Getting Outside
Winter Solstice
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside / Our Best American Essays
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From my book Temple Stream [then as now, though the dogs are gone, and a new one in their place, pretty Baila, Elysia not only born since (her birth part of the narrative) but eleven years old!]:
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Winter Solstice
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Starting as early as October, but more likely November in a given year [and not till mid-December in 2011], Temple Stream begins to freeze. Every day the ice changes, grows, shrinks back, advances.
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And every morning the dogs and I hiked down there to have a look, and hiked down again each evening, just to see what had changed. Ice paved the way: the muddy parts of the path were thrown up in frost castles, delicate keeps and crenellations of dirt and ice that collapsed with a satisfying crunch underfoot. The kingfisher was quietly gone, the mallard Continue reading →
Audubon Christmas Bird Count 2011-2012
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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I saw this rainbow bee-eater in Australia, and in my dreams at naptime, but not during the X-mas bird count this year.
This year marks the 112th Audubon Christmas bird count. It was begun in 1900 by my hero Frank M. Chapman to replace the Christmas bird hunt, wherein teams of well-heeled sharpshooters went out on Christmas day to see who could destroy the most birds, which they did in the millions. Even then declining populations of birds had conservationists (if not conservatives) concerned. The bird count caught on, and the deadly version of the hunt ended.
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Last year, according to the Audubon Society count summary, “All counts combined tallied 61,359,451 birds; 57,542,123 in the United States, 3,355,759 in Canada, and 461,569 in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Islands species totals were impressive as well. In the United States during the 111th count, the total tally was 646 species, plus an additional 45 field-identifiable forms.” These numbers can be used to spot trends, find trouble spots, and Continue reading →
Seven Good Things About Fall
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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1. Jumping in leaves.
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I don’t love fall: the shortening days, the daylight-savings axe, the opening of troubling views through once-impenetrable forest, the birds of summer abandoning me, the regressive chores, the incremental turning inward. It’s a big breath in, and hold, and wait, like waiting for death, or at least December 21, when you can breathe out again, and the light grows. Then again, Fall. You don’t burn the leaves anymore, but still you can smell them. The kitchen’s full of food from the garden. It’s back to school, a rhythm I’ve never shaken. Continue reading →
Visual Haiku
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside / Reading Under the Influence
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wild cucumbers
Herewith, a couple of visual haiku. Three lines invoking a season, denoting a shift or change. Silence.
Big Wind
categories: Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics / Getting Outside
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Some of the Towers on Kibby Ridge
I’m writing this column and you’re reading it on a computer powered by coal smoldering somewhere. There may be some diesel fuel thrown in, and some waterpower, and no doubt a little biomass, a spot of nuclear, a few turns of wind. But it’s only been ten years or so that my writing required any power at all beyond breakfast—I went from a Hermes portable typer straight to an old MS-DOS PC by Zenith, enormous learning curve, hours of study, all those arcane pathways, nothing I need to know anymore, six generations of computers later. Continue reading →
Confessions of a Nature Writer
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Let me say this straight out: it’s not easy. You see the fame, the interviews on ET, the magazine covers, the late night chats with the President, all the trappings, and you say, “Man, I could do that, I could write lyrically about plovers and shit.” But then there’s what you don’t see. You don’t see the stress, the constant media scrutiny, the prying into your personal life, the paparazzi chasing after you as you try to take a solitary walk along the beach to contemplate sanderlings and profoundities. What you don’t see is how hard it is to focus on the sublime with all those flashbulbs flashing; what you don’t see is the mudslinging, the interviews, the fierce rivalries with the Matthiessens and Dillards. And of course the sex. A godawful lot of sex.
Perhaps I am revealing a little too much of what goes on behind the scenes in the life of a nature writer. But I do so in the name of honesty so that young people out there who are considering getting into this game will know it’s not all leaves and acorns and quoting Thoreau. Being quietly meditative is the least of it. There are the three martini lunches with Wendell Continue reading →
Green Headed Jelly Babies and Other Fruiting Bodies: Mushroom Day at Bill and Dave’s
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Green headed jelly babies
The woods have been full of mushrooms this year, as I think I’ve mentioned. Not yet a ton of edibles, as in years past, though I passed up a generous fruiting of black trumpets in the Big Reed Reserve, where you generally want to leave things alone. But I took photos, which I hereby share. This is by no means the best mycological fruiting season I’ve ever seen. That has to belong to the late summer of 2006, in the Kit Carson National Forest near Taos. Never before or since have I seen so many species fruiting in such profusion. But Big Reed this past month won the prize for corals, and for species I’d never seen before. Some of which I haven’t yet identified. Photos may not be adequate–but if you know any of these, let me know! 32 species here, and a lot left in my camera… My personal favorite? Green headed jelly babies!
Boletus Edulis?
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Boletus edulis
In my Big Reed post I mentioned all the mushrooms and other fungi we spotted. I’m still working on a more general mushroom post, with tons of photos… But yesterday morning I spotted a tall, lone Boletus edulis under a white pine in a mixed forest on the daily walk. My daily walk–the mushroom was standing still. This time of year the bugs aren’t bad and beetles hadn’t gotten to it, nor slugs. King bolete! I hadn’t seen one for a few years, luck of the weather. This one was fairly pale on top with a heavy stem–every other mushroom on the morning’s walk Continue reading →
Big Reed Forest Reserve
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Ktaadn from the Abol Bridge--still 2 hours north to go!
Thanks to my friend Drew Barton, the forest ecologist immortalized in my my book Temple Stream, I got to go on a trip this past weekend to the Big Reed Forest Reserve, which protects the largest remnant of old-growth forest in New England (and likely well beyond). Our guides and hosts were Nancy Sferra and Dan Grenier, who are, respectively, the Director of Science and Stewardship and the Maine Preserves Manager for the Maine chapter of the Nature Conservancy. When I hear the words old growth my mind tends to conjure up enormous trees and pinecones the size of Volkwagens, but this isn’t the Pacific Northwest, it’s Maine, tough territory for forests and people alike. Instead what we found in the reserve were more than 4500 acres of undisturbed habitats, Continue reading →
Profusion
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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ready for the 4-H sale
The garden’s a grocery store, this time of year. One of my great pleasures is to make meals that involve nothing but a trip down the hill, 100 feet or so and into the wild zone. I’m a chaos gardener—flowers and weeds and veggies and herbs and compost pile and big rocks and lots of sticks and a tall ribbon pole all coexisting with the million insects and a toad or two, plenty rodents, plenty slugs, a couple of snails and at least three snakes.
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Elysia is the garden girl, and if it’s not too hot she’ll spend hours with me, digging, planting, mulching, weeding, and at last harvesting.
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Hurricane Irene knocked the popcorn over, but we’ve propped it back up and it should recover—the ears are well in place, and well along. The Continue reading →
