Bucket List event, and whaddya know, it was in our back yard. Barred Owl spotted after entire bird population was sending five-alarm fire calls. 7:00 to 7:30 pm. 83º F. July 1, 2026. Darien, CT. All photos can be found at this link.
Bucket List!
Tag: Wildlife
Quiet, please. We are not alone.
Spring unfolds each year in color, yes, but also in sound. And, regrettably, in noise — some of it emanating from our gardens.
When Nancy Lawson, a Maryland-based naturalist and nature writer, speaks about the voices of frogs or birds, she uses the word “sound.” When she refers to humanity’s voice — the din of mowers, blowers and chain saws — she describes it as noise, specifically “anthropogenic noise.”
Her definition: something that is “disrespectful of all the other sounds and runs roughshod over them,” she said, with “often unnecessary rudeness.”
These days, we’re not just driving one another crazy with the racket that fills most neighborhoods. We’re “smothering some of the opportunities for animals to communicate through their senses,” she said, “to perceive the world through their senses.”
That means communications are masked and predator alarms and other critical life cues are stifled.
The challenge she poses for us: “Let’s think about the fact that these are our neighbors, too. And they can’t just run inside and put on noise-canceling headphones.” […]
In other words: Easy does it.
“If you treat the local environment like the homeland it’s meant to be,” she writes in “Wildscape,” “you’ll be exposed to more cultures and ideas and ways of life than if you visited with people from every country in the world.”
Sometimes, she said, that’s not about doing something, but the opposite: Stop mowing so often; stop leaf blowing. “Stop these sensory disruptions,” she said.
Even with actions we know can cause harm, like using pesticides, it’s not just the direct damage that she alerts us to.
“It turns out that putting out scents into the world that cause odor pollution can disrupt flower fragrances, and bees’ ability to find the floral resources that they need,” she said of an often unnoticed violation of the Scentscape.
Noise has unexpected effects, too, like reducing the nesting success of bluebirds and tree swallows, and decreasing the foraging ability of owls and bats.
Or this: As cars drove past, Ms. Lawson noticed a monarch caterpillar flinching upward from the milkweed it was feeding on near her roadside. A paper she found cited the same reaction — and how traffic-stressed animals even bit the researchers, something they had never documented before.
Quiet, please. We are not alone.
— Margaret Roach, from “Quiet, Please: You Are Not Alone in Your Garden”
Notes:
- Photo: Entodon seductrix is a moss species that softens the edges of Ms. Lawson’s property in Maryland.Credit…Nancy Lawson
- Nancy Lawson is the author of “Wildscape: Trilling Chipmunks, Beckoning Blooms, Salty Butterflies, and Other Sensory Wonders of Nature
Yep.
Notes:
- Photo: DK @ Gull @ Daybreak. 42° F. 6:48 am. September 24, 2022. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from this morning here.
- Quote Source: @jessecase (via Last Tambourine)
Walking. And licking the wounds.
697 days, almost consecutive. Like in a row. This daybreak walk at Cove Island Park.
38° F, feels like 30° F, flashes Dark Sky app. Sorry, but that’s crap. Winds gusting up to 35 mph.
Just look at those clouds overhead in the photo. Even they’re huddled together trying to stay warm.
I’m standing in the exact same spot as my last post. That pure and clean moment. That soul lifting moment, lifting me, elevating me up and over my pesky, 1st world problems.
And here we are, a week later, and I’m feeling nothing. Nothing spiritual. Nothing soul lifting.
Jill Horton’s words are pumping into my earbuds on Audible from her title “We are All Perfectly Fine.” No, we’re not perfectly fine Jill. “What’s that like? It’s like bullshit…it’s like violence to my soul.”
So the picture must be crystalizing for you this morning. We’re cold, we’re in a pissy mood, and not really sure why. Why not turn this bus around, suspend this walk, go back home, roll under the covers and sleep it off? Whatever the hell ‘this’ is. But I know that I excel at wallowing in it.
I keep walking.
I pull the hoody (‘hoody’ Dale, not ‘hoodie’, or some other French Canadian separatist derivation) over my head to cut some of this wind. And I pick up the pace to warm these bones.
I walk the breakwall, taking care to avoid the slime, to avoid a headlong tumble, to add to the morning woes.
I hear a scurrying in the stones.
I hit pause on Audible, yank my ear buds out and stop.