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.

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.

Rambling with Bradford Torrey: “A Rambler’s Lease”, 1889

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Natural History  No Responses »
Jun 142020
 

It is one of the enjoyable features of bird study, as in truth it is of life in general, that so many of its pleasantest experiences have not to be sought after, but befall us on the way; like rare and beautiful flowers, which are never more welcome than when they smile upon us unexpectedly from the roadside.

JUST FOUR YEARS AFTER MARY TREAT PUBLISHED HER “HOME STUDIES IN NATURE”, BRADFORD TORREY PUBLISHED THE SECOND OF WHAT WOULD BE TWELVE BOOKS ABOUT NATURE. I suspect, however, the two never met, as they inhabited such different worlds. Mary Treat was a scientist, carefully observing birds and spiders in her backyard; Bradford Torrey was a saunterer, heir to Thoreau, rambling the countryside near his home with a fond familiarity. Known as an ornithologist, he published no scientific studies, but instead did much to encourage city-dwellers and the ever-increasing suburbanites of his native New England to get out into nature and appreciate its wonders. Born in 1843 in Weymouth, Massachusetts, Torrey published his first natural history book, “Birds in the Bush”, in 1885. “A Rambler’s Lease”, a collection of essays he had written for periodicals, followed four years later. Torrey continued writing for the rest of his life, though his productivity declined after 1900, when he took on the task of editing Thoreau’s Journals. (The edition he ultimately published, reprinted by Dover as two immense volumes of 14 books condensed to two, was the one that I read in my own childhood.) In Torrey’s last several books, he reported on travels to various parts of the country: Florida, Tennessee, the Blue Ridge, New Hampshire, and California. Torrey died in Santa Barbara, California in 1912.

I first met Torrey through another book on my shelf, an anthology of six well-known American nature writers published by Houghton-Mifflin in 1909. The fact that I had never heard of three of them (the other three were, of course, Thoreau, Muir, and Burroughs) kindled my curiosity, ultimately leading me down that path to this blog. I quickly obtained all of Torrey’s works in online editions, but I still longed to be able to hold a copy in his hand. Here, the degree to which he is forgotten today served me in good stead. For a relative pittance, I was able to purchase a first edition of one of his books, in fairly good condition, with a signed original poem by Torrey tipped into the front.

READING IT, I CAN SEE RIGHT AWAY WHY TORREY IS NOT KNOWN TODAY AS A POET. It is more bland than eloquent and more religious than inspiring. Still, it was never published and is in Torrey’s own hand, accompanied by his signature. Apart from this, the book bears practically no trace of its life these past 135 years; all I have to chronicle its journey is a tiny book trade label affixed inside the front cover: W.B. Clarke Co., Booksellers & Stationers, 26 & 28 Tremont St. & 30 Court Sq., Boston.

TORREY MAKES FOR A CHARMING TRAVEL COMPANION FOR THE ARMCHAIR NATURE EXPLORER. I found his prose quite flowing and the author charming and endearing. The volume includes a number of accounts of his “rambles” across the countryside, interspersed with a few more speculative pieces, such as “Butterfly Psychology” (more about those later). At home in the woods, Torrey engages with the animals he encounters (especially birds) as familiar friends. In one chapter, he describes befriending a pair of brooding orioles, to the point that he is able to hand-feed them plant lice, while they are still on their nest. At the same time, Torrey expresses a humble appreciation of the abundance of nature: “I stood in the path…and looked about,” he write of his visit to a nearby tract of land that he had inherited from a relative. “So much was going on in this bit of earth, itself the very centre of the universe to multitudes of living things.”

IN HIS WORK, TORREY PERCEIVED THAT HUMAN LAND USE CHANGES COULD ACTUALLY HAVE POSITIVE IMPACTS ON SOME NATIVE SPECIES. Decades before the term “ecology” entered the lexicon, Torrey was able to observe that clearing a patch of forest for farming could enhance bird life in the area: “…in such a place [a farmed clearing in the woods] one may see and hear more birds in half an hour than are likely to be met with in the course of a long day’s tramp through the unbroken forest….. Up to a certain point, civilization is a blessing, even to birds. Beyond a certain point, for aught I know, it may be nothing but a curse, even to men.” I will leave the 21st century reader to render a verdict on that.

WHILE TORREY HAD A KEEN EYE FOR NATURAL HISTORY, ESPECIALLY BIRD BEHAVIOR, HE ALSO HAD A POETIC SIDE THAT HE SOMETIMES FELT COMPELLED TO DEFEND. In a passage from his essay on “Esoteric Peripateticism”, he argues for sometimes approaching the landscape as a poet rather than as a naturalist: “…it is a blessing to be able on occasion to leave one’s scientific senses at home….. There are times when we go out-of-doors, not after information, but in quest of a mood. Then we must not be over-observant. Nature is coy; she appreciates the difference between an inquisitor and a lover. The curious have their reward, no doubt, but her best gifts are reserved for suitors of a more sympathetic turn….. One may become so zealous a botanist as almost to cease to be a man. The shifting panorama of the heavens and the earth no longer appeals to him.” With these words, Torrey plants himself firmly on the terra-firma of late 19th century natural history writing — a golden age when scientific scrutiny often alternated with poetic reverie. Sometimes, as in many of Torrey’s essays in this book, the two would flow together. At others, such as in Mary Treat’s essays, the poetic allusions feel somewhat forced or as an afterthought.

AT THE SAME TIME, TORREY CONFESSES ON MORE THAN ONE OCCASION TO ANTHROPOMORPHIZING WILDLIFE. Speaking as an ornithologist, Torrey remarks, “To borrow a theological term, my conception of bird nature is decidedly anthropomorphic, and I incline to believe that chickadees as well as men find it easier to blame others than to do better themselves.” In perhaps the most odd essay in the book, “Butterfly Psychology”, Torrey wonders about how butterflies encounter their world. Do they wonder how they came into being? Do they recognize the brevity of their lives? To what extent are they able to recognize and appreciate beauty? After several pages of such wild speculations, he defends such musings with a bit of self-deprecation: “It is my private heresy, perhaps, this strong anthropomorphic turn of mind, which impels me to assume the presence of a soul in all animals, even in these airy nothings; and, having assumed its existence, to speculate as to what goes on within it.”

AT THIS POINT, I CANNOT RESIST COMPARING BRADFORD TORREY’S APPROACH TO NATURE WITH THAT OF MARY TREAT, THE CONTEMPORANEOUS SCIENTIST. Both studied bird behavior, including making close observations of nesting birds. Both had some interest in botany, though Torrey was more at home listing common names, which Treat kept to resolutely to scientific ones. It is in looking at their approaches to insects that the clearest difference emerges. Mary Treat approached ants and spiders and wasps with fascination and patient observation, seeking to know their minds (which she argued they had at a time when many people thought otherwise) by studying them meticulously. Torrey, on the other hand, approached butterflies with imaginative inquiry, wondering about they extent to which their own thoughts and feelings mirror those of human beings. His poetic musings entertain the reader, but do not really add to our scientific understanding of how nature works.

BOTH TREAT AND TORREY HAVE ENCOURAGED ME TO SPEND MORE TIME OBSERVING NATURE, A TREND THAT I HOPE WILL CONTINUE THROUGHOUT THIS JOURNEY. I envy Torrey his countryside rambles, and would love to take more of my own. In the case of Treat, on a recent dog walk I paused to inspect some spider burrows topped with turrets, wondering if the spiders who constructed them could belong to the same genus as the ones that Treat studied. Here are a couple of photographs that I took yesterday of these fascinating constructions:

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