Notes of a Naturalist
by Thomas Belton
Definition: stul·ti·fy [Mid-18th century. < late Latin stultificare "make foolish" < Latin stultus "foolish," literally "immovable"]
What's in a word, except the sublime lust of vowels and consonants they hold together? I love words but if the understanding of a particular word comes after I write it down, yet I love that word so much, I’ll change the entire arc of my narrative to suit the word. I'll build a moat around the ephemeral and mellifluous concentrators of that sound; build a castle of air made of my imagination to render the word a just pennant atop the loftiest redoubt above the last battlement and see the Duchy of its syllables enthroned where they belong.
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Many of the nineteenth century natural scientists such as Charles Darwin, Stephen Wallace, and Joseph Banks were often mystified by what would appear to be a species stultifying behavior, its apparently foolish, recalcitrant response to a new stressor in its environment. Many species respond with plasticity when confronted with a new predator or competitor in the neighborhood, rising seas or volcanic eruptions, adapting to a changing environment, while other species hold to tried and true instinctual behaviors, immovable positions, and pay the price through reduced abundance or possibly extinction. As a research ecologist I often find myself in similar awe as my nineteenth century predecessors, watching stultifying animal behavior with a fascination as what protects them, what strategies they straddle, allowing them to persist in the face of ecological ruin.
1. The Goshawk
Rancocas Creek Wildlife Management Area, Westhampton New Jersey
I walk through the Audubon Society wildlife preserve on a sandy outcrop above Rancocas Creek, a long winding stream that starts in the red acidic waters of the New Jersey pine barrens, then winds its way through the oak and deciduous forests on the inner coastal plain to end in the tidal swell of the Delaware River on the opposite side of the state. Above me the Fall bird migration is in full display, with flocks of redwing black birds moving overhead, followed by clusters of blue jays and robins in parallel flight, sweeping over the woodland in their drab winter plumage, bare traces of red tint on the wings reminiscent of spring-time displays of sexual prowess.
Suddenly the three flocks drop into the tree canopy around me, the plummeting flocks like falling stars, shuffling and puffing amid the branches in silence like slovenly children. The shift of my reverie, from the airborne flight to its untoward plummet, leaves me unsettled. An eerie stillness fills the woods with an absolute silence in spite of the thousand birds rustling in the understory. It reminds me of the foreboding crows perched on the farmhouse in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, The Birds, right before they attacked.
One bird alone fell out of this uniform silence though, one juvenile robin that hopped about frantically on a branch just above my head, shrieking at the sky through the foliage.
I heard the goshawk before I saw her. She swept up on a thermal from the valley below and cried once in her distinctive cry, Ke Ke Ke, then swept through the over-story to snatch the shrieking robin from its perch. Startled by this plummeting raptor, its path through the trees more sensed than seen, a sudden shadow shifting amid the branches, I saw a flash of grey and white plumage, the robin screaming sideways in the raptor’s claws, then a rustle of leaves as the burdened hawk lifted her struggling prey and pumped once, then twice, to lift from her arc and glide out through the branches on a puff of wind, a curious sideward glance in my direction as she parted.
I stood amazed by the finality of the moment. Although a commonplace kill by the goshawk, each day a series of strikes, misses, sudden struggles against its powerful talons and then the devouring on a high limb; it still startled me to see how in the midst of all those birds, only one, the foolish one who cried aloud in terror was taken. As this thought passed through me, the flocks lifted as one through the trees with a whisper-like flutter of wings through the branches, the three flocks sorting themselves out into the sky over the hill as they proceeded south.
As a field biologist, you get used to death. The capture of fish, birds, bats, insects - the whole panoply of Aristotle’s “Animal Inquiries” - we trap, hook, or cage. Yet the immediacy of this kill moved me emotionally, its stultifying stupidity. Which is unusual for a naturalist, typically inured to the tooth and nail battles in the woods. The terrified bird’s death so meaningless in the face of its cohort’s instinct to hide in the foliage, quietly waiting for the hawk to pass over.
Yet I realized there is symmetry in the prey’s terror too. The robin’s mistake and death were sustenance to the hawk for another day, her energy for another hour’s flight, the raptor moving imperceptibly southwards, day after day, following the robins and redwings like a shark behind schools of fishes. The conjunction of majesty in parallelism, the conjoined dance of the predator and prey acted out upon the ether. The air more substantial than the flood of tides, their migrations like the oceanic gyres where tuna and whales feed, the atmosphere a cross-grid of wind and flyways, ageless trails in the nighttime sky filled with reasoning ingrained to the click of their genetic memory; eat, fly, move south in winter - and don’t be eaten.
Thus, I find it peculiar when one among thousands forgets the way and falls prey to its hereditary predator, so common and yet so vast a mistake.
2. The Tiger Salamander
Higbee Beach Wildlife Management Area, Cape May New Jersey
The king and queen of the summer meadow are the grasshopper and the butterfly. The grasshopper ungainly flight is more a huge hop than a graceful soaring and his crackling flutter of wings an unbalanced improbability, almost a caricature of flight. The sleek butterfly, in contrast, is a smooth parabola with periodic stutter steps toward some suggestive flower with its open petals and sweet-smelling nectar, its path purposeful and esthetically pleasing, her bright colored wings a brilliant contrast to the brown dun of the hopper who hides mufti in the shadowed grass.
I find yellow buttercups fringing the meadow with startled upright expressions surrounded by purple loosestrife on short waving stalks. A small shrub waits in the shadow at the edge of the forest, its foliage graced with a thousand white florets like a bridesmaid’s virginal nosegay. Vast swarms of light green aphids buzz about in the warm sunshine, attracted by the sticky pollen of the florets as tiny blue butterflies hover purposefully nearby, then land like a tiny bus amidst the insectile traffic jam, sucking up the enriching broth from a flower for a moment, then off to its next stop down the line.
This buzzing mass of nectar-seeking creatures swerves chaotically yet meaningfully, no collisions, no squabbles over florets, just a passing momentary community of dozens of insect species feeding amongst the vast forest on one bush in bloom. The insects coalesce and eat the bounty offered by the bush whose objective isn’t to feed the multitude of insects but to coat their chitinous legs with its yellow pollen, which is then dispersed throughout the woodlands for propagation on the unsuspecting flights of the floral harvesting creatures.
I reluctantly move on from this spectacular frenzy for a short walk deeper into the woods towards a secret place that few know about. I feel the firm meadowland drop away towards soft bottomland beneath my feet into a hard wood swamp where mud sucks at my boots and tall yellow reeds replace the flowering bushes under towering stands of swamp oak and red maple.
What I seek is the Tiger Salamander Pond. Artificially built by local wildlife biologists, it is shallow and ephemeral, only filling during the spring freshet when rain and high water flood its waiting basin. The salamander pond was lovingly scraped from the earth beside fresh water to nurture an annual mystery that has played out in these woods since the first quadrupeds, sea creatures with feet instead of fins, slipped onto land to fill a new niche in life.
The land is moist and boggy around the pond, the ground springy beneath my feet. This is where the adult tiger salamander makes its burrow and stays below ground for most of the year as it digs and forages for worms and tree root insects. Only in spring do they arise and come out, return to their ancestral ponds to swim, find a mate, and spawn in the ephemeral virgin water under the sheltering trees. However, it must be a pond with no fish! For fish will eat the salamanders and their newts before they can metamorphose and grow legs, creep out of the pond like their parents and spend the long winter months underground as terrestrial creatures.
This unique need for the salamanders, to fine fish-free ponds, has been thwarted by human development where roads traverse their ancestral migration routes and where ponds have been filled in for housing and malls. Thus, the need for creating artificial ponds, otherwise, the secretive Tiger Salamander may slowly slip off towards extinction. Another way we’ve found to protect these sensitive species is through easements upon landowners to keep parts of their property natural, to purchase right-of-ways for migratory corridors so the slimy little quadrupeds don’t have to sneak through backyards in the spring dreaming of water.
Some landowners complain that these are intrusions into their right to develop their private property as they see fit. However, if they could only see the Tiger Salamander for what it is, a fantastic amphibian that sits athwart nature’s evolutionary divide, part water-borne yet land-entrained, pulled by a genetic tidal surge that predates human history. They would see that it makes sense to give the secretive salamander a little room, perhaps only a small patch in our wetted gardens where amphibian logic can still endure, on a minor scale.
3. The Crepuscular Creatures
Forsythe Animal Refuge, Absecon New Jersey
Some creatures only come out at twilight. The female firefly, Photuris lucicrescens, a crepuscular beetle only arises from its perch in the shrubbery when shadows lengthen and night threatens to fall. That’s when the females go aloft and compete, perform their aerial display, each species using a specific luminescent code to entice a male of their own tribe to respond with a receptive single flash. The lightning bugs unique biological display comes through unique physiological adaptations including an opaque abdomen filled with an enzyme called luciferase that can be controlled to flash in a cipher sorted by evolution to occur when most aerial predators are asleep or just coming out. Other diurnal species include chimney swifts and bats, jaguars and skunks. Unlike their diurnal cousins who move by day or slip through the woods nocturnally at midnight, these twilight creatures are entrained by evolution to seek and survive only in the transient world where sun and moon are diminished, where all is transition and neither day or night persists.
Field biologists who study these crepuscular species must adapt as well. Those who seek to study bats and birds must use special equipment to trap them in a way that respects the parameters of their flight. Typically, we sweep them from the sky with mist-nets so gossamer fine that on a darkening evening, if placed properly, they can snare both bats coming from their sheltering caves and passerine song-birds seeking the safety of their nests before true night steels upon them. The nets succeed only if carefully placed to intersect the subtle path of the animal’s path through the evening air. The naturalist must place the nets between bushes and at the slightest tilt suggested by the softest of prevailing winds keyed to a sixth sense as to how topography and the contours of the land are used by the animals to guides them home as twilight disappears and darkness brings new dangers from owls and other nocturnal predators.
It’s a terrifying yet exhilarant moment when the trap is hit, there may be a sudden loud shrieking of birds mixes with the piercing chirrups of bats squealing, many captured together! It’s a peculiar dance then, to wade into the cacophony, delicately lifting the net to carefully extricate a bird without breaking its spine while a bat snaps at your fingers.
These animals have evolved to hide from both day and night’s predators, perhaps hoping to be ignored as a survival strategy. This crepuscular twilight is a fertile position in most habitats. For it is here that, the fireflies, chimney swifts, and common mice stir themselves; crepuscular species that need only a few hours to forage and mate before the fiery sunrise or deadening darkness fall. For each of these animals an equal amount of time is sufficient at sunrise and sunset when deep shadows soften the light. These twilight animals forage best when there is protection from the eyesight-dependent predators, the hawks, the owls, and the bobcat predators of night.
I’ve often wondered what wonderful adaptive intermediates must have existed in prehistoric times to create and isolate these species into such fixed temporal niches. Was it a slow adaptive slide over millions of generations or was it a sudden population shift across an evolutionary gap? Stephen Jay Gould, the noted evolutionary biologist, hypothesized these evolutionary leaps in short time as punctuated equilibrium or evolution on a short-term geologic and environmental scale that pushed these species into islands of twilight. I wonder at the rare fact of them; their life style of separating day and night into transitional phases, organisms active in two altogether different times punctuated by hours of ebony darkness or golden. How many thousands of lost family trees were there? Species rising and dying out, creating false evolutionary trails that led nowhere. Yet steadily the circumstances favored a few billion species that come awake at dawn and dusk like fairies, only when the sun is waning or brightly waxing. This while most other animals sorted into grey or black-coated night-dwellers or brilliant diurnal creatures covered with bright plumage and visual clues to signal status or behavior to maximize the light. To many of these night creatures’ vision is a vestigial tail.
4. The Yellow Jacket Wasp
Haddonfield New Jersey (My Backyard)
It was a hot day in December. One of those anomalous amalgams of sun and warm gulf stream air that wanders north to in a freak sub-tropical thrust from the Florida Keys. I was out in my yard in a tee shirt and shorts - this in frosty intemperate New Jersey where December is typically heralded by dirty slush and freezing wind that crisscrosses our peculiar peninsula of land trapped between the meandering shores of the Delaware River and the wind-fetched expanses of the great north Atlantic Ocean.
It was a yellow jacket wasp that brought me out my stuporus daydreaming as I raked some leaves locked from under my yew bush for my mulch barrel. I hoped to dedicate these to the compost heap, which was percolating over in the corner of my yard with mid–winter abandon. There a microbial kingdom of decomposing fungi and bacteria fed on the last mulch leaves of my summer garden. I opened the top of the barrel composer and a whiff of deep rot and earth spun stink greeted my nostrils, a somewhat sickly smell of decay but fraught with all the possibilities of regeneration, last years corn husks and pea pods clinging tuberous and wondrous, making new soil for next year’s peas and cauliflower gardens.
I guess it was this rank smell of fecundity that drew the wasp to my naked arm where it shook like a dog on my goose-bumped skin. I looked down at her yellow majesty a brilliant moment in the otherwise slurred nor’easter suspension that is winter. The wasp turned about in a slow dizzying dance, possibly smelling on my mulch covered skin some perfumed essence of summer gone; possibly mistaking the dank odor of decay within the mulch barrel as a distant dream of time’s intensity. Drunk with the sweet sense of the fallen flowers she danced her directions out on my arm to remember where she'd been then up, she flew and was gone. Flying home, I guessed, to her monastery of honey-comb caves in the earth where sister workers diligently waited on grubs and larvae, tending the Queen in her jelly chamber, dancing for them in the darkness a buzzing song that worked its hold on the hive. It sang of the elixir of summer, the succor that all should follow. All the sacred chamberlains of the Queen’s chamber becoming agitated, circling and acting out the directions of the bee's dance till all as one they fled, leaving only a few warriors to guard the Queen and her egg chamber.
Up and out, they came erratically like blind men mounting stairs, following their guide, spilling upon the wind like a rope of gold seeking ambergris. Up they flew into the bright sun upon my garden and hovered in the deep shadows behind my garage where unfortunately the mulch barrel was set tightly closed once again, its aroma dissipating. I’d hosed down the barrel with a garden hose and washed my arms so it was to this detente, this non-eventuality, that the swarm of bees came to, flying about in erratic spirals above the mulch drum.
They sensed the diminishing odor but having lost the intensity of the scent, took to searching in ever-widening spirals to the extremes of the yard in search of the source. I stood in the wonder watching as they flew about my head like a golden cyclone, their tiny hearts yearning for the smell of the decaying flowers evaporating into the cooling air. A foolish, stultifying wish that evaporated with the closure of the mulch drum, the desire to feed slowly fading until the bees eventually flew back to their lair and crept back through their windowed opening into the earth, crawled down into their heated cellar to work more diligently till winter’s end, chastened by the promise of a false spring.
*Originally published in Eunoia Review (2024).
BIO: Thomas Belton is an author with extensive publications in fiction, poetry, non-fiction, magazine feature writing, science writing, and journalism. He is a marine biologist, an environmental scientist, and a public health official for the State of New Jersey. His professional memoir, “Protecting New Jersey’s Environment: From Cancer Alley to the New Garden State” (Rutgers University Press) won “Best Book in Science Writing for the General Public” by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/protecting-new-jerseys-environment/9780813548876 In non-fiction he has published hundreds of scientific articles, essays and creative non-fiction pieces. His most recent creative non-fiction essay “Escape from the Cancer Ward, (2024),” was published in “Ars Medica,” a Canadian journal out of the University of Toronto that specializes in literature that addresses public health issues; https://ars-medica.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/1851/467 In addition, his essay “The Making of an Environmentalist,” was published in “Transformations” a project of the “Narrative Storytelling Initiative” at Arizona State University and a publishing channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books. https://www.transformationnarratives.com/blog/2021/10/13/the-making-of-an-environmentalist.