If you’re a field biologist heading to a bog, your first concern isn’t usually a hot-pink flower. Not that the flower doesn’t matter. It does. But first, you must get to the bog without getting yourself lost.

That’s because trails to bogs are rare — at least to most bogs I’ve visited over the past four decades. In the days before GPS, I would bushwhack to bogs with a map and compass. And, sure, if I got too eager chasing a warbler or too distracted by an orchid, I’d sometimes get turned around and lost.

Like the time I went off-course chasing dragonflies at a bog in Saskatchewan. From a remote gravel road, I navigated well enough to the bog, which was lovely, but lost my bearings on the way back. I also lost my nerve. When the road and my truck failed to appear, my heart began to pound and my mind played tricks on common sense: Maybe my compass needle had lost its affinity for north. What if I had the declination wrong? Or maybe my hand-drawn map was no good. “Just keep walking northwest, Bryan,” I kept telling myself, “and you’ll hit the road.” Otherwise, I might be lost for good. Eventually, common sense and magnetic north prevailed. Never was I so happy to see a gravel road.

But that relief has never come close to the euphoria I experience each time I arrive at a bog. And these arrivals have little to do with being lost, found, or any bushwhack. The bushwhacks are usually fine, by the way. And even when they’re not, when the black flies and my aches and pains and mood get the better of me, I would bear far worse to reach a bog. That’s because the moment I arrive at a bog, everything in the world goes right for me. Everything falls into place.

To convey for you this feeling of contentment, I can only hope you yourself experience something similar. Maybe it’s the bliss you feel coming home to the person or family you love, or the transcendence you might enjoy arriving at a moving flourish while listening to your most cherished and affecting music. I suspect you know of others.

At a bog, I find safety and sensuality — a sense of belonging and transcendence alike. And in spring, at many bogs I am greeted by the flowers of Rhodora (Rhododendron canadense).

Among those blooms, whether I’ve come for science or business or pleasure, I find rare birds, butterflies, and dragonflies. Better yet, I find joy, contemplation, and meaning. Yeah, all that from wetlands too often dismissed in the culture as dark, dangerous, and worthless.

Far from worthless, bogs are timeless. Born of the retreat of glaciers here in New England more than 10,000 years ago, bogs are slow-motion ecosystems. Their change is measured in centuries, not years. Wars, fascists, greed, hatred — bogs are not immune to them, but generally outlast them.

And maybe that’s another reason I make the bushwhacks. At a bog, for me, the world stops spinning so fast. It did the same for Henry David Thoreau more than 150 years ago.

“There are no richer parterres to my eyes than … these tender places on the earth’s surface,” Thoreau wrote in his final essay, titled Walking. “Botany cannot go farther than tell me the names of the shrubs which grow there — the high blueberry, panicled andromeda, lambkill, azalea, and rhodora — all standing in the quaking sphagnum.”

I now stand beside him, with wet feet at those tender places unchanged. However lovely or arduous the bushwhack, however lost I might find myself in nature or culture, when I arrive at the quaking sphagnum, the Rhodora tells me, yeah, you’ve made it, Bryan. You’re here. You’re alive. You’re home.

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Bonus Images

Postscripts

• Like its botanical kin the azaleas, and unlike some rhododendrons, Rhodora is deciduous, dropping its leaves in autumn. In spring, Rhodora erupts into those blooms before its leaves emerge — a very good look in a bog.

• Granted, in really boggy places, like Maine, Rhodora can show itself along roadsides. Good for anyone who wanders or drives by!

• For the style police among you, yep, contrary to most style manuals, I capitalize the common names of plants, animals, fungi, and other wild things here at Chasing Nature. (Thoreau didn’t capitalize rhodora and other species, nor do most other writers.) Hey, it’s my Substack — I set the rules.

• To my mind, Walking is among Thoreau’s most challenging essays. I had to read it twice before I realized that it’s less about walking than about spirituality, civilization, and a more virtuous form of Manifest Destiny (although he never uses the term). At just over 12,000 words, Walking was published in The Atlantic Monthly in June 1862, shortly after Thoreau died of tuberculosis at age 44.

Given the world’s troubles, I recognize that a droplet at the tip of a bizarre flower isn’t exactly breaking news.

And yet you, dear readers, are among the few people ever to see this droplet, which is the sugary secretion of a parasitic plant called Eastern Dwarf Mistletoe. That’s because, as best I can determine, I’m the first person to photograph this phenomenon in the wild and publish its image.

But this isn’t about me, or even entirely about the droplet, which botanists unceremoniously call “stigmatic exudate.” This is instead about the satisfaction of finding something small, odd, or even common in nature. Mine is a droplet in a bog. Yours may be a triumph closer to home.

The Parasite

But let’s begin with the plant, which itself is rare enough. Eastern Dwarf Mistletoe (Arceuthobium pusillum) isn’t exactly the plant some of you might steal kisses beneath at Christmastime. It’s one of more than a thousand mistletoe species on Earth, all of which are parasites on other plants.

Rather than sending their roots into soil, mistletoes tap through bark into a tree or shrub’s plumbing to extract water and nutrients (it doesn’t always damage or kill the host). And like other plants, mistletoes produce flowers and fruits, which can be food for insects, birds, and other wildlife.

Eastern Dwarf Mistletoe grows on conifers — spruce, tamarack, fir, or pine — but mostly Black Spruce here in Vermont. Neither leafy nor showy, it presents instead as brown shoots, only a centimeter or so in length, along spruce twigs. Finding Eastern Dwarf Mistletoe amounts to searching the spruce needles for a fat brown version of one.

The “Wrong” Flowers

My journey to the droplet began April 4 at a woodland spruce bog that Josh Lincoln, my dear friend and most trusted field companion, knew to be busy with mistletoe. On that chilly day, the bog was calm, more a place of promise than of presence. A Common Raven croaked overhead. Ice floated in bog puddles. Josh and I got to work.

After scrutinizing hundreds of mistletoe shoots, and just as we were about to give up the search, I noticed some fetching yellow specks, bright as fresh highway paint, in a shrubby spruce. These were mistletoe flowers, and yet only half of our journey: they were males. Although Josh and I rejoiced among these odd blooms, our quest was not yet complete.

Dwarf mistletoes are dioecious, which means a given plant is either male or female. Those yellow specks were anthers bearing pollen, each resting on a brown petal like an oyster on its shell. Josh and I found no female plants in flower, and therefore no sugary droplets. We would need to return to the bog another day. (It’s not hard to get Josh and me to a bog any day.)

The Droplets

On April 25, three weeks after our initial visit, the bog was coming to life. The raven still croaked. Leatherleaf flowers, swelling in their buds, dangled like little white bells from their twigs. Two Blue-headed Vireos had arrived to sing their sweet repertoire: swee-up… cheerio … be-seein’-you … see-ya! And Eastern Dwarf Mistletoe males were now in full bloom — lots of them.

“I want droplets,” I said over and over to Josh, who puts up with me like nobody else. (Josh wanted droplets as well.)

The female flowers of various dwarf mistletoe species sometimes produce a tiny, glistening drop of liquid containing the sugars sucrose, fructose, or glucose. Probably a reward for an insect conveying pollen from male flowers, the droplet also seems to help pollen grains germinate and fertilize a female flower’s ovules. Although I had read literature about this, nowhere was I able to find photos or even illustrations of Eastern Dwarf Mistletoe’s droplets. (It’s hard enough to find images of the female flowers, which look nothing like any flower you’re familiar with.)

A bog is a big place with lots of wonderful distractions. Josh and I were basically searching for a translucent poppyseed on a weird plant. It amounted to leaning into what looked like female mistletoe shoots and scrutinizing their tips with a 7-power hand lens. I felt like Sherlock Holmes (without the brainpower). But one thing about us humans: we’re probably more dogged than dogs.

“I’ve got droplets!” I finally shouted across the bog toward Josh. Or, as an academic botanist might say, “I’ve ascertained stigmatic exudate!” As it turned out, so did Josh. And now you do as well.

I went to the bog, twice, not to seek orchids or warblers or butterflies, but to search for a droplet on a odd plant. It became for me a way of purpose and grace.

Purpose and grace may wait as well in the backyard, by the roadside, or in a crack in the pavement. It need not be rare or even beautiful — as long as it means something to you. So seek your orchid, your warbler, your butterfly.

Seek your droplet.

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Bonus Botany

• My more modest aspiration closer to home this spring was to see the flowers of American Beech (Fagus grandifolia). For virtually my entire life (so far), I’d walked among these common trees and never once seen their separate male and female blooms, perhaps because I’m usually looking at songbirds in May. But that’s no excuse. A better excuse would be that beech flowers tend to be high in the canopy. Nonetheless, after considerable and determined searching this month, at long last I found my low-hanging flowers (and soon-to-be fruit). Triumph in the prosaic. Along the way, I reclined in the woods to watch the clouds and the leaves. I do this a lot.

• Eastern Dwarf Mistletoe causes its tree hosts to form growths we call “witches’ brooms” — something Henry David Thoreau described inn 1858 from Walden Pond, 13 years before the mistletoe itself was described to science.

• Mistletoe fruits mature in capsules that explode in fall, shooting sticky seeds onto spruce boughs, where they later germinate and infect the trees twigs. The shoots we see are the tips of a kind of root system in the host plant.

• Confirmation of my mistletoe droplets came from Dr. Daniel Nickrent, an expert on parasitic flowering plants at Cornell University. (Even he’s never seen the droplets.)

• My motivation on mistletoe comes in part from the naturalist and botanist Steven Daniel, who for years has been observing the flowers of Eastern Dwarf Mistletoe, and ultimately joined the club and found droplets this spring. Read Steven’s wonderful article on page 14 of this issue of Mitchelliana, a publication of the New York Flora Association. It includes Steven’s images of the all-but-invisible female mistletoe flowers (along with droplets from a different mistletoe species).

Related Reading

References

• Hawksworth, Frank G.; Wiens, Delbert. 1996. Dwarf mistletoes: Biology, pathology, and systematics. Agricultural Handbook 709. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Forest Service. 410 p. https://research.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/4699

• Daniel, Steven. 2024. The Strange and Fascinating Dwarf Mistletoe, Arceuthobium pusillum Peck. Mitchelliana. Vol. 35 (2), 14-16.

One day during the 18th century, on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, a songbird with the quirky habit of wagging its tail was killed, probably by fine-grain birdshot, and collected in the name of science.

Shipped to Europe, the specimen eventually reached Germany, where the naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin, in 1789, gave the species a misleading scientific name: Motacilla palmarum, which means a tail-wagging bird living among palms.

Two hundred and thirty-seven years later, millions of these songbirds, now going by the common name Palm Warbler, are migrating north through the U.S. and into Canada toward breeding sites far from any palm trees. Along the way, they’re unwittingly bringing tranquility and meaning to a kinetic and damaged world.

With plain plumage and an inelegant song, Palm Warblers lack the cachet of their close relatives — except for their idiosyncratic tail wagging (really more pump than wag). Other birds, including a few warbler species, wag or flick or bob their tails, but no warbler pumps like a Palm. So distinctive and constant is the motion that we birdwatchers can identify a Palm Warbler by its waggling alone.

Like other migratory species, the Palm Warbler is a creature of three distinct worlds: where it winters, where it breeds, and where it navigates in migration. In winter, Palm Warblers range from the southeastern U.S. into Mexico, Central America, and islands of the Caribbean — close enough to actual palms, even though the warblers do fine without them. During the breeding season, Palm Warblers are all but different animals, occupying remote bogs across much of Canada and parts of the northern U.S., where they nest on or just above the mossy bog mat. (Had it instead been shot and collected for science during its nesting season, this songbird could easily have been named Sphagnum Warbler.)

And yet most birdwatchers encounter Palm Warblers only in their third realm — as spring or fall migrants between the tropical and the boreal, when they stop to rest, feed, and pump their tails anywhere from forests to front lawns, from swamps to shopping centers. And once they see a Palm Warbler, many birders typically note it and then move on in search of flashier songbirds.

Not me.

This past week I was visiting family on foreign turf — the suburbs of southeastern Michigan. As much as I love my family, I struggle in their landscape. Wetlands there are filled or half-dead. The relentless din of traffic drowns out the dawn chorus. From every shopping center, I can gaze out in most any direction to see … yet another shopping center.

Still, on my morning walks in the scarcity of green, I gazed at the Palm Warblers passing through. Their seesaw tails remind me that they’ve been to wilder places north and south. We have a kinship, the warblers and me: in our time together in suburbia we do our best to get by on a damaged planet.

A Palm Warbler will always fly toward an uncertain fate, which is true for all of us. And yet even as I head home to Vermont, and warblers move on from suburbia, we will meet again soon enough.

Next week, as I do almost every spring, I’ll make my way to bogs, mostly to search for rare butterflies and dragonflies. At a Vermont bog, there is no din of traffic, no shopping malls, no politics or email. Instead, Rhodora will bloom hot pink, last year’s cranberries will be fat and ripe, and a small songbird, transcending the story imposed on it two and a half centuries ago, will be pumping its tail and singing for a mate.

As a migrant, a Palm Warbler lives entirely nowhere, except where it exists on any given day. And when we meet again at the bog, the warbler and I will renew our kinship. And in many ways, we’ll both be home.

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Extras

• Why the Wagging? A behavior that everyone notices is somewhat mysterious to ornithologists. Some birds wag, flick, or flash their tails (or wings) to flush insect prey. Other hypotheses are more speculative: Ground-dwelling birds (wagtails, pipits, Hermit Thrush, Palm Warbler) might wag to signal a kind of cocky confidence so that predators shouldn’t bother trying. Or it could be a form of social status or sexual signaling. We’re not entirely sure, which is fine.

• Back in 1789, Gmelin could be forgiven for assigning the warbler specimen to the genus Motacilla, the wagtails of Europe, Africa, and Asia, none of which inhabit the Americas. The Palm Warbler has since been moved into the more typical warbler genus Setophaga. The specimen, collected in Santo Domingo and then shipped to Europe, seems to have since been lost (which is why the collection date and collector seem to be unknown).

• Palm Warblers come in two subspecies: The “Western” Palm Warbler, plainer in plumage, nests generally west of Ottawa, Ontario; the “Eastern” Palm Warbler, showing more yellow on its body, nests east of Ottawa.

Reference

• Wilson Jr., W. H. (2020). Palm Warbler (Setophaga palmarum), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (A. F. Poole, Editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.palwar.01 (Thanks, Herb!)

Yet again the conventional wisdom is wrong. Spring isn’t green; it’s countless shades of red. Carmine tints emerging leaves. Ruby dyes early flowers. And scarlet conveys songbird desire.

The green of spring comes soon enough. But if you seek beauty and drama in nature, even perspective on the best and worst of human nature, you’re seeing red.

Among the great apes known as humans, red is a primary color and a social construct. A red carpet bestows honor, the red pill a harsh reality. Red flags are warnings, The Scarlet Letter a mark of shame. Red is what evolution and we ourselves make of it — good, lousy, or otherwise.

Among other animals, red plays a leading role in springtime. Red is the fireworks from the crown of a kinglet seeking a mate, the warning glow of a young Eastern Newt, or the blaze on a moth called The Herald (so named because it flies at the start of a new season).

Where animals flash red to signal either desire or danger, plants use it for survival thanks to pigments known as anthocyanins. They bring blues, purples, and reds to fruits, stems, leaves, and flowers.

Anthocyanin pigments help plants withstand the chill of early spring; they deter wildlife from eating new and tender leaves; and they act as sunscreen against harsh UV light before chlorophyll production ramps up and turns the world light-loving green. But the springtime red in plants does something more for me.

Here in Vermont, our evergreen trees are, well, always green — stability in uncertain times. But red doesn’t run like that. Sure, I want the world to be the benevolent and peaceful red — the red of flowers and feathers and Valentines. But red is also the color of anger, bloodshed, and a certain president’s necktie. It reminds me that nature and culture are beautiful, ugly, complex, and impermanent — basically the story of life on Earth.

Even so, after every winter, no matter how long or cold, how brutal or difficult, there comes a moment when everything goes right. It happens for me in April, when our winter-gray hardwoods turn not to green but first to a subtle, lacy canvas of red — the flowering of Red Maples, one of eastern North America’s most abundant trees.

For me, those reds aren’t colors — they’re feelings. Anthocyanins aren’t pigments — they’re an experience. Whether I’m worthy or not, the red brings me joy. I fall in love with the world yet again. And to receive these rewards, I need not work or travel or plead my case. It’s springtime. All I need to do is look around.

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Postscripts in Red and Other Displays

By the way, red doesn’t corner the market on drama. Green Jays, Yellow Warblers, and Indigo Buntings make as impactful statements as Scarlet Tanagers, Northern Cardinals, or Vermillion Flycatchers.

Finally for Paying Subscribers:

Prologue: My friend Terry Allen died a week ago at her home here in Vermont. She was 78. An artist, journalist, photographer, and rebel, Terry had an enduring sense of beauty, curiosity, and justice. While drafting Terry’s obituary this week, I spent some time perusing her portfolio of journalism and photography — from villages in China to war horrors of El Salvador to anti-ICE rallies in the U.S. Then I came upon the American Robin pictured above, in attack mode, which Terry photographed some years ago through a window from inside her home. She phoned me at the time, wondering what the heck was going on with this robin. Here’s an explanation that Terry might have liked.

At a bog in Alaska, a farm in Iowa, and a mall in Miami, American Robins claim lofty perches and sing as if they own the place. In many ways, they do.

More than an iconic backyard bird, the American Robin (Turdus migratorius) is a paragon of versatility, occupying forests, open land, and spaces in between across nearly all of North America. Few songbirds claim such range. The robin does so with a blend of moxie and manifest destiny.

Food figures big in this American success story. Robins do not live by earthworm alone. They’ll eat anything from spiders to dragonflies, from the fruits of poison ivy to the berries of junipers. A study of stomach contents from 1,169 robins found fruits from 50 plant genera and invertebrates from more than 100 families.

That diet demands dexterity. A robin hunting earthworms will pause, watch, cock its head, and studiously adjust its gaze before striking at the sod. But a robin can also run down flying insects or search the forest floor for food by flipping fallen leaves. A robin on the wing can snatch fruit off a twig or vine. And on rare occasions, robins have eaten fish, frog, snake, and skink. So when it comes to their diets, robins are opportunistic — kind of like Americans.

They’re even more opportunistic in real estate. As pioneers, settlers, and developers claimed the continent for homes, farms, and commerce, robins followed in their wake. The American Robin is now a bird of forests, riversides, barnyards, city parks, shopping centers, golf courses, or most any other places altered by humans. The robin is a land-grabber — kind of like certain Americans.

And once it claims turf, the American Robin defends it from predators with an enhanced version of the songbird arsenal: shouting, harassing, or a good thrashing. Confronted with a raccoon, squirrel, crow, hawk, or a human wandering too close to the nest, robins spring into a dance of agitation: they hop from perch to perch, flick their wings, wag their tails, and blurt emphatic, staccato YEEP! and CHUCK! calls. These antics often draw other songbirds into the fray, sort of a coalition of the willing (unlike current American military policy).

Occasionally, robins can make at least glancing contact with a predator or interloper, usually around the head and neck. One robin was reported to have killed a Steller’s Jay by thrashing it with its wings and feet and pecking through its skull. (I think that’s gonna leave a mark.)

The aggression can also come to your window. A robin glimpsing its reflection in the glass sees only another robin intruding on its territory, which was the case with Terry’s robin. These ensuing and unnecessary turf wars can go on for days (kind of like the battle for Greenland) and bloody both robin and window.

In those instances, a robin is at war with itself — kind of like America.

Warranted or not, it’s easy to pick on America. Social media and the 24-hour news cycle only exaggerate and exploit our differences. So, sure, as metaphor, I might see in Terry’s robin a nation divided. Or maybe something greater.

Anyone who knew Terry would tell you that she had an edge — headstrong might be a good way to describe her, even acerbic. But Terry, nothing if not versatile and savvy, could talk the malice out of a soldier or MAGA man. As a journalist, she witnessed trauma in the world. As a potter and photographer, she also captured its beauty. And now she’s gone, a life complete.

It’s spring here in Vermont. On Tuesday, I was out in the rain searching for wildflowers by day and amorous amphibians by night, getting soaked and not minding one bit. As I write, an American Robin sings in my neighborhood.

Sure, the world can be harsh and cruel, but it’s the only world we’ve got — still worth fighting for. So, yeah, in Terry’s image I see a nation at war with itself. I also see an angelic songbird. And maybe I see the breadth of America — not only as it is, but also what it might yet become.

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Postscript

A sampling of Terry’s photography remains at her Substack called Opposable.

Here’s a poem I read last Friday at one of the many Poem City events this month in my home city of Montpelier, Vermont. As if April weren’t wonderful enough, Montpelier’s storefront windows are now postered with poetry and our venues are alive with poets reading their work.

Let’s define power, wealth, success, and fame not by the abuses and exploits of humans, but by the rhythms and harmonies of nature.

Power

We measure power by our capacity for wonder.
Explosions come not from bombs
but from a kinglet’s crown
or a hazelnut’s bloom.
Power is the spider we set free from our home
or the salamander we escort across the road on a rainy night.

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A whale defies intuition. It is vast yet ethereal, slow yet powerful, eerie yet enchanting. A whale is a sublime dream come true.

Sleek and elegant, metallic gray with a pinkish belly, the Rice’s Whale is one of the most endangered whales on Earth. But unlike any dream, this whale could soon become an unwitting test case of morality, extinction, and political power in America.

Having already granted the Rice’s Whale (Balaenoptera ricei) necessary protection in 2019, the U.S. government is now poised to take it away — not because the Rice’s Whale is safe, not because it threatens anyone or anything, but rather because of the Trump administration’s fixation on fossil fuels.

The Department of the Interior next week intends to convene a rare meeting of the so-called “God Squad,” which has the authority to revoke protections afforded to endangered species. The committee’s stated objective is to foster oil and gas exploration and development in the Gulf of Mexico, whose waters are home to the last 50 or so Rice’s Whales in the world.

What’s unusual about this is not only that the God Squad is meeting for the first time in more than three decades. Even more remarkable is that we can watch the machinery of the Rice’s Whale’s potential demise when the God Squad’s meeting is live-streamed on YouTube on Tuesday, March 31, at 9:30 am Eastern Daylight Time (1:30 pm UTC).

Endangered Morality

Monumental and profound, whales should be easy — an open-book test of the human bond to the natural world. To disregard a whale is to spurn the sublime, to scoff at our dreams. But let’s be honest: Many other imperiled species are too often abstractions lacking the whale’s cachet. We don’t revere them in the same way, or know them as we know our pets or backyard birds or favorite wildflowers. Even though I’m reluctant to rank or compare, the Rice’s Whale has a lot more going for it than, say, the Devils Hole Pupfish or the Furbish’s Lousewort. Few of us are in the streets shouting “Save the Pupfish!”

But the U.S. Endangered Species Act recognizes that extinction is a singular event — as much about us as it is about any given species, no matter how odd or obscure. The act makes no judgments on popularity, economics, or politics. So profound is extinction that even the Lousewort, even if we don’t know or care much about it, is our moral obligation.

Here in the U.S., we protect speech, even when it is obscure or objectionable or offensive. It’s a founding principle, making us stronger as a people and a nation. It’s supposed to unite us. And yet protecting plants, animals, and wild places isn’t as foundational to the nation, even as the human bond to nature is all but universal.

Despite the Endangered Species Act’s considerable achievements, its safeguards are hard to secure. They are subject to the rigors of science, which is fine, and the vagaries of politics, which isn’t. In the course of U.S. history, Republicans and Democrats alike have too often failed to protect biological diversity and abundance. But Trump and his enablers are now escalating this longstanding disconnect between biodiversity and governance. And they’re doing so with hypocrisy and irony.

To Imperil a National Symbol and an Ideal

In its published notice to convene the God Squad, formally called the Endangered Species Committee, the Department of the Interior, making no mention of Rice’s Whale, says only that “The Committee is meeting regarding an exemption under the Endangered Species Act with respect to oil and gas exploration, development, and production activities in the Gulf of America.” (Emphasis added.)

But here’s something else to know about Rice’s Whale: It is the only baleen whale in full-time residence offshore of the United States of America. Other whale species simply visit or pass us by. The Rice’s Whale is more American than a Bald Eagle. Its survival depends on no other nation but ours.

That Trump would assault nature comes as no surprise. Even before his war on Iran made him ever more desperate for oil, the president has been determined to open Gulf waters to new oil and gas exploration and extraction. That Trump would assault a whale, an American icon, for oil seems only fitting of his character and presidency.

None of us knows what will happen at Tuesday’s meeting of the God Squad. (The Center for Biological Diversity has gone to court to stop the meeting.) Rice’s Whale, widely believed to be the target, is known to be vulnerable to the vessel collisions, noise and explosions from seismic surveys, and oil spills related to fossil fuel exploration and extraction in the Gulf. (The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 killed a fifth of the Rice’s Whale population.) The God Squad’s marks could be any of five species of threatened or endangered sea turtles in the Gulf or various other listed species. Still, it doesn’t matter which — our obligation is to all of them.

To be honest, I can’t say that my life would be materially depleted if the Rice’s Whale or other species were to suffer or go extinct. For most of us, by any name, the Gulf would still be the Gulf. But it wouldn’t be the same Gulf. It would be ocean depleted of beauty and diversity. And with it would be a nation depleted of identity and integrity.

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Postscripts and References

• March 31, 2006: The “God Squad” Plays God

  As expected, the God Squad did indeed revoke protections for threatened and endangered wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico, including the Rice’s Whale. This betrayal of the imperiled was pro forma, live-streamed, and well-rehearsed. And as expected, a coalition of eco-groups has gone to court to stop the move. We barely have governance anymore in the U.S. This place runs on abuse of power, acrimony, and lawsuits.

• The NOAA Fisheries recovery outline for Rice’s Whale.

• The (701-page) “Biological Opinion on Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Gulf of America Oil and Gas Program.”

• On Monarchs: In the waning days of the Biden administration, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed listing the Monarch butterfly as a threatened and warranting the protections of the Endangered Species Act. At the time, I explained in an essay and podcast episode how one of the most familiar butterflies on the continent could be imperiled. But I was naive about whether the Trump administration would follow through, respect the law, and issue a final ruling on saving Monarchs by the required deadline. It has not (and has been taken to court over it).

  

PICK your favorite sign of spring: birdsong, baseball, amphibian sex, seed catalogues. Mine is the first plant in flower, which turns out to be an American hoax.

Your own inaugural bloom depends of course on where you live and where you search. Here in Vermont, I had three reliable contenders for first in flower of 2026, each somewhat an iconoclast:

• Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum) — This is likely first for many of us in the northern U.S. Although attractive in their own ways, Silver Maple flowers have no petals — they simply flaunt their reproductive parts (pistils and stamens) like fireworks in the vernal winds. They’re also sexually fluid (see postscript for paying subscribers).

• Eastern Dwarf-Mistletoe (Arceuthobium pusillum) — Full disclosure: I was rooting for it. Hard to find, this rare plant is a parasite on twigs and branches of certain conifers, mostly Black Spruce (Picea mariana) in Vermont. And if its peculiar flowers aren’t enough, dwarf-mistletoe will go on to disperse its sticky seeds by firing them like cannonballs at spruce boughs.

• Eastern Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) — As it turned out, this was my first plant in bloom in 2026, and is probably first across much of its range in the eastern U.S. and adjacent Canada. Mine was flowering on March 12 in wet woods beside Vermont’s frozen-over Lake Champlain (the banner above). Which makes it odd and amusing that the first native flower of the year for many of us is fetid and deceitful.

Night (and Day) of the Living Dead

Determined, ruthless, and stinky, my triumphant skunk cabbage probably beat the competition to blooming by a week or so. And this is no ordinary flower.

The first thing a skunk cabbage plant shows the world emerges from wet earth like a zombie rising from the grave. It resembles fresh or rotting meat — and it stinks. The ruse features two major parts: a maroon-colored sheath called a spathe, which shrouds a pale knob called a spadix. By any name, the odor (and perhaps its appearance) lures flies, beetles, and other insects normally attracted to carrion. I could smell it from a couple feet away.

The spadix bears a mosaic of tiny flowers — in a sense, a bouquet. Lacking petals as we know them, each little flower on a spadix has a single pistil surrounded by four stamens. That’s it — that’s your first flower of spring awaiting its flies. A letdown? Hardly. There’s more.

During the cold, early stage of its life above ground, the spadix generates heat — something called thermogenesis. Not only can it help the spathe rise through frozen soil, ice, and snow, it enhances vaporization and wafting of the plant’s odor toward pollinators. It also turns the skunk cabbage at this stage into an insect warming hut, probably increasing pollination efficiency and keeping the reproductive parts from freezing. During my visit, the outside temperature was 34°F — inside a spathe: 50°F. As spring progresses, skunk cabbage goes on to develop bumpy fruits in its spadix and grow big leaves (which will never end up as soup or sauerkraut or kimchi).

Lies and Hope

For my first flower of 2026, I could have waited a week or two for the crocuses and snowdrops (neither native to North America) to sprout on the lawn, or for the Silver Maples to erupt in ruby fireworks (below). Instead, I sought out a skunk cabbage and made it an exalted sign of spring.

At the end of a severe winter here in Vermont, with war darkening the springtime, maybe I needed a plant determined enough to rise through snow and ice, even if it goes on to perpetrate a hoax on insects, who receive no nectar (bees do take its pollen).

After all, deception is a way of life on Earth. Opossums feign death to trick predators. Caterpillars can resemble anything from snakes to twigs to bird shit. A plant can stink like carrion to attract pollinators. We humans lie for various selfish reasons: survival, lust, greed, cruelty, power. And now we’re reminded that truth is the first casualty of war.

I’ll take the mendacity of plants. Even if they deceive now and then, plants tell us like no other organisms where we are in the world. Name me the trees in a forest; I’ll tell you what birds likely nest there. Name the plants in a wetland; I’ll predict its butterflies. As someone who has watched birds for half a century, not until I turned my attention to plants did I truly develop a sense of where I am on the long, green path.

Sure, I go off course in nature and too often feel lost in the maelstrom of human culture. It can happen to any of us. But last week, in a time of war, I found my bearings beside a lowly skunk cabbage. Generating heat, beckoning insects, perpetrating a hoax, my first flower of the year was an odd and odorous display of resiliance rising toward the new light of spring.

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Postscripts

• Gratitude goes to , an artist and field naturalist partial to Eastern Skunk Cabbage who writes here on Substack; to Steven Daniel for his image of Eastern Dwarf-Mistletoe’s odd, three-lobed male flowers; to Cody Limber for the IR image; and to Jerry Jenkins for his photograph of skunk cabbage burning through the snowpack (and pointing out that some of the melt around the plant was due to solar heating).

• For Paying Subscribers: My post on the fluidity of maples: “Red Alert: Springtime and sexual identity expressed in maple flowers.”

• Finally, if you’ll be in or around Montpelier, Vermont, on April 3, meet me and friends for Natural Selections, an evening of poetry, prose, and music at North Branch Nature Center (NBNC). I’ll be reading a new essay and a poem or two. Part of Montpelier’s annual Poem City celebration, the event is a fundraiser for NBNC (my favorite nature preserve).

  

  

THE Chasing Nature podcast returns with birdsong and a recitation of my short essay (below) titled “Sunlight and Warfare.” But this episode mostly comes by way of writer and birder , who interviewed me for his podcast Ten Birding Questions, a feature of Nate’s Substack .

Nate and I wander in conversation to cover, among other topics, my birding origin story, birds in decline, why I write, the virtues of Vermont, field guides and gadgets, birdwatching’s carbon problem, why I’m a reluctant participant in holiday bird counts, and the fireworks of a Ruby-crowned Kinglet.

A version of my short essay is below. If you click and listen to the episode, you’ll not only hear me read it, but also get bonus birdsong and my lively conversation with Nate, who’s terrific.

Sunlight and Warfare

By Bryan Pfeiffer

IN the new light of March, a chorus rises. Black-capped Chickadee, Tufted Titmouse, Common Raven, White-breasted Nuthatch, Northern Cardinal, and lots of other birds sing out at the end of a severe winter: plenty cold, but also now a time of war.

For most of us, the dawn chorus conveys renewal and hope on these lengthening days. Still, the bombs fall. The drones hunt. Children die. And I wonder whether my enjoying nature here in Vermont is somehow a disservice to pain in the world.

Another writer immersed safely in nature at a time of war was Nan Shepherd (1893–1981). A poet, novelist, naturalist, and mountain woman of the Scottish Highlands, Shepherd wrote a classic, The Living Mountain. You’ve probably never heard of it, even as the book belongs in the pantheon with with the likes of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.

The Living Mountain chronicles Shepherd’s time during World War II exploring the Cairngorm Mountains of northeast Scotland. Unforgiving, dangerous, and beautiful, the Cairngorms are, as Robert Mcfarlane put it, “Britain’s Arctic.” From those mountains and plateaus, Shepherd writes with intimacy, honesty, and awareness like no other western nature writer of her day, except perhaps Carson, who at the same time, while exploring the barrier islands of North Carolina, was herself beginning to write about nature. (Best I can tell, the two never met.)

In her chapter titled “Air and Light,” Shepherd writes of the ephemeral state of both. Sure, there’s promise in early spring. But cold rain, thick fog, and dirty snow can still make the mountain harsh and unwelcoming, “a monstrous place,” as she put it. And then Shepherd writes:

But even in this scene of grey desolation, if the sun comes out and the wind rises, the eye may suddenly perceive a miracle of beauty. For on the ground the down of a ptarmigan’s breast feather has caught the sun. Light blows through it, so transparent the fugitive spindrift feather has become. It blows away and vanishes.

The light is coming and the bombs are falling. I have no moral clarity about it, other than to grieve, to write, to act. And yet any one of us is little more than a feather in the wind. Nothing is permanent. So spend your time well in the light.

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IF you romp or ski too fast through the winter woods, you will surely miss the little miracles now scattered across the snowpack. If you’re dead-set on finding Snowy Owl or Bobcat, you’ll probably overlook the drama and opportunity at your feet. So slow your pace, open your mind, and scrutinize the snow like a detective. Only then will you discover what falls to earth from the birches. In these lovely bits of tree you’ll find fate and meaning, even poetry and story.

I’ve spent the past week devoted to the tiny fruits and scales of birches, four species in total: Paper Birch (Betula papyrifera), Gray Birch (B. populifolia), Yellow Birch (B. alleghaniensis), and Sweet Birch (B. lenta). Your local birches may vary, but trust me: If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you’ve got birches, which means you’re probably stepping on this extravaganza on your way to work, in your yard, or at the park.

But before I give you the charm and meaning, here first is a year of birch reproductive biology distilled into a minute of reading:

Birches produce separate clusters of male and female flowers in slender, cylindrical structures known as catkins. An inch or two long, nascent male catkins now show themselves on birch twigs in winter; female catkins emerge from buds with leaves in spring.

The female catkin contains dozens to hundreds of overlapping, three-lobed scales arranged perpendicularly around a central axis (like horizontal shingles surrounding a flagpole). Each scale is attended by three female flowers. Once fertilized, a flower typically produces a single fruit known as a samara, which is a lovely word for a seed with wings.

Birch catkins hold their stacks of scales and samaras together into winter (below). That is, until a bird, a squirrel, snowfall, a strong wind, or someone like me comes along and causes the catkin to break apart, sending scales and samaras to snow and earth.

That’s when we find them and the fun begins. If all goes well for a samara, it will eventually become a birch tree. So it might seem that the samara would be the celebrity of this essay. After all, a seed no bigger than the letter “o” on this page goes on to become something magisterial and more enduring than any one of us (including the heartless men and women in power here in the U.S. who don’t give a damn about trees). A tiny seed becomes a tree — isn’t that enough? (Yeah, it’s enough.)

And yet I’m finding myself more enamored of the three-lobed scales. To be sure, a mature tree is an experience — even the most reluctant tree hugger knows this. And I suspect many of you have your own seminal or profound experiences among trees.

In my case, when it succumbed to disease a half century ago, the American Elm in the backyard of my childhood home became the first great loss of my life. The Giant Sequoias of California’s Yosemite National Park brought me, as a teenager, my first encounter with the sublime. I’ve taken shelter from a torrential rain beneath a huge American Beech, chugged the sap of Sugar Maples, and borne witness to the oldest living trees on earth, the Great Basin Bristlecone Pines, one of which, still living, was a seed about 3,000 years B.C.

In January of 1998, a major ice storm coated and bent birches to earth here in Vermont — their crowns touched the snowpack. In the sunshine after the storm, I wandered up a hillside and into the crystal chandeliers of the Robert Frost’s poem “Birches,” which is about the exuberance of youth and the burdens of being an adult.

Frost writes that a boy swinging on birches lowers the trees temporarily to earth. (Birches are like that — they bend but do not break, and often spring back.) But an ice storm brings the encrusted birches down for good. Frost writes:

Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load …

At various points in life, most of us are dragged to the withered bracken. I’ve been there literally as well, among the shattered remains of that ice storm. Sad and surreal, I’ll never forget the experience. But I now know yet another way to swing on birches: among their tiny, fallen scales. Sure, the seeds can become trees. The scales — their work is done; their destiny is to become dust. But not before becoming the subject of my fascination and photography.

More so than samaras, birch scales are fairly distinctive to species. Give me only a tiny scale, and I will name for you (most of the time) the birch species from which it came. Yellow Birch scales are robust and hairy, Sweet Birch slightly smaller and lacking hairs. Paper Birch scales, smaller still, resemble a fleur-de-lis. And Gray Birch…ah, the Gray Birch scales — they’re tiny birds on the wing.

For a week now, birch scales and samaras have been my destinations. They’ve guided me to my city’s central park for Yellow Birch scales, to a mature forest in western Vermont where I went knee-deep in snow to gather scales and samaras of Sweet Birch, to my local nature preserve for those little birds of Gray Birch, and to a singular White Birch in front of a federal building, where I was greeted by a pistol-carrying security guard who wondered what I was collecting off the snow with forceps into a glass vial. (We had a fine conversation about birches and security threats.)

A seed becomes a tree. A scale becomes dust. Along the way, I become both child and adult of that Frost poem. “Earth’s the right place for love,” he writes. “I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” Still, Frost would like to take leave of earth for a while, as would I, and then return to start anew:

I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

And one could do worse than be a lover of samaras and scales.

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Postscripts

• The complete poem “Birches” by Robert Frost.

• The flowers of birch catkins have no petals — only reproductive parts. Absence of petals is a good sign that pollen is spread by wind rather than insects.

• Correction: An early version of my post last week (“I Hear the Tree Buds Singing”) misidentified the top left image, which is in fact the twig of a White Ash.

Save the Date

If you’ll be near Montpelier, Vermont, on April 3, join me and friends for an evening of poetry, prose, and music. Titled “Natural Selections,” it’s a fundraiser for my favorite eco-center, North Branch Nature Center (where I’ve been busy with birches this week). I’ll be reading and showing a few images.

SOME advice for winter: Dress in layers, watch the wind chill, and notice the bud. Far more than an inert bump on a twig, a bud is a compressed expression of time and space, of songbirds in treetops, butterflies in gardens, and bears in a forest.

When it opens and unfurls in spring, the bud is a Big Bang giving rise to an expanding universe of life and experience in nature. So much potential in each bud, so much promise — we too often pass it by. Someone who did not was Emily Dickinson, who wrote: “How soft the fire of the Bud.”

For me, the soft fire begins with variety, advances to knowledge, and expands profoundly by way of imagination. Yeah, all that from a little bud on its twig. I’ll explain.

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Dear Readers: See news below for paying subscribers (and for others who might want to go paid).

THE morning I guided a group of blind and visually impaired folks on a bird walk, it soon became clear that many had done their homework. About two weeks before the outing, I had sent everyone recordings of 10 species we’d likely encounter on the walk. My strategy worked.

Not long after our group took to the trail, a little brown bird sang out from somewhere in a thicket. “That’s a Song Sparrow!” declared one of the birders. (She unwittingly made my day.)

We stopped and listened — not only to the sparrow, but to the way the breeze shook spring’s early leaves. We smelled Balsam Poplar and Vermont mud. And as it sang, I did my best to describe for everyone the sparrow beyond what the rest of us can plainly see. I sought the sense of the sparrow: small, textured, unadorned, perky, curious, neighborly.

Farther along on the walk, it was enough to describe the noisy Yellow-bellied Sapsucker chicks, invisible to everyone in their tree cavity, as hungry, begging, and chitter-chattering. The Louisiana Waterthrush shouting from beside a woodland stream was, apart from its song, furtive and sparrow-like but with a silly walk.

Although it wasn’t in the homework, or even in the woods that morning, at some point one of the birdwatchers asked me to describe a Bohemian Waxwing. This was at first daunting because Bohemian Waxwing is, for me, a bird of extreme beauty and personal sanctity. How might I honor anything so elegant, sculpted, sensuous, and meaningful? What poured out of me nonetheless went something like this:

Well, if you were to nestle a Bohemian Waxwing in your palm, it would feel sincere and above all silky smooth. Were it to shift in your hand, similar to the way it carries itself in the world, the waxwing would be tame and docile, but moving with purpose and dignity. The wispy crest atop its head might caress your fingertips. From there, the silky feeling along your fingers would be broken by a lattice of bright white and loud yellow wing markings. You’d also feel a row of little bumps — the red, waxy droplets that give waxwings their name. Below its belly, basically at the waxwing’s “privates,” is a fluffy patch of sweet cinnamon feathers. And finally, that straight edge on your wrist would be the tail edge, marked as if dipped in screaming yellow paint.

Although faithful to my reply that morning, I’ll admit that my description above is an enhanced version of what I actually said on the spot to the birders. Still, I give you the sense of a waxwing, which of course is much more than the sum of its feathers.

To dwell in the company of any songbird is to reignite your senses. Heck, to spend time with an orchid or dandelion, a salamander or caterpillar, is to know the full capacity of your senses. We can experience so much beyond what we might be looking at in the natural (or not-so-natural) world. If only we take the opportunity.

This notion of “you look but do not see” is of course well-worn and worthy terrain in traditions from the Buddha to Thoreau to Nan Shepherd (see below) to Robin Wall Kimmerer. All of them wrote not only of looking, but of a resonance of body, mind, and environment, our neurons and senses firing away. Those senses are by their very nature subjective. And that’s fine — actually, it’s great. You alone get to experience, however the heck you want, what’s genuine and wild in the world. Nature’s good that way.

Yet there’s some irony in this. Even as humans deplete and destroy wild diversity nearly everywhere, nature does not judge us. What survives our carnage is neither bitter nor vindictive — it just keeps giving, even as we ourselves become depleted by its decline. We are collateral damage of our own making.

Still, finding what you seek in nature remains fairly simple — the visually impaired birders reminded me of that on our walk: go outside, slow down, stop often, sit, recline, listen, smell, taste, touch, and if you are so able, look around. In awareness there is fidelity to yourself and loyalty to the world. Or as Mary Oliver wrote: “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

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News for Paying Subscribers

For the good people who make Chasing Nature possible:

• The next episode of the Chasing Nature podcast is an “Ask Me Anything” exclusively for you. Send me your questions about, well, anything: birds, insects, plants, field gear, photography, reading, writing (including my process of thinking, writing, and editing for these essays). Your deadline is February 2. I’ll make us a podcast episode.

• Although it won’t work for all paying subscribers, plenty of you live near enough to Vermont to attend a Chasing Nature gathering this spring or summer. We’ll meet up at a state park or some other preserve for nature walks and a picnic. Watch for details. For subscribers at the Founder level, if you happen to be near my peregrinations this year, I’ll do what I can to meet you for a personal outing. If you’re interested, send me a note with your general whereabouts; perhaps our paths will meet.

• At the end of this post is a rough map of Bohemian Waxwing sightings so far in 2026. If you’re near or in that purple zone, I’ve got insider advice and clickable maps so that you might discover this attractive songbird on your own. Find that perk and more at our Go Wild portal’s Sightings page, another expression of gratitude for your paid subscription.

Postscripts

• Credit where it’s due: I organized that birdwalk some years ago with the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired. We walked the grounds of the amazing Birds of Vermont Museum. I resolve to revive this walk in 2026.

• Nan Shepherd (1893–1981), poet, novelist, naturalist, and independent mountain woman of the Scottish Highlands, wrote The Living Mountain, which is among the most perceptive and eloquent books of nature, exploration, and experience that I know (and which is much too unknown in the world). I’m re-reading The Living Mountain, which is even better the second time around.

BEFORE I explore a big idea expressed in a tiny patch of yellow on tree bark, let’s first agree on this: a lichen is a metaphor machine.

It would be easy for me in this essay, for example, to go with symbiosis. That’s because a lichen is a collaboration — a union of a fungus and a photosynthetic partner. I’d go on to point out that the Candleflame Lichen (Candelaria concolor) pictured above would not exist without symbiosis. Neither would any one of us.

Another easy metaphor would be change. After all, for two years I’ve been watching this minuscule patch of lichen grow. And I can now confidently report that you’ll find more excitement watching grass grow or paint dry (and certainly now by watching a glacier melt).

But I have yet another metaphor for you, which I’ll get to soon enough. For now, let’s stick with change.

That I even noticed this nano-patch of lichen two years ago is unusual enough. Although it can splatter-paint tree trunks yellow around the world, this was the only Candleflame Lichen I had ever encountered in woods I’d been walking for a decade or so. Perhaps it had twinkled in the clear, angled light of January on a good day for me and the lichen. Or maybe I happened to be tuned more so to tiny things that afternoon — really tiny things. Even though I know its exact tree, a Sugar Maple, on many days I strained to relocate the lichen on its bark in front of my nose.

It is no secret that lichens grow ever so slowly. But how slowly? Although I could have chosen a patch more suitable (bigger) for measurement, this one became my “study site.” I set out to watch this lichen change over time.

The world of course changed a lot during those two years — you need not hear details from me. Our politics and culture move even faster, distract more often, and break nearly everything. The lichen moved nowhere, distracted no one (except me), and kept itself mostly unbroken. I liked that about the lichen.

It also grew. I won’t bore you with scientific rigor here — because there was none: No null hypothesis. No established or randomized sampling dates. No time-lapse photography. Quite simply, N = 2: before and after photos spanning two years, a period including a year of Joe Biden and a year of Donald Trump.

Accordingly, by my measurements, the lichen grew … spoiler alert … a little. Documenting it required only macrophotography. I’ve marked two of the most obvious growth spots in side-by-side images below (with the eye of a needle in 2024 as our measuring gauge).

So what’s the point of all this? Well, at the very least, in two years of growth and change in our culture, some of it wonderful, some of it horrible, and so much of it turbulent, the lichen didn’t do much of anything. It endured. It remained in repose. I liked that as well about the lichen. It’s one reason I walked to it day after day.

Which brings me to this essay’s coda: Destination. Actually, something more than destination. Until I noticed it two years ago, nobody else in the world had ever seen this lichen (or so I can assume). It rested at about eye-level on a maple beside a path in Montpelier, the capital city of Vermont. And yet it was mine— all mine. It still is. And nobody else’s.

Destination need not be great or sublime, iconic or wondrous as, say, the Grand Canyon, the Eiffel Tower, or the Pyramids of Egypt. It can also be the prosaic just off the beaten path. Nature is a million destinations never experienced by anyone, except perhaps you: a Promethea cocoon on an ash branch, a place where no one else has ever sat in the woods, a monkey-faced bud scar on a Butternut twig, a tiny patch of Candleflame Lichen. Your terra incognita — anywhere.

We live in the epoch of the infinite — the scroll, the feed, the playlist, the possibilities, the 24-hour grudge cycle. My patch of Candleflame Lichen is finite. In this era of upheaval, it is balance. And when I’m feeling lost, the lichen is destination.

So when the world spins much too fast, which is basically always, get yourself to the long, green path, no matter how well-trodden. Find your destination. Make it yours. Visit often.

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This essay was conceived and written by a human being (me) — and not AI.

For Paying Subscribers

This patch of lichen makes an appearance in my essay and buyer’s guide on hand lenses (sometimes called jeweler’s loupes) — your portal to new worlds. I never leave home without my lens. The post is behind the paywall, but open by way of gratitude to Chasing Nature’s paying subscribers.

Postscript

That a lichen might be “do basically nothing” is license on my part. Lichens (their algal or cyanobacterial participants) photosynthesize, in part to provide nutrients for the fungal partner. Lichens can break down their substrates (even rock) and aid in soil formation. They’re essential food for a few animals. They’re sensitive to air pollutants, making them indicators of air quality. And similar to counting growth rings in trees, lichen growth on exposed rock can be used to determine the date the rock emerged from under ice, soil, or some other cover — it’s called Lichenometry.

• Gratitude to my dear friend and colleague Josh Lincoln for lending me his 65mm macro lens for the lichen images.

IN the pantheon of trees and shrubs, you could do worse than Yaupon Holly, even allowing for the problem with its scientific name: Ilex vomitoria.

An evergreen, this plant is verdant and leafy when so much of the world is gray or brown or frozen stiff. Its fruits glow scarlet. And Yaupon Holly is essentially the only caffeinated plant native to the United States. Long before coffee joints became houses of worship, Indigenous people of what’s now the American Southeast drank Yaupon tea as a stimulant, medicine, and the beverage of choice during purification rituals. Because the ceremonies included willful vomiting, Europeans watching from the sidelines wrongly assumed Yaupon Holly was an emetic. So a Scottish botanist gave the plant the Latinized epithet vomitoria, a genuine and original misnomer.

By any name, Yaupon Holly had a role in my own purification ritual during a recent journey to the southeastern US. To escape the cold and take a break from the troubling news of the world, I drove the shortest route I know from Vermont to warmth: the coast of North Carolina near Cape Lookout National Seashore, where the tropical waters of the Gulf Stream graze the continent before flowing northeast out to sea. My plan was to walk the shoals and beaches, the scrublands and forests, so that I might regain some equilibrium.

It began well enough. On my first day in unfrozen woods, a Ruby-crowned Kinglet flashed his crimson crest at me. Soon enough, a Sleepy Orange (Eurema nicippe) butterfly floated by in the sunshine. On a shoal I walked with beach-running sandpipers and collected a few seashells along the way, including a prize aptly named Angel Wing (Cyrtopleura costata).

During a day offshore, on the island known as Shackleford Banks, I came upon a beached and listless Green Sea Turtle (Chelonia mydas). A spate of chilly weather had probably sent it into the reptile version of hypothermia. Never before had I seen this turtle species, not its chestnut hues nor its dazzling mosaic facial pattern. And yet its predicament superseded my predilections for this trip. Rather than a return to the ocean, the turtle needed warmth and most likely a boat ride to the local sea turtle hospital.

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ON the coldest days of the year, even on the shortest day of the year, ducks in frigid waters are engaged in one of winter’s great performances: full-frontal courtship.

You can watch.

Take the Buffleheads I noticed frolicking recently in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Maine. At a glance or from a distance, Buffleheads appear black and white and inornate. But in the clean light of winter, the male’s head glows iridescent purple and green — proof that even scarce light is giving light and that rarely are things in the world so black and white.

Those colors alone won’t secure him a mate, so males compete among one another and perform for females. But why now in icy waters? After all, Bufflehead pairs will migrate north in spring to breed at lakes and ponds scattered across much of Canada and into Alaska. They nest in abandoned woodpecker holes, mostly those excavated by Northern Flickers. (It’s a reminder that any of us, from time to time, rely for our well-being on folks we’ve never met.)

But the breeding season in the north is short, and flicker nest cavities and potential mates can be scattered and scarce. So Buffleheads get courtship and pair bonding out of the way now so that they’ll have more time for the business of breeding come spring. Moreover, in these wintering flocks, a female Bufflehead has a greater selection of males from which to choose — good for her.

There’s no reason for me to describe the courtship for you here — I’ve got videos and a bigger point to make for you below; the production is way better seen in person anyway. (For paying subscribers I’ve posted map links on our Sightings page to help get you to the show). Suffice it to say that the performance features comical head pumping and dipping, short flights and wing flapping, splashing and diving.

And yet for all their gyrations and antics, here’s something you should also know about male Buffleheads, which is also true for lots of other male ducks: they’re “deadbeat dads.” On the northern breeding grounds, once mating is complete males depart for the season, leaving females alone to incubate eggs and care for young. No surprise — females often bear a disproportionate burden in reproduction.

Still, there may be more to the male’s winter courtship displays than his prospecting for a new spring fling. In some cases, the performance leads to a reunion. Although they live separately and apart after breeding, a given male and female might migrate independently in fall to the very same waters where they first met. And there they can start again. Even in a flock where everyone more or less looks alike, the male and female can find one another and renew their bond. (Think about that the next time you can’t find your car in the parking lot or remember the name of an acquaintance.)

Although it’s difficult for biologists to study this kind of year-to-year monogamy among remote northern ducks, it’s been documented in Bufflehead and its close relative Barrow’s Goldeneye (it’s probably so with the widespread Common Goldeneye as well). Regardless, many of you can watch courtship displays among various duck species at unfrozen lakes, ponds scattered across southern Canada, the U.S., northern Mexico, and much Europe, including the U.K, and in calm coastal bays.

After all, here in the Northern Hemisphere, the shortest day of the year is upon us. Darkness and injustice seem all-too-common, including new and terrible gun violence around the world this past week. And yet now is a time for ritual and renewal. It might be a bonfire on the winter solstice, an observance of faith, or a gathering of family and friends.

Or maybe even a raft of waterfowl.

Buffleheads certainly won’t cure the world. Only we can do that. But for me, even on the darkest days of the year, my ritual and my faith also lie in what’s here and now in nature, not the least of which features amorous ducks in icy waters.

Duck Dynamism

Although these videos are by no means cinematic (nor are they mine), the Buffleheads and Common Goldeneyes nonetheless steal each scene.

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ALTHOUGH it has achieved a kind of celebrity status among birdwatchers, let’s be honest about the Five-striped Sparrow: it’s no bird-of-paradise. Brown and sooty, the sparrow is named for five white stripes that fan out across its face and throat — an arrangement not particularly unusual among sparrows. Its song, a progression of tepid “dinks” and “chips,” sounds as if the Five-striped Sparrow can’t quite decide whether to sing out for a mate.

Even so, we birders go to great lengths to see this sparrow. It begins with a flight to Arizona, where we rent SUVs because roads to the sparrow can be rough and rutted. We then drive south toward Mexico, toward Sycamore Canyon or California Gulch, which are among the few reliable places to find Five-striped Sparrow north of the border. And there among the mesquite and the rattlesnakes, we begin our quest. Stereotypes clad in khaki and toting binoculars, we drive the dirt in search of a little brown bird.

And once we finally locate a Five-striped Sparrow, skulking in some thicket, we might chase it around a bit, peer at it through binoculars, study its antics, snap photos, and slap high-fives. We then turn and drive out, northbound toward the cantinas and coffee joints to celebrate and plan for the next day’s birdwatching adventure.

But the problem with Five-striped Sparrow is not its muted plumage or feeble song, not its furtive behavior or unforgiving habitat. The problem is that through no fault of its own the Five-striped Sparrow is bad for the planet. In our hot pursuit of this rarity, birdwatchers drive — we drive a lot. If a songbird could express a carbon footprint, the Five-striped Sparrow would be a tiny coal-fired power plant.

Birdwatching’s dirty little secret is that in our enjoyment of nature we birders warm the planet. Even as we go electric on the road, petroleum nevertheless fuels our adventures. To be sure, we are not alone in this regard; lots of people drive to work, to the doctor, to drink microbrews, to play outdoors. Most of us board flights for vacations and to visit faraway family. We’re prosperous — we burn stuff.

And yet birdwatchers, especially this time of year, have an unusual dependence on our vehicles. Our cars, trucks, and SUVs are often foundational to how we discover and enjoy birds anywhere. Birders probably drive more in the pursuit of nature than do botanists, hikers, hunters, mountain bikers, or most other people who recreate outdoors. What’s troubling about this is that birdwatchers cultivate a certain ethos about our pursuits: that we’re unlike snowmobilers or ATVers or other people who partake in “consumptive” forms of recreation. We make the case that birds are a gateway to nature and that watching them builds a conservation ethic, which is ultimately good for the planet. A lot of this is even true.

And by no means do I intend to put on trial well-meaning birders or anyone else with similar passions for wildlife and wild places, which is pretty much all of us. Birdwatching is good for the world. Except that right now tens of thousands of birdwatchers are on the verge of some serious carbon-burning.

Holiday “Bird-Driving”

We birders and our organizations go on at great length about the climate crisis and various eco-disasters. The National Audubon Society issues ample warnings about rising global temperatures and a corresponding decline in birds or a shift in their patterns of distribution. We’re told of “389 Bird Species on the Brink”1 or that climate change is “the single greatest threat to birds and other species”2 or that “10 States Could Lose State Birds.”3

To be sure, the reports and admonitions are warranted; Audubon and the rest of us need to keep pressing on climate, including calling out and voting out climate deniers and demagogues. Even so, as it calls us to action, Audubon every year encourages birdwatchers to undertake an epidemic of binge-driving. The annual Christmas Bird Count is a storied citizen science project. Around the winter holidays, birdwatchers fan out to count every bird we encounter within established, 15-mile-diameter circles — nearly 2,700 of them scattered mostly across the Western Hemisphere. For 125 years, birders have been participating in these one-day counts, during which we gather valuable data on bird population trends. The Christmas count is a triumph of participatory science (even if it needs a new name).

But the Christmas count is also a group exercise in burning carbon. It basically goes like this: drive around, stop the car, get out and count birds, maybe walk a bit, write down your tally, get back in the car, repeat all day long. A friend of mine calls this “bird-driving.” Most birdwatchers on Christmas counts drive far more than they walk. Many walk less than a mile or two over the course of the day, and drive 10 or 20 times what they walk.

Even though these counts aren’t year-round affairs, birdwatchers undertake other specialty expeditions that mirror the Five-striped Sparrow quest — only with more driving. In Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado, for example, a well-established route brings us to at least five species of grouse performing outrageous mating displays in early spring. Birders who make the trip not only get to see the chicken-like birds dancing and strutting and sometimes copulating in some of the most bizarre and wonderful rituals in North American birding, we also get to add the five species4 to our life lists — the ongoing tally of all the birds we’ve ever seen. But finding the grouse necessitates some serious bird-driving, 2,000 miles or more over the course of a week and a half.

Birders make all kinds of crazy trips like these, including spur-of-the-moment outings when a rare bird turns up closer to home — or far away. The internet helps set our travel plans, thanks in part to the esteemed Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. In addition to being the most important tool for aggregating crowd-sourced data on bird distribution and abundance, Cornell’s eBird platform issues email alerts5 about rare birds anywhere they’re reported. So if, say, a Eurasian Skylark shows up in British Columbia or a Masked Booby lands in Florida, we can hear about it on the hour. A subset of determined birders uses these alerts to hop in the car or board a flight to pursue far-flung rarities.

While visiting family vacationing in Florida about 30 years ago, before eBird existed, I was fortunate to dwell in a park with a Bananaquit, a frenetic slate-and-yellow songbird that had strayed from its normal turf across Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. As I watched the Bananaquit flit in the low branches of a leafy tree, three birders from New Jersey pulled in. They had driven all night, part of it through a snowstorm, to reach the spot. We watched the Bananaquit together for about 20 minutes. Then, having ticked the songbird for their lists, the birders piled back into the car and headed for home.

I should point out that most birdwatchers are not so obsessive. Nearly 100 million of us watch birds in North America.6 We range from the hard-core few chasing rarities to the homebound enjoying whatever’s at the backyard feeders. Many of us, privileged and a bit nerdy or odd, are worthy prey in a tradition of satire. And yet for our shared devotion to birds and their fate, for our bond with nature, I remain proud and wholly supportive. Passion for anything in nature is an enduring and essential human trait, not unlike our passion for art or literature or one another, and far more genuine than most of what’s online or conjured up and packaged for popular consumption. No wild things in nature — not orchids or butterflies or trees — command so much organized devotion as do birds. And that is a very good thing.

Captured by Carbon

But devotion to nature, however well-intentioned, is a poor excuse for excessive consumption, which, after all, is killing the planet. The author Jonathan Franzen, a birdwatcher himself, poked at this question some time ago in a New Yorker essay titled “Carbon Capture.”7 Franzen first admits to guilt about driving and listing birds. Then in no short order he picks a fight with Audubon, accusing it of a fixation on global warming’s threat to birds. As it turns out, birds face multitudes of risks more problematic than a warming planet, including death by house cat, window strikes, lead shot, invasive species, pesticides, and, most importantly, outright habitat degradation and destruction, mostly for agriculture. Anyone who’s been watching birds for 30, 40, 50 years or more, as I have, has witnessed the disaster in real time: fewer birds, largely for reasons having little or nothing to do with climate.

Franzen’s point is that emphasizing the climate threat, including our personal fuel consumption, although worthy, amounts to guilt-tripping and distraction. Not only does it shift blame and burden to us, who as individuals are all but powerless when it comes to achieving appreciable greenhouse gas reductions, it won’t do much to help birds. “Although you could demonstrably save the lives of the birds now colliding with your windows or being killed by your cats, reducing your carbon footprint even to zero saves nothing,” he writes. “Declaring climate change bad for birds is therefore the opposite of controversial. … Climate change is everyone’s fault — in other words, no one’s. We can all feel good about deploring it.”

More practical and important, Franzen points out, is protecting as much habitat as possible so that birds have refuge from deforestation, industrial agriculture, and other proximate ecological disasters. “To prevent extinctions in the future, it’s not enough to curb our carbon emissions,” he writes. “We also have to keep a whole lot of wild birds alive right now. We need to combat the extinctions that are threatened in the present, work to reduce the many hazards that are decimating North American bird populations, and invest in large-scale, intelligently conceived conservation efforts, particularly those designed to allow for climate change.”

Franzen is among our most brutally authentic voices at the intersection of birds, nature, and the rest of us. And he’s right about the futility of personal action on climate. Absent genuine political leadership or more effective mass movement, carbon reduction on the part of any individual is noble and yet feeble. It’s the right thing to do, it inspires others, but it won’t save many birds. Franzen drew unwarranted opprobrium from the birding establishment for “Carbon Capture,” even as he accepted climate change’s “supremacy as the environmental issue of our time.” I welcomed his essay. Still, he might have reckoned a bit more with driving.

Petroleum enriches lives and destroys lives. To keep the crude flowing, the U.S. government — under Democrat and Republican alike — has sponsored despots, bombed nations, killed innocent people, and spoiled places abroad and at home. The fossil fuels that bring us prosperity, safety, comfort, and Five-striped Sparrows come by way of human and ecological abuses from the Niger Delta to the Persian Gulf, from the tar sands of Canada to the fracking lands of the U.S. For better and for worse, our culture and economy are founded on cheap goods, abused land, exploited labor, and crude oil. Blood and oil — they have always flowed together.

Granted, for most of us, to live is to cause harm or injustice somewhere, whether we buy gadgets or sweat-shop jeans, eat livestock or drink coffee, buy gasoline or burn firewood. As a field biologist focusing on birds and insects, I live in a tiny space of 464 square feet, but work and play (and often live out of) a gas-guzzling Toyota pickup. Most of us are perpetrators or victims or both on a warming planet.

Franzen’s essay, now a decade old, has aged well through failed COP meetings on climate and into Donald Trump’s second round of eco-malevolence. Market forces are now driving power generation increasingly toward wind and solar (even as heat pumps and electric vehicles in the U.S. still run on electricity generated more from fossil fuels than from renewables). To be sure, greenhouse gas emissions increasingly threaten birds and other wildlife, especially butterflies and other insects, and, most profoundly, ocean life. Still, Franzen’s essay holds. The greatest threats to birds include:8

• Habitat loss or degradation owing to agriculture, deforestation, urbanization, and suburban sprawl.

• Domestic and feral cats (which kill birds by the billions every year) and invasive plant and animal species (especially rats and pigs on oceanic islands).

• Windows strikes, vehicle collisions, and agricultural pesticides and other poisons.

• Bycatch of albatrosses, petrels, and other seabirds during commercial fishing.

Climate change certainly matters, and exacerbates these threats. Every fraction of a degree of heating avoided makes a difference, especially for human well-being. But when it comes to individual acts, however symbolic, doing right by birds is probably more a matter of what we eat than how much we drive.

Walk More, See More

Birdwatching’s carbon problem is of course about more than carbon — or even birdwatching for that matter. It’s about how any of us live in and relate to an increasingly unnatural world. Another dirty secret about birders is that too many of us have lost our fondness for the familiar. Perhaps more than any other breed of nature geek, birders sometimes exhibit a benevolent disregard for what’s in front of us and an obsession with what’s next. Sure, the Ruby-crowned Kinglet is fine, but we gotta drive on to find the rare Violet-crowned Hummingbird. Too many birders simply click-like the kinglet and move on to what’s next. We’ve been doing this long before the internet addled our brains for impatience.

I have chased more than my share of rare birds in vehicles, including as a birdwatching guide finding Five-striped Sparrows and other rarities in Arizona. I gave it up years ago (including the extra sparrow driving) for more time with nature closer to home — and for more walking. Bird-walking. Most of the time, on my outings here in Vermont, I do not find the rarities that motivate many other birdwatchers. So be it. I accept what comes. That Ruby-crowned Kinglet sings with vigor and sends a bolt of energy toward his crown, from which ruby feathers erupt like little flames. Too many birders fixated on what’s next have never seen these fireworks (which will never erupt anywhere from a Five-striped Sparrow).

Shall we keep on birding, driving, and sending donations to the Cornell Lab, American Bird Conservancy, Audubon, and our local eco-groups? Of course. We might also buy less stuff, board fewer airplanes, eat less meat, drink fair-trade coffee, drive electric vehicles, install heat pumps, watch birds closer to home, and partake in eco-travel with authentic carbon offsets and real benefits to people living in our destinations. We can support landscape-level conservation projects. We can vote out the demagogues, liars, and retrogrades.

And we can continue counting birds, even driving for them, this holiday season. But at the very least, if you are able, try to walk more than you drive during a bird count, or at least walk more than a mile or so. (If walking isn’t an option due to a disability or some other reason, Birdability might help.) My own Christmas Bird Count route where I live is a 4.5-mile walking loop featuring zero miles of bird-driving.

In the end, when it comes to carbon and consumption, there’s little new here among our obligations as citizens, whether we join mass movements or act alone. Apart from that, I know of no reliable path through this moral thicket — other than to walk. I walk in nature even as hope for wildlife and wild places seems elusive. I walk in nature because equanimity everywhere else can be elusive. And I walk in nature so that I might love myself, love the world, and do what I can to make it a better place.

And then do even more.

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Postscripts

• An exemplary landscape-level conservation project is the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund (GDFCF). Check it out and donate money.

• Read more Franzen essays in “The End of the End of the Earth.”

• , who writes here on Substack, expresses beautifully the virtues of watching birds in an essay that went viral.

• , who writes , is a studious and searing voice on our place on an abused planet.

• This essay was written and revised (many times) by a human being — not A.I.

8

https://www.birdlife.org/papers-reports/state-of-the-worlds-birds-2022/

I mean no disrespect, but thankfulness has become somewhat a cliché in nature writing. When eco-writers reach for meaning — beyond the orchid’s sensuality or the rainbow’s grandeur — we often retreat to gratitude.

And I guess that’s fine. After all, what self-respecting human (other than an ingrate or asshole) isn’t grateful for something these days, especially for what’s genuine and of this Earth.

So what’s a tree-hugging writer to do during the winter holiday season? I could offer you a short list of natural things for which I’m grateful, but then I’d risk becoming predictable, performative, even tiresome.

Instead, I bring you a common chickadee.

Orchids and rainbows are easy. But so is a chickadee. And I suppose that’s my point. I’ll explain by way of the Black-capped Chickadee, which can stand in for many of the world’s 15 or so species of chickadee and tit (as they’re known across Eurasia).

First is fidelity. Even when it’s tough to be grateful for winter, when it’s cold enough to kill you out there, the chickadee will not leave you for warmer climes. Even when you’re bummed about war and injustice, or fearful about illness and loss, the chickadee will not abandon you to migration. Steadfast and feisty, chickadees are birds of faith.

Next is infidelity. However faithful, the chickadee is a cheater. Although breeding pairs are largely monogamous, a female will sometimes dart away from her nest for a copulation with another male. But not just any male — she goes for one more dominant or attractive than her mate.

What makes him so appealing? It could be any number of things: his age (older is better), his aggressiveness, the flash of his feathers, the vitality of his song, or however else a female chickadee might judge fitness or perhaps even beauty in a male. And because she and her young can fare better from the mixed paternity, this amounts to a case of female reproductive autonomy. Also know this: chickadees are sorting things out now in your own backyard or local park.

When they’re not paired and breeding (and cheating) in springtime, chickadees congregate into stable, winter flocks numbering from a few to a dozen. Within these groups they establish a pecking order: males asserting dominance and females taking notes, perhaps to support infidelities next spring. Hey, it’s Shakespearean at the feeders now.

Finally, experience. The audible flutter of its wings, the glint from its black-marble eye, the soft rose on its flanks, or simply the way it calls out to the light — these are the sparks of a chickadee, this week and for a lifetime.

Like nature itself, one of our most common songbirds unwittingly offers me intrinsic rewards, for which it seeks nothing in return — except maybe respect or reverence. Beyond that, am I grateful for a chickadee? Sure, guilty as charged. Lucky me, I find my faith in the prosaic, whether it chirps at the bird feeder or sprouts from the cement. Gratitude is that easy in nature. Which is why it’s cliché.

So this holiday season, whether or not you celebrate, whether you find yourself alone or among people you love, here’s a bird for all of us. Together, let’s be grateful for gratitude itself.

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Postscripts

• This essay was conceived and written by a human being — not AI.

• The poet , who writes here on Substack, invokes the chickadee in “A reason to wake early.”

• My sources for Black-capped Chickadee breeding behavior comes from a large body of research, some of it at bird feeders and much of it cited and covered in this (paywalled) reference:

  • Foote, J. R., D. J. Mennill, L. M. Ratcliffe, and S. M. Smith (2020). Black-capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (A. F. Poole, Editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.bkcchi.01

Unusual and unkempt, the last flower blooms in sleet and snow. It also defies common sense, which makes the last flower somewhat like the U.S. government.

The last flower is that of Common Witch-Hazel (Hamamelis virginiana), whose season in bloom coincided roughly with the 43-day shutdown here in the U.S.

Do I have any business comparing a shrub (or tree, depending on its stature and your point of view) to Congress? Well, yeah: Witch-Hazel not only gets more done, it’s also a loaded gun. Let me explain.

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Prologue: At its core, this essay is about how any of us might navigate the machinery of technology so that we can preserve our place in a more genuine and natural world. My trigger for this one is a spit-up-your-coffee essay in The New Yorker.

NOW that most of the autumn leaves have dropped, we’re on our way to “stick season” here in Vermont. That’s what we call the month or so—falling between the end of radiant foliage and the onset of winter—when our forests become naked and drab. Gone are the blazing maples and busloads of tourists. Vermont for the time being is a liminal season in fifty shades of earth—and yet a season of something greater still.

Scattered across the muted landscape, and catching the angled light of November, holdout leaves of Quaking Aspen glow yellow and tremble in unison in chilly winds. Long past peak foliage, Vermont’s hillsides remain nonetheless sublime.

That a golden tree or even a single leaf can be sublime comes as no surprise, especially here in New England where Thoreau and other thinkers brought us close to and beyond the beauty and meaning of the natural world. But the sublime resides as well in technology. Or so argues Joshua Rothman in his October 21 New Yorker essay titled “Should We Look on New Technologies with Awe and Dread?”1 Unfortunately, Rothman can’t seem to decide. Tech might subsume us, he writes, but like the sublime to be found in nature, we cannot turn away from the “technological sublime.”

Like thinkers before him, Rothman defines the technological sublime as “the feeling of awe, braided with dread, that can emerge in response to the engulfing possibilities of technology’s progress.” He begins with examples of the sublime in science fiction: the “sprawling cyber-cityscapes of ‘Blade Runner,’” the “cascading green code of ‘The Matrix,’” or even the “uncannily beautiful android” Ava in the film “Ex Machina.” In all of this there’s a “promise of revelation” or “some idea of what it might mean to be more than human.”

Sure enough, these are fantasies of an “as-yet-unrealized future,” but Rothman goes on to assert that the technological sublime does indeed exist in the real world: for decades in the upsweeping ambition expressed in Lower Manhattan’s skyscrapers, more recently in the spectacle of SpaceX rocket flights, and yet more to come in artificial intelligence’s blend of promise and fear.

But are these sublime? Do they warrant from us awe, reverence, or respect? Here Rothman guides us outdoors—and then goes astray. It’s one thing to experience the sublime in a poem or a flower, but Rothman turns instead to 18th-century conservative philosopher Edmund Burke’s alternative sublime in nature—the vast, indifferent, terrible beauty that can kill us: storms, oceans, darkness, deserts. This kind of sublime, Burke wrote, is “not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror.” So it is with the dangers posed by tech, including AI, whose researchers work in reverence for what they’re creating. “The fact that they aren’t entirely in control of these systems,” Rothman writes, “seems to heighten their sense of being in the presence of something sublime.”

This is a dreadful analogy based on an outdated idea.

It’s long past time to rid ourselves of Burke’s beautiful and terrible sublime, which is a disservice to awe and to what’s left of nature. Invoking it in our relationship to big tech only makes us its cowardly, willing, and disembodied subjects. Not only an affront to the human capacity for wonder, it’s an affront to the idea of the sublime in nature. It’s almost as if Rothman is warning us of the dangers while standing in line for his place in The Matrix.

Burke’s terrible sublime belongs to an era when existential threats were man and god and nature. We’re now more likely to die by nuke, pandemic, or AI than by a desert, ocean, or storm. (And I say this as a mountaineer who’s flirted with death, a field biologist who’s worked in storms and deserts and among wasps and snakes, and as a tree-hugger who knows beauty in nature.) Tech oligarchs and what they’re foisting upon us are not gods unless we make them so.

Rothman and other worthy thinkers might instead scrutinize tech’s almighty patron: capitalism. For better and for worse, capitalism has delivered to us sugar, cotton, and coffee; beef, poultry, and fish; trucks, iPhones, and algorithms. It’s done so for centuries by securing human labor (beginning with slavery) and abusing the planet by way of deforestation, extraction, overuse, deregulation, and technology. If anything in the culture is terribly sublime, it is capitalism’s ascendancy and versatility. And now capitalism has yet another commodity, a new frontier: the human mind. Its drill-rig is the glowing screen.

Before the internet, we used to say that television rots your brain. Kids used to go outside to play—now they go online. And if we’ve learned anything from the data fusillade now unleashed upon us, it is that more information is not necessarily better information. The 24-hour news cycle, the infinite scroll, and the surveillance economy haven’t exactly become fountainheads of candor and veracity. Look no further than the state of public discourse, elections, and governance.

Rothman certainly knows the perils. In closing his essay, he directs us toward the natural world, but ends with equivocation:

At some point, you have to flee from the oncoming wave. You have to return to yourself—to remember, and embrace, the fact that you’re a particular person with agency, obligations, and values. In the natural world, returning to yourself can be as simple as walking away. But, in the technological one, it’s more complicated, because we’re in charge of the pace of exploration, discovery, and invention. Technologists can, to some degree, conjure the technological sublime, and consumers of technology can become addicted to it. But the path to responsibility leads through disenchantment.

Disenchantment or not, I see no easy path to walking away from tech. I myself write on a laptop, publish on Substack, and use gadgets for field work. In seeking refuge from the technological maelstrom, it too often seems there’s nowhere left to walk.

Except toward beauty, toward the genuine sublime.

I think and write in nature. For this essay, I wandered not far from home into the gray woods, sat beneath one of those holdout blaze-yellow aspens, and began writing my first draft, as usual, in pencil in my hard-bound notebook. Then came a butterfly, a Mourning Cloak, with chocolate wings edged in butter and studded with blue jewels—a worthy distraction from writing.

But the Mourning Cloak also does something unusual for a butterfly: It survives winter not as egg, caterpillar, or chrysalis, but rather as an adult. Soon enough this butterfly will tuck itself into a slot beneath tree bark or some other cavity, wait out the freeze of winter, and then rouse to fly and mate in the sunshine next spring.

Nature has enough problems—it need not stand in for the perils of tech. Sometimes an existential threat is just that—an existential threat—and there’s nothing sublime or beautiful about it. So let’s leave the sublime where it belongs: art, literature, love, and especially nature. I’ll find mine not online or in the gadgets, but in mountain ranges, beneath golden leaves, or even beside a gossamer butterfly surviving winter in a tree.

The poet writes of hope in gold:

Natural Voice

One Tree

Hope is such a strange companion…

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7 months ago · 19 likes · 3 comments · Scudder Parker

WHAT’S left to say about geese flying south for winter? Hackneyed as frost on the pumpkin (or pumpkin-spice anything), worn as the falling leaves, what have geese done for us lately?

Well, that’s up to us.

It turns out that geese, among the most familiar birds on Earth, have a lot to say (er, honk) to us about fidelity, altruism, and awe. If only we’d let them. (I even have a stupid joke for you about geese.)

Setting aside what makes a goose a goose, and how many goose species inhabit the world (because it’s complicated), consider the three we’re most likely to encounter across North America or Eurasia: Canada Goose, Snow Goose, or Greylag Goose. Sure, they migrate vast distances and live anywhere from golf courses to the Arctic. But what I admire even more about geese is their fidelity.

Geese mate for life, which is unusual among animals, especially birds. Pairs stick together year-round. And if they become separated among thousands of lookalikes in the flock, a male and female reconnect by recognizing one another’s body language, honks and other vocalizations. Think about that the next time you can’t find your car keys or recall the name of someone you’ve known for decades.

Although the lifetime bond seems to work for them, no partnership is perfect: some geese occasionally engage in infidelities, which is well studied among our most angelic goose species, the Snow Goose (Anser caerulescens).

Biologists (rarely at a loss for jargon) call the cheating “extra-pair copulation.” When a male Snow Goose in a breeding colony temporarily wanders away from his mate at the nest, a neighboring male might move in for a quick copulation. (By the way, the paired male had probably wandered off in pursuit of his own extra-pair affair—a literal case of what goes around comes around.)

Still, geese also exhibit what we might call altruism—or at the very least cooperation. First is family. Adult geese migrate with their offspring, which is also unusual among birds. When songbirds, shorebirds, raptors, and many others head south, the adults leave behind their young, which undertake their first migration unguided (but often in the company of other birds). Not so among geese. Here below is what’s almost certainly a Snow Goose family flying together.

Altruism and cooperation also take the shape of a V. When geese fly in V-formation, the lead bird’s wingtips generate upward air currents that offer extra lift to trailing birds. Because the lead bird works harder, flock members take turns in the lead to share the burden (an example for all of us).

The Pulse of Ten Thousand Wings

Fidelity, infidelity, altruism, cooperation—for us they’re matters of mind. Better yet is what geese offer the soul: the pulse of wings and a sense of awe.

It begins when you find your flock of Snow Geese—5,000 or more is not unusual. Resting in migration, the geese might be floating out on a lake or feeding in a farm field. As they dip and swim or flap and honk, the birds are a mass of kinetic energy—like a symphony orchestra tuning up for a performance.

The energy builds. The geese are 5,000 arrows drawn on 5,000 trembling bows. Sunrise might launch the flock. Or maybe hunger. Or perhaps an eagle overhead. Sometimes we never know. It doesn’t matter.

Whatever the trigger, in an instant they launch. A massive pulse of ten thousand wings. Not only do you see and hear it, the launch rolls through your blood and your bones. You become the launch. You become the flight. Awe embodied. I know of few other moments in nature that compare. It renders my superlatives inadequate.

So in closing, I’ll try my best to convey the sensation of the launch by way of my own video at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico (make sure it’s playing in HD). After that, I give you two clips that might also express for you the gathering energy and the explosion into flight: Watch and listen to the opening minute of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and then behold what is arguably the best rock-and-roll scream in the history of the universe from Roger Daltrey and The Who. They match the energy of a Snow Goose launch.

After that, as promised, the stupid joke. Onward!

The Stupid Joke

Tell this to a friend when you see geese in formation overhead (and then guard yourself):

So ornithologists have studied the V-formations in geese to determine why sometimes one arm of the V is longer than the other.

Their conclusion: the longer arm has more geese in it.