Entry #8: Silent Witness

Tuesday, April 11, 2017
68 degrees F

Late afternoon and I am working in my front yard, using a pitchfork to scoop chunks of composted mulch into my wobbly wheelbarrow. Dark brown in color, the mulch pile stands taller than my head; it is a rounded mountain--ten cubic yards of shredded hardwood scraps. With each thrust of the pitchfork, the mulch's earthy aroma fills my nostrils. Clouds of steam rise into the air. I breathe in the familiar smell, a combination of sweet molasses and cured tobacco. Over the coming weeks, I will spend an hour or so after work each day moving the mulch around my pollinator garden. It is an annual chore, but one I always enjoy. Filling the wheelbarrow and rolling it across my yard. Dumping the mulch into the garden, then smoothing it out with my hands. I love to watch the rich, dark mulch cover the gray, weather-worn soil. Like giving an old wall a new coat of paint.

Watching me while I work, the grand magnolia stands as a green goddess over the garden. I am constantly aware of the tree's presence. Pausing to move a strand of hair from my eyes, I study the tree, taking in the full circumference of its base. It completely consumes one half of the yard. The lower branches on the east side are beginning to grow over the sidewalk to our front door.

 "Gotta trim those branches back soon," Terry keeps saying.
 "Wait a little longer," I beg. "I don't care if we have to walk around the branches."

Above my head, I hear the twittering of a pair of chimney swifts. Careening in their courtship flight, they dive and pivot in an acrobatic ballet against the blue sky. The chimney swifts arrived in Carolina Beach last week after a flight of more than 2,000 miles from the Peruvian Amazon. I have been watching and hoping for their return. After removing the cap from our old brick chimney in 2013, Terry and I waited three years until a nesting pair of chimney swifts finally discovered it. For the second year in a row, the swifts are nesting in our chimney. Since swifts usually return to successful nest sites each year, we assume our swifts are the same nesting pair.

March 12- Our first and only
snowfall from the winter of 2017.
 It was gone by early afternoon.

Chimney swifts originally nested along the steep walls of caves and in hollow trees found in old growth forests. The arrival of settlers brought the clearing of old growth forests, but also the construction of houses and factories with suitable chimneys for nesting. In recent years, chimney swift populations have declined as newer homes are being built with narrow flues or permanently capped chimneys. Uncapping our chimney seemed like the right thing to do. While sitting in our den, we hear the drumming vibrations of their wing beats as they enter and leave our chimney. In the evenings and early mornings, their soft singing pipes down through the flue. I imagine the swifts building their half-saucer nest
of small twigs, which they will glue along the inner wall of the chimney using sticky saliva. A nest of sticks and spit--now that's resourceful! If all goes well, we will soon hear the sounds of nestlings echoing throughout our house.

April 11- A magnolia bud is
just beginning to develop.

Since beginning this blog in January, I have watched the magnolia's seasonal changes with close attention. I felt the cold winter wind and chilling drops of rain. From the top of the tree, I watched the sun rise out of the dark blue sea. In mid-March, a sprinkling of snowflakes rested on the magnolia's evergreen leaves for a few hours. Now spring has arrived for the grand magnolia. All around the tree I find the first flower buds beginning to swell in size. The magnificent flowers, nearly eight inches in diameter, will bloom from mid-May through late June. Each flower will open for only one day before the browning petals drop to the ground.


As of this year, the grand magnolia has witnessed sixty springs. Sixty Aprils. Sixty arrivals of migratory birds. I am only six years younger than the tree; I expect it will long outlive me. But for many years to come, I will continue to watch and learn from the magnolia, happy for its companionship throughout the  year. Now, it's time to get back to my mulching before darkness falls!

For photos and more information about chimney swifts, check out this link:
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Chimney_Swift/lifehistory

Entry # 7: Glimpse of a Miracle

April 1, 2017
Carolina Beach, NC

It is late in the day on a Saturday afternoon. I have dropped to my knees beneath the grand magnolia to view an architectural marvel. Close to the ground and strung between low-growing branches, a spider web gleams in the long rays of the sun. I didn't see it at first as I walked beneath the tree. But then a stream of sunlight found an opening between the leaves. Like a spotlight shining on a work of art, the beam illuminated the threads of silk.

The web is mostly round with radiating spokes and a winding spiral, the typical web design of spiders known as orbweavers, a family of more than 3,000 species. Some of the strands look ragged and worn. Near the bottom of the web, I observe an oblong hole where the silk has been torn. I do not see the web's builder, which I would expect to find hanging upside down in the central hub. No, the web appears to be abandoned. Raising my index finger, I gently touch a narrow part of the spiral band. The sticky silk attaches to my finger, then breaks apart like a cotton candy fiber.

To build an orb web such as this, the female spider must first climb up to a desired height. Once she has completed her ascent, the spider releases a non-sticky strand of silk from her spinnerets to float upon the air. If the spider is lucky, this first strand, known as the "bridge thread," will land on a distant object. After fastening the bridge thread with a button of silk, the spider creates a non-sticky frame, somewhat triangular in shape. Next come the radiating spokes to which the spider attaches a spiraling band. She slides along, lifting and attaching the silk with the smooth tarsal claws in the middle of her feet. Now that the basic web structure is in place, the spider begins to glue down the final sticky spiral. On average it takes an orbweaver about an hour to create the wheel-shaped web, which is nothing short of astounding. Only an hour to craft a masterpiece that also functions as a hanging net to capture insect prey.

The fossil record reveals that the orbweaver family, Araneidae, evolved about 140 million years ago, which means that spiders had already been weaving webs for 40 million years when the first magnolias bloomed on earth. This relationship between tree and arachnid is long indeed.

The sunlight lingers on the web for only a few minutes, allowing me a narrow time frame to admire its intricate beauty. Here is an optical coincidence in which rays of light-- do they travel in waves or particles?-- reflect from the web and pass through my corneas, which bend the rays through the pupils, and next through the convex lenses that focus the rays on my retinas where millions of light sensitive cells convert the rays into electrical impulses that travel my optic nerves to the occipital lobes at the back of my brain. A spider web! My brain thinks in 13 milliseconds. If I had been standing one inch further to the right or left, my eyes would not have caught the glimmer; the web would have remained invisible, unknown.

Such a knife's edge we walk between glimpsing a miracle and stumbling blind through the darkness.