Nature Red in Beak and Claw, Part Two

My Thursday afternoon ride on my stationary recumbent bike presented me with an interesting conundrum. I've been using the iPad to read Juliet Schor's new book, Plenitude, while I ride, but am easily distracted because the bike is on our screened-in porch, and I've got a nice view of a large pecan tree upon which all manner of activity takes place.

I guess one can tell I'm not a real photographer, or I might have slipped off the bike and tiptoed into my study to get the camera when a nearly full-grown red-tailed hawk alit on a nearly horizonal branch of said tree. I thought he was just resting, and kept an eye on him, but kept riding. By this time my dogs had settled down next to me to watch as well.

We soon discovered just why the hawk had chosen this particular perch. A young squirrel was making his way up the tree, and the hawk sat watching, patiently. The little guy got closer and closer, and turned his back on the bird for a moment. The hawk crept down his branch rather noisily, but the squirrel seemed not to notice. The next time he turned around, however, was his last, because the hawk gracefully lifted his big body up and down onto the tree rat, flew back to his perch, and then down onto the grass, prey between his claws.

The only camera handy was my iPhone, so I tried to snap him on the grass, but he was hidden by some cannas (dash those big leaves!). I got up off the bike for a better shot, but spooked him, so no picture to accompany text. I also lost .10 mile off my workout. Fortunately, Wikimedia Commons came through with a rather lovely shot of a similar event.

A better person than I might have tried to save the squirrel, but as I've mentioned, they're currently the bane of my little domestic world: plants dug up, fruit devoured, pecans wasted (this will be our third year with no yield at all). So I watched silently as nature had its way.

I'm not sure how I would have felt if the little squirrel had screamed in pain, but it didn't. The hawk did his work quietly and efficiently before he flew off to enjoy his meal.

Image credit: Hawk eating prey by Steve Jurvetson. Be sure to read his description of the event he caught on film. Even if I'd had the camera I couldn't have captured anything nearly as amazing. (The link is to his Flickr page, but I found the image on Wikimedia Commons.)

Nature Red in Beak and Claw

Sunday afternoon, which was dreary enough that we stayed indoors, both the Beloved Spouse and I were alerted to potential drama by the squawking cacophony of at least a dozen blue jays in the back yard.

Sure enough, the lot of them were doing their best to scare off our neighborhood punk--a sharp-shinned hawk who thinks our particular back yard is a feeding trough. His usual victims are cotton rats and small squirrels, along with specimens from our abundant supply of English sparrows. This time, though, he snagged himself a fledgling jay.

I took a couple of shots through the screen door, not wanting to interrupt his meal (although he hadn't actually killed it yet), but then tried opening the back door quietly enough to get a cleaner view. I snapped one while he was on the ground, and then he took off, jay in his claws, followed by the unsuccessful defenders. I hadn't had time to set the shutter speed, so all the pictures were blurry--but I did think the photo that serves as my Earth Day "poster" this year ended up looking almost as if I'd planned it that way.

This is, in fact, the third Earth Day on the Farm, and I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the sheer power this planet has exerted this past year, and--oddly, for curmudgeonly person like myself--to appreciate what most people will agree were pretty devastating events. Like the hawk amidst the blue jays, it's all been part of the way things work.

Perhaps we need to be reminded occasionally of who's really in charge here: Mom. Mother Earth, Gaia, Terra, or whatever we choose to call the planet on which we find ourselves living, she's one powerful babe. It seems natural to see her as a her, primarily because she does nurture life in a somewhat motherly fashion: providing us with materials for satisfying our basic needs within what many television series are showing us these days to be spectacularly beautiful, and yet infinitely fragile. If you haven't already, take a look at Planet Earth, Life, and/or Ken Burns's The National Parks. The variety and beauty of the species who share this space consistently drench me in wonder.

But Mother Nature also makes use of an equally wondrous variety of meteorological and geological events to shape and build the planet and that frequently put us in our place. Two major earthquakes and an economically expensive volcanic eruption can serve as timely announcements that human beings do not rule the universe.

Whether these events inflict damage on the undeserving poor in Haiti or Chile or Mexico, or simply disrupt the travel plans of the wealthier members of our globalizing economy, they do call our attention to the devastating power that lies beneath the feet or above the heads of every being living on and within the frail skin of earth and atmosphere we call home.

I keep hoping that disasters will make us wiser; that they will teach us to do better next time--in managing our population, building appropriate infrastructure, making sure that we understand science well enough to prevent much of the human (or even the general biotic) cost of events that shake the land, shift mountains, raise tides, and generate tumultuous winds.

Within every tiny glimmer of hope lies a realization that whatever we're doing, it's not enough. The disease metaphors keep creeping in: cancer, plague, pandemic. Only when I think of these diseases, I think of human beings as being the agents more than the victims.

Our many thoughtless follies, including our greed for things we don't need, and our sybaritic overindulgence in physical pleasure and quest for material wealth, lead us to make unsustainable choices that may not be reversible.

Over the next decade, and ten more Earth Days, we'll inevitably be visited with typhoons, hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis, tornadoes, volcanoes--everything Mom can throw at us while her internal processes are at work. How these "disasters" affect the denizens of this planet will increasingly depend on how human beings manage what's actually within our power.

Do we keep adding more and more population, using more carbon-emitting fossil fuels for power, threatening one another with war, building inappropriate structures in seismically active zones, attracting people to cities that can't sustain them, and living well beyond our environmental means?

We may not have the power to control natural processes, but we do have the power to mitigate the damage they inflict. Whether we choose to live in ways that help prevent the kind of suffering endured in Haiti, or ease the effects of drought on famine-stricken populations, or even encourage ways of traveling that don't lead to economic catastrophe when a volcano erupts, or whether we just go on as we have been--it's up to us. We can choose.

I'm just not convinced that we will.

Nature in Sub-Urbia

Skywatch Friday addendum, 16 April: If I don't cheat and use this as my SWF entry for this week I won't have time for one at all--so here's an update. The evening after I posted what appears below, the moth was still on the screen. But as soon as I switched on the porch light, he fluttered off. I guess I was sort of hoping he was dead, so I could "collect" him--but now I'm just as happy he was just resting for the day. The birds, however, seem to have moved in permanently.

A couple of days ago I was slaving away at the computer, and glanced out the window in front of me to see a gang of Cedar Waxwings frolicking in my birdbath. I say "gang" rather than "flock" because these birds are ruffians. They attack any unwary bush with anything resembling a berry on it, and completely denude it in moments. One day last week, they were busy stripping my pear trees of blossoms. No pears this year.

Right around equinox time they were at the holly, and I can imagine that it's only a matter of time before the pyracantha berries are ripe enough to gobble up.

After their group bathing experience (I only managed to catch three at it, and I had to shoot from inside the house), they gathered to sun themselves in a neighboring tree (see below). As I've mentioned in an earlier post, these birds once used to fly through, eat berries, and leave--after depositing the remainder of their meals on unsuspecting lawn furniture and laundry. Somehow they managed not to poop on the pillowcases drying on the line behind the pecan tree.

Nowadays they seem to treat this place like a cafeteria, especially since the establishment of the Carbon Sink on the southwest corner of the property. There's a lot of privet there, some of it probably contributed by these very birds, as well as the volunteer Chinaberry that grew from seed about six years ago and is now over twenty feet tall. This tree is, of course, thought by many to be a weed, but to me its a link to my Asian childhood, and also to Italy, where I saw it growing as well.

At any rate, when they're through feeding or bathing, they congregate for a nice long squawk, yellow breasts gleaming in the sun. I think I can put up with a bit of bird lime (the color varies with the meal) in exchange for tree ornaments and a concert every now and then. If you'd like to see what they look like in action, YouTube has a whole page of videos.

The latest oddity is the appearance of a Luna moth on the rusty screen door at the entry to the house. Beloved Spouse noticed it last night when he was shutting down the house at bedtime, and I snapped a couple of shots, assuming that the moth would be gone by morning.

But he was still there at sunrise, and so I photographed him from both inside the house and out. I love the shot with the shadow with the grids created by the screen and door muntins, but was especially pleased with the one backlit by the sunrise that opens this post.

I think this is the only time I've seen one of these beauties alive (if, in fact, he is still alive, and didn't just choose to die on my screen door; I didn't poke him for fear that he'd fly away). I knew they were in the neighborhood because I found a wing once when I was cleaning up the garden.

I'm heartened by the continued appearance of evolution's incredibly varied results, because in moments when I think we might be getting stupider and stupider as a species, something might survive our (ahem) lunacy. I guess it's just time to stop reading the op/ed pages of the Daily Poop, and certainly stop watching really bad doomsday movies (we caught the train wreck called Armageddon a couple of nights ago; very messy, stupid science, but a tear-jerker nonetheless).

Every time I drive by a manicured lawn (in the very economical and ecologically correct Vera, who has already rewarded me with four leaves for good driving) I can't help but feel slightly morally superior, knowing that my ratty, 100% organic yard has become a haven for all manner of flora and fauna. The Carbon Sink is now a jungle, full of edible goose grass, which is great in salads and cures all manner of ailments. Last year it was cow parsley, but this year the late winter rains seem to have drowned out some of that, and what the kids used to call "sticky weed" has replaced it.

The Beloved Spouse mowed on Sunday, and although back quarter-acre doesn't exactly look like Augusta National (many of the plants for which various holes on the course are named actually grow in my yard, too), it's rather more civilized now that it's been shorn; at least the clumps of assorted wild grassy stuff are all relatively the same height. I do wonder, when I'm sitting out enjoying it all, whether our lack of a chemical lawn service is going to make it more difficult for my neighbor to sell her manse (asking price is $519K). But I'm thinkin' that the kind of folk who don't like my yard will do one of two things: not buy the house, or put up a fence (saving me the trouble of repairing mine, and giving me something to hang bird feeders on). I live in hope that people will love the house (it looks rather like Morris's Kelmscott Manor), and think having scruffy, farmer-wannabe neighbors with a suburban wildlife sanctuary is a good thing.

Images: all taken with the Nikon D80, with minimal adjustments in PhotoShop.

Nature and/as Nurture

One reason I don't like watching much television is not just because of advertisements, but because an increasingly large number of these ads seem to concern drugs. It seems that every other male (particularly the ones who watch evening news programs and sports events) in the country suffers from "ED." Cholesterol medications even start messing with language (according the the Crestor people, "athero" is an acceptable alternative to "atherosclerosis." Never mind that "athero" by itself only refers to half the equation: the fatty deposits alone, not the hardening thereof). The assumption that people are becoming too stupid or lazy to pronounce the disease properly may not be far off the mark, but should advertisers be pandering to them? An unnerving number of ads refer to sleep inducers or antidepressants, suggesting that things are getting to be just too much for us, to the extent that we're willing (or should be, according to the ads) to put up with all manner of horrific-sounding side effects in order to regain our equanimity.

But all this makes me wonder how much our modern ailments depend on our technologically mediated lives. The human species evolved with much simpler tools that required active participation to manipulate, so I suspect that we weren't particularly fat 100,000 years ago. A certain girth, in fact, probably indicated fertility in women, since we now know that when body fat falls below 10% ovulation and menses can cease. The earliest portable artworks, such as the Woman from Willendorf and the recently discovered ivory carving from Hohle Fels cave in Germany, may well have been fertility talismans (instead of Paleolithic porn as the news wonks seem to prefer. For anyone interested on my take regarding persistent sexism in art interpretation, I'm working on a related post for The Owl of Athena).

Of course, our distant ancestors were always in danger of being offed by some preditor, or by other mishaps, but people didn't settle into habitats without a reliable supply of food sources, so unless climates shifted too quickly, early hunter-gatherers might have well have been lean, and they almost certainly weren't plagued by the scourges of obesity. Women who successfully bear children, however, tend to have large breasts, stomachs, and thighs, so it shouldn't be surprising that evidence of fertility should prove to be an admirable quality. And after a hard day of gathering and felling game, people probably didn't have much trouble getting to sleep--even if they might have been a bit anxious about the size of that mammoth herd down the valley.

I'm not saying that lives in the past were necessarily healthier than those we live now, but it's hard not to come to the conclusion that certain aspects of those lives might indeed have generated fewer of the lifestyle illnesses to which we are now prey. Although genes for high cholesterol and diabetes were undoubtedly floating around, if you don't have the luxury of getting fat from inactivity and indulge in a diet heavy on the Big Macs and soda pop, those genes may not have a chance to kill off the carriers. Other perils may have contributed to shorter life spans (things like new strains of flu and plague, not to mention infections and the like), but these would have been accidents of nature rather than the consequences of excess.

Some of us, because of peculiar combinations of nature and nurture, are doomed to require life-long medication with potentially dangerous drugs in order to live out our artificially lengthened lifespans. I for one am immeasurably grateful to the folks who invented statins and especially to those who discovered that a substance originally used as rat poison could actually help keep people with certain heart conditions manage the clotting rate of their blood. I'm also really glad that human beings are smart enough be able to replace defective body parts or functions with mechanical substitutes. I'm on my second round of not being dead because of advances (not miracles, mind you, because they were invented by brilliant people who know exactly why they work) made in medical science that, if I start behaving more like our distant ancestors, may well extend my life significantly.

The bottom line is that we have choices, and we should be making better ones. No one is forcing us to eat fatty hamburgers or guzzle high-fructose corn syrup or pull carcinogen-laden smoke into our lungs. If we have functioning arms and legs and half a brain, we can get our butts moving, get a lot more exercise, learn to eat more healthfully, and obviate the need for most of the drugs that are causing me to wear out the mute button on my remote control.

Come to think of it, I kind of miss the exercise I used to get from getting up off the couch to turn down the volume. So maybe the real answer is, like the song goes, to blow up the TV. Spend all that time out in the garden, growing our own food, taking care of our own land, calming our own anxieties, relieving our own stress, building useful muscle mass and reducing our body mass indices without the need of pills or the advertising designed to sell them. Who knows. Maybe watching all those birds going at the business of making baby birds might inspire solutions to other problems as well. (The illustration is of the cunning birdhouse my daughter bought me for Mother's Day; it's roughly fashioned after the Shasta Airflyte trailer I dream of securing to use as a guest house in the back of my garden.)

For the record, I spent a couple of hours this morning pulling weeds, transplanting escaped violets, cat mint, and chamomile, sweeping pecan catkins off the patio and onto the compost heap, and admiring the nasturtiums I've finally been able to grow, thanks to all the wet, dank weather. Now, having probably over-reached my capabilities (I'm just six weeks post-op), I'll retire to a lawn chair with a good book and work on the inside of my skull for a while. The day is lovely, and this weather won't last for long, so I'll let nature nurture me while I can.