There’s a glory of snowdrops in the backyard, glowing in the
sun. One recent, warm day that included some sunshine, rare in this part of the world at this season, I strolled out in the afternoon and started cutting
back last year’s stalks, as I do every year. Spring cleanup is always a messy
process, what with stacking small bundles of stalks in various places, adding some
to the compost heap, and dropping others to gradually add organic material to
the soil. Seasonal rhythms are a little different when gardening with mostly native plants, while attempting to be in sync with the needs of birds and pollinators. As I work, I
think the usual spring thoughts. The vernal equinox arrived with no fanfare
among all the pandemic pandemonium and it’s cheering to know that we’ve crossed
the threshold to longer, light-filled days.
Right now, stuck at home, unable to go to work, nearly
everything closed due to the coronavirus, I am grateful to have a garden, to
have a place that’s safe and out-of-doors, a place where, moreover, I can stand
and talk safely with my next door neighbor ten or fifteen feet away.
She, a young doctor, mother of two small children, tells me
dire stories: of sick people, lack of sleep, updates every half hour, depletion
of masks and other supplies, and so on. I tell her I’m home until early April,
and she says, “If you can go back then.” We agree that it’s scary and the worst
is yet to come. If this eminently qualified, sensible person is scared, having directly
experienced the difficulties caused by the US lack of preparedness as she
cares for patients while attempting not to bring the virus home to her family and
is worried about outcomes, why should I or anyone disbelieve or downplay the seriousness
of the situation? Who knows what will happen?
Yet the sun pours down, the plants are stirring, the birds
singing despite the presence of the slim, muscular Cooper’s hawk lurking high
in a nearby tree. Actually the hawk is singing, too, a sort of high-pitched,
scolding, dry ack-ack-ack that is its nearest approach to melody, reflective,
perhaps, of its apparently querulous temperament. Is it well fed, for the
moment? Do the local cardinals and robins, sparrows, house finches, woodpeckers,
and chickadees feel somewhat safe, so long as it vocalizes without moving? All of us below know how fast and with what
agility it can hurtle through trees and bushes. Not for the Cooper’s hawk the
lazy circles of the stocky red-tailed hawk riding thermals above woods and fields.
As we humans chat, the baby smiles at me, having stared for long moments to see
if she remembers me from the fall, or is a new person to experience. The boy
messes with his soccer ball and then manages to pick up, only to hit himself
with, a large stick that fell from their maple tree during some winter storm. He
runs mewling to his mother and clings to her leg. She gently pats his head.
The birds don’t know what is happening with us humans, how
chancy our lives are. They must get on with their own singing, foraging and
reproducing in accordance with their natures. Nor do the plants. Northern
Illinois is in the anticipatory pause before the mad rush of full-on growing
season. Soon the air will be full of the hunger cries of nestlings, the trees
will be covered in soft green leaves and the ground will rapidly disappear
under a flush of stems and leaves you can almost see growing. Predators are
always, inevitably present. Last September I watched a praying mantis hunt
honey bees among the autumn pink blooms in a patch of Japanese anemone. After a
blindingly fast pounce, she meditatively ate each bee head first before
proceeding on to the thorax and abdomen, gaining sustenance for her own
autumnal work of laying eggs before winter. Now I’ve found two oothecas, or egg
cases, one nestled in the fork of two corky bur oak twigs, another clinging to
a dry beebalm stalk, both resembling stuck-on, dingy globs of spray-on
insulation that glitter slightly in the sun, though incredibly easy to overlook.
But predators face their own dangers, and few young mantises will survive the
spring.
The hawk family moved in some years after the local crow
population was decimated by West Nile virus and found a good living in my leafy
neighborhood. Cardinals became more frequent late summer visitors when I
started growing milkweed for the monarchs; large numbers of red-orange milkweed
beetles showed up from who-knows-where to feed on the plants, which, it has turned
out, the cardinals enjoy hunting. I’ve seen the adults demonstrating their
skills to somewhat gawky adolescents. Just last summer, a small group of crows
recolonized, and proceeded to mob one of the hawks, chasing it tree to tree,
raising a rowdy ruckus, clearing a space for their own clan. Always the push
and pull, the expansions, disturbances, and retrenchments that define a state
of dynamic equilibrium, however temporary.
How will we humans adapt to this massive disturbance this
spring and summer? It will be interesting and mostly not joyous to live
through. Many inhabitants of modern, well-off societies have somehow, for
years, been able to pretend that humans make the rules, all is well, and we
will be safe. Such pretense is a luxury the animals never have enjoyed. Hard
planetary boundaries and fraught ecosystem requirements do exist. Yet love
exists too, and everywhere, amidst the imperatives of risk and survival. My neighbor’s son has learned lessons about
both motherly patience and the qualities of wood as expressed in tree branches.
My husband is building me a cold frame, something he never had time for before,
that soon will be sheltering seedlings. The buds are near bursting. I’m pretty
sure that a certain species of mining bees will appear as usual, just as the
chokeberry blossoms first open to display pollen-laden anthers, and they’ll be
able to provision their nests. The bumblebees, hummingbirds and butterflies
will show up. Then, as the days grow shorter, the robins most probably will be
feeding ripe chokeberries to their lately fledged offspring. I’m looking
forward to these things.
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