For a Handful of Feathers Read online

  In the long run it makes no difference; short of nuclear holocaust, the earth will outlive this present set of species, including man. Regardless, my heart goes out to the creatures that aren’t nimble enough to avoid death on those days when I walk the woods with fire dripping from my fingers. I look at the empty shells of box turtles and armadillos, the ashes of skunks, hook-shaped and white against the pitch-black earth, and I feel remorse for them and the thousands of crawling creatures that blew away in the updraft of my tempest. But it is a short sorrow; death came and went quickly over my land, and unlike most modern disasters, this ending is as old as the planet and leaves behind, if not solace for the sentient ones that perished, at least faith and a future for those that survived.

  VI

  Nature’s production of wild food, which is at its natural low in February, has by April shifted into second gear. Warm nights and warmer days unlock pollen and release to the wind a pale, green mist. Oak trees stand behind gossamer veils of budding leaves, the pubescent flowers of the wisteria vines mantle fences and host trees, wild grasses stretch out of the lukewarm earth to accommodate and protect the insect hatch. Redheaded woodpeckers drill into the trunks of pine trees, delivering them of sap, which flows like an apron of lava, a girdle of glue retarding the progression of snakes to the birds’ nests.

  I watched an osprey pluck a rat snake off a limb at the very crown of an eighty-foot loblolly pine. A mockingbird took offense and pestered the hawk until it dropped its catch. I searched for it, but the snake’s bungee cord body had absorbed the fall, and it was gone. I then looked straight up to where it had fallen from and delighted at the resolve of an appetite that would shimmy that far for an egg.

  The ratio of male to female bobwhite quail is six to five in favor of the males, thus encouraging competition for breeding rights; numbers good for perpetuating the gene pool, less good for one out of six males. The hens, who are not as anxious to breed as their counterparts, concentrate on gaining the weight and building the strength necessary to fashion nests, lay and incubate a dozen or more eggs, protect and rear the broods, and survive the process, which begins as early as March and ends as late as November, when family groups disperse and intermingle with each other.

  It is April, and the bobwhites have been singing for two weeks. I see them on every log, eyes glazed, beaks open, singing out in an unconscious world of moist dreams, chattering nerve cells, and female cloacas. The hens in turn display a soft spot for those bobwhites that exhibit a strong paternal instinct, as incubating the clutch and caring for the hatchlings is the ticket to nirvana. Quail are about as monogamous as humans. If the opportunity for a little aside presents itself, pourquoi pas? But in general the couple work out whatever differences birds encounter and raise their brood together. One would assume that a hen grants a male access to her favors because of his strength, his beauty, or his aggressiveness, and I’m sure that it happens, but last spring I watched three cock birds jousting with one another while the object of their desire stood demurely in a thicket, a few yards away, seemingly paying no attention to the goings-on. One bird was being bullied by the other two, and after having been run off half a dozen times, took refuge under a pine top and resigned himself to the role of spectator. The two remaining birds faced off, blew up their feathers, lowered their heads, and chased each other like billy goats. The contest eventually took them out of sight behind a large oak tree, a signal for the spectator bird to emerge from under his branch and run to the thicket as fast as his short legs would take him. There, he stood inches in front of his paramour, tilting his head this way and that, showing off his colors. To his utter joy and astonishment, I’m sure, the hen squatted on the ground, twisted her tail feathers out of his way, and allowed him to mount her. Or so I think, because all I saw of this adherence of organs was a momentary flutter of wings. When the louts returned from battling each other, the chosen one ran them off.

  I like to think that my seven-ounce hero charmed his hen by using his wits, but regardless of my fantasy, studies indicate that once a male successfully covers a hen, his confidence is such that he will successfully defend his tenure from all interlopers. Although the consensus of opinion is that couples are monogamous, I have also observed some less-than-devoted conduct on the part of hens openly encouraging display behavior from males other than their mates. It seems that if promiscuity there is, it originates with the female of the species. However, in this day and age, polyandry is a state of affairs best left alone.

  In the case of the single male, his lusting and pining continues. For those unchosen males the priority is still to con a hen the only way they know how: by whistling one up. But as the season progresses and hens become scarce, the bachelors can only covet what they don’t have and hope for the death of a rival. The birds that sang so longingly in March forget the refrain by September.

  For those birds that have found each other, the consideration is to pick a site and build a nest. In the first instance, and I assume after much bird talk, some couples merely fill a depression in the earth with grass, pine straw, and leaves, while others add a roof and an entranceway to their home. In either case, quail like to nest on the edges of unrelated habitat, such as next to a road or field or a freshly harrowed firebreak, preferably close to food. A good management practice is to leave a hundred-foot-wide strip of rough on either side of all dirt roads for nesting cover. Later, when the breeding season is over, those strips of rough can be left as is, mowed, or harrowed-in and planted in a late season cover crop such as clover or rye.

  The loss rate of hens during incubation is higher than at any other time of the bird’s adult life, and it is this vulnerability to predation that accounts for the lopsided ratio of five hens to six males observed the rest of the year. A pair of skunks working a fencerow at night will eat every single egg they come across, as well as what birds they catch napping. Studies show that 50 percent of quail nests are destroyed by weather, predation, or man, and although bobwhites do rebuild their nests until they are successful or run out of time, the clutches grow progressively smaller with each attempt.

  The average clutch for a bobwhite quail in the Southeast is fourteen eggs, of which most hatch, but only 50 percent of the hatchlings celebrate their two-week birthday. From that original clutch of fourteen eggs, six will live to see the leaves turn. Not a percentage to brag about, but one that does explain why such little birds lay so many eggs.

  When the weather is good, hens lay an egg a day until the clutch is complete. During that time I see pairs of bob-whites all over the farm, and I know that somewhere, hidden under a pine top or inside a clump of dead grass, a nest awaits its daily deposit. I follow paired birds to their nest sometimes and, careful not to touch anything, return when they are feeding elsewhere. Every day I count a new off-white-colored egg, but I have never seen a bird of any kind lay one, except a chicken once, when I was young and lived on a farm in France. The hen grunted (or so I like to remember) and pecked at my hand when I removed her investment from the straw. I wiped the egg on my shirt, piped two small holes at opposite ends with my knife, and sucked the slippery warmth down my throat, like all farm boys did in those days.

  VII

  April 19, 1992 (Easter Day)

  Bill says, “It is best to cut a hog on a falling moon. It keeps the bleeding down.” We cut two boar hogs today. Pigs out of a sow trapped six months earlier in Reed Swamp. We bred her to a Georgia boar and I have been feeding these swine corn and kitchen scraps ever since the day the sow built herself a mattress of dog fennel, hid underneath it, and dropped a litter of eight young ones. We turned the piglets and their mother out in the woods for a month to flavor them up, so to speak, lost two gilts to coyotes, and trapped the rest back in order to cut the boars and fatten them. I will have them butchered next month and they will weigh between forty and fifty pounds, dressed.

  Bill’s brother, Jerry, who is in the pig business, came by early, before church, and after telling me that every inch of
a pig makes fine eating—from the rooter to the pooter—sent his black helper into the pen. The short, stocky man, whose scars attested to a number of mistakes, moved like a dancer and herded the pigs into a corner. When it was right for him, he snatched a young boar by one ear, tipped it over, and, taking hold of a ham hock, handed seventy pounds of pig, effortlessly, upside down and screaming, over the railing. Bill set the boar hog on its back into an open-ended metal funnel with its head completely enclosed in an iron cone. Jerry cut down the middle of the pig’s scrotum, fished out the testicles one at a time with his forefinger, severed the canals, dropped the fruits of his work, and squirted the incision with menthol. Back in the pen, the barrow huddled in a corner, screaming louder than ever, until it spotted its nuts in the wallow and ate them. Neither he nor a second pig bled a drop. A sign of moonbeams and dexterity.

  Later that day it rained on the farm for the first time in weeks. Almost half an inch, enough to clean off the grass, the air, and the plowed earth. Bill planted corn off and on until seven P.M. He went home but returned to the fields three times after the pigs were cut, once after church and twice between rain showers. He plants our corn with old mule planters he jury-rigged to pull behind the tractor. He sows in low gear, as anything higher flings the seeds past the slots out of which they are intended to fall. The exactness of planting corn while sitting on a tractor in front of a planter built to be used while walking behind a mule is demanding and antiquated, but it works. The rows are straight and true, just as the farmer in Bill wants them to be. I watch him from my office and wish he drank so I could offer him some whiskey. During a break he tells me that when he was a kid he used to peel the bark off of young sweet gums, wait a day or two, scrape the resin, mix it with some of his mother’s flour, and chew it while he worked, instead of gum, which cost a penny. Bill spins the tractor back on track and says, “Hell, it wasn’t nothing but sap and worm shit.” The light now is bright and yellow around the tractor; the earth turns black behind the planters.

  VIII

  Jim Buckner is a tall, dark-haired man, soft-spoken and knowledgeable in the way that all wildlife biologists (in his case forester-biologist) should be. Many of his peers conveniently forget, a decade or so into their careers, that life and the study of life begin in the field, and that while extrapolating data is a necessity, the gathering of that material is the art. The window through which a quail, for example, looks at the world can be measured in inches and angles; what it sees cannot be read on a chart. Managing a species or an ecosystem is an unstable alliance between the technocrats and the gatherers. Those who choose to live and die behind a desk have in effect taken the position of pontificators. Buckner is from the school of “hands-on” management, at the cross roads of science and art. The fundamental accountability of research is in the sharing of knowledge, and Jim obliges with grace.

  A hundred or so thousand years ago, when we inherited the extra gene or two that differentiated us from our first cousin the chimpanzee, we became the best killing machines on the planet. Our greater skills and intelligence were no match for the animals we coveted, and we coveted them all. The extinction of every great mammal during the years following our emergence out of Africa coincides closely with our arrival on each of the remaining continents. A hundred years ago we plucked the feathers off egrets to make hats for our wives; now we spray our armpits and tear open the heavens while slowly but surely the developers cement the earth to the sky.

  It is naive of me, I know, but I always assume that regardless of our specific talents and differences, hunters, naturalists, biologists, animal lovers, and the multitude of organizations that profess to revere and delight in the natural world are all working, by choice, for a cast of characters so utterly dependent on our compassion and decisions that self-aggrandizement and vanity within these factions is as inconceivable as it is when dealing with starving children. I am wrong in both cases, of course. At best, the competing powers within the various communities can be blamed for indulging in “the narcissism of small differences”; at worst they are politicians. “An oyster held too close to the eye obscures the view of the rest of the world,” is the polite way Herbert L. Stoddard put it. Being less polite and more militant than Herbert L., I find the word that best fits my opinion of these small men with large egos is assholes.

  Buckner, however, is in the field four or five hours a day, five days a week, and the remarks that leave his mouth ring with the quiet confidence of a professional too wise and circumspect to second-guess nature’s ways.

  I rode on the tire guard of a tractor next to Buckner while he drew an entire landscape with a six-foot-wide harrow. He cut my two-hundred-acre, L-shaped field into long slices of red clay where, in his mind’s eye, he could already see rows of pine trees growing. At first it didn’t make sense, but after he had raised and dropped the harrow a few times, the ribbons of freshly turned dirt began to take on a shape and life of their own. I realized that what had seemed like aimless meanderings were in fact geometrical strokes that bisected and trisected sections of this enormous field in patterns firmly embedded in his head. Jim used the wet-weather ponds and the handful of solitary oaks and ironwoods that pepper the field as landmarks. To deter erosion he clung to the contour of the terrain, explaining while he harrowed that during the fourth or fifth winter I would have to pick and choose the best loblolly pines, mow down the poor specimens, and prune the lower limbs of the remaining trees at eye-level to stop them from spreading horizontally. The work involved in pruning the limbs off thousands of pine trees was mind-boggling then, and getting worse as the time grows nearer.

  Jim worked the natural profile of the land, drawing lines that pleased his eye while accomplishing the goal of turning an empty sea of grass into a future maze of long, narrow fields framed by rows of tall trees. We were in fact building a landscape reminiscent of some of the classic gardens of Europe, except on a much larger scale. And instead of planting slow-developing evergreens such as yew trees and boxwoods, we Americans had opted for fast-growing softwoods. This topiary was not being designed so much for the sake of the gentry as for the contemplation of high-flying birds and the pleasure of those that would land in it.

  While we were on the tractor, Buckner outlined the habits of the game that would be drawn to the farm, the vagaries of the weather, the plants and seeds best suited for the loamy soil of the region, and always returned to one statement: “In this business, there are no givens. Nothing is predictable. The name of the game is experiment.”

  Since that day, and in subsequent years of tinkering with this earth, I have watched plum trees thrive in one place and others die, six feet away. I have moved pitiable food patches by as little as ten yards and watched them flourish. And I have stubbornly planted trees in the holes where other trees had died and watched the new ones expire just as quickly. A French viticulturist friend, justifying the greatness of his wine, told me, “First, it is a matter of soil, then a matter of history, and finally a matter of love.”

  A few days after Jim traced the clay, a large truck full of seedlings—followed by a flatbed, a tractor, and a transplanter that looked like an antiquated metal sulky with a three-point hitch, a blade, cogwheels, metal slots, a very uncomfortable-looking bicycle seat, and a single, offset rubber tire—made its way up to the barn. The tractor, driven by a well-fed white man, set out after Buckner’s harrowed ground towing the planter, in which five hundred loblolly seedlings were stacked within arm’s reach of a much thinner black man sitting on a dried-out leather seat. The leading blade of the transplanter dug a shallow furrow into which each seedling was hand-delivered via a narrow metal holder soldered to a motorcycle chain, calibrated to plant a pine tree every six feet. The rows were four trees wide and ten feet apart, leaving plenty of room for Bill to mow between them without skinning bark.

  It was a meticulous and boring job for the tractor driver and a real backbreaker for the man setting the seedlings as he bounced across anthills, tractor ruts, and go
pher holes. Counting the field in question plus four smaller ones, the black man planted twenty-two thousand pine trees in three days, the disks between his vertebrae serving as sole shock absorbers.

  I could have joined a government program that would have supplied me with both pine trees and the cost of planting them, in an effort to control erosion and reforest some of the millions of acres it had encouraged to be over-timbered during the past century. It is (for once) a good program, but I had just informed the Agriculture Stabilization and Conservation Service (ASCS) office that I intended to let the fields grow fallow and much to my stupefaction had been told that I was entitled to huge dollar allotments for not (!) growing corn or wheat for profit. Being new to the game I took the money and began my life as a “farmer” by doing nothing. After the third visit from one of the two agencies concerned I realized that if I wanted to keep my privacy (the only reason for owning unproductive land) I had better shut my mouth, turn down every subsidy dreamed up by a government that at the core of its policy-making is either venal or unconscious, and mind my own business. So I planted my own trees.

  IX

  The seven or eight coveys of quail that lived on the farm when I bought it in 1990 represented the average number of birds, give or take, that had been living there since the land had been actively managed for hunting twenty-five years earlier. To increase those numbers I needed to do three things: plant permanent food/cover patches; plant annual food/cover plots; and—my only real headache in terms of quail management—remove as much Pensacola Bahia grass (originally brought in from South America to fight erosion on the beaches of northeastern Florida, and later used for hay) as possible. The two-hundred-acre field had been planted in corn for so long that the problems would not appear until the following year, in the shape of common Bermuda grass, another invading herb planted for forage thirty years before when Brahma cattle roamed the plantation. The fields, pasture, and woodlots had endured the defecation of a thousand intestines and the weight of four times as many hooves, the former propagating undigested grass seeds and the latter packing those seeds into the ground to a depth and hardness that challenged the sharpest chisel plow.