forever wild?

          On Sunday, July 6, 2012 the frontpage of the NYT's SundayReview featured an article on "Rethinking the Wild." In general it is a thoughtful article and the changes discussed in the management of the Wilderness Act 1974 are actually minor and commonsensical. Most are concerned with remedying and forestalling the effects of the northward movement of warmer temperatures. The central question is raised by one of the Act's promoters, viz. that "we should be guardians, not gardeners." The article's recommendations are summed up as "We need to be more nuanced in our hands-off approach."
          The danger lies that once the hands-off approached is open to modification the politicians will gradually introduce ecologically harmful "nuances" on the advice of graduates from forestry etc. departments of State Universities that are primarily funded by commercial corporations hungry for more resources. On the premise that one should not bite the hand that feeds these Departments they are not conducive to promote free thought. Some pretty disastrous remedies emerging from the Department of Agriculture include the recommendation of creating windbreaks and hedgerows of multiflora roses the hips of which provide food for many songbirds who caused the roses to become pests invading every untended plot including the "forever wild" ones. An other such invasive remedy was the use of the Japanese honeysuckle used to stabilize railroad banks against erosion. That too gets spread by birds and in my untended woods the multifloras provide support for the honeysuckle creating an area much loved by breeding songbirds and migrating or wintering guests.
           The problem of the Act lies in the fact that its aim to protect wilderness areas from destructive human exploitation was based on a pre-1970's concept of "hands-off" as direct physical action. Virtually all ecologist then were not fully - or at all - aware of the long term and distant - as well as cumulative - effect of human action that creates climate change as well as the acidification of the earth's surface. There were instances of man-made natural disasters in the past such as the dustbowl of the 1930s, which in the memory of most became a draught caused by capricious nature because the Plains became fertile and populated again and thus providing arguments for the eco-sceptics of today, arguments that are still more salient than the disappearance of the Ice Age when the Sahara had the climate of Europe and Canada an new England uninhabitable. Draughts are seen as tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes and floods which have been around ever since records were kept. And people continue to build homes in fragile coastal areas or in forests prone to wildfires, for most people remain unaware or disregard the warnings of the steady increase in such disasters and their violence. Our culture allows us to satisfy our desires and provides the  justification for it by providing a moral, political and economic system of protection one socially costly aspect of which are the insurance companies. I am reminded of the devastating hurricane of the early sixties when the then Secretary of the Interior suggested that the destroyed areas on New Jersey barrier islands be turned into a national park. Today these areas are more built up than before.
          Of course, the article's nuanced approach can not be a one time remedy for of climate change will be with us forever as the world population continues to increase and modernization of the poorer nations accelerates. Thus we see the 1950s smog of London replicated in today's Peking. A telling instance was described in a long article in the NYT of 7/27 concerning the adoption of frozen food as a staple in Chinese households and the deleterious consequences on the environment of the increased demand for refrigeration.
           But even if there was no man-made climate change, the wilderness areas that were created under the Act would inevitably change as suggested by the maxim that all wild areas revert to forest, a maxim well illustrated by the forests of New England in many of which one comes across the old stone walls of farms that were abandoned since the late 19th century. This is in a climate suitable for forests; in other places it may be deserts, a place where gardening is a challenge.
          Usually when we are in Maine in August we visit the Singing Meadow Preserve in Edgecomb, a truly favored spot. Although it is mowed once a year to keep the brush down and paths are mowed more than once, the landscape has been changing, subtly, but changing nevertheless. Alders are particularly resistant to the yearly mowing and I suspect that it's done by a landscaper "who has adopted" the Meadows that it is not done very well. And there certainly is no resemblance to the original working farm. But as an "abandoned meadows" preserve the "forever wild" doesn't apply as the meadows would no longer have the same singing birds and insects. And I wonder whether the "forever wild" concept didn't mean wild as it appeared when designated. If that includes saving the species that were there then at the time, the preservation becomes more like curating a museum.
          

         

the modest birder (18): environmentalist integrity

            Note: This post began as a plea for integrity on the part of environmental advocates but ended up as a fairly long summary of available information on the status of the N. American population of the Red Knot, a summary that suggests scientists need to be more careful  with their data. (10-11-12)

When I taught "Historical Methods" I emphasized that when one does research for an honors thesis, etc. or to make a convincing argument in an exam essay or term paper, one must be aware of and examine all facts,  including those that may run counter to one's thesis. Rather than an "on the one hand or the other hand" mind set, the students should consider that each hand has 5 fingers, etc. As I was not very successful, I started to use the example of a trial lawyer who is confronted with an opponent who presents a petition to a judge. The petition is based on precedent, e.g X vs. Y. The trial lawyer has to know this precedent and its context in order to present cases that reject X vs.Y as valid ground for the granting of the petition.  In academic research, of course, the idea is not to win (which in courtroom cases may lead to innocents being put in jail, for ex. the recent cases in Illinois). The one-sided "lawyerly" approach is well illustrated by the 2008 biography of Roger Tory Peterson, Birdwatcher, written by a lawyer. She produced a hagiography, glossing over important negative aspects of P's personal relationships etc. that belong in a biography. Then there's the recent biography of Rosalie Edge, the sometime suffragette who later founded Hawk Mountain Sanctuary where I spent countless happy hours. At a conference in Tucson, Ariz., the author called Ms. Edge "the Godmother of the environmental movement" which might be overlooked as hyperbole but for the fact that it alters the history of that movement, of which, for ex. the 19th century George Bird Grinnell was a pioneer. In both cases, I think, we meet an author engaged in sales promotion. A good historian presents, where necessary, the most plausible alternative to a received interpretation to help establish a more accurate picture of the past. On the whole, Historians are less subject to financial and other pressures than scientists some of whose sloppy and even fraudulent research was highlighted by a front page article in the NYT Science Section of April 17, 2012.  And Th. Piersma et. al., in The Ecologische atlas van Nederlandse wadvogels (1999),[Ec.atlas] also discuss the problems associated with the  "privatization" of research funding (pp. 343-4). Other examples of scientific misconduct are given in an article in the NYT of 10-2-12, p.D3.

           I got to thinking about this as I was reading one of my magazines about my favorite subjects, namely birds, nature and their conservation. One topic concerned global warming and in letters to the editor, 2 rejected the idea that there was a crisis and/or that it was man-made. The foundation for this was one-sided, viz. the US Senate Environment and Public Works Comm., which is the domain of the  ecologically skeptic Senator Inhofe, as well as data from Native Energy (which promotes clean coal etc.) An example cited was the natural cycle of warming and cooling in the past, which is  common place in the debate. One writer said not to worry about the polar bear as they had survived the warm period "when the Norse [the Danes?] were farming Greenland [only a small coastal strip then that is now becoming larger but covered with rising sea water] and the Northwest passage was open?" I wonder which Northwest Passage? The reader might think about the Bering Strait named after a Dane. But when was that open? Not when Bering was looking for it nor in the late 16th century when the Dutch under Barents (there is a Barents Sea north of Siberia) tried to get to the fabled East. Was it when the Indians came out of Siberia to settle in the Americas? Would any one think that it was a break in the ice approximately where the Mississippi Valley is now? Millennia ago! Not, of course, when the reference is to Norse agriculture on Greenland. Though the question about the polar bear during an earlier arctic melt down could be important if we find evidence of such a meltdown before or after the polar bear had evolved from the grizzly.

            As to whether modern humans cause global warming I go along with scientists who argue that we are. Previous natural cycles could last as many as 15 centuries and since the last cooling (the so-called "little ice age," ca.1500-1750) not enough time has lapsed to account for the current warming or the current rate of increased warming. The salient factor that is different from earlier warming periods is the recent (since about 1700) expansion of the human population and the even faster increase of modern inventions (since about 1850) that cause the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere which is accompanied by the destruction of forests worldwide that could absorb some of it. The destruction of forests is not only part of the climate change story, but also of the much more general issue of the worldwide human impact on the environment (i.e. habitat destruction). Some of the scientific information has alarmed the U.S. Navy about the melting of the ice in the arctic seas (D. Mackenzie, "Arctic Meltdown," New Scientist, 2002, 2 March:5).

           The polar bear reminded me of a more acute question involving another example of our impact on the environment, namely the connection between the increased fishing of horseshoe crabs, beginning in the 1990s in the Delaware Bay and the decline of the rufa subspecies of the Knot Sandpiper that feeds on the crab eggs to store energy for the flight to their arctic breeding grounds. These Knots are called Red Knots in America, but they are actually only one (or two) of the subspecies of Knots  that spread as the last ice age began to recede. Alarm bells have been ringing, New Jersey has a moratorium on the harvesting of the crabs and the Audubon Soc. and others are pressing for the bird's endangered status. To come back to my History Methods model: not merely for the obvious scientific reasons, but in particular for public relations' sake, is it important that conservationists in general and defenders of threatened species or of bio-diversity in particular,  do not fail in their goals because they appear to neglect information (let alone suppress it) and thus give fodder to the "Inhofes." At 82, I no longer have the drive to do the sort of research I did for my publications in History, but I have gathered some information concerning the sketchy data of the past occurrence of the Red Knots that I could do as a mostly sedentary birder.

           But first a summary of the birds' present status for which we have numerous research papers as well as a 2007 collation of these: Status of the Red Knot Calidris canutus in the Western Hemisphere, by L.J.Niles and others, as well as the 2010 Update (resp. Status 2007 and Update 2010). And I did some clicking on the Internet sites of the New Jersey Fish Commission and some of its links, for ex. the www.ceoe.udel.edu/horseshoecrab/regulations/html (udel.edu) where, among other information, one finds the regulations of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC).

            The debate about the well being of the rufa population of the Knot is fuelled by estimates of 200,000 shorebirds based on aerial counts in the 1980s that were about equally divided between Red Knots, Ruddy Turnstones, Sanderlings and Semi-palmated Sandpipers, i.e. some 50,000 Knots. Incidentally: were Dunlin, Dowitchers and Black-bellied Plovers overlooked or sorted out? These estimates have since been called into question and the high of the 80s has been corrected to approx. 70,000 shorebirds. Yet the old numbers persist in the literature, for ex. D.M.Buehler, B.I. Tieleman and Th. Piersma (Auk, 2010, 127:394-7) open with: "Hundreds of thousands of shorebirds" occur on spring migration in the Delaware bay. And an article in the NYT of June 5, 2012 that describes the banding, etc. at Reed's Beach, N.J., while noting that this year's count of Knots in the Bay are was about double that of 2011, also states that this is way less than the "100,000 of the 1980s." These numbers may be supported by a report on the udel.edu site "Migratory Shorebirds" stating that according to once-weekly aerial counts in May and on June 5, 2001 "the actual number of shorebirds  [. . . ] may surpass one million." Yet, the accompanying graph shows a peak for Semi-palmated Sandpipers at fewer than 200.000 on May 30; fewer than 100,000 Turnstones on 5/23;  fewer than 50,000 Dunlin on 5/23 and slightly fewer Knots on the same day, which makes significantly less than half a million birds (but still "hundreds of thousands") by adding the peak days for each of these species;  it is hardly an "equal" division among species. Using the term "shorebirds" while talking about Knots seems to create confusion. As I pointed out, "shorebirds" includes more than the four species mentioned above. Also: its use in a discussion of Knots leaves the impression that "hundreds of thousands" rely on the horseshoe crab, which is not the case (see below).

          Meanwhile I received a beautifully illustrated "coffee table" book Life Along the Delaware Bay. Cape May, Gateway to a Million Shorebirds. Rutgers U.P., 2012. Written by Lawrence Niles and others, it is illustrated with photographs by Jan van der Kam. Both titles are somewhat misleading as the focus (as can be expected from Lawrence Niles) is primarily on the horseshoe crab and the birds that feed on them an in particular on the Knot (for which Cape May is not a major stop over in either season). It has a pie chart showing the peak aerial count for eight primary species of shorebirds in 2008. The explanation refers to "nearly half a million birds in the 1980s" and "fewer than 150,000 in 2010 of which Knots comprise 9% with Dunlin 31%, Semi-palmated Sandpipers 35% and Ruddy Turnstones 13%. Of these the Knots and Turnstones, according to the relevant chapters, are most dependent on the crab eggs.

           Research also focuses on counting the number of a species in its Arctic breeding regions [that are affected by global warming] and in their winter quarters [that are also affected] (Morrison, R.I.G. a.o. “Population Estimates of North American Shorebirds.” Wader Study Group Bull. 111:67-85).  Apparently not all knots fly to Argentina, for. ex. some winter also along the Atlantic coast and 60 were observed in Stone Harbor, N.J., in February of 2008 and 66 appeared there on the Bay shore in Jan. of 2012 and in yet another winter there were about 100 on Hereford Inlet near the toll bridge to Wildwood; these may belong to a different population, the roselaari.

          The rufa Knots are one of five subspecies all of them apparently only geographically separate populations that spread north eastward after the last Ice Age from a rather small number of survivors of the nominate species, Calidris canutus canutus, that lived then on the tundra in what is now Western Europe. Like the rufa population, these nominate Knots are long distance migrants. They winter on the west coast of Africa and farther south; the Dutch Wadden Sea and the Wash in Norfolk, Engl., are their major foraging areas on migration. (One autumn in the 1950s, a few birding buddies and I witnessed a flight of Knots that numbered in the 10s of thousands as they sought higher ground in the Wadden Sea. Apparently they were only a portion of the Knots there). The five subspecies split at different stages as the ice receded. Two of them (Piersmai and Rogersi) breed in northern Siberia, while two others, the Roselaari  and Rufa populations spread to Alaska and the Canadian tundra. However these splits occurred, a large population, the Islandica separated from the Canutus in Europe and moved northwest to Iceland, Greenland and the easternmost Canadian archipelago (Ec.atlas, p.144). Observing them from a distance, even now with a scope, I have never been able to distinguish either the Islandica from the nominate in Holland or the Rufa from the Roselaari on the Delaware Bay. I am not the only one having problems, for ex. the Petersen and Burrows Birds of New England (2004) warn against confusion with several other shorebirds (they also note that small numbers of Knots winter along the coasts of Southern New England). I was much relieved when I saw a photo (Status, 2007, p. 9) of two handheld Knots one of which "is believed to be a roselaari." Throughout the Status report its authors refer to the "taxonomic uncertainty" about the populations in the USA (incl. Alaska where Roselaari may be joined by Siberian Rogersi Knots). In the past all these Knots had one name: Tringa islandica. Like other birds, Knots are subject to many problems, for ex. Evans and Penkovski (1984) estimate a 20-30% survival rate of 1st year birds and Baker and Baker (1973) found only a 40-50% fledging success.

          I had never seen more than "hundreds" of shorebirds together at one time in May and early June along the Delaware Bay beaches. Even adding the various groups at several spots they numbered perhaps a few thousands, only a small number of Knots among them. When they are feeding on the eggs it is difficult to keep them apart from behind the fences that now protect the spawning horseshoe crabs in many places on the Jersey side. The Delaware Rare Bird Alert recorded 6,000 Knots on a roost near Mispillion at the end of May in 2011, most of which any birder could observe. When feeding, the birds jostle each other onward or out of the way and some, having ended up on the back of the spawning crabs confound my attempts to identify those on the other side. In their feeding frenzy they appear oblivious to their surroundings. The first time I saw this phenomenon was on the then still very small beach at the Forsythe (Brigantine) NWR. We stood together with several other birders on the dyke right above the egg laying crabs and the gorging birds. They were nearly all Semi-palmated Sandpipers, perhaps a hundred, pressed together so closely that one could see no sand between them and the crabs. The few Dunlin and Turnstones stayed out of the fray and fed on the edges among the Laughing Gulls; no Knots. Actually among the flocks I see each spring on the beaches, the Semi-palmated Sandpipers are always the most numerous though in some spots Turnstones dominate, like on the beach remnants along the rock reinforced road at Port Mahon in Delaware. When I am there Knots are rare, for ex. on May 18, 2012 I found nine along the road, but the Del. Shorebird Project people located 200 in the entire area (along with 2000 Semi-palmated Sandpipers of which I saw fewer than 100, 1500 Ruddy Turnstones of which I saw about 500 and 20 Sanderlings, of which I saw 11). There were also 8 Willets and about 200 Laughing Gulls and some 100 Dunlin in two flocks, one of which on the mudflats where the road curbs along the shore (these were not mentioned by the Project). It was low tide and although one day before the full moon, there were hardly any crabs along the road, which was surprising because two weeks earlier there were about 100 crabs trying to find a beach. While the shorebirds feed on fresh eggs before they fly on to the Arctic, not all the remaining eggs hatch in the summer, some take several months and so we saw in late September 2009 a flock of about 50 Turnstones and 20 Sanderlings feeding in the “May mode” on a rare clean patch of gravelly beach at Port Mahon.

          Away from the beaches, especially at high tides, large numbers of shorebirds may gather to roost in impoundments, as was the case on April 20, 2012 at Bombay Hook (Del.) when I estimated the various separate groups of a few hundred at more than 2,000 all together; a flock of less than 100 Black-bellied Plovers was off by itself on dry mud in Bear Swamp, but in the other pools three groups of Dunlin contained also quite a few Short-billed Dowitchers, Lesser Yellow Legs and some smaller peeps, but two flocks, one of them of several hundred, of Semi-palmated Sandpipers were off by themselves. The size of these flocks looked most impressive when they all wheeled about in the air as a Harrier tried its luck. During the next two weeks the Del.RBA still mentioned thousands of shorebirds there. On May 18, at low tide several thousand actively foraging birds were mostly spread out on the mudflats across from Shearness including hundreds of Black-bellied Plover and Dunlin; as expected for mudflats, there were no horseshoe crabs in evidence. For the week of 4/25/12 the Del. Rba reported 7,000 Knots, 5,000 Dunlin, 10,000 Semi-Palms, 1,000 Sanderling and 2,000 Sh-billed Dow., at Mispillion; at the Ted Harvey area there were 2,500 Knots, 3,800 Dunlin, 6,000 Semi-palms, 2,500 Sh-billed Dow. This adds up to 40,300 shorebirds (Ruddy Turnstones or other shorebirds were not included in the reports from either place). The Delaware Shorebird Project, noting on 5/29 that shorebird numbers were greatly diminished, reported for Mispillion 50 to100 Knots, 2,000 Ruddy Turnstones, 1,500 Sanderling, 14,000 Semi-palms and small numbers of Dunlin and Sh-billed Dowitchers. We were along Rte 9 and Bombay Hook, not at any beach, on 5/31 at low tide and saw about 750 Semi-palms spread out over the mud (flying in small separate flocks of about 50 when moving), 2 Black-bellied and 3 Semi-palmated Plovers, 1 White-Rumped Sandp., and perhaps 20 Dunlin. Although the crabs prefer gravelly sandy beaches to lay their eggs, once again we scoped the mudflats that were open to the Delaware Bay and found no evidence of Horsehoe Crabs (and never any Knots). Thus while tens of thousands of shorebirds stop over on the Bay, most do not depend on the crab eggs and large numbers clearly do not feed near the "horseshoe beaches."


           In 2014, Colette and I spent May 19-21 in N.J. and Delaware. We started with the Forsythe NWR which after super storm Sandy has a larger sandy stretch along the Southern dike, but we saw few crabs and no Knots. It was low tide and were 100s of Semi-palmated Sandpipers, some twenty Turnstones, a few Dowitchers were foraging in the mud and shallow channels, while the Dunlin were mostly in the impoundment along the North dike. By the time we got to Nummy Island it was high tide and shorebirds were hard to find in the tall saltmarsh grass that was high enough to hide a foraging Tri-colored heron when it stepped into a channel. The next day we stopped off at Reed's Beach where on the southern beach there were plenty of crabs, a few thousand Laughing Gulls and lots of shorebirds, including Knots. But even at 60x the clustered shorebirds were difficult to keep apart. At the North end, there were also lots of crabs, but only 3 Knots among the hundreds of Gulls. In the afternoon we had more success at Cook Beach (which is below Reed's) where the fence is closer to the shorebird roost. But the best views we had the next day at Mispillion, on the Delaware side. According to one of the researcher Colette talked with there were some 1500 Knots roosting on several sand spits and the jetty and thousands of such other shorebirds as Turnstones, Dunlin, Sanderlin and Semi-palmated sandpipers as well as the ever present Laughing Gulls. We did not visit any of the other Delaware Bay beaches, but at Bombay Hook there were a larger numbers of Semi-palms and Dowitchers on the mudflats.



         To me, this kind of evidence is among the most spellbinding as it raises questions about the rhythm of nature, the life of birds, the timing of their migration, the choice of the Delaware Bay rather than some other place where there also are horseshoe crabs, or what will happen if the crabs, these fossils of earlier stages of evolution, really disappeared. Current studies are mostly focused on the taking of the crabs for bait by eel and conch fishermen or for medical research which uses their blood since it was discovered, in 1956, that the crabs have an inbuilt blood-clotting mechanism which acts like a primitive immune system. These crabs have a 90% survival rate when they are returned to the sea (Post "LAL Research" on udel.edu). A "soundbite" item in the Nat. Geographic Mag. for August 2011, pp 28-29, states that 500,000 crabs are caught each year along the US coast, They take 20% of the blood of each crab, after which they are returned to the ocean where they have a 15% survival rate, which means that 75,000 don't make it.  A post (2 Febr.,’03) on the Delaware Audubon website painted a dismal picture: from an estimated 80,000 Knots on the Bay in 1998, the number fell to about 30,000 in 2002 and the Knot was thought to have a 54% survival rate [for the Bay population?]. In the post "Shorebird Recovery Project" at Manomet.org [2008?] it is estimated that the Red Knot "will become extinct by 2010." As reported in the NYT article cited earlier, this fortunately has not happened and the Manomet post should have been updated. A 2012 post at Manomet.org (Shorebird Recovery) giving a graph of the decline for several species states that the Knot population declined to 15,000 from 50.000 in 1985. Somehow the numbers do not appear to add up.

          Such declines may seem hard to believe and since the Morrison article, more research has been done on the accuracy of counting birds by European ornithologists. They found that the average error for flocks of roosting birds was 37% and 17% for flying flocks. Status 2007 makes it clear that recent counters, incl. Morrison himself, are fully aware of these possible errors. (37% or 1/3 of 150,000 equals 50,000 or the alleged total of 1985). Some annual fluctuations in the numbers cannot be explained by counting errors; other explanations are unfortunately still hypothetical. Aerial counting has the further disadvantage that small wader species are difficult to identify, though on the Bay the larger size of the Knots may help. Still, even if the Delaware Bay figures are only approximate but show a long term trend they are alarming indeed and crab conservation measures may be coming too late, partly because crabs take about eight or more years to reach the egg laying stage.

Obviously there remains a lingering confusion about the actual numbers. Apparently researchers, writers, much less reporters, do not spend much effort in weeding out the received data from later and more accurate ones. I have given sone examples above, but here is another one from Birdlife International (2010) whose www.Birdlife.org/datazone/sowb/casestudy/23 on the impact of shellfisheries states that at one time there were 150,000-100,000 and "now as few as 18,000" Knots while referring to Status 2007 (for the later number?).

          As I indicated, we don’t have horseshoe crabs in Holland and thousands of Knots (both the Canutus and Islandica subspecies) feed in the Wadden Sea area on small cockles. Over-harvesting of cockles, it is thought, caused the drastic decline in the number of the nominate Knots, but not as much of the Islandica subspecies that feed on the same prey. This may be because the nominate species (from the Eurasian tundra) arrive after the Islandica (from Greenland and Canada) and thus find fewer prey. The destruction of cockle beds in the Wadden Sea resulted from fishing with suction dredges which increased the yield of cockles some forty times to 80,000 tons in 1989 over the older trawling methods. This type of fishing was outlawed in 2004, but by then the damage was done. Similar shellfish harvesting problems existed on the Wash. Considering that there are many other small prey like Baltic tellins, sand gapers and so forth in the Wadden Sea, I wonder why the disappearance of one shellfish could have such a drastic effect, unless the dredging disturbed the bottom habitat for these other prey as well.

          I have also wondered whether rufa Knots could switch to another source of food. The rufa that winter in Patagonia, like other long-distance migrants (for ex. Bar-tailed Godwits and the canutus Knots in Europe), undergo physiological changes to reduce their weight before they undertake their northward flight. Among these is a change in their digestive system which prevents the Rufa from feeding on mollusks and makes it convenient for them that there are crab eggs. It would take extra time for the digestive system to change back, up to six days, before they could use the other food on which Dunlin etc. forage. It is argued that the birds need to regain the body weight they lost during the flight from the wintering grounds and a delay needed to change the digestive system would retard their return to the Arctic where there is only a short window to breed. Of the six populations of Knots only the Rufa has come to rely on the horseshoe crab. There is, nevertheless, important evidence provided by research done on the Virginia barrier islands, where some 13,000 Knots feed on the way north and that are apparently not dependent on the horseshoe crab (F.M. Smith and others, 2008); a summary of which is an addendum to Update 2010. Status 2007 (2008) discusses the Va counts  in detail, going back to the late '70s - the era of high counts - when on May 20, 1978, 8,000 were counted on Metompkin Island alone. Their more recent numbers are larger than that of the alleged Roselaari populations that winter in northern Brazil or Florida and that might move up the coast in Spring; thus these Virginia Knots are likely to be Rufa. I have not found evidence for my suspicion that Virginia's Knot numbers are used to justify its opposition to the ASMFC harvest thresholds of the crabs. There is also some evidence that Knots from Caribbean areas may use the interior (and crabless) flyway from Texas to Saskatchewan.  This may be corroborated by John Krider who in his [hunting] Notes (1879) states that they stop "for a day or two in Iowa, feeding along the slough."

          I was interested to read in Clay and Pat Sutton’s Birds and Birding at Cape May (2008), a book that I much enjoyed, that in the late 19th century horseshoe crabs (in the Delaware bay?) had also been faced with extinction. They were nearly fished out of existence for fertilizer and it took many decades for the survivors to repopulate the Delaware Bay. In all my reading on the alarming state of the Bay, I found no reference to that kind of depletion of the crabs other than the fact that by the middle of the 20th century, when the crab population nearly collapsed,  artificial fertilizers and other changes in agriculture reduced the need for the crabs (just as it reduced the use of alewives as fertilizer in New England).  In the post "Fertilizer" (udel.edu) one learns that the number of crabs remained at about 1.5 million from the 1880s to the 1920s. The post "Regulations" on udel.edu cites a report that in 1857 the "entire strand of beach" was covered for miles with the crabs and it shows a foto from the early 1980s illustrating a similar event. Recently, as I hobbled down the stairs to the bathroom in a Lewes, Del., restaurant I noticed a black and white photograph among the historical pictures on the walls of a gigantic pile of Horse-shoe crab shells: unexpected evidence of their overfishing. Apparently between 1960 and 1980 their number was relatively constant at 2.3 to 4.1 million. Demand for eels from Japan in the 1970s and later for conch, mainly from Sth-east Asia, led to a rapid increase of the crab harvest in the 1990s. Fortunately, ASMFC regulations have led to significant reductions in the numbers taken for bait.

          Because my mind has been professionally focused on critically examining received theories (in history), several specific questions occurred to me while reading the Suttons' discussion. Among these are: what did the Knots feed on in those allegedly horseshoe-crabless years?  Were there great numbers before the overfishing? Did they feed instead on small mollusks like those seen farther south? And by the way: does the physiological change of the stomach occur also before their southward migration or do they then stop to forage more frequently and longer in one place than on their way north because there is no hurry to find a nesting place? The Suttons report also that the absence of old Knot decoys indicates that there may not have been enough Knots for the hunters to bother making them.

          In a odd fit of nostalgia for the days of research for my publications (in the History of Ideas), I perused some of the earlier writers (among my own books) that could have been familiar to Witmer Stone, on whose Bird Studies of Old Cape May (1937) the Suttons relied for for much of their historical data. None of these writers mention horseshoe crabs, which may be because they focus on the southbound migration (August-October), all of them blame the near demise of the Knots around 1900 on market hunters “in the old days,” (Nat. Geogr. Book of Birds, 1932). Eaton, (Birds of New York, 1910) says they are more common in the fall [on Long Island] when “they return in large flocks” than in the spring and Forbush, (Birds of Massachusetts and Other New England States, 1925), noting that the Eurasian and American “forms” were recently split [into two populations], says that “in the days of our grandparents [they occurred] on Cape Cod by the thousand” but were rare by 1900. Knight’s 1908 Birds of Maine supports these findings: they are generally uncommon but more numerous in the fall when there are plenty on the mudflats near Calais; they occur between May 24 and June 11 and return from August through September. The greater number in the Fall than the Spring is the reverse of the modern data for the Delaware Bay. Though these older sources talk about the southbound migration for the autumn, beginning in August, the July 5, 2012, Delaware RBA mentioned about 100 Knots. (This fuels my wonder at the rhythm of nature with shorebirds leaving the Bay in the 1st week of June and returning already in the 1st week of July. And they are not all non-breeding adults, for some were "still" in breeding plumage). These early publications all make use of data from the Proceedings of Bird Clubs, Scientific Societies and Reports from the various Boards of Agriculture. A note in the Jnl of the Maine Ornithological Society (1900:54-55) also bewails the "empty beaches." Stone in 1937, appears to rely almost exclusively on hunting lore. Through his leading career at the Philadelphia Academy of Science, etc. Stone could have had access to any number of 19th century sources . For ex. I wonder what lies hidden in the archives of the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife,  that go back to 1870 (www.state.nj.us/fgw/history.htm).

          Stone says “as they [Dowitchers and Knots, flocking together] decoyed easily they most nearly approached extermination” at the turn of the century, but suspects the picture may be not be that bleak. This statement may explain why there are no old specific knot decoys, a generic large shorebird one may have done the job. Moreover, 19th Cent. sources often refer to the Knot's unwary behavior so that decoys may not have been necessary. Stone too concentrates on the southbound migration (which may be the result of his mostly summer observations and the hunters he then talked too) and he focuses on the Atlantic beaches and adjacent marshlands. Though he also observed them feeding in May, neither he nor Charles Urner, his correspondent for the Brigantine beach to the north mention horse shoe crabs; the numbers they give are only in the hundreds. The authors cited above describe their food as mollusks, crustaceans, sea-worms and insects which may be less the result of observation than of stomach content of shot birds in the autumn, for in the 19th century much attention was given to the question of a bird's usefulness to combat the generally held view of birds as pests. I wonder whether the pothunters were at it all year or whether they concentrated on the fall migration when numbers were large and farming tasks fewer. I am thinking about the British game law of 1831 that set hunting seasons for game birds from August through January.

          A colleague and friend who collects prints drew my attention to Alexander Wilson whose American Ornithology is a pioneering work, much of which can be retrieved on the internet. In the 1840, 3 vol. edition by Thomas Mayo Brewer "with notes by [Sir William] Jardine," (the Scottish naturalist) a later editor wrote: "of this prettily marked species I can find no description . . . The common name on our seacoast is the Gray Back . . . [and it occurs] in small flocks on the sand flats." This is followed by a description of the Red-breasted Snipe, i.e. the Dowitcher. But in Alexander Wilson. The Scot Who Founder American Ornithology, (2013), the authors cite (pp 182-4) two descriptions of the knot, one the "Ash-colored Sandpiper, Tringa cinerea," which is the Knot in winter dress and the other the "Red-breasted Sandpiper, Tringa rufa" for the Knot in breeding plumage. . . . its favorite food, which is the small, thin, oval, bivalve shell fish of white or pearl color, and not larger than the seed of an apple.[which] must be extremely nutritious, for almost all those tribes [of sandpipers?] that feed on them are at this season [May] mere lumps of fat." I wonder whether these small white pearls were really shell fish rather than the eggs of the horse shoe crab. But in his description of the Ruddy Turnstone, which he calls a "rare species," Wilson mentions that in Cape May and Egg Harbor they are "known by the name of the Horse-foot Snipe from its living almost entirely on the eggs" of the crab, which is in fact what Knots do as well. It is likely that the "gunners" whom he mentions sometimes as sources, may have given him anecdotal information, which seems to indicate that it came from the ocean rather than the Bay beaches.

          In the 19th century "Snipe" was a frequently used name for shorebirds especially for those with long beaks. Not only was the Knot known as Robin-Snipe, but Shriner in his Birds of New Jersey (1896) also gives the name "Gray Snipe" and on p. 139 lists seven non-snipes, including Stone Snipe (Yellow Legs), Winter Snipe (Dunlin) and Grass Snipe (Pectoral Sandpiper) though the last two do not have particularly long beaks. Of the Knot he says (p.94) "it has been killed off to a great extent, proving an easy prey for pothunters" and also adds "it feeds on small shell-fish along the beaches," which is does in the Fall. In 1869, William Turnbull published a list of Birds of Eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey, in which he gives the following common names for the Knot: "Red-breasted Sandpiper, Robin Snipe, Ash-coloured Sandpiper, Grey Back, White Robin Snipe in its autumn plumage." He says that it is "common" and "arrives in May on its way north, returning about the middle of August." There is no information about its feeding habits.

          Considering the difficulty of traveling in Sth. Jersey before the automobile – Stone talks of days with walks of 10 or more miles - the Delaware Bay was apparently neglected by birding summer residents who preferred the then still mostly unspoiled beaches of the barrier "islands." Horseshoe crabs prefer rough sand beaches and quiet shores over the surf beaten Atlantic coasts. All this information coincides with the numerous maps of "Critical Habitat" in the back of the Status 2007 report that are based on recent surveys. Clearly reflecting the interests of the New jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife for which the report was put together, there are two maps for the Delaware Bay region, one for the Spring and one for the Fall Migrations (## 19-20), the latter showing more critical habitat on the Atlantic beaches. Map #17 shows the habitat for Virginia, one long stretch from Assateague to Fisherman Island, nearly all of it on the Ocean side with a relatively small area on the Chesapeake Bay.

          Because I once thought about collecting decoys, I looked into the question raised by the Suttons and Stone's remark. Evidently late 19th century shorebird decoys (unlike duck decoys) are mostly primitive carvings that may disappoint someone who has seen decoys from 1950 and later that increasingly developed into what the trade calls "decorative." These can be exquisite works of craftsmanship, painted with great attention to actual plumage. Antique decoys, their original paint flaked off, look more two-tone and even uniformly dark. The actual shape and size of a shorebird species clearly was not one of the carver's criteria even in the so-called "elegant" type. One catalogue (Old Decoys, from Cary Campbell)  has a Black-bellied plover "painted over as a robin snipe" (the folk name for  Knot) now looking just dark. It also shows a "dowitcher or yellow legs" of 9.5" in a 2-tone grey; a 10.25" robin snipe, also 2-tone with reddish below and an 11" turnstone "perhaps from Cape May" of which the remaining paint barely imitate the colors of an actual Turnstone. It also has a 13.5" Crowe carved decoy, uniformly dark, from N.J. "very much like shorebirds from the area," which  has a broad beak and thus might be modelled on a Knot which has a heavy beak. The Sedge Island Decoys Antiques catalog features a small robin snipe,very dark, with a short bill, with shot marks, as "from South Jersey." The Dayton's on-line catalogue of Nov.2011 has a "black bellied plover, about 1900. from Tuckerton, N.J. with original paint." It's all black underneath and very dark above with some lighter spots  imitating a shorebird's back;  it's a plover in name only. The current Raven's Way Antiques website in describing a Shute (Cape May Courthouse) carved Blackbellied Plover (1870-1900) says that few Shute decoys have come to market incl. "a couple of Red Knots." The site also shows a 9" robin snipe from Chincoteague, early 20th cent., that is dark above, dark red on throat and breast with off-white to the tail, the bill is  longer than a Knot's. There's also a picture of a Rio Grande, N.J. "plover" that's uniformly dark brown with black "feathering" spots, 8.5" and it has an unploverish plump body. All this suggests that around 1900 hunting shorebird decoys were not very species precise and apparently interchangeable all along the East coast, incl. Sth. Jersey.

          One of the sources I also looked at was Cassinia, the organ of the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club, of which Stone had been an editor as well as a club member from its very beginning. Some of its articles give a good impression of the pre-automobile difficulties of birding. For example, the 1903 Christmas count at Cape May Point was done on foot (some participants had no binoculars or only 3 and 4 power ones, i.e. "opera glasses"). J. Fletcher Street (l931/2) writes that the car made all the difference as day trips to the Jersey shore became possible (though even now, with more and better roads my own day trips involve fours of back and forth). Most early field trips, he writes, were to areas around Philadelphia and those to the shore did not begin until the 1920s. Street recounts that Stone, in 1918 or so, ventured the opinion that all but 2 or 3 of a group of members knew nothing concerning shorebirds, a remark that spurred Street on to remedy his shortcomings. Having acquired a cottage on Sea Island, NJ, (i.e. also on the Atlantic rather than on the Delaware Bay) he kept a record of the birds there, a ten year summary of which he published that year; of the Knots he says that they are much commoner (but not in great numbers) in the Spring than in the Fall, but nothing at all about feeding habits. In the 1951 issue these observations are confirmed, but again there's nothing about feeding habits. By then the hunting pressures of the past had been absent for decades and one would have expected reports of larger numbers. In the on-line Indexes to the journal there's also no mention of the horseshoe crab. The general impression gained from the pre-1950 on-line articles is that the DVOC was club of gentlemen from various backgrounds who gradually changed their collecting of skins and eggs (about which there are several stories in the earliest issues) to exchanging mostly random observations. Stone deserves praise for recording these, together with his own, more systematically for Cape May).

          At the occasion of Biodiversity Day 2007 the U.N’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre issued a news release on the status of the world population of all six populations of Knots, four of which are declining in numbers. In Europe and the USA the cause is thought to be “drastic habitat changes in the major mudflats” but a significant part of the release discusses the disappearance of large snow free patches in the Arctic breeding ranges, a probable result of global warming which increases precipitation that falls there as snow. In spite of these declines the worldwide status of the Knot is listed as of "least concern." Yet, a release, issued by the Convention on Migratory Species of 8-16-07 reveals that major losses of Knots occurred near the border of Uruguay and Brazil (a place that does not occur in the discussions on Knot migration that I have read), the causes of which are under investigation.

          The threat to the rufa Knots has been dramatized in a 2008 documentary that did the rounds on PBS’ Nature series (it was also seen in some European countries). Another question suggested by that documentary is whether it is only the convenient availability of the crabs’ presence in the Bay that makes it the eel's and especially the conch's allegedly preferred food. After all, what did fishermen use for bait before the 1990s when the increased harvest began or in months, before the crabs come to shore or after the surviving crabs returned to the ocean? From my childhood experience, including the catch of our neighbor the fisherman, I know that eels feed on virtually anything, including carcasses of mammals and I think that offal from the chicken slaughter around the Bay would be much appreciated by the eels and conches. I also wonder whether egg bearing female crabs are really more useful than males. There's a good deal of evidence that eels feed on the eggs of alewives and the like (which they suck out) when these move upstream to spawn, in fact it is well known that eel prefer live bait and eel farmers have to accustom elvers to eat their food and the loss of elvers is fairly large during that process. But in the wild fish and crab eggs are "opportunistic" foods.  Delaware has a regulation of one half female and one whole male per eel/whelk pot, which indicates that the eggs are not an indispensable food. This I wonder why the many crabs that die after spawning or are turned on their back by wave motions littering the beaches cannot be collected for bait. Perhaps conches  that feed normally on clams (and other mollusks) need to have a food supplement because the natural food has declined in the polluted Bay.

          As a result of its t.v. time restrictions the PBS documentary focuses too much on the horseshoe crab and the rufa Knots of the Delaware Bay. Carl Safina, The View From Lazy Point, 2011), described how he and an acquaintance attempted to protect horseshoe crabs on Long Island from being taken [probably to be sold to Delaware Bay fishermen]. I have seen dead crabs in many places along the Atlantic coast, for example near Nausett on Cape Cod and even as far inland as the Salt Bay above Damariscotta in Maine where they have to go under the traffic bridge. And Rachel Carson (Edge of the Sea) states that the crab occurs from the Yucatan to new England. Interestingly, Paul Brooks (The House of Life, p.152) relates that the idea for Carson's book may have originated during a walk on Cape Cod by "distinguished literary figures [. . .] somewhat lacking in biological sophistication" who saw the beach covered with horseshoe crabs which they began to return to the sea. A Houghton Mifflin editor who was among them then thought about finding an author who could write "a layman's handbook to the shore."  

          Anyway, in accordance with the new population research method of counting birds on their winter and summer territories, the film shows the searchers camping out in Tierra del Fuego where the numbers have declined, and on the arctic tundra looking in vain for breeding birds. I have not seen much tundra and that only in Alaska, but have the feeling that a presumed 15,000 pairs of Knots can completely disappear in the vast expanses, a problem that is discussed in Status 2007. Telemetric data (obtained, of course, from a very small number of outfitted birds) give a good illustration of the very wide breeding territory, anywhere from about the 60th to 68th parallel and from the 62th to the 100th degree longitude (fig. 11, p.19). Yet, considering the well established fact of “site fidelity” in many breeding birds, the expectation is that Knots would return to their territories year after year. (Ec.atlas, p. 303). Their absence could be significant evidence of their decline unless the returning birds, finding conditions altered move to more suitable nesting sites, "territorial fidelity" in knots not having been definitely established. Piersma and Lindstrom (cited below) assume that relocation to suitable sites would be normal.

          The documentary focuses also on the here and now and as such brings to the attention of a wide public how the fortunes of the crab and the Knot are (have become?) intertwined and affected by human actions e.g. a 2012 post on Manomet.org "Red Knot Protection in Southern Argentina," has examples of promoting more responsible recreational use of the coastal areas where the Knots winter). As would be expected the two Status Reports are more balanced and often discuss the disparities in the data, in particular the divergence in earlier estimates. The authors of Status 2007 (which was published, with an earlier update, in 2008 as #36 of Studies in Avian Biology), present their findings with great scientific integrity. They even address whether their own scientific investigations may pose a threat to the Knots. Such qualifiers as "estimate," "conjecture" and acknowledgements that further research is needed are frequent. Update 2010 "reflects the state of knowledge as of 1 April 2010. . . This material [unlike the 2008 publication] has not been peer-reviewed. We offer it in the interest of timely information exchange among researches, managers and others interested in Red Knot conservation." These statements can of course be used by skeptics to minimize the crisis and a reader of funding proposals may dismiss the "need for further research" as a plea for continued employment of the researchers.. I would say so far, so good. The 2008 recommendations, rather modestly, focus on the conservation of current numbers and habitat improvement. These objectives are significantly at odds with the goals set in the "Executive Summary" of Status 2007 (p.iv) where the goals for 2015[!] are based on the figures of 25 years ago although these have since been corrected downwards. All this does not mean that conservation measures are not warranted, both for the horse crab and the rufa Knot; for ex.: following Canada's example of according the rufa Knot "threatened" status seems a given.

          But it still appears to me that a thorough and systematic study of historical evidence, however dispersed, would be useful either for establishing that present developments are less critical because the crabs as well as the Knots have recovered before (thus forestalling the skeptics) or for making the alarm of the environmentalists still more justified. Additionally there remains the decline of the other populations of Knots in other parts of the world (and of other shorebirds, e.g. the almost total disappearance of Red-necked Phalaropes on the Lubec Flats, Me. since the 1990s) which may point to other (man-made?) environmental factors. Numerous studies have been published on the decline of shorebirds. Among these I found Christoph Zockler, et. al. "Wader Populations are declining- how will we elucidate the reasons?" Wader Study Group Bulletin, (2003), 100:202-211, the most balanced. Of the 209 species of waders 92 showed a declining trend of which 79 are among plovers and sandpipers. They concentrate on the gaps in our knowledge about the reasons for that trend. Perhaps the Knot could be treated as the proverbial canary in the mine or the rose at the head of a row of vines, and its decline taken as a warning of the accumulating effect of global environmental degradation (Piersma and Lindstrom. "Migrating shorebirds as integrative sentinels of global environmental change," Ibis (2004), 146 , Suppl.1, 61-69). The relationship between the Horse-show Crab and the Red Knot is well studied but the factors that affect other Knot and shorebird populations may also (additionally) affect the Red Knot.

          Meanwhile the Delaware Public Radio station WDDE aired an interview with Kevin Kalish of the    Delaware Division of Fish and Wildlife in which the old numbers do not appear. Instead it's about the alarm caused by the "crash" numbers of 15,000-20,000 and the 2012 estimate of 44,000. Kalish was cautiously optimistic "that there is no extinction risk in the next few years. We have at least stabilized the population." (www.wdde.org/45004, June 1, 2013). However, on May 30 the Manomet Center for Conservation Science posted a newsletter about the resighting of Knot B95 at Mispillion and in the companion article said that the expected number of Knots was 28,000, the same as in 2012. Thus there's a disparity which would be a reason to be less optimistic about the recovery than the number of 44.000.
          With apologies to Jonathan Swift as well as Steve Kress, I offer a modest proposal that may help increase the Horse-shoe crab eggs available to the Red Knot. In order to restore the tern populations
at the same time as that of the Puffin, one of the techniques was to turn (and shaking) the eggs of the gulls whose populations had exploded as a result of the open garbage hills of coastal tons in Maine. This markedly reduced the gull population that preyed on the eggs of terns and their hatchlings. A similar program along the Delaware Bay would help reduce the population of Laughing gulls that seem to me to be the major consumer of the crab eggs.

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).

the modest birder (15) May-August 2011

This spring was chiefly notable for confirming that several regular breeders had in fact abandoned our woods. The biggest loss, as far as I'm concerned is that of the Wood thrushes. When we moved here in early 1999, they foraged all around the house and they continued to do so when I built the walled terraces during the next years. Sometimes several would be inspecting the cracks between the uneven field stones or drink from the rain filled bird baths. They nested in the neglected brush near the creek and in some years there were two pairs. At least one pair returned even after the roadwork of 2006-7 which included the installation of a flow bed for the new storm drains above the creek. We heard the last "evensong" in 2009. I don't know why they left, for approaching 80, I have allowed the brush along the creek on both sides of our slope to increase and become more impenetrable. Cardinals and Catbirds appear to like that habitat. Maybe the much increased morning rush hour traffic on the new road with its 11 school buses creeping up the hill is too much of a disturbance. Or perhaps the new street light that was installed in 2008 when the road was finished is the reason, though it doesn't seem to affect other breeders. The song of the Cardinals, even the mumbled strophes of the Catbirds are of course welcome, but I truly miss the evocative and lilting ee-oh-lay that filled the silence at dusk. I sometimes think it was this song, when all the others, even the Carolina Wren had packed it in, that revealed the quiet of the coming night. It used to recall that Vivaldi violin concerto in which the beauty of sound is enhanced by an off-stage violin echoing the soloist. [I'm happy to note that the Woodthrushes returned in May 2012].

It appears that some of the Baltimore Orioles also have moved on. In previous years there were as many as 5 at once in the spring and we had at least two nesting pairs as two males sang some hundred yards apart in the upper stories and three could be seen chasing each other. This year there was only one pair and that bred down the creek across the road and only foraged here. Phoebes also gave up breeding in our woods. A pair nested each year under the home made wooden bridge over the creek that a previous owned had built next to the dam that created a waterfall in spring and autumn. The passage of the tail end of one hurricane took away two of the boards of the deck, spring floods finished the destruction and now only one of the cross beams remains. Our house has lots of eves and some early Aprils a Phoebe hawks from the honeysuckle that climbs up a trellis on the side of the porch steps, but in May and June there are no Phoebes around. [Some Poebes must have set up shop close by - also in 2012 - for both a male and a female come by regularly, one of them often perches on the bench in front of the picture window].

As hope springs eternal and I was actually excited when I saw a Robin sized brown bird on a snag by the creek that, as it turned around appeared to be a Wood thrush. Alas, it flew on and was neither seen nor heard again. But in 2010 the lacuna left by the Wood thrush was filled by a pair of Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, good looking birds that nested above the creek across the road but frequently came to forage in our trees. This spring I noticed them on April 24. The next day, as I was fiddling in the garden, the male was singing near Rte 113. As it came down our road, stopping to sing in the crab apple, it passed close to me. It sang in a dogwood, flew across the road and that was the last I saw of them. Welcome though they were, their singing - sometimes described as "robin like, without gurgling notes" - doesn't make up for that of the Thrush.

Ever since the road was moved the 27 acres across the road have lain fallow, even the For Sale signs have been taken down. The first summer it was mowed twice but now it has become a brushy jungle with some young trees sticking out. Only some 20ft along our road and 113 is being kept clear "for appearances sake." This has attracted Field and Song Sparrows and a bright White-throated Sparrow sang there well into the month of May before moving to the mountains. The new growth may also have attracted an Orchard Oriole of which I had only seen one in our first spring here. Every morning for about eight days in early June a dark robin sized bird appeared to gorge itself on the nests of the tent caterpillars in the crab apple. I first saw it as I was preparing a bed for green beans. At that time the sun was directly behind the tree, hence the uniform darkness of the bird. I noticed the insectivore's bill type and a slightly notched tail. The next day it was back and thus I made a point of sitting in my garden chair against the garage before its arrival at about 8.30. It flew in directly from the old trees above the creek that bordered the new second growth bushes; when it flew back it raked the top of the young black cherries and landed out of sight in the middle story above the creek. It fed for about twenty minutes flitting from nest to nest on the inch long caterpillars. It did not appear when I had placed my chair in the patch along the road so that I would have the sun at my back (perhaps because the lined up cars junked their horns at me), thus I never got a good view of the bird's colors. Unfortunately it did not come on cloudy days and it wasn't until June 9 that I could identify it as I was clipping the side of a juniper that sort of hid me while giving me a 90 degree angle to the sun.

In my previous blog I remarked on the smaller number of winter residents and it looked like this year's spring migrants were also fewer, in particular the warblers. Usually they arrive when the oaks begin to bloom to feed on the insects attracted by the flowers. In some springs there were more than 10 of a morning and in some springs there might be several species. Among these the Yellow-rumped Warblers - nearly all of them males in splendid breeding plumage - dominated. These year there were only 3 other species: a Prairie and an unidentified one on May 2 and on May 19 a Tennessee. On April 19 there were 5 Yellow Rumps that I followed through the upper stories as they travelled down the creek from South to North, on other days there was mostly only one, usually a male. But on May 14 there was what probably was a pair and they hang around for two days, the male singing one time for about two minutes. Other note worthy migrants were a Peregrine Falcon circling over the farm fields beyond the trees, a Yellow-throated Vireo gleaning for a while in the middle story of the hickories, and the annual Scarlet Tanager on May 2. The real treat was the appearance on April 12 of two male Purple Finches in brilliantly fresh breeding plumage, a first in my birding experience; usually I see them on migration or as winter residents in Delaware. Another? male was on the feeders on the twentieth.

The second "first" was the courting of "our" flickers on several occasions, the longest on April 16. Clinging to the bark of the Norway spruce, their bodies about 3 inches apart, their neck stretched up, they moved the shoulders in half rotation towards each other, but their heads not touching while uttering their loud rolling calls; on the morning of the 24th I saw them copulating on a hickory branch, after which the male flew off and the female began to forage on the ground.

The arrival of our summer residents proceeded as usual except that the first Towhee, a male, surprised me on March 23. On the 30th there was a female Bluebird but she moved on. On the other hand, by April 9 I was sure of the pairing off of nine species, including the Redtails that nest on the adjacent farm in a copse visible from Rte 113. The Catbirds didn't arrive until April 26, a male Hummingbird on May 2 (the female on May 16); the Baltimore Orioles and Great Crested Flycatchers completed "our" residents on May 4, a pair of Bluebirds having moved on after lingering for an afternoon.

For several summers I have kept notes on the singing of our birds spurred on by the fact that birds we had found regularly on our New Jersey trips in May had stopped singing. The explanation given was that they were either building nests, breeding or feeding their hatch lings. My suspicions were that they were not there because the same birds were still singing in the woods along Rte 9 in Delaware. On both May 9 and June 14 of this year we heard Common Yellow Throats and Yellow Warblers, Ovenbird, Red Eyed Vireos, Woodthrushes and Towhees. In addition on June 14 there were also Scarlet and Summer Tanagers, both Orioles, Willow and Acadian Flycatchers and a Blueheaded Vireo, the June 14 songs all identified with my friend's CD where needed. I cannot explain why some Jersey experts could list numerous songbirds in late April on "first of season" joints, but these birds were not around on the three roads we explored. My "garden" records are not very systematic as I write down what strikes me. For example on June 25: Birdsong well into midday, Towhee, Indigo Bunting (across the road), Robin, Cardinal, and catbird, some of it in almost early spring force. On July 6: Birdsong, mostly until about 10.30, mostly a few lines at a time, except for the Towhee and a Robin that sang for several minutes at intervals; Towhee Robin, Catbird, Carolina Wren, Field and Song Sparrow (rare), Mocking Bird (sustained). If birds sing primarily to announce territory this may indicate that their nest were robbed (by Blue Jays, squirrels or chipmunks) and they started again. Ominously on July 15: a cowbird singing intermittently down the hill...

BP's disastrous environmental record

Oil companies often engage in a "green offensive" that usually turns out to be an exercise in public relations, surpassed only by the "clean coal" commercials on t.v. According to my son with his Green Peace background, BP actually earned itself a "green" reputation (as compared f.ex. to Exxon, still blackened by the Valdez spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska). In the Week in Review section (NYT 6-6-10) there's an article, entitled "Even With a Cleanup, Spilled Oil Stays With Us," on the lasting effects of the Exxon Valdez spill that reminded me of my son's pictures taken on the 10th anniversary of the event. About 100 tons of oil is still in the beaches there and 2 years ago when we were in Resurrection Bay, miles to the West of the Sound, you could see a broad black line where the oil was deposited 21 years ago.

Whatever BP has done to earn its "green" reputation has been offset by the poor maintenance of its Alaskan pipeline that was the result of wilfully negligent maintenance. Poor maintenance was also the cause for the explosion at its Galveston refinery (that cost the life of several workers). And now there is more loss of life in the explosion and sinking of one of its drilling platforms 50 miles off the Louisiana coast (where other human activity all along the Mississippi River already created a large "dead zone" in the Gulf).

Oil spills always remind me of the early 1940s when my mother would take me on a summer day to visit her niece whose husband was a shrimper on the Dutch coast. Eventually the German occupiers closed the beaches (and the dunes) as they began to build their famous Atlantic Wall against and Allied invasion. But until then the beach where my cousin fished remained open. Sometimes a large oil slick, both viscous and vicious, from a torpedoed ship would foul the beach and I was told to get into clean water, for example between two sand banks at low tide. But being only 10 or 11 that was easier said than obeyed and once I came out pretty gooey. I was marched back to my cousin's and washed with soft green soap on the sidewalk in front of her house. Very embarrassing for a naked boy and amusing to most neighbors, except a worried old woman who warned that my skin might come off (her husband had been an oiler on a merchant ship). My mother was less worried, for once when I was three I had opened a barrel of tar in her dry-goods store and it took her, she oft repeated, about half a day to get the stuff off. "He's lucky, he's got a thick skin."

I waited about a month before continuing this blog [and kept on inserting info afterwards] because it turned out that from the very beginning the information released by BP and echoed by government spokesmen was far from complete. Thus the insertion of items from different dates. It now appears that BP engaged more in PR "damage control" than in the actual control of the physical damage to the Gulf which is and will be for a long time, a socio-economic and environmental catastrophe in spite of the fact that 2,5 million feet of booms were being laid almost immediately. Evidently these booms are not very effective as crews are cleaning beaches and serious amounts of oil have entered the marshes. One environmentalist reported on CNN that in places there was more oil inside the booms than outside. Some 22,000 people [when Obama visited on 5/28 BP sent in some workers dressed in colorful, Latin looking holiday outfits caught by the camera in what looked like make belief cleaning of a not very dirty beach - it was shown again on June 2 and it still looked phony, but BP learned its lesson and in a whole page advert in the NYT of June 30, it showed local people in everyday dress, but still on a very clean beach and none of them looking very hard working], 1,150 vessels are at work and almost one million gallons of dispersants have been used. In spite of the experience with the "long ago" Torrey Canyon spill in SW England, the dispersant used now is only slightly less toxic than the oil. Dispersant sounds fine, but it merely spreads the oil rather than remove it. And unlike spills from wrecked tankers, the oil gushing from the well in the Gulf only partly arrives at the surface and much is mixed with the sea water down below well out of sight and thus also not subject to the degrading effect of the sun. Does anyone know how long this oil remains in the water or if it could be filtered out or before it is carried off by underwater currents?

Among the dribbles of information that become available are the accusations by knowledgeable people (workers on the rig)that BP once again disregarded warnings and took shortcuts in maintenance procedures. It appears that those decisions were made by fairly high up company officials who apparently still live in the pre-pipeline and explosion company culture of "don't bother, nothing is likely to happen and if it does we can take care of it and let's not stop the pumping;" changes at the very top have, it seems, had very little effect. [The NYT, 5-30-10, has more specific info about earlier worries about "key links in the chain that led to disaster" and an engineer warning of a "worst-case scenario" which he had actually witnessed elsewhere. The phrase "worst-case scenario" probably made BP think everything was ok.] Under the weekly rubric "The Way We Live Now", NYT Magazine (also on 6-6-10), David Leonhardt links this oil disaster to the recent financial crisis in an article entitled "Underestimating Risk," which argues that because some disaster had not happened before it's difficult to imagine the results and thus there's no urgency in preventing it. But drilling accidents happen regularly (which is why there was a blow-out preventer) and therefore it's inexcusable - for BP - to dismiss warning signs. Ironically this mornings ad in which Tony H. was saying once again that BP will be responsible for the clean-up, etc., he was being followed without a break by the line in which Toyota announced that every one is entitled to safety and that is Toyota's first concern. And to think that almost the first English words I learned was the motto, I think of the KLM, "Safety first,"(which having seen it written I pronounced "safetti" until my father corrected me) followed by "Narrow Escape" the name that my brother painted in 1945 on our neighbors tugboat that had never been detected by the German occupiers.Now there is no escape because safety comes in second after the bottom line.

Still more disquieting is the revelation that there has been no research and thus no innovation in the technology of prevention. All research is concerned with "spill response" or disaster containment since the Exxon Valdez (that could clearly be attributed to one man, the alcoholic captain) and other spills, including the regular "minor" spills at drilling platforms from pipelines (some 11,000 barrels on average per year). Some of that "spill response" research is paid for out of the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund maintained by the industry. No doubt this is laudable, but it seems a tacit acceptance that oil spills are an accepted risk. And why do prevention research if you believe that "nothing is likely to happen" or you rely on some other company's "automatic blowout preventer technology" (and how was that tested on deep water wells?) It was also revealed that the blow out preventer's reliability was less than 50%!!! In the Cong. hearing with the 5 CEO's they four others said that they could deal with spills, but their documents show that theirs are almost identical copies of BP's. Don't they know their lies are going to be found out?

The environmental catastrophe has become a reality and even the British CEO, Tony Hayward, of BP has finally admitted this. Oil is daily shown to penetrate the marshes and oiled animals are found dead in many places. There is of course no telling what is going on below the surface, for ex. on nearby deep sea coral reefs. Everyday more sq. miles are closed to fishing and cleaners are having health problems from breathing fumes of the floating oil they try to capture.

The financial cost, not to mention the emotional pain of the people, of this ongoing spill can only be estimated. BP's paper losses (the decline in the price of its shares) are enormous and its pay-outs to local businesses and for the cleaning will be very very large. All of this will be paid for by BP's customers and other oil/gas users, by the tax payer who has to make up for BP's reduced tax bill and in a general increase in the price of food, etc. And in spite of all the talk that BP will pay all legitimate claims and the cleanup will not cost a dime for the American taxpayer (in a commercial where Hayward is shown against the background of a clean beach being cleaned by more holiday dressed people), there will be long term residual costs long after experts and courts have decided that the clean-up is complete or BP is bankrupt and taken over.

Today (June 9) the Media talk about some more imprecise information from BP, this time about the amount of oil that still spouts out after the cap was placed on the well while some is siphoned off; the estimates are now close to 40,000 barrels or about an Exxon Valdez every 10 days or so. Also: a Reuters' Newsbreak calls for the resignation of Tony H. as well as of the Chairman of the Board [who was appointed last January after a successful stunt at Swedish telecom, expecting the new job would be "smooth sailing"]. But why only those two? After all who was responsible for the choice of Tony, who looks like a nice enough guy to be the public face. He's a trained geologist, but apparently has no inkling of what oil drilling is all about. Then there is a report in today's NYT about scientist sampling the water miles away from the well to see if there are "plumes" of oil floating below the surface (which Tony said there weren't). They found the more poisonous parts of the oil in plumes at various depths well below the surface.

June 16: Obama's speech predictedly received according to which talking heads people listen to, but then almost all of the t.h. complained about O's too slow response and of course the NYT's editorials were critical also and today it's not too happy either. But today's meeting with BP execs and the possible 20 billion fund has turned opinions as people feel they will be indemnified. Perhaps. I'm afraid that big interests will manage to get the lion's share. Also in the news is a new estimate of the oil gushing into the Gulf, maybe as much as 60,000 barrels/day or an Exxon Valdez every 4 days.

The hearings this week in the House (6-16), incl. the travesty of Mr. Barton's apology to BP - and his still more pathetic retraction at the urging of his leadership who didn't want a too public image of stupidity and greed, even though Reps Bachman, Spence and the like are using the same terms in their anti-Obama soundbites - showed that there a few "wise legislators." For these hardened ideologues R. Emanuel's "Never let a crisis go to waste," comes in handy. Tony H. used the legalese equivalent of the Fifth Amendment (and was removed from his job in the Gulf by BP the next day) but could not deny the long cost cutting and resulting failures that was spelled out in documents. But this week also clearly shows that Minerals Management section of the Interior Department continued in its lax oversight, etc. after its scandalous practices were well known, even under Secr. Salazar, who as a Republican from Oklahoma was closely connected to that bureau's personnel.

It's pretty clear that the Oil Companies, like the Wallstreet financial firms (and whoever else, habitually misrepresent the facts in the documents required to obtain government approval, licenses and whatever and in spite of Enron, etc. they get away with it.

And of course, all resulting costs are ultimately born by the consumer at large even if the most immediate cost is born by the families on the Gulf Coast (and that not only in jobs lost - perhaps for a very long time - but also in emotional insecurity. I was really shocked by an interview with a late-middle age shrimper who said:"What can I do? I don't know how to write and I can't read." It brought home the disgrace of the total disconnect between corporate decision making (and its callous disregard of its consequences)and the life of those who are ultimately at its mercy.

The preliminary reports issued in Sept. 2010, by the President's own select committee indicate that the Obama Admin. too was lowballing the damage and even tried to prevent independent scholars from publising their findings. The Adm. was alo eager to agree that the Gulf "was clean" and the oil dissipated, while in fact much of the oil had sunk to the bottom. Not very hopeful if the pronouncements at the top are sabotaged down the line (if that's what happenend).

March 22, 2011: Because of the nuclear disaster in Japan and that government's reluctance to provide information (not unlike the case of Three Mile Island) the US govt's poor record in this BP oil catastrophe came to mind. And today the NYT published in its Science Section an interview with a marine scientist whose study group discovered the gas plumes that remained below the surface and whose existence was denied. The members of the study group were dismissed as poor scientists because "they had talked to the press before having published a [scientific] paper."
The interview also deals with the lasting impact of the catastrophy on the ocean floor which looks "like a graveyard." Meanwhile BP has been plastering the t.v. since early 2012 with scenes of pristine beaches and other info that shows all is well and good now, just "cme on down."

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.