Thoreau Farm

By Corinne H. Smith

What affinity is it brings the goldfinch to the sunflower – both yellow – to pick its seeds? … In a day or two the first message will be conveyed or transmitted over the magnetic telegraph through this town, as a thought traverses space, and no citizen of the town shall be aware of it. The atmosphere is full of telegraphs equally unobserved. We are not confined to Morse’s or House’s or Bain’s line. Raise some sunflowers to attract the goldfinches, to feed them as well as your hens. What a broad and loaded, bounteously filled platter of food is presented this bon-vivant!
~ Thoreau’s journal, September 2, 1851

It was not time wasted when I spent a whole weekend watching a set of goldfinches who were harvesting sunflowers at Thoreau Farm. Animals are intriguing when they can ignore human intrusion and focus instead on their own specialties.

The three sunflowers growing in our heirloom garden were top-heavy with seed. Their heads were beginning to turn toward the ground. The birds of the neighborhood were undeterred by this potential challenge of gravity. Somehow they knew it was time to get to work.

At first, they were just flashes of yellow and black dipping past me, swooping around the garden and chirruping with each dip. (Thoreau referred to the sound as a “twitter,” back in the days before social media changed the meaning of the word.) I must have been deemed an idle threat. The goldfinches didn’t mind at all that I sat just a few feet away, mesmerized, and with a camera aimed in their direction. It took only a few minutes to catch each step of the harvesting process.

First, hang onto the sunflower head and pull out a full seed.

Then fly the short distance to the top of the head and use it as a table.

With seed in beak, tap it on the top of the sunflower. The light husk will magically break into two halves and fall to the ground. The seed will drop right down the bird’s throat.

Repeat, until satisfied. Manners: Only one feeder may feast at the head at any one time. Then it’s time for the next harvester to fly in. A few quick chirps confirm the switch.

And so the afternoon passed. One by one, seed by seed, bird by bird. Again and again.

I watched in amazement as they took turns, over and over. Eventually I could tell some individuals by their unique markings. The male had a black cap; the female had a greenish cast to her body color. There may have been just two, or there may have been four birds in all. Sometimes the outlines of the black caps looked a bit different, so there may have been at least two males involved. The goldfinches chattered to each other as they took turns. I guess they were figuring out the eating order at this all-you-can-eat birdie buffet.

And yes, perhaps they telegraphed their find amongst their own small group. But unlike the birds that Thoreau wrote about that September day in 1851, they didn’t let the rest of the town in on the location of their treasure. Maybe they employed the finders-keepers rule.

Thoreau’s analogy for the sunflower-goldfinch interaction was a “bounteously filled platter of food” to a “bon-vivant.” My dictionary defines the French term as meaning: “A person who enjoys good food and drink and other luxuries.” To a group of goldfinches on one end-of-summer afternoon, a garden full of sunflowers proved to be one of life’s little luxuries.

One Mind Two Answers

School has begun, and we (my 31 students and I) are making our way into “Walking.” Yesterday, after digesting Thoreau’s criteria for a walk, we set out; we didn’t go far. Confined both by a class period and the Sudbury River, we reached and then lolled some on the grass near its banks. There, we spent ten minutes watching the day’s open sky. Here’s what appeared:

Across the blue slate of this day
nothing is written
until a wisp of white
materializes
and then tendrils appear
and the everbusy mind begins
its search for shape, begins
to imagine symbols – it looks
like…o
no
there
it
goes.

Blue again only blue, which –
give it its due – is
really blue.

Open Sky, Single Cloud

Here we are. I’ve tracked down John Pickle, our school’s meteorologist and weather-savant, and we are in the parking lot where I am describing the cloud phenomenon that four or five of us saw while sky-watching (surely a form of reading) in class. “Clear blue sky,” I say. “Cloudless. And then, as we watched, a wisp cloud, a rumor of cumulus or a scintilla of cirrus, appeared. For 30 seconds or so, it grew. Then, perceptibly, it began to fade, until 30 or so seconds later it was gone, and the sky was pure blue again. This happened three times that I saw.

“John,” I say, “What happened?”

“O,” he says, “here’s what happened. The air you were watching hit a rise; it lifted. And, as it did, it cooled, and the water in the air condensed, and a cloud began to form. But then, that air sank again, and, as it did, it warmed, and the cloud vanished.”

John is as excited by his explanation of the variability of clouds as I am by the way things materialize and then vanish; together, in this parking-lot conversation, we represent aspects of the mind that Henry Thoreau worked to yoke to his purpose to know the world.

Throughout the drought of August, 1854, Thoreau often “improved” his walks by visiting places normally inaccessible on foot. Little land bridges arose everywhere, and he was often at and in the swamps that he saw as some of Concord’s richest troves.

On the 23rd, we find him afoot in Gowing’s Swamp on “a dense bed of quaking sphagnum, in which I sink eighteen inches in water, upheld by its matted roots, where I fear to break through.” There, on this terra-not-so-firma, in this intermediate world that only he would visit, Thoreau finds a “new cranberry on the sphagnum,” and, with typical precision, he records its appearance: “It has small, now purplish-dotted fruit, flat on the sphagnum, some turned scarlet partly, on terminal penduncles, with slender threadlike stems and small leaves strongly revolute on the edges.” It’s classic Thoreau, nosing deeper and deeper into the world.

A few days before his visit to Gowing’s Swamp, Thoreau’s afternoon path crosses that of a turtle, which has taken up residence near one of that season’s few shrinking pools. Thoreau attends closely to the turtle and its movements, of course. But he also takes it up and carries it off with him. A little later we find that he has followed another persistent exploratory urge and killed the turtle to examine it scientifically. The aftermath of this other nosing into life brings the following paragraph:

I have just been through the process of killing the cistudo [Eastern Box turtle] for the sake of science; but I cannot excuse myself for this murder, and see that such actions are inconsistent with the poetic perception, however they may serve science, and will affect the quality of my observations. I pray that I may walk more innocently and serenely through nature. No reasoning whatever reconciles me to this act. It affects my day injuriously. I have lost some self-respect. I have a murderer’s experience in a degree.

Next, without transition, Thoreau returns to his observer’s world: “The bobolinks alight on the wool grass. Do they eat its seeds?”

I returned to this passage three times, reading it as much for its stark placement as for its stark content. In it Thoreau acknowledges his complexity, the way he is driven to know, even to the point of killing another creature. It is in service of “science,” a system of knowing that demands facts, that goes forward on the wheels of recorded data. But the cost of this knowing is an inconsistency “with the poetic perception” that “will affect the qualities of my observations.” Perhaps Thoreau knew that these slow turtles sometimes live to be 100 years old; perhaps he didn’t know. But he did reckon the cost: a division from nature, even as he had divided the turtle.

Thoreau then turns in language to prayer – not that he may be right with some personified god, but that he may “walk more innocently and serenely through nature.” Killing to know has separated him from nature; next we see it has also separated him from his day and from himself.

Part of why I read and reread Thoreau stems from his bracing honesty with self. We walk in nature to observe, to marvel, to delight in what we meet. And we lay hands on nature, dig into it to know its secrets.

And I think we must ask: when we inquire into it, must we murder mystery too?