Essay by Nancy Stranahan
All Photos by Larry Henry except for the following:
  Beaver © William C. Gladish, All Rights Reserved www.ACriticalDecision.org  & tree swallow by John Howard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

feathers

 

life is what we make of it.

behold the hidden secret in all of nature

not the beaver, but its earnest sculptures of mud and bough

not the ancient hemlock, but its ringed and twisted growth

not the bee, but the honey it secretes in its comb

not the person, but the hope that defies the mind’s tether

not the toad, but its song

not the bird,

     but a feather

 

 

 

 

                 late autumn

 

  On a cold November gray afternoon, approximately one year ago, I took a walk into the Cedar Run region of the Highlands Nature Sanctuary. At 300 acres, Cedar Run was the largest single land purchase among the nearly sixty tracts that have been stitched together by the Arc of Appalachia Preserve System in our quest to restore the Eastern Deciduous Forest. On that particular day, for no particular reason, I could feel my psyche banked low against my spirit, just as the shelf of gray clouds above my head blocked out most of the sun’s winter light. The only color in my winter world were shades of gray and the bleached tans of Cedar Run's old farm pastures — hues of dead grasses trembling in the biting wind. To distract myself from the seemingly barren landscape, I began cleaning out dozens of bluebird boxes we had erected several years ago — constructed during an era when the Sanctuary was our only preserve instead of the eleven we manage today, a time when our lives as managers were therefore much simpler.

 

  The nesting boxes had been an immediate success with the birds. But as the Arc of Appalachia had rapidly grown over the years with no concurrent increase in staff, this was one of many tasks that had gotten left behind as we raced to save the land — burning with the knowledge that time was shorter for this critical mission than sometimes we could bear. Simple chores, like cleaning out bird boxes, sometimes just had to wait.

  But today there was time. As I walked from one box to another, I pulled out the twiggy nests of the house wrens and the grass-woven nests of the bluebirds that rustled in the cold wind. Then I came upon the creations of my favorite bird of all – the unmistakable nests of tree swallows. Woven among their nesting fibers were feathers that the parent birds had collected from other bird species, feathers both large and small. Freed by my activities, the feathers skimmed the air, wafting a bit before pinning the earth, as if they could recall loftier days when there was still a living will directing them; a will that buoyed them on wings and took them on heady journeys across the sky.
 

  I wondered, “Do the feathers bring inspiring dreams to the naked newborns, who drop their blind weak heads so heavily upon their shafts?” Do the feathers whisper crisp satiny promises of the baby birds’ exalted destinies as creatures of flight?” On impulse I picked the largest feather off the ground and tried to propel it high into the air. But no matter how hard I threw it upward, the feather stubbornly resisted a gain in altitude and drifted slowly earthward once again. Its days of flying were over, at least in hands as illiterate in the language of air as my own.

 

  How I wished for spring, knowing with an animal-like certainty that it would indeed return.

               solstice

 
  Because we are human, likely we shall always walk in two inner worlds. In our winter world we curl up around ourselves and are anxious, cold, cautious, and protective. In our inner spring world we are hopeful, empowered, resilient and strong. To try to extinguish winter is an act of futility. The trick to surviving winter, I think, is to be a good naturalist and pay careful attention to the scenery, regardless of where our psyche finds itself. By gaining consciousness of the tilt of our inner axis, we may adjust to, if never quite defy, our inner seasons. If we must walk through winter from time to time, we might at least use the experience productively, cleaning out our musty bird boxes and providing a good clean space for something new to be born. When spring returns again, then, truly, it is time to master flight.

 

  We walk the wheel. Most of the time buying and preserving land for the sake of native diversity is a heady and victorious feeling. Other times it feels like a late autumn day with a hint of frost. The hardest fact to face is that there are growing forces in our world that seek to undo nature’s hard-won accomplishments over eons of evolution, as well as those more recent accomplishments of those of us who love and cherish the earth.

 

  Yet, despite the sometimes grim state of the world, here at the Highlands Nature Sanctuary, it is impossible not to see the gentle forces of nature that quietly continue to heal, mend, and restore -- even during storms of change.
 

  And so we wish to share with you a few stories of spring, stories that ride on wings of hope.

 

             spring

 

  Resurrection. Last April, I followed the trail tracing the rim of the bluffs at Kamelands, an area of the Sanctuary that we purchased over a decade ago. Kamelands was once a farm, a rumpled blanket of eroded, worn-out pastures pushed up against the rim of the Rocky Fork Gorge. In the narrow band of ancient forest where the two landscape features met, the oak trees were immense. Spring wildflowers, however, were few, and trilliums almost non-existent.  Notably, however, on the bluffs was a colony of at least a half dozen rare American columbo plants, their cabbage-like rosettes glowing brightly in the springtime sun.

  Last April, when I made my spring rounds to witness nature’s handiwork at Kamelands, it was hard to believe I was hiking the same preserve that we bought ten years earlier. To my delight, covering the ground were thousands and thousands of trillium seedlings that I had somehow missed in previous seasons. Each one was one to three years old. Collectively, this carpet of plants promised to produce a showcase of elegant flowers just a few years hence.

 

  And the columbo!! Surely my eyes were deceiving me! I recalled that one or two of the rosettes had gone to seed a few years ago – no small event in the life of this long-lived plant. Columbo lilies stay in their vegetative form for an average of 29 years, patiently storing away spring’s sunlight in their massive roots, before they shoot up a 5 foot-tall flower stalk covered with spotted lily flowers. After setting large number of seeds, the exhausted parent plant dies to the ground, for good.

 

  Like phoenix rising, these flowering columbos had truly resurrected themselves. Now, before my eyes, stood carpets of healthy young rosettes in incredibly dense colonies – more plants than I have ever seen in one location in my entire life. I ceased counting after I reached 400 individuals and surely there were even more!

*****

 

  Renewal. When the Highlands Nature Sanctuary was birthed thirteen years ago, the flowering dogwoods were actively dying back throughout the Eastern Forest. Although the blight hitting the dogwoods was not 100% fatal to the species, it killed so many of them that the iconic spectacle of flowering dogwoods – dense tiers of pure white flowers floated among the greening trees – had become a thing of the past over much of the East. Because of this unfortunate timing, I never knew dogwoods to be an important component of the Sanctuary, and I learned to satisfy myself with the ethereal displays of pink redbuds that always outdid themselves each year.

  And so, it came as a delightful shock to wake up one spring morning and see nearly every old field within the Sanctuary rimmed by a hedge of white dogwood blossoms, the flowers hovering just a few feet off the ground and contrasting brighty against the pink redbuds. Apparently, after the killing blight, a whole new generation of dogwood saplings had sprouted from seed, and were once again filling their favored niche at the forest’s edge, quietly reclaiming lost ground beneath the radar of our observation.

 

  This spring the dogwoods were finally old enough to announce the miraculous story of their re-appearance, relaying their good news to us through the universal language of flowers.

 

******

   Mending the Web. The spring rains caused the pond to overflow its banks at Taloden Woods this year. Consequently, on a warm April night, accompanied by a symphony of primordial trills, the American toads gathered at Taloden and laid their eggs with enthusiastic expectation in the shallow temporary outwash -- benevolently free from predatory fish and dragonfly larvae. By late April the narrow stream of exiting pond water exploded with thousands of tiny dark plump tadpoles, the first successful hatch at Taloden in over four years. It was only a tentative success for the toads, however, because the flow of the water was far from secure, requiring a steady diet of rainfall to keep it coming.

 

  As May progressed and the weather began to dry, the water level dropped precipitously. I checked on my tadpole friends frequently and with no small anxiety as the air heated up and the rains came to a halt. Each day the tadpoles grew, but the water became shallower and shallower. At one point, I was agitated to see that the water had dropped to less than an inch. Then, I got particularly busy at work and a whole rainless week passed before I returned to the pond. I approached with trepidation. I prepared myself to see a mud-cracked stream bed stained with the drying and decomposing bodies of thousands of my cherished friends. But instead, I found the stream not only intact, but a few inches deeper than before. The tadpoles had doubled in size and were plump and happily wiggling in the fertile bounty of mud and algae.

 

  “Impossible!” Befuddled, I followed the stream to its final outflow where it dropped over a ledge into a nearby stream. I stared without comprehension at a very small but stunningly effective dam of mud – a ridge of dirt a mere five feet long and only a few inches high - which thwarted the water’s exit. The dam had raised the outflow’s water level by a modest two inches – exactly what the tadpoles needed to thrive. More confused than ever I bent over the mud and stared at it until I finally saw the signs.  … a tell-tale footprint here, and there, a crease in the mud from a dragged tail.

 

  Beaver!

 

  Beaver had returned to Taloden Pond for the first time in its history.

 

  My mind spanned Taloden’s human-wrought biography. We bought Taloden Woods back in 2001 off the auction block. At the time it was an operating RV park called Lake Wahoo, a Sanctuary in-holding boasting 30 trailers and a half dozen golf carts that patrolled the meadows and woods. The forest had just been cut a second time in five years. Cut hard. And the pond was over-fished.

 

  Today Taloden is tranquil and quiet. The recreational vehicles are gone and the roads invisible under a carpet of blackberries and poke. A hiking trail winds through a healing forest. The wood ducks and the grebes return to the pond each spring, and the Canada geese successfully raise a brood on its banks each year. Bluegills scoop out nests in the mud for their eggs, eyeing drifts of floating dragonflies, while huge bass patrol nearby.

 

And now, the beaver are back, too, providing habitat for their ancient ecological beneficiaries:  our beloved toads.

 

************

   Feathers.

Last spring I returned to the now verdant meadows of Cedar Run. The grasses were alive with mouse burrows and the old pastures were crisscrossed with the paths of rabbits, groundhogs, and coyotes. The sky above was bluebird-egg blue and a red-tailed hawk floated high in its vault, while the real bluebirds warbled cheerfully in the fencerow. I was cleaning out the few nesting boxes that I had missed last winter when my hands had gotten too cold for the task. One of the old nests had a tree swallow nest and I shook out a few of the recycled feathers. As I approached the next box on the bluebird trail, I saw with satisfaction that it had been claimed by a newly-arrived pair of tree swallows who were chittering to each other, slicing the air with daredevil swoops and dives.

 

  On impulse I lifted the feather in my hand towards one of the soaring birds and threw it as hard as I could up into the air. A small gust of wind was kindly, and held the feather aloft for a few short seconds, just enough time for the sharp-eyed swallow to plummet down and snatch the feather in its beak, just a few feet in front of my face. I could feel a willful wind on my cheeks.

 

  The midnight-blue bird streaked to its nesting box, carrying the over-sized feather like a prized plume behind it. He soon disappeared within the box's depths to plant the feather like a seed-idea among the progeny of his own seed.

 

  Perhaps to nurture another generation of tree swallows.

 

             Perhaps to remind them of the promise of flight.

 

 

 

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