Outdoors – Page 10

Haying Season

It’s haying time. But I am only an observer. Others work hard in the field to harvest the sweet grasses and the late summer flowers into large, round bales for winter livestock.

All summer I have walked the paths in the fields. The grass has grown up alongside and flowers have blossomed and faded. The meadow larks rise and fall into the depths of the grass as they lure me away from their nest. The red-winged black birds hold onto the tall, stiff reeds of grasses and bob with the wind, watching me as I pass through their domain.

But now the grass is ready to be cut. The bugs will fly up, and the birds will fly down to catch them. The young birds have fledged and are able to take part in the feast. But they will return to a strange earth cut from a sea of waving stems to a crackling stubble.

This is not a bleak picture but a picture of a cycle that has interwoven the grass, the farmer, and the meadow lark and the other birds that live in the grassy fields. It’s late summer, and it’s time to cut the grass.

Last winter I was flying into Dulles airport returning from a job in California. I looked out onto the rolling hills of piedmont Virginia where the fields rise slowly up to meet the Blue Ridge Mountains. There was a dusting of snow over the landscape. Something caught my eye which I had not seen before. In several places dotted on the landscape below were large brown stars on the fields. There was a mixture of designs. Some stars had six arms radiating from a central point. Others had four or five arms. They were all somewhat symmetrical. But what were they? I could see that each star radiated from the crest of a small hill with the arms of the stars reaching out and down the hill. From my perspective of several thousand feet in the air each arm may have been up to 100 feet long. The arms were brown and textured and in some places the snow showed through.

“There’s another one,” I said to myself. Looking further out I could see others as they came into the view of the descending plane. Soon though, the open fields and winter wood lots gave way to suburbs with their tangle of roads and snow dusted roofs.

What I was seeing was the result of haying. The large round hay bales had been taken to the top of small hills and rolled outward to form the stars. The hay was now available to the livestock. Perhaps it was hay cut the year before from the fields I was gazing at now.

The grasses in these fields are harvested under a hay lease from the National Park of which the fields I walk in are a part. The farmer pays the Park Service for the right to harvest the hay which they then use or sell. The funds help support this park and other parks in the national system. And the haying keeps the historic vistas open. It is also part of the centuries old cycle of the ground and the grass and the bird and the farmer. I am a witness to the covenant between man and nature. We care for the Earth and nature, and it supports us in its growth and regrowth.

Robert Frost in his poem Mowing speaks for the scythe whispering to the grass. What secret do they share? It is the secret of the covenant. It is the tale of the blade returning to the grass each year and the rejuvenation of the grass to receive it. It is a promise to return year after year to the haying. And to whisper.

This excellent video tells of the hard work of the haying covenant between the farmer and the Earth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwl-YLvru1s

The art work is based on a screen shot from the referenced video.

Robert Frost’s poem Mowing may be found at the Poetry Foundation site at – https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53001/mowing-56d231eca88cd

An Acorn in my Hand

When I walked outside this morning it was warm and humid but there was promise of change in the air. It is August, and we are well into summer so the temperature and the humidity were not a surprise. But I realized in my first few steps into the day that a change was coming. It was not as bright. The sun had not yet come up. The days are growing shorter. Soon we will have darker mornings and cooler nights. Then the moisture will slip away and we will enter Fall and Winter. There will be no more long, balmy days. But it will be a great time to go outside into the dark and to marvel at creation.

Any day or any hour we can look around and see creation all about us. Yet for me to look up at the clear night sky and see the stars and distant galaxies is always the most fantastic of moments. In the current summer nights Arcturus and Vega rule the night sky. The Summer Triangle of Vega together with the bright stars Altair and Deneb is clearly visible even on less than pristine nights. As we approach Fall, Orion with its brilliant display will rise in the night sky.

Each of these stars and the hundreds of billions of stars in each of the visible galaxies are part of the vastness of creation. Each of them – which we see as points of light of varying brightness – was born out of a cataclysmic explosion and a whirling vortex of hot gasses which coalesced to form stars, galaxies, and for us, our planet, Earth. This is not to imply that ours is the only planet. We know we reside in our star’s system with eight other planets (I am including Pluto) and a myriad of asteroids and comets and minor planets. And beyond the Solar system we have discovered there are a multitude of other stars with planets circling them. All of these are part of the vastness of creation. But we are on this one, and that makes it the most important planet in the universe for us. We are part of it. It is our home. It coalesced from the cosmic dust, and so did we.

When I lie down on the grass under a night sky full of stars I can marvel at creation. I look up and let my mind be swept away to amazing and far distant places. I wonder how we will get to there. Will we be able to wander across other worlds? I know that we will someday make that journey, and I am a little sad that I will not be on that ship. I am sure we will find unknown marvels in the vastness of creation.

I stand up from gazing at the stars and look around me. I see the forms of grass waving around my legs and the outline of trees in the darkness. I walk over to an oak tree, and I bend down and pick up a fallen acorn. I hold it up and study it and realize that inside this acorn are packed all the marvels of the universe, the galaxies, our solar system, and this Earth, our home.

Quail and Sparrow

I submitted my siting to the online bird database. The first thing they told me – and I expected them to tell me this – was that I likely did not see what I told them I saw. But that’s ok, the data managers’ responsibility is to ensure the data submitted makes sense.

What I had seen was a black bellied whistling duck (BBWD). But I knew the bird was way out of its normal neighborhood. The BBWD is a bird of Florida and southeast Texas and up the Mississippi River as far as Tennessee. The map of its range can be seen on the black bellied whistling duck page of the terrific, on-line Cornell guide to birds. But it is not seen in a creek in the hills of Virginia. But that’s where I saw him, or rather them. Three BBWD standing in a creek on those long, very unduck-like legs with their long necks held high.

They looked quite at home in this lowland stream. And I was very much at home in the outdoors walking these woodland paths. I had not seen one of these long-legged ducks before, but I knew them from pictures. I was certain they were not geese. But I was surprised to see them there minding their business while I minded mine. As I watched them they flew off to some other more private stream. I imagine that they were heading back to a location that they are more use to. I watched them until they disappeared through the trees. I stood and continued to watch and listen in case they circled back. They did not.

What is it about birds that has the capability to enrapture us?

I think it’s because they make themselves available to us. They fly overhead. They will sit in a bush – perhaps hidden – and sing to us and to all of creation. They have the capability to remind us of the life and the beauty that is abundant in this world. And knowing this, they also remind us of our responsibility to enjoy and protect them, and to protect areas in which they can live so that they come back year in and year out to nest and sing and give new life and joy. The appearance of a certain bird may be a harbinger of spring. Or it may be an indication of a change in the weather, as gulls flocking inland may be warning of a storm. Their morning songs bring up the sun. And their last flights of evening bring the return to the nest and the calm of the night.

There are two birds in which I am currently interested as a volunteer citizen-scientist for a national park. I help with the park’s bird observation and management programs. It’s great. I have a reason to be out in the woods and the open fields. And it takes me out for the sunrise and into the new day that follows. I often hike to my listening stations in the pre-dawn darkness. It takes me out in the Spring and in the Fall and my task is – to listen to the birds sing.

I listen for the gentle call of the Northern Bobwhite Quail and the often hidden and reclusive Henslow’s Sparrow, a little bird of the open fields. The surveys each bird are repeated in selected areas along specific transects with established stations. It requires standing still and listening; it requires patience. Often I do not hear the quail whether it be the well-know “bob-white” call or the more muted nesting calls that might be heard. Nor do I often hear the Henslow’s Sparrow the thin, reedy notes that might rise and fall in the tall grass. But that’s all part of being outside. The birds are allowing me to share their home. I come with respect and quietness. And I am rewarded, if not by the song of my subject bird, by the call of all their feathered partners of the woods and fields.

Listening and surveying for these birds is part of an overall program to determine the health of the local environment and its ability to support these birds and birds similar to them. If the birds are present it means that they have an adequate food supply and have a place to perch, or hide, or loaf. I love that term and often picture the quail loafing around their nesting area. However, absence of these birds indicates that they and other birds may not find the food or cover or level of calmness that they like in order to take up and maintain residence in the area. As noted above we have a responsibility to ensure that we maintain and conserve areas where wildlife may thrive and we can go and loaf ourselves.

And the Whistling Ducks, they are welcome to come back anytime, but I agree with the purveyors of protocol on the bird site. This is not a normal occurrence, but it is the normal and the not-normal that continue to draw me outside to enjoy the birds, and the woods, streams and open fields.

Halcyon!

Picture is taken from Jules Breton’s painting “The Song of the Lark” from the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.