5:11 a.m. 60 degrees, wind N 1 mph. Sky: dull and congested; more gray than blue; rumpled and torn. Permanent streams: emaciated versions of themselves; upper mute and lower retreats below the surface. Wetlands: a fresh green without a hint of fog. Pond: rolling mist converts reflections into an impressionistic painting like Monet's water lilies or a landscape photograph taken through a vaseline-filter. Terminal seeds of mountain maple took flight.
Pockets of sound: house wren chattering in the pines; blue jay family in the front yard cherry eating unripe cherries, one after the other, all noise, all business; ovenbirds holler; juncos trill; veeries and thrushes flute; white-throated sparrow whistles; yellowthroat chips; catbird meows. Woodpecker's drum sets the valley's beat. On an old pine, limb by horizontal limb, a chickadee combs through the bark and stringy, pale-green lichen. Every pocket of sound has a vireo.
An adult female junco, pale brown, methodically hunts caterpillars in the needles of hemlock, which she eats on site. David Sibley, in the second edition of The Sibley's Guide to Birds, devotes two pages to the dark-eyed junco. He portrays five of the six subspecies, each with a description and range map. (Some ornithologists believe several are suitable species.) I don't care whether dark-eyed juncos represent a group of subspecies or a group of sibling species. To me, their beauty resides in the dynamic way their ancestors colonized North America after the Ice Age. I watched volcano juncos last winter in Costa Rica, pick through treeline rubble in the Talamanca Cordillera. The ancestors of these juncos retreated to Central American highlands during the glacial epoch and never returned. Eyes turned yellow. Bellies as gray as the morning sky. Volcano junco changed over the abyss of time, became a slightly different species, as breathtaking and eye-popping (for cerebral reasons) as resplendent quetzal.
A recent Gallop Poll concluded that eight-three percent of Americans reject Darwin's view of life. Forty-five percent believe God created human beings in our present form within the last ten thousand years; the other thirty-eight percent believe we evolved over the past million years with God's guidance. A mere thirteen percent of Americans agree with Darwin, far and away from the lowest total of any technologically advanced nation.
So what exactly did Darwin say? He denied us special status. He perceived how species evolved from one to another through natural selection, a process in which traits best suited to survival pass from generation to generation. A sort of biological arms race foraged in the foundries of natural selection. As a product of natural selection, humans like juncos and are subject to the same trials as every other species. Or put another way: all life is related, past and present and future. Now, how cool is that.
Darwin never used the word evolution, opting instead for the term descent with modification, the unifying theme of biology that reveals every species as an ever-changing, unfinished work of art.
There is grandeur in this view of life, wrote Darwin . . . and that while the planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
Juncos bear a message that like gravity, evolution is a planetary law, not a theory.
I can only hope those who were surveyed were all at a Trump rally.
Your Gallop Poll stats are horrifying, Ted. I guess we'll all find out if this mystical thinking does us as much harm as everything else going on. Meanwhile, thanks for your lovely prose on your keen observations!