Shifting Baselines, Shifting Birds

“Many many years ago, before humans existed on this earth, the sky held only light. There were no people yet, there were only animals. For a while the animals existed in peace and harmony. But soon, like any small community, the animals began to fight. A friendly match of stickball erupted into bickering that turned bitter and angry. Great Spirit heard the noise, and decided something must be done to resolve the argument. He decided to punish the creatures by covering Earth in a thick, dark blanket.”

So a Native American origin story begins, as it was perhaps relayed to anthropologist James Mooney during his Appalachian travels, to the countless generations of indigenous communities that came before him, and to the 2022 class of Highlands Field Site students as we listen to the tale under the wide expanse of stars above Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

As the story goes, Bear climbed up to the top of the highest peak to try to lift the blanket, but he lost his balance and fell all the way down the mountain, squishing his very long trunk-like snout into the short nose bears have to this day. Vulture flew up to the blanket and tried to lift it off, but when he reached it, his head got stuck on the other side of the blanket, and his luxurious and colorful head of feathers was burned off by the sun, leaving the shriveled head vultures have to this day.

Finally, despite being made fun of by the other animals, Hummingbird flew up to the blanket. He tried over and over again to lift it, but he could only poke his beak through. Each time he tried, he left a pinprick of light behind, and the pattern he left became the Milky Way. Back then Hummingbird was shabby and gray, but Great Spirit saw the selflessness of the little bird and gifted him brilliant red and green feathers for his efforts. Great Spirit was reassured by the teamwork of the animals, and rewarded them by lifting the blanket. However, to remind them to remain peaceful and cooperative, Great Spirit has lowered the blanket every night since.

When we exit the story, sitting in a circle one night on our class field trip to Purchase Knob, we are left looking up at familiar perforations across a dark sky. At daybreak, the blanket will lift and life will return to its normal rhythm. If we are lucky, patient, and resourceful enough, the delicate light of day will reveal to us a tremendous diversity of living things. We will watch bears with familiar snouts, vultures with familiar heads, and hummingbirds with familiar plumage of reds and greens. These creatures will appear to us the way they always have, yet we will return to the light of day with a new connection to each one, because we now possess the secret formula of how they came to be. Each nose that sniffs for mulberries is appropriately short, each head that glides on currents over the cliffs appropriately bare—Great Spirit deemed it to be so, and so it was.

Yet each night, when the familiar blanket returns to smother the familiar sky, we will look up at the specks of light that still peek through, and our minds will drift to these great, lost beasts from long ago. How long was that snout? How thick were those feathers? What fullness, length, abundance is our daylight missing? How much have we really lost, and how much do we still have left to lose?

These were questions I asked myself this summer as I trudged through the frigid lakes of Glacier National Park with my classmates at Flathead Lake Biological Station, competing against other groups to see who could conduct the best repeat photography in a single afternoon. Repeat photography refers to the discipline of positioning yourself in the precise spot where a historical photo of a glacier was taken in order to frame your camera in such a way that the peaks, coves, and valleys of each photo align perfectly. The one thing that doesn’t align perfectly, if you are successful, is the glacier. Our target photo showcased Grinnell Glacier sprawled across a ridge in an expanse of white. From our vantage point chest-deep in a quick-moving current, we carefully aligned each peak and valley in the viewfinder, yet our view looked very different—Grinnell had melted into two narrow halves.

Left: T.J. Hileman, courtesy of Glacier National Park Archives, Circa 1920, https://www.usgs.gov/centers/norock/science/grinnell-glacier-footbridge-1920-2008.

Right: Hallie Turner, Jack Hanson, Sylvia Blodorn, Dalton Thunstrom, July 2022.

Whichever committee has the privilege of naming dwindling fragments of ice as they halve and halve again had christened this new chunk Salamander. This didn’t make sense to me in the moment, because I hadn’t been lucky enough to hold a salamander at the time. However, as I look back at our tie-winning photo now, after three months in Highlands that have included countless salamanders, I watch as several tons of ancient ice morph into a delicate amphibian. Crouched in the palm of my hand, It watches me with big eyes and absorbs the gases that leak from my skin. I don’t need a story around a campfire to know just how long this glacial salamander used to be.

The best decision I’ve made in my time at UNC has been to spend a semester studying at the Highlands Field Site. At Flathead Lake I had familiarized myself with the area’s native species, and it was strange to be 2,331 miles closer to home with so many new species left to learn. But even in the midst of a strikingly different landscape, I found the same familiar questions taking shape, just with different names: Campephilus principalis, Castanea dentata, Puma concolor couguar.

How impressive was the trajectory of an ivory-billed woodpecker as it soared towards its hollow roost along the Chattooga? How deafening was a flock of passenger pigeons descending upon a gigantic American chestnut, breaking branches with the roar of feathers and unity on the Little Tennessee? What did a herd of bison look like spread out across Cades Cove?

I’m not sure yet whether the answers of these questions can be fully grasped by science or myths alone. However, this semester has taught me that both science and storytelling together help us to retrieve and reshape our story, even if only in bits and pieces. They both allow us to appreciate exactly what we have and exactly what is gone. We can observe Tsuga caroliniana as it is today and allow scientific methods to teach us just how wide its rings are, how old it is, and how many storms it has weathered. Yet we can also allow myths to impart the wisdom that great mistakes yield great consequences, and sometimes lost things can’t be returned.

For now, when I look at these various forms of repeat photography that stretch back through human history, it is comforting to see that some fragments of the snapshots remain the same. Bear had claws before he tried to remove the blanket, and his claws remain today. Elk still bugle in Cataloochee, hummingbirds still sparkle, there is old-growth poplar and white pine left if you know where to look, and little pixels of crisp white ice still show up in our images here, and here, and here. We still sit around fires and come up with little stories to explain it all.

If we are lucky, patient, and resourceful enough, our children will get to sit around fires, too. We will tell them about a few special things like the bears and the vultures and hummingbirds that we almost lost, but not quite. Maybe we will tell them the story of how the Blue Ridge two-lined salamander earned its tail, or why Carolina hemlock has needles that spread out in all directions, and maybe the delicate light of day will reveal to them a tremendous diversity of living things. They will watch bears with familiar snouts, vultures with familiar heads, and hummingbirds with familiar plumage of reds and greens. These creatures will appear to them the way they always have, yet they will return to the light of day with a new connection to each one, because they will possess the secret formulas, embedded in a legacy of mythology and science, of how they came to be.

—HT