Tangled Bank: Writings from Orion

The Element of Surprise

26 The Element of Surprise The sweaty satisfaction of activism has a dark flip-side.Its name is burnout. Which of us,worn down by too much devotion to an enterprise that needs us, has not known the distress and guilt that bailing brings? Yet I believe nothing freshens the wrinkled will like immersion in the natural world.This is especially so for conservationists, who way too often forget what they are working for, what it looks and smells like.And nothing restores the wonderment like sheer stupefaction: the shockingly novel sensation that awaits every watcher who goes forth to indulge in the blessed ordinary, then rediscovers that it seldom is.This antidote is free to anyone willing to attend the infinitely generous offerings of happenstance. Take,for example,bats.Naturalists know bats,though commonly reviled, to be valuable and fascinating animals.We go to see their phenomenal flyouts , in black-cloud millions, from places like Bracken Cave in Texas or Austin’s Congress Street Bridge. But a single bat where you least expect it can be just as stunning. After Christmas snow and a month that brought a yard of rain, an early January day came bright and balmy. Snowdrops swelled near to bursting in the dooryard;the long catkins of hazel and the first skunk cabbage,by their golds, signaled the halting but sure start of spring. Indoor work had gone stale, and we couldn’t resist a walk. AsThea and I climbed a grade above Gray’s River, looking down valley, we spotted what appeared to be a bird, then, we thought, a big red moth. But it didn’t fly like a song sparrow, and we were months away from the cherry-and-mahogany ceanothus silk moths,which,in any case,don’t fly by day.Well, neither do bats, which should have migrated or been hibernating by now. Big and little brown bats appear in our bedroom many a summer night, and hunt insects over the yard; but in January? Then I recalled that one year before I’d seen a bat working this very same stretch of road, just after sunset, as a barn owl and a tree frog called on the hillside. 27 The Element of Surprise Our subject fluttered back and forth past our faces, its own ears and face readily visible.Against the blue sky of the east,its wing-strokes showed all above its back, like those of a short-eared owl. Then, backlit by the dropping sun while hawking midges at the meadow end of its hundredyard circuit, its thin membranes that do for wings flashed bright red. Darting back again, under maples, alders, and spruce, it looked for all the world like a big brown butterfly. That perception took me back to the Colorado River, when I was following the migration of monarch butterflies two years before. Gary Nabhan had alerted me to monarchs moving through the Grand Canyon earlier that fall.When he first saw them coursing above his raft, he’d taken them for bats abroad in the daylight. I chuckled at that until I stood on Navajo Bridge, looked far down into the canyon, and beheld the desired monarchs milling in the late sunshine. Surprise: they were bats. Our Willapa winter bat flickered in the sun, veered, and motored past again,its warm brown dance reminding me of another false call.Following the Orion Society’s Forgotten LanguageTour inTexas last autumn,I canoed with local conservationists working to save a wild bayou near the mouth of the Trinity River above Galveston Bay.We’d slowly paddled among alleys of fluted cypress buttresses and their gnomic knees, dodged under great golden orb-weaving spiders on their ten-foot webs, spooked little blue herons and roseate spoonbills.Then, in a narrow, leafy channel, a powerful brown bat appeared down bayou.We stared as it zigzagged across the black water; but something wasn’t right, and when it alighted on a hardwood bough, I yipped,“It’s a black witch!” “A what?”came back four voices.It was indeed the huge moth,beautifully striated with black and turquoise, a southern species that sometimes emigrates north. I had only seen Erebus odora once before, twenty years before, flapping its way through the hot canyons of downtown Denver. Surprise! It keeps the world fresh, no matter where you find it—the percussion in the ceiling that announces the presence of woodrats;the vole in the cellar, deep in deer mouse...