Lost Woods (3 page)

Monotones of red and brown and lustreless black are the prevailing colors in the deep sea, allowing the wearers to reflect the minimum of the phosphorescent gleams, and to blend into the safe obscurity of the surrounding gloom.

On the muddy bottom of the abyss, treacherous oozes threaten to engulf small scavengers as they busily sift the débris for food. Crabs and prawns pick their way over the yielding mud on stilt-like legs; sea spiders creep over sponges raised on delicate stalks above the slime.

Because the last vestige of plant life was left behind in the shallow zone penetrated by the rays of the sun, the inhabitants of these depths contrast strangely with the self-supporting assemblage of the surface waters. Preying one upon another, the abyssal creatures are ultimately dependent upon the slow rain of dead plants and animals from above. Every living thing of the ocean, plant and animal alike, returns to the water at the end of its own life span the materials that had been temporarily assembled to form its body. So there descends into the depths a gentle, never-ending rain of the disintegrating particles of what once were living creatures of the sunlit surface waters, or of those twilight regions beneath.

Here in the sea mingle elements which, in their long and amazing history, have lent life and strength and beauty to a bewildering variety of living creatures. Ions of calcium, now free in the water, were borrowed years ago from the sea to form part of the protective armor of a mollusk, returned to the main reservoir when their temporary owner had ceased to have need of them, and later incorporated into the delicate statuary of a coral reef. Here are atoms of silica, once imprisoned in a layer of flint in subterranean darkness; later, within the fragile shell of a diatom, tossed by waves and warmed by the sun; and again entering into the exquisite structure of a radiolarian shell, that miracle of ephemeral beauty that might be the work of a fairy glass-blower with a snowflake as his pattern.

Except for precipitous slopes and regions swept bare by submarine currents, the ocean floor is covered with primeval oozes in which there have been accumulating for æons deposits of varied origin; earth-born materials freighted seaward by rivers or worn from the shores of continents by the ceaseless grinding of waves; volcanic dust transported long distances by wind, floating lightly on the surface and eventually sinking into the depths to mingle with the products of no less mighty eruptions of submarine volcanoes; spherules of iron and nickel from interstellar space; and substances of organic origin – the silicious skeletons of Radiolaria and the frustules of diatoms, the limey remains of algæ and corals, and the shells of minute Foraminifera and delicate pelagic snails.

While the bottoms near the shore are covered with detritus from the land, the remains of the floating and swimming creatures of the sea prevail in the deep waters of the open ocean. Beneath tropical seas, in depths of 1000 to 1500 fathoms, calcareous oozes cover nearly a third of the ocean floor; while the colder waters of the temperate and polar regions release to the underlying bottom the silicious remains of diatoms and Radiolaria. In the red clay that carpets the great deeps at 3000 fathoms or more, such delicate skeletons are extremely rare. Among the few organic remains not dissolved before they reach these cold and silent depths are the ear bones of whales and the teeth of sharks.

Thus we see the parts of the plan fall into place: the water receiving from earth and air the simple materials, storing them up until the gathering energy of the spring sun wakens the sleeping plants to a burst of dynamic activity, hungry swarms of plank-tonic animals growing and multiplying upon the abundant plants, and themselves falling prey to the shoals of fish; all, in the end, to be redissolved into their component substances when the inexorable laws of the sea demand it. Individual elements are lost to view, only to reappear again and again in different incarnations in a kind of material immortality. Kindred forces to those which, in some period inconceivably remote, gave birth to that primeval bit of protoplasm tossing on the ancient seas continue their mighty and incomprehensible work. Against this cosmic background the life span of a particular plant or animal appears, not as a drama complete in itself, but only as a brief interlude in a panorama of endless change.

2

[1922]

My Favorite Recreation

RACHEL CARSON KNEW
from her earliest conscious memory that she wanted to be a writer. A solitary child, she read voraciously and was particularly influenced by the children’s literary magazine
St. Nicholas,
which not only offered writing of exceptional literary quality, but also awarded prizes for and published children’s work. Carson submitted five stories in all and in doing so joined the company of such future literary luminaries as William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, e.e. cummings, S. Eliot Morison, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and E. B. White, all of whom won prizes and were published in the pages of
St. Nicholas.

Carson’s last story appeared when she was fifteen. She had already achieved the esteemed status of “Honor Member” of the
St. Nicholas
League and been paid $10 for one of them. This story about exploring the Pennsylvania hills was her first about nature and was submitted in the category of “My Favorite Recreation.” It shows something of Carson’s already acute observation of the natural world and is noteworthy for the inclusion of her favorite bird, the wood thrush.

THE CALL OF THE TRAIL
on that dewy May morning was too strong to withstand. The sun was barely an hour high when Pal and I set off for a day of our favorite sport with a lunch-box, a canteen, a note-book, and a camera. Your experienced woodsman will say that we were going birds’-nesting – in the most approved fashion.

Soon our trail turned aside into deeper woodland. It wound up a gently sloping hill, carpeted with fragrant pine-needles. It was our own discovery, Pal’s and mine, and the fact gave us a thrill of exultation. It was the sort of place that awes you by its majestic silence, interrupted only by the rustling breeze and the distant tinkle of water.

Near at hand we heard the cheery “witchery, witchery,” of the Maryland yellow-throat. For half an hour we trailed him, until we came out on a sunny slope. There in some low bushes we found the nest, containing four jewel-like eggs. To the little owner’s consternation, we came close enough to snap a picture.

Countless discoveries made the day memorable: the bob-white’s nest, tightly packed with eggs, the oriole’s aërial cradle, the frame-work of sticks which the cuckoo calls a nest, and the lichen-covered home of the humming-bird.

Late in the afternoon a penetrating “Teacher!
teacher!
TEACHER
!” reached our ears. An oven-bird! A careful search revealed his nest, a little round ball of grass, securely hidden on the ground.

The cool of approaching night settled. The wood-thrushes trilled their golden melody. The setting sun transformed the sky into a sea of blue and gold. A vesper-sparrow sang his evening lullaby. We turned slowly homeward, gloriously tired, gloriously happy!

3

[1938]

Fight for Wildlife Pushes Ahead / Chesapeake Eels Seek the Sargasso Sea

CARSON COMPLETED HER M.A.
in Zoology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1932. The Depression dashed her hopes of going on for a doctorate but she continued to teach part-time at the University of Maryland while she tried to find a college position. Although she thought she had forever abandoned a writing career, economic necessity, compounded by the death of her father in 1935 and her assumption of the role of head of household, forced her to return to writing.

Research for radio scripts she was writing for the Bureau of Fisheries served as the basis of feature articles on Maryland’s natural history which she sent to the local newspaper, the Baltimore
Sun.
Sunday editor Mark Watson was impressed with Carson’s lucid style and her scientific accuracy and published as many of her articles as he could, sometimes sending those he could not use to affiliated newspapers.

Much of Carson’s newspaper writing concerns the population and habitat changes of mid-Atlantic fish and wildlife and reflects the research of a thoroughly competent marine biologist. They show Carson’s already broad interest in the conservation of resources, her special interest in wildlife, her concern with the impact of human exploitation on wildlife habitats, and her fascination with the intricate processes of nature.

Carson’s interest in eels began during her summer study at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where she saw the ocean for the first time in the summer of 1929. Later, in a protozoology experiment at Johns Hopkins, she observed the effect changes in the salinity of sea water had on the behavior of the eel. Carson’s fascination with these beautiful and unfathomable creatures appears most significantly in Book III of
Under the Sea-Wind,
where the central character is Anguilla, a European eel who ends her maturation with a two-hundred-mile journey to the open sea.

Carson’s brief but successful journalistic career with the Baltimore
Sun
was an important apprenticeship in writing science for the public. It established her identity as a writer who had discovered what she wanted to write about.

Fight for Wildlife Pushes Ahead

[ … ]
THE INESCAPABLE FACT
that the decline of wildlife is linked with human destinies is being driven home by conservation the nation over. Wildlife, it is pointed out, is dwindling because its home is being destroyed. But the home of wildlife is also our home.

One of the most startling pictures painted by those who are fighting for conservation of natural resources is that of the speed with which the work of destruction has been accomplished. It is not necessary to go back to Colonial times for contrast. A scant hundred years ago, more than half of America was unspoiled wilderness. Wild swans, geese and brant were to be found in every marsh and slough and prairie pot-hole; slaves in the Chesapeake Bay country were fed on canvasbacks until they are said to have revolted at the fare; wild turkey, grouse and other upland game birds were incredibly abundant. Antelope ranged the Western plains in numbers perhaps equalling the bison, and from coast to coast the bugling of the elk resounded in the forests.

A hundred years ago, Audubon, the artist naturalist, saw from his Kentucky village the skies literally clouded with the flocks of the passenger pigeon. He estimated that more than a billion birds must have passed overhead in a four-day flight. When the beechnuts were ripe, the pigeons flew 200 miles in a day to feed on them, and forest areas of more than a hundred square miles were so densely packed with roosting birds that the trees broke under their weight.

A hundred years ago, salmon still ran in the rivers of New England wherever dams had not blocked their passage and mills poisoned their spawning beds. The spring run of the alewife, or river herring, was an important event of the year to villagers on New England rivers, and shad poured into the Susquehanna, the Delaware and other coastal streams in such numbers that the shallow waters foamed with their passage. Sturgeon leaped in the waters of the Great Lakes, where the sails of the first fishing vessels in those inland seas moved over Erie, Huron and Michigan.

A hundred years ago the flights of migratory waterfowl winging their way southward along the Mississippi flyway passed along the dividing line between the known and the unknown halves of the continent. To the west, beyond miles of prairie still unbroken by the plow, the sun set over untamed Rockies; eastward, a sprinkling of farms and villages traced out the Ohio and the Tennessee and the wall of the Appalachians hid the lights of the Seaboard cities, where, alone on all the continent, were dense settlements.

But what of wildlife today? Government service, whose business it is to know conditions, paint a general picture of scarcity and depletion. The last heath hen perished on the island of Martha’s Vineyard in 1933, and the passenger pigeon is now a creature of legend. Salmon are virtually gone from the rivers of New England, and the Atlantic Coast shad fisheries have declined some 80 per cent within half a century. Waterfowl flights fell in 1933 and 1934, and although Government regulations plus the establishment of sanctuaries have resulted in some improvement, the plight of certain species, notably canvasback and redhead duck, remains serious. The ranks of elk were so thinned by 1904 that domestication was urged as the only means of preventing their extinction. Although prong-horn antelope are now on the increase within refuges and reservations, they are reduced from some 30,000,000 or 40,000,000 to about 60,000. Mountain goats, moose and grizzly bear are also on the wane.
*

Yet this mere remnant of wildlife supports a resource estimated by business interests as worth considerably more than a billion dollars a year in cash turnover. Sportsmen’s expenditures run to three-quarters of a billion annually, while expenditures of others in the enjoyment of wildlife are estimated at something over half a billion. Every year, more than 5,000,000 automobiles carry sportsmen to hunting and fishing grounds, the mileage used being equivalent to the actual consumption of 87,000 automobiles. In the States of New York and New Jersey, about 2,000 boats are licensed to carry fishing parties, and the fish and game commissioners of the latter State estimate that each season more than a million salt-water anglers are attracted to its shores.

Such figures carry convincing proof that preservation of wildlife is good business. However, the job of conservation that is being urged this week has a deeper significance than the restoration of wildlife alone.
*
For three centuries we have been busy upsetting the balance of nature by draining marshland, cutting timber, plowing under the grasses that carpeted the prairies. Drainage operations, intended to reclaim more land for agriculture, have directly affected millions of acres of waterfowl nesting grounds, and indirectly destroyed additional millions by lowering the water tables of the soil from 10 to 60 feet within a score of years.

The story of lower Klamath Lake in Oregon, once described by Theodore Roosevelt as “one of the greatest wild-fowl nurseries in the United States,” has been repeated many times in the case of other areas drained in the name of progress. Klamath Lake was drained at considerable expense to convert the region to agricultural use, later devastated by numerous fires, and finally abandoned because it was found impossible to sweeten the soil of these former marshlands for agricultural crops. There is now talk of reflooding it!

But as long as it was only the ducks and their kind that were being pushed nearer and nearer the brink of extinction, the cause of wildlife had few champions. Then one day – less than four years ago – the winds blowing over the Western prairies picked up the soil that had no anchor because the grass was gone and carried it eastward. People in Pennsylvania looked up to see the sky darkened by dust from the fields of Kansas, and New York farmers received a donation of soil from Nebraska. The words “dust bowl” and “resettlement” became part of our national vocabulary.

The program of national conservation agencies that is being put before America this week is no mere sentimental plea for birds and fish and big-game animals. It means checking the spread of the dust bowl, and perhaps in time binding its swirling sands once more with the tough roots of prairie grasses. It means reforestation of hillsides so that the melting snows may be held in the ground that is dying of thirst. It means giving back to the waterfowl and the muskrat a few million acres of land which nature meant to be marsh forever. [ … ]

Chesapeake Eels Seek the Sargasso Sea

FROM EVERY RIVER AND STREAM
along the whole Atlantic Coast, eels are hurrying to the sea. Reaching salt water, they will strike out south and east to the Sargasso, there to mingle with other eel hordes which have made the longer westward crossing from Europe. From Greenland, Labrador, the United States, Mexico, and the West Indies; from Scandinavia, Germany, Belgium, France and the British Isles, eels go at spawning time to those mid-oceanic meadows of brown sargassum weed.

So the most remarkable of all Chesapeake Bay fishes is born in alien waters. Before it is half as long or as thick as a man’s thumb it makes a journey across 1,000 miles of strange, wild waters without benefit of chart or compass, finding the shores from which its parents came a year and a half before. In bays, rivers and streams it feeds and grows for ten years, perhaps fifteen or twenty. At last, obeying an instinct as old as the tribe of eels, it sets out on the return journey to the Sargasso to produce its young and itself to die. Thus is the life cycle of the eel completed.