One of my earliest memories of my grandparents is sitting on the porch of their Massachusetts home, a brownie my grandmother had baked for my brothers and I in hand and a glass of ice water placed beside me. Before my brothers, my grandfather and I was his birdfeeder, always busier even than the Boston intersections we had traveled through to get there. And for each new arrival while I could only identify them by color,
“There's a yellow bird, a black one, that white one’s tiny!”
but my grandfather always had a name for them in hand,
“That’s an American Goldfinch, there goes a Purple Martin, that was a Wood Thrush!”
And together we would sit and watch birds as the sun lowered to rest behind us until grandma called us in for family dinner.
Now more than a few years later while marching through the Hurlburt Swamp, Lime Pond, the Green Hills, or any of the other countless preserves the Nature Conservancy maintains to protect these properties it can almost seem like they are utterly lifeless. It’s when you stop to get a bearing on your surroundings, or break for lunch and allow the silence to return to the woods that you finally glimpse the life surrounding you. It starts with a flutter of wings you hear behind you, or a few branches shaking in the corner of your eye whose former occupant launches off by the time you turn your head. Then come the calls, loud aggressive Red Eyed Vireos, Grey Catbirds crying like kittens, and the nostalgic chirping of robins.
Conservation allows us to keep the past alive so that more than just ourselves, but future generations as well can experience the unbroken tapestry of nature in a way that nothing else on this Earth can replicate. I may not know what life will be like 500 years from now or what it was like 500 years ago. But I know that those who lived in the past heard and saw the same birds that populate New England today that feel so special from my childhood, and I hope more than anything those living in the distant future will be able to enjoy them as well.
Tucker is a half-year member serving with The Nature Conservancy this summer. Learn more about Tucker here!