The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature (20 page)

Theologians have tried to answer Darwin’s challenge, but theistic philosophers have, perhaps unsurprisingly, little insight into the lives of caterpillars. Caterpillars are assumed to have no souls or consciousness, so their suffering cannot be a mechanism for their spiritual growth or a consequence of their free wills. Another argument claims that caterpillars don’t really feel anything or, if they do, their lack of consciousness means that they cannot think about their pain, so the pain isn’t true suffering.

These arguments miss the point. Indeed, they are not arguments but restatements of the assumptions that are being challenged. Darwin’s claim is that all life is made from the same cloth, so we cannot
dismiss the effects of jangling nerves in caterpillars by claiming that only
our
nerves cause real pain. If we accept the evolutionary continuity of life, we can no longer close the door to empathy with other animals. Our flesh is their flesh. Our nerves are built on the same plan as insect nerves. Descent from a common ancestor implies that caterpillar pain and human pain are similar, just as caterpillar nerves and human nerves are similar. Certainly, caterpillar pain may differ in texture or quantity from our own, just as caterpillar skin or eyes differ, but we have no reason to believe that the weight of suffering is any lighter for nonhuman animals.

The idea that consciousness is a humans-only gift likewise has no empirical basis: it is an assumption. But even if the assumption were correct, it would not resolve Darwin’s ichneumon challenge. Is suffering greater when pain is embedded in a mind that can see beyond the present moment? Or, would it be worse to be locked in an unconscious world where pain is the only reality? A matter of taste, perhaps, but the latter option strikes me as the poorer one.

The sunfleck has swung across the mandala and now shines on my legs and feet. It moves on and beams directly on my head and shoulders, like a caricature of divine inspiration. The Sun Goddess unfortunately sends no sudden insight into the knots of philosophy; rather, she starts the sweat running down my face and neck. I’m feeling the energy that sustains the wasps’ fidgeting dance across the forest floor. Their bodies are so slight that even a few seconds in the sun will raise their temperature by several degrees. To keep from roasting, the wasps send air currents flowing over their bodies, keeping a second-by-second balance between the inpouring of the sun’s rays and the outflow of heat by convection. My own oozing sweat is the sluggardly response of a bulky mammal for whom heat balance is measured in hours, not seconds.

The sunfleck finally falls off my right shoulder, leaving the mandala
as it travels east. The troubling wasps move with it. As the sunfleck flows away, dimness returns to the mandala, and I find that my senses have been changed by the experience of the sunfleck’s passing. Now as I gaze around the forest I see not the uniformity I knew before but constellations moving over a dark sky.

R
ain has drawn the leaf litter’s humid world into the open. The litter’s inhabitants scuttle exposed on the mandala’s water-glazed leaves. The largest of these explorers is a salamander, a red eft, which stands on a mossy boulder, peering into the haze.

The eft’s belly and tail rest on the rock. The animal’s chest curves up, held by a push-up of spread front legs. The head is level and still. Eyes like droplets of gold stare unmoving across the mandala. Unlike the skin of most salamanders, the eft’s looks dry, like crimson velvet, even in the heavy mist.

Two rows of bright orange spots run down the eft’s back. These spots beam warnings to birds and other predators: stay away, toxins! The eft’s skin is impregnated with poisons, giving the animal a shield against predation that most other salamanders lack. Efts are therefore confident, sauntering aboveground while most salamanders skulk below. This boldness explains the eft’s unusually dry skin. Unlike their timid, light-fearing cousins, efts have thick, relatively waterproof skin that can withstand the daylight glare.

The eft holds still for a couple of minutes, breaks its trance with five steps across the moss, then halts and freezes again. Most likely it is searching for gnats, springtails, or other small invertebrates, using alternating bouts of quiet watching and surging movement to sneak up on, flush, and grab its prey. This is a common hunting tactic. Watch a
robin on a lawn or a human searching for a lost cat and you’ll see the same pattern of movement.

The eft’s walking style is clumsy. Legs sprawl away from the body and oar the ground. A back leg swings out and forward, then the front leg on the opposite side, then the other back leg. The spine curves from side to side as the legs move, throwing the legs out and forward. This horizontal sway of the spine is like a fish swimming. Although the bones and muscles of efts are adapted to a terrestrial existence, their overall walking style is a fishy wiggle. This sideways twist works well for animals swimming against the all-encompassing solidity of water or soil, but on two-dimensional surfaces the writhe is inefficient—salamanders have to balance on three legs (or on their bellies) as they swing out one leg at a time. A panicked, running salamander is a whir of flailing limbs.

Terrestrial vertebrates whose lives require speed have reworked the fishes’ ancient architecture at least three separate times. The ancestors of mammals and two lines of dinosaurs each came up with modifications to the sprawling inefficiency of the fish-on-land. Legs moved in and under, putting the animal’s weight directly over its feet. This made it easier to balance and, therefore, to run without toppling over. The spine’s side-sway was replaced with an up-and-down flex. Mammals are masters of this flex and can reach forward with both forelegs while pushing off with the combined power of both hind legs, then curve the spine down and stuff their forelegs back while swinging the hind legs forward to plant them ready for the next push-off. No salamander can match the bounding gait of a mouse, let alone the enormous leaps of a running cheetah. This newfangled spine has, ironically, returned to the ocean to compete with the old fishy spine. Whales move their tails up and down, rather than side to side, revealing their terrestrial ancestry. Mermaids, it seems, do the same.

The eft’s spine and limbs make it ungainly on land, but the animal’s life cycle is only partly terrestrial. “Efts” are just one of many stages in the life of the eastern red-spotted newt. The eft is a midlife stage, sandwiched
between a larval stage and an adult. Unlike the eft, both the larva and the adult are aquatic. The larva chews its way out of an egg anchored to submerged vegetation in a pond or stream. The hatchling has feathery gills on its neck and lives submerged in water for several months, feeding on small insects and crustaceans. In late summer, hormones bewitch the larva’s body. Gills dissolve, lungs grow, the tail turns from a paddle to a rod, and the skin roughens and flushes. The eft that walks onto land has been torn apart and rebuilt by an exaggerated puberty.

Once metamorphosed, efts stay ashore for one to three years, exploiting the bounty of the forest with no competition from bullying adults. Efts are like caterpillars, growing fat on a food source that no other life stage of their species can use. When efts get large enough, they return to water and transform themselves once more, this time into olive-skinned swimmers with sexual organs and keeled tails. These adults remain in the water for the rest of their lives, breeding yearly and, in some cases, surviving for more than a decade in this final life stage.

The complexity of this life cycle sheds some light onto the strange name of the animal in the mandala.
Eft
is the Old English name for newt, and this archaic label is retained to distinguish the immature terrestrial life stage from the sexually mature aquatic stage. Egg, larva, eft, adult; a succession that sends us to the basement of our language to rummage for words with which to tag all the phases.

When newts return to water to breed, their poisoned skin allows them to live side by side with large predatory fish, thus unlocking habitats that are too dangerous for other, less toxic salamanders. By damming streams and creating thousands of ponds stocked with bass and other predators, humans have unwittingly given the newt a great advantage over its salamander kin. The newt is riding the bow waves of the Great Ship of Progress.

The newts’ repeated transformations are just one slice of the remarkably diverse repertoire of salamander life cycles. The
Plethodon
that squirmed across the mandala in February passed its larval stage in the egg. The egg hatched into a miniature adult that had no further metamorphosis to endure. So,
Plethodon
salamanders never need go to water to breed. Upstream from here, spotted salamanders lay eggs in ephemeral spring pools. Their larvae stay in the water, feeding desperately to transform into subterranean adults before their pond dries up. The streams that I can hear from the mandala contain two-lined salamanders that keep the egg-larva-adult system but remain in the stream as adults. Downstream from here mud puppies live in larger streams and rivers. They skip the “adult” stage, keeping the gilled larval body throughout their lives and growing reproductive organs in this juvenile form. Flexibility of sexuality and growth is therefore responsible for a large part of the salamanders’ success. They mold their lives to fit the environment, and they live in a wider array of freshwater and terrestrial habitats than any other group of vertebrates.

As the standard-bearer of sexual flexibility lumbers out of sight, the mandala is washed with sounds from another champion of adaptability. A jumble of high-pitched barks and yowls is answered by a lower howl and yap. Then, the sounds meld into one tangled chorus of yowls and yips. Coyotes. They are very close. I am likely overhearing a mother greeting her teenage pups in the rock scree thirty paces east of the mandala.

The coyote pups were born in early April, just as the maples leafed out. Their parents courted and mated in midwinter and, unusually for a mammal, the male stayed with the female through her pregnancy and brought food for the youngsters for several months after they were born. By now the pups are old enough to have abandoned the cave, hollow log, or burrow that the mother chose as a nest site. Coyote parents leave the half-grown pups at rendezvous sites where the youngsters loiter and play while the parents search for food. Feeding adults often travel a mile or so away from the pups, then return amid joyful
howls at dawn and dusk to feed, groom, and rest with their offspring. Most probably, it is one of these reunions that I heard. The weaned pups are first fed regurgitated food, then unchewed scraps. Over the late summer and fall the pups will range farther on their own, eventually leaving the natal home range in late fall or winter to seek their own home. Finding suitable territory that has not already been claimed can be hard, so these wanderers travel tens, sometimes hundreds of miles from their mothers’ dens.

The air over the mandala has only recently been tickled by the yodels of coyotes. Although coyotelike animals may have lived here tens of thousands of years ago, these proto-coyotes were extinct long before the arrival of humans. When humans arrived, from Asia and, later, from Europe and Africa, coyotes lived in the western and midwestern prairies and scrublands; wolves ruled the eastern forest without interference from their smaller cousins. In the last two hundred years, however, wolves have declined rapidly and, in just the last few decades, the coyote has colonized the entire eastern half of the continent. What accounts for the startling reversal of fortunes of these two canids? Why did European colonization of North America crush the wolf but cause the coyote to sweep victorious over half a continent?

The wolf’s symbolic role in European culture predestined North American wolves for intense persecution. The sound of howling wolves that woke the Pilgrims on the
Mayflower
during their first night in the “New World” stirred deep “Old World” fears. Wolves also lived in Europe, and their presence had soaked into the mythology of the colonists. Europeans regarded wolves as fearsome and turned the animal into a symbol of unleashed evil, nature’s passions directed against us. As European wolves were exterminated, the distance between man and wolf widened, and the extravagance of the fear increased beyond anything justified by the wolves’ depredations. When the
Mayflower
anchored at Cape Cod, the Pilgrims were therefore primed to shudder at the eerie howls. Here at last was the animal they had been taught to fear but had never encountered. At the time of the
Mayflower
’s journey,
wolves had been extinct in England for more than a century, but in this savage new world they were, it seemed, everywhere.

This loathing is not entirely irrational. Wolves are carnivores whose specialty is eating large mammals. Because they hunt in cooperative packs they can easily take down animals heavier than themselves, including humans. We are their prey, so our fear is justified. Wolf behavior fans these flames of fear. Wolf packs trail lone human travelers for days, perhaps planning a kill, perhaps not. Such behavior guaranteed the wolf a position in our culture’s symbology of evil. The fact that humans rank very low on the wolf’s list of food preferences makes little difference. A few attacks and stalkings were enough to cement the Big Bad Wolf into our stories.

Direct persecution with traps, poisons, and guns accounts for a large part of the wolf’s demise in North America. But Europeans also unwittingly launched an assault on the predator from another, indirect angle. Our rapacious use of wood and overharvesting of deer turned eastern North America from a meat-filled woodland into a deerless patchwork of farms, towns, and ragged logging scars. The champion predator of large herbivores was backed into a corner. The livestock that grazed in the formerly forested areas were the only prey left, and wolf attacks on homesteads increased the hatred, hardening the settlers’ determination to stamp out the animal. Wolf eradication quickly became the policy of the new governments. States hired hunters, paid bounties, and, in a move that attacked both wolves and Native Americans, required “Indians” to pay, under penalty of “severe whipping,” a yearly tax of wolf pelts. Wolves sat at the apex of the forest food web, a mighty but precarious position. Fated by their own specialization and by the fears of the colonists, they succumbed as the web was rewoven in the image of northern Europe.