THE NATCHEZ NATURALIST NEWSLETTER (Natchez being a small, pretty town on the Mississippi River in extreme southwestern Mississippi, USA) by Jim Conrad ***** COPYRIGHT MATTERS: Copyright Jim Conrad 2008 This publication is made freely available to anyone who wants it. You can download it, print it on paper, and give it away if you want. You can even print it out, bound it and sell the finished product if you want. I got my payment living the days the book describes. Just don't change around my words and thoughts. That's why I'm copyrighting it, to keep you from changing it. If you feel like sending me a little money, then please feel free to do so. If you don't want to, don't feel bad. I'm just happy you were interested in what I had to say. Still, even a single dollar would be appreciated. If you do want to send some money, please find a mailing address at www.backyardnature.net/j/writejim.htm ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank the owners of the plantations on which I lived during my years in the Natchez area. Thanks to Bea in Ontario for proofreading. Also thanks to Karen and Jackie Wise of Kingston who befriended me while I was there, moved my trailer when it needed moving ? twice ? and helped me in so many other ways as well. PREFACE The Natchez Naturalist Newsletter In early 1997, at age 49, I pulled a tiny, hangdog-looking trailer into the woods of a large plantation a few miles south of Natchez in southwestern Mississippi and began living there. Mornings I'd work in the plantation's garden, then the rest of the day I'd study and work on the Internet. I'd strung wires through the woods for the Internet connection. During my years there, thanks to the Internet, I always felt well connected to the world, even though sometimes I spent entire months without speaking a single word to anyone. On the Internet I created several web sites and exchanged emails with people all over the world Still, in 2001, I began worrying that I was losing my ability to order my thoughts in a way that permitted me to communicate with others. Though I could think abstractly better than ever I was becoming an awful word-groper. Also, maybe around that time I was beginning to miss being part of some kind of human community. Consequently, each week I began issuing, via email, the Natchez Naturalist Newsletter. The idea was that each week this would oblige me to exercise my mind with thinking patterns of the kind needed for regular conversation. Before long I felt my talking powers returning, plus I was gratified by how many people subscribed to the newsletter. Gradually a nice little cyberspace-based community crystallized around the newsletter. In 2003 I had to leave the plantation, but a newsletter subscriber invited me to move onto his unoccupied property a few miles east of Natchez, adjoining Homochitto National Forest. I took my trailer there and continued my work and issuing the newsletter as always. Therefore, some entries in this book were written at the first plantation, and some were written at the second. The "Broomsedge Field" and the hunters were at the first, the barn and the "Loblolly Field" were at the second. I've mingled the entries here so usually you can't know which plantation the entries were written at. In 2004 I left the Natchez area and until now haven't landed anyplace that feels permanent. Maybe it's because wherever I find myself in the presence of a few trees and birds I feel at home. Now my newsletters are called "Jim Conrad's Naturalist Newsletters." You can find current information about where I am and what I'm doing by clicking on my name at my main web site at www.backyardnature.net. As I always say to my newsletters subscribers, I appreciate your interest in what I have to say, and I hope you keep paying attention to the world around you, too. ***** CHAPTER 1: JANUARY COLD DAYS AT PEACE This has been a chilly week with several frosty mornings. With the plastic tarpaulin over my trailer, the windows plugged with Styrofoam boards, and blankets draped over the ill-fitting door, inside the trailer I remain comfortable, even cozy. With windows and door-cracks sealed, it's dark inside and the trailer feels like a small cave. At night I remain toasty inside a good sleeping bag and during days the heat of my computer and my own body keep the trailer's small space warm enough. I wear several layers of clothing and often work at the keyboard in fingerless gloves. My main problem is that sometimes the oxygen runs low and I must let in fresh air. Then heat escapes like a scared wren. This entire last summer I never once turned on a fan (most days I wore clothing only for jogging and working in the garden), and I'm hoping to make it through this winter without once using the small electric space-heater kept for emergencies. Some years I've managed, others I've needed the heater, though never for more than a few minutes each day. This week last year we had a 14° morning and I was glad to have the heater then. When I'm in a regular US home and either the air conditioner or heat pump drones on and on, it weighs upon me. I cannot but keep thinking of the vast environmental destruction being caused in the name of my physical comfort. Land lost to coal mining, the production of greenhouse gases, radioactive wastes... all to produce energy to have me feel cooler or warmer without needing to add or remove clothing. When at night I turn off my energy- efficient computer and my little 40-watt, high-intensity reading lamp, not an electron of energy flows in my trailer. While I sleep, no ecological violence is committed on behalf of my comfort, and maybe that's one reason I sleep so soundly and awaken so glad. ***** FIRE On these cold mornings I am especially aware that each day for me begins with a touch of magic. I am thinking of the orange flash that erupts at the end of my match, then moves as a hesitant blaze into the teepee of dry branches and wood splinters I've heaped beneath the grill and skillet. Then for a few minutes a kind of dance between the fire and me takes place as I try to make the flame feel at home. If the air and wood are moist this can be hard but so far I've always managed to cook a meal. There must be some kind of atavistic memory at work here, maybe a certain sequence in my genes resonating with the memories of morning fires accompanying untold generations of my evolving ancestors in their caves, their winter lodges of bark and fur, and on Africa's savannas. Every campfire is a piece of the sun itself momentarily visiting me. Energy from the sun flowed through space and was captured on Earth by the bush or tree whose wood I am now burning. That sunlight energy was stored among the chemical bonds of the carbohydrates comprising the wood. Now as that wood burns, its chemical bonds break apart and the former sunlight energy is released. If we are looking for an appropriate ceremonial communion with the agencies sustaining us as living beings, there can be no more appropriate act than to conscientiously ignite and nurture a fire just large enough to do its job, and then to be thankful for its service. ***** SUNLIGHT IN THE LOBLOLLY FIELD On chilly, sunny days such as we had earlier this week, I like to sit in the Loblolly Field. There, sunlight is the thing. For example, down inside a dense, shoulder-high thicket of brown, frost-killed goldenrod there'll be a clump of scarlet blackberry leaves. I'll set next to them, being sure to position the red leaves between the sun and me. When my eye is about rabbit-nose high, looking up at the blackberry leaves glowing with the sun on the other side, I think that no one on Earth must be seeing anything as red as I am. If I get into position fast enough, and I always do, during the first few seconds of looking at those red blackberry leaves I am showered with thousands of tawny goldenrod fruits knocked from the goldenrods' nodding heads as I sat down. As the goldenrods' fruits fall, sunlight ignites inside their fuzz parachutes. Back-lighted, the stiff, slender goldenrod-stems show up as silhouettes, some vertical, others diagonal. On one side of each black stem there's etched a thin glaze of luminous ice. Atop the silhouetted stems sunlight charges each goldenrod's pyramidal fruiting head consisting of thousands of fuzz- parachuted fruits with radiant translucency. Sunlight also etches a narrow but intense fire-rim around each head. Then, beyond the fuzz-blaze there's the blue sky, translucent itself as only the blue sky gorged with sunlight can be. It's misleading just to say that a back-lighted blackberry leaf is red, for the leaf is mainly an intricacy in which each vein and veinlet is delineated as with black ink, every fungal infection causing a splash of urgent yellow or brown, and every bug-munched spot forming a lacy fringe. Viewing a red blackberry leaf with sunlight pouring through it, there are cell structures to see, systematically spaced stomata, and textures and contrasts beyond words. Moreover, if you enter the Loblolly Field not in the middle of a sunny afternoon, but rather right after dawn as the day's first sunlight pours in, and there's heavy white frost encrusting the goldenrods' pyramidal fruiting heads and the bluestems' curling brown leaves, and you keep all this between you and the sun so that a frost-white world glistens as you move through it toward the sun, and sparrows and towhees rise from amidst it all shaking white frost crystals into powdery snows, and here and there intensely green and blue and pink dew-sparkle-beacons flash on and off, and you stand there breathing out great clouds of steam, so vividly aware of your own wet breathing, cold air rushing in and out of warm, pink lungs, pink mouth and nose-holes and curling face- hair, and then there's the sky so blue, and you look and look... ***** PEENTING THE LOCAL TIMBERDOODLE In a recent Newsletter I mentioned the American Woodcock currently at home in our Loblolly Field. Cheryl up in Michigan writes telling me how a naturalist she knew coaxed woodcocks into flight. It's done with the "Timberdoodle dance." Timberdoodle is another name for the American Woodcock, at least up there. The bird also goes by the names of Pepperdoodle, Bog Sucker and Big Eye. The dance consists of first pinching your nostrils shut with your fingers, then calling "peent." Cheryl further writes, "As you make the 'peent' sound you bend your knees, which lowers your body 1-2 feet. Then you straighten back up, rotate your body ¬ turn and repeat the 'call and dip,' allowing 10-20 seconds between each 'peent.'... After each 'peent' rotate ¬ turn before 'calling and dipping.'" On Tuesday night, at about 5:30, just when the sky was visible but everything else lay deep in shadows, I went near where I'd seen the woodcock and "peented." I didn't bother with bending my knees, but I did pinch my nose and rotate my body between each call. After several series of calls it got so dark that I figured any nocturnal bird by then would be busy at work, and so I started my return walk to camp. But then all in less than a second I heard heavy flapping attended by a sharp whistling sound, and I looked up just in time to see an absurdly chunky-looking little being with stubby, rounded wings and a long, needle-like beak zooming past exactly at the level of my nose. If I had enjoyed more sense of presence than to jump backwards, throw out my arms and yell "Jeeze!" I might have been able to reach out and grab me a Timberdoodle. I had assumed that the idea behind peenting was to encourage the courtship display, which is complex and interesting, and which I've seen in Kentucky but not here. However, maybe you peent just to attract the bird. If that's the case, I'm not sure I'll be peenting much, at least not wearing a helmet. ***** RED-SHOULDERED HAWKS SCREAMING This week's mostly warm, sunny days have been busy ones for the Red- shouldered Hawks. Usually by midmorning the air had warmed nicely, a slight breeze had begun stirring, and a very great deal of hawk screeching had begun cascading from the sky. Several mornings this week I planted apple trees, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts and sandals, and the sunlight, breezes and hawk calls overhead made a heady mixture as I worked. Often three or four birds flew tight circles near one another, sometimes almost touching in midair, all the while issuing their shrill calls. One call was a kind of "kee-yar," and another was a constantly repeated, sharp "eep, eep, eep." The males swooped a lot. High in the sky a male would suddenly draw in his wings, dive headfirst, level out, then, as on a roller-coaster ride, shoot back skyward carried by his momentum, performing a U. I suppose that the tighter the U, the faster the dive, and the higher he climbed with his built-up momentum, the more impressed any watching female might be. The funniest thing was when a male rested at his perch and a female deigned to visit. The male gave the clear impression of being surprised, even intimidated, by the visit. Especially the male's body language showed that he was of two minds. On the one hand he was desperately eager for the female's attention but, on the other, he was more than a little respectful of her larger, more powerful build and sharp beak and talons. ***** PACKRATS AND SPATULAS Our Eastern Woodrats, Neotoma florida, are very different from Norway Rats, the typical "alley rat." Eastern Woodrats possess large ears and large eyes, while Norway Rats have squinty little eyes and small ears. Woodrats possess bushy tails while Norway Rats have naked ones. Woodrats are called packrats out West, and I think they should be called packrats here, too. Packrats tend to wander around in the night gathering things. Long ago I learned not to leave anything small lying around or else one of my Eastern Woodrats would pack it off. But during the course of a year sometimes I simply forget to hang my kitchen utensils on their hooks on my outside-kitchen's roof beams, and sometimes I simply forget to chuck my chopsticks and knife into the jar where woodrats can't get them. Consequently, now nearly all my kitchen utensils are missing. I am now down to a pair of mismatched chopsticks, a bone-handled hunting knife too heavy for them to carry off, and a butter knife. All my spoons, forks, kitchen knives and my two spatulas have been stolen one at a time. Monday when my last spatula disappeared I tried to track it down. Without a spatula I can't properly flip my daily cornbread. I used to flip cornbread by tossing it into midair from the skillet, with a certain wrist motion it took years to perfect, but then the handle came off my skillet. Now I need a spatula. Beneath the wooden platform on which I sit during breakfast I found a collection of about a hundred stolen dried peppers and various mismatched chopsticks. A woodrat was there looking at me with that big-eared, wide-eyed, goofy look woodrats have, but I didn't bother her. Beneath my trailer I found a foot- high pile of shiny items, mostly aluminum foil from trash my handful of visitors have left here over the years. Rummaging in the pile I found a butter knife, but not a trace of my two lost spatulas or my favorite "anodized stainless steal forever-sharp" knife. A small trail was clearly visible leading from below my trailer into the wild clutter of shattered limbs left by the collapse of the big Pecan tree during Hurricane Lili. I plunged into that jungle and followed the trail to the other side, to a collapsed shack once lived in by a tenet farmer, now little more than a few rotten timbers and some very rusty sheets of roofing tin. There the trail went beneath the tin sheets and the Pecan's trunk lay exactly atop that. In short, my spatulas were lost. If I should move things too much, the Pecan's trunk might shift onto me. I rather like my woodrats, and I accept my lost utensils as just chastisement for my general forgetfulness. My woodrats knock about beneath the trailer each night and explore my kitchen as soon as night falls. They are good company, but I do miss my spatulas and "forever-sharp" knife. ***** ANDROMEDA GALAXY OVERHEAD AT DUSK About an hour after dusk nowadays one of the most majestic views in the night sky is available right overhead. It's the Andromeda Galaxy, also known as M 31. This is one of those things that you'd never give a second glance if you didn't understand what you were seeing. For, what's to be seen is nothing more than a very small, faint smudge in the sky. In fact, right now moonlight makes it a bit hard to see, but if you wait for a few nights before looking, until the moon is below the horizon at dusk, I think it'll be clearly visible for you. The understanding needed to appreciate the Andromeda Galaxy is that all the stars in our night sky belong to our own galaxy. About 1,900,000,000,000 stars -- or "solar masses" as they are called today -- populate our galaxy. Usually galaxies are portrayed as vast, whirlpool-like swirls of stars. Such galaxies have "arms" composed of untold numbers of stars spiraling outward from an intensely bright center. Not all galaxies are spiral shaped, but our own galaxy is considered to be a spiraling one, and efforts are being made to map the various arms. Now here's the wonderful thing about the Andromeda Galaxy: When we see it, we're seeing something outside our own galaxy. It's a whole other galaxy. It's like being a fish in an aquarium, with all the stars we see in our sky being objects inside our own aquarium. The Andromeda Galaxy is a completely different aquarium across the room containing nearly as many "solar masses" as our own galaxy. A light-year, the distance that light travels in a year, is about 6,000,000,000,000 miles. The diameter of our own galaxy is about 100,000 light-years. No star visible in our sky with the unaided eye is farther away than 100,000 light-years. Well, the Andromeda Galaxy, the "nearest large neighbor galaxy" to our own, is 2,900,000 light-years away. Here's how to find the Andromeda Galaxy. At this latitude around 8PM, face northward and look high into the sky. One of the most conspicuous constellations there looks like a crooked, somewhat squashed M. This is the constellation Cassiopeia. Notice at the top, left of the M's left hump there's a smaller star. That star more or less points to the Andromeda Galaxy. Hold your arm skyward and make a fist. The Andromeda Galaxy's blur lies about a fist's distance from Cassiopeia, in the direction pointed to by that smaller star. Binoculars show the galaxy as a blur. ***** GIANT GARLIC Here and there in the forest large patches of garlic appear. Usually the ruins of an old house stand nearby, often just a brick chimney rising among tall trees. Sometimes there's not even that, just a relic population of garlic hanging on where once a garden was tended. Naturally, having such a supply of garlic, I eat prodigious amounts of it, and must smell accordingly. Such a garlic patch grows all around my trailer -- hundreds of plants, nowadays with green leaves over a foot tall. There's one place where the garlic plants are at least twice as large and dark green as the others, and that's at the edge of my living space where periodically throughout my days I go pee. The deal is that in the human body when amino acids (the building blocks of proteins, of which our muscles are made) are broken down - - and our bodies are continually replacing old tissue -- urea is produced as a waste product. The nitrogen in my urea then undergoes an amazing series of changes brought about by soil microbes to become a fertilizer for my garlic plants. Therefore, whenever I pee I stand there visualizing a nitrogen cycle beginning with nitrogen atoms in the foods I eat incorporating themselves into my body, my body constructing with those atoms all kinds of wondrous tissue and organs, then during the process of continual rejuvenation my body finally getting rid of the nitrogen as waste urea, which would poison me if it were not properly cleansed from my system. My garlic plants receive my abandoned nitrogen as if it were manna from heaven. From experience I know that this summer when my garlic plants' green blades will have died and shriveled away I'll go dig up enormous white garlic bulbs at my peeing place. The bulbs will have no odor of urine at all in them, of course, for my discarded urea will have been transformed by magical processes into pure garlic essence. And how good that garlic will be in a salad or soup, or eaten raw on my tomato sandwiches. And all the time as the garlic aroma wafts about me I'll be thinking what a wonder it is that at that moment many nitrogen atoms will be making a return trip to my body, that again they will find themselves inside my muscle tissue and the DNA and RNA of my genes, and, eventually, sure as anything, at least some of those nitrogen atoms will be peed again in the vicinity of some needful garlic. ***** GRACKLES A couple of times each day a flock of 300 to 400 of those foot-long, black, long-tailed, sleek-looking birds called Grackles, Quiscalus quiscula, announces itself with a sound which, when heard from a distance, is reminiscent of a rain coming through the woods. The flock draws closer, squeak and chuck calls of individual birds emerge from the general din, and finally the diffuse bird-cloud filters noisily through the treetops around me. It's as if the birds can't decide as a flock which tree to light in. Maybe a hundred will land in one tree but the rest will pass a few hundred yards beyond to another tree, and some birds won't land at all, just keep going, and when the ones in the first tree see this they take wing again, but by then the ones who didn't land now are landing... Well, it goes on like this, and in the end the entire flock more or less keeps together as it drifts through the forest. On Thursday as I worked in the garden part of such a loud, rambling, undisciplined flock landed in a large Water Oak nearby. I wondered whether they were eating that tree's small, orange-fleshed acorns. All the birds I could see were only squawking and looking around at their neighbors so I decided that they were not. However, soon part of the flock rose up and flew to join their companions across the hill. As they passed directly above me I heard expressive sounds I would not have thought any bird capable of making, sounds maybe you'd expect from a troupe of half-drunk, completely uneducated and uninhibited elf- thieves chortling over something dumb they'd done. Something plopped onto the ground beside me as they passed overhead. It was half of a Water Oak acorn, so some of them had indeed been foraging. In fact, in our area acorns are this bird's second-most important food source, after corn scavenged from fields. ***** TURNIP APHIDS This week I've been studying aphids and I find them pretty interesting creatures. First of all, there are many kinds of aphids, and each species has its own special life cycle. The one on my turnips is the Turnip Aphid, Lipaphis erysimi. A typical aphid life cycle goes approximately like this: A wingless female hatches from an egg and begins sucking juice from its host plant. Without assistance from a male, this female -- instead of laying eggs -- gives birth to a number of wingless females like herself. Wingless virgin females then produce generation after generation of wingless virgin females. About when summer comes along a certain number of them begin producing offspring that develop wings, and this new generation of winged aphids then flies to a new plant, which may be a completely different species from the host plant of their mothers. On this second host plant, new generations of mostly wingless females are born. As colder weather arrives in late fall, suddenly another generation of winged aphids is produced, but this time about half are males. Sexual reproduction takes place the usual way and the females return to the kind of host plant we started with in the spring, and lay eggs on it. These eggs overwinter and next spring the cycle begins again. The life cycle of my Turnip Aphids differs from the above scenario. Since Turnip Aphids live mostly where winters are not severe, the overwintering egg stage usually is skipped. As my January turnip leaf shows, the females just keep producing females all year round, and both eggs and males are usually very hard or impossible to find. Turnip Aphids do often switch host- plant types, though the new host species must be a member of the Mustard Family, which includes radishes, kale, collards, and weeds such as Bitter Cress and Shepherd's Purse. In places where Canola, or rape seed, is grown, Turnip Aphids have become serious pests. The ability of aphids to reproduce is mind-boggling. Wingless adult females can produce 50 to 100 offspring. A newly born aphid becomes a reproducing adult within about a week and then can produce up to 5 offspring per day for up to 30 days! The French naturalist Reaumur during the late eighteenth century calculated that if all the descendants of a single aphid survived during the summer and were arranged into a French military formation, four abreast, their line would extend for 27,950 miles, which exceeds the circumference of the Earth at the Equator! ***** FORAGING GRAY SQUIRRELS Most mornings in dawn's twilight, before the sun's rays begin shooting in from the east, several Eastern Gray Squirrels, Sciurus carolinensis, work among the slender branches at the top of oak trees in the woods. Sometimes there's five or more. Acorns cluster at the outer branches so when a squirrel goes there the branches yield. A squirrel's acorn- nabbing foray usually begins with a brief pause on the stable part of a branch, then there's a hurried rush to a branch-tip acorn, and then a rush back onto the stiffer part of the branch. Sometimes a squirrel misjudges a branch's strength and momentarily finds himself dangling, or worse. If you ever see such a group of foraging squirrels, notice how each individual runs along a branch for a second or two, then freezes, then runs some more, then freezes. When several squirrels in a tree all move in this stop-motion manner, it's a funny thing to see. My guess is that they pause because that helps them spot approaching hawks and owls. Seeing how all squirrels stick to such a disciplined program of stops and goes, we have a hint as to how serious the predator threat is for them. By the time morning's sunlight hits the treetops, the squirrels are gone. I suppose that's because the bright light makes them more vulnerable to their predators. They don't always return to their dens for the rest of the day, though, for often in the middle of the day I hear the "Aaarghhhh!" call typically made by aggravated female squirrels while they're being chased by several males. These chases can go on for hours. ***** HERMIT THRUSH Each morning as I prepare my campfire breakfast, a Hermit Thrush comes visiting. He seldom gets closer than about six feet but he definitely likes to watch me from not far away. More than once he's landed on a water bucket and cocked his head sideways so that one eye looked directly into my own eyes. Saturday morning he briefly landed on the table less than a yard away. Hermit Thrushes belong to the same bird family as the American Robin, so they are about a robin's size and shape (a little smaller), hop on the ground like a robin, and share with robins that curious ability to appear to hold their bodies in one place while, in a flash, their two legs scratch the ground below, stirring up insects and earthworms. Unlike robins, Hermit Thrushes are fairly drab- looking birds, mostly rusty-gray on their backs, and with a few modest speckles on their pale breasts. Thrushes and thrashers should not be confused. Brown Thrashers, found here year round, are of a similar color and also bear speckled breasts, but they are in the same family as Mockingbirds and Catbirds, so they are larger birds, with much longer beaks and tails. Several thrush species visit our area, but only the Hermit Thrush is a winter resident. During migration, unless you hear their songs, it can be hard to distinguish the various thrush species. The main visual fieldmark of the Hermit Thrush is its reddish tail and rump -- the rump being that part of the back right above the tail. Of course I do not overlook the point that I am a genuine hermit each morning being visited by a genuine Hermit Thrush. Nor do I ignore Walt Whitman's lines: Solitary, the thrush, The hermit, withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements, Sings by himself a song. ***** JANUARY'S FOREST GREEN Though nowadays the forest is mostly brown and gray, there's ample greenness to please the eye. Right now I'm taking a five-minute walk in the woods, and here are the main green things I notice: Trees: WATER OAKS: still bearing ±1/3 of their leaves LOBLOLLY PINES: scattered, common SOUTHERN MAGNOLIA: scattered, a bit less common AMERICAN HOLLY: occasional, largely extirpated EASTERN REDCEDARS: remnants from when this land was cleared Evergreen vines: GREENBRIARS: several species JAPANESE HONEYSUCKLE: introduced weedy vine YELLOW JESSAMINE: soon to flower CROSSVINE: semi-evergreen Evergreen ferns: CHRISTMAS FERNS: Abundant on the forest floor SOUTHERN SHIELD FERNS: Some winters get frostbitten EBONY SPLEENWORTS: Common small ferns Other: CANE: Abundant in the forest understory MISTLETOE: Common, especially on Black Oaks SPROUTING SPRING FLORA (many emerging spring herbs and grasses) The greenness being talked about here is a dark, bronzy, tattered and diffuse one. It's very different from spring's rambunctious, sunlight-charged yellow-greenness. Our current greenness is a placid, almost somberly mature color, a dark, residual hue full of the sense of biding its time during this season of waiting. The two main species providing our January forest-greenness are the Water Oak, and Cane. Water Oak, our most common forest tree, slowly loses leaves throughout the winter. When spring's new leaves begin emerging, some of last year's green leaves will still be present. Cane, a native bamboo averaging 8-12 feet high but sometimes much taller, in places forms "brakes" so dense you can hardly shoulder your way through them. ***** FART-BLOW When a deer is frightened it reflexively alerts other deer by issuing a kind of loud blow-sound and by stamping the ground. Similarly it is a natural function of a good hermit to fart whenever the need be. At dusk once this week I was standing as silently and quietly as I could next to a field of blackberry brambles, hoping to spot a rare species of sparrow that sometimes sings at dusk. Without thinking much about it, I let a fart rip. Unbeknownst to me, a deer had walked up right behind me, probably not seeing me because of the darkness and because I was so still. My detonation occasioned the deer's sharp blow and this in turn scared me out of my wits. There must have been a moment when both deer and I were airborne with our wheels spinning. ***** STORM JOG Saturday morning at dawn I awakened sweating in my sleeping bag, for during the night the air had turned unseasonably warm and humid. I jogged wearing only shorts and shoes, and before long I was good and sweaty, feeling as if I were a detached awareness with my body on auto-pilot running below me. That's a good feeling, when the body is working well and the fresh air rushes into the lungs feeling like high-octane fuel, and the trail below invites you on and on. Suddenly there came a roar into the trees and at a distance heavy rain could be heard coming through the forest. In a second the gloomy warm air all around was sliced through by a fist of cold air feeling exactly as if it were a blast off of ice. Double-speeding back to the trailer, the wind roared and the trees bent, and my lungs and heart revved to a fast-paced cadence. Beautiful it was to run in the wind, to be hard and fast in a grand theater of gentle rage. ***** WIND ROAR ICE MOON The cold front that moved through here late this week was an amazing thing to behold. On Tuesday the thermometer in my Waxmyrtle read 72°F at noon. Then the wind rose into a roar and by Friday morning it was 15°. Wednesday night at midnight, embedded in the wind's howling, a persistent sound of an animal gnawing on plastic awakened me. I imagined the Opossum having finally succeeded in knocking my large thermal mug off its high perch, now eating away the mug's plastic cap to get at the hunk of cornbread stored there from the previous day. I abandoned my toasty sleeping bag and went to save the mug and cornbread. But the mug stood in its place and the cornbread was safe. The gnawing issued from inside the woodpile where probably an Eastern Woodrat was chiseling at something. After figuring all this out I turned around, and above the trailer's roof in the frigid darkness I beheld a transfixing sight. The gibbous Moon hung above the eastern horizon like a finely etched chunk of white ice. Five long, flat clouds lay below it, evenly spaced like stair steps leading from Earth to Moon. The Pecan tree with its swaying Spanish Moss rose black-silhouetted to the left. In recent years it's seemed to me that the blackness experienced when I close my eyes at night isn't as pure as the blackness remembered from childhood, and the same can be said of silence, and of the odors and tastes of things. The blackest blackness I can manage now is somehow a bit pale, and I never experience real silence, there always being a sort of ringing in my ears. But Wednesday night the silence was palpable and pure, and the leafless Pecan tree's silhouette against the moonlight-flooded sky was black as my childhood's blackest hole. The Moon dazzled not only with eye- hurting glare but also with a savage, cutting clarity. It erupted with glare, while the stair-step clouds wore luminescent edges. The wind roared, the sky cut, the Earth lay stunned, and I stood there thinking this: That maybe the reason the senses dull as one grows older is that only children possess the resilience to survive glimpsing how exquisitely alone and vulnerable life on Earth really is. ***** COLDNESS BRINGS A MOOD Several friends have emailed me expressing concern about the cold weather, for they knew me well enough to guess that I'd try to make it through the freeze without using my space heater (and I didn't use it). But, this cold snap was no problem at all. It brought a kind of mood worth savoring. During late afternoon before the night of the big freeze the sky spread over with a mysteriously heavy blueness that was so opaque and shadowy that when I looked into it, it seemed as if I heard a deep- bellied Ommmmmmmmmm. Deep in the night, alert to the coldness and quietness outside, I in my sleeping-bag cocoon imagined myself as an embryo in an egg suspended in distant empty space. Friday morning during my jog, chunks of ice coagulated in my beard, and I ran laughing, feeling the ice with my stuck-out tongue. Later, sunlight slanting in from the east during breakfast was dazzlingly bright and clear, and how amazing it was that in such coldness the titmice should sing their spring song and my friend the Hermit Thrush should come looking at me just as he does on any warm day. The campfire blazed with orange flames and the smoke that drifted upward, having the last three mornings blown hard into my face as the wind streamed from the north, was nothing but friendly now. Sometimes a taste of bitterness is required to remind us of the wonder of sweetness. This cold snap was bitter, and what comes now is pure sweetness. ***** STINKHORN On Monday the season's first Stinkhorn, Mutinus elegans, a weird but fairly common sort of mushroom, appeared among the leaf-mulch in one of our organic gardens. It's called a stinkhorn because it stinks, and if you see what it looks like you'll understand why country folks sometimes call it Dog-pecker Mushroom, or some such honest name. Some books call it "Devil's Dipstick" but I think that that's just a made-up name to get around the fact that it looks so unsettlingly like a dog's penis. Stinkhorns secrete disreputable- smelling, greenish goo. Flies and other insects attracted by the stench walk over the goo's surface. In doing so the fungus's spores stick to the feet, and then when the insect flies away it carries those spores to new locations, thus serving as the mushroom's dispersal mechanism. This strategy must be effective because stinkhorns are found worldwide. A curious part of the stinkhorn life cycle is that the part above the ground "hatches" from a distinctly egglike structure forming in the ground. The first such "egg" I shoveled up in the garden I thought was surely a turtle egg. It had a leathery "shell" and a more or less gelatinous interior. However, stinkhorn eggs are strictly fungal, and you can eat them, too -- just slice and fry. I've read that you can eat the above-ground part as well, but it's mostly hollow and it stinks, so I can't imagine it being appetizing. Stinkhorns teach that just because you can do something, that doesn't mean that you necessarily should do it. CHAPTER 2: FEBRUARY WITH A SONG IN MY HEART Here's something worth thinking about: Investigators have found that even when newly hatched White- crowned Sparrows are kept where they can't hear any kind of bird song, when they're about a month old they begin singing simple notes. This bird babble, known technically as subsong, continues for about two months. When the birds are about 100 days old, their subsong "crystallizes" into a form that thereafter doesn't change much. The singing of White-crowned Sparrows of this age who have never heard other birds of their species sing is not nearly as rich and pleasant to hear as that produced by birds who have grown up hearing their own species sing, but experienced birders can definitely hear the White-crowned Sparrow element in their song. Think of it: The power of the genetic code is so great that it enables a bird to sing its song, even if the bird has never heard that song before. Melodies can be passed through the dimension of time encoded in the genomes of living things. Furthermore, when a female Canvasback duck is about a year old and builds her first nest, she builds a nest exactly like all other Canvasbacks, even if she has been kept in isolation, and couldn't have learned Canvasback nest-building technique from other ducks. These facts cause me to wonder to what extent the songs and "nesting instincts" in our human hearts are genetically fixed. Just how much of each of us is any more than what our genes say we have to be? ***** SASSAFRAS ROOT I have some fine kinfolk in Kentucky who know what I like, so the other day my cousin Miles dug some sassafras root back behind his house and my cousin Eva Ray packaged it up and sent it to me. When the package arrived I could smell the sassafras through the cardboard. My cousins had read in this Newsletter that we have Sassafras trees around here but they are so uncommon that I don't want to harass them by chopping at their roots. In contrast, in the hedgerow behind my cousins' homes in Kentucky, Sassafras grows like a weed. Same with Persimmons. Both Sassafras and Persimmon trees are abundant in Kentucky, but around here they're uncommon. I got to drinking Sassafras tea when I was a kid. Each spring Papaw Conrad would say he needed some "to thin out the blood" after sitting inside all winter, and he'd always make sure I got my share. In fact, all the old folks around there spoke of needing their blood thinned at winter's end, and Sassafras tea was known as the drink that would thin it. In college my professors were of the mind that winter didn't thicken blood, and that Sassafras tea didn't thin it. They shrugged off my family's tradition as just another hillbilly superstition. However, history books tell us that sassafras tea was once much used medicinally, first by native Americans, then by the colonists. It was believed that the tea made the body more resistant to diseases in general. Eventually our culture's affinity for synthesized name-brand medicines caused nearly all interest in sassafras to die away. Sassafras began making a comeback right before World War I when it was shown that people who drank sassafras root tea were more resistant to severe sore throat infections and colds than those who did not. Later it was found that sassafras has a general antiseptic power, and that it also induced the liver to cleanse toxins from the system. Is that "thinning the blood?" The original natural flavor of root beer was sassafras root. Though I have seen chips of what appeared to be sassafras wood sold in US stores meant for making sassafras tea, on the Web I read that, because sassafras root contains the dangerous chemical safrole, the wood cannot be sold in the US for human consumption. Sassafras root bark can be sold because it contains less safrole than wood, so maybe the woodchips I saw were classified as bark, despite their appearance. I can't say that sassafras tea makes me feel any better or keeps me healthy because I nearly always feel good and seldom get sick. But I can say that on a cold morning with an orange flame flickering beneath my pot of steeping sassafras root, a good cup of sassafras tea more than hits the spot. It evokes memories, spreads a sweet warmness all through my body, fills me with a sense of well being, and I'm pretty sure it thins my blood, too. ***** "PAPAW'S DIRT" Before the package of Sassafras root arrived, cousin Eva Ray emailed me that the roots were still a little dirty but, she added, "It's Papaw's dirt." What she meant was that the roots were dug from land that used to belong to Papaw Conrad, and therefore to us older folks in the family it was invested with a touch of sacredness. This was the dirt that Papaw plowed with a team of horses, the dirt on which he'd set his rabbit traps, and the dirt that stuck to his shoes when he just wandered around looking at things, which people used to do. Maybe the two most profound way to divide humanity into two parts is this: * Those who do and those who don't have a feeling for family * Those who do and those who don't have a feeling for the land In the old days nearly everyone fit into the "do" part of each grouping. Nowadays the trend is definitely toward the "don't" side. That's too bad, for my impression is that people living in emotional solitude are generally unhappy and dysfunctional in one way or another. Similarly, those with no feeling for the land tend to live their lives without regard to the environmental consequences, the cumulative effects of which, done by so many who also have no feeling, is to threaten all life on Earth. Of course there are remedies for this state of affairs, and they are simple and well known ones. Most religions, most philosophers, most Black mammies and most backcountry Papaws agree on them: "Live simply"; "don't be a hog"; "be decent to one another." But there's something in the human character that causes us to choose other paths. Anyway, Papaw's dirt on the sassafras root was a double- barreled hello from my family and from the Earth. Many a good, hot cups of tea I have enjoyed this week ruminating on the thoughts those dirty roots stirred up. ***** VULTURES AND THE NITROGEN CYCLE In a certain spot along the road along which I jog each morning, on recent mornings about twenty vultures have been hanging out, for below them there's the remains of a pretty doe whom the hunters wounded. She had pulled herself to behind a log beside the road, lain down and died. It's a mixed flock attending the corpse -- both Turkey and Black Vultures, with more Black than Turkey. When I approach the flock the birds make a racket as their wings clumsily slap against tree limbs and make whooshing sounds lifting heavy bodies upwards. Beneath the trees where the flock hangs out the ground is heavily splotched with white droppings. When I jog, my body goes onto autopilot. I don't think about running, but rather the mind effervesces or obsesses on completely unpredictable topics. These days seeing the ground beneath the trees growing whiter morning after morning, my thought process usually goes something like this: In my mind's eye I see the hunter wounding the doe, I'm touched by the deer's fear and pain, and I see her lying down to die there behind the log. The vultures come, and then two kinds of processes begin. The events of one are expressed in terms of vultures, the ripping apart and gorging of flesh, bird digestion and bird defecation. The events of the other are expressed in terms of nutrient cycling. As I jog, my mind replaces black images of vultures in winter trees with the pregnant thought that an atom of nitrogen lies at the heart of every molecule of every amino acid. Amino acids not only are the building blocks of protein, of which muscles and many other of the body's parts are made, but also they are the basic constituent of DNA, which carries the genetic code for all living things. Nitrogen atoms lie at the center of molecules of ADP and ATP, which enable energy transfer during photosynthesis and many other vital processes. Obviously, without nitrogen, life as we know it on Earth is simply impossible! So when the deer lay down to die, she bequeathed to her local ecosystem untold numbers of nitrogen atoms. Now the vultures are helping spread those atoms over the ground around the doe's body, and later when the rain comes dissolving the white splotches, the doe's nitrogen will seep into the ground. Comes spring, the grasses, vines, bushes and trees in that spot will be a little greener, will photosynthesize a little more lustily, because of this generous bequest. In my mind's eye, the ever-increasing numbers of white splotches of vulture shit are no less than spontaneous funereal blossoms appropriate for a dignified passing. In fact, as I jog I understand that this is how I'd like my own body to be received into death. In view of the fact that I have accomplished what insights I now have as a passenger inside this body, it's clear that it would be disrespectful to discard the body into the hands of those whose beliefs and behaviors are opposite to mine. Please, if any reader ever hears of my passing, please do what you can to keep the morticians, preachers and politicians away from this body. At my death I wish to lie atop the ground and have my nitrogen received into vultures and ants exactly as has this deer, to have the wild boar and coyotes rejoice in gnawing my bones prior to redistributing my calcium to the Earth from which it came. I do not want this honored body's final metamorphosis to be impeded by embalming fluid and I do not want my spirit insulted by the presence of any religion's formulated prayer or anybody's stock phrases at all. I wish my body spontaneously to sing in the wind as black wings rise, to become white rain that helps spring grass grow. ***** ODOR OF YELLOW JESSAMINE Near my trailer Yellow Jessamine, Gelsemium sempervirens, climbs into young Sweetgum trees, letting a few of its bright yellow, foxglove-like blossoms dangle fairly low. Saturday afternoon after a long hike in the cool sunlight I passed by this plant and of course I had to take a sniff. Though the odor was almost timid, for a moment it hit me like a good kick in the stomach -- the mingling of sparkling sunlight, fresh air and this unexpectedly sweet perfume evoked a practically suffocating half-second-long pang of romantic yearnings and memories. In that half second pure Eros tinged with poesy and "music of the spheres" rampaged through my soul like all the redneck hounds of Hell. This is one of the problems with being a hermit, of keeping things simple for long periods of time: Little things like incidental flower-whiffs can knock you flat. If I had been nibbling cellophane- wrapped K-Mart candy all morning, or if lately I had been indulging my libidinousness, that Yellow Jessamine flower's odor would hardly have registered. This experience recalls one of my theories. And that is that, in the end, most people who lead lives of regular lengths usually end up amassing pretty much the same measures of the world's pleasures and pains, its ecstasies and anguishes. If a life lacks down- home sensuality, then more ethereal satisfactions blossom out of nowhere. ***** FROG EGGS & RELIGIONS One morning this week while listening to Public Radio I wandered over to the pond to admire some frog eggs. While cogitating on them, the radio reported that officials in Georgia sought to remove the word "evolution" from that state's school curricula. That juxtaposition of my frog-egg reverie with the news from Georgia cast me into a certain combative mood. How dare they seek to rob me of one of the most important words I use when cataloguing the wonders I ascribe to the Creator. This news from Georgia got me to thinking this: Maybe now is as good a time as any to clearly and concisely explain why I am so antireligious - - why I am a hardcore, dyed-in-the- wool pagan. It is precisely because I regard all religions as artificial, unnecessary barriers between people and the higher states of spirituality to which they naturally aspire. We look into the heavens, experience love, or contemplate frog eggs, and we become aware that something, somewhere, has created these marvelous things and circumstances, and that this Creator and the creation itself are worthy of adoration. Human spirituality begins like this and should continue through our lives in the same vein, perpetually growing and maturing. The highest calling of every community should be to nurture its citizens' quests for spirituality, to inspire them toward ever-more exquisite sensitivities and insights, and to encourage them to love, respect and protect that tiny part of the creation into which we all have been born. Instead, religions divert the energies of our innate spirituality-seeking urges into the practicing of mindless ceremonies and rituals having little or nothing to do with the majesty and meanings of the universe. Religions insist that we must disbelieve the evidences of our own minds and hearts, and submit to primitive scriptures interpreted and transmogrified by untold generations of clerics who, history reports, all too often have hustled to promote their own bureaucratic and political agendas, and continue to do so today. In my opinion, anyone wishing to "get right with God" should begin with cleansing from his or her own life all traces of religion. And the first step in doing that is to get straight in one's mind what is religion (dogma in scriptures), what is spirituality (one's personal relationship with the Creator and the creation), and what is love (intense empathy and well meaning). You do not need to believe in someone else's curious dogma in order to be spiritual, or to love your neighbor and do good works. Finally, why is a diatribe like this appropriate for a naturalist's newsletter? It is because this newsletter springs from my passion for all that is natural -- the Creator's Earthly creation. Natural things on our planet are now being destroyed at a rate greater than at any other time in the history of the Earth. That destruction is being committed at an ever- increasing rate by human societies such as our own that are more and more rationalizing and excusing their excesses in terms of religious doctrine. ***** CYCLOPOID COPEPODS Last Sunday I passed by a woodland pond, so down on my belly I went with the handlens. I focused down through the water until my handlens edge touched the water and suddenly a vast migrating cloud of tiny beings came into focus. They were pale cream animals with single black eyes and forked antennae jerkily paddling through the water. They were tiny crustaceans (like crayfish and shrimp) called copepods. In fact, they were one of the few copepods I could identify, because of their single eyes and curious antennae. They were Cyclopoid Copepods. Yes, a cloud of them, millions and millions surely, completely invisible until I got close enough for my nose to touch the cold water, a cream-colored cloud streaming along the bank about an inch below the water's surface. Long I watched, sometimes so attentively that I forgot to breathe. A kind of Cyclopoid Copepod reverie came over me so that it became as if I myself were in that cloud, my brothers and sisters all around me as far as could be seen, flowing, flowing, flowing, suspended inside a three- dimensional universe spangled with alga cells glowing yellow green in sunlight flooding through crystalline water. Abruptly a creature shot onto the scene shaped like a T, a fast- moving, streamlined thing ten times larger than my little Cyclopes, its long, stiff antennae bright red and its transparent body boldly splotched green as if in places it photosynthesized (and maybe it did photosynthesize). This rambunctious creature, another form a copepod, careened among my Cyclopes so fast I couldn't see what it was doing but I could guess that it was preying upon my flock. I felt as if I were witnessing an outrageous slaughter of innocents, yet I was fixed in another dimension of reality and could do nothing about it. To calm myself I rose from the water's edge, caught my breath and looked into the silent woods awhile. I brought out my little "Golden Nature Guide" called Pond Life and read about Cyclopoid Copepods. "They seize and bite their small prey," the book said. So, while the big T-shaped copepod ate them, they themselves preyed on clouds of grazing beings even smaller than they... Then the big tree trunks around me echoed my cackling, for what other response is there when we glimpse how this world really is put together? ***** SNAIL SHELLS IN THE LOESS You simply can't walk in the bayous here without finding fossils. Our most abundant fossils are white snail shells embedded in the loess forming the bayous' almost-vertical walls. Loess is dust deposited by wind at the end of Ice Ages. My trailer sits atop about 30 feet of it, and on certain bluffs along the Mississippi River it may be over 200 feet thick. Loess-embedded snail shells were used by geologists to figure out when our loess was deposited. Snail shells just like ours were removed from a roadcut through loess at Vicksburg 70 miles north of here and their age was determined using Carbon-14 dating. Shells toward the top of the roadcut were found to be 17,850 years old, give or take 380 years. Shells from the middle of the cut were placed at 19,250 years old, give or take 350 years, and shells at the bottom of the loess registered at 25,300 years old, give or take 1,000 years. Of course it makes sense that the deeper you go in the loess, the older the shells would be, since what's on bottom is what was deposited first. These dates -- between 17,850 and 25,300 years ago -- mark the end of the last Ice Age. At that time the ice sheet north of the Ohio River was melting, producing enormous quantities of meltwater that passed by our present location on its journey to the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi River then was a vast "braided stream" much larger than the present river. Its water gushed over a vast plain bearing unfathomable amounts of gravel, sand and silt. As now, during winters less water flowed because precipitation north of here was frozen. When water in the Mississippi River of that time was relatively low, large mudflats and many islands appeared between the big river's widely separated shores. It's theorized that mud coating those emergent land masses dried, then strong westerly winds stirred up silt particles from the dried mud and carried them as dust. This dust then dropped on the Mississippi's bluffs and highlands immediately to the east -- where we are now -- and that deposited dust became our loess. It was a slow process, with thousands of years of dust deposition leaving only a few hundred feet of loess. Life atop the accumulating loess went on as always. And when snails died their shells remained as stonelike fossils. The 25,000-year old shells pried from our local loess today look just like last year's bleached ones atop the soil. **** ON THE BEAUTY OF HUNKERING DOWN Much of this week has been both cold and wet -- a painful combination in an unheated trailer. Sometimes I had to crawl into my sleeping bag just to keep it together. In times like that, you can't be very creative. You have to hunker down and wait for time to pass. I am glad to have had these days. Let me explain. First of all, the other day I was discussing this matter via email with my friend Rengyu in Bangladesh. I said that once such a trial is over, it's as if you have acquired a new measure of inner strength. Rengyu could relate to that, especially because at that time he was fasting during Ramadan. By voluntarily enduring hardships and denying one's natural instincts to seek comfort and security, and by stubbornly following a secret star even when to others what's going on looks appallingly dreary, one gains something of great value internally that can't be explained to someone who doesn't already understand. Earlier when I described the effect on me of sniffing a Yellow Jessamine blossom, the point was less that Yellow Jessamine really smells good than that by exercising self control most of the time I am priming myself for later forays into a realm of sensuality that no debauched hamburger eater can imagine. When these cold days finally pass and cascades of golden sunlight gush over me, who do you think will feel the return of spring more acutely than I? One reason I live the way I do is simply because I love to feel alive, strong, hungry, aggressive... I like to feed my senses. There have been times in my life when that meant eating a lot, other times when it meant being with special kinds of women. Right now it means preparing myself so that the odor of Yellow Jessamine just knocks my pants off. A third reason is this: I am convinced that there is no greater Earthly "sin" than to needlessly abuse and endanger the living system -- the ecosystem -- with which the Creator has graced this good Earth. And I know that when I flip a switch to warm my feet I am ordering electricity to be produced, which increases greenhouse gasses and radioactive wastes. I will not belabor the point. Every human appetite translates into environmental destruction, and it is up to each of us to identify for ourselves how much destruction we wish to be responsible for. ***** POOR BIRDS "Poor" in the sense of "unfortunate." "Poor birds" is what I've said more than once this week as I've watched what's happening to them. For example, all winter during my breakfasts the White-throated Sparrows have peacefully foraged on and along the forest trail between my outside kitchen and the blackberry field, pecking seeds and the occasional bug or spider, the very picture of a contented little community of meek, hard-working citizens. But this week one of them acquired a splendiferous white throat patch, a throat so white and well defined it looked painted-on, actually artificial. The white throat wasn't the problem, though. It was the attitude that came with it. The same spring-induced hormones causing the dazzling white throat to suddenly, seemingly overnight, pop into existence had bestowed this little male bird with unbounded machismo. He claimed the entire pathway for himself, attacked whomever else wanted to peck seeds in his domain, and sometimes he attacked for no reason at all. It wasn't just the White-throated Sparrows, either. That tightly knit little family of titmice I told you about a couple of weeks ago now is having family problems. One of them, supposedly an oversexed male, chases the others around like a demon possessed. The chased ones squeal and squawk in indignation like teenage boys being chased from home by a father "finally fed up, finally at his limit." Other birds look on in wide-eyed amazement. It's clear that the congenial bird gatherings I've known this winter are growing dysfunctional and soon will break up, the members in them metamorphosing into territory obsessed, male-female breeding factories. Hormones. Where there was peace now there is strife and it's just because the Earth tilts in a certain manner causing days to grow longer, sending light and more light flooding into our lives, and this light tickles photosensitive glands in our bodies so that they issue chemicals guaranteed to drive us all crazy and make us do outrageous things. When I saw that White-throated Sparrow running amuck on my trail I thought of a conversation Plato reports as having taken place with the aged poet Sophocles. Someone had asked Sophocles whether he was still capable of enjoying a woman. Sophocles replied, "Don't talk in that way. I'm only too glad to be free of all that. It's like escaping from bondage to a raging madman." Poor birds. Poor humans who behave as if it were spring and as if they had the whitest throat pouches of all. Poor all of us living critters to whom the coming of spring means submitting to the bondage of a raging madman. ***** SPARROW COLORS It's interesting that sparrows can be divided into two general groups according to whether their breasts are streaked or unstreaked. Both chest types provide sparrows with good camouflage. You can imagine a bug looking upward, seeing the Swamp Sparrow's dark, gray chest very like the wintry sky behind it, or the Song Sparrow's strongly vertically streaked chest blending with the sky-reaching, winter-brown tussocks of grass or sedge behind it. Chests are generally lighter than back colors, to compensate for shadowing. The backs, or tops, of sparrows are essays in brown and black splotches and streaks. From the falcon's perspective they look very much like the messy floor of a field or a forest's leaf litter. Therefore, sparrow colors and patterns make sense. Still, you can't help feeling that something is going on here other than the sparrow species having blindly evolved random camouflage patterns. Sparrow patterns are so elegant and the colors are so sublimely complementary that surely they can't arise from mere Darwinian selection. One senses a hand at work here that creates with a flair. If this Creator were to walk into the room, you'd not be surprised if She were whistling a jaunty little tune. I think that the question of whether one finds a sparrow's plumage pretty or not is a good measure of how comfortable that person is with reality at large. I am struck by the general "earthiness" and "hominess" of sparrow colors and patterns. Since I regard "earthiness" and "hominess" as hallmarks of a peaceful, happy, sustainable life, it seems that sparrow colors and patterns abstractly express something to which I aspire. It's as if what I regard as the Creator's guiding principles for life on Earth were somehow expressed in terms of sparrows. I'm not suggesting that Nature teaches us to live exclusively in a subdued manner harmonious with earth-tone sparrow colors. After all, the Creator also produced Cardinals, Blue Jays and Painted Buntings. But, if in your bird fieldguide you scan the species from cover to cover, you'll see that maybe 80% of the species are, you could say, modest looking but elegant -- like sparrows, sandpipers and thrushes. Maybe 18% are colorful (but not spectacular) or somehow novel in appearance, in the manner of woodpeckers and hummingbirds. And only a handful are outright bodacious, like the Cardinal and Blue Jay. So I would say that if in nature the Creator provides paradigms upon which we humans should pattern our lives, the bird fieldguide reveals one view of the matter: The enlightened and fulfilled life will be 80% modest and dignified; 18% colorful but not gaudy, and; maybe 2% outright rip-roaring. ***** FROST LOOKING Earlier this week we had mornings when every grassblade and every shrub and sapling was white with frost. At dawn before the sun had fully risen I was jogging by a pasture holding about twenty cattle, including several newborns. The pasture's grass and trees shimmered silver-white and the cattle were black silhouettes. Slow-billowing steam rose from a pond just behind the pasture and other clouds of steam puffed from the cattle's nostrils. I ran along pat-pat-pat feeling hot, wet and rosy inside, wondering how those cows felt, wondering what they were thinking about and what their world felt like to them at that very moment. During breakfast next to the campfire my tunnel-like view down the path through the woods to the overgrown field between here and the hunters' camp showed a field like an essay in hoarfrost and sunlight, and I went there to walk in it. I looked closely at things, with my handlens saw perfect crystals encrusting brown goldenrod stems, I smelled the frost and listened closely as frost-rimed grassblades brushed my shoes, and I felt what it's like when white crystals sprayed onto the corners of my eyes and meltwater ran down my cheeks. Most beautiful were the leafless Sweetgum saplings, their stiff, sunlight-exploding limbs white-lacy against obsidian-black forest beyond. ***** VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY One of my all-time favorite quotations is one by Friedrich Nietzsche. In general I regard the thrust of Nietzsche's thoughts as being a bit unsavory and small spirited. Still, he did make this point: "Most people don't really see something until it has a name" -- "Wie die Menschen gewönlich sind, macht ihnen erst der Name ein Ding überhaupt sichtbar." With that insight in mind, I just want to place before Newsletter readers the following "name" of a concept I think needs more consideration, and that is "voluntary simplicity." If you have some time this week to reflect upon life and the state of the world, I hope you will remember to conjure up that term and spend some time turning it over in your mind as if it were a mantra that could possibly open doors to new levels of happiness and fulfillment. Several sites on the Web deal with voluntary simplicity. You might Google the term and let destiny lead you forward at your own pace. But be wary of sites trying to sell you things to simplify your life. Simplicity is free. ***** PICKLE JUICE Monday morning I awakened groggy and annoyed because Eastern Woodrats had thumped and bumped all night beneath the trailer. This was unusual because the rats have done this all winter and usually I find their presence good company. Often I have to laugh, imagining what shenanigans must be going on below for such unlikely noises to be produced. "Pickle juice," I concluded. The plantation manager periodically cleans out her refrigerator and sometimes I am the beneficiary when she sends my way her sour milk (good in cornbread batter), fungusy cheese, and delicacies such as pickleless pickle juice (also good in cornbread batter). Well, the day before the woodrats, the manager had set next to the garden gate a jar with pickle juice in it and I had used it. Like so much in the American diet, this pickle juice contained outrageous concentrations of salt. Just a little salt causes me to retain water so that within an hour or two of ingesting some I get blurry-eyed, my ears ring, I can't think or sleep well, and later feel grumpy. One day all's right with the world, then some salt slips into my diet, and the next day the world is wretched and insidious. This is worth thinking about. For, is the "real me" the one with or without pickle juice? What are the implications when we discover that we think and feel basically what the chemistry in our bodies at that particular moment determines that we think and feel? And if what we think and feel isn't at the root of what we "are," then just what is the definition of "what we are"? Actually, I can shrug off that question, but only because a larger one nudges it aside. That is, is "reality" like Chopin's gauzy, dreamy etudes, the way I experienced it on Sunday, or more like Sch”nberg's angry, disjointed, atonal piano pieces, the way I experienced it on Monday after taking into my body the pickle juice? Thoughts like these have led me to distrust all my assumptions about life no matter how obviously right or wrong they appear at the moment. I have long noted how huge blocks of my behavior appear to depend exactly on how much testosterone happens to flow in my blood. An acquaintance's tendency to weepiness corresponds precisely to whether he's taken his blood pressure medicine and another's whole personality depends on her remembering to take her lithium pills. In the end, however, you have to accept certain assumptions just to get through the day, even if you don't quite trust them. I have chosen two insights in particular to serve as bedrock on which all my other assumptions about life and living rest. One insight arises from meditating upon the grandness, the complexity, the beauty and majesty of nature -- the Universe at large -- and thus I recognize that the Universe has a Creator worth contemplating. (This has absolutely nothing to do with religiosity, by the way, for religions are manmade institutions.) The other insight is that love in whatever context is worth seeking and sharing. This latter insight is the one that keeps me hanging around in this quaint biological entity, my body, with or without pickle juice. CHAPTER 3: MARCH LISTENING TO SPRING ODORS Here and there in our woods, especially on moist, shaded banks, bright yellow blossoms adorn slender branches of the Spicebush, Lindera benzoin. This is one of our most spectacular harbingers of spring. If with a thumbnail you bruise a Spicebush's slender stem, a spicy, clean-smelling fragrance blossoms into the chilly air. This week the Spicebush's smell got me to thinking about odors. In traditional Japanese culture there's a ceremony called "Listening to Incense." The idea is to refine one's sense of smell and to exercise the ability to respond to odors of various incenses. I have read of one such ceremony during which the participants not only identified a large number of discreet fragrances and combination of fragrances, but also related the odors to specific events in ancient Japanese history and mythology. When it's cold, things don't smell much, but heat and humidity nurture odors. During this spring's warmer, moister days, the sleeping bag in which I've slept all through the cold weeks has begun emanating a certain funky odor, as does the sweater and socktop I've worn a long time. I don't hesitate to speak of this, though I know that in our culture we are programmed to be uncomfortable and unaccepting of nearly all odors that are not sweet or commonly accepted by everyone as "wholesome." I believe that the degree to which most people in our culture are antiseptic, scrubbed and odorless, or even artificially perfumed, amounts to nothing less than an unhealthy obsessive neurosis. Lately I've awakened several times deep in the night and I've made a point of just lying there cocooning in my sleeping bag, savoring odors blossoming up from the bag and of odors carried on the wet, velvety night air. I've been amazed at the richness of the experience. There was the odor of mud, woodsmoke, crushed grass, wet feathers, Yellow Jessamine, my own oily skin, moist wool... There were cheesy, moldy, musty, musky, overripe odors -- purple, brownish- green and bruised-blue ones -- odors in minor keys, base-note odors and odors that neither laughed nor sneered but just came curling about like a sulky friend inviting attention. You might want to try it. Unhitch your preconceptions and prejudices, close your eyes, turn off your ears, lie quietly, and just smell. Give a name to each odor that comes along, put it in a mental pigeonhole, then go to the next one. Quietly collect odors until you have a rainbow, then let yourself be drawn into your rainbow, experience it like walking in a flower garden, loving the dark blossoms as much as the bright. ***** 17° AT DAWN Thursday morning at dawn it was 17°F (-8.3°C). I jogged eastward into a kind of sunrise seldom seen at these latitudes. It looked like a slab of inflamed raw flesh lying on the horizon. The dark blue sky lay right next to it, with no pastels between the hard colors to mediate. It looked spooky and I was comforted by the white steam billowing from my mouth, something alive and normal. Wiping my mouth with the back of my hand I felt chunks of ice coagulating in my beard. When sunlight began casting golden halos around the dangling beards of Spanish moss along my path, finally things began seeming normal. My main task for the plantation this week has been to grub out with a shovel deep-taprooted Honeylocust trees in one of the hay fields. Honeylocusts bear large, hard spines that can puncture a tractor tire or go right through a shoe. So at midday on Thursday in the middle of the field I ate my cornbread and then did something that most of the time is impossible here: In the cold, sunny air I lay in the grass on my back, looking into that curious blue sky. Usually lying in the grass is impossible here without ticks, fireants and chiggers swarming over you. How seldom we lie on our backs on the solid Earth, yet what a comfort it is! My body tingled from the morning's exertions, and now the dazzling sunlight stung my skin. Red blotches and white starlets animated the blackness behind my closed eyelids. The cold but sunlight-charmed air hummed with silence. But then a grasshopper flew by, it's crackling sound arcing from one side of my head to the other. Well, if that grasshopper could make such a lusty crackling after a 17° dawn, probably the ticks, fireants and chiggers were just as capable of doing their thing, so that was the end of my Earth-lying. ***** CHICKASAW PLUMS FLOWERING Last Monday, on March 1st, the first blossoms of our Chickasaw Plums, Prunus angustifolia, appeared. It was just two little, white blossoms inside an intricate tangle of spiny, dark stems, but what a pleasure it was to walk up to them, stick my nose next to them, and breathe in their perfume. What odor could be more pleasing than that of wild plum blossoms on a spring morning when the air is warm, moist, and redolent of mud and crushed grass? This species' flowers appear before its leaves do. Sometime during the next couple of weeks, probably for just one or two days -- until a stiff breeze comes along -- our thicket of Chickasaw Plums will simply glow with white flowers, and if you go stand among them the perfume will throw you for a loop. Chickasaw Plums are native throughout most of the southeastern quarter of the US, averaging maybe ten feet tall, and bearing blossoms a bit smaller than those on cultivated plum trees -- only about 0.3 of an inch across. On this property they form a thicket about 20 feet long and ten feet broad, along a fence. I'll bet that the thicket's parent tree was "planted" there by a bird who years ago upchucked a plum pit while perched on the fence's wire. Since I first noticed the blossoms as I was pulling up metal fenceposts from inside the thicket, I can also tell you that their interlocking branches bear slender, sharp- pointed items that are half twig and half spine, but which can puncture and scrape as if they were 100% spine. Around the end of May these trees will produce bright red or yellow, lustrous, thin-skinned, juicy and a bit tart fruits about half an inch in diameter. Last fall, right after the trees lost their leaves, I dug up several sprouts, making sure to get plenty of their underground runners. Now the buds on those transplants are opening and I hope that this time next year we'll have the beginnings of several more plum thickets. ***** BROWN THRASHERS SINGING In last year's October 13 Newsletter I described a "wave" of Brown Thrashers passing through migrating southward. I remarked how secretive they were, hiding themselves in bushes and issuing melancholy smacking sounds. All winter some have hung around, always skulking and staying quiet, sometimes showing a yellow eye glaring at me from deep in the shadows. Then one day last week and several days this week, the Brown Thrashers have begun singing. It's not half-hearted stuff, either. They fly into the tops of the taller trees and call louder than anyone else except the hawks and owls. Whole mornings they sing. I've been thinking what it must be like being a Brown Thrasher at this time of year. Naturally these behavioral changes are brought about by alterations in their hormone levels. Yet, surely, for birds as well as with us, hormones express themselves as moods. So, what must have been the mood like that all winter kept the Brown Thrasher silent and withdrawn? What conflict of urges have these poor birds endured these recent days as their minds lay locked in gloomy hush while their hearts irrepressibly began swelling with the need to fly high and sing? What must it be like now there in the top of the big Water Oaks singing with nothing but the sky above and the broad Earth spread out below, when just a day or two ago it was enough to lurk inside dismal Blackberry thickets? ***** SONG SPIRIT Back to those singing Brown Thrashers... Biologists are trained to avoid being anthropomorphic when interpreting animal behavior -- they don't assume that ducklings follow their mothers because they love them. I believe in that admonition, but I fear that in our culture we have gone too far with it, and this reduces our sensitivity to, and appreciation for, other living things. The Brown Thrasher at his appointed time overcoming his wintry sulk, then flying to the tallest treetop to sing his loudest and clearest has this week been what I think of as a local outburst of the Creator's spirit. Each morning when I passed that singing bird I tipped my hat in form of a silent prayer. For, I believe that the Creator's spirit flows everywhere, and we -- we humans and birds and everything else -- are part of it, the way that notes are part of music. The Creator's spirit wrought something out of nothing, crafted unfathomable beauty and complexity out of chaos, and right now evolves the Universe and all things in it to ever higher levels of sophistication, and ever more exquisite manners of being and conceiving. So, I think I know that bird's feeling, though I try to avoid anthropomorphism, and I know for sure that the bird's brain is wired much differently from my own. I know the thrasher's feeling because each of us is part of the same general flow of the Creator's spirit flooding through the Universe. The bird doesn't sing because he's happy in a human way, but I am confident that he is indeed tickled through and through by the Creator's spirit flowing through him, just like me. ***** BLACKBERRY BRAMBLE GREEN DIFFUSION In abandoned fields, around old brushpiles and at the edge of woods often there are blackberry brambles. Stiff, semi-woody, gloriously spiny, close-together canes six feet long and longer arch from the ground forming thickets a human or even a deer can't get through, but which a rabbit can, at least by keeping his ears low. Now those canes are issuing penny-size tufts of green leaves. When seen from a fair distance these tufts give the entire bramble a diffuse, pale green cast. This is a wonderful sign of spring. If you stand close enough to see individual tufts and there's a low sun beyond the bramble, the tufts glow and seem suspended within a dark mahogany cloud. If you stand farther away and let your eyes drift out of focus, the brambles look like glowing, green fog. Before long this blackberry bramble green diffusion will seep into the trees as buds on tree limbs burst with little leaves. ***** SOUTHERN TWAYBLADE ORCHID In the October 28 Newsletter I told you about a dainty little orchid about half a foot tall blossoming here, but so slender and small- flowered that most people would never notice it. It was the Nodding Ladies' Tresses. Last Sunday in the woods I found a second similar orchid species that was the same size and just as slender and small- flowered. It was the Southern Twayblade, Listera australis. It seemed impossibly delicate to have survived that week's 17° weather, but obviously it had. The similarities between the two species are only superficial. Getting onto my hands and knees and looking with a handlens, the tiny (3/16 on an inch long), reddish- purple flowers displayed profoundly different floral anatomies. Well, this is how orchids are: At first glance they're all alike, but up close every blossom type is a wildly imaginative variation on the fundamental orchid theme. This is a fairly rare wildflower. In fact, though I looked for a long time, I found only one specimen in that part of the forest. ***** WOODPECKER MEETS FLYING SQUIRREL Next to a pond where I was sitting a Red-bellied Woodpecker was pecking at something inside a hole in a dead snag about 30 feet up a Water Oak. I thought he might be cleaning out the hole to make a nest, but he wasn't removing debris so I couldn't figure out what he was doing. And then it became clear. Suddenly his wings flashed and he jumped back as a Southern Flying Squirrel, Glaucomys volans, shot from the hole and scrambled down the trunk with the quickness of a mouse streaking across a floor. He moved so fast that I hardly saw more than his size and color, and a goodly amount of loose skin rippling along his sides. Within a second or two the squirrel had disappeared. The woodpecker hung around for a minute and then flew off not to return while I was watching. My impression was that getting the squirrel out of the hole had been his whole mission, and I can only guess that he simply didn't want any potential woodpecker nesting hole in his home range claimed by anyone, whether another woodpecker or a rodent. Because flying squirrels are nocturnal, I never see them unless one of them has bad luck. In towns, cats often bring them in. At my previous location they lived inside the walls of an old building and at night orchestrated a wonderful noise. The people there occasionally managed to trap one, but always others remained to thump and scrape all through the night. Here on summer nights I often hear sounds in the trees which I suppose to be made by them, especially when at acorn-eating time. ****** MUD TURTLES IN THE WOODLAND POND Around here if you see a turtle in a typical farm pond, usually it's the Red-eared Turtle, the kind sold in pet stores, with yellow stripes along its head and neck, and bright red spots where its ears might be. Sometimes it'll be a snapping turtle. In fact, around here, anytime you spot a turtle that's not a Red-eared or a snapper, you have something interesting. Our little woodland pond has Mud Turtles, Kinosternon subrubrum, and lately they've been sunning themselves on logs. Mud Turtles are found throughout the Southeast, and if there's anything special about their general appearance it's that their top shells, their carapaces, are higher than most pond turtles, though not as high as a dry-land box turtle's. Mud Turtles are smallish, with their shells seldom more than 4 inches long. Otherwise Mud Turtles are fairly unspectacular, being olive to dark brown, with little ornamentation other than some yellow around the shell's sides, and some vague, yellowish speckles on the head. Mud Turtles eat crayfish, insects, mollusks, amphibians, aquatic vegetation and other things as they walk along the bottom of a pond, swamp or stream. Their main enemies are raccoons, crows and humans. Mud Turtles are represented by three subspecies and my fieldguides indicate that here we should have the one known as the Mississippi Mud Turtle, K. s. hippocrepis, with yellow stripes along the head. However, ours are clearly the Eastern subspecies, K. s. subrubrum, so someone needs to tell the fieldguide writers about that. ***** WOOD DUCKS During Friday's walk one highlight was coming upon a flock of eight Wild Turkey hens in the woods. However, the best moment of all came when I was resting beside the woodland pond and suddenly male and female Wood Ducks descended through the trees and landed right in the pond's middle not 20 feet from me. Prepared for just such a happening, already I held my binoculars near my face, with my elbows on my knees. Very slowly I brought the binoculars up, and then for about 20 minutes I was able to watch the birds without my arms getting tired holding up the binoculars. Though I remained perfectly still, an awareness seemed to grow in both birds that something about my presence wasn't right. They stared and stared right at me. After about five minutes the male began preening, though the female never did. The male nervously watched me as he curved his neck, swam through shadows and sunbeams, sloshed water and stretched his wings and legs, displaying his prettiness like a model on a stage. The greenness of his crown shimmered with iridescence. The satiny blackness on his cheeks was outlined exquisitely by fingers of snowy whiteness, and in the center of this excellent harlequiny sat his blood-red eye, always focused right on me. His warm, deep- chestnut-colored breast when seen in sunlight revealed itself as finely speckled, like a knight's coat of mail. And all this, as well as other colors and designs too numerous to list, were reflected in the pond's black water. What a display! Though I never moved a hair, gradually in both ducks the conviction seemed to gather that I was more than an inert bump. The male began opening and closing his beak as if quacking. I could hear nothing, but surely the female could. Then the male swam to the pond's bank and climbed upslope a few feet, constantly keeping me in view, and the female followed. This better view unsettled them even more. Maybe you recall how last year I enjoyed a similar experience watching a Pileated Woodpecker, who just never caught on that I was something special. These ducks, I believe, were smarter. Something in their brains was perking, enabling them to interpret images at a higher level than is possible for a simple, grub-gulping woodpecker. Both birds then positioned their bodies behind different trees, with their heads poked around from behind, looking squarely at me. I didn't move. But finally their concern crystallized, and both rose into the air and flew away. ***** WOODSIAS EMERGING On the steep, mossy slopes of gullies eroding into our forested uplands, right now there's a delicate little fern unfurling. It's the Blunt-lobed Woodsia, Woodsia obtusa, sometimes called Blunt-lobed Cliff-fern. It's unfurling in the usual fern way, with "fiddleheads" uncoiling from base to tip, like one of those curled-up paper things kids blow on at parties, and shaped like the knobby head of a fiddle. Christmas Fern fiddleheads are also uncoiling right now, but they're much larger. Deer love to eat Christmas Fern fiddleheads and they can be boiled and eaten like asparagus, but the Woodsia's fiddleheads are far too small to bother with. The mature Woodsia frond stands only about 6 inches high. The nice thing about these Woodsias is that they look so perfectly at home where they are. Their little yellow-green fronds are among the most fragile-looking and frilly- looking of all ferns, and somehow their delicate appearance matches perfectly the environments in which they grow. They unfurl on slopes encrusted with green tussocks of soft moss and threads and ribbons of scrambling liverworts. Here and there a slug's glistening slime- trail crosses the greenness like a fairy's trail through an enchanted woods. Simply sitting and gazing at this peaceful community fills one with admiration and peace. ***** DIETER'S GARDEN Back to those Woodsias. On the day I hiked through the woods after admiring the Woodsias I experienced this train of recollections and thoughts: The notion that the Woodsias had looked "so perfectly at home where they are" took me back to my early traveling days, to a delicious summer morning in Vienna, Austria in the 1970s, when I was visiting my friend Dieter. We were in the vast gardens of the old Summer Palace of Sch”nbrunn, where I had never seen so many roses, row after row of them, and so many perfectly trimmed hedges, and acres of geometrically arranged beds of tulips and irises and other bright blossoms. "I never dreamed a place could be so pretty," I gushed to Dieter. Dieter, one of the most dignified and refined individuals I've ever met, glanced at me with pity in his eyes. Art history was a passion with him, and the matter of the beauty of Sch”nbrunn's gardens rightly fell within his domain. "You can think about it in evolutionary terms," he said, more or less. "Maria Teresa laid out the garden's plans in the early 1700s. Just a few years before that, there'd been a real question as to whether Vienna could survive the starvation brought on by a siege mounted by the Turks. In a real way, then, glittery, ostentatious Sch”nbrunn with its regimented flowerbeds and eternally clipped hedges can be seen as a reaction to those earlier times, a statement confirming Western man's newly acquired dominance over his environment." "These gardens are bright and totally controlled like an infant's playroom," Dieter continued. "There's an obsession here with bright color, ignoring more complex possibilities such as the mingling of leaf textures or the interplay of form and shadows. There's a single-minded fixation on simple geometric precision while ignoring harmony with the landscape, for example, and local folk traditions. This garden is an effort by Maria Teresa and the people of her time to convince themselves that with militarism and science they could overcome what they regarded as the chaos of nature. When I walk in these gardens, yes, the bright colors are nice the way children's bright balloons are nice, but, on a higher level, I am oppressed by the garden design's total lack of mature spontaneity, and by its insensitivity to its natural and cultural context. It's almost as bad as your mowed lawns in America where esthetics among the masses also remains at an immature stage of development... " The shock of having such a fully formed thought pregnant with so many alien assumptions placed before me left me speechless. Instantly I recognized veins of truth in his argument. All I could do was to sniff a rose and grin. In later years I learned how plantings could be arranged so that, for instance, gatherings of leaves complemented certain blossoms. There have even been times when I also felt oppressed by naked, straight lines of tulips marching across mowed American lawns, no matter how bright the tulips' reds and yellows were. But, now in my graybeard days, somehow I feel as if I'm wandered through and then out of the whole discussion, and when I see a tulip wherever it is I just feel like dropping to my knees and poking my nose into its brightness. Still, I'd like to visit Dieter again, to see how his ideas have evolved. I'm sure that, as always, his insights will have developed beyond mine. I would like to broach with him this idea: From what I've seen, the most sophisticated gardens are those aspiring to look natural. Therefore, might not the final stage of esthetic development be when one loves best what is indeed natural -- the wild forest, the marsh, the meadow? I would like to ask Dieter if any garden he can imagine could equal the loveliness of the embankment I visited this week, where the native Blunt-lobed Woodsias unfurled so graciously among their homey little moss and liverwort companions. ***** WEEK OF THE BIG CHANGE During the whole year there will not be a week during which the forest's appearance alters more than during this last one. A week ago the forest was gray and brown but now it is definitely green as leaves burst from buds. Many trees are flowering. Blossoms of Redbuds and Dogwoods explode at woods' edges, and along streams Cottonwoods drop finger-sized, wormlike, red catkins. Plum trees look like large bouquets of white blossoms with black stems, and the oaks issue millions of honey- colored catkins of male flowers. Pawpaw trees bear their curious three-symmetry brown blossoms and in the forest's understory Red Buckeyes surprise the eye with luscious yellow-green leaves and spectacular clusters of red blossoms. Wisteria vines are heavy with drooping, lavender flower clusters you can smell from a hundred feet away. Saturday at dawn as sunlight- dazzle melted frost from green grass and charmed the icy blue air, imagine how those Wisterias smelled, with a hint of plum- blossom from down the road. Smelling this, with the eye on flaming azaleas along the drive, a hermit on his bicycle laughs and just peddles on through the orchard's steaming wet grass, which has its own odors, textures and meanings. ***** POKE WEEK Also this is the week when poke sprouts got big enough to eat. A well prepared dish of poke is as good as any plate of asparagus and in some ways better. Poke-picking time has always been important to my Kentucky family. When my mother was alive every year at this time she, my grandmother and I would pile into the old Chevy and drive miles to certain spots we knew about, where poke grew in profusion. Poke sprouts emerge from large, underground roots, and you pick them when they are up to a foot tall. You can cook them like asparagus or -- even better -- pickle them. What a wonderful thing is pickled poke on a mid-winter fried-egg sandwich! Poke is known botanically as Pokeweed, Phytolacca americana. It's such a strange and peculiar plant that it has it's own family, the Pokeweed Family, or Phytolaccaceae. The best place to find Pokeweed is where somebody has bulldozed a pile of trees. Pokeweeds like recently disturbed, rich soil, open to the full sun. You locate plants by spotting last year's white stems, now bent to the ground as if they had melted. Stems of Giant Ragweed also are white and in similar places, but those stems are more slender and straight. You pick only green pokeweed sprouts, for when the stem's skin turns purple and tough, it's poisonous. I seldom pick poke here because it's relatively uncommon around Natchez. I'd rather just let it grow unmolested. However, if this week I had been back in Kentucky in some of my old picking grounds, and if I had had a way to can it, I'd have picked several bushels, and I'd have a pot of it cooked up right now! ***** BLUEBIRDS ON MY BLUEBIRD BOX In this year's February 29th Newsletter I told you about my building a bluebird box. The day I nailed that box onto its pole down at the Field Pond, a certain unnerving thought came to mind. That is, of the approximately 392 bird species recorded as occurring in Mississippi, how can I presume that just one of those species, the Eastern Bluebird, will choose this nest box? Therefore this week when one dusk I went to sit beside the Field Pond I was astonished to see a male Eastern Bluebird atop my creation, singing his heart out. He'd fly to the hole and disappear into the box's darkness, then reappear with his face framed by my jaggedly cut hole, then fly back to the top and sing some more, then return into the box, and he did this again and again, as if trying to convince himself that the box really worked. This inspired me to build a second nest box. Within two days it also had a male atop it behaving in the same manner. The answer to the question of how my box was finally chosen by a bluebird and not another species lies in the fact that each living thing lives its life occupying a narrow ecological niche. In the big tree outside my window Black-and- white Warblers glean the tree's bark, Red-eyed Vireos keep to the higher branches, and Carolina Chickadees prefer the lower branches. Nature is highly ordered, and invisible and inviolable boundaries crisscross everything we see. I suspect that a chickadee or wren would have loved living in my nest box, but I placed it too far from the forest and too much in open air, for them. That box needed a bird loving open fields, but one thinking in terms of hollow snags or tree trunks for a nest site, and it needed a bird able to fit through its 1.5-inch hole. Of the 392 Mississippi bird species I know of, only the Eastern Bluebird fits all those criteria. My banged- together nest box is practically a job description for the Eastern Bluebird. A neighbor built a nest box just like mine, and bluebirds came to check it out, but they rejected it. Probably that happened because, instead of placing the box near a large field, he put it near his house where he could see it. Bluebirds need plenty of field space to forage in, so if you don't have that, don't count on getting bluebirds. ***** SLEEPING BENEATH THE STARS This Monday I set up my mosquito net and moved my sleeping bag to the wooden platform in the woods. In years past I'd not slept there this early in the season. During the summer, tree leaves completely blot out the sky but, now, though most forest trees are leafing out, stars still show through the late- leafing Pecans' branches above my platform. I had forgotten how beautiful it is to lie beneath the stars. With my feet toward the south, Orion stood to my right, the Big Dipper to my left, and right above me Jupiter shined like a coon hunter coming through the woods with a powerful beam. It was good breathing the night's cool, fresh air. In the trailer, air pools in the night and it gets stuffy. There in the woods every breath seems to seep deep inside, energizing and cleaning away cold- weather sluggishness. I wondered how much some people would pay to experience what I was feeling -- though just about anyone can sleep outside, anytime they really want to, for free. But, at 3:30 Wednesday morning I was reminded why some might not pay much to sleep outside. I was awakened when energizing, cleansing rain came pouring through my mosquito net! ***** BROWN-HEADED COWBIRD MORALITY Thursday morning as I prepared my campfire breakfast, four blackish, dumpy-looking birds landed in the top of a nearby Pecan tree. They made squeaky, gurgling calls and fluttered in a curious way so that even without binoculars I knew I had four Brown-headed Cowbirds. I watched as three males orbited around a female displaying. During the "Bill-Tilt Display" a male would lift his head and point his bill skyward. This would often be followed by the "Topple-Over Display," during which the bird would fluff his body feathers, arch his neck, spread his tail and wings, and lurch forward, sometimes issuing the gurgling song. Apparently these displays excite females, and probably females mate with males doing the best job. Female cowbirds do not lay eggs in their own nests. Being careful to go unobserved, sneaking quietly through undergrowth or among dense leaves, they look for the nests of birds of other species. Often they locate nests still under construction. Then the female cowbird watches the nest until egg laying begins, and one dawn she sneaks in, removes and sometimes eats the nest-owner's egg, and lays her own. If only one "host" egg is present, she does not remove it, apparently because doing so might clue the nest owner that something is amiss, and the nest might be abandoned. Not only do cowbird eggs usually hatch one day ahead of the host's eggs, but also cowbird nestlings typically are larger, are more aggressive in begging for food, and grow faster than the host's own young. Even when the cowbird fledgling grows much larger than the host mother herself, the mother just doesn't catch on that there's a problem. Of course this is hard on "host" families. Before humans began cutting up the landscape, cowbird "nest parasitism" wasn't as important as it is now because cowbirds in most places tend to focus their activities in open areas and forest edges. However now humans have broken vast forests into tiny plots and there are so many access roads that many remaining forests consist of nothing but "ecological edges." Cowbird nest parasitism is a very serious problem contributing to the ongoing collapse of many bird populations. Species hurt particularly hard include the Song Sparrow, Chipping Sparrow, Eastern Phoebe, and Northern Cardinal. How can Mother Nature tolerate such a free-loading species? Maybe we just have to recognize that Nature rejoices over diversity to the same extent that She doesn't really care much whether individuals like you and me get exactly what we want. Nature exults in the robust feeling embodied in the music, not in the destinies of us individual notes comprising the score. CHAPTER 4: APRIL NESTERS Nowadays the world is filled with earnest nesters, and if I were the nervous sort I might be getting peeved at the whole thing. Each morning a Carolina Chickadee comes tugging at loose threads on an old backpack hanging from the ceiling of my outside kitchen. This year the Carolina Wrens want to nest in my biking helmet, also hanging there. The other day I was outside reading with my legs crossed, felt something on my naked toe, and there was a wren with a straw in his beak perched there, apparently oblivious to the fact that he was tickling me. The worst are the Eastern Woodrats. Each night they cause a huge racket thumping around in my kitchen and below my trailer. Twice this week I've negligently left my new ever- sharp knife on the kitchen table and twice the following morning I've had to crawl beneath my trailer to retrieve the knife from a foot-high heap of glittery nest- junk a woodrat is building there. Well, actually I find it encouraging that spring has come and that once again such a homey, generous instinct as nesting is part of it. ***** GREEN TO MAKE THE HEAD SWIM All around my little trailer too- close-together Sweetgum saplings flaunt their new leaves right at eye level. Their profound greenness when the sun shines through them makes the head swim. Above me, the big Pecan trees are just beginning to put on leaves, so by looking up one can see blue and gray, but throughout the normal day I feel like a fish in an algae-filled aquarium left in the sun. The fish analogy is fitting because I feel as if I'm breathing this greenness, swimming and dreaming in it, absorbing it and having it flow through my veins. The other morning I was staring into this three-dimensional super- greenness while listening to the radio about the upcoming Shuttle lift-off, and about the project in store for it upon reaching the orbiting International Space Station. The juxtaposition of this green-staring and radio listening conjured a flash of insight, or maybe even a vision. The Space Station is a gangling thing bristling with solar panels. Therefore, my fleeting, radio- listening "vision" was this: The Sweetgum saplings around me right now are doing exactly what NASA is doing with the orbiting Space Station. Both the Sweetgums and the Space Station are putting out their solar panels to capture energy needed to function and stay alive. For a split second I saw that both the Sweetgum saplings around me and NASA are confirming and celebrating a fundamental formula around which Life on Earth has crystallized. That formula is this: the sun --> capture of sunlight energy --> that energy used to grow and evolve ***** CLOGGED EAR About once a year my left ear gets infected, and this week has been its time. This has seriously reduced my bird-spotting ability. That's because most birders develop an uncanny talent for precisely locating the positions of singing birds with their ears before they begin looking with their eyes. I seldom notice this ability until it's gone. This week, with one ear closed down, I have been at a loss to say whether a bird was before me or behind me, to the right or left. There's a benefit to this loss, however, assuming that the hearing returns as it always has. That is, I am reminded of what an amazing invention the human body is. I am obliged to reflect on all the things that can go wrong with a body to affect not only its hearing, vision and other senses, but also its sense of balance, blood-sugar level, the functioning of the heart and brain... What an amazing fact that back in 1947 the button on my body-machine was pushed, and I've been going every since with very modest maintenance. In college I studied the chemical pathways involved in metabolism and respiration, how blood pH is buffered... It is all so complex, so majestically ingenious. Really it's amazing that we can ever feel good for a moment, yet I feel good nearly all the time. Every moment of feeling good is a tremendous gift. ***** WHITETAILS, CORPORALS & PONDHAWKS A while back wildlife photographer Jerry Litton from Pelahatchie gave me the Dragonflies through Binoculars fieldguide. This was a wonderful gift, for it opened a whole new world to me. Of course I've been watching dragonflies all my life and I thought I knew all about them, but when anyone begins studying anything seriously for the first time, it's quickly apparent just how little really was known. This week I took the new fieldguide and my binoculars down to the pond and here are the three dragonfly species I identified with certainty after about an hour of watching: Common Whitetail, Libellula lydia, a 1.7-inch long, black- and-white, chunky species abundant from coast-to-coast. When the air is chilly it faces the sun and raises its abdomen to increase its body temperature. Males compete with one another and the one who can fly vertical loops around his opponent wins. Blue Corporal, Libellula deplanata, a 1.4-inch long, pale blue, thick-bodied species mostly of the US Southeast. At the base of each wing appear two narrow, brown streaks (corporal stripes). Males patrol along banks, often hovering. Eastern Pondhawk, Erythemis simplicicollis, a 1.7- inch long dragonfly with a slender, blue abdomen that turns green at the thorax (chest area), and with a green head. The abdomen ends with two, tiny white points (cerci) -- a good fieldmark. Found in most of the eastern and central US, this is one of our most ferocious species, even attacking members of its own species. Sometimes it lets humans and other large animals flush its game. Males defend territories of about 5 square yards and enter into contests in which one flies under and up in front of the leader, then the new follower does the same to the new leader, and this maneuvering may continue up to a dozen times. By the way, low-powered binoculars that can focus up close are far better for dragonfly watching than powerful ones. ****** THE WORLD OF DRAGONFLIES Now that I'm sensitized to dragonflies, I look for them every day the way I do birds, and every day I discover new things about them. What an interesting, even surreal, world they live in! Dragonflies, being a fairly primitive group of insects, undergo simple metamorphosis. Therefore they don't pass through a caterpillar and pupa stage like butterflies and moths. When a dragonfly egg hatches, a small edition of the adult emerges, known as a nymph. This nymph has the basic structure of the adult dragonfly, except that it is wingless, and aquatic -- it lives completely underwater. Over 300 North American dragonfly species occur in North America, displaying endless variations in habitat preference, mating rituals and life cycles. Some of the strangest aspects of the dragonfly's life cycle relate to its parasites. Dragonfly eggs are parasitized by very tiny wasps that fly underwater to find the eggs. Other parasitic wasps have been seen riding on dragonflies waiting for eggs to be laid. A certain biting gnat sucks blood from dragonfly wing veins, even while the dragonfly is flying. Other behavior to watch for is "basking" in sunlight on cold days, "wing-whirring" to warm the wings and keep them at peak efficiency, and "obelisking," or raising the abdomen high to collect less sunlight and keep the body cool. Some dragonflies allow breezes to lift their wings flaglike while others glide on their widened hindwings. ***** NEATNESS AS ABOMINATION A fellow in the vicinity has been busy this week bulldozing the trees and bushes from a ditch running across his large, flat, grassy field. Someone remarked to me how wonderful it is that "things are getting cleaned up around here, really looking neat now." Let it be known that when it comes to neatening up the landscape for neatness' sake, what I see is habitat destruction, and there's nothing neat about it. I use the word "abomination" advisedly. I am aware of the word's religious connotations, for many of us never see that term except in the Bible, where many things are classed as "abominations before the Lord." I use the word not in a religious context, but in a spiritual one, and in my opinion the destruction of life-giving habitat purely for the sake of appealing to the local community's concept of "neatness" is abomination before the spirit of the Creator. For, when you look into the Universe and at the Web of Life on our little Earth, you see plainly that the Creator blossoms diversity out of nothingness, evolves sophistication out of awkwardness, and leaves strands of interdependency among all things. Whatever in spirit goes against this grand and beautiful theme of the Creator is "abomination." The bushes and trees along that little ditch across the field provided a tiny island of habitat for a gorgeous diversity of living beings. A thriving local ecosystem of mutually dependent living things existed in an ocean of ecologically unstable monoculture grass. It was a polyphonic song sung in a desert. And its destruction for the sake of neatening up the landscape is an abomination. ***** BLACK VULTURE AND CONVERGENT EVOLUTION Monday afternoon as I sat working at the computer suddenly there was a solid bang atop the trailer. I assumed a limb had fallen from the big Pecan tree above me. But then I heard claws scratching the aluminum top and all I could think of was the time a large iguana fell onto my tin roof in Belize. My trailer is so small that I can stand in the open door and peep over the roof. I did that and came face to face with a Black Vulture with a wingspread of about 54 inches. Naturally he instantly exploded into a huff of whooshing wings, and vanished behind some trees. I suppose I was lucky to get by with whooshing wings, for vultures are known to indulge in projectile vomiting when upset. Vultures are equipped with powerfully hooked beaks, beautifully designed to tear into flesh, just like a hawk's. However, unlike a hawk, a vulture's feet are weak. This introduces an interesting fact. My old, tattered and moldy birding fieldguide, copyright 1966, places vultures along with hawks and falcons in a single order. In other words, the authors of that book in 1966 assumed that vultures, hawks and falcons were all very closely related, having shared a common ancestor not far back in evolutionary history. One problem with that idea was the vultures' famously weak feet. Recent results from genetic sequencing have shown that our New World vultures are most closely related to storks and ibises, not hawks and falcons. Vultures in Europe and Asia continue to be placed with hawks and falcons, however, since their genes do indeed indicate a common recent ancestor with that group. This is a beautiful example of convergent evolution. Millions of years ago there was an ecological niche open for birds to fill, that of eating carrion. Since the carrion-eating "job" is done most effectively by birds who look and behave in a certain way, eventually, as Old World hawky birds evolved to fill that niche and New World storky birds did the same thing, the two unrelated groups of carrion-eating birds came to look and behave very similarly. It's the same phenomenon that causes many Australian marsupial species to look like similar mammals here, though they are not at all closely related. Also it accounts for South Africa's succulent Euphorbias being so like our American cactuses. ***** ON THE BEAUTY OF CONVERGENT EVOLUTION Back to the vultures' convergent evolution. Again and again in nature you find very unrelated species evolving to look like one another. The reason is always the same: There's an optimum appearance and behavior for a species exploiting any specific ecological niche, so whatever ancestry you have, if you as a species decide to occupy that niche, your appearance and behavior will gradually evolve to the "optimum appearance and behavior" for that niche. For me, the pretty part of this process is the confirmation that abstract ideals exist in nature and that, existing, they manifest themselves in the "real world." These abstract ideals are like ghosts suspended in eternity, beckoning parts of the changing world around them to come closer, to assume the character of the ideal's essence -- to become a material manifestation of the spiritual ideal. Thus the Ghost of Carrion-eating Birds for millions of years beckoned toward the bird world, and out of the mists stepped Old-World members of the hawk order, and New- World members of the stork order. After millennia of walking toward the Ghost of Carrion-eating Birds, the Old-World hawk volunteers and our New-World stork volunteers now look almost the same. What ghost beckons us humans forward as we evolve? What is the abstract ideal toward which we humans are walking out of the mists? What will be our final appearance and behavior? For me, the search to an answer to those questions almost defines what it means to be a spiritual (not a religious) person. One's spiritual quest must be to glimpse the thing toward which humankind walks, and to keep consciously approaching that Holy Ghost, metamorphosing appropriately during the process. My own journey is at an infantile stage, and I see the Ghost only at a very great distance and through profoundly disorienting mists. Yet already I can tell you three things I'm sure this Ghost favors. 1. She favors vitality over inertness. 2. She favors evolution over inaction. 3. She favors diversity over monotony. These insights at first glance seem pretty general and unsexy. However, at this time when the flow of history is getting stuck in mindless conservatism, when fundamentalists deny the existence of biological evolution, and homogenizing "globalization" is the catchphrase of our times, maybe the human character just can't handle more than these elemental insights. ***** CALLUSES This week I've been grubbing Red Buckeye saplings from the hayfields and this has hardened the very slight calluses on my hands. I do just enough hoeing, scything and shoveling to keep respectable hints of calluses on my fingers and palms. These calluses got me remembering and thinking. For two or three summers during the 1980s I was in Ulm, southern Germany, home to "Europe's tallest cathedral," begun in 1377. During my Ulm days, whenever I visited the cathedral I went straight to an obscure little carving in an out- of-the-way corner portraying a naked man absolutely shaggy with long fur. Apparently back in 1377 he had been a famously pious hermit, someone who swore off clothing and other of man's conventions, and in reaction to Germany's habitually cold and rainy weather he had grown long hair all over his body. So, the body can react to harshness in surprising ways. Corned feet once served our barefooted ancestors well. Long before humans had tools and worried much about clothing, maybe all humans looked like the shaggy hermit in Ulm's cathedral. For, the time since humankind emerged from the Stone Age is just a tiny flash at the end of many millennia of humans evolving in the context of small family or tribal units, on the open savannah and in the forest. It's logical to think that today our inherited human genetic code continues producing humans meant to function in our ancestors' long- enduring world, not our recently acquired one. Moreover, our minds, like our bodies, must react to stimuli and the lack of stimuli as if we were still in those distant times. But instead of protective calluses, corns, and shaggy hide, the mind must protect itself with mental armor. Much of my thinking this week has been about what that armor might be. Today the mind reels before the complexity of the societies we humans have invented. Maybe the main "mental callus" protecting our fragile minds -- keeping us from going crazy -- is the ease with which we can withdraw into and identify with gross simplifications -- inflexible, black-and-white doctrines like racism, nationalism, communism, the trickle-down economic theory, and the world's many religions. Grubbing up a Red Buckeye sapling in the middle of a sunny, windswept hayfield, I stare dumbly at the muddy, oversized root, and the sunburned, wrinkled hands holding the root. Crows call and I hear myself breathing. More than a little I sense the out-of-whackness of being what I am, being just here, doing this, the way I am in all this greenness and blueness and odor of crushed grass and earth- smell on the wind and the oily smell of my own skin in the sunlight, the cool wetness in my mouth, the feeling of fresh air rushing into my lungs... indulging in the illusion that Red Buckeyes need to be grubbed out... And what can I do but just laugh and keep grubbing? ***** MOMENTS OF PERFECTION This week the world has been profoundly fresh and vibrant. Showers came and went leaving plants sparkling in spring sunlight, birds put on shows, new flowers blossomed every day, it was neither too hot nor too cold, and the mosquitoes weren't bad. The big Pecan trees above my trailer now sprout leaves and dense, dark clusters of catkins of male flowers. Bugs swarm among the catkins eating pollen, and worms attack the succulent new leaves, so birds rush from branch to branch eating bugs and caterpillars. On Saturday morning several Orchard Orioles and Northern Orioles, both bright-orange-and-black species freshly arrived from the tropics, along with some warblers and woodpeckers, made a gaudy circus above me. Some afternoons white-topped thunderheads built up, and sometimes I just have to escape from the computer and go watch how the clouds' towering tops billow into the dark-blue sky. There's power and purpose in those enormous, rumbling, dark-bottomed clouds. Through my binoculars I see how cloud edges boil and seethe, and I stand imagining the howling, cold winds and mighty electrical charges at play inside the clouds, but when I take down the binoculars, the drama vanishes and all I see is pretty white against pretty blue, and perhaps later there will be a pleasant little shower. Right before dusk there's a fresh spurt of activity among the birds and I walk along the woods' edge looking into the interiors of trees lighted by low-slanting sunlight. What a pleasure just seeing the colors of birds and butterflies in those theaters of glowing green leaves and black limbs gilded with orange sunlight. If I had a million dollars I could never purchase the pleasure and contentment I have enjoyed for free during this past week. ***** HONEYSUCKLE STAGGERS Tuesday morning for the first time this year during my dawn jog I ran through a moist, warm pool of air suffused with the odor of Japanese Honeysuckle. My legs almost buckled as I was swept with a wave of mingled perfume-inspired nostalgia, memories of distant romances, and a need to be intimate and vulnerable... All very un-hermit sensations. Well, it's been shown that much mammalian behavior (and therefore human) is linked to the effects of airborne chemicals known as pheromones -- especially pheromones produced by members of the opposite sex. Pheromones may or may not smell, but one thing they can do is to trigger hormone production, and you know how crazy you get when your hormones act up. Thing is, odor-molecules of flowers are often very similar in shape and size to pheromone molecules. In other words, I got the honeysuckle staggers because my body reacted to the molecules creating the honeysuckle aroma as if they were molecules of sex-associated pheromones. There's been a good bit of research on how certain odors sexually arouse humans. Amazingly, among the most potent of odors is that of lavender combined with pumpkin pie. That fragrance causes a 40% increase in, as the researchers put it, "penile blood flow." The odors of orange, black licorice, cola and Lily-of-the-valley also cause significant excitement. On a spiritual level I find the effects of honeysuckle odor to be confirming with regard to my world view that all us living things, from fern to bee to human, are intimately interrelated, all of the same stuff, all dancing to the same Earth-tunes, and all vulnerable to the same Earth-abuses. I don't mind if a honeysuckle tricks my gonads. It's a good joke, a God-joke. ***** A KETTLE OF HAWKS Late Wednesday afternoon I noticed some hawks overhead and, as I watched, ever greater numbers of the same species began passing by. They were Broad-winged Hawks, and they were all sailing west- northwest, never beating a wing, just gliding in straight lines. Some were fairly low and others were very high. Sometimes they appeared alone, sometimes in small groups, and one cluster of about a dozen passed by. "Cluster" isn't the right word, for this kind of hawk migration is so spectacular that there's a special word for it. I was witnessing the passage of a kettle of Broad-winged Hawks. Actually, my kettle of about 30 wasn't a particularly notable one. Above Duluth, Minnesota up to 10,000 Broad-winged Hawks have been spotted in one day. A more general name for any group of hawks is "cast." It was typical that those Broad- wings glided above me without beating a wing. As Broad-winged Hawks migrate they locate rising air currents, or thermals, and circle inside them until they are high in the sky. Then they break away and glide in their chosen direction, not beating a wing if they can manage, until the next thermal. This fairly common, forest-loving hawk spends winter from southern Mexico south to Peru and Brazil, and in southern Florida.