Guinea pigs for dinner

In the Times recently, a reporter described dining on roast guinea pig at an Ecuadorean restaurant in Queens. Guinea pigs are eaten, and apparently enjoyed, in the countries of the Andes, and a painting in the cathedral in Cuzco, Peru, pictures Jesus dining on guinea pig with his disciples. The reporter’s description was less than enthusiastic:

There was very little meat, and it tasted somewhat similar to the dark meat of chicken, gamey like duck or rabbit. The meat was fatty and stringy at times. I had to pick it off the little ribs, and the skin was crunchy, with parts of it thicker with a chewy, almost rubbery, texture.

I was reminded of The Wine-Dark Sea by Patrick O’Brian, the 16th volume in the Aubrey-Maturin series, in which Dr. Maturin sets out on a perilous mission through the Peruvian Andes. The account of guinea pig is even less appealing there:

Three times that day, and at ever-increasing heights, they had left their mules in the hope of a partridge or a guanaco, and three times they had caught up with the llamas not indeed empty-handed, since Stephen carried a beetle or a low-growing plant for the pack of the animal that carried their collections, but without any sort of game, which meant that their supper would be fried guinea-pig and dried potatoes once more; and each time Eduardo had said that this was a strange, unaccountable year, with weather that made no sense and with animals abandoning customs and territories that had remained unchanged since before the days of Pachacutic Inca.

A few pages later, Maturin suggests shooting a vicuña for food, observing to his companion, “You yourself said that you were tired of fried guinea-pig and ham.” Eduardo quietly confirms this in a little while, when Maturin says he would like to dissect an unusual bird they have just bagged.

‘That would mean fried guinea-pig again,’ observed Eduardo.

The two eventually arrive at a Catholic mission, but the priests are nonplussed at having little to offer their guests. “Well,” says one at last, “there may be a few guinea-pigs left in the scriptorium.” One would think that O’Brian has exhausted the subject, yet his final unfinished novel (published under the title 21) features “a formal dinner given by an Argentine grandee, which includes lobster in a bitter chocolate sauce and 70 freshly harvested guinea pigs.”

Baby hawks

This discouraging story appeared in the Times on May 13. The excerpts below are for those who can’t read it online. I suppose it’s remarkable that hawks try to raise families in Manhattan at all.

Three nestlings born in recent weeks to red-tailed hawks in the south end of Riverside Park in Manhattan are believed to have died, bird experts said on Monday. The body of only one young hawk — or eyas — has been recovered so far. The city’s avid bird-watchers have confirmed that the other two babies are not in their West Side nest and are feared dead as well.... “On Sunday morning I went out at 7 a.m.,” Dr. [Leslie] Day said in a phone interview on Monday. “Standing at the nest, I could see there were no babies. They had become so large, standing at the rim, strengthening their wings.” ... While the cause of death awaits a toxicology analysis, Dr. Day suspected that the parents may have fed the nestlings pigeons or rats that contained lethal levels of poison — a common cause of death for the delicate hawks.

In his website palemale.com, where the photo above appears, photographer Lincoln Karim later wrote, "UC Davis lab results are in for the 1st retrieved baby hawk from Riverside Park: Blood/organ samples contained lethal levels of two anti-coagulant rodenticides.... All poisoning of animals must stop now! Starting with Riverside Park and Central Park."

Disappearing Bats

First frogs, then bees, and now bats... Over the last few months there have been reports of a massive die-off of bats in the Northeast. As the article at Bat Conservation International puts it, “Hibernating bats are dying by the tens of thousands in the northeastern United States, and a growing circle of top scientists is anxiously trying to figure out why. The mystery affliction, reported in New York, Vermont and Massachusetts, is dubbed ‘white-nose syndrome’ because many affected bats had visible halos of white fungus around their faces.” I’ve always been fond of bats. On summer evenings at the family camp on Skaneateles Lake, when I was growing up, I would wait for dusk and watch them dart around for insects. In Arizona I once visited a wildlife refuge where hummingbirds visited feeders filled with sugar water during the day, and bats came to the same feeders at night. (This photo of an Arizona nectar bat is courtesy of Charles W. Melton.) And in Kathmandu I once saw giant fruit bats hanging from tree branches all day like big leather packages, then unfurling themselves at dusk and flying low over the city, flapping their wings in slow beats like albatrosses: an eerie and beautiful sight.

Reverend Henry Wisner and the Wolves

The page and a half devoted to the Reverend Henry Wisner (1807-1878) in The Wisners in America doesn’t promise much excitement at first. Wisner was born in Camillus, New York, to a family “all noted for their sturdy, moral and religious integrity.” At the age of twelve, Wisner “became the subject of divine grace” and began teaching school. “His great modesty, which was almost a mental disease, long kept him in the background, but in 1830, unsolicited on his part, he received his first license as an exhorter, and the following year his license as a preacher. The same year he was married to Miss Byancy House, a woman worthy to be his companion.” No examples are given of Rev. Wisner’s extraordinary modesty. Two paragraphs later, his eulogy is being read, and he is praised as “a man with an unsullied reputation.” Then comes the good part.

About the same time (November 9, 1878) Mr. DePew wrote a long article in the Yates County Chronicle (New York), giving a thrilling account of how Rev. Henry Wisner spent a night in a tree in the mountains of Pennsylvania in 1835, being trapped by pack of wolves after he had lost the trail in crossing the mountains, one night in his itinerary. To console himself and to pass away the time, while suffering all sorts of discomforts in the tree, he preached a long sermon on that occasion taking as his text, “There shall be no night there.” To prevent freezing, for it was the 12th of November and a sleet storm was raging, he grabbed the branches over his head and lifted himself up as far as he could and then he would suddenly drop to the branch on which his feet rested, a gymnastic exercise, or a species of dance, the music of which came out of the thick walls of darkness in the nature of blood-curdling yells of the blood-thirsty wolves.

Thoreau and hay fever

Every spring, around the time the forsythia is in bloom, Jenn has a terrible time with nasal allergies. The English scientist Charles Blackley discovered in 1869 that pollen caused hay fever, but Thoreau was among those who suspected earlier that it might be the culprit. On June 21, 1860, he wrote, “Who knows but the pollen of some plants may be unwholesome to inhale, and produce the diseases of the season?”

Bitten by a milk snake

While walking with my mother along a bike path near Burnt Hills, New York, I saw a small milk snake. I picked it up and let it run between my fingers until it became scared or impatient and bit me on the forearm. Its teeth were so small and sharp that it felt like getting a shot with a very fine needle. Impressed with its nerve, I put the snake back down in the grass. On my skin was a small V of tiny red dots. The milk snake is one of the prettiest snakes in the Northeast, and one that I’ve rarely seen. Thoreau wrote about it, as he did about nearly every creature to be found near Concord. He called it a “checkered adder” and noted the “forked light space” on the back of its head. His description of one (on May 28, 1854) was rather detailed and technical, suggesting that he killed it, but the act of doing so seems to have made him thoughtful. “The inhumanity of science concerns me,” he wrote, “as when I am tempted to kill a rare snake that I may ascertain its species. I feel that this is not the means of acquiring true knowledge.”

Thoreau imitates a Canada goose

March 20, 1855 Trying the other day to imitate the honking of geese, I found myself flapping my sides with my elbows, as with wings, and uttering something like the syllables mow-ack with a nasal twang and twist in my head; and I produced their note so perfectly in the opinion of the hearers that I thought I might possibly draw a flock down.

More on the black hole

The New York Times gave more details today on the possibility that a proton smasher in Switzerland could destroy the earth.

Today we require more than prayers that a scientific experiment will not lead to the end of the world. We demand hard-headed calculations. But whom can we trust to do them? That question has been raised by the impending startup of the Large Hadron Collider. It starts smashing protons together this summer at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or Cern, outside Geneva, in hopes of grabbing a piece of the primordial fire, forces and particles that may have existed a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Critics have contended that the machine could produce a black hole that could eat the Earth or something equally catastrophic.

Agassiz and Thoreau

Thoreau had a prickly relationship with Harvard, his alma mater, and particularly with the celebrated Louis Agassiz, the Swiss-born professor of geology and zoology at Harvard. I don’t know whether Thoreau was aware of Agassiz’s racial theories, which have been exposed and dissected by Stephen Jay Gould. They would surely have rankled Thoreau, who participated in the Underground Railroad and delivered fiery speeches on the subject of John Brown. At any rate, Thoreau never lost an opportunity to puncture some of Agassiz’s more dubious pronouncements on natural history. Whenever he does this in his Journal, it is in straight-faced New England style, utterly without comment.

May 18, 1856 R.W.E. says that Agassiz tells him he has had turtles six or seven years, which grew so little, compared with others of the same size killed at first, that he thinks they may live four or five hundred years. 

June 2, 1856 Agassiz tells his class that the intestinal worms in the mouse are not developed except in the stomach of the cat. 

July 26, 1856 Agassiz says he has discovered that the haddock, a deep-sea fish, is viviparous. 

March 20, 1857 Dine with Agassiz at R.W.E.’s. He thinks that the suckers die of asphyxia, having very large air-bladders and being in the habit of coming to the surface for air. But then, he is thinking of a different phenomenon from the one I speak of, which last is confined to the very earliest spring or winter.... When I began to tell him of my experiment on a frozen fish, he said that Pallas had shown that fishes were frozen and thawed again, but I affirmed the contrary, and then Agassiz agreed with me. 

May 14, 1858 Picked up, floating, an Emys picta [painted turtle], hatched last year. It is an inch and one twentieth long in the upper shell and agrees with Agassiz’s description at that age. Agassiz says he could never obtain a specimen of the insculpta [wood turtle] only one year old, it is so rarely met with, and young Emydidæ are so aquatic. I have seen them frequently.

Frozen creatures

One of Thoreau’s most endearing habits was his repeated attempt to revive frozen animals that he encountered on his rambles. I’ve found eleven examples in the Journal where he attempted to bring a creature back to life, and three other discussions of attempts by others. The creatures included a striped squirrel (chipmunk), a toad, a tortoise, caterpillars (including the woolly bear caterpillar), dor-bugs (scarab beetles), grasshoppers, pickerel, and snow-fleas. The other day, The Blog of Henry Thoreau featured Thoreau’s unsuccessful attempt to revive a toad that he found frozen on the sidewalk in Cambridge. Here are two more of my favorite examples.

March 15, 1853 There were fewer colder nights last winter than the last. The water in the flower-stand containing my pet tortoise froze solid, — completely enveloping him, though I had a fire in my chamber all the evening, — also that in my pail pretty thick. But the tortoise, having been thawed out on the stove, leaving the impression of his back shell in the ice, was even more lively than ever. His efforts at first had been to get under his chip, as if to go into the mud. Feb. 20, 1860 J. Farmer tells me that his grandfather once, when moving some rocks in the winter, found a striped squirrel frozen stiff. He put him in his pocket, and when he got home laid him on the hearth, and after a while he was surprised to see him running about the room as lively as ever he was.

Albino alligator

No special reason for this post, except that I thought this was a fine photo of an albino alligator. The alligator is named White Diamond, and he grew up in Florida and is now on display in Germany. He (or she?) almost looks as if he’s carved out of ivory. I was reminded of the legend that alligators (perhaps albino) dwell in the sewers of New York City, and of the 1996 film Albino Alligator, which made only $350,000 in the US despite the efforts of Gary Sinise, Matt Dillon, William Fichtner, Viggo Mortensen, Joe Mantegna, and Faye Dunaway.

Something new to worry about

Worrying about the economy, the Iraq war, and global warming can get monotonous. Here’s something new from the New York Times of Saturday, March 29. It was on the front page — but on the day of the week when the fewest people read the paper.

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature. But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.”

Rails covered with lichens

During my latest journey through Thoreau's Journal, I was struck by this amazing sentence from January 27, 1852. It strikes an uncharacteristically melancholy note for Thoreau, it takes more notice of the inner life of Thoreau's neighbors than is usual for him, and at 436 words it must surely be the longest sentence in his collected works. (If any knows of a longer one, let me know!) I'm not aware of any critic who has taken notice of it.

As I stand under the hill beyond J. Hosmer’s and look over the plains westward toward Acton and see the farmhouses nearly half a mile apart, few and solitary, in these great fields between these stretching woods, out of the world, where the children have to go far to school; the still, stagnant, heart-eating, life-everlasting, and gone-to-seed country, so far from the post-office where the weekly paper comes, wherein the new-married wife cannot live for loneliness, and the young man has to depend upon his horse for society; see young J. Hosmer’s house, whither he returns with his wife in despair after living in the city, — I standing in Tarbell’s road, which he alone cannot break, — the world in winter for most walkers reduced to a sled track winding far through the drifts, all springs sealed up and no digressions; where the old man thinks he may possibly afford to rust it out, not having long to live, but the young man pines to get nearer the post-office and the Lyceum, is restless and resolves to go to California, because the depot is a mile off (he hears the rattle of the cars at a distance and thinks the world is going by and leaving him); where rabbits and partridges multiply, and muskrats are more numerous than ever, and none of the farmer’s sons are willing to be farmers, and the apple trees are decayed, and the cellar-holes are more numerous than the houses, and the rails are covered with lichens, and the old maids wish to sell out and move into the village, and have waited twenty years in vain for this purpose and never finished but one room in the house, never plastered nor painted, inside or out, lands which the Indian was long since dispossessed [of], and now the farms are run out, and what were forests are grain-fields, what were grain-fields, pastures; dwellings which only those Arnolds of the wilderness, those coureurs de bois, the baker and the butcher visit, to which at least the latter penetrates for the annual calf, — and as he returns the cow lows after, — whither the villager never penetrates, but in huckleberry time, perchance, and if he does not, who does? — where some men’s breaths smell of rum, having smuggled in a jugful to alleviate their misery and solitude; where the owls give a regular serenade; — I say, standing there and seeing these things, I cannot realize that this is that hopeful young America which is famous throughout the world for its activity and enterprise, and this is the most thickly settled and Yankee part of it.

A strong and beautiful bug

Years ago I learned to set type by hand and to print broadsides on the old Vandercook proof press at the Bow & Arrow Press in the basement of Harvard's Adams House. I printed several favorite quotations from Thoreau, including this one, from the end of Walden. My mother recently remembered it and asked me for the exact quotation. Though it refers to a "perfect summer life" it seems appropriate now, when we are seeing the first stirrings of spring.

Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts -- from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb -- heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board -- may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

Jeffrey S. Cramer, in his annotated edition of Walden, traces this story to John Warner Barber's book Historical Collections, but doesn't attempt to identify the bug. Perhaps it was the golden buprestid beetle, whose "metallic green and burnished copper" certainly make it sound beautiful. (Photo is by Scott Tunnock of the USDA Forest Service.)

Woodchucks

From the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, October 10, 1858

"As I go along the Groton road, I see afar, in the middle of E. Wood’s field, what looks like a stone jug or post, but my glass reveals it is a woodchuck, a great, plump gray fellow, and when I am nearly half a mile off, I can still see him nibbling the grass there, and from time to time, when he hears perchance, a wagon on the road, sitting erect and looking warily around for approaching foes. I am glad to see the woodchuck so fat in the orchard. It proves that is the same nature that was of yore."

Woodchucks are an underappreciated creature, but my friend Lucy has a couple of pages (with quotations from Thoreau) dedicated to them, including a tribute to a gentle woodchuck who met his end too soon.