Disintricate

Just before I left for the day's hike, an email from local birder and dragonfly aficionado Dan Tallman allerted me to shorebirds at a newly constructed catchment pond just outside of town. So, on my way to the Cannon River Wilderness Area, I stopped and had a look. Several pairs of Least Sandpipers waded the muddy shore. A Killdeer, several Mallards, and a pair of Canada Geese joined them. Across from the pond, earthmovers, backhoes, and dumptrucks rumbled and stirred up great clouds of dust. A few shorebirds along with a new housing development.

With less than an hour at the wilderness area, the hike was more aerobic exercise than attentive sauntering. I busted through acres of woodland flowers to reach the open oak savanna only to find it had recently been burned. So with the few minutes I had to poke around I headed upslope to the bluff tops to see what I could see and was soon out of the burn area. While admiring a grouping of three small Hoary Puccoon plants a mason wasp landed on the dirt and gathered up a mouthful of clay for her nest. This was a welcome encounter, the first mason wasp of the year.

After the wasp flew away, a weird little fly made an appearance at the tip of a dandelion leaf. A ruby-and-ivory-colored Thick-headed Fly, genus Myopa. I'd seen this species before. Known parasites of Andrena Bees, these flies have preposterous ovipositors that resemble hand-operated can openers. Using this contraption, they are able to pry apart segments of the host bee's abdomen and insert their egg.

Louis MacNeice, in his preface to The Poetry of W. B. Yeats, claims that "all literary critics are falsifiers in that they try to disintricate the value or essence of a poem from the poem itself; they peel away the onion." True as this may be in the literary realm, there seems to be a parallel distinction to be leveled at the so called "objectivity" of scientific articles. The cool, matter-of-fact style put forth in journals and text books, cuts out what it can of the messy emotions and subjective realities and contains blessed little passion for the world. The goal, as I see it, is to keep observations intricate. While gathering data, why not work to include indications of connections and complications? One's loyalties must remain with the senses and the living encounter. I suspect this is why we still read Darwin and Wallace with pleasure.

Posted on May 12, 2017 12:11 AM by scottking