Return to Warden's Grove: Science, Desire, and the Lives of Sparrows (Sightline Books) [1 ed.] 1587296330, 9781587296338

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Return to Warden’s Grove Science, Desire, and the Lives of Sparrows ch r i s t o ph e r n o r m e n t

. . . . . . .Return . . . . . . .to . . Warden’s . . . . . . . . . .Grove .........................

. . . . . . . . sightline . . . . . . . . . .books ................................. The Iowa Series in Literary Nonfiction Patricia Hampl & Carl H. Klaus, series editors

Christopher Norment

Return to Warden’s Grove Science, Desire, and the

...................................................

Lives of Sparrows

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2008 by the University of Iowa Press www.uiowapress.org All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Harris’s Sparrow on title page by Lisa Hendricks. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative and is committed to preserving natural resources. Printed on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Norment, Christopher. Return to Warden’s Grove: science, desire, and the lives of sparrows / by Christopher Norment. p.

cm. — (Sightline books: The Iowa series in literary

nonfiction) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13:

978-1-58729-633-8 (cloth)

ISBN-10:

1-58729-633-0 (cloth)

1. Harris’s sparrow — Northwest Territories. history — Research — Philosophy. QL696.P2438N67

I. Title.

2008

508.719′3 — dc22 2007043801 08 09 10 11 12

C

5 4

3 2 1

2. Natural

This book is dedicated to: My children, Liza and Martin — may “the wild” help carry them through their lives. Melissa, who stayed behind.

We know a few things which were once hidden, and being known, they seem easy; but there are the flashings of the Northern Lights . . . there are the startling comets, whose use is all unknown; there are the brightening and flickering variable stars, whose cause is all unknown; and the meteoric showers — and for all of these the reasons are as clear as for the succession of day and night; they lie just beyond the daily mist of our minds, but our eyes have not yet pierced through it. — m ar i a m i t che l l , nineteenth-century astronomer; letter, December 26, 1854 The sound of geese in the distance is wonderful: in our minds we rise up and move on. — ro ber t s und , “Spring Poem in the Skagit Valley”

Contents ......................................................... Preface and Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 North 9 Settling In 27 In a Country without Maps 53 The Names of Things 79 Lines upon a Graph 103 Killing Things 125 The Broken Compass 145 South 174 In the Far Country 195 Bibliography 211

.Preface . . . . . . . .and . . . Acknowledgments .............................................

To begin with, a disclaimer about the structure of Return to Warden’s Grove, which is built around my own scientific study of Harris’s Sparrow (Zonotrichia querula) breeding biology in the Northwest Territories, Canada. Although I studied Harris’s Sparrows between 1989 and 1991, Return to Warden’s Grove is organized around a single, archetypal field season, while including incidents, ideas, and people from all three summers. Edward Abbey did something similar in Desert Solitaire, as did John Wesley Powell in The Exploration of the Colorado River and its Canyons. Powell’s account reads like a single journey down the Colorado River, but it actually contains incidents and people from explorations in 1869, 1870, 1871, and 1872. Powell mentions this in the preface to his book, but he still was criticized for his narrative approach. While I have none of Powell’s importance, I’ll lay claim to his literary sin; although abandoning a strictly chronological narrative goes against my inclinations and scientific training, it allows me to avoid a “we went there, then, and did that” account. Perhaps most important, I make no attempt to keep my three field assistants separated chronologically. Thus, Ken Wicker (1989), Martin Fuller (1990), and Paul Hendricks (1991) drop in and out of the narrative. A fourth assistant, Kevin Kimber, also was present for three weeks late in my first field season, and he makes a cameo appearance in one chapter. Another potentially confusing point is that when I began my Harris’s Sparrow work in 1989, my family included my wife, Melissa, and my daughter, Liza — but our second child, Martin, was born between the 1990 and 1991 field seasons. Although Melissa, Liza, and Martin weren’t physically present at Warden’s Grove, they were part of the context within which I lived and worked, and thus they appear in the book from time to time.

xii Preface and Acknowledgments

A second disclaimer has to do with the language of Return to Warden’s Grove as it applies to the ecology of Harris’s Sparrows and other Barrenlands species. For narrative purposes, I usually avoid qualifiers such as “probably,” “may be,” and “appear to be,” which impart an aura of uncertainty or ambiguity to scientific writing. Such language is important, because scientists know enough about the natural world to understand that its truths are relative and approximate, and always open to potential revision. Yet, I feel confident in abandoning most of these qualifiers when describing Harris’s Sparrows at Warden’s Grove, as most of this information is derived from my own research, much of which has been published in peer-reviewed papers, although some data exist only in my field notebooks. I also am confident about describing other aspects of the lives of Harris’s Sparrows, particularly during their winter residence in the Midwest, when these descriptions are based upon published scientific papers. I feel slightly less certain, though, in basing some descriptions not on research on Harris’s Sparrows vetted by peer review, but on studies of other species in similar habitats. For example, the reproductive physiology of Harris’s Sparrows has not been studied in detail. Yet much is known on the general subject from research on other alpine, arctic, and subarctic breeding birds, including the closely related White-crowned Sparrow, which has been studied extensively at Fairbanks, Alaska, in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and in the laboratory. I have used my professional judgment in extrapolating from other scientific studies, but this is not a technical work and I do not make such extensions transparent in the text. However, my paranoia about making assumptions unsupported by published research — honed especially by years of having my manuscripts ripped apart by peer reviewers — has led me to include a list of technical references at the end of the book. Readers wondering about the factual basis for my assertions can examine the relevant references if they wish. Many individuals and organizations have helped with this project, either in supporting my research on Harris’s Sparrows, or in the writing of Return to Warden’s Grove. I am particularly indebted to Martin Fuller, Paul Hendricks, Ken Wicker, and Kevin Kimber for their enthusiastic help with the fieldwork, sometimes in the face of difficult conditions and a cur-

Preface and Acknowledgments xiii

mudgeonly “supervisor.” Martin, Paul, Ken, and Kevin were my only companions in the field, and they were integral to the success of my research. All were volunteers, paid only in wilderness, wildlife, mosquito bites, and all the oatmeal and dried prunes they could consume. Yet, they were generous with their time and energy, surrendering several months of their lives in exchange for a free trip to the Barrens and plenty of long, hard days in the field. In particular, Martin’s, Paul’s and Ken’s dedication, companionship, and careful data collection helped ensure the success of my project. My doctoral advisor at the University of Kansas, Dr. Richard F. Johnston, supervised my study and helped guide my work. The Frank M. Chapman Fund of the American Museum of Natural History; Panorama Fund of the Museum of Natural History and the Department of Systematics and Ecology, University of Kansas; Inland Bird Banding Association; Bill and Marilyn James; Gwen Norment; and Willetta and John Lueschen provided financial support for my fieldwork. Doug Heard, Kevin McCormick, and Peter and Teri Arychuck provided important logistical support. Dave and Kristen Olesen, the “Hoarfrost Fisherfolk,” opened their home to Paul and me in May of 1991 and were our only radio contact with the outside world while we lived at Warden’s Grove. Permits to live in the Thelon Wildlife Sanctuary and study Harris’s Sparrows were issued by Indian and Northern Affairs Canada; Wildlife Management Division, Northwest Territories Renewable Resources; Science Institute of the Northwest Territories; and the Canadian Wildlife Service. Air Tindi, Latham Air, and Ptarmigan Airways provided professional air charter services and safe access to my study site. My wife, Melissa Norment, stayed behind, took care of our children, worked, and held our household together while I was in the field. These were not easy tasks, and without her sacrifice and understanding, my fieldwork would not have been possible. My young children, Liza and Martin, did without their father for months on end — although they didn’t have much choice in the matter. So I’m happy to report that they will still talk to me and seem to bear no deep-seated grudges about my sudden disappearances during their formative years. Paul Willis and Paul Hendricks read large chunks of Return to Warden’s Grove, and their detailed, careful comments helped make

xiv Preface and Acknowledgments

it a much better book. Ralph Black, Martin Fuller, Lisa Hendricks, Marty Morton, Melissa Norment, and Sarah Lazazzero also read and commented on one or more of the chapters. Mark Robbins and Thor Holmes, collections managers at the University of Kansas Museum of Natural History, answered many questions about the bird and mammal collections. Bob Gilliam, Interlibrary Loan librarian at SUNY Brockport, chased down many obscure references when I was gathering background material. Discussions with Ralph Black, Paul Willis, and Paul Hendricks helped focus my thoughts and writing about natural history, ornithology, and “sense of place.” My sister, Lisa Hendricks, created the Harris’s Sparrow illustration that graces the title page. Kristie Klees drew the maps, and Fran Forman created the cover art. My mother, the Reverend Gwen Norment, pointed out the source of the title of the last chapter, a quotation by Meister Eckhardt: “God is at home, we are in the far country.” The guidance of Joe Parsons and Carl Klaus at the University of Iowa Press, and my editor, Arnold Friedman, helped turn a rough manuscript into a finished book, and I thank them for their efforts, and for their wise and generous counsel. Others at the University of Iowa Press who helped with the book include Holly Carver, Karen Copp, and Charlotte Wright. I very much appreciate their professional assistance with the project. Finally, I’d like to thank the professor (who shall remain unidentified) at a small university in Oregon (which also shall remain unidentified) who asked me during a job interview, “What good is your research?” Even though I didn’t get the job, the thoughts and emotions that began with her intemperate question about my Harris’s Sparrow work eventually gave rise to this book. I hope that I’ve answered her question adequately, but if not — well, I’ve had fun anyway.

. . . . . . .Return . . . . . . .to . . Warden’s . . . . . . . . . .Grove .........................

Map of the Northwest Territories, by Kristie Klees.

Introduction ......................................................... or three summers, I lived at Warden’s Grove, a small stand of spruce at the edge of the Thelon River, Northwest Territories, which lies about one hundred and eighty air miles northeast of Great Slave Lake, sunk in the great space and silence of the Canadian north. I lived in a wilderness as vast as any in the world, quietly and with a single assistant, and I went about my business, which was scientific research. The locus of my world was a tiny fleck of trees lost in an isolated and often harsh land, and there I studied the breeding biology of the Harris’s Sparrow, a songbird that nests only in the mosaic of tree and tundra vegetation that trends southeasterly for nearly fifteen hundred miles from the edge of the Arctic Ocean to Hudson Bay. I did not wander much, but stayed close to camp and sought out the birds. I watched and listened, weighed and measured — and I was where I wanted to be. I completed my Harris’s Sparrow study in 1991 and now, sixteen years later, I am writing about my research for a nontechnical audience. But Return to Warden’s Grove is about more than the biology of Harris’s Sparrows; at its core, it is about the process of doing science, particularly the type of science that is focused on the lives of nonhuman animals in their natural environments. This type of science is built upon the discipline of natural history and careful, patient and (dare I say it) sympathetic observation — and it seems to have fallen out of favor, both among contemporary ecologists and the “cutting-edge” cell and molecular biologists who inhabit research laboratories throughout the world. Although studies such as mine never will help cure disease, treat genetic disorders, improve the material comfort of our lives, or even necessarily test important ecological hypotheses, I still feel that they have something very important to offer — a sense of connection to something beyond the self, and a

F

Map of the Warden’s Grove area, by Kristie Klees.

Introduction 3

way in which to develop a sense of place in a world that feels increasingly less welcoming, certain, and familiar. At our core, each of us yearns to be at home. When I began my Ph.D. program at the University of Kansas in 1988, I was married, with an eighteen-month-old daughter, and at thirty-seven much older than most of my fellow graduate students. Five years after beginning a job teaching science and running an outdoor program at Westover School, a private secondary boarding school in Connecticut, I had tossed aside a more certain and settled existence, dragged my family to Kansas, and shifted my gaze toward an academic life. The somewhat shabby apartment where we first lived in Lawrence, the instantaneous avalanche of course work, the loss of financial security that came with the transition from a salaried position to that of a graduate teaching assistant, and my young daughter’s frantic demands to nurse, after having been weaned — all of these things made it clear that I had not chosen the easiest path. And then there was my pursuit of Harris’s Sparrows — a Ph.D. project perhaps best described as “quixotic,” one that would take me far from friends and family and deep into the wilderness that Canadians call the “Barren-grounds,” “Barrenlands,” or more simply, the “Barrens.” It was a project that involved both financial and physical risks, and carried no guarantee of success. When I tease apart the tangled web of circumstance and intent that drew me north, to Harris’s Sparrows and their country, what I find are the threads of personal history and restless intellectual, emotional, and physical desire. My interest in Harris’s Sparrows was as much about the aesthetics of a particular landscape as it was about my academic goals and interests in avian ecology. Since my teenage years, I have spent as much time in the wilderness as I could manage, mainly in places like the High Sierra, North Cascades, Grand Canyon, Mojave Desert, and the Canadian North. I love hiking, climbing, and paddling in spare, empty environments, and it is no coincidence that I am most drawn to the science of ecology in the deserts, mountains, and arctic tundras of this world. In places such as the Barrens, the adaptations of the animals and plants, and the ways in which they make their ways through the world, are most compelling, and it is in these habitats that the boundary between my fascination with research and

4 Introduction

my yearning for an emotional and physical connection to the world blurs. My attraction to raw, elemental landscapes, where my intellectual and emotional responses intergrade and inform one another, is mirrored by my fascination with ecotones, the ecological transition zones between habitats. In an ecotone, where the aesthetics, animals, and plants of two ecosystems blend, there is something psychologically pleasing about the interwoven geographies of space and species. Perhaps I was mostly drawn to Harris’s Sparrows because they breed in an empty, wind-swept world, far from humans, where the trees die away and the boreal forest fades into arctic tundra. These birds are happiest in the wilderness, where space and silence rise up out of the land — and so am I. But my choice of a dissertation topic was based upon more than my passion for a particular wilderness landscape. I was interested in Harris’s Sparrows not only because they spend their summers in a wild and beautiful place, but also because their isolated summer range meant that very little was known about their breeding biology. Like most scientists, I am attracted to the unknown, and I was intrigued by a tantalizing passage from A. Marguerite Baumgartner’s short monograph on Harris’s Sparrows in A. C. Bent’s Life Histories of North American Birds: “Perhaps when the life histories of our commoner and more easily-studied summer birds have all been put on record, some intrepid young naturalist will elect to fill in the many remaining gaps in our knowledge of this bird of mystery.” Now here was a challenge, and even though I was not particularly young or intrepid, I was fascinated. Part of the reason for the dearth of knowledge about the Harris’s Sparrow nesting biology was because public transportation reached the species’ summer range only at Churchill, Manitoba, where Ms. Baumgartner first encountered Harris’s Sparrows: It was on a crisp June day in 1933 among the stunted spruces and reindeer moss of the timberline at Churchill on Hudson Bay that I made the acquaintance of my first Harris’ sparrow. I was captivated at once by the bold black hood and pink bill, the plaintive, melodious, two-toned whistle, and the shy, gentle ways of the large handsome sparrow of the middle west. A bird of mystery, I was in the heart of its breeding grounds where that veteran explorer, Edward A. Preble, had discovered young just out of the nest in

Introduction 5

1900, and where George M. Sutton had found and described the eggs for the first time. Bird of mystery, indeed (and misplaced modifier aside); Sutton’s discovery in June 1931 marked the end of a good-natured contest between American and Canadian ornithologists to discover the first active Harris’s Sparrow nest with eggs — supposedly the last nest and eggs of a North American breeding species to be so described. When I was searching for information on Harris’s Sparrows, I talked to one ornithologist who had tried to follow up on Sutton’s work at Churchill. However, the density of Harris’s Sparrows in the area wasn’t high, nor was the birds’ breeding habitat located near the field station where most biologists stay while working at Churchill, and he didn’t find many nests. But I knew where there were lots of Harris’s Sparrows — in small patches of spruce along the Thelon River, in the heart of their breeding range. The Thelon River heads in timbered country about one hundred miles north of the Saskatchewan border and flows north and east into the tundra of the mainland Northwest Territories and Nunavut. Eleven years earlier, I had spent more than a year in this region, as a member of a six-man expedition in the middle of a 2,200-mile canoe trip from the Yukon Territory to Hudson Bay. From late August 1977 until mid-July 1978 we used a small cabin at Warden’s Grove, in what was then the Thelon Game Sanctuary, as our base camp. There, we lived through freeze-up, a long winter, and the onrushing summer that allowed us to return to the rivers and lakes for the last weeks of our journey. During my time at Warden’s Grove, I had seen many Harris’s Sparrows and stumbled across several nests, and I saw the cabin as an ideal base for my project. I could live in the midst of my study area, in a familiar place that I knew well and loved deeply, and where I once had felt at home and focused. On a wind-tossed, brilliant day in July 1978, I had stepped out of the cabin at Warden’s Grove, rolled a canoe onto my shoulders and walked the quarter mile to the Thelon River. There, I had thrown the canoe into the water, loaded it with enough food and equipment for the six-week paddle to Hudson Bay, and, with my five companions, headed north and east — deeper into the Barrens, and then into another life. Within little more than a year, I had married and begun a master’s program at Washington State University. I studied alpine

6 Introduction

birds in the Beartooth Mountains of Wyoming, found enough free time to spend three summers working as a mountaineering instructor for Pacific Crest Outward Bound, traveled with my wife to New Zealand and Australia, and then became a high school science teacher at a private school in Connecticut. But, even as I tried to settle into a world of lesson plans, dorm parenting, and New England landscapes, I struggled to hold onto my academic interests. I found fascination in numbers and hypotheses, even as I enjoyed teaching adolescents, and once a month I would travel to the science libraries at Yale or the University of Connecticut to read scientific articles and work on manuscripts that I submitted to professional journals. I also liked the burnished, autumnal forests of rural New England, the tiny pockets of alpine habitat on the highest peaks of Maine and New Hampshire, and the Adirondack ponds cupped in thick stands of paper birch and white pine. Yet, my heart couldn’t cease its ambivalent ramblings, couldn’t stop roaming into northern and western landscapes. My life felt too scattered and I yearned for what I imagined was simplicity, for the sense of purpose that seemed to characterize my life in the wilderness. I wanted empty, quiet lands, adventure and days of hard physical labor, the directness and commitment of a long expedition. I read the epigraph to E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End — “Only connect” — and felt that once again I might realize such a connection at Warden’s Grove. There, I might recapture the intense sense of place and belonging that I once had felt, the type of intimate, passionate attachment to something outside the self that brings joy, and anchors me to the world. This type of experience had been much on my mind because I had just finished writing a book about my canoe expedition across northern Canada, In the North of Our Lives. And so my return to Warden’s Grove would be more than a search for Harris’s Sparrows and a Ph.D. It also would be a pilgrimage, an homage to a symbolic past that had been transformed by the winnowing effect of memory and the retelling of tales into something slightly (or was it vastly?) different from what it truly was. . . . Mostly, I think, I wanted to feel more at home in the world, to move with some combination of the heart and mind into the world of animals and wilderness, to encounter what Vladimir Nabokov described in Speak, Memory: “This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like the momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love.” Ah, there it is — love. What I wanted (and still

Introduction 7

want) was to cross into a world of sparrowsong and sedge, where the horizon burned with radiant light, and planes of memory and desire convened and bent north. I desired a place where I could feel the rough chaos of wind and sun on my face, and a research project that would allow me to navigate, with both numbers and sentiment, into ecotones of the heart, mind, and body. And so Return to Warden’s Grove is an account of my time at Warden’s Grove, my work with Harris’s Sparrows, and how the process of exploration — of a single place, and mostly of one species — flowed outward and into the wider world, like circles on water. It is built around my firm belief that science and what might loosely be described as poetry are important, and mutually reinforcing, ways of encountering the world. In The Dream of the Marsh Wren, the poet Pattiann Rogers writes, “It has seemed to me impossible to live in our world, to survive. . . . if a union could not be found and created between these two ways of knowing, the artistic and the scientific, both so essential and so present in our lives.” And although Samuel Johnson once remarked that “the poet does not number the streaks on the tulip,” the poet and science writer Peter Forbes has countered that “there will always be poets who are drawn to those tulips and some tulip-streak enumerators who hunger for the wider picture.” That’s me: tulip-streak (or bird feather) enumerator, a scientist hankering for a broader, more inclusive view — one to be had, perhaps, at Warden’s Grove. Whatever meaning I can gather from my experiences there lies with the Harris’s Sparrows, the process by which I learned something about their lives, and the land that enveloped both the animals and me. I think about meaning, about events, but I am left mostly with questions: Where was it that I lived? Who was it that I lived with? What is it that I carry with me, after all these years? What use is there in understanding the lives of birds? But most often: What is it that binds us to this world? Listen. When I cup a small bird in my hand and feel its heat, feel the thrum of its fear and the tiny pounding of its heart against my palm, it is impossible not to wonder. Or when I look into the umber silence of its eyes and imagine the paths of light and chemicals that bind us together (cornea

8 Introduction

and lens, retina and optic nerve, sodium and potassium, brain and neural network), it is impossible not to wonder. And when I am done with my measurements and I have written down the last of the numbers, I will open my hand, as if in supplication, and the bird will rise into the air. Then, too, it is impossible not to wonder — about the arc of its flight, the way in which the barbs and barbules of its feather vanes interlock, the lightness of its bones and very being and, most of, all, its completeness. Connected as we are by the paths of history and genes — stasis and change, extinction and speciation, and the tangled necklaces of adenine and guanine, thymine and cytosine — it still is impossible not to marvel at its sheer otherness, and the way in which it makes its way through the world. Or to know a place well — to stand on some gentle hill and look past a meadow of sedge tussocks and a thin sliver of stunted spruce, over a curving river and into a landscape marked by silence and unimaginable distance, and in doing so, to understand something of the vast geometries of tundra and water, of cold and light and wind. To follow in your heart and mind the movements of the animals, the great inertial pulse of caribou, the way in which the birds arc through the brilliant air of spring, and to listen to the clangor of their gathered voices as they fill the morning air. To watch the land climb out of winter as the first hesitant sedges flower at your feet and tiny whorls of green leaves suddenly appear, at the edge of the melting snow, and to then savor the bright taste of summer, the endless days and flush of energy in your veins. And later, to listen as the last of the bird songs fade into a silence as great as that which marks the country itself, and to watch as the animals disappear southwards, or into their shelters. To gather the last of the berries, half-hidden among the cast-off leaves of willow and dwarf birch, to catch the scent of winter on the north wind and to feel, finally, that the land’s great history and your minor one are somehow, blessedly and inextricably, linked. . . . These animals, this country, those moments when the land and air are suffused with burning light — all are antidotes to displacement, to the feeling that nothing seems to fit and that the world will fall away, into darkness. And so, as I move deeper into middle age, I turn toward the far country — toward a roofless cabin two thousand miles to the north and east of where I write, and to the memory of a small bird and its whistled song, and to the hunger and hope that flow outward from these things.

North ......................................................... In the April night, there are geese, trailing north, vectors of spring. Their lost cries fall like soft rain, a rain that speaks of movement, of growth, and the year turning round upon itself. I sleep fitfully as the geese drift in and out of my dreams. I wake to their calls and worry about the future, about the meandering direction that my life has taken and might take in the months ahead. My wife sleeps with her back toward me, and I envy her rest. She breathes slowly, rhythmically. I want to reach out to her and tell her about the night, about the geese, about my uncertainty, but I do not. All this year I have struggled — with lost dreams, with the burdens of desire and history, with what should have been and what is not. In the past few years I have made many mistakes, the greatest of which has been to ignore the susurrus of my heart. Unlike the geese, I do not know my path, feel no great Spring in my soul. I am thirty-eight, silent, and too much alone. I am unsure about most everything in my life, except that in one month, I, too, will head north. My graduate program demands a dissertation and I have chosen a topic based not so much on the dictates of science as on personal history and desire. I sit perched on a ridge with many divides: family and solitude, academia and wilderness, certainty and hesitation. But now there is the northward flight of the geese, the sun’s great climb into the spring sky, the awakening of the land. And in spite of my unvoiced fears and uncertainties, I, too, will migrate. I sink into the North like a stone. arris’s Sparrows are birds that seek out edges, the boundaries between plant communities, in both summer and winter. In this, they are like other North American species in the genus Zonotrichia, or crowned sparrows — the White-crowned Sparrow, White-throated

H

10 North

Sparrow, and Golden-crowned Sparrow. During the breeding season, Harris’s Sparrows are found in the forest-tundra transition that stretches north and west from Manitoba through Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, where they nest in shrubby vegetation at the margin of spruce woods. From late fall through early spring, they favor other kinds of edges, those set amidst the hedgerows, shelterbelts, and brushy ravines of the central Great Plains. There, they spend their time in twittering flocks, foraging amongst the tangle of shrubs and trees that line the watercourses and margins of weedy fields. When I watch them near Lawrence, they seem patient, even stolid. They work their way through the underbrush, pausing occasionally to survey their surroundings, perhaps fleeing to a secure, high perch when a sudden movement or sound gives sufficient cause for alarm — and in this they are unlike most other sparrows, which seek out refuges with low, thick cover when disturbed. When the worst of the winter storms come, they retreat further into the brush, seeking shelter from the snow and wind. But on most days, particularly in the mornings and late afternoons, they fossick in the undergrowth, hopping or running along the ground, stopping to peck vigorously, sometimes kicking backward with both feet to expose new food sources. They work their way among the grasses and weeds, feeding for hours at a time, never straying far from cover. At midday, they may cease feeding and roost for short periods, but often they move almost continuously: a restless waiting. During the fall, winter, and early spring, while in what’s known as their basic plumage, Harris’s Sparrows conform only partially to the stereotypical image of sparrows as “lbbs,” the “little brown birds” that give beginning birders identification fits. The back, wings, and tail of nonbreeding Harris’s Sparrows are mostly shades of brown, perhaps streaked with black. However, nonbreeding birds also have black crowns and variable amounts of mottled black on their throat and bib, with more color tending to occur in older, male birds. But lengthening spring days stimulate the physiological changes that will drive their northward flight and transition into breeding condition, which in Kansas begins in mid-March, when Harris’s Sparrows start their annual spring molt. The spring molt in Harris’s Sparrows, technically known as the prealternate molt, produces a much more impressive plumage than

North 11

in winter birds. The molt is a partial one, and the flight feathers of the wings and most of the tail are not replaced. When the molt is complete, sometime in late April or early May, all birds, regardless of their age or sex, have a similar breeding plumage, with a distinctive (some might even say magnificent) black hood and bib that covers the top of the head, nape, front of the face, and throat. Set amidst all of this blackness is an incongruous, bright pink bill, as if added as an afterthought by a mischievous artist. Other changes accompany the latter stages of prealternate molt and prepare Harris’s Sparrows for migration and breeding. Blood plasma levels of luteinizing hormone and prolactin increase in both sexes, while testosterone levels increase in males. Luteinizing hormone and prolactin are produced by the pituitary, a small endocrine gland at the base of the brain; increases in the circulating levels of these hormones stimulate changes in the reproductive system, leading to growth of the gonads and production of sex hormones such as testosterone and estrogen, which affect breeding activities. In turn, secretion of pituitary hormones is controlled by the nearby hypothalamus, a small area of the forebrain. In birds, the hypothalamus integrates environmental information and regulates production of several hormones involved in reproduction; it also may be the location of the biological clock that controls many seasonal responses to increasing photoperiod, but this point is controversial. During the last few weeks of April, the midday lull in feeding that characterizes their winter activities disappears and Harris’s Sparrows become what is termed hyperphagic. During the day, they feed intently and almost continuously, and their body mass and fat stores increase rapidly in preparation for the energetically demanding task of migration. The mass of individual birds may increase by as much as 30 percent over this period of intensive feeding. Talk about “bulking up”; an equivalent mass gain in a 150-pound human would be 45 pounds! Fat stores also increase quickly. Winter birds typically are very lean, with fat levels below 5 percent of their mass, while migrating birds depart from their wintering grounds with fat loads approaching 20 percent of their mass. A few days before Harris’s Sparrows begin spring migration, they undergo a dramatic change in behavior and enter a period of premigratory restlessness known by the German term Zugenruhe. Most

12 North

small perching birds that migrate long distances do so at night, and prior to the start of migration they cease feeding earlier in the day, perhaps an hour or more before twilight. But instead of roosting and remaining inactive at night, as during the winter, they become restless and hop about almost continuously, particularly during the early evening, as if they are loosening up, like a runner before a marathon. Although in birds most seasonal reproductive activities apparently are controlled by the hypothalamus, another gland in the brain, the pineal gland, has a major effect on avian day-night rhythms, and thus migratory behavior. This effect is due to production of the hormone melatonin; in nonmigratory birds, melatonin levels are lower during the day than at night, but in migrating individuals, melatonin levels decrease at night. With Zugenruhe comes the Harris’s Sparrows’ departure from their wintering areas, but not all of the birds leave at once. Some move into more northerly parts of their winter range — Nebraska, Iowa, and southeastern South Dakota — in March and early April, although many remain further south into late spring. Within an area, flocks may shift their ranges and individual birds may come and go, but toward the end of April there’s a heightened sense of urgency amongst the sparrows, a collective, gathering tide of activity. And then, suddenly, in late April or early May, the sparrows begin to move north in a more concerted pattern. Soon, only a few stragglers remain behind, but by mid-May they, too, are gone. Each year I, too, must prepare for migration, and this process comes to border on ritual: weeks of frenetic activity amidst final exams and the minutiae of academic life, a shopping expedition to the same health food store in Kansas City, the endless logistical tasks, lastminute projects around our house, financial headaches, the process of packing my equipment and food into a space too small to receive it, and, worst of all, the final, sad, and awkward good-byes with my family. During the winter, I am always making lists for research equipment, camping gear, and food, and there is a seemingly endless series of questions that require resolution: Who will I recruit as my field assistant and companion, a position that carries no compensation other than a free trip to Warden’s Grove, and the promise of a continuous string of twelve-hour (or more) workdays? Do I have

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enough bird bands from the Canadian Wildlife Service, and an extra set of banding pliers? Is the first aid kit complete, with enough penicillin to see someone through the initial stages of appendicitis? How much flour, cheese, and peanut butter will two people need for three months? Do I have the tools necessary to repair the cabin, which I’ve heard has been damaged by bears? Will the research grant from the American Museum of Natural History come through? And, most importantly, what have I forgotten? For there will be no resupply flights into Warden’s Grove, no way to replace anything that I’ve left behind. There always is too much to do, and each spring my sleep dwindles from eight to five hours a night as the departure date approaches. I become hyperactive, fret constantly, and possess my own, diurnal form of Zugenruhe. To relax, I take long runs out from my office in the Museum of Natural History, beneath the purple blossoms of redbud trees along Memorial Drive and onto the levees bordering the Kansas River, running eight to ten miles at a time and matching the sparrows in their restlessness. During my preparations, I often feel guilty, because I will soon leave my wife and children to fend for themselves. Three months might not be much relative to military personnel who are absent from home for as much as a year, but the separation isn’t trivial. It will place a tremendous burden on Melissa, who suddenly will be without a partner to help with everything from childcare to household chores. And Liza doesn’t help to assuage my feelings of irresponsibility. As a three-year-old, she asks, “Why do you have to go?” The next year, as I board a plane for Spokane she cries out, “I don’t want my Daddy to be a biologist!” Guilt, as well as gasoline, will fuel my drive north. But it is a relief to finally move. Like the birds, I have prepared as best I can for the long journey to Warden’s Grove. I am compelled to migrate, eager to become Homo peregrinus, the Wandering Man. I am ready to begin my research, ready to follow the movements of the small bird that will serve as my compass: North. Birds wintering around Lawrence probably cover a straight-line distance of at least sixteen hundred miles during their spring migration. If Harris’s Sparrows navigate with the same cues used by other medium- and long-distance migrant songbirds, they guide themselves during their nocturnal flights primarily by celestial cues, the dip and

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orientation of magnetic fields, and their position relative to the setting sun. Whatever their navigational tools, the Harris’s Sparrow migration advances along a broad front that extends across much of the central Great Plains, with the highest numbers occurring east of the 100th meridian. Their northward flight is more certain and swift than their fall migration, although their passage may be delayed by late season storms. Scattered banding returns suggest that Harris’s Sparrows move an average of 65 miles per night, although recent radiotelemetry studies indicate that similar-sized North American thrushes may cover as much as 130 miles on nights that they fly. Spring migrants usually arrive in North Dakota during the first week in May and pass quickly northward, reaching their breeding grounds during the last week of the month. On their way north, they pass through the wheat and corn fields of the Midwest, then through the aspen parklands of southern Canada. Their nocturnal flights carry them across the wide sweep of boreal forest that in the prairie provinces begins somewhere around 52° N and spreads into the immense solitude beyond La Ronge, Saskatchewan, and Flin Flon, Manitoba. Birds that summer at Warden’s Grove must move along a line trending northwest from eastern North Dakota to near the 105th meridian, passing into the boreal forest beyond Winnipeg, flying past scattered, isolated settlements, across countless lakes and rivers just beginning to melt out after the long winter. Somewhere beyond the 60th parallel, the border of the Northwest Territories, they cross treeline, move into the forest-tundra transition, and pick up the thin, intermittent necklace of spruce that traces the Thelon River Valley. Two hundred miles or so after crossing into the Thelon’s watershed and a few miles downstream from where two rivers spill into the Thelon, many of them must recognize a triangular patch of trees situated above the west bank of the river and somehow know that it is time to cease moving. They arrive when much of the ground is snowcovered, temperatures can drop into the single digits, and the Thelon is still frozen. Their flight will have carried them beyond the forests and beyond spring, back to the edge of winter and into a wilderness of light and snow, spruce and tundra. When I think of Harris’s Sparrows during spring migration, I imagine their final movements toward the breeding grounds as steady and determined, impelled by the flux of hormones in their blood and

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the gathering light. They pause, but only if they must, as when an arctic front dips into the boreal forest and spring temporarily retreats from the North. In May 1991, during a week-long bout of miserable weather, I waited at a friend’s camp near the Hoarfrost River, on the northeastern margin of Great Slave Lake, for the opportunity to fly into Warden’s Grove. Storm-bound and anxious, I watched Harris’s Sparrows collect by the hundreds in sheltered woods just beyond the margin of the lake, only a few dozen miles from their breeding grounds. The skies were low and gray, full of sleet and wet snow, the winds fierce and bitter out of the north. Conditions at my friend’s place were difficult enough for the sparrows, but they would have been far worse in the exposed and rocky uplands rising immediately to the north. The Harris’s Sparrows hopped nervously through the snowcovered spruce trees as they foraged among the lichens and shrubs, and were easy to catch as they flocked to my seed-baited traps. Those that I banded carried plenty of fat, and the males were approaching breeding condition. They were mostly quiet, but when I stepped out of the cabin one morning, I heard a lonely, desultory Harris’s Sparrow song. The notes floated through the flurries of drifting snow, as if suggesting that the birds were primed for summer even if the land was not. But a few days later, the weather turned and the Harris’s Sparrows vanished into the arctic spring — or, like the little fur child in the book I read to Liza when she was three, “into the windiness, into the wild.” By following the rising country north to their breeding grounds, they would have finished their long migration out of the south in no more than a few hours. Then they would have settled into a land where the forest fades into tundra, into a country without people, into the great silence: Home. First comes the long drive west across Kansas and into eastern Colorado on Interstate 70, then north and west through Montana and Alberta. Beyond Edmonton, the route trends mostly north to Great Slave Lake and the Mackenzie River. Our initial destination is Yellowknife, capital of the Northwest Territories, where the road north ends. From Yellowknife, we will charter a small plane to carry us into Warden’s Grove, about three hundred and fifty miles to the northeast. There is this general geographic pattern to my migration, but each May the details of the journey, and my companions, are different. In 1989,

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I drive from Lawrence with Ken Wicker, my research assistant for the first summer. The second year, I drive alone from Lawrence, and meet my new field assistant, Martin Fuller, in Yellowknife. In 1991, I fly to Spokane, Washington, where I meet up with my brother-inlaw, Paul Hendricks, who will help out during my final field season. Each time, I make the three-thousand-mile journey from Lawrence in four or five days of intensive travel, sleeping only four or five hours a night, immersed in pedal-to-the-floor movement and the desire to be there. I race north because I want to beat the Harris’s Sparrows to my research site. I carry with me the frantic pace of my academic and family life and a refusal to acknowledge the necessity of adaptation, of slowness, when dictated by circumstance. An illustration: On the first trip, Ken and I plow headlong into an ice-choked Mackenzie River on May 15, fewer than four days after leaving Lawrence. The Mackenzie River ferry is still shut down, a beached metal whale on the southern side of the crossing. Welders are working on the ferry, and the streams of sparks arcing from their torches tell me that there will be no quick way to finish the last miles of the drive. Yet, for me, waiting is an emotional and physical impossibility, fueled as I am by momentum and impatience, running north out of a southern sensibility. The Metís woman with strabismus who pumps our gas at the roadside stop near the ferry comments, “Yeah, that ferry won’t be running for another week or two,” as one eye drifts off into space. Her disconcerting gaze brings me to an abrupt halt under a depressive gray sky, in a garbage-strewn parking lot two hundred miles shy of Yellowknife, and I wonder if the birds have passed me by and already reached Warden’s Grove.

Migration Notes Kansas Waves of wind over fields of winter wheat spread beneath a mackerel sky as we barrel across the Great Plains. The familiar westward progression from the ecotone of oak-hickory forest and prairie (or now, agricultural fields) surrounding Lawrence: trees scatter and thin and the woods no longer cover the hills, hiding only in swales and bottomlands along meandering, muddy streams. As the trees

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disappear, so do the people, and soon there are only scattered towns — Ogallah, WaKeeney, Oakley, Colby, each with the gray, cylindrical grain elevators that anchor the island settlement to an ocean of sky. Humidity drains from the air. There is more atmospheric clarity and light; the clouds have more vertical sense about them as thermals drive moisture higher into the atmosphere. West of Hays, near the 100th meridian, sage and yucca first find a home. Lark Buntings, a species of the prairie, rise into the air. The brilliant, katydid green of new cottonwood leaves traces the paths of sandy washes. Somewhere in eastern Colorado, well after midnight, we pull off the highway and throw down our sleeping bags in the shortgrass prairie. We rise in the cool dawn to the smell of sage and moist grass, and the song of a Western Meadowlark. At first light, I brew a pot of tea and then we’re back on the road. We slip through Denver before rush hour, turn north and move along the eastern edge of the Front Range to the lovely poetry of the western sky — syntax of clouds, rhyme of light and space, dance of virga on the horizon.

Wyoming We drive on through the dry bunchgrass basin of the Powder River country, past the massive scarp of the Bighorns rising just to the west, scattered flocks of grazing pronghorn antelope, the backlit silhouette of fault-block mountains stretching north. We begin to grant the drive its rhythm, accept the long hours of sitting, the hurried meals in marginal restaurants, the engine’s never-ceasing hum chanting us North, always North. Music helps here. There’s a point at which the songs drifting from the tape deck mesh with our motion, with the slap of tires on asphalt. A musician friend says that the songs I like best for driving are generally in 2/4 time, which works well for movement. The proper rhythm is created by strong and repetitive, but not overly insistent, bass and percussion lines. The melodies are in places subtle, in others complex and unpredictable, like the drive itself. Long instrumental pieces are best, open-textured music that unfolds gradually, with bright spots flashing like the land — improvisations on a theme of place, on the subtleties and variations of terrain, emotion, and human culture that reveal themselves with our movement. The sections within songs that I respond to most intensely often involve what I think of as

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musical ecotones: transitions in pitch and tempo in which the weight and tension of the melodic line builds gradually toward change and then resolution. Even the titles of some pieces help: “Are You Going With Me?” “The Fields, The Sky,” and “’Cross the Heartland” by the Pat Metheny Group; “Song of the Wind” or “Tales of Kilamanjaro” by Santana. And the right music encourages a gradual transition in mood, like the way in which landscapes blend with one another, emotional transitions merging with geographical ones. As we climb through high desert grasslands, pockets of aspen and pine appear in more sheltered sites, perhaps nestled beneath a north-facing cliff. Soon the grasslands are gone, replaced by forests of ponderosa pine and Douglas fir. Doubts about my project dissipate with the sweetness and grace of the music and the land, replaced by a sense of optimism. The music carries us into another country.

Montana In one of the most evocatively named places that I’ve ever encountered — Big Timber, Sweetgrass County — we stop for breakfast at the Frosty-Freeze Drive In. It looks enticing because all of the vehicles parked out front are local — no Winnebagos. The décor also suggests that we’ve made a good choice: 1950s-era linoleum and metal, sturdy and worn, no recent exercise in nostalgia. The breakfast, when it comes, is huge: bacon, eggs, and pancakes, and nothing is too greasy. Even the tea is hot enough, a real surprise in the American roadside cafés’ perennial competition to combine tepid water and cheap orange pekoe to create the World’s Worst Cup of Tea. In the booth next to us are two elderly farming couples, the males in bib overalls and baseball caps. The talk is of the usual things — the weather, chores to be done, what’s going on in town, the price of things: “God-damn a duck. I’ve got to put new tires on my tractor. They cost seven hundred dollars each and I just bought ’em eighteen months ago.” We drive through light rain showers, low gray clouds breaking against the flanks of the Big Belt Mountains. Rain falls on verdant young hayfields, the rivers muddy and high. In the high valleys north of Bozeman, the cottonwoods are just now breaking bud and it feels like we are outrunning spring. Earlier in the day, wet snow drifted

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out of a somber sky, blanketing the gray and silent woods along the streams. The wipers beat in time with our motion, metronomes for my dreams. There’s something vaguely sensual about this movement, the gentle sway of the land like the hips of a young woman, the promise of connection, a graceful touch upon the skin and soul, some hope that’s waiting just ahead, beyond the next range of hills, as Richard Hugo wrote in “Driving Montana”: Tomorrow will open again, the sky wide As the mouth of a wild girl, friable clouds you lose yourself to. You are lost in miles of land without people, without one fear of being found, in the dash of rabbits, soar of antelope, swirl merge and clatter of streams.

Alberta We stop to run in southern Alberta, hoping to shake off the combination of tight muscles and sluggishness that comes from too many hours of continuous driving. We leave the car in a tiny park at the edge of a prairie town and head into the country, past white farmhouses and brightly painted wooden grain elevators, one brick red, another turquoise blue. Male Red-winged Blackbirds sit perched in pockets of marshland, bright drops of black and reddish-orange color against a yellow-green canvas of young cattail shoots. The sun is at our backs and the angle of light paints the scattered clouds as warm balls of cotton, the fields and sky a rich pallet of green and blue pastels. After ten minutes of running, the stiffness in my joints disappears; thirty minutes later, and I am temporarily free of the mental and physical chains that have bound me to the road. Northwest of Edmonton, the highway carries us back into the height of a spring fueled by the lengthening days. Night drains from the sky. Out of the aspen parklands and into the boreal forest, the road is a gray vector slicing through the green tide of spruce and budding birch that rises with the latitude. On a warm morning, with the wind gentle out of the south, the highway feels like a swift but placid river; it’s as if we were riding gravity northward, without effort, sliding downhill through a great but gentle basin that stretches

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all the way from Kansas to Great Slave Lake. The long rush out of Kansas metamorphoses into ritual as we roll through the string of towns leading north: Valleyview, Peace River, Manning, High Level. We reach a point at which the quality of light and shifting landscape and the steady stream of miles are no longer a transition, no longer a getting to somewhere, and we are locked onto the asphalt arrow shooting north, toward some seven-inch-long bird waiting beyond the forest, along a still-frozen river. A musician once defined a melody as “a group of notes in love with one another,” and I wonder if it’s possible to describe this time of perfect movement as one when the miles are wonderfully in love with one another. There’s a gentle swell of land near Valleyview where the terrain slopes away toward the Peace River and the 60th parallel, where the promise of the North lies spread out before me, waiting just beyond the horizon. Speeding down the long, gentle grade to Peace River on a fine May morning, there’s a sense of insouciant youth in the air, with the rich black fields stretching on into the infinite distance, toward the tundra and the shining rivers. Sometimes I wonder if I am more in love with the idea of the North than with the North itself, but when I look toward the Arctic on a brilliant spring day, I sense that I am returning to a place that feels like home. Beyond Valleyview, at the edge of the possible, the world is open to change. For the moment there are, blessedly, no questions, and I encounter the sudden joy of recognition that’s like the great, swelling surge of summer’s light.

Northwest Territories After sleeping north of Edmonton, we cross into the Northwest Territories at the 60th parallel and again leave spring behind; the birches along the highway are leafless, the air still carries a taste of winter. Just beyond Louise and Alexandra Falls on the Hay River, we leave the pavement and turn onto the Mackenzie Highway for the 250-mile arc around the western end of Great Slave Lake to Yellowknife. Each year, I worry that we will hit the Mackenzie River when it can’t be crossed, in the window between the closing of the winter ice road and the opening of the ferry, when the river is running but still choked with ice. In 1989, when I am most anxious about the project, the thaw is late and the ferry isn’t operating. So Ken and I retreat ninety miles to the town of Hay River on the southern shore

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of Great Slave Lake, throw our equipment onto a commercial flight and vault the lake to Yellowknife. But in 1990 and 1991, the ferry opens earlier and we are easily across the turgid, gray river and into the North, rattling through muskeg and swaths of upland spruce, clouds of dust and gravel spitting from passing cars. Yearning to be finished with the drive after sixteen straight hours or more behind the wheel, we run out of the great broad valley of the Mackenzie River and into the granitic uplands of the Canadian Shield country, moving from a land of big rivers to one of myriad lakes, already thinking of the Barrens, wanting to be free of the tyranny of the automobile, finally hitting pavement just before town and thankful that the driving is DONE. And then it’s ennui in Yellowknife, the Northwest Territories’ largest town. Each year, our hurried migration is followed by a week or more of bad weather that prevents us from flying into the Thelon. Each year, there’s a long stretch of impatient lassitude, punctuated by an aborted flight to or beyond Reliance, the tiny settlement at the eastern end of Great Slave Lake, where we leave behind the clear or partly cloudy skies that have been with us since Yellowknife. Immediately north and east of Reliance, the country changes dramatically; the trees thin quickly and the forest-tundra transition is only about forty miles wide. This rapid transition is due partly to elevational change, as the land rises almost one thousand feet from Great Slave Lake in a few miles, but this also is a region where continental and arctic air masses collide, creating a strong climatic gradient and unpredictable weather conditions. The transitional nature of the weather patterns, combined with an absence of weather stations in the 450 miles between the east of Great Slave Lake and the village of Baker Lake, means that it is difficult to predict what flying conditions will be like over the Barrens, based on the situation at Yellowknife. And so each year, we pile eight hundred pounds of food and equipment into a single-engined Turbo Beaver equipped with skis and head east from Yellowknife under clear skies, only to be turned back by bad weather short of the Thelon River. In 1989, we get only as far as the Reliance area, while in 1990 and 1991, we make it to within fifty miles of Warden’s Grove before running into thick clouds that make it impossible to locate the cabin. In 1989 and 1990, we return to Yellowknife for another four to seven days, while in 1991, we are

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fortunate enough to spend four days with my friend Dave Olesen at his Hoarfrost River camp, about twelve miles shy of Reliance. Forced to a halt by recalcitrant weather just a few hours of flying short of our goal, we are grounded, like the Harris’s Sparrows, in the midst of snow squalls and the rough arctic winds. Waiting. In Yellowknife, we put up in a cluttered mobile home rented by the Canadian Wildlife Service and begin playing our annual word association game: Yellowknife equals boredom, sloth, tedium, lethargy, anxiety, inactivity, monotony, lassitude, drudgery — and most definitely, general malaise. After buying a few last-minute supplies and meeting with several biologists there isn’t much to do — or rather, my inertia and lack of motivation blind me to any possibilities beside waiting. I feel displaced, trapped in a state of suspended animation somewhere between Kansas and the Barrens. Yellowknife is just emerging from winter and many of its streets are dusty and strewn with garbage, and the place seems shabby and impermanent. On overcast days, which occur frequently, everything about the town is cast in shades of dreary gray. We wander among the small cluster of downtown office buildings and high-rise hotels, past a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant and prefabricated homes, and think of Yellowknife as just a small slice of Edmonton transported six hundred miles north. Yet, I know that my view of the town is superficial, tainted by my restlessness and my status as a transient, someone who lacks the sense of place of a resident. On most days, we are tethered to the phone because the charter company might suddenly decide to head for the Thelon. We wait anxiously, enticed by the possibility of flying, drinking too much tea, not exercising, watching too much TV and, as Martin puts it, “reading the hell out of the paper.” On days when the weather is cold and rainy, the waiting makes sense; on days of bright sun, though, it’s hard to sit still, even if a meteorologist at the airport tells us that flying conditions are vastly different two hundred miles to the east. I am at the twin mercies of the weather and the charter company, and I resent my lack of control. There is too much empty time; I spend countless hours trapped in an infinite loop of worry, wondering if the Harris’s Sparrows already have arrived at Warden’s Grove, if my money will run out, if the cabin will be uninhabitable, if my research project and

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entire Ph.D. program will disintegrate because I am unable to reach my research site. The best times in Yellowknife are spent outside, away from my anxieties — banding raven chicks with a biologist with the NWT Department of Renewable Resources, or sitting on a lichen-spotted rock by the shore of Kam Lake on the outskirts of town at 10:00 P.M., watching the sun slide toward the horizon between a mantle of gray clouds and band of spruce that mark the western edge of the land. Pans of melting lake ice, arcs of radiance, glow in the soft light while wood frogs call from the shallows. For a moment, I am able to shed my doubt and lethargy; for a moment, I can accept my temporary captivity, yet still believe in my enterprise. I also can believe in the North and in my place in it, when we are invited into local homes, and there is the opportunity for companionship, for long, rambling conversations, and I am able to temporarily abandon my obsession with getting out of Yellowknife. And then finally, as on May 21, 1989, there are the adrenalinproducing words: “Flying conditions look good. Come on out to the airport!” Ken and I use every square foot of available space in the Turbo Beaver for gear and bodies, and we’re soon airborne on our three-hour flight, headed over the wooded Canadian Shield country east of town, above ice-bound lakes ringed by open water, leaving the last of the roads behind. Beyond Yellowknife, there’s almost nothing in the way of human habitation until Baker Lake, 590 miles to the northeast — just the miniscule settlement of Reliance, which is little more than a handful of scattered cabins. We hit Great Slave Lake at Taltheilei Narrows, where McLeod Bay empties from the east into the main body of the lake and currents keep the water open through the winter. Off to our right are the massive scarps of brown granitic rock that form Pethei and Kahochella Peninsulas, rising over one thousand feet above the frozen reaches of McLeod Bay and running east all the way to Reliance. We land on the lake ice near the village so that Wally, our pilot, can refuel the plane from a cache of forty-five-gallon drums. Beyond Reliance, we climb over familiar country — Pike’s Portage, and the string of lakes and carries that I followed in 1977, past Artillery Lake and into the Barrens. There’s little conversation; Wally is laconic, focused on route finding and the country ahead,

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although at one point he glances at me, shakes his head slightly, and says, “I’d never want to do what you guys are doing.” Ken is quiet in back, and I am intent on picking out landmarks from my 1977 trip. At Artillery Lake, we leave behind the last of the spruce, and there is nothing below but a trichromatic world of snow and ice, burnt umber tundra, and gray, frost-shattered rock. From the air, there looks to be little relief — just an endless progression of frozen lakes and low, rounded hills, still mostly blanketed in snow. We are flying above country that’s more water than dry land — a pointillist landscape of ice-covered lakes, gouged by Pleistocene glaciers into an infinite variety of sizes and shapes. Occasional eskers, levee-shaped strands of sediment deposited by streams flowing beneath the glaciers, snake toward the horizon, which fades into a guess of bluish-white snow and sky. I imagine Warden’s Grove, somewhere Out There, one hundred miles to the northeast, a copse of spruce and an abandoned cabin lost in the Barrens; once we have crossed this land and been set down amidst this vastness, we will have been denied one world, yet given another. The plane drones on and it’s too loud to talk much. I sink into the vastness; in any case, I am too anxious for casual conversation. I fidget with the map on my knees as I search for familiar landmarks and imagine covering a similar distance in the Midwest — say Interstate 70 between Lawrence and St. Louis — and encountering not a single sign of human habitation in all of that country. Alaska is huge and mostly empty — about 640,000 people in 571,000 square miles — but the Northwest Territories are more immense and even less crowded: only 65,000 people in an area more than twice as large as Alaska. As we fly over a minuscule slice of this emptiness, Ken hunkers down in the back seat, mute, his six-foot-four-inch frame crammed amongst the boxes and packs. He retreats further and further into his parka, like a turtle pulling its head into its shell, seeking a small and comforting radius of shelter from the unfamiliar distance that engulfs him. It’s the very day that he should be graduating with his friends and walking down Memorial Hill at the University of Kansas, drinking beer, kissing a young woman, and celebrating on a warm and sunny morning — and here he is, headed into an isolation such as he has never seen, into terra incognita. He seems nervous and a bit overwhelmed; hell, I have some idea of what to expect, and I’m

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agitated. I feel as though the plane has carried me through a thick band of my own reluctance, or as if I’m paddling into the head drop of a fierce rapid: This is it; no more doubt, no more questions. The ennui of Yellowknife has vanished. We cross the height of land east of Artillery Lake, pass over Ford Lake, Campbell Lake, and Mary Frances Lake. On the gradual descent into the Hanbury River drainage, we encounter the first scattered pockets of spruce huddled on the leeward slopes of eskers, a sign that we are approaching the oasis of trees that traces the Thelon River far into the Barrens. We find Hoare Lake on the Hanbury River, which lies on the summer canoe route between Great Slave Lake and Thelon River, and turn downstream, following the thin necklace of ice and stunted trees on its route through familiar territory — Dickson Canyon, Ford Falls, and Helen Falls. Soon we reach the junction of the Thelon and Hanbury rivers, bank northward and track the frozen river for a few miles before I see Warden’s Grove. It’s off to the left of the plane and about a quarter mile from the river, a small wedge of spruce surrounded by tundra, sitting partway up the slope of a rocky hill that rises five hundred feet above the river. We pass over the cabin, then tilt sharply above the broad, S-curved sweep of the Thelon. Wally lines up on the long axis of the river and descends quickly, working the rudders and easing back on the throttle, nosing the plane toward the frozen surface. There’s that sensation of hesitant falling, a bit like the feeling when you descend a set of stairs and pause ever so briefly on each tread — and then we’re down on the river ice. Wally reverses the props on the Turbo Beaver, we bounce to a rapid halt, and he turns off the engine. For a moment or two, I listen to the ticks of the cooling motor as it settles into silence, then I swing open the door and tumble out of the plane. We quickly unload the food and equipment onto the river ice; a few minutes later, we’ve said our hasty good-byes and Wally taxies into the wind and accelerates upriver. There’s a roar of noise and we are blasted by the wash of the prop as the Beaver goes airborne and retreats westward, toward Yellowknife. For a minute or two, Ken and I focus on the receding plane. We watch it disappear into the cloudless sky, saying nothing, each of us quiet in the abrupt isolation, in the awareness of where we are, and where we are not. And then, suddenly, I am conscious of the

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Barrens — of a soft southerly wind, cold air on my face, brilliant sunlight reflected off the river ice, and Warden’s Grove off to my right, uphill and just out of sight. Patches of open, tawny sedge meadows dot the bank of the river where the snows have melted away. This is familiar ground and there’s a faint but recognizable smell in the air, of thawing tundra and warming soil. In spite of the breeze and a cacophony of goose calls rising from somewhere nearby — snow, Canada, and white-fronted geese, mostly headed north — the stillness of the place envelops us. Our world has narrowed, very suddenly, to this bit of ground. Like the Harris’s Sparrows, we have migrated to a land where the forest fades into tundra, into a country without people, into the great silence.

Settling . . . . . . . . .In ................................................ I imagine the first sparrows of spring reaching Warden’s Grove in the early morning, a flock of four tracing the Thelon’s valley downriver, pushed north out of the trees by a following wind. I imagine that these birds have come all the way from Kansas, that they left in April, that they are weary of flying, yet still strong — that they have made this last flight of migration from north of the Saskatchewan border, working their way through snow squalls, navigating beneath a dawn sky streaked with tendrils of clouds. They arrive at 2:00 A.M., greeted by the desultory song of a lone robin, the temperature a few degrees below freezing. The small flock comes in low over the tundra in the gloaming light, skims the ice-crusted sedge meadow east of the cabin, then wheels into the spruce with a quick but graceful arc. Each bird tilts its wings back, fans its tail, and settles onto a perch with a gentle ruffle of feathers. All are tired after the long flight. Three of the four birds, two males and a female, recognize this place. They bred here last year, know the dip and sway of the land, the particular way in which the spruce along the south side of the grove grades into tundra, with the broad sweep of river below the trees. They know the best places to feed, recall the paths of predators. But the fourth bird, a female, is new to Warden’s Grove. Last summer, she fledged from a nest sixty miles to the south, in open country near where the Thelon spills into the south end of Eyeberry Lake. She has been with the older birds since northern Saskatchewan, and stops moving only when they do. The four birds will spend the next fifteen weeks here, within a quarter mile of where they first settle. Since leaving Kansas, they have flown over sixteen hundred miles, into a land that’s only now, tentatively, emerging from winter. But they carry spring with them, through the snow and cold and wind, their arrival an unconscious act of hope. he first migrant Harris’s Sparrows reach the Thelon during the latter half of May. They arrive at the midway point of the spring

T

28 Settling In

migration for songbirds that breed around Warden’s Grove — after Northern Shrikes, American Robins, American Tree Sparrows, and Lapland Longspurs, but before White-crowned Sparrows, Graycheeked Thrushes, and Blackpoll Warblers. Most likely, they have followed the Thelon River north, using its broad, frozen path as a navigational aid. The Harris’s Sparrows seek out an ecotone within the larger forest-tundra ecotone, where small patches of spruce woods grade into dwarf birch, green alder, and willow, and these shrubs grade into dry upland tundra. As during the winter, Harris’s Sparrows venture out of protected thickets to forage on the ground amidst the shrubs or perhaps beyond, in more open habitat. But they almost always remain within fifty yards of cover, which is why the species doesn’t breed beyond the furthest reaches of the forest-tundra transition. However, they also require habitat with scattered shrubs and open ground, and do not breed in the closed boreal forest. Because spruce comprises only about 10 percent of the habitat around Warden’s Grove, Harris’s Sparrows are birds of islands. They live in an archipelago of spruce groves, each island isolated from the others by a sea of mostly uninhabitable rock, sedge, and grass, and they are tied to their wooded islands only slightly less than any terrestrial bird is restricted to an oceanic island. When Harris’s Sparrows arrive at Warden’s Grove, most of the ground beneath the spruce still is blanketed in several feet of snow, and the best areas for foraging are at the edge of the tundra, where the snow is less deep and melts earlier. Unlike the birds at the Hoarfrost River, grounded only a few miles and days shy of their breeding grounds by inclement weather, Harris’s Sparrows returning to Warden’s Grove are no longer in large flocks. Sometimes solitary, sometimes in small groups of two to six birds, they shuttle back and forth between snow-free ground and thick cover, moving constantly while they forage. Some are headed farther north and disappear shortly after arrival, but the activities of others already are centered on the ground that will become their territory, and where they will nest. In contrast to many species of boreal- or arctic-breeding migratory birds, in which males arrive between a few days to a few weeks earlier than females, both sexes of Harris’s Sparrows reach Warden’s Grove at about the same time. When males arrive, they are approach-

Settling In 29

ing prime breeding condition, with enlarged testes and testosterone near maximum levels. Both males and females have bold black plumage on their bibs and heads, and are indistinguishable from a distance, but a breeding male in the hand is easily sexed. Unlike in most male mammals, a male bird’s testes are buried deep within its body cavity. However, breeding males have a swollen area around the cloaca called (naturally) the cloacal protuberance. This structure contains the sperm storage organs — the seminal vesicles — and it becomes enlarged and turgid when a male is producing high levels of testosterone and sperm. The transition from nonbreeding to full breeding condition is a gradual process that begins well before the birds arrive at Warden’s Grove, but the final stages in the transition must occur fairly rapidly. Birds halted in late May at the Hoarfrost River had only partially swollen cloacal protuberances, while they were fully developed in males arriving at Warden’s Grove. Although their testes continue to grow for a few weeks more, they are fertile and physiologically ready to breed, and they do not have much time to do so. Unlike for many temperate-breeding species, the breeding season of migratory arctic birds is constrained by the short length of the growing season and conditions favorable for reproduction. Territory establishment, nest-building, egg-laying and incubation, raising and fledging nestlings, and development of fledged young to the point where they can manage the southward migration, must occur within a narrow window of time — about three months maximum at Warden’s Grove. Thus, males begin singing within two days of their arrival at Warden’s Grove, although other activities associated with territory establishment and courtship will not peak until early June. Even though males arrive at Warden’s Grove very close to full breeding condition, females take a bit longer to become breedingready. Levels of hormones associated with reproduction, such as luteinizing hormone and estradiol (an estrogen), don’t reach maximum levels until they have been on the breeding grounds for several weeks, and proportionally their ovaries grow much more than the gonads of males during this time. Both sexes, however, are in excellent physical condition when they arrive, at or near their maximal weight. The size ranges of males and females overlap; on average, males weigh more than females, about thirty-nine grams versus thirty-four grams

30 Settling In

(an average male weighs as much as a handful of about sixty raisins), and both sexes carry high levels of subcutaneous fat. Qualitative estimates of body fat are much easier to make in many birds than in mammals because bird skin is relatively thin and transparent, and the bird’s fat is stored in clearly demarcated, yellowish subcutaneous deposits. Two of the most prominent deposits are located on the abdomen just below the ribs, and in the v-shaped hollow between the paired clavicles and coracoid bones. Although females tend to have more stored lipids than males, many birds of both sexes arriving on the breeding ground are bulging with fat — an indication that their fifteen-hundred-mile-plus migration, with its potential vicissitudes, has not depleted their energy reserves. And they will need these reserves to help them through the early part of the nesting season, when harsh weather and energy-demanding activities, such as territory establishment for the males and egg-laying for the females, place additional energy demands on birds. Late May and early June at Warden’s Grove can be a tough time for small birds. One day may be beautiful, with bright sun, gentle winds, and temperatures five or even ten degrees above freezing — and the land seems as blessed as any on earth. But twelve hours later, the Barrens can be struck by a long and bitter arctic storm. In midJune 1978, a four-day storm brought freezing rain, snow, and winds that were continuously higher than forty miles per hour, with gusts above seventy. In the aftermath of the storm, dead Horned Larks and Lapland Longspurs lay scattered over the tundra. Insectivorous species such as Blackpoll Warblers and Yellow-rumped Warblers, which forage mostly in trees, disappeared from their territories, never to return. But I found no dead Harris’s Sparrows or White-crowned Sparrows, and most males on territories prior to the storm remained after it had passed. In 1991 a severe three-day storm began on May 29, after Harris’s Sparrows had arrived at Warden’s Grove. More than a foot of new snow fell; open ground completely disappeared; and temperatures plunged to fifteen degrees. Nothing moved on the tundra or in the trees, and almost all of the Harris’s Sparrows vanished temporarily. Where did they go? At timberline in the Sierra Nevada of California in May, White-crowned Sparrows may abandon their breeding grounds temporarily during inclement weather and fly four

Settling In 31

to ten miles eastward, and three thousand feet down slope, to where conditions are milder, to wait out the storm. However, there was no similar, readily available retreat for Harris’s Sparrows at Warden’s Grove, and when I ventured out into the storm, I never saw any birds sheltering in the spruce, or foraging. Although almost all of the Harris’s Sparrows apparently disappeared for a few days during the storm, most did not die; they were back in force on the first of June, emerging into milder conditions from some unknown refuge. Most small songbirds run hot. When active, their body temperatures average five or six degrees Fahrenheit higher than in equivalent-sized mammals. This trait, along with their small body size and high surface-to-volume ratio, means that Harris’s Sparrows require a lot of energy to fuel their activities, especially when events like spring storms bring colder than normal temperatures and high winds that challenge a bird’s ability to thermoregulate. At temperatures five or ten degrees below freezing, a bird the size of a Harris’s Sparrow exposed to winds of only ten miles per hour requires up to 30 percent more energy to maintain its body temperature than if winds were calm. Harris’s Sparrows confronting a spring storm can rely to some extent on stored fat reserves and seek out favorable microclimates in which to roost, where there is much less wind and perhaps slightly higher temperatures. Still, at some point, they must eat in order to defend their body temperatures — when food is potentially difficult to find. In late May and early June, few of the arthropods that form the bulk of their summer diet are active, although spiders and some other ground-dwelling groups appear in patches of snow-free ground before flying insects become common three or four weeks later. Harris’s Sparrows eat whatever arthropods and seeds they can find, but early in the breeding season they rely heavily on the small fruits of several species of prostrate, woody “subshrubs,” which ripen during the previous summer and are preserved for up to eight months beneath the snow. The sparrows feed mostly on the bright red fruits of mountain cranberry and the dark purple fruits of crowberry and alpine bearberry, which are arrayed along tiny ground-level branches, among senescent or dead leaves. Crowberry is in its own plant family, while mountain cranberry is a relative of blueberry, and alpine

32 Settling In

bearberry is a close relative of manzanita. All three are circumpolar species, widely distributed throughout the Old and New Worlds in arctic, alpine, and boreal habitats. Some fruits that are common in the fall at Warden’s Grove are gone in the spring, particularly bilberry, another blueberry relative, and cloudberry, a relative of the raspberry — perhaps because they either grow above ground-level (bilberry), or are thin-skinned and fleshy (cloudberry). But rich pockets of mountain cranberry, crowberry, and bearberry are scattered throughout the woods, shrubs, and dry upland tundra, where they reach densities of up to ninety fruits per square meter. The fruits are high in sugar but low in protein and lipids, and surprisingly sweet after the long hiatus between ripening and consumption. Early in the season, Harris’s Sparrows work among the patches, their bills and bibs stained purple, consuming up to ten fruits per minute, pausing every now and then to scan for predators. Perhaps the Harris’s Sparrow’s early-season reliance on such an abundant food, one present in the relatively benign microclimate at ground level and whose availability doesn’t depend on the weather, means that they are better able to forage during periods of inclement weather than are birds such as the Blackpoll Warbler, which feeds in more exposed locations and relies more heavily on insects during the breeding season. The summer business of Harris’s Sparrows is reproduction, and the birds get about it quickly as they establish breeding territories during their first few weeks at Warden’s Grove. Males begin singing within a few days of their arrival. Although at first their singing is sporadic, males soon are singing at rates of ten songs per minute during bouts that may last up to fifty minutes. Their songs, consisting of one to three pure tonal notes at the same pitch, fill the air around Warden’s Grove from the start of the dawn chorus at 12:30 in the morning until about 8:30 in the evening, with a few determined stragglers continuing until after 10. George Sutton described these notes as “plaintive whistles,” elaborating in language now vanished from the scientific literature: The above tune is almost precisely the first four measures of Schubert’s Minuet from the Sonata in G, Opus 78, No. 3, save for the omission from the birds’ performance of the very first note of the composition. The hiatus is filled in the above score, by a quar-

Settling In 33

ter rest. The Minuet is an allegro moderato movement, whereas the birds sang it more as largo. Males sometimes interject a hoarse, buzzy call amongst their whistled songs, which Sutton describes as “Eeeeeeeeee zhee, zhee, zhee, zhee, zhee.” But allegro or largo, whistles or buzzes, Harris’s Sparrow songs and calls are a constant aural backdrop during late May and June, as males establish territories and attract mates. Harris’s Sparrows generally are tolerant of one another and not given to great displays of aggression. However, during the first two weeks of June, they temporarily abandon their placid demeanors, moved by hormonal surges and the urgency of reproduction. Males sing and survey their incipient territories from the tops of stunted spruces, from where they suddenly may interrupt a song bout to dive toward an intruding male. What follows may be a twisting, acrobatic flight amongst the spruce and shrubs, perhaps joined by several other birds, with the air full of sharp turns and twittering complaints. Or one male may fly slowly toward another male, almost suspended in midair, his breast feathers fluffed out, crown feathers erected and head held back as he sings. Females also participate in chases and other aggressive interactions associated with territorial defense, although they generally seem more amiable than the males. In any case, the contests end suddenly and without apparent reason, the birds having at least temporarily settled whatever issue they were squabbling about and then returning to what they were doing before the dispute began — singing, feeding, or perching quietly. In early June, relations among the sparrows seem fluid, as if they have not yet worked out the social arrangements that will carry them through the summer. Territorial boundaries shift and birds may move several hundred yards off territory to a favored foraging site, where they feed in loose, small flocks. Two males may perch side by side for a few minutes, seemingly oblivious to one another, then abruptly give chase. Disputes erupt and then are quickly abandoned. A male and female follow one another closely for an hour, never more than a few yards apart, then suddenly separate, only to rejoin one another thirty minutes later. Birds flock during a storm, then re-form pairs immediately afterwards. But whatever any one pair of sparrows is doing at the moment, there is an air of intensity and urgency about

34 Settling In

their collective activities. There is more noise, more volume, more movement, and more interaction, and this pattern is repeated across other species that breed in or around Warden’s Grove. And on one of those rare and special days in early June, when the temperature hits fifty degrees, when the air is laced with brilliant light and only a slight breath of wind touches the tundra, when rivulets of meltwater are everywhere amongst the trees and meadows — the land is electric, alive with the passions of birds. Although during the first two weeks of June space use and relationships among the birds are dynamic and unsettled, there is a pattern in the behavior of both males and females: more time on territory, more time together as a pair, more overtly sexual behavior. Each male starts behaving like a benevolent stalker. He remains close to his mate, shadowing her as she moves — foraging within a few feet of her, or watching her intently from a nearby perch. It is obvious that the female controls the pace and flow of the activity, as if she is leading her partner, who behaves like a demented poodle on an invisible leash. The female moves, and the male invariably follows; the male moves first, and the female, likely as not, remains behind. The purpose of the male’s behavior is mate guarding — protection against cuckoldry, either solicited or forced, by a sneaky male intruder. It’s not known how commonly this occurs in Harris’s Sparrows. However, studies of two other Zonotrichia, the White-crowned Sparrow and White-throated Sparrow, suggest that what ornithologists term “extra-pair fertilizations” could account for up to 35 percent of the eggs present in Harris’s Sparrow nests. Still, by the end of the first week of June, the pair bond seems more intense, more certain. There is an intimacy about this association symbolized by the female’s precopulatory display, during which she crouches on a perch, cocks her tail almost vertically, tilts her beak skywards, and gently but rapidly flutters her wings, which are held out at the sides of her body, all the while uttering a long burst of trills and twitters. Males may give a similar display, but usually only when an intruding male encroaches on his territory. Sometimes mating follows a female’s precopulatory display — a brief, two- or three-second affair in which the male climbs on the back of the female and touches his cloaca to hers before the pair separate and resume their regular, more mundane activities.

Settling In 35

Precopulatory displays are an indication that mating and nestbuilding cannot be far behind, or that they already are occurring. By mid-June, most Harris’s Sparrows will have established territories, more or less settled boundary disputes with neighboring birds, paired with a mate, begun or even finished a nest, and perhaps laid a clutch of eggs. They will spend the next month or so mostly confined to an area of less than two acres and, if lucky, they will fledge four or five young from a ground nest protected by a small clump of shrubs. They will navigate among the stunted spruce, probe the edges of the tundra, and work their way among the alder and scrub willow and dwarf birch. They will switch from a diet of mostly fruits to one of mostly insects, confront predatory short-tailed weasels, arctic ground squirrels, and Northern Shrikes. By mid-June, the birds will know their space. They will have defined the locus of their world and accommodated themselves to the Barrenlands’ flux of light and life and time. They will have settled in. Ken and I listen as the drone of the Turbo Beaver fades away into a sudden and profound quiet, a silence that embraces the chorus of goose voices drifting downriver. We say little, just glance at each other and at the pile of boxes and packs that lies at our feet. I kick a patch of snow and look toward the route to the cabin: west across the river ice, onto the sedge flats bordering the Thelon, up a steep bank, and through a band of spruce. I know that, out of sight and several hundred yards across a meadow, lies Warden’s Grove and what’s left of the cabin. It is five o’clock in the afternoon on the twenty-first of May, and the air is just a few degrees above freezing. The long flight from Yellowknife, above the boreal forest and the tundra’s infinite scatter of frozen lakes, has given us our isolation, and it feels absolute. There is nothing to do for it but work, and so we shoulder our packs, grab a food box, and trudge toward the cabin. It takes fifteen minutes to slog through the snow and across the mucky tundra. The most difficult part of the short hike is ascending the steep riverbank and wading through the band of soft, rotten snow lying in the narrow grove of spruce east of the cabin. Once past this obstacle, I am sweaty and breathing hard, and in spite of my anticipation, it is difficult to glance up and examine Warden’s Grove. In

36 Settling In

the meadow, I concentrate on my footing, and on hopping from one floppy sedge tussock to the next. The box I’m carrying seems to have doubled in weight since I first hoisted it, and my arms and shoulders begin to ache. I keep my eyes focused on the ground and don’t look up until I am through the last of the meadow and set down my burden in front of the cabin. I wipe the snot and sweat from my face and hear Ken coming up behind me. He throws down his load and we plunge through a last small drift to the cabin, or what remains of it, push open the door and step inside. The ruin that confronts us is disheartening. I curse softly. There is nothing but four walls and three roof beams; the rest of the roof has vanished. Some of the roof poles have collapsed inward and lie half-buried in the waist-deep snow inside the cabin’s shell. The benches and bunks that line the cabin’s interior are covered in snow and debris. I use our shovel to clear away a bit of snow and find six inches of ice and frozen mud layered above the floorboards, remnants of the sod insulation that once helped keep the cabin snug and warm during the winter. A solitary piece of stovepipe hangs against one wall, suspended by a twist of wire; the little stove that we’d once cooked on lies half-buried in the snow, dented and rusted. Garbage is everywhere — on the benches, in the snow, frozen in the muck on the floor. High, thin clouds have collected since we set down on the river ice, and the light inside the ruins of the cabin is diffuse and gloomy. Ken and I are subdued: This is our home? Although I’d heard that the cabin’s roof had been damaged by bears, I had not expected this level of devastation — or perhaps I simply could not square the probable reality with the memory of the cabin that I’d carried with me for the last eleven years. When we departed from Warden’s Grove in July of 1978, bound for Hudson Bay, we nailed boards over the windows, secured the door, and left a home that was in almost immaculate condition. Now I am confronted by the antithesis of memory. The bears and the weather, agents of entropy, have destroyed the cabin of my past and replaced it with a ramshackle ruin. I am disheartened, and mentally unprepared to step into what looks to be the narrative of Arctic Squalor. But we don’t spend long cultivating our depression, which could become acute if we focused on the ruins. There is too much to do. We clear snow from the wood and metal platform in front of the cabin, lay down a sheet of plastic, empty our packs, and begin ferrying loads

Settling In 37

from the river. Most of the weight goes in the packs, but on each trip we carry boxes in our arms, and the combination of soft snow, sloppy tundra, and awkward loads is exhausting. After four hours of continuous work, we have hauled everything up to the cabin and secured a tarp over the lot, and my body is shaking with fatigue. We set up our tent next to a patch of stunted spruce, gather some firewood and cook a hasty meal, then retreat to the tent and the warmth of our sleeping bags. It’s gotten much colder and the wind has come up, so the tent’s a welcome refuge. It’s well after midnight and we are too drained for much conversation, but I mention to Ken that I haven’t heard or seen any Harris’s Sparrows, which means that we probably have beaten them back to Warden’s Grove. It’s a small piece of good news for me, but Ken isn’t impressed. He’s just been through one hell of a commencement ceremony, far different from the traditional one at the University of Kansas, but it’s not at all clear what he’s graduated to. Ken’s breathing is soon slow and rhythmic, but I am too anxious to sleep. I listen to gusts of wind in the trees and the flapping of the tent fly, and consider how far I have migrated in the twelve days since leaving Lawrence: to this place! I think about Melissa and Liza, about the absent Harris’s Sparrows, about my research and the path that’s brought me here, into the depths of uncertainty. It’s tempting to yearn for the comfort of my family, for lying spooned against my wife’s back on a warm May morning in Lawrence, for playing with my daughter at the park. There are ghosts, too — amongst the trees, on the tundra, inside the ruined cabin — ghosts of a much younger man who lived for more than ten months at Warden’s Grove and felt at home here. What I forget is that he had needed time to adjust to life on the Barrens, even though he had arrived at Warden’s Grove after more than two months of difficult wilderness travel, and had moved into an intact cabin. I sleep, finally, but my rest is fitful. Bears pad through my dreams. They pace back and forth before the ruined cabin, wander across the Barrens, sniff the nylon walls of the tent. Storms roar out of the North, out of the past, and their drifting snows cover me in spindrift sleep. In the morning, I wake to the sound of spitting snow hitting the tent fly, glance outside and see ribbons of lenticular clouds streaming through a broken sky. I lie back in my sleeping bag and consider all that needs to be done, and it’s here that I confront the tension

38 Settling In

that will accompany me for the next several weeks. It blossoms from the conflict between my desire to create a secure, comfortable home and the need to study Harris’s Sparrows. Both require our full attention, and I suspect that it will be difficult to balance the competing demands on our time and mental energies. I dress for a tour of Warden’s Grove to reassure myself that there are no Harris’s Sparrows in the area, letting Ken rest for a few more hours. The cabin is in the southeastern corner of the grove, which is fifteen to twenty acres in size and shaped roughly like a triangle, with its apex pointing west and upslope. I start up the south side of the trees, then swing down the east flank of the grove before heading north toward some isolated islands of wind-flagged spruce. The going is slow, since much of the area is still snow-covered, but I hear no “plaintive whistles,” see no flocks of black-bibbed birds feeding amongst the dwarf birch. On my return, and after a quick breakfast of oatmeal, we devote ourselves to the cabin, which I am determined to repair — both as a comfortable base for our research activities and as a way to placate the ghosts of memory, which shadow me around Warden’s Grove. We begin by digging the snow out of the cabin, clearing off what’s left of the benches and shelves, salvaging and sorting usable roof poles, and tossing debris onto a rapidly growing garbage heap outside the cabin. We work steadily for twelve hours, to the accompaniment of goose music and occasional snow squalls. In spite of the windy, cold weather, male robins are haggling and chasing one another through the spruce, and streams of meltwater snake across the Thelon’s ice and accumulate in pools along the edge of the main channel. I am elated by these small intimations of spring and by our initial progress at clearing out the cabin, and by day’s end, we are able to move most of our food and equipment onto what remains of the cabin’s shelves and establish a modicum of order in our lives. On the morning of the twenty-third, I hear a single Harris’s Sparrow song, but see no birds during a two-hour search of the area. I feel free to work on the cabin, and we begin by setting the salvaged roof poles and cutting, delimbing, and debarking enough young spruce trees to fill the remaining gaps in the roof. By evening, we have nailed down enough poles to support two tarps, which we secure over two-thirds of the roof. There’s much more to be done on the roof, though. We have to chink the gaps between the poles with moss, cre-

Settling In 39

ate a waterproof layer by covering the poles with plastic sheeting, and secure the plastic with a layer of turf, which will provide additional insulation. But these tasks won’t be possible until the tundra thaws enough to allow us to harvest moss and cut sod squares. We rescue the rusty sheet metal stove, which we hammer into some semblance of its original shape and fit to some scavenged stovepipe. We place the stove on a flat rock, which sits on the glacier of mud and ice that covers the old floorboards, and fire it up. It’s nine degrees outside, and a nasty wind drives snow flurries that drift across the Barrens, but the walls and roof poles of the cabin, plus the tarps, provide partial shelter from the deteriorating weather. After dinner, Ken and I prop up two broken chairs and huddle close to the stove, craving its warmth, as snow sifts through the cracks in the roof. It’s almost comfortable as long as we remain next to the stove, but if we move even two feet away from the fire, any effects of its feeble heat vanish. The wind sounds like a rapid in the sky, a roaring toss of foaming water. Surging gusts pummel the Barrens, tearing snow from the heavens, sending tendrils snaking across the tundra, and eddying inside the leaky cabin: In the midst of spring, we confront the memory of winter. We discuss the day’s progress, which is substantial — but the ambience of the wrecked cabin remains decidedly dreary. It’s odd to see it snowing inside the cabin, to sit on broken furniture and pick our way amongst the garbage embedded in the sheet of frozen debris on the floor. We speculate as to “what the neighbors are doing,” and figure that it’s probably too far — maybe 180 air miles — to pay them a visit. Ken wonders “if this is what it was like in the Gulag.” “Although the wages are the same, we have more food,” I reply. “And there are no guards.” It takes us ten days to finish repairing the cabin, as we must wait for thaw and devote much of our time to research activities. We are handicapped by a lack of tools and have to do most of the work with the few that we have brought with us — a single axe, a lightweight, collapsible saw, and a hammer — although we do find a second hammer and rusted shovel, which help. Except for nails, we also have to salvage any necessary building materials from the wreckage. These limitations, plus our dearth of carpentry skills, mean that our workmanship will not win us a guest appearance on “This Old Cabin.”

40 Settling In

The worst tasks are hacking the six-inch-deep layer of iced muck off the floorboards, and chinking the roof with moss. The latter job is unpleasant because most of the moss is still frozen in situ, and what little we do manage to harvest must be wrung out and stuffed into cracks with bare hands. On a windy day, with the temperature just a few degrees above freezing, it’s agonizing work. And getting rid of the ice on the floor is pure tedium. Ken and I take turns whacking away at the frozen mud with our axe — a necessary abuse of the tool — while the other rests and shovels away the debris the axewielder has chipped off the terminus of the retreating glacier. We measure our progress in inches, and it takes us several days of hard labor to clear the floor. Along the way we chop through broken glass, scraps of paper, metal dishes, the remains of paperback novels, the miscellany of a once well-stocked cabin. Occasionally there’s a useful find — a cooking pot and enamel mug, a small bale of wire, the second hammer — but most everything is beyond repair and goes onto the rapidly growing trash heap. Perhaps the most valuable discovery is a tub of Bag Balm, which elicits a whoop of joy from me when I chip it out of the ice. I forgot to bring skin lotion, and my hands, nurtured by the soft life of an academic, are a mess — cut, blistered, and lined with deep, bleeding cracks, which I try to repair with adhesive tape. My fingers feel as though they have been gnawed on for days by angry Yorkshire terriers, and the antiseptic ointment feels great — although my ruined hands remind me of the limitations of university life, and a dimly remembered line from a high school play: “When the revolution comes, they’ll take those without calluses first.” We repair damaged shelves and floorboards, stuff moss into sections of the walls that have lost their chinking, and uncover two intact windows stored beneath a bunk bed. These allow us to remove the boards nailed over the openings and add much-needed light to the cabin’s interior. The final task involves cutting sod squares from an area of upland tundra that has thawed to a depth of six inches, and placing them on the plastic covering the roof poles. The job takes most of a day, and after finishing, we light the stove and feel warm enough to strip down to long underwear — a first for the trip. The cabin feels snug and welcoming, and a rainstorm on June third tells us that the roof is watertight. The interior, which is about fifteen feet

Settling In 41

by fifteen feet, is clean, dry, and organized. Our food and equipment are stashed on shelves in one corner, cooking gear arranged on a bench next to the stove. We place our high-frequency radio on a small table attached to one wall, which stands below a shelf stocked with a small library, and run the antenna from a tall pole outside the cabin to a nearby spruce. Two chairs, repaired with wire and nails, stand next to a small table, which somehow survived the ursine vandals and ten years of exposure. A multicolored collection of jackets, daypacks, and sweaters hangs from the wooden pegs that line the roof beams and supports for the two bunk beds, which fill the southwest corner of the cabin. We tack a map of the Northwest Territories on the wall and are done. Now, when I plod across the tundra after six hours of fieldwork on a windy and cold day, it feels wonderful to see smoke curling from the stovepipe, and anticipate a warm and comfortable refuge. We have worked through snowstorms and bitter winds, a scatter of sunny days, and the gradual transition from hesitant spring to the edge of summer. We have waited for the land to warm, and on June 3 the temperature hits fifty degrees. Patches of snow-free ground spread through the interior of Warden’s Grove, and large sections of open water appear on the river, although the main channel below the Hanbury/Thelon junction is still frozen. Floes of candled, rotten ice pirouette downriver and jostle in the shallows near shore, and a meltwater stream tumbles down the rutted path in back of the cabin. On pleasant days, Ken and I take lunch breaks on the platform in front of the cabin, where we sit in T-shirts and sunglasses, surveying the view, watching “our” river. Dopey with food and afternoon languor, we discuss our work, wildlife sightings, and what the “folks back home” most likely are doing. Nesting birds begin to return in large numbers as we work on the cabin, although the first pulse of migration seems tentative. After hearing the one short bout of singing on May 23, I see no Harris’s Sparrows on the twenty-fourth, but on the twenty-fifth, I spot three sparrows feeding together on exposed upland tundra. There are at least five Harris’s Sparrows in Warden’s Grove on the twenty-seventh, eight on the thirtieth, twenty on June 1. Singing remains desultory until the end of the month, then quickly builds to a crescendo, with

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pairs of obviously mated birds everywhere. The explosion of breeding activity and the swirl and chatter of birds among the spruce pull me toward research, but we still need to finish the cabin. And so the days are more than full. Often I am up at 5:00. I grab a handful of trail mix, then head out for a few hours of fieldwork — mainly observing birds and trying to develop some basic sense of the ecology and behavior of an unfamiliar species. I return to the cabin and either cook breakfast or eat what Ken has prepared. What we do next depends upon the weather: if field conditions are poor, we work on the cabin; if they are good, we spend a few hours more on research, then focus on the cabin for the rest of the day. We don’t stop working until after 7:00 P.M., and I usually find myself writing up my field notes at 11:00, while contemplating all that we failed to accomplish during the day. I continue to think of ecotones, and see them everywhere. There’s the broad swath of the forest-tundra transition, extending south into Saskatchewan and north toward the Arctic Ocean. There’s the smallerscale ecotone between Warden’s Grove and the surrounding tundra, where trees grade from individuals forty feet high into stunted, windflagged “krummholtz” three or four feet tall. These stunted spruce then transition into a thick band of shrubby dwarf birch and alder, which in turn thins, shortens, and fades into tundra. I see physical ecotones wherever I walk, and sense another kind in the transition from renovating the cabin to a devotion to research. But there’s also a more profound and difficult emotional ecotone that I must confront — the borderlands between living as a visitor to Warden’s Grove and feeling as though I am at home. Simply put, during my first three weeks at Warden’s Grove, I mostly am not of this place. I do not belong. I am no more settled here than are the transient birds that we occasionally find, species that have wandered into an alien world — the exhausted Brown Thrasher that allows us to approach to within three feet on May 25, or the Eastern Kingbird that we catch in a net on June 3 — birds three hundred miles or more north of their breeding grounds, vagrants lost in the vastness of the Barrens, incapable of finding their way home. Perhaps I expect too much. Perhaps I am foolish to anticipate that the attitudes that I developed in 1977 and 1978 would return as soon as I climbed down from the plane and walked the quarter-mile upslope to the cabin. I expect that the short hike will comprise my

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emotional ecotone, that it will be all the time I require to complete the transition from the life and attitudes of the Outside to those of the Barrens. Stupid. I have been too long away, and seduced by the selective workings of my memory, which have transformed the past into something more profound, less nuanced and mixed, than it really was. Over the years Warden’s Grove has become a symbol of a beautiful, peaceful, and adventure-filled world, a refuge with little doubt, pain, or frustration. It lies at the nexus of my journey across the Northwest Territories, which I see both as a transformative experience and as an icon of my earlier life, when I had focused so much time, energy, and imagination on the wilderness. My experiences in the wild, strung out over the twenty-three years between my first hiking trip in the High Sierra, when I was fourteen, and my return to Warden’s Grove at thirty-seven, are central to defining who I am. I remain nostalgic for the life I once had, or think that I had. The year that I spent at Warden’s Grove hovers in my heart like the scatter of stars in a perfect night sky — a constellation of memory and desire, a memorial to something a bit different than it actually was. And so I am emotionally unprepared for the gutted cabin, the trash that we shovel from the ruins, the late May temperatures that dip to twenty degrees below freezing, our sudden isolation. I am unprepared for the loneliness that spreads outward from our cabin, south and west for 180 miles to Reliance, and east 250 miles to Baker Lake. Emotionally, there is something fundamentally different about coming to live at Warden’s Grove, as opposed to passing through such a place on a summer canoe trip. It is the difference between visiting somewhere for a few hours or days, and having to be there. I cannot substitute movement for adaptation, paddle strokes for accommodation. I cannot use distance and physical exertion to avoid contact. There is no instantaneous acceptance of place, no immediate recognition. Instead, I wander through a landscape of frustration and doubt, anger and impatience. I find reason for consternation everywhere, and repeatedly wonder about my reasons for being at Warden’s Grove, about the usefulness of studying Harris’s Sparrows. Why devote three summers of my life, plus untold hours in four academic years, to the study of a species about which it might be said, “Little is known because no one has bothered”? I quietly curse the cold, the ruined cabin, the garbage, the lack of proper tools to repair

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the damage caused by the goddamned bears, my wrecked hands. I am mute in my anger and whine constantly to myself as I bungle my way through the tasks that need to be completed before the cabin is repaired. I think constantly of Melissa and Liza, wonder why I left them behind. Worst of all, I have lost my sense of humor. Nothing is funny, and like a constipated curmudgeon, I am not amused by much of anything — even though I should be. There are moments, as when I am flailing away at the frozen floor or contemplating my mangled hands and the eddies of snow whirling around the inside of what’s left of the cabin, that I seem to be nothing more than a character in an absurdist, existential play. Surely, I should be humored by the fact that, after spending so much time picking up after my young daughter, I am now picking up after the bears. I should be able to find something comical in my performance in this scientific farce, but the joke is lost on me. I crab-walk through my days, and feel like I am channeling H. L. Mencken. And I am unfairly frustrated by Ken, who at first seems intimidated by the isolation and not overly enthusiastic about studying Harris’s Sparrows. Ken is tall, rangy, and strong. He is fifteen years younger than I am, and I envy his energy, the way his enormous strides cover ground, his lack of stiffness when he climbs out of his sleeping bag in the morning. He does what I ask of him without complaining, never questions my judgment. He can be inventive and full of initiative, such as when he fashions a screen door for the cabin out of bits of scrap lumber and some extra mosquito netting. I know that he is in a difficult situation — plopped down in an alien landscape, far from friends, working for free twelve hours or more a day, seven days a week, on a project that’s not his, with a supervisor whom he doesn’t know well, and who sometimes must seem obsessive, uncommunicative, and petulant. Yet, I am unduly bothered when Ken leaves the cabin door open, when he starts dinner late, when he spills a pot of soup — never mind that I am fully capable of the same small mistakes. My reactions are petty, and although I keep them to myself, I imagine that my moodiness is transparent. I am good at frowns, good at silence. I cannot be easy to live with, but I never ask Ken if this is so. It occurs to me that my basic problem is that I am not settled. Although I miss nothing in the way of physical comforts, such as fresh

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food and showers, I am not at ease with my surroundings. I am not at ease with my project, which sometimes seems pointless. And most importantly, I am not at ease with the Harris’s Sparrows, whose basic behavior and ecology I do not understand. The birds begin mostly as a puzzle and remain so for weeks, enigmatic wraiths skulking around in the shrubs, doing god knows what. I’ve read what few scientific papers have been written on Harris’s Sparrows, but I cannot relate the texts to anything that I’m seeing. My most immediate concern is that I cannot figure out how to catch the birds with the mist nets that I’ve brought along — black, fine-meshed nets about thirty feet long and five feet wide that, when strung between two poles and set in the proper location, can be invisible to birds in flight. The nets aren’t easy to place because they are prone to tangle, especially in the shrubby areas where Harris’s Sparrows spend much of their time. And those that Ken and I erect yield few birds — the almost constant winds mean that the nets often flap like Buddhist prayer flags, even when anchored securely. We monitor a number of territories, and place two or three nets in each along flight paths between their occupants’ favorite perches. We then watch as the birds fly directly toward the nets before suddenly veering over or around the barriers and disappearing into the shrubs. My failure to catch many Harris’s Sparrows mocks me, and I am ready to attack the nets with garden shears. My first few weeks of research are layered with sediments of frustration and nervousness: if I can’t catch the birds, I can’t band them, can’t sex them, can’t tell where they are in their breeding cycle. And if I cannot determine basic aspects of their breeding ecology, I’ll have no dissertation and this “expedition” will become little more than an expensive and futile vacation, and I will have to figure out another research topic. But what is most aggravating is that, on a daily basis, I live with more fear than I had ever anticipated, almost all of it connected to bears. From my previous stay at Warden’s Grove — not to mention the wrecked cabin and piles of fresh dung liberally scattered amongst the trees — I know that brown, or grizzly, bears are common in the area. They den in the extensive sand dunes along the east bank of the Thelon, several miles upstream from the cabin, and wander the ridges behind camp. Out on the Barrens I’ve come across places where the ground looked to have been excavated by a D-9 Cat — a

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cratered jumble of boulders and sand, all that remains of an arctic ground squirrel nest destroyed by a bear in search of a snack. I’ve found freshly eviscerated and dismembered carcasses of bull muskoxen — six- to eight-hundred-pound animals — near willow thickets, where blood, shattered bones, and tracks tell of ambushes and quick, brutal kills. And I understand that I must work in the midst of similar thickets, where the possibility of surprising a bear, or being jumped by one, is always present. We have a 12-gauge shotgun equipped with slugs, which in the hands of a competent marksman is firepower enough to stop a charging bear. But I am an incompetent marksman, and because all I would accomplish with a shotgun would be to create one hell of a mix of wounded and angry animal, the weapon is nothing but a psychological prop. Besides, it is inconvenient to haul around a gun while doing fieldwork. I do carry bear repellant, though, a pressurized can of capsicum-laced spray that the label asserts is effective at up to twenty-five feet, which works out to the somewhat discomforting distance of less than three body lengths of hostile bear. The spray brings me little reassurance, as I wonder how it would work in the windy conditions that predominate around Warden’s Grove, or if the bears might relish a meal of biologist heavily spiced with pepper spray. I also know that, in the case of a nonfatal mauling, emergency help probably would be a long time in coming, as we are rarely able to raise anyone on the radio. I can’t give voice to my fear and uncertainty, because I don’t want Ken to worry about our situation — for if the old Barrengrounds hand is nervous, how should the novice feel? And so, during my first few weeks at Warden’s Grove, I quietly carry my paranoia and frustration with me. The fear is like a small, nagging cut that won’t quite heal. It generally hovers just beyond the reach of my awareness, but remains quietly insistent, and suddenly intrudes into my consciousness when I encounter a new pile of dung or set of tracks. My anxieties subside when Ken and I are together, but flourish when I am alone. I sense agents of my angst everywhere, and this discourages me. Once I had felt at ease at Warden’s Grove and had wandered the Barrens without constantly glancing over my shoulder. I desperately yearn to shed the fear, anger, and doubt that plague my days; I do not want three summers of this self-inflicted oppression.

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And gradually, blessedly, my attitudes metamorphose. There are no great epiphanies. Rather, I traverse an ecotone of unease and gradually move toward more open, congenial ground. We finish repairing the cabin, which brings us comfortable shelter and time to concentrate on research. We sort through the garbage that we’ve collected, burn what we can and bury the rest, removing the last vestiges of squalor from Warden’s Grove. I begin to develop a tentative sense of what the Harris’s Sparrows are about, catch and band some birds, and stumble across my first nest on June 14. The weather is changeable but trends towards milder conditions. We even take the time to wash our long-neglected, filthy bodies and clothes. The first flowers of spring appear in sheltered spots — the tiny collection of yellow stamens of cottongrass; the minute blossoms of crowberry; then the greenish-white, urn-shaped blossoms of alpine bearberry. The first leaf buds break on the dwarf birch and there are pendulous, yellow-green catkins on the willows around the cabin. I lower my binoculars while watching a Harris’s Sparrow, vaguely aware of a nearby presence, and slowly turn to confront a wolf not ten yards away. It’s mostly white, with a frosting of gray-tipped hairs — and it surveys me calmly, with what I sense is curiosity. We regard each other for several minutes, then it turns slowly and trots leisurely southward across the tundra. The Thelon moves toward breakup, and migrants dot the pools of open water or roost on the edge of disintegrating floes — American Widgeon, Northern Pintails, Mallards, Northern Phalaropes, and Green-winged Teal. On calm evenings, pairs of Longtailed Ducks skim the surface of large leads, trailing black-and-white reflections, the male’s beautiful and ethereal call, ahr-ahr-ahroulit, floating across the still waters. As the days drift by, my appreciation for Warden’s Grove and the surrounding landscape returns. The cabin is situated at the southeastern corner of the spruce, protected from the worst of the Barrenground winds. There is a year-round spring twenty-five yards from the cabin, and expansive views eastward across the tundra, toward the distant sand dunes that line the Clarke River, which during my third summer Paul and I will christen “Last Light Hills.” The country around Warden’s Grove is open and varied. Downstream, the river cuts through a narrow gorge, past high cliffs and into the marshy,

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willow-covered flats of Grassy Island, home to myriad waterfowl and some of the moose that colonized the Thelon Valley in the 1970s. A set of large sand dunes flows south along the east side of the Thelon toward the Hanbury River. Less than a day’s walk to the west lie the rocky uplands of Dickson Canyon — Peregrine Falcon and Gyrfalcon country — where the Hanbury slices through canyons of pink and brown igneous rock, tumbling over falls and cascading through narrow chutes before joining with the Thelon. Billy Hoare and A. J. Knox, who established the Warden’s Grove camp in the autumn of 1928 when they built a small cabin and cache there, chose well; Hoare later wrote that Knox “had been down the river for a distance of ten miles and had not seen a more suitable place than the little stand of spruce where we were then camping.” I begin using names that we gave to features in 1977 and 1978, and it’s satisfying to revive these symbols of familiarity. The most prominent of these is “Home Hill,” the five-hundred-foot-tall, rounded knob of jumbled rock west of Warden’s Grove, which served as a landmark whenever we returned from a long journey. But there are many others, such as “Beddingstraw Creek,” north and east of the cabin, where we gathered dried grass for our sled dogs’ shelters; “Muskox Hill,” about three miles to the east of camp, where a herd of seventy muskoxen appeared in the spring of 1978; and “Bonanza Grove,” two miles north of the cabin, where we discovered a valuable supply of standing deadwood for our stoves. One landmark that I recall particularly well is “Cache Lake,” almost two-and-one-half miles west of Warden’s Grove. In September 1977, the Thelon had looked too low for a safe landing, and our chartered Twin Otter had deposited at the lake three loads — about eight thousand pounds — of food and equipment for the impending winter. In order to protect it from marauding bears, we had spent the next five days hauling everything to camp during a manic, all-out “mega-portage.” (Ironically, Paul and I would mimic the effort, albeit on a smaller scale, in May 1991. Because we were held up for so long by bad weather, there was too much open water to land on the Thelon. So our pilot opted for the safer ice of Cache Lake, leaving us with three days of hard labor before we had moved everything safely to the cabin.) I am comforted by the flux of memory, by recognition of this place. This process is partly triggered by visual cues and the use of

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names that reflect my personal history, but it seems most strongly based upon the recognition of particular smells. One of the most evocative odors is that of thawing upland tundra. On a warm day, in a sheltered, wind-free microclimate, the Barrens give off a pungent, organic smell. The odor is slightly acidic, perhaps composed of volatile molecules released by the combination of crowberry, alpine bearberry, mountain cranberry, bilberry, moss, and lichens that clothe the tundra. Neurobiologists tell us that the events that comprise learning and memory are encoded in physical changes in individual neurons, and the synaptic connections among them. They also know that the intricate neural connections between our olfactory cells and the regions of the forebrain devoted to memory are more developed than for sight, touch, and hearing. I consider this relationship between the recognition of place and smell one warm afternoon in early June, as I place a series of stations to catch insects and spiders in what I term “dry heath” habitat. Each sampling station consists of a small “sticky board” for trapping flying insects, and a pitfall trap for catching ground-dwelling species. The sticky boards are rectangles of Plexiglas set on the ground and coated with an extremely viscid material — think of a substance several orders of magnitude tackier and gooier than corn syrup — during weekly, twenty-four-hour sampling periods. They are simple to set, while holes for the pitfall traps, which are nothing more than small plastic cups set flush with the ground, have to be laboriously chopped into the frozen soil. Each pitfall trap takes fifteen minutes or more to place, and as I sit on the ground and pound away with hammer and chisel, the scents that envelop are familiar and soothing. I imagine the neural templates forming as I wandered the Barrens in 1977 and 1978 and inhaled the chemicals given off by the tundra — the growing dendritic connections forever encoding the smells in my brain, the neurons primed to fire when the familiar smells are encountered eleven years down the road. Thus the warp and weft of history, the shuttle of experience weaving a template of recognition from threads of protein and lipid, the physical transformed into a chemistry of memory and desire. . . . And as I hike the banks of the Thelon, track Harris’s Sparrows through thickets of dwarf birch and alder, I mercifully begin to shed my fear of bears. One morning, I find fresh bear tracks in the snow; they approach to within twenty yards of the cabin, then veer sharply

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away. I take this as an omen, a promise of coexistence, even though such thoughts are silly. I know that I could stumble across a sow with cubs, or swing downwind around a small clump of spruce and confront a big male, only twenty feet away, feeding on a caribou carcass. No matter. After about three weeks I find myself slipping into a mental accommodation with the grizzlies. Even though — at least in my experience — Thelon bears have always retreated when they have become aware of people, I understand that they are unpredictable and fierce. I accept the notion that this place is theirs more than mine. If I am to enjoy life at Warden’s Grove, I have to jettison my fear and accept the unavoidable risks that come with living in bear country. I do what I can to minimize the chances of an encounter, but I know that nothing is certain. I take my chances. I don’t quite understand the process, but years later I will recognize it in a passage from a poem by Wendell Berry: Then what I am afraid of comes. I live for a while in its sight. What I fear in it leaves it. And the fear of it leaves me. It sings, and I hear its song. I stop thinking about shotguns, sometimes forget to stuff the bear spray in the pocket of my field vest when I head into the field. I remain aware of my surroundings, judge the wind’s direction and make noise when I move into thick vegetation (unless I’m stalking a Harris’s Sparrow), but these acts are simply an acknowledgment of the bears’ sovereignty, and that I live amongst them. It is a blessing to hike the Barrens without forty pounds of angst on my back. On June 6, Ken and I take a day of rest, our first after sixteen days of constant, insistent work. We wake late, then hike toward Steel Lake, which lies about six miles to the northwest of Warden’s Grove, behind “Home Hill.” Along the way we search for wolf dens, prospect for unusual birds in an isolated pocket of large trees, then take lunch on a patch of snow-free ground by the shore of the frozen lake. The air is calm and luminous. In the distance is a chatter of birds, and the murmur of a creek tumbling through boulders before it spills onto the lake ice. We strip down to T-shirts, air our feet, relax

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in the warm sun as we eat our cheese and bread, and chase the food with swigs of lemonade from our water bottles. Here, six miles from camp, the Outside world falls further away, as does the tension that has strung my heart since our arrival. I close my eyes and retrace the canoe route from Great Slave Lake to Warden’s Grove, imagine looking down on the two of us from high above, then zooming out in an expanding circle of emptiness. How far would one have to go, right now, before encountering another human being? I ask Ken what he thinks of our solitude. “It’s with me all of the time,” he says. “I’m constantly aware of the loneliness. But at the same time I like the experience. I like being so far removed from the rest of the world and enjoy the novelty of it all. ” I reply that here, at Steel Lake, my sense of our isolation has begun to fade. Then I correct myself. I say that I am intensely aware of our solitude, that I sense every mile between here and Reliance, but that this distance no longer is a source of discomfort. Our isolation is nothing more than the backdrop against which we will live out the rest of the summer; it has become our habitat. June 12, 10:00 P.M. I step out of the cabin after a long day of fieldwork, stand on the porch, and look eastward toward the sand hills that line the Clarke River, shining in the rich light of an arctic evening. The air is still and mild, the Thelon alive with drifting floes. A nearby male Willow Ptarmigan lets loose with his chuckling rattle, then a Harris’s Sparrow chimes in. I figure that it’s the thirty-seven-gram male that I banded last week, and that he’s singing from his favorite perch, a six-foot-tall black spruce just east of the cabin, where there’s a patch of cloudberry coming into flower. A hint of smoke from the stove wafts towards me, its fire dying down in the aftermath of dinner. The river, mirror-calm on this windless evening, reflects the golds and browns of the Barrens, which roll away to the east. Wisps of cumulus drift across the sky, charcoal gray beneath, electric white above. Hints of rain in distant virga, torn silver curtains hung beneath a sky the color of robin’s eggs. The Barrens are numinous. I have spent the last hour writing about the day’s activities, detailing the lives of the sparrows, the vagaries of the weather, the building wave of flowering plants and the passage of migrant birds, much as I have each night during the last three weeks. But tonight there’s a subtle difference, I

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think. I am no longer simply recording information; in working up these field notes, I am beginning to understand something of what they actually mean. It’s mid-June, and I am coming to know my space. I have defined the locus of my world and I am accommodating myself to the Barrenlands’ flux of light and life and time. I am settling in.

In . . .a. Country . . . . . . . . .without . . . . . . . .Maps .................................... I have always loved maps. When I was young and lived in California, I would bicycle down to the local service station and ask for maps of the western states, which at the time were free. I would take them home, spread them out on my bedroom floor and plot routes to the emerald-green areas, which mostly were national parks or forests — places wild and mysterious, far removed from my boring suburban home in the San Francisco Bay Area. I ignored the cities and created myths about the exotic places — Humboldt National Forest, Yosemite National Park, the Grand Tetons. My visions of these green patches, floating in the seemingly empty spaces of Nevada, California, and Wyoming, were seductive, and I imagined traveling U.S. 50 or Nevada State Route 247 into the hinterlands, into an undiscovered country. For one nine-year-old kid, those maps were visions of a life not yet lived, symbols of a world being dreamt into my heart. Twelve years later, I spent a winter in Minnesota, far from wilderness. I was new to the area and mostly alone, and to pass my free time I often visited the library at the nearby college, where there was a wonderfully complete map room — shelf after shelf of atlases, drawer after drawer of maps from all over North America, a world of possibilities. I loved to open the drawers that housed the 1:250,000 topographical maps from Alaska and find sheets from the Brooks Range. The maps looked as though they were newly printed. They had never been pulled from the trays and studied for the details revealed by their contours, the patterns formed by the blue necklaces of lakes and rivers, the widely scattered reference points marked by bench marks and precisely measured elevations: a chemistry of latitude and longitude, the coordinates of desire and imagination. . . . Best of all were the half-empty maps on which the contour lines flowed into a sea of white, where there was nothing save a few blue dotted lines marking hypotheses about paths of water. I took comfort in those empty spaces, in the knowledge that the world had not been entirely mapped,

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that there were remote and unknown lands out there, beyond the reach of plane tables and theodolites. I wanted to escape from the cartographer’s reign and navigate without maps, and I remembered what Aldo Leopold had written:”I am glad that I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?” fter my first spell on the Thelon River, I became interested in C. H. D. Clarke, who conducted the initial biological survey of the Thelon Game Sanctuary, which had been established in 1927. By then, the water route connecting Great Slave Lake, the Hanbury/ Thelon rivers, and Hudson Bay had been traversed by several parties, including one led by the Canadian geographer J. W. Tyrrell, who mapped the route in 1900. However, the biology of the country between Artillery Lake, to the northeast of Great Slave Lake, and Baker Lake was mostly unknown, and Clarke was assigned the task of investigating the region. With his assistant, W. H. B. Hoare, Clarke explored the area during the summers of 1936 and 1937, traveling mostly by canoe, making observations on the geography, flora, and fauna of the area. They carried with them a 1:500,000 map prepared by the Topographical Survey of Canada, which I suspect was based mostly on data gathered by Tyrrell’s party. The map, which has no contour lines, depicts the outline of Great Slave Lake, and then a band of lakes and rivers leading north and east across Pike’s Portage, past Artillery Lake, and into the Barrens. Beyond Artillery Lake, the band divides, one branch leading due north to Clinton-Colden Lake, the other tilting east toward the Hanbury River and the Thelon. I like to consider what Clarke and Hoare must have seen and felt as they explored the area and listened to the songs of Harris’s Sparrows, but what fascinates me most are the dimensions of their known world, as shown by Clarke’s map: a closely packed network of lakes and rivers about fifteen miles wide, spreading across the Barrens in a roughly Y-shaped pattern. Beyond this band, there are almost none of the symbols that we associate with maps, save for a few dotted lines marking the estimated positions of a few lakes: a guess of geography lost amidst the empty spaces and marked by the phrase “unmapped country many lakes.”

A

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“Unmapped country many lakes” circa 1937: but now the lakes are known, the country mapped. The blank spots have vanished. The incomplete maps of the 1930s have been replaced by a series of 1:250,000 topographic maps, each highly accurate and allowing precise location, each promising certainty. I can gaze at the Hanbury quadrangle (number 75 P) and wonder about places surrounding Warden’s Grove that I have never seen, much as I did with the road maps that I collected as a kid. But deliver me blindfolded to Lake 952 on map 75 P, point out where I am or let me use my handy, pocketsized GPS, and I will know my latitude and longitude. I will understand that I am fifteen miles northwest of Warden’s Grove and that if I head downstream from Lake 952, my route will trend northeast for five miles, then dogleg sharply to the southeast and eventually lead to Grassy Island. An easy upstream paddle of eight miles then will bring me back to Warden’s Grove. I will know that there is an esker running parallel to the unnamed stream draining Lake 952, about four miles to the northeast, and that I will find timber along the Thelon River, just below Grassy Island. I will not know the details of the country (Look: a wolf den dug into the side of that esker; a Red-breasted Merganser’s nest beneath that small, marbled shelf of igneous rock, three feet from the stream bank; a small copse of wind-battered spruce huddled in the lee of the hill just east of Lake 952, ringed with a flowered garland of Labrador tea and dwarf birch). But I will know the lay of the land and this knowledge will grant me a fundamental security, one transcending the bears that prowl the Barrens, the storms that pound out of the North, the swarms of blackflies and mosquitoes that rise from July’s warmth. I will know where I am. I never have traveled in the wilderness without accurate maps; I am accustomed to the comfort that they provide. I love the knowledge that they represent, the suggestion of adventure that they contain. And yet I yearn for an unmapped country, one now found almost nowhere in the geographical world. In a few short decades, modern technology has completed the task begun centuries ago by surveyors and cartographers. The men (mostly) who hauled their bulky equipment up peaks, down rivers, through tangled forests and into the unknown world returned with data that on drafting tables were

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transformed into knowledge — a process hastened by airplanes and satellites, and by the computer algorithms that convert digital images into printed maps. I know that if I desire to travel in a country without maps, I will have to look beyond geography. I could have chosen many possible directions and methods for my travels, but I hope to find my unmapped country, with its many lakes, amongst the lives of sparrows. In 1989, when I began my research, the unmapped country of the Harris’s Sparrow was not as unknown as the country lying only a few miles beyond the rivers that Clarke and Hoare paddled in 1936 and 1937. In spite of what Marguerite Baumgartner had written about “the many remaining gaps in our knowledge of this bird of mystery,” some information was available on the breeding ecology of the species — much of it in Baumgartner’s own account, which was published in 1968. Although much of her monograph focused on the winter biology of the Harris’s Sparrow, she also summarized information on its summer habits. The major paper on the breeding biology of Harris’s Sparrows was John B. Semple and George M. Sutton’s 1932 article, “Nesting of Harris’ Sparrow (Zonotrichia querula) at Churchill, Manitoba,” which contained descriptions of ten nests found by Sutton’s party, along with information on the species’ song, diet, and eggs. Other papers, although not focused on Harris’s Sparrows, contained scattered bits of information on their nesting habits and distribution. Still, when I began my work, many basic features of the species’ biology, such as development of the young, range of nesting habitats, patterns of incubation and nestling care, post-breeding molt and plumage, and foraging ecology, were undescribed or only vaguely understood. For example, it wasn’t known if both sexes incubated the eggs — although if the nesting behavior of the Harris’s Sparrow was similar to that of other Zonotrichia, then only the female would care for the clutch prior to hatching. I was intrigued by the paucity of basic information on Harris’s Sparrows, and the somewhat embarrassing truth was that I was more interested in studying their natural history than I was in conducting hard-core scientific research. I would rather poke around in the nooks and crannies of the country surrounding Warden’s Grove and watch sparrows forage for berries and tend to their nests, than design and run a complex ecological study. In spite of the authoritative name

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attached to my home department at KU (Systematics and Ecology); the technical papers that I was reading in seminars (“The Distribution of Postmating Reproductive Isolating Genes in Populations of the Yellow Monkeyflower,” “Effect of an Experimental Bottleneck on Morphological Integration in the Housefly”); and the quantitative genetics and multivariate statistics that I was learning, I felt like an ersatz scientist-in-training. I was interested in the intellectual world of modern ecology and evolutionary biology, but what I desired most was to wander the Barrens, collecting natural history notes and probing the lives of birds. The ecologist Robert MacArthur once wrote: To do science is to search for repeated patterns, not simply to accumulate facts, and to do the science of geographical ecology is to search for patterns of plant and animal life that can be put on a map. The person best equipped to do this is the naturalist who loves to note changes in bird life up a mountainside, or changes in plant life from mainland to island, or changes in butterflies from temperate to tropics. But not all naturalists want to do science . . . Although there were patterns in nature that fascinated me, such as the positive relationship between clutch size and latitude in most birds, I was most drawn to what I termed the “factoids” of the natural world — the clutch size of Harris’s Sparrows at Warden’s Grove, the location of the particular spruce in which the Northern Shrikes that I had seen in the vicinity of camp were nesting, the name of that small, purple flower growing amongst glacial debris high on Home Hill, the date that Yellow-rumped Warblers reached the Thelon in the spring. I understood that I needed to translate my fascination with natural history into a Ph.D. dissertation, which meant that I would have to search for MacArthur’s “repeated patterns,” test hypotheses, albeit simple ones, use sophisticated statistical software, and write papers that were more than collections of observations. I would have to meet certain expectations about the quality and kind of my work, and remain within the mainstream of current scientific practice. I had chosen a particular path through the academic world, with a rigorous set of requirements. Although these expectations about my performance were fair, none of them were fundamental to what I really was after at Warden’s Grove. What I desired most was to apprehend the

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scope and contours of an unknown world, one that paralleled Clarke and Hoare’s “unmapped country many lakes.” In 1936, when Clarke and Hoare began working in the Thelon area, they followed a traditional route into the Barrens: west by rail to Edmonton and Ft. McMurray in Alberta, then north by water on a Hudson’s Bay Company vessel. They didn’t arrive in Reliance until July 10, more than three weeks after leaving their homes in Ontario. Clarke later wrote that 1936 was “the last season when everyone [Barren-ground trappers, government officials, and traders] came and went by boat.” The increasing use of airplanes in the North meant that many of the transportation difficulties faced by early travelers would soon disappear, and that the North could be accessed in days or hours, rather than weeks. Indeed, ten days after Clarke and Hoare arrived in Reliance, they flew into the backcountry, courtesy of the Royal Canadian Air Force, which was assisting with mapping operations in the region. They then were able to complete a quick aerial survey of the Thelon River and work three remote stations before returning to Reliance at the end of August and heading south via the long water route up the Slave and Athabasca rivers. The following year, Clarke and Hoare flew north from Edmonton, and a commercial pilot moved them to the head of the Hanbury River on June 19, almost a month earlier than they had reached the Barrens in 1936. Their early arrival meant that they had ample time to collect wildlife observations and complete their canoe journey to the trading post at Baker Lake before freeze-up. The airplanes that granted Clarke and Hoare easy access to the Barrens also were transporting surveyors into its most remote regions, which meant that much of the country surrounding their 1937 route soon would be marked by at least rough coordinates and contours. Airplanes also made my Harris’s Sparrow project possible. Charter flights provided easy access to Warden’s Grove, where there was an excess of birds and, more importantly, the opportunity to live quietly and close to the animals. The solitude and silence of the Barrens were an integral part of the process of discovery, of living with Harris’s Sparrows and understanding something of their world. If I had conducted my research at Churchill, with its easy access, roads, automobiles, comfortable research station, and the commotion that comes with civilization, my connection to the place and the species

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would have been diminished. I do not believe that I would have come to learn as much as I did; I would have been distracted in some crucial way, and the Outside world would have pulled at me more. My country would have been different. Much behavioral and ecological research is at its heart an attempt to get inside the minds of animals. For example, for the last twelve years my graduate students and I have studied the habitat selection and breeding biology of grassland birds in western New York. Grassland bird populations are declining across much of North America, including the Northeast, and our research projects collect data useful for management and conservation. One of our objectives is to statistically describe relationships between the abundance of grassland species such as Savannah Sparrows, Eastern Meadowlarks, and Henslow’s Sparrows, and features of the habitat in which they occur. For each species, we are after an external representation of what the ecologist John Wiens has termed a “habitat selection template” — the “internal image . . . (genetically determined and/or learned) of what constitutes a suitable habitat.” At first glance, the process seems straightforward: count the number and types of birds in an area; measure variables associated with the vegetation in their territories, and characteristics of the surrounding landscape; then use these data to develop mathematical models that explain the maximum amount of variation in bird abundance among grassland sites. Hopefully, these models can be used to recommend management techniques that create or maintain the types of habitat that the birds prefer. This approach seeks to substitute one kind of knowledge — a mathematical description of the association between a species and its habitat — for something that is unknowable — what actually occurs in the minds of individual animals when they decide, even if unconsciously, to settle in one place rather than another. This is the goal, but in practice the science of modeling bird-habitat relationships is less than exact. The models sometimes explain only a small proportion of the total variation in bird numbers among study sites, meaning that a lot of noise remains in the system, and that we have failed to measure variables closely associated with the habitat features that the animals actually respond to. More disturbing is that even a strongly significant bird-habitat model developed for a species in one study may not

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hold for the same species at another time or place. To quote from one study on shrub-steppe birds in the Intermountain West, “The failure of such statistically robust models suggests that much of the local, within-year variation in shrub-steppe bird abundances may be unrelated to proximate habitat conditions, at least within broad limits.” In other words, birds, at least those of shrub-steppe habitats, aren’t too picky about where they live, as long as the habitat has a certain, general configuration. An alternative conclusion to that proposed by the biologist quoted above is possible: perhaps the birds respond to habitat features of which we are only dimly aware, or which are impossible to measure or describe with our equipment and statistical software. In some years, we are fortunate: those habitat features important to the birds are highly correlated with whatever it is that we measure. In other years, though, there are no strong correlations, and our modeled relationships vanish into the wasteland of statistical insignificance. In thinking about bird-habitat relationships, I keep returning to the fundamental question of what actually occurs in a bird’s mind when it settles in a particular spot: what mix of sensory cues leads it to chose one place over another? In the case of a grassland bird such as the Henslow’s Sparrow, is it the height and density of the vegetation, the particular mix of grass and broad-leaved herbaceous plants, the lack of shrub cover, the size of the grassland, the distance to the nearest grassland/forest boundary, or the angle between the horizon and tops of the tallest trees on the skyline? Or is it the way in which the fresh, green growth of spring grass waves in the wind on a bright May morning, the play of sunlight on the dead, silver-gray stalks of last year’s wild carrot, the great and glorious sweep of grass and sky and space arcing from one edge of the horizon to the other, the comforting presence of others of its kind, or some mysterious mixture of these qualities? Or does it just feel good? Whatever the case, I have noticed that, even if I can’t quantify the precise nature of the relationship between a bird and its habitat, I sometimes know that a place is good for the species. If I have watched and listened for long enough, my intuition will allow me to do what measurements and statistical analyses will not: develop some sense of what an animal is about, and how it responds to the gestalt of its environment. A few summers ago, one of my graduate students, Sarah Lazazzero, and I conducted a small experiment with Henslow’s Sparrows that

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illustrates this point. I chose Henslow’s Sparrows as a test species because they are one of the most uncommon grassland birds in New York. They often are absent from habitat patches that appear highly suitable, and I have been unable to develop good habitat models for them. Before I visited Sarah’s study area, I asked her to select ten fields, five with Henslow’s Sparrows, and five without; the fields should be approximately the same size, with similar vegetation. She then was to present them to me in random order; her goal was to confuse me, while mine was to rank the fields, from most to least likely to support Henslow’s Sparrows. I didn’t want to have any information about the birds themselves, so I wore headphones to block song, glanced down at the ground as I walked into each field, and visited the sites during the mid-afternoon lull in activity. Once in the field, I glanced around for a minute, scribbled a few notes, and then was led to the next site. I neither heard nor saw birds in any of the fields. After visiting all ten sites, I nervously presented my rankings. Perhaps I had been overly confident in my ability to recognize good Henslow’s Sparrow habitat, and would fail completely. But I didn’t. Of the five fields with Henslow’s Sparrows, I correctly identified four of them, and placed the fifth field in the sixth position. I was much better at predicting Henslow’s Sparrow occurrence than were our models, although I couldn’t say why I’d selected some of the fields; they just felt right. It’s humbling to consider the process of getting inside the mind of a nonhuman animal and understanding something of how it views the world. I’d like to think that my twelve years of fieldwork with grassland birds allowed me to develop some intuitive sense — partial and imperfect as it might have been — of how a Henslow’s Sparrow sees a grassland. During my first field season at Warden’s Grove, I had far less time to do something similar with Harris’s Sparrows. My target was a tangle of neurons that body mass–brain mass equations predict weighs about one gram, or in my units of choice, about 1.6 raisins. Most behavioral biologists argue that fundamental differences in how human and nonhuman animals perceive the natural world make it impossible to understand what it is like to be another species. The difficulties are compounded by the necessary limitations of the scientific method. We can study the structure and function of a Harris’s Sparrow neural system at scales extending from the organ (brain, central and peripheral nervous systems) to subcellular

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(individual ion channels in neurons) and molecular (action potentials and the chemistry of neurotransmitters at synapses) levels. We can quantify relationships between physical and social environmental stimuli and the organism’s behavioral responses under precisely controlled laboratory conditions, or less rigorously controlled field conditions. We are very good with anatomy, physiology, chemistry, and behavioral outcomes, but we are very poor with emotion and answering a fundamental question, What is it like to be a Harris’s Sparrow? At Warden’s Grove, my research needs were straightforward. They required only that I understand something about the external expression of intent (where a bird might place a nest or spend its time), rather than the nature of the intent itself. Still, my task would be easier if I could glimpse something of what it was like to “think like a Harris’s Sparrow.” Yet I was wary of anthropomorphism — a fundamental scientific sin, the fear of which had been instilled in me during my years of education. I had good reason to be suspicious, as I have enough trouble figuring out what is transpiring in the mind of another human being, even someone with whom I share a common tongue and general set of experiences, and am intimate. Why should I have had the hubris to believe that I could enter into a dialog with Harris’s Sparrows, and understand anything about the working of their minds? I desired to travel into the deepest unmapped country, but I had no way of seeing the terrain. Barry Lopez captures the nature of the problem at the start of his essay, “In a Country of Light, Among Animals.” He begins with a description of the Utukok River country in the western Brooks Range — its solitude and the quality of its light — and the logistical problems in working in such a place. He closes the introduction with the observation that “ . . . working up your field notes in the earth’s wildest places — up here on the Utukok — you feel vaguely uncomfortable. You are very far from home. Your language is spoken by no one in the region.” At the start of the term, I assign this short passage to students in my animal behavior class, and ask them what they make of the last few sentences. They usually respond with something about the physical difficulties of studying wild animals, and how lonely it might be to do fieldwork in the Brooks Range. They invariably miss what I take to be the main point, which also is the central problem of animal behavior: “Your language is spoken by no

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one in the region.” The poet Kenneth Rexroth puts it another way in “Doubled Mirrors”: . . . Coming up the road Through black oak shadows, I See ahead of me, glinting Everywhere from the dusty Gravel, tiny points of cold Blue light, like the sparkle of Iron snow. I suspect what it is, And kneel to see. Under each Pebble and oak leaf is a Spider, her eyes shining at Me with my reflected light Across immeasurable distance. My first crucial task was to catch Harris’s Sparrows, so that I could band them and determine their reproductive condition. I needed to tell male from female, distinguish among individuals in neighboring territories, and determine how frequently birds returned to Warden’s Grove in successive years. Because mist nets had worked poorly during my first field season, I needed to find a more successful method to use during the rest of my study. I decided to try Potter traps, wire mesh cages approximately nine inches on a side, which are baited with seed and have a door that falls from a vertical position when a bird hops onto a treadle in the trap. The next issue was where to set the traps. It turned out that, early in the season, before the birds settled into their territories, the wood and metal platform just beyond the cabin door was an excellent spot for capturing birds. We established a feeding station on the platform, and the traps often yielded a Harris’s Sparrow or two whenever we were in the cabin. More problematic were birds whose movements rarely if ever brought them to the vicinity of the platform. I had to catch these individuals on their territories, which were large enough, about two acres, so that their owners might not discover the traps unless they were placed properly. After a bit of experimentation, I found that an effective site usually was at the edge of the spruce, within a few yards of a small tree six feet or so high. Males used these trees as song perches, while both sexes used them as points from which to

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survey their surroundings, often before foraging. Then the process was simple: select a territory with unmarked birds; choose several likely-looking spruce; and place a piece of scrap plywood near each one. Scatter seeds across the board and set a Potter trap over the seeds. After an hour or so, check the trap, which often contained an unbanded bird. I worked the northern and southern sides of Warden’s Grove, then the surrounding, smaller islands of spruce, eventually picking off at least one member of almost every pair in my study area. The traps, which Paul christened AHEMs (Automatic Harris’s Sparrow Entrapment Mechanisms) worked remarkably well. Although I only caught a few of the recalcitrant birds, my map of the study area soon was filled with a satisfying series of rough polygons marking the territories of banded birds. This progress, basic as it was, was made possible by trial-and-error learning and one small realization about how Harris’s Sparrows behaved. If the panicked Harris’s Sparrow throwing itself against the side of the Potter trap was unbanded, I sexed it and then attached a numbered, butt-ended Canadian Wildlife Service aluminum band, which I opened and then crimped shut on its left tarsus, just above the toes. The numbered band was followed by a unique combination of three colored plastic bands, so that I could distinguish individuals from a distance. I placed one plastic band above the aluminum band — red for female, blue for male — to let me quickly determine the bird’s sex. Two other plastic bands went on the right leg. The bands gave rise to the nicknames that we bestowed on certain individuals: one male, whose band number ended in 666, became “The Beast.” The male and female of one pair, which were trapped on different days and locations, each chanced to end up with one black band and one orange band, so they became the “Halloween Couple”; and a female with two green bands, who later became a heroine, was simply “Mrs. Green.” After banding, I scored males for size of their cloacal protuberance and females for development of the brood patch on their bellies. Maximum swelling of the cloacal area indicated that a male was in full breeding condition, while a fully developed brood patch — defeathered, with wrinkled and swollen reddish-purple skin — was evidence that a female was incubating eggs. I then scored the bird for fat, using a scale from 0 (no fat) to 5 (all fat deposits bulging) and looked for signs of molt, which were absent in almost all birds until

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after they had fledged young. Afterward, I measured wing chord; tarsus length; bill length, depth, and width; and mass, so that I could evaluate pairing status and reproductive output in relation to body size. The wing chord measurement was made with a fifteen-centimeterlong metal ruler, which had a small angle of metal welded to one end that fit tightly against the bend in the wing, while the other measurements were done with a set of calipers. The last step, and the one in which I occasionally lost a bird, was to weigh the sparrow using a spring-loaded scale. I stuffed the bird head-first into a foot cut from a pair of panty hose, then clipped the little sack to the scale. When I finally released a bird, it usually flew to a nearby spruce, where it would shake itself, ruffle its feathers, and preen. It often picked futilely at the bands, which at first must have been an irritant (“Just what are these things?”), before disappearing into the brush. Of all my research tasks, banding birds was the one that I enjoyed most. I loved sitting on the tundra with my legs splayed apart, holding a newly-captured Harris’s Sparrow in my hand and feeling the thudding race of its tiny heart against my fingers. Sometimes I would hold a bird close to my face and gaze into its chocolate-brown irises and wonder what I looked like to it. If the light was right, I could see the golden sheen of my curved reflection in its eyes, and as I worked I considered the ways in which the light bound the bird and me together, across the immense distance of evolutionary time. I took pleasure in the ritual of banding and measuring each bird — clenching a pencil in my teeth while I worked; shifting the bird, banding pliers, bands, calipers, scales, and wing ruler from hand to hand; pausing between measurements to record numbers on my clipboard — always feeling that I would benefit from an extra set of arms, like some Hindu deity, yet pleased with the way in which my manual dexterity improved as I handled more birds. I also enjoyed recapturing individuals and taking a second or third set of measurements — of knowing that number 625 had lost two grams and a bit of fat in the week since I had last weighed him, that number 657’s brood patch was fully developed, a sign that she was incubating eggs. I loved walking over the tundra to the thin line of spruce just south of Warden’s Grove in early July and finding the “Halloween Couple” still there, as they had been for the last month — only now they were feeding four fiveday-old nestlings. And in the third year of my work, I found number

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604 perched in the same spruce that he had used in 1989 and 1990, and knew that he had survived at least six migrations plus three tough winters somewhere in the Midwest, and I marveled at the unerring precision with which he had found his way home, again. (And in a more anthropomorphic moment, I imagined 604 settling onto one of his favorite perches for the first time in late May of 1991, surveying his surroundings, seeing me, and thinking in whatever way Harris’s Sparrows think, “Well, it’s back again, and without wings. . . .”) I enjoyed knowing about returns and mass change of banded birds, but mostly I appreciated the way in which banding helped me to see individuals as distinct entities, rather than as interchangeable representations of some average, archetypal Harris’s Sparrow. By attaching small bits of aluminum and plastic to their legs, I could distinguish among them — not simply as males and females, or as members of pairs or inhabitants of particular bits of space, but as unique creatures. One of the main messages to emerge from the great mass of ecological research conducted over the last century is that the world and the organisms that inhabit it are variable and often unpredictable. The great surge in the application of statistics to ecological data description and hypothesis testing since the advent of modern computational methods is a recognition of this variability. No wonder that in many university biology departments the resident statistician is, more likely than not, an ecologist. Statistical analyses of even the most basic data sets are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and often involve multivariate techniques. These methods simultaneously consider several to many variables, and in some cases, create synthetic variables comprised of subsets of the original ones. While these techniques have tremendous value for describing natural systems and testing hypotheses, they carry a potential cost: obscuring the essence of the organisms that comprise these systems. In our desire to quantify, we (I) may forget that, although numbers may provide a useful representation of a thing (an individual bird, population, species, community, or ecosystem), they are not the thing itself. For example, once I had accumulated a sufficient number of measurements, I could use multivariate statistics to describe the variation in size among Harris’s Sparrows, and relate size differences among individuals to differences in such things as egg mass. Although this

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process was interesting, I felt sometimes that the analyses led me too far into the veiled world of principal components and discriminant functions, and farther from the birds themselves. But even though we understand that ecological systems and their components are inherently variable, and we use statistics to deal with some of this variability, we still are inclined to think of the natural world in terms of average conditions or characteristics. When I began my research, I was predisposed to see an “average” male or female Harris’s Sparrow, with a certain mass and size, a particular plumage and set of behaviors. In the language of statistics, I was focused more on measures of central tendency (mode, median, mean) than on measures of dispersion (standard deviation and variance). This inclination would have remained with me longer than it did if I had not banded birds and spent many hours watching them, and coming to know them as individuals, with their own personalities — consistent differences in behavioral traits such as aggressiveness, shyness, sociability, and activity. These sorts of individual differences have been identified in species from black rhinos to Great Tits to two-spotted octopuses. One of the things that I noticed about Harris’s Sparrows is that birds varied tremendously in how cautious they were. Some sparrows refused to go to their nest if I were any closer than one hundred yards. These individuals often would perch in a nearby spruce and utter an interminable series of chink warning calls, their bodies shaking slightly and moving from side to side as they protested my presence. A wary female might eventually flit from tree to tree, then drop to the ground twenty yards from the nest and skulk back to her eggs through the surrounding thicket of shrubs. But she would do so cautiously, and only after I had positioned myself behind a distant obstruction. Birds that were most cautious also appeared more vigilant when they foraged, and interrupted their feeding more frequently to scan their surroundings. Other individuals seemed less concerned by my presence. I could follow them more closely when they were feeding, and they sometimes went to the nest even when I was nearby. Once I watched from only five yards away as a banded female flew into a nearby spruce, dropped to the ground, and approached her nest. I was too busy to try to measure cautiousness and shyness, but it did seem that these behavioral differences sometimes translated into distinct outcomes: the nests of cautious individuals were more

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likely to fledge young, and the more vigilant birds were less likely to disappear from the study area. And it wasn’t until several years after I’d finished my work at Warden’s Grove that I noticed a passage in Marguerite Baumgartner’s Harris’s Sparrow account: “Harris’ sparrows appear to have personalities as variable as man himself. While some are quiet and meek, others are domineering and aggressive. Some are mild and easily handled, others become wild and difficult to trap. . . . It is these individuals that escape the occasional shrike that gets into the trap.” Shrikes are perching birds a bit smaller than robins. They are the raptors of the passerine world, and in the subarctic they specialize on small vertebrate prey such as voles and sparrows, although I also have seen them take bumblebees on the wing. In 1991, a pair of Northern Shrikes nested in Warden’s Grove, and shortly after they took up residence, banded Harris’s Sparrows began disappearing from my study area, in a pattern that suggested a widening circle of death radiating out from the nest. Some birds — most often individuals that I had labeled as “cautious”— seemed to last longer, although some of these eventually disappeared, too. I suspected the shrikes, but wasn’t certain until I located one of their caches, about fifty yards from their nest. There I found the carcasses of red-backed voles, Savannah Sparrows, tree sparrows, Lapland Longspurs, robin nestlings, large beetles and bumblebees and, alas, several Harris’s Sparrows. Some of the kills were mostly intact, but the Harris’s Sparrow remains were little more than feathers, wings, and two sets of open mandibles, gaping grotesquely from small nubbins of willow branches. Scattered amongst the piles of feathers below the cache were three banded Harris’s Sparrow tarsi. All of these kills were females, and most of the other marked birds that had disappeared from their territories were females, too. I had no proof, but thought that incubating females might be more vulnerable to predation. Harris’s Sparrows usually foraged within fifteen yards of the nearest shrubs, but they still were vulnerable to attacks by aerial predators such as shrikes. During the early part of the nesting cycle, when the shrikes were dining on Harris’s Sparrows, males appeared more vigilant when foraging. They often would hop a few feet, scratch at the ground with their feet, pick up a crowberry fruit or insect, and then pause, lift their heads and scan the horizon before resuming feeding. Incubating females appeared less wary, though. One factoid that I discovered

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about Harris’s Sparrows is that only the females incubate. Their incubation bouts varied in length, depending mostly on temperature, but averaged about thirty minutes. When a female left the nest, she had only a limited amount of time to forage before returning to her cooling eggs. During their time off the nest, females seemed more intent on feeding, and scanned for predators less frequently than males. Perhaps their hunger, and need to return to the nest, made them less able to detect approaching danger. By early July of 1991, few active Harris’s Sparrow nests remained in the vicinity of the shrike nest. The closest surviving nest, which had five nestlings, was near a small spruce about fifty yards beyond Warden’s Grove. It belonged to a banded pair that included “Mrs. Green.” These birds obviously were concerned about the shrikes; if a shrike called from the grove, they took cover and scanned the area, while if a shrike was hunting nearby, they disappeared for fifteen or twenty minutes before reemerging. But they had to feed their young, and twice we witnessed shrikes attack Mrs. Green while she was foraging. In both cases, her mate gave a warning call as the shrike approached. Mrs. Green immediately retreated into a nearby spruce, where she remained stationary. The attacking shrike flew into the far side of the spruce and hopped through the branches toward her. Mrs. Green then bolted toward Warden’s Grove, with the shrike about three yards behind, like a Spitfire and Messerschmidt in the Battle of Britain. A short, weaving chase ensued, with the shrike gaining on Mrs. Green before she curved into deep cover and the shrike broke off pursuit. I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, inside that one-gram brain, to live with such constant tension — to rarely put aside the burden of being prey, with every provisioning trip from and to the nest featuring the real possibility of death-byshrike. I couldn’t imagine that Mrs. Green, her partner, or their young would make it through to fall migration. However, she and her mate fledged all but one nestling, which died six days after hatching, and moved the fledglings to thick brush near the cabin, where we lost track of them. And five years later, I received a banding return record from the Canadian Wildlife Service informing me that one of her nestlings, number 36684, had survived the shrikes and made it through two breeding seasons on its own before being reported in December 1993 near Lawrence, Kansas. The tenacity of life, once again.

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Nest finding is the other aspect of fieldwork, besides banding, that I find most rewarding. I was aware, mostly from Semple and Sutton’s account, of where Harris’s Sparrows should build their nests — at the edge of spruce stands or among scattered trees, on the ground beneath dwarf birch, Labrador tea, alder, or perhaps a small rock. Their paper also suggested that the birds should be incubating eggs during late June, and feeding nestlings in early July. However, translating written descriptions into an ability to actually find nests was difficult and frustrating, especially during my first field season. The main problems were that I had no understanding of the behavioral cues indicating when a bird is about to go to the nest, and more importantly, I had no search image — no mental picture of what a Harris’s Sparrow’s nest and nest-site looked and felt like. Even though the birds spent most of their time either in or very near brushy habitat at the edge of the trees, I had no idea just where I would find nests within the swath of shrubs that ringed most spruce stands. Each shrub looked pretty much the same, and I had no idea if the birds would be more likely to nest immediately adjacent to the spruce, ten yards out, or fifty yards out, where the dwarf birch graded into tundra. I didn’t know if they built their nests beneath shrubs that were three feet high, one foot high, or six inches high, or if they tended to place them where shrub cover was thick or sparse. Worst of all, I had no sense as to whether Harris’s Sparrows at Warden’s Grove behaved like those at Churchill; instead of preferring shrubby habitat, perhaps they nested amongst the tallest spruce, or on the Barrens, far beyond the trees. And so, at the start of my first field season, I was very nervous about this nest-finding business. It was bad enough that I was having trouble catching and banding birds; if I failed to find enough nests, I really would have to abandon my Harris’s Sparrow project. When I returned to Lawrence, I would have to slink into the office of my major advisor, Richard Johnston, declare myself a failure, and discuss alternative research topics — not a pleasant thought. I used two simple methods to find nests. The first involved trudging through likely-looking habitat, making as much noise as possible in the hopes of flushing an incubating bird off the nest. This method had the virtue of requiring almost no skill or knowledge (which suited me admirably). However, this approach had its drawbacks. First, its success rate was low in situations in which there was

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a lot of potential habitat and nest densities were low. Second, endless, noisy tromping yielded few insights into their behavior. A third problem was that if a female were away from her nest when I passed by, I would dismiss the area as a potential nest-site and ignore it in future searches. The second method involved tracking parents to the nest. This tactic often was more efficient than plowing through vegetation, but it was difficult when I had no intuitive sense of the species’ behavior, or understanding of the subtle cues that indicated when a bird was about to go to the nest. With species such as Harris’s Sparrow, which have no sexual plumage differences, it also helps if at least one member of the nesting pair is marked, so that it’s possible to distinguish male from female. This was most true during incubation, when females spent up to thirty minutes on the eggs, then left to feed for ten to fifteen minutes before skulking back to the nest. Still, the observational approach appealed to me because it involved a bit of finesse, and offered some opportunity to work my way inside the Harris’s Sparrow brain. I began searching for Harris’s Sparrow nests by thinking of them as robust White-crowned Sparrows, whose nesting habitats I was familiar with from my Master’s research in Wyoming — although White-crowned Sparrows nesting below timberline usually built their nests a few feet off the ground, in low, wind-flagged Englemann spruce and subalpine fir. Above timberline, though, they nested beneath scrubby willows, and I figured that Harris’s Sparrow nests might be placed in similar locations. During my first field season, I tried both tromping through likely-looking habitat and tracking birds to the nest, but the dearth of banded females made it difficult to know the sex of most birds that I followed. I sometimes spent thirty minutes shadowing a bird in the hope that it would lead me to a nest, only to turn away in frustration when it revealed its sex with a burst of impassioned song. During my first field season, I was obsessed with finishing the cabin, settling in at Warden’s Grove, figuring out where the birds were, and establishing and running transects that I would follow throughout my study — to estimate snow cover and measure the abundance of two important food sources, arthropods and fruits. I did not focus sufficiently on simply watching Harris’s Sparrows and figuring out

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the finer points of their mating behavior, and so I was slow to understand some of the behavioral cues that distinguish unmarked males and females and indicate when a bird had just finished an incubation bout or was about to return to the nest. By my second field season, though, I’d watched enough birds, and I knew the temporal pattern of the nesting cycle. I noticed that, prior to incubation, males often guarded their mates closely from marauding males. It was the female who flew first, and seemed to decide when and where to feed, perch, or preen. I also realized that males ceased incessant mate guarding soon after the female laid her clutch of three to five eggs, when her brood patch was primed for incubation. If I was watching a banded female, particularly one that I had captured recently, I knew where she was in her breeding cycle, and how she probably would behave around the nest. But in 1989, those halcyon days were a year away, and I was left to muddle through the business of nest-finding. I slogged through miles of dwarf birch and followed dozens of unmarked birds, looking for clues, paranoid that I was missing signs of nesting that should have been obvious, and that the birds were far into their nesting season. The weather, which had remained cool through the end of May, turned unseasonably warm, with the ice on the Thelon going out on June 12 and temperatures reaching almost ninety degrees on June 13. These conditions suggested that nesting should be further along than in 1931 at Churchill, when Sutton found his first nest, with a complete clutch of four eggs, on June 16. But on June 14, I caught a lucky break. I was returning to camp for lunch after having searched unsuccessfully for nests for three hours, walking along the uphill side of a finger of trees extending north from Warden’s Grove, about twenty yards from the nearest spruce, when a Harris’s Sparrow flew from directly below my feet and skittered off into deep cover. There’s a delightful and unmistakable whirr of wings that comes when a bird flushes from a nest — a brief, satisfying flutter — and I knew that I had found my first Harris’s Sparrow nest. I knelt and discovered a nest of dried, amber-colored grass, held within a larger cup of lichen and moss, with an inside diameter of about three inches. Lying in the cup was a single egg, pale bluish-green, with irregular, brownish blotches, a bit less than one inch long. Behind me, a bird uttered a series of the high-pitched alarm calls of an agitated Harris’s

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Sparrow. I looked at that lonely egg and for a moment felt a surge of relief; I knew that my study would work out in the long run. I would find enough nests, band enough birds, secure enough money to fund my next two field seasons. Still, I felt almost silly to be as excited as I was, a thirty-eight-year-old riding an adrenalin high generated by a sparrow egg. The solitary egg suggested that Harris’s Sparrows were just initiating clutches, and each day I returned to the nest to check on its status. The four-egg clutch was complete on June 17, the day that I found my second nest. Two more nests followed on the eighteenth, one on the nineteenth, another on the twentieth, and two more on the twenty-first, the first day on which we were harassed by mosquitoes. By early July, Ken and I had found eighteen nests — not a tremendous total, but minimally sufficient for my purposes, and probably 60 to 70 percent of the nests in my study area. Nest-finding had chewed up lots of our time — each nest represented about eight hours of effort — but, with practice, the process became easier. I began to notice behaviors and attributes indicating that incubating females had just left the nest, or were about to return. A slightly bent tail or darkened depression in the central breast feathers identified a female that had just completed an incubation bout, while preening hinted that a female might be preparing to return to her nest. Once a female was ready to resume incubation, she often made several short flights between perches on either side of the nest, punctuating each flight with nervous glances and intentional movements — brief, hesitant motions, often in the direction of the nest, as if she wanted to fly, but was reluctant to do so. And if I were far enough away from the nest and sitting quietly in a concealed location, she might finally launch herself, like a diver who finally gathers the courage to leap from a tall cliff, and disappear into the shrub concealing the nest, or one close by. And once the eggs hatched, increased back-and-forth activity by parents feeding young made nests easier to locate, along with the fact that a bird with food in its bill — say a green caterpillar larva — meant that it was feeding young. But even if a bird had gone to the nest, I couldn’t be certain of finding it on my first, second, or even third try, for I often was watching from too far away to figure out exactly where the bird had disappeared to. Heat waves rising from the tundra and foreshortened shrubs made it difficult to accurately gauge

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distances, so for perspective I often placed several small pieces of colored flagging on plants that I figured were close to the nest, then backed off and returned later. Some individuals were less intimidated by my presence than others, and I usually located their nests after several visits to their territory. Others I found by dumb luck during haphazard wandering, when I inadvertently flushed an incubating or brooding female. Some nests, though, I found only through determined effort and repeatedly returning to observe a pair. At times my determination bordered on obsession: a man (tipping the scales at 150 pounds) and a pair of birds (each weighing in at about one-fifteenth of a pound) engaged in a contest of will, patience, and intellect. It does little for my ego to reveal that I eventually overcame most Harris’s Sparrows in the intellect department, but that they were far superior to me in terms of patience. One should never underestimate the ability of an animal with a one-gram brain to do nothing other than wait — to persevere in the face of what, for this human, was utter tedium. The wariest Harris’s Sparrows were the equivalent of meditation masters, able to clear their minds of everything but concern about the nearby, two-legged nest predator and remain in an indefinite state of agitated awareness. I, on the other hand, would begin the contest by pledging unflagging commitment to finding this nest. For fifteen minutes or even a half an hour, I matched my patience to that of the bird’s. But at some point my arms would begin to tire from holding my binoculars, and I would change my position. My mind would wander, to thoughts of what else I should be doing, right now, or how hungry I was, or how irritating the mosquitoes were when they worked their way behind my glasses and into my ears. I would begin to fidget like a five-year-old in time out and mutter to myself. Inevitably, I would glance away from the bird. And in that moment, the bird would vanish. I would swing my binoculars back to the spot where the Harris’s Sparrow had been, only to find an empty perch. Percy Taverner, a Canadian ornithologist who “raced” Sutton to find the first Harris’s Sparrow nest with eggs, was frustrated by this “beam-me-to-the-nest, Scotty” quality of their behavior: “We found them to be the most aggravating birds. I personally watched pairs for hours in the aggregate only in every case to have them suddenly vacate the neighborhood entirely and apparently permanently without giving any indication of the position of the nest.” At this point I would trudge off, vowing a

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return: I would win in the end. And sometimes, I did. I would catch my target off guard, glimpse movement out of the corner of my eye, kick up a bird in a part of the territory I had not considered. I would hear the telltale flutter of wings, feel that little kick of adrenalin, kneel to find four or five blue-and-brown eggs, and feel as though I had “won” (what?), even though some birds would defeat me — I never would find their nests, either because they were situated in places for which there was no good vantage point, or because they were smarter, in their Zen – Zonotrichia kind of way, than I was. We located twenty-three nests during my second field season — only five more than in 1989, but probably 80 percent of the nests in the study area. Many of these were found with less effort, and earlier in the nesting cycle, and by my third field season I had a strong search image and enough understanding about the behavior of nesting birds to make nest-finding much easier than it was in 1989. I had some intuitive sense of where Harris’s Sparrows nested, and occasionally it seemed as though I just knew where a nest would be. However, nest-finding was more frustrating for my field assistants in 1989 and 1990, Ken and Martin, who had only a single field season in which to develop their skills, and no prior experience with the process. Both of them put long hours into nest searching, and they eventually located a few on their own — but the cost/benefit ratio was very high, with meager rewards for their considerable efforts. Conversely, Paul, who had never seen a Harris’s Sparrow nest prior to 1991, quickly became adept at finding them. His dissertation research dealt with the breeding ecology of American Pipits, and I think that his nest-finding experiences on that project gave him the background to quickly develop a sense of what nesting Harris’s Sparrows were about. He spotted several nests when they were still being constructed, prior to leaf-out of the dwarf birch, and quickly tracked a number of incubating females to their nests. Although I was pleased to enter Paul’s rapidly growing tally of nests in my field notebook, I also was slightly frustrated, for I had wanted to be the Harris’s Sparrow “expert” who showed his brother-in-law how it was done. We became engaged in a good-natured contest to see who would find the most Harris’s Sparrow nests, like Sutton and Taverner sixty years before, and I was happy when, with much effort, I found enough nests to match his total for the season. Paul’s facility with nest-finding illustrates a phenomenon that I’ve

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recognized more fully since I began studying the breeding ecology of grassland birds. Over the last thirteen years, I have hired many students for projects that required finding the mostly cryptic, well-hidden nests of Eastern Meadowlarks, Bobolinks, Savannah Sparrows, and Henslow’s Sparrows. Finding their nests is not easy under any circumstances, but I’ve noticed that some students are much better at it than others. Even if each novice is taught in the same way, some seem to have the knack, while others, no matter how hard they try, never get it. Perhaps these differences are due mostly to variations in patience and determination; experience exploring the natural world, whether as a hunter or birder; and even the ability to process sensory information. But it also is likely that people differ in their intuitive sense of animals. For the fortunate few, this gift translates into an ability to recognize phenomena associated with natural objects such as bird nests, using information from sources other than those directly associated with the senses. These “phenomena” are not the nests or the habitats themselves, which are accessible to our sensory systems. Instead, I wonder if we differ in our ability to perceive the “rightness” of a nest site — if, as we search an expanse of grassland or dwarf birch scrub, certain locations feel better than others because they slot into a template composed as much of emotion as of neural connections. Perhaps, if we work hard enough and have the proper qualities of mind and heart, some ineffable essence of “Harris’s Sparrowness” or “Henslow’s Sparrowness” becomes palpable, and we can sense what once was obscured by a tangle of grass or shrubs. Although I am deeply skeptical of such crypto-mystical sentiments, perhaps, in a manner analogous to how people differ in their innate ability to learn human languages, they also differ in their ability to understand the languages and minds of nonhuman animals. This is what I am interested in, something that’s more than the ability to develop a search image or process visual information. Henry Beston has written that “Animals are other nations,” and it may be that some of us are better able than others to live and travel in the broken and sometimes ambiguous border country that separates humans from other species. When John Muir wandered through the Sierra, he searched for signs that glaciers had carved the mountains, including the magnificent valley of the Yosemite. The professional geologists of the time,

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including Josiah Whitney, chief of California’s Geological Survey, instead held that Yosemite Valley was a graben, a down-dropped block of land between two faults, which had been formed by a massive earthquake. Muir’s travels in search of evidence of glaciation took him far afield, into an unmapped country of both geography and scientific theory. There Muir found remnant glaciers, sheltered in cirques along the crest of the Sierra, and from these he traced the paths of Pleistocene ice sheets that once flowed along canyons draining the high peaks. In the lower reaches of the Sierra, Muir discovered glacial polish, moraines, and erratics, and his evidence eventually carried the day, in spite of professional opposition and Whitney’s condescending description of him as “an ignorant sheepherder.” Muir traveled into an unmapped country, while Josiah Whitney did not, or could not, and his travels helped him see how glaciers helped create the mountains that he loved so deeply. He built a map of his heart, one that paralleled the paths of glaciers, and navigated through a previously unexplored emotional, empirical, aesthetic, and spiritual landscape. Muir described one version of his map in an essay on the water-ouzel, or American Dipper, a bird that lives along mountain streams in the American West: Were the flights of all the ouzels in the Sierra traced on a chart, they would indicate the direction of the flow of the entire system of ancient glaciers, from about the period of the breaking up of the ice-sheet until near the close of the glacial winter; because the streams which the ouzels so rigidly follow are, with the unimportant exception of a few side tributaries, all flowing in channels eroded for them out of the solid flank of the range by the vanished glaciers — the streams tracing the ancient glaciers, the ouzels tracing the streams. Like the ouzel, Muir’s heart mapped the paths of glaciers, and I believe that by studying Harris’s Sparrows as I did, I was able to plot a map of my heart and its surrounding landscape, too — and by doing so, travel far into an unknown country. Harris’s Sparrows, Warden’s Grove, Thelon River, Northwest Territories: like C. H. D. Clarke, I travel through an unmapped land. Like the early Barrenlands cartographers, I want to depict this unknown country. Some-

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times this country seems inconsequential, its terrain flat and unexciting, arcane and far removed from the things that are important to most people. Why should anyone care about the contour lines that define the lives of Harris’s Sparrows, the many lakes that mark the course of their annual cycle, and the histories of individual birds? Why should we concern ourselves with a map that depicts the boundaries of 36604’s territory and plots Mrs. Green’s desperate, evasive flight from an attacking Northern Shrike? Why should we bother tracing the path that took one of her young, 36684, from a nest beneath a dwarf birch fifty yards southwest of Warden’s Grove to near Lawrence, Kansas, some sixteen hundred miles and twenty-nine months away? Perhaps answers to these questions will be found on the map that I sketched during my time at Warden’s Grove, one that depicts features found in no two-dimensional topography: over there, the sparrowsong given out in the aftermath of a late May blizzard; here, the slight bows toward the nest made by an agitated female who desires only to incubate her eggs; across the way, the deep, unfathomable look in her mate’s eyes when I grasp him in my hands and attach a small band to one of his legs. . . . Years later, I will open up the tattered Hanbury quadrangle, 1:250,000 scale, number 75P, which saw me through my days at Warden’s Grove. I will see the contour lines, the myriad lakes (Eyeberry, Axecut, Hoare, Steel) and rivers (Hanbury, Thelon, Clarke, Radford), the exact elevations and benchmarks (1096, 1256). I will look at the map and I will know the lay of the land, note the axis of the world I once traveled through. And yet, for all of its accurate detail, when I hold 75P in my hands, I will know that there still is an unmapped country out there, a hidden landscape that radiates out from a small bird and into the larger world. I will consider all that I know about this bird, and more importantly, what I do not know. And I will take comfort in the blank spots that shall always remain on my map, waiting to be explored.

The . . . . Names . . . . . . . of . . .Things ........................................... It is a brilliant day in late June of 1989. I have been searching for Harris’s Sparrow nests and, as is often the case during my first field season, I am frustrated: another four hours lost to trudging across the tundra and watching uncooperative birds, with nothing to show for my efforts. The habits of the animals remain cryptic and inaccessible. I am tired and sweaty and decide to take a break in an open spot, where there is a good view of the Thelon and the winds keep the mosquitoes at bay. I take off my pack and sit on a rock, grab a bite to eat, and drink some water. The food and water revive my spirits and energy; I leave my pack propped against the rock and meander across the tundra, cataloging the flowering plants that I recognize. In the drier upland sites, I find crowberry, alpine bearberry, mountain cranberry, alpine azalea, dwarf birch, Lapland rose-bay, and alpine holy grass. In areas of wet tundra, amongst the sedge tussocks, I note bog-laurel, andromeda, cottongrass (which actually is a sedge), cloudberry, and a new plant for the summer, a species of lousewort, genus Pedicularis, about six inches high, with beautiful, pale yellow flowers. I recognize the genus from my recent summers in Wyoming’s Beartooth Mountains, where one of my favorite species, elephant’s head (Pedicularis groenlandica) blooms in moist alpine and subalpine meadows. I once knew the name of this species, too, but over the last nine years it has vanished from my memory. So I retrieve Porsild and Cody’s Vascular Plants of Continental Northwest Territories, Canada, from my pack and flip through the pages to Scrophulariaceae, the figwort family, then find the genus Pedicularis. There are only twelve species of Pedicularis in the continental Northwest Territories, so I figure that I’ll be able to identify the plant without too much difficulty. I take a hand lens from my field vest, swat away a few annoying mosquitoes, and begin working through the dichotomous key, which is arranged in couplets. The first choice is between branched and unbranched stems. The stems are simple, so I move to the next couplet, which involves the easy choice

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between yellow, or pink or purple, corollas, the corolla being the fused petals, which in the genus form an irregular tube. The delicate corolla, less than an inch long, is yellow, and so my next decision involves distinguishing between a beaked and unbeaked “helmet,” the arched structure that forms the upper petals of the corolla and surrounds the four tiny stamens. The helmet is beaked; this path brings me to the end of the key. I am holding a sprig of Pedicularis lapponica L., or Lapland lousewort — the L. standing for Carl Linnaeus, who first named and described the species. In this moment of identification, after a fruitless morning of nest searching, I am strangely happy. I have attached a name to this small and wonderfully fragrant plant, and now I am able to properly label it. By virtue of identification I know something of the habit that it shares with other members of the genus — it is a hemiparasite, a plant that has chlorophyll and can photosynthesize, but also takes much of its nourishment from underground suckers that grow into the roots of other plants. I can look at the species’ distribution map in Porsild and Cody, trace the pattern of dots that spreads in a broad arc from eastern Greenland across the Canadian tundra to northwestern Alaska, and imagine Lapland lousewort growing in other landscapes that I desire and love. On this wind-tossed, sunny June afternoon, I find pleasure in naming Pedicularis lapponica, and in the knowledge that flows from the name. I take a last drink of water and return Porsild and Cody to my pack. I am refreshed, and ready to resume nest searching. My world is slightly richer, and for the moment I am content. om Killion’s book The High Sierra of California is a beautiful collection of woodcut prints, accompanied by quotations from John Muir’s writings and excerpts from Gary Snyder’s journals. The art and writing are a masterful evocation of the Sierra landscape; I love the colors and lines of the prints, which are done in the Japanese manner, their symmetry with Snyder’s spare but eloquent journal entries, and Muir’s vivid descriptions of the high country. I suppose that most people who have visited the Sierra wilderness would agree with my sentiments about The High Sierra of California, and if they are familiar with Muir’s writings, with what Killion wrote in the introduction: “Muir rose above scientific description and inquiry . . .” Catch me on the right day, and I might agree, too; but when I consider this statement more fully, its implications become irritatingly clear.

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Suppose that Killion, now transformed into a radical materialist, had written: “Muir rose above poetic description and inquiry.” Or, “Muir rose above artistic creativity and expression.” Either sentence would seem narrow-minded and foolish. But by virtue of one phrase — “Muir rose above scientific description and inquiry” — Killion has erected an intellectual and creative hierarchy. Rather than acknowledging that Muir’s scientific inquiries were central to his appreciation of the Sierra, or that science might be of equal value to art in describing and exploring our relationship to the natural world, Killion makes it clear that art occupies a more central and powerful position than science in its ability to evoke the beauty and spirit of the High Sierra. Killion is, of course, not alone in his views about the aesthetic and epistemological limitations of science. The novelist John Fowles, himself a skilled amateur botanist, wrote in The Tree that, Even the simplest knowledge of the name and habits of flowers or trees starts this distinguishing and individuating process, and removes us a step from total reality towards anthropocentrism; that is, it acts mentally as a camera view-finder. Already it destroys or curtails certain possibilities of seeing, apprehending or experiencing. . . . I came to believe that this [the scientific] approach represented a major human alienation, affecting all of us, both personally and socially . . . Later in the same essay, Fowles states, “The scientist has even to generalize himself, to subtract all personal feeling from the conduct of experiment and observation and from the enunciation of results.” For Fowles, at least at this point in his essay, science falls short because it cannot embrace all ways of interacting with and describing the natural world, and because the process of objective observation separates the scientist from what he or she is examining. I take Fowles’s point to be that science fails because it is limited in what it can tell us about the natural world and our relationship to it. In other words, it fails because it is not art. The poet W. S. Merwin agrees in part with Fowles’s critique of science, although he extends his criticism further. In his essay “The Tree on One Tree Hill,” Merwin discusses artists and botanists working with Captain James Cook’s Endeavour expedition in the South

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Pacific between 1768 and 1771. For Merwin, science, and more broadly, language, represents “a kind of knowledge that at once informs seeing and impairs it. It exists because of a knowledge of separation, and in partially healing the separation, it confirms it, perpetuates it, proves it. It is at once a power and an indication of helplessness, incompleteness, necessity.” But Merwin also sees a more sinister effect of the process of science and naming things, at least as it was practiced on an eighteenth century voyage whose purpose was extending the realm of British colonial power: “finding the ‘real’ name of anything is a way of claiming and establishing power over it. In itself it is an act of appropriation, an annexation, and the moment of such naming of the flora and fauna of the South Pacific coincided with the final and most pervasive era of European imperialism.” Merwin’s focus is on eighteenth-century Enlightenment science, which Fowles actually prefers to the nineteenth-century Victorian brand, but Merwin’s critique seems a more general one. Scientists labor to name, describe, and deduce structure and relationships, with the goal of increasing human understanding of, and control over, Nature — an intellectual imperialism that leads to detachment, loss of wonder, and ultimately, to despoilment of the natural world. Both Fowles and Merwin also are less than sanguine about the Swedish scientist and physician, Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus, who worked out of the university town of Uppsala between 1730 and 1770, developed the modern system of hierarchical classification and biological nomenclature, including the binomial (such as Zonotrichia querula). Fowles and Merwin view Linnaeus as a harbinger, an angel of alienation and destruction. For Fowles, the process of naming and distinguishing one living thing from another begins the process of separating humans from Nature, and limits how we see, in the most profound sense of the word: these effects are “the bitter fruit from the tree of Uppsalan knowledge.” Merwin agrees, but for him Linnaeus is even more of a cultural heavy: “There surely is no need to magnify the name of Linnaeus and his system and what they have accomplished. He and his method evolved from a craving of his species to possess a sense of the order of life, to occupy a commanding position in a pattern of existence that they alone understood, and therefore they alone, in the long run, would control.” The Linnaean

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system’s objective and practice are “the deduction of structure and labor of separation. Of role from role, species from species, life from life. And abstracted from these abstractions, the isolated human species with its relative knowledge remains the mirror of the unknown.” Quite an accomplishment for the man who wrote in Critica Botanica (1737),“If you do not know the names, your knowledge of the things perishes.” And quite an accomplishment for the method that gave us, among other names, Zonotrichia querula — the official binomial for the Harris’s Sparrow, as agreed to by the Committee on Classification and Nomenclature of the American Ornithologists’ Union, and derived from the Latin for “the banded thrush with the whistle-like song.” Nomenclature, and all it represents, also is a major irritant to Rob Perkins, who has spent months alone in the arctic wilderness: “Science and monotheism have driven the gods from Olympus but not the musk-ox from the arctic. The technician is the modern missionary bringing every bird, every grass blade, wave pattern, and molecule into the fold of human knowledge and domination. As we continue to unfurl our presence on earth, must everything have name and a use?” I find much to quarrel with in the above quotation. First, technicians are not equivalent to scientists, just as technology is not equivalent to science; the technician applies the results of scientific discovery, but the scientist does the (dirty?) work of bringing the birds and grass blades into “the fold of human knowledge,” or as with Merwin, closer to “human domination.” But my fundamental disagreement is with the notion that taxonomy — the science of naming and classifying living things — and by extension, science itself, must lead to disconnection and, ultimately, to subjugation. There need not be any Faustian bargain in the practice of naming and describing life: this much knowledge for this much alienation. Instead, I’d argue that nomenclature can bring us closer to a full appreciation of the natural world. Names are not the things themselves, but they carry with them the possibility of understanding, and even wonder. Let’s begin with the meaning of a few binomials of birds that occur around Warden’s Grove; these are taken from E. A. Choate’s The Dictionary of American Bird Names. The Horned Lark is a small songbird that breeds in open country with sparse ground cover — desert, the

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high plains, arctic and alpine tundra. Its binomial is Eremophila alpestris. The genus name Eremophila is from the Latin eremos (lonely) and phileo (love); the species name (alpestris) is from the Latin for alpine. Thus, we have the alpine lover of solitude. Perhaps I should take the name, too: Eremophila alpestris normentii. The evocative, haunting cries of Long-tailed Ducks drift across leads of open water when the Thelon breaks up in early June. The species breeds throughout the arctic, and winters in (seemingly) inhospitable waters along northern portions of the East and West Coast, and the Great Lakes. I have watched rafts of them in January, as they drifted through leaden swells of thirty-four-degree water and swirling snow flurries off the ice-bound shore of Lake Ontario. The Long-tailed Duck’s binomial is Clangula hyemalis. The genus and species names, again from the Latin, mean “noise” and “wintry”: the noisy bird of winter, a perfect descriptor for this loud and vocal inhabitant of cold places. The Northern Shrike, killer of Harris’s Sparrows, also is known as Lanius excubitor, the butcher (Lanius) and sentinel (excubitor), for its habits of watching for prey from high perches, and storing the bodies of its victims in caches, where it impales them on sharp objects. But perhaps my favorite scientific name is the now-abandoned binomial for the Snow Goose, Chen hyperborea. Chen means “goose,” while hyperborea means “beyond the north wind”: goose from beyond the north wind. How lovely, and the perfect name for a goose that breeds from Hudson Bay north to Baffin and Ellesmere Islands, and from Greenland west to Wrangel Island off the northeastern coast of Siberia. Alas, the name has been lost to the principle of priority, in which the earlier binomial has precedence, all other things, especially our understanding of evolutionary relationships, being equal. And one final name, again lost to priority, as well as to an improved understanding of evolutionary relationships: that of the mammal that destroyed the Warden’s Grove cabin, and by virtue of its presence, changed the nature of how I approached life on the Thelon: Ursus horribilis, or the horrible bear, now Ursus arctos. . . . Ursus horribilis, Eremophila alpestris, Chen hyperborea, Lanius excubitor, Clangula hyemalis, and of course, Zonotrichia querula: although I know that these species — or rather, the individuals that I recognize as belonging to these species — are more than, and something different than, their

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names, all of them pad or fly across the Barrens, and all of them trail through my dreams. They carry their names with them, but in their names I see poetry and knowledge; I sense no separation, cultural hegemony, or lust for power, whatever the motivations of the individuals and societies that first bestowed binomials upon the species and placed them in a taxonomic hierarchy. Beyond the aesthetics of the names themselves stands a more important property, one that can profoundly increase our understanding of the living things that they identify. Binomials lie at the base of a system that arranges all living things in a hierarchical classification. This system represents a series of working hypotheses about evolutionary relationships among organisms, and it informs us about their shared and divergent characteristics. As such, it is a kind of map, one that charts the 3.4 billion-year web of history that connects us to the lowliest sponge and enteric bacterium. Linnaeus developed his hierarchical classification system about one hundred years before Darwin published Origin of Species, and so he worked in the intellectually limited framework of a young Earth and the immutability of living things. Linnaeus once wrote: “The invariability of species is the condition of order.” Although the conceptual basis for the Linnaean system has evolved over the last two hundred fifty years, the framework remains, and there is much to be learned and treasured in “the bitter fruit from the tree of Uppsalan knowledge.” When I hold a Harris’s Sparrow, Zonotrichia querula, in my hand, I know its name; I know how it fits into the hierarchical classification scheme, which in a simplified form is: 1. Kingdom Animalia, the animals; 2. Phylum Chordata, the chordates, animals with a dorsal nerve chord, dorsal notochord (a flexible rod), and pharyngeal gill slits at some stage of their life cycle; 3. Class Aves, the birds, living chordates with feathers and a furcula (“wishbone”); 4. Superorder Neognathae, birds with a “modern” configuration of bones in the bony palate; 5. Order Passeriformes, song or perching birds, which are characterized by a suite of traits, including oil glands with a

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unique nipple structure, sperm with a spiral head and helical tail membrane, and a specialized arrangement of muscles, tendons, and bones in the hindlimb, which facilitate perching; 6. Suborder Passeres, oscine songbirds with well-developed muscles associated with the song-making structure, the syrinx; 7. Family Emberizidae, the New World Sparrows, one of several families of passerines with nine primary flight feathers; 8. Genus Zonotrichia, the crowned sparrows, lovers of ecotones in beautiful places, my favorite genus of birds; and 9. Species querula, the Harris’s Sparrow. Thus, Zonotrichia querula [Nuttall], first named Fringilla querula, the mourning finch, by Thomas Nuttall in 1840, based upon a specimen that he collected on April 28, 1834, near present-day Independence, Missouri — a bird that was relatively late (unfortunately so, for it) in departing northwards, and judging by the longitude, one that could have bred north of Saskatchewan, in the Thelon River drainage. . . . This ladder of names might overwhelm many readers, yet they tell me something about evolutionary relationships — common descent and divergence — and characters that may either unite groups of organisms, or identify them as separate lineages: the structure of the syrinx, musculature of the hindlimb and, within Zonotrichia, such shared traits as similar juvenile plumages and songs. For example, one field guide describes the songs of the four North American Zonotrichia as follows: Harris’s Sparrow (“a series of long, quavering whistles”); White-throated Sparrow (“a single whistle, generally two single notes followed by three triple notes”); White-crowned Sparrow (“usually one or more thin, whistled notes, followed by a twittering trill”); and Golden-crowned Sparrow (“a series of plaintive, whistled notes”). If I play a series of unknown New World sparrow songs to my ornithology students, they usually are good at picking out those of Zonotrichia, because all share whistled elements. There’s a common gestalt to Zonotrichia songs, a product of species’ close evolutionary relationship, which is codified by their placement in the same genus. I don’t need to know the names of these birds to detect these similarities in the field, but for me the technical names place them in a particular context, and make it easier to understand and appreciate

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who and what they are. And, contrary to W. S. Merwin and Robert Perkins, I will take a small bit of pleasure, and quiet satisfaction, in this knowledge. Perhaps I have exaggerated the antipathy of Fowles, Merwin, and Perkins to the naming of living things; they all are authors, and they make their livings by words. Perkins doesn’t develop his ideas about names all that much in Talking to Angels, the book from which I quoted earlier. Merwin is partly concerned with the limitations of language, but although he may be expressing a poet’s frustration with the difficulty of describing the essence of experience, his antagonism to Western science and Linnaeus seems very real. He sees in them “an ambition to obliterate whatever was different by recording it,” and considers them accomplices to the process by which European nations “laid waste whole cultures and archipelagos.” Fowles is not concerned directly with the relationship between science, Linnaeus, and imperialism, but with the negative ways in which science has influenced the process of seeing and interacting with the natural world. He spends the first half of The Tree developing his arguments, but then about halfway through, admits that his own attitudes toward science have evolved — perhaps there isn’t quite the gulf that he had once imagined between science, the process of naming, and the synthetic nature of experience: “I discovered too, that there was less conflict than I had imagined between nature as external assembly of names and facts and nature as internal feeling; that the two modes of seeing or knowing could in fact marry and take place almost simultaneously, and enrich each other.” The above passage pleases me, for it carries Fowles’s admission that science may contribute as much to an emotional, subjective relationship with the natural world as do art, literature, music, and poetry. I am not thinking of this “subjective relationship” as it pertains to the sense of mystery and awe that come from contemplating more than three billion years of organic evolution; the massive bulk of the Tyrannosaurus rex displayed in the American Museum of Natural History; or the processes of sedimentation that deposited the strata of the Grand Canyon. Rather, I am considering the benefits that derive from the epistemological process of science, or science as a way of knowing and seeing. Science is fundamentally about creating and testing hypotheses, and developing theories that successfully organize infor-

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mation and generate predictions about the natural world. Although the ultimate goal of science is the discovery and explanation of broad patterns, it has at its foundation a reductionist approach built upon repeated, patient observation and measurement. And I suspect many people feel that this approach — what’s done both in the laboratory or in the field, with equipment ranging in sophistication from rulers to atomic mass spectrophotometers — can lead to alienation from the natural world. There are many reasons for this prejudice, including the poor state of science education in the public schools, our society’s deep suspicion of intellectual pursuits, and the inability of scientists to effectively communicate with the public. But a more fundamental problem may be discomfort with the process of quantification, which involves precision, accuracy, and repetition, and often the representation of data obtained from this process in equations. I even encounter this dislike of rigorous quantification and careful observation in my students, most of whom are science majors; they often are impatient — and reluctant to remain focused long enough to complete a series of meticulous, repetitive measurements. Many are even more averse to confronting mathematical representations of the natural world; they are intimidated by abstraction and by the use of symbols and numbers to represent patterns. All these explanations occur to me. But I think that a fundamental reason for many people’s suspicion of science has to do with its language, and how this language appears to obscure and detract from direct experience of the natural world. This reaction is due partly to the intimidating, alien jargon of science; it’s been said that students in a college-level introductory biology course learn more new vocabulary than do students in a first-year foreign language course. The avalanche of new terms is at least off-putting, often difficult, and sometimes overwhelming; it’s why most people find it easier and more interesting to read about (and to remember) the Harris’s Sparrow rather than Zonotrichia querula. But beyond the plethora of alien words, including Latin binomials, lies a more intractable problem — the emotionally detached nature of scientific language, which creates a distance between the author and reader. Another way of saying this is that, for many people, scientific language lacks relevance; it is deficient in the emotional context and content necessary to connect the reader and writer. Which brings me, curiously enough, to muskoxen, or

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Ovibos moschatus (the “musky sheep-cow”), those phlegmatic and shaggy Pleistocene refugees that wander across the arctic tundra. Although overhunting drove muskoxen to the brink of extinction early in the twentieth century, legal protection and the reestablishment of extirpated populations has led to dramatic increases in their numbers. Today, travelers frequently encounter them across much of the arctic. Robert Perkins describes one such incident, which involved a dead muskox, in his book Talking to Angels. Perkins repeatedly visited the carcass over a four-day period, and it is while describing his visits that he offers the short critique of science that I quoted earlier, which ends with the question, “must everything have a name and a use?” I, too, once found a dead muskox — actually, I’ve seen a number of them along the Thelon River — but I watched the one I’m referring to die during a very long week in early May of 1978. Over the years, I have often contemplated this event: the scientific, rational Norment, and the artistic (for want of a better word), emotive Norment stumbling upon one creature’s suffering and death, and what this encounter has told me about the workings of the natural world, and the ways in which I interact with and respond to it. My thoughts are of course about death and contact (or a lack of it), but they deal also with the language of experience and description. My companions and I had been living at Warden’s Grove since August of the previous year, when we’d arrived after ten weeks of paddling from the Yukon Territory. We had come through a long, difficult winter; the first day of thaw did not occur until April 30, the same day that a herd of about seventy muskoxen climbed onto a rounded, barren rise three miles northeast of Warden’s Grove. The simultaneous appearance of the muskoxen on what we creatively named “Muskox Hill” — we had seen only a handful during our previous nine months at Warden’s Grove — and the arrival of above-freezing temperatures was a marvelous congruence that marked our emergence from winter’s sensory deprivation chamber, with its low-angled light, lack of odors (well, other than our own) and paucity of wildlife. After six months of continuous, belowfreezing temperatures, a blessed but unfamiliar sensory world suddenly blossomed before us: the sound of meltwater dripping off the cabin roof, forgotten scents rising from the thawing earth, and migrant birds and muskoxen wandering above or across the Barrens.

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This rapid transition from winter to spring was invigorating, and during a week-long spell of moderate weather in early May, we rambled far out onto the tundra. On May 6, three of us climbed Muskox Hill to search for more muskoxen. We found one adult bull and two adult cows near the summit, and as we approached them, the bull and one female ambled off leisurely, while the second cow retreated to the highest nearby ground, where she assumed a defensive position. I was surprised that she had separated from the others, because female muskoxen are social animals; although lone bull muskox are common in the wild, solitary cows are extremely rare. We edged closer to the cow, who responded by bending her head and rubbing her preorbital gland against the inside of her foreleg. When we were ten yards away, she made a short feint in our direction, then retreated to her stance and resumed her gland-rubbing. All of this was typical muskox behavior, but there was a listlessness about her actions, as if she was preoccupied by something other than three potential predators, and her heart was not in defense and its prescribed patterns of behavior. Later that day, after we returned to camp, we watched through binoculars as four tiny dots — another small herd of muskoxen — wandered close by the spot where we had last seen the cow. From our distant vantage point, it looked like the cow did not follow them down from Muskox Hill. We were curious about the solitary cow and returned to Muskox Hill on May 8, although we figured that by then she would have moved on. But she was still there, alone and obviously weakened. Although she assumed a defensive position, gland-rubbed and charged if approached too closely, her movements were sluggish, and she appeared to ignore us as long as we kept our distance. The cow was sick, and I knew that she probably would never leave Muskox Hill. When two of us returned on May 10, she was in the same exposed spot, despite a fierce storm that had settled over the Barrens, and her condition had deteriorated noticeably. She was extremely lethargic; she lay with her back to us, facing into the wind, as long as we remained twenty yards away. If we edged closer, she struggled to her feet and retreated an equal distance; there were no defensive stances, gland-rubbings, or charges. Her movements were awkward and weary; she moved her hindquarters with difficulty, and walked with an arthritic, stiff-legged gait. Blood and fecal material were matted in the hair around her vulva, and she left a spot of blood in the snow each time she struggled

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to her feet. Although we should have considered the impact of our actions earlier, and then given the cow her space, we finally retreated and sat down on the ice-crusted tundra. We watched for three hours as she slowly fed and rested near the exposed summit, the two of us mostly immobile and battered by the gusting winds and numbing, below-zero temperatures, conditions almost as severe as during a full winter storm. We wanted to stay with her longer, but the cold was agonizing, and we were forced to move. The winds moderated below the summit, and the walk back to Warden’s Grove warmed me up. But all the way home, as I trudged through the frozen tussocks, I thought of the muskox, sick and alone amid the flurries and bitter winds. The cow lingered for two more days before she died. I’ve written two accounts of the “muskox incident,” as I’ve come to call it; one is in my book on our canoe traverse of the Northwest Territories, In the North of Our Lives, and the other was published in 1980 as a short scientific note in The Journal of Mammalogy. Rather than continue with the above narration, I will switch to quotations from the two accounts, interspersed with one another in a temporal sequence, beginning with the Journal of Mammalogy article, which is in italics. I want to consider how each description carries us into the broken terrain of experience and interaction, and portrays the death of the muskox — in other words, I am interested in the stories these two accounts tell about the natural world and our place in it. On 11 May, I found the cow in a resting/rumination posture (Gray 1973), with the hind legs folded forward, and the forelegs folded backward under her body. As I approached to within 7 m, she raised her head and “sniffed” the air, but made no attempt to rise. At one point, she placed a foreleg in front of her and rested her chin on the snow. During 90 min of observation, she reached for several mouthfuls of snow and attempted unsuccessfully to rise once. A series of irregularly spaced contractions passed over her body; they occurred at intervals of approximately 15 min, and began in the shoulder area and progressed towards the anogenital region. lthough the storm continued through the night, I was drawn back to the hill the next morning, both from curiosity (Just what was wrong with the cow?) and the desire to keep her company. This

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notion was foolish; how could my presence do anything but compound her fear? There was no rational answer to my question, but it was far too lonely up there, far too desolate a place. . . . So Kurt and I went out into the storm, and found her still alive, lying with her hind legs folded forward, and her forelegs bent backward under her body. As we walked towards her, she raised her muzzle and sniffed the air, but she made no attempt to rise and face her potential assailants. Not wanting to disturb her any more than we already had, we backed off, sat down with our backs to the wind, and waited. For what? I had no idea, but I realized that I was as close to a dying creature as I’d ever been, that my thoughts and emotions had become linked to the cow and her ordeal. And so we sat on the frozen tundra, with the frigid winds tearing at our parkas. Each gust rocked our huddled bodies and sent tendrils of ice crystals streaming past us and out across the Barrens. . . . Torn shreds of cloud fled through a sky streaked with glimpses of blue as the weather broke against us, as we watched, and waited. The cow moved very little during our two-hour vigil. She grabbed several mouthfuls of snow and vegetation and attempted to rise once, struggling onto her hind legs before collapsing again. Afterward, she extended her forelegs and placed her chin on the ground, as though utterly, infinitely weary. Too exhausted to turn her body, she lay facing into the wind, with her flanks coated with rime and her muzzle encrusted with snow. She was wonderfully adapted to life in the Arctic; her insulating coat of long outer guard hairs and silky inner hair enabled her to remain immobile during long, furious storms; yet now the protection only prolonged her agony, allowing her to lie motionless for hour after hour without sinking into the relief of a numbing sleep. The gusts rippled through her beautiful coat, and she closed her eyes as a slow, shuddering contraction spread from her shoulders along her flanks. Another contraction followed fifteen minutes later, and I wondered if the clotted blood, stiff-legged gait, and contractions were evidence of a complicated pregnancy. So it was to be a slow, lingering death on that hill — six or seven days to die as she awaited a final contraction and wave of pain, or confronted a marauding pack of wolves. . . . As I watched the dying cow, I tried to focus on her eyes: Were pain and fear present in them, or just the mirrored reflection of my own humanity? I refused to believe that

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she was not experiencing some sensation akin to what we encounter on our own deathbeds; there had to be some primordial sense of passing, some stark emptiness that all living things confront at the end of their days. I couldn’t comprehend what form this might take in a mollusk, and insect, or even a reptile. . . . but the dying muskox was much closer to home. In our chests beat almost identical mammalian hearts; in our brains were similar neurons, and many of the same neurotransmitters. There must have been a commonality connecting us, a thread of existence that linked our very different lives. There was a harsh irony in this feeling, for the muskox’s imminent death reminded me of my own mortality, and linked me to her in a way that would have been impossible if she had been healthy. If this feeling was anthropomorphic, so be it. I simply could not accept the idea that some mortal terror and uncomprehending agony was not concealed beneath her placid exterior. It wasn’t entirely a matter of screaming neurons, genes, and programmed behavior; somewhere within her slow bovine brain must have been a fear and loneliness far beyond what ethologists are able to describe and catalog. . . . These thoughts tumbled through my mind as I cowered from the assault of the wind. I felt completely ineffectual, consumed by an impotent compassion. In my most imaginative moments, I pictured myself as a veterinarian, able to reposition the hypothetical calf — or, failing this, that I could have comforted the dying cow, provided relief from her pain and some reassurance that she was not alone. But surely a closer approach would have brought only more terror, and a futile effort to rise to her feet, for I was not kin. I could not communicate, I could not bridge the gap that separated us. Frustrated, on the verge of tears as the wind and ice beat against me, I thought: This is death, very direct and no longer expressed in the language of biology, the phrases to which my university training has exposed me. This was not only a statistic from a life-expectancy table, an event predicted from adult mortality rates. . . . The dying cow forced me beyond numbers, beyond the bleached, weathered caribou bones scattered across the tundra, the tufts of ptarmigan feathers strewn beneath a gyrfalcon’s perch. Her sufferings bore little resemblance to the glossy photographs of a wildlife calendar, or even the celluloid deaths recorded in a thousand nature films. Instead, her agony was related to the entrails streaming from a zebra as it is disemboweled

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by a pack of African hyenas. It was closer to the patient, careful consumption of a caterpillar’s organs by the parasitizing larvae of a braconid wasp. . . . But what was I to offer the muskox in her helpless pain? Perhaps nothing more than a prayer, and a willingness to carry some small measure of her agony in my heart, as partial compensation for all the times that such pain had happened before against the backdrop of an indifferent arctic world. My mother once related a story about finding a scrawny and bedraggled kitten when my sister and I were young. In spite of our best attempts at nursing it back to health, the kitten soon died — but my younger sister said, “I’m glad that we had it for a little while. At least it had someone to cry for it when it died.” Was I fooling myself to think that it was better that Kurt and I were there, sharing something of her death? No, for perhaps this was where my humanity . . . offered up the chance for a momentary sacrament of passage. Perhaps this was all that I could hope for, and it was enough. Kurt and I finally were driven off the hill by the cold; we left depressed, and I brooded over the dying cow for the rest of the day. Why was it taking her so long to die? Why hadn’t the wolves found her, and ended the agony? The cow was found dead on the morning of 12 May. The eyes were still soft and the joints not yet stiffened. The body was in the resting/rumination posture with the chin resting on the ground between the extended forelegs. The cow had moved 7 m from the place that she rested on the previous afternoon. he next morning we decided to return to Musk-ox Hill, armed with a rifle and enough bullets to end her ordeal. . . . It was another storm-wracked day; I felt weighted down by a burden of cold and death and didn’t speak to Kurt while we crossed the tundra. As we climbed the slopes of Musk-ox Hill, I encountered the spirit of a place that had been consecrated by the solitary yet momentous event that was occurring there — the pain and dying had bestowed an atmosphere of sanctity on the summit. There was no need for the rifle. The cow was dead, lying in the same position in which we had left her, although somehow she had

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managed to rise and drag herself twenty feet to her final resting place. Her chin lay on the ground between her extended forelegs, and her rump was coated with snow and clotted blood. A postmortem examination showed a fully-developed female calf to be lodged in the birth canal. The fetus appeared to be recently dead, and no signs of decomposition were evident. It was the breech presentation (U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1942), with the hindquarters forced against the pelvis and the hind legs bent at the hips and thrust forward. The position of the fetus was such that passage though the pelvic girdle did not appear to be possible. The chorio-allantoic membrane had burst, although severe hemorrhaging had not occurred. When the peritoneum was punctured, urine-colored fluid tinged with blood flowed out. The cow was lactating, and the rumen was approximately one-third full. From horn development and tooth wear (Tener, 1965), age of the cow was estimated to be 4 to 6 years. Wilkinson (1974) stated that parturition in captive muskoxen involves few difficulties, although assistance in repositioning the fetus is required occasionally. However, data on the frequency of fetal malpresentations in muskoxen and other wild bovids apparently are not available. Williams (1943) and Arthur (1975) estimated that about 5% of all births by domestic cows (Bos taurus) involved a presentation other than the normal longitudinal-anterior presentation, in which the nose and forelegs of the fetus are directed towards the posterior end of the dam. Serious dystocia always occurs with the posterior presentation in cows if the hind legs are flexed beneath the fetal body. . . . Age of the female may have contributed to the dystocia as primiparous females in domestic species experience more difficulties during parturition than multiparous individuals (Arthur, 1975; Hafez, 1968). However, Williams (1968) found that most cases of dystocia in primiparous cattle were related to oversized fetuses, whereas malpresentation was more common in multiparous females. Unfortunately, the estimated age of the dam that I observed (4–6 years) made it impossible to predict if she had calved previously as muskoxen in Greenland and the Canadian Arctic reportedly do not calve until they are 4 years old (Tener, 1965). Maternal death during parturition, a phenomenon well known in domestic stock, apparently is rarely observed in wild animals (Knowlton and Michael, 1965; Sadleir, 1969). However, maternal death in muskoxen was

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reported previous to the incident recorded herein; Jennov (1933) reported on the postpartum death of a dam which gave birth to a fully developed calf but he failed to mention if parturition was a contributing factor. or a minute I stood at a distance and gazed at her corpse. I walked up to her, took off a mitten and felt the solid boss of her horns, then ran my hands through her thick fur, letting my fingers rest in the soft, luxurious underhair. She was a beautiful animal, well nourished and powerful; she was not yet stiff, and there was little about her that suggested death, except for the lidded eyes and motionless form. Perhaps we should have let her be, but the wolves would have found her eventually, and my biological training spurred me to find out why she died. So out came the knives. It was terribly cold, and our hands froze as we worked, but we slit open her abdomen from the sternum to the pubic bone. As we cut through the layers of skin and muscle, I felt as though I were conducting an autopsy on a friend — guilty for violating the privacy of her death, and for substituting a clinical approach for one of simple mourning. Yet I worked quickly and with determination; I had to know. Inside the ruined uterus was what we expected to find: a fully developed female calf jammed in the birth canal, with its hindquarters forced against the pelvis and the hind legs bent at the hips and thrust forward. The tiny creature was still warm, her hooves soft, eyes closed, teeth unworn. Behind a veil of burst placental membranes, she looked to be perfectly formed — but there would be no emergence into a world of light and snow and wind. It was the end for both of them, nine months after conception and seven days after the cow had come to her final hill.

F

There was one Chris Norment up on Muskox Hill in May 1978, one observer watching the dying muskox — but his interactions with the cow were complex, affected as they were by his scientific training, emotions, and desire. And from this process, this one experience, came two published descriptions of the muskox’s death. These accounts differ in many ways, most of which make the scientific version less accessible to anyone who is not a biologist. First, the Journal of Mammalogy account contains technical terms difficult for a layperson to decipher, such as agonistic (behavior given in the context of an aggressive interaction), dystocia (difficulty of giving birth), primipa-

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rous (giving birth for the first time), parturition (giving birth), and chorio-allantoic membrane (a fused layer of tissue, composed of two fetal membranes, the chorion and allantois, that surrounds the fetus and forms the placenta). In contrast, In the North of Our Lives does not require retreat to an unabridged dictionary. Second, although the technical article is entirely descriptive and lacks statistics, graphs and tables, it still contains many numbers, which have to do with distance, date and time, and the cow’s age — 7 m (meters), 15 min (minutes), 11 May, 4 to 6 years, etc. Although I do keep track of dates, and occasionally mention distance and approximate time in In the North of Our Lives, numbers are much less prominent. Third, the Journal of Mammalogy article contains numerous references, such as Tener, 1965; Gray, 1973; and Sadleir, 1969. These references, which are linked to full bibliographic citations at the end of the article, support my observations and conclusions, document what’s unusual and important about the information, and connect the reader to the larger body of scientific literature on muskox. No such citations interrupt the narrative flow of In the North of Our Lives; the account connects readers to a particular muskox’s death, but not to a larger body of knowledge. A more crucial difference between the two accounts is the rarity of personal pronouns and references to identifiable individuals in the Journal of Mammalogy account. Instead of “Kurt and I,” or “I,” there are (earlier in the article) “observers.” Also, much of the article is written in the passive voice: “The cow was found dead. . . .” “The position of the fetus was such . . .” The absence of personal pronouns and names, and the use of the passive voice, removes the event from the realm of personal experience; the observer and recorder recedes into the background of the narrative, a process that’s magnified by the utter lack of emotion in the scientific note. This absence is related to another difference between the accounts: although the Journal of Mammalogy article is highly descriptive, the description is focused entirely on the muskox; the many adjectives and relatively few adverbs tell the reader almost nothing about the weather, the observers, or the environment. We know where the events occurred, because at the beginning of the article I mentioned “a low, barren hill 5 km NE of a small camp known locally as Warden’s Grove (63°41’N, 104°26’W),” but we know nothing about either the physical or emotional setting

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for the story. We read that “I approached to within 7 m,” but there is no sense of what that approach was like, what I felt, or what I did afterward. I describe the results of the “postmortem examination,” but nothing connects the reader to what I experienced as I slid my knife into the muskox’s abdomen, disemboweled her, and confronted a full-term fetus lodged in her birth canal. There is no sadness or sense of mortality, no rifle, no pain or depression, no agonizing cold, no guilt about cutting open the cow after she had died. When compared to the account in In the North of Our Lives, my technical note seems to embody a clinical detachment and callous disregard for the suffering of the muskox — as if I had been purged of my anguish, sense of impotence, and muted rage by the winds that tore across Muskox Hill. The narrator, Chris Norment, has disappeared, cloaked in the anonymity of scientific objectivity. A cynical way of saying this is that the article contains many data but little knowledge, because of its emotional disconnection and lack of any obvious, humane response. It’s as if the scientific account is situated in a Barrenlands of the emotions. Finally, the Journal of Mammalogy account contains the bet-hedging language of scientific uncertainty — “appeared to be,” “apparently,” “may have,” “was estimated to be,” and “seemingly.” It is the language of skepticism, of a way of knowing that understands that we cannot be completely certain about most events and causes, and that there are plenty of relative, approximate truths in the natural world, but no absolute ones. I did not know exactly when the cow was born, and could only estimate her age, based on tooth wear and horn development. The fetus appeared to be recently dead, but I had no way of ascertaining the precise time of her death. There apparently were no data on the frequency of fetal malpresentation in wild bovids, although the possibility existed that I was unaware of an extensive review on the subject, published in 1956 in the Transactions of the Albanian Scientific Association. In the Journal of Mammalogy account, the female muskox’s death is reported in the language of measurement and dispassionate, impartial observation. Merwin, Perkins, and Fowles might (there I go again) label it as the language of alienation, and argue that it illustrates how Western science has separated humans from direct experience of the natural world. Technical terms, numbers, extensive

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citations in the body of the text, absence of personal pronouns and names of people, the passive voice, lack of a physical and emotional context for the narrative, and uncertainty are evidence of this separation. It is physically more difficult to read, harder to understand, and less accessible than the description from In the North of Our Lives. The combined effect of these traits should render the Journal of Mammalogy account less interesting, compelling, and relevant to most readers, who relate more to emotional response than to detailed, precise, and technical descriptions of muskox biology. These readers must recognize that only part of the story of the muskox’s death has been told, and desire a more complete telling; they want to know more about death, about cold and anguish, than about tooth wear, age to parturition, and distance between the impassive observer and the cow. For many readers, then, the account of the muskox’s death in In the North of Our Lives is more successful, interesting, and useful than the one in the Journal of Mammalogy. Yet, the comparison is unfair, because the two accounts are meant to do very different things, and are targeted at different audiences. One audience is more interested in direct experience and emotion; it wants to be transported to Muskox Hill during a storm-wracked week in May 1978, and to climb into someone else’s heart and body: to imagine. The audience for the Journal of Mammalogy article does not require the same type of transport; it is interested primarily in numbers and accurate description — in the particulars of the event, its relationship to similar phenomena, and possible explanations. Thus, the goals of the scientific account are limited: to describe, as accurately and concisely as possible, the immediate sequence of events leading to the muskox’s death; report as much relevant physical information about the cow as possible; list all evidence for the cause of her death; and provide a context — what is known about breech presentation of the fetus in muskoxen — for the incident. The article is focused entirely on the physical aspects of the muskox and her breeched fetus; the observer recedes into the background, where in this case he should remain. Injecting intensely personal and emotional reactions into the Journal of Mammalogy account would decrease its scientific utility and effectiveness. It is not the place for such things. Any emotional responses, ethical questions, or larger implications regarding our relationship

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to the natural world are left for other venues. Yet, I would hope that anyone who reads the Journal of Mammalogy article might wonder about an alternative telling of the muskox’s death, for to encounter her as I did would have led to other, powerful responses, and into the type of story that I’m certain must lie hidden within many other scientific articles. I believe that I first became aware of these other stories in 1975, when I read an article in the technical journal Ecology, entitled “The Role of Competition in the Distribution of Andean Birds,” by John Terborgh and John Weske. The paper described ornithological data gathered between 1965 and 1972, as part of a study “to improve our understanding of the factors involved as primary causes in imposing distributional limits.” Many data are presented in the paper, and because I was very interested in how competitive interactions affect the structure of bird communities, I read and annotated it carefully. I even read the “Acknowledgments,” which as in most scientific papers, was set in smaller font and placed near the end of the article, just before the “Literature Cited” section. And there I encountered this stunning sentence: “The first-named author’s life was saved in a grueling ordeal of emergency by the extraordinary exertions of several unnamed Campa Indians and four Peruvian assistants: Klaus Wehr, Manuel Sanchez, Erasmo Guerra, and Moro Vasquez.” Nothing in the article foreshadowed this sentence, and there was no description of the “ordeal of emergency,” or the “extraordinary exertions,” or information on where one might read about this story — the one that would be most compelling for lay readers. It was not the place. But the issue of alienation remains. Does the Journal of Mammalogy note represent, even in the smallest way, something harmful in how we approach the natural world? Does it symbolize a failure of the imagination, a dangerous separation from both nature and experience, as well as a lust for power and control? That is a heavy burden for a two-page note, and I think not. In fact, whatever its limitations, the article represents the possibility of direct and intimate connection to the natural world, for it was built upon patient, careful observation (well, at least as much as I could muster with my frozen fingers in the bitter, agonizing cold), attention to detail, and what I can only think of as shared experience. I was up on Muskox Hill, for hours on end, watching, waiting, and being pummeled by the same winds and skidding crystals of ice. I observed and measured,

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ran my bare hands through her fur, then cut into that newly dead, beautiful animal. On Muskox Hill I huddled in my down parka and sought what little shelter I could, then jotted down some hurried and barely legible notes about the cow and her calf — distances in meters, times for the contractions to spread down her body, preorbital gland rubs, movement patterns, fetal condition. I did these things even though I was enveloped in a shroud of sadness and bitterness, and pissed off at “Creation,” or “Nature,” or “God,” or whatever term we apply to the totality of the forces that determine the fates of living creatures. This process of recording observations and measurements is standard practice for any field biologist, but within this scientific context there also exists the opportunity for alternative approaches to understanding, and interacting with, the world. Each day, after visiting the cow on Muskox Hill, I returned to the warm comfort of the cabin, where I used my hastily scrawled notes to write more extensive descriptions in my field notebook, which later formed the basis of the Journal of Mammalogy article. As I wrote and reflected on what I had seen, some deep but ineffable sense of the lives and deaths of animals, of the natural world and my place in it, began to develop — a vision based in experience and raw emotion, yet embedded in the process of observing and recording information. The measurements and descriptions, which I see as an extension of the practice of naming of things, were fundamental to this process of seeing, and eleven years later I carried the memory of the muskox with me when I returned to Warden’s Grove and began my Harris’s Sparrow research. Over the course of three field seasons, I made extensive, structured, and repetitive observations on the birds. I gathered a tremendous amount of data, many of which were summarized in the tables and graphs that eventually found their way into my technical papers. Although these tables and graphs present data, the lines and numbers they contain also symbolize the possibility of a more subjective, emotional relationship to the natural world: for me this was one legacy of the muskox’s death. In the patches of dwarf birch surrounding Warden’s Grove, just as on Muskox Hill, there was a single observer, Chris Norment, and there were the animals. There also were two ways of seeing and presenting their stories, and two types of languages used in the telling, which informed and reinforced one another, and to me it seems certain that scientific observation and

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measurement help shape a different, complementary understanding of the natural world. There was, and is, no need to “rise above scientific description and inquiry,” as Tom Killion would have it. I know this because I have probed Pedicularis flowers and held sparrows in my hands, and I once ran my fingers through the fur of a newly dead muskox. Pedicularis lapponica, Ursus horribilis, and Zonotrichia querula; descriptions of a dying muskox and postmortem examination, Harris’s Sparrows and their world of dwarf birch and tundra, arctic ground squirrels and storms. Language flows from these things and their stories, and from my experiences, and connects me to the larger world. Wallace Stevens once wrote that “The ear is an eye,” but the tongue, the skin, and the nose are “eyes,” too, and there is no reason why extensions of these organs — binoculars, rulers, microscopes, spectrophotometers — cannot help us to see more effectively, completely, and (Yes!) passionately, and tell a more complex and profound story about the world. At Warden’s Grove, my business was mostly science, but I saw the world — heard it, touched it, smelled it, tasted it — and later told about it, in different but complimentary and reinforcing ways. In all of this, I needed to remain steady. I needed to observe and describe the plants and animals, and their world, with care, precision, humility, and empathy — work that, as always, began with the names of things.

Lines . . . . . . upon . . . . . a. .Graph ............................................ There is a graph in my doctoral dissertation depicting the pattern of nest attendance for a female Harris’s Sparrow over a twenty-four-hour period in July 1989. She was feeding and brooding five five-day-old nestlings at a time when the Barrens were beset with unusually hot weather, and the mosquitoes and blackflies were as bad, or worse, than I had experienced anywhere in the North. The graph contains a line showing the rate at which the female fed her nestlings (number of feedings per hour) and another line depicting temperatures at ground level (degrees Celsius). We gathered the data that eventually found their way into the lines of this graph during consecutive two-hour shifts throughout the twenty-four-hour period. Each of us sat one hundred yards from the nest, on a foam pad with a backrest, and used binoculars to observe the female and her mate. Once each hour we would rise and read a battery-powered thermometer, which was placed beneath a shrub similar to the one that concealed the nest, where it recorded the ambient temperature. But for the most part we remained still, and watched. The graph shows that the female ceased her nightly bout of continuous brooding, which had lasted four-and-one-half hours, at two-thirty in the morning, when she began to feed her nestlings. Her feeding rate increased rapidly to twelve nest trips per hour by six in the morning, then decreased to five trips per hour by nine. During the hottest part of the day, when shade temperatures at ground level rose to 104 Fahrenheit, hot enough to kill her nestlings, the female alternated short foraging trips with bouts of brooding, in which she shaded the panting nestlings by crouching over them with extended wings. She ceased brooding around six in the evening, when temperatures declined to below 80 degrees, but continued to feed her nestlings until almost ten. At this time, when the sun was low enough so that her nest would be in the shade for the remainder of the night, she resumed continuous brooding. Her mate also fed the nestlings, although

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he did not brood; his feeding rate increased more slowly than the female’s, reaching eleven feedings per hour by eight in the morning. All told, the parents fed the five nestlings 251 times over the twenty-four-hour period, a rate of 2.1 feedings per nestling per hour. During the nest watches, each of us sat fully exposed to the sun, the heat, and the hordes of blackflies and mosquitoes that swarmed around us. If the noonday sun was merciless, the insects were even more so, and to protect ourselves we wore headnets, gloves, windbreakers, and long pants. We sealed the sleeves of our windbreakers, drew our hoods tight over our headnets, and tucked the hems of our pants into our socks. It was stifling inside our nylon and cotton cocoons, but at least we were shielded from the worst of the insects — although a few of our most intrepid tormentors always managed to slip past our defenses. The frenzied attacks sounded like hard rain falling on a tent fly, and I once killed forty-eight mosquitoes with one swat. We were engaged in low-tech research, work that could have been done much more efficiently, and generated much more data, with the aid of modern, miniaturized equipment. Six event recorders, each smaller than a deck of cards, with a tiny battery weighing about one gram, a long lead, and a small microswitch device at the lip of the nest cup, would have produced more data than I ever could have desired, at least about overall rates of visitation — the device could not have distinguished between visits by the male and female. But miniaturization was still in its infancy when I began my study, and if prototypes of such equipment did exist, I could not have afforded them. Far bulkier options, powered by twelve-volt car batteries, were available, but there still was the matter of cost and the fact that I would have had no way to recharge the batteries. Another option might have been video cameras equipped with timers, but the issues of money and a power source remained. And so I was left with an inefficient, and from a scientific standpoint, undesirable, method of observation, complete with its manifest tedium and masochism. My companions and I were left to bake under the sun and offer ourselves up as sacrifices to the voracious insect gods while sitting silent and still, like the most practiced Buddhist meditator: “Om mane padme hum, Hail to the jewel and the blackfly.” As the minutes of my two-hour nest watches crept by, as I watched the Harris’s Sparrows feed their nestlings, as sweat trickled down my nose and insects whined around my head and I whined to myself, I wondered about what I could ever hope to gain

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from such an enterprise — other than a stiff back and the buzzing, flushed sensation that spread across my face after a few too many blackfly bites. I already had envisioned the graph that would result from the data that we were gathering, but would that graph be in any conceivable way worth the effort that had gone into it? These questions inevitably led to a larger question: Did this endeavor have anything to do with science, and even if it did, did my brand of science have much to do with, well, anything rational? I had plenty of time to think while I was out there, and I had my doubts. The graph never was published, although it did appear in my dissertation. I eventually wrote a small paper on the nestling feeding behavior of Harris’s Sparrows, but the peer reviewers thought that such a graph, based as it was upon the activities of one bird, wasn’t worth much. And so, to save space, it was deleted from the manuscript. uring my time at Warden’s Grove, I often operated in a mundane and tedious world divorced from the romanticized one inhabited by the adrenalin-addled field biologists whom we watch on television. I figure that I spent more than two hundred hours just watching sparrows incubate eggs and tend to their nestlings, mostly during one-hour observation bouts scattered throughout the birds’ active day, and the rest during the two- and four-hour blocks of extended nest watches. I devoted at least an equal amount of time to entering data from the nest watches into spreadsheets, analyzing them, and writing up the results — first as a chapter in my dissertation, later as two papers that were published in The Journal of Field Ornithology and The Canadian Field-Naturalist. The papers contain four graphs, three of which are reproduced here in modified form. They represent roughly ten weeks of my working life, in addition to several more weeks contributed by my field assistants. All those hours of observation were distilled into data, which were then analyzed and transformed into the patterns of lines and bars that traverse the graphs. A poet friend of mine once said, “The data are part of their story,” and each pattern tells a story about the relationship between a predictor, or independent, variable, and a response, or dependent, variable: ambient temperature and length of incubation bout, nestling age and parental feeding rate, etc. But behind these stories are two other stories — hidden and interrelated. One embraces the lives of the individual sparrows whose behaviors are summarized by the graphs,

D

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the second involves the work that leads to the data and hypothesis tests, but that also may take us far into a deep and different world. The stories held by the data seem straightforward. For example, one of the two graphs in the paper on incubation behavior of Harris’s Sparrows and White-crowned Sparrows uses columns to show the relationship between ambient temperature and the average length of incubation bouts. The broad, U-shaped valley formed by the black bars shows that female Harris’s Sparrows spent the most time incubating their eggs, an average of about fifty minutes per bout, at the coolest temperatures. The trough of the “U” occurs between 16 and 21 degrees Celsius (61 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit), where average incubation time was about twenty-four minutes; the bars then rise to around thirty-two minutes at temperatures above 22 degrees Celsius. The white bars representing the smaller (by about 22 percent in mass) female White-crowned Sparrows show a similar relationship, although the shortest incubation bouts came at slightly lower temperatures, and incubation times increased only slightly at higher temperatures. The columns also show that Harris’s Sparrow incubation bouts generally were longer than those for White-crowned Sparrows. The bars in a second graph show that the average time female Harris’s Sparrows spent away from the nest increased with temperature, from about seven minutes at temperatures below 4 degrees Celsius to around eighteen minutes at temperatures above 24 degrees Celsius. Female White-crowned Sparrows behaved in a similar way, although their bouts away from the nest were consistently shorter than those of female Harris’s Sparrows. The patterns in the graphs, ancillary data, and findings from other studies make it possible to summarize the incubation behavior of crowned sparrows at Warden’s Grove, and the likely explanation for their actions. Females spent about 80 percent of a twenty-four-hour day, and 60 percent of their active day, on the nest. During the night, female Harris’s Sparrows incubated continuously for almost eight hours, female White-crowned Sparrows for nine hours. Longer incubation bouts at cooler temperatures occurred because greater transfers of heat from the female to the eggs are required at lower temperatures. Bird embryos, particularly in small eggs like those of crowned sparrows, which weigh two to four grams, are more susceptible to heat than cold, because high temperatures affect proteins more than

Feeding rate for a female Harris’s Sparrow, and ambient temperature, over a twenty-four-hour period in July 1989.

Nestling feeding rates (male, female, and total) for Harris’s Sparrows at Warden’s Grove. Bars indicate ± 1 standard error.

Average duration of incubation bouts (top) and bouts away from the nest for Harris’s Sparrows (black columns) and White-crowned Sparrows (gray columns). Bars indicate + 1 standard error

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cold temperatures. Thus, longer incubation bouts at higher temperatures protected eggs from the potentially lethal effects of high ground temperatures. Incubating females spent most of their time away from the nest feeding, and shorter foraging trips at cooler temperatures most likely were necessary to maintain proper thermal conditions for embryo development. Finally, shorter bouts on and off the nest for White-crowned Sparrows probably were due to a combination of the species’ smaller size, more shaded nest sites, and lower susceptibility to predation. The smaller White-crowned Sparrow eggs would heat and cool more quickly than Harris’s Sparrow eggs, allowing female white-crowns to warm their eggs more quickly. Thicker vegetation at White-crowned Sparrow nests could have reduced insolation at the nest and facilitated maintenance of stable egg temperatures; because Harris’s Sparrow nests are subject to higher predation rates than nests of White-crowned Sparrows, female Harris’s Sparrows could have reduced predation risk by incubating for longer periods and taking fewer, longer trips away from the nest. The graph from the article on nestling care uses lines instead of bars to depict how feeding rates changed with nestling age. Most nestling Harris’s Sparrows and White-crowned Sparrows at Warden’s Grove fledged at about nine days of age, although some left the nest at eight days while others lingered for ten. Although only females brooded nestlings, both sexes fed the young, and at increasingly frenetic rates as the nestlings aged. Combined parental feeding rates approached a maximum of thirteen trips per hour for Harris’s Sparrows and sixteen trips per hour for White-crowned Sparrows as their broods approached fledging. These rates translate to about one parental trip to the nest every four or five minutes — a constant shuttling back and forth between the nest and feeding sites while foraging both for their young and themselves. The graphs also show that males of both species were recalcitrant about tending to newly- hatched young, and during the first four days after hatching, females made the majority of the feeding trips. It often appeared that some males had to be “coaxed” into feeding young. In these situations, the female perched near the nest, usually with food in her bill, and waited. If her mate did not appear, she made a series of “chink” calls, which continued until the reluctant male appeared and visited the nest. Yet, males eventually warmed to their parental duties. By the time the nestlings were five

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days old, male and female feeding rates were similar, although female trips still comprised about 60 percent of the 1,100 feedings that we observed — trips that extended over an active day that stretched to twenty hours just before the hungry young fledged. Females, but not males, also brooded nestlings, mostly when the nestlings had few feathers and were incapable of keeping themselves warm for more than a few minutes at a time. Two additional graphs in my dissertation show that female Harris’s Sparrows spent about 50 percent of their time brooding young less than three days of age, with an average bout duration of around ten minutes. At this point the growing, feathered nestlings began to develop “physiological endothermy” — the ability to regulate their own body temperatures when huddled together in the nest. Thereafter, females spent less time brooding and more time feeding their young, which grew rapidly from around three grams at hatching to twenty-five grams at fledging, more than an eight-fold increase in mass over a nineto ten-day period. Think of this in human terms (it took seven to eight years for my son and daughter to achieve an equivalent mass increase), and it’s amazing how quickly young songbirds develop. In fact, nestlings of those bird species that are naked and helpless when they hatch — technically, altricial young — grow at a faster rate than the young of any other group of vertebrates. Occasionally, I sift through my Harris’s Sparrow papers, glance at the graphs and tables, reread the abstracts, and contemplate their collective value. I take some pleasure and (I’ll admit it) pride in seeing my efforts, and those of my field assistants, summarized in a final, printed form. I particularly enjoy the moment when I first hold a journal that contains one of my papers. I like knowing that the information on Harris’s Sparrows is “out there,” some eight articles and eighty pages, published in the scientific literature for all to see. But in truth few do see; I don’t keep track of such things, but I’m certain that I have never received more than thirty or forty requests for any one of my Harris’s Sparrow papers, while some have attracted fewer than ten. Sometimes, I achieve an extremely limited and temporary scientific immortality when one of my papers is cited in another article. But for the most part, my research has vanished into the void of anonymity that claims most scientific articles. Perhaps Willetta Lueschen, who passed away shortly after funding the small Harris’s

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Sparrow research award that first helped me on my way toward the Thelon, would have cared, but few others do. Part of the explanation for my scientific anonymity lies with the sheer volume of technical papers published; in ornithology alone, this number exceeds eleven thousand papers annually. But another reason lies with the nature of my research. Although I discovered much new information about the natural history and basic biology of A. Marguerite Baumgartner’s “bird of mystery,” my work fell far short of achieving the status of cutting-edge research; it was not (to use a term that I loathe) “sexy” science. For example, the details of Harris’s Sparrow behavior during the incubation and nestling phases of the nesting cycle that I have described fit well-known, general patterns of passerine breeding ecology, and are primarily of interest to what one testy reviewer termed “Zonotrichia-philes.” (They do exist, a micro-subculture within a mini-subculture within a small subculture of ornithologists.) Even the paper that I was most excited about, because it presented relatively new information — that some, and perhaps many, birds arriving on their arctic breeding grounds consume large quantities of the abundant fruits that are preserved beneath the snow for eight months — received little attention. “Breeding season frugivory by Harris’ sparrows (Zonotrichia querula) and whitecrowned sparrows (Zonotrichia leucophrys) in a low-arctic ecosystem” disappeared into much the same silence that claimed my other Harris’s Sparrow papers. Neither did I develop new methodologies to facilitate more efficient data collection. Luddite that I am, I mostly disdained technology and relied on the grunt work of sustained observation. Perhaps I was nothing more than a scientific minimalist, the Philip Glass of Zonotrichia, with my main tools being nothing more than a pair of binoculars and a ruler. And so my work could be seen as containing little that was new, or of broader interest. No wonder that, during my first interview for a college teaching job, a prospective colleague asked me “What good is your research?” The question came when I was visiting a small liberal arts school in Oregon. I was competing for a position that I wanted desperately, partly because there were few open academic jobs in my field, and partly because I yearned to live in the West again. Prior to my on-campus interview, I had plenty of time to cultivate the anxiety that came with being a novice job applicant: how would I measure

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up against my competitors? How would my “job talk,” which I had never given before, go? Would I get on well with people in the Biology Department? The interview schedule called for me to begin with an hour-long seminar on my dissertation research, followed by visits with individual faculty and administrators. On Monday morning I was as jittery as a toy poodle on amphetamines, but I rolled through my talk in good style. I described my research objectives, the challenges of studying an unfamiliar species and working on the Thelon, the data and analyses, and future directions for my research. I did a good job of fielding questions from the audience, and so I began the interviews feeling upbeat: maybe, just maybe, I would get the job! My first interview was with the department’s botanist; I had done my homework, and knew that she studied mychorrhizae — symbiotic relationships between fungi and plants — in conifers, and I was looking forward to discussing her research and the biology program at the college. She ushered me into her office, and as soon as I had sat down, fixed me with a withering glare, as if to say, “There will be no small talk here.” She then snapped, “What good is your research?” Her vehemence jolted me. It was as if I had just soiled my academic pants in public, and I was filled with anger and shame. My face flushed and, instead of salvaging my dignity by presenting an impassioned defense of the value of basic research or responding with an equally aggressive question (“What good is your attitude?”), I stumbled through some lame answer, the gist of which escapes me. And I knew that my chances of landing the job were just about as good as George McGovern’s were of getting elected president in 1972. Dr. Mycorrhizae was unprofessional and impolite. Yet her basic question — What good is it? — still troubles me. There are moments when I might agree with her unstated but strongly implied answer, which would have been “Not much” — especially when weighed against the contributions of major figures in ornithology, such as Robert MacArthur (community ecology, island biogeography); James R. King (physiological ecology); John Wiens (avian community ecology and habitat selection); Robert Ricklefs (avian life-history patterns); and Gordon Orians (avian mating systems). These are hardly household names, but they are, or were, important in the field. Instead, I labored away in the scientific trenches, a buck private in the small, mostly academic, army of graduate students and professors. But what-

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ever the value of my research, it still was vital to my academic training. It prepared me to apply for grants, conduct a long-term study, and publish my results. For this, plus completing the required credit hours and passing my comprehensive exams and dissertation defense, I received my academic commission — a University of Kansas Ph.D. The crowd went wild. Or at least Melissa and Liza did, during the doctoral hooding ceremony for newly minted KU Ph.D.s, class of 1992 — all 248 of them, marching off to jobs within “the academy,” industry, government, the ranks of nongovernmental organizations, or, if their luck and timing were bad, the local Wal-Mart. I suppose that I could justify my research by referring to its role in increasing “our” knowledge of a living creature. And I did unearth new information, much of which found its way into the Birds of North America monograph on the Harris’s Sparrow, for which I was the lead author, and was published in the American Ornithologists’ Union’s series of life-history reviews for all 716 breeding bird species in North America north of Mexico, and the Hawaiian Islands. The information in these monographs is crucial for on-the-ground conservation biology and management, and for developing future research projects. And perhaps my work on Harris’s Sparrows, when combined with what’s known about its better-studied congeners, the White-crowned Sparrow and White-throated Sparrow, might help us understand a bit more about how evolutionary history, and natural selection operating in particular habitats, affects the evolution of lifehistory traits, such as patterns in growth, development, and reproduction — or perhaps my breeding biology work will provide a partial basis for a study examining the troubling decline in Midwestern winter Harris’s Sparrow populations during the last three decades. But I would hope that the best end to my efforts lay in illuminating something of the life of a small bird and that this light, however feeble, helped connect me, and by extension, others, to the great world. Existence — life — is multi-scale. It extends from the individual to the ecosystem and beyond; it is more than MacArthur’s patterns alone. Each species is unique, as is every individual, and much can be learned from studies conducted — or stories told — at each scale. Biological research, both in the field and the lab, acts to honor the great and exuberant complexity, diversity, and abundance of what, for want of a better word, I’ll call “creation.” Perhaps it was enough to

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have given tentative, partial witness to the lives of Harris’s Sparrows, and come to understand some infinitely small fragments of their language, a language that speaks of the patient and constant devotion of parents to their young, determination in the face of hungry shrikes, the birds’ insistence on the flesh-and-blood details of life. This end is a far cry from John Fowles’s “major human alienation,” Merwin’s “claiming and establishing power,” and whatever it was that Tom Killion felt that John Muir “rose above.” On a personal level, what was best about what I did at Warden’s Grove lay in the process of my research. Much of what I came to understand about Harris’s Sparrows and the world around me was due to how I worked — another story hidden within the graphs. I measured, measured again, watched, and watched again; my project, with its lack of automated efficiency, its repetitive activities, and focus on an uncooperative animal, forced me into what I might describe as slowness. One of Lisel Mueller’s poems bears the title, “The Need to Hold Still,” and that was what I had to do. This “need to hold still,” to fall into slowness and simply watch, is a chief blessing of focused work in both descriptive natural history and hypothesis-based research. It is a skill that both scientists and nonscientists need to cultivate, a vital way to pay attention to the world. Perhaps it also is where science and art can interact with one another — sensory experience as a synthetic, creative process that grows out of watching and waiting, listening and coming into patience. Through observation, it is possible to develop a richness of texture and nuance, substance and form, in our understanding of the animate and inanimate residents of this world — and our place in it. It is how we become informed. There is a poem that I love, “Famous,” by Naomi Shihab Nye: “The river is famous to the fish. / The loud voice is famous to the silence.” At Warden’s Grove, I found this kind of fame — the only kind that I’ll ever know or that is of much importance. I discovered it as I watched the constant shuttling of parent birds to and from a nest, or repeatedly counted the number of times that a metal rod intersected the twigs and leaves of shrubs, or measured the mass and tarsus length of each nestling in a brood of five young for eight consecutive days. Through these actions, the Harris’s Sparrows and dwarf birch became famous to me, along with the Barrens themselves, and upon occasion, other animals — wolves, grizzlies, and (yes) mosquitoes and blackflies. And

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I suppose that I was famous to the birds I watched, to one white wolf, and to the many flies that sought their nourishment from me. A passage from my 1989 journal describes my first twenty-fourhour nest watch, which tracked an incubating female through her day, and reveals one aspect of Shihab Nye’s type of fame, in this case, to mosquitoes: Our schedule called for two-hour observation shifts, followed by a four-hour stint from either 10:00 in the evening to 2:00 in the morning, or 2:00 to 6:00 in the morning. During my first shift, from 10:00 A.M. until noon, I was fine. I did not tolerate the mosquitoes, I ignored them. I imagined my observation bout as a form of meditation, in which I concentrated on an object — in this case, the stubby spruce that sheltered the Harris’ Sparrow nest that I was watching. I focused on the spruce, searching for movement, indications that the female was either leaving or returning to the nest, and I finished my first stint surprised at how quickly the time passed, pleased with my ability to ignore the bugs. It wasn’t so bad, and I felt like I’d earned a passing grade in Barrenlands Entomology 101. My next shift, from 2:00 to 4:00 in the afternoon, was not so easy. The mosquitoes were more numerous and persistent. My motionless body created a favorable microclimate, with reduced wind and warmer temperatures, and a vibrating, living cloud surrounded me. The bugs worked their way under my headnet, burrowed into my beard, explored my ear canals and nostrils, sought meals behind my glasses. Occasionally, I’d suck one into my mouth, and then spit it out — inside the headnet. An erratic breeze blew; an increase in its speed pushed the pulsing mass to my leeward, a decrease let them surround me. The hum of mosquitoes kept time with the wind’s modulations: NUHH, NUHH, NUHH, nuhh, nuhh, nuhh, NUHH, nuhh nuhh, drifting in and out of reception like a distant radio station. I was wearing windpants and an anorak over my regular clothes, along with the headnet, and in the direct sun, it was hot. I felt like I had carried my own Kansas summer day north from Lawrence. Sweat trickled down my forehead and into my eyes, mixing with the smashed carcasses of mosquitoes I’d killed. Although I still was in a decent mood,

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and not too tired, the second shift passed slowly, and I was happy to see Ken as he climbed the hill. His turn. My 6:00 to 8:00 shift destroyed my precarious harmony. The mild, more humid evening air was completely still; mosquitoes swarmed about me and I could barely tolerate the “fucking bastards,” as I repeatedly, vehemently, and silently described my assailants. I squinted through a fog of insects, and marked the time closely: Only an hour more, thirty minutes, fifteen minutes, five minutes. I clenched my jaw and tightened the muscles throughout my body. I breathed shallowly and less frequently, as if I had withdrawn beneath a mental and physical carapace. I forced myself to stay focused on the female, but the rest of the environment — except for the mosquitoes — disappeared. I hunkered down, peered past the bugs, and waited. At 10:00 P.M. I began my long watch, and prayed that the cooler air would discourage the bugs. Wrong. Fifty degrees didn’t faze them; neither did forty-five degrees, nor forty degrees. At thirtysix degrees, minimum for the night, the volume of mosquitoes hadn’t diminished, but there was a shift change; rather than the small ones that had plagued me earlier, a larger variety kept me company. The quality of their whine changed, too — from a higherpitched nuh to a lower pitched hum that bore an odd resemblance to the Hindu’s most sacred syllable: om. The Barrenlands mantra, perhaps. The female had ceased foraging around 7:00 P.M., but I couldn’t relax and watch the moonrise over the Thelon — instead, I spent the long hours slapping Boone and Crockett Club-sized mosquitoes. As the night wore on and the air (and I) chilled, I became more and more enraged at the ability of those ectotherms to keep flying; could they thermoregulate? When my last shift finished, I stumbled back to the cabin and tried to nap. But “they” had infiltrated the cabin’s defenses and were there to keep me company. I cursed again, for the umpteenth time, donned my stuffy headnet, and fell into an exhausted sleep — but not before accepting the lesson of last twenty-four hours: that in spite of my aspirations and pride I would never become a Zen Master of the Tundra, for I’d abandoned my equanimity, slaughtered thousands of mosquitoes, and thirsted for the deaths of millions more.

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After the mosquitoes peaked, the blackflies blossomed. In two summers, the transition between forms of insect harassment was gradual — a few blackflies here and there, with a leisurely building crescendo, accompanied by a decline in mosquitoes — a tag-team affair. But in 1990, the blackflies appeared en masse, with little advance notice. Although the worst of the blackflies came after we had finished measuring nestlings and observing nests, we had to sample nest vegetation when blackflies were increasing exponentially. This process, which took up to one hour at each nest (we measured as many as thirty nests in a field season), was completed during threeor-four-day bursts of intensive work after the nestlings had fledged. At each nest, I measured thirteen variables. Some measurements, such as compass orientation of the nest entrance, were quickly done; but others took longer and required me to move slowly for five to ten minutes. For example, to measure vegetation density at the nest, I established two perpendicular, one-meter-long transects centered on the nest. At ten-centimeter intervals (about four inches) along each transect, I passed a thin metal rod vertically through the vegetation and counted the number of times that leaves and branches contacted the rod. To do this properly, I had to crawl along the transect and peer into the foliage. I often had difficulty seeing into the shadows with my headnet down, and so off it came. Although my assistant, who recorded numbers as I called them out, could wear his headnet and move around, I was an easy target for the blizzard of blackflies that swirled around me. As I worked, I became more intimately familiar with the behavioral differences between mosquitoes and blackflies. Mosquitoes are irritatingly persistent and fastidious; their attacks are like an elaborate, graceful dance. There is a delicate shyness to the female mosquito’s feeding method; like a hesitant suitor, she approaches, settles, probes with her proboscis, and then, for no apparent reason, abandons what looks to be an acceptable feeding site. Like a refined and fussy aesthete, she is not easily satisfied; she may fly off a bit, circle, approach, land, and probe again. This sequence may be repeated several times, with each sortie accompanied by her aggravating whine, before she finally lands, tests several spots, and determines the perfect location in which to drill. Unless the feeding mosquito directly hits a nerve ending, the blood meal is taken from the victim with a minimum

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of discomfort — a slight sensation, like a tiny pinprick, and that’s it. Mosquitoes also prefer unprotected skin and don’t seek out dark, confined areas beneath clothing, although they are content to feed once they work their way beneath a headnet. Blackflies, on the other hand, behave like the Mongol hordes. There is no delicacy to their method; they know only the dull and frenzied attack, never the retreat. Step out of a cabin on a calm, warm July day and the blackflies don’t just immediately surround you, like mosquitoes; they are on you. They attack any exposed surface and, although diurnal, will work their way into tight, dark spaces, where they chew and slash away with biting, blade-like mouthparts — no probing and pain-free drilling for them. Full beards, hats, and elastic sleeves are ineffective blackfly barriers, and I’ve often found their carcasses, and tracks of blood from their bites, beneath my windbreaker and pants — and on the worst days, beneath my underwear. While insect repellants with high levels of active ingredient DEET (N, N diethyl-meta-toluamide) deter mosquitoes, they have relatively little effect on blackflies, which seem to dine on the stuff. The only way in which blackflies compare favorably to mosquitoes is that the former are disinclined to attack when they are inside a cabin or tent, and always move toward light. On a calm August day, it’s impossible to enter a tent without bringing along a blackfly escort, but once inside they ignore the occupants. Instead, they gather on the netting and attempt to escape toward light with the same single-mindedness with which they pursue their attacks — while their pals bombard the outside nylon and desperately try to get in. This behavior is curious, given the blackfly’s willingness to explore the confined spaces beneath one’s clothing. A swarm of blackflies inside a tent never will disturb a night’s sleep in the way that a single persistent mosquito can, so I don’t bother tracking down and killing every blackfly that pursues me into a tent, although I am ruthless in doing so with mosquitoes. Yes, the mosquitoes and blackflies were bad, and it’s hard not to see some of my adventures in nest watching and vegetation measurement as exercises in perversity. And although I would love to return to the Barrens during the summer, I don’t care ever again to offer, on such an extended basis, the same stationary and convenient target for the little bastards. And yet, I did learn something out there, knowledge that could not be gained in any other way, that I had not learned in the

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past, even on long canoe trips in the North. I came to a full emotional understanding of what the data on insect numbers in the Canadian arctic mean. H. V. Danks, in Arctic Arthropods, states that blackfly larvae, which mature on stream vegetation and rocks, can exceed densities of one million per square meter, while there can be more than five million adult mosquitoes per acre. More importantly, I appreciated, at least in a vague way, something of what it must be like for many of the mammals and birds of the Barrens. It’s one thing to read about how caribou are harassed by biting and sucking flies, how they drift into the wind, seek out ridges and large patches of snow — any place where the insects are less abundant — and how on still days at the height of summer they sometimes are driven to stampede across the tundra. But it’s something else entirely to live out there, among the insects, with no place to hide. Although I donned protective clothing and coated myself with bug dope, and had hands with which to swat my tormentors, my work meant that, for large blocks of time, I couldn’t escape. I could not keep moving or seek refuge. I had to remain mostly still, and in doing so, like the caribou, I was vulnerable. It was a humbling and, at times, almost overwhelming experience, as fierce as any storm, and one that I coped with only by using all my willpower. The assaults that I suffered led me to wonder how sparrow nestlings cope with mosquitoes and blackflies. When nestlings hatch, they are almost naked, and for the first four or five days of life, their growing feathers offer little protection from the flies. The female broods them for long periods, which might provide some relief, but she still must leave the nest to forage. Even after their feathers have erupted from their sheaths, the nestlings are stationary and restricted to the nest until they fledge at nine or ten days of age. What do they do, those warm-blooded, helpless birds? What do adult birds do, especially the incubating and brooding females? Surely, the blackflies and mosquitoes attack bare spots around the birds’ eyes and beaks. I know nothing about the degree to which adults were harassed, but when I made my daily nest rounds and stopped to measure young birds, I discovered something amazing — that although I might be covered in blackflies and mosquitoes, even on the skin that I’d slathered with 99 percent DEET, the nestlings were almost completely free of insects, and remained so as I handled them. What was the secret to an apparently blackfly- and mosquito-free life? To this day, I have no idea, although

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I suspect that their immunity is related to a relative absence of mosquito and blackfly species that specialize on birds (in technical jargon, ornithophilic species). Much research has been done on the behavior, ecology, and physiology of biting flies in the arctic, due to their effects on human activity, but studies on host selection have given contradictory results. Some species of mosquitoes typically feed on large mammals, such as caribou, but birds are sometimes major hosts in the high arctic, and some boreal blackflies feed exclusively on birds. One observation supporting the idea that insect harassment is reduced for arctic birds is that infection rates for unicellular blood parasites transmitted by blackflies or mosquitoes are lower in tundra-nesting species than in species breeding further to the south. However, young raptors in high latitude boreal forests, which remain in the nest much longer than Harris’s Sparrows (about forty-six days in Red-tailed Hawks, for example), are sometimes killed by the direct and indirect effects of biting flies. One study in the Yukon suggested that, in some years, a majority of the Red-tailed Hawk nestling deaths are caused by blackflies. But sitting quietly for long periods brought fame to more than mosquitoes and blackflies; there also were encounters with other animals, and with the land itself. One such incident happened late one evening as I finished up three hours of observation at a Whitecrowned Sparrow nest. The female, who was brooding nestlings, had settled down for the night. She had been on the nest for more than thirty minutes, and from other, longer watches, I knew that she was done foraging. The evening air was cool and still, but for some reason the flies had settled down, too. I was enjoying the quiet and mentally preparing to end my observation when I became aware of a presence behind me. I hadn’t heard anything; it was as if I had sensed a subtle shift in the ambience of my world, rather than the soft pad of an animal across the sedge tussocks. I glanced over my shoulder and not ten yards away was a solitary wolf. We looked at each other for a few moments, and then I stood slowly, as I was more comfortable in an upright position. She — for some reason I thought of her this way — was yellowish-white, and rangy. She moved a few paces toward me; I held my ground, and she backed off. I drew in my breath, and focused on the wolf. The evening sky, the spruce and tundra, even the river, disappeared. The wolf and I regarded each other for a minute or two; she seemed more curious than anything. She carried some-

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thing in her mouth, which she began tossing into the air. Two adult Hoary Redpolls, small finches that nest in the dwarf birch around Warden’s Grove, fluttered around the wolf, agitated and uttering panicked, high-pitched calls. Eventually, the wolf dropped whatever she’d been playing with and trotted off to the southwest, stopping every few yards to glance back at me. I walked over to where she had been, and where the redpolls still were protesting. At my feet was a newly fledged redpoll, dead, its tiny body punctured by bite marks. Unless the blackflies and mosquitoes were out in force, I could relax into the nest observations, and the hours usually passed quickly. Although I had to remain alert for movement by the parents and my attention could not wander, I sometimes felt a tension that pulled me away from the nest. My back felt exposed, and it wasn’t easy to maintain my focus when this feeling was most intense. This sense of vulnerability was due to the grizzly bears that roamed the area. I wasn’t paranoid and fearful, as I had been when Ken and I had first arrived at Warden’s Grove. I had reached a mental accommodation with the bears, but part of this accommodation was acknowledging that I, like the caribou and ground squirrels, was potential prey. I automatically incorporated this understanding into my behavior when I was walking, and habitually scanned my surroundings for bears, but only rarely — as when I stumbled across a fresh pile of dung — did they truly penetrate my consciousness. But when I was sitting on the tundra and concentrating on the sparrows, I sometimes got a prickly sensation and shivered involuntarily, as if I was being watched or stalked. And so, during nest watches, I would occasionally glance up, make a quick scan, and return to my observations. I then could relax for a few minutes, but my sense of vulnerability invariably returned and I would rapidly survey the area again. It struck me that I was behaving like a foraging Harris’s Sparrow — for the most part focused on the task before me, but always vigilant and looking up every minute or so to scan for predators. It never was possible to forget my status in the world; as the Northern Shrikes were famous to the sparrows, the bears were famous to me. On the Barrens, I learned of insects and sparrows, wolves and bears; but while I sat on my pad and searched out the lives of birds, the country spoke, too, in the language of heat and wind and light. There were times when I felt the assault of the heat almost as much

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as I did the flies, especially during my first field season, when masses of still, warm air settled across the Canadian arctic. Temperatures topped 100 degrees at Warden’s Grove, and the sun was relentless. It beat the mosquitoes into submission, although the blackflies weren’t deterred, and even on the hottest days I had to wear a windbreaker and headnet, tuck my pants into my socks, and offer myself up to the sky. But what I remember more than the heat was the light. To begin a nest watch at 2 A.M., in the amethyst air of the arctic night, and watch the sun rise an hour later, was to know something of morning — the gradual dying of deep tourmaline light into pink and orange; the oblique rays of the sun spreading across the tundra, from the Last Light Hills toward the Thelon; the march of long shadows away from the Harris’s Sparrow nest that I was observing, and the female’s first foray into the day; the lost cries of Long-tailed Ducks drifting up from the Thelon, still as my heart, at least for those few hours; and the rising tide of the dawn chorus, flowing like light across the Barrens. Or to sit high above Warden’s Grove on summer solstice and watch the sun break through a sky of scattered clouds, the unkept promise of distant virga hanging on the horizon, curtains of rain suspended in space, with everything bathed in color: the sinuous, speckled gray flow of cobbled Pleistocene moraines that meandered along the contours of Home Hill; the brilliant, grasshopper green of new dwarf birch leaves; the tawny, golden wash of sedge meadows; the white electric edges of billowing cumulus. I came to see light as more than streams of photons, a phenomenon of physics alone, as if it had been transformed from something whose existence was rooted in quantity, a function of wave and particle alone, to one based on quality, a presence that bound me to the things of the world. . . . During my long hours of watching and wandering, the more I came to see the Harris’s Sparrows as belonging to the place where they lived, and the more I felt that I belonged there, too. Through the practice of science, I attended more fully to the details of the lives of animals and how they responded to their environment. I entered into their world in a deeper, more fundamental way than I ever had done before, in spite of the years that I had spent outside. I was forced to pay attention to my surroundings, to the furtive rustle of a sparrow in the underbrush, the language of her actions, and the manner in which her comings and goings were tied to her developing eggs and

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nestlings, to patterns of heat and cold, to the lives of predators. As I focused more fully on Harris’s Sparrows and gathered the numbers that eventually would find their way into graphs and tables, I came to know more about the skim of ice on a tundra pond, the waxing and waning of the insects, the melting of the snows, the movements of wolves, the delicate, yellow flowers of a lousewort inflorescence, the scent of warm earth after the storms of May, the pulse of light and heat at the height of summer. I had entered into my surroundings and the substance of things, had wandered into a landscape that had an emotional counterpoint in me. I lived and worked in a physical ecotone, one formed by the gradation of boreal forest into arctic tundra, but I also inhabited a different sort of transition zone — one in which the quantitative merged with the subjective, where measurement and observation intergraded with an emotional, aesthetic approach to seeing. I was doing science, but I did not have to “rise above” anything. I love the time of day when the last tasks are finished: tomorrow’s bread baked, pails of water fetched from the spring, field notes and journal entries completed. Before climbing into my bunk I step outside for one last look at the view: the sedge meadow immediately to the east, then the narrow band of spruce that hugs the cutbank above the river. Beyond lies the Thelon, then the undulating waves of tundra, rolling off toward the Clarke River. The best evenings come before the full flush of summer, before sparrows fledge their young and clouds of mosquitoes rise into the air. When the night is tranquil and the final bit of sunlight has faded from the Last Light Hills, when the air is calm and the river is still as silence and the last sparrow song has died away, I sometimes have the notion that all is right with the world. Then it’s hard to pull myself away from the view and the sense of quiet satisfaction that comes after a good stretch in the field, but I’m usually dog-tired after a day that, more often than not, has stretched on to eighteen hours. Once in my sleeping bag, I pick up a book and read a few pages, then drift off to sleep. But before doing so, I like to replay the day’s events and tally my successes — one new nest found, three more birds banded, two more hours of nest observations completed, another snow survey finished. I measure my progress through the field season, and occasionally, through my entire study and doctoral program. I recall MacArthur: “To do science is to search for patterns.” I know that I will uncover a few of these patterns, but I recognize another sort of pattern,

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too — one that’s formed by my work. The intensive search for nests, bird trapping and banding, daily nest rounds, weekly arthropod counts, vegetation measurements — these tasks create a kind of rhythm, one flowing within the frame of reference formed by the Barrens. There is the insistent northern wind, the rising tide of migration, the pirouette of ice flows on the spring river, the wandering bears, the flowering heads of sedges rising from brown tussocks, the eggs laid in nests of woven grass, beneath the stunted birch. I have my work, and it’s nice to know that this work is good. I watch the numbers accumulate — usually slowly, but on most days I add a few more items to my cache of data. I take pleasure in this process, in coming to know a few things that haven’t been known before, however trivial they seem in the larger scheme of things. I know that part of this pleasure comes from the pride of possession, and having some small measure of uniqueness in the world. The lives of Harris’s Sparrows are clear to me in ways in which they are clear to no one else, and I will produce the tables and graphs, the dissertation and scientific papers to prove it. And yet, beyond this small expression of hubris there lies a more satisfying and worthwhile end. I have, in spite of my own limitations — my impatience and crabbiness, my fears and lack of attention to detail, and my inability to see well — stumbled toward a more complete sense of the world. Through right practice — by sitting and watching, weighing and measuring — and almost in spite of myself, I have entered into the landscape. The focused attention of a female Harris’s Sparrow to her eggs and nestlings has focused my attention, too. This concentration has led me into an obsession with Zonotrichia querula, but it has led in the opposite direction, too — into the world that spirals outward from a female bird (mass of 33.7 grams) incubating her clutch of eggs (average mass of 3.09 ± 0.26 grams/egg), past the dwarf birch that shelters her nest (average height of vegetation at the nest of 47.6 ± 22.4 centimeters) toward the green sedge meadows (18 percent of the landscape around Warden’s Grove) and Last Light Hills and beyond, into the infinite distance that fades into a rumor of blue on the endless horizon.

Killing . . . . . . . Things .................................................. There is a place where the vectors of a man and a bird intersect, two miles north of Warden’s Grove, along the west bank of the Thelon River. It happens on a bright June day as the last of the ice that blocks the narrows below the cabin gives way and the river rolls on into summer. The trajectories that have brought us to this confluence are complex. The Harris’s Sparrow’s involves a sixteen hundred mile spring migration north from its wintering grounds in Kansas, the fourth in a long and fortunate life. He’s a large male — almost forty grams — with a black bib that extends farther onto his belly than in most Harris’s Sparrows, and he’s adept at surviving the close calls that almost every adult bird will experience. Last January, while foraging beneath a bird feeder, he narrowly escaped the sudden swoop of a Sharp-shinned Hawk; in early February, he found sufficient shelter and food to avoid freezing to death during a blizzard that swept southeast across the Great Plains and killed several sparrows in his flock. He has found mates in each of his four breeding seasons, and successfully raised one brood of young — three fledglings in 1987, with one of these surviving through the southward migration and subsequent winter. In June 1986, during his first breeding season, his mate was killed by a Northern Shrike (a blur of white and gray and black cutting around a small spruce and plucking her from the ground as she foraged, his last-second warning call coming too late to allow her to escape) and her eggs went cold. Last year, he and his mate managed to raise four nestlings until they were eight days old. But then an arctic ground squirrel stumbled across the nest, which was well-hidden in a clump of dwarf birch and Labrador tea — dumb luck, mostly — and the squirrel killed and ate the young. This year he returned to his breeding territory on May 25, carrying a bit more fat than most of his fellow males. Within four days of his arrival, he was mated to a two-year-old female, who had wintered fifty miles to the south of him and arrived on the breeding grounds on May 26. By

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the middle of June, she had built a nest beneath the branches of a thirtyinch-high dwarf birch, and laid her clutch of four eggs. Her partner is more vigilant than most males, and relentless in attending to his territory. He patrols its boundaries frequently, watches for predators and intruding males, hangs close to his mate while she forages. Having survived and learned much, he is good at what he does. And so, on the day that I wander into the landscape of his concern, he is quickly aware of my presence. When I unknowingly approach to within thirty yards of the nest, he does not seek cover and silence, as do most species of birds that nest around Warden’s Grove. Instead he rises, as is the habit of Harris’s Sparrows, into the tallest branches of a small spruce. There he strings his single-note alarm call — a metallic “chink” — into a long, insistent, and monotonous monolog. With each call, his body shakes slightly. He punctuates his litany of concern with small bows and nervously wipes his bill from side to side on the branch where he is perched. My path intersects his after a longer, more circuitous migration — the three thousand mile drive from Lawrence to Yellowknife, a week-long hiatus there, then the charter flight north and east to the Thelon. Since arriving, I have established my home range, settled into a routine of research and maintenance activities. On the day that our paths intersect, I spend four hours of the morning in a vain search for nests. After a lunch of cheese, dried fruit, and bread, I grab a .22 caliber rifle, stuff a box of bullets loaded with birdshot into the pocket of my field vest, and put a scalpel, syringe, plastic bags, and some ethanol in my daypack. I am subdued and only tell Ken, “I’m headed up to North Grove. I’ll be back in a few hours.” I walk north from the cabin, into open sedge meadows and dry, upland tundra, well beyond the limits of my study area and into country populated by birds that aren’t “mine.” I stick to rocky benches and the margins of spruce islands when I can, seeking out the drier ground and avoiding muck and tussocks as much as possible. And as always, I watch for bears. I carry the unloaded rifle in my right hand and keep my mind focused on walking; I am silent even to myself. After thirty minutes of rapid hiking, I crest a gentle rise and see a stand of spruce about half as large as Warden’s Grove, ringed by dwarf birch, still leafless in mid-June. The grove sits perched above a steep bank that slopes down to the Thelon, and is bounded to the north by a large creek that drains from a broad basin to the west. The tundra is tawny-brown, and pockets of snow lie scattered in the lee of the woods and the cutbank of the tributary stream.

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I descend to the edge of the grove, stop and load the rifle, check and double-check the safety. The sun is deliciously warm on my face, and I remove my windbreaker and stuff it in my pack. I start east, toward the river, hesitate, and for some unconscious reason, reverse my course and skirt the west side of the trees. I work around a finger of spruce that projects toward the creek, which is running full with meltwater. I flush a robin, then a tree sparrow, but see no Harris’s Sparrows. A Blackpoll Warbler sings once from the grove, and is quiet. And then a black-bibbed bird rises from the ground into the tallest branches of a small spruce, his path a sudden arc that cuts across my peripheral vision. He is exposed, obvious, backlit against the afternoon sky. y graduate student hovel was in “The Penthouse,” the nowvanished eighth floor of Dyche Hall, which houses the KU Museum of Natural History. The hall, which opened in 1903, is a magnificent building of native limestone in the ornate Venetian Romanesque style. It stands on the crest of Mt. Oread, the highest hill in the region, and the site of the original buildings that comprised the nascent university. On most work days, I climbed the steps to the main entrance on the fourth floor of the museum and passed through four floors on the way to my office. The first three of these floors contain public exhibits and the museum’s administrative offices, along with the fish, amphibian, and reptile collections; the fourth isn’t open to the public, but is home to the museum divisions devoted to research on birds and mammals. These divisions are known as “ranges”; each occupies about one-half of the floor, with space for offices, preparing specimens, a library, and the collection. On the bird range, the specimens include whole animals in alcohol, tissues, skeletons, and study skins; the total number of specimens in the bird collection runs to about 100,000, while there are about 165,000 on the mammal range. When I was a graduate student at Kansas, the study skins in the bird collection were housed in white metal museum cases, each about twenty-eight inches wide, forty inches tall, and forty inches deep. The cases were stacked two high, in long rows, and each day, as I ascended to my office, I passed through this white steel forest. I usually didn’t think much about what was in the cabinets; there always was a class to prepare for, a grant to write, or a lab to teach, and I was focused

M

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on what I had to accomplish in the hours ahead. But occasionally, I needed to examine some specimens — for example, those of the museum’s Harris’s Sparrow series, which now runs to 384. If I flipped the latches on the cabinet and removed the unhinged panel on the front, I found a set of trays containing rows of perfectly aligned study skins, each with its own identifying tag and accession number. Most of the specimens are prepared in the same way, which is different from the taxidermic mounts on display in the Panorama Room of the museum, where a vast diorama shows characteristic birds and mammals of the major North American life zones, each in a “lifelike” pose. In contrast, each stuffed study skin in the ornithological research collection lies on its back, with the bill almost parallel to the body axis. The wings are folded against the flanks, and a few of the breast feathers are fluffed over the edges of the wings to give the bird a more “natural” appearance. The legs are crossed below the ankles and secured with thread; the tail feathers are fanned slightly, and a data tag is attached where the legs cross. A small bit of cotton protrudes slightly from each eye. The number of specimens stored in a case varies, depending upon the size of the species that it contains. A case of small songbirds, such as Zonotrichia sparrows and their allies, holds roughly four to five hundred study skins, each in its characteristic pose, the symmetrical arrangement of bodies reminding me of rows of corn in a Kansas field. Many individuals have contributed the specimens that fill the bird and mammal ranges, but a few stand out as distinguished and prodigious collectors. Among ornithologists, Max Thompson added about 7,000 specimens to the bird collection, and James Rising another 3,900; Richard Johnston, my dissertation advisor, contributed more than 3,000, most of these House Sparrows collected during his classic 1960s study of rapid evolution in the species, which was introduced to North America in 1851. Phillip Humphrey, a former director of the Natural History Museum, collected 2,500 specimens. However, these numbers pale before those of several individuals who provided specimens for the mammal collection. J. R. Alcorn, a professional collector who sold specimens to natural history museums around the country, has 18,140 mammal specimens in the KU collection — although his field catalog, which lists almost all of the specimens that he collected during his long career, continues to 28,110 and includes birds, reptiles and amphibians. E. Raymond

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Hall, director of the Natural History Museum from 1944 until 1967, had a field catalog that ran to 9,292, although many of his specimens are not at Kansas, while thirty-four other collectors contributed more mammals to KU’s collection than did Hall. Although the days of the independent, professional collector are now past, and there are more stringent regulations about what, where, and when one can collect, the museum’s bird and mammal collections continue to grow. New specimens are being added constantly to the trays that layer the storage cabinets like strata of sedimentary rock. The study skins in the trays shimmer with vibrant colors — the metallic, iridescent greens and deep red of a male Broad-tailed Hummingbird; the exquisite, turquoise blue of a Lazuli Bunting; the brilliant, electric orange of a Blackburnian Warbler; the delicate blend of brown and black flecks along the back of a Harris’s Sparrow. And the diversity of bird life represented by KU’s collection, which spans the range of extant birds, is astounding — extending from the flightless ratites (kiwis and their kin) and penguins to the more recently evolved passerines, such as finches and blackbirds. There also is a fascinating and aesthetic symmetry to the arrangement of the specimens, which are grouped by taxonomic categories reflecting evolutionary relationships. A tray of North American orioles, family Icteridae, genus Icterus, contains a myriad of brightly-colored birds, especially among breeding males. Members of the same species and sex resemble one another closely, of course, although there are subtle variations among birds of even the same sex, age, and reproductive status — brighter orange in the belly of one male, less extensive black on the head of another. Closely related species are placed next to each other, and this arrangement helps one see the evolutionary relationship between them. For example, Baltimore Orioles, Icterus galbula, are placed next to Bullock’s Orioles, Icterus bullockii, mirroring the way that the breeding ranges of these two species overlap in the western Great Plains, where they sometimes hybridize. There are ecotones on the trays, gradations of forms blending into one another: similarity and variability, species after species laid out in row after row, tray after tray, cabinet after cabinet, their arrangement depicting the flow of life and time. The Museum of Natural History at the University of Kansas is an expression of the desire of Western science to describe and understand the natural world, an idea that first flourished during

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the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One of the earliest natural history museums was established by Dr. Olaus Worm, a Danish physician who built his collection to teach seventeenth century students at the University of Copenhagen. Worm’s museum was a hodgepodge of stuffed bears and gulls, moose antlers, turtle skulls, horse jaws, and narwhal tusks. By intently studying the objects in his museum, Worm believed that a person could develop a full and accurate understanding of the natural world. “Let us take off the spectacles that show us the shadows of the things instead of the things themselves,” Worm wrote. Worm’s quotation, with its epistemological language and mystical flavor, suggests that science can yield more than description of the natural world; it also may provide insight into the nature of things, both animate and inanimate. In this I am reminded of the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who described his visit to the gardens and collections of the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris in 1833, in “The Uses of Natural History.” In his 1833 lecture, Emerson discussed what he termed a “Cabinet of Natural History,” including the “house of stuffed birds,” which was a “finer picture gallery than the Louvre.” Emerson argued that The eye is satisfied with seeing and strange thoughts are stirred as you see more surprizing objects than were known to exist . . . The limits of the possible are enlarged, and the real is stranger than the imaginary . . . I am impressed with a singular conviction that not a form so grotesque, so savage, or so beautiful, but is an expression of something in man the observer. We feel that there is an occult relation between the very worm, the crawling scorpions, and man. I am moved by strange sympathies, I say I will listen to this invitation. I will be a naturalist. “In a cabinet of natural history,” Emerson continued, “we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldy and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect.” Emerson used “occult” several times in his essay. We tend to associate the word with séances and Ouija boards, but I imagine that Emerson’s intended meaning related to “mysterious” or “hidden.” Whatever his intent, Emerson’s “cabinet” was more than a forty-inch tall metal box housing stuffed birds or mounted insects and plants; it was a microcosm of creation, a repository of evidence of both the sub-

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stance of nature and, in the Transcendentalist tradition, the nature of man. Indeed, for Emerson, it was “the greatest office of natural science . . . to explain man to himself.” But when I open the cabinets that contain specimens of the family Emberizidae, or New World Sparrows, I find no evidence of the nature of man, other than our species’ passion for collecting things. There are no metaphysical or epistemological clues in these cabinets, no views of occult relations — just trays filled with dead sparrows. While Emerson wrote of the naturalist, “It is he who marries the visible to the Invisible by uniting thought to Animal Organization,” I sense nothing of “the Invisible.” There are no transcendentalist mirrors in the cabinets, only specimens and data that represent some of the interspecific and intraspecific variation present in birds. I can examine the series of Harris’s Sparrows and compare the plumage and size of individuals from the large sequence of winter birds to those few specimens from the breeding grounds. I can pull out my calipers and measure beak and wing lengths, look for evidence of molt, record information from the tags on mass, reproductive condition, and age. I can consider larger questions of ecology and evolution, and the relationship between form and function. And if I am in the right mood, I might contemplate the connection between the living Harris’s Sparrows that I know from the Thelon and the dead ones that reside in these cabinets, the interwoven paths of the collectors and the collected, the ways in which attitudes about life blend into those about death, and my small role in the process that has built this wonderful and beautiful and important and sad collection. In 1931, when George M. Sutton journeyed north to Churchill to find and describe the “first” Harris’s Sparrow nest with eggs, he took his collecting kit with him. On June 16, after weeks of searching, Sutton finally found the nest that he was after, one that his memoirs make clear he had dreamt about since he was a boy: A little before nine o’clock, while marching across an all but impassable bog, I frightened from the sphagnum island underfoot a slim, dark-colored bird. It made no outcry, but from the explosive flutter of its wings I knew it had left a nest. I searched for a moment, parting with my hands the tough, slender twigs of flowering Labrador tea. And there was the nest — with four eggs that in the

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cool shadow had a dark appearance. The mother bird, by this time, was chipping in alarm. I looked at her briefly in my glass. A Harris Sparrow! I raised the gun, took careful aim, and fired. Marking the nest, I ran to pick her up. Upon my return, the male appeared. I shot him also, for I knew that the record would not be complete unless I shot both parent birds. To say that I was happy is to describe my feelings all too tamely. I was beside myself. Shooting those important specimens had taken control. I had been so excited that I had hardly been able to hold the gun properly. As I knelt to examine the nest a thrill the like of which I had never felt before passed through me. And I talked aloud! “Here!” I said. “Here in this beautiful place!” At my fingertips lay treasures that were beyond price. Mine was Man’s first glimpse of the eggs of the Harris’s Sparrow, in the lovely bird’s wilderness home. In a technical article on the Churchill expedition, Sutton described collecting specimens “sparingly”; all told, he obtained seven nests and clutches of eggs and at least six birds associated with these nests. Score: Sutton thirteen, Harris’s Sparrows zero. Although Sutton’s elation apparently had more to do with “Man’s first glimpse” of a Harris’s Sparrow nest with eggs (never mind the Chippewa who undoubtedly stumbled across more than a few during their hundreds of years of living on the edge of the Barrens) than with shooting the parents, the first time that I read his account I was appalled by what I saw as his cavalier attitude toward collecting birds. Yet I knew that Sutton, one of the preeminent ornithologists of the mid-twentieth century, deeply loved birds, and that I was judging attitudes and actions from across the divide of time. For it wasn’t until the 1960s or 1970s that collecting birds became less common among professional ornithologists — a function of the growth in environmental activism, increasing concern about declining bird populations, and a general disciplinary shift toward research questions less devoted to taxonomy and documenting distributions. Prior to the 1960s, few ornithologists would have questioned the need to collect specimens; most would have viewed it as essential to the discipline. And even today, the practice remains crucial for certain types of ornithological research. Even John Burroughs, the noted nineteenth century naturalist and

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essayist, praised collecting as indispensable for anyone interested in enjoying and understanding nature. In “The Invitation,” Burroughs wrote, “The satisfaction is in learning [ornithology] from nature. One must have an original experience with the birds. The books are only the guide, the invitation.” And how to best learn about “the birds”? Burroughs accomplished this when “I took my gun and went into the woods,” and offered this advice to anyone interested in birds: “Take the first step in ornithology, procure one specimen, and you are ticketed for the whole voyage.” For Burroughs, the ornithological voyage followed a particular route: “First find your bird; observe its ways, its song, its calls, its flights, its haunts; then shoot it (not ogle it with a glass), and compare with Audubon. In this way the feathered kingdom will soon be conquered.” In later essays, Burroughs displayed a more ambivalent attitude toward collecting. Although he never articulated the political sensibility and environmental activism of John Muir, Burroughs criticized the destructive actions of “professional collectors,” and wrote that “a man in the woods, with a gun in his hands, is no longer a man — he is a brute. The devil is in the gun to make brutes of us all.” And in his journal writings, Burroughs admitted that collecting specimens might interfere with appreciating and understanding the natural world: “. . . my excursions into the woods are often spoiled, or at least vitiated, by taking my gun and making it a specialty to obtain a bird . . .” Fast-forward to 1947, and Farley Mowat, a young zoologist and aspiring author hired to accompany Dr. Francis Harper on an expedition to, in Harper’s words, “investigate, inventory and catalogue the wildlife of the southern District of Keewatin in the Northwest Territories of Canada.” The base of their operations was Nueltin Lake, an isolated area practically “unknown to science.” And “science,” as embodied by Harper, was in the form of an old-school, irascible zoologist with a Ph.D. from Cornell, circa 1925, awarded in part for his studies of the fauna of northern Alberta and the southern Northwest Territories. Harper had participated in two collecting expeditions to the region, in 1914 and 1920; the second, which focused its efforts along the Athabaska River, returned with 350 mammals and 1,200 birds. In the intervening years, Harper had dreamed of returning to the North, but was not able to do so until his trip with Mowat, a recently dis-

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charged veteran of the Canadian Army. Almost from the start of their two-person expedition, Mowat and Harper did not get along, and Harper “dismissed” Mowat after less than six weeks in the field. The two were like sodium and water together, mostly because of strong personality differences and conflicting expectations about what Mowat’s role was to be on the expedition. Mowat felt as though Harper had given him permission to act as a semi-autonomous entity, while Harper expected “devotion to common scientific cause,” a cause consisting primarily of collecting specimens. Mowat later described collecting trips as “little more than high-grade plundering ventures devoted to slaughtering everything non-human or non-domesticated that came under the gun, in order to produce ‘study skins’ for deposit behind sealed doors in endless rows of steel cabinets,” and from the start Mowat’s enthusiasm for the collecting tasks that Harper set him to was less than complete. This feeling grew over the weeks before their final split, which came when Harper ordered Mowat to shoot a Ruddy Turnstone, a brightly-colored migrant shorebird. Mowat did the deed, but afterward vowed that he would “give over being a butcher in the service of science” — although a few days later he did present Harper a Harris’s Sparrow nest with five eggs, which proved to be only a temporary peace offering. Harper returned from six months at Nueltin Lake with 113 mammals and 117 birds, which meant that he collected specimens at a rate of about one animal per day — a good number of deaths, but hardly the product of a “slaughter” from a “high-grade plundering venture” — and small change in terms of J. R. Alcorn’s or E. R. Hall’s lifetime collections. How should I react to Harper’s Nueltin Lake collections, and Mowat’s revulsion? In some ways I sympathize with Mowat’s passions; yet I also believe that Harper’s actions were driven by an equally intense passion to describe and understand the natural world. I always have been drawn to the exploits of the early biologists who explored the Canadian subarctic and arctic, and returned with specimens documenting the flora and fauna of the region. These were collected, prepared, and transported under arduous and sometimes life-threatening conditions, and they represented something important to those who did the collecting — men like Dr. John Richardson, surgeon-naturalist with John Franklin’s 1819–

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1822 expedition to the Coppermine River and wilderness north of Great Slave Lake, who almost starved to death during the expedition; Roderick Ross MacFarlane, an officer with the Hudson’s Bay Company, who between 1859 and 1893 collected more than five thousand specimens from the Canadian north; George Sutton, who spent much of 1929 and 1930 studying the birds of Southampton Island in Hudson Bay, traveling by dogsled and living among the Inuit; and Edward A. Preble, who undertook several lengthy and difficult collecting trips in subarctic Canada. Preble’s 1900 journey, which he made with his brother and two assistants, is emblematic of what a scientific collecting trip into the northern wilderness entailed. The four men left Winnipeg on June 14 and returned there on September 22, having completed a journey by sailboat and canoe of more than twelve hundred miles. Their route took them to Hudson Bay by way of the Nelson and Hayes Rivers, York Factory, and Fort Churchill. From Fort Churchill, Preble proceeded for another two hundred miles up the west coast of Hudson Bay, before backtracking to York Factory and ascending the river system leading to the height of land that accessed waters draining toward Lake Winnipeg. The journey involved brutal portages; long sections of upriver travel, much of it, as Preble wrote, “through difficult water”; and arduous, perilous travel along the coast of Hudson Bay, with its strong tides and capricious winds. Preble and his brother collected more than 180 birds, 370 mammals, and 31 frogs, and hauled them to Winnipeg, along a route that few if any modern-day canoeists, with their lightweight, waterproof tents and clothing, and indestructible plastic canoes, would contemplate — not to mention a graduate student in Gore-tex raingear and rubber boots, deposited on the Barrens by air charter in May of 1989, who then proceeded to whine about the inconvenience of a gutted cabin, a bit of snow, and the difficulty of catching some recalcitrant sparrows. . . . Men like Preble, MacFarlane, Sutton, and Richardson were tough, committed, competent, and fascinated by the species that they collected. They took their work seriously, felt that it had great value, and made tremendous physical sacrifices to see it through. I admire their accomplishments, both in terms of their scientific discoveries and difficult travels. In some ways, I would like to emulate their work,

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and look upon the early years of biological exploration in the North as a golden age. My own efforts pale before theirs, and certainly the collecting that I did was insignificant in terms of numbers, and done for a different purpose. I collected Harris’s Sparrows because I wanted to document the species’ diet during the breeding season, and I knew that I could not do so by relying entirely on observations of their foraging behavior. Nor would it be convenient to capture birds and flush their stomachs or administer an emetic — methods with their own costs, in terms of dead or traumatized birds. I wanted to understand their diets because I was interested in how Harris’s Sparrows respond to the shifting weather, food base, and nutritional requirements that accompany the transition from spring to summer, and from their arrival on the breeding grounds to feeding a nest of rapidly growing, voracious nestlings. Ignoring any argument over the worth of the data that were included in my dissertation and a journal article — data bought and paid for with the blood of eighteen Harris’s Sparrows — I believe that specimens provide valuable biological information, information that cannot be obtained in any other way and often may be important for conservation. In the case of birds, specimens are crucial for studies of taxonomy, distribution, evolutionary relationships, geographic variation, anatomy, reproductive biology, molt and plumage sequences, sex and age characters, development, and toxicology. Without specimens, it may be difficult to identify and designate “units of conservation concern,” a process based on identifying morphological and genetic differences and similarities among populations. The distributional information obtained from specimens also is valuable in identifying biodiversity “hot spots” and priority areas for land acquisition. Although some of the above information may come from live animals, much of it is best obtained from museum specimens. Except in the case of threatened or endangered populations, which are protected by law, collecting specimens will have no significant or long-lasting effects on local populations, let alone regional or global ones. The few thousand bird specimens added to museum collections each year, which rarely include more than ten specimens of a single species from a single locality, will not impact populations of a targeted species, not when the magnitude of other sources of human-caused and natural mortality is considered. In the case of song-

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birds, and depending upon the species, natural adult mortality rates are estimated to vary between 10 and 50 percent annually — thus, in a population of 5,000,000 adults, anywhere from 500,000 to 2,500,000 individuals may die of natural causes during a year. Longterm population studies, particularly of waterfowl, also have revealed that natural mortality often is compensatory, with an increase in mortality due to one factor (such as hunting or collecting) offset by decreased mortality caused by another factor, such as competition for food. Beyond natural mortality lie effects due to human agency. In the United States, for example, window collisions alone may kill upward of one billion birds a year, while domestic cats may kill somewhere between 80 million and 640 million birds — hence a biologist friend’s bumper sticker that reads, “The only good cat is a flat cat.” Deaths from human-induced habitat loss are difficult to estimate, but in the tropics alone as many as 150 million birds per year may die from destruction of rain forests and other habitats. Because scientific collecting will have no measurable impact on all but the most endangered bird populations, which in any case are protected, any objection to the practice must be based on a moral principle — the right of the individual animal, as opposed to the species, to exist. This moral objection may be countered by utilitarian arguments about the larger worth of collecting specimens. The scientific argument is summed up by J. V. Remsen Jr., who in his article, “The Importance of Continued Collecting of Bird Specimens to Ornithology and Bird Conservation,” writes The reality of the natural world is that every year, billions of birds die across the planet from natural but painful causes. Most scientists, therefore, do not believe that it is “wrong” to sacrifice a few individuals, usually in the most humane way possible, for the purpose of gaining more knowledge that in turn will be applied to saving birds through scientifically sound conservation. I don’t know how either side really can win on the issue of the morality of collecting. It’s difficult to balance the utilitarian worth provided by scientific specimens against moral arguments about the taking of animal lives; how does one choose? I happen to think that collecting specimens, if done in a responsible way, can be justified. I have little sympathy for the attitudes of animal rights advocates,

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other than their basic concern for the pain and suffering of animals. I dislike their moral certainty, ideology, and arrogance, and yet I remain uncomfortable with my own actions, and those of other collectors. Grant that millions upon millions of birds die each year from natural causes and human actions. Grant that relatively few birds are collected each year. Grant that specimens increase our understanding of the anatomy, physiology, ecology, and evolution of birds, and that this knowledge could not be obtained in any other way. Grant even that information obtained from ornithological specimens can have valuable applications for conservation — I still remain uncomfortable with scientific collecting. I am not entirely at ease with the attitudes and practices that have provided the specimens deposited in natural history museums throughout Europe and North America. I am not at ease with the 265,000 bird and mammal specimens housed at the University of Kansas, nor with the eighteen Harris’s Sparrows that represent my small contribution to the collection. It is not necessarily a matter of the deaths themselves; I believe that these can be justified, as much as we can justify the death of any creature that we are responsible for killing, either directly or indirectly. No. It would be too easy to condemn, from a distance, the relatively small number of deaths that have accrued through the actions of field biologists — deaths promulgated “in the name of science,” deaths engineered by guns, traps, chemicals, and mist nets, deaths that, at least in today’s regulated environment, often are as “humane” as possible — while at the same time ignoring or acquiescing to the billions of deaths for which we share a collective responsibility — the lost lives represented by the thick slabs of prepackaged meat that we purchase at the supermarket, or the invisible deaths connected to the cars that we drive and the homes in which we live. Again, no. It occurs to me that I am bothered most by what I suspect is the refusal of those who collect the specimens to acknowledge, and through that acknowledgment partially atone for, the deaths for which they are responsible. I wonder if J. R. Alcorn ever was haunted by the magnitude of the 28,110 specimens that he collected, and if any of the deaths recorded in the pages of his field catalog ever intruded on his conscience. Did he, in his dreams, ever see ghost armies of mice, shrews, or voles? I wonder if George M. Sutton ever cast a sad and wistful glance over his shoulder at the Harris’s Sparrows that he shot at Churchill, “here, in

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this beautiful place.” I wonder if E. A. Preble ever thought about the female Gray-cheeked Thrush and two newly fledged young that he collected “in a dense willow thicket July 13” at York Factory, Manitoba. And I imagine a young ornithologist, passionate about her work in the jungles of South America and vitally concerned about providing the knowledge on the taxonomy, distribution, and population biology of tropical birds necessary to conserve species dwindling toward extinction. I wonder if there are any webs of regret as she removes an antwren tangled in a mist net and places her thumb and forefinger on either side of its sternum and squeezes the breath and life out of the bird. And I wonder if Chris Norment truly confronted the moral complexity of his actions as he aimed his rifle at a Harris’s Sparrow perched in the crown of a spruce tree, squeezed the trigger, searched for the body amidst a tangle of shrubs, and then cut the stomach and crop from the carcass with a scalpel and placed them in alcohol for later analysis. Did he ever consider the data that came from those eighteen stomachs, or from the skeletons that later were prepared from the remains, and think about the trade-offs involved in the equation: this much data for this much death? It’s curious, but what I think about from time to time, when I am feeling least comfortable with my collecting, is not the actual act of killing animals. Rather, I contemplate the language that biologists use — that I purposefully have used in this discussion — when describing their roles in the deaths of animals, whether in the context of collecting specimens in the field or during laboratory-based research. (And laboratory biologists are responsible for many more animal deaths each year than are field biologists, even if these mostly are “only” animals raised solely for research purposes.) This language suggests a fundamental refusal to deal directly and honestly with the deaths that result from our actions. Commonly used verbs such as “euthanize,” “collect,” “take,” and “sacrifice” are indirect and evasive, and fail to capture the essence of what we are doing; they are the scientific equivalents of “collateral damage.” Each represents the systemic refusal to acknowledge, and fully confront, death — an ironic situation in a discipline that so highly values accurate description and measurement. Each verb denotes something about our attitudes toward the natural world, and science itself. And by virtue of their inappropriateness, these verbs deny us the possibility of atonement

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and apology. Better the direct and explicit language of the hunter, and his or her inability to avoid direct responsibility for the deaths of animals, the person who only can “shoot” and “kill” whatever prey he or she is stalking. And so, in thinking about the deaths for which I am responsible, I have tested several commonly used terms as descriptors of my own actions, and laid them next to the bodies of the Harris’s Sparrows that I shot. “I collected eighteen Harris’s Sparrows.” This is the most common word used to describe the act of killing animals to obtain specimens, and it is the term that I used in the technical paper that I published on Harris’s Sparrow diets. To collect means to bring together; it is from the Latin legere, to gather. Humans love this process — to accumulate the objects of our passions. We collect coins, stamps, pottery teacups, Japanese woodblock prints, sports memorabilia, nineteenth century glass bottles, rare books, postcards, toy soldiers, porcelain statuettes, and a myriad of other inanimate objects. We collect the peaks that we climb, visa stamps in our passports, rivers that we paddle, races that we run. And in our use of language, we make no distinction between a dead Harris’s Sparrow — once a living, breathing creature of heart and blood, sex and sense — and an embossed spoon from Grand Canyon National Park: good to carry home, toss in a drawer and forget about, or alternatively place, carefully and lovingly, in a plush box and examine once every year, after our most recent vacation out west. “I took eighteen Harris’s Sparrows.” This term is used less frequently than it once was to describe collecting specimens. For example, in his 1902 monograph, “A Biological Investigation of the Hudson Bay Region,” Edward Preble reported that “a small series [of White-crowned Sparrows], including adults of both sexes and young birds not long out of the nest, was taken July 12 to 14.” My dictionary lists thirty-two different meanings for the verb, which is from the Middle English taken. The first definition seems most appropriate: “To get into one’s possession by force, skill, or artifice,” but we use the word in many ways. The Montreal Canadiens take the Stanley Cup; we take naps, walks, vacations, notes, breaths, seats, bribes, pitches, advice, offense, French or Calculus, craps. A storm can take lives, just as a field biologist can, but in the context of collecting specimens, the operative idea seems to be the act of getting some-

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thing, such as a bird, “into one’s possession.” I know that I employed force when I took Harris’s Sparrows, but I am not so certain about skill (I am a poor shot), and I don’t think that artifice applied, either — I had to approach the birds slowly, but they generally were doomed by their stereotypical behavior, which impelled them toward the tops of trees, where they made loud and obvious targets. What bothers me most about describing the “taking” of a Harris’s Sparrow is that the term ignores the transition of an animal from a state of life to one of death; the verb evades entirely the issue of killing. “I euthanized eighteen Harris’s Sparrows.” Field biologists generally don’t use this term, thankfully, but laboratory researchers do: “We euthanized one hundred golden hamsters.” Often this is done by placing the animals in a closed container and adding carbon dioxide or ether. My dictionary defines the noun as the “act or practice of ending the life of an individual suffering from a terminal illness or an incurable condition,” and indicates that the word is derived from the Greek euthanatos, or easy death. Whether we are talking about lab rats or Harris’s Sparrows, the word seems inappropriate — that is, unless the animals were used in an experiment that injected them with a virulent pathogen or toxic chemical, in which case the death might certainly end an animal’s suffering. I doubt that any of the Harris’s Sparrows that I collected suffered from a terminal illness or incurable disease, although I did find a few parasitic worms in the digestive tracts of two birds that I shot. As far as “easy deaths” go, I suppose that it depends upon the method of choice, although scientific organizations such as the Ornithological Council have guidelines for the “humane” care and death of laboratory research animals, and animals killed in the field. These guidelines are meant to minimize the animals’ pain and suffering, but when collecting birds in the field, this may depend upon an individual’s skill with a gun. I tell myself that most, but not all, of the eighteen Harris’s Sparrows that I collected died quickly and suffered little, as they plummeted directly to the ground after being shot and were almost immediately still — although I am unsure about the two birds that fluttered off into thick brush, and which I never found, or the gut-shot female whose neck I was forced to wring because she did not die quickly. But I know nothing about how “easy” any of their deaths were. “I sacrificed eighteen Harris’s Sparrows.” This is the most inter-

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esting euphemism for ending an animal’s life, and is another word used more by laboratory biologists than by field biologists. I also understand that those who work with lab animals often use a slang variant, “sac,” as in “We need to sac those thirty mice.” This slang version may have developed because we tend to shorten and familiarize frequently used technical terms, but I wonder if “sac” may have arisen partly out of a subconscious desire to create more distance between humans and the animals they kill. Perhaps lab biologists are uncomfortable with the act of killing lab animals, and “sac” somehow settles more easily in the conscience than “sacrifice,” no matter how necessary the animals’ deaths might be for medical or biological research. Whatever the genesis of “sac,” the root word, “sacrifice,” is the most enigmatic of all the terms meant to avoid direct acknowledgment of cause and effect. My dictionary gives as the first definition of sacrifice, “The act of offering something to a deity in propitiation or homage, especially the ritual slaughter of an animal or person.” A second definition of the word is, “Forfeiture of something highly valued for the sake of one considered to have a greater value or claim.” Sacrifice is derived from the Latin sacer, or sacred — something that is holy, or worthy of religious veneration — which is a curious way to think about science, given that its focus is on the natural, rather than the supernatural, world. Humans sometimes sacrifice animals in the context of religious worship — goats, lambs, calves. Mayans and Aztecs once sacrificed the hearts of human beings to propitiate the angry gods. God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, but relented at the last moment. We offer symbolic sacrifices of rice, spices, or money. Our sacrifices, whatever their nature, often are placed upon altars. Soldiers are said to sacrifice their lives (if we are to believe the rhetoric) for their country or some other, greater good, or for their comrades. So, when a scientist kills an animal, is he or she presenting something to a deity in propitiation or homage? Participating in a ritual slaughter, for some holy purpose? The lab manual from my undergraduate cell biology class called for rats to be “sacrificed,” so that we could extract enzymes from their livers; our instructor did this by whacking the animals’ heads against a lab bench — quick and effective, although the action hardly calls to mind any sort of ritual worship: “In the name of Our Father, we offer this rat . . .” And when I shot Harris’s Sparrows, I wasn’t offering a sacrifice to the gods or

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participating in the practice of the holy, any more than J. R. Alcorn’s 28,110 specimens were meant as a form of homage to some scientific deity. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to assert that sacrificing animals during scientific research means forfeiting “something highly valued for the sake of one considered to have a greater value or claim.” Perhaps the “greater claim” part of the above statement is defensible in the context of medical research, education, or accumulating knowledge that enhances our understanding of, and assists in conserving, the natural world. Still, I wonder if the lives of the individual animals lost to scientific research are “highly valued.” Were the lives of the rats used in my cell biology lab experiment highly valued? Were the lives of the millions of birds and mammals that reside as specimens in museum collections throughout the world highly valued? Were the lives of the eighteen Harris’s Sparrows that I collected highly valued? And if so, how? “I collected eighteen Harris’s Sparrows.” “I took eighteen Harris’s Sparrows.” “I euthanized eighteen Harris’s Sparrows.” “I sacrificed eighteen Harris’ Sparrows.” These sentences fail to describe and acknowledge accurately what I did when I ended the lives of those birds. I prefer language that is more direct, doesn’t confuse the issue and will not be misunderstood: “I killed eighteen Harris’s Sparrows.” Even more accurately I might write, “I shot and killed eighteen Harris’s Sparrows.” Or sometimes, in my most bitter and uncertain moments, just after pulling the trigger on my rifle, finding the dead bird (or gazing into the uncomprehending eyes of a wounded bird before wringing its neck) and cutting the stomach from its warm body and placing it in alcohol: “I blew the fucking shit out of eighteen Harris’s Sparrows.” At Warden’s Grove, I lived with the knowledge of my deeds — that I had purposefully killed eighteen (or was it twenty?) individuals of a species that I deeply respected, knew intimately, and loved. I lived with conflicting sentiments — anger, sadness, and belief that the deaths of these birds could be justified and that the research collections housed in natural history museums throughout the country were valuable and should continue to grow. I could justify my actions on an intellectual level, yet I desired some sort of absolution — even as I truly believed that none was possible. The best that could be

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hoped for was an honest appraisal of what I had done and felt, an acknowledgement that began with the use of direct and truthful language: “I killed eighteen Harris’s Sparrows.” This language could not atone for the killings, but I believe there is some importance in accepting responsibility for the deaths of those birds, giving thanks for the knowledge they provided, and accepting the cost of this knowledge — and admitting that the objects in museum cabinets represent something more than “specimens,” inanimate things perpetually devoid of life. Perhaps it should be as John Haines wrote in The Stars, the Snow, the Fire, his memoir of life in the Alaskan bush: “I cannot trap and kill without thought or emotion, and it may be that the killing wounds me in some small but equally deadly way. Life here is equally in sunlight and frost, in the thriving blood and sap of things, in their decay and sudden death. It can be hard and cruel sometimes, as we are prepared to see it clearly. I put the beast to death for my own purposes, as the lynx kills the rabbit . . .” For my own purposes, with thought and emotion, wounded in some small way: Thus, on a beautifully warm day in early June, when the air was suffused with light, in the moment before I took aim and pulled the trigger of my .22, I admitted that I was about to kill an animal with its own history and personality, an individual who was something more than an “average” Harris’s Sparrow, a bird that was not interchangeable with any other bird of the same age, species, and sex. And so I offered up a silent prayer, a quiet apology for what I was about to do. I hoped that there was some value in my confession, in confronting the length and breadth and depth of my impact on the world and on the lives of animals, and the impact of their deaths upon me. I understood that I was doing more than collecting, taking, euthanizing, or sacrificing Harris’s Sparrows; I was doing more than just killing “things.” As I turn to face the Harris’s Sparrow, the songs of warblers and white noise of tumbling meltwater disappear. The wind and sun on my face no longer are sensible and my world narrows. I hold my breath and sight down the barrel of the gun. There is a sudden buckle of sound and air, and in the brief moment when I feel the kick of the gun against my shoulder, the lives of a man and a bird are connected, bound together by a thread of metal.

The . . . . Broken . . . . . . . .Compass ............................................. Mid-June during my third field season. It is evening and I am alone by the river. The air is calm and cool and liquid with slanting light after two days of rain and blustery, gray winds. The Thelon went out last week and thick slabs of candled ice lie scattered along the shore. Thin slivers of ice fall from the floes and shatter on the ground, remnants of a long winter disintegrating into summer. The sedge tussocks growing along the banks are goldenbrown, but at their bases are tiny shoots of new leaves, a promise that the land soon will metamorphose into green. A pair of Long-tailed Ducks skim the open water, black-and-white vectors spliced to their own reflections, the male’s yodeled call floating through the still air. Across the way, a small herd of caribou wanders across the umber uplands, their golden coats shining against the dark tundra. It is the Earth’s canonical hour, a rare and ecotonal moment when the Barrens seem benign, after winter has abandoned the land, but before mosquitoes and blackflies rise out of the water and days of heat — sporadic but brutal — descend upon the Thelon. It is easy to feel both comfortable and comfort here, and to absorb something of the evening’s peace. The anxiety that I felt two summers ago, generated mostly by the once tenuous nature of my research, has vanished. After two full field seasons and a good portion of a third, I know something of Harris’s Sparrows, and I understand that I will have enough data for my dissertation. The cabin is secure and snug, our food supplies and equipment sufficient to see us through until the end of the research season. It has been almost a month since we were dropped off at Warden’s Grove, and the memory of that flight, like the roar of the departing plane as it accelerated down the ice and rose into the air, has faded into the great silence of the land. It is a time when the Barrens are empty and our nearest neighbors are 180 miles away. Paul and I are sunk deep in solitude, alone but not lonely, content with the rhythm of our days; we live with the sparrows and wolves, watch as summer comes on.

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We are at peace, I think. And here, in this blessed moment, it is possible to believe in a grace that rises from the land and the lives of its animals, a redemption granted through my place in this sublime wilderness. It is possible to be seduced by the beauty of this refuge and the simple directness of my life here, and to be misled by tired clichés: the interconnectedness of all living things, the healing power and purity of Nature and Wilderness. There are moments when I am enveloped by Warden’s Grove, and the world beyond the Barrens fades, as if glimpsed through a fog-shrouded lens. Then it is possible to forget about much of the Outside and will it into a state of suspended animation, or to view it as an abstraction relegated to some other dimension. I cleave to this tendency even though during my three field seasons I have repeatedly been visited by concerns about my family and unpleasant memories of a less than perfect childhood. And I remember the winter of 1977 – 1978, when debris from a Soviet nuclear satellite plunged into the snow ten miles from Warden’s Grove and the outside world leaked into my life in a big way, teaching me the utter foolishness of believing that wilderness can ever completely insulate me from society. And finally, on this most magical of evenings, it is possible to deny my own failings — as a husband, as a father, as a friend. Here, it is easy to be deceived by the possibility of salvation — not by accepting Jesus as my personal savior or New Age spirituality, but through living in this extraordinary wilderness. Here I can embrace the seductive essence of a hope described by the poet John Haines: “Here in the hills I have known a kind of stillness and agreeableness in myself. Is it entirely imaginary that the ground underfoot somehow transmits its character and energy to the person who walks upon it?” Yes. At this moment I feel both agreeable and still, blessed by a depth of calm that rarely touches my life. I can believe in myself and in my own goodness, and I can attribute my tranquility to the “character and energy” of the land. I hold to this belief as intensely as a Medieval acolyte would have venerated the relics of a saint, as devoutly as a Hindu disciple descends the ghats to bathe in the Ganges. This harsh, yet benign, wilderness: sometimes I sense that it serves as my prayer flag, crucifix, or sacred amulet — or better yet, as my Lourdes, Mecca, or Bodh Gaya. . . . In southern Tibet, near the source of four great Asian rivers — the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, and Sutlej — sits holy Mt. Kailash, dwelling place of Shiva. For Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims, the thirty-two-mile circumambulation of the mountain — mostly done by walking, sometimes by crawling — is a

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form of worship. Although I lack the certainty of belief that motivates the pilgrims, I still envision my life on the land as a form of devotion, a way of achieving some degree of transcendence and purification. I believe that living here for these few months, as part of the years that I’ve spent outside, will make me a better person, and that it is possible to carry the grace of wilderness with me when I make the long migration south to Lawrence and the rest of my days. But of course we sometimes adhere to beliefs that bear little relation to reality — an ice-free continent somewhere south of Australia, trickle-down economics, an impending millennial apocalypse, holy wars. And so, as I walk the banks of the Thelon, as ducks glide across the quiet waters and the arctic twilight comes on, I consider the question of where grace resides. I wonder if the Barrens — this locus of my desire — can enter into my heart in some transformative way, or if my happiness and sense of well-being are mostly transitory. I wonder if I will pass through Warden’s Grove fundamentally unaltered, no different and certainly no better a person than I was in May 1989, when I began my fieldwork, or in August 1977, when we beached our canoes on the sandbar below the cabin and I first came to live along the Thelon River, a pilgrim seeking something more than the land itself. first went into the wilderness in 1966, when I was fourteen, driven by an epiphany I’d had the year before, when my family and I had visited Yosemite Valley. On a beautiful May afternoon, at Mirror Lake on the valley floor, I’d encountered the first trail sign of my life (Snow Creek 3.7 miles, Tuolumne Meadows 21.4 miles), which led to the unexpected but less-than-brilliant conclusion that there were footpaths that traversed the roadless mountains. I am unclear as to exactly what motivated me on that luminous day, although I imagine that it was some potent combination of personal history and innate inclination, incubated in the scent of warm pines, the sight of booming waterfalls and the monolithic face of Half Dome, and a prepubescent rise in blood testosterone levels. Whatever the stimulus, from that moment on I knew that I had to hike in the Sierra, as soon as I could assemble the necessary equipment and convince my parents that such an endeavor was a perfectly reasonable ambition for an inexperienced and callow fourteen-year-old boy. The following winter, I discovered that one of my schoolmates had done some hiking with the Boy Scouts, and I eagerly agreed to go

I

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along when he suggested a two-week backpacking trip of one hundred miles through the High Sierra — eastward from Crescent Meadow in Sequoia National Park to Mount Whitney, north along the John Muir Trail to Vidette Meadows, and then down Bubbs Creek to the trailhead at Cedar Grove in Kings Canyon National Park. Although I desired the mountains, I was completely ignorant as to how to travel in them safely and comfortably. I didn’t bother to do much research about backpacking beforehand and my only preparation for the trip was a seven-mile hike along an unpaved road to a fire tower near our home in the California Coast Range, where the elderly lookouts cooked me a hamburger for dinner and worried that I was walking by myself. Considering myself sufficiently prepared by this expedition, I set off into the Sierra equipped with gear purchased with money from my paper route: a lightweight down sleeping bag (smart choice), a knapsack lacking both waist belt and padded shoulder straps (bad choice), insufficient food for fourteen days (worse choice), and work boots without adequate ankle support (worst choice). I had no gloves, no sleeping pad, and only a vague idea of how to read a map or use a compass. And in the manner of most teenaged males, I also had no warning voice in my head whispering, This might not be such a good idea. But oddly enough, my parents apparently had no such cautionary voices in their heads, either. Although I lacked experience and proper equipment, I did have plenty of enthusiasm and energy, and most importantly, a Sierra cup — a shallow metal container with a wide mouth, cleverly designed to spill cold drinks and burn one’s lips on hot ones, but with a curved metal handle that allowed me to carry it hooked over my belt like a veteran mountaineer. I wore the cup proudly; along with the rucksack that I soon would come to curse, it was my badge of membership in an elite fraternity of adventurers: backpackers and mountaineers. As I recall the trip, I consider my fourteen-year-old son, Martin, who has much more wilderness experience than I did at his age. I know that I would never allow him to traipse off on a two-week hike with a friend his own age, no matter how good their equipment, which leads me to the question: Just what were my parents thinking? My mother figured that “I would get in less trouble in the mountains than downtown,” but her knowledge of the mountains, outside of books, was minimal, and less trouble (no adolescent pranks, 1960s-era experiments with

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drugs, run-ins with police or other teens) is not the same thing as no trouble. Still, I am grateful that my parents allowed me an adventure that I would never permit my own son at the same age. When I left Crescent Meadow, laden down by a pack that weighed more than a third of my weight, I was what might be generously described as a scrawny kid — and when I reached Cedar Grove I was even scrawnier, having lost ten of my one hundred and five pounds along the way. We were thin on food, and I was even thinner on cooking experience. My ineptitude cost us two dinners, once when I added macaroni to a pot of water before boiling it, which created a mucilaginous lump of inedible flour, and a few days later when I dumped two tablespoons of salt into our instant mashed potatoes. Because I hadn’t brought enough warm clothing, I often was cold in the evenings, but fortunately the Sierras lived up to their reputation as “The Gentle Wilderness” and we encountered no inclement weather after walking through light rain showers on the first day. I bathed only once, and my exposed skin soon was streaked with the dust that billowed up from the trail and mixed with my sweat in patterns like alluvium in a braided river channel. But worse than my almost constant hunger and lack of hygiene were my weak, pronated ankles, which collapsed about five miles out from the trailhead. I was able to hike well on the uphill, but from the first day on, every step on flat terrain was uncomfortable, and every step of downhill was painful. The nadir of the hike came on the fourth day, during a steep and agonizing descent from the Chagoopa Plateau to the Kern River, and then along a mostly level, but very sandy and hot, section of trail headed north toward Junction Meadow. After lunch, my companion hurried ahead; the sandy soil exacerbated the pronation in my ankles, and I hobbled along at less than one mile an hour, alone and enveloped in a shroud of heat and pain. I eventually jettisoned any semblance of adolescent male bravado and began a whimpering and sniffling jag that lasted for hours. When I finally stumbled into camp, I was exhausted, dehydrated, and almost defeated by pain, thankful only that no one had seen me in such wretched and embarrassing circumstances. My ankles tormented me until the penultimate day of the trip, when I was limping down the Bubbs Creek trail and ran into an athletic trainer. He quickly diagnosed my problem, canted the soles of my boots outward by slicing off sections of each heel, and

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securely taped my ankles. The relief was instantaneous and it was wonderful to walk quickly and without pain for the last ten miles of the trip. My parents met us at the trailhead, where they greeted me with a mixture of alarm and bemusement, for I looked and smelled like a street urchin straight out of Dickens — dirty and emaciated, torn and filthy clothes, stinking of woodsmoke and sweat. I don’t recall how I answered when asked the inevitable question about how the trip had been, but my reply must have been something very close to, “It was great!” And my answer wouldn’t have been dishonest. Although I was relieved to see the trailhead — I could get that miserable, damned knapsack off my back, eat all that I wanted, and bathe (I had been hungry for the entire trip, in pain for much of it and cold for some of it) — I also had been exhilarated and happy, and in a mysterious way, content. Memories of my painful ankles quickly faded, partly due to the blessed job of taping that my benefactor had bestowed on me, and partly due to the effects of a hormone that to this day remains unidentified by endocrinologists, but which I’m convinced exists: amnesiarone. Amnesiarone works to diminish negative memories, and is responsible for both nostalgia and the tendency of humans to repeat the same mistakes that they’ve made before; perhaps it was selected early in human evolution to convince women that childbirth really wasn’t all that painful or dangerous. And so, even as we drove home, down from the Sierra and across the hot and smoggy Central Valley, my body already was pumping out amnesiarone. I understood I had done something meaningful in my life and that I would return to the mountains the following summer — with more food, a better backpack, and appropriate boots. I spent the winter poring over maps of the Sierra and did a spring hike in the Ventana Wilderness of the Big Sur country. The trip went perfectly and gave me confidence — I could walk as quickly as my friends and travel comfortably in the wilderness. And the following summer, before my junior year of high school, I hiked the John Muir Trail from Yosemite to Mt. Whitney, 223 miles in three weeks, free of all ankle pain, and with little hunger. Best of all, at least from an adolescent male’s perspective, on most days I was able to hike my companion into the ground — the same fellow who, during the previous summer, had abandoned me on the bleak and teary hike along the Kern River.

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By most people’s measure, my “First Summer in the Sierra,” unlike John Muir’s, would be counted as a disaster, and certainly not as one worth repeating. Yet I saw the hike as an almost unqualified success. (As I write this, almost forty years after the fact, I am confident that I am not befuddled by the lingering effects of amnesiarone.) I was not a particularly introspective kid, though, and I don’t recall ever asking myself the obvious questions: Why was I attracted to the wilderness? Why did I ignore the discomforts of my first hike and return to the mountains for an even more ambitious trip the following year? If anyone had asked me about motivation, I suspect that my inarticulate answer would have involved words such as “adventure” and “beauty.” I was motivated in part by an attraction to the unknown, to the countless peaks, lakes and passes scattered across my topographical maps: Thousand Island Lake, Evolution Valley, Pinchot Pass, Sky Parlor Meadow, Mt. Ritter, Muir Pass. I read and reread the laconic route descriptions in Starr’s Guide: Guide to the John Muir Trail and the High Sierra Region, which covered the swath of high country between Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks in only 122 pages. In Starr’s Guide, four miles of trail might be described in a single sentence: “Our trail follows down the deep, beautiful canyon of Mono Creek on the north side to the Muir Trail (8,300 – 4.0).” These brief descriptions made the country seem more alluring than the painfully detailed accounts in so many modern guidebooks, and I spent my idle hours plotting myriad hikes into what was, for me, terra incognita. If my topographic maps and tattered copy of Starr’s Guide promised adventure, they also described places that I knew would be beautiful. I don’t believe that my adolescent aesthetic senses were welldeveloped or that I had any clear idea of why particular places were attractive. Yet I was consciously moved by the qualities of the places that I visited during my first trip — the rough, glacier-scoured cirque that held Hamilton Lakes; the endless sweep of peaks and valleys seen from the summit of Mt. Whitney, Gary Snyder’s “mountains and rivers without end”; the delicate, flower-filled meadows along upper Bubbs Creek. What I do not understand is how this incipient aesthetic, this attraction to mountain landscapes, developed in a boy raised mostly in a suburban universe of tract homes, and in a family that spent little time outside, other than during frequent

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summertime excursions to the beach. We did not hunt or fish, rarely went camping, and never hiked, even for a few hours on a Sunday afternoon — my stepfather was a minister, and weekends were given over to sermon preparation or church services. My parents, particularly my mother, read natural history books, and she often commented on the beauty of places that we visited on our blitzkrieg-like June drives from California to Missouri, where my stepfather attended his denomination’s ministerial conference. In my family, there was no expressed interest in wilderness, and that fortunate excursion to Yosemite Valley, when I was thirteen and everything seemed to click into place, is an anomaly to me. It was as if I carried within me a hidden desire, one due not to cultural inheritance but to innate inclination. This disposition was hinted at by the road maps that I collected when I was nine, but remained buried until its expression was triggered by a fortuitous combination of place and circumstance on a bright spring day in Yosemite. Thoreau would have appreciated that my moment of self-understanding came at Mirror Lake, its calm surface a transcendentalist’s reflection that revealed the inner workings of my teenaged soul. If adventure and beauty were part of my initial attraction to the mountains, my wilderness trips also granted me a vital sense of selfworth and identity at a time when I desperately needed them. I was small and late-developing, only five-foot-three-inches tall when I began tenth grade at Los Gatos High School, and I suffered from the standard anxieties that affect short, adolescent boys: insecurity, poor self-image, and an utter lack of confidence with girls. By seventh grade, I had been labeled as “intelligent” by the educational authorities and placed in an honors track. Intellectual achievements — good grades — may have held value for my honors classmates, but they carried little weight in the wider school culture. Although I liked doing well academically, I did not want to be seen as too smart, or as too connected to the world of teachers, books, and intellect. Thus, I often acted out in class — talking when I shouldn’t, playing the fool and wisecracking my way through lessons. Because I was a “good student,” perceptive enough to know when to back off and too much of a coward for outright rebellion, I was granted some leeway by my teachers. After one annoying incident, I recall one of them fixing me

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with a baleful stare, shaking his head and muttering, “I just don’t know what to do with you.” My lack of size and quickness meant that I wasn’t much good at sports; I also lacked other compensatory talents, as in music or art, that might have set me apart from the masses. In short (pun intended), I saw myself as entirely unexceptional, someone who would never achieve status in a culture in which athletic ability, physical attractiveness, wealth, and social ease were the currencies of choice. For some inexplicable but fortunate reason, I never attracted the attention of predatory bullies, unlike some of my overweight, awkward, or socially inept classmates — those who carried slide rules on their belts, wore horn-rimmed glasses and clothes five years out of style, and carried themselves like turtles, ready to withdraw into their shells at the first hint of approaching trouble. But I knew that I never would gain access to the social world populated by jocks, cheerleaders, school officers, and the wealthy kids who, at sixteen, had their own new cars — a world that I publicly disdained but secretly yearned for. My lack of social capital increased my desire for an identity, something exciting that would set me apart from most of my classmates, something physically challenging that would compensate for my lack of status and demonstrate that I wasn’t a model for Charles Atlas’s ninety-eight-pound-weakling ads. Thus the allure of adventures in the mountains, which proved my physical toughness and took me into an environment as remote from the lives of the popular kids as I was from their privileged world. Backpacking, and then rock climbing — even though I was never very good at it — had not yet achieved the popularity that they soon would, and they provided me with a crucial sense of self-worth, purpose, and individuality at a time when I desperately needed them. And thankfully, I never was tempted to seek my identity in the culture of drugs and sexual experimentation that blossomed in the late 1960s. Although I was no prude and loved rock and roll, I was only mildly fascinated by the ethos symbolized by the Grateful Dead, and never sought out the places that eventually would claim the souls of some of my classmates: Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco and Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. Unable to gain entrance to the world of the socially privileged and uninterested in most of the alternative cliques at Los Gatos High, I

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joined the tiny cadre of hikers and climbers, exclusively male and mostly “honors” students, who prided themselves on their independence and articulated their rebelliousness by disdaining the Boy Scouts as a paramilitary organization. We took most of our classes together and identified ourselves by clomping around campus in uncomfortable and impractical mountain boots, and as soon as the school’s dress code eroded under the advancing wave of 1960s culture, wearing shorts throughout the winter. We completed our uniforms by carrying our books in canvas Millet rucksacks, which we often accessorized with carabiners. We joined REI (Recreational Equipment Incorporated) when its membership numbered fewer than sixty thousand and its catalog was printed in black and white, discussed the merits of various kinds of equipment (butane cartridge versus white gas stoves, goldline versus kernmantle ropes), talked of weekend climbing trips to Pinnacles National Monument, spring hikes in the Big Sur country, and summer walks in the High Sierra. We read John Muir and Summit Magazine, hung out at the only sporting goods store in the area that sold backpacking and climbing gear, fantasized about finding girlfriends who hiked and climbed, and when we grew bolder, sometimes lied to our parents, cut classes, and hitchhiked to Yosemite. My friends and I never talked much about why we were so enthusiastic about the wilderness, backpacking, and climbing; they simply were what we did, and cared passionately about. Adventure, identity, and a mostly unarticulated aesthetic all were part of the attraction, but for me there was another factor that I never acknowledged to my friends, and was only rarely conscious of: escape, partly from the hum and clatter of urban and suburban California, which was beginning to irritate me, but mostly from a family life that was less than ideal. During my high school years, my mother’s and stepfather’s marriage entered a period of accelerated decline, characterized most often by a subtext of quiet anger rather than by slammed doors, shouting matches or refuges in separate bedrooms. My stepfather’s behavior also became more and more erratic; at unpredictable but increasingly frequent times, he was extremely nasty to my mother, sister, or me — mostly verbally, but he also could be physically abusive. He was a large man, and I always was afraid of his anger and potential for violence. He was morose, drank heavily, made irrational

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purchases that drove him deeper into debt, and neglected his ministerial duties — sometimes announcing early on Sunday morning that he “didn’t feel well,” and leaving my mother to cover his sermon and other ministerial duties. I remember him sitting for hours in the living room, chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes (Pall Malls), sipping mixed drinks (Manhattans), staring vacantly into space, and contemplating whatever demons of jealousy, rage, and paranoia possessed him. My stepfather’s moods darkened the atmosphere of our house, which became progressively more oppressive, volatile, and toxic, and I desperately wanted OUT. My tactics involved as much emotional detachment as I could muster: retreat behind my bedroom door, where I planned imaginary adventures; immersion in extracurricular activities; and after my friends and I learned to drive and we became more independent, as many trips to the mountains as I could arrange. In addition to its other attractions, the wilderness became a refuge where I felt much safer than at home. The outdoors was almost the only issue on which I was willing to risk a confrontation with my stepfather, as when I agitated for permission to skip Sunday services to climb on a regular basis. I’m certain that he saw my desire to avoid church as a personal affront, and we argued about the issue for weeks. We finally reached a compromise: I could climb every other weekend and attend church on alternate Sundays. But on those Sundays when I was obligated to participate in services, I retaliated by mentally traveling as far as I could from what I saw as the ironically named “sanctuary” of our church. I refused to listen to the sermons or prayers; instead, I created my own kind of liturgy by retracing the routes that I’d previously hiked, reconstructing in great detail each mile of trail, every campsite. In the wilderness I could find a physical and mental refuge from my stepfather and the increasingly angry and fearful environment of my home. In On the Loose, a Sierra Club book popular at the time, I found a passage that served as an anthem for my youth: “Got to move on, got to travel, walk away my blues.” And so I did. My desire for peace and emotional tranquility led me to seek out friends who were mostly quiet, calm, and not given to anger. I avoided conflict at any cost, because there was so much of it in other parts of my life, and I chose as wilderness companions those with similar

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inclinations, a trait that I have maintained to this day. Once the wilderness became a sanctuary for me, an idealized world in which I could escape from the turmoil of my home and feel safe and strong, it was easy to conclude that by its very nature the wilderness cultured humane, moral behavior. I became convinced of the following syllogism: The wilderness is good; I am in the wilderness; therefore, I am good. It was this line of history and logic that I considered as I wandered along the Thelon on a tranquil evening in June of 1991, some twentyfive years after I first went into the mountains and three years after the death of my stepfather from the cumulative effects of alcohol, cigarettes, and loneliness. Since my first hike in 1966, I had spent more than four years in the wilderness, in the High Sierra, North Cascades, Himalayas, Grand Canyon, Mojave Desert, sandstone canyons of southeastern Utah, and the Canadian Arctic. I had settled on field biology as a profession, in part because it offered the opportunity to spend more time outside, and I saw the wilderness and natural world as the primary source of my moral compass. But I had begun to wonder about whether the compass needle pointed true, or if whatever it was that I believed healed and strengthened me mostly remained behind when I returned to civilization. At Warden’s Grove, I sought more than Harris’s Sparrows; I desired a form of grace, one that would carry me through life, grant me a sense of purpose, and transform me into a better person. But over the years, I still had struggled with commitment to my marriage, the demands of parenthood, and conflicting tendencies toward honesty and betrayal, tenderness and cold-heartedness. I sometimes felt adrift, my compass deflected by an invisible lodestone of emotional iron. I berated myself for sins of commission and omission, and I felt the anguish of St. Paul: “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” In May 1989, I had left Lawrence wondering if my marriage would survive. I saw the time at Warden’s Grove as an opportunity for reflection and perhaps healing, for rediscovering the sense of direction that I apparently had lost. I desired what William Wordsworth articulated in “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey . . . ,” a view that I’d always cleaved to, about the role of the natural world in crafting and sustaining moral behavior, finding

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In Nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being. It was Wordsworth’s memories of days spent wandering amongst the hills and along the River Wye that had helped restore and guide him “. . . ’mid the din / Of town and cities,” where he “owed” to his memories of “beauteous forms” In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind, With tranquil restoration: — feelings, too, Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man’s life, His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love. . . . This belief in the restorative and ultimately moral force of the natural world has been articulated more succinctly by many modern writers, including John Haines, René Daumal, Barry Lopez, and Yasunari Kawbata. In the novel Snow Country, Kawbata’s protagonist, Shinamura, “. . . who lived a life of idleness, found that he tended to lose honesty with himself, and he frequently went out into the mountains to recover something of it.” Daumal, the French poet, surrealist and climber, described his hope of natural salvation in “Summit Poem”: “There is an art of conducting oneself in / The lower regions by the memory of / What one saw higher up.” Lopez is more concerned with the landscape, its inhabitants, and our responsibilities towards them. For him, nature is more than a tool for cultivating honesty and informing our behavior; rather, whatever moral benefits we derive from the natural world arise from our interaction with it: For a relationship with landscape to be lasting, it must be reciprocal. . . . In approaching the land with an attitude of obligation, willing to observe courtesies difficult to articulate — perhaps only a gesture of the hands — one establishes a regard from which dig-

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nity can emerge. From that dignified relationship with the land, it is possible to imagine an extension of dignified relationships throughout one’s life. . . . I wish the order of my life to be arranged in the same way that I find the light, the slight movement of the wind, the voice of a bird, the heading of a seed pod I see before me. This impeccable and indisputable integrity I want in myself. Like Lopez, I want integrity. Like Daumal, I desire the “memory of / What one saw higher up” to guide my behavior. I always have yearned for these things, always have thought that I might discover and cultivate them in the landscapes of my desire — somewhere in the winding sandstone canyons of Utah or in the wind-scoured space of the Barrens, in the xeric, heat-pounded mountains and washes of the Sonoran and Mojave Deserts, and first of all, among the granite peaks and light-drenched meadows of the Sierra. My vision was most pure and innocent when I was young, but it remained the impetus for what I sought at Warden’s Grove. I sometimes considered the nature of this desire as I tracked Harris’s Sparrows, or climbed Home Hill and gazed out at the wilderness that has claimed so much of my life and imagination. What I wanted to know — and still do — is if this land and my life in it has brought me any closer to some metaphorical home, to what I might describe as my place in the world, or if it has, in some seductive and mistaken way, taken me farther from it. What exactly did I desire from my life at Warden’s Grove, beyond the opportunity to study Harris’s Sparrows? I know that Lopez’s “integrity,” and the “stillness and agreeableness” that John Haines sought in the Alaskan bush, were part of it. Yet I have become suspicious of the claim that the natural world can provide a guide for human behavior. I still believe, though, that landscapes can provide the context and stimuli for our interactions with other living things, both human and nonhuman, and that this process offers the possibility of a more humane attitude toward ourselves and others. This effect grows out of the ability of the natural world to diminish our suffering and sense of dislocation. Again, it’s as Barry Lopez writes: “The living of life, any life, involves great and private pain, much of which we share with no one. In such places as the Inner Gorge [of the Grand Canyon] the pain trails away from us.” The origins of my

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belief about the healing power of the natural world and its ability to foster a more compassionate and tender approach to others lie in my adolescence, scattered along the Sierra trails that I once walked. Back then my faith was subconscious, but at Warden’s Grove I confronted the questions that it raised directly, without the innocence and insouciance of my youth, guided as much by a sense of personal loss and failure as by possibility and optimism: What had I gained by living in the immense wilderness that held Warden’s Grove, and what would I take with me when I left? On the Barrens, I confronted a landscape that could overwhelm and negate me. There were the huge and sprawling sky, the great arc of tundra that swept toward horizons as much felt as seen, the fierce winds that streamed south out of the arctic archipelago. I lived within the physical and emotional immediacy of a world devoid of other people, submerged in the grand, inertial rhythm of the arctic’s annual cycle. The northern landscape had a paradoxical effect on me, for it simultaneously annihilated and cultivated my sense of distance, time, and isolation. Glance up at the immense sky, or out across the seemingly endless march of the Barrens. Trace the path of the Thelon as it flows north and east toward Hudson Bay, across a distance that took five weeks to paddle, the eighty-mile-long lakes covered with ice at the end of July. Think back to the long flight into Warden’s Grove, the hours spent droning above all that empty, frozen space, or to the naked crackle of static that was the only response when I tried to contact Dave Olesen — anyone — on the radio for the third week running. Recall the sting of ice and wind upon my face on a storm-wracked day in May, as I trudged through a foot of fresh snow in a world retreating from summer’s promise. Contemplate the long skeins of snow geese bending north, the streams of caribou passing the cabin at a rate of two hundred per minute, the same black-bibbed sparrow perching in the same stunted spruce three years running, the explosion of fresh sedge shoots, willow catkins, and wildflowers suddenly bursting forth into summer and just as quickly fading into winter. Hike north and west from Warden’s Grove on a bright day in early June and take lunch six miles from camp, by the shore of a frozen lake, and know that your nearest neighbor is 180 miles away. Or better yet, think back to that night in early October, all those years ago, camped by Hornby Point along the Thelon, thirty miles north of

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Warden’s Grove. There were two of us huddled close around the fire, pans of ice in the river’s eddies, and only a few withered leaves left dangling from the scrub willow. The Barrens hovered on the edge of the long winter — what would soon be my winter — and the icy vault of heaven, with its explosion of stars, gleamed above me, immense and overwhelming. I felt the great tide of solitude that swept across the Barrens, and I was lost even to the small cabin at Warden’s Grove, which in turn was lost to the larger world. Think of these things and know — feel — what time, distance and solitude are. And yet the soul somehow responds, rushes out into the emptiness, embraces the silence and sheer physicality of the landscape, the animals and plants that are at home on the Barrens. That night at Hornby Point, I was immersed in the great and terrible and beautiful emptiness of the North, but I also felt anchored to the landscape, and complete, in a way that I seldom have encountered in my life. This sense of belonging evolved in a way that mitigated, but did not deny, distance, time, and isolation; it developed from the particular experiences and feelings that I had when I was there. On the Thelon, I learned that it was possible to be on good terms with solitude, and live, at least for awhile, beyond the constraints of time. I once read that “Loneliness is the absence of time.” But for me, loneliness was the presence of time; beyond its borders lay accommodation to, and acceptance of, solitude. My sense of belonging also encompassed a belief, which I knew was partly illusory, in my own self-sufficiency. My reaction to the landscape and my position in it was comforting, calming, and self-assuring: “This cabin, my one companion, the Barrens, the animals and plants, my work here — they are enough to sustain me in the weeks and months ahead.” A seductive thought, but also one that was potentially addictive and harmful. For a life can be lived too close to the land, or rather too far from humanity; given the right circumstances, it would be easy to ignore the wider compass of one’s life and embrace solipsism and the myth of self-sufficiency. On the Barrens, the powerful reach of earth and sky — and even my focus on Harris’s Sparrows — could have pulled me into a widening distance in myself, one that mirrored the solitude that embraced Warden’s Grove like the land itself. Sometimes I sensed this gravitational pull strongly — as when I wandered, alone, across some beautiful patch of upland tundra, with the light brilliant in the windy air. At such moments, I felt as though I could drift off into space like the ice

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floes that float down the Thelon and disappear into the lost distance on some fine and lovely June day. Everett Ruess was a pilgrim who traveled, mostly alone, through the wilderness of the Southwestern deserts. He vanished in the sandstone canyon country of the Escalante River in November 1934, when he was only twenty. A search party found his two burros in March 1935 and, in a nearby Anasazi ruin, the carved words “NEMO 1934,” but discovered nothing more about his disappearance. A collection of his letters, edited by W. L. Rusho and framed by essays on Ruess’s life and disappearance, tells of Ruess’s obsession with the Southwestern deserts and recording their magnificence in his writings, paintings, and wood-block prints. Ruess was independent, passionate, physically tough, and self-confident, and he saw the world in a mystical, transcendent way. He once wrote, “I have seen almost more beauty than I can bear,” and his letters bear eloquent testimony to his intense love for the desert landscape. Yet, as Rusho states, “. . . Everett’s writing had one important limitation: he apparently was unable to fully appreciate or describe human events and interactions with the landscape he understood so well.” Perhaps Ruess’s limitations were due in part to his youth, but I wonder if his passionate connection to the natural world affected his ability to perceive and portray the human world — as if he (or any human being) had a finite capacity for empathy and connection, and either by subconscious inclination or conscious choice allocated most of his ration to the wilderness. In a letter from high on Navaho Mountain, after more than two months of wandering through the isolated canyon country of the Four Corners region, Ruess wrote The beauty of this country is becoming part of me. I feel more detached from life and somehow gentler. . . . I wish harm to no one and occasionally try to be kind, though it seems futile striving. I have some good friends here, but no one who really understands why I am here or what I do. I don’t know of anyone, though, who would have more than a partial understanding. I have gone too far alone. I have gone too far alone: Ruess’s letter was dated June 29, 1934, and it described a metaphorical disappearance just six months before his physical one. There were times at Warden’s Grove when I wondered

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if I, too, had gone “too far alone,” or if I were at least tempted by the possibility of doing so — of living in this wilderness landscape, without deep attachment to others. Human connection sometimes seemed like such a brittle and fragile thing, especially when I was sunk deeply in isolation, thousands of miles and months or more away from family and friends. There, where the boundaries of my world were defined by the horizon, where silence spalled from the land like rocks from an immense cliff, I pursued my obsession with Harris’s Sparrows. I lived in a society of two, and in this environment, with my preoccupation with research, it was possible to become lost from a more human-oriented world. As the weeks passed during each field season, I became more misanthropic; I adapted to the quiet, to deciding the shape and pace of my days based almost entirely on my own wishes and needs. The days of isolation seeped into me, and their litany of solitude most often felt very good. I was helped in this process of accommodation by my field assistants, who were easygoing and mostly quiet, particularly my longtime friends Martin and Paul. Our relationships were similar to those that I’ve had with most of my wilderness companions — calm, safe, and in some ways distant. Ken was an unknown quantity, as I had met him only months before my first field season, but he proved easy enough to get along with. In spite of the tough conditions that we endured during the first field season, Ken retained his energy and enthusiasm throughout the summer. Although he eventually decided that fieldwork, with its long hours of patient observation, repetition, and meticulous recording of data, wasn’t for him, he never complained about what I asked him to do or drove himself less than I did. In turn, I tried to give him more time off than I allotted for myself, and revealed few of the doubts and frustrations that plagued me early in the first summer. I never voiced my questions about my competence in the field, or whether I should continue with my Ph.D. program at KU. Neither did I mention much about personal issues, and so our conversations were mostly superficial and dealt with the mundane aspects of our lives: chores, research, behavior of the birds, nest searches, weather, insects (a favorite), bears, muskox, and caribou. When we did discuss our histories and emotions, our conversations never touched upon the darker, more fearful, and insecure places. I never talked of the disturbing dreams about my family

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that I sometimes had, or of my fears about the future. I kept an emotional silence, a silence every bit as deep as that which falls over the Barrens on a midwinter’s night, when the winds calm, temperatures plummet to forty below, and the resident animals seek shelter and curl into themselves. During the second field season, I was helped by Martin Fuller. We’d been friends for twenty years, ever since I was a student at Prescott College in Arizona, where he taught at the time. Over the years, we often had hiked together and consequently I knew that Martin would be quiet, calm, neat, and precise, both in his personal habits and his approach to fieldwork. I knew that he would be slow to anger and would rarely voice frustration. Although he had no formal training in ecological research, his forty years of teaching and research in chemistry made him an ideal field assistant. Once I showed him how to do some research task, I could trust that he would do it correctly and well, and that the data he collected would be accurate. Our lives at Warden’s Grove were much less stressful than Ken’s and mine had been the previous year. The mosquitoes and blackflies emerged later and in much more tolerable numbers, and there was less early cold and late-season heat. We found the cabin with roof intact and ready for occupancy, a huge change from 1989. The research also went smoothly, as we caught Harris’s Sparrows and found their nests with much less effort. We got on well, and had long discussions about science, education, literature, and politics. All of these things reduced the mental and physical stress that had existed in 1989 and, along with our friendship, made it easier to laugh, and talk more about personal history and emotional issues — although I remained reluctant to discuss my personal life or my vacillating moods about research. I didn’t want to probe too deeply, and in so doing disturb the easy familiarity I felt with Martin, or the peacefulness that I felt on most days. Martin later remarked that I “didn’t reveal much about what was going on inside,” an accurate assessment of my general approach to life. I preferred to let the necessities of my research, and the immediate pleasures of being on the Barrens, deflect me from examining deeper, personal issues. Paul Hendricks, my companion during the third summer, was, and is, married to my sister. In 1991 he was finishing his Ph.D. at Washington State, studying under the professor who had been my

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Master’s advisor a decade before. We shared similar intellectual interests, loved arctic and alpine ecology, and had published several technical papers together — and importantly, he was as reticent as I was, and as reluctant to delve into emotional issues. He also loved to read, and so we passed long stretches of inclement weather quietly absorbed in books. Except for the first few days in the field, our life at Warden’s Grove wasn’t very stressful. Our charter pilot deposited us on a lake almost two and one-half miles from Warden’s Grove — too much water on the river ice — and we had to shuttle heavy loads from what we christened “Eight Hundred Pound Dump,” a la Robert Falcon Scott, to the cabin that had, once again, been vandalized by marauding bears. But we repaired the cabin in just two days, and a three-day snowstorm that began on May 29 set back the bugs even more than during the previous summer. The research went very well, in part because Paul was such an excellent field biologist and he was very adept at finding Harris’s Sparrow nests. We laughed a lot, and generated ideas such as celebrity Barrenlands canoe trips (Madonna, Jim and Tammy Bakker, Joan Collins), and mosquito zombies from Hell (“Come out Norment, come out of the cabin. . . .”). We imagined the fog of insect harassment accompanied by a soundtrack featuring Muzak versions of “Galveston” and “The Girl from Ipanema,” and greeting summer visitors with questions such as, “Whatever happened to the Captain and Tenille? Are they still together?” “Is Carter still president?” and created situationappropriate lyrics for songs such as the 1960s protest ballad, “The Eve of Destruction,” which we renamed “The Eve of Complaining” (“Aw, you don’t believe / That we’re on the eve / Of complaining.”) But as with Martin and Ken, and in spite of a deep friendship, Paul and I held mostly to the easier path, embracing familiarity and slotting into a simple and mostly satisfying existence. We grew into the quiet pattern of our days, into a rhythm of immediacy focused on Harris’s Sparrows, and a life lived close to the weather and our work. We were a society of two, in which interpersonal relationships and responsibilities were quietly simplified and framed by the breeding cycle of the sparrows. In this intimate and familiar world, it was easy to play the role of resident hermit and curmudgeon. When the first canoeists of the season stopped at Warden’s Grove, usually during the first week of

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July, I was superficially friendly, but inwardly disappointed that our long spell of solitude had been broken. I desired Warden’s Grove for myself and did not want the flow of our days disturbed by “outsiders,” although some of these visitors were guides and veteran canoeists who had paddled thousands of miles through northern Canada. We often invited them to the cabin for tea, or in some cases they invited themselves. They brought with them stories of the Outside, often traded in gossip, and voiced a surprising amount of antagonism toward paddlers, outfitters, and bureaucrats who were well known in northern circles. These conversations depressed me. They temporarily poisoned the atmosphere of Warden’s Grove, and it was a relief to watch the canoes disappear downriver — to feel the quiet return, and to no longer expend energy on conversations with strangers. My desire for seclusion was a reflection of a seductive and dangerous tendency, which I consciously fought, to see Warden’s Grove as “mine,” to aspire to some form of ownership other than one based on intimacy alone. By 1991, I had spent about eighteen months living at Warden’s Grove — far longer than anyone else in recent history, I suppose. I’d cleaned up the garbage and repaired the cabin, and I knew the grove of spruce and its surroundings well; it was tempting to see myself as both guardian and landlord, and to develop a proprietary attitude toward Warden’s Grove. As the weeks passed, the Outside fell away; I could believe that I was living in a land without government, and that I required no deed to claim ownership. In spite of the myriad of permits that I needed to live and conduct research at Warden’s Grove — land-use (Indian and Northern Affairs Canada); bird banding (Canadian Wildlife Service); bird collecting (Canadian Wildlife Service); scientific research (Science Institute of the Northwest Territories); wildlife research (Wildlife Management Division, Northwest Territories Renewable Resources) — the absence of people, particularly government bureaucrats, provided no evidence of who presumed to own the land. The only indications that an outside world existed were the occasional, filmy jet contrails high overhead and the voices that floated in no more than once a week, when we turned on our radio and tried to raise Dave Olesen on the Hoarfrost — an attempt that usually failed due to atmospheric disturbances. Instead, we sometimes heard shreds of conversation in what we took to be Inuktituk or one of the Dené languages, ethereal

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voices drifting through the arctic air. Our isolation made my permits seem completely irrelevant. There was no connection between the insubstantial bits of paper and the immediacy of the tundra. Life had become almost completely immediate. There were no newspapers and no “current events,” other than the ascending or descending sun, the advance or retreat of air masses that meant better or worse weather and more or fewer mosquitoes, the appearance or disappearance of migrating wildlife, the flowering or fruiting of plants, the need to don or remove a layer of clothes or focus on a different stage of the Harris’s Sparrow’s breeding cycle. Time was parceled out by reference to changes in the land and its inhabitants, rather than by watches, jobs, and responsibilities to others. We lived in a “societal deprivation chamber,” with its walls formed by the emptiness of the North — barriers that kept out people and their institutions. Our world was embedded in the hard soil and cold water and huge sky of the Barrens, but it floated free of governments and nations, suspended above or beyond the things that we take for granted and rarely can avoid, even if we so desired: rules and regulations, automobiles, television, advertising, poorly manufactured goods that we neither need nor want, politicians, pollution, noise, crowds, irritating music, money, bills, useless conversations, convenience marts. Things. Within the rather lax limits imposed by my equally relaxed and jaundiced companions, I was free to do as I pleased: fart, belch, swear, refrain from washing, wear filthy clothes, eat with my hands, pee wherever I wanted (well, not in the cabin), even tramp buck-naked across the Barrens if I was willing to risk either frostbite or the rapt attention of millions of bloodthirsty mosquitoes. Ah, freedom. During my three summers at Warden’s Grove, I understood, even more so than in 1977 – 1978, the seduction of a life lived beyond the fringes of society. I understood the genesis of solipsism, and the words of Chris McCandless, who vanished into the Alaskan wilderness when he was only twenty-four: “All true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you.” I could appreciate the stereotypical, ramshackle, end-of-theroad camps in Alaska, inhabited by bearded, antisocial refugees from the “Lower Forty-eight.” I gave more credence to stories of trappers who lived without companionship for years and slipped into irrational hatreds and paranoid fantasies. I could understand, if not condone,

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stories of hunters who killed two hundred wolves a year, mostly after high-speed chases on snow machines, or who shot caribou as bait for wolves, and then left them to rot: the rules do not apply to me. Or better yet, there are no rules. . . . I related more fully to the myth of independence and self-reliance, a myth as prevalent in the North as on the rangelands of the Intermountain West. I came to a clearer understanding of the adjective “bushed,” as in “He’s bushed,” bent by the solitude, left adrift by months and years spent without companionship, too far removed from the sound of other human tongues. And I remembered the words of Everett Ruess: “I have gone too far alone.” Perhaps it was good for me to realize that the world invariably would seep into Warden’s Grove. I knew this. I recalled the bitter day in January 1978 when two members of our party, John and Mike, returned early to Warden’s Grove from what was meant to be a tenday dog sled trip. They reported that there were “some weird things going on downstream,” and that they “had found this strange object in the river ice.” They had stumbled across debris from Cosmos 954, a Soviet nuclear-powered satellite that had disintegrated over the Northwest Territories on January 24. At a time when concern was increasing exponentially over the fate of the one-hundredpound reactor core, with its treasure of radioactive strontium, cesium, iodine, and plutonium, John and Mike had made the initial ground contact with the debris. The seven-foot-diameter crater in the river ice, marked by a few protruding, charred metal struts, which emitted only small amounts of radioactivity (fortunately), catapulted us into a ten-day mandatory evacuation to Yellowknife and Edmonton, news conferences, brief appearances on national television, and temporary (very) minor (extremely) celebrity status. A search camp operated by the Canadian Armed Forces and housing up to one hundred scientists and support personnel blossomed only ten miles north of Warden’s Grove — complete with a five-thousand-foot bulldozed runway on the ice of a nearby lake, daily C-130 Hercules supply flights, hot showers, movies, enough alcohol to keep a small town drunk for a month, a two-and-one-half-ton mess truck, and a fleet of helicopters. Camp Garland, as it was called, dramatically changed the nature of our winter at Warden’s Grove and forcefully dragged us out of our isolation. The bitter irony of the situation was obvious — to have paddled more than 1,500 miles from the Yukon to Warden’s Grove,

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with the intention of spending a year living in an isolation about as complete as one could find in North America, only to have our plans irrevocably altered by debris from a nuclear satellite, the only piece found within one hundred miles of our camp. The odds that the trajectories of six canoeists and a dying Soviet satellite would intersect were infinitesimally small, yet the Cosmos 954 debacle was a powerful metaphor, and it fundamentally altered how I viewed both the trip and the nature of wilderness. From January 1978, I no longer saw even the deepest wilderness as inviolate, and I believed that no true sanctuary was possible. I always would anticipate the next intrusion, be it shards from a nuclear satellite, oil rigs in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, motorbikes on a mountain trail, a float plane dropping out of the sky, or the overwhelming insistence of our society on the right of ultimate ownership. Even without memories of Cosmos 954, I understood that my fantasies about ownership and isolation were illusory. The sheaf of government permits, even if they seemed irrelevant, told me that I lived and worked at Warden’s Grove only with the approval of the territorial and federal governments, either of which could have sent a representative to Warden’s Grove for a surprise inspection. In an extreme case, a violation of the rules by which I pledged to live could have resulted in my expulsion from Warden’s Grove, or prevented my return for another field season. More fundamentally, a glance at the map tacked to the cabin wall showed the boundaries — of the Thelon Wildlife Sanctuary, the District of Mackenzie, the Northwest Territories — that defined patterns of ownership. I also knew that the Canadian federal government, the Northwest Territories government, and the Dené and Inuit peoples were locked in land claims negotiations that included discussions about the Barrens. And we occasionally received news from the Outside, via radio. In June 1989, during a radio conversation, Dave told us of the slaughter of Chinese students in Tiananmen Square. Afterward, I walked out of the cabin and looked out across the meadow in front of Warden’s Grove. Thoughts of blood and tanks intruded more than I would have thought possible, and the litany of human suffering, hatred, and oppression seemed all the more incongruous when juxtaposed against the tranquility of a June evening and the long waves of tundra that spread eastward toward the Clarke River dunes.

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At Warden’s Grove, the Outside intruded occasionally, and its potential to disrupt our lives always lurked in the background. Yet two of the main attractions to life on the Barrens remained the absence of people to answer to, and the lack of disagreement and emotional disruption. As in the other wild places where I’d traveled, we built our relationships around things to do: birds to trap and band, nests to find, vegetation to measure. We were responsible for each other’s safety, and for our share of the necessary maintenance activities, but that was the sum total of our obligations. There was the glory of beautiful country and the pleasure of physical activity; and, in spite of whatever storms, biting flies, heat, hunger, or thirst came our way, in spite of the occasional days of body-numbing physical exertion — or even fear — we never were responsible for each other’s happiness. Even if we occasionally talked of deeply personal issues, of pain, failure, regret, and loss, the burden of emotional responsibility, perceived or real, was never present — or if I had any sense that it was, I’d retreat from it as rapidly as I could. The expectation always was that we would take care of ourselves emotionally and that our happiness, or lack thereof, was our own business. This was partly why I often had trouble being with girlfriends, and later, my wife, in the wilderness. Even if they denied and showed no evidence of it, I assumed that they placed the burden of responsibility for their happiness on me. If someone was upset or physically distressed, I felt responsible for fixing things, even if I could not. So I chose my companions carefully and looked for the combination of even temper, humor, cheerful insouciance, physical strength, and experience that would translate into an emotionally easy trip, without anger, argument, or sadness. I did not want to deal with weakness or with frailty. It was as Helen Humphreys describes in Wild Dogs: “Now I live out in the woods again and I feel cleansed by the solitude. There is no one to answer to, no one to disappoint.” On a late June night during my second field season, I was startled awake by a dream of my three-year-old daughter, lying face down in the swimming pool at her grandparents’ home in Connecticut, drowned. I was sweaty, agitated, and upset — both by the dream’s outcome and by the terrible sense of powerlessness that I felt. I could not save her; I could not warn my wife of the danger. I tried to

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reassure myself by recalling Melissa’s vigilance around Liza, and the three-foot-high fence that surrounded the pool, but for the first time that year since arriving at Warden’s Grove, the distance that separated me from home was oppressive, and in recalling the vivid grief of my dream I despaired of my isolation, and my lack of control over my child’s well-being. This was not the first time that I had been disturbed by dreams of my family. Early in my first field season, while rebuilding the cabin and trying to get some sense of Harris’s Sparrows, before we had established radio contact with Dave Olesen and had any link to the Outside, I dreamt that Liza had been kidnapped. I awoke to a terrible, anguished fear, one that I wasn’t able to shake for days. This sense of dread was compounded by the general anxiety — sometimes vivid, at other times subdued — that I felt about my marriage. In May, Melissa and I had parted after a very difficult year, which had included a move from friends and secure jobs in Connecticut to Lawrence, a substantial decrease in our income that accompanied my return to school, and constant stress about our relationship. As a result, I carried worries about the future with me throughout that first summer at Warden’s Grove. And during the third summer of fieldwork, after my son Martin’s birth the previous December, I read a disturbing novel, N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, in which a four-year-old girl dies. Again, I was filled with worry and foreboding; again, I was reminded that I did not live in a world of isolation, but that I was bound, forcefully, to the larger world, even while opposing forces pulled me away from it. These forces arose mostly from within — the longing for solitude, autonomy, and a simplified and conflict-free emotional life — but I also worried about the process of forgetting: if you spend long enough apart from those you love, will their reality begin to fade, and will you be left with nothing more than the sensation of missing? During my months at Warden’s Grove, I knew that Liza and Martin were my children and that Melissa was my wife, and that I missed them; yet I sometimes felt as if the separation had transformed them from beings of flesh and blood into beings of memory. I wondered: if I were separated from my family long enough, would only history remain, emotions prompted by a photograph or an old letter? Or would some fundamental essence of those I love endure, beyond memory, distance, and isolation? In spite of the seduction of solitude and the pleasures of my days,

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the uncertainties about my marriage, and the possibility of forgetting, I understood that I remained connected to my family; I had not gone “too far alone.” The stratigraphy of my life was not simple, with each layer of history piled smoothly and evenly upon each preceding layer, separate and contained; instead, there were folding and faulting, intrusions of memory and desire and love, with the past, my life beyond Warden’s Grove, rising to the depositional surface of the present. I was linked to the Outside by more than government permits, the intrusions of technology and current events, my need for food and supplies. Although after the first few difficult weeks in 1989, I was most often happy at Warden’s Grove, and wasn’t conscious of missing my family and friends — the days were too full for that — I thought of them often and anticipated returning south. As I held Harris’s Sparrows, searched for nests, worked on the cabin, and moved across the tundra, memories of my family suddenly manifested themselves: my six-week-old son’s first smile, waking next to Melissa on a sunlit spring morning, Liza’s attempt to smuggle gravel home from her preschool playground by stuffing rocks in her shoes, or her question, “Why don’t shadows have eyes?” I was bound to others by history and the thread of love, and I knew that there would come a time when I would seal the cabin, climb into a float plane, and head toward Yellowknife, ready to reel in that thread. But the question remains: what did I take away with me from Warden’s Grove, beyond a ream of data sheets, some pressed plant specimens, my field notes and journals? Following a line of thought and belief that I can trace back forty years, to my first hiking trips in the Sierra, I ask myself if my time at Warden’s Grove made me a better person and if, to paraphrase John Haines, “the ground underfoot somehow transmitted its character and energy to me as I walked upon it.” I felt better out there, no doubt. The physical aspects of life on the Barrens were mostly pleasurable, as were the simplified demands and responsibilities that came with living in a society of two, beyond the daily reach of the larger world. I was not bombarded by aspects of life on the Outside that I found irritating or reprehensible. I didn’t need to deceive or dissemble, or deal with much conflict. I had a specific job to do, one that I eventually became skilled at, and I did not have to struggle with how, and to whom, I parceled out my time. The general directness and contained nature of my life at Warden’s

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Grove made it easy to live well. And in living well, it was possible to be more at peace with myself and the world, and perhaps to believe that I was a better person than I really was, or am. Freed of most responsibilities, of the pressure to act in certain ways, of conflicting demands upon my time, of conflict per se, I could create and maintain illusions about my wider, more general life. I could forget my shortcomings and failures, and even believe that they would not reappear once I stepped off the floatplane and onto the dock at Yellowknife. Perhaps this fantasy explains part of the attraction for most pastimes in which we indulge ourselves, be it fishing, preparing and eating a good meal, golf, reading, music, sex, climbing, or watching sporting events. When we are fully engaged in something direct and straightforward that takes us out of ourselves and into a larger world, we can believe, at least temporarily, in our own goodness, and that all is right with the world. I deeply enjoyed my life at Warden’s Grove, just as I have enjoyed almost all of my journeys into the wilderness, and I feel blessed to have lived there for as long as I did. I know that my life there was good; it’s just that I have come to doubt that such an experience ever will be transformative, in a moral sense. I climb mountains, walk trails, paddle rivers, live miles from nowhere while studying Harris’s Sparrows: these activities help me feel at home in the world and more at peace. My life without these things is inconceivable. They have given me a focus and I don’t know how I would have gotten through the years, my own sadness, dislocation, and sense of inadequacy, without them. And yet . . . I write these words in my fifty-fourth year, somewhat burdened by creaky knees (a torn meniscus in each knee, repaired by arthroscopic surgery) and a tender back (partially herniated disk, L4–L5 vertebrae), but mostly with the knowledge of personal failure. As I write, I consider the words of Albert Camus: “A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first leapt.” I know that my “heart first leapt” forty-one years ago, beside Mirror Lake, and that I have spent much of my life attempting to cultivate, or rediscover, that sense of joy. But I have come to doubt that this attempt, as crucial as it has been to me, has made me a better husband, a more loving and giving father, or a more constant friend, other than by providing a temporary release of the

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tension that builds in me with demand and busyness, and the sense that I am isolated from something central to my being. I understand that my time in the wilderness has made me calmer and happier, more at home in the world and less disconnected than I otherwise would be. But the idealism of my youth has vanished — alas. I no longer see the wilderness as a panacea for my ills. I no longer believe that my moral compass points toward true north when I am outside, or that it will continue to do so when I return to the trailhead. Instead, time spent in the wild seems necessary, but not sufficient, for my well-being. Perhaps what remains is enough, though; perhaps it is even more than I should hope for. Maybe it’s a bit like what C. S. Lewis once wrote, in response to the criticism that most Christians were hypocrites, because they sometimes (or usually) did not live by the precepts of their faith. Lewis granted that very often Christians fail at living as they should — but then he asked how wicked many Christians would be without their faith. I fail far too often in my personal life, and I don’t believe that any permanent grace resides in me, as a product of the years spent in the wilderness — or if it does, it is a muted and tentative thing. Yet I still believe that something vital remains, that all of the time that I have spent outside, at places such as Warden’s Grove, and the years that I have spent studying and watching “the wild,” has made me more capable of dealing with, and feeling at home in, the world. I carry this blessing with me, throughout the course of my days; I feel it eddy and flow around me, like the current of a warm and gentle stream as it sweeps through some lost, lovely valley.

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In mid-August, the sense of the Barrens begins to shift. Most days still are warm and full of blackflies, but the nights are cooler, perhaps tinged with frost. The storms, when they come, carry intimations of winter — a trace of snow, more felt than seen, the steel-edged winds slicing down from the arctic islands. Stars bloom in the night sky and there’s an autumnal quality to the light — a slanting richness, a rumor of senescence and the land’s slide toward sleep. The tundra turns to color, its fall forests only inches high: the brilliant, electric red of alpine bearberry leaves, the dying yellow of scrub willow, the brilliant reddish-orange of dwarf birch. Ripe berries are everywhere, purple, red, salmon: dwarf bilberries, crowberries, mountain cranberries, bearberries, cloudberries. It’s been seven weeks since the last snow disappeared from sheltered hollows. The river is low and curves past long crescents of golden sand. Animals are on the move. The post-calving aggregation of Barren-ground caribou, an impatient, inexorable throng, passed by Warden’s Grove on the twentieth of July. Thousands upon thousands of bulls, cows, and calves splashed across the Thelon below the cabin, headed upriver, toward the forests. Now there are only small bands of stragglers tracing the rutted paths laid down by the main herds. White wolves follow the caribou, and they eat well. Small, scattered flocks of waterfowl drift south, but there are far fewer birds than in the spring, when long skeins of geese worked north across the sky. Gray-cheeked Thrushes and Blackpoll Warblers vanish from Warden’s Grove. Harris’s Sparrows begin to move; banded birds disappear from Warden’s Grove, and other, unmarked individuals take their place. They gather in uneasy flocks that sift through the underbrush at the edge of the trees. Adults and young of the year molt their body feathers, begin to fatten. A far view across the rolling tundra, a scent of cool air, a glance that catches the character of light, even the touch of the sun’s warm grace in a

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sheltered hollow, tells you that the long days are dying. The smell of wood smoke drifting from the stovepipe is more welcome than it was a month ago, and it feels like an antidote to the coming winter. You put away your headnet, add a layer of clothes, linger over an extra cup of tea after breakfast. One morning, there’s a skim of ice on a small tundra pond, like the edge of melancholy that sometimes forms in the eddies of time that mark your days. Later, when you are out gathering berries, you notice that there are fewer sparrows around the cabin, and that the grove has begun to quiet. You look to the south, trace the path of the river as it curves past the dunes, wonder what those whom you love are doing. The heart is restless. he last Harris’s Sparrow nestlings leave their nests in the middle of July, about ten days after the first young of the season fledge. The stragglers are from second nests, built after their parents’ first clutches were lost to a predator, most likely an arctic ground squirrel. Ground squirrels take more eggs and nestlings than any other predator. They are effective, but not particularly fastidious, about the process, and appear to stumble across the eggs or nestlings, which they sometimes eat much like corn-on-the-cob — not a clean kill. I once watched a female sparrow make repeated visits to her nest shortly after an arctic ground squirrel had eaten her five newly hatched young. Each time, she hopped to the edge of the cup, peered into the nest, then flew into a nearby shrub, before repeating the process a few minutes later — as if to say, “Now just where did I leave the kids?” Short-tailed weasels are more precise about the killing (a clean bite to the base of the skull does the job) but they may not consume all that they take, and I’ve found dead nestlings strewn around the nest in the aftermath of a weasel visit. Gray Jays and red squirrels also destroy an occasional nest, and others fail because one of the parents, usually the female, is killed before the young fledge. All told about 40 percent of Harris’s Sparrow nests fail; this rate of loss might seem high, particularly when considering the potential dangers faced by first-year birds — Northern Shrikes during the last six weeks of the summer, the energetic demands of fall migration, and winter’s blizzards — but it’s much less than for many ground-nesting sparrows in the Midwest, where more than 80 percent of the nests may be lost to predators.

T

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Harris’s Sparrows will renest if they lose a clutch of eggs, but they will not do so if their nestlings are taken; then they are done for the summer, and afterward disappear from their territories. When nestlings fledge, they weigh twenty-four grams on average, about 70 percent of what an adult bird weighs. Nestlings grow most quickly when they are three to five days of age, and their mass increases at a rate of 25 percent per day — an impressive, but not unusual, rate of gain for a bird that weighed about three grams when it hatched, naked and blind, nine or ten days before. The first ten days after hatching are the most perilous time in a Harris’s Sparrow’s life, and the goal of the parents is to get the young out of the nest, where they are protected from the elements and easy to feed, but vulnerable to predators, as quickly as they can. Although a ten-dayold fledgling weighs only two-thirds of what an adult might weigh, it is fully feathered and capable of regulating its body temperature. The fledglings’ flight feathers and muscles aren’t developed enough to support flight, but their legs are as long as an adult’s and they are surprisingly nimble. At first they tend to crouch silently when a potential predator approaches, but after a few days they can scuttle quickly among the shrubs. Within four days of fledging, the young birds’ primary and secondary wing feathers are long enough to support short flights of up to thirty feet — panicked, wobbly, weaving arcs a few feet off the ground, often punctuated by a crash at the end, but flights nonetheless. Fledglings can fly and thermoregulate, but they remain dependent upon their parents for food until they are about one month old and achieve adult mass. For the first few days after fledging, they remain hidden in vegetation near the nest, but by the time that they are three weeks old, they may have drifted one hundred yards from where they hatched. If both parents are still feeding fledglings (males, once again, seem to be more reluctant than females to care for young), they tend to divide the brood and consistently feed different young. I’ve spent hours watching a parent deliver food to what I thought was a nest, only to find after much searching that my “nest” was a newly fledged bird. Thus, during the first three weeks after fledging, the family and its subunits begin to dissolve as parents and young move farther from the nest, and each other — although siblings sometimes will travel together for several weeks more.

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Young birds have about seven weeks in which to prepare for fall migration. During this period they grow to adult mass, fatten, and molt. This first molt of their lives involves the body feathers only and not the new flight feathers of the wings and tail; it begins when the young birds are about one month old, and lasts for a bit more than thirty days. Given that juveniles are gone from Warden’s Grove less than two months after they fledge, they probably complete their molt early in migration. The onset of hyperphagia, the insistent feeding that precedes migration, begins in the latter stages of molt, shortly before fall migration, and lasts about nine days. During this time, young birds fatten and gain about 0.7 grams per day, or 2–3 percent of their body mass — equivalent to a four-pound-per-day gain in a 150-pound person. Adult birds also must prepare for the long migration into the central Great Plains. In Harris’s Sparrows and other photosensitive species, the beginning of this process, called photorefractoriness, occurs as breeding activity ceases and the hypothalamus becomes insensitive to the stimulation of long periods of daylight. Nothing is known about control of photorefractoriness in Harris’s Sparrows, which occurs at the height of the arctic summer, but it has been studied extensively in White-crowned Sparrows and Dark-eyed Juncos. Maintenance of reproductive function is dependent upon gonadotropic hormones, including luteinizing hormone, which are produced by the pituitary gland, while decreases in these hormones are correlated with the cessation of seasonal breeding. Several models have been proposed to explain this process, but whatever the cause, the ebb of gonadotropic hormones initiates a cascade of events leading to fall migration. The first of these is the prebasic molt, which in adult Harris’s Sparrows completely replaces the body and flight feathers. Most arctic-breeding songbirds do not begin prebasic molt until the young have fledged, probably because it would be too energetically expensive for an adult to simultaneously feed rapidly growing nestlings and replace all of its feathers; peak energetic demands for White-crowned Sparrows during prebasic molt may equal 58 percent of an adult’s basal metabolic rate. Molting birds also must metabolize large amounts of protein, the primary constituent of feathers, and crowned sparrows cycle as much as 8 percent of their body protein per day at the peak of molt. Nestling feeding also is energetically demanding, with females

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losing 14 percent of their mass and males 8 percent during the nestling stage. They then experience a rapid gain of 6 – 8 percent of their body mass once the young are independent, analogous to the financial gains that human parents realize when their children leave home. I’ve not seen data on energetic costs incurred by adult crowned sparrows when they feed nestlings. However, one researcher who studied this in Lapland Longspurs, another arctic-breeding sparrow, estimated that each of a pair of longspurs raising a brood of five must capture an additional three thousand insects per day during peak energy demands, and forage for more than 50 percent of their active day to accomplish this. Separation of nesting and molt in Harris’s Sparrows, and the brief summer, means that prebasic molt must be telescoped into the short window of time between fledging and deterioration of weather conditions. At more southerly latitudes, molt proceeds more slowly than in the north, and in some migratory White-crowned Sparrow populations, parents may raise a second brood of young and begin molting before these nestlings have fledged. But these birds have the luxury of extending molt and replenishment of energy reserves further into the fall. For example, adult White-crowned Sparrows from coastal California, near the southern limit of their breeding range, complete prebasic molt in about eighty leisurely days, while the same species in Alaska take only forty-eight days, as do adult Harris’s Sparrows at Warden’s Grove. Harris’s Sparrows initiate molt in mid-July. They start by replacing their primaries, or outer flight feathers of the wing, but soon begin molting secondaries (the inner flight feathers), and tail and body feathers. Molting waterfowl such as the Canada Goose shed their flight feathers simultaneously, which renders them incapable of flight for almost six weeks. However, songbirds shed and replace their flight feathers gradually, and remain capable, if sometimes reluctant, fliers during prebasic molt. Most Harris’s Sparrows, as well as White-crowned Sparrows breeding in northern Alaska, complete the entire prebasic molt before departing from their breeding grounds. As adult Harris’s Sparrows molt, they lose some of their bold and distinctive solid black head and throat plumage. Instead, their throats and bibs become speckled with black and white feathers, and their black hoods are less glossy. Males and females in basic plumage vary

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in the extent of black on their throats and bibs, although adults generally have more black than do first-year birds, which have a more mottled appearance. In the spring, the Harris’s Sparrows departed for the North before we left Lawrence, but after the breeding season we reversed the sequence and headed south before the birds did. Each year we cleared out in late July, after the young had fledged and we’d measured the vegetation around twenty-five or thirty Harris’s Sparrow and Whitecrowned Sparrow nests in a last, frenetic burst of activity. The July days were long and sometimes warm, and during the day mosquitoes had mostly given way to blackflies. The post-calving caribou herds had moved past the cabin, leaving in their wake rutted trails and the occasional half-eaten carcass, lost to wolves or bears. Parties of canoeists paddled past Warden’s Grove; some paused to visit the cabin, and were surprised to find it occupied. Others hurried past, bound for Beverly Lake and a rendezvous with a charter flight, or for the village of Baker Lake. The tussock meadows were full of the white, plumed heads of cottongrass, one of the first plants to flower in the spring, already gone to seed. On a sunny day, the view from the cabin was dominated by green swells of tundra, but the vista was streaked with the greenish blue of the Thelon and the bright, golden-white of the sand bars exposed by the receding river. It seemed incongruous to abandon the Barrens at the height of summer. I should have stayed on, into the fall, rather than turning toward home, but I was pulled south by the missing of my family and the impending start of the fall term at KU. I had not fledged any young, shed and replaced my hair, doubled my food intake and added fresh layers of fat, or felt the stirrings of Zugenruhe. Yet I was uneasy and fidgety, and began to look upriver more often, toward the Midwest. I was ready to be done with research and the continuous assault of the bugs, and eager for a hot shower, a clean T-shirt and pair of shorts, and to see my family. Each summer, I finished my work by running a last set of arthropod transects, as part of a season-long effort to measure the abundance of resources likely to be eaten by Harris’s Sparrows. There were four of these transects, each consisting of six paired pitfall traps and sticky boards and placed in a habitat frequented by foraging birds. I ran the transects six or seven times each field season; dur-

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ing each run I’d set the traps for twenty-four hours, then return to identify, count, and measure whatever arthropods had been caught. On July 15, 1991, I set the traps for the last time. When I returned the next day to count and measure my captures, I was accompanied by what seemed to be a swarm of all the mosquitoes and blackflies that I hadn’t trapped. I worked patiently, trying to savor the last hours of fieldwork during the last season of my project, but my insect assistants made it difficult to enjoy the process, and when I’d emptied the last pitfall trap and scraped the last sticky board free of Tanglefoot, I was more relieved than euphoric. The end of the fieldwork was, of necessity, anticlimactic — I sorted and measured the collection of spiders (mostly) from the final pitfall trap, filled in the last row of numbers on a data sheet, collected my tools, and sought refuge from the flies. As I stepped into the cabin and removed my headnet, my only remark to Paul was a laconic, “Well, that’s that.” After the last of the fieldwork, we had little to do except wait for the plane that would take us back to Yellowknife. Each summer, the timing of the flight was uncertain. I saved money by side-chartering planes returning from dropping off canoeists, and once we’d made arrangements for a pickup, we couldn’t wander far from the radio. Weather conditions made charter flight schedules tentative, and we had to be prepared to leave with only a few hours’ notice. And so, for a few days at the end of each field season, we inhabited a narrow but restless ecotone, suspended between Warden’s Grove and Yellowknife, fieldwork and travel. We packed our equipment, hauled loads three quarters of a mile downstream and cached them at the head of the narrows below Warden’s Grove, where the Thelon was deep enough for a floatplane to land, and waited. We read, went for short walks, remained restive, then waited some more. In 1991, during what I suspected was my last night at Warden’s Grove, I sat at the cabin table, reading listlessly and making desultory scribbles in my journal. At ten-thirty the Harris’s Sparrows were quiet. A solitary Gray-cheeked Thrush sang from the woods behind the cabin, his solo performance replacing what in June had been an evening chorus. Mosquitoes hovered at the screen door, persistent in their obsessive interest, their collective hum an ironically gentle susurrus. I made myself a cup of tea, then stepped outside

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for one final evening’s view eastward, toward the Last Light Hills. The thrush had stopped singing, and there was not even the breath of a breeze. In the words of Wallace Stevens, and in spite of the rapt attention of the mosquitoes, the night “was quiet and the world was calm.” There still was a world of light in the sky, and the Thelon shone like a mirror, reflecting — what? My Transcendentalist, Emersonian soul? The numinous spirit of the Barrens? The fundamental essence of my work at Warden’s Grove? Or only the banks of the river I’d watched for so many months? I knew that in the morning I would search out a Harris’s Sparrow and watch it for a few minutes — one last view and a nod of acknowledgement in its direction, before turning away. Paul and I would listen for the radio call telling us that the plane was on its way, then pull down the antenna, pack up the last of our gear, and place our packs outside the cabin. We would nail plywood boards over the windows, sweep the floor, and bolt the door shut. We would shoulder our loads and trudge north past East Grove, across tussock meadows once sloppy and full of meltwater, now turned firm and dry, then descend the Thelon’s cutbank and cross the sedge flats to our pickup point. We would throw our packs on top of the pile of gear that we’d already hauled down to the river’s edge and find a comfortable spot in which to rest. We would settle in and wait for the floatplane’s familiar hum, and relax in the warmth of a July day. Summer was not gone from the Barrens, but we were almost gone from them. Somewhere around the first of August, as molt proceeds and the young achieve independence, Harris’s Sparrows begin to lose their affinity for the small piece of ground that has held them close for the last two months. They start to flock, shift foraging sites, move from one patch of spruce to another. Banded adults disappear from Warden’s Grove and are replaced by other, unmarked birds. Near the end of prebasic molt, as parents and their surviving young drift apart, adults begin to forage constantly. In the two weeks before they migrate, adult Harris’s Sparrows “bulk up,” adding up to eight grams (about 20 percent) to their body mass. They also increase their fat loads from about 3 or 4 percent of adult body mass during the latter part of the nesting cycle, to about 16 percent in late August. By then,

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adults and juveniles have completed most of their molt and they are fatter and heavier than at any time during the last two months. The Harris’s Sparrows are ready to move and, as during the spring, birds preparing for migration enter Zugenruhe and become progressively more restless at night. The birds are unquiet. The night skies darken and the land moves into an ecotone of light. There’s a heightened sense of transition in the air, a restless energy. The Barrens accelerate their shift toward autumn, and the vivid greens of the sedge meadows fade into golden browns. On the dry ridges and benches, thin nets of red, like strands of a spider web, spread through the leaves of alpine bearberry. The deep purple fruits of bilberry are thick in Warden’s Grove, and one morning in late August there’s a halo of frost on the orange leaves of the dwarf birch outside the cabin. As August moves into early September, there are fewer and fewer Harris’s Sparrows at the edge of the trees, and of those that remain, most are young of the year. Finally, on the evening of September 9, three and one-half months after the first Harris’s Sparrows arrived in May, the last birds, a small flock of juveniles, rise from thick cover near the cabin and wheel south, toward treeline. They fly up valley, above the Thelon and past the long sand ridges that line the east side of the river. They head into the night sky but away from another, longer night, looking to gather with other stragglers of their kind. They’ll find the first of them in the spruce south of Eyeberry Lake, eighty miles from Warden’s Grove, and soon there will be more — birds from the headwaters of the Thelon, from the endless scatter of spruce and lakes that spreads south and east from Great Slave Lake. The flight paths of the migrating birds resembles a watershed whose headwaters are flung across fifteen hundred miles of the forest-tundra transition, from the southern end of Hudson Bay almost to the Arctic Ocean near the Mackenzie River Delta. To the west, the birds gather in tributaries draining the country around Great Bear Lake and the upper reaches of the Coppermine River. To the east, the birds move south from Nueltin Lake, where Francis Harper worked, and the lower stretches of the Nelson and Churchill Rivers, where E. A. Preble traveled in 1900. The paths of the Harris’s Sparrows funnel together, rivulets into creeks, creeks into rivers, forming a larger, more confined stream as the birds move

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southward. The current of this broad, ill-defined river ebbs and flows with the weather. Yet, the sparrows gather together, drawn toward their wintering grounds by constellations in the night sky, the alignment and dip of magnetic fields, and the collective compass of their genes and experience. Flocks coalesce, divide, grow again. Many birds feed constantly when they are not flying; some complete the last stages of molt as they work their way south into the boreal forest. The Harris’s Sparrows move in a more leisurely manner than in the spring, stopping to feed during good weather, no longer drawn toward their breeding grounds by the lengthening days. Birds coming from the Thelon River drainage cross the 60th parallel and move southward, into eastern Saskatchewan and northwestern Manitoba. They leave behind the great arc of water and rock, spruce and paper birch of the Canadian Shield, move into the aspen parklands and then the wheat country, always searching out the edges for rest and food. Some birds — mostly juveniles — die along the way, worn out by the stress of migration or killed by a domestic cat or hawk at a backyard feeder. Other birds become confused, lose their way and their own species, and fly more east or west than south. They end up in New York or California, living among White-crowned or Golden-crowned Sparrows and drawing flocks of excited birders hoping to add another species to their life lists. These sparrows never will find their way home. By mid-September, the main current of birds has reached North Dakota, and it will flow around and through the state for the next month. Around Fargo, Harris’s Sparrows linger and feed, then move south with the beginning of a warm southerly wind; others soon replace them. The migrants may average flights of only ten to fifteen miles per night as they drift toward the southern Great Plains, but by the end of October and early November, the first birds arrive on their wintering grounds in southern Kansas, Oklahoma, and northern Texas. There, they collect in shrubby thickets, probe the edges of pastures and fields and remnant patches of tallgrass prairie. Many sparrows join a flock and stay with it for a week or two, then disappear southward. By early December, most birds have reached their winter residences, where they’ll remain until spring. Some adults are returning for a second or third time, as Harris’s Sparrows show a high degree

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of fidelity to their wintering grounds. The birds seem steady, both in temperament and the predictability of their movements. Those that find their way into traps are easy to handle, and gentle. About 40 percent of the adults will live through the fall, winter, and spring, and return to the site where they bred the year before. Among the males that breed around Warden’s Grove, many take up the same territories that they occupied the previous summer. Others, for whatever reasons, settle in territories a few hundred yards away from where they last nested. Adult females return, too, although at a slightly lower rate than males — but they always find different mates, and shift their home ranges to other, nearby stands of spruce. Birds that lose their nest to a predator are less likely to return to the previous year’s breeding site than those that succeed, as if disheartened by vague memories of ground squirrels or weasels, and suddenly vanished eggs or nestlings. And one bird, number 36684, banded on July 6, 1991, seven days after hatching out in Mrs. Green’s nest, survives the vagaries of its first summer and fall. It grows, molts, and fattens, then departs from Warden’s Grove at the end of August. From the Thelon, it works its way southward along a true bearing of about 160 degrees, and over the next three months travels a straight-line distance of sixteen hundred miles. It finds its way without having flown the route before, as it moves southeast through the Northwest Territories and then Manitoba, passing west of Winnipeg and Grand Forks, North Dakota. It lingers in the shelterbelts of eastern South Dakota, then moves on as the weather turns bad in late November. At Yankton, it picks up the Missouri River and follows the west bank though Nebraska and into Kansas. Near Leavenworth, on the final night of its migration, it drifts a bit to the southwest, over fields of winter wheat and corn stubble, and the woodlots of leafless hickory and oak that cap limestone outcrops on the gentle hills. Just east of Lawrence, Kansas, only about eight miles from the Museum of Natural History, it stops flying. Perhaps it is, in its own Harris’s Sparrow sort of way, tired of flight, and it yearns to be still. Perhaps it simply does what its flockmates do, and settles when they settle. Or perhaps there is a sudden recognition — lock and key, enzyme and substrate: this place. Whatever the cause, there is a moment before dawn, when the cold December sky is streaked with the first hints of orange and pink, that

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the young bird spreads and angles its wings upwards, fans its tail, and settles onto the branch of an Osage orange. Done with movement, it rests. The plane that collected Paul and me was an old (circa 1955) Single Otter. The pilot made one sweep over the cabin, found us, and then set down into the wind, which was up and out of the north. We quickly transferred our gear to the plane, and the pilot, Jimmy, helped us settle in. His dog, a small black poodle that traveled everywhere with him, sniffed us — lots of interesting scents, I suppose — then hopped up and settled into a niche between Jimmy’s shoulders and the seatback. After less than ten minutes on the river, Jimmy taxied away from the shore and accelerated downriver. The plane rose over the willow bottomlands and sedge meadows of Grassy Island, then banked to the south. Below us was Warden’s Grove — a last look at the patch of spruce with the small cabin at the southwestern edge — and then there were the gray uplands of broken, glacier-scoured rock and clean blue lakes full of chop, whitecapping in the wind; the long, meandering eskers cutting across the lay of the land; and the tumbling falls and deep canyons of the lower Hanbury. The Single Otter flew southwest, retracing the route that we’d flown over two months before. The country had been lost to the snow and ice of May, but now it was verdant and green, open to the edge of the Earth. The space felt as addictive as ever, and my urge to leave the Barrens suddenly seemed foolish to me, as I had worked so hard and so long to get into them. And so I was moved, and reluctant to go — but then there was only the rattling drone of the old plane, nausea, and a splitting headache caused by the hot cabin and stray fumes of aviation fuel. I lost all enjoyment of the flight and had no desire to take in the views of the Barrens and Great Slave Lake. I wanted nothing more than what I finally got — to be deposited on the floatplane dock, feeling queasy and hungover, like a down-and-out refugee from some Yellowknife bar, flat out of luck and fifteen hundred dollars poorer after a night of gambling. Next to us was a group of tourists decked out in their immaculate Eddie Bauer best, some even with creased chinos, waiting for a flight to a fishing lodge in the bush. One of them walked up to me, took in our pile of battered boxes and packs, glanced at my scraggly beard and filthy pants, once khaki-colored but now a dark,

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greasy gray and splattered with the carcasses of innumerable blackflies and mosquitoes, and asked, “Been out long?”

Migration Notes Northwest Territories We remain in Yellowknife for a day, cleaning up, returning borrowed equipment, and discussing the state of the world with friends during a long, leisurely meal amply lubricated with Irish whiskey, then head south in the late afternoon. First there’s the long, dusty drive around the North Arm of Great Slave Lake, past the villages of Rae and Edzo, out of the shield country and into the lowlands west of the Mackenzie Bison Sanctuary, one of the last refuges of the wood bison. We cross the Mackenzie River on the ferry, then camp on a finger of rock and gravel jutting out into the water, where the winter ice road reaches the south shore. The night is fine and mostly clear, with a few pink and orange clouds in the sky, and enough breeze to keep the insects at bay. From the river and willows along the banks comes the gathered cries of a legion of birds — Common Terns, Lesser Yellowlegs, ravens, and Rusty Blackbirds. The terns circle above the tent, scolding us and hunting fish. I stay up later than I should, writing in my journal and enjoying my last night in the Northwest Territories. I contemplate the broad roll of the river and the path its waters take to the Arctic Ocean, and think back fourteen years to when I paddled 225 miles upriver, from Fort Simpson to Great Slave Lake and beyond, headed toward the Barrens and Warden’s Grove for the first time. The skies darken into night, and I know that I have crossed the dividing line between “North” and “South,” an ecotone no broader than the Mackenzie. I close my journal, slip into the tent, and for the first time since mid-May, I sleep in a country of stars. Then it’s south through thick forests of spruce, poplar, birch, and aspen and into northern Alberta. The country around Manning, Peace River, and Valleyview is rich with winter wheat and the brilliant, neon yellow splash of canola flowers. We cross muddy rivers running rich with topsoil as they meander through the agricultural fields and mosquito-filled forests, then pick up our first freeway in Edmonton, nine hundred miles south of Yellowknife. We stop for donuts, but for some inexplicable reason, not at the West Edmonton Mall, billed

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as the “world’s largest entertainment and shopping center.” I buy a copy of the Edmonton paper, and for the first time in more than two months, immerse myself in the business of the Outside. Concern about the news tugs at me with an insistence that I haven’t felt for months. The language of the paper is not the language of Warden’s Grove, and the cabin drifts away from me, farther and farther into the past. South of Edmonton, to the west, we see the broad, jagged scarp of the Rockies backlit by the evening sun, then stop in Calgary for the night. In the morning there are the green and orange grain elevators of the Milk River country, and just beyond, the border crossing at Sweetgrass, Montana. The U.S. customs agent at the border sees nothing suspicious in our demeanor and waves us through without a question — no worries about the Harris’s Sparrow carcasses tucked away (legally of course, with all necessary import papers in order) in one of the boxes.

Montana and Wyoming At the border, we pick up Interstate 15 and barrel on toward Kansas, running out of Canada and the high plains and into the basin-andrange country of the Rocky Mountains. Primed for movement and pulled south by the gravity of family and other commitments, we stop only for gas and food. Unlike the Harris’s Sparrows, we do not linger along the path to our wintering grounds, and our southward flight is every bit as focused and insistent as was our northward one; we do not wait for southerly winds to push us toward the Great Plains. At Livingston, Montana, we grant ourselves a diversion and cut south and east through Yellowstone and the Absaroka Mountains. We camp for one final night in the cool air, along a cottonwood-lined stream. We are in grizzly country once again. They are common in the high mountain valleys just to the south of where we sleep, and for a short while Warden’s Grove draws closer, before our predawn start carries it into the far distance of memory. Beyond the mountains, we cross the high and arid basin of the Powder River country, years shy of its coalbed methane dreams. Casper is a tangled mass of truck stops, motels, and strip malls, but I’m drawn away from the sprawl, toward the heavy rain squalls that crown the Laramie Mountains. Near Douglas, Wyoming, there’s a

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billboard — “The Four Winds Motel: Jesus is Coming Soon” — but we sacrifice the possibility of a chance encounter and drive on. We leave Interstate 25 south of Douglas and follow a rain-slick two-lane highway along the North Fork of the Platte River, through irrigated fields smelling of cut hay, uplands rich with the scent of wet sage. Cottonwoods dance in the wind, sheets of rain and thunderclouds are layered over the hills and pastures. Humidity begins to rise into the air, and the skies are full of summer haze. We see the first fields of corn just shy of the Nebraska border, and the first feedlots come soon after. The Midwest gathers its presence.

Nebraska and Kansas We stop for dinner at a café in tiny Oshkosh, Nebraska. A family of four enters the restaurant and sits at a nearby table. The mother, in her mid-twenties, looks exhausted and bitter. She wears a loose-fitting shirt, checked polyester pants, and soiled tennis shoes, and snarls constantly at her restless young kids: “Shut up!” “Don’t touch that!” “Don’t think that you’re funny!” But absolutely nothing is funny, and the kids flinch each time she targets them. The man whom I take to be the father is large and laconic, dressed in jeans and a chambray shirt cut off at the shoulders. He wears a baseball cap extolling the joys of fishing: “Happiness is a 15-incher.” A ring of keys dangles from his belt. He’s in tight control of himself and says nothing for ten minutes, while the mother and kids are locked in their tense back-andforth. His detached, stoic silence is eerie, and there’s an air of mute anger about him. I try to shut out the four of them, and glance to the adjacent booth, where another young woman sits. She’s dining with her four- or five-year-old daughter; both of them are immaculately dressed, and look happy. The woman bends gently toward the girl as they discuss menu options and order their food. She is focused on her child, solicitous and caring, and the two of them look to be at ease with one another. As we walk out to the truck, I think about the two families and the deep emotional divide that separates them, and me. I realize the extent to which I have been divorced from people these last few months, how little the everyday interactions and concerns that blanket most people’s lives have intruded into my world.

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The West ends at sunset, as U.S. 26 crosses the North Platte and climbs through a wide canyon at Ash Hollow State Historical Park. The last eroded landscape of the journey, breaks of sedimentary rock, bunchgrass and juniper, slide into darkness. There’s lightning on the horizon, flashes of orange light catching the spread of distant rain as the sun slips beneath a layer of clouds and then goes to ground. At Ogallala, I call Melissa: “I’ll be home tomorrow, by early afternoon.” She sounds tired and more than ready to have me back. I am ready to be home, too, and feel a wave of guilt and longing wash over me — I’ve been gone too long, left too much to her. We pick up the Interstate and drive on, deep into the humid night, past North Platte, Gothenburg, Kearney. The truck has no air conditioning and so we keep the windows rolled down, let the thick Midwestern air swirl around us. It’s too noisy for conversation as the tires slap against the joints in the concrete highway and the poorly sprung truck bounces eastward, so I sink into myself, consider the past three summers, my family, Lawrence. I feel myself traversing this last, emotional ecotone, one that parallels the wide divide we’ve just crossed, from the mountains of Wyoming into the rich, agricultural lushness of Nebraska. I think about holding Martin, now seven months old, how I’ve missed the last three months of his development. I imagine reading a book to Liza — her favorite activity — then tucking her in and playing one of our goodnight games before turning out the lights. I wonder what it will be like to greet Melissa again, and stay up late, talking of summer. I wonder how I will manage the transition back into the Outside. I know that the pace of my life will accelerate, that I soon will be caught up in child care, home repairs, and maintenance activities. I will have to change countless diapers, mow the lawn, buy groceries and cook dinner, worry about bills, teach three sections of introductory biology labs, instruct a general biology course at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, analyze my data, and write a dissertation. The technical details of Harris’s Sparrows will fill my world, and the birds will become statistical ghosts; they will fly from graph to graph, forage among multivariate equations, build their nests in files of data. I will begin searching for a full-time job, and will have to justify my research to a larger, critical audience. Warden’s Grove will recede into history, but I know that I will be seduced by my

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memories of the place, by a world viewed through the fog of nostalgia. The obvious contrasts between my life in Kansas and on the Barrens will work away at me, and at times I’ll gravitate toward the cabin, where things were far simpler and quieter, and I wasn’t pulled in a thousand directions at once. More and more, I will come to disregard the difficult aspects of my time at Warden’s Grove — the fear that I carried with me during my first summer, the nagging uncertainties about my research, the relentless attacks by the mosquitoes and blackflies, the heat, the stink of my clothes and body after months without a real bath, the times when I yearned for what was in Lawrence. And yet, there was, and is, that view from Warden’s Grove, the one that I’d seen so many times — eighteen months worth of sunrises and sunsets, last glows of evening light on the Clarke River dunes, winter moonrises over the frigid, silvered immensity of the tundra, summer moonrises over the mirrored surface of the Thelon — a view held, like a perfectly cut diamond, in a beautiful setting of silence and distance. Eighteen months of views: eleven of them during my youth, when I was part of the “Traverse of the Northwest” expedition, seven more when I’d traced my obsession with Harris’s Sparrows back into the Barrens. Since I’d arrived at Warden’s Grove in 1989, the birds had become an integral part of the view, and my world. Over the years, I’d put a lot of time and energy into Warden’s Grove, and I supposed that I knew it better — felt more for it — than anywhere else on Earth. I’d repaired the roof on the main cabin three times, twice because of bear damage; roofed the upper cabin, built in 1928 by A. J. Knox and Billy Hoare; helped haul tons of food and equipment to the cabin, either from the edge of the Thelon (blessedly) or, as I’d done in 1977 and Paul and I had done again in 1991 (not so blessedly), from the shores of Cache Lake. I’d climbed Home Hill a hundred times, spent hundreds of hours doing little more than sitting on the tundra, and watching. I knew the animals and plants of the place more intimately than I knew them anywhere else, felt an easy familiarity and respect for them, for the ways in which they had adapted to the adversities of life on the Barrens. All told, my life at Warden’s Grove had been a very good one, and most of the time I’d felt very good while in it. A botanist I knew in Lawrence once walked, with a friend, from the eastern edge of Kansas to the Rocky Mountains, mostly cross-country, as a way of coming to some fundamental understand-

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ing of the Great Plains. He’d experienced, and thought about, many of the same things that had grown out of my time at Warden’s Grove and my expedition across the Northwest Territories: a deeper sense of place, and the satisfaction and delight that come from having attained a difficult goal and done something more or less unique in our modern, late twentieth century world. But in the shadows of both journeys was a negative consequence: a tendency to discount the bad moments, the exhaustion and anger, the discomfort and doubt, and remember only the beauty, the strength, the joy of movement and solitude. By doing so, we were more likely to take comfort in what we recalled, rather than in what actually was — and thereby set ourselves up to deny the present, the life “Outside.” It’s easy to yearn for the past, whether it resides on the banks of the Thelon or somewhere out in the emptiness of the shortgrass prairie and aching sky, when you’ve forgotten (or refuse to remember) the downside. It’s easy to look at your life, set as it is in the present, with its hodge-podge of demands, concerns about money and logistics, and rush of frenetic activity, and contrast it unfavorably with your filtered memories. The present most often comes up short in this comparison, because the selective filter of memory cannot act on what’s happening right now. Personal history becomes less messy and complicated than it really was, and the past can acquire an almost antiseptic appeal. My friend also spoke of the sense of disconnection from other people and lack of focus he’d encountered after the trip, and his tendency to return to the journey. He’d mentally retraced his route a thousand times, much as I’d hiked the High Sierra trails of my high school summers again and again, while I sat in church and suffered through another sermon. And in the years following my final paddlestrokes into the village of Chesterfield Inlet on Hudson Bay in 1978, I’d sometimes felt a similar longing for a time and place far removed from the present. It was seductive, and sometimes easier for me, to inhabit the past than to live in the present. Toward the end of our conversation, my friend commented, “You know, in many ways, I’ve never gotten over the trip.” As he said this, I experienced a moment of recognition, and I wondered if, like a veteran struggling with the legacy of Viet Nam, I would ever “get over” Warden’s Grove, and view it with the proper perspective. Years later, I will encounter a passage by Barry Lopez: “It is through the powers

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of observation, the gifts of eye and ear, of tongue and nose and finger, that a place first rises up in our mind; afterward it is memory that carries a place, that allows it to grow in depth and complexity.” I will recognize this process and relate it to what I experienced on the Thelon, and continued to experience, through memory. I want Warden’s Grove to “grow in depth and complexity,” yet I also am leery of the process, for I understand that it can carry me away from where I am, right now. I love Warden’s Grove and my adventures during the Traverse of the Northwest Territories, but I’m sometimes dismayed by the way in which they’ve transported me away from, and diminished, the present. I have attempted several times to exorcise what I’ve come to call “the ghosts of Warden’s Grove,” with only partial success. The first effort took four years and produced In the North of Our Lives. The second attempt came during my first field season, when I returned to what I knew would be a ruined cabin, repaired it, and cleaned up the garbage that had resulted from the effects of bears and time. A journal entry from my first summer captured something of what I was after: Back at the cabin by 6:15, I went to work on the former cache. Carried bits of rusted metal and glass to the burial pit, hauled anything burnable to the fire pit, then shoveled out the remaining debris from the interior. I worked continuously for two hours, even though the day’s fieldwork had tired me out. I felt as though I was finally paying off a long-standing debt when I threw a bit of stove fuel onto the trash pile and watched smoke billow into the air. Coming back has given me the opportunity to contemplate 1977–1978. Sometimes I feel as though it has dominated my life to an unreasonable extent. The Traverse of the Northwest Territories was a wonderful experience, one set within a particular context and time in my life. I am now eleven years older, a husband, father, and fledgling academic, and yet I somehow expect the magical past to continue. Although I have never wanted, really, to repeat the experience, and I know that I wouldn’t want to live in the wilderness for the rest of my days, the trip has become a major part of the way in which I define myself. I cannot quite get beyond it. There is always the desire to repeat the intensity of the

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experience, and return to Warden’s Grove. Although there’s nothing wrong with living intensely, I think that I’ve come to confuse intensity with context. I want to transcend this tendency; I want to celebrate Warden’s Grove, the Traverse of the Northwest and Harris’s Sparrows, but to be owned by none of them. I love this place and this life, but I’d like to be able to leave and never return, and be happy. The smoke rises from the fire. It carries the molecules of memory, those that hold me too tightly to this place. I want to leave Warden’s Grove much as I found it in August of 1977. I want the past to curl away from me like the smoke. I want to walk away from its acrid smell, and back into the present. I think about these things as the truck pounds along, further into the Midwest and the humid night. We stop driving after midnight, and pitch our tent at a roadside rest area south of Interstate 80. The night is thick and still and warm, and I sleep in shorts and a T-shirt, without a sleeping bag. The adrenalin throb of cicada songs fills the air, lightning bugs glimmer above a nearby field: I have left one summer and migrated deep into another. In the pre-dawn morning, we cut south on U.S. 81 to Salina, then ride the Interstate east to Lawrence, through the Konza Prairie Reserve and the Flint Hills, toward Topeka. East of the Flint Hills, the prairie gives way to trees, which crowd the landscape wherever it’s not tilled, plowed, or grazed. The fields are rich with corn and wheat; on the limestone-capped hills are forests of hickory and oak and Osage orange, drowsing in the summer heat. The morning’s conversation is desultory; I am road weary and talked out, and silently contemplate my reunion with Melissa, Liza, and Martin. As the last of the three thousand road miles drain away, I am excited — ready to be done with movement and anxious to see my family. We take the West Lawrence exit off Interstate 70, head east on Sixth Street, then turn north onto Louisiana and park the truck on the east side of the street. Only about one mile shy of the Museum of Natural History, I stop traveling, months ahead of the Harris’s Sparrows. I am done with driving, and yearn to be still. There is a sud-

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den recognition of this one place: home. This sage-green, two-story Victorian house, shaded by two large maples, with two rockers on the front porch, is where I need to be. There is a moment around noon, when the pearl-gray sky is hung with blinding light and the air is draped in sweaty heat, when I turn off the engine, open the truck door, and step onto solid ground. I walk toward the house, ready to settle. Done with movement, I rest.

In . . .the . . . .Far . . . Country ............................................... It is five in the morning on a late February day. The house is still, and the world outside has not yet stirred into activity. It has been a mild winter, and yesterday morning felt like spring. Snowdrops have broken the surface of the muddy soil and I’ve heard the first, brilliant songs of a Northern Cardinal. But now a storm approaches Brockport, sweeping down out of Canada, and in the last sixteen hours the temperature has plunged almost forty degrees. Gusts of arctic air build and subside, push tendrils of fine snow across the frozen ground. The winds speak of Great Slave Lake, the Thelon, and the Barrens; they carry the scent of the North. It is no time to be outside, but in the warmth and comfort of my home, almost fifteen years and two thousand miles removed from Warden’s Grove, I find myself thinking about the months that I devoted to Harris’s Sparrows, and the years I’ve spent elsewhere, in the deserts, mountains, forests, and prairies of this Earth. I wonder about equations of value, the time and energy that I’ve devoted both to scientific research and to wandering in places as far removed from the crowded and civilized world as I could make them: this much effort for this much data, and for all those wonderful views. . . . As the winds break against the side of the house and stir the branches of the leafless maple outside my office, I consider the relationships between science and emotion, wilderness and knowledge, the natural world and the human one. I ponder ways of seeing and ways of knowing, and wonder how to make myself at home in a world that is steeped in beauty but that often seems malevolent or, at best, utterly indifferent to the interests of humans. And I recall the words of the fourteenth century German mystic Meister Eckhardt: “God is at home; we are in the far country.” I believe that I understand what Eckhardt was trying to say, but on this cold and desolate morning, I pull my jacket close around me and purposely misinterpret him. I acknowledge that I know almost nothing about God, but at the same time I argue for the converse of Eckhardt’s statement. I propose that, whatever his/her/its

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nature and essence, God is in the far country — somewhere Out There, on the Barrens, nestled in the great rivers and greater distances, but also in the wind-flagged heads of cottongrass, and carried in the hearts of birds as they trace the paths of their days. And I understand that it was my belief in the locus of the far country, and my desire to seek it out, that drew me back to Warden’s Grove, and into the lives of Harris’s Sparrows. ecently, I had the good fortune to spend a week hiking with a friend in the Grand Canyon. Our ambitions were moderate and in the afternoons we camped early, which gave me the opportunity to do something that is rare in my life — nothing. Sometimes I brewed up a hot drink and after extinguishing the stove’s muted roar, I sat quietly with my back propped against a rock, surrounded by the depths of the Canyon: sipping strong tea, watching the world, listening, waiting. Along our route, there were many beautiful views, but I was particularly drawn to those dominated by Vishnu Temple, a massive pyramid of red and golden rock rising thirty-five hundred feet above the gray-green shales of the Tonto platform, in isolated country on the north side of the Colorado River. Over the course of six days, I spent many hours sitting quietly, staring at Vishnu Temple’s many incarnations, each created by a unique perspective or angle of the sun, and characterized by its own palette of colors, sunlight, and shadow. The vastness of the Canyon, the quiet, the simple rhythm of hiking, even the names on the map (Angels Gate, Krishna Temple, Rama Shrine, The Tabernacle) drew me into the silence, into a stillness so profound that it was transformed from an absence of sound into an active presence. And during my walk I traveled through layers of rocks rising from, in Norman Maclean’s words, “the basement of time.” There, amongst the thousands of feet of strata built from sand and silt and tiny sea creatures, and the tortured folds of metamorphic rock, I encountered the insistence of antiquity, the sense of an inexorable process that moves through all things. In this landscape, sunk deep in time, the sense of God hovered at the edge of my heart, a stillness and a power that rose from the massive layers of sedimentary rock, the symmetry of Vishnu Temple, and the two-billion-year-old schists that line the Colorado River — but also from the tumbling, liquid melody of the Canyon Wren’s song and the delicate insistence of a solitary anemone flowering in the

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desert scree. Yet God’s presence remained an inchoate mixture of visions. I did not know if God is a supernatural force, and the Canyon a product of his/her/its creative power. I did not know if God is the celestial cement that holds the pattern and process of rock and light and flesh together. And I did not know if God is simply in the Canyon, a part of the animate and inanimate: the heresy of pantheism. All I knew, and know, is that the Canyon and the creatures that live there are sacred, in the full meaning of the word. In the Grand Canyon, the voice of God is strong, yet ineffable; it emanates from the physical world. But on those Sundays when I attend church services, this voice is less perceptible to me, and the path toward faith feels like the most indistinct and meandering of trails. Sometimes I wonder — what is it that members of the congregation worship when they raise their collective voice to God? While the people may believe in and celebrate the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and loving deity, I sense that there really are two central aspects to their worship. The first is a petition to what I only can term probability — what we also call fate. The probability that we will live and not die, that we will prosper and not fail, that we will be loved and not hated, that we will understand and not wither in ignorance, that we will not be alone. The world is beautiful, but it also is mysterious, dangerous, and unpredictable, filled with terrifying diseases, unforeseen accidents, and forces we cannot control. We yearn for order, for security, for assurance that “it” will not happen to us or our children, and that if “it” does happen, we will find the strength and courage to endure. The second aspect of our worship is a celebration of what is best in humanity. It is an admission that humans are full of contrasting qualities: selfishness and selflessness, love and hate, darkness and light, cowardice and courage, awkwardness and grace. We are products of our genes and our environments, and both may curse us; yet we do not have to be the victims of circumstance. We can rise above our shortcomings and sometimes transcend the antecedents of our behaviors — and this is best done in the company of our fellow celebrants. Sometimes I look out at the members of the congregation and wonder what secrets they hide, what failings they embody, what pains and sorrows they bear: as Tim O’Brien would have it, the things they carry. And I see their worship, in its purest form, as a celebration of the world’s beauty, an acknowledgment of their own

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humanity, and a desire to cultivate what is best in them. They yearn to not be at war with the world and with themselves: to be at home. And it occurs to me that I am most at home, and closest to whatever I can sense of God, in the far country — a thought that leads, somehow, into a meditation on several spiders that live on Ellesmere Island, at almost 82 degrees north, less than six hundred miles shy of the North Pole. At Hazen Camp, at the northern end of Ellesmere Island, there is a small community of spiders that is active only when the continuous summer sun moves behind Mt. McGill, which rises almost three thousand feet above the valley that holds the arctic oasis surrounding Lake Hazen. Then the lowlands are filled with mountain shadows that last for a minimum of four to six hours. These spiders, mostly Typhochraestus latithorax and Minyriolus pampia, avoid the full light of the sun, which at this latitude does not set for more than eighteen weeks. They seek out the shadowed areas in meadows and near ponds, where there is soggy, well-vegetated habitat. T. latithorax and M. pampia are less than two millimeters long and much too small to notice unless you drop to your knees and search for them among the mosses and sedges. They feed on minute invertebrates, mostly springtails and other spiders, and overwinter as adults. The author of the study on the spiders of Camp Hazen, R. E. Leech, interpreted the two species’ preference for shaded areas as evidence of their southern biogeographic affinities. Leech hypothesized that T. latithorax and M. pampia are relatively recent immigrants from temperate or low arctic regions; he implied, but did not state directly, that they carry some memory of nocturnal summer activity in their genes. And so, in the shadows of the high arctic summer, in a world of continuous light, these spiders manage to find their night. When I stumbled across this paper, I imagined spending a summer at Camp Hazen, absorbed in spiders, seeking them out amidst the sedges and alpine avens, on the rocky slopes and the braided gravel stream deltas below Mt. McGill. The study focused on taxonomy, and Leech killed and collected 20,534 spiders during two summers of fieldwork, identifying among them four families and thirteen species. But Leech also discovered a night within twenty-four hours of continuous daylight, a night carried by tiny spiders not much larger than the nib of a broad-tipped pen. If only we look long enough and

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carefully enough, we will see things in new and different ways. We will encounter William Blake’s “world in a grain of sand” among patches of sedge and moss on Ellesmere Island, or in a nest of sparrow eggs beneath a clump of dwarf birch along the Thelon River. There is wisdom in data, emotion in numbers, stillness at the center of a Long-tailed Duck’s call, hope and tenacity in the lives of birds, joy in the presence of spiders, if only we see properly. In these visions, complex and sometimes contradictory, lies an understanding that roots us more firmly and completely in our world. Henry Beston has written of animals: “In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time. . . . ” I yearn to travel to these “other nations,” to catch the eyeshine from Kenneth Rexroth’s spider and gaze at her across “immeasurable distance.” I want to look into the dark brown pupil of a Harris’s Sparrow and see something other than a faint reflection of myself, or some pale view of the human animal. I do not desire zoos, or tame deer in county parks, grown fat and semi-domesticated by a life without predators. Neither do I want the moral messages that people may take from the lives of animals, such as those “family values” discerned by some conservative commentators in the recent film March of the Penguins. In a smaller sense, these supposed lessons are foolish because they are based on an incorrect understanding of the animal. Yes, Emperor Penguins show devotion to their mate and young — within a single breeding season. But the divorce rate for mated pairs is 100 percent across years, and if data on other species of Antarctic penguins can be related to Emperor Penguins, they must engage in frequent extra-pair matings. So, which set of penguin behaviors should we seek to emulate? Those that agree with our notions of “family values,” or those associated with a more promiscuous lifestyle? Neither, of course — they’re penguins, damn it. But beyond the misunderstanding and misappropriation of biology is a larger error. By attempting to find miniature, imaginary people hidden within coats of feathers or fur, we diminish animals. We judge them on our terms, by our rules, and they become something less than they are. They become “ours.”

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Instead of searching for morality among the animals, I want to see and understand something of the Other, in all its mystery and magnificence. I want to follow the advice of Iris Murdoch, and “ . . . take a self-forgetful pleasure in the sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones, trees.” If in this process I do find some faint evidence of the human, it would be something carried by the genetic memory of a shared ancestry that has been partially sundered by evolutionary divergence. In the case of Harris’s Sparrows, this split lies somewhere in the Pennsylvania Period some three hundred and twenty million years ago, when the lineages leading to modern reptiles (and birds) and mammals diverged. And for the spiders of Ellesmere Island, the split must extend back five to six hundred million years, into the world of the Cambrian or Precambrian seas. The incomprehensible vastness of such time means that, if I do catch some vision of humanity in the presence of another animal, it would be like the shadow of movement at the very edge of my peripheral vision, or the ghostly flicker of the faintest star more felt than seen, its light gathered by the rods of my retinas after arcing across an unimaginable distance of space, across light years of time. Or in the depth of winter, far beyond the Arctic Circle, the faintest rim of light on the southern horizon, the promise of summer brushing the deepest night, in seventy degrees of frost. For three summers, I lived deep in the wilderness, where I studied Harris’s Sparrows and “did” science. The memory of this time and place, and what I came to know of the animals and their lives, rises up in me like mountains breaking from the shortgrass prairie, somewhere on the high plains of eastern Montana. Drawn north and into the wild by personal history, by aesthetics and curiosity, I wandered through an ecotonal landscape of measurement and imagination, analysis and desire. During the time that I lived at Warden’s Grove, my meanderings had enough pattern and frequency so that in places I wore faint trails into the tundra’s lichens and sedges — trails that circled south and north around the lower edge of Warden’s Grove, then climbed its flanks toward the summit of Home Hill. Unlike the trails of the great post-calving herds of caribou, my trails would disappear soon after I left the Thelon. Still, they were trails. They led out from the cabin, into the larger world of sparrows and spruce, but they

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also led toward an interior landscape, one that I explored more easily and completely in the context of wilderness, and through the practice of science — an emotional and aesthetic landscape held deeply within a larger, physical one. The epigraph to Helen Humphreys’s novel Afterimage is a quotation from the journals of H. F. Amiel (October 31, 1852): “Any sort of landscape is a condition of the soul.” If I read this passage correctly, it implies that Amiel believed that our view of the natural world is influenced by who we are, and that this process creates what we think of as “landscape,” which exists as a human construct. This sounds — and with my added quotation marks, looks suspiciously — like a postmodernist attitude. Although our view of the natural world and how we interact with it are affected by our “souls,” by our histories and personalities, I would argue more for the reverse situation: that “any sort of soul is a condition of the landscape.” The exterior landscape helps define a person and how he or she interacts with and views the world: it helps us to see our souls. So I wonder what my passion for the lonely and often forbidding environments that have claimed so much of my life and desire — arctic tundra, high mountains, heatblasted deserts — indicates about the quality of my soul, the person I was and the person I have become. I am less certain about the nature and effects of internal landscapes. In (appropriately enough) The Soul of Nowhere, Craig Childs writes that every place has an “. . . interior landscape that will never be divulged by a map or photograph. It defines a person’s vision, how well one will move or pause . . . [it is] something not so much seen as sensed. It is something transitory, a moment when the tone of light and the shape of the horizon, perhaps the sudden sound of an animal or wind, meet at one place, revealing the indwelling landscape.” I think that Childs is referring to the essence of a place, the hard edges and softer contours of the land that are created from the various animate and inanimate elements of existence that we encounter as we wander and watch. Childs’s interior landscape is of a place, as much as are rivers and mountains; it is not the same thing as the internal, psychological landscape that each individual carries within — even if it does assist with the exploration and development of one’s personal terrain. I see Childs’s “interior landscape” as synonymous with my notion of the far country, or what the poet Theodore Roethke called

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the “far field”: “I learned not to fear infinity, / The far field, the windy cliffs of forever, / The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow.” It is in this far country, in those far fields, that God, whatever his/her/its form, is most accessible to me. And I have found the far country most often in wild and empty and harsh places, such as Warden’s Grove, or the xeric, hardscrabble Panamint Mountains of Death Valley, where I first worked as a field biologist. Physical isolation and barren landscapes, and the time and distance and silence that they bring, provide the most conducive context for exploring the profound world that parallels — or is embedded within — its physical setting. My understanding of this far country is deepened by concentrating on the details of the exterior landscape and its inhabitants, through the practice of scientific research. And through this process, I may come to sense something of what I might call the spirits of the world’s inhabitants, be they Harris’s Sparrows, caribou, Lapland lousewort or even Aedes mosquitoes. There are moments when I take this practice, with its focus on close observation and measurement, to be a form of meditation, one that requires patience, time, and the ability to concentrate on particular phenomena. And the more that I concentrate on these things, the more that my own soul, and that of the world, is brought into focus. I desire the hard soil, the empty lands, the windy cliffs of forever. I want to gaze toward the aching, distant horizon, wander across a landscape in which the nearest other person is one hundred miles or more away, and then drop to my knees and find the tiniest of spiders, scurrying amongst the pebbles and lichens on some glacier-scoured rib of rock, far beyond the last trees. I desire time, distance, silence, space — the very things that our culture seeks to obliterate. We live mostly in a world of noise, the constant, insistent racket of automobiles, music, television, conversation, and mp3 players. We are quiet only when we sleep, and even then we often are bathed in noise. And when we do encounter silence, we usually seek to escape from it: too much opportunity to listen to our hearts. Turn on the tube, plug into the iPod, call up a friend on the cell. “Forget the world outside,” as an ad for a technologically advanced set of earphones proclaims. Get in a plane and fly somewhere, and do it quickly; travel coast to coast in five hours, around the world in twenty-four. We demand immediate gratification: information and

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communication at the click of a mouse or with the punch of a few keys. E-mail, cell phones, the World Wide Web, wonders all; technology that I use, too: they bring the world closer to us, at a touch of a finger. Or do they? I watch students as they leave class and head across campus. Many immediately pull out their cell phones, even as they ignore the person next to them who, more likely than not, is talking on a cell phone, too. Other students note the cell phones blossoming around them and, Pavlovian creatures that they are, respond by pulling out theirs. And as the students text message and chatter away, the Northern Cardinal singing in a nearby maple disappears, as do the tiny violets flowering along the edge of the campus path. Or I watch myself as I run some statistical analysis on my computer — the kind of procedure that would have taken the better part of a day in the ancient world of key-punched cards and batch processing. If my analysis takes more than a few seconds, I begin to shift uneasily in my chair. I have trained myself to be impatient, and I want results now. I ignore the library, the physical world of books and journals, paper and ink, for the virtual world of online journal articles. I forgo writing friends detailed letters and sending them via “snail mail,” settling instead for hurried, superficial e-mails. We — and I include myself in this — are disinclined to wait, to probe the silent places, to embrace complexity and nuance. Perhaps the world, for all its speed and accessible information, remains as distant and elusive as ever. But the more that I attend to the facts and details of the natural world, and investigate what some might call its veneer, the more I feel as though I can sense its breadth and depth, its mystery. It’s like focusing my attention on the surface of a still pond, while at the same time becoming fully aware of the column of water beneath, the sweep and undulations of the bottom sediments, the paths traced by beetles, plankton, and fish as they move through the pond’s depths. Henry Miller writes: “The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.” For Chet Raymo, a professor of physics and astronomy, “Description is revelation. Seeing is praise.” Yes. While I lived at Warden’s Grove, I focused my attention on Harris’s Sparrows. I measured fluctuations in their mass, the growth of their nestlings, their movements and foraging behaviors, and connected what I found to the larger world. Sixteen years after the fact, I look at

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a photograph of a banded Harris’s Sparrow caught on June 18, 1989. I hold the bird in my bandaged right hand, which is a dirty mess of cuts and abrasions. The combination of color bands tells me that the bird is a male, number 36510, with a wing length of 85.1 millimeters and a mass of 35.4 grams. I know where his territory was — centered on a linear island of spruce, about two hundred yards south of Warden’s Grove — and that his mate was number 36508. She weighed 34.8 grams when first captured, with a wing length of 74.8 millimeters. I can tell you where she nested — there, beneath that small clump of dwarf birch, her nest of dried grass and sedge cupped within a garland of mountain cranberry and gray-green lichen. I know that number 36510 and 36508 survived until I left Warden’s Grove, but that they lost their brood of five, one-day-old nestlings, most likely to an arctic ground squirrel. I know that the male didn’t return to Warden’s Grove in 1990, but that his mate did — I first trapped her on June second — and that she nested two hundred fifty yards from where she did in 1989, in the territory of another, banded male. (Do you want his band number and measurements?) I know that in 1990 she laid four eggs — I can tell you the mass and volume of each — and that three of these hatched successfully, while the other egg was infertile. I can look at the data on growth of her nestlings, and tell you that on day four of their lives they averaged 13.5 grams, but that the third nestling lagged behind its siblings, and weighed only 11.4 grams. Give me a few moments, and the right software, and I can calculate a growth curve for the nestlings. I can work out the rates at which the parents fed their nestlings on the third day of their lives. I can tell you that I banded their seven-day-old nestlings on July 4, 1990, and that they fledged two days later, before they disappeared into the great void that swallows the marked fledglings of almost all migratory songbirds. I could go on, of course. I could overwhelm you with an avalanche of data, numb you with numbers. But when I consider all of the data that I gathered and recall the long hours that I spent sitting on a foam pad, watching nests, an immovable feast for the mosquitoes, or look at the photograph of male 36510 as he’s cradled in my hand, I see as much mystery as data, sense as much of the presence of God as I imagine that I ever will feel. The numbers represent the surface of things, but they also provide a path to the wonders that are carried in the heart and blood of thousands of generations of Harris’s Spar-

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rows. The birds fly out of the past and into the future, a great river of them, and during my summers at Warden’s Grove I waded into just the smallest eddy of their current. Yet it was there, in the shallows, in my attention to the details of the birds’ lives, that I was brought most fully into the world. Although the numbers and observations are not the Harris’s Sparrows themselves, they are of them. They are part of their story, which is only one story among the millions that are held within the fabric of life. I consider the breadth and depth of existence and I see lessons everywhere, woven from the warp of measurement and observation, the weft of emotion and spirit — parables of sparrows, of course, but also of penguins, algae, and even lowly laboratory mice.

Three Parables — Of Penguins, Algae, and Mice During the Antarctic winter, female Emperor Penguins spend two months foraging at the edge of the land-fast ice before returning to the breeding colony to feed their chicks, which have been cared for by their mates. Biologists have outfitted a number of these females with time-depth recorders and monitored their behavior as they foraged on crustaceans (krill), Antarctic silverfish, and squid. As reported in one paper, the daily pattern of the females’ lives remained remarkably similar throughout the Antarctic winter. Each night they huddled together on the sea ice for roughly nineteen hours. They began feeding around nine-thirty in the morning, in twilight or when the sun had climbed above the horizon. Over a five-hour period, each penguin completed about twenty-six foraging dives, in waters between 29 and 33 degrees Fahrenheit. Most of the dives were at less than 164 feet, but some females regularly dove to between 328 and 656 feet, and one fed at depths greater than 984 feet on more than 40 percent of her dives. The maximum recorded dive depth was about 1,570 feet. At this depth, penguins would have been subjected to hydrostatic pressures roughly forty-nine times the atmospheric pressure on the surface of the earth. During their foraging dives, the females used the same motions and muscle groups as birds in flight, propelling themselves through the water by powerful downstrokes of their stubby wings — for unlike flightless terrestrial birds such as emus

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and ostriches, Emperor Penguins have many of the same musculoskeletal adaptations as do flighted birds. These include a welldeveloped projection off their sternum, the keel, where the large muscle that powers the wing’s downstroke, the pectoralis, is attached, and a large wishbone, or furcula, which increases the efficiency of flapping flight. The average length of the females’ dives was about 3.6 minutes, although the duration of the longest dives by individual penguins averaged 12 minutes, beyond their calculated behavioral aerobic dive limit. Other studies have shown that Emperor Penguins conserve oxygen stores during dives by slowing their heart rate and reducing peripheral blood flow, and that they have a remarkable ability to tolerate oxygen depletion, or hypoxia. During extended dives, the penguins consume close to 100 percent of the respiratory oxygen stored in their air sacs and lungs, and arterial blood oxygen levels — including those in the brain — may be even lower than those in the respiratory system. The authors of a study on Emperor Penguin oxygen depletion comment, “How emperors avoid shallow water blackouts remains a mystery,” as does the ability of the birds to avoid developing nitrogen bubbles in their blood, or “the bends,” as they quickly rise to the surface at the end of a dive. To summarize: in a world below the Antarctic sea ice, where there are fifty atmospheres of pressure, subfreezing waters, darkness, and extreme hypoxia, Emperor Penguins go about their business. Elsewhere in Antarctica, the dry valleys of southern Victoria Land lie at an elevation of about thirty-two hundred feet, and have a climate as harsh as any on the planet. During the complete darkness of winter, temperatures probably drop to −76 degrees Fahrenheit, and winds of sixty miles per hour or more, descending from the Antarctic ice plateau, rage across the landscape. Although on good days, summer temperatures may climb to a few degrees above freezing, the desiccating winds remove much of the moisture deposited by rare, minimal snowfall events. Even during the relatively mild summers, rapid fluctuations in environmental conditions impose additional burdens on organisms: due to changes in cloud cover and gusting winds, surface temperatures fluctuate by as much as thirty degrees over the space of a few minutes, resulting in a sequence of freezing and thawing events on soil and rock faces. The environment of

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Victoria Land’s high-elevation dry valleys is so cold and dry, and so inimical to life, that scientists have proposed that it could serve as a model for environmental conditions on Mars. The author of one paper on Victoria Land writes, “The extreme conditions on . . . the surface create a barrier to colonization that cannot be overcome by physiological adaptations.” There are no visible signs of plant or animal life, not even the crustose lichens that occur in other, highlatitude environments. And yet life does endure, all of it in protected places — a small amount in dry valley soils, occasionally in rock fissures. However, in Victoria Land’s mountains, life is most abundant beneath the surface of rocks. There, collections of microorganisms, termed cryptoendolithic communities, persist in the pores of exposed quartzite, where they grow to a maximal depth of one to two millimeters. Cryptoendolithic communities are sustained by warmer temperatures on north-facing rocks, and the presence of liquid water in the pore spaces for several days after a snowfall. In Victoria Land, cryptoendolithic communities are composed primarily of photosynthetic cyanobacteria and the algal portion of the lichen symbiosis; the consumers are the heterotrophic, fungal portion of the lichens, while bacteria function mainly as decomposers. The translucent, permeable exterior of the quartzite allows the penetration of sunlight, water, carbon dioxide, and oxygen in quantities sufficient to sustain the microorganisms. In the bitter environment of Victoria Land, a more benign world exists. Beneath the surface of the rocks, where we would least imagine it, life flourishes. Laboratory mice live in an environment just about as far removed from the sea ice and dry valleys of Antarctica as one can get on this planet, and yet they have their mysteries, too. When male mice encounter females or their pheromones, they emit high frequency vocalizations, beyond the range of human hearing, which probably serve to attract or retain mates. Male mouse vocalizations have many of the characteristics of bird song, as they are composed of several different syllable types with a consistent temporal sequencing, and contain repeated phrases. Some syllables have large, sudden changes in pitch, and display both a fundamental frequency and a faint harmonic, a trait found in the syllables of many bird songs. The authors of a recent study on mouse vocalizations conclude that mice are among a select group of mammals — humans, whales, and

208 In the Far Country

bats — known to sing, and state that, “the richness and complexity of mouse song appears to approach that of many songbirds.” Male mouse songs also possess stereotypical structure, which can be used to identify individual animals. It is not known if male mice produce their songs by resonation of the larynx or by aerodynamic whistles, or if they learn songs through experience. Because humans cannot hear mouse songs, they remained undetected until very recently. Beyond the veneer of our aural world there exists unexpected complexity and structure, an unimagined universe of song. Most often, we live on the surface of the world, and of our lives. We are disinclined, or too busy, to look toward the centers of our own hearts and minds, or to probe the depths of creation. We are reluctant to hold still, and to embrace silence, distance, and solitude. Only rarely are the world and its inhabitants famous to us. Our education generally does not prepare us to think creatively or passionately, and to take intellectual and emotional risks. When we encounter numbers and graphs, the data of life’s rich presence, we lack sufficient imagination to fully appreciate the patterns that they reveal, their significance and beauty. For many reasons, we rarely see into the far country, or travel through the far fields — just as we do not consider the deepest parts of the ocean when we glimpse the roiling waves, explore the interior of rocks when we feel their rough exterior, or seek out song when we perceive only quiet. Yet, we live in a world of wonders, far richer than our imaginations, where penguins fly through the ocean, algae breathe in stone, and mice sing — and where a small songbird, Zonotrichia querula, passes its unremarkable, miraculous life. Twice each year, these birds travel sixteen hundred miles or more between their breeding and wintering grounds, finding their way through the great vastness of boreal forest and prairie. They build their nests and nourish their young, huddle in leafless thickets during the winter, survive storms, hawks, ground squirrels, blackflies, and the eternal search for food. They move in ways that we never will fully comprehend, speak a language that we never will translate. There are many times when I feel lost and adrift in the world, uncertain of my direction or purpose. But when I stand at the edge of a tiny copse of spruce, somewhere on the Barrens, and cradle a small bird in my hand, I can feel its heart beating against my flesh and I can search the depth of its eyes. There, I will encounter something fundamental,

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something that binds me to the world. Immersed in silence and solitude, I can travel deep into the far country, and go to ground. There, I can feel at home. In the early morning, before dawn, I dream of the far country. I dream of sparrow song and the Thelon going out on some bright, wind-tossed June day. The sky is full of birds and light. Geese are flying, and their gathered calls drift over the Barrens. In the dream, I understand where I am, what keeps me rooted in the world, and why this arctic ache, this desire borne out of emptiness and space and living things, will be with me always.

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