Ralph Waldo Emerson, I’d like a word—and bring along Henry David, too, because September is National Botfly Month, at least for white-footed mice in the Brockport Woods. Pick up a mature white-footed mouse in September and there’s a decent chance that it will carry one or more botfly larvae nestled in its groin. Each larva chews a breathing hole through the mouse’s skin, and there it lies: softly pulsating, living the good botfly life. A full-grown larva might be three quarters of an inch long and weigh one gram, about five percent of an adult mouse’s weight—equivalent to a 7.5-pound larva in a 150-pound human. Shades of Alien, although there’s no spectacular explosion from the mouse’s chest, just a soft, rhythmic writhing before the mature larva exits the mouse, goes to ground, and pupates. Come spring the surviving pupae metamorphose and emerge as adults who devote their short lives to reproduction. Botfly eggs, which females lay near rodent burrows or runways, will hatch quickly after exposure to the subtle increase in temperature caused by a passing mouse. The tiny larvae latch onto the wandering host, usually near the nose or mouth—openings they’ll use to enter the mouse before migrating to the groin, where they’ll grow fat and happy in their warm and sheltering home. All god’s creatures, great and small. About those botflies. Over the decades I’ve mostly grown inured to the gruesome things that field biologists inevitably encounter, but sometimes my stomach does a small two-step at the sight of a full-grown botfly larva, softly turning beneath its mouse-skin blanket. My digestive distress soon dissipates, but a deeper psychic angst does not. Partly it’s the ghastly physical presence of a full-grown botfly, but there are larger issues here. “There seems to me too much misery in the world,” wrote Darwin, and for me botfly larvae represent this overabundance of suffering and pain. That’s a lot of symbolic weight for a one-gram parasite to bear, but still: that writhing mass, so foreign in its otherness, just beneath the mouse’s skin. (And yes, there also are human botflies, although they are mostly tropical and their life cycle differs from that of a mouse botfly.) And so to Emerson and his declaration: “I will be a naturalist.” Ah, but Ralph Waldo, you were an armchair naturalist, inclined to a warm hearth and your comfortable Concord lodgings. For you an expedition into “Nature” might involve a trek across a snowy village commons— and from that congenial position you could declare, “I am impressed with a singular conviction that not a form so grotesque, so savage, or so beautiful, but is an expression of something in man the observer.” Maybe, but I’d like to drag your ghostly philosophical butt out into the Brockport woods, hand you a white-footed mouse with two or three Boone and Crockett-sized botfly larvae, then ask if “Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.” Enlighten me as to what we might confront in the Transcendentalist’s mirror as it reflects the image of a botfly larvae onto our “transparent eyeball(s)”? Perhaps Thoreau would have been better equipped to grapple honestly with issues raised by mouse botflies, whether as metaphor or fact. As his short life progressed Henry David became more and more entranced with details of the natural world, with observation and collecting what we would call data, whether on the depth of Walden Pond or the phenology of plants growing around Concord—a practice that Emerson admonished him for. Thoreau’s field studies must have exposed him to pain and suffering in the natural world and perhaps he could have engaged with the philosophical difficulties raised by botflies, just as he acknowledged the “worms, which even in life and health, occupy our bodies.” Henry David saw the world as “savage and awful, though still beautiful,” which is one powerful way to describe mouse botflies. My white-footed mouse-studies involve weighing, sexing, and marking every individual that I catch. To do so I grasp the mouse behind its ears, much like a kitten, and there’s usually a point when the two of us are face-to-face. And sometimes I wonder: what exactly does the mouse see through those bulging, black-brown eyes? What do I look like, and what exactly is going on in that tiny mouse-brain as it regards me from the far side of a gulf that arose 80 or 90 million years ago, when the paths leading to rodents and primates diverged? In the words of Henry Beston, mice may be “other nations”--yet domestic rats have emotions and there must be some mouse analog to what humans call fear, similar to what I once felt when I jumped a grizzly bear dozing on a caribou carcass, an “I-am-about-to-be-breakfast” jolt of adrenalin-laced panic. Thus my sympathy for the mice, a fondness and concern bred from decades of familiarity, some sense of shared experience, and the string of data that trail across the decades—sex and age ratios, timing of reproduction, survivorship and movements, population fluctuations. Brothers and sisters in placenta and fur, milk and neurons, our worlds—mouse and human—turn. And so those botfly larvae gnaw away at me—figuratively, rather than in the literal way that they do in the mice. Which brings me to theodicy, or the attempt to explain the existence of evil (such as pain and suffering) in a world created by an omnipotent, good, and just god. This is a central conundrum for Christianity. Most folks who have grappled with the issue have focused on human suffering—why do we deserve god’s wrath, and the shit-storm of anguish that haunts human experience? But some people have also thought about theodicy in relation to the suffering and pain endured by non-human animals. It’s a difficult thing to do, though. As C. S. Lewis noted, “the Christian explanation of human pain cannot be extended to animal pain. So far as we know beasts are incapable either of sin or virtue: therefore they cannot be improved by it.” A 2003 discussion of “Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil” discussed several possible ways of dealing with the issue, none of which make much sense to me:
And so theodicy seems to have reached a dead end, at least in regards to non-human animals. There is no sensible cause-and-effect theological explanation for non-human animal pain and suffering, only the obvious Darwinian one: organisms adapt as best they can to their environment, with individuals of each species pursuing their own selfish ends. Selection should favor both hardy white-footed mice that survive invasion by botfly larvae, as unpleasant as it must be, and botfly larvae that do not harm their hosts too much--and this more or less seems to be the case. If this view of life seems bleak, to me it’s far less so than a world view that marries the existence of an omnipotent, good, and just god to any of the explanations for animal pain and suffering that I mentioned above.
But what to take away from the story of the mouse botfly and its long-suffering host, other than a slight queasiness of the stomach and far greater discomfort of the soul? I see no harmony of nature there, no Emersonian “currents of the Universal Being.” But what I do see and feel is the terrible, aching beauty of life going on, of two small creatures (one cute, the other not so much) grappling with one another across the millennia. Twenty-nine years of close familiarity with both species, of weighing and measuring and thinking—science!—has helped me see that much. And this sense of going on—well, we humans do that, too. We struggle with our own botfly analogs—sometimes physical, more often than not spiritual—and mammal-centric being that I am, I take great comfort in the sheer perseverance of those white-footed mice, their battles with “worms” and owl talons, fox teeth and long and bitter winters. And so I’ll give a final nod to Thoreau, coming off Katahdin: “Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?” Thoreau knew, and so he wondered.
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I first came to the desert in 1969, during my freshman orientation at Prescott College. I felt an immediate and powerful attraction to the arid expanse of the Colorado Plateau and soon widened my explorations (and love) to include the Mojave, Sonoran, and Great Basin deserts. I was drawn—in a primal and innate way—to the calcined playas, the spare and empty lands, the naked rock, the backlit xeric ranges, the fractals of light and space that dominate the arid West. Heat and drought are integral parts of these landscapes and back in the 1970’s there was a point in my aesthetic evolution where I learned to embrace these things, too, as I chased feral burros through what was then Death Valley National Monument. And if anything my more recent obsession with the Inyo Mountains salamander, the many months of fieldwork in a country where water feels like an afterthought, has deepened my connection to the desert world. And yet my travels this summer, through a multitude of heat-blasted, drought-scourged, smoke-choked western landscapes, from mountain and forest to desert, wore me down. I learned a new language of catastrophe and I liked neither its syntax nor its vocabulary: heat domes, pm 2.5 air quality, a Tier 1 water shortage declaration for the Colorado River. I lost nothing along the way and suffered from little except inconvenience, and so my experiences were only the thinnest of notes from a much larger atonal symphony, as if Arnold Schoenberg had risen from the dead and brought his twelve-tone technique to twenty-first century atmospherics: 120° during an afternoon rush hour in Las Vegas; a mid-June absence of snow at 12,000 feet in the High Sierra; the Pioneer Range in Montana, shrouded in wildfire smoke and invisible from only five miles away; week after grinding week of 90°- and 100°-plus temperatures; an August campsite in a grassy meadow below Glacier Peak, where thick ice had lain fifty or sixty years before; and a cultural conflagration of sorts, a field of MAGA flags flapping against a smoke-strangled central Washington sky. No locusts, boils, frogs, or lice, though—just the Four Horsepeople of the Apocalypse riding hard across the American West, savaging the land and its people: heat, drought, and wildfires, plus a pandemic of human cussedness and intransigence. But just the facts, ma’am:
In late August the persistent stress of heat, drought, and wildfire smoke—leavened by the spike in Delta variant Covid-19 infections—helped send me scurrying back to western New York and what I somewhat surprisingly thought of as “home,” having felt like a partial exile for most of my thirty years in the region—never quite settled, always looking West. Yet there was a deeper psychic burden associated with my retreat, as frustrations with the summer’s extreme weather morphed into a more profound and general angst about climate change and the Earth’s slide toward some seemingly inevitable tipping point. But then a perfect late-summer’s day greeted me as I drove the final miles of my traditional I-90/I-80 eastward vector, an afternoon resplendent with brilliant air and the drift of electric-white cumulus clouds, the great blue sweep of Lake Erie to the north and west. And everywhere a rush of green in all its chlorophyll-rich magnificence, a riotous expanse of tree and vine and lush agricultural fields sprung from a fortunate intersection of climate, geography, and glacial history. And a few days later, during a long and lovely run along the Erie Canal, this rich palette of greens and blues welcomed me in an unfamiliar but blessed way. Although a string of gray and dreary weeks will undoubtedly trail through the region from November through March, on that early September day there was this great rising of sunlight and azure sky, plants and wind-chopped water—relief for my parched mind and body, on a morning that triggered more than a small splash of joy. And while most models suggest that in the coming decades the Great Lakes region will experience some effects of climate change, I suspect that western New York will escape the worst damages inflicted by rising temperatures and seas, apocalyptic hurricanes and forest fires, and diminishing air quality and precipitation. In spite of all the bad climate news that just keeps on giving, there’s something comforting about living next to twenty percent of all the fresh surface water in the world, where on a late summer’s day green and blue still feel like the dominant colors of the earth. Perhaps western New York will experience an economic and social renaissance in the coming decades, as climate refuges flock to the region and Rochester again becomes known as the “Flour City.”
Climate change and my associated discontent aside, I’m not sure what retirement and 2022 will bring—but I suspect that next April will find me deep in the Inyo Mountains, probing the dun-colored, arid lands. The salamanders and their desert silence await and sometimes I still imagine a move out West, perhaps to Montana or the far side of the North Cascades. And yet in the long run water and chlorophyll might help hold me here. “Thousands have lived without love,” wrote Auden, “not one without water”—and there is much to be said for a pigment that reflects green light, drives oxygen production and carbon dioxide uptake, and clothes this part of the world in such fecund and emerald beauty. |
AuthorI am a professor emeritus of Environmental Science and Ecology at SUNY Brockport. What began in 2017 as a sabbatical blog continues in a haphazard way, as the spirt moves me and time allows. The focus, though, remains the same - the natural world, in all of its complexity and beauty, and our relation to it. Archives
November 2023
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