Seen Anything?

​ “Look, over there.”Bill pulled the green conservation authority pickup onto the shoulder, stopped on the concession road. A farmer we were to meet was a no-show; we are killing time, happier in the cold truck cab than back at the office.I peer over the frozen corn stubble, past the fence posts half sunk in snow, into the gray light by the hydro lines maybe 300 yards off.
Nothing, at first. Then a shimmer begins resolving itself, a horizontal whirl of specks, fluid, flying, lighting on the ground, taking off, landing again, guided by its own rhythm and purpose.
“Snow buntings,” Bill informs me.
They are winter birds, migrating from the Arctic in the coldest months. I’d never seen them before. A half-smile crosses Bill’s face.
Another day, hot summer. Ken and I are walking under hydro transmission towers searching for eastern tallgrass prairie plants – big bluestem, Labrador tea, butterfly milkweed – but  mostly eating wild strawberries, which Ken is uncannily skilled at finding. He stops at a pile of wood chips.
“There’s a red-bellied snake here.” Ken prods the pile with his boot, separates a few chips with his hand, reaches down.
“Oh, hello” – as if the snake had called with an invitation.
He picks up the small snake carefully with his fingers, lets it writhe for a few seconds, lays it gently back on the ground. The encounter is small stuff to Ken, a herpetologist. I stare as though he’d conjured the snake from the soil itself.
I spent time with Ken and Bill when I had this great job sending letters and making phone calls to landowners on the Oak Ridges Moraine, the long, glacier-formed ridge of sand and gravel that snakes through south Ontario, soaking up rain like a sponge to fill wells and feed streams.
I was paid to sell the idea that planting trees and keeping cattle out of the moraine’s creeks would be good stewardship for the aquifer. When people were interested, I visited. Experts like Ken and Bill added real value with their insights on invasive species, tree planting, bird identification, whatever. I listened and learned.
I learned a forester knows not only the names and ages of the trees, and whether they should be harvested or left to grow, but can tell if cattle grazed the woods two decades previously. A forester can read land like a book, will look at a massive oak with sprawling limbs in the midst of the woods and tell you that, a century ago, this was all open pasture.
And I learned that a good birder knows species by their voices even when some of them – grey catbirds, brown thrashers – mimic other birds. They listen – is it the “sweet sweet I’m so sweet” of the common yellow warbler or the “see-it see-it see-it, titititi” of the less widespread Nashville warbler? Hear it? There is a difference.
The biologists, ecologists, environmental technicians would come back to the conservation centre from the field, meet with coffee behind the workshop.
“See anything?”
Someone might recount spotting a red-headed woodpecker – a rare site these days – perched on a fence-post. Then someone else might counter with a long story about a red squirrel’s epic and futile struggle to escape a hunting weasel. There was a measure of one-upmanship in the storytelling.
A neophyte, I was careful with my offerings, limited them to what I thought I was certain of – the first sight of buffleheads swooping over broken ice, the distinct ‘turkey’s foot’ of fully ripened bluestem by a roadside, a pileated woodpecker, impossible to miss, hammering at a rotted tree trunk.
Still, even in my early days of encountering “the others” – author Farley Mowat’s collective name for the animals with whom we share this planet – I quickly learned the more you look the more you’ll see.
Awareness is everything. Read a two-inch story in your local newspaper about a winter outbreak of great gray owls and, next thing, one of the darned things will startle you as you drive, a huge bird swooping directly across your car window.
Discovery requires only an afternoon sitting quietly in the corner of a field. Make it early summer; pack a lunch. A bobolink will call, its song leads you to the top of a gnarled soft maple and you will see his yellow-crested head. His liquid bubbling music fills the air. An osprey flies towards its nest, long sticks on a platform mounted at the top of a telephone pole. Look closely. There’s a fish in her claws. She points her catch fore and aft for aerodynamics, like a torpedo. A fox happens by, just yards from your feet. You are both equally startled. She gives you a quick appraisal. Harmless. She carries on across the field, a mouse clenched between her teeth for her kits.
In his book on Haitian voodoo, The Serpent and the Rainbow, ethnobotanist Wade Davis writes how humans have lost the ability to see the planet Venus in daylight even though, in theory, it continues to reflect sufficient sunlight to be a navigational tool, just like ancient days. His hypothesis is that we access one world view and close others, leaving behind some secrets hidden in plain sight.
This insight came home to me in, of all places, a junkyard where I was looking for a taillight lens for my ancient Subaru station wagon. I realized that although I struggled to identify the trees, woody shrubs and grasses on the properties I visited, I could easily sight up and down the flattened car carcasses and rhyme off every car’s maker, from clues as subtle as hubcaps, grills, and rear-end stylings. A lifetime of exposure to automobile culture had permeated my awareness.
A couple of years pass. I’d done my moraine work, said goodbye to Bill and Ken. I connect the dots – between taillight lenses, climate change and the loss of species, red-bellied snakes hiding under wood chips.
What is revelation to me is that our minds have limited capacity to hold more than one world view. It is time to replace those auto hupcaps in our mind with buffleheads and hunting weasels, to read the woods like a forester, discern the difference between yellow and Nashville warblers. Our environmentalism needs baseline knowledge of the earth’s natural systems. Without it, how can we measure the small victories?
I propose a new start. We return to that afternoon in the corner of the field. You are expecting nothing. A bobolink lands on a branch, starts his liquid melody. A fox happens by, bringing home a meal for her kits. She decides you are harmless and passes close.
It does not remove an ounce of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, plant a tree, or resolve Venus. But I can recognize a swirl of snow buntings across a gray winter field, and that’s a start.