Keeping a phenology notebook is a beautiful home practice. All that is needed is a way of noting things down that is accessible to everyone in the household. We’ve developed our own, slightly idiosyncratic method. Before my grandmother became so old that she stopped writing things down altogether, she kept a perpetual diary—not a personal diary, but a simple record of daily happenings. Who visited, what the weather was like, and, maybe, if it was really yummy, what was for dinner. For this she used a giant spiral-bound notebook, with one page for every day of the year and the date written across the top. She would take a few lines per page for each day, then the following year start the same notebook again at the beginning, writing under the previous year’s entry for that date, so that as she filled in her lines for the day, she could see what happened the year before, and the year before that. I loved hearing her say, for instance, as we sat down to a family dinner, “Oh, Lyanda, you were in Japan this day eight years ago. Why on earth did your mother let you go all that way?” The opinionated verbal commentary was inevitable, but the diary held just the fact. I used this as the model for our own family’s phenology notebook, but instead of just keeping a list of phenological observations for the day, I decided to follow my own philosophy about diaries and create a phenology record that reminds us how personal life and wild life twine and inform each other, unfolding side by side. Thus the “what happened today” section occupies a few lines on the left side of the page, and the phenology a few lines on the right. We call this The Book of Everything. Instead of a spiral notebook, I use a large three-ring binder with filler paper, so I can add and remove garden notes in the back. I also keep a few pages in the back for our home wildlife list—what birds, mammals, conspicuous insects, arachnids, and “bugs” have visited our yard. Almost magically, knowing that this receptacle for our observations exists and that what we see will be shared, we become more alert, notice more, and it seems that there is actually more to see.
There are good web sites that will help organize phenological observations and that make it easy to contribute your notes to national citizen-science efforts. Citizen science has never been so important, and it is absolutely true with no exaggeration that the kinds of daily observations each of us is making, small and disjointed as they seem, are contributing to a new sense of what is unfolding on the earth, and how deeply we are all a part of it.
It is largely through citizen contributions to phenological studies that people have become aware of how organisms are responding to climate change: many flower species are blooming earlier, and the pollinators are correspondingly confused; some avian migrations are occurring earlier, following rises in temperature trends and subsequent changes in insect hatchings. Thoreau was an obsessive phenologist and started keeping track of the wildflowers in the Concord woods nearly 160 years ago. His notes are being compared with modern records to track the impact of climate change on the flowering plants in the area. Overall, there has been a general rise in temperature since Thoreau’s era of 2.4 degrees, resulting in a flowering time that is about a week earlier for species that are able to respond to temperature changes. But many species have a set flowering time that is not responsive to temperature, and it is these species that are facing serious declines: the dogwoods, violets, saxifrages, roses, lilies, bladderworts, orchids, and others. Without Thoreau’s notes, we would not have this knowledge, and it is not impossible that our own small efforts will have similar significance.
In October, I looked out into my backyard to see a scrub jay perched boldly on top of my opened cold frame, looking for all the world as if he belonged there. The blue on his back glowed—brighter than the blue of our local Steller’s jay, which is normally found in shady, leafy places, where brightest blue is not as useful as it is for a bird of open scrubby places. But if you look at a species-distribution map for the scrub jay, you will see that, officially, it doesn’t belong here at all. Birders and some wildlife officials know that for the past decade, scrub jays have been turning up in parts of Seattle, unbidden, and even unwanted (between crows, Steller’s jays, and the occasional raven nesting in a forested park, there is enough corvid mischief around here). Do these scattered sightings indicate that the jays are expanding their range, and if so, why? For the naturalist, the sighting of a creature in the wrong place is both exhilarating and disorienting. We keep track of all these things.
Sleep outside. Every summer, we move our sleeping quarters outside into a tent. I love crawling out through the tent door at midnight (admittedly, to pee in the grass) and finding myself in the night world—sky, moon, stars, the rustling of night creatures real and imagined. It always feels new and surprising. And being something of an insomniac, I love that I sleep so much better out there, tucked into a big flannel sleeping bag, cool air on my face, and stars through the screen overhead.
Stars, moon, breeze. Sounds so sweet and calm. But it can be mayhem out there. Mayhem. Some nights we wake to opossums rustling, or raccoons trilling, or who knows what manner of creature grunting and sniffing. Every morning, I fully expect to step out of the tent and see the yard in a shambles, with benches overturned and shrubbery uprooted, but somehow the daylight garden is tranquil, just as I’d left it. One night early in the season, a raccoon climbed the cherry tree above our tent to gather the farthest reaches of the harvest—the berries we couldn’t reach on our ladder. The tree swayed over our heads, and we could see the ringed tail hanging in the shadows. Then the pits started falling on our tent. They left red marks that wore off only after several summer rains.
Last summer Tom and I opened the tent flap to investigate some particularly suspicious sounds and found a small raccoon a few feet away, chewing on Tom’s shoe. It was so close—even though the clock read 2:00 a.m., we woke Claire to have a look before Tom crawled out in his skivvies to chase the little thief away and retrieve his nibbled sandal. Once Claire woke me up to listen to a gull she heard in the dark of morning. But it wasn’t a gull, I whispered to her (Tom was sound asleep), it was a western screech owl, a small owl that doesn’t actually screech; its voice sounds like a muffled bouncing ball. Later that day, I found a screech-owl feather a block from our home, and on that same walk, just one block farther, I discovered fresh coyote scat right on the sidewalk. I have never seen one of the coyotes that inhabit the nearby greenbelt venture into our yard, but in the middle of the night, amid all the noise of the urban wilds, I am always grateful we took the effort to make our chicken coop so snug and impenetrable.
We sleep in the tent because it’s cozy and fun, of course, but also because I love being reminded that the “urban wilderness” is more than just an expression—that we live in a more-than-human world filled with creatures who have no regard for the City Limits sign. In recent years, we’ve started leaving the tent up longer—into late October if we don’t get too cold—and in these weeks, I love knowing that Claire heads to school each morning with not only a backpack of completed assignments but also visions of wild creatures in the night, an owl in the morning, and stars over her dreaming head. When we eventually do move back into the house, we remember the wild stories unfolding all around us as we sleep, even when we’re not out there in their midst.
Cultivate a still spot. In childhood, most of us had a small space outdoors that we claimed as our own, a place of sweet secrecy outside the walls of home that cradled and comforted us. A place we gravitated to like the laps of our mothers. A place we would sit, outside of time, not hearing calls to dinner, knees drawn to our chests, eyes skyward.
My absolute favorite book on nature practices is the Coyote’s Guide to Connecting with Nature, published by the Wilderness Awareness School and holding decades of wisdom gleaned by the school’s founders and teachers. In the book are hundreds of activities drawn from human cultures across time and place. These are not lessons, we are told, not knowledge, but “things people do to learn nature’s ways.” They are habits, practices. The sit spot is the center, the magic pill of their core routine, and the
instructions are minimal: find a place outdoors that speaks to you, and visit this place in a spirit of observant quiet. (I prefer the term still spot, which I am borrowing from nature writer and dear friend Lynda Mapes.) Do this frequently, preferably every day, and bring nothing more than your notebook and pencil, if you bring anything at all, and stay there as long as you like. In this place, we stretch the boundaries of our comfortable built dwellings and find a home in nature where we experience all the wild tendrils we normally strive so busily to exclude: darkness, weather, bugs, the technologically unmediated thrum of the natural world. There is no rule for finding a place, but ideally it would hide us a little, offer some shade or shelter, and put us in the potential path of wild things (they don’t have to be “fancy” wild things—we aren’t going to be seeing coyotes every day in our backyard still spot—but perhaps there will be birds sometimes, spiders, an occasional rainfall). I have two still spots—which might be cheating a little, but frequency is key, so I have a place in the backyard that is my special place of meditation, observation, and retreat, and I have another place in Lincoln Park, the urban woodland near my home. The Wilderness Awareness School teachers envision us in a traditionally wilder place, but urban still spots might include patios, the bases of fruit trees, shaded corners of grass and leaves not far from a birdbath.
In sitting still, we are both inviting and invited. The insects, birds, and possibly hidden mammals are always disturbed by our arriving, our initial sitting. They bristle, stiffen, become quiet, turn motionless, fly away. As we sit in stillness, they begin to realize two things: that we are not going away and also that we are not going to be moving about. They go back to what they were doing, to their more-than-human lives, and we are given the opportunity to become attendant upon these lives. The more often we come here, the more quickly this return occurs; the more easily we shed our housebound skins, the deeper we are allowed to enter. Sitting still in one place, outside, is the essential activity for humans in the urban bestiary. How lovely, how necessary, how simple and difficult, how thoroughly countercultural. Here is what Thoreau wrote, sitting in his cabin doorway:
There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of head or hands. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.
In stillness, outdoors, we are dislodged from the human economy and dropped into the natural wild economy. We are made for this. I do not want to pretend that we should be sitting about in our skins all day every day. We have other things to do, good things. But it is this stillness that is in danger in the modern economy, and it will refresh and restore us, as it schools us in another kind of knowing. It is no wonder this is something so many of us have done on our own since we were children—the Wilderness Awareness School teaches that we are rediscovering what the Haudenosaunee people call our original instructions, our evolved, innate aptitude for awareness and delight in nature. Our wildness.
This list is short and personal, and it is meant to be an invitation, more than anything. We are all called to imagine and cultivate our own practices, daily habits that bring us to life, bring us to intimate presence with the wild among us. Walk more. Wear flowers in your hair to attract hummingbirds to your head. Bake bread. Study field guides. Sketch birds. Eat dandelions. Celebrate the seasons with abandon. Plot with neighbors, save trees, share lettuce, invent cottage industries, create a life that makes sense. Write your own bestiary, and allow the creatures around you to contribute to its pages with their own tracks, words, roars. We don’t have to wait for government funding, or scientific research, or political platform, or academic approval. We can think things up and carry them forth, on our own, with intelligence and heart, in the community of neighbors and all beings. We move forward with a mature optimism, one that recognizes fully the daunting ecological outlook for the earth, while maintaining our human obligation to live with awareness, and respect, and joy. We are learning to inhabit this new nature, and finding our way as we go. We are humans in the bestiary, a blessed, privileged, weighty, beautiful thing to be.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the wildlife professionals, scientists, scholars, naturalists, writers, friends, and family who contributed so much to this project, including Stan Gehrt, Brian Kertson, Dennis Paulson, David Moskowitz, John Marzluff, Sean Met, Chris Anderson, Russell Link, Tracy Record and the West Seattle Blog, Rand Johnson, Jane Geddes, Maria Dolan, Kathryn True, David Williams, David Laskin, Lynda Mapes, Douglas MacDonald, Langdon Cook, Andrew Emlen, Karen Kuhar, Nancy Stillger, Tauna Evans, Phil Evans, Maggie Hooks, Jerry Haupt, Irene Haupt, Kelly Haupt, Jill Storey, Ginny Furtwangler, Al Furtwangler, Ann Copeland, and Delilah. Thank you, Unspeakables. So much gratitude to artist Tracie Noles-Ross, whose gorgeous work graces these pages. I’m grateful to my editor, Tracy Behar, and my agent, Elizabeth Wales, for their abiding patience, enthusiasm, and skill. Thanks to Tracy Roe for her intrepid copyediting. Thanks to the good folks at Whiteley Center and the University of Washington Friday Harbor Labs for providing a glorious writing desk at the edge of the Salish Sea. I’m indebted to the Benedictine sisters at St. Placid Priory for their hospitality and peaceful inspiration. As always, I’m beholden to the librarians at the University of Washington’s Suzzallo and Allen Libraries, and the Seattle Public Libraries. Love to all the relations who share my home and inspire my days: the two-legged, four-legged, feathered, and finned. And, as ever, thank you with my whole heart to Tom and Claire Furtwangler.
Look out for Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s next book,
Mozart’s Starling.
Following is an excerpt from the book’s opening pages.
Prelude
A PLAGUE OF INSPIRATION
This book would have taken me half as long to write if it were not for one fact: most of it was composed with a starling perched on my shoulder. Or at least in the vicinity of my shoulder. Sometimes she was standing on top of my head. Sometimes she was nudging the tips of my fingers as they attempted to tap the computer keys. Sometimes she was defoliating the Post-it notes from books where I had carefully placed them to mark passages essential to the chapter I was working on—she would stand there in a cloud of tiny pink and yellow papers with an expression on her intelligent face that I could only read as pleased. She pooped on my screen. She pooped in my hair. Sometimes she would watch, with me, the chickadees that came to my window feeder to nibble the sunflower seeds I left for them. Sometimes she would look me in the eye and say, Hi, honey! Clear as day. “Hi, Carmen,” I would whisper back to her. Sometimes, tired of all these things and seemingly unable to come up with a new way to entertain herself or pester me, she would stand close to my neck, tunnel beneath my hair, and nestle down, covering her warm little feet with her soft breast feathers, so close to my ear that I could hear her heartbeat. She would close her eyes and fall into a light bird sleep.
It sounds like a sweet scene, but there is a conflict at its center. I am a nature writer, a birdwatcher, and a committed wildlife advocate, so the fact that I have lovingly raised a European starling in my living room is something of a confession. In conservation circles, starlings are easily the most despised birds in all of North America, and with good reason. They are a ubiquitous, nonnative, invasive species that feasts insatiably upon agricultural crops, invades sensitive habitats, outcompetes native birds for food and nest sites, and creates way too much poop. Millions of starlings have spread across the continent since they were introduced from England into New York’s Central Park one hundred and thirty years ago.
An adult starling is about eight and a half inches from tip to tail, a fair bit larger than
a sparrow but still smaller than a robin, with iridescent black feathers and a long, sharp, pointed bill. Just over a hundred and fifty years before the first starlings appeared in Central Park, the Swedish botanist and zoologist Carl Linnaeus had placed the species within his emerging avian taxonomy and christened it with the Latinized name we still use: Sturnus vulgaris. Sturnus for “star,” referring to the shape of the bird in flight, with its pointed wings, bill, and tail; and vulgaris, not for “vulgar,” as starling detractors like to assume, but for “common.”* When Linnaeus named the bird, it was simply part of the European landscape and had not spread across the waters. There was no controversy surrounding the species; it was just a pretty bird. Starlings are now one of the most pervasive birds in North America, and there are so many that no one can count them; estimates run to about two hundred million. Ecologically, their presence here lies on a scale somewhere between highly unfortunate and utterly disastrous.
In The Birdist’s Rules of Birding, a National Audubon Society blog by environmental journalist Nicholas Lund, one of the primary rules is actually “It’s Okay to Hate Starlings.” Sometimes beginning birders in the first flush of bird-love believe that it is a requirement of their newfound vocation to be enamored of all feathered creatures. But as we learn more, writes Lund, our relationships with various species become more nuanced. Some species are universally loved; who wouldn’t feel happy in the presence of a cheerful black-capped chickadee? But once we become more informed about starlings, we begin to feel an inner dissonance. Lund tells birders who are first experiencing such confusion not to feel guilty: “It’s okay to hate certain species… healthy, even. I suggest you start with European Starlings.” In addition to the issues with starlings I’ve listed, Lund adds: “They’re loud and annoying, and they’re everywhere.”
The Urban Bestiary Page 27