Thoreau Farm

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.

By Ashton Nichols

Like many, if not most, readers of The Roost, we have recently had the coldest cold-snap in recorded memory. In our neck of the Eastern woods, the mercury has hovered in the single digits for days, and it has reached 0, and 1, and 2 degrees Fahrenheit (that’s -18, -17, and -16 (or thereabouts) Celsius for you more sensible European counters) at night. The days have not been much better, single digits for almost a week and more cold forecast into February.

Today we had a warming spell: 15 at sunrise, then 20, 25, and now 35 outdoor degrees on my indoor/outdoor thermometer. In our wood-heated home, the indoor temp is a wonderfully warm 67 F. We were standing at the kitchen window, just a few minutes ago, drinking our afternoon coffee when my wife said, “Look at those birds, they are bathing in the snow in the birdbath. “

And there, sure enough, were a dozen or so English sparrows, sitting on the hard frozen surface of their summer birdbath, with 2-3 inches of recent powdery snow on top, and they were shuffling and fluffing, and pecking, and doing all of the things that birds do in the summer when their birdbath is full-up with clean fresh, and always unfrozen, water. But now it was icy cold winter.

We had never noticed this phenomenon before, so we stopped what we were doing, and we stood at the kitchen window, and we watched those cute little birds taking their icy cold birdbaths in the fluffy cold snow all around them. They shook their chests as hard as they seemed able, they kicked the snow up onto their fluffy breast feathers, they hopped a little and ruffled their feathers a lot, and they made nice little circles of open space on the hard-frozen water beneath them.

English Sparrow Snow Baths

I went outside to make sure that the water had not started to melt and, sure enough, it was as hard-solid as an ice skating rink, with only the tiny sparrow claw-marks and striped feather strokes pushing the snow away from the frozen ice surface beneath. After I came back inside, the birds would return for a minute or so, then something would spook them and they would fly off again, into the nearby trees, waiting for the chance to return to their snowy ice bath; after all, it was still winter.

Birds bathe, not because they want to be clean as we humans do, but because they need to get the dirt and the lice and the mites out of their feathers, partly so they do not weigh more when it is time to take to the air, but probably most of all because those other little living critters must make them crazy as they nip and nibble and latch onto the bird’s skin underneath that tight surface-covering of feathers. Ornithologists also report that bathing is essential in order for birds to retain necessary oils in their plumage, oils without which the birds could neither fly nor survive.

So here were out little creek-side sparrows (we live within sight of the creek), with no birdbath-water in sight, bathing in the snow on an icy birdbath in order to retain those precious oils and keep those nasty parasites at bay. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge might have said, these little birds were “miracles of rare device.” As Henry David Thoreau did say, “I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment [. . .] and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.” That is how we felt today, watching our local sparrows snow-bathe in front of us: honored and distinguished, lucky to have chanced upon this little moment of sparrow-life that still seemed so special to us.