I can bet you didn’t know the average milkweed pod contains 226 seeds.  I love that word – average – implying that some researcher is carefully counting milkweed seeds, adding the sums, and dividing by some specific number of pods.  How many pods are needed to have a reliable and robust average such as 226 seeds?

That’s abundance!  It’s hard to believe that so many seeds, so many flowers, so many bees, or even so many wild turkey poults are required for any one organism to survive.  Abundance is one of my Objects of My Desire.  Not an object, I realize; rather a concept.  But the main criteria for my Objects of My Desire artist book is that the something amaze me so that it’s forever astonishing when I reconsider it.  Abundance thus fits my definition.

It’s been an abundantly grand season for wildlife this spring and early summer.  Or maybe I think so because I’ve been at home more and for longer stretches of time to study the landscape.  Or because my sleep rhythms are crazy and I’m up at 4:30 or 5 am to see what’s going on in my yard.  Either way, my close attention is different this year and my awareness has rewarded me with an astonishing number of examples.

flowering wild cherry

This spring I have catalogued a male fox chasing a female, deer and then suddenly fawns, eagles and osprey carrying snakes as snacks.  In my meadow and nearby trees warblers, wood thrush, phoebes, chickadees, juncos, hummingbirds, robins, finch have visited my feeder or nested.  (I’m godmother to three nests of babies above my front door.)

coyote in February

Bees, ants, chipmunks and mice are all vying for their new nests around the house.  I’ve begun identifying the fritillary, swallowtail, and hairstreak butterflies that come with summer.  In the local ponds are beaver, muskrat, maybe a mink.  The woodchuck has just returned to bore holes in my stone walls.  And at night the coyotes howl.  A neighbor feeds grapes to the wild turkey we have adopted.  And I haven’t even begun to talk about what’s going down at the ocean’s edge.

barnacles at Lincolnville Beach

What I’ve observed over the last three months is that left alone and without disturbance, nature continues to do extremely well at generating itself.  Human beings not so much.  I am more aware than ever that I need a knowledgeable respect for the abundance of plants, animals, sea creatures, plankton.   And yes, also for the microorganisms that have been spreading from mouth to mouth, infecting us all, and warning me how to be more cautious.

One more thing … I have a dish of dead bumblebees on my kitchen counter.  Quite beautiful.  If anyone knows taxidermy, I’d like to study and preserve them.

Abundance is astonishing!