The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature (26 page)

S
qualling bands of cold rain scoured the forest last week, bringing to ground the first significant accumulation of leaves. Now a strong sun has baked the leaf litter, and every moving animal stirs up loud rustling. Crickets and katydids are quickened by the warmth, and they sing with vigor: regular high pulses from crickets hiding beneath downed leaves and raspy trills from angle-winged katydids clinging under branches. Unlike the dawn chorus of birds in the springtime, the fall-breeding crickets are loudest in the midafternoon, when their bodies have sponged the day’s heat.

The precise songs of insects are punctuated by untidy crackling sounds. A gray squirrel shambles toward the mandala, intermittently plunging its nose into the litter. The squirrel seems fevered, its body trembling with disorganized energy. The animal continues alternate surges and rummaging until it reaches a tree, where it scrabbles up and disappears from view. A few minutes later it descends, headfirst, with a hickory nut in its mouth. The squirrel catches me with its dark eyes, then freezes. Its head is held tipped up, and the tail straightens parallel to the tree trunk. The squirrel watches. Then trembling waves agitate the tail. The fur on the tail flattens, turning a brush into an undulating fan.

I hear quiet drumming as the tail pulses. Somehow, the flattened tail is substantial enough to beat out a warning tattoo on the trunk. I have seen the tail-fluttering display many times but have never been
close or quiet enough to hear the subtle tapping. This novelty is not just a consequence of my weak powers of observation—I am likely not the intended recipient of the signal. Gentle drumming sounds carry poorly through air, but the vibrations move with great efficacy through wood. Other squirrels in this tree, especially those in tree holes, will hear the warning through both their ears and their feet.

The squirrel completes its descent in spurts, alternating stationary drumming with darting rushes down the trunk. It reaches the ground, runs to the far side of the trunk and, after poking its head out from behind the tree to glance at me one last time, bounds away, the hickory prize locked in its jaws.

The drumming squirrel was not alone. Within five meters of me at least four other squirrels ply the mat of leaves, with more above in the branches. The hickory adjacent to the mandala is one of the few trees in this patch of forest with nuts still falling, making it a popular destination for squirrels, whose winter survival depends on body fat and nut stores. Competition among the foragers stirs up a frenzy of crinkling leaves and chittering mouths.

I sit and listen as the afternoon turns to evening. The squirrels’ urgent sounds rise and fall against the backdrop of the constant, mellow trilling of crickets. As light starts to dim, a new sound pushes into my awareness. The sound comes from behind me, upslope. I am loath to swing around and startle whatever animal is making the unfamiliar noise, so I sit motionless and focus on the sound. Unlike the nose-pushing or bounding of squirrels, this sound is steady, a continuous rustle, getting louder, like a large ball rolling through the litter. The strange sound builds. It is headed directly at me, and I feel a small surge of anxiety. Slowly, I twist just my neck, hoping to steal a glance.

Twelve paws paddle the litter as three raccoons trundle toward me. Their movement is focused, calm, and purposeful. They seem to glide down the hill, like mammalian caterpillars, fuzzed in silvery gray. They are slightly smaller than the adults that I see in these parts; perhaps they are young of the year, born this spring.

I sit directly on the line of the raccoons’ path, and they come within a foot before abruptly stopping. My neck is turned the wrong way, so the animals have moved out of sight. I pour my attention into my ears. The raccoons puff and sniff as they stand, making a nasal investigation. After half a minute, one snorts gently, giving a soft, fleshy oink. At this, all three continue on their path, skirting me by a foot or two. They show no sign of alarm as they come into sight, then pour away down the hill.

My first reaction to the raccoons was that of surprise, a jolt of excitement as the strange sound resolved into the advancing trio. Then the raccoons’ appealing faces came close: dark velvet masks set in crisp white borders, obsidian eyes, rounded ears perked jauntily, and slender noses. All this set in ruffs of silver fur. One thing was evident: these animals were adorable.

My zoological self was immediately embarrassed by these thoughts. Naturalists are meant to have outgrown such judgments. “Cute” is for children and amateurs, especially when applied to a common animal like a raccoon. I try to see animals for what they are, independent beings, not as projections of desires leaping unbidden from my psyche. But, like it or not, the feelings were there. I wanted to pick up a raccoon and tickle it under the chin. Surely this was the ultimate humiliation of the zoologist’s scientific hauteur.

Darwin might have sympathized with my plight; he knew the emotional power of faces. In
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
, published a decade after
On the Origin of Species
, Darwin explained how human and animal faces reflect emotional states. Our nervous systems scribe our inward feelings onto our faces, even when our intellect would rather conceal what is within. Sensitivity to the nuances of facial expression is a core part of our being, Darwin claimed.

Darwin focused on the nervous and muscular mechanisms that translated emotions into facial expressions, implicitly assuming that observers of faces would interpret them correctly. In the early and mid-twentieth
century, Konrad Lorenz, one of the first proponents of the evolutionary study of animal behavior, made explicit what Darwin had assumed. Lorenz analyzed faces as forms of communication, analyzing the evolutionary benefits that animals might gain from being sensitive to facial expressions. Lorenz also extended Darwin’s analysis by considering why humans are attracted to some animal faces and not to others.

He concluded that our affinity for the faces of human babies could mislead us when we viewed animals. We see baby-faced animals as “lovable,” even if the animals’ true characters are decidedly not cuddly. Lorenz believed that large eyes, rounded features, proportionally large heads, and short limbs all release in us an instinct to embrace and to pet. Misplaced feelings also apply to other facial types. Camels hold their noses above the level of their eyes, causing us to view them as haughty and disdainful. Eagles have resolute brow ridges and mouths set in narrow, determined lines; we see in their faces leadership, imperialism, and war.

Lorenz’s view was that our perceptions of animals are strongly discolored by the rules that we use to judge human faces. I suspect that he was right, but only partly so. Humans have interacted with animals for millions of years. Surely we might have picked up the ability to see that a raccoon isn’t a baby? This ability would have served us well. Any ancestor who could correctly interpret the danger or utility of other animal species presumably had an advantage over those with no zoological acumen. I suspect that our unconscious reactions to animals are shaped by these judgments as much as they are by misapplication of rules evolved for human faces. We have an affinity for animals that pose little physical danger to us: those with small bodies, delicate jaws, and averted, submissive eyes. We fear those whose eyes stare us down, whose faces bulge with jaw muscles, and whose limbs could outrun and overpower us. Domestication is the latest chapter of our long evolutionary relationship with other animals. Those humans who could work effectively with animal partners gained hunting dogs, goats for
meat and milk, and oxen for labor. Agrarianism requires a sophisticated ability to read other animals.

When the raccoons ambled into view, my ancestors called to me through the evolved intricacies of my brain: “Short legs and delicate jaws, squat bodies; these fellows pose little risk. The body looks well muscled, a decent meal; they show no fear, perhaps it would be fun to keep one; charming faces, like little babies.” All this wells up wordlessly from the past and suffuses me with an attraction to the animals. Later, the words try to explain the longing, but the process of attraction happens first entirely below the level of reason, layered under words and language.

Perhaps I should not have felt so embarrassed at my immediate and strong attraction. What I interpreted as the humiliation of my pretensions as a zoological sophisticate was in fact an education in my own animal nature.
Homo sapiens
is a face-reading species. We ride waves of emotional judgment all our lives, drawing rapid, unconscious conclusions every time we see a face. The raccoons’ faces gave me a psychologically incongruous shock, waking my conscious mind into discomfiture. But my reaction to the raccoons was just an extension of the responses that I experience dozens or hundreds of times each day.

As the raccoons walk away, crunching over the dry litter, I sense that my observation of the forest has held up a mirror to my own nature, a mirror that is less clouded here than in the synthetic modern world. My ancestors lived in community with animals of forests and grasslands for hundreds of thousands of years. As in all other species, my brain and my psychological affinities have been built by these millennia of ecological interactions. Human culture now modifies, blends, and transforms my mental predispositions, but it does not replace them. By my returning to the forest, albeit as an observer rather than a full participant in the community, my psychological inheritance starts to reveal itself.

T
he sound of my footsteps has changed radically this week. Two days ago, the forest floor was deep with sun-dried fallen leaves. Silent movement was impossible; walking was like traversing a field of balled crinkle-wrap. Today, the crash and crunch of autumn’s shed leaves are gone. Rain has relaxed the leaves’ tense curls, and animals move across the wetted, muted ground with silent steps.

The rain followed a weeklong dry spell, so the moisture-loving animals of the leaf litter are moving to the surface after many days of hiding. The most striking of these small animals is a slug that glides over a patch of emerald moss. Although I have seen these slugs in other parts of the forest, this is my first glimpse of one in the mandala and my first view of one traveling exposed in the midafternoon. Unlike the European slugs that plague gardens in our region, this species is a native and lives only in its aboriginal forest habitat.

The familiar European slug has a saddle mounted on its back, just behind the head. This smooth patch of skin is the mantle that covers the lungs and reproductive organs. The native slug in the mandala belongs to the Philomycid family, all members of which have distinctive mantles that stretch the entire length of the back, like the icing on a pastry éclair. Philomycids therefore look more decently attired than their European cousins that have an unpleasant naked aspect. The expanded mantle also provides a canvas for beautiful markings. The slug in the mandala has a matte silvery ground color with dark chocolate
decorations—a thin line scribed along the center of the back and fingers reaching from the mantle’s edge to the midline.

On the rain-freshened green moss, the slug’s markings are striking and richly contrasted. As the slug slides onto the lichen-covered rock face, the effect changes. Color and form melt into the variegated surface; beauty remains, but it is the camouflaged beauty of belonging.

My focus on the slug is interrupted by the sound of heavy rain against the tree canopy. Distractedly, I pull on my rain jacket, keeping my eye on the slug. But I was fooled: there is no rain, just pelting falls of wind-thrown leaves. The squall of leaves settles, adding another stratum to the thickening bed over the mandala. Most of this bed was deposited in the last couple of days, the leaves’ tenacious hold on their twigs broken by the extra weight of moisture from the rain. Two days ago, the forest canopy was thickly metaled with the bronze and gold of hickory and maple leaves. Today, a few sparse scraps hold out, but the canopy’s armor is gone.

Finally, rain comes, starting with big, cold, splatting drops and settling into an even shower. More leaves descend. A tree frog rasps loudly from an oak trunk, greeting the rain with four bursts of song. Crickets fall silent. The slug continues its exploration, at home in the slick air.

I huddle in my rain jacket, feeling an unexpected sense of aesthetic relief at the changing forest. This is hardly reasonable—autumn rains presage the cold and the pinching in of life for winter. But some quality that was missing from summer has returned. As I gaze through the rain, I realize that I am buoyed by an expanded quality of light under the opened forest canopy. My view of the forest seems deeper, fuller. I am released from a narrowness of luminosity that I hadn’t known existed.

The herbs in the mandala appear to sense the change also. Sweet cicely plants that grew in late spring, then faded through summer, have put out fresh sprays of growth. Each plant has several new sets of lacy leaves. Presumably these low-growing herbs are grabbing a few days of
extra photosynthesis under the thinned canopy. Despite the short days, enough light now reaches the mandala’s surface to make worthwhile the investment in new growth.

Without an umbrella of leaves, the forest floor is brighter. But my response, and I suspect part of the herb’s response, is due as much to the shape or quality of the light as it is to increased intensity. The loss of leaves has widened the light spectrum and freed the forest’s painterly hand.

Summer light is constrained, clipped back into a narrow range. In the deep forest shade, yellow-green light reigns; blues, reds, purples are all muted, as are the hues that form in combination with these missing colors. Sunlight that lances through the canopy is dominated by intense orange-yellow, but these beams are so narrow that the sky’s blue or cloudy white are missing. Near larger gaps in the canopy, the ferny colors of the shade are augmented by indirect colors from the sky, but the sun’s copper seldom reaches through. Life under the summer canopy is played under a miserly range of stage lights.