Lawrence Niles, et. al., Life Along the Delaware Bay. Cape May, Gateway To a Million Shorebirds. Rutgers U.P., New Brunswick NJ., 2012. Pp.153.
What we have here is a handsome coffee table book, beautifully illustrated with more pictures than text, about the importance of the Delaware Bay as a stop-over place for a number of shorebirds, among which the threatened Red Knot receives most attention. Larry Niles is well known for his work on the Knot and is the author of several previous publications (see the post The modest birder # 18).
After a quick glance at the town of Cape May and its Hawk Watching platform, a brief mention of the NJ Audubon's counting of the Fall migration of raptors and song birds, the authors (their individual contributions are not clearly identified) jump into media res with the following chapters on the importance of the horseshoe crab whose eggs make the Bay "the most important [shorebird] stopover in the Western Hemisphere" before giving a chapter each to the Knot, the Ruddy Turnstone and Sanderlings. The remaining shorebirds are lumped together in a chapter on "mud birds," among which the Semi-palmated Sandpiper is (as in the overall numbers) the most numerous. A separate chapter deals with gulls, the great competitors for the crab eggs; it is followed by a chapter on the Bay's marshes and a final chapter discusses the threats to its ecology.
It should be clear that this is a book for more than an occasional visitor to Cape May. On the other hand, even a casual nature lover will find much of interest while the non-specialist birder cannot easily find so much interesting and important information. I particularly like the several maps and graphs as well as the pictures (pp. 33ff., 45 and elsewhere) showing the actual work of the many volunteers who capture the birds, note their vital statistics before placing the, sometimes several, bands on their legs before releasing them.
A world map on p. 44 shows the location and migration routes of the nominate species (Calidris canutus canutus) and the five subspecies of Knots, two of which, the C.c. Rufa and the C.c. Roselaari) occur in North America and of these the Eastern species, the Red Knot, accounts for the smallest population. By the numbers, Knots are actually mostly European birds. Although the fate of the Red Knot (and the horseshoe crab) is the focus of Niles' research, the graph on p. 37, shows that the Rufa Knot only accounts for 9% of all the shorebirds using the Bay during their Spring migration (during the Southward migration the Bay is unimportant), Semi-palmated Sandpipers and Dunlin together making up 66% (in the fall they are the majority also). But the apparently declining population of the Red Knot is a significant indicator of the health of its various habitats, the Arctic where it breeds, the coasts of South America and in particular Southern Argentina where it winters and perhaps of greatest significance the Delaware Bay where it refuels on the way north with enough energy reserves for successful procreation.
From remarks while discussing other species it becomes clear that shorebird populations globally face declines and this is true of all the Knot groups, independent of the decline of the horseshoe crabs. The causes of these declines are rarely as clear as in the case of the Red Knot with its temporary but all important dependence on one food. Such birds as the Sanderling, which is only an opportunistic feeder of crab eggs and more numerous on sandy beaches anywhere than in the Bay seems to be holding its own better than other species as for ex. the Semi-palmated Sandpiper (one of the book's "mud-birds" and also only an opportunistic feeder of the eggs (the crabs preferring sandy beaches rather than mudflats as is clearly evident in such places as Bombay Hook in Delaware). Such drastic declines as that of the Phalaropes in the Bay of Fundy, far from metropolitan polluting areas, remains a puzzle. And while the horseshoe crab-Red Knot relationship provides a clear ecological model, the factors discussed in the last chapter on such environmental threats as rising sea levels should be studied with as much immediacy.
Yet, while we must applaud Niles and his collaborators for their contributions to our knowledge, the book has a few problems. For ex. the Google map (p. 46) of the Western Hemisphere showing the migration route of one known Rufa, gives the distances in kilometers while the explanation uses miles, which would be ok if the arithmetic were correct: the flight north from Uruguay is given on the map as 8000km in 6 days but described as 3,000 miles, while it is more likely 5,000 miles, one mile being approx. 1.6 km (the distance being easily obtainable for Google). And while we are talking about Uruguay, there was a (still unexplained?) kill of some 2,000 Knots about a decade ago on their stopover place there. Meanwhile there is some encouraging news: At the end of Sept. 2013 the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed "endangered species" status for the Red Knot and since 2012 there's a managements plan that ties the horseshoe crab fishery explicitly to the Knot's recovery.
A, to me, more significant problem, for which we probably must blame the Rutgers University Press are the book's misleading titles that reveal an advertising mentality aiming at the "hype" rather than at accurate information. As a "bird book" it provides only a small, if significant, slice of "life" along the Delaware Bay. The subtitle clearly exploits the fame of Cape May as a resort and a remarkable birding spot, though among the birds, shorebird migration in the number of 1,000,000 strikes me, a 30+ year birder in southern Jersey as a gross misstatement. And, as results from the authors' own data, half a million in the month of May when there is the greatest concentration, is a better "ballpark figure." And considering the importance of the Delaware side of the Bay, it could with better justification, have been called "Lewis, the Gateway, etc." But why, Cape May having been put forward, is there such slight mention of important birding at other times of the year when "Life along the shore" is often as exciting s the month of May. Or why is the work of the Cape May Bird Observatory passed over by a slimple reference to the counting of Fall migration done by NJ Audubon.
Which brings me to a rather unrelated fact though it seems worth mentioning. Most of the documentary photography is by Jan van der Kam, a fellow Dutchman, with whose jealous making work, I have long been familiar, most recently through his work in a Dutch coffee table book simply called Shorebirds (whose scientific standards are a model). Van der Kam, a professional who seems to do nothing but shorebirds in their habitats, I am still pretty amazed by the occasionally artistic, rather than merely documentary shots that are included also in this book. Yet, through the CMBO blog "View from the Field," I have come to realize the possibilities of what a person with a sense of photographic "view" (and a knowledge of bird behavior) can do with modern equipment.
Showing posts with label book notices. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book notices. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
booknotice: Ch. C. Mann's 1493
I bought this book after I read an appreciation of it by John Tierney in the Food section of the NYT of August 30, 2011. He uses the book, and an interview with the author, primarily to support his own eco-scepticism stressing the fact that because of the globalization that Mann argues was initiated by Columbus, all our foods come from somewhere else and thus creates a dilemma for locavores. And where Charles Mann recognizes the often "unpredictable and destructive consequences" of the free movement of food plants, Tierney stresses Mann's conclusion in the interview that the gains have been greater than the costs. But in his book Mann writes that "the transport of useful species out of their home environment has been a boon to mankind" in spite of huge social and environmental problems and adds: "The balance between benefits and harm may be closer than free trade advocates tend to admit."(p.266) The book had also received a generally enthusiastic review in the NYT Bookreview of August 21, which I did not read until today.
Book in hand, I began to realize that I was familiar with its author, having read his 1491, which opened up the pre-Colombian world with which, as a result of teaching the Survey of World History for several years I was not unfamiliar but of which I had, it turned out, only a pretty fragmentary knowledge. That book is a real tour de force and the author's efforts at assimilating the wealth of information he unearthed, too often resorted to speculations that did not seem warranted by his facts which as a matter of course were based on random survivals of artifacts and archeology rather than on written documentary materials.
The present volume is no less of a tour de force, but even though most of his information comes from written sources, he still draws conclusions that are, admittedly, based on speculation. These conclusions are presented in the "Prologue" and repeated in the introductions of new subjects, the treatment of which is in support of the conclusion but which ends with a modifying paragraph or two.
The full title is 1493. Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. It emerges that this world is somewhat larger than "the New World" (i.e. the Americas); it includes China and the Philippines, but not the nations of the Indian Ocean or Africa (except for the slave trade and some food, and bacteria, that traveled with the slaves), omissions the author decided on for the sake of brevity "for even a pretense at completeness would be unwieldy and unreadable."(p.xvii) What is left is actually quite readable, even seductive enough to make his conclusions believable at first glance.
What are some of these conclusions? The basic one is implied in the book's title. While it can be taken as an attention grabbing literary fancy, the book's 459 pages (including the copious footnotes) make it clear that it not only announces the author's program but it is also his thesis which he appears to present as proven when he takes the reader on an imaginary plane trip across the world of 1642 (pp.25-38). More specifically, he believes that such introductions as sweet potatoes and corn led to the ultimate collapse of the last Chinese dynasty (elaborated in Ch.5) or that malaria brought over by European colonists (ch.3) played a role in the creation of the United States (p.xvii). Such claims are modified in the text where they turn out to be only contributing factors (p.105 for malaria and pp.176-7 for China). As such they add dimensions to the historical developments that are not only interesting in their novelty but useful as well. And the obvious merit of the book, regardless of its extravagant claims is the bringing together of a wealth of material, mostly from other studies that never became bestsellers, much less eBooks.
To argue that the collapse of the last Chinese dynasty was caused in part by socio-economic factors resulting from the introduction of new foods raises the question of the demise of every other dynasty, for example that established by the Mongols in the 13th Century, or the Ming during in the 17th. And while malaria caused the death of many colonists, the United States was founded by survivors - and there were many even before the use of quinine - and by those who were less exposed to the illness, i.e. the tea drinkers of New England.
Perhaps Mann's problem is that as a journalist he's too eager to tell a good story rather than take the time to reflect on such complicated issues as the causes for the English Civil War (1642-1649), which he calls the "English Religious Civil War, part of the worldwide unrest associated with the Little Ice Age."(p.93). Relying on mostly one source, he suggests that "this global thermal anomaly"(p.30) may also have been a result of Columbus' discovery as native Americans died and with them tree burning stopped and forests became choked with brush, all of which took carbon from the air which brought lower temperatures (p.31). But by associating the Civil War with the Ice Age he evokes Christopher Hill's thesis that the main cause for that war was less religious than social. In support of the brush choked forests he cites a 1634 statement by a New England colonist (p. 31) but he has another 1634 statement from Maryland to the contrary(p.49,[and that one is supported a century later by the Swedish traveller Peter Kalm for Pennsylvania]). Thus we are to believe that the cooling of the Northern Hemisphere was mostly caused by changes in New England, for in Europe too forests were not choked with brush, rather they were cut down in such an alarming rate that the English feared they would run out of timber to build their ships. And are we to believe that the sparsely populated parts of eastern North America upset the effect of the wood covered remainder of the continent?
Another sweeping statement based on the work of Wm Macneil(p.198) maintains that the spread of the potato coincided with the end of famine in Europe "and permitted European nations to assert dominance over most of the world between 1750 and 1950."
But by 1750, before the acceptance of the potato as a staple, the seaborne empires of the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English were well established, though European interference in China didn't occur until around 1900, by which time the United States also played a role. All this seems possible because of Mann's deliberate omission of developments not directly related to the Colombian Exchange of foods, etc. Thus in a footnote on p.164 he says that he barely mentions the Portuguese and the Dutch because the Spanish empire is more germane and the Dutch were not independent until 1648. The not yet independent Dutch nevertheless established the Dutch East India Company in 1602, a shareholding corporation that established an empire that included at one time or another not only modern Indonesia but Shri Lanka and Taiwan as well. In 1618 they created the West Indies Company that controlled New York, and areas in the Caribbean and, for a while, even Brazil.
Sometimes Mann's reliance on others leads to confusion as in the case of possible Dutch pirates off China in 1547(p.130) which he found in a collection of documents assembled by a Chinese official in 1762. Dutch sailors in China occur in Dutch history not until the 17th century. They were sent by the Dutch East India Company and often allied with Chinese pirates in an attempt to force the Chinese government to permit regular trade. There was one Dutch sailor, in the 1590s, who worked for the Portuguese in order to discover their route to their possessions in the Indian Ocean. The Chinese confusion may result from a mixing up of dates or even from the fact that, as pointed out by Mann, their word for the Portuguese is Farangi which comes from the Arab word for Europeans [i.e. the crusading Franks]. It appears that Mann is not familiar with the relevant scholarly literature, e.g. Tonio Andrade (2000and 2004) and many of the sources cited by Andrade.
But I wonder whether a more important omission, i.e. the Arab oecumene of the Indian Ocean which established Islam on the S.E. Indian continent as well as in modern Indonesia long before 1492, doesn't skewer Mann's perspective. After all, vide Marco Polo, Europe already knew about China and, to single out one of Mann's most desired commodities, Europeans had even created a silk industry based on silk worms brought via the ancient overland "silk road" from China to the Near East. It was to a large extent the Venetian monopoly of the Arab-oriental exchange with Europe that made others look for ways to get around [circumnavigate?] the Venetians. I would even raise the question whether modern globalization would not have resulted from European access to the East and the eventual discovery of the Americas from the Pacific as Europeans searched for the allegedly shorter way back to Europe, a sort of Columbian voyage in reverse possibly following the reports of the Chinese sailors sent out by emperor Zhu Di in the early 1400s (see Gavin Menzies' 1421).
Book in hand, I began to realize that I was familiar with its author, having read his 1491, which opened up the pre-Colombian world with which, as a result of teaching the Survey of World History for several years I was not unfamiliar but of which I had, it turned out, only a pretty fragmentary knowledge. That book is a real tour de force and the author's efforts at assimilating the wealth of information he unearthed, too often resorted to speculations that did not seem warranted by his facts which as a matter of course were based on random survivals of artifacts and archeology rather than on written documentary materials.
The present volume is no less of a tour de force, but even though most of his information comes from written sources, he still draws conclusions that are, admittedly, based on speculation. These conclusions are presented in the "Prologue" and repeated in the introductions of new subjects, the treatment of which is in support of the conclusion but which ends with a modifying paragraph or two.
The full title is 1493. Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. It emerges that this world is somewhat larger than "the New World" (i.e. the Americas); it includes China and the Philippines, but not the nations of the Indian Ocean or Africa (except for the slave trade and some food, and bacteria, that traveled with the slaves), omissions the author decided on for the sake of brevity "for even a pretense at completeness would be unwieldy and unreadable."(p.xvii) What is left is actually quite readable, even seductive enough to make his conclusions believable at first glance.
What are some of these conclusions? The basic one is implied in the book's title. While it can be taken as an attention grabbing literary fancy, the book's 459 pages (including the copious footnotes) make it clear that it not only announces the author's program but it is also his thesis which he appears to present as proven when he takes the reader on an imaginary plane trip across the world of 1642 (pp.25-38). More specifically, he believes that such introductions as sweet potatoes and corn led to the ultimate collapse of the last Chinese dynasty (elaborated in Ch.5) or that malaria brought over by European colonists (ch.3) played a role in the creation of the United States (p.xvii). Such claims are modified in the text where they turn out to be only contributing factors (p.105 for malaria and pp.176-7 for China). As such they add dimensions to the historical developments that are not only interesting in their novelty but useful as well. And the obvious merit of the book, regardless of its extravagant claims is the bringing together of a wealth of material, mostly from other studies that never became bestsellers, much less eBooks.
To argue that the collapse of the last Chinese dynasty was caused in part by socio-economic factors resulting from the introduction of new foods raises the question of the demise of every other dynasty, for example that established by the Mongols in the 13th Century, or the Ming during in the 17th. And while malaria caused the death of many colonists, the United States was founded by survivors - and there were many even before the use of quinine - and by those who were less exposed to the illness, i.e. the tea drinkers of New England.
Perhaps Mann's problem is that as a journalist he's too eager to tell a good story rather than take the time to reflect on such complicated issues as the causes for the English Civil War (1642-1649), which he calls the "English Religious Civil War, part of the worldwide unrest associated with the Little Ice Age."(p.93). Relying on mostly one source, he suggests that "this global thermal anomaly"(p.30) may also have been a result of Columbus' discovery as native Americans died and with them tree burning stopped and forests became choked with brush, all of which took carbon from the air which brought lower temperatures (p.31). But by associating the Civil War with the Ice Age he evokes Christopher Hill's thesis that the main cause for that war was less religious than social. In support of the brush choked forests he cites a 1634 statement by a New England colonist (p. 31) but he has another 1634 statement from Maryland to the contrary(p.49,[and that one is supported a century later by the Swedish traveller Peter Kalm for Pennsylvania]). Thus we are to believe that the cooling of the Northern Hemisphere was mostly caused by changes in New England, for in Europe too forests were not choked with brush, rather they were cut down in such an alarming rate that the English feared they would run out of timber to build their ships. And are we to believe that the sparsely populated parts of eastern North America upset the effect of the wood covered remainder of the continent?
Another sweeping statement based on the work of Wm Macneil(p.198) maintains that the spread of the potato coincided with the end of famine in Europe "and permitted European nations to assert dominance over most of the world between 1750 and 1950."
But by 1750, before the acceptance of the potato as a staple, the seaborne empires of the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English were well established, though European interference in China didn't occur until around 1900, by which time the United States also played a role. All this seems possible because of Mann's deliberate omission of developments not directly related to the Colombian Exchange of foods, etc. Thus in a footnote on p.164 he says that he barely mentions the Portuguese and the Dutch because the Spanish empire is more germane and the Dutch were not independent until 1648. The not yet independent Dutch nevertheless established the Dutch East India Company in 1602, a shareholding corporation that established an empire that included at one time or another not only modern Indonesia but Shri Lanka and Taiwan as well. In 1618 they created the West Indies Company that controlled New York, and areas in the Caribbean and, for a while, even Brazil.
Sometimes Mann's reliance on others leads to confusion as in the case of possible Dutch pirates off China in 1547(p.130) which he found in a collection of documents assembled by a Chinese official in 1762. Dutch sailors in China occur in Dutch history not until the 17th century. They were sent by the Dutch East India Company and often allied with Chinese pirates in an attempt to force the Chinese government to permit regular trade. There was one Dutch sailor, in the 1590s, who worked for the Portuguese in order to discover their route to their possessions in the Indian Ocean. The Chinese confusion may result from a mixing up of dates or even from the fact that, as pointed out by Mann, their word for the Portuguese is Farangi which comes from the Arab word for Europeans [i.e. the crusading Franks]. It appears that Mann is not familiar with the relevant scholarly literature, e.g. Tonio Andrade (2000and 2004) and many of the sources cited by Andrade.
But I wonder whether a more important omission, i.e. the Arab oecumene of the Indian Ocean which established Islam on the S.E. Indian continent as well as in modern Indonesia long before 1492, doesn't skewer Mann's perspective. After all, vide Marco Polo, Europe already knew about China and, to single out one of Mann's most desired commodities, Europeans had even created a silk industry based on silk worms brought via the ancient overland "silk road" from China to the Near East. It was to a large extent the Venetian monopoly of the Arab-oriental exchange with Europe that made others look for ways to get around [circumnavigate?] the Venetians. I would even raise the question whether modern globalization would not have resulted from European access to the East and the eventual discovery of the Americas from the Pacific as Europeans searched for the allegedly shorter way back to Europe, a sort of Columbian voyage in reverse possibly following the reports of the Chinese sailors sent out by emperor Zhu Di in the early 1400s (see Gavin Menzies' 1421).
Monday, September 6, 2010
on wine (5)
August 2010 Report:
This month's wines were rather unexceptional if quite palatable. For one thing, I developed a middle ear infection that became a neuralgia and alcohol made the pounding in my head still worse. Most of the month we were in Southport, Maine and rather than lug up some better wines from the cellar, we relied on what was available at Hannaford's in Boothbay Harbor. They had, for a grocery supermarket, a wide selection of American wines, mostly white (no doubt because it's summer with lots of seafood) and a relatively minute selection of Europeans. This surprised us, for with all the money around for yachts, expensive rentals, etc. you would expect a more sophisticated selection. Maybe people on vacation temporarily abandon the sophisticated, although twice some people examined the Europeans and decided to wait till they got to the Market Basket near Camden, and upscale delicatessen. I also noticed that the selection in restaurants had barely one French wine and that often a generic one. It made me wonder whether some wholesaler's buyer is a Tea-party Patriot. Anyway, there were some good stand-bys, all around $10 or less. The one we drank most was the generic Chianti "Borgho d'Elsa," some Spanish Temperanillo and a few well made Riojas. We had two memorable meals, one at the Port of Tuscany (a very inventive fennel/orange/field green salad and a fine maigret de canard) with one of the better Montepulcianos di Abbruzzi; the other was at the Waterfront in Camden where we each had a different salad with a surprisingly dry Pinot Grigio from the Venice area (which usually are too sweet for my taste). It was a splendid day and in the morning had walked around the Merryspring Gardens where we were entertained by a juvenile Redstart that sang for about 10 minutes as if it was Spring.
When we got back and added some "every day wines", the State Store had a Campo Viejo (Rioja) 2005 reserva on sale. A "never seen before" bottle. Although grown in the Rioja region, the wine was actually a tempranillo and it was a bit rough; C. called it "rustic," her catch all for immature roughness. In fact, as I drank the first sips, not having looked at the label carefully I was taken aback having expected a smooth true rioja. This actually reminded me more of a Catalayud garnache, earthy and rustic, not much like the other tempranillos that I mentioned in earlier entries. So I checked Hugh Johnson's 2009 Guide where it says: "there are also many brands [for ex.] dark, often jarring Campo Viejo." Indeed. Another disappointing bottle was a 2006 beaujolais Ch. de La Chaize, which we had enjoyed a few times throughout the year. This had spent the summer in the bottom of the sideboard in the normally a.c. living room. But as we were away and August here turned out to be as hot as July, the wine turned out rather flat. It poured pale brown and had a musty nose. As the temp at lunch was 74 after a cool night the color became darker and the mustiness disappeared, for wine can restore itself; alas, the fruitiness of beaujolais remained lost.
While in Maine a read Feeding a Yen, a collection of pieces by the often humorous and generally smart wordsmith Calvin Trillin who portrays himself as an overeating barbecue and beer loving cholesterol sufferer in somewhat of a sophisticated put on. In one of these he tries to find out whether the U. of Cal. Davis wine courses actually subjected students to a blind tasting test to distinguish not one grape from another, but white wine from red. The rumors as well as an alleged participant indicated that the tasters had not been successful. This I can understand, for while taste is affected by vinification of grapes with (red) or without skins and stalks (white), the real difference is made by the type of grape, soil and climate. Thus a sauvignon de St. Brie, adjacent to the Chablis region in Burgundy, tastes differently than a sauvignon from the western Loire valley; not to talk about the winemaker's skills and the requirements of regional style. Trillin and the experience with the Rioja tempranillo made me pick up some older wine books that had been very fashionable among British cognoscenti before the expansion of wine drinking in the 1970s. One of these was George Rainbird's little manual of 1963, another H. Warner Allen's l932 The Romance of Wine. Both spend some time on the "great wines," their service, etc. Rainbird's is very basic and though he recognizes other countries produce wine also, his wines came from France. All very British and with chapters on Cognac and Port. Allen's is more fun. A worker in the trade, he gives due attention to wines that were fashionable among his clientele, thus he has a good deal to say about German wines, the "hocks." He has two long chapters on the making of a "natural red" and "natural white" wines; i.e. not Sherry, Port or Cognac which are manipulated products of the vine and each have their own chapter. The last chapter is, to me now, the most alluring as it deals with ancient Greek and Roman writers about wine.
But what struck me was that both writers pay little or any attention to the relationship between grape variety and the taste of wine. Rainbird doesn't mention the varieties that go into a bordeaux and how taste (as well as other aspects) is affected by the relative percentages of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot in a wine. For that one has to rely on Penning-Rowsell's The Wines of Bordeaux(1970). C. de Rhones, Chianti Classicos are other wines that consist of a varying blend of grapes (unfortunately, marketing experts are changing these blends to satisfy an alleged demand for a specific taste favored by wealthy consumers that did not grow up in a wine drinking culture). To Rainbird and Allen, "blended wines" are Sherries and Ports.
Meanwhile there were some nice bottles in August. One a non-vintage Heidsieck brut to celebrate Marijke's arrival in Main, drunk on a clear evening overlooking the Sheepscot in Edgemont and the others, at the traditional lunch for our friend who took care (very well as always) of the gardens, a 2003 barolo from Michele Chiarlo. If hot 2003 was not a truly great year, I wrote, this was nevertheless a worthy barolo: dark, long lasting (2 hours after opened) with a slow robe and no trace of chaudron.
This month's wines were rather unexceptional if quite palatable. For one thing, I developed a middle ear infection that became a neuralgia and alcohol made the pounding in my head still worse. Most of the month we were in Southport, Maine and rather than lug up some better wines from the cellar, we relied on what was available at Hannaford's in Boothbay Harbor. They had, for a grocery supermarket, a wide selection of American wines, mostly white (no doubt because it's summer with lots of seafood) and a relatively minute selection of Europeans. This surprised us, for with all the money around for yachts, expensive rentals, etc. you would expect a more sophisticated selection. Maybe people on vacation temporarily abandon the sophisticated, although twice some people examined the Europeans and decided to wait till they got to the Market Basket near Camden, and upscale delicatessen. I also noticed that the selection in restaurants had barely one French wine and that often a generic one. It made me wonder whether some wholesaler's buyer is a Tea-party Patriot. Anyway, there were some good stand-bys, all around $10 or less. The one we drank most was the generic Chianti "Borgho d'Elsa," some Spanish Temperanillo and a few well made Riojas. We had two memorable meals, one at the Port of Tuscany (a very inventive fennel/orange/field green salad and a fine maigret de canard) with one of the better Montepulcianos di Abbruzzi; the other was at the Waterfront in Camden where we each had a different salad with a surprisingly dry Pinot Grigio from the Venice area (which usually are too sweet for my taste). It was a splendid day and in the morning had walked around the Merryspring Gardens where we were entertained by a juvenile Redstart that sang for about 10 minutes as if it was Spring.
When we got back and added some "every day wines", the State Store had a Campo Viejo (Rioja) 2005 reserva on sale. A "never seen before" bottle. Although grown in the Rioja region, the wine was actually a tempranillo and it was a bit rough; C. called it "rustic," her catch all for immature roughness. In fact, as I drank the first sips, not having looked at the label carefully I was taken aback having expected a smooth true rioja. This actually reminded me more of a Catalayud garnache, earthy and rustic, not much like the other tempranillos that I mentioned in earlier entries. So I checked Hugh Johnson's 2009 Guide where it says: "there are also many brands [for ex.] dark, often jarring Campo Viejo." Indeed. Another disappointing bottle was a 2006 beaujolais Ch. de La Chaize, which we had enjoyed a few times throughout the year. This had spent the summer in the bottom of the sideboard in the normally a.c. living room. But as we were away and August here turned out to be as hot as July, the wine turned out rather flat. It poured pale brown and had a musty nose. As the temp at lunch was 74 after a cool night the color became darker and the mustiness disappeared, for wine can restore itself; alas, the fruitiness of beaujolais remained lost.
While in Maine a read Feeding a Yen, a collection of pieces by the often humorous and generally smart wordsmith Calvin Trillin who portrays himself as an overeating barbecue and beer loving cholesterol sufferer in somewhat of a sophisticated put on. In one of these he tries to find out whether the U. of Cal. Davis wine courses actually subjected students to a blind tasting test to distinguish not one grape from another, but white wine from red. The rumors as well as an alleged participant indicated that the tasters had not been successful. This I can understand, for while taste is affected by vinification of grapes with (red) or without skins and stalks (white), the real difference is made by the type of grape, soil and climate. Thus a sauvignon de St. Brie, adjacent to the Chablis region in Burgundy, tastes differently than a sauvignon from the western Loire valley; not to talk about the winemaker's skills and the requirements of regional style. Trillin and the experience with the Rioja tempranillo made me pick up some older wine books that had been very fashionable among British cognoscenti before the expansion of wine drinking in the 1970s. One of these was George Rainbird's little manual of 1963, another H. Warner Allen's l932 The Romance of Wine. Both spend some time on the "great wines," their service, etc. Rainbird's is very basic and though he recognizes other countries produce wine also, his wines came from France. All very British and with chapters on Cognac and Port. Allen's is more fun. A worker in the trade, he gives due attention to wines that were fashionable among his clientele, thus he has a good deal to say about German wines, the "hocks." He has two long chapters on the making of a "natural red" and "natural white" wines; i.e. not Sherry, Port or Cognac which are manipulated products of the vine and each have their own chapter. The last chapter is, to me now, the most alluring as it deals with ancient Greek and Roman writers about wine.
But what struck me was that both writers pay little or any attention to the relationship between grape variety and the taste of wine. Rainbird doesn't mention the varieties that go into a bordeaux and how taste (as well as other aspects) is affected by the relative percentages of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot in a wine. For that one has to rely on Penning-Rowsell's The Wines of Bordeaux(1970). C. de Rhones, Chianti Classicos are other wines that consist of a varying blend of grapes (unfortunately, marketing experts are changing these blends to satisfy an alleged demand for a specific taste favored by wealthy consumers that did not grow up in a wine drinking culture). To Rainbird and Allen, "blended wines" are Sherries and Ports.
Meanwhile there were some nice bottles in August. One a non-vintage Heidsieck brut to celebrate Marijke's arrival in Main, drunk on a clear evening overlooking the Sheepscot in Edgemont and the others, at the traditional lunch for our friend who took care (very well as always) of the gardens, a 2003 barolo from Michele Chiarlo. If hot 2003 was not a truly great year, I wrote, this was nevertheless a worthy barolo: dark, long lasting (2 hours after opened) with a slow robe and no trace of chaudron.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
the modest birder (13): feeding, pairing and departing
At the very beginning of April, this does not look like "the cruelest of months" unless the exceptional fine weather is pushing the season and the days of spring will soon loose the flowers of the celandine, trout lilies, spring beauties, Dutchman breeches, trilliums, Virginia bluebells and primroses, all of which are already out, and only dandelions will remain. On the edge of the farm field a black cherry is in full bloom and the oaks are on the point of releasing their flowers from the swollen buds. I have the impression that this winter's heavy snows (55" in toto), hit by the sun kept the soil from freezing very deep so that the warmer temperatures of the last two weeks were enough to awaken the roots of everything. On the 18th of March I sowed a mixture of lettuces, mesclun and Asian peas (for their young shoots) and the plot has a wash of green and soon will allow me to put John Evelyn's advice to the test (see my blog on his "salad bowl"). 3/22/13: last week was cool, wet with night frost, now, the 2nd day of spring, there was light snow overnight and a high in the mid 30s. The veg. beds were rototilled on the 10th, but have been too wet to rake out: nothing sowed yet other than the salads.
Birdwise the first three months of 2010 were sort of tame and they were not improved by the reading of The Wisdom of Birds. An Illustrated History of Ornithology, by Tim Birkhead, a Professor at the University of Sheffield, England, which had been praised by the book review editor of Birding. I found in it a great deal of interest. Having proposed to German colleagues that the 17th century Englishman John Ray was the fountainhead of scientific ornithology, the author sets out to prove his case by way of a series of topics, e.g. migration, evolution, sex, territorialism; beginning with what Ray said about these and how Ray's ideas stood the test of time. Before Ray (and long after him) ornithological knowledge was mostly limited to the writings of Aristotle. One problem not adequately dealt with by Birkhead is whether subsequent, non-English investigators knew Ray's work and it appears to me that, however impressive Ray's curiosity, he serves primarily as an excuse for the topical organisation of the book. It is also fairly insular as most non-anglophone sources are used via previous English treatments and as a result much French or Dutch research is overlooked. He refers to Jac. Thijsse, somewhat dismissively, as a "Dutch schoolteacher," which even in 1906 (Birkhead's point of reference) he no longer was (he was then teaching biology to future teachers and Head of the Teacher's College in Amsterdam and thus today would be a Professor). But at the time Thijsse was Editor of the still extant nature mag. that he helped found. He was also secr. of the Dutch Assoc. for the Protection of Nature, of which he was a co-founder. As I wrote in two previous blogs, Thijsse inspired the sort of study that made Niko Tinbergen famous and thus helped create the field in which Birkhead is active. It also appears that Birkhead's real great ornithologist is his older centemporary David Lack, notwithstanding the fact that Lack often rejected earlier findings "out of hand" while later accepting either their importance or at least recognizing their proposer as a valued member of the tribe. I found the book slow going, which turned out a good thing, for not being able to work much outside there were many idle moments to fill. The illustrations are excellent. One new item, that answered one of my long standing questions, was the research indicating that birds pick partners that look like their siblings but are not identical and thus they avoid "inbreeding." My question arose from my having learned, partly from observation in "my" Dutch meadows, that birds return from their migration to the site they were born and also, from reading a study about prairie chickens that small isolated populations may die out as no "new blood" is available, for. ex. to maintain pr. ch. in 2 Illinois areas, they imported some from other states. When I "googled" kin-recognition as related to inbreeding it appeared to be a fertile field of study and no "one theory [that] fits all" has yet been found. But I was happy to find that birds recognize their kin. But back to the birds in my yard. [Addendum: I lost and can't find the reference, but a recent article (winter 2013) stated that birds also recognize siblings through smell, which would indicate that they have a memory of smell].
Caveat lector: As in all my garden observations the numbers are not exact science, they may even be thought anecdotal, for ex. when I write "3 Red-bellied Woodpeckers" it means that 3 were in my sight at one time, but as the birds are not marked I don't know whether the subsequent sighting of one or two are part of the three or additional ones. Of course if the three consist of one male and two females and later there are two males, there must be four Redbellies; etc. I observe throughout the day, mostly 15 minutes on the hour, sometimes longer as I have a coffee or read.
FEEDING: I began these Modest Birder blogs with questioning the maxim: "If you plant them, they will come" or the advertising that feeders will attract birds. In these blogs I was sceptical and after two years of observation, I am now only a little less so. March 2013: I deleted those early entries but was reminded of them by the arrival of an "Audubon Workshop" garden catalog featuring plants that will attract butterflies and birds (the plants were all more expensive than in nursery catalogs). The title of the catalog appears misleading as I can't find a connection to the A. Society. The content is also misleading as there are picture galleries throughout of birds that are not around at the same time or in the same place but the pix may make people believe that these birds will come "if they plant" the stuff for sale. Usually the "if you plant them" people promote (local) natives, unlike this catalog which assumes that people know what works in their area.
As I wrote in the Mod.B.(11), I had waited with putting up the feeders until I was pretty sure the usual winter residents were already present and put them up before Thanksgiving when my grandchildren would be here. This spring I kept them up through (the early) Easter as my grandkids were there again, but interestingly enough many winter residents had left by that time and so far only two of the summer residents (Towhee and Chipping sparrows) have arrived and the Towhees only picked at the food on the ground a few times, preferring to forage in the dead leaves at the edges of the woods. The Chipping Sparrows are also little interested in the feeders.
This winter I spent a good deal of time on observing aggressive behavior among birds of the same species (there was little) and among birds of different species which was strongest among the woodpeckers at the suet. Among them there was a clear pecking order with the Redbellies being at the top, followed by the Hairies, the larger Downies, the smaller Downies, the Nuthatches and very last the "really timid" Brown Creeepers. All of them left when Starlings arrived or stayed away when a Starling was on the suet. Only twice did I see a male Redbelly try to resist a Starling (in vain). The woodpeckers also did not allow another woodpecker on the suet, not even a conspecific one and also not in the last two weeks even though the resident Redbelly (1) and Downy (1 of each size) pairs would arrive near the suet tree together AND THE MALES MIGHT BRING A MORSEL TO THE NEARBY FEMALE. The most interesting was the fact that the 3 and now 2 Flickers foraged in the trees and on the ground (when there was no snow) but never came to the suet as they did last year when they, like the other woodpeckers also frequented the seed feeders. Interestingly enough, although the largest, the Flickers left when a Redb. arrived or waited until it had left.
The Hairies and Creepers had departed during the last week of March when it was unusually warm (but not as hot as in April and the week after Easter). I didn't refill the suet basket after Easter and the remaining woodpeckers and Nuthatches go to the seed, but mostly forage in the trees here and up and down the creek.
This winter I saw of the Cardinals, most of the time, only one male and one female and twice 2 males and once 2 females. In each case, even if they arrived close together the female left the feeder when a male landed on it and flew away or waited close by until the male had left. Last week, however, (the local) pair fed together for about 3 minutes. This week there have been 3 males singing and one afternoon two males were fighting above the creek. Like last year, this time when there were two females, I noticed them because they chased each other and one returned (which happened twice that morning). Female Cardinals have a song also and I wonder whether this territorialism is part of a female's make up just as it is of the males. I have not noticed it in other species in our woods.
Among the ground feeders, the Juncos are often the most "tolerant," which is no doubt why there can be so many of them (21 when the snows were highest). It was only towards the end that one or two would show some aggression and they would even chase each other around the bush or pick at each other while spiraling upward. And sometimes when one was alone on the dish with food that I had on a little table, it would try to keep others off, but back on the ground it would feed with the group. This may be a question of space, for even on the ground, with 10 or more feeding together, they would occasionally pick at each other when they came too close. The defense of space by a lone feeder when another arrived was most pronounced in the Song Sparrows; while smaller, the lone feeder would rush at an arriving White-throat who would then move to the edge of the spread out food. Among the White-throats (there were 9 for some time and 6 now) the males with the most striking facial pattern have become defenders of space but not only against other males but also the females, though it is not a very sustained action, maybe because the others usually feed at a large enough distance. Twice I saw a lone Song Sparrow rush at the viburnum and the brush pile behind it when a brown job flew into the viburnum too fast for me to recognize it. But the Song Sparrow would have none of it and chased the newcomer, once a Chipping Sparrow and the other time a White-throat away, though a little later these returned by way of a slow approach while foraging on the ground; the Song Sparrow let them be. In all these cases, excepting the dish defense, the aggression began or was more noticeable in the last few weeks with the approach of pair forming and departure.
One phenomenon that might be mentioned is that when a bird landed in full flight from some distance rather than from a nearby perch (when the flight would be slower and structured differently), most of the birds would give up their place and sometimes fly to a close branch, especially if it was a larger bird like a Redbelly or a Jay, but hardly ever if the newcomer was a mourning dove. Today (4/12) when there's no more suet and barely any food on the platform feeder or the ground, the Redbellies and Downies cling to the tube to feed. When the Redb. is there no other birds feed, not even on the opposite perches; when the small Downies are there (one at the time) Chickadees and Titmice will quickly steal a seed from an open perch.
In general the birds arrived to feed in the same "mixed flock" waves as the Fall migrants and most often from the same direction, i.e. from downstream, spreading out to forage in our trees and "spying out" the open space around the feeders before landing there. When not nervously flying up when a truck or school bus noisily slowed down on the road or exploding at the approach of a raptor, they would leave up the hill into the neighbor's yard and I got the feeling that the group was making a long circular movement that brought them back every hour or so. This pattern was broken during the inclement snows when they stayed very long to feed and would return less frequently. This "mixed flock" also included the sparrows though the Juncos, Whitethroats and Song Sparrows were often by themselves at daybreak and nightfall, apparently they didn't join the chickadees etc. until these arrived somewhat later when it was daylight. In fact the Whitethroats frequently stayed in the yews down by the creek to sleep during the day (and the night?), bundled fairly close together, three or more on a branch deep in the green from which they emerged by flying to the bare branches of the redbud above the yews before coming to the feeders. The morning doves preferred a snag whose tip rested in the creek, and sometimes I counted eleven huddled together, but during the day they also arrived when the "mixed flock" did and often as part of it.
As far as the food is concerned, I know that black sunflower and safflower seeds are favorites, that sorghums are less so, even among the sparrow like, and spelt is so-so but white mustard seems better than nijer for finches: last week I ran out of nijer and filled up the tube with white mustard and the finches fed more higher up than lower where the nijer languished. In fact when the tube was full with nijer, finches would mostly feed on the ground among the sparrows and juncos, while the latter would only once in a while go to the nijer tube. The "house" mix with or without nijer is preferred by all species, except the Brown creepers that never come to the seed feeders.
PAIR FORMING: As I wrote in early 2009, I had some problem deciding whether any of the Cardinals were residents or partial migrants from New York or so. Only an off-color male (dull pinkish red) that was thus easy to recognize, stayed around for sure. He has been there again since late January, but turned up only occasionally. Now he is paired and hangs out up the creek where he is occasionally confronted by a dark red male, that sings mostly in our bushes along the creek. Birkhead reports that Buffon, the 18th century French naturalist, once saw a very old bird that had actually turned gray; it's too anthopomorphic and I am sceptical, but could this paler cardinal no longer have the capacity to mould into full color? It appears that the dark red one and his female have been a pair at least since February when they began the alternating feeding patterns having arrived more or less together and leaving in the same direction. The paler one and probably his partner come to the feeder once in a while. The two pairs rarely meet there because they always perch first in the open some 20ft away as if to spy out the land, then fly to the Norway spruce and land on the feeder when the coast is clear. It's one way to avoid the competition though it's probably more to be safe. There is a 3d male singing near Rt 113 but apparently has a territory that is separated from us by the neighbor's earth moving equipment etc. Sometimes he and his mate fly across 113 where there are other neglected woods and evergreens near the adjoining office complex (where the local Mocking Bird hangs out).
It seems to me that the different woodpeckers are year around residents except for the Sapsuckers and Hairies though they may not move far away as there's a lot of suitable habitat along the Perkiomen and Schuylkill, both "scenic rivers" with forested banks. Occasionally a Hairy appears in May, but never the Sapsucker. Whether these were pairs, I don't know though there was one male and one female Sapsucker all winter, but never together and at intervals of sometimes more than a day. Once in a while there were 3 Hairies, but most often a male and female were more or less together, that is on different trees in our woods but in sight of each other and occasionally on different parts of thee suet tree. There were sometimes 3 Flickers, but lately there have only been a pair; the same goes for the smaller Downies and the Redbellies, in all cases the extra one was a female or immature and they disappeared when it got warmer and the snows had melted. The larger Downies were a pair all winter.
During the record snows of February there were several Titmice and Chickadees (incl. an uncommon Black-capped), but I'm pretty sure that there was one pair of each (that are still there) as two would come to the feeder at the same time if not always close together. The same goes for the Nuthatches. The two Brown Creepers acted pretty much like the Sapsuckers, and it was rare to see the two at the same time or on the same tree.
Only once were there three Song Sparrows, one of which turned out to be a Savannah on close inspection, complete with yellow lores. Thus the S.P. may have been the pair that is there now and the increasingly more sharply defined head and breast patterns on one may indicate the male in breeding plumage. The Juncos were present in uneven numbers, dark males outnumbering the more brownish juveniles or females. And I never clearly noticed pair like behavior among them. Several times a male was singing, but there were other males and brown ones nearby, none of which paid any attention. It's pretty much the same with the White-throats although now there are usually 6 of them, 3 males and three drab colored ones, perhaps females not yet changed (2 of the males showed their colors only in the last three days). Today, April 15, a day of declarations, 2 pairs of White-throats foraged jointly, one on the hanging feeders and one on the ground, they had arrived together and each pair landed in different parts of the spruce before descending to feed. When the 2 pairs got too close, the males went at each other and whirled upward in the typical aggression flight.
Some of the male Goldfinches are now in full breeding plumage, one already for 3 weeks, but the numbers remain uneven and no clear pair pattern has emerged, though every so often a male and female are not far apart, but they may fly off separately and in a different direction. With the Housefinches it is less complicated, even in February though there might be an uneven number (5 or 7) at least 2 pairs arrived regularly together and would feed on the platform feeder, on the ground or on opposite perches on the tube.
The general pattern suggest that among the winter residents some (local?)pairs are present but in a rather free association and the extras of a species disappear more or less when weather conditions make my fast food stations less of a necessity. Thus whatever may be the incident of infidelity, pair bonds seem established before the breeding season begins. In the case of the Whitethroats the likely pairs that were around left together, so that in their case the frequently encountered statement that males arrive on the breeding ground ahead of females may not apply.
I do not know, of course, whether some exchange of partners occurred when the extras were around, for example if one bird decides that a younger partner could improve the survival rate of the clutch. It's what ornithologists call "evolutionary strategy." I don't believe in the "evolutionary strategy" concept (it sounds too anthromorphic) when it comes to the species. I don't know whether the extras of residents were winter guests or juveniles of last year. Nor do I know whether the extras left or were the prey of the Cooper's that still comes several times a week (or more, but when I'm not observing); I've seen him carrying a dove and smaller birds to a tree up the creek and found Mourning Dove, Titmice and Junco feathers spread in a hawk's plucking pattern and I've see a Redtail devour a Junco right in the middle of the feeding area on the ground in front of my armchair. Come to think of it, the Cooper's may be the bird that is really attracted to our backyard by way of the feeders, if only indirectly through the songbirds that frequent them, for while a pair of Cooper's breed either along the Schuylkill or the Perkiomen, I have not noticed them in "our" woods during the summer
And talking about pairing: On January 4 during a week when the temperature rose above freezing (36!) only one day, a male Redbelly began to "drum" on a nearby dead branch, a few minute later a female joined in the drumming on another branch, then they got together and the male mounted her. Surprisingly enough a few hours later a Mourning Dove, feeding on the ground, "blew up" its neck, ran after another and mounted also. (Not a very promising "evolutionary strategy" or where they trying to stay warm? Perhaps I feed them too well?)
April 22: I took down and cleaned the feeders. Although they have been empty for almost 2 weeks the resident birds kept visiting them, interrupting their foraging in the trees, etc.
DEPARTING: One difference between modern humans and birds is that the latter do not throw "good-bye" parties or even just say a reverderci; they simply up and leave; their absence becomes memory. Nor does the availability of food keep them hanging around. I already mentioned the non-appearance of the Sapsuckers and Creepers around or before April 1 and about the same time the Juncos were gone, definitively on Easter Sunday when many pairs of eyes checked the feeders. The Juncos had become fewer gradually during March, but their absence was still pretty sudden and even a lone male that appeared in the late afternoon would have looked surprised had he been human: he left after about three minutes. Last year a few were still around on April 18 but then we did not have a run of beautiful weather and since temperature is said to affect migration, this may be the difference. On the same day last year there was still a pair of Hairies but this year no one saw any after Easter. Of the non-breeders only the White-throats are still around and in general all birds come less to the feeders; but my diary records that there were many clear days, even cold ones in January when that was also the case; the largest number of birds coming to the feeders, and at frequent intervals during the day, was on snow and other intemperate days. But since during the heart of winter the numbers were fairly steady it looks like the feeders only bring the local birds closer to the house when "fast food" is attractive in between periods of taking shelter in the evergreens. At all times when it was a clear day tree foragers would be busy in the trees and when the ground became visible the ground feeders also fed less on the food spread out in front of the window.
Something may be said about the arrival of summer residents and passing migrants, after all they depart from somewhere. The first male Towhee arrived two weeks ago, at least that's when it fed among the sparrows. I was probably pushing the season when on a sunny day earlier in March, I was "sure" I heard a chewink down the creek. The female arrived 4 days later. Both were earlier than the previous five years that I checked (last year it was 4/19. A Chipping Sparrow arrived at the same time, also earlier. On the Saturday before Easter a male Yellow-rumped Warbler flew into the spruce and first drew my attention by interrupting his gleaning for the typical fly-catcher like sallies after flying prey. Some years there were Yellow-rumps for most of the winter, but this year there were none after November. Because some oak species are already in full bloom, this may not be a good spring for warblers; they come usually late April and early May which is the normal hardwood blooming time. Last year there were 3 species on one day and 5 during the period. Now not one other bird is feeding that high up, not even the Chickadees and Titmice that during the winter sometimes were in the upper stories picking away at the very closed buds. On the 5th of April a male Pileated Woodpecker flew into a hickory from up the creek and then descended to two snags on which he foraged carefully all around the bottom parts; the flaming red tuft clashing vehemently with the redbud through which I observed him. He stayed for 2 days (last year one arrived from the same direction on the 4th, but left the same day). I think I heard a Phoebe down the creek in the last week of March, but saw one hawking from my amelanchier on April 5 (it left the next day); last year there were 2 on the 7th. During the early evening of April 16 a few thunder showers passed and left 1/5" of rain. The next day there was a pair of Palm Warblers foraging most of the day and on the 18th, after a day of more passing showers around us, there was a Prairie and a Black and White Warbler plus one that looked like a female Pine Warbler. (The Palm and Pine are new Yard List birds). On the 19th there were 3 Yellow-rumps (1 female) and a Nashville Warbler. The first oaks that bloomed are dropping the catkins, but several later oaks are blooming now; the hickories are just showing green.
These warblers demonstrate to me that no matter how many food sources you have in your yard, birds (especially migrants) appear but incidentally, for ex. when they meet a storm and stop their flight, at least that's how we had Yellows a few times, once 2 Kentuckies and last year a Golden Winged; the Yellow Rumps and Black and Whites are more or less annual in ones or twos, though when the oaks are in full bloom there may be more Yellow Rumps and they may linger. Think of the thousands of migrants overhead during the night and the hundreds of blooming oaks (from my chair alone I can see 100+ in the 80 degrees of the horizon, of which 18 (27 in total) in our own woods) plus hickories etc., and the rare sighting of warblers. For some reason it's different in the Fall when many more migrant passerines may turn up for a day or so.
Birdwise the first three months of 2010 were sort of tame and they were not improved by the reading of The Wisdom of Birds. An Illustrated History of Ornithology, by Tim Birkhead, a Professor at the University of Sheffield, England, which had been praised by the book review editor of Birding. I found in it a great deal of interest. Having proposed to German colleagues that the 17th century Englishman John Ray was the fountainhead of scientific ornithology, the author sets out to prove his case by way of a series of topics, e.g. migration, evolution, sex, territorialism; beginning with what Ray said about these and how Ray's ideas stood the test of time. Before Ray (and long after him) ornithological knowledge was mostly limited to the writings of Aristotle. One problem not adequately dealt with by Birkhead is whether subsequent, non-English investigators knew Ray's work and it appears to me that, however impressive Ray's curiosity, he serves primarily as an excuse for the topical organisation of the book. It is also fairly insular as most non-anglophone sources are used via previous English treatments and as a result much French or Dutch research is overlooked. He refers to Jac. Thijsse, somewhat dismissively, as a "Dutch schoolteacher," which even in 1906 (Birkhead's point of reference) he no longer was (he was then teaching biology to future teachers and Head of the Teacher's College in Amsterdam and thus today would be a Professor). But at the time Thijsse was Editor of the still extant nature mag. that he helped found. He was also secr. of the Dutch Assoc. for the Protection of Nature, of which he was a co-founder. As I wrote in two previous blogs, Thijsse inspired the sort of study that made Niko Tinbergen famous and thus helped create the field in which Birkhead is active. It also appears that Birkhead's real great ornithologist is his older centemporary David Lack, notwithstanding the fact that Lack often rejected earlier findings "out of hand" while later accepting either their importance or at least recognizing their proposer as a valued member of the tribe. I found the book slow going, which turned out a good thing, for not being able to work much outside there were many idle moments to fill. The illustrations are excellent. One new item, that answered one of my long standing questions, was the research indicating that birds pick partners that look like their siblings but are not identical and thus they avoid "inbreeding." My question arose from my having learned, partly from observation in "my" Dutch meadows, that birds return from their migration to the site they were born and also, from reading a study about prairie chickens that small isolated populations may die out as no "new blood" is available, for. ex. to maintain pr. ch. in 2 Illinois areas, they imported some from other states. When I "googled" kin-recognition as related to inbreeding it appeared to be a fertile field of study and no "one theory [that] fits all" has yet been found. But I was happy to find that birds recognize their kin. But back to the birds in my yard. [Addendum: I lost and can't find the reference, but a recent article (winter 2013) stated that birds also recognize siblings through smell, which would indicate that they have a memory of smell].
Caveat lector: As in all my garden observations the numbers are not exact science, they may even be thought anecdotal, for ex. when I write "3 Red-bellied Woodpeckers" it means that 3 were in my sight at one time, but as the birds are not marked I don't know whether the subsequent sighting of one or two are part of the three or additional ones. Of course if the three consist of one male and two females and later there are two males, there must be four Redbellies; etc. I observe throughout the day, mostly 15 minutes on the hour, sometimes longer as I have a coffee or read.
FEEDING: I began these Modest Birder blogs with questioning the maxim: "If you plant them, they will come" or the advertising that feeders will attract birds. In these blogs I was sceptical and after two years of observation, I am now only a little less so. March 2013: I deleted those early entries but was reminded of them by the arrival of an "Audubon Workshop" garden catalog featuring plants that will attract butterflies and birds (the plants were all more expensive than in nursery catalogs). The title of the catalog appears misleading as I can't find a connection to the A. Society. The content is also misleading as there are picture galleries throughout of birds that are not around at the same time or in the same place but the pix may make people believe that these birds will come "if they plant" the stuff for sale. Usually the "if you plant them" people promote (local) natives, unlike this catalog which assumes that people know what works in their area.
As I wrote in the Mod.B.(11), I had waited with putting up the feeders until I was pretty sure the usual winter residents were already present and put them up before Thanksgiving when my grandchildren would be here. This spring I kept them up through (the early) Easter as my grandkids were there again, but interestingly enough many winter residents had left by that time and so far only two of the summer residents (Towhee and Chipping sparrows) have arrived and the Towhees only picked at the food on the ground a few times, preferring to forage in the dead leaves at the edges of the woods. The Chipping Sparrows are also little interested in the feeders.
This winter I spent a good deal of time on observing aggressive behavior among birds of the same species (there was little) and among birds of different species which was strongest among the woodpeckers at the suet. Among them there was a clear pecking order with the Redbellies being at the top, followed by the Hairies, the larger Downies, the smaller Downies, the Nuthatches and very last the "really timid" Brown Creeepers. All of them left when Starlings arrived or stayed away when a Starling was on the suet. Only twice did I see a male Redbelly try to resist a Starling (in vain). The woodpeckers also did not allow another woodpecker on the suet, not even a conspecific one and also not in the last two weeks even though the resident Redbelly (1) and Downy (1 of each size) pairs would arrive near the suet tree together AND THE MALES MIGHT BRING A MORSEL TO THE NEARBY FEMALE. The most interesting was the fact that the 3 and now 2 Flickers foraged in the trees and on the ground (when there was no snow) but never came to the suet as they did last year when they, like the other woodpeckers also frequented the seed feeders. Interestingly enough, although the largest, the Flickers left when a Redb. arrived or waited until it had left.
The Hairies and Creepers had departed during the last week of March when it was unusually warm (but not as hot as in April and the week after Easter). I didn't refill the suet basket after Easter and the remaining woodpeckers and Nuthatches go to the seed, but mostly forage in the trees here and up and down the creek.
This winter I saw of the Cardinals, most of the time, only one male and one female and twice 2 males and once 2 females. In each case, even if they arrived close together the female left the feeder when a male landed on it and flew away or waited close by until the male had left. Last week, however, (the local) pair fed together for about 3 minutes. This week there have been 3 males singing and one afternoon two males were fighting above the creek. Like last year, this time when there were two females, I noticed them because they chased each other and one returned (which happened twice that morning). Female Cardinals have a song also and I wonder whether this territorialism is part of a female's make up just as it is of the males. I have not noticed it in other species in our woods.
Among the ground feeders, the Juncos are often the most "tolerant," which is no doubt why there can be so many of them (21 when the snows were highest). It was only towards the end that one or two would show some aggression and they would even chase each other around the bush or pick at each other while spiraling upward. And sometimes when one was alone on the dish with food that I had on a little table, it would try to keep others off, but back on the ground it would feed with the group. This may be a question of space, for even on the ground, with 10 or more feeding together, they would occasionally pick at each other when they came too close. The defense of space by a lone feeder when another arrived was most pronounced in the Song Sparrows; while smaller, the lone feeder would rush at an arriving White-throat who would then move to the edge of the spread out food. Among the White-throats (there were 9 for some time and 6 now) the males with the most striking facial pattern have become defenders of space but not only against other males but also the females, though it is not a very sustained action, maybe because the others usually feed at a large enough distance. Twice I saw a lone Song Sparrow rush at the viburnum and the brush pile behind it when a brown job flew into the viburnum too fast for me to recognize it. But the Song Sparrow would have none of it and chased the newcomer, once a Chipping Sparrow and the other time a White-throat away, though a little later these returned by way of a slow approach while foraging on the ground; the Song Sparrow let them be. In all these cases, excepting the dish defense, the aggression began or was more noticeable in the last few weeks with the approach of pair forming and departure.
One phenomenon that might be mentioned is that when a bird landed in full flight from some distance rather than from a nearby perch (when the flight would be slower and structured differently), most of the birds would give up their place and sometimes fly to a close branch, especially if it was a larger bird like a Redbelly or a Jay, but hardly ever if the newcomer was a mourning dove. Today (4/12) when there's no more suet and barely any food on the platform feeder or the ground, the Redbellies and Downies cling to the tube to feed. When the Redb. is there no other birds feed, not even on the opposite perches; when the small Downies are there (one at the time) Chickadees and Titmice will quickly steal a seed from an open perch.
In general the birds arrived to feed in the same "mixed flock" waves as the Fall migrants and most often from the same direction, i.e. from downstream, spreading out to forage in our trees and "spying out" the open space around the feeders before landing there. When not nervously flying up when a truck or school bus noisily slowed down on the road or exploding at the approach of a raptor, they would leave up the hill into the neighbor's yard and I got the feeling that the group was making a long circular movement that brought them back every hour or so. This pattern was broken during the inclement snows when they stayed very long to feed and would return less frequently. This "mixed flock" also included the sparrows though the Juncos, Whitethroats and Song Sparrows were often by themselves at daybreak and nightfall, apparently they didn't join the chickadees etc. until these arrived somewhat later when it was daylight. In fact the Whitethroats frequently stayed in the yews down by the creek to sleep during the day (and the night?), bundled fairly close together, three or more on a branch deep in the green from which they emerged by flying to the bare branches of the redbud above the yews before coming to the feeders. The morning doves preferred a snag whose tip rested in the creek, and sometimes I counted eleven huddled together, but during the day they also arrived when the "mixed flock" did and often as part of it.
As far as the food is concerned, I know that black sunflower and safflower seeds are favorites, that sorghums are less so, even among the sparrow like, and spelt is so-so but white mustard seems better than nijer for finches: last week I ran out of nijer and filled up the tube with white mustard and the finches fed more higher up than lower where the nijer languished. In fact when the tube was full with nijer, finches would mostly feed on the ground among the sparrows and juncos, while the latter would only once in a while go to the nijer tube. The "house" mix with or without nijer is preferred by all species, except the Brown creepers that never come to the seed feeders.
PAIR FORMING: As I wrote in early 2009, I had some problem deciding whether any of the Cardinals were residents or partial migrants from New York or so. Only an off-color male (dull pinkish red) that was thus easy to recognize, stayed around for sure. He has been there again since late January, but turned up only occasionally. Now he is paired and hangs out up the creek where he is occasionally confronted by a dark red male, that sings mostly in our bushes along the creek. Birkhead reports that Buffon, the 18th century French naturalist, once saw a very old bird that had actually turned gray; it's too anthopomorphic and I am sceptical, but could this paler cardinal no longer have the capacity to mould into full color? It appears that the dark red one and his female have been a pair at least since February when they began the alternating feeding patterns having arrived more or less together and leaving in the same direction. The paler one and probably his partner come to the feeder once in a while. The two pairs rarely meet there because they always perch first in the open some 20ft away as if to spy out the land, then fly to the Norway spruce and land on the feeder when the coast is clear. It's one way to avoid the competition though it's probably more to be safe. There is a 3d male singing near Rt 113 but apparently has a territory that is separated from us by the neighbor's earth moving equipment etc. Sometimes he and his mate fly across 113 where there are other neglected woods and evergreens near the adjoining office complex (where the local Mocking Bird hangs out).
It seems to me that the different woodpeckers are year around residents except for the Sapsuckers and Hairies though they may not move far away as there's a lot of suitable habitat along the Perkiomen and Schuylkill, both "scenic rivers" with forested banks. Occasionally a Hairy appears in May, but never the Sapsucker. Whether these were pairs, I don't know though there was one male and one female Sapsucker all winter, but never together and at intervals of sometimes more than a day. Once in a while there were 3 Hairies, but most often a male and female were more or less together, that is on different trees in our woods but in sight of each other and occasionally on different parts of thee suet tree. There were sometimes 3 Flickers, but lately there have only been a pair; the same goes for the smaller Downies and the Redbellies, in all cases the extra one was a female or immature and they disappeared when it got warmer and the snows had melted. The larger Downies were a pair all winter.
During the record snows of February there were several Titmice and Chickadees (incl. an uncommon Black-capped), but I'm pretty sure that there was one pair of each (that are still there) as two would come to the feeder at the same time if not always close together. The same goes for the Nuthatches. The two Brown Creepers acted pretty much like the Sapsuckers, and it was rare to see the two at the same time or on the same tree.
Only once were there three Song Sparrows, one of which turned out to be a Savannah on close inspection, complete with yellow lores. Thus the S.P. may have been the pair that is there now and the increasingly more sharply defined head and breast patterns on one may indicate the male in breeding plumage. The Juncos were present in uneven numbers, dark males outnumbering the more brownish juveniles or females. And I never clearly noticed pair like behavior among them. Several times a male was singing, but there were other males and brown ones nearby, none of which paid any attention. It's pretty much the same with the White-throats although now there are usually 6 of them, 3 males and three drab colored ones, perhaps females not yet changed (2 of the males showed their colors only in the last three days). Today, April 15, a day of declarations, 2 pairs of White-throats foraged jointly, one on the hanging feeders and one on the ground, they had arrived together and each pair landed in different parts of the spruce before descending to feed. When the 2 pairs got too close, the males went at each other and whirled upward in the typical aggression flight.
Some of the male Goldfinches are now in full breeding plumage, one already for 3 weeks, but the numbers remain uneven and no clear pair pattern has emerged, though every so often a male and female are not far apart, but they may fly off separately and in a different direction. With the Housefinches it is less complicated, even in February though there might be an uneven number (5 or 7) at least 2 pairs arrived regularly together and would feed on the platform feeder, on the ground or on opposite perches on the tube.
The general pattern suggest that among the winter residents some (local?)pairs are present but in a rather free association and the extras of a species disappear more or less when weather conditions make my fast food stations less of a necessity. Thus whatever may be the incident of infidelity, pair bonds seem established before the breeding season begins. In the case of the Whitethroats the likely pairs that were around left together, so that in their case the frequently encountered statement that males arrive on the breeding ground ahead of females may not apply.
I do not know, of course, whether some exchange of partners occurred when the extras were around, for example if one bird decides that a younger partner could improve the survival rate of the clutch. It's what ornithologists call "evolutionary strategy." I don't believe in the "evolutionary strategy" concept (it sounds too anthromorphic) when it comes to the species. I don't know whether the extras of residents were winter guests or juveniles of last year. Nor do I know whether the extras left or were the prey of the Cooper's that still comes several times a week (or more, but when I'm not observing); I've seen him carrying a dove and smaller birds to a tree up the creek and found Mourning Dove, Titmice and Junco feathers spread in a hawk's plucking pattern and I've see a Redtail devour a Junco right in the middle of the feeding area on the ground in front of my armchair. Come to think of it, the Cooper's may be the bird that is really attracted to our backyard by way of the feeders, if only indirectly through the songbirds that frequent them, for while a pair of Cooper's breed either along the Schuylkill or the Perkiomen, I have not noticed them in "our" woods during the summer
And talking about pairing: On January 4 during a week when the temperature rose above freezing (36!) only one day, a male Redbelly began to "drum" on a nearby dead branch, a few minute later a female joined in the drumming on another branch, then they got together and the male mounted her. Surprisingly enough a few hours later a Mourning Dove, feeding on the ground, "blew up" its neck, ran after another and mounted also. (Not a very promising "evolutionary strategy" or where they trying to stay warm? Perhaps I feed them too well?)
April 22: I took down and cleaned the feeders. Although they have been empty for almost 2 weeks the resident birds kept visiting them, interrupting their foraging in the trees, etc.
DEPARTING: One difference between modern humans and birds is that the latter do not throw "good-bye" parties or even just say a reverderci; they simply up and leave; their absence becomes memory. Nor does the availability of food keep them hanging around. I already mentioned the non-appearance of the Sapsuckers and Creepers around or before April 1 and about the same time the Juncos were gone, definitively on Easter Sunday when many pairs of eyes checked the feeders. The Juncos had become fewer gradually during March, but their absence was still pretty sudden and even a lone male that appeared in the late afternoon would have looked surprised had he been human: he left after about three minutes. Last year a few were still around on April 18 but then we did not have a run of beautiful weather and since temperature is said to affect migration, this may be the difference. On the same day last year there was still a pair of Hairies but this year no one saw any after Easter. Of the non-breeders only the White-throats are still around and in general all birds come less to the feeders; but my diary records that there were many clear days, even cold ones in January when that was also the case; the largest number of birds coming to the feeders, and at frequent intervals during the day, was on snow and other intemperate days. But since during the heart of winter the numbers were fairly steady it looks like the feeders only bring the local birds closer to the house when "fast food" is attractive in between periods of taking shelter in the evergreens. At all times when it was a clear day tree foragers would be busy in the trees and when the ground became visible the ground feeders also fed less on the food spread out in front of the window.
Something may be said about the arrival of summer residents and passing migrants, after all they depart from somewhere. The first male Towhee arrived two weeks ago, at least that's when it fed among the sparrows. I was probably pushing the season when on a sunny day earlier in March, I was "sure" I heard a chewink down the creek. The female arrived 4 days later. Both were earlier than the previous five years that I checked (last year it was 4/19. A Chipping Sparrow arrived at the same time, also earlier. On the Saturday before Easter a male Yellow-rumped Warbler flew into the spruce and first drew my attention by interrupting his gleaning for the typical fly-catcher like sallies after flying prey. Some years there were Yellow-rumps for most of the winter, but this year there were none after November. Because some oak species are already in full bloom, this may not be a good spring for warblers; they come usually late April and early May which is the normal hardwood blooming time. Last year there were 3 species on one day and 5 during the period. Now not one other bird is feeding that high up, not even the Chickadees and Titmice that during the winter sometimes were in the upper stories picking away at the very closed buds. On the 5th of April a male Pileated Woodpecker flew into a hickory from up the creek and then descended to two snags on which he foraged carefully all around the bottom parts; the flaming red tuft clashing vehemently with the redbud through which I observed him. He stayed for 2 days (last year one arrived from the same direction on the 4th, but left the same day). I think I heard a Phoebe down the creek in the last week of March, but saw one hawking from my amelanchier on April 5 (it left the next day); last year there were 2 on the 7th. During the early evening of April 16 a few thunder showers passed and left 1/5" of rain. The next day there was a pair of Palm Warblers foraging most of the day and on the 18th, after a day of more passing showers around us, there was a Prairie and a Black and White Warbler plus one that looked like a female Pine Warbler. (The Palm and Pine are new Yard List birds). On the 19th there were 3 Yellow-rumps (1 female) and a Nashville Warbler. The first oaks that bloomed are dropping the catkins, but several later oaks are blooming now; the hickories are just showing green.
These warblers demonstrate to me that no matter how many food sources you have in your yard, birds (especially migrants) appear but incidentally, for ex. when they meet a storm and stop their flight, at least that's how we had Yellows a few times, once 2 Kentuckies and last year a Golden Winged; the Yellow Rumps and Black and Whites are more or less annual in ones or twos, though when the oaks are in full bloom there may be more Yellow Rumps and they may linger. Think of the thousands of migrants overhead during the night and the hundreds of blooming oaks (from my chair alone I can see 100+ in the 80 degrees of the horizon, of which 18 (27 in total) in our own woods) plus hickories etc., and the rare sighting of warblers. For some reason it's different in the Fall when many more migrant passerines may turn up for a day or so.
Monday, March 29, 2010
John Evelyn's "Salad Bowl"
A friend and former colleague came to lunch and during the conversation he revealed one of his ingenious finds for a topic that he is working out to present at a conference. Though also retired he, unlike me, remains active as a scholar and thus has become a prod for my otherwise vegetating mind. Currently his interest is focused on John Evelyn (1620-1706). While reading up on Evelyn's Sylva as part of an investigation into literary evidence of changing attitudes toward nature, his attention was grabbed by the curious phrase "Man is like an inverted oak." He checked it out and found, among other things, a 16th century emblem (published in Antwerp) showing an image of the inverted tree (with a man inside it) accompanied by a poem in Latin that tied the phrase to the biblical text "By its fruit you shall know[the tree]." Subsequently he lent me some of Evelyn's writings as well as 2 pages from Francis Bacon's Natural History (pp. 431-432, in Vol. 4 of B's works, edited by Douglas Denon Heath et.al., in the 19th century). In the process of distinguishing the nature of plants from that of "living creatures" (i.e. animals) Francis Bacon wrote:"and therefore it was said, not elegantly alone but philosophically:'Homo est planta inversa'" to illustrate that feeding in plants is in the lower part and in animals in the upper part, etc. The editors refer the reader back to an essay by the younger Scaliger, a near contemporary of Bacon's and then say that the phrase is founded on Aristototle's On Youth and old age. By now my curiosity was revived and thus I set to work.
I could not find Aristotle's essay, but I found one attributed to Roger Bacon, the thirteenth century Franciscan scholar who among other things set out to clear the texts of classical authors, Aristotle in particular, from the scholia of previous readers that had become part of the text. The full title of the Roger Bacon essay is De retardatione accidentium senectutis. Another essay on the same subject, attributed to Arnald de Villanova, a younger contemporary of Roger's is called De conservatione iuventute et retardanda senectute. This was dedicated to the Aragonese King of Naples and most of the modern scholarly work on these 2 essays (treated as two versions of one) is in Spanish. The attribution to Roger Bacon has been questioned by non-English scholars, in one case because internal as well as external evidence suggests that it was written too early for Bacon [and thus also for Villanova]. All this doesn't bother me very much for medieval scholars often omitted the name to the original author of a work they emended, etc., probably because they assumed that the name would be known in the small circle of the learned or because plagiarism wasn't a concept then.
I have been unable to find a text of that essay, but if the editors of Francis Bacon knew the alleged Aristotelian text, they may have gotten it from this presumably Roger Bacon essay of which a translation was published in London in 1683 by one Richard Browne (who has the same name as John Evelyn's brother in law); John Evelyn actually refers to that 1683 edition in his 1699 treatise Acetaria on the growing and use of salad and other greens to maintain good health (John Evelyn. Directions for the Gardener and Other Horticultural Advice. Maggie Campbell-Culver ed. Oxford U.P., 2009, pp. 141ff.) Evelyn also knew the essay by Scaliger in which he defends the usefulness of vegetables against an Italian scholar who argued that plants are actually harmful to a persons health. But the editors of Francis Bacon are correct in saying that the "inverted plant" phrase is "founded on what is said by Aristotle," but in A.'s De partibus animalium, iv.10 where he wrote: ... the animal becomes a plant that has its upper parts downwards and its lower parts above. For in plants the roots are the equivalents of mouth and head. (transl. Wm Ogle, eBooks at Adelaide, 2007). This simile was summed up as "Man is an inverted tree, and a tree is an inverted man" by Medieval scholars. A.'s phraseology and context - of what sets plants apart from animals - is pretty close to Francis Bacon, but A. is relying on Plato's Timaeus, 90a, where we find (in F.M. Cornford's 1937 transl. p. 353)... "the sovereign form of soul [which] dwells in the summit of our body and lifts us from earth towards our celestial affinity, like a plant whose roots are not in the earth, but in the heavens." Medieval scholars could have had a field day with this striving towards the heavens, had they but known that part of the Timaeus.
Neither Plato, nor his pupil Aristotle is concerned in this context with the preservation of youth or slowing down old age which was the topic of Roger Bacon/Arnald de Villanova and that interested John Evelyn. Somewhere in its historical life a commentator suggested that the simile includes a play on the Greek word anthropos that contains ano(=high) and thropos(=moving upward) and additionally on the similarity of the latin homo(=man) and humus(=earth). In the process Medieval commentators moved from an explanatory comparison between plants and animals to a phrase that became a poetic commonplace, though that 16th century emblem reflects the moral baggage that medieval usage had attached to the phrase by associating it with the evangelical tree which, if it bore no more fruit, was rooted up. An extreme example of this development is Cardinal Lothar de Segni (later Pope Innocent III)'s On the Contempt of this world in which Matthew 7,17-18 inspired him to compare plants and man as follows: "Plants and trees produce flowers, greens and fruit and from which we get oil wine and balsam; from the human body [we get] spit, urine and shit; they have sweet smell [while] the human body gives off the abomination of decay; for what is man according to his shape if not an inverted tree." Segni is using here one of Quintillian's topoi that poetry is used either to praise, or to revile and ridicule by turning a thing into its opposite, much as we may say "what a mess, this is the world upside down.". But we are a long way from Aristotle's and Plato's natural philosophy or from the Medieval teachings on the benefits of plants and their products for the health of the human body, let alone for the prolongation of life.
John Evelyn's treatise on the growing and preparation of fresh vegetables - he discusses more than just lettuce - fits into the latter tradition as is clear from his reference to "our famous Roger Bacon's "the Cure of Old Age and Preservation of Youth." (p. 187) What struck me while reading Evelyn was how close he comes to such of our modern healthy eating advocates as Michel Pollan and Mark Bittman, for it is only when Evelyn wants to show that his advice is backed up by both the learned of the Classical and Medieval world as well as by Catholic and Protestant scholars that we become aware of his precursors and probably also of his awareness of the revolutionary nature of his essay. Not that he was alone in the 17th century to write about the benefits of vegetables and books about gardening were best sellers. One of the editions of The Herball or Generall Historie of Plants by John Gerard (1597) has a beautiful title page that includes a picture of an estate's garden with vegetable beds and fruit trees in a design that John Evelyn encountered in his extensive travels. And John Parkinson's Paradisus Terrestris (1629) has a title page showing the Biblical paradise in an oval. The imagery is a play on his name: paradise=park, son=sun, hence the Paradisus in sole above the title and the rays of the sun surrounding the oval. It reminds me of the title of John Evelyn's great unfinished work Elysium Britannicum. But it also recalls the well established Medieval knowledge that before the Fall Adam and Eve were vegetarians and that even after the Flood Noah was permitted to eat but little meat.
The collection of essays of which the Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets is the one that interests me here, also includes "Calendar for Gardeners" and "Directions for the Gardiner." According to the editor all three works were to be part of the Elysium. There may even be a reference to his continued work on the great project when he refers to critics who say: "This Man began to build, but was unable to finish!" (p.139) It is not likely to refer to his actual gardens the experience of which furnished him with the material for these essays and he continues with an explanation: He has not achieved his project because of "the Unsatiable Coveting to Exhaust all that should, or can be said upon every Head...[and he sees his Silva and Kalendar as the first installments that are] both capable of Great Improvements." This intrigues me for in the three essays in this collection there is an emphasis on healthful plants for the vegetarian diet of Adam and Eve. The full title of the Calendar is "Kalendarium Hortense: or, the Gard'ners Almanac; directing what he is to do Monethly, throughout the Year; and what Fruits and Flowers are in Prime," (with an helpful reminder from the Roman Columella that I too can heed: "Be wakeful, men, for the seasons flee with silent tread, and the year turns without a sound.") Among Evelyn's tasks not the least are those of keeping plants healthy and the garden clean, including the use of [organic] fertilizer and pesticides, and clean top soil composted with aged manure from well kept stables. Then there is the advise on watering: "Water gently, not hastily, or in a great stream, for it only hardens the ground and [does] not penetrate: therefore imitate the natural showers."(p. 104) These "Directions" were written for his own gardener. It begins with a list of garden terms that is followed by lists of plants for the kitchen garden, most of which are salads and herbs, after which comes a list of medicinal pants that must be set out in "Alphabetical order for the better retaining them in memorie" obviously to avoid errors in their use. The variety of plants available, including exotics from the newly discovered worlds, is impressive. The reader will be grateful to Ms Campbell-Culver, the very erudite editor, for her glossary of plant names (pp. 261-310)as well as for her explanatory notes (on which I rely for my remarks) identifying the many names Evelyn drops and the translations of his citations (pp. 235-260 for the Salad Book).
In his letter of dedication - which is actually a plea to provide a permanent home and steady income for the Royal Society - Evelyn ranges his little essay, "Trifle" he calls it, among the tasks of the Royal Society which is to free the works of nature "from those Illusions and Impostors that are still endeavouring to cloud and depress" true knowledge as well as in the tradition of the elder Pliny, Cicero and his corespondent Atticus, who all loved gardening. He aims to "recall the World, if not altogether to their Pristine Diet, yet to a much more wholesome and temperate [one] than is now in Fashion"[and largely composed of meats]. In his Preface he returns to his humble contribution that stands in contrast to "those of late, who have arrogated and given the Glorious Title of Compleat and Accomplish'd Gardiners, to what they have Publish'd." After all too much remains yet to be discovered. Perhaps he had Nicholas Culpepper, his contemporary, in mind? Then he mentions an anonymous person who had studied only bees for sixty years as well as "a Person of my Acquaintance [who] spent almost Forty, in Gathering and Amassing Materials for an Hortulan Design, to so enormous an Heap, as to fill some Thousand Pages [for] only two, or three Acres of Ground; nay within the Square of less than One (skillfully Planted and Cultivated)..." I wonder whether he is here writing about himself, for he refers in his Kalendar (whose ninth printing encouraged him to improve upon it) to a nursery of one acre laid out in squares [as for example on the Gerard title page].
The text of the Acetaria suggests that he relied for his many references to persons and quotes on his own chapbooks. It recalls my own copious note taking (on five by eights), first for my graduate papers and doctoral thesis and then for my lectures, papers, articles and books. Although taught by an excellent teacher in the required Historical Methods seminar to write down complete and precise references and avoid abbreviations, especially in another language, at the end of the day these rules were easily forgotten. Thus some of Evelyn's errors look like mine, for example when he cites "the learned Harduin" who is quoting a Latin author as saying that "beets are less innocent(innocentior) than cabbages"(p.180) where the editor corrects him because Harduoin actually has "more harmful(nocentior)," which is what the Latin author intended. And when Evelyn talks about salads bringing sound sleep (p.204) he has people sleep "under a gentle tree" (molli sub arbore) which the editor calls a "garbled reminiscence of Vergil's "and gentle sleep beneath a tree" (mollesque sub arbore somni," which actually fits better with Evelyn's point and which he cites correctly in his Sylva,bk 4). The editor was also unable to find the source for some of Evelyn's attributions. It seems to me that Evelyn cited from memory not bothering to check his notes or when he could not easily find his source in those "1,000 pages" of chapbooks.
The Acetaria begins with a descriptive list of useful plants that reveals the lasting indebtedness of the 17th century to the approach to medicine as defined by Galen in the 3rd century that dominated Medieval writings. Central to this was the concept of the four humours (choler, melancholy, blood and phlegm) that were affected by the four elements of fire, earth, air and water and whose bad effects on a persons health should be treated by remedies that were either hot or cold, dry or moist. In the treatises on the conservation of youth etc., young people were said to be hot and old people cold and that cold plants were good for the young and hot ones for the old. Thus one reads in the summarized 11th century Tacuinum Sanitatis (Tables of Health): Turnips(Napones). Nature: Warm in the second degree and humid in the first. Optimum: The long and dark ones. Usefulness: They increase the sperm and render the flesh less prone to swellings. Dangers: Occlusions in the veins and pores. Nutralization of the dangers: Stewed twice and served with very fat meats." Evelyn has:" Turnep; moderately hot and moist: Napus; the long Navet is certainly the most delicate..." He suggests young radish-sized ones for the salad bowl, but some people wrap them and roast them under the embers." The Tacuinum says that sage is warm in the first degree and moist in the second and good for paralysis, but that it should be rinsed well. Evelyn echoes this: "Sage,Salvia; hot and dry. The tops ... well picked and washed ... retain all the noble properties of the other hot plants; more especially for ... all paralytical affections ... [and] the assiduous use of it is said to render men immortal." But in contrast to these remnants of tradition, Evelyn's essay also bears witness to the work of Renaissance linquists who made the original works of the Ancients available in mostly complete and carefully corrected texts. Above all, Evelyn relied on his own experience as a gardener which was also informed by that of such others as the Romans Columella and Palladius, the more recent French Olivier de Serres and, in addition to his acquaintance with gardeners of various aristocratic friends, Evelyn published The French Gardiner, a translation of the work by the contemporary Nicolas de Bonnefons. Yet he advises the mixing of hot, dry plants with cold and moist for their effect on the "humours," but they will also taste better by offsetting the pungent with the mild: "in the Composure of Sallet, every Plant should come in to bear its part, without being over-power'd by some Herb of a stronger Taste." Advice he supports with and elegant verse from the 5th century Macrobius' Saturnalia. Actually, when picked in season when they are tender and delicate, they are "in a word, [good] for Persons of all Ages, Humours and Constitutions whatsoever."
Before he goes on to the composition of and dressing of the actually salads he repeats a strong warning against the careless gathering of herbs in the wilds advocated by some who say a fool can pick greens as long as they are young and tender. It is too easy to mistake hemlock (what done in Socrates) for parsley or cow-parsley for chervil, etc. Even wild medicinal plants should be avoided, for what may be good for one thing may be bad for another. Moreover, one must be careful of fruits that have been damaged by insects and carefully rinse vegetables to get rid of insect eggs, etc.: "let your Herby Ingredients be exquisitely [carefully] cull'd, and cleans'd of all worm-eaten, slimy, canker'd, dry, spotted, or any ways vitiated Leaves." And then for dressing use clear oil, preferably of Lucca olives, mixed with the best wine-vinegar (also clear) that may be infused by roses, rosemary etc.; for salt he recommends sea-salt "as the least corrosive" (the best if from France) and in addition to mustard and freshly ground pepper, one may add orange or lemon peel and if a knife is used, it should be of silver and not steel, for the acids will release a metallic taste. What Good Housekeeper could not approve?
The last twenty pages are dedicated to a somewhat rambling defense of a "Herbaceous Diet," replete with allusions to the Bible and the Ancient Classics, in favor of vegetarianism, for. ex. Genesis 1,29 as well as Gen. 5 and 9, all from before the time that there were "flesh-shambles" (slaughter houses) and when people lived to a very great age. [No doubt we find here a reflection of the widespread debate on the glory of the "Golden Age" literature that received a secular impulse as a result of the 16th century's voyages of discovery]. And writing in the context of the Great Plague of the 1660s, he quotes a doctor friend who wrote at length about the unhealthy conditions in the cities as opposed to those of the country with its clean air; he himself had penned an essay advocating the clearing of the "shantytown" environment of poor cottages to put in gardens and parks so that the smog of all the chimneys would disappear and to which he returns several times in his Sylva. The Great Fire did some of the clearing, but no gardens and parks replaced the burnt houses, much to the regret of Evelyn. In the Acetaria, Evelyn decries market gardeners who near those cities use (in contrast to clean composted soil) "rotten dung," [the refuse of city dwellers], as fertilizer whose foul smells, "wafted by the Wind poison and infect the ambient Air and Vital Spirits," to make their hot beds for raising forced vegetables "for the Wanton Palate...[But what is] corrupt in the Original, cannot but produce malignant and ill Effects." Here he cites "the Editor of our famous Roger Bacon's Treatise" on the Cure of Old Age and Preservation of Youth as an early authority. Not only do such animals as cows and horses that feed on grass live to a great age, but Evelyn cites numerous instances of humans that did, including one "old Parr" who when he gave up his simple diet for the fare at Court, "quickly sunk and dropt away." (Thomas Parr, ?1483-1635, had been a farm servant, whose age made him into a spectacle and he was introduced at court). Evelyn was convinced that the rich diet killed Parr, but his life may simply have run its course.
In his defense of the salad bowl Evelyn doesn't only criticize the luxurious life of his effete contemporaries, but he digs up as evidence from the Younger Scaliger that "Flesh-Devourers (such as the farthest Northern) become Heavy, Dull, Unactive and much more Stupid than the Southern; and such as feed much on plants, are more Acute, Subtil and of deeper Penetration..." (So much for Hitler's great Arian race of tall and blond northerners and long live the Mediterranean diet!). It gets worse for "flesh-eaters" often also consume blood and to obtain it engage in cruelty to animals. And it became still worse, for not only did the luxuries of the East conquer Rome [echoes of Cato the Elder], but the happy famers lost their two acres [in contravention to the warning in Isaiah 5:8-10: "Woe to those who join [...] field to field until everywhere belongs to them...]to those who needed "Entire Forests and Parks, Warrens and Fish-Ponds and ample Lakes to furnish their Tables [did he have Lucullus in mind?], so as Men could not live by one another without Oppression" and later the "Spawn of Pagan Scythians," i.e. Goths and Vandals, invaded the West and intermarried. [These barbarians were actually named as an example of "enemies of the human race" in a political treatise called Le Prince by Guez de Balzac (1635)]. He also speculates that the flesh and blood diet these invaders brought with them could explain why so much blood has been shed between Christians and may even be the cause for "so many Impertinent Disputes and Cavels about other {than Christian] superstitious Fopperies, which frequently end in Blood and cutting of Throats." Evelyn comes close to the slogan on a button of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta): People who kill animals rarely stop there. (My vegetarian daughter with her Quaker education can appreciate this). Not surpisingly, in anticipation of Candide, Evelyn believes (in the words of the poet Abraham Cowley) that "Happy [is] the Man who from Ambition free, A little Garden, little Field does feed...The specious Evils of an anxious Life, He leaves to Fools to be their endless Strife." And for good measure he adds some lines from Milton's Paradise Lost describing the idyllic life before the Fall.
It's too bad that he was induced to attach and "Addendum" with recipes that are far removed from the hallowed simplicity of his own salad bowl. But it's not often that I'm getting this much pleasure out of reading a book, Evelyn's seventeenth century syntax notwithstanding.
I could not find Aristotle's essay, but I found one attributed to Roger Bacon, the thirteenth century Franciscan scholar who among other things set out to clear the texts of classical authors, Aristotle in particular, from the scholia of previous readers that had become part of the text. The full title of the Roger Bacon essay is De retardatione accidentium senectutis. Another essay on the same subject, attributed to Arnald de Villanova, a younger contemporary of Roger's is called De conservatione iuventute et retardanda senectute. This was dedicated to the Aragonese King of Naples and most of the modern scholarly work on these 2 essays (treated as two versions of one) is in Spanish. The attribution to Roger Bacon has been questioned by non-English scholars, in one case because internal as well as external evidence suggests that it was written too early for Bacon [and thus also for Villanova]. All this doesn't bother me very much for medieval scholars often omitted the name to the original author of a work they emended, etc., probably because they assumed that the name would be known in the small circle of the learned or because plagiarism wasn't a concept then.
I have been unable to find a text of that essay, but if the editors of Francis Bacon knew the alleged Aristotelian text, they may have gotten it from this presumably Roger Bacon essay of which a translation was published in London in 1683 by one Richard Browne (who has the same name as John Evelyn's brother in law); John Evelyn actually refers to that 1683 edition in his 1699 treatise Acetaria on the growing and use of salad and other greens to maintain good health (John Evelyn. Directions for the Gardener and Other Horticultural Advice. Maggie Campbell-Culver ed. Oxford U.P., 2009, pp. 141ff.) Evelyn also knew the essay by Scaliger in which he defends the usefulness of vegetables against an Italian scholar who argued that plants are actually harmful to a persons health. But the editors of Francis Bacon are correct in saying that the "inverted plant" phrase is "founded on what is said by Aristotle," but in A.'s De partibus animalium, iv.10 where he wrote: ... the animal becomes a plant that has its upper parts downwards and its lower parts above. For in plants the roots are the equivalents of mouth and head. (transl. Wm Ogle, eBooks at Adelaide, 2007). This simile was summed up as "Man is an inverted tree, and a tree is an inverted man" by Medieval scholars. A.'s phraseology and context - of what sets plants apart from animals - is pretty close to Francis Bacon, but A. is relying on Plato's Timaeus, 90a, where we find (in F.M. Cornford's 1937 transl. p. 353)... "the sovereign form of soul [which] dwells in the summit of our body and lifts us from earth towards our celestial affinity, like a plant whose roots are not in the earth, but in the heavens." Medieval scholars could have had a field day with this striving towards the heavens, had they but known that part of the Timaeus.
Neither Plato, nor his pupil Aristotle is concerned in this context with the preservation of youth or slowing down old age which was the topic of Roger Bacon/Arnald de Villanova and that interested John Evelyn. Somewhere in its historical life a commentator suggested that the simile includes a play on the Greek word anthropos that contains ano(=high) and thropos(=moving upward) and additionally on the similarity of the latin homo(=man) and humus(=earth). In the process Medieval commentators moved from an explanatory comparison between plants and animals to a phrase that became a poetic commonplace, though that 16th century emblem reflects the moral baggage that medieval usage had attached to the phrase by associating it with the evangelical tree which, if it bore no more fruit, was rooted up. An extreme example of this development is Cardinal Lothar de Segni (later Pope Innocent III)'s On the Contempt of this world in which Matthew 7,17-18 inspired him to compare plants and man as follows: "Plants and trees produce flowers, greens and fruit and from which we get oil wine and balsam; from the human body [we get] spit, urine and shit; they have sweet smell [while] the human body gives off the abomination of decay; for what is man according to his shape if not an inverted tree." Segni is using here one of Quintillian's topoi that poetry is used either to praise, or to revile and ridicule by turning a thing into its opposite, much as we may say "what a mess, this is the world upside down.". But we are a long way from Aristotle's and Plato's natural philosophy or from the Medieval teachings on the benefits of plants and their products for the health of the human body, let alone for the prolongation of life.
John Evelyn's treatise on the growing and preparation of fresh vegetables - he discusses more than just lettuce - fits into the latter tradition as is clear from his reference to "our famous Roger Bacon's "the Cure of Old Age and Preservation of Youth." (p. 187) What struck me while reading Evelyn was how close he comes to such of our modern healthy eating advocates as Michel Pollan and Mark Bittman, for it is only when Evelyn wants to show that his advice is backed up by both the learned of the Classical and Medieval world as well as by Catholic and Protestant scholars that we become aware of his precursors and probably also of his awareness of the revolutionary nature of his essay. Not that he was alone in the 17th century to write about the benefits of vegetables and books about gardening were best sellers. One of the editions of The Herball or Generall Historie of Plants by John Gerard (1597) has a beautiful title page that includes a picture of an estate's garden with vegetable beds and fruit trees in a design that John Evelyn encountered in his extensive travels. And John Parkinson's Paradisus Terrestris (1629) has a title page showing the Biblical paradise in an oval. The imagery is a play on his name: paradise=park, son=sun, hence the Paradisus in sole above the title and the rays of the sun surrounding the oval. It reminds me of the title of John Evelyn's great unfinished work Elysium Britannicum. But it also recalls the well established Medieval knowledge that before the Fall Adam and Eve were vegetarians and that even after the Flood Noah was permitted to eat but little meat.
The collection of essays of which the Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets is the one that interests me here, also includes "Calendar for Gardeners" and "Directions for the Gardiner." According to the editor all three works were to be part of the Elysium. There may even be a reference to his continued work on the great project when he refers to critics who say: "This Man began to build, but was unable to finish!" (p.139) It is not likely to refer to his actual gardens the experience of which furnished him with the material for these essays and he continues with an explanation: He has not achieved his project because of "the Unsatiable Coveting to Exhaust all that should, or can be said upon every Head...[and he sees his Silva and Kalendar as the first installments that are] both capable of Great Improvements." This intrigues me for in the three essays in this collection there is an emphasis on healthful plants for the vegetarian diet of Adam and Eve. The full title of the Calendar is "Kalendarium Hortense: or, the Gard'ners Almanac; directing what he is to do Monethly, throughout the Year; and what Fruits and Flowers are in Prime," (with an helpful reminder from the Roman Columella that I too can heed: "Be wakeful, men, for the seasons flee with silent tread, and the year turns without a sound.") Among Evelyn's tasks not the least are those of keeping plants healthy and the garden clean, including the use of [organic] fertilizer and pesticides, and clean top soil composted with aged manure from well kept stables. Then there is the advise on watering: "Water gently, not hastily, or in a great stream, for it only hardens the ground and [does] not penetrate: therefore imitate the natural showers."(p. 104) These "Directions" were written for his own gardener. It begins with a list of garden terms that is followed by lists of plants for the kitchen garden, most of which are salads and herbs, after which comes a list of medicinal pants that must be set out in "Alphabetical order for the better retaining them in memorie" obviously to avoid errors in their use. The variety of plants available, including exotics from the newly discovered worlds, is impressive. The reader will be grateful to Ms Campbell-Culver, the very erudite editor, for her glossary of plant names (pp. 261-310)as well as for her explanatory notes (on which I rely for my remarks) identifying the many names Evelyn drops and the translations of his citations (pp. 235-260 for the Salad Book).
In his letter of dedication - which is actually a plea to provide a permanent home and steady income for the Royal Society - Evelyn ranges his little essay, "Trifle" he calls it, among the tasks of the Royal Society which is to free the works of nature "from those Illusions and Impostors that are still endeavouring to cloud and depress" true knowledge as well as in the tradition of the elder Pliny, Cicero and his corespondent Atticus, who all loved gardening. He aims to "recall the World, if not altogether to their Pristine Diet, yet to a much more wholesome and temperate [one] than is now in Fashion"[and largely composed of meats]. In his Preface he returns to his humble contribution that stands in contrast to "those of late, who have arrogated and given the Glorious Title of Compleat and Accomplish'd Gardiners, to what they have Publish'd." After all too much remains yet to be discovered. Perhaps he had Nicholas Culpepper, his contemporary, in mind? Then he mentions an anonymous person who had studied only bees for sixty years as well as "a Person of my Acquaintance [who] spent almost Forty, in Gathering and Amassing Materials for an Hortulan Design, to so enormous an Heap, as to fill some Thousand Pages [for] only two, or three Acres of Ground; nay within the Square of less than One (skillfully Planted and Cultivated)..." I wonder whether he is here writing about himself, for he refers in his Kalendar (whose ninth printing encouraged him to improve upon it) to a nursery of one acre laid out in squares [as for example on the Gerard title page].
The text of the Acetaria suggests that he relied for his many references to persons and quotes on his own chapbooks. It recalls my own copious note taking (on five by eights), first for my graduate papers and doctoral thesis and then for my lectures, papers, articles and books. Although taught by an excellent teacher in the required Historical Methods seminar to write down complete and precise references and avoid abbreviations, especially in another language, at the end of the day these rules were easily forgotten. Thus some of Evelyn's errors look like mine, for example when he cites "the learned Harduin" who is quoting a Latin author as saying that "beets are less innocent(innocentior) than cabbages"(p.180) where the editor corrects him because Harduoin actually has "more harmful(nocentior)," which is what the Latin author intended. And when Evelyn talks about salads bringing sound sleep (p.204) he has people sleep "under a gentle tree" (molli sub arbore) which the editor calls a "garbled reminiscence of Vergil's "and gentle sleep beneath a tree" (mollesque sub arbore somni," which actually fits better with Evelyn's point and which he cites correctly in his Sylva,bk 4). The editor was also unable to find the source for some of Evelyn's attributions. It seems to me that Evelyn cited from memory not bothering to check his notes or when he could not easily find his source in those "1,000 pages" of chapbooks.
The Acetaria begins with a descriptive list of useful plants that reveals the lasting indebtedness of the 17th century to the approach to medicine as defined by Galen in the 3rd century that dominated Medieval writings. Central to this was the concept of the four humours (choler, melancholy, blood and phlegm) that were affected by the four elements of fire, earth, air and water and whose bad effects on a persons health should be treated by remedies that were either hot or cold, dry or moist. In the treatises on the conservation of youth etc., young people were said to be hot and old people cold and that cold plants were good for the young and hot ones for the old. Thus one reads in the summarized 11th century Tacuinum Sanitatis (Tables of Health): Turnips(Napones). Nature: Warm in the second degree and humid in the first. Optimum: The long and dark ones. Usefulness: They increase the sperm and render the flesh less prone to swellings. Dangers: Occlusions in the veins and pores. Nutralization of the dangers: Stewed twice and served with very fat meats." Evelyn has:" Turnep; moderately hot and moist: Napus; the long Navet is certainly the most delicate..." He suggests young radish-sized ones for the salad bowl, but some people wrap them and roast them under the embers." The Tacuinum says that sage is warm in the first degree and moist in the second and good for paralysis, but that it should be rinsed well. Evelyn echoes this: "Sage,Salvia; hot and dry. The tops ... well picked and washed ... retain all the noble properties of the other hot plants; more especially for ... all paralytical affections ... [and] the assiduous use of it is said to render men immortal." But in contrast to these remnants of tradition, Evelyn's essay also bears witness to the work of Renaissance linquists who made the original works of the Ancients available in mostly complete and carefully corrected texts. Above all, Evelyn relied on his own experience as a gardener which was also informed by that of such others as the Romans Columella and Palladius, the more recent French Olivier de Serres and, in addition to his acquaintance with gardeners of various aristocratic friends, Evelyn published The French Gardiner, a translation of the work by the contemporary Nicolas de Bonnefons. Yet he advises the mixing of hot, dry plants with cold and moist for their effect on the "humours," but they will also taste better by offsetting the pungent with the mild: "in the Composure of Sallet, every Plant should come in to bear its part, without being over-power'd by some Herb of a stronger Taste." Advice he supports with and elegant verse from the 5th century Macrobius' Saturnalia. Actually, when picked in season when they are tender and delicate, they are "in a word, [good] for Persons of all Ages, Humours and Constitutions whatsoever."
Before he goes on to the composition of and dressing of the actually salads he repeats a strong warning against the careless gathering of herbs in the wilds advocated by some who say a fool can pick greens as long as they are young and tender. It is too easy to mistake hemlock (what done in Socrates) for parsley or cow-parsley for chervil, etc. Even wild medicinal plants should be avoided, for what may be good for one thing may be bad for another. Moreover, one must be careful of fruits that have been damaged by insects and carefully rinse vegetables to get rid of insect eggs, etc.: "let your Herby Ingredients be exquisitely [carefully] cull'd, and cleans'd of all worm-eaten, slimy, canker'd, dry, spotted, or any ways vitiated Leaves." And then for dressing use clear oil, preferably of Lucca olives, mixed with the best wine-vinegar (also clear) that may be infused by roses, rosemary etc.; for salt he recommends sea-salt "as the least corrosive" (the best if from France) and in addition to mustard and freshly ground pepper, one may add orange or lemon peel and if a knife is used, it should be of silver and not steel, for the acids will release a metallic taste. What Good Housekeeper could not approve?
The last twenty pages are dedicated to a somewhat rambling defense of a "Herbaceous Diet," replete with allusions to the Bible and the Ancient Classics, in favor of vegetarianism, for. ex. Genesis 1,29 as well as Gen. 5 and 9, all from before the time that there were "flesh-shambles" (slaughter houses) and when people lived to a very great age. [No doubt we find here a reflection of the widespread debate on the glory of the "Golden Age" literature that received a secular impulse as a result of the 16th century's voyages of discovery]. And writing in the context of the Great Plague of the 1660s, he quotes a doctor friend who wrote at length about the unhealthy conditions in the cities as opposed to those of the country with its clean air; he himself had penned an essay advocating the clearing of the "shantytown" environment of poor cottages to put in gardens and parks so that the smog of all the chimneys would disappear and to which he returns several times in his Sylva. The Great Fire did some of the clearing, but no gardens and parks replaced the burnt houses, much to the regret of Evelyn. In the Acetaria, Evelyn decries market gardeners who near those cities use (in contrast to clean composted soil) "rotten dung," [the refuse of city dwellers], as fertilizer whose foul smells, "wafted by the Wind poison and infect the ambient Air and Vital Spirits," to make their hot beds for raising forced vegetables "for the Wanton Palate...[But what is] corrupt in the Original, cannot but produce malignant and ill Effects." Here he cites "the Editor of our famous Roger Bacon's Treatise" on the Cure of Old Age and Preservation of Youth as an early authority. Not only do such animals as cows and horses that feed on grass live to a great age, but Evelyn cites numerous instances of humans that did, including one "old Parr" who when he gave up his simple diet for the fare at Court, "quickly sunk and dropt away." (Thomas Parr, ?1483-1635, had been a farm servant, whose age made him into a spectacle and he was introduced at court). Evelyn was convinced that the rich diet killed Parr, but his life may simply have run its course.
In his defense of the salad bowl Evelyn doesn't only criticize the luxurious life of his effete contemporaries, but he digs up as evidence from the Younger Scaliger that "Flesh-Devourers (such as the farthest Northern) become Heavy, Dull, Unactive and much more Stupid than the Southern; and such as feed much on plants, are more Acute, Subtil and of deeper Penetration..." (So much for Hitler's great Arian race of tall and blond northerners and long live the Mediterranean diet!). It gets worse for "flesh-eaters" often also consume blood and to obtain it engage in cruelty to animals. And it became still worse, for not only did the luxuries of the East conquer Rome [echoes of Cato the Elder], but the happy famers lost their two acres [in contravention to the warning in Isaiah 5:8-10: "Woe to those who join [...] field to field until everywhere belongs to them...]to those who needed "Entire Forests and Parks, Warrens and Fish-Ponds and ample Lakes to furnish their Tables [did he have Lucullus in mind?], so as Men could not live by one another without Oppression" and later the "Spawn of Pagan Scythians," i.e. Goths and Vandals, invaded the West and intermarried. [These barbarians were actually named as an example of "enemies of the human race" in a political treatise called Le Prince by Guez de Balzac (1635)]. He also speculates that the flesh and blood diet these invaders brought with them could explain why so much blood has been shed between Christians and may even be the cause for "so many Impertinent Disputes and Cavels about other {than Christian] superstitious Fopperies, which frequently end in Blood and cutting of Throats." Evelyn comes close to the slogan on a button of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta): People who kill animals rarely stop there. (My vegetarian daughter with her Quaker education can appreciate this). Not surpisingly, in anticipation of Candide, Evelyn believes (in the words of the poet Abraham Cowley) that "Happy [is] the Man who from Ambition free, A little Garden, little Field does feed...The specious Evils of an anxious Life, He leaves to Fools to be their endless Strife." And for good measure he adds some lines from Milton's Paradise Lost describing the idyllic life before the Fall.
It's too bad that he was induced to attach and "Addendum" with recipes that are far removed from the hallowed simplicity of his own salad bowl. But it's not often that I'm getting this much pleasure out of reading a book, Evelyn's seventeenth century syntax notwithstanding.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
the modest birder (12) Jac. P. Thijsse
December and January were colder than usual and bird life around the feeders, in spite of some interesting moments (e.g. what looked like 2 immat. White Throated Sparrows with a black spot on the chest that turned out to be Tree Sparrows when I decided to pay attention with my binoculars: an interesting example of being too lazy and assuming that all were the usual White-throats while Tree Sparrows are rare visitors) were not different enough from previous winters to merit a long entry. On the other hand I spent a good deal of time in my armchair reading. One of the books, a collection of Jac. P. Thijsse's essays from the periodical De Levende Natuur (DLN), took me back to my youth, especially to my grade school years. These essays were collected by Th. just before his death in 1945, but edited for publication after Word War II in 1946, by Luke Tinbergen.
I have mentioned both Tinbergens in other entries ("On reading a National Geographic" and "On a biography of Niko Tinbergen" - Luke's older brother). Thijsse (1865-1945), in addition to his duties as a teacher, was a long time editor of the DLN, and a founder of the Association for the Preservation of Nature Monuments (Natuurmonumenten) of which he was the Secretary. He was, together with Eli Heimans, a fellow teacher, a prolific writer and popularizer and their enthusiasm was infectious. They also inspired the students that formed the Netherlands Youth Organization for Nature Study (NJN) in 1920 of which the Tinbergens as well as I (20+ years later) were members. My mother, who said she had gone to a school where Heimans had been headmaster, took me one day, I was 9 I think,, on a trip to a ruined medieval castle that was within walking distance of Thijsse's Hof, a five acre landscape garden that held all the plants growing wild in the Dutch dunes. So we stopped there also. He happened to be there on his daily walk and she nudged me to ask him the name of several plants that I saw there for the first time. He was then about 78, but still a statuesque gentleman, standing straight in his three-piece suit and bow tie. Not someone I then thought you could walk up to and ask for the name of plants. But I did and he was without pretensions even taking the trouble asking how I came to be interested in plants and pleased when I told him my mother had given me one of the books he and Heimans had written (see below). The he asked where I lived and encouraged me to take the little book along on the family's Sunday walks. I have been reminded several times of his appearance by an illustration in books about him where he stands amidst people on an excursion that he still led occasionally in those years.
As in the case of Niko T. there are some parallels between the activities of the young Thijsse and my own; they are the more remarkable as Thijsse was already 65 years old when I was born. It shows how little family life had changed in spite of the economic and social developments in the intervening years. During our grade school years both Thijsse and I were surrounded by the habitats (he much to the South of Amsterdam and I to the immediate North), that he and Heimans were to describe in In sloot en plas [In Ditches and Ponds] that my mother gave me when I got my first aquarium at the age of 8 or 9. That little book was part of a series introduced by Van vlinders, vogels en bloemen [Of Butterflies, Birds and Flowers]; each described the different Dutch levensgemeenschappen [lit: communities of life] or habitats announced in the title of the series. In the first book this then fairly new concept was slipped in by way of Greek mythology to introduce the Atalanta butterfly (Vanessa atalanta; Red Amiral in the US), a beautiful as well as common butterfly. Its eggs are laid on the stinging nettle and the writers "guided me" from a neglected dirty corner of a nearby house where nettles were abundant, to a rural road, armed with a piece of paper and a pencil to write down the "signalement" (of which they gave several samples) where the Atalanta and its relatives might be sunning themselves. Another unattractive habitat was the home of thistles; these were introduced by an anecdote explaining why the thistle was Scotland's national symbol. They are the host plant of the Painted Lady and the flowers attract not only butterflies but birds too, among which the Thistle Finch (Carduelis carduelis) is the most colorful. Thus I learned that much beauty can be found amidst the "ugly" plants we warned away from. One of my teachers was fond of encouraging us by citing the motto of Prince Federick Henry, the Queen-consort, Per aspera ad adstra [through the rough to the stars] which admirably fits the approach of that introductory little book.
There was, of course, a very practical reason for treating each habitat separately, namely the distances between them. In the 1890s only the upper and well to do middle classes had the time and money to travel and even in as small a country as ours, getting from the wet meadows environments to the dunes or the beach, only between 25 to 35 kilometers from my home took 2 hours in 1938 and a walk there would thus involve an entire day. The heath and forests were still father away and even in the 1950s you might have to walk an hour from the nearest railroad station and thus the focus on each habitat per book was convenient as well as affordable. Het Wandelboekje(1900) [The Walker's Booklet] was more general with suggestions of what to look for during short strolls not far from home. It also focuses on plants and insects so that one did not need costly equipment. After all, both authors were then working as teachers in the poorer sections of Amsterdam and were themselves not all that well paid. That little book incidentally also tells us that most people didn't think of taking walks during the inclement weather months when most people already had to walk several kilometers from and to their work: the excursions are arranged in a "yearly" cycle that only covers the months of March through September. It was not until 1944 that Thijsse prepared a new edition that was to include every month, because by then NJNers and others were in the field at any time even if, during WWII and the late 1940s, it meant surviving the cold by means of layering old newspapers next to our underwear.
A much larger "coffee table" book was Het Vogeljaar [the bird year], first published in l904, of which I got the 1946 reprint, beautifully illustrated with (black and white) photographs, as a birthday present. I have it still and read it when nostalgia for the landscapes of my youth needs remedy. When I first read it I came to admire the Starling for which Thijsse had a soft spot (which was shared by Rachel Carson who, in 1939, published an article called "How About Citizen Papers for the Starling?" [which was imported from Europe]. It was one bird that was always with us, in the city as well as on the meadows where it rambled in the grass between the legs of the cows. But I have since developed a great dislike for that a greedy and aggressive dominator at my feeders where they are even avoided by the larger Blue Jay; only once or twice did I see a Redbellied Woodpecker succeed in forcing a Starling off the suet. But its rambunctious behavior and softly murmured song with its humorous variations that caused Thijsse to select the Starling for his bookplate which showed a drawing of several Starlings clinging to some phragmitis stems that were bent by a typical Dutch wind above the motto Onbekommerd [without worry]. Starlings now put me on alert to prevent it from nesting in my covered rain gutters and clogging up the works.
Thijsse's motto may be a reflection of his religious childhood and inspired by the gospel of Matthew when Christ consoles his disciples to consider the lilies and birds that are alive and beautiful without worrying and admonishes them not to worry about the day of tomorrow because each day had enough of its own cares. Recently a selection of his letters has been published in the Netherlands with the title "Wanhoop nooit aan de vooruitgang" [Never Despair of Progress]. It's more specific than his motto and occurs in a letter of encouragement towards the end of his life (de died in 1945, during the German occupation of WW II and after the years of the Great Depression). But both his motto and that encouragement typify his personality. It is a sentiment that comes out very strongly in his letters to teenagers whose interest in nature caused them to write the Great Man. These letters reminded me of my brief encounter with him in "Thijsse's Hof."
Like Thijsse I often played hooky to watch the bees and the birds or rather the salamanders and fishes. It seems however that I got punished less than Thijsse, probably because my father came home after my wet clothes had been changed and also because my mother was the contact with my teachers so that my father may not have known about my truancy (I have a vague memory of my teachers thinking that I was sickly). Yet I was disciplined from time to time for a variety of reasons and once in while I was set to write 50x or 100x the same line as Th.: "Lord, set a watch before my mouth" (which after the exercise was no longer a prayer and thus not heeded). Having realized that Thijsse, Niko T. and I all played hooky as part of developing our knowledge of nature, I wonder whether such truancy was a precondition for greatness; in that respect I missed the boat.
As a teenager I too spent the summer vacations roaming around in reed fields, though mostly I paddled through our watery environment in a kayak I had found in the attic of the local yacht harbor and that my eldest brother had fixed up. As I talked about my adventures with some of my teachers I was asked to give talks in the (Headmaster's) biology class, for example on the courtship flights of Common Terns and Snipes or the floating nests of Grebes and Black Terns. Thus I was doing the same, at about the same age as Thijsse when he was a an apprentice teacher. In my final year I contracted a serious pleurisy and could not go to school for six months. Again like Th., who suffered from the same illness (but in his early 30s) I sought the allegedly healing effect of fresh and clean air and I could be found on every nice day (there were enough rainy days to study for my final comprehensives) somewhere in the fields.
During one of those vacations I took the same long walk Th. described in 1896 in the first of his collected essays (but mine was on a sunny day). The landscapes had not yet changed much and I remember most of the flowers, probably because they were new to me. Even 6 years ago, when I was last there, whole stretches looked the same and several of the regions we traversed some 50 years apart, are now declared cultural heritage sites and managed in a traditional, pre-WW II manner. When I took that walk, I had not read any issue of the DLN; it must have been an instance of what one of Th.'s close collaborators called the "Thijsse effect" (thijsseficatie). As a recent member of the NJN, I then was eager to learn about where "specialists" went and that walk had become an excursion tradition.
As I am reading these DLN essays I become aware how much I was influenced by Thijsse. My connection to him is a good example of the idea in Six Degrees of Separation, though in my case it was only two or three degrees, for example by way of the Tinbergen brothers and other NJNers. Niko's work, culminating in his Ph.D thesis on digger wasps etc. as well as in the essays in Curious Naturalists (1958, 1974) are extensions of observations Thijsse described in his DLN articles and the title of NT's autobiographical essay "Watching and Wondering" (which I already mentioned in Lazy Ch. B. #10) is a precise summing up of the "Thijsse method," namely the observing of what happens and asking questions about the how and why. It is the sort of thing I did as a young naturalist and what I now do again in my retirement. The observations and speculations I have recorded in previous LChB. entries, Th. would spin out in his friendly conversational style; often they would include remarks like "our younger [nature students] will find here much of interest that will enlarge our knowledge." These younger people were NJNers and occasionally he praises their journal, Amoeba, for serving well in spreading the gospel of nature's beauty. This beauty was both visual and intellectual.
There is an odd difference between the young Tinbergen as well as myself and Thijsse who was the most influential advocate for the Dutch conservation movement. As I recall the Holland of my childhood with all its open spaces, Thijsse appears to have been farsighted, for after WW II the country underwent a rapid expansion of even small towns and Amsterdam swallowed up entire villages. The meadows and bogs where I roamed have been reduced to 1/3 of their size. Yet, already in 1901 Thijsse warned of the loss of bird species as a result of new agrarian methods, the disturbing of nests, the destruction of habitats to create more agrarian land, the lowering of water tables and scientific forestry (i.e. the introduction of monoculture): "Birds are fellow creatures whose [evolutionary] development must fill us with amazement." NJNers were of course aware of the need for conservation and once in a while a NJN President (elected for one year) would make conservation the center of his program. But, as I remember the 1940s, most were rather willing to leave the actual work to our elders. There was a notable exception in the late Forties when unheard of protest by a NJN faction interrupted the annual meeting of Natuurmonumenten which in the end made even Thijsse despair of reconciling the then president with his friend and long term collaborator in Natuurmonumenten. Yet, those of us, whose parents were not members of Natuurmonumenten had no access to the important preserves and resented their closure to such serious nature students as we thought ourselves to be. Not that it kept some of us out and I too received my citations from the local constabulary. In an essay from 1938 (the pre-agro-chemical era), Thijsse pleads for the preservation of wilderness areas because agriculture, forestry, etc. have a continuous need of scientist trained in the study of the different phenomena of nature and he points specifically to scientists who as NJNers received their first scientific training in field studies. The "Letters" show that Thijsse actually agreed with most of the suggestions of the "rebel" NJNers.
There was one notable exception to the general acquiescence in the work of our elders and that actually involved a large slice of "my" bogs known as Twiske after the slow moving river that began at the locks near our house and flowed along our garden where I had my kayak. The region was to be made into a typical Dutch polder as part of the government's (much needed) policy of providing jobs. There was a widespread movement against this project and the NJN sprung into action. But it was all discouragingly in vain; dikes were thrown up, canals were dug and then, after WW II when there was work aplenty, the project was abandoned after all and now large areas are kept wild and lakes were created for water sport. But we learned that preserves of Natuurmonumenten were not save after all as the project gobbled up the few parcels it owned.
NJNers were divided on how preserves should be managed. Most favored leaving them alone so that, as Thijsse repeatedly argued, the environment of the pre-historic Netherlands might be restored in them, a process that would offer study opportunities to the younger nature students for generations. These NJNers were thus critical of the practice of exploiting preserves in the traditional manner by farmers in exchange for income with which to buy other preserves. Thijsse himself was more flexible and once he reluctantly favored the creation of a habitat in the oldest preserve for the introduction of an extremely rare West European butterfly that occurred in only one place elsewhere in the Netherlands. Other NJNers, no less critical, were in favor of the changes that now, after a generation, have been adopted with a vengeance by Natuurmonumenten, as a result of so many former NJNers having assumed leadership roles in the organization, for example it now has volunteers that interfere in its preserves to remove invasive species and to keep the preserve as much as possible in the state for which it was acquired. Today the primary objective is to maintain bio-diversity and to protect threatened species.
One of the results of experiences like Twiske, was that many of us became active in making inventories of an area that was threatened in order to have scientific evidence of its natural wealth. Luke Tinbergen's 1942 Birds In Their Domain, which I later received a a birthday present, described types of habitats and how certain birds preferred one over the other as well as how many birds a habitat could support. It became a sort of handbook for those of us who wanted to inventory an area, for example the fairly wild mixed woods near my high school that was created as a park (and where in its beginning my mother had pushed me in a perambulator). Because there was a German camp in part of it, it had not been cut down for fuel by the local people. In April and May I went there way before school, to map the singing perches of the different species. Luke's book is an example of Niko's major interest, i.e. "ethology" or the study of animal behavior in their natural setting. Luke concentrated most on what today is generally referred to as the carrying capacity of a habitat for a specific species, the type of study that became known as eco-ethology. I have always been more interested in a species breeding' territory that can be mapped by means of the male's singing perches for I have observed that such territories can be used for foraging by other species that may hunt for the same food, for example caterpillars. But my observations are only occasional and thus anecdotal.
Among the collection of Thijsse's essays there are several on the morphology of flowers and how bumblebees find the plants and the honey. Here also there is a link with Tinbergen who set a member of his workgroup in Oxford, Aubrey Manning, to pursue that subject as his doctoral work. Ethology ultimately sought to find out how an animal's behavior affected the survival of the species and was thus of a Darwinian inspiration. Thijsse, who was well read in English, German and French (he lent foreign language books to friends) may well have read Darwin's The Form of Flowers,, for in one of his essays he relates how he specifically went to observe bumblebees to show that a Belgian scientist was mistaken in his conclusions about what helps a bee find his flowers. Thus we can speak of a genealogy of biologists whose observations led them to ask questions and seek answers.
Many NJNers were botanists, Thijsse's first love. With Heimans he had authored a fat Flora, arranged on the Linnaean system. It was rather unwieldy even though I had learned the system in biology class. They had illustrated it with their own drawings, often in great detail. I was reminded of them as Tijsse's DLN essays are similarly illustrated. It's all rather amazing that they could do it, after all they were only trained as grade school teachers and while that training included drawing, they clearly had talent. The edition I got as another birthday present had become still fatter and very scholarly as professional botanists, complete with Ph.D.s were engaged for the many revisions. I soon gave up dragging it along in favor of an old gas mask container in which I collected the day's unknown plants. Botany had the advantage of being a cheap past time, for apart from the Flora, the container, notebook and pencil, no other equipment was required. An NJNer of Luke Tinbergen's generation, Victor Westhoff, wrote a the NJN manual on plant sociology for those who inventoried specific plots. They generally belonged to the Sjokgroup [sjokken=to trudge] and had their own (stencilled) journal called Kruipnieuws [Crawlnews] as much of their work was done on one's knees. Much fun was made of them and Victor, who wrote serious poetry, wrote a self mocking verse that's not easily translated:"Sjokking is a strange activity,/you mostly lie on your lazy bod;/you taste a bit of grass and chew some moss while phantasizing wildly. Rain splashes on your notebook, but never mind, you must write; mud penetrates your pants, but you keep going/ and will never forget that time full sjok and dampness." I did some inventories of sphagnum bogs near Twiske as one of the volunteers gathering material for an old NJNers doctoral research. Rather than counting the same plots for several years, we tried to find several plots in various stages of development. It was painstaking work to write down every plant, their number, their manner of growth in the community. Then you had to measure the thickness of the peat layer and its Ph as well as the depth of the groundwater (which by that time had seeped into your pants). My area was thought important as it was slowly recovering from the injection of salt during the Great Flood of 1916 (when the sea water covered the area to a height of 6 feet).
I was never a very participating NJNer, primarily because since the beginning, when Saturday was still a workday, the excursions were on Sunday and only after I had finished High School did I have the liberty of skipping Sunday duties, i.e. attending church. Most of the other activities of the Amsterdam district were held in the southern part of the city which was a bit of time consuming travel, but I did attend lectures by former NJNers who had become professional biologists, later I gave some informal talks myself, for example the one on the courtship flights of the Common Tern that I also wrote up for the Inktzwam [Inkcap], the organ of the Amsterdam district. Later I went to some of their weekend camps but by that time I had become a merchant mariner and was away most of the year.
One, to me, amusing aspect of the collected essays are the referenes to Th.'s walks, his sitting or even lying down in the dune grasses or on a pile of dried seaweed to watch whatever natural event had caught his attention. Thus he wrote: "What could give greater pleasure than lying in the dunes and observe all that goes on?" In another piece, already sixty, he addressed his readers: "You may think 'what does this man, lying in the dunes all day long?' But I intend to go on doing this and even more after I retire; I advice you to follow my example." And in Vogeljaar, observing some Wheatears on a barbed wire fence he remarks that the fence was one "he still had to get over" and that in a book for the then well-to-do burghers for whom climbing over barbed wire was a "Not-Done." His walks with his students, a practice he helped establish in the school program, became legendary. There are old photographs of him wearing a well made and not old three-piece suit that behoved a teacher, including his hall mark bow tie (that he apparently never took off in public). In one picture he walks up a dune followed by a line of students, the young ladies in dresses wearing summer hats. It's a sign of his times when there was not yet something like an L.L.Bean Outdoors catalogue. In his late seventies, alone and under the difficult circumstances of the War years, he was less well groomed. Two NJNers who came to report to him on the birds of his favorite preserve, found him, as they recorded, delightfully dressed in a rumpled shirt and his bow tie had slipped down a little, "just how you imagine an old nature lover." Other times, other mores, but I truly enjoyed reading these essays. They introduced my childhood hero in his own words and in the process I got to recall much of my own adventures, both aspects being almost equally enjoyable.
I have mentioned both Tinbergens in other entries ("On reading a National Geographic" and "On a biography of Niko Tinbergen" - Luke's older brother). Thijsse (1865-1945), in addition to his duties as a teacher, was a long time editor of the DLN, and a founder of the Association for the Preservation of Nature Monuments (Natuurmonumenten) of which he was the Secretary. He was, together with Eli Heimans, a fellow teacher, a prolific writer and popularizer and their enthusiasm was infectious. They also inspired the students that formed the Netherlands Youth Organization for Nature Study (NJN) in 1920 of which the Tinbergens as well as I (20+ years later) were members. My mother, who said she had gone to a school where Heimans had been headmaster, took me one day, I was 9 I think,, on a trip to a ruined medieval castle that was within walking distance of Thijsse's Hof, a five acre landscape garden that held all the plants growing wild in the Dutch dunes. So we stopped there also. He happened to be there on his daily walk and she nudged me to ask him the name of several plants that I saw there for the first time. He was then about 78, but still a statuesque gentleman, standing straight in his three-piece suit and bow tie. Not someone I then thought you could walk up to and ask for the name of plants. But I did and he was without pretensions even taking the trouble asking how I came to be interested in plants and pleased when I told him my mother had given me one of the books he and Heimans had written (see below). The he asked where I lived and encouraged me to take the little book along on the family's Sunday walks. I have been reminded several times of his appearance by an illustration in books about him where he stands amidst people on an excursion that he still led occasionally in those years.
As in the case of Niko T. there are some parallels between the activities of the young Thijsse and my own; they are the more remarkable as Thijsse was already 65 years old when I was born. It shows how little family life had changed in spite of the economic and social developments in the intervening years. During our grade school years both Thijsse and I were surrounded by the habitats (he much to the South of Amsterdam and I to the immediate North), that he and Heimans were to describe in In sloot en plas [In Ditches and Ponds] that my mother gave me when I got my first aquarium at the age of 8 or 9. That little book was part of a series introduced by Van vlinders, vogels en bloemen [Of Butterflies, Birds and Flowers]; each described the different Dutch levensgemeenschappen [lit: communities of life] or habitats announced in the title of the series. In the first book this then fairly new concept was slipped in by way of Greek mythology to introduce the Atalanta butterfly (Vanessa atalanta; Red Amiral in the US), a beautiful as well as common butterfly. Its eggs are laid on the stinging nettle and the writers "guided me" from a neglected dirty corner of a nearby house where nettles were abundant, to a rural road, armed with a piece of paper and a pencil to write down the "signalement" (of which they gave several samples) where the Atalanta and its relatives might be sunning themselves. Another unattractive habitat was the home of thistles; these were introduced by an anecdote explaining why the thistle was Scotland's national symbol. They are the host plant of the Painted Lady and the flowers attract not only butterflies but birds too, among which the Thistle Finch (Carduelis carduelis) is the most colorful. Thus I learned that much beauty can be found amidst the "ugly" plants we warned away from. One of my teachers was fond of encouraging us by citing the motto of Prince Federick Henry, the Queen-consort, Per aspera ad adstra [through the rough to the stars] which admirably fits the approach of that introductory little book.
There was, of course, a very practical reason for treating each habitat separately, namely the distances between them. In the 1890s only the upper and well to do middle classes had the time and money to travel and even in as small a country as ours, getting from the wet meadows environments to the dunes or the beach, only between 25 to 35 kilometers from my home took 2 hours in 1938 and a walk there would thus involve an entire day. The heath and forests were still father away and even in the 1950s you might have to walk an hour from the nearest railroad station and thus the focus on each habitat per book was convenient as well as affordable. Het Wandelboekje(1900) [The Walker's Booklet] was more general with suggestions of what to look for during short strolls not far from home. It also focuses on plants and insects so that one did not need costly equipment. After all, both authors were then working as teachers in the poorer sections of Amsterdam and were themselves not all that well paid. That little book incidentally also tells us that most people didn't think of taking walks during the inclement weather months when most people already had to walk several kilometers from and to their work: the excursions are arranged in a "yearly" cycle that only covers the months of March through September. It was not until 1944 that Thijsse prepared a new edition that was to include every month, because by then NJNers and others were in the field at any time even if, during WWII and the late 1940s, it meant surviving the cold by means of layering old newspapers next to our underwear.
A much larger "coffee table" book was Het Vogeljaar [the bird year], first published in l904, of which I got the 1946 reprint, beautifully illustrated with (black and white) photographs, as a birthday present. I have it still and read it when nostalgia for the landscapes of my youth needs remedy. When I first read it I came to admire the Starling for which Thijsse had a soft spot (which was shared by Rachel Carson who, in 1939, published an article called "How About Citizen Papers for the Starling?" [which was imported from Europe]. It was one bird that was always with us, in the city as well as on the meadows where it rambled in the grass between the legs of the cows. But I have since developed a great dislike for that a greedy and aggressive dominator at my feeders where they are even avoided by the larger Blue Jay; only once or twice did I see a Redbellied Woodpecker succeed in forcing a Starling off the suet. But its rambunctious behavior and softly murmured song with its humorous variations that caused Thijsse to select the Starling for his bookplate which showed a drawing of several Starlings clinging to some phragmitis stems that were bent by a typical Dutch wind above the motto Onbekommerd [without worry]. Starlings now put me on alert to prevent it from nesting in my covered rain gutters and clogging up the works.
Thijsse's motto may be a reflection of his religious childhood and inspired by the gospel of Matthew when Christ consoles his disciples to consider the lilies and birds that are alive and beautiful without worrying and admonishes them not to worry about the day of tomorrow because each day had enough of its own cares. Recently a selection of his letters has been published in the Netherlands with the title "Wanhoop nooit aan de vooruitgang" [Never Despair of Progress]. It's more specific than his motto and occurs in a letter of encouragement towards the end of his life (de died in 1945, during the German occupation of WW II and after the years of the Great Depression). But both his motto and that encouragement typify his personality. It is a sentiment that comes out very strongly in his letters to teenagers whose interest in nature caused them to write the Great Man. These letters reminded me of my brief encounter with him in "Thijsse's Hof."
Like Thijsse I often played hooky to watch the bees and the birds or rather the salamanders and fishes. It seems however that I got punished less than Thijsse, probably because my father came home after my wet clothes had been changed and also because my mother was the contact with my teachers so that my father may not have known about my truancy (I have a vague memory of my teachers thinking that I was sickly). Yet I was disciplined from time to time for a variety of reasons and once in while I was set to write 50x or 100x the same line as Th.: "Lord, set a watch before my mouth" (which after the exercise was no longer a prayer and thus not heeded). Having realized that Thijsse, Niko T. and I all played hooky as part of developing our knowledge of nature, I wonder whether such truancy was a precondition for greatness; in that respect I missed the boat.
As a teenager I too spent the summer vacations roaming around in reed fields, though mostly I paddled through our watery environment in a kayak I had found in the attic of the local yacht harbor and that my eldest brother had fixed up. As I talked about my adventures with some of my teachers I was asked to give talks in the (Headmaster's) biology class, for example on the courtship flights of Common Terns and Snipes or the floating nests of Grebes and Black Terns. Thus I was doing the same, at about the same age as Thijsse when he was a an apprentice teacher. In my final year I contracted a serious pleurisy and could not go to school for six months. Again like Th., who suffered from the same illness (but in his early 30s) I sought the allegedly healing effect of fresh and clean air and I could be found on every nice day (there were enough rainy days to study for my final comprehensives) somewhere in the fields.
During one of those vacations I took the same long walk Th. described in 1896 in the first of his collected essays (but mine was on a sunny day). The landscapes had not yet changed much and I remember most of the flowers, probably because they were new to me. Even 6 years ago, when I was last there, whole stretches looked the same and several of the regions we traversed some 50 years apart, are now declared cultural heritage sites and managed in a traditional, pre-WW II manner. When I took that walk, I had not read any issue of the DLN; it must have been an instance of what one of Th.'s close collaborators called the "Thijsse effect" (thijsseficatie). As a recent member of the NJN, I then was eager to learn about where "specialists" went and that walk had become an excursion tradition.
As I am reading these DLN essays I become aware how much I was influenced by Thijsse. My connection to him is a good example of the idea in Six Degrees of Separation, though in my case it was only two or three degrees, for example by way of the Tinbergen brothers and other NJNers. Niko's work, culminating in his Ph.D thesis on digger wasps etc. as well as in the essays in Curious Naturalists (1958, 1974) are extensions of observations Thijsse described in his DLN articles and the title of NT's autobiographical essay "Watching and Wondering" (which I already mentioned in Lazy Ch. B. #10) is a precise summing up of the "Thijsse method," namely the observing of what happens and asking questions about the how and why. It is the sort of thing I did as a young naturalist and what I now do again in my retirement. The observations and speculations I have recorded in previous LChB. entries, Th. would spin out in his friendly conversational style; often they would include remarks like "our younger [nature students] will find here much of interest that will enlarge our knowledge." These younger people were NJNers and occasionally he praises their journal, Amoeba, for serving well in spreading the gospel of nature's beauty. This beauty was both visual and intellectual.
There is an odd difference between the young Tinbergen as well as myself and Thijsse who was the most influential advocate for the Dutch conservation movement. As I recall the Holland of my childhood with all its open spaces, Thijsse appears to have been farsighted, for after WW II the country underwent a rapid expansion of even small towns and Amsterdam swallowed up entire villages. The meadows and bogs where I roamed have been reduced to 1/3 of their size. Yet, already in 1901 Thijsse warned of the loss of bird species as a result of new agrarian methods, the disturbing of nests, the destruction of habitats to create more agrarian land, the lowering of water tables and scientific forestry (i.e. the introduction of monoculture): "Birds are fellow creatures whose [evolutionary] development must fill us with amazement." NJNers were of course aware of the need for conservation and once in a while a NJN President (elected for one year) would make conservation the center of his program. But, as I remember the 1940s, most were rather willing to leave the actual work to our elders. There was a notable exception in the late Forties when unheard of protest by a NJN faction interrupted the annual meeting of Natuurmonumenten which in the end made even Thijsse despair of reconciling the then president with his friend and long term collaborator in Natuurmonumenten. Yet, those of us, whose parents were not members of Natuurmonumenten had no access to the important preserves and resented their closure to such serious nature students as we thought ourselves to be. Not that it kept some of us out and I too received my citations from the local constabulary. In an essay from 1938 (the pre-agro-chemical era), Thijsse pleads for the preservation of wilderness areas because agriculture, forestry, etc. have a continuous need of scientist trained in the study of the different phenomena of nature and he points specifically to scientists who as NJNers received their first scientific training in field studies. The "Letters" show that Thijsse actually agreed with most of the suggestions of the "rebel" NJNers.
There was one notable exception to the general acquiescence in the work of our elders and that actually involved a large slice of "my" bogs known as Twiske after the slow moving river that began at the locks near our house and flowed along our garden where I had my kayak. The region was to be made into a typical Dutch polder as part of the government's (much needed) policy of providing jobs. There was a widespread movement against this project and the NJN sprung into action. But it was all discouragingly in vain; dikes were thrown up, canals were dug and then, after WW II when there was work aplenty, the project was abandoned after all and now large areas are kept wild and lakes were created for water sport. But we learned that preserves of Natuurmonumenten were not save after all as the project gobbled up the few parcels it owned.
NJNers were divided on how preserves should be managed. Most favored leaving them alone so that, as Thijsse repeatedly argued, the environment of the pre-historic Netherlands might be restored in them, a process that would offer study opportunities to the younger nature students for generations. These NJNers were thus critical of the practice of exploiting preserves in the traditional manner by farmers in exchange for income with which to buy other preserves. Thijsse himself was more flexible and once he reluctantly favored the creation of a habitat in the oldest preserve for the introduction of an extremely rare West European butterfly that occurred in only one place elsewhere in the Netherlands. Other NJNers, no less critical, were in favor of the changes that now, after a generation, have been adopted with a vengeance by Natuurmonumenten, as a result of so many former NJNers having assumed leadership roles in the organization, for example it now has volunteers that interfere in its preserves to remove invasive species and to keep the preserve as much as possible in the state for which it was acquired. Today the primary objective is to maintain bio-diversity and to protect threatened species.
One of the results of experiences like Twiske, was that many of us became active in making inventories of an area that was threatened in order to have scientific evidence of its natural wealth. Luke Tinbergen's 1942 Birds In Their Domain, which I later received a a birthday present, described types of habitats and how certain birds preferred one over the other as well as how many birds a habitat could support. It became a sort of handbook for those of us who wanted to inventory an area, for example the fairly wild mixed woods near my high school that was created as a park (and where in its beginning my mother had pushed me in a perambulator). Because there was a German camp in part of it, it had not been cut down for fuel by the local people. In April and May I went there way before school, to map the singing perches of the different species. Luke's book is an example of Niko's major interest, i.e. "ethology" or the study of animal behavior in their natural setting. Luke concentrated most on what today is generally referred to as the carrying capacity of a habitat for a specific species, the type of study that became known as eco-ethology. I have always been more interested in a species breeding' territory that can be mapped by means of the male's singing perches for I have observed that such territories can be used for foraging by other species that may hunt for the same food, for example caterpillars. But my observations are only occasional and thus anecdotal.
Among the collection of Thijsse's essays there are several on the morphology of flowers and how bumblebees find the plants and the honey. Here also there is a link with Tinbergen who set a member of his workgroup in Oxford, Aubrey Manning, to pursue that subject as his doctoral work. Ethology ultimately sought to find out how an animal's behavior affected the survival of the species and was thus of a Darwinian inspiration. Thijsse, who was well read in English, German and French (he lent foreign language books to friends) may well have read Darwin's The Form of Flowers,, for in one of his essays he relates how he specifically went to observe bumblebees to show that a Belgian scientist was mistaken in his conclusions about what helps a bee find his flowers. Thus we can speak of a genealogy of biologists whose observations led them to ask questions and seek answers.
Many NJNers were botanists, Thijsse's first love. With Heimans he had authored a fat Flora, arranged on the Linnaean system. It was rather unwieldy even though I had learned the system in biology class. They had illustrated it with their own drawings, often in great detail. I was reminded of them as Tijsse's DLN essays are similarly illustrated. It's all rather amazing that they could do it, after all they were only trained as grade school teachers and while that training included drawing, they clearly had talent. The edition I got as another birthday present had become still fatter and very scholarly as professional botanists, complete with Ph.D.s were engaged for the many revisions. I soon gave up dragging it along in favor of an old gas mask container in which I collected the day's unknown plants. Botany had the advantage of being a cheap past time, for apart from the Flora, the container, notebook and pencil, no other equipment was required. An NJNer of Luke Tinbergen's generation, Victor Westhoff, wrote a the NJN manual on plant sociology for those who inventoried specific plots. They generally belonged to the Sjokgroup [sjokken=to trudge] and had their own (stencilled) journal called Kruipnieuws [Crawlnews] as much of their work was done on one's knees. Much fun was made of them and Victor, who wrote serious poetry, wrote a self mocking verse that's not easily translated:"Sjokking is a strange activity,/you mostly lie on your lazy bod;/you taste a bit of grass and chew some moss while phantasizing wildly. Rain splashes on your notebook, but never mind, you must write; mud penetrates your pants, but you keep going/ and will never forget that time full sjok and dampness." I did some inventories of sphagnum bogs near Twiske as one of the volunteers gathering material for an old NJNers doctoral research. Rather than counting the same plots for several years, we tried to find several plots in various stages of development. It was painstaking work to write down every plant, their number, their manner of growth in the community. Then you had to measure the thickness of the peat layer and its Ph as well as the depth of the groundwater (which by that time had seeped into your pants). My area was thought important as it was slowly recovering from the injection of salt during the Great Flood of 1916 (when the sea water covered the area to a height of 6 feet).
I was never a very participating NJNer, primarily because since the beginning, when Saturday was still a workday, the excursions were on Sunday and only after I had finished High School did I have the liberty of skipping Sunday duties, i.e. attending church. Most of the other activities of the Amsterdam district were held in the southern part of the city which was a bit of time consuming travel, but I did attend lectures by former NJNers who had become professional biologists, later I gave some informal talks myself, for example the one on the courtship flights of the Common Tern that I also wrote up for the Inktzwam [Inkcap], the organ of the Amsterdam district. Later I went to some of their weekend camps but by that time I had become a merchant mariner and was away most of the year.
One, to me, amusing aspect of the collected essays are the referenes to Th.'s walks, his sitting or even lying down in the dune grasses or on a pile of dried seaweed to watch whatever natural event had caught his attention. Thus he wrote: "What could give greater pleasure than lying in the dunes and observe all that goes on?" In another piece, already sixty, he addressed his readers: "You may think 'what does this man, lying in the dunes all day long?' But I intend to go on doing this and even more after I retire; I advice you to follow my example." And in Vogeljaar, observing some Wheatears on a barbed wire fence he remarks that the fence was one "he still had to get over" and that in a book for the then well-to-do burghers for whom climbing over barbed wire was a "Not-Done." His walks with his students, a practice he helped establish in the school program, became legendary. There are old photographs of him wearing a well made and not old three-piece suit that behoved a teacher, including his hall mark bow tie (that he apparently never took off in public). In one picture he walks up a dune followed by a line of students, the young ladies in dresses wearing summer hats. It's a sign of his times when there was not yet something like an L.L.Bean Outdoors catalogue. In his late seventies, alone and under the difficult circumstances of the War years, he was less well groomed. Two NJNers who came to report to him on the birds of his favorite preserve, found him, as they recorded, delightfully dressed in a rumpled shirt and his bow tie had slipped down a little, "just how you imagine an old nature lover." Other times, other mores, but I truly enjoyed reading these essays. They introduced my childhood hero in his own words and in the process I got to recall much of my own adventures, both aspects being almost equally enjoyable.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
on wine (3)
As the result of another NYT book review by a careless reader, I received Jonathan Nossiter's Liquid Memory (2009) as a birthday present. In a pre-Christmas issue of NYT "Book Review" there was a little add calling it "the best wine book I've read," which was taken from a back cover endorsement by Bill Buford, the writer of Heat (and a new Anthony Burdain); it must have been Nossiter's muckracking approach to the wine industry that made Buford so gushy. As I was reading the book (ending up with 27 postums for problematic passages, I was reminded of Nero Wolf, the fictional detective, who is not infrequently described as tearing up a book, page by page, as he refuses "to be gulled" by its author. I merely depose disappointing books in the recyclables.
Nossiter earlier claimed the attention of the wine world with his film Mondovino (1904) and his Introduction to this book he asks the reader to note that it is not a continuation of the film, which is disingenuous, for he is mostly revisiting the topics and, in particular, the people of the film. There's much less that's new about wine or terroir - the alleged topics of the book - than it is a somewhat jumbled essay in self-justification. We are told why the people whose wines he praised deserved that praise and why the people he interviewed but did not praise but criticised and/or did not include in the film merited their treatment. For example. he had several encounters with Jancis Robinson, the British wine expert that went from "bad to silly." She wrote numerous sympathetic e-mails but "once she found out she wasn't in the film she didn't disguise her anger." She wrote a "bit sour and petty" review at first but when the "wine world potentates" perceived the film as threatening, she attacked the film as "manipulative and false" in defense of Michel Rolland, an oenologist and one of Mondovino's betes noires (188-190).
Another instance is his chapter on a visit to Alain Senderens (111-119) who is clearly showing Nossiter that he's not worth th time set aside (he arrives late and leaves early and while discussing what great wines to serve during the interview, ends up leaving Nossiter with the sommelier and a lesser wine. He too remarks that Rolland is a friend of his. Nossiter's reaction: "What just happened? What is he so afraid of? [...] did his pal Rolland warn him of the interloper with his nefarious ways? Certainly a man of taste [but] he behaved in front of me, alas, strictly as a man of power (fear being the principal agent of power)." In this interview Nossiter inadvertently uses what French teachers call a faux ami by translating climat, in Burgundy a synonym for cru (as in Les Saint Georges, the classified growth in the territory of Nuits St. Georges) as climate.
Nossiter's pre-occupation with himself leads to anther odd statement when he discusses Victor de la Serna, a Spanish grower who is guilty of establishing a "brand" (a sin he also sttributes to Ms Robinson (and of course to Robert Parker).
"Not only is Serna one of Spain's most influential wine journalists, but since 1998 he has also been the owner of a winery [...] Indeed, two years after starting his 'artisanal' winery,he co-founded elmundovino (no relation to my film but yet another uncanny doubling)." Of course two years after 1998 is several years before the release of his film and one might wonder who did the cunning doubling.
I couldn't have any quarrel with him about his criticism of Robert Parker, for I don't believe anyone can taste as many wines, even with spitting and a plain cracker and come up with an objective evaluation of a specific wine; at most it's a comparative: this one isn't like the previous one(s). Yet I wouldn't blame Parker for the decision of winemakers to heed his tasting notes, for that's their decision and they have adjusted their wines for different markets not as influenced by Parker as the US one. And what about the growers who sicked their dog on P. and declared him persona non grata? After all, he had to employ Pierre Rovani for Burgundy. In the 50s, before Parker, I met Burgundy wine people who had been to the States and said "they like their wines sweet." But some were equally down on Belgian drinkers (and too polite to talk about my own countrymen).
Nossiter,like me, is also down on "winespeak" and gives several amusing examples from Parker and others (he lumps them together as "the masonic mafioso") among which: " a big, sweet, peppery, earthy, creosote ..." (not a wine for me) or "explosive, hedonistic, seductive, sexy fruit bomb ..." (not appealing to one of my age) or "a nose of smoked meats, various fruits and black tea. A puckery mouth, inflamed with spices ... In the mouth it leaves persistent notes of bacon strips" (really?) (146-7). And there are wine lists and wine lists: on p. 123 he praises a simple 2 page list as opposed to "heavy books, turning pages of complicated texts; while on p. 183 he lauds a "the most amazing thick black books on the wine planet:" perhaps because it has wines he likes at "risible [low] prices."
ENOUGH SAID.
Our own drinking, aside from the 1st growth burgundies and the like for the Nov. and Dec. holidays has been interesting. We had none of the great Italian wines and only Rosso de Montalcino from other than the suspect 2003 harvest, which I had avoided because of early reports about the quality of the grapes, so that I lucked out. (The growers apparently agreed not to combine their grapes with such others as Cabernet, or the cheaper montepulciana to improve -stretch- their production.)
Because of numerous visitors over the Thanksgiving weekend and the 10 day around Christmas and New Year, we bought a good deal of "everyday" wines, of around $10 per bottle (Spanish of less and French mostly a little more, though there was a sale on Jadot Beaujolas Villages and Vieille Ferme. Among these, apparently only of the "once time" acquisitions of the State Store system, were a Costieres de Nimes, a relatively new appelation, called Les Enfants Terribles, which came in handy and was amusing. It also was a most palatable wine, reminding us of lunches during our visits to Nimes and the Camargue; nice color, a solid robe and no tar. Another, a Premieres Cotes de Blaye was a 2005 Chateau Maison Neuve from Alexia Eymas. Only 2 bottles were left on the shelves, which was "too bad," for while we rarely drink Bordeaux and then only a classified growth, this was a very good buy, mostly because the 2005 was a great year, but also the producer had kept the wine relative light, diminishing the effect of the merlot that has come to dominate the wines from the lesser appelation. (Nossiter would have liked it as it was "simple" and not "Parkerized." We also found a few bottles of 2005 Chinon, one of our favorite Loire reds, at a price below its New York average. But here too, only 2 bottles were left. The same was the case with a simple white Bourgogne 2006 "vieilles vignes" from Albert Bichot, a reputable grower, that could easily have been a Cote de Beaune Villages. A joy to drink. Among the cheaper Spanish wine, was a Hoya de Cadenas, reserva Tempranillo 2004 from Vincente Gandia, that the State Store should carry regularly, but unfortunately does not. These bottles gave us great hope for the future, even if we may have to wait for another festival season when the State Store apparently has the scour the importers to meet the greater demand.
As someimes happens, but rarely with a Duboeuf wine (there's something to be said for a brand that, if not bringing the real stuff, makes certain that its close approximation can always be relied on), one of the last of a case of 2006 St. Amour - a small, but excellent separate beaujolais appelation - was more liquorice and tar than the light and fruity gamay it is supposed to be. I brought it up too late and it was too cold so that the tar (chaudron) absolutely dominated, but even after one hour+ in the glass the gamay was a pale reminder of our walks in its vineyards (or of the previous 10 bottles in that case).
To close this blog on a happier, even amusing note, we were at Wegmans and decided to have lunch at the Pub's bar. We ordered a Pinot Grigio and the one they had was called "Smoking Loon," so named because someone at the Napa winery was always running around fast. The wine is produced by "Three Loose Screws", founded in 2004 by three Sebastianis (of the Sonoma family), who all appear to have their head solidly attached. We decided that this was the best of the few American Grigios we have had, light and dry, it was refreshing and asking for more. Normally we drink Alto Adige Grigios and they are a bit more complex than this one, yet it was an unexpected and happy find.
Nossiter earlier claimed the attention of the wine world with his film Mondovino (1904) and his Introduction to this book he asks the reader to note that it is not a continuation of the film, which is disingenuous, for he is mostly revisiting the topics and, in particular, the people of the film. There's much less that's new about wine or terroir - the alleged topics of the book - than it is a somewhat jumbled essay in self-justification. We are told why the people whose wines he praised deserved that praise and why the people he interviewed but did not praise but criticised and/or did not include in the film merited their treatment. For example. he had several encounters with Jancis Robinson, the British wine expert that went from "bad to silly." She wrote numerous sympathetic e-mails but "once she found out she wasn't in the film she didn't disguise her anger." She wrote a "bit sour and petty" review at first but when the "wine world potentates" perceived the film as threatening, she attacked the film as "manipulative and false" in defense of Michel Rolland, an oenologist and one of Mondovino's betes noires (188-190).
Another instance is his chapter on a visit to Alain Senderens (111-119) who is clearly showing Nossiter that he's not worth th time set aside (he arrives late and leaves early and while discussing what great wines to serve during the interview, ends up leaving Nossiter with the sommelier and a lesser wine. He too remarks that Rolland is a friend of his. Nossiter's reaction: "What just happened? What is he so afraid of? [...] did his pal Rolland warn him of the interloper with his nefarious ways? Certainly a man of taste [but] he behaved in front of me, alas, strictly as a man of power (fear being the principal agent of power)." In this interview Nossiter inadvertently uses what French teachers call a faux ami by translating climat, in Burgundy a synonym for cru (as in Les Saint Georges, the classified growth in the territory of Nuits St. Georges) as climate.
Nossiter's pre-occupation with himself leads to anther odd statement when he discusses Victor de la Serna, a Spanish grower who is guilty of establishing a "brand" (a sin he also sttributes to Ms Robinson (and of course to Robert Parker).
"Not only is Serna one of Spain's most influential wine journalists, but since 1998 he has also been the owner of a winery [...] Indeed, two years after starting his 'artisanal' winery,he co-founded elmundovino (no relation to my film but yet another uncanny doubling)." Of course two years after 1998 is several years before the release of his film and one might wonder who did the cunning doubling.
I couldn't have any quarrel with him about his criticism of Robert Parker, for I don't believe anyone can taste as many wines, even with spitting and a plain cracker and come up with an objective evaluation of a specific wine; at most it's a comparative: this one isn't like the previous one(s). Yet I wouldn't blame Parker for the decision of winemakers to heed his tasting notes, for that's their decision and they have adjusted their wines for different markets not as influenced by Parker as the US one. And what about the growers who sicked their dog on P. and declared him persona non grata? After all, he had to employ Pierre Rovani for Burgundy. In the 50s, before Parker, I met Burgundy wine people who had been to the States and said "they like their wines sweet." But some were equally down on Belgian drinkers (and too polite to talk about my own countrymen).
Nossiter,like me, is also down on "winespeak" and gives several amusing examples from Parker and others (he lumps them together as "the masonic mafioso") among which: " a big, sweet, peppery, earthy, creosote ..." (not a wine for me) or "explosive, hedonistic, seductive, sexy fruit bomb ..." (not appealing to one of my age) or "a nose of smoked meats, various fruits and black tea. A puckery mouth, inflamed with spices ... In the mouth it leaves persistent notes of bacon strips" (really?) (146-7). And there are wine lists and wine lists: on p. 123 he praises a simple 2 page list as opposed to "heavy books, turning pages of complicated texts; while on p. 183 he lauds a "the most amazing thick black books on the wine planet:" perhaps because it has wines he likes at "risible [low] prices."
ENOUGH SAID.
Our own drinking, aside from the 1st growth burgundies and the like for the Nov. and Dec. holidays has been interesting. We had none of the great Italian wines and only Rosso de Montalcino from other than the suspect 2003 harvest, which I had avoided because of early reports about the quality of the grapes, so that I lucked out. (The growers apparently agreed not to combine their grapes with such others as Cabernet, or the cheaper montepulciana to improve -stretch- their production.)
Because of numerous visitors over the Thanksgiving weekend and the 10 day around Christmas and New Year, we bought a good deal of "everyday" wines, of around $10 per bottle (Spanish of less and French mostly a little more, though there was a sale on Jadot Beaujolas Villages and Vieille Ferme. Among these, apparently only of the "once time" acquisitions of the State Store system, were a Costieres de Nimes, a relatively new appelation, called Les Enfants Terribles, which came in handy and was amusing. It also was a most palatable wine, reminding us of lunches during our visits to Nimes and the Camargue; nice color, a solid robe and no tar. Another, a Premieres Cotes de Blaye was a 2005 Chateau Maison Neuve from Alexia Eymas. Only 2 bottles were left on the shelves, which was "too bad," for while we rarely drink Bordeaux and then only a classified growth, this was a very good buy, mostly because the 2005 was a great year, but also the producer had kept the wine relative light, diminishing the effect of the merlot that has come to dominate the wines from the lesser appelation. (Nossiter would have liked it as it was "simple" and not "Parkerized." We also found a few bottles of 2005 Chinon, one of our favorite Loire reds, at a price below its New York average. But here too, only 2 bottles were left. The same was the case with a simple white Bourgogne 2006 "vieilles vignes" from Albert Bichot, a reputable grower, that could easily have been a Cote de Beaune Villages. A joy to drink. Among the cheaper Spanish wine, was a Hoya de Cadenas, reserva Tempranillo 2004 from Vincente Gandia, that the State Store should carry regularly, but unfortunately does not. These bottles gave us great hope for the future, even if we may have to wait for another festival season when the State Store apparently has the scour the importers to meet the greater demand.
As someimes happens, but rarely with a Duboeuf wine (there's something to be said for a brand that, if not bringing the real stuff, makes certain that its close approximation can always be relied on), one of the last of a case of 2006 St. Amour - a small, but excellent separate beaujolais appelation - was more liquorice and tar than the light and fruity gamay it is supposed to be. I brought it up too late and it was too cold so that the tar (chaudron) absolutely dominated, but even after one hour+ in the glass the gamay was a pale reminder of our walks in its vineyards (or of the previous 10 bottles in that case).
To close this blog on a happier, even amusing note, we were at Wegmans and decided to have lunch at the Pub's bar. We ordered a Pinot Grigio and the one they had was called "Smoking Loon," so named because someone at the Napa winery was always running around fast. The wine is produced by "Three Loose Screws", founded in 2004 by three Sebastianis (of the Sonoma family), who all appear to have their head solidly attached. We decided that this was the best of the few American Grigios we have had, light and dry, it was refreshing and asking for more. Normally we drink Alto Adige Grigios and they are a bit more complex than this one, yet it was an unexpected and happy find.
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