Nature At a Snail’s Pace: “In Lower Florida Wilds” by Charles Torrey Sampson, 1920

 Backyard Nature, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Native Plants, Natural History, Night, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Jul 212020
 

[The Seminoles’] words are composed of a great number of syllables. Willoughby has given a vocabulary of them in his book Across the Everglades and in this only two words have a single syllable while many run up into eight or more. For instance heron is “wak-ko-lat-koo-hi-lot-tee”; instep is “e-lit-ta-pix-tee-e-fa-cho-to-kee-not-ee,” and wrist “in-tee-ti-pix-tee-e-toke-kee-kee-tay-gaw.” I should think it would take a half hour for a Seminole to ask the time of day, but fortunately he has plenty of time.

There is something very distressing in the gradual passing of the wilds, the destruction of the forests, the draining of the swamps and lowlands, the transforming of the prairies with their wonderful wealth of bloom and beauty, and in its place the coming of civilized man with all his unsightly constructions — his struggles for power, his vulgarity and pretensions. Soon this vast, lonely, beautiful waste will be reclaimed and tamed; soon it will be furrowed by canals and highways and spanned by steel rails. A busy, toiling people will occupy the place that sheltered a wealth of wild life. Gaily dressed picnicers or church-goers will replace the flaming and scarlet ibis, the ethereal egret and the white flowers of the crinums and arrowheads, the rainbow bedecked garments of the Seminoles. In place of the cries of wild birds there will be heard the whistle of the locomotive and the honk of the automobile.

We constantly boast of our marvelous national growth. We shall proudly point some day to the Everglade country and say: “Only a few years ago this was a worthless swamp; to-day it is an empire.” But I sometimes wonder quite seriously if the world is any better off because we have destroyed the wilds and filled the land with countless human beings. Is the percentage of happiness greater in a state of five million inhabitants than in one of half a million, or in a huge city with all its slums and poverty than in a village? In short I question the success of our civilization from the point of view of general happiness gained for all or for the real joy of life for any.

IN THIS TIME WHEN HAPPINESS IS RARE INDEED TO FIND, SIMPSON’S WORDS SPEAK DIRECTLY TO MY HEART. Opening the first pages of “In Lower Florida Wilds”, I developed an immediate affinity for the author. Though I know relatively little about him yet (his published biography is on its way to me now), through the pages of this book I have found him to be sincere, affable, thoughtful, perceptive, caring, and a bit self-deprecating to boot. His deep love for nature flows through these pages — along with his keen scientific mind and eye. Over the course of nearly 400 pages and over 60 black and white photographs (not to mention a color frontispiece of Simpson’s beloved tree snails), the reader travels through the geologic story of South Florida and then the myriad terrestrial and marine ecosystems found in the region. Through it all, Simpson mourns again and again the tragic demise of Florida’s wild animals, plants, and places. He seems largely resigned to their passing, though he does offer a ray of hope that conservation might yet be possible:

This locality [along the south shore of mainland Florida] is one of the last resorts of some of our most beautiful and interesting wading birds. Here in days gone by resorted vast numbers of gorgeous flamingos, scarlet ibises, roseate spoonbills, and roseate terns. This was one of the chief breeding places of the ethereally beautiful egret…and the even more perfect snowy heron…. Owing to woman’s vanity and man’s greed they are now well-nigh exterminated….

The entire region (which is of little value for anything else) should be set apart by the federal government, as a great bird reservation, but even then it would be difficult enough to protect the birds within it, for the same men who killed Bradley [a murdered bird warden whose tale is told here] would not hesitate to do the same by any other warden.

ON A LIGHTER NOTE, SIMPSON IS ALSO A MARVELOUS TELLER OF TALES OF HIS EXPERIENCE IN THE SOUTH FLORIDA WILDS. One of my favorite stories, though, happens to him in Key West, where he finds himself collecting lovely shells — of still-living snails — with quite comicl consequences:

I once made a cruise in the schooner Asa Eldridge from Bradentown, Florida to Honduras and on a Sunday morning while lying at Key West I strolled over to the north side of the island. As I approached I saw from a short distance that it was everywhere a mass of glowing violet color and then I found it to be covered from below tide to well out on the land with fresh Hanthinas. All the depressions and pot holes in the rocky shore were filled — in places several feet deep. A vast community or gathering of them probably extending for miles had stranded the night before on the beach. It was the most astounding sight in the way of molluscan life I had ever seen and when I recovered from my surprise I proceeded to collect specimens. Lacking any receptacle in which to put them I used my handkerchief, then my new straw hat, then one pocket after another of my fresh white linen suit, and when fully loaded I started for the schooner.

The day was hot, and soon the snails seemed to be melting. To my horror violet blotches appeared on my coat and trousers, spreading rapidly until the purple juice from the animals actually ran down and filled my shoes! I reached the city as the church bells were ringing and I tried to evade people by taking alleys and back streets but everywhere I met groups of churchgoers who stared at me in astonishment. They no doubt took me for an escaped lunatic. It seemed to me that Key West had a population of a hundred thousand and all churchgoers. Having run that gauntlet and reached the vessel our crew greeted me with shouts and laughter. My smart suit was ruined, nor could I even wear it around the vessel without being derided — but I had the satisfaction of cleaning up over two thousand fine Janthina shells.

Janthina janthina sea snail with its bubble raft, washed up on the east shore of Maui, Hawaii. (Wikimedia Commons)

THOUGH I DO NOT PICTURE SIMPSON AS A CHURCHGOER HIMSELF, HE WROTE OFTEN OF THE INSPIRATION AND WONDER HE FOUND IN NATURE. For instance, in this passage, he wrote admiringly (and well ahead of his time) of an intelligence operative throughout the natural world — not the intelligence of a supernatural designer, but of the plants and animals themselves:

It seems to me that there is a soul throughout nature, that the animals, and I like to believe, the plants, to a certain extent, think, something in the same manner that human beings do. Howe invents the sewing machine, Bell the telephone, McCormick the reaper — all devices to perform some service to the benefit of man. A palm sends its growing stem deep into the earth and buries its vitals to protect them from fire; the mangrove raises itself high on stilted roots in order than it may live above the water and breathe; an orchid perfects a complicated device to compel honey-loving insects to cross-fertilize its pollen. Animals resort to all manner of tricks to conceal themselves from their enemies. All these work not merely for themselves but for the benefit of the race to which they belong. If the work of man is the result of thought that of animals and plants must be also in some lesser degree. If man developed from a lower animal, the superior from the inferior, where may we draw the line between reason and instinct?

Consider, too, the paragraph below, in which Simpson (an “old man” at 73, though he lived another 13 years after this) celebrates the deep joys that come from going on wilderness adventures under primitive conditions in the swamps of south Florida:

Why should an old man, past the age when most persons seek adventure, leave a comfortable home and plunge into the wilderness to endure such hardships? What rewards can he receive for it? I never return utterly warn out from such a trip but that I vow it is the last. But in time the hardships are forgotten and recollections of the pleasant features only remain and I am ready to start again. There is in all this a sort of fascination not easy to explain — the relief that comes from being away from all the restraints and artificialities of communal life — and then, the “call of the wild.” There is a wonderful inspiration in the great out of doors. Every feels it — some more, some less. Personally I cannot resist the call and must respond when I hear it and understand its meaning.

Here is a lovely passage in which Simpson expresses a childlike wonder at the experience of being outdoors at night:

I love the night with its silence, its strange sounds, its beauty and mystery. It has an infinite attraction for the devotee of nature: al that he sees, hears, and feels are so different from the experiences of the daytime; he seems to be in another world…. Much of the wonder and beauty of the night consists in what is only half seen, in what is partly suggested, leaving the imagination to do the rest.

Itis then largely because of the stimulation of the imagination that the night is so wonderful. Under its spell we create a world of our own and revel in the make-believe — like the children of a larger growth that we all are.

Finally, I will close with this marvelous passage in which Simpson speaks of his reverence and devotion toward nature, something he fears that too many specialist scientists have lost:

It was in the wilds that Humboldt, Darwin, Wallace, Bates, Spruce, and the splendid company of the earlier and greater naturalists studied and worshipped Nature. They were interested in every phase and detail of it; their contact with it made them broad and big and able to see the great truths. There are many specialists who study intensively some small group of animals or plants until they know more about it than anyone else, but they have too little general scientific knowledge, and they care too little for the great scheme of nature. In fact they are too little. They may slave on the anatomy or heredity of a few things but they neglect the larger questions of environment and distribution. They are closet students — scientists, not naturalists; their whole occupation is business; they find neither beauty nor charm in it. They dig in a tunnel and see nature through a pinhole….

I do not want to investigate nature as though I were solving a problem in mathematics. I want none of the element of business to enter into any of my relations with it. I am not and cannot be a scientific attorney. In my attempts to unravel its mysteries I have a sense of reverence and devotion, I feel as though I were on enchanted ground. And whenever any of its mysteries are revealed to me I have a feeling of elation — I was about to say exaltation, just as though the birds or the trees had told me their secrets and I had understood their language — and Nature herself had made me a confidant.

Close-up of page edges of “In Lower Florida Wilds” showing water-damage(left);
birthday note to unknown recipient from Elsa, 1932, on flyleaf of book (right)

REGARDING MY COPY OF THIS BOOK, IT HAS HAD A ROUGH LIFE, THAT’S FOR SURE. The covers bow out a bit, and the pages have recovered from a good soaking. Reading it, I do not get that pleasurable sensation of being able to bend back the top corner of the page and advance quickly through the text; pages turn only singly. Though there is no salt brine, and my wife assures me the damage is not great enough to reflect a complete immersion, I cannot shake the image of this book having been used as a life preserver, cast overboard to a drowning would-be swimmer somewhere off the Florida Keys. I suspect the truth is as prosaic as an unexpected afternoon rainshower falling on a book left on a table on the back patio.

In terms of its history, the only event in its existence of which I can speak (besides its publication in 1920) happened on an unknown recipient’s birthday, March 4th, 1932, when Elsa gave someone this book on her (or his) 40th birthday, in Miami, Florida.

As another note from one who has taken a fancy to Charles Torrey Simpson — the friendship can be a costly one. This book was not terribly costly — about $40. However, his other two books, published in 1923 and 1932, are another matter. I have learned that any book published after 1922 is not available as a free scan online, nor are facsimile copies sold on Amazon or elsewhere. The book is truly out of print. For those craving more of this author, the choices are hunting university libraries for copies, or buying copies. I opted for the latter. I snatched a copy of his 1932 book for only $40, but his 1923 book was a “steal” in a signed copy in good shape for “only” $135. I think in the future I need to stick to less desirable authors — the disreputable riffraff of the literary naturalist community, if there is such a thing.

A Seaward Brook: “From Blomidon to Smoky and Other Papers” by Frank Bolles, 1894 (1856-1893)

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Day Hikes, Environmental conservation, Natural History, Sense of Place, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jul 182020
 
Frank Bolles, photographer unknown, from Wikimedia Commons

Far up the cliff a brook, which had worked patiently downard from the soil on the summit of the mountain, appeared in a circular opening, and dashed its small spray seaward. Most brooks must fight their way over boulders and fallen trees, through dark ravines, by hot waysides and sleepy meadows, at last to win only a right to merge their lives in the greater life of the river. This brook had gone straight to its mother ocean, unchecked, unturned, and when its clear, cool drops fell towards the sea they were as pure as when they left the sky. The brook seemed symbolic of some lives, which, though living out their appointed time, go back to the source of life without ever having been polluted by society, or lost in its sullen and ill-regulated current.

I FOUND FRANK BOWLES’ LAST BOOK A DIFFICULT ONE TO READ. It was not specifically that the book was assembled posthumously from four essays about a vacation trip to Nova Scotia augmented by all Bowles’ essays (on birds) that had previously appeared in periodicals. Though I am not tremendously keen on birds and bird behavior (I am working on this, considering how prominently birds figure in early nature writing.), that was not the primary obstacle. I had already read two volumes of Frank Bolles’ work and therefore knew what to expect, but while Bolles’ work lacks the stunning mysticism of Henry Beston, he had become a familiar friend over the previous two volumes of his I had read, and his occasional gems of insight are a joy to encounter. No, what I found most difficult was that the book contained essays written mostly in the last year or so of an all-too-short life, chronicling Bolles’ summer adventures before the winter of his death by pneumonia. I experienced at once both the bittersweet appreciation of how fully he invested himself in engaging with nature (particularly birds), and also the realization that his gifts as a writer and scientist have been mostly lost to the world, thanks in good part, I suspect, to his early death. And I thought, naturally, of my late father, and our summer outing together to Nova Scotia many years ago to some of the very same places Bolles visited. I also thought back to the summer in Maine that Dad felt compelled to document in his tidy black ink handwriting; I have that work now, though have only read it once.

TO THOSE NOT FAMILIAR WITH BOWLES LIFE, THERE IS LITTLE TO FOSTER INTIMATIONS OF MORTALITY IN THE READER. The only direct indications that this book was Bolles’ last are in the form of a brief opening note about the book’s contents by EQB, and the fact that it is copyrighted Elizabeth Quincy Bowles instead of the author himself. Elizabeth is mentioned only a couple of times in Bolles’ essays; readers learn that she paints watercolor scenes of Chocorua Lake, and that, clearly, she has an inordinate level of patience for Bolles’ menagerie of pet owls. Reading this book, I could not help but wonder what became of her. I know they had children, and one daughter donated the family’s White Mountain land (or at least a good portion of it) to the Nature Conservancy in 1969. Still, I wish Elizabeth had illustrated this volume (at least the frontispiece) with her artwork, so that readers might get to know her better.

THIS BOOK MAY HAVE A CLUNKY TITLE, AND MAY BE UNEVEN, BUT IT STILL CONTAINS A FEW INSPIRING PASSAGES. One of my favorites describes Frank’s experience rowing a small boat in a bay near Ingonish with his family, and encountering a marvelous phosphorescence in the water. It leads him quickly on a cosmic path:

In the sky, bright masses ploughed their way through our air, impelled by an unknown force, driven from an unknown distance, and aiming for an unknown fate. In the sea, bright atoms ploughed their way through the water and glowed in soft splendor. The meteors are inorganic, dead mysteries. The phosphorescence is an organic, living mystery. Yet it is not more impossible to imagine the history and future of a body perpetually traveling through endless space than to try to count the numbers of these phosphorescent myriads. Generally I have the feeling that science is bringing us nearer to a perception of what the vast creation is which surrounds us, but at times the greater truth flashes before my eyes — that what we are really learning is not more than a drop in the limitless ocean of fact.

In another section, describing a forested gorge not far from Ingonish, Bolles speaks of the spiritual beauty of wilderness in a way that seems almost to mirror John Muir. Was Bolles acquainted with Muir’s writing? I cannot imagine otherwise:

Since leaving the open meadow by the sea and entering the dark forest, I had felt the spell of the wilderness resting upon me, the sense of age, beauty, purity, persistent force; all existing or working without man’s knowledge or approval, yet being the very essence of this dewy land of twilight. On coming to this grotto of rushing waters, Nature seemed for the moment to find a voice with which to tell of her wonderful power….

The spell of the wilderness grew stronger upon me, and when, suddenly, I thought how many wearied souls there were in great cities who would love to see this beautiful, hidden spot, something akin to shame for my own race came also into my mind. If man came here, would he not destroy? His foot would trample, his hand deface, and finally he would cut down the firs, blast out the rock, choke the salmon with sawdust, and leave the glen to fire and the briers which follow flame. It is always so; those of us who love nature and the beautiful are only the few, soon to be thrust aside by the many who value bread or riches higher than the fair earth’s bloom.

Later in the same essay, standing beside a flowing stream within the gorge, Bolles returns to this subject. In the passage below, he seems to reject , the dominant anthropocentrism of his era for an appreciation of how humans are only one facet of Earth’s life, and the recognition that nature can have value in and of itself.

This sense of beauty is a focus of nature’s deepest and purest life; and though in it man has no place, it does not on that account lack meaning or significance. Man is a masterful figure in the drama of creation, but he is not all, nor even half, what the world has long been taught to consider him. Perhaps he has been studied too much; certainly Nature, unspoiled by his greed, has not been studied enough or loved enough. Standing alone in that fair solitude, as much alone as on some atoll in a distant sea, I felt as though I might know man better, see him in stronger contrasts and clearer lights, if I could live apart from him longer in such still, calm, holy places as Indian Brook cañon.

THE FINAL TWO-THIRDS OF THE BOOK CONSISTS OF BOLLES’ PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED ESSAYS. These were tougher slogging (for me, at least), because they were all concerned with birds, either wild or tamed. Bolles tamed a number of owls (obtained partly by shooting the parents and partly as gifts from others who had presumably done the same), and also raised three yellow-bellied sapsuckers (again, after dispatching the parents). Accompanied by one of the owls, Puffy (named by his children), Bolles found himself able to get wild birds come to him out of curiosity. Thus, he was able to include still more lists of birds observed. In terms of particular observations, Bolles played the role of the amateur scientist; particular interests included the diet of yellow-bellied sapsuckers (tree sap, insects, or a combination of the two) and the personalities of owl species.

FROM WHAT I HAVE READ, I WOULD PROPOSE THAT BOWLES’ GREATEST CONTRIBUTION TO CONSERVATION EMERGED FROM HIS OBSERVATIONS ON INDIVIDUALITY IN BIRDS. Strange as it may seem to the modern reader, there clearly was a time post-Descartes when animals were viewed as machines, incapable of developing unique personalities. As such, they could be freely shot without remorse. And Bolles did quite a bit of that, early on.

With me, belief in the individuality of birds is a powerful influence against their destruction. Like most men familiar with out of door life, I have the hunting instinct strongly developed. If a game bird is merely one of an abundant species, killing it is only reducing the supply of that species by one; if, on the contrary, it is possessed of novel powers, or a unique combination of powers, and can be distinguished from all its fellows, killing it is destroying something which cannot be replaced. No one with a conscience would extinguish a species, yet I already feel towards certain races that their individuals are as different from one another as I formerly supposed one species of bird to be from another. At one time I should have shot a barred owl without a twinge of conscience; now I should as soon shoot my neighbor’s Skye terrier as kill one of these singularly attractive birds.

In his next paragraph, Bolles considers his own work in the light of biological investigations at the time, and puts out a prescient plea for early citizen science to address the deficit:

Sentiment aside, bird individuality, if real, is of deep scientific interest. If we knew more of the influence of individuals, we might have a clearer perception of the forces governing evolution. Serious science is now so fully given up to laboratory as distinguished from field study that but little thought is given to problems of this kind. This fact makes it all the more possible for amateurs to work happily in the woods and fields, encouraged by the belief that they have innumerable discoveries still to make, countless secrets of nature still to fathom.

Like Christopher Robin leaving Pooh at the edge of the Hundred Acre Wood, it is in the wooded patches around his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that I will leave him — observing birds and recording their behaviors. As we part company, Bolles reminds me to keep observing nature and making discoveries:

A Sunday afternoon in May spent in the groves and fields of suburbs gives acquaintance with more species than there are hours in a day, and close watch for an hour of any one bird may yield a fact which no naturalist has ever recorded.

In Tune with Nature: “At The North of Bearcamp Water” by Frank Bolles, 1893

 Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Landscape History, Natural History, Night, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Jul 082020
 

During nearly the whole of the forenoon of July 3, 1892, a soft rain had been falling. It had begun in the night to the discomfiture of the whippoorwills, but not to the extinguishment of their voices. It continued until nearly noon, when the wind shifted from east to west, patches of blue sky appeared, and ever and anon gleams of sunlight fell upon the distant forest across the lake, or slid slowly over the tree-tops on the side of Chocorua.

FRANK BOLLES’ FIRST BOOK, COVERED THE FIRST HALF OF A YEAR’S ROAMINGS IN NATURE, JANUARY THROUGH JUNE OF 1891. His second book, picks up the tale a year later, telling largely of his nature encounters between June and December of 1892. The lost year represents a considerable shift in Bolle’s world; no longer are his nature outings centered on the outskirts of Boston; instead, nearly the entire book (apart from a page or two at the very end) is set in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Some time earlier, Bolles had purchased an old farmhouse with a red roof, on the shore of a heart-shaped lake, opposite the peak of Chocorua. Presumably his family accompanied him during most of his visits to New Hampshire, though he barely mentions them and never volunteers any names. Mostly, the book is filled with his rambles, along cascading mountain streams and up along the ridges of the mountains. Always there are the birds, which “calls for” (presumably using a call of an owl or another predator) and describes with much enthusiasm. In one “experiment”, Bolles spends from prior to sunrise through sunset watching a hollow snag beside a stream flowing into the lake, noticing all the birds that visit the area at various hours of the day.

FOR THE MOST PART, THE BOOK READS LIKE THE ACCOUNTS OF PLEASANT OUTINGS WITH A CHARMING FRIEND. Rarely does the writing soar poetically like Beston or Muir, and not often does Bolles stop to contemplate the “big picture” of the ecological relationships evident around him, or the nature of human impacts on the White Mountain landscape. Still, reading the book transported me back in time, back to an age of sawmills and logging camps, railroad timetables and hidden bear traps in the forest. As a means of escape — a time machine between navy blue cloth covers — the book was mostly a delight. Before I had even finished it, I went ahead and ordered the only other book of Bolles’ essays ever published, a posthumous collection of essays including four from a trip to Cape Breton (more about those in a later post). Only one essay troubled me; Bolles wrote about the forest “gnomes” (voles, shrews, and the like) and his campaign setting out deadly traps near his home to see what he could catch (and kill). For all his evident respect for birds, he seemed to have a different attitude toward small mammals — one that was no doubt in keeping with that of most Americans at the time.

FOUR PASSAGES IN THE BOOK CAUGHT MY EYE, FOR DIFFERENT REASONS; I WOULD LIKE TO SHARE THEM HERE. The first is in the opening essay, A Thunderstorm in the Forest. Walking through the deep woods in a storm, he interrupts his ornithological observations to appreciate the rain falling on the leaves of various plants:

The rain pelting into my eyes bade me look less at the sky and more at the beauties at my feet…. There were no flowers, but the leaves were enough to satisfy both eye and mind — large leaves and small, coarse and delicate, strong and feeble, stiff and drooping. Some were long and slender, others deeply cleft, some round, or smoothly oval, others shaped like arrow-heads. Some received the rain submissively and bowed more and more before it, others responded buoyantly as each drop struck them and was tossed off. In some the up-and-down motion communicated by the falling drop was by the formation of the leaf-stalk transformed at once into an odd vibration from side to side, which was like an indignant shaking of the head.

What I appreciate about this passage is that, instead of stopping at describing leaf shapes, Bolles notices how the plants interact with the raindrops; instead of a static scene, the woodland forest floor comes alive for a few sentences. And I am left wondering how the different plants where I live here in Georgia might respond to the falling rain….

THE SECOND PASSAGE IS A MOMENT OF COSMIC WONDER, REMINISCENT OF BESTON. For Beston, that wonder called forth the rich interconnectedness of all things in ever-flowing energy and changing form; for Bolles, it points instead toward evidence for the existence of a God:

There is something inexpressibly touching and inspiring in the combination of fading night, with its planets still glowing, and the bird’s song of welcome to the day. Night is more eloquent than day in telling of the wonders of the vast creation. Day tells less of distance, more of detail; less of peace, more of contest; less of immortality, more of the perishable. The sun, with its dazzling light and burning heat, hides from us the stars, and those still depths as yet without stars. It narrows our limit vision, and at the same time hurries us worries us with our own tasks which we will not take cheerfully, and the tasks of others which are done so ill. Night tells not only of repose on earth, but of life in that far heaven where every star is a thing of motion and a creation full of mystery. Men who live only in great cities may be pitied for being atheists, for they see little beyond the impurity of man; but it seems incredible that a being with thoughts above appetite, and imagination above lust, should live through a night in the wilderness, with the stars to tell him of space, the dark depths of the sky to tell him of infinity, and his own mind to tell him of individuality, and yet doubt that some Being more powerful and less fickle than himself is in the universe.

THE THIRD PASSAGE IS FROM THE CLOSE OF THE BOOK; AS IF PRESAGING HIS OWN DEATH ONLY A YEAR AFTER THE BOOK WAS PUBLISHED, BOLLES CLOSES HIS FINAL ESSAY WITH THOUGHTS ON MORTALITY. Bolles ended his first volume on a similar note, though here, it is rendered more potently, as if Bolles is endeavoring through images and analogues of nature to convince himself that there is existence beyond the grave. There is tragic irony to his musings here:

…years are very real to us who can count so few of them before we reach that wide ocean towards which our stream flows. The flower has a day in its year, the gnat an hour. What a mighty harvest death has reaped since year began; yet no one expects any shrinkage in the current of life in the next year. The world’s rhythm will be just as strong, just as even, just as full of joy to those who will accept joy as the birds accept it. What, then, is death if it cannot diminish the sum total of creation’s forces? Is it more than a transfer of energy from one point to another? When the flower dies we can see and measure the transfer; when a man dies we who live cannot see it at all, but we can measure the poor shell which is left to us and feel sure, terribly sure at first, joyously sure in time, that all which was there in life is not still there; that something has been transferred where we can neither see nor measure it.

I WILL CLOSE ON A BRIGHTER NOTE, WITH THE FOURTH AND FINAL PASSAGE THAT CAPTURED MY ATTENTION AS I READ THIS BOOK. I have never seen Frank Bolles quoted anywhere — I hadn’t even heard of him before embarking on this blog. Meanwhile there are millions of Thoreau quotes written everywhere — there are even books filled with Thoreau’s quotes on different subjects (I have one on Education). But if I were to happen upon a Frank Bolles quote someday, I suspect it might be this one:

If we are in tune with nature, all her music can find a way into the heart and satisfy something there which yearns for it, and never can be wholly happy without it.

FINALLY, A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE COPY OF THE BOOK I READ. I managed to obtain a book whose cover appears practically new — vibrant blue cloth not at all faded, no writing inside — not even a bookplate or owner’s name anywhere. The volume was published in 1896, and is indicated as a Third Edition. I am gratified to know that, for at least a few years, Bolles’ work had some degree of popularity. From other copies I have seen for sale online, I suspect that my edition was also the last.

Full Assurance of Spring: “In New England Woods and Fields” by Rowland E. Robinson, 1896

 Agriculture and Husbandry, Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Insects, Native Plants, Natural History, Reptiles, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Jul 022020
 

The lifeless dun of the close-cropped southward slopes and the tawny tangles of the swales are kindling to living green with the blaze of the sun and the moist tinder of the brook’s overflow.

ROWLAND ROBINSON IS NOT AN EASY AUTHOR TO READ. His sentences sometimes run for a dozen lines on the page, nearly every one a dense thicket of adjectives and nouns with scarcely an adverb in sight. He was taken to reflecting, and rhapsodizing, on the campfire; half a dozen of his essays focus on them. (He is quite taken with fire in general, as the quote above demonstrates.) The volume I read is a collection of short essays, written for the magazine Forest and Stream, an early conservation magazine that merged with Field and Stream in 1930. As such, the works are organized, to a rough approximation, across the seasons of the year. But otherwise, the book has no structure or theme beyond encountering nature in the woods and fields of Vermont. And while his text includes a number of passages in his essays on various animals that could be interpreted as the work of an early conservationist, he falls short of advocating for greater regulations on sport hunting. (In Robinson’s defense, George Bird Grinnell and Theodore Roosevelt are even more famous conservationists who bagged far more game than he did.)

AND YET HIS WRITING SOMETIMES EVOKES SEASONAL MOMENTS OF NATURE IN A VIVID AND BEAUTIFUL WAY. Consider, for instance, that same quote with which I began this essay. Or here is another one, from earlier in the season. Reading it slowly, I am transported there, to see and feel his world of the northern Vermont forest, still gripped by winter but with intimations of springtime, tree trunks decorated by shifting patterns of light and shadow:

The coarse-grained snow is strewn thickly with shards of bark that the trees have sloughed in their long hibernation, with shreds and tatters of their tempest-torn branches. But all this litter does not offend the eye nor look out of place, like that which is scattered in fields and about homesteads. When this three months’ downfall of fragments sinks to the carpet of flattened leaves, it will be at one with it, an inwoven pattern, as comely as the shifting mesh of browner shadows that trunks and branches weave between the splashes of sunshine. Among these is a garnishment of green moss patches and fronds of perennial ferns which tell of life that the stress of winter could not overcome. One may discover, amid the purple lobes of the squirrelcup leaves, downy buds that promise blossoms, and others, callower, but of like promise, under the dusty links of the arbutus chain.

IT IS EASY TO CLASSIFY HIS WRITING AS “FLOWERY” AND DISMISS IT ALTOGETHER. Nowadays, nature writing is not tasked with painting pictures, but instead can accompany them. Robinson was first an artist, and only later in life a writer; surprisingly, this book of nature essays is entirely unillustrated apart from its cover art. Instead, his essays are filled with still-lifes, vivid sentences depicting the landscape and its inhabitants (primarily birds, frogs, and mammals, with a brief nod to a few different plants (like squirrelcup, a.k.a. hepatica, which has cameos in several of the essays). They challenge the frenetic reader of today to slow down and let the words sink in and allow his landscape to appear in the imagination:

At last there is full and complete assurance of spring, in spite of the baldness of the woods, the barrenness of the fields, bleak with sodden furroughs of last year’s ploughing, or pallidly tawny with bleached grass, and untidy with the jetsam of winter storms and the wide strewn litter of farms in months of foddering and wood-hauling.

There is full assurance of spring in such incongruities as a phoebe a-perch on a brown mullein stalk in the midst of grimy snow banks, and therefrom swooping in airy loops of flight upon the flies that buzz across this begrimed remnant of winter’s ermine, and of squirrelcups flaunting bloom and fragrance in the face of an ice cascade, which, with all its glitter gone, hangs in dull whiteness down the ledges, greening the moss with the moisture of its wasting sheet of pearl.

At its best, the result of Robinson’s wordsmithery is a prose poem to the season, fraught with images akin to William Carlos Williams’ poem, Red Wheelbarrow, but far less spartan — more like a scene filled choc-a-bloc with various wheelbarrows, all clamoring for attention at once:

Summer is past its height. The songless bobolink has forsaken the shorn meadow. Grain fields, save the battalioned maize, have fallen from gracefulness and beauty of bending heads and ripple of mimic waves to bristling acres of stubble. From the thriftless borders of ripening weeds, busy flocks of yellowbirds in faded plumage scatter in sudden flight at one’s approach like upblown flurries of dun leaves. Goldenrod gilds the fence corners, asters shine in the dewy borders of the woods, sole survivors of the floral world save the persistent bloom of the wild carrot and succory — flourishing as if there had never been mower or reaper — and the white blossoms of the buckwheat crowning the filling kernels. The fervid days have grown perceptibly shorter, the lengthening nights have a chilly autumnal flavor, and in the cool dusk the katydids call and answer one to another out of their leafy tents, and the delicate green crickets the Yankee folks call August pipers play their monotonous tunes.

VIVID, OR OVERWROUGHT? Rowland walks that line through much of his prose, and my reaction to it depends upon my willingness to absorb his words and enter his world. Either way, though, I can still appreciate him, too, for some of his environmental sentiments. For instance, here he speaks out about the wanton killing of garter snakes, at a time when the killing of animals of any and all kinds was commonplace and often done with little thought of the consequences:

…a moving curved and recurved gleam of gold on black and a flickering flash of red catch your eye and startle you with an involuntary revulsion. With charmed eyes held by this new object, you grope blindly for a stick or stone. But, if you find either, forbear to strike. Do not blot out one token of spring’s awakening nor destroy one life that rejoices in it, even though it be so humble a life as that of a poor garter snake. He is so harmless to man that, were it not for the old, unreasoning antipathy, our hands would not be raised against him; and, if he were not a snake, we should call him beautiful in his stripes of black and gold, and in graceful motion — a motion that charms us in their undulation of waves, in their flickering reflections of sunlight on rushy margins and wooded shores, in the winding of a brook through a meadow, in the flutter of a pennant and the flaunting of a banner, the ripple of wind-swept meadow and grain field, and the sway of leafy boughs.

Robinson continues the scene by imagining that the viewer witnesses the garter snake, newly out of hibernation, catch and swallow a frog. He then suggests that the snake will, in fact, catch and eat many “noxious insect[s] and mice over the course of the year, and thus be of considerable benefit to the farmer. Robinson acknowledges that a garter snake might also feed on some eggs and young of ground-nesting birds, supposedly providing justification for killing the snake. In fact, though, Robinson argues, that is a hypocritical act, because the same person killing the snake probably shoots numerous woodcock and grouse for sport. Robinson closes the scene with these strong and prescient words about the human relationship to nature:

Of all living things, only man disturbs the nicely adjusted balance of nature. The more civilized he becomes, the more mischievous he is. The better he calls himself, the worse he is. For uncounted centuries the bison and the Indian shared a continent, but in two hundred years or so the white man has destroyed the one and spoiled the other.

AT THE SAME TIME, THERE ARE MOMENTS IN HIS WRITING WHEN HE SEEMS WILLING TO EXCUSE SOME OF THE DAMAGE, OR AT LEAST EXPRESSES RESIGNATION TO THE FACT THAT IT IS LIKELY TO CONTINUE. For instance, it is still okay in his book to kill potentially harmful animals, or animals that provide some value to humans. Robinson’s is still an anthropocentric viewpoint, much aligned with the end of the 19th century in America. His essay, A Century of Extermination, bemoans the fate of so many dwindling creatures — bison, passenger pigeons, heath hens. The last two were still living in 1896, though rapidly headed toward extinction. Yet Robinson offers little hope for change, closing the essay with an image of an old man grateful he will not live to see the destruction, and sad when pondering “the poor inheritance of his children.”

By Mfwills – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11310696

AS A POSTSCRIPT, I OFFER THESE REFLECTIONS ON WHAT PHYSICALLY REMAINS OF ROWLAND ROBINSON’S LIFE AND WORK. I will begin with a photograph of Rokeby in Ferrisburg, Vermont, the home for 200 years of the Robinson family, including Rowland Robinson’s father (a radical abolitionist who used his home as a stop on the Underground Railroad) and Rowland himself. Apart from Gene Stratton-Porter (two of whose homes are preserved and open to the public in Indiana) and John Burroughs (whose cabin and final home are both available for viewing New York), Robinson is only the third of the eight authors with at least one home preserved for posterity. (I might add that efforts are also underway to save Chimney Farm, Henry Beston’s home in Maine after leaving the Outermost House.) Sadly, I have yet to visit any of these places; perhaps I will plan a tour once travel becomes both possible and safe again.

MEANWHILE, I HAVE A FIRST EDITION (ONLY EDITION) OF ROBINSON’S BOOK. My copy is in excellent condition, which, on the flip side, means that there is little I can share of its history. Only one page, the opening of his Golden-Winged Woodpecker essay, contains pencil writing. On the margin, almost a poem, are the words, “Flicker / white rump / wings show / yellow in / flight.” It is comforting to know that at least one reader of this book was not content to encounter nature by armchair, but also sought to encounter its wild inhabitants out-of-doors. Dare I call it a flicker of hope?

Living with Reverence: “The Outermost House” by Henry Beston, 1928

 Birds, Books, Natural History, Sense of Place  1 Response »
Jun 262020
 
Aprof2 / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)

Creation is here and now. So near is man to the creative pageant, so much a part is he of the endless and incredible experiment, that any glimpse he may have will be but the revelation of a moment, a solitary note heard in a symphony thundering through debatable existences of time. Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.

CAUGHT UP IN POETIC WONDER, I HAVE COME HOME. In Beston’s writing, I glimpse nature as elemental force pervading the planet, flowing through our veins, rooting us to the land, to each other, to the sea, to the sky. I share the Outermost House with him, gazing reflectively into the hearth, peering out the window into a thunderstorm, seeing the swirl of birds just beyond the doorway in the dunes. Having read six previous nature writers, all struggling to convey something of what it is to encounter the natural world, I find success at last in Beston’s prose. All six authors — Treat, Torrey, Thomas, Burroughs, Stratton-Porter, Flagg — struggled to combine scientific scrutiny with poetic rapture. Their solution, time and again, was to riddle their prose with snatches of poetry — Emerson, Whitman, or even original work. Poetry and prose remained separate, apart. The prose spoke of wonder at times, yet never fully realized it. Until now. In “The Outermost House”, Beston has brought the two together at last, crafting some of the most soaring, magnificent sentences I have ever read. There is scientific insight here, and there is wonder here too. I am not quite clear where one ends and the other begins. Here, for instance, Beston explains how he came to take up solitary residence there, in words that could have been written just yesterday:

The world today is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot. In my world of beach and dune these elemental presences lived and had their being, and under their arch there moved an incomparable pageant of nature and of the year. The flux and reflux of ocean, the incomings of waves, the gatherings of birds, the pilgrimages of the peoples of the sea, winter and storm, the splendor of autumn and the holiness of spring — all these were part of the great beach. The longer I stayed, the more eager was I to know this coast and share its mysterious and elemental life….

THERE IS CLARITY AND WHOLENESS — AND HOLINESS — TO “THE OUTERMOST HOUSE”. Beston’s small cabin, the fo’c’sle, is positioned within a field of elemental forces — wind and wave and the life-energy of the schooling fish and flocking seabirds. And it is situated in a liminal space, between ocean water and salt marsh. Human presences are there, but isolated and largely predictable — the regular beats of the Coast Guard walking from the station at Nauset Light in the north, southward to a half-way house (a small structure lying halfway to the next station), then back to Nauset Light again. Beston would watch the time for the moment of their passage, hoping for a knock on the door, hot coffee prepared for the visitor. His world was contained, whole, and at once both austere and rich without measure: “…there is always reserve and mystery, always something beyond, on earth and sea something which nature, honouring, conceals.” And always overhead, the Sun, whose seasonal wanderings traverse the pages of Beston’s book:

We lose a great deal, I think, when we lose this sense and feeling for the sun. When all has been said, the adventure of the sun is the great natural drama by which we live, and not to have joy of it and awe of it, not to share in it, is to close a dull door on nature’s sustaining and poetic spirit.

FOR BESTON, NATURE, TOO, IS ELEMENTAL — AN ENERGY FLOWING THROUGH ALL BEINGS, NOT STRICTLY CONTAINED IN DISTINCT FORMS, BUT A FECUND FIELD OF POSSIBILITY. “Dwelling thus upon the dunes,” he explained, “I lived in the midst of an abundance of natural life which manifested itself every hour of the day, and from being thus surrounded, thus enclosed within a great whirl of what one may call the life force, I felt that I drew a secret and sustaining energy…. Life is as much a force in the universe as electricity or gravitational pull, and the presence of life sustains life.”

WITHOUT DOUBT, BESTON’S “THE OUTERMOST HOUSE” IS ONE OF THE GREATEST WORKS OF NATURE WRITING EVER WRITTEN. He is renowned today chiefly as a regional writer, a naturalist who captured vividly life on the Cape Cod shore and, quite a few years later, on a farm in Maine (“Northern Farm”, 1948). “The Outermost House” is still in print, though that is not true of his other books. The book stands above the others I have read for several reasons. As I noted at the opening of this post, Beston merged science and poetry into a single, powerful voice, and used that voice to enchant the reader with the experience of life on the shore of Cape Cod. He also constructed a single, highly coherent work that spanned a natural passage of time (a year) — though, like Thoreau with Walden, he actually condensed the experiences of about two years down to one. For months, Beston gave himself fully to the experience of inhabiting the world, observing the birds and ants and growing dune grasses during the daytime, and writing into the evening. I sense, too, that Beston, in the wake of his years as a foreign war correspondent in Europe and stationed aboard a US destroyer, hungered for the deep, elemental engagement with the cosmos that living in the Outermost House offered him. The results were moments of wonder, awe, and deep insight — such as this famous passage about animals — the myriad other beings with which we share this planet — with which I will close this brief essay:

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feature magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

AS A POSTSCRIPT, I WILL SHARE BRIEFLY ABOUT THE COPY OF THE BOOK THAT I READ THIS WEEK. Limited by financial considerations, I stopped short of buying a first edition hardcover of this work; eBay currently offers a signed copy of the work for merely $5,000 (but at least there is free shipping). I settled for a Viking Compass Edition paperback in its 11th printing from September, 1969. It included a forward written by Beston to mark the 20th anniversary of the work in 1949. The font and typesetting, at least, were the same as in the original hardcover edition. The back cover includes the text of a plaque placed on the house in a 1964 ceremony declaring it a National Literary Landmark. Beston actually attended the ceremony; it was his final visit there. (Unfortunately, the fo’c’sle was washed out to sea in a winter storm in February, 1978.) The brief bio of the author on the back cover of my book uses present tense to describe Beston, though he had actually died a year and a half before my copy was printed. As for the book’s history, it contains no marks that would offer clues, except for a bookseller’s stamp for the Fireside Book Shop in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, a small town east of Cleveland.

Travelling Through an Extensive Morass: “A Year Among the Trees” by Wilson Flagg, 1881

 Backyard Nature, Books, Environmental conservation, Landscape History, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Jun 252020
 

WHEN THOMAS WILSON FLAGG DROPPED HIS FIRST NAME EARLY IN HIS WRITING CAREER, IT WAS HIS FIRST AND LAST ACT AS EDITOR. What would follow, over the course of a lengthy and prolific writing career, would be dozens and dozens of highly detailed accounts of nature — birds, trees, the functions of a forest. What they nearly all share is a writing style that one admiring reader called “whimsical” but I would classify instead as soporific. I will allow the modern-day reader to judge from this supposedly “whimsical” passage:

Evening calls [the botanist] out from his retreat, to pursue another varied journey among the fairy realms of vegetation, and ere she parts with him curtains the heavens with splendor and prompts her choir of sylvan warblers to salute him with their vespers.

Another example, the inspiration for the title of this post:

The White Cedar constitutes with the southern cypress the principal timber of the Great Dismal Swamp, and is the last tree, except the red maple, which is discovered when travelling through an extensive morass.

FLAGG IS NOTABLE TODAY CHIEFLY FOR BEING A CONTEMPORARY OF HENRY THOREAU, RECOGNIZING THOREAU, GEORGE PERKINS MARSH, AND JOHN BURROUGHS AS SOURCES OF INSPIRATION. Alas, he and Thoreau never met (nor did he meet the the other two, from what I have found). However, in an 1857 letter to Daniel Rickerson, Thoreau voiced his opinion of Flagg’s work in no uncertain terms; after reading 300 pages of Flagg’s writing, I honestly confess that I agree with Thoreau on this one:

Your Wilson Flagg seems a serious person, and it is encouraging to recognize a contemporary who recognizes nature so squarely…. But he is not alert enough. He wants stirring up with a pole…. His style, as I remember, is singularly vague (I refer to the book) and before I got to the end of the sentences I was off the track.

TO BE FAIR TO FLAGG, THE BOOK I READ PUTS HIM AT A CONSIDERABLE DISADVANTAGE FOR WINNING OVER THE READER. During his lifetime, he produced dozens of essays, and all of his books are essay compilations. One of them followed the year round, making use of an organizational structure that was commonly employed from the 1840s through the 1940s, and is still encountered in some modern-day nature writing. The one I read — the only volume I could afford, I might add, due (I expect) to the relative scarcity of the other tiles — was “A Year Among the Trees”. It consists of a subset of essays, taken from a larger work, “The Woods and Byways of New England”. The common theme in this work is trees and shrubs. Unfortunately, most of the essays highlight particular tree and shrub species, giving them a rather field-guidish treatment but often without illustrations and without scientific names in the text (though they are included in the table of contents). Flag tends to focus his account on aesthetic considerations, highlighting the degree to which a tree form is picturesque or not, and the extent to which the tree is more or less attractive than its English counterpart (when there is one). Combine that with wandering sentences generally long on Latinate words, and the result is a sort of mind-numbing tedium, a morass of tree limbs, leaf forms, and flowery words.

THERE IS ANOTHER KIND OF ESSAY IN THIS BOOK, TOO; IT INCLUDES SOME OF HIS FINEST WORK AND ALSO SOME OF HIS MOST PECULIAR IDEAS. In a series of essays scattered throughout the book (with no clear order to them), Flagg explores the nature and functions of forests. The volume opens with an essay on The Primitive Forest in which Flagg proposes that, prior to European settlement, most of North America east of “The Great American Desert” (as the Great Plains was called at the time) was densely covered with forest. Subsequent clearing of the trees has led to regional warming, for reasons explained here:

The American climate is now in that transitional state which has been caused by opening the space to the winds from all quarters by operations which have not yet been carried to their extreme limit. These changes of the surface have probably increased the mean annual temperature of the whole country by permitting the direct rays of the sun to act upon a wider area….

WHILE HIS CLIMATOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS FELL WIDE OF THE MARK, HIS CONCERNS ABOUT THE LOGGING OF STEEP SLOPES REMAIN SCIENTIFICALLY VALID. As in his thoughts about the influence of forest cover on climate, it is not clear the extent to which Flagg’s ideas are original; in this case, for instance, he may owe a debt to George Perkins Marsh (who he mentions in another essay in the book). In his essay Relations of Trees to Water, Flagg explains,

If each owner of land would keep all his hills and declivities, and all slopes that contain only a thin deposit of soil or a quarry, covered with forest, he would lessen his local inundations from vernal thaws and summer rains. Such a covering of wood tends to equalize the moisture that is distributed over the land, causing it, when showered upon the hills, to be retained by the mechanical action of the trees and their undergrowth of shrubs and herbaceous plants, and by the spongy surface of the soil underneath them, made porous by mosses, decayed leaves, and other debris, so that the plains and valleys have a moderate oozing supply of moisture for a long time after every shower. Without this covering, the water when precipitated upon the slopes, would immediately rush down over an unprotected surface in torrents upon the space below.

AS AN AMATEUR GEOMORPHOLOGIST, FLAGG IS QUITE NOTEWORTHY. Indeed, his musings remind me of some of Thoreau’s own unpublished research and observations on the effects of dams on stream flow. Like Thoreau, Flagg looked closely and thought deeply about natural processes in his native Massachusetts. Also like Thoreau, he calls for the establishment of parks to protect the remaining New England forests. First, here is Thoreau, from the last pages of his manuscript “Wild Fruits” as edited by Bradley Dean:

I think that each town should have a park, or rather primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres…where a stick should never be cut for fuel, nor for the navy, nor to make wagons, but stand and decay for higher uses — a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation.

And here is Wilson Flagg’s proposal, from his essay The Dark Plains; though not quite as plainly spoken, he echoes Thoreau’s general sentiment well:

Some spacious wood ought to remain, in every region, in which the wild animals would be protected, and we might view the grounds as they appeared when the wild Indian was lord of this continent.

FINALLY, A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY BOOK ITSELF. This time, the closest I could come to an original volume by the author was an edition of Flagg from 1889, eight years after the original edition, and five years after Flagg’s death. Apart from the gilt cover with pine branch and cones, the book is fairly nondescript. The work includes three photo illustrations, including the roadside elm above. It also includes a number of line drawings of the parts of various trees and shrubs. Affixed to the inside of the front cover is a book label, indicating this book was once part of the Private Library of Walter S. Athearn. Here my tale potentially gets more interesting. Out of curiosity, I did a Google search of the name, and this biography turned up. Dr. Walter Scott Athearn lived from 1872 until 1934, and was a pioneering religious educator. While much of his life was spent in Iowa, he did move east in 1916 to serve for 13 years as a Graduate School Dean at Boston University. Could he have purchased the title in some used bookshop upon his arrival, perhaps with an eye toward learning more about the trees and forests of his new home state? Or could the person who owned my book just happened to have had the same name? I could not locate any obituaries online for a different Walter S. Athearn, but I doubt I will ever know for certain. Meanwhile, his photo brings a fitting closure to this post.

With Senses Alive to Everything: “Music of the Wild” by Gene Stratton-Porter, 1910

 Agriculture and Husbandry, Backyard Nature, Birds, Books, Natural History, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Jun 222020
 
Ripening pawpaws: Gene Stratton-Porter, 1910 (left) & the author, 2020 (right)

“Somewhere in the depths of the forest you will meet the Creator. The place is the culmination of His plan for men adown the ages, a material thing proving how His work evolves, His real gift to us remaining in natural form. The fields epitomize man. They lay as he made them. They are artificial. They came into existence by the destruction of the forest and the change of natural conditions. They prove how man utilized the gift God gave to him. But in the forest the Almighty is yet housed in His handiwork and lives in His creation. Therefore step out boldly. You are with the Infinite.

AFTER READING OVER THREE HUNDRED PAGES OF GENE-STRATTON PORTER’S BOOK, “THE MUSIC OF THE WILD”, I AM UNSURE WHERE TO BEGIN; SO I WILL BEGIN WITH THE PAWPAWS. The ripening pawpaws on my backyard tree offer me an immediate and direct connection to her work. The book is laden with her original photos. Taken sometime prior to the book’s publication in 1910, they represent some of the earliest nature photography in America. Only four years earlier, in 1906, National Geographic had published its first photographs of wildlife. Across 110 years, I find a sense of connection and belonging. It is relatively easy for me to find those points of contact through her photography; her text, however, frequently leaves me feeling adrift in a foreign land. For Gene Stratton Porter, everything exists by design of God, and was carefully brought into being in order to meet the human needs. To go into the deep woods is to enter a cathedral in a quite literal sense. Nature brings humans delight fundamentally because nature is the handiwork of a Supreme Being.

THERE ARE OTHER OBSTACLES TO APPRECIATING THIS BOOK. She tends to anthropomorphize most everything, from a calling songbird to a flowing stream. In the case of animal calls, she frequently translates them into everyday human speech with less than inspiring results. For instance, she proposes that a calling heron could be saying “Come my love, this spot is propitious. Share a morning treat with your dearest,” or might intend to mean “Better keep away, old skin and bones; there’s danger around this frog pond.”

AND THEN THERE IS HER RELENTLESS “POETRY”. The lovely black and white photographs, some the result of hours spent atop a ladder in her orchard, are each accompanied by a few lines, usually rhymed. Some innocuous passages are taken from other poets, like Emerson or Whitman. Others are snippets of doggerel she dreamed up, best forgotten as quickly as possible after reading them. For instance, consider this one: “The screech owl screeches when courting, / Because it’s the best he can do. / If you couldn’t court without screeching, / Why, then, I guess you’d screech too.”

FOR THOSE THAT SURVIVE POETRY THAT WOULD PUT A VOGON TO SHAME, AND ENDURE HER INSISTENT CHRISTIANITY, THERE IS MUCH TO BE GAINED FROM SPENDING AN AFTERNOON WITH STRATTON-PORTER. Although not a professional scientist, she carefully observed the workings of nature in and around Limberlost Swamp in northern Indiana. She took photographic sequences documenting breeding birds, from nest-building to the first flights of the young — in some cases, being the first to do so for particular species. As she explained early on in the volume,

Whenever I come across a scientist plying his trade I am always so happy and content to be merely a nature-lover, satisfied with what I can see, hear, and record with my cameras. Such wonders are lost by specializing on one subject to the exclusion of all else. No doubt it is necessary for someone to do this work, but I am so glad it is not my calling. Life has such varying sights and songs for the one who goes afield with senses alive to everything.

THROUGHOUT THE BOOK, STRATTON-PORTER CELEBRATES THE RICH PLANT AND ANIMAL LIFE OF RURAL INDIANA — THE MOTHS, THE BIRDS, THE FROGS, THE BATS. She takes delight in celebrating what others would pass off as mundane. “I sing for dandelions,” she announces proudly. “If we had to import them and they cost us five dollars a plant, all of us would grow them in pots. Because they are the most universal flower of field and wood, few people pause to see how lovely they are.” After essays on the forest and the field, she closes the book with a paean to the life of the swamp and its rich music:

It is the marsh that furnishes the croakings, the chatter, the quackings, the thunder, the cries, and the screams of birdland…. At times we may think that we would be glad not to hear again the most discordant of these musicians, but they are all dear in their places, and were any of them to become extinct, something of its charm would be taken from the damp, dark, weird marsh life that calls us so strongly. We have learned to know and understand them, and they have won our sympathy and our love.

IF STRATTON-PORTER DEPICTS HER LIMBERLOST LANDSCAPES AS AKIN TO PARADISE, THERE IS A SERPENT IN THE GARDEN: HUMANS. Lurking in the passage above is the possibility of extinction, something naturalists were just beginning to come to grips with then. Four years after the book was published, Martha, the last known passenger-pigeon, died. Concerned over what was being lost, Stratton-Porter wrote bitterly of the wanton destruction of waterbirds for the millinery trade, and the trampling and picking of wildflowers by unthinking nature tourists. And already in her day there was abundant evidence of how humans were altering the land — turning forests into agricultural fields and draining the swamps. In my opinion, without a doubt the most perceptive passage in the book is one where she considers, the bigger picture — how humans were even beginning to alter Earth’s hydrologic cycle:

It was Thoreau who, in writing of the destruction of the forests, exclaimed, “Thank Heaven, they can not cut down the clouds!” Aye, but they can! That is a miserable fact, and soon it will become our discomfort and loss. Clouds are beds of vapor arising from damp places and floating in air until they meet other vapor masses, that mingle with them, and the weight becomes so great the whole falls in drops of rain. If men in their greed cut forests that preserve and distil moisture, clear fields, take the shelter of trees from creeks and rivers until they evaporate, and drain the water from swamps so that they can be cleared and cultivated, — they prevent vapor from rising; and if it does not rise it cannot fall. Pity of pities it is; but man can change and is changing the forces of nature.

ALAS, IT WAS A WARNING THAT NO ONE HEEDED. When the first water cycle diagrams appeared two decades later, they depicted an entirely natural process, from which humans were absent. That is still the case in most hydrologic cycle diagrams available today. In a recent Nexus Media article on human impacts on hydrology, Dr. David Hannah from the University of Birmingham remarked that “Nearly a century ago, human impacts were less extensive and less understood. But we have no excuses now not to include people and their various interactions with water in a changing world.”

AS AN AFTERWARD, A FEW REFLECTIONS ON THE COPY THAT I READ. When this first edition copy of “Music of the Wild” first arrived in the mail many weeks ago, I immediately thought back to my penchant as a child for removing book jackets and disposing of them. Here, I really wished the jacket had been retained, as the outside of the book is rather soiled, detracting a bit from the charm of its gilt gold lettering against a green background. Making the spine white was not particularly wise to begin with; it definitely shows its age. In terms of the volume’s history, all I can say is that it once belonged to Jean Kerr, who wrote her name on the top of the first page in flowing pencil. The most notable characteristic of the book is its weight: 2.4 pounds, according to a bathroom scale. Every sturdy page of text is followed by an even thicker page with a photograph on it; there are literally over a hundred photographs included in the volume. What a magnificent “coffee table” tome it must have been, 110 years ago.

In Praise of Luna: A Moth Encounter

 Backyard Nature, Books, Natural History, Night  No Responses »
Jun 202020
 

June is the time for appreciative people to sing in praise of the moths…. (Gene Stratton-Porter)

THE OTHER EVENING, along a stretch of Piney Woods Church Road bordered primarily by loblolly pines, with a scattering of sassafras, sweet-gum, and persimmon, I encountered a male luna moth. When I met up with him, he was just in the process of unfurling his elegant wings; half an hour later, when I left him, he had achieved the glorious pose in the last of the series of photographs above.

SEEKING TO LEARN MORE OF LUNA’S WAYS, I turned to my bookcase with its growing collection of old natural history books and field guides, wondering what nature writers thought and wrote about Actias luna over one hundred years ago. First, these brief words, from “The Moth Book” by W. J. Holland, 1916:

This common and well-known insect has an extensive range from Canada to Florida and westward to Texas and the trans-Mississippi States as far as the region of the great plains. The larva [see below]…feeds upon the various species of walnut and hickory, the sweet-gum, the persimmon, and other trees. In North Carolina it appeared to be particularly fond of the persimmon. The cocoon is thin and papery, spun among leaves, and falls to the ground in autumn.

Next, I consulted my copy of “Moths and Butterflies” by Mary C. Dickenson, 1901, with a less than satisfactory result:

The larva feeds on hickory, walnut, and birch; and the cocoons are found under these trees…. The cocoons are very thin, so thin that color can be seen through them and the time of change from the green caterpillar to the brown chrysalis be ascertained. The large light green moth is very beautiful indeed and is a great favorite with amateur collectors.

Finally, I opened Gene Stratton-Porter’s “Moths of the Limberlost” from 1921, where I found this richer and far more satisfying account of the majestic creature I had seen:

Clinging to my finger, the living creature was of such delicate beauty as to impoverish my stock of adjectives in the beginning. Its big, pursy body was covered with long, furry scales of the purest white imaginable. The wings were of an exquisite light green colour; the front pair having a heavy costa of light purple that reached across the back of the head: the back pair ended in long artistic “trailers”, faintly edged with light yellow. The front wing had an oval transparent mark close to the costa, attached to it with a purple line, and the back had circles of the same. These decorations were bordered with lines of white, black, and red. At the bases of the wings were long, snowy, silken hairs; the legs were purple, and the antennae resembled small, tan colored ferns. This is the best I can do at description, A living moth muse be seen to form a realizing sense of its shape and delicacy of colour.

Photograph by Gene Stratton-Porter from “Moths of the Limberlost”, 1921

Keeping a Sharp Lookout: “A Year in the Fields” by John Burroughs, 1901

 Agriculture and Husbandry, Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Landscape History, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place  No Responses »
Jun 192020
 

…the student and lover of nature has this advantage over people who gad up and down the world, seeking some novelty and excitement; he has only to stay at home and see the procession pass. The great globe swings round to him like a revolving showcase; the change of seasons is like the passage of strange and new countries; the zones of the earth, with all their beauties and marvels, pass one’s door and linger long in the passing…. I sit here among the junipers of the Hudson, with purpose every year to go to Florida, or to the West Indies, or to the Pacific coast, yet the seasons pass and I am still loitering, with a half-defined suspicion, perhaps, that, if I remain quiet and keep a sharp lookout, these countries will come to me.

AFTER THREE QUITE OBSCURE NATURE WRITERS, I THOUGHT IT WAS TIME TO VISIT FAMILIAR GROUND, SO I PULLED MY VOLUME OF BURROUGHS DOWN FROM THE SHELF. Granted, many casual natural history readers forget “the other John”, recalling from this time period only John Muir (who, like Burroughs, sported a white beard and spoke exultantly of nature’s marvels). The two, though, are remarkably different. John Muir was a mountain prophet, speaking in tones of religious rapture about his beloved Sierra Nevada fastnesses. John Burroughs, on the other hand, grew up and lived out his days in the Catskills of New York State, keeping close to the Hudson River. Muir walked long distances alone in the mountains and climbed a redwood in a thunderstorm just to feel it rocking in the wind; Burroughs, meanwhile, remarked self-deprecatingly about his own efforts to venture into the wilds. After a particularly difficult short camping trip with a few companions, he observed that “On this excursion…I was taught how poor an Indian I should make, and what a ridiculous figure a party of men may cut in the woods when the way is uncertain and the mountains high.” It must be added that the highest point in the Catskill “Mountains” is Slide Mountain, at 4189 feet; the highest point in the Sierras, Mount Whitney, is 14,505 feet.

JOHN BURROUGHS’ PROSE WANDERS COMFORTABLY THROUGH THAT LIMINAL RURAL SPACE BETWEEN CIVILIZATION AND THE WILD. I would classify him as a ruderal writer, using a term most commonly applied to plants that are the first to colonize ground disturbed by human action, such as an abandoned field. Cattle roam across many a page, and he frequently writes of fields and weeds. My particular copy of this book, the second edition from 1901, features about 50 photographs (all black and white, of course) of John Burroughs in the landscape and at home. Most of his out-of-door images show predominantly open farmland dotted with occasional trees. In these familiar haunts, Burroughs encountered, and wrote about, numerous birds, trees, and forbs (flowering ground plants), occasionally drifting into comments about his other “neighbors”, from bumblebees to black bears. In all of his walks, his enduring goal, I think, was to realize himself as more deeply a part of his home landscape, and to more fully understand not only nature, but himself as part of it:

One’s on landscape comes in time to be be a sort of outlying part of himself; he has sowed himself broadcast upon it, and it reflects his own moods and feelings; he is sensitive to the verge of the horizon: cut those trees, and he bleeds; mor those hills, and he suffers…. Man can have but one interest in nature, namely, to see himself reflected or interpreted there; and we quickly neglect both poet and philosopher who fail to satisfy, in some measure, this feeling.

FOR BURROUGHS, KEEPING A SHARP LOOKOUT INVOLVED ALL THE SENSES, NOT JUST THE KEEN EYE. In his essays in this volume (collected from his previous works), Burroughs wrote with equal enthusiasm about the scents and sounds of the fields and woodlands near his home. For instance, writing about early April, he enthusiastically remarked:

Then its odors! I am thrilled by its fresh and indescribable odors — the perfume of the bursting sod, of the quickened roots and rootlets, of the mould under the leaves, of the fresh furrows. No other month has odors like it. The west wind the other day came fraught with a perfume that was to the sense of smell what a wild and delicate strain of music is to the ear. It was almost transcendental.

Speaking of “music to the ear”, here Burroughs describes the sounds of tiny frogs (species not identified) “piping in the marshes” in late April:

…toward the last of the month, there is a shrill musical uproar, as the sun is setting, in every marsh and bog in the land. It is a plaintive sound, and I have heard people from the city speak of it as lonesome and depressing, but to the lover of the country it is a pure spring melody.

BURROUGHS ALSO CELEBRATES SEASONAL CHANGE, AND HOW IT REFLECTED THE NATURE’S INNATE VITALITY. “Does not the human frame yield to and sympathize with the seasons?” he asked the reader, in his essay “Autumn Tides”. Underlying it all, no matter how much insight science can offer us, is an abiding mystery: “The only thing inexplicable is the inherent impulse to experiment, the original push, the principle of Life.”

BURROUGHS IS AT HIS MOST PROFOUND, I FEEL, IN HIS MUSINGS ABOUT SCIENCE AND POETRY. In his written work, he moves comfortably between the two worlds, appreciating their kindred natures. As he explains toward the close of his essay, “A Sharp Lookout”,

You may go to the fields and the woods, and gather fruit that is ripe for the palate without any aid of yours, but you cannot do this in science and in art. Here truth must be disentangled and interpreted — must be made in the image of man. Hence all good observation is more or less a refining and transmuting process, and the secret is to know the crude material when you see it…. Before a fact can become poetry, it must pass through the heart or the imagination of the poet; before it can become science, it must pass through the understanding of the scientist.

THE PACE OF TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE DURING HIS LIFETIME WAS QUITE DRAMATIC. He was already in his late 20s when the Civil War broke out, but by the last decade of his life he gleefully roamed the countryside in a Model T automobile given to him by Henry Ford. His long life (he died just short of his 84th birthday) spanned America’s transition from a largely agrarian society to a rapidly industrializing one. Yet he maintained a confidence in what science and technology have to offer. I wonder if he would still maintain this outlook if he were alive today?

Science does not mar nature. The railroad, Thoreau found, after all, to be about the wildest road he knew of, and the telegraph wires the best aeolian harp out of doors. Study of nature deepens the mystery and charm because it removes the horizon farther off. We cease to fear, perhaps, but how can one cease to marvel and to love?

BEFORE CLOSING THIS ESSAY, I CANNOT RESIST COMPARING HIS WRITING STYLE WITH THAT OF HIS CONTEMPORARY, EDITH THOMAS. Both of them, it turns out, wrote about gossamer — the slender threads of spider silk festooning the landscape in the autumntime. Thomas actually devoted an entire essay to it, and provides a more detailed picture of the phenomenon than Burroughs does. Here is an excerpt:

During this season [of gossamer summer], …miles and miles of hazy filament (if it could be measured linearly) are floating about in the soft, indolent air. Especially, late in the afternoon, with a level and glowing sun, do these mysterious threads flash out along the ground, horizontally between shrubs, slantwise from grass to tree, or else cut adrift, and sailing as the wind wills…. It takes nothing from the poetry that lies in the weft of the gossamer when it is known to be the work of an unconsidered spider…. By some, it is claimed that this floating web is not spread with predaceous intent, but rather as a means of aerial navigation; indeed, these vague and indeterminate threads would hardly disturb a gnats’ cotillion, if blown in their path. Hitherto, we have regarded the spider as an humble, plodding creature of the earth, an unaspiring, stay-at-home citizen, but this new aeronautic hypothesis hints that the poor insect is a very transcendentalist, an ideal voyager…. Some naturalists assert that the gossamer spider instinctively takes advantage of the levity of the atmosphere, thrusting out its threads until they reach a current of warmer and rarer air, which draws them upward, the spider going along with the uncompleted web. Whether it is capable of cutting short its journey and casting anchor at pleasure is indeed questionable.

And here is gossamer again, this time described by Burroughs:

A peculiar feature of our fall may sometimes be seen of a clear afternoon late in the season. Looking athwart the fields under the sinking sun, the ground appears covered with a shining veil of gossamer. A fairy net, invisible at midday and which the position of the sun now reveals, rests upon the stubble and the spears of grass covering acres in extent — the work of innumerable little spiders. The cattle walk through it, but do not seem to break it. Perhaps a fly would make his mark upon it. At the same time, stretching from the tops of the trees, or from the top of a stake in the fence, and leading off toward the sky, may be seen the cables of the flying spider, — a fairy bridge from the visible to the invisible. Occasionally seen against a deep mass of shadow, and perhaps enlarged by clinging particles of dust, they show quite plainly and sag down like a stretched rope, or sway and undulate like a hawser in the tide.

(A hawser is a thick rope for mooring or towing a ship.)

AS A POSTSCRIPT, I WOULD LIKE TO SHARE WHAT I CAN ABOUT MY PARTICULAR VOLUME OF BURROUGHS. I was able to obtain an original second edition from 1901 (augmented by a biographical sketch of Burroughs and the some further photos by Clifton Johnson). It has a lovely gold gilt cover, and includes dozens of photographs of Burroughs, posing on rocks, standing in the doorway of his study, pointing out tracks in the snow with his walking stick, etc. My copy bears almost no marks of its 119-year journey to me, with the notable exception of a normally blank back page filled with text in ink. It is a poem (not inspiring particularly, but a step up from Bradford Torrey’s), entitled “The Lure o’ the Woodland”, attributed to Thomas S. Jones, Jr. Thanks to the marvel of the Internet, I was able to discover that the work originally appeared in Ainslee’s magazine in November, 1907. Unfortunately, every year of the magazine is available online except for 1907. So this transcription of the poem, semi-legible though it is, may be the only copy left in existence. Of the copy-writer, all I know is that his or her initials were JWD, and that he or she was in Jacksonville, Florida on March 19, 1911.

The Poetic Eye: “The Round Year” by Edith Thomas, 1886

 Backyard Nature, Birds, Books, Geometry and Nature, Natural History, Night  2 Responses »
Jun 172020
 

I find the night, like the cup of Comus, “mixed with many murmurs.” First and the nearest at hand, the lively orchestration of the crickets (the later summer adds the fife of a grasshopper and the castanets of the katydid); then, in the distance, the regular, sonorous, or snoring antiphonies of the frogs at different points along the winding course of the creek. It would not surprise me to learn that these night musicians are systematically governed by the baton and metronome, so well do they keep time in the perplexing fugue movement which they are performing.

THANK GOODNESS FOR WIKIPEDIA, OR ELSE EDITH THOMAS WOULD HAVE LOST ME ON HER VERY FIRST LINE. Comus, it turns out, was the Greek god of festivities and revels. A god of excess, he represents anarchy and chaos. He was cup-bearer for Dionysus, Greek god of wine and fertility, so it is fairly easy to guess what Comus’ cup contained. Knowing this adds a contextual richness to Thomas’ imagery; the sense of chaos and wildness is juxtaposed with the “orchestration” of the “night musicians”. I glimpse a poet at work here.

EDITH THOMAS WAS FIRST AND FOREMOST A POET, FAMOUS IN HER DAY AND COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN NOW. Her poetry is tightly constructed, flowery, and ornate. Fortunately for her, and we in the 21st century, she also wrote a single book of nature essays, “The Round Year”, published in 1886. Written shortly after Thomas moved from her native northern Ohio to New York City (where she remained the rest of her life), the book is infused with a bittersweet longing for her home place. (“Who knows whether soul or body pines more for the familiar environment?” she asks in the book’s first essay. “Have wood, field, rock, and stream vested in us something of theirs? Or have we parted our spirit among them, that separation touches us so sorely?”) The title of her book comes from a poem by Emerson with these lines, “Cleave to thine acre; the round year / will fetch all fruits and virtues here.” In this, my third book journey, the pendulum has swung a full arc, from a scientist who seasoned her careful observations with a few poetic passages (Mary Treat) to a poetic rambler with a keen eye for birds and trees (Bradford Torrey) to a dedicated lifelong poet, well versed in literature and Greco-Roman mythology.

IT IS EASY SOMETIMES TO DROWN IN THOMAS’ LITERARY ALLUSIONS, WONDERING AT THE POINT OF IT ALL. There are certainly obstacles to accessing her work. By this, I mean not only the mythological thickets abounding in her prose but also her poetic flights of fancy that sometimes left me wondering if it all might be condensed to a pithy sentence or two instead. It is easy to write her off as lost in raptures of poetic fancy and musings of obscure myth, disconnected from nature. And then the minute I decide that, I find a passage that convinces me that she is, in fact, a perceptive observer of the natural world:

A strange servitude is this of the oak to the cynips, or gall-fly, in thus contributing of his substance to the housing and nourishment of his enemy’s offspring. The mischievous sylph selects sometimes the vein of a leaf, sometimes a stem, which she stings, depositing a minute egg in the wounded tissues. As soon, at least, as the egg hatches, the gall begins to form about the larva, simulating a fruity thriftiness, remaining green through the summer, but assuming at length the russet of autumn. The innocent acorn nature puts to bed as early as possible, that it may make a healthy, wealthy, and wise beginning on a spring morning; but the cradle that holds the gall-fly’s child she carelessly rocks above ground all winter.

THERE IS SCIENTIFIC ACCURACY HERE, THOUGH CLOTHED IN POETIC TRAPPINGS. Replace the sylph — an imaginary aerial spirit — with a wasp, and you have a fairly robust description of the formation of an oak gall. And sometimes Thomas’ poetic insights can even shift from being an obstacle to understanding to offering the reader a path toward an alternative way of encountering the world, a reminder that a successful scientist needs imagination and wonder, too. Consider this image:

Would you for a while shut out the earth and fill your eye with the heavens, lie down, some summer day, on the great mother’s lap., with a soft grass pillow under your head; then look around and above you, and see how slight, apparently, is your terrestrial environment, how foreshortened has become the foreground — only a few nodding bents of blossomed grass, a spray of clover with a bumble-bee probing for honey, and in the distance, perhaps the billowy outline of the diminished woods. What else you see is the blue of heaven illimitably stretched above and beyond you. You seem to by lying not so much on the surface of earth as at the bottom of the sky.

Consider, too, this lovely blending of mathematics and flowing water:

In cooler and deeper retirement, on languid summer afternoons, this flowing philosopher sometimes geometrizes. It is always of circles — circles intersecting, tangent, or inclusive. A fish darting to the surface affords the central starting-point of a circle whose radius and circumference are incalculable, since the eye fails to detect where it fades into nothingness. Multiplied intersections there may be, but without one curve marring the smooth expansion of another. There are hints of infinity to be gathered from this transient water-ring, as well as from the orb of the horizon at sea.

DESPITE THEIR DIFFERENCES IN WRITTEN VOICE, TREAT AND THOMAS SHARED MUCH COMMON GROUND. For instance, just as Treat studied nature in the field (the backyard or the further woods), so Thomas spoke strongly of the need to engage with living nature, instead of collecting dead specimens. On the very first page of “The Round Year”, for instance, she addressed the reader thus:

You come, eager and aggressive, on your specialist’s errand, whatever it may be — botany, ornithology, or other; you may take hence, perforce, a large number and variety of specimens, press the flower, embalm the bird; but a “dry garden” and a case of still-life are poor showings for the true natural history of flower or bird.

ANOTHER COMMON ELEMENT IS THAT BOTH WRITERS ENCOUNTERED A KINGFISHER AND DESCRIBED IT TO THE READER. A comparison of the two accounts provides further insight into their different approaches to observing birds. First, Mary Treat:

The belted kingfisher (Ceryle alycyon) is another familiar bird that frequents the grounds. His name indicates his occupation, and a very successful fisher he is. His fishing-post is on the railing that runs along the wharf. The wharf extends from the grounds about two hundred and fifty feet into the river. Whether he remains at this post the entire year I do not know; we find him here upon our arrival, and leave him here when we depart for the North. I am inclined to think that his permanent residence; at all events, he objects to being disturbed, as if he had been sole manager too long to yield the ground without a loud protest. If more than one person geos upon the wharf, he leaves with a clang and clatter which sound like a watchman’s rattle. and usually flies to the terrace, and alights upon a small tree bending over the water, where he can overlook and watch proceedings. But he does not seem to be afraid of one person alone; if I go upon the wharf unaccompanied, he flits along before me, alighting upon the railing, often not more than fifteen or twenty feet distant, and faces about as if to intimidate me. Seeing this I quietly drop upon a seat; for really, with his rumpled crest and fierce-looking black eyes, he looks rather formidable, being a foot or more in length. Seeming to be satisfied that I am under subjection, he goes on with his fishing, in which he is very expert. Motionless he eyes the finny tribes beneath him until one of their number comes within his range to suit his taste, when he dives under the water and brings it up; and now beating it upon the railing until it is quite limp, he swallows it. Small fish-scales are scattered along the entire length of the railing, where he has dressed his fish preparatory to taking his meals.

And now a very different account of a kingfisher (likely a different species, one found along Lake Erie in Ohio) from the pen of Edith Thomas:

There were fish taken under my observation, though not by line or net. I did not fish, yet I felt warranted in sharing the triumphs of the sport when, for the space of ten minutes or more, I had maintained most cautious silence, while that accomplished angler, the kingfisher, perches on a stately elm branch over the water, was patiently waiting the chance of an eligible haul. I had, meanwhile, a good opportunity for observing this to me wholly wild and unrelated adventurous bird. Its great head and mobile crest, like a helmet of feathers, its dark blue glossy coat and white neck-cloth, make it a sufficiently striking individual anywhere. No wonder the kingfisher is specially honored by poetic legend. I must admit that whenever I chanced to see this bird about the stream it was faultless, halcyon weather.

IT IS AMAZING TO THINK THAT BOTH AUTHORS ARE ENCOUNTERING THE SAME BIRD. I have to confess that Treat’s kingfisher strikes me as far more believable than Thomas’s. Perhaps that is in part because Treat sought to interact with the kingfisher, while Thomas instead watched it quietly from a distance. Treat’s kingfisher emerges as a unique character, while Thomas’s is inextricably part of a semi-mythical landscape, with one foot on an elm branch and the other lost in the mists of “poetic legend”.

AS A POSTSCRIPT, A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY PARTICULAR VOLUME. I managed to locate an 1886 copy, the first (and, I suspect, only) edition. It is an austere volume, bound in army gray without ornamentation apart from the title and author in gold on the spine. It was once Number 2973 at Belding Memorial Library but was stamped Discard at some point. Curious about where my book had been, I tracked down the library. There are two Belding Libraries. There is one in Michigan, but I do not think that is the correct one, since that is technically the Alvah N. Belding Library (in Belding, Michigan). More likely, this book was once held by the Belding Memorial Library in Ashfield, Massachusetts, pictured below.

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