Farmers’ Market Musings: Sound of the Music

Last night, a lone coyote howled nearby under the new moon. His compadres in the hills called in reply. We often hear packs yipping in the distance, but this one coyote was fifty feet from my open window. At first, I was alarmed; Our DNA is set to fear for our safety when we hear wild creatures in the dark. As I once heard Doris Lessing say, we still have more fear of the saber-toothed tiger, than we have fear of driving on the freeway, because millions of years of evolution trump recent evolution. My next thought was of the small flock of chickens and the goat duo that we lock up every night at sunset; Fort Clucks requires a daily ritual of locking doors with numerous snap hooks and carabiners, one for each door, a total of nine.
Why was the coyote venturing so far from his pack, I wondered in the middle of the night. Is he the one who left a rabbit’s foot in our driveway recently? (Why is it good luck to find a rabbit’s foot, anyway?) Maybe he will dig up and eat some moles, voles, gophers, rats or mice…that would be a benefit to our farm. The sound of the coyote is music to my ears, but so is the sound of the roosters crowing in the morning. When my niece Fiona visited recently, she helped with the chicken chores and gave the loudest rooster the name “Sound of the Music.” Yes, the crowing is music in the morning, especially as an assurance that the flocks survived another night protected from the claws and fangs of raccoons, foxes, coyotes, wild dogs, and as our neighbors and friends the Kiffs remind us – weasels.  
To a discerning ear, there is a distinction between the sound of the music of the creatures of our “civilization,” which sometimes borders on noise, and the sound of the music of wild creatures. Chickens fall into the group of domestic creatures of civilization, which I think can also include the geese that fly from pond to reservoir, and stay in our mild climes throughout the year. They are not to be confused with the wild geese, whose faraway, lonesome, but noble sound during their winged migration was described by Aldo Leopold as “goose music.” The wonderful, wild call and hammering sound of the red-shafted flicker has been omnipresent this Indian summer as the leaves fall from the Valley Oaks. The golden-crowned sparrow has returned, as well as a phoebe who was absent for awhile. We regularly hear from the Anna’s hummingbird, barn owl, California quail, towhee, Cooper’s hawk, mourning dove, Nuttall’s woodpecker, titmouse, red-tailed hawk, western bluebird, nuthatch, and especially the acorn woodpecker. However, this is the time of year when the noise of the starlings begins to drown out the songs and calls of the native birds.
Although the European starlings live in the wild, I classify them as part of civilization because they only prosper where humans have tipped the balance to give them an unfair advantage over the native species. In the past few years, as fellow columnists Renee Kiff and Ray Holley have noticed, we have added the Eurasian collared dove to the list of invasive pests. It has a soft coo like the mourning dove, but its other call, a harsh nasal “caw, caw” is as offensive as the screeching, finger-nails-on-the-chalkboard grating noise of the starlings.
There are some native species, such as the crows, scrub jays, and coyotes, who also dominate because of the way we humans have altered the natural world. They harass the flicker, acorn woodpecker, and our other native species. The flicker and acorn woodpecker have adapted to their valley oak home over millions of years. When John Muir lived in California, not one starling had yet invaded the state; That didn’t happen until the 1940s or 50s. There is a war going on in these oaks over the feeding territory, but especially the nesting territory. A few years ago I heard the sound of acorn woodpeckers in distress. I walked outside and looked up to see five acorn woodpeckers fighting with one starling over a prime nesting cavity. Eventually, the tenacious starling won, and starlings have occupied that home ever since, hatching families of more starlings. And while they thrive, I have watched the demise of the native birds, and their song and calls have been replaced by noise.
Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor sat at my bedside as I listened to the coyote. Her book “Lazy B: Growing up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest” has taken me back to the time when the desert was the frontier to people like her parents and my grandparents. She writes about the cowboys who worked on their ranch, the windmills and wells and the limits of water in the desert, the rattlesnakes, javalinas, Gila monsters and coyotes that were all a part of the land. Somehow, I feel closer to those times than I do to the present. It is not sentimental nostalgia; I am attempting to discern how much civilization of the earth we can handle. How much music has been displaced by noise? “What they lived”, I dream. I can’t help but wonder if the civilization in which we live, so disconnected from the natural, wild world and its music, and so detached from an understanding of the limits of finite resources, is really fulfilling the dreams that our ancestors had for us.
Dedicated to Jim Modini, and Margaret and Howard Kelley.
Mary Kelley is the manager of the Healdsburg Farmers’ Market. The Saturday morning market runs through November. The Wednesday afternoon market runs through October.