The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature (21 page)

Coyotes prefer to dance over the food web rather than perch atop it. The ax, plow, and chainsaw created forest clearings, pastures, and scrubby edges that offered the coyote just what it needed: plenty of rodents, berries, wild rabbits, and small domesticated animals. Coyotes
are flexible, not fierce, and the loss of any one food item makes little difference to their ability to survive. They can hunt alone or in small groups, changing their social system to fit the environment. Wolf eradication removed another barrier. No longer would wolves persecute and hold back the lithe western invader.

Unlike top predators such as wolves, coyotes are abundant, and this makes them particularly invulnerable to attempts at eradication. As the French Revolution discovered, and the predator control arms of the U.S. federal and state governments rediscovered, it is harder to stamp out the upper classes than it is to kill the king.

The coyote also lacks the cultural baggage with which the wolf is saddled. No terrifying tales from Europe were pinned onto this North American native. Coyotes do prey on livestock, but they leave humans alone. So, although sheep farmers will kill coyotes and lobby the government to do the same, no coyote howl ever awakened the loathing of town dwellers, and no father ever hunted down a coyote for fear that it would slaughter his children as they played in the yard.

Coyotes swept into the northeastern corner of North America in the 1930s and 1940s. The southern wave started later, in the 1950s, and reached Florida by the 1980s. Coyotes arrived at the mandala sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, about a hundred years after the two native wolf species, red and gray, disappeared. Farther west, the invading coyotes overlapped with the declining wolves and may have picked up some genes from lonely remnants of the wolf population. Many of the first southern coyotes were surprisingly red and large, perhaps indicating a mixed parentage of coyote and red wolf. Analyses of DNA from living wolves and coyotes, and from museum skins that predate the coyotes’ advance, support the idea that coyotes interbred with both gray and red wolves. The coyotes howling next to the mandala may, therefore, have a wisp of wolf in their blood.

Biological fluidity allowed the coyotes to flow into the hole left by the wolf. As deer became more abundant, coyotes spread out from the scrublands and into the forest. Eastern coyotes are larger than their
western ancestors and, in some northern areas, have narrowed their diet and started specializing in deer. Coyotes have always preyed on fawns, but these new, larger coyotes hunt in packs and can bring down a healthy adult. It seems that the spirit of the wolf is returning, carried by the changing bodies of its coyote kin and perhaps helped by some stray wolf genes.

The coyote’s colonization of the East has been a dance with the forest. The coyote’s diet and behavior have turned and swayed, following the rhythm of the East. The dance partner, the forest, has added new steps and recovered some older, almost forgotten moves. Deer now have a wild predator, another layer of danger to add to disease, feral dogs, automobiles, and firearms. The catholic diet of coyotes means that their effect on the forest’s choreography spreads beyond predation on deer. Fruiting plants now have an additional disperser, one that carries seeds many miles. Smaller mammals now live in fear of the wild canid. Coyotes also reduce populations of raccoons, opossums, and, to the consternation of pet owners, domestic cats. The suppression of these small omnivores has an unexpected silver lining for birds. Areas with coyotes are safer places for songbirds to build nests and raise young.

The addition of the coyote to the forest’s troupe therefore sends ripples and lurches throughout. The predator makes life safer for the prey’s prey. No doubt other parts of the forest also feel tugs and pulls. Because the coyote prances across the food web, eating fruits, killing the rodents that eat fruits, and eating the raccoons that eat fruits and rodents, the coyotes’ ecological effects are hard to predict. Is seed dispersal helped or hindered? How do ticks fare with fewer mice but more birds? The forest’s future depends, in part, on the answers to these questions.

Coyotes also teach us something about the forest’s past. The original dancers, the wolves, are gone, but their understudies, the coyotes, give us a glimpse at the former grace and complexity of the forest’s motion. The deer, also, are filling in. They not only play their own role
but have taken on the parts of the elk, the tapir, the woodland bison, and other extinct herbivores. The success of the coyote and the deer in the eastern United States is therefore both a symptom of our culture’s profound effects on the forest and a return to a semblance of the cast and plot of the continent before the arrival of Pilgrims, guns, and chainsaws.

Although the mandala sits in an old-growth forest, the flow of life here is powerfully affected by currents running in from the surrounding landscape. The coyote owes its presence in the mandala to the cascade of changes that European colonization brought to North America. This cascade also affected aquatic ecosystems, and there would be fewer efts in the mandala if humans had not dammed nearly every stream around it, creating scores of ponds and lakes.

Ecological mandalas do not sit isolated in tidy meditation halls, their shapes carefully designed and circumscribed. Rather, the many-hued sands of this mandala bleed into and out of the shifting rivers of color that wash all around.

S
ummer’s heat has coaxed another flush of fungi from the mandala’s core. Orange confetti covers twigs and litter. Striated bracket fungi jut from downed branches. A jellylike orange waxy cap and three types of brown gilled mushroom poke from crevices in the leaf litter. The most arresting member of this death bouquet is the earthstar lodged between rafts of leaves. Its leathery outer coat has peeled back in six segments, each segment folded out like a flower’s petal. At the center of this brown star sits a partly deflated ball with a black orifice at its peak.

My eyes meander over the mandala’s surface, delighting in the profusion of fungal bodies. Two white domes at the mandala’s edge eventually catch my attention. The spheres emerge from the receding tide of decomposing litter. I reposition myself to get a closer look. Golf balls! Like a discarded beer can in a stream or bubble gum stuck into the bark of a tree, these plastic globes seem profoundly ugly and out of place.

The golf balls were sent flying from the high bluffs that overlook the mandala. A golfing friend tells me that shooting a ball from the edge of the cliff gives him a thrilling sense of power. The golf course extends to the cliff edge, providing ample opportunity to indulge this buzz. Most of the balls land to the west of the mandala where local children gather bagsful to sell back to the golfers.

Glossy white plastic balls are visually startling in the context of a forest. But the balls also jar because they have arrived from a parallel
reality. The mandala’s community emerges from the give-and-take of thousands of species; a golf course’s ecological community is a monoculture of alien grass that emerged from the mind of just one species. The mandala’s visual field is dominated by sex and death: dead leaves, pollen, birdsong. The golf course has been sanitized by the puritan life-police. The golf green is fed and trimmed to keep it in perpetual childhood: no dead stems, no flowers or seed heads. Sex and death are erased. A strange country.

A dilemma: should I remove the balls or leave them nestled in place? Removing them would break my rule about not meddling in the mandala. But taking them away would restore the mandala to a more natural state and might make room for another wildflower or fern. Discarded golf balls have nothing to contribute to the mandala. They don’t decompose and release their nutrients. They don’t become another species’ habitat. The grand cycle of energy and matter seems to halt when it reaches a dumped golf ball.

My first impulse, therefore, is to restore the mandala to “purity” by removing the plastic balls. But this impulse is problematic for two reasons. First, removing the balls will not cleanse the mandala of industrial detritus. Acidity, sulfur, mercury, and organic pollutants rain in continually. Every creature in the mandala carries in its body a sprinkling of alien molecular golf balls. My own presence here has undoubtedly added strands of worn clothing fiber, alien bacteria, and exhaled foreign molecules. Even the genetic code of the mandala’s inhabitants is stamped by industry. Flying insects, in particular those whose ancestors have come near humans, carry resistance genes for many pesticides. Removing the golf balls would merely tidy up the most visually obvious of these human artifacts, preserving an illusion of the forest’s “pristine” separation from humanity.

The impulse to purify might fail on a second, deeper level. Human artifacts are not stains imposed on nature. Such a view drives a wedge between humanity and the rest of the community of life. A golf ball is the manifestation of the mind of a clever, playful African primate. This
primate loves to invent games to test its physical and mental skill. Generally, these games are played on carefully reconstructed replicas of the savanna from which the ape came and for which its subconscious still hankers. The clever primate belongs in this world. Maybe the primate’s productions do also.

As these able apes get better at controlling their world, they produce some unintended side effects, including strange new chemicals, some of which are poisonous to the rest of life. Most apes have little idea of these ill effects. However, the better-informed ones don’t like to be reminded of their species’ impact on the rest of world, especially in places that don’t yet seem to be overly damaged. I am such an ape. Therefore, when a golf ball in the woods strikes my eyes, my mind condemns the ball, the golf course, the golfers, and the culture that spawned them all.

But, to love nature and to hate humanity is illogical. Humanity is part of the whole. To truly love the world is also to love human ingenuity and playfulness. Nature does not need to be cleansed of human artifacts to be beautiful or coherent. Yes, we should be less greedy, untidy, wasteful, and shortsighted. But let us not turn responsibility into self-hatred. Our biggest failing is, after all, lack of compassion for the world. Including ourselves.

Therefore, I resolve to leave the golf balls in the mandala. I’ll continue removing strange plastic objects from the rest of the forest, but not from here. There is value in keeping a patina of “naturalness” along hiking trails and in gardens. Our harried eyes need a visual break from the productions of industry. Keeping the woods trash-free is a symbol of our desire to be more careful members of life’s community. But there is also value in the discipline of participating in a world as it is, discarded golf balls and all.

Yet the utter indigestibility of the golf balls seems an affront to the mandala’s other creatures. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century golf balls were biodegradable, being made from wood, leather, feathers, and tree resin. Modern “ionically strengthened thermoplastic” balls cannot
be eaten by bacteria or fungi. One billion golf balls are manufactured each year. Are they all destined for a brief bounce on the green, then eternal life as garbage? Not quite, is my guess. The golf balls in the mandala will continue to sink through the litter as the biological material they rest upon decays. In a few years they will hit sandstone and lodge between the jumbled boulders that underlie the mandala. Here they will be ground to ionically strengthened thermoplastic dust. The escarpment on which we sit is receding eastward, so the golf balls will join the slow rumble of grinding rock, and the little balls will be pulverized. Eventually their atoms will settle into new rock, either in a compacted layer of sediment or in a hot pool of magma. Golf balls don’t end the cycle of matter, as they seem to do. They take mined oil and minerals into a new form, soar briefly, then return the atoms to their slow geological dance.

Another fate is possible. The earthstars and mushrooms that ring the mandala’s golf balls may devise a way to digest and recycle the balls’ plastic. Fungi are masters of decomposition, so natural selection might produce a plastic-munching mushroom. Stupendous quantities of matter and energy are locked up in plastic. Evolutionary triumph awaits the mutant fungus whose digestive juices can free these frozen assets and conjure them to life. Fungi, and their equally versatile partners in the business of rot, bacteria, have already shown themselves capable of thriving on other industrial innovations such as refined oil and factory effluent. Golf balls may be the next breakthrough. “Are you listening? Plastics. There is a great future in plastics.”

C
HA CHA! CHA CHA!
The whole forest vibrates.

It is evening and the mandala is dim, unfocused, made of patches of light and dark. As light fades, the chorus pounds louder.
CHA CHA! CHA CHA!
—the double beat of thousands of katydids singing from the trees. Occasionally the isolated notes of a single singer stand out, but mostly individual triplets and couplets merge with the songs of others:
CHA!
The insects question the forest, then answer, “ka-ty-did? she didn’t!,” pause, then question and answer again. The exclamations tumble into one another, melding into a thumping beat. The rhythm holds steady for a minute or more, breaks into a din of unsynchronized songs, then unison is reestablished.

The barrage of sound is the acoustic expression of the forest’s great productivity. Sun energy, turned to tree energy, turned to katydid energy. Katydid youngsters feed on leaves through the summer, gradually molting into larger sizes, finally emerging as thumb-sized adults. The great vigor of the forest’s plants thus translates into spectacular blasts of sound. The katydid’s scientific name expresses this connection,
Pterophylla
camellifolia
, the camellia leaf-wing. Not only is the katydid’s life powered by and built from foliage, but the insect looks just like a leaf.

Katydids sing with their wings. A corrugated ridge, called a file, runs across the base of the left wing, just behind the head. A nub on the right wing sits opposite the file. The insect strums these wing bases
together, drawing the nub like a plectrum over the file to make a buzz or hum. Katydids are no amateur jug band strummers. They inflect the vigor, angle, and length of their strokes like master violinists on their bows. The katydids’ speed outshines concert-hall virtuosos and backwoods flat-picking guitar champions. Some species strum more than a hundred times each second, which, when combined with the closely spaced bumps on their files, produces fifty thousand pulses of sound per second, sounds that are well above the limits of human hearing. The katydids around the mandala are more mellow strummers, pulsing just five to ten thousand sound waves each second. These notes are higher than the highest notes on a piano keyboard, but they are low enough that our ears can perceive their whines.