ENVIRONMENT
NATURE SAMPLER Comstock Publishing Associates an imprint of Cornell University Press
2020
This sampler includes a small excerpt from the following new and forthcoming books published by Comstock Publishing Associates, an imprint of Cornell University Press. For more details about these books, as well as all others in this field, please visit our website. Turfgrass Insects of the United States and Canada, Third Edition by Patricia J. Vittum Advancing Environmental Education Practice, by Marianne E. Krasny The Comstocks of Cornell - The Definitive Autobiography, by Anna Botsford Comstock, edited by Karen Penders St. Clair Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast: A Field Guide, Second Edition, by Peter Del Tredici Nature beyond Solitude: Notes from the Field, by John Seibert Farnsworth When Birds Are Near: Dispatches from Contemporary Writers, edited by Susan Fox Rogers
TURFGRASS INSECTS OF THE AND
UNITED STATES
CANADA
THIRD EDITION
Patricia J. Vittum
Comstock Publishing Associates an imprint of Cornell University Press |
IT H ACA A ND LONDON
Copyright © 1987, 1999, 2020 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 1987 by Cornell University Press. Second edition 1999. Third edition 2020. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Vittum, Patricia J., 1951–author. Title: Turfgrass insects of the United States and Canada / Patricia J. Vittum. Description: Third edition. | Ithaca : Comstock Publishing Associates, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019025916 (print) | LCCN 2019025917 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501747953 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501747960 (epub) | ISBN 9781501747977 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Turfgrasses—Diseases and pests—United States. | Turfgrasses—Diseases and pests—Canada. | Insect pests—United States. | Insect pests—Canada. Classification: LCC SB608.T87 V58 2020 (print) | LCC SB608.T87 (ebook) | DDC 632/.7—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025916 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025917
Contents
Preface xi Acknowledgments xv Preface to the Second Edition xvii Acknowledgments to the Second Edition xix Preface to the First Edition xxiii 1 Turfgrass in the Modern Environment 1 Grass Structure 1 Grass Identification 3 Turfgrass Climatic Adaptations 3 Major Turfgrasses in the United States and Canada 5 Cool-Season Grasses 5 Warm-Season Grasses 8 Summary of Grass Characters 9 Drought Dormancy and Its Relationship to Insect Damage 11 Dichondra Lawns 11 Economic Impact of Turfgrass Culture 11
2 Insects and Near Relatives 13 Phylum Arthropoda 13 Taxonomy of Insects 13 Form and Function of Insects and Mites 14 Types of Mouthparts and Turf-Feeding Damage 19 Chewing Insects 19 Sucking Insects 19 Other Types of Mouthparts and Feeding 21 Orders of Turfgrass-Damaging Insects and Mites 21
3 Insects and Mites: Turf Association 22 Habitats of Turfgrass Insects 22 Leaf-and Stem-Inhabiting Pests 23 Stem-and Thatch-Inhabiting Pests 23 Thatch-and Root-Inhabiting Pests 25 Seasonal Presence of Injurious Stages 27
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vi Contents 4 Acarine Pests 31 Bermudagrass Mite 31 Zoysiagrass Mite 35 Buffalograss Mite 36 Winter Grain Mite 37 Clover Mite 41 Banks Grass Mite 42
5 Orthopteran Pests: Family Gryllotalpidae 44 Southern and Tawny Mole Crickets 44
6 Hemipteran Pests: Suborder Heteroptera 66 Chinch Bug Taxonomy 66 The Blissus Chinch Bugs 66 Hairy Chinch Bug 68 Southern Chinch Bug 75 Western Chinch Bug 83 Common Chinch Bug 86
7 Hemipteran Pests: Suborder Homoptera 87 Greenbug 87 Two-Lined Spittlebug 95 Rhodesgrass Mealybug 99 Buffalograss Mealybugs 102 Ground Pearl 104
8 Lepidopteran Pests: Family Crambidae (Formerly Pyralidae), Subfamily Crambinae 107 Temperate-Region Sod Webworms 107 Tropical-Region Sod Webworms 121
9 Lepidopteran Pests: Family Noctuidae 127 Cutworms and Armyworms 127 Black Cutworm 133 Variegated Cutworm 141 Winter Cutworm 142 Armyworm 143 Bronzed Cutworm 145 Fall Armyworm 146 Yellow-Striped Armyworm 151 Lawn Armyworm 151
10 Lepidopteran Pests: Family Hesperiidae 155 Fiery Skipper 155
11 Coleopteran Pests: Family Scarabaeidae 161 Overview 161
12 Scarabaeid Pests: Subfamily Aphodiinae 174 Black Turfgrass Ataenius 174 Aphodius spp. 182
13 Scarabaeid Pests: Subfamily Cetoniinae 186 Green June Beetle 186
Contents 14 Scarabaeid Pests: Subfamily Dynastinae 193 Masked Chafers 193
15 Scarabaeid Pests: Subfamily Melolonthinae 205 Asiatic Garden Beetle 205 European Chafer 210 May and June Beetles 223
16 Scarabaeid Pests: Subfamily Rutelinae 237 Japanese Beetle 237 Oriental Beetle 254
17 Coleopteran Pests: Family Chrysomelidae 262 Dichondra Flea Beetle 262
18 Coleopteran Pests: Family Curculionidae 267 Billbug Taxonomy 267 Bluegrass Billbug 270 Hunting Billbug 278 Phoenician Billbug, Rocky Mountain Billbug, and Other Billbug Species 283 Annual Bluegrass Weevil 284
19 Dipteran Pests: Families Tipulidae and Chloropidae 299 Invasive Crane Flies 299 European Crane Fly 303 Common Crane Fly 306 Frit Fly 311
20 Hymenopteran Pests: F amily Formicidae 317 Ants—Overview 317 Red Imported Fire Ant 320 Turfgrass Ant 325 Harvester Ants 329
21 Hymenopteran Pests: Families Sphecidae and Vespidae 332 Bees and Wasps 332 Cicada Killer 332 Yellowjacket 334
22 Minor Insect Pests 336 Northern Mole Cricket (Orthoptera: Gryllotalpidae) 336 Short-Tailed Cricket (Orthoptera: Gryllidae) 337 Grasshoppers (Orthoptera: Acrididae) 338 Periodical Cicadas (Homoptera: Cicadidae) 338 Leafhoppers (Homoptera: Cicadellidae) 340 Fleahoppers (Heteroptera: Miridae) 340 Bermudagrass Scale (Homoptera: Diaspididae) 341 Turfgrass Scale (Homoptera: Coccidae) 341 Cottony Grass Scale (Homoptera: Coccidae) 342 Lucerne Moth (Lepidoptera: Crambidae) 342 Burrowing Sod Webworms (Lepidoptera: Acrolophidae) 343 Granulate Cutworm (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) 344
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viii Contents Striped Grassworm (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) 344 Sugarcane Beetle (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae, Subfamily Dynastinae) 345 Tomarus subtropicus (Sugarcane Grub) (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae, Subfamily Dynastinae) 347 Carrot Beetle (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae, Subfamily Dynastinae) 348 Polyphylla spp. Grubs (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae, Subfamily Melolonthinae) 348 Wireworms (Coleoptera: Elateridae) 349 Vegetable Weevil (Coleoptera: Curculionidae) 350 March Flies (Diptera: Bibionidae) 350
23 Turfgrass-Associated Arthropods and Near Relatives 352 Turfgrass-Associated Invertebrates 352 Earthworms 352 Stinkworms 354 Snails and Slugs 355 Turfgrass-Associated Arthropods 355 Pillbugs and Sowbugs 355 Millipedes 355 Centipedes 356 Spiders 356 Mites 357 Scorpions 357 Ticks 357 Chiggers 358 Turfgrass-Associated Insects 359 Springtails 359 Earwigs 359 Fleas 359 Mosquitoes and Biting Midges 360 Wild Bees 360 Effect of Insecticides on Nontarget Arthropods 361
24 Vertebrate Pests 362 Birds 362 Mammals 364
25 Principles of Integrated Pest Management 370 Site Assessment 371 Scouting or Monitoring 372 Setting Thresholds 372 Predicting Pest Activity 373 Stress Management 374 Biological Control 377 Chemical Control 378 Finding Compatible Strategies 379 Evaluation 379 Advantages of Integrated Pest Management 380
26 Sampling Techniques and Setting Thresholds 381 Accurate Diagnosis 381 Scouting or Monitoring 382 Early Detection and Diagnosis 382 Relating Symptoms to Cause 382
Contents Collecting and Labeling Specimens for Identification 383 Population Survey Techniques 383 Active Sampling Techniques 385 Passive Sampling Techniques 390 Setting Thresholds 393
27 Biological Control Strategies 399 Using Natural Enemies in Turfgrass Management 399 Predators 401 Parasitoids 403 Pathogens 406 Bacteria 407 Entomopathogenic Nematodes 410 Entomopathogenic Fungi 412 Rickettsias 413 Viruses 413 Protozoans 414 Endophytes 414 Pheromones 415 Insect Growth Regulators 416 Botanicals 417
28 Chemical Control Strategies 418 Accurate Diagnosis 418 Threshold Populations 418 Influence of Thatch 419 Timing of Application—Seasonal 420 Timing of Application—Daily 424 Windows of Opportunity 425 Names of Insecticides 425 Chemical Properties of Insecticides 426 Chemical Classes of Insecticides 428 Insecticide Resistance 430 Effect of Insecticides on Nontarget Organisms 434 Toxicity of Insecticides 434 Application Technology 435 Environmental Fate of Pesticides 436 Selecting an Insecticide 438 Pesticides and Pollinators 438 Other Beneficial Insects 440
Appendix 1. English and Metric Units of Measure and Conversions 441 Units of Measure and Examples 441
Appendix 2. Abbreviations 445 Glossary 447 References 465 Index 511
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Preface to the First Edition
This book attempts to fill a long-standing need for a comprehensive text reference on turfgrass insects that w ill bring together u nder one cover a discussion of practically all insects and other arthropods that are destructive to turfgrass in the United States, including Hawai‘i but excluding Alaska, and in southern Canada bordering the United States. Turfgrass insects of the latter region are included because climates near the border are similar. I have provided substantial technical detail to make the book useful to the professional entomologist who might seek background information on biology and behavior as a basis for further study and research. Measurements in most cases are given in SI (metric) units, followed by their English equivalents in parentheses. Conversion to the metric system in the United States is fully expected to take place, however slowly, at least for the more commonly used measurements. I hope that the technical nature of the text does not dissuade turfgrass managers with limited or no entomological training from using this book to help them understand some aspects of the turfgrass insects they encounter. They will find many distribution maps and life history charts, as well as other illustrations that are self-explanatory. The full-page color plates, which depict some phase of practically all turfgrass insects found in the United States and southern Canada, should be helpful to both professional entomologists and laymen, as they aid in the identification of many turfgrass insects and promote understanding of the insects’ habits. Chapter 1, an introduction, discusses the turfgrasses that are most important agronomically. Chapter 2 provides fundamental information about insects and related arthropods. In Chapters 3 through 21, the orders and families of pest arthropods are covered in the same sequence used in most introductory textbooks in entomology; this sequence affords a logical framework for the treatment of the entire insect fauna. Chapters 3 through 20, and the appropriate sections within t hose chapters, discuss the taxonomy, importance, history and distribution, host plants, stages, life history and habits, and finally natural enemies of each insect or group of closely related species. Treatment of t hese topics in the same sequence throughout the book facilitates comparison xxiii
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Preface to the First Edition
of the habits of different species or groups. Chapter 22 considers vertebrate pests of turfgrass, since their presence and destruction of turf is, in most cases, directly related to the presence of insects. Finally, Chapters 23 through 26 provide a general overview of all the interrelationships between insects and the turfgrass ecosystem. Control recommendations for insects were purposely omitted because t hese change frequently as new insecticides are approved and as older insecticides become ineffec tive for various reasons. Chapter 26, a discussion of insect control principles and strategies, should provide sufficient background to permit effective management of turfgrass insects. Many persons and organizations have contributed to the realization of this book. The inclusion of the full-page color plates was made possible by private funds that helped subsidize their cost. Generous financial support for them, which I wish to acknowledge with gratitude, has been granted by the following organizations: Ciba-Geigy Corporation, Greensboro, North Carolina; Mobay Chemical Corporation, Kansas City, Missouri; New York State Turfgrass Association, Massapequa Park, New York; O. M. Scott & Sons, Marysville, Ohio; The Lawn Institute, Pleasant Hill, Tennessee; and Union Carbide Company, Inc., Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. The manuscript review process was conducted with help from entomologists and other biologists who have been or are presently involved in turfgrass research or extension activities. I owe much to the following reviewers for their time and effort: entomologists Sami Ahmad and Herbert T. Streu, Rutgers–The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick; William A. Allen, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg; Arthur L. Antonelli, Western Washington Research and Extension Center, Puyallup; James R. Baker, North Carolina State University, Raleigh; Paul B. Baker, Paul J. Chapman, Timothy J. Dennehy, Charles J. Eckenrode, and Michael G. Villani, New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, Geneva (NYSAES); Robert L. Crocker, Texas A&M Agricultural and Extension Center, Dallas; Paul R. Heller, Pennsylvania State University, University Park; John L. Hellman, University of Maryland, College Park; Milton E. Kageyama, O. M Scott & Sons, Marysville, Ohio; James A. Kamm, U.S. Department of Agriculture at the Oregon State University, Corvallis; M. Keith Kennedy, S. C. Johnson & Sons, Inc., Racine, Wisconsin; S. Dean Kindler, U.S. Department of Agriculture at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln; Thyril L. Ladd and Michael G. Klein, U.S. Department of Agriculture at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, Wooster; Kenneth O. Lawrence, ChemLawn Services Corporation, Boynton Beach, Florida; Wallace C. Mitchell and Charles L. Murdoch, University of Hawai‘i, Honolulu; Harry D. Niemczyk, Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, Wooster; Daniel A. Potter, University of Kentucky, Lexington; Roger H. Ratcliffe, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Beltsville, Maryland; Donald L. Schuder, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana; Mark K. Sears, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada; David J. Shetlar, ChemLawn Corporation, Columbus, Ohio; Patricia J. Vittum, University of Mas sachusetts, Suburban Experiment Station, Waltham; Joseph E. Weaver, West V irginia University, Morgantown; and Turf Management Specialist A. Martin Petrovic, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
Preface to the First Edition
xxv
Many entomologists, including some who w ere also reviewers, loaned color transparencies of turfgrass insects for color plates, especially in the case of the southern and western insects; the captions indicate the source of borrowed transparencies. I am most grateful to the following individuals, who have contributed to the plates: William A. Allen, Arthur L. Antonelli, Leland R. Brown, University of California, Riverside; R. Scott Cameron, Texas Forest Service, Lufkin; Patricia P. Cobb and Costas Kouskolekas, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama; Sharon J. Collman, Cooperative Extension Service, Seattle, Washington; Robert L. Crocker; M. Keith Kennedy; Michael G. Klein; Charles L. Murdoch; Harry D. Niemczyk; Asher K. Ota, Hawaii Sugar Planters’ Association, Aiea; Daniel A. Potter; Roy W. Rings, Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, Wooster; Mark K. Sears; David J. Shetlar; Herbert T. Streu and Louis M. Vasvary, Rutgers– The State University of New Jersey; and Michael G. Villani (for slides he prepared before joining the Department of Entomology, NYSAES). Roughly half the color slides attributed to the NYSAES were photographed by Gertrude Catlin (now retired) and Joseph Ogrodnick, and the remaining slides w ere photographed by me except for single slides by John Andaloro, Shiu-Ling Chung, and James Larner, all former employees of the NYSAES. Various individuals supplied live subjects for many photographic transparencies. Some specimens w ere available from routine rearing colonies, while for other specimens, concerted efforts w ere made to locate infestations so that live specimens could be collected and forwarded. T hese contributions have significantly improved the scope of the color illustrations. In this connection I must thank James R. Baker; William C. Buell, veterinarian, Geneva, New York; Frank Consolie, NYSAES; Kenneth O. Lawrence; Wayne C. Mixson, O. M. Scott & Sons, Opopka, Florida; Charles L. Murdoch; Roger H. Ratcliffe; David J. Shetlar; Constance Strang, Cooperative Extension Service, Plainview, New York; Clyde Sorensen, North Carolina State University, Raleigh; and John Zukowski, Eisenhower Park, East Meadow, New York. Important turfgrass insects for which neither color transparencies nor live specimens w ere available for photography included mainly pyralid and noctuid moths and the more common beetles of the genus Phyllophaga. Illustration of these was possible thanks to Paul J. Chapman and Siegfried E. Lienk, NYSAES, who collected and prepared the noctuid moths as museum specimens. Thanks are also due to James K. Liebherr, curator of the Cornell University Collection at Ithaca, who supplied museum specimens of pyralid moths, Phyllophaga adults, and a variety of secondary insect pests. These contributions are indicated in the source notes in the captions. Mary Van Buren, librarian of the NYSAES, has most helpfully assisted in searching the literature, obtaining publications through interlibrary loan, and tracking down publications and dissertations, often with the vaguest of clues. I am immensely grateful for her time and efforts in adding to the fount of information available to me. The photographic and illustrative services for the Departments of Entomology and Plant Pathology, NYSAES, are provided by Joseph Ogrodnick, Bernadine Aldwinckle, and Rose McMillen-Sticht. Gertrude Catlin also provided this service until her retirement. In
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Preface to the First Edition
addition to supplying color slides, they photographed many of the black-and-white illustrations. Bernadine Aldwinckle also did much of the intermediate work involved in the preparation of the color plates. Rose McMillen-Sticht’s artistry and illustrative skills are evident in the many drawings she prepared in their entirety or adapted from e arlier publications. The many significant contributions made by these station staff members have greatly increased the value of the book. Two members of the secretarial staff of the Department of Entomology, NYSAES, made essential contributions to this book. I owe a debt of gratitude to Janice Allen for typing almost the entire manuscript, entering it on the word processor, and preparing the many revisions. Preparation and completion of the book also entailed much correspondence, particularly to obtain permission to use copyrighted material. I am grateful to Donna Price for doing most of this work. To the Department of Entomology, NYSAES, I express my most sincere gratitude for allowing me unlimited access to the services of all the staff members whose special skills I sought and for permission to use the fruits of their labor—the many color slides, black-and-white photographs, and drawings, as well as the secretarial and stenographic output so efficiently and willingly rendered. I also thank the department for the use of its facilities and supplies. Finally, I am grateful to Helene Maddux and Robb Reavill of Cornell University Press, who were most patient and helpful during the preparation and completion of this book. HARUO TASHIRO Geneva, New York
1 Turfgrass in the Modern Environment
Of the more than 7,500 species of plants in the grass family Poaceae (formerly Gramineae), about 40 species are considered “major” turfgrasses in various ornamental, recreational, and functional uses throughout the world. Turfgrass typically refers to an individual plant or species and turf refers to a uniform stand of grass or a mixture of grasses mowed at a relatively low height, usually less than 10 cm and serving any of the abovementioned purposes. In accordance with common usage, turf maintained around a residential property is called a lawn. Sod typically refers to plugs, squares, or strips of turf, often grown commercially and used for vegetative planting. A green is a smooth, grassy area maintained at the lowest height of cut (less than 5 mm) for golf, lawn bowling, tennis, croquet, or other sports. A fairway is a smooth, grassy area maintained at 1 to 2 cm height of cut as a primary playing surface in golf (Beard 1973; Hanson et al. 1969; Smiley 1983). Healthy turf is aesthetically pleasing as well as functional. Residential lawns, golf courses, athletic fields, cemeteries, parks, and arboretums all benefit from healthy, lush stands of turf. Healthy root systems reduce soil erosion and allow for enhanced infiltration of water into the soil (thereby reducing surface runoff). Normal plant growth enriches the soil by adding organic matter and other decomposition products. Healthy turf also improves air quality by absorbing carbon dioxide (and, in some cases, carbon monoxide) and releasing oxygen. Through evapotranspiration, turf also reduces air temperatures, particularly in urban and suburban areas. Many grass species used for turf are also found in pasture, field, and forage production associated with the livestock industry. In this usage, particular grasses often have the same pest problems that are associated with them when used as turf. This text does not, however, cover grasses grown for livestock consumption.
Grass Structure All turfgrasses have a similar basic structure, with some variations. A typical grass plant (Figure 1-1) has a crown (an unelongated stem composed of leaf primordia and buds) located at or near the soil surface, where most of the meristematic activity occurs. This basal growth enables the plant to tolerate repeated mowing without sustaining permanent damage. A highly fibrous adventitious root system originating from the crown 1
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Turfgrass in the Modern Environment
Figure 1-1. Schematic diagram of a grass plant. (Adapted from O. M. Scott & Sons 1979, p. 46, courtesy of the O. M. Scott &. Sons Company.)
permeates throughout the surface soil. The stem, also arising from the crown, is enclosed in a leaf composed of the leaf sheath and a wider unfolding leaf that is called the blade, or lamina. If allowed to grow naturally without mowing, the stem usually terminates in a cluster of flowers (inflorescence), sometimes called a seedhead. Following termination of flowering, the reproductive tissue dies, often resulting in temporary discoloration and thinning of the turf. Some mowed turf may also produce flowers below the cutting height. Lateral growth and maturation of a grass plant results in tillers (primary lateral stems) that emerge directly from the original crown. Additional lateral growth originates from stolons (aboveground creeping stems that can produce roots and shoots at each node) and/or rhizomes (long underground stems that also can produce roots and shoots at each node) that produce secondary and tertiary crowns at their internodes. The tissues in the crown are the most vital portion of the turfgrass. A plant can recover from loss of roots or death of leaves and stems but not from the death of its crown, from which all these structures originate.
Turfgrass Climatic Adaptations
3
Grass Identification Seemingly minute differences found at the junction of the leaf sheath and blade are of utmost importance in the vegetative identification of grass species (Figure 1-1). These include various morphological differences found in structures called the ligule, the auricle, and the collar. The vernation or configuration of emerging young leaf buds (e.g., rolled or folded) is also an important taxonomic character (Anonymous 1979; Beard 1973; Turgeon 1991).
Turfgrass Climatic Adaptations Turfgrasses grown in the United States are designated as e ither cool-season or warm- season grasses, depending on their climatic adaptations. Cool-season grasses grow best at temperatures between 15.5°C and 24.0°C, and their growth is markedly slower outside this range. Warm-season grasses grow best at temperatures between 26.6°C and 35.0°C, and their growth is usually inhibited at temperatures below 10°C. Warm-season grasses are best adapted to the climate in roughly the southern third of the United States, including Oklahoma, Texas, and all states to their east, as well as the southern half of New Mexico, Arizona, and California (Figure 1-2). Internal leaf structure and physiology differ between warm-and cool-season grasses. Breeders have expanded the range farther south for cool-season grasses and farther north for warm-season grasses.
Figure 1-2. Turfgrass adaptation zones in the United States. (Adapted from Beard 1975, p. 4, courtesy of Beard Books, College Station, Texas.)
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Turfgrass in the Modern Environment
Each of the two growing zones (or regions) is further divided, according to precipitation, into humid and arid-semiarid zones. The dividing line lies near the 100th meridian. The four distinct turfgrass adaptation zones in the United States (Figure 1-2) are governed by temperature and precipitation. Two distinct coastal influences also occur. Along the Atlantic coast the warm, humid zone extends north as far as Delaware. Along the Pacific Coast, a narrow cool, humid zone extends from the Canadian border to southern California. Only cool-season grasses grow in Canada, with the possible exception of buffalograss (cool, humid zone in coastal areas and bordering the G reat Lakes, and cool, arid-semiarid zone in the Plains states. The four zones and their dominant features as given by Beard (1973, 1975, 1984) are characterized below.
Cool, Humid Zone The cool, humid zone is characterized by cold winters and mild to hot summers in the east and by mild temperatures along the Pacific Coast. Rainfall ranges from 50 to 115 cm throughout the zone in the east and from 50 to 250 cm along the Pacific Coast. Kentucky bluegrass is the dominant species, followed by bentgrasses, tall and fine fescues, perennial ryegrass, and annual ryegrass. Although not planted, annual bluegrass is a major species in the region, found on heavily utilized and wet or shady sites. Tall fescue, zoysiagrass, and bermudagrass are sometimes planted in the transition zone, an area where both cool-season and warm-season turf can survive and do well under certain conditions. The transition zone is discussed in more detail l ater in this chapter.
Cool, Arid-Semiarid Zone The cool, arid-semiarid zone consists of two contrasting regions, the vast Central Plains area to the east and the mountains to the west. Both are characterized by cold winters and hot summers. Rainfall ranges from less than 25 cm in the intermountain plateaus to about 65 cm along the eastern edge of the zone. In the drier areas, irrigation is required to maintain turf of good quality. With irrigation, Kentucky bluegrass, perennial ryegrass, and creeping and colonial bentgrasses are dominant through most of the region, with bermudagrass and zoysiagrass used sparingly in the transition zone in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Where there is no irrigation, buffalograss, Buchloe dactyloides (Nutt.) Engelm., and wheatgrass, Agropyron smithii Rydb., are sometimes used in the transition b elt, because both have good to excellent drought resistance.
Warm, Humid Zone The climate of the warm, humid zone is characterized by mild temperatures in the northern portion and subtropical areas along the Gulf of Mexico and in Florida. Rainfall ranges from 100 cm along the Atlantic seaboard to 180 cm along the eastern Gulf Coast, and is as low as 65 cm in parts of Texas and Oklahoma. Bermudagrass is grown throughout the zone. Zoysiagrass is planted mostly in the north, while bahiagrass, centipedegrass, and St. Augustinegrass are used primarily in the southern third of the region. Buffalograss is becoming increasingly popular in the western parts of this region.
Major Turfgrasses in the United States and Canada
5
Hawai‘i is in this zone. The turfgrass species grown t here are nearly the same as t hose of southern Florida except for bahiagrass, which is not grown in Hawai‘i.
Warm, Arid-Semiarid Zone The warm, arid-semiarid zone is a b elt occupying the southern half of each state from Texas into Southern California, with northward projections into Nevada and central California (Figure 1-2). Precipitation ranges from less than 13 cm to about 50 cm; summers are generally dry. Bermudagrass is used widely with and without irrigation. Zoysiagrass is used to a limited extent. St. Augustinegrass, centipedegrass, and dichondra are grown in southern California. Cool-season grasses such as perennial or annual ryegrass and rough bluegrass are used extensively for temporary cover of dormant warm-season species during the winter months. Irrigation is generally required to maintain lawns of good quality.
Transition Zone A relatively narrow belt 160–480 km wide extending along the line of cool-season and warm-season adaptation zones constitutes a transitional climatic zone. In this region, either group of turfgrasses (warm season or cool season) may survive and can do well under weather conditions favorable to the agronomic requirements of the given species. However, u nder adverse conditions, a stressed species may not survive at all. This transition zone is widely regarded as the most challenging place to maintain turf in the United States. Turf managers in these areas often overseed dormant warm- season species with high rates of cool-season species, particularly in late fall and early spring.
Major Turfgrasses in the United States and Canada Cool-Season Grasses The most commonly used cool-season grasses include some 14 species in 5 genera, as listed below (Plate 1). All except the ryegrasses are native to Europe or Eurasia. The ryegrasses are native to North America and Asia Minor (Beard 1973; Hanson et al. 1969). Bluegrasses Poa spp. Kentucky P. pratensis L. Annual P. annua L. Rough P. trivialis L. Ryegrasses Lolium spp. Perennial L. perenne L. Italian (annual) L. multiflorum Lam. Fescues Festuca spp. Strong creeping red F. rubra ssp. rubra Gaudin Slender creeping red F. rubra ssp. littoralis (Gomey) Auquier Chewings F. rubra ssp. commutata Gaudin
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Turfgrass in the Modern Environment
Hard F. brevipila Tracey Sheep F. ovina L. Tall fescue Schedonorus arundinaceus Schreb. Dumort./nom. cons.; formerly Festuca arundinacea Schreb. Bentgrasses Agrostis spp. Creeping A. stolonifera L. Colonial A. capillaris L. Velvet A. canina L.
All the bentgrasses and bluegrasses listed (except some forms of annual bluegrass), as well as strong and slender creeping red fescue, have extravaginal growth and produce rhizomes or stolons, which produce creeping, spreading habits of growth. Some ecotypes of annual bluegrass, the ryegrasses, and the remaining fescues have intravaginal growth, resulting in a tufted or bunch habit of growth (Beard 1973). Growth habit has an impor tant bearing on the ability of the turf to recover from mild attack by insects. Patches of dead grass in recovery fill in much more rapidly with grasses of extravaginal growth because of their creeping, spreading growth habits. The bluegrasses (most commonly Kentucky bluegrass) are the most widely distributed turfgrasses in the cool, humid region. Improvements in perennial ryegrass and tall fescue, plus price increases on improved Kentucky bluegrasses, have resulted in a decrease in seed sales of this species (L. Brilman, personal communication, 2018). The most distinctive vegetative character of the genus Poa is the boat-shaped leaf tip. Most bluegrasses are adapted to moist, fertile soils of pH 6.0–7.0. Except for annual bluegrass, Poa spp. show their best quality at a cutting height of 2.5–5.0 cm. Kentucky bluegrass is the most widely used general-purpose turf and lawn grass in cool-season zones. Its extensive rhizome system allows rapid recovery from damage. Most general-use sod produced commercially in the cool-season region is composed primarily of Kentucky bluegrass. Many new cultivars have been developed that are very dense, low growing, dark green, and have good disease resistance. More than 100 improved cultivars are evaluated annually in the National Turfgrass Evaluation Program (NTEP). Slower germination and establishment and lower seed yields limit its use in some areas and in many commercial mixtures. Annual bluegrass is generally considered a weed in turfgrass culture, but many golf courses in the Northeast manage Poa annua reptans as a perennial grass. It is typically light green to greenish yellow in color, with shorter, broader, softer leaves than Kentucky bluegrass. It is well adapted to moist, shaded environments and compacted soils and grows best in fertile soils of pH 6.5–7.5. A cutting height of 2.5 cm or less makes it a very aggressive, competitive turfgrass. Its prolific flower production, even at a cutting height of 0.6 cm or less, makes it an undesirable grass on putting greens, which it often invades. Use of plant growth regulators on golf greens has reduced flowering of annual bluegrass, improving the playability of the greens. Rough bluegrass produces turf of relatively poor quality in full sun. It does best in shaded areas that are wet and poorly drained and is included in many lawn and turf seed mixes for such areas. Rough bluegrass often invades Kentucky bluegrass, much as creeping bentgrass does, producing a light-green patch. It is often used as a temporary grass in winter overseeding of warm-season grasses.
ADVANCING ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION PRACTICE Marianne E. Krasny
COMSTOCK PUBLISHING ASSOCIATES AN IMPRINT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
ITHACA AND LONDON
Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. To use this book, or parts of this book, in any way not covered by the license, please contact Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Krasny, Marianne E., author. Title: Advancing environmental education practice / Marianne Krasny. Description: Ithaca : Comstock Publishing Associates, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2020. | Series: Cornell studies in environmental education | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019020285 (print) | LCCN 2019021611 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501747076 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Environmental education. | Environmental education— Social aspects. Classification: LCC GE70 .K73 2020 (print) | LCC GE70 (ebook) | DDC 363.70071—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020285 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019021611 ISBN 978-1-5017-4708-3 (PDF ebook) ISBN 978-1-5017-4709-0 (epub/Mobi ebook)
Contents
Par t I
Par t II
Preface Acknowledgments
ix
Introduction
1
xi
GETTING STARTED 1.
Theory of Change
15
2.
Evaluation
27
ENVIRONMENT AND BEHAVIOR/ACTION OUTCOMES 3.
Environment, Sustainability, and Climate Change
45
4.
Environmental Behaviors
54
5. Collective Environmental Action
69
Par t III INTERMEDIATE OUTCOMES 6. Knowledge and Thinking
85
7.
Values, Beliefs, and Attitudes
101
8.
Nature Connectedness
117
9. Sense of
Place
127
10. Efficacy
139
11. Identity
149
12. Norms
160
13. Social Capital
173
14. Positive Youth Development
182
15. Health and Well-Being
192
Conclusion. Resilience: Adaptation and Transformation
202
Appendix References Permissions for Survey Instruments in the Appendix Index
215 255 286 287
Introduction
My ultimate goal in writing this book is to better position environmental educators to contribute to environmental quality, sustainability, and resilience. To accomplish this goal, I have summarized research-based information on the myriad pathways by which environmental education can contribute to the health of the environment, the community, and individuals. Like other researchers, I challenge the knowledge-attitudes-behavior pathway—the assumption that environmental knowledge and attitudes lead to environmental behaviors. Instead I review research that shows that certain types of knowledge are more likely than others to influence behaviors, and that sometimes it is better to work with existing attitudes than to try to change them. I then expand our purview of potential intermediate outcomes of environmental education beyond knowledge and attitudes to include nature connectedness, sense of place, efficacy, identity, norms, social capital, youth assets, and well-being. All these intermediate outcomes can be nurtured through environmental education and can lead to future environmental behaviors and collective action. Environmental education encompasses any learning activities that help ecosystems and societies thrive. It includes learning opportunities embedded in hands-on stewardship, citizen science, environmental activism, and unstructured time spent in nature. And it is part of a larger effort by policy makers, researchers, the private sector, and civil society to respond to pressing environmental challenges. The goal of environmental education is nurturing
1
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INTRODUCTION
individual behaviors and collective actions that lead to healthy and resilient environments and communities. Whether you are a practicing or prospective environmental educator, I hope you will benefit from the synthesis of environmental psychology and related research found in the chapters of this book. Whether you work at a nature or community center, national park or urban pocket park, botanic garden or community garden, in the school classroom, or in a museum, aquarium, or zoo, the information in this book should help you home in on ways you can most effectively engage and influence your participants. In addition to the environmental educator, this book is written for the college student volunteering in an environmental club or considering pursuing an environmental education career. Whether you want to directly improve the environment, to enhance systems knowledge and critical thinking, to create environmental norms and social capital, or to foster youth development, you should be able to find information in this book to help you achieve your goal. In the beginning chapters of this book (part 1), I focus on theory of change and evaluation strategies. I turn next to exploring environmental quality outcomes of environmental education, followed by separate chapters on individual behaviors and collective action (part 2). Whereas individual behaviors and collective actions are often hard to separate in environmental education programs, the research on factors leading individuals to change a behavior differs in important ways from findings on what influences a group of people to take action together. For example, self-efficacy plays a prominent role in what we do as individuals, whereas collective and political efficacy and social capital play a role in what we do as a collective. In places where there is overlap between behaviors and action, I use the two terms interchangeably, whereas in sections where I discuss factors specific to individuals or groups, I distinguish between individual behaviors and collective action. To reach its ultimate goal of improving the environment, environmental education fosters action-related knowledge and systems thinking, takes attitudes into account in program planning, and provides opportunities to connect with nature and with place. It helps people develop feelings of efficacy and forge environmental identities. Environmental education programs can set the standard for environmentally friendly norms and create social capital among participants and community members. And environmental educators engage youth in activities that foster positive development, health, and well-being, including a sense of hope. All these intermediate outcomes (part 3) can be viewed as cognitive and affective pathways to environmental behaviors and action. Sometimes, environmental education programs consider youth development, well-being, or another intermediate outcome as their most important goal, focusing less on
INTRODUCTION
3
environmental behaviors per se. Finally, environmental education can start by engaging participants in stewardship or other action, which in turn fosters the cognitive and affective intermediate outcomes that then lead to additional environmental behaviors. Although many focus on changing the way people think and feel in order the change their behavior, it is important to keep in mind that performing a behavior can also change the way we think and feel. In short, this book helps educators to plan, assess, adapt, and transform their programs based on research findings. It does not offer specific instructions for lesson plans or activities, which can be found in numerous publications produced by nonprofit organizations such as Earth Force, the Paleontological Research Institute, or the Nature Conservancy, as well as by the US Forest Service and Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies. Nor does it describe the wealth of environmental education practices. For a compendium of contemporary environmental education practices, Cornell University Press’s Urban Environmental Education Review may be useful (Russ and Krasny 2017). Below is a brief overview of the individual chapters, followed by discussions of the controversy surrounding environmental quality as the ultimate goal of environmental education and of the largely discounted knowledge-attitudebehavior theory of change. I close this introductory chapter with reflections on environmental education as one node in the network of endeavors addressing environmental quality.
Chapter Summaries Read a quick summary of each chapter below.
Theory of Change (Chapter 1) A theory of change is a diagram and narrative that shows how your program activities lead to your intermediate, behavior/action, and ultimate outcomes. As the Cheshire Cat observed in Alice in Wonderland, if you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there. In other words, without a theory of change, an environmental education program “is vulnerable to wandering aimlessly” (Reisman and Gienapp 2004, 1).
Evaluation (Chapter 2) Evaluation presents an opportunity to revisit our theories of change, initially to specify outcomes to evaluate and later to adjust our activities, outcomes, and
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INTRODUCTION
theory of change based on informal observations and formal research. Whereas environmental educators sometimes conceive of evaluation as an unwelcome obligation or an opportunity to prove their success, a “learning through evaluation” culture spurs program change when needed. In addition to pre-/post- surveys, evaluation can encompass learning activities embedded in programs as well as “Most Significant Change” and appreciative evaluation strategies that focus on how a program achieves positive outcomes.
Environment, Sustainability, and Climate Change (Chapter 3) For many environmental educators, the ultimate goal is to improve environmental quality. Environmental education can improve environmental quality directly, for example by restoring pollinator habitat or decreasing greenhouse gas emissions. Environmental education also can have an indirect impact through working to change resource management practices and policies. Other approaches to address environmental issues, such as sustainable development and resilience, integrate social and economic alongside environmental concerns.
Environmental Behaviors (Chapter 4) Lifestyle behaviors, like taking shorter showers, recycling, or turning down the heat, often come to mind when we talk about environmental behaviors. But environmental behaviors are much broader than what we do in our home or workplace. They include hands-on stewardship, teaching others, and political behaviors like voting or influencing environmental policy.
Collective Environmental Action (Chapter 5) Environmental actions entail working collectively with others. They include citizenship behaviors, such as engaging in protests and advocacy, as well as collective stewardship practices like volunteer tree planting or litter cleanups. Although environmental behaviors and collective action overlap, factors that predict individual behaviors may differ from those that predict collective action, which is why I devote a separate chapter to collective environmental action.
Knowledge and Thinking (Chapter 6) The closer the knowledge and skills your audiences acquire are to the intended behaviors, the more likely those knowledge and skills are to lead to that behavior.
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Generalized environmental knowledge is not likely to lead to behavior change or action, whereas action-related and effectiveness knowledge and systems thinking show greater promise.
Values, Beliefs, and Attitudes (Chapter 7) Values are broad principles guiding what we do in life, whereas environmental beliefs have relatively little influence on our behaviors. Attitudes toward specific behaviors are more likely to influence behaviors than are general environmental attitudes. However, environmental attitudes can be hard to change, especially among adults. The environmental sociologist Thomas Heberlein (2012) compares attitudes to strong river currents and suggests that rather than try to change attitudes, we should learn to navigate them.
Nature Connectedness (Chapter 8) People who feel a strong connection to nature are motivated to take action to protect it. Nature connectedness also contributes to emotional health and psychological resilience.
Sense of Place (Chapter 9) Just as we can feel connected to nature, we can form attachments to a place. We associate certain meanings with places where we have lived, we depend on specific places for recreation and well-being, and we may even form an identity based on the places we know.
Efficacy (Chapter 10) Our beliefs about whether our actions can achieve our individual and collective goals—that is, our personal, collective, political, and civic efficacy—determine the goals we set, the actions we take, and how persistent we are in trying to achieve our goals.
Identity (Chapter 11) Identity is about the labels we give to ourselves, the groups we belong to, and how we distinguish ourselves from others. Although we often think of identity politics—appealing to particular ethnic, social, or religious groups—we also develop environmental identities, which influence our environmental behaviors.
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Norms (Chapter 12) Just as we can have individual and collective efficacy and individual and shared identities, we have personal and social norms. Personal norms are our expectations for our own behaviors, and influence our behaviors through making us feel guilty or giving us a sense of pride. Our perceptions of what most people actually do in a particular situation (descriptive social norms) or of what more and more people are doing (trending social norms) impact our behaviors more than what we are told we should do (injunctive social norms).
Social Capital (Chapter 13) Social capital includes trust and social connections. When we trust and feel connected to others, we are more likely to work together for the common good— including stewarding our shared environmental resources. Environmental education programs where participants depend on each other to address a physical or other challenge can foster trust and social connections.
Positive Youth Development (Chapter 14) Positive youth development is about acquiring assets important to success in life. Many of these same assets—efficacy, social connections, trusting others, and civic participation—also enable youth to engage in environmental behaviors and collective action. A focus on positive youth development allows environmental educators to partner with youth and community development professionals who view environmental education as a means for youth to acquire life skills.
Health and Well-Being (Chapter 15) Similar to positive youth development, a focus on health and well-being enables environmental educators to develop ties with organizations that prioritize social issues. Whereas concerns about environmental quality are often described in opposition to concerns about human well-being, the evidence is clear that spending time in nature contributes to health and happiness. Importantly, people are motivated by finding meaning in life; spending time in nature, as well as stewarding and restoring nature, gives our lives meaning. In short, nature and health and well-being work hand in hand.
Resilience (Conclusion) Similar to environmental quality, resilience is an ultimate outcome for environmental education. Similar to sustainable development, resilience integrates social
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alongside environmental concerns. It refers to how individuals and communities respond to ongoing change and catastrophic disruption by adapting and transforming. Thus resilience is particularly relevant in an era of rampant and rapid social and environmental change. Education programs embedded in civic ecology practices, such as community gardening, tree planting, and litter cleanups, can foster psychological, social, and ecological resilience as participants benefit from the healing power of nature, social connections, and seeing the positive results of their collective efforts on the environment and community.
Appendix The appendix includes survey tools for measuring environmental education outcomes covered in the book chapters.
Environmental Quality: The Ultimate Outcome of Environmental Education? Environmental quality, including sustainability and climate change mitigation, are often the ultimate outcomes of environmental education. Considering these ultimate outcomes shifts the focus from what participants think, feel, and do to the environmental impacts of their actions. Psychological and social factors like efficacy, identities, and norms are intermediate outcomes in pathways to behaviors and collective action, which in turn lead to environmental quality. Environmental quality is necessary for humans to thrive and is also important because of nature’s intrinsic value. However, because of the impact humans already have had on the environment, for example on our climate, we are forced to adapt, preferably in ways that also mitigate future negative impacts. Thus, in addition to environmental quality, we discuss climate adaptation in chapter 3 on environmental quality. Resilience, another ultimate outcome that recognizes the need to adapt and transform in light of ongoing change and incorporates social alongside environmental factors, is discussed in the concluding chapter. Some may object to a primary focus on environmental quality outcomes of environmental education. They ask whether this approach is too “instrumental�; that is, education becomes a tool for the environment rather than for youth to develop their competencies or realize their potential. Holders of this view might object to environmental education action programs whose goal is to increase ecosystem services or reduce greenhouse gases, for example by engaging youth in constructing rain gardens or joining a climate protest (Dietz et al.
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INTRODUCTION
2004). Yet many environmental action programs, such as those where youth work in community gardens or intern with local government officials, integrate environmental and youth development outcomes (Jensen and Schnack 1997; Wals et al. 2008; Schusler et al. 2009; Delia and Krasny 2018). Further, work on sustainability and resilience increasingly recognizes the intricate and inextricable ties between social and environmental outcomes. In short, programs don’t need to be either for the environment or for youth. In fact, engaging successfully in civic life, including volunteer environmental actions, may contribute to critical thinking (see chapter 6), self-efficacy (chapter 10), social capital (chapter 13), youth development (chapter 14), and well-being (chapter 15), as well as lead to environmental outcomes.
Knowledge-Attitudes-Behavior: A Debunked Theory of Change That Persists Here in Europe around 75% of the population believes that climate change is a very serious global problem. Europeans classify climate change as the third most serious problem in the world (after hunger and terrorism) so there is not much need to convince people about the existence and threat of climate change. However, very few people actually change their behaviour. The step from “knowing” to “doing” seems to be the hardest one. (participant in Cornell online course, 2018)
In 1977, 265 delegates from sixty-eight countries gathered with representatives from the United Nations in Tbilisi, Georgia, USSR. There they issued a call to action: environmental education should help address environmental problems (UNESCO 1978). Their definition of environmental education seemed logical at the time: Environmental education is a learning process that increases people’s knowledge and awareness about the environment and its associated challenges, develops the necessary skills and expertise to address the challenges, and fosters attitudes, motivations, and commitments to make informed decisions and take responsible action. (NAAEE, n.d.) We can visualize the Tbilisi Declaration theory of change as follows: environmental education activities create the knowledge, skills, and awareness needed to address environmental challenges and foster attitudes, motivations, and
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commitments, which lead audiences to make informed decisions and to take action. This is simplified as the Knowledge-Attitudes-Behavior theory of change. The traditional thinking in the field of environmental education has been that we can change behavior by making human beings more knowledgeable about the environment and its associated issues. This thinking has largely been linked to the assumption that if we make human beings more knowledgeable, they will, in turn, become more aware of the environment and its problems and, thus, be more motivated to act toward the environment in more responsible ways. Other traditional thinking has linked knowledge to attitudes and attitudes to behavior. An early and widely accepted model for EE [environmental education] has been described in the following manner: “increased knowledge leads to favorable attitudes . . . which in turn lead to action promoting better environmental quality.” (Hungerford and Volk 1990, 258) Environmental education scholars Hungerford and Volk go on to warn that “most educators firmly believe that, if we teach learners about something, behavior can be modified. In some cases, perhaps, this is true. However, in educating for generalizeable [sic] responsible environmental behavior, the evidence is to the contrary” (267). Twenty years later, environmental education researcher Joe Heimlich reinforced this warning, lamenting the “stickiness” of the knowledgeattitudes-behavior paradigm. No criticism of theoretical weakness [of environmental education] would be complete without the acknowledgement of the old “knowledge to attitude to behavior” or “attitude to knowledge to behavior” claims many environmental educators still hold to be true. There is not much consensus regarding how attitudes might affect and predict environmental behavior. . . . Even so, myriad educators and scientists continue to believe if people just know enough, they’ll change. Or if they feel a certain way, they’ll act differently. (Heimlich 2010, 183–184) Environmental education has experienced a lot of changes since the Tbilisi meetings in 1977. Multiple practices have split off from the Tbilisi approach to environmental education. Perhaps the most important of these is Education for Sustainable Development, which emerged with UNESCO support in the early 1990s. Its goal was to broaden environmental education to encompass social and economic justice, or “to empower and equip current and future generations to meet their needs using a balanced and integrated approach to the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development” (Leicht et al. 2018, 7). The emphasis on social justice is an invaluable contribution and
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has been followed by similar efforts such as community and youth development approaches to environmental education. Yet as recently as 2018, a key UNESCO publication states, Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is commonly understood as education that encourages changes in knowledge, skills, values and attitudes to enable a more sustainable and just society for all. . . . The concept of ESD was born from the need for education to address the growing environmental challenges facing the planet. In order to do this, education must change to provide the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes that empower learners to contribute to sustainable development. (Leicht et al. 2018, 7) I advocate that we liberate ourselves from a narrow definition of education as transmission of knowledge and skills, or even attitudes. Instead, I envision environmental education more broadly as “all forms of formal, non-formal and informal education and training that equip individuals and institutions in the public, private and community sectors to effectively respond to pressing environmental challenges” (Wals and Benavot 2017, 405, italics added). In short, if we start with the big goal of how to address environmental challenges, we can broaden our tent to encompass the cognitive and affective capacities—whether they be action-related knowledge, nature connectedness, sense of place, efficacy, identity, norms, or social capital—that studies have demonstrated influence environmental behaviors and collective actions.
Node in the Network To be most impactful, education and lifelong learning should be part of an integrated approach that also includes changes in governance, legislation, research, financing and regulation towards greater environmental sustainability. (Wals and Benavot 2017, 405)
In their book, The Failure of Environmental Education, Saylan and Blumstein (2011) claim that the environmental crisis is evidence that environmental education has failed. But no one ever suggested that environmental education alone can change the world. We might describe environmental education as “one tool in the toolbox”—or “one node in the network”—of efforts to improve the environment. Environmental education works alongside laws and regulations, research, the private sector, and civil society advocacy and voluntarism to make a difference.
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Barry Commoner, the renowned scientist and activist whom Time magazine dubbed the “Paul Revere of Ecology,” famously said, “The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else” (C250 2004). A century earlier, John Muir pointed out, “When we try to pick out anything by itself we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe” (Sierra Club 2018). Environmental educators are familiar with the connections described by Commoner and Muir and in fact incorporate such “systems thinking” into their programs. But we can also apply Muir’s web of invisible cords to elucidate how environmental education programs are connected to other forces working for environmental and educational change. For example, environmental education connects to laws and regulations when program participants identify and research a problem and work with local officials to implement new policies. Environmental education connects with research through citizen science and other types of data collection efforts. It connects to the private sector through corporate social responsibility initiatives, such as community cleanups or support of renewable energy. And environmental education connects to community organizations, which provide internships for youth, partner with nature centers to conduct Earth Day festivals, and join in activities ranging from hands-on stewardship to environmental advocacy. The North American Association for Environmental Education recognizes these connections, stating, “Environmental education is a key tool in expanding the constituency for the environmental movement and creating healthier and more civically-engaged communities” (NAAEE, n.d.). But environmental education is not just part of a network of initiatives and organizations. It is also part of a network of solutions. Three broad “fixes” categorize our efforts to address environmental problems. Technological fixes involve changing the environment directly (for example by installing solar panels). Structural fixes entail changing laws and regulations. Most would describe environmental education as a cognitive fix, which relies on people changing in response to new information (Heberlein 2012). However, here again a web of connections more accurately describes the situation. Environmental education has affective as well as cognitive outcomes. Youth environmental action programs may directly change the environment, for example through restoring habitat or reducing greenhouse gases. They also can influence policy. It is critical to take into account the technological, political, and other structural barriers that limit what we can do; environmental education is not a panacea. But environmental education is not only a cognitive fix. It can also be part of technical and policy solutions to environmental problems. In short, a network of government, private, and civil society organizations work in a web toward a greener environment, and environmental education
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organizations are nodes in this network. Online social media accelerates this trend toward “networked� environmental governance—or policy formation through both formal government and civil society organizations (Bennett and Segerberg 2013; Connolly et al. 2014). It is this governance network that can address policy changes and other structural barriers that constrain the ability of environmental education to reach its goals. At the same time, by leveraging individual partnerships and by being part of a broad network of organizations, environmental education can help accomplish what it is unable to accomplish alone. This book poses the question, What if instead of starting with knowledge and attitudes, we begin with factors that research has demonstrated predict environmental behaviors and collective action? What if we draw on research in environmental psychology, sociology, economics, and political science to inform our programs? In answering these questions, I ask the reader, in addition to focusing on better ways to teach, to consider environmental education as a broader cultural and social force that includes knowledge and attitudes, but also efficacy, identity, norms, connections, and trust. And just as environmental education can benefit from connecting with research across multiple disciplines, it should not try to tackle the environmental crisis alone. Through forming partnerships with the network of government, private, and civil society organizations working toward the public good, we collectively have the capacity to achieve our common goals.
THE COMSTOCKS OF CORNELL
n
—THE DEFINITIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Anna Botsf ord Comstock Edited by Karen Penders St. Cl air
COMSTOCK PUBLISHING ASSOCIATES AN IMPRINT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London
Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Comstock, Anna Botsford, 1854–1930 author. | Penders St. Clair, Karen, editor. Title: The Comstocks of Cornell—the definitive autobiography / Anna Botsford Comstock ; edited by Karen Penders St. Clair. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Comstock Publishing Associates, an imprint of Cornell University Press 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019020876 (print) | LCCN 2019980589 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501716270 (cloth) | ISBN 9781501716287 (epub) | ISBN 9781501716294 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Comstock, John Henry, 1849–1931. | Comstock, Anna Botsford, 1854–1930. | Cornell University—Faculty—Biography. | Entomologists—New York (State)—Ithaca—Biography. | College teachers— New York (State)—Ithaca—Biography. | Women woodengravers—New York (State)—Ithaca—Biography. Classification: LCC QL31.C65 C66 2020 (print) | LCC QL31.C65 (ebook) | DDC 595.7092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020876 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc. gov/2019980589
Contents
Acknowledgments xi For the Reader xiii Editor’s Commentary xvii
I. The Boyhood of John Henry Comstock, 1849–1865
1
II. A Sailor and a Scholar
17
III. Undergraduate Days at Cornell, 1870–1874
39
IV. Anna Botsford Comstock—Childhood and Girlhood
59
V. A University Professorship and Marriage, 1876–1879
97
VI. Entomologist to U. S. Department of Agriculture (Life in Washington as United States Entomologist, 1879–1881)
117
VII. Return to Cornell
153
VIII. The Year 1888–1889; With a Winter in Germany
181
IX. California and Stanford University
199
X. The Nature Study Movement at Cornell University; A Journey South to Study Spiders
223
XI. “How to Know Butterflies” and the “Confessions to a Heathen Idol”
249
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XII. A Sabbatical Year Abroad—Egypt and Greece
275
XIII. Italy, Switzerland, and Home
305
XIV. Chapter 15: 1908–1912, Cornell’s New Quarters for Entomology and Nature Study
323
XV. The Two hundred and Fiftiethanniversary Celebration of the Royal Society and The International Entomological Congress
331
XVI. The 65th Milestone and Retirement
355
XVII. Florida and Retirement
379
XVIII. The Toronto Meeting of the A. A. A. S. 1922. A surprising election and a voyage westward.
415
XIX. Honolulu and Happiness, a Voyage to Europe
445
XX. Mentone
463
Editor’s Epilogue
485
Appendix A: Original Preface for The Comstocks of Cornell. Written by Simon Henry Gage in 1938 499 Appendix B: Original Foreword for The Comstocks of Cornell. Written by Glenn W. Herrick for the 1953 Edition 501 Appendix C: An Epilogue Written by Glenn W. Herrick for the 1953 Edition 503 Appendix D: Memorial Statements for Anna Botsford Comstock Issued by Cornell University and Ithaca Daily Journal News 505 Appendix E: Memorial Statements for John Henry Comstock Issued by Cornell University 509 Bibliography Index
513
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For the Reader
As editor of the twenty-first-century edition of Comstocks of Cornell, I have minimized my personal imprint on Mrs. Comstock’s autobiography. My goal has been to preserve as much of her voice and personality as possible in her finished typescript since she wrote it ninety years ago. My edits, items I did not touch, and Mrs. Comstock’s writing style are explained as follows: • The paragraphing style of this book is Mrs. Comstock’s, and she wrote in the present-tense, first-person point-of-view. The 1953 edition grouped her paragraphs and changed her tense to the secondand third-person points of view. • Mrs. Comstock’s language in her manuscript connects the timeline of her life, whereas the omissions and alterations of her language in the 1953 book chopped the connections. The alterations to phraseology were so prolific that context, tense, and voice of the manuscript were changed from Mrs. Comstock’s to that of Glenn Herrick. The omission of emotional adjectives and substance minimized the impact of the storytelling capacity of Mrs. Comstock’s memoir. She wrote as if she were sitting next to you and telling her story. Yet the sense of this intimacy was lost in the Herrick edits. • Mrs. Comstock referred to her diaries as the template for her book. She wrote of her and her husband’s day-to-day life and habits. In her publications, their lives were recorded and remembered with an emotional pleasure that is palpable through her writing and reminiscences. Unfortunately, these original diaries have not been recovered and are presumed to have been destroyed. • The language of the 1953 edition differs from Mrs. Comstock’s own verbiage. For example, we read on manuscript page 7–26: “He told us plain truths about our inefficiency and lack of skill, but told them so sweetly and so tactfully that we felt honored rather than disgraced.” Compare this same sentence to the 1953 edition, page 153: “He xiii
FOR THE READER
xiv
•
•
•
•
•
•
• •
criticized our work so kindly and tactfully that we felt honored rather than disgraced.” I have corrected little of Mrs. Comstock’s language. I did correct blatant typographical errors (for example, she routinely misspelled the word “magnificent”). I did not correct spelling if the word or phrase was colloquial to the time period, such as “Cryptogamic Botany, “non-plussed, “cosily,” and “lustre.” Nor did I correct Mrs. Comstock’s writing pattern. For example, Mrs. Comstock would split words in ways we might not today: “Chickenpox,” “far-away,” “high-strung,” “room-mate.” Mrs. Comstock did not regularly call her husband by his first name, as was written in the 1953 edition. The original editors substituted “Harry” for “Mr. Comstock” more often than not. In her manuscript, Mrs. Comstock refers to her husband, in the formal, almost eight hundred times, compared to the informal first name at forty-two times. This name replacement by Herrick and colleagues removed the formality of Mrs. Comstock’s language and the respect she held for her husband in his academic position. Square brackets [ ] are placed around words that I or a previous editor clarified, primarily to explain state abbreviations, academic organizations, nicknames Mrs. Comstock used, or to reinstate initials in names that had been removed. Scripted brackets { } appear for sections of the manuscript that were initially omitted from the 1953 publication and that now have been returned to their place in this book. Through discussions with the publisher and myself, we came to an agreement that such a demarcation of the omitted text would interfere minimally with the reading experience of the reinstated material and would allow the reader to compare and contrast what are essentially two different books from one copy of the original manuscript. Parentheses ( ) are Mrs. Comstock’s comments to herself as she typed her manuscript. Many of the sentences are transposed in the 1953 edition from the manuscript. The information relayed is unchanged and the essence of the meaning is comparable. The transposed sentences created some confusion for me as I compared the manuscript to the printed book. —KSt.
Photograph of page 5–24 of the Comstock-manuscript.
E dito r’s Comme nta ry
This book is the autobiography written by naturalist educator Anna Botsford Comstock and is also about her husband, the entomologist John Henry Comstock, during their tenure at Cornell University in its foundation years. The manuscript, which Mrs. Comstock had typed in preparation for publication, is based on her diaries during the zenith of their professional careers in their respective fields of study and on her personal reminiscences during the last years of their lives. The abstract statement for my doctoral thesis sums up the impetus for my years of research on the Comstock manuscript: Anna Botsford Comstock contributed significantly to fostering imagination in nature study education at the turn of the 20th century. Through the process of restoring the ‘Comstocks of Cornell’-manuscript for historical accuracy and completeness, Comstock’s genuine voice is revealed thereby emphasizing her written legacy in both scientific and Cornell University history.1 That research uncovered discrepancies between this document and the 1953 edition of The Comstocks of Cornell. The 1953 edition of The Comstocks of Cornell has been regarded with veneration as the definitive biography of John Henry and Anna Botsford Comstock by researchers since its publication. The first document in the original order of the book’s publication was the little-known Comstock manuscript, typed by Mrs. Comstock, which served as the 1953 book’s template. The Comstocks of Cornell (1953) was altered from its source, becoming a biographical book with third- and fourth-generation information, which was only a shadow of the autobiographical document that Mrs. Comstock wrote. The importance of my dissertation and its parallel archival research was to bring the egregious actions to light and to restore the voice of Mrs. Comstock to her own autobiography as definitively as 1. St. Clair, Karen Penders, Finding Anna: The Archival Search for Anna Botsford Comstock (2017). https://doi.org/10.7298/X44X55ZB. xvii
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possible. The significance of this book is that it resonates with the genuine voice of Mrs. Comstock. By using first- and second-generation material, touched only marginally by this editor, this book is as near to Comstock’s original written piece as could be obtained. For more than thirty years, Professor and Mrs. Comstock directly influenced the personal expression and professional imagination of their students. The collegiate lives of dozens of young men and women were enriched by their alliance with the Comstocks, and the Comstocks’ influence also spread to their department colleagues during their tenure at Cornell. Long after Mrs. Comstock had been awarded accolades for her woodcarving artistry in the illustrations of her husband’s entomological work, and while she continued the development of her own nature study curriculum, Comstock sat down to write her and John Henry’s biography. As Mrs. Comstock’s widely acclaimed Handbook of Nature Study (1911) gained acceptance and popularity, however, other obligations pulled her from the autobiographical manuscript, and the document was put away until such time that Mrs. Comstock could devote herself fully to its completion. The work on her autobiographical manuscript was picked up again around 1928, in the last years of Mrs. Comstock’s life. During this time, Professor Comstock, an invalid from several strokes, could not speak or walk. Mrs. Comstock had been debilitated by cardiac problems for many years, and her strong frame weakened as cancer began its insidious unraveling of whatever good health remained. A determination to finish her work on the book, and the sense of urgency she must have felt as she labored over it, are palpable through the pages of the manuscript. When Mrs. Comstock completed the manuscript, she did not have a title for her book. The task of editing, printing, and subsequently naming her book fell to the hands of others in the decades to follow. As probate and protocol dictated, after the death of Professor Comstock (six months following his wife) their collective effects and papers were ultimately bequeathed to Glenn Washington Herrick (1870–1965), their closest living relative, and to their attorney, George H. “Jim” Russell. The original 760-page autobiographical document was among the possessions bequeathed to these executors of the Comstock estate in February 1931. Glenn Washington Herrick was a second cousin to Mrs. Comstock on her father’s side. He said of his cousin that to everyone she always spoke beautifully and quietly. Those who knew her valued her friendship, her loveliness, and her sense of wonder of the world, which resonated through the grateful hearts she touched. It was at her urging that Herrick petitioned to attend Cornell University. Herrick was a student at Cornell University
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from 1892–1896 and followed in the footsteps of John Henry Comstock by studying in the department of entomology. He would say of his undergraduate years that the men who most impressed him were John Henry Comstock and Liberty Hyde Bailey for he was gratified to work with them and admired them completely. Herrick’s passion for his own work stemmed from his devotion to his mentor, John Henry Comstock, a man he described as a natural teacher, quiet, kindly, and one who loved cigars.2 After graduation, Herrick was a biology professor at the State College of Mississippi, Starkville, for several years, and then briefly taught entomology at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, College Station. He returned to Cornell in 1909 as professor of economical entomology for the Department of Entomology and Limnology.3 Those who knew Herrick characterized him as friendly, sincere, and a bit naïve. Herrick’s teaching was described as animated and clear, his religious convictions strong, and his hospitality an enjoyment. He wrote many bulletins and papers on insect control that were considered good and inspiring, but not groundbreaking to the degree of his peers’ accomplishments. Herrick, who was a lifelong accumulator of information, was bored after his retirement from Cornell University in 1935. He would occupy himself with projects that he hoped would give him a small boost of satisfaction, if not attention. Herrick carefully studied the newspaper in his retirement, saving every news clipping or document of interest to him, as it served as a valuable gateway to the world for him. Herrick preserved the corrected pages of his own articles and of those written about him. He kept original illustrations he rendered, the travel brochures from every place he visited across the United States (and into Canada), and ledger booklets of household expenses from 1917 to 1963. In the early 1950s, the fastidious Professor Herrick, rooted in a pattern of monotony, returned to a passion project he had tabled twelve years earlier. He still held the autobiographical manuscript of Mrs. Comstock, and he still desired to publish it, but this time under his own name. That the manuscript should fall to one who was painfully inclined to detail was fortuitous; however, Herrick’s enthusiasm may have worked against him as he endeavored to share this last offering from the Comstocks. Herrick’s devotion was admirable to one Comstock, but at the sacrifice of the voice of the other.
2. St. Clair, Finding Anna, p. 89. 3. From the Memorial Statement for Professor Glenn Washington Herrick who died in 1965. The memorial statements cited in this book were prepared by the Office of the Dean of the University Faculty of Cornell University to honor its faculty for their service to the university. https:// ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/19056.
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As we follow the history of the Comstock manuscript and its publication, the enormity of the value of the document was not lost on Herrick. In 1937, he originally sought the manuscript’s publication with guidance from a core of close intimates of the Comstocks. He did so through an exchange of twenty-one letters from the fall of 1937 until the following summer of 1938. Herrick took counsel from two Cornell emeritus professors, Simon Henry Gage (1851–1944) and George Lincoln Burr (1857–1938); or rather, he pushed for their opinion of and support for publication of the manuscript. In August 1937, Herrick wrote to Gage, then President of the Comstock Publishing Company, that he believed Mrs. Comstock’s manuscript would make a “very interesting book” and was “a fine narrative” of both Comstocks. Herrick also believed that such a biographical book as this would have “wide remunerative value” and suggested two titles to Gage: Our Years Together as Teachers, Scientists and Writers: an Autobiography of John Henry Comstock and Anna Botsford Comstock, or A Life Program Together as Teachers, Scientists and Writers: an Autobiography etc.4 Herrick’s plans were met with succinct objections by Professor Burr, a notable Cornell historian in his own right. In a letter to Herrick, dated April 1938, Burr questioned the historical significance of corrupting someone else’s manuscript, especially after their death, and of the changes Herrick proposed to make, and had already made, to the document. Professor Gage, a close personal friend of both Professor and Mrs. Comstock, was significantly concerned about the Comstocks being personally presented in a diminished point of view. The manuscript was then passed from Simon Gage and George Burr to the critical eye of Woodford Patterson (1870–1948), editor of the Cornell Alumni News and secretary of the university. Patterson culled large sections from the document with a purple wax pencil. Patterson believed that the Comstock manuscript was too personal and trite for scholars of the Comstocks’ character. He believed a book produced from such a manuscript would devalue the contributions both Comstocks made to their individual fields of study. Patterson’s terse review of Mrs. Comstock’s autobiography halted any further discussion of publication with Herrick by the board of the Comstock Publishing Company. Shortly after receiving Patterson’s letter of July 19, 1938, and the assessment contained within, Simon Gage met personally 4. St. Clair, Finding Anna, pp. 96–97.
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with Glenn Herrick to persuade Herrick to curb his enthusiasm for publishing Mrs. Comstock’s manuscript. Gage proposed that creating a marginal biography that emphasized the accomplishments of John Henry Comstock would be more appropriate to the Comstock legacy. Gage added that Mrs. Comstock’s professional legacy was secondary to that of her husband’s. Herrick wholeheartedly agreed with Gage; however, privately he was also more inclined toward establishing his name in the time line of the Comstocks’ biography. Twelve years after this fateful meeting, Herrick’s decision to send the document to print regardless of Gage’s opinion was equal to Patterson’s culling within the Comstock manuscript. As mentioned above, when Herrick re-opened his files in the early 1950s to work on the manuscript, he did so with all previous detractors to his project being deceased. With such key participants (Gage, Burr, and Patterson) silenced, Herrick had the literary freedom for the final dissection of the Comstock manuscript. The worthiness of Herrick’s publication efforts collapse when one realizes that he was the one who corrupted the Comstocks of Cornell in every plausible way the others had hoped to preserve of the Comstocks’ legacy—the historical, the personal, and the academic. At any time during these early phases of the second publication attempt of the Comstock book, Herrick could have reset the marginalized document back to its near 1937 format, which he had enthusiastically tried to sell to Gage, Burr, and others. Yet, years later, he remained swayed by Woodford Patterson’s critique against Mrs. Comstock’s memoirs, particularly as Herrick believed Professor Comstock may have been diminished, and as such, he kept Patterson’s expunctions. Whatever essential core of Mrs. Comstock’s persona remained after Patterson’s culling was further altered by Herrick’s over-enthusiastic admiration for Professor Comstock. Herrick removed the emotional grit of the attachments Mrs. Comstock held to objects, people, or situations significant to her throughout their lives. The personal anecdotes, emotional adjectives, historical Cornell University persona, and truly, any statement of detraction—or declination of Mr. Comstock that Herrick perceived as damaging to the deceased entomologist’s career by Mrs. Comstock—was omitted by his critical hand. Herrick’s severe edits and omissions created for posterity a third- and fourth-generation document that diminishes the stature of Mrs. Comstock’s university status as a professor’s wife, the legacy of her work and professorship, and her intentions to preserve their lives equally. The ramifications of such a personal sense of hubris on the part of Herrick created a book that is not a piece of fiction but is also not entirely genuine when compared to its manuscript. Herrick changed the first-person narrative of Mrs. Comstock to a third-person narrative with him as the voice of the Comstocks.
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The only printed edition of The Comstocks of Cornell has served as a reference for many books and publications since its debut. As a historical reference piece of the beginnings of Cornell University, and of the lives of the Comstocks, the book represented a window into a particularly poignant time of Cornell’s history as told with a singular voice from that time: Mrs. Comstock’s. The recension of large portions of Comstock’s memoirs of her and her husband’s personal and professional life together is not unique or unusual, nor singular in its occurrence. Written documentation that has been altered in such a way is a continual critical talking point among rhetoric and archival researchers. The altering of facts, recollections, and point of view in the recording of history is so prevalent through time that to discover an example where these instances are not adulterated would be the true find. The document that is Anna Botsford Comstock’s autobiographical manuscript is preserved in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at the Carl A. Kroch Library within Cornell University. What remains of the document today is 712 pages in length, forty-six pages less than what Woodford Patterson reported receiving in 1938. The Comstock manuscript is composed of twenty chapters, denoted by Roman numerals, by both Mrs. Comstock and myself, for continuity. The shortest chapters are I and XIX at twenty-six pages each; the longest manuscript chapter is IV, at sixty-six pages, and concerns Anna Botsford’s family history, childhood, and youth up to her admission to Cornell University. For comparison, in the 1953 edition of the book, Anna Comstock’s early life is recorded in thirty-five pages, with the longest chapter in the book, regarding John Henry Comstock, his childhood, youth, and his work, at fifty-two pages. Manuscript Chapters XV (35 pages), XVI (33 pages), XVII (55 pages), XVIII (47 pages), XIX (26 pages), and XX (34 pages) total to 230 pages of the manuscript and were all omitted from the 1953 edition of the book. This figure does not include the many paragraphs, several pages, and other chapters also removed from the manuscript. Chapter XIV is missing and per Herrick in a note he left at the front of Chapter XV: “Chapter XIV: I cannot account for it.”5 The parallel chapter in the 1953 edition, Chapter 15, is titled “Cornell’s New Quarters for Entomology and Nature Study.” This chapter is duplicated in this book as it was printed in the 1953 edition. Important in this chapter is the chronological range of 1908–1912 during which time Mrs. Comstock relays how
5. John Henry and Anna Botsford Comstock papers, #21-23-25. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
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she conceived of the idea of, and prints, her magnum opus, The Handbook of Nature Study. It is within the time frame of this chapter that the Comstocks bought, and sold, the land called The Pinnacle, which would later be the site of the rhododendron and azalea collection on Comstock Knoll at the Cornell Botanic Garden. In this chapter is when they purchased the property that would become their last permanent home and the future site of Comstock Publishing Company. In this chapter, Mr. Comstock finished the manuscript for The Spider Book, and John Walton Spencer, nature study educator in partnership with Mrs. Comstock, who was known fondly as “Uncle John” by thousands of nature-enthusiastic children, succumbed of unknown causes in Ithaca, New York. The death of Spencer is significant because his loss brought the end of an era in nature education, not only in his home state of New York but also nationwide given that his work reached thousands of children. We can only surmise what might have been omitted from this chapter. Another significant artifact of the 1953 edition is the choppy chronological order of the book’s format. For example, Chapter 16 splits the year 1912 (a leftover remnant from Chapter 15 described above) and continues through to 1914. Several prominent events in the Comstocks’ personal and professional lives occurred during these years that Mrs. Comstock would have unabashedly described, or at the very least commented upon, although she may have been silenced for her candor. Such events include the surprising retirement of Liberty Hyde Bailey as dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell in June 1913. Not six months later, in December 1913, Professor Comstock resigned his Cornell professorship to take effect almost immediately, at the end of the year. Alice McCloskey, also at Cornell as a prominent nature study educator in her own right, became an associate in rural education and edited the Rural School Leaflets. The following year, 1914, McCloskey was promoted to assistant professor, as was Mrs. Comstock. McCloskey, however, is demoted to “Mrs. Comstock’s assistant” in the 1953 edition and is mentioned only the one time. My point here is that Mrs. Comstock gave credit to her peers where credit was due, which is evident in her manuscript, but not in the 1953 edition of the book. Further research on my part yielded that the two women were dissimilar on many levels. Comstock was considered a scholar, artist, and scientist. McCloskey was considered frank and sincere, yet maybe less educated. Perhaps Herrick knew of this contention and opted for the latter’s removal? Other nature educators mentioned in Mrs. Comstock’s manuscript were omitted from the book, including Julia Rogers and Ada Georgia. Mary Rogers Miller is mentioned once in the book in a footnote referencing her husband. All of these women made significant
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contributions to nature literature and nature education in the disciplines of their interests. Today they are among the specters lost by judicious omission. Not everything was crossed off in the manuscript, however; some of the initially untouched text in the manuscript was also not included in the book. This led to careful reading and comparison on my part between the manuscript and the 1953 edition to recapture what (or who) was lost, to re-introduce emotional descriptors and colloquial language, and to ensure accuracy and completeness. All 712 pages (except for Chapter XIV as mentioned above) of Mrs. Comstock’s manuscript have been restored completely in this book. The 1953 edition of The Comstocks of Cornell is 267 pages in length, also divided into twenty chapters; however, the last chapter is only four paragraphs in length. Some changes were made by Herrick for diplomacy, or what we today call “political correctness,” particularly regarding slavery, religion, or university politics. Details lost in the 1953 edition include those of early Ithaca, New York; early Cornell University milestones; and pioneering personalities, visitors, and alumni of Cornell University across several departments. As mentioned previously, the choppiness in the chronology of the book comes from the omission of great portions of (or entire) chapters spliced together with the remnants. A sobering example of such a schism occurs at page 229 of the 1953 edition: Mrs. Comstock’s infamous Handbook of Nature Study is first mentioned here, and shockingly, there remains only forty-two pages in the biography for the discussion of the final twenty-five years of the Comstocks’ lives! This 1953 edition has served as a single important source to describe the collective history and background information of both Professor and Mrs. Comstock, their colleagues, and Cornell University. The ramifications of Herrick’s actions have affected more than sixty years of researchers and educators. Anna Comstock’s voice is one worth recovering from her original manuscript because she tells the history of her husband’s entomological work and her nature-study work at the turn of the 20th century. The anecdotes she provides give a strength of precedence to the work we do today in agricultural, entomological, and horticultural extension work, as well as nature education and public garden initiatives. The extent to which Comstock is still referenced today in these disciplines legitimizes the strength of historical relevance of her memoirs. Knowing both John Henry and Anna Comstock through their complete biography, and autobiography, helps us to rediscover their efforts, the efforts of their colleagues, and opens us to listen to their collective legacy. Karen Penders St. Clair Ithaca, New York
Peter Del Tredici
Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast A Field Guide
second edition Foreword by Steward T. A. Pickett
Comstock Publishing Associates an imprint of Cornell University Press Ithaca & London
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Copyright © 2010, 2020 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First edition first published 2010 by Cornell University Press Second edition first published 2020 by Cornell University Press Printed in China library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Names: Del Tredici, Peter, 1945– author. Title: Wild urban plants of the Northeast : a field guide / Peter Del Tredici ; foreword by Steward T.A. Pickett. Description: Second edition. | Ithaca : Comstock Publishing Associates, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2019025507 (print) | lccn 2019025508 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501740442 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501740459 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501740466 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Urban plants—Northeastern States—Identification. | Weeds—Northeastern States—Identification. Classification: LCC QK118 .D45 2020 (print) | LCC QK118 (ebook) | DDC 581.7/560974—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025507 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025508
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Contents
Foreword to the Second Edition by Steward T. A. Pickett, xi Preface to the Second Edition, xiii Acknowledgments and Photography Credits, xv Introduction, 1 Mosses and Ferns
Bryaceae (Byrum Moss Family), 30 Dryopteridaceae (Woodfern Family), 32 Horsetails
Equisetaceae (Horsetail Family), 34 Conifers
Taxaceae (Yew Family), 36 Woody Dicots
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Anacardiaceae (Cashew Family), 38 Berberidaceae (Barberry Family), 42 Betulaceae (Birch Family), 44 Bignoniaceae (Trumpet Creeper Family), 50 Cannabaceae (Hemp Family), 52 Caprifoliaceae (Honeysuckle Family), 54 Celastraceae (Stafftree Family), 58 Elaeagnaceae (Oleaster Family), 62 Fabaceae = Leguminosae (Pea Family), 64 Fagaceae (Beech Family), 70 Juglandaceae (Walnut Family), 74 Moraceae (Mulberry Family), 76 Oleaceae (Olive Family), 78 Paulowniaceae (Princess Tree Family), 82 Ranunculaceae (Buttercup Family), 84 Rhamnaceae (Buckthorn Family), 86 Rosaceae (Rose Family), 90 Rutaceae (Rue Family), 104 Salicaceae (Willow Family), 106 Sapindaceae (Soapwort Family), 112
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Simaroubaceae (Quassia Family), 120 Solanaceae (Nightshade Family), 122 Ulmaceae (Elm Family), 124 Vitaceae (Grape Family), 128
Herbaceous Dicots
Amaranthaceae (Amaranth Family), 134 Apiaceae = Umbelliferae (Carrot Family), 138 Apocynaceae (Dogbane Family), 140 Asclepiadaceae (Milkweed Family), 142 Asteraceae = Compositae (Aster Family), 146 Balsaminaceae (Touch-me-not Family), 196 Brassicaceae = Cruciferae (Mustard Family), 198 Cannabaceae (Hemp Family), 210 Caryophyllaceae (Pink Family), 212 Convolvulaceae (Morning Glory Family), 224 Crassulaceae (Stonecrop Family), 226 Cucurbitaceae (Gourd Family), 228 Euphorbiaceae (Spurge Family), 230 Fabaceae = Leguminosae (Pea Family), 236 Hyperiaceae (St. John’s Wort Family), 250 Lamiaceae = Labiatae (Mint Family), 252 Lythraceae (Loosestrife Family), 260 Malvaceae (Mallow Family), 262 Molluginaceae (Carpetweed Family), 264 Onagraceae (Evening Primrose Family), 266 Oxalidaceae (Woodsorrel Family), 268 Papaveraceae (Poppy Family), 270 Phytolaccaceae (Pokeweed Family), 272 Plantaginaceae (Plantain Family), 274 Polygonaceae (Smartweed Family), 282 Portulacaceae (Purslane Family), 296 Ranunculaceae (Buttercup Family), 298 Rosaceae (Rose Family), 302 Rubiaceae (Madder Family), 306 Scrophulariaceae (Figwort Family), 308 Solanaceae (Nightshade Family), 310 Urticaceae (Nettle Family), 314 Verbenaceae (Verbena Family), 316 Violaceae (Violet Family), 318
Monocots
Amaryllidaceae (Amaryllis Family), 320 Commelinaceae (Spiderwort Family), 322 Cyperaceae (Sedge Family), 324 viii Contents
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Iridaceae (Iris Family), 326 Juncaceae (Rush Family), 328 Poaceae = Gramineae (Grass Family), 330 Smilacaceae (Smilax Family), 362 Typhaceae (Cattail Family), 364
Appendixes
1. Urban Habitats and Their Preadapted Plants, 367 2. Plants Treated in This Book That Are Included in Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica, 370 3. European Plants Listed by John Josselyn as Growing Spontaneously in New England in the Seventeenth Century, 371 4. Species Suitable for a Cosmopolitan Urban Meadow, 372 5. Shade-Tolerance Ratings of the 40 Trees Covered in This Book, 373 6. Key Characteristics of Important Plant Families, 375
Glossary, 379 References, 391 Index, 399
Contents ix
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Foreword to the second edition
Ten years ago, Peter Del Tredici produced a very useful and thoughtful field guide to the common urban plants of the northeastern United States. The region includes some of our largest urban agglomerations and suburban territories, extending up and down the East Coast from Montreal to Washington, D.C., and from Boston to Detroit. That first edition provided an important resource for urban residents and land managers by giving them a convenient tool to identify and learn about the plants that inhabit their cities. It is a welcome event to mark the publication of a new edition of that pioneering book that adds forty-five new species to the plant roster—an increase of 20% over its predecessor. Urban ecologists and climate scientists have become more convinced that the continued human movement of organisms to cities, along with changes in climate and associated local environmental conditions, have transformed them into “novel ecosystems.” These new combinations of species have no analogue in the past and their future trajectories are unknown. On the one hand, this realization suggests that the plants that spontaneously establish in cities are capable of adapting to ongoing environmental change; on the other hand, it shows that managing the ecology of urban ecosystems strictly by looking backward is a poor strategy for keeping pace with our rapidly changing environment. These conclusions may seem radical and, to some perhaps, disturbing. The new introduction to Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast, however, provides a concise and easily comprehensible summary of the key lessons of modern urban ecology that support these conclusions. It includes well-documented and thoughtful descriptions of the origins, characteristics, evolution, and benefits of plants that establish spontaneously in urban habitats. This introduction is, in fact, a very good survey in approachable language of relevant findings from modern urban ecology. Readers of this book will garner much more understanding than simply knowing what plants are growing in their neighborhood or in the neglected slivers of land in their cities or towns. Readers will begin to appreciate more fully the role of ecology—the patterns and processes influenced by organisms of all sorts—in the city. They will also come to appreciate how much disturbance and intentional change takes place in cities, and how plants respond to these pressures. And finally,
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they will come to understand the immense amount of “free work” that spontaneous plants perform in urban systems. With this understanding, they will question the simplistic and judgmental focus on species labeled as exotic or invasive, and instead, will evaluate the resulting novel ecosystems by the functions and services they provide. This book provides readers with a viable alternative to the usual simplistic labels of species as either native or non-native. Instead, they will find a rich section on the “Cultural Significance” of each species that illuminates the compelling connections between humans and the plants that surround them in the urban environment— many of them dating back thousands of years. These human–plant interactions are continuing to evolve along with our changing climate, and readers will see how exciting an arena the cities are for understanding the ongoing process of plant evolution in an urbanized world. Specialists in ecological research who delve deeply into the book will find some very nice ideas to stimulate new research. This new edition is important to a broad audience who already have an interest in plants, but it is also an important statement of the emerging and changing ecological reality of our cities. Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast is not just an updated tool for the task of identifying individual species of plants in cities and towns and appreciating their history. It is also an important tool to help land managers, policy makers, landscape architects, garden designers, maintenance contractors, and residents better understand, and thus better manage, novel urban ecosystems. Few tasks are more important for people who inhabit our increasingly urbanized world. Steward T. A. Pickett Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and Baltimore Ecosystem Study Millbrook, New York
xii Foreword
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Preface to the Second Edition
The genesis of this book goes back sixteen years—to the spring of 2004—when I was on a field trip with my landscape architecture students from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. We were visiting Spectacle Island, a capped landfill in the middle of Boston Harbor, to study the vegetation. At some point, as I was explaining how to identify a particular weed growing alongside the pathway, I casually mentioned how unfortunate it was that we lacked the class time to learn about the weedy plants that are so common in the urban environment. The ecology course covered native species, and my class dealt with cultivated species, but nobody talked about the weeds that were growing everywhere. The curiosity of one of the students, Leah Broder, was piqued by this comment, and she immediately suggested that maybe we could set up a website for the class that would help students learn to identify these plants on their own time. Without giving it much thought, I agreed and naively suggested that with her help maybe it could be done in time for next spring’s class and that we could use slides I already had in my collection. Leah immediately agreed to help with the project. Back at the Design School, I quickly put together a grant proposal for the Harvard Center for Innovative Teaching Technologies, and they quickly approved it. With money in hand and technical support from the Design School’s IT specialist Kevin Lau, I was able to hire and train Leah and another of my students, Ken Francis, to begin working on the project. In August 2005—some sixteen months later— we launched the first version of the Emergent Vegetation of the Urban Environment (EVUE) website in time for the fall semester. With a continuation of the grant for a second year and additional help from two new students, Sharon Komarow and Addie Pierce McManamon, we expanded the website to nearly one hundred species and added digital images to replace blurry scanned slides. Shortly after the launch of EVUE 2.0 in September 2006, the money from Harvard ran out, leaving the website fully functional but frozen in time. It was at this point that I approached Cornell University Press about putting the information and photos from the website into book form and expanding the number of species covered. Producing the book version of the website took an additional four years, and the first edition of Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast came out in spring 2010.
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Now, ten years later, you hold the second edition of this book in your hands. It covers forty-five new plants (a 20% increase), which brings the total coverage to 268 species. Some of these additions are plants that have become more common in urban areas since the first edition came out, while others probably should have been included in the first edition but were left out because of space limitations or a lack of data about the extent of their distribution. In addition, the introduction to the second edition has been totally rewritten to reflect the increasingly obvious impacts of climate change on urban ecology. Conditions that were once seen as looming in the future have now been recognized as the “new normal” for cities across the globe. Indeed, most of the plants described in this book, when confronted with resources that have become more available as a result of urbanization—CO2, soil nitrogen, and heat—respond by growing more rapidly and reproducing more abundantly. Many of our native forest species, by contrast, are adapted to environments with scarce resources and are at a loss for how to handle the ten pounds of nitrogen per acre that is falling from the sky every year as a result of the burning of fossil fuels. Regardless of how we feel about it, the world of tomorrow belongs to those plants that can keep pace with rapidly changing environmental conditions. In this sense, Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast is a field guide to flora of the future.
xiv Preface to the Second Edition
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to many people for their assistance in the production of this book. With the first edition, I am indebted to Randy Prostak of the University of Massachusetts, who reviewed the manuscript and photos for accuracy; Les Mehrhoff of the University of Connecticut (now deceased), who helped me with the identification of several problematic species; and Roxana and Ledlie Laughlin of Cornwall, Connecticut, who generously allowed me to use their beautiful cabin in the woods to complete the manuscript during the summer of 2008. I also want to acknowledge the support of my two children, Sonya and Luke, who uncomplainingly put up with innumerable travel delays while I took yet another “weed� picture, and of my wife, Susan Klaw, for her willingness not only to make sudden stops by the side of the road to let me take photos with her iPhone but also to stand in the pictures for scale. I cannot overstate the importance of her encouragement and patience during the sixteen years I have been working on this book. For the second edition, I would like to acknowledge the encouragement and assistance of professional colleagues and general readers who pointed out errors in the first edition, suggested additions to the species treatments, and/or offered constructive criticism on the content of the book. Because of this input, the second edition has 20% more plant entries than the first edition and is considerably more accurate. Note that I used the opportunity of a second edition to replace photographs that were too small to be legible with images that worked better in the available space. Finally, I acknowledge the support of my editor at Cornell University Press, Kitty Liu, who shepherded this book through the editorial process.
Photography Credits In addition to the photos provided by Les Mehrhoff (Acer pseudoplatanus and Berberis thunbergii flowers) and Lou Wagner (Vintoxicum rossicum flowers) for the first edition of this book, the following individuals have generously given me permission to use their excellent photographs in the second edition of this book: Randall G. Prostak, University of Massachusetts, provided ten images from the Weed Herbarium website he manages at http://extension.umass.edu/landscape/ weed-herbarium: Berteroa incana, whole plant and flower close-up; Capsella bursapastoris, mature fruits; Cardamine hirsuta, in flower; Erophila verna, whole plant; xv
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Euphorbia maculata, flower close-up; Gallium aparine, fruits; Medicago lupulina, inflorescence; Potentilla norvegica, flower; Scleranthus annuus, flower close-up and plant in hand; Verbena urticifolia, flower close-up. Will Cook provided the image of Smilax rotundifolia flowers. Thomas H. Kent, FloraFinder.org, provided the image of Typha angustifolia flowers. Robert Klips provided the image of Bryum argenteum spore capsules. Justin Thomas provided the image of Ceratadon purpurescens spore capsules. All other photographs are my own (see more information at the end of the introduction).
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introduction
The flora of today surely differs from that of five hundred or more years ago, due largely to the influence of an increasingly complicated civilization; may it not be of interest to record in detail the ruderals and escapes of to-day as a prophesy of the flora of the not distant future? — Edgar Anderson and Robert Woodson The Species of Tradescantia, 1935 Ailanthus, sumac, sunflowers, and other weedy wildflowers colonize the wastelands and forgotten corners of the city and provide, at no cost, many of the same services that the cultivated plant communities do. In urban wastelands, they decorate what would otherwise be a desolate environment. But most city dwellers are blinded to their beauty by a more domesticated aesthetic. An unappreciated and neglected resource, their energy goes unharnessed. — Anne Whiston Spirn The Granite Garden, 1984
The basic goal of Wild Urban Plants is to help the general reader identify the plants that grow spontaneously in the urban environments of the Northeast and develop an appreciation for the role they play in making our cities more livable. The 268 plants featured in this book fill the vacant spaces between our roads, our homes, and our businesses; take over neglected landscapes; and line the ever-changing shores of streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans. Some of the plants are native to the region and were present before humans drastically altered the landscape; some were brought intentionally or unintentionally by people; and some arrived on their own, dispersed by wind, water, or wild animals. They grow and reproduce in the city without being planted or cared for by people. They are everywhere and yet they are invisible to most people. Given that cities are human creations and that the original vegetation that once grew there has long since disappeared, one could argue that these spontaneous plants have become the de facto native urban flora. Indeed, the basic premise of this book is that the ecology of the city is defined not so much by the cultivated plants 1
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that require ongoing maintenance or the native species that are restricted to protected natural areas, but by the plants that dominate the neglected interstices of the urban environment without human permission. This “wasteland” flora occupies a significant percentage of the open space in many American cities, especially those with faltering economies. If such vegetation is left undisturbed long enough to develop into woodlands, it can provide cities with important social and ecological services at no cost to taxpayers (Riley et al. 2018). The most well-known example of a “spontaneous” urban plant is Ailanthus altissima, or tree-of-heaven, from China. Widely planted in the Northeast in the Spontaneous trees, such as this tree-ofheaven (Ailanthus altissima), have become first half of the nineteenth century, Aisignificant components of the urban lanthus was later rejected by urban tree forest. planters as uncouth and weedy. Despite concerted efforts at eradication, the tree managed to persist by sprouting from its roots and to spread by scattering its seeds to the wind. The niche it occupies in cities was famously described by Betty Smith in the opening page of her 1943 novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: “There’s a tree that grows in Brooklyn. Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly . . . survives without sun, water, and seemingly without earth. It should be considered beautiful except that there are too many of it.” Although it is ubiquitous in the urban landscape, Ailanthus is seldom counted in street tree inventories because no one planted it and consequently its contribution to making the city a more livable place goes unrecognized. When Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City promised to plant a million trees to fight global warming in 2007, he failed to realize that if the Ailanthus trees already growing throughout the city were counted, he would be halfway toward his goal without doing anything. And that, of course, is the larger purpose of this book: to open people’s eyes to the ecological reality of our cities and to appreciate it for what it is without passing judgment on it. Ailanthus is just as good at sequestering carbon and creating shade as our beloved native species or showy horticultural selections. Indeed, if one were to ask whether our cities would be better or worse without Ailanthus, the answer would most certainly be the latter, given that it typically grows where few cultivated trees could survive without maintenance. 2 Introduction
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Common reed (Phragmites australis) dominates this “loading dock wetland” in an abandoned Detroit factory.
There is no denying the fact that many, if not most, of the plants covered in this book suffer from image problems associated with the label “weeds,” or the more recent term, “invasive species.” From the plant’s perspective, invasiveness is just another word for successful reproduction—the ultimate goal of all organisms, including humans. From a utilitarian perspective, a weed is any plant that grows by itself in a place where people do not want it to grow. Calling a plant a weed gives people license to get rid of it; similarly, calling a plant invasive allows them to blame it for ruining the environment. From the ecological perspective, a weed can be defined as a plant that is adapted to disturbance in all its myriad forms, from bulldozers to acid rain. Weeds are symptoms of environmental degradation—not its cause—and as such they are poised to become increasingly abundant as human-driven climate change relentlessly degrades the world’s environment. In this sense, the plants described in this book are the flora of the future. They are the plants that can respond positively to increased levels of carbon dioxide, soil nitrogen, and heat while most of our native forest flora is adapted to habitats where resources are scarce and competition fierce. As Edgar Anderson pointed out in 1952 in his “dump heap” theory on the origins of agriculture, weeds have been inseparably linked to the accumulation of human waste for millennia.
What Is a Weed? I consulted innumerable books and articles about weeds and invasive species in the process of writing this book, and the one concept that stands out is that a weed is a social rather than a biological construct. In the immortal words of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1879), a weed is “a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” At its core, a weed is, quite simply, a plant that people do not like because it is growing Introduction 3
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Quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) colonizing the roof of the abandoned Central Train Depot in Detroit.
where they do not want it to grow. To put it another way, it is the context in which a plant is growing—not the plant itself—that makes a weed. The Romans, who had names for most things, had no specific word for weed. According to various sources, the closest term they used was viriditas, which roughly translates to “greenness”— a purely descriptive term lacking value judgement. In the modern Romance languages, the words for weed are simply a negative descriptor added to the word for an herbaceous plant: mala hierba in Spanish, mauvaise herbe in French, and erbaccia in Italian. In German the word for weed, unkraut, carries the same negative connotation. Most books about weeds focus on species that are problematic in either an agricultural context, where the issue of competition with economic crops is the primary concern, or a landscape context, where an unsightly plant is growing in a place where people are trying to cultivate something else or do not want anything at all to grow (Salisbury 1961). The term invasive species is typically used to describe a plant that displaces desirable native vegetation in natural areas in an ecological context. This, of course, raises the question of what constitutes an invasive species in an urban context, where humans long ago destroyed most of the original vegetation? By the same token, the concept of a native species in an urban context has little meaning beyond its historical significance. In general, people’s negative feelings about spontaneous urban vegetation are either aesthetic—they are seen as ugly or indicators of neglect—or fear-based—they provide cover for illicit human activity or habitat for disease-carrying vermin. Although the overlap is considerable among the three categories of “weeds” listed above, they can be readily distinguished by the types of landscapes in which they grow. In general, agricultural habitats combine annual soil disturbance with high nutrient levels; ecological habitats are characterized by low levels of both soil
4 Introduction
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The urban glacier (left) leaves a trail of compacted glacial till in its wake.
disturbance and nutrients; and urban habitats experience intermediate levels of soil disturbance and nutrients. While disturbance is an integral part of the ecology of all three types of habitats, they differ from one another in the frequency with which the disturbance impacts their ecological structure. This is really just another way of saying that succession—the term used by ecologists to describe the changes in the composition of biological communities over time—is driven by disturbance. The initial stages of the process are referred to as early succession and are dominated by rapidly growing plants that do best with full sun and bare soil, and they reproduce quickly. Over time, these plants give way to more shade-tolerant, late successional species—typically trees and shrubs—that dominate the site until the next round of disturbance resets the time clock. The disturbance cycle for vacant urban land tends to be episodic: structures are built, used, abandoned, torn down, and rebuilt. Such disturbance is often tied to governmental approval processes that can take anywhere from 5 to 20 years for implementation (Muratet et al. 2007). For agricultural land, the typical disturbance cycle occurs on an annual basis and begins every time the ground is plowed. Most farming practices are designed to prevent succession from happening in order to allow the growth of annual crops. The disturbance cycle for woodland landscapes is on the order of 50 to 100 years, depending on a combination of unpredictable climatic, biological, and economic factors (Weiss et al. 2005). The periodicity of the disturbance cycle has a major impact on the composition of the spontaneous plant communities that grow in each of the three habitat types: annual and biennial species dominate agricultural landscapes; long-lived woody plants (trees, shrubs, and vines) typically dominate forested landscapes; and the patchwork of annuals, herbaceous perennials, and woody plants found in cities reflects the heterogeneity of its disturbance cycles.
Introduction 5
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Nature beyond Solitude Notes from the Field
John Seibert Farnsworth Foreword by Thomas Lowe Fleischner
Comstock Publishing Associates an imprint of Cornell University Press Ithaca and London
Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Farnsworth, John Seibert, author. Title: Nature beyond solitude : notes from the field / John S. Farnsworth. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Comstock Publishing Associates, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2019020924 (print) | LCCN 2019980215 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501747281 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501747304 (epub) | ISBN 9781501747298 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Farnsworth, John Seibert—Travel—California. | Farnsworth, John Seibert—Travel—Oregon. | Farnsworth, John Seibert—Travel— Washington (State) | Natural history—Fieldwork—California. | Natural history—Fieldwork—Oregon. | Natural history—Fieldwork—Washington (State) | Ecological reserves—California. | Ecological reserves— Oregon. | Ecological reserves—Washington (State) | Ecology—Research— Calfornia. | Ecology—Research—Oregon. | Ecology—Research— Washington (State) Classification: LCC QH318.5 .F37 2020 (print) | LCC QH318.5 (ebook) | DDC 508.79—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020924 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019980215
Contents
Foreword by Thomas Lowe Fleischner
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1. Notes from the Hastings Natural History Reservation
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2. Notes from the Santa Cruz Island Reserve
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3. Notes from the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory
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4. Notes from the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest
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5. Notes from the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center
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Afterword
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Acknowledgments
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References and Further Reading
191
Foreword Welcome to the New Golden Age
Several days of rain have saturated the hills a few miles above the sand terrace where I squat. The river is swollen over its banks, brown with sediment, carrying debris, spilling out of the granite gorge. Clouds stream past in an atmospheric river that promises to deliver snow to the mountains tonight. Even here, in the high desert, this afternoon’s wind has some bite. I sit, paying attention to these simplest sights—clouds, sand grains, the color of water, direction of the wind. All this, part of the practice of attention we call “natural history.” Natural history represents a practice of compassion, of “feeling with.” Too often, people—even those predisposed toward conservation—lump all of nonhuman life into one amorphous bundle and label it “Nature.” This is good as far as it goes, but “Nature” hides at least as much as it illuminates. We tend to have our deepest compassion for individual beings, not for general categories. Mother Teresa took on mass hunger by looking each person in the eye as she lifted a ladle to their lips. Look into enough eyes and some sense of caring for humanity as a whole can emerge. The same goes for “Nature”—we need to watch an individual bird struggle to stay warm as it fluffs up against swirls of snow, or contemplate the purple gentian flower blooming an inch above the grassland of the high Andes, tenaciously clinging to the ground as a fierce wind knocks human observers to their knees. Watching a particular bird sing—this redwing, from this fence post—or a particular flower blossoming—this lavender jewel we call Penstemon—helps us transcend the vague notion of “Nature,” or worse yet, “the environment,” and replaces it with texture, depth, and a realm of specificities. And in the process, awe suffuses our beings—from the
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simple recognition that something like a paradise tanager actually exists. If this expansion of consciousness is not a spiritual practice, I don’t know what is. Natural history, too, is ultimately political in that its practice shifts relationships of value and power. We fall in love; we change the way we relate to the world. We foster this falling-in-love in ourselves first. Then, love by love, friend by friend, story by story, we engage hundreds, thousands, millions of others—and we just might make a brand-new world. The great jazz musicians Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock, in an open letter to the next generation of artists, concluded, “Lastly, we hope that you live in a state of constant wonder.” Natural history, more than anything I’ve ever experienced, yields recurring states of wonder—wonder in the familiar and the exotic, in the near and the far. The author of the volume in your hands herein declares “a new golden age of natural history.” A message that I approve, and applaud. John Seibert Farnsworth has contributed to this golden moment by his own ongoing practice of attention—in this book he recounts his practice of encountering, and befriending, new landscapes. His temporary encampments at field sites along the west coast of North America provide glimpses into the world as it really is, uncluttered by media masks, and liberated from preconceptions. Yet what is the value of these brief relationships with landscapes and the field stations that concentrate their essences? Why does it matter, one might ask, for a grown man to, basically, just wander around and look at things? Well, for starters, it makes you, the reader, laugh, and it makes you wonder. And humor, insight, and curiosity are all too rare in our world today. There is no match, of course, for years-long, deep connection with a place. Where one comes to know the scent of specific shadows, the sequence and timing—what an ecologist refers to as phenology—of flowers: which colors blaze forth with which others, which autumn leaf transformations precede which others. But there’s another type of value, too. Like the medieval minstrels who roamed from site to site, carrying the news from one village to the next, collating and curating stories from each—John Farnsworth’s travels between field stations serve this ancient function. His observations become tales that enliven campfires, stimulate conversations, prompt listeners to lose themselves, to ponder, and to wonder. He has taken up residency—temporarily, but long
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enough to peel away stories—and then moved on, building a bank of stories to share with us all. Listen to these songs. Let the music lift you into your own stories, remind you of your own special places. Sit back and bask in these words. Let the narrator, this big bear of a man, show you five ways to befriend a new place. This is the work of the world, and he’s a fine guide. Thomas Lowe Fleischner
Sundowner
Books on nature seldom mention wind; they are written behind stoves. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949
There’s just enough left of the sundowner breeze to keep the bugs away. I sit here tonight, alone at a picnic table near the vacant dorms of a remote field station in the Channel Islands, watching something I’ve never observed before. A female acorn woodpecker is taking a dust bath in a shallow depression where the soil seems especially powdery, a place where birds have apparently done this before. She hunkers down low, dips her head first, shaking her bill side to side to stir up the dust, then arches her back, flinging dust toward her tail while she flops to her belly and begins flapping her wings as if drowning. I’ve seen quail do this, and house sparrows, and I’ve heard that this is how many birds deal with ectoparasites, but it’s the first time I’ve watched a woodpecker bathe. I am tempted to view this scene as comical. Field guides tend to describe the acorn woodpecker’s face as “clownish” or “clown-like,” and when birds thus perceived lie on their bellies and flap in the dirt, it’s hard to ascribe them dignity. But this woodpecker seems quite earnest about her bath, so I observe the ritual with appropriate solemnity. Finally bursting from the dust, the woodpecker seems heavy, as if gaining altitude is a struggle. Straight up she flies, landing vertically on the broad
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trunk of a eucalyptus tree immediately above the bathing site. Her white belly is still the color of the dust. Briefly she seems to rest, propped up by stiff tail feathers, and then she flies over to an adjacent tree, another stately eucalyptus, still climbing steeply. The woodpecker stops momentarily at a cavity entrance, and then disappears inside. I imagine that she tracked a great deal of dust in with her. I enjoy writing in situ,1 on site. This way I’m not only writing about nature, I’m writing from nature. Right now I’m writing at dusk, from dusk, during a drought, from just beyond the canopy drip line of a dry, dusky eucalyptus that shelters a dusty bird that has just bathed. It was not my intent, when I first sat down at this picnic table, to describe a woodpecker’s bath. I’m not even certain I intended to write. It’s more accurate to say that I was prepared to write, with notebook and pen at the ready, should anything seem remarkable. There are also binoculars on hand, and a glass of wine. The breeze tails off for the night, and a mosquito buzzes my ear. I realize that I’m having to deal with my own little ectoparasite at the moment. While this realization connects me to the woodpecker now bedded down in its cavity, I assuredly won’t be indulging in a dust bath anytime soon. My better options seem to be to slather myself with repellant, or to go inside. I go inside. Although I’ve skipped the dust bath, I’m doing the same thing the woodpecker just did, retiring for the night to an interior domicile. But I’m not nearly as connected to the bird now as I was a few minutes ago. Here, indoors, I’m no longer employing skills of observation, which are some of my most well-developed skills. Now I’m merely remembering, reflecting, and sipping wine.
The living room in the house I grew up in had a marble fireplace that was rarely lit, and the books in the bookcase to the right of the mantel were dusted more often than read. Although I was a precocious reader as a child, I perused few of them: Profiles in Courage, David Copperfield, The Lives of Saints, The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth. Reading four books from the living room bookshelves was plenty, and I suspect that none of my siblings read more from that particular library than I. 1. Situ is the ablative case of the fourth declension Latin noun situs, which is most simply translated “site.” The ablative case is tricky, because nouns in that case tend to function like adverbs. Therefore, when I say that I plan “to write in situ,” I’m describing as much how I’m planning to write as where. Unfortunately, the ablative case doesn’t translate well into English.
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Our family room had a brick fireplace that was inevitably fired up prior to Halloween and rarely went out before Easter. On cold Colorado nights Dad would put a chunk of coal the size of a cantaloupe in the back of the firebox before going to bed, and the embers would be ready for a fresh log the next morning, no kindling needed. That fireplace had a built-in knotty pine bookcase to its left, and those books were dog-eared and edge-worn. When I close my eyes I can see Walden sitting on the same shelf as A Sand County Almanac and Silent Spring, all three in paperback. Our copy of Walden included the essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” because Walden itself didn’t fill out the book. Were you to send a book manuscript the size of Walden to a publisher today, it would probably come back with gentle advice that there were too few words. Walden has plenty of words, the best of which is the adverb “deliberately.” The author wrote, famously, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Walden was more than a book to me. It was a manifesto. To an impressionable adolescent still called “Johnny,” this manifesto suggested that the best way to experience nature was alone. Indeed, solitude was the only way to experience nature deeply. Truly. Transcendentally. I write this book to interrogate that mentality, seeking my own conversion. Yes, my experience of the woodpecker’s bath this evening was solitary, and had I been distracted by companionship I might have missed it entirely. Solitude plays its role, especially for introverts such as myself, and it’s a gracious role. But I find myself searching for other paths—focused, communal, enduring alternatives—to augment the experience of the natural world. Such paths need not take the place of solitude, but would go beyond it, completing the experience of nature beyond solitude. When I was an undergraduate, the three nature writers who had the strongest hold on my psyche were all men. Regrettably, I did not investigate women writers until my postgraduate studies, at least in part because I read for my bachelor’s degree at a small, now-defunct college in Santa Fe, New Mexico, run by the Christian Brothers. I don’t recall having read any female authors during those years, regardless of subject matter. Until I discovered Annie Dillard, shortly after graduating, my three favorite authors were Henry David Thoreau (Walden; or, Life in the Woods), John Muir (My First Summer in the Sierras), and Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness). Aside from their maleness, what these three had in common was that they turned to solitude as a remedy for the disruption of living in a modern world. Their writing is highly reflective, at least in part because of the
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composition process each employed, writing from field notes after considerable time had passed. John Muir’s first summer in the Sierra took place in 1869, when he was thirty-one years old. He didn’t write about that summer until 1911, at the age of seventy-three. We must be amazed that, even with the aid of field notes and sketches, he could remember his experiences so vividly, describing them forty-two years after the fact. By his own admission, Edward Abbey wrote parts of Desert Solitaire in a bar in Hoboken, New Jersey. The book was published more than a decade after the experiences it describes, but in the book’s preface Abbey claims to have taken most of his writing “direct and unchanged” from his field notes. I’ve read his handwritten field notes from the two summers he spent at Arches, and the greater part of the book’s material didn’t come from them.2 Ironically, much of the time Thoreau spent writing in his cabin on Walden Pond during the years 1845–47 went into the composition of the book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, a tribute to his brother John, who had died in 1842. The book was about a boat trip the two brothers had taken in 1839. Thoreau’s biographer, Joseph Wood Krutch, himself an important nature writer, wrote of the process of composing Walden that there is . . . abundant material to illustrate the fact that [Walden] was put together out of materials previously written, some of which were composed during Thoreau’s actual residence by the pond site, some of which were already in existence before he went there, and some of which were not put on paper until long after he had left.3 None of this is to take away from the genius that went into Muir’s, Abbey’s, or Thoreau’s writing, or to negate the profound effects that their books have had on readers like me. (Indeed, I must confess to having written the thesis for one of my master’s degrees about Desert Solitaire.) I am, however, proposing a more distinctly immediate process for the book you are about to read. Please note that I am not undertaking this project as a critique of the trope of the solitary nature sojourner, or to suggest that I’ve found a better way to go about nature writing. Instead, this is a personal quest to unlearn some of what I’ve learned before and try a different way to go about my business.
2. I have written about this at length in “What Does the Desert Say? A Rhetorical Analysis of Desert Solitaire,” published in the journal Interdisciplinary Literary Studies. 3. Krutch 1948, 100.
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My method in the pages that follow, writing in situ, will not only entail writing from the place I’m writing about, but as nearly as possible from the moment as well. My commitment to the reader is to describe today’s events today, never putting the writing off till tomorrow. While there are certainly times when I will need to close the notebook, slip it into my pocket, and trudge up the damned hill, I’m hoping that hiking can become part of composing, especially if I don’t take too long after arriving at the summit to attend to my notes. One of my mentors, a former editor, worries about this approach, but I’ve assured her that there will still be room for redaction once I’m back in town. Where my notes need tightening up, especially in terms of deleting the unremarkable, I will do so. But these are field notes, not a collection of essays. Let the genre be what it is.4 For me, the commitment to writing in situ, where description is almost contemporaneous with observation, is about hoping to engage in a more intense level of experiencing and evoking. My writing activity will need to become a process of deeper immersion than anything I’ve written in or about nature before, and I will have to find ways to eclipse the logistics of fieldwork itself in order to facilitate the writing. The bottom line here is that I go into the woods to write deliberately, writing in the present, from the place. In the parlance of Dr. Elliot Coues, who wrote about keeping ornithological field notes in 1874, I must let the paper on which I write “smell of the woods.” The appreciation of nature takes so many forms—it should not come as a surprise how well it lends itself to collaborative endeavors. My plan here is to seek out a specific sort of communal experience of nature where teams of researchers have committed to gathering data for over long periods of times: decades, at the very least, and, in one instance, centuries. During this exercise, I will spend six months in the field, dividing time among five field stations following, generally, a south-to-north trajectory. My timing may seem strange, at first, since I will end up in the northernmost, highest-altitude station right before the winter solstice, but this is intentional. I have chosen these stations with an eye toward long-term ecological research projects, and my field time in the earlier stations corresponds with nesting/denning periods, peak migration, et cetera, of the ongoing studies I most want to write about.
4. The first draft of this manuscript, submitted for formal peer review, contained without apology the original spellings I’d made in the handwritten versions of my field notes. That did not go over well, so you’ll find corrected spelling and grammar in the notes that follow. Those wanting to read some wonderful field notes with the original misspellings preserved should consult the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition. I recommend Bernard De Voto’s edition, which is faithful to the originals.
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I could not be more excited about the diverse palette of field stations I will visit during this project. The first is the eldest, run by a flagship research university in partnership with a venerable natural history museum. The second is run by another public research university, this one renowned for environmental science, in partnership with the world’s largest nature conservancy. The third is a citizen science project run through a national park conservancy, a project where I’ve been a volunteer for some time. The fourth is an experimental forest, part of the Long Term Ecological Research Network, run through a three-way partnership between the US Forest Service, the National Science Foundation, and a land-grant research university. The fifth is an educational field campus run as a partnership between a national park, the forest service, local tribes, the nation’s first dedicated college of environmental studies and sciences, a major metropolitan city, and an institute devoted to environmental education. At each of these stations I will have the opportunity to hang out with people who have immersed themselves in these sites longer than Thoreau did at Walden or Abbey did at Arches. Significantly longer. Among the things I want to investigate in this book are how long-term ecological projects foster unique ways of experiencing the natural world. My hypothesis here is that numerous researchers at numerous field stations are experiencing nature in profound ways that rival or even surpass the transformational/transcendental experiences of Thoreau, Muir, and Abbey. Ultimately, evoking their experience is what most fascinates me about this project, and I am guided by Thoreau’s observation that one can never get enough of nature. This manuscript is not intended to become a field guide to field stations; rather, these are field notes from a search for vigorous, long-term ways of experiencing the natural world. Let this be both my discipline and my pledge—an honest chronology, written in situ, that takes its depth from the immediacy of the writer’s experience.
When Birds Are Near Dispatches from Contemporary Writers
Edited by Susan Fox Rogers
Comstock Publishing Associates an imprint of Cornell University Press Ithaca and London
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Copyright © 2020 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2020 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rogers, Susan Fox, editor. Title: When birds are near : dispatches from contemporary writers / edited by Susan Fox Rogers. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Comstock Publishing Associates, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2020004197 (print) | LCCN 2020004198 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501750915 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501750939 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501750922 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Birds—Literary collections. | Bird watching—Literary collections. | Essays. | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC PN6071.B55 W48 2020 (print) | LCC PN6071.B55 (ebook) | DDC 808.8/3628—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004197 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004198
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Contents
Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Susan Fox Rogers 1. Nighthawks: Lake Perez Katie Fallon
5
2. Spotted Owls Rob Nixon
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3. Birding in Traffic Jonathan Rosen
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4. Buried Birds Elizabeth Bradfield
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5. The Problem with Pretty Birds Andrew Furman
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6. Red-headed Love Child J. Drew Lanham
46
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v iii Conte nts 7. Crane, Water, Change: A Migratory Essay Christine Byl
54
8. The Black and White Sara Crosby
68
9. One Single Hummingbird Eli J. Knapp
81
10. Assault on the French Canal Bridge R. A. Behrstock
88
11. Wild Swans Alison Townsend
95
12. The Snowy Winter David Gessner
101
13. Koan Ursula Murray Husted
109
14. This Is My Tribe Thomas Bancroft
114
15. In the Eyes of the Condor Christina Baal
120
16. Little Brown Birds Richard Bohannon
133
17. The Keepers of the Ghost Bird Jenn Dean
144
18. The Hour (or Two) before the Dawn Donald Kroodsma
167
19. Secret of Owls K. Bannerman
177
20. Guardian of the Garden Renata Golden
183
21. Chasing the Ghost of the Imperial Woodpecker Tim Gallagher
192
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C o n ten ts ix 22. Extralimital Alison Világ
206
23. Death and the Rose-breasted Grosbeak John R. Nelson
215
24. Birding on Bleaker Island Rachel Dickinson
222
25. Nest Watcher Susan Cerulean
228
26. My Bird Problem Jonathan Franzen
237
Notes 269 Contributor Biographies
275
Credits 285
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Introduction Susan Fox Rogers
Some pig. Terrific. Radiant. Humble. Charlotte, the marvelous spider of E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, weaves these words into her web in order to save Wilbur the pig from being carted off to the pig factory. I wasn’t much of a reader as a child unless the books contained outdoor exploits—hikes or rafting trips, explorations of unknown lands (Enid Blyton was a favorite)—or if they focused on animals. So Charlotte’s Web was a much-read book, and White a much-loved author. White did not write his wonderful book to teach a lesson. Still I walked away knowing this: a spider can save a pig’s life. All it takes is imagination and some web-weaving skills. What might I do? As an adult I keep E. B. White near, and I still turn to his essays when I need a cleansing, a reminder of how beautiful a sentence can be when you stick with nouns and verbs. And so it happened that one summer, not long into my bird-obsessed life, I sat down with White’s essay titled “Mr. Forbush’s Friends,” and a new bird world opened to me. The essay
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2 Whe n Bi rds Are Ne ar introduced me to Edward Howe Forbush who is best known for writing Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States, a three-volume set published in 1928. I think of guidebooks as necessary but not necessarily entertaining reading, so White’s enthusiasm for Forbush’s work intrigued me. E. B. White picks up one of Forbush’s volumes when he is “out of joint, from bad weather or a poor run of thoughts.” White makes Forbush seem like a bird explorer, a daring enthusiast and a real nut. The kind I want to be my friend. Forbush was often in precarious situations. like when his boat ran aground off Cape Cod, a sou’wester blowing, and his oars “carried off to sea.” Does he panic? No, he is “absorbed in ‘an immense concourse of birds’ resting on the sands, most of them common terns.” Forbush’s passion for birds was singular and complete. White admired that “birds being near, Mr. Forbush found the purest delight.”1 I was able to download Forbush’s work, but my pleasure in reading him came only when a friend sent me the three-volume set for my birthday. The hardbound books are dull green and oversized, a pleasant weight on my lap while I read. Within these pages, I found the expected information—breeding and feeding, size and color—and a bit of the unexpected in his reports on the “Economic Status” of each bird. In this section, he offers how the birds are perceived in the human economy, like the Black-crowned Night Heron, which “is accused of being injurious to the fishery interests.” Or Gannets, who “have been accused of doing considerable damage to the fishing interests.” Forbush always defends the birds: “These harmful effects [of overfishing] have been much overestimated.” And “There has been no thorough investigation of their food habits,” he writes of the herons. Often, of course, no complaints can be made against a bird, as with the bitterns. Of them, Forbush writes: “Their economic status is not well known, but doubtless they are indispensable aids in keeping true the balance of life.” Which seems another way of saying: Leave them be, let nature take its course.2 But what White enjoyed about Forbush was the section titled “Haunts and Habits.” There, Forbush details his encounters with the species, or those of others who write in with their reports. Among the “Haunts and Habits,” it’s hard to beat his four-page description of spending a night in a Black-crowned Night Heron rookery near Barnstable. “On the ground under these trees,” he noted, “the odor of ancient fish and that of the ammoniacal fumes accompanying decay were so nauseating that, having
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I n tr o d u ctio n 3 taken a few hurried snap-shots, I was ready to seek the open air to alleviate certain disagreeable symptoms.”3 Yet near this miasmic smell, he settled in for the night, head-net protecting him from the flies, midges, and mosquitoes that had swarmed around him all day long, ignoring a few hungry wood-ticks that were still burrowing into his flesh. Most people would at this point flee, but not Forbush, who spends the night listening to the pandemonium of the rookery. Forbush manages to ignore, perhaps even enjoy, danger and discomfort as he brings himself closer to the birds. Forbush was an inspiration in wanting to edit this collection, which I think of as an extended “Haunts and Habits” of contemporary birders. Hearing of others’ encounters with birds always cheers me—nothing makes me happier than a friend or a student pulling out his or her phone and showing me a photo or video and asking, “What is this?” or “What is this bird doing?” These reports from the field create a collage of information that slowly adds up to some understanding. I wanted more of these stories from the field—in-depth reports that revealed the birds, our relationship to them, and perhaps also some unexpected wisdom about the mess of life, or this beautiful planet we live on.
To compile this work, I read widely. I relished Florence Merriam Bailey in the early twentieth century birding on horseback in the West, and was mesmerized by Kenn Kaufman hitchhiking his way through a Big Year in 1973. Narratives, old and contemporary, have given me new ways to think about birds, our relationship to them, and the ways the (bird) world has changed, both good and bad. I liked that we had moved from shooting birds to identify them to using an opera glass to focusing high-powered binoculars. I didn’t like that the thousands of Passenger Pigeons described by Alexander Wilson are now extinct. I liked that we no longer used bird feathers for women’s hats; I didn’t like that we have destroyed most of our native grassland and with that seen populations of grassland birds plummet. Then I sent out calls for stories. Soon, dispatches arrived from the field describing bird life and behavior from Florida to Alaska, and beyond, and about birds that range from the Baird’s Sparrow to the Sandhill Crane to the Great Skua. I delighted in those writers who seemed to adopt a
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4 Whe n Bi rds Are Ne ar Forbushian attitude, relishing or dismissing physical challenges as the thrill of bird finding takes over: journeying by bus and foot along Highway 1 to find California Condors, or jouncing students down dirt roads to find one special bird, a Lucifer’s Hummingbird. A masochistic approach to birding was not a prerequisite for inclusion in this collection, however. What I was looking for in these essays I distilled to “birds plus something.” These could not be simply guidebook reports from the field; the person writing had to add his or her unique perspective on the bird. Often that “something” is our role in the natural world, from the small to the large, from saving an injured bird to fighting the destruction of our grasslands. Sometimes that “something” is less concrete, more personal. As Rob Nixon writes in his essay, “Spotted Owls,” “Sometimes the best bird experiences are defined less by a rare sighting than by a quality of presence, some sense of overall occasion that sets in motion memories of a particular landscape, a particular light, a particular choral effect, a particular hiking partner.” Or, seen through Elizabeth Bradfield’s lens in “Buried Birds”: “We resonate with certain animals, I believe, because they are a physical embodiment of an answer we are seeking. A sense of ourselves in the world that is nearly inexpressible.” These essays are, then, not just field reports. They expand with reflections on love, family, life, and death and engage a range of emotions from wonder to humor. And because birds magnify our relationship to the natural world, you will read stories about habitat loss, declining species, birds that collide with buildings, or birds now extinct. Some too tell of small victories. This wide-ranging collection weaves tales that show us some bird. Terrific. Radiant. Humble. It’s a perfect read for a winter night when the wind is blowing and you are feeling out of sorts; it’s an anthology to keep near when the birds are not.
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Chapter 1
Nighthawks Lake Perez Katie Fallon
The sounds of a party — a wedding — float across Lake Perez in Stone Valley. Bursts of laughter, children calling to each other, and the low, bubbling murmur of conversation. I don’t know who’s gotten married, or where they’re from, but love is in the air. And this is my favorite time of year: mid May. Appropriate for weddings, for renewal, for rushing into bloom. I sit on the opposite bank, just down the hill from the cabin where I’ll be spending the night. Before me, nighthawks wheel and boomerang above the lake’s glassy black surface, their long wings cutting the air. The birds’ movements are fluid, elastic, easy, and graceful. They swoop low, then climb, swoop low again, like giant, agile bats, hawking insects. Each long wing bears a distinct white stripe, which looks like a strip of reflective tape from below, and each bird’s white throat patch gleams against the darkening sky. Perhaps the nighthawks are fueling up before the storm we all know will come tomorrow, the rain so common in an Appalachian spring. Perhaps they’re pushing on ahead of it, migrating still, making
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6 Whe n Bi rds Are Ne ar their way north from their South American wintering grounds. I want to call across the lake to the folks at the wedding, to get them to look at the bird show overhead. Instead, I watch in wide-eyed silence. Nighthawks and their relatives — whip-poor-wills, oilbirds, frogmouths, pauraques, and nightjars — are odd, secretive, mostly crepuscular or nocturnal birds. On the wing, a Common Nighthawk is acrobatic and incredibly sleek. In the hand, however, its wings seem too long, its body squat and strange, its eyes dark and clear as a mountain lake at dusk. A nighthawk’s tiny black beak hides an enormous mouth that resembles a bullfrog’s when it opens. Because they eat and drink while flying, this oversized mouth is useful for trapping insects and skimming lake water. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that these unusual birds used their huge mouths for another purpose: drinking milk from the teats of goats and sheep under the cover of night. According to the lore, a goat suckled by a nightjar met an unfortunate end — blindness and then death. Of course, the birds do not engage in this behavior, but the belief earned their family the name Caprimulgidae, or “goatsucker.” As Stone Valley darkens, I retreat to my cabin and recline on the bench outside the door. Birds around me sing to the fading day: an Eastern Wood-pewee (the first I’ve heard this spring), a Wood Thrush, and Chipping Sparrows below the pines. Frogs along the lakeshore join the chorus, but my mind is still soaring with the nighthawks. My first encounter with a nighthawk had been more than fifteen years earlier. I’d just started graduate school and had moved to West Virginia with my boyfriend (now my husband), Jesse. He dreamt of going to veterinary school one day, so two evenings a week he volunteered at local small animal clinic. We also began volunteering together at a wildlife rehabilitation center, and injured birds of all sorts began to find their way to us. Shoeboxes and dog carriers would appear at the clinic, containing limping geese, twisted ducklings, cat-attacked robins, and, one evening, a small bundle of brown and black feathers with long wings, a mini beak, and glossy black eyes. Someone had found the strange bird stunned on the shoulder of a road and scooped it into a box. Radiographs showed a wing fracture, but it wasn’t badly displaced. We wrapped the wing to the bird’s body and would wait for it to heal. We soon realized that caring for an immobile nighthawk would be difficult. Three or four times a day I cupped the bird in my hands while Jesse
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Nigh th awk s 7 gently pried open its beak and pushed a cricket or mealworm or soggy piece of cat kibble inside. It was labor intensive and stressful for the bird (and us), but we all soldiered on. I remember how warm the bird was, how its feathers were impeccable. Jesse and I worried it would lose too much weight, or that our insect-and-cat-kibble regime wasn’t appropriate. We kept the box clean and warm, lined with soft cloth. We cooed over the bird, we stared into its black eyes. Of course, we fell in love. With the nighthawk, and with each other. Weeks passed. Finally the bone was stable, calloused, and it was time for the bird to exercise. But how? The wildlife center didn’t have a flight cage with small enough mesh, and the veterinary clinic didn’t have a spare room. Our apartment was too crowded with animals already. So we improvised. Behind the animal hospital was a wet, swampy meadow, filled with high grass and cattails. At dusk Jesse and I would head out there, stand facing each other, and slowly, gently, toss the nighthawk back and forth. Every evening we stood further and further apart, and the bird’s strength returned. The last few evenings, it wheeled over our heads, and we turned and sprinted after, following the bird to the place it finally landed. Then one evening it happened; I gently tossed the nighthawk, and the bird beat its long wings and lifted, lifted, lifted into the darkening sky, much higher than it had flown before. Jesse ran but it was futile. The nighthawk kept going, higher and farther, until it was out of sight. We cheered and cried, hugged, and collapsed, laughing in the meadow. From my bench outside my cabin in Stone Valley, I smile at the memory and look out over Lake Perez. Fish lip the water, leaving concentric rings on the surface. The robins settling in the pines sing abbreviated songs. The wedding’s voices and laughter continue to float across the lake, though muted now, softening. Nighthawks still dance in the twilight, their reflections flickering on the dark water. I will never know for sure if our nighthawk’s repaired wing was strong enough to fly to South America and back, season after season. Perhaps the bird ended up on a road again, or succumbed to any one of a number of dangers during migration. Perhaps, ultimately, the life of one nighthawk is insignificant; perhaps our human lives are insignificant, too. But no matter how small, on that day’s end, as the sun slipped below the horizon, what returned to the sky was made of love, was buoyed by love. The same love spins in the air tonight and fills the valley. Long may it fly.
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