by Brian Brett
SUNRISE BRINGS THE DEWBOWS, fogbows, halos, rainbows, and sun-rains of our temperate coast that enhance the opalescent greens of the landscape. There’s something about our local misty greens that enchants me more than the gaudy tropics. Each of us carries within us the homeland of our dreams, and this is mine. As Dorothy discovered in The Wizard of Oz, my heart’s desire is in my own backyard.
All the hope of the day is singing in the shrubs surrounding our farm while I make more tea and move to my desk. In the animal world, apart from humans, birds are my first love. I have lived with the African Grey parrot, Tuco, in my study for twenty-three years. He is very good at correcting me when I lose contact with the natural. He may have fewer brain cells, but they’re all turned on, unlike mine at various points in the day, and he does delightful double takes when a lost frog croaks. He sits on my shoulder while we communally sip our tea from my mug, and he stares at the endlessly fascinating computer screen before he turns to me and says, “Whaddya know?”
In odd ways birds have shown us how intelligence works. It was commonly thought we were dealt all our neurons at birth, until a team of researchers investigated the canary’s brain and discovered that learning new songs created more neurons. Yes, music makes their brains grow. Now we have evidence of the same with the human brain. Those who teach our children music in schools advocated this idea long before science proved them right. Experience is often ahead of science.
The mind invents itself with song, though not always. While the canary might be making a different music with its tunes, the chickadee is a three-note wonder, and it sticks to those notes until it can drive you mad in your backyard. Like many birds chickadees are constant in their song. Other birds are also obsessive. The red-eyed vireo wins the gold medal for intrepidity—one demented individual was recorded singing 22,197 songs in a day. That said, the intelligence of birds constantly surprises me. Ravens are so smart they can make your jaw drop with their tricks and tool uses. I like to think our pair of resident ravens are the real owners of our farm, blithely strutting about, supervising the day.
Mike Byron, the seventy-seven-year-old farmer down the road who, along with his wife, Bev, taught me so much about the small farm—even though I originally assumed I already knew enough to get along fine—once told me that in his childhood he’d owned a flock of guinea fowl. They might be good eating, and great alarm birds, but they’re also obnoxiously noisy and usually regarded as stupid. However, one of his hens hatched twenty eggs. Shortly after, the young hen, apparently fed up with the demands of her large flock, went down to the creek and crossed it via a narrow log, the chicks dutifully following. A chick fell off and was swept away by the rushing water. At the other bank the hen turned around and came back, losing more chicks along the way. She repeated her journey several times while Mike stood agape, paralyzed by this combination of murderous intent and intelligence. She whittled her flock down to one and then returned to the barn with the surviving chick blithely following.
Peafowl, in contrast, are known for their ferocious mothering, and at Trauma Farm they provide, along with the geese, our best early warning of trouble in the fields. They drive Sharon mad because of their love of dust baths in newly planted seedbeds and their addiction to tender garden greens, especially brassicas and mustards. Yet they work at keeping the ravens and eagles away from the chickens, maintaining a hundred-yard safe zone around the house. They are so obsessive they will spend all day driving starlings off the lawn.
There was a morning I was at my desk nursing my tea, wondering what words I could put together that would make enough meaning in my life to prevent me from becoming a victim of it, when suddenly the dawn became even noisier than usual, with a great honking of geese and wild ducks, joined by the warning blat of a peahen. Then I heard an eerie kiee-kieee cry I recognized immediately. Eagle. I strode out of my office and onto the deck of the adjoining second-floor greenhouse, where I had an overview of the fields. An eagle, obviously young and enraged, was striding along the shore of the top pond, screaming at the ducks and Chloe, the goose. He’d obviously muffed a dive at the mallards (eagles around our neighbourhood are far too cowardly to take on a fully grown goose), and now that the mallards had seen him, they were safe and would just dive if he tried again. They were swimming in circles, a few feet away, tormenting him, squawking out a duck’s version of “Nyah-nyah, you missed me,” as he strutted along the shoreline, powerless.
Meanwhile, the white peahen, Adona, at the lower pond with four chicks, was growing more stressed by the eagle’s refusal to depart and equally enraged by his hubris—turning his back to her and ignoring her warning cries. While the frenzied eagle screamed again at the ducks, she rushed him from behind, covering the thirty feet in seconds. She jumped onto his back, grabbed his white neck feathers, and began beating him with her wings. The terrified eagle tried to leap into the air, but she hung on and rode him like a bucking bronco as he ran across the field, her powerful beating wings preventing him from extending his own and flying away. His gut-wrenching screeching echoed across the field. Feathers were flying, and she must have ridden him a hundred feet before he finally rodeo-tossed her with an impressive jump kick, his beak striking the ground. Then he fled into the sky. I never saw that eagle again, or at least I didn’t recognize him. Adona harrumphed back to her chicks, while the ducks, the geese, and I froze temporarily, filled with silent awe. I returned to my office, knowing that Trauma Farm was secure in its madness, and began to write.
AS SOON AS WE bought the farm we began creating a sanctuary for local wildlife. Over thousands of years, ever since the first grain seeds were collected and stored for the following spring, farms have provided an environment for wildlife, often despite the farmers’ attempts to eradicate every unwanted living creature within trapping or hunting range. Our planting of bird “sanctuary trees” impenetrable by cats and other small predators—and shrubs that provided fruit and seeds all year around—was rewarded, within a decade, by a growing community of birds, including more quail than you could shake a stick at. When the quail returned to the farm, after being driven off initially by our cats and dogs, we thrilled at their cuteness, the multiple parenting of their young—the “alarm” males standing sentry on the fence posts. Quail have a very structured society.
Then one day Sharon was planting peas. She turned around and discovered a row of quail picking out the pea seeds behind her. She’d become a Pied Piper of quail. We decided to create a less quail-friendly habitat. But when you provide for nature it also provides for you. Soon after, before we could do anything, a Cooper’s hawk showed up, perched every morning on the high crossbar above the garden gate. The quail and, sadly, the Steller’s jays disappeared at a stunning rate. We began to call him Coop, short for Cooper’s hawk, and also after Gary Cooper, because he had the silent but determined gunslinger look of the actor in High Noon.
The ecology, because of its very nature, explodes around its barriers, like a river, always flowing in the path of least resistance. Although the first grains were harvested as long as twenty millenniums ago, it was almost another ten millenniums before mixed farms truly began to find their form and spread across the planet. Small animals, birds especially, learned to use the borders, the woodlots, the untilled land along the roads and trails surrounding these farms as habitat, allowing many of the migratory songbirds to flourish. These “margins” are now perhaps, along with diminishing marshlands and jungles, the richest sources of bird and mammal life in the temperate regions.
With the human populations expanding in Europe and Asia, the large predators and undomesticated ungulates gradually withdrew into the few wild pockets of today. Smaller animals and birds were hunted, and their populations also diminished. Plates of baked nightingales and skewers of deep-fried sparrows replaced roasted deer and boar. During the past century in North America, as thousands of small farms were swallowed by corporate agribusiness, or devolved into landscaped suburbs, their margins have also been lost
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Once people began moving into cities and suburbs in accelerating numbers at the beginning of the twentieth century, the phenomenon of birdwatching appeared, and within a hundred years it emerged into its current status: the fastest-growing hobby in North America and Europe. Now that we no longer live with the hens and the hawks we have to go looking for them. The planet is rapidly being converted into a collection of zoos, tourist hot spots, and little islands of endangered species we need to visit and view before they become extinct. The increasing rareness of birds makes them even more attractive to the strangest kind of enthusiasts—life-listers, birders who number their bird sightings. It’s the body count that counts, and the more endangered the bird, the better.
To have a unique bird show up in your yard can turn your life into a chaotic invasion of privacy, as numerous victims of “birder stampedes” have testified. I often laugh at the poet and novelist Jim Harrison’s bogus threat to shoot a rare little tweety bird at his ranch because so many birders were lurking in the shrubs, hoping for a sighting and driving him crazy.
Birding is a benevolent fresh-air sport that inspires a need to protect our depleting wildlife, and I can understand the desire to chance upon a rare grey owl or motmot, yet the life-lister’s compulsion to rigorously count sightings is symptomatic of the way we affect the earth—it’s the linearity of their fanatic hearts that sometimes makes the counting more important than preserving the endangered birds.
EXPERIENCING THE PRIVILEGED STATE of being middle-sexed in my younger years, like Tiresias, I saw the world while drifting between the female and the male condition. I’ve spoken with both their voices, the testosterone-pushed “voice of blood” and the intuitive female voice, watchful and communal.
In some ways these bipolar voices mirror human history on the planet—the demands of our male and female natures, the hunters and the gatherers, each with its blessings and dangers. Wendell Berry talks about our schizophrenic nature as comprising the exploiter (hunter) and the nurturer. Together they can make a lovely marriage but also a potentially toxic combination, depending on whether they balance each other or not. Men hunt and women gather. Skewed cultural slanting of these tendencies can lead to an endangered world—the dominance of those who hunt like heroes and berserkers, or of those who protect our nest with all the implacable compulsion of a psychotic mother.
Hunter-gatherer cultures based on sharing survived for hundreds of thousands of years. Many of them were matrilineal, giving slightly greater power to the feminine side, but history has shown us that men gravitate toward technology. The word, the plow, the potter’s wheel—all changed our social structures. Once tools and record keeping reach a critical stage, sharing becomes a lesser trait—until this century, in the developed world, where the power of the feminine principle has finally begun to rise again in everything from writing to tool use. Women now run tractors and pottery wheels, drive trucks and program computers. This is going to make for interesting times, and new possibilities for cultural change as our species faces the increasing threat of an environmental endgame.
The naturalist Bernd Heinrich believes that “our well-being is tied not so much to the structure of our society and the politics that determine it, as to our ability to maintain contact with nature, to feel that we are part of the natural order.” While it’s dangerous to generalize too much, occasionally it’s impossible not to when you are living close to the earth. It’s my belief that, because of the miracle of writing, which allows collective memory to be retained beyond oral tradition, we haven’t evolved as quickly as our tools, and thus accidentally separated ourselves from that natural order. That’s why I find myself in the odd position of attempting to write myself back into the landscape where I live.
But not on this eighteen-year-long day in the life of our farm. I shut down the computer and stand up. Tuco flies back to his cage. Outside, the morning is fresh with promise. LaBarisha, the Arabian mare, lets out a loud snorting neigh by the paddock. For her it’s always breakfast time, and when you are a beauty of the world, as she believes she is, breakfast should come regularly, which unfortunately it doesn’t always if Sharon is at the hospital, where she works as an emergency nurse, and I am locked in my room. The sheep are moving down from the field behind the house, which they find more comfortable in the dark. Since I’ve opened up the cross-fencing between the two largest fields, they’ve developed a routine. Spend the night behind the house, with the dogs standing sentinel; then drift down to the dewy grass of the lower field for a leisurely morning, and finally move up to nap beside the ponds, tug for a while at the hayrack, and wait for dinner.
Most farmers do their chores early and return to the house for breakfast, but my best writing hours are in the morning, so I do only the essentials, such as feeding the animals or opening their shelters, before breakfast (more honestly, Sharon usually does them) and then return to write until my office grows hot in the afternoon. That’s when I work the farm.
The dogs are ready as soon as I pick up the horse’s feed bucket by the greenhouse. Jen, the older border collie, glances at me with her knowing eyes, as if to say, “I’m ready to organize the farm, Boss. What should we do first?” The feed bucket is the giveaway. They bolt down the walkway; Bella the puppy, eager in the morning, deflects off a fence post and misses a turn—sliding hockey style into the page-wire fencing. But she is so young and thrilled with energy she hardly notices this spectacular crash. The dogs brake at the pasture gate, staring up at the horse, who studies them with contempt. She’s interested only in her breakfast. I dump the feed into her bucket, hung on the fence, and toss a couple of carrots in, which she crunches triumphantly.
Returning in the cool, freshened air, surrounded by the dancing dogs, it’s hard to lose heart. I glance over at the koi pond by the back door and notice the empty insect shells. The dragonfly nymphs have already climbed up the stalks of the iris and cracked open like science-fiction monsters, allowing the blue or orange adult dragonflies to emerge and unfold their lustrous wings to dry—leaving their transparent, hollow exoskeletons still attached to the leaves when they leap into the air and begin to hunt. Everywhere there’s a magic show, and I’ve stepped out of the dawn into the day, ready to let the tricks of life unfold.
3
FOWL PLAY
I PASS THE KOI pond and walk around the back of the house to the chicken run’s gate, which we leave open for the dogs to patrol at night and for the chickens to free-range during the day. The gate is only for emergencies. Then I unlatch the ramp to the coop. I love the thump of the hinged door with its little wooden steps when it hits the ground, and the fluttering exodus of the chickens, cackling excitement and joy. Every morning the chickens know delight. I wish I did.
As the birds rush toward the field a ruthless cock leaps onto the nearest hen, and she crouches dutifully, wings spread and trembling. The hens that escape the sex-mad roosters of the morning sometimes won’t stop for a hundred feet. I don’t blame them.
I open the side door and check the feed and the water. When I’m raising layers I carry a woven collecting basket that makes me feel like Little Bo-Peep.
There it lies in the straw. As fresh as it’s going to get. The egg. Despite its current sorry state in factory farms the egg remains one of history’s great cultural icons. From the cosmic egg to the primordial egg to the golden egg laid by that doomed goose, this marvellous creation has long inspired our imaginations. “Whiter than an egg . . . ,” Sappho said twenty-six centuries ago. This phrase, quoted from a rare Greek text known as the Dinner of the Learned, is all that remains of a poem written by a long-dead woman with a fondness for young girls. It’s taken on its own beauty over the years. Kenneth Rexroth called the fragment a supernatural gleam and a delusion. When I first encountered Sappho I was shocked by the evocative simplicity of this phrase, and the shock has remained with me for forty years. An egg can hardly be called white, but it’s a phrase that means more than it means; it can also describe a coo
ked and peeled egg, as firm and white as a young Greek woman’s thigh. It evokes purity, the qualities of whiteness, the mythology of eggs.
How lovely the egg—within it all the miracles of creation. Besides white, you can find brown, blue, speckled, grey, and even the legendary black eggs of a mysterious bird, possibly a honeycreeper, in deepest Central America. Pablo Neruda once talked of encountering eggs in the jungle that shone like a shotgun barrel.
Eros, that libidinous symbol of Greek mythology, was born from the egg laid by Nyx, the goddess of night. Leda met her swan, and the twins Castor and Pollux were born of her eggs. A multitude of cultures—Phoenician, Egyptian, Hindu, Japanese—insisted the world was either egg-shaped or hatched from an egg laid by the creator of the land. According to the Dogon people of Sudan and Mali, the cosmos is represented by the Nommo, a gigantic egg with two placentas. The Russians have a cruel wizard named Koshchei the Deathless, who can be killed only by destroying a magical egg in which the needle of his soul is buried. The Egyptian sun god hatched from an egg. And Sun Hou-zi, the divine ape of China, was also born of an egg, impregnated by the wind. The serpent-circled egg was a key symbol of the ancient cult of Orpheus.
GALLUS GALLUS, THE RED jungle fowl, and its variant, the grey jungle fowl, strode out of the Indus Valley into backyards at least five thousand years ago, and was more famed originally for cockfighting than for its eggs or meat. Black-chested and black-legged, it has red-brown neck feathers that shine deep mahogany. The hen lays clutches of six to eight brown eggs, an impressive number in the wild-bird world, though some birds can produce more. The partridge can clutch up to seventeen eggs. The chicken is so prolific the world is now eating more than 78 million tons of chicken a year.
