Hey Tree, can I get your number?

Just back from a beautiful wintry walk with the dogs. What a spectacular day! How grateful I am to be walking along in the woods, the soil still embedded with ice beneath myfeet, making a delightful crunching sound as I go, the ocassional swoop of a red-tailed hawk casting a momentary shadow across the trail, and in this season, the panorama so open, the trees bare, the large rocks fully exposed. The open landscape creates a doorway to the cluttered mind, from which falls the trivial concerns, the pent up anger, the task-driven anxiety. Ah, yes, of course, this is who I am, the lone person and her dogs in the winter landscape, looking so tucked into herself under hat and gloves and coat and yet, feeling so released. Isn't this why we all need space now and then? To see ourselves in a larger landscape, reduced in self-importance and awed by the recognition of our place in such a vast surrounding. And then I see what you might think were trail markers nailed into the trunks of trees and of course, much to my sadness, they turn out to be more numbered trees. More numbered trees. More and more numbered trees. This particular tree was a young oak, bearing its new blue label pin, #72.

What do numbered trees mean? They mean that someone, somewhere is planning to do something with the land you're standing on. The trees, which until such time were free residents of their own universe, become numbered and tagged citizens of an organized master plan. I think this is the new trend in suburban development. The blight inflicted upon the landscape by rows and rows of ranch houses is an icon for poor planning, not to mention how downright awful it is to live in this type of housing. Driveways abutting driveways abutting little artificial rows of dwarf pines and cars everywhere. So, the current trend in our area is to build massive houses on small plots of land that allegedly blend into the landscape they have essentially consumed. Hence, the trees are numbered because some of those numbered trees may be left standing while the landscape around them is stripped and remodeled to fits its new residents, the suburban dwellers with their own botanical preferences, cosmetically improved flora, and inspired landscape designs.

Taxes are extraordinarily high here, land is expensive, and egos are big. You just can't keep yourself hygienically up to snuff unless your have five showers to chose from, all spouting water at your body from the bottom, top and sides. Jeez. A large home has been for sale in our community for so long, I decided to try and find out why one of those taxpayer-funded Wall Street bonuses hadn't been used to claim it. Real estate agents are always eager to show off their wares online and it wasn't difficult to learn that this brand new home had been built with 8 (!!!) bathrooms to go along with its 5 bedrooms. I suppose each person can choose the toilet of their choice based on their coordinates, mood and whether or not they were feeling the need for up, down, light, heavy duty or moderate rinsing. All of those choices will cost you though; the house was over $2M and the taxes are $60,ooo. Yup. That's right. Sixty grand.

So, more numbered trees means more bathrooms and less trees, less trails, less canopy, less noise reduction, and in my eyes, less aesthetics. But, of course, despite my ranting to no one in particular and despite the town meetings where passionate individuals will stand up and remind everyone how important it is to keep our community clean and green, the ultimate decision, once you've stripped away all the frosting, will induce it to be grungy and gray. More pavement, more automated landscapes, more cars and people and all of their accouterments. And since even the most developmentally minded civic leaders will say they do not want to encourage total deforestation of our old, beautiful communities, the developer will show in his plan how the trees are to be preserved...the important ones, that is - for you see, they know which trees are important. And these important trees, well they are given numbers and then they are plotted on a map, which the developer will bring to the meeting, where the civic leaders will see all the trees to be preserved while cement pits are built all around them. Cement pits that will hold another eight bathrooms and a media room to boot. Numbered trees, drafted into a green army, have no idea what lies ahead for them but it is certain it won't be anything like they life they've led so far.

And the planners, of course, think this is progress. More expensive homes means more people with more money to spend, more tax income for the community, more students, more funding, more services are needed, more jobs, more! More! More! But the downsides are not often recognized, let alone discussed and evaluated. In the timeline of consideration, our window is very narrow. We see only the new tax revenue and peripheral benefits. And if I think about this in terms of these numbered trees, I see a certain limited range of possibility. Because the numbered tree is preserved only as a means to secure permission to destroy everything that sustains it. The numbered tree is not a stand-alone commodity that fits as nicely into the 50 x 100 ft yard with swimming pool as it does in this yet wild space. In time, the numbered tree becomes a burden, growing where its new owners don't want it to, dropping leaves on an otherwise pristine green lawn, drinking up the lawn pesticides and fertilizers, attracting pests and in general, standing in the path of nature the way we want it to be - manipulated and controlled to our liking, a mere attribute of our homesteads.

Sacrifice

Eating Like Vultures

Somehow in our quest for the organic mesclun and the non-GMO corn chowder, we forget just how the food chain was designed to function. Certainly, we aren't going to learn that from our friends in the agri-business and while it may be their intention to keep us less than mindful of the source of our food, it may be our own choice to deny ourselves knowledge of what has to be sacrified in order for us to eat. Recently, a few black Turkey vultures (and I'm sorry to all the orthinologists out there, these guys are as ugly as sin) provided a helpful reminder of food chain politics. 

I've posted before about our neighbor and his McMansion with the gothic fence (spires galore). One of the fence victims, a young deer who probably found his way in but not out of the yard, died in the snow just beyond the fence. I became aware of this when our dogs went into a frenzy on our side of the fence, probably smelling the still living deer in the final hours of his trauma. The next morning I awoke to a bewildering site, at least for our normally contained, suburban lives: a flock of vultures had settled all around the deer. They were on the ground, in the trees and some where sitting in the snow at a distance from the others. These guys are big AND ugly. When you have these types of birds just 30 feet or so away from your door and in these kinds of numbers, you begin to question your own sanity. When you approach them, they throttle their wings in giants gulps of air in order to move away quickly. The affect this creates is a deep whoosing sound while a dark shadow moves about you, much, much too close for comfort. I noticed that we have a natural instinct to cover our heads with our arms (my sons, myself). this leads me to think that we have programmed into our genetic history a technique for dealing with vulturous birds swooping down on us. Grrreat. Sorry to have missed that wonderful times. 

For two days, the vulture pack lived in and about our yard while they fought over and plundered the dead deer. Young vultures (still had the white heads) had to wait in line for the big, agressive red-headed ones to be done before they could get their share. And among the big ones, there was constant bickering. One particular bully kept the others at bay while he feasted. Hate to use such a bad pun but even in the vulture world, there is a pecking order. Most everyone I mentioned this to was horrified. Vultures in the yard? Eating meet off the bones of a deer carcass? Swooping about whenever you stepped outside? Yes, yes and yes. Sure, it's a horrible site. And yet, that's how it works. Animals die. However timely or untimely their deaths may be, other animals feast upon their flesh. Thank you, turkey vultures, for this valuable reminder (and could you please move along now? Thanks.)

Oh, Dear, Another Day in Paradise

A daily experience for many of us in the Hudson Valley is the appearance of deer...everywhere. Not just at a viewing distance grazing among the trees but right under our noses, in our gardens, walking on our driveways and patios and even, so I've heard from a neighbor, walking up the front steps of the house to snack on geraniums. I've heard of wayward deer wandering into stores, deer giving birth in a small grove of tall grasses right on the property (happened to me) and one need not travel far to find plenty of deer carcasses all along the major and minor roadways. Deer are eating away at everything they can, especially now with the ground under a snow cover for several weeks. 

The deer situation is difficult for homeowners. Both beautiful and destructive, they have pitted their many ardent fans against fuming horticulturists. Some want them protected. Many others want them culled, i.e., shot and killed. I don't try to grow things that deer are attracted to and invest hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, trying to keep them away from the thing they've been instinctively programmed to seek out (well not anymore, that is). This means giving up on the kind of natural landscape we'd like to have and sticking to a few basic plants that they apparently detest. On the other hand, most of our neighbors have taken a warfare-like approach in dealing with deer. With all of 8 and 10 foot fences that have gone up around us, our once beautiful outdoor area feels more like a jail yard. The unique, if not extraordinary views that are a part of the natural landscape here are blemished by a patchwork of fences intersecting and framing off the land as if it were a patchwork of animal cages. All this – and the deer continue to eat their way through suburbia as if they had no other choice. (Oh wait! They don’t!)

I know the deer are a destructive force and their over-population is a complex environmental issue that needs resolution before our few remaining forests are depleted.  The co-sharing arrangement between human and deer habitats is not working -- that is plainly obvious. But, since I don't intend to begin the population reduction methods myself by slinging a shotgun out the bathroom window, I figure I have to accept the consequences of habitat destruction, i.e., the land and its supporting eco-system that once kept the deer population to a suitable concentration are gone. In their place is our home and thousands more like it. The predators are gone too and every time someone in the community spots a coyote, a witch hunt ensues to kill the beast before our children are dragged away by the neck.

The rear of our house faces up to the Taxter Ridge, a preserved area (thanks to the Town of Greenburgh and Westchester Land Trust) of some 200 acres that provides a most needed green canopy in otherwise congested Southern Westchester.  A unique geological feature of the Ridge are tall granite croppings that border the developments that were built right under their flat peaks. It reminds us what created the Hudson Valley and stands today as it probably stood hundreds of years ago when these lands were home to Native Americans and visited by European explorers. Yet, despite the opportunity to live amongst so unique a landscape, its residents see no harm in marring it with chain-link fencing and invasive plants (bamboo anyone?).  All of these efforts are designed to thwart the deer, who gobble the Impatiens with gusto and trample the well-tended lawn. 

The outcome of these costly investments in deer deterrence (an entire industry has spawned around this) travel the full length of the human-beast connection. Both tragic and comedic, the drama seems to never reach conclusion (or resolution).  The comedy would be the neighbor who has had his entire property wrapped in plastic netting. This is a fairly new invention that is marketed as "invisible at a distance and yet effective” because the deer simply can't eat through the plastic netting. Professional installers came to render the neighbor’s house deer-proof one day and left behind a house that looks as if it has been caught in one of those giant fishing nets dragged along by trawlers. I imagine our poor neighbors like captured marine animals, safe from their plant eating enemies but unable to move about the property. In time, swaths of the "invisble" netting in time began to droop and loosen, creating an awful eyesore only a notch better than the deer mangled trees they were meant to protect. There was also the sad sight of small birds trapped in the netting, not to mention the chipmunks we occasionally rescued through pruning shear extraction.

Another neighbor sprays the summer annuals over and over and over again with gallons of products designed to "odor" away the deer. From May to November, he has badger urine concentrate (a unique line of business, for sure) sprayed over every tightly rowed line of Impatiens, Marigold and the like. The poor fellow is out every morning, urine pumper in hand, reminding us that beauty is in the eye of the beholder (and certainly not the nose). While not everyone can get into a daily urine pumping routine, I did notice that this neighbor was the only one to achieve that highest of goals in the gardening world, that pinnacle of the Home Depot Gardening Club challenge course – COLOR! The rest of us were stuck with drab grays, brown and greens while his containers and borders looked like recurring patterns of Crayola boxes. However, I did find out that some deer – and whether they are nasty, stupid or just plain indifferent to fear I’ll never know – will put aside their distaste for badger urine long enough to eat through an entire row of salmon-pink Impatiens right down to the roots and even pull them clear out of the ground.

Worst of all are the fences. Why, you say? Fences seem like a logical and passive animal control system is what you're thinking, right? I suppose they would be if they were constructed with some knowledge of deer agility. Here's the thing: deer can jump really, really high. And when under stress, I've noticed, deer jump even higher. So, if you're going to put up a costly, rod iron fence that is designed to give your house the appearance of a medieval fortress, please first consult with someone who has knowledge of deer behavior. If you had, Mr. Neighbor, you might not have spent thousands on a fence designed to impale deer intent on crossing over your fence for one reason or another. Right now the reason is that you've got a two-acre smorgasbord of deer food sitting in there – a virtual Viennese Table of deer desserts – and hundreds of hungry deer sitting right outside the gate. The deer have to be culled one way or the other but I don't suggest that we painfully impale them one at a time on the spear-headed prongs of your gothic fence as happened to me one recent morning, a sight I don't recommend for everyone.