Let the Birds Do It!

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!

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

Of Chickens and Cliches

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

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.

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

Secret Nights of Salamanders

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.

The River of Life

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

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Originally written 1992.