“In wildness is the preservation of the world.” – Henry David Thoreau
My son didn’t want to leave the park. He tugged on my hand, pulling me toward the swings. “Let’s stay here.”
The wind was starting to blow, rain spattering our faces. “Come on. I’m hungry,” my husband called. He was already halfway down the sidewalk, dragging my son’s scooter behind him.
Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed something in the sky.
“Look at the birds,” I called.
The three of us turned and stared up as hundreds of starlings swarmed across the gray sky. They moved into a black mass, and then spread out, shifting together and apart, like dancers in a ballet. After a few minutes they landed all at once on a nearby oak tree, settling into its decaying leaves and gnarled branches, almost camouflaged, except for their cacophonous birdsong.
My husband cut across a field toward the tree. My son and I followed, the swings forgotten. We stood together, speechless, as we watched the starlings swarm into the sky and land, again and again.
It reminded me of other wild moments I’ve witnessed. Years ago, at Yellowstone, my husband and I trekked along a hillside at dawn, listening to an elk bugling. Then we glimpsed him on an opposite hillside, his muscular body and massive antlers silhouetted against the pale sky.
Another time, on a sweltering July day in Colorado, we lugged gear up a steep, rocky trail to an off-the-beaten-path campsite my husband had discovered as a kid. We made multiple trips from our car to the site. Then, just as we slumped into our lawn chairs, a brown bear lumbered into our campsite.
More recently, we sat on a jutting rock next to the Pacific watching waves roll in and glimpsed a whale a few miles from shore.
Watching the starlings was a similar experience – unexpected and wild. Except this time, we were just a few blocks from our home.
I’ve always loved going to nature – driving up mountain roads, finding wildness in alpine snowdrifts and aspen groves, atop fourteen-thousand-foot mountains, amidst old-growth stands, and on wind-swept beaches. These days, we do less of that. We ride our bikes and walk almost everywhere we go, and we usually spend our days off exploring the ten square miles of urban land where we’ve lived for almost a decade.
I miss driving into the wilderness, but I’m discovering that wildness is not something we need to drive to find. It’s all around us. Starlings swarm. Squirrels scavenge for acorns. Deer munch on our neighbors’ arborvitae. Wild turkeys wander the hills above our house. Ducks swoop through our neighborhood.
These creatures are our neighbors, so perhaps the moments when they surprise us and render us speechless are even more wild than the ones we traveled miles to see, binoculars in hand.
It reminds me of something I heard the nature writer David Gessner say in an interview. He travels around the world, experiencing nature, but some of his most wild moments have been at home.
I was with my dad when he died and heard his breathing slow. I was with my daughter when she was born, and these are wild moments too. For me, the key to wildness is its integration with our so-called normal lives.
Have you experienced any wild moments close to home? I’d love to hear about it.
Yes, we do experience wildness close to home. I love walking in the little woods close to home and escaping momentarily. But it’s just not enough for me on a regular basis. I also think as kids get older they need more space to roam. More uncharted territory to discover. I find more and more that I need to be out, away from the city to really unwind and reset. I think it’s cool you can do this in your neighborhood.
You know Abby, I seem to keep harping on this same message. My own tiredness and angst about living in a city. Please ignore me. I feel bad for always being this way on your lovely blog (I seem to be so negative in this space). I love that you write about finding happiness in the city. If I come across as being pessimistic, please disregard it. I love your urban-love message. I do love parts of living in a small city but it just seems so hard to make the most of it with a family of 5 and a strong desire to be out in the wilderness.
Take care.
Renee, You don’t seem pessimistic at all. I love all that you have to say here, and I share your strong love of the wilderness. That’s why I love living vicariously through your blog posts about your family’s adventures. I grew up in the mountains, then I moved to a big city to go to college. I spent so much of those five years dreaming about the wilderness, and spent every day off hiking and exploring the nearby trails, often by myself. So, trust me, I know where you’re coming from. Now that my family’s experimenting with more local living, I’m so glad I’m finding peaceful wild spots and wild moments right here in the beautiful small city where I live. But I still take every chance I get to go hiking.
I hadn’t thought about it as wildness when I posted it, but I recently blogged about an experience I had with a dying pigeon that was very moving: http://www.on-the-other-hand.com/loophole-for-the-unforgotten/
It’s been almost a year since that happened and I still think of it often.
People can have wild moments, too. One of the most amazing things I’ve seen happened a few years ago. There was an elderly man riding the subway alone late at night. I couldn’t tell if he was drunk or had some sort of balance or muscle problem but he was trying to reach the subway doors before they closed. He kept falling to the floor.
Several young men sitting on the other side of the subway rose together and carried/supported him off the subway. Two of them told their friends that they were going to ensure that he made his way home safely. And then they left.
In what is often an unfriendly city, this snagged my attention right away. They were so full of concern for a stranger that there was something “wild” in the air in a very good way.
Thanks for your comment, Lydia. What beautiful wild moments. I loved reading about the act of kindness you witnessed on the subway. I agree, it’s quite wild – a moment where other creatures surprise you and render you speechless, and where you realize how connected we all are.
This was a stirring post. I love finding wildness in unexpected places. I, too, have been startled by starlings. Have you seen the swarm on the UofO campus? There is a huge flock that roost in the large chimney stack.
Last summer we had a bee swarm in our back yard that was a lovely encounter with wild urban activity. We also have developed several relationships with squirrels in various homes and been able to watch their strange social structures and urban habits (even being able to feed them out of our hands at times)
I too had a somewhat profound moment with a dead bird several years ago. I blogged about it here: http://attemptingtransparency.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html and here: http://attemptingtransparency.blogspot.com/2007/02/finding-poem-for-day.html
I could go on, but I’ll stop. I really like this post.
Thanks, Marianne. I’ve heard much about the swifts at the U of O campus, but haven’t seen them yet. We’ll make a point of it this year. Do you remember when they’re there? Thanks for linking to your posts. You’re a poet! I had no idea. What a beautiful poem.
Where your parents and I went to college (and met) in Greeley, CO, a two-block stretch of 10th Avenue along the old campus was lined with trees that housed so many starlings that the sidewalk was slimy with their droppings and the stench was almost overwhelming from across the street. They really were a pestilence. The city finally got them to move by placing a public-address system along the street that played repeated sounds of anguished, tortured starlings.
Starlings, as you may know, aren’t native to North America — they were brought here, along with a variety of other non-native birds (e.g., the English sparrow), in the late 19th century by Eugene Schieffelin, a well-meaning literature lover who wanted to introduce all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare to New York City’s Central Park.
Today, they are so widespread and destructive that the federal government lists them as an invasive species, and they’re not subject to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (meaning that it’s legal to destroy adults, nests, eggs and young). Their aggressive nature and indiscriminate nesting habits have driven many native species to near extinction (an example is the purple martin, now entirely dependent on nest houses put up by humans, who must also protect the houses from colonization by starlings).
Yes, nature can be wonderful, but when it’s unnatural nature that has a real destructive effect, not so much.
Hi Bill, All very interesting information. Thanks for commenting. Ha, I’m not sure who to root for in a stand off between a city and a murmuration of starlings. It seems like they have a lot in common. Cities also fit the bill of “unnatural nature that has a real destructive effect”, and cities have also driven many native species to near extinction. According to the Audubon Society habitat destruction due to suburban development is a huge threat to birds, as are cell towers, sky scrapers, pesticides, chemicals, domestic predators, etc. And John Flicker, the head of the Audubon Society, says the single biggest threat to birds is global climate change, which scientists generally agree we humans and our cities are to blame for.
Watching these starlings (which I’ve been doing quite a bit lately) has reminded me of the book Providence of a Sparrow by Chris Chester. Chester falls in love with a member of that other non-native species you mentioned – the English Sparrow. He finds the bird as a featherless baby under his window, takes him into his house, and names him “B”. “B” shocks and beguiles Chester with his intelligence and affection. Pretty soon, he and his wife have turned their entire upstairs into a bird aviary and taken in quite a few other sparrows and finches. It’s funny how even the most reviled creatures can teach us about nature and ourselves.
Yes, humans are probably the most unnatural species on earth, a salient trait being their drive to impact their environment, mostly in negative ways if you judge by their effect on other species. Our use of the words “nature” and “natural” is telling, even among sensitive and aware people, because for the most part we define them as something separate and apart from ourselves.
I live these days on an arm of the Puget Sound, and glory in the migrations of seasonal birds (I’m watching loons, mergansers, buffleheads and goldeneyes dive for their dinners as I write this). It’s amazing to see Arctic terns pass through and consider that they get more daylight than any other creature on earth because they summer in the Arctic and winter in the Antarctic, flying nearly pole to pole with each equinox (the longest regular migration of any known animal). My next-door neighbor, a retired Evergreen State College science prof and a birder who’s expanded her life list with trips to Africa and South America, has numerous bird feeders, so we see more land birds, too, than we otherwise might.
But the starlings are truly a scourge. They drive off the native birds, find numerous nooks and crannies to nest in, including under our eaves and deck, poop everywhere and make an awful racket. The birding neighbor has even offered to buy me a pellet gun if I promise to take out the starlings. (I’m trying to close off their nesting places before getting so drastic.)
I consider the non-native starlings to be another negative and unintended consequence of human activity.
Thanks so much for your comments, Bill. You’ve given me an excellent idea for an essay. Your home sounds incredibly beautiful, as is your description of it, and I hope you are able to find peace from the starlings.
Starlings also hang around our house. They settle in the giant cottonwoods in our neighbors’ backyards and make the awful racket you speak of. Of course, in our case, we far prefer their birdsong to the roar of the traffic we hear when they’re not around. Apparently starlings are incredible mimics. They can even repeat human words and phrases.
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4811