animals

This week in the NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE Charles Siebert wrote one of those articles you want to point all your best friends toward: "What Are the Whales Trying to Tell Us?"

Siebert is one of my favorite environmental journalists, one interested in writing about the hastily constructed, ever dissolving lines between our species and the millions of others we share the planet with.

All over the upcountry this morning the warm, south-facing sides of houses are covered with boxelder bugs.  Have you seen them? They're orange and black and about a half-inch long.

I make this prognostication because it's true at my house. The boxelder bugs are swarming, so they're probably swarming elsewhere. I've noticed them in other years, but this time it's looking a little like a bad horror film-"The Invasion of the Boxelder Bugs."

Someone forwarded an e-mail my way with the heading "River Falls Rattler." The embedded picture showed a monster rattlesnake being held toward the camera on the tip of a stick. The body of the e-mail sounded official and stated that the snake had been found on the local golf course, and to be careful when retrieving balls from the rough.

We just got back from Manhattan where we attended AWP, a big writers convention. There were 7,000 academic writers-mostly students, graduate students, and writers who teach-all packed into a two conference hotels in mid-town not far from Time Square.

Out here our house is turned to the linear wildness along the creek like a big ear. We listen for what happens in the timber and thick undergrowth below us with the fascination of someone sampling a new CD. If I hear a bird I don't know, I try to track it down for identification, adding its name to our "play list" of what this place might spin in our direction. I scribble the name in the back of an old field guide, a note as to what is passing by.

"There is a season, turn, turn, turn," the Byrds sang in 1965, quoting loosely from Ecclesiastes, "and a time for every purpose, unto heaven." Every year about this time I'm reminded of the appropriateness of this old Bible verse turned folk-rock poetic insight into the turning year as the first day of fall rolls around.

It's easy to draw negative conclusions about yellowjackets. They seem to us humans to always be in bad moods and so they are hard to love. They have little charisma. Though yellowjackets make good football mascots, they would not be on anyone's short list for the next pilot cuddly creature show on "Animal Planet."

Our dog Toby has been eating cicadas the last few weeks. I limit him to three a day, though if I let him run free and wild amid the arboreal buffet I think he'd top that in a few seconds.

You've all heard the cicadas. It's our signature summer sound in the South. If you have hardwood trees you can hear them rasping in waves. It's a sharp, rolling, rusty sound. The woods around our house are rich with them, rich in sound—and calories.

For the last two weeks at our house we've been watching the Discovery Channel's powerful and mesmerizing eleven episode series "Planet Earth," or as Betsy calls it, the "Somebody's Mama Steals Somebody Else's Babies so Her Babies Can Eat" series.

This week I started to teach the last novel of the semester, Sue Monk Kidd's THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES.  This is the story of a young motherless girl who lives on a South Carolina peach farm and throughout the story, bees are a significant symbol, first of the young hero's fears and fantasies, and then later for the health of her community and the hope for her own future.