Praise be to painted ladies by Alessandra Simmons
/Before I ever knew their name, I had seen them flying around the farm and thought to myself, “Not a monarch.” Less showy than monarchs, painted lady butterflies have smaller wings and their orange and black pattern isn’t quite as bright. Painted ladies, however, are more common than monarchs. Unlike monarchs, which can only lay eggs on milkweed, painted ladies have been discovered on over 100 different host plants. The pearly everlasting is one of them and it precisely why I came to finally notice this frequent visitor. At Hoot Blossom, we are propagating wildflowers and wildgrasses that would grow in this region had humans not had such a predilection for building roads, buildings, and lawns. As I was potting up the pearly everlastings for sale, I noticed cobweb-like things and little black caterpillars on the silvery fuzzy leaves. “What pest is this?” I wondered. It wasn’t pretty, and I didn’t think anyone would want to purchase the plants so I stopped potting them up.
After a bit of research, I learned it was the painted ladies laying eggs on the pearly everlasting plants, building silk nests and eating the leaves. Carrying on as painted ladies will do. I learned painted ladies are found across north america and around the world, are not picky eaters and are not in need of conservation, and I felt disappointed.
We are also propagating and selling butterfly weed, a type of milkweed adored by monarch caterpillars. When we find a monarch caterpillar on the underside of the narrow leaves, chomping away, we rejoice and show it off to visitors who also ooh and ahh.
I wonder about my different reactions to the types of butterflies living on our plants. With monarch populations at risk due to loss of habitat, it has become quite popular to breed them. This is one reason we are so excited to find their caterpillars. Especially since scientists are now saying the best thing you can do to support healthy butterfly populations is plant milkweeds and butterfly habitat and let them breed in the wild, rather than breed them indoors.
Currently we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction: 1 million species are on the brink of dying off according to the recent report “2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services” released by the U.N. which states that this extinction is in part caused by the fact that humans have radically altered 75% of the usable land primarily with agriculture and concrete.
Monarchs are one of the species at risk, painted ladies less so. So while I think excitement is a reasonable reaction to finding a caterpillar on a milkweed; I think finding a painted lady caterpillar ought to inspire the same joy. In the poem “Pied Beauty,” Gerald Manley Hopkins extols ordinary speckled parts of the landscape:
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
While we are doing the urgent work to restore habitat for monarchs (and the other 999,999 other species at risk of extinction), it seems to me that we need another version of Hopkins poem to help us appreciate the common place plants and animals that are doing the hard work of living with us as neighbors.
Glory be to things that survive. Quack grass that persists, hackberry trees that thrive through drought and flood. For so-called “street trees,” bur oak and hedge maple preservering on polluted curbsides. For Austrialian Cuttlefish. Squirrels feasting on the nuts of city parks. Falcons nesting on skyscrapers. Coyotes and crows adapting to an urbane lifestyle... and yes glory be to painted ladies growing as happily on my pearly everlasting as it does on parking lot thistles.
An Indescribable Sound: Lessons from a Raven by Alessandra SImmons
/The silhouette of a dark bird flew over, the white winter sky bright behind it. I could hear the thrum of its wings and its call. A sound I had never heard before. It sounded circular. Like bubbles rising. No matter how hard I tried to imitate it when I got home I could not. Though the bird’s shape appeared corvid, I assumed it must have been a different kind of bird. For I have heard raven’s caw and crackle. This was so different from those bellicose laughs; it was ethereal.
Then, I forgot about this bird and its mysterious sounds until a month later when I was walking again on the section of the same street. This time I could see the bird perched at the top of the trees. Opening his mouth, the familiar gurgly caws of a raven or crow. (For the life of me, I can never remember the defining features of crows vs ravens in the moment of actually seeing one.)
But, then, in an instant the call changed to the magical weightless noises I had heard before. As we approached the bird interchanged the caw for a ringing bell in his throat. Then it flew away.
This time when I got home, I started googling. Sounds of Ravens. Sounds of crows. Of all the sounds on the Cornell birds page only one approached the magic I had heard in the tree that day. I emailed my birds gurus—Kristen and Eric—to help me understand what I am hearing—since Google was not forthcoming enough.
They were generous with their time and answer. With access to a member’s only bird resource through Cornell called “Birds of the World,” we learned “the total vocal repertoire may be virtually limitless.” Kristen went on…“What’s interesting is that there’s a lot still unknown about raven calls, esp. since they can vary locally (birds can have dialects too, which is fascinating) and even among individuals. Ravens can also mimic non-bird sounds.”
Ravens make a variety of croaking calls, but researchers have also noted “knocking, bell-like, hiccup, dripping, woo-woo, and toot calls of unknown function” as well as “growls” “whines” “screams” and “honks.” None of these descriptions are fitting for the gossamer sound I heard, but now I know it’s because their vocabulary is more expansive than ours. (Note: I will bake cookies for any birder who records this magical raven noise so we can study it together and try to find the words to describe it. Both times I encountered this bird, I was walking on the north end of Main Road.)
So, ravens have dialects, are accomplished imitation artists, communicate with family members and neighbors in sounds indecipherable to humans, with messages not meant for us. As I learned more about ravens, I was humbled by all that I didn’t know. And worse yet— all that I had assumed. I believed the little I knew about ravens was all that they had to offer. How often do I make these kinds of assumptions?
Columnist Alessandra Simmons is a poet and gardener. “Everyday nature” is sponsored by the Washington Island Art and Nature Center. The Art and Nature Center is dedicated to the promotion, preservation and understanding of the creative arts and natural history of Washington Island.
Everyday Nature: Spring Re-Awakens by Alessandra Simmons
/Like many of the trees on the Island, the Everyday Nature column has been dormant for a while. I was finishing up my PhD in English with a creative dissertation — which means I wrote about 60 pages of original poetry and a 30-page critical introduction. My dissertation, titled What Is Urgent Is Also Beautiful after a poem I wrote for a Write On and Midsummer Music collaborative event last summer, is a study in ecopoetry. Ecopoetry — derived from the Greek word oikos, meaning house — is poetry that asks its reader and writer to consider the house we live in. It’s poetry that features our environment, the planet where we live as more than a setting for human stories and more than a metaphor for human emotions; the natural world is a fully fleshed character in its own right, place in crisis, a place of deep beauty.
When I moved to Milwaukee five years ago to start my PhD, I hadn’t heard of Washington Island, and yet, through a series of fortunate events, I had the opportunity to start farming on the Island and working as a Naturalist at the ANC the following summer. My oikos is now very much the Island, and the poems I wrote for my dissertation reflect that. I’ve written poems for economist Thornstein Veblen whose writing cabin is next to the Jacobsen Museum, poems for the mountain ash outside my bedroom window, for the eagle that dropped a seagull carcass in front of me while I took a winter walk, to lake flies and chickadees, to mushroom hunting.
While I have missed some of the aspects of student life like living in Milwaukee and teaching classes on campus, my Island home has afforded me a new perspective and space to grow as a writer, mother, gardener — for which I am incredibly grateful. Finishing up my dissertation on the Island during COVID-19 meant that my oral defense — a conversation about my dissertation with five professors — also took place on the Island. I sat in the Rutledge Room with my headphones plugged into my laptop connected to the most reliable Internet on the Island (that I know of) as my professors talked through my manuscript, asked me questions, and ultimately decided to pass me.
After the defense, I drove up Main Road, where I was flagged down by my husband and son, who surprised me with a picnic lunch that we enjoyed at Schoolhouse Beach. It was one of the first glorious sunny days that felt like spring was a harbinger for summer. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate.
So now I’m a doctor and I can prescribe poems, and I can also write Everyday Nature articles again! I look forward to starting that conversation again.
Selection from “What Is Urgent Is Also Beautiful”
For forsythia stitching yellow blooms, magnolia and serviceberry covered in a luxury of white, willows and birch washing the sky in gauzy green, these bags, their rotting innards do not exist. Only misunderstood as nuisances, when the wind lifts them from our hands and they tangle in branches. Trees do not know they are competing for spring. Who can bloom faster, fiercer. Catkins, seedpods, pollen tuffs, maple spinners, Q-tips, nylons, bottle caps.
Family Portrait on a Farm (1933)
A blur-faced son looks away, while his brothers hold
our gaze. Their light eyes ghost in this old photograph.
What did they want us to see? A field and its workers.
A mother, thin-lipped, worn and sun-spent as her sons’
clothes. What we are allowed to catalogue — how they
ploughed the acres and slopped the pigs. Seeded
and cut down. Threshed and slaughtered. Of the mother
we only allow for dishes washed, water carried, laundry
hung, coffee poured. But what of her mineral body
given and given and given. Ten sons and daughters
and three in the cemetery. Wheat poured through
a living thresher, calcium, phosphorus, potassium.
first published in Spillway
Everyday Nature: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bold Jumping Spider by Alessandra Simmons
/I notice a large — too large — black something on my kitchen ceiling. I stand on a chair, with a glass bowl and seed catalogue grabbed quickly from the counter to escort this uninvited guest outdoors. The seed catalogue is thicker than I want it to be. I coax it under the glass bowl and in doing so jostle the spider. What are spider legs? Did I hurt yours? I carry you out to the picnic table in our front yard.
It is your jointed legs, all sharp angles, that make me feel uneasy. The number of them; how dexterous they are.
Spider, dear spider, you preen. You are a lesson in #selfcare. All the mom blogs and pandemic articles love to describe the absolute necessity of self-care, but who has time for that. On my picnic table, after I release you from the slightly damp bowl, you acrobatically and thoroughly dry yourself. Leg by leg. Again and again. Each leg tending to its neighbor. You smooth your large abdomen with your second to last legs.
Your abdomen, yes, it is called an abdomen, is large, unusually so, because you are pregnant. Godspeed, mama, may you find a good crevice or flat surface to nestle against and spin your webbing and lay your eggs. Just, please, not inside the house.
On my picnic table, you continue to preen unhurriedly, you have no where to go, and so I fetch my phone and take your picture to upload to an insect identification group on the world wide web. (A hunter, you use your ethereal thread to as a life-line when you leap, not to build a web to catch your food.) From nerdy strangers on a public forum, I learn your proper name: Phidippus audax. Audax as in audacious. Bold. daring. Common to Southern Canada, the U.S. and parts of Mexico and Cuba.
A jewel, a button. Alive. Breath travels through your lungs passively. You do your small part to filter the air and return it to the trees.
It is not your slight velvet that makes me think of luxury as I watch you. I am here, watching you, when I could be doing something useful. My son is occupied with crayons. I have work to do. I have weeds to pull. Dinner to cook. And yet, for more than ten minutes I do nothing but I watch you, my eight-legged neighbor — and this is a luxury.
After I empty you from the bowl, and you have preened yourself for some time, you turn around to look at me. Your captor, your mode of transportation: a giant, but with only four oddly placed appendages. You wonder, how does she get anything done?
As you rub your large eyes with your smallest forelegs, I wonder about your humanity. To have you humanity do you need to be human or to act like a human? Washing my face brings me a certain kind of relief, maybe even joy. What is it you are thinking right now?
You are an interruption. There were other things I wanted to write about — the bats I’ve seen flying in the daytime, the well-curated and labeled wildflower planting behind the Art and Nature Center — and yet I am here, writing about you.
I recently read Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a poignant reflection on western science, indigenous wisdom, and the more-than-human world. I am struck by the author’s intimate observation of place. In one chapter, she spends more than a page describing how rain accumulates and falls differently from different types of trees. To understand this she had to sit and ask questions of trees during a rainstorm. While I desire this kind of intimacy with the earth, I find it hard to step away from my cell phone, my to-do list, my toddler who is about to fall into hydrangea bushes. You, dear spider, invite me into stillness with your busyness — your eight legs are still smoothing and grooming fastidiously
“Are you?” My son doesn’t yet know the word “where,” so when he looks for things he asks, “Are you mama?” “Are you spider?”
Shadow in full sun / in detail, you carry on / silk thread drifts, then gone.
Columnist Alessandra Simmons is a poet and gardener. She's inspired by the beauty of nature every day and loves to learn about its intricacies. If you have a photo or question to share about Washington Island's great outdoors, send it to editor@washingtonislandobserver.com.
“Everyday Nature” is sponsored by the Washington Island Art and Nature Center. The Art and Nature Center is dedicated to the promotion, preservation and understanding of the creative arts and natural history of Washington Island.
Everyday Nature: Parable in the Flower Garden by Alessandra Simmons
/You have to be in a pretty bad mood to maintain it while harvesting flowers on a breezy Wednesday morning. Luckily, I had thoughts of the global pandemic weighing on me and a shouty toddler punching the flowers as I tried to cut them, so I was able to retain my gloomy disposition quite well. Even as monarchs flitted from the pink and purple scabiosa daisies to coneflowers. Even as the fresh-faced sunflowers smiled at me. Even when the toddler started to pick at weeds and sing lullabies to himself for a brief interlude between his big unnamable emotions.
What finally startled me out of myself was a white admiral butterfly flying — hither and thither — with just one and a half wings. Her right wing was completely missing the lower half. And yet, just like the brightly colored monarchs and work-minded honey bees buzzing about, she went about her business unfazed by her missing part. Both the physics of it and the clear lesson about perseverance were a marvel to me. But there was something more to it, something that in the moment, I couldn’t name.
The flowers needed cutting and the toddler needed soothing so I carried on about my own business with my buckets and clippers, singing the “Wheels on the bus go round and round.”
Throughout the day I continued to contemplate the fraction of a butterfly I witnessed in the flower garden. I remembered the poem “Zacuanpapalotls” by Milwaukee poet Brenda Cárdenas and re-read it. Poetry has the ability to put words and images to what is ineffable and this poem was able to come closer to naming what I felt as I watched the white admiral butterfly. The last stanza of the poem reads:
We are—
one life passing through the prism
of all others, gathering color and song,
cempazuchil and drum
to leave a rhythm scattered on the wind,
dust tinting the tips of fingers
as we slip into our new light.
The poem draws awareness to what we normally resist noticing — the power of our interconnected lives. How my life passed through the white admiral butterfly’s and her life passed through mine and we were both changed. She was able to lift out of my sullenness because she was able to explain it to me. With her help, I understood that I feel bits of myself missing in the day to day of this enduring pandemic — with loved ones so far away carrying on, getting married, being born and dying, with so much tumult, disparity, and distrust revealed by the hardship across the nation, and yet, like this butterfly, we can slip into new light. We can resist the darkness. As the pandemic wears on and we continue to greet friends and strangers from safe distances and from behind masks, may we still gather color and song.
Columnist Alessandra Simmons is a poet and gardener. She's inspired by the beauty of nature every day and loves to learn about its intricacies. If you have a photo or question to share about Washington Island's great outdoors, send it to editor@washingtonislandobserver.com.
“Everyday Nature” is sponsored by the Washington Island Art and Nature Center. The Art and Nature Center is dedicated to the promotion, preservation and understanding of the creative arts and natural history of Washington Island.
Praise Be to Painted Ladies by Alessandra Simmons
/Everyday Nature
Before I ever knew their name, I had seen them flying around the farm and thought to myself, “Not a monarch.” Less showy than monarchs, painted lady butterflies have smaller wings and their orange and black pattern isn’t quite as bright. Painted ladies, however, are more common than monarchs. Unlike monarchs, which can only lay eggs on milkweed, painted ladies have been discovered on over 100 different host plants. The pearly everlasting is one of them and it precisely why I came to finally notice this frequent visitor. At Hoot Blossom, we are propagating wildflowers and wildgrasses that would grow in this region had humans not had such a predilection for building roads, buildings, and lawns. As I was potting up the pearly everlastings for sale, I noticed cobweb-like things and little black caterpillars on the silvery fuzzy leaves. “What pest is this?” I wondered. It wasn’t pretty, and I didn’t think anyone would want to purchase the plants so I stopped potting them up.
After a bit of research, I learned it was the painted ladies laying eggs on the pearly everlasting plants, building silk nests and eating the leaves. Carrying on as painted ladies will do. I learned painted ladies are found across north america and around the world, are not picky eaters and are not in need of conservation, and I felt disappointed.
We are also propagating and selling butterfly weed, a type of milkweed adored by monarch caterpillars. When we find a monarch caterpillar on the underside of the narrow leaves, chomping away, we rejoice and show it off to visitors who also ooh and ahh.
I wonder about my different reactions to the types of butterflies living on our plants. With monarch populations at risk due to loss of habitat, it has become quite popular to breed them. This is one reason we are so excited to find their caterpillars. Especially since scientists are now saying the best thing you can do to support healthy butterfly populations is plant milkweeds and butterfly habitat and let them breed in the wild, rather than breed them indoors.
Currently we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction: 1 million species are on the brink of dying off according to the recent report “2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services” released by the U.N. which states that this extinction is in part caused by the fact that humans have radically altered 75% of the usable land primarily with agriculture and concrete.
Monarchs are one of the species at risk, painted ladies less so. So while I think excitement is a reasonable reaction to finding a caterpillar on a milkweed; I think finding a painted lady caterpillar ought to inspire the same joy. In the poem “Pied Beauty,” Gerald Manley Hopkins extols ordinary speckled parts of the landscape:
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
While we are doing the urgent work to restore habitat for monarchs (and the other 999,999 other species at risk of extinction), it seems to me that we need another version of Hopkins poem to help us appreciate the common place plants and animals that are doing the hard work of living with us as neighbors.
Glory be to things that survive. Quack grass that persists, hackberry trees that thrive through drought and flood. For so-called “street trees,” bur oak and hedge maple preservering on polluted curbsides. For Austrialian Cuttlefish. Squirrels feasting on the nuts of city parks. Falcons nesting on skyscrapers. Coyotes and crows adapting to an urbane lifestyle... and yes glory be to painted ladies growing as happily on my pearly everlasting as it does on parking lot thistles.
I Was Here: Leaving A Mark on Nature
/Sara Hafner, Grandma Wendy and Grandpa Lee were here, etched onto rocks at School House beach. ATVs plow tracks into the patches of dwarf lake irises at Carlin’s point, and along the roadside on Indian Point, the irises are mowed by the town crew. The zip of SeaDoos in Detroit harbor breaks the silent sunrise. A speaker whines country music from a boat in the harbor. A creative AirBnB is docked all summer at the ridges in Jackson Harbor, puncturing the vista to Rock Island.
Depending on the public space, we have certain expectations. At the Ridges Natural Area, we expect to find plants in protected, while along Indian Point Road we do not. At School House Beach — where we’ve been trying to come up with campaigns to have visitors help us preserve the rock beach — we may be frustrated to find people scratching their names. We expect motorized crafts to be speeding along the edges of the Island, though we may hope to avoid them while we paddleboard or fish in our boats.
Bill McKibben wrote an essay a few decades ago about the “End of Nature.” The gist of his thesis is that there is no corner of the earth that is unmarked by humans. Our air pollution, noise pollution, footsteps, hitchhiking seeds and germs on our shoes and hands have touched and changed every place — nothing is as it was. Though I’ve never been to the North Pole, the carbon dioxide from my car has.
If nature has ended, should I expect dwarf lake iris to persist? With a small and shrinking habitat around the Great Lakes, the flowers are considered a threatened species by U.S. Fish and Wildlife. Does it matter if they become endangered or even extinct?
In late spring when they bloom, their bold little faces upright and aglow in the fresh sunlight, the answer is wholeheartedly yes. Yes, they have a right to exist, and I want them too. In August, when they express themselves only in green, the answer is still yes.
So how do we help people who do not appreciate them to love them just as much? Maybe we suspend placards from the surrounding trees around with Louise Gluck’s “Wild Iris” inscribed on it, so hikers and ATV riders would have to duck or read the poem that makes us consider the perspective of the iris:
At the end of my suffering
there was a door.
Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.
Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.
It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.…
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.
And perhaps at School House Beach, to help people love and care for the rocks, we could make a mock museum exhibit: A rock on velvet in a display case, with a placard that reads: “This is a rock. Smooth and lovely to touch. Alone it is just a rock, but together with all other rocks on the shoreline of this beach, it is more than a rock. Please leave the rocks in this place where they can be more be a natural wonder enjoyed by all who visit.”
Creative interventions like these may or may not stop a trampling foot or grafitti-prone hand. But they do tell me that nature didn’t end. We may have changed, corrupted, depleted it, but as a whole it is not dead. I believe nature is a process and that humans are a part of it: our creativity marks and changes habitat for ourselves, other creatures, and geological creations. We have to decide what kinds of marks we leave.
Broad Wing Hawk Migration
/On an early morning last spring, I was driving along on Washington Island and a broad-wing hawk broke from his statue-like form on a low branch and cruised beside the road for a moment before disappearing into the woods. Startled and delighted, I continued on and saw eight more hawks in flight or perched along the roadside before I reached my destination. Later, on a walk I saw a hawk swoop down and pick up an unlucky garter snake that had likely just awoken from his winter hibernation. My jaw dropped like a cartoon character. What were the chances? The sight of a raptor catching a snake is marvelous enough to cause the founding of city. It is said the Aztec god of the sun told his wandering people to settle down and build a city when they saw an eagle with a snake in its claws sitting on a cactus. Where they saw this spectacle is now Mexico City. Perhaps what I saw was even more marvelous, for the bird and snake were in midair!
What I didn’t know on that day is that hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of broad-wing hawks had descended on Washington Island as their migration instincts called from northern South American to finding breeding forests in the north. In the days that followed, I saw great numbers hawks flying in large circles high above the Island. I heard many different explanations for these flying formations. My favorite was the birds were promenading to find a date in their avian way. Instead walking around the town square after dinner, these birds promended with the clouds to find a suitable mate for their upcoming breeding season. But in fact, these high laps above the Island help broad-wing hawks to orient themselves and find thermals. They use thermals drafts to give them a boost on their many-mile journeys. Broad-wing hawks are actually not particularly social birds, but they often migrate in groups of several thousand because the best way for these traveling birds to find thermals is by following other like-minded birds. While traveling on thermals and updrafts help the birds conserve energy and fly faster, the air currents do not necessarily track with their ultimate destination, so as the birds head north they are more careful to orient themselves and correct course.
The woods on the Island were laden with hawks. From my kitchen window, I saw another hawk make a meal of sunning snake. It is not marvelous, I realized, to see a snake caught in the talons of a hunter hawk, it just very hawk. Flying, swooping, hunting, catching, eating is what hawks do. Because the hawks had amassed on Washington Island in such great numbers, we land-dwelling humans were outnumbered and therefore momentarily the Island transformed. I no longer saw the Island as human village, but as a hawk’s.
One reason the Island made such a great place for the hawks is because Washington Island well suited for a layover migrating birds. As Kristin Wegner, a director of the Hoy Audubon Society and a guide for Washington Island’s 2019 Birding Festival describes: “Birds that head up the peninsula get ‘funneled’ to the island as they head north, so by the time they get to the island, they might be more concentrated than they would be if they had headed north over the wider part of Wisconsin.” On the island, Wegner explained, there's habitat to feed a variety of birds. “Raptors can hunt, shorebirds can peck for tidbits on the beaches, grassland birds find insects in the fields, and warblers feed up in the trees (and those birds LOVE the huge groups of midges that emerge on the island in May!).” What’s more, the Broad-winged Hawks and other raptors can't catch thermals over open water, making the island “a good staging point and they can follow the other islands north on the way to breeding grounds in Canada.” Migrating birds like the Broad-wing hawk may stop on the Island for a couple of days days to whole week depending on weather conditions and how much they need eat in preparation for the next flight.
For a few days when the Broad-wing hawks visited us, I was able to see field and forest from a hawk’s perspective — branches for alighting, colors for blending, winds for soaring, snakes and mice for eating, the northern horizon for traveling. As I learn more and more about birds and their behaviors, the more the landscape unlocks before my eyes.
On foxes, building blocks, and the behavior of mice
/One of the great benefits of being on Washington Island is our proximity to the natural world. We have the privilege of hiking through the deciduous forests and discovering the tiny kingdoms of mushrooms. We have the privilege of watching sandhill cranes strolling through the fields snacking on worms, grasshoppers, frogs, and other small animals. To see monarch caterpillars munching on milkweed. We have the privilege of being neighbors to the fox as it slink across the road at dusk and, if we are lucky, to hear their strange bark. Poet Alice Oswald described her eavesdropping of a fox like this:
I heard a cough
as if a thief was there
outside my sleep
a sharp intake of air
a fox in her fox-fur
stepping across
the grass in her black gloves
barked at my house
hungrily asking
in the heart's thick accent
Washington Island is home to two kinds foxes, red and gray. Gray foxes are particularly notable because they are one of only two canines in the world that have the ability to climb trees using their semi-retractable claws.
Both kinds of foxes are considered small predators, meaning they hunt mice and other smaller mammals. As other articles in the Observer have noted, this role is an important niche in our ecosystem.
A new study out of Denmark, Cascading effects of predator activity on tick-borne disease risk, sought to learn why there is a relationship between mice, fox, and lyme disease. For two years, Dr. Hofmeester studied the concentration of ticks found on mice and tested them for the disease-causing bacteria in areas where small predators, like the fox, were protected versus areas where the fox were heavily hunted.
He found that in areas that were home to small predators, mice had 10-20 percent as many newly hatched ticks on them compared to mice in habitats without many predators. Further, the density of Lyme-disease-carrying ticks on these mice also decreased by a significant margin (15 percent of the area with fewer predators).
Interestingly, the prevalence of foxes and other small predators did not decrease the number of mice but rather changed their behavior. Mice with predator pressure curtail their movement, which Dr. Hofmeester suggested decreases their availability to be host to questing ticks. If mice curtailed their movements, larval ticks might feed on other birds or mammals or uninfected hosts that would not carry the disease to humans. Or better yet, perhaps ticks would not find that first bloodmeal at all.“The predators appear to break the cycle of infection,’’ said Dr. Hofmeester as quoted in the recent New York Times article, “Lyme Disease’s Worst Enemy? It Might Be Foxes.”
All of this reminds me of my seventh grade science class where we built a large pyramidal structure out of blocks; each block represented a plant or animal in an ecosystem. Then the teacher asked us to start removing certain blocks—species that had gone extinct or were removed from our immediate surroundings. As we took away certain species of plants, insects, or animals, the structure became less and less sturdy until it eventually collapsed with a great thunder.
As we were picking up the blocks, one of my classmates found a block with the word “humans” written on it. As fear crept into our little seventh-grade hearts, our teacher assured us that our ecosystem was not yet close to complete and utter collapse like our tower of blocks, but that it was important to note that humans were a part of our ecosystem. We are not outside the natural world, but part of it.
With this idea in the forefront of my mind, I realize the need to rewrite the opening of this article: “One of the great benefits of being on Washington Island is our proximity to the natural non-human world.” We have the privilege of seeing how our actions directly impact our neighbors, the mice, the foxes, the ticks, the birds, and the humans.
By describing the fox as “hungrily asking / in the heart's thick accent,” poet Alice Oswald reinforces this idea of interconnectedness for me. I feel a longing in my own heart for something just as hard to describe as the eerily human-dog sounds of a fox’s bark.
The Miraculous Commonplace
/In her illustrated poem “On Behalf of Seeds,” Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña observes that seeds are: “Keepers of inner time, they know when to jump. / Some have parachutes, others weight. / Every seed is a space ship, a nomad planet waiting to sprout.”
This poem embodies what I love about poetry. A good poem makes me see the world again, newly. A poem can transform a familiar object, like a water glass or swiss chard seed, and make it miraculous or strange. Since reading Vicuña’s poem, I’ve started to see spaceships and galaxies of all sorts in my garden and around the Island...
There is a yellow and purple-speckled lily I wanted to cut for bouquet-making, but when I leaned closer, I discovered it was a galaxy I could not interrupt. The residents were incredibly tiny basket weavers. So small, they were still within the basket their mother had made for them.
A sunny day followed by an evening rainstorm transformed the paved roads into public sauna for bold (unaware) toads. On the steamy wet roads, toads meditated in their toadly fashion. This long, narrow galaxy of toads that criss-crosses the Island transformed our car into an ungainly monster as we zigged and zagged to avoid the lounging toads.
The milkweed blooming in front my house is a bed and breakfast for all sorts of cavorting insects, with sweet nectar on tap, leaves that fold into private rooms or serve as a dinner table and dinner combo. My window corners contain a soap opera of spider drama and artistry. The sunset transforms Detroit Harbor into a new yellow sky. Mosquitoes are fighter pilots attempting to land on and pillage new planets, the warm skin I call my arms and legs. (They too often complete their missions successfully.) The center of a zinnia is fertile ground for a tiny flower garden of its own: yellow, star-shaped blooms.
The haiku is a kind of poem that is given to this sort of small-wonder discovery. The haiku asks a writer to concentrate on a single image. With only 17 syllables (usually in three lines 5/7/5) a writer must condense a world of full of detail and movement into a single intense moment. Like this one by 17th-century haiku master Matsua Basho (translated by Robert Hass)
A bee
staggers out
of the peony.
What small and near galaxies and transformations have you seen recently around the Island? Please share your pictures or haikus that capture the miraculous commonplace.
It’s torch! It’s a medicine! It’s mullein!
/Flannel leaf, cowboy’s toilet paper, bunny ears, hag taper, candlewick plant, Aaron’s rod, Jupiter’s staff, lungwort, Quaker’s rouge. When a plant has a long list of names, you know that is has interesting stories to tell. One if its most ancient claims to fame is found in the Odyssey, when Ulysses must overcome the temptations of Circe. The gods give him mullein and with the plant’s aid “he dreaded none of her evil works.”
This common plant, mullein, can currently seen blooming around the island (including out the window at the Art and Nature Center). It is actually the homely cousin to the snapdragon. Within the Scrophulariaceae family, the genus Verbascum consists of about 300 species native to Europe, West and Central Asia, and North Africa. Most are tall biennials with large leaves and flowers in long spikes.
A biennial, mullein grows a low rosette of soft leaves in its first year, and, in the second year, it sends up a stalk which can grow to be 8 feet tall. The yellow, honey-scented flowers attract all kinds of insect pollinators. Hardy and drought- and pest-resistant, mullein is easy to grow in your pollinator garden.
And after it has bloomed, it is a plant that keeps on giving. The leaves and flowers can be steep as a tea to help sufferers of respiratory problems like chest colds, bronchitis and asthma. Both parts of the plant contain saponins, which makes coughs more productive, and mucilage, which soothe irritated membranes.
When you have finished harvesting the leaves and flowers, there is still more functionality left in the plant! In a field of mullein, you may notice dried out, one-year-old stalks still standing. This is the part of the plant that ancient Romans dipped in tallow to create torches to carry during funeral processions. If you are having a outdoor party, you can make your own rustic garden candles with this plant. Simply harvest dried stalks, dip them in wax (such as bees wax or melted down old crayons). Once they are dried, you have a one-time use torch! It is recommended to have a bucket of sand on hand, should you need to extinguish them before they are completely spent.
This year while my mother visited the Island she took on the task of weeding the circle garden with a crab apple tree in the center. While she pulled out the grasses and thistle, and planted the marigolds, nasturtiums, and snapdragons, she left three soft-leaved mullein plants. Since she left they have grown to be taller than me! Next summer, I’m going to have some amazing garden torches.
Another Spectacular Sunset at People’s Park
/My first week on the job at the Art and Nature Center last summer, I was asked where the best place to watch sunsets on Washington Island is. Without a doubt, the answer is People’s Park off Little Lake Road. The sun drops behind the clouds, the bay, through the silhouetted cedar trees. Every night is a different kind of art project. Sometimes the sky is brushed with subtle pinks and purples in glossy water color. Other evenings, clouds are outlined in neon acrylics.
The color of the sky is determined by the distribution and disturbance of the light rays on our earth’s atmosphere. During the daylight hours, gas molecules in the atmosphere, mostly oxygen and nitrogen, cause sky to appear blue. At sunrise and sunset, however, the sunlight travels a longer path through the atmosphere before it reaches our eyes, removing most of the blue and leaving red and yellow light. Cloud help enhance sunsets because they act as a canvas for the sunlight. Because clouds are made up of particles that are much larger than visible light waves, they takes on the same hues as the incoming light.
Last Monday, the sun first set behind a cloud casting a rose-gold outline along the clouds turreted ridge. Then, the sun reappeared beneath the cloud: a glowing red-pink disk. In all my years of sunset-watching, I had never seen a sunset quite like this. With picnic tables, People’s Park a great place to bring a meal and watch the sunset. On some days, there large groups attending to the sunset. While I love watching the sunset anywhere, anyday, there something special about watching it with friends and strangers at People’s Park. Usually, at the moment of sun’s last rays bending over our corner of the earth, a hush settles over the crowd. A collective sigh.
What is it about the transient, celestial beauty of sunset (or sunrise, for that matter) that captures our imagination? I could come up with my own theories, but I love how poet Eloise Klein Healy describes it in her poem “Beach at Sunset.” First, she smartly acknowledges sunsets are dangerous territory for poems ( “All the clichés for it sputter”), and then she notes the specifics of the sunset she watches:
“what attracts me anyway
are these four species of gulls we’ve identified,
their bodies turned into the wind,
and not one of them aware of their silly beauty.
I’m the one awash in pastels…
When we are oohing and ahhing at the sun, we are caught in its light.
A Grass Meditation
/Grass: A Meditation
Recently, it has occurred to me that you can tell the history of a place through its grasses. In her stunning debut, Whereas, the Oglala Sioux poet Layli Long Soldier writes,
a grass chorus moves shhhhh
through half-propped
windows I swallow
grass scents the solstice
makes a mind
wide make it
oceanic blue a field in crests
With the “grassesgrassesgrasses,” Long Soldier paints a landscape of intimate knowledge and memory. In her poems, she most often refers to native grasses from the prairies of South Dakota, where her tribe’s reservation is located. I was struck by this collection, not only because of its fine craft and timeliness, but because of its exultation of grasses. The truth is I’ve never felt renewed by a chorus of grasses. When I eat oatmeal, corn chips or wheat bread, I never consider how these grains are truly cultivated grasses. Growing up in Los Angeles, I never had a lawn or thought much about them. Since the draughts, lawns have become almost impossible to keep. For a while, public service announcements with images of dead grass boasted “Brown is the new green.”
When I moved to Indiana for grad school, I admit I was amazed by the generous space between houses, the sprawling green, and the fact that everyone had a lawn but no one liked to mow. But it is here on the Island that I’ve can say for the first time I’ve become intimate with grass. When I close my eyes, I have visions of grass. Specifically, the long white rhizomes of quackgrass that haunt our garden beds. I’ve spent quite a few hours in the last three weeks digging out quackgrass, tracing the roots through the dirt with a claw-like hand tool, not a hoe, to avoid severing the roots as best I can. During these hours of weeding, I’ve had a lot of time to think. I come to have a new appreciation for the term ‘grassroots organization.’ If an organization is built like quackgrass, it can meet a lot of opposition, get its leaves (or leaders) pulled out, and still rebound again and again.
Native to Europe and Western Asia, quackgrass followed grain-planting settlers and now is a weed in 65 countries known by many names, including twitch grass, couch grass, scutch grass, and devil’s grass. By many farmers it is considered one of the worst weeds and has been for a long time. In 1931, the USDA put out special bulletin to warn about quack. Agronomist L. W. Kephart reported “whole farms have virtually been abandoned because the weed could not be controlled economically.” The bulletin also notes that as early as 1578 in the “Old Country” scutch grass was know to be “a naughty and hurtful weed to corne.”
One of the reasons twitch grass is so terrible is because it is nearly indestructible: it reproduces both by seed and by rhizome. The seeds are viable for up to six years and will remain so even if they pass through the digestive tract of most farm animals other than pigs. Further, if the rhizome breaks, say through tilling or weeding, the orphaned rhizome just forms a new plant.
Though there is nothing quite as satisfying as pulling out an entire rhizome, it is not plausible to rid the entire garden of quackgrass by hand. The longest quackgrass rhizome on record was found in Canada measuring in at 154 meters, with 206 shoots of growing from it. For this reason, we are covering the areas of the garden most quack-infested with black landscape fabric. The dark covering will cut off the photosynthesis of the grass and cause it to wither. A withered devil’s grass is much easier to pull out. Another option for overcoming quackgrass is gardening using the “lasagna-style,” which means layering cardboard and compost in the place where you want to grow your garden. Russell Rolffs will demonstrate this technique at the ANC’s first Garden Chat meeting of the summer, June 29 at 10:00 am.
For now as I return to the garden wishing and pulling the grassesgrassesgrasses out of the ground, I will try to encourage myself with notion that I am not just weeding, but I am participating in the history of this place.
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Everyday Nature: The oak took no heed
/In A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold muses,“An oak is no respecter of persons.” Each year, the oak tree grows a new ring of wood no matter who owns the land where it roots. No matter the human drama being acted out in faraway government offices or in nearby houses, the oak tree continues its sunlight alchemy so long as it can.
A year ago, I had not heard of Washington Island. But through a chain of happy events, I found myself living on the island, working as a naturalist as The Art and Nature Center and growing veggies for Hotel Washington. With two roles that kept me outdoors, I had the honor of surveying a piece of the Niagara Escarpment, dwarf lake iris, ringneck snakes. I witnessed the annual parade of blooms along Jackson Harbor Ridges as we approached the Summer Equinox, and then recede back into greens and browns as Fall took hold. I saw bald eagles, hawks, vultures soar over the garden as I dug up a millennia of rocks. And in the midst of all the creatures, geological formations, plants, I felt small and content to be so.
I am thankful for the beauty of Washington Island, its diverse biology and geology, and how it reminds me of my place. A creature alongside creatures, delighting in a cool evening at Schoolhouse Beach. The cedar soaks in the last rays of evening sun as do I.
Yellow, yellow, yellow; How leaves turn color in the fall
/Yellow, yellow, yellow I lie here thinking of you:—
the stain of love
is upon the world!
Yellow, yellow, yellow
it eats into the leaves,
smears with saffron
the horned branches...
William Carlos William published this poem, “Love Song,” in 1916 and it has been re-written every year on the trees in autumn. Ten years ago, when I moved to the midwest from the ever-present sunshine of southern California, I was stunned by this slow firework show in the trees. “How do they all get the memo at the same time?” I asked my midwestern friends. “How do the leaves know to change color and fall of the tree?”
It turns out it is not one thing that causes the leaves to change color and fall; there are a myriad of factors that contribute to bold autumn coloring of the tree line. As winter approaches, our nights grow longer and our days grow shorter. In response to the decreasing sunlight, trees produce a decreasing amount of chlorophyll—the green pigment and chemical in the leaves that is necessary to turn sun into sugar for the tree. As the chlorophyll decreases the carotenoids--the pigment in corn, carrots and buttercups--are able to show through. Carotenoids are always present in a leaf, but they must wait until chlorophyll production decreases to show their colors.
In addition to the decreasing amount of chlorophyll, the leaf will shut down its circulation by building up a cell barrier at the base of each leaf. The sugars that get trapped in the leaf stimulate the production of anthocyanins—the red pigment that appears in cranberries, strawberries, and plums. When the circulation between leaf and tree is completely shut down, the leaf is ready to fall. Fall temperatures and moisture in the soil can affect how showy or muted the autumn colors appear from year to year.
In the way that golden red mix in the maple trees along Indian Point Road is a signal for us to unpack autumnal sweaters and winter coats, it is a signal that the trees are preparing for the coming winter.
Linking Art Forms, Painting, Glass and Jewelry with Jeanne Cauldwell
/Linking Art Forms, Painting, Glass and Jewelry with Jeanne Cauldwell
Growing up Jeanne Cauldwell was always interested in creating. She learned to sew, crochet, English smock, cross stitch, and to needlepoint and decoupage. Much of this she learned from her Grandmother. While working as a flight attendant, she often had several projects she was working on. After retiring from Delta Air Lines 10 years ago, she wanted to explore new ways to express herself.
Her art forms now include Painting, Jewelry making and fused glass.
Her paintings are mostly in oil. But, she has also has work in watercolor. She first started painting here on the Island by taking classes with Lorna Cornell and then with Rodger Bechtold.
Most of her paintings are set here on the island. Spending part of the day outside painting is a real joy.
In relation to jewelry, Jeanne has had jewelry at the Art and nature Center for several years. But has recently concentrated on working with leather for bracelets and necklaces. The organic nature of the leather makes it fun to work with as wellbeing beautiful and comfortable to wear.
In addition, she is glass artist. Jeanne began working with glass about 4 years ago after taking a class in making fused glass pendants for jewelry. She was immediately hooked. The properties of glass make it very interesting work. Glass is a fairly sensitive medium that can be manipulated depending how the kiln is programed. She makes fused glass night lights and glass bowls and platters in addition to making glass pendant necklaces.
New and different art pieces will be introduced at the reception.
Jeanne is a seasonal resident. She and her husband, Malcolm, live in Knoxville, TN when not living on the Island. Her show, “ Linking Art Forms, Painting, Glass and Jewelry with Jeanne Cauldwell,” will be on display July 10-August 6. A reception for her show will be held Thursday, July 14, at 4:30 at the Art and Nature Center
Art in the Park and Ice Cream Social
/Saturday, July 9, 11 -3 This event features various art activites for kids and adults to dabble in. These include woodbuilding, mono-printing, collage, beading, face painting and more. Brats, hot dogs and ice cream are also available. Fun for the whole family.
June 13-July 9 Four Generations of Artistic Talent:
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June 13-July 9 Four Generations of Artistic Talent: Featuring the art of Clifford Charles Young, Lorel Jean Gordon, Jason Charles Gordon, and Lauren Marie Gordon
50th Anniversary Canvas Quilt
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More than 150 canvases by many artists create a stunning canvas quilt. Each individual canvas will be raffled off for $35. Winning tickets can be purchased at the Art and Nature Center until July 29 or until tickets are sold out.