Foibles of the $47,000 fish: the Connecticut River Atlantic salmon restoration, a poor return on investment

(Note: edited versions of the following OpEd appeared in the Daily Hampshire Gazette on February 6, 2010, and in the Greenfield Recorder on February 3, 2010.)

“There will always be a hatchery component to the program.” That statement came at the Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission’s December meeting.  Hatchery production must continue forever in order to produce a few returning salmon—74 fish this year.  The restoration program is now admittedly fish-farming.  This prompted the USFWS Region 5 CRASC representative to ask about hatchery costs: “How much are we spending per year?” Answer: “$ 3 – 4 million, for personnel and supplies alone.” ”How much does that amount to per fish?” That answer was left hanging.

In my dreams the Connecticut is as it was in 1991—a four-state river recovering its age-old biological connection to the sea.  May currents met a run of almost a million fish: 520,000 agitated American shad and 410,000 blueback herring lifted upstream at Holyoke dam.  There were 41,000 lampreys and a tiny return of 200 hybrid-Atlantic salmon.  Fifty-five thousand shad pushed past the dam at the Turners Falls-Northfield Mountain hydro complex; a record 37,000 shad wriggled up the Vernon ladder to Vermont and New Hampshire.  This was a legacy for coming generations.

The answer is $47,000 per salmon.  Federal hatchery expenditures alone came to $47,000 per fish in 2009.  Millions more went to genetic tests, smolt study, inoculations, electronic tagging, tracking and recapture—and state hatcheries cranking out salmon fry.  Add-in infrastructure and personnel and you can guess at a real cost per fish.

More questions arose after a presentation by USFWS researchers investigating if salmon returns would improve if hatcheries raised output–pouring millions more fry and smolts into the river.  Models predicted no more than about 50 additional fish would result from the different scenarios.  In no case would more than about 300 hybrid salmon return upstream.  The study also asked whether costs and low returns would continue to be acceptable to the public—and suggested public acceptance might be swayed if more spawned-out hatchery salmon were dumped in rivers for fishing.  “You are talking about a put-and-take fishery?” CRASC’s Chairman responded, incredulously.

“Put-and-take” is stocking fish in water bodies for anglers to yank out.  This is how the salmon program essentially works now.   Expenses aside, hatchery fish are massively disruptive to ecosystems and natural populations.  The difference here is there are no real returns to catch—though you could start charging $100,000 for a hybrid salmon license.  This led to another question: “What are the goals of this program?”  There was a lot of looking at shoes until the Connecticut representative offered, “Well, we didn’t have a specific number in mind.”

In 1967 this program set 38,000 as its goal for returning salmon–with an annual recreational catch of 9,600 fish.  The target for shad: one million at Holyoke, 850,000 at Turners Falls, and 750,000 passing Vernon dam.  Their objectives were clear: create “high quality sport fishing” and “provide for the long-term needs of the population for seafood.”  Despite its name CRASC remains responsible for all the fish in the herring family here–the core of the runs: alewives, blueback herring and the American shad, “founding fish” of this river’s restoration.  These fish fed people; an extinct salmon strain never anchored anyone’s larder.

But CRASC doesn’t stress accountability—laying claim instead to hatchery output and the latest low figures coming upstream as accomplishments.  A salmon-focused program with “no specific number in mind” costs our river dearly.  Today, two-thirds of that once-riotous shad bloom is gone; a scant 1 – 2 % of the tens of thousands of American shad that reach Turners Falls now squeeze through.  Just 16 passed Vernon dam in 2009–adjacent to warmed effluent poured in the river by Entergy’s nuclear plant.  Only 39 herring swam past Holyoke in 2009.  None have reached New Hampshire in a decade.

Occasionally I talk a little philosophy with Dr. Boyd Kynard of Amherst, MA.  Boyd’s a brilliant guy and a world-class expert on fish behavior, restoration, and the Connecticut’s migratory species.  This “retired” professor emeritus and USFWS biologist has his feet wet most of the year–consulting with China’s EPA-chief about Yangtze dams; fish passage on the Amazon; endangered sturgeon in Europe; or dam-disrupted ecosystems on the Columbia.  Something he once said about the resources going to lab study of juvenile salmon struck me, especially from someone not prone to generality, “I bet more money has been spent studying this single life-stage of this one species of fish, than the money spent on all the fish species in the world.”

It’s all about priorities.  There are bright, thoughtful people at CRASC too–people who say they would like to see a change of course.  I believe them.  The big problems are now acknowledged at the table: fish elevators 10 years past-due at Turners, with fluctuations from the Northfield plant scuttling passage at that dam; thousands of young shad killed when FirstLight drained its canal in September; thermal effluent dumped in at Vermont Yankee—with record low passage at the Vernon ladder.  These are all problems good on-the-ground science could begin turning around–on a path to a river we all could be proud of.

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Karl Meyer’s “The State of the Snake” appears in the spring issue of Sanctuary.  He tackles nighthawks and bald eagles for Birdwatcher’s Digest in May and November.

Stagnation at Turner Falls © 2008 by Karl Meyer

“It will not be forgotten by some memory that we were contemporaries,” Thoreau, on shad blocked by a dam.

I first watched a riot of migrating American shad nervously school in the fishway windows at the Holyoke dam over a quarter century ago. That Connecticut River was brimming with life: agitated blueback herring, slithering sea lamprey, fidgeting American shad. It so inspired me, I have scarce missed a season since, visiting three and four times annually from mid-May to June. Sadly, that great migration is coming undone. Each spring sees less fish. From the first half million shad tallied there in 1984 and 720,000 witnessed in 1992, to just 153,000 arriving in spring 2008. From the 630,000 blueback herring counted at Holyoke in 1985, to just four score and nine last year.

In 1955 the nation’s first fish passage success saw 4,899 American shad lifted past the Holyoke dam, 86 miles from the sea. A simple, bucket-type elevator had restored a spawning run blocked since 1849. From Holyoke it was just 36 river miles to the next dam, Turners Falls—a barrier that would surely fall quickly to this elegant solution. An 1872 Supreme Court ruling against Holyoke mandated fish passage at dams. It recognized shad runs as a rightful resource of hungry upstream citizens. It meant hope for the suite of fish that had used the Connecticut’s spawning highway to and from the sea for millennia. They included federal trust fish—the endangered shortnose sturgeon, the shad, and the blueback herring, plus migrating eels and sea lamprey.

Today, shad runs at Holyoke are half what they were in the 1990’s; herring are gone. The most recent 5-year average for shad has dropped 42% compared to 1999-2003—from 267,000 to 155,000 fish. Thirty-six miles upstream at Turners Falls dam, the center of linked to hydro facilities including Northfield Mountain and Cabot Station, passage has plummeted over 80% since 1999, when energy deregulation came to those sites. Passage there hovers near 1%, yet the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission listed the Connecticut’s shad population as “stable” in 2007

To understand you have to look to the 42 year-old bureaucracy emphasizing the reestablishment of an extinct salmon run on the Connecticut. It began in 1967 on the heels of the 1965 Anadromous Fish Conservation Act, when the US Bureau of Sports Fisheries and Wildlife, the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries and fish commissioners of CT, MA, VT and NH assumed responsibility for the restoration and preservation of migratory fish here. That mission–extended by Public Law 98-138 in1983, recognized the Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission, CRASC, as the agency of record. CRASC has a Shad Studies Subcommittee and a Fish Passage Subcommittee.

Driven by sport fishing interests, that agency focused on the Connecticut’s only missing species—the restoration of a leaping, but extinct strain of cold-loving salmon to a warming Connecticut. Though shad and herring naturally range from Labrador and Nova Scotia south to Florida, they received poor step-child status. Market research for 1967 projected a yearly harvest of 9,600 salmon–bringing $120 per fish from high-end anglers. Two foot long shad were a bargain at $3 each, with a projected harvest of 150,000 annually. After 42 seasons, 82 salmon returned past Holyoke in 2008.

Despite millions spent on research, hatcheries, genetics, and Byzantine stocking programs, more American shad were lifted at Holyoke in 1955 than all the salmon returned there in the program’s history. The Connecticut’s salmon strain was extinct by 1815. A pioneering species, it was a recent transplant–its southward spurt the result of an all-too-current phenomenon: climate change. Salmon biology and archeological data point to an arrival on the changing Atlantic currents of a brief, northern hemisphere climate aberration, the Little Ice Age, 1400 AD – 1800 AD.

In 1992 Catherine Carlson said this in a dissertation in the Anthropology Department at University of Massachusetts. Carlson was doing masters archeology work at the University of Maine when she was surprised by the absence of salmon bones in digs at coastal, estuarine, and inland-river fishing sites. Her work impressed professor emeritus Dena Dincauze, head of UMass, Amherst’s Anthropology Department, who recruited her to continue that research at UMass.

Carlson’s thesis, The Atlantic Salmon in New England History and Prehistory: Social and Environmental Implications, showed the salmon’s importance in colonial New England had been largely over-stated by sport fish minded interpreters. My own research at Antioch New England University in 1995 bore that out after extensive examination of the Sylvester Judd (1789-1860) Manuscript at the Forbes Library in Northampton, MA. Judd is a primary source for colonial history, natural history and genealogy of Connecticut River towns from northern Connecticut to Turners Falls. His records and interviews with men who had fished opposite Holyoke in the 1750s and 1760s led him to conclude salmon “were always few in number compared to the shad.”

Carlson surveyed seventy-five digs across the northeast in which fish bones had been identified at least down to their genus. A 5,000 year record revealed regular use of shad and river herring as a food source at many locations. But just a single salmon bone from Maine was positively identified. At one Turners Falls site, 590 fish bone fragments were uncovered. All were shad or river herring.

Carlson outlined the Little Ice Age here—showing the salmon’s migration this far south was driven by that brief climate oscillation. Dams and pollution were minor factors in its Connecticut demise–as salmon still survived further north on Maine’s long-dammed Penobscot. Her findings were not welcomed at CRASC. Their 25 year-old effort—annually hatchery-raising millions of salmon fry from eggs; fattening smolts, and stocking it all in tributaries was languishing. Carlson had noted the taxpayer costs, $80 million by 1989, and that “One Fish and Wildlife study has predicted that costs between $120 million and $450 million will be spent between 1989 and 2008 to make the restoration effort successful.”

“Some of them were quite hostile to me,” Dr. Carlson recalls sixteen years later. After leading departments at two universities she’s now a consultant in her native Vancouver, B.C. “No amount of manipulating is going to change the environmental conditions for the reintroduction of that fish,” she says. Climate science agrees. Asked why her work didn’t receive its full due, she cites several factors, “First, it was archeology, not biology; you are trying to prove a negative—that salmon weren’t there.” Being female in a male dominated field wasn’t helpful, “It was all political. It didn’t have much to do with the actual science. My sense is that they were just so heavily invested in it.”

But Carlson’s findings couldn’t be rejected out of hand, particularly since Dr. Boyd Kynard, fisheries biologist at the USGS’s Conte Anadromous Fish Lab in Turners Falls was on her committee. An associate UMass professor, Kynard had a reputation as an expert in migratory fish behavior and fish passage. Today he consults with governments on fish passage and rare sturgeon species on major rivers in China, Europe and Brazil. His credentials couldn’t be impugned. Carlson’s work remains largely unchallenged today. In 2002, her “absent-salmon” conclusions received note in John McPhee’s shad tribute,” The Founding Fish.”

This spring thousands of Connecticut Valley kids will raise salmon eggs in school–guided by USFWS personnel, trout organizations, teachers and college instructors who recruit many for fry stocking. Programs like Adopt a Salmon and the Atlantic Salmon Egg Rearing Program (ASERP) are neatly tailored to classroom math and science requirements. It’s an easy fit for teachers and has great PR value for a restoration program always lobbying for funds. The USFWS Connecticut River Coordinator sometimes dresses as a salmon at these programs, which reach into167 watershed schools. In Maryland today, kids are hatching shad and raising American eels in their classrooms—learning, at least, about the real problems of viable species on local rivers.

Adult, spawned-out hatchery salmon are stocked to lakes, ponds and rivers in watershed states here. This agency PR gives weekend fishing families and trophy anglers a taste for big introduced fish, but no context for understanding faltering native stocks. But, complexities are mounting. Didymo, an introduced, smothering algae, a.k.a. “rock snot”, was recently found above the federal salmon hatchery on the White River in Bethel, Vermont. Didymo carpets river bottoms, choking off oxygen. Since the White River is used as a direct hatchery water source, its operations were temporarily shut down–lest didymo be transported via stocking.

This spring none of the eggs; six-million fry, and hatchery smolts seeded into Connecticut River tributaries will come from “wild” salmon stock. All the “wild” sea-run salmon had to be destroyed a year back because a highly contagious virus, IPN, was found in salmon at federal hatcheries. Infectious Pancreatic Necrosis, deadly to fry and smolts, is a by-product of fish farming. Farmed salmon are escaping ocean pens and infecting North Atlantic strains. IPN got into the new salmon hybrids migrating back to the Connecticut—fish that are recaptured for breeding. “Biosecurity” programs are now deployed at all hatcheries, as stocking programs are potential vectors for new disease.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that CRASC has known for 30 years that some of the biggest restoration problems center at the fishways and generating facilities linked at Turners Falls dam. They helped create them. In the late 70’s, those state fish commissioners and federal officials insisted Northeast Utilities install fish ladders there based on Pacific salmon runs on the massive Columbia River—this, despite evidence those ladders might not work for shad and herring. Two ponderously-long ladders and a narrow gatehouse exit were installed at Turners Falls in 1980. Millions were spent. The few arriving salmon passed easily, but just 10% or less of arriving shad succeeded.

Kept quiet, that single-species blunder effectively locked meaningful runs out of Vermont and New Hampshire habitats for at least the next twenty years. Completion of those prescribed fishways prevented any revisit of the issue for two decades under the site’s 40-year FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) license, which expires in 2018. FERC regulates operations at mainstem facilities and is tasked with enforcing protections for federal trust fish. Licenses can be reopened and FERC can halt operations if conditions injure runs. FERC receives information from CRASC–which recently characterized the Connecticut’s shad population as “relatively stable.”

Incredibly, a 5-year, CRASC partnered study begun in 1999 by the USGS’s Conte Fish Lab found that half the shad passing Holyoke “attempt but fail” to make it past Turners Falls: “Passage of American shad through the fishway complex at Turners Falls is poor (less than 1% in some years), and may be having a substantial limiting effect on the Connecticut River population as a whole.” This profound development—shad had plummeted from over 10,000 shad annually to around 2,000, was also left below decks. That drop was on the heels of energy deregulation at the hydro facilities owned by Northeast Utilities throughout the study. Some 70,000 shad were likely turned away at Turners Falls last spring.

What changed to cause the drop between 1999 and 2000 that continues to this day? Possibly something to do with the newly-deregulated, electricity “spot market” generation at the Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Project, sister operation to the Turners Falls dam and canal. Just five miles upstream, Northfield generates upwards of 1,000 megawatts of electricity by pumping water out of the Connecticut’s bed and into a 5.5 billion gallon mountaintop reservoir, and sending it back through turbines in downstream surges according to demand and spikes in the market price. Turbines for the 300 acre reservoir can reverse from sucking up water to sending millions of gallons downstream in minutes.

Water level fluctuations in that Turners Falls “pool” average 3.5 feet daily, but can range to 9 – 10 feet in the course of weekly operations. Those pumping and flushing effects through Turners Falls are felt by migrating shad and the river’s only breeding population of endangered shortnose sturgeon–slugs of water that must be reacted-to by operators at the Holyoke dam, 36 miles downstream.

Whatever the cause of the new Turners crash, urgency isn’t apparent at CRASC’s public meetings. Annually there is tinkering at the fishways; and a few truckloads of shad are dumped upstream to maintain a biological pulse for the run. But the partnership–the USFWS, Conte Lab, the National Marine Fisheries Service, reps from CT, MA, NH, and VT, watched this new disaster unfold and never brought it forward as their public trust. They left the public ignorant about the fish; the river. In fact they chose to “throttle back” shad monitoring at Turners, later stating in an April 3, 2008, discussion of failed herring returns, “There is less concern about the shad population since it has been relatively stable, though at a lower level than historic peaks.”

CRASC didn’t press FERC to intervene. FERC–who could reopen the license, shut down operations, or force a return to conditions that recently squeezed 10,000 shad through Turners, didn’t enforce. The eroding shad migration on the Connecticut can apparently wait for 2018.

Recently Dr. Raymond Bradley spoke on climate change here at Greenfield Community College. Decades back Bradley partnered in groundbreaking science–using polar ice core data to substantiate early signs of climate change. Included in those findings was a now-notorious “hockey stick graph,” vividly depicting spikes in greenhouse gases and temperatures. The Bush Administration tried to quash those findings. In 2007 Bradley, who directs the UMass Climate Research Center–along with Al Gore and other partnering climate scientists, received the Nobel Peace Prize.

This night Bradley, my “Climatology” instructor in the late-70s, has more sobering news—that Massachusetts and Vermont temperatures will likely align with the climate of today’s North Carolina and Virginia in just two generations. It’s a cold comfort message to deliver–one that would be small solace to Catherine Carlson, I’m sure. Still, basic biology shows that American shad would be at home in those climates; and, with help, herring could be at home there too.

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Karl Meyer is author of Wild Animals of North America, winner of a 2008 Teachers’ Choice Award for Children’s Books. His latest, Dog Heroes, is out from Storey Publishing.

Towards a New River; or, How to keep a dead fish alive

© 2009 by Karl Meyer

Charles Darwin was born in 1809, the year the last wild fish from a minor strain of cold-loving salmon died out on a warming Connecticut River. Half a century later, On the Origin of Species placed evolutionary theory and reasoned science at the forefront of how we perceive our place among the world’s plants and animals. For 42 years now over half a billion public dollars has been spent turning the Connecticut into a four-state science experiment to create a new strain of “wild” Atlantic salmon from hatchery spawned fish. It has failed. It’s time for a new idea on the Connecticut River.

Predictions in 1967 from the bureaucracy that became today’s Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission (CRASC) promised an annual angler’s dream of 9,600 returning salmon. Returns average 140 fish. Einstein said insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Today, without the six-million hatchery fry dumped into tributaries annually by fisheries biologists, trout interests, scout leaders, teachers and school kids, the few fish that limp back each year would die off in an evolutionary heartbeat.

For decades CRASC has been responsible for the Connecticut’s age-old runs of American shad and blueback herring—part of a suite of “federal trust” fish that include the shortnose sturgeon. The herring run is essentially dead—from 630,000 fish passing Holyoke in 1985, to 89 fish returned in 2008. In 1992, Holyoke hoisted 720,000 shad at its lift. A decade back runs averaged 300,000 fish. Just 153,110 American shad returned in 2008.

Two hundred years after Darwin’s birth its time to stop thinking we are smarter than rivers; smarter than fish. The Connecticut was the southern-most river in the salmon’s biological footprint. In 1992, Dr. Catherine Carlson’s UMass anthropology thesis revealed a gaping absence of salmon in the region’s archeological record. Thousands of bones covering a 5,000 year sweep were identified as shad or herring. Across all sites–including 590 bones from two sites at Turners Falls, MA, just a single bone from Maine was positively identified as salmon.

Scores of Connecticut River town histories record 17th, 18th and 19th century farmers crowding riversides each May, confident in leaving with a supply of shad. But salmon was a new visitor. It arrived with the Little Ice Age–a period of cold winters and brief, chilling summers which lasted in New England from the mid-1600s to the early 1800s. When cold conditions warmed, salmon runs died out, helped off the stage by the first dams across the Connecticut. They persisted on the colder, dammed rivers in Maine.

The salmon limping back today are evolved in tanks, their genetics guided by computers. They are not what are best for our river. Hatchery fish mask the real problems of rivers—foundering native populations, warming currents, deteriorating habitats, and blocked access upstream and down. Hatcheries are now potential dispersal points for exotic plagues like deadly IPN and smothering didymo—which recently caused closures at federal sites in Sunderland, MA and Bethel, VT..

The historic significance of salmon here has long been overblown by lobby interests wielding clout far in excess of their numbers. In 2008 CRASC representatives from the US Fish & Wildlife Service scheduled “outreach” visits to Congressional offices at a rate of more than one per week. State fisheries managers annually dump fat, spawned-out hatchery salmon in lakes to whet angler appetites for big, exotic fish. Teachers bring salmon eggs into classrooms, where thousand of kids participate in mini-hatchery programs tailored to math and science goals. Shad and herring losses go unexplored.

It’s time to stop holding the Connecticut hostage to this experiment–conducted largely without public input, published budget data, or notice of public meetings. All but 1% of migrating shad are now blocked at Turners Falls–virtually next door to the Dept. of Interior’s million-dollar Conte Fish Lab created to protect runs of “federal trust” fish. That information never reached the public.

In October, Dr. Ray Bradley, Director of the UMass Center for Climate Studies, spoke at Greenfield Community College. I had Ray for “Climatology” in 1979. He is one of the team of scientists awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for documenting unprecedented climatic warming—information the Bush Administration suppressed. Our new President believes in evolution, science, and eliminating programs that don’t make sense. Dr. Bradley illustrated his talk that night with a graph showing Vermont and Massachusetts mirroring the climates of Virginia and North Carolina just two generations hence—hardly salmon country. Ages ago shad and blueback herring evolved to spawn in rivers as far south as central Florida. Its time we evolved too.

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Karl Meyer’s Wild Animals of North America won a 2008 Teachers’ Choice Award for Children’s Books. His “Turners Falls Turnaround” is in the spring issue of Sanctuary.

Confluence: entry one, January 28, 2009

I spent an hour walking in the snowy woods along the edges of a ridge that presides above the confluence of the Connecticut and Deerfield rivers. I walk there frequently. It’s a jumble of shorter and longer trails, some up, some down. You can pick your length and pretty much get what you want from a walk just ten minutes beyond the center of town. It’s an extension of the Pocumtuck Ridge, an ancient basalt escarpment that extends two miles to the north, and maybe six miles south of here. It’s interrupted by the water gap here where the Deerfield was forced to enter the Connecticut from an upstream angle due to this ancient rock formation. There is energy along this corridor.

As I walk the morning is cold, in the teens and sunny, but otherwise unremarkable. A few tufted titmice are beginning to hold forth with extended notes, foretelling their anticipation of spring—still months distant. If you take any one of the trails diverging from the main paths you can generally have a solitary walk in these woods. Noise from the outside world is not excluded completely, but it is generally a distant muffle against the sound of your own footsteps. As I circle down and then up along the shoulder of the ridge tumbling toward the Deerfield, I note through the trees for the first time that the river, half-obscured by my angle looking south from this ridge, is snow covered and frozen. I don’t recall that from last year—this being my second winter walking these trails.

What are remarkable, apart from the prints of snowshoes, skis, people and dogs along this trail, are the easily identifiable deviations of the wild creatures. Of most note are the tracks of coyotes which lead off in bee-line fashion at steep angles from the beaten paths, veering toward ridge lines and bounding down hillsides as they go about their wild business. It is pair bonding time for this species. These woods are busy each night as dusk descends. Rising up the hill from a site near the mouth of the Deerfield, comes a steady low hum and then banging echoes of a metal recovery works. Beyond that and opposite on the Deerfield sits the sprawling and sometimes busy track grid of the East Deerfield rail yard—still a significant switching station here in the Northeast. From there the rumbles of idling locomotives and the chain-slamming start-ups of train vibrate the air.

As I finish my loop here I am angling up hill with a view north toward a gap in the ridge with pure blue sky looming above. Something pulls my eyes in that direction and I’m struck with the absolute blue of the sky spreading beyond that snow covered lookout. It is such a deep blue I am momentarily dumbfounded—the stuff that you might pick out of the pure selections offered from a computer program for brochure printing. Only this is the real thing: deep, clear, clean blue. It is a saturated natural canvass, and one that I scarcely remember coming across before. There must be some interplay of sun, snow, and ridgeline color, and the angle of late-morning January light that has caused it, but all I can think is that it is magnificent.

I’m trying to capture this in my head, azure?—cerulean??—I’ve never been good with color descriptors. A speck glides into view against that canvass. It slides across with a flap or two of its wings, and then simply floats northward above the ridge. Though it is perhaps a seven hundred feet up there is no mistaking this raptor. White tail, white head, dark body—strong, flat-winged glide: bald eagle. I count back in my head and realize that this will be the ten year anniversary of the return of naturally nesting bald eagles to the shores of the Connecticut. That nest is less than three miles from here. It’s possible that’s where this bird is heading. Against the blue I’m reminded of the eleventh hour attempt by the Bush Administration to turn back many of the tenets that brought this species back here for the first time in over a century—the Endangered Species Act.

A Fun Depression: blogging through

Entry 1: January 25, 2009

Since early fall–when the scale of this financial debacle was becoming glaringly clear, I have mentioned to friends the idea of making this a “fun depression.” Heck, by then most of us had already been steeped in a stew of depression for the past eight years. The idea of a depression was nothing novel. In all cases the “fun” idea was favorably received: a small attempt at a bailout for the psyche for what was at hand—and of course for those gloomy days predicted on the horizon. So, this is my call to arms: let’s have a fun depression!

This one doesn’t have to be your parent’s depression; your grandparent’s market crash. Let’s wade into this downturn with the idea that there’s room for a few laughs. There is no need for the rest of us here in the rabble to OWN the damned thing. Let’s have a little fun with this ugly puppy, engineered by the greedy. Let’s let THEM be grim for a bit, and we’ll keep plugging along with a joke, and a story, and a grin from time to time. Like the last one, this one just ain’t ours. And once again, all we have to do is figure out how to endure it!

I’ve been trying to decide on a first Fun Depression entry, and it’s been somewhat daunting. You don’t want to head out on a downturn with a wrong turn. But then, over-thinking things has a whole rash of its own pitfalls. So, here goes:

Blog One: “A lone swallow in a dreary winter.”

“A lone swallow in a dreary winter,” I heard someone use this phrase this morning on the radio. It’s possible you’ve already guessed the chap was British. I was delighted upon hearing the phrase—so descriptive, quotable, delivered in that clipped way. I looked it up, but could not track down a specific reference. Still, it does have a literary flavor. His subject matter—birds, seasonality? Actually, and you might have guessed this too, he was talking about the financial market. That lone swallow referred to was a British bank called Barkley’s, I believe. It appears they actually made some money this quarter—as opposed to other banks in England teetering on the edge of default. Hence–his metaphor.

But gosh I liked hearing it. Loved thinking about that “lone swallow” out there. Here in Western Massachusetts the idea of a swallow—flocking, or on its own, in a winter with a good foot-plus of snow cover on the ground, is quite the image. A swallow set against these sub-freezing January days is a cheery thought indeed. Too bad he had to confuse such a splendid bird family with the cold realities of the banking industry. That is a mixed metaphor. Still, you can’t argue with his dreary winter characterization. I’m not quite sure why I let these “market” programs into my living room any more—they were the ones that helped whistle us right into the graveyard. I’ll have to be quicker on the button next time.

And yet, I like a lone swallow in a dreary winter. It has a utility to it, as well as some poetry. It could be describing that last swig from the bottle in some chilled January cabin in the north—or an apartment like my own for that matter. The beginning of a novel? The final act of a desperate debtor or market manipulator?? In the end, I’ve taken it to refer to my own winter circumstance. Here, I’ve deconstructed it into a mix of the literal and figurative in my own life: my little, suction-cupped bird feeder, fastened to the front window of my living room. It has been there for six weeks, full of seed. I saw two chickadees visit that first week, and the shadow of what might have been a nuthatch. Though it’s still full, they have been the sum total of my feathered visitors. I’d put the thing up to brighten my dark winter days.

As it turns out, they were my lone swallow in a dreary winter. Plural, of course. And yet, I haven’t minded missing them—the birds. Much. I’d debated picking up this rather modest thing—a stand alone perch that holds maybe a cup of sunflower seed smack against the middle of a west window. The neighborhood is rabid with gray squirrels, so this was the only site where I could hope to dodge the marauding rodents in any meaningful way. And, I knew having a few birds bounce around just beyond the glass pane would brighten these long, cold days.

So, I spent a little cash—which is somewhat scarce at the moment, and bought both feeder and seed. Once installed and filled, I’d waited. And waited. It took most of a week before I caught the quick flit and perch of first one chickadee, then another. They came in succession, stopping, glancing around for predators, then craning in for a seed and quickly flying off. “I’m in business,” I thought. These visits came closely on the heels of that shadowy retreat of what I believe was a nuthatch (white breasted, likely—I just got a glimpse.)

Unexpectedly, sadly, that was it. All she wrote. A lone swallow in a dreary winter. Day in and day out, that little, clear-plastic feeder sits smack in the center of my living room window–suctioned on invisible glass like some strange space ship hanging in the air. It’s still full of seed and promise. Day in, day out, it remains unvisited by birds; unmolested by squirrels. I guess I’ve taken to seeing it as a fun depression’s first artifact. It fits the bill. Its promise was of purple finches, goldfinches, chickadees, cardinals, maybe the odd red-breasted nuthatch. What it delivered were two minute- waltzes, from a pair of skittish visitors. Lone swallows in a dreary winter.

Well, toughen up old chap. Chin up old boy. Barkley’s is paying a dividend, and if I look far enough across the parking lot my friends Tracey and Michael have a gaggle of birds at their feeders. Perhaps I should be grateful there’s been no run on my bank.

In the end, my feeder is just exactly what it was when I brought it here: the promise of birds. This is Plato’s quintessential bird feeder; his perfect chair. It’s purely, the notion of itself. The longer it sits there, the more I appreciate it. It’s a time capsule, really, at this point. In a week it will be February. The sap will run. Six weeks from then, it will be March—my little space-ship feeder still suctioned and full at the window. A week after that, we’ll be approaching the equinox. I may just be looking out through the window past that feeder then, and there it may be—a lone swallow in a dreary winter. As promised. This one will be a tree swallow.

Fall’s well-fed bears, by Karl Meyer

I live bear country, Franklin County, west of the Connecticut River. Rolling up into the heart of the Berkshires are the deep woods and mature nut and pine tree habitats that state biologists say are prime bear habitat. And black bears are thriving in Massachusetts, after their near extinction here in the 19^th century. They’ve long since recrossed the Connecticut, swimming east. And today, though a good deal of it is sub-optimal suburban habitat, most people living beyond the crescent of Boston’s Rt. 128 again reside in towns visited by bears. Fearful of humans; largely hidden, they are out fattening up for hibernation right now.

“For bear, they be common, being a great black kind of bear which be most fierce in strawberry time, at which time they have young ones.” Thus wrote William Wood in New England’s Prospect, published in London in 1634, on the heels of his four-year New World sojourn. Residing in the fledgling settlements along today’s North Shore, of bears nearing winter, Wood observed, “Food being scant in those cold and hard times, they live only by sleeping and sucking their paws, which keepeth them as fat as they are in summer.”

And fat they must be. In late fall bears need to head to den sites with enough accumulated calories to cover the 30% of body weight that simply vanishes with the energy expended in hibernation. That fat is in large part the result of the black bear’s age-old association with nut trees: white oak, beech, red oak, hickory, and chestnut. These are the preferred fall buffet for bears. But if things get tough—if the mast crop fails as it does cyclically, black bears are wonderfully resilient. They’ll make up part of that deficit with grubs, roots, leaves, seeds, and berries, and supplement–or even substitute that lost forage with trips to isolated corn fields, orchards, or unsecured trash bins.

“Bears are omnivores,” emphasizes Massachusetts wildlife biologist Jim Cardoza, who has been the state’s Bear Project Leader since 1970, “They eat almost everything.” But wild game is rare, he says, “It’s hard for them to prey on live animals.” They do some scavenging though, and on rare occasions easy opportunities may tempt older males and they’ll prey on a penned-up goat, or get into a cage full of rabbits. Mostly it’s the nut crop they want in fall—the mast, plus wild cherry and the other succulent forest foods that Cardoza calls soft mast. “If necessary,” he notes, “they’ll eat whatever is: one, abundant; two, nutritious; and three, tastes good.”

Trackers and photographers often study bears. Ask MassWildlife photographer Bill Byrne and retired professional tracker—now turned nature photographer, Paul Rezendes, what would be heaven for a fall black bear, and their portraits nearly merge. Years of anticipating the needs of their quarry solicit these settings, “I think of a beautiful, old beech forest with some big canopies and big, old hemlocks—which are really good for cubs,” says Rezendes, “If there’s trouble the cubs and that bear can go up into the hemlocks and you’ll never see them. We’ll call that bear paradise.” Unapprised, Bill Byrne almost mirrors the image, simply adding in oaks, “A secluded oak and hemlock ridge, with a bumper crop of acorns and a scattering of beechnuts. The hemlock would provide security–I could feed undisturbed all day.”

A few decades after William Wood’s New England’s Prospect was published, a minister’s wife in Lancaster, Massachusetts was roused by a fierce attack on an icy February 10, 1676. It led to her three-month captivity among rebelling Native Americans. Mary Rowlandson lived and struggled alongside the embattled Nipmucs, Narragansetts, Wampanoags, and Pocumtucks of King Philip’s War until she was ransomed in early May. She experienced their desperate, subsistence flight from the standpoint of a virtual slave–retelling her story in The Captivity and Restoration of Mary Rowlandson, a colonial “best seller.” Rowlandson was dealt indignity, abuse and hunger–as well as unexpected kindness, while held by her captors. One turned out to be the Metacom, King Philip himself.

In early March the fat and meat of a bear, likely killed at its den, greatly fortified Rowlandson. She had met King Philip, who she could converse with in English, and did “extra” artisan labor for him and other captors—knitting, in exchange for food and small privileges. She shared a dinner with Metacom, “He asked me to make a cap for his boy, for which he invited me to dinner. I went, and he gave me a pancake, about as big as two fingers. It was made of parched wheat, beaten, and fried in bear’s grease, but I thought I never tasted pleasanter meat in my life.”

Starvation was never far off for the pastor’s wife, or the Indians. Often she was reduced to begging, and hoarding tidbits, “I was fain to go and look after something to satisfy my hunger, and going among the wigwams, I went into one and there found a squaw who showed herself very kind to me, and gave me a piece of bear. I put it into my pocket, and came home, but could not find an opportunity to broil it, for fear they would get it from me, and there it lay all that day and night in my stinking pocket.” Her treasure nearly rancid, she went back, “In the morning I went to the same squaw… I asked her to let me boil my piece of bear in her kettle, which she did, and gave me some ground nuts to eat with it: and I cannot but think how pleasant it was to me.”

Mary Rowlandson survived her ordeal; and those samplings of bear loom large in a hunger-filled memoir. Metacom and many of his people ultimately perished in their struggle for a homeland. Partly as a result, the following century saw the Massachusetts landscape wholly remade in the image of old Europe. Forests fell; fresh farms blanketed ancient woodland terrain. Wolves, beavers, bears, and wild turkeys quickly paid the price for an expanding drive for land and timber. Squirrels, cottontails, and the occasional deer, were what remained for game.

But black bears are survivors in every sense of the word. Nearly extirpated when hunters sought them in their last remaining stands, they somehow hung on in rugged Berkshire reaches into the 20^th century. But even in that sheltering place they witnessed the demise of one of their ancient staples, the American chestnut. Still, in the late-1970s when New England forests were slowly reaching maturity once more, those oaks, beeches, and hickories churned out ample mast. That, along with a supply of soft mast, ants, grubs, leaves, shoots, bird’s eggs, berries, mice, frogs, and sundry other omnivorous treats, helped the bear population begin to expand.

Today, from a core population of perhaps a hundred bears three decades back, the Massachusetts black bear population is estimated at nearly 3,000 animals according to Jim Cardoza. It’s thought to be growing by 8 % annually. The densest populations remain west of the Connecticut River, but bears are now fairly common in the central part of the state. Sightings in eastern Worcester County regularly make the news.

According to fact sheets from the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, average weights for Bay State bears are 140 lbs. and 230 lbs., for adult sows (females) and males (boars) respectively. These forest and swamp omnivores–basically the size of adult humans, have evolved a survival strategy that emphasizes retreat, into trees or dense cover. Untempted by the baits of human trash, bird seed, and untended food sources, they skillfully avoid human conflict. But to a bear, the scent of “grill grease” is tantamount to the mention of McDonalds to a 10 year old in a car, says Jim Cardoza. When bears develop a taste for our human food traps, they risk paying a high price as “problem” bears. The problem is that we’re baiting these animals.

Bear sightings are always remarkable. They bring people face to face with the presence of “other.” And when that other is a black bear, it usually stops an observer dead in their tracks. Most sightings are strikingly brief, recounted using terms like “big,” “small,” “lumbering,” or “scampering.” Though the largest, oldest, males may reach well over 400 lbs., most are much smaller. In the Bay State, upright black bears rarely rise to over 5-1/2 feet, and they are notorious for their response to most human intrusions: they run for cover.

Paul Rezendes knows the places where black bears run. He’s tracked them to dens, tree refuges; feeding sites. He knows their resilience—having witnessed their fall movements when food is plenty and noted their resourcefulness when its scarce, “They gravitate to whatever mast crop is producing heavily.” Rezendes says. He remembers one fall in the Savoy area where the mast crop had failed, the acorns and beech, “But there was this enormous crop of ash seeds. And the bears were climbing up in there and tearing those trees apart. I’ve never seen that before or after.” Given a choice though, Rezendes says bears seem to prefer beech nuts, “Even after the snow falls I’ve seen them digging through over a foot of snow to get to beech nuts. They probably smell them–they’ll even put off sleeping if there’s a good crop.”

Rezendes also remembers a particularly difficult fall for bears in New York State, “I used to do some tracking programs in the Catskills, and they had a mast failure there, with the oaks.” But the keen noses of bears led them to a bread bakery, where they repeatedly rifled through dumpsters, “They had a heck of time. When the mast fails, the bears start taking chances—start going places where they don’t normally go.” Bears are generally not risk-takers, they like the security of mature woods. If those woods happen to be oak, “The bears gravitate toward white oaks,” says Paul Rezendes, “If there’s lots of activity in a mixed oak area, you’ll probably find clawing and bite marks on the white oaks.” Another fall favorite is wild cherry, “They just love the stuff.”

State photographer Bill Byrne has been shooting pictures for MassWildlife for over three decades. He’s taken a lot of bear pictures in Franklin County. He’s also witnessed the seasonal diet change, from heavy foraging on late-summer blueberries to a nearly instant switch to mast—in one instance turning to acorns from red oak, “As soon as those first acorns were falling, they lost interest in the berries.“ Byrne says it’s all about getting the best pre-winter calories, “Its like how much fat can I gain before I have to sleep?” He’s witnessed other evidence of the black bear’s fall drive for calories; the signs of their foraging–they rip open paper wasp nests. “Insects are pretty high in protein.” Black bears also dig up ground wasp nests, “The bear will just open that up and expend the energy to consume the larvae. It’s not a big expenditure of energy–but it’s impressive how they’ll accept the pain of the stings.”

When mast and forage is less than optimal, these opportunists sometimes turn to other available soft “mast”: isolated cornfields. “When there is high productivity in berries, in grapes, in acorns, there’s less pressure on the corn fields,” observes Byrne, who says 90% of his observations are in Franklin County. But damage to feed corn is a regular occurrence. Many seasoned farmers just accept it as the price of doing business in bear country, telling Byrne, “I know they get my corn, so I just plant more.” It’s often the secluded fields that are hit most, he notes, “So some are planting more crops that keep an opening around the corn. They’ll seed-in alfalfa.”

Bill Byrne holds black bears in high regard. He wants people to know that conflicts with bears can be minimized if humans make good choices, “The more people can learn about them, the more they can actually protect the bears.” The photographer sees situations where people are actually putting out food to attract them, “That usually spells a death warrant for bears.” Jim Cardoza will tell you that bears have a long memory, returning season after season to check on an easy cache of sunflower seed—long after a wildlife enthusiast may have learned to take down the bird feeders between April and December. For bee farmers with hives and honey to protect, the standards for electric fencing are changing, “Some bears are learning to negotiate anything that is not hugely hot, “says Bill Byrne, “5000 volts now seems to be the standard if you’re going to protect hives. They are right up there with black angus.”

Still, with thick fall woods around, and good mast, most people won’t be encountering bears from year to year—even if they are in the neighborhood. Suburban sprawl and thoughtless human behavior will certainly be a continuing cause for difficulty as bears go about fall foraging. The American beech continues to struggle under a series of weakening plagues, and the relatively rapid loss of the eastern hemlock to the scourge of the wooly adelgid will present these shy creatures with a new security problem: the shielding branches of their favorite refuge trees are disappearing.

But, with winter approaching, it’s pleasant to contemplate this late-fall portrait, rendered by Bill Byrne. A friend had called, saying he’d discovered a bear den. It was basically the remains of an overturned tree–the base of the root ball. The two approached slowly, upwind, and watched a very large male from a distance. “It was December, there was snow on the ground,” Byrne says, “But it turned out to be a warm day, and he was dozing on top.” This bear was “sated,” Byrne recalls, “just waiting to put up the do not disturb sign.” Fascinated, they observed quietly, the photographer noting the impressive size of the head; the creature’s slow movements, “The males tend to hibernate last,” Byrne notes. But this would not be that day. As they stared, the logy bear roused a bit, “Then he turned around, like a dog, and lay down again.” For now, this bruin was just napping on top of the covers.

Lunar cycle

I spotted it, the spotted newt, in the half-dawn, half-moonlight. I wanted to just skip it, forget what I saw, but it had bubbled up into my consciousness that chilly, mid-August morning. It was in the road, alive. It could get squished.

It was a pact I’d made with myself at some distant time: if it’s savable, and you can save it, stop. Reluctantly I slowed, swerved left, circled back and there it was—a foot from the white line. Unmoving. I reached down to gently pinch the burnished red creature by its sides with my seemingly enormous claw. I hesitated just perceptibly, thinking I might harm this tiny sliver of flesh. I followed through, half-expecting a small squirm of anguish that some red efts display. Instead, there was nothing. Just the softest pinch of puffball sides.

I had the little character, and without a fight. But, oddly, something went out of me when I pinched that creature and was met with something more than heavenly softness. Warmth. This fellow traveler conveyed warmth to my bumbly fingertips in the pre-dawn August chill.

It was an abrupt, disarming surprise—like a bucket of water in the face, only opposite. Warmth, softness, giving flesh where it is least expected. Cold pavement, hard road, unflinching full moon about to set.

And this. Red eft. Would-be salamander. Hand warmer to sleepless middle-aged guy. Hi hardly knew what to do. Reflexively I walked it to the edge of the pavement, dumping it, unceremoniously into cold, dew be-dripped crab grass. It landed, half flipped on its side, in the close-clipped blades. Unmoving.

I turned and reset my foot in the toe-clip, slowly regaining the momentum of this flat, pale moon soaked stretch. It registered then, too late, that the little guy had been drawing its warmth from the stored reservoir of the night pavement. I hadn’t a clue what I was doing. Off balance, that was me—flipping a pavement warmed amphibian into the cold grass and then thinking I was of service.

“I’m way off center,” I remember thinking as I rode south past perfect rows of corn—the setting moon to my right, the orb of an August dawn to my left.

This wren uses the stairs

The wren visits on the dreariest of winter days, and it uses the stairs.  I like the wren.  It visited today.  It prefers afternoon visits.  That’s fine with me.  It prefers days that are rainy, and gloomy, and somewhat out of synch.  That’s great too.  And it uses the stairs—did I already say that?  The wren hops down the stairs.  It’s a very orderly wren.  You don’t often think of wrens as house guests, good or bad, but this one is exceptional.  It visits and hops down the deck stairs, inches from my window–on dreary days.  It is quite cheerful.  I like this wren.

You might figure, from its manners and suburban setting, that it is a House wren.  It is not.  It’s a tidy Carolina wren.  It hops down the stairs one at a time, and looks sideways and askance in the window as it passes.  As a wren, it could easily take the steps two at a time—with all the attendant clatter.  My wren does not do this.  It is very polite and quiet as wrens go.  Very southern, I think.

My Carolina wren is a bird of generous character.  Its visits are spontaneous; they are good will offerings of a high order.  This is not a wren here for a hand-out, or a hand-up.  I’ve made no wren offerings to entice it—no suet hung, or seed hors d’oeuvres set out for wren entertainment on the patio. 

This wren has been winter’s great surprise: a whimsical guest on days when rain and fog press hard on dirty piles of snow.  It arrives in the afternoon, and takes the stairs one at a time.

There is no obvious reason for this tidy, visiting wren.  Winters of late have been warm, but this one’s had a wintry bite.  Not a whit of hospitality has been offered wrens this winter.  December drifts, driving rains, wild temperature swings—hardly wren-friendly weather.  This winter did not say, “May I take your wren hat, your muffler?”  Yet, curve-billed, quizzical, a Carolina wren visits, hopping politely from stair to stair.  I like the wren.

It could go south, this guest, to safer and warmer wren quarters.  But this wren does not.  At peril to life and limb it stays nearby for raw, rainy days, then comes to the stairs and looks in on me as it hops.  In turn I offer surprise–understated of course; a modest turn of the mouth, a raised eyebrow.  There are no false or ungraceful moves.  I keep my comportment natural, and don’t jump up to put on the kettle.  Truth be told, I don’t know much wren protocol.  So I keep it simple.  If it were a House wren I might offer cookies; a Winter or Cactus wren?–maybe dried fruit, or chips and guacamole. 

But this is a Carolina wren, one that hops past the window on gloomy, wintry days.  It takes the steps quietly, one at a time, and always uses the back entrance.  This wren is just the wren you’d want.  After you’ve whined about the weather, called your friends, slogged down coffee, and despaired of light ever returning to the landscape—a wren calls, unannounced.  Its timing is always perfect; it never stays too long.  It hops into view, politely.  It nods its wren head; and glances at you with its bead-black eye, then continues down the steps, cheerily, one at a time.

Winters can be vexing, and seemingly unending.  Brilliant days are matched by others that are punishingly-dark.  But one afternoon—one somber and dulling afternoon, a tiny, feathered comet may burst through the fog and begin bouncing down the steps.  It will acknowledge you with a nod, and a glint from its fiery black eye.  And–politely, you will smile. 

                                                                   © Karl Meyer 2008

                                March Madness

It’s become familiar turf—part of my personal landscape history. I realized this when I left the edge of the pavement and fitted myself into a narrow, snow-slumped trail made by hikers, cross country skiers, and snowshoers in a wide swatch of woods. Something about the light, and the March snow cover, enabled me to discern the date almost exactly: it was 9 years ago that I’d first taken this path into these woods.

I remembered because I had just moved back to the Connecticut Valley after a stint living in Rhode Island, and then eastern Massachusetts where I’d worked for Mass. Audubon. I was thrilled to be back, and went out walking along the edge of this ridge with a small knot of friends. It was a sunny, mid-afternoon when we came abreast of a small hemlock grove along the dirt track. The sound caught my ear immediately; we all stopped.

It was a thin, melodious, wavering trill, coming from somewhere in the shadows of those hemlocks. Eastern screech owl. There came that sweet, spooky, arc of a trill again. We all stood, mesmerized. These were not thick hemlocks; the little grove was only fifteen feet deep, spread along sixty feet of trail. It seemed there was no way these birds could not have been aware of four people chatting as they moved through the woods.

But there was more to this, of course. The duettng screech owls had mating in mind. These were courtship calls. Both the males and females of these 8-inch, tufted-eared owls sing. We never glimpsed either of them. But neither did we disturb them. Pair bonding was occurring as this little herd of humans stood silent, taking in the cool March air. By mid-April they would be sitting on 4-5 eggs, the male and female sharing the incubation. Sometimes the two of them would squeeze into that tiny nest hole together. By May they would be feeding their young pre-digested bugs, mice, and wood frogs.

I continued my walk, reminded that this is now a familiar wild place—about equal parts park, open woods, and forest. I’m grateful to have it as part of my history. This was another cool March afternoon. There had been another recent snow, but the angle of the sun was conspiring to scour out bare ground in many south facing places. The maple sap was building in those tree roots, readying to make its spring run. You could just feel it. I little downy woodpecker hammered away at a bark-less snag.

For then next while my walk was unremarkable; contemplative. Footsteps on a softening snow path. I eventually wandered up a path that brings you alongside a little rill. With nothing in particular wedged in my mind, I can only say I was startled by a raucous “bah!, bah!, bah!!” I froze. It was a pileated woodpecker, a familiar resident here. Its fist-sized carvings are a signature of many decaying hardwood snags in this tract. I looked up to the trees, but saw nothing.

Then, a shadow, and “bah!, bah!, bah!!” again. It was below me, and to the left, smack in the middle of a ten foot pool of water–moved gently by the input of that tiny brook. Red-crest raised, wings held aside, this crow-sized king of the woodpecker family was having itself a bird bath. I didn’t move. I thought it had been yelling about my intrusion. This was something else. It fidgeted in awkward contentment in that stream for twenty seconds. When it looked aside I quickly shifted so I could see better look around the thick trunk in front of me. The woodpecker shook its wings, droplets rolled off its back. Then it took off.

I thought it would be gone, but the bird stayed. It simply pumped off wing beats enough to take it to a spindly, wrist-thick elm, and then glued itself to the bark, where it used its bill to preen from the tail forward. It was a ridiculously small tree for such a large bird. But then it shot into flight again—not away from me, but back into the puddle. “Bah!, bah!, bah!!!”, it screamed, settling into the chilly stream. Again, it bathed for a minute; then took off to a nearby tree. This one was a slightly more suitable maple, the thickness of the barrel of a baseball bat. There, it did a little more preening, perhaps dispensing with some of the mites in its feathers.

It repeated this act once more, its boisterous yells coming as it settled into the cold water. I felt like I was watching some Russian bureaucrat visiting an icy Moscow pool, then scooting back into the steam bath. Finally, after a victorious yell, it took off for a more suitable forest tract, landing about 40 feet up on the fat trunk of a hundred-foot white pine. I soon lost it in the branches—in woods that are now part of my landscape history.

American Pastime

On this February morning there was drama in the United States Congress. Two powerful men thought to have deceived the American people for most of a decade were answering questions. There were references to wire tapping and intimidation to keep crimes hidden. Personal information had been leaked to impugn credibility. The story was riveting: hubris, bedroom secrets; the let down of the next generation of kids.

It was a story of power and ego; lots of money involved. One party rallied around the powerful man as a god. The other assaulted his testimony as if they were bringing down the Bastille. Hushed talk began circulating of a presidential pardon. This was terrific theatre, but hardly of a high order—sports-entertainment and drugs, the stuff America invests its soul in. The testimony of a baseball player and his trainer rang out in homes across the country.

But as the time of spring training neared my fantasies went way beyond baseball. I dreamt Congress was sending blistering line drives and punishing grounders at the two highest officers of the land—hard ball questions that offered no cover. Stand and catch the ball, or let it go by–on a level playing field, in full view of the American people. Whack: what about weapons of mass destruction? Whack: what about leaked names? Bang: what about soldiers, civilians, sacrificed? Bam: what about water boarding–what about the country’s soul, Sir?

The day’s baseball drama WAS riveting. He said–he said; he said that she said. What did he say; when did he say it? Patriotism, hard work, respect for rules, were all used to mask the ominous and building backdrop of wrong-doing. The big guy said he could not be a bad guy. It was a miss-understanding. Words were miss-spoke, miss-heard. He was a leader, in control—a decider. Something foul occurred on his watch. He’d moved swiftly to get a handle on it. Now jealous people and the media had turned on him. His reputation was at stake. His legacy. He wanted his soul back. He stood pleading before a soul-less Congress. Expectant.

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