By Justin Isherwood

Fragile. A spider web qualifies as fragile, only to mention its strands are among the strongest in the world. The Lunar Lander qualifies for fragile, when 50 years ago on a July afternoon North American time, two guys stepped onto the beach of the Sea of Tranquility.

Thinking of that accomplishment, what this nation accomplished in the space of a decade, the take-away isn’t so much the wealth of a nation that matters as its reach. To take that chance, wage the risk, to dare to accomplish all those impossible things whether of science, health, species, or global warming.

Beyond all the sound and fury as was Apollo 11, to realize how fragile was that 10,000-some pounds of Lunar Lander, only a little beyond a balsa-bowed kite wrapped in aluminum foil. Just enough fuel, just enough oxygen, to recall the ladder was too short to reach ground. Seems the engineers wanted to save weight. To the end Neil Armstrong had to hang on the ladder and jump to the moon. Not particularly dignified. If the more poetic for Mankind that summer day, when our collective heart jumped over the moon.

I was afield when this same thought, of fragile, occurred. From the tractor seat I spied killdeer chicks. Their fragility in part due to my place at that moment in the cab of a John Deere articulated tractor. A relative giant, eight elephantine wheels with horsepower to fly a cultivator in 12th gear. I was cultivating one of our marsh fields in anticipation of a corn crop, which on the Buena Vista is sometimes a touch more anticipatory than it is actual. A chance I could improve a bit by adding a center pivot to this field.

I am reluctant because the last thing Central Wisconsin needs is another center pivot, and also the last thing our distressed ag-sector needs is another 20,000 bushel of No. 2 yellow. To the end there is a kind of wholesale health to a non-irrigated field allied with killdeer chicks.
This is a Roscommon muck field with those four newly hatched killdeer chicks. The chicks that struck me as illogically fragile. Too fragile to survive, yet they do. Nature like the Lunar Lander builds to the task, not the accessories.

Killdeer chicks are known as precocials, from the Latin ripened, the root word for precocious. There are distinctive bird species whose chicks are precocial, ducks, geese, chickens, quail come to mind. Infants born active and self-feeding, what every chicken yard knows. Within moments of hatching that chick is afoot and looking for something to eat. Skipping that whole ugly chapter of the nestling, that big mouth in hope someone puts food in it. This alternate-built version of the bird child, this blind, naked lizard is called an altrical, from the Greek, wet nurse.

The functional difference is a larger egg, and an incubation period about twice the norm of nesting birds. For two weeks a robin tends those gaping mouths, what the killdeer spends on incubating a large egg that in the end is capable of nourishing itself.

The year 2019 has been a wet spring, the planting was haphazard, there were fields even that articulated Goliath couldn’t swim across. Perhaps to think there should be a Farm Bill designed to do unto agriculture the very same as a wet spring, to the purpose of punctuating my farm sector’s precocious zeal for fence-row to fence-row agriculture.

To the end, more places for killdeer and bobolinks and meadow larks and just maybe a favor for the price of No. 2 yellow.