Lucas Cranach the Elder (c. 1472 – 1553)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832)
by Elizabeth Pennisi
for the American Association for the Advancement of Science
For years, cognitive scientist Lars Chittka felt a bit eclipsed by his colleagues at Queen Mary University of London. Their studies of apes, crows, and parrots were constantly revealing how smart these animals were. He worked on bees, and at the time, almost everyone assumed that the insects acted on instinct, not intelligence.
Chittka’s team has shown that bumble bees can not only learn to pull a string to retrieve a reward, but they can also learn this trick from other bees, even though they have no experience with such a task in nature. The study “successfully challenges the notion that ‘big brains’ are necessary” for new skills to spread, says Christian Rutz, an evolutionary ecologist who studies bird cognition at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom.
Many researchers have used string-pulling to assess animals, particularly birds and apes. So Chittka and his colleagues set up a low clear plastic table barely tall enough to lay three flat artificial blue flowers underneath. Each flower contained a well of sugar water in the center and had a string attached that extended beyond the table’s boundaries. The only way the bumble bee could get the sugar water was to pull the flower out from under the table by tugging on the string.
The team put 110 bumble bees, one at a time, next to the table to see what they would do. Some tugged at the strings and gave up, but two actually kept at it until they retrieved the sugar water. In another series of experiments, the researchers trained the bees by first placing the flower next to the bee and then moving it ever farther under the table. More than half of the 40 bees tested learned what to do.
Next, the researchers placed untrained bees behind a clear plastic wall so they could see the other bees retrieving the sugar water. More than 60% of the insects that watched knew to pull the string when it was their turn. In another experiment, scientists put bees that knew how to pull the string back into their colony and a majority of the colony’s workers picked up string pulling by watching one trained bee do it when it left the colony in search of food. The bees usually learned this trick after watching the trained bee five times, and sometimes even after one observation. Even after the trained bee died, string pulling continued to spread among the colony’s younger workers.
But pulling a string does not quite qualify as tool use, because a tool would have to be an independent object that wasn’t attached to the flower in the first place. And other invertebrates have shown they can use tools: Digger wasps pick up small stones and use them to pack down their burrow entrances, for example. But that two bees figured out how to pull the string with no help while other bees picked up on that ability, was impressive, says Ivo Jacobs, a cognitive zoologist at Lund University in Sweden who was not involved with the work. “This shows unexpected behavioral flexibility.”
Rutz is impressed, too, because the work involved almost 300 bees and clearly documented how string pulling spread from bee to bee in multiple colonies.
With additional experiments, Chittka hopes to figure out the neural basis of these abilities.
The findings hint at a form of culture in bees, Jacobs says. With their ability to learn where others are, find out what they are doing, and experiment on their own, the insects demonstrated that they can pass on knowledge—a key requirement of culture, considered to be a complex phenomenon.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/10/hints-tool-use-culture-seen-bumble-bees
Detail, Scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Edwin Landseer (1802 – 1873)
Everything changes, nothing dies: the spirit wanders, arriving here or there, and occupying whatever body it pleases, passing from a wild beast into a human being, from our body into a beast, but is never destroyed.
So, I say as a seer, cease to make kindred spirits homeless, by wicked slaughter: do not let blood be nourished by blood!
Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570 BC – c. 495 BC)
in Ovid’s Metamorphosis
Acacia
John William Lewin (1770 – 1819)
The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.
John Muir (April 21, 1838 – December 24, 1914)
attrib. LWR Wenckebach (1860-1937)
In ancient times the Japanese divided their year into 24 periods based on classical Chinese sources. The natural world comes to life in the even more vividly named 72 subdivisions of the traditional Japanese calendar.
The 24 divisions are each split again into three, for a total of 72 kō that last around five days each. The original Chinese names did not always match up well with the local climate, so in Japan they were eventually rewritten, in 1685, by the court astronomer, Shibukawa Shunkai.
(The dates in the following table are approximate and may vary by one day depending on the year. [My own fear is that climate change will have distorted seasons everywhere, and so the dates may vary more widely. –SecretGardener]
There are no standard readings in Japanese for the kanji names of the 72 kō, so other sources may give different readings.)
Risshun (Beginning of spring)
February 4–8: East wind melts the ice
February 9–13: Bush warblers start singing in the mountains
February 14–18: Fish emerge from the ice
Usui (Rainwater)
February 19–23: Rain moistens the soil
February 24–28: Mist starts to linger
March 1–5: Grass sprouts, trees bud
Keichitsu (Insects awaken)
March 6–10: Hibernating insects surface
March 11–15: First peach blossoms
March 16–20: Caterpillars become butterflies
Shunbun (Spring equinox)
March 21–25: Sparrows start to nest
March 26–30: First cherry blossoms
March 31–April: Distant thunder
Seimei (Pure and clear)
April 5–9: Swallows return
April 10–14: Wild geese fly north
April 15–19: First rainbows
Kokuu (Grain rains)
April 20–24: First reeds sprout
April 25–29: Last frost, rice seedlings grow
April 30–May 4: Peonies bloom
Rikka (Beginning of summer)
May 5–9: Frogs start singing
May 10–14: Worms surface
May 15–20: Bamboo shoots sprout
Shōman (Lesser ripening)
May 21–25: Silkworms start feasting on mulberry leaves
May 26–30: Safflowers bloom
May 31–June 5: Wheat ripens and is harvested
Bōshu (Grain beards and seeds)
June 6–10: Praying mantises hatch
June 11–15: Rotten grass becomes fireflies
June 16–20: Plums turn yellow
Geshi (Summer solstice)
June 21–26: Self-heal withers
June 27–July 1: Irises bloom
July 2–6: Crow-dipper sprouts
Shōsho (Lesser heat)
July 7–11: Warm winds blow
July 12–16: First lotus blossoms
July 17–22: Hawks learn to fly
Taisho (Greater heat)
July 23–28: Paulownia trees produce seeds
July 29–August 2: Earth is damp, air is humid
August 3–7: Great rains sometimes fall
Risshū (Beginning of autumn)
August 8–12: Cool winds blow. The mountains begin to color.
August 13–17: Evening cicadas sing
August 18–22: Thick fog descends
Shosho (Manageable heat)
August 23–27: Cotton flowers bloom
August 28–September 1: Heat starts to die down
September 2–7: Rice ripens
Hakuro (White dew)
September 8–12: Dew glistens white on grass
September 13–17: Wagtails sing
September 18–22: Swallows leave
Shūbun (Autumn equinox)
September 23–27: Thunder ceases
September 28–October 2: Insects hole up underground
October 3–7: Farmers drain fields
Kanro (Cold dew)
October 8–12: Wild geese return
October 13–17: Chrysanthemums bloom
October 18–22: Crickets chirp around the door
Sōkō (Frost falls)
October 23–27: First frost
October 28–November 1: Light rains sometimes fall
November 2–6: Maple leaves and ivy turn yellow
Rittō (Beginning of winter)
November 7–11: Camellias bloom
November 12–16: Land starts to freeze
November 17–21: Daffodils bloom
Shōsetsu (Lesser snow)
November 22–26: Rainbows hide
November 27–December 1: North wind blows the leaves from the trees
December 2–6: Citrus tree leaves start to turn yellow
Taisetsu (Greater snow)
December 7–11: Cold sets in, winter begins
December 12–16: Bears start hibernating in their dens
December 17–21: Salmons gather and swim upstream
Tōji (Winter solstice)
December 22–26: Self-heal sprouts
December 27–31: Deer shed antlers
January 1–4: Wheat sprouts under snow
Shōkan (Lesser cold)
January 5–9: Parsley flourishes
January 10–14: Springs thaw
January 15–19: Pheasants start to call
Daikan (Greater cold)
January 20–24: Butterburs bud
January 25–29: Ice thickens on streams
January 30–February 3: Hens start laying eggs
https://www.nippon.com/en/features/h00124/
detail, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 – 1851)
from the SALTAIR NA RANN attrib. Oengus the Culdee, ninth century
King who ordained the eight winds
advancing without uncertainty, full of beauty,
the four prime winds He holds back,
the four fierce under-winds.
There are four other under-winds,
as learned authors say,
this should be the number, without any error,
of the winds, twelve winds.
King who fashioned the colours of the winds,
who fixed them in safe courses,
after their manner, in well-ordered disposition,
with the varieties of each manifold hue.
The white, the clear purple,
the blue, the very strong green,
the yellow, the red, sure the knowledge,
in their gentle meetings wrath did not seize them.
The black, the grey, the speckled,
the dark and the deep brown
the dun, darksome hues,
they are not light, easily controlled.
King who ordained them over every void,
the eight wild under-winds ;
who laid down without defect
the bounds of the four prime winds.
From the East, the smiling purple,
from the South, the pure white, wondrous,
from the North, the black blustering moaning wind,
from the West, the babbling dun breeze.
The red, and the yellow along with it,
both white and purple ;
the green, the blue, it is brave,
both dun and the pure white.
The grey, the dark brown, hateful their harshness,
both dun and deep black ;
the dark, the speckled easterly wind
both black and purple.
Rightly ordered their form,
their disposition was ordained ;
with wise adjustments, openly,
according to their position and their fixed places.
The twelve winds,
Easterly and Westerly, Northerly and Southerly,
the King who adjusted them, He holds them back,
He fettered them with seven curbs.
King who bestowed them according to their posts,
around the world with many adjustments,
each two winds of them about a separate curb,
and one curb for the whole of them.
King who arranged them in habitual harmony,
according to their ways, without over-passing their limits ;
at one time, peaceful was the space,
at another time, tempestuous.
Translations from Irish Gaelic Poetry into English Prose and Verse SELECTED AND EDITED BY ELEANOR HULL, 1912 To Miss Eleanor Knott I am indebted for valuable help in the translation
[with thanks to @AnneLouiseAvery for twitter discussion of wind-color]
Jacopo Ligozzi (1547, Verona–1627, Florence)
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
Edward Thomas (March 1878 – April 1917)
Hans Hoffmann (c.1530, Nuremberg – 1591/92, Prague)
Simona Kossak: they called her a witch, because she chatted with animals and owned a crow who stole gold.
She spent more than 30 years in a wooden hut in the Białowieża Forest, without electricity or access to running water.
A lynx slept in her bed, and a tamed boar lived under the same roof.
She was a scientist, an ecologist and the author of award-winning films and radio broadcasts.
She was also an activist who fought for the protection of Europe’s oldest forest.
Simona believed that one ought to live simply, and close to nature. Among animals she found what she could never find with humans.
“Simona first saw Dziedzinka in moonlight,” a relative remembers. “We decided we would go there at night time. The four of us went down the road with torches: my husband, a hired carter, myself, and Simona.
Suddenly, an aurochs stepped out onto the Browska Road. The horse jibbed, we got scared, but we got there.
Simona was enchanted with Dziedzinka straight away.” Years later, she described the expedition and the encounter with the king of the forest:
“It was the first aurochs that I ever saw in my life, I am not counting the ones in the zoo. And this greeting right at the entry into the forest – this monumental aurochs, the whiteness, the snow, the full moon, white everywhere, pretty, and the little hut hidden in the little clearing all covered with snow, an abandoned house that no one had lived in for two years. In the middle room, there were no floors, it was generally a ruin. And I looked at this house, all silvered by the moon as it was, romantic, and I said ‘it’s finished, it’s here or nowhere else!’”
Before Simona went to live in Dziedzinka, the house had to be renovated. The employees of the Białowieża National Park repaired the roof, changed the joists, got rid of the fungus, and said that that ought to suffice for five years (and indeed it did).
After the renovations, Simona did her part. She papered the walls, washed the windows, added a bench, and upholstered the armchairs that were brought from her family home.
She brought clocks, as well as a Turkish dagger, lace tablecloth and window curtains, books, oil lamps, an antique iron, a collection of weapons, ebony jewellery chests, as well as glassware, porcelain, cupboards and an oak bed.
She hung a shotgun from the Kossaks’ collection right by the door. A large tile stove in the old style stood in the corner of the room, and a large table in the middle – her workshop and study, where she worked by an oil lamp.
Simona rode a motorbike, sometimes a tractor, and she also swept through the landscape on cross-country skis.
A hunter recalled, “Once I saw this phenomenon advancing on a komar – wind in the hair, a pilot-cap, rabbit pants, and eye goggles. It passed me by and I had to turn around, because I didn’t know what it was”.
Professor Kajetan Perzowski, a colleague of Simona’s from her university years in Kraków says, “We were once going across the Białowieża Forest with a friend in a small truck. We suddenly see someone pushing through the snowdrifts carrying a motorbike on the back. It was Simona. We packed her together with this motorbike onto our truck. She made us a big pot of stew at Dziedzinka.”
The forester of Białowieża National Park, Lech Wilczek, was her housemate, and one day brought home a newborn wild boar piglet. The humans grew close to each other, and the female boar, eventually immense, lived with them for 17 years.
“She stood vigilantly at the door like a dog, she went out on walks, and more and more often she cuddled up to her people and demanded to be caressed.”
The crow. He stole cigarette cases, hair brushes, scissors, and the lumberjacks’ sausages. He tore up bicycle seats and made holes in grocery bags.
Said a forest worker, “He would even steal the workers’ pay. But once I was walking around the reserve without a permit, and the guard saw me and started to fill in a penalty slip. While he was handing it to me, the crow appeared. He took the paper in his beak, flew to the roof of Dziedzinka, and tore it up with his leg. The guard didn’t know what to do, and finally just shrugged his shoulders at the whole thing.”
“He loved to attack people who rode bicycles, especially girls. It was very impressive, he would attack the rider’s head with his beak, the person would fall off, and he then would perch on the seat triumphantly, looking at the spinning wheel.”
People thought that Korasek – because that’s what he was called – was some kind of a punishment for their sins.
Simona’s friend: “Once he stole my car keys. And Lech said “Don’t worry, he’ll bring them back.” He told the bird that if he returned the keys he would get an egg, and if he didin’t he would be punished. And the crow perhaps understood this, because after a moment, he flew up to me, furious, with the keys in his beak and threw them onto a table!”
With time, more animals appeared: a doe who approached the window and ate sugar, a black stork for whom Simona created a nest in a drawer, a dachshund and a female lynx who slept in Simona’s bed, and peacocks. She loved, healed, and observed them all, while Wilczek photographed them. Here, as a mother she raised moose twins, Pepsi and Cola, washed the neck of the black stork, kept the female rat Kanalia in her sleeve (as the animal panicked in open spaces). She would let the befriended doe give birth on the patio, took in lambs with their mother, and sheltered the rats Alfa and Omega. She checked on weather by observing bats in the basement.
The menagerie grew with each year.
Simona raised several deer by bottle-feeding orphaned fawns, and followed them around the woods for many years.
“One day, my pack of deer showed signs of fright, and did not want to go out onto the forest field to graze. And I started to approach the young forest, because this was the direction in which the deer startled, their ears raised, and the hair standing up on their rumps: apparently something very threatening was in the woods.
I crossed about half of this open space, but I stopped, because I heard a choir of terrified barking behind me. When I turned around, what I saw was five of my deer standing stiffly on tense legs, looking at me, and calling with this bark: don’t go there, don’t go there, there’s death over there!
I must admit, I was dumbstruck, and then finally I did go. And what did I find? It turned out that there were fresh traces of a lynx that had crossed the young forest. I went in deeper, and I found lynx droppings, still warm.
What did that mean? It meant that a carnivore had approached the farm, the deer noticed, were frightened and ran, and then what did they see?
They saw their mother going toward death, completely unaware, and knew she had to be warned. And for me, I will honestly admit, this day was a breakthrough. I crossed the border that divides the human world from that of the animals. If there was an impermeable barrier, they would not have taken action–they would probably not have noticed what I was preparing to do. That they noticed, anticipated what might happen to me, and responded, meant one thing and one thing only: you are a member of our pack, we don’t want you to get hurt.
I admit that I relived this event in my mind for many days, and in fact today, when I think about it, my heart warms.”
In the winter of 1993, Simona commenced her war to save the lynxes and wolves of Białowieża.
A group of scientists planned to collar the animals for data-collection, but Simona came across traps in the form of metal jaws, so she took them with her and refused to give them back.
There was a hearing during which she pointed out that there were 12 lowland lynxes left, in danger of being poached—and now in danger of being mortally wounded by the traps.
“It is a disgrace for the world of science to have contributed to this.”
[Now the entire Białowieża Forest, which includes some of Europe’s last primeval woodland, is under threat.
Białowieża was designated a Unesco World Heritage site in 1979, but Poland’s environment minister, who has allowed large-scale logging for years, has called for the woodland to be stripped of Unesco’s natural heritage status.
The forest is–for now–home to 20,000 animal species, including 250 types of bird and hundreds of European bison, plus firs towering 50 metres (160ft) high and old oaks and ashes.]
http://culture.pl/en/article/the-extraordinary-life-of-simona-kossak
[wonderful photographs of Simona Kossak and her menagerie at Dziedzinka in the Białowieża Forest,]
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/22/primeval-forest-bialowieza-must-lose-unesco-protection-says-poland
http://www.poranny.pl/magazyn/art/5423022,simona-kossak-puszcza-bialowieska-i-lech-wilczek-dziedzinka-stala-sie-ich-domem,id,t.html
John La Farge (March 31, 1835 – November 14, 1910)
Snow
Snow is what it does.
It falls and it stays and it goes.
It melts and it is here somewhere.
We all will get there.
Frederick Seidel (b. 1936)
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (1844 -1916) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The making of gardens and parks goes on with civilization all over the world, and they increase both in size and number as their value is recognized.
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.
This natural beauty-hunger is made manifest in the little window-sill gardens of the poor, though perhaps only a geranium slip in a broken cup, as well as in the carefully tended rose and lily gardens of the rich, the thousands of spacious city parks and botanical gardens, and in our magnificent National parks–the Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, etc. — Nature’s sublime wonderlands, the admiration and joy of the world.
Nevertheless, like anything else worth while, from the very beginning, however well guarded, they have always been subject to attack by despoiling gainseekers and mischief-makers of every degree from Satan to Senators, eagerly trying to make everything immediately and selfishly commercial, with schemes disguised in smug-smiling philanthropy, industriously, sham-piously crying, “Conservation, conservation, pan-utilization,” that man and beast may be fed and the dear Nation made great.”
Thus long ago a few enterprising merchants utilized the Jerusalem temple as a place of business instead of a place of prayer, changing money, buying and selling cattle and sheep and doves; and earlier still, the first forest reservation, including only one tree, was likewise despoiled.
Ever since the establishment of the Yosemite National Park, strife has been going on around its borders and I suppose this will go on as part of the universal battle between right and wrong, however much its boundaries may be shorn, or its wild beauty destroyed.
These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.
John Muir (1838 East Lothian, Scotland – 1914 Los Angeles, California)
Secret Gardener 
