Scribble-de-bop!

Some progress:

Top is- "Evolution of a Pied-Billed Dweeb Grebe"

Bottom is- "Prairie Falcon Enttäuschung"

I think he's bummed because someone drew his wing like a fried egg which was itself badly drawn.

Irony alert: I think it was the wing that dragged this one down.

On Apical Dominance

The main biological determinant of the shape of a pine tree or fir is the presence of a lead or apical bud which directs the upward growth and sends hormones down to the lower buds which keep them subordinate and prevent them from growing longer.  This helps the tree to quickly shoot up to where it can catch the maximum amount of light.  When the apical bud dies, is broken off, or is otherwise damaged, the other buds around it go into a kind of race to replace it as the new lead.  This is what causes the split crowns, double tips and other marks of individual character in these trees.


In the same way we can speak of times in our lives when the driving force, whatever our own sort of apical bud is to each of us, has left us or been irrevocably damaged.  All of us have felt how the wind shook us and snow buried us in our younger years, damage to our weaker branches in a storm, the old growth falling off as we no longer need it.  But when we no longer have that bud leading us forward, the mind goes a little haywire with worry, confusion, doubt and everything else.  Recently it has been good for me to think that maybe there are other things inside us, other strengths and loves ready to help us lead ourselves forward into light and health.  The change might always be detectable and we may always be able to see just where the crisis point was-- our trunks growing a little crooked, our symmetry a little off.  But I have always found far more interesting and endearing the trees that have grown a little out of the ordinary, that have suffered damage, been bent by the weather, struck by lightning, singed by fire and still kept growing.

Clowns of the Forest

Acorn Woodpecker; Meladerpes formicidorkus

Acorn Woodpecker; Melanerpes formicivorus

So I'm playing around with planning a kids Nature Club, ideally to be offered at the Library.  It's something that I am actually pretty excited about and it's been fairly motivating for me.  A loose outline of the idea would be to get the kids each a nature journal, talk to them about different ways that they can experience the wilderness and all the different media and modes that they can use to express what they've encountered and how they've felt with subsequent meetings allowing them to share what they've seen and made while giving interpretive guidance on narrower subjects such as birds, geology, trees and forests, etc..  The idea would be to encourage them towards a creative interest in the wilderness and to subtly instill a deep wonder in and care for the natural world and the desire to become better stewards of such an integral part of our community.

In this spirit, I thought it might be a good idea to teach myself to draw in a more realistic mode than my usual cartoon mess so that I could talk at least somewhat convincingly about the ways in which one can improve one's skills from even abysmal beginnings.  Above you will have seen my first attempt, knocked out in a few minutes between extemporizing to visitors at E.T. about the beauty of the Lake.  I picked an Acorn Woodpecker for its impeccably well-defined lines, thinking this would make it simpler.  It did, and at least I was able to put forth something that was at least identifiable as  the species it was intended to depict.  I thought I'd put it out here as kind of a marker of my first attempt and as I practice and hopefully improve, I can loosely document my progress and have some tips I can share with kids.  So check back in... 7 years... maybe... and you should see some fairly passable bird sketches going on.

That little Woodpecker I drew just looked a little sad and uncomfortable though, so I figured I would research a bit of its Life History in order to practice evoking a little of the bird's natural personality in my "art".  Combining this with my own personal observations when I took the above picture I came up with something that I think makes rudimentary steps, at least, towards portraying the Acorn Woodpecker's relationship to the world around it including it's unfailing sense of style and personal struggles with a social drinking habit slowly creeping into early stage alcoholism.  Nature really can be unforgiving at times.

Acorn Woodpecker; Smoothanerpas formicivelourus

Placerville 4/24/15

Female Bushtit; Psaltriparus minimus

In an overcast lunch hour break from out-of-town meetings I could forgo my food and just slip out the door, going hungry down a roadside slope into tangled vegetation, through tall weeds, past barbed wire and across the limbs of a tree long since downed, into a small clearing. Nearby might be a homeless bed in dense undergrowth and a feeling of forgotten life on the margins of something half understood, close to daily life but far removed. There I could stand under a foreign tree and watch little yellow-eyed birds flicker among the budding twigs of a shrub I cannot name. A scrub jay might call out from where I had entered this space, which could be a calling back from a world no one knows I left or a scolding reminder that I don't belong to this overgrown side either. It would be easier than going back to stoop under these low branches and trail down through the knee-deep grass of a hillside, past a lone snag riddled with the work of birds, through an impromptu gate ripped in a rusted fence and into the bright and noise of a crowded parking lot.

    Out in the human open I would feel less a wanderer and more a stranger, drifting down sidewalks where others are hurrying.  It would be a relief to cut across lawns under the oak trees where squirrels are busy stealing acorns cached by woodpeckers who call at them in anger and swoop with little effect.  This conspicuous feeling would draw me on though, and down a curving dirt road which trails along past thorn bushes where mockingbirds sing and a cat, black, feral and thin, sighs away, at my passing, into a pile of rock and concrete debris.  On past a disused shed, around piles of wood slash and dried out bush trimmings, I might come to a kind of rest alone in the open where an abandoned warehouse barely stands there on the other side of a wide ravine which is choked with vegetation and scattered with trash blown by the wind. Here, at the edge of several places, I might encounter a small, quick species of bird I had never seen before and wonder if they feel this too-- this tenuous solitude and this free but restless spirit. Do they seek these places out the same as me or do they simply enjoy the indirect protection from predators one finds in a closer proximity to humans?  Their appetite and need for safety certainly leads them most places but their heart must also pull them forward just as mine does for me.  In the end, I suppose these places help my spirit as well to avoid its own predators and perhaps this is something else we share-- species more comfortable with the ambiguity of the borders between.  And upon returning, as I will have to, who but those little gray birds with their tiny black eyes and all the other small things out there would know the lonely world I have returned from and just what I have kept with me from that place?

Oak Titmouse; Baeolophus inornatus

A photograph I might never take

Sometimes I have recognized in these dim, late-winter woods a deep sense of quiet neglect. It is as if the spirit of the forest had nodded off in waiting for spring and, now sick with dreams, it is unable to find its way back out of its long, twisting burrows. All the little eyes that find themselves outdoors absently watch as the soft, light snowflakes drift through the pines in a fitful breeze. There is an awareness of something going gently feral within yourself-- an inner forgetfulness which lets us slip away from ourselves as easily as a book might slip out of a sleeping hand onto the damp bed of pine needles beneath us.

There is the great, constant, monotone shifting of pine branches rising and receding overhead and in the stillness between these breaths one can sometimes hear, close by, the faint clatter of willows and the sound of cold, clear water flowing away down the creek. A small hawk is perched low and puffed up in a somewhat protected limb. One wonders how it is able to soothe itself, alone among those wavering branches or if it even has to try. There is that vigilant, raptorial boredom in its eyes. In its bearing, an intimation of a life lived between the blood of its meals and punctuated by the glory of the skies turning through the tips of its wings. There is an understanding of the lonely things it must do to feed itself. Its beauty is stark and removed in the graying light as the woods sink again into a less ambiguous sleep.

Seeing the World in Two Ways

"At one time I was interested in birdwatching, and I noticed that when I saw a bird for the first time I couldn't really see it, because I had no formal arrangement, no sense of pattern, for it.  I couldn't remember it clearly, either.  But once I identified the bird, the drawings in bird books and my own sense of order arranged the image and made it clearer to me, and I never forgot it.  From then on I could see the bird in two ways-- as the fresh, unpatterned vision and the patterned one.  Well, seeing death nearby is very like the first way of seeing."

Harold Brodkey , This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death

a quote from a book I did not read which came to me via

Johnathan Rosen's The Life of the Skies 

 

This idea of seeing the bird in two ways has been powerful for me as I extrapolate it out into my life. For me, it is the idea of seeing the actual physical bird, it's beautiful feathers, grace of movement, and its way of life in front of you. It is seeing this while knowing the bird's life history and how it's tied to the world around it, understanding the reasons for its behavior, and seeing the underlying qualities that make it what it is. It means knowing something as much as we are able to both in heart and mind. In this way we can understand it as another form of life in the world and thereby understand something of ourselves and our connection to the wilderness.

We can expand this idea out into the wider world as well. Seeing this little snowflower we can know that its brilliant inflorescence belies not only a larger life under the soil but also the fungus that it leeches from and the root systems that live in tandem with that fungus, together holding and keeping healthy the soil. Daydreaming to the patterns in the clouds, we can understand them as the patterns of ice crystals shaped by winds high above us-- a seeming randomness out of which comes such diverse beauty. As we look at a hawk and it looks back we can imagine how it sees us with its acute and  tetrachromatic vision.  We can make sure to keep the heart asking as many questions as the mind. What icy wind has blown across this mountain face, what cool rivulets and rushing streams, what beating sun and slow trembling of earth?

In thinking of how trees grow and the workings of apical buds, distance between limbs, proximity of trees and so on, we can know something of the life of individual trees. We may not be able to tell what cracked this crown or limb, when this gall was formed, how long since lightning struck this tree but we can see them in a similar way to how we see the faces of others. A face wrinkled with lines from laughter and joy, kind eyes with dark circles around them, smiles with an undercurrent of sadness, old scars and twinkling eyes. When we know a person's life, these things become visual cues that connect our knowledge with our emotions, that prompt us to sympathy and empathy. This is how understanding leads us to kindness, compassion and love. To understand at least part of what something is in the world must be the only way towards a deep love for it whether we're talking about a person or a creature, or the land itself. I can look at your face and say that it's beautiful as easily as taking a snap shot at a vista point around a beautiful bay. But, when I know what your life has been and I have shared some of it with you, then I am able to see these things in your face-- what the weather and the world have done to you and for you, where you were born, the places where you were broken down and the happiness and peace you knew in your calm weather. With humans and pets we call this friendship, love, kinship, family and a thousand things besides. With the wilderness we are more subdued and call it knowing Natural History, going for a walk, and keeping our eyes well open. 

Blue

Steller's Jay- Cyanocitta stelleri

       At Explore Tahoe, I am currently working on some sheets to complement a childrens' “Discovery Table” and both add some dimension to the information already given and give my coworkers and I some interpretive tools to help reach out to visitors. In researching, I came across two facts which I paired with the above photo and connected like this:

 “Is this Bird Blue?

 While a Steller’s Jay does have a beautiful blue coloring, the blue is not actually a pigment or natural color of its feathers. If you were to hold one of its feathers up in front of a bright light, it would actually have more of a brown color. This is because the blue is a “structural color” meaning that it’s caused by microscopic patterns in the feather’s physical shape. These tiny shapes help to absorb all but the most easily scattered, low-wavelength light which happen to be blue and violet. These two colors are then reflected back out. Our eyes are much more sensitive to blue than violet, so the Jay appears blue to us!

This is similar to the reason why Lake Tahoe has different shades of blue. In the lake’s case, light is absorbed by tiny particles in the water and the water molecules themselves. The deeper the water is, the more light is absorbed as it travels through. The more light which is absorbed, the darker the shade of blue that appears to us.”

       These are beautiful facts to me not just for what they impart or for the elegance of one idea helping to answer two loosely connected questions but for the many other questions they can open up. We know what causes those feathers to appear blue to us. How do they appear to a bird who can see farther into the ultraviolet range? Why those colors there on the Jay's wings and not on its head? Why these iridescent patterns at all but why in places with such uniformity within species and such stunning diversity across species? Why should they look pleasing to us as well? What do these things mean to the birds themselves? They have been proven to have an effect upon mating but why did they evolve in the first place? Evolution as a theory can teach us how these patterns may have evolved but as yet cannot incorporate quite why they have evolved as opposed to other and simpler means to the same ends.

        On the whole, nature doesn't do simplicity. There are simple concepts and patterns within it that we can grasp but its complexity is so great as to be almost indescribable except as evidence of a greater order which we cannot yet understand. This is what Wendell Berry describes as “a music so vast that no one hears it except in fragments.” We can grasp these small parts but must always keep in mind that they are just that, parts of a larger order that we cannot as yet fully see.

        The mind needs these mysteries. Just as we can partially explain these patterns in bird plumage, we can partially explain the intricacies of the brain as a series of chemical impulses. This knowledge can have serious and beneficial effects in finding treatments for mental disease and disorder but how can it ever hope to account for how the mind and its already dizzyingly complex array of emotional shades interacts with the seemingly infinite complexity of the world around us and the other minds around that to create such nuanced and relatively exact communication as we see in works of art from the great on down to the most simple. This is still the realm of the creative mind and can still only be apprehended in parts by the artistic spirit. This is part of the essential nature of art and creativity: To give us the mental, spiritual, and emotional tools to be able to understand more deeply the facets and obscure connections of the world around, inside, and between us. We can analyze great works of art but it would take lifetimes to understand precisely where it came from out of the complex currents of history, society, personal history, emotional intensity, abstract expression and so on. To say nothing of the question of how exactly it is able to bridge that gap and resonate with its audience in all of their own endless and ever-changing complexity. And then to attempt to talk about these things coming about from a base of simple chemical impulses. It seems futile in one sense, but its very nature as overwhelmingly boundless mystery is sustaining to that constantly hungry imagination within us. We may not be able to explain the complexity of bird plumage and our own form of art and dreams but we can dream pointedly and endlessly about them. These huge mysteries create wellsprings of questions which the mind can play at and which can carry us onward into a deeper understanding and connection with ourselves and the beautiful world around us.