The World Outside the Door
All around us, the night comes in
on little possum feet.
"Animals Among Us: Living with Suburban
Wildlife" by Fran Hodgkins (Linnet Books; North Haven, Connecticut;
2000; 114 pages; $19.50)
"Watching Birds: Reflections on the Wing" by Ann Taylor (Ragged
Mountain Press; Camden, Maine; 2000; 160 pages; $19.95)
By Charles Coe
The Europeans who explored and settled North America saw their new world
as a boundless cornucopia. When they had exhausted the forests, fields,
and game of one locale, they'd simply move west and begin anew. Not until
the latter part of the nineteenth century, when huge portions of the frontier
had been developed and forever lost, did it become clearer that the environment
is a system of fragile-and finite-resources.
Two excellent books by Northeastern
graduates offer very different but equally thoughtful and compelling perspectives
on how we can live in greater balance with our surroundings, in an ever
more crowded world. Animals Among Us: Living with Suburban Wildlife, by
science writer Fran Hodgkins, AS'87, examines how wild animals have learned
to cope with, and in many ways benefit from, suburban development. And
Watching Birds: Reflections on the Wing, by Salem State College professor
of English Ann Taylor, Ed'64, MA'66, offers a series of elegant and poetic
essays on what birds can teach us about the natural world, and ourselves.
Animals Among Us combines a down-to-earth, sometimes
humorous writing style with a wealth of factual information. The first
chapter, "A Wildlife Tour of Town"-an amusing description of
the secret lives of the wild things that share the suburbs with their human
inhabitants-is by itself worth the price of the book.
According to Hodgkins, the presence of humans can actually be a boon to
wildlife for many reasons. Garbage cans, bird feeders, and dishes of food
left out for family pets are a bonanza for hungry raccoons, possums, coyotes,
and other wild visitors. And our virtual elimination of larger predators
such as cougars and bears from suburban environments has contributed to
an explosion in the deer population, and helped the resourceful coyote
thrive in its new position atop the local food chain.
On the other hand, people sometimes put animals
at risk without realizing it. Hodgkins points out that the common house
cat, when left free to roam backyards and woods, kills millions of songbirds
a year. She urges readers to keep their cats inside, where they're also
less susceptible to injury and disease, or at least to fit them with belled
collars and place bird feeders out of their range.
Often, when animals create problems for us, our
first impulse is to get rid of the animals. Hodgkins encourages us to look
instead for ways to minimize their impact. For example, beaver population
growth can present serious problems in the suburbs. Water backed up by
beaver dams can flood septic tanks and drinking-water wells, create breeding
grounds for mosquitoes, and wash out roads.
In response, some people resort to trapping, although
that strategy is now illegal in many areas. Hodgkins recommends the use
of "beaver deceivers," ingenious combinations of pipes that allow
water to flow through the dams. The bonus: Beaver dams become a benefit
rather than a liability, helping to clean and filter the water flowing
through them; and the resulting wetlands provide food and shelter for a
wide variety of animals.
"Wildlife will be with us always," says
Hodgkins. "We need to understand it, appreciate it, and be willing
to take responsibility for it." Her book provides a long list of strategies
for doing exactly that. Animals Among Us engages and entertains while greatly
expanding the reader's understanding of wild animals that live, often unseen,
under our very noses.
In Watching Birds: Reflections on the Wing, Ann
Taylor offers a series of more personal reflections on the natural world.
Her essays combine travel writing with memoir and reflection, carrying
her readers along as she "trails through eel grass on marshy Monomoy
Island looking for a bald eagle," or "crawl[s] over craggy boulders
for a close-up photograph of a feeding puffin, a sunlit calendar puffin
with its yellow beak firmly clamped on a school of little silver fish."
Taylor never takes herself too seriously, realizing
that many people view bird-watchers with bemusement. Yet she firmly rejects
the tired stereotype of a birder as the "knobby-kneed simpleton in
pith helmet, striped shirt, baggy plaid shorts, argyle socks, and lumpy
shoes-a type of eccentric loony."
Nature writer James Fisher once commented, "The
observation of birds may be a superstition, a tradition, an art, a science,
a pleasure, a hobby, or a bore; this depends entirely on the nature of
the observer." In that light, Taylor's essays reveal as much about
her own interior life as they do about the birds she describes.
We gain insights into her family and her love
for teaching. We learn she's an adventurous and perceptive traveler whose
bird fascination has carried her to Italy, Africa, England, and Alaska.
And we feel her scholarly passion for the work of such great writers as
Thoreau, Wordsworth, and Wallace Stevens, as well as less familiar authors
whose names this reader jotted down for future reference, such as Gilbert
White, an eighteenth-century British writer, and John Burroughs, an early-twentieth-century
American essayist who, Taylor claims, had "the scientist's eye and
the poet's heart."
As Hodgkins does in Animals Among Us, Taylor speaks
to our responsibilities toward-and dependence on-the natural world. "It
is no longer easy to simply admire birds, to find consolation in their
predictable presence," she says. "Appreciation is now accompanied
by an inevitable fear about the future of birds, and ultimately of ourselves."
She notes that the populations of some migratory
songbirds have decreased by half over the last twenty years, and warns
that "more from neglect than malice, we are destroying their habitat,
withdrawing our protection, and ignoring the consequences as we allow losses
unlike any others in history." In the face of this neglect, she wonders
"how silent our springs may become."
Our ancestors were blissfully ignorant of a fact
we can no longer afford to ignore: Our quality of life and very survival
depend on our being responsible stewards of nature. But Hodgkins and Taylor
clearly believe there are reasons beyond simple self-interest for us to
cherish and protect our environment.
By way of illustration, Taylor tells us she and
her husband have tried to pass their love of bird-watching down to their
teenage son. She hopes for him what she seems also to hope for her readers-the
ability to find in nature "the chance to respect something bigger
than ourselves, the chance to hike a path, as Thoreau said, 'however narrow
and solitary and crooked, with love and reverence.'"
Charles Coe is a program officer with the Massachusetts
Cultural Council, and a former writer and editor in the University Publications
office.
"Wolf Howl: Poems"
By Francis Blessington
BkMk Press, 2000
Writer Ann Taylor's husband (mentioned in the
last paragraph of the above review) has written a book of his own-a poetry
collection that covers much the same ground as his wife's work: nature,
family, travel.
Wolf Howl is the eighth book
and second volume of poetry by Francis Blessington, Northeastern professor
of English. Blessington is a classicist and John Milton expert, familiar
with locales as far-flung as the Isle of Man, Salvador, and North Carolina.
As in Taylor's book, the intersection of the wild
and the suburban finds voice here. The title poem describes the sense of
strangeness and elation felt by caravanners who venture into the wilderness
to hear the howls of wolves in the darkness:
Before the blackout, our cordon
of headlights jammed seven miles.
Beyond are the wolves, though
no one sees them but winter rangers
airlifting endangered moose
over snow to thicker woods.
But the wolves wander at will.
Other plainspoken yet elegant poems reconstruct
the transcendence of a father watching a son maneuver on an icy lake unassisted
for the first time ("Skating Again"), of lovers relearning truths
about their relationship ("Everglades"), of a visitor's response
to snapshots of long-dead workers ("Coal Mine Museum"), of a
crowd watching a dazzling pyrotechnical display ("Firework")."
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