Horny Grouse and the Need for Mystery

This morning I discovered that a sound which I had been thinking all spring was some neighbor starting an engine was actually a male ruffed grouse doing a mating drumming performance with his wings. This mind-bending epiphany came after I almost stepped on this nest (see below) on my morning walk (which is probably more accurately called a hike… lack of sidewalks, the need to carry a machete to get through thickets, and the potential for stepping on ground-nesting birds’ nests all seem like things that qualify a walk as a hike).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. This isn’t just about horny birds revving their engines and the finer distinctions between walks and hikes. This is about discovery and learning new things. This is about how our nincompoop-ness gives us reason to hope. This is about the miracle of life… and of course wine.

Ruffed Grouse chicks hatching… the result of all that engine starting.

Every morning (okay, not EVERY morning, but I try) I take a walk before I do anything else. Well, in Los Angeles I take a walk. In New York on the Wineforest Farm I take a hike, I guess.

Sometimes when I roll out of bed and I’m not feeling perky and the weather is wet and/or cold, finding the motivation to get out the door can be tough. On those mornings, more often than not, it’s not the health benefits that get me moving, it’s the idea that I may learn something new.

In Los Angeles, I’ve learned that we have barn owls, coyotes, and gophers living amongst us. The silent passing overhead of a barn owl in the pre-dawn dimness was one of the cooler moments I’ve had on my LA walks. That gophers live and tunnel in the thin strips of parkways between streets and sidewalks in LA still impresses me… and also makes me hope the barn owls and coyotes get the gophers before they get my young vines and trees.

I’ve discovered a church that has turned all of the land around it into a veggie garden. I’ve discovered a lime tree that occasionally doesn’t get harvested so that I can pick up dropped limes for my guacamole. I’ve also discovered that we waste A LOT of water in LA, both by not checking automated sprinkler systems that have broken or that run when it’s raining, and by not collecting the precious little rainfall we get.

Flying into Los Angeles versus flying into the Finger Lakes region of New York… walks vs hikes.

During morning hikes on the Wineforest Farm, I’ve discovered at least ten kinds of edible and medicinal mushrooms, baby foxes, grapevines growing everywhere (some quite old and large), and a smorgasbord of birds… from cuckoos to woodpeckers, orioles to blue jays, rose-breasted grosbeaks to red-winged blackbirds, cardinals to yellow warblers, and turkeys to ruffed grouse. When the mulberry trees start to ripen their fruit, there can easily be 30 species of birds in and around the farm house. The air swarms with bright oranges, flashing yellows, iridescent blues, and striking reds like a flying flower garden… almost like an aerial reflection of the meadow full of blooming flowers on the ground.

Now, before I wax myself into a poetic stupor, I want to point out that I just tossed out “rose-breasted grosbeaks” like I’m a bird expert. I’m not. The truth is I just learned about them this morning. I saw this stunning bird with bold black and white plumage and beautiful bright red throat, and so I searched that description online and discovered what it’s called. (AllAboutBirds.org is a great resource from Cornell.) I also often open identification apps like Merlin (for birdsongs, also from Cornell) or PlantNet or ShroomID. (As a word of caution, you don’t want to bet your life on an identification from any plant or mushroom identification app. They can be wrong. But they can be a helpful step in the process of elimination.)

In other words, I have a lot to learn and I’m learning constantly, especially about the things I care about and might be perceived as having some expertise in… like wine. I try to cultivate “beginner mind” by taking actions that put me in new circumstances. Yes, this is uncomfortable, potentially embarrassing, makes me feel like a nincompoop, and sometimes exhausts and frustrates me… but it also exposes me to the thrill of discovery, eliminates my prejudices and misconceptions, leads to magical revelations, and brings surprises that change my perspective and my life forever.

…Like almost stepping on a secret nest, seeing baby birds struggling out of their egg shells, and then tumbling down the rabbit hole of research and discovery about ruffed grouse, and solving a months-long mystery about the origin and explanation of a strange engine-starting sound that didn’t make sense.  It turns out this little hollow has some excellent acoustics for reverberating avian, and other, pageantry.

Beginning this process of developing a married-vine farm system that is the first of its kind in the Americas is one of the big actions I’ve taken to thrust myself into the unknown. It has definitely made me aware of the innumerable things I don’t know. Did you know, for example, that a tea made with willow is an organic rooting hormone and contains the same compound (indole butyric acid) that is in rooting hormone that you buy from a store in a powder? Yep, we’ve all been wasting our money buying something that was derived from what the earth gives us for free.

But that makes me hopeful. Some of our biggest problems may have solutions yet to be discovered.

Some of the best discoveries I’ve made when exposing myself to the unknown (aka flashing the abyss, upcoming book title) are other people. I once trekked deep into the jungles of Hawaii - fording waterfall-fed rivers past feral horses, giant monkey pod trees, and taro paddies – to discover a woman named Linda Beech. She was in her 70’s when we met. She had been a war correspondent during WWII. Married five times. Became a TV celebrity in Japan in the 1950’s. And worked as a hospice nurse for the ten years prior to retiring to the jungles of Hawaii. I asked her what she had learned as a hospice nurse.

“People keep learning and changing until the day they die,” she said.

It’s scary, of course. Learning new things means losing old ideas and beliefs, sometimes deeply held ones into which we’ve allowed our egos to become embedded. The term “life-changing” can imply things both rapturous and devastating. Something must die so that something else can live.

As J.R.R. Tolkien put it, “It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

But I think outside our metaphoric door is the only place we can find hope.

I’m learning daily about what it takes to manage a few dozen acres of land (ruminants for one, if you don’t want to use fossil fuels, and community too) and look forward to learning how wine tastes differently from grapes grown on living trees (a “tree-lis” vs a trellis). I’m learning so much it’s overwhelming. And every once in a while I remind myself how lucky I am to have mysteries to solve.

Vine cuttings of various hybrid grapes rooting in pots… the second wave of planting for 2025.