A Dry And Thirsty Land

We startled a dozen frogs and caught one carp, two bluegill and a bullhead that day. School was out. It was June 1961. My sister, Becky, and I were 12 and 8. We were fishing in a tiny stream up the road from our northern Illinois farm. Suddenly, as we crawled out from under a willow, something let go with a loud honk and hurtled toward us in the grass. We flattened down on the bank in terror as the creature took off over us, its wings—seven feet from tip to tip—making great thwopping sounds as they fanned our faces. Then another lifted off, and another. Altogether, six great blue herons swept off above us. We stood, peered through the brush and watched them glide up over the cornfields toward the horizon.

We toted our fish home in a metal pail, put them in the feedlot water tank and spent the summer watching them rise to the cornmeal that floated off the cows' noses as they drank.

This was June on the prairie. There was always dew and rain, and the mosquitoes ate us alive when we picked strawberries. We needed to mow the lawn every few days, and nesting grackles and robins dive-bombed us when we did. Baby rabbits blitzed past the dog. The creatures of the woods—white-tailed deer, skunks, raccoons, possums—foraged in the lush woodlots and streams.

Today the unrelenting drought, coupled with what the human population has done to the world, is threatening to wreak unprecedented havoc in fields, streams and dwindling ponds across the country. Fish have died by the tens of millions this summer. Duck populations are down to about 85% of normal—the pintail duck is down to 46%. Large flocks of shore-birds—such as sanderlings, whose predrought population was only 20% of what naturalists consider it should have been in the first place—are facing starvation and poisoning.

If next summer is like this one—and most climate watchers say it will be—such fur-bearing mammals as muskrat and beavers will crowd into remaining waters and fight to the death for territory. Those are the animals we think of first because we see them the most frequently. Of the 506 "endangered" and "threatened" plant and animal species, many beleaguered populations are being pushed to the brink of extermination by a lack of water.

In Minneapolis, Kim Chapman, an ecologist in a regional office of The Nature Conservancy, a private conservation group, says the drought is "a natural catastrophe, one even our native oak-savanna refuges are barely able to cope with. I can't help but think that if it looks like this here, there must be pockets of habitats out there facing waves of extinctions."

Twenty-seven summers after the heron, just a few hundred yards from where the water tank stood, a duck bursts out of the alfalfa. My sister jams her foot on the tractor's double brakes, sliding the big red Farmall to a stop. There, inches ahead of the front tire, lie nine blue mallard eggs in a tiny grass nest. She backs up the rig, leaves a nice patch unmowed around the nest and watches the hen mallard circle back and land. Much obliged.

My sister and I remain fond of the wild things that live on the land. Other than that, everything has changed.

On a visit home early this summer, I think it is as if our ecosystem were two slides in a projector. Click—green. Click—brown. Every day, the temperature nears 100°. Ground temperatures hover around 130°. There is never any rain. My sister's well pumps great gulps of air along with the water. The lawn has turned to brown stubble. The grackles are missing. A single robin hammers at the concretelike earth. There are no rabbits in the yard.

From horizon to horizon the air has that white-pink color peculiar to very hot days. Everything looks slightly liquid, rippling. It feels as if we are baking to death. It is a sad, terrifying, helpless feeling.