Tag Archives: nature writing

Feather, Light, and Air

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Did you know there’s a whole volume of chickadee poems? I’m apparently one of many fans of this cheerful, talkative, hardy, round little acrobat. Anna Botsford Comstock points out that the winter birds have a special place in the hearts of Northeasterners, and I would agree.

Thornton Burgess relates that as a boy practicing with his first gun, he shot a chickadee. But he always regretted it. It made “Tommy Tit,” the chickadee of the Burgess Bird Book, his favorite of all the birds. It was one of the experiences that helped him to understand his chosen tool was the typewriter, not the gun, as an intermediary between himself and the natural world.

Here are a few photos of a chickadee feeding on our pine cone feeder out front. I’m impressed by the athleticism of these round little birds. Clearly it’s not only the large, soaring birds who know a thing or two about aerobatics.

 

A Wing in the Door

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A Wing in the Door by Peri Phillips McQuay is by turns a beautiful and a frustrating book. It narrates the fate of a female red-tailed hawk taken illegally by a would-be falconer from her nest when only a month old. The hawk — named Merak — is confiscated by Canadian authorities and kept at a rehab for awhile to be “untamed,” then released at a conservation center. McQuay and her husband, a naturalist at the center, live on site and observe the bird over the next several years.

At first there is some question whether Merak has been humanly imprinted, but it doesn’t take long to see that she has been. Her antics are both heart-breaking and humorous: building a nest on the front porch to lay her yearly eggs (always infertile, because she never mates); sparring with cats and dogs; finding various ways to communicate her moods to her human caretakers. For that is what the McQuays become, even though the original intent was to usher the hawk back into wild living. She proves permanently damaged — McQuay often uses phrases like “essentially infantile” — by her early contact with humans.

McQuay’s writing is beautiful. Her response to nature is poetic, and she finds many ways to infuse the narrative with interesting information about red-tails from her ongoing research. I found much of the material fascinating and could relate to many of McQuay’s perspectives on nature.

What was frustrating, though, was the co-dependent relationship the McQuays seem intentionally to preserve with Merak. It is clear early on that the hawk can hunt for herself. I couldn’t understand why they kept providing her with mice and (in winter, when she refused to migrate) muskrats from local trappers. It would have been more responsible to leave Merak completely on her own for a time to establish whether she could provide for herself, and, if she couldn’t, then keep her captive for use in the center’s educational programs. Our local nature center has several hawks that are not able to live in the wild, and they are licensed to keep them and provide for them, offering them some quality of life as well as protection.

Instead, the McQuays persist in providing food for the hawk as well as interposing themselves in other ways. Parents who never let their growing children make any decisions or experience any consequences on their own will be left with an unhappy, demanding human ill-equipped for life. In the same way, the McQuays end up with a moody hawk who looks upon them as her tribe, responsible for providing for her needs, and sharing her territory. By the end of the story they at last begin withholding food, and the hawk becomes more independent. (Even after Merak learns to supply her own food, McQuay’s husband interferes on one occasion by knocking a wild rat snake out of the hawk’s talons. ???) But she will never be wild, and she never learns how to relate to other hawks. It was hard not to feel that the McQuays were complicit in the unfortunate long-term results of the original crime against Merak.

Rufous Redtail

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I read this book when I was around 10, and I’ve always remembered it as one of the best. I didn’t remember all the details, but I remembered some of them. Mostly I remembered it as a book that had a strong impact, opening my eyes to new knowledge and moving me deeply.

You won’t find much about Rufous Redtail (1947) online, or about its author, Helen Garrett. There is more information out there about its illustrator, Francis Lee Jaques. Out of print and priced far out of my range, this novel makes an appearance from time to time at used book sites. It follows a red-tailed hawk from the day he hatches out of his egg, through his mastery of flight and hunting and his fall migration, on to his return to the Northeast in the spring and his finding of a mate and raising of a family. (We live in the Northeast, and red-tails don’t migrate in the winter. Rufous spends summers farther North than we are.)

A young red-tail in our neighborhood.

Our library system doesn’t have it, but a wonderful librarian found a copy at the library of the state capital and requested it for us. It took us four days to read, and we enjoyed every word and picture. It’s full of detail about red-tailed hawks, and I wish I could learn more about its author, who must have had many opportunities to observe these grand birds firsthand. But it’s also a coming-of-age story that takes Rufous from the egotism of a newly hatched chick bursting with pride to the confidence and knowledge of a mature adult hawk. We laughed often as we read, and were sometimes brought to tears.

Another local red-tail, this one mature.

The birds talk in this book, but it’s not sentimentalized the way Thornton Burgess’s stories are. The dialogue carries the plot forward and gives us necessary information without spoiling the realism of the characters. Unlike many of the modern nature books we’ve read, there is no politicization — no page in the back highlighting the loss of habitat of this species, no legislative initiative for this or that, no website to visit to see how you can help. These things have probably been worthwhile and helpful in protecting species and cultivating an ecological ethic. But what shines through in this novel is love for nature, wilderness particularly, and for the creatures that make their homes there.

I think this delight and wonder are stronger influences than anything else. Reach the hearts of children, and they’ll remember. I have remembered this book for several decades, not because someone was defending hawks, but because someone painted their lives in words in such a way as to make me respect and admire and love them myself. I can’t see into the future, but judging from their reactions, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear my daughters saying the same thing someday.

Jaques' illustrations adorn the inside cover.

Becoming Native to This Place

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I was introduced to Wes Jackson’s work through reading Wendell Berry. The two men have a longstanding friendship and have similar views of what Berry has called “culture and agriculture.” In Becoming Native to This Place, Jackson explores the ways our assumptions about the earth as an inert repository of resources for us to extract and manage developed, how they are destructive to community, and how they might be changed to develop new paradigms in our relationship to nature.

Like Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson sees agriculture as the heart of our relationship to the earth, a discipline that reveals our attitudes toward the world and each other. He operates The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, which has worked for several decades to “develop an agricultural system with the ecological stability of the prairie and a grain yield comparable to that from annual crops.”

The book asks several important questions. Why does land cultivated by post-World War II methods produce less, and erode more, than it did before cultivation? Why does it support less life? How did the ideas underlying our system of food production, our use of land and animals, and our reliance on nonrenewable energy develop? Perhaps most basically, what if the settlers of this country had approached their lives asking a different question: “How do we become native to this place?”

I read this years ago, but since then I’ve had children and experienced the Little House books. I couldn’t help but think of the Ingalls and Wilder families’ resounding failure at agriculture as they pushed westward. Kind of like the preacher in Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible, they brought the assumptions and methods and crops from their places of origin, and it just didn’t take on the prairie. Yet they saw it as a very promising place, and they were right; it was a very fertile landscape. But it had its own ecology, which was foreign to them, and which for whatever reason they never really figured out. Their style of farming was to impose themselves on the land rather than to figure out where they were and how to live there.

That, I think Wes Jackson would say, is pretty much the story of America — or of what Wendell Berry has called The Unsettling of America. There are aspects of this book that I don’t have a good enough backing in science to really know what to do with; Jackson has a B.A. in biology, an M.A. in botany, and a Ph.D. in genetics, and though he writes accessibly enough that I could usually understand, I don’t have the context to evaluate it. I didn’t have a clear sense of the underlying moral or spiritual framework Jackson advocates either, though he sees our various compartmentalizations — of church and state, of science and philosophy, of empirical knowledge and moral knowledge — as negative.

However, when he writes about how different localities have different ecosystems and therefore don’t lend themselves to industrialized agriculture that crams all places into the same mold, it simply makes sense. When he writes about human arrogance in acting confidently before we know all that we think we know, and then having a big mess on our hands afterward, it simply makes sense. It’s easy to feel helpless, but we can at least start where we are, and begin to get to know our own place. I felt glad about the nature study our family has embarked on this year, because learning to love one place is the beginning of an ecological ethic. If we love our place, and learn the names of the native living things that constitute our community, and tune in to the stories going on all around us, we can begin to live with more awareness — and perhaps eventually with more wisdom.

Exhaustless entertainment

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The fields and woods about one are a book from which he may draw exhaustless entertainment, if he will. (John Burroughs, from the essay “A Sharp Lookout”)

Today, the girls and I took our dog (Katie) and rambled at a place where we spent a fair amount of time in August and early September, collecting monarch caterpillars. It was chilly, with a thin blue sky and a lot of mud and gray tree trunks. After being there when it was abuzz with activity — meadow birds, butterflies, caterpillars, and the occasional soaring redtail — it seemed dead and dull.

Until we came upon a pair of mallards that brightened the brown landscape with their vivid colors and immaculate plumage.

Shortly after that, in the midst of the silent landscape, we came to a bush alive with chirping.

It sounded like the cheerful racket of goldfinches, but a zoom in with the camera revealed what looked like sparrows.

Then we came upon the sound of woodpeckers. We spotted what looked like either a downy or a hairy at work. Then two or three more revealed themselves. They were busy on three large, dead trees beside the creek. It was a true haven for woodpeckers. The king of them all — a pileated — swooped in making his characteristic laugh, and a few of the smaller ones scattered.

I think these birds are magnificent. In “The Rise” Wendell Berry speaks of them as birds of “the big trees and the big woods, and more than any other birds along this river they speak out of our past.” But here was one in a strip of hedgerow/brush between a park and a neighborhood. It was a real treat.

On our way out we saw what we thought must be a muskrat, since we saw no signs of beavers.

One of the scenes I remember from The Long Winter is when Pa sees muskrats building an extra thick mud house and surmises that the winter will be a hard one. I was surprised this week to read John Burroughs’ confession that he no longer thinks muskrats know any more about what kind of winter is coming than he does. He thinks they build according to whim, not according to any reliable intuition as meteorologists.

On the way home we stopped for a few minutes to watch a couple of squirrels harvesting seeds.

My 7-year-old wanted to use construction paper to make paper-cut-outs for her journal page, so as I relived the walk by downloading my photos, she went to work.

Her older sister (10) followed suit.

We had a great time seeing so many surprises, and the pleasure was intensified by the gloomy feeling early on that we weren’t going to see anything much. So I’ll conclude with one more fitting John Burroughs insight to book-end this post:

The place to observe nature is where you are; the walk to take today is the walk you took yesterday. You will not find just the same things: both the observed and the observer have changed; the ship is on another tack in both cases. (From “A Sharp Lookout”)

This post is submitted to the Outdoor Hour Carnival.