1953Sudbury Valley Trustees2013Celebrating 60 Years of Conservation, Collaboration and Community

The prospect of doing with less fossil fuel makes us writhe, like earthworms on hot asphalt. We really need some great ideas. Here's one I read online: trees that shade streets during the day and turn into street lamps at night. That's one of the improbable genetic engineering notions for the future of bioluminescence.

The experts in this field are insects. Alien, six-legged beasts whose blood isn't red; whose jaws move sideways. Some insects make honey, some make music, and some, when they want to find a girlfriend, light up their bellies.

If your daily travel includes Route 2 in Concord, you might recall a period of construction that took place a couple of years ago. After rush hour, huge lights illuminated the work site. Among the changes made to improve the highway was the addition of median barriers. Although they improve safety for cars, the barriers make the highway more hazardous for wild animals. Roads isolate natural communities, reducing the vigor of their gene pools and their ability to replenish themselves after catastrophes. And road kill has an impact on slow-reproducing species such as turtles.

I suppose most adults have mixed feelings about snow. Who doesn’t enjoy the quiet as it falls, or relish the transformation of familiar landscapes to purest white? But snow gets in our way, impedes travel, and it often becomes ice, threatening unpleasant surprises for those of us afflicted by gravity.

For my first Boy Scout camp out I was equipped with a down sleeping bag left over from World War II. That long wheezy night led grownups to conclude I was allergic to feathers—but for me the difficult breathing was just part of the overall strangeness of sleeping on hard ground among kids I didn’t know.

At dawn I heard one of my new companions shuffle between the old-fashioned pup tents, pulling up the pegs, removing the tension necessary to give them their shape. Collapsing the tents was a faux-comic ritual with these fellows.

On any morning walk, no matter how early or how cold, I see people outdoors with their dogs. The dogs, far more wide-awake than I, dash across parks in joyous pursuit of tennis balls. People cherish the companionship of their pets. It was sad, last week, to see, on the front page of the MetroWest Daily News, the photograph of the bereaved owners of a small dog that had been killed by a coyote.

The intelligence of crows is widely recognized. Some scientists link their smarts to their sociality—crows have to deal with relatives. Or, turned the other way, because crows (and other social animals) can cooperate they gain a survival advantage over solitary animals. For most bird species, families come and go with the seasons. Out from their eggs tumble homely lumps of imperious appetite. After frantic weeks of feeding, the youngsters fly away, family feeling fades, and it’s every bird for herself until next spring.

Earth whirls around the Sun so rapidly that nearly 2% of the circuit is completed every week. In my boyhood, this sense of rushing through the seasons gave me a sinking feeling every August. Freedom’s weeks drained away, their passing marked by the acquisition of uncomfortable garments. Each had to be tried on in the store, with my funny-looking self for the model, inspected by my mother and by random members of the public. To self-conscious, bespectacled me, this was torture.

Here’s a summertime riddle. I chase flies under the lights at Fenway Park. Having no mitt, I shag them with my mouth. I don’t attend day games. What’s my name?

Imagine, in this season of good times outdoors, that you gave a garden party for wildlife. How would you manage the guest list? Which of our local wild animals would you leave out? Shrubbery-munching, tick-carrying white-tailed deer have lost popularity, but their delicate beauty might get them invited anyway. Some fault fishers and coyotes because they are supposed to take a house cat now and then—but others decline to be prejudiced on that account. Everyone hates mosquitoes, but they aren’t wildlife. A mosquito is an itch with wings.

To learn the meaning of an unfamiliar phrase, I typed the words “spring ephemera” and “wildflowers” into an Internet search box. The definition appeared instantly: “The wildflowers that display for a few weeks before the trees leaf out are collectively called spring ephemera.”

As a child, I associated toads with fireflies and the happiness of warm summer twilights. That’s because once, during the perfect time when lightning bugs twinkle in the deepening dusk, a silent, clod-shaped creature hopped into view on sun-warmed concrete and brought himself to my attention. Few wild vertebrates give kids a close-up look at themselves, but toads will. Survival-wise, they can afford to, because they exude a toxic slime that makes them bad eating. If you don’t put them into your mouth or rub their juices into your eyes, toads are harmless. But silent they are not.

QUONK-quer-REE! The male Red-winged Blackbird trumpets his vigor and his readiness for the tests of spring. With unabashed bravado he flashes blazes of scarlet, underscored with yellow, from each shoulder. With each QUONK-quer-REE! he proclaims himself master of enough Massachusetts marsh to raise a family. In April, this hopeful month, a redwing’s intention to reproduce makes the finding-each-other of suitable mates the paramount preoccupation.

I said, “Pretend you are on your hands and knees, peering down through black ice on a pond.”

“Okay.” For a college student, my daughter is admirably patient with her father. She’s a biology major, curious about our world, but I think I can stump her.

“You see a small animal swim by beneath the ice.”

“A fish?”

“No. Furry. What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know. A weasel?”

“Hah! The right answer is 'star-nosed mole'.”

I wasn’t finished. “Okay, you’re in biochemistry class, and I ask you what a mole is.”

Fierceness, as a quality of temperament, repels intimacy but arouses interest. The fiercest birds are a group of rapacious hawks called accipiters. Of course, hawks all live high on the food web; you don’t find them grazing or scratching for acorns. They hunt. But they have a range of styles.

Have you seen a wild mink? Winter is the best time to spot one. Garbed in dark brown fur at all seasons, they’re easy to pick out against snow or ice, as they patrol the water’s edge in search of rodents, frogs, fish, and crayfish. Mink, in turn, are consumed by foxes, coyotes, and owls.

Mink are medium-sized members of the Mustelid family, smaller than fishers and river otters but larger than weasels.

The New York Times reports that Concord’s famous field guide author David Sibley spent ten days in Arkansas searching for ivory-billed woodpeckers, but did not find one. I looked for them, too, years ago, in the Big Thicket of east Texas, with much worse credentials but the same result. I suppose everyone has made a journey in the hopes of seeing a spectacular, seldom-seen creature and returned home disappointed. But sometimes nature comes to you. Last week it visited my deck.