Mowing the Meadow

Grace visits often when you live deep in the country, but she seems to come around more than usual in April. I spend the month in a state of building ecstasy, as one wonderful thing after another unfolds, each a fresh surprise, yet old as time. The ringing song of a newly-arrived brown thrasher on a misty morning makes me laugh out loud. Especially when I have the peas and lettuce planted the night before he arrives. Pick it up, pick it up, drop it, drop it, cover it, cover it! he exhorts, and I can smile smugly, because I already have.

Managing these 80 acres boils down to a constant struggle to keep the 12 that are open, open. It’s a pitched battle with multiflora rose and Japanese honeysuckle and a horrid plumy exotic Eulalia grass that escaped from bouquets at a little church cemetery about a mile away. Mow, and everything backs down for a year or two. Let it slide, and mowing becomes brush-hogging, becomes forestry.

Complicating this battle plan are the innocents in the middle, the birds that like things a bit overgrown, a little brushy. We leave last summer’s growth standing in the meadow over the winter, for all the juncoes and sparrows that need the seeds and cover. Traditionally, our mowing season begins in early spring, when it gets warm enough for Bill to think about tinkering with our ’54 Massey-Ferguson tractor in the cold garage. It ends when we see the first field sparrow sporting cat’s whiskers of pale grasses, on her way to a nest in progress. In cold, wet springs, like this one, those two parameters collide.

Last year, we added another constraint, when Bill’s first, second, and third mowing pass along the east border put up a woodcock from the same spot. Our suspicions of a nest were confirmed when, a few weeks later, I found in the same spot a nearly whole, freshly-pipped eggshell , lavender-splotched, too big for any songbird. It had the distinctive pyriform shape of a shorebird egg, the only shorebird that displays, mates, and nests on our property. I was ecstatic.

So it was a nudge from grace, I believe, that sent me out onto the deck to check Bill’s progress as he mowed the meadow on Sunday afternoon. Liam, 3 1/2, bundled in two coats and a yellow stocking hat, was supervising from the deck, waving and calling to his daddy as he rounded the near corner. Suddenly, a big, fawn-colored bird rose practically from under the mower deck, and flew erratically a few yards to the edge of the woods, where it landed. A woodcock! Bill couldn’t have seen it; he’d already passed when it flew up. I marked the spot in my mind and took off running to keep him from making another pass. He turned off the tractor, and together we searched the area. We found no eggs, but the ground nest of a woodcock is so beautifully camouflaged that we chalked it up to poor searching. Bill left the narrow, unmown strip as it was, and called it a day.

The next morning, I got up early and walked quietly out to the meadow, scanning the unmown strip. There she was, still as a rock, hunkered down into the wet grass between two small multiflora rose bushes. Her onyx eyes and the black bar across her high, angular forehead had given her away. I caught my breath. The world buzzed and sang around me. A couplet from Margaret Gibson’s heartbreakingly beautiful poem, "Gift," sprang into my mind.

Yes
I had wanted to rest—but rest
is just this quiet
tumult in the body’s
own blossom, that turns the sky
to avalanche, and ocean.

The mower deck had missed her nest by eight inches. On the next pass, the tractor wheel would have rolled right over the eggs. She had stood her ground as the huge red machine had roared up and past her, only rising off her eggs when the shrapnel-spewing deck practically touched her. Now, she would have to finish out their incubation in this narrow strip of brush, a feature in the now-featureless mown meadow. The multiflora around her was leafing out rapidly, though, and for once I was thankful for its rampant growth.

I left her to her silent work, and walked back home, thinking about the irony of land management. If we didn’t mow, the woodcocks would have no place to stage their displays or lay their eggs. Yet our mowing was the single greatest threat to their reproductive success. Every way I thought about it, I met a blind corner. We’d always mown in patches, the worst first, as we put it. The best answer I could come up with was to mow only half the meadow each spring, and to do it earlier yet, before the woodcocks had settled on a nest site. We’d just have to put up with a ragged-looking meadow. What’s the point of managing a meadow for breeding woodcocks if you wind up smashing their nests?

Though it’s still really too cold and early to do much, I find something to do in the garden every evening. Bill tilled it for me, and I’ve got the snap peas and the lettuce and mustard green seeds planted. I’m trying to stay ahead of the weeds, knowing I’ll lose. I let them go to seed every fall, because the indigo buntings and sparrows flock in to rustle around in the wreck of my garden, feasting on goosefoot and foxtail seeds, and I love to be greeted with the whirr of their wings when I open the gate.

Mostly, though, I time things so I’m in the garden, alone, when the woodcock start to call. Starting at dusk, his funny raspberry call bursts across the meadow. He peents twenty, thirty times, then launches slowly into the air, wings twittering, in a huge swinging circle over our house. So high now he looks like an aspen leaf, he suddenly sideslips, falling to earth in jagged zags, singing like mad the whole time—a liquid twitter that falls like silver rain all around me. I stand in the dark, heart swelling. Your children are safe, I tell him. Make some more, will you?