FIELD NOTES
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“On
golden wings, or blue.”
We had followed its song into a
thicket by a hayfield,
beckoned by what we thought was the song of the Golden Winged Warbler.
However,
when we finally spotted the bird flitting amongst low trees, its yellow
body,
grey wings and black mask declared it to be a Blue Winged Warbler. The
distinction between the two species isn’t trivial. It tells a story
about our
land, of where it’s been and where we may be taking it.
Some two hundred years ago, the
Golden Winged and Blue Winged
Warblers led largely separate lives in the brush resulting from
disruptions
such as fire, flood, wind, and early agriculture. The Blue Winged
nested mainly
in Kentucky,
Tennessee,
and Missouri,
straggling
through southern Illinois
and Indiana.
The closely-related Golden Winged bred pretty much where it does now –
straddling the US/Canada border from Minnesota to Vermont and dipping
down into
the northern portions of the Blue Winged’s range. Then, as we changed
our land,
the fortunes of these two species changed.
The spread of extensive
farmland from New England
to the Midwest
during the
1800’s opened up a field and shrubland highway that species such as the
Blue Winged
Warbler followed northeast. Where its nesting grounds overlapped
extensively
with those of the Golden-Winged, the two interbred producing fertile
young
which tended to resemble the Blue-winged. Furthermore, as the highway
of
openland has been shrunk by reforestation or development, it seems that
the
more opportunistic and tolerant Blue-Wingeds have tended to dominate
ecologically. Evidently, these two apparent species had relied on
geographic
separation to keep their bloodlines separate, neither their genetics
nor their
ecologies seem suited for substantial coexistence. It is predicted that
the
Golden-Winged will be extinct in much of its former range by 2050.
Should we concern ourselves?
Yes, although I am not so naïve
as to think the fate of two relatively obscure warblers is, in itself,
likely
to achieve prominence. I am not even sure of the specific moral of
their story.
Rather, these two species are innocent reminders of one of modern
humanity’s
Achilles heals: i.e., that which we learn from is largely restricted to
what we
experience in our own life times. Gone are the oral traditions that
handed down
personal ethnic and familial history as an evolving set of stories and
legends.
Often living removed from other generations of our family, we largely
lack a personalized
transgenerational memory and so find it hard to appreciate change that
occurs at
time scales longer than our own memories. These warblers are reminders
that when
we are inadvertent poisoners of this planet, we often as not employ a
cumulative arsenic of sorts rather than an instant cyanide. The
ultimate result
is the same, but our ability to viscerally perceive the act differs and
hence too
its likelihood of widespread realization and of correction. From
ecology to
politics, the conceit of the present rarely bows to the mutterings of
the past,
even when it would be in its own better interest.
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