Of Men and Marshes

7. of marshes and islands

of marshes and islands Marsh islands of the northern states and northward are often distinctive land areas, partaking of the wildness of the marsh itself. If sufficiently inaccessible, they are as nearly unvisited by man and by man's domestic stock as any of the higher ground about a marsh or lake that we may expect to find in long-settled human communities . Heavy growths of certain weeds of cultivation may at times take over parts of these island areas having soil that is frequently disturbed , as by ice, wave-action, or rodents. Marsh islands may have their timber cut and be more or less littered with trash and may have shacks or cottages built on them. Still, they are not apt to be put under cultivation, and many of them are man-free for months or even years at a time, except perhaps during the hunting and trapping seasons. In spring and summer, marsh islands are often the retreats of concentrations of wildlife finding undisturbed breeding conditions when they need them most. This is not to say that the crowded occupants of island breeding grounds live with idyllic security just because they are relieved from human intrusions-though relief from the latter can be among the greater blessings that wild things enjoy! The laws of life may apply to the island-dwellers even more conspicuously than to the dwellers of the real marsh, because of the of marshes and islands 85 even greater crowding that may take place on the islands. There is friction between crowded individuals, there is exploitation of the exploitable, and there is death on the islands, but, with man largely out of the scene, the processes of living and dying have the sanction of timeless Order. Of course, modern man is of Life, also, yet his dominance and his faculties for upsetting so much of the rest of life serve to rule him out of what we think of as "natural" relationships of living things. There could hardly be, it is true, human dominance more complete in its way than the dominance of some islands by fish-eating birds. A small island may have almost nothing alive on it except cormorants and the scavengers, predators, and parasites associated with cormorants and their foods. The cormorant islands reek of dead fish, of excrement, and of combinations of odors unpleasant to the human nose. The ground has its dead birds in all stages of decay and dismemberment, together with the fish bones and the whitewash over all. Similar domination by one or a few species is to be found on island rookeries of pelicans, gulls, and other kinds of colony-nesters. I am not saying that one must be able to enjoy close contacts with some of these rookeries to appreciate their meaning as natural phenomena, to appreciate their manifestations of life in, yes, its beauteous aspects. For the foulness, by human standards, of the rookeries need not detract from the grace of gulls in flight nor of cormorants in the water, nor from the spectacle- at a distance, if one prefers-of living creatures living as their kinds lived on islands in the ancient seas, lakes, and marshes. We need not impute conscious dignity to wild animals because they look dignified (when they are not squabbling or trying to choke down something too big to swallow), but theirs is still the dignity of the millions of years that they and their behavior patterns have persisted. Island rookeries are not always dominated by single species to the exclusion of a varied fauna. I have seen many heron rookeries having hundreds of nests concentrated on island areas of a few acres. While it was plain that the herons were there, at least some of these islands were rich in other life. Away from the groups of trees that were loaded with heron nests lived many of the usual animals of islands. Beneath the heron nests would be hunting grounds for predators and scavengers, and a windstorm violent enough to blow nests out of trees might really bring down some exploitable food resources. 86 of marshes and islands One central Iowa island of not much more than an acre had during a single breeding season a rookery of black-crowned night herons, a pair of great horned owls, a mother mink and her family of young, one or two raccoons, a lone fox squirrel, a considerable number...