A male woodcock, on migration. Injured, downtown Manhattan. Image © Dave Marshall
“The Earth’s green cover with the few inches of soil which holds the rain and makes plant growth possible is the most important factor in our ultimate survival.”
One bird who carries a definite gestalt in our neck of the woods is the American Woodcock, a.k.a. Bogsucker – so called in certain States for its habit of sticking its long bill deep into muddy soils in search of yummy earthworms. Accordingly, the bird is brownish and sort of looks like leaf-litter (for camouflage) because it spends most of its life on the ground, facing the earth beneath it. How does it see incoming predators? Easy: the ears are located in front of the eyes, meaning the bird can see out the back of its head, meaning it has total peripheral, 360 vision and can see you coming. It also has the heart-stopping habit of flushing at the last second. The anatomical feat of having its ears in front of its eyes is enabled by an even quirkier accomplishment of adaptive radiation (the bird is technically a ‘shorebird’): it’s brain is upside down. Did I mention that the woodcock is also round and plump and holds the world’s record for slowest flying bird, so as to maneuver between the densely packed saplings in the second growth it likes to live in, without constantly slamming into trees? Yes, there are times in life when I wish I had all the attributes of the bogsucker, including its habit of feasting on the adjective-defying earthworm.
A quick digression on the latter. In our culture, the worm – from the Old English wyrm, meaning dragon or serpent - is loathed, feared even, basically ‘ew’d’ at; worse, we use it as bait for what we really want, sacrificing it on the alter of modern-day hunter-gathering. Why the revulsion? Maybe because worms in general symbolize death, for their habit of 1) living underground and 2) decomposing dead things, or should I say, recomposing them, making them available to plants, to Life. Hah! Maybe that’s why we dislike them: because they’re too powerful! Perhaps, on a more psychoanalytical note, worms are reviled because they’re flesh colored and extendable but also gooey and covered in dirt - as potentially pineal a symbol as they are simultaneously scatological, a combination unbearable for the anal puritan and capitalist control-freak alike. Now try imagining, be it for one revolting second, a culture where worms are celebrated, adored, totemized even, to the point of being eaten, for their ‘purity’. I know such a people. Consider the Ye’kuana people in the Venezuelan Amazon (with whom I’ve lived and worked). For them, the earthworm is a delicacy. The Earthworm is sacred. It’s also a meter-long, jumbo-sized pack of protein in their neck of the woods and it is the favored food for young kids, as pure and boneless a source of ‘blood’ and ‘meat’ as you can find in the rainforest. No spine attached, no body parts. Infection free, i.e.: in their world view, devil-free. Accordingly, the Ye’kuana believe that only old people who have passed the trials of time can eat ‘animals with bones’ without risking intoxication or ‘dis-ease’* from the spirit world. In the rainy season especially, women and children hunt for the giant earthworms within the muddy banks of rivers and streams and eat them live or boiled in a stew. Not surprisingly, they also celebrate a bird, the Green Ibis, for its habit of eating earthworms (like a giant version of our north American bogsucker). The Ye’kuana have a yearly ritual named after it, the ‘Corocoro Madi’. It is a dry season festival for completing the village round house. A house made of mud, mud crafted from a pit in the earth, where dirt and clay is mixed with water, kneaded by the whole community, with their bodies, as they stomp and splash around with their bear feet, their hands, smothered head–to-toe in mud. Mud, home of the earthworm, made into a home for people, the ‘So’to’. From underworld to überworld, death into life, thanks to life-forms the likes of a worm. Closet biologists take note: the worm also marks the transition to modernity in evolutionary terms, to complexity; it harks all thing arthropod and vertebrate. It is more closely related to us than to the jellyfish or the coral reef. Earthworm, caviar and crux of our terrestrial family tree.
In New York City, the worm-eating Bogsucker can be found in any borough on migration and in three during mating season. It has a field day in the Big Apple because, like the robin, it can feast on one of urban ecology’s first signs of dysfunctional soils: massive amounts of earthworms without much topsoil to live in. Fast food for birds. Overpopulating monocultures of earthworms. In Central park and all other Parks – European earthworms, to be precise, brought over with potted plants; just remember how all the northeast used to be smothered by glaciers so earthworms did not survive and have since been introduced, along with smallpox, progress and the industrial revolution by the white guy. Don’t believe me? Go to Central Park, bend over and notice how the leaf litter is non-existent (because it’s raked). Notice then how the topsoil is quasi-absent. Notice too the superabundance of worms. Now, were we to let the leaves decompose, let the worms do their jobs of recomposing ‘dead’ stuff into ‘life’, there would be more topsoil and less worms. How to? New York City takes great pride for having just calculated the economic services (price tag) bestowed unto us by our urban trees, claiming that for each dollar we invest in one, the benevolent old geezer gives us 5 dollars back (in clean air, shade, etc…).
Okay, now that we finally have an all-American, half-decent reason to save our trees for their market value and invest in more of them, how say the Apple put a value on its dead leaves, too? Only one problem: when you let Money talk, it can get to talking too loudly in polite society, saying the wrong thing to the wrong people: if New Yorkers understand the ‘yooge’ value of dead leaves then we’d have to leave them there, on the ground, let them wilt into the earth, die and de-, and recompose in peace, instead of raking them up each fall. Imagine that!, the Greensward of Central Park littered with leaf-litter. Ouch. Not going to happen. How could a society who 1) grows lawns just so they can mow them and 2) denies death its intrinsic value, possibly learn to value rotting things like brown decaying leaves, let alone assign a dollar value to them? First, understand that neither trees nor leaves are objects. Let alone consumer goods. They are part of a process. They are the process, in fact; a soil-making process, a life-making process, along with the earth worm, the rabbit and the dandelion. Communities of beings that make soil that then makes more communities, which in turn means more trees, more worms, more rabbits. Value that! I’m drifting, dreaming. In this country, if you want to let leaves fall where they may, first you’d have to get everybody to reconsider their use and definition of the word ‘dirt’, teach them to revere it (it and other nasties, like ‘rot’ or ‘decay’), as well as change the cultural status of the earthworm, soil, dandelions even. In other words, Americans would have to reconsider their relationship to death in its entirety, learn to see it as a potentially fruitful thing here on earth. We’d also have to see ourselves not only at the top, but at the bottom, too, of the food chain, instead of consistently locking death up in a coffin – and a flag, as if it was beyond us. Only then might we have a chance at changing the world at our feet. More to the chase: a society who truly values life wouldn’t even need to put a price tag on death. And vice-versa.
Ultimately (am I still dreaming?), the US of A would have to stop gloating over symptoms and find the roots of its problems, too, and accept so-called radical ideas as intelligent and ethical ones. But speaking of radical (as in root), all of this would require digging, n’est-ce pas? Probing. Re-immersing ourselves in the underworld, the land of the dead, the land of our past, emerging with filth beneath the fingernails of our raw, parched hands.
Back to my woodcocks. The bird nests in various locations in the Bronx, Staten Island and Queens. In Pelham Bay Park in particular you can hear and see the males display in the evening, beginning in March and lasting through April. They start by flying out into their ‘lekking’ ground (from the Finnish word for play), a meadow or clearing in the woods (or a golf course if they have to) where the males compete for female attention. Which involves the following: a bird will hang out on the ground at dusk and make a call that bird books describe as ‘beent’. I prefer the image of an egghead with a very bad cold trying to say the name ‘Pete’. Then quite suddenly, the bogsucker take to the air and flies skyward in spirals, while making his wings twitter, to a couple of hundred feet, then returns slowly twittering (this time with his beak), then lands, then starts to say ‘Pete’ again. Etc. For the female woodcock, quite the knee-weakening spectacle.
The problem with lekking is the following. It usually occurs in bird species where the male has ‘lost’ the war of the sexes. As in all species, females have to invest in eggs and young and that’s expensive. You need a good return on your investment. A good male. The best male. The best genes. In the case of the woodcock, males have had their wings twisted, as it were, into performing this ridiculous routine every night in spring. So the females have the luxury of choosing between competing dorks. Some bird species have it worse, like this other cock, the Cock-of-the-rock, a non-migratory rainforest resident of south America who spends its entire life in these big, all-male disco-like arena setups in the understory dancing their hearts out every time some finicky female shows up. Turns out there’s usually one jock alpha who appropriates most copulations and some birds apparently are left out their whole life. Never chosen. They continue to dance nonetheless (hope, the thing with feathers!). But they never get laid. Zippo offspring.
I don’t think male bogsuckers ever have it that bad – minus one caveat. In the Bronx, one of their lekking grounds is wedged between a giant parking lot, a public beach, a NYPD firing range and located just under the approach to LaGuardia Airport. I’ve been there in late March, with my pal and NYC parks biology dude Dave Kunstler. The woodcocks were spiraling skyward into a low hanging sagging mess of clouds lit up all pink from beneath by urban light pollution as giant, roaring airplane lights descended through the whole thing like something out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The birds’ aerial displays were both invisible and inaudible to any potential on-looking females. Urban bird species like mockingbirds and thrushes can solve the noise pollution problem; they modulate their songs in urban environments, play around with frequencies and send them bouncing over the surrounding wall of white noise, but that’s because their songs are learned, and can be perfected over a life-time. A woodcock on the other hand comes with a genetically, hard-wired repertoire and so these unfortunate Bronx birds don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of being heard. Luckily, LaGuardia shifts its approach around, so some nights, I hope, these woodcocks have an attentive (albeit toffee-nosed) audience of exigent female bogsuckers.
A word about Dave Kunstler. He first brought me to this odious mating ground in the Bronx a few years ago. We spent a few days in the field together, between Van Cortlandt and Pelham Bay Parks. Dave grew up on Long Island. He’s humble. Careful. He’s a naturalist, not a consumer. Sort of embodies the Thoreau idea of integrity, although, unlike the latter, does not return once a month to his Mom’s place have his laundry done. He also sports a classy ‘stache and has sort of a tick where he twitches it, mostly for punctuation, for emphasis. He also likes to uproot (or dig out) invasive plants. He has no other recourse. He works for the NYC Parks Department. He can’t stop world trade. He can’t close the ports and airports of New York through which these castaways hitch a ride into the Americas. So he sacrifices the odd Garlic Mustard, the Japanese Knotweed. They have uncouth tricks whereby they take over entire ecosystems, killing out all other plants. If they’re growing in the midst of a Bronx wildflower meadow he’s been trying to restore fro ten years in Pelham Bay or Van Cortlandt, Dave hastens to yank out the unwanted wort (old word for plant, in English, monophyletic with the word ‘root’, as in liverwort).
Many times when we’d be in the field together, I’d be bending down to identify some Violet or Rue and this arm would appear over my shoulder and with one terse snap of a stem, de-earth a living creature in front of me. I’d turn around: there would be stolid Dave, profiled against the NY sky like out of some spaghetti western, with a twitch of the old ‘stache. Onward we’d proceed, thru the woods of which he is the steward, the caretaker. The lover. He showed me the Spring Peepers and Wood Frogs he’d reintroduced in diminutive ponds near the Park’s Golf courses. In Africa, men fight over elephants and big game. In Yellowstone over wolves. In New York city, characters like Kunstler fight for frogs the size of a finger nail, over rare species of mint that grow in last bastions of fragmented urban Dystopia, surrounded by moats of cement and impervious cover, protected – God forbid- from the onslaught of this thing called wilderness.
Dave showed me the birdhouses he’d put up for swallows and Bluebirds that rim one of the Park’s golf courses. He had his 15 minutes a few years back when the NY times featured the return of the bluebird to NYC, the first breeding pair in years, the state bird of the Empire State no less, that he had ushered back into the Bronx on a red carpet of bird boxes. The bluebirds accepted. They nested. They have not returned since. Bluebirds, bogsuckers and wildflowers. Dave Kunstler, in a nutshell. Not to mention his love for butterflies, for dragonflies. On our first meeting I asked him where is family was from:
“Austria.”
“the Name Kunstler have any particular meaning?” I queried.
“My grandfather won a prize in a competition, one of the prizes was a new name, Kunstler, means ‘artist’.”
Used to be the main difference between an ecosystem and a work of art was that the latter could not reproduce, whereas as an ecosystem can. Today, fragmented habitat cannot achieve any sort of perennial status without the intervention of an artist the likes of Kunstler. Or Don Riepe. Or Dave Burg. Or Mike Klemens. Or Mike Fellar.
These are my friends, my community, my ‘men’ – I won’t use the word hero because the cemeteries are full of them. These grassroots New York nature dudes (now that I have left the city), have helped me in my exodus to Vermont. They left me with a legacy of what to do. City or country, same fight: dig. Get grounded. Root cause or bust. Be the change you want to see in the world. What do I do up here? I take the word ‘root’ quite literally, I seek it everywhere, in my language, my psyche, our history, but most of all now, starting with our own food, the one I’ve decide to grow, so I too can root myself and my family into this ground I tread upon, to reassert my ecology at every level of its calling. It’s my first step towards self-sufficiency – and the new number 40 on Confucius’s 39 steps of escape, the number 1 of which is flight, remember. Because self-sufficiency, when you think about it, is sort of like starting a family. Unlike self-indulging and the protracted teenage life of the contemporary male (and some females), it requires taking care of everything on whom your survival depends. The compost you make, the soil you help replenish, the plants you care for and that eventually take care of you. Being self-sufficient means no longer being the only important guy in the room. Come to think of it, it’s sort of like adoption (from the Latin Adoptare, to choose, to wish).
Another thing with self-sufficiency (that distinguishes it from provincialism and chauvinism and isolationism and racism) is that it imagines and creates a world where everyone is equally important – just like in an ecosystem, just like in the goal of democracy. A world not just for the elders. Not just for the youngsters, either. A life, and hopefully one day an entire human population, decentralized to the point of no longer obeying to one centralized ego – or projection thereof. Funny enough Darwin sort of nailed it a century and a half ago, a feat all the more ethically mature considering his time and the fact that his own theory could have led him into the Hobbesian pits of ‘reciprocal altruism’:
“As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the mean of all nations and races.”
You heard the man, time to adopt the world around us.
Now I make bird houses, too, like Dave Kunstler. I make (from the Indo European Mag, meaning to knead, since the first houses were made of mud, duh) mine with scrap wood I found in my barn attic, because I wouldn’t want to make them from Indonesian hardwood like they have on sale at the ‘local’ Sticks and Stuff. Remember, in today’s Wal-Mart world there is nothing more radical than making your own stuff. Also because the first object you make changes your relationship to all ‘objects’ in general, because when you start to make things with your own time, everywhere things start to have a subject attached. A dimension. A name. A life. You can no longer enter a store and take a carrot or a shirt for granted. Time and context become present, too. Call it color, taste, touch, smell. I call it reality. Because without subject, object becomes abstract. Object no longer real.
I’m removing invasive plants, too, like this giant and stubborn patch of Japanese Knotweed up the road from where I now live.
I also have a lekking ground for bogsuckers nearby – minus the air traffic. I hear them blurt out the odd “Pete’ every night at dusk.
Most of all, I’m into plants. Gardening. Germinating. Tilling. Hoeing. Raking. Composting. Dirt! Ah, life’s sweet brown medium, the essence of autopoiesis - one man’s dump is another guy’s food. Side note, a question really: when we water the earth, our minds sing ‘fertility!’. Then why is it that when we throw dirt in the water our culture screams ‘disease!’. Funny things, these cultural constructs of ours. Seems are minds are the real mud in town. Scientists are now learning (sic!) that muck is good for our kids; that getting dirty can improve the regulation of your serotonin levels, thus helping to prevent depression and that exposure to dirt can also help boost a child’s developing immune system, versus staying indoors with chemical cleaning acids and breeding asthma along with allergies while developing cancer.
Do we not come from the earth?
Our aversion to filth, where is it from? A left over from living in pestilent, cholera-living cities? Is it adaptive? An evolutionary by-product? Likewise, our craving to restore an earthly paradise, a functional, locally grown, organic garden of ‘eatin, be we American environmentalists or evangelicals – is this evolution at work? Will gardener’s inherit the earth? Should it be ‘the survival of the filthiest’ – as in a gardener’s fingernails? Of the greenest thumb? According to some of today’s top-notch ecologists like Lester Brown or William Rees, it’s not that we have to or should – it’s because, when you do the math, we have no choice. There is no decent arable land left. We have to save what little is left, restore what’s gone, and make more at home. Consider the community gardens of New York City. Night Soil. Adam Purple. Bricks and Central Park Horse manure.
Used to be I spent my life looking over the fence, the ocean, looking for Eden in places like the Amazon, in somebody else’s back yard. No more (I ended up in New York). No, today, perhaps because of -or should I say thanks to - New York City, every day on earth, wherever I am, has sort of turned into a kind of ‘Dirt day’, a day for grounding, in praise of gravity, and all things Telluric, especially back home, here in the Green Mountains, in Vermont, perhaps because here we call spring ‘mud season’ and so lately I have been snorting too much of the stuff. The other day, Val and I actually made some dirt. We crafted some starter soil for legions of baby plants by mixing in some peat and local nitrogen-rich soil and some cow manure compost and we spent days kneading a ton of this stuff together with our bare hands in the cellar. Cow shit and top soil. The odd earth worm gently let back outside. Dragons, dirt and manure.
Manure, from the French main d’oeuvre, meaning to work with one’s hands, to mix in some of the old bovine bull’. Again, why the bad rap? Is all manual work and/or labor synonymous with shit? Remember agriculture 12000 years ago had more to do with the centralization of power than with food, guys with power in one corner and a lot of losers with sore backs and bad knees working the fields in the other. If you were low cast, a peasant, not even chosen by God, if you were poor, as in dirt poor (vs. filthy rich?), then it meant you had to work the fields, feed the rest of humanity, get dirt under your nails. And vice-versa. You were a bottom feeder, at the bottom of the food chain. Scum. We used to be a land of farmers. Should I take it we were a land of losers? No. Now we are an empire of consumers. Real shysters. Want homeland security? Then restore or take care of the topsoil beneath us. Don’t let BigAg take out what little is left. Set up a compost in your kitchen, invite some worms in to help with the job (the game!), start a dry-toilet, grow your own potatoes and tomatoes and corn, and carve out your own knife, fork and spoon, too.
I choose not between right or wrong, I chose between life and death, earth and sky. Enough with the heavens already. Paradise is beneath us. Around us. Consider this: good topsoil is organic material that the cold months of winter won’t let decompose and recompose and recycle immediately into something else, like in a tropical rainforest, where no humus has time to accumulate. It accumulates north and south of the equator. At the equator, no winter, no delay in recycling, no soil. Get it? Thus, intensive monoculture (and the empires that accompany it) are deeply rooted in nature’s cycles – including long cold winters, and their propensity to ‘make’ soil, the very dirt our same agriculture has successfully depleted. Now, reconsider climate change and the end of cold months and what will happen to temperate topsoil. Topsoil no longer. Civilization?
Today, every morning I wake up, and after watching my son gleefully manipulate his own genitals and stuff some wooden toy into his mouth, I take five, and go into the woods and pretend I can see plants growing. Think about it, take a tree for example, isn’t it supposed to sink with its own weight, respond to gravity? Nope. Life on earth is inherently pneumatic. It is outward bound. Expanding. It achieves this by creating porosity and interstitial space and volume and surface area like no other force in the universe. A square inch of rich, nutrient rich top soil is bubbling with a gazillion bacteria and equally humungous potential for surface area, for water retention and gaseous exchange. Imagine what happens when it fills with roots - more absorption value still. A few square miles of saltmarsh peat on the coast can stop a hurricane surge. A forest (and its soil) is the world best dam. Think of life as a cake in the oven doped on yeast. The mother of all sponges.
After my spin in the woods watching the Trillium and the Trout lily start to grow, I work my way downstairs into the basement of our Cabin where I have a whole crowd of thirsty seedlings of broccoli and onion and basil and stuff in the boiler room. Wailing for my attention. Val and I have also converted half of our living space into a ‘greenhouse’ – just for the effect. My own contribution to the ‘war on climate change’. My pumpkin plants and tomatoes are doing fine (for a guy without a green thumb, but a green heart). And by the way, my son’s nickname is Pumpkin. Go figure. A shrink might clear his throat and suggest I have still to resolve my fertility issues if I’m so busy growing my own seed alongside my adopted son.
Points of view. Retain many, opposite if possible, and still function. I say we cultivate cognitive dissonance. Inner discord. Your own private democracy. If somebody says you’re contradicting yourself, say “ good”, that you prefer it that way. Like eyesight, two different views come from two different eyeballs, not one is correct but together they somehow give you perspective.
So this is what I’ll share with Manny (i.e.: my point of view), one day, if indeed we get there, apart from the aforementioned sexual literacy. Enough of looking skyward, already, I’ll say, you’re not a freakin tourist, be grounded, face the earth, swim in the stuff, because every day is dirt day, this dirt from which we all grew out of – as in ‘out of this world’, yes, we’re out of this world, Manny, we did not come into it, we came out of it. Know that.
Just don’t yank too hard on your orchid, and show great respect for vanilla.
Pete, the wannabe Bogsucker.
Ps: Phallus shares the same Indo-European root as Bull and Whale.
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