The Complicated Dependence of All the Life about Us: “Two Bird-Lovers in Mexico” by C. William Beebe (1905)

 Birds, book review, Books, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jul 212023
 

Every walk about our camp revealed new flowers or seed pods of beautiful colours and strange shapes. We longed for the key to the interrelations of plants and insects, for hints concerning the complicated dependence of all the life about us, — bird on insect, insect on plant, plant on both, which ever links even the extremes of nature.

When William Beebe published Two Bird-Lovers in Mexico in 1905, he was 28 years old and nly three-years married to someone as fascinated by nature as he was., Mary Blair Rice. Though they had honeymooned in Nova Scotia after the wedding, their trip to Mexico together from December, 1903 until April of 1904 was a second honeymoon for the two. The stated purpose of the expedition was to study and collect birds for the New York Zoological Park, where Beebe had recently become Curator of Ornithology. Much of Mexico was still wilderness at the time, and the two traveled mostly by horseback through a variety of tropical ecosystems, from desert scrub to lush rainforest, staying in tents at base camps for weeks at a time. Everywhere he went, Beebe was impressed by the rich bird life and the vast number of birds he encountered. For example, on a visit to the marshes surrounding Lake Chapala, he gushed that

…the feelings we experienced cannot be put into words; such one feels at a fist glance through a great telescope, or perhaps when one gazes in wonder upon the distant earth from a balloon. At these tims, one is for an instant outside of his petty personality and a part of, a realizer of, the cosmos. Here on these marshes and waters we saw, not individuals or flocks, but a world of birds! Never before had a realization of the untold solid bulk in numbers of the birds of our continent been impressed so vividly upon us.

There is a youthful vigor to this book. While Beebe would later be famous for his vast number of global expeditions, particularly to the topics, at the time of his trip to Mexico he had never been so far from his home in New York City. He brought with him a zest for seeing wildlife, though his desire to learn all the ways of the local wildlife did not extend to the human cultures of the region, as this whimsical tale of his daily encounters with a local villager makes plain:

Every day about noon, an old, old man drove several forlorn cows down the trail and up past our camp, for a drink and an hour’s feed of fresh green grass. A ragged shirt, a breech-clout, and a pair of dilapidated sandals formed the whole of his outfit. He knew not a word of Spanish, but jabbered cheerfully away to us in some strange Indian tongue, — Aztec, we pleased ourselves by calling it, — as if we understood every word. When he learned that we were afraid to have his half-wild cattle roaming at will about our provision tent, he took great pains, by means of liandfuls of gravel and a torrent of “Aztec” expletives, to banish them to the opposite side of the stream. His greeting was always ”Ping-pong racket!” This may seem absurdly trivial and irrelevant, yet these syllables exactly represent his utterance. “Ping-pong racket!” I shouted to liim as he appeared with his wild charges. “Ping-pong racket!” he answered joyfully, and patted me on the back with an outburst of incoherent gutturals, doubtless expressing his pleasure at my ready grasp of his mother tongue!

He showed us where the purest and coldest spring was to be found, for which we were extremelv grateful. A bowl of frijoles drew expressions of extravagant delight from him. But he seemed most pleased if only we would talk to him, although the words could convey not a particle of meaning. I would converse for a while in my choicest German, then harangue him with all the Latin I could recall and perhaps end witli an AEsop’s Fable, or part of tlie multiplication table. Whether I gravely informed him that Artemia salina could be converted into Artemia muhlenhausii by adding fresh water and stirring, or whether I chanted the troubles of AEneas, the venerable “Aztec” courteously listened with the greatest interest!

His final greeting was tremulous and sincere, and, as we repeated the phrase which sounded so ridiculous to our ears, we felt a strong pity for this poor ignorant man, whose speech was that of long-gone centuries. And yet he had no need of our sympathy. Day after day for years (so we gathered from his sign language) he had driven his cattle back and forth from some tiny village miles away. He was faithful in this and his happiness was full. It was overflowing when, at parting, we gave him some little trinkets and our spare change.

I found this charming and whimsical tale (albeit a bit disdainful on the part of a white American scientist) to be a highlight of the book. Beyond it, the prose was pleasant enough, though lackluster. Beebe was still developing as a writer, and the fact that the book reflected a first journey into uncharted territory meant that he came way from the trip with far more questions than answers. Still, while so much of the narrative was consumed with descriptions of the birds he saw, Beebe also offered glimpses of a more inclusive vision of nature, one that would emerge into the mainstream as the discipline of ecology over the coming decades. While 19th Century writers like Badford Torrey would go for woodland rambls seeking to identify and observe birds and plants just like Beebe in Mexico, Beebe was consumed by the questions of how they related to each other, and how they fit together into a larger whole — a “complicated dependence of all the life”.

What Wildness Still Remains: “The Log of the Sun: A Chronicle of Nature’s Year” by William Beebe, 1906

 Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Insects, Ocean  No Responses »
Aug 182020
 

In the fifty-two short essays of this volume I have presented familiar objects from unusual points of view. Birds-eye glances and insect’s eye glances, at the nature of our woods and fields, will reveal beauties which are wholly invisible from the usual human view-point, five feet or more above the ground.

Who follows the lines must expect to find moods as varying as the seasons; to face storm and night and cold, and all other delights of what wildness still remains to us upon the earth.

WITH THESE WORDS, THE EXPLORER-NATURALIST WILLIAM BEEBE SETS THE READER ON A JOURNEY THROUGH THE FAMILIAR WILDS OF THE NORTHEAST COAST, FROM JANUARY TO DECEMBER. Clearly inspired by John Burroughs, Beebe intended his first book to be another of many volumes published at the time tracing out seasonal changes in New England and environs (in this case, near New York City). His format: a weekly entry about nearby wildlife, especially birds, capped off with a bit of nature poetry as a nod to the temperment of the age. But at this project, Beebe largely failed. Yes, there are a number of brief pieces about looking at the familiar in new ways, such as studying pond life with a microscope or getting down close to the ground to see the winter world of tunneling mice close-up. But there are a number of chapters — his finest writing in the book, in my estimation — that seek out wilder places such as swamps and marshes or, better still, the open ocean. Indeed, the book’s longest chapter, at twenty-four pages, is Secrets of the Ocean. There is wanderlust in these pages — a world adventurer constrained, for a time, to a single place, seeking to make the most of it. In fact, at one point he celebrates the love of home as a source of abiding connection with the birds he so keenly observes:

This love of home, of birthplace, bridges over a thousand physical differences between feathered creatures and ourselves. We forget their expressionless masks of horn, their scaly toes, and looking deep into their clear, bright eyes, we know and feel a kinship, a sympathy of spirit, which binds us all together, and we are glad.

Clearly, though, while he may appreciate a sense of home, what he truly yearns for instead is wilder places, where humans have not ventured. In wetlands he found an approximation that was temporarily satisfying:

To many, a swamp or marsh brings only that very practical thought of whether it can be readily drained. Let us rejoice, however, that many marshes cannot be thus easily wiped out of existence, and hence they remain as isolated bits of primeval wilderness, hedged about by farms and furrows. The water is the life-blood of the marsh, — drain it, and reed and rush, bird and batrachian, perish or disappear. The marsh, to him who enters it in a receptive mood, holds, besides mosquitoes and stagnation, — melody, the mystery of unknown waters, and the sweetness of Nature undisturbed by man,

The ideal marsh is as far as one can go from civilization. The depths of a wood holds its undiscovered secrets; the mysterious call of the veery sends a wildness that even to-day has not ceased to pervade the old wood. There are spots overgrown with fern and carpeted with velvety wet moss; here also the skunk cabbage and cowslip grow rank among the alders. Surely man cannot live near this place — but the tinkle of a cowbell comes faintly on the gentle stirring breeze — and our illusion is dispelled, the charm is broken.

But even to-day, when we push the punt through the reeds from the clear river into the narrow, tortuous channel of the marsh, we have left civilization behind us. The great ranks of the cattails shut out all view of the outside world; the distant sounds of civilization serve only to accentuate the isolation….

The marsh has remained unchanged since the days when the Mohican Indians speared fish there. We are living in a bygone time. A little green heron flies across the water. How wild he is; nothing has tamed him. He also is the same now as always.

The chapter continues, and night settles in. Beebe revels in the wild sounds and presences all around him, until at least compelled to depart:

All sounds have ceased save the booming of the frogs, which but emphasizes the loneliness of it all. A distant whistle of a locomotive dispels the idea that all the world is wilderness. The firefly lams glow along the margin of the rushes. The frogs are now in full chorus, the great bulls beating their tim-toms and the small fry filling in the chinks with shriller cries. How remote the scene and how melancholy the chorus!….

The moon rises over the hills. The mosquitoes have become savage. The marsh has tolerated us as long as it cares to, and we beat our retreat….

A water snake glides across the channel, leaving a silver wake in the moonlight. The frogs plunk into the water as we push past. A night heron rises from the margin of the river and slowly flops away. The bittern booms again as we row down the peaceful river, and we leave the marshland to its ancient and rightful owners.

ULTIMATELY, THOUGH, IT IS TRUE WILDERNESS HE YEARNS FOR. A microscope or a canoe may carry him out of the familiar for a time, until “the charm is broken”, but the open ocean is far wilder, far more remote, and it calls to him:

We are often held spellbound by the majesty of mountains, and indeed a lofty peak forever capped with snow, or pouring forth smoke and ashes, is impressive beyond all terrestrial things. But the ocean yields to nothing in its grandeur, in its age, in its ceaseless movement, and the question remains forever unanswered, “Who shall sound the mysteries of the sea?” Before the most ancient of mountains rose from the heart of the earth, the waves of the sea rolled as now, and though the edges of the continents shrink and expand, bend into bays or stretch out into capes, always through all the ages the sea follows and laps with ripples or booms with breakers unceasingly upon the shore.

The oceans, too, set a boundary for human destructiveness, or so it seemed to Beebe over a hundred years ago, long before the invention of plastic:

The time is not far distant when the bottom of the sea will be the only place where primeval wildness will not have been defiled or destroyed by man. He may sail his ships above, he may peer downward, even dare to descent a few feet in a suit of rubber or a submarine boat, or he may scratch a tiny furrow for a few yards with a dredge: but that is all.

Alas, Beebe failed to predict so much, from commercial trawler fishing operations to single-use plastic grocery bags…. But in 1906, many years and journeys lay still ahead for him, around the world and into the ocean deeps. He would even return, almost half a century later, to another visit with the commonplace, publishing in 1953 “The Unseen Life of New York” As a Naturalist Sees It”. But for the moment, I will close with one last glimpse of the wilds of a marsh — in this case, a cypress swamp somewhere in the coastal plain of the American Southeast:

…in the mysterious depths of our southern swamps we find the strangely picturesque cypresses, which defy the waters about them. One cannot say where trunk ends and root begins, but up from the stagnant slime rise great arched buttresses, so that the tree seems to be supported on giant six- or eight-legged stools between the arches of which the water flows and finds no chance to use its power. Here, in these lonely solitudes, — heron-haunted, snake-infested, — the hanging moss and orchids search out every dead limb and cover it with an unnatural greenness. Here, great lichens grow and a myriad tropical insects bore and tunnel their way from bark to heart of tree and back again,. Here, in the blackness of night, when the air is heavy with hot, swampy odours, and only the occasional squawk of a heron or cry of some animal is heard, a rending, grinding, crashing, breaks suddenly upon the stillness, a distant boom and splash, awakening every creature. Then the silence again closes down and we know that a cypress, perhaps linking a trio of centuries, has yielded up its life.

FINALLY, A FEW WORDS ABOUT MY BOOK. Not being overly drawn to costlier first editions, I purchased a 1927 copy of Beebe’s work. The book is without a mark, though the pages are considerably browned with age. Alas, apart from the wintertime scene frontispiece shown above (by Walter King Stone), the book is unillustrated.