Author: scorrigan20

I used to talk to birds. Oddly, they used to talk back. Walking down my street, in the shadow of tall trees, I would hear a solitary whistling call from some lonely bastard or other. I would whistle back in the same rhythm. A few moments later, I would get a response in a slightly different tone. Then came the crucial part. If I failed my response, the conversation would end. There would be silence, and no amount of whistling could bring my conversational partner back. Repeated experimentation allowed me to feel out the breadth and basics of the social cues they used, and eventually I was able to progress through multiple calls and responses without committing avian faux-pas. I was very proud of this ability and would practice it often.

I do wonder whether any of them figured out that I was not a potential mate. I never thought at the time about why the birds were calling, I just felt compelled to call back. I wonder how many species I irrevocably damaged, how many birds I cockblocked, just by trying to say hello.

In my freshman year, a squirrel was murdered outside of my dorm building. The perpetrator was a bird of prey of some fashion. It gathered onlookers as it slowly consumed its victim, stopping at the halfway point, once the corpse was light enough, to carry the remains up into a tree for a safer meal. It was not especially large, and it struggled to carry even half of a squirrel into the lowest branch of a nearby oak, but it had efficiently and quickly killed its prey with a large set of talons.

I never looked into its identity then, and the pictures of it are long gone, but I think I’ve narrowed it down to two possibilities; A red-shouldered hawk or a red-tailed hawk. The former only occasionally prey on tree squirrels, while the latter do so far more often. This is probably due to their respective sizes – red-shouldered hawks seem to prefer prey that is smaller than them, and eastern grey squirrels such as our campus’ famed black squirrels can easily grow to match their weight. Red-tails tend to outweigh tree squirrels by a comfortable margin, but they also seem to prefer ground squirrels to their arboreal cousins.

Ultimately, based on their native ranges, I would guess it was a young red-tailed hawk. Red-shoulders only spend their summers in this area, but red-tails will often spend their lives here.

The title says it all. Thoreau was a pretentious son of a gun, especially when it came to writing and reading. In his aptly-named chapter Reading, he spends a great deal of time glorifying the ancient “works of genius” of the Romans and Greeks while at the same time bemoaning the state of both contemporary literature and contemporary literature of the middle ages. What specifically grinds my gears is his insistence that the spoken word is inferior to the written one.

“The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and health of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.”

That’s what Thoreau says, still discussing the epics of Ancient Greece. Then he hits us with: “No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his expeditions in a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of relics.” Now a pretentious pontificator is one thing, but a pretentious pontificator who forgets that the Iliad was created as an oral poetic epic while at the same time railing against the spoken word is something else entirely.

 

Johnson’s Woods is invaluable as a window into pre-industrial Ohio forests. And it only exists because for four hundred years people have not seen the land as valuable. It’s a funny thing, for the forest to have gained value thanks to being seen as worthless. Too swampy to farm and possessing no mineral reserves to exploit, it remained largely untouched by human hands. But as soon as our society began to appreciate the last shreds of our old-growth forests, we perceived Johnson’s Woods as having value.

And as soon as we valued it, we began to degrade it. A boardwalk was put in, and the tree-carvers followed. We made the woods accessible so we could better appreciate them, but in doing so we irrevocably changed the nature of the woods. The land was not farmed because it was too swampy, it was probably left un-mined because it lacked minerals, and it was not developed into a neighborhood or a shopping center probably because it is too far from other hubs of human activity. It was left inaccessible, free from harm, until, in our zeal to preserve it, we opened it up.