The Forest Unseen_A Year's Watch in Nature

by David George Haskell

  The eft’s spine and limbs make it ungainly on land, but the animal’s life cycle is only partly terrestrial. “Efts” are just one of many stages in the life of the eastern red-spotted newt. The eft is a midlife stage, sandwiched between a larval stage and an adult. Unlike the eft, both the larva and the adult are aquatic. The larva chews its way out of an egg anchored to submerged vegetation in a pond or stream. The hatchling has feathery gills on its neck and lives submerged in water for several months, feeding on small insects and crustaceans. In late summer, hormones bewitch the larva’s body. Gills dissolve, lungs grow, the tail turns from a paddle to a rod, and the skin roughens and flushes. The eft that walks onto land has been torn apart and rebuilt by an exaggerated puberty.

  Once metamorphosed, efts stay ashore for one to three years, exploiting the bounty of the forest with no competition from bullying adults. Efts are like caterpillars, growing fat on a food source that no other life stage of their species can use. When efts get large enough, they return to water and transform themselves once more, this time into olive-skinned swimmers with sexual organs and keeled tails. These adults remain in the water for the rest of their lives, breeding yearly and, in some cases, surviving for more than a decade in this final life stage.

  The complexity of this life cycle sheds some light onto the strange name of the animal in the mandala. Eft is the Old English name for newt, and this archaic label is retained to distinguish the immature terrestrial life stage from the sexually mature aquatic stage. Egg, larva, eft, adult; a succession that sends us to the basement of our language to rummage for words with which to tag all the phases.

  When newts return to water to breed, their poisoned skin allows them to live side by side with large predatory fish, thus unlocking habitats that are too dangerous for other, less toxic salamanders. By damming streams and creating thousands of ponds stocked with bass and other predators, humans have unwittingly given the newt a great advantage over its salamander kin. The newt is riding the bow waves of the Great Ship of Progress.

  The newts’ repeated transformations are just one slice of the remarkably diverse repertoire of salamander life cycles. The Plethodon that squirmed across the mandala in February passed its larval stage in the egg. The egg hatched into a miniature adult that had no further metamorphosis to endure. So, Plethodon salamanders never need go to water to breed. Upstream from here, spotted salamanders lay eggs in ephemeral spring pools. Their larvae stay in the water, feeding desperately to transform into subterranean adults before their pond dries up. The streams that I can hear from the mandala contain two-lined salamanders that keep the egg-larva-adult system but remain in the stream as adults. Downstream from here mud puppies live in larger streams and rivers. They skip the “adult” stage, keeping the gilled larval body throughout their lives and growing reproductive organs in this juvenile form. Flexibility of sexuality and growth is therefore responsible for a large part of the salamanders’ success. They mold their lives to fit the environment, and they live in a wider array of freshwater and terrestrial habitats than any other group of vertebrates.

  As the standard-bearer of sexual flexibility lumbers out of sight, the mandala is washed with sounds from another champion of adaptability. A jumble of high-pitched barks and yowls is answered by a lower howl and yap. Then, the sounds meld into one tangled chorus of yowls and yips. Coyotes. They are very close. I am likely overhearing a mother greeting her teenage pups in the rock scree thirty paces east of the mandala.

  The coyote pups were born in early April, just as the maples leafed out. Their parents courted and mated in midwinter and, unusually for a mammal, the male stayed with the female through her pregnancy and brought food for the youngsters for several months after they were born. By now the pups are old enough to have abandoned the cave, hollow log, or burrow that the mother chose as a nest site. Coyote parents leave the half-grown pups at rendezvous sites where the youngsters loiter and play while the parents search for food. Feeding adults often travel a mile or so away from the pups, then return amid joyful howls at dawn and dusk to feed, groom, and rest with their offspring. Most probably, it is one of these reunions that I heard. The weaned pups are first fed regurgitated food, then unchewed scraps. Over the late summer and fall the pups will range farther on their own, eventually leaving the natal home range in late fall or winter to seek their own home. Finding suitable territory that has not already been claimed can be hard, so these wanderers travel tens, sometimes hundreds of miles from their mothers’ dens.

  The air over the mandala has only recently been tickled by the yodels of coyotes. Although coyotelike animals may have lived here tens of thousands of years ago, these proto-coyotes were extinct long before the arrival of humans. When humans arrived, from Asia and, later, from Europe and Africa, coyotes lived in the western and midwestern prairies and scrublands; wolves ruled the eastern forest without interference from their smaller cousins. In the last two hundred years, however, wolves have declined rapidly and, in just the last few decades, the coyote has colonized the entire eastern half of the continent. What accounts for the startling reversal of fortunes of these two canids? Why did European colonization of North America crush the wolf but cause the coyote to sweep victorious over half a continent?

  The wolf’s symbolic role in European culture predestined North American wolves for intense persecution. The sound of howling wolves that woke the Pilgrims on the Mayflower during their first night in the “New World” stirred deep “Old World” fears. Wolves also lived in Europe, and their presence had soaked into the mythology of the colonists. Europeans regarded wolves as fearsome and turned the animal into a symbol of unleashed evil, nature’s passions directed against us. As European wolves were exterminated, the distance between man and wolf widened, and the extravagance of the fear increased beyond anything justified by the wolves’ depredations. When the Mayflower anchored at Cape Cod, the Pilgrims were therefore primed to shudder at the eerie howls. Here at last was the animal they had been taught to fear but had never encountered. At the time of the Mayflower’s journey, wolves had been extinct in England for more than a century, but in this savage new world they were, it seemed, everywhere.

  This loathing is not entirely irrational. Wolves are carnivores whose specialty is eating large mammals. Because they hunt in cooperative packs they can easily take down animals heavier than themselves, including humans. We are their prey, so our fear is justified. Wolf behavior fans these flames of fear. Wolf packs trail lone human travelers for days, perhaps planning a kill, perhaps not. Such behavior guaranteed the wolf a position in our culture’s symbology of evil. The fact that humans rank very low on the wolf’s list of food preferences makes little difference. A few attacks and stalkings were enough to cement the Big Bad Wolf into our stories.

  Direct persecution with traps, poisons, and guns accounts for a large part of the wolf’s demise in North America. But Europeans also unwittingly launched an assault on the predator from another, indirect angle. Our rapacious use of wood and overharvesting of deer turned eastern North America from a meat-filled woodland into a deerless patchwork of farms, towns, and ragged logging scars. The champion predator of large herbivores was backed into a corner. The livestock that grazed in the formerly forested areas were the only prey left, and wolf attacks on homesteads increased the hatred, hardening the settlers’ determination to stamp out the animal. Wolf eradication quickly became the policy of the new governments. States hired hunters, paid bounties, and, in a move that attacked both wolves and Native Americans, required “Indians” to pay, under penalty of “severe whipping,” a yearly tax of wolf pelts. Wolves sat at the apex of the forest food web, a mighty but precarious position. Fated by their own specialization and by the fears of the colonists, they succumbed as the web was rewoven in the image of northern Europe.

  Coyotes prefer to dance over the food web rather than perch atop it. The ax, plow, and chainsaw created forest clearings, pastures, and scrubby edges that offered the coyote just what
it needed: plenty of rodents, berries, wild rabbits, and small domesticated animals. Coyotes are flexible, not fierce, and the loss of any one food item makes little difference to their ability to survive. They can hunt alone or in small groups, changing their social system to fit the environment. Wolf eradication removed another barrier. No longer would wolves persecute and hold back the lithe western invader.

  Unlike top predators such as wolves, coyotes are abundant, and this makes them particularly invulnerable to attempts at eradication. As the French Revolution discovered, and the predator control arms of the U.S. federal and state governments rediscovered, it is harder to stamp out the upper classes than it is to kill the king.

  The coyote also lacks the cultural baggage with which the wolf is saddled. No terrifying tales from Europe were pinned onto this North American native. Coyotes do prey on livestock, but they leave humans alone. So, although sheep farmers will kill coyotes and lobby the government to do the same, no coyote howl ever awakened the loathing of town dwellers, and no father ever hunted down a coyote for fear that it would slaughter his children as they played in the yard.

  Coyotes swept into the northeastern corner of North America in the 1930s and 1940s. The southern wave started later, in the 1950s, and reached Florida by the 1980s. Coyotes arrived at the mandala sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, about a hundred years after the two native wolf species, red and gray, disappeared. Farther west, the invading coyotes overlapped with the declining wolves and may have picked up some genes from lonely remnants of the wolf population. Many of the first southern coyotes were surprisingly red and large, perhaps indicating a mixed parentage of coyote and red wolf. Analyses of DNA from living wolves and coyotes, and from museum skins that predate the coyotes’ advance, support the idea that coyotes interbred with both gray and red wolves. The coyotes howling next to the mandala may, therefore, have a wisp of wolf in their blood.

  Biological fluidity allowed the coyotes to flow into the hole left by the wolf. As deer became more abundant, coyotes spread out from the scrublands and into the forest. Eastern coyotes are larger than their western ancestors and, in some northern areas, have narrowed their diet and started specializing in deer. Coyotes have always preyed on fawns, but these new, larger coyotes hunt in packs and can bring down a healthy adult. It seems that the spirit of the wolf is returning, carried by the changing bodies of its coyote kin and perhaps helped by some stray wolf genes.

  The coyote’s colonization of the East has been a dance with the forest. The coyote’s diet and behavior have turned and swayed, following the rhythm of the East. The dance partner, the forest, has added new steps and recovered some older, almost forgotten moves. Deer now have a wild predator, another layer of danger to add to disease, feral dogs, automobiles, and firearms. The catholic diet of coyotes means that their effect on the forest’s choreography spreads beyond predation on deer. Fruiting plants now have an additional disperser, one that carries seeds many miles. Smaller mammals now live in fear of the wild canid. Coyotes also reduce populations of raccoons, opossums, and, to the consternation of pet owners, domestic cats. The suppression of these small omnivores has an unexpected silver lining for birds. Areas with coyotes are safer places for songbirds to build nests and raise young.

  The addition of the coyote to the forest’s troupe therefore sends ripples and lurches throughout. The predator makes life safer for the prey’s prey. No doubt other parts of the forest also feel tugs and pulls. Because the coyote prances across the food web, eating fruits, killing the rodents that eat fruits, and eating the raccoons that eat fruits and rodents, the coyotes’ ecological effects are hard to predict. Is seed dispersal helped or hindered? How do ticks fare with fewer mice but more birds? The forest’s future depends, in part, on the answers to these questions.

  Coyotes also teach us something about the forest’s past. The original dancers, the wolves, are gone, but their understudies, the coyotes, give us a glimpse at the former grace and complexity of the forest’s motion. The deer, also, are filling in. They not only play their own role but have taken on the parts of the elk, the tapir, the woodland bison, and other extinct herbivores. The success of the coyote and the deer in the eastern United States is therefore both a symptom of our culture’s profound effects on the forest and a return to a semblance of the cast and plot of the continent before the arrival of Pilgrims, guns, and chainsaws.

  Although the mandala sits in an old-growth forest, the flow of life here is powerfully affected by currents running in from the surrounding landscape. The coyote owes its presence in the mandala to the cascade of changes that European colonization brought to North America. This cascade also affected aquatic ecosystems, and there would be fewer efts in the mandala if humans had not dammed nearly every stream around it, creating scores of ponds and lakes.

  Ecological mandalas do not sit isolated in tidy meditation halls, their shapes carefully designed and circumscribed. Rather, the many-hued sands of this mandala bleed into and out of the shifting rivers of color that wash all around.

  August 8th—Earthstar

  Summer’s heat has coaxed another flush of fungi from the mandala’s core. Orange confetti covers twigs and litter. Striated bracket fungi jut from downed branches. A jellylike orange waxy cap and three types of brown gilled mushroom poke from crevices in the leaf litter. The most arresting member of this death bouquet is the earthstar lodged between rafts of leaves. Its leathery outer coat has peeled back in six segments, each segment folded out like a flower’s petal. At the center of this brown star sits a partly deflated ball with a black orifice at its peak.

  My eyes meander over the mandala’s surface, delighting in the profusion of fungal bodies. Two white domes at the mandala’s edge eventually catch my attention. The spheres emerge from the receding tide of decomposing litter. I reposition myself to get a closer look. Golf balls! Like a discarded beer can in a stream or bubble gum stuck into the bark of a tree, these plastic globes seem profoundly ugly and out of place.

  The golf balls were sent flying from the high bluffs that overlook the mandala. A golfing friend tells me that shooting a ball from the edge of the cliff gives him a thrilling sense of power. The golf course extends to the cliff edge, providing ample opportunity to indulge this buzz. Most of the balls land to the west of the mandala where local children gather bagsful to sell back to the golfers.

  Glossy white plastic balls are visually startling in the context of a forest. But the balls also jar because they have arrived from a parallel reality. The mandala’s community emerges from the give-and-take of thousands of species; a golf course’s ecological community is a monoculture of alien grass that emerged from the mind of just one species. The mandala’s visual field is dominated by sex and death: dead leaves, pollen, birdsong. The golf course has been sanitized by the puritan life-police. The golf green is fed and trimmed to keep it in perpetual childhood: no dead stems, no flowers or seed heads. Sex and death are erased. A strange country.

  A dilemma: should I remove the balls or leave them nestled in place? Removing them would break my rule about not meddling in the mandala. But taking them away would restore the mandala to a more natural state and might make room for another wildflower or fern. Discarded golf balls have nothing to contribute to the mandala. They don’t decompose and release their nutrients. They don’t become another species’ habitat. The grand cycle of energy and matter seems to halt when it reaches a dumped golf ball.

  My first impulse, therefore, is to restore the mandala to “purity” by removing the plastic balls. But this impulse is problematic for two reasons. First, removing the balls will not cleanse the mandala of industrial detritus. Acidity, sulfur, mercury, and organic pollutants rain in continually. Every creature in the mandala carries in its body a sprinkling of alien molecular golf balls. My own presence here has undoubtedly added strands of worn clothing fiber, alien bacteria, and exhaled foreign molecules. Even the genetic code of the mandala’s inhabitants is stamped by industry. Flying insects,
in particular those whose ancestors have come near humans, carry resistance genes for many pesticides. Removing the golf balls would merely tidy up the most visually obvious of these human artifacts, preserving an illusion of the forest’s “pristine” separation from humanity.

  The impulse to purify might fail on a second, deeper level. Human artifacts are not stains imposed on nature. Such a view drives a wedge between humanity and the rest of the community of life. A golf ball is the manifestation of the mind of a clever, playful African primate. This primate loves to invent games to test its physical and mental skill. Generally, these games are played on carefully reconstructed replicas of the savanna from which the ape came and for which its subconscious still hankers. The clever primate belongs in this world. Maybe the primate’s productions do also.

  As these able apes get better at controlling their world, they produce some unintended side effects, including strange new chemicals, some of which are poisonous to the rest of life. Most apes have little idea of these ill effects. However, the better-informed ones don’t like to be reminded of their species’ impact on the rest of world, especially in places that don’t yet seem to be overly damaged. I am such an ape. Therefore, when a golf ball in the woods strikes my eyes, my mind condemns the ball, the golf course, the golfers, and the culture that spawned them all.