"A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm"

Herewith some excerpts from Edwin Way Teale's classic 1974 book.  I've just finished what I think is my third reading of the book, and I wanted to save some miscellaneous thoughts and anecdotes here in the blog.  Page citations are approximate depending on your published edition.

"A mile below the village, and 153 miles from its beginning at Provincetown on Cape Cod, U.S. 6, the longest highway under one designation in America, passes on its way to Long Beach on the coast of California."  [I see a comment on the Wikipedia entry that "Route 6 runs uncertainly from nowhere to nowhere, scarcely to be followed from one end to the other, except by some devoted eccentric."] (16)

"By the time a calf is an hour old it can often outrun a man." (41)

"The life span of a gray tree frog may extend for as much as seven years; that of a bullfrog for as much as sixteen." (111)

"More than once we have caught a faint low "Gur, Gur" coming from the water.  It has been the voice of the pickerel frog.  This grating sound is often produced when the frog is submerged and resting on the bottom of the pond.  In the midst of this spring chorus of the frogs there rises the most beautiful of all our batrachian sounds, a pure sustained trill that goes on and on.  It is the mating-time music of the American toad." (112)

"On our 130 acres, I found, the combined length of these massive stone fences totals almost five miles.  Each begins about two feet below the surface to provide a solid foundation below the frost line." [I was surprised to learn that these walls were countersunk.  It would make sense, but I wonder how much of the depth is secondary to the formation of new soil from leaf litter since the walls were set up?] (144)

[Re the elderly naturalist stocking her mind with pleasant things to remember before going blind, see my post "What a wonderful attitude".]

"When he was nearing seventy, this mild-mannered collector of insects was following a lonely road on Staten Island with his net in his hand when he encountered three young thugs who blocked his way.  One pulled out a gun and demanded his money.  This so infuriated the naturalist... that he swung his net, whacked the thug over the head with the brass ferrule, then pursued the three down the road flailing them with his butterfly net.  Later a friend asked him: "But weren't you taking an awful chance?"  "I suppose I was," he replied.  "I didn't think of it at the time.  But I might have injured them severely." (221)

"I dug down through the snow to the rosette of a mullein plant.  I brought it home in a paper bag.  Sitting that afternoon beside the fireplace, I made a census of the small creatures that were hibernating between the woolly leaves as though between thick soft blankets.  My magnifying glass revealed a minute spider and a number of tiny brownish beetles.  But the real population of the mullein plant consisted of springtails.  I counted eighty-two snugly protected within the hibernaculum of this one rosette." (230) [English spelling of wooly]

"... a young buck was observed feeding on pussywillow catkins.  It would wrap its tongue around the base of a branch and then strip off all the aments at once with a sidewise sweep of its head." (251) [new word for me]

"But of all the creatures that have been attracted to the ground-up corn, the most unexpected were the honeybees.  Before the end of winter, in their earliest days abroad, when skunk cabbage flowers and pussywillow catkins were the main source of pollen, we found them crawling over our little piles of corn in search of a pollen substitute... On one small mound of grain, less than six inches in diameter, I counted thirty-five honeybees.  Continually they moved back and forth, gathering corn dust, the pale-yellow vegetable powder which they packed into the pollen gaskets on their hind legs." (278)