Putting Hands to Work

8/15/24 – Working and caring for other species

Adult tree swallow, Tachycineta bicolor

Hello everyone:

I’m still busy working on another writing project - edits for a second edition of my Antarctic book - and so, to bring you something “new” from the Field Guide, I’m enjoying going deep into the archives for essays seen by my much, much smaller early readership. As always, the essay has been edited, partially rewritten, and updated.

Also, I forgot to include in my essay last week on Malaga Island that there is a new novel out by by Pulitzer-winning author Paul Harding, This Other Eden, based on the Malaga story. I haven’t read the book yet, but Harding is a brilliant, lyrical writer. Here are two reviews from NPR and the Times.

Please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some new curated Anthropocene news.

Now on to this week’s writing:

I use the word “biodiversity” here a lot, even though it’s an abstract word that doesn’t really conjure the vital reality of the community of life that includes us. The generalization is inevitable when writing about the Anthropocene scale of our impacts on ecosystems across the globe, but it’s unsatisfying. I need language that summons the physical reality of the leaf, fur, bark, feather, skin, root, and soil that share this world with us. Better yet, I need sometimes to leave language behind and reconnect with the community.

Just as nature is not contained in the word “biodiversity,” the Earth is not contained within a map, globe, or satellite image. Society cannot be found online. Your photo is not you. We know but forget that the richness of reality is hidden in shadows as we navigate our busy days, moment by moment, through a muddled world of makeshift representations, whether digital, physical, or aural. I think of it as the human theater.

This online essay is representations within representation, coding and pixels forming words which, lest we forget, are mere sounds or scribbles we’ve agreed to endow with specific meanings. Words are currency within the information economy, but like coins or bills (or the idiocy of crypto) they are only social constructs.

We are social apes in a world of stone, ocean, fire, air, soil, microbes, insects, plants, and animals. We’re only a part of the biodiversity. In fact, we’re nothing without the community of life. But we live in a era in which a few centuries of destructive human behavior have made any discussion of biodiversity a depiction of lives being lost, of the diminishment of solitary bees, pangolins, hemlock trees, forest elephants, right whales, prairie grass, and millions more.

All of which is to say that it’s vital for us to step out of the human theater whenever we can and put our hands to work saving plants and animals that are right in front of us. We desperately need the connection, and they desperately need us to reconnect.

Here in the north it’s midsummer, the season of heat and green growth and animals raising young. Heather and I keep our hands dirty in the vegetable garden and walk barefoot when we can. We’re busy coping with the cornucopia, fermenting and pickling and freezing and giving away… Anyone want some cucumbers?

Part of my original tree swallow colony / author photo

I’m also making plans to build more bird boxes this winter. Specifically, I’d like to make another 20 or so tree swallow boxes. Why tree swallows? I think my urge comes from a blend of love, admiration, memory, aesthetics, a desire to help, and a limited skill set. It started, I think, because my mother’s parents lived in a beautiful old home on the shore in Phippsburg, Maine, with a century-old hundred-foot-long wharf that once served fishing schooners. Every year in the first week of May a large flock of barn swallows arrived from Central or South America to nest in the rafters, zipping nonchalantly by our ears as we moved in and out of the dock. Like all swallows, they’re masters of flight, with remarkable speed, agility, and elegance. I loved hearing their beaks click as they grabbed mosquitoes near my head.

Barn swallows, though, are difficult to build for – we need to get back in the habit of inviting them into our outbuildings – and while they’re rarer around here the species is doing okay. Tree swallows are in decline but easy to help by building nest boxes. Interestingly, they have no illusions about where these artificial homes come from. I’ve had a pair fluttering around a box, trying to claim it, as I was planting the pole in the ground. Which tells me that they are as cheerfully aware of being our neighbors as we are of being theirs.

Tree swallows (Tachycineta bicolor – “quick-moving two-color”) are beautiful and astonishing. They are exquisite, iridescent dynamos who drink and bathe on the wing, intercept tiny winged insects at breakneck speed – imagine their cognitive capacity for visual processing! – and perch unafraid in the open while bird-eating hawks fly overhead. Tree swallows fly like an opera singer sings: swirling, diving, twisting, soaring, all while glinting blue-green in the light like a tropical sea.

They’re also intensely social creatures who have been migrating together in swarms between Central and North America for countless millennia. And they are voracious eaters of insects. During the nesting season, tree swallows eat about 2,000 per day per adult and 6,000 per day for the brood in the box (4 to 7 nestlings), which adds up to an estimated 300,000 insects per nesting family in the 45-day nesting period.

Got some mosquitoes and blackflies you’d like taken care of?

The moment that happens thousands of times a day

At our previous home I maintained a colony of eight boxes for a decade. Thankfully there was a farm next door whose owner was happy to make a long-term promise to host them when Heather and I moved across town. I’ve increased my boxes in that colony, and the farm manager has built another ten or so boxes too. But that was just the start. I’ve set up a half dozen boxes in the fields at my mother’s place and four more at some friends’ property, donated ten to an existing collection of bluebird/swallow houses at Coastal Rivers Conservation Trust’s Salt Bay Farm, and helped to start a new colony in the fields belonging to Inn Along the Way.

CRCT and Inn Along the Way are both wonderful local nonprofits: Coastal Rivers does great conservation and education work, and the Inn serves the social and emotional needs of elders and their caregivers. Both have perfect tree swallow locations, old farms with a lovely small pond in the middle of rolling fields. Most importantly, they will both provide reliable long-term locations for the colonies. Every year, in this world we’re still rapidly transforming, the need for that kind of habitat reliability grows greater for swallows and other migratory birds.

I will confess that I am a terrible carpenter, which makes me perfect for making bird houses. That is, my capacity to accurately plan, cut, measure, and build things with wood is limited to stout but wonky houses for wild birds (and my mother’s chickens). Their standards for housing are low enough to accommodate my work. And so I’m marching happily on, building a minor midcoast Maine bulwark against decline. (For tree swallows, that is; chickens already rule the world.)

Tree swallows usually show up here in the first week of April. As long as the boxes are up when they arrive, the work is pretty much done until I take them down in the late summer. (The swallows fledge and leave the nesting area in June, but I leave the boxes up longer in case bluebirds are using them.) My relationship with the birds once they arrive is simply to enjoy them and hope they have a good breeding season. I worry about nest failure or the chicks starving if we have several cold rainy days early on, and I worry about them suffering heat death in these rapidly intensifying Anthropocene summers. But the worry is all part of the task of caring for others, which is otherwise an honor and a joy.

I do try to stop and feel the wonder and gratitude that come with knowing that these individual birds will, after half a year many thousands of miles away in the south, return to the same field or even the same box which I have provided. This is called “site fidelity” or “site tenacity” by ornithologists, and I wish we all paid more attention to it. That bird eating your mosquitoes flies away to South America and then back to your yard every year. In fact, birds with site fidelity become increasingly loyal and tenacious as they age (assuming they have success raising young at your site). That’s astonishing, really. And I think it deserves a little fidelity and tenacity of our own to provide reliable care. They’re our neighbors, remember? It is, in many ways, a relationship.

I’ve been tempted to participate in some citizen science via NestWatch, which requires peeking in the boxes throughout the breeding season to assess the nest, eggs, and young, but so far I’ve just let the swallows be swallows and then looked at the nest after they’ve gone. At season’s end, when I clean out the boxes, I have a pretty good idea whether the nest was used and how successful it was. It’s always hard to see the bodies of fledglings that didn’t quite make it, whether because of heat, a lost parent, or because the flock took off before the last chicks were ready to go (as I noted, they are intensely social). But there’s still so much joy in watching the swirling multigenerational flock feeding in the air above as they move on with their mysterious, beautiful lives.

A very well-used nest - note the white feathers, which tree swallows work very hard to find as nesting material / author photo

Another successful nest, though perhaps a smaller brood / author photo

It is a mark of how difficult things have become for migratory birds that tree swallows are considered a species of “Low Concern,” even though their population dropped by an estimated 49% between 1966 and 2014, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey. And according to All About Birds, the comprehensive site from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, tree swallows “rate an 8 out of 20 on the Continental Concern Score,” and are not on the 2014 State of the Birds Watch List. 

Partners in Flight estimates a global breeding population of 17 million, which faces the usual Anthropocene problems of habitat loss and a toxic environment. “Natural cavities,” as All About Birds notes, “where most Tree Swallows build their nests, have been disappearing for the past 200 years as people clear the land, manage woodlands, cut down older trees, and remove dead trees.” A once-forested continent now converted to agriculture threatens tree swallows with the bioaccumulation of pesticides and other man-made chemicals in the vast numbers of insects they consume.

Worrying about migratory animals, birds especially, is like worrying about grown children. They travel too far and make contact with too many strange places. It seems that we can only look after them in those brief periods they’re around, and hope that others will do the same for them wherever they go.

To that end, Partners in Flight, an umbrella organization made up of 150 organizations spread throughout the Western Hemisphere, works to protect birds in the Americas. It has four goals we should all support:

Maintain healthy bird populations, in natural numbers, in healthy habitats and ecosystems

Keep species from becoming threatened or endangered through proactive measures and science-based planning

Promote full life-cycle conservation of migratory birds throughout the Western Hemisphere

Promote the value of birds as indicators of environmental health and human quality of life

If you’re interested in getting deep into the data on birds in this part of the world, check out the State of North American Birds 2022 list.

For tree swallow nest box design, don’t go shopping. Start here at TreeSwallows.com, which has an incredible amount of information about these amazing birds. The folks behind that site love the birds fiercely, and have hard-won knowledge about the best box design and everything else that will make you a good host. One of their main concerns is that many store-bought boxes and some design plans are actually dangerous for tree swallows, especially those with too-small floors. Read their site for more info.

If you’re interested in building nest boxes for other species, go to the NestWatch site where you can find plans and advice for hosting everything from black-capped chickadees to great horned owls.

I’d like someday to have a network of colonies that add up to a hundred (or hundreds?) of swallow houses as part of the local bulwark I mentioned above. And sometimes I dream of creating a nonprofit focused on motivating the public here to get involved in a bunch of rewilding/restoration initiatives: nest boxes and habitat for a variety of birds, boxes for bat colonies, and no-mow habitat havens in privately-owned fields and meadows for pollinators and other insects. (Got to feed those swallows!) Some of this work is being done, of course, but the more the merrier.

Tree swallow swarm on the eastern shore of the Virginia National Wildlife Refuge, VA. Credit: USFWS

I know many of you are already doing much more than I am, and are outside reconnecting as often as you can. If not, though, I highly recommend that you find an outlet from the human theater and the Anthropocene tragedy. It’s important to have times of wordless joy in the service of life. Find your species to patch up, replenish, or fiercely defend from this dangerous world we’ve built. Or find your piece of ground to rewild. Or choose a body of water to protect. Build bird boxes or nurture native flowers and shrubs to spread to whoever will plant them. Build pollinator havens. Volunteer for organizations who are doing any of this work.

I’ll pass on the brilliant advice I heard from the great poet Charles Wright: If you can’t be the genius, be the one the genius admires. You don’t need to be the turtle whisperer or the lifelong obsessive rewilder of a native forest or the head of a conservation nonprofit. You can simply be the volunteer they rely on or the supporter who brightens their long days. You can be their funding angel because you believe the work they’re doing makes them your Anthropocene angel.

Whatever you do, though, get your heart out there and keep your hands dirty.

Thanks for sticking with me.

In curated Anthropocene news:

From the Guardian, a good reminder of how much good climate work Vice President Kamala Harris has done behind the scenes of the Biden administration. The writer interviewed Harris after the landmark climate legislation Inflation Reduction Act was passed two years ago, and was impressed:

When we spoke, Harris demonstrated a depth I didn’t expect – she geeked out over heat pumps, confessed her love of electric school buses and described the heavy burdens poorer communities face from air pollution. The more I learned about her background, the more I found a clear pattern: policy ideas that she championed became central to federal legislation. Our nation’s landmark climate law, which is turning two years old this month, has Harris’s signature all over it.

From Vox, the best animal-rights essay I’ve read in a long time. Specifically, it’s a exploration of where we are now, ethically and politically, in relation to the horrors of factory farming, and where we need to go.

From Noema, the shaky and morally questionable (but maybe necessary?) prospect of geoengineering our way out of a climate apocalypse is, of course, now finding support from Silicon Valley investors who think they might be able to make good money from it.

From the Times, Americans are taking advantage of IRA tax credits much more enthusiastically than expected, to the tune of $8 billion. Folks are installing solar, wind, and other energy systems, and they’re upgrading their insulation or windows, and they’re installing heat pumps. Last year, 750,000 Americans claimed the tax credit for solar energy, and 260,000 claimed it for heat pumps. You should be doing the same, if you can.

From the Irish Times, a good honest article about how capitalism is killing the planet but no one wants to talk about it.

From the Guardian, in a bizarre but not unexpected development, the U.S. Air Force has argued that it shouldn’t have to comply with a federal order to clean up its PFAS contamination of drinking water in Tucson, AZ, because the Chevron decision by the right-wing SCOTUS suggests that federal regulators don’t have sufficient legal authority. This is the start of the nightmare that will follow in the wake of the ecologically half-witted and reprehensible rulings by SCOTUS.

From Scientific American, “Microplastics Linked to Heart Attack, Stroke, and Death.” A study of over 200 people undergoing surgery

found that nearly 60% had microplastics or even smaller nanoplastics in a main artery. Those who did were 4.5 times more likely to experience a heart attack, a stroke or death in the approximately 34 months after the surgery than were those whose arteries were plastic-free.

From Grist, there were a lot of people in high places, and even in everyday magazines, talking about climate change in the 1960s. All the recent decisions by SCOTUS based on what justices think was known about climate change a half-century ago are based on bad assumptions. The historian who dug up the truth

hopes the paper will “put the lie to the myth that has been propagated that the Clean Air Act had nothing to do with carbon dioxide” and spur conversation among lawyers, judges, and legal scholars.

From Mother Jones, the EPA is finally banning a dangerous pesticide it labeled a carcinogen in 1995. Why did it take so long? Because the U.S. doesn’t take a precautionary approach to chemicals, and because the pesticide manufacturer was allowed to delay the process by many years.