Observations from a Dying Planet

From Greater Wapanucka, Oklahoma

July 10^th, 2020

“Wolves”

1958 – 1973- 2020

When I was twelve, a neighbor a quarter-mile west decided that there were dangerous 

wolves prowling near his place, so he called in government trappers. They put out bait that used cyanide bullets and were almost infallible. Shortly after they deployed their traps, I found a decaying coyote that had gotten hit: it died a slow, terrible death in a shallow, icy ditch. Within about six months, the trappers had cleared the area of coyotes. (There were never any wolves.) My paranoid neighbor was elated and presented himself as a hero.

In the next two years, however, the unchallenged rodent population soared: there were so many field mice and rabbits that they wove trails in the pastures; the areas under the brush piles were laid bare from the pounding of many, many small feet. Then some sort of epidemic swept into the rodents and suddenly the pastures were full of dead carcasses that emitted a thick stench. The area remained void of both rodents and coyotes for years. When I came back from Vietnam (1971), the pastures had somehow partially rebalanced to the earlier population of canny coyotes and cautious rodents. But the always-evolving ecology had shifted with deer, armadillos and who-knows-what new species moving in while other creatures quietly disappeared. 

My neighbor who had called in the government trappers died in 1973; none of his survivors made more requests for government trappers to kill “wolves.” 

Timid coyotes now appear on my game cameras at the Wapanucka farm and each dusk I hear three packs announce their presence and turf to their kin; they usually repeat their chorus at the first hint of dawn. My present neighbors fear them and wish there was a way to rid the area of “wolves.” 

Roundup

2014 – 2020

When my older brother, Bill, was killed in an auto accident at age 76 he left me his farm. He had never spoken to me about how he managed it. I had offered to help him with chores many times but he refused, so my visits to his place were strictly social and usually only over a one night visit during which we played dominos -- but broke so he could watch The Big Bang Theory on his television that received reception off a satellite dish. Fate had made that TV show a clever, surrogate family to fill his void.

Each week following his funeral, I traveled the 330-mile trip from Austin and stayed at the farm for several days to probate his will – but more interesting to me, to figure out how he had spent his time, and that of his family composed of his wife, Kitty; two deceased sons, and one still alive, Billy Jr., who passed away three months later. 

Bill’s neighbors expected me to sell the farm after auctioning off his equipment and his 1992 Ford pickup. They sometimes spotted my Tacoma pickup and stopped to chat as they surveyed farm equipment over my shoulders; the conversations always turned to what I was going to do with his place. Undecided, I put them off.

Among the pieces of equipment sat a 200-gallon sprayer that my brother had used to apply Roundup. His closest neighbor told me he had coached Bill to spray and that “Bill was coming along.” I was not sure just what that meant at the time, but  informed by my personal experiences with DDT fifty years earlier, I knew I would not be spraying any chemicals.  The summer after Bill died, the place was inundated by hordes of grasshoppers that devoured everything that grew and practically ate the paint off the farmhouse.

I was slow to perceive just what was going on, but I noted that there were almost no birds on the place. Knowing birds are the natural balance to too many insects, I ferociously researched online, and decided to play host to the missing flocks: I built ten Bluebird houses and placed them 300 feet apart in the area around the farmhouse where I could observe them. The thrushes wasted no time moving in, and in 2016, the grasshopper population was cut in half. It reduced as much in the succeeding years and now there are only a few that appear each August. 

Despite the $7.4 billion settlement that Monsanto has recently agreed to, Roundup is still prevalent on the shelves of retailers and my neighbors are routinely spraying it on their pastures. 

Bill’s sprayer remains idle and I’ve found that a  few grasshoppers make good fish bait. And the Mockingbirds, Marsh Wrens and Scissor Tails relish the rest.

DDT

1940 – 1972 – and on-and-on

In the 1940s dichloro-diphenyl-trichioroethane (DDT) was mass produced and distributed worldwide to combat insects that threatened commercial farming. It was adopted in the rural US on commercial and family farms as the USDA promoted it as the “modern way to farm.” By the early 1950s, DDT was in every rural feed store and used on every American farm. 

The slightly-gray dust looked almost like flour and at age four I experienced a bag of it in the smokehouse behind our family shack: it was tasteless and uninteresting on my tongue so I did not try it again. My mother, however, bathed her garden plants with the milky mixture and my dad sprayed our small heard of milk cows with it to kill flies and ticks. The cows often retreated to a nearby pool; waded out until the water was over their backs -- they looked like hippos with only their noses above the waves. Dead fish lined the pool’s banks for weeks after our cows bathed after each spraying. 

The practice of spraying cattle was promoted by the local USDA agents who dug strategic ditches along gravel roads within several miles of farmers, and filled them with milky-looking water richly laced with DDT. Farmers, to include my dad, would herd their cattle to the trench and drive them through it. The USDA for-whatever-reasons ended that practice after several years.

When I returned from Vietnam in 1971, my parents had gone to a DDT class, hosted by the local USDA, and after 45-minutes of training, were issued licenses to use it. 

The next year it was banned from sale in the United States. Though it has been replaced on American shelves with Roundup, DDT is still widely used in India and China.