The Bobolinks

The rumble of the mower was slow to reach the house. The man at the wheel had begun by cutting the far end of the field and looping toward the back, mostly out of earshot. This wasn’t nefarious, just a sensible path for carving through the tall grasses across the road from us— in a field that was harboring bobolinks, a flashy, noisy, black-and-white-and-tan bird that nests on the ground. 
             He had made one pass around the front field and was completing a second when the rumble of the machinery caught my attention. I glanced at the calendar: June 28th. The bobolinks would be at the peak of their nesting cycle.
             Those fields, part of a state Wildlife Management Area, usually weren’t mowed before August.
            I slipped on my shoes and went out to investigate. Maybe it was something else. Maybe I was mistaken. But no: There he was, finishing a second circle around the field’s perimeter with a tractor towing a bush hog. 
             He had passed the end of our driveway half a minute earlier. I bolted down the road, running as fast as I could, barely gaining on him but gaining. He couldn’t hear my shouts. I got close enough for him to see me and waved my arms. “Hey! Please stop.”
            He halted, looked at me, surprised, and turned off the tractor.
            I held up a finger in the classic sign for just a second. “Thanks for stopping,” I said when I had caught my breath. I explained about the bobolinks, and how for years these fields had been cut by neighborhood volunteers, and not until August.
            “Well,” he said, “the state told me to cut ‘em.” He got down from the tractor, a working man in jeans and boots, muscular but a little thick around the middle. “The state told me to come do it,” he repeated.
            “They’re paying you?”
            He looked annoyed but nodded.
            “Could you wait until August?”
            He took out his phone and dialed a number, punching the buttons roughly. He hung up—the call must have gone to voicemail.
            I knew who he was trying to reach: the wildlife biologist in charge of the region. I had called him too, a few weeks earlier, volunteering Jeff and myself as the new neighborhood mowers. The man who’d done it for many years was hanging up his spurs. The wildlife biologist hadn’t called me back.
            “Could you please wait to cut it?” I didn’t want to take the job away from this man.
            He made a face. “I don’t want to get all political about this,” he said. He turned, climbed back on the tractor, started it, and put it roughly in gear. He drove briskly off, bush hog lifted, down the field to the trailer that had delivered the cutting machine to our road. 

A bobolink female or immature bird? It’s very hard to tell. Photo by Jonathan Irons, All About Birds, The Cornell Lab

When we moved to Maine, the most forested of states, I had expected to find a home nestled in trees. We ended up in an old farm field that we’ve come to love, and that’s become a beautiful meadow. Trees run down two sides and sneak partway along the back of the house. The rest is open field—bobolink country.

            Surveys in Maine show bobolink numbers to have dropped 3 percent each year from 1966 to 2017, a trend that will lead inevitably to extinction. During that half-century, the species suffered an 88 percent decline in their numbers continent wide. The authoritative Birds of Maine reports that they are “listed as a Species of Greatest Conservation Need because of concern about cutting hay and silage during the nesting season.” More recently, real estate developers have targeted the open fields.

All good reasons to care for these quirky little birds. But besides that, we love having them around.

            They chortle. They squawk. They perch on the wavering tips of grasses, the males gabbling like old men. The sight and sound of them lift our spirits. And so, on July 8th when I once again heard the mower across the road, my heart sank to somewhere around my kneecaps.

            I didn’t dare again confront the man mowing. So I called the wildlife biologist who had hired him.

            He answered this time, in a thick Southern accent that made me feel right at home. But this was Maine, not the North Carolina Outer Banks. Before we hung up, I asked him where he was from.

            “Georgia,” he said.

            I told him we’d lived down south and that I loved hearing his accent.

            “I sure have taken some hell about it all my years up here,” he said good naturedly.

            “It’s music to my ears,” I said. And it was.

            The verdict he imparted was not music, however. He’d told the mower to recommence. He’d checked and had read that the birds would be mostly done nesting by the end of the first week of July.

            That wasn’t at all what we had observed. I swallowed my protests, thanked him for researching the matter, and hung up. Across the road, the cutting was halfway done.

            Bobolink males are mostly black but have a butterscotch swatch on the back of the head that to me looks like a toupee. Their shoulders and rumps are flashily patched with white. They look ready for a night out on the Jersey shore. Females and young birds are drab by comparison, easily confused with sparrows but for the shape of their bodies and beaks. In autumn bobolinks migrate through the Caribbean and spend five or six weeks in Venezuela before continuing on to grasslands scattered through Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina. They come north again each spring, settling in open fields, which are fewer with each passing year.

            The day before the mower showed up for the second time, I’d glimpsed a dozen birds—three males and nine drab females or young—on the electrical wires along our road. An encouraging sight. But that was before.

            Might the chicks in the mown fields have all fledged? It was impossible to know. In the silence after the second mowing we caught no glimpses of bobolinks anywhere, for weeks. I scanned the fields each morning, my heart numb. A flyer put out by the nonprofit Vermont Center for Ecostudies cautions against mowing in northern New England until July 20th, before which, it says, “Nests are fledging young that are incapable of flight for 10 days.” A delay to August 1 would be best. A wildlife specialist at Ag Allies, a Maine grassland birds program, echoed the need to wait until at least July 15th.

            How many young birds might have been killed by the mowing? What should we do about it—if anything? We’re new to Maine (though we’ve been here six years). This isn’t a culture where pushiness is appreciated. Then again, I’ve never been one to shirk a fight.

            One morning in mid-July, a week after the second cutting, I glimpsed two males and a couple of drab birds—females or new chicks—in the undisturbed grasses in back of our house. The males sat up tall, as if daring anyone to mess with them. Their companions were more cautious. The birds didn’t show themselves the next morning, or the next week. It isn’t unusual for bobolinks to appear and disappear. But things seemed quieter this year. Emptier.

            The following morning we left on a sailing trip. When we returned after a week, the power lines along the road to our house were empty. The fields were distressingly silent.

            Two mornings later, though, our front field exploded with birds: four splashy males and another 16 or 18 females and young. It was a party, a grass-top mashup. The birds made no attempt to conceal themselves, calling to each other, chattering away, all the while bobbing on their shaky perches. We watched; we counted; we rejoiced. When I ducked quickly inside for my tea and came back, they were gone, another of nature’s disappearing acts.

            And—that was all. I envision them now in the wild rice fields around Merrymeeting Bay, fattening up for the trip to South America.

I know I can’t protect everything I love in this world, whether people or animals or places. Even so, doing nothing is never an option.

I don’t want to get all political. Neither did I. This wasn’t a political matter but simply an exchange between people with differing fears, overlaid on the needs of a small, quirky bird.

I wrote to the wildlife biologist with the information I’d gathered: the local bobolink census figures, with dates when the birds generally leave the fields; the graph from the Center for Ecostudies recommending that mowing be delayed. That was all I could do. He wrote back within minutes to say that we can probably work something out for mowing later next year.

The seasons will turn; the election will come and go. Regardless of its results, our nation will be living with these rough edges for the foreseeable future. May I do nothing to sharpen them. May I instead find ways to soften them until—however long it takes—the concept of “getting political” over small but important matters, like caring for bobolinks, no longer holds sway over the American psyche.

Writing Home

One spring day nearly twenty years ago, I found myself in front of a class of bored eighth grade students, scrambling for whatever key I could turn to ignite their imaginations. I had walked into their school that morning with the assumption that I could easily run this class—that I could quickly engage these kids and get them thinking about their home landscapes: the places nearby that they considered special, and how those places affected their lives. Ha!

            Early that morning I had slung a backpack full of papers and books into my car for the hour-drive from our home on Roanoke Island, over two bridges and three islands, past fields of rolling dunes and glimpses of blue-green surf, to the Cape Hatteras School, grades K through 12. I was teaching in the school that week through a visiting writers’ program sponsored by the state of North Carolina.

Normally I loved this kind of assignment.  It gave me a chance to connect with young people—to spark a little creativity even in students to whom the idea of creative thought seemed utterly foreign. But for the previous few years I’d been teaching workshops with college students and adults. I was (I realized belatedly) badly out of practice working with students this young.

The assignment I’d given them had always worked well in the past: Write a few paragraphs about your favorite place in the world. Maybe it’s somewhere you can comfortably be alone. Or maybe it’s where you hang out with friends. What’s special about that particular place? How does it make you feel? I stood in front of the class trying to hide my deer-in-the-headlights surprise that my request was falling so flat.

I changed tacks and asked the students how many of them planned to leave Hatteras Island after high school. Twelve hands shot into the air. “I don’t know where I’m going,” one boy volunteered, “but it’s outta here!”

“It’s too boring here,” another boy said. “There’s nothing to do.”

“What about the beach?” I asked. “Any of you like to surf or fish or hang out there?”

Most of the students nodded, if reluctantly.

“Okay,” I said, relaxing slightly. “We all have places we love, even if we live in the dullest spot on Earth. Think of where you like to hang out with your friends. Those places may not be anything special to anyone else, but they’re where you feel at home. Right?”

A few of the students nodded; a few others looked thoughtful. These kids were so young! But for their guarded expressions I would have guessed them to be in fifth grade, not eighth. Most were looking down at their desks, but two or three shot furtive glances toward me One girl with incredibly smoothly combed hair, wiggled a pen between her fingers and stared coolly and directly at me.

I asked the students to take out a piece of paper and sketch a simple map of the places on Hatteras Island that they most loved. “Maybe start with your house, or even your bedroom” (I hoped they had bedrooms) “and go from there.”

This seemed to do the trick. Heads down, they went to work. After ten minutes I asked them to choose one of the special places they’d drawn and describe it in three or four paragraphs. Several of the boys groaned loudly. “That’s almost a page,” one complained.

“Just try it,” I urged.

In a few minutes they were bent over their papers, writing, their brows creased. Occasionally one would pause, as if working through how to describe a thought with words. Only one boy, a youngster with very short, dark hair, wasn’t working. He sat alone at a table on the side of the room, his legs and arms sprawled as if he were dumbfounded by the assignment.

This was Josh, who seemed to have no intention of complying with my request. I made my way to his desk and stood in front of him. “What’s up?”

“I can’t do this. I can’t think of anything to write about.”

“Do you ever go to the beach?”

He shook his head.

“Do you skateboard? Is there anyplace special you go with your friends?”
            “I don’t have any friends.”

I crouched down so we were eye-to-eye. “What do you do after school?” I asked quietly.

“Nothing. I just go home.” His chin rested heavily on his hand.

“You stay inside all afternoon?”

“My mom makes me take the dogs for a walk.”

“Write about that,” I said, trying to hide my annoyance. “Write about walking the dogs.”

He curled his upper lip distastefully and let his hand collapse on the desk.

I hurried across the room to answer a question from another student. When I glanced back, to my surprise Josh was writing.

At the end of the period I asked the students to take their pieces home and finish them overnight. I’d collect them the following day. As I watched them stuff books and papers into folders and backpacks, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Josh. “Look,” he said, thrusting a paper into my hand. “Look what I wrote.

It was three-quarters of a page about his two dogs and how he loved to take them out to romp in an old campground. “I don’t know where to find adventure,” it said, “but they do. They follow their noses, and I follow them.”

The next day, when he handed in the paper, he had lengthened the piece and titled it, in curly script, “The Smell of Adventure.”

The teacher was astounded. “I’ve barely been able to get him to string two sentences together,” she confided.

All week I had similar experiences.

A sixth-grade boy who swore he hated to write turned in a story about his favorite hideaway beneath a bridge over a marshy creek.

An eighth-grader composed a beautiful passage about a live oak she often visited, and the solace she found in its sinewy branches and textured shade.

After a particularly silent-and-surly ninth-grade class, where students refused to acknowledge my simplest questions, a girl turned in a story about her father, who had once encountered a humpback whale on an offshore fishing trip with friends. The whale swam around his boat, coming frighteningly close. As the amazed fishermen watched, it stuck its head out of the water to reveal a fishing net wrapped tightly around its mouth. It couldn’t feed. Reaching carefully for his knife, looking all the while into the whale’s large, liquid eye, the girl’s father cut away the net. The whale remained motionless, watching. Once it had been freed, it sank out of sight, surfaced a final time, and was gone.

I read the story to the class.

“Cool,” said a tall, pretty girl in the back, looking at the floor as she spoke.

“That’s supposed to be true?” asked a wise-cracker boy.

“The ocean’s a mysterious place,” I told them. “Strange things happen there all the time.”

I read them another story, one of my own, about a Hatteras woman whose husband had vanished in a fishing accident. Months after his disappearance, the woman heard him calling to her. She made her way, as if led, into a nearby marsh and immediately found his body, where a high tide had washed it, perhaps the previous day.

“These are the kinds of stories that define our communities,” I said. “They remind us why living by the ocean is so special. But they’re not getting told anymore. Everyone’s too busy watching TV.”

By the end of the week I was exhausted. When the alarm went off at 5:20 Friday morning, I pulled myself out of bed, wondering how our school teachers manage to keep going.

My class load was lighter that day, and the hours passed quickly. I drove north again in a buoyant mood, past fields of shining salt hay and stunted cedars, over bridges and across the blue, blue waters that defined my home. I had no illusions; I hadn’t changed anyone’s life that week. But I’d introduced them to the concept of landscape and story, and I’d reminded myself that all people—even the problem students who never, ever crack a book—have immense capacity for creative thought. It’s a lesson I hope I’ll carry with me all my life.

Landscape of Dreams

Alaska: The word itself is beautiful, the idea of it too vast and faceted to be easily held. Alaska: largest of states, and in some ways the most varied, from shadowy rain forest to the most frigid, light-filled tundra. In my mid-20s, at a time when nothing was certain for me—indeed, when my I-can-do-anything bravado was crumbling—I had a dream about Alaska: a sky-blue sparkling landscape, a place of many colors, more beautiful than any I’d seen. Of tall, snowy peaks; of slanted sunlight and the clearest lakes; of vast meadows of wildflowers.

         I awoke dazzled.

         There was no question beyond when I would go. The timing was tricky, because I had what was considered a good job at a newspaper in Oregon, a position I’d worked hard to win. The pay was generous, the schedule relentless. To my dismay, I neither liked nor excelled at the work. So I kept my head down and saved money. When I had what I thought was enough, I quit the job, drove to Seattle, and caught a ferry north. I left my car with friends, figuring I’d improvise when I reached the end of the ferry line.

         “Improvising” turned out to be hitch-hiking. On the ferry from Vancouver Island, I met a feisty German woman with laughing blue eyes who went by the nickname Mausie, and we decided to travel together. Standing on the road shoulder alongside her, I felt much safer. Mausie had no such fears. She’d explored much of the world with her thumb.

         We hopped ferries as far as Skagway, threading through the islands of southeast Alaska, pausing on any whim. Most days were cloudy with spitting rain, the mountains appearing and disappearing like ghosts. North up the Klondike Highway, where mists closed thickly around us. “I sure wish you girls could see the mountains we’re passing,” lamented the kind truck driver who’d picked us up. I tried hard to envision them rising in every direction.

He let us out at Tok Junction, a sparsely traveled crossroads known as a brick wall for hitchhikers. But we were two women; it took us only four hours to snag a ride. Men waiting with thumbs out glared at us. We rode southwest, passed quickly through Anchorage, and turned toward the beautifully green, off-and-on rainy Kenai Peninsula, where I had a friend from school. North again to Denali National Park and patchy gray weather. The mountain revealed itself briefly on the summer solstice, more spreading and lovely than any peak I’d ever seen.

         But where was the beautifully lit landscape of my dream, and the stretching fields of wildflowers? I had fun traveling Alaska, yes, and a sense of accomplishment for having struck out on my own. Still, sitting around a fire one night, when another camper said, “You should come back in autumn. It’s drier and the wildflowers are amazing!” my spirit gave a small, sad cry.

         What is it about the places we hold dear that nourishes us and makes our souls sing? For me it’s the sense of being slapped alive by the beauty of the landscape. Many people find verve in cities, but I’ve always sought out natural places.

Decades ago on Hatteras Island and the North Carolina Outer Banks, I believed I’d found the natural and spiritual home where I’d live out my life. Climate change and overdevelopment derailed that plan. Now we have a new home in Maine, in a community that has graciously embraced us. These past pandemic years I’ve come to better understand the sentiment of a writer friend who’s given up travel, who’s content to stay close to his home landscape in northern New York.

Still, the restlessness I keep thinking I’ve killed off has a way of reasserting itself.

         “You should come back in winter.” I couldn’t help remembering the words of a colleague in Anchorage, where I was teaching summers at the university.

         “Really?” I’d responded. The idea of winter there, with its relentless darkness, was daunting.

         “Come in March. There’s more light, and the snow is amazing.”

That was in 2019. Alaska in March: The idea echoed through my mind that autumn and early winter, until the global pandemic silenced it. A few months ago I found an opening: a plane ticket I could afford and a trio of friends happy to host me. So in early March I again boarded the ferry from Juneau to Skagway, retracing the first part of my route with Mausie.

The waters of the fjord were rough that day. Steep waves stirred up by north winds collided with the ferry, making it something of a dance exercise to walk to my seat. But the skies were clear, the snow-covered mountains fully in view. They rose straight out of the water, lining the eastern and western horizons. More snowy peaks awaited in the north. Through the ferry’s large windows I could see them all.

There were few other passengers on this cool, late winter day. A couple of women at a table laying out a jigsaw puzzle. A man stretched out in a sleeping bag. A group of Natives of varying ages. I relaxed into my seat as steep white mountains slid by on both sides. I imagined the precipitous plunge of their slopes beneath the ocean surface.

The Native kids were full of energy. Several adolescent boys threw open a side door and tried to fight their way forward to the open viewing deck on the bow. The wind had other ideas. Its force distorted their faces; they scrunched their eyes and pressed on, mugging comically for those of us in the cabin. One boy opened his coat and let himself be blown backwards along the side deck. Watching from inside, a little girl with pink footie pajamas and worshipful eyes ran to the window, laughing and waving to get his attention.

These kids were of the Tlingit tribe, which holds ancestral lands here, and they were well accustomed to the bright mountains we passed, with their rocky shoulders sliding toward the water. Snow-covered peaks above a beard-like covering of forest. Treeless white strips that showed old avalanche routes. There is a way of seeing a landscape in which you know exactly how the pieces fit together. I had that understanding on the Outer Banks, a much smaller tableau. I wondered how many of these kids would come to have it here. I hoped they all would.

The mountains slid by, and by. Even the rough waves couldn’t shake my feeling of being suspended in time. Six hours later, when we reached Skagway, I gathered my things and left the boat as if awakening for the first time that day.

 Wonderful times followed: a trip with a friend to a small town in British Columbia, where the temperatures dropped to -25 F one night and the days were barely above zero. We stayed in a simple cabin, woodstove heat only; no indoor plumbing. Outside I was careful to cover my nose and mouth and to wear gloves, especially whenever I touched something metal. The threat to my skin felt slightly existential. But, oh, the crystalline clarity of the air! I felt as if I could see forever. We walked along a mostly frozen river and skied on a lake overlooked by mountains as high and snow-covered as any I’ve seen. With no wind and great gear, the temperatures were manageable. When the thermometer climbed to zero, we began shedding clothes.

I floated through the days, aware that they were too short but lengthening them by enjoying each moment. It felt a little like magic, like smoothly walking a balance beam knowing that at any moment I could topple off—but also knowing I would not.

Back in Juneau, two other friends and I hiked and kayaked along the rocky, forest-lined coast. We bought a king crab right off a fishing boat and drove past high rise buildings slam up against mountain cliffs. At my request we visited the Mendenhall Glacier. When I’d last visited the glacier in 1980, it had truly seemed like a river of ice, its front face a glaze of snow and dirt and rocks. It filled the river valley and towered over me. Here and there depressions revealed a core of glowing, electric blue. What I found this time was as third as wide, almost a half mile farther back, and clearly dying. Before turning away from it, I said a small prayer of apology.

There were, of course, no wildflowers. I didn’t miss them.

I found the landscape of my dream, and it was not just scenery. I know now that Alaska would never have revealed itself to me on its own. It did so thanks to my friends, all with deep ties to their home. They helped me glimpse its heart. It in turn glimpsed mine, changing me in a small but profound way. It kindled a glow within me that I feel even now as I move again through my daily life, here in pastoral Maine.

I close my eyes and see snow-covered mountains: rocky jumbles, merengue tops, cleaved white faces, long ridges running down to a wave-ruffled fjord. The tracks of my skis as I glide along a frozen lake, circling an island beneath snowy behemoths. A little girl in pink footie pajamas, laughing at her brother who’s outside on the deck, jousting against the wind.