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Hawks and Eagles

Silent Spring was published in 1962. Alida, the daughter of a neighbor was bookkeeper for Griggs, an office supply and book store in downtown Bellingham. Griggs closed in 2014 after a 100 year run. Alida brought home a copy of Silent Spring. Her family read it. They lent their copy to my dad and mom. Dad, Mom, and I all read it.

The neighbors were big fans of Carson. Their family was inclined to extremes. At one point, they became vegetarians. During their vegetarian phase, the patriarch of the clan was a frequent guest at the heavy platters of the roast beef from cull dairy cows that were the mainstay of the Waschke Road diet. The vegetarian distraction did not last long, but the patriarch’s frequent appearance at our dinner table colored the reaction of my parents to his enthusiasm for Rachel Carson.

Dad was not a fan of chemical herbicides and pesticides. He often talked about the declining effectiveness of DDT. When he first applied it around the cattle, he said the barn flies died so quickly, he swept a black carpet of fly carcasses from the barn floor. The next time he sprayed, flies died, but not as fast or in as great a quantity. Within a few years, he said DDT scarcely worked.

Sometime in the 1960s, burdock, the invasive weed that inspired Velcro, became a problem in the barnyard and the outskirts of the woods. Burdock burrs got in cows manes and tails and had to be cut out. Without tending, wads of burrs grew softball sized and interfered with the cows’ feeding. For a while, Dad carried a hand pump sprayer and spot sprayed burdock with 2 4.D, the broad leaf herbicide, like people use glyphosate (Roundup) today. That lasted about a season before he decided that a grub hoe was cheaper and more effective. For a couple of years of we carried around grub hoes and rooted out every burdock we saw before seeds formed. Then the burdock practically disappeared and the grub hoes stayed in the tool shed.

Dad continued to use chemicals, but he was always skeptical. He maintained chemicals were most effective if they were used lightly as a supplement to traditional cultivation and weeding, but he never said they were bad, just over used.

But let me get back to Rachel Carson. She predicted that bird populations, especially birds of prey like hawks and eagles, would decline if DDT and other pesticides and herbicides continued to be used indiscriminately. She hit the right note at the right time and eventually the environmental protection act was passed.

You can argue that the EPA is an unwarranted extension of government and a bureaucratic nightmare, but I disagree. I’ll go along that most large organizations have elements of inefficiency and confusion—I developed software products for several Fortune 500 corporations and I will testify that if the Waschke Homestead had been run like a corporation, we all would have starved long ago.

Some people think government is less efficient than private enterprise. I disagree there too. I’ve executed software contracts with the Department of Defense, Allstate Corporation, NATO, Deutsche Bank, and dozens of other large organizations. Both government and private enterprises can be run well or badly. Good ones are effective and efficient, bad ones are incompetent and wasteful. And small business is not off the hook. It’s quality that counts, not private versus public, big versus small.

We could use more good businessmen in government, not scam artists who have failed in serial bankruptcies, but good men who have a track record of success. And a lot of businesses could use the scrupulous integrity of good public servants. I’ll admit that there is less incentive to become a public servant today. It’s easier to make your first million in business than public service. From what I have seen, good public servants are in it to serve the public, and there are fewer such people today. I profoundly wish that were not so. Note that I have not mentioned politicians. I did not intend to. A good politician is harder to find these days than a hummingbird nest. They exist, but you have to keep your eyes open.

When I was a kid, seeing a hawk was rare. So rare that Dad would stop the tractor to watch them hunting field mice over the pastures. Eagles? Who ever saw an eagle in the 50s and 60s? That has changed. When I walk Waschke Road and the fields, I see hawks and eagles almost daily. Farmers stopped spraying DDT from fifty-gallon drums and started using chemicals carefully instead of indiscriminately. It’s not perfect, but it is so much better now.

And the hawks and the eagles came back.

Photos by Jake Knapp (C9 Photography).

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Changes: People, Slugs, and Hawks

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This afternoon, I was out wandering and I started thinking about what has changed and what has stayed the same during the fifty odd years that I have stumbled over the fields and woods of the farm.

The people have changed the most. I grew up surrounded by my great grandmother, grandparents, parents, uncle, aunt, cousins, and my sister. It was a large and close family spread over four houses. I would have been as likely to knock on our own door as I would have been to knock before walking in on my cousins or my grandparents. Now, my sister, parents, uncle, aunt, grandparents, and great grandmother are all dead and my cousins have all moved away. I am unnerved that I don’t even know the names of the people who now live in those houses that I used to walk into freely.

At another outpost on the evolutionary spectrum, the slugs have changed also. The totals in the slug census have not changed, but the species have. When I was small, there were two kinds of slugs: spotted and striped. The spotted variety was most common. Both varieties were smooth skinned.  They were so common in the woods that when I was about ten, my cousins and I would engage in what we thought of as trans-species eugenics and stage slug hunts in which we counted the number of slugs we could disembowel with sticks. The only slightly exaggerated kill tallies on those hunts were often over a hundred each for a half dozen hunters. The victims of this ichorous carnage were almost all spotted.

It’s been dry, so the slugs are in hiding, but I saw a few in the woods this afternoon. They were all of the dark and wrinkled variety that were unknown in the Darwinian salad days of the slug hunt. The wrinkled slugs only began to show up thirty or forty years ago. The spotted variety is now hard to find. Striped slugs are a little more common now than spotted, but the wrinkled species has taken over. This year slugs in general are not especially numerous, but the slug population is cyclic, or dependent on the weather. A couple years ago, the wrinkled slugs were as numerous as the smooth slugs of the slug hunts.

The number of raptors that patrol the skies above the farm has increased for the last thirty years. I remember  hawks circling above the fields when I was in elementary school and at that time, eerie owl hoots and the dark figure of owls sweeping over the fields were commonplace in the summer twilight. Then for the next fifteen or so years into the seventies, I don’t believe I saw a single hawk and the hoots were few. My dad, who was out in fields all the time and most likely to spot a hawk, might mention seeing one a year during that time. In the late seventies, the hawks and owls began to reappear and we began to see eagles occasionally, which dad remembered from his youth. Now scarcely a day goes by that we don’t see several birds of prey, circling, swooping, and diving for mice and the occasional rabbit.

The return of the raptors could be related to the ban on DDT. Among my dad’s friends, some thought banning DDT was nothing but government meddling; others, like my dad, thought that DDT might be useful in other places, but they couldn’t see that DDT really did that much good here and we were probably better off without it. One of the reasons cited for banning DDT was that it was killing off the birds of prey. DDT was banned in 1972 and the hawks had begun to come back by the late seventies. It may be a coincidence, but I am inclined to think that DDT caused the hawks to die off and the ban brought them back.

People change, slugs change, and hawks return.