NATURAL PROGRESSION: A PERSONAL VIEW
THE SPELL OF NATURE
By Barbara Tatham Johnson
The captivation begins early in the simplest of experiences, perhaps as
easily as a child sending dozens of dandelion seeds dancing on fine white
filamentous dress into the air with a gust of breath. When a rock is
overturned in play, the discovery of an ant colony scrambling to move tiny
white pupae to safety from exposed tunnels sets off a lifetime fascination
with creatures hidden under leaves or in the crevices of logs.
What we discover when we observe nature can be as enchanting as anything in
a fantasy world. In fact, there is a fine line between the imagined in the
natural world and the incredible actuality. The goal is to be curious,
open-minded, and observant. Approach nature with youthful enthusiasm.
Science writer and teacher, Chet Raymo, writes, “Most of my adult life has
been a struggle to become a child again in nature’s presence, to perceive
nature’s flow and wholeness and my place in it with a child’s purity of
sight.”
Curiosity and imagination combine in fascinating ways. The flash, flutter,
and iridescence of dragonfly and damselfly wings are easily transformed into
the flitting presence of fairies by the fanciful. Darting from the grass
beside a path, zigzagging through shadow and sunlight along a forest
streambed, ruby meadowhawks and ebony jewelwings are real insects with
fanciful names. Their life cycles are as adventurous and bizarre as any
fairy tale. In the larval stage they resemble plated aquatic dragons.
Feeding by extending a hinged lower jaw with lightning speed to grab prey,
these creatures are voracious hunters in their watery environment. Their
emergence from larval skeletons to adults of brilliant colors and
spectacular winged flight compares with the transformation of beast into
prince.
Dragonflies and damselflies decorate and enliven the natural world from
spring into late autumn. On a morning of light frost a few years ago, I
walked the edge of a meadow just before sunrise. As I concentrated on my
footing across a wet area, I saw a small dark spreadwing damselfly dangling
from a threadlike dead plant stem. The dainty wing and body position,
diamond coated with a light film of frost, brought me to a halt, almost
authenticating belief in fairies. When I returned an hour later, I
appreciated the reality of resilience as I saw the damselfly, warmed in the
sunlight, take flight.
On the night of the first spring rain after the first spring thaw when
temperatures reach the low fifty degrees, spotted salamanders leave their
shelters and burrows in the forest to gather in the vernal pools where they
were born. I attend the local spotted salamander gathering at a pool in my
woods every April. Standing at the side of the pool not long after sunset, I
see in the strong beam of a battery lantern arriving salamanders pushing
away from the leaf litter at the water’s edge to swim and twist past sunken
branches farther into the pool. The night deepens. Rain falls gently. Wood
frogs, floating on their bellies atop the water “clack” steadily, and the
light beam reflects from the eyes of pairs in mating embrace. Along the
bottom of matted leaves and sticks, I see more and more yellow spotted
elongate black bodies, some six inches and more from nose to tail tip,
moving slowly into a group that becomes a tangle of twisting sliding bodies
moving over and around each other. Now and then one breaks free to wriggle
to the surface for a quick sip of air before submerging to rejoin the swirl.
The sight is mesmerizing. I recall Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies and
can imagine Tom and his companions at play. Then I realize that I am
observing the awesome primal effort of a species to replicate itself.
Salamanders remain at the pool for several days, although the twirling dance
is a one night only performance. The females retrieve with the lips of their
cloacae the sperm packets deposited by the males along the bottom,
fertilizing their eggs, which they will lay in jellylike globular masses on
submerged twigs and grasses.
Over the weeks of May and June, I watch the salamanders hatch and develop.
Henri Fabre wrote, “Yes, a stagnant pool, though but a few feet wide,
hatched by the sun is an immense world, an inexhaustible mine of
observation.” My visits to the vernal pool prove this as my observations of
the larval spotted salamanders become lessons in the amazing endurance of a
species as some of the tiny legless gilled creatures avoid fatal encounters
with predaceous diving beetle larvae, dragonfly nymphs, and a host of pool
visitors: turtles, animals, birds, humans. The growing salamanders must
survive the shrinking of the pool as spring turns to drying summer as well
as the flushing waters of heavy thunderstorms. If I time my visits well
enough, I can see tiny legs develop and gills shrink. On one lucky occasion,
I find a fully developed young salamander, a fragile miniature adult three
inches long in the satin black of new skin, stepping away from the drying
pool to seek shelter in the forest floor. In my momentary state of awe, I
surprise myself with thoughts returning to Kingsley’s Tom emerging to a
better life, cleansed by his watery experience.
I am fascinated by the science of entomologists whose observations and hard
work allow me to explore the life style of the solitary bees, Andrenidae,
that collect pollen on the elongating pussy willow catkins in early spring.
Each bee constructs a burrow on the edge of the sandy driveway and stores a
bundle of pollen for her emerging larva to feed upon in each nursery
chamber. At the same time, I watch for the arrival of bee flies among the
patches of blooming bluets in the meadow. Fuzzy-bodied little flies with
long proboscises to pollinate the specialized reproductive structure of the
bluet flowers, these flies will discover the sandy cone entrances of some of
the Andrenidae burrows and in a quick low overflight drop an egg close to
the opening. The egg hatches immediately. The threadlike fly larva enters
the burrow and finds a chamber with a bee’s egg and pollen-packet food
supply. The fly larva feeds on pollen, molts into a maggot and parasitizes
the now hatched Andrenidae larva. As it fattens, the fly maggot may be
parasitized by a wasp partial to sandy burrows. Next spring in a feat of
legerdemain the little sandy burrow may produce a bee or a fly or a wasp to
continue a timeless business.
There is no more enchanting sight in summer than a meadow full of flashing
fireflies as dusk deepens into night. Many years ago when I lived in West
Virginia, I witnessed the display of a grassy hillside alit with many
thousands of firefly signals. I knew that scientists had determined that the
firefly genus Photinus had characteristic patterns of flashing and special
flight paths particular to each of its species and that, if I set my mind to
it, I could distinguish the J-shaped signal of Photinus pyralio from the
hops and hovers and quick flashes of another species. I knew that females of
one species were mimicking the flashing of males of another species in order
to attract them to fatal proximity—the males becoming meals not mates. The
sight was too delightful to turn into scientific corroboration. I stood with
my family for a long while, hovering in an imaginary space vehicle above the
vast sprawl of lights of an unknown civilization, enthralled with a
bewitching sight. Then I crouched to the eye level of my five-year-old son
and found myself in the middle of a giant Fourth of July sparkler. The
dazzle of that moment has never faded.
The entomologist Howard Ensign Evans wrote in Life On A Little Known Planet,
“magic is not likely to be diminished by all the science we can muster.” Our
lives are fuller when we can distinguish the real from the imagined yet are
willing to allow a blurring of the edges every now and then. Joy is seeking
an answer to something we observe and in the search glimpsing what is beyond
explanation.
(This is the second part of a three-part essay.)
