A Walk in the Woods With My Brain on Fire: Spring

PLEASANT VALLEY, Mass.—Two visits to this wildlife sanctuary.  One week apart. I came to report the arrival of spring, an under-covered story. In the hope, too, that the new season might extinguish the fire in my brain, ablaze in the Anthropocene: The accelerating heat with its cascading catastrophes; the barbaric wars with their crimes against humanity; scorching hatreds shared instantly everywhere. Our raging modern inferno. 

And yet, we are in the midpoint of a great annual renewal, marked by the seasonal migration of creatures beyond number flying their way north. Might the incessant flapping of billions of pairs of wings cool down the hemisphere? Surely birdsong is balm for our blisters and burns? I went looking for remedy with little idea of what I was soon to witness.

It turned out not to be the birds. You can hear them, but they’re hard to see. Sure, I had an adequate pair of binoculars with me, and a bird ID app on my phone. Hopeless tools for an earthbound biped like me. My naked ears were far more useful. They could hear a woodpecker knocking into a distant tree. Mourning doves cooing in a branch above. An unseen swallow buzzing past my scalp. Blackbirds shrieking among the tall phragmites. Though it was daytime, an owl hooted, and a bullfrog seemed to answer. A paddling mallard provoked the obnoxious honking of a pair of rowdy geese. Only two of them, so damn loud. My notes also say: Fiddleheads. Bees. Chipmunks. Flash of orange. (In retrospect, likely an oriole.) 

I was grasping one thing at a time, cataloging the natural order—an outsider to it. What if I tried to listen to everything at once? It took repeated effort to gain fleeting entry into a parallel  world that wasn’t mine. A fluid orchestra of countless musicians perfectly riffing. The forest multi-tonal. Deciduous jazz. Not a single bad seat in the house. The debut of an up-tempo composition I’ll call How many dialects of warbler can the robin understand? Never to be played again.

What became apparent is that I don’t speak nature. The other sapiens I encountered didn’t seem to, either. A wholesome church group of well-dressed young adults. A guy in a baseball cap effusive about sighting a beaver. A teenager in pants striped red and white sporting a nose ring. All of us of such varied plumage yet belonging to a single species. 

To us it was Saturday morning. How laughable. I had arrived at nine—much too late to get the worm—and now, after a few hours as I began walking out, I turned my gaze upwards. I saw the architecture of tree branches; bud break of leaves; the sky. Oh! The bird reaIm! The aerial kingdom! I would need to return to see it in a new light.

My neighbor remembers when she was a young girl, the birds were so loud in the early morning that to sleep she’d have to plug her ears. We didn’t realize how much things were changing around us over the last half century. The human population was roughly doubling from four to eight billion. On the other hand, the population of breeding birds was declining by three billion, a 30 percent drop—in North America alone. 

The last time birds had it so bad might have been when an asteroid six or nine miles wide slammed into the Earth, eons before hominids first walked upright. With two hundred million years of evolutionary history in their bones, birds are confronting a relatively instantaneous collective demise at our hands. 

We’ve been hearing these dire warnings for many years, yet the environmental carnage continues unabated. It’s part of what science calls biodiversity loss, the path we’ve trod in the Anthropocene, with its thousandfold increase in extinctions. We have no shame. 

The natural world is thus becoming quieter and more homogenous. Here’s how a scientific abstract described the diminishment of avian music in North America and Europe:

We integrate citizen science bird monitoring data with recordings of individual species to reveal a pervasive loss of acoustic diversity and intensity of soundscapes across both continents over the past 25 years, driven by changes in species richness and abundance. 

These results suggest that one of the fundamental pathways through which humans engage with nature is in chronic decline, with potentially widespread implications for human health and well-being.

What the forests must have sounded like, even just a hundred years ago.

Don’t imagine it’s poetic justice that human languages are rapidly disappearing, too. It’s a parallel tragedy. Some scholars estimate 50 percent of the 7,000 tongues that exist now will be severely endangered or gone by this century’s end. Others say 90 percent. Mostly, the languages of First Peoples will vanish, and with them will go oral libraries of rare human knowledge; about animals and plants and nature’s remedies; legends and histories; poetry and song. The people who speak nature, potential codebreakers of the climate crisis, their words silenced forever.

In these woods in this season there’s little nourishment for such broodings. This time I arrived at 6:30 a.m. and encountered great good fortune: the cloudy sky was an even dome of soft backlight behind the bursting branches overhead. I took the path toward Pike’s Pond and followed the trail along the downstream flow of Yokun Brook, gazing upward, mouth open, witnessing the slow-motion explosion of spring and its unconditional, inexhaustible, eternal generosity. 

Four hours looking up like this, walking carefully so as not to stumble or fall, until the spectacle dissolved as the sun gained height, burned away the clouds and turned the sky postcard blue. 

For Further Seeing:

Perfect Days, a film by Wim Wenders (2023)

Evil Does Not Exist, a film by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (2023)