Author Archives: Sandy Stott

by Ashton Nichols

Do you have a crazy cardinal? We do, and he is so crazy right now that we are starting to worry. Let me begin at the beginning. We had our first crazy cardinal when we moved to the countryside of Virginia . . . in 1978. Since then, whenever we have lived even a mile or two from town, we have had one crazy cardinal, or two, or three, every winter. How do we know? It is easy.

Around this time of year, almost like clockwork, in late February or early March, a banging sound begins on our windows. It sounds at first as though a neighbor might be throwing something at the window, whether we have neighbors or not. Then it sounds so repetitious that we realize that it must be a big branch banging on the glass, or falling icicles, or some other repeated natural sound. Then we remember, Cardinal . . . winter . . . crazy cardinal.

Looking for Interlopers

Bang! There it went again, just now, while I was typing this sentence. Bang! . . . and again. I am not making this up. He is banging into our lodge-room window right this minute. And before that he was banging against the dining room glass, and before that, when our car was parked in the driveway, he was flying from a nearby forsythia bush . . . bang . . . into the glass of the passenger window. Then he would see his reflection in the side mirror and, bang, he would fly into that reflective spot. He would even rest on top of the side-view mirror, waiting until he saw his reflection in the larger window again, and then . . . Bang! There it went again. Just now.

These cardinals are not really crazy. They are just being good cardinals, almost always male cardinals. They are doing their cardinal jobs in spite of all of the reflective glass surfaces we humans have added to their natural, usually non-reflective, environments. In springtime, each male cardinal wants to carve out his territory. He wants a territory and then a mate, and then a nest, and finally baby cardinals. He begins by clearing his territory of all other cardinals, especially other male cardinals. When he sees a male cardinal, whether it is another male cardinal or the reflection of a cardinal–even himself!–he attacks without pausing, and he attacks again and again until the competitor cardinal is gone. Unless the competitor is him.

In the wild, this means that a successful male chases all of his competition away, so that each male cardinal is left with the female or females in one special area and he can get on with the business of mating and creating this year’s cardinal family.

Bang! There it went again, bang! Twice in ten seconds. The only way to stop him is to put a piece of cardboard on the offending glass, move the car, or wait for the sun to shift the reflective surface. I had better go get the cardboard now, and let this poor cardinal get on his with his mating, his nest-building and fathering. After all, I want to help him to be a good cardinal. These crazy cardinals actually seem to be the smart ones.

Battle Won…for now

Ashton Nichols holds the Walter E. Beach ’56 Distinguished Chair in Sustainability Studies, Environmental Studies and Science and is Professor of Language and Literature in the Department of English at Dickinson College

By Corinne H. Smith

This winter I have been so busy watching and worrying about the little birds hunkered down in our evergreens, that another resident of our yard completely escaped my notice.

This story begins with the tall shrub that stands in front of our picture window. I don’t know its species or even its common name. It gets pink flowers in the summertime. It’s not a Rose of Sharon, a hydrangea, or a rhododendron. For now, let’s call her Eleanor. She had been cut short before we moved here. She spent most of last year growing tall and wide and leafy. I’ve since roped her in a bit in order to train her to grow up instead of out, because she’ll have to clear the roofline this year. I will admit that she does bloom nicely.

All winter long, Eleanor just resembled a vertical stack of bare sticks. I’ve been looking past her for months to admire the falling snowflakes. Only recently did I notice a lump on one of her branches. I trudged outside in the snow to get a closer look. It must be an insect gall. Some little critter has been spending the winter safely tucked inside it. And whenever it senses that the time is right, it’ll eat its way out and join the ecosystem of our fine neighborhood. Who knew? Not me, until now. Our mailman brushes past this bush six days a week as well, without giving it a glance. The gall blends in with the landscape.

Gall 1

All I know of galls is that an insect deposits an egg into some sort of plant matter in the fall. The plant secretes something that encases the egg, thereby unduly protecting it and giving it a future food source. A gall may look cancerous, but most of the time, it doesn’t result in an adverse effect to its host. And specific insects choose specific plants. The two are somehow perfectly matched. I usually associate them with goldenrod. I almost always find a marble-sized mass stuck in the middle a few stalks standing in a patch of goldenrod. But now that I have another example right in front of me, I think of how amazing this entire process is. And wouldn’t you know it? When I went outside to take a photo of it, I found a second similar gall on another branch of Eleanor, too. One of these days, we’ll have two new residents.

Gall 2

Our old friend Henry Thoreau found galls on goldenrods, too. But most often he spied them on oaks and willows. In his journal on June 1, 1853, he spent a few lines considering this phenomenon.

“It is remarkable that a mere gall, which at first we are inclined to regard as something abnormal, should be made so beautiful, as if it were the FLOWER of the tree; that a disease, an excrescence, should prove, perchance, the greatest beauty, — as the tear of a pearl.”

Thoreau must have taken some time to ruminate on galls and their greater meaning. Nearly two months later, on July 30, 1853, he wrote about them again. By now he could find a related human-sized metaphor.

“[An insect gall completely changes] the destiny of the plant, showing the intimate relation between animal and vegetable life. The animal signifies its wishes by a touch, and the plant, instead of going on to blossom and bear its normal fruit, devotes itself to the service of the insect and becomes its cradle and food. It suggests that Nature is a kind of gall, that the Creator stung her and man is the grub she is destined to house and feed.”

Well, I don’t know that we have to go THAT far.

Nevertheless: Two specific insects who have been attracted to this specific bush – Eleanor — have used her to their advantage for many months. Soon they will leave as anonymously as they arrived. The only notice I’ll have is to suddenly see a small hole in each one of these hive-like cases. And then they will be gone, off to do whatever tasks are left for their little insect souls to do. They’ll get no fanfare, no trumpets, and no applause. And I’ll bet that not even the mailman will notice.

Come to think of it, that does sound a lot like us.

These days the morning light has me looking up and out. Despite the ongoing cold – it was one below zero again this morning – the advent of each day whispers, “spring,” and I can, if I want, raise a glass of evening wine to the cloud calligraphy on a backlit sky. On both ends the days stretch out like a dog awakening from a long nap.

Amid the snow, rising light.

This oncoming spring has a special tang to it in that I’ve decided it is the one in which I will finally “graduate” from high school, moving on to the sketched lines of what’s next. That approach has me paying close attention to the present, of course, and it has me also in a summary mind about my many accompanied readings of Thoreau. Here’s a little of that thinking.

Teaching Henry Thoreau to high school students has prepared me for it: “He saw so far into the future. How did he do it?” A look of unguarded awe defines her face.

It’s a couple of months into the semester and we are near the end of Walden; “Economy” and its long consideration of “necessaries” is fading memory, if it is memory at all. And my student is in the grip of wonder at this writer who saw so clearly, both across Concord’s fields and over time. I often ask myself this question too: how did he do it?

Early in 2013, without aiming at answer to this or any other question, I decided to accompany my passage through that year with Henry’s in 1854, publication year for Walden; without being overly rigid about the day to day, I would read his journal for those months, keeping rough time with it. It seemed a companionable prospect, and it was. In the edition I read, this volume ends on August 31st. For a school-teacher this seemed fitting.

But what occurred to me over those months was how Henry Thoreau’s close and clear-eyed look at his daily world coalesced and became a vision of the larger world…and where it was headed.

The close examination “Economy” is, of course, a key to seeing forward – what exactly is necessary, it asks. And once that’s determined in its spareness, in its simplicity, then, then there is time to look up. And out.

When the flowers will out; when the birds will return; when each individual will become her- or himself. Thoreau was both scientist extrapolating and poet imagining – that’s at least some of how he did it.