Homeboy at Home During Coronavirus

August 18, 2020: Coyote Hollow, Thetford Center, VT

5:49 a.m. 59 degrees, wind SW 1 mph. Sky: Cloud bound and humid; mist transitions to drizzle; long tines of the sunlight blocked by moisture. Permanent streams: upper, rain inspired; a lisping flow; lower, pools of water merge, more dribble than flow; flickers of daylight on tenuous ripples, a tranquilized light show. Intermittent streams: resurrected; puddles kiss, hold the promise of current. Wetlands: encased in fog and sprinkles; the far shore a suggestion. Pond: calm and foggy; a painted turtle hangs on the surface; smooth, black shell an island in the mist; yellow-striped head a hint of color in a brown world. Goldenrods and Joe-Pye-weed, a run of purple and yellow, a late summer bouquet amid the dark green of alders. A splatter of yellow leaves, expanding trace of autumn—sugar maple, basswood, yellow birch, black cherry—a calico patch on a brown road. August tilts perceptibly toward September. 

AOR: hermit thrush, deliberate and trusting, wanders just ahead of the dogs and me; investigates gulleys. A walk without robins.

Yesterday's pulse of red-breasted nuthatches packed up their voices and moved on. A solitary pewee whistles, the bitter end of the Neotropical chorus. A great crested flycatcher, calls, the first since June; a wet catbird in alder, calling not singing, shares a soggy post with young-of-the-year male Baltimore oriole, equally wet. A flock of jays at the mouth of the marsh heard but not seen. 

Background sounds: the chatter of red squirrels; the drone of crickets; the splash of raindrops; red acorns hitting the metal roof.

At least once each decade, when the stars align, according to a constellation of variables—weather, soil moisture, geography, genetics, tree health, and so forth—red oaks produce lots of acorns, an event known as a mast year. In the aftermath, what biologists call a trophic cascade, woodland mammals (and wild turkey) prosper: white-footed mouse, the most abundant mammal in an oak woods, breed throughout the winter. The following summer, mice may have swelled their population from one or two per acre to more than fifty. And then, the second summer, two years after the acorn drop, the number of cases of Lyme disease rises, sometimes exponentially. 

A more appropriate name for the blacklegged tick ought to be the white-footed mouse tick—the cute, bug-eyed, soulful-looking rodent is the most competent reservoir host of Lyme disease. With apologies to Thoreau, the mass of mice (as well as men) lead lives of quiet (and frantic) desperation. A litany of mid-sized predators eat mice, depend on mice, their fortunes controlled by the expansion and contraction of the mouse population. During a short and brutal life, a white-footed mouse eats, mates, and mates again. No time to groom. . . ever. In the world of the white-footed mouse, cleanliness and godliness don't comingle. Tick larvae cluster by the dozens on white-footed mice. Around the eyes, lips, and inside the big, soft, adorable ears. Because their immune system does a weak job clearing infections, white-footed mice pass Lyme disease on to ninety percent of the ticks that feed on them. 

Animals that eat mice help suppress Lyme disease. 

Mice are on the menu for owls and hawks, weasels and milk snakes, coyotes and rattlesnakes. A biologist determined that each summer, a three-foot male timber rattlesnake removes more than six thousand blacklegged ticks from its neighborhood, of which between one thousand and twenty-eight hundred host Borrelia burgdorferi, the spirochete bacterium that causes Lyme disease. 

The moral: befriend a rattlesnake; be kind to a weasel; spare a coyote; praise a barred owl; be thankful for a red fox. Make room for a milk snake in your stonewall. 

Little brown bats, a party of three, behind the west-facing barn door. The third day in a row.