BY HARRY WEEKES
How do you notice things? Natural things? How does one go about recognizing all that lives out in the world, especially when so much of what lives out in the world specifically tries not to be noticed?
The simplest method I have found—stand still. Stand still and pay attention. Nicely, it turns out, standing still happens for all sorts of reasons, from the intentional to the non. For the intentional, simply find a spot, stop, and stay for a while. This can be standing, literally, or sitting. You may even try lying down.
You may wonder what “unintentional standing” even means. By way of example, this happens when you find yourself standing in the driveway with your in-laws where they are intensely and at length discussing how someone might park a car in front of their house. The key part of the unintentional situation comes from recognizing you are in it. As soon as that happens, start to let your eyes drift over the landscape. Turn on your innate Naturalist and start noticing.
At the end of September, on one of those days where there wasn’t even a thought of a cloud in the sky, I stood taking in the back and forth regarding potential parking spaces. I let my eyes glide over the surroundings—to the willows on the hill, which started yellowing about a week ago; to the fluttering of the aspen leaves in the wind; to the camouflaged micro-tank navigating the dirt at my feet. What the?
There, trudging through deep furrows of dried mud, sporting a kind of desert camouflage, ambled a bug. I reached down to grab the beast, and it instantly did a move best described as “tuck and go rigid.” The insect pulled its legs in just a bit, then froze. Not surprisingly, this made it difficult to pick up. I gently poked and nudged and coerced the small creature into my hand, where something cued it to move again.
My pattern recognition software kicked in, “weevil.” The body shape, the extended snout, the antennae on the snout, the hooked appendages all added up to weevil. But what kind of weevil? This one obliged my intrigue, and my in-laws suffered my “I’ll be right back, I need to get my camera,” as I carried him, or her, into the house, then returned for better lighting.
Turns out I held the knapweed root weevil. Well, well, color me intrigued. Apparently, these little knapweed fiends come from Europe, having been introduced as biological control agents against our noxious knapweed, some of which we have springing up on the side of the chicken coop.
The journey from where I picked up this weevil marvel back to the coop seemed like an epic journey at weevil scale, so I broke one of my rules (work to put any creature back as close to where you found it as you can), and carried my new friend to the stalks of knapweed.
“Here you go. Now get in there and do your magic,” I whispered, working to push the bug into the prickly bushes as gently as I could.
“What was that?” I was asked on my return to the driveway discussion.
“Oh, just working on getting rid of some of that knapweed. Thanks for noticing.”
I returned to standing still.
Harry Weekes is the founder and head of school at The Sage School in Hailey. This is his 54th year in the Wood River Valley, where he lives with Hilary and their two mini-Dachshunds. The baby members of their flock have now become adults; Georgia and Simon are fledging in North Carolina, and Penelope has recently changed roosting sites to Connecticut.
