Saving Tarboo Creek

by Scott Freeman

  SAVING TARBOO CREEK

  One Family’s Quest to Heal the Land

  scott freeman

  Illustrations by susan leopold freeman

  Timber Press •  Portland, Oregon

  Men nowhere, east or west, live yet

  a natural life, round which the vine clings,

  and which the elm willingly shadows.

  —Henry David Thoreau

  A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

  (emphasis original)

  Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction:

  Noticing Things

  A Stream Is Born

  Trees

  Salmon

  Planting Season

  Blood, Sweat, Tears

  A Working Forest

  Damnation

  Wild Things

  A Natural Life

  Acknowledgments

  References

  Index

  Dedication

  My father-in-law, Carl Leopold, was born on December 19, 1919. Less than two weeks before his twenty-second birthday, the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor. His life, and the lives of millions of other American men and women in their late teens and twenties, changed that day. The United States declared war on Japan on December 8, 1941, and on the Axis powers led by Germany on December 11.

  On Christmas Day 1941, the free world essentially consisted of Australia, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, and the United States. The government of every other country was a dictatorship or fascist, with the exception of Sweden and Switzerland, which remained neutral in the war against totalitarianism. The Battle of Britain had been won, but everywhere else—in Eastern Europe and Russia, Africa, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific

  —the armies of tyranny were advancing.

  Imagine that you were a high school or college student on that morning. If you were living in Europe or Asia, you were under occupation. If you resisted that occupation or happened to be Jewish, Romani, a Freemason, or homosexual, you were almost certain to be killed.

  What if you were living in what was left of the free world? My father-in-law and his brothers and sisters celebrated Christmas that year in the living room of their home in Madison, Wisconsin. Life there was quiet, but there was also disquiet: the rest of the world was in flames. The young were realizing that they had to fight a war—one that the democracies were losing badly—before they had any hope of finishing school, starting a family, and getting a career under way. They were being called upon to save the world.

  My father-in-law enlisted in the U.S. Marines and spent four years in the Pacific as a captain in the artillery. He survived, went back to school in 1945, and had a long, distinguished career as a research scientist. But two-thirds of the young men in his officer training class were killed in action. This book is dedicated to them, and to him.

  Today, seventy-five years after the Second World War became a global conflagration, high school and college students are again being called on to save the world. This book is dedicated to them, too.

  Introduction

  Noticing Things

  My uncle Carl Holtz farmed in southeast Wisconsin for forty years. But before he started farming, he went to the University of Wisconsin to row on the crew team. While he was a student there he took a course on wildlife biology—then called game management—from a professor named Aldo Leopold.

  During the semester, each student was required to have a brief one-on-one conversation about the course with Leopold in his office. More than twenty-five years later, my uncle told me about that meeting: “I sat there like the dumb jock I was back then, you know. Professor Leopold was asking me about this and that, and I had absolutely no idea what he was driving at. But then something caught his eye out the window, behind his desk. He looked at it for a moment, then turned to me and asked, ‘Carl, what bird is that?’”

  “I had no clue, of course,” he laughed. “But years later I realized it was a palm warbler, migrating through.”

  My uncle was a big man, with hands the size of salad plates. He held them up. “Leopold knew I wasn’t going to go on to graduate school or become a wildlife biologist. He just wanted me to look up and notice things.” Uncle Carl put his hands down and nodded at me. “And so I have—ever since.”

  〜

  Outside my window in Seattle right now, a flock of bushtits is feeding in the bare branches of a birch tree. Some are upside down; some are right-side up. They are flitting, fluttering, jumping. Then they disappear all at once—diving into the cover of a nearby Douglas-fir tree. Now they’re back. A moment later, they’re gone—until tomorrow.

  These birds are adults and juveniles. They are neighbors from the previous year and new immigrants to the neighborhood, and by now are well acquainted. The members of a winter flock like this one find each other in late summer and stay together until the following breeding season. Although bushtits dominate this particular group, there are also some golden-crowned kinglets and at least one chestnut-backed chickadee. Around here, it’s common to find northern juncos, black-capped chickadees, and hairy woodpeckers in the mix, and sometimes even ruby-crowned kinglets.

  You can find these types of mixed flocks almost anywhere you go in the world. In Japan, there would be marsh tits and great tits and goldcrests—close relatives and look-alikes of North America’s chickadees and kinglets. The Eurasian treecreeper and Eurasian nuthatch would take the place of our brown creeper and red-breasted nuthatch; Japanese pygmy and great-spotted woodpeckers would stand in for our downy and hairy woodpeckers.

  In the lowland rainforests of southern Ecuador, all Hades breaks loose. There may be twenty-five species and forty or more individuals in a mixed foraging flock like this. In addition to woodpeckers and woodcreepers, there will be several types of antwrens, a handful of flycatcher species, and a bouquet of tanagers: yellow-throated, blue-winged, orange-eared, blue-browed, and bay-headed, among others. The colors streak from branch to branch. They are dazzling, brilliant, sublime.

  Typically, each species in a mixed flock will be eating something slightly different, in a different part of the vegetation. Out my window, the bushtits glean from the tiniest twigs; chickadees pick at branches; brown creepers probe the trunk’s furrowed bark; hairy woodpeckers rap at spongy, rotting spots in the wood.

  When these little gangs appear, moving slowly but steadily through the trees, the woods look like Central Park on a summer Sunday. You’ll find every size, shape, color, and linguistic group imaginable among birds—all moving and jostling, going about their day.

  For a mixed flock like this, there is knowledge in numbers. Large flocks can draw on the collective wisdom of fifteen or twenty memories, finding food in obscure locations when ice and snow coat the branches and ground.

  There is safety in numbers, too. If a sharp-shinned hawk dove into this birch tree and surprised the group, the little birds would scatter like shot—making it hard for the predator to draw a bead and snatch one from the air. And to avoid surprise, many eyes are better than two. In black-capped chickadee flocks, individuals that notice flying predators give a high-pitched “seet” call; in response, the others dive for cover. But if the predator is sitting, the spotter gives the “chick-a-dee” call and adds “dee’s” to indicate the degree of danger. Biologist Chris Templeton and co-workers figured this out by bringing live predators into a large outdoor aviary where a chickadee flock was living. Chickadees are little—almost as tiny as bushtits—and it is the small, agile killers like saw-whet owls and northern pygmy owls that worry them the most. In the experiments, small predators could elicit a string of five “dee’s” or more. But big, lunking hunters like great gray owls, which strike fear in the
hearts of snowshoe rabbits and grouse, got only a “dee” or two—barely more than the response to a harmless, seed-eating bobwhite quail. Follow-up work by other biologists showed that Carolina chickadees do the same thing.

  Later, Templeton and Erick Greene showed that red-breasted nuthatches, which are common in chickadee flocks, respond much more strongly when they hear long strings of “dee’s” as opposed to short strings. The nuthatches understand Chickadeean, even if they can’t speak it. After this work was published, researchers found the same pattern in mixed flocks from locations around the world. In most or perhaps all cases, alarm calls are mutually intelligible to mixed-flock members.

  So the next time you’re out and about and hear chickadees giving the call that inspired their name, count the “dee’s.” The birds may be describing how dangerous you are. Or if early in the morning you hear males giving territorial “fee-bee’s” back and forth, appreciate that each individual’s voice has unique and recognizable characteristics—even though it’s a simple, two-note song. To us, they all sound alike. But chickadees know their neighbors by voice.

  As you walk, then, you’ll be doing the same thing that bushtits are reminding me of today and that Aldo Leopold prompted my uncle to do sixty-five years ago: look up and out. When you begin to notice the wild things around you, like the clash of orange and yellow on the head of a golden-crowned kinglet, even a dull day can spring to life.

  〜

  This book is about small things, like watching birds brighten a February afternoon or hearing a tree frog on a cold, moonless night; about planting a tree or hoeing beans. But it’s also about a big thing: what life will be like in 2100, when the human population passes 11 billion and almost half of the species alive today are extinct; when every organism left on the planet will be trying to cope with what may turn out to be the most rapid period of climate change in Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history.

  〜

  The twentieth century was rife with conflict among nations and races. Tens of millions died, and hundreds of millions more suffered, in three world wars—two hot and one cold. Those deaths were tragic, but they also accomplished something profound: fascism, communism, and colonialism are gone, or nearly so. Racism, nationalism, tribalism, and religious extremism are still alive, but they are not well, relative to historical norms. The -isms that have plagued our kind for thousands of years no longer move hundreds of millions to violence and exploitation.

  As the twentieth century’s wars were being fought and won, the flowering of modern science and engineering created wealth and improved health. In a hundred years, we established standards of living that had been unthinkable since the dawn of humankind some 150,000 years ago. Mothers could remain calm if their children came home with a slight limp, because it wasn’t polio. Tens of millions of us ate like kings, wore fine clothing, and lived in small castles.

  The challenge of this century is a product of the past century’s successes.

  If you are young as you read this, you are entering a world filled with danger: peril from those who cling to the old ways of tribalism and religious extremism, and new threats to our planet’s ability to support life, brought about by our species’ recent success at acquiring and using resources. If you are a parent or a grandparent as you read this, your children and grandchildren are entering a world you did not experience but must prepare them for.

  As far as we know, no human culture has ever limited its use of resources voluntarily. Throughout history, people have used forests, wildlife, water, and soil until they were used up. When that day arrived, the individuals who were affected either died or moved. Time and again, overexploitation led to the collapse and disappearance of entire civilizations.

  The power of those lost civilizations to devastate landscapes was nothing compared to ours, however. We have the technological prowess, the numbers, and the appetite to threaten the future of most life forms, including our own. And now there is nowhere to move to. Earth is full.

  So yes, there is danger. But there is also possibility.

  〜

  In 1949 my uncle’s teacher, the forester and wildlife biologist Aldo Leopold, published a book of essays called A Sand County Almanac. It comprised nature observations, hunting and fishing stories, and an indictment of the gospel, unquestioned at the time, that destroying natural areas in the name of human progress was good. But most important, it also contained an idea—a solution to the waste and loss that occurs when we treat the land around us as property, as something we are free to use and abuse without restraint or consequence. Leopold proposed a fundamentally new way of thinking about the relationship between people and the natural world. His idea was simple: good people should treat the land around them the same way good people treat the people around them.

  To Leopold, this insight was a logical step in the progressive evolution of human ethics—a process that started thousands of years ago, when the first inklings of civilized behavior began to rein in our predisposition to act out of pure, unbridled self-interest. At the genesis of this ethical sequence, the novel idea was that we should act with care and consideration toward members of not just our immediate family but also our immediate community—our neighbors. Leopold saw the Mosaic Decalogue—the Ten Commandments—as a summary statement of this early stage, a marker and touchstone that we still use today. Later, the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount extended the standards of ethical behavior to members of our broader society—to people we do not know and to those outside of our tribe or group. The invention and practice of democracy applied these norms to the community called a nation. Although Leopold died in 1948, I would claim that the international organizations and trade agreements that have emerged since the Second World War—the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the European Union, nato, the Organization of African States, the United Nations—are attempts to extend ethical standards to the community of nations. Since humans first began to walk upright and live in groups larger than extended families, our circle of ethical responsibility has been expanding outward.

  Leopold simply extended this progression to the natural world. In his view, ethical people would no more harm a marsh or forest than they would harm their family, or their country, or any human being who wasn’t actively trying to injure them. Leopold called this idea the land ethic. It was an eleventh commandment: thou shalt not harm the land.

  The key idea was that land cannot be your property, any more than another person can be your property. People do not have the right to use land and resources badly any more than they have the right to use other people badly. Leopold wrote A Sand County Almanac because he saw no other way to stop the thoughtlessness and destruction that was occurring everywhere he looked. The only lasting solution had to come from ethics—from the depths of the human heart.

  But in the same breath that Leopold proposed this simple idea, he also wrote that “nothing so important as an ethic is ever written . . . it evolves in the minds of a thinking community.”

  Saving Tarboo Creek is written for that thinking community—for the network of people across the globe, from all walks of life and every possible background, who live a thoughtful, examined life. An examined life pursues wisdom. It is mindful of the needs of others. It is a life worth living.

  My wife, Susan, is Aldo Leopold’s granddaughter, and our two boys are his great-grandsons—part of the fourth generation of Leopolds to work on ecological restoration. The chapters that you’ll be reading tell two stories about this legacy, woven as on a loom. The warp—the long, vertical threads that a weaver sets to begin a rug or tapestry—is the work that we are doing as a family to help restore a heavily degraded salmon stream that runs into the Pacific Ocean off the northwest coast of North America. The weft that shuttles back and forth is made up of strands from the larger world that affect the work: the history of resource use over the past two thousand years and observations on the current and projected state of the world. The warp is what we do; the weft expl
ains why. As we plant trees, build trails, and watch our little creek change over time, we consider the tasks that we are doing together and the world around us. This is how we take part in the thinking community that Susan’s grandfather wrote to.

  The state of the world defines a twin challenge for us all. The first is to discover a set of values based on self-restraint and on a commitment to the long-term health of human and natural communities. The second is to live by them. The goal is to find a harmony with each other and with the land.

  It has never been done before. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be.

  A Stream Is Born

  In the Puget Sound Basin of western Washington, stream restoration work starts in early August. The key is the rain—it’s rare from early July through mid-September, and soils dry to powder. Rivulets dry up; creek depths drop to inches; rivers slow to a warm, sluggish crawl.

  The salmon that call Puget Sound home leave their foraging grounds in the northeast Pacific Ocean about this time and home in on their natal streams. Fish with return addresses in big rivers may run up into the freshwater and spawn right away, but fish from small rivers and creeks usually delay. In the low waters of September, the small-stream fish would scrape their bellies over gravel for mile after mile; they’d have no bellies left by the time they reached their spawning grounds high in the watersheds. They’d also have no place to hide from the bald eagles, black bears, and river otters that are checking the streams every day, anticipating their return. So they wait.

  Then, November arrives. Temperatures drop to the low 50s, winds rise, the first storms blow in from the north Pacific, and a salmon’s thoughts turn to love. The fish will still hold back, schooling in bays and estuaries, until a howling storm or two have swollen the smaller rivers and creeks. As the water deepens, the salmon make a run for it—moving pell-mell upstream. They swim against the current, in the manner of poets and prophets.