Author Archives: David George Haskell

Ugly Ducklings, Lent, French translations and counting birds

Some news about Cudzoo Farm and The Forest Unseen:

Sarah has opened a new page on her soap website for sales and specials. These special prices on organic goat-milk soaps will be offered only intermittently, so I encourage you to investigate them now. Currently, she has a Five-for-four Special and an Ugly Duckling Assortment. Great soaps, fabulous prices: from our hard-working herd of goat princesses.

From soaps to books. The Times (London) has published a list of recommended reading for Lent. I was surprised and delighted that Jane Shaw, Dean of Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, chose The Forest Unseen. She writes that the book “is not a religious book, but [Haskell’s] careful observation of a one-square-metre patch of Tennessee forest over a year teaches us something vital about training our attention on the world around us, to see what we usually miss. That sense of attention and focus is central to all Lenten practices.” Is there a parallel between the study of natural history and the Lenten disciplines? This is an interesting idea. Within their own traditions they are both seen as practices that help us to pay attention to what matters: snails on one hand, the divine on the other (and a few of us think that some snails are themselves simply divine). Both practices are also often misunderstood as dour and outdated (Lent? Names of birds? How Victorian…), yet they have within them the potential for unrivaled connection to the world beyond and within ourselves (if such worlds exist, of course…). I’m intrigued by this Lenten connection and honored to have The Forest Unseen highlighted as helpful to those engaged in meditative practices.

I’ve also received some other good news about the book. A French translation will shortly be underway, joining ongoing translations into Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. I grew up in France and I’m especially happy that the book will be available to French readers. Schools in France used to (and maybe still do) celebrate the work of Jean-Henri Fabre, a close observer of the ecology of his home and prolific author. So I hope that my approach might fall on some ready ears, even if mine is a vastly more modest contribution (in many ways) than that of Fabre.

Last, readers of Ramble might be interested to know that this is the weekend of the Great Backyard Bird Count. From Feb 15-18 we’re all encouraged to submit checklists of the birds that we see in our neighborhoods. Last year the count collected over one hundred thousand checklists (!) comprising 17.4 million individual bird observations: a rich source of data on the populations of North American birds. This year the project has gone global and is connected to ebird.org, an amazing site that “crowd-sources” data (hundreds of millions of observations to date) about birds. So our bird sightings are now both rewarding for us as individuals and they can contribute to a better understanding of global ecological patterns. I encourage you to participate. The count is set up for non-specialists including beginning birders, so do not feel that you have to be an “expert” in order to join the project.

Eagles

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My Ornithology class had some great views of bald eagles this week near Woods Reservoir.

Adult bald eagle. Photo taken by Jamie Sue Wilson.

In addition to two adults, we saw a couple of young eagles circling overhead.

Immature bald eagle. Photo by Jamie Sue Wilson.

Bald eagles take four years to reach full adult plumage. The individual shown above is likely a second or third year bird. For two great overviews (and some fabulous photos) of the maturation sequence of eagle plumage, see Ron Dudley and Mia McPherson’s pages.

The two adults were nesting: one sat in the nest and one stood close by in the tree. Until recently, such a sight would have been very rare in Tennessee. In 1990, only sixteen nests were known in the whole state. Now, there are at least one hundred and seventy five nesting pairs of eagles in Tennessee.

The population increase in Tennessee is part of a nationwide trend. After decades of decline caused by shootings and poisonings (encouraged by bounties), followed by the impacts of DDT, bald eagle populations have edged higher year-by-year since the 1970s. In 2007 the species was removed from the federal list of threatened and endangered species, although it (and its cousin, the golden eagle) remain protected by other laws.

Bald eagle nests are huge: brush piles crammed into the crowns of high trees. Nest-building can take up to three months, although when pressed the birds can slap something together in a few days. Most clutches have just two eggs (a few have one or three). Both male and female incubate the eggs, although the female does most of this work. Between them, the parents keep the eggs covered by a warm body for 98% of the time. Eagles are relatively heavy and they have sharp claws, so the parents take extreme care in the nest, walking around the eggs with clenched feet.

The incubation period lasts 35 days; the young leave the nest two to three months after hatching. These young birds stay with the parents for a variable period, from a couple of weeks to several months, then set off on an extended period of wandering. During this unsettled stage they have no fixed territory but move around, presumably seeking food and, later, mates and a good place to nest. The immature birds at Woods Reservoir are likely in this wandering stage.

The return of nesting eagles to the U. S. has intersected with the internet age to produce a new phenomenon: the eagle cam. You can now follow the adventures of nesting eagles from your computer, an activity that is usually considerably more compelling than working through your email inbox. So, be warned, there is a reason why some of these websites get millions of viewers… Here is one in Florida with two eaglets (hatched back in early January).

Lichen meadow

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In a low winter sun: Cladonia lichens growing around a sandstone outcrop on the Cumberland Plateau, Sewanee, TN. Few plants can survive the thin soil and extreme summer heat near these outcrops. Masters of difficult conditions, lichens move in.

Further north, this genus of lichen blankets parts of the tundra (and feeds caribou). The tundra is another place that is too challenging for most plants, as are mountain tops, rocky coasts, bare cliffs — all places that lichens spread their slow-growing algal-fungal fingers. Another winning mutualism.

Shelf fungus as a rain shelter for woodpeckers?

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Older black locust trees in our region are often rotten on the inside. Fungi worm through the tree trunks, digesting their cores. When these fungi are mature enough to reproduce, they sends filaments (hyphae) to break through the tree bark. The exposed hyphae grow into “shelves” on the trees’ trunks. These shelves are comprised of the remains of thick-walled dead hyphae, intermingled with thin-walled living strands. The “wooden” feel of the shelves comes from the walls of the dead cells; the spores are made by living hyphae. “Wooden” is not quite accurate: fungi cell walls are strengthened not with the stuff of wood, cellulose, but with chitin, a molecule that also finds use in the exoskeletons of insects. The shelves are tough enough to persist for many years.

Rotten trees provide habitat for many animals. Much of this utility is mediated through the work of woodpeckers. In excavating a fresh nesting hole each year, woodpeckers leave a trail of convenient roosting and nesting sites for other species, most obviously many bird species (titmice, chickadees, great-crested flycatchers, wood ducks, owls, etc), some mammals (flying squirrels), and bees (feral honey bees love big hollow trees). Most woodpeckers will only attack trees that are partly rotten, so it is the combination of bird and fungus that produces this real estate boon in the forest.

Woodpeckers and fungi may also have more short-lived associations. My friend Joseph Bordley pointed out to me that the tree bark under shelf fungi is often scratched up. This seems to be particularly true for shelves of Phellinus robiniae on locust trees. I found one such example this weekend on the trail to Bridal Veils falls near Sewanee. As the photos below demonstrate, the distressed bark sits directly below the shelf. Are woodpeckers using shelves as shelters in the rain? Despite keeping my eye on locust trees for many years now, I’ve yet to see any birds under shelves in rain or shine. I’d be interested to hear whether anyone has any other relevant observations. Might animals be gnawing the wood to slurp mushroom spores? Is there some other reason for the mysterious scratchings?

The Newtownian Apple, the Darwinian Galapagos, and the Archimedes’ Bath of Geology.

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The city of Edinburgh is overlooked by the cooled remnants of ancient volcanoes. The most famous of these fiery landmarks is Arthur’s Seat, the highest point in the city and a popular place from which take in the view (and the wind) after a vigorous climb. The dome of Arthur’s Seat was formed from the inner “pipe” of a volcano, the central conduit through which molten rock rose. The rest of the volcano has, over about three hundred and fifty million years, eroded away.

Arthur's Seat, viewed from one of many well-worn access trails. Who "Arthur" was is unclear.

Arthur’s Seat, viewed from one of many well-worn access trails. The origin of the name, including the identify of “Arthur,” is unknown.

My guides: Photographic evidence that locals and their half-tamed wolves sometimes join visiting American tourists at the peak.

The Grindley mountain guides, Julia, Kathy, and Hannah: Photographic evidence that locals and their half-tamed Scottish wolves sometimes join visiting tourists at the peak.

Next to Arthur’s Seat, facing Edinburgh castle (itself perched on volcanic rock, one of the vents from Arthur), an escarpment curves around, presenting an impressive cliff line to the city. These are the Salisbury Crags: cliffs that contain some of the most famous rocks in the world.

Salisbury Crags, viewed from the southeast.

It was on the Salisbury Crags that James Hutton, the Scot whose work founded the modern science of geology, saw evidence to refute the “Neptunian” view that rocks had been recently deposited as sediments in a catastrophic flood. Hutton’s views inspired Charles Lyell who in turn strongly influenced Darwin. So the Salisbury Crags are also foundation stones for modern biology.

In the crags, Hutton saw flows of magma crunching into sedimentary rock (magma is molten rock; lava is the above-ground manifestation of magma). The sedimentary rocks were formed in an ocean, but the magma was not; it came from a volcano then flowed into (and distorted) the other rocks. Here, then, was evidence that the world’s geology could not be explained by catastrophist, diluvian processes. Instead, these rocks (and unconformities from elsewhere in Scotland) showed Hutton that the world was very old and that ongoing interaction between processes like vulcanism, sedimentation, and erosion could explain how the physical features of the world came to be.

In Theory of the Earth (1795) Hutton writes (with my explanatory additions in square brackets):

the whin-stone [rock formed from magma/lava] is interjected in form of strata, having various degrees of regularity, and being of different thickness. On the south side of Edinburgh, I have seen, in little more than the space of a mile from east to west, nine or ten masses of whin-stone interjected among the [sedimentary] strata. These masses of whin-stone are from three or four to an hundred feet thick, running parallel in planes inclined to the horizon, and forming with it an angle of about twenty or thirty degrees, as may be seen at all times in the hill of Salisbury Craggs.

…these masses, which have flowed by means of heat among the strata of the globe…[are] subterraneous lavas, as they may be termed.

This view is confirmed by present-day geologists. The crags are a sill (a sheet of igneous rock intruded between sedimentary layers) that formed when magma flowed out into the oceans, pushing into sedimentary layers.

For good measure, here is the most famous passage from this book. Hutton emphasizes a uniformitarian worldview: nature operates according to a system of rules and these rules are consistent across time and space. He makes an analogy to the law-like motion of the planets (as would Darwin, many decades later, in the concluding paragraphs of The Origin) and ascribes the operation of the physical world to these natural laws, not to higher causes. We now know that his famous “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end” is not true, at least as far as the Earth is concerned. But the rest of his vision still stands.

We have now got to the end of our reasoning; we have no data further to conclude immediately from that which actually is: But we have got enough; we have the satisfaction to find, that in nature there is wisdom, system, and consistency. For having, in the natural history of this earth, seen a succession of worlds, we may from this conclude that there is a system in nature; in like manner as, from seeing revolutions of the planets, it is concluded, that there is a system by which they are intended to continue those revolutions. But if the succession of worlds is established in the system of nature, it is in vain to look for any thing higher in the origin of the earth. The result, therefore, of this physical inquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an end.

Dolerite (cooled lava flow) on top. Sedimentary rock below.

Hutton’s famous rocks. Dolerite (cooled lava flow) on top. Slab of pushed up sedimentary rock below.

I'm pointing to the famous point of contact between the two rock types. Ably assisted by Rocky (yes, a geological dog) and Kathy.

I’m pointing to the point of contact between the two rock types. I’m ably assisted by Rocky (a geological dog) and Kathy who sports her new snow leopard headgear.

Edinburgh’s growth and the industrial revolution created a market for the crags’ cooled magma, dolerite. The hard rock was used for paving streets, including some as far away as London. Quarrying activities on the crags removed large quantities of rock, but Hutton convinced the operators to leave one small rock with a particularly good example of a hematite seam (formed by hydrothermal venting into the rock). So Hutton not only founded modern geology, but enacted the first conservation program for significant geological formations. The rock stands to this day.

Some of Edinburgh's streets are lined and paved with dolerite to this day. This example (inscribed outside the Scottish Parliament) may be the world's only example of a gutter with mineralogical engraving.

Some of Edinburgh’s streets are lined and paved with dolerite. This example (outside the Scottish Parliament) may be the world’s only example of a street gutter with mineralogical engraving.

Hutton’s Rock, being closely observed by Edinburgh’s next generation. The rock marks the original front wall of the cliff. The quarry pushed this wall back to the location seen behind. Arthur’s Seat rises in the background.

Hematite seam running through the middle of Hutton’s Rock. It is worn smooth by the many tourists who clamber over the rock each day.

Remarkably, no signage notes (or protects) these treasures of our shared intellectual heritage. Tourists walk past ignorant of the fact that they are passing the Newtownian Apple, the Darwinian Galapagos, and the Archimedes’ Bath of Geology. Bouldering hands have chalked up nearby rock faces. Hammers have chipped at some exposed areas, including a portion of Hutton’s Rock. In hindsight, I feel bad for sitting on the famous rock, adding my little bit of buttock-polishing to the well-rubbed patina. The whole area is officially a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest, but this has not resulted in any on-site signage. Surely a place that tore apart a befuddled worldview and launched one or more new scientific disciplines deserves more than a “Beware” sign?

Danger — Enlightenment may strike and spread across Europe. It happened once; it could happen again. So think with care.

The crags also host some biological gems. Peregrine falcons patrol the cliff faces. Fulmars nest on precarious rock ledges: these are birds of the wild North Atlantic, yet here they are at the center of a major European city.

This peregrine flew past, sending pigeons swirling away.

Northern Fulmar, getting its nesting area ready for spring. The bird is lodged way up a cliff. Any mammal skilled enough to climb up there will be rewarded with a face-full of vomited fish oil. Welcome to Edinburgh, laddies and lassies. Fulmars are related to albatrosses, soaring birds of the wind-blown oceans.

The view from Hutton’s Rock: Edinburgh.

[Thanks to Chris Clinkscales for comments that clarified the magma/lava terminology in this post and for insights into geological mechanisms — see comments section below.]

Happy New Year from the Blue-spotted Mudskipper

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One of the many delights of working with Sewanee’s students is the biodiversity that they bring to my desktop. Sometimes, these species arrive on my actual desktop (snails, leaves, dead coots, live hummingbirds, and so forth…), but species also arrive via the glow of the screen. Here is one such arrival. I’m posting it for no other reason than the smile it brought to my face. Thank you, Dr. Bert Harris (Sewanee class of 2006 — a great vintage), for sharing this after a recent research trip to Sumatra. Without further ado, the blue-spotted mudskipper:

mudskippers

These air-breathing fish live in the mud flats of Asia. Males come out of their burrows to joust each other and to perform leaping dances for females. You can read more about their biology here and here.

What these websites will not explain is why they make me slightly nervous: I get the sense that they are ready to step in and take over when the current gaggle of tetrapods finally gives up the ghost. Give these mud-skippers three hundred million years and they’ll be strutting around with sapiens after their names. So this New Year, let’s look sharp and keep focused. We have competition.

Addendum: Thank you to Karen C. Rio for pointing me to this video of the mudskippers in action :)

Beech

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The woods are mostly bare and gray, but American beech still shines. The trees, especially the young trees, retain their coppery leaves until spring. Beech is the bright ornament of the dark woods, gold leaf flecking the gloom.

winter beech

The leaves are exposed to all of winter’s assaults and many of them abrade away until all that is left is translucent paper, etched with veins.

beechtrans

Other trees weather more slowly. Perhaps they grow in slightly more sheltered areas or have a genetic propensity for toughness. Their leaves keep the full, metaled color of autumn.

beech copper

Botanists are fond of classically derived English neologisms to describe their plants and the scientists have not let us down here. Unfallen leaves are “marcescent” (from the Latin, marcesco, wither).

But nomenclature is easier than explanation. Why might trees be marcescent? One idea is that a fuzz of leaves might protect nutritious buds from browsing animals like deer. Having watched goat lips strip shrubbery, I initially found this explanation unlikely. Browsers are adept at taking what they like and leaving the rest. Goats work around tiny thorns with ease. A few crisped leaves would be unlikely to keep deer away from beech buds. But my skepticism should be tempered by actual experiments. I know of no such experiment in North America, but a study of beech, hornbeam, and oak in Denmark did find that marcescence had a protective effect for beech and hornbeam, but not for oak. Apparently, the lower nutritional content of the leaves compared to buds and twigs acted as a deterrent for deer. The fact that marcescence is most common in young, short trees and on the lower branches of older trees is another piece of evidence in favor of this hypothesis.

On the other hand, retained leaves may act as cues for ovipositing insects in the spring. Or so it appears for gall-forming cynipid wasps infecting one species of California oak. This tree species lives in a very different environment, but galls are also common in Sewanee’s forests.

Another idea is that the retained leaves subtly change the micro-climate around buds. There is experimental evidence for such an effect in Andean plants with rosettes of marcesent leaves. It is possible (although no-one has checked, that I know of) that the ice and snow that gathers on marcescent leaves might act as a buffer, protecting buds from the more extreme winds and temperatures of winter.

I encourage you to seek out beech on your woodland walks. The species is found all over eastern North America. On the southern Cumberland Plateau it has an odd distribution. Puckette, Priestley, Kuers and Hay’s excellent 1996 guide to Sewanee’s trees states that beech is found “almost exclusively in the bottomlands and the neighboring lower slopes of coves.” I’d add that the species also likes (strangely) dry ridges and the streamside habitat of the eroding bluff. It may be that the semi-domesticated hogs that ran through these forests for decades have caused the species to have a more patchy distribution than it otherwise would have done. Beech nuts were favorite food for hogs and in the late 1800s and early 1900s it is likely that almost no young beeches germinated across large parts of the mountain. The species’ present-day distribution is therefore hard to interpret.

Look closely and you’ll see another interesting feature: needle-like buds. Unlike the rotund buds of oak, ash, and maple, beech has stilettos on the ends of its twigs. They are quite remarkably elongate.

beech bud beech bud2 I am not the first person to marvel at this species. I have heard that Native Americans in these parts viewed groves of beech as sacred places. One such grove, in Champion Cove, has come up repeatedly in conversations over the years. A destination, perhaps, for a pilgrimage next year.

Reindeer carved deep into our history

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How long have reindeer been dancing through our midwinter celebrations? Rudolph,_The_Red-Nosed_Reindeer_Marion_Books

Rudolph is seventy three years old. He came into being in 1939 for a Montgomery Ward Christmas publicity campaign. He joined his older cousins Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, and Blitzen, a little herd that celebrates its one hundred and ninetieth birthday this week. The eight “tiny rein-deer” originated with Clement Clarke Moore’s poem, A Visit from St. Nicholas, written in 1822. Moore apparently re-imagined some Norse myths, replacing Odin’s Wild Hunt with St. Nicholas’ sleigh-in-the-sky. To power the sleigh, Moore replaced Thor’s goats (called teeth-barer — the snarler — and teeth-grinder) with more kid-friendly reindeer. Moore may also have penned a slightly older poem, Old Santeclaus, that also places reindeer at the head of a sleigh (originally published in a pamphlet by William B. Gilley, but the poem’s authorship is apparently in doubt). Unlike A Visit from St. Nicholas, this poem languishes in obscurity, perhaps because it ends with the gift of a birch rod with which parents can enact God’s will by thrashing their kids. Montgomery Ward would have a hard time weaving that idea into their sales pitch. Christmas is a lot tamer these days: gone are the snarling goats and instruments of corporal punishment. thor-clipart

In sum, Rudolph is a bit of an upstart. But all these modern deer are babies compared to the venerable grandma and granddaddy of them all: the Swimming Reindeer of Montastruc. This pair of reindeer are thirteen thousand years old. They live in the British Museum, in a carefully climate-controlled case. The pair were carved by an artist in what is now France. The artist carved a mammoth tusk (!) to create a sculpture of two reindeer swimming across a river. swim

This carving is a work of stunning beauty, carrying the artist’s skill across a chasm of time. More, it reveals much about the world in which the artist lived. Reindeer (Rangifer tarandus, called caribou in North America) are animals of the tundra and northern forests. Their presence in France is a reminder that at the time of the carving the world was engulfed by the last ice age. Half of Britain was under ice, as was much of North America. The people of Europe were living in conditions similar to those of modern northern Scandinavia. Reindeer formed a substantial part of the diet of these early modern people, especially in the coldest years of the ice age. (The so-called Cro-Magnon/Paleo diet should, if carried out with rigor, be comprised of about 95% reindeer, with a little horse, cave bear, chamois, and mammoth thrown in for good measure. And don’t expect to live much beyond forty.)

I’m awed by the sculpture. For a more complete discussion of the artistic and archeological context, I recommend Robin McKie’s recent article in the Observer (reprinted in the Guardian). Here I’ll just note the artist’s attention to the particularities of the animals’ lives. This is the work of someone who understood their subject and was able to convey this understanding through sophisticated artistic technique. Natural history, science, and art have been close companions for a long, long time.

For a good view of the carving, use the British Museum’s online viewer and press the “zoom” buttons to magnify the image. Click the little square underneath these buttons to flip into “full screen” mode. You can see most of the details quite clearly and thus imagine the hands that conjured reindeer from a tusk so long ago.

Of all the various symbols and myths of the modern solstice celebration, reindeer may perhaps be the oldest. Humans were celebrating the return of Light with reindeer meat, hides, and carvings long before the agrarian revolution, let alone the origin of the Abrahamic religions. Clement Clarke Moore tapped something deep. Lighted reindeer on lawns and Rudolph songs are reminders of who we are: a species that has depended on ungulates for tens of thousands of years. These animals are carved into our psyche.

I know nothing about the midwinter traditions of cultures in places other than western Europe (transplanted to North America). Like most arctic animals, reindeer have a circumpolar distribution, so I’d predict that they appear in solstice stories in other northern temperate regions. If anyone know of any such stories (or their absence), I’d love to hear about them.

[Photo sources/credits: Rudolph, Thor, Swimming Reindeer.]

Fifty Shades of Grey: Woodland Edition

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Sitting in the woods with my class last week, I was struck by how grays had come to dominate. The light environment is transformed. Of course, a “fifty shades” wisecrack had to work its way into my impromptu lesson on the visual aesthetics of the forest. The witticism turned into a small project for my walks of the last week: pay attention and find these shades. So here they are, fifty photographs of variations on the theme.

Gray is the most egalitarian of hues. Indeed, its essence is that is not a single color. Instead, gray gives us a muted echo of all the light spectrum, a moody version of white. Contrast this with the bias of other pigments — reds, blues, yellows — that reflect just a tiny slice of the light available to them.

Gray is an unassuming mirror of the world and a quiet companion for its more assertive kin. It absorbs metaphors with ease, having combined light and dark: ash, silver, lead, pepper. A suitable tone, then, for winter reflections.

Happy Solstice, fellow ramblers.

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Cudzoo Farm soaps: free shipping through Monday.

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snapdragon

Snapdragon says: “Only one day left on free shipping for Cudzoo Farm goat milk soaps and soap gift boxes. Baaa!”