MUSINGS FROM THE MARSH
Ann Woodlief

XII.Death and Life

In the country one is rarely sheltered from an overwhelming and perhaps unpleasant truth: death is everywhere, and often intimately connected with life. The dance between predator, including human ones, and prey often takes place in the open. Yet sometimes these dramas are well hidden, requiring searching and perhaps an alert nose.

Raccoons, opossums, skunks, foxes, deer, and even turtles are the most obvious deaths, generally on or beside the road, often victims of their nocturnal habits and attraction to light. These bodies generally don't stay long on the road out here, though. Vultures, crows, and even eagles patrol, following their keen senses and voracious appetites, generally within hours. So death fuels life, with some help from the wheeled machines flying in the night.

I must admit to a certain fondness for the black and turkey vultures which ride the winds with such grace. On the road they are awkward, bold, and usually bloody, fearlessly daring cars to interrupt their feast. They seem to be comic characters hopping about, but once aloft they swoop and soar tirelessly, fueled by their gory meals.

Still, vultures bear watching. One day I stretched out on my pier, looking for crabs swimming in the marsh creek, when I suddenly felt I was being observed. I looked up to see seventeen vultures soaring in diminishing circles overhead, and realized they might consider me a target. It was definitely time to move!

Vultures are communal birds, rarely alone, but they seem to know their place in the larger community of birds. One fall afternoon, a drama played out on a nearby harvested corn field. On center stage was a raccoon, perhaps brought down by the two bald eagles pulling away its flesh. Hopping around in a large circle were seven black vultures, keeping their distance. Soon the eagles had their fill, leaving the rest to the vultures while they watched from high branches of trees on the field's edge. None of them paid any attention to their human audience.

Death also comes on a small scale. I have a collection of the remains of small creatures. Right now there are seven crouching tree frogs, whose skeletons appear in the dust on the sun porch or caught in the gazebo. There are butterfly wings and the preying mantis who finished her job of laying eggs for the spring, and flipped over to die at my door. Then there are the hundreds of ladybugs who in occasional winters cluster on the skylights until their pungent bodies fall to the floor.

Not surprisingly, the neighborhood wildlife sometimes presents itself in death. One morning I found a young raccoon dying on the grass; it looked as if it had been dropped from above, with only a wound to its foot. But there's always the threat of rabies in the country, and shortly after it was collected by the county official, a sign appeared on our road warning of rabid animals in the neighborhood, so perhaps that was reason it died. But I remember spending an afternoon watching it and its sibling carefully strip the crabapple and Bradford pear trees of their fruit, dangling at times by their toenails as they reached to the ends of branches.

I wonder about the hidden deaths of many. There are times, for example, when rabbits seem to be everywhere, and then suddenly there are none. I once found the body of one which was evidently the prey of a hawk, but that was unusual. Where do they go to die?

Birds also disappear, and not because they have migrated. Sometimes we find their bodies, crashed into the grass, victims of our large windows. There are a few cats around the neighborhood, and I have seen figures suggesting that cats typically kill many birds, though I have never seen a murder. We watch the hawk that lurks over the bird feeder, but he rarely seems to succeed.

More noticeable are the trees that are downed, gone to the chip mills to help feed our hunger for paper. Trees are a prime crop here, ideal because they replant themselves-life out of death. But I wonder-what about the life that was dependent on those trees, from the microscopic to the megafauna, the deer, bobcat, bugs, birds, even flowers? Their homes and nourishment are disrupted for a while-surely whole communities die among the stumps and freshly dozed hills, especially if they are not mobile enough to find new homes in fast decreasing forests.

Each fall, as we drive an isolated country road, we have been surprised by the vibrant purple berries of a bush beside an abandoned driveway. It's called an American Beautyberry bush, and it is, quite simply, stunning in the sunlight. But this year the VDOT crew got a bit enthusiastic in their clearing, and somehow reached up the three feet to destroy the bush in full bloom. What a useless death of beauty! How could they have missed seeing it? I found out how to turn some of those berries into small plants next spring, but still-the place which once blazed is hauntingly empty.

I am more comfortable with the seasonable and natural dying of plants, as the corn, soy, and winter wheat turn yellow and dry, ready for the harvester. One must admire the young corn coming up so bravely in a harvested field, only to be cut down by frost into fertilizer for next year.

The marsh thrives on the cyclic death of the grasses and creatures. That rich rotting smell of the mud is the scent of life and death combined. The grasses which die and rot in the winter turn into those fresh green stalks which signal the true beginning of spring and the millions of fiddler crabs living and dying in their regularly flooded barrows. The great blue herons and their smaller cousins stay healthy on the crabs and fish, leaving only a few clawed leftovers.

Death may seem tragic to us, but it is a base for new life in nature. Do animals grieve losses at all? Perhaps, to a degree. When the female bluebird disappeared after laying her eggs, we knew it for the male was singing loudly and ,it seemed, sadly.

Another spring we heard the bluebirds chattering excitedly, and saw that they were attacking a black snake whose head was in the birdhouse hole, eating their newly hatched young. But after the snake left, they were quiet, and within a few weeks, another brood hatched. And the snake had his dinner.

So life goes on.

Pleasant Living Magazine, September/October 2007