6:32 a.m. 43 degrees, wind ENE 2 mph. Sky: spotless at first, then broad, broken line drifting in from the northeast, an aerial articulation of clouds like a whale skeleton or the limbless bones of a dinosaur. Permanent streams; water lonesome, leaf cordial. Wetlands: ground-level mist. Pond: not a turtle at the surface; red-breasted nuthatches in the hemlocks. Flowers of New England aster, yellow bound in grape, brightens a withered stand of ferns. Seedling ashes finished for the season; leaves yellow and brown, a decorative patch of ground cover.
DOR: gray squirrel, sans head and shoulders
AOR: crow feeds on the squirrel, morsel by morsel; holds ground as I approach, its goitrous throat crammed with pieces of the squirrel. Nearby, raven in pine just grunts; watches the gluttonous crow; an unfulfilled dream of a squirrel for breakfast—eventually, both the crow and the raven flush.
Red-shouldered hawk, above the eastern rim of the Hollow, calls and then flies across the valley, just above the canopy. Blue jay, unable to contain himself, mimics hawk; fools no one. Wood thrush, in a fit of sulks, lands on a low limb, remains motionless and pensive. Leaves its perch and melts into the forest; bound for Costa Rica or Panama, the broad-leafed jungles of the Pacific Coast, wintering amid the toucans and parrots.
Robins. Robins, robins, on the road, in the trees. Go my compost pile, please.
You'll enjoy your time there. The pile, which sits west of the garden, consists of two ripening mounds of table scraps, grass clippings, expended garden plants, and hand-pulled weeds that I turn from time to time. When I do, sweet aromatic steam rises from an organic welter of interior blackness. Worms love it here and convene by the hundreds, maybe more. None are native. All are exotic, some dangerously so. Robins, you can eat all day, uninterrupted.
North of the southern boundary of the last glacier, which in New England scrubbed bedrock bare, earthworms are not native. Every single earthworm in Vermont is an alien invasive; fourteen European species, two Asian. The pedigree of every worm ever laced on a fishhook, every worm ever yanked by a robin or a woodcock, can be traced to England or France. Even Japan. Several species arrived here in the seventeenth century; others more recently.
Not exactly Magellans or Balboas, earthworms colonize approximately thirty feet of turf per year. Left to their own devices, in fifty thousand years, earthworms might reach Coyote Hollow.
New England woodlands evolved without them; our forests depend on soil fungus and arthropods to slowly decompose organic matter into useful plant nutrients. Invasive earthworms digest leaf litter so rapidly that they threaten the very stability of hardwood forests. They also increase soil emission of two leading greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide—by more than a third. So, one might say earthworms have a starring role in the climate change drama, our sylvan soap opera with vast and negative implications across the Northeast. Earthworms and fossil fuel . . . who knew?
Go to my compost pile robins. I beseech you . . . go, go. There's a banquet waiting for you just below the surface.
Earthworms do far more benefit for our soils and no damage to anything. Invasive? LOL since the ice age killed everything living then everything is invasive. Earthworms are food, loosen up soils so plants, tress can root and grow and turn regular soil into super healthy soils. No earthworms are not responsible for climate change. I would like to see scientific facts in your article. None of it makes sense.