Love and Joy

When John Janovy talks about love and joy (see June 17 post), he’s talking about working and teaching. Does your job give you joy? Do you love your work? I did.

Though I didn’t realize at the time that it was a luxury, I always had work that made me feel useful, work that allowed me moments of sheer, ecstatic joy. The kind of joy I’m talking about is not the squealing, jumping around kind of joy, but rather a quiet sense of being right with the universe.

Those moments have almost always involved an animal or maybe a flower. One of them that’s as clear in my mind today as when it happened more than thirty years ago, happened at the “Four Corners” where Nebraska 14 meets Nebraska 20.The road ditches there were marshy and, as I reached the corner, I was headed somewhere else. I glanced at the ditch and spotted a small flock of shorebirds, stalking around on their spindly little legs.

Part of my job those days, working for the Game and Parks Commission, was to take wildlife photographs for NEBRASKAland magazine and other publications. So, opportunist that I am, I parked the car as far off the road as I could get, grabbed the camera that always rode with me, snapped on the longest lens I had—a 200 mm—and stepped out of the car, gently shoving the door shut.

The birds were mostly phalaropes and they were very busy birds, spinning around and sort of stirring the mud on the bottom of the puddle, gobbling up grubs and insects they dislodged. As I crouched and scuttled across the roadbed, the birds barely reacted, although they definitely had their boundary. When I reached its edge, they fluttered a little farther away.

I had no shade, but the temperature remained springlike, so I found a dry place and I sat, camera in my lap, to watch. I shot a couple of rolls, taking my time to see if the birds would forget me and come closer. They didn’t. At last, with a grin and a “thanks,” to the phalaropes, I went on about my errand and they went on with theirs.

Another of those moments lasted several days—and nights. At Lake McConaughy, I shot 16mm movie film to document the Commission’s attempt to cross striped bass with white bass so that they could add the resulting “wipers” to anglers’ alternatives. We were out on the lake at night and my equipment did not include portable lights, so we (the fisheries biologist, Doug Kapke, and I) rigged a heat lamp, direct current, to a car battery, clamped the light to my camera and I moved in close. 

We pulled nets and found not a white bass, so we finally went home about dawn. We agreed to meet next morning at ten. I walked in the house, threw a quilt on the floor and fell asleep in my clothes.

Next morning at nine-thirty, Doug phoned. I picked up the receiver and held it to my ear, but I couldn’t remember what you say when you answer the phone. After a long silence, Doug said, “Hello,” and I remembered. He said he’d pick me up in a half hour, so I took a quick shower, shook out my hair like a dog, dressed, and grabbed my camera bag in time to answer the door. And we did it all again.

Sheer joy!

John Janovy’s Keith County

In his 1978 book, Keith County Journal, John Janovy, Jr. takes a delightful ramble over a county full of surprises. As he kicks around the county, turning over cow pies and hunting snails, he learns and teaches his students how to find, not only biological facts but also life lessons. “There are times when a person ‘goes after’ a species with the idea that maybe, just maybe, there will be something in the life of that creature that will add perspective to the life of the person,” he writes.

Of the termites he locates in cowpies, he writes that the “group is the organism; the individual is one of the organism’s cells.” He speculates about the termite’s persistence through the evolutionary chain—mastodon waste, through bison dung, to cowpies—with its symbiotic microbes that digest its cellulosic cowpie meals.

Janovy draws you into his world of nature. “Anyone can enter a cattail marsh,” he writes. “Just wade in. Just walk up and wade in. It’s that easy.” Once in, Janovy discovers snails and the parasites that live inside them. He discovers how they travel, washed out of their warm homes in the cattails through the effluent of water releases from the foot of Lake McConaughy—or on the legs and feathers of marsh birds.

Like Louis Agazziz, Janovy has decided to study nature, not books, and his enthusiasm about its sheer improbability brims over on every page. As the snails pioneer new places on the wings of migrating geese, he vows to pioneer some new place of his own, maybe a place in his mind.

Of wrens, he writes, “That buzzing sound? That’s the marsh wren . . . . Oh boy; oh boy, oh boy! That defiant creature with the gnarled feet [the rock wren] makes a bed of rocks [a nest] that tinkles like a wind chime . . . I will climb the bluffs and listen to the wren nest.”

Janovy supplements his clear, picture-perfect imagery with occasional drawings. The wrens are among those drawings, as are the swallows. Like termites, cliff swallows live in colonies, and share them with sparrows in the winter when they migrate south.

“Keith County has a way of inundating the human with nature,” he writes then goes on to demonstrate that inundation. We meet fish and snails, termites and protozoa, kingbirds and red-headed woodpeckers and long-billed curlews. We chase kangaroo rats through the sands of Arthur Bay so we can count the lice and chiggers that have attached themselves. We capture Rocky Mountain Toads and scavenge dead carp to study the flies they attract.

“We have approached nature,” he writes, “and we have asked ourselves what there is to be learned from nature, rather than about nature, out in these hills of termite country . . . . We have learned to seine, learned to extract our animals from their environments, and in so doing we have met the ranchers and we have thought seriously about the heavyset women on Omaha streets but also about work and play and the methods for turning work into play and play into work.”

As he talks about the love and joy of his work, he quotes his friend Steve Fretwell: “What should be taught is love and joy; teach your students to love the total world of life and to get joy out of the revelations of any tiny part of it.”

Keith County Journal certainly provides a guide for getting that joy out of nature.

Goose Roundup

One of the projects I got to cover when I worked for the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission was the goose restoration project. At that time, dark geese had nearly disappeared from Nebraska’s Sandhills, so the game management folks had acquired a small flock of Canada geese. They kept them at the Sacramento-Wilcox Game Management Area.

When the geese laid eggs, the managers stole their eggs and replaced them with pantyhose “eggs,” so the geese wouldn’t abandon their nests, and incubated the stolen eggs. Once they had the incubators full, they removed the fake eggs and let the geese raise their broods. Then, when the goslings were old enough to imprint on their home territory, the game biologists rounded them up and took them to the Sandhills.

So here’s how a goose roundup worked: First, keep in mind that these animals are in pre-flight stage and that they are in a very large, fenced pen. You should also know that there is some danger that they will pile up and overheat. A lot of goslings can die that way. So the roundup takes place around dusk.

A whole bunch of game management workers surround the pen and start walking toward the end where they will “work” the geese, shooing the birds ahead of them. Once the goslings are gathered, the workers go get a bite to eat so the birds can settle down and cool off. When they’re all calmed down, the biologists capture them, one by one, sex them, band them and place them in cages. This goes on for hours . . . and hours . . . and more hours. Sometime between midnight and one a.m., with all the birds ready to haul, the guys settle down around the yard light where they’ve been working, talking quietly, maybe smoking a cigarette. Some of them might bet on which toad, among the few gathered round the light, will catch the most mosquitoes in a minute.

Very soon, they wander off to the bunkhouse and pile in, fully clothed, for a nap. By three a.m., they’re on the road with hours to drive by dawn, so they can get the goslings out of the cages before the day heats up. Pickup loads of goslings scatter around the hills and finally, just at dawn, they arrive at selected Sandhill lakes each with a pickup load of goslings in cages. They’ve selected sites with plenty of vegetation, so the birds will have shade when they need it and nesting areas when they return to breed the next spring.

They gently peel the stacked cages off the pickup and carry them to the lakeshore. When they open the cages, it takes the goslings a few moments to realize they’re free to go. Slowly, one by one, they step out of the cages and gather on the water, stretching their wings, gabbling quietly as if to ask, “Hey, do you know where we are? Where are we supposed to go now? What’s out there in the water?”

And they start moving out onto the lake, necks stretched looking around, flapping a wing here and there. A raft of geese, making this Sandhills lake home. They were the long V heading south, gabbling on the wind in the fall, returning to territory their kind had mostly left behind.

It’s For the Birds

Birds are fascinating creatures, don’t you think? They can do something we can’t—fly. And they do it so beautifully, like a dance. I’m not a great fan of starlings, but watching them fly in formation, making split-second turns and swoops, takes my breath away. By my mundane calculations, they should be running into each other and falling out of the sky.

I see fat robins scratching up my grass—looking for worms, I guess. When I shoo them a way, they hop off a few feet and eye me with their one-eyed stare. They’ve made a bare patch in the middle of my yard that I’ve replanted several times. It might just survive this time. They’ve become very bold, standing just a few feet away and watching while I move hoses so they can bathe. When I’m not prompt enough, they bathe in the dog’s water dish, much to the dog’s disgust.

One spring when I still lived on the farm, the wind grabbed my front door as I left the house and broke a panel out. Later, when I came home from buying groceries, I found a wren, building a nest on top of the cabinet on the porch where I kept fencing pliers and such. She got confused when we tried to shoo her out and ended up battering herself silly before she found the open door. She never came back.

My sister had a resident cardinal that noticed her back window. Somehow the glass must have reflected his movements, because he kept attacking it, flying against the glass and bouncing off so he could do it again. It was always about the same time in the evening when the light was just right. Every once in a while, I hear a bird slamming against my patio doors. The impact has to hurt their little bones, but I’m not sure what I can do to take the reflection out of the glass at that time of day.

Once, I read a memoir in which a daughter cleared the hair out of her mother’s brush as she went through her dead mother’s things. She spread those last hairs on the bushes, “For the birds. For their nests.”

I was so touched by that simple act that I began spreading the hair I shed onto the bushes by my back door, not knowing if the birds would use them or not. The hair always disappeared, but it could have just blown away; we have some fierce winds in Nebraska. But a couple of summers ago, the wind blew a nest out of my tree. It was made almost entirely of my hair.

I’m not sure why I kept that nest. I put it in a plastic bag and laid it in a box of crafts materials, and there it remains. But I think about it often. It’s such a strange thing. I’ve tried to make some kind of meaning out of it but it’s just there. It reminds me of birds.

When I work around the yard, I sometimes notice birds watching me, mostly it’s the robins and the mourning doves. I wonder what they’re thinking. Do they have any understanding of what I’m doing when I plant seeds or are they just wondering if I’ll leave soon so they can scratch them up and eat them?

Friends

When I was a kid, we had a little black cocker spaniel we called—Blackie. He was a lonesome little critter, the only dog on the place. My parents gave him to me for my fourth birthday and he promptly peed all over me. I never forgave him.

We lived on a farm, so he lived outside with all the other animals. I really didn’t give him much attention and neither did the rest of the family. He lived on what little affection and attention we occasionally spared him. He was always an afterthought at best.

Since Blackie wasn’t a stock dog, he didn’t have a job on the farm like everybody else and I think he got bored as well as lonesome. So he got in the habit of following the tractor out to the fields when Daddy went to take care of the crops. He particularly liked the hay fields.

One night, when Mom went out to feed him, she smelled a skunk. After that, the skunk came around every night and soon Mom realized Blackie was sharing his feed bowl. We all assumed he was sharing involuntarily—after all, who wants a skunk for a friend? So before long, we’d scared that skunk away and Blackie went back to his solitary existence.

None of us really noticed at first. We had a little runt pig that we brought into the house to warm up. We hand fed him until he caught up with his brothers and sisters and he had the run of the yard. Blackie was always interested in our special cases and he got to spending a lot of time with Runt.

Next thing we knew, Runt was following along when Blackie followed along behind the tractor. Unfortunately for Runt, he wasn’t built for speed. His little, short legs made jumping over corn rows and windrows a real labor and he just couldn’t keep up with Blackie or the tractor and soon a pattern emerged. Dad would drive the tractor out to the field and do his work. As he made the circuits of the field, he’d often see Runt coming when he was going, with Blackie somewhere in between. He’d drive back to the farm yard and turn off the machine, only to hear the pig, about a quarter mile back, squealing his heart out as he ran his legs off, trying to catch up. That came to an end when Dad decided it was time for Runt to live in the pen with the other pigs.

The separation must have broken Blackie’s heart and he moped around the yard for a few days. Then he learned a new trick. He learned to climb a woven wire fence, like a ladder. Soon he was able to join his bosom buddy inside the enclosure. He must have been shocked when he found that Runt loved to wallow, and wallow he did, shoulder deep in hog mud. But, apparently, Blackie would do anything for love. He began coming when he was called for food, completely encrusted with mud, the kind of mud you only find in a hog pen.

I certainly have to give my little dog credit for more tolerance than I had.

 Isn’t it amazing that such absolutely different animals could find a way to form such a close bond when so many of our species—blessed with the power of advanced communication—can’t even talk to one another?

Stalking Wild Things

If Aldo Leopold, the dean of wildlife conservation, sees the salvation of wild things in the individual deeply knowing her own place, then Annie Dillard must be among those individuals. In her 1974 book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard takes her readers on an extended ramble around a few acres of woods, meadows, and creeks in Virginia’s Blue Ridge.

Dillard’s concerns in Pilgrim aren’t so much focused on conservation, though, as in understanding. Beginning with her old tomcat who prowls the nights, then leaps through the window to make bloody paw prints on her body, she turns the lens of her intelligence on nature, red in tooth and claw. As she ponders the irony of paw prints that look like roses, she wonders if, in washing them off, “I’d purified myself or ruined the blood sign of the passover.

Dillard’s journey becomes a trail of seeing. She remembers reading about people, blind from birth, who have had sight restored. Specifically, she remembers one little girl who saw a tree for the first time, identifying it only by touch. She calls it “the tree with the lights in it,” because she doesn’t yet understand the sunlight shining through the leaves of the tree. Dillard attempts a fresh vision, like the little girl’s tree with the lights in it.

She never shrinks from the brutality she sees. As we take our first little walk with her, she spots a frog that doesn’t jump. As she stares at him, he “slowly crumpled and began to sag.” In describing the frog’s carcass, “like a deflating football,” she also notices a giant water bug. It’s the bug that has caused the frog’s cruel demise, injecting it with enzymes that dissolve “the victim’s muscles and bones and organs . . . [and] sucks out the victim’s body, reduced to a juice.” Again and again, she comes back to that frog and its brutal death.

“Cruelty is a mystery,” she writes, “and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull.”

“Nature is, above all, profligate,” she writes. In a chapter entitled “Fecundity,” she discusses the millions, the countless progeny of countless species. “The faster death goes, the faster evolution goes,” she writes. But she wonders if all the death and profligacy is really necessary. At least a part of her wonders if it wouldn’t be more humane to produce fewer and kill less.

As she wanders and ponders, Dillard draws our attention to the minutiae of her particular surroundings. She counsels us to give up our consciousness of our selves as we try to observe other—a tree, a muskrat, a bird, an insect. “What I call innocence is the spirit’s unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object. It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration.” She encourages us to notice the world’s “texture . . . filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity . . .”

So Dillard, in her rapt attention to the detail of her surroundings, her ability to forget her self, has forged a new way to look at nature. Perhaps we could join her.

If All the Beasts Were Gone . . .

“If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of spirit.” That quote, written for an environmental film entitled Home by screenwriter, Ted Perry, sums up my relationship with the hordes of red-winged blackbirds that used to stop through my dad’s windbreak every spring. They would bend the branches of the elms and cottonwoods with their weight and fill the air with sound, a blending from hundreds of throats that sounded like chip-chip-chereeeee. That sound, even just a single bird, brings back the smell of damp loam and the tiny flowers of a bush Grandma called spring bride.

In summer, there were meadowlarks with their two falling notes and a warble or a killdeer, repeating its name across plowed fields. I could lie on my back in a meadow, watching the clouds form and reshape themselves and listen to a tiny, tinny chorus of insect sounds. Or I could walk down the hill west of the house and burrow into a plum thicket in full bloom, smelling sweeter than sugar, and doze to the drowse of bees gathering all that pollen to make honey. When I got back to the house in the evening, I could use up gallons of nail polish covering the welts where chiggers had embedded themselves during all that laying around.

Walking methodically up and down crop rows with a corn knife, whacking at weeds, I was occasionally startled by a bullsnake or even a blue racer slithering among the corn. Sometimes, even now, I reach for an onion or a carrot and withdraw my hand to watch a garter snake escaping. One summer I watched a ball of them mating in the branches of my little forsythia bush.

I remember coming home from a visit to neighbors and following a jackrabbit along the “back road” as he zig-zagged for a mile or more in front of the car, big, black-tipped ears standing straight as flags. I could see them turning and flexing as the rabbit ran his race with my car.

At night, I might spot a coyote skulking along a fencerow as I walked the four miles around the section roads. I could stand in the front yard, under a sky so black it looked like deep pile velvet, broken only by a sprinkling of stars that were blotted out where the prairie hills shouldered into the sky. Right across the road, I could hear coyotes yipping quietly, like a low conversation or a series of greetings at the end of a busy day.

As a young adult, I discovered the rainwater basins. There I could watch ducks taking off and landing on muskrat houses. The pintails with the streamlined white streak up their necks and spiky tails would tear through the sky like fighter jets, while shovelers, with their iridescent green heads and cinnamon chests, lumbered along like bombers. In the evenings, the air would fill with a cacophony of quacks and chatters.

I remember taking pictures inside the goose enclosure at Branched Oak Lake. The geese were being bred to restore native flocks in Nebraska. Photographing a goose on her nest, I lost track of the gander, until he took a run at me, wings outspread. I lost my balance as I tried to rise from a squat and when I was flat on my back, the gander left me to check on his mate. They had a loud gabbling, honking conversation. I assume it was about me. I left while they were still talking.

I have not seen a firefly for decades. I miss them. Like stars you can touch, fireflies used to float around our backyard, waiting for us to catch them so their glow could fill the cup of our hands.

All the creatures that have been part of my life, are common, unremarkable “beasts of the field.” Now, the bees are disappearing; I seldom see a jackrabbit; and ducks throughout the Central Flyway have been in trouble for years. If they all disappeared, my life would be a whole lot less interesting. Would I die? I don’t know. I hope I don’t have to find out.