Category Archives: Environment

By Corinne H. Smith

The air is full of the notes of birds, — song sparrows, red-wings, robins (singing a strain), bluebirds, — and I hear also a lark, — as if all the earth had burst forth into song. The influence of this April morning has reached them, for they live out-of-doors all the night, and there is no danger that they will oversleep themselves such a morning. ~ Thoreau’s journal, April 2, 1852

Morning has broken like the first morning,
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.
~ Eleanor Farjeon, “Morning Has Broken”

Each spring I look forward to hearing what I call the First Bird of the Morning. He’s the first one to wake up and the first one to sing his song. He sings for a few minutes, then he stops. There’s a momentary pause throughout the neighborhood. (For all I know, the other birds may have groaned, mumbled, and hit their snooze buttons.) After 20-30 minutes of relative calm, the rest of the avian residents finally wake up and chime in, with the First Bird of the Morning leading the chorus. It’s a lovely symphony that filters into the inch of air allowed by my open bedroom window.

Over the past decade, I’ve witnessed different species claim First Bird status. The first year I paid attention to this phenomenon, a robin took center stage. The next year, it was a mourning dove. I’ve heard first melodies from a house finch, a Carolina wren, and from someone I could never quite identify. This year, my First Bird is a song sparrow. And what a singer he is! He seems quite proud to have claimed the first arbor vitae bush next to the carport. He wants to tell the world exactly where his new home is. And his favorite stage of all is the stop sign at the corner.

Yesterday, my morning started like any other. I got up at 5 a.m. and fired up the computer and the teapot. By dawn I had finished with e-mail and social media and had turned to work on current projects. The morning bird music was “on” in the background. I heard the song sparrow again as a soloist after the sun had come up over the horizon. I thought I knew where he would be sitting for his performance. And sure enough, when I looked out the living room window, I saw him perched on the top edge of the stop sign.

But as I watched him rear back his head and offer his beautiful tiny notes to the sky, I saw something else, too. We had been under a frost warning overnight. No white coating covered the grass, but the outside thermometer still hovered around 30°. Accordingly, each time the First Bird sang, little white puffs of his breath came out, too. I had never seen such evidence of bird breath. I stood transfixed and said “Wow” with each delivery.

Sparrow sings

It was the smallest possible sighting, really: the exhalation of a warm-blooded creature into the chilly atmosphere that surrounded him. An inconsequential observance, most would say. And yet it struck an immediate chord with me. How often do we remember that these animals are breathing the same air that we are? That their little bodies have functioning life systems like ours do? (Each one “a parcel of vain strivings,” as Mr. Thoreau might say.) Probably rarely, if ever, and not as much as we should. But it’s solid proof that we are all connected by living together on this same home planet. I wonder if he saw MY breath in return when I carried the garbage bag out to the curb a few minutes later.

I grabbed the camera and tried to get photos of First Bird, but I can’t seem to get him in focus. You can get an impression of him, but you can’t see exactly what I saw. You’ll just have to take my word for it. The picture remains clear enough in my own mind’s eye.

As I type these sentences now in the following morning, I hear the song sparrow again. Sure enough, he’s sitting on the stop sign. But the air is a few degrees warmer than it was yesterday. I watch intently and I don’t see puffs of his breath. Too bad. I will always remember what they looked like, though. And I will remind myself to always acknowledge that he and I – and all the rest of them — are indeed fellow creatures sharing one single environment.

Editor’s Note: Corinne’s recently released book, Thoreau for Kids, drew a very fine review in the Chicago Tribune the other day. Here’s a link to that review: http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-prj-henry-david-thoreau-for-kids-20160414-story.html

Surveying the Tommy Wheeler farm.
Again, as so many times, I am reminded of the advantage to the poet, and philosopher, and naturalist, and whomsoever, of pursuing from time to time some other business than his chosen one, — seeing with the side of the eye. The poet will so get visions which no deliberate abandonment can secure. The philosopher is so forced to recognize principles which long study might not detect. And the naturalist even will stumble upon some new and unexpected flower or animal. Thoreau, Journal, 4/28/56

Henry Thoreau had no real fondness for surveying, even as he had a talent for it, and it provided him with steady work (when he wanted it) and some of his family’s income. Still he profited not only from the work, but also from its habits of foot-found measurement. Not only could Thoreau pace off land and boundaries with formidable accuracy, but he also grew used to and adept at seeing maps on the ground. And though this habit fostered too a sort of ambivalence, his mapping eye was a sort of “seeing with the side of the eye,” I think, and the maps he formed of the Concord area grew well beyond the making of boundaries for which he was paid. They became illustrated, animated, narrative maps as well, and his stories flowed from them.

Gleason’s famous 1906 map of Thoreau’s Concord area

Thoreau’s mappings and mapping-mind came to mind recently as I read an essay by Kim Tingley about the Secrets of the Wave Pilots of the Marshall Islands in the NY Times Magazine. Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/magazine/the-secrets-of-the-wave-pilots.html?_r=0

Some scientists had traveled to these Pacific Islands to see if they could understand the navigations of wave pilots, who, for hundreds of years, had sailed over seemingly trackless seas from island to island. The best wave pilots navigated with remarkable accuracy and without instruments; reportedly, they did so by sensing variations in the waves that showed them what they called the di lep, the way on the water.

The article was long and the years of summarized science complex, but it turned on a sort of cognitive mapping, which the wave pilots learned, and which yielded familiar water and known routes from what everyone else sees as chaos. In particular these wave pilots had grown adept at reading the way waves interacted with the widespread islands, setting up distinctive patterns that suggested where those islands were over the horizon. And the idea of sensitivity to surroundings shaping maps in the mind called up similar, land-based experiences that I’ve had in familiar hills I’ve walked for tens of years.

Just as one of the story’s wave pilots could orient himself by reading and feeling immediate waves, I’ve found that, even in the fog of cloud banks, and even in the absence of trails, certain trees and rocks and slopes suggest the way. There is, however, a qualifying IF: such orientation works if I carry in my mind an overall map of the area, and that map is a composite of study and experience. The study comes from my habit of reading topo-maps (or sea charts) for fun; the experience comes from being a foot pilot in the terrain of those maps. Over time, across land, it becomes a familiarity that I follow, even in “trackless woods.” My familiarity may not take me over miles to visit a particular tree, as Henry Thoreau sometimes did, but I can see how the miles of walking and re-walking have formed mind-maps. And how, sometimes in those woods, I feel “everywhere at home.”

The footway, clear here

And that offers a whiff of understanding for how wave pilots may develop their exquisite readings of water.

And for another time: The essay also speculates about a fascinating link between motion over sea and land and our narrative inclinations and abilities – in short, it wonders if our stories come from our memories of motion. Thoreau, I think, would lean (or walk) in that direction. He would read Tingley’s narrative of the di lep avidly.