Return of the raptor?

A barred owl (the barred owl?) is on the same branch occupied several days ago by either the same bird or a different one that looks very much  the same. Since, as far as I know, it’s not possible to put ear tags on barred owls, I have real difficulties telling one from another. The one on the perch today doesn’t look quite like the one previously seen, but that could as well be my  eyes or memory. In any  event, we’re more than pleased that the perch is again occupied by a barred owl, right out where we can watch from our easy chair.

today’s barred owl

Photo by J. Harrington

If it’s not the same owl, what are the odds that the one branch on an oak tree is so ideal that two separate owls would choose it? If it is the same owl, where was it yesterday and the day before? Maybe owls are also guided by conditions like “When the moon is in the Seventh House // And Jupiter aligns with Mars” that help them determine where to perch.

I have two books about owls, Intriguing Owls and Twelve Owls. It’s been awhile since I’ve read either. Time to pull them off the shelf and see what they say about barred owls. Seems the least I can do to get to know more about a new neighbor.

The Owl

Edward Thomas - 1878-1917

Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved;
       Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof
       Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest
       Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.

Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,
       Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.
       All of the night was quite barred out except
       An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry

Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,
       No merry note, nor cause of merriment,
       But one telling me plain what I escaped
       And others could not, that night, as in I went.

And salted was my food, and my repose,
       Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice
       Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
       Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.

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A day for hope

The sun is shining; temperatures are above freezing; snow is melting! Eternal springs the hope that spring may return. To realize that, in the nadir of winter, bear cubs are being born while the mother is in hibernation; that many animals and birds are in the beginnings of mating and nesting season; that life is in preparation to continue, is more than enough reason to hope.

Maria Popova has shared a wonderful quotation by Rebecca Solnit on the idea of hope:

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.

sunshine brings hope of melting frost

Photo by J. Harrington

The quotation above also captures something I learned late in life about meaning and the future. Once I believed that meaning was something out there that we needed to find. Instead, I now believe the meaning is something we create through what we do and how we do it. I no longer accept that what the future holds  is some independent given but something we create through each action we take each moment we live.

Tomorrow may bring the return of cold, cloudy, snowy, dreary weather that makes the return of spring seem hopeless. It won’t, however, cause the bear sow to abandon her cubs; the great horned owl to abandon her eggs and nest; just as it shouldn’t cause us to abandon our efforts to make a better life for ourselves and those who will come after US.

An Old Story

By Tracy K. Smith

We were made to understand it would be

Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,

Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. 

 

Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful 

Dream. The worst in us having taken over 

And broken the rest utterly down. 

 

                                                                 A long age 

Passed. When at last we knew how little 

Would survive us—how little we had mended 

 

Or built that was not now lost—something 

Large and old awoke. And then our singing 

Brought on a different manner of weather. 

 

Then animals long believed gone crept down 

From trees. We took new stock of one another. 

We wept to be reminded of such color. 

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Misinformed, ignorant, or duplicitous?

Earlier today, our member of congress posted this on Twitter, apparently in response to Congressperson Betty McCollum's bill to protect the Boundary Waters Wilderness and  her support of the Green New Deal:

What the Tweet in question failed to mention is that the majority owner of PolyMet, Glencore, is

"the world’s largest cobalt-mining company by a long shot, achieving total production of 27,400 tonnes in 2017. According to the Financial Times, the company is aiming to increase its cobalt output to 63,000 tonnes by 2020.
To do so, Glencore has been taking steps to increase its presence in the cobalt space. It upped its involvement in the cobaltand copper markets last year, paying Fleurette Group $960 million for its stakes in Mutanda Mining and Katanga Mining (TSX:KAT), both located in the DRC."

According to the Mesabi Daily News, "Stauber’s first act: Clear path for PolyMet."

Birch Lake at the edge of the Boundary Waters

Photo by J. Harrington

It's no doubt just me being old fashioned, but there appears to be a little bit of hypocrisy and pot and kettle calling in Stauber's Tweet @BettyMcCollum04. No doubt, your mileage may vary.

The other point mention in Stauber's Tweet, with which I vehemently disagree, is that Minnesota's mining standards are "the strongest labor & environmental standards in the world." In fact, I wish Minnesota would establish a blue ribbon commission, comparable to the one that prepared a plan of action for mining reform in British Columbia. If Minnesota's mining standards were consistent with and comparable to those recommended for British Columbia, I might agree our standards are "world class." If you search this blog, however, you'll find a number of times when assertions similar to Stauber's, about the strength of our mining standards, have been challenged. In fact, it's my firm belief that, if Minnesota's standards actually were world class, and were actually followed, McCollum's Boundary Waters Protection legislation would probably not be needed.

The Wilderness 

by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Come away! come away! there’s a frost along the marshes,
And a frozen wind that skims the shoal where it shakes the dead black water;
There’s a moan across the lowland and a wailing through the woodland
Of a dirge that sings to send us back to the arms of those that love us.
There is nothing left but ashes now where the crimson chills of autumn
Put off the summer’s languor with a touch that made us glad
For the glory that is gone from us, with a flight we cannot follow,
To the slopes of other valleys and the sounds of other shores.

Come away! come away! you can hear them calling, calling,
Calling us to come to them, and roam no more.
Over there beyond the ridges and the land that lies between us,
There’s an old song calling us to come!

Come away! come away!—for the scenes we leave behind us
Are barren for the lights of home and a flame that’s young forever;
And the lonely trees around us creak the warning of the night-wind,
That love and all the dreams of love are away beyond the mountains.
The songs that call for us to-night, they have called for men before us,
And the winds that blow the message, they have blown ten thousand years;
But this will end our wander-time, for we know the joy that waits us
In the strangeness of home-coming, and a woman’s waiting eyes.

Come away! come away! there is nothing now to cheer us—
Nothing now to comfort us, but love’s road home:—
Over there beyond the darkness there’s a window gleams to greet us,
And a warm hearth waits for us within.

Come away! come away!—or the roving-fiend will hold us,
And make us all to dwell with him to the end of human faring:
There are no men yet may leave him when his hands are clutched upon them,
There are none will own his enmity, there are none will call him brother.
So we’ll be up and on the way, and the less we boast the better
For the freedom that God gave us and the dread we do not know:—
The frost that skips the willow-leaf will again be back to blight it,
And the doom we cannot fly from is the doom we do not see.

Come away! come away! there are dead men all around us—
Frozen men that mock us with a wild, hard laugh
That shrieks and sinks and whimpers in the shrill November rushes,
And the long fall wind on the lake.

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Amongst December's mysteries

Last Spring the Better Half bought four beach plum plants. They arrived bare root stock so I planted them in pots rather than expose them to pocket gophers. Late Autumn I brought the pots into the house and put two on a book case at a West-facing window and 2 in a South-facing alcove window. One of the two plants facing West has dropped all its leaves. The other has a couple of green leaves left. One of the South-facing plants has four or five green leaves and the other has about a dozen.

beach plum: no leaves

Photo by J. Harrington

beach plum: 2 green leaves

Photo by J. Harrington

All plants were potted in the same soil; spent the Summer next to each other on the deck; and were placed randomly at the windows come Autumn. I have no idea why there's such a wide range of green leaves on the four plants. It'll be interesting to see how things develop come Spring 2020 and time for new leaves to emerge.

On another strange happening to report front, something has been creating what looks like a nesting spot in the road ditch snow bank South of the driveway and just north of the field entrance for our property. Before we ended up with permanent seasonal snow cover, there were two similar depressions that, at first, I thought had been made by deer pawing for acorns. Now I'm not sure what's going on since there don't appear to be many deer tracks surrounding the "pawed" area.

beach plum: many green leaves

Photo by J. Harrington

beach plum: 4 or 5 green leaves

Photo by J. Harrington

The cold weather has chickadees, nuthatches and woodpeckers (downy and hairy, pileated has disappeared again) at the suet as well as the sunflower seeds. So far I think the red-bellied woodpecker has only been feeding on sunflower seeds but I'm not positive about that.

We're hoping the weather forecast is accurate and that warmer, actually seasonal, temperatures arrive come mid-week. Meanwhile, we at least appreciate the blue skies and sunshine that's showing up between nuisance snowfalls of an inch or so each day.

Fall Leaves Fall

Emily Brontë - 1818-1848

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away; 

Lengthen night and shorten day; 

Every leaf speaks bliss to me, 

Fluttering from the autumn tree. 

I shall smile when wreaths of snow 

Blossom where the rose should grow; 

I shall sing when night’s decay 

Ushers in a drearier day.

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Making Minnesota home #phenology

Today, the Yellow Goat's Beard (Tragopogon dubius) has come into bloom. We've been sprinkled on a few times, but not even a real shower has fallen yet. We're noticing that trees that are fully leafed-out appear much more restless, more often, than Winter-bare branches. Unaccustomed as we are to actually chilling out and enjoying a lazy day, we're going to take a crack at that this afternoon since we don't want to do yard work in the rain and aren't really in the mood to do much around the house.

yellow goat'sbeard in bloom

Photo by J. Harrington

We've almost finished reading the prose poems in Thomas R. Smith's Windy Day at Kabekona. We've taken a couple of his classes at The Loft Literary Center and both enjoyed and learned from them. Somehow, we missed his prose poetry writings until recently. As we read the blurbs on the back cover of Windy Day, we discovered another acknowledged master of the prose poem, Nin Andrews. Looks like we may have to get our hands on one or more of her volumes to add to our collection of prose poetry. We note that we've come to particularly associate the prose poem with our adopted state of Minnesota, thanks to its creation by such native or naturalized Minnesotans as Smith, Robert Bly, Louis Jenkins, and Julie Gard.

As we've proceeded with our readings in Creating Minnesota, a History from the Inside Out, we've discovered a similarity we share with its author, Annette Atkins. She's from South Dakota, and finds herself more comfortable and at home in the western, open biome of Minnesota than in the deciduous or boreal woods. We relate our identification with lands near the Atlantic Ocean and the ocean's openness with Minnesota's prairie, but we also have the benefit of having spent time in New England's North Woods in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine. Perhaps that's why we may actually be more Minnesotan than we realize, according to Atkins. She writes: "It's this passion, this visceral connection to trees and water, that informs Minnesota history, identity, and life. It's the impulse that makes Minnesotans Minnesotans." We admit to a visceral connection to trees and water, although our water has salt in it and our preferred trees tend to grow on mountains or in beach sand, but we fit Atkins' version of Minnesota impulse better than we ever will attain "Minnesota Nice."

A HOMEMADE WORLD

We all live in one, Huxley said.
Look around, and it's here,
individual as a signature.
How have you built your world?

Many people salvage bricks
from their childhood homes.
They nail the old framed
prejudices above the fireplace.

They can't see out their windows
because they've recycled the smoked
glass of fear.  Even their
books keep out light.

If you build with only
the things you've made your own,
a friendliness toward living
warms you like a patchwork quilt.

If you build your world-house
with toxic cast-offs, there's some
poison everywhere you turn.
And if you build your country

with bombs and oil instead of
wheat and schools--you can't help it,
you'll just go on electing
Disaster as your president.

--from The Foot of the Rainbow, Red Dragonfly Press, copyright 2010 Thomas R. Smith
(original appearance:  Pemmican 2010, www.pemmicanpress.com)

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How Minnesotan!

At Boom Island Park on the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, with the temperature hovering in the single digits and snow falling, Senator Amy Klobuchar, one of Minnesota's two woman US senators, has announced her candidacy for US president in the 2020 election. Here's some very interesting perspectives on her candidacy from two of Minnesota's leading political pundits, David Schultz and Eric Black. We're going to watch closely as the Democrats proceed to move toward selecting a nominee. As far as we're concerned, they self-destructed and lost the 2016 presidential election and they continue to rehash the same damn issues.

Sigurd, an essence of Minnesota, at risk to mining with Sen. Klobuchar's help?

Photo by J. Harrington

We haven't lived in Minnesota long enough to have watched the Vikings lose the Super Bowl any of their four appearances (all in the 1970s), but we have followed politics long enough to remember Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, and Walter Mondale all failed as presidential candidates, although two of them, Humphrey and Mondale, served as vice president.

We have long wondered if "Minnesota Nice" doesn't play all that well outside Minnesota, but then our East Coast brashness doesn't play that well with Minnesotans. The older we get, the more impatient we become with those who's observance of "the niceties" interferes with moving the ball down the field. But maybe the concept of being Minnesotan grows on one very slowly. We were reading Minnesota's quintessential poet, Robert Bly, before we started this posting and will return to his Collected Poems as soon as we push publish. Don't hold us to it but we're starting to wonder if this Minnesota or New England as home is actually a both / and rather than an or. We're not sure how that may play out on the political scene. We do believe that Minnesota has moved more toward the right than it was when we first moved here. We also recognize that we may have correspondingly moved toward the left as neoliberalism replaced the real thing.

The Great Society

By Robert Bly

Dentists continue to water their lawns even in the rain:

Hands developed with terrible labor by apes   

Hang from the sleeves of evangelists;

There are murdered kings in the light-bulbs outside movie theaters:   

The coffins of the poor are hibernating in piles of new tires.

The janitor sits troubled by the boiler,

And the hotel keeper shuffles the cards of insanity.   

The President dreams of invading Cuba.   

Bushes are growing over the outdoor grills,   

Vines over the yachts and the leather seats.

The city broods over ash cans and darkening mortar.   

On the far shore, at Coney Island, dark children   

Playing on the chilling beach: a sprig of black seaweed,   

Shells, a skyful of birds,

While the mayor sits with his head in his hands.

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Poetry saving America Day 11 #NationalPoetryMonth

Today's poem brings us halfway through the list of Twenty Poems That Could Save America. Tony Hoagland selected Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese" for this spot. If you would like to hear the poet herself read this work, follow this link.

wild geese

Photo by J. Harrington

Wild Geese

by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

If Hoagland has written anywhere about why he chose this particular poem by Oliver, we've been unable to find evidence of such. Oliver is known as one of America's best-selling poets. She has drawn criticism because her poetry is considered so accessible. On the other hand, Hoagland contends that poetry, to save America, should return to a mainstream position in American life and, to do so, needs to be more accessible. We lean heavily towards Hoagland's contention. Oliver has long been one of our favorites, as have wild geese. We have, and have read (and reread), a number of her volumes of both poetry and prose. Reading just the words on the page, "Wild Geese" provides us with a strong sense of relief, as well as a release from meeting expectations, our own and others. As one of the world's few superpowers, could America benefit from similar relief from the obligations that accompany such responsibility. Could such be found in a poem like "Wild Geese?". How many of us would need to read this poem, to help save America, so that the entire country could feel that sense of release? So that America could realize its "place in the family of things."

If you suffer the misfortune of being unfamiliar with wild geese, we offer "The Geese Return" from Aldo Leopold's magnificent A Sand County Almanac as inducement to become more familiar.

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Angels? Ghosts? Or ...?

We had to drive into The Cities this morning. We followed "blue highways" instead of interstates. The scenic qualities of I-35 between home and The Cities are lacking. As we proceeded in traffic under pale, gray skies toward White Bear Lake, a flock of five or six trumpeter swans flew from right to left across the road ahead of us. Some day we hope to get a good (or better) photo of white swans as they blend with low-hanging clouds.

December swans, Carlos Avery Sunrise River pools

Photo by J. Harrington

Haunting ephemera! Did we truly see something? What? A flight of angels? A shroud of ghosts? We must admit that sightings such as today's are at least one, perhaps the only, benefit of our chronic Winter overcast. Our response to visions such as we think we saw this morning certainly diminishes any SAD feelings we've been suffering. Now, one of the questions is, is this flock part of a larger group and, if so, where are they wintering? Perhaps it's part of the Sucker Lake flock? So now we're aware of a Hudson, WI flock and a different one in Ramsey County. Where else are swans overwintering locally?

Winter Swans

by Owen Sheers

The clouds had given their all –
two days of rain and then a break
in which we walked,

the waterlogged earth
gulping for breath at our feet
as we skirted the lake, silent and apart,

until the swans came and stopped us
with a show of tipping in unison.
As if rolling weights down their bodies to their heads

they halved themselves in the dark water,
icebergs of white feather, paused before returning again
like boats righting in rough weather.

‘They mate for life’ you said as they left,
porcelain over the stilling water. I didn’t reply
but as we moved on through the afternoon light,

slow-stepping in the lake’s shingle and sand,
I noticed our hands, that had, somehow,
swum the distance between us

and folded, one over the other,
like a pair of wings settling after flight

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Icing called #phenology lake turnover

Small, shallow ponds and pools in our neighborhood are now covered with skim ice. Any remaining swans, geese and ducks are being concentrated on the open water  of bigger, deeper lakes and slow-moving rivers. Yesterday, we noticed several flocks of Canada geese rafted on the Sunrise river near Highway 36. They'll probably hang around until the fields are covered in snow deep enough that there's no feed to be gleaned.

shallow pond icing in early November

Photo by J. Harrington

On the other hand, even in the North Country, near entrances to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, larger lakes like Shagawa, were still ice free and being fished from boats and canoes last weekend. We didn't check, nor did we ask, if fall turnover had happened yet. Shallow lakes don't turn over, so their heat loss proceeds more quickly due to a limited volume of water.

deeper, larger, ice free lake in early November

Photo by J. Harrington

As far as we know, waterfowl don't know, or care, about lake turnover. They focus on whether open water is available. If the snow cover on local corn fields doesn't get too deep, and local lakes such as Forest Lake stay open, we won't be surprised to see November ending and December beginning with noteworthy populations of Canada geese still hanging around, making early and late in the day flights to feed, and giving some of us a thrill at how close we can live to the wild, even without actual wilderness.

                     Flathead Lake, October

By Geraldine Connolly

The eagle floats and glides,

circling the burnished aspen,

then takes the high pines

with a flash of underwing.

As surely as the eagle sails

toward the bay’s open curve,

as surely as he swoops and seizes

the struggling fish, pulling

it from an osprey’s beak;

so too, autumn descends,

to steal the glistening

summer from our open hands.

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Grading trout streams on a curve

It would seem that Fillmore County's townships have never heard of section line roads. Few, if any local roads run straight for any significant distance. In the valleys. they parallel the creeks. On the ridge tops they follow the ridge tops. In between, there's a number of switchbacks to get between ridge tops and valleys. Here's a sample (local roads in brown, section lines in red).

some local roads in Fillmore County

Despite what you may have read about the richness of river bottom lands for farming, the farms are on the heights for the most part. Campgrounds, and cabins  are scattered along valley bottoms and state forest land covers hillsides. It's an interesting and scenic pattern, but very different than what some of us who live in more level parts of Minnesota are used to.

trout might see you even if you don't see them

Photo by J. Harrington

Much of our morning was spent reconnoitering several designated trout streams. The one that seemed  most "fishable," without requiring a machete to get near the water, or looking so shallow as to be barely short of being declared "intermittent," had a nice view, from the bridge, of a stretch where we could see several trout feeding underwater on something. We tried a soft hackle on our tenkara rod and the fish responded with the old "if you can see them they can see you and probably won't play." The Better Half tried dapping a dry fly a little further downstream with the same result. It will, no doubt, take awhile to get back in the swing of fly fishing small streams. Meanwhile, we enjoyed the wild flowers, butterflies, and what, as far as we remember, was our first "in the wild" view of a hummingbird (ruby-throated female?) feeding on streamside jewelweed.

                     Speckled Trout

By Ron Rash

Water-flesh gleamed like mica:

orange fins, red flankspots, a char

shy as ginseng, found only

in spring-flow gaps, the thin clear

of faraway creeks no map

could name. My cousin showed me

those hidden places. I loved

how we found them, the way we

followed no trail, just stream-sound

tangled in rhododendron,

to where slow water opened

a hole to slip a line in,

and lift as from a well bright

shadows of another world,

held in my hand, their color

already starting to fade.

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November, my thankful list (con't)

Every once in awhile I get the feeling that I'm being too damn cantankerous about those who would rape and pillage what's left of our natural heritage. That's when I drag out a copy of some of Edward Abbey's writings to see what real cantankerousness is. I'm thankful that Abbey was with us, even if for too short a time, that he cared as much a he did about the country in which he lived, and that he wrote as well as this:

"Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets' towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you --- beyond that next turning of the canyon walls."

Edward Abbey

from the chapter Terra Incognita: Into the Maze in his book Desert Solitaire

St. Croix River emerging from its mystery

Photo by J. Harrington

I'm also thankful that Abbey provides aspirational goals like the paragraph above as an inspiration for my own writing efforts. My turnings tend to come not in canyon walls but from river bends and curves in two track trails. Most of my swamps are "miasmal and mysterious," and I'm still looking for my poets tower. If you haven't already, check out Abbey and his writing. They were anything but flat.

Flat: Sentences from the Prefaces of Fourteen Science Books

By Bruce Covey 

1.  Mary-Frances applied continual pressure on me to start

      the job and helped in recording and editing.

2.  Thanks to Sandra for her heroic typing, although this

      need not be taken to indicate her agreement with

      various points.

3.  Peter provided information about the notorious

      perpetual pills.

4.  As someone who gloried in seeing dogma overturned,

     he would have delighted in the irony of seeing

     arguments for the reverse.

5.  And without their willingness to take on the chore of

     responding to our whims and fancies over a 3-year

     period, this book would have fallen short of its goals.

6.  The production of this tome would have been

     unthinkable without the marvelous electronic tools that

     are now widely available.

7.  However, Chapter 7 was written in a relatively self-

     contained fashion, so the serious student may skip

     Chapter 6 and delve directly into the theory.

8. The late abbess of Shasta Abbey proved that looking

     through different windows into the same room is not a

     metaphor.

9.  Nick, who is writing a book on oxygen, gave much 

     appreciated data concerning that element.

10. The filmstrip format employed in Chapter 10 originated

       with Elizabeth.

11.  I have been very fortunate in being able to use such

        penetrating minds.

12.  In recent months, I have often felt like a small child in a

       sweet shop as astronomers all round the world have sent

       me the most mouthwatering new data.

13.  Suffice it at this point to observe that I am not just talking 

       about wallpaper patterns on shirts and dresses, although

       many of these patterns do turn out to have interesting 

       properties.

14.  I do not expect that many readers will want to be 

       masochistic enough to want to read the book in order 

       from cover to cover.

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Royale pain

The Isle Royale wolves are back in the news and on the radio again. More specifically, public discussions are underway about what to do. According to Ron Madore at MinnPost, the options are:

• Let the wolves die out and leave mainland wolves to decide whether, and when, to recolonize the island.
• Let the wolves die out, then reintroduce new packs captured for the purpose.
• Attempt a "genetic rescue" by bringing a small number of new wolves to the island, in hopes that adding new genetic material will improve the population's health and resilience. This is the option now favored by John Vucetich and Rolf Peterson, longtime directors of research into the wolf/moose population balance on Isle Royale. 

From our recent trip up north, here's a very distant view of the island in question. (It's the dim land near the horizon, not the obvious islands more clearly visible.)

The question I haven't yet seen raised (and maybe I just missed it) goes like this: Both wolves and moose are immigrants to the island. If human intervention is decided upon this time (2nd or 3rd option above) how long until another intervention is needed? The island will stay an island, I presume. I recall only too well Stewart Brand's observation in the Whole Earth Catalog that "we are as gods and might as well get good at it." I also recall Einstein's thought to the effect that "God does not play dice with the world." It seems to me that any course that involves direct human intervention is playing dice with Isle Royale. We've tried before, in different times and locales, to "manage national parks. One example is documented in Playing God in Yellowstone. From my perspective, our track record as gods is less than sterling. Let's carefully consider Aldo Leopold's guidance and see if we can figure out how it would apply to the island situation. He wrote "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." I agree with the philosophy. I've simply found that sometimes, integrity, stability and beauty can be mutually exclusive. Think about it. Think also about whether wolves are iconic wild creatures or not and whether, indeed, we are as gods.

On A Moonstruck Gravel Road

By Rodney Torreson 

The sheep-killing dogs saunter home,

wool scraps in their teeth.

From the den of the moon

ancestral wolves

howl their approval.

The farm boys, asleep in their beds,

live the same wildness under their lids;

every morning they come back

through the whites of their eyes

to do their chores, their hands pausing

to pet the dog, to press

its ears back, over the skull,

to quiet that other world.

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Thanks for listening. Come again When you can. Rants, raves and reflections served here daily.

Old snow, new snow

© harrington

Wet, gray, rainy day. Snow in the forecast. I'd be more upset but I saw this year's first red-wing blackbird and remember the year it snowed three inches into my boat at mid-May's walleye opener. Enough weather, let's look at poetry. I've written about Connie Wanek, poet from Duluth, in past postings. Today's extracts are from "On Speaking Terms," which is her third book of poetry. This one published by Copper Canyon Press. We're going to look first at part of

Dog Days

Call it selfishness. Call it self-preservation.
We need ignorance,
a day on the water without the chatter
that pours out of the television,
without the picture that requires a thousand words
to disarm. We need the pines
that have stood through two hundred winters,
and the insects that live only a few hours.

Surely the planet will mend behind us
as water heals behind the canoe.
Cruelties in the fossil record are cruelties no more.
It seems our wrongs spring from our right
to pursue our own happiness,
which is a red fox running before the dogs,
dying in their teeth....

There's an awareness here of the necessity of our connectedness to nature. A speaking to the idea that we don't always know or do what's in our own best interest, or at least, if we do, we don't behave that way enough. Have you ever been in a canoe? It's path over and through water is very different than a motor boat's. Water does indeed heal behind canoes, and sail boats. Happiness is hounded by its pursuit of itself? Now, to help us celebrate our persistently tardy Spring, let's take a look at a little of

Old Snow

Thaws have taken their toll,
and once rain fell across the white hills.
The snow is half ice now,
granulated and industrial, and the men
in the yard have lost their coal teeth
and are hollow-eyed and helpless.
They've been loyal to the picket line
all winter, watching scabs come and go,...

Nature literate and grounded in place? I think there's no doubt. Trickster? What else would you call toothless snow men? Crafty and getting work done? Both, captured in picket lines and scabs. Can you fill in the assessment of Snyder's other points? Will you look for Connie's work the next time you're at your local, independent book store? Thanks for listening. Come again. Rants, raves and reflections served here daily in My Minnesota.