Join me on a behind-the-scenes journey into the magical place that inspired my new book. It’s our very own wildscape, where logs come alive with sparkling insect jewels, flowers shake with buzzing bees, and trees form froggie chorus lines.
Writing a book might seem like a solitary endeavor, but authors never really work alone. Countless people have informed my thinking over the years and helped me hone my approach to conveying the wonders of the natural world. Through reading and conversation, I’ve gained priceless insights from scientists, naturalists, advocates, other writers, friends, and family. As Jonathan Safran Foer wrote of such collective influences in his 2005 novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, “My life story is the story of everyone I’ve ever met.”
Even more important to my development as a naturalist and nature writer, though, are my relationships with the many other beings who inhabit my community, the ones who offer glimpses into what it’s really like to live in the wild. And yes, the “wild” is right here, steps away from the sliding door to my office (and sometimes even in my office, as when a scared black rat snake accidentally slipped inside and hid under my desk until we could safely shepherd her into a box and release her into the trees).
The animals and plants are my co-authors and teachers, helping me see, hear and otherwise sense and imagine the world differently than I ever could on my own. My life story is the story of every creature I’ve ever met, from the green frog who knows how to stand out above the noise to the camouflaged looper caterpillar who knows how to blend into a flower. Let me introduce you to just a few of these wild spirits who inspired me as I researched and wrote my new book, Wildscape: Trilling Chipmunks, Beckoning Blooms, Salty Butterflies, and Other Sensory Wonders of Nature.
The Couple Who Blinks Together Syncs Together
You haven’t lived until you’ve watched the mating melees—often called “mating balls”—of American toads. Emerging from the leaves in spring, these otherwise unassuming-looking, relatively quiet creatures turn into extraordinary trillers and leapers. As they pile atop one another, puffed-up and sporting an array of colors on their skin, they look like tiny bodybuilders on steroids. In their frenzy, males become rather indiscriminate, compelling other males trapped beneath them to emit a chirping release call that essentially says, “Let go of me; you’ve got the wrong frog!”
I’ve read that females can actually suffocate in the process—something I’m happy not to have witnessed. Instead, I saw this couple very quietly parting ways with the crowd and engaging in synchronized blinking. Of course I wanted to know why, but as with so many of my observations, it appears that no one knows for sure. I sent the video clip to Cy Mott, an associate professor at Eastern Kentucky University whom I’d interviewed for Wildscape. “I have no idea and have never seen this before!” he replied. “I’m wondering if it was coinciding with the exact moments when sperm and/or eggs were being released, but that is my best speculation.”
Hey, Hey, You, You, Get Off of My Flower!
I once dressed up as a flower for Halloween, but my pipe-cleaner costume was no match for this camouflaged looper caterpillar, whose clever disguise seemed to fool even a sweat bee. Many caterpillars are masters of crypsis, a predator avoidance strategy, but camouflaged loopers are particularly creative, cutting pieces of flower petals and attaching them to their backs.
Though I still hadn’t spotted one in my garden, I knew they liked to dress up as echinacea and black-eyed Susan blooms, so one July week, I spent part of each morning dashing back and forth between flower patches to watch the action. At the moment I filmed this clip, I couldn’t tell whether the bee didn’t see the caterpillar or didn’t care about her presence, but the caterpillar seemed none too pleased, raising her head as if to say, “Hey, what the heck? Stop stepping on me, please!” Only later, when playing the video on my computer screen, did I notice how many other insects were living in the flower. Can you spot them too?
A Banjo? A Dog? A Frog!
The animals heartily approved of our first pandemic project, a small pond carved out of a previously mowed area. Wood frogs, American toads, tree frogs—they all came calling (and mating and mating and mating some more). But it was the green frogs who stole my heart. Loud and proud, they even competed with the neighbors’ mowers and chainsaws, croaking and blurting and sometimes barking like puppies.
How do frogs and other wildlife handle noise pollution in an increasingly mechanized, human-driven world? Some species fare better than others, and I hear the green frogs calling even from inside the house. Unlike us humans, though, animals can’t run inside and away from the sounds of devastation, and many of their voices are lost to grinding machinery and highways. In writing my book and researching the effects of manmade noise on wildlife, I sometimes forced myself to stay outside with them in solidarity—and planted even more buffering plants to try to mitigate these aural assaults.
Bow Down for Me, Thistle; I Am Goldfinch!
Rounding the corner from our mini-woodland and into the meadow one early September afternoon, I saw this goldfinch going to town on native field thistle, throwing down the fluff and inevitably dispersing a few seeds into the winds. All summer I’d been watching how the thistles—which were originally grown from seed by my friend Kevin—were acting like the mothers of all plants. They were the guardians, with sharp thorns that protected more vulnerable young plants around them from browsing. They were the bee and butterfly feeders, offering up an abundance of irresistible nectar and pollen.
And now they were feeding the birds too. Thistles’ role in the touchscape and the tastescape is too often overlooked, and even maligned, by humans who reject thorny plants as weeds. My role, in turn, is to be an advocate, capturing imagery that I hope will convey the importance of such plants to the animals and the environment.
The Stump Shimmers with Ant Jewels
My husband, Will, saw them first: ants lighting up this piece of tree trunk that we had placed like a stump at the end of a pathway. For a couple of years, it was a hot spot for our resident pileated woodpeckers, who made a daily habit of visiting all the stumps and bits of tree trunk throughout our garden to find ant snacks. Now here were some of the ants themselves, emerging and dispersing from their natal home. Except these sparking jewels weren’t the woodpeckers’ favored carpenter ants; they were ants in the Lasius genus, some of whom are known as citronella ants because of the scented chemical they emit.
We felt so lucky to be able to witness this mating swarm; within hours the ants appeared to be gone, settled into the ground or new wood. Many times people come across a mass emergence of insects or other animals and instantly recoil in fear or disgust; we’ve become so accustomed to a sterilized world that we’re trained to think of these situations as aberrant. But stepping outside of ourselves for just a moment and considering the world from the ant’s point of view is the first step to turning that fear into wonder and appreciation. Because these ants live mostly in dead wood and underground, I have not seen them again and consider their ephemeral sunlit show a gift.
What a Great Place to Raise Kids!
When you have a habitat garden, you don’t have to pack your bags and get in the car to observe wildlife. But it’s a good idea to keep a camera in your pocket because you never who’ll cross your path. In this case, a mama box turtle sauntered by while I was weeding and chatting on the phone with a friend one evening. She was either not bothered by my presence or too determined in her mission to give me much thought. I watched her until the sun went down, with Will joining me when he came home from work. The soft woodchipped path seemed to serve as a guide for the turtle as she explored patches in the meadow and under the trees.
Finally she settled on a spot in what I call the sumac garden. Once filled with mugwort, a thick-rooted invasive herb, this area beyond the pond was the focus of another long-term pandemic project. Through pulling and smothering-by-cardboard-and-woodchips, I made way for many natives—some of them planted, some of them popping up on their own, and all of them worthy competitors with mugwort roots: walnuts, sumacs, mountain mints, golden ragwort, sea oats, broomsedge, goldenrods, wild bergamot, wild basil, and much more.
When Mama Turtle chose the edge of the patch to dig in, she laid her eggs right next to the cardinal flowers and native wild strawberry, one of her favorite fruits. And as it turned out, this sweet lady was an old friend; our videos revealed a T-shaped scar on her shell, a telltale giveaway that we’d met her a few years before, around the same time of year, eating berries under the dogwoods in front of the house.
Bees Shaking Their Booties
If you want to set up a Sonication Station, you could do no better than planting patches of wild senna and Maryland senna. Many native bees sonicate—or “buzz-pollinate”—senna, whose black-and-yellow blooms look a little like bees themselves. They do this by vibrating their flight muscles at high frequency, shaking pollen out of poricidal anthers (or those that have only a small pore at the top or slits on the sides) that would otherwise not release their pollen grains. Making pollen is an expensive endeavor for plants. By requiring extra effort to access it, they can ensure their floral resources aren’t wasted on any old insect happening by. Honeybees are unable to buzz-pollinate, but bumblebees and many other native bees possess this booty-shaking talent.
Sometimes I’ve also seen bees buzz-pollinating flowers with non-poricidal anthers, as this sweat bee was doing to extract pollen from a native Virginia rose. (Turn up the volume to hear the buzz above the distant airplane and barking dog.) Why would the bees expend such energy if they don’t have to? They can get more pollen that way, says T’ai Roulston, curator of the State Arboretum of Virginia at Blandy Experimental Farm.
“When I was in grad school collecting tons of pollen from all these different plants, I found that actually using a tuning fork to get the pollen out was really helpful no matter if it was poricidal anthers or not,” explained Roulston when I interviewed him for Wildscape. “So vibrating can definitely be helpful. The main pollinator of ground cherry is a specialist pollen collector, and ground cherry does not have poricidal anthers. And yet the females collect that pollen with that buzz behavior.”
Feeling the World Through Your Belly
Not long after we bought our house 23 years ago, I came home to find a black rat snake sunning herself on the sidewalk. My presence startled her, and she slipped into the nearby plants and vanished. That scene repeated itself often enough that I realized snakes are living all around us throughout our community, but we rarely see them because they go out of their way to avoid us. When they bask in the leafless trees in early spring to soak up some sun, they conform to the shapes of the branches. When they hide among the leaves and brush piles, their coloring matches their surroundings. Any sightings we’ve had have been lucky ones.
Once after filling watering cans and hauling them out to irrigate newly planted trees, I came back to find Will admiring a snake drinking from the puddles I’d left on the sidewalk. Another day we were cleaning around the potting bench when we saw this snake moving along the retaining wall, back and forth on the narrow ledges formed by stacked blocks, smelling with her tongue all along the way. What would it be like to be so strong yet so malleable, able to touch every surface of your journey with your whole body? That’s a question I’m still exploring, as we’ve barely even begun to understand the sensory lives of these misunderstood animals.
So This Is Where the Party Is!
Habitat is everywhere in our wildscape, from the side of our house where tree frogs wedge themselves in between the bricks to the front driveway where butterflies “puddle” for amino acids and salt, which can assist in reproduction. Habitat exists on my glass, my books, my camera, my toe, my flipflop, even my knee; in short, anything on my person or anything I’ve touched seems to offer some kind of saltiness that the butterflies crave. Sometimes they puddle alone, but their presence is known to build on itself, often attracting more and more butterflies to the puddle party. The above video shows Eastern tiger swallowtails, cabbage whites, and a summer azure congregating after a rain—the first time I saw multiple species in a puddling area at once in our habitat. What drew the first one to this spot, though? Nobody knows yet, but one scientist I interviewed for Wildscape described some theories she’s testing.
I can only assume it was the salty imprints of my fingers that drew this solitary summer azure to a birdbath one weekend in July, after I’d rinsed and refreshed it just hours before. He spent at least an hour on the task, and I watched him absorbing water, excreting, and then sometimes later returning to sponge up the liquids he’d excreted onto the edges of the dish.
It was almost October when I came upon two more blue butterflies puddling; this time two Eastern-tailed blues had taken a particular liking to a hose nozzle. One was a little down on his luck, repeatedly thwarted by the fluffy white pappi of a burnweed seed, but eventually he found his way to the jackpot.
Not Seen But Very Much Heard
In a game of hide-and-seek, tree frogs would be the best masters of disguise but for one fatal, beautiful flaw: their tendency to emit shrill trills. We would never have seen this little one if he hadn’t given himself away by joining in the chorus of his competitors. Maybe he was on to us just as much as we were on to him, though, because he didn’t make even a peep while we had our cameras focused in his direction. Still, he was puffed up and ready, filling the crotch of a young tree where he was mostly hidden behind draping Virginia creeper vines.
In my part of the country, as in many others, frogs of all kinds have been waiting out the winter under leaves, underground, and underwater. Bees, snakes, turtles and caterpillars have joined them in the fallen layers of the previous season too. But it won’t be long before they all reemerge and begin telling their stories, tales of an ever-evolving Earth where humans are just one of an untold number of species jostling for space and position and, ultimately, survival. What will we learn when we listen, look, and welcome them to our wildscapes?
All videos/photos by Nancy Lawson/Humane Gardener