Thoreau Farm

By Corinne H. Smith

In the 19th century, they flew in flocks so enormous that they filled the entire sky and seemed to go on forever. They were Passenger pigeons, Ectopistes migratorius. And Americans considered them to be just as endless a natural resource as the water and the trees and the rest of the terrific bounty found on this continent. This opinion prevailed until the last individual, a captive pigeon named Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914. With her death, a once prominent species went famously extinct.

Henry Thoreau was quite familiar with these birds. In June 1861, he and traveling companion Horace Mann Jr. examined several wild pigeon nests that they had found in basswood, oak, and hop hornbeam trees in the prairie land near Minneapolis. When the men later steamed by riverboat up the Minnesota River, they passed through a remnant of the Big Woods, the noted old-growth stand that once covered 2000 square miles. Here the trees on either side of the water were “all alive with pigeons & flying across our course,” Thoreau wrote. You can almost imagine the sight and the sound of a thousand beating wings.

Ectopistes migratorius

Back in Concord, Thoreau saw smaller flocks and individual Passenger pigeons in the wild. But several men he knew also built “pigeon-places” designed to attract large numbers of birds. They offered good nesting spots and plenty of food … until large nets were strung up and dropped to catch and to kill as many birds as possible. Entries in Thoreau’s journal describe these local outposts.

“Saw a pigeon-place on George Heywood’s cleared lot, — the six dead trees set up for the pigeons to alight on, and the brush house close by to conceal the man. I was rather startled to find such a thing going now in Concord. The pigeons on the trees looked like fabulous birds with their long tails and their pointed breasts. I could hardly believe they were alive and not some wooden birds used for decoys, they sat so still; and, even when they moved their necks, I thought it was the effect of art. As they were not catching then, I approached and scared away a dozen birds who were perched on the trees, and found that they were freshly baited there, though the net was carried away, perchance to some other bed. The smooth sandy bed was covered with buckwheat, wheat or rye, and acorns. Sometimes they use corn, shaved off the ear in its present state with a knife. There were left the sticks with which they fastened the nets. As I stood there, I heard a rushing sound and, looking up, saw a flock of thirty or forty pigeons dashing toward the trees, who suddenly whirled on seeing me and circled round and made a new dash toward the bed, as if they would fain alight if I had not been there, then steered off. I crawled into the bough house and lay awhile looking through the leaves, hoping to see them come again and feed, but they did not while I stayed. This net and bed belong to one Harrington of Weston, as I hear. Several men still take pigeons in Concord every year; by a method, methinks, extremely old and which I seem to have seen pictured in some old book of fables or symbols, and yet few in Concord know exactly how it is done. And yet it is all done for money and because the birds fetch a good price, just as the farmers raise corn and potatoes. I am always expecting that those engaged in such a pursuit will be somewhat less groveling and mercenary than the regular trader or farmer, but I fear that it is not so.” ~ Thoreau’s journal, September 12, 1851

“Brooks has let out some of his pigeons, which stay about the stands or perches to bait others. Wild ones nest in his woods quite often. He begins to catch them the middle of August.” ~ Thoreau’s journal, July 18, 1854

“They are catching pigeons nowadays. Coombs has a stand west of Nut Meadow, and he says that he has just shot fourteen hawks there, which were after the pigeons.” ~ Thoreau’s journal, September 14, 1859

While Henry Thoreau kept in contact with the owners and operators of these pigeon-beds, he was most interested in what the birds ate. He wrote down what kinds of seeds the men used as bait, and what evidence could later be found in the birds’ stomachs. “It is a wonder how pigeons can swallow acorns whole, but they do,” he noted, on September 13, 1859. They must have been truly remarkable creatures. And because Heywood, Harrington, Brooks and Coombs were not the only folks who kept pigeon-places, the pigeons are now gone.

In 2014, we can use the centenary of the last Passenger pigeon as a time for contemplation about sustainability. Certainly we now understand that species come and go, within the natural dynamics of our earthen environment. But Martha’s kind suffered a man-made extermination. How many other deliberate and preventable extinctions have happened in our lifetimes? How many more will we tolerate? How and when will we memorialize the future disappeared: the last Cave salamander, the last American emerald dragonfly, the last polar bear? Now is the perfect time to reflect and consider and act, and to learn from the mistakes of the past.

To learn more about “Project Passenger Pigeon: Lessons for a Sustainable Future,” visit http://passengerpigeon.org, or “Like” its page on Facebook.

“The delicious soft, spring-suggesting air, – how it fills my veins with life! Life becomes again credible to me. A certain dormant life awakes in me, and I begin to love nature again. Here is my Italy, my heaven, my New England.”                     Journal – 1/7/55

January does have a way of making us look forward – to longer light, to easing cold, to the whole green future presaged by thaw. Thaw presses us ahead in time and imagination; we shift from our endurance shuffles with their little steps to avoid slippage and our necks pulled in toward bare-headed strolling. Even the sky seems to draw a little closer. We feel expansive. And, paradoxically, we also feel returned to the present moment; rather than trying to hide from it, we feel the very air.

So it was for Henry Thoreau during 1855’s January thaw, and so it has been for me. Along the nearby Sudbury River each morning a column of fog has mimicked the water’s passage, a gray and gauzy snake of tangible air. It flows; the water opens.

The other day, amid all this “spring-suggesting air,” I bumped into an article in the Boston Globe recommending that we attend to our “online lives,” with an eye toward what will happen to them after we die – offline that is.

Really?

That odd juxtaposition got me thinking about my growing unease with things-online, where one is never present, never alive in the very air of the moment. It’s bad enough to be distracted from the place where we live, but if we are now to begin planning for our online afterlives, how much wider will the split between our real and conjured lives grow?

As he walked on that January day in 1855, thaw brought this to Thoreau: “On the same bare sand is revealed a new crop of arrowheads. I pick up two perfect ones of quartz, sharp as if just from the hands of the maker.”

I think I prefer such a line of walking, where the past can join the present, to the leaping away and forward of online time. I prefer to be here rather than there.

Endnote: yes, there is the irony of hoping that you read this piece as online posting. I genuflect to that irony. Then I go out the door and down to the river.

By Corinne H. Smith

In the “Time is But a Stream” post of December 31, 2013, I wrote about the Susquehanna, my neighborhood river. I included a beautiful photo of it taken by my friend Bob Hollis on the blue-sky afternoon of December 21. Ever since, I’ve continued to look at the river, to think about it, and to consider Thoreau’s metaphors about rivers and eternity and how time flows by and with us. And we, with it.

Then the “polar vortex” hit. When I next peeked at the river from our second-story office window, I saw solid white instead of fluid gray. It had frozen over. Single-digit temperatures had turned this mile-wide liquid stream into a chunky ice-covered meadow. What an amazing sight it had become! And so quickly, too. I could barely stop admiring it. I could barely stop smiling at it. I had to go down to its edge and take a closer look.

Susquehanna River, Jan. 8th, 2014

Of course, the Susquehanna wasn’t completely frozen. Areas of open water lay next to the nearest bridge. And somewhere beneath the ice, a current was still heading for the Chesapeake Bay, fifty miles away. Fish and other critters must still be surviving in its chilly depths. But when I looked downstream, all I could see was the jagged white stripe of a cold and arctic landscape. “Surreal” was a word that came to mind. I almost expected penguins and polar bears to materialize on the horizon.

This wasn’t the first time I had seen changes to a major body of water in winter. On my first-ever visit to Concord, Massachusetts, in December 2000, I found Walden Pond under a seamless layer of snow. If it was truly the “earth’s eye,” as Henry Thoreau considered it, then it had quite a blind or albino gaze that day. I’d also seen a snow-covered Mississippi River separating Illinois from Iowa, during the years when I lived in the Midwest. You had to know where the river was, back then. Otherwise, the space was just as flat and white as the buried cornfields beyond its steep banks.

No, it was ice that capped the Susquehanna this week, not snow. Occasional sunlight sparkled off a myriad of sharp and crusty points. It was as if the roof of a cave had landed upside down in our midst. Or, closer to home: it resembled the shaggy crystals that hang along the sides of a kitchen freezer that hasn’t been defrosted in a while. (I know of what I speak.)

This unusual sight was enough to prompt a few Thoreauvian metaphors and philosophies to swirl in my head: how unforeseen challenges can suddenly change the consistencies of our lives; or how time can seem to be suspended, or even stopped, when we least expect it. And yet we all go on; we have no choice but to somehow “go with the flow/floe,” and pause when it pauses. Yes, the river was even more beautiful and interesting and thought provoking to me than it had been before. I felt as if it were putting on this special show for me alone.

Then, a few days later, the local media took notice. The state of the Susquehanna was a top story on the six o’clock news. Was the ice dangerous? How were the ice chunks moving downstream? Would they cause flooding when the air temperature rose and the ice began to melt and move? Were any of the river-edge residents in the adjacent cities and towns in jeopardy? Authorities were said to be “watching it.” Well, so was I. Join the club, I thought. Where were you when the first ice patch materialized?

While their concerns were no doubt valid, they bothered me. It seemed narrow-minded and nearly rude to focus on the hazards of the ice, and not the marvelous beauty of it all. As is too often the case, the newsfolk brought their negative brand of reality into my icy fantasy world. The Susquehanna may flood, or it may not. And we’ll just have to deal with what comes with our now-warmer temperatures. Either way, Thoreau was right. What a piece of wonder a river is!

Susquehanna River, January 12, 2014