I followed a well-worn path through an opening in low-hanging branches of trees and shrubs; newly fallen leaves crunched underfoot, and the scent of cedar drifted by as I passed a waterfall cascading over rocks. I came up to a patch of tall grass where Eastern Yellow Jackets had built a nest in the ground a few months ago. When we realized we had a yellow jacket’s nest in the middle of our yard, we were concerned. We mentioned it to friends and quickly received advice on how to kill them. Gasoline, kerosene, insecticide, and hot water were all mentioned as a way to take direct action. We decided to take a wait-and-see approach. My son mowed around this area in our backyard for three months, and my wife kept hanging laundry within ten feet of the nest. We went about our activities as we watched the yellow jackets go about theirs. We managed to coexist without incident until a few days ago when nature had her way with them.
I walked by the path that passed by the nest and did not see the normal stream of yellow jackets coming and going. I took a few steps closer, stood and stared in disbelief. The vegetation was matted down, and there was a 12-inch-diameter hole in the ground where the small opening to the nest used to be.
The yellow jackets that I feared turned out to be the victims of an attack. Something had dug up the nest and eaten the larva inside. This seemed incredible to me. Who is capable of such daring?
There were three possible suspects: skunks, possums, and raccoons. I'd never seen a skunk in our yard, so that seemed unlikely. Possums and raccoons are familiar visitors, so it was probably one of them. I had recently learned that some people encourage natural predators of yellow jackets by placing peanut butter near their nests.
Possums have a peptide in their blood, which makes them immune to hornet and yellow jacket venom, and raccoons are generally unstoppable. Even so, it is hard to fathom eating a yellow jacket’s nest. It would be like eating a waffle topped with fury. Can you imagine sticking your head into a yellow jacket’s nest?
A little farther down the path, I came up to a huge red oak with leaves rustling in the breeze. I looked up and noticed a flash of brown streak through the sky beyond the canopy. A Red-shouldered Hawk came into view. They were nesting in a large shingle oak a few hundred yards to the west. I had watched a pair of Red-shouldered Hawks go through their courtship ritual in the spring; the aerial acrobatics ended with them copulating in the top of this very Red Oak tree. I routinely heard their wild kee-ah calls emanating from the sky. The resident Blue Jays like to mimic them, though, so the sound had been a common refrain for months.
I had also seen Red-shouldered Hawks in our local parks. Now that fall migration is in full swing, we've had an influx of migrating hawks in our area. A few days ago, I watched a preening Green Heron in a creek in a nearby park when a Red-shouldered Hawk flew in and perched above it. When the hawk dropped down near the water, the heron gave a loud squawk and flew off.
The hawk was so focused on the frogs in the water that she did not seem to mind my presence. I watched her repeatedly drop into the water and come up with talons full of wet leaves and sticks. She would pick through them with her bill, searching for a frog before loosening her grip and trying again.
Between bouts of hunting, she would stop and stare at me. I was mesmerized by her intense, tawny eyes.
When she decided to hunt in a new area, she flew to a wire just above my head, shook her feathers, crouched down, and launched herself with a soft humph sound.
I watched her fade into the shadows and gracefully swoop up to perch in a Silver Maple. Seeing her sitting there in the filtered light made me think of a brilliant passage from H Is for Hawk by Helen McDonald, in which she describes a hawk she had trained for falconry.
"The feathers down her front are the color of sunned newsprint, of tea-stained paper, and each is marked darkly towards its tip with a leaf-bladed spearhead, so from her throat to her feet, she is patterned with the shower of falling raindrops. Her wings are the color of stained oak, their covert feathers edged in palest teak, barred flight feathers folded quietly beneath. And there's a strange gray tint to her that is felt, rather than seen, the kind of silvery light like a rainy sky reflected from the surface of a river. She looks new. Looks as if the world cannot touch her. As if everything that exists and is observed rolls off like drops of water from her oiled and close-packed feathers. And the more I sit with her, the more I marvel how reptilian she is. The lucency of her pale round eyes. The waxy yellow skin about her bakelite-black beak. The way she snakes her small head from side to side to focus on distant objects. Half the time she seems as alien as a snake, a thing hammered of metal and scales and glass. But then I see ineffably birdlike things about her, familiar qualities to turn her into something lovable and close. She scratches her fluffy chin with one awkward taloned foot; sneezes when a bit of errant down gets up her nose. And when I look again, she seems neither bird nor reptile, but a creature shaped by 1 million years of evolution for a life she's not yet lived. Those long barred tailfeathers and short, broad wings are perfectly shaped for sharp turns and brutal accelerations through a world of woodland obstacles; the patterns under plumage will hide her in perfect, camouflaging drifts of light and shade."
Yellow jackets. Possums and raccoons. Red-shouldered hawks and a green heron. These encounters occurred in my yard and a small park in my neighborhood. These isolated islands of green can be expanded and linked together with a little education, planning, and opening to new possibilities. There are many resources to help people do this. One of my favorites is Homegrown National Park, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people rewild their yards.
Restoring our yards and connecting them with community green spaces and corridors like rivers, creeks, and trails will increase the functionality of these natural areas and allow animals to move and interact with the land. This will put positive feedback loops in motion, like those described in this poem by Camille Dungy about Yellowstone National Park.
"After the reintroduction of gray wolves
to Yellowstone and, as anticipated, their culling
of deer, trees grew beyond the deer stunt
of the mid century. In their up reach
songbirds nested, who scattered
seed for underbrush, and in that cover
warrened snowshoe hare. Weasel and water shrew
returned, also vole, and came soon hawk
and falcon, bald eagle, kestrel, and with them
hawk shadow, falcon shadow. Eagle shade
and kestrel shade haunted newly-berried
runnels where deer no longer rummaged, cautious
as they were, now, of being surprised by wolves. Berries
brought bear, while undergrowth and willows, growing
now right down to the river, brought beavers,
who dam. Muskrats came to the dams, and tadpoles.
Came, too, the night song of the fathers
of tadpoles. With water striders, the dark
gray American dipper bobbed in fresh pools
of the river, and fish stayed, and the bear, who
fished, also culled deer fawns and to their kill scraps
came vulture and coyote, long gone in the region
until now, and their scat scattered seed, and more
trees, brush, and berries grew up along the river
that had run straight and so flooded but thus dammed,
compelled to meander, is less prone to overrun. Don't
you tell me this is not the same as my story. All this
life born from one hungry animal, this whole,
new landscape, the course of the river changed,
I know this. I reintroduced myself to myself, this time
a mother. After which, nothing was ever the same."
The appetite of the wolf drove this ecological cascade. Now, we are the wolf. We can leverage our appetite to initiate the same dynamic in our yards; instead of wolves and elk, we can influence coyotes and deer. They, in turn, will cause an enlivening ripple to flow through the ecology of our yards. Our imagination holds the key to this blossoming of life.
The unlock that needs to happen is for us to listen to and trust our inner voices. We are swept up and constrained by an old, outdated story, a cultural narrative that would have us believe we are separate from nature and we can control it at will. It is this separation that drives so much of our sadness, addiction, and aggression. It is through opening and connecting to the life around us that we can fully appreciate this one short, beautiful opportunity we have to be a part of something bigger, something capable of revealing beauty beyond belief.
Each restored yard is a green island of habitat that houses a kindred spirit. Every rewilded yard makes it easier for the next person to go against our conditioning. One of our neighbors who is rewilding his yard has a little free library rising up out of his prairie planting. I stopped one day and perused his books. One name caught my eye: Barry Lopez. There is hope for us yet. Arctic Dreams and prairie dreams reveal the love of life in our imagination, which holds the key to allowing the life outside our door to express itself. We think we are in control, but our lives are short and filled with illusions. We really don't know life at all.
Rows and floes of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I’ve looked at clouds that way
But now they only block the sun
They rain and snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way
I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It's cloud illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all
Both Sides Now, Joni Mitchell
Bill- I really enjoy the inspiration of this essay; its inspiration from the serendipitous occurrences happening all around us in nature. I interpret this as hopeful.
A waffle topped with fury!! Brilliant — vivid and funny. I’d love to hear how that came to you. Big fan of H is for Hawk; thanks for this gorgeous passage. 😍