BY TALLEY V. KAYSER
On my twenty-ninth day alone in the mountains, I was awakened by three birds.
I came into Hidden Canyon from the east, over a ridge whose peaks tower two thousand feet above the canyon floor. The canyon is one of those classic sculptures the glaciers carved, a U-shaped channel filled to its high, rocky brim with clean clear air. Near the headwaters of Hidden Creek, meadows a half-mile wide churn knee-deep with wildflowers, small groves of dark whitebark pine mutter and nod, and the creek itself––two strides wide, maybe three––is a burnished strand of living light. Hidden Canyon is, by every measure I can think of, a good place.
But the descent to this pleasant terrain is, shall we say, steep. For the first hundred feet or so, I faced the mountain and crawled backwards, shifting my weight carefully from shelf to shelf, my nose inches from the stone. This foot. Good. Now that foot. Breathe. Now this hand, good. After the vertical section came the talus, the jumble of rocks the ridge has shed over millennia: ramshackle boulders large and larger, their great grinding weights laid atop each other with no particular aspirations for stability. I crossed the talus on a sunny afternoon, as the rocks reared from beneath a rough surface of deep snow––dangerous. During the day, their dark surfaces catch sun and radiate heat, melting and thinning the snow from below. Put your boot into such snow with confidence, and your foot might sink two inches, or two feet, or twenty feet; your boot, if not your whole body, will sink into whatever gap happens to be there. Ergo, it’s best not to step with confidence. It’s best to step with care, with all flesh alert to the possible chasm. This foot. Good. Now that foot. Breathe.
I made a thousand feet of careful descent, through a deep blue sky ripping with cold wind. When the talus ended, I trod with relief onto the gentler slope of the canyon’s U. Here, small willow tangles gained purchase, crowding around thin deep trickles of descending snowmelt. Between the willows spread steep and slippery grasses, and then there was a weather-hunched cluster of whitebark pine, and then my soles were in the meadow! A gently sloping field, springy and soft––how walking feels in the better dreams. Wildflowers tickled my knees with orange and purple and gold; I half expected to emerge with my shins and calves painted in sunset colors, impractical camouflage.
Finally I arrived at the creekside, where low slabs of granite basked amid intricate grasses. The frigid wind muscled north. I set up camp in the lee of a stand of whitebarks, pitching my tent in a lump of sun rich as butter, then shucked my boots and socks and hobbled to the creek. I stood shin-deep in silver while the wind tore me to shivers. When even the bones of my feet were numb, I stumbled back into my patch of light, a place of miraculous sheltered heat. I plopped down beside my tent and made plans to not move. Not for a full night, not for most of the next day. I would sit and soak in the open weather while my muscles repaired themselves, and in the afternoon I would pack up and leave the canyon––leave the mountains. I was a half-day’s hike, if that, from the terminus of my trek.
My last day, then. Nearly two hundred miles behind me, and too few to go. I leaned against a warm rock and settled my eyelids. Water ran over stones. The conifers parted the wind. Time passed.
I stirred when I heard shrieking: incessant cries, kraah kraah kraah kraah. I sighed and turned over, scrunching my eyes in objection, but the calls came insistently closer, until I awoke with the dim awareness that I had been hearing them for quite some time.
What was going on? I scratched my scalp, yawned, and stretched. Sampled. A definite shriek, but measured. More mezzo than soprano, varying slightly in pitch and duration but not in timbre. Not so much as a break for breath. Overall profile: crying kitten plugged into preamp, ratcheted up to high volume. Also: bird.
The cries came closer. I looked at my freed feet, wondering whether my curiosity was worth shoe-ing them again, and then there was a flap to the east and the bird was next to me. Birds, rather: a family of three, parent and two juveniles, flopped together into the shadow of a whitebark not twenty feet distant. Three birds, but only one of them crying that loud kraah kraah kraah kraah, scouring away even the creek-music.
The birds, I recognized, were Clark’s nutcrackers. If the adult’s general features (slightly smaller than a crow, gray back with black-trimmed wings, white underbutt) left any room for doubt, its behavior did not. The bird perched on a swaying branch, and focused its bright black gaze on the nearest whitebark pine cone. It bowed its head and drove its long black beak among the cone’s tight-packed seeds. It didn’t peck, and it didn’t jab––the bird drove down, with a precision of intent that called to mind my mother digging space for a hydrangea in cold spring earth. The deep piercing shovel-stroke with her whole weight behind it; the uneven rhythm of return; the vulnerable back of her neck exposed. Dig, went the bird’s beak. Dig, dig. Dig, dig, dig. Dig.
Then the gray feathered head came up. The narrow beak (“dagger-like,” the ornithologists say) held a cocoa-brown pine nut aloft. The bird reared back; with a sort of tremulous extended jittering the seed moved down the beak and into the throat––and thence, I mistakenly assumed, into the bird’s stomach.
I would clarify that mistake later; at the time, I was simply bemused by the dynamics of the family. The kraah kraah kraah kraah came from one of the young, a still-slightly-downy chick seated on the ground underneath its foraging elder. With every cry, it launched its head back piteously and flared its wings outward, then clamped them shut––as though the wings were bellows frantically pumping air into tiny lungs. Kraah kraah kraah kraah: the little black beak panted skyward, the wispy gray feathers trembled. Begging has never looked like such hard work. Meanwhile, its sibling––older, better-fed, or just more even-tempered?––sat beside the crying child, mute and calm as a rock. I watched the parent bird dig and dig and shake seed after seed into its own gullet. Apparently, it was content to glut itself at the expense of its (apparently) starving chick.
When finally the adult swept, in a grand flare of black-and-white tail, to the side of its crying young, I withheld my impulse to applaud. Kraahs silenced; beaks clattered. The adult disgorged, carefully, into the chick’s throat, and the kiddo lost it in ecstasy, closing its eyes and rapid-fire gurgling, its tiny wings vibrating into a downy blur. Then the adult returned to digging at pine cones, the kiddo returned to begging, and the sibling continued to quietly observe.
Moving slowly, so as not to disturb the family, I retrieved my notebook from my back pocket to sketch their antics. And, to my surprise, I found myself penning a half-remembered fragment from the half-remembered days when I was a disciplined Bible reader. “Look at the birds of the air,” I wrote. Then I stared at the ink awhile, wondering about the context of this injunction––why the Christian religious text, which so often urges people to look away from the material world and toward a heavenly one, in this case enjoins its believers to take up birdwatching.
Regardless, I was happy to oblige. From the comfort of my butter-lump of light, I considered the birds. The adult fluttered from tree to tree, its children awkwardly following, and continued its selfish seed-swallowing while its young cried out for food. Only when I noticed the oncoming shadow of the ridge creeping closer, ready to consume my pocket of warmth, did I stand and flush the birds, turning to prepare my own dinner.
After I returned to civilization and looked up the verse, I was surprised I had not remembered it more fully. The phrase “look at the birds of the air” comes from the Sermon on the Mount, one of Jesus’ most famous preachings. Even those who have never cracked a Bible open will likely recognize some of its gems, among them “blessed are the poor,” “turn the other cheek,” and “love your enemy.” The Sermon on the Mount is a central text in the Christian tradition; during my upbringing as a minister’s daughter, I read it hundreds of times.
But if I’d failed to remember the verse in its totality, my skepticism that a Bible verse would laud earthly beauty was nonetheless justified. In the sermon, believers are instructed to watch birds, but not out of appreciation for avian life. Instead, the birds offer a lesson in the benefits of carefree living––and (typical!) a reminder that any single human life outranks the collective lives of other species. “Look at the birds of the air,” the passage reads. “They do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?”
But this verse, while compelling, is wrong. Fact: when in the lull of Hidden Canyon I watched that greedy adult swallow seed after seed, I was unwittingly watching it reap and store away.
Clark's nutcrackers, as it turns out, have a pouch beneath their tongues in which they keep seeds. Not just one or two; the pouch can hold over a hundred seeds at a time. Adult birds fill their pouches with seed, and then haul their load up to fifteen miles, gaining or losing thousands of feet of elevation in the process. Then they do it again, making five or so trips per day.1 In this way, a single Clark’s nutcracker gathers––reaps––anywhere between 20,000 and 100,000 seeds between summer and autumn.
Perhaps you imagine the bird ferries its harvest to a central location. Think again! A Clark’s nutcracker stores its seed not in a single hoard, but in many small caches. After bringing its flight to a rest (always on the southern, sunny side of a slope), the bird scrapes away an inch or so of soil. Once the ground is prepared, the bird hacks up three to five of the seeds in its throat pouch into the exposed earth. Then it covers the hole again with dirt, and moves on to the next cache. It repeats this action thousands of times, making as many as 5,000 caches in a single season. Sowing, if you will.
When winter hits, monogamous pairs of Clark’s nutcrackers feed themselves, as well as the two to four juveniles in their care, on tens of thousands of seeds from thousands of small caches that they reliably find again over six months later, after wind-driven snow has cloaked most discernible landmarks.
In short: the parent I watched wasn’t denying its child food. It was planning for its family’s future.
My species has its own specialized capacities, which include a talent for questions. I returned from my trek with an idle curiosity about both a half-remembered verse and the selfishness of avifauna parenting (“which of you, when his child asks for bread, will give him a stone?”). Weeks later, I was still flitting through the annals of nutcracker science. Examination of long-term visual memory capacity . . . spatial memory and cognitive flexibility trade-offs . . . energetic behavioral-strategy prioritization . . . dig, dig. Dig, dig, dig.
There was plenty to dig into. Since many of us humans lose track of our possessions far more readily than Clark’s nutcrackers (I, for example, lose my cell phone approximately every nine minutes), they’ve attracted quite a bit of scientific attention. After a gamut of tests, Clark’s nutcrackers2 have demonstrated abstract concept learning, mirror self-recognition, and inferential reasoning. They are Corvids, after all, and share a genus with some of our most intelligent and underappreciated birds: Crow, Raven, Magpie, Jay. But of all their many talents, Clark’s nutcrackers are most researched for their enviable spatial memory, which transcends expectations for even the cleverest of bird brains. Say a Clark’s nutcracker makes a cache between two visible landmarks: fence posts will do nicely. Researchers can remove the posts, snow can cover the landscape, and (six months later, remember!) the bird will fly unerringly to its meal. Moreover, if a Clark’s nutcracker recognizes that it is being observed while creating its cache––that another bird or organism might steal its future food––it will often return to the cache later, dig the seeds up in privacy, and re-cache them in another spot. Which it then returns to, six months later.
From what I gather, the scientific community doesn’t much like to link complex, interdependent functions to a single physical feature of the brain. Nonetheless, research into long-term and spatial memory tends to focus on the hippocampus3 (more properly hippocampi, since humans and Clark’s nutcrackers each have two). They have enormous hippocampi, Clark’s nutcrackers. Bigger than ours, relatively, though scientists prudently reserve judgement on whether size matters.
Most striking to me, however, is that Clark’s nutcrackers grasp both past and future in ways that put humans to shame. Studies affirm that, as they forage, nutcrackers assess the available resources in their environments, consider the amount of energy their family will need to survive, and alter their behaviors accordingly. They take only what they need in years of scarcity, and reap more in years of abundance. Ecologists call this combination of prudence and foresight “projecting an energy budget.” It is an arena in which many individual humans, and far more fossil fuel corporations, fail spectacularly.
The birds sow, they reap, they stow away. Thus they are fed. Still, there’s that question that ends the Bible verse: “are you not more valuable than they?” Despite my quibbles about its factual content, the verse is not really about birds. It’s about people, who shouldn’t worry because we are (so the story goes) the top of the spiritual food chain. We may be creation’s sinful-est, but we’re also its best and brightest, made only a little lower than the angels. One does not have to be raised in a religious tradition to accept this narrative; by and large, my culture seems convinced of human superiority as fact.
If I had not spent so much time tramping about in wild places, perhaps I would rest secure in my exceptionalism. But I have been to Hidden Canyon. I have considered the birds of the air, and I have puzzled over their movements. I’ve applied my native talent for questions: what is this, here, in the garden? What is its value?
In my experience, two words are implied after the question “what is its value.” What is a thing’s value to me? Or, if we’re feeling expansive, what is its value to humans? The assumption that human benefit is the inherent measure of value influences even scientific language. Ecosystem services, ecologists call it, when a healthy ecosystem provides value . . . to humankind. In this equation, services that nonhuman agents provide to each other (cue robot voice) do not compute.
This, quite obviously, is not how the world hangs together. If a tree falls in the non-proverbial forest, and no nearby human carts it away for profit, it offers all kinds of “ecosystem services.” In fact, the fallen tree nurtures seedlings so effectively that we give it the dignity of personification and call it a “nurse log.” Clark’s nutcrackers, too, perform service. As each bird sows and reaps, it distributes the seeds of the whitebark pine over its range, which can cover over 150 square miles and over 3,000 ft of vertical elevation. Even highly capacious hippocampi can’t account for every single cache in such a territory. Ergo: though the birds eat most of them, many pine seeds find their protein-rich nutritious bodies conveniently buried at precisely the depth they need to take root, on south-facing slopes that offer lavish sun. With a little luck, the seeds go unnoticed through the snows, and when spring comes begin a centuries-long process of flourishing.
The Clark’s nutcracker meets the trees’ needs. And shapes them. Other species of pine open their cones to the autumn, drying and spreading, shaking loose their progeny in hopes the scattered seed will take root in fertile soil. Whitebark pine cones, by contrast, remain tightly packed and green, invulnerable to many pests and predators . . . though not to the Clark’s nutcrackers and their diligent dig dig dig.
Economists posit that “services are intangible in nature.” Nature, it appears, posits otherwise.
When I look at the interdependent complexity of this planet, I marvel. I also doubt. I doubt that I am of any great service. I’m smart, sure, and powerful; my species has built cities, invented the internet, moved mountains! But nothing indicates to me that I am inherently more valuable than a bird. Or, frankly, that you are.
The whitebark pine, on the other hand, is demonstrably valuable. It is, in fact, a “keystone species,” from the architectural term “keystone,” meaning “don’t take this piece out, you fool, or the whole thing collapses.” Whitebark pine, Pinus albicaulis, produces seeds that power its ecosystem’s diversity. Its seeds are 30–50% dietary fat. Black bears, red squirrels, and a host of other animals rely on those seeds––often, they obtain meals by raiding Clark’s nutcracker caches––to survive the winter. And, of course, even more predators rely on those predators. As if that weren’t enough contribution, whitebark pines also (by virtue of the long shadows they cast at high, otherwise bare elevations) slow snowmelt, which eases mountainside erosion and controls the flow of streams. Pinus albicaulis is not only a keystone species, but a “foundation species”––one that physically modifies and stabilizes habitat essential to its ecosystem.
I am far from an impartial admirer. Whitebark pine, I feel obliged to confess, is a tree I value; it is a species valuable to me. Not only because it is keystone and foundation to an ecosystem I love, but because it is a tree with great symbolic weight. Whitebark is the pine of high places, the alpinist’s pine. In the Sierras, it grows between 7,000 and 12,000 feet above sea level, in the same elevations I wander. Unlike me, however, the trees have to stick around all year . . . and conditions at those altitudes are, to put it mildly, harsh. At the height of their range, the pines must anchor in bare rock, rooting down despite heavy snows and driving winds. In deference, they knuckle and grow low to the ground. Sometimes wind and snow twist whitebarks into thick, dense carpets called “krummholz”––traditional, if insufficient, shelters for mountaineers caught unexpectedly in alpine storms. I know of several krummholz in the Sierras that arch over bare-scraped patches of ground, showing signs of continued use by human and other-animal alike. This is a tree that grows in places no other tree will, and still produces food and shelter for others. This is a tree that knows service.
I cannot, I refuse to, imagine the High Sierra without it.
But as of 2011, whitebark pine––this keystone, this foundation––is endangered.4 What could possibly threaten such a rugged, tenacious mountaineer? The list is familiar. There’s a nonnative fungus, introduced by humans,5 that causes a disease––white pine blister rust. Knuckle and bow as Pinus albicaulis might, it can’t live through the rust, which has been working its way through the Sierras since at least 1941. Mountain pine beetles, formerly kept in check by cold snaps, have expanded their range as temperatures warm and are chewing ever higher through the whitebark ranks. Fire favors the whitebark, but decades of human fire suppression have empowered other trees to dominate its traditional grounds . . . which are shrinking as climate change shuffles the weather warmer. Invasive fungus, invasive beetles, invasive weather: a familiar list indeed. In less than a hundred years, human influence has endangered a species whose individuals, despite their punishing native habitat, live a millennium or more.
I want, more than anything, to walk the whole world. Not the entire world, but the whole one: the one where birds reap and sow, and species are valuable in proportion to their service––to their ecosystem service. The world where a Clark’s nutcracker feeds its family, and trees take wing from the earth.
This “whole world” is a world of unfathomable entanglement, a world where no species or being or even cell is truly discrete. Consider your human body. Epigenetics says that what your grandmother breathed is written on your genes. Ecology says that the sediment load upriver courses through your kidney. In your body, as in the Sierras, life and nonlife affect each other iteratively through what physicist Karen Barad calls “the ontological inseparability of tangentially intra-acting components.”6 The whole world says we have never been apart––that we are, and have always been, a part.
To some cultural traditions, this is obvious truth. But my culture is only beginning to recognize what such interdependency calls for: a radical revision of our lifestyles and ethics. Contemporary anxieties about individual plastic use, corporate carbon footprints, worldwide climate change . . . these are attempts to reckon with an understanding of the human as not a near-angel but a material creature entangled with its world. Such attempts can appear futile, hypocritical, and even comical in a social context that assumes humans are Creation’s darling. Yet: “the morality of affirmation,” Kathleen Dean Moore writes, “is a soaring invitation to affirm what you believe is good and beautiful and right, and to align your life with those values.”7 If we see the world beyond us as good and beautiful and whole––if we see ourselves as part of that whole, our every action as materially co-constituting our world and its future––are we more valuable than the birds of the air? What would it look like to live with value as our aim? What would it look like to be of service?
Exploring these questions is not comfortable; within a few steps, inconvenient and unstable and even dangerous possibilities rear. But when we walk into such questions, we walk into a specialization of our species; we walk into our home territory. Ecology comes from the Greek oikos, meaning home. Ecology is the study of organisms in their homes. We who have made so much of the planet our home, who spread our seeds so far . . . it is past time for us to apply our talent for questions, for study, for imagination, to the complex impacts of the path we tread. Not as demigods, not as divinely-appointed stewards, but as animals who step each day through a world whose intricacy transcends our understanding.
This foot. Good. Now that foot.
Breathe.
1Since I have on occasion struggled to make ten miles per day over this same terrain, with a comparatively lighter load, I consider this an impressive feat of stamina.
2Particularly Cornelius and Gabby, two wild-caught male Clark’s nutcrackers, who have provided my species with knowledge about their species over a period of twelve (and counting) years. I hope they receive care and accommodation commensurate with their contribution.
3 The hippocampus (which, to my utter delight, was accidentally mislabeled the “hippopotamus” for fifty years of scientific history) plays an oversized role in the Darwin-era evolutionary drama. Sir Richard Owen, the 19th-century naturalist who gifted us the word “dinosaur,” chose to fixate on the hippocampus as a feature that distinguishes humans from other primates. Darwin’s supporters––most notably pugnacious Thomas Henry Huxley––disproved Owen’s argument outright via public dissections of ape brains. WANTED: similarly effective demonstrations supporting climate science.
4That is, the IUCN lists it as endangered. The US Fish and Wildlife Service does not . . . only because, the organization admits, it cannot financially afford to protect the whitebark pine under the Endangered Species Act. See.
5Some point to one particular human: Gifford Pinchot, the legendary conservationist, father of the US Forest Service, and media foe of John Muir.
6Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke UP, 2007), 33.
7Kathleen Dean Moore, Great Tide Rising: Toward Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change. (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2016), 18.
Talley V. Kayser has worked as a naturalist and wilderness guide since 2007. During the academic year, she directs The Pennsylvania State University’s Adventure Literature Series, teaching courses that combine literary study with outdoor expeditions. She spends her summers writing and exploring mountain landscapes. Read more at talleyvkayser.com.