Monarch butterflies and naturalists

 An interesting scientific paper suggests that Monarch butterflies are not arriving earlier in the United States but are staying longer in late summer before heading back to Mexico.

If you’ve been wondering about how the Monarch’s migrations have been affected by climate change, you’ll like the paper. The lead author is Diane M. Debinski, an ecologist at Montana State University.

But the heart of the paper is a set of data compiled by Harlan Ratcliff, who was an environmental engineer at Camp Dodge, headquarters for the Iowa National Guard. He compiled the data as an amateur on his lunch hour, using a technique called a Pollard walk. The technique was devised with amateur naturalists in mind.

The basic idea is to imagine that you, the observer, are in a 5-meter cube or box. You walk along a set course — the technical term is a transect — repeatedly on a schedule and record the species of interest you see in your box. Ratcliff’s findings were remarkable because they run from 2003 to 2019. The data suggests that Monarchs were staying nine days longer. The warmer temperatures in autumn extended the season for milkweed.

Sadly, Ratcliff died in 2022. But his blog, The Roused Bear, is online. If you want to get an idea of what a naturalist is like, it’s a good place to start.

• Sources: Diane M. Debinski, Norah Warchola, Sonia Altizer, Elizabeth E. Crone, “Implications of summer breeding phenology on demography of monarch butterflies”; Journal of Animal Ecology, 17 Feb. 2025, https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.70004

It’s here:

https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1365-2656.70004

Harlan Ratcliff’s blog The Roused Bear is here:
https://therousedbear.wordpress.com/

Inner resources

 Yesterday’s note on Doris Grumbach’s Fifty Days of Solitude should have included an example of the kinds of items that make up the book. Here’s an excerpt from an entry long enough to be an essay: 

Inner resources: What are they? Are they like mineral resources, so deeply buried they require a mining operation to raise them to the surface. Or are they simply there, so that they can simply be used at will, like the ability to follow a line of thought to its conclusion, as the young Valéry trained himself to do, or like the rich muck of memory that yields useful parallels and evidence for one’s ideas at the moment they are required, or like the ability to lose oneself in books and be comforted and interested in music and live in paintings, to be able to forget the world and remember only the faint shadow of the inner being one is searching for.

 

I’d have put a couple of question marks in there, but Grumbach did not. I take the sentences as questions. Instead of either-or, I’d say both possibilities are sometimes true. Some resources can be tapped only with discipline, which is why some of us are interested in the routines and disciplines of other writers and artists. Some resources seem to require almost no discipline, although I suspect that’s an illusion — that we are simply missing something.

If you saw a course in a college catalog that promised to cultivate “the ability to follow a line of thought to its conclusion,” wouldn’t you take it?

I would. I would take that course first, before all others.

• Dorus Grumbach, Fifty Days of Solitude; Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, pp. 95-6.

'Fifty Days of Solitude'

 In the winter of 1993, Doris Crumbach spent 50 days in solitude.

Her partner, Sybil, was on a long trip. Grumbach, at 75, wanted to get away from the distractions of a full life and think. She holed up at their home on the coast of Maine with her books and music. She took walks but tried to avoid company.

I’d say it was mostly solitude.

Like Thoreau, Grumbach was trying to get far enough away from other people to front only the essential facts of life. She kept a notebook, the basis of Fifty Days of Solitude.

It’s a short book, about 30,000 words.

It’s divided into 79 sections. Some are just a few sentences. Some run several pages. An average entry is 400 words. An older reader, like me, might spend some time wondering whether these entries are notes, remarks or essays. A younger reader would see a series of blog posts in print.

Many of the entries are about aging. Writers are supposed to keep up with things, including the news. But at a certain age, is it OK to retreat and look at questions that don’t involve the news? Is it presumptuous to call them more important questions?

Many of the entries involve the tension between being a part of the larger world and being creative, which means being alone. Being a responsible member of society involves working with other people. Writing involves bolting the door and shutting others out.

We learn what Grumbach makes of the tension. We also learn about the people who’ve influenced her thinking. We learn that if she could take one novel to the proverbial deserted island it’d be Middlemarch.

What emerges is a picture of one writer’s mind. Whether you like her book might depend on whether you like people who like Middlemarch. I do.

I think the book is a good model for writers who are thinking about their own work. Recently, I posted some notes about the routines of writers and other artists. A friend sent me a note about the novelist Terry Pratchett, whose one rule was to write 400 words a day.

If you followed that rule from 80 days, you’d have something that looked like Fifty Days of Solitude, at least in form. The possibilities are interesting.

• Dorus Grumbach, Fifty Days of Solitude; Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.

A naturalist in the garden

 I’m not the gardener in the family. I just dig the beds with a shovel, turn the soil with a fork and follow orders with a smile. The orders are to weed the garden and prepare the beds for fall plantings.

When biologists talk of “disturbed” soil, they are thinking of me — a fellow with a shovel and with a wife who dreams of gardens. Two of the native plants that take advantage of disturbed soil are partridge pea, in genus Chamaecrista, and rhomboid mercury, Acalypha virginica. I’ve pulled and dug hundreds of them out of the vegetable beds. Dandelion, Taraxacum officinale, comes in a distant third.

Of the trees: sweetgum, tulip trees, pines and oaks put out seedlings in the broken ground. They are listed by order of frequency. There were more little sweetgums than all the others combined. I found one winged elm,Ulmus alata, which has a new home in the woodlot.

The other equinox

 I marked the equinox on Monday, of course, but there’s another one: the day when you get 12 hours of sunlight and 12 hours of night. That day is near the astronomical equinox, not on it. The variance is attributable to the fact that sunlight is refracted as it travels through the atmosphere and comes from an enormous astronomical body, rather than from a point.

Today’s that other day. Daylight and dark are balanced. 

Some recent sights to mark the season:

• After a month with little rain, even the goldenrods looked ragged. But the forest sunflowers were radiant. When we finally got a light shower, all the plants looked happy except the sunflowers. They were drooped and bedraggled. I love sunflowers and have been told I am a contrarian.

• A light rain after a long dry spell knocks dried pine needles to the ground. The pines shed year-round, but old needles stay aloft until we get a blow. The trail was covered with a thick layer.

• A flight of Canadian geese went by, noisy as a train. On the pond south of Stone Mountain, we saw one mottled duck. It was gone the next day. No ducks stayed on the pond this summer, and if mottled ducks were heading south, I can’t imagine why we saw just one.

• I’ve been watching for Ruby-throats at the hummingbird feeder. I haven’t seen any for a week. I saw one on Oct. 12 a couple of years ago. The date  now strikes me as kind of late in the season, although that’s just a guess. Terry Johnson, a naturalist who lives in Central Georgia, says Ruby-throats travel about 23 miles a day as they head south. 

• Source: Terry Johnson’s Backyard Wildlife Connection is here:

https://backyardwildlifeconnection.com

A trapped mantis

 The mantis was caught in a spiderweb.

It was a sight I’d never seen, so the garden project came to a halt.

Mantises have powerful forearms — so strong they can catch and kill hummingbirds. I’d assumed that a mantis could tear through any web it blundered into. What was going on?

This mantis appeared to have fallen, rather than blundered, into the web. He appeared to have been snagged by the back. Perhaps the mantis could not get to the web with those powerful forearms.

Then again, the web was the work of a Joro spider. These spiders, recent immigrants from Asia, build strong webs. When I run into one, I marvel at spiders that spin webs that feel like fishing line. I wondered whether this was a case of strength vs. strength — a strong web builder vs. getting the better of a strong web cutter.

This little drama was interesting biologically but troubling ethically. I try not to kill living things. The Wise Woman smiles when I evict — rather than kill — spiders, centipedes and other creatures, even those that bite and sting.

The exceptions are the killers. I leave poisonous spiders and snakes alone unless they’re in a place where they could do harm.

This mantis, alas, was too near the hummingbird feeder.

To imagine a language

 Imagine a band of ancient foragers in a forest in Asia. The people have a language, but they use it infrequently. People speak less as they get older. By the time people turn 40, they are silent. If an older person speaks, people know something’s wrong. If an old person speaks routinely, the presumption is that something is wrong with him.

We — especially those of who are older — can barely imagine it. We don’t recognize the form of life.

But consider that these people were hunter-gathers. They did not send their kids to college. The kids did not need help with homework or advice on careers. The children needed instructions on basic survival techniques, and they learned early. They went through rites of passage at 8. They were independent by 13.

Parents and other adults talked to children to teach them. But it was considered bad form to tell another person what to do. Children heard much less from adults when they turned 8. They heard hardly anything when they turned 13.

Older people, like everyone else, had to hunt and gather. But when the kids were out of the nest there was no need for them to say anything, so they didn’t.

This is not the outline of a science fiction story. It’s a comment on a line from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations:

 

And so to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.

 

How hard is it to imagine a different form of life?

As hard as it for an old guy like me to imagine shutting up.  

• Source: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §19.