In Praise of the Bobolinks

I am a volunteer at Greensprings Natural Cemetery, where I also have a plot and where some of my husband’s ashes (those not in the garden of our former home) are interred. The 130-acre cemetery is kept wild, with woods and meadows and only a few paths mown through. Bobolinks nest there among the tall grasses and wildflowers. Recently I was shocked to read in Living Bird magazine that bobolinks are an endangered species because of habitat loss and changing mowing patterns due to climate change. So I decided to do my Global Earth Exchange this year for the bobolinks.

One other person came to join me, Tom Schoelgel, who has recently moved to Ithaca. He had participated in a previous Global Earth Exchange through our mutual colleague Sasha Daucus, who leads the event through the Deep Adaptation network.

I arrived early and stood in the West Meadow where at least four pairs of bobolinks were nesting. They were alarmed by my presence and chipped their warnings as they flew around in what one description I read called their “helicopter flight”—low to the ground, with wide, slow circles. The females are little brownish-yellow birds; the males have very distinctive fuzzy yellowish caps on their heads. I was missing my husband Andy a lot today, because he always used to participate in the Global Earth Exchange with me. As always, the determined, feisty life of living beings made me fall in love again with the creative pulse of the Earth.

When Tom arrived, we sat for a while at a picnic table by the meadow and talked about the bobolinks and the story of the Global Earth Exchange. Then we separated, each going to a separate meadow to be with the birds.

Half an hour later, we met up again at the picnic table. Tom was moved by the beauty of the cemetery and how the graves are so unobtrusively part of it. He saw Greensprings as a great example of how people, working in collaboration with the natural world, can make the Earth thrive. He also talked about how it bothers him when people speak as if humans are simply destroyers, damaging the natural world, when in reality, we are inventive, curious, and generous beings.

I came back to the picnic table with a big bouquet of wildflowers from Bobolink Meadow, where my plot is. I described seeing a male and female bobolink pair flying around the meadow together, and that made me think of how one day my bones will be interred there with Andy’s ashes. I find that a comforting thought. I had also questioned whether, as a good environmentalist, it was okay for me to pick flowers. Then I realized that that was a ridiculous question, and of course I could!

After we shared our stories, we made a RadJoy Bird out of the wildflowers, a pinecone, and some bark from a birch tree. For the male bobolink’s distinctive fuzzy yellow cap we used dandelions. We concluded by speaking aloud to the bobolinks. We apologized for alarming them with our visit, thanked them for their presence here in this place, and wished them long lives and a safe return to Greensprings next year.