The Natural World/ Roll Call

By Dr. Robert Michael Pyle

Haying is going on right now a spate of recent travels, and the where I live, each farmer with face-changes that spring brings, one eye on the rows, one on yielded these contacts for me: the clouds. Here in Willapa, people talk a lot about grass—also Douglasfir, black-tailed deer, and elk; coho salmon, sturgeon, and Dungeness crab; Holsteins, Herefords, and slugs. In the country, many people (though fewer each year) still take their livelihood directly from other forms of life. Townspeople are less likely to connect with nature on a regular basis. Some, such as bird or butterfly watchers, wildflower and mushroom That damn dog who barked me awake. A Wilson’s warbler incessantly seeking a mate. Two Felis catus patted goodbye, each made (in part) of six or eight species of recycled rainforest rodents. The badly broken coyote limping along the road on my way to the airport, where tall cottonwoods leafed out limbless in the “designated wetland,” survivors of last winter’s ice storm. The sweet balsam scent of their unfurling buds. fanciers, organize their free time Then, in Fairbanks, exploding aspen catkins; sweet birch sap around nonhuman encounters. But flowing from beaver cuts; waffles sweetened with three species such folk are uncommon overall, and of Vaccinium; and last year’s tart lingonberries lingering on the considered strange by many of their forest floor, sodden with snowmelt. Browsing moose and musk neighbors: eccentric, obsessed, if ox cows and calves, nesting tundra swans, and sandhill cranes harmless. The majority, in fact, shows flying over the muskeg. Early purple pasqueflowers blooming little awareness of other life forms under black spruce on the University of Alaska campus, a beyond cats, dogs, lawns, and fellow benignant brown bear looming behind the museum podium, humans. and taxidermically malevolent polar bears presiding over each To resist this all-too-easy ignorance, Alaskan airport lobby. I recommend making a written Back home again, violet-green swallows nesting by my accounting of the many species we study window, tree swallows on the porch, barn swallows in brush up against daily. For example, the canoe room. Big bird biomass at smelt by the covered bridge—eagle, osprey, gull, merganser, cormorant, corvids. Cattle in deep green grass, anise swallowtail and mylitta crescent over phlox. Thousands of dispersing Asian ladybirds, one or two of them rounding my computer screen and glasses rims at all times. Rug-munching clothes moths, a red ant biting me where it never should have been, and tiny ants invading the bathroom.

A giant carpenter ant on the road with me as horizontal Sitka spruce, western hemlock, and western red cedar pass by on log trucks, while California poppies and Scots broom splash I-5’s shoulders

Robert Michael Pyle is a naturalist and writer who has resided along Gray’s River in Wahkiakum County for many years. His 24 books include the Northwest classics Wintergreen, Sky Time in Gray’s River, and Where Bigfoot Walks. His newest titles are The Tidewater Reach: Field Guide to the Lower Columbia River in Poems and Pictures (with Judy VanderMaten, recently published by CRRPress, see page 2 and 35) and Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays. Photo by David Lee Myers

This is the 26th in a series of selected essays to appear in Columbia River Reader. These were originally published in Orion Afield or Orion Magazine in the author’s column, “The Tangled Bank” and, subsequently, in the book of the same name published by Oregon State University Press in 2012.

with bright color. Aloft again with Chief Flight Attendant Diane Alder, Pilot Scott Redheifer, and eight recognizable species in the lunch.

Life is a litany of other species. So why are we often oblivious to all but our own? Earlier cultures had a basic, intensive, and entirely essential working knowledge of other species in their midst. In my grandmother’s day, the leading of botany and bird walks was a routine part of the grammar school curriculum. Yet in Fairbanks, where many people were studying “nature,” not a single person I met had noticed the outrageous early eruption of purple pasqueflowers.

On another recent trip, I traveled by that species of transport named for a fleet grey dog. To escape the clouds of Nicotiana vapor rising from the riders’ spontaneous combustion at each stop, I took short, quick walks to see what I could find behind the run-down depots: milkweed and sweet clover in a vacant lot; Gaillardia and petunia in a planter; hops, yeast, and barley in a pint glass. I never saw another passenger leave the stations. As I stretched my seat-sore muscles, I lamented that what seemed absolutely natural, even essential, to me drew only puzzled glances from my fellow travelers.

The species roll call makes an illuminating school assignment or journal exercise—not necessarily going forth to “document biodiversity,” but simply taking into account the other members of what poet Pattiann Rogers calls “the family.” You don’t have to know everyone’s name; you can list “the purple flower with the woolly leaves by the corner,” or “the bird that squeaks like a rusty gate each morning.” Once a neighbor is accounted for, the next step is knowing who it is, what it does, and how it fits in among the wider community of life.

Gary Snyder reminds us that “one is in constant engagement with countless plants and animals...the non-human members of the local ecological community.” When we fail to pay attention to our evolutionary neighbors, we deprive ourselves of much of the pleasure, comfort, fascination, and companionability of the world. Taking roll, we begin to sense our own fit.