Essays from Sanctuary magazine

Facebook | John Hanson Mitchell

2009-12-23T16:15:00.000-08:00

2009-12-23T16:14:00.000-08:00

2009-12-11T10:39:00.000-08:00

Bygone Birds

I grew up in a town famous for its old trees and gardens and also for its birdlife. There was a landscaped hillside visible from my bedroom, and one of my earliest memories is of the vast rolling chorus of robins, doves, and thrushes, and the unidentifiable (at least to me) squeaks, squawks, chips, buzzings, and peeps that on spring mornings would pour in my window like a waterfall.

I never thought about this great choral expression; it was just there, part of my world.

My family had come north from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and, on summer visits to the rural settings of the old family farms and town gardens, the dawn chorus of birds was equally loud—as was the daylong winsome calling of the bobwhites and the noisy barking of crows in flocks that would dip across the cornfields. At night on my cousin’s river farm, I lay awake listening to the dark quock of night-herons sounding out from the riverbanks, and by day we lived with the eternal circling cries of ospreys. I even used to see bald eagles there, a rare event back then.

After that I lived in deep woods in northwestern Connecticut, where there were vast migrations of wood-warblers each spring and fall. That was owl country; the odd caterwauls of barred owls rang out from the nearby swampy lowlands in autumn and again in spring. I would hear the ghostly whinny of the screech-owl all through the summer, and the deep booming of the great horned owl on late winter nights, along with other shrieks and calls. Also on summer nights there, I used to be awakened by the mysterious night song of the ovenbird, along with the shrieks and snarls and cries of things I couldn’t identify—probably bobcats.

When I first moved to Massachusetts thirty or so years ago, I lived in an old house surrounded by farms. Each spring, the scrubby pasture just north of the house was loud with the calls of prairie warblers and blue-winged warblers. All along the brushy edges of the property, yellow warblers and yellowthroats nested. The indigo buntings would be singing madly by June, and every day the woodland edges were pierced with the sharp call of the great crested flycatcher.
I used to see kingbirds in a nearby orchard; while the woods to the west, just beyond the garden wall, were alive with the songs of veeries, wood thrushes, ovenbirds, and black-and-white warblers, as well as ruby-crowned kinglets and parula warblers. And east of the house, hay fields dropped down to the marshes of Beaver Brook in a series of terraces, over which barn swallows and tree swallows coursed from dawn to dusk. Wood ducks, hooded mergansers, marsh wrens, green herons, and even the occasional bittern and sora rail used to appear in the marshes from time to time.

At dawn last spring, I heard the song of a black-billed cuckoo. That got me thinking about local birds. How long ago had it been since I last heard a black-billed cuckoo in the yard? For that matter, how long had it been since I had heard the plaintive dawn song of the wood pewee? Or the night wailing of the whip-poor-will? This year, other than the music of black-billed cuckoo, and one ovenbird, plus the usual array of garden birds such as blue jays and song sparrows, it was a silent spring. Furthermore, I have revisited most of the places I lived in the past and have noted the same phenomenon. The woods and fields have gone to development, and no birds sing.

All this is anecdotal evidence, but it’s a story you hear over and over. And now the facts of a massive worldwide decline of birds are everywhere in the scientific news. The whole class of aves, a group that evolved from dinosaurs some 160 million years ago, for a variety of reasons, is at a low ebb.

2009-12-08T12:06:00.000-08:00

LOST IN THE STARS

On warm summer nights when the smell of the river marshes below the house would fill the air and dusk had long since faded out, we would sit on the front porch, watching the fireflies flashing in the hayfields to the west. My family—uncles, aunties, distant cousins, friends of cousins, cousins of friends of cousins—would sit and rock and talk about crops and dogs, horses, and hot weather. The air was thick then, and summer had its grip on us, and sometimes, it seemed to me, the very house would lift from its foundation at these hours and float suspended above the drying grasses and the fields to the north where the corn rustled in the evening wind.
On nights such as this, as the fireflies ascended, my old father would often reminisce about his years in the Orient, and as winking stars of light rose in the fields below us he would retell yet again the old Japanese folktale of Princess Firefly and recount stories of the traditional firefly festivals that took place all over Japan in his time.
I was lost in the mystery of all this and would be swept into some vague, almost timeless suspension of disbelief. It all seemed so real, even though my father was telling the story of a firefly that was in fact a princess in a kingdom inhabited by insects. I was too young to know it was not true.
And often on those hot nights, as children have done for a thousands year, my cousins and I would descend from the porch with kitchen jars and sweep the grasses, catching the flashers and carrying them around in the jars like mystic lanterns.
Timing seemed everything to me, even then. Why did the fireflies flash at certain intervals? Why did they quit flashing periodically, and why did some of them never take to the air and perch low in the grasses, emitting a long, sustained light?
It was only later that I learned that there was a dark side to the luminous display taking place in the fields below the house, and that all the bright poetic legends and folktales had an element of truth. Out there in the real world of the grassroot jungle, the lights that so inspired the folktales and festivals were in fact all about sex and death.
Fireflies flash to attract mates, and it is for the most part the males that we see on summer nights. Shortly after they reach adulthood, usually around late June in New England, as dusk falls, the males launch themselves in the air and patrol to-and-fro across open areas, flashing a semaphoric signal to female fireflies, who lie below, watching. There are as many as thirty different species of firefly in New England, and the males of each species have a set pattern of flashes, which the female can recognize.
Below in the grasses, females spotting a potential mate light up with a sustained flash. The male blazes back, the female lights up again, and, after a series of exchanges, the male descends to locate his mate. Sometimes more than one suitor will fly down and the firefly princess will be surrounded by a company of suitors, each flashing handsome signals. But fireflies, it appears, are discreet denizens of this untamed complex world. Once the couple has found each other the lights go out and they mate.
All is not love in the world of fireflies, however; there is also the question of sustenance. There is one species of firefly that makes use of the flashing repertoire of males to attain a meal. These carnivorous femmes fatales lie low in the grass and watch plays for the signals of other species of males flashing above. They imitate the flash pattern, and thereby draw the unsuspecting male down to his demise.
But all that is science. When you are ten years old, and it is night, and the sparking stars of fireflies drift over the hay fields, and the wind is in the corn, it is all a half-lit poetic mystery.

2007-12-23T04:47:00.000-08:00

The Death of Mr. Smith

Just for the record it should be said that Mr Smith was not the warm, chatty local shopkeeper whom all the people loved. This Mr Smith was polite, but laconic; he would answer your questions in monosyllables, with typical Yankee reserve. He dressed everyday in a hound’s-tooth coat, a pressed white shirt and an out-of-fashion tie from the 1950s, and he wore steel rimmed glasses perched at the end on his thin nose.

Nor was the fare that Mr Smith sold in his little general store anything remarkable: canned food, dry cereals, milk and eggs, and candy, and in spite of the fact that the town was known for its orchards, dairy, and produce farms, not a single item that was grown locally. The shop was cool, under lit, and had dusty wooden floors worn down by a hundred years of use. Also always open. Everyday, even Christmas and Sundays, Mr Smith was there, with his minimalist greetings and his thank very much and goodbye. Try as you might, you could not get any gossip from Mr Smith.

The town in those days seemed to be characterized by eccentric shop-keepers, Across the street from Mr Smith there was a hardware store that never, at least not in the time that I lived there, opened its doors to the public. Its shelves were lined with dusty screwdrivers, saws, hammers, and various cans of motor oil, glue, and paint. And if you shaded your eyes and looked in through the plate glass window, just inside the entrance, in front of the aisles, you could see a new 1950s Pen Yan motor boat, its fresh varnish gleaming in the half light, its brass fittings polished. The story was that the store had been kept by two brothers. When one of them died, some ten years earlier, the living brother closed the shop and maintained it just as it had been when his brother died.

There was a country store in the town that still sold penny candy, and there was an ice cream stand associated with one of the dairy farms that drew people all the way from Boston, some thirty-five distant. People came to the town in summer for the ice-cream and the corn and pumpkins from the five working farm stands. They came in autumn for apples; they came in winter to ski, and in spring they came to look at the flowering orchards and watch the horses that were pastured there.

Given this diversity of foodstuffs and entertainments you would think Mr Smith would have given up years ago. But in fact children regularly stopped in to buy candy from Mr Smith, and the locals were forever stopping in to get things they had forgotten to pick up at the main grocery store in the town, which kept normal nine to five hours and closed on Sundays. Mr Smith was the only show in town after hours. ---nine in the morning to nine at night behind his counter in his hounds-tooth coat and his pressed shirt.

All this was long ago, forty years ago. Around that time a highway came through the community, and rammed through two of the best working farms and an orchard. A couple of new gas stations opened near the interchange, and then one day a sign appeared in the window of Mr Smith’s store. “Closed due to illness”.

Not long after that, either from an obituary in the local paper, or maybe just gossip, I learned that Mr Smith had died.

The shop closed permanently. The building remained empty for a year or so. Traffic increased on the highway. A chain convenience store came into the town, which stayed open from seven to eleven.. The grocery store expanded. A chain hardware store opened Two farm stands closed. Three new banks opened, one of them an international corporation. A multinational computer company constructed a plant in one of the local pear orchards, and then one day a sign for a lawyers office appeared in the window of Mr Smith ‘s former store. And nowadays, over in the burying ground on the west side of town, Mr Smith lies in his grave, still silent.

Coming in March, 2008

2007-12-22T13:57:00.001-08:00

How the Common Came to Pass

Winter 2006-2007

In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elm trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about…where the lawns ended in the orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky… from Stuart Little by E.B. White

Stuart Little would have loved the little rural towns between Connecticut and the Canadian border. Back roads in this section of New England still exhibit remnants of the old English version of the town common—a central green, a meeting house or church at one end, and a surround of high white clapboard structures on the other three sides, with pastures and forests beyond. Just the sort of place E.B. White’s wandering mouse hero enjoyed.

The vernacular settlement pattern known as the common is—or more accurately was—an excellent model of community conservation of green space, an example of mutually accepted preservation without debate or vote. The common was once a cultural fact of life, it was what you did if you wanted to lay out a village, and it was an ideal that still endures in the American psyche. The image appears everywhere, from Christmas cards to ads touting wholesome family life.

The archetype of this idealized town has its roots deeply planted in English history, but in North America it is unique to New England. In its most basic form, the English village (from the Old French term vill) was no more than a collection of houses, barns, and outbuildings surrounded by cultivated fields and pasturelands, with a forest beyond. Under the old feudal system the whole of this was under the management of the lord, who was responsible for the safety of his underlings who had gathered themselves together under his protection to save themselves from the raiding armies of invaders, such as the Vikings or Normans. Small landholders in this system surrendered whatever rights they may have had to the control of the lord in order to protect their croplands, the source of their livelihood.

In a typical feudal holding, some two to three hundred acres around the vill would have been cleared from the native forest of beech, ash, and holly. About sixteen to twenty families would be living in the village—all told around 200 people. The system worked communally. The families would have owned a number of plows between them, and they would have had teams of oxen, also shared, to pull the plows. They may have had community fishponds on the local streams, and weirs, and even a water mill. The fields, which began at the forest edge and ran to the border of the village, consisted of one, long, open stretch. The patchwork division of small fields and pastures that you see today in England would come later in the seventeenth and eighteenth century with the acts of enclosure.

This great open field cultivation was ploughed in strips that were roughly ten times as long as they were wide. The design, known as a furlong—a standard furrow's length (220 yards)—came to pass because of the difficulty in turning a team of oxen. The long strips of arable land were planted to grains, barley, and peas, and were altered on a three-year system of rotation, allowing some strips to lie fallow in any given year. Each family planted and harvested its own crop on a given section of land, although the strip a family cultivated might not be the same piece of land each year. Under this system, fields of different quality would be equitably distributed among the farmers over a period of time. Unless you were a serf—essentially the equivalent of a slave—you would be guaranteed a certain amount of land. The distribution of these arable lands was decided each year at a meeting known as the annual allotment.

In addition to the great fields, each family would have maintained, close to their house, a small privately cultivated plot for a garden, and a yard for hens and geese and a few fruit trees.
Surrounding the cultivated fields of grain were the pasturelands, where each day the herds of cattle, sheep, and goats were driven out to graze. These lands were also held in common by the village but not divided into lots.

Beyond the pasturelands was the forest, which was held, in effect, by no one. Here the local peasants went to gather nuts and firewood, here they turned out their swine to forage, and here also they hunted rabbits, deer, and boar for their larder. This so-called waestland, or wilderness, was the dark forest of European myth and folktale. It was the known domain of goblins and witches and hideous imaginary creatures, as well as all-too-real escaped criminals and robbers, such as Robin Hood. It was, in effect, the opposite of the comfortable, managed, public space of the common.

In 1066, William the Conqueror, as Anglophiles will attest, at once altered this primordial village system and refined it to his liking. One of his earliest violations of the traditional Anglo-Saxon structure was to declare the forest his private hunting domain. Locals who were discovered in his greenwood collecting faggots, digging out rabbit warrens, or, worst of all, killing deer—his deer mind you—were severely punished. William’s ruthless protection of “his resources” altered the ecological makeup of the forest in those areas where it had been heavily used by the peasants. In fact, excluding people from the forest may actually have had a beneficial ecological effect, at least around the villages, but it was not good for the local peasantry.

In the time of William, rents for lands were paid in-kind. That is, you supplied a certain amount of grain to the lord of the vill each year according to the amount of land you were using. You rendered unto the lord a certain amount of work each year, or military service. You applied each year to renew your holding, and the terms of your arrangements were set. Rights of use of land formed a great theoretical pyramid, with the king at the top; the serfs, or cottars, at the bottom; and various tenants and thanes, villeins, earls, and lords in the middle and upper reaches. “From the Crown, all titles flow,” as the phrase had it.

All this more or less came to an end about the time that the Pilgrims and Puritans came to North America. By this time, in the mid-1600s, the old tenure system requiring payment in-kind or in personal services had faded. The King granted the lands of the Massachusetts Bay Company common socage, which meant that the rights of use of the land could be paid in rent rather than grains or firewood, or knights’ service to the King.
Common socage was actually not an unusual form of payment for land in Kent and also in East Anglia, where many of the Puritans came from and where the feudal system had less of a footing than in other sections of England. Even before this time, peasants in England were able to maintain certain rights under what was known as the allodial system, which had been in practice as far back as the Roman period elsewhere in Europe. This held that no matter who was in control, no matter which king or queen sat on the throne, or who was lord, the peasants could continue on their traditional lands. There were no laws stating this, it was simply a reality, but it was such an enduring one that it has been at the root of the private-property system even into our time. It was from this concept that the idea of the common began to erode.

This idea of holding private property in fee simple, that is to say, as the absolute ownership of a piece of land that can be bought and sold, is actually a fairly recent development in legal history. The idea of land as property, something you own, as you would a book or a piece of furniture, did not come into full use until the eighteenth century. Before that, in English law at least, what you bought and sold was land held of someone; you bought the right to live there, or the right to use it. You did not actually own the ground.

By the eighteenth century in Britain, the common rights associated with land—pasturing cattle, for example, or cutting timber or turf—began to give way to a rigid set of regulations based on private outright ownership of property, and the tradition of the common began to fade. This was the same period as the Acts of Enclosure, when some six million acres of commonly held lands—meadows, open fields, and forests—were transferred into private hands by parliamentary approval and were hedged and fenced for private gain.

Here in New England, even though the idea of the commons was still ingrained in the colonial soul, the concept of the private plot, of each man as lord of his own manor, flourished in the wide-open spaces of the New World. Within a few decades of settlement, in communities such as Plymouth and Sudbury, the great fields and the pasturelands, and even the wild forest beyond, switched from common land to private holdings.

Nevertheless, the primordial idea of a public green space, a commonly held tract of land at the heart of the village, has endured. And although sadly diminished, the old town commons can still be found by anyone willing to shun the superhighways and poke around a little on back roads.

As one of the characters tells Stuart Little, “A person who is looking for something doesn’t travel too fast.”

2007-11-09T11:40:00.000-08:00

The Flight of the Wren

On any given morning between May 5 and May 10, I can step out in the garden and hear, for the first time in a year, the incessant, even frenetic, trilling of the house wren. They come in with the south wind, usually on a clear sunny morning, and go out, with far less flourish, on the northwest wind five months later.
The male is the first to arrive, and he goes around “his” land (which according to twenty-first century legal documents is actually “my” land) stating his presence in no uncertain terms. He’s been here before, and he knows his way around.
The female arrives a few days later. And after a certain amount of ritual, and restatements of territorial boundaries—none of which I can follow—she will begin work on a nest in a palatial birdhouse I have set up in back of the garden. The two of them spend the spring and summer there. Flitting around, getting angry, and hunting through the shrubbery for spiders and caterpillars.
Bird aficionados are not supposed to like wrens. They’re noisy little devils, for one thing, and they have some very nasty habits. Once they’ve crammed their bulky stick nests into whatever convenient crevice they can find, they range around their property pecking the eggs of other nesting birds, almost out of spite, it would seem. Furthermore, they are not—how shall I say—the most beautiful bird in the backyard. They are patterned with a few dark stripes against a dull wood-colored brown background, their belly is whitish, and they have a mean little decurved bill that looks like it was designed for surgical purposes. Nor are they loyal mates. Once they have set up housekeeping, and the female is incubating the eggs, the male patrols his territory seeking other females. Given all this, they have not endeared themselves to those who seek wholesome metaphors from the world of birds—even their semi-musical trilling becomes tedious when you hear it every minute or so throughout the daylight hours.
In spite of all this I am partial to wrens. I like their spunk. I like their cocky little tails and beady eyes, and the way they get mad at anything in their path and begin whispering and chattering at cats and dogs and even people.
But mostly what I like about wrens is their predestined willingness to undertake marathon flights from the cold gardens of New England and Canada, south to Florida, and even beyond into Central and South America. It seems somehow unfathomable that these tiny packages can summon the energy to fly all the way down a continent and back up in the course of a year, select mates, and then go about the business of raising children, only to turn around and go back south again in autumn.
Sometime in the summer, I don’t know when exactly since they slip out quietly, the wrens leave my garden. They fade from the sunny borders and move back into the shady woods, where they spend the late summer and early autumn feeding low to the ground, no longer singing and assuming, a certain hardworking, businesslike effect. Perhaps they need to lay low in this manner. They have a long trip ahead of them.
Although a few individuals may hang around the northern woods until November, most house wrens begin their mass exodus in September. Like many land birds, they move south in fits and starts; and, like many migrants, they run into hardships all along the way. Storms carry them far out to sea. Head winds batter them, cats eat them, and, along with a growing number of birds nowadays, wrens crash into things at night. Fifty years ago these obstacles were radio towers, water towers, and the skyscrapers of cities. Now the birds have to contend with the proliferation of cell phone towers as well.
Somehow, through all this, through pure atavistic drive and that unstoppable wren energy, they make it.
Wrens are not long-distance migrants in the manner of swifts or nighthawks, or even warblers and hummingbirds. They generally only go as far south as Florida. But it is that lack of limelight, that businesslike, dogged manner, that I like about them. They’re working birds, energetic little sparks of life in a hard rock world.
I daresay they will never to become extinct. JHM

2007-10-29T18:04:00.001-07:00

EL LOBO

Some years ago, I inherited a Jack Russell terrier, who for some reason promptly choose me as his boon companion in his otherwise circumscribed life . If I went for a walk to the hemlock grove behind my house, he would join me, sometimes tagging at my heels, sometimes ranging out ahead of me in ever widening gyres, and poking his black nose into every hole, log hollow, rock crevice, tree crevice, leaf pile, brush pile, puddle, and pit he could find. In the garden he was also there. If I was in the process of digging a hole to plant a new tree, he would stand beside me, ever at alert, his head cocked, watching my work intently. If I deserted this task and moved over to clip a hedge he would trot behind at my heels. Waiting. And if ever I was on my knees with my hands deep in the good earth ---- about at his level in other words ---- I would hear his snuffling, and glance over. There he’d be, cheek to jowl, eyes fixed on the ground, ears perked forward, ready for some action. In time I taught him to dig out weeds, and even trained him to dig holes for tulip planting.

His other work with us was to protect the property from intruders which, to his dogly mind, were legion. There were known to be bears, wolves, foxes, wild ungulates, and all manner of unidentified species lurking in the forest beyond the garden wall. We ourselves could not always see these beasts, and we often wondered why, on some otherwise quiet afternoon, he would charge out from the porch and race along the top of the stone wall barking furiously, as if holding at bay a primordial herd of invading mammoths or a rangy pack of dire wolves from the time when this little patch of earth was all forest and swamps.

One afternoon, while I was working in the garden, I heard my companion barking furiously in the woods beyond the back wall. Nothing out of the ordinary really, except that he would return periodically to my side, circle my ankles and charge out again into the alien forest to resume his barking, which I noticed had a slightly different, more frenetic (if that’s possible) timbre to it. It occurred to me that he had treed something, and after a while, I went out to see what it was. It turned out he was holding at bay the largest, wildest coyote, I have ever seen.

Most of the coyotes that periodically cross this property are skittish things that tentatively flit over the walls to feed on compost. If they see you, or hear you, or even think they see you, they fade into the forest. But this animal was a fearless Goliath, and he was standing his ground ---- a great gray and brown furred, wolflike thing with a wide head, his forelegs propped on a low rock, staring back at this little canine poseur who circled at safe distance, yapping furiously. I realized, if he so chose, he could step down and with one snap, do away with my loyal companion. So I stepped forward and waved my arms.

Rather than dash away, the coyote merely sauntered off indifferently, took a stand on another boulder and turned to stare. The dog charged after it, circling and barking with even more ferocity, having presumed, I suppose, that he believed he had got the better of this devil dog. I called him off with a whistle and clapped my hands to scare off the intruder and returned to the garden, the dog at my heels.

We saw this coyote on several occasion after this event. We sometimes saw him standing on a wide stone wall that runs along the west side of the property, the morning sun gleaming off his gray -gold fur. Another time we saw him saunter across the yard, glancing over at the house periodically, straight–legged, and spoiling for a fight. He became a commonality. He even earned a name: el Lobo. We actually came to appreciate him for his wildness.

It was about this same time that I learned that his wolflike appearance was no accident. New genetic studies on the origins of the Eastern coyote seemed to indicate that, genetically, they were far closer to the original New England wolf, a sub-species of the red wolf, than they were to the simpering, little coyotes of the West. He and his like had returned to their native forest habitat along with the bears, fishers, bobcats, white-tailed deer, other denizens of the primordial forest that grew back in New England after the region lost most of its farmlands.

Twice over the following year, the Jack Russell stood el Lobo off again. Once at the stone wall next to the garden, and once when, for no apparent reason, he appeared in the middle of the vegetable garden among the tomatoes plants and the chard, glaring back at the house. On both these occasions, alerted by the barking of my assistant, I was the one who ultimately drove him away.

Later that winter, however, there was a third stand off.

We had a big, disorganized group of people at Christmas Eve dinner that year. Late in the evening, one of the guests went out on the porch and found the Jack Russell by the back door, his head hanging low, in apparent defeat. He walked in, slowly, an almost unheard of gait for him, and we noticed that he had a bloodied shoulder and that his unbounded, unstoppable energy seemed to have drained out of him. I gathered him up and found deep bite wounds all around his shoulders. Within a half an hour we had him bundled and raced him off to a nearby animal emergency center which, having determined that he had been badly mauled, sent us off to the Tufts Animal Hospital [rose, do you know the proper name for this place??] in Westborough.

This begat an ironic night drive through darkened landscape of rural New England, when all the world was stuffed and sleeping off the full dinners of Christmas Eve. The dog was admitted and the vet, a refined gentleman from one of the southern states said he was not sure the dog would survive the night, but that they would do what they could.

We drove home and waited for the dreaded call. When it came, around seven, we were informed that he was still alive.

He lived through the second night. The entire staff, having heard his story began rooting for him. He rallied, lived through the third night, and was released a week later, much battered, barely able to walk, but still counting himself among the living.

At his exit interview from the hospital, the vet explained that he had been picked up and shaken by a large animal, probably a coyote, but that he must have put up a very good fight.

“I imagine,” he said in his lazy drawl, “ that he must have got in a few good bites.”

Maybe he did. After that night, the woods were still. The great horned owls began calling in the hemlock grove in late January. In February the snows began melting back slowly, and by March, the wood frogs began calling from the nearby vernal pool.

But, after that terrible Christmas Eve, we never did see el Lobo again.