The Wilderness Writings of Howard Zahniser

Mark W. T. Harvey, Mark W. T. Harvey

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780295805153
• Topic: Ciencias biológicas
• Subtopic: Ecosistemas y Hábitats

Howard Zahniser (1906–1964), executive secretary of The Wilderness Society and editor of The Living Wilderness from 1945 to 1964, is arguably the person most responsible for drafting and promoting the Wilderness Act in 1964. The act, which created the National Wilderness Preservation System, was the culmination of Zahniser's years of tenacious lobbying and his work with conservationists across the nation. In 1964, fifty-four wilderness areas in thirteen states were part of the system; today the number has grown to 757 areas, protecting more than a hundred million acres in forty-four states and Puerto Rico. Zahniser's passion for wild places and his arguments for their preservation were communicated through radio addresses, magazine articles, speeches, and congressional testimony. An eloquent and often poetic writer, he seized every opportunity to make the case for the value of wilderness to people, communities, and the nation. Despite his unquestioned importance and the power of his prose, the best of Zahniser's wilderness writings have never before been gathered in a single volume. This indispensable collection makes available in one place essays and other writings that played a vital role in persuading Congress and the American people that wilderness in the United States deserved permanent protection.

PART 1

The Makings of a Nature Writer

---

---

With his education in history and English and his love of literature and books, Zahniser found that he had an aptitude for language that was appropriate for a government career involving editing, writing, and public relations. Zahniser's duties at the Biological Survey demanded that he quickly learn how to write for a general audience, but the poet in him yearned to write for a more literary audience. He found that opportunity in 1935, thanks to the suggestion of his friend Edward Preble, a veteran biologist at the Survey and later an associate editor of Nature Magazine, who recommended that Zahniser be offered a column with the magazine. For the next twenty-five years, Zahniser wrote Nature in Print, a monthly column that he used primarily for reviewing books by and about nature writers and other nonfiction works on wildlife, forests, waterways, seashores, and other American landscapes. The following three columns reveal his interest in the natural world close at hand, crafted in the style of John Burroughs, a leading naturalist and nature writer at the turn of the twentieth century, whose work Zahniser much admired. Each illustrates his passion for nature but also his love of the language, as he took delight in listing the names of the critters and plants found in the forests, lakes, meadows, and wetlands near the places where people live.

IN THE MONTH OF MAY

One who knows the outdoors will make his own appointments in May. From year to year he remembers. For him there are 31 May Days. He needs not to be told what to see, what to listen for, or what the fragrances are

Wherewith the seasonable month endows

The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild.

Now even the casual attendant has little need for program notes on the pageants of Nature. He needs only a word in the ear: “Attend!” If he looks, he cannot help but see. No straining of ears to hear the music, no effort to catch the fragrance of blooms, no difficult adjustments—to sense that all living things are in love! More significantly than ever “the kingdom of God is at hand.”

This is the month of life abundant—life abounding, leaping forth. The essence of the meaning of the name itself is “to grow,” a meaning known to all through associations and to scholars by researches into the origins of words. As distant as the origin of the name are the beginnings of celebrations on May Day, the gay new advent of life an occasion for liveliness and gayety, customs in a sense perpetuated today by playful observances in some communities. And after the blooms of May become profuse they grace memorial ceremonies on Decoration Day.

But nature's celebrations are those we most wish to attend: the trees and flowers in bloom, the birds in song, the insects in almost ceaseless activity, the frogs in good voice, and the mammals in renewed life are inexhaustible sources of interest and delight and revelation.

No matter how easily one forgets to think of trees as plants during the rest of the year, he cannot fail to notice their blooms in May. The time for the blossoms of the buckeye has come, and the branches of these trees are heavy with their panicles of showy yellowish or greenish flowers. It is blossom time in the orchard, too, and the trees there are “seas of bloom and soft perfume and sweet perfume.” Other trees are putting forth flowers—the flowering dogwood, the choke cherry, the sugar maple, and God's plenty to add. Every leaf has, in fact, the aspect of a bloom—the red young oak leaves replacing their predecessors that have rustled through the storms of winter, expanding and revealing a new color, of lavender, and then changing to light and to darker green; the crinkly little alder leaves; the wondrous bundle of infant leaves wrapped neatly in the beechen bud; and the shapely young maple leaves that will take on their most resplendent hues in autumn frosts to come.

Nearer the ground are the flowers more often noticed, as we walk with eyes to earth—though fleecy clouds traverse clear blue skies! But the downcast eye, too, will start with beauty in May if it catches sight of the trailing arbutus, the “Mayflower,” hidden in a mossy, rocky place. A little higher the azalea, or wild honeysuckle, tempts the bees to dust themselves on its anthers or displays itself to boys looking for Decoration Day flowers. Violets, too, are about in May—birds'-foot on hillsides, downy yellow violets in shady woods, and in meadows the blue-flowered and the flecked white ones. There is no flora like the flora of May—rue anemone, columbine, jack-in-the-pulpit, rhodora, daisy, buttercup, nodding trillium, arethusa, and near the end of the month the modest dwarf Solomon's seal.

From treetops in the heavens, from lower shrubs, and up from the very ground itself, through all this enlivened world of bloom and fragrance, come the songs of birds returned once more to their nesting places or moving toward more suitable regions to the north. Back from Nicaragua, or somewhere south to Peru, the wood pewee in the canopy above is making its song in a minor key. The bobolink has returned from its winter sojourn in central South America and, its breeding plumage renewed, bubbles its name in song from a bended weed in the field. Scratching in dead leaves on the ground, the white-throated sparrow is singing the last plaintive strains that will be heard from this bird in the southern parts of its range until fall. On the breeding grounds others of its species have already begun the summer-long days of sweet singing—along the mountainsides of northeastern states or farther north where most appropriately it seems to sing “Sweet Canada.” More wildly, more joyously the Baltimore oriole and the house wren are whistling and warbling, and the breezes carry the music of dozens of other birds that are glad to be alive and in love in May.

It is the month of all months to

Go forth under the open sky, and list

To Nature's teachings.

---

SEPTEMBER

September begins with an ending, ends with a beginning; and in the midst of the month comes the long-lingering harvest moon—month of transition from summer to autumn, with a full moon that for a few nights seems almost to have come to stay for a while. With Labor Day summer seems more definitely to end for the city dweller than with the sun's crossing the equinoctial line three weeks later, for the holiday dedicated to labor marks the end of vacations, return to school, and resumption of business-as-usual at the office or shop. Then the dog days end, and September settles down. Back in memory to the days of June one must go for comparisons with the pleasant bright days of this month, but the later pleasantness has more of peacefulness and contentment, less of exuberance and zest. Thinking for images in nature to express the subjective influences of these thirty perfect September days—almost as rare as June days—one remembers again how the river described by Whittier:

…winding through its vales of calm,

By greenest banks, with asters purple-starred,

And gentian bloom and goldenrod made gay,

Flows down in silent gladness to the sea,

Like a pure spirit to its great reward!

Yet September quickly runs on to a close, and after nearly a month of hints of prophecy, one almost suddenly realizes that autumn has begun.

Continuing evidence of summer activity comes from the insect orchestration produced by cicada, katydid, and cricket. On a Labor Day excursion to the beach, or under some old shed roof in the country, one may have watched the unfortunate ants sliding into the symmetrical funnel-traps excavated in sand by an ant-lion—squat and ugly larva gathering strength for its later transformation to an elegant and slender lace-wing fly. The grass spider, maker of the webs that have been jeweled in morning sunlight after dewy nights, is in September beginning to prepare for the preservation of its species through the winter. No individual grass spider lives from summer to summer, but the species persists in the egg sacs that the females, about to die, store under loose bark on trees or stumps or in other hidden places. In September one may also find the leaf-walled nests of the nursery-web weavers, those spiders that at all times recently wherever they have gone have carried with them their cumbersome egg-sacs and have now provided a nursery for the young, three hundred or more, or less. As the arachnids are thus maintaining their numbers in differing ways, the moths and butterflies too are providing variously for the passage through winter. Cocoons are the evidence for many species, but the season is more apparently signalized by the migrating monarch butterflies making their way, like southward falling leaves, to warmer latitudes.

The birds, greatest of travelers, are returning from their summer resorts and winging their ways to wintering grounds. Early in the month the rough-winged swallows and the orchard orioles are leaving for Costa Rica and Colombia. Before long the purple martins are off for Brazil, the Baltimore orioles are following their cousins, and the yellow warblers are making for Guiana, Brazil, or Peru. And later in the month the kingbirds are starting for the region of their winter domains from southern Mexico to Bolivia, the wood pewees are leaving for Nicaragua or south to Peru, and the rose-breasted grosbeaks are about to fly to southern Mexico or Yucatan or on as far south as Venezuela or Ecuador. The heavens are the scene this month of the movements of thousands of migrating birds as these and many other species respond to the season's urge. Birds of still other species are gathering together—sparrows and juncos and towhees. The red-winged blackbirds are in flocks, and the bluebirds, gathered in choruses, are singing farewells to summer, greetings to autumn, and praises for September.

Nor is this month of final summer displays and autumn previews without its own distinctive appearances in flowering plant and tree. The witch hazel bears its axillary clusters of bright yellow flowers in September—the last of the trees to bloom—and in low meadows and moist, open woods the fringed gentian is waving those flowers that look through “fringes to the sky,” the flowers that inspired Bryant by their late-coming alone and their heavenly color—

Blue, blue, as if that sky let fall

A flower from its cerulean wall.

Other flowers adorn September—the smooth aster with its blue or violet ray flowers and its tawny centers in open fields, the pinkish purple spicy fleabane in salt marshes along the coast, and the swamp sunflower with its purple-like disks and brilliant yellow ray flowers. And, as always, in any month, after those to be named are set in their sentences, there are others.

Yet, after all, in the end, September is the beginning of autumn, and the season's coming has through many of the days of the month been painted on the landscape by ivy, Virginia creeper, sumac, and dogwood. Grapes are ripe and purple. Windfalls of apples are on the ground. Already the red maple stands out brilliantly against the green of other trees. Vanguard of autumn, it starts the riot of colors that will last through October and into November. Its virtues, as Thoreau said, are as scarlet; one cannot escape its testimony; and one knows when he is a witness to the red maple that he has again lived through another summer.

---

JANUARY

When John Keats, casting the spell for his tale on “The Eve of St. Agnes,” wrote:

The hare limp'd trembling through the frozen grass,

he created an enduring image of the “bitter chill” of that January night. The matter-of-fact lot of rabbits during the cold days and nights of midwinter may, however, be found by the outdoors person of all seasons to be much less severe than that of the animal so distressed on the night when Porphyro and Madeline “fled away into the storm.” The god Janus, perpetuated in man's memory by the name of the month, is fabled to have looked forward with a face of youth and backwards with a face of age to the more abundant life of the future and of the past; yet even about us in January there is an abundance of life with a marvelous variety of activity peculiar to one of nature's most interesting phases.

Unless he chances upon some diseased individual, the one who goes into the woods or fields in January will see no evidence of limping hares, but, rather, in the snow he is likely to find trails telling stories of fast movement, and better than at any other season will be his opportunities to catch sight of the makers of the tracks. Crisscrossing in a maze to confuse any follower, rabbit tracks may have interspersed with them a pair of small tracks that tell of pursuit by a weasel, bounding along, its hind feet falling in the prints left by its front ones. Perhaps the rabbit tracks may be those of the broad feet of a varying hare, or snowshoe rabbit—an animal that in winter is white like the weasel, even whiter, for the tip of the ermine's tail is bright black, catching the observer's eyes and making even less apparent the animal's outline against the white background of snow. Perhaps the tracks may be those of the familiar cottontail, and it may be that in place of the weasel's trail the watcher may find the loping tracks of a fox.

The mink, marten, and otter, too, are alert during the cold months, and gray squirrels and red squirrels leave tracks in the snow that tell of continued activity. The white-footed mouse may need to add provisions to its dwindling store of linden nuts in its warm burrow in the earth, and if so it leaves with its tail a well-marked trail, perhaps toward a white birch tree that has scattered seeds on the snow—and home again, unless the snow tells of tragedy for the woods mouse. The top layer of the unspeakably marvelous, always six-sided, delicate snowflakes may also show the light trail of tiny shrews that are amazingly active in the coldest weather, finding insects in the snow; feeding on leftovers from the kills of other predators; and leaving the most delicate trail of all. Protected by the amazing warmth of the blanket of snow, the meadow mice may have their nests and extending galleries in vegetation on the surface of the winter earth, places of departure and quick return, as told by the tracery left on the upper surface of the snow at night. And deep in the ground, below the frost line, the moles are still burrowing. Certainly the wildlife activity of winter is not confined to the chickadees and other birds so conspicuous.

For in January the four-footed creatures seem for once to attract more attention than do the flying creatures. Among the birds there are in any area probably fewer arrivals or departures from or to other latitudes than during any other month, the population remaining relatively stationary but for an occasional visit of snow bunting or snowy owl driven south by unusually severe weather. A warm day may amazingly produce a mourning-cloak butterfly, and on a sunny afternoon of one of the lengthening days a big brown bat may venture forth. But the sight of winged fourfoots is rare during the winters of cold climates. Red bats have probably migrated southwards, like many of the feathered flyers, and little brown bats in thousands may be hibernating in some cave.

Toward the end of almost any extended excursion on a cold January day—in spite of the lingering exhilaration brought by the frosty air and still with a welcoming appreciation of nature's winter moods—one is almost certain to linger on the thought of the animals that pass the winter unconscious of the cold. It is easy then to recall the record of a hibernating woodchuck so independent of outside conditions that deadly carbonic-acid gas proved harmless, though the experimenter left the animal in the gas for four hours. Perhaps the possibility of such complete and long-lasting dormancy as the woodchuck's, or that of the jumping mouse that spends about half of the year in its cozy underground nest, is not as pleasant to contemplate as that of the raccoons that curl up by families in the ample quarters of a large hollow tree to spend only such parts of the winter as are coldest—or that of the bustling chipmunks that also are likely to respond to warmth of any great duration. The thought of the beavers and the muskrats, in specially prepared winter quarters, beyond the reach of cold and yet alert to such social opportunities as their arrangements permit, is also likely to come pleasantly on a winter evening. And as all of nature's marvels have instances the wonder of which seems most exquisite and most intimately associated with one's personal appreciation and worship of life, so the account of the black bear in its winter confinement giving birth to blind, naked young, scarcely six inches long and less than a pound in weight, seems to bring to one the most significant incident in the natural history of hibernation.

The thought of the large and competent black bear beginning life in a condition that seems so helpless, beginning it in the dead of winter, in January, is as exciting and as momentous as the sight of swollen flower buds on the silver maples or the revelation of the rosettes of mullein, hawkweed, tall thistle, or aster, that are bright green beneath the snow—all ready for the first spring urge.

---

As part of its public relations efforts to reach the general public, the US Department of Agriculture published newsletters, flyers, and booklets that provided information and commentary about wildlife. In this short article, which appeared in National Nature News, Zahniser shared the doings of birds and animals near a public highway in Pennsylvania. Like many of his early columns in Nature Magazine published during the 1930s, the piece reveals his delight with wild nature close at hand. Though he spent most of his career touting the values of wilderness in distant landscapes, his upbringing in rural Pennsylvania made him a careful observer of what wild nature offered close to home. In this characteristic piece, Zahniser celebrates the birds and small critters in a small roadside meadow one bright day in the early summer of 1938.

JUST A ROADSIDE FIELD

The Pennsylvania Department of Highways has probably estimated the number of automobiles that daily travel the Lincoln Highway between Bedford and Stoystown, but it is not likely that there is any way of knowing how many of these automobiles stop by a certain field on the south side of the highway just east of a side road “To New Buena Vista.”

Yet the full moon rises over this field at sunset. Daisies, buttercups, paintbrushes, and pendant blue blossoms on high stems sway as the breeze comes up at twilight. Down in the grass, where the bluets are, yellowlegs gather delicacies before nightfall. And over the field, nighthawks flap their thin wings casually, flutter, dive, boom, and rise again to continue their intermittent “peents.”

I chanced to be driving by this field on eleventh day of June, hurrying on to where I knew there was a spring and a likely spot for a few sandwiches, cookies, and coffee from the vacuum jar. I had not noticed the field until a quick glance and a sudden thought seemed to tell that a bird on the telephone wire was unusually large and had strangely long legs for a bird on a w...