Prodigal Summer - Barbara Kingsolver [28]
Deanna’s legs ached but she squatted a little longer, taking the time to flatten and dissect the scat completely with her twig. Something else here surprised her: millet seed, both red and white. No millet grew on this mountainside, or on any farm down below, as far as she knew. Certainly not red and white millet together; that was a combination unlikely to be found on any farm. Mostly it showed up in the commercial seed mixes people put out for their birds. Probably this was the birdseed she had put out herself. She stood up blinking, peered downhill through the tree trunks, and thought about it. Who else around here was likely to be feeding chickadees? “You rascal,” she said aloud, laughing. “You magnificent son of a bitch. You’ve been spying on me.”
She spent the afternoon in an edgy distraction, curled into the dilapidated green brocade armchair that sat on her porch against the outside wall, sheltered under the eave. With her field notebook on her knee she cataloged the contents of the scat and the size and location of the tracks and the location of the magnolia warbler she’d heard today. Then she reached back in her memory to the first magnolia warbler and quite a few other things she should have recorded before now. She had ignored her notebooks completely for the full nine days of his visit. Even now she felt abnormally jumpy, in need of something to eat, or to look up, or to check on, and had to scold herself like a child to sit still and focus. She stared at the blank, numbered pages ending with today’s date, May 19, and felt coldly disgusted by her laziness and poor concentration. Anything could have happened in those days, life or death, and she would have missed it.
What she had here on this mountain was a chance that would never come again, for anybody: the return of a significant canid predator and the reordering of species it might bring about. Especially significant if the coyote turned out to be what R. T. Paine called a keystone predator. She’d carefully read and reread Paine’s famous experiments from the 1960s, in which he’d removed all the starfish from his tidepools and watched the diversity of species drop from many to very few. The starfish preyed on mussels. Without starfish, the mussels boomed and either ate nearly everything else or crowded it out. No one had known, before that, how crucial a single carnivore could be to things so far removed from carnivory. Of course, the experiment had been replicated endlessly by accident: removing mountain lions from the Grand Canyon, for example, had rendered it a monoculture of prolific, starving deer that out-bred all other herbivores and gnawed the landscape down to granite. Plenty of people had watched and recorded the disaster of eliminating a predator from a system. They were watching it here in her own beloved mountains, where North America’s richest biological home was losing its richness to one extinction after another, of plants and birds, fish, mammals, moths and stoneflies, and especially the river creatures whose names she collected like beads: sugar-spoon, forkshell, acornshell, leafshell. Sixty-five kinds of mussels, twenty now gone for good. There were hundreds of reasons for each death—pesticide runoff, silt from tilling, cattle in the creek—but for Deanna each one was also a piece in the puzzle she’d spent years working out. The main predator of the endangered shellfish was the muskrat, which had overpopulated to pestilence along the riverbanks over the last fifty years. What had kept muskrats