Suburban priorities: destroying a farm to build ballfields, the price of overdevelopment

Requiem for a Farm
A natural classroom's destruction teaches a lesson about the priorities of people

ecessions aren't all bad. If not for the recession of 1974, I might never have discovered birds. I had just graduated from college and was living with my parents in Westport, Connecticut. I visited dozens of companies and mailed hundreds of resumes, but no one was hiring. With time on my hands, I sat one day in a friend's yard watching blue jays and chickadees take sunflower seeds from a gallon jug fashioned into a hanging bird feeder.

I was a kid from Queens who had never paid much attention to birds. I thought that if a bird was black, it must be a crow. Blue jays, a rare sight, were bluebirds of happiness.

My family moved to Westport while I attended college in Massachusetts. Visiting them on school breaks, I felt we'd settled in the country—at least it seemed that way compared to Queens.

Now college was over, and job prospects were bleak. Gazing that day at the birds coming to my friend's feeder, I realized I too could lure these marvelous creatures to my yard. Maybe this could keep me busy while I waited for the economy to improve.

My first project was to build a bird feeder and birdbath, then I set up a camera to catch the parade of wings. I found a pair of World War II binoculars buried in a storage cabinet and bought A Field Guide to the Birds.

It wasn't long before I outgrew backyard birding. Yearning for new birds, I set out to explore wilder places. With my dog, I crawled under a fence behind our house and emerged onto a small farm.

It was the beginning of my 20-year attachment to a cornfield, an apple orchard, an overgrown meadow, and a small woodland. I walked there with my dog nearly every day, rambles that got me inextricably hooked on birds. When old age claimed my steadfast companion, I introduced a second dog to my private sanctuary.

This spot was all that remained of the farmland that once covered much of the town. For me, and anyone wishing to explore there, it was a portal to the disappearing world of nature.

It was here that I once surprised a sandhill crane, a bird standing more than four feet tall. Bugling as it rose from the cornfield, it "Sandhill Crane in Flight" by Robert Winkler flew off and later showed up at a tidal pond near the town beach. Feeding at the cornfield by day and roosting on a grassy island in the pond at night, the crane was a spectacular rarity, and hundreds of New England birders came to see it.

I have never found a better place than this farm to watch American woodcocks in early March put on their unique air show. To attract a mate, the male circles high into the air on whistling wings, then spirals to earth with a cascading love song that turns into unromantic buzzes when he lands.

On warm late-winter days in the orchard, I would sometimes hear the song of the eastern bluebird beckoning spring. For most of one summer, I listened at dawn and dusk to the amusing catcalls of the rare yellow-breasted chat and was lucky enough to glimpse this largest of North American warblers in the tangles west of the cornfield.

I saw other rarities: Lawrence's warbler, upland sandpiper, dickcissel. I watched a sharp-shinned hawk send a flock of dark-eyed juncos scattering; white-throated sparrows scold a lone screech owl; a merlin zoom by like a jet fighter; vengeful crows chase a red-tailed hawk.

Bullfrogs called from a pond at the farm's southwest end and dodged the dagger-bills of great-blue and green herons. White-eyed vireos, indigo buntings, yellow-billed and black-billed cuckoos, and willow flycatchers returned to the thickets in summer.

"Electronic Swallow" by Robert Winkler

Toward evening in mid-August, the wood thrush's wistful melody echoed through the small woodland cathedral, a dirge to the nesting season's end. In September, common nighthawks migrating south skimmed the tops of the uncut grass, feasting on flying insects, and ruby-throated hummingbirds helicoptered between jewelweed blossoms.

Years ago, I moved to a neighboring town where I can wander in nature preserves 50 times the size of this farm, but I still visited the place where I had seen so many birds for the first time. For all it offered, the farm was usually deserted, but others eventually discovered it, and they weren't watching birds.

The Town of Westport, owner of the land, had been leasing it to an out-of-town farmer, but the cornfield had fallen idle. Westport officials viewed the unplowed land as somehow incomplete and felt compelled to find another use for it.

"The Apple Picker" by Robert Winkler They began pushing to transform the cornfield into an athletic field, with studies showing an athletic-field shortage and backing from the Little League. Our young athletes are deprived, they argued, and we must build athletic fields even if it means sacrificing the last remaining farm.

I have fond memories growing up playing basketball, stickball, and football, but they fade to insignificance compared to the richness of my experiences in nature. I saw plenty of athletic fields in town, but only one farm. Replacing the cornfield with a ball field would drive away or destroy wildlife and demolish a valuable natural classroom. It would kill an old farm.

When their representatives voted to bulldoze the farm into history, most townspeople saw it as progress. Preserving land is fine for tropical rain forests, but not in our backyard!

Where do they think migratory birds from the rain forest raise their young? Every spring, birds that spend the winter in Central and South America return to New England's cities, suburbs, and towns, nesting on farmland and forgotten patches of nature.

We call such places "undeveloped," an innocuous-sounding term that has crept into the language and created an anti-nature bias without our knowing it. The term implies that the poor, impaired land needs our help to reach its full potential. But as naturalist David Suzuki has pointed out, from the perspective of the plants and animals living there, this land is fully developed. Nature knows how to make full and wise use of the land, if only we would let it.

A few weeks ago I revisited the farm, now an athletic park, its name carved in foot-high letters into a boulder at the entrance to a new parking lot. Empty of people, it was pleasant enough—a flat expanse of trim green bordered by a grandstand and a chain-link fence.

Water pipes and electrical lines have been laid, a thick layer of smooth blacktop has replaced the bumpy dirt driveway, and a public telephone stands watch.

The pickup truck that rusted for decades near the orchard, almost hidden by weeds, has disappeared. The old footpath, where I crawled under fallen limbs and squeezed between thorny wild roses, now is wide enough for a bus.

I thought of my dogs—both are buried near the fence that allowed us to enter this place. How puzzled they would be to behold the old farm now.

Untouched land still surrounds the ball field, but that too is owned by the town, which undoubtedly will feel compelled to "develop" it. Town officials claim that an athletic-field shortage still exists, and they have been eyeing an adjacent meadow as the site for a new 1,200-student middle school, which would replace a school that closed a few years ago because of declining enrollments.

Standing there I realized that, whatever remains of the old farm, my heart is no longer with it. On my way to the car, I saw a female American kestrel effortlessly winging a few feet above the grass. She alighted on one of the conifers planted to screen the ball players from neighboring houses.

I took my spotting scope from the trunk and watched her confidently survey the new landscape, fanning her reddish tail and spreading her wings to keep her balance. Perhaps she is descended from the kestrels I found nesting here years ago and, like me, had come to mark the passing of yet another remnant of the wild.

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A message from Robert Winkler

Jeff Brush/Connecticut Post (used with permission)

If you enjoyed this essay, I know you'll enjoy my critically acclaimed book, Going Wild: Adventures with Birds in the Suburban Wilderness (National Geographic), which expands on many of the short pieces I've posted here. Why do I write about birds? Because they represent the wild in all its glory. They're numerous, diverse, intelligent, talkative, and beautiful; their power of flight never ceases to amaze; and they're the most conspicuous class of wild animal—even in the suburb, they're just about everywhere. Whether you're a beginning or advanced birder, a fan of nature writing, a curious suburbanite, or a reader in search of that rare bird known as a good book, Going Wild could very well change how you view your world. So get your copy now, or buy one for your favorite birder or nature lover. Best deal on the Web: brand new, perfect copies $5 each (69% off) at National Geographic Books.

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