Nature at Night: Celebrating Nature and the Beauty of the Dark

It's 3am all is quiet and still.

But is it?

If the daytime world goes quiet, there is another world that pulses, crawls, flies, prowls, glows, migrates, and generally thrives at night.

When you look or listen closely enough, you can see it and hear it.

Nighttime is our constant companion that swings round once a day to remind us that the earth moves in cycles to which all life on the planet is uniquely adapted.

Day and Night Stepping away from the glare of civilization into the night, author Charles Hood reveals this enigmatic, alluring, vaguely frightening world in his new book, Nature at Night.

Charles Hood is a prolific naturalist, writer, poet, photographer and adventurer.

He finds beauty and fascination in forgotten, unseen or unwanted places.

His writing and photography allow his readers to share in the adventure and broaden their perspective of what constitutes the natural world.

Yosemite is marvelous, but nature is right outside.

Based in Southern California and Now in his 60s, Hood's wide ranging career has taken him from factory floors to ski slopes, from college classrooms to remote wildlife habitats around the world.

He has recently retired and holds the title of Professor Emeritus and calls the Mojave Desert home where he is surrounded by his beloved books, dogs, kayaks and mountain bikes.

His other books include A Salad Only the Devil Would Eat, the Joys of Ugly Nature, Nocturnalia, Nature in the Western Night, which he co authored with Jose Gabriel Martinez Francesca A Californian's Guide to the Birds Among Us, A Californian's Guide to the Mammals Among Us, Wild Sonoma Exploring Nature in the Wine country and Double Hyenas and Lazarus Birds, A Sideways look at the Pacific Ocean and Everything In It.

He is also co author for Wild LA A Guidebook to Nature in and Around Los Angeles.

Nature at Night is part how to manual for anyone interested in exploring nocturnal nature, in part happy, humorous and colorful journey for the curious reader.

The following is an edited version of my conversation with Charles Hood.

Due to technical difficulties with the audio of my voice from the original interview, I tee at Mr.

Hood's original responses in post production and off we go into the night.

Charles sometimes calls himself a raging generalist.

He explains that college wasn't a given.

He dropped out nine times even as he was eventually accepted into the prestigious UC Irvine Poetry program.

If his path wasn't typical, it opened up the world and taught him the value of hard work and persistence.

English was sort of in the midpoint of that journey.

Okay, so I'm the guy who dropped out of college nine times because I wasn't college.

You know, I wasn't college bound.

Nothing against my you know, God bless my.

My late parents, but they didn't do what some parents do, which is to take you on the college tour.

And here's your college fund, and this is where your arc should be, you know, and it's sort of my life was like, well, when you're 18, what.

What job are you going to do?

I thought, well, maybe.

I don't know, I'll wash dishes, because there's an opening for that right now.

So I would work in a factory or do something kind of cruddy, to be honest.

And then I better go back to school then.

School cost money and required, you know, some transportation and things that I didn't necessarily have at the moment.

So I'd go work and go back to school.

And I actually started out as a history major because I like history.

I was good at it.

But it turns out you have to go to class, and I have my work schedule change.

I'd miss some classes, and I'd do badly on the midterms, I think.

What's a major where I could just bullshit my way through?

Oh, English.

I'm on it.

I can just write the midterm, whether I've read the book.

That's fun.

That's pretty funny.

Yeah.

Native fluency with the English language.

You can sort of fake it till you make it kind of thing.

And one thing leads to another.

I was actually living in my car when I started graduate school, which is really bizarre because I went to a really posh school.

I went to UC Irfian's poetry program at that time.

Harder to get into than Harvard Medical School.

And I just sort of blundered my way in.

Then I meet these people that have gone to private universities, you know, and have, you know, 4.2 GPAs, and they had tea with the professors every Sunday.

And, like, oh, that's how the other half of society went through college, you know, My college was a morning job, school in the afternoon, and then a night job.

I can't.

I like your way.

Hold on.

How do I get to be your way?

I come from this generation, you know, and my dad was a World War II veteran, and he had, you know, survived the Depression.

You know, I came from the generation where men go to work, and if you're sick, you make it happen anyway, or you don't.

You don't let yourself get sick.

And that's been useful for me in terms of wanting to go to all these exotic places.

Just to be kind of blunt about it, it costs a lot of money to go I've been to 80 countries and I've seen 6,000 species of birds.

Looking at what normally would be kind of a lawyer's, you know, doctor's level of income.

And to do that as a teacher, that meant I taught a lot of extra classes.

And I taught basically anything anybody offered me is like that joke about never turn down a combat assignment if you want to be, you know, get ahead in the Air Force.

Like you got a class, it meets on Saturday mornings.

I'm, I'm on it.

Where do I show up?

Tell me what, what book do I use and where do I show up?

And so that's what, that's where.

Having more of a blue collar kind of attitude about I'm not going to be precious about.

It doesn't matter whether I like that class, does it pay money?

Oh, I.

His blue collar perspective reveals an appreciation for how nature abides in non precious locales.

The mountain cathedrals of places like Yosemite evoke words of John Muir and his love of grand nature.

But then there's a magpie flitting up from a bit of grass in an abandoned brown field or a flower poking out from a broken sidewalk.

Well, the reality is Yosemite doesn't need us.

Yosemite actually could use about 3 million fewer of us.

It comes down to it, right?

And I, and I love Yosemite.

I go every year, but I try to go in the off season.

Early December, one of these low visit times, and the reference to Ugly Nature is a title of a book of essays whose full title is A Salad Only the Devil Would Eat Cold Joys of Ugly Nature.

And that comes from a line in an essay about where I live.

Because people do dismiss the high desert, and I don't live in the Joshua tree 29 palms high desert, which is pretty artsy trendy right now.

I live in a different high desert outside of Los Angeles that people kind of dismiss a little bit.

And during the pandemic, I was originally going to walk from work home, connecting up all the little vacant lots and the aqueduct and the back alleys, because I thought I can actually pretty much avoid other than crossing streets, I can avoid pavement for the 15 miles between my campus and my home.

But then, then the pandemic came.

So I just began radiating out from my house and saying, you know, when I go to Trader Joe's, there's a blank spot in my mind.

I get in the car and I arrive at Trader Joe's.

Wait, what was in the middle in between the two?

And it Turns out if you know where I live anyway, there are little pieces of, I'll say, abandoned habitat.

They still have some Joshua trees, or the Joshua trees are even starting to come back.

In some cases, they got some sagebrush.

And once I began to explore it a little more systematically, there was birds that I didn't expect.

I saw a gopher snake that I didn't expect.

You know, it really was intact.

And one reason, as an ecosystem, it is intact, it is not Pacific Grove.

The problem with Pacific Grove is there are houses, you know, except for the golf course and the lighthouse.

Right.

All the rest is houses.

What would it be like if everyone hated on Pacific Grove, but there was some bubonic plague that wiped out the population?

The half the houses were derelict.

Wouldn't that be the place to be, you know?

Yeah.

So that's really the case for my neighborhood, that it is undeveloped and underappreciated and underpaved by contemporary standards.

If this was a more desirable piece of real estate, I, A, I couldn't afford to live here, and then B, there wouldn't be any nature left.

Taking pictures at night, especially of wildlife, is challenging for both the photographer and the subject.

There are methods to make it work.

Charles took about half the pictures in nature at night, and he discusses how there were no deer in the headlights, if you will, for any of the photographs in the book.

And the one thing I want to let your listeners know is that we went out of our way, my friends and I, never to have a deer in the headlights.

And we use that as a cliche, but that's also a style of flash photography where it's overlit and it's bugging the animal and it's bugging me.

And so I'm the guy that actually went to the.

To the rainforest in Peru with fashion lighting.

When they shoot the COVID of Vogue magazine, they're using a lot of very diffused wraparound light.

You know, models are beautiful anyway.

That's their.

That's their job.

And they're all made up to be made even more beautiful.

But fashion lighting wraps a soft light around the subject.

On average, there's a harsh lighting, you know, sub component, but on average.

So I brought fashion lights so I could shoot bats.

You know, when you.

When the researchers catch a bat in a net, they've got it in their hands for a few moments before they release it to fly away.

And I wanted to take pictures of bats that used fashion lighting so they would look cute, adorable, friendly, not like they're going to give you Rabies.

Now, individual bats have different personalities.

Some bats don't mind being handled.

They're like a friendly dog.

And other bats are like, I'm going to rip your head off, you mf you let me go right now before I bite your glove.

And so obviously the ones that are kind of resisting, number one, they're stressed, so let them go.

Number two, they make bad subjects because their teeth are showing and they're echolocating and you know, they're, they're just turning too much.

But there are ways to get really beautiful pictures of animals at night.

And that's something that the book tried.

To do, cover to cover nature at night.

The book and the thing itself is fascinating.

For me, one of the most alluring nighttime occurrences that Hood describes is his book is the planet wide vertical migration in the world's oceans.

As the light of the sun fades, creatures from the deep move in mass up the water column in search of food and often to become food.

We were talking earlier about Monterey Bay and the vertical migration that happens at nighttime.

So let's just run that through the elevator pitch version of that.

So phytoplankton are using light to become little ocean plants.

The surface, they need to be at the surface.

The light only penetrates 300ft, so if you're below that, you're in the darkness.

If you want to eat the phytoplankton, it's better to come up at night so that you don't get chomped by everything else.

So trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions of organisms worldwide are making a vertical migration at night, coming up from the dark, safe depths up to the now dark evening part of the ocean, hoping to avoid predation, and then at sunrise sinking back down 1,000, 2,000ft, depending on the organism.

And that's why dolphins in Monterey are so happy and frolicking, because they've been feeding all night, those rizzos dolphins that we see during the day from Monterey Bay Whale watch.

I'll give a call out to my favorite boat, the point third clipper.

Those, they're, they're happy and frolicking because they've been eating squid that were following the X, that was following the Y, that was following the zooplankton that was following the phytoplankton.

But one of the things that made me realize the kind of interconnected of all of this is I was in Indonesia on a boat.

Gosh darn it, I had to go to Bali for this book.

I had to go To Borneo.

I had to go to Madagascar.

Sorry honey, I'm off to Borneo.

I gotta write that book.

Be back in a month.

But I was in Indonesia and I saw a rough toothed dolphin.

We don't get many of them in California.

Tropical species leaping out of the water.

It had little white corsages down its flank, little scars that look like little, you know, little Christmas stars on the top of the Christmas tree.

And like, well, what you know, that's not from a squid.

You know, like you look at Rizzo's dolphins here in Monterey Bay and they're scarred up from, from tussling with each other and from the beaks of the squids.

But like what's causing these coarse slashes?

And that's a cookie cutter shark.

So as the animals are going up and down, there is a predator, a predator that's waiting to predate them as they go past a little cookie.

So we're talking about something about a foot, foot and a half long.

Looks like a little pink slug, a mouthful of brown, mouthful of teeth.

And they zip up to the whale or the dolphin or in the case of a submarine, the neoprene of an American submarine sonar housing.

And they take a little divot of flesh and they pull away.

So they, they swim up, grab a little bite of your butt and peel off like a chainsaw connected to a leech.

That le.

That typically is not fatal on average.

And, and so it leaves a little divot that becomes a scar.

So I have a picture of a rough toothed dolphin leaping out of the water that's full of the white scars.

And that tells me what's been going on at night, that as that animal fed, it was going through the water column and it was getting pumped on by the cookie cutter sharks.

So even during the daytime we know what's been happening at night.

And I don't know, I just find that interesting.

I like knowing that.

As alluded to in the previous clip, Charles and I discussed the work of the Monterey Bay Aquarium during our interview.

It's one of the world's most prestigious aquariums and is home to world class ocean research.

Is it worth a visit?

That's an unequivocal yes from Charles and me.

They're doing amazing work, right?

The amount of money, amount of research coming out of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

And if people, if you're, you know, if your listeners have never been there, it's absolutely worth a vacation.

If you've got kids, go there and don't go to Disneyland, you're going to Have a better quality experience, and you're.

Going to learn something.

You're going to learn something and you're going to have an aesthetic experience of even just watching, you know, they have the tide pool display or just watching the, the divers clean the tanks or something.

It's aesthetically really a fascinating kind of experience.

And what of science funding in support of the arts?

Given Hood's work, I was interested in his take on the Trump administration's defunding of science and the arts in the federal government.

Charles remains as upbeat as possible.

It isn't the end of the world, nor of science and art.

Right.

And I want to reassure your listeners that obviously I don't have all the answers.

I don't know everybody working in science, but I do know enough people, and I'm going to.

I'll give you some reassurance.

First of all, there are multiple funding strands, and Mr.

Trump's government is only a strand on all the strands.

And second of all, some of the grants are still ongoing and still well funded, and they will not be altered.

But then also, I know in the poetry world, where I have a little bit of.

It's another one of my, one of my many octopus features over in the poetry world, there are going to be private foundations that will step up and fill in the gap.

They can't completely, you know, the NEA will go away.

That's inevitable.

But, you know, the National Endowment of Arts, for those who are not into acronyms, but there will be groups that can step in.

Something actually called the Poetry foundation is well funded, as these things go, and they can afford to spend down a little bit of capital, or the Getty Museum can spend down a little bit of its endowment.

So art will find a way, science will find a way.

Is it disappointing to watch mistakes happen?

Yes.

Is it frustrating?

Yes.

Yes.

Is it the end of the world?

No.

Should we do.

Should you go to bed despairing?

No.

Hood pushes back on the high church narrative of climate and nature that too often tends toward doom and gloom.

Who, me?

Given all that's happening and humankind's apparent assault on, or at the very least disassociation from the natural world, Charles suggests there is much left to celebrate.

Nature will endure long after humans have.

Left the scene is an example.

Since you know it very, very well, and as you know, if you went out to Crespi Pond, out on the golf course, there would be raccoons there tonight, and there's going to be coots there during the daytime.

And if we set up our Spotting scopes.

There's going to be, you know, birds offshore.

And it is true.

If we were to go back 300 years, it would be a different mix of species.

That is absolutely true.

And in fact, I.

I can't guarantee this.

I think there were jaguars in California.

There's some debate about this, but there were.

If they were jaguars, if all the accounts are true, they were in Monterey, and this is as recently as the 1820s.

So obviously the jaguars are not coming back.

There are jaguars, of course, in Arizona.

They're in.

And, you know, they were in Texas as recently as the.

As the 1940s.

They, you know, they've been as far north as the Grand Canyon in Arizona.

And there are somewhat credible records that there were jaguars as recently as 1860 in California.

Right.

So Monterey isn't paradisical, but it's also true.

There's a whole heck of a lot of people in Monterey right now.

And yet the deer are there, the raccoons are there.

You know, the pumas are not that far away down in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

The condors are not that far away at Big Surface.

You know, and obviously, you know what the marine life is offshore.

You know, how many species the whales and dolphins there are.

It's pretty good shape, y' all.

Despite all the nonsense and foolishness we've been doing.

Dump a DDT in the barrels in the ocean and, you know, fishing the heck out of the seas and blah, blah, blah.

You know, we've done all these things that we really kind of shouldn't have been doing.

Not to our advantage, but yet look at the.

Look at the life that's still there.

So is global warming real?

Yes, your.

Your podcast is correct.

It is.

Doesn't mean the end of nature.

No, it just means nature will be distributed in different kinds of ways than it is now.

We will have an altered nature, but nature itself is fine.

We may not prefer the mix of species because we have some type of hierarchy in our minds that, you know, a deer is good and a rat is bad or whatever, but whether we do, whether we're here in 500 years, I'm not putting long money on those odds.

But will nature be here, Abs?

Absolutely.

Plenty of nature to go around, y' all.

If nature at Night sounds interesting, his other books, including A Salad Only the Devil Would Eat the Joys of Ugly Nature, and his new book, Double Hyenas and Lazarus Birds, A Sideways look at the Pacific Ocean and Everything in it, which Hood describes as his love letter to the ocean, are great additions to the bookshelves of avid readers and lovers of nature.

Your listeners who are also readers, they would like probably the book of essays that includes a long chapter about Monterey and that's called A Salad Only the Devil Would Eat Colon the Joys of Ugly Nature.

And that's out from Heyday Books in Berkeley, California.

And the final chapter just happens to be a real trip that I took on Monterey Bay, that it was spectacularly successful.

In fact, we saw so many cetaceans, so many species, My editor said, would you knock off with the whales already?

But it's sort of a love letter to life and a love letter to the ocean that, that that book starts out with.

It starts out in the desert with me coming to the.

To the Antelope Valley.

And then I have a brand new book coming out that I really do think your listeners might enjoy.

It's called Double Hyenas and Lazarus Birds.

And I'll say that again.

Double Hyenas and Lazarus Birds.

The Pacific Ocean, A Sideways look at the Pacific Ocean and everything in it.

Even I don't even know my own title, A Sideways look at the Pacific Ocean.

And that is my ocean book.

And it includes a long chapter on Rickets and Rickets and how he wrote the Pacific Tides book.

And kind of my relationship with my father, who had been in the Navy in World War II and journeying across the Pacific Ocean, I went on a boat from New Zealand to Japan vertically up through the North Pacific took a month.

And I was there to see birds and also to kind of follow the ghosts of the World War II Pacific Campaign and, and JFK and the PT109.

There's a chapter that says sea level doesn't exist.

It's a fiction.

And I'll let you read the chapter to find out why I think sea level exists.

Yes, there's something about the, oh painters like Turner, for example, Winslow Homer.

So it's my love letter to the ocean, slash, hate letter, because I am deeply afraid of water.

Water is always trying to kill me.

It was very successful one time when I was a child and killing me and then almost killed me a few other times.

So it's a love letter to the ocean from someone who deeply, deeply distrusts the ocean.

And that's called Double Hyenas and that is from Hay Day and Berkeley also.

And then the book we're talking about, Nature at Night is for Timber Press.

In all of these books, buy them from a real bookstore.

They need your love and support.

Bill Watterson, creator of the much beloved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes once said through his strip, if people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I'd bet they live a whole lot differently.

Charles Hood's books and his vibe as we spoke evoke that sentiment.

When we step back and look at the world, from the boundless cosmos to the flash of a firefly, we are better off.

We can appreciate and do right in our corner of the world.

Explore, be curious and be grateful.

I just want to remind everybody, you don't need to solve it yourself.

Just, just be happy today.

Just live a good life today and the rest of the world will sort itself out.

And the things that you can't change, you can't change, you know?

So just, just have a radius of 50 meters and make that your happy place happy and keep it in that 50 meter space and, and congratulate yourself at the end of the day.

Charles Hood's Nature at Night is available from Timber Press.

A Salad Only the Devil would Eat, the joys of Ugly Nature and Double Hyenas and Lazarus Birds, A sideways look at the Pacific Ocean and everything in it are available from Heyday Books, based in Berkeley, California.

Please support real bookstores.

They need your support much more than Jeff Bezos does.

That's it for this episode.

I'm your host, Tom Schuenemann.

Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time on Global Warming is Real.

Sa Sam.