There’s been a lot of talk about the ill effects of loosing touch with nature, but most has focused on how it affects the spirit or leads to behavior that damages the natural world. Now, here’s a physical health reason to drop the smartphone and take a walk in the woods. Reminds me of a remark my quite healthy dairy farming neighbor made the other day: “You’re not a real Vermonter unless you’re knee deep in shit.”

From the Editor’s Choice section of the 8 June issue of Science:

MICROBIOLOGY

Hygiene Can Hurt

As human societies urbanize, chronic inflammatory disorders become more apparent. The hygiene hypothesis suggests that individuals exposed to infection in childhood are less likely to develop inflammatory disease because exposure to microorganisms is important for stimulating responses that maintain epithelial cell integrity. Hence, in urban environments, reduced contact with the full diversity of the microbial world may be leading to the increased incidence of inflammatory disorders. Hanski et al. took a random sample of 118 adolescents from towns, villages, and isolated dwellings in eastern Finland, tested their immune function and allergic responses, surveyed their skin microflora, and investigated the biodiversity within their homes. They found several significant correlations, not least that low biodiversity was surprisingly strongly associated with atopy, and concluded that humans need to interact with natural environments for their physical health, not just for their peace of mind.

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 109, 10.1073/pnas.1205624109 (2012).

With apologies to T. S. Eliot, I have to say that in northern Vermont right about now the answer seems to be yes.

Even “real Vermonters” are getting sick of winter at this point; they have been for a few weeks now. We’ve had persistent cold, quite a few mornings below zero — one just this past Thursday when it went down to -15 — and lots of snow. But last Tuesday, March 1st, was Town Meeting Day, always a harbinger of spring, and things really began looking up on Saturday, which was Losar, the Tibetan New Year, and the end of the inauspicious dön season. Yes, it rained, but it was warm, and so was Sunday morning, which brought more rain. The mountain of snow at the back end of our door yard shrunk noticeably and a pile of wood that I never thought we were going to need, but now I’m pretty sure we will, began peaking out from under its white cover in the wood yard.

Chatting with our neighbor, Marilyn, as she was picking up her mail last week, I learned that Town Meeting Day was when they always tapped their trees when she was a kid. Her father would go to town meeting and the rest of the family would go out and tap. She also reminded me that many folks start their seedlings about now, since it is traditional to plant on Memorial Day, although she often delays both the seedlings and the planting for a week or two, as frosts remain a possibility into the second week of June.

And so, on Sunday afternoon, the day we first noticed the red of new buds on the trees around our fields, Wendy and I tapped two sugar maples — in early spring sunlight with that special silvery hue that is unique to New England. What an amazing experience for two city slickers. The sap began dripping before we could hammer the tap in, and those two trees began gushing faster than we could keep up, about ten gallons of clear sugar water between them every day …

That night a storm hit, one of the five snowiest ever to hit the state, according to the newspapers. It raged all day Monday. When I went out to plow with my medium-sized tractor, a 30-hp John Deere 870, at about 11 am, it was coming down so fast I couldn’t keep up. About 18″ fell altogether.

But the trees kept producing. And then, of course, mud season began on Thursday. You have to roll with the punches around here …

Winter is beginning to feel long here in late February, as the temperature dropped below zero for the umpteenth time again last night. Today’s crisp, clear, still weather does elevate the spirit, though. We took a walk in the sunlight to start the day — a good way to fight seasonal affective disorder at this time of year.

I’d guess that the creatures in the woods are having a harder time than we are. We and our neighbors have been seeing more of them lately; they seem to be getting hungry. Last Wednesday, as I was packing a bag for a short trip to Boston, Wendy called from her office, “Mark! Come quick! Come quick!” And there in the back yard was the first fisher cat I have ever seen in broad daylight, jet black against the snow. (I’ve seen them in the headlights before, skulking by the side of the road; they’re generally nocturnal.) He (she?) was healthy and chipper-looking, easily three feet long, a good portion of that length being a strong, shaggy tail, and he seemed to be snooping around for food, which, in a fisher’s case usually means flesh or blood, as I understand it. The first time we visited this property, we hung around admiring the place for a while after the realtor left, and the neighboring dairy farmer and his wife drove up the dirt road (they and their family are the only other inhabitants on this dead end) and stopped for a long chat. I’ll call them Bob and Marilyn. At one point, they began telling us animal stories, and Bob, who pastures a few heifers and grows hay and sweet corn on some of our fields, told one about seeing a fisher the previous spring trying to drown a baby fawn in the stream that runs through our property.

The fisher we saw last Wednesday looked beguilingly friendly, although I wasn’t close enough to see the icy weasel eyes. He was quivering with energy and intelligence as he checked out the empty chicken house in the backyard (where a squirrel and a vole or two are headquartered for the winter) wandered across the small frozen pond next to it and meandered downhill in the strip of woods that follows the stream where the attempted and perhaps successful drowning took place, checking out the trees for living inhabitants. Not finding any, he followed the stream across the road and down toward the Connecticut River.

That same day or the next, a bobcat nabbed a chicken from a neighboring friend’s coop. She happened to be outside when the cat came by the following day, hoping for another treat, and the cat was utterly unconcerned by her presence, even when she called to her roommate, who also came out to watch. The cat turned and stopped, looked them in the eyes for a while, and took its own sweet time wandering away.

It’s nice to know there are such healthy critters in the woods, but Wendy kept the cat inside for a day or two.