Letter From The Land

by Suvia Judd, from the March 2003 Newsletter

The Naturalist Gerald Durrell (author of My Family and Other Animals, and founder of the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust), wrote that a good thing about being a naturalist was that he could find interest and enjoyment anywhere, whether among huge herds of animals in the African veldt, or in a suburban backyard. Well, I haven't been to Africa, our backyard is a little wilder than you would find in most suburbs, and of course, I'm not Gerald Durrell. But even with all of wild Idaho at my doorstep, I find a lot of pleasure in the surprises and mysteries of nature right here in our yard in Moscow.

In mornings after very rainy nights, we find earthworms in the water buckets at the barn. These are five-gallon rubber buckets, without worm-sized ramps or ladders, and I have wondered for a long time, how do the worms get in there? Why, when the ground is so saturated that the worms are surfacing from the soil to avoid drowning, do they fetch up in the bottom of five gallons of water? I have wondered if something was dropping them, because in cherry season, for example, the buckets are full of cherry pits; however, the pastures are full of starlings and magpies then, too. Are some of the forty-pound raccoons that live in our neighborhood washing their worms before making worm jerky of them?

One rainy February day in this warm El Niño winter, I found sixteen worms among three buckets. It was early evening, and I took a flashlight to look more closely. There were worms around the foot of the buckets, and there were worms circling the rims of the buckets, and by golly, there were worms climbing the sides of the buckets, right up the flared sides, and over the folded-over rim. I picked all the wriggling worms out of the buckets, and wondered. Now I knew how, but why?

My earthworm knowledge is pretty basic. We had a big outdoor worm box for compost when I was a kid, so I had known for a long time that worms eat dirt and compost and turn them into good soil. I had known at least since I was ten, and a boy put a worm down the back of my shirt, that many people find worms disgusting, and expect me to also. From a Ph.D. student in Michigan I picked up that American native earthworms have been largely displaced by immigrant worms from Europe. I learned from Theresa Beaver here in Moscow that you could just as well have that worm box under your sink and not trudge out to the back forty with your pail of compost every day. And at a very interesting two-day symposium put on by the Palouse Prairie Foundation last Spring, I learned that native Palouse giant earthworms, three feet long and white, once lived deep beneath the hawthorn breaks of our region, although no one has seen one for a long time.

I consulted an encyclopedia and learned that there are 2200 species of earthworms world wide, that they have five hearts and hemoglobin, although some species are pale instead of pink and one is even blue, and that they breed hermaphroditically and deposit the fertilized eggs in the ground in a little neck-warmer which slips off over their heads. I also learned that earthworms locomote by means of four pairs of setae (bristles) set around each segment of their bodies. Okay, so now I know what helps them climb the buckets.

The encyclopedia also confirmed that the worms are flooded out of their burrows and appear on the surface after heavy rains, as we have all observed. So the best answer I can think of for why they climb into the water buckets is the same as why the chicken crossed the road: to reach the other side. The worms climb the buckets to escape the water in the ground, and when they reach the rim, there is no where to go but the other side, and when they go down they can't get out of the water again. But I don't know why they can't get out again.

I've got lots more to learn about worms, and I am seldom bored in my backyard. Did you know that earthworms bring to the surface 7-18 tons of soil per acre annually?

Suvia Judd lives in Moscow. She checks her alpacas' buckets for earthworms everyday.

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