Astrov in Uncle Vanya

Up until a few months ago, a photo of the playwright Anton Chekhov would have seemed the last image to include on a blog about nature. But this past fall, after theatrical scenes for a tragicomedy on climate started coming to me, I decided to enroll in an acting course at the adult school in town. Though the experience was completely different from anything I had tried before, the character I was asked to play, Astrov in Chekhov's 1897 play, Uncle Vanya, bore an uncanny resemblance to a modern day environmentalist. He's a doctor who loves forests and struggles to save them from wholesale destruction.

In the quotes below are prescient mention of climate, the beneficial effect of a healthy natural world on people and culture, the satisfactions of restoring woodlands, and the unending conflict between the human power to create and the economic imperative to destroy for short-term gain. As remains common today, Astrov's pronouncements about nature and its value are met with a mix of praise and skepticism by the other characters.

From Scene 1:

SONIA. No, the work is thrilling. Dr. Astrov watches over the old woods and sets out new plantations every year....................He says that forests are the ornaments of the earth, that they teach mankind to understand beauty and attune his mind to lofty sentiments. Forests temper a stern climate, and in countries where the climate is milder, less strength is wasted in the battle with nature, and the people are kind and gentle. The inhabitants of such countries are handsome, tractable, sensitive, graceful in speech and gesture. Their philosophy is joyous, art and science blossom among them, their treatment of women is full of exquisite nobility——


ASTROV: ........I don't object, of course, to cutting wood from necessity, but why destroy the forests? The woods of Russia are trembling under the blows of the axe. Millions of trees have perished. The homes of the wild animals and birds have been desolated; the rivers are shrinking, and many beautiful landscapes are gone forever. ....................Who but a stupid barbarian could burn so much beauty in his stove and destroy that which he cannot make? Man is endowed with reason and the power to create, so that he may increase that which has been given him, but until now he has not created, but demolished. The forests are disappearing, the rivers are running dry, the game is exterminated, the climate is spoiled, and the earth becomes poorer and uglier every day. [To VANYA] I read irony in your eye; you do not take what I am saying seriously, and—and—after all, it may very well be nonsense. But when I pass peasant-forests that I have preserved from the axe, or hear the rustling of the young plantations set out with my own hands, I feel as if I had had some small share in improving the climate, and that if mankind is happy a thousand years from now I will have been a little bit responsible for their happiness. When I plant a little birch tree and then see it budding into young green and swaying in the wind, my heart swells with pride .......

From Scene 3: (spoken to his love interest, Yelena, who has her mind on other things)

ASTROV. I have my own desk there in Ivan's room. When I am absolutely too exhausted to go on I drop everything and rush over here to forget myself in this work for an hour or two. Ivan and Miss Sonia sit rattling at their counting-boards, the cricket chirps, and I sit beside them and paint, feeling warm and peaceful. But I don't permit myself this luxury very often, only once a month.

[Pointing to the picture] Look there! That is a map of our country as it was fifty years ago. The green tints, both dark and light, represent forests. Half the map, as you see, is covered with it. Where the green is striped with red the forests were inhabited by elk and wild goats. Here on this lake, lived great flocks of swans and geese and ducks; as the old men say, there was a power of birds of every kind. Now they have vanished like a cloud. Beside the hamlets and villages, you see, I have dotted down here and there the various settlements, farms, hermit's caves, and water-mills. This country carried a great many cattle and horses, as you can see by the quantity of blue paint. For instance, see how thickly it lies in this part; there were great herds of them here, an average of three horses to every house.

[A pause] Now, look lower down. This is the country as it was twenty-five years ago. Only a third of the map is green now with forests. There are no goats left and no elk. The blue paint is lighter, and so on, and so on.

Now we come to the third part; our country as it appears to-day. We still see spots of green, but not much. The elk, the swans, the black-cock have disappeared. It is, on the whole, the picture of a regular and slow decline which it will evidently only take about ten or fifteen more years to complete. You may perhaps object that it is the march of progress, that the old order must give place to the new, and you might be right if roads had been run through these ruined woods, or if factories and schools had taken their place. The people then would have become better educated and healthier and richer, but as it is, we have nothing of the sort. We have the same swamps and mosquitoes; the same disease and want; the typhoid, the diphtheria, the burning villages. We are confronted by the degradation of our country, brought on by the fierce struggle for existence of the human race. It is the consequence of the ignorance and unconsciousness of starving, shivering, sick humanity that, to save its children, instinctively snatches at everything that can warm it and still its hunger. So it destroys everything it can lay its hands on, without a thought for the morrow. And almost everything has gone, and nothing has been created to take its place.

(translation from http://www.gutenberg.org, photo of Chekhov from Wikipedia)

Ivy Claims a Tree

This tree was leaning against a neighbor's fence after Hurricane Sandy, and had to come down. It looks like it was some sort of flourishing evergreen tree, but the tree itself had dropped all its leaves well before the hurricane arrived. What remains green, and what was likely responsible for giving the hurricane winds leverage to push the tree partly over, is english ivy that had found the tree trunk to be a perfect substrate for supporting its vertical aspirations.

You can see that the tree was holding up not only itself, but also a similar weight of vines clinging to its bark. The vine is not a vampire. It doesn't feed on the tree's sap. But its roots compete with the tree's for water and nutrients, and its leaves eventually extend up and out to where they begin competing with the tree's leaves for light. The tree becomes weakened even as its burden of vines increases.

Meanwhile, the vine was happily producing tens of thousands of berries along the full length of the tree.

The tree company gave me the firewood--black locust burns very hot and clean after being cured for a year. Nice to have firewood, but the tree would still be shading the yard if the owner had simply cut the vines off near ground level every couple years. Neglect and deferred maintenance strike again.

A Hawk Does Lunch

Yesterday, a red-tailed hawk took a leisurely late lunch, perched on a Kentucky Coffee Tree overlooking North Harrison Street. Just below, cars streamed by on their way to or from the shopping center, oblivious to the lone diner. The winter menu being slim, the hawk had selected the day's special, raw rodent, from a neighbor's self-serve, backyard buffet. Hawks, it seems, don't make lunch dates but prefer instead to dine alone.

I like to think that the unlimited choice of perches, each with a commanding view, make up for any monotony in the diet. If people had the keen eyesight and dull tastebuds of a hawk, our restaurants might dispense with chefs and invest instead in vistas. Towns would inventory and protect their viewscapes to insure that all could feast their eyes to their souls' content.

Radical Change Comes To Hidden Valley

There's a small valley in the middle of Princeton, unseen though thousands pass close by every day. The  stream, its channel badly eroded over time by stormwater from the hardened campus landscape, underwent an elaborate restoration (previous posts here and here),with boulders set in specific configurations to make a series of pools and riffles.

In contrast to most of Princeton's forests, which grew up on agricultural lands abandoned as recently as the 1960s, this valley's beeches, oaks, tupelos and white ash are nearly 200 years old. A few were sacrificed to reconfigure the stream and make room for the big equipment necessary to place the boulders in position, but many remained,

that is, until Hurricane Sandy came along. The nicely crafted stream channel is now clogged with fallen trees. If left uncleared, the trees will divert flow away from the carefully engineered channel.

I counted some twenty mature trees down, reminiscent of Pearl Harbor's battleship row after the Japanese bombing in 1941.

Included in the carnage were some of the giant old trees, their extensive, healthy root systems no match for winds that may well have been 20 mph faster than anything these trees had been exposed to in the past.

One theory I have, which may or may not be valid, is that the winds were not only stronger but also came from a somewhat different angle than our forests have been exposed to before. In this google map photo, the blue meandering line marks the hidden valley (next to Washington Road), and the purple line marks the direction of the hurricane winds, which being from the east had an unhindered path on Carnegie Lake to gain speed before slamming into the valley. It's also possible that the curved roof of Jadwin Gym (the white object above the tip of the purple arrow) served like the airfoil of a plane's wing to increase the wind velocity.

The few gaps in the canopy made by the stream restoration have now expanded, increasing the future exposure for those trees that remain.

Many young trees--this is a beech tree-were planted as part of the restoration. A more mixed-age forest should take shape over time. The trees will be cut away from the channel, and the hidden valley will still have its beautiful aspects. We can still admire the great trees left standing.

But the loss of so many grand, old, and still very healthy trees may be a local example of what is happening worldwide, as the radicalization of weather exposes forests to conditions they have not had time to adapt to. Seldom mentioned in discussions of changing climate is the extraordinary speed with which the human-caused changes are occurring. What might have happened over tens of thousands of years is now coming to pass in a century. In what has been lost here, it's hard not to see a warning. The more we cling to the status quo, the more the world around us will change.

Flocking Birds

Birds seemed scarce during this long spell of cold weather, but three days ago a flock of small birds was doing a bird's version of Spanish tapas on Linden Lane, converging on the top of a hemlock, feasting, conversing, then quickly moving on to another conifer down the road. There was a contagious, buoyant optimism in their treetop society, their jazzlike mixture of individuality and collective coherence.

It was a small flock--maybe 20 or 30 birds in all--but it's refreshing to see any sort of expression of abundance among what were likely native birds. Abundance is more commonly associated with some human-induced imbalance, like the introduced starlings that suppress native bird populations by competing for food and nesting sites. This small congregation on Linden Lane was a bit of good news cast against winter's gray.

I wanted to know what they were, which proved an inconvenient urge. Knowing more, I might have immediately recognized something defining in their call or body language. Knowing little, I was stuck peering up at their dark, backlit silhouettes, detecting what might be some color in their necks. A photo didn't help. That smudge there is the last bird flying away as I finally got a good angle.

Thinking there might be some particular species most likely to be found gathering high in the hemlocks on a winter's day, I emailed local birder Fred Spar for ideas. He offered many: "... leading possibilities are Juncos, House Finches, or White-throated Sparrows. All are pretty common right now and tend to move in flocks. Male House Finches are reddish-purple on head and neck; Juncos are dark on the head and chest, but with a white belly; White-throated Sparrows have, predictably, white throats, but also very distinctive yellow marks from the eye to the base of the bill. All would make some cheeping/chattering sounds as they communicate with each other while feeding. Junco calls tend to be much higher pitched. Goldfinches or Purple Finches (a bit larger and more rosy colored than the House Finches) are also possibilities, but are not as plentiful as the others. Cedar Waxwings have been pretty scarce this winter, but can usually be identified by very high-pitched lisping sounds. They'd probably also be seen higher up in trees with berries. Could be some more exotic finches or sparrows: There have been Red and White-winged Crossbills in NJ this winter. These are small finch-sized birds with a lot of pink coloring. Maybe Redpolls? These are small birds with a distinctive reddish cap. Pine Siskins are a possibility, too, but they've been scarce since Sandy."

Maybe a finch.

The next day, more abundance paid a visit: a flock of what looked to be a hundred or so robins in trees across the street, with a woodpecker or two thrown in.

By the end of the day, though, abundance had reverted to stereotype, with hundreds of starlings descending on the backyard, like flecks of pepper from a shaker, seeming to gorge on phantoms in my desolate backyard.

Backyard Minipond In Winter

A backyard minipond, essentially a dugout area strategically located to catch runoff from the house or neighbors' yards, serves multiple functions. There's the hydrologic aspect, in that it contributes a tiny bit to controlling runoff in the community. It's greater gifts, though, come in many forms. This pond has attracted an occasional great blue heron and even one time a wood duck, along with robins wanting a bath, and a wayward turtle or frog now and then. Compared to the static nature of the rest of the landscaping, a minipond is particularly dynamic in winter, when it may be open water one day, then frozen into beautiful patterns the next.

Even in a pond just a few feet deep, the experience of peering down into clear waters can evoke a sense of mystery, complexity and depth, which may awaken awareness of similar properties in our minds.

The other day, when the pond ice was an inch thick, my neighbor came over with his two young boys. While we talked, the boys did what boys love to do, which is break the ice, pull the chunks out, drop them on the ground and watch how they broke into pieces. What other material do they encounter that they can break without consequence? As they explored the pond, they tested the ice's strength, assessing the consequences of putting their weight on it. Without even realizing, they were exploring the nature of risk in a place where they could do so safely. They ended up with wet feet, but home was just one door away.

Later, like shaking an etch-a-sketch, a thaw melted the broken ice, leaving a clean slate for the next cold spell to work its frozen magic.

These are some of the beauties of a backyard minipond.

(Note: Beginning in April, I'll be teaching a mini-course on miniponds and other ways of utilizing runoff in the landscape, at the Princeton Adult School.)

Princeton Tree Guide

The Whole Earth Center always has interesting stuff on its bulletin board, beyond the cash registers on the way out. If you still have page 7 of the Dec. 12 Town Topics, you'll find a tree guide for boro streets developed by the Boro Shade Tree Commission (now merged with township and reconstituted).

It will also show up as a pamphlet, to be made available at the public library and the Whole Earth Center.

A map shows the streets, with abbreviations for what trees grow along them. And some 30 trees are described, with photos of leaf shape. Should be a useful item. The borough tree inventory was done by Jim Consolloy, who had recently retired as head of university grounds.

There are plans to begin inventorying street trees in the former township as well.

The bulletin board also had a copy of some guy's take on climate change and the 60s musical Camelot.

New Blog Format

Readers of PrincetonNatureNotes will have noticed a new page layout. I held on to the old one for many years because of a preoccupation with content over appearance, and also liked the narrow verticality of it, akin to walking along a nature trail. But this new format should help navigate more easily from one post to another.

If you put your pointer in the upper left hand corner, on "sidebar", a menu should drop down with all sorts of viewing options that are fun to try out. Along the right edge of the page is a slim black bar that, if touched with the pointer, should pop out and offer links to my contact info, categories of posts, a list of other websites, and a way to subscribe to this blog.

Next step for me is to update the categories and make it easier to find posts from the same season in past years. I welcome any feedback on this or any other aspects of the blog.

May your new year be filled with discoveries while exploring the nature that is all around us.

2012: The Year We Got Chickens

I've been holding back on talking about some truly remarkable creatures that came into our lives this past year. When the pleadings of our 12 year old finally proved too much, I asked around about proper protocol for having chickens in town, and we went ahead and bought some chicks at a local farm supply store in May. Not having had any luck with keeping birds, or particular affection for chickens, I was not optimistic. And yet, over the summer and fall, they have worked their way into our hearts. Gentle, even huggable, imbued with personality and panache, generous in their provision of eggs, they are at the same time surprisingly independent, foraging for much of their diet on their own, living a quiet, unobtrusive life in the backyard.

The coop offered a chance to brush up on rusty carpentry skills and put to use materials scavenged from the curb.

With the entry of these charismatic creatures into our lives, the outdoors, specifically the backyard, began competing more successfully with all the diversions that tend to keep kids indoors.

This is a brief introduction. I'll post more, including more recent research on town poultry policy that made me feel comfortable about blogging on the subject.

Tree Gets Double Whammy

This hapless spruce tree lost its top in a previous wind storm, then suffered a hit from a black locust felled by Hurricane Sandy.

A whole line of black locusts was toppled in Quarry Park by the hurricane. They, like many other fallen trees in town, were located on the west side of a clearing, in this case the parking lot for the Senior Resource Center on Harrison Street. The high winds came from the east, gathered speed in clearings, and then walloped the trees on the far side.

I, too, lost a tree situated like this, on the west side of a playfield. A similar pattern is noticeable where winds gathering speed across the meadows of Tusculum slammed into the forests of Mountain Lakes, and in the devastation of a 200 year old grove of trees just west of a long stretch of Carnegie Lake. One question is whether the extraordinary damage has been caused only by the excessive wind speed or if recent high winds came from an unusual direction.

We're all wondering if the trees left standing have proven themselves durable enough to survive future storms as well. It's also possible that some left standing have been traumatized in ways that will be expressed over the next few years, and that some that were protected from winds from the east could prove vulnerable if the next great winds come from a different direction. The one thing that's clear is that no one's in a hurry to find out.

Rogers Refuge--Pavement Meets Wetland

When is pavement a good thing in a wetland? Take the example of Rogers Refuge, a special spot in Princeton just below the Institute Woods. It's owned by the American Water Company. They have a few wells there, but it also serves as a haven for 200 species of birds attracted to its deep forests and extensive marshes.

The Friends of Rogers Refuge (composed mostly of birders--I'm the guest plant person) has worked with the water company and Princeton township to manage the wetland as bird habitat. Near the water plant is a kiosk and several observation platforms overlooking the marsh,  open to the public and all accessed via a gravel road off of West Drive.

The road, built long before laws were passed to discourage building in floodplains, impedes the flow of water from the upper marsh (on the right) to the lower marsh (left). When the nearby Stonybrook River floods, like it did last week, it swells into the marsh and sends water flowing over the road. Every time this happened in the past, gravel from the road would be washed into the lower marsh, and the water company would have to repair the road.

Now, with pavement laid in short sections where the washouts used to occur, plants growing in the lower marsh will no longer get smothered in gravel, and there won't be an ongoing need to bring heavy equipment in to keep the road open. I'm sure state regulations and the Department of Environmental Protection made it very difficult to get permits to do this (I've heard it was a three year process!), but the result is positive for the wetland, and for anyone wishing to visit.

The most remarkable thing about this, for me personally--having advocated over the years for so many things in Princeton--was to return and find that the water company had actually gone ahead and done it. I've encouraged the township to pave a similar patch of unpaved driveway that sends gravel downstream at Mountain Lakes Preserve, but the regulatory hurdles may have proven too difficult to overcome.

More info on Rogers Refuge at www.rogersrefuge.org.

Course Offered on Managing Runoff

For those interested in better utilizing runoff in the yard, this spring I'll be teaching a course entitled Managing Runoff in the Landscape through the Princeton Adult School, beginning April 11. Registration has begun. The course is in the Personal Enrichment section on their website, princetonadultschool.org, under "home".

Here's a description:

"Water flow in the landscape can drive decisions about what to plant and where. Wet ground offers a chance to grow some of New Jersey’s most attractive and low-maintenance native species. We will visit several examples in Princeton of using runoff to aesthetic ecological advantage, including projects the instructor has contributed to Rogers Refuge, Princeton University’s stream restoration, Harrison Street Park, Princeton High School’s Ecolab wetland, and constructed raingardens large and small. By studying these examples, participants will gain knowledge of native plants and ideas for managing runoff in their own yards."

A Great Blue Heron Pays a Visit

Reality check here. Two days after Christmas. No creatures stirring in the house. Mousetrap empty. Stockings still hung by the chimney with care. Visit from Santa? Check, but how did he get through the wood stove? Children still nestled all snug in their beds? No doubt. It's vacation. Sugar plums dancing in their heads? There always seems to be something dancing in their heads.

But what's this? I by my window, computer before me,

When outside there arose such a flutter,
I sprang from my desk to see what was the mutter.
Away from the window, I flew like a flash.
Searched for my camera amongst all the trash.

It came at 8am on this grey, overcast morning, drawn by the backyard miniponds swollen by recent rains. For the first minute, the breeze ruffling its neck feathers, it stood still but for its head, shifting angles of sight, perusing the watery scene. Whether its extraordinary state of alertness was devoted to sensing potential danger or potential food, I couldn't say.

The pond it found so intriguing has its genesis in runoff from neighbors up the slope. When rain continues for days, the soil becomes soaked and our ephemeral tributary of Harry's Brook comes to life, flowing under the fence,

across stone walkways,

down the reconstructed channel and floodplain planted with native water-loving sedges, rushes, and wildflowers, past a firewood sculpture that keeps an eye on the backyard, and finally under the lower fence, to run the gauntlet between two neighbors' homes built before building was banned in floodplains.

Not finding what it wanted in our ponds, the heron checked out our driveway "retention basin". Note the clouds in the sky that look just like leaves. Actually, oh, sorry, this photo is upside down.

Here we go. That's better. One reason I put little faith in pipes to drain things like driveways is that the pipes tend to get blocked. The one here was clogged or crushed by a tree, which we finally cut down. Routing, excavation--all have been attempted, to no avail.

However, perhaps the tree roots are starting to rot away, because the pipe has begun to work again, making the driveway act like a retention basin that catches stormwater runoff, then releases it slowly into the local waterway, which as mentioned happens to coincide with our backyard.

We contribute less to downstream flooding, and we get visits from distinguished guests. Not a bad deal.

I like to think the heron was fooled by our swollen pondlets just like I was as a kid, living for a month on top of a mountain in Texas while my dad was on an observing run at McDonald Observatory. At the base of the mountain was a pond full of catfish that we had much success catching during long evenings before my dad headed up to the telescope, to scrutinize the depths of the universe for the night. That part of Texas was known for its lack of rain, which is why the observatory was there. But one afternoon, a single large cloud appeared on the horizon in an otherwise blue sky. It came right over us, as if on a mission, dumped its thick rain upon us, then left within an hour. I looked down the mountain and saw the pond had tripled in size. Maybe it was all of those Field and Stream magazines I was reading, but to my thinking the swollen pond meant that the fish had tripled in size as well. I was so excited I hiked all the way down the mountain, sugar plummed lunker fish dancing in my head, and cast my line into the sprawling, muddy waters, expecting great things. Not a single fish. Slowly it dawned on me that there still were the same number of fish, and they hadn't grown. They were just more spread out and they couldn't see the bait because of all the muddy runoff. I was, in the true sense of the word, dis-illusioned. But in retrospect it made for a great hike.

Before I could rouse the kids this morning, the heron flew off into the bleak morning sky, to grace some other place, and hopefully return after some future rain, to lend our modest waters its deep scrutiny.

A Whitish Christmas, and Wild Turkeys

The snow came Christmas eve and lingered until mid-morning today, long enough to lubricate Santa's sleigh.

We opened the wood stove's doors long enough to add the fire's soulful presence to the present opening.

Then came a walk among the boulders and ghostly beech trees of Herrontown Woods. The beeches hold their light brown leaves, making for a nice effect. If you see two small ducks walking with us, it must be your imagination.

There's plenty of evidence of what Princeton has been through this fall.

Moss has a good growth strategy for surviving wind storms.

And then, driving home on Snowden, a sighting of wild turkeys.

Ten of them crossed the road, presumably for the same reason chickens do.

Following perhaps fifty feet behind, keeping an eye on everyone and everything, was the largest turkey of all, a male with a prominent "beard".

According to Princeton's animal control officer, Mark Johnson, there are 50-60 wild turkeys in Princeton. I hear they are fairly common in the Little Brook neighborhood.

To more fully appreciate the magnificence of these birds, I highly recommend the one hour PBS documentary, My Life as a Turkey. It can be watched online, or at the Princeton Environmental Film Festival a month from now.

A Mathematician's Dot and Line Forest

This shot was taken while walking down off the Princeton Ridge towards the small farmstead in Herrontown Woods, in eastern Princeton. It was a clear, crisp afternoon earlier this fall. The boulders, which diminish in size as one walks downhill, add punctuation to the woods--dots to go with the trees' lines.

Which reminds me of one of my favorite books growing up, "The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics", in which a line falls in love with a dot and seeks to win her over from her squiggly boyfriend by overcoming his stiffness and learning how to make all sorts of magnificent shapes. It's still available online, and there's even a ten minute animated movie version on youtube.

The first 81 acres of Herrontown Woods were donated to the county back in 1957 by a famous mathematician and his wife, Oswald and Elizabeth Veblen. They lived the last decades of their lives there, in the Veblen House, clearly in love with the dot and line woodlands of the ridge.

Though my daughter didn't know it, her pause next to the trail to gaze across the light-filled woodland was exactly what the Veblens had in mind. According to a New York Times article at the time of the donation, "Mr. and Mrs. Veblen donated the tract because they felt this rapidly developing area was in dire need of a public park. 'There is nowhere around here where you can get away from cars and just go walk and sit,' Mrs. Veblen said. 'Princeton, when we came here in 1905, was a lovely village,' Mrs. Veblen declared. She explained that the donation was made in the hope that a little bit of this outdoor atmosphere will be preserved.'"

And so it was, and so has much more been preserved over the decades, building on that simple but central vision of a place to go walk and sit. The romance of the dot and the line ends with a moral: "To the vector belong the spoils." We are surely the vectors, imbued with direction and magnitude, with many trails and vistas to call our own.

Wood Pile Habitat

One easy way to provide habitat in the backyard is to build a wood pile, even if one isn't intending to use the wood. We happen to use the wood, which brings discovery of just how varied and inviting are all the protected spaces these highrise hotels create.

Wooly bear caterpillars curl up inbetween logs.

This beetle liked a particular furrow in the bark.

Little ant hamlets, with ants larger than the variety that invade the home but much smaller than carpenter ants, cluster on small hollows in the split wood.

And a spider looked to be spending the winter sprawled protectively over its well webbed brood tucked in a knothole.

All this microlife makes naturalists slow wood gatherers, given the need to at least try to spare these animals, there homes set aside where they can remain through the winter.