A Country Year

by Hubbell, Liddy; Hubbell, Sue;

  That is why I have stopped sleeping inside. A house is too small, too confining. I want the whole world, and the stars too.

  Last winter a bird never before seen in Missouri or any of the lower forty-eight states, the slaty-backed gull, a native of the Bering Sea, was blown into the state on an arctic cold front and was spotted near the Mississippi River by a birder experienced enough to realize that this rather undistinguished-looking gull was different. “When I first saw it, I had no idea what it was, but I knew what it wasn’t,” said Bill Rudden, who holds several state titles for rare-bird spotting.

  That there can be titles for rare-bird spotting is an indication of what has happened to bird watching now that it has become birding. It is a competitive affair. Field days are held in which one demon birder pits his skills against another, and the winner is the one who has sighted the most species of birds within a twenty-four hour period, aided by tapes of the birds’ song, which entice them into view. Birders keep life lists of birds seen, and travel around the country for the single purpose of adding to their lists. It is a trophy approach to natural history. I once asked a ferocious birder about a spring warbler that I had seen in my woodlot during migration time. It had puzzled me, and I was not sure that I had seen what I thought I had seen. Did he know the warbler? Had he ever seen it? “I don’t know,” he replied, “I’d have to check my life list.”

  The slaty-backed gull’s appearance in Missouri was an event for competitive birders, and they flocked, pardon the expression, to the ice floes on the Mississippi River, pencil in hand, to be able to add the bird to their lists. The confused gull had flown into the state on wing power buoyed by arctic winds, but the Audubon Society flew its top muffler-wrapped birders in on an airplane. After positively identifying the gull, they called a news conference, and the gull’s picture and story appeared on the front page of The New York Times. The slaty-backed gull was duly noted to be the 378th bird species to be identified in Missouri, and was solemnly declared to be the state’s Best Bird.

  I’ve always disliked making lists and taking part in organized fun and games, and the few birding expeditions that I have been on have only reinforced this dislike. I will never make a birder.

  That said, I feel free to award my own title of Best Bird wherever I please, and to change it from time to time. This week I have given the title, in its plural form, to a pair of cowbirds. Birders wouldn’t give a cowbird a look. Black birds with brown heads, they are far too common, and appear at one time of the year or another in every part of the country, sometimes flocking in numbers, often foraging among cattle for insects disturbed by the animals’ hooves. Their habit of laying eggs in the nests of other birds for the latter to raise, to the detriment of their own young, has, it is claimed, reduced the population of orioles, tanagers, warblers and vireos. As a result they are considered to be rather trashy birds. One of my bird books refers to them as “utterly irresponsible,” and goes on: “In keeping with its unholy life and character, the cowbird’s ordinary note is a gurgling, rasping whistle, followed by a few sharp notes.” My other bird books speak no better of their song. But these books are wrong, which is why cowbirds are my Best Birds this week. Two of them have been courting, and when I first heard them I was inside the cabin and came out with my binoculars to see what was singing such a beautiful song, reminiscent but slightly different from the liquid, bubbling trill of red-wing blackbirds. It was the cowbirds.

  Since I became aware of this song, I have been watching the cowbirds all week. They are conducting their love affair in the treetops and on the power lines that run between the barn and the cabin, so I can set up a lawn chair in the space between and watch them comfortably through my binoculars. The male throws its head straight back, fluffing up all his feathers elaborately and singing a piercingly sweet song. Wing-fanning and tail-wagging follow, and the display culminates in a plebian-sounding s-k-r-a-a-a-t, a finale that the female seems to find impressive. I’m delighted to have heard and watched their carryings-on, and to report that I think their courting will be successful. I hope everything works out for the two of them.

  Last week my Best Birds were a pair of Baltimore orioles. Even trophy birders would concede that these birds are beautiful, although they probably would insist that they are far too common to be of interest, since they are summertime residents all over the United States. The males are brilliantly colored, orange with black hoods and backs; the females are somewhat duller. They eat insects and caterpillars and are usually seen feeding in trees, so I was startled when I walked through the living room last week and saw a flash of orange near the syrup-filled hummingbird feeder that hangs in front of the window—a dainty bit of glass and red plastic with four slim wells. I waited for whatever it was I had seen to reappear, and in a few minutes a pair of Baltimore orioles returned. The orioles are robin-sized, and clumsily found toeholds on the feeder, tipping it from side to side to spill out drops of the syrup, which they dabbed up with beaks more suited to an insect diet. I could hardly believe what I was seeing, but over the next several days I watched them repeat their performance, clutching awkwardly at the wildly swinging feeder while they slurped up syrup, offending the hummingbirds and driving them away.

  Then, at the end of the week, the newspaper from the county seat, some thirty miles away, ran a front-page picture story of a Baltimore oriole feeding at a town resident’s hummingbird feeder. The woman who owned the feeder had spotted an oriole there the same day I had first seen my pair. She telephoned the state conservation department’s local office for an explanation of this bizarre behavior and was dismissed by the agent, who assured her that a Baltimore oriole would not be at a hummingbird feeder and that she had misidentified the bird. Annoyed, she telephoned the newspaper office, which sent out a photographer who took a series of pictures showing an oriole at his gymnastics.

  What had happened? Did Baltimore orioles all over the Ozarks just last week independently discover that those red plastic feeders had good stuff inside? Or did word go out that, though not as tasty as caterpillars, those red things were worthwhile if you tipped them just right? If so, how was this information passed around? I don’t know the answers to those questions, but thinking about them beats the making of bird lists.

  My idea of bird watching is to stuff my pockets full of bird books, hang my binoculars around my neck and go out with the dogs to sit quietly under a tree by the edge of the woods where there is both open and leafy habitat. My walk to the spot will have been noted by all the birds around, for their eyesight is keener than mine. For a time I’ll neither see nor hear a bird. Andy will trot off to track rabbits, but Tazzie will sit beside me as close as she can get and sigh. She knows bird watching is a quiet and solitary business, and that if she is to be allowed to stay she must be still. In half an hour the birds are no longer alarmed and resume their usual affairs—and I am privileged to watch them, sometimes so close that I do not need my binoculars.

  Even better than sitting in the woods is to go out to the rope hammock hanging between two pine trees below the cabin. I crawl into it with my books and binoculars late in the afternoon when I am tired and when the birds are feeding for the last time before dusk. Just to one side of the pine trees is a patch of sumac and other low, wild, shrubby growth, and beyond that is the open field. Birds congregate all about me—common enough birds, to be sure: goldfinches, indigo buntings, hummingbirds, blue-winged warblers, prairie warblers, yellow-breasted chats and all the rest of the warm-weather residents whose names, songs and behavior I have become acquainted with over the years. They are like old friends to me. I enjoy seeing what they are up to, and listening to their end-of-the-day songs.

  Early this morning, before I left to work with the bees, I went to see how the rhubarb is coming along. My brother, Bil, and his wife, Ann, are going to be here for a visit soon and I want to make them a rhubarb pie. It is Bil’s favorite.

  Back when there were two of us here to eat and do the work, I had a big garden b
etween a grove of pepperidge trees and the old road down to the river. I enjoyed the work that was necessary to produce, by midsummer, the neat rows of beans and beets, carrots, potatoes, corn, tomatoes, Swiss chard, onions and lettuce of good flavor and amazing hues. I mulched the plants with newspaper and straw to keep moisture in and weeds out. I planted peas along the inside of the garden fence; the plants blossomed and produced tender pods. And throughout the garden I had bright gold and orange marigolds. They helped to protect the vegetables, because bugs dislike and avoid their flowers, avoiding the vegetables at the same time.

  For one person a garden is not worth the work, which comes, for the most part, just when I am busiest with the bees. But sometimes I still clear away a little corner of the patch and plant a few tomatoes and lettuces for summer salads. This year, however, there are only the tough perennials that can hold their own against weeds. A few strawberries still grow, but the turtles will get the fruit before I do. Rhubarb, asparagus and feisty elephant garlic are flourishing. The herbs, particularly mint, feral plants that they are, are spreading. The garden is being taken over by wildness. Shoots of pepperidge growing up in it from the roots of a nearby tree will become a new grove in a few years and claim the garden as their own.

  Living even the modestly domestic life that I do in a wild place requires a constant balancing act. While I was out in the garden looking at the rhubarb, wild things were asserting their rights in the cabin. The termites were swarming up out of the floor in the old part which is my living room. They have done this for a ten-to twelve-hour period in the springtime for the past several years, and today was their day. The living room is the original one-room cabin built here fifty years ago. Like many Ozark cabins, its underpinnings are a series of two-by-fours balanced on paired rocks on the bare ground. It is protected, damp and warm under there, a perfect habitat for termites, and they feast upon the two-by-fours and probably on the floor itself.

  Our houses are only a minor source of food for termites, and if we humans did not have a penchant for building things out of wood we would look upon them with kindness for the role they play in turning dead and fallen wood into soil. The soil provides the base and nutrient for new-growing plants, and so the termites give the wheel of process an important turn.

  There are more than two thousand species of termites, but in North America, not a favorable climate for them, there are a scant forty-one. Of these, the subterranean termites who belong to the family Rhinotermitidae are the ones who most alarm human beings.

  Termites are social. Their eating habits make them so. Although some people call them flying ants, they are not related to ants but to cockroaches. Like some roaches, they contain within their gut microorganisms that process cellulose, transforming it into a food they pass between one termite and another by anal feeding. This makes social organization necessary.

  Most of the termites within a colony are sterile workers, and, in some species, “soldiers,” with big heads and jaws, who protect the colony against enemies, usually ants. The workers of these subterranean species do not have the hard chitinous body covers of many other insects. They must construct tunnels to their above-ground food sources in order to protect their pale, delicate, wingless bodies. The tunnels are made of fecal pellets, a building material that also requires a cooperative social structure. These tunnels, scaling the face of a concrete foundation, are often the first sign we have that our houses are providing termite dinners.

  The termites I saw swarming out of my floor this morning were the reproductives, the alates, winged, unmated males and females who had emerged from the underground nests to establish new colonies. Their wings are weak and they cannot fly far. When they land they break off their wings by pressing the tips to the floor. After a minimal courtship the future king and queen of a new colony pair off, select a suitable spot for a nest and begin excavating a burrow from which they will never again emerge. From the eggs that the queen lays, sterile offspring will appear to build up the colony and do its work. The mother queen lives for many years, and when she begins to fail she is replaced by secondary reproductives, so it is possible for a termite colony to live as long as its food supply.

  The termites that eat our North American houses, members of the genus Reticulitermes, are regarded as fairly primitive species by entomologists. The tunnels that they build to their food supply free them only a little from their food sources. The most primitive of all are prisoners to their food and must live within it, a happy circumstance for those who want to study them, like the researcher I read about who for years kept a prospering colony of primitive termites in a block of wood inside a bottle in his office. No special heat or humidity was required, and they needed no care or attention.

  The majority of the world’s termites, however, belong to more evolutionarily advanced species than those minimalists, or even those who nibble away at our houses. They are found in tropical climates, and are diverse in form, social organization and habits. The most advanced are found in the Old World tropics and have managed to free themselves completely from dependence on existing wood. They raise their own food inside mounded nests on the ground, and build round combs in special chambers within their nests; on these they grow fungus gardens that serve as a food supply. Big populations are needed to build and maintain these complex nests; approximately two million termites live within each of the huge mounds.

  I don’t suppose there are that many of these less-sophisticated termites under my floor, but even if there were I wouldn’t worry about them. Perhaps this is because I have never owned a television set and am therefore spared what I hear are terrifying advertisements that depict termites and scare homeowners into buying the services of pest-control companies. But I also know that in temperate climates it takes termites a long time to eat up something as big as my cabin. I still have time before wildness takes it, and tonight I will simply sweep up the shed termite wings on the living-room floor.

  I think it is sensible to let the garden go; I have neither the need for it nor the time to work it. But I am not yet quite ready to give up on shelter, so I am planning to replace some of the cabin’s sills and studs with treated lumber, to tear out the living-room floor and put down fieldstone. This will not only be discouraging to termites, but will provide enough mass to equalize the temperature in the room by storing heat from the sunshine that streams through the windows. I cannot make this change right away, because the labor and materials are too expensive. But termites who live in a temperate climate are leisurely creatures, and I believe I shall have the money for a new floor before they have finished with the old one.

  A young friend of mine, Winnie, who lives in Boston, attended a conference in Kansas City recently. After her meetings were finished, I drove there to pick her up and brought her back for a visit, which has just ended. We hiked, read aloud from a book she had brought, talked and sunbathed down by the creek. One day we went canoeing on the river and saw great blue herons, a snake eating a fish on a rock and the yellow and scarlet blossoms of columbine clinging to cliff faces everywhere.

  Another day we went into town to do errands; when we were done, Winnie suggested we have a drink together. It is the sort of thing we do when I visit her in Boston; it is harder here in a dry town of one thousand three hundred ostensible teetotalers.

  There is one bar outside the city limits, down by the sewage lagoon. It is dark, forbidding-looking, dreadful. A couple of years ago a man who had been drinking and shooting pool there picked several fights in succession, went out to his pickup and returned to settle matters with his chain saw running at full throttle. The crowd in the bar was badly frightened: a pool cue was sawed in two and several people cut up before the man was stopped with a charge in his stomach from a 20-gauge shotgun another man had handy. It is not the sort of place where Winnie and I could enjoy a quiet drink.

  But when she proposed it, I remembered a restaurant, also outside of town, that had recently opened and had, tentatively and with considerable
daring, advertised a Happy Hour on Friday afternoons. It was a Friday, and Winnie thought Happy Hour in the Ozarks was not to be missed, so we drove out there. Inside we found the town yuppies, a small group who cling together with the pathetic tenacity of the pharmacist, doctor, government inspector and schoolmaster in Russian novels about provincial life.

  I introduced Winnie, and we sat down. She looks younger than her twenty-six years, and when the waitress took her order she asked for proof of age. Winnie handed over her Massachusetts driver’s license, but the waitress shook her head. Not good enough; for a driver’s license to be proof, it would have to be from Missouri or an adjacent state.

  Winnie looked disbelieving, but this is the Show Me state, and those distant places, if they do indeed exist, might not know how to get their important facts straight.

  Winnie fumbled through her billfold, slightly embarrassed. “What about my Lord and Taylor charge card?” she joked.

  The waitress looked with awe at the piece of green plastic.

  “I’ll take it to the manager and see,” she said to our surprise. She returned a few minutes later. “He said it was acceptable,” she reported solemnly. If you can handle the responsibility of a Lord and Taylor charge card, then, by golly, you can drink a margarita in Missouri.

  The yuppies were impressed with the power of big-city ways and asked Winnie all about Boston. She, in turn, liked them, and asked them about their jobs and lives. They drank their margaritas, told lies and had a good civilized time.

  I have a lot of visitors in the spring and summer. Most of them I know and love, like Winnie, but over the years I have more and more visits from people I do not know. They are people who have grown weary of cities and who want to move here to live the Simple Life. Sometimes they would like me to tell them how to make a killing in bee farming; some are just looking for an idyll, a bucolic Simple Life, never mind the bees—though of course they would like a hive or two.