Read Online Wandering Home by Bill McKibben - Free Book Online

buckthorn has ascendancy, but here the dogwood is still king.”
    So do you wring your hands over this, rooting for the dogwood and the prickly ash, rooting up the buckthorn? Or do you just decide that nature is whatever it is—that since the world is in constant flux, there’s no real damage that can be done to it? For instance, Warren pointed outa small elm tree. “As you know, they get Dutch elm disease when they’re about twenty. But they start producing seed when they’re ten. So they have a decade before the fungus starts to shut them down. As a result, we’re getting increasing numbers of elm trees that get to be about that big. Not the big umbrella street-lining trees we grew up with. But they have this niche now. They’re an understory tree—that’s just what they are now.” Are we to mourn the passing of big elms? Celebrate the success of this fungus we helped introduce? Merely marvel at all the different stratagems that evolution puts in play?
    And the questions get more complicated than that, even. A few hundred yards west of the creek, we wandered out into a big hayfield. “Grassland is an interesting subject in this part of the world,” Warren said. “There are a small number of species—bobolink, upland sandpiper, eastern meadowlark, grasshopper sparrow, savanna sparrow, Henslow’s sparrow—that require it. They make their nests in the tall grass.” But in recent years, as farms have been abandoned, much of that grassland has grown into scrub forest. And the grass that’s left has become more intensively managed, with farmers trying to get an extra cut of hay—which means harvesting prior to mid-July, before the birds can get their broods safely off. “So the question is, do you manage for them, or do you let nature take its course?” That is, do you set aside some fields to maintain in grass, cutting them even though no one is farming, and cutting them late so that the birdshave time to nest? Or do you let nature and the economy take its course? “Henslow’s sparrow is already gone from the state, the grasshopper sparrow is down to a few pairs in the state. Bobolinks aren’t at any great risk yet, but that’s the general tendency.” Maybe that’s bad, and maybe that’s “right.” I mean, the only reason those birds were here in the first place is that farmers came in and opened up the woods. Or maybe not—maybe they were opened up first by the Indians who lived in this valley. Are Indians different—more “natural”—than the rest of us humans, and does that change our relationship to the bobolink? Maybe our attachment to grasshopper sparrows is only sentimental, romantic.
    These questions of what constitutes the natural, what composes the real, when you draw the baseline, how much change a place can stand before it loses its essence—they are the questions that will grow stronger and louder the farther west we go, into the Adirondack wild (whatever “wild” means). For now, it’s enough perhaps to note what Warren and Barry King have done: they’ve pulled up the water chestnut and the purple loosestrife, because those exotics were overrunning everything in their path and decimating the food supply for a wide variety of animals. They have not fished every carp out of Dead Creek, or cut down every buckthorn. When the snow geese come through in the fall, they stand by the roadside with their spotting scope so neophytes can take a look. Once a year, under the auspices of the local Audubonchapter, they organize Dead Creek Wildlife Days—which features plenty of birdwatching, but also hunters showing off the retrieving skills of their bird dogs. That is to say, they do what they can, guided by a certain tropism toward “the natural” but governed by common sense and a dose of wry humility.
    Mostly they make sure to marvel. “Do you hear the flicker calling just now?” asks Warren—I hadn’t, of course, but now I did. “Oh look, that’s a harrier. The white rump patch,