Part 2

Everyone knows that the month of August is loaded with insects, although they come under the heading of “bugs,” a menace to human society. Their fibrous trills are incessant in the grass. Their high, shrill sounds announce the heated air. Those two species that we hate more than most, just for their familiarity, the flies and mosquitoes, drone around us. In the heat of noon our senses are a little clouded. We may be mumbling something about “the will of life be done,” and it is being done ... in great part by the insects. The summer rage to take and to share in taking is carried out in minute detail, from the tiniest mite in the soil to the dragonfly.

Manifest energy, using its short summer span, fills our surroundings with its wealth of insects. It has not been long since I was taught the modicum of knowledge needed to name a few of them, to start in on a fraction of the 680,000 species that fill the earth; but it was enough to add to my sight. I had never realized that such foreign and incredible variety existed so close to me.

A yellow jacket tugs furiously at a dead cricket on the road, like a hungry dog with raw meat. Delicate aphids waver on flower stalks. A big striped cicada killer roams through the oaks. Other wasps sip juice or nibble carrion. Dragonflies dart across both land and water on their tangential licks of speed. The cabbage butterflies flutter and alight with pale, yellow wings held together like one thin sail against the sunlight. Over and under, in and out, flying, crawling, suspended in plants and in the growth of plants, seizing their time, waiting, indefinitely if need be, held in chrysalis or egg, emerging, feeding, adding to death and life in death ... what are these strangers?

There are wasps as red as rubies; flies of a more scintillating, vibrant green than emeralds; and shiny bronze or golden beetles which are the envy of human art. If color is life, to make the human eyes ring and the body respond, they have it, and they also lack it. Some are so diaphanous as to belong only to the sunlit air, and some are so dark, as though part of unseen depths, that all color is only a dance, springing away.

We use up constant, frustrated energy keeping them in check. Their dry throbbing annoys us. They eat our crops, transmit disease, and drive us away from our pleasures: although in the bold stare of nature they are effective employees. We might, slapping a mosquito, recognize their necessity as pollinators, earth movers, or food, respect the role they play in decomposition and growth ... then we must turn around and invent new poisons. Insects are redoubtable enemies. We are never quite sure which of us is in the ascendancy, just as we are never sure of what they are.

Still we can look and marvel at their complex detail: these wings like lace or spun glass; wings cut short and wide or thin as a hair; wings with the pattern of flowers, or veins of a leaf; bodies round and narrow, oval or oblong; strange truncated abdomens; huge, compound eyes; legs impossibly thin and long, or unbelievable in number and still co-ordinated; heads like alligators; bodies like sticks; false eyes; false horns; repulsive, intangible, unreal.

Here seems to be automatic, nerve-end response in unreflecting zeros, whose lives pass with their deaths, but still, on this earth crust they are affiliated with everything. That which may frighten or startle a bird, like the eye spots on a moth’s wing, is related to a bird. Animals are adapted to their environments and the medium in which they live and act; but so many tricks and curiosities are embodied in the insects, so many far-fetched connections of shape and motion, as to leave all particular environments behind.

In their variety they are in balance with our imagination. Don’t they show as many bursts, tricks, starts, halts, and fires, as much somnolence and surprise in their color, shape, and action as we desire in the exercise of our consciousness? Nature is unbiased in its attention, concentrating equal power on all forms of its expression. When we begin to conceive of nature in terms of creative process--continually evolving, fantastically complex, immensely resourceful--then we recognize our counterparts wherever the sunlight strikes across the air. We share in a communication.

Last month I noticed a group of small butterflies on the mauve flower of a milkweed. They were, as I found out, hairstreak butterflies, with a dusky, grayish-lavender coloration, and little orange patches on the lower edge of their wings. When the wings are folded, their hind tips have tails resembling antennae, which may have the effect of a protective device to confuse a predator. After I frightened them off, they returned in a little while to rest on the very same flower. Their color was not the same as a milkweed’s but in tone and value it was close enough so as to hide them from view at a fairly short distance. The flower and the animal were united in a sensitive embodiment of contrast.

A few days later I noticed that the flower was gradually paling. Then, on the twenty-fifth of July, the last blossoms dropped off, and the butterflies were gone. An obvious affinity, and a mystery at the same time, of two forms of life in a unique response to nature’s web of motion.

It took me a long time to become aware of just how much these affiliations and responses made up the life of earth, how much of an elaboration they amounted to. In the past also, when I saw a robin hop across the lawn, a frog jump into the water, or a tree swallow glide through the air, I reacted with pleasure or disregard--by chance, in other words--without realizing just how big a role chance played in their appearance. In the same sense the obvious upheavals of a season--drought, or heavy rains--meant little to me beyond their immediate, local effect. After a while I began to be aware of all the circumstances that must surround me. One dull day I realized their unlimited context, and thought how slow and agonizing my own changes were in comparison.

Expected things happen. But the variations are just as compelling as the stable order from which they come. This June, for example, was cold and wet, and the rains continued into the summer months. The hatching of insects was delayed and the development of some plants and grasses. Many fledgling tree swallows were found dead in their nests, a disaster which seems to have been caused directly by the weather. Aquatic insects are a favorite food of the tree swallows, but in cold, wet weather these insects tend to remain in immature stages and do not develop into flying adults. (Swallows chase after their food in flight.) And, in fact, when insects are few, the tree swallows seem to be discouraged from looking for them. If such conditions keep up, they may leave a nesting area to look for food elsewhere.

Our local run of alewives, those inland herring that migrate from salt water every spring to spawn in fresh-water ponds, seemed to be a little later than usual; and the young, hatched from the eggs they left behind them, started down to salt water past schedule in July. If the ponds are colder in temperature than is normal, it probably affects the young alewives’ size and chance of survival. They grow larger and healthier in warm-water ponds because they are started sooner and have a richer supply of food. A smaller, slightly weaker fish is more easily caught by a predator.

Because this spring was somewhat off the average mark (and in a sense there is no average), many of the relationships between plants and animals dependent on it were altered. Some of the effects, in animal population or health, might be felt for a long time to come.

Although ice, fire, storms, hurricanes, unusually wet or dry seasons, and now the hand of man, may alter the local earth almost beyond recognition and bring its inhabitants to disaster, natural occurrence has an indomitable will. Its changes outlast all others. Uncounted lives are sent ahead, balanced always, but with relationships through time and space that are never exactly the same. A leaf drops earlier. Frogs start to shed their skins, or migrate locally at a time that depends on new climactic conditions. Why have I seen so few mole runs this year? Last year there were comparatively few baltimore orioles. This year in orange pride they were leaf calling and diving everywhere. I have seen very few phoebes in our vicinity of late, and scarcely any bluebirds. There may be more mosquitoes this summer and fewer grasshoppers than usual. I can inquire, for each species, and find out what I want to know, if there is logic, and cause and effect to its behavior; but all are related in a realm that is wider than I ever imagined.

_The Musicians_

Many Augusts, singing loud, have passed me by without my giving them a shred of attention. What made the sound? The air, or the trees, the month itself, embodied in unknown voices? I don’t think I knew much more than that, although I suppose I was aware of what a cricket sounded like. Perhaps it is time to find out more. I know now, as I did then, that at night when the air is soft and cool, a multitude of separate actions having died down, and when the earth is relieved of a fire taken to the stars, a plainsong goes up and the night takes substance in pulsing sound.

When I listen, I see that in detail the sounding of an August night is not melodious. It is full of clicks, dry rasps, ratchets, reedy, resinous scrapings, and except for countless populations playing on one string, disassociated. There is only one phrase for each species of insect. The over-all sound is occasionally reminiscent of telegraph wires, mechanically shrill and tense; but in the context of the night, speckled with stars, it becomes as wide, warm, and luminous as any symphony.

Having heard of using a flashlight to search for these musicians, I go out, sometime after eight-thirty, and start training it on sounds, with complete lack of success at first. Either the sound stops, or the animal that makes it is invisible to me. A bat flies overhead, chasing insects. It is known for accuracy, having ears with a receptiveness like radar, tuned to the finest measurements of space, but its flight seems frantic. It beats back and forth, around, over and under. Suddenly it is very close, perhaps a few inches over my head. I duck at the leathery, fluttering sound, something like the rippling folds of a taut chute, despite my knowing that only in lingering myth and hearsay do bats catch in human hair. Then it is off again, with its violent, erratic flight.

The darkness takes deeper hold. It is full of the loud throbbing, the insistently high-pitched rasping of the insects, with an occasional tree frog sounding a contrapuntal “Ek-ek.” Playing my flashlight under the trees shows up a spider web in beautiful detail. The silk strands are clear against the black night, their swoops and whorls all held together by long perfected execution, with the tiny engineer way up on his round span, his semblance of the globe in its vast waters.

In high suspension, in the larger silences of the sky, all rings well in consonance, and the pulse of living instruments is with the massed stars that run out and dive away above all heads, and with the ground, my heart and ear, my blood and bone.

A persistent light racheting makes me concentrate on one bush, where I eventually find a green, well-camouflaged, long-horned grasshopper with orange eyes--a male, since it has no ovipositor on its abdomen. The females are silent, with the honored role of being courted and invited.

The flashlight seems to have no effect on him. The front wings are slightly apart, raised up a little, and vibrating ... a kind of fast, dry shuddering. The sound is a light “zzz,” ending with a rapid “tic-tic-tic.” This grasshopper is a waxy green. His antennae, almost twice as long as his body, go up in sweeping curves, and wave, sometimes both together in a semicircle, sometimes singly in both directions, as he stops his playing, and begins to move slightly down a twig. Then I notice a female moving in his direction. Had he increased the tempo of his playing when she came near? Did he sense success?

Still harder to spot--almost impossible by day, and difficult enough at night--are the snowy tree crickets, but they are numerous in this low-treed, shrubby area. Where the long-horned grasshoppers sound at intervals, the combined chorus of snowy tree crickets pulses on. They are slender little creatures, a very pale, almost immaterial, green, but their fragile, transparent, membranous wings, raised higher than those of a long-horned when it plays, make a cry that rises up like peepers in the spring. This is the famous “temperature cricket” whose song speeds up or slows down in response to heat or cold. According to the field manuals, you can divide the number of notes per minute by four and then add forty, which will give you the approximate temperature in degrees Fahrenheit.

So this great scraping and fiddling perpetuates a dance. The first frost will end the lives of most of these musicians. August’s high sounding means a coming end, but all of its connections and associations join in sending on the year. This is what the month means, as well as the hum of tourists driving down the Cape and back again. Listen to the chosen string.

There is a miraculous sensitivity in the cricket that slows down when the temperature begins to cool at night, or even when a cloud passes over the sun by day. The male calls to attract the female, though it is apparently not known whether her arrival may not be the result of happenstance. His playing is as much a part of general expression as individual intention or reaction. In any case the eggs are laid, which will stay dormant throughout the winter, to hatch in the spring. The organic cycle continues, making an announcement, sending up a music whose players are so attuned to light and dark, sunlit or clouded skies, warm air or cold, day or night, that their existence depends upon the slightest change.

_A Walk with an Oven Bird_

The broader aspects of the weather are more apparent to my kind of receptiveness, which is less mortally tuned to degrees than a grasshopper. There is still an abnormal amount of rain as the month goes on. Their sun blotted out, many tourists have left the Cape earlier than usual. I notice that the days are shorter and cooler. The prevailing wind, southwest in fair weather, southeast before a storm, blows gently, or in gusts when it rains. A big mud puddle on our wood road has collected a whole population of green frogs. At night there is great frog carnage on the wet highways. I have noticed in the past that this is their season for traveling, whether it is wet or dry, but heavy rains encourage their migration, sending them far and wide. There is a multitude of garden toads around the house. One night it cools down to about 50 degrees and in the dawn hour the leaves are bluish gray with dew. A hurricane, spawned in the Bahamas, is two hundred miles east of Florida, but beginning to turn slightly to the north, away from the eastern seaboard. High seas are predicted in three or four days’ time.

I feel as though we were hesitating on the brink of new necessities, swinging between one resolution and another not yet found. The season is beginning to join the winds. Some migrant birds have already flown away. Other birds fly through the leaf canopy feeding seriously and silently. A warbler, a female yellow-throat, skips lightly along a patch of briar and vines. A brilliant oriole jumps into a patch of oaks and moves on down sunlight-yellow ramps of leaves, and a black-billed cuckoo, a large brown bird with a handsome, long tail, stops in on a branch with a look of eagerness and seeking, then flashes off again. There is a change in their action and timing. The adults are long since through with the claiming and proclaiming that rang in the woods before they nested. The steady, constant business of feeding their young is about over for most species, though I see a flicker, or yellowhammer, come through the trees in diving, shooting flight, with a young one following loudly after it. There are many fledglings, but on the whole the birds, many of them starting to molt, are silent compared with spring and early summer.

[Illustration]

This wood road of ours, where the birds fly through, is used every school-day morning by our children on their way to catch the bus. It is a kind of open line through change. It rides the side of a low ridge, and glacial hollows dip away from it. It once served as a wagon road for woodcutters, and is still shaded by the insistent, if none too “sturdy,” oaks, which come back again and again, no matter how many times they are cut. They make the road a green tunnel in summer, and their gray branches with knotted fingers rattle and sway above it in the wintertime. It receives many travelers by land and some by sea. (A few Januaries ago I found a dovekie there, a little sea bird with the black back, short black wings, and white breast of a penguin. It is one of the members of the auk family, breeding in Greenland and migrating down from the ice-locked waters of the Arctic Circle to feed in the Atlantic during the winter. Its short wings are meant for swimming, diving, and flying in and out of waves, so they are not very effective when blown inland by a storm. The dovekie I found was unable to take off, and in any case weak and hungry. So after a futile effort to feed it, I took it back to Cape Cod Bay, where it started to fly along the surface of the water, though weakly, in short, floundering dashes.)

With a half mile of concentrated road it is easier to take cognizance of friends and strangers than when you are trying to make California on the transcontinental highway. You can see how it is used by skunk, squirrel, deer, and the hunters of deer. I walk it in expectation. One of the animals that constantly move across the road and live in the woods beside it is that bird which looks like a tiny thrush but is classified as a wood warbler, the oven bird. Its “Teacher! Teacher!” rings out in spring and early summer. It was named after its leaf-hidden nest, made on the ground, with a hole going in at the side like a Dutch oven.

Here is an oven bird, tail bobbing slightly, perched on the lower branches of a red maple beside the road ... a little more out in the open than usual, less concentrated on its earlier nesting territory. It flutters down to the road. This is one of those birds that have the distinction, if that is what it is, of being able to walk, rather than hop or run. So it starts walking, through the dappled shadows on the road, as I keep a respectable distance behind it. Or perhaps I walk and it attends to business. The oven bird goes back and forth, pecking insects, with a quick meandering, interrupted by an occasional little jump at the leaves of an overhanging shrub or plant. This is not a straight walker, no Indian with a destination, but its body moves constantly from left to right in purposeful flexibility.

“How well you see!” I think to myself. I can see nothing at my level but a tiny yellow caterpillar swinging through the air on a silken thread. But it is clear to me that the oven bird works the road with clear results. We keep going. We come to a stretch in full sunlight where the trees stand off to the side, and my companion keeps to the shadows with determination, pecking away at insects along the few inches of shaded bank to one side. A flicker bursts through, shouting: “Tawicka! Tawicka!” and the oven bird flies ahead a few feet and then goes on walking.

We have now traveled about an eighth of a mile. Under a heavy weave of leaves the bird moves to left and right over the road, pecking for insects, working, progressing. Olive brown; capped with an orange stripe; with speckled breast and pale pink legs ... a shadow bird, a leaf litter bird; and now a fellow walker, that has made more use of this road than any of us and our omnivorous machines. At a sharp bend in the road where it leads up to the house, the oven bird finally flies off and disappears in the trees, in a southerly direction by coincidence. Our walk is over, but the flight of birds will leave all cars behind.

_Toward the Sea_

There is “man” and there is “nature.” But do we really know where the climate of existence starts, where its storms are brewed? All weather is unexpected. Another variation in the known routine, another change in use, and we may move, reluctantly, into some new awareness while primal energy bowls on with infinite capacity.

Among the oaks the leaves on the top branches sway and rustle, while those on the wood floor scarcely lift at all, but there is a constant sound of air among them, and it might be possible to hear a ferment in the ground. Small suns blaze through round leaf lobes. Standing on a slope toward the north from which the glaciers came, and the auroras crackle, shimmer, and flow, and the cold from Canada will have its way, I have a feeling of portentous motion, of being sledded out on a speeding globe.

The hurricane veered off. There was rain, but no great winds. The mud puddle in the road dried up after several sunny days, and the green frogs left; but when it filled up again they had not returned. The frogs have a different motion in them and will not come back to suit my metronome.

Many vacationers are going home. We can almost walk across the highway without fear. There is still the press, the fevered demands of summer in the air, but something else is going to have its way.