Gray treefrog.
My fascination with this game-cum-challenge of finding the treefrog in the swale leads me to make out the most cryptic one yet. He is settled in a small hollow at the branching base of a red maple. Anything recognizable as part of a frog is all but lost in the confusion of color, pattern, texture, and scrambled outlines of scaly tree bark layered with lichen. Bark and lichen are as much a part of this frog's ecology as woodland and wetland. I record him in my notebook as "lichen with eyes." I impress myself with this discovery. It is always reassuring to find that my eyes can still do such work, make such interpretations. It is largely a visual language that I endeavor to read in the wetlands and their surroundings.
The frog does not blink as I bend over him for a close-up photo, shifting my camera around, almost in his face. I wonder at what point he would consider that danger—or even death itself—was so imminent that he would make a leap for it. Although I am loath to cause any disturbance, my curiosity, which I suppose I could justify as a scientific need to know, leads me to reach out and touch a finger to his back. He gives two quick, thrusting kicks of his hind legs and then pulls himself back exactly into his former position. This irrevocable evolutionary commitment to camouflage is like that of wood turtles I find on land, who will not alter the freeze-frame pose they take immediately upon detecting me (which is nearly always before I see them), even when they have stopped in midstep, unless I actually touch them. But the turtle has a court of last resort, one adaptation left when going unseen has failed: his shell. The treefrog would seem to be completely defenseless once detected by a predator. I do not know whether this species has a final chemical ploy, a skin secretion like that of a toad or red eft, that would deter a predator from taking it in its mouth. And I have even seen toads failed by their toxicity.
I cannot imagine finding a more occult treefrog, though there must be some I have been unable to descry in this quest. And I wonder how many turtles I have overlooked in my search for frogs. Any one thing intimately observed inevitably means many things left unseen. I shift back to a turtle focus and begin to read water and sedge and grass instead of emergent shrubs and saplings. I am elated at the discoveries I have made, at adding something of such significance for me to the bank of search-images I have been building since that long-ago boyhood day when I saw my first turtle in the wild. It is this deep fund of search-images, based on years of the most dedicated looking—though there is an intuitive aspect as well—that guides me as I continue to follow that trail through marsh and swamp, along river and stream.
INTERVAL WITH RED DEER
10 JUNE, 6:35 A.M. She is suddenly standing before me, the way it is sometimes with deer. As I look up from a long spell of reading the spare earth for signs of turtles nesting, the red doe, which my peripheral vision never picked up, is poised directly in front of me, out in the open. How does it happen that such an unconscious approach to this most wary and fleet-footed of animals is sometimes—rarely, but sometimes—possible? I have on some occasions had a deer approach me as I stood still. Did my manner of movement here, my blind-to-all-else absorption in inspecting the ground somehow disguise me as a human, a potential menace? Does my intense involvement with my immediate surroundings allow me to pass as a part of the broader scene? During the best moments, I do enter into the day and become an aspect of all its workings.
She is posed like a postcard Rocky Mountain sheep atop a boulder near the crest of the long-abandoned sandpit. Set against a backdrop lush with the greens of a rain-rich spring, even along the impoverished borders of the sandpit, she is an almost burning red-sienna and yet is nearly lost against the dense-leaved tapestry of sweet fern and gray birch on the steep ascent just behind her. It is remarkable how the red of the whitetail deer in spring and summer can disappear so quickly, so completely, into the green of those seasons.
I hold still. She looks directly at me. There is something about this being regarded by a deer ... I wear my camouflage shirt and earth-green warm-season waders, but she can hardly have failed to see me. (There is that face, those hands I always wish were not so conspicuous and often try to hide.) Utterly motionless, she holds her pose for a full two minutes. Without taking her eyes from me she begins to chew the bunch of leaves she holds in her mouth. There is no movement other than the working of her jaws as she finishes off her generous mouthful. I cannot make out what she is eating. It is not the green of the aromatic sweet fern that skirts the great stone she stands upon—that would be a morning tonic. Then, within that consummate stillness, her ears turn slightly, now both at once, now each separately, scanning, interpreting sounds in a morning moment that to my ears is pure silence. Another three minutes pass (moments of stillness in a presence such as this are a different kind of time, extended time), with no more movement than the slow shiftings of her ears, occasional blinks of her large, dark, moist eyes, and the subtle rhythmic movement of her belly as she breathes.
We are so close to each other that I can see these subdued signs of life quite clearly. Her eyes, ears, and nostrils are filled with the morning ... her mouth has the taste of it. Her eyes take in the early light of the day, everything in the landscape before her with a clarity I could never possess, a perception I cannot guess at. Her ears pick up whispers of sound I cannot hear, her nostrils detect scents I will never know. She reads the morning I have been trying to read. To have those senses—would I trade my thinking, dreaming, imagining mind for them for one full day, from sunrise through the day and night until the following sunrise? If I were able to make such a trade, would I ever want to come back, reverse the exchange and return to human sensibilities?
At length she turns and walks upslope, unhurried, graceful, silent, stands statuelike again at the crest, turns one more time and disappears, a red deer vanishing with absolute silence into the green.
NIGHT, DISTANT LIGHTNING
12 JUNE. I move from the faint light that lingers in the great watery depression of the marsh to the lesser light of the spare, sandy, bluestem-tufted field at the edge of the wood, where turtles come to nest. By degrees the twilight fades. The reflecting marsh enhances the final light more than the pale field does; already the woods are cloaked in darkness. A massive silhouette darker than the night stretches across the northern horizon. Set against the sky it looks more like a mountain range than a mountain of clouds imperceptibly moving through. Above it expands a dome of open sky in which stars appear.
As I turn on my flashlight and begin to search the ground, faint flickers of light from the sky catch my eye, only to vanish before I can focus on them. Except for the moon and stars, one cannot look the night directly in the eye, for what is looked at straight on disappears and can be seen again only by a slight glancing away, a looking back just off to one side. But these capricious flashes—which, like the most ephemeral shooting stars, never seem to streak exactly where one is looking—are light; I should be able to catch sight of one. I begin to wonder if they might be the product of something in my own eyes.
But then I turn to see clearly a sudden, stronger flash within the distant cloudbank. Hardly has it gone out than a truly explosive light bursts within and illuminates a cloud-tower that ascends as the bright glow within it pulses. It burns out in complete silence, and I cannot make out the shape of the cloud. I turn off my light and watch a succession of strikes light up the upward-billowing thunderhead that encases them, exploding lights that surge successively brighter and then die away. The night's profound silence is magnified by the stunning display of this lightning storm within a cloud-mountain several miles away, celestial fireworks of a stunning magnitude.
Somewhere, I wonder just how far away, the earth is not so still. It seems strange—no hint of thunder, driving rain, or roaring wind reaches me, only the pulsing flashes of a fury that rages within its own domain, moving through the vast serenity of an early June night. With every burst of its internal fires, the outer shape of this tower of exploding lights is clearly delineated in the encompass
ing blackness of earth and sky. I watch as this storm within clouds slips slowly eastward, beyond the clear night sky and the brilliant array of stars that arch over my own place in the landscape. Have I ever known such stillness and silence as that about me now?
I resume my search for nesting turtles. Later I see many more distant flickerings off to the south. I keep an eye on the starlit space between these clouds and watch for any flashings approaching from the west. These cloud-worlds, so beyond reach, seem to represent a realm of their own. Yet they spring from the earth I walk, the water I wade; they are bound to the world through which I drift in my own earthbound way.
MEDICINE-SMELLING EARTH
13 JUNE, 5:30 P.M. Almost upon my arrival to begin another evening search for nesting wood turtles, I come upon one on a nearly perpendicular slope. She has an ambitious dig in progress. I had scanned all areas diligently with binoculars before walking out into the open, but she was concealed by a slight ridge. Something in the way these turtles orient themselves as they travel, in the way they hold still, then move again, move without moving, it seems, enables them to appear by surprise at my very feet, not just in heavy riparian cover or densely brambled field-edge habitat but in open terrain, even sandpits and riverine sand and cobble bars. Wood turtles are cliff dwellers at nesting time. If she nests here, though, it will be in the most precipitous nest site I have ever observed. Now, as I walk along lower ground, I see where she made an earlier ascent and moved along a steep incline just below the overhanging turf at its crest.
Wood turtle nesting in the rain.
Rain appears imminent; this often inspires wood turtles to move out to nest, sometimes even at midday. They seem to know when rain is due within the next twenty-four hours, even when there is no sign of it that I can read. If her impressive trail, so clearly etched in sand, is not washed away, I should return tomorrow to photograph it.
Half an hour later, as I circle back along the edge of the hayfield, I see that the turtle I found digging earlier has come up over the crest of the slope. I regret I've come too close to her once again. She has already seen me, and it is too late to do anything but walk on by. Evidently she is continuing her search for a nest site. As I move away and descend the slope, I find several trial digs and an abandoned chamber, the work of the same agile turtle, I suspect.
Running, that is, hurrying in my turtlelike imitation of running, up the last fifty yards of the gentle incline of the old logging road, I just beat a heavy downpour to my car. My history at turtle-nesting time is marked by dodging thunderstorms, twice being overtaken by swift and violent ones, and being pinned to the earth by them. I had heard this one coming for a few minutes, that roar like a sudden wind, an almost trainlike sound in the trees, though all around me was breathlessly still. Though not far off, the sound came from the south, and I thought the east—west drift of the rain would have it pass by me. But then, seeing the near landscape go silver with heavy rain, I made my move just in time. I should know by now not to shave these margins so closely. Rain pounds my car as lightning cracks and thunder roars. I would want more shelter than a poncho and my own skin in this tempest; it's lucky that I was far closer to this refuge than I usually am in my wanderings.
The storm furies off to the west, and the rain abates; I walk in a steady drizzle as it quiets away. The hard-packed dirt road is a shallow, swift-running stream. Footprints and turtle trails, all signs of nesting, have been washed away. I had been wanting a clean slate to read, as my footprints from previous days' wanderings, along with the turtles' trails and trial diggings for nest sites, the tracks of deer, and excavations by egg-seeking predators have made it difficult to distinguish signs of fresh nesting activity. It is warm and still, silent except for distant rumbles of thunder now and again.
Mercifully, the mosquitoes have not yet come out into the open air, though it is cloud-darkened and steamily humid. Rain-scented air, medicine-smelling earth, silence now interspersed with faint bird calls from across the hayfield, stillness broken at moments by slight stirrings of wind, so imperceptible that the slender grasses seem to move on their own. How loud the droning of a bumblebee some distance off among the blackberry flowers. Thunder rolls again. It is to the north and east, moving away; for a time I can walk without rain.
WITH THE GRAY FOX
EDGING MY WAY along the eastern margins of a peatland that is about a mile and a half long and variously a fifth to a quarter of a mile wide, I try to pass unseen by those traveling the busy roadway that runs along the entire length of the fen. Painfully close, the pavement is generally less than fifteen yards from the wetland border. I can bring myself to be here only by virtue of the extremely dense cover that occupies most of this narrow margin, a barrier of buttonbush, sweet pepperbush, sapling and occasionally mature red maple trees, a near-impenetrable woody structure made all the more formidable by being bound up in stout-thorned common greenbrier.
This cover shields me from a world very different from the peatland, which, with deep reluctance and many misgivings, I have agreed to investigate. I am loath to do suburban turtle work, but some individuals and the local conservation commission have asked me to document the presence and seasonal movements of spotted and Blanding's turtles. Road-killed spotted turtles have been found here—I saw the shell of a three-year-old—and the Blanding's are strongly suspected to inhabit the peatland and its surroundings. These two species are declining primarily because of habitat loss and are considered of special concern throughout their ranges. Proof of their presence might provide a bit of leverage to gain concessions from a suite of developers poised to press upon the entire western side of this remarkable ecosystem, some backing off that might spare a measure of the habitat margins. I have conducted such field investigations before and have seen my evaluations and recommendations all but invariably come to naught in terms of any truly meaningful protection. Pointing this out and elucidating scenarios from my personal history, in which "information/documentation" and "education" have time and again proven not to be the answer, I sought to avoid this engagement. (There will come a time when I can no longer become involved in such campaigns at all.) But once again a conscientious group has sought my perspective, and I have agreed, for the nature of this peat land intrigues me. There is also the fact that paid turtle work is uncommon and sometimes hard to turn down.
The greater portion of this boglike wetland is untraversable. I thrust my five-foot wading stick down into a pool surrounded by sphagnum laced with sweet gale, a rafting that shakily supports me, without touching anything solid. My course is dictated by a circuitous route in which I can find enough footing to sink no more than waist-deep and by my efforts to keep a concealing screen between me and the road. The growth in this acidic fen, dominated by leatherleaf and sweet gale, is generally no more than waist-high. By wading mucky channels that are not bottomless, I can shorten myself and thereby attempt to avoid detection by passers-by as well as by the turtles I hope to see before they see me. It is decidedly "advantage turtle" here.
My only other ally in achieving stealth is my customary trait of moving slowly and holding still for periods of time. Houses have been built on the upland peninsulas thrusting from the roadway into the wetland, and I feel all the more exposed to human eyes as I explore a backwater cove between two of them.
As I stalk turtles who may or may not be here—so much of the time I search for the invisible, and for much of that time the object of my search may not even be present—a shadowy, silver gray movement catches my eye. I make out a small fox in a welter of shrubs and greenbrier who is intent upon a grackle which, in quest of his own food, is tossing leaves about in a tiny clearing. With extreme, rather catlike stealth, the gray fox inches forward, employing the upland-border screen, as I do, to pass unseen, but he steals through it with consummate grace and complete silence. The coloring of his pelt is far more concealing than the camouflage shirt I wear. He is one with sunlight and shadow, the grays of the shrubs, fawn and sienna of fallen le
aves, a beautiful ghost of a predatory mammal who is alternately there and not there even when moving. I am in a zone of open water and low-growing leatherleaf; the shoreline vegetation must block me from his vision. I freeze the moment I make him out, and he goes statue-still at the same moment. Does he sense me? Or is he reckoning his approach to the preoccupied but doubtless alert grackle? The jet black bird gleams iridescent purple and gunmetal as he goes about his foraging on the floor of the thicket.
The fox makes an additional increment of advance. With a burst of his wings the grackle takes flight and vanishes at once. A large bird for such confining quarters, he has his own ways of navigating branch mazes and weavings of thorny vines. The fox, who has been in something of a crouch, stands erect, on tiptoes even, his large ears also erect, and stares at the place from which his prey has disappeared. He opens his jaws wide and runs his tongue over his shiny black lips, as though tasting the bird he was unable to get hold of. Then he moves off a bit and settles himself in a small hollow at the base of a wild apple tree that has somehow found a footing in this narrow jungle. He curls up and wraps his tail around himself.
My back has become painful, though I have straightened it a bit at times and shifted my weight from one foot to the other when it seemed the fox wouldn't notice. There are only tiny windows in the mazes between us. He looks directly at me for a moment ... his face appears and disappears with slight turnings of his head. For seconds at a time, we seem to look right at each other. I look straight into his almost dreamlike eyes, see clearly his fine features, beautiful coloring, narrow muzzle, and sharp, black-tipped nose. Once again I feel that my own pale face must be conspicuous, out of place even. But he does not appear to make it out.
Following the Water Page 8