My Mockingbird Teacher

Living among the ghosts of wild animals.

I missed something in an essay I wrote a few years ago, and I need to correct it.

“The Lonely Ruralist” published in The Georgia Review, and in it I talked about how relationships with farm animals had replaced relationships with people in my life.

I am the lonely ruralist.

I live on a farm 13 miles outside a small town in the south of Georgia. The farm was historically hundreds of acres, and we were lucky enough to purchase 46 of them. We live in a farmhouse built in 1850, on a dirt road. Our road is two miles long, and two other families live on it. Those families have dwindled to three people. We see neither of their houses from ours. What we see from our house is gardens, pasture, and forest.

For over two decades my husband, Raven, and I have been able to merge our work into the rest of our life. We don’t have a work life and a home life—we just have a life. We have a quiet, rural life.

Sometimes we see our neighbors driving past, and sometimes we see a delivery person, but mostly we see no one.

~*~

What I wrote about before was how I interact with and study the farm animals. Their lives are endlessly fascinating, and I learn so much from them.

Here’s what I realized and wish to correct.

I also interact with the wild animals. Their lives are endlessly fascinating. I study them and learn so much.

For example, a couple of months ago I watched a pair of mockingbirds build a nest in a tangle of coral honeysuckle growing up a snag in the butterfly garden. I could see them working from the kitchen table, where I do my work.

In last week’s Trackless Wild I told you that the babies had fledged. One airlifted herself into the goumi berry bush, and that day I had watched her as I picked and ate berries. She was only two feet from me, and I could have reached through the thick stems of bush and touched her. Instead I studied the adorable brown spots on her pearly breast, and I listened to the baby noises she was making.

All week I’ve watched the parents taking care of the two fledglings. Seven days have passed, and the babies are still acting like babies. The parents feed them. The babies flex their wings. They have flown farther distances and a bit more daringly each day. But still. The nest is not empty.

Some days I look up to see four mockingbirds on the deck railing. I worry like the parents worry. Will they ever grow up? Will they ever learn to catch their own insects? Will a snake get them?

~*~

I watch hummingbirds do their mating dances. The dance is like trapeze—they fly down and then up, in the shape of a U, down and up, down and up. It’s an incredible, majestic circus act.

Today going out for the laundry I saw a flicker in the redbud tree, or as she is known in my myth-making, The Tree Who Births Snakes. Sure enough, a snake was in the tree, climbing. At first glance I thought it was a yellow rat snake, since over the weekend Raven caught and relocated four—four!—gigantic ones wadded up with each other in some kind of orgy. (We’re eHarmony over here for the rat snake population.)

Upon closer examination, this snake turned out to be a water snake, the kind with a pink belly. She had obviously fed, because a sizable lump—about the size of a fledgling mocker, if I tell the truth—swelled her middle. Oh my gosh, that set Carolina wrens buzzing their alarm call, and then I noticed that the call of a nearby cardinal changed. I have heard this call many, many times, and finally I am realizing that it may also be an alarm call.

What else?

A skunk crossed a pasture.

On Monday a swallow-tailed kite dipped down within ten feet of the ground right off the deck. I was inside the house, arguing with my grown daughter, who was working at my house for money. I hate arguing, and I love my daughter, and I can’t understand some of the choices she’s making. I miss her. I’m worried about her. Then the kite appeared.

What else? Butterflies. Hornets. Native bees. Toads. An otter down at the pond. A V of 20 white ibis overhead. Black-bellied whistling ducks. Armadillo holes in the yard. Frogs in the marsh. The crepuscular chuck’s-wills-widow still calling. Bats jerking through the barnyard air. More killdeer than I’ve ever seen. A lone great blue heron flying home at dusk.

Photo by Crumbstarz, used by arrangement.

~*~

During much of the three¹ million years of human evolution, we had countless interactions with animals. For most of this time we enjoyed a plentiful, abundant, inhabited earth, what we now call biodiversity. We were constantly interacting with animals,

• watching them

• listening to them

• stalking them

• killing them

• eating them

• laughing at them

• running from them

• chasing them off

• scolding them

• veering around them

• stepping over them

• brushing them off us

• feeling them

Now most of us, most of the time, get little to none of this.

I think there is something deeply satisfying—deeply meaningful—subconsciously right—truly precious—about our interactions with animals.

~*~

Once I wrote about an experience in which a mother manatee swam up to me, looked me in the eyes, and spoke to me. “You must help us,” is what she said. That was such a powerful experience that when I got to the surface of the limestone spring and found a place shallow enough to stand, I sobbed and shook and sobbed and shook.

I know what I heard.

~*~

We humans have been interacting with animals for longer than we’ve been talking.

Homo habilis was probably capable of rudimentary speech.

To be honest, the speech we still have is rudimentary. In what language do I speak of the plea from the manatee? What language do I use to talk about the wren that landed on me a few weeks ago as I sat outside writing? Are there words to theorize why the swallow-tailed kite arrived when she was needed, and what she brought in her little medical bag?

~*~

I’m surrounded by birds, by birdsong, by fox-bark and bat-dive, by deer-snort and turkey call.

~*~

However.

Consider this fact: the place I live was a thriving village 150 years ago. Hundreds of people who lived nearby are gone. I am surrounded by more ghosts than real people.

In this place we have also lost—perhaps not permanently but to all extents and purposes—

• the Carolina parakeet

• the woodland bison

• the red wolf

• the ivory-billed woodpecker

• the king vulture

• the passenger pigeon

and many many more beings.

The population numbers of all species are way, way down.

Even with bat-whistle and wren-buzz, I am surrounded by more ghosts of animals than real animals.

~*~

I heard Craig Foster, the filmmaker who made My Octopus Teacher, say that we humans get scared with the loss of biodiversity. We subconsciously look around and see barrenness where there should be fecundity. It’s terrifying. We know there’s not plentitude, not enough to draw from.

~*~

The ghosts scare me because I miss the teeming world that was. My loneliness has something to do with this.

And one last thing I’ll say: The animals miss you.

Photo by James Holland.

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Happy Full Moon

This month’s full moon was named by poet M.K. Creel. Rat Snake Moon. She sent me a poem that she wrote about it this week, and I never thought another minute about coming up with a name for the May moon. Rat Snake Moon works perfectly well. M.K. has now published the poem on her Substack, A Small Spectacle.

And Thank You

I especially want to thank the underwriters of Trackless Wild. Your support makes these offerings possible. I thank you sincerely for giving me the opportunity to do this work without worrying about paying bills or a bank account dipping below zero or if I’m able to buy a new pair of boots since the sole is flapping on my old pair and the glue doesn’t work. I sincerely hope these essays bring you hope and joy and inspiration. If there’s anything I may be able to help you with, please be in touch. If there’s a topic you’d like me to address, I’d love to hear it.

Peace be with you all. We’re a beautiful community.

1. This figure is in question, of course, and may go back another few million years.