We start this series of Birds of the Week with a species of sublime beauty and a harrowing history of persecution. The Snowy Egret is a mid-sized heron with plumage so brilliant it looks bleached except for black legs and bright yellow feet. A dagger-like bill extracts food hiding in mudflats where it is often a solitary feeder and occasionally seen in flocks up and down the East Coast or the West Coast through Mexico where this individual was spotted.
You almost hear Tchaikovsky playing when you watch an egret dancing along the shoreline, elegant as a ballerina. Over a century ago this species, and other herons and ibises, were decimated by a millinery trade making elaborate feather head-dresses. But hats off to other women who were appalled at the slaughter and campaigned to abolish the fashion. They helped to build the National Audubon Society and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. The Snowy Egret is an icon in bird conservation.
Our Weeping Cherry tree started to bloom on March 28, an old lady now yet still graceful. She has a voluminous floral dress spread wide from her ‘hips’ by branches like the hoops and side panniers of a woman in the court of George III. She cheekily displays through the cascade the one silvery leg she stands on. We hope she dances in the spring breeze for more years.
The same day, the National Park Service announced the famous lines of cherry trees lining the National Mall reached peak bloom. Fewer people stroll there in a pandemic year but can view them at #BloomCam. This year the blossom that celebrates beauty and grace is a brilliant contrast to the chaos and violence viewed from the Mall of the Capitol steps on January 6. But it also symbolizes the impermanence of life.
The trees were gifted to Washington DC in 1912 by the Japanese, who celebrate bloom time with spring festivals (hanami). This year the peak occurred in Kyoto on March 26, earlier than usual, as in the Mall. Bloom times have been recorded in Japan for 1,200 years. The date varied depending on when winter lost its grip, but on average stayed constant over centuries or rose slightly until the 19th century since when it has steadily advanced.
The ancient recorders of first blooms and shoots could not imagine why they should interest us today. But there are no more blazing signs of a warming planet than trees exploding in color. On March 28, Red Maple buds burst at Mechanicsburg, PA and Pawpaw at Gibsonville, NC, although Redbud is still dormant at Spring Hill, TN (already rose pink here in Williamsburg, VA). If you doubt our climate is changing, ask the trees.
The blogger is back after pausing to finish a novel
Even if some days still feel wintry, birds and bees think otherwise. Carolina wrens and bluebirds have started nests in our boxes. My hive boiled with insects, rising like steam out of the opened hive when I inspected it, every frame covered with industrious bodies filling the comb with pollen and nectar. To avoid them swarming to find more accommodation I need to ‘split’ the hive soon.
After losing some every year (40% on average for Virginia apiaries), I decided to abandon beekeeping if I failed again, but bees won’t let me go this time! Among the threats, careless gardening is high on the list of suspects. Since bugs and weeds flourish in hot and humid Tidewater summers, a huge market exists for pesticides and weed killers.
Some years ago, I wrote to the manager of our local Lowes store asking to draw customer attention to products that can harm pollinators. I didn’t get a reply, but perhaps someone in a distant office had the same thought. Plants for sale now have warning labels in case they have been exposed to pesticide residues in nurseries.
Neonicotinoids (neonics) are synthetic analogues of nicotine and among the most deadly insecticides (think how smoking deters bugs). They affect nerve transmission via the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR), a molecule I am familiar with from research on electric rays at the Stazione Zoologica in Naples. Their electric organ has such an extraordinary density of these receptors it helped biochemists to characterize a protein of great medical significance. Rays need them to stun their prey with an electric shock but made me wary of dipping a hand in their tank.
Skipping the digression, our nACh receptors are different to insects, making us less vulnerable to neonics. If only honeybees were more like us! Mounting evidence shows they have multiple impacts on development, sleep (yes, they do), navigation (finding home) and diet (preferred flowers). Absorbed into the vascular system, they are distributed systemically, including the nectar carried in the crop of bees.
Neonics are used worldwide, except in the EU where they are banned. A backyard hive is not safe from the range of products sprayed on gardens even when a beekeeper carefully avoids them because his/ her bees forage for miles from home. The practices of neighbors, lawn care companies and farmers can destroy bee colonies, often unknowingly. Gardens are supposed to offer a connection with nature but are killing fields to beneficial insects. Home owners bothered by a biting species reflexively call Mosquito Joe to mist their yard and the street, making victims of honey bees, butterflies and other pollinators. To love these insects you must live hopefully and prepare for grief.
The graveyard of Grace Episcopal Church, Yorktown, Virginia is an apt place to meditate on Veterans Day (Remembrance Day in the UK). 101 veterans from as far back as the 17th century are buried in these grounds. Lord Cornwallis’s troops used the church behind me as a powder magazine and the battleground ending the Revolutionary War is a mile yonder.
One shouldn’t feel ‘sides’ at this distance of time and can’t be blindly patriotic when you have ancestors on both sides of the tragedy and waste of war. Photos too are poignant, like a scene I know at the Third Battle of Ypres in which three wounded soldiers, one Canadian and two German, cling to each other as they wade through mud and destruction, a scene that inspired a famous poem and the tradition of wearing poppies.
.. If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, tho poppies grow
In Flanders fields
John McCrae
That battle is better known as Passchendaele for the tiny village destroyed at its center. As best I can translate Flemish it means Easter (or Passover) Valley. Winston Churchill called the battle “a forlorn expenditure of valor and life without equal in futility.”
A century later a letter came into our hands about two brothers, Leonard and Conrad, from their C/O. The address ‘From the Front’ implied it was typed in a dugout in the trenches or close to the Frontline. Imagine the scene from Sam Mendes movie, 1917. Dated this day in 1917, the day after the four month battle ended and precisely one year before the Armistice, he wrote to their mother.
My great uncles emigrated to Canada before the war, where Len got married, but they joined the Canadian Pioneers when hostilities broke out. Len was a stretcher-bearer, probably Con too as they served together. A few weeks earlier a Toronto newspaper reported that Len was commended by the C/O for saving lives at Passchendaele. Soon afterwards, a shellburst killed him instantly along with several soldiers. The letter wrote of his ‘glorious sacrifice’ (sic) and how Con was buried under debris with grievous injuries, but had the courage and presence of mind to stay to care for the injured, all the time his dead brother lying close by. Con was awarded a high decoration for valor.
I wonder what they would say if they looked down on us today as wars continue (a new one announced this week) and infighting divides us, even giving a stress test to our democracy.
Paddling the Powhatan Creek on a fall day I floated near the saltmarsh at low tide. The mud heaved with armored creatures that I alarmed, hauling themselves on ten legs to run into the reeds with a giant claw like a fiddle under an arm. The abundance of nature is still gob-smacking. If the scene is magnified in the imagination, Michael Crichton could have written the story Brachurid Park.
Sandy Bay, Powhatan Creek, looking toward Jamestown Island
Close to the bank, dozens of small fishes leapt out of the water for a second, as if checking for the long, pointed beak of a fisherman up to his knees. And then my bow suddenly lifted and slammed down as a huge snapping turtle disturbed on the creek bed made off with as much panic as it left me steadying my kayak.
But none of those sights were as indelible as the tiny spinning whirlpool in a patch of still water. Paddling to see if the insect caught in a meniscus would be gobbled by a fish I found a drowning honeybee.
For nearly a quarter hour I watched and tried to rescue it on the blade of my paddle, but it always slipped off in the wash. Eventually it caught and I knocked it onto my prow to study it. Golden-yellow, the bee wasn’t from my Russian colony four miles away. Over several minutes it scrubbed its head and body and dried in the afternoon sunshine. Then it flew off, with my blessing. The boy scout of years ago rose inside: it was my good deed for the day.
I can’t help reflecting that I am the stranger of the two, and perhaps of all species. Every day I am responsible for the death of living creatures by eating, driving, gardening, etc., and when not in the deed I am complicit through others. And yet, I now take more care of my choices as a consumer and try to avoid harming animals met as individuals, like the mouse in our house and the worm exposed by my garden fork, but if I try to be Franciscan, revering all nature, I soon fail. I am guilty of deliberately stepping on a giant cockroach today.
Roger musing about Peace with Nature 