For many months now I have been reviving my interest in birdwatching, a childhood pursuit of mine. It feeds a passion for observing wildlife, for being outside in nature, even if it is only in a city park in which I trek. It also get me thinking, reflecting, even musing, in a way that only occurs during those long walks.
There is an experience, in our mortal life, in which a temporary state of submersion in one’s thoughts cannot help but prevail. There is a state of being (if I may use the phrase) where one’s surroundings will sway and hum with one’s reflections, where every sight and sound seems to heighten and reverberate with one’s inner life. I am talking, of course, about a walk in the woods. Many will recognize this fondness of mine. I am confident the reader’s own recollections will bear me out as I discuss the joys of that straying. You walk, and walk – never do you have a destination in mind, for you are of your destination, and you are vanished amid the happenings all around you. A vibrating forest, speckled with living mammals and birds and reptiles, spans your consciousness in all directions. As you walk one mile, then another, then another of the rocky trail, you
lose your native sense of place and gain a new orientation. Gone are the four-cornered rooms and walls, gone are words and signposts and people. Drowning out your memory of those things are the loud buzzing of cicadas, the drumming of woodpeckers, or the whooshing of the giant cottonwood trees, which can obliterate all these sounds when the wind is strong enough. Victorian-era biologists first proposed that every living thing is descended from a single common ancestor that existed billions of years ago. Was he walking in the woods, the scientist to whom this thought first occurred? Walking in the woods, with the leaf-speckled sunshine on his cheek?
I myself walked through the woods yesterday. It was at Hyland Park, a medium-size regional park reserve, and I had the good fortune to be there early in the morning on a weekday when the birds are most active and no other people are around. As soon as I set upon the path I saw wood ducks sitting in one of the small ponds near the trail. The male of this species is a pompous creature, with bright red eyes and an odd "helmet" on his head. The female, like many animals tasked with incubating eggs, is a drab brown.
Some ways down the trail I pursued a loud and grating kak sound until I knew I was near its source. I scanned the larger tree branches until I saw it: an immature Cooper’s hawk, sitting there on a thick, dead branch in the open, screaming louder than anything else in the woods.
I came to a copse of young elm trees, one that seemed alive with small birds. I stood there for some time as multiple downy woodpeckers flitted from tree to tree. They were feasting not only on the grubs they heard within the wood, but also on the insects crawling about on the bark, using their keen eyesight to snap them up. Woodpeckers will eat as many insects as they can while the warm months last, before the cold returns and they must go back to cached nuts and deep-buried larvae. As I stood I noticed also the nuthatches, creeping in their distinctive way down the tree. These little birds, incapable of drilling holes, crept down the tree head first, whereby they found the food that the woodpeckers had missed. I thought of how neatly intuitive this was to a person who grew up in a market democracy and was taught to be mindful of market niches and to think opportunistically. I observed the black-capped chickadees, too, as they flew about. These little eleven-gram birds lived here and throughout the Arctic tundra, where they must find a seed every fifteen seconds on average if they are to survive the winter. Brave, curious and tiny, a chickadee will perch on your thumb and eat seed from your palm, confident in its ability to dash out of reach in time, should you betray it.
From this shaded copse, where no sunlight shone through, I followed the trail to where it rejoined the perimeter of the lake. The lake was big enough to generate waves, which beat back the duck weed crowding its edges and maintained open water throughout the summer. It was nine in the morning by then and the sun’s heat was stronger. I began to sweat lightly as I scanned the shore with binoculars and saw bleached trunks jutting out amid the rocks. Not far from me a green heron was standing very still next to some cattails. I knew that this secretive bird was one of the few that will place a twig or leaf on the surface of the water as bait and then wait to ensnare small fish as they come to investigate. I thought about the fish themselves. Next to the heron they were relatively simple creatures. They possessed two eyes and a brain and a spinal column, this last feature being the prize of an elite few in the kingdom Animalia. I thought about the phenomenon of pedomorphosis, whereby a species’ larval form attains sexual maturity while bypassing the normal change into an adult form. Minnesota’s own "mudpuppy" amphibian is an example, showing how the adult salamander retains the gills characteristic of a juvenile. I thought about this concretely observed modern phenomenon as it is applied in evolutionary theory: perhaps, at some time in the prehistoric seas, an immobile sea sponge released its tailed larvae into the currents. The mobile larva was to implant itself on a distant shelf and mature into another filter-feeding sponge. But instead it stayed in larval form. Some gene failed to express itself, some protein was never secreted. The larva, perhaps impregnating itself, swam forward and reproduced asexually, spawning a host of mutant progeny that went on to populate the primeval waters. The newly mobile creature (perhaps no bigger than a pencil eraser) fed lazily on floating animal detritus. The nerve cord of these creatures was amenable to the growth of a nerve center on its forward end. This inchoate brain was receptive to the development of light-sensitive cells on its periphery. Useless eyes developed, atrophied, and developed again. Eventually a predatory form emerged from the swimmers’ own ranks and exerted pressure on the other bottom-feeders to innovate and diversify. The nerve cord was better protected in those swimming creatures that had calcium deposits forming around it, leading to the proliferation of a hard inner skeleton that afforded protection and flexibility to the two-eyed swimmers. Two-eyed swimmers. That was what the green heron hunted as I watched, two hundred feet away, through my binoculars.
Where did I come from? The question came to me as I continued on the trail. The trail itself was well-groomed, covered with coarse wood chips that cushioned the feet. Seemingly each time I stopped to look through my binoculars at a bird or at the daytime moon, I looked down at my feet to see a freshly sprouted fungus growing there. The night before had been moist, and the fall season was approaching, two factors that favored the sprouting of fungus. I looked down and saw a flat white toadstool the size of a dinnerplate. I saw a group of bright orange toadstools, not flat but contorted like pieces of melted glass. I came upon a white plastic bag that was not a bag at all but rather a giant puffball fungus, as big as a volleyball, sitting there next to the trail. This fungus was moist and fleshy and round and full of trillions of spores. I passed by bracket fungi (which grew like shelves on the sides of trees). Later I came across a group of another type of puffball. I scarcely knew I was walking over them until I heard a poof and saw a green smoky substance drift from under my foot. These were known by some as "wolf-fart puffballs," and I thought of wolves and of farts as I knelt to examine them. I squeezed one and watched a puff of weightless green spores drift off into their destiny. There was no breeze, and yet they moved upwards and away. I left the rest of the wolf-fart puffballs undisturbed and continued.
The next fungus I saw was an orange coral fungus, a bright, branching product of an acid dream. This particular specimen sprouted from the side of a downed basswood trunk. The fungus grew from the soft, rotting wood, first in a pale white stalk, and then in flexible orange branches that grew thinner and orange-er as they split. I crouched next to the log, a dozen feet from the path, and looked into the orange fractals. I had learned about fractal geometry at some point. This mathematical entity, a pattern that stayed the same at any magnification, found itself expressed in nature as if by design. The downed tree had possessed that same branching vasculature in its roots and branches and internal tubules. My arm was outstretched, leaning on the log for support. I looked down at my arm and noticed my own veins. Through the pale skin of my underarms I could see their blue branches swell as they labored to move blood back to my heart. The thick-walled arteries had filled my arm muscles with the blood they demanded, and now the weak veins struggled to carry the depleted blood back to my chest. I lifted my arm above the level of my heart and watched the veins collapse again.
I touched the fungus and felt its strength. To call it a coral fungus gives the impression that it is fragile, but this specimen was firm and resilient to touch. Some of its strength came no doubt from chitin, the carbohydrate that fungi use to maintain their structure. This compound, chitin, was found in abundance in the animal kingdom. Insects used it to construct their exoskeletons, which had allowed them to dominate the earth. In number of individuals and in sheer mass and in span of existence, the insects outnumbered and outweighed and outlasted humans, who have yet to prove their viability as a species. The chitin that my orange fungus shared with the insects was part of a shared inheritance. They had both derived it from a common ancestor and now they both thrived. The chitin also set the fungus apart from the trees and shrubs that surrounded it. At some point in geologic time, the fungi split from the plant lineage and never re-joined them. The animal lineage split from the fungal one in the same way. The fungus I examined was more closely related to me than the most familiar of trees. The beloved maple from my childhood front yard was a distant cousin, but the weird orange fungus was my sibling.
Where did I come from? I reflected further as I sprayed more mosquito repellent on my arms and neck. I came from a branching lineage extending to a single being in the primordial oceans.
I was near the end of the trail when I came across a painted turtle sitting in the middle of the path. It scrambled away as I approached it. Perhaps it was a female looking for a place to bury its eggs. I thought of this turtle’s relative, the box turtle. I once had a pet box turtle, Sylvester. They had excellent color vision, seeing the world in an array of spectacular hues that we cannot imagine, allowing them to find and select the animal and vegetable matter they relied on. Apes such as myself have excellent color vision compared to most other mammals, but only because we regained it after living our nocturnal existence as rodent-like creatures at the feet of the dinosaurs. This turtle arose from the same lineage as the dinosaurs. The apes arose from those rodents through a series of intermediate forms whose exact nature is still mostly unknown.
Where, then, did I come from?
Later that night I looked up the birds I had seen in my guide. I was laying on my back in bed, my chin touching my chest, my eyelids laboring to stay open. My rat Kurt moved about as I read. He became more active as the evening sunk into night. At times he crawled down my shirt and hid there for several minutes. At others he bounded across the bed and sniffed the air from the edge, propped up on his hindlegs, his tail providing him balance. The heavy guide sat propped up on my stomach where it oppressed my breath, but no message went from the brain, down the tubular bundle of nerves to tell the arm muscles to remove it. I closed my eyes for a moment and opened them. The guide had fallen flat from my hands. I beheld the image of primeval life before me. I saw its arching back, felt its gentle weight on me, its inviting fur that felt to my sense so heavenly warm. I saw a budding consciousness move toward me, eyes like mine peering back, and upon my cheek I felt the eager licking of its tongue.
*See my two favorite chapters of "The Magic Mountain": "A Stroll by the Shore" and "Research."
pseudoisaac 