Wish I Was a Nomad

One of my fondest childhood memories is the ritual of sitting down weekly (Sunday nights?) to watch Marlin Perkins narrate animal stories on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. I was really not much into either Nature or Animals as a kid - not at all, in fact - but this show was one of my favorites.

The show is still around. Last night I watched the most remarkable story of a lioness in Kenya with an 'unnatural' penchant for adopting orphaned oryx calves . The film just left me speechless. But, as is the case with pretty much all such stories, this one does not have a happy ending. For most of the calves, and for the lioness herself (who disappeared and hasn't been sighted in several years). And certainly not in my own heart. But still. Wow.

As with so many things in my world, i have a love/hate relationship with these sorts of nature shows, probably with Nature herself. I love learning, watching, observing, but there is always the inevitable sadness.

Thinking of Moving...

...into the Langley Hall library (aka the Biology library). Seriously. Conveniently located right across the street from where I work, it's like a wee little library full of the coolest books. If I had a home library like that, I'd never have to leave my house. I just can't stop pulling books off the shelves in there. I went during lunch today for just two particular books, which turned into four, which then turned into seven, and then I saw one more I'd missed on the "new book" shelf right by the checkout. And there were several more I just couldn't carry.

I really should have had some sense about me fifteen years ago and studied wildlife biology, instead of English. How very different my life might be. Ah, hindsight.

This Distance Pulls at the Breath

So an old high school friend of J.'s sent him an email the other day with an interesting story . A painted bunting seems to have taken up residence in his friend's mother's yard in southern New Jersey. What makes the story interesting is that this type of bird lives exclusively in the southern U.S., the very far south. This is the northernmost sighting, ever, of this particular bird. His presence has caused quite a stir, a ruckus almost, among bird watchers and preservation groups, particularly the Audubon Society, and now friend's mother's yard is under constant watch by many people. No one is sure quite why he's gotten himself out of his "natural" habitat. Me, while I am in awe of the bunting's obvious beauty , I am also a bit sad for him. Most certainly he will never find a mate way up there and will likely live a lonely existence, indeed.

Though I've Dreamed Them, In Sleep's Spaces

Friday necessitated my going to Ohio for the day. I offered, on the way home, to help transport two wolfdogs from a temporary home in OH, to their new foster home in PA. The story of the journey itself, while mildly interesting (How it Took M. 7 Hours to Drive a Mere 150 Miles), is unimportant at the moment. Suffice to say that if I ever consider such a journey in the future, it will definitely be on very different terms, MY terms.

I knew/know very little about wolfdogs. Intuitively, I've always had this sense that such breeding between species may not necessarily be the best idea. Now that I've done a bit of retrospective research, I am very conflicted about having participated in this rescue endeavor, conflicted for a few reasons:

• At the OH home, the wolfdogs lived in an outdoor kennel (talk about filthy dogs! my car is still stinky!). At the PA foster home, they are going to a person who has little if any experience with this type of animal, who has 2 small-ish children and a puppy; the dogs will most likely live in a basement room and the new caretaker will not have the time or the resources to handle/socialize them as they will need in order to be adopted. Have I unknowingly helped to trade one *bad* home for another? Has this actually been the best thing for these two dogs? I am not sure I would have done this if I'd known what I do now.

• Is there any real reason, any real benefit, to breeding wolfdogs in the first place? By "benefit" I mean, does this practice make things better for the individual or collective animals themselves? They are, essentially, neither wolf nor dog, stuck somewhere in the middle, uncomfortably and unwillingly straddling those two worlds. It seems that any reason one could offer up for doing this would just reinforce my developing belief that this is done only for selfish, purely human reasons. The kind of home environment all the resources indicate wolfdogs need, does not seem like it would give any of them the quality of life they deserve. Then again, this same issue could be raised for any number of *exotic pets*. This seems to get back to the issue L. and i were discussing a while back, about when and to what extent can/should humans intervene/meddle with Nature?

• What does it mean that I am bothered by say, keeping a bengal tiger as a "pet," but conversely, I am not bothered by say, keeping an "exotic" reptile (provided it's captive bred) as a "pet"? Hypocritical? Am I assigning some hierarchy of importance/meaning to particular animals' existences based on some overtly subjective, personal criteria?

I am seriously grappling with the ethics of this whole thing.

It did occur to me on Friday that spending the little time I did with those animals, is perhaps the closest I will ever come to being truly near the wild wolf.

The Book Excerpt

After almost four years, The Animal Book is finally in print!
Here's what the editors have to say about my essay...

“…Those of us who have shared our lives with animals may recall a time when we ‘lost our eyes’ and thus attained a fuller vision. Perhaps one day it will dawn on us that our dog finds us difficult to communicate with—that the problem was ours—instead of vice versa; we might have realized suddenly what our horse has been telling us all along about the field we tried to force him through. Melanie Dylan Fox has loaned her eyes in this way to the black bears of Sequoia National Park. In ‘Ursus Americanus: The Idea of a Bear,’ Fox examines her responsibility to the bears she has come to know in their trespassed habitat. Like Steeves and other contributors to this volume, she also ponders the etymological and semantic quandaries that accrue to us when we attempt to speak about such knowledge. We must violate ‘traditional grammatical rules’: each bear for example, is a ‘he,’ a ‘she,’ a ‘who’ with an individual temperament, not an ‘it’ or a ‘that’ with merely a species identity.

In the tradition of Herman Melville in Moby-Dick, and more recently, of Loren Eiseley and Barry Lopez, Fox looks at animals through the dual lenses of science and myth. Like Eiseley in the title essay of The Star Thrower, or Lopez in Of Wolves and Men, Fox seems hopeful that some verbal concatenation of empirical detail and mystical insight might inspire the reader’s own exploration and discovery. Her cross-species, social relationship with bears has changed her forever, and the experience she describes is available to all who expand their conceptions of what is possible.”

Hmm. My essay contains empirical detail and mystical insight. Cool.

While I'm on the Subject

Excerpt from the still-unfinished hawk essay:

Lengthening days of summer heat and stillness now. The tree that houses my hawks is exploding with green and lush leaves. I spend as much time as I can spare every day observing them. Kneeling in front of an open third-floor window, heavy binoculars in hand, I focus and refocus the lens, following their movements. The hawks are present in these moments, still visible if I look closely, but will soon be completely hidden beneath a twisted tangle of dense, leafy branches.

The female seems about two feet long, the feathers of her back blurring from auburn to intricate patterns in shades of cinnamon, her underbelly a pale, milky vanilla-white encircled by a dark band. She holds herself with a palpable air of dignity and grace. The male is noticeably smaller, his colors darker, more monochromatic, less vibrant, though still impressive. His underbelly is beige, not pure white, and his face, head and beak are a deep brown so mottled it’s almost impossible to tell where his features begin and end. The tails of juvenile hawks are grayish-brown and won’t begin changing till the bird’s second year; these hawks flaunt tails of adulthood’s familiar russet red shade. The hawks have exaggerated, bony brow ridges which shade the large black eyes from direct sunlight. They appear angry, face locked in a perpetual scowl, eyes protruding above the cere, the soft, mustard-yellow skin where the beak begins. If I notice them in the trees from my perch near the window, they must certainly notice me, with vision eight times more accurate and powerful than mine.

Red-tails are masters of flight, using updrafts and thermals in the air to their advantage. The distinctive aerial behavior is used to protect territory—which can be up to two square miles—and for elaborate courtship rituals during which they swoop up and down and try to touch one another with their talons. They can have a wingspread of 43-56 inches, which doesn’t surprise me. When they patrol their territory, they soar and dive, in an undulating orchestration, wings outstretched and reaching, almost touching the sky. Watching them I hold my breath and believe that I too could take flight so effortlessly and naturally if I tried.

I shift my weight to my other knee and refocus the binoculars. I see a flash of white and am startled to be looking into the faces of two baby hawks, something I’ve been hoping to see. They hardly look real, completely white and covered in fluffy down. I want to reach out my hand and feel their plush softness. I am certain I saw stuffed animals in their likeness the last time I visited the gift shop at the Pittsburgh Zoo. The chicks’ eyes are already large and noticeable and seem much too big for their heads, not yet forming the same scowl as the ones their parents wear proudly. They move awkwardly, bobbing their heads up out of the nest, hesitating, standing, falling down clumsily. I guess them to be only a few weeks old, and they will remain in the nest for another month before they fledge. The male stands right outside the nest, looking for his mate to return with prey to feed the chicks. I remain silent and unmoved, waiting and hoping for the chance to witness this act of mutual parenting.

I detail everything I notice about the hawks in a green spiral notebook, so I won’t forget. Later, I will turn the observations into something larger, something tangible, perhaps an essay. It is these details that will breathe life into the prose on the page.

Someone once told me that God was to be found in the details. I don’t know if I believe this, but I do know that noticing the details allows one to understand the world in unexpected ways. It will be the details that make a difference.

End excerpt:
I am one of those people who pay attention to everything, looking for signs, portents all around. things that eventually refuse to be ignored.

The Sky is Falling

Walking home from the bus stop last evening—for the first time I really and truly have to admit to myself, shivering in the near-darkness, that winter has very nearly arrived—it happened again. Same, dense rustle of feathers, I look upward to the telephone pole, see the birds (two this time) drop like heavy, smooth river stones, straight to the street, thudding to the hard concrete into a tangled sprawl of feathers less than two feet from me.

Only this time, it isn't a dying, juvenile robin. This time, it's one of my hawks, one of the red-tails that nest each season in the tall tall tree across the street from my home, and a dark greyish pigeon. I can only guess that, despite all the hawk's fluid grace when flying, the two birds have somehow collided mid-air, sent them both stunned to the ground. from the vivid coloring, I guess it to be the adult female, not the darker male and not one of the pair's young. I'm certain it's the bird I've watched year after year. And all I know is that she's standing close enough for me to reach out and touch her. That and this incident has just left me utterly and completely startled.

I see cars coming in either direction; I must do something. So I do something really stupid, and walk partway into the street, approach the hawk, dangerously close. I stand so that the cars have to go around me. A year ago, M. and I did this very same thing, helping a snake that had been awakened by the unseasonably warm October weather, cross the street safely.

A couple in a silver sedan slow, roll down the passenger window, stare at the birds still on the ground. The hawk has stood, but she clearly is disoriented. And the pigeon, well, it's safe to say the pigeon has not survived, either the collison or the fall.

The cars pass, the hawk attempts flight. She makes it to the other side of the street, to a front porch. Her wing is bent awkwardly, clearly in a twisted position that isn't quite right. We stare at one another with blinking eyes for many minutes, the human-animal distance between us breathtakingly small. Her beauty, which i can finally see in detail for the first time, brings tears to my eyes. I watch and wait.

More moments pass. She turns and takes flight, erratic and obviously strained, makes it to the roof of a two-story apartment building. In this instant, I have a helpless, but inevitable, feeling that I can do nothing but trust. I will see her again next spring.