Best-laid Plans

"Tha best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley."
Robert Burns, 1785: "To a Mouse."

(7/2018) I suppose the Summer Solstice arrived on June 21 as scheduled, but you couldn’t tell, because it was still dark. The sun was supposed to come up around 5:30, and I had planned to get up and put my compass on the sidewalk in front of the house so I could hold up a thin stick and mark the earliest shadow on the compass to find the direction of the sunrise from Emmitsburg on the longest day of the year… but two things went wrong. First of all, I overslept and didn’t get up until 6:30; and second, it didn’t matter because it was completely overcast and raining outside. The only alternative was to turn on the computer and look it up. Emmitsburg wasn’t on Google, but from a nearby point in Pennsylvania the compass bearing to the solstice sunrise was 58< east-northeast. That was probably more accurate than a shadow on a compass, but not nearly as much fun. It was a big disappointment; I’d wanted to do that for several years now, and each year I would either forget or it would rain or I’d be somewhere else on that day. I suppose there will be another solstice next year, but at my age it’s not smart to count on it. I might really be somewhere else by then.

It’s been a strange summer so far. In the western states, drought began early; they are already fighting forest fires, and some National Parks are closed. Here in the East, both May and June have been wet; there have been a couple of serious floods with property damage and loss of life. In Emmitsburg the average rainfall for those two months combined is 9.93 inches; so far, they have yielded over 13 inches. For June alone, our average rainfall is 4.35 inches, and as I write this on Solstice Day, we already have received five and a half… and more is forecast for the next two days. So (as if you hadn’t noticed), it’s been wet.

The response of our garden varies. I planted the garlic bed last October, and put the potatoes in on St. Patrick’s Day. They both happen to be in the best-drained part of the plot, and at this date both are the best we’ve ever had. The rest of the garden couldn’t be planted until after frost was past; we managed to get a few tomato and pepper plants set out, but they start slowly in water-logged soil and at present they are in a losing battle with an exuberant crop of weeds. Beans, squash and cucumber seeds are still waiting for the ground to get dry enough to give them a chance to germinate before they rot.

Birdwatching from the breakfast table has been harder since the plum tree fell over in February. We planted it around 1991, after our house was built, and as it grew it became like a little ecosystem within itself. It provided shelter from wind and rain, an occasional place to nest, and a place for small birds to hide when hawks or cats came by. One branch was the ideal place where the seed and suet feeders were visible through the window; birds apparently couldn’t see through the glass from outside, but from inside we were close enough to see their color patterns in detail.

Without the tree, my records were much scantier than previously; missing were rose-breasted grosbeaks, pine siskins, purple finches, tree sparrows, white-crowned sparrows and fox sparrows. Some of these losses were because the tree was gone; and some of them, no doubt, were because I cannot see and hear as well a I did just a few years ago. Some were the result of natural cycles; populations of all species rise and fall. But records from the past several decades show climate is getting warmer, and the northern birds that populated our winter feeders in the past do not migrate as far south as they used to.

When we moved into Emmitsburg in 1968, the land where our house now stands was an open meadow. As a result of our inspiration, or what my mother-in-law called our neglect, it grew into a woodlot that our grandchildren named "The Great Forest;" and as the trees grow taller, things changed. Hawks of various kinds have nested in them, and this year we have a pair of red-shouldered hawks. They are big birds, with a wingspan of nearly four feet, and they can be noisy; when courting and nest-building last January, and when guarding the nest now, they sound somewhat like a flock of angry blue jays.

In February they built a nest in a large tree that I could see from the yard before the leaves came out; it looked rickety and uncomfortable, but it withstood the windstorm that took out our plum tree. Eggs were laid in March, and both parents took turns brooding them; and both parents now take turns guarding the nestlings and hunting for food. The nest is now hidden behind leaves and is too high for me to see into it to count the young ones, but two or three is the usual number. Like most hawks, when the young ones are small their parents are very patient and tear the food into tiny pieces which they feed gently to them. But they grow rapidly, and their appetites grow even faster, so as soon as they are able to tear little strips of meat from a mouse carcass, the parents just drop the food into the nest and let them fight over it. In lean years the smallest ones may starve, but when hunting is good there will be enough to go around. Life in the wild is tough.

Every species has to adapt in order to avoid extinction, and an animal’s place in the food web has a critical role in that adaptation. The food web seems like a simple concept, and it is taught to students now in primary grades; but as you learn more about it, you find it has many subtle and complex aspects. Large predators like red-shouldered hawks look spectacular if you see them swoop down and kill an adult rabbit or an unwary wild duck; but if that were all they ate, rabbits and ducks would disappear and the hawks would then starve. In the area where they live, the most abundant prey are field mice, and that is number one on their menu. They are opportunistic predators, so they also take larger things like mourning doves, pigeons… even smaller species of hawks… as well as squirrels, snakes and a variety of small birds, especially young ones that have recently left their nests and haven’t yet learned to be wary. When we see this happen we are tempted to feel sorry for the prey species; but they have always lived under these conditions, and they have adapted by producing more offspring than could survive if they all grew to adulthood. In fact, when predators are absent, many of them become pests… rodents, pigeons, starlings, and so on. This is what we call the Balance of Nature.

This balance applies to humans as well as to hawks and mice. A couple of millennia ago, our population lived as predators and grazers, and we in turn were eaten by bigger, meaner predators. We out-produced and eliminated them, and now our population is out of control on a world-wide basis. We fight each other, and the losers are forced to leave; and when they reach our borders, many self-serving politicians call them pests. We who try to live by Christian ethics call them Fellow Human Beings; but they are still a problem. And little attention seems to be given to the underlying causes of it.