Field Notes —

Move It Or Lose It, It’s A Natural Law

By Curtiss Clark

It’s time to move.

That is the thought of hapless commuters stopped dead in traffic and also the unarticulated impulse that drives birds south at this time of year. Everything needs to move.

Motion is the sign of life itself — the beating heart, the fluttering eyelid, the heaving chest. When we come upon a scene where nothing moves, we declare, “This place is dead.”

But what of the plant world, rooted as it is in one spot? Beyond a bit of bending and swaying in the wind and pushing upwards in growth, individual plants don’t move around from one place to another. Could it be that evolution forgot to give them marching orders? (“Don’t just do something, stand there!”)

Take a walk through the fields, or along the side of the road if you are indeed stopped in traffic, and you will see that plants actually are on the move at this time of year.

Milkweed pods have split and are spilling their silken cargo into the slipstream to join the thistledown there and to ride the wind to who knows where.

Oaks and hickories have cast nuts as far as they will roll, and squirrels are picking them up and carrying them even farther to stash, and as often as not, to forget.

Under the cover of their colorful leaves, sugar maples have hung out seeded spinners that fly like helicopters once they are launched by a passing breeze. Some will land in the path of young boys, Pinocchio poseurs, who will pry open the seed case and press its stickiness to the end of their noses just for a laugh.

Bittersweet, barberries, and even the despised poison ivy vines are plumping up pretty berries that are irresistible to birds flocking up for the big push south. The enclosed seeds will rain down from those airborne avian skeins as they warp and twist their way toward the Carolinas and beyond.

And at the end your walk, check your socks for burdock burs or any of the other spiny-hooked seeds that stand ready for a ground-level scrum with whatever dog or deer or stranded motorist that passes by.

Over the eons, nature has come up with innumerable strategies to move plant life from one place to another. What we see outside right now are the successful strategies still in play. All the plant species that failed to move their seeds to new and fertile ground died out long ago. In the natural world, when it’s time to move, and you don’t move, you’re dead. It’s a natural law: move it or lose it.

For all our inventiveness, we humans still have some pretty poor strategies for moving around. If you don’t believe this, you’re invited to join the traffic jam out on I-84. But we have come up with some good ideas for making things stay put — Velcro, for example. Velcro your cell phone to the dashboard and it won’t go anywhere. When you need to call the office to say you’re stuck in traffic and will be late, the phone is right where you put it — it hasn’t moved. Let’s see nature do that!

Actually, the story of Velcro is interesting. Its Swiss inventor, George de Mestral, said he got the idea while he was out for a walk — or at the end of his walk, to be precise. It came to him as he was pulling burs off the cuffs of his pants. He noticed on close inspection that the tiny hooks on the spikes of the burs were locking onto the looped wool filaments of his trousers.

It inspired him. You could even say it moved him.