wildlife

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.

One percent of the land in the lower forty-eight states is what might be considered "wilderness." Ninety-nine percent is utilized in some way for human profit-urban areas, suburbs, logging, mining, grazing. In 10,000 short years we humans have found ways to extend our shadow over the whole reach of a peopleless continent.

It's seven in the morning. Coffee steams from my cup and I've been up for nearly an hour. I've already been out with the dog. It's cool today, a good break from all the unseasonably warm weather we've had. The drought has lifted for a little while. My rain gauge, unemptied, still tells me last week we had over an inch and a half of rain here east of Spartanburg. It's felt like the South again for a few days-moist and verdant. Now autumn has suddenly arrived, and the dry weather will likely return if the patterns hold true. The sourwood trees are turning that burnt red that for me signals fall. Winter is only 12 weeks away.

For the last two weeks I've been seeing the monarchs migrating through. No, I don't mean that convoys of kings and queens have been trucking down the interstate. I'm talking about the most royal of butterflies, the orange, black, and white monarch.

I don't spend much time channel surfing, but the other morning I was stuck in the house waiting for the cable man, and I wandered into a program on ANIMAL PLANET called "Backyard Habitat." I'll admit I was fascinated. On the program a perky former Miss Florida in khaki pedal pushers and a friendly naturalist from the National Wildlife Federation fly all over the country helping families revamp their old-style yards into little pieces of territory friendly to wildlife. It's a sort of "green eye for the normal guy."

It's been over a year since I wrote about snakes, but I think it's time. SNAKES ON A PLANE has brought my reptile friends into the spotlight, and once again they're getting a bad rap.

I have enjoyed encounters with snakes for three decades now and still mark my years by the first snake I see in the spring. The year 2006 it was a Northern Brown Snake out in the yard, a slug, earthworm, and insect eater only 10 inches long. It turned up in some wood I was moving. I picked it up, admired it, and then placed it back under the log.

"Snappers are the most widely distributed of North American turtles … they are abnormally reclusive, and when one makes a public appearance it is not an event to be passed over lightly," writes my friend Franklin Burroughs, a low-country South Carolinian transplanted 30 years ago to Maine, Burroughs is writing about a big female snapper he'd chanced upon in the dirt road in front of his family's farmhouse in Bowdoinham. "They come out in late spring," he writes, "or early summer… They need sandy soil to lay their eggs in."

I just walked with my dog down to the creek. We dropped a few dozen feet of elevation off the ridge where we built our house into the board flood plain of the Lawson's Fork. Then we turned west and hiked up the sewer right-of-way to the confluence with Cold Water Branch. The smaller creek got its name because in its headwaters seven springs rise.