For a Handful of Feathers

by Jim Harrison

  A covey of quail is a coterie, an assembly of coquettes and dandies. Eight to ten inches tall, ovate in shape, balanced on overly long toes, scaly legs, and fat thighs, they assume an impeccably upright posture, particularly when perched on logs and fence posts. These are birds that display a vocabulary of fall colors with lively black eyes and strong, horny beaks designed to deal with stubborn seeds. But in hand they feel like soft-boiled eggs, brown, buff, ash, black, and chestnut-colored eggs whose barred and crescent patterns remind one of swollen leaves on the bottom of a pond. Bobwhite quail are plump and malleable like cotton candy. Tender birds without the musculature of distant travelers or even roamers, quail gravitate to where the food is plentiful and within walking distance; they enjoy both grit and chatter and are loath to fly for any reason. The male bird wears a white mask over his cheeks and chin and black eye stripes down to his beak. The female’s coloring matches her mate’s—a similarity of plumage usually indicates an inclination to sharing of parental duties—except that the hen’s mask is ochre yellow in coloring. The entire covey faces its destiny with poised terror.

  The fact that I devote a certain effort to the well-being of bobwhites during these times of political perjury, fast food, and baboonlike talk shows falls on understanding ears in this part of the country; ears that have been conditioned to the hubristic sounds of spring whistling, the startled scatterings of roadside coveys, the resonance of autumn guns, and the invigorating cracklings of fried quail and okra. So when I am asked what kind of a farm I own I say, “A bird farm,” readily admitting to being, by modern criteria, a bum. However, instead of being questioned about my motives or the rationale behind them, I am queried on the condition of the land, the dogs, and that year’s crop of quail. The questions entertain well-hidden remembrances, reminders of gentler days when slow dancing, drive-in movies, spandex girdles, and Golden Hawk Studebakers were fashionable.

  When I am asked the same question up north, I reply, “A big farm.”

  “Oh! You mean an everything farm?” he or she asks, backpedaling for all it’s worth in an effort to forestall any thought I may have regarding honking on about rural life, mud holes, and chiggers.

  “Yeah,” I answer, looking the asker in the eye. And much to everyone’s relief, that’s usually the end of it.

  For reasons of life, death, and changing interests, the farm had not been managed for quail for fifteen years prior to my arrival. Deer were culled from tree stands and doves were shot in the cornfields, but for a long time there was only one serious quail hunter: a fine old Southern gentleman whose family name is that of a famous American shotgun, a friend of the family who ran his pointers three or four times a season as much for the exercise it offered his dogs as for the memories; treasured memories of the quick, full, busy years of youth when turning over twenty coveys of quail in a day’s hunting meant little more than a comfortable number of birds to drink to at sundown.

  To the best of my knowledge there were but seven coveys of quail living on the farm when I bought it; a year later there were fifteen; the following winter twenty-one; and now, as I write, I have counted and marked twenty-five coveys on the map. My original plan was to raise the number of bobwhite quail to saturation point, partly as an exercise in management, partly because it stimulates my dogs’ raison d’être, and partly because I was cocksure that by increasing the population I would be doing the birds a favor. Now that I have settled on the land and lived through a progression of seasons, I better understand the pace and guidelines nature has set for herself on this particular piece of dirt, guidelines that encourage certain endeavors and discourage others. I can improve the habitat by removing or adding to what is already here, but there is nothing that I, or for that matter any man, can do, to impress nature. By saturating the farm with bob-white quail what I really had in mind was impressing myself and my friends.

  On the other hand, I am going to shape this small corner of nature into a vision of what I believe will best glorify its inherent qualities, a sculpturing of the land—heresy to some who would leave nature to her own devices—gardening on a large scale, subjective landscaping for beauty’s sake. And, as I like to see as far as my eyes allow, I remove what is diseased, repetitious, or ugly: catfaced, topless, rachitic, stunted, and otherwise suppressed trees that compete with specimens that would otherwise grow strong and relatively straight. To offset this inclination to prune, I plant five times as many trees as I remove, so that one day, unless I go broke in the process, no matter where I stand I will see only what pleases me. When I want ugly I’ll drive into town.

  In conjunction with this bit of gardening insanity, I do everything short of killing hawks, bobcats, and coyotes (I do set live traps for the nest destroyers such as opossums, raccoons, and skunks) to provide Colinus virginianus, visiting turkeys, and the local deer herd with a comfortable place to live. I realize that the culling of predators is subjective, but culling is an everyday aspect of farm life. In every other respect I do my best to offer free bed and board to those animals or birds that migrate to or take up residence on this land.

  In the fall and winter I kill a small percentage of my tenants and eat them. Those I don’t eat I give to others who do. Nothing is wasted except the money and time it takes to run the operation, and it might be argued that neither is wasted. In my life I have polluted and abused nature and thousands of her residents, and despite this questionable behavior nature has granted me a life of pleasure and unqualified beauty. Now that I have the wherewithal to manage and tend to this farm and the species that live on it, it would be a moral insult not to do so. The more food and cover I plant the more game and nongame species will thrive, the more water holes, the more fish, the more wildlife, the more predators. Small as it may be, I will make this sequestered world of mine revolve with the assurance of time.

  Francis Thompson, an English poet, wrote that one could not pick a flower without troubling a star. To be protective of things because they happen to live here is a new experience, one that I am trying to sort out. So far, owning land has made me aware of nature’s ingrained patience, of weather and its reign over every action and conversation, of the feel of steel disks cutting new ground, of the stretching noises of growing corn on a warm summer night, of the weight that monotony bears on those who work the earth, of how the simplicity of rural life is unnecessarily complicated to give it weight and importance, and of how grateful I am to have such a canvas on which to create whatever pleases me; a cocoon inside which I live and love and fight my demons. I keep my contact with the outside world to a minimum and my address book thin; my wife, meanwhile, has joined the contemplative order of the Carmelites. Should I wonder why?

  So the farmer in me grows an annual crop of wild flying delicacies and the hunter in me harvests a percentage of this fruitage; the businessman in me recognizes a losing proposition and the child in me doesn’t give a shit. A long time ago, a hunter said, “Doubtless the good Lord could have made a better game bird than bobwhite, and better country to hunt him in than our Southern States, but equally doubtless he never did.” Any other lingering doubts as to the simplistic nature of my endeavors need only be addressed to my dogs.

  The tango:

  A sad thought that can he danced.

  —Carlos Fuentes

  Spring

  I

  The chain of events leading to a late-June hatch of bob-white quail in northern Florida begins in March, a month of indecision and longing. Birds that have lived in communes since the day they were born begin to wander off, alone or in small groups, escaping from each other for reasons they don’t quite understand. A few weeks later, by the official start of spring, their perplexities have vanished and the males are doing everything short of slam-dancing to convince a hen, any hen, of their desirability. They act foolish under the same spell that has provided the males of all species with a temporary state of grace since the beginning of time. Bobwhites sing loudly, dance around each other without the slightest regard to
predators, strut their seven-ounce bodies like twenty-pound turkeys, huff, puff, and glow like any other teenager looking for a female to rub up against. This exemplary display of male hormones begins in late February and lasts until each bird finds a mate, gets eaten, or steps into his sophomore year a virgin.

  In March, however, failure is not an issue. Alone by choice for the first time in his precocious life, the bobwhite is free to do as he pleases, and what pleases him is to bandy his weight around looking for a cheap investment by clambering up on logs and stumps from where he bares his breast, taunts his rivals, and, with the delivery of a diminutive Pavarotti, screams his needs like a jackdaw. When the sun sets, like the put-upon poet he knows himself to be, he revels in the pain of yearning.

  This behavior, unwise in terms of survival, is non-negotiable in terms of glands. It’s a good thing quail speed along on skinny legs and have learned how to squeeze a nine-inch frame into a three-inch opening, because this boisterous conduct, indulged by the females, is nothing more than a mess call to the predator corps.

  Predation is most effective when the woods are brown and gray and the stumps are black, the clay wet and the footing treacherous on any given day. In March, when the natural world emerges from winter hungry, a high percentage of each species is earmarked for fodder, and the simple laws of nature don’t condone bravado. If anything, the imbecilic behavior of courting birds is programmed to simplify the jobs of their enemies at a time when food is imperative to the survival of themselves and their young. As spring progresses, the task of the hunter is made easier yet by legions of new births. The young and tender of one species feed the young and tender of another, and like musical scales, nature, when left to her own devices, is programmed to achieve a balance between the eaters and the eaten. In March, raptor predation is at its peak, and the accipiters—Cooper’s and sharp-shinned hawks—dart from the branches of dead trees and skim noiselessly over the fawn-colored broom sedge worrying the disconnected bob-whites of spring.

  Full-grown coyotes run out of the safety of woodlots and across open ground in response to my turkey calls, coyotes I never see at any other time of the year. In April an alligator took up residence in my pond, and I watched it drag under the surface a six-week-old gosling, the only gosling on the pond. By the time I took aim, its parents had seemingly forgotten the mishap and returned to the business of preening. That night I sautéed a slab of the alligator’s tail in garlic and butter. I didn’t like it—not so much because it had no taste but because I had the gosling in mind, stuffed with shallots and prunes.

  Spring welcomes migrating hawks from southern Florida, Cuba, and South America. Some haven’t tasted quail since November, and unlike the soaring hawks that are deliberate and slow, these birds are intemperate and quick: bob-whites’ main avian nemesis. In their nocturnal hunts, owls undoubtedly reap the rewards of the quail’s independence and of its newly found solitary roosting habits, habits that for the other 75 percent of the year concentrate and shape coveys into saucers of bodies the size of hubcaps. Side by side on the ground, the small round birds fight for position, jamming their bodies into a genetic wheel of life that offers security and warmth. From there they face the dangers of darkness as a unit of thirty-odd eyes, some open, some closed. Communally they flush their last meal into neat piles between their heels. In the spring, bobwhites do without the assistance of auxiliary eyes and live precariously between the thrills of courtship and the anguish of being coveted as a special on the menu. Only a minute percentage of wild birds survive until old age. Though you might see the same bobwhite for three springs, the average life expectancy of a quail is eight months, that of a Cooper’s hawk one year.

  II

  I took ownership of the farm in March 1990, but two months earlier, with only a handshake as collateral, the owner, a diminutive sixty-five-year-old Southern belle endowed with the energy of three women half her age and answering to the fine name of Fanny Malone, allowed me to work her land. Her faith in my word, at a time in history when such things are considered at best naive, was remarkable both because of the value of her property and because the work I proposed included planting 22,000 trees in fields where corn had always been sown, cutting down every strand of barbed wire on the place, gutting outbuildings to make room for tractors, grading new roads, and running lit firepots through her woods. Not once during those months did she question my reasons, decisions, or, more important, my qualifications. Faith in a person’s word is still honored in the South and is one of the most endearing reasons to live here.

  The man who made the improvements on the farm possible, and who is responsible, four years later, for the tenfold improvement in the quail habitat, not to mention the quality of my life, is Bill Poppell, a fifty-five-year-old resident of Coon Bottom, Florida, a workaholic middleweight with eighteen-inch arms and gray hair, a man of pride blessed with the ethics of a Jesuit priest.

  Bill does everything from purchasing to repairing, from planting to culling, from burning to mowing; he gives reason to believe in miracles, particularly for someone like me who is neither qualified nor ever will be and whose interests in the inner workings of life are intangible and not at all practical. When Bill was fourteen years old and going to school he stood four feet, eleven inches tall and weighed ninety-three pounds. A year later he went to work full-time in the tobacco fields and flourished under the sun. One decade later, after serving in Korea, he stood five foot ten and weighed two hundred and twenty pounds. He said, “One more year in that classroom would have killed me.” Bill has the light skeletal frame and heavy muscle mass of a wrestler, and what percentage of strength he has lost to time has been compensated for by willfulness and an intricate array of levers, wedges, pulleys, and come-alongs, essential to men who like working alone. He prides himself on getting the job done right and ahead of schedule. He is a rare wonder to observe.

  Bill, like all men who live on and from the land, is pragmatic when it comes to animals. He will tend to a sick horse for three nights without sleep as easily as he will shoot a possum or a coon for eating bird eggs or a crow for stealing corn. His has been a life of hardship and work, beginning when he was seven years old, lugging tobacco leaves for fifty cents a day during weekends and holidays. His has been a life of farming and hunting and getting good at everything he tried his hand at, from tearing a tractor apart to building a house.

  Poppell lives in the shade of his hat, doesn’t owe anyone anything and is proud of it. He works harder than any man I’ve ever met, drinks black coffee, chews tobacco, and is addicted to vanilla ice cream. It is a fact that what Bill does he does by choice, exactly as it should be when you’re fifty-five years old and have worked your ass off for forty-eight of them. This farm is as much his as it is mine, and I’ve told him so.

  Bill understands land, weather, and the order of things as I understand how to shoot a gun and cook a bird. He tailors my land to my desires while I wander around dreaming up new things for him to do. He tells me when to take my hand off the poison ivy, my foot off the piss ants, and my mouth off the persimmons. He explains why the bush hog blows a blade when I try to turn the oak stump into wood chips; he pulls my tractor out of the bogs I blunder into, breaks down the nitrogen, phosphate, and potash numbers found in fertilizer, names the wild grasses and flowers that share the land, points out which ears of corn are sweet by the color of the tassels, tells me odd stories about the little people who land on earth on summer nights and leave behind telltale rings of charred grass, and of holes that cannot be filled on waning moons. But best of all he is patient with the mistakes I need to make in order to learn.

  Bill sees life as a series of causes and effects and he is practical in his approach to life and work. As the farm’s hired gun he protects my sensibilities by dealing quietly with the disagreeable task of predator control and leaves all shapes and forms of reverie to me. Illusions conjure mistakes, and mistakes in his world are costly in terms of time and money and quite often pain. The romance
of rural life is best left to those who don’t actually handle shovels for a living.

  III

  When the yellow jessamine flowers swell the fence-rows and the swamps are laced with honeysuckle vines, everyone in the county knows that it is only a matter of time before the fires begin. The day following the end of quail season—the first week in March—white smoke rises and drifts over tens of thousands of acres of southern Georgia and northern Florida forests. The wind moves the smoke that rises from the burning earth in great white sheets across the countryside, and one cannot help but think of the Civil War, of Sherman’s army, and of the thousands of small critters incapable of getting out of harm’s way. For them, it is war; for the hundreds of species that otherwise would strangle under the suffocating accumulation of Southern vegetation, relief is at hand. Simply put, the number of dead box turtles I see after burning is inconsequential compared to the number of turtles that without fire would starve.

  Ten years ago my introduction to controlled burns involved dropping napalm from a helicopter on five hundred acres of land bordering the city limits of Tallahassee, land leased to me by my cousin, a good man who appreciates a hot fire.

  The pilot of the two-man French Hirondelle helicopter was a fast-talking redhead from New Zealand, where helicopters are kin to bicycles. He stirred the napalm in a fifty-gallon drum with a broomstick until it thickened and moved with a life of its own. From the drum he bucketed the brew into holding tanks fastened to the Hirondelle’s belly. He told me that he was just back from Alabama, where he had fired 27,000 acres of planted pines for a lumber company and hadn’t been to bed in two days. By then my cousin had called the Forestry Department for a burning permit, conveniently forgetting to mention that we planned to nuke the suburbs of Tallahassee from the sky. When the Hirondelle’s side canisters were full of the same mixture the pilot had dropped on the forests of Southeast Asia twenty years earlier, he stuck his thumb in the air and we followed it upward, leveling off just above the steeple of the tallest loblolly pine.