a note from the editor

The road between Fitchburg and Boston passes through the Oxbow National Wildlife Refuge. Every spring, migratory Great Blue Herons return there to repair their nests in the leafless snag trees that rise out of the marsh. Then they roost, with one member of each pair settled on the eggs while the other flies out to spear bluegill, perch, or the occasional bullfrog. In ordinary years, traffic along this stretch habitually slows to a crawl during rush hour, giving commuters plenty of time — twice a day — to watch the colony and its reproductive dramas. Pre-pandemic, I made that drive daily and came to measure the progress of the season by silhouettes: first the paired shapes of the adults, and then, suddenly, the appearance of a third smaller form in the nest — the new hatchling.

For more than a year, the usual buzz and activity of our civilization have slowed. So many of us were shut up at home for so long that the commuter traffic vanished, leaving the herons to nest and hunt and fledge their young without the disturbance of the old traffic noise. When I have reason to drive past the rookery these days, there are still more nests than I have ever seen.

Reports from around the world suggest the same pattern. In the temporary quiet of the COVID era, wildlife tentatively expanded into spaces humans had withdrawn from. It is a bittersweet kind of consolation. Several poems in this issue zero in on that tension between stillness and disturbance. They look closely at the creatures who share our landscapes and at the fragile conditions under which they persist; they document how the lives of wild creatures can proceed with complete indifference to human anxieties about distancing and contagion; they eulogize creatures who are gone forever.

Though lockdown restrictions in Massachusetts have begun to be lifted, we remain suspended in the strange stillness of the pandemic, the world made weird and slightly unreal, as though we had crossed beneath the shadow of a dangerous eclipse. Accordingly, we’ve decided to place the magazine on hiatus after this issue. Like many projects (most much more important than this!) our editorial work has been challenged by the pandemic, with its dispersal of collaborators, uncertainty of schedules, and shifting of priorities. Rather than rush imperfectly forward, we choose to pause. There is other work to be doing just now. Nature, meanwhile, carries on.

I expect we will publish again in the future. Certainly, I hope we do. In the meantime, I wish health & safety for you and yours, dear reader.

— Zachary Bos, Editor

<< return to the Table of Contents for New Series #11: Summer 2021, Volume 6 Number 1