For a Handful of Feathers Page 6
There have been insinuations of adultery among quail, a thought that pleases me a great deal, and one that telemetry—the application and monitoring of a small radio transmitter attached to a subject, in this case quail—will soon prove one way or the other. What we do know is that the species is basically family-oriented, possessing fierce protective qualities and good staying power. Percentage-wise, very few broods result from the couple’s first nesting endeavors. Incubating is a dangerous business, and predation, weather, farming, and the poor managerial practices of first-time parents affect the outcome, but because bobwhites are genetically forewarned of failure, they are also genetically programmed to renest two or three times a summer to ensure the survival of the species. These nesting failures, incurred early in the season, account for prime hatching time being late July instead of early June, if one counts backward to the whistlings of March.
For three weeks before entering the world, the embryo grows inside the inseminated egg, breathing the gases exchanged between the shell and the egg’s soft inner lining, twitching inside its cocoon, growing wings and feet and an oversized head. Hours before hatching the embryo deliberately moves its beak within striking distance of the shell and pierces the protective membrane, gaining access to its first gulp of oxygen; soon after it jerks backward, and the beak—more specifically a small tool known as an egg tooth—rips through the shell in the process called piping. With an unlimited quantity of oxygen now available the hatchling begins a counter-clockwise trip inside the egg, splitting the shell and emerging as a soggy, down-covered bobwhite quail. The process of birth lasts a matter of hours and is well choreographed in that a chorus of “clicking” sounds from inside each individual egg during the final hours of the embryo’s imprisonment alerts the rest of the clutch that birth is imminent. It is a program that prompts a basketful of one-ounce bobwhites to hatch simultaneously. As soon as the natal down is dry, the parents lead their brood away from the obsolete and dangerous nest into a world of equal unkindnesses.
Jim Buckner’s feelings on early hatches of bobwhite quail are pretty radical. “If I had my druthers, I’d step on every nest I could find, until the first of July.” The reasoning behind these heretical words is that the earlier quail hatch, the longer they are exposed to weather and predation. Mammalian predation intensifies during the summer months, as do the number and diversity of prey. Summer weather is intense and critical to the survival of the fledglings. Rain, hail, and floods account for most of the 50-percent mortality that occurs in quaildom during the first fortnight of life. The birds have the resilience of the rural poor: destroy their home and they build a new one. Therefore, in terms of survival, even though the later nest would contain fewer eggs, if those eggs hatched in September rather than June or July, the clutch would be exposed to less weather and less predation.
I visualized Jim scrambling quail eggs for the welfare of the population and asked him how his theory was received by the old-guard plantation owners who live and die by what is referred to locally as the “Thomasville tradition.”
“I don’t mention it,” he said without a smile.
All too familiar with the mind-set of the wealthy, I said, “Tradition is the excuse of small imaginations.”
II
The black-and-orange monarch butterflies that float over the farm on powdery wings land on the scats of predators and, given the chance, cannibalize each other. Ruby-throated hummingbirds dart tongues as long as their bodies into the heart of carmine-colored columbines and, using their bills as foils, fence over the sugar water in the feeders. Bumblebees swarm the tiny violet flowers that cloak the bicolor Lespedeza shrubs, and white-tailed fawns fall out of their mothers onto the soft grassy arbors of summer. On a morning walk, my English pointer followed her nose into a thicket and ran back out, yodeling and queer-eyed, her tail between her legs, closely followed by the high-stepping hooves of a white-tailed doe. The doe would have killed Mabel had she caught her, but she didn’t, and the element of danger enhanced the comic moment of her escape.
An immature, sharp-shinned tiercel took to eating mole crickets off the lawn in the late afternoon when no one was watching but me. The little hawk, invisible until it opened its wings, studied the earth from inside the branches of a live oak and swooped at the only piece of unstable turf in an otherwise orderly expanse of greenery. The raptor landed talons first, crushing the dirt tunnel, ripping into the ground with its beak, dragging the two-inch-long insect out of the earth. The accipiter stood on the grass for a while, savoring the taste. I equate the first doves of the year with large grains of sturgeon roe. The sharp-shinned must have similar thoughts about mole crickets because the choice of meals on the farm is plentiful.
In the last decade, a joint invasion of armadillos from the south and coyotes from the west settled into northern Florida. Armadillos sleep an average of nineteen hours a day and wake up with either grubs or worms on their minds, which brings them to my garden at night in times of drought. In the morning a child’s shoe would fit in the spade-shaped holes under the sprinklers where their favorite food rose to moisture. Armadillos are too simple-minded to run away from a light and too stubborn to be discouraged, except by death, and they take an incredible amount of killing. I once shot an armadillo through the head with a .38-caliber Magnum at two o’clock in the morning and watched it perform bloody somersaults on my porch for ten minutes before lying down. Another time, although mortally wounded, a large male armadillo ran between my houseguest’s legs, ricocheted off his Labrador, and fell into the swimming pool, feet churning, body sinking, and blood trailing the advertisement of its descent to the bottom, where it came to rest upside down. Not an attractive sight for two friends who had just finished pontificating on the ethics of killing. Our dogs peered into the pool, and so did we, caught between the horror of the rising plume of armadillo blood and a classic bit of old-time comedy. Jim Fergus looked at me in the yellow glow of the outside lights and remarked, thin-lipped, “What do you think the animal-rights people would have to say about this bit of ignominy?”
Chaos drifted through the ranks of the golf club a few summers back when my playing partner and I were the first to stumble upon the remains of a newborn fawn in the middle of the fairway of the par-three third hole. Our footprints in the dew led the players that followed us to where the coyote had munched on the deer’s posterior. The women members putted in tears and their husbands volunteered to form a posse.
I don’t own or like sheep (for the same reasons I don’t like cows), but if I did own sheep I’m sure I would shoot coyotes. They do take deer and turkey and a quail or two off the farm every year, but that’s not reason enough for me to kill them. My livelihood does not depend on the survival of my game. I raise wild things for the pleasure of raising wild things, and if they are eaten by other wild things, so be it. I am much more inclined to kill a stray dog or cat than a wild predator, and as for the armadillos, I guess my relationship with them is one of bonne guerre. If I catch one tearing up the place I’ll shoot it.
The truth is that I like coyotes. I like their family tree, their cunning, and their adaptability to a habitat that was foreign to them a century ago; but mostly I like to hear them at night, when the high notes of their lupine melodies scale the vertebrae of my neck. Now that the coyote has moved into the Southeastern states and has replaced the almost extinct panther and the endangered fox, it is seen, in the minds of some, as a new and formidable threat to wildlife.
Then there are the E.A.s (Fred Turner, in his book A Border of Blue, defines E.A.s as Educated Assholes), who feel that the coyote doesn’t belong east of the Mississippi. As if Argentinian Bahai grass belongs in Florida, or hyacinths or melaleuca or any of a thousand other species we shortsightedly introduced to the country. It is as it is because we changed the rules—we killed off the bears, the cats, and the wolves—and the coyote has moved into a biological slot to replace them, to keep under a semblance of control the cotton rats, the opossums, the raccoo
ns, the snakes and … the list goes on. The bottom line is that the coyote has as much right to pursue game as does the eagle, the alligator, the blue jay, and the armadillo. The biologist J. B. S. Haldane said, “Civilization is based not only on men, but on plants and animals.” Our behavior in respect to our fellow humans differs from our behavior toward animals only in terms of numbers and the fear of reprisal. So far there have been more animals to mistreat than humans, but as our own population reaches saturation, the situation will even itself out.
If one is raising turkey, sheep, ostrich, or llamas for profit, coyotes should probably be dealt with. Some farmers inject antifreeze into hot dogs and toss them into the woods. Antifreeze kills slowly by boring holes in the stomach lining. Local farmers bait meat with pesticides. The use of poison is economical, even if it is cowardly, and justifies the outrage of those who are opposed to killing, but then who am I to tell another man what is right and wrong? I shoot armadillos for rooting up daylilies but protect coyotes because their songs make me happy. Civilized behavior functions within the parameters of the soul, an intangible innocence that defines us as human beings. The soul is the domain of love, of God, of art, nature, music, children, parents; the forgotten domains, trampled of late under the hooves of our ever-multiplying herd.
Every predator in the world would like to eat a bob-white quail. Some don’t, for reasons of the bird’s celerity, but those that are shrewd enough and have the speed will continue to pursue the fat little bird until the end of time. Among those are: opossums, raccoons, skunks, weasels, cotton rats, foxes, dogs, cats, crows, blue jays, cattle egrets, chickens, turkeys, and red ants. Also, snakes: coach and whip and king and black; sharp-shinned and Cooper’s hawks, shrikes, parasites, and me. Hawks attack from above, snakes from below. Long-billed birds take aim at its brain, and fire ants infiltrate pipped eggs and devour the embryos before they are born. Summer rains flood its nest, and droughts wrinkle the egg membranes like old snakeskins so that the chicks can’t pip their way out and thus suffocate. The list is incomplete but does hint of mayhem.
We humans raise quail, release quail, protect them, feed them, shoot them, hang them, pluck them, cook them, and serve them to our very best friends. The bobwhite quail is one of the most sought-after items in nature’s deli, which may explain the fact that they are scarce, paranoid, and run like hell.
III
June 25, 1992
Noon, 96° Fahrenheit
Fish crows turn to face the smallest breath of air with open beaks. Half a dozen bobwhite quail whistle. The light is white. So is the surface of the pond, disturbed by riffle beetles skating over its milky surface in long reaches that end abruptly in dimples. The heat is such that I see through cataract eyes, heat rising out of the earth, a condition that will last three months and that more than once will scare me into believing the land is on fire.
Anhingas break the surface of the lake with brims as wide as my hand sideways in their beaks. Anhingas hunt underwater alongside the turtles and alligators; at water-level they swim like snakes. I watch them waddle up on stumps, smack brim against logs and throw them in the air to make them fall headfirst down their throats. Then they open their wings wide to dry. Yellow light highlights their primary feathers and long, pale, buff-colored necks, which flop back and forth from the bird’s chest to its back, to each wing and back again, slowly, languorously. In flight the anhinga’s head is almost invisible, an extension of a neck ending in a sharp, thin, yellow bill, fashioned long before man invented the spear. In the water, the narrow head never stops moving, swimming, angling, looking back and front—a distant cousin of the Loch Ness Monster. Steam rises out of the pond.
My farmer friend gave me four geese, two brown ones and two white. I wanted a pair of Canadas, but that’s what I got. The brown geese have orange-rimmed eyes; the white geese have yellow rims and blue eyes. They all have orange bills and wrinkled legs with thick nails filed to a point, and their stomachs are shaped like a woman’s purse. On hot days like today they lie around and nod.
“The trout won’t bite when the cows are lying down,” Bill tells my doctor friend this morning. He and another doctor had been casting flies at bass since dawn. “Check Channel Six, at five-fifty-five P.M., Doc; they broadcast the Solunar Tables. Feeding time’s the same for fish and cows. It’s too hot. The cows were already on the ground when I drove up this morning.”
Doc tells Bill about the cottonmouth they saw swimming high in the water shortly after sunup. Bill spits out his plug and says, “I was fishing this hole one time when I saw this cottonmouth moccasin swallering her young ones. I shot her in the belly, and damn if them little ones didn’t spill outta her and swim away.”
The doctors leave. Purple martins skim the water on the pond; some pitch in the water headfirst. Bill looks at his notebook: “I pushed up two hundred tree stumps this winter, and killed twenty-six Bell Boys (rattlesnakes). One snake about every ten stumps.” He thumbs through the pages on which he records things like that, along with planting dates, maintenance dates, weather-pattern dates, the-number-of-fish-caught dates, odds-and-ends dates, etc.; a well-kept record of his year on the farm that adds weight and credibility to both our lives.
He continues, “To that, add seven moccasins and the five-foot alligator that ate the gosling. You cooked it up in butter and garlic with black beans and rice and said it didn’t taste like anything.” Bill keeps good records.
I listen to other figures that have to do with the price of grain and seeds while I wonder again about the ethics behind killing species that out of fear, surprise, or plain hunger could kill one of my dogs. I know, of course, that in a year’s time twenty-six rattlesnakes eat hundreds of rats, and that alligators eat just as many turtles, who in turn eat just as many fish. But no matter how much I think about it, in the end, the safety of the dogs, like the safety of children, prevails. It has something to do with the humanization of pets.
I shot a yellow-bellied slider the first year I was here because I was told that there were too many turtles and they would eat all the bream. When the turtle blew up, I wondered what possessed me to do such a stupid thing and for a while I lost my mind. Perhaps it is a sign of abnormal times or simply a sign that my time is coming, but in either case, every year it is getting more difficult to kill. I need help in the matter, help from my dogs who so love to hunt the birds I so love to eat. In cases like this, I pray for fall to come quickly, before I forget how much I love to hunt, how maudlin I can get when I drink red wine, and that, on the average, quail live less than a year.
IV
Charley Johnson is an independent contractor who worked heavy machinery for the previous owner of the farm. Since the beginning of my tenure he has built two dams, knocked over hundreds of worthless trees, pushed fire lanes, dug ditches, broken down, ran his crawler into mud holes and out of gas, pissed me off, and made me laugh. Charley is also part-owner of a raw bar in Cairo, Georgia, and cooks a pretty good barbecue. When I give a party we serve his oysters and my pigs. So far no one has died or complained.
In the 1960s Charley worked construction on one end of Grand Bahama Island while I fished on the other. I understand Bahamian time so I understand Charley, and it amuses me that someone I met thirty years after the fact is keeping up the old island tradition of resting from taking a nap.
I, too, cherish my naps, and I daydream, and I still drink rum, so when Charley doesn’t show up for a week it rings a bell. Being a sucker for memories I usually forgive Charley, and to be honest I’m not sure how I’d behave if our situations were reversed.
He is an operator-owner, and despite the fact that the owner in him is still living in the islands (a stronghold for zero maintenance), the operator in him has seen it all, including the death of fellow operators. He owns more nonfunctional pieces of equipment than functional ones, but like a gunslinger he travels with his favorites: Gerty, the excavator, and baby Gert, the small bulldozer that moves sideways like a land crab. Both machines are p
ainted commercial yellow and oil black, and have to be started with a screwdriver. Big Gerty finally “passed” (as they say down here) a while back, after sixteen years of service, but little Gert is still with us and pushing dirt as I write. The smoke and ooze that used to leak out of big Gerty would have given any state official an apoplectic fit, but for reasons I will make clearer, I do my best to keep the government off my land.
Charley’s usually smiling face turns copper brown by June and he advertises the pleasant fifty-year-old belly of a man who enjoys an evening splash. His grandmother was a full-blood Creek, a lineage I would be proud of, but given that very little has been written about the Southeastern Indians, Charley’s reticence to talk about his family tree is understandable. In any case, who wants to relive century-old atrocities, atrocities that are no better or worse than those committed today.
The Creek laws of marriage did not allow a man from a high rank or blood to marry a woman of the same social class, only a woman from a lower caste. This was implemented to obviate inbreeding and keep things in perspective. Take it from a genuine blue blood and sometime dog-breeder: the Creek law beats the hell out of line breeding.
Charley and Bill are as different in their approach to work as two men can be, and yet they are both bound by the pull of the earth.