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Dear
Heron Dancers,
Life must breed. Nature has no use for organisms,
variations, or groups that cannot reproduce abundantly.
She has a passion for quantity as prerequisite to the
selection of quality; she likes large litters, and relishes
the struggle that picks the surviving few; doubtless
she looks on approvingly the upstream race of a thousand
sperms to fertilize one ovum.
- The Lessons of
History, Will and Ariel Durant.
That pecking you hear may be the Yellow-bellied sapsucker
who has recently returned to these woods from their wintering
ground. They drill holes in trees, the sap attracts insects
and the Yellow-bellied sapsucker eats the insects that
the holes attract. (Visit
here to listen in).
Aspen leaves are beginning to emerge from buds. I once
saw a black bear in a tree casually munching on these
early greens. Which reminds me a little of the grizzly
bear I once came across in a mountain meadow, casually
grazing on the spring grass like a cow, but that is another
story for another time, I suppose.
The real show this time of year in the northern woodlands—the
no-tell motel of the spring woods—is the vernal
pool. These pools form in shallow depressions, many caused
by ancient glaciers, and are incubators of life. Because
they are only temporary—evaporating within a few
months at the most—fish can't live in them. Fish
are the main predators of the species who mate and gestate
in the pools. Over the last couple of weeks, and over
the next two weeks, salamanders, wood frogs and spring
peepers all have their turn at the dance.
The other evening, I headed out to sit by my favorite
pool in the woods to listen to the sound of life abundant,
life emerging. It was a wood frog (brown frogs with black
masks) evening, and a cacophony of their clacking and
quacking reverberated through the trees. (You
can listen to them here.) The males do the clacking.
The females—much larger because they are bloated
with eggs—are silent.
The male wood frog will attempt to mate with anything
that comes near, including salamanders and other male
wood frogs. He wraps his front legs around the object
of his affection, and locks his thumbs together. That
must be disconcerting for the inadvertent salamander swimming
by. If the male locks thumbs with a female wood frog,
they sometimes embrace for several days before she expels
her eggs and he sprays them with sperm. In a week or two
both males and females will leave the pond to live on
land.
Wood frog egg sacs, containing up to 3000 eggs, will take
about two weeks to hatch. As tadpoles, they'll feed on
algae and breathe with gills. As with all vernal pool
young, they are in a race against time. If the pool dries
before they are ready—for instance before the wood
frog tadpoles have lost their tails, grown legs and developed
the ability to breathe air, they'll perish. Many vernal
pool-dependent species sense the rate of pool evaporation
and alter their rate of metamorphosis accordingly. By
late summer the pools will be dry and barely discernible
on the forest floor. The moisture that remains will sustain
an array of wildflowers.
The surrounding forest benefits in countless ways from
these pools. The biomass of salamanders and wood frogs
up to a mile away from one of these pools exceeds that
of breeding birds and small mammals combined. The life
they help gestate will be important to countless species
and provide food for birds, turtles, snakes and even raccoons,
skunks and other mammals.
In celebration of the Great Dance of Life,
Roderick W. MacIver
The Laws of Nature
 Ralph
Waldo Emerson was among the first to incorporate the
importance of wild nature into his worldview, and
was instrumental in the founding of Transcendentalism.
Heron Dance has collected excerpts from his writings,
gleaned from personal journals as well as published
works to provide a glimpse into the wild soul and
brilliant mind whose work has affected our perception
of the natural world in many subtle ways.
Nature
is a mutable cloud which is always and never the
same. She casts the same thoughts into troops
of forms, as a poet makes twenty fables with one
moral. Beautifully shines a spirit through the
bruteness and toughness of matter.
–
Ralph
Waldo Emerson, excerpted from The Laws of Nature.
Visit
here
to read excerpts from The Laws of Nature.
Visit
here to order The Laws of Nature.
Pausing
for Beauty Poetry Diary
 The
Pausing for Beauty Poetry Diary
is a beautiful, multi-purpose journal that is both
inspirational and practical. With its ample collection
of poetry and prose excerpts, as well as over 140
of Rod’s nature paintings spread throughout,
this uplifting book stimulates creativity, provokes
thought, and makes organization beautiful, if not
easy.
Because it is not date specific, the diary can be
used for any year. It contains a full-page calendar
for each month with gridded squares large enough
for jotting down appointments and brief notes. As
visually pleasing as it is mentally stimulating,
The Pausing for Beauty Poetry Diary turns
the task of organizing into a pursuit of pleasure.
Visit
here
to read additional excerpts from The Poetry
Diary.
Visit here to order The Poetry Diary.
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