Chapter Six

Inhabitants

WHAT MAKES ME think I own this place? Not only have many people occupied the house and worked the farm before me, but many of its current inhabitants pay me less heed than I give to ants or houseflies (who actually command much of my attention). I speak not only of the songbirds, woodpeckers, and hummingbirds I try to attract with my feeders and birdhouses but also of the uninvited guests who find my place amenable to their needs. There is no particular reason they should not regard it as theirs rather than mine. We invade their homes and they make use of ours, living here regardless of what we think or do.

Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass explains the belief of the native people of the Great Lakes that, contrary to the idea that Homo sapiens is the pinnacle of evolution, human beings are at the bottom, the most recent with the most to learn, and the best teachers are the plants and animals whose wisdom is apparent in that they know instinctively how to live. Seeds and roots contain all the information that plants need in order to survive, and animals learn quickly from mothers or family groups. We, on the other hand, take eighteen years to mature, and even then, most of us could not survive on our own. We are also the only creatures foolish enough to destroy our own habitat.

While I have always been an observer of birds and wildflowers, it was Colleen who taught me most about perception. We walked many times throughout the day but always at dusk, when we circled the lawn, checking on the horses and hens, Soxie the cat accompanying us. Although I have owned more than twenty-five cats and seven horses, I have called only two dogs my own: a mixed-breed beagle with a broken tail named Duke who was my companion throughout high school, and Colleen, whose long, black-and-buff-colored hair and curving tail gave evidence that she was partly Norwegian elkhound and partly something else—we never knew what. As she ran about the lawn and smelled the grass and air, she showed me that I know almost nothing about the creatures that live and visit here. Each area of a stem of grass carried for her a code revealing what transpired not only during the night but also days and perhaps even weeks earlier. She loved the outside: in winter she scooped up snow the way a pelican scoops fish and caught large falling flakes on her tongue. Perhaps some ancient instinct was at work here. In summer she rolled in the grass and ran great circles around the lawn, a constant presence for fourteen years. Thirteen years after she died, we still miss her and talk about her.

We acquired her when her previous owner, who owned too many dogs for the space available, advertised her as a one-year-old Border collie (she was not) who loved people and needed a good home. Most dogs love people who do not mistreat or neglect them. Colleen adored us. She turned Clarke into a dog person and then an animal person. Her expressive eyes and mute adoration overcame his reluctance to have an animal in the house, owing to a childhood spent without pets. Her sensitive ears were always tuned to the words she liked best—go, out, walk. She understood more about us than we ever did about her, master as she was of human nonverbal communication. Tying the strings on my hiking boots meant to her that we were headed for the Mohican Park. When I pulled on Wellington boots she knew we would go out to do chores. She knew which clothes I wore for teaching (when I put them on she became visibly depressed) and which I put on for work around the place.

Colleen had one flaw—her dislike of cats. Although she never tried to injure any, she disdained them, especially when I paid them attention. She lived in perpetual disappointment, however, because a farm will never be without cats. People drop them off when we are not at home and even when we are. Resentful at first, I learned over the years to value the abandoned ones especially and now think of the people who leave them as anonymous donors. Socks Van Gogh, whom we called Soxie, was a tabby with a white bib and boots. The surname originated when she lost the tip of her right ear in a fight. Her enormous green eyes were proportionally even larger than most cats’, and, although slightly bowlegged, she was slender and beautiful. She carried her tail straight up. Although I was unable to lay a hand on her for six months, she became one of my favorites—an excellent mouser who walked with Colleen and me in the evenings. Shy but affectionate, she lived the most fulfilled life on the farm: her work was her play; her time was her own. When she wanted to come inside she clung to the screen door until we let her in; she was at home sleeping on our bed or in the barn.

Soxie came to us the first year we lived here. Several years later, two gray and white kittens came running to me out of the evening fog. We named them Hansel and Gretel. I eventually found a home for Gretel, and to this day I regret adopting her out as I was more attached to her than I thought. We nicknamed her brother Bardolph because he had a bright pink nose like the character in the Henry IV plays, although he was a good deal wiser, and it was to that name he answered. He carried his tail curved like a question mark as if he were asking the meaning of all he surveyed. While he understood me immediately, it took me four years to realize his value. He came when called like a dog, accompanied Colleen and me on walks, stayed away from the road, and never voluntarily left the property. Other cats never hissed at him, even at first meeting; not once did he get into a fight. On the contrary, he served as peacemaker, caretaker of kittens, official welcomer of new arrivals. A feline bodhisattva, he seemed to embrace the philosophy that sharing meant there would be enough for all. Most distinctively, he vocalized when I spoke his name and when I held him placed his paw gently on my face. He lived to be nearly fifteen when his hind legs, crippled with arthritis, collapsed beneath him, and we reluctantly put him down.

Bardolph died in August 2012; in November of that year another cat, a yellow tiger, appeared at the front door begging for food. I took him in with the intention of neutering him and taking him to the local feline adoption agency, as six cats lived here already, but he had other plans and established himself immediately as a favorite. Clarke wanted to name him Lefty because his head tilted slightly left; I wanted to call him Pumpkin for his color, so we called him Lefty/Pumpkin. He was the most demonstrably affectionate barn cat I have ever owned, begging to be picked up each time he saw me and rubbing his head against my neck. He loved life: always he played, climbed, jumped, ran, explored. On April 2, 2014, he did not show up for the morning feeding, and a few days later we found him in a tuft of grass, his neck broken by dogs that had been running loose at night. We still feel the void created by his passing.

Horses, usually suspicious of dogs, liked Colleen. They love cats, however. I have seen horses scratching a cat’s head gently with their soft noses. They will rub a cat’s belly, allow a cat to sleep on their backs, and nibble carefully around one sleeping in their hay. Dakota stroked the ears of one of my barn cats, Guy Noir (he was black), with his large lips; I have seen them greeting each other by touching noses. Once I saw Xanadu step gingerly over Bardolph, lying in the doorway of the barn, rather than disturb him.

When we first moved to Ashland County I kept six New Hampshire red hens in a shed with a fenced run. I didn’t let them forage freely because I had sighted red foxes several times; coyotes had moved eastward, and I often heard them barking in the evening. I named the older hens for the goddesses Hera, Minerva (the feistiest hen), and Ceres while the younger were Pertelote, Partlett, and Guinevere. They usually produced six large eggs a day—more than we used, so I sold them at a local farm market. In the evening just before they roosted I fed them corn out of my hand. They came to me when I entered their pen and even lost their fear of Colleen. Five died of old age, while Partlett was taken by a fox which slipped through a hole in the wire I thought too small to admit a predator. The next morning, nothing was left but a pile of soft, red feathers.

Largest and most prominent of the wild inhabitants are the white-tailed deer, which prosper in the absence of their greatest predators, the mountain lion and timber wolf. When Clarke and I first moved here, Colleen was young, and although she slept in the house, her smell was everywhere outside, so the deer stayed toward the back of the property where they killed my cherry trees and sampled the garden produce. As Colleen grew older, they gradually moved closer to the house, and after she died they made the entire lawn their nighttime playground. Especially in the fall during rut, I find their hoof marks on the sand of my riding arena and torn-up turf on the lawn where they have been sporting. I see their two-toed prints in the snow, sometimes solitary, sometimes in groups. Nearly blind by human standards, they see shapes and movement but not details and know their world through their senses of smell—more acute than a bloodhound’s—and of hearing. They can turn the pinnae, or large outer ears, in three directions, an ability which helps them evade predators. Beautiful to watch browsing in a field or following each other single file along Honey Creek, and highly intelligent, they communicate with each other by wagging an ear or flipping a tail. I have seen as many as thirteen in a group and spot one or two every time I ride horses at Malabar Farm. Bird netting keeps them out of the strawberries and blueberries. For a time we kept them out of the corn with aluminum pie plates tied to fence posts that bang incessantly in the wind and a Japanese invention called flash tape—narrow strips of colorful shiny plastic which dance and shimmer like fire—but they wised up quickly and now help themselves, most years leaving us enough. Their own speed is their safety, but they become confused by the noise and lights of automobiles. Like human beings, many are killed on the road, but nevertheless their population is said to be increasing beyond sustainability.

One spring a neighbor called to tell me there was an abandoned fawn in my pasture. As I stepped across the stream, the speckled baby leaped up and trotted away and into a hillside thicket. It had not been abandoned; does leave their fawns alone during the day, when their presence would signal to predators the whereabouts of the young, and return to nurse at night. If the fawn had truly been abandoned it would have wandered about the pasture crying. After that incident, I noticed that every year a doe raises her fawn in my pasture, nearly unseen. I am careful to make sure the fawns are weaned before we mow.

One danger for horses is the pesky groundhog, also called woodchuck because of the Native American name wushak, a term that has nothing to do with wood. A large rodent, it digs holes in the earth just large enough for a horse’s foot to get caught in and just deep enough for the leg to go down into. A horse going fast enough can injure a tendon or break a leg in which latter case it must usually be destroyed. Groundhogs nevertheless aerate the soil and are said to turn up six hundred thousand tons of soil per year in the United States. They make their first appearances in late March and early April. People get rid of groundhogs by poisoning, shooting, trapping, or smoking them out of their holes. The best way I know of to discourage them is to keep a dog that can harass them into moving away, but it has to be a big, aggressive dog. Colleen was neither. I simply fill in the holes as I find them, and usually the groundhogs give up and eventually migrate. I trap the more determined ones, using apples as bait (they are suckers for apples), and transport them to the Mohican Forest. (In 2017 my catch totaled six.) The groundhog ripples over the grass like a monk in flowing robes and pours itself down the hole it has laboriously excavated but sometimes turns back to look at me, perhaps calculating the threat. One stood its ground when I was riding the pony Shio on a tractor path but decided the combination of horse and rider was too much and decamped. Another stood up to Clarke when he turned into the driveway where the groundhog was busily feasting on fallen pears. Clarke interpreted his indecision as the reflexive question, “Should I get out of the way or can I take this measly Geo-Metro?” If that was what it was thinking, the woodchuck decided against the latter strategy and waddled away.

Opossums are infrequent visitors to the hayloft. I trap them and take them to the park because their feces contain a bacterium that can cause neurological disease in horses. Raccoons I leave alone. Although they dig up flowers, raid bird feeders, drink from my barn cats’ water dishes, and sometimes trash some of my corn crop, they usually do not interfere with horses. They occupy vacated groundhog dens usually in heavy brush where horses cannot go, and they are interesting with their bandit faces and nocturnal comings and goings. I sometimes happen upon them if I go out to the barn after dark and they have already entered the feed room in search of cat food. They usually skitter away when they see me. Once a raccoon swung down from the hayloft, hung for a moment by an arm, and faced me like Tarzan in the lianas before it decided to dispense with introductions, leaped to the floor, and scrabbled into the shadows. Skunks wander through but never stay—fortunately, as they are the most frequent carriers of rabies of any mammal in North America. Although I have heard landowners say that coyotes will attack skunks, most predators are wise enough to avoid them.

Recently an eastern red squirrel has also taken up residence in one of my log-pile horse jumps.

Frequently I see reddish-brown eastern chipmunks with their distinctive white stripes in the woods, and several live in a crack in our concrete stoop on the north side of the house and take what the birds throw down from the feeders. I love to watch their quick, jerky little movements when they groom themselves or turn seeds or nuts around in tiny, dexterous paws. Like squirrels, they make opportune use of what we have. I put out nuts and dried fruit for them and watch while they come and go to the nearby pine windbreak. Sometimes they let me approach as close as ten feet.

The fogs of springtime accompany the earliest sounds. The first harbingers of the vernal equinox are the ascending birdlike whistles of spring peepers, seldom seen by people; later, their songs are mingled with the loud, resonating trill of gray tree frogs (they are actually green), raspy quack of wood frogs, G-string twang of green frogs, and throaty jug-o-rum from amorous bull frogs. The thunderous cacophony becomes exuberant when birds called nightjars utter their zipping sounds. Frogs and toads are great consumers of mosquitoes and other insects that feed on vegetables. Whenever I see a toad in the barn or garage I capture it and place it beneath the rhubarb leaves or asparagus ferns, hoping it will take up residence in the garden.

For several years in March, local naturalist and photographer David Fitzsimmons has shown me the place at Malabar Farm where the salamanders dance. With the help of flashlights, we find our way through heavy brush to a vernal pool—shallow snowmelt that dries up in April or May. Visible only in late evening, spotted and Jefferson salamanders swim upward from the bottom in corkscrew fashion to the surface to attract a mate. The woods are thunderous with the sound of tree frogs and spring peepers. A whole ecosystem thrives, unknown to most human beings.

The pond in my pasture is also home to painted and eastern box turtles as well as big snappers. Colleen and I found a snapping turtle, looking from a distance like a large rock, in a water-filled swale on the township road one spring day when we were out walking. It did not withdraw its head even when I touched the carapace. Colleen wanted to investigate, but I kept her away from the powerful beak. In its own good time, the turtle heaved itself out of the water, propelled itself across the road, slid down the bank, and plunged into the drainage ditch that empties into Honey Creek. With their sage expressions and long life spans, snappers seem to represent the integrity of the entire biosphere. As I walk around the edge of the pond, I hear the splash of frogs and turtles before I see them. I want to tell them I mean them no harm and will not allow trappers on the property, but they take no chances. To them I am an ominous shadow not of their kind, an intruder, and, evolutionarily speaking, a latecomer, but watching them and listening to the birds and frogs, I regret that I did not become a biologist.

Our bank barn hosts many creatures who find its rafters and corners an ideal home. Once I found a snipe nesting in the sawdust on the barn floor. I hear the clicking and squeaking of bats whenever I go into the hayloft. They leave their guano on the floor, but they repay me for the trouble of cleaning up after them by keeping the mosquito population down. I know how truncated the human auditory sense is when I realize they can hear a fly cleaning its wings. Bats create colonies in rafters where they hang upside down during the day; at night I see them fluttering away from the barn roof like ships setting sail from the harbor.

One year while weeding I surprised a fox snake in the garden. It was reddish brown with distinctive dark blotches. Many fox snakes are killed because of mistaken identity: their coloring leads people to think they are copperheads, while their small vibrating tails cause them to be taken for rattlesnakes. Later my snake turned up in the strawberry garden. Soxie circled it curiously while it lay coiled, watching her intently. At last she wisely gave up, leaving the snake master of the situation. After a few weeks, the fox snake chose the garage as refuge, lying there nearly three days, curled in a dark corner. Still later, Hansel found our fox snake wrapped around the water heater in the basement; it had probably gained access through a small opening in the mortar of the basement storm door. Snakes belong in the garden, not in the house. With a broom, Clarke and I hustled it into a cardboard box, as snakes do not retreat from harassment but go toward it. We closed the lid with the critter inside, transported it to the hayfield, and released it. I imagine he (or she) relates this story to friends of having found the way into a castle only to have the resident giants first imprison and then release him, to joyful relief. We have not encountered any fox snakes since, and we have repaired the mortar beneath the storm door.

Each spring the red-winged blackbirds are the first to accompany me while I rake and hoe the garden soil, shrilling their three-note song and populating the cattails around my pond. Robins also fly down to feed on the earthworms I turn up. Later I have the song of the field sparrows. I hang a thistle feeder and mixed seed feeder outside one of the windows and in winter a suet holder. Year-round visitors are chipping sparrows, field sparrows, purple finches, slate-colored juncos, cardinals, goldfinches, and chickadees. In the spring I have seen brown-headed cowbirds, red-and white-breasted nuthatches, ruby-crowned kinglets, brown thrashers, house wrens, ruby-capped sparrows, titmice, vesper sparrows, black-headed grosbeaks, rose-breasted grosbeaks, evening grosbeaks, and song sparrows. Migrating pine warblers and northern mockingbirds feast on the fruit of lingonberry bushes my predecessor planted behind the house. Perhaps they view me as the African bird views the rhinoceros on whose back it rides, picking at insects on the rhino’s skin: I am just another creature providing an opportunity for food.

Omnipresent from May until September when they begin their journey to Mexico, the ruby-throated hummingbirds are feisty, aggressive, and territorial. If I am not quick enough in spring to hang the feeder, they hover just outside the dining room window and sometimes even tap their beaks on the glass. Although my feeder has four stations, only one male or two females will feed at any one time. Males spar with each other in midair, emitting high-pitched squeals. At about three inches long, they are the smallest North American birds, but their quickness and agility make them fearless, and indeed I have never seen one in the jaws of a cat. One year when I climbed in Rocky Mountain National Park, a hummingbird pecked at my bright red helmet. They drink their three-ounce weight in nectar every day, and their tiny nests are woven of the smallest pieces of grass and bound with threads of spider webs. The nectar feeder is also the favorite haunt of the magnificent Baltimore oriole, which has become more frequent over the years. Their melodic song is some of the most beautiful natural music I have heard.

Frequent visitors for the first ten years we lived here were the bluebirds, who do not visit feeders. In flight they look like pieces of the sky. I kept a bluebird trail of four boxes on T-posts facing the woods to the east. At least once a week I had to open the boxes to remove the sparrow nests. House sparrows are dominant over bluebirds and will take over if they are allowed, but they can build almost anywhere, while bluebirds require a hollowed-out space. Cutting and pruning of trees has eliminated many of the holes they used to occupy. Bluebirds build small, round nests with oval centers, while sparrows construct large, rambling nests. When I saw the male bluebirds perched on the boxes in the evenings like householders sitting on their porches after a day’s work, I knew they had established themselves. After 2003 they became rarer, but not because their numbers were dwindling: the efforts of birders and bluebird societies have succeeded in increasing their population, but they like open ground, and my trees had grown to such maturity in those ten years that the bluebirds moved away. I still see one or two visiting the birdbath and sitting on fence posts but have only a few sightings now each summer, whereas I used to see several every day. Once I sighted an indigo bunting, known for its brilliant azure color, in a bush outside the house. These birds are difficult to spot because they usually dwell high in the trees and from the ground appear like black silhouettes.

I allow tree swallows and house wrens to nest in bluebird boxes and often find perfectly round wrens’ nests in the branches of shrubs and white pines. Once I discovered an abandoned nest in which the wren mother had woven a soft under-layer of Kestrel’s chestnut-colored hair into the center. The bird had also used Shio’s long black hair to bind the little twigs and stemmy grass. I could not even pull one hair from the nest, so intricately and tightly was it woven among the smallest twigs I had ever examined.

Pheasants were common in the early 1990s but not so much in later years. Others birds I saw with some frequency in the fields surrounding our place were bobwhites (whose loud song is unmistakable), eastern phoebes, and Carolina wrens. Several times I spotted yellow-shafted flickers in the long grasses near the field, and every January I saw eastern meadowlarks with their distinctive black V on sun-yellow breasts sitting on the paddock fence. When my neighbor mowed his field and fenced it in for cattle in 2008, they disappeared.

The elusive wood thrush calling from across Honey Creek makes a series of melodious phrases followed by a guttural trill. The field sparrow’s song is a slurred whistle in increasing tempo. Meadowlarks make a clear, slurred whistle. One of the most memorable is the white-throated sparrow whose song is a series of flutelike phrases in increasing length, which accompanied me as I climbed Mount Katahdin in Maine and now follow me as I hike in the Mohican woods. One harsh winter a beautiful snow bunting hovered near my tractor, seeming to stand still in a very strong wind before seeking shelter on a rafter in the garage.

Regular visitors to my pond and Honey Creek include mallards, Canada geese, and great blue herons. More gray than blue, the herons fly over with their legs out behind them, necks craned in an S shape. They lift off from the water nearly vertically and will not stay if I step closer than a hundred feet. Bufflehead ducks traveling through to Canada from the south in March float on my neighbor’s pond. I have spotted loons and common gallinules there. In the rushes near my own smaller pond I sometimes happen upon nesting American woodcocks. Horseback riders frequently see woodcocks because they tend to nest in brush or leaves near open spaces. The birds do not fly as I approach but utter a plaintive moan whereupon I leave them to their musings. On a few occasions, snowy egrets and great white herons have graced my pasture during their migrations in early summer, walking through high grass and feeding on grasshoppers and beetles. Sandhill cranes make their homes on low-lying fields near the Mohican River and at wetlands in various places throughout the county.

Most years a pair of Canada geese build their nest on a tuft of grass on the bank of the pond, and after the goslings hatch, the brood (usually about seven) strut in a line across the pasture with one parent leading and the other bringing up the rear. Of all the migrators I witness, Canada geese are the most abundant, adults flying in V formation northward in spring and summer, southward in fall and winter, the long ribbon of their bodies flung purposely through the air. Honking exuberantly as they trace their ancestral routes hundreds of miles, they spiral over the pond, hold their wings bell-shaped to arrest their speed upon descent, and create a wake as they splash down on the surface.

Barn and cliff swallows arrive in early or mid-May and build their half-shell or water-jug nests on the beams in the understory. Perhaps they are descendants of birds who arrived here long ago just as the human inhabitants were all descendants of immigrants. They nest all summer, the young not fledging until August or even September. They are omnipresent, shrieking every time I enter the barn, dive-bombing my barn cats, and circling me as I turn up worms and insects with my rototiller. In July and August when I mow the field they weave an aerial dance before me, catching on the wing the gnats and mosquitoes my tractor flings up. Occasionally a swallow fledgling, grown too large for the nest, falls to the barn floor or lawn, in which case I lift it back. Swallows are voluminous insect eaters and so, like the bats, repay me for cleaning up their dung. As soon as the young fledge in late summer, they disappear, abandoning the barn to eerie silence. I leave the old swallow nests affixed to the beams in the barn for returning birds who need immediate accommodations after migration. Aldo Leopold advocates knocking down these nests so that the swallows must build anew, because the old ones may contain parasites harmful to the young, but one year after I took them down too early I found four dead swallows in a bluebird box where they had huddled together for warmth. Since then I have left the nests alone.

One summer I found a sparrow fledgling in the grass not near any nest. Following instructions from the Ohio Bird Sanctuary in Mansfield, I gave it water with an eye dropper, fed it cat food softened to mush, and set it on the highest branch I could reach. Mother birds can recognize the chirping of their own chicks and will continue to feed them after they leave the nest. Handling by human beings does not deter them, for all the folklore about mother birds not returning if people interfere. In this case, the chick turned around and crawled back into my hand and up my arm. I set it back on the branch and walked away.

The year Grayfell was born, a bobolink bubbled and gurgled in the high grass along the edge of the fence as I planted. In later years bobolinks have decreased, and I have not seen one on my place for about ten years, although many are sighted at a county wildlife sanctuary a few miles to the north.

Several times I’ve found small pieces of cellophane in the middle of sparrow nests, and once a piece of brown cotton, a poignant reminder of the day when Colleen and I played tug-of-war on the lawn with an old brown knee sock. She snatched the toy from me and dashed off with it, leaving a small triangle of cloth lying on the grass. I ran after her, forgetting to pick up the torn piece. There it lay—small, brown, triangular—connecting me to that afternoon when I played with my dog and to the adult bird who had salvaged it to create a soft place to lay her eggs. We are all of one fabric of the world.

Because my neighbor stocks his pond with fish, eagles fly over and perch in the highest treetops. Eagle nests have been sighted a few miles away near Malabar Farm. I had seen eagles in the wild on Assateague Island, Virginia, and Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska; in Juneau I saw them as frequently as I see robins in Ohio. I rejoice that pesticides that damaged their eggshell formation and reduced their numbers have been banned but regret that we have been unable to protect the habitat of bobolink and eastern meadowlark.

Kestrels use my clothesline pole to survey the prospects of a meal. One year I saw what I thought was an injured bird fluttering in the garden and went out to learn that two kestrels were mating. Another found its way into the tack room of the barn, no doubt looking for game and unable to find its way out. As I captured it in a net for release, I was able to observe closely the blue wing feathers, speckled breast, and fierce yellow eyes. Frequently I catch and release barn swallows, sparrows, and robins that have become trapped in the feed room.

Starlings are not usually regarded as beautiful, but in mid-fall every year these European immigrants weave beautiful patterns above the fields, rising, swooping, and diving in undulating aerial shapes, no bird ever losing its place in the flock. They gather on the telephone wires, a great chorus raising a loud ode to time, change, and destiny; then suddenly they fly all at once, leaving the wires and treetops empty and the fields silent. After they migrate in late fall, I hang suet feeders for the downy and red-bellied woodpeckers; when starlings are in residence they congregate at suet feeders and chase woodpeckers away.

Vultures circle overhead, watching to carry to the other life whatever can no longer bear this one. Red tails and rough-legged hawks frequent the trees near the riding area. I have sighted quail on a few occasions but see wild turkeys several times a week. Once a female peregrine perched on my clothesline pole, and a few times I have been lucky enough to catch a glimpse of a northern goshawk. I am sometimes lucky enough to hear owls hooting in the morning or evening. One year I heard several screech owls in the white pines behind the house.

Sparrows flutter outside my window, sometimes with grass in their beaks, looking for a place to build. Mourning doves hover near cypresses that frame the front of the house, and a Carolina wren once perched on my windowsill, scooped up the shells of dead ladybugs, and looked at me for a long time unconcerned before departing. Sometimes I find birds that have collided with a window lying on the pavement outside the sunroom. If they are not killed, I put them into a cage so the cats cannot get to them. They recover after a few hours, when I can release them. One year a female golden-crowned kinglet hit the window and lay stunned; I put it into the cage inside the sunroom. Going to check on it, I found the door still closed but the bird gone; having worked its way out through one of the holes, it was loose in the house. When my search turned up nothing, I assumed the cats had captured and eaten it. After I returned from work, Clarke told me that when he got home he saw one of the indoor cats, the calico Bodie, sitting on the windowsill in the kitchen looking down at a bird right next to her. Clarke approached and, when the bird did not fly, raised the sash and then the screen. Neither bird nor cat moved, so he pushed the bird forward, and it spread its wings and flew.

In May 2011 on a bright day following a storm, I returned from a ride on Dakota when I saw a large white bird with charcoal wing tips strolling on the concrete dais in the middle of the lower barn. After I untacked the horse and put the saddle and equipment away, the bird was still there, looking up at me as no wild bird would do. I fed it fennel and sunflower seeds and caught it with my hands; it was banded, so I placed it inside a rabbit hutch and searched “homing pigeon” online. The first link to pop up was the American Racing Pigeon Union, and the first screen had a box into which the user could key in the band number of a found bird; hitting “enter” brought up the owner’s contact information together with instructions on how to care for the bird until it could be returned. (These people are organized.) I learned that the birds’ water had to be several inches deep since pigeons do not drink as other birds do but siphon water through a hole in the tops of their beaks. They should be fed cornmeal, but as I had none, I continued to feed him wild birdseed.

I left a message at the number listed for found birds, and the next day the owner called to say that one of his young breeding males was indeed lost, that it had been blown eastward by a storm when it was out for exercise. Its home was Defiance, Ohio, about 150 miles to the northwest. The man sent me a cardboard shipping carton with air holes covered with permeable gauze so the bird could breathe but not stick its head out the opening. The carton was to be shipped “priority,” as all live animals have to be, since they are without water until they reach their destination. I took the bird to the post office in Loudonville where the postal clerk accepted it without surprise, stamped the carton, prepared the address, and whisked it to a back room. On the way home I felt a tremendous sadness. The beautiful pigeon had filled my days with his sweet cooing; besides, I become attached to animals I have fed and taken care of. The owner told me that the bird had probably chosen my barn because his pigeons lived in a bank barn from which the upper floor had been removed so the birds could have the whole space to fly around in. He owned about fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of pigeons. The bird was not so far from home as I thought: what birders like him do is drive to Missouri and release the pigeons, who fly home, often arriving before the people. (It makes as much sense as any other sport.)

Although the human eye is able to perceive nearly infinite gradations of color during the day, our visual power is limited at night; nevertheless, other beauty reveals itself to us. One of the most magnificent shows are the fireflies of the summer solstice, for then they are in their greatest abundance. Near midnight on June 30, 1996, my unaided eyes perceived an atmosphere full of thousands of fuzzy blinking white lights. I have always been an observer of fireflies, their tiny pinpoints of light rising from the grass at dusk, but I had never seen a light show this spectacular. I stood mesmerized for several minutes before going to put on my glasses. The pointillist blinking lights were even more beautiful than the impressionist ones had been. Throughout the back lawn and beyond, a galaxy of fireflies sent their amorous signals to each other in one of the most beautiful courtship displays on earth. The cottonwood leaves rustled with a sound like falling rain. Horses snuffled near the fence. Tree frogs chirred. Bullfrogs croaked. Surely the true God lives in the natural world, not in some extraterrestrial place.

In later years the vast galaxies of fireflies dwindled. Thinking that pesticides might be to blame, I contacted an entomologist from the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster who told me that fireflies overwinter in tree bark and underground where pesticides usually do not penetrate. Internet sites, however, suggest that pesticides have taken their toll on the firefly population. Lately I have noticed a resurgence in their numbers, although they have not recovered the multitudes I observed in the late 1990s.

While I have always been a birder, I came to appreciate butterflies more recently, when I left a section of white clover in my riding area unmowed because honeybees were feeding on the flowers. By late summer a mass of butterflies clung to seed heads on long stems. The next spring I planted zinnias, sunflowers, and wildflowers in the garden and the very first year witnessed a profusion of butterflies as well as honeybees and bumblebees. The flowers appear to dance with the movements of colorful wings opening and closing as the butterflies feed on the blossoms. Seeming so delicate, they are actually quite agile and pursue their zig-zagging flight patterns with greater speed and at greater altitudes than their fragile wings would seem to allow.

Spring azure and brown elfins appear earliest in summer. A small yellow butterfly I have never been able to identify inhabits my garden as well as cabbage butterflies, which are probably responsible for tiny pinholes in spinach leaves. The colorful Baltimore—black with white and orange spots—is an early visitor. Wild asters blooming in July attract the Harris’s checkerspot, which is orange with many white spots. Among my favorites, the black-and-orange pearl crescents drink at mud puddles throughout the summer. The “eyed” butterflies that hover close to the ground are the little wood satyr, wood nymph, and eyed brown. The multicolored painted lady, question mark, and white and red admirals arrive as soon as the garden flowers bloom. Swallowtails appear in July and stay through September—blue spicebush; eastern tiger, the most magnificent with orange wings streaked with black; eastern black, whose wings are ebony lined with white or orange; the green swallowtail, which is actually blue; and the giant, which is mostly black with distinctive white markings. In October we see the bright-orange Milbert’s tortoiseshell, pearly eye, and buckeye with its blue and orange spots and its white-and-red Indian paint. Although numbers of monarchs and viceroys are dwindling, we have both species daily from June until October feeding on zinnias in the garden and ironweed in the pasture. Their orange and black wings remind me of panes of stained glass.

Wasps build their nests along the garage overhang and near fences. I am stung at least once a year, but I don’t tear down their houses because they eat tomato worms and other insects that infest the garden. The black and auburn woolly bears appear in late autumn. Insects that infest the garden include corn worms, which I deal with by pulling them off the stalks, and the European corn borer, which I get rid of by cutting off the tips of the corn. Grasshoppers are present from late summer until the first frost. Japanese beetles seem to confine their menus to leaves of flowers past bloom time. I get rid of Mexican bean beetles and yellow, fuzzy saltmarsh caterpillars by brushing them off the bean leaves and dumping them into the field. Since I began rotating broccoli, I have seen few of the tiny green worms that crawl inside the flowerets.

Far from eluding us, the wild batters at our walls and windows. Bees, wasps, and hornets sometimes choose our roof overhang to build their nests. In February 1999 a bat found its way in and flew into the living room where it lay on the carpet clicking and squeaking until we caught it in the animal box and released it in the barn to an uncertain night: bats hibernate in winter, and why this one was active I could not know. We sometimes hear bees or mice between the siding and drywall. One September I heard a katydid shrilling so loudly it was audible in the farthest room, where I sat with opened book. I found the curled green leaf of its body clinging upright to the back window screen where the breeze filtered through. It did not fly when I approached. The natural world was calling to me loudly from some place beyond my understanding.

Sometimes the wild encounters me silently. One night in November I returned from my late class at about 10:30. As I stepped out of my truck, I saw something move above me, a ghostly creature flying among the rafters of the garage. In the dim illumination of the truck’s dome light, it fluttered above and around the beams—perhaps a screech owl or barn owl. It fluttered among the shadows, out the door, and into the night with a full moon shining on the barn among dark hills, the point of the roof resembling a ship’s prow forging through high waves. I had always wanted to observe an owl close up. As it winged away into the night, I remembered Peter Matthiessen’s words in The Snow Leopard that the wild creature we seek will reveal itself only when we are ready to see it.