Timberdoodles, Transitional Ecology, and the Drilosphere
... or Skylarking o'er the Apocalypse
The sun, now taking a much broader trajectory across the horizon, sinks slower and slower as vernal equinox looms, gifting an extended twilight to this hardpan prairie. Provided the wind is still, the buzzing peent of woodcocks carries from out in the brambled thatch of early succession edgelands. The American woodcock (Scolopax minor), or if you prefer, timberdoodle, bogsucker, night partridge, brush snipe, or hokumpoke, is certainly an odd bird– plump bodied and short-legged with a rotund, outsized head and an ungainly long prehensile beak that juts forward straight as an arrow. It is crepuscular– active largely at dusk and dawn– but the sharp, far-off calls are drowned out in the morning cacophony of grackle mobs. Only at sundown do I ever hear its distinctive buzz.
The male’s aerial dance, classified as skylarking, is a rather convincing act of courtship, a spiraling glissando ascending 50-100 feet up, followed by a zig-zagging, leaflike earthward flutter. Air rushes between his primary wing feathers, producing a melodious twittering song of wind, drawing in timberdoodle hens for the next performance– a stiff-legged, bobbing, bowing march replete with vertically extended wings. If the woodcock sticks the landing, he stands a good chance of consummating the necessary action of vernal lust. But, for the male woodcock, the end result seems to be of less interest than the dance itself. He will not assist the hen in nesting, food gathering or child rearing, but instead keeps performing this elaborate courtship display for no audience in particular, weeks, or in some instances even months, after mating season.
Regardless of gender, Scopolax minor lives a life of dance– if not by gracing the dusk with heavenly pirouettes then by means of its bizarre, herky jerky skulking strut down along the dewy thatch and evening-dampened brush. Bobbing and stomping, the terrestrial cavorting bop of earthbound woodcocks may be an example of aposematism, or evolutionary survival strategies that signal to potential predators that an animal is not worth the effort of attacking or eating. Woodcocks, being slow, small, and particularly vulnerable to predation may adopt their wobbling strut, replete with bright white undertail flashing, to convey that they are aware of the predator’s presence– even if they are not actually much aware of anything.
Perhaps more likely, however, is that this activity falls into the category of worm charming, as previously detailed in the almanac. The woodcock, after all, has a uniquely articulated beak that can be plunged into damp soil and manipulated by way of its unusual bone and muscle structure to pluck out slick, wriggling worms, the keystone of its diet.
Weeks of irregular late-winter heat and brittle dryness have given way to an influx of moisture at long last, opening and expanding the fractional terrain of the drilosphere, or that portion of the soil which has been influenced by the burrowing, secretions, and castings of earthworms. In essence, there are a few major ecological groupings we can divide earthworms into– anecic, epigeic, endogeic, and epi-endogeic.
Anecic earthworms are big, dwelling in deep, unbranched vertical burrows that are capped with a mound of castings, or worm shit. They are pigmented and feed on fresh litter. Epigeic earthworms are small-sized and pigmented as well, thriving in surface litter itself, without burrowing. Endogeic worms are the pale ones that only surface when their branching horizontal tunnels flood in wet weather. They feed on soil and dwell in mineral earth rather than organic matter. Somewhere between epigeic and endogeic are, logically, epi-endogeic worms, mid-sized, pigmented worms that primarily inhabit surface litter but are known to perform some light burrowing on occasion. Taken together, this network of burrows, outlined in slime and wormshit and litter and its associated microbial and fungal communities is the drilosphere.
Beaconed to activity by warming soil temps and urged to the surface by inundating rains, knots of slimy worms seemingly blossom overnight in populations so abundant that our ducks, whom would ordinarily implore me for some spilled corn at first light, spend the dawn waddling along puddles and sodden earth, ever-plumping on bill-fuls of wriggling, unbitten annelids, performing their own jiggling strut in pursuit of writhing pink manna. I purposely strew the poultry yard with a few rotting boards and logs in key locations and turn them most morning to expose small parcels of this dirt-borne crop to the voracious beaks of hens.
As much as I like to view myself as a part of the natural world, I find earthworms a bit hard to connect to. Eyeless, lungless, and hermaphroditic, the earthworm has as much brain in its head as it does in its ass– an un-relatable if nonetheless sympathetic beast. I feel bad for their shriveling, marooned husks twitching in the sunny gravel after the rain clears, but with the knowledge that earthworms are an introduced species on this continent that has wrecked havoc on northern woodland ecosystems relying on the thick blankets of detritus they now consume, I take some joy in watching my spring feed costs shrink as the poultry fill their gullets.
Between early importations of European horticultural material, mostly trite ornamentals, and the climate-enhanced spread of populations to regions that have not hosted members of the Lumbricina suborder since the last ice age, the simple, unassuming earthworm is a ubiquitous reminder of the unintended consequence of global commerce, and dare I say, capitalism.
Varieties imported for angling bait from Asia, where earthworms are very much a keystone of native ecology, are particularly aggressive in their reproduction and consumption of forest floor debris. While there may be some treatments to reduce populations locally, performed at a substantial labor cost, the reproductive prowess of the earthworm is remarkable. It would appear that the earthworm is here to stay in North America, and native forest ecosystems are to be forever altered, their component parts of duff-loving plants and seedling trees, and the vertebrate and invertebrate animal life reliant upon them, starved of necessary nutrients.
While earthworms are but one key cause in forest decline, timberdoodles not only thrive on these non-native populations, but also upon the the cycles of anthropogenic disturbance and subsequent reemergence of woodland ecosystems, finding adequate shelter, predator cover, food and nesting locations in the transitional ecology of both freshly logged and early-succession woodlands. In our admittedly shallow understanding of complex systems, humans have a tendency to view a balanced ecosystem as static, closed, and unshifting. This is exemplified in regenerative agriculture as closed-loop functioning, the assumption that appropriate diversity can be maintained without outside influences, or in permaculture, as the “guild” system, in which the operating assumption is that we can select a few specific plant interactions to function harmoniously. However, static conditions do not prevail for very long in nature– and in a world simultaneously drowning and immolated by climate extremes, not to mention sometimes influenced more or less subtly by introduced species, habitat loss, and generalized anthropogenic disruption, the insurance of order offered by complex relationships of biology, climate, and geology is standing on an ever hollowing foundation.
Unlike much of the North America’s native flora, fauna, or original cultures for that matter, the woodcock has historically benefited from early colonial agriculture. The dynamic and textured landscape of logged out woods and field openings, and subsequent abandonment of edge lands in between (plus the importation of worms), have all formed to create a network of ecological niches for this odd bird. That said, the trend of contemporary suburbanization and field edge-to-field edge monoculture now even threatens the human-centric landscapes which harbor the woodcock. Since 1960, in spite of increased forest disturbance and earthworm populations everywhere, the woodcock population has trended downward, at around 1% per year.
The woodcock is a tiny beast of ephemera, thriving on the temporal edge of disturbance and regeneration, the dynamic re-sprouting of life reaching out from a landscape of extraction. It is a creature that subsists on change, transition, and even turmoil. And I think it’s noteworthy that such a simple, toy-like bird, with its odd, slow gait and bobble-headed haplessness and vulnerability is seemingly more equipped for said change, transition, and turmoil than our own species, or at least those of us who hold any power. Even with the much heralded arrival of artificial intelligence, the entirety of recorded historical examples of crumbled and decimated empires, the full force of Earth’s fossil energy and the prowess of both human intellect and computational processing power, we can scarcely engineer our way out of rising sea levels and killing heat at present, let alone in the next ten to a hundred years.
Capitalism inevitably leads to depletion and extraction in part because it is so singular, unsophisticated, and lacking in forethought. Contrary to its own claims of engendering innovation, it is the ideology of the least imaginative people I know. It does, however, bear one partial resemblance to the hokumpoke– or at least the male woodcock, who will sometimes spend weeks or months performing his fluttering, dangling dance for no one: artifice. But whereas the all-show-and-no-go aerial ballet of lone timberdoodles is a harm to no one, the meaningless deceit of an economic system hell-bent on entertaining us ‘til every forest is burnt and every unamused population is relegated to “humanitarian islands” is perhaps the only carefully calculated measure perpetrated in such a lumbering, oblivious monster of an economic ideology.
But in a world burning by our own profiteering hands, we sometimes are left to make lemonade out of lemons (so long as the lemon trees have not all been singed or torn out), as does the woodcock in its environment of disturbance, or in our case here, eggs out of earthworms. And the eggs are indeed abundant these days. Trapped as I am in this system, I too must convert my abundance into capital. Prior to the recent bout of rain, the earth was dry and firm enough to begin pasturing our birds by means of a handful of mobile wagons. But without meaningful rain, vegetation and insect forage out on the pasture has been minimal, and without active grass growth, the potential for denuding the landscape through early pasturing has appeared to be an unacceptable environmental risk, which is why we keep our flock limited to one fenced acre in the dormant months. As soon as we manage our biggest undertaking of the spring, the extensive tree planting project looming on the horizon, we’ll quickly transition to the rhythms of pasturing and grazing– though chances are likely that the ruminant livestock will be out soon, as green up is approaching quicker than ever this year.
Once our birds have flown their winter coop, so to speak, the bare earth in this sacrificial yard can be planted to a diverse mix of sprouting annuals like sorghum, amaranth, buckwheat and cowpea, alongside durable reemerging prairie grasses and beneath the giving limbs of mulberry, hazel, and Asian pear. It’s not a perfect system… let’s call it transitional. But until then, it is a landscape of worm-ridden boards, washed out thatch, corn-stalk trash and chicken shit– hardly the glossy brochure image of regenerative agriculture currently forced down our throats like gobs of squirming endo-epigeic protein.
Farming, even virtuous, benign farming, is aesthetically unpleasant at times, which makes the reality of farming very poor entertainment. It looks like shit, and smells even worse. And while there is plenty of charm and beauty in little things like speckled buff and blue-green eggs in a wire collection basket, neat rows of velvety piglets at the teat, or the freshly pruned boughs of fruitwood at budbreak, there is also the horror of ratholes, fly swarms, dogs full of burrs, the occasional pus-filled abscess or mud-streaked cow bellowing in the March wasteland of muck and gloom. And in order to gnaw off a sufficient enough shred of market share to sustain this project, we must keep up appearances as best we can.
I do what I can, within the constraints of physical reality. Last week, when heading out for egg delivery I had to carry my cleanest shoes to the car, so as to not track manure all the way to St. Louis. The line between the aesthetic perception of agrarian life, the reality of it, and the strange in-between of how farmers must present themselves when out in public plying their wares can be hard for me to track. A finely curated patina of bronzy dust on the boots is acceptable, or even desirable, whereas the more-common half-inch of grassy cow dung lining the bottom is uncouth. Rolled-up sleeves and tawny forearms? A must at the farmers market, but missing buttons, sooty shirt-tails, arm-hairs all clumped together with goat colostrum and, for some reason, weird cuts all over my hands are a non-starter, even though all these things are more common in reality than the disheveled elegance performed for the gentle public for which we provide such simple, nourishing extravagance. The best I can do is to carry my town shoes ‘til the risk of stepping in shit subsides.
To an extent, I like making friends and building relationships with the folks who appreciate our work and our food, and I’m happy being able to do it within the context of selling to mission-oriented grocers, or directly to the eater, rather than ever going to another farmer’s market in my life where folks are not only sizing up your produce, but your appearance. Outside of the labor, infrastructure and resource inefficiencies of small-scale, non-industrial agriculture, I would contend that one of the biggest burdens we are yoked with is taking time off the manual operations of our farms to do our own marketing. I’m amazed at how many folks appear competent at both when they employ such different skill sets. It might just be that those folks are actually only good at marketing. If you’re in the right demographic, you’ll even come across these farm marketing coaches. Without exception, they appear to be all hat and no cattle —or to put it differently— with that much skylarking, you know someone’s getting fucked. They’re definitely very clean in appearance though.
What’s clear to me is that the farmer’s market movement will always be limited by the artifice of marketing itself— the elaborate skylarking we all must perform from time to time. Personally, this shit is hard enough without having to humiliate myself every week. I wonder if instead of competing with each other over who has the most sustainable, regenerative product (the proof is in the price), we could just work together towards a system where the majority of food is raised with ecological and social integrity in mind (and ethanol is not raised at all). If instead of performing pirouettes for the well-heeled consuming public, for our “market share”, we instead did the work of replacing the status-quo food economy with something that serves those who grow and those who eat… and let the multi-national corporate fraudsters and market speculators skylark for their dinner. If they can’t improve life for us with all that power, or change the burning, crumbling, sinking course they’ve put us on, the least they can do is entertain us with a silly little dance, prior to their inevitable predation.
*peent*
I was aware that the marketing aspect of farming can be difficult, requires a totally separate skill set, and is often the least favorite part of the work farmers do. I didn't know that selling at the farmers market can be humiliating, or that there was a competition to be most regenerative. I wouldn't mind reading more about that in the future.