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.