Henry Adams on the Prussian educational system

Still reading The Education of Henry Adams. Last night I ran across these interesting passages, written about Adam's stay, as a recent Harvard grad, in Berlin. As context, Adams had gone to Germany to study law, but quickly realized that he was in over his head in the university, so he enrolled in a regular "high school" school with twelve and thirteen-year-olds to learn the language instead:

Bismarck himself was then struggling to begin a career against the inertia of the German system. The condition of Germany was a scandal and nuisance to every earnest German, all whose energies were turned to reforming it from top to bottom; and Adams walked into a great public school to get educated, at precisely the time when the Germans wanted most to get rid of the education they were forced to follow...

...one could at least say in defence of the German school that it was neither very brutal nor very immoral. The head-master was excellent in his Prussian way, and the other instructors were not worse then in other schools; it was their system that struck the systemless American with horror. The arbitrary training given to the memory was stupefying; the strain that the memory endured was a form of torture; and the feats that the boys performed, without complaint, were pitiable. No other faculty than the memory seemed to be recognized. Least of all was any use made of reason, either analytic, synthetic, or dogmatic. The German government did not encourage reasoning.

All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes. The German machine was terribly efficient. Its effect on the children was pathetic...

They never breathed fresh air; they had never heard of a playground; in all Berlin not a cubic inch of oxygen was admitted in winter into an inhabited building; in the school every room was tightly closed and had no ventilation; the air was foul beyond all decency but when the American opened a window in the five minutes between hours, he violated he rules and was invariably rebuked. As long as cold weather lasted, the windows were shut. If the boys had a holiday, they were apt to be taken on long tramps in the Thiergarten or elsewhere, always ending in over-fatigue, tobacco-smoke, sausage, and beer. With this, they were required to prepare daily lessons that would have quickly broken down strong men of a healthy habit, and which they could learn only because their minds were morbid. The German university had seemed a failure, but the German high school was something very near and indictable nuisance.

Adams seems to have had an amazing knack for being in the right place at the right time, possibly because he had the fortune (for good or ill) to be born into a very influential family. At any rate, he seems to be describing, first hand, the very educational system that Bostonians Horace Mann and Adams's own relative, Governor of Massachusetts Edward Everett, had just introduced into the United States as its first public school system. (Reading this, I'm not sure they succeeded entirely, but they did make some headway.) John Taylor Gatto and others, of course, have had plenty to say about the Prussian system elsewhere, but I thought it worth sharing this vivid first hand account.

Midsummer post

Since I've been posting so much about books lately, one might get the impression I'm holed up in the dark with a sweater and a mug of hot chocolate. Well, that might have been an accurate enough impression of our June, and even our early July was cool, but now...

Last night when I was preparing dinner, I had the sudden thought, "Why does this moment feel so Southern?" I looked down and saw that I was shucking fresh corn for a chowder, wearing khaki pedal-pushers with a blue sleeveless blouse (showing a pronounced "farmer's tan") and there was a gullywasher of a thunderstorm blowing in from New Jersey. Oh, that's because it's summer! We only turned on the window unit A/C this weekend, and even then, it really wasn't so much because of the heat as to drown out the loud, tinny Top 40 radio from the block party below. Our A/C is loud and it rattles.

It seems like summer's laid-back schedule is still new to us, too. We were busy until late June because that's when activities end here. Then we went off to Georgia, and then there was a little algebra to finish. But now we've settled into a nice, relaxed groove. C.Z. has taken to piling up in her loft with stacks of old National Geographics. She's reading about Antarctic expeditions, alternating with episodes of Wuthering Heights. (She says she can only take so much Joseph at one time.)

Meanwhile I'm piling up on the sofa with stacks of cookbooks, planning out how to use my CSA veggies. I've been cooking lots of new things, but it usually doesn't occur to me to take a photo until I'm done, and by that time, pulling out the camera would produce rolled eyes, so we say the blessing and eat instead like sensible people. I also forgot to take photos of my roofdeck planter, and it's starting to decline now, so I won't bother. But it's been a great year for herbs and little tomatoes.

C.Z. and I have both been taking turns lately rapidly filling out a laminated map of the world which currently covers the end of our kitchen counter. (It's a Sonlight Mark-It Map, which we rarely used at the proper time.) C.Z. fills it out because she just likes maps. "I suppose it's too late to be a Christopher Columbus now," she sighs. "Do you suppose the satellites missed any South Pacific islands?" I needed to update my geography to reflect the post-Soviet era. C.Z. puts me to shame on the "-stans." My tiny West African countries were a muddle, too, but I've just about fixed that.

Come to think of it, maps and Antarctica were two of C.Z.'s early childhood obsessions. Her main interest has been music for so long that I'd forgotten! But I'm glad she's returned to them, even briefly. That's another nice thing about summer.

And it may be time to rent Breaking Away. Bob has combined his continued study of Italian with a new cycling interest. He started biking about a month ago because he hurt a calf muscle and couldn't run, but then he decided that he really liked cycling. Yesterday he was out near the Carousel in Central Park doing about 19 mph on a borrowed hybrid bicycle (which he thought an improvement over his), and some guy in the next lane looked over and shouted, "Don't you think it's about time to get a new bike?" He and C.Z. have been biking every weekend. They plan to get me a bike, too.

This week, our plans are: Go to our knitting group, return to Jamaica Bay for another heron survey, and go out on the East River for a heron cruise at sunset (we volunteer to hold up signs and pass out binoculars in exchange for free admission). We've been catching up on all the doctors' appointments which we neglected during our twice-per-week physical therapy era last winter/spring. I've also been doing a few extra cleaning and organizing jobs each week.

I'll leave you with an image that brings the conversation (monologue!) full circle, back to winter, the season in which people hole up with books. C.Z. has taught herself to knit patterns (below are 2.1 projects she's done for our HFNY group), and now she has her eye on some Norwegian sweater patterns. We have just time enough to finish something before the cold returns!

The Education of Henry Adams

I've been meaning to read The Education of Henry Adams for a long time, and I've finally waded in. I don't think it's going to go very quickly, but I think I'll be glad I've read it.

Henry Adams was the grandson of John Quincy Adams and the great-grandson of John Adams. He grew up in what he calls an "18th century" Boston, one that still lived in the atmosphere of the Boston Tea Party. As I read, I am amazed that how many influential streams branch out of the Boston of that time (Longfellow, Emerson, Webster, Horace Mann, etc.), and how many seem to have been personally acquainted with the Adams family. What a way to grow up! Yet I gather by the tone of the book that Adams felt that his childhood prepared him poorly for his life, as he looked back on it in the early 20th century.

Was he right? I can't tell, at least not yet. In one early passage, he expresses surprise at the impotence of the Boston Unitarianism in which he was raised. The atmosphere in which he grew up was not only devoid of strong theology, but also of interest in philosophy. Only literature and politics remained worth discussing. Through his eyes, one gets a picture of an American city which has thrown off what the Old World had to offer, but doesn't know how to embrace the new, either. I guess I'll find out more as I read.

In the second chapter Henry Adams gives an appraisal of his schoolboy education. That's why I'm posting about the book--because this passage interested me. Although he says "the boy" throughout this quote as though he means it generally, it soon becomes evident that he's talking about himself in particular:

Home influences alone never saved a New England boy from ruin, though sometimes they may have helped to ruin him; and the influences outside of home were negative. If school helped, it was only by reaction. The dislike of school was so strong as to be a positive gain. The passionate hatred of school methods was almost a method in itself. Yet the dayschool of that time was respectable, and the boy had nothing to complain of. In fact, he never complained. He hated it because he was here with a crowd of other boys and compelled to learn by memory a quantity of things that did not amuse him. He memory was slow, and the effort painful. For him to conceive that his memory could compete for school prizes with machines of two or three times its power, was to prove himself wanting not only in memory, but flagrantly in mind. He thought his mind a good enough machine, if it were given time to act, but it acted wrong if hurried. Schoolmasters never gave time.

In any and all its forms, the boy detested school, and the prejudice became deeper with years. He always reckoned his school days, from ten to sixteen years old, as time thrown away. Perhaps his needs turned out to be exceptional, but his existence was exceptional. For success in the life imposed on him he needed, as afterwards appeared, the facile use of only four tools: Mathematics, French, German and Spanish. With these, he could master in very short time any special branch of inquiry, and feel at home in any society. Latin and Greek, he could, with the help of the modern languages, learn more completely by the intelligent work of six weeks than in the six years he spent on them at school...

...Indeed, had his father kept the boy at home, and given him half an hour's direction very day, he would have done more for him than school ever could do for them. Of course, school-taught men and boys looked down on home-bred boys, and rather prided themselves on their own ignorance, but the man of sixty can generally see what he needed in life, and in Henry Adams's opinion it was not school.

Most school experience was bad. Boy associations at fifteen were worse than none. [Here he names many amusements common at the time.] From none of these amusements could the boy learn anything likely to be of use to him in the world. Books remained as in the eighteenth century, the source of life, and as they came out--Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, Tennyson, Macaulay, Carlyle, and the rest---they were devoured; but as far as happiness went, the happiest hours of the boy's education were passed in summer lying on a musty heap of Congressional Dcouments in the old farmhouse at Quincy, reading "Quentin Durward," "Ivanhoe," and "The Talisman," and raiding the garden at intervals for peaches and pears. On the whole he learned most then.

Considering how generally negative Adams is, I'm not sure we should take his word as wisdom, but as a firsthand description of the extraordinary life to which he was born, the Education is very interesting reading.

The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann

The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann is a book I pull out now and then to remind myself of certain things I perceive to be true, but don't often hear stated openly. Father Schmemman was a Russian Orthodox priest who loved his church, country (Russia), and adopted countries (France and the U.S.) greatly, but was also honest to himself about their problems. Father Schmemann's journals are also full of intimate and loving comments about his family, close friends, and the weather. These latter are all ordinary sorts of observations, but they made the journals very personal, and after you've read a number of them, you feel glad to have known Father Schmemann through his writing.

Some of my favorite passages are brief notes about clouds, or a one sentence mention of a friend. Here's a typical example from the beginning of the book:

"I spent the whole morning at home. After a week in California, after the feast in Wilkes-Barre (consecration of Bishop Herman), after a trip to Philadelphia (funeral of Ivan Czap). What pure joy! Working in the dining room is Tom Hopko [later his son-in-law], with whom I always feel the presence of light and goodness. Snow outside my window."

See what I mean? All it takes to make him (and me, which is why I like this book) happy is a bit of rest at home, a friend or two in whose presence one can feel comfortable, and the ability to notice his natural surroundings.

Yet here are two observations about Americans in churches that I came across this morning:

Nowadays, especially in the U.S., the Church is perceived as an enterprise, an activity. The priest constantly harasses people to do something for the Church. And their activism is measured in quantitative criteria: how many meetings, how much money, how much "doing." I'm not sure it is all necessary. What is dangerous is not the activity itself, but the reduction of the Church, the identification of this activity with life in the Church."

and these fragmented notes after a meeting with a seminarian:

Pathological fear of not being popular, of falling out of the social micro-organism to which one belongs. How much in America depends on pseudo-friendship, pseudo-interest in each other, on a sort of ritual, symbolical unity. All of it comes from a pathological fear of being alone, even for a short time. There is so little inner life in people in these times. It is stifled by this necessity to be "with it." And when an inner life manages to break through, man is seized by total panic and rushes to some analyst....The reason is the pursuit from childhood of an adjusted life. People are taught about it in their family, in kindergarten, in school and in college, so that any falling out of the established "socium" is perceived as a threatening symptom of maladjustment, demanding an immediate cure. I often ask myself--even wrote about it: Why is there so much tension at the seminary? The answer is simple, I think. Because everyone lives depending on the other. They think it's Christian love. But it's neither Christian, nor love. It is a selfish concern and fear about one's self; a fear of not having a witness in the other, a confirmation of one's own existence.

Now it's not quite fair of me to quote these two criticisms in the midst of a book that has so much to say that's positive and loving. It may give an impression that is disproportionate. And so might my commentary. But I do think that these criticisms, made in 1982, still hold for many churches. I think they apply to modern education, too. And they are especially telling next to his positive comments about secure relationships and home life.

Since we got back from our trip to Georgia, I've been mostly by myself--that is to say, I've not sought out any social events--and I've really enjoyed the quiet. Now that it's finally calm at home, C.Z. has been entertaining herself quite well with various interests, and sometimes we go out to a museum or a park together for a change of scenery. She's also been biking with Bob (I don't have a bike yet).

I've been surrounded by people the whole time, of course. One always is in Manhattan. I interact with grocery clerks and people at the farmers' market, Audubon volunteers, our summer violin teacher, neighbors I see in the hallway, and our doormen, and we shake hands with the people around us at church. I had one phone call from a local friend about some plans, and left a message for another just to catch up. I've gotten some group e-mails and corresponded a bit privately, and Bob and I have spoken to our parents on a regular basis. My point is that, if I didn't seek people out actively by joining things, my life might easily continue on like this indefinitely. Would that be so bad? Is it Christian enough?

It's not that I mind doing things for others, or being with others, including new acquaintances. Sometimes I enjoy it very much. But if the atmosphere around me seems to place a primary emphasis on activity, and my ordinary life doesn't bring me into close contact with others, it's really no wonder that I enjoy being alone. I'm not going to go out and seek company just to measure up to someone else's idea of a well-adjusted life. No, I think I'll stay home and pray instead, and see what God has for me. It could eventually be an activity, just not right now.

Thanks Susan for recommending this book. You're welcome to sit at my dining room table (such as it is) anytime!

Shop Class as Soulcraft

During the past week or two I've been reading Matthew Crawford's new book, Shop Class as Soulcraft. I bought the book because I read a link from Rick Saenz's blog to an article of the same name in The New Atlantis.

I'll tentatively say that I think this book makes a successful leap from article to full length book. I think there are a couple of reasons for this: One is that Crawford has a background in philosophy, and the book balances philosophy with nuts and bolts throughout. While reading, I picked up references to ideas that I'd read in C.S. Lewis, as well as a host of lesser books on classical education. The flavor is vaguely Aristotelian, if I understand Aristotle right. I'm not a scholar.

The other, I think, is that Crawford isn't primarily a journalist. He repairs motorcycles, and enjoys doing so. (He also has a job with the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, which he seems to truly enjoy, unlike his earlier think tank job.) I think he's genuinely writing out of an imperative to know, so his book has something of a searching feel. I've read so many books that feel very formulaic to me--anecdotes strung together with a thin veneer of ideas. Whatever the book's faults, I think Crawford is not too glib.

That said, I felt a slight disorganization in the book. This could be because I read it in snatches, and because I'd already read the two essays/articles which are interspersed throughout the book. (A link to the second one is posted below.) And while sometimes he uses just the right words, at others he uses a lot of extra ones. This doesn't kill the interest for me, though. I'd probably like to reread it later and see what I think then.

On the face of it, Shop Class seems to be an apology for the manual trades. Most of the examples are taken from Crawford's own work as a motorcycle mechanic. (Replete with macho, as opposed to manly, talk.) But as Crawford himself says, he's not trying to get more people to become blue-collar workers; he's trying to get them to examine the received wisdom that a white collar is the key to having a job that requires thought. The book is really about how modern capitalism has separated thought from production in office jobs, resulting in a work place where no one is truly accountable for what is produced.

Some have criticized the book for unrealistically glorifying manual labor at the expense of office work, and that Crawford is a special, somehow privileged case, in having a career that spans both extremes. Well, I don't know, but I'm frankly glad someone has tried it--it's not like everyone is going to want to! These criticisms sound to me an awful lot like people who won't homeschool because not everyone does.

The reason for the mechanical anecdotes, of course, is that they add credibility to his arguments about the nature of work. I don't know the guy's whole background or how he happened to study philosophy as well as the manual trades, but it's obvious that he really does like fixing motorcycles. And I find myself hoping that he really is good at it, and not just waxing poetic, because his whole thesis seems to hang on it. I think of people I know who can talk about paintings, but can't paint. There's a lot of insight in the nitty gritty.

I don't want to try to encompass the whole book in my review, but I would like to list some points that struck me as I read, either because they were new ideas or because they made connections between things I had already thought about in other contexts:

One of the most Orwellian chapters of the book was "The Contradictions of the Cubicle." He tells the basic story in an article that was recently published in the New York Times: With his advanced degree, he once procured a nightmarish cubicle job writing abstracts for academic articles. The setup of the job was totally ill-suited for the day to day work in a way that can only happen when the upper-level managers are more concerned with efficiency than the work itself. (Think tech support.) One guy was even narcotizing his feelings of absurdity by doing heroin on the job.

Crawford uses this as an example of the futility of credential inflation. In a section of the chapter called "What College is For," he writes:

[In the push for increased college attendance] there is little accommodation to the diversity of dispositions, and of the fact that some very smart people are totally ill suited both to higher education and to the kind of work you're supposed to do once you have a degree. Further, funneling everyone into college creates certain perversities in the labor market...My very existence, multiplied a millionfold, is precisely what puts the futureologist in a rapture; we are getting to be so smart! Yet in viewing my situation from afar in this way, the M.A. degree serves only to obscure a more real stupidification of the work I secured with that credential...Is this our society as a whole, buying more education only to scale new heights of stupidity?

Until after WWII, lots of business jobs didn't require a college degree. Now we have degrees for technicians. When the college push first started a couple of generations ago, at least colleges selected for a certain self-discipline, but now recruiters are looking more for a certain type of personality. That's why the extracurriculars have become so important. They show that one is a joiner, ready for teamwork. And higher education habituates people to a certain disconnect between rhetoric and reality. That also suits the office environment.

(For what it's worth, I have worked in a cubicle before, so I have some experience with what he's talking about. But since my job was in design, at least I went to construction sites, and my measurements had to add up.)

Elsewhere in this chapter Crawford describes example after example of management techniques that are at some times reminiscent of girl cliques and at others almost remind me of Communist "re-education" camps. The point of this chapter is that "teamwork" is a vague and contentless concept that is necessarily manipulative because in a consumer-driven culture, there are no objective standards.

A good part of the [management] job, then consists of "a constant interpretation and reinterpretation of events that constructs a reality in which it is difficult to pin blame on anyone, especially oneself.

[In the context of teamwork]...authority becomes passive-aggressive, trying to pass itself off as something cooperative and friendly; as volunteerism. It is always pretending to be in your best interest, in everyone's best interest, as rationality itself.

The risk is of being deceived into thinking there is a common good where there is not one.

In contrast with teamwork is "solidarity," which is based on concrete common interests.

Solidarity with others is a positive attraction, akin to love... Its scope is necessarily smaller, its grip on our affections tighter, than that of any vaporous universal.

Another helpful chapter is entitled "Work, Leisure, and Full Engagement." Crawford posits the example of a mortgage broker whose work is not intrinsically satisfying, so he works hard to earn money for a vacation to Mount Everest, where he can feel the satisfaction of confronting a concrete, unyielding Reality. At the turn of the last century, such a banker would have possessed a community to give context and accountability to his work. He would have gone down to the local hardware store to ask the owner how likely a potential borrower was to pay back his account there, and he would have considered the good of his community as a whole if he lent the man money. By contrast (which is obvious now, but wasn't to many people as little as three or four years ago), the 21st Century mortgage system is set up to discourage accountability altogether. Not only does the mortgage broker not know his borrowers, he has no incentive to find out--not from his brokerage, which wants to rack up origination fees and immediately sells the mortgage to a third party, or from Wall Street, which wants to profit from a lending boom.

This example, of course, makes me wonder whether Crawford wrote these chapters before the mortgage bubble burst or afterwards, but banking isn't the only industry structured this way. Our entire economy is structured to discourage reality checks. This not only leads to temporary setbacks like foreclosure and housing busts, but prevents most workers, white collar or blue, from being able to work in a job that makes sense, even in the most prosperous of economic times.

At the end of the book Crawford conducts a very interesting discussion about the difference between being independent and being autonomous. I think this is a distinction that Christians would do well to recognize, just as they recognize three Greek words for "love." One frequently hears pastors extol community and preach against hyper-individualism, and I understand why. There are extreme tendencies in our society that, if followed, could lead to each person isolating himself from God and neighbor in his or her own private Hell. But sometimes our solutions, couched in management speak, produce something more like a corporate "encounter session" than hard won faith in an Incarnated God, or community with particular people who share specific tasks.

In light of this, I like to remember that there is also a form of independence or healthy skepticism, perhaps better termed human dignity, that protects people from false intimacy. Orthodox Christianity contains the right balance, the best of both individual freedom and thoughtful community, but sometimes we Christians veer to one side of the road or another in our attempts to live it out.

Here's how Crawford puts it:

[A journeyman's] individuality is...expressed in an activity that, in answering to a shared world, connects him to others: the customers he serves and other practitioners of his art, who are competent to recognize the peculiar excellence of his work. Such a sociable individuality contrasts with the self-enclosure that is implicit in the idea of "autonomy," which means giving a law to oneself. The idea of autonomy denies that we are born into a world that existed prior to us. It posits an essential aloneness; an autonomous being is free in the sense that a being severed from all others is free. To regard oneself this way is to betray the natural debts we owe to the world, and commit the moral error of ingratitude. For in fact we are basically dependent beings; one upon another, and each on a world that is not of our making.

To live wakefully is to live in full awareness of this, our human situation. To live well is to reconcile ourselves to it, and try to realize whatever excellence we can. For this some economic conditions are more favorable than others. When the conception of work is removed from the scene of its execution, we are divided against one another, and each against himself...A humane economy would be one in which the possibility of acheiving such satisfaction is not foreclosed ahead of time for most people. It would require a sense of scale. We in the West have arranged our institutions to prevent the concentration of political power...But we have failed utterly to prevent the concentration of economic power, to to take account of how such concentration damages the conditions under which full human flourishing becomes possible (it is never guaranteed). The consolation we seek in shopping serves only to narcotize us against a recognition of the facts, even while contributing to the Giant Pool of Money.

Crawford isn't speaking from a Christian point of view, but this Christian would like to live closer to the way he describes.

Foraging for herons

A Snowy Egret. We saw lots of these. Love those feet!

We saw a Green Heron today, too

Today C.Z. and I started our volunteer work for the New York City Audubon Society. We're doing what's called "citizen science," where volunteers take down information that scientists use to learn about birds' habits. This study is on how herons forage for food. Our site is Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge.

It's really quite easy in theory, and with practice I'm sure we'll get much better at it in actuality, too. We have nine sites. At each site we record the weather and habitat (in percentages) and the number of each kind of wading bird. Then we do three-minute observations of what the birds are doing. We also record what other wading birds, if any, are nearby, in meters. For instance, if we're observing a spot along the West Pond, we might see open water, phragmities (a tall marsh grass), a mudflat, and shrubs. Perhaps there's a Great Blue Heron sitting on one little island of phragmites, and a Great Egret sitting on another, and a Snowy Egret walking around the perimeter of the egret's island. So we'll watch each bird for three minutes and record what he does, and how far the other birds are from him.

The tricky part, of course, is what to do when you get a lot of birds, but by the time you write them down, they've all changed. Or you were watching a Glossy Ibis, and he just up and flew away. Or you're not sure whether the Snowy Egret that just caught a fish is the same one you were watching a few minutes ago. And maddeningly, they all seem to start doing something really interesting after your three minutes are up. Are you allowed to start over?

As it was, we were there for four-and-a-half hours today, but what a lovely time it was. New York City, as those of you who live nearby know, is having an unusually cool summer. Before we left for Georgia, it was cool and it rained every day. Since we got back, it's been cool and gorgeous, with low humidity. This is a golden summer, and it's good to be outdoors in it as much as possible!

At Jamaica Bay, the high was in the seventies, the breeze was constant, and the colors were clear and bright. We saw all kinds of herons, almost every wading bird in our list! What I hoped we'd accomplish by doing this survey, besides learning how surveys work and helping conservation efforts, was to really learn how each species behaves. And we did learn some things, even today on our first trip. I learned that Snowys and Tricolors are fast foragers, while Great Egrets and Great Blues stand and wait for longer for something to come by. The Tricolors are quite aggressive in their fishing, and they tend to fish alone. Ours was on the water's edge as the tide was coming in, bay side. The ibises walk along with their heads in the water, sweeping from side to side like a blind man with a cane. And I learned that Great Egrets spend a lot of time sleeping in trees.

The survey made us more aware of the different plants on the island, too. I'd seen many of them before, but having to note them makes you pay more attention. All the flowers are in full bloom right now, and they're a riot of color. And I now know my spartina altiflora from my spartina patens from my phragmites. I always knew that I liked they way they look in the broad sweep of a saltmarsh landscape, but now I know what the different species are, too.

Yellow Warbler

And one reason the survey took us so long today was that it was a nice birding day generally, so we kept taking breaks to watch the other birds. During our rather sparse spring migration outings, I kept joking that all I wanted to see was a Yellow Warbler, so I'd know it was spring. Well, today I saw a whole family of them!

And we saw a mother flycatcher feeding her baby a dragonfly, up close. It was a huge dragonfly, and the mother had to keep taking it back out of the baby's mouth each time it took a bite, so she could change the angle. At first, we wondered whether she was going to take some for herself, but no, she never did! Then they both turned in our direction, and we beheld their satisfied birdy faces as they sat side by side on the branch. Cute! We saw so many flycatchers that C.Z. called it an "empi epidemic."

The Barn Swallows we saw looked like this. I think they were babies.

We saw two Barn Swallows just sitting still on a branch outside the Welcome Center. I'd never actually seen a Barn Swallow sit still before. In fact, I was so startled that I had to look them up in my Sibley Guide to make sure that's what they were. They were bigger than I'd thought! And I saw the brightest House Finch I'd ever seen in my life eating mulberries out of a tree. He really looked as though he were a sparrow who'd stained his feathers with bright red berries. And of course, there were Song Sparrows singing everywhere. They really add to the ambience of a bird sanctuary.

Oh, and once, as we were walking along the path, we stopped right in our tracks because, just thirty feet away, we saw a terrapin digging a nest. That was last year's volunteer research project, the one that got us to interested in doing more, but Dr. Burke is in Italy this year studying lizards. We sat on the trail for about five minutes, trying to be utterly still and quiet so our terrapin could finish digging her nest, but I think she got scared and scuttled off. It was right on the trail. We saw terrapins in the water, too, and dozens of marked terrapin nests, both real ones with cages, and fake ones without. They're to fool raccoons--Shh, don't tell!

Cedar Waxwings really like berries. They're fairly common, but aren't they beautiful?

Here's our full list, for whomever follows these things:

Mute Swan

Double-crested Cormorant

Great Blue Heron

Great Egret

Snowy Egret

Tricolored Heron

Green Heron

Black-crowned Night Heron

Yellow-crowned Night Heron

Glossy Ibis

American Oystercatcher (flocks)

Greater Yellowlegs

Unidentified plovers and sandpipers

Laughing Gull

Great Black-Backed Gull, which pulled a huge fish out of the water and proceeded to eat it!

Least Tern

other terns

Black Skimmer (love these!)

Empidonax flycatcher (mother, baby, and others, still not sure which kinds)

Tree Swallow

Barn Swallow

Gray Catbird

Northern Mockingbird

Brown Thrasher

Cedar Waxwing (eating beautiful translucent red berries)

Yellow Warbler family

American Redstarts

Common Yellowthroat

Song Sparrow

Red-winged Blackbird

House Finch (eating mulberries)

American Goldfinch

This is ever so much more fun than going to classes, I must say! And this weekend we're going to help with an Eco-Cruise. Who says New Yorkers can't get out in nature? Of course, it took a two-hour train ride to get out there, but who cares!

(All images from Wikipedia Commons)

Summer in pictures

We did so much during our ten days in Georgia that it defies easy description.  So I thought I'd just post some pictures with a little commentary.  This is a little hard to do while respecting the privacy of all of our various family members, friends, and one daughter who got a haircut. But I hope this will do the trip justice...

9 p.m.*, June 27th.  Bob's parents' house north of Atlanta. We played game upon game of spoons, which eventually evolved into a new game called "Extreme Spoons," in which the number of spoons gradually diminished until blood was drawn.  We also played "No Way!," a bluffing game which really has another name, but we don't call it that.  And "Outdoor Clue," a kind of tag in which no one knows who's "it." And badminton. A certain family member became extremely punchy during "No Way!" and laughed a lot at his own antics.  "Challenge me!"

We ate breakfast every morning on the screened porch, and made mint chocolate chip ice cream for dessert one night.  And C.Z. got in a little target practice.  Her grandfather think it complements her violin skills nicely to be a good shot with a revolver.

Taking the fishing boat out onto the pond on Bob's parents' property.  The area has been built up a lot over the past twenty-five years, but it's still pretty private where they live.  Does this photo look as hot and humid as it feels to me, or am I just such a Georgian that I can sense it in all that green?  Don't forget to plug the boat!

We also went ice skating, indoors, which of course is the only way you can go ice skating in Georgia, even in winter.  I didn't take the camera.  As it was, I had some trouble with the popsicle-like surface of the indoor ice, which kept catching on my rental skates. I really hate it when I look up through a lot of white dots and see people staring at me and looking all concerned!  But at least I wasn't wearing flip-flops...

June 30th, noon. Seven of us went trail riding (on horses) near Dahlonega and then hiked up Amicalola Falls.  The orange object in the foreground is a flip-flop, which can only mean one thing, Susan.

And what trip down South would be complete without catching a few crayfish in a stream?

Or spotting a newly molted cicada?  

Other sounds, and some bird highlights:  A Chuck-will's-widow at night, a Belted Kingfisher over the Apalachee River, and a Pileated Woodpecker knocking on an old pine. 

Next up, Athens, Georgia, where we ate potato salad and cantaloupe, drank sweetened iced tea, and then did a lot of swimming, at my parents'.  Just before we left for Athens, C.Z. got ten inches cut off her hair for Locks of Love.  It looks great, but she won't let me post a picture!  

July 2, 6:45 p.m., outside Athens in an 1870s farmhouse.  Some good friends invited us over for dinner and kayaking.

Just what every child needs: a fishing hat with a bit of rope stuffed inside, and a good stick.  But a tin-roofed hunting shack with taxidermic animals is also nice to have nearby.

Apalachee River, 8:45 p.m., from a kayak.  We're learning to pole around fallen trees.

A neighbor's woodshop, 9:15 p.m.  A radio was blasting slightly dissonant orchestral music as we entered through the open barn doors and saw the shapes of ancient power tools, with their old oil smell, looming in the dark.  I felt for a moment as though I was in a slightly eerie movie as my friend went to switch on the lights.  I later found out that her neighbor kept NPR turned on all night to keep the deer out.  The owner of the shop, like me, is reading Shop Class as Soulcraft.  And he built his house after A Pattern Language, too!  I love it when I meet people who like the same things I like.  

July 4, 7p.m. Athens, Georgia.  My sister's veggie burger and my niece's dinner invitation.  My nine-year-old niece also made an American flag cake, and my six-year-old nephew made lemonade. I also really liked my brother-in-law's grilled andouille sausages!  I won't say how old he is.

7:45 p.m.  Roger is caught red-pawed, licking off the plates in the dishwasher.  

10:00 p.m., a strip mall parking lot in Athens. Two six-year-old boys examine a really cool first-aid kit after watching fireworks (below) from a local park.  Also included in the evening's entertainment:  Hoola-hoops.

Happy 4th of July!  And then we went home. 

One more mental picture:  On the way home, on the train in the Atlanta airport, a tall, thin, tanned and pretty (but not model-gaunt) young woman with dark hair and eyes, in 4-inch heels and a black mini dress. In one hand she carried a clear, unscratched plexiglass box with a tiara inside. Underneath the tiara was a green and white silk sash, folded carefully so that the word "Georgia" was clearly visible. She was with her mother, I think.  

Next to Miss Georgia on the train was a seven-year-old girl with a pink suitcase and similar complexion, gaping open-mouthed in admiration.  What a perfectly Southern way to end a trip to Georgia!  

*All times are "ish" times, to quote a certain six-year-old.