Nature, Culture, and Two Friends Talking

Fort McMurray residents evacuating via Highway 63 as the fire approaches. Photo RD Darren

June 9, 2016. The Fort McMurray wildfire in Saskatchewan, north of Calgary, the provincial capital and an oil producing mecca for decades—most recently using sand impregnated with bitumen and called “tar sands”—is the biggest disaster in Canadian history. It burned some 2,400 homes to cinders, caused the temporary shutdown of an oil production facility and burned up its housing complex, and sent 80,000 people scrambling for safety. This all happened in early May after a very warm, dry March and cool April. At the time of the fire, temperatures in the area hit 90 and humidity was extraordinarily low. The fall and winter meanwhile had been dry because this was an El Niño year—the second strongest on record. We had a similar set-up in 1988-1989, which I remember well because it gave us one of the best tomato crops we’d ever raised in our little garden in St. Paul, thanks to hot temperatures at the peak of the growing season—though we did have to water frequently. Our tomato bonus was the bane of many others—the ‘88-‘89 drought was among the worst natural disasters in the United States, ranking up there with Hurricane Katrina and the Dust Bowl era.

The Saskatchewan fire burned out of control for several days. It’s still burning because it’s so big that the fire fighters haven’t fully caged it, which will allow it to burn out on its own inside a safe ring of forest pre-ignited by the fire fighters. Of course, a fire of this size has happened before: think of the Yellowstone fires of 1988 which burned about half of the park and some adjacent landscape. Casting our thoughts back further, forgotten by most, we recall the terrible, city-devouring fires of the 1870-1910 logging era. At that time the practice of good forestry was to clear-cut an area of all merchantable timber, the results of which you can still see across the upper Midwest—immense stumps in pastures that haven’t grown up into thickets. Good management was also to pile and burn the slash from the tops of trees, the thought being that the plow followed the axe, despite the land’s poor soils and a growing season so short that few crops could support a farming industry. Somehow it would all work out, went the common wisdom. This idea extended back to the early forest-clearing days in New England and points east—and was exported to the Midwest and practiced by loggers and farmers alike.

The practice of burning slash, though, had its downside. First, it deprived the forest of nutrients. After taking the large logs away and sending the tops up in smoke, there wasn’t a lot of nutrition left in the soil to support a new crop of trees. Second, the fires often killed all the young pines that were waiting in the wings to grow up after the big pines had been taken away. Of course, the worst thing it did was to set the stage for catastrophic wildfires. Where these slash fires smoldered, all it took was weather conditions like those in Saskatchewan to ignite a firestorm.

If you ever get to Hinckley, Minnesota, there’s a museum dedicated to the devastating fires of 1894, which destroyed not only Hinckley but, in separate incidents, many other towns—Peshtigo, Wisconsin, and in Michigan, Holland, Manistee and Port Huron, to name a few—along with hundreds of thousands of acres of young timber. This set the region on a path to growing mostly aspen and birch, with scattered spruce and fir. Thus the original conifer-rich forest—full of pines, cedars, and hemlocks—was transformed in a couple decades to something very different. Hinckley’s survivors who fled north on a burning train and jumped into Skunk Lake—a shallow mudhole really—to escape the fire, spoke of three waves of flame passing overhead in the next several hours. The first was a true firestorm creating its own weather, with lightning, thunder, and a huge vacuuming of air to feed the flames—actually depriving people in the vicinity the oxygen to stay alive—many suffocated. This type of fire behavior was reported from Dresden, Germany, in the famous fire-bombing of that city, as well as above Fort McMurray in May. Picture this—massive cumulonimbus clouds towering over the fire, packed with energy due to the immense amount of heat being released, with thunder, lightning, and fast winds. Strange.

Cloud able to make its own weather, rising from the Birch Lake Complex Fires, NW Territories, Canada. Smoke from these fires covered Minnesota in July 2014. Photo Mike Gravel (from P. Huttner’s Updraft Blog)

The second and third fire waves the Hinckley survivors talked about swept through in the next few hours, perhaps using for fuel the tree trunks still standing, and perhaps also the humus of the forest floor, which would have been dried by the previous fire waves. People in our region have noted the low-productivity of many burned-over areas in the north woods, and perhaps this is part of the reason. In those days the forest floor was packed with material from partly decomposed fallen leaves, branches, and tree trunks, which, when dried out, make pretty good kindling. Think of dried peat, nothing but partly-decomposed plant parts, used as a fuel source for millennia in places with big peat bogs. The surface layer of peat is cut into bricks and dried for later burning. I saw it being done in Ireland years ago, using a tool called a “slawn”.

The Fort McMurray fire didn’t appear to have waves of flames—though there are stories of weird fire behavior. But it touched us personally. When it gets warm enough, we leave our windows open, especially when a big mass of Arctic air sweeps in, pushing far south into the Midwest. About a week after the Fort McMurray fire started, I woke up at three in the morning smelling smoke. We first thought something in the house was on fire. Then we thought something was burning outside—wood smoke from a chimney, somebody’s garage (which actually happened a few doors down!). Then it dawned on me—there was something familiar about the smell, something of the north woods in it, burning. I told Elizabeth, I think it’s just trees from somewhere far away. Sadly, we had to shut the windows because, with all that smoke swirling around the bedroom, we couldn’t sleep.

Smoke from the Fort McMurray fire covered Minnesota and points east in early May, 2016. Image from NOAA.

I’d smelled this before, in August 2014, when our region was also blanketed with smoke from Canadian wildfires. It gave the world a strange look in the daytime. You couldn’t see clearly beyond half a mile—objects at that distance were oddly indistinct—and all surfaces, especially white ones, were tinged with pink because smoke scatters the sunlight in a certain way, letting mostly red hues show while the blues are muted. In any case, it’s a strange thing to live in a smoke-pallored place—the smell so pervasive it makes you feel a little claustrophobic until it clears out.

Some people want to directly connect the fires to global climate change, but truth be told, this thing has happened before due to many factors—suppression of wildfire and spraying for pest insects create the conditions that fuel megafires, for one. Maybe you can say that the record-setting El Niño set things up nicely for a catastrophic fire, which may be related to climate change. We won’t know for sure until a couple more decades of data have been gathered, parsed, and embedded in a computer model that matches what we see in the real world. What can be said is that the picture of regional drought being drawn by climate change models suggests that the number of fires will increase over time. If that turns out to be the future, we’ll have more firestorms and smoke-filled bedrooms. Beyond that, as a thoughtful scientist, I hesitate to speculate, but the poets among us could take it further in metaphor. My son-in-law, for instance, said to me, “Maybe you can think of it as the forest’s act of protest—self-immolation, like Buddhist monks protesting the Vietnam War.” That is an interesting idea—the planet itself rebelling against an authority it did not elect, one that is—intentionally or not—imposing its will on everything. – Kim

This very Bombus impatiens, gathering nectar from Jim’s garden in Winona, is now immortalized in picture and word. Photo by J. Armstrong

June 8, 2016.  I spent some time yesterday sitting in my front yard watching a bumblebee forage in the flowering pinks on the verge of our sidewalk. She was visiting not only the new blooms but also the nearly-expired ones, grabbing the withered blossoms and plunging her head deep into the faded stamens.  Why would she be attracted to this seemingly past-prime flower?  I went to the internet to look up what kind of bumble I was dealing with; thanks to the handy guide on the “befriending bumblebees” website, http://befriendingbumblebees.com/bumblebeesofMNweb.pdf, I was able to determine that this foraging worker was Bombus impatiens–the most common bumble in eastern North America.  B. impatiens, like other generalists such as robins and squirrels, do well in a variety of habitats, including suburbs and urban areas.  Their willingness to adapt to a variety of forage has led to their use by the greenhouse industry as a pollinator, and farmers use them to pollinate pumpkins, blueberries and tomatoes.  They were not historically common in Minnesota, but the fact that these bumbles perform an economic service has helped to spread their range.  At this point, with their cousins the honeybees in such decline, these bumblebees are now the most important pollinator species in North America.

Like most bumbles, B. impatiens colonies construct nests one to three feet below the ground, which they access through tunnels.  In the wild the bee is likely to be in wooded areas or meadows, as it depends on woodland flowers in the spring.  Upon learning this I wondered if the worker I was watching was from a local greenhouse, or from a wild hive that had survived the cold Minnesota winter.  I was surprised to read that B. impatiens lives in large groups of up to 450.  I was also interested to learn that my visiting bee was “traplining,” meaning that she had identified my flowery front yard as good forage and would return to it each day, along with other productive floral stops, taking the shortest route from her hive.  Bumblebees (along with many other species, such as hummingbirds) use this strategy to maximize the efficiency of their foraging (rather than randomly searching anew each day).  It was interesting to think this buzzing worker bee had memorized my yard and in fact was a local expert in exploiting its energy potential.  That would seem to explain why she was visiting past-prime flowers—she was mopping up every last bit of nectar.

She is not limited in her searches, however.  The traplining strategy includes the option to change foraging patterns: when the pinks in my yard stop giving nectar the bumble will notice and shift her location to a different and suitably plentiful source.  In this way, her hive is constantly learning and adapting as new information comes in from workers.

Another eusocial pollinator, bald-faced hornet (actually a vespid wasp) sips nectar in a wet meadow in late August near Bemidji, Minnesota. Photo by K. Chapman

All this points to interesting parallels between insect hives and human cities.  Bees evolved to live in communal groups that are termed “eusocial,” meaning that most individuals in the hive don’t themselves reproduce.  In the bumblebee hive, some tend the larvae and feed them while others, like the bee in my yard, are tireless nectar-seekers.  The queen, of course, lays the eggs.  This frees up the others to become specialists and coordinate with each other—becoming much more powerful in aggregate than they would be as individuals.  While humans are not that self-sacrificing—so far we haven’t designated one female to bear all our progeny—our urban class structures share the same strategy of using job specialization and worker coordination to efficiently exploit resources in the environment, near and far.  And this implies, for both hives and cities, a special relationship to plants.

Bees and flowers co-evolved in the Cretaceous period, the product of an interesting symbiotic dance.  Flowers are essentially complicated bee-attractors, using their color and structure to entice insects to land on them and brush up against their pollen-producing stamens—so that the pollen will be carried to other flowers and accomplish sexual reproduction.  The bees get the nectar and pollen as bankable rewards for their labor—from the nectar they make honey, which with the pollen can be stored and enable colonies to survive the winter.  The flowers get genetic variation from cross-pollination, strengthening their gene pool.

Humans have similarly been able to stay in place and build communities because about 11,500 years ago they learned to successfully breed food plants (usually grains) to produce storable calories.  Unlike the bumblebees, however, the process was a conscious one, as humans noted which plants were most fruitful and through selective breeding encouraged them, year by year, to increase their yields.  The other aspect that makes the human strategy different is the scale at which humans are able to act in unison: the current global economy has essentially turned the entire earth into one big foraging field for the massive human population.  This makes us even more successful than B. impatiens because we have expanded our range and influence through our own energies, rather than being manipulated to greatness by a master bee-keeper.

My busy B. impatiens visitor also is lucky, in that she has for the moment entered into a kind of alliance with the human hive.  Many other pollinators are not so fortunate.  As pressure grows to convert land and water into calories for billions of humans, the important question becomes, will we be able to share our global and commercial traplines with the many other species on the planet? – Jim

May 22, 2016.  Spring has come to Minnesota…well, we actually had summer back in March, then late winter a week ago, so I’d say spring has come twice to Minnesota, all in the same year.  And with spring there is a striking plant that’s putting on green biomass for its big show around July Fourth.  Together with fireworks, the large-leaved lupine (Lupinus heterophyllus) puts on quite a display.  Here’s a picture of it.

Large-leaved lupine stands at attention by a road in northern Minnesota. The multi-colored flowers suggest George Russell’s hybrid, for which the Royal Horticultural Society awarded him the Veitch Memorial Medal. He disliked the original blue of the natural form, to which, sadly for horticulturalists, the hybrid reverts after a couple generations. Photo K. Chapman

Just as in American democracy different personalities and life experiences produce different political outlooks and party platforms, so it is with people’s opinions about the natural world.  Here’s what some posted about large-leaved lupine at the excellent Minnesota Wildflowers website (https://www.minnesotawildflowers.info).

Broke my heart to read that this is not native. I have some in my garden! I guess it’s time to weed….

I LOVE THIS FLOWER!!! We first started seeing it in our area about 20 years ago. The seeds scatter themselves when they pop open, but we helped them along by collecting and scattering where we wanted them to grow. Now we have a huge area at our cabin north of Grand Marais that is just covered with them. They are so beautiful and the fragrance is delightful!!

This was a very big year for lupines in NE Minnesota all along Hwy 61 and inland. Although it is an invasive species I do think they are very pretty.

Is it legal to dig Lupine from ditches to replant in my yard?

If these are so invasive, then why in the heck are they being sold in seed packs at the store…where unknowing gardeners can mistakenly plant them? Sounds to me like DNR is not doing their job…!

We have the non-native lupines growing on our septic mound. We are trying to control by cutting the seeds but they are spreading too rapidly. Will this cause a problem for our septic mound? If so, do you have any ideas of how we can safely remove them?

What is the harmful effect that Lupine causes? The butterflies seem to love them. I have them in my garden and have a heck of a time trying to keep them alive! I love them, but I have not seen any large amounts anywhere. I am surprised that all the synthetic chemical spraying that is done doesn’t kill them in the roadsides. Thank you.

What a range of opinion!  How to decide who is right?  And once decided, what do you do about it?  A young woman who went to college for several years to get a master’s degree in natural resources management, and who for several years has watched the landscape change with the lupine, might have one opinion.  A woman with children who vacations up north, taking in the world through the lens of beauty and enjoyment—fishing, relaxing with family—she will have a different view.  Whose view is the trump card?

My economist friends would say, you can decide this by figuring out who benefits and who is harmed by the spread of large-leaved lupine.  If the dollar value of the benefits is greater than the dollar value of the harms, then go sow your wild oats, but if not, then pull the plant out by the roots.  Yes, but how do you put a value on these things?  How much does it cost the guy pulling lupine out of his yard versus the dollar value gained by the sight and smell of lupine at your cabin?

I don’t know how to do that math.  What I do know is that large-leaved lupine, brought from its natural streamside habitat of the Pacific Northwest, has free rein in the Midwest.  Its spread is, unchecked, very much like that of any contagion—Zika virus, Lyme disease, the common cold, you name it.  It starts with small points of infection, which grow and then start new infections nearby, which also expand and infect new places—until it is everywhere.  Over the last twenty-five years I have seen this plant first appear, then multiply and begin to coalesce from Duluth to Grand Portage, up the Gunflint Trail, and last summer I saw the first colonies south of Duluth along Interstate 35.  It has begun its march south to the Twin Cities.

The well-intentioned woman quoted above, along with other people who love its beauty and scent, have helped it along.  Here’s a picture of how the story begins—on two sides of a driveway back to a cabin in the woods.  Just pick some seeds from down the road, toss them into the corners of your drive, and you get an adornment, just like the two stone lions you see at the entry to estates.

Like entry monuments, these two patches of large-leaved lupine announce that a northwoods cabin is nearby. Photo K. Chapman

Do the people spreading lupine owe anything to the guy pulling it off of his septic mound?  Maybe.  That question is asked of a host of environment topics.  Do coal-powered plants around the globe, and people like me guzzling electrons as I type this, owe people who fish a payment for the mercury from power plant smokestacks which fish tissue takes up?  Do farmers in the Midwest owe the shrimpers in the Gulf of Mexico because farm practices help create a Massachusetts-sized oxygen-free dead zone that has no shrimp?  What about the horticulturalists and botanists who brought us Dutch elm disease, European buckthorn, and my personal nemesis, creeping bellflower—what do they owe society for releasing invasive species into the environment?

These are heady questions and the answers elusive.  My opinion of the lupine is that it is capable of preventing other plants from growing, including seedlings of trees that are important timber trees, like white pine.  On the North Shore a couple decades ago I studied the reproductive success of white pine—the mainstay building material from Maine to Minnesota during the lumbering heyday from the mid-1800s to early 1900s. The tree already has problems bringing the next generation along, and it’s possible the spread of lupine into white pine stands will make things worse.  It certainly won’t make things better.  The most we can hope for is no effect—but who can know?

In the face of uncertainty about outcomes, do you double down on an action, or pause to consider?  Jim and I find endless fascination in the story of the starling’s introduction to North America by the American Acclimatization Society—a group dedicating to bringing to America all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s works.  For people who enjoy Shakespeare, that’s a nice concept—completely divorced from any thought of consequences.  Today the starling is a genuine problem.  Did the enjoyment of the AAS members knowing starlings at last were living here trump the pains taken to get rid of them now?  After thousands of stories from around the world of species introductions for a good cause which turned bad in the end, you’d think we would be more thoughtful.  Oh for a little ecological education for everybody in high school!  Even if all we did was consider unintended consequences and take a precautionary approach, that would be a good start.  But in a democratic society, information doesn’t necessarily carry the day.  Deeply-held values and the heat of the moment—one’s economic pain, one’s urgent fear, one’s emotional reaction to a recent event—can swing the outcome one way or the other.

I would sum it up as, one set of values and an emotional tug are driving the expansion of a plant whose effects are unpredictable for others, but possibly will be negative.  So, what’s the choice? Until the majority of us have a more deeply engrained awareness of the ecology of North America, it may be that our best hope is awareness of this simple fact:  each individual, acting out of self interest or a sense of duty, with their own understanding of the situation, changes the world.  Each of us has that power, whether we feel it or not.  And because of that, don’t our actions require self-examination?  Don’t we owe it to our neighbors and children to pause and ask, what am I doing now that is changing the world in unexpected ways which may cause regret later on.  Those small decision—so tyrannical in their effect, so tyrannical in their demands on our wisdom—are the big ones, believe it or not. – Kim

Gray catbird with rusty rump–are those raspberries he’s holding? Photo Wolfgang Wander 2005.

April 21, 2016.  Our resident superstar, Prince, died this morning about thirty miles west of here, and I am pondering how decisions by each of us, individually, affect the big, beautiful, blue-green world.  His particular genius required he stay out of the common limelight, out of pop magazines, and in a purple world of his own creation—all the better to work his particular brand of magic.  Thinking of his enclave in Paisley Park reminded me of a lilac thicket at the main entry to the university’s St. Paul campus, a spot I passed daily walking to classes over a decade ago.  One May a gray catbird took up residence and stayed the summer.  Hundreds of cars and buses, thousands of students and college workers, passed there every day—and the catbird, sitting in the catbird seat deep in the lilacs, sang on.  If you’ve not heard a catbird, it makes an upward-downward ree-ayr, like a mewling cat, but the best thing it does is not repeat the same thing twice.  It takes bits of other bird songs and noises from wherever, adds odd notes here and there, and keeps you pretty engaged listening to it.  What a memory a catbird must have to produce that variety of sound.  It’s in a group called the Mimidae, or the mimics, which includes mockingbird and brown thrasher (the bird of a thousand songs).  The catbird is not all gray—there’s a rusty colored patch on its rump and males have a slightly dark cap.  Here’s a recording of a catbird I made on the Gateway Trail–biking with William.  (A song sparrow also occasionally pipes up.)

The catbird symphony, a regular part of my day, was not to last.  Some time later that summer the grounds crew was given the all clear to clear all the lilacs and replace them with a Big Ten-looking planting of showy flowers and scattered low shrubs.  Not surprisingly, no catbird after the change.  Nor one the next year, or the next.  That particular arrangement of lilacs and trees suited the catbird just fine, but the make-over didn’t.  In my wanderings about campus, I heard no other catbird—apparently that was the one place thereabouts where a catbird wanted to live.

The wish to alter one’s surroundings is universal–for an artist, it is to keep creativity flowing, and for ordinary folk it is to make life a little better.  My neighbors, for instance, have in the last year created a new world all around me—each making changes in his or her own yard to fit a personal vision.  One neighbor replaced tangled shrubs with small, neatly-arranged plants.  Another also removed the shrubs, including a rabbit-inhabited raspberry patch.  On three lots behind and nearby, large trees were cut to let more sun shine on the lawn, or because the trees were going to die anyway, someday.  I’ve not lifted a finger, yet the world around me has changed in ways I’d rather it hadn’t.

In the aftermath of my neighbors’ uncoordinated and entirely reasonable modifications, the tree canopy hereabouts has been lessened by a quarter.  Shrub cover—the big missing ingredient in urban ecosystems—has also shrunk.  Having studied bird responses to vegetation changes, I knew this would shake things up, as far as birds go.  To compensate, my wife and I went on a shrub-buying binge.  Most made it through the first winter, but they are small, despite their big price tag.  It will be a while before what was lost will be restored.

Each person making decisions until the entire world is changed.  That is how it is, and how it always has been at some level—though city planning and zoning regulations do help decisions get made according to agreed-on standards.  We’ve learned over time to prevent serious land use conflicts and have, through elected representatives, created a system of development rules mostly to protect the quality of people’s lives and their livelihoods.  What remains a distant mountain to climb is for everybody to have a basic understanding of ecology and to know the effect of their individual decisions on the environment.  That’s not much different than wanting everybody to know how American democracy works, or how to keep oneself healthy.  How to balance a checkbook, drive a car safely, and all the other routines of western civilization—it would be nice if ecology were part of that mix.  My neighbors might have known that to keep a catbird, house wren, or other wilder thing than house sparrow and robin, you need a little habitat on a few adjacent lots.  Instead, what my neighbors have accomplished, sensibly and with good intentions, may play out this spring unhappily for me.

Well…although bird activity seems diminished in my yard, the annual sapsucker pilgrimage still took place and the red pine was duly visited.  In a week or two we’ll see the first wave of warblers and other migrants from South and Central America.  Among them, I hope, will be a Swainson’s thrush.  I’ve heard one every year for over a dozen years.  He spends a few days in the back yard, running from shrub to shrub, perching momentarily on a low rock, and enchanting me with his double-noted, slurring song—a sound heard here for one week each year, because the rest of the time he lives south of the Gulf of Mexico or in the north woods.  Prince was lucky—he sat in his own catbird seat, surrounded by acres and acres of his envisioned world, buffered against the small decisions of his neighbors.  All his neighbors, making their isolated decisions, changing everything. – Kim

A Japanese cherry tree demonstrating life’s fleeting nature beside Lake Winona. J. Armstrong

April 17, 2016.  This is a photo of a cherry tree in bloom, under the river bluffs of my hometown, Winona, Minnesota. The sight of blossoming cherry trees is not unusual in spring, but this tree is: it is a gift from Japan. In 2012, Winona was one of 36 cities across America chosen by Japan’s Consulate General to receive a group of Sargent cherry trees.  This was in commemoration of Tokyo’s gift of 3,000 trees to Washington D.C. in 1912. Those cherry trees and their annual blossoming became such a fixture of Washington life that when it was proposed that many of them be cut down to make room for the Jefferson Memorial, a group of women actually chained themselves to the trees to protect them.

In celebration of the centennial of that original gift, representatives from our sister city of Misato came to Winona and we held a dedication ceremony, during which the trees were presented and my daughter and a friend sang a Japanese song, “Sakura,” which describes the custom of viewing cherry blossoms in spring. Many of the Japanese delegation sang along–the song is famous because for hundreds of years the Japanese have gone out in the spring to picnic under the falling blossoms and to meditate on life’s beauty and brevity—a custom they call hanami. The combination of both beauty and fleetingness is central to the Japanese idea of nature. The feeling it elicits is called mane no aware, which is defined as a consciousness of the transience of things and the resulting gentle sadness at their passing—as well as a deeper wistful recognition that this is the primary truth about life itself.

As a result of this custom of philosophical meditation, cherry trees have been planted everywhere in Japan—in spring, pink clouds of blossoms are ubiquitous, both on wild mountainous hillsides and on urban boulevards. It is an interesting example of the intimate connection between nature and culture. And now these same cherry trees have come to colonize Winona, though I wonder how many pragmatic and optimistic Americans realize the underlying melancholy of their symbolism. I keep careful watch over these trees in the spring, and each year I have photographed their blooming and posted it on Facebook so our Japanese friends in our sister city can see the trees performing their delicate Japanese ritual of blooming and fading. Every year I have vowed to picnic under their blossoms and write a Haiku. So far I have always been too busy—a bad American habit. – Jim

Blanding’s turtle showing the colors in southern Ontario. Photo Joe Crowley

March 19, 2016.  Our remarkable, ever-surprising country has a case of Berniemania and Trumpitis, with a low-grade Cruz-Hillary fever.  Driving the highway a few weeks back, pondering all this, I passed a place where, over a decade ago, I’d saved a turtle’s life and then wrote a poem about it….

Race with turtle

A quarter mile ahead on the Interstate
a brown hump sits on the dashed line
at the center of the southbound lanes.
Somewhere up around White Bear Lake
a female Blanding’s turtle takes a chance.

Insane is the word that comes to mind,
or biological imperative,
which is much the same thing—consider
the urgent mantis losing his head over
making copies of himself with her,
his undoing.  An impulse large as time
colliding with the freight train of us.

Lucky for turtle it’s me at eighty-miles an hour,
a sentimental goop who wants to keep
a few other species in the neighborhood
for selfish reasons—to entertain me,
to maybe replace me if the vast consuming
enterprise of humanity doesn’t work out,
and—what the hell—even to let God
amuse himself by populating the planet
with oddball freaks of nature such as
this turtle here, with its banana yellow throat,
long life, and silly annual pilgrimage of hope.

Ten seconds later I’m running back to her
against the vortex of semis and all
manner of fast cars.  Unbelievably she stays still
head stretched to the limit, watching the traffic.
In a break I dash and grab her.  Her head
tucks into the turtleneck—I use
it in its exact sense—and I carry her
across three lanes to where she was going.
Picture it, a madman in an egg race
holding what seems a gray bowler hat
legging it to safety, in love with a turtle.

Now on that drive a few weeks back, the place I’d saved the turtle was under construction.  A complete re-do of the interchange, just one in a series of several multi-year upgrades to the major highways in the metro intended to shave time off the average forty-five minute commute hereabouts.  It was also, I am sure, a missed opportunity to stem the attrition of uncommon species from the region’s roster of wildlife.  You have your starlings, house sparrows, robins, deer, raccoons, and other abundant animals who’ve adapted quite nicely to people—and then you’ve got your Blanding’s turtle and their like.  I happened to have examined every historical record of this species in the metro for a project some years back and learned that the dates of last record for this species correlated with the presence of major highways.  In areas of several to dozens of square miles ringed by major highways, nobody has reported this species in a couple decades or more.  In contrast, similarly large places at the edges of the metro have a record of Blanding’s turtle up to the recent past.  Why is this?  One explanation is that the females, who walk up to a mile from their wetlands to sandy, sunny places to lay eggs, are killed on roads.  Since this species can live possibly for a hundred years, you might still find males, but if the fertile females are gone, the population eventually will wink out.  Raccoons pillaging eggs are another reason, but if females are common enough, some nests go undiscovered.

Inside the main highways in yellow, records of Blanding’s turtle sightings are getting old.

The place where I met a Blanding’s turtle on the Interstate. White outlines her wetland territory and the blue line was her path across the highway.

That’s what the turtle was doing—coming or going from laying eggs—when I passed her going fast on a day in June, the month egg-laying usually happens.  I’ve moved other turtles in June—including another Blanding’s at my office in Spring Lake Township.  Underpasses and overpasses have been built to help wildlife cross highways, but not often.  There are some marvelous ones in Europe and a few in western North America (http://arc-solutions.org/new-solutions).  But for the most part, wildlife-safe crossings are too expensive—they might add one percent to the cost of a highway project, and that is too much in the minds of most transportation planners and elected officials.  Why that point of view?  Why that perspective when a quarter to a third of all species in the Midwest exist in small or steadily-shrinking populations?  You have to chalk it up to a) not knowing, b) not understanding, c) not being careful enough, or d) not valuing.  Possibly a bit of all these.  Yes, every highway project runs the regulatory gauntlet to discover the obvious environmental problems.  There are often biologists involved offering their opinion on the effects of projects.  Too often, though, the analysis is a narrow one for any number of reasons.  As a result, the need for a wildlife crossing to aid a Blanding’s turtle or bull snake or another uncommon, declining species that crosses roads does not rise to the top of concerns.

Near Banff, Alberta, wildlife safely cross over the Trans-Canada Highway. Photo WikiPedant 2014

What might have happened to give a turtle crossing the road a better chance of making it? First, I could have reported the turtle to the state natural heritage program.  That record would have shown up in an environmental review for the highway project. Second, somebody parsing the information for the environmental review would have had to understand the situation facing Blanding’s turtles in the metro—highway encirclement and slow attrition.  I doubt people understand this—my report is buried in somebody’s files at the natural resources department.  Then there’s the thoroughness of the review—a professional did the very best job of looking at environmental issues, but perhaps wasn’t able to spend enough time delving into all the issues because…time is money and schedules are tight.  Lastly, what is the need of one Blanding’s turtle against the needs of hundreds of thousands of people speeding down the Interstate?  Pretty puny by comparison.

So there you have it…a recipe for the local extinction of a Blanding’s turtle population.  Does it matter in the big picture?  Aren’t there Blanding’s turtles elsewhere, away from major highways?  There are…and we could always drive (on a major highway) to those places and see them, or while waiting in traffic revel for a moment in the continued existence of Blanding’s turtles somewhere, though not here.  That is something, at least.  I would hope, though, that we could do better.  If the highway department had a policy, say, that at likely places where wildlife cross major highways, accommodations should be made.  Maybe I’ll be surprised when the interchange project is done—maybe there will be a wildlife crossing!  – Kim

This Blanding’s turtle crossed Hwy 8 in her annual pilgrimage to a nesting place. Photo K Chapman, June 30 2004

March 1, 2016.  Last month Elizabeth and I drove several hours in the general direction of the North Pole, walked across a frozen lake on snowshoes, and settled in for a few days of isolation and immersion in the cold and white of a Minnesota winter.  We’d come to our friends’ cabin, trying to outrun the presidential election trauma and leaving work and care behind for a while.  A mere year earlier one of the rewards of the trek would have been a sense of immense isolation—only a telephone line and radio waves connected us to the larger world.  No TV, no Internet, no road.  Really—a place to unwind and escape the sense that you were missing something by not tuning in to the max.

Escape on a pair of snowshoes.
Photo K Chapman

Well…this time, not so much isolation, for the intrepid cable guys had in the previous months successfully penetrated the wilderness with a cable that sutured us to the world.  With wireless now available in the cabin, laptops and phones were out and active.  I tried to resist, but gave in to my personal failing—looking crap up.  Which I did, though not relentlessly, as I might have back home.

All this is to say, when Elizabeth and I made our snowshoe way out and about over the next couple of days, it was marvelous to discover who our neighbors were.  By that I mean, the nighttime wanderers who left tracks in the snow for us to find the next day.  Wolf, moose, fisher, marten, flying squirrel, red squirrel, otter, snowshoe hare, and possibly least weasel (which we’d seen before—they dive in and out of snow banks, leaving round entry holes).

What else but an otter? Photo K Chapman

Maddy the dog stands in tracks made by one of two wolves the night before. She is alert–good dog! Photo K. Chapman

How did these tracks begin in the middle of nowhere? Flying squirrel dropped in–notice the tail smudge on the left. Photo K. Chapman

All that in a night’s work, while we slept, or, just before lights out, checked our email, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts–and looked up crap.  Gotta be aware of all that’s happening in the world, right?  I am happy, though, that the natural world gets along just fine without the trappings of a hyper-connected civilization. – Kim

Keeping people safe on icy roads with just a pinch of salt.
Photo Michael Pereckas 2006.

February 6, 2016.  We’re all mostly correct in our collective outrage that Flint’s water supply was contaminated with lead after switching from using Detroit’s water system to drawing from the Flint River.  As we now know, that river water corroded the lead pipes leading to taps in people’s homes, pushing lead levels in the blood of some children dangerously high.  Chloride, the corrosive element in the Flint River, strips lead molecules from the walls of lead pipes and contaminates the water flowing through them.

What’s so interesting here is the cause of the Flint River’s corrosive effect on lead pipes.  That cause—or some of it—originates in the desire to have dry roads in winter.  Since the 1960s we have spent billions of dollars spreading salt with chloride on our nation’s highways to melt snow and ice and prevent crashes, injuries and deaths.  Since 1990 road salting across the country has doubled, reaching about 135 pounds per person per year.  The Flint River’s salt concentrations, together with its naturally high salt levels, at one point increased chloride in Flint’s drinking water to eight times higher than Detroit’s, which is drawn from the fairly clean-running Detroit River and nearly pristine Lake Huron.

The Flint River, Michigan, under a floodwall lock and key in downtown.
Photo US Army Corps of Engineers 1979.

Forewarned of the risk of switching to local river water, Flint officials should have upgraded the treatment of drinking water and reduced the chloride—but they didn’t and the rest is unfolding history that may end up as a case study in an environmental science textbook some day.

But isn’t it strange that, to make people safe on the highway other people are made unsafe?  As always in human affairs, the unintended consequences of our actions cannot be imagined.

There’s another turn here.  Without knowing it, the people who decided to switch Flint’s water source were in large part simply assessing risk using a standard that was worked out years before by scientists and “stakeholders”— people who would be affected by a regulatory outcome.  The US Environmental Protection Agency and its local implementer, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, employed a regulatory standard for assessing lead in drinking water of 15 parts per billion.  (That is the level at which somebody should take action to get the lead out—but the actual target for lead in drinking water is zero.)  If 90 percent of the households in Flint at the greatest risk of lead contamination fell below this level, all was well.  One step in the assessment process, then, is to ignore crazily high readings, such as discovered at several households by Virginia Tech scientists.  In other words, those readings can be ignored because they represent a small risk to society as a whole…or so the logic went.

As they say, go tell that to the judge.  We can only assume that, despite the science and rigor behind developing a standard for lead in drinking water, a family whose lead concentration is a high outlier in the data will not be pleased, with legal action likely to follow.  In theoretical economic terms, the risk that a few families would be exposed to lead levels sufficient to affect their children’s mental development had been weighed against the lives saved and repair bills avoided for winter crashes on the highways, including those involving the working poor who cannot afford medical or car repair bills.  (An actual cost-befit analysis of car crashes versus developmentally disabled children has probably not been done, but it is implicit in the standard for lead in drinking water regardless.)  This cost and benefit analysis, this process of trading off costs to one group against costs to another is pretty standard practice in managing environmental risk.  It emerges naturally from an economic mindset we all participate in—most risks in some fashion being translated into cash value so as to fairly spread costs around society and keep things humming along nicely.  While this works well in theory, and increases the efficiency of our economic engine, it requires that some individuals be sacrificed.  So long as they don’t know they are making a sacrifice, they will express no outrage at bearing the cost for the rest of society.  When they do find out, though…look out. – Kim

January 9, 2016.  One day this week I spent twenty minutes watching an immature red-tailed hawk trying to catch squirrels in my back yard.  I first noticed him out my dining room window—if you have never seen a red-tail, they are quite impressive:  they have a 40 inch wingspan and weigh up to a pound and a half (which is a lot for a bird).  He flew across my snowy yard and sat on a fence post near where I store my canoe.  He seemed to be staring obsessively at the ground.  At first I couldn’t figure out what he was doing—then I caught a glimpse of a twitching tail:  a young gray squirrel was at the base of the post, protected from the hawk by the gunwale of the canoe.  “Poor squirrel!” I thought.  The hawk then flew up to a branch of the old walnut tree that dominates our back yard. From the window I took a closer look and saw another young squirrel confronting the hawk, quivering with perhaps anger or fear (or both).  The little squirrel dashed back and forth, edging to within a foot of the hawk, who regarded the squirrel with a cold, predatory stare.  To see the gyrating squirrel, the hawk had to turn his head completely around and almost upside-down, a rather comical look for a predator.  I reacted again with fear for the squirrel.  I suspected, since he was a young squirrel, he didn’t know the danger he was in.

Gray squirrel meets red-tailed hawk in a treetop stare-down.
Photo by Bob Arihood 2006.

Suddenly I noticed there were many squirrels, on various limbs, all chattering angrily, all very exposed on the tree.  Were they crazy?  Then I realized the truth:  the hawk is huge, like a B-52 bomber.  He is built for dropping from high in the sky onto prey in open fields.  He may be strong but he’s not quick or maneuverable enough to nab these squirrels inside the tree canopy, and they knew it—they were taunting him.   A squirrel then climbed up to sit on a fence post, twitching his tail like a matador’s cape.  Enticed, the hawk flew at him but the squirrel skittered nimbly down just ahead of the talons.  The hawk landed on the fencepost and ruffled his wings impatiently.  Then he flew back to his tree limb as a trio of squirrels scolded him—or was that mocking?  Perched in the tree, the hawk was harmless. One squirrel circled the trunk around and around, stopping from time to time almost within reach of those wicked talons, yet the hawk could do nothing except stare. Eventually he flew—slowly and majestically—and perched on the chimney of the old mansion two houses away, turning his back to us all.

I came away with new respect for the squirrels’ intelligence and impudence—they were telling the hawk, “Hey, you’re in our neighborhood now, buddy, and it takes more than brute force to catch a squirrel.”  As long as they were in their arboreal niche, they were superbly adapted to escape death from the skies. – Jim

November 14, 2015.  Watching the horror unfold in Paris yesterday, reminded of the many horrors visited on the world regularly, I can’t help but feel that writing about a bird is a trivial, perhaps even disrespectful thing to do.  But that is what I intend to do now.  I was at McCormick Place last weekend and, surrounded by a few thousand fellow conference attendees, I was paid a visit–or rather, McCormick Place was visited by an unusual bird weighing less than an ounce.  I was standing in the cavernous lobby near the walkway to the hotel and other buildings west of the Lakeside Center, under the massive, black steel overhang that characterizes this 1971 building, and out of the corner of my eye I saw something move.

McCormick Place & Lakeshore Drive–a tough neighborhood for a bird.
Photo by Pamela Kufahl 2014.

Something fluttered up against the glass then dropped out of sight and onto the horizontal beam above the door.  I had glimpsed a curved bill on a brownish bird and said to myself, What are you doing here?  On one side of the creature, a massive steel and glass structure with a vast overhanging roofline, and on the other, Lakeshore Drive with thousands of cars a day passing by.  Not the best place for a migrating bird.  It was late for migrants–but this species just moves a little north and south in spring and fall, and it is one of the first and last of the migrants to come through, so it wasn’t a disaster to be late.  Of course it prefers to move through verdant terrain, but birds in migration travel through inhospitable lands and over water if it is necessary to get where they need to go.  For this bird, though, it might have become a disaster if it got stuck in the corner where the walkway over Lakeshore Drive meets the walls and overhang of the building.  Since I didn’t know what the outcome would be, I decided to do something about it.

I propped open the door to the outside with my briefcase and, standing on the door hinge, reached for where I thought the bird was.  It flew and landed on the ground in the corner of the glass wall and walkway.  I approached slowly, bending low, and with a slow movement of my hand from behind, managed to catch it and clap my other hand over it to form a hollow.  It piped several times, then went quiet in the dark of my cupped hands.  I stepped inside and asked a nearby woman to slip my briefcase strap over my head–she was puzzled that I didn’t do it myself and must have wondered why I was praying.  No matter.  I then walked the few hundred feet across the crowded lobby to the opposite side of the building where the big lake was, praying all the way, or so it must have seemed to people who noticed me.

Outside, near the lake, I stopped by a copse of crabapples and opened my hands near the base of one of them.  The bird didn’t move.  I waited.  It opened its eyes briefly, then closed them again.  Stressed out, I thought.  I nudged it with a finger and it flicked toward the tree and landed.  This bird, a brown creeper, walks in a spiral up the trunks of trees (passing nuthatches who walk down).  He walked up the trunk a bit, then stopped.  After admiring it for a while, I took this picture.

Brown creeper resting near Lake Michigan after some unsettling events, Nov. 7 2015. Photo Kim Chapman.

Then back to the conference I went, wondering what would become of the bird.  I returned a couple hours later–the brown creeper was gone.  Ironically, the area just south of McCormick Place–a couple hundred feet from where I first saw the bird–that area is a “bird sanctuary.”  Maybe that’s where he went.

This was a small act of kindness.  It required only that I noticed something, projected my human compassion onto another creature, and acted.  Many would find this silly or strange to expend energy on such a thing.  Against these charges, I take solace in this:  if I have the capacity to consistently notice and care for the little things in life, does it not follow that I am training myself also to notice and take care of the bigger things in life–at least those things I am able to take care of?  I can’t write this without thinking of Pope Francis’s similar thoughts in his letter, On Care for our Common Home.  It is through small acts of generosity and kindness that a person’s character is proven; and the small or large acts of hatred and violence against others suggest lack of experience with taking care of the small things.

On the other hand, didn’t the villain Dr. No have a pet cat always on his lap? And didn’t Hitler love children and dogs?  For all we know, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the monster at the helm of Daesh who unleashed the dogs of war in Paris, has a fondness for small birds.  I doubt it…but you never know.  On the other hand, I know that if I hadn’t helped the brown creeper at McCormick Place, I would have recalled it with regret even years hence.  It was another of those moments that define you.  Faced with that, no matter how trivial the act, you must decide and act, or live forever with the knowledge of a small but telling failure. – Kim