Grebe Lake in Yellowstone, A Cautionary Tale

There was a time when I was all about fly fishing, particularly in Yellowstone National Park. In the late 1980s you could book a room in West Yellowstone on short notice, and drive into the park with no delay at the entrance.  I was hooked after my first visit and soon found that I preferred to go alone rather than compromise my stay with others. But that led to a chilling experience.

In much of the park you can walk 100 yards from a parking lot and feel that you are in an unexplored wilderness.  Not many visitors were in the park in September in those days, and it was worth paying attention to your surroundings. In Grebe Lake, 3 miles in from the trailhead, Arctic Grayling had once been stocked, one of only a few places they were found in the lower 48 states. On the easy hike to the lake I counted numbers out loud to keep from surprising a grizzly bear. (Highly recommended.) One thousand is a lot of numbers to repeat, but it was a layer of security.

Grebe Lake was one of the few places I have had the pleasure to experience absolute quiet. A Raven did not just call, the sound pierced the air, clean and clear and it lingered. The lap of water at the edge of the lake was distinct, I didn’t have to try to hear it.

My goal for this trip was to reach the outlet to the Gibbon River, about ¾ of a mile around the lake. No sooner had I started to walk than I was shaken by the sudden movement of something very large to my left.  My first thought was grizzly, but an immense bull moose had been lying unseen, not 50 feet away. This enormous, humped creature rose, staring at me with eyes too small for its large equine head, supporting wide plates of massive antlers. I was frozen in fear. There would have been nowhere to go if 2,000 lbs. of muscle and bone had perceived me as a threat. I have always felt in that still world I could audibly hear my thumping heart from that near encounter.

The rest of the way around the lake was without incident, but my goal proved to be an impenetrable soggy marsh, and my fright had extinguished my interest in fishing for that day. I turned to retrace my steps. But on the other side of the lake, knee deep in the water near the trail, were now two bull moose, vying over the rights to a cow standing between them. It was September, the rutting season, and I was trapped, uncomfortably alone and vulnerable to these huge, excited animals. All I could do was watch this fascinating display of aggression by these bulls until, as quickly as it started, it was all over, and each went its own way. Timidly, and with a fluttering gut, I made it to the trail, so rattled I forgot to signal my presence to any bear as I hurried back to the parking area. It seemed to take forever to feel safe once again. Grizzlies, rutting moose, Yellowstone is not my backyard. The experience taught me a new lesson of respect for our place on this planet of dwindling wild lands.

Later that week I was standing in the Firehole River fishing a nice riffle when I noticed a migrant thrush on a riparian shrub. I couldn’t pick out the species at that distance, so I returned to the riverbank, laid down my rod, and picked up my binoculars - for the rest of the trip. 

Killing Barred Owls

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed killing 470,000 Barred Owls over 30 years in three Pacific states in order to protect the Spotted Owl. Killing birds on purpose is a tough call. We have grown up in recent generations in which we protected birds. There are sanctuaries and laws, less hunting overall, and hopefully many fewer rogues caught up in illegal meat hunting, in superstition and rumor. I read over the blog ‘Conservation Sense and Nonsense’, a January 2024 treatise defending the Barred Owl’s invasion of the Pacific Northwest. I have to say I disagree with the premise that territorial expansion is Barred Owls is normal, ergo the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service should not be killing Barred Owls. I think they should be killing the invader, and quickly.

Barred Owl range expansion

I do agree that territorial expansion is a natural state. Successive generations of members of the animal kingdom will expand their range into suitable habitat as a method of perpetuating the species. And that is fine as long as each species occupies its own niche.  But what happens when two closely related species use the same habitat, the weaker of the two is a threatened species, and the more aggressive of the two has no natural predator to keep its population in check?

 Spotted Owls are not the only species at risk. There appears to be little research, and therefore it is almost unknown to the public, of the impact the owls are having on a cast of small owls: Eastern Screech Owl, Western Screech Owl, and perhaps Northern Saw-whet Owl. All of these owls can be found in habitat that is suitable to Barred. (Note that Barred Owls are not found in arid or scrub regions of the country, so those populations of small owls are safe.)

Each ring indicates a Barred Owl
territory  with a 1 km diameter

I can attest to the decline of the eastern species through my own work over five years surveying Eastern Screech-Owl populations in my home county. That was complimented by a master’s candidate working on her thesis at the University of Georgia, along the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area of Fulton and Cobb Counties. Barred Owls are the only ones now to be found in otherwise compatible habitat for the screech-owl. They still exist here in Chatham County, but only in habitat such as second-growth pine forests, where Barred Owls are not found. They are even absent from the uninhabited barrier islands. Transient screech-owls in winter are occasionally caught by trail cameras, but they otherwise visit undetected since they don’t vocalize, and in my experience, don’t respond to playback.

I am not alone in trying to draw attention to this issue.  A correspondent of mine on Bainbridge Island just off Seattle has documented the precipitous decline of the Western Screech-Owls since 1990 – when the Barred Owl arrived. His paper can be found at:

 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259928248_Recent_Trends_in_Western_Screech-Owl_and_Barred_Owl_Abundances_on_Bainbridge_Island_Washington

As of 2021, according to my personal correspondence with the author, it was rare to find this once relatively abundant little owl anywhere in King County during the annual Christmas Count.

Since populations of the little owls may appear otherwise stable no one is spending time or effort to study these pockets of decline - yet. There is also a lame argument that eventually screech-owls will find ways to adapt.  When? I do have some reports of both screech and Barred Owls being found on the same territory, but that point-in-time is not very telling. It isn’t indicating which way the populations are trending. Even though this problem has evolved from a natural North American species, as opposed to an introduced invasive species like the Burmese Python, with no natural predators, one must arise.  That higher order predator, for better or for worse, must be man. 

Eastern Screech-Owl Nestling - 2008

Note: May 26

I heard back from the writer of the referenced blog post. A little snarky, suggesting the invasion of Barred Owl on the west coast was really natural selection. Of course USFWS doesn't see it that way at this point in time.  The writer also suggested that the years of experience those of had witnessing the decline of screech-owls was 'speculative'. So I found what I could about this individual, looking for credentials. I found nothing. Simply an ardent preachy conservationist. 

Real Humans Win the Nobel Prize for Literature

 

I recently watched an old documentary on the life of Saul Bellow (American Masters, PBS Passport). Along with his literary achievements he had five wives, and no telling how many girl friends on the side, nor how many girlfriends on the side eventually became wives. The last one did; she was 43 years his junior and a student of his at the University of Chicago. She now teaches in Boston

Interestingly, many of our twentieth century Nobel laureates in literature did not lead exemplary lives. Booze and women were constant themes for Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, Hemingway, and Bellow. Faulkner had his issues with the bottle as well. John Steinbeck had two wives, but not at the same time. Hemingway, while on safari in 1935, got drunk and screwed one of the native women in his entourage. Today we would characterize his behavior as rape. But he wrote about it in his nonfiction Green Hills of Africa as just another day in the bush.

In his fifties he fell in love with a 19-year-old in Italy and wrote a wretched novel about it and death, Across the River and into the Trees. In fairness, taking a more analytical approach, academics liked the book. Nevertheless, you should read Hemingway’s A Movable Feast, about life in Paris in the nineteen-twenties among the ‘lost generation’ of American writers. (That term was originated by Gertrude Stein if memory serves me.) Supposedly “Feast” is non-fiction. Supposedly. I guess too often human weakness is a price for creative gifts. At the risk of sounding like only horny drunk men qualify for the Nobel, I should also say that Pearl Buck and Toni Morrison had their evenings in Stockholm, as did the poet Louise Gluck in 2020. Enough.

Majoring in the Liberal Arts

 

Last December the New York Times posted its best op-eds of 2023 in “The Morning”. One caught my eye, by Pamela Paul, “How to Get Kids to Hate English” (March 9, 2023). What really rang my bell was her defense of English and history majors, which are losing ground to STEM – training kids for jobs as opposed to educating them. I can’t argue that the job market isn’t different from what it was when I graduated college, nor can I argue that tech jobs are not a critical part of our economy.  But what a dreary, gray, and distrustful world it would be without literature, music, and art, not to mention journalism written by humans (instead of AI), and history to learn from, and live by.

 I remember very little from my less than distinguished undergraduate years; a little psychology, maybe a bit of chemistry, but I do remember being assigned A Farewell to Arms and J.D. Salinger’s For Esme with Love and Squalor. One classroom experience led me to read and collect most of Hemingway’s and Salinger’s works. I have seared into my memory the surprise of Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, and dozens of other characters in dozens of other books spawned by an early love of reading. I was a lucky kid; we didn’t have TV or social media.

 Who doesn’t remember music from their youth, or the first skeptical time you saw a live symphony perform, or being awestruck at the Met, or standing in front of Picasso’s Guernica in Madrid, or even Rodin’s “The Thinker” at the High in Atlanta? Are systems analysts, important as they are, going to give you those kinds of life experiences? They stick with you, long after you have forgotten calculus and linear programming.          

 Over time we can get all this on our own, but being exposed first will light the fire. Isn’t that what college is about? My granddaughter is set to spend 3 weeks in Rome, between her sophomore and junior years at Emory, with her classmates under the tutelage of a professor of art history studying the art, architecture, and history of this ancient city. Education and memories for a lifetime. Go for it.

 It seems this emphasis on tech training is ignoring the need for not just educating young people, but also threatening graduate and professional programs for which high achieving and hungry liberal arts graduates are eminently qualified. I am sure most of this threat applies to political pressure on state supported public institutions competing for job growth, but it can be existential to smaller private liberal arts colleges. However, Ms. Paul specifically referenced Columbia University, and by definition a university comprises all academic disciplines. I hope we will hear and read many more national voices in opposition to siphoning scarce dollars from a real college education.    

Reading World War II

 I’ll bet everyone who has an interest in WWII has their own reading list.  Me too. But I am deliberately not a big collector of this genre. I have about 85 books on the major events, the journalism, memoirs, and also novels in which the war plays a pivotal role.

My primary interest though, is how Britain withstood the onslaught of Hitler’s attacks, and in particular how England, Churchill, and the English people stood up.  I mean Stood Up, when the odds were so stacked against them that Roosevelt initially dragged his feet on aid, fully expecting the Brits to collapse by the end of 1940. However, it isn’t really possible to read about WWII without considering the ultimately massive, U.S. contribution.

This essay is on a small handful of books primarily about the European theater, but with one significant exception, Hiroshima (1940), by John Hersey. This slim book is considered by some the best piece of journalism of the 20^th Century. It views the immediate aftermath of the bomb from the perspective of several of the city’s surviving residents.  Sticking with journalists, and turning to Europe, William Shirer’s Berlin Diary is an inside look at Hitler and Germany between 1939-1941. When Shirer learned he was being watched, he left Berlin, with his hidden notes safely undiscovered by the Gestapo. Among the hundreds of correspondents covering the war, Ernie Pyle is unforgettable for his columns from the trenches written in a style for everyman, Ernie’s War – The Best of Ernie Pyle’s WWII Dispatches (1986), edited by David Nichols. After spending most of the war on or near the front lines of Europe he opted to go to the Pacific and cover that conflict. It did not go well. During a battle for Okinawa in 1945 he raised his head to look around. His loss caused shock and mourning among his followers at home.  

Surely a standout book of history about the beginning of the war, Britain’s early struggles and Winston Churchill is the third volume of William Manchester’s magnificent biography of Churchill, The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm. (2012) by William Manchester and Paul Reid.  I have never read a 1,000-page book where I didn’t want it to end. I think it is time to read it again.  Hitler’s planned invasion of England was profiled in Operation Sea Lion (2014) by Leo McKinstry. But the real value of this book is the fascinating home-brewed barriers the English people prepared for the invasion which never happened, replete with planning fire on the ocean as the Nazis approached the shores of England across the Channel.

As early as 1940, even while England’s very existence was threatened, the government suggested its citizens keep a diary of their experiences during the war. One in particular rises to the top, Nella Last’s War (1981), edited by Broad and Fleming. A humble housewife tells her experience living in Barrow-in-Furness, near a shipyard, of blasted windows, shortages of food, fear for her family, making do with little, and vain attempts to live a near-normal life. Of course, the most famous personal diary needs no introduction, that of Anne Frank, reprinted who knows how many times and read even by school children, Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl.

As for the United States contribution I can think of nothing better than Rick Atkinson’s Liberation Trilogy, An Army at Dawn (2003), The Day of Battle (2007), and The Guns at Last Light (2013). From the first landing on the shores of North Africa with an army so green soldiers are literally pissing in their pants in fear, through the bloody battles of Sicily and Italy, to the D-Day invasion and ultimately the collapse of the Nazi regime, they are masterfully written.

There are many others worth your time. So, to finish, I will mention five more good reads as the events occurred chronologically:

-  Miracle of Dunkirk (1982), Walter Lord. The story of an incredible escape of 300,000 British, French, and Belgian soldiers.

-  Battle of the Atlantic (2016), Johnathan Dimbleby. Hitler’s attempts to sink American aid with his submarine wolfpacks and starve England.

-  The Longest Day (1959), Cornelius Ryan. The D-Day Invasion, a classic.

-  A Bridge too Far (1974), Cornelius Ryan. The thoroughly botched attack on Arnhem, Holland planned by Field Marshall Montgomery, and resisted by Eisenhower.

-  Dresden, February 13, 1945 (2004), Frederick Taylor. The incredible destruction of a beautiful city by allied bombing.  The value of those day and night raids is still debated today.

Of Old Books and Dead Authors

 

Charing Cross Road in London is famous as the street of booksellers. It is also celebrated in the title of Helene Hampf’s wonderful little book, 84 Charing Cross Road. I bought John LeCarré’s A Perfect Spy on its first day of issue in a store there. Keepers among this writer’s novels are The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the Smiley trilogy, and that one. LeCarré’s early spy novels are usually free of violence and gratuitous sex scenes. I think Hemingway did the most tasteful job describing sex between his protagonist, Robert Jordan, and Pilar’s daughter, Maria, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, with the simple phrase ‘he feels the earth move out and away from under them’. Let me add that was probably Hemingway’s most elegant description of the subject among many.

On the subject of American authors, I have recently been reading East of Eden. I’m about halfway through, about 300 pages. I will grind on through the book in time, but for now I have laid it down. I don’t care for Steinbeck’s style in this book, and many of his metaphors are clunky. None of his books have a ‘happily ever after’ ending, and I don’t expect this one to. For example: Rose of Sharon Joad nurses the starving boy at her breast in a barn in the pouring rain to end The Grapes of Wrath. George has to shoot Lennie in the head so he will not be arrested for accidently killing Curly in Of Mice and Men.  Kino throws his precious find back into the ocean in The Pearl, and in The Winter of our Discontent, Ethan takes razorblades on his walk, following his betrayal of a friend and his own principles. Morality and poverty are common themes for Steinbeck.

Instead, I picked up Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. I have had a paperback of this classic for probably 50 years and never read it. I am grateful to have been born in an era without TV or, God forbid, social media.  Reading became a natural part of my life from the earliest book I remember, Johnny’s Machines.  I read avidly until I reached puberty, and then I finally rediscovered them in college. When I was about 12, we were assigned to read The Green Pastures, a parody of Heaven’s characters in the Black dialect. (Imagine that in today’s middle schools!) It was written for the stage by Marc Connelly in 1930. I came across a copy in the Strand Bookstore in 1984 for $5.00. I still have it, of course.

I marvel at the ability of some authors to write in the vernacular, whether it is Mark Twain, in Huckleberry Finn, William Faulkner in his Mississippi novels, James Baldwin in Go Tell it on the Mountain, or Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus. They are all classics; they have stood tall over many decades, they are still read, and they will NOT be banned for presenting America as it once was. And if you care, Johnny’s Machines (1949) is still available.