Outside The Box

Here’s a word you can drop at the next family gathering and watch the eyebrows rise. The word is “weenus.” The weenus is the loose skin at the end of the elbow. It’s also known as the olecranal skin, but that’s not nearly as fun to say.

That skin at the end of my elbow itches a bit this morning, recently injected, as it was, by a bit of venom from a baldfaced hornet. It was just a love tap and could have been much worse, believe me. A full injection feels like being punched by a spiked fist, over and over again.

I’ve been punched by that spiked fist and I’ve also been love-tapped several times during my tenure here at the edge of the wilderness. It is my strong opinion, subjective and based entirely on anectdotal evidence as it is, that a love tap comes from a hornet that knows you, accepts you as part of its environment, doesn’t perceive you as a threat, but hey, buddy, you’re about the cross the line there.

In this instance I had mowed recently within a foot of the nest without seeing it, and walked that path many times, unaware and unmolested. The “hey buddy” moment came when I decided to drag a garden hose through the weeds, which disturbed the cantaloupe-sized dwelling. A single hornet targeted the elbow attached to the arm attached to the hose to inform me of my error: Hornet Defcon 5. You never want to see Hornet Defcon 1.

This was the exclamation point to end the chapter of a very strange and sad week in our relationship with the natural world. We’re still puzzling through the meaning of it all, the meaning we will ultimately assign to it.

It all started with Buddy, the Carolina Wren Tracey rescued from the gentle jaws of our pup, Peaches, who had retrieved it from the not-so-gentle claws of the cat. Carolina Wrens are famously shy birds, but Buddy would answer his rescuer when she whistled and often visited when she was sitting on the deck. From time to time Buddy would sit on the corner of the railing and sing his song while Tracey sat quietly and listened. Buddy and his mate moved into the birdhouse at the end of our deck and were raising three hatchlings there. It was a joyful time.

A couple of weeks ago Tracey was returning from town and as she came up the hill below the church, she saw a black snake in the middle of the road, stretched out his full length and just sitting there enjoying the warmth of the pavement. It was just after 5 in the afternoon and she thought the snake was on borrowed time considering the traffic that would soon pass that way.

Sadly, some folks will go out of their way to run over a snake, any snake, that they find within the range of their front tires, so she got out of the car, picked up the snake and drove him home wrapped around her arm. We have mice sufficient to feed a black snake, and where the black snake goes, the copperhead goes not. It seemed like a win-win. She named him Sssydney, and released him near the barn about 200 feet from the house.

Saturday afternoon Tracey sat with Buddy on the deck and listened to his song. Then she walked to the mailbox with her dog, Max, and when she came back about 10 minutes later, Buddy and his mate were in a panic. She called me to come quickly to the deck. Sssydney had climbed the deck, the railing and the corner of the house and found his way to the birdhouse.

Snakes are strong, and it took some effort to remove him from the little dwelling, but it was too late for the little birds. Crushed and terrified to death, their little bodies lay lifeless inside the birdhouse. They were just shy of being able to fly out for the first time.

We were horrified, and the sadness lingers to this day. What meaning, what wisdom can we extract from this tragic event? If the snake had been left alone, the birds would probably be alive, but the snake would most likely be dead. The snake was doing exactly what snakes do to survive.

We know that nature can seem cruel in the inescapable truth that all creatures must eat to survive, and many must kill to eat. There is no denying that. But our sadness does not come from there. You see, for a moment in time we were allowed to interact with a wild creature that trusted us and accepted us as a part of its environment. We felt like proper stewards of the land, endeavoring to coexist with the birds, the bears, the bees, and even the snakes. It was a precious moment in time, a bubble of shared experience, shattered in an instant.

That coexistince can seem crowded at times. Everywhere we look, humans have elbowed out, dissected and destroyed and pushed the creatures of the wild into ever shrinking spaces. A healthy ecosystem is an intricate network of delicately balanced relationships and dependencies. It does not long endure fragmentation and subdivision, yet here we are as well, and like many who came here seeking the same things we sought, wanting to close and lock the gate behind us.

The sad week wasn’t over yet. It’s almost as if nature wanted to make sure to drive the lesson home, whatever lesson that was, and this time it came on the wings of bats.

For years we’ve accommodated a pair or two of little brown bats in the gables. Screens keep them out of the attic, and there is a bit of pressure washing to be done, but nothing eats more mosquitoes and gnats. In recent times we have seen more of them. Aside from the core group that stays here, we’ve seen as many as fifty at a time. The gables are too small to accommodate that number for long, so we’ve often wondered what disturbs them that they take temporary shelter here.

This year several pairs raised their young in one of the gables. Believe it or not, bats are very loving parents. The mothers hold and comfort their pups, and the community helps care for the young. If you’ve ever been close enough to a bat to be hissed at, you’ll know that these endearing behaviors are best observed from a distance, and I was eager for the pups to be old enough to leave the roost so I could complete the yearly pressure washing ritual.

On the morning of the day of the hornet-stung weenus, I walked out of the shop to find a juvenile bat face down on the wet concrete, some distance from the roost. I carefully collected it and put it in a shaded area under the roost so the mother could find it on the next emergence that evening. Unfortunately, the colony had left to seek residence elsewhere and abandoned the pup. It did not survive.

If there is a lesson in all this, I think it might be that humans, like it or not, are part of nature too. We have to eat to survive, and that survival, like the survival of every living creature, comes at a cost. That cost grows exponentially when our wants far exceed our needs.

We are a greedy lot, and addicted to our conveniences, distractions and instant gratifications. We think nothing of destroying an ecosystem to replace it with a mimicry of nature we call “landscaping,” which we then mow and spray to keep it sterile and free from the unpleasant features of the natural world, the tooth and claw and eat-to-live aspects we prefer to think don’t apply to us.

Those of us who believe ourselves to be more attuned to nature also have to mind our elbows. We have to accept that when our efforts at stewardship are inconsistent with the balancing equations of nature, nature will correct the error in the most expeditious manner.

The good news is that Buddy and his mate both survived. They abandoned the nest on the deck and moved into the meadow close by. As wrens do, they will likely raise another brood this year to replace the one they lost. We can still hear him sing in the evening.