This year in the North country, Windigo stole March, normally a month of subtle change when rain begins, snow recedes and the first tentative walks in the woods become possibility, if not reality. My turkeys must still swim through white slop to feed if they come at all. On a morning like this one not one gobble. Only the cardinals visit at dawn, yet migrants like the Sandhill cranes, woodcock, winter wren, and phoebe, flew over our county last night along with many ducks … 3 billion extinct, 10,000 migrating – is hope to be found on the wing?
It snowed again last night with more to come. After 5 months of black on white, bowed and wind whipped trees, shattered trunks and boughs, ongoing freeze thaw and ice, Windigo continues to stalk the landscape. Uneasy, I tell myself that I must expect more extreme weather, floods, and droughts, even while acknowledging that the weather is not really the problem – at least not now. No shoveling is necessary, the earth is thawing and afternoon sun will soften the monstrous drifts and strip the trees of ice before the day is over. Increasingly extreme weather is only one symptom of some disastrous changes that are occurring.
Windigo is a mythological monster so named by the Northern Indigenous tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy (template for the Constitution – minus rights for women) because this figure used to the haunt the lives of Northern peoples who often starved to death when winter refused to let go. Always hungry, he had to have more and yet nothing ever filled him up. In many images he is depicted as a head, usually with antlers. The bones of the dead.
In the original Indigenous First Nations tale Windigo was finally vanguished because the season shifted into spring. Nature set limits on the damage Windigo could do at least for Northern peoples. Across the plains it is understood that humans become Windigos because of greed and avarice. It should be noted that every Indigenous tribe has a figure like Windigo; he goes by many names.
Today Windigo has become a more threatening monster assuming any form he wishes, and his presence is felt among all peoples, not just those with Indigenous roots. Recall this figure is always starving…As human populations skyrocket from eight billion to ten, Windigo is at the helm. Our Collective Greed and Overpopulation increase his power with each passing day…”More, More, More” His sultry voice is insistent, even haunting our dreams.
Windigo is stealing souls. I will not give him mine.
I think of another tale I loved as a child. Little Black Sambo was an Indian* boy who was chased by ferocious tigers who wanted to kill him. The boy gave the tigers all he had to escape being murdered by his predators. Outwitted, the furious tigers then turned on each other in a jealous rage, racing round and round in a circle so fast that they changed physical form transforming into butter!
Little Black Sambo knew when to let go of everything but himself and got away. And, indirectly, he did away with the tigers too! There’s a lesson here for me and perhaps for all humans about breakdown.
With our current political ‘identity’ crisis, many black and white folks still revile this latter tale insisting it is a story of discrimination and misogyny – totally missing its message. Like Windigo in his current guise as insatiable monster who is with us all year long, predatory tigers stalk the vulnerable as we speak. We have become a nation so starved for meaning that we can’t feel the Windigo expanding within us with the ferocity of a wild cat. Consumers consuming themselves while Windigo whispers ‘more’. We are tigers chasing our tails into oblivion; There is a huge difference between knowing what we want and what we need.
If a story – child understood the difference, why can’t we?
Listening to tale like this with open minds and feeling hearts might help shift perspectives – we might yet begin to change the ending – but will we?
This morning I read an article about Maine legislators angrily fighting over leasing hundreds of ocean miles for fish farming.
Just when did we decide we owned the ocean that birthed us?
With this kind of greed …
I leave the reader with an open ending.
I have Indigenous roots and have been discriminated against for being ‘different’ all of my life… so it’s not that I don’t have compassion – it’s just that I believe it’s time to move through our differences.
I just finished this story and published it when I learned that indeed the Sandhills are in Maine as of March 25th they are in Winthrop – considering this is the date of the first mother’s day I am including this wondrous sighting. Ancestors in flight
For the past two weeks I have been obsessed by the thought of emerging bloodroot, a wildflower I have loved since childhood that grows just outside my door (among other places). This obsession, and I take each one seriously, always provokes the same question: what’s really going on here? Bloodroot does not bloom under four feet of snow, and my guess is that this year one of my favorite wildflowers won’t burst with white stars until June.
Today, I also remembered with astonishment that in the old ways, Mother’s Day occurred on March 25th, the time when ‘Becoming’ begins, long before the snow recedes. I’m struck by the difference between the two mothers’ days, this one seems so much more authentic, no room for sentimentality when we face this messy, muddy turning from winter to spring (at least in the Northeast).
But I digress…To discover the root of my obsession I started writing as I always do to figure out what’s happening beneath my awareness. The following narrative seemed to write itself. Ah, the root of my obsession with ‘Blood – Root’ was more about my Motherline than the flower! As I wrote the story, I was flooded with memories of my mother that have been obscured by long term mother – daughter confusion and abuse. Abuse twists and distorts memory, so we forget the good parts of what we once knew. After I finished my story I ‘re -membered’ a mother I loved too deeply, one who taught me about wildflowers, how to identify, transplant, and care for them. Clearly her love for these wild plants was passed on to me. And I have carried my mother’s wildflower torch all the days of my life. Even if my mother didn’t have much use for me. No way to know. Enjoy!
Mayflower Memories
We knelt together my grandmother, mother, and I carefully placing freshly dug plants in the rock garden under the swaying white pines. We were transplanting wild columbine, dutchman’s breeches, maidenhair and Christmas ferns in between the silvery gray spikes and star like bloodroot flowers that were buzzing with bees. Those who had already bloomed had huge, notched palm sized leaves. Seed capsules were forming. The year before we had scattered forget – me not seeds, planted wild violets, and dug in the bloodroot that grew so profusely in the woods.
Sprays of blooming forget me nots and violets in shades that varied from deep purple to lavender blue and white had already spread throughout the rock garden along with the bloodroot. Worried about disturbing roots that bled crimson when spaded up by accident, I was also distracted by the scent of trailing arbutus with its leathery leaves that had spread so quickly, their tendrils almost reaching the bench under the pines. Each pale pink or white flower possessed a perfume so fragrant I was compelled to kneel, as if in prayer, to soak in the scent.
The day my mother and I planted the trailing arbutus it was raining. We had recently returned from Maine with two burlap bags of precious cargo, two clusters of leathery leaved arbutus that had so much soil around them that it dwarfed the plants. My mother had insisted that extra soil was necessary to allow the trailing arbutus to thrive. How did she know? 60 years ago, we had no idea that trailing arbutus as well as all wildflowers had a complex mycorrhizal relationship with the mycelial net beneath our feet? When wildflowers are transplanted without extensive foreknowledge few survive.
Three years earlier my brother, my father and grandfather and I had collected the rich loam from the moist woods where an abundance of wildflowers grew. Together we built up and graded a hill in front of the ledge. Below, my father dug a shallow pond that was fringed with irregular flat stones. My mother directed the placement of each rock throughout the garden and the pond with an artist’s keen eye. My father built the beautiful granite bench from old stones piled behind the farmhouse, and it sat between the two pines that shaded the garden from the heat of the afternoon sun. My brother and I were excited because my dad had also constructed a complex waterfall that cascaded down the stony hill to mist the wildflowers and feed the pond that was large enough for two children/adolescents and green frogs to wade in!
The rest of the wildflowers – spring beauties, Canada Mayflowers and other anemones, trout lilies, trillium, lady slippers came in time, all transplanted from our woods where they were abundant. Except for hepatica, a delicate blue flower that appeared at the moist edges of the field. Already becoming rare in our area, my mother was unwilling to risk moving even one plant.
The wildflower garden thrived for years under my mother’s, grandmothers, and my careful attention. It wasn’t until my grandmother’s death in 1974 that my grandfather filled in the pond and spread her ashes amongst the masses of wild bloodroot. A fitting memorial.
Wildflowers like the ones I helped plant so long ago remain the ones most dear to my heart. When I moved to the mountains, I brought bloodroot, trillium, anemones, trout lilies and various ferns with me and created my own wildflower garden that continues to thrive today. I still search for wildflowers recording wherever I find them. I have yet to find hepatica. These days I never dig up any wildflower or plant that I find. With a couple of exceptions. When the Gore Road was widened and bulldozed again, in utter desperation I removed the last of the shriveling trailing arbutus, lady slippers, and trillium hoping to save these flowers from extinction. To my satisfaction all survived with trailing arbutus spreading everywhere throughout this property, but I never would have risked transplanting it (or any of the others) without knowing exactly what to do and knowing from experience the kind of habitat these plants must have to thrive. My mother and nature taught me well.
All the wildflowers mentioned here are native to the Northeast. Still considered ‘common’, my field work as a naturalist suggests otherwise. We know that wildflower habitats are being destroyed by heavily traveled trails (even on foot), logging, housing, global warming etc.
Every day I give thanks for the forests that being left to re-wild themselves by visionary people, some whom I am privileged to call friends, for herein lies the key for wildflower survival.
Happily, there are alternatives to digging these plants in the wild if you are interested in creating a wildflower garden. Mc Laughlin Gardens in South Paris sells some native wildflowers and there are a multitude of heirloom wildflower and seed catalogs available to anyone that is interested.
My only two caveats: please do not remove any wildflower from the wild, and please do thoroughly research any wildflower you wish to plant after purchasing, because each has very specific requirements.
Another piece of information worth knowing is that in most places the wildflower show is over by the end of May!
When I was a small child, most girls liked dolls; I had a huge frog that squealed. I dragged the earsplitting amphibian everywhere I went, so I suppose it was inevitable that I would seek out the live frogs who inhabited the woods as soon as I could!
I think my sibling and I were both born naturalists. As soon as my little brother was old enough, we took flashlights into the woods at night to visit a marsh that quacked! We watched bulging gold rimmed eyes and ballooning throats belonging to two -inch masked bandits who ushered in the spring with hypnotic conversation even while sheets of ice still lingered. (This shallow marsh, bursting with skunk cabbage and budded marsh marigolds was our favorite place to visit because frogs quacked, peeped, and croaked there all spring). Deafening. After the third or fourth night, wood frog symphony ceased abruptly. Each year we returned to count the massive amounts of jellied egg clumps that appeared like magic throughout the marsh. These round clusters were always attached to some kind of grass or detritus just under the surface. Black on the top and white on the bottom the freshly laid eggs enveloped in jelly (that held together even when transporting by pail) developed a greenish tinge as algae covered all the clusters left behind – future food for tadpoles.
I was eight years old when we collected the first wood frog eggs to raise in an aquarium. We changed the water daily. As the tadpoles matured, we fed them bits of lettuce, impatient for back legs to appear. We were careful to make certain that their home became partially terrestrial as the gilled tadpoles transformed into froglets that breathed air through their lungs and skin. I was transported by gold rimmed eyes, the black masks they wore and their coppery brown/tan bodies that shimmered with an iridescent glow…I always had trouble saying goodbye when we returned our catch to their birthplace as froglets. I loved them so.
Almost 40 years later when I moved to my present home in the mountains, I immediately sunk an old oak barrel into the ground next to the stream with the intention of increasing the local frog population. Green frogs were abundant but few wood frogs lived in my immediate vicinity (I did have peeper springs and a couple of vernal pools above the waterfalls further up the serpentine brook). I had been haunted for years by the threat of eventual frog extinction after reading scientist and visionary Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ as a young adult. She warned us about the dire consequences of the continued use of pesticides/herbicides in 1962. Frogs were especially vulnerable she said because they breathed through both lungs and skin. Our canaries in the coal mine. Because I loved frogs and hoped to help them survive, I wanted as many as this habitat could support.
The following April raucous quacking split the night in two. Three days later silence, but in the oak barrel attached to some submerged cattails were three clumps of gorgeous eggs that soon became wiggling black tadpoles. I supplemented my wood frogs diet of algae and rotting leaves with tiny bits of torn lettuce, adding a few bugs for good measure just as I had done as a child. I kept a sharp eye out for back legs and when they appeared I placed a wooden raft in the water as well as a ladder made from bark so no one would drown, and by early July pinky sized masked bandits began hopping around my feet before vanishing into lush vegetation reappearing down by the brook.
That was the beginning. I have been raising wood frogs, peepers, and toads ever since. Eventually, I constructed a large vernal pool upstream by digging out debris around a bubbling spring that fed the brook, ringing it with stones and wild greenery. Until recently this spring fed oasis always held water until the eggs of wood frogs and peepers hatched transforming into frogs. When I discovered that salamanders were eating tadpoles, I began to remove the intruders’ eggs transferring them to another vernal depression across the field, a practice I continue to this day.
Every year more wood frogs hopped around my feet. Peepers also laid eggs in my barrel, and because I had so many tadpoles, I was careful to supplement their diet twicedaily so they wouldn’t predate on each other. Green frogs took over the barrel after the froglets left. I caught sight of a leopard frog a few times, but this habitat primarily supported wood frogs, peepers, and migrating green frogs. Naively, I thought my efforts had been successful.
When summer drought became more prevalent (last ten years) my large vernal pool started to dry up in June – too soon. I checked on others further up the stream. All were shrinking or gone. The water table was dropping. That year I took about a thousand tadpoles down to North Pond to release when my shallow pool turned to mud. A desperate move due to fish predation. Outside my door wood frog tadpoles still thrived in their barrel, only because I was able to control the water level.
After the vernal pool continued to dry up most years, the once abundant clusters of wood frog eggs began to plummet. Because wood frogs are an indicator species, (masses of wood frog eggs designate a vernal pool as a conservation area) I found this trend alarming. Last year we had a heat wave in April. Two nights of quacking. Wood frogs laid one clutch of eggs in the old barrel, and then it froze – hard. Two more clusters appeared below in the vernal pool. Not one egg hatched.
I also spend three seasons in protected forest lowlands and have noted adult wood frogs are still visible, not as plentiful as before, but can be seen if one knows where to look for them. My one hope.
I recently learned that Dr. Nat Wheelwright, professor of biology at Bowdoin has been monitoring wood frogs for 28 years. In 2013 he lost a whole pond filled with wood frog tadpolesto a ranavirus within 24 hours. There have been other losses, none quite so severe. Apparently, this disease which also affects salamanders, is becoming more of a threat to sensitive indicator species like wood frogs and some salamanders.
As of December 2021, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) listed 673 critically endangered amphibian species, including 146 which were tagged as possibly extinct. 9.2% of all evaluated amphibian species were listed as critically endangered.
Fragmentation of forested areas is a direct result of massive amounts of logging and new housing developments in this area. The role that continued use of pesticides/herbicides has consequences we don’t seem able/or willing to measure. Water and air pollution are ongoing factors. A UN assessment done in 2019 found that half a million insect species are under threat of extinction. All frogs need to eat insects, snails, and slugs to survive.
Unfortunately, studying a frog of ‘least concern’ (LC) like the wood frog is not a priority with researchers/academic institutions/governments so research is scarce. Most frog sites still categorize these frogs as being quite common in Maine.
“When it comes to frogs Least Concern (LC) is total nonsense. All amphibians are seriously threatened,” states Al Falster, Research Director Maine Mineral and Gem Museum (scientist and accomplished naturalist).
Sources vary but frogs have been around for 250 – 400 million years and have managed to survive 4 or 5 extinctions. They are found throughout Alaska and the Northeast, in small numbers further south. Wood frogs are the only frogs who live above the arctic circle. They adapt to cold by allowing their bodies to freeze (a special kind of antifreeze called glucose prevents ice from freezing cellular tissue). The first warm days and nights thaw wood frogs out. Hurriedly, they migrate to vernal ponds and ditches to lay eggs before vanishing into forested lowlands, the most likely place to spot one. They are ready to breed at 1-2 years and return to the same sites year after year. Sexes can be distinguished by looking at the shape of the webbing on back toes. Females have concave webbing, males convex. Females are larger and sometimes a lighter tan and can lay as many as 1000 – 3000 eggs. I am painfully aware that it’s been years since I’ve seen such large clusters around here.
As I come to the end of this narrative one question looms: What can we do to support wood frog populations? The first answer to this question is simple. Allow forests to re-wild. Once woodlands have a chance to begin recovery vernal ponds will appear naturally. Healthy forests will sustain them.
Another option is if you have a low moist area that is partially shaded on your property (necessary now with sudden heat waves) dig in a barrel, vernal pool, or a create a shallow pond that doesn’t support fish, but please make sure that you have a regular uncontaminated water source to supplement shrinking waters if you choose either a barrel that has not been treated, or a vernal pool. Either way make certain the area is planted with local vegetation and stones. Emerging froglets need protection. I put a huge piece of driftwood in the center of my vernal pond. Within a year it had marsh grasses sprouting all around it, becoming a hideout for all.
Once your tadpoles get to know you, they will swim to the edges of their enclosure to visit, eyeing you with curiosity. All have different personalities. I’ll wager you’ll never be the same.
Long live the wood frogs, those masters of genuine transformation! – from egg to tadpole, to frog, these creatures are able to bring forth new life.
My little brother and I spent our happiest childhood years on my grandparents’ pre-revolutionary farm. I remember my grandmother perching us on my grandfather’s oak desk (as toddlers) so we could watch robins and chickadees in one of the 300 plus year old sugar maples or oak trees that shaded the house during hot summer days … trees that we later climbed and lived in, spending our daylight hours with the birds. Bluebirds raised their broods in the bird houses my dad and grandfather built and posted on the ten-acre field just beyond the old farmhouse. Apple, Pear, and Cherry trees thrived in the open landscape. In the spring fragrant blossoms took my breath away; bees sipped nectar from every flower. We took to the woods with flashlights to watch the wood frogs and peepers singing at night. In the fall my brother and I would collect golden apples (as we dodged dining wasps) that my grandmother then baked into pies.
Set free to explore the woods, swamps, and brooks all year round, my brother and I were naturalists long before we had any awareness of the term. When setting off for the woods as soon as we were old enough, we trailed cardboard boxes behind us. These containers held our lunches, and the bird, reptile, mammal, insect guides that we could read for fun, or use as a reference for new discoveries.
Neither of us would have said it then but we were in love with dogs, birds, brooks, trees, skunk cabbage, marsh marigolds, salamanders, newts, frogs, butterflies, fireflies, deer – all animals/plants/trees that we could befriend. Virtually every living being we encountered captured our attention. Because we were situated in the country interacting with wildlife was a daily experience. It never occurred to either of us why deer, woodchucks, weasels, and foxes (to mention a few) let us approach them without fear, often following us around.
Nothing changed as we grew older. The forest was our home – our safe place. A place of perpetual wonder. For me it still is.
As an adult educator I taught Natural Sciences/ Ecology at the university level (among other things) but after fifteen years I became disillusioned. It seemed to me that the entire focus was on acquiring and classifying information. Where was the wonder I continued to experience? Something was wrong but I didn’t know what it was.
I was already a published nature writer who always wrote from personal experience/perspective when it finally occurred to me that feeling, ‘falling in love with nature’ was not included as part of the academic agenda. Why? Because academic learning does not allow a researcher to develop a relationship with whoever one might be studying while observing. Naming and classification are the primary ways we use to learn about our subject (always the ‘other’ – an it). We call attachment behavior anthropomorphizing – attributing human characteristics to the wild creatures and plants we encounter. Materialistic/mechanistic science, our current paradigm, criticizes/ostracizes any scientist or researcher that dares to interject feeling into any academic discussion. Plato’s Mind over Matter lives on. We privilege ‘facts’ that don’t even exist like the famous one about objectivity. (Niels Bohr demolished that myth more than 100 years ago). Today’s facts are too often tomorrow’s mistakes! The current theory suggests that we live in an evolving universe.
In Natural Sciences we create theories and try to prove them while accruing masses of information. If we can’t quantify it, it’s not good science… A good example is bird migration… we have many theories, have tagged, killed, and dismembered many birds in the name of science but we still have not solved the mystery of how birds find home even when young ones have never been there before. The usual explanations offered include use of the sun moon and stars for navigation, the use of magnetic fields, or attributing ‘genetic programming’ to bird behavior when we can’t find any other explanation. All probably contribute, but the point I’m making here is that we still don’t know how birds manage to return to their summer or winter homes when migrating, or as in the case of homing pigeons, manage to cross oceans to reach their lofts (see sheldrake.org recent release on homing pigeons).
Although we are finally acknowledging that birds can feel after having lost 3 billion birds, no one other than Sheldrake (that I know of) has posited the obvious – that birds may return to their homes because they are attached to them (I can imagine the screams/outrage – heresy – burn her at the stake).
What happens when we fall in love is that we create a relationship or bond to the being in question be whether it be bird, animal, or tree. Awareness or consciousness seeps in opening a door to communication. We are already related through our DNA (differences are minimal when one attends to the big picture). When we start observing, asking questions, developing feelings, and sometimes identifying with an animal, a tree, or bird that being may respond in unusual ways.
Last year it was the hemlocks that began the conversation. I simply followed the nudges I was receiving. I made a conscious effort to become a receiver, a person who listens as she observes…I am keenly aware that other species have lives of their own with purposes that may be quite different from mine. Thus, communication occurs most effectively when I quiet my mind and open my heart…I am NOT suggesting that this tree was talking to me, at least in the usual way. However, trees did respond singly and as part of their community, and because I was attentive, insights followed. Most seem to bubble up from my body and this makes good sense because our feelings, senses, intuition etc. reside in our bodies. It’s at this point that my mind attempts to untangle the meaning(s) behind what I am sensing…body and mind – we need both.
There is one more point I need to make. When this kind of communication occurs it carries a grounded sense of truth – a kind of inner knowing that’s impossible to articulate. Like a stone sinking into my pelvis, my root connection to earth creates a resonance with the whole of nature throughout my body.
No doubt my experiences will be considered absurd by many. And yet, ironically, the reason the earth is in crisis is primarily because humans have forgotten how to perceive or listen to the messages our planet has been trying to give us as species after species go extinct. Apparently, few are aware that humans may be next. Earth is our source and context – our home. No small point here.
I am not suggesting that education isn’t important if one is going to make most disciplines, including science, a career choice. However, it is critical from my point of view to include in one’s education learning how to be presentto the experience of being with a frog, or weasel, because this is when a person can also develop an emotional attachment to that being.
‘Falling in love’ allows us to see, sense feel intuit in ways that defy explanation as I just tried to explain using my experience with hemlocks as an example. Perhaps learning to listen is the most important skill of all.
Unfortunately, the dominant culture continues to privilege mind over body, intellect over senses. ‘Trust the experts’ or take a course and become a ‘master’ something – you fill in the blank. Or maybe like me you accrue degrees. What we need to remember is that learning is a life – time process. I believe I am learning this lesson well, because the more skilled I become as a naturalist, the more obvious it is to me that I will always be a beginner.
In closing I hope that I have demonstrated through this personal narrative that education is not enough when it comes to learning about the complexity that is Nature (inside or outside academia). We learn the most by integrating our thinking with our senses. We educate ourselves to learn more about some other non – human being but…
In the monotonous gray glare, spring feels like a dream. It is a challenge to stay present to now without succumbing to something akin to despair. Another round of raging northeasters… Will this winter ever end?
But I have help. Mourning doves are cooing all day long, turkeys are gobbling, and flocks of chickadees and cardinals gather at the window for seeds.
And now I am witness to the birth of a scarlet runner bean.
Ten days ago I threw an old mauve and rose bean seed in a packet of liverworts that I was taking to my friend‘s lab to view under a microscope.
The seed was an old one that I had used for a number of years in winter bouguets. I still have no idea why I added the seed. After a year or two scarlet runners are no longer viable (according to experts). Imagine my astonishment when I opened the packet and discovered the seed had germinated! My friend, an experimental scientist and I peered at the root microscopically; I was astounded to see hundreds of rootlets waiting to penetrate soil that will eventually allow them to join a mycelial network.
When I reached home I planted the sturdy white root in poor compacted soil, the only untreated medium I had access to during the winter.
Three days ago I noted the bulging surface. The seed was struggling to break hard ground. One day later the seed case was visible as was a grayish veining leaflet that curled in on itself in a tight spiral as if saying goodbye to its root.
After a trip to a greenhouse for organic (non – miracle grow) medium the next day I amended the soil on the surface, raking some in with a fork but left the root untouched.
Within 24 hours I had a bean plant. During this period I photographed the changes that occurred within hours – just obsessed by the process – and just as if I hadn’t been planting seeds all my life! The naturalist in me obviously retains a child of wonder.
Yesterday’s poem was a tribute to my charged relationship with this particular bean plant. It wasn’t until I finished the writing that It became clear that the boundaries between the seed and myself had blurred.
I have been a gardener all my life and had only recently given up growing scarlet runners because the abundance of deer ravaged both vines and flowers. Fenced in gardens create such artifical man made boundaries…so I adapted, believingmy life with scarlet runners had come to an end.
(my garden full of scarlet runners before the deer destruction)
Well, not quite. I promised this bean that s/he would find home here and be left to grow into maturity safely. How I will acomplish this? Fencing. I‘ll transplant the bean next my protected guardian cedar!
Historically they used the Eastern flyway but were extirpated by hunting… a slow recovery is in process and the stately Sandhill cranes are once again returning to breed in Maine… so far only birders have been keeping track of their numbers but these majestic pre-historic birds have haunting cries that are often described as bugles, rattles, croaks and trumpets and can be heard 2 -3 miles away. They also utter sounds that combine a kind of brrring in unison. Their impending arrival next month calls up a chant I love…
“There’s a river of birds in migration, a nation of women with wings. There’s a river of birds in migration, a nation of warriors with wings.”
I remember the chill that crawled up my spine as those words seeped into my body all those years ago… I wept, not knowing why.
I had exactly the same experience when I first heard the brrring cries of Sandhill cranes heading towards the river to roost in New Mexico seven years ago. Entranced, I stood there struck dumb – awed as tears slid down my face.
I re -membered, felt something – but didn‘t know what it was… and whatever it was/is still haunts me when I hear that song or recall the cries of the Sandhills circling round in the sky to orient themselves to the right direction before heading to their northern home to breed.
I am a woman in migration, a woman with wings….
Today when I listen to the cranes on You Tube, – I‘m impatient thinking about them and need to hear their eerie unearthly calls before they arrive – I am keenly aware that we have lost three billion birds. And even in the fields I visit to watch Sandhills feeding on old grain and corn I also see the signs: POISON STAY OUT. This vulnerable population is ingesting pesticides that are sprayed on the fields – not just here but everywhere. Not one birder I know who visits these fields to watch the cranes ever mentions those signs.
The cranes are also actively hunted in the fall and spring along the Eastern (Tennessee and Kentucky) and Central Flyways (fourteen more states situated on or near the central highway – the route most heavily traveled). In Maine there is not enough evidence to be certain about just how the Sandhills get here, but my guess is that they use the Eastern Flyway because they remember the route from long ago when they once migrated to Maine in healthy numbers (see sheldrake.org). Some observers in Maine and other New England states believe they are seeing the same flock (s) migrating north and south. These birds, like so many species, were extirpated by hunters… it’s taken a couple of centuries for them to begin a cautious return. That we have Sandhills nesting so close to my home is a source of poignancy and pure joy.
I am a woman who sees…
Women and Birds belong together: we are the hunted ones, dismissed despised, invisible, murdered. Like birds. Who will notice when we are gone?
I am only too aware of how many women we have lost to violence, rape, and murder – the reality that patriarchy perpetuates. Men must have their guns. Women must remain silent or be silenced … We could rise up as ‘a nation of women’ to stop the carnage but as things stand now most women can’t even be civil to one another across the isles. Our resistance to quelling the bird and animal hunting massacre speaks to our tacit acceptance of the superiority of man, the rightness of his love of guns and lust, our acceptance of the worst objectification women have ever been subjected to, and the need to allow the killing machine to continue.
Just like the birds we are under attack by the NRA.
Is our only viable option flight?
What I have learned from the various women’s movements is that taking to the streets is not enough, standing up for our beliefs is not enough. Truth telling is not enough. Endurance is not enough. Patriarchy isn’t crumbling – Yet. I’d like to think it might be in its death throes because this destructive system is now turning on itself – like a dragon swallowing its own tail.
Nature is also intervening to redress hubris and imbalance, graphically demonstrating to humans how stupid we have become as a species. As we poison the fields the Sandhills feed in, we poison ourselves. The elements of wind and water make certain that no home grown food or field will be spared.
I am a woman in flight.
I dream of joining the cranes, who in their most ancient wisdom understand that no species survives without genuine community. Not pockets of like-minded folks, but the kind of community that embraces all differences, in deference to the whole.
Our culture praises human endeavors and independence while I look to cranes who reveal and reflect the interdependence that all of us need to survive.
Leave until it’s safe to return?
I‘m learning how to listen….
During the month of March I don my feathery cape, becoming a bird woman who is obsessed by bird migration. Even with masses of snow covering the ground my beloveds are starting to migrate to their summer homes and breeding grounds. Each morning I consult Cornell’s bird cast to find out which birds flew over my county last night. At First Light, long before dawn I am outdoors standing in the snow recording a new migrant call, a cardinal song, a courting male dove, turkey twittering, gobbling, chickadee convocations – embracing a chorus of avian concertos. I watch the pair of ravens fly through a deep blue crack between twilight and dawn, silent, perhaps praying for all. Messengers in flight. I scatter the first round of seed. Once inside I place some on my windowsill so that the chickadees and I are parted by less than two feet….
I cannot live without them.
Still listening…
I’m a warrior woman in flight,
attached to Roots
sprouting hyphae
under frozen ground.
A few bits of information regarding Sandhill cranes:
Most Sandhills use the Central Flyway but some fly over Mississippi. There are four flyways in all. During migration the cranes typically fly 200 to 300 miles a day attaining speeds of 25 – 35 miles an hour. During migration family groups travel together. At night they feed and roost communally. Sometimes cranes gather in the thousands but most groups are smaller. Sandhill cranes mate for life and except for nesting spend their years in close relationship with relatives and friends. Always watching out for each other. They breed and nest in bogs, marshes, damp meadows and open wetlands. Although some migrants will breed in the US many continue to Canada and even beyond, entering Siberia. Sandhill cranes are one of the most ancient birds on earth. In Nebraska one fossil was found to be ten million years old
.“There’s a river of birds in migration, a nation of women with wings. There’s a river of birds in migration, a nation of warriors with wings.”
My little brother and I spent our happiest childhood years on my grandparents’ pre-revolutionary farm. I remember my grandmother perching us on my grandfather’s oak desk (as toddlers) so we could watch robins and chickadees in one of the 300 plus year old sugar maples or oak trees that shaded the house during hot summer days … trees that we later climbed and lived in, spending our daylight hours with the birds.
Bluebirds raised their broods in the bird houses my dad and grandfather built and posted on the ten-acre field just beyond the old farmhouse. Apple, Pear, and Cherry trees thrived in the open landscape. In late spring fragrant blossoms took my breathe away; bees sipped nectar from every flower. In April we would set off for the woods with flashlights to watch and listen to the peepers singing up the night. May brought hepatica, bloodroot, violets, oh so many wildflowers often hidden under old leaves. Summer nights were alight with fireflies -both yellow and green. In the fall my brother and I would collect the golden apples (as we dodged dining wasps) that my grandmother then baked into pies.
Set free to explore the woods, swamps, and brooks all year round, my brother and I were naturalists long before we had any awareness of the term. When setting off for the woods as soon as we were old enough, we trailed cardboard boxes behind us. These containers held our lunches, and the bird, reptile, mammal, insect guides that we could read for fun, or use to reference new discoveries.
Neither of us would have said it then but we were in love with birds, brooks, trees, skunk cabbage, marsh marigolds, salamanders, newts, frogs, butterflies, fireflies, deer – all animals/plants/trees that we could befriend. Virtually every living being we encountered captured our attention. Because we were situated in the country interacting with wildlife was a daily experience. It never occurred to either of us why deer, woodchucks, weasels, and foxes (to mention a few) let us approach them without fear, often following us around.
Nothing changed as we grew older. The forest was our home – our safe place. A place of perpetual wonder. For me it still is.
As an adult educator I taught Natural Sciences/ Ecology at the university level (among other things) but after fifteen years I became disillusioned. It seemed to me that the entire focus was on acquiring and classifying information. Where was the wonder I continued to experience? Something was wrong but I didn’t know what it was.
I was already a published nature writer who always wrote from personal experience/perspective when it finally occurred to me that attachment, ‘falling in love with nature’ was not included as part of the academic agenda. Why? Because academic learning does not allow a researcher to develop a relationship with whoever one might be studying. Naming and classification are the primary ways we use to understand our subject ( always an ‘other’ – an it). We call attachment behavior anthropomorphizing – attributing human characteristics to the wild creatures and plants we encounter – Materialistic/ mechanistic science, our current paradigm, criticizes/ostracizes any scientist or researcher that dares to interject feeling emotions into any academic discussion. Plato’s Mind over Matter lives on. We privilege ‘facts’ that don’t even exist anymore like the one about objectivity. (Neils Bohr demolished that myth more than 100 years ago). Today’s facts are too often tomorrow’s mistakes!
In Natural Sciences we create theories and try to prove them while accruing masses of information. If we can’t quantify it, it’s not good science… A good example is bird migration… we have many theories, have tagged, killed, and dismembered many birds in the name of science but we still have not solved the mystery of how birds find home even when young ones have never been there before. The usual explanations offered include use of the sun moon and stars for navigation, magnetic fields, or attributing (random)‘genetic programming’ to bird behavior when we can’t find any other explanation. Most if not all probably contribute, but the point I’m making here is that we still don’t know how birds manage to return to their summer or winter homes when migrating, or as in the case of homing pigeons, manage to cross oceans to reach their lofts (see sheldrake.org)
Although we are finally acknowledging that birds can feel after having lost 3 billion birds, no one other than Sheldrake (that I know of) has posited the obvious – that birds may return to their homes because they are attached to them (I can imagine the screams/outrage – heresy – burn her at the stake).
What happens when we fall in love is that feeling creates a relationship or bond to the being in question be whether it be bird, animal, tree. Awareness or consciousness seeps in opening a door to communication. We are already related through our DNA (differences are minimal when one attends to the big picture). When we start observing, asking questions, developing feelings, and sometimes identifying with an animal, a tree, or bird that being may respond in unusual ways.
Last year it was the hemlocks that began the conversation. I simply followed the nudges I was receiving. I made a conscious effort to become a receiver, a person who listens as she observes…I am keenly aware that other species have lives of their own with purposes that may be quite different from mine. Thus, communication occurs most effectively when I quiet my mind and open my heart…I am NOT suggesting that this tree was talking to me, at least in the usual way. However, trees did respond singly and as part of their community, and because I was attentive, insights followed. Most seem to bubble up from my body and this makes good sense because our feelings, senses, intuition etc. reside in our bodies. It’s at this point that my mind attempts to untangle the meaning(s) behind what I am sensing…body and mind – we need both.
There is one more point I need to make. When this kind of communication occurs it carries a grounded sense of truth – a kind of inner knowing that’s impossible to articulate. Like a stone sinking into my pelvis, my root connection to earth creates a resonance through my body.
No doubt this attitude will be considered absurd by many. And yet, ironically, the reason the earth is in crisis is primarily because humans have forgotten how to perceive or listen to the messages our planet has been giving us as species after species go extinct. Apparently few are aware (or care?) that humans may be next. Earth is our source and context – our home. No small point here. Next stop the moon?
I am not suggesting that education isn’t important if one is going to make most disciplines including science a career choice. However, it is critical from my point of view to include in one’s education learning how to be presentto the experience of being with a frog, or weasel, because this is when a person can develop an emotional attachment to that being. ‘Falling in love’ allows us to see, sense feel intuit in ways that defy explanation as I just tried to explain using my experience with hemlocks as an example. Perhaps learning to listen is the most important skill of all.
Unfortunately the dominant culture continues to privilege mind over body, intellect over senses.‘Trust the experts’ or take a course and become a ‘master’ something – you fill in the blank. Or maybe like me you accrue degrees. What we need to remember is that learning is a life – time process. I believe the naturalist is learning this lesson well, because the more skilled I become the more obvious it is to me that I will always be a beginner.
In closing I hope that I have demonstrated through this personal narrative that education is not enough when it comes to learning about the complexity that is Nature. We learn the most by integrating our thinking with our senses. We educate ourselves to learn more about some other non – human being but…
The following poems were written after making a decision to move into an apartment for the winter, and then struggling to understand what went wrong. Instead of community I met with hostility, and as we know one breeds the other, and for a time I got caught by my shadow too.
Called home out of necessity and need, the longer I stayed the harder it was to leave even when 16 feet of snow crashed down from the roof blocking the entire front of my house. ‘The Peace of the Wild Things’ is in my blood and as hard as I try, I can’t seem to make an adjustment to living in a town where crows and wo- ‘men’ rule, and birdsong is absent though migration is under way.
Last night I dreamed that Little Deer, (a very real small deer who lives on my land with his mother) who also carries my Indigenous name, was struggling to get to my window at home, though I am here. He couldn’t make it through the snow. It was just too deep. His struggle and mine are one. The night before, on the seed moon, his mother, Red Deer, appeared just outside the same window around midnight…
How to interpret such dreaming and experience is always the challenge, even when Nature speaks through two of her own…Am I being called home by my Indigenous roots? What I know is that here, I am locked into isolation that deadens me.
I have committed repeatedly to keeping an open mind, although not one person has welcomed me; virtually all have criticized my every move – focusing on my dogs. Just two days ago another complaint came in about my little girls – even though they hadn’t been here for almost two weeks! Obviously, someone is deliberately using the dogs to intimidate/blame insisting that I am not cleaning up after them when I am. Two days ago, I wrote to the owner naming the bullying and harassment that I continue to experience.
I have given up asking why.
What has happened is that I am starting to realize that harassment and hostility are not the real problems. But apparently being here is.
First of all, this behavior constellated my own harpie! I have ruefully acknowledged her as a part of myself, and that helps a lot.
As a result, I am in the process of letting go of the confusion, anger, and resentment I initially felt, although I still feel keen disappointment. Naively, I suppose, I hoped for some kind of community. I have tried to imagine what kind of lives these people are living – lives perhaps without meaning attached. Bitterness perhaps.
I am also refusing to make a decision at this time. The practical part of me says it is time to leave my home in the winter, but my soul body is struggling, so I keep taking her home, grateful that I still have a home to go to. I cast daily circles of protection around us, and prayers for clarity are ongoing.
I am grateful that I am old enough to be patient. I also suspect that the hand of patriarchy is behind the confusion I can’t seem to let go of. My feelings are being blocked, which means my poor body is stuck experiencing unpleasant bodily symptoms. I can’t feel what I think I know.
I remind myself that I grew up in an ocean of confusion – whatever I felt was dismissed as nonsense if the feeling contradicted thought… this deadly pattern is repeating.
I share this conundrum because it is helpful to do so for me, and because I hope this writing might help others. When I am having difficulties, writing poems seems to help me articulate points that journaling doesn’t. The latter – too rational maybe?
Split Nomad
(1)
Caught
Betwixt and Between
How can this be?
Peace,
Stillness
Sounds of Silence
Soul stitched
to Nature
Cardinal whistles
Turkey Twitters
White pines
Open skies
Winding brook
Waters rippling
as they rise
Sweet breathing
Beloved animals
And yet
Tortured body
drowns in
churning waters
Abandoned
I can’t let go.
Day after day
Even here
denied
sleep
Body
Keening
Innocence
a crimson stain
on the snow
There
White Blobs of
Blinding Light
All Night Long
Steel and eggshells
Rules,
Screaming Harpies
twisting meaning
Dead eyes
Envy?
Absence of kindness
stares of hatred?
Unnerving
one room to hide
Another kind
of prison
Cringing
even the dogs
walk on air.
Flowing like Water
(2)
In the dream
I stand snow – bound
at the Crossroad
Listening
a still point
centered
two paths
ahead
only I
can choose…
Postscript on snow.
When snow covers the land and forest I love I struggle to stay attached to the deep green religion of hope, so psychically I am more vulnerable in the winter than during the other three seasons…My body thrives when her feet are touching brown earth. And from a visual standpoint, months of snow also creates monochromatic monotony… It is no surprise to me that death roams the hills and valleys in winter snow.
Without thinking I threw the old seed into a bag of moist liverworts that I would be looking at under a powerful microscope with my scientist friend Al in a couple of days. I have no idea why I added the seed. The scarlet runner was one I kept in a winter bouquet that I had recently dismantled. The purple and rose bean had to be four or five years old. It would not germinate now …
Imagine my astonishment when I opened the bag in the lab. The bean had sprouted! The long twisted root was hunting for earth. Carefully I re – wrapped the bean and put it in a little container until I could get home and plant it, but not before we looked at it under the microscope. More about that later.
Buried under another 20 inches of snow after a week of almost continuous snowfall I can hardly imagine anything but this glaring white world I live in, a place where turkeys have to swim to reach the seed at my window – swim or fly like cannonballs. Turkey gobbling seems oddly out of place as does the predawn cardinal’s call. And an old bean sprouting months before it could be placed outside?
I am photophobic, meaning that I am extremely light sensitive and every year I dread the ugly White Glare of March Snow, which along with the sun literally blinds me during the day, even while wearing prescription sunglasses. We have had snow on the ground since mid November – snow and ice. We are going to have serious flooding problems I suspect. The sun is relentless melting the toughest drifts and sheds tons of frozen ice and snow from the roof yesterday during its climb to the sky. Not surprising this occurs on the full moon – the ‘seed moon’ according to Indigenous peoples’ reckoning in the Americas…I remind myself that the 16 foot wall at my front door met by more dripping water from the roof will help keep the ground moist feeding thirsty fruit trees later in the spring, after it finishes flooding my cellar…
Then I turn back to my magic bean for inspiration…
Experts insist scarlet runner bean seeds aren’t viable after one or two seasons and this one has been sitting around here for at least five years.
The older I get the more wary I become of the experts or the masters who take a course or two and call themselves professional somethings.
What I have learned from personal experience is that Nature is always teaching us if we let her into our lives and that one human lifetime does not a ‘master’ make. We know almost nothing about how nature really works as a living organism. All of us are beginners but almost none of us will acknowledge this truth.
This knower attitude makes me crazy but I know two men that are exceptions – both are scientists who refuse to be cowed by the materialistic scientific community. One, Dr Rupert Sheldrake was kicked out of the academy 40 years ago for hypothesizing that all nature was alive and possessed memory. He suggested that this collective memory could be tapped into by every species and is responsible for the form of every living thing…DNA codes for proteins but cannot provide an organism with the physical characteristics that make up the body of a porcupine or a person. Furthermore, he posits that each plant or creature is attached to its morphogenic ( physical) family field by invisible means and that an acorn, for example, is actually pulled by its oak field to create the actual form of the tree. Like attracts like – for example, humans have a greater resonance with self than with those of other humans including those in one’s family. This theory remains controversial and many scientists regard it as nonsense.
As a former Jungian analyst I see the patterns that continue to repeat in my own life and that of my clients on a personal and/or intergenerational level as examples of how Rupert’s ideas work in humans; it’s the patterns that make it is so hard to change individual behaviors.
Last night I listened to one of Rupert’s recent podcasts on homing pigeons for the third time. Birds have already begun spring migration; and yet migration is a mystery that still cannot be explained. We hear phrases like birds know how to get from one place to another by ‘genetic programming’. What does this machine – like phrase really mean? Other theories include navigation occurring with the help of the sun, moon, stars, smell, landmarks, magnetic fields etc. Scientists accrue masses of data but still can’t answer the question…if you are interested in migration this podcast is well worth listening to because Rupert debunks theory after theory with a respectful elegance, while acknowledging that parts of all may be true, but THAT WE DON’T KNOW. How utterly refreshing! Rupert’s own hypothesis is that birds may use cues like the sun or magnetic fields ( the current popular theory) or landmarks to help them navigate but that they are also pulled home to lofts, breeding and wintering grounds because they are attached to these places by feeling and this force pulls them to these destinations because the feeling attachment is already there. Home.
I want to interject a personal antidote here regarding migration. This winter I rented an apartment in town because I am getting old and it is hard to take care of myself here with so much shoveling and ice. I moved in only to discover neighbor hostility was running high. Not helpful. Worse, I couldn’t sleep or concentrate. I could feel the pull of my home – it was and is a visceral experience – something about spending 40 years on beloved land seems to be calling me back againstmy conscious will. How I am going to solve this conundrum remains to be seen, but my gut sense is that my house and land want or need (?) me to be here? I feel crazy saying this but recognize that this feeling might be related to a morphogenetic field – I may be experiencing the effects of an invisible field that is pulling me home.
Now, back to Rupert. Another interesting facet of this extraordinary and brilliant man is that he refuses to separate science from spirituality. Rupert is a practicing Anglican who leads pilgrimages to holy places in The UK. BYOB he quips… bring your own beliefs! Again, how refreshing. This is the best kind of Christianity – no one has an agenda! Kudos Rupert.
Al is a well known chemist who studies the properties of stone and like Rupert is also an experimental scientist and a Free Thinker. With equally impressive scientific credentials he is also a practicing Oglala Medicine man who believes that we are just one species of many.For Al, mysticism and good science go hand in hand. I meet with Al once a week for Earth School – I’m the only student and I never know what I am going to learn. Last week we spent our time in the underground cavern looking at his most recent mining discoveries and each week I come home having learned something new about a mineral. Looking through an extraordinary microscope that has a screen that allows you to see things that are unimaginable, I saw bright green sacs of water in the liverworts I brought in – sacs that these organisms use to withstand drought. Finally we put the bean under the microscope. Amazing little microscopic rootlets like the finest hairs were sprouting out of the side of the root. Wow, what a day.
Al believes organized religions are responsible for the cultural depravity we are experiencing now, and in his words “ the utter stupidity” associated with mainstream science. Al is the best teacher I ever had and being a beginner with him is my greatest joy. Whenever I am awed by one of Al’s papers he says “I know just a little”
.
Both of these men are too busy being lifetime learners to bother with people / scientists who think they have the answers. Today’s facts are tomorrow’s mistakes! As Rupert states science is evolving – there are no laws (even the word law is an anthropocentric word only humans have laws), nature probably has habits built up over time in an evolving universe. Who knows.
As a lifetime naturalist and learner these brilliant men are powerful models for me. They demonstrate the kind of humility that helps me to stay in touch with my own need to follow in their footsteps….as a learner not a knower.
Need I add that both of these men are devoted naturalists and eco- feminists of the highest order?
And this brings me around to the bean sprout that has already taught me the experts were wrong about this bean at least!It wasn’t until I finished a draft of this writing that I also realized that for about two weeks the pull of the Seed Moon has been exerting her force over me – This is probably why I threw that bean in with my liverworts
Most of us are familiar with the mythology around oak trees. They are considered oracular beings in many traditions. The Druids considered them to be sacred, the Greeks associated oaks with Zeus ). In Britain there was a goddess of oak trees….but in general oaks are considered to be male beings though they bear seeds and flowers on one tree. Curiously, they do not self pollinate according to author Doug Tallamy, so other oaks are needed to produce acorns.
Mighty male trees ? Nothing could be further from the truth in terms of behavior because oaks are found all over the world and in this country they are what is considered to be a keystone species. What this means is that oaks support and nurture an incredible amount of animals, insects and birds. A ‘ Mother Tree’ in every way. We have four species in this country, one of which clones itself and behaves like a bush. It is believed to be about 1300 years old ( found in the west). Oaks are also considered to be keystone species throughout the Northern Hemisphere..
The natural lifespan of an oak is about 900 years although few live that long. Oaks, even as tiny seedlings support insects that birds need to survive. Moths in particular. Some butterflies, both in the larval stage. Most nestlings need insects for protein and fat. Many people don’t know that most birds are insectivores so without insects we will continue to lose more than the three billion birds that we have lost already. I recently learned that birds like chickadees, nuthatches, and titmice have a winter diet that combines the two equally – seeds and insects.
Most oak tree insects in the larval stage just sit there in oak branches. They have glycerine, a kind of antifreeze that allows them to survive even the harshest winters. In the fall acorns the seed capsules belonging to oaks support an incredible variety of woodland animals like turkeys, opposums, grouse, deer, bear, and of course, the squirrels to name just a few.
One of the most fascinating pieces of information I learned is that jays and oaks co – evolved about 60 million year ago forming a mutually beneficial relationship. Jays carry acorns a mile or more and bury them one by one in their home territories. In this way the jays of the world have been responsible for the spread of all oaks !
Oaks hang on to their leaves, some throughout the winter and when these leaves finally drop they purify the water of toxins and stabilize downpours that create flooding as a result of heavy summer rains. This detritus keeps oak roots moist and creates a habitat for earthworms and springtails as well as many other creatures we don’t see. Allowing the leaves to remain as mulch helps the tree and every other living creature associated with oaks and beyond…
Another advantage of having oaks is that you can plant them close to a house and not worry about tree damage. Oaks planted in good soil will develop a taproot and extensive underground root systems that will keep an oak upright in all but tornadoes. Better yet plant them in small groups ; oaks roots will intertwine making them even more stable. Besides, oaks like their own company ! If you have small yard you can plant an oak that will not tower over your property! There are a number of little oaks, one that will produce acorns when five feet tall. Oaks are both disease and drought resistant which is a huge advantage with global warming increasing surface temperatures at an unprecedented rate.
Most oaks begin to produce acorns by the time they are twenty years old, but please do not buy big trees. Start with a seedling or better yet an acorn. Oaks are fast growing and they will reward you for your patience by developing into healthy long lived trees.
When I first moved to the mountains 40 years ago I noted that the one tree missing from my property was the oak. Because it was my intention to plant primarily for animals, birds butterflies and bees – to give back the gift that nature had given me for so many years – every flower, tree, herb, wildflower I put into the ground was planted with nature in mind. Then I let nature decide what would happen next.Today we would call this rewilding.
Because I had no oaks I collected acorns in the fall for a few years seeding them directly into the earth. Nothing. Disappointed, I assumed the soil might be the problem.
Then about ten years ago I noticed some giant red oak leaves drifting to the ground in the fall (Quercus is the genus for all oaks). Where had they come from ? A few birches fell exposing more understory and that’s when I noticed young red oak trees appearing next to the pine trees. I had oaks at last. Thanks to the bluejays and maybe a few forgetful squirrels ?
Now I make it habit each spring to join what the jays do in the fall – collect acorns ! I select specimens that have no holes in them. If the weevils have gotten in the acorn will not sprout. I find mine along the side of country roads, and sometimes it is possible to pick one up that has already split. I start looking in April and as soon as I find viable seed capsules I soak them in wet towels for a day or so until the white root with its red tip is visible. Then I plant Quercus ( genus) in clay pots, transplanting seedlings close to white pines in early fall because oaks and pines have a mycorrhizal relationship.
Don’t be discouraged if you see only two leaves emerge that first year ; this is normal. The root is ten times the size of the emerging twig. All the growth is occurring underground. Burgeoning roots will eventually store an immense amount of carbon, safely, and for a very long time. A wire cage will help keep seedlings protected from deer and other browsers, and because oaks are fast growing you will have an elegant little tree in a very few years.
The ‘experts’ tell us to gather acorns in the fall, but I did that and no seedlings emerged. So I wait for spring to forage and have not had a problem germinating red oak seedlings. Apparently white oaks – the elipitical ones – take 18 months to germinate, while red oaks ( round) only take a year. The cluster of white oaks I planted here a few years ago also germinated in the spring, so perhaps I was just fortunate. This April when I go in search of my acorns I’ll plant white oaks again to see if they grow. White oaks are less common around here.
When spring arrives why not forage for and plant an acorn or two ? I have found this process to be a satisfying one. As a lifetime gardener/forager and naturalist I look forward to the the joy of watching an acorn becoming a tree that will support so much wildlife. Nature will thank you.
Over The Edge and Beyond: Journal of a Naturalist 