Three Ways Of Touching The Earth

“In the deep discovery of the Subterranean world, a shallow part would satisfie some enquirers…The treasures of time lie high, in Urnes, Coynes, and Monuments, scarce below the roots of some vegetables. Time hath endless rarities, and shows of all varieties; which reveals old things in heaven, makes new discoveries in earth, and even earth itself a discovery. A large part of the earth is still in the Urne unto us.”

—Thomas Browne, Urne-Buriall

Recently I have been thinking about three different ways of touching the earth. A neighbor of mine, who lives a few doors down the street from me, and whose building I pass several times a day while walking my dogs, has a front yard with a large blackberry bush on one side and a patch of dirt on the other. This dirt is not the kind I usually think of as healthy (very dark, thick, rich-looking, with relatively large constituent chunks of soil); it’s pale and sandy-textured, and looks like it would easily produce clouds of dust if you kicked it.

One morning I walked past it a little earlier than usual, and I saw nine or ten sparrows all wedged into individual egg-shaped depressions in my neighbor’s dirt patch. They were taking a dust bath together.¹ A dust bath is a marvelous, ingenious little procedure, and I hope you have the opportunity to see one soon. The dust patch was alive with quickness, each little bird kicking and rustling and wriggling and flapping in order to kick up as much loose earth as possible, and yet no sparrow left its patch. It was both comic and heartbreaking, that much stillness and that much motion together, as if the Tour de France were being raced on a bunch of stationary bicycles.

The idea, as I have said, is for the bird to kick up as much dirt as it possibly can, and let the particles shower over its outstretched wings. Then the bird waggles itself further, ruffles its feathers, occasionally straightening them out with its beak, turns this way and that, and shudders pleasantly, all in the service of distributing the dirt equally over the bird’s body. This is part of what is commonly called “maintenance work” in studies of animal behavior, and likely helps birds keep their feathers clean, distinct, and aerodynamic; it may also help to get rid of parasites and exfoliate the skin. Many birds dust, including sparrows, pheasants and guineafowl, turkeys and chickens — even ostriches and some kestrels do it.

“In well-watered areas bathing is most common,” according to Erlich et al, while “in arid ones dusting is more often observed. Wrens and house sparrows frequently follow a water bath with a dust bath.”

The necessary criteria for a bird’s bath include ritual, posing, and a fixed sequence of immersion. This of course makes me think about how people bathe, and I cannot help but attribute to the sparrow a comical role of imitation, even though I know perfectly well that sparrows bathe for their own reasons, and not as a pattern after us:

A bird is considered to be bathing whenever it uses any of several stereotyped movements to wet its feathers. One pattern, wading, is commonly observed in birds with strong feet and broad, short, flexible wings. In a typical sequence a bird stands in the water, fluffs the feathers to expose the bare skin between their bases, and rapidly flicks the wings in and out of the water. The breast is submerged and rolled vigorously back and forth, and then, as the front end emerges, the head is thrown back, forming a cup with the partially elevated wings and tail, and dousing the feathers of the back. Those feathers are elevated so that the water reaches the skin, and then lowered, forcing the water between them. The sequence may be repeated, with the bird submerging farther in each cycle, until it is a mass of soaked disarranged feathers.

Birds with weak feet, such as swifts and swallows, which spend most of their time flying, dip into the water in flight, thus getting their baths "on the wing." As the body is dipped, the tail is raised to direct a spray of water over the back, and the feathers are vibrated. Flycatchers dive repeatedly from their perches into water, and vireos, which may combine both wading and diving, stand briefly and dip in the water between dives…After bathing, birds dry themselves using ritualized movements. Even swimming birds must force the surplus water from between their feathers to protect their insulating properties. Anhingas and cormorants, which often sit in a characteristic sunbathing posture with drying wings spread, are perhaps also thermoregulating. (Vultures take on similar sunbathing postures in the morning.)

I still cannot help it! I read “Swallows get their baths on the wing” and “Vultures sunbathe in the morning,” and I think, They think they’re people. At its worst this sentiment is narrow-minded, speciesist, and self-centered, but at its best, it expands the idea of peopleness to include anything that is capable of urgency, agreeableness, cooperation, fastidiousness, reflection, an enjoyable vanity in appearance, and taking one’s comfort. Sparrows taking a dust bath are surely being people together, if not human.

I found the sight of these dust-bathing sparrows deeply pleasurable. It seemed to me like they were being sociable with one another that reinforced my own ideas about sociability. The ritual possessed all three of the necessary elements of beauty, namely proportion, radiance, and integrity.² I found their actions harmonious, tending towards symmetry, charmingly proportionate to their smallness – it seemed like a “cute” act, both keen and minute, busy yet relatively unimportant, in the same way I often find bumblebees cute, where inconsequentiality is equally yoked to industry and concentration. A bumblebee always seems to be working very hard to, for example, hover on top of a clover-flower without falling over. A sparrow, even a very determined sparrow, cannot kick up very much earth at all; the combined force of these nine or ten sparrows bathing all at once made very little difference to my neighbor’s yard, and you would only recognize the post-bath indentations if you were looking for them.

Because they were touching the earth lightly, and because the dirt itself was loose and inconsequential, I was charmed and did not think of their activity as dirty.

The second way of touching the earth that has lately been on my mind is wallowing. This is also a form of “maintenance behavior,” but what distinguishes wallowing from dust-bathing is the presence of water. An animal takes a dust-bath in dust, but it can only wallow in mud. The addition of water inevitably slows down the whole procedure, and introduces the possibility of becoming stuck (you cannot get stuck in dust, but you can certainly get stuck wallowing). Mud cannot be shaken off, as dust can; wallowing means letting something adhere to you, and act as a temporary skin. We don’t refer to dust-bathing in our descriptions of human behavior, but we often talk about a person “wallowing” in a certain feeling, usually negative.

Dust-bathing can be quick, energetic, productive, industrious, silly, light-hearted; it can be easily commenced and just as easily left off. Wallowing is heavier, thicker, more elaborate; wallowing is big. Pigs and rhinoceroses wallow; elephants and warthogs wallow; bison and elk, seals and hippopotamuses wallow. Wallowing is similarly protective and useful to the animal wallowing. It shields the skin from the sun and biting insects, helps an animal cool down in hot weather, and provides relief from molting and parasites. Sometimes wallowing looks ingenious, pleasurable, private, charmingly indulgent; sometimes it looks debased, uncomfortable, gloopy. A wallow goes much deeper into both water and earth than a dust-bath, and the hollow left behind takes much longer to disappear. Digging, rooting, and smearing are introduced. Birds in a dust-bath never appear desperate, but it is possible to wallow in desperation. Dust-bathing birds will choose any suitable spot, and quit it as soon as they have finished, but a rhinoceros might use the same wallow for up to three months. Digging, rooting, and smearing have introduced in their turn the prospect of repetition, return, recursion, habit, compulsion, fixation, preoccupation, mania, and uncleanliness.

What causes a room to become dirty? Too much use, and not enough time in between use to restore order.

Wallowing is poised almost exactly on the edge between pleasure and shame, the productive and the indolent, the necessary and the selfish. To wallow, or to watch something else wallow, creates (in me at least) a desire to either go much, much further, to be wholly buried in the earth and out of sight, or to scale much further back, and to touch the earth less. A sparrow taking a dust-bath always looks like a sparrow; the water-buffalo in the featured photo above has been so thoroughly covered in mud that it now looks like something more than a water-buffalo. To look like something more than yourself is in effect to look like something less than yourself; anything off the exact mark, even only to a slight degree, is to miss entirely.

Recently I was a little distressed to be reminded that fossils don’t just include skeletons, but rocks that have adopted the shape of skeletons. It’s also the impression the skeleton left behind, not just the skeleton itself. Not only skeletons, I should say, because fossils can also include flowers, coral, wood, or footprints. The word fossil, loosely translated from Latin, means “what you get from digging.”

Fossilized footprints are themselves relatively rare. This is a third way of touching the earth. Possibly the rarest kind of fossilized footprint is called a mortichnia, or “death march” — the fossilized footprints that terminate in a fossilized body, the last-ever footprints that body produced before dying. It is the closest thing the natural world has ever come to creating a movie; it is a continuous document of motion that survives the motion itself.

Here, for example, is the mortichnia of “a small but determined horseshoe crab.” It records a nearly 10-meter “fatal trek” that ended in a muddy lagoon many millions of years ago.

From a 2012 BBC interview with one of its researchers, Dean Lomax:

"The lagoon that the animal found itself in was anoxic, so at the bottom of these lagoons there was no oxygen and nothing was living...This horseshoe crab [Mesolimulus walchi] found itself on the lagoon floor and we can tell by looking at the trace that the animal righted itself, managed to get on to its feet and began to walk. However, the anoxic conditions of the lagoon floor quickly proved fatal to the arthropod and it soon began to struggle.

We started to study the specimen closer and saw that the walking patterns and the animal's behaviour started to change. The leg impressions became deeper and more erratic, the telson (the long spiny tail) started being lifted up and down, up and down, showing that the animal was really being affected by the conditions.”

Often this kind of fossil is referred to as “exquisite,” which I think is not too distant from the “cuteness” of my neighborhood sparrows’ dust-bath. The exquisite and the cute are both delicate and ingenious, pleasing and well-proportioned; but something cute is sturdier, less breakable than something exquisite. The cute cannot produce much tragedy, although it may be affecting; the exquisite might, but its tragedy is miniaturized.

In both the dust-bath of the sparrow and the mud-wallow of the rhinoceros, an animal touches or immerses itself in the earth, sometimes for a very short time, sometimes for a few concentrated hours, but always temporarily. In the mortichnia this is reversed, and the earth immerses itself in an animal, in that animal’s absence. The earth is not touched, and it records that vacancy of touch. This particular mortichnia depicts the failure of one specific crab to successfully wallow; wallowing may sometimes be morbid but is not itself a sign of morbidity, nothing can wallow and drown at the same time.

[Image via Wikimedia Commons]

1. Ornithologists can sometimes identify what species of bird lives in a certain area depending on the size and shape of the dust-bath hollows it leaves behind. The quail, for example, creates a hollow between three and six inches in diameter.

2. Aquinas, STQ39, Article 8.