In mammal class, we pondered how you deal with a raccoon in a hot tub. We learned that swamp rabbits—“canecutters”—are twice the size of other cottontails; that groundhogs are a kind of squirrel; that raccoons eat yellowjackets; that the star-nosed mole has fingers on its schnozz. Someone told the story of the Tullahoma Bear, who raided rich folks’ garbage in the 1990s; she was eventually the victim of a witch hunt—shot and killed. We learned that if you smell skunk above you in the forest, look up: there’s likely a great-horned owl’s nest nearby. They savor skunk.
In mammal class, I also learned that deer, not so long ago, were once incredibly rare in Tennessee. Imagine: In 1931, there were only a couple hundred deer in the state. In the state.
Only two hundred of these soft brown beasts; these biggish, skittish, forest-dwelling mammals.
Imagine: How, in 1931, it would have taken your breath away to happen upon a single doe, or a buck or, best of all, a fawn. Today, in Tennessee, there are roughly 19 deer per square mile, or around 1.5 million Odocoileus virginianus.
At the park near my house, they are comfortable with humans, and do not retreat until you come exceedingly close. And maybe not even then. They trust us park-people to do no harm.
When I see them, I pause, and gaze back into the black pools of their eyes, and try to send vibes of kindness and calm. They do not make me gasp in wonder, but I do not find them less beautiful for their ordinariness.
What was once scarce is now commonplace; what once was rare is now everywhere, a risk to their own kin in their abundance.
There’s this push and pull in the relationship of humans to the creatures we share our world with: we crowd them out, almost shove them wholly off the planet; then we scramble to protect them. Could you call it a dance? Or a yo-yo diet, an indecision. An indecision of deer. First rare, then recovered, then robust. Sometimes, if wildlife recovery measures go well, they go too well. And the animals are at risk again, all elbows in the environment we have to offer them.
Too much, not enough, too much.
Then comes trouble. There’s a wasting disease, caused by overpopulation. A protein in a deer’s brain spreads through their body, into their nervous tissue. The proteins are called prions, which sounds to me like a make of car, or a robotics company. The deer gets skinny, tired, unafraid. They thirst.
In class, I held a deer pelt, smoothed it with my hands and lifted it to my nose. It had been purchased online I think, in a transaction perhaps partly handled by robots, and smelled like nothing. But the deer I come so close to in the park near my house exude a terrific musky scent; you can know they’re there even when they remain hidden. Once, while running, I came upon a nestled fawn, curled like a kitten in the grass beside the paved trail. I’ve since learned this is a thing mothers will do in their babies’ best interest: Leave them alone, isolate them, because they are less in the predator’s path than they would be with their kind, their vulnerable mama.
On my way home from naturalist class, my headlights catch the fallen bodies of several deer, slain on the side of the I-24, seen only for a fraction of a second as I speed by at 70 mph. I am predator then, whether I like it or not. (I don’t like it.) The deer’s worst enemy, careening down the highway, lost in my thoughts.
While I am thinking about bad proteins and overabundant prey and overabundant predators, my daughter is in biology class, making memes about DNA—about the proteins involved in it, about the synthesis of said proteins, which involves the processes of transcription and translation, which I know only as a thing you do on the waves of language. I picture my daughter at school in downtown Nashville, in a big, beautiful old Gothic building now surrounded by hotels and tourists. Recently we learned that a 20-story Marriott will break ground this summer on the space right behind her school—more traffic, more road closures, more tourists, more noise. We’ve been wondering, asking aloud: Is it a done deal, is there nothing we can do? I don’t think there’s anything we can do.
Just enough, not enough, too much.
I run away, back to naturalist class. I learn more names of things:
~the limnetic zone of a body of water, a place of gradient light where the sun breaks through at the top, and the depths are darker, and “good stuff is happening;”
~the littoral zone, a kind of threshold (and how I love thresholds!);
~the beautiful phrase, and thing, that is vernal pond.
We ponder the reality that often, wildlife rehabilitation and release sentences animals to death; they are no longer fit for the environments we offer them to. Consider fish: reintroduced to habitats that no longer serve them, sometimes victims to riparian zone loss, or to cow-and-geese-poop-ridden waters.
But we learn, too, names like hogsucker and tangerine darter and rosy side dace and musky. We learn there is a river in Georgia where you can snorkel and see all kinds of bright fishes.
We go to a nearby creek, where some of my fellow naturalists-in-training peel off socks and roll up cuffs and wade into the cold water with nets. Then we examine tiny creatures—macroinvertebrates—and try to identify them. We are all so excited, so eager to find and name as we peer into a shallow plastic dish: here a tiny crawdad, there a damselfly! A wild beastie, wormlike with a triangular head, whips itself back and forth wildly; it looks possessed or ready to explode into some horrible new being, and we’re in a collective tizzy, consulting our apps and laminated literature, what is it, what is it! A crane fly larvae is our final answer. The more different macroinvertebrates you find in a waterway, the healthier its ecosystem. We feel reasonably certain this creek is in good shape.
I am content among my fellow nature geeks, such an odd assortment of humans, all of us spending our weekends stroking animal pelts and wading in streams and chatting about parasites and rogue bears. After returning home I’ll spend the week bombarded by robots—or at least by news of them. Their emojis fill my emails; they are getting in arguments and washing windows and generating headlines for an editor friend of mine, who is given no choice but to listen to what they say. The robot tells her that the public wants stories on “the benefits of clutter in parenting.” So assign that, stat. The robot sez the public wants to know how “communication is important in parenting.” The robots seem to have suddenly arrived en masse, or maybe they have been gathering gradually, quietly, all along, and suddenly we have flipped on the lights. When I hear about them crawling the web I picture insects, or damselflies, busily doing their thing, mostly hidden from view, down in the murk. And us big, clumsy humans on the banks, trying to understand what the hell is going on.
And I want to go back into the woods.
I’ve wanted to share some of artist Dave Muller’s observations on the art and practice of watercolor (which I think can be applied to writing, too), so let’s make that happen. I’m going to make this available only to paying subscribers because, as Maggie Smith reminds me, this writing thing is work. And it’s ok to receive payment for your work. I’m going to take another class with Dave soon, and so can you! He has two coming up with Case for Making, and I really did not plan for F I E L D T R I P to become a CfM stan blast, but what can I say; I’m crushing on them right now!I do like a good crush.
Dave sez…
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