I was chastened by this insight. I like to think that I am in tune with the animals around me, but somehow I had forgotten that though this season is good for insect-eating warblers and mulberry eaters, if you are a creature specializing in nuts and the like, these are hungry times.
The squirrel found a mushroom, nibbled it, jumped backwards and froze staring at it. Then in aggravation he barked, stamped his feet and turned and ran away violently flicking its tail.
*****
SILVERY SPIRES IN THE GARDEN
In my gardens nowadays nothing is prettier than the various kinds of onion and garlic. Their slender, arching, green blades are handsome enough but what really sets them off is their silvery, Byzantine-cathedral-tower tops, or caps. The caps in one patch of garlic stand four feet high. Eventually the caps split, revealing enlarging flower clusters and/or small bulbs.
The world of onions and garlics -- the genus Allium -- is fascinating even if you don't eat them with relish as I do. Below is a "key" I've fixed up to help fix in mind the differences between the various common kinds of garden Alliums. If you can't make sense of the key, you might want to visit my page explaining identification keys at www.backyardnature.net/keys.htm
KEY TO COMMON, EDIBLE GARDEN ALLIUMS
A. Leaves cylindrical, usually hollow
B.Flowering stem thick, inflated
C. Leaves thick, few
D. Bulb hardly thicker than neck: SPRING ONION
DD. Bulb large, rounded: BULB ONION
CC. Leaves slender, many: SHALLOT
BB. Flowering stem thin, not inflated: CHIVES
AA. Leaves flat, not hollow
B. Bulb separating into cloves: GARLIC
BB. Bulb not separating into cloves
C. Flowers pinkish: LEEK
CC. Flowers not pinkish: RAMP
The above-mentioned onions and garlics just scratch the surface of the genus Allium. There's a world of Allium types known and enjoyed by other cultures but seldom seen in our markets -- such as eastern Asia's Allium tuberosum, which produces 1-3 brownish bulbs attached to a horizontal rhizome. There's a rainbow of Alliums with flowers pretty enough for any garden.
If you wonder how scallions fit into the picture, the term "scallion" is a general one applied to various kinds of young onion that haven't developed a bulb yet, though the base may be somewhat swollen. Scallions are pulled and eaten in salads and as greens. The term is also applied to young shallots and leeks.
*****
COOL ELEPHANT EARS
Between Wednesday of last week and Wednesday of this week we received 11.5 inches (29cm) of rain. This Wednesday finally blue sky broke through, the air above the sodden ground grew hot and steamy, mosquitoes and flies began biting, and sunlight on skin bore down in a manner decidedly Mississippish.
In Wednesday afternoon's glare, with sweat streaming down my face, I was attracted to the dark greenness of my fast-growing Elephant Ear leaves. It occurred to me that if I should touch a sunlit lawn chair constructed of metal of a thickness and dark greenness similar to the Elephant Ear's blade, it would scorch my skin. Yet when I touched the broad, flat Elephant Ear leaf facing squarely into the sunlight, it felt cool. Then I walked into the forest, and it also felt cool.
The main reason plant leaves remain cool despite being dark and sunlit is that they are constantly evaporating water in a process known as transpiration. Water changing from a liquid to a vapor state is an energy-absorbing, or endothermic, process, as anyone knows who has felt the coolness when a fresh breeze evaporates sweat.
In the middle of an average day, each hour an average land plant transpires around half a cup of water per square yard of leaf surface -- an area about the size of a large Elephant Ear. An average corn plant transpires more than two quarts of water each day. Most of this water exits the leaf through microscopic pores in the leaf called stomata. The bottom of an average oak leaf bears about 375,000 stomata per square inch (58,000 per square cm). Consequently, at 95°F the temperature of an average leaf in full sunlight is about 88°F.
When we convert vegetative areas to pavement and buildings, the local ecosystem is shocked by much more than a loss of diversity. We can glimpse how severe that shock is by simply walking from the cool, welcome placidness of the forest into suffocating, mid-afternoon, manmade glare and heat.
*****
LIFE IN A MAGNOLIA BLOSSOM
You pass by a magnolia tree -- Southern Magnolia, Magnolia grandiflora -- and the lemony odor and glossy whiteness of its eight-inch wide blossoms, the stateliness of its form, the moist coolness of its shadows... all invite you to step closer.
You draw near a blossom and its perfume makes you dizzy. You choose a young flower with petals just starting to open and a honeybee escapes. "And there's nectar inside as well?" you wonder. You part the petals and stick your face right into everything, probing with your tongue the base of the column of stamens and stigmas, down to where petals arise, and then, yes, after a first sensation of soapy bitterness, there's a hint of sweet nectar, too.
There's a world of business going on there inside the blossom. Tiny, black, slender insects, maybe 1/8th of an inch long, with strangely flexible abdomens segmented like cars on a kid's toy train, skitter about, clearly upset by your disturbance. They are Rove Beetles of the family Staphylinidae, of which around 3,000 species are found just in the US. Under the handlens you see that Rove Beetles have powerful jaws, and this makes sense, for they mostly feed on other insects.
In fact, these tiny creatures turn out to be the giants of this blossom. Your botherings cause a large number of much smaller, cream-colored, winged beings to come skittering from beneath the clutter of used-up and discarded stamens littering the surface of the tilted flower's lowest petal. With the handlens you can barely see that the skitterers bear the same curious shape as the much larger Rove Beetles, and indeed they may be one of the other 3,000 species. However, they are too small and too fast for certain identification.
You go to another blossom, this one not yet completely open, but with a worm hole through the middle of one of its petals. Inside the young blossom you find crumbs of pink caterpillar feces, and there's the caterpillar himself, one beautiful enough to live in a magnolia blossom, over an inch long and translucently, almost glowingly, pink. In this all-pale-cream blossom, what magic chemistry resolved itself into such vivid pinkness?
The next blossom is home to roundish mites, and the next one contains a minuscule pink worm curled into the shape of a C inside a droplet of dew. There's also some kind of shield-bug, and blossoms farther along reveal more and more kinds of life, always something new to know and think about.
Like the Earth itself, each magnolia blossom sustains a unique community of self-absorbed beings for whom the blossom amounts to the entire universe.
*****
YELLOWTHROAT ACROSS THE FIELD
If you walk past a large field with a bushy fencerow or blackberry thicket nearby, you'll hear one of the purest, most appealing sounds of summer, a ringing, uncomplicated wichity, wichity, wichity... If you watch closely as you approach the calling you might spot the little bird making the big sound, and you'll see its bright yellow underparts, yellow-brown top, and the very conspicuous, black bandit-mask across its face. It's the Yellowthroat, a common summer resident throughout most of North America. Few sounds are more evocative of heat-stunned, humid, broad-skied summer days than this.
The Yellowthroat's name is descriptive, if not distinctive. For beginning birders, the name is too similar to others -- Yellow-throated Warbler, Yellow-throated Vireo, Yellow-breasted Chat, Yellow Warbler... And it's true that in the bird world, especially the insect-eating part, plenty of species possess yellow throats and chests.
The reason for this is easy to figure out. Imagine being a bug or earthworm in the grass when a bird suddenly appears above you. If the bird's throat is pale -- yellow or white -- the bird's form will show up against the bright sky much less than if it were dark.
The Yellowthroat's yellow throat must help it a good deal because the species is very successful, being distributed not only from coast-to-coast in North America, but through the West Indies and as far south as Colombia and Venezuela. As often happens with species occupying such large distributions, it's evolving several subspecies, which eventually may become full-fledged species. What a pleasure to hear this bird's "regional accents."
*****
CAESAR'S MUSHROOMS UP
Our recent rains have brought fourth a number of handsome mushrooms, and one of the prettiest and best tasting is the Caesar's Mushroom, probably Amanita umbonata, formerly known as A. caesarea. It’s a large, red-topped mushroom.
Caesar's Mushrooms are absolutely delicious. They've provided some of the best eating that Julius Caesar and I have ever experienced. However, unless I find a patch large enough to warrant making some test-nibblings before preparing a banquet with them, I leave them alone. That's because Caesar's Mushrooms are members of the genus Amanita, which includes the most deadly of all mushrooms. It doesn't help that the genus's taxonomy is a mess, so it's a challenge to be absolutely sure that you're eating the harmless species.
Eating an Amanita is like marrying into a family of moonshiners: You can hardly enjoy the experience because of thinking about the relations.
*****
ON THE PLEASURES OF LEAVING ANIMALS ALONE
On Wednesday morning while preparing breakfast an adult bluebird arrived with a new fledgling. While the fledgling perched there, the parent flew around catching bugs and bringing them to the big-eyed youngster. Their nest box lies across a wide field so I wondered why the parent would bring the young bird to perch on the solar cooker not ten feet from me.
In a similar vein, earlier I put up a nice box for the resident Carolina Wrens, but instead of using my box, which was at the barn's edge, they chose a little covey-hole not far above the entrance to the room where I do my computering. It was as if they wanted to be near me. Now the wrens' first brood is raised and they've established their second nest in a box of nails in the tool room across from where I work. Sometimes as I work a wren hops into my room and just looks at me.
Even the Green Anoles, skinks and Fence Lizards seem to regard me as perfectly harmless, maybe even as a desirable companion. This means that if I'm not careful I'll step on them, for often they won't get out of my way as I walk toward them. A certain large Fence Lizard likes to sun on a post right at the barn's door and doesn't move when I pass just inches from him. At dusk, rabbits wander around right outside my door, Bobwhites visit my garden, and deer stand in the field gawking at me.
I had the same thing at my previous location. Early readers of this Newsletter will recall the bats and Chimney Swifts in the well beneath my outside-kitchen roof (I have bats here, too), and how Prothonotary Warblers nested in the kitchen's hollow bamboo stems.
It's clear that if we leave animals alone, they are willing, sometimes even eager, to coexist with us. In doing so they enrich our lives. I'd much rather be part of a community with my wild animals, than to have a dog to bark at them, or a cat that would eat them.