The Harrier

By Jennifer Lynn Craig

When I spotted a bobolink in the wetlands, I pulled over and got out of the car. Sedge and tall reeds spread out through the marsh with Musquash Stream shining here and there in the spring sunshine. The bobolink swayed on a stalk. Then he flew, and I turned to scan the bog, and close to me a northern harrier was hunting low over the marsh, undulating about four feet off the ground. When the bird came near the road where I was parked, he pulled up and circled back down the stream and then coursed again along the small stretch of water, the patch of white on his rump flashing. But I didn’t see him catch anything, and after several tries, he disappeared into the land trust that bordered the wetland. I went back to the marsh later that afternoon and then on the next day. I didn’t see the harrier again, but when I woke at night in the narrow bed at the sporting camp, I thought about the way he ranged over his territory. He was no backyard bird; he was wild, and he lived in a wild place.

I had been cooped up all winter, and as the days grew longer and the spring warblers began to arrive, I became restless. I wanted to be someplace wilder than where I had lived for much of my life. I knew well the region where I lived, the way the marine light shifted throughout the day and the way the buoy in the harbor rang unevenly. Yet this beloved area sometimes felt a little too cultivated and even a bit crowded, and as the roads were no longer so icy, I went exploring and ended up at a sporting camp on the edge of a lake in Downeast Maine. On the first morning, it was 37 degrees in the cabin, and I hated to push back the woolen blankets, but soon I had built a fire in the woodstove. After a cup of coffee, I went out, hoping that it might be birdy around the camp, but there were few birds to be seen. I spotted a small hawk disappearing into the trees. The ravens in the tall pines had been talking since dawn, but I couldn’t see them. I thought I saw a warbling vireo although the bird book said that was ‘unlikely.’ I was ‘unlikely’ myself since I’d shown up with no trailer, no boat, no motor, no-fly rods or creels or nets or cooler of food and no canoe strapped to the car roof. The camp owner had looked at me sideways as she showed me around—an older woman traveling solo is often a curiosity— but my binoculars seemed like part of an answer. Spring migrants . . .  the birding festival in Lubec, I said. She thought for a moment. We have loons on the lake, she said, but I didn’t hear them.

On this first day, I am at the edge of the forest. Lakes and streams glint through thick stands of trees. Canoes are strapped to car roofs. Most lakes have a public boat ramp, and trucks with their empty boat trailers are parked in the tall grass while the owners fish. Convenience stores have racks of fishing lures, and sporting camps fill up with people who want to catch bass or trout. Walls are full of photos of people holding large fish and grinning into the camera. Bird hunting season will begin in September. Then in deer season, cars and trucks will drive south with deer carcasses strapped to the roofs. Late in the fall, corner stores tag moose. Fishing and hunting aren’t the only sources of recreation. Down on the coast, people rent summer cottages and swim and hike and hope to see whales in late summer. Painters paint, woodcarvers carve, and there are a few art galleries, restaurants, and gift shops. There is also a spring birding festival, and that is where I am headed.  

Birds are what I am looking for, but birds are also an excuse to wander around in the natural world, and I like to do that.  I could do that closer to home, but this spring, I am drawn to places that are less thickly settled.  It’s not that people don’t live here.  This land has been home to native people for 12,000 years, and it is still home to many of them, but it is less densely inhabited than where I live. To me, it feels like the village where I grew up. In town, folks lived in close-together houses, but on the outskirts, people spread out. They lived in rambling farmhouses or faded mobile homes with swathes of grassland or woods around them. In the dusk, a few small windows laid faintly lit rectangles on the ground and winked across the dark fields.  Far back in a meadow where an old house had given way, the massive lilac shrubs still stood like a memory. Closer to the road, children’s toys near the front steps. A shed. A clothesline looped between two posts. Handmade signs near the road telling how people were making ends meet—stump grinding, firewood, crab meat, eggs.  

Now as I drive these roads, I see a lot of open space between the houses, mobile homes, and the few motels and gas stations that are scattered over the landscape. Meadows that will be spiky with lupine in June, alders in wet spots, fields that are as of yet untilled. The forest presses against the clearings, and the inland horizon has that broad stroke of blackish green, a reminder of what is still mostly wild.  On this trip, I am hoping to see warblers who arrive in these thick, dark forests to breed.  But it’s a struggle. When I try to get into the forest, there are no trails, and instead I find piles of slash and skidder roads made for trucks. I don’t worry about harm from humans or animals, but the possibility of spraining an ankle on an isolated logging road worries me, and usually I head back to the safety of the car and the ease of trails at the land trust. It’s a contradiction. I came to be in wild places, but I end up in places that have been groomed for humans.  I admit that I am not very outdoorsy. My hiking boots haven’t been out of the closet for a while. I don’t own a sturdy water bottle. I am not fond of thickets. I admit that I want nature to be accessible but then of course, it’s not wild. It’s got my human trace—footprints, scent—all through it no matter how careful I am, and then it’s slightly diminished although I am fortified in the way that only being in the natural world provides.  

But even though very little land is truly untouched, we still like to imagine it that way because it satisfies something in us. I want to be in that wild place, silent on that narrow road as I watch the harrier, on those corduroy roads in the woods. I return to the view out to the islands from the top of Beech Hill Preserve, a land trust parcel near my home. I remember long ago swims with the children in Nesowadnehunk Lake near Baxter State Park, distant mountains glimpsed between low clouds. But these aren’t entirely wild places. Instead, much of the land has been protected against development by the efforts of federal and state agencies and by local land trusts. Because of those efforts, birds and other wildlife still have some—although not always enough— habitat in which to live. It’s a tension.  We humans want to use the land.  We hang fancy calendars with beauty shots of birds or scenery, but we also want to get onto that land, into that water. To hunt. To fish. To snowmobile. We want a place to put in the canoe. We want a trail that we can walk with our children or our elders. We’d like a trail with lookout points over the view of land that seems untouched even though it really isn’t. Outhouses. Parking lots. 

It pleases us to be in those surroundings. And it pleases us to be in our bodies, to climb or ski or paddle or even to stand still, watching a bird.  It is recreation in the sense that being out of doors in the natural world does re-create us. For some of us, being in the natural world is as close to a spiritual experience as we have in our secular lives. Often, when we are out of doors, we are outside ourselves. The mind may let go of mundane worries, may go inward toward deep-seated thoughts that we seldom share. For wildlife, the natural world is bursting with their efforts to shelter and feed themselves and their young, but for us humans, it can be solace from the noise of our lives.  

In addition to pleasure and inspiration, people who live here year-round find sustenance in the natural world. The harrier is not so different from them. He was working to feed himself, and his human neighbors are at work, too, usually at jobs that are knit into the natural world. Heavy trucks with stacks of logs chained to the truck beds thunder along the narrow roads. I pass boat shops where the deep-water fishing boats are built and mended. Small, tart blueberries are raked in the late summer and then frozen and shipped all over the country. Rangers work in the National Wildlife Refuge. Scientists monitor the health of inland and coastal fisheries. Bird ecologists track the puffin population on a small island. Guides and boat captains, cooks and cleaners—everywhere, people are at work. It is a web of human ecology that links the wild world to business, to industry, to the food that parents buy for their families, to tradition, to easements, to science, to education. And there are politics, as well, which is just another way to say desire and power. When I go into a general store, trying not to be lost, I overhear a man at the coffee counter complaining about the dams on rivers being removed and then alewives coming into the lakes and eating the bass. Since bass fishing is part of his livelihood, he’s upset. Another man at the counter disagrees with him, and in the flurry of argument that follows, I get some directions and leave. Later someone tells me about the native people on the nearby reservation who have not had clean water for decades. At the land trust, I hear how foresters and scientists have helped the land trust balance biodiversity, sustainable forestry, and the traditional pursuits of hunting and trapping, but all of that took months of careful negotiation. We say that open land is to be protected, but still there should be public access—we insist on it— and still workers are working where they can, extracting something from someplace—fish, lobster, timber, berries—and moving it somewhere else. 

I expected to see warblers, but I saw only a few. I did see razorbills, kittiwakes, and purple sandpipers on a ledge in Head Harbor Passage, and each of those sightings stayed with me. But I also remembered the men arguing about alewives and fishermen on the wharf loading crates of fish into their beat-up trucks, and the shivering birders looking for a bird in the chilly spring rain. Each of us wanted something from the natural world, and of course, it is only human to want things, but how do we know when we want too much? How much is enough? Some of us are driven by need and perhaps by greed. Perhaps it’s the haze of pleasure and the tangle of human expectations. We take so freely and whether we take away a lot or a little, what we give back isn’t clear. I thought about what I would take home: the memory of coffee next to the woodstove in the morning, silent walks along trails in the land trust, stormy views over the bay. For all of this, I had paid the camp owner, festival organizers, and guides. But I hadn’t paid the harrier. I hadn’t paid the tree swallows for the pleasure of their blue wings. I’d given back nothing to the purple sandpipers who huddled on the ledge.  

At the festival, birders wanted to see warblers, but the birds did not like the windy weather any more than we did, and most of them stayed tucked into the branches. Still, I wasn’t disappointed. I’d seen the harrier at work, his owlish face focused on the marsh below, his wings with their powerful beat.  In the months that followed when I sometimes was awake in the night, I thought about the harrier, hunting in his wild world. I was grateful, but I wondered if that could ever be enough.