John Burroughs, Pre-Scientist

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1 I l 1 John Burroughs, Pre-Scientist by James Stapleton Before I begin my topic, I would like to put all relevance aside for a moment to make my usual pitch. And that is for John Burroughs as representative of this region-the Mid-Hudson-Catskill area. Why Burroughs? Who was he? He was: A fruit farmer in Apple Country USA; A naturalist-he knew at first hand the natural features of this region doubtlessly better than anyone of his day; A great literary anist in what has become one of America's best known extended an colonies; An outspoken advocate of natural resource conservation when that was far from bandwagon advocacy; A lifelong and tireless teacher of all he knew and believed in; A true representative of the Hudson-Catskill area to his contemporariesat a time when people did not jet to Norway or Paris but depended on Strindberg and Proust to give them a sense of these places, John Burroughs was the Mid-Hudson region for just these people. These characters make him ideally suited to serve the same purpose for these people who live here now. Now more than ever this region needs a kind of patron saint to figure the place in the imagination of its people. Only with a 54 The Hudson Valley R egional Review, March 1984, Volume I, Number I

sense of their place as region-dwellers, as opposed to villagers or nationals, will Hudson Valley people be able to understand and deal with their special problems over the next quarter century.

But also answers to internal questions of land use and quality of life will require a vision of what this place is and what it can be.

2 sense of their place as region-dwellers, as opposed to villagers or nationals, will Hudson Valley people be able to understand and deal with their special problems over the next quarter century. For instance, the problems of encroaching urbanization. However the life-signs of the sprawling Megalopolis to our south and east graph out, it will profoundly affect this region. But also answers to internal questions of land use and quality of life will require a vision of what this place is and what it can be. "How does the Ruby-crowned Kinglet know he has a brilliant bit of color on his crown which he can uncover at will and that this has great charms for the female? During the rivalries of the males in the mating season and in the autumn also, they flash this brilliant ruby at each other. I witnessed what seemed to be a competitive display of this kind one evening in November. I was walking along the road when my ear was attracted by the fine shrill lisping and piping of a small band of these birds in an apple tree. I paused to see what was the occasion of so much noise and bluster among these tiny bodies... " 1 What the author saw next was an epi-deictic display although he died forty years before the word was coined in this sense and ten to twenty years before scientists like Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen began to take seriously the "curious antics" of birds and other animals during their mating season. Although he would have called himself "naturalist" rather than "scientist," many of Burroughs' observations, like the one here on the Rubycrowned Kinglet, form the first critical step in the scientific method: intuiting the simple connections in the natural world. In this case he saw that the kinglet's peculiar patch showing behavior had a lot to do with their breeding and reproduction. In view of this gift of perception I am making up the word "pre-scientist" (as a back-formation from "pre-scientific") to denote those observers of the natural scene who do not choose to carry out the further steps of modelmaking and verification necessary to complete scientific theories, but whose eyes are quick and minds alive to the network of events in the natural world. John Burroughs excelled as a pre-scientist: the 23 volumes of his collected essays abound in acute observations of events which were later elaborated by other observers into modern biological theories. This is not to say he was the first to see these things-there must have been many before him who watched male Ruby-crowned Kinglets display to each other- or that his was the observation from which the present theory dates. On the contrary most of the theories mentioned below took form decades after John Burroughs stopped writing. Whether there was in any case a direct influence, whether the author of the theory got his first clue from reading a Burroughs' essay, 55

3 would make interesting historical research, but is of no particular relevance here-i am saying only that John Burroughs saw many things that later researchers discovered were important for understanding of the natural worlds. One thing is certain, the sources of his insights were not published reports but the rolling woodlands of the fertile Mid-Hudson Valley. His instruments of discovery were simply keen eyes and the steady habit of keeping a sharp outlook. I t must have taken years of close, careful observation, and something else, to arrive at the following insight into avian life: "Each species of warbler, it seems, has its own range and prey. The insects this Redstart took certainly could not have been taken by any other bird. In the lower branches and bushes the Black-throated Blue Warbler was pursuing its game very leisurely, picking it up at rest, and never taking it on the wing. About the orchards and open trees, I saw the blue yellow-back (Parula Warbler) probing the flowers and buds with its beak, either for honey or a microscopical insect. The creeping (Black and White) Warbler was scouring the trunk and branches for its food-not forcing a way to it like the woodpeckers, or probing deeply like the Brown Creeper, but picking it up apparently on the surface of the bark and lichens."2 Burroughs goes on to differentiate other groups of warblers according to where and what they feed upon: in other words he separates them into 'guilds' and sets them in their 'niches.' He would not have said so because these expressions have only become current in the past twenty years. They are part of an attempt by ecologists to classify birds anew along functional rather than the older morphological lines, that is to group them according to what they do and how they live rather than the number of feathers in the wing or bones of the head. Thus the Brown Creeper and Black-and-White Warbler both belong to the bark gleaning guild and, roughly speaking, occupy the same niche-i.e. both live in the deciduous-evergreen forest of the north-temperate zone and hitch themselves along the bark of trees picking off insects. More exactly speaking they fill slightly different niches because, as Burroughs points out, the creeper has a longish sickle bill for prying out beetles and other burrowers almost exclusively from the heavy trunk bark, while the Black-and-White Warbler might be found on the branches as well, nipping up surface aphids with its tiny bill. The purpose of the new classification is to study birds and other organisms not from the point of view of their evolutionary development as the old taxonomy allowed, but within the larger framework of the interrelationships between them and the rest of their world: other animals, the forest that supports them, and the inanimate factors-climate, soil, geology, and history-which underlie the whole. In a word they are studied 1 I 56

4 ecosystemically. Burroughs would certainly have applauded this new development in biology, not only because it is the true daughter of the older 'natural history' to which he contributed so much, but even more-the man thought ecosystematically; he saw, thought, and wrote in terms of wholes in the natural world. He realized he knew very little about birds unless he observed for himself what the various species ate, what habitat they nested and foraged in, when they arrived and departed, and how they acted and reacted with the rest of the world. A good instance of this broad-handed grip on the science of the forest is the paragraph above. In it the modern ecologist's mental set in approaching the natural scene are evident, if not his phrases and numbers. This is what I mean by 'pre-scientist.' Another good example comes from his splendid volume of essays Signs and Seasons. Burroughs muses, almost aimlessly it seems (this incidentally is the mark of some of the most penetrating questions he puts to nature) about the difference between animals such as mice, that bear and lose many young annually, and others, that reproduce more sparely. In wondering about this he was probing along the edges of one of the most fruitful conceptual constructs in modern animal ecology-the idea of 'r' and 'K' selection. The means that a species adopts in evolutionary time to best insure its survival is called its strategy. Some species adopt an 'r' strategy (the letter refers to a variable in an equation): they produce many young, usually in several litters throughout the year. Mice are good examples or brine shrimp or quail. They need to do this because they are so heavily preyed upon. In fact it is through this predation pressure that natural selection works-a better mouse is a faster mouse. At the other end are 'K' selected species: whales, condors, or porcupines. They are limited by the resources that sustain them rather than by their natural enemies. So the evolutionary trend is toward animals that better exploit that resource-a faster eating porcupine is better off than a faster one. (Quite aside from the main point-when a 'K'-selected animal finds itself suddenly, out of the evolutionary context, at the far end of a new and efficient predator/prey relationship, like men/whales, it is in desperate trouble.) s e r, d Of course, John Burroughs did 'not much expand upon his acute perception of "the difference" he noted in these types. Had he done so he might have given 50 years more of life to a now young and important chapter in population ecology. What is remarkable is that he perceived the difference as significant. From the same productive volume, Signs and Seasons-"In fact all signs and phases of life in the early season are very capricious, and are earlier or later just as some local or exceptional circumstance favors or hinders. It is only such birds as arrive after about the twentieth of April that are at all 57

5 'punctual' according to the almanac The May birds, it seems, will not come in April no matter how the season favors."3 In these few words Burroughs opens upon the broad field of phenology, the study of the timing in plants and animals and the environmental influences on that timing. Examples are the migration of birds, the blooming of plants and the hatching of insects. Today there is no central theory in phenology, perhaps for the lack of a Darwin to knit up the many strands of this fascinating tangle. But there is no lack of interest. In practically every issue of 'Ecology' you will find an article that speculates about or documents the time-marking abilities of some living organism. One of the latest analyses of spring bird migration bears out Burroughs' insight: March birds are responsive to weather patterns and arrive at their breeding grounds early or late depending on the mildness or severity of the early spring weather. The May birds, however, seem to be quite precise in their arrival dates, apparently taking their cues from the lengthening of the days alone. That is the significance of the downward sloping regression line on the graph which follows. All this was established with a linear regression program, a tall stack of punched data cards, and a roomful of computer hardware. Burroughs used his eyes. t Before filling out any more the image of Burroughs, the natural historian and scientific futurist, it might be enlightening to discover what he himself thought of the relation between natural history and science. Burroughs was well read in the sciences and kept himself quite abreast of the developments in his day, so his views in this point are doubtlessly not casual considerations. I quote from The Ways of Nature: "He [the nature student] is just as zealous for the truth as is the man of science. In fact, nature study is only science out of school, happy in the fields and woods, loving the flower and animal which it observes and finding in them something for the sentiments and emotion as well as for the understanding. With the nature student, the human interest in the wild creatures-by which I mean our interest in them as living struggling beings-dominates the scientific interest or our interest in them merely as subjects for comparison and classification. "4 Whether one shares this view or not, he must admit it is more than a clue why Burroughs chose not to pursue his insights beyond noting them. Another interesting insight in this regard is afforded from his journals upon finishing The Origin of Species in 1883; "A true wonder book. Few pages in modern scientific literature so noble as those last few pages of the book. Everything about Darwin indicates the master... he is in his way as great and as remarkable as Shakespeare and utilizes the knowledge of mankind in the same way... he is the father of a new generation of naturalists.' '5 58

6 Burroughs was especially prescient in this last phrase; the 'new generation' is, of course, ecologists, ecology is natural history informed with the theory of evolution. U nquestionably, the most fruitful field for correspondences of the kind that I am finding, between John Burroughs' observations and the structured theories of modern biology, lies in the discipline now called animal behavior or ethology. As far as I know John Burroughs did not have so compact a name for this subject, but his pages teem with acute observations that a modern ethologist could categorize with a knowing nod. In fact I have often thought a graduate student in this discipline looking for a thesis topic could make good use of his time paging through one of Burroughs' nature volumes. For instance, he discusses in several places the advantages and disadvantages to animals of joining together in bands or flocks, and usually couches his observations in terms of evolutionary adaptation, a strikingly modern trait. Another such topic that he skins several times in his first success, Wake-Robin, can be summed up in his own words " plainness of dress indicates powers of song." To an ethologist this observation raises a flurry of associations surrounding 'reproductive isolation: the means the various species adopt to keep themselves distinct as species. Other Burroughs' observations on the behavior of birds cover a wide range from dust-bathing to pecking orders to the homing instinct, but his most extensive and thoughtful notes deal with bird song, an imponant topic in modern animal communication. He listened carefully to bird songs all his life and was especially keen to catch variations from bird to bird. He related this variation to the nesting success of the individual birds, a connection which has recently been established in controlled experiments. In his journal he speculates on why birds sing at all; had he lived a few more years he would have seen the classic treatise by the English ornithologist, Eliot Howard, on territoriality and song. Other of his speculations that have borne fruit signalling among crows has been worked out with newer techniques, and song learning among young male birds has a literature even now half in and half not quite in press. But his most fascinating observation upon animal communication has not been investigated as far as I know-more on that later. In sum, his views on animal behavior, especially the question of instinct vs intelligence to which he devotes most of the volume Ways of Nature, are strikingly modern in spirit and largely in accord with the European school of Lorenz and Tinbergen. It's too bad Burroughs is not required reading in college courses on ethology, too bad for the young generation. It is only fair to point out that Burroughs was not consistent In 59

7 developing natural history into science. In Last H aroest he berates the shade of poor Thoreau for fooling away his time counting tree rings. Tree-ring research today is one of the exciting new possibilities for determining the long term climate of the world, which, along with food production and population growth, constitutes mankind's number one problem complex. In another essay and on quite a different plane he fails to see the value for survival of Batesian mimicry, the color-miming, for example, by a good tasting butterfly of an ill tasting one, or, a little later on, will not admit that altruism could be a force in the animal world. Both of these are flourishing ideas in modern ecology. On the other hand we have what I call his "successes beyond today," astute insights into the natural world which, for one reason or another, have not been developed in modern biology. One of the more fascinating involves group communication among animals, as in flock movements and mammal migrations. "An army of men attempting to move without leaders and without a written or spoken language becomes a disorganized mob. Not so the animals. There seems to be a community of mind among them in a sense there is not among men. The pressure of great danger seems to develop, in a degree, this community of mind and feeling among men. Under strong excitement we revert more or less to the animal state and are ruled by instinct."6 What is this community of mind and how does it work so well among animals? As far as I know it is not being studied. One other success beyond today is in a sense being studied but inadequately. It is ecosystem research, the integration of the many separate factors-geology, soils, climate, plants and animals including especially man and his effects-that make the natural world what it is. It is the way of the generalist, complementary to the more current specialist approach, and now more than ever, badly needed. It is difficult to give a single quote to exemplify Burroughs' understanding at this level. Rather his whole work is pervaded with the ecosystem outlook and I can only recommend that the reader pick up one of his nature books and start at any essay to catch the large-minded sense of this extraordinary nature lover, writer, and thinker John Burroughs, pre-scientist. 0 Notes 'john Burroughs. Far and Near (New York, 1968). p Clara Barrus, ed., The Heart of Burroughs's Journals (Pon Washington, N.Y., 1967). p john Burroughs, Signs and Seasons (New York. 1968), p 'john Burroughs, Ways of Nature (New York, 1968), pp 'Clara Barrus, The Life and Letters of John Burroughs (New York. 1968). Vol. I. p "Burroughs. Ways of Nature. p

8 :E c.70 '3 c CI.I.60.g c c.50 CI.I... IJ -< S.40 S c.g ].30 ( I ii.10..c:... bij 70 =: 80 April Best Correlation to Any Given Environmental Variable vs Arrival Date 22 Migrant Avian Species Mohonk Lake, New York Linear Regression Slope: Intercept: U8 Coefficient of Determination: 0.63 Significant at 0.1 % level. 110 Arrival Date of Bird Species (year-day) May

The Origin of Species The Making of a Theory

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