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Ecology & Poetry: Background & Exploration
The fields that prompted these thoughts are at Steepletop, the Edna St. Vincent Millay home site. The orchids there are a modest species (the Pale-Green Orchid) and not ones fit to be grown in gardens or pots. But, for a biologist, their presence is fascinating, as is the occurrence of a range of other plants such as Water Avens, the affectionately -named Lousewort, and Wood Lily (pictured at head of article).


Insects too are unusual. Aphrodite Fritillaries, which we had seen as rare singlets twice during the preceeding nine or so years of butterflying, were abundant this summer. The Coral Hairstreak showed up for the first time in our records for the County, and the Grey Comma made its third appearance in our records. The Rusty-Patched Bumblebee, a species which has been declining throughout the Northeast, is represented by only one specimen in our collection from... Steepletop.


What makes this such an unusual spot is, as the nugget explains, not clear to us. Certainly these high, mature, old fields are something of a rarity in our neck of the woods. Many hill fields tend to be on poor soil. And, once you have unusual plants, then you may often get unusual insects. What it was in the history of that field which led to such modern diversity we don't know. A poet's eye may have been part of it.


The explicit mixture of "poetry" (as a stand-in for all emotive writing) and science has largely gone out of fashion. In the 19th century, the distinction was perhaps not so clear. Samuel Scudder, late 19th century Massachusetts lepidopterist, made an appearance in an earlier nugget on Great Grandfather's Butterflies. As we mentioned therein, his main tome was a three volume set entitled Butterflies of the United States and Canada with Special Reference to New England.(1889).


Each species account in that book is highly detailed. For example, his description of the Aphrodite Fritillary (which he called the "Silver Spot Fritillary") contains a quarter page on the historic scientific names for this species, followed by two and a half pages of description of the adult (in small print), a half of a page of description of the younger stages, a page of comparative description, one half page of distribution records, one half page of food plant information, a half page of life history, a half a page of "habits" (e.g., they "usually fly near the ground" - a description that actually is very evident when one sees a field of them), a paragraph on "postures and flight", another on enemies and finally a list of "desiderata". In short, this is dense book full of scientific description.

However, there, lurking between the synonyms and descriptions is the following:

"The grass, with its low insect-tones, appears
As murmuring in its sleep. This butterfly
Seems as if loth to stir, so lazily
It flutters by.

(if a pinned bee seems out of place at the end of an essay on the poetry of ecology, please realize that for us to identify these creatures, we sometimes need to collect them. That is the science of it. Can that still go together with poetry?)