The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature Read Online Free PDF

the annual migration of millions of tanagers, warblers, and vireos.
    Overnight deaths will also fine-tune the chickadee species’ fit to its environment. Smaller Carolina chickadees will be more likely to perish than their bulkier kin, reinforcing Bergmann’s latitudinal pattern. Likewise, extreme cold will purge from the population those birds whose shivering abilities, feather fluffiness, or energy stores are deficient. In the morning, the chickadee population in this forest will be better matched to winter’s demands. This is natural selection’s paradox: from death comes life’s increasing perfection.
    My own physiological inadequacy in the cold also has its origins in natural selection. I am out of place at the icy mandala because my ancestors have dodged selection for cold-hardiness. Humans evolved from apes that lived for tens of millions of years in tropical Africa. Keeping cool was a much bigger challenge than keeping warm, so we have few bodily defenses against extreme cold. When my ancestors left Africa for northern Europe, they brought with them fire and clothes, carrying the tropics to the temperate and polar regions. This cleverness produced less suffering and fewer deaths, unquestionably good outcomes. But comfort sidestepped natural selection. We are condemned by our skill with fire and cloth to be forever out of place in the winter world.
    Darkness comes and I retreat toward my inheritance, the warm hearth, leaving the mandala to the avian masters of the cold. This mastery was earned the hard way, through thousands of generations of struggle. I wanted to experience the cold as the mandala’s animals do, but I now realize that this was impossible. My experiences come through a body that has taken a different evolutionary path from that of the chickadees, precluding any fully shared experience. Despite this, my nakedness in the cold wind has deepened my admiration for these others. Astonishment is the only proper response.

January 30th—Winter Plants
    A continuous low-pitched roar comes from the wind raking the trees on the high bluff above the mandala. Unlike the northerly gales earlier in the week, this wind is from the south, and the bluff protects the mandala from all but a few eddies and gusts. The changing wind has eased the temperature. It is just a couple of degrees below freezing, warm enough to sit comfortably for an hour or more in winter clothes. The urgent, unrelenting physical pain of the cold is gone, and my body welcomes the benign air with a glow of quiet pleasure.
    Birds in a passing flock seem to revel in their release from the arctic death grip. Five species travel together: five tufted titmice, a couple of Carolina chickadees, one Carolina wren, a golden-crowned kinglet, and a red-bellied woodpecker. The flock seems bound by invisible elastic threads; when a single bird gets left behind or strays beyond the ten-meter radius of the flock, it is yanked back to the center. The whole flock is a rolling ball of agitation as it moves through the inanimate snowy forest.
    The titmice are the most vocal of the birds, streaming a continual jumble of sound. Each titmouse jabs high-pitched
seet
notes, creating an irregular beat against which play their other calls, hoarse whistles and squeaks. Some birds repeat
pee-ta pee-ta,
a sound that was absent from their repertoire earlier this week in the deep cold. This bright two-noted sound is the breeding song. Despite the snow, these birds are already turning their attention to spring. Egg laying will not happenfor another couple of months, but the extended social negotiations of courtship have begun.
    The life-filled exuberance of the birds contrasts with the mandala’s plants. Their gray branches and bare twigs below offer a scene of desolation. Death juts from the snow: fallen, partly decayed maple branches and the frayed stubs of leafcup stems protrude, each stem ringed by a circle of sublimated snow that reveals the dark litter below. Winter