The Naturalist's Journal: Heading into the woods to search for anti-apocalyptical hope

Whenever I’m on the trail, whether I’m in the lead or I’m being led by nature, I always try to do one thing: avoid a hard-and-fast agenda. To be sure, I often have a search image in mind for a particular area at a particular time, but I also make sure that I open my senses to any other gift that the natural world chooses to present.

It’s a balancing act, and as flora and fauna are now putting so much on the proverbial observation and documentation plate, it can lead to pure chaos and sensory overload. I will, however, take it. At this rebirthing time of year, I don’t want to miss anything.

As usual, I started close to home.

“I have traveled a great deal in Concord,” declared that famous homebody Henry David Thoreau in his masterpiece “Walden.” But there was certainly a world of discovery to be had in his Massachusetts backyard, and I have, over the years, taken HDT’s advice to heart. “I have traveled at great deal in North Stonington,” declared the Naturalist, and wherever you call home, I recommend a similar strategy, and the deepest of local reads.

So it was that I was scanning, at close range, the myriad wildflowers — OK, weeds by any other name — that have established themselves in what passes for a lawn on the ridge. I did, I have to confess, have an agenda, and I was looking hard for the first of the flower flies. These colorful insects, many of which resemble yellow jackets or bumblebees, have, in the past, come out to pollinate flowers as early as the first days of spring, but this strange year, the blossoms remained syrphid-free until close to the end of April, and even then, the lone debut representative of the congregation has remained a solo traveler.

This is disconcerting, since the dire warning, “More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas,” that was written by a group of German researchers and published on Oct. 18, 2017, in the authoritative scientific journal PLoS One, brought the term “insect apocalypse” into the biological and popular consciousness. Sadly, more than a few studies have since corroborated similar, dramatic entomological declines in other parts of the world, and I have to reluctantly admit to observing the same depressing phenomenon in my area.

I’m hoping that the flower flies, a group of fascinating insects I’ve been watching intently since a review copy of a Princeton University Press field guide dedicated to the group came my way more than five years ago, are not the latest population in catastrophic decline, but they’re sure not around this year.

I did spot lots of genuine bumblebees and their less social hymenopteran relatives pulling pollen and nectar out of the lungwort and gill-over-the-ground flowers, so there are certainly still insects working the home turf. Here’s hoping that the diversity challenges are only a temporary glitch — the ghost of droughts past, perhaps, or deluges present, maybe — and nature’s ship will soon right itself. Even in the steadiest times, insect numbers are notoriously prone to roller-coastering, but they can often come back quickly from what appeared to be a fatal crash.

While I looked, I also listened. One ongoing project, as long as my ears still function, has been to try to correlate the pitch and pattern of insect sounds with their producers. This is an observation strategy, of course, that birders practice, and my aural attentiveness to bugs carried over to some newly arriving things with feathers. Out of the forest came the “tea-cher... TEA-cher... TEA-CHER!” call of a small woodland warbler called the ovenbird, and the exquisite flute sonatas crafted by a wood thrush.

Both are personal favorites — birds I wrap my May calendar around — but both, like far too many members of the avifauna throughout the world, are vulnerable to the various slings and arrows of environmental degradation and climate change, with the wood thrush in a sharp population decline that is estimated to be in the vicinity of 50 percent between 1966 and 2019, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey. (The NABBS suggested the ovenbird numbers were relatively stable over the same period, although still subject to the same stresses.)

With luck and enlightened stewardship, those birds would soon have plenty of company, and while the expected arrival of the backyard waterthush brigade never happened in late April, the female ruby-throated hummingbirds have joined their potential mates at the feeder, there are Baltimore orioles singing sweetly in the back woods, and I have every reason to expect the warblers to start paying us a dazzling visit or two.

Indeed, the possibility of seeing and hearing those “gems of the bird world” convinced me that it was time to do a little traveling beyond the backyard ... but still in my town. One traditional stop in my local “world tour” is the trail leading to the top of Lantern Hill. The rugged climb up to its 491-foot-tall “summit” — this is not quite Everest, but the view is pretty spectacular — is always filled with botanical adventures and a wide assortment of faunal possibilities, from the first-of-the-year dragonflies, which are typically blue corporals, to an assortment of swallowtail butterflies and other species, and from various snakes to the resident ravens and their feathered neighbors.

At this time of year, I had one bird in mind to spot: a pine warbler.

These yellowish birds with olive-colored backs are not among the knock-your-socks-off warblers, but they’re pretty enough, in their own modest way, and they have a heart-warming trill that I always associate with a spring you can finally believe in. The song is not, however, delivered in a pattern that is pine-warbler-alone, so when I finally hear what I think is the right singer, I’m also scanning the, well, pines, for similar sounding species, particularly chipping sparrows and dark-eyed juncos, whose trills are all easy to confuse with one another. The pines I walked through were alive with calls, but when I zeroed in on one of the singers, I got a fine view of a chipping sparrow, not a pine warbler. I wasn’t about to complain. A song is still a song, whatever the identity of the vocalist.

The notes announced, no, proclaimed, that this little corner of the natural world was opening for business, and they told me in no uncertain terms that I’d better be looking down as well as up. I knew that was true, especially since I had some business to transact along the rocks and forest floor regions of the area. May is not May until I’ve spent time with the blossoms of a low-growing wildflower known as trailing arbutus, and in many of its usual haunts, I found the creamy white blooms held aloft over the leathery, evergreen leaves. Even at this height of land, there were bumblebees working the flowers.

All was right with the awakening world, and it got righter when I descended through sections of other newly minted wildflowers, particularly a collection of rue anemones, a.k.a. “windflowers,” on account to their delicate leaves that so easily dance on every breeze, that I see in the same place every year.

Close by there’d be other dependables: wild red columbines, yellow violets, and yellow-green cohosh blossoms. In the face of too many challenges to the natural world, seeing the expected species at the more-or-less appropriate times in the predicted spots is grounds for hope. I even took a measure of reassurance from spotting the first brilliant leaves of the region’s signature plant, poison ivy. While I paused to look, I was swarmed by black flies and bitten by an early flying mosquito. Some creatures, alas, were paying no attention to apocalyptical announcements. I shouldn’t complain.

Bruce Fellman is an environmental photojournalist and educator who lives in North Stonington. He has been writing about the natural world for for nearly 50 years. You may reach him at fellnature@sbcglobal.net.