Dear Cub kids,

I used to think that the behavior of songbirds seemed completely random. In fact, (I hate to say it), in the self-absorbed ignorance and conceit of my life as a human, I used to feel rather sure of it, to feel only fleeting curiosity about the behavior of the small birds in my neighborhood. Too small, too seemingly random… “beneath” my interest??

As so often happens, my mind was changed, my attention seized, by a book. (I hope books never disappear!) This one is called What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal The Secrets of the Natural World. It was written by Jon Young, who was lucky enough to grow up under the mentorship of a man of Native American ancestry, with keen abilities to be in and of wild places.

This book is full of intriguing stories, advice and insight about how to learn of and from birds. Okay, I admit, my realization that birds’ lives and behavior just might be full of meaning preceded my reading of this book. It has grown as I have grown, with the years – if there is one thing I do know now that I didn’t 40 years ago when I was 14, it’s that we – Homo sapiens – know so very little about the natural world around us, and that we constantly, constantly underestimate the behavior, capacities, and yes, wisdom, of other creatures!

Everything that songbirds do is to a purpose. As well-educated kids with great science teachers, you’re probably thinking to yourselves, “well, right, no kidding Jen!” Everything every animal does, with the possible exception of our own species, is to the purpose of survival, to put it a little too simply.

Have you ever spent time watching the small birds in your neighborhood? Have you noticed the quicksilver ways that they move and communicate with each other? Our scientific understanding of songbird behavior is in its infancy, but people like Jon Young have learned a lot from years of simply… paying attention. When you think of songbirds, in addition to their minute beauty, your mind probably dwells on their songs, right? Have you asked yourself why songbirds “sing”? Jon Young and other “observers” of bird language, (including many in India!), listen to, identify, and try to interpret many different kinds of vocalizations: songs, companion calls, territorial aggression, adolescent begging, and alarms. Young says that he is sure that there are many more that we humans are unaware of, including at least three others: migratory flight calls, whisper songs, and copulation calls.

Young shares fascinating stories about blue jays imitating the screech of a sharp-shinned hawk so as to frighten other birds away from a feeder, and his own realization that a weasel (not some other animal) was prowling in the woods near his home by watching the behavior of an alarmed flock of tiny wrens. He asks readers if they’ve noticed the varying behaviors of different kinds of birds at a feeder – the way one type of bird is always the first to flee at some, as yet to we humans, invisible sign of danger, while other birds take longer… and why?

Young urges readers to develop an as-frequent-as-possible habit of sitting in one spot outdoors, and watching and pondering the behavior of the birds in the small area within the reach of our senses. He talks about three reasons for doing this on a sustained basis: first, the human observer will develop a deeper sense of what’s really going on in the world of birds; second, through our deepening awareness of bird language and behavior, we will inevitably see and learn more about local wildlife (since everything birds “say” and do relates to the world around them); and third, we, the human observers, will “settle down.” Literally, into our bird “sit spot,” but also figuratively, into a dawning realization that understanding birds can help us, as Young poignantly puts it, “understand ourselves and, if we wish, make some changes.” “Too often,” Young’s childhood mentor used to tell him, “we humans walk in arrogance.” The awareness needed to understand birds, the prolonged practice of quieting ourselves and turning our attention outward to what is really happening around us, will inevitably change us… into, I would venture to guess, deeper, more thoughtful human beings…

When we first start paying attention to birds and their songs, says Young, we hear only unordered cacophony. Listen more deeply, and you’ll begin to “hear” the reason underlying the chaos. Harmony emerges… an essential lesson for the noisy, cacophonous, fractious primate in danger of desolating a beautiful planet.

But don’t worry about that. For now,  join me in finding your own bird sit spot, and we’ll learn together.

Your friend,

Jen

Ah, not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner -- what is it? if not intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/C. Martin (Caltech)/M. Seibert(OCIW)

According to today's New York Times, the "treasures" uncovered by the melting Arctic await plundering. When will it ever end?

(Photo credit: John Harrington)

Talkin' Tigers... 12/11

Dear Cub kids,

In 1933, a little boy named George was born in Germany. As George grew from baby to boy, from youth to adult, he found his salvation in animals, and they found theirs in him. Life took him from the forests of Germany, all over the world, from Alaska to Africa, from India to China, and many, many places in between. On December 2, 2011, George stood with other wildlife protectors on a stage in Mumbai, and accepted a Sanctuary Lifetime Service Award for services rendered to the wild world.

But though George Schaller is being honored for his life’s work, his life and his work are still unfolding.

Here is just a snapshot of George’s adventurous life…

At 14, George and his family left Germany and moved to the United States. During his senior year in high school, George took an aptitude test to help him choose his direction in life. The results of the test pointed George in the direction of interior decoration. But instead of pursuing a life in carpets and curtains, George went to the University of Alaska to study zoology. During summers of fieldwork, George canoed the rivers of northern Alaska, surveying birds. Later, George would compare his summers in Alaska to his childhood years in German forests, conceding about himself, “Essentially, I never grew up.”

Upon completion of graduate studies of Alaska’s caribou, an older scientist asked George a fateful question: “Would you like to study gorillas?” No one had ever studied living gorillas in the wild; they were considered too ferocious, too dangerous. The only things known about wild gorillas had been gleaned after they had been shot. George changed that, moving into a cabin in a flower-sprinkled mountain meadow in the Belgian Congo in 1959. During a year-long study, George discovered and studied eleven gorilla groups and several lone males, and the ecosystem in which they roamed. He achieved what others had thought to be impossible: he studied gorillas on their own terms, alive and fearless in the deep jungles of central Africa. His gorilla studies revolutionized field biology, showing that supposedly dangerous animals could be studied in the wild with little risk.

By 1963, George had a Ph.D. in zoology, a wife, Kay, and two little boys. The family had just begun life in a new cabin, this one in Kanha National Park in India. For three years, as his baby sons grew, George studied tigers, the deer they preyed on, and the beautiful forests and grasslands that sustained them. Embarking on the first systematic, scientific study ever attempted of tigers and their prey, George wanted to unravel the secretive lives of tigers, to learn what effect predator had on prey. While Kay and the boys went looking for tigers on elephant-back, George walked the rolling grasslands and forested ravines of Kanha, sometimes coming face-to-face with his striped quarry as it stalked the herds of sambar, barasingha, chital and blackbuck. After studying the life of Kanha for three years, George realized that tigers were “good” for their prey species, keeping their numbers at levels the ecosystem could sustain. George was among the very first scientists to document the symbiotic relationship between hunter, hunted, and ecosystem.

From India, George and his family moved to Tanzania, studying the lions of the Serengeti, to Pakistan, Nepal and the Himalayas to study the snow leopard, to Central China to study the panda, to the Tibetan Plateau of Western China to study asses and antelopes. He broke new scientific ground everywhere he went, learning about species previously thought impossible to study on their own turf. Everywhere he went, George inspired and enriched the work of fellow field biologists, and looked for young scientists to encourage and mentor.

George’s passion for wild animals and places led him to recognize that they must be protected, and that science could do that best. As fascinating as science is, George said everywhere he went, it must not be undertaken for itself alone, but to ensure the protection of all living things. His insistence that field biology be wedded to conservation might just be his single most important contribution – it led to the protection of over 190,000 square miles of wilderness around the world, an area the size of Spain!

Where in the world is George Schaller today? I don’t know for sure, but I do know that wherever he is, planet Earth is a better place.

Your friend,

Jen

P.S. If you would like to read more about George, I highly recommend: A Life in the Wild: George Schaller’s Struggle to Save the Last Great Beasts, by Pamela Turner.

Talkin' Tigers... 10/11

Dear Cub kids,

I had NO idea how amazing trees are until I read a bunch of books about them. Of course, trees made the books about trees that I read! It’s great to read about single species; I have a wonderful book about oak trees… and it’s also a lot of fun to read books about all trees.

People often use trees to represent nature itself. They play such a large part in our thinking, our mythology, and in our economic and aesthetic lives. Children around the world grow up learning about and experiencing the everyday comfort to be found in a tree.

The very first book with which I struggled as a beginning reader was A Tree is Nice by Janice May Udry. Here are a few lines from the book, a copy of which I still have on my shelf:

Trees are beautiful. They fill up the sky. If you have a tree, you can climb up its trunk, roll in its leaves, or hang a swing from one of its limbs. Cows and babies can nap in the shade of a tree. Birds can make nests in the branches. A tree is good to have around. A tree is nice.

Trees are foundational to humans. In the pre-kindergarten class taught in my neighborhood, the 4-year-olds study the seeds of trees. My 16-year-old is spending a few months in Vermont studying environmental science. The first book the students read, in an apple orchard surrounded by tree-clad mountains, was The Man Who Planted Trees. On the bookshelf at my right shoulder is Valmik Thapar’s little gem, Tigers & A Banyan Tree. A tree is planted in the memory of my mother in a park near my childhood home.

Have you heard of Wangari Maathai? She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for environmentalism and social activism. Worried about the industrialization of her native Kenya, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, spending decades mobilizing women to plant 30 million trees.

Trees were victims and victors of epic struggles in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. In Tolkien’s vivid imagination, “ents” were trees that spoke and strode from one place to another. In the “real” world, trees cannot run or hide or swat at attackers. But they do have defenses, from their armor-like bark to chemical compounds they make to repel invaders. Trees can warn their neighbors of insect attack, stimulating them to synthesize their own repellents!

The roots of trees in a community may mingle and even fuse, enhancing the trees’ communication and exchange of materials! David Suzuki explains it poignantly in Tree: A Life Story. “No tree is an island; it is a communal citizen and derives the same benefits from cooperation, sharing, and mutual effort that any living creature receives from participating in a fully functioning ecosystem.”

Did you know that trees allow fungi to take up residence in their cells, in return for which fungal cells produce substances that defend against bacterial infection? Fungi and tree roots grow into each other until they become almost a single organism, a compound life-form called mycorrhizae, meaning fungus-root. Very few plant species grow without a fungal partner (there are 90,000 known species of fungi!).

Here’s the relationship: Fungi are incapable of manufacturing their own food because they don’t have chloroplasts as other plants do. But to reproduce, they must have sugars, so they penetrate the roots of trees taking sugar from their hosts. The relationship isn’t one-sided, however. If it were, the fungus would be a parasite and the tree would eventually die. No, the fungus returns the favor. In return for the sugar it takes, its vast network of mini-roots called hyphae provides trees’ root systems with access to nutrients and water that they would not otherwise be able to reach.

The enormous mat of fungal hyphae in the soil beneath trees vastly increases the volume of soil a tree is able to explore, making Tolkienesque ents of them all, capable of amassing far more nutrition from the soil than their stationery stance would suggest!

When I walk in a forest, or within just a small community of trees, I know that in the soil beneath my feet is a universe of fungal hyphae nurturing and sustaining the trees, as they are nurtured and sustained by the trees.

Will wonders never cease? Not if you fall in love with nature!

Your friend,

Jen

Talkin' Tigers... 2/12

My latest letter to readers of Cub...

Dear Cub kids,

There are creatures in my home.

I know I am supposed to be bothered by this. The “extermination” business in America is a gigantic industry. People call “the exterminator” when they see a single ant on their kitchen counter. Cockroach – don’t approach, mouse – out of my house, fly – good-bye.

I do prefer not to live with swarms of anything, including people. But if a mouse finds its way into my apartment, I find a way, hopefully before my cats get busy, to capture it calmly and gently, and release it outside. But my gosh, the effort, the expense Americans go to to try to ensure that they live in hermetically sealed spaces in which all other species are banished, is nothing short of extraordinary.

Take the humble stink bug. A member of the insect “superfamily” Pentatomoidea, in the Heteroptera suborder of the Herniptera order, there are apparently some 7,000 species in this family. I have stink bugs in my apartment. These little creatures are related to insects known variously as “shield bugs” and “jewel bugs.” The kind I have are apparently non-native, having arrived from China (so many things “made in China”!), in some shipment of something or other in the mid-‘90s. Since that time, they have become something of a pest to fruit farmers, as well as to homeowners of the type that flip out whenever they encounter an insect in their tightly-sealed, pesticide-sprayed domiciles.

Stink bugs are so-called because they have glands in their thorax that produce a foul-smelling liquid, used defensively to deter potential predators. The smell can also be detected when the bugs are crushed. Now, people do NOT like animals that employ “bad” smells in their defense, but, hey, if you lived in a world of giants that took pleasure in eradicating you, wouldn’t this seem like a sensible way to protect yourself?

The stink bugs in my apartment (on a good or bad day, depending on how you think about it, I probably see three or four), are known as brown marmorated stink bugs, or Halyomorpha halys. The dignity conferred by the beautiful Latin name is overkill because these are intrinsically dignified “bugs.” They are very small, about 17 milimeters long. They are a nice brown-ish gray color. They have short, elbowed legs, two, nice short antenna. They have a small head, and their body is shaped like a tiny shield.

Really, they are quite charming. But homeowners deplore them, and according to the Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences, they are “becoming an important agricultural pest in Pennsylvania,” since they, like people, enjoy the taste of apples and peaches. They also have a fondness for blackberries, sweet corn, field corn, soybeans, tomatoes, lima beans, and green peppers. Nice vegetarian diet!

The Penn State entomology website says: “These insects are not known to cause harm to humans, although homeowners become alarmed when the bugs enter their homes and noisily fly about. The stink bug will not reproduce inside structures or cause damage.” The website warns that pesticides used against stink bugs are ineffective and may lead to the arrival of other, more “problematic” insects, so waging chemical warfare against stink bugs is not advised. This has not stopped countless extermination companies from advertising their anti-stink bug services on the Internet, however, or homeowners from railing against the tiny insect, and begging each other for tips on how to rid their homes of their deplorable presence.

Well. What is it like, living with stink bugs? The few I see each day seem to do the following: Sit. Walk extremely slowly. Fly, slowly, and with an impressive heavy, buzzing sound for a second or two. My cats were initially mildly curious, but now completely ignore them. I put one outside once, on a chilly winter day, but when I noticed two hours later that it had not moved from the spot I had put it, and seemed stunned by the temperature, I brought it back in to my pleasantly warm living room, leaving it on the broad leaf of a plant. It revived.

That is about all I have to say about stink bugs. They look quite prehistoric, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there are fossil stink bugs indicating exceedingly ancient origins. They are really quite decorative, in their humble, brownish-gray way, and their cousin, the emerald-green jewel bug, is a ravishing beauty. I do not mind sharing my space with them. Why should I? We don’t bother each other. They remind me, when I am indoors, that nature will not be denied. Thank goodness for stink bugs. Having avoided harming one, I have yet to smell one.

Vin et sine vivere. Live and let live.

Your friend,

Jen

Haikus for Julia

Red Knot and Horseshoe

From pole to pole
We stop for eggs
Our mute friends' offering.


~ Jennifer Scarlott, 2/9/12

Haikus for Julia

The Couple

Mallards on a plank
How swank
y

~ Jennifer Scarlott, 2/7/12

Haikus for Julia

Humpback

Journey south,
Journey north,
One-ton baby.


~ Jennifer Scarlott, 2/4/12

Haikus for Julia

Canine Contemplation

Blithe spirit.
Her sweet collie self,
Dominates brooding shepherd.


~ Jennifer Scarlott, 1/27/12

Haikus for Julia

Indian Pond

She floats
Suspended beneath ice trees
Awaiting spring.


~ Jennifer Scarlott, 1/25/12

Haikus for Julia

This January

Dandelion blooms
In snow.
Worm weather.

~ Jennifer Scarlott, 1/24/12

Directive

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry—
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there’s a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods’ excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone’s road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you’re lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left’s no bigger than a harness gall.
First there’s the children’s house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny’s
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it,
So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.
(I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

~ Robert Frost, 1946