5:31 a.m. 67 degrees, wind SSE 5 mph (delicious). Sky: cloud ceiling and colorless. Permanent streams: upper a faint ripple, on life support; lower puddled and then expires, again. Wetlands: no fog or mist or haze; just a bowl of green reeds hemmed by a wall of green trees. Pond: also without mist, fog, or haze; wind-driven current; insects skate the surface, ride the wakes. Lots of milkweed flowers. No monarch eggs . . . yet.
DOR: sticky slug en route across the road died unintentionally gathering grit
AOR: catbird on shoulder intentionally gathering grit
A family of blue jays harvests unripened cherries in the front yard. Make lots of noise. House wrens gush; ravens converse; ovenbirds shout; yellowthroats chip; chickadees dee-dee-dee; titmice whistle with conviction; brown creeper whistles with much less confidence.
A pair of song sparrows work the recently mowed shoreline of the pond. Red-eyed vireo crooning in a maple, head back, face vacant, casually leaning into each phrase as if attempting to send the song farther afield. Vireo has that very same poker face as a hermit thrush but how different their voices. Now, in high summer, who's listening beside me? Vireo flies across the road, almost directly overhead. Sees me; executes a tight "U" turn.
Robin, with a bill full of a worm, patiently listens to amped-up fledglings. Flies into maple where pandemonium breaks loose, a chorus of squawks. Wings slapping leaves sounds like shredding paper.
Last night, windows opened wide, I listened to the hollow whistle of a black-billed cuckoo cu-cu-cu. Perfect sets of triplets repeated at short intervals. By dawn, as I dressed and mused in the gloaming, the cuckoo kept to himself, cloaked in the hush and silence of the woods.
Of course, he may have decamped— like the quartet of yellow-billed cuckoos, which I haven't heard in several days. Cuckoos are secretive and unpredictable. They gave up philopatry for nomadism, gave up abundance and stability for rarity and capriciousness. For cuckoos, born and fledged without the urge to return, topophilia is an alien concept. Shaped by eons of trial and error, by four waves of glacial congestion interspersed with four pulses worldwide warming, cuckoos embody the mercurial aspects of evolution. Their behavior: strange. Their breeding habit: equally strange. That they survived and diversified is a testament to the creativity of natural selection.
Yesterday, a friend sent me a link to an online article recently published in Science, "13% of H.S. Biology Teachers Advocate Creationism in Class." Based on a nation-wide survey of biology teachers, the report also claimed most teachers to avoid conflict don't make a solid case for evolution. Fewer than thirty percent take an adamant pro-evolution stand; Darwin relegated to the back pages of science.
Evolution by natural and sexual selection informed and formed Earth. I can't imagine physics without gravity; the constitution without the bill of rights; ceramics without clay. Science, based on profound, repeatable observation, transforms myth and nonsense into understanding . . . uncloaks a wondrous planet.