I.

A WOOD THRUSH IN THE HAND

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Thud! Something hit the glass of our sun porch overlooking the beaver pond behind our house. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that sound and whenever I’ve checked in the past, there’s been no sign of any damage—to the glass or what I assumed was a bird. Sometimes, tell-tale feathers adhering to the glass told me it was a bird, but the one that left it behind was nowhere to be seen.

This time, as I looked out the window and down to the ground below, I saw a russet-colored bird with a speckled white chest looking somewhat dazed and confused in the gravel. “A thrush of some sort,” I thought to myself, “Hermit or wood?” I went out to check on him. (I assumed it was a male because from what I know of thrushes the males show up first in Spring and it was still early enough to make that assumption.)

He didn’t move when I approached, his wings were spread awkwardly, but his eyes and beak were open, and he appeared to be breathing. When I picked him up, delicately employing a bird bander’s grip, he didn’t protest. I transferred him to my open palm, and he sat there, content, even closed his eyes for a bit, breathing regularly.

Upon closer inspection, I confirmed the bird’s identity—a wood thrush (Hylocichla mustelina) and I thought of poet Basil Bunting’s poem from his Second Book of Odes:

A thrush in the Syringa sings.
‘Hunger ruffles my wings,
Fear, lust, familiar things.
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Although this thrush was neither in the lilac bush nor signing; he had been lying lifeless on the gravel. Moving the thrush to my other outstretched palm, I smoothed his feathers, trying to make him as comfortable as possible, and snapped a few photos with my phone. He opened his eyes, and looked at me, displaying neither fear nor trepidation. He sat there, quiet, calm, unmoving, for thirty minutes; I recalled Seamus Heaney’s poem about “Saint Kevin and the Blackbird”:

And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so
One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
And lays in it and settles down to nest.
Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,
Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.
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According to legend, Kevin prayed with the blackbird in his hand while the bird nested there and her eggs hatched and young fledged, which would have been about a month, to account for incubation, hatching, and feather development. (Kevin’s blackbird would have been the Common or Eurasian blackbird, Turdus merula, which is a species of “true thrush,” a group of insectivorous birds that includes the American robin in addition to the wood thrush.)

I was glad my little wood thrush friend had no such need, for I am no Saint, and holding my hand aloft for thirty minutes was about my limit. (I later learned that I shouldn’t have handled this bird at all, as there are strict regulations about handling migratory birds without a permit.)

When he finally began to stir, I gently placed him on the ground. He hopped a few times into the leaf litter on the banks of the beaver pond, and looked back at me once or twice, before starting to forage below the leaves. I later saw him at the edge of the gravel, as if looking for me. My new-found friend.

Glass, however, is not a friend to birds. Each year, according to estimates by the Smithsonian, between 365 million and one billion birds die from glass encounters each year, more than wind turbines, airplanes, or cars—although less than from outdoor house cats, which kill approximately 2.4 billion birds annually, according to American Bird Conservancy.

Birds collide with windows because vegetation reflects in the glass, and they can’t distinguish between reflection and reality. They may also see their mirror image, perhaps taking it for another bird encroaching on its space and attacking it. To us, the glass barrier protects from the elements; to the bird, it becomes a reflection of its vulnerability in the face of human intervention.

As homeowners, we can do several things to help prevent bird-window collisions, including putting vertical markings on the outside of windows, which can be done with soap or tempera paint, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, or dot-pattern tapes, screens, curtains, netting, or transparent films, all of which are commercially available. There are even some UV-reflective liquids that can be applied to windows, although I’m not sure how good these are for the environment. The key is to make sure whatever markers used are in a two-inch-by-two-inch grid pattern to make it an effective deterrent for even the smallest bird species.

We’re still looking into the various applications. For now, I marvel over my encounter with the thrush and its temporary stillness in my palm forced my own stillness, a rare moment of complete attention in our rushed world.

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II.

SNAPPING TURTLE RITUAL

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One morning last June I opened the front door to find an adult female snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina) laying eggs in our gravel driveway. While I was startled, she seemed relatively undisturbed, even ignorant of my presence. We left her alone to do her business and we kept our dog Beverley in the house.

About an hour later, she moved off, heading back to the beaver pond through our wildflower garden and up over the hill. She never looked back, and she’ll never see her young.

When she was safely gone, I examined the nest where she had deposited her eggs, covered by a layer of dirt and gravel formed into a heart shape or so it appeared. I got some chicken wire and staked it down over the top of the nest.

I marveled at the snapper’s choice of a nesting site: gravel with a relatively soft sub-surface with plenty of sun (this helps with their brand of absentee incubation). She’d seemingly thought of everything—except the raccoons, which my covering might help deter.

The snapping turtle can lay between twenty and forty eggs. Such a high volume is a hedge against predation and other losses. Only around one percent of turtle hatchlings will make it in the wild. The sex of a snapping turtle is determined by the temperature of the eggs during incubation; males are produced between temperatures of 73- and 81 degrees Fahrenheit, while lower and higher temperatures produce females. I wonder how climate change will affect the sex ratios in turtles and what that will do to future populations. Hatchlings aren’t expected until at least August and can still come out through October when they’ll make their way to the beaver pond in time to feed and prepare to over-winter in the mud below.

Chelydra is Greek for tortoise and the snapping turtle does look more like a tortoise than the other turtles in the beaver pond, which are likely painted (Chrysemys picta) and spotted (Clemmys guttata). The snapper, with its stegosaurus-like tail, complete with small bony spikes, and its wedge-shaped snout, looks like a dinosaur, which is proper since it first appeared on the Earth more than 200 million years ago.

"Snappers though, they were different,” the Abenaki writer Joseph Bruchac wrote in his story, “Snapping Turtle.” “Long-tailed, heavy-bodied, and short-tempered, their jaws would gape wide, and they’d hiss when you came on them ashore. Their heads and legs were too big to pull into their shells and they would heave up on their legs and lunge forward as they snapped at you. They might weigh as much as fifty pounds, and it was said they could take off a handful of fingers in one bite. There wasn’t much to recommend a snapping turtle as a friend.”

I knew from childhood warnings about not getting too close to snapping turtles—they can be quick, their necks are a lot longer than they look, and their bite can cause considerable damage. (Only the alligator snapping turtle, a southern species, has a strong enough jaw to sever fingers, I’m told.)

When they do hatch, I’ll let the baby snapping turtles make their way to their natural habitat. MassWildlife notes that “all but three species of turtles in Massachusetts (Eastern Painted Turtle, Stinkpot, and Common Snapping Turtle) are protected, meaning they cannot be captured or kept. All other turtles require a permit to possess, alive or dead, including shells.” They also warn that you should never release a store-bought turtle of any species into the wild; such turtles may transmit diseases such as mycoplasma or Ranavirus to our native turtles.

Some people believe that seeing a turtle is about grounding, about finding balance, taking a slower pace, or even reaching a new level of emotional understanding. They seem to possess ancient wisdom. Among many of the original, Indigenous people to the Berkshire-Taconic woodlands, this continent was “Turtle Island.”

When the little snappers hatch, I’ll remove the chicken wire covering and hope the raccoons and foxes don’t notice. To witness that ritual emergence, as old a ritual as there is in the circle of life, will be quite an experience.

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**

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On the last day of September, I noticed a hole in the ground at the nest site. The hole, which was at the front edge of the chicken wire, was smooth and showed no signs of an exit, no dirt around the edges of the hole; no obvious markings of something crawling out. I thought for sure a snake had gotten into the nest and destroyed the eggs. I snapped a photo and brought it inside to show my wife.

One of our daughters and a group of friends were visiting that weekend and overheard me explain my finding.

“Oh, we saw a couple of dead turtles in the driveway,” one of them offered. “They looked pretty flat like they’d been run over.”

“Aaaagh!” my wife Samantha cried. She’d been the one out for a drive that morning and assumed she’d been the one to crush the baby turtles.

I went outside and looked in the driveway. There they were, two tiny snapping turtles, their black shells about the size of a silver dollar, their tiny talon-like claws a stark white at the ends of their black legs. Crushed and lifeless. The baby turtles were so small that we could not have seen them coming or going. Our attention is only so finite, our eyes are only good for bigger details; our distraction to daily tasks grips us. We are only human, after all.

I knew that snapping turtles could lay between twenty and forty eggs. So, there might have been some eighteen survivors. I moved the dead baby turtles off the driveway and vowed to look whenever we were about to pull out of the driveway. We didn’t put the driveway in the path of the snapping turtle’s ritual nest site, but we were now responsible for it and keeping her and her brood safe.

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III.

BEAVER BELIEVER

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The beavers are active on the pond behind our house this evening, a few days after the summer solstice. A couple of them are venturing between this pond and the one just beyond it, over the dam that has kept this a pond since at least 2003, if aerial photos are to be trusted. They are constructing what appears to be a new lodge, which likely means the youth were sent out of the home they’ve known since they were born a few years ago.

A great blue heron, who makes regular visits to the beaver pond, lands on the low structure. This doesn’t seem to bother the beavers at all as they continue to swim from shore to construction site, bringing new material to build the lodge. Beavers begin building their homes from within, around an underwater door, which will provide access from below and protect them from predators. Logs, sticks, and even small shrubs provide the building materials, packed with mud and stones to form walls sometimes two or three feet thick.

Beavers need at least five feet of water for their lodges as they enter from below water level, keeping their entrance secret. Inside is a kind of mudroom, where the beavers will clean themselves and dry off prior to entering the main chamber. Beavers are fastidious and prefer their bed chambers free of mud and debris. The main room houses the entire family—as many as six at a time—and is lined with wood chips, bark, and even grass.

In winter, we often notice steam rising from the lodge—a tiny, chimney-like hole lets out the excess heat generated by the family within. In winter, we barely see the beaver, unless the pond is completely unfrozen for several days straight. They cache their winter supply of food underwater, in a kind of natural refrigerator near the lodge entrance. (We could learn a lot from beavers.)

Now, however, it is summer and I’m curious that the beavers sense the days are already getting shorter, already seem to be stepping up their activity. Contrast this with the otters who share the pond. We never see the beavers frolicking and playing. The otters on the other hand seem to do nothing but play, swimming around in what appears to be games of tag or “Marco Polo” without a care in the world. (We could learn a lot from otters, too.)

I open the sliding door of our sun porch to get a better look at the construction site over one hundred yards away. This startles the heron, who flies off, but the beaver takes no notice. Training my binoculars on the site, I can see the conical form of the new lodge taking shape. The beavers are building like there is no tomorrow or like winter will be here soon.

“Beavers are a keystone species,” writes Leila Philip in her excellent book Beaverland, one of several beaver books I’ve been reading since we moved to the Berkshires. “An organism so critical to the survival of a biological community that they function like the keystone in a medieval archway, that one shaped block that forms the apex or the arch and upon which the entire span of bricks depends.”

Scientists are now beginning to understand just how important this rodent is to the North American landscape. Watching the beavers in the pond behind my house over the past two years, it is clear how important they are. All the wildlife in this pond, from the otters and heron to the snapping turtle who laid her eggs in our driveway last month, to the ducks and geese, and even the resident belted kingfisher, depend upon the habitat created by the beaver colony. A once free running brook was dammed twenty years ago when our house was constructed and from that single beaver-engineering project, an entire wetland ecosystem was created.

“Many animals use tools and are important to biodiversity,” writes Professor Philip. “But only beavers and humans dramatically alter the landscape to create the environment they need (or want).” Indeed, we could learn a lot from the beavers and, if we learn to pay more attention, perhaps we can begin to repair the damage we’ve done, one stick at a time.

As I watch the beavers make nightly repairs on their dam, preparing for a future they can't fully predict, I wonder: Are we so different? In our wood and concrete lodges, our glass-walled observation posts, are we truly separate from this wild world? Or are we, in our fumbling attempts to control nature, simply another species reacting to the winds of change? And if so, what might we learn from the patient, persistent beaver about adapting to a world perpetually out of balance?

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IV.

THE DAY THE DAWN CHORUS WENT SILENT

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Early one morning, shortly after moving to the Berkshires, I made a startling discovery during what’s known as the “dawn chorus.” The usual trio of least flycatchers, veerys, and sparrows sang the morning’s opening bars, joined by a barred owl’s whinnying call. As I rolled over in bed, trying to get back to sleep, I noticed something odd: the birdsong seemed to stop and start depending on which ear was pressed against the pillow.

Confused and a little concerned, I sat up and experimented. Covering my right ear silenced the birds; covering my left had no effect. A distant crow’s low croak came through clearly in both ears, but the high-pitched songbirds were absent on the left side.

“I can’t hear the songbirds singing in my left ear,” I told my wife when she woke up. The worry in her voice mirrored my own as she urged me to see a doctor.

The visit to the ENT was a blur of tests and explanations. The audio technician ran me through a series of tones, my hand rising and falling like a conductor’s baton. When we switched to my left ear, the higher notes faded into silence, my hand hanging still at my side.

“You’ve lost the ability to hear sound quieter than 15 to 20 decibels for frequencies above 2,000Hz,” the technician explained. The doctor, attempting levity, suggested I might now be able to tune out my wife’s “honey-do” list. I wasn’t amused.

As I weighed the treatment options—steroids and an MRI—I realized this hearing loss had likely been creeping up on me for years. Was it a remnant of my post-punk bass-playing days in the 80s? Or perhaps a souvenir from the wailing sirens of New York City during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic? The quiet of the country had simply made it impossible to ignore any longer.

Reviewing the side effects of the steroid—irritability, anger management issues, a short fuse, etc.—I decided against taking it. We were about to leave on a family vacation and the prospect of me flying off the handle and having to stay out of the sun the entire vacation didn’t thrill me.

The MRI was to rule out the possibility of what’s known as an acoustic neuroma, which is also called a vestibular schwannoma, a type of benign brain tumor that develops on the nerves running between the inner ear and the brainstem. The doctor reassured me there was an extremely small chance of this tumor, but they needed to be certain. (The MRI was negative, as they suspected; better to be safe and in the clear.)

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“Growing old sucks, but the alternative is worse,” I used to joke. Now, at sixty, those words took on new weight. There are worse things than losing high-frequency hearing in one ear, I reminded myself. I can still make out the songbirds with my right ear, even if conversations in crowded spaces have become a struggle.

In the following weeks, I paid closer attention to the sounds around me. The rustle of leaves in the wind, the babbling of the nearby stream, the deep hoot of an owl at dusk – all these became more precious. I began to appreciate the subtle differences in bird calls that I could still discern and found a new patience for asking people to repeat themselves in noisy environments.

Adapting to this change hasn't been easy. There are mornings when the silence in my left ear feels like a loss, a small death of something I’d taken for granted. But there are also mornings when I relish the ability to tune out the world simply by rolling onto my right side.

In this partial silence, I've found an unexpected gift: a reminder of life’s impermanence and the importance of savoring each moment. The dawn chorus may have dimmed, but it has made me listen more intently to the symphony of life around me.

And if I want to sleep through the early morning cacophony? Well, now I have a built-in mute button. It’s not the silver lining the doctor jokingly prescribed but one I’ve come to appreciate—along with the occasional interruption of a crow or barred owl, reminding me that I’m still here, still listening, even if a little less perfectly than before. .

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