North on the Wing

by Bruce M. Beehler

  That evening, Brown would offer an owl walk, and later in the week she’d hold programs on alligators and on the history of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Through thousands of such field programs with visitors, state parks enrich the experience of weekend visitors in important ways. I tip my birder’s cap to Brown, and to all the staff who make state parks work.

  HERP HUNTING

  One creature I hoped to encounter on my journey north up the Mississippi drainage was not a bird at all, but a very large and frightening-looking aquatic denizen of the river’s tributaries, swamps, and wetlands—an Alligator Snapping Turtle. The biggest individuals can weigh 250 pounds. As I was not a herpetologist, I did not know how to find one of these turtles, but Brown told me that a university group was spending the weekend surveying the herpetofauna at the adjacent national wildlife refuge. Perhaps they could show me an alligator snapper.

  I tracked the group down at their makeshift encampment in a large utility garage in the center of Caddo Lake National Wildlife Refuge. There, herpetologist Rich Kazmaier and six of his students from the Department of Life, Earth, and Environmental Sciences at West Texas A&M University were busy photographing snakes, turtles, and frogs they had collected the night before. They were happy to include an extra participant, so I dove right into macrophotography of their diverse array of creatures, which they’d soon release: an Eastern Hog-nosed Snake, a Rough Green Snake, a Diamond-backed Watersnake, a Rough Earth Snake, a Green Treefrog, a Gray Treefrog, a Spring Peeper, and a Red-eared Slider.

  Kazmaier told me that the Caddo Lake ecosystem is one of the richest in the Deep South for snakes, turtles, and frogs, which is why, each spring, he and his students drive nine hours from Canyon, Texas, to come here. I myself was already seeing creatures I didn’t even know existed. While we photographed an adorable and cooperative Milk Snake, Kazmaier told me that he had netted a hundred-pound Alligator Snapping Turtle the previous year and that he hoped his traps would produce a similar behemoth this year. I crossed my fingers.

  The team then ventured out for much of the night (without me), searching every likely spot for intriguing specimens. The next morning, I rejoined them at the refuge’s shoreline access to Caddo Lake; I wanted to be present when the herp hunters checked the traps they’d set in the depths of the lake. The first creature they brought in was a Mississippi Green Watersnake, a specialty of the area but rarely seen. The nasty-tempered serpent repeatedly sank its teeth into the arm of one very stoic graduate student. Next they brought in a truly bizarre creature called a Three-toed Amphiuma, an eel-like aquatic salamander with vestigial limbs, no eyelids, and no tongue. The creature was about eighteen inches long, dark olive, and smooth-skinned. Another underwater trap held a two-foot-long Spotted Gar. But no luck on the Alligator Snapping Turtle.

  We returned to the team’s base to look at the terrestrial catch from the night before. Because they knew I wanted to photograph a Cottonmouth snake, they had brought one back for me (this species is so common and easy to identify that they don’t usually bother to catch it during their nightly surveys). The snake was quite docile, so I was able to get very close to photograph it, along with a DeKay’s Brownsnake and a Cajun Chorus Frog.

  Although the herpetofauna is diverse in this part of the world, it does not fare well. Turtles crossing roads in spring get run over by cars, and nearly every snake that enters someone’s backyard meets a hasty end. And then there are the infamous rattlesnake roundups, such as the one in Sweetwater, Texas. These roundups are annual events in which rural communities collect and dispatch every rattler they can collect in a single long day of hunting. The objective is to rid the local environment of a venomous reptile, but in fact, these shy and long-lived creatures have a low reproductive capacity and are wiped out from areas where they are heavily collected. Most people, even those who love birds and other animals, do not give a snakes a break, and that’s a shame.

  Cottonmouth snake

  Some youngsters have an affinity for nature and for natural history fieldwork, and the group Kazmaier taught was composed of just such kids. There was not a slacker in the bunch. Spending time with the group, I witnessed excitement and passion for nature among the students, who already knew a lot about local herpetofauna, birdlife, and plant life. And of course, their teacher was a true expert, with encyclopedic knowledge; Kazmaier loved both nature and sharing his knowledge with his students (a nine-hour drive is well beyond most professors’ call of duty), and I am confident that at least several of the students will make careers in wildlife biology. These sorts of intense field experiences can transform the lives of students and encourage the growth of natural history field study in the United States. The classroom component is important, but it is in the field where students fall in love with their prospective profession. And these young knowledge keepers become leaders in the next generation, populating local, state, and federal agencies in charge of wildlife and parks and passing on their own knowledge and enthusiasm to yet another generation.

  KAYAKING CADDO LAKE

  In the afternoon, after my last visit with Kazmaier and his students, I drove south from Karnack on Highway 43 to look at the T. J. Taylor estate, where Lady Bird Johnson was raised by her father, a local “big man.” The large white house sits above the road, handsome and substantial for the area but nothing out of the ordinary. Taylor, a widower, was smart and financially successful but also a bully. As a child, Lady Bird suffered with her unsympathetic father, and her marriage to LBJ was likewise difficult. But later in life she became something of a national saint. Her love of wildflowers and her campaign to beautify the nation’s roadsides created a legacy that persists to this day. Lady Bird’s flowers now bloom in glorious profusion in various places along Texas’s highways, and as I drove I reflected on the power of individuals to change the world for the better. The accomplishments of Don Henley, Rich Kazmaier, and Lady Bird Johnson are examples to us all.

  I spent my last dawn in Texas kayaking among the blackwater cypress in a narrow arm of Caddo Lake named Carter’s Shute. A cold front had passed through, bringing blue skies and crisp temperatures. In places the fragrance of honeysuckle was overpowering. At the boat landing, I heard the distant, low, evocative drumming of a Pileated Woodpecker in the cypress. Low mist spread across the still, dark water as I followed a marked route through a flooded stand of the trees, draped with Spanish Moss. An Anhinga soared overhead. A Red-shouldered Hawk cried out in the distance. In a side channel, a Barred Owl perched low on a cypress stub. I quietly drifted toward it in my kayak as it mutely watched me. I snapped pictures until I got too close to use my long lens. I saw not another soul on my two-hour circuit. It was utterly peaceful.

  As the sun rose, birds started to sing—first North Cardinal and Carolina Wren, and then Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, Prothonotary Warbler, Northern Parula, and—as an addition to my quest list—Yellow-throated Warbler, singing from the moss-draped canopy of a cypress. I had seen the species earlier on the trip, but only as a migrant. Here the species was breeding in the cypress swamp. Common in the Deep South and wintering in Florida, the Caribbean, and Central America, this crisply patterned bird has a big yellow throat patch, black and white markings on the face and flanks, white wing-bars, and a dove-gray cap and back. It has an unusually long and narrow bill, which it uses like a pair of fine tweezers to capture creeping insects in treetops. Its syrupy song is a descending series of slurs that abruptly ends with a sweeet note. Given the bird’s canopy-dwelling habit, the song is critical to locating the species, which often nests in hanging bunches of Spanish Moss like those festooning the great cypresses of Carter’s Shute.

  BIG CORPORATIONS AND THE ENVIRONMENT

  Late at night, a powerful thunderstorm passes over my campsite. Lightning strikes nearby, the wind blows, rain falls in buckets, and large branches tumble out of the canopy. I lie in my tent waiting for a branch to come down onto my tent, which once happened to students of mine in New Guinea (they survived, with some broken ri
bs). Perhaps now it is my turn. But luck is with me tonight.

  My next stop was Crossett, Arkansas, about three hours northeast of Karnack, where I planned to shoot an environmental video with the Georgia-Pacific company and participate in GP’s annual Water Ways Festival. The skyline of Crossett, deep in the piney woods of southeastern Arkansas, is dominated by the large GP mill, which produces paper towels and toilet paper. West of town, I started to set up my tent beside the cypress-filled Ouachita River bayou, but before I’d done much, Terry and Sheryl, the park managers, came by in a golf cart to warn me that the bayou’s water was supposed to rise twelve inches that night. They instructed me to move my tent to an upslope campsite.

  At dusk, a neighbor at an adjacent site was busily cleaning several huge fish at his picnic table. I asked him the fish’s name and how he’d caught them. In his eighties, the fisherman was friendly and had a sense of humor, like everyone else I met in the South. He happily said he was long retired but, to keep busy, worked as a freelance commercial fisherman netting Black Buffalo fish from the Ouachita River. The Black Buffalo can grow to nearly a hundred pounds, and its flaky white flesh, which he informally sold to locals in Crossett, is highly prized. The fish he’d caught that day each weighed more than thirty pounds and yielded a lot of fillet meat. This entrepreneur was making a killing selling them in town, he said; he was tickled to be able to do this work in his sunset years, as it made him feel useful.

  As it got dark, a Chuck-will’s-widow, the southern piney woods cousin of the more familiar Whip-poor-will, sang in a pine not far from my campsite. This southern night bird, which I’d heard sing only a handful of times, is not uncommon in the piney woods, but it is very difficult to see, as it roosts in a hidden perch during the day.

  Early the next morning I birded the tall pines of the campground as I waited for the GP crew to pick me up, and I was rewarded with the highlight of another male Yellow-throated Warbler, this time singing from a tall pine. It would be a cool, sunny day for shooting the educational video; I worked in front of the camera with GP’s wildlife program manager as we toured GP’s wildlands, extensive local production forests of Loblolly Pine owned and managed by GP partners, and pine stands within nearby Felsenthal National Wildlife Refuge that support colonies of the endangered Red-cockaded Woodpecker. Passage migrants sang throughout the woods (a singing Swainson’s Thrush was the high point), as did Neotropical migrants on their breeding habitat, including White-eyed Vireo, Northern Parula, Painted Bunting, and Pine Warbler—yet another quest warbler for me (number 12).

  The Pine Warbler is a strict inhabitant of stands of pine during both the breeding season and in winter; to locate the bird, finding a good stand of pines is a prerequisite. It will inhabit just about any pure pine stand, even those planted as plantation monocultures. This warbler does not get much respect because it is rather dully plumed: mostly plain olive, with white wing-bars and undertail and a drab olive-yellow throat and breast, with some obscure streaking. In addition, it mainly winters in the vast pinelands of the Southeast, so we don’t find this species winging over the Gulf of Mexico twice a year. As a breeder, the Pine Warbler ranges northward to southern Canada, so the species is widespread in the East. Perhaps the best thing about this bird is its song: a very sweet trilled series, invariably given from the canopy of a tall pine.

  The following morning, I made my way to the Crossland Zoo, situated in a wooded section of Crossett City Park, and set up a “Spring Migration” table at the seventh annual Water Ways Festival, hosted by GP and focusing on the importance of water conservation and wise water management. I had been invited to host the station for groups of elementary school students, who were the event’s target audience. Other institutions hosting visiting stations included the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture, the Boy Scouts of America DeSoto Council, the Crossett Centennial Garden Club, Georgia-Pacific, the Crossett Fire Department, the Crossett Rescue Unit, and the Crossett Zoo. Groups of fourth-graders visited each station for fifteen minutes to learn various aspects of water use and water conservation.

  I hosted ten groups over the day, taking each batch of students on a short bird walk and talking about spring songbird migration. I’d worried that I might not find birds to show to the fourth-graders in a city park, but to the sharp-eyed, the woods were fairly birdy that day: Mississippi Kite, Gray-cheeked and Swainson’s Thrush, Yellow-throated Vireo, and Orchard Oriole were in evidence, plus a Tennessee Warbler in song and—best of all—a very cooperative Yellow-bellied Sapsucker that was managing a sap resource at a small elm tree near my station. The sapsucker tended its neat rows of drill holes about three feet above the ground, a perfect position for the students, many of whom had never seen a woodpecker. The children quietly approached to within about fifteen feet of the tree to take a good look at the foraging bird. Remarkably, despite the crowds and noise, the sapsucker remained at its elm from morning until the end of the festival in the afternoon. I told the students how the bird managed a water resource that provided it with sugars and other nutrients, and how it ate various insects attracted to the sap.

  This sapsucker winters here in Arkansas, and this one would soon make its way north to its breeding territory in the Great North Woods. In fact, I wondered if I’d see this very same bird in late June in Ontario, when the forests ring with the cadenced drumming and squealing calls of the birds. The species is distinguished especially by its habit of drilling rows of small sap wells in certain favored trees, an unusual foraging specialization known only among the genus Sphyrapicus, the sapsuckers, which comprise four species that nest in the United States and Canada. Their favorite sap-producing trees are birches and maples (think maple syrup). Ruby-throated Hummingbirds appreciate the work of the sapsuckers and forage for sap at these manufactured resources, as do Cape May Warblers, bats, and even porcupines. The Yellow-bellied Sapsucker is the only completely migratory woodpecker; like Neotropical songbird migrants, it entirely departs its breeding range in the winter. It nests in the northern United States and Canada and migrates to a geographically distinct wintering range in the southern United States, Mexico, and Central America. I looked forward to making contact with the species on its breeding ground in the young mixed forests of Ontario; I grew up with these birds in the Adirondacks, and whenever I see a sapsucker now, it reminds me of summer in the North Woods.

  It might be surprising, but one sponsor of my spring field trip was Georgia-Pacific, a major wood-products corporation, through a grant to the American Bird Conservancy. Although corporations are a part of America’s wealth and its gigantic economy, big resource-extracting industries have done plenty of harm to the country’s natural environment. Just think of the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company, which took out every last bit of old-growth forest in the Tensas basin. Big companies cleared ancient forests across North America at a prodigious pace between the 1840s and the 1940s—it boggles the mind to think of the billions of acres of ancient forest cut down during that hundred-year stretch. Yes, the timber was harvested to build American homes and other infrastructure, but the timber companies rarely left even an acre of original forest standing. Harvesting operations sought to maximize immediate yield, not long-term sustainability of the harvest, and there is no question that their focus on extraction changed the face of the eastern half of the United States forever. Only now is mature forest returning to some of the logged-out sites, and climate change may prevent the full and proper return of the old-growth forests that predominated across the East prior to the Civil War.

  So, it is easy to speak negatively about America’s extractive industries and their long-term record. But going forward, it is worthwhile considering how to effect change for the better, and most industries and corporations today are seeking to balance their negative environmental impacts (which continue) with their beneficial environmental offsets (which are more and more commonplace). For instance, GP partners with the Wildlife Habitat Council’s Conservat
ion Certification Program to improve stewardship over the corporation’s extensive properties to benefit wildlife and nature. The interventions that GP carries out are audited by the Wildlife Habitat Council, and the council publicly recognizes outstanding efforts on behalf of nature conservation. Recognition of GP’s conservation achievements then encourages other corporations to carry out similar beneficial activities for nature. Given the wealth of most of American corporations, it is rather straightforward for their leadership to commit to investing a percentage of the annual corporate budget in environmental good works. These can take place on the campus of the corporation (as is the case with Conservation Certification), or the corporation can make investments elsewhere. Amoco Production Company, as we saw in chapter 3, donated the oak woodlands and rookery pond on High Island, Texas, to the Houston Audubon Society, thus performing a permanent good—land conservation—that offsets the company’s negative impact elsewhere.

  The best results on this front tend to arise from partnerships between big corporations and environmental organizations. For instance, Walmart has worked closely with Conservation International to make its supply chain more efficient, thereby substantially reducing its use of gasoline and diesel fuel. This has had three positive effects: it has saved Walmart money, of course, but it also has reduced fossil fuel emissions and made both Conservation International and the company look smart and good. Today most Fortune 500 companies invest in offsetting their negative environmental impacts, and that is a step forward.