Both
Squirrel and Owl
“They
move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost
or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren,
they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the
net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of earth.”
Henry
Beston, Naturalist (quoted in An Immense World by Ed Yong, Random House, New
York, 2022)
I heard
Ed Yong interviewed on NPR last week and went straight to the bookstore and
bought An Immense World. It is a book about animals and how they differ from
us, but mostly it is just an homage to the wonderful world of creatures for
themselves—as Yong says, “This is a book about animals as animals.”
Did you
know for instance that owls’ ears are placed one higher than the other which
allows them to assess the location of prey “in both vertical and horizontal
planes.” Or that a snake has senses inside the pits on its snout to “see” the
infrared radiation coming from a warm body—such as a mouse. Did you know that a
bee sees “an ultraviolet bullseye” in the center of a sunflower that tells it
where to land, whereas we see only a yellow flower. There are so many animal
facts in this book that reading just the Introduction hooked me. What an
immense and misunderstood world we inhabit.
I go
back and forth—first, telling myself that I am a mystic who imagines that other
creatures have intelligence and the ability to relate to humans, and secondly,
that I am a crazy old lady who talks to plants and insects, and other animals.
I can’t shake the belief that frequently, the squirrels in my yard come to the
porch when I am working there to fuss at me about the scarcity of food and
water for them. I am pretty sure the crows who nest in the neighborhood know that
I call to them, and they respond. Since I stop in the street to watch hawks and
woodpeckers, I believe they know how much I admire them. These are sentient
beings, not just an aggravation.
Yesterday,
I wrote about the arrogance of humans to believe that we are somehow masters of
the universe. This disinterest in animals as beings is a prime example of not
just arrogance, but of ignorance. We shoot wild animals for sport and pat
ourselves on the back about our trophy without considering that each animal has
life and breath, and the ability to attach and relate to its cohort, and to us
if we give them a chance.
I
learned a new word from An Immense World, “Umwelt.” It was coined by Baltic-German
Zoologist, Jakob von Uexkull in 1909, to mean the surroundings that an animal
can sense and experience, “its perceptual world.” Each animal has an Umwelt,
and they are different from ours. Uexkull compared our senses, and those of the
rest of the animal kingdom, to windows in a house that open into a garden.
There’s “a light window, a sound window, an olfactory window, a taste window,
and a great many tactile windows.” The way that these windows are built
determines how the garden looks from inside the house. And since many animals
cannot see the colors of the rainbow, but can see colors outside our visual
range, they see that garden fundamentally different from the way we do. Not
lesser, nor incorrectly, but different. Each creature’s perception of the world
is its Umwelt.
We
humans have much to learn from other species that inhabit this planet. We’ve
only just begun to scratch the surface of what exists and has existed around us
since time immemorial. It’s time to wake up and smell the roses—and hear the
buzzing of bees, and the call of the wild wolf, and….
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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