Mandala by night

Aug. 29 8:10PM

Light through the canopy

underside of a flowering dogwood

slug

I arrive at dusk, just after sunset, with just enough light to make it to the mandala with natural light. I set up my stool until a tulip tree, sit down, lean back, and let me eyes adjust to the quickly darkening forest shadows. I envision an abundance of nighttime prowlers that should be coming out about now but if there is, I'm disappointed that my untrained eyes and ears don't identify much. The remaining sunlight is surprisingly distinguished by the forest canopy and it seems much darker here than beyond the forest edge.

Initially, the cacophony of this hot, humid, sticky summer night seems largely dominated by the HVAC systems of the dorms a few hundred meters away, keeping 1500 students cool in some of the worst heat of the season. Sounds from the football practice make it through the canopy to the mandala too. The longer I sit, the more sounds of nature are distinguished. Eventually, nature overwhelms the anthropogenic noise. I try to count the number of different calls that I hear but I'm either too lazy or distracted or otherwise incapable to get much beyond five. The sounds continuously shift, by location as similar calls echo from different spots around me and as different species join the chorus and others fade out. I'd really like to do this little exercise with an entomologist and a herpetologist. I hear crickets, katydids, and what I suspect are frogs (though nothing matches when I explore possibilities online).

While I'm immersed in this evening's chorus and struggle to identify individual parts, I wonder what I'm missing. How would my ears adjust if I were blind, or it I say here all night? Would I detect more and be more sensitive to individual players? Could the same be said for my eyes? Have we created an environment that actually desensitizes humans? I suspect so. Our evolutionary fitness doesn't often benefit from superior eyes and ears. We're not going to catch more food or avoid becoming prey or find more mates. In short, I feel woefully inadequate to my task this evening. I worsen this feeling by getting up to search for critters. I know that if I can't photograph anything to share on social media, my little experiment may as well as not have happened at all. I was confident at first given previous successes triangulating katydids. I quickly lose any confidence and succumb to self-doubt. I'm a lousy naturalist. I listen for the katydids but it sounds like they're all in the tree canopy, out of reach unless I want to climb but not tonight. So I settle for a distinctive call on the ground. It must be a frog. I follow it, being as stealthy as possible, but each time I approach a caller, it stops. I'm not patient enough to wait long and never do put eyes on anything besides a few ground beetles, moths, and slugs. I suppose I'll have to try again.

Here are some clips of the sounds of the mandala: