The Raptor Garden: A Hawk-eyed Affair.

      I think the hawk loves me. Or else he's playing me.

      So (this is two days ago) I walk to the saltmarsh because the day is sunny and warm and I'm hoping the snow has melted on the footpaths, which it has not quite. I'm clumping through the crystalline, crustless snow on the path, looking for birds when I round the first bend, look out across the flat expanse of the marsh -- disappointed that no large wading birds have returned yet to go fishing in the tidal marsh -- when I scan the single big tree in view and notice a sort of pudgy irregularity among the branches and guess at once what it is. 

        Some part of my brain knows this hawk. He has his own synapse.

        I assume right away it's the same red-tailed hawk I'd seen the week before. Descriptions of the red-tailed hawk use words like "blocky" and "broad" with "a whitish underbelly with a dark brown band across the belly, formed by horizontal streaks." It's those streaks I'd focused on as the identifying marker when I'd seen hawk the first time. 

          It seems some part of this hawk's brain knows me too. He is really quite far away. In no way is someone below the marksmanship standard of, say, Katniss Everdeen, standing on my side of the marsh a threat to a hawk on his side of the marsh. But when I lift my little field gasses to check him out, he lifts his wings and flies across the marsh.

            Toward me. I switch from little glasses to little camera and try to catch him flight.

            He lands in the trees that border the high side of my path, but not so far away that I can't see him. So I walk slowly along the path, trying to get close enough for a picture. But when I lift the camera he flies away.

            This is the standard behavior of a bird who wants to keep his distance, but the hawk drops down again not very far off and still on the line of my path. I catch up to him, click a few more shots off; this happens twice more until the path goes around a bend and I grow tired of clumping through snow and decide to cut across a wooded area where the footing is uniform and easier.

            I cross under the trees and make it back to the wide footpath that takes you out to the street when I notice something large directly in front of me on the wide, flat path. My hawk is standing there, in a puddle, his feet and lower feathers in the water.A bathing beauty?

            I approach, slowly -- thinking 'some coincidence?' -- and snapping off photos every few feet as I approach.

            I get to the point where I have to ask 'how close do I want to get?' The hawks, aside from moving his head from side to side as birds seem to do almost all the time, has not otherwise displayed the slightest concern over my presence. Are we playing chicken-hawk? Would he let me get close enough touch him? He's big (two-feet long and "blocky," bigger than he looks in the photos), he also has very effective claws and beak, and I realize getting too close could be extremely unwise.There's a grassy patch to one side of the path and I slide over onto it; no reaction from hawk-friend. Then I slowly work a perimeter around him, keeping a good 10 feet away. I emerge on the other side of him, back on the main path again and snap a few more photos from this angle. 

     Finally I turn my head, and my camera, in the other direction at the cry of a bluejay, and when I turn back the hawk is gone. In a flash. Absolutely soundless. I have no idea where.

            OK, that was fun. I think my face time with the hawk is over for the day, but when I get back to the car I realize I have somewhere dropped the black carrying case for my field glasses. Since it's still a nice day and I think I should be able to find it easily if I retrace my steps, so that's what I do, taking a little shortcut directly to the spot where I took the glasses out of the case to gaze at "my" hawk where I first spotted it in a distant tree. Nothing. I retrace the rest of my path, exactly. Nothing. 

            I'm cutting back through the trees, as I did before when I catch sight of the hawk's large body -- yet again -- perched in a tree right along the marsh path and wholly exposed to view. I come up close and taking a few more pics, through tree limbs. The hawks sees me of course, but shows no concern.

            OK; think again. Why can't I find the dropped glasses case? 

            It's now that I begin to suspect that the hawk has arranged this cunning series of distractions to lure me away from the place where I dropped the case. And then, when I finally left the marsh, darted back and picked up. I imagine it warming a clutch of hawk eggs somewhere in a nest.

            Back at my car. An interesting day; some gains, a loss. I climb into the driver's seat and only then notice, on the very edge of the marsh as close to the car as a bird can find purchase my hawk perches on a patch of brush barely strong enough to hold its weight. He could easily find a higher, better perch in a nearby tree, far less exposed. He could, for that matter, sit across from somebody else's car.

            He's across from mine.

            Can't get enough of me, I think. I take a farewell shot. I assure my hawk that if I ever put together a "big bird issue" for a national magazine, or a calendar, he will definitely be on it.

             Sequel: I go back to the same place the next day. Dark skies, drizzle. No birds around, certainly no interesting ones. I go back to the spot from which I first spotted the hawk in the big tree across the harsh. There on the path lies the black field glasses holder. It was not there yesterday when I looked for it. Why is it back there today? Where has it been? Who or what took it?

            Conspiracy theories abound.

Reading the Book of Nature: 'The Signature of All Things'

            "The Signature of All Things, " a phrase that I've loved for years, is the title of a new novel by Elizabeth Gilbert and a very old book by 17th century Christian mystic Jakob Boehme.

          I had not read either of these when I came across the phrase and thought it a delightful way to express an understanding of the natural world. Where I came across it is something I cannot remember, though it probably popped up in one or two of my graduate school classes where we looked at authors and thinkers interested in visionaries such as Jakob Boehme, a product of the Renaissance and Reformation.

           It was hard to be a visionary, mystic, or "prophet" in the Middle Ages in Europe, because the established church kept a close watch on unapproved religious ideas. New ideas, interpretations, doctrines, etc. would pop up. If they caught on they were likely to be called heresies and their followers eliminated.

            If a visionary made a point of saying he or she had been communicated to directly by God and gained any sort of a public following, their probably lifespan made them a poor risk for insurers. "Direct communication with God" was widely regarded as a "prior condition" that caused wiser heads to move away from them on the bus.

            A prominent example is Joan of Arc, who was "told" by God to rally the French against the English during the Hundred Years War; she went and did so, relieving a major city from an English siege and winning the French a rare, heartening victory during the period when the English tended to win all the battles (and then go home). For her reward French nobles convened a court of religious inquiry, the inquisitors found that Joan stuck to her story that God had spoken to her, and since this was a heresy -- it had happened in the early days of the Christian church, the church taught, but now there was no need for it since "true religion" had been revealed; so now if you thought that God was talking to you it was actually the Devil -- recommended that Joan be burned to death as a heretic. The French political establishment was only too happy to comply, ridding themselves of a troublesome peasant who was proving more popular than they were.

            Beginning in the 16th century the Protestant Reformation brought forth any new number of new doctrines and interpretations of scripture; visions, movements, and plans to make a new heaven on earth. Oddly, however, wherever somebody like Luther set up a new church it behaved toward doctrinal dissenters in exactly the same way the Roman Catholic church did -- burning them at the stake as heretics. Or if their numbers were great and established power and wealth threatened, go on a great honking massacre. Personally, I lost my religion when I read that Luther were personally responsible for the peasant massacres in 16th century Germany.

            So in the 16th and 17th century, when the "last" of the Christian mystics appear, a new "vision" of God, or his teachings was a risky business. Emanuel Swedenborg (born 1688) is regarded by some as the last Christian mystic and some Swedenborgian churches still exist. His teachings include the belief that the Bible describes the transformation of a human being from a materialistic to a spiritual being, and that the creation myth in Genesis is actually an account of man's rebirth or regeneration in six steps allegorized by the six days of creation.

            Swedenborg was an influence on William Blake, a poetic visionary, rather than a "Christian" one since Blake's "prophetic" works are a criticism of Christianity. Blake was also known to have read Jakob Boehme's "The Signature of All Things."

            As compelling as I find the notion that all things in nature are a "signature" that can in some way be read or understood, I have to confess that anyone who can read Boehme's book for more than a page or two today is a better man than I.

            Commentators who have read it say one way to understand Boehme's idea is that he conceived of the objective, material world as the impression, or inprimatur, of the Creator's design. The analogy is to early forms of printing. The divine artist-author-creator has "pressed" his design -- his mold, or master, or lithographic plate -- into the living material of nature.

            Hence it is a matter of seeing, or "reading," that signature in order to truly understand and appreciate the physical world. The clues are all around us, Boehme believed. The oak tree represents strength. The walnut shows the shape of the human brain within the shell of the cranium. Other examples rely on folk medicine, herbalism, and naturopathy.

            The idea that the shape and look -- and the feeling -- of the natural world: what it says, that is, not just to the eye but to the mind and the soul is an idea I found wildly inspiring. (Though I'm not at all sure it's what Boehme had in mind.)

            It meant to me that the natural world could instruct us, and continue to instruct us, in what our minds and our souls need to know. And it made sense to me that this instruction came more "naturally" if one approached it as a poet.

            In her recent novel, published last year, Elizabeth Gilbert makes wonderful use of the title "The Signature of All Things" in her own way. But I'll leave off here, because her book deserves its own review.

New Light, Old Trees

            The temperature went to the mid-fifties today and everyone who wanted to do anything in the last two months on a Saturday got into their car and did it. Not surprisingly roads were crowded and traffic backed up all over the Quincy-Boston area.

            Even without higher temps, over the last two weeks the increasing amount of light and growing length of day has been dragging our tired psyches into thoughts of seasonal succession. A higher sun seems to have lifted the sky itself. The balance between light and darkness is evening out. Birds have changed their tune and are singing even in raw afternoons when the sun doesn't shine, the wind doesn't slack, and the humans go around muttering under their breath. The calendar of the sun's ascent tells the birds it's time to be starting that round of activities that leads to more birds.

            The light has had its way with the snow too. It bakes the top of the snow fields into a kind of heavy, shiny saran wrap that's shiny and brightly reflective from a distance, but has a plastic, unnatural looking consistency up close that simply don't look long for this world. Where the snow meets pavement at the edge of the road or sidewalk the melt water gathers under the ice, squirming like the first germs of life.

            At Boston's Arnold Arboretum, where we found both clear paths and old snow, we glimpsed other signs that spring is on its way. Children pop up, little ones especially, on these warmish late winter-early spring days. Some walked free, others were ferried in strollers and all manner of baby carriers; some rode tiny bicycles, including one that lacked petals -- who needs petals if you have quick feet? They were dogged by a cartoonish diversity of tiny canines.

            This time of year is also an excellent opportunity to appreciate the skeletal structures -- or natural architecture -- of deciduous trees. The snow's no longer thick enough to obscure the pattern of the branches, the cold doesn't hurry you along, and the new buds and leafage are still far off. What you have is the tangle, the watershed delta-like branching of the limbs.

            Rivers "branch" because their divisions resemble trees.

            "Tree diagrams" are based on the growth patterns of branches. These patterns are objects lessons in change and progression over time. 

            And some trees have a lot more time to work with than people do. Sequoias, perhaps the most long-living lifeforms on earth, can live from 1,200 to1,800 years or more. Maybe longer if we leave them alone.

            We learned, in the course of our ignorant gawking at a shapely, leafless, and utterly unknown (to us) tree, that another kind of sequoia is now growing in the eastern USA at sites such as the Arnold Arboretum. As we admired the tree from across the path, passing incorrect guesses back and forth on the species of this fine specimen --

            "Is it a cedar?"

            "You mean a cypress?"

             "But if it's a cypress how come it's leafless in the winter?" --

a learned gentlemen of a certain age did us the favor of identifying the tree and telling us about it.

            "It's a metasequoia."

            "A sequoia?"

             "Yes, but a metasequoia."

            The species had been known only as a fossil, the professorial looking stranger informed us, and was believed to be extinct.

            But then the tree was discovered in China. The arboretum sent people over to bring some seeds back and it was grown successfully here. Seedlings were then distributed to other sites in America and Europe.

            Looking for sources later at home (once I got the spelling right), I learned that the metasequoia is indeed deciduous and described as one of the three species commonly called "redwoods." It was "rediscovered" in the 1940s in a mountainous region of China. It grows to about 200 feet and has become a popular ornamental.

            As a fossil it was placed in the Mesozoic age, the time of dinosaurs, lasting from 250 to 66 million years ago. That's another way of being a long-lived tree.

            The tree has an oversized candelabra shape to it, branches lifted to the sides like arms akimbo. A yellow-brownish cast to the bark, not as red as the redwoods we saw growing in California. The higher branches are festooned with what looked like last year's seedpods. (Top two photos on left.)

            The man who identified the metasequoia for us also told us we would find some other intriguingly shaped trees just around the bend. We walked on and found his trees --beeches: thick-trunked, thickly branched, beautifully articulated forms. (third and fourth photos.)

            Green will have its day, and it's coming soon, but bare is beautiful as well.

The First Garden: Eden According to Karen Armstrong

            People who love gardens like to point out that Western religion has a long tradition of regarding the ideal, perfect, paradisal home for human beings as "a garden." When God created human beings he established them in the Garden of Eden.

           What happens next is a matter of interpretation. Karen Armstrong, whose recent book is titled simply "The Bible," points out that from its beginning the Judeo-Christian scripture defeats any attempt at a literal, consistent understanding of the text.

            "From the first, Biblical authors contradicted each other and their conflicting visions were all included by the editors in the final text," she writes. "There is for example no single doctrine of creation in the Bible and the first chapter of Genesis was rarely read as a factual description of the origins of the cosmos..."

            Both accounts of creation in Genesis, however, do place Adam and Eve in the garden, and some of us still find comfort, and inspiration, in that choice.

            For Armstrong's theological reading of that creative choice, however, the idea of "garden" is not a matter of a certain arrangement of plants and other facilities -- water source? archway? benches? hermitage? -- but of creating a setting to make ecstasy possible.       

            Ecstasy -- from the Greek ekstasis: "standing outside one's normal state" -- transcends the divisions and fragmentary nature of ordinary life. Armstrong writes:  

            "The biblical story of the Garden of Eden depicts this experience of primal wholeness: God and humanity were not divided but lived in the same places; men and women were unaware of gender difference; they lived in harmony with animals and the natural world and there was no distinction between good and evil..."

            I'll start with the "harmony" point in this evocation of wholeness, since I doubt I'll have much to say about the others. For me, ideally at least, harmony means everything is welcome in our gardens. All creatures that thrive in urban and suburban human settlements find their way into our gardens and most escape without molestation. In our own case we've had squirrels, skunks, racoons, a muskrat, wild turkeys, a snake, a rabbit, and both feral and domestic cats and have dwelled, if not always "in harmony," then in a coexistence more peaceful than not. I've been known make some exceptions when it comes to squirrels, who dig the place up when hiding acorns, and even to wandering cats. For what purpose, exactly, is a cat nosing about in my garden? To leave behind some special feline donation?

            When it comes to insects, I've been trying to put out the welcome wagon for honey bees in recent years, and this year I will try to plant even more of the flowering plants they find useful. Some people, of course , are allergic to bee stings and understandably shy of their presence. I've come to regard them as part of the life blood of the garden and have grown used to deadheading blown flower heads while the bees make their collection visits to the blooms of the same plant.

            Similarly, butterflies are a reward for growing the plants they like. Our butterfly bushes draw the monarchs. But the monarch caterpillar, as I have lately learned, will eat "only" eat milkweed. I will find this plant this year and grow it.

            Even if our home gardens are not perfect models of the peaceable kingdom, gardening tends to put us on better terms with both the plant and the animal kingdoms. In the places where most of us live we don't raise chicken, milk cows, tolerate goats or pigs, and the practical value of grazing sheep as lawn services is only lately being recognized. We keep pet animals, but they mostly indoors with us.

            But in our gardens we live not only with the plants we grows and the bugs that crawl or fly, but with birds, those miniature angels of the sky's dominion. I'm not sure the birds feel they're in harmony with us, but I do my best for them, from the winter-long feeding program we maintain, to the cultivation of certain crops such as blueberries that they get more out of than we do and the prodigious expansion of the mulberry tree that provides a June feast for winged creatures but almost nothing usable for us.

            And the birds do hang around. Very few accounts of the pleasures of gardening omit mention of the pleasure of bird song.

Even wth nothing much to eat in the back garden this time of year, certain birds -- cardinals, bluejays, grosbeaks, make regular, perhaps daily stops at the weeping cherry tree behind the house.

            The routine goes like this.

            Bird lands on upper branch. Turns head one direction. Turns head opposite direction. Back, forth. Back, forth. Hops to one side. Hops to the other side. Receives sudden crucial information imperceptible to human senses, and darts off. Repeats whole performance two minutes later.

            It's the grosbreak, I think, I've often seen poised on a viburnum that keeps its large, purple-black berries for much of the winter. There must be a connection.

            If you garden you are ipso facto in harmony with "the natural world." If you are not, it's a sad labor trying to impose one's will on the earth. Harmony means allowing the other party to make at least some of the decisions. 'Oh, I see you want to live over there rather than where I put you. OK, we'll try it your way and see how that works.'

            Plants grow where they like, as much a

s they like, or get discouraged and fade. We shape them, cut them back, and encourage the slackers. They win at least half the contests. That's my idea of harmony in the garden.

            I know there are more exacting approaches to making a garden. Versailles, for a prominent example. But I believe that if human life ever enjoyed a "paradisal" Garden of Eden, it less resembled Versailles than a lush, marshy, overgrown, enormously fertile chaos of flowering, fruiting abundance. A messy treat for the senses. The fertile crescent in ancient Babylonia, perhaps. Or some spot on the Amazon -- somehow minus all the creatures that sting, poison, or enervate. A place of abundance and variety. Water and sunlight.

            Before the tree of knowledge was plucked, Armstrong notes, the Bible depicts man and God sharing the same space. She also says its readers early on raised the question of literal meanings: "For example, did God really walk with Adam in the cool of the evening?"

            Well, if God ever did go for a stroll in search of the "cool of the evening," as Genesis aptly puts it, he wouldn't have chosen a desert, or a parking lot, or a mall, or a tavern, or a corridor of power. He might have said to himself, "Oh, let's drop in on Adam. I hear he's got a pretty little garden."