New England Summer, a Tropical Paradise

Rutland Brook in Petersham. Or should it be in Panama?

Every day, now that summer has arrived here in Harvard Forest, I’m struck with the false sense of having landed in the tropics: same high humidity and almost daily rainfall, the lush greenery and exuberant growth, exotic sounding birdcalls and all those monkeys…um, chipmunks running around. Walking through the woods yesterday I saw how similar a temperate and tropical rainforest look. The trees are mostly tall poles, struggling up through heavy foliage to reach the light, and here and there are bigger specimens, the ones who made it up there first and got to hog the penthouse real estate. The only thing missing is the buttress.

Plein air drawing at Rutland Brook. 8″x8″ graphite and pastel on toned Canson Mi Tientes paper.

Funny about the birds, too. One of the commonest species around the Canal Zone in Panama is the slaty antbird. You can’t go thirty steps without hearing or seeing one skulking around the understory. Northern equivalent? The gray catbird. Another ubiquitous dark gray skulker with a blackish cap and inquisitive and noisy manner. How about the frugivores? Tanagers and euphonias and manakins make a tropical living out of eating berries. So do the cedar waxwings, which are just now nesting- well after the phoebes, who have started their second clutch- and it’s timed to coordinate with the burgeoning fruit of the New England summer: blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, black cherries, and some kind of bright red fruit I’ll have to get back to you about. The hill beside Benson House is covered with blueberries as well as tiny but perfectly sweet strawberries. The waxwings have built a large messy cup nest in one of the maples next to the house and have been practicing their hovering skills over the berry patch where they drop drown to feed most merrily. And being a good primate with a sweet tooth I’ve been following their example. Another tropical evolutionary echo, perhaps. Is this why humans learned to watch birds? To learn where the food sources are?

Sharing the resources with cedar waxwings.

One of the most mysterious and seductive similarities between the forests of Meso-America and northern New England is the plethora of stone ruins scattered throughout the woods, just waiting to be stumbled upon or over if you aren’t watching your step. There are cellar holes, house foundations, remains of former small industries, fallen chimneys and miles and miles of stacked stone walls winding up and down hills, across streams, everywhere. There were once a thriving people here. Where did they go? What cataclysm drove them to abandon their homes?

Stone wall at the Old French Inn, Harvard Forest. Once a waystation for drovers between Petersham and Athol, Massachusetts. Plein air drawing, 22″ x 15″, graphite and pastel on Rives BFK.

The New England landscape of Thoreau’s time was pastoral, tamed, cultivated. The old forests had almost entirely been cut and the newer forests were managed woodlots to be used as fuel and lumber. In his journals (excerpted and interpreted from an historical and ecological standpoint in a fascinating book by David Foster, Thoreau’s Country), Thoreau commented on the decline and rarity of large animals:

Is not this [the muskrat] the heaviest animal found wild in this township? (May 17, 1854)

Minott says his mother told him she had seen a deer come down the hill behind her house, where I.Moore’s now is, and cross the road and the meadow in front; thinks it may have been eighty years ago. (January 21, 1853)

And Bill Bryson describes it in A Walk in the Woods:

In 1850, New England was 70 percent open farmland and 30 percent woods. Today the proportions are exactly reversed…until the middle of the nineteenth century, farms survived in New England because they had proximity to the coastal cities like Boston and Portland…then two things happened: the invention of the McCormick reaper (which was ideally suited to the big, rolling farms of the Midwest but no good at all for the cramped, stony fields of New England) and the development of the railroads, which allowed the Midwestern farmers to get their produce to the East in a timely fashion. The New England farmers couldn’t compete, and so they became Midwestern farmers, too. By 1860, nearly half of Vermont born people- 200,000 out of 450,000- were living elsewhere.

Millstone on a stacked pillar, Old Tannery, Harvard Forest. Plein air drawing, 22″ x 15″ graphite and pastel on Rives BFK.

Thoreau was well aware of the social changes going on around him, and railed against them. The California gold-rush was a contributing factor in the human migration, and Thoreau didn’t mince his words (and I, being a former Californian, am really delighted by this one):

I know of no more startling development of the morality of trade and all the modes of getting a living than the rush to California affords. The philosophy and poetry and religion of such a mankind are not worth the dust of a puffball. The hog that roots his own living, and so makes manure, would be ashamed of such company. It makes God to be a moneyed gentleman who scatters a handful of pennies in order to see mankind scramble for them. Going to California. It is only three thousand miles nearer to hell. Satan, from one of his elevations, showed mankind the kingdom of California, and they entered into a compact with him at once. (February 1, 1852)

Doyle’s Old Homestead, what’s left of it, Harvard Forest. Plein air drawing, 22″ x 20.5″, graphite and pastel on Rives BFK.

So the farms were gradually abandoned and the forest once again claimed the landscape. Deer, bear and even moose have repopulated the woods, the goshawk nests again, and the fisher thrives at densities last seen prior to the arrival of European fur traders. The ruins of the past are scattered throughout, just waiting to be discovered, silent remnants of an earlier culture. They are poignant, haunting and strikingly similar to the stone ruins deep in the abiding forests of the Yucatan.

As for antiquities, one of our old deserted country roads, marked only by the parallel fences and cellar-hole with its bricks where the last inhabitant died, the victim of intemperance, fifty years ago, with its bare and exhausted fields stretching around, suggests to me an antiquity greater and more remote from the America of the newspapers than the tombs of Etruria…This is the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. (Henry David Thoreau, February 13, 1851, Thoreau’s Country)

As I write this I am getting ready to head out the door and drive up to Maine, with a stopoff in New Hampshire to join up with Cindy House. We are off to the coast, or as they say here, Down East, for a few days of hiking, birding and sketching. See you soon!

Drawing a fine old sawmill and millstream at Moore State Park, Paxton, MA. Photo by Barry Van Dusen.

Blueberry Hill with Strawberry Topping

Blinded by the light: what I saw when I got up this morning, over coffee and watercolor.

There is such a rich mixture here right around Benson House that it’s tempting to stay nearby and simply record what’s close to home. Perfectly lovely views are to be had from every angle, porch and window; step away thirty feet and look back to see your sweet little colonial cottage tucked into a lush woodland. Sit out on the front porch with your morning coffee, as I did today, and watch the sun light up the sugar maples’ leaves like they were blazing green torches. The little hill next to the house is covered in wildflowers and meadow grass and a low shrubby groundcover, no more than six inches high, which today I discovered turns out to be a respectable blueberry patch. I see pie in our future.

And to make it even sweeter, the entire hill is swimming with wild strawberries, their long runners twining through everything else: yarrow, milkweed, asters, ox-eye daisies, little violet-blue flowers that might be something like bachelor’s buttons and some other stuff I’ll have to get back to you about, y’all. The strawberries are teensy, not a lot bigger than a pea, but sweet, oh, wow, really sweet. And deliciously fragrant. I collected a handful of them and they just smell red.

Pond at Fever Brook, Quabbin Reservoir near Petersham, MA

With all these riches right at hand it’s easy to find excuses to stay put. But part of the fun of being here is going exploring. Last week it was Fever Brook at the Quabbin painting with Barry again, the day before yesterday it was Royalston Falls in the company of botanical illustrator and biologist/naturalist Elizabeth Farnsworth, who introduced me to this beautiful nature preserve owned by the Trustees of Reservations and entertained me with natural history lessons. She even pointed out my first Ebony Jewelwing damselfly for me. Thanks, Elizabeth!

Fever Brook, Quabbin Reservoir, Petersham, MA

A quiet shady pool just below Royalston Falls

Just below Royalston Falls, a great tree root grows down to the water’s edge from its perch on top of a cliff. Smart tree.

If you have kids and they can’t tear themselves away from their electronics and other indoor pursuits, I recommend they take up birding. Bill of the Birds has written an excellent book to help shoo them out the door and into the field, binoculars and all. And if you want to read and hear what he has to say about it all, he’s featured on All Things Considered this very afternoon, taking Melissa Block and her daughter Chloe on a bird walk. Bill, you have the perfect voice for radio.

Stone wall in Harvard Forest; part of the ruins of the old French Inn, once a drover’s waystation between Athol and Petersham.

Today I went for a long walk in Harvard Forest and was enticed by a hand-lettered wooden sign that simply said, “Doyle’s Wall” pointing to a path leading down the hill. Who could resist? Doyle built himself one kick-butt excellent wall of stacked stone that must have once bordered Doyle’s fields (did he grow strawberries?) a century or two ago. Now it meanders down the hill through a close-knit forest that’s grown around and through it, tall trees filled with singing birds. There are lots of walls like this one all across New England, marking property boundaries where people lived and worked the land. At the end of Doyle’s Wall is a lovely cascade, also marked with a wooden sign, and an old campsite that might have once been a little cabin. A tiny, perfectly enchanting waterfall drops like a glass sheet over stone and roils one end of a quiet pool no more than four feet across, It’s secluded and mossy and cool. There are spirits there. Tomorrow I’ll go back with paper and paint. If I disappear it can only be because I’ve been carried away by fairies. Check with you later. Maybe.

Bobolink Babylon

The Petersham Commons Meadow

And here’s yet another difference between New England and the jungles of Panama: sunrise and sunset. In Panama the sun rises at 6am and sets at 6pm every day, year round, like clockwork. Here in the northern latitudes of Petersham it’s getting light around, oh, 4:30 a.m. The birds can hardly wait to get their act going. This morning a chipping sparrow jumped the gun and sang like a rock star right outside. It was 4 a.m. I threw a pillow at it and went back to sleep.

Bobolinks on a mission. Drawn in Petersham Commons Meadow.

I’ve mentioned this before but one of the special things about Petersham is their beautiful Town Commons. There’s a great haymeadow, a lilypond, a forest preserve and even a blueberry patch. All there for the people of Petersham to enjoy and use anytime. A local farmer cuts the hay, and if you live here you can pick the blueberries. There are pathways throughout for a pleasant stroll, even pathways mowed in the meadow. I went for a little walk here the other day and found a bonanza of bobolinks. Their wild, bubbly song (Bobolink song, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology), is part of their flight display, and they like having a lot of bobolink company so they can put on the best show.

Female bobolink, in her plain brown wrapper.

Like a lot of guys, they are displaying to each other as much as they are to the females, flexing their muscles and flashing their colors. Every so often a plain tan female would fly up from the grass and a male would launch himself after her, floating on outstretched wings, turning slowly in the air to show off his beautiful black, white and gold pattern and bubbling away like a canary on steroids. Generally he’d land near another male and they’d strike hunky masculine poses at each other until the next flight departure.

From my seat on the ground I was enjoying the bobolink show, when I heard my lifer bluewinged warbler sing. This one’s high on my wanted list; if you’re a birder you’re a collector, too. Collectors need to complete the set, whatever it is. I left the bobolinks to their business and went to hunt the bluewing.

My lifer bluewinged warbler.

With a little judicious spishing, the warbler flew into the open, but just as I got my binoculars on him out of nowhere a big dog rushed up and began swirling around my legs in a friendly way, bumping into me and panting with joy. I heard its owner off in the distance calling “Abby- come back here!” which had about as much effect on the dog as reciting Shakespeare. I never looked away from my life bluewinged warbler (it was really gorgeous), never looked down, never saw the dog at all. Dear Abby finally gave up on me and moved on. When I FINALLY got my fill of looking at the bird, I turned around and saw the two disappearing around the bend, the dog’s long silky tail waving gently back and forth in the meadow grass and buttercups. My heart gave a sharp tug of regret.

Abby was a golden retriever.