beautiful sun-warmed shell I have an extraordinary connecting with the season and the life that it bears. I leave her to her solarium and turn back to the tussock pool. Regrettably, my intrusion will break her bond with the day, with the April sun. That would have been so even if I had not placed my
hand on her shell. When she feels it is safe to move she will return to the pool and hide for a time in one of its deepest, darkest recesses before continuing on a journey I wish I had a way of following.
I tend to linger where the water lingers; it is the middle of the afternoon and I am still by the tussock sedge pool. I stand on a broad crest formed by shrub mounds and strewn with windflowers, or wood anemones. Named for their trembling on any slight stirring of the air, the flowers are motionless in this still, still afternoon hour. My back is to the sun as I look into the black water of the pool's deepest trench from behind a screen of thickset winterberry stems, interwoven like some medieval fencing, my coign of vantage for looking over the pool. The profuse specklings of white lenticels on the submersed sections of alder and winterberry stems take on an amber cast in the tannic water. They mimic the patterns of a spotted or Blanding's turtle's shell and suggest one where there is none or conceal one who is there. Perhaps an example of ecology influencing development in a species, this kinship of carapace markings with the effect of the dark water and light lenticels characteristic of the woody wetland plants native to the turtles' prime habitats, or with the scattered sparks of sunlight, the forms and tones of seeds of sedges, grasses, and buttonbush, dropped in season and often persisting, hardly seems coincidental. Dark, tannic water, specks of sunlight coming through dense
foliage, light tips on the "leaves" of sphagnum moss, seeds, circular pale pores on underwater stemsâall these must have played a role in designing the shadowy blue-black, flecked, and spotted shells of these two turtles of kettle holes, fens, marshes, and swamps, the spotted and the Blanding's.
As I keep watch I sight another vigil-keeper. Waiting, watching, with a patient intensity and keen perception I would do well to emulate, a ribbon snake lies unmoving at my feet. Not having moved for some time myself (perhaps I can be more patient than the snake; I am not here for my daily bread), I have gone unnoticed by the snake I didn't see until just now. Waiting is a critical component of my observation, as it is of those I am most intent on observing. Most of the time, he who moves first is seen first. I have no idea when this silent one appeared. His stealth in approaching the pool has been so accomplished that he could just as well have slipped out from under my feet. His camouflage is remarkable, even by the standards of a world so infinitely, minutely, and resolutely dependent on crypsis. This bronzed, straw yellow, and shadow black ribbon of snake is wound over, under, and among a littering of leaves and twigs, coilings of fern, bleached vines, and strands of grass, all laced with ribbon snakeâimitating weavings of sedge. Anytime I see a snake before he detects me and whips into motion, I take it as a reaffirmation of my interpretive eyesight.
Drifts of clouds that came together to take over the sky with the afternoon's advance have recently broken up and separated out. The sun is very hot. The snake's sun-struck sides expand and contract rapidly; he breathes at a hare's rate. With a barely perceptible flowing, disturbing nothing around him, he vanishes beneath a mat of fern wreckage. The silence of such animals in the upper layers of last year's fallen leaves, blades, and stems, so quickly brought to a rustling crispness, even on the soggy floor of the alder carr, by April's drying breezes, is as amazing as their endless ways of blending into virtual invisibility with their immediate surroundings. After several minutes the snake
hand on her shell. When she feels it is safe to move she will return to the pool and hide for a time in one of its deepest, darkest recesses before continuing on a journey I wish I had a way of following.
I tend to linger where the water lingers; it is the middle of the afternoon and I am still by the tussock sedge pool. I stand on a broad crest formed by shrub mounds and strewn with windflowers, or wood anemones. Named for their trembling on any slight stirring of the air, the flowers are motionless in this still, still afternoon hour. My back is to the sun as I look into the black water of the pool's deepest trench from behind a screen of thickset winterberry stems, interwoven like some medieval fencing, my coign of vantage for looking over the pool. The profuse specklings of white lenticels on the submersed sections of alder and winterberry stems take on an amber cast in the tannic water. They mimic the patterns of a spotted or Blanding's turtle's shell and suggest one where there is none or conceal one who is there. Perhaps an example of ecology influencing development in a species, this kinship of carapace markings with the effect of the dark water and light lenticels characteristic of the woody wetland plants native to the turtles' prime habitats, or with the scattered sparks of sunlight, the forms and tones of seeds of sedges, grasses, and buttonbush, dropped in season and often persisting, hardly seems coincidental. Dark, tannic water, specks of sunlight coming through dense
foliage, light tips on the "leaves" of sphagnum moss, seeds, circular pale pores on underwater stemsâall these must have played a role in designing the shadowy blue-black, flecked, and spotted shells of these two turtles of kettle holes, fens, marshes, and swamps, the spotted and the Blanding's.
As I keep watch I sight another vigil-keeper. Waiting, watching, with a patient intensity and keen perception I would do well to emulate, a ribbon snake lies unmoving at my feet. Not having moved for some time myself (perhaps I can be more patient than the snake; I am not here for my daily bread), I have gone unnoticed by the snake I didn't see until just now. Waiting is a critical component of my observation, as it is of those I am most intent on observing. Most of the time, he who moves first is seen first. I have no idea when this silent one appeared. His stealth in approaching the pool has been so accomplished that he could just as well have slipped out from under my feet. His camouflage is remarkable, even by the standards of a world so infinitely, minutely, and resolutely dependent on crypsis. This bronzed, straw yellow, and shadow black ribbon of snake is wound over, under, and among a littering of leaves and twigs, coilings of fern, bleached vines, and strands of grass, all laced with ribbon snakeâimitating weavings of sedge. Anytime I see a snake before he detects me and whips into motion, I take it as a reaffirmation of my interpretive eyesight.
Drifts of clouds that came together to take over the sky with the afternoon's advance have recently broken up and separated out. The sun is very hot. The snake's sun-struck sides expand and contract rapidly; he breathes at a hare's rate. With a barely perceptible flowing, disturbing nothing around him, he vanishes beneath a mat of fern wreckage. The silence of such animals in the upper layers of last year's fallen leaves, blades, and stems, so quickly brought to a rustling crispness, even on the soggy floor of the alder carr, by April's drying breezes, is as amazing as their endless ways of blending into virtual invisibility with their immediate surroundings. After several minutes the snake
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