Paleobrain and spring bird song

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Note: This program first aired May 9, 2015. 

Spring, such a sweet word here on the 44^th parallel. All winter long we ache for it, and then suddenly it’s here, and it is a revelation each and every year. And the revelations are for all of the senses. Visually things reappear as the snow pack melts, dog toys, garden tools, the tiny green shoots of the chives and the daffodils. When the air warms and moistens, smells return-rotting leaves, broken balsam branches, open water. Your skin knows it is spring by the warmth of the sun on your face, the softness of the humid air on your body, and the rare and joyful days when you can walk outside without a jacket. For me though, the sense that is most enlivened by the start of spring is the auditory one; as much as I love the warm air and sunlight, the increasingly complicated soundtrack of spring is the sign I love best.

Winter is a season of silence, punctuated by gusty wind, the breaking of snow laden branches and the twittering of the same familiar avian cast at the bird feeder: chickadees, nuthatches, juncos, gold finches, purple finches, redpolls, tit mice, blue jays, and downy and hairy woodpeckers. During the right kind of storm, if you are patient, you can hear the snowflakes hitting the ground. Go for a walk on a bright cold morning and the snow creaks under your boot steps. Sparse is winter’s soundscape.

Spring by contrast is an every growing cacophony. This winter was cold enough that our precipitation was all snow, and the sound of the spring’s first rainstorm on my metal roof was a delightful surprise. More so than weather, the sounds of animals coming back to life are what most of us think of as the sound track to spring. Chickadees may have been singing since January or February, but the woodcock is the first bird I hear that tells me that winter’s back has indeed been broken. Next comes the phoebes, and the wood frogs, then hermit thrushes, then the peepers. I heard a familiar whistle and looked up to see a broad winged hawk pass overhead. Soon sunrise will bring with it the restless tuning of a symphony of little warblers. Our current cold gray weather has slowed the progression of spring migration, but when the sun comes back out and the air starts warming in earnest, each day will bring a new voice to the outdoor audio mix.

As this happens, I would encourage you not to worry about identifying the bird you are hearing, at least, not at first. Just let your brain do what it does best, let it tune into the sounds around you out side. Like an old fashioned radio, you just need to spin the dial to the background bird frequency and your brain will do the rest. Suddenly without realizing you heard anything, an awareness will bubble up into your consciousness that you just heard something you don’t recognize, or do recognize but haven’t heard yet this season. Many a spring morning I have been draw into consciousness, pushed out of that light early morning sleep by that just below the conscious part of my brain, as it got excited by hearing a new bird song, and had to wake me up to share the excitement. We are evolved to do this, to pay close attention to the goings on in the world around us. All of our senses, dulled as they are by modern life, have hundreds of thousands of years of accumulated  evolutionary honing for just this purpose. A couple hundred years of being industrialized doesn’t make that go away.

There’s good genetic evidence for this too, scientists have shown that humans and birds use the same genes to fire up the same parts of their respective brains used in communication. I don’t know if birds’ brains are stimulated when I talk to them as I walk through the woods, but I am sure that my human brain responds to bird song, even when I am not consciously listening to birds, and it is a remarkable experience. So this spring let yourself just hear the birds, let your brain recognize and sort out the different songs, get familiar with the patterns and then you will notice when they change. This is the brain’s true work.

References:

Genetic evidence for birds and humans sharing communication genes: https://today.duke.edu/2014/12/vocalbird

Ok, but I still want to know WHAT birds I am hearing: http://birdcast.info/forecast/24-april-1-may-2015-forecast-and-thats-a-cold-shot-baby/#MidwestNortheast

If nothing else, listening to the birds will make you feel better: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494413000650

December Darkness

Note: This program first aired on December 20, 2014.

It’s December in Maine, and I know people who hate this time of year, people who struggle with the darkness. People who utter a quiet little curse at the summer solstice when the days start to get imperceptibly shorter, and wail and gnash their teeth out loud at the fall equinox when the balance tips in favor of the night. For them the winter solstice means hitting rock bottom, with only the faintest brightness that from here on out for the next 6 months, the days start getting longer.

I have to admit publically, and I may lose some friends for this, that I love this time of year. I love waking up in the dark, and burrowing in to home and hearth in the late afternoon. I love the long nights and late mornings. The pace of modern life is so mismatched to the natural seasonal rhythms here at the 44^th parallel, we rush off to work in the morning, stay until late afternoon, come home after sun down. Of course the long nights and short days feel untenable. But if you can give your self the mental space to touch base with your inner self, call it your ancestral self, I think you will find, as I have, that these long nights serve a purpose. Your body knows what it is.

As the days grow shorter in the late fall, I have a harder time going out to run. I start thinking about yoga instead, and I restart my meditation practice. I stop eating salad, and instead roast root vegetables by the pan full. I do this because it is what feels right, because I trust the ancestral knowledge in my cells, because my body evolved with seasonal patterns, and the past 150 years of human evolution (or lack thereof) hasn’t erased them.

If you look around the natural world for cues this time of year, every one of them will tell you to settle down, to rest up, to wait. Deciduous trees draw their sap down underground and wait out dry and the cold of winter. Many mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and insects spend this time in a state of suspended animation, living off the bounty of summer, waiting for the next productive season to come. In learning to embrace winter I do not suggest truly hibernating, or hardening yourself against the cold; instead use this time as a resource. Nature bids us inside, and provides us with quiet. Take these moments to rest your self and let your mind settle, these moments are fleeting and rare in our modern lives. One of the reasons we find the holidays so stressful is that we’ve let them become a time of arousal and glitter, parties and over indulgence instead of reflection. Everyone I know who celebrates Christmas tells me the same story; their favorite thing is to sit quietly in their living room looking at the lit up Christmas tree, the rest of the lights off, families asleep. Silent night indeed.  We are seeds, waiting in the frozen soil, we are chipmunks resting in our burrows, we are chickadees flying at day break, we are wood frogs frozen in the leaf litter, we are white tailed deer yarding up in a cedar swamp, we are humans negotiating an increasingly complex world here half way between the equator and the pole.

We’re coming up fast on the Winter Solstice, the moment when the Earth’s axis of rotation points us in the northern hemisphere as directly away from the sun as possible. It will be another 6 weeks or so before we notice that the days are getting longer, at about that time the plants will start to notice too. In the mean time, stoke up the fire, turn off the lights and plug in your Christmas tree, or light a candle or look out at the stars and the moon. Take this dark time for what it is, a gift not a curse. Happy solstice everyone.

References:

http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/december-solstice.html

Rewilding

Note: This program first aired December 13, 2014.

The more I read and the more I see, the more I’ve been feeling lately, that my life is increasingly irrelevant in this world. Or better put, the way I live is increasingly irrelevant. I feel that the world has rushed by eastern Maine, or hurtled past, perhaps when I had my head down weeding carrots in the garden, or while I was in the wood shed stacking firewood, and I am just now noticing, feeling the pull of the vortex created when all that energy and technology blew by.

Currently more than half of the people in the world live in cities, and that trend is expected to continue, by 2050, more than 66 % of people world wide will be living in urban areas. In North America alone 82% of people live in cities, the highest percentage in the world, which is probably why I feel this irrelevancy so acutely. I feel like I live in the land time forgot. Just to be clear, I know that by global standards, eastern Maine is not the land time forgot. We have power and plumbing and the interweb and all that, but by America standards we are a quiet and aging back water in a country that worships youth and speed and technology.

I feel irrelevant when I hear yet another story on the radio about how awesome Copenhagen is, with its high standard of living, its elevated bike paths, or its green roofs. Or how Helsinki is getting rid of cars, or about the latest apps for ordering pizza to be delivered at the push of a button and the calendar that learns your daily routine and suggests ways to save time during the day. When I go into a city I feel overwhelmed, astonished to be reminded just how many people there are on this planet, how many lives are being lived simultaneously. I wonder where the food comes from, where the heat comes from, where the water goes.

And at the same time I am feeling irrelevant, another feeling rises up in me, one that says that not only I am not irrelevant, but that my way of life is exactly the opposite, it’s the most relevant thing you can be doing right now.  When I get home from work, my house is cold. To get it warm, I have to start a fire. To start a fire, I have to bring in wood. Wood from trees my husband cut down around our house and our neighborhood. Much of the food I eat grew in earth I have nurtured. I fed and watered the chickens and ducks and pig that fill my freezer. I can see the path my survival takes from earth to warmth and fullness, and I play an integral role in it. To me this seems perfectly relevant, this life filled with details of natural rhythms and sunset, moonrise, snow fall.

In having this feeling rising inside me I am not alone. There’s a movement out there, gaining steam, changing lives. Its called Rewilding, a term borrowed from conservation biology. In its original context it referred to restoring chopped up urban and suburban landscapes and connecting those landscapes on large scale levels, to ensure that high trophic level predators would have enough connected habitat to survive and thrive. In the human context it means taking actions to connect your self back to the natural world and your own survival. It includes hard core survivalists preparing for the zombie apocalypse, primitive skills aficionados, herbalists, botanists and edible landscape enthusiasts, and soccer dads making tea from the flowers in the back yard. Every action counts, this is a big tent kind of a thing.

Some will critique this as a first world issue, though the most rapid 21rst century urbanization will be taking place in the global south, and it isn’t clear exactly what economic opportunities that rapid urban migration will yield, as most of that expansion will come in the form of urban slums with no services. Others may say that I am speaking from a place of privilege, and it is true, on a global scale, I am incredibly privileged, and I am using that privilege as a soap box to stand on to call it like I see it. Any actions you can take to be connected to or aware of natural rhythms and the unbreakable laws of nature will improve your life in ways you may not understand at first. You can do this in a city, you can do this in the country. Here in the land time forgot, rewilding is sort of a no brainer. Its not even re-wilding, many of us never got that domesticated to begin with.

References:

 

The UN World Urbanization Prospects 2014 http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Highlights/WUP2014-Highlights.pdf

A sample of the human rewilding movement popping up in this country: http://rewildu.com/

Car free perfection in Helsinki: http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=14-P13-00048&segmentID=2

More about how awesome Copenhagen is: http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=14-P13-00048&segmentID=3

Pizza app: http://www.businessinsider.com/12-hot-new-apps-that-came-out-recently-2014-9?op=1

The calendar that “learns how you do thing and suggests ways to make you better” http://www.businessinsider.com/11-hot-new-apps-you-may-have-missed-2014-8?op=1

Bears love donuts, and so do we

Note: This program first aired October 25, 2014.

 

I’ve been trying to avoid election propaganda and advertising this election cycle, not having a TV goes a long way towards that goal. As a naturalist though, it is hard to miss the rhetoric around the upcoming referendum about bear hunting methods here in the state of Maine. Bear baiting in particular got me thinking about how we’re really not so different, the bears and us.

Bear baiting is a hunting method where by food is left in the woods consistently in an attempt to attract the bear and train it to return to the same spot repeatedly during the hunting season. The hunter hides in a blind near by and shoots the bear when it returns. Here in Maine the season for hunting with bait is most of the month of September, and the baiting/habituating process can begin as early as the end of July. Typically the food used is old fast food, fryolator grease, and donuts and pastries, though really anything can be used.

So why does bear baiting work? And by work I mean, bears come to eat the food. The obvious answer is that they are hungry. As wild animals they spend their entire lives looking for something to eat. For bears, their need is even more extreme. They need to eat enough to not only survive, but also get obese enough to survive a winter of not eating. In the wild they work hard to get these calories from berries and other fruits, insects both adult and larval, live prey and scavenged carrion. Up to 90% of their diet is plant based, mainly fruits, which come in waves during the growing season. Strawberries, then pin cherries, then blue berries, then raspberries, then choke cherries, you get the idea. With this in mind it isn’t a great leap to hypothesize that bears are adapted to seek out sweet flavors, if fruits make up as much as 90% of their caloric intake.

I know another animal that seeks out sweet flavors, and like the bear, this habit can be its undoing. Humans are adapted by evolution to seek out sweet flavors, salty flavors and fats. These three tastes represent nutrients that were extremely limited or difficult to come by in our evolutionary history. By evolving a preference for them we have trained our cells to seek them out. This by the way is another way to define addiction, and it is no exaggeration to state that humans are addicted to sweet, salts and fats. But being addicted to something that is very limited in the environment, not to mention also beneficial in small quantities, isn’t so bad a thing. The problem of course is that these nutrients are no longer limited in the environment, but we are still addicted to them. This fact, along with changes to our microbiomes, sedentary lifestyles and increases in chronic estrogenic chemical exposures have led to the obesity epidemic we face today.

Bears, just like us, seek out sweet and fat, a slave to their genes. They, unlike most of us, are seeking obesity. Baiting bears with donuts holds up a strange sad mirror, reflecting poorly on our own sad lives. Their weakness, their physiologic need mirrors our own, with bad results for both of us. Bears love donuts, and so do we.

References:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4618562

http://www.mfoa.net/animal_activism_events/activism/black_bears_analysis.html

Them’s the rules: http://www.mfoa.net/animal_activism_events/activism/black_bears_analysis.html

About black bears: http://www.esf.edu/aec/adks/mammals/black_bear.htm

Michael Moss’s book about the flavors we are drawn to: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/books/review/salt-sugar-fat-by-michael-moss.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0