Trauma Farm (4 page)
We accidentally made the landscape-shifting decision of introducing sheep to replace the long-gone goats of the original owners. The sheep ate the tall grass. Sheep have no interest in frogs, but the loss of cover lured the frog-eating herons, and the slaughter began. Soon there was hardly a peep from the ponds, and to our horror we realized the enormity of what we had done. Thus I found myself fencing back the sheep and planting willows, wild iris, and swamp grass to provide a safer habitat. The roar began to build again, though it still hasn’t reached the level of our first years. Such a significant change in a soundscape because of a dozen sheep was one of the first events at the farm that helped me to recognize that an ecology may appear simple but it’s difficult to reconstruct.
Our frogs fade out by dawn, though a few sometimes emerge in our sunroom or attached greenhouses, nestled among the tomatoes and the bougainvillea. They are difficult to spot and often croak amusingly at odd moments, as if announcing they are lost.
SUNRISE BRINGS THE DEWBOWS
, fogbows, halos, rainbows, and sun-rains of our temperate coast that enhance the opalescent greens of the landscape. There’s something about our local misty greens that enchants me more than the gaudy tropics. Each of us carries within us the homeland of our dreams, and this is mine. As Dorothy discovered in
The
Wizard of Oz,
my heart’s desire is in my own backyard.
All the hope of the day is singing in the shrubs surrounding our farm while I make more tea and move to my desk. In the animal world, apart from humans, birds are my first love. I have lived with the African Grey parrot, Tuco, in my study for twenty-three years. He is very good at correcting me when I lose contact with the natural. He may have fewer brain cells, but they’re all turned on, unlike mine at various points in the day, and he does delightful double takes when a lost frog croaks. He sits on my shoulder while we communally sip our tea from my mug, and he stares at the endlessly fascinating computer screen before he turns to me and says, “Whaddya know?”
In odd ways birds have shown us how intelligence works. It was commonly thought we were dealt all our neurons at birth, until a team of researchers investigated the canary’s brain and discovered that learning new songs created more neurons. Yes, music makes their brains grow. Now we have evidence of the same with the human brain. Those who teach our children music in schools advocated this idea long before science proved them right. Experience is often ahead of science.
The mind invents itself with song, though not always. While the canary might be making a different music with its tunes, the chickadee is a three-note wonder, and it sticks to those notes until it can drive you mad in your backyard. Like many birds chickadees are constant in their song. Other birds are also obsessive. The red-eyed vireo wins the gold medal for intrepidity—one demented individual was recorded singing 22,197 songs in a day. That said, the intelligence of birds constantly surprises me. Ravens are so smart they can make your jaw drop with their tricks and tool uses. I like to think our pair of resident ravens are the real owners of our farm, blithely strutting about, supervising the day.
Mike Byron, the seventy-seven-year-old farmer down the road who, along with his wife, Bev, taught me so much about the small farm—even though I originally assumed I already knew enough to get along fine—once told me that in his childhood he’d owned a flock of guinea fowl. They might be good eating, and great alarm birds, but they’re also obnoxiously noisy and usually regarded as stupid. However, one of his hens hatched twenty eggs. Shortly after, the young hen, apparently fed up with the demands of her large flock, went down to the creek and crossed it via a narrow log, the chicks dutifully following. A chick fell off and was swept away by the rushing water. At the other bank the hen turned around and came back, losing more chicks along the way. She repeated her journey several times while Mike stood agape, paralyzed by this combination of murderous intent and intelligence. She whittled her flock down to one and then returned to the barn with the surviving chick blithely following.
Peafowl, in contrast, are known for their ferocious mothering, and at Trauma Farm they provide, along with the geese, our best early warning of trouble in the fields. They drive Sharon mad because of their love of dust baths in newly planted seedbeds and their addiction to tender garden greens, especially brassicas and mustards. Yet they work at keeping the ravens and eagles away from the chickens, maintaining a hundred-yard safe zone around the house. They are so obsessive they will spend all day driving starlings off the lawn.
There was a morning I was at my desk nursing my tea, wondering what words I could put together that would make enough meaning in my life to prevent me from becoming a victim of it, when suddenly the dawn became even noisier than usual, with a great honking of geese and wild ducks, joined by the warning blat of a peahen. Then I heard an eerie
kiee-kieee
cry I recognized immediately. Eagle. I strode out of my office and onto the deck of the adjoining second-floor greenhouse, where I had an overview of the fields. An eagle, obviously young and enraged, was striding along the shore of the top pond, screaming at the ducks and Chloe, the goose. He’d obviously muffed a dive at the mallards (eagles around our neighbourhood are far too cowardly to take on a fully grown goose), and now that the mallards had seen him, they were safe and would just dive if he tried again. They were swimming in circles, a few feet away, tormenting him, squawking out a duck’s version of “Nyah-nyah, you missed me,” as he strutted along the shoreline, powerless.
Meanwhile, the white peahen, Adona, at the lower pond with four chicks, was growing more stressed by the eagle’s refusal to depart and equally enraged by his hubris—turning his back to her and ignoring her warning cries. While the frenzied eagle screamed again at the ducks, she rushed him from behind, covering the thirty feet in seconds. She jumped onto his back, grabbed his white neck feathers, and began beating him with her wings. The terrified eagle tried to leap into the air, but she hung on and rode him like a bucking bronco as he ran across the field, her powerful beating wings preventing him from extending his own and flying away. His gut-wrenching screeching echoed across the field. Feathers were flying, and she must have ridden him a hundred feet before he finally rodeo-tossed her with an impressive jump kick, his beak striking the ground. Then he fled into the sky. I never saw that eagle again, or at least I didn’t recognize him. Adona harrumphed back to her chicks, while the ducks, the geese, and I froze temporarily, filled with silent awe. I returned to my office, knowing that Trauma Farm was secure in its madness, and began to write.
AS SOON AS WE
bought the farm we began creating a sanctuary for local wildlife. Over thousands of years, ever since the first grain seeds were collected and stored for the following spring, farms have provided an environment for wildlife, often despite the farmers’ attempts to eradicate every unwanted living creature within trapping or hunting range. Our planting of bird “sanctuary trees” impenetrable by cats and other small predators—and shrubs that provided fruit and seeds all year around—was rewarded, within a decade, by a growing community of birds, including more quail than you could shake a stick at. When the quail returned to the farm, after being driven off initially by our cats and dogs, we thrilled at their cuteness, the multiple parenting of their young—the “alarm” males standing sentry on the fence posts. Quail have a very structured society.
Then one day Sharon was planting peas. She turned around and discovered a row of quail picking out the pea seeds behind her. She’d become a Pied Piper of quail. We decided to create a less quail-friendly habitat. But when you provide for nature it also provides for you. Soon after, before we could do anything, a Cooper’s hawk showed up, perched every morning on the high crossbar above the garden gate. The quail and, sadly, the Steller’s jays disappeared at a stunning rate. We began to call him Coop, short for Cooper’s hawk, and also after Gary Cooper, because he had the silent but determined gunslinger look of the actor in
High Noon.
The ecology, because of its very nature, explodes around its barriers, like a river, always flowing in the path of least resistance. Although the first grains were harvested as long as twenty millenniums ago, it was almost another ten millenniums before mixed farms truly began to find their form and spread across the planet. Small animals, birds especially, learned to use the borders, the woodlots, the untilled land along the roads and trails surrounding these farms as habitat, allowing many of the migratory songbirds to flourish. These “margins” are now perhaps, along with diminishing marshlands and jungles, the richest sources of bird and mammal life in the temperate regions.
With the human populations expanding in Europe and Asia, the large predators and undomesticated ungulates gradually withdrew into the few wild pockets of today. Smaller animals and birds were hunted, and their populations also diminished. Plates of baked nightingales and skewers of deep-fried sparrows replaced roasted deer and boar. During the past century in North America, as thousands of small farms were swallowed by corporate agribusiness, or devolved into landscaped suburbs, their margins have also been lost.
Once people began moving into cities and suburbs in accelerating numbers at the beginning of the twentieth century, the phenomenon of birdwatching appeared, and within a hundred years it emerged into its current status: the fastest-growing hobby in North America and Europe. Now that we no longer live with the hens and the hawks we have to go looking for them. The planet is rapidly being converted into a collection of zoos, tourist hot spots, and little islands of endangered species we need to visit and view before they become extinct. The increasing rareness of birds makes them even more attractive to the strangest kind of enthusiasts—life-listers, birders who number their bird sightings. It’s the body count that counts, and the more endangered the bird, the better.
To have a unique bird show up in your yard can turn your life into a chaotic invasion of privacy, as numerous victims of “birder stampedes” have testified. I often laugh at the poet and novelist Jim Harrison’s bogus threat to shoot a rare little tweety bird at his ranch because so many birders were lurking in the shrubs, hoping for a sighting and driving him crazy.
Birding is a benevolent fresh-air sport that inspires a need to protect our depleting wildlife, and I can understand the desire to chance upon a rare grey owl or motmot, yet the life-lister’s compulsion to rigorously count sightings is symptomatic of the way we affect the earth—it’s the linearity of their fanatic hearts that sometimes makes the counting more important than preserving the endangered birds.
EXPERIENCING THE PRIVILEGED STATE
of being middle-sexed in my younger years, like Tiresias, I saw the world while drifting between the female and the male condition. I’ve spoken with both their voices, the testosterone-pushed “voice of blood” and the intuitive female voice, watchful and communal.