Small Wonders

Basil Coyote, Sadie Owl

2011-10-24T07:53:00.000-07:00

We are privileged to live among wildlife. Sometimes it's also heartbreaking, but it's always a privilege. If we love living here, that can't be just because no sacrifice is required. We have to accept balance among the sometimes-conflicting things we choose to love. We learn to understand risk.

Basil was a sweet, innocent, big, gorgeous young cat we loved very much. He showed up, just appeared, one morning on the neighbor's doorstep—one tiny kitten in a light dusting of snow—and he ended up with us. Two years later, he disappeared just as abruptly. We guessed he went off to become a coyote. Paths crossed; a transformation took place. Basil Coyote. We're pretty fond of coyotes too, though from a larger distance than cats, and we had a clear idea whose rights—and whose needs—took precedence.

When my sister took Sadie to "the land" (their new home in the oak woods of southwest Colorado), she understood the risk. But Sadie was an outdoor cat, inevitably a hunter. She loved the woods, the clear fall days, but only briefly. The day after she failed to come home, my sister found herself face-to-face with a great horned owl in those same woods. She had an eerie feeling she was looking straight into Sadie's wild-hunter eyes.

Perhaps you've never been face to face with a wild owl. It's an experience you don't forget. An owl's eyes contain uncompromising wildness, more than enough to make you back up a step. The one I saw up close was hurt, but the only readable expression I caught was wariness (of me) and sharp intelligence. Not for nothing are owls thought wise. Those eyes will stay with me always. The impenetrable look of a wild predator calmly assessing ... you. (Photo by Peter Manidis, courtesy Wikipedia.)

Some cats sometimes show us this face. Cats are only marginally domesticated (part of their appeal for some; part of their horror for others). You'll never see this look in the eyes of a companion dog. One of the cats I've known is capable of this. Tame, trusting, and occasionally affectionate as he is, looking into his eyes, as into the owl's, is sounding the depths of the unknowable. It would be difficult to be comfortable with such eyes, or complacent about life while he is watching. The wild waits always.

One of my favorite books* has a story about Jumping Mouse, who wanted to explore—to see farther than any other mouse had. It is a mouse's nature to know best what is up close, to see clearly only that which is at hand. Mice are nervous and timid little creatures, and rightly so. You would be too if you lived at the bottom of so many food chains. Although he was frightened, Jumping Mouse persisted—and eventually succeeded—in his quest. He was transformed into Eagle, a being who could fly higher and see farther than most mice ever dreamed.

Transformation is a recurring theme in Nature. What goes around comes around. Cute saying: Nature invented it. Sometimes mice become cats and sometimes cats become coyotes or owls. Sometimes German shepherds become mountain lions. I don't think we have much chance of escaping this merry-go-round. We're all just reshuffling patterns. If there's anything you value more than you value the process, maybe you're living in the wrong place.

* The book is Seven Arrows, by Hyemeyohsts Storm... recommended reading! You can read the story of Jumping Mouse at the link.

Rethinking Arbor Day

2011-04-24T10:47:00.000-07:00

For the school child, Arbor Day is one of the unquestioned goodies of childhood indoctrination, like Washington’s or Lincoln’s Birthdays, a day to be happily and unequivocally celebrated by the planting of trees. But as the actual presidential birthdays have succumbed to our busy and efficient world of Monday holidays, perhaps it is also time to look at what Arbor Day is really about, how we came to celebrate it at all, and whether it is still a fitting holiday for today’s world.

In fact, our relationship with trees is ancient, vital, and undoubtedly eternal. It stems from primordial memories of our ancestors seeking cover and protection when threatened. Researchers have suggested that in the savannas of our species’ youth, certain trees and small woods offered refuge from the large cats and hyenas that were predators on early humans. Today, we are still attracted to such pastoral situations—open areas with good visibility, yes, but not unrelieved openness. Think of 18th century landscape paintings. It is not trees in deep woods that attract us, but smaller stands of isolated trees nestled in verdant meadows. Deep woods, in fact, add to our sense of danger and foreboding.

When J. Sterling Morton and his wife arrived in Nebraska from Detroit, unrelieved openness was pretty much what they found. The vast plains were a surprise to pioneers who had just spent several generations clearing their way through the dense forests of eastern North America. The few cottonwoods along the riverbanks were quickly depleted by a society focused on obtaining shelter and fuel, and settlers soon learned what it meant to live without trees.

From his platform as editor of Nebraska’s first newspaper, Morton promoted the planting of trees. On the first Arbor Day, celebrated on April 10, 1872, an estimated one million trees were planted. In 1885, when Arbor Day was made a legal holiday in Nebraska, April 22nd was set as the date for its observance. In his speech to a packed opera house, including 1,000 schoolchildren who had triumphantly paraded through town after their requisite tree-planting, he said

“...in picturing the heaven we long for, man’s brain has always drawn largely for its imagery from man’s vegetable co-tenants of the globe. This being man’s concept of human happiness, let us endeavor then ... to so embellish the world with plant life, trees, flowers and foliage, as to make our earth homes approximate to those which the prophets, poets and seers of all ages have portrayed as the Home in Heaven.”

Morton sought, especially, for his fellow citizens to help repair the denudation they had themselves created, as the “fifty-five millions of Americans consume daily for their varied uses 25,000 acres of forest.” (Today our number is 311 millions, and that effect has multiplied. We were only 270 million when I first wrote this article.) “We ought to bequeath to posterity as many forests and orchards as we have exhausted and consumed,” he added. Who could argue?

Here in this country, we settlers have always planted trees. We want to be in the company of trees. Growing up in rural New York state, whose original forests were decimated, we would travel the back lanes looking for old homesteads or graveyards, always spotting them by the characteristic pattern of artificially planted trees: A few Norway spruces, standing out darkly against the regrown deciduous forests native to the area; or looking closer, perhaps an old orchard, a few lilac bushes. In Wyoming, a similar pattern prevailed, with homesteads outlined by regimented windbreaks of Russian-olive. We plant trees, it seems, but we often plant exotics that instantly mark the landscape as man-made.

If you compare the way Denver looks today to historical photos, you know that things have changed significantly. And Russian-olive, once distributed intentionally for erosion control and “wildlife habitat,” is now outgrowing native cottonwoods and destroying wildlife habitat to such an extent that many declare it a noxious weed subject to eradication. This Arbor Day, as in most celebrations past, many of the trees to be planted will be exotic or ornamental introductions, especially those offered “free” by banks and others who haven’t thought through what they’re doing. Be wary. There are alternatives to remaking our landscape—we could plant more natives for example, if we must plant trees. Or we could learn to live with the prairie landscape we have. Yet, as we approach the 140^th anniversary of Arbor Day, the National Arbor Day Foundation tells us, “a visit to Nebraska today would never disclose that the state was once a treeless plain.”

“Most of Earth's terrestrial ecosystems are treeless, and planting trees degrades them.”

—from Don’t Worry, Plant a Tree, by Ted Williams, Audubon magazine, May 1991

In harboring qualms about Arbor Day, one feels like a Grinch or a Scrooge. How can we not love the idea of planting trees? There’s a right way and a wrong way, a right place and, in the case of large parts of Colorado, “treeless plains.” We ought to think twice before planting, for there are many places where trees never lived and are still not needed today. Do you really want to be out digging holes and hauling water, when you could be relaxing and watching a field of native grasses waving in the spring breezes?

Not truly treeless, however, our prairies have their own arbors of cottonwoods, hackberries, chokecherries, even pines—all in appropriate places along streams or on rocky outcrops. In inappropriate places or inappropriate species, trees become a maintenance struggle, as most residents of the urban Front Range have discovered the hard way.

Eternal prairie and grass, with occasional groups of trees. Frémont prefers this to every other landscape. To me it is as if someone would prefer a book with blank pages to a good story.
—Charles Preuss, Exploring with Frémont, 1842

Although prairies do have their “good story” and their trees, they never support dense forests like those that were, ironically, destroyed by those who moved on to become born-again tree planters on the plains. The prairies had tenants of their own, tallgrasses and midgrasses, wildflowers most of us have never seen. The past tense is largely accurate, for most of the native prairie and many of its inhabitants are gone. Like the forests before, the deep-rooted true prairies that once thrived in our challenging environments were destroyed by the “sodbusters,” who then quickly learned the necessities of erosion control.

——
By Sally L. White, originally published in Colorado Gardener, April 1999

A Harvest for the Holly Days

2010-12-26T08:37:00.000-08:00

That holiday tradition of “decking the halls” is a long one still well practiced today. Seeing our homes and streets festooned with greenery, we might think little has changed from those nostalgic Victorian Christmases we emulate. Gathering decorative greens, however, is a rite best practiced in places where sustained harvests are possible. How well have familiar—and some not so familiar—holiday plants withstood the pressures of our seasonal festivities?

Taking the old songs seriously, we’d first observe a notable lack of “boughs of holly” in our local decorations. I’ve seen quite a few Christmases, and I’ve yet to see more than a small twig of actual holly at a time. In the milder climates of England and southern Europe, where it is native, holly (Ilex aquifolium) grows into a tree some 70 feet tall, and it is perhaps still feasible to harvest entire boughs for the mantelpiece. According to one study, regeneration of holly trees is not dependent on the seeds eaten by birds, which are deposited under trees in great numbers, because seedlings cannot survive the deep shade and high competition there.
Most successful young trees are found in well-lit patches where they are safe from grazing animals. Thus, cows may hold a key to holly’s long-term survival. Gardeners hold another: Many species of holly are also cultivated, even in milder parts of the U.S.

Ground pines, among my favorite plants, were once used to make wreaths—and may still be in lusher northern regions, such as Scandinavia. I think that most of us were born too late to see such abundance of this obscure plant in the U.S. You’ll find no red or white berries on this primitive plant—only spores. Other than decorative uses, those spores seem to be the most useful feature. They have been used for baby powder, to stop bleeding, and for flash powder for early photography. Thus the reproductive effort of these plants once literally went up in smoke.

Ground pines, also known as clubmosses, have had their day, and that day ended more than 300 million years ago. Thanks to the Denver Museum of Natural History, we can imagine what these ancient trees of the coal age may have looked like. These plants invented trees—and forests! Lepidodendron, the “scale-tree” as one example, was more than 100 feet tall, and grew in dense forests in the equatorial swamps then prevalent across North America and Europe. They, too, eventually went up in smoke; the vast coal deposits these prehistoric forests formed have kept entire countries warm for decades.

Now those ancient giants are gone, and only about 450 species of their lowly relatives survive. Most survivors belong to the genus Lycopodium, or wolf’s foot to Greek enthusiasts. We have few species of Lycopodium in Colorado; most abundant, though hardly common, is the unusual Lycopodium annotinum, stiff clubmoss, growing on the West Slope in small patches. This species occurs from Greenland to Alaska, where it is found in mature forests, especially those not disturbed by logging for many decades, and is occasionally eaten by moose. It is ranked S4, "apparently secure", in Colorado; very secure in much of Canada. Another species, L. alpinum, is "critically imperiled" in Colorado and Newfoundland, but rated apparently secure in the Yukon, British Columbia, and Alberta. (Photo by Franz Xaver from Wikipedia.org).

Are the remaining clubmosses on the way to extinction? If so, it may be that we have helped them down that road a bit. In moist forests of turn-of-the-century New England, ground pines were harvested in great volume for wreath material and other hall-decking. As a child in the northeast, I remember these wonderful plants but never found them in great abundance. About six inches tall at most, spreading outward in patches under the trees, these plants do resemble miniature pine trees. As with most “useless” plants of the forest floor, they are rarely discussed in forestry studies and rarely thrive in managed forests and tree plantations. In New York today, lycopods are protected on public lands, as they all, as a group, are considered to be declining and vulnerable to exploitation, in part because they regenerate very slowly after being harvested. Commercial collecting has made some species rare; the L. complanatum I remember is now considered "critically imperiled" in New York State, but L. obscurum remains secure there. [Explore the status of species of Lycopodium at NatureServe.org.]

Our wreaths and boughs today usually substitute easily gathered pine, spruce, and fir branches for these older plants. Some of us may be able to harvest boughs from our own backyards; most of us probably cannot. A few commercial collecting permits are offered in our nearby national forests; the Arapahoe-Roosevelt Forest this year [1996] sold commercial permits for about 8 tons of boughs at $50 per ton. (If you have a permit to cut a Christmas tree, you are allowed to pick up a few boughs for personal use.) Decorative boughs for wreaths and garlands are harvested from private lands in Colorado as well.

Some coniferous decorations offered for holiday sale here and elsewhere in the U.S. are imported from the Pacific Northwest, where trees are larger and grow more quickly. In the Wenatchee National Forest in Washington, more than 90,000 pounds of limbs and boughs were harvested in 1995, along with 500 bushels of cones and 2,500 pounds of other “foliage.” Perhaps some of this year’s harvest—regional or imported—will end up brightening your own front door.

——
by Sally L. White, originally published in Upbeat, December 1996, ©2010.

Do Sleeping Plants Dream?

2010-11-13T08:31:00.000-08:00

Disclaimer: It amazes me that this essay was written more than 14 years ago. Since then, science has indeed marched on, and an update on nastic movements is now posted over at Foothills Fancies.

My new prayer plant is an early riser. Although the sun is below the horizon and the room is dark, the sky is lightening, and she is already wide awake. How do I know? Well, some plants are dramatic in their daily movements, and her species is one of many that have attracted attention for centuries because they give the appearance of waking and sleeping each day. Pliny the Elder, a Roman scholar circa 75 A.D., remarked on the somnolent plants; much later Linnaeus devoted a famous essay, Somnus Plantarum, to the subject.

When I set out to write this essay, I wanted an appropriate subject to observe, and lo! not one of the 50+ houseplants in my current collection is this visibly hyperactive type. In my search I came first upon a prayer plant (Maranta leuconeura), although I might have found a dainty shamrock (Oxalis spp.), often available this time of year. If I were very lucky, I might even have encountered a sensitive Mimosa, a faddish plant that periodically disappears from the horticulture trade as each generation tires of touching them to watch the leaves collapse. (These days it may take more to amuse us, for I haven’t seen a Mimosa in years.)

Photo of Maranta leuconeura, awake!, by Kurt Stueber. From BioLib.de, Creative Commons, GNU Free Documentation License, accessed from Wikipedia.

But I shall have to get up early indeed if I expect to see this plant in action, her leaves unfolding from her nightly prayers to spread themselves in anticipation of the light. Trying again, I find that she is prepared even before the first hint of light appears to my eye, although she was sound asleep when I went to bed. In his study of plant movements, Charles Darwin observed dozens of plants that raise or lower their leaves in sleep. These plants don’t respond to light alone, he found, but to the cycles of light and dark, the difference between intense light and its absence. Plants need strong light and good moisture conditions to demonstrate sleep behavior. Plants that are stressed or disturbed, as his Maranta was by strong wind one night, remain sleepless for some time thereafter.

Typically thorough, Darwin lists sleeping species in 86 genera belonging to 26 distinct plant families, although the legumes have by far the most. Sleepers include species of lupines, milkvetches, sweet clovers, wild licorice, and many others whose relatives grow wild here in our foothills, as well as tamer ones like hibiscus and cotton, common garden beans and radishes, nasturtiums, four-o’clocks, and morning glories. Sleeping plants...it’s a charming concept that modern scientists tersely labeled nyctinasty (from Greek roots for night and pressing close), then mostly ignored.

Tracing the movements of individual leaves day after day, Darwin concluded that sleep movements are a modified form of the normal—though far less obvious—movements healthy leaves continuously make. How can a plant with neither muscles nor nerves move so quickly? You’ve probably noted that leaves are capable of abrupt position changes when they run low on water. We call it wilting. Most nastic movements are also based on hydraulic changes within the cells. By raising or lowering water pressure on opposite sides of the leaf stem, a leaf can move through angles of 90 degrees or more, and even turn on its axis. Some plants, such as my Maranta, are equipped with specialized joints that control their daily movements. These structures, called pulvini, occur where the leaf blade joins the petiole, functionally a bit like the wrist joint connecting your hand and forearm.

By forcing some leaves to stay “awake,” Darwin also tested whether plants are protected from cold nights by their cozy postures of sleep. It’s not the cold wind that’s the threat, he tells us, but radiation—a subject we tend to overlook. On clear nights, any exposed surfaces will lose heat directly to the open sky—to space, as it were. By folding up or down in sleep, leaves turn their narrowest edges to the sky, protecting their broad flat heat-losing surfaces. According to his experiments, leaves thus protected were less often damaged by frost. If sleeping offers such advantages, why don’t more kinds of plants—especially those in cold areas—sleep?

Well, they do, don’t they? Most of our local plants are deep in a season-long sleep, leaving only tropical houseplants to keep us company through the long deprivations of winter. While these companions keep us in touch with the spirit of plants, they also fill our shuttered houses with good green oxygen and remind us of spring. “Storms and winter weather,” some say, “bring plants and people close together.” We probably have a few storms yet to weather this winter, and can rely on our faithful houseplants to help us get through them.

Although we have an extensive leguminous flora, I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve never caught one of them asleep. So when spring does come, I plan to take some walks at dusk, just to see if I can spot the “jerky movements” Darwin speaks of, and to see how many native cousins of the greenhouse plants he studied also sleep. Darwin noted in his classic understated style, “It is troublesome to observe the movement of leaves in the middle of the night,” although he did so nonetheless. Can such inconveniences explain why the fascinating sleep of plants is so little studied now? In his later years, although he rarely left his home grounds—or sometimes even his study—his curiosity and patience yield us marvels to contemplate more than a century later.

——
by Sally L. White, originally published in Upbeat, March 1996, ©2010.

A Light in the Forest: Aspens and Fire

2010-06-01T10:23:00.000-07:00

The morning after fire, burned soils are slowly cooling. Lodgepole pine seeds drift down from cones opened by the intense heat. Light breezes stir the layer of ash on the ground. Survivors—birds, mammals, and other forest life—are already seeking new homes. The forest is quieter today and smells strongly of fire. For us humans, fire is a terrifying and uniquely threatening experience—one we cannot always control or appreciate. We see only a charred landscape, and grieve. But while we continue grieving, nature simply begins again.

Already the shallow lateral roots of aspen are feeling the effects of auxin deprivation. The aboveground stems, now absent, no longer send their chemical message of living trees above, a message that has held potential new shoots at bay. Thousands of tiny buds, the primordia of aspen trees to come, are awakening to start the long process of recovery. Long, that is, by our standards. In the life of a forest, events will proceed quickly. In a year or two, there could be thirty young shoots for each mature stem that existed before the fire. Within 20 or 30 years, superficial evidence of fire disappears, leaving the aspen themselves as the primary clue.

In an aspen woodland, the life below ground is older than the forest we see, and it may well have seen fires before. In fact, aspen has an ancient relationship with fire, but it is an unusual one. With a lifespan comparable to ours (say 60 to 120 years), individual stems of aspen are short-lived as trees go. The forests they create thrive on the rebirth that fire provides. That is, until we came.

Today, aspen forests are as often rejuvenated by logging as by fire. Any method that removes the overstory trees without damaging the all-important root system is effective. In fact, researchers have found root density to be a key indicator of successful regeneration in aspen stands. Too few roots, and the aspens give way to grasses or conifers.

Of all the forest types adapted to fire, aspen is the least flammable and in many ways the most dependent on fire. Our other forests—of ponderosa pine, spruce and fir, or other conifers—burn more readily. In most seasons, aspen forests are either snow covered or too green to carry fire, and may even act as a firebreak, slowing or stopping fires that reach them. This trait is used to advantage by firefighters. In fall, however, when the lush understory has been killed by frost and the thick layer of aspen leaves has dried to a fine tinder, then aspen can burn and burn brightly.

Most fires in aspen woodlands occur in October under just such conditions. Such fires during the mid- to late-1800s gave us the aspen glories we drive to the mountains to enjoy today. We have so few deciduous trees: what would we do without the golden glow of October's aspen? Some years, extra hot and dry, give us Octobers to watch with caution, mindful of the long-standing relation between aspen and fire.

That dependence of aspen on fire has its own dynamic. Although they need fire, aspen forests are very vulnerable to it. Individual stems, with their thin bark, are girdled and killed by even moderate fires, but remember that the deeper life is underground. The parent root system must start over, each time, from scratch. Even a severe fire kills lateral roots only in the top two inches of soil. Suckers can sprout from laterals five to six inches deep if necessary.

If fires are too frequent, however, the roots will be exhausted from the efforts of renewal. If fires are too rare, occurring at intervals of more than a century or two, the aspen may grow old and die out beneath a dominant overstory of conifers, leaving no roots to replenish the site. Fire every 50 to 100 years is about right for continuous aspen, if that's the goal.

In comparison, ponderosa pine forests use a different strategy to achieve persistence through time. Frequent fires, every five to twenty years or so, thin the understory while individual trees live on, encased in their protective layers of bark. Fire delayed is made deadly. As we live with and in Colorado's forests, we are not required to choose whether or not we will have fire: we will. Our challenge is to decide whether we prefer fires to be frequent—or intense. Choose wisely, be careful, and enjoy the gentler side of aspen's October glow.

——
Copyright, S.L. White, 2010. Illustration copyright Jan Ratcliffe.
Originally published in Upbeat, October 1994.

Let the Birds Do It!

2010-02-25T07:05:00.000-08:00

Each spring for a few weeks I get the urge. I study seed catalogs and linger longingly at nursery displays. Sometimes I even succumb to the lure of bright flowers and elegant shrubs. But despite my fantasies, I have yet to achieve the perfection and visual charm I so often see portrayed as The Ideal Garden.

Two things conspire against me. One, our semiarid climate, seems to be a barrier between my wild, unruly yard and the delicious pictures I see in the gardening or lifestyle magazines. I know that such designs are made for eastern gardens or other places where water can be used profligately. The second controlling factor, which prevents us from ignoring the first and simply spreading water everywhere anyway, is our 400-foot-deep well. Barely adequate (with care) for the two of us, it is not enough to support a traditional garden in the style it prefers. Our yard has been called an extreme Xeriscape test garden—if it can grow here, it can grow anywhere. We’ve tried out many plants, and it is a limited set indeed that can master our inhospitable circumstances.

There is a third factor, no doubt. My own laziness, or perhaps readiness to be distracted by other demands, creates an inability to focus on the garden’s needs and contributes to my sense of failure. So I have had to find another route to (limited) success—I have recruited the birds to my aid. If I want a garden that provides habitat for wildlife, what better approach than to take advantage of the birds’ tendency to improve their own habitat? This generates a serendipitous garden that is less about control than about spontaneity. A garden that continually surprises the so-called “gardener” with new developments. A garden that evolves in harmony with the animals and plants that live within it and is “designed,” so to speak, to meet their needs.

One year I noticed a clump of chokecherries (Prunus virginiana, Padus virginiana) getting started at the end of the driveway, and that was the beginning of gardening by birds. When the peach tree, long suffering from that oozing rot they get, finally died and we cut it down, I found an outline, almost a ghost, of it on the ground. Reflecting the branching pattern above were rows of chokecherries and three currant bushes. This thicket now includes a golden currant (Ribes aureum) and two wax currants (Ribes cereum) there in the back yard, planted by the birds to their own accidental pattern, and the peach tree’s memory lives on in them. If selecting the right site for each plant plays an important role in its survival, who knows better than the birds where their favorite plants will do well?

Real gardeners often look askance at “volunteers.” Letting plants spring up where they will violates their sense of design. In our yard, these plants aren’t really volunteers, they’re recruits. It’s the birds who have recruited their preferred fruits and berries.

Judging by what we get, chokecherries are high on their list, and juniper berries are popular. Currants, of course, also get their attention. (Golden currant, photo left.) These plants operate by providing a juicy, tempting, nourishing treat, the fruit or berry, wrapped around a hard, indigestible seed. If you’ve wondered why blackberries (including raspberries, thimbleberries, and other relatives) pop up along fencerows and under streamside thickets, think about where birds spend their time. More than a hundred species of animals, including grosbeaks, orioles, tanagers, towhees, grouse, and robins among the birds, take advantage of these summer fruits.

Species that provide edible seeds are using a different principle, sacrificing many seeds to the cause of dispersal, but berries and stone fruits attract birds and other animals to their purposes without such losses of valuable seed. Wild plum (Prunus americana), another native I’d like to have, is too large a fruit, too large a seed really, to be carried by birds, and has yet to appear here accidentally.

There are two approaches to accidental gardening: one is to let the birds do it, and live with the results. You’ll find seedlings under bushes and trees, along fences, and even under telephone wires. My husband suggests that perches strategically placed around the yard would help fine-tune this haphazard process. Another way is to let the birds create a nursery for you. We have a large oriental elm in the backyard, a beautiful tree from an unfortunate species, but the birds enjoy perching on its branches. Underneath it, we find a flock of juniper seedlings that will tolerate its shade for a while, but won’t do well there in the long term. So we transplant them to sunnier locations once they’ve gotten off to a good start. This nurse tree approach can often be observed in the wild, but there the survival of the young plants often depends on the timely demise of their nurse.

Other species we’re keeping an eye out for are the vines: wild grapes (Vitis riparia) and western woodbine (Parthenocissus inserta) have berries that ripen and stay on the vine late in the season, providing fall and winter food for many species of birds, including woodpeckers, chickadees, bluebirds, and waxwings. Snowberries (Symphoricarpos spp.) could also pop up, as they too provide winter food for many species. All will be welcome.

When you let the birds help with your landscaping, you will not only be providing them a feast, but will enhance their nesting sites and protective cover, as well as giving many other animals food and home sites, from deer and rabbits to coyotes and bears, allowing you many more surprises in the garden!

——
Copyright, S.L. White, 2010. Illustration copyright Jan Ratcliffe.
Originally published in Upbeat, June 1997.

Of Chickens and Cliches

2008-12-15T07:03:00.000-08:00

Our language is enriched by words and phrases that have become so commonplace we no longer freely react to them. When they reach that stage, we call them clichés, and their meaning grows dull. Yet their origin, their entrée into such common use, was based on the conciseness and effectiveness with which they captured truth. There’s another reason such phrases grow dull. It happens when our experience grows away from the truths they offer.

Take chickens, for example. I never had a close personal relationship with chickens, except on the dinner table. Until now. Unable to resist recurring temptation, I bought a few pullets (female chicks to the rest of us) recently, and was thrown into instant confrontation with certain linguistic realities. Already I know where we got the idea of “spring chickens,” who personify youth and vigor and innocence for the rest of us. I thought I understood “pecking order” as a concise description of a dominance hierarchy, but there’s more. It also, more benignly, tells the story of the first chick to wake up—her pecking wakes the others who then rush to join her at the feeder. “What, there’s food? Oh boy!” For me, pecking order isn’t just part of the cultural overlay of education or absorption anymore, it’s part of my direct experience.

Once upon a time, in this land not so long ago, most everyone lived with chickens and daily experienced certain chicken truths. “A chicken in every pot” was a well-understood promise on which a politician could ride to the White House, much the way “A MacDonald’s on every corner” might work today. It was a guarantee of abundance people could relate to, and it translated instantly into everyone’s experience. Today, chickens and eggs are “produced” on industrial “farms” without ever being touched by human hands.

Living with chickens, I’ll learn that “henpecked” describes a pretty grim reality , and that having “egg on your face” isn’t just a sign of shame but absolute proof of guilt, as it’s often the only way to tell which hen has developed the bad habit of egg-eating. I’ll find out whether chickens always come home to roost and maybe I’ll start going to bed with the chickens, as real farmers do. Maybe I’ll even figure out whether “egg money” and “chicken feed” ever strike a balance.

I’m sure I’m going to be learning a lot more from these birds, and it won’t just be old sayings. Attempting to raise chickens in the foothills will teach important Nature lessons too, and put my relationship with local predators on a whole new footing. Whether or not one plans to raise domestic animals for meat, there will be lessons of life and death, attachment and letting go. I’ll learn to let go when I have to share my chickens with local hawks and coyotes, just as I have with cats who disappear in the night now and then. I’ll learn to be more aware of and responsive to changes in weather and seasons, as I weigh their effects on the chickens and watch the hens’ behavior change with them. And, perhaps most important, I’ll learn (again) humility—when and how much interference Nature will tolerate—as I learn whether to try to save a weak chick or a sick bird, and whether human ingenuity and chicken wire can outsmart sheer hunger and determination on the part of local skunks and foxes.

If our experience with domestic animals is becoming limited—and how many of us have tried to lead a horse to water or bought a pig in a poke lately—so is our direct experience of wild animals. Although there are truths in some clichés, many others abound with contradictions. As our experience grows away from the roots of these expressions, how will we know which are which? If we neglect to sit and watch crows cavorting on the thermals near a cliff face, we won’t know how straight they fly. Without personal observation, we can’t be sure what “eating like a bird” really means, or where acorns fall in relation to their trees, or how big an oak will grow from one. It’s not books or teachers that tell us what happens when a twig is bent or an ill wind blows, but experience.

Our language would be far poorer without such sayings, but it’s easy to lose track of their true meaning. We've forgotten that “a bird in the hand” and the innocent nursery rhyme about “blackbirds in a pie” recall times and places when songbirds were (and still are) dietary staples, a practice we’ve come to deplore as we rely more and more on domesticated foodstuffs—including, of course, chickens!

I doubt I’ll ever solve the old riddle, but in my experience the chickens will come months before the eggs. With luck, I’ll learn what fresh eggs taste like sometime this fall. And above all, I’ll learn that chickens are true birds, with charming individual personalities and fascinating behaviors, not just wrapped packages in the supermarket. I’ll learn about instinct, as I watch day-old chicks grow into competent adults without a shred of parental guidance, an accomplishment we mammals can’t begin to match. Maybe I’ll even learn a few words in the rich assortment of clicks, whistles, and alarms with which the flock communicates. And I expect I’ll be learning chicken lessons until the cows come home.

Copyright, S.L. White, 2008. Illustration copyright Jan Ratcliffe.
Originally published in Upbeat, June 1996.

When Winter Comes: Strategies for Survival

2008-11-14T07:20:00.000-08:00

Our world is surprisingly full of animals, even in our heavily developed areas. How does nature ensure that fullness? By paying a large price: Excess. This annual tax often comes due in winter. Every student of nature stumbles upon and must come to terms with the necessity for such excess. Charles Darwin once remarked upon the "clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature." Henry David Thoreau sounded a somewhat more optimistic note: "I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey upon one another." Whatever we may think of this system, it works.

In the plant world, we find it useful to describe life cycles by their duration. For example, we understand some plants to be annuals that go from seed to seed in a single season, investing all their energy in the next generation. Others are perennials that take several seasons (or decades) to grow, reproduce, and die. The concept is equally useful when applied to animals. Some animals, especially among the insects, could be considered annuals, going from egg to egg in a single season or year. Even those who could live for years—potential perennials—often don't. Winter is one of the reasons for shorter lifespans.

Many insects invest any hopes they have for the future in an egg or pupa that is dormant during the cold months; most butterflies use this approach. Others, for example hornets, go from the abundance of a large "city"—the paper nest with its thousands of inhabitants—to a few adult queens, stocked with sperm for the following spring. At least one must make it through winter to begin again. On the average, one does. Ladybird beetles also go through winter as adults, coming together by the thousands each fall to hide in crevices and other sheltered places on mountaintops.

For animals large and small, winter success is often a matter of survival of the fattest. Stocking up enough reserve energy to get through the winter is especially important to those who will not look for food again until spring: bears, snakes and lizards, frogs and toads, hibernating ground squirrels, and many more. They sleep, gambling that the fat they've stored will last longer than the winter ahead.

Others remain active, using hidden food caches as pine squirrels and scrub jays do, or searching for food all winter as deer and elk do. Stocking up is still important, though. The more energy they've been able to store internally during summer's abundance, the better their chances of finding enough external food sources to get by.

Among birds, many escape the rigors of winter by migrating, but there is no escaping the annual tax, and no way the world can hold all the young produced each year. In 1991, volunteers for Hawkwatch International counted a thousand Sharp-shinned hawks migrating over one mountain ridge in Utah; almost half were immature birds making their first trip south. Only about one-third of those young birds will live to make the return trip. By our standards, this reflects an oppressive tax indeed; by nature's standards, it is a necessary one.

Our smallest winter-resident bird, the chickadee, lives all winter on a nutritional and energetic edge. In ten years, Aldo Leopold banded 97 chickadees on his Sand County farm. Only one survived five winters; 67 didn't make it past their first. But survival isn't just a lottery; much can depend on the decisions the animals themselves make. Read the chapter on chickadees that ends his Sand County Almanac—it's one of his best.

It seems likely that weather is the only killer so devoid of both humor and dimension as to kill a chickadee....To the chickadee, winter wind is the boundary of the habitable world....Books on nature seldom mention wind; they are written behind stoves.

—Aldo Leopold

It's no wonder, then, that animals do whatever they can to reduce the demands winter places on them, to increase their chances of being here come spring. Deer invade your yard to eat fall apples or early spring tulips; mice and squirrels, along with wasps and spiders, invade your house in search of warm spots where their limited stored energy will not be drained by cold. It's going to be a tough time to be outdoors, and somehow the animals know it. That wasp wedged under the bark in your woodpile may be the queen of a new city; the spider in the corner of your porch could found a new dynasty; the mouse in your basement is the matriarch of next summer's owl food. All are just doing the job nature assigned them at a time when she's not about to make that job easy.

——
Copyright, S.L. White, 2008. Illustration copyright Jan Ratcliffe.
Originally published in Upbeat, November 1994.

Secret Nights of Salamanders

2008-03-05T06:18:00.000-08:00

Perhaps you can ignore the first time a salamander knocks on your door, but when it happens again, it’s time to pay attention. This soggy summer of ours has brought renewed encounters with Colorado’s only species, the tiger salamander (Ambystoma tigrinum). I hadn’t seen a wild one in six years, which says something either about our weather, or the nonexistent night life I’ve been leading! One night when my husband found one at the door about 2 a.m., I recalled my first encounters with these startling but delightful critters. I’ve also noticed lately that many people who have never met them are surprised to discover them here at all, and wonder what—and why— on Earth they are. The days may be ours, but the nights belong to them.

Field work in eastern Wyoming brought me my first encounters with tigers. After a day or more of good hard rain, suddenly our campsite was crawling with these large amphibians. Groping a damp tent floor in the dark to make sure none of them are planning on spending the night with you is not a great way to develop fond feelings for the slimy fellows, but it does get you wondering about their enigmatic lifestyle. Where, in a ten-thousand acre expanse of sagebrush (and little else), does a tiger salamander come from?

We think of the prairie as a dry place, albeit interrupted by stream channels or swales that are also usually dry. The evidence of water is there in the paths it has taken or the places it has rested, but it is rarely visible. The monsoon season we had this summer changed all that. At the Plains Conservation Center, a large preserve on the prairie east of Denver, water was everywhere. In pools and puddles, flowing down those abandoned-looking channels, and even filling the buffalo wallows. I imagine that, by now, amphibians too are everywhere, and not just on the prairie.

Taking advantage of all this moisture, adult salamanders leave the burrows where they’ve been hiding from our typical summer sun, and wander about, especially at night. Young salamanders, newly metamorphosed, are also on the move. Perhaps the rain, to salamanders, signals greener pastures or happier hunting for food or mates. Salamanders start life as eggs, then larvae, in ponds and pools in every county in Colorado. In dank muddy prairie potholes and cool subalpine ponds, they hatch and feed with their fellows. The larvae, with three gills on each side of their necks, are creatures who must live strictly in water. As they grow into adults, the gills are lost, and they venture out on land. Sometimes drying ponds push them into maturity a little early— the ones I saw this summer seemed very small for adult salamanders.

They were especially small compared to the growing monsters who live at the local Natural History Museum, where we have been impressed with the engaging personalities and voracious appetites of these easy-going amphibians. Alert and responsive, especially if there’s food in the offing, they are favorites of staff and visitors alike. Most visitors. One mentioned that, had she known such creatures prowled her backyard, she would have moved! It’s true they’re a bit slimy and strange looking, but they have cute faces, and you do grow to like them once you get to know them.

The sliminess we correctly associate with amphibians is part of their defense. The mucus layer over their skin contains antibiotics that help them resist infection. Like reptiles, amphibians also shed their skins as they grow. Instead of dry papery skins like snakes, though, they shed a diaphanous membrane, which they often eat. No sense wasting good protein. Sometimes I’ll see a ghostly hand floating in the tank, evidence of a recent shed, inside-out like a discarded glove. Because they spend so much of their lives in water, their skin is in constant contact with whatever the water brings, including some of the oxygen they need. Here salamanders, mythical creatures associated with fire, are truly playing with fire, as many of our waters bring pollutants that are also in direct contact with that critical layer of skin. Tiger salamander populations seem to have remained strong as other amphibians have begun to decline, but in recent years this may be changing, and some researchers are looking more closely.

Local populations of salamanders become adapted to specific conditions of their home areas, and that’s important in a species that occurs in such a wide variety of habitats and deals with drastically different conditions across its range. In fact, biologists warn us that some amphibians become so closely tied to their habitats that attempts to re-establish dwindling populations through captive breeding and release programs can hurt rather than help. Our one species is the only salamander in the entire state, but it has developed three locally distinct subspecies, each with a different color pattern. As a result of transport and release by fisherman, the original distribution has already become almost hopelessly mixed.

Although I normally wouldn’t recommend wild animals as pets, tiger salamander larvae are readily available under redeeming circumstances. Instead of capturing wild ones, you might consider liberating one or two from a bait shop. If you decide to put a tiger in your tank, be aware that you’re taking on a long-term commitment; these guys can live 20 years or more. Observing amphibians in captivity or in the wild can teach us a lot about the lives of these amazing animals who share our neighborhoods and wild places so secretively that most of us remain unaware of their presence.

Copyright, S.L. White, 2008. Illustration copyright Jan Ratcliffe.
Originally published in Upbeat, September 1997.

Not-So-Good Housekeeping

2008-01-30T09:30:00.000-08:00

One year, we entertained a house spider from Thanksgiving to the Fourth of July. All winter I caught flies for her, operating on the theory that predators are a higher lifeform, more worthy of aid, than prey. Where did I get flies in the dead of winter? I forget, just lucky I guess. As time went on, her web on the ceiling in a corner of the bathroom became old and ratty, littered with souvenirs of her previous meals, but I couldn’t evict her. Where would she go? Actually, I felt honored she had chosen to move in with us, and curious to see what would happen. An eight-month experiment ended in failure: I never did learn the outcome. One night she seemed excited and alert; the next morning she was gone. Off to greener pastures I guess. She disappeared while I had a fly chilling for her in the fridge. (Did she ever wonder why her meals were colder than she was?) When we finally took her web down, it contained the remains of a dragonfly, several small moths, and the carcasses of innumerable houseflies. She was not a particularly tidy housekeeper.

Neither, you may rightly conclude, am I. I’ve noticed that men are rarely judged by their housekeeping, and then only if they’re sole householders. Women, whatever else they may accomplish in a productive lifetime, are still judged on how they keep a house. (Remember the discussions of Janet Reno’s somewhat casual lifestyle after she was nominated for Attorney General?) There’s an old saying “An immaculate house is a sign of an extremely boring woman [person].” Let’s just call those of us who choose otherwise “creative housekeepers,” shall we? A friend of similar persuasion doesn’t like to kill houseflies—so she just stuns them and feeds them to her frogs!

Another time I brought a near-frozen orb weaver in out of a December snowstorm. She stayed several days, then one night I found her walking across the living room, and she too disappeared. I’ve even watched a wolf spider attack and kill a black widow here in the house, and I finally unraveled the mystery of why spiders are found in bathtubs. By the way, if you don’t want to scoop them up, you can hang a strip of toilet paper over the edge for them to climb out on. That’s creative housekeeping!

Probably my tolerance for spiders is higher than most people’s.
(I definitely don’t like them in bed, though. Eew.) Or maybe it’s because of the background in biology, and meeting lots of people who grow strange things at home—a respectable tradition among biologists. Remember that Darwin kept earthworms on the piano, not that his wife Emma appreciated it much.

I’ve rescued tiger salamanders from the garage, found hatchling yellow-bellied racers in the kitchen, let a baby towhee sleep overnight in the study, and chased young scrub jays in the bay window. Most of those encounters were courtesy of the cats, I suspect. But some wildlife find their way in on their own. There’s nothing like coming face to face with a skunk in the kitchen at midnight! That happened a few times before we got a cat door installed. Now I suspect they’ve learned to use the cat door too, and it’s wise to remember to put the cat food up off the floor during skunk season! I’m happy to say we have never had a skunk “accident” inside though. Besides, I’m pretty sure they do it on purpose.

You know you’ve created a permeable household when the bees start hitting on your houseplants. One year, the nectar dripping from the flowers on my waxplant (Hoya carnosa) attracted a honeybee who could not possibly have recognized or remembered this plant. I also found a mature seed pod on my “hearts entangled” vine (Ceropegia)—documenting that at least one intruder was successful in pollinating its complex flower. Ecology is the science of the “household,” after all, and this is ecology in action.

My mother believed there were more important things in life than housekeeping, and certainly more important parts to the business of childhood than learning to wash dishes or being forced to take on adult responsibilities at a tender age. That example has brought me both blessings and banes, but it did leave us free, as children, for the explorations so necessary to discovering and growing to understand the world. Adults call it play, but that’s a grown-up abstraction that grossly oversimplifies the process.

The more I see the effects of “good housekeeping,” the more deeply I appreciate that I was never trained to be a sterilizing force on the planet. Our dependence on chemical poisons (called cleaning products) is frightening. Thankfully we are beginning to rediscover more benign alternatives—vinegar, baking soda. Overly fastidious people may not feel comfortable in my house, but most other beings will find welcome. A living creature, whether two- or four- or six- or eight- or no-legged, any creature that enters our house has a good chance of getting out alive. Knowing that gives me pleasure, and a certain sense of pride.

Copyright, S.L. White, 2008. Illustration copyright Jan Ratcliffe.
Originally published in Upbeat, February 1997.

The River of Life

2008-01-24T06:24:00.000-08:00

You can never step twice into the same river.
—Heraclitus

There is a river, they say, at the bottom of some oceans. A current aswarm with life below fathoms of sterile water. I have never seen it. But here, six thousand feet above the top of the ocean, I have seen its like.

One day this place, for all I could tell, could have been the bottom of the ocean. Even here at six thousand feet, an ocean of air floats above us. The foothills slopes nearby suddenly became undersea cliffs and canyons. Between me and those canyons, the river of life flowed, drifted rather, slowly northward. Millions of minute creatures were made visible by the setting sun behind it. Trapped in the current, they moved generally northward, while indulging a random dance of their own. Bottom-dwellers such as I could only sit and watch the river go by. Under the sudden weight of a mile of atmosphere, it would have been difficult to move. The perception was so abrupt, and so complete, I wanted to gasp for air.

The second time I saw the river, it was invisible, so the perceptual shift was less abrupt. Only the presence of the birds, darting in and out of the current as if they were sharks or huge plankton feeders, made it visible. Hundreds of gulls and nighthawks and swallows swirling southward. The aerial plankton were on the move again-- this could only be a feeding frenzy. I never saw the creatures on which the birds fed, presumably insects; only the river of birds moving down the valley between the hogback and the foothills, spiraling with the current from one side of its channel to the other.

Seeing the river will never, I hope, become commonplace. By the third time, however, I recognized it immediately. A nighthawk or two might be allowed; a swarm of them in midday is a clear omen. We walked into the river this time, and stood in its path. Hundreds of nighthawks swirled around us, some almost brushing our shoulders, all oblivious to our presence. They seemed equally oblivious to passing cars, but I saw none hit despite their bold dives and swoops. An apparent hatch of insects along the wetter Gunnison River had invoked this river, clearly another aerial feeding frenzy.

As a biologist, I had been taught of the existence of an aerial biota. I "knew" that scientists had found insects, spores and seeds thousands of feet above earth. But that was book learning, second-hand knowledge. My mind knew, but it had never told my heart. I had never seen the river.

In these days, when the word "media" has come to mean TV, radio and newspaper, we forget that the contact between land and air is as dramatic as that between water and air or land and water. These are the true media with which we live. We live in such an empty world most of the time. Why do we trick ourselves into believing that the air is a void, that the rivers and lakes contain only water, that the very earth, the soil itself, is sterile? Science tells us otherwise, but it does not tell our hearts.

We are rightly fascinated by the underwater discoveries Jacques Cousteau brings into our living rooms, but we know so little, experience so little, of our own every day media. The air and water and land around us, close at home, are equally alive. For the most part that life is unseen and unappreciated.

Our 20th-century media cannot tell our hearts the real news. Some evening before sunset, go out into the media that are as old as time. Perhaps you will also see the river of life firsthand. Perhaps you too will see that our "empty" air is as full of life as any ocean. Then you will know that we live within a river of life, surrounded by more than we ever know.

but look! round about you beings live their life,
and to whatever point you turn you come upon being.
—Martin Buber, I and Thou

———
Originally written 1992.

The Importance of Being Alone

2008-01-23T06:20:00.000-08:00

In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions; know that you are alone in the world.
—Henry David Thoreau

Some days even the dog is too much company. To walk up the mountain with someone, human or canine, is to have a companion for the duration of the hike. To go alone is to have the world as a companion. Company can be more distraction than comfort. Walking alone sharpens the senses, opens one's perceptions to the rest of the world. Alone it is possible to converse with the whole reality, and to hear its quiet messages.

Our tolerance for alone-ness and silence (its usual companion), may determine the quality of our experience with the mountain. After all, how much of the noise that surrounds us is made by our fellow humans? Walking alone removes some of that noise and may even quiet the voices in our heads—making room for the soft voices of creation to reach us: The wind in pine trees, the rustle of dry leaves on poison ivy stems, a distant bird-chirp or lizard-scuttle dashing from bush to bush.

Absence of companions may be considered positive or negative, may be called either loneliness or solitude; but for absence of noise we have only positive connotations: silence, quiet, stillness, calm, lull, serenity, hushed, peaceful…

Perhaps our ability to distinguish the ache of loneliness from the poignant joy of solitude, and experience both as appropriate, measures us individually and collectively. We live in a world that offers few opportunities for solitude or silence. Are aloneness and silence voids we must hasten to fill, even when we can only fill them inadequately? Or can we learn to appreciate them for the rare opportunity they are—the opportunity to experience the incredible fact that we are never alone in this world?

How many more generations will pass
before it will have become nearly impossible
to be alone even for an hour, to see anywhere
nature as she is without man's improvements upon her?
How long will it be before—what is perhaps worse yet—
there is no quietness anywhere, no escape from
the rumble and the crash, the clank and the screech
which seem to be the inevitable accompaniment of technology?
Whatever man does or produces, noise seems to be
an unavoidable by-product. Perhaps he can,
as he now tends to believe, do anything.
But he cannot do it quietly.

Perhaps when the time comes that there is no more silence
and no more aloneness, there will also be no longer
anyone who wants to be alone.
—Joseph Wood Krutch

— — —
Originally written 1989.

Seeing Things: Single Visions

2008-01-21T06:48:00.000-08:00

These things, these things were here
and but the beholder wanting.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins

What about the things you know you will only see once in life? Those rare happenings we are occasionally privileged to witness are a special gift. The foothills seem to favor opportunities for serendipity, for the unusual events that engender the unique sights of life. This wonderful in-between world, neither mountains nor plains but with some of the flavor of both, somehow captures a special essence. Today was that kind of a day.

As weather goes, fog is unusual in Denver, but it is even more so in the foothills. On fall mornings we may wake to a bright clear day, with an achingly blue sky, only to find that Denver and its surrounding lowlands are a sea of fog. The hogback seems to act as a dam, holding back the fog, keeping the foothills and mountains clear.

On one such morning, the fog found a low spot in the hogback, and poured westward—a waterfall of wet air, flowing over the ridge and down the valley to settle in Morrison. In other parts of the world, fog seems merely to be—it just sits; but here on the edge it is an active agent whose movements we sometimes glimpse.

This morning was white, even here above the 6000 foot contour. Recognizing an unusual opportunity, I hurried to be on the mountain before it burned off, as the weather man assured us it would. I had barely started before I began to outreach the fog and entered a more typical morning of bright sun and clear skies. But the visions made possible were special indeed. Denver was gone, lost in the mist, but not missed. The very top of Green Mountain was an island, as was Mt. Glennon, adrift in a sea reminiscent of the one that once contained the hogback. One tip of stone was all that remained of Red Rocks Park. The fall colors were brilliant—from red-purple of sumac, to oranges and yellows, all the greens from gray-green to blue-green, all the grass colors from straw to the pink-red of the bluestems—amid all this, what's the attraction of the monochrome of mountain aspen?

But there were more single visions in store, only this once, and only for me, for no one else was there to see them. Coming down, a sight I had missed in my fascination with "Green Island"—a river of white along Bear Creek, barely glimpsed through the trees, but clearly separating Mt. Morrison from Mt. Falcon more completely than Bear Creek ever has.

Unusual, as well as unusually brief, was the vision around the next corner. Perhaps memorable sights are forgotten because they can be so brief we question whether we saw or imagined them. The fog I thought I had left far below had come up behind me—advancing a couple hundred feet in elevation when I wasn't looking. And there it was, in huge breakers, crashing against the foothills as if to engulf them. This was no ordinary fog, but fog with an agenda. The sunny slope, where foxes had played last spring, was now similarly inundated. And seconds later, barely giving time to be noticed, the fog retreated, ebbing down the valleys like a tide that's peaked and lost its momentum, becoming normal quiescent water vapor again. By the time I reentered its cold dampness, it was its old familiar self, and it just continued to lay there until, as predicted, it burned off and the reality of a normal day returned.

It left one more vision, a reminder of the abundance of life in our small local universe. Everywhere in the grass were tiny, three-dimensional spider webs, suddenly visible with the dew. About two or three inches in each diameter, each web was hundreds of threads woven by some spider-being too small to be noticed under normal conditions. But, presumably during the night, these many creatures had been busy, leaving evidence of their existence to day-bound creatures. Once I had seen a similar dance of life, in the air we usually consider sterile. Backlit by a setting sun, the air suddenly appeared alive with insects, bits of down carrying seeds off to new locations, a host of living things going about their business in a medium we consider only as a blend of gaseous elements.

These occasions, too brief and too rare, remind us how little we see most of the time. And they tell us, if we will pay attention, how special is this place in which we live. I wonder how many of these moments, these single visions, I've missed on the days I don't take time to walk up the mountain, or on days when my attention is elsewhere. We are fortunate indeed to share this special place. But how long will it remain a special place if we don't pay attention to it? What will happen if we neglect the everyday beauties and the extraordinary single visions that surround us? Maybe we're already beginning to discover the costs of our failure to appreciate the world we share.

... of nature's poems and pictures we are invited to become a part.
—Joseph Wood Krutch

———
Originally written 1989.

An Hour at a Time

2008-01-17T06:07:00.000-08:00

"Follow your genius closely enough and it will not fail
to show you a fresh prospect every hour."
—Henry David Thoreau

It's amazing what a brief hour can reveal; how much can be seen and experienced in so short a time. There are few friends whose company offers as many rewards as an hour spent with the mountain in springtime. Or anytime. A short time away, a mere week's absence, changes the scene completely at this time of year. An hour here changes me. There's always something to learn here. This is where ideas and feelings flow together. The mountain is a true and reliable teacher—if I fail to learn anything in an hour on the mountain, the fault lies in me.

April 13: Full of spring, today's hour on the mountain. A day to observe the appearance of each new plant, and be rewarded for expectations based on long experience with this trail. There ought to be spring beauty right here on the trail, and looking carefully near a warm rock, I find it. Then surely the pasque flower must also be showing—and at a bend a first clump is in bloom. An eager bee forces its way into a closed flower. Around the corner, I realize it's not so early after all—an entire field of pasque flowers comes into view.

The downward trip offers a second chance: lower on the trail I spot pasque flowers and mountain ball cactus in full bloom, but overlooked on the way up. Over-looking is easy when the pleasures of the scenery distract. Always watch your toes. Watch everything if you possibly can.

Downward: playing leap-frog with an iridescent green bug who insists on staying on the trail, but manages to avoid my feet, barely. Below, a small butterfly tries the same game. I reach him; he flies ahead and lights again. Repeat. For a hundred yards or more, a few feet at a time. Where is he leading me? Do they ever get stepped on, playing this game?

These frequent walks also enable me to spot favorite plants long before they become very obvious. Knowing where to look is the trick to learning to recognize even their first leaves. The snowball saxifrage to come is today only a red bud-heart in the middle of its leaf rosette. Next week the stem will be half up, perhaps three inches above the rosette, and the following week it will be in full bloom.

One section of trail I think of as relatively barren this time of year. Of wildflowers at least. No, it's just over-looking again. Here's a whole slope covered with yellow violets in full bloom—where were they on the way up?

May 6: Towhees are visible today: one squawks nasally at me from a nearby maple, but gets flustered when I attempt to squawk back. Most days, they're invisible but clearly present once the ear is accustomed to the small sounds made by their scratching dance in the dry leaves. At first, I wondered what creature was sneaking about; now I welcome the reassurance of their presence.

After customary counting of coup on a favorite oak clump, I lie down under the big oak for a look up at its intricate sky-lacing branches, as I have all winter. Today, however, the flower buds are fat and leaf primordia are expanding toward visibility. Soon the sky will be a minor part of the composition, and the fascination will be with the way this tree distributes each leaf to obtain exposure to the light.

What's that movement on the opposite hillside? A small mammal, creeping from bush to bush, puzzles me. Seconds tick by as I watch. A weasel perhaps? No. As the seconds stretch, A view of its long bushy tail suggests a rock squirrel, often found in the foothills. A football field away by air, and twice that distance by snake—I'm lucky to see it at all, and wish for binoculars. Later, I decide its light tan color makes it more likely a bushy-tailed wood rat. Rewarding speculation, as I've seen no evidence of wood rats (a.k.a. pack rats), although they're 'supposed' to be here. It's always an experience to encounter a critter going about its business. Sitting here, I've watched deer browse on that hillside, and foxes chase each other across it. But never a creature such as this. The encounter is a special one.

"What one finds... will be what one takes the trouble to look for."
—Joseph Wood Krutch

———
Originally written 1989.

The Naming

2008-01-16T14:15:00.000-08:00

Nature mocks at human categories.
—Harold Bold, taxonomist

But Nature's mockery doesn't stop us from naming. Assigning names seems to be a fundamental human process, at least since the creation of language. We name because we perceive differences, and only when we perceive differences. The naming is itself a symptom of our perception, and differences in names reflect differences in perception.

We've all heard the classic example of the Eskimo's many names for snow. Similarly, it is said that certain African peoples have 90 words for that which we would call "green." Certain teenagers can name make/model/year on anything others would be content to call a car. We name what we know, and what we need to know. Perceiving and naming, therefore, are not abstract events but participatory.

Our concept of reality is less absolute than we like to believe, a little more fluid relative to time and space—and the individual—than we care to admit. It is said that Goethe refused to wear glasses because to do so would modify his unique way of seeing things, his reality. This may work fine if you're in the majority, but what if (as we say) you see things differently. Applying a least-common-denominator approach means that your personal vision may be limited in some areas, perhaps enhanced in others, in the attempt to conform to a cultural mold.

For the last few hundred years, that cultural mold has been dominated by a particulate approach, and we've wandered through the world blithely assigning names to the discrete physical objects (and less tangible internal emotions and processes) as we perceive them. We've gone well beyond the pragmatics of naming to a mind-game we call labeling. Because our ability to perceive minute distinctions is undergoing a technological explosion,* we have to learn to ask when a label or name is useful and when it merely creates confusion. When we create names based on our technical ability to do so rather than on any human perception or need, we are amplifying distinctions that we cannot use.

The more we look for differences, the more we find. We're so intent on our search for differences, we no longer perceive similarities and relationships, and we have few words to describe them when we do.

In the same way that naming makes a thing or an idea real to us, not naming makes things, and especially ideas, somehow unreal. An unreal thing, not part of consensual reality, is easy to miss, and to dismiss. For lack of a name, we've been missing the vision and experience of wholeness, interconnectedness, that we desperately need right now.

Once the whole is divided, the parts need names.
There are already enough names.
One must know when to stop.
—Lao Tsu

———
Originally written in 1989, * before DNA testing made even finer distinctions possible.

Dead to the World

2008-01-15T06:58:00.000-08:00

Custom does not breed understanding, but takes its place, teaching people to make their way contentedly through the world without knowing what the world is, nor what they think of it, nor what they are.
—Santayana

The world in which and with which we have always lived, the world which formed us and gave us our instincts, was what we now call the 'natural' world. We distinguish it, by and large, because we now see it as separate from the world we have created in recent centuries—a world of society, of humans and their creations, of cities and machines. Most of us find we have come to live in the second world, and the first is more and more a place we only visit. A place to spend weekends and vacations, a place to "get away from it all." Under normal circumstances.

In the second world we are remaking ourselves, retraining our instincts to be creatures of a different jungle. We do not know what pattern we follow, only that it is a different pattern from that of our original making. We are learning new skills, replacing cooperation with suspicion, care with neglect, Earth knowledge with Earth ignorance. More and more, we are replacing the first world with the second.

This first world is always there—we do not need to step outside our normal lives to visit it. But while we are immersed in the world of our own making, we tend to be dead to the first world. It cannot reach us in our heated and air-conditioned buildings and cars. Its few remaining representatives, wind and weather, weeds in sidewalk cracks, stars and planets, impinge on our consciousness only to the extent that they inconvenience us. Even the dramatic evidence of the passage of time, displayed by the moon in all its phases, escapes us while we turn the pages of our desktop calendars.

But when we deliberately visit the first world, we are able to set aside the trappings of civilization and truly re-enter it. We become alive to the first world at once—don't we? We are instantly attuned to the sound of rushing water, a twitter of birds, an insect hum in the atmosphere. We become alive to the vibration of color and life; the physical touch of extreme heat or cold. We absorb the sunrise, the sunset and the night with complete abandon. Or so we wish. We deeply experience the exertion, thirst, hunger, awe, fear, excitement—all the sensations the first world has to offer us. These are sensations from which we have removed ourselves in the second world; the sensations that make us human.

Unfortunately, it is rarely so. Our comfort in and with the first world comes of practice. With ever longer times away, we become less able to make those connections that were once instinctive. We more and more transport the materials of the second world into the first, project second world values onto the first. We enter it to possess it or destroy it, not merely to experience what it has to offer. We return to the first world, not naked and alive to it, but encumbered by our second-world selves. We are as insulated from the first world as we are from its remaining manifestations in the second world.

Occasionally, however, the first world manages to visit us—it seeks us out in our cloistered isolation and forces itself into our consciousness. Such times always appear to us as an improper intrusion, aberrations somehow out of the natural order of things. We find ourselves using words like catastrophic, devastating, destructive; we say Nature is capricious, hostile, mad. We have chosen to believe, in the face of all contrary evidence, that the first world is normally gentle, that it supports our existence and does not interfere with our desires, that we are always in control. We are continually surprised to find otherwise.

In truth, the first world is gentle and violent, as we are; it is warm and cold, as we are; it is calm and passionate, as we are. It is as we are, and it is what made us what we are. The first world is paradox, as we are. We cannot entirely leave it without leaving ourselves.

———
Originally written 1989.

What's in a Name?

2008-01-14T09:57:00.000-08:00

'My name is Alice, but —'
'It's a stupid name enough!' Humpty Dumpty interrupted.
'What does it mean?'
'Must a name mean something?' Alice asked doubtfully.
'Of course it must,' Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh.
— Lewis Carroll

Aside from the fact that the naming of things is a fundamental human activity, it is important because our ability to name both reflects and determines our ability to perceive differences among the components of our environment. Most of us have no need for the high level of nomenclatural distinction practiced by academic botanists and zoologists (and geologists, soil scientists, etc.), but as a society we ought to be able to recognize that there is a qualitative difference between a golf course and a native prairie, although both may serve as open space. We need to cultivate sufficient discrimination to recognize that most plants we see along our roadsides are not wild nature at its best, but are as much a part of our modified human environment as street trees and backyard zinnias, though infinitely more interesting. Why is this important to anyone but a practicing taxonomist?

First, our ability to name helps us perceive differences more clearly. On a hike with a group of adults one spring, we came across a young bullsnake on the trail. As one of the women present admitted a fear of snakes she wished she could overcome, I picked the snake up so she could get better acquainted. But before I picked it up, there was an extended discussion of whether or not it was a rattlesnake. I was sure it wasn't, as I had no intention of picking up a rattlesnake, no matter how small. But others in this group, most of whom spend a great deal of time outdoors, weren't confident of the differences (and there are admittedly some similarities) between a rattlesnake and a bullsnake.

Similarly, I'm told that each year people confuse wild onions and death camas with disastrous results. Although I can see some resemblance in the linear leaves, the whole effect of the plants is, to me, now distinct. But I've been practicing, and can see a lot more now than I could a few years ago. The ability to distinguish can be developed, but without the ability to name, there's no way to mentally tag the items you've learned to distinguish. On a personal level, it may not matter whether we call the green butterflies 'Charlie' and the black and white ones 'Bob', as long as we start to become aware of the diversity around us. But there's no way to communicate our discoveries to others without a common set of names.

And you can learn something from knowing the proper names. Superficially, knowing the correct name allows you to look up many interesting tidbits about a creature, should you care to do so. More subtly perhaps, the name itself may be of interest. It may directly tell you about the creature described: 'yellow- bellied sapsucker' tells you a great deal about a bird (if inaccurately), as does 'red-shafted flicker'. Thus a well-crafted name aids in recognition and remembering. I recall the first time I saw a largish black insect rolling a ball of horse manure. 'Dung beetle' I called it in my mind, rejecting a few alternatives as unsuitable for general use, and dung beetle is indeed how these creatures are commonly known. I was similarly lucky with 'yellow- bellied racer', an unknown snake I described thus to a naturalist who confirmed its identity. However, I'm at a loss to describe the large ornate spiders that frequent our yard accurately enough to discover their name(s).

There seems to be a trend in environmental education to de-emphasize names as insignificant to understanding life forms. Is it that learning so many names places an excessive burden on our, or on children's, mental abilities? Or is it that such knowledge has become irrelevant to our daily lives in ways that it wasn't 50 years ago? Is it that we so rarely encounter a rattlesnake or a death camas that recognizing them accurately no longer matters?

The fact that what used to be natural history— concerned with the names and behaviors of plants and animals— now is environmental education—concerned with toxic wastes, rainforest destruction, ozone depletion, greenhouse effect, and so on—demonstrates the shift in our understanding. These frightening worldwide issues are part of our lives today, perhaps because we allowed ourselves to get so far out of touch with our surroundings and their inhabitants. As we no longer bother to know them by name, perhaps we've also neglected to notice what was happening to them, and to us.

———
Originally written 1988. These days we should add "global warming" to the above list of environmental education topics.

Lines on the Land

2008-01-12T09:30:00.000-08:00

The country was made without lines of demarcation,
and it is no man's business to divide it...
The earth and myself are of one mind.
The measure of the land and the measure of our bodies
are the same... Do not misunderstand me, but understand me fully
with reference to my affection for the land.
I never said the land was mine to do with it as I chose.
The one who has the right to dispose of it
is the one who has created it.
—Chief Joseph, Nez Percé

Perception is such a personal thing. I've been perceiving lately that there are two kinds of people. For each of us, for any mood we may have, we could perceive two kinds of people. There are always 'our kind' and 'some other kind.' And there are hundreds of bases for developing dichotomies. Why are there so few for developing unity? And why do we always seem to see only two sides?

We credit other humans with being fundamentally like ourselves: sharing a basic physical form, and perhaps sharing basic interests or feelings like love of family, joy or pain, anger or grief. Thus it can come as a surprise to learn that there are people who see land differently, not as land but as lots—people for whom drawing lines on the land is both natural and necessary: Lines of ownership, lines of use, lines of vision.

We have only to look around us to notice the prevalence of the line drawers in today's world, and the effects created by their particular way of looking at our world. From the haphazard pasture fence or carefully surveyed property boundary, to the deliberately engineered sweep of a highway alignment or railway, these lines divide our world up into manageable chunks and enforce a rigid linear pattern on all of us. Each line propagates new lines. And we cheerfully fall into line, following and even respecting the lines someone else has drawn on the land.

But it is well to remember that before there can be a fence or a highway or property line, there must be someone who can imagine, then create, the necessary lines. The presence, and indeed dominance, of line drawers in our world is thus a function of the way we as a people are taught to see the world, the land. It is only one way out of many. When I look at the land, I can see the lines the line drawers create. But I could never have imagined them. I can see also lines that were not put there by the hand of man; which are, for the most part, ignored by humans.

For me though, land is often a seamless whole. There are parts and parcels of the natural community, as there are of the human community, but overall there is a wholeness in the pattern. Blending of edges, continuity in time and space. On bad days, I may see only disruption, but thankfully more often I can look beyond misplaced intrusions. On good days, a weed on abandoned mine spoils is enough to reassure me that the natural system will prevail.

Others have the vision, while I struggle to apprehend mere reality. They see future roads and buildings—homes and workplaces for future people—where I search for old dried bison dung without success. They see lawns and parking lots, where I see endless reaches of tall prairie grasses. They see landscaping where I see only land. How can I have become so superficial? My weak sight can see only what is there, and what is there no more. Their superior vision sees what could be, and sees it clearly enough to make it be. They see the future, where I can see only present, and past.

A continent totally without lines, were it even possible to imagine such a thing, is no more useful than a continent with nothing but lines. But perhaps it is time to ask whether we already have enough lines on this piece of the planet, and whether it is time to consider other ways of perceiving, time to overcome the rigidity imposed by dichotomies. We forget that once any line is created, it will endure far beyond its makers.

Clearly we need a third type of person. My weak historical vision and the superior futuristic vision of others only define the extremes. Where is the person who can see both of these, and add a unique sense—a moral vision perhaps—that can see what is right for a particular time and place? Neither what is/was, nor what could be, but what should be. Someone who can sense what serves all, not merely one of us; what will work with the land, and its inhabitants, large and small. One who can blend and soften the lines on the land, and know what belongs.

Man is whole when he is in tune with the winds, the stars,
and the hills as well as with his neighbors.
Being in tune with the apartment or
the community is part of the secret.
Being in tune with the universe is the whole secret.
— William O. Douglas

———
Originally written 1989.

Perceptions and the Mountain

2008-01-11T07:22:00.000-08:00

You can never step twice into the same river.
—Heraclitus

Or walk twice upon the same mountain. Our experiences have always shaped our perceptions: of people, places, and the elements and events of our world. So it is with “my” mountain. Time spent with this mountain over these years has made it mine, has it not? I have purchased this mountain with the hours, the attention, the care-full regard, and with all the experiences the mountain and I have shared.

As I have come to know the mountain in its many seasons, weathers, times of day, my perceptions of it have evolved. I know now that my fellow beings and I do not see the same mountain, just as I no longer see the mountain I first saw. Each mountain biker or horseback rider is surely experiencing a different mountain. The trail will be a different place for a jogger than for a butterfly collector or dog-walker. Each of us creates a unique mountain; each of us lives a distinct experience.

The memory of each experience becomes part of the mountain for me. Every time I walk past the location where I saw a rattlesnake, or encountered a fox, or met a belligerent young racer (snake, that is), those memories are renewed. Such encounters are as physical a part of the trail for me as a special tree or boulder. A favorite resting spot was changed forever the day someone left me a dead rattlesnake there. What perception of the mountain does one have that makes a dead rattlesnake more appropriate than a live one at that particular location? That person may now remember that tree as the place I killed a big rattler. But the memory of that violence adds an abrasive quality to what was, for me, a peaceful place. Someone's perception was different, was perhaps that the trail would be a safer place without that rattlesnake. Others may have wished for a chance just to see that rattlesnake, alive and bit scary. We need such encounters to keep our own instincts healthy.

Sometimes I meet other owners of the mountain. How does it seem to them?, I wonder. What are their perceptions of it? Where I see an impenetrable tangle of mountain mahogany, the deer see a feast, and a safe hiding place from which to watch my passage. Where I see an attractive grassy slope, they see a place to bask and browse in the morning sun. We can perhaps guess some of their perceptions, being mammals as they are, but what is the mountain to a butterfly or a bug?

How many mountains can this one mountain support? As long as our varied perceptions do not threaten the mountain's integrity, its perception of itself, the mountain can go on being a mirror, being something quite different to each of us. With care, the mountain can be big enough for all our perceptions. It was big enough to accommodate the perceptions of a very big dreamer in 1910, big enough to hold the excitement of his early auto races as well. It was big enough to absorb both, almost without a trace. And the mountain can be big enough to support the many perceptions of future generations, non-human and human, who come to it.

I know that Open Space considers the mountain theirs, much as I consider it mine, John Brisben Walker considered it his, and the deer and snakes, no doubt, consider it theirs. Whose mountain is it? In the end, it belongs to those who truly dwell there, only temporarily to those who visit it to shape a new reality.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.
Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.
—John Muir

———
Originally written 1988.

How to See a Year

2008-01-10T06:35:00.000-08:00

The sun also rises, and the sun goes down
And hastens to the place where it rises.
—Ecclesiastes 1:5

Once, in New Mexico, I stood in a Navajo hogan and noted its celestial geometry: the door, a perfect East, windows North and South, and the smoke hole, straight to the heavens; bare earth the floor that joins and complements all. The house of the six directions, as they say in that part of the world. We remain, for the most part, encapsulated in only four. But, like the Navajo, I am fortunate. Through no foresight of my own, my door faces East, and I am treated to a spectacle of light.

Sometime, long ago, allegedly primitive peoples developed sophisticated calendars and cosmologies. I always wondered how, without instruments or physics classes, they were able to figure out all that complexity. The Mayans even predicted eclipses thousands of years away. We, in our more advanced cultures, can't see the year without a calendar, nor tell time without a clock.

It requires only time to look, and willingness to focus beyond the press of other daily commitments, to begin to open consciousness to these events around us. At last, I've begun to understand the Sun's journey, internally, and can chart its path across my life. When we slow life down to the larger rhythms, we begin to sense what's really going on with the world. Time is another direction, the seventh apparently, but as we wander through it, we rarely get to see it, even though we eventually feel the effects of its passage.

Occasionally rising early to greet the dawn, as tribal people here did every morning, I have an opportunity to observe the calendar outside my door. A friend says I've reinvented Stonehenge, as perhaps I have. Outside my eastern window lies a low ridge—the hogback, Mt. Glennon. About two miles long and rising 500 feet above its surroundings, it forms my eastern horizon. On its ragged edge I can see the rising Sun's location and track its journey through the seasons. Its southern limit, near the Turkey Creek water gap, and its northern limit at Bear Creek define the extremes of the seasons. On the fall equinox, the Sun rises in a notch midway down the ridge.

As the Sun swings back and forth, from one end of the hogback to the other, the years of my life, of all our lives, go by. Time has suddenly become measurable in a direct, personal fashion; more satisfying somehow that turning the pages of a calendar.

There are other ways, of course, to see the seasons. The fall pilgrimage to the mountains to check out the aspens may be the most obvious example. More subtly, more privately, you know, if you watch the stars at all, that as summer leaves us, you must forgo the sight of Scorpio hanging on the southern horizon and begin to get reacquainted with Orion instead.

We can reset our daily clock to the natural rhythms as well. Here in the valley behind the hogback, we live on a slightly different schedule than does the rest of the Front Range. With the hogback on one side and the foothills on the other, our days are just a little shorter than they are elsewhere. The Sun rises a few minutes later than the weatherman says it will and sets just a trifle earlier. Perhaps this helps us, as the sky is already light when the Sun actually comes up over the hogback. Or perhaps it deprives us of the more spectacular sunrises over the eastern plains. If we begin to cool off a few minutes earlier on a hot summer evening, we also have marginally longer winter nights. If we get to track the sunrise against our eastern ridge, urban residents can as easily track the sun setting on the foothills.

No matter where we are, the opportunities to observe and to learn surround us; they simply take different forms. The Spirit of every Place waits to inform us; we have only to listen.

———
Originally written 1988.

Roots

2008-01-09T06:53:00.000-08:00

If I soon become restless during theoretical discussions
about "the environment" it is because this bland term
does not convey the sensual impact of a real place.
The environment is not a pervasive something out there
but rather implies the responses of the whole being
to the stimuli received from the place.

— René Dubos

In recent years it seems I've been more and more exposed to people who have, or are trying to develop, a sense of place, a true relationship with the land they call home. Most such people tell me this cannot be done in the Front Range or metropolitan area— that there's too little left. So I've been surprised to find lately that I'm beginning to have a sense of place, right here in Jefferson County.

Many years ago, when four callow youths made our first trip west, I remember the intense discussion on the Great Plains, focusing on whether or not it was a boring childhood, growing up in such a place. "What was there to do?" We were fresh from childhood among the second-growth forests, glacial lakes, and shale canyons (we called them ravines) of upstate New York—a marvelous place to grow up. But I thought the Plains had mysteries of their own, opportunities and intrigue only a child there could know. Certainly, passing through at 60 mph, we would learn little of such a place.

Now, living here at the edge of the Plains, I'm just beginning to find the truth of that early suspicion: Every place has something to teach us. I resisted for awhile, inadvertently preoccupied with jobs and mundane concerns. But now it's starting to get hold of me. Now when I leave, I can feel the little newly-formed roots tearing out of the soil. Yet it takes generations to let the land truly seep into you, and I have only this one chance at forming a relationship. At first it was my immediate backyard, this acre and its setting. But now I've grown attached to a larger backyard, and I'm taking all of Jefferson County, and more, as my home territory. It takes time—one can't uproot and move every few years if one wishes to have a sense of place. And it takes paying attention—noticing and seeing your surroundings, letting them speak to you, and caring what happens there. Acting as if your place matters.

Maybe the first indication was when we'd be riding home from Longmont—the long stretch south on I-25 to the Mousetrap, then sweeping west on I-70. Once in a while, approaching Denver, I'd suddenly see the land as it must have looked to the local tribes or the first settlers from the East: Stripped of the roads and rooftops, with its rolling hills and stream courses exposed again to view; stripped too of its blanket of urban trees, but covered in prairie grasses and flowers, covered here and there even in buffalo. Then, with a wrenching shift of focus, I'd see it again as it is now, only as it perhaps looks to the descendants of the Arapahoe, those who remember it as it was. If any still do.

Yet Denver, the entire metropolitan area, has its own rightness and beauty. Even Denver has something to teach us. Denver too grew out of this land, and will return to it in time. We should remember the source of Denver's strength, and be more conscious of what we are costing the land. Perhaps we can learn to walk more gently, and to protect that other rightness and beauty that was here before us. Every place has something to teach us. The children have to learn from their childhoods, whether in the land or in the city. They will become a reflection of what's under their feet and over their heads, as we all do. Will it include open land and open sky, or will they reflect only concrete and steel beams? Can we give them live earth to sink their roots into? Can we remember, and teach them, that we live in the land, not on it—and the land lives or dies in us?

I am glad that I will never be young
without wild places to be young in.
—Aldo Leopold

———
Originally written 1988.

Life After Life

2007-09-13T10:32:00.000-07:00

Hidden within our soils is a host of organisms engaged in decomposition, that deconstruction project without which life on Earth would have long since disappeared. As with other ecological systems, this one is an iceberg: The part we can’t see is far bigger and more complex than the small fragments that intrude into our everyday lives.

Most of the time, then, we are able to remain blissfully unaware of where everyone’s next meal is coming from. We may be able to talk comfortably about the water cycle, despite the probability of eventually drinking “Cleopatra’s bathwater,” but most of us would rather not examine the nutrient cycle too closely. Perhaps the Halloween season is a good time to talk a bit about the fate that awaits us all, humans, mice, and pine trees alike. Though some may say “we’re a long time dead,” the truth is that, sooner or later, reincarnation is a virtual certainty. We’re not immortal, but the chemicals within us are.

Most of the critters that carry out the phases of decomposition spend much of their lives in soil, or in the litter layer that often covers it. The first steps, of course, are occasionally carried out by larger organisms, like mice and squirrels and cows, who eat plant materials and then deposit the indigestible portions on the ground. In the global cycle, that’s only an optional side trip for carbon and nitrogen—most of the organic material tied up in plants, even in the hugest redwoods, will be released by much smaller organisms, those we tend to dismiss as insignificant.

Only in size can we easily dismiss them, for soil life is diverse and abundant. In a good season, one prairie acre might harbor two billion microarthropods (such as mites and springtails), as many as five million earthworms, and 200,000 millipedes. A host of insects and macroarthropods, such as fly larvae, termites, pillbugs, and crickets, also participate in decomposition. Outnumbering them all would be the nematodes, or roundworms: At 22 billion per acre, they are among the most abundant organisms on the planet, and are found in pretty much everything and everybody. In the prairie environment, almost half of the nematodes feed on fungi, which are also abundant soil inhabitants, along with the couple of tons of bacteria also present.

A forest ecosystem, of course, is equally dependent on those tiny soil inhabitants, and some forests produce enough organic matter to support even larger populations of such critters. In our dry forests, decomposition is far less obvious than in the moister forests across the great divide. It may go on more slowly, but still it must go on. It may have to hide, literally, from the light of day, but this is one process that works just fine in the dark. Unless we go looking for evidence of decomposition, sifting through leaves and litter or kicking open rotting logs, we will rarely see this process in action.

When conditions are just right, with cool weather and a little moisture, the last participants in the decomposition process begin to “flower,” reminding us of this unsuspected underground world. Suddenly, often overnight, mushrooms appear in our meadows and forests. Their forms are as varied as their cryptic lifestyles, and we often name them for their underworld associations: Destroying Angel, Jack-o’-lantern, Devil’s Snuffbox, Witches’ Butter, Dead Men’s Fingers are all names that remind us Halloween is approaching. And all are the tips of their own respective icebergs, appearing above ground to spread their spores, ensuring that nowhere on Earth will dead things go undecomposed. If one Giant Puffball (Calvatia gigantea) can produce seven trillion spores, few acres will miss receiving their fair complement.

The real decomposition work, however, is being done by the mycelium, a webby mass of underground strands, called hyphae, that makes up the body of the fungus and occasionally produces the “fruit” we see. Some mycelia are annuals that grow from a single spore each year and die after one season. In contrast, other fungi form “fairy rings,” whose fantasy name reflects our attempt to explain their mysterious origin. Whether produced by deadly Amanita or delicate Marasmius, the rings are formed by the outward growth of mycelia that live year after year, and form mushrooms only where they are actively growing. Fairy rings have been found in Colorado that may have taken more than 500 years to develop.

Puffballs spread their spores on the wind, as our child-selves know, but some mushrooms depend on animals to consume the tempting fruits and spread the spores; the stinkhorns even attract flies for that purpose. Slugs, mice, turtles, and squirrels, as well as deer and cattle, will eat these seasonal temptations when they can. We humans are also attracted by the culinary qualities of many species of mushrooms, and by the exotic substances (hallucinogenic or merely deadly) produced by others.

In the end, though, the economic importance of edible mushrooms and yeasts, even the financial havoc wrought by the many fungi that cause tree and crop diseases, pales in comparison to the service soil fungi provide us by assuring the final chemical breakdown of organic matter into its constituent minerals.

Modern biology has taken a step to honor these hard-working characters. No longer are they considered some kind of bizarre member of the Plant Kingdom. In recognition, perhaps, of their services, and also of their biological uniqueness, the Fungi have been given an official Kingdom all their own. Without their help, the continual recycling of life from one form to another would end, and the wheels of chemical reincarnation would stop turning forever.

Copyright, S.L. White, 2008. Illustration copyright Jan Ratcliffe.
Originally published in Upbeat, October 1996.

Spring Sap Rising

2006-06-03T08:08:00.000-07:00

Groundhogs across the country have spoken, and everyone from the Farmer's Almanac to the National Weather Service seems to agree with them. An early spring. Not great news in a place that's seen too little of winter. Winter, as anyone who's been once around the sun in Colorado knows, brings us most of our urban water supply. And water, as we may be about to find out, is what brings us spring. We think spring is as inevitable as April 15th, but is it?

To anyone who's lived in places where the same snow remains on the ground from October until April, our winters are incomprehensible. This year, during most of the calendar winter, we've enjoyed weather that fits more properly in fall, even summer. Winter weather, with snow and cold and all, is frequently part of our calendar spring. Just when plants ought to, and indeed are trying desperately to, put out flowers and new leaves, they get killer frosts and heavy branch-breaker snows. Daffodil snows, I call them. We aren't the only ones tricked by Colorado's weather.

Is our weather getting trickier every year, or are we only imagining it? It's hard to take the long view and evaluate whether this is global warming we're seeing, or just a "normal" drought cycle. Okay, things are looking up today (I'm snowed in as I write this), but can a few heavy spring snowstorms make enough of a difference? Actually, this February storm alone has changed Denver Water's statistic for the Upper Colorado River Basin from 80% of normal to 95% within a few days. We need, however, to distinguish the mountain snowpack that quenches our thirst from the local precipitation that supports the life around us, just as we need to distinguish the calendar seasons—only an astronomical guideline—from what's going on in the real world.

Although only about a quarter of our moisture falls as snow, the large areas it falls on feed the streams that fill our reservoirs. March and April snows put down moisture that can soak deeply into soils. More than half our moisture, though, comes during the growing season—between May and September—and almost all of that is directly and immediately used by plants. Thus, the effect of dry periods—whether they disturb us or our local environments more—depends on when they strike. Last summer, which ranked among the five hottest and driest in a 123-year record, clearly disturbed plant life throughout our area, as moisture eluded them just when they needed it most.

The largest part of the structure of a tree is the water-carrying plumbing that brings us spring. This tissue we call wood is dead, but not dry as long as the tree lives. (The living parts of a tree are tiny fractions at either end—tips of roots, tips of stems—and a continuous paper-thin cylinder of living tissue that connects them.) The wood itself is made up of long, narrow dead cells, connected end-to-end like straws, through which water and nutrients are pushed and pulled up into the leaves and needles. The physics of water movement in a straw, or in a plant, requires that the water column be continuous from one end to the other, or from root to bud. Water pushes into roots from wet soil, but what happens when the soil is empty of water? No nourishment flows into roots; the upper ones wither away. From deeper layers, the fine roots continue to search for water; if there is none, they too die. As our warm, dry chinook winds suck more water from plants than can be replaced from dusty soils, the water column in the stem breaks, and spring begins to look less and less likely. Anyone who's carried a bouquet of wildflowers home to mom knows what happens when water is no longer being continuously forced or drawn into a stem.

We hardly ever think of sap, and when we do use the word, it's often to label something that isn't very impressive. Yet sap is responsible for creating glory for us each spring. Although sap is often pulled up the trunk of a tree or the stems of a shrub, especially by active leaves, it is also pushed. These pressures underground, of water moving from soil into root, from root into bud and leaf, make spring seem an undeniable force that simply must happen. Metaphors of rebirth, awakening, and hope flow into us, as into our religions, our poetry, and our visual arts, from the simple force of sap rising. It's in the spirit of those metaphors that we go looking for signs of spring, even in March. And often find them. I've seen green buds on the wax currants in mid-March, albeit icy ones. Some of our early flowers have even been known to appear in a February warm spell. I looked for Easter daisies in February, but no luck this time. Our temperatures welcomed them, but our dry soils wouldn't give them that underground push.

Fortunately, much of a Colorado "winter" occurs six weeks after the groundhogs have their say, often even after the arrival of calendar spring. I want to believe the almanac, which promises us a cold, wet March. Perhaps it will come in time to bring us a "sappy" spring after all.

Copyright, S.L. White, 2006. Illustration copyright Jan Ratcliffe.
Originally published in Upbeat, March 1995.

Latin Lessons: Classics in our Backyards

2006-06-03T07:36:00.000-07:00

Once it was important, if one was to be considered truly educated, to study Latin, Greek, and other classical languages. Now that those days are long past, it’s good to know these “dead” languages still come alive in our backyards, meadows, and woodlands where they remain fresh and accessible to us through the living creatures that share our world.

Linnaeus established our present system of scientific nomenclature in the 1700s, and was the person who endowed all the plants and animals then known with their original names. There are two parts to a scientific name. The genus name, always capitalized, is followed by the species name, as in Homo sapiens, the name that designates all humans. Every living or extinct organism known is given a scientific name, and some become quite familiar, as have Philodendron, Geranium, Stegosaurus, Salmonella, and Giardia.

Most people seem wary, even phobic (from Greek, fear), of classical words when they’re applied to plants and animals. Yet we use these word roots constantly in our everyday lives, where most of us can distinguish our ophthalmologist (from Greek ophthalm, eye, and logos, study of) from our chiropractor (from Greek chiro-, hand, and Latin pract-, work) and can pronounce them both just fine. A simple shopping trip in your automobile (Greek auto-, self, with Latin mobil, movable) might include the local delicatessen (Latin, deli- pleasant, alluring), a stop to pick up cosmetics (Greek, cosmet-, well adorned) or medicine (Latin, medi-, heal), or a visit to the movie theater (do I need to do Arachnophobia?). There’s nothing (except spiders) to fear in these words.

We’ve spoken before of the men who are honored in the names of our familiar plants and animals. When an English, German, or Japanese surname is converted to Latin by the addition of a few vowels (each of which often becomes a whole syllable), the results range from tongue-twisting at best to downright unpronounceable. Yet many of the world’s critters will forever be burdened with awkward Latinized names honoring botanists, expedition leaders, patrons of science, or other celebrities of the day in which they made their first appearance in the world’s scientific publications. These Latinized twists fortunately render into English via easy possessives: Nuttall’s Cottontail (Sylvilagus nuttallii), Abert’s Squirrel (Sciurus abertii), Engelmann Spruce (Picea engelmannii), Gambel’s Oak (Quercus gambelii), Frémont’s Cottonwood (Populus frémontii), and Parry’s Primrose (Primula parryi) are good examples.

Very few women were admitted to this exclusive old boy’s club. Alice Eastwood (1854-1953), author of Colorado’s first flora, whose dedication to plants earned her a permanent place in botanical history, is commemorated in our rarest monkey-flower (Mimulus eastwoodiae). Although her long and illustrious career provides justification enough, she is also remembered for saving California’s important botanical specimens from the San Francisco earthquake in 1906.

If few real women are so honored, whence come all those seemingly female plants we keep hearing about: Lady’s Mantle, Lady’s Slipper, our own rare Ladies’ Tresses. One story is that many of these honor a Lady of considerable renown in the Christian world, the virgin Mary. After all, most of the scientists who named the world’s creatures for us were working in a predominantly Christian culture. But remember, they were also scholars immersed in a sophisticated intellectual community whose members would have considered classical references the stuff of everyday life and language. They had probably read Homer’s Odyssey in the original Greek.

Looking a little closer then, we learn that the Lady’s Slipper, our large woodland orchid, belonged to an older Lady still. The Latin name, Cypripedium, reveals its two roots. Cypri-, the Cypriot, refers here not just to any resident of Cyprus, but apparently to the famous lady who came ashore in a clam shell, none other than the lovely goddess Venus. Pedi- is a little more convoluted, but in this context must derive from the Latin root for “foot” (familiar to us in the word pedal), rather than the Greek roots for child (from which we derive pediatrics) and education (whence pedantic).

Our smaller woodland orchid, the fairy slipper (Calypso bulbosa), belongs to another lady of Greek myth. Calypso was the sea nymph who lured Odysseus from his quest to spend seven years with her on her island, much as these delicate flowers now lure passersby to linger awhile in the dappled shadows where they are found by the lucky or observant.

Few schools today offer Greek or Latin; fewer still require them. Thanks to conventions established by Linnaeus, however, every student of life sciences must become conversant with these languages, even if she must learn them in a somewhat backward fashion. Gradually, through constant exposure, they begin to seep in and even to make sense. Each of these names has a story to tell, and, taken piece by piece, they’re really not so hard. A little knowledge may be dangerous, but in the end learning a few Latin and Greek roots saves a lot of time spent in the dictionary—and makes it far easier to understand what your doctor is telling you!

Copyright, S.L. White, 2006. Illustration copyright Jan Ratcliffe.
Originally published in Upbeat, November 1996.

Douglas-Fir: By Any Other Name

2006-06-01T07:07:00.000-07:00

The tree we know today as Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) baffled botanists for decades. People have known it as yellow spruce, red spruce, red fir, Douglas spruce, and Oregon pine. It's not unusual for a plant to have many common names, but this one has tried on many botanical names as well. Botanists first called it Pinus taxifolia, the pine with yew-like leaves. Later, they tried squeezing it in with spruces, then firs. In 1867, 75 years after it was made known to western science, they finally gave up and created a new genus (Pseudotsuga) to house Douglas-fir and its oriental cousins. Pseudotsuga, meaning false hemlock, reflects its similarity to true hemlocks, or Tsuga, which, to compound the confusion, is the Japanese word for larch.

Our species is named for Archibald Menzies, Scottish naturalist with the Vancouver Expedition, who first collected it in 1792. These grand trees occur from British Columbia to the highlands of northern Mexico, although our Rocky Mountain version of Douglas-fir (the hyphen reminds us it's not a true fir) is sometimes considered to be a distinct variety, called glauca for its bluish color. A second American species, bigcone Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga macrocarpa) occurs in southern California.

The accepted common name honors another Scotsman, David Douglas, pioneer explorer-botanist of the Pacific Coast, who collected the seeds of Douglas-fir and also discovered many other new conifers in California and the Pacific Northwest. He once wrote to Sir William Hooker, recipient of the many specimens he sent to England: "You will begin to think that I manufacture pines at my pleasure." New species were, in those days, more abundant than botanists.

Through all the confusion of nomenclature, the trees have, of course, not changed perceptibly—nor has their utility been compromised by botanical uncertainties. If this tree was tough to categorize, it was easy to appreciate. In the temperate rainforests where Douglas-fir was first "discovered," its size, abundance, and the quality of its wood were all that mattered, and few cared what you called it. When you hear "old-growth forest" on the evening news, this coastal Douglas-fir is the tree in question. It comprises almost 90% of those forests. From the Blue Ox to the Spotted Owl, Douglas-fir is part of our lore and landscape. And more. For a century and a half, Douglas-fir has literally formed the foundation of our history and development.

In Oregon and Washington, Douglas-firs may reach 300 feet in height and 15 in diameter. Who could resist such timber? No one did. Its contributions to western civilization have been both mundane and monumental: from the humble 2x4s that hold up our homes to the massive beams of the Mormon Tabernacle, from the railroad ties and telephone poles that knit the growing West together to new (in 1925) masts for the U.S.S. Constitution, Douglas-fir has served our needs. Its popularity was assured, in part, by the demise of virgin eastern white pine, which had provided the Constitution's original masts in 1798, but no longer grew tall enough to do so. That species had dominated the lumber market from the late 1700s until its virgin stands were logged beyond effective use a century later. (Eastern white pine still occupies its original range, but it has not yet returned to its original glory.) Logging firms from the east shipped their lumberjacks (and sometimes their entire operations, mill and all) west to the new frontiers of timber, to the great forests of Douglas-fir.

Here in the Rocky Mountains, our trees do not grow nearly as big or as quickly. They can reach diameters of three feet and heights of 130 feet at maturity, about half the height of large scale coastal Douglas-fir. Our trees are, by necessity, better able to withstand drought and less shade tolerant than those in the Northwest. Rocky Mountain trees are also valuable as timber, though less so than their coastal cousin. Douglas-fir makes up about 10 percent of Colorado's forest acreage, but only accounts for about 5 percent of the harvested wood. Not for lumber or legend do we think of Douglas-fir today, however. This month, thousands of these elegant trees will once again deck our holiday halls. If you head out to public forests to "cut-your-own," you're likely to come back with a Douglas-fir: the young trees often have the attractive symmetrical shape expected of Christmas trees.

Never mind the differences—you'll recognize Douglas-fir wherever you find it. The 3-pronged bracts between the cone scales are unique to Pseudotsuga. In fact, it's often easiest to recognize Douglas-fir along the trail by the squirrel-cut cones you see on the ground; the leafy tops are often too tall to distinguish. You'll find its needles are flat but blunt, giving it a softer feel than spruces; its twigs are somewhat roughened—not as much as in spruces, but more than those of true firs. The graceful presence of Douglas-fir illuminates our woodlands from the foothills to the upper montane, but it rarely occurs in large, single-species stands. At its lower elevations, it often accompanies ponderosa pine, replacing it on the cooler north-facing slopes. In southern Colorado, it's likely to be found with white fir (Abies concolor).

In addition to its value to us humans, Douglas-fir provides many services to wildlife. Its branches provide cover and nesting sites; its seeds provide nourishment, but keep critters busy in the process. With 20 to 30 seeds per cone, a bushel of cones yields about half a pound of seeds. That's the entire production of an average tree in a good year. At that rate, by my clumsy calculation, it would take about 12 Douglas-fir trees to support one hungry squirrel through winter—if he can get all the seeds. (In real life, it probably takes even more trees. Squirrels might do better on ponderosa pine seeds, which have more calories, but they'll have to work harder to get them out of the tougher cones.) So how does a tree make sure some seeds survive to grow new trees? By tricking those pesky squirrels, and anyone else who's looking for lunch. Douglas-fir, and a number of other trees, have "learned" to do this by starving the squirrels (or forcing them to look for food elsewhere) during most years, then overwhelming them with a massive seed crop in an occasional good year. Because the squirrels can't take advantage of this sudden wealth, seeds have a better chance to escape and some will grow. Douglas-fir generally has one complete failure and two or more light crops between heavy, or "mast," years. As naturalist Sylvia Brockner tells us, this year is one of the good ones. We, and the squirrels, must be prepared for a few lean ones ahead.

Copyright S.L. White. Illustration copyright Jan Ratcliffe. Originally published in Upbeat, December 1994.

Everything's Rosy!

2006-05-29T08:21:00.000-07:00

Here in Colorado's foothills and mountain slopes, our future is rosy. So is our present, and for some time, so has been our past. We are fortunate in that almost everywhere we look, we see roses. Although June is the traditional month for traditional roses, the native roses we enjoy here often appear in May. Many of them, however, masquerade under other names, some even under disguises so complete most of us never suspect their true identities. There are roses hiding, literally, in almost every one of the flowering shrubs we seek out for their color and beauty each spring.

Roses have long been the domesticated friends of humans, serving in a variety of capacities. Flower and fruit provide pleasure and food, fragrance and sustenance. Among familiar tame roses, we find apples, pears, peaches, apricots, cherries, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries: It's hard to make a fruit pie without involving one or another of Rose's cousins. If these fruits seem too diverse to be related, it's because the Rose Family, with 3,000 members worldwide and 69 species here, is large and a bit unwieldy. Botanists often divide it into three separate subfamilies: The apple subfamily, with its multi-seeded fruits, includes pears, quinces, and hawthorns; the peach subfamily includes the "stone" fruits, cherries, plums, and apricots; and the rose subfamily is a catch-all for the rest—strawberries, true roses, potentillas, raspberries, and so on. A close look at the flower reveals an underlying unity: Five petals and sepals—and many, many stamens—characterize roses.

If you think first of our wild pink rose, you're on the right track. It alone, of all our local roses, retains the Latin name Rosa, although its specific name is variously given as arkansana, woodsii, acicularis, depending on where you are. Most of us have difficulty separating these very similar species—for good reason, as Rosa itself is described as "taxonomically difficult." This genus alone has rosebuds, leaves, and "hips" nearly identical to those of our tame backyard roses, and is sought for rose hip jelly or tea. The Rose Family also includes many other dramatic and ubiquitous native shrubs. All are attractive enough, at least to me, to serve in domesticated situations, as well as in wild landscapes. Native roses—mountain mahogany, serviceberry, chokecherry, wild plum, potentilla—are readily available in the nursery trade, though you may have hunt for them. We're fortunate that local nurseries stock all of these and many other native shrubs. Several local roses also provide food, at least for those who trouble to collect fruit for chokecherry or wild plum jelly (or wine!) each fall. Chokecherries and plums are also greatly appreciated by coyotes and other local wildlife who enjoy their abundance in season. If you don't know how chokecherries got their name, try one!

Our other woody roses also have much to offer. The hawthorns (Crategus erythropoda and C. macracantha), with their lovely white flowers, glossy leaves, bright red fruits, and thorny red stems, are often found in foothills canyons. Feathery fruits adorn Apache plume (Fallugia paradoxa), a more-distant native transplanted from lower deserts. Rock spirea (Holodiscus dumosus) is a distinctive local shrub with a loose spike of minute rosy-pink flowers and soft, almost pleated leaves.

Two that may be less familiar but are well worth looking for are the Boulder raspberry (Rubus deliciosus) and mountain ninebark (Physocarpus monogynus). The Boulder raspberry, with conspicuous white flowers and less-than-inspiring fruits, seems to tolerate sun and shade, and thus is seen in a variety of habitats. Mountain ninebark has tiny white flowers in clusters—the plants look like spring snowdrifts in shady areas. It grows a little higher in elevation and blooms a little later than other roses. Both have an orangish, shredded bark that offers winter interest.

To avoid entrapment by the thousands of rose clichés western civilization has inherited, I'm being vigilant against a powerful temptation. Who could write about these plants that have so long and so gracefully served humankind without repeating the discoveries of centuries of Rose's admirers? I'll leave it to you to remember our rosy sayings, but I think you'll agree it's hard to name another plant family that's given us so much symbolism and legend down through the ages: from Eve's apple, to the briars that grew up to protect Sleeping Beauty's castle, to the symbol of love and loyalty still used by swains today. In song, in poetry, in our hearts, roses hold a special place. This year, remembering our natives, let the roses of Mother's Day say even more than they usually do.

And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies...

—Christopher Marlowe, 1599