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Jargon-Free Gardening

I just did something I love to do: surf the net looking at pictures of beautiful gardens. They’re so inspiring, especially when I look out my window on a late September morning and view my weedy, out of control garden. Next year I’ll plan better and stay on top of things, I like to promise myself.

Ancient Egyptians used "permaculture," too!

There was something off-putting about the surfing this time, however: I noticed all the trendy technical mumbo-jumbo. Perhaps because of my full-time career in academia, I’m sensitive to the over-use of jargon. These garden photos proclaimed their association with big words that actually belie simple origins. For example:

• Permaculture = the way our grandparents gardened
• Bio-integrated = the way our grandparents would turn the chickens into the garden to clear the weeds and eat the bugs
• Polyculture = the way our grandparents gardened because they wanted to have more than one crop to eat throughout the winter
• Regenerative gardening = taking a beat up patch up earth and gardening it the way our grandparents gardened.

It makes it even worse that most of the photos include some 20-something couple with their free-range toddler, their hair unmussed, and their skin clear of dirt even after a day of permaculture gardening in their cute little L.L. Bean Wellies. Sometimes one of them is holding a happy-looking chicken. There is almost always a dog present, a dog that apparently loves to wear bandanas around its neck.

Why does this bug me? Let's face it: I'm jealous of that couple! But a more intellectual reason is because it turns gardening or small-scale farming into a technical, textbook, jargony pursuit that, to me, goes against what’s beautiful about these techniques: that they are letting nature takes its course. Save the multisyllabic words for the GMO industry, please!

Another: because it’s all too trendy. If you tell people to eat better and exercise more to lose weight, that sounds boring and slow and hard - and anyway, that’s what their parents used to tell them and they’re sick of hearing it. Instead, they want a diet with a name and industry behind it: books, websites, expensive packaged goods coming in the mail. Same with gardening. If you tell people to take care of the soil and use mulch and compost to keep it healthy, and to reduce pesticides and herbicides because they’re ultimately polluting and harmful, and to get down on their knees and do some weeding, and to plant some flowers in the garden because they’re pretty and will draw nice insects - all that sounds boring and slow and hard. But tell them that they’re part of the “permaculture revolution” or the “regenerative farming movement” or the “trend toward urban polyculture,” then maybe you’ll grab them (and their money and support and presence at your public lecture).

Unfortunately, trends don’t last. And science and technical stuff are great, but they’ve also gotten us into some trouble when it comes to gardening and farming. What all these fancy names and trends stand for - getting back to nature - is supposed to be the antidote to all that. It’s supposed to be where the relationship between humans and nature becomes easier, clearer, more impulsive, more real.

So surf the web, grab some ideas, appreciate the fresh young beauty of millennial farmers as they stand outside their trendy tiny house. But then go plant something and enjoy watching it grow. Let your hands scoop into the soil. Appreciate the process. And call it something simple, like “gardening.”

The Individual vs. the Species

I recently read an amazing book: American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West, by Nate Blakeslee. It tells the story of the release of wolves into Yellowstone National Park, and it follows “characters” in a novelistic style: the wolves themselves, the elk hunters who hate the wolves, the politicians, and the various employees of U.S. Fish & Wildlife who have to balance the science, the wildlife, and the politics. It’s a fascinating read - just the kind of book I would love to write. 

One of the tensions described in the book exists between those who see wolves as a species and those who see wolves as individuals. It is easy to fall in love with the individual wolves as Blakeslee describes their struggles to survive, find mates, protect their young, hunt and feed, and maintain their territory. A wolf life is a hard life, and you can’t help but admire an individual who is particularly good at the game or overcomes enormous obstacles to come out on top. When a hunter kills Oh-Six, a magnificent wolf with an online following from around the world, her loss destroys the pack altogether. Oh-Six’s fans are so enraged that they come together to turn the local anti-wolf political tide.

Wolves chasing bull elk in Yellowstone.
Photo by Doug Smith, Public Domain.

For hunters and many FWS employees, however, the emphasis is on the species. As long as the species is healthy and has sufficient numbers to survive, the loss of individuals cannot matter. Hunters have played a role in maintaining the health of many species, either by promoting habitat or culling overpopulated numbers. To them, the presence of too many wolves lowers the number of elk drastically, meaning that hunters cannot enjoy hunting as many did before. And before you start dismissing these hunters as nothing better than the trophy hunter who killed Cecil the Lion a couple of years ago, remember that many hunters are subsistence hunters, providing meat to their families that would otherwise be unaffordable or because they believe that meat from the factory farming system is unhealthy.

I started reading another book a couple of years ago about scientists trying to figure out bird migration and nest-building patterns among migrating songbirds. They would wreak havoc on individual birds in order to understand the species better. For example, they would kill or relocate males to assess how and when other males would move into their territory. I was so upset that I couldn’t continue reading. I kept thinking: what do those individual birds care about the species? You’re ruining their lives! I feel the same when I hear about efforts to keep nearly-extinct species extant by caging them and raising them in captivity so that maybe they can be released into the wild someday. If we could ask these individuals whether they wish to sacrifice themselves as individuals to save their species, what would they say? And yet how can we sit by and not do everything possible to keep species from going extinct?

Laos Cattle Keeping, photo by ILRI Stevie Mann.
CC NY-BC-SA 2.0

All of this seems to boil down to what “use” we see animals serving. And culture matters here. Those of us who are taught to see animals primarily as pets or as objects to be viewed at a zoo may be more likely to anthropomorphize them, or give them the human qualities that allow us to see them as individuals. Those whose cultural context shapes them to see animals as populations to be studied or managed are able to look at the woods rather than the trees. And then there are those people in the world who live closely with animals as part of their livelihood; they seem able to take both views at once. They have to distance themselves from the animals as individuals in order to herd, transport, or kill and butcher them. And yet, living so closely with them, they come to notice and admire their individual traits and tendencies, what many would insist are their “personalities.”

Who is right? Which attitude is best for the short- and long-term wellbeing of wildlife? It’s hard to say. Maybe we need the combination of perspectives, and the push and pull of debate, to reverse the harm we have done to the world’s wildlife. And Blakeslee's book offers a poignant reminder: we must also try to understand one another and the human experiences that we bring to the debate.

That Bomb Cyclone is Gonna Open Up a Can of Whoop-Ass on the East Coast, Y'all!

It’s no surprise that those of us who love our pets and other animals tend to anthropomorphize, or project our human emotions, onto them. But storms? Come on.

Hurricane viewed from the International Space Station.

During the terrible 2017 hurricane season, many newspaper headlines described the “fury” or the “wrath” of a particular hurricane. “Menacing” “monster” storms “ravaged” human settlements. I kept waiting for some newspaper in the South to claim that a hurricane was gonna “open up a can of whoop-ass” on some poor coastal city, but the media never quite went that far. (So I’ve done it myself, in the above headline.)

And now we’re hearing about the “bomb cyclone.” According to Wednesday’s Washington Post, the bomb cyclone is quite a nasty human being. After it “blasts” the East Coast, it’s going to “punish” it, “assault” it, and “batter” it. East Coast people take note: you need to get a restraining order against that son of a bitch! Meanwhile the polar vortex is going to take it easy and do some uncorking. No, not of wine, silly. According to the article's headline, it’s going to “uncork tremendous cold.”

Hurricanes are natural phenomena that develop because of water temperatures and wind. They hit where they hit. They’re not particularly angry about anything. If anything, I would expect them to be happy that rising global temperatures may make better conditions for hurricanes. Why must we turn them into angry, vengeful human beings - even menacing estranged boyfriends on a mean streak after getting out of prison - in order to get the point across that they cause a great deal of damage and death and heartbreak?

Likewise, a bomb cyclone is simply a low-pressure storm that suddenly intensifies, causing high winds and winter weather. I lived in Boston for eleven years, and we were pretty darn used to icy temperatures and extreme snow. We used simple, descriptive names like “Nor’easter” to describe these storms, i.e. a blizzard that blows in from the Northeast. Oh, sure, we might have called the storm “wicked,” but that was not a judgment about the moral failings of an anthropomorphized storm. We used that term for a lot of things: wicked good pizza, a wicked fast car, and so on. Using the term “bomb cyclone” is not going to make the snow any easier or harder to shovel off the sidewalk.

Au Revoir, Summer!

It’s August - better known as the month I ruin by complaining the whole time that the summer is almost over. I love spring and early summer: the birds, the soft sunshine, the longer days, and the relaxed let’s-get-together-outside nature of friendships. But in August, the birds grow more quiet. The garden goes from abundant to weedy and overgrown. The sun seems too hot and the days too short. And the first day of the coming semester looms like a shadow over my carefully-cultivated summer-break calm and tranquility.

"Baby Eastern Bluebird" by Mark Theriot CC BY-NC-NC 2.0

But, as often happens when I take a long walk down our country road, nature had a lesson to teach me this morning. I was reminded that life comes in seasons and the fullness of life doesn’t diminish in fall and winter. It simply changes. Even though the birds may get quieter and begin to migrate away, there is still a wonderful bird-ness about August. Today I saw flocks of blackbirds and Canada geese feeding on the cut grain fields. I saw young, speckle-breasted bluebirds, trying their hand at hunting for insects, which are plentiful in the August heat. In fact, I saw lots of juvenile birds, and heard them, too; the beauty of the dawn chorus has been replaced by the amusing sounds of recent fledglings trying to mimic the adults. I heard a Northern Flicker cry out over and over again, in a time with the adults have mostly grown silent - it even attempted drumming a few times against the hollow wood of a snag. A fluffy little blue jay, in a rare moment of vulnerability for such a tough, canny species, cawed over and over again.

"Mother's Love" by Victoria Samuel USFWS CC BY 2.0

And then I looked through binoculars at a funny brown spot at the edge of the distant wood and made out a turkey, and then another turkey, and then lots of turkeys straggling in and out of the boundary of the wood: four hens and the twelve poults of their collective nursery. Later I saw a fawn, grown quite big but still with spots, looking at me curiously. Then it followed its mother across the road and disappeared into a cornfield. August is still alive - and magical.

And I relearned the rather trite lesson that everything has its season. We must move on to fall, and fall will be beautiful in its own way. Then there’s Christmas, and winter, and those first couple of snowfalls are indeed breathtaking. There may be fewer birds left at that point, but they’re easier to get to know. They spend their time nearer to us as we bring food to the feeder and crack the ice on the birdbath, and we can observe them more readily on the bare branches of trees. Then, just when we think we can’t take winter any longer, there are those marvelous days of March that hint at spring. Slowly, once again, the world comes back to life. And then I spend another August trying not to lament the end of summer.

"Sunset over Cornfield," by Johan Neven CC BY 2.0

I think we’re seasonal creatures living in a culture that tries to erase the seasons. We live a moderate-temperature life in our homes, no matter the weather outside. We buy strawberries and apples all year round. Christmas decorations show up in Walmart starting in September. It feels good to be outside on an August day, observing the specific pulse of life that happens only in August, and to bid summer au revoir rather than adieu.

Litter, Litter Everywhere!

 Is it just me, or is our litter problem getting worse? I live on a country road in Maryland, and every day there are more plastic bottles, McDonald’s sacks, beer cans, paper napkins, and Big Gulp containers than the day before.

One of the many ways that plastic trash can affect the health and growth of
wildlife. Photo by Ian Kirk from Broadstone, Dorset, UK CC BY 2.0

Not only is the litter unsightly, it harms wildlife. One of the reasons animals get hit by cars is that they are attracted to roadsides and medians by the delicious smells of our litter. The last couple of times I’ve gone up Interstate 81, a 60- or- so-mile stretch from Hagerstown, MD, to Harrisburg, PA, I’ve noted ten or more dead birds of prey along the median - an alarmingly high number for that amount of space! The median is covered with litter, which no doubt attracts mice, which no doubt attract red-tailed hawks, which are no match for the steady stream of 18-wheelers going down the road at 65 miles per hour.

Food trash on the side of an Arkansas highway

I keep thinking about four possible explanations for all this litter. First, we are eating more and more crap from fast food restaurants and gas stations, which require plastic forks, plates, and cups, and paper napkins. We buy this unhealthy stuff, eat it in our cars, and then pitch it out the window. It makes me sad to think that most of the litter is from completely unnecessary purchases of so-called food that, for health reasons, we shouldn’t be consuming in the first place - and that we’re consuming our meals in our cars instead of at home with our families.

Second, in some places, local governments are providing fewer services, including trash collection. In our rural area, we have to pay for both trash collection and recycling, and they are expensive. Some of our neighbors choose to pay a smaller fee and haul their own trash to the dump. And some people choose to throw their trash on the side of the road: big kitchen garbage bags full of waste, television sets, tires, and all kinds of other things that cost big money to get rid of.

Third, I wonder if the increasing litter is a sign of Americans’ decreasing interest in the social contract. We don’t trust our government, we don’t like our neighbors, we feel this country isn’t giving us enough, and so we don’t mind junking up the roadways, even in our own neighborhoods. Think I’m making this up? I was talking to someone just the other day who said he never used to litter but now he does. His explanation? “I hate this #%!*ing state!”

Finally, I can’t help but think that the litter problem is related to our attenuated relationship with nature. Important books have been written in recent years about how we are spending less time in nature and how that harms us physically, emotionally, and psychologically - especially children. Perhaps people do not appreciate nature as a rich setting that we share with trees and animals and insects and depend on for clean air and water; perhaps instead people see it as empty space, a wasteland that may as well be trashed as not.

What do you think?

Stoopid Birds!

I often hear people make comments along the lines of: “Today a bird flew right into my window. Stoopid bird!” or “Stoopid ducks - why are they crossing a busy highway?”

But what’s really stupid - or maybe “silly” or “surprising” or even “horrifying” is the better word - is that we as humans have the expectation that wild birds should figure out our unnatural human world and make accommodations for it. In the last few decades, we seem to reason, wild birds should have evolved an understanding of reflective windows in houses and how dangerous they are. And they certainly should have figured out what a highway is and how to avoid it, even if it is inconveniently located between a prime nesting spot and a desired body of water.

"Barn Swallow," by Linda Tanner CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

In fact, birds make surprising accommodations to our human world and its infringement on their own. In The Bluebird Effect (one of my favorite books!), naturalist and artist Julie Zickefoose writes that in multiple incidents recorded in the U.S. and Japan, barn swallows have figured out how to open the sliding glass doors in big-box stores and warehouses. They identify the motion-activated electric eye unit and hover in front of it until the doors slide open. Then the birds quickly fly in (or out) before the doors close. Successive generations learn the technique from their parents, such that a Home Depot in Maplewood, Minnesota, has had a barn swallow colony return every year to nest inside the store since 2000!

"Put Me Back! House Finch Greets the World,"
by John Flannery CC BY-SA 2.0

And this article and video summarize a recent experiment by Mexican scientists seeking to explain why urban house finches have the odd behavior of stuffing discarded cigarette butts into their nests. The scientists theorize that it’s a pest-control technique: the cigarette butts ward off blood-sucking ticks that otherwise infest their nests. It turns out that nicotine has some anti-parasite properties.

Despite these happy stories, overall our human world is changing the bird world much too fast for the birds to keep up. Bird numbers are declining - alarmingly fast for some species - because we’re clearing their habitat, poisoning the insects they eat and the water they drink, interfering with their migration by putting windmills in their path and lighting up the night sky, and so on. (For more information, see the 2016 State of North America's Birds report.)

Even the clever little house finches haven’t yet caught on that those discarded cigarette butts - one of the world’s greatest sources of environmental pollution, by the way - are causing genetic damage to their chicks by interfering with cell division. But doesn’t that make us humans, the ones who throw out the cigarette butts in the first place, the stoopid ones?

Driving My Dad, Part 2

Last week I wrote of my dad's civil engineering view of nature and the growing belief over his lifetime that nature should be put in service of humans. I was thinking a great deal about his perspective during my recent month-long stay in Beijing, China, and its environs.

Over the last ten years, China has embarked on the world's largest reforestation program, spending as much as $100 billion planting trees. In case that passed by you, let me repeat it: ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS.

China has done this in response to some pretty dire environmental (and economic) concerns: desertification, soil erosion, air pollution, and runoff into waterways. But recent data shows that this effort has been useless at best and disastrous at worst. Non-native, genetically engineered, and ecologically inappropriate trees have been planted where trees previously did not exist. Monocultures of poplar and other tree species have been planted, inviting disease and insect infestation. Mixed-growth forests have been felled and plantations of "economically useful" (such as rubber) trees planted in their place.

A tree-planting program in Hebei Province, glimpsed from a bus.

What was immediately apparent to me in Beijing was the fact that tree-planting programs had been conducted in defiance of basic ecological and biodiversity approaches. I saw rows and rows and rows of one species of tree, each individual exactly the same age and size, planted exactly the same width apart, with no weeds or undergrowth allowed. One recent study showed that biodiversity actually declined when agricultural land was reforested with monoculture plantings in China: bird species took a modest hit and bee species a drastic one.

At the Temple of Heaven, imperial building styles show symmetry and clean lines.

Always thinking like a cultural anthropologist, I immediately wondered if there must be some cultural preference for this kind of planting. Vague notions of “feng shui” came to mind, something about harmony and order. I had noted the perfect symmetry and clean lines of many of the imperial buildings we visited in Beijing, such as the Temple of Heaven. They were surrounded by parks and gardens characterized by these same too-perfect plantings. I remembered feeling oppressed in such places, even as I admired their beauty, because of that carefully constructed perfection. I was also creeped out by the lack of wildlife and insects, other than magpies and a couple of other bird species that I saw again and again.

The symmetry and clean lines continue into the plantings of the Temple of Heaven park.

A bit of research suggests that my assumptions about culture were both right and wrong. Traditional Chinese gardens were, yes, very composed, but in such a way as to fill the human eye with a mixed portrait of trees, flowers, water, rocks, and buildings. Each vista was intended to provide a diverse offering of human-nature interactions brought into harmony and accord. Interaction with the West in the 19th century and beyond brought a new fashion: green grass, neat plantings of trees and flowers, and long views of lawn. It turns out those oppressive parks I saw represent a Western aesthetic taken to a Chinese extreme.

The Purple Bamboo park in Beijing, showing the traditional Chinese garden style.

I think the monoculture tree plantings represent a syncretism: the ancient Chinese love for composing nature for human pleasure, combined with a Western love for taming nature for human control, combined with a contemporary Chinese belief in planning nature through science and technology for human benefit. The scale of Chinese planning is breathtaking. The cities in North China are running out of water, so the Chinese government is rerouting some of the Southern rivers and piping water up to the North. The desert is growing, so the Chinese government is planting acres and acres of eucalyptus trees in hopes of containing it. Beijing has a lot of smog in part because there isn't enough wind to blow it out, so the Chinese government is building tall forests that will reroute the wind to and through Beijing.

I see a lot of Dad's point of view in the way that China is managing nature today. I hear echoes of my father saying, "All the big problems in the world today are engineering problems." But there is something deep within me that rejects the idea that nature can limitlessly serve humans and be addressed primarily through engineering, and I can't help but feel that China's failing reforestation efforts prove me right.

Driving My Dad, Part 1

In the last several years of his life, my father and I loved to go on car rides together. I would drive while he would point out landmarks: a creek where people used to be baptized, the location of one of the peach sheds that marked Arkansas’s long ago past as a major peach producer, a hillside thick with cedar trees indicating the presence of limestone. He knew so much about the history and the topography of southwest Arkansas, and I always learned a lot.

These car rides harkened back to many such car rides with him when I was a little girl. I loved to ride in the car, snooze on and off, and stare out the window and daydream as he told me long and (to my child’s mind) boring stories about his work life or a civil engineer’s view on the merits of asphalt versus concrete roadways. (I’ll never forget one car ride adventure, when I was around eight or nine years old. We stopped at a gas station, and I asked if I could have some money to buy some candy. “Sure,” he said and gave me a dollar. A week or so later he asked, “Where’s that dollar you owe me?” A child of the Depression for sure!)

In later years, there was something that frustrated him more and more on our rides together. He would see a brushy fencerow, or a stand of scraggly trees along the side of the road, or a weedy pasture, and shake his head in disgust. “Who would let that go to waste like that? I hate to see it!” he would complain fiercely. “I just don't know why a person or a government would allow that to happen.” That would lead into a discussion, again a civil engineer’s view of the world: rivers are meant to produce power, fields are meant to nurture crops or feed animals or grow pine trees for the local paper mills, and roadsides are meant to look neat and clean and tidy, showcasing good management of shared public property.

I look at those same scraggly places and see sources of food and cover for wildlife, fields that could grow grasses to sustain the breeding of the many grassland bird species now in rapid decline, and roadsides of bee-covered wildflowers and weeds. “But Daddy, what about the wildlife?” I would ask, knowing how much he loved birds and wildlife, too. He would grunt or answer noncommittally and move on to the next topic. I got the message: wildlife shouldn’t get in the way of progress.

Dad’s point of view made me think of centuries of rugged people in America logging forests, diverting waterways, building canals and bridges, and mowing lawns. They saw the land as something to be put to use and managed, something that would help them survive or make them grow rich. And the land and water have given us much. I’ve written previously about how we’ve also developed a preference for mowed yards and careful landscaping, a containment of nature. But it seems to me that we’re realizing now the importance of the scraggly, the unmanaged, the wild.

A few days ago I returned from spending a month in China, where I observed the manifestations of a cultural and historical context that has viewed nature as something to be organized, managed, and brought into harmony. More on that in Part 2. Hint: this photo of a tree-planting project shows neat, weed-free rows of one species of tree, with the same precisely-measured distance between each individual. I think Dad would approve!

Nature Human Is on Hiatus!

It's been a while since I posted, and it will be a little longer still. Nature Human is on hiatus. I will begin posting again on Thursday, July 6, and every Thursday thereafter. Thanks for checking in!

Bake Sales for Crabs

I wrote a blog post for the City Creatures Blog at the Center for Humans and Nature! Please read it by clicking on this link.

I Love My Cats. Do They Love Me?

Chili, the angel.

Our cat Chili is an angel. All she requires is regular food and water, a little daily string chasing, a warm lap to curl up in every time she gets a chance, and a hefty amount of independence.

Lemmon, on the other hand, is a whiny pest. She follows us around, mewling and trilling and stretching up to try to turn the doorknobs of doors she wants us to open. When I open the pantry for any reason, she runs across the house hoping to be fed. She stations herself in the path where she knows I will walk next, desperate even for the attention of being kicked accidentally. I can never feed her enough food or play with her for a long enough period of time to satisfy her insatiable desires.

Lemmon, in a calm moment.

Or so it used to be. Although I love her desperately even at her whiniest, I was concerned that she wasn’t behaving in a healthy way. I did quite a bit of reading online about needy and demanding cats and finally happened upon an article stating that focused attention for a few minutes a day could turn these behaviors around. The author wrote of the importance of holding and petting a needy/whiny cat like Lemmon, looking in her eyes, and telling her how much I love her, repeating her name over and over again. Believe it or not, it works! At first it was hard for her to get used to being held like a baby, and she seemed to feel a bit strange about all the eye contact (as cats do). But now she settles right in and blinks at me happily as I repeat her name and coo at her. Sometimes she reaches her paws up towards my face, and a couple of times she has even bitten or licked me softly on my nose and cheeks. Five or ten minutes of this special time calms her down for a long time; a couple of sessions usually last the whole day.

Recently my husband and I watched The Lion in Your Living Room, a Netflix documentary about cats and how, even after millennia of domestication, they retain their wild behaviors. It was fascinating. But the documentary didn’t cover the emotional lives of cats, didn’t seek to explain moments like my special times with Lemmon. Is her growing calmness in my arms simply a reliving of her days as a kitten, turning instinctively to her mother for food and warmth and security? Or do we share an emotional relationship that exists beyond instinct?

Scholars in Animal Studies are currently studying this question: do animals experience emotions and, if so, what is the nature of those emotions? The field bifurcates: domesticated animals whose lives are wrapped up with those of humans may or may not have an emotional life different from that of free-ranging animals. The problem is that scientists cannot ask animals to explain their emotions, so they must infer them from their behaviors. (Of course, just because humans can explain their emotions doesn’t mean we fully understand those either!) Moments of play, courtship, and sharing of food suggest that animals are experiencing such emotion as joy, love, and care, respectively. The behaviors of hanging onto a dead relative or mate with a dejected air - which has been documented in many species of mammals and birds - suggest grief. The next question is how long these “emotions” last. Can animals be said to have real emotions if they are fleeting, unlike humans, who can remember and dwell on emotions such as grief for years?

There are also promising directions in research involving brain imaging, showing what areas of the brain light up when animals see other animals or humans or food or toys. And physical measurements can be taken: heart rate, eye movements, and so on. But then there is the problem of interpretation, as in studies of the human brain: explaining what is happening is much easier than figuring out why.

I think about these questions as I hold my little Lemmon. I’m glad we’re trying to answer them even though I’m not convinced we’ll ever really know the nature of animal emotions. Some scholars argue quite convincingly that humans are simply projecting our own emotions onto those animal behaviors. But it’s amazing enough to me to me that two such very different creatures as Lemmon and I can snuggle, let everything else go, look each other in the eye, and simply feel good in each other’s company. Isn’t that already pretty remarkable? And it sure feels like love to me.

The Seven Bird Gifts of Christmas

On Christmas Eve, I can’t help but notice that most of the gifts given in “The Twelve Days of Christmas” are birds:

Seven swans a-swimming

Six geese a-laying

Five golden rings

Four calling birds

Three French hens

Two turtle doves

And a partridge in a pear tree. 

Wait, you say! Golden rings aren’t birds. Well, not a lot is known about the origins of the song, but many speculate that, in keeping with the other kinds of gifts mentioned, the five rings may refer to rings on a bird, such as the ring-necked pheasant, or perhaps to the “goldspinks," which shows up in an old Scottish version, a reference to the goldfinch. Another clarification: “calling” birds is a more recent term. Older versions refer to “collie birds,” which are blackbirds (think black like coal), or “canary birds.” French hens are basically chickens.

Xavier Romero-Frias, "Twelve Days of
Christmas Song Poster," CC BY-SA 3.0

This very old song probably originated as a children’s memory and forfeit game, where one child keeps advancing until making a mistake in trying to remember all the words, and then the next child gets a turn. Since the song is about Advent gift giving (probably from a lover to his love), this implies that at the time of its origin birds were considered among the very best gifts possible. One can imagine that birds represented all kinds of ideas that a lover would wish to convey to his beloved: beauty (swans), fertility (geese laying eggs), nourishment (pheasants and hens), cuddling (turtle doves), and romantic love (partridge, with its heart-shaped breast). It also shows the agricultural base of the context, calling up an image of maids a-milking (perhaps another nod to fertility), surrounded by farm animals such as geese and chickens.

In short, this silly song provides another example of how we invoke animals as symbols in our relationships to one another.

So Merry Christmas to you all. Thank you for the gift you give me of reading my blog! In return, I give you this old video of a wonderful parody of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” by the a cappella group Straight No Chaser.

Unnatural Nature

What is “nature?”

Recently I’ve been noticing that some of my favorite nature spots are not sprawling wilderness. They are sites with a history of heavy human activity. When I was in my hometown of Nashville, Arkansas, recently, I walked most days on the “nature trail” at the City Park. It is a beautiful half-mile trail that meanders through an overgrown pecan grove, by a lazy creek, and past an old cow pasture. The land was a farm once, and the landowner donated the land to the park. There are places along the asphalt trail to stop and read signs about how to look for and appreciate nature, even among the carefully planted rows of pecan trees.

Closer to home, I love to walk on the battlefields of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where I work. There is no place around here more serene, at least outside of tourist season. There are pastures, woods, a creek, and small, picturesque hills. I never fail to see a myriad of birds, squirrels, chipmunks, and sometimes deer. But these trails are part of a so-called commemorative landscape covered with monuments to Union and Confederate units. The ground is soaked in the blood of tens of thousands of soldiers who died in a brutal three-day battle. And, if you'll notice in the photo, there are plenty of con trails in the clear blue skies overhead.

"Flower in a Sidewalk Crack", by Fuzzy Gerdes (unaltered), CC BY 2.0

If these two places qualify as “nature,” then what about the garden in my backyard? And if that qualifies, what about potted garden plants on an urban balcony? Or the tuft of grass that sticks out of an urban sidewalk crack and provides cover for the occasional beetle? Or a zoo full of wildlife?

Google provides the following definition of nature: “the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations.” Hmm. That definition disqualifies all of the above, which are human creations - or, perhaps, places where the physical world struggles to exist in spite of human interference.

Earthlights 1994-95, captured by NASA

Every geological epoch is given a name to reflect the major occurrences of that period. Although the international bodies that decide these things have not approved it, the current age has been unofficially named the Anthropocene to convey the great impact that humans have had on the earth since our existence. When you think about it, there is hardly any aspect or location of nature that has not been impacted by humans. We have changed the soil, air, water, atmosphere, and seismic activity of this planet. We have changed the genetic structure of plants and animals. We have moved into almost every territory. A CNN travel article online, entitled “10 of the World’s Last Great Wilderness Areas,” includes hotel recommendations for each of them!

So does that mean the whole planet can no longer be considered “nature?” Of course not.

I like that we call the unnatural “nature.” It reminds me that nature is all around us and that we are part of nature as well. It shows me that we don’t have to go to great pains to go out into nature; instead we can begin to appreciate nature as it exists around us. It suggests to me that the kind of human-nature integration that we think only occurred in the past, or is now only accessible to indigenous peoples and hermits, can be ours, too, if we simply decide to slow down and pay attention to what is all around us.

Land of Memory

Each semester in my Introduction to Cultural Anthropology class, I assign a reading about Apache place names by Keith Basso. The Apache, like other indigenous peoples, locate their moral system within the landscape. The place where a particular crime occurred, for example, becomes a perpetual reminder of right action and the consequences of bad choices. This is one of the reasons that indigenous peoples cannot simply be relocated to a new piece of land: that new landscape does not hold their cultural and moral memory as a people.

The house in the woods

Over the last few weeks, I have traveled home to Arkansas for a research project involving family history and traveled to western New York with my mother-in-law for a funeral. As I learned more about my family history, I realized how deeply it is located in the landscape around Nashville, Arkansas. There is the oak tree that my mother’s grandmother planted out on the Hope Highway, there is the old house where my father’s mother was adopted out of an orphanage and into a family, there are the woods where my father once dreamed of building a house and eventually did. I rode around the area with my father, who showed me the creek where Young family members were baptized, the peach shed where everyone used to work during the summer, the cedar trees that indicate the presence of lime in the soil. Our car rides always comfort him and spur memories in a brain that is becoming a little foggier each year.

The old family barn in Avon

In Rochester, New York, and the nearby village of Avon, I got to see house after house that belonged to my mother-in-law’s relatives, places she used to go after school or babysat on the weekend or visited with cousins. She could look at the urban landscape, now much changed, and still envision the Italian grocery that used to tie up her family’s meat purchases in brown paper and the fancy boutique where she was taken by her mother to shop for a dress, a rite of passage that signaled she was growing into a young woman. As she loses her elder family members, that landscape and its buildings remain important ties to her childhood years and her memories of who she used to be.

The landscape is important to us, whoever we are. It holds memories, morals, emotions, and culture. No wonder land can be so contentious: just think of the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, and what’s happening now in Standing Rock. Even as we move far away from the land where we grew up, we clearly remember the smell of the trees, the feeling of the wind, the way the hot sun burned our skin - sensory experiences that cannot be replicated anywhere else. We still see buildings and trees that are no longer there, or imagine a person walking down a lane or the picnic that occurred just over the hill.

It’s a beautiful, magical connection reminding me that, no matter how much our mobile lifestyles and technologies may seek to separate us from a particular place and its landscape, that attachment is too deeply-rooted, too meaningful to ever really go away.

Hummingbirds of Winter

It’s a wonderful feeling when I find out fascinating new information about nature.

Calliope Hummingbird of Lafitte's Cove
by Dan Pancamo CC BY-SA 2.0

This week it has come to my attention that people see hummingbirds in winter here in central Maryland, where I live. Not the ruby-throated hummingbirds that we have in the summer, but calliope and rufous hummingbirds from the West. They should be in Mexico but instead end up in Maryland and other places on the East coast.

It turns out that lots of people around here leave their feeders out during the winter for the hummingbirds. There are all kinds of tricks online about how to keep your feeders from freezing, for example here.

And then there’s this interesting fact: when they can’t find nectar, hummingbirds eat insects. They can pick them off of leaves or grab them in midair, which is known as “hawking”. In fact, while hummingbirds fatten up on nectar to begin their migration South, they fuel up on insects to begin their migration North.

I spend hours each week obsessively watching birds, reading about birds, and thinking about birds. Hummingbirds are some of my favorites. So how could all of this knowledge have escaped my attention until now? I think the answer lies in the source of my information: other, more experienced birders, who have been feeding and watching birds for much longer than I have. What I actually get to see in the world of birds and nature depends on where I am and when. What I read about birds and nature is equally serendipitous. There’s so much to know about nature, and that’s what makes it so endlessly fascinating. It’s not surprising that foragers, human societies that rely for subsistence on hunting and gathering in their natural environment, require years of training and experience to become good hunters and gatherers. It’s also not surprising that they depend on more experienced elders to teach them. Why should I be any different?

In case you like to feed hummingbirds, or would like to try, consider winter feeding. And keep in mind these important “don’ts”:

• Don’t dye the water red! Hummingbirds are attracted to red flowers (like those on feeders), but they couldn’t care less what color the nectar is. Red dye is harmful to hummingbirds.

• Don’t use commercial nectar! It is full of preservatives and dyes, which are harmful to hummers just like they are to humans. It’s cheaper and safer to make your own nectar. Boil one part sugar in four parts water, cool, and serve. Use regular ole white sugar, not honey or any other sugar substitute.

Mexican Long-Tongued Bat at Hummingbird
Feeder by Ken Cosma CC BY 2.0

• Don’t worry that keeping your feeders out will make hummers stay around when they should be migrating! They know what to do and when to do it, and that decision has to do with their internal clock rather than the availability of food. You should keep your feeders out as long as you’re seeing hummingbirds.

• Don’t be surprised if other critters find their way to your feeder!

The Extinction of a Tool User

There are many reasons to prevent the extinction of species, and one of them is that we have a lot still to learn about plants and animals. My last blog covered three species that have been brought back from the brink of extinction thanks to concerted human effort. Cross your fingers with me that the same can be done for this fascinating one.

U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

The Hawaiian crow (Corvus hawaiiensis) - known in Hawaiian as the ʻalalā - is a tool user. It can clutch a stick in its bill and use it to dig food out of a crevice. That already puts it in a unique group of bird species that have been found to use tools in this way. But the Hawaiian crow is a bit exceptional even within this group: it not only uses tools, it manufactures them. The crow can pry off a twig and shape it into just the tool it needs. Watch the process in this video: the crow realizes it needs a tool, makes the tool, and then figures out the best place to use it!

Unfortunately, Hawaiian crows became extinct from the wild in 2002 as a result of disease, predation, habitat encroachment, and shooting by farmers who saw them as a threat to their crops. They have been bred in captivity since then in hopes of reintroducing them to the wild. The success of reintroduction is not assured, especially since rising temperatures have allowed mosquitoes that carry bird malaria to thrive in the higher altitudes of Hawaii where the crows once lived. Nevertheless, six fledglings will be released into the wild this November, and you can read about and follow the process here.

There are many reasons to care about the Hawaiian crow and its survival, and one of them is that the species can help us understand something very interesting about the relationship between humans and nature. One of the many early assumptions about the differences between humans and animals was that only humans use tools. Over the last few decades, scientists have discovered tool use among a diverse set of animals: from sea otters that use stones to open abalone shells to bonobos that use leaves as umbrellas to elephants that use branches to swat flies. There is much to learn about the parts of the brain that allow such complex abilities as tool use and when, where, and how tool use is taught rather than instinctive.

And for those of us who aren’t scientists, there is the simple sense of awe that comes from learning what animals can do and how much like us they can be. I hope someday to watch a video of wild Hawaiian crows using tools and showing us their genius, adaptability, and determination.

Back from the Brink

I was just skimming over my nature notes from this time last year and recalled an amazing week. It was a busy week, and I couldn’t have spent more than 40 minutes total walking outside. But in those 40 minutes walking up and down my country road, I saw three amazing things: a bald eagle, a mink, and an eight-point white-tailed buck deer. Why is that so amazing? Because all three species have been pulled back from the brink of extinction thanks to concerted human effort.

"Bald Eagle Head 2" by Tony Hisgett CC BY 2.0.

The sight of a bald eagle is still a thrill for me because I remember a time when it was such a rare sight. Now the bald eagle is listed as “least concern” and “population increasing” and has been taken off the endangered species list, with over 6,000 breeding pairs in the lower 48 states. Their endangerment was caused by a whole host of factors: habitat encroachment; poisoning by DDT, lead shot, mercury, and other toxins in the prey eagles consumed; and shooting by ranchers and others who considered them a pest. Some of these explanations are considered controversial, as are all claims by environmentalists that threaten an industry or way of life, but what is clear is that a combination of efforts taken over the last decades has worked well. Federal and state agencies and individuals have worked hard to protect habitat, outlaw the shooting of eagles, and reduce use of toxins, and will continue to do so in order to ensure the bald eagle survives.

"An American Mink in Capisic Pond, Portland,
ME" by Chuck Hemler CC BY-SA 3.0

By the early part of the 20^th century, wild mink were in trouble because of the demand for their fur. This conservation story is a mixed-happiness one: the wild population was saved because of the increase in mink farming. Mink farming is not a nice industry, and the animals are subject to a great deal of cruelty. Mink were farmed in the U.S. and then exported to Europe, what was then the U.S.S.R., and South America to fill the high demand worldwide for mink fur coats. Escapees from mink farms outside the US are now an invasive species, out-competing other native small mammals and reducing bird populations through egg predation. In the U.S., mink farm escapees, bred to be smaller and have thicker pelts, are changing the genetics of the wild population, which may have important long-term effects. But for now, this story shows that, when we stop over-hunting a wild population of animals for whatever reason, the population has the potential to rebound quickly and stabilize.

"Whitetail Deer" by Garett Gabriel CC BY-SA 3.0

And the white-tailed deer. It is hard to believe today, but that population was in severe decline by the end of the 19^th century due to hunting for meat and buckskin by Native Americans and settlers of what was then a relatively small population, as well as the removal of food sources through heavy logging in forests. There is historical evidence of concern for deer populations; one New York locale had deer laws as early as 1788 that established a season for deer hunting! Throughout the first half of the 20^th century, feeding of deer combined with limits on both season and numbers brought the population back. The clearing of forests ultimately aided the deer, as it provided edge habitat - the meeting of forest and field - that deer prefer. Now, of course, the white-tailed deer population is too big, and they have become pests: harming agriculture and private gardens, destroying new growth in forests, and decimating the habitat of birds and other animals, not to mention causing car accidents. Now many forest and wildlife conservation efforts include the hunting of white-tailed deer.

"American Bald Eagle" by rightclicks
CC BY-SA 3.0

What seems to me to be the most important common denominator in these stories is a change in culture. Conservation efforts are the nuts and bolts of the rebounding of endangered populations, but most important of all, they change our mentality about the importance of animals. Eagle poaching began to decline in part because of stiff financial penalties, but today I’m certain it is kept in check because people have come to see the bald eagle as a somewhat sacred symbol of our national identity. Trapping of minks, beavers, and other animals have declined as the demand for furs and pelts have declined; even mink farming is on a downward trend. And hunters have become some of the best conservationists over the course of the 20^th century, realizing that animal populations and their habitats must be managed carefully in order to ensure that the sport of hunting can continue. (In fact, I would argue that we need to encourage more of a hunting culture in this country.) Now we must turn this concerted human effort toward other species facing extinction, and that will be the subject of my next blog.

Peace, Love, and Dinner

My husband and I are out walking. Mourning doves fly up into the air, startled. I exclaim with delight at their beauty and soft alarm calls. He lifts a pretend shotgun and starts shooting them. I envision them canoodling in love and peace, the perfect example of monogamous bird love. He imagines them stewing in a sauce of garlic and herbs.

Doves symbolize peace, love, dinner, and lots of other things, depending on the person or the society. Doves figure heavily in religious symbolism around the world. Goddesses in ancient societies, such as Aphrodite, were symbolized by the dove. The dove gained an important meaning in Judaic lore when Noah released a dove to guide the ark to land after the flood. Christianity applied the dove as symbol to both Jesus and the Holy Spirit, among other things. Perhaps because of its status in religion, the dove became a symbol of peace in European culture. It is symbolic of fidelity and fecundity in Chinese arts and holds spiritual meanings in Indian culture. And expressions such as “lovey-dovey” in English show that somewhere along the way doves became symbols of romantic love as well. How can doves mean so many different things to different people and cultures? Are there any aspects of the actual lives of doves that may have leant themselves to these meanings?

Perhaps it is their look. Most doves around the world are smooth and round, with muted colors: a wonderful gray-brown with shades of rose, or pure white, or light pink or orange. Maybe these colors make them seem peaceful and mild. However, tufted titmice, juncos, and house finches come in varying shades of gray and pinky-grey and white, yet I have never heard them mentioned as symbols of peace.

Perhaps it is their soft cooing, which seems gentle or even mournful. But a similar low hooting on the part of the great horned owl is cast as creepy or ominous or even wise, not sweet or gentle or mournful.

Perhaps it is the close companionship of mated pairs. Males and females are always together, and they mate in much of the world for the entire year (rather than in a limited breeding season, like most birds). Maybe we simply see them displaying mating behavior more often than other birds, which makes them seem more loving. Their young accompany them for a while after fledging, meaning that they are often in small groups. But of how many birds can we say the same?

Even their “prey” meaning to hunters doesn’t make a great deal of sense. They’re larger than many birds, but not as large as many others, so they don’t provide a significant amount of meat. They can fly fast, which I suppose makes them an interesting challenge for hunters, but can’t many other birds fly fast as well? In fact, one of the concerns of those opposed to dove hunting is that hunters may in fact be shooting other birds with much the same general size and shape, which suggests doves aren’t terribly unique as sport.

In thinking about all of this, I would like to suggest a simple explanation: it is their ubiquity, both in time and in space, that makes doves so meaningful. Doves are one of the oldest bird species, older than the songbirds. They are a family of birds (Columbidae) that is spread over almost every part of the world, thrives in just about every type of ecosystem, and includes over 300 species. In other words, there are lots of them around, and there always have been. Human societies have had plenty of time and opportunity to attach meanings to doves. And since doves are familiar to humans all over the globe (unlike most bird families), it makes sense that some of those meanings would come to be shared. Perhaps one religious group had the idea to represent a deity through the symbol of a dove, and that same representation spread to another through syncretism. Migration and shared cuisines could have brought the idea that doves are good to eat from one continent to another.

At the end of the day, doves are birds, doing bird things: breeding, searching for food, calling to each other, flying through the air. That they are the carriers of symbolic meaning says much more about us humans than it does about them.

Mowing Up with the Joneses Part III

My mother-in-law Sharon just sent me a link to this blog last week in the Washington Post arguing that we ditch our lawns. It provides even more interesting information about our obsession with lawns and the various kinds of harm that it does. (Mind-blowing fact: more than 20% of the states of New Jersey and Massachusetts is covered in lawn!) Following up on Parts I and II of this series on my own blog, if our desire for a neat, green lawn is the result of history and culture and chasing after prestige, then can it be changed in favor of something that is more environmentally friendly, less dangerous for humans, and easier to keep by homeowners who are already sufficiently busy and stressed?

There are all kinds of substitutes for a green lawn that are beginning to make headlines today. Some people plant gardens in place of lawns. Some people in rural areas let their lawns revert to what they were intended to be, such as woods or a little piece of wetland. Some people grow grass and wildflowers to attract birds and butterflies and other pollinators. Some people grow food forests. It's particularly exciting when businesses on large plots of mowed lawn make a switch. For example, the Audubon Society local chapter to which I belong is now working with the National Humane Education Society in Charles Town, WV, to convert twelve acres of lawn to wildflowers and native grasses.

Will these efforts continue and expand? I predict that they will because they push our prestige button in much the same way that organic food has done: once it became more widely prestigious to eat organic food and shop at farmers markets, and just a little bit more affordable, the movement took off. Now even Walmart attempts to sell mostly organic produce. Such processes trickle down from the wealthy to the Joneses, and then Americans in general begin to aspire to those markers of status. Today there are people taking workshops on growing monarch way stations or planting native species in their backyard. Sales are increasing on books explaining how to grow enough food for one's entire family on one acre of (previous) lawn. People may not be ready to convert their entire lawn into a micro-farm just yet, but lots of them are putting in greenhouses or small gardens.

There are also government efforts afoot in many places. My above-mentioned mother-in-law lives in Montgomery County, Maryland, and the county government is converting a portion of the lawns of neighborhood residents into rain gardens to help capture rainfall that would otherwise carry more pollutants into the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. Top-down government solutions such as these are controversial and sometimes create other problems, but they are also a sign that local government policies, which have long been pro-lawn, may be changing.

The key to these efforts, in addition to wrapping them in what I would call "attainable prestige", is changing our aesthetic values. We have to make messiness visually pleasing. The eyes that have been trained by culture to appreciate a neat, green lawn will have to be retrained to love the look of bright wildflowers buzzing with bees and butterflies. The rural landowners who mow all their fields to keep them neat will have to learn to feel good about letting a few of them go to grass and milkweed, knowing that there are grasshopper sparrows and meadowlarks and monarch butterflies thriving because of that decision. And we will all have to stop complaining about that neighbor’s messy yard.