Nomenclators of a place

 Here’s an idea from William Least Heat-Moon for your next walk through the woods: Leave the guidebook behind. Instead of trying to identify an animal or plant by its common or scientific name, see if your specimen’s appearance or behavior suggests something.

Least Heat-Moon wrote a chapter on the many names of Circus cyaneus, the Northern harrier. Many people have called hawks wind riders, which I like. But ink dippers might be even better. The tips of the harriers’ wings are black, and their looping flight suggested a dip pen writing words on the sky. Wind writer was a variant.

Least Heat-Moon thought that giving a plant or animal a name of your own making was important: 

 

then it will become yours to carry into dreamtime because memory depends finally upon what we create for ourselves, and, until we become nomenclators of a place, we can never really enter it. 

 

That line reminded me that sheep played a big role in the consciousness of the ancient Greeks, who called them πρόβατα, ones that move forward. It’s an apt name. Grazing sheep advance like lawnmowers.

Me? I’ve been watching a headstander. White-breasted nuthatches, Sitta carolinensis, often feed upside down. The one I’ve been watching ran, headfirst, down the trunk of a pine, searching for bugs.

• Source: William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991, pp. 422.