June

Tags

A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, macrophotography, photography, Sunflowers

A field of sunflowers in Bulloch County, Georgia

In June, the sunflowers are in bloom in South Georgia. In Wisconsin, Aldo Leopold finds himself reminiscing about a fishing idyll on Alder Fork in A Sand County Almanac:

“In the fresh of the morning, when a hundred whitethroats had forgotten it would ever again be anything but sweet and cool, I climbed down the dewy bank and stepped into the Alder Fork. A trout was rising just upstream. I paid out some line–wishing it would always stay thus soft and dry–and, measuring the distance with a false cast or two, laid down a spent gnat exactly a foot above his last swirl. Forgotten now were the hot miles, the mosquitoes, the ignominious chub. He took it with one great gulp, and shortly I could hear him kicking in the bed of wet alder leaves at the bottom of the creel.”

“Another, albeit larger, fish had meanwhile risen in the next pool, which lay at the very ‘head of navigation,’ for at its upper end the alders closed in solid phalanx. One bush, with its brown stem laved in the middle current, shook with a perpetual silent laughter, as if to mock at any fly that gods or men might cast one inch beyond its outermost leaf.”

Macro shot of sunflower . . .

Leopold continues his reminiscence, and closes with:

“I shall now confess to you that none of those three trout had to be beheaded, or folded double, to fit in their casket. What was big was not the trout, but the chance. What was full was not my creek, but my memory. Like the whitethroats, I had forgotten it would ever again be aught but morning on the Fork.

Macro of the ripening seeds . . .

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May

Tags

A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, Ecology, Environment

Plover by Charles W. Schwartz

It’s May in Wisconsin and clearly Aldo Leopold has a great love of birds, as this month he chronicles the return of the plovers from “the Argentine”:

“When dandelions have set the mark of May on Wisconsin pastures,” he writes, “it is time to listen for the final proof of spring. Sit down on a tussock, cock your ears at the sky, dial out the bedlam of meadowlarks and redwings, and soon you may hear it: the flight-song of the upland plover, just now back from the Argentine.”

Once the plover has landed, it surveys its domain:

“There he sits;” Leopold writes, “his whole being says it’s your next move to absent yourself from his domain. The county records allege that you own this pasture, but the plover airily rules out suck trivial legalities. He has just flown 4000 miles to reassert the title he got from the Indians, and young plovers are a-wing, this pasture is his, and none may trespass without his protest.”

By August, Leopold says, the young plovers will have graduated from flight school and the birds will wing their way, once again, toward the pampas.

“Hemisphere solidarity is new among statesmen, but not among the feathered navies of the sky,” he writes.

Leopold ends by saying: “In farm country, the plover only has two real enemies: the gully and the drainage ditch. Perhaps we shall one day find that these are our enemies, too.

“There was a time in the early 1900’s when Wisconsin farms nearly lost their immemorial timepiece, when May pastures greened in silence, and August nights brought no whistled reminder of impending fall. Universal gunpowder, plus the lure of plover-on-toast for post-Victorian banquets, had taken their toll. The belated protection of the federal migratory bird laws came just in time.”

The plover, fortunately, was luckier than the carrier pigeon, for example. And since 1963, we’ve managed to eliminate nearly 40 more species of birds, fish, amphibians, molluscs, plants, mammals, and insects in North America alone.

That number will continue to grow as our population continues to expand. According to population estimates recently released by the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 328 million people rang in the new year in the United States. This is an increase of more than 2 million people from the previous year.

The growth was concentrated in western and southern states, where communities and wildlife have felt increasing pressure from drought, severe weather, threats to public land and unsustainable development, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.

“Wildlife and wild places face pressures from a rapidly growing population as politicians and corporations gun to open public lands in high-growth areas to toxic mining, drilling and fracking,” said Kelley Dennings, a population campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Runaway growth and development will harm irreplaceable natural and cultural treasures and our incredible biodiversity.”

Red wolves and Florida panthers in the south, Mount Graham red squirrels in Arizona, and Humboldt martens in California are just some of the species that are facing extinction.

When are we going to start taking seriously the loss of all these creatures?

March

Tags

A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, photography

“One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is spring,” Aldo Leopold begins his chapter on March in A Sand County Almanac.

Canada geese by Charles W. Schwartz

While ruminating on the yearly patterns of geese, Leopold wonders, “Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his [awareness] is soon a pile of feathers.”

In warmer climes, one can find Canada geese year-round, but in Leopold’s Wisconsin, they appeared only twice yearly to proclaim the arrival of two seasons–winter and spring.

“November geese are aware that every marsh and pond bristles from dawn till dark with hopeful guns, ” he writes. March geese, on the other hand, are a different story.

“They wind the oxbows of the river, cutting low over the now gunless points and islands, and gabbling to each sandbar as to a long lost friend.”

Later, Leopold writes, “Once the first geese are in, they honk a clamorous invitation to each migrating flock, and in a few days the marsh is full of them. On our farm we measure the amplitude of our spring by two yardsticks: the number of pines planted, and the number of geese that stop. Our record is 642 geese counted in on 11 April 1946.”

Leopold later discovers that “goose flocks are families, or aggregations of families, and lone geese in spring are probably just what our fond imaginings had first suggested. They are bereaved survivors of the winter’s shooting, searching in vain for their kin.”

Our daughter, at 11 months, visiting with the geese.

Canada geese were very much a part of our life when we lived on Dews Pond near Calhoun, Georgia. They often nested in our yard and that of our neighbor, and we would look forward to the time when the goslings would emerge from the eggs. They became so tame that they would eat from our hands, and we would spend hours watching their antics. To this day, the honk of a goose brings back fond memories.

In Savannah, March sees the blossoming of our daffodils and crocuses.

And the loquats that were beginning to ripen in January are finally edible.

February

Tags

A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, history, photography

Illustration for A Sand County Almanac by Charles W. Schwartz

Aldo Leopold begins his chapter on February this way:

“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”

Wendell Berry would agree.

He continues, “To avoid the first danger, one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue.

“To avoid the second, he should lay a split of good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no furnace, and let it warm his shins while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside. If one has cut, split, hauled, and piled his own good oak, and let his mind work the while, he will remember much about where the heat comes from, and with a wealth of detail denied to those who spend the week end in town astride a radiator.”

A mackerel-scaled February sky signals an impending winter storm.

I was fortunate enough to have lived on a very small-scale farm during a few of my teenage years. Although we had a garden, our cows (and at one point, pigs) accounted for more of our diet than vegetables. Having helped slaughter, clean, and grind meat, I am now always keenly aware from whence my meat comes (which is one reason I am attempting to eat less of it).

The house we lived in at the time (Briarpatch) was heated by wood stoves. That meant a large portion of the year, after school and on weekends, was dedicated to cutting and hauling wood to be later burned in those stoves. It was never easy but it was particularly difficult when it was cold and my numbed fingers could barely feel the logs I was hoisting into my arms.

Following college, I was once again reminded about heat when my husband and I spent a winter either crouched before the fire place or locked in a room with a space heater when the gas company refused to turn on our heater because they didn’t want to be responsible for a possible leak. Although we were both employed by a daily newspaper, we were still too poor to have the heater fixed and had to suffer through a colder than normal mid-Georgia winter, in which the temperatures plummeted more than 6º below 0º Fahrenheit.

A view from a February morning walk around Daffin Park.

In A Sand County Almanac, Leopold takes us back in time as he discusses the history of the oak that is burning in his fire place. When the tree was cut, he calculated that it was a seedling about 1865, at the end of the Civil War. But, he writes, the acorn that produced it most likely fell during the preceding decade “when covered wagons were still passing over my road into the Great Northwest.”

A bolt of lightning put an end to the 80-year-old tree during a July thunderstorm. Leopold and his family let the wood season for a year “in the sun it could no longer use” and eventually felled it on a crisp winter’s day.

“Fragrant little chips of history spewed from the saw cut,” he wrote, noting that the saw was carving its way “into the chronology of a lifetime, written in concentric annual rings of good oak.”

The from the reign of the bootlegger who had previously owned his farm in the 1930s, forced out by the Dustbowl droughts of that era, Leopold takes us back to the 1920s. From 1929 when the stock markets crumpled to 1925 when Wisconsin saw the demise of the last marten to 1922 and the “Big Sleet” of March, that tore the limbs from the surrounding elms.

Further back, from 1910 to 1920, the oak continued to grow despite even as the Supreme Court abolished state forests in 1915. In 1910, “a great university president published a book on conservation (Charles Van Hise, University of Wisconsin-Madison), and then 4 years earlier (1906) when the first state forester took office not knowing state forests would be abolished not even a decade later. That same year, fires burned 17,000 acres of the sand counties.

The ring from 1899 was mute about the last passenger pigeon, which had “collided with a charge of shot near Babcock”, two counties to the north of Leopold. 1893 saw the year of “The Bluebird Storm” when a March blizzard killed nearly all of the migrating bluebirds.

Chickadee illustration by Charles W. Schwartz.

Then further back–1890–and the year of the Babcock Milk Tester and why Wisconsin is known as “America’s Dairyland” today. The previous year, a drought year in Wisconsin, was the year Arbor Day was first proclaimed. At the beginning of that decade, in 1881, the Wisconsin Agricultural Society debated the question: How do you account for the second growth of black oak timber that has sprung up all over the county in the last thirty years?

“My oak was one of these,” Leopold writes.

The decade of the 1870’s saw Wisconsin’s “carousal in wheat”. By the end of the decade, farmers realized that they had lost the game of “wheating the land to death.”

“I suspect that this farm played its share in the game,” Leopold writes, “and that the sand blow just north of my oak had its origin in over-wheating.”

1874 saw the arrival of the now ubiquitous factory-made barbed wire. Finally the rings have reached the center of the tree:

“Our saw now cuts the 1860’s,” writes Leopold, “when thousands died to settle the question: Is the man-man community lightly to be dismembered? They settled it, but they did not see, nor do we yet see, that the same question applies to the man-land community.”

The pith of the oak, 1865, is the year that John Muir offered to buy the home farm from his brother. Thirty miles east of Leopold’s oak, this land was a sanctuary for the wild flowers that had gladdened Muir’s youth. While his brother refused to sell the farm John, the dream remained, and as Leopold notes, “1865 still stands in Wisconsin history as the birthyear of mercy for things natural, wild, and free.”

A February day at Honey Creek on the Georgia salt marshes.

January

Tags

A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, macrophotography, photography

The first section of A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold is devoted to a month-by-month description of the natural world as the year passes in Wisconsin, a state located in the north-central part of the United States. Before I go more into that, though, I would like to draw your attention to a fellow writer’s blog, which captured what Aldo Leopold writes about in A Sand County Almanac.

The author of the Lif4Gd blog used a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that captured this concept beautifully. See more here: Lif4Gd

I particularly liked this stanza:

What would the world be, once bereft    

Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,              

O let them be left, wildness and wet;               

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Back to January . . .

Illustration from A Sand County Almanac by Charles W. Schwartz.

“Each year,” Leopold writes, “after the midwinter blizzards, there comes a night of thaw when the tinkle of dripping water is heard in the land. It brings strange stirrings, not only to creatures abed for the night, but to some who have been asleep for the winter. The hibernating skunk, curled up in his deep den, uncurls himself and ventures forth to prowl the wet world, dragging his belly in the snow. His track marks one of the earliest datable events in that cycle of beginnings and ceasings which we call a year.”

Living in the South, as I do, it is not the tinkle of melting snow that we hear, but the drip, drip, drop of a steady rain. Gone are the torrential downpours that have pelted us from May through October.

Winter rains keep the bird bath filled.

Winter in the Savannah, particularly as the weather becomes more tropical by the year, is marked by three types of weather. It is either clear and cold, warm and wet, or grey and what I think of as Raynaud’s weather–neither warm enough not to worry about keeping my fingers warm nor cold enough that I have to wear my mittens. That means it is somewhere in the 50s (Fahrenheit) and I may or may not lose the feeling in my fingers.

Because we live in the south, we also experience things that only happen during warm winters–Painted Buntings perched on the bird feeder, Camellias about to burst into bloom, and the slow swelling of the Loquat fruit.

Camellia buds

Macro Camellia bud

Loquats, which may or may not ripen this year because of our unusually cold November and December.

A macro shot of a clathrus columnatus mushroom about to burst forth.

 

Next week: February

A Sand County Almanac

Tags

A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, Books, Ecology, Environment

Now we face the question whether a still higher ‘standard of living’ is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.

Those words are as true today as they were when Aldo Leopold wrote them on March 4, 1948, just 48 days before his death on April 21st of that year. A Sand County Almanac was published posthumously by Leopold’s son, Luna, in 1949. Later, in 1953, Leopold’s unpublished essays were put together in a book called Round River.

In 1966, A Sand County Almanac and Round River were combined to form this edition:

More than seventy years later we are still struggling to maintain the balance between progress and keeping things “natural, wild, and free”.

“These wild things, I admit, had little human value until mechanization assured us of a good breakfast, and until science disclosed the drama of where they come from and how they live,” Leopold wrote. “The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress; our opponents do not.”

In his foreword to A Sand County Almanac, Leopold also wrote, “Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the esthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture.

“That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten.”

Aldo Leopold

Leopold also wrote, “our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. . . . Nothing could be more salutary as this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.

“Perhaps such a shift in values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined terms of things natural, wild, and free.”

Over the course of the next weeks, I will be working my way through A Sand County Almanac. I hope to convey that what Leopold saw as important, or even imperative, in 1948 is just as important in 2019.