The Daily: 23 June 23

Tonight is the night that Shakespeare had faeries running amok in the woods around Athens. This is Midsummer’s Night, tomorrow being Midsummer. Folklore has it that this is the best time to go find the Good Folk, though lore also makes it pretty clear that you may be in for trouble if you do. I have no experience with that and have no desire to invite faerie mischief into my life. I’m having enough problems with the more tangible nature beings.

I bought some perennials on clearance from Bluestone. What with the dry year last year and the late freeze in May, I had some holes to fill around the house. Remarkably, there were plants that I wanted at the sale prices. I also splurged on a few more mums for a new outdoor sitting area since I got rid of Ex’s enormous and completely rusted smoker — for which, being a vegetarian, I had little use even if I could have restored it. (Not sure why that ended up here, other than it was enormous and I had some space…) In any case, I received my sale plants last week and put them in the ground on Monday. I also did all the weeding and trimming. By Monday evening, the garden looked fantastic. Happy and healthy new plants, lots of flowers on the mature plants, public sidewalks reclaimed from the arborvitae and maple, grass cut and pulled out of all the perennial beds, all the browning early spring plants dead-headed and cut back. It was glorious.

On Tuesday morning I looked out my bedroom window at the new sitting area garden. And it looked wrong… I couldn’t see exactly what had happened from the second story window, so I put on my shoes and went outside.

I had planted some lily bulbs, three mums, and four other perennials back there. Nothing but maybe the lily bulbs was even remotely edible. All the other plants were the sorts of things that taste awful no matter if you’re human, ruminant or rodent. I can’t even imagine what chrysanthemums must taste like. Their scent is like soap mixed with black pepper or something. So there is absolutely no excuse for what had happened out there.

All of the mums, a lavender plant and a cranesbill geranium were dug up and left lying forlornly on the mulch. Some of the bulbs had been dug up, but none had been eaten. They were just abandoned as well. I cried a little bit… because it was too early in the morning to scream obscenities.

I then walked around the yard to check on the other new plants. Most of them had been dug up and left to die also. These are plants like monarda and asters. Again, not food, nor even palatable. This was just wanton destruction.

To top it off, the vermin also dug some holes in the grass at the edge of the gravel mulch and tossed a large piece of sandstone paver out of the gravel and into the grass. The point? No idea.

Fortunately, the new plants were from Bluestone who ships all their perennials in fiber pots. You just plant the whole pot. Cuts down substantially on transplant shock as well as plastic waste. And as these were end-of-the-season plants, most had roots woven into the fiber so there was no way the plants would come out of the pot. So the vermin pulled the whole pot out of the ground. And I could put the whole pot back. For nearly two dozen plants… Before breakfast and tea… In my pajamas… I won’t say there wasn’t colorful muttering.

I think most of the plants will survive. Not sure about the lavender. It still looks peaky. I’m also pretty sure that the lilies are destroyed, though I got most of them back in their holes. They looked deflated. Probably not good.

I am almost certain this was squirrel damage. Groundhogs don’t put this much work into digging. They just eat what is sticking out of the ground. They also don’t eat things that smell like lavender and mums. It might be chipmunks. But we have a plague of squirrels here, so it’s statistically unlikely that the one or two chipmunks I’ve seen can be responsible for this much damage when we’ve got hundreds of obnoxious tree rodents running around. Also chipmunks are less inclined to waste that much effort on destruction. Squirrels, however, seem to relish it.

I’ve seen squirrels go down a row of squash seedlings, ripping each plant up, maybe nibbling a bit on each seed, and then tossing most of it. I’ve seen them methodically break sunflower stalks to get at the flowers, eat a few seeds, and go on to the next plant. I regularly see them take strawberries and tomatoes out of the garden, take one bite of the fruit, and leave it in some prominent place to rot — apparently just to piss me off. Squirrels love to destroy things. They suck all the joy out of a garden.

Most rodents do, I suppose, but few are so wasteful as the squirrels that have learned to prey on human spaces. This rampant destruction less than twelve hours after I finished the garden work reminded me of something I’ve read in the last couple years. I can’t remember where. I think it was a plague-era book, so it’s not too old, but that’s all I can come up with. The author (pretty sure this was a woman) was talking about our many failed efforts to control the biological world, mostly through spreading poison everywhere. She said, ‘…we’re going to decimate the natural world, leaving only those super-parasites that prey on us, that have adapted to and often adopted our behaviors, and that have developed biophysical resistance to all our efforts to kill them.’

I think grey squirrels might fall into this category. At least I think this on mornings like Tuesday, when I was cleaning up absolutely senseless destruction. Squirrels are learning our lifeways. They are ingeniously destructive and running rampant all over the world. They’re even wiping out native species, those that aren’t as amenable to living with humans. I can’t help but look at the torn up mums and think ‘My heavens! They’re just like us!’

Humans have destroyed so much, often for no other reason than to see if we might be able to wrench a dollar or two out of the mess. My garden has a plague of grey squirrels, but it is a rare day that I see a butterfly or moth in the flowers. Only a few years ago butterflies were so ubiquitous, I didn’t even notice them. Now, I notice every one — because that’s all I see in a day. One. And many days it’s none at all. The herb garden used to hum with bees. Now, in a whole day of gardening, I’ll see a few dozen bumblebees and maybe a few hoverflies. I’ve had toads, lizards and snakes in every veg patch I’ve ever tended. I haven’t yet seen a reptile or amphibian in my current garden, though I have a quarter acre of prime habitat. The difference is not my new surroundings. My neighbors have plenty of snake-in-the-basement stories, though they don’t seem to realize that none of these tales are recent. No. The difference is that these other life-forms are gone now. Locally extinct. Dead.

In her last blog post, Stefanie Hollmichel was talking about the silence of the dawn in her part of the world. Not long ago, she’d need to close windows if she wanted to sleep in on Saturday. Now, it’s uncannily peaceful. Hushed when it should not be. Quiet as the grave. We have killed so many in the dawn chorus — individuals, species, the odd whole genus of birdlife — mostly without intention, accidental waste, death by externality. The enormity of this sudden silence — predicted over half a century ago, mind you — is chilling. The canary is dead. And yet we are still digging ourselves in deeper!

I live on the edge of mountain woodlands. There is still noise at dawn here, but there is less singing than raucous crows making morning plans. Once in a while a robin will wake me up. But it’s not a chorus, and it is changed in ways that are not reassuring. These days, there are few birds that don’t feed off of humans. And this is a place that is not as human-mediated as other places I have lived, places that had a dawn chorus. Not long ago, I lived in more urban surroundings than I do now, and I couldn’t sleep through the early morning. There were usually dueling robins in the pre-dawn gloaming, later joined by warblers, finches and all the chattering others I could not identify, along with the neighborhood roosters. Birds were everywhere, despite the built environment. Now… even the woods are empty.

Except for pests. I can’t go hiking the woodland trails at the end of my street because each time I come out of the the trees I have ticks on my body. So far, I’ve been able to pick them off my clothes, though one got down my shirt. But I can’t take the chance on missing even one and getting bit. And it would be so easy for one to drop into my hair where I would never see it, would not even know to test for Lyme disease until it was too late to treat.

Similarly, while we have no ‘moth snowstorms‘ at night, the humid afternoons and dusky evenings are swarming with midges and blackflies and mosquitoes. All the expensive spraying of poison has merely bred pests that are immune to all the expensive spraying of poison, while wiping out creatures that do not feed on us, insects that are already stressed by food scarcity and habitat loss. And of course, the dwindling bird (and bat and frog and, and, and…) populations are not eating the bugs. Swallows and bats and martins used to keep the number of flying pests low. Now, the flying pests have no predators. And we are their prey.

This should terrify people. Or at least annoy people enough for them to notice. But humans are particularly good at normalizing the present, no matter how sudden and apocalyptic the change from the past. Furthermore, most don’t seem to be aware that we are the cause of this disaster. Pesticide companies have excellent marketing. There is no connection ever made between the new lack of butterflies and the mosquito spraying campaigns along the river banks. Few can see the links between concentrated agricultural poisons and dwindling numbers of swallows and ballooning populations of midges. Nor do many people understand that grey squirrels are watching us and learning our behaviors. And they can reproduce much faster than we can…

The silence is not merely sad, not only the sound of extinction and the denuding of the world, it is the death knell for us as well. Why did we think that spreading poison all over the planet would not come round to harm us? How do we think we are going to survive when all that’s left of the more-than-human world preys on humans? If the situation weren’t so frightening, these delusions would be hilarious. But I suppose stupidity always carries its grim repercussions.

In any case, I doubt it’s a good Midsummer’s Eve to go seeking out the Good Folk. These days, if you manage to find them, they’re not likely to hold humans in high regard. And even if they let you go, you’ll probably end up with Lyme disease for your efforts.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2023