Author Archives: Sandy Stott

By Corinne H. Smith

I should have known that the place would be packed with cars and people, because our newspaper had run the story on the front page. Dozens of bald eagles had been spotted fishing in the open water by a dam in the lower Susquehanna River valley, the reporter said. The rest of the river was encased in ice. But with temperatures rising, the scenario could soon change. The ice would melt, and the birds would find other fishing options and would leave. What else could we do? We don’t usually see eagles around here. So off we went, for an eleven-mile countryside drive downriver to the Safe Harbor Dam.

Susquehanna Eagle Tree
Photo by Tom Knapp

It was noon by the time we got there. We earned a front-row parking space only because someone else was leaving when we arrived. Bunches of avid birders were lined up along the shoreline. Some of their scopes and lenses were longer than my arm. A few low and quick conversations murmured in the background. You could identify the many amateurs, like me. We just wheeled our little binoculars toward anything that was in the air. Turkey buzzards, gulls, crows, whatever. Could you see a white head and white tail? No? Darn. Where were all of these silly eagles, anyway?

I’m not totally new to these sightings. I’ve seen bald eagles in the wild on a few occasions. Most often it was when I lived in the Midwest, within a few hours’ drive of the Mighty Mississippi. River towns in Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin hold eagle-watching days at this time of year. Whenever the surrounding landscape is blanketed with snow, the eagles flock to fish the dams. I once saw 15 bald eagles sitting in a tree at Guttenberg, Iowa, and watched as they took their turns diving down to the water. That’s a special and vivid memory for me.

But there’s nothing quite as spectacular as the unexpected encounter. On a murky winter day in December 1996, I was driving south along the Mississippi River from Minnesota to Wisconsin. The river was to my left – looking like a flat white meadow — and my car and I darted among the high sandy bluffs. Suddenly I saw a large black bird flying at our level, over the river. My mind zipped through a series of mental flash cards to identify it. When it matched the size with the white head and tail, it sent the answer to my mouth. “Oh my god, that’s an eagle!” I said out loud to myself, several times. I got a real-life shiver along my spine. And then he wheeled out of sight.

Henry Thoreau may have felt this same magic when he saw a bald eagle flying over Fair Haven Bay in the Sudbury River in April 1854. He had recently bought a new spyglass and suddenly found a good reason to use it.

“Saw a large bird sail along over the edge of Wheeler’s cranberry meadow just below Fair Haven, which I at first thought a gull, but with my glass found it was a hawk and had a perfectly white head and tail and broad or blackish wings. It sailed and circled along over the low cliff, and the crows dived at it in the field of my glass, and I saw it well, both above and beneath, as it turned, and then it passed off to hover over the Cliffs at a greater height. It was undoubtedly a white-headed eagle. It was to the eye but a large hawk.” ~ April 8, 1854

Two weeks later, he saw it again:

“Lying on the ground with my glass, I could watch him very easily, and by turns he gave me all possible views of his wings curved upward slightly the more, like a stereotyped undulation. He rose very high at last, till I almost lost him in the clouds, circling or rather looping along westward, high over river and wood and farm, effectually concealed in the sky. We who live this plodding life here below never know how many eagles fly over us. They are concealed in the empyrean. I think I have got the worth of my glass now that it has revealed to me the white-headed eagle.” ~ April 23, 1854

But back at Safe Harbor on this day, among all of the other glass-wielding watchers, I found I didn’t have the patience or the proper attitude for eagle-watching. The sun was too bright. The birds weren’t hungry or restless. They weren’t flying or fishing. Some of them sat in trees on little islands that were too far away for me to focus on. When I caught a glimpse of a golden eagle flying overhead, I didn’t point him out to anyone else. He could remain anonymous and unremarkable this time. The stars of this show were supposed to be the ones with the white heads and tails. I eased back behind the wheel and slowly maneuvered us and our car out of the congestion and back into the open countryside. I’ll come back when the eagles outnumber the people.

I Meet the Happiest Dog

In the white air
of this storm
he is
wherever
you are.

Perhaps it is the full air, all that cold contact with snowflakes that must feel like so many cold noses, but whenever I meet dogs while walking through snowstorms, they seem inordinately happy. This goes especially for capering labs, who set up also resonance with the memory of our yellow lab, Elmo.

Elmo in another season

A walk, any walk, was the day’s celebration for Elmo, but snow was a holiday – snow was for snuffling and rolling; snow was the right substance for “tossing a nutter,” the sudden break into sprinted circles that mystified us even as he blurred with speed and stirred snow. When he stopped, Elmo would look at us expectantly – why, his eyes seemed to say, aren’t you running in circles? How can you stand still? Then, he’d bark once and be off, following whatever thread of scent or thought ran ahead of him.

The other day, walking the river as it snowed, I met Elmo’s chocolate cousin (many times removed). He stopped, looked up happily, expectantly. “Grrrreat!” he seemed to bark; then, he was off, snow flying up from his paws, the whole forest within reach.

Charley K on a best day

Henry Thoreau referred to most dogs as “Bose” or “Trey,” common canine names in his day. Here, I think he missed out. There are few (no?) better companions for “cross-lots walking,” the sort Thoreau preferred.

by Ashton Nichols

Thoreau Farm, and its new blog outlet, “The Roost,” are important sources for information about the links between human life and the natural world. These are the same links that Henry David Thoreau worked so hard to explore and explain in the nineteenth century. My latest book, Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) explores a number of those links in detail. Most importantly, I argue that we need a new concept, and a new word to describe that concept. The new word we need is “urbanature.” The concept this word describes is the idea that nature and urban life are not as distinct as we have long supposed. Here is why.

Hawks are roosting on skyscrapers near Central Park East and Central Park West. Peregrine falcons are feeding on the Flatiron Building, and owls are nesting throughout Manhattan. Meanwhile, thousands of environmentalists board carbon-gulping airplanes and fly thousands of miles (carrying tons of Gore-Tex) to get “back to nature” in Montana. At the same time, the World Wide Web tells us that Thoreau said, “In wilderness is the preservation of the world.” Over 600 websites say so. But Thoreau did not say, “In wilderness is the preservation of the world.” He said, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” This difference–”wildness,” not “wilderness”–makes all the difference.
Urbanature (rhymes with “furniture”) is the idea that all human and nonhuman lives, all animate and inanimate objects on our planet (and no doubt beyond) are linked in a complex web of interconnectedness. We are not out of nature when we stand in the streets of Manhattan any more than we are in nature when we stand above tree-line in the Montana Rockies. When nature-lovers say they long to return to nature, they are making what the philosophers call a category mistake. As Tyler Stalling has recently noted, “There is no ‘real nature’ to which to return. Rather, in the face of burgeoning technologies such as nanotechnology and genetic manipulation, the once defined border between nature and culture is obsolete.”

We are never fully cut off from wild nature by human culture. This is the central aspect of all true ecology. Nothing we can do can ever take us out of nature. There is nowhere for us to go. We are natural beings from the moment we are biologically born until the moment we organically die. Instead of describing the nonhuman world anthropocentrically—in human terms—we now have many good reasons to describe the whole world ecocentrically [eco-: oikos, house]. Our nonhuman, natural house is the same place as our fully human, cultural home.

Urbanature includes the biggest of big pictures: birds on buildings, fish in fishponds, chemists making medicines, mountaineers climbing mountains, every dolphin and domestic dog, every gust of solar wind and every galaxy. To be “natural” originally meant, “to have been born”: natura—“birth” and also “essence,” as in “the nature of the problem.” The human-made is no less natural because it has been shaped, no less born or essential because it has been fashioned by human hands. The bird makes a nest, and her nest is no less natural than the bird herself. Human hands make a house, and the house–or even the skyscraper–is no less natural than the human hands that shaped it.

Thoreau fits with this idea so well because his hut at Walden Pond was a mere mile-and-a-half from Concord. He could walk into town for dinner with his mother or a conversation with Emerson. Indeed, he was arrested and spent his famous single night in jail during his two “wild” years at Walden. These details are important because–along with his successors: Aldo Leopold, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, and Terry Tempest Williams, to name just a few–Thoreau and these other nature writers remind us that life away from the urban world is only part of the nature-writing story.

Walden Pond Replica of Thoreau’s Hut

Urban culture and wild nature come to much the same thing: Urbanature.

Ashton Nichols is  the  holder of the Walter E. Beach ’56 Distinguished Chair in Sustainability Studies & a Professor of English Language and Literature at Dickinson College.
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–See:
http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Romantic-Ecocriticism-Urbanatural-Nineteenth-Century/dp/1137033991/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=
for more details.