Backyard Boa

Billie appeared at my doorstep in the heat of the afternoon, her hands cupped firmly together and held against her body.  "I've got a boa," she said.  "It came out of a weedy area I was mowing, and I don't want it to get into the road.  Can we release it in your rock wall?"

By all means.  The elusive rubber boa, Charina bottae, is one of those common and utterly overlooked creatures that echos greater things.  It is the small and nearly invisible cousin of the impressive anacondas, pythons, and boa constrictors, massive snakes large enough to eat small deer and peccaries.  The boa family line has some unusual characteristics among snakes.  The members carry two lungs, rather than the single lung considered adequate by most snake species, and boas retain their eggs in their bodies, giving birth to fully-formed young rather than laying the eggs like many other snakes do.  For the uninitiated, boas hunt by lunging out at unwary animals, encircling their prey in coils of their thick, smooth bodies, and strangling their dinner.

 

Rubber boa. Photo: J. A. Gervais

But the boa family is probably most noteworthy for another reason: they are snakes with legs.  They still retain the tiny nubs of what were once fully functional limbs.  Both sexes carry small spurs placed along their sides above the vent, used primarily by the males in courtship. 

The northernmost branch of the family ranges into North America in the form of two species, the rosy boa and the rubber boa, which extends up into British Columbia.  These are the poor cousins of the spectacularly patterned and impressively sized South American relatives.  The rosy boa boasts some handsome stripes but its northern cousin, the rubber boa, is notable for its plainness and the fact they occur in a wide variety of habitats although they are rarely noticed.  The body is olive or brown or pinkish, the belly lighter and possibly more shaded with yellow, and there are no lovely patterns of brown or black or green, no rings or stripes or spots or really anything of interest at all.  Their scales are small and very smooth and hardly offer any texture to break the monotony of their skin.  All in all, they are spectacularly uninteresting, other than the chance to see those relict legs that are now reduced to small spurs.

Except for two things: rubber boas have tiny eyes.  And they have thick, knobby tails that are as large as their heads.  With the very fine scales and tiny eyes, you might mistake one for a large fat worm.  The legs are pretty surprising, but they're easy to overlook.

Rubber boa head. Photo: J. A. Gervais

Rubber boas spend much of their time underground, haunting rodent burrows and cracks in the earth, sheltering under appropriate human junk.  They seem to do much of their hunting at night, and they are the scourge of the cozy nests of mice, shrews, and other small mammals.  The snake will eat all of the babies if it can, holding the mother at bay with that thick, knobbed tail.  One report also documents a snake consuming both a mother ensatina salamander and her clutch of eggs, which the salamanders brood until hatching.  These snakes are the real cradle-robbing monsters of nightmares.

 However, the boas themselves are often heavily scarred, and some voles and mice will counter-attack repeatedly to defend their offspring.  They may even kill the attacking snake if the snake is a small one.  Bigger boas will also eat birds if they can catch them, and smaller snakes feed on the eggs of other reptiles.  There are reports of big boas trying to eat smaller ones, although these incidents were seen in captivity.  There's a lot of tabloid-style drama going on out in the fields that we never notice.

Billie put out her hands and slowly opened them so I could see the boa.  It was olive in color, with a yellowy underside, about two feet long, and much more interested in hiding its head and presenting its tail to us than escaping.  The rubber boa is also one of the most docile of snakes, moving slowly and nearly impossible to provoke into biting.  They are far more likely to release musk from their vent to deter rough handling, and need to be harassed to do even that.

Down a mouse hole. Photo: J. A. Gervais

Rubber boas in the northwest breed in early spring.  The spurs are part of the courtship ritual, used primarily by the male snakes, whose spurs are more mobile.  Females' spurs are also more conical in shape, where the male snakes have spurs shaped like hooks.  Adult females are larger than males, with shorter tails, and more tail scarring, possibly because the demands of producing young require more hunting.  Females may not eat the entire summer that they are carrying their young.  Instead they seem to spend as much time as they can keeping their body temperature as high as possible to speed the babies' development and birth.  They will be born in August, not long before temperatures drop and all of the snakes must find sites to spend the winter.

Rubber boas are homebodies, frequently caught over and over in the same small area year after year.  They are also impressively long-lived, perhaps reaching a half-century even in the wild.  Their habit of rarely showing themselves in the open keeps them safely off the roads that take the lives of so many garter and gopher snakes, and helps ensure their reputation as the boa you never knew about living right in your backyard.

We looked the snake over closely but missed seeing the spurs, which I didn't know about at the time.  The snake might well have been a female, whose spurs are hardly larger than her scales and may not even be visible.  We released it in the grass not far from the half-buried line of concrete rubble that runs along the edge of our yard, the remains of an old barn foundation we had recycled into snake habitat.  There are too many mouse droppings in the bike shed.  I hope this snake sticks around.


References:

•  Dorcas, M. E., and C. E. Peterson. 1998. Daily temperature variation in free-ranging rubber boas. Herpetologica 54(1):88-103.
• Hoyer, R. F. 1974. Description of a rubber boa (Charina bottae) population from western Oregon. Herpetologica 30(3):275-283.
• Hoyer, R. F., and G. F. Stewart. 2000. Biology of the rubber boa (Charina bottae) with emphasis on C. b. umbratica. Part I: capture, size, sexual dimorphism, and reproduction. Journal of Herpetology 34(3):348-354.
• Hoyer, R. F., and G. R. Stewart. 2000.  Biology of the rubber boa (Charina bottae) with emphasis on C. b. umbratica. Part II: diet, antagonists, and predators. Journal of Herpetologica 34(3):354-360.
• Macey, R. M. 1983. Charina bottae food. Herpetological Review 14(1):19.
• Peabody, R. B., J. A. Johnson, and E. D. Brodie, Jr. 1975. Intraspecific escape from ingestion of the rubber boa, Charina bottae. Journal of Herpetology 9(2):237.
• Rodriguez-Robles, J. A., C. J. Bell, and H. W. Greene. 1999. Gape size and evolution of diet in snakes: feeding ecology of erycine boas. Journal of Zoology 248(1):49-58.

Groundhog Day on a Bicycle

I've been pretty committed to reducing my carbon footprint for a few years now, spurred by the scientific evidence that suggests that global warming is bringing about severe changes to the planet's climate even faster than we had expected.  I'm not someone who still needs convincing. But I still find that the gap between intention and action can be persistent and pervasive, requiring a large reserve of daily resolve to bridge.

I ride my bicycle to town to my office, and for many of my errands.  I have decided not to be dogmatic about it, allowing trips at night and trips to pick up heavy bags of dog food, livestock feed, or kitty litter to be made in the car. But I continually challenge myself to leave the car in the driveway, and take the bike instead.

I've made it easy on myself by riding a good bicycle, a touring bike outfitted for commuting with fenders, lights, and reflectors.  I've got good bike bags, and a nice rain jacket.  My commute is really a lovely short tour for much of the way if I choose a longer route, and bike lanes or bike paths exist on all but the first three-quarters of a mile of my journey.  The shortest distance to my office is just over five miles, and my office has great secure, dry bicycle parking and a place to hang wet clothing.  In sum, I've got the optimal situation for bicycle commuting.

Still, I find the walk from the front door to the bike shed past the car to be one of the most challenging twenty-five yards I've ever traveled.  The battle goes like this: I'm already behind schedule. It's raining. It's hot. It's cold. I'm really tired today.  I might be coming down with something. If I drove, I could do this errand that is not feasible by bicycle.  Everybody else drives.  Maybe I'm just a freak for caring so much.  Why don't I give myself a break today, and  I'm sure I can come up with a reason why I deserve one.  Meanwhile I'm trudging to the shed, pumping up the tires, and resolutely rolling my bike up the driveway.  Fortunately, I live at the top of a hill, because that easy launch helps overcome the last resistance, and off I go.

I've been surprised at the continual inner battle, despite what I know about the science, the consequences of continuing to carelessly emit carbon into the atmosphere, and the fact that I really do enjoy riding my bicycle.  It helps me realize how much greater the challenge must seem to someone who doesn't have such an ideal commuting situation, or whose job is less amenable to arriving at the office wet or sweaty, and needing to change, can't safely ride at all, or who perhaps doesn't see global warming as an immediate threat.

The daily inner battle has also taught me that I need lots of different arguments to help me push the bike out of the shed.  Sometimes, but not often, pure guilt is a motivator.  It typically doesn't work two days in a row. Who wants to feel guilty?  Of all emotions, I think we're best at managing to avoid this one.  I consider it a tool of last resort.

Sometimes I can get myself going by reminding myself of how much I usually enjoy the ride in to town.  This is true, but  the trouble is that I remember plenty of rides I didn't enjoy, when either bad weather, a negative interaction with a motorist, or too many dead deer carcasses on the side of the road ruined the fun.  Still, on the ride to town and back I have enjoyed some spectacular sunrises, encounters with friends, surprise wildlife sightings, and even fresh blackberries in season.  I almost always feel better after exercising.  This motivator works more often than any other.

I've also found I'm pretty reward motivated, and I'm not above personal bribery.  I keep a package of homemade chocolate biscotti in the freezer at work.  All right, I tell myself, biking burns calories.  Ride in today, carrying all of your gear and with full intention of stopping at the store to buy groceries on the ride home, and you can have TWO cookies on your coffee break.  On a bad day I might need three cookies.  I can always promise myself I'll pedal harder to make up for it.

The final motivator is highly personal, and I don't use this one if I'm already in a difficult mood.  I can remind myself of the latest rash of scientific papers filling in the lines of what we're in for as our atmosphere changes.  The danger here is this can make me angry, and too resentful of other people who don't seem to be spending their free time perusing the latest issue of Nature Climate Change or following Skeptical Science, RealClimate, or Climate Progress, but who might be driving their dog to the forest as I bicycle past them.  This is generally counter-productive.  First, resentment gets you nowhere.  Second, being angry at cars while you're riding a bicycle is very dangerous.

Instead, I have to apply all of this knowledge to view global warming as a direct threat to something I care very deeply about, something I don't want to lose or see destroyed.  I think of the glaciers I've seen that my nieces and nephews never will, or the high mountain forests now under threat from bark beetles and fire.  I think of my nieces' and nephews' future, which won't have the glorious biodiversity and take-it-for-granted planetary life support systems I enjoyed when I was their age.  Most often, I think of a small dune of sand that arcs up just above the waves in the far northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

Hawaiian monk seal and pup, Laysan Island 1991. Photo: J.A. Gervais

It hurts to think of all that is going to be lost, parrotfish and monk seals, tropic birds and albatrosses and sea turtles.  I can at least act to prevent more damage, however mundane and humble and small that action might be.  This will get me on my bicycle even in very cold wind and rain.  However, it is also quite dangerous to ride a bicycle if you are upset.  I try the cookie motivator first. 

The little daily battle in the war on global warming has me thinking that although the action is happening in the atmosphere, the front lines are drawn by our smallest actions, held firm by whatever resolve we can muster. There won't be a conclusive confrontation, some  great climax that once and for all ends the war.  It's going to be a lot more like the movie "Groundhog Day" than D-Day.

I'll continue to engage in the fight with the daily trudge up the driveway, one small act of defiance over and over against too much loss to bear.

************************************************************************
Chocolate Biscotti (origin of recipe unknown)

Mix and set aside:
2 cups flour
0.5 cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt

Cream together 1 cup sugar with 3/4 stick (6 tablespoons) of butter.  Add two large eggs, beat together well.  Add 1/2 cup chocolate chips and 1 cup chopped walnuts.

Combine sugar-butter-egg mix with the flour mix.  Divide the batter and pat each half into a log, roughly 2 inches wide, 1 inch high and 12 inches long.  Bake on greased cookie sheet for 35 minutes at 350 degrees F.  Let cool on wire rack completely.  Cut into 3/4" slices and put back in the oven for another 10 minutes.

Make cookies while baking some other item to get the most from the electricity needed.

Metric version:
240 g flour
55 g cocoa powder
5 ml baking soda
5 ml salt
200 g granulated sugar
100 g butter

The Baloney Detection Kit

Have you ever read a book that had been published years before you read it, but you find it strikes a chord with you as if the author was writing it for the present you're in?  I just had that experience reading Carl Sagan's last book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Random House, NY).

I had not even known Sagan had written it until recently, although it was published in 1995, the year before he died.  I had been enthralled by the television series "Cosmos" and the book was given to me as a Christmas gift from my parents.  I still have it, tattered and well-traveled, on the shelf reserved for the favorites.  Sagan's ability to communicate the wonder and challenge of science remains unequaled.  Having worked as a science communicator myself for the National Pesticide Information Center, I know how difficult, and how important, communicating science to the general public can be. 

The Demon-Haunted World has many prescient chapters that ring even more true today than they did sixteen years ago; I won't spoil your personal discovery.  But in an election year of unparalleled hyperbole, in a time marked by highly organized, very well-funded anti-science campaigns, a few pages of this book need to be widely distributed.  These pages constitute Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit.

To quote the book, "What's in the kit? Tools for skeptical thinking."

They include the ground rules that every practicing scientist should have memorized by heart.  Information must be independently confirmed to be true.  Authorities have no special standing, only experts do.  However, the experts had better be prepared to defend their views in vigorous, open debate, which should be strongly encouraged.  The validity of ideas is independent of the rank or status of the person presenting them.  Scientists should maintain at least a small herd of alternative hypotheses that may explain a phenomenon to avoid unreasonable attachment to any one idea.  All hypotheses need to be able to be falsified in order to be useful. If faced with two equally plausible explanations, choose the simpler of the two.

In addition, included for all of us is a list of fallacies to be recognized and called out for the bad practices they represent.  Among the most relevant of these:

Confusing causation for correlation.  Just because two phenomena occur together doesn't mean that one causes the other.  Weight gain and baldness are both associated with aging in men.  However, gaining weight does not induce baldness.

The false dichotomy (also known as the excluded middle).  Either you're for something, or you're against it.  If all parts of the genome haven't been shaped by evolution, then evolution isn't valid.  The slippery slope is a special case of the excluded middle.  Another special case is the short-term versus the long-term argument.  We need the jobs mining and transporting coal will provide, so we can't afford to pay attention to future environmental or human health costs.

The non sequitur, which literally means "it doesn't follow".  This is the derailing of the logical argument.  For example, the claim that teaching human reproductive biology in school will lead to sexual promiscuity is a non sequitur.

Misunderstanding of statistics and probability.  This is a hard one for folks without much math background, but Sagan offers an example that illustrates the extreme: President Eisenhower was purportedly alarmed to learn that fully half of all Americans were below average intelligence.

Observational selection: we consciously or unconsciously winnow our recognition of events to support our cherished viewpoints.  For example, only the failures are enumerated, not the successes.  Solyndra went bankrupt, so there is obviously no point in supporting companies developing alternative energy technologies.  We are also prone to forgetting failures.  In both cases, we're not going to be able to learn from what we've tried before if we choose not to remember it.

The straw man: the straw man is built from a gross oversimplification of a position to make it easier to attack.  If global warming is actually occurring, how come it snowed so much in some places last winter?  Straw men often turn up as jokes, but in this case both sides have to appreciate the caricature for the joke it is meant to be.  Otherwise it isn't funny at all.

Ad hominem: Latin for "to the man", this is similar to shooting the messenger.  It involves attempting to discredit the source so no one will believe them, even if there is abundant support for what they're saying.  Think character assassination.  Unfortunately it has become an increasingly common strategy in public discourse in general and for the climate change denialist movement in particular.  Deniers are now seeking to discredit the scientists themselves, in hopes that the public will be fooled into thinking that if the scientist is a jerk, his or her work will not be worth anything. 

Inconsistency: this one is miserably pervasive, which is a sad comment on all of us because it's also one of the easiest ones to spot and call out. You might also refer to this one as the pot calling the kettle black, and in the case of ethical positions, the word "hypocrisy" might apply. 

Sagan points out that all tools, even a baloney detection kit, may fail or be misused.  However, it still seems worth investing in developing a good one to better recognize what's being served up in the media and public discourse.  In fact, maintaining a healthy, fully functioning democracy requires that all citizens be so equipped.

Sagan makes an eloquent argument for remembering what science really is: a universal pursuit whose revelations are independent of religion, nationality, language, or political persuasion.  These are truths unaffected by whether or not we exist to recognize them. Science exists independently of its discoverers.  It is up to us to wisely use and apply the discoveries, making sure that we all engage in open, skeptical, and reasoned debate that acknowledges the potential risks and benefits.

View from the Roof

It was one of the first summer mornings we've had this year, but like too many summer mornings, there were always chores to do.  The solar hot water system has been on the blink for some months now, thanks to an unreliable sensor, and although Dan had finally obtained the necessary parts and even rigged a temporary repair, the fix needed to be made more permanent.

This required another trip up to the highest roof of the house.  The living room juts out from the main wall, so getting to the rooftop panels means hauling a ladder to the top of the living room's first-floor roof, then setting it up to reach the roof over the second story, the uppermost roof of the house.  Good sense seemed to require a spotter at the base of the ladder, so repairing the sensor became an all-hands-on-roof affair.  The dogs offered moral support from the grass below.

The second-floor windows on the south side of the house are set just above this first-floor roof.  The view from my desk is essentially the same as the one I obtained by sitting on the roof with my back against the exterior wall, waiting until I was needed.  However, there wasn't much else I could do but sit and watch a summer morning unfolding on our small corner of the world.  This is something I confess I absolutely do not spend enough time doing.  There may be days, very bad days, when I hardly look out the home office window at all.  Instead, my existence is shaped by the computer, by proposal deadlines or the text of a report, the dead words on the electrified screen blocking out the living world outside.

This morning, there was no window, only open air filled with the ruckus of two house wren families, both with newly fledged young, bouncing from fencepost to wire and back, squabbling and begging without any sense of propriety.  Young chickadees were working the riparian edge, noticeably less careful than their parents about popping out of the foliage into plain sight for long stretches at a time.  The swallows flashed like feathered sabers, slicing up the sky in search of prey to bring their still box-bound baby.  Far less graceful, our four big red hens and the little flock of young hens rambled about the pasture, the unruffled dignity of the older hens a striking contrast to the gawky, awkward cliquishness of the young girls, who are still quite unsure of themselves.

The goats had already had a good graze and had retired to their platform play structure to chew their cud and dangle their feet in the morning breeze.  The old ram eventually came to join them.  A massive beast, he's pretty gentle, and has been seen putting up with the indignity of having lambs and even the goats climb up on his back as if he were nothing more than an old stump.  When he's had enough, he heaves to his feet, standing in an Eeyore posture of gloomy stubbornness until his tormentors find something else to do. This morning, he seeks out the small patch of shade under the goat platform, or maybe he's just seeking their company.  It's a nice morning to share.

The reverie broke when a small roll of electrical tape came wheeling out over the edge of the gutter and launched into the atmosphere, arcing out over the grass below.  Would you mind getting that, a disembodied voice cried.  In through the window, down the stairs, pause to plug in the coffee pot, search the long grass until the errant tape is located, another pause to pour the coffee and grab a book I've been wanting to read, back up the stairs and through the window.  The tape delivered, I spend another forty minutes reading, enjoying my coffee, the sounds of the creek and the birds, and wishing that all house chores were similarly demanding.

More than that, I wish I were better at simply stopping, remembering to stand in awe of a green and feathered early summer morning, one among billions, but one of the few in which I am alive and privileged enough to witness.  The book I read on the roof offered up a prescient quote by Marvin Bell:

"Of all animals, only Man has to remind himself that he possesses life."

The Ecology of Fear

Wolves are back in the far west.  They are not exactly universally welcomed, showing a sharp divide between ecological science and a human-centric world view.  During a recent academic interview, the candidate from the intermountain region lost his cool at the very end of the required seminar presentation, when he suddenly announced in a heated voice that wolves were a very serious issue, and those of us who had not yet experienced the real wolf on our doorstep had no idea how dangerous these animals were.  "You wait, it will be a bigger issue than salmon!"

Traveling wolf.  Photo: MacNeil Lyons

In the Pacific Northwest, that seems at first hard to believe.  Salmon, after all, have spawned savage political water wars at a national level and extreme controversy over removal of dams on the Columbia and Snake Rivers.  Salmon long shaped the biological, cultural, and economic landscapes of this region.  They fertilized the coastal forests that surround the spawning streams, supported a rich variety of indigenous cultures, and bore a major fishing industry.  Now many of the salmon runs along this coastline are headed to extinction.  They are leaving only echoes of their legacy in a world made poorer by their absence in a myriad of ways.  Their absence is revealing the size of the role they once played.  Wolves have some pretty big fins to fill.  They may well be up to the part.

We've learned a lot about the role of wolves in ecosystems since they reappeared along the continental spine.  Wolves have been credited with bringing back the riparian forests in Yellowstone, no less, and increasing the pronghorn herd.  We've also learned that they're every bit as controversial as they've ever been.  It is very easy to find someone with strong feelings about wolves.  They just don't happen to all agree with each other.

That is the understatement of the century.

Wolves in Yellowstone have revealed not only just how complex ecosystem linkages are, but how we have ignored the importance of the behavior of individual animals in understanding system function.  There are more aspen in Yellowstone because there are wolves.  True, more wolves has meant less elk, because wolves like to have elk for dinner.  An even bigger factor, though, is the fact that the elk are very much aware that wolves like to eat them.  And they are afraid.

 Wolves hunting an elk in Yellowstone.  Photo by Doug Smith.

The ecology of fear has undergone a recent renaissance in ecology.  The basic idea is that prey animals will behave in a manner to balance the risk of being eaten with the need to eat themselves, and they will moderate their behavior according to how they perceive that risk.  With the wolves gone, elk and moose in Yellowstone were free to go anywhere they wanted, and feed there uninterrupted.  Their populations grew, and hordes of hungry, careless elk browsed the riparian areas in Yellowstone into stubble.  Along the way, beaver, birds, and amphibians all suffered the consequences, and the very hydrology of these streams was altered.  The elk had simply gotten out of hand.

Enter wolves stage right, some fifty years after their extirpation.  So many years had passed without wolves in Yellowstone that when the wolves returned, the moose did not even recognize them as a threat.  The word got around quickly, however, and the elk found that the rough, low-visibility terrain of the riparian systems was too risky a neighborhood for loitering, even without many shrubs or trees.  Exit elk, stage left.  They are still around, never fear, along with much wiser moose.  Enter beaver and rare wetland plants and small birds.  Wolves also suppress the smaller predators, who wreak havoc on prey that wolves would ordinary not bother with.  Pronghorn fawns suffered fewer losses to the jaws of coyotes after the wolves returned.  Enter more fawns and small mammals.

So, wolves are busy, letting trees grow, birds sing, and pronghorn fawns romp across the landscape.  There may indeed be fewer elk out there, but there are still elk, and there are a lot more of other native species, which is a good thing all around.  At least it is from an ecological point of view.

 North fork of the Flathead River near Glacier National Park.  Note the lack of medium-sized aspen and the distinct browse line.  Wolves have begun returning to this area.  Photo courtesy of Randy and Pam Comeleo.

The wolf howl is heard, out of the darkest reaches of backstage.  For a century and some, we've been able to pretend that the entire western landscape was ours to do with whatever we wanted, facing no worse threats than occasional severe weather or accident.  Mountain lions reasserted themselves as something to pay attention to in some areas, but they have not proven to be the stuff of nightmares.  Our livestock grazed at will throughout this vast region, and we collectively gave little thought to the welfare or existence of any native species.  Until the wolf howled beyond the borders of our national parks.

Enter the fear of the wolf, center stage.  The ecology of fear is proving itself a potent force to reshape landscapes once again, as ranchers declare that wolves will be the utter undoing of an entire industry and a traditional way of life.  It really isn't about the losses of a few dozen cattle each year.  The carnage will not be absolute, or unchecked.  That may not be said of the rage arising from the challenge to the perceived human hegemony.  Will we choose to de-wolf the west once again, or will we learn to live within complex landscapes shaped by the interactions of many species, even the ones we fear? Will we learn to live among a web of competing visions and values shaped by our own species?

Photo: USFWS

We've viewed the place as utterly our own for a long time in our own minds, although not even two centuries have passed since we've begun the great ecological unraveling of the west.  The howl we need to attend to is the one coming from ourselves.  Do we really think that we are the supreme masters of our environment, subject to no limits, beholden to no ecological laws?  Even among ourselves, whose vision should direct the action?

The real wolf here isn't the large, predatory canid.  It is our own outsized, arrogant, egotistical view that only our needs matter.  Even if our needs were the only ones that did matter, we can't get along without all the rest of the biosphere.  Let's hope we're wise enough to speak to the real issue, not the shadow-play of an outdated view of our own place on the stage.

Grossbeak Convention

The male evening grossbeak may be one of the most brightly colored birds we overlook right in plain sight.  At least, I always think this in the last week of April and the first two weeks in May, when flocks composed of hundreds of individuals suddenly descend on the center of Oregon State University's campus and spill over into the tall trees in the historic downtown area.  To be fair, the evening grossbeaks stay high in the trees, and their green, black, and yellow plumage, which seems so bright, blends in astonishingly well with the new leaves against a startling sunny sky.  It is as if suddenly someone turned on the color after a long monochrome winter, and all that green and yellow is too overwhelming to pick apart into individual components. 

Photo: J. A. Gervais

Evening grossbeaks aren't wallflowers.  They are big, they are loud, and they are mobile.  But they do like the upper parts of the canopies of the tallest trees, making them somewhat difficult to see.  Binoculars help.  Watching the flocks of grossbeaks inevitably invites watching the crowds of people thronging the campus between classes, to see who else is paying attention, and if anyone else is craning their neck to see the treetop show.

It's hard to tell who actually notices the loud clear calls and buzzy whistles and the rain of empty seed pods wafting down from the heights, but isn't actually trying to look.  There are schedules, after all.  The grossbeaks keep them too, arriving on campus typically in mid-morning, having flown in from the hills northwest of town.  In the late afternoon, they filter back up into those hills, apparently refusing to spend the night in town.  I hear their morning commute while walking the dogs before I commute to town myself.  They fly over in tight flocks, urging each other on with hurry-up calls.  I have no idea if anyone is taking attendance.

I've asked people on campus if they'd like to borrow my binoculars on occasion, if they don't have their eyes fixed to the pavement while moving at warp speed, and if their ears are clear of electronic devices.  Most people have been shyly curious, and delighted when they finally get a glimpse of the handsome males.  These birds look like they belong on the tropics, not on campus with the drab sparrows and juncos that students might ordinarily glimpse on the way to class.  Suddenly there are brighter possibilities afoot, the campus a lot more interesting-  People start to notice the trees and the birds again, if only for a little while.  I take this as a hopeful sign.

Evening Grossbeak, Coccothraustes vespertinus.  Photo: USFWS

Grossbeaks are nomadic, known for their wanderings far out of their typical haunts if good seed years are followed by very bad ones, so that there are too many hungry grossbeaks and a mass exodus ensues.  The flocks around campus come every year with adamant regularity, however, and spend these few weeks frantically eating and courting.  When the speed dating session is over, they disperse; presumably, they're heading into the Coast Range and the Cascade Range to get down to the business of breeding.

How they all know to come through Corvallis, Oregon at this time of year to feed on the seeds of the elms around campus and around town is an open question.  Presumably the juveniles learn by following the older birds, and now there's some kind of tradition- "Let's meet on campus!" followed by, "See you next year!" 
Just as suddenly as they arrived, the grossbeaks leave, the banquet over. I'll still hear solitary, plaintive raspy contact calls in the woods above our farm for a few more weeks, before those too go silent for another year.  Probably the local little brown birds breathe a big sigh of relief to be rid of the big noisy showboats from out of town.

The menu.  Photo: J. A. Gervais

I hope the little brown birds continue to be so overwhelmed every spring, as many parts of the country are seeing declines in these gorgeous finches.  It isn't entirely clear what's going on, because evening grossbeaks get around and don't mind showing up in new places where they may be entirely unexpected.  Their stubborn predictability here is a treat.

Imagine

We were trying to herd the sheep into their small three-sided shelter one evening recently, so we could worm the ewes and trim hooves.  It always amazes me how good animals are at reading human body language; they often seem to know what we're up to before we even know ourselves.  Somehow, when the order of business switches from feeding them to moving them around, the sheep recognize it instantly, and they are not always on board with the agenda. They weren't on board this time, behaving as if we were driving them into a dragon's den.

Part of the problem is that sheep really don't like going from bright light into a dark space where they can't see well.  Individually, they enter this shelter on their own all the time, but being pushed as a group made a significant difference in their willingness to enter when we were pressuring them.  Time and again we almost got the lead ewe through the wooden gate, and at the last second she dodged aside, the younger ewes and the lambs quickly following her lead to the far end of the field.  This went on until the light softened with the setting sun, reducing the contrast of the dark interior of the shed.  The old ewe finally decided that it wasn't so frightening in there after all, and led the flock inside.

Photo: J. A. Gervais

Taking the risk of going forward isn't always easy, even if you're a human.

We're facing an unprecedented global environmental crisis because we've modified the atmospheric chemistry enough to begin raising global temperature.  The science behind this fact is well established; the devil is, as usual, in the details.  We don't know precisely at what point increasing carbon dioxide concentrations may begin to force positive feedback loops, whereby the rate of warming is increased still faster.  We do know that this could happen when the frozen methane hydrates in the high-latitude ocean sediments and in the tundra's permafrost begin to melt, releasing large volumes of methane.  Methane is a potent greenhouse gas.

We know that even the deep ocean is warming rapidly.  We don't understand how exactly that will alter ocean currents, or how quickly warmer water will begin releasing the frozen methane in marine sediments, or breaking the ice dams that have stabilized some of the world's largest ice sheets by slowing their entry into the seas. We don't know at what point melting ice sheets will reach a point of no return, where nothing we do could stop the enormous volume of glacial water from pouring into the oceans.  We know from the paleoclimate record that sea level has risen in the past as much as a meter in a quarter century.  We just don't quite understand the exact conditions that would be needed to trigger an event like that again.

But we can guess that we may be getting close.

These are enormous facts, dark facts, rooted in a past most of us cannot imagine and extending into a future that we cannot see, even though that future may be only a few decades away.  Facts fail to resonate with most of us, leaving them in the realm of simply facts, hard-edged, immutable, and seemingly irrelevant to the impulses and instincts that drive most of our behavior.  What does it take to make these inert facts part of our living consciousness?

I wonder if part of the problem is that we don't run forward into the utter unknown very well.  For the vast majority of our evolutionary history, not launching off into the abyss was probably very wise; you take those sorts of risks only when going back or staying where you are is absolutely untenable.  Pushed hard enough, the unknown ahead is less horrific than what you know is behind you, and then you jump.  The trick is recognizing when you are truly at the point of jumping or being pushed, that instant between having some mastery over your fate and losing any hope of control.

 Photo: Jeff Gervais

We may actually be at one of those tipping points, where we could manage to make our planet's climate very difficult for human civilization to persist, at least as we've known it for the last few centuries.  Are we able to perceive that we may have no choice but to accept the fact that the way of life we know now cannot continue, and we can choose, or not choose, to consciously guide its transformation?

Beyond any other species that has ever existed on Earth, we have the capacity to imagine future states and plan out the actions needed to achieve them.  I wonder if our apparent inertia in the face of an increasingly dire body of scientific evidence isn't rooted in two paradoxes.  The first is that although we are intelligent enough to create civilizations that ultimately threaten our own life-support systems, and even to realize it, we seem unable to emotionally grasp and process the enormity of the danger we collectively face.  Rational choice requires emotional roots.  Can an incipient catastrophe carry sufficient emotional weight, or do we have to live through it first?

The second paradox lies in the fact that despite our technological prowess and extraordinary cultural and social diversity as a species, we  appear unable to imagine any other world, any other set of human societies, than the ones we currently know.  So we are caught, unable to emotionally respond to the danger that our current position threatens, and unable to imagine a future different from the present, one that is worth risking the unknown to achieve.  Both block proactive planning and execution of those plans.

Imagine first the world you would like to live in, or the one you would like to bequeath to those who follow you.  What things and beings, tangible or intangible, would this world have in it?  If you listed them all out, how many of them deal with the roots of survival and of happiness, versus the trappings of our civilized lives that bring as much stress or ambivalence as they do real value?  What aspects of our society are most necessary to achieve those core needs?  If no one steps forward to lead us all, how can each of us fill that leadership void, in our own communities, in our own individual way?  How will we break the impasse, and will we manage to get in front of the wave of changes we've unleashed, or allow it to utterly overwhelm us?

Photo: Jeff Gervais