11/24/08 THE MIND'S EYE AND BIRCH SEEDS

Monday, 6:00 AM. 23 degrees, wind W, calm. There is a sliver of moon and some stars. The barometer is down.
End of the day: it was another frustrating day in the deer woods. Sat as long as I could this morning, watched a weather front come in (see photo) and it snowed off and on all day. In the afternoon I abandoned my tree stand for a new part of the woods where I found reasonably fresh deer sign but still saw no deer. This is beginning to sound like some Papa Hemmingway saga, perhaps “The Old Man and the Woods.” Anyway, it gives one time to think and observe. A thought: the mind has to process and categorize what the eye gives it, and if the mind does not recognize what the eye gives it, it will adjust it to something it can identify or rationalize. Viz.: two crossed branches do not process, and so become two alert deer ears; a charred stump does not look like a stump so it becomes a black bear. And on and on. That’s one reason I always carry binoculars in the woods, not so much to see what things are, but what they are not. “The mind’s eye” is very literally an organ of sight. I remember, at least 50 years ago (that’s becoming something of a routine comment) walking a hedgerow in a farm field in southern Wisconsin with a deer hunting buddy, and we both commented on the branch laying flat on the ground that we had nearly stumbled over looking very much like deer antlers. As we turned around to look back toward the “branch” it suddenly got up and ran away, attached to a very large buck. Two startled young hunters never got off a shot. Our brains processed what our eyes saw as branch, rather than antlers, because they were flat on the ground.
Observation: the fecundity of nature is truly amazing. The photo is of tiny star-shaped white birch seeds, now dispersed throughout the woods at least one to the square inch. Multiply that by inches per square foot and square feet per acre and acres per mile and one soon gets into the numerical realm of a bank bailout. The amazing thing is that the birch trees are not asking for any taxpayer help. But, don’t give them any ideas.