The Relationship Between Humans and Nature: What a Little Bird Told Us
Once upon a time, there were parrots living in America. Not the escaped kind we know today that steal away from airports and apartments to find improbable refuge in Brooklyn or Chicago, but wild parrots that evolved here in their own slow, mysterious way.
They were large, colorful, noisy birds, found from the Ohio Valley to the Gulf of Mexico. John James Audubon noted the decline in the Carolina parakeet back in the mid-19th century, but the birds hung on in the wild until the turn of the 20th century. The last known Carolina parakeet died in the Cincinnati Zoo 90 years ago, on Feb. 21, 1918. His name was Incas. He had outlived Martha, the very last passenger pigeon — which also died in the Cincinnati Zoo — by four years. Once you get a celebrity cage and a human name, it is usually over for your species.
What is the right way to honor the memory of Incas and his species on the anniversary of their extinction? And what lessons are there to apply from his death?
One lesson is the importance of zoos. It is big news, understandably, when a tiger escapes, but as a rule, it is the animals that need protection from us, not the other way around. Incas wasn’t the only caged Carolina parakeet, and there were even pairs that hatched out young, but as Christopher Cokinos points out in his excellent history of extinct birds, no effort was made to coordinate among the zoos to create a diverse breeding flock. Or to rescue the eggs that Incas and his mate repeatedly tossed out of their nest.
That thinking has changed. I remember looking at Micronesian kingfishers some years ago in the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. These birds are extinct in the wild, but in the 1980s, before they winked out altogether, scientists gathered up 29 remaining birds and have been successfully breeding them with an eye to returning them to an island close to where they once lived (without the snakes, introduced accidentally by humans, that killed them off).
Another lesson is that birds need protection from our sentimental urge to see them as simple creatures that can be “saved” without a radical change in our thinking about the world. Saving birds means nothing if we don’t re-create an environment for them to live in. Birds are not dangerous, like tigers — unless, of course, bird flu becomes a threat — but they are wild, and they live inside an infinitely complex web of complementary dependencies.
The Carolina parakeet became extinct for the usual reasons — hunting by humans, loss of habitat. But also, it seems, for a few unusual reasons, like the spread of honeybees — brought here by European settlers and referred to by Indians as “the white man’s flies” — that took over the hollow logs the birds nested in.
Though the Carolina parakeet managed to hang on in land developed for farming, this very adaptability may, in a crowning irony, have proved its undoing since it is speculated that proximity to human habitation exposed the birds to poultry disease, which they could not withstand.
In this sense, they fell victim to the law of unintended consequences as well as our own rapacity.
Not that rapacity is to be underestimated. Frank Chapman, the man who created the Christmas bird count, the annual volunteer effort to tally bird populations, inaugurated in 1900 in New York City, tells a chilling story about Carolina parakeets. Chapman was a pioneering ornithologist at the American Museum of Natural History, and he devised the bird count as a way of sublimating the hunting urge and replacing it with the conservation urge, the counting urge — in short, the bird-watching urge. But Chapman was also a hunter, and he tells a story in his memoir about a shooting trip he made in Florida in 1897, when there were hardly any Carolina parakeets left. Chapman learned about a small flock and, unable to resist gathering rare specimens, shot them. Looking at the bodies laid out before him, he vowed to shoot no more of the birds. But later that day, he stumbled on another small cluster and killed them too. “Good resolutions,” he wrote, “like many other things, are much easier to plan than to practice.”
This dual heritage — the killing urge and the conserving urge — lies at the heart of our relationship to nature, and it is only by acknowledging it that we will do right by the wild world around us. This is why hunters often make the most pragmatic, and effective, conservationists. And why it is fitting that Audubon lent his name to bird conservation, though he too was a great hunter. He spent his life killing birds, impaling them on wires in animated poses, and then painting them as if they were alive.
On the very first page of his memoir, Audubon describes the death of a parrot as if it were a murder. It is an extraordinarily strange but meaningful story. According to Audubon, his mother, a highborn Louisiana lady living in St. Domingue, kept a number of parrots as well as several pet monkeys. One morning, one of the parrots asked for breakfast, and a monkey, offended for some reason, stood up and killed the bird. Little Audubon was so traumatized by this primal scene that he recalled it, he writes, thousands of times, noting that it was responsible for his lifelong love of birds.
One of the things that makes the story disturbing is that Audubon was creating a sort of racial parable with his tale — his mother, he later tells the reader, was killed by blacks in the slave revolt that turned St. Domingue into Haiti; his story, therefore, feels like a weird racial parable in which his mother is somehow the delicate bird and the black slaves are the killer primates. But Audubon was lying — his mother wasn’t killed in St. Domingue; she died in childbirth and was a chambermaid. Audubon was fabricating a story to hide his illegitimacy. Which is something I believe many of us do in relationship to nature — hide our origins. Darwin, after all, has made monkeys of us all. Racism is merely the crudest attempt to force a single group to bear the burden of our shared animal natures.
Looking at birds, at any wildlife, brings us into contact not only with these creatures but with ourselves — as we are, and as we wish to be. We are both the talking bird and the killer primate — as Audubon clearly knew at some level, intent as he was on both killing birds and bringing them back to life. And we need to fit our understanding of the natural world into our understanding of ourselves.
I sometimes wonder how it is that the passenger pigeon is more often remembered than the Carolina parakeet. To be sure, it was the more dramatic loss because its flocks took days to pass, and it is speculated that the birds, numbering in the billions, accounted for one-quarter of the bird life in the United States. But I also think it’s worth noting the dates of the two birds’ disappearance. Martha the passenger pigeon died in September 1914, just one month into the World War I, which the United States had not yet entered. Four years later — after millions of wartime deaths and a complete upheaval in the world order — Incas the Carolina parakeet died. The fall of a sparrow, or any bird at all, must hardly have weighed much against the balance of human carnage, about to be doubled by the Spanish flu pandemic.
Today, amid war and terrorist threats and daily worries about the economy, there are certainly enough global distractions to keep us from recalling the Carolina parakeet or noticing the creatures in need of our protection. But according to Watchlist, put together by the American Bird Conservancy and the Audubon Society, one in four bird species in this country is imperiled. These birds do not all live in the same place or suffer for the same reasons — for the Hawaiian duck, it is the introduction of cats and dogs and mongoose, as well as the destruction of wetlands. For the Bicknell’s thrush, nesting in specific elevated regions of the Adirondacks or Catskills, it may be acid rain that has reduced its habitat.
A lot of what we know about the numbers of these birds comes from what the Audubon Society calls “citizen scientists” — concerned watchers who participate in annual tallies of the sort pioneered by regretful parakeet killer Frank Chapman. Just identifying the problem, opening our eyes to the natural world, marks a beginning. There is no single, simple solution, and we are not going to suddenly choose the preservation of nature over economic growth. Bird-watchers know that balance is the key — the watcher and the watched, the hunter and the conservationist, the talking parrot and the killer primate. All of us need to shoulder the responsibility of becoming “citizen scientists,” or at least “citizen naturalists.” We might as well begin by remembering Incas, last of his species, a wild animal with a human name who died in a zoo 90 years ago.
Jonathan Rosen, a novelist and essayist, is the editorial director of Nextbook. His book about bird-watching, “The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature,” is being published this month.
Copyright 2008 Los Angeles Times
Birds are mobile barometers of the state of our environment, and of our caring about it. The passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet had a number of things in common, possibly the most important being that they were flocking species, which made it easy to both locate and kill them. The passenger pigeon was killed in large numbers for food, while the Carolina parakeet was killed in large numbers because it fed on fruit, including fruit from orchards. Both birds also required substantial areas of forest to nest in, so the decimation of the original eastern deciduous forests contributed to their decline as well.
I’m a birder, and have seen in the last few years a number of species of southern birds in my vicinity that I never saw before. Mockingbirds and Carolina wrens come to mind. Barometers, perhaps, of global warming.
Seeing a snowy owl or a rough-legged hawk in winter tells us that there has been a lemming crash in the arctic, even though the arctic might be a thousand miles away. Again, a barometer of something that’s occuring many miles away.
When a species that can just up and fly away from predators, and can also fly to a new breeding grounds should something happen to the one it’s using, becomes rare, it’s a good barometer that something is wrong, somewhere.
The world is full of these barometers, these “canaries in mine shafts,” and we don’t really have to be climate scientists or professional biologists to see that something isn’t quite right. Nature is letting us know.
This article underscores the arrogance of our unfortunate race, that we imagine ourselves entitled either to decimate or conserve animal populations. We have no more right to “manage” other creatures than we have to kill them off. The depth of our psychosis is perfectly reflected in the picture of Audubon and his fellow hunter-conservationists, conflicted between the love of birds and the irrepressible desire to flock-shoot them into extinction. From the standpoint of nature we are Clovis man, a malignant virus that has not yet run its course.
I look forward to the day when, as Cormac McCarthy so elegantly put it, the human race disappears completely and we can all breathe easier.
ticonderoga -
I’m also a bird man. I live in a desert-mountain transition zone in Southern Arizona with many dozens of species of local and migratory birds. The drought is changing things around here very much for the worse, so I have put out three gallons of seed a day for the past 18 years to maintain the whole food chain around my place. Natural events are all interconnected, as you say. We used to have thick billed parrots here, but they have retreated into Sonora in spite of efforts to re-introduce them. I also have lived with a couple of macaws for 12 years, and have come to know them as family. Hanging out with animals is a real eye opener. I have no patience with the common view that birds and other critters are not people like ourselves.
I no longer hear the evening call of the whip-or-will, or see the black and white flashing wings of the red headed woodpecker. The Quail’s (bob white) voices no longer ring in the fields. So much has been lost since I was a kid. Biologists tell us that hunter-killer man seems to be winning over civilized man. If true that could spell the end of human life. The birds do not have to be in the mine to show us we are on a dangerous path. It would be good to escape this death culture we are living in. Hunter-killer man dominates the media, television, movies, business, politics, and the armed forces. Will God intervene, will man touch the obelisk, will nature’s checks and balances exert their powers? Species extinction is now as great a threat to human existence as is global warming. I am doing all I can and will retain my hope. It’s just sad to watch.
Outside my bedroom window, the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill, are squawking away as the sun returns after a rainstorm. What started off as 2-4 wild parrots, has in a few short years, turned into a flock of 200 - in downtown San Francisco. You can see, what I see every day, by clicking on this link:
http://www.iplanretirement.com/retirementblog/telegraph-hill/
They give me hope, and reason to believe, that nature will survive man. The article points out something important, the majority of the destruction of the environment in the United States, took place over 100 years ago. What once was has disappeared from our collective memory. Fly cross-country a few times and you will understand.
Ramsay
I did not read this essay for an obvious reason: the title excludes the majority of the human species: women and children. A progressive website should know better. Really. It’s no minor error.
Growing up in Hialeah Florida, I remember migrating birds by the millions.
They are GONE!
tj, yes but, males are the ones so proud of their 8 gague shotgun, because it was designed to kill as many crows as possible as they sleep in a tree.
Women and children don’t naturally think that way.
In another year or two, you will see very few birds if any, of any type, in almost any location on this planet. Birds in nature truly are the same as using birds to warn miners, that there is a serious problem with their atmosphere.
We just finished tending to our bluebird boxes for the year here in rural Missouri where the whippoorwills and quail have become scarce. Not to mention many snakes, frogs and toads.
We live on a 50 acre piece mostly wooded with oak, hickory, walnut and a myriad of other species. We are blessed to see any number of birds daily feeding on our deck and nearby. The titmouse, purple finch, nuthatch , chickadee, cardinal, goldfinch, juncos and a glorious variety of woodpeckers are common. We often hear and see the pileateds not to mention the eagles, golden and bald of which Missouir is a winter hold over.
Although I hold them all dear, it is the bluebird with it’s sweet conversational song that makes me stop and celebrate my existence whenever I am priveleged to see and hear them. I am humbled by their beauty, their kindness and my small place in their world.
What has happened to those poor birds will happen to humans within the next 5 to fifty years. It’s just a question of whether the nukes get us or global warming.
We humans, like lemmings, are marching on a path towards self-destruction and we will take most other species with us. However, rats and cockroaches will survive and take our place on the top of the evolutionary tree.
They deserve it more than we do!
www.dangerouscreation.com
Ramsay -
I met Mingus last year. He’s down at the Oasis Bird Sanctuary a few miles from here with several of his San Francisco friends. I can report that he is very well off today in the excellent care of Sybil Erden and TJ Georgitso, two strange and wonderful people who have provided an elegant retirement home for hundreds of abused and adandoned hookbills. Bird lovers could do worse than to google them up and send them money.
great piece. thanks.
The trouble is, the extinctions are accelerating. The estimated extinction rate is over 1000 times the normal, pre-human background extinction rate.
The last bird to become extinct that I know of is the Hawaiian Po’o-uli, which is the 14th of the Hawaiian honeycreepers to go extinct with only seven species left. And all of them are seriously endangered.
Here is a nice summary article about the Po’o-uli:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4066077.stm
The best book I have read on this topic is David Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions. It is totally outstanding.
The loss of the Earth’s biodiversity is one of the key factors of the Earth crisis facing us and caused by us. Will humans continue the march towards ecocide? Or will we wake up and live sustainably?
To be decided in our lifetimes . . .
“hunters often make the most pragmatic, and effective, conservationists.” This is just silly, following the anecdote about Chapman wiping out not one but two flocks of parrots, knowing they were endangered, because he couldn’t help himself. Rarity makes things more attractive to kill to those with the psychopathic mentality that allows a man with a gun to press a trigger and wipe out something in a millisecond that took millions of years to evolve, and will never be seen again. And for what? A pseudo-sexual orgasmic surge that you have the power of death dealing to whatever you choose to turn your gun sights on? Don’t pander to killers by pretending that they are conservationists, they are not - they have an urge to kill, not an urge to conserve and protect. And they are a major part of the problem not a solution (http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/33350/Big_gun_small_p.html).
No Ramsey Mameesh;
The majority of environmental destruction didn’t happen just 100 years ago! I grew up in the Southern part of the “Garden State”…..I have seen heartbreaking loss there in my lifetime! We had the largest food producer in the world during WWII. Every farm had a WORKING WINDMILL! One of the clubs in our high school was Future Farmers of America! My classmates were daughters of dairy farmers. Migratory birds were part of everyday life.( and plentiful).
For a long while, thanks to the W C Fields remark about third prize being a weekend in NJ, it shielded the farmland from developments…..but when North Jersey, & Philly suburbs, were all used up, the developments began ( just in the last 20 years). Don’t forget, several years ago, we reached a doubled population, in JUST 40) YEARS!
I fled it to the north eastern most corner of Maine. In 17 years it is happening HERE too! This winter I had NO junko’s, no purple finches, NO Great Blue Heron! They have been here every summer for the 17 years I have lived here.
In my old home town paper on line I read about a woman in Edgewater Park who was being fined and harrassed by the township officials. Her crime? SHe had planted her property to “weeds” for the birds and butterflys. They were trying to get her to conform and plant a tidy lawn, requiring chemicals tokeep it going, ( one big reason I left, my neighbors were going against the natural pine barrens habitat, to have lawns.)
Even tho this woman had gotten certified by the Audubon society, they were harrassing her. I wrote a very stern letter to them, letting them know that their conformity was affecting MY YARD in MAINE by eliminating stopping points in the migration patern of the birds. ???? No resposeno feedback don’t know whether I had any effect.????
A plus to the housing market bubble bursting…. it has slowed down the rich retirees, who have been building McMansions down the road from me! Some of them just to flip, not to live in & enjoy the area!
tj February 24th, 2008 2:47 pm ..Did I miss something? The title I just read is “The Relationship Between Humans and Nature…….”. Was it changed and I missed it? Please ’splain, Lucy….
Yep, New Jersey “The Garden State”. The black topsoil near Moonachie NJ was three feet deep. Truck farmers grew three crops a year and New Jersey was one of only five areas on this planet that was capable to grow enough food to feed the entire world’s popluation in 1950.
No more, and you see very few birds in New Jersey anymore, except for a plentiful supply of geese here and there, who no longer migrate south in the winter, because someone feeds them year round. We were ocean fishing in New Jersey last October and saw only a handful of seagulls. And you don’t dare eat the fish, they are full of poisonous toxins.
There is a wonderful program on Discovery (or Science, or History) Channel called “Life after People.” It chronicles how quickly and how completely all memory of human habitation and activities will occur if our species were to disappear. We, like the passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet are temporary inhabitants of this planet, which is, itself, a temporary fixture in the universe. We humans make the mistake of thinking we’re important — but we’re only important to ourselves.
And to our children and they to us.
Willybill, you’re not alone. I have to admit that I didn’t get the point of tj’s post, either.
rucognizant:
The parrots are still squawking outside my window. Their is an irony, in the fact that wild South American parrots (Cherry Headed Conyers), live in my San Francisco neighborhood. Less than two years ago, in the jungle of Costa Rica, I alerted my neighbors and we grabbed our machetes, and chased two men who were robbing a parrot nest.
I have seen the recent, and rapid destruction of the environment, of which you write. I fought, and created a blog, to try and stop the extinction a species of monkey - due to retiree McMansions.
http://www.bananatreehotel.com/costarica/environmentalists-killing-monkeys/
So, I don’t argue your point. I’ve watched, fought,and tried to stop, the recent destruction you are referring. But the Buffalo were wiped out over a hundred years ago, the last Grizzly Bear was killed in California 150 years ago, only 5% percent of the Redwood Forests remain. Our nation has a history of environmental destruction that goes back to it’s founding. You mention Maine (my mother’s birthplace), a state who lived off whaling, I was born in the “Garden State” and my grandparents lived in Elizabeth, you could smell it before you entered it, the refineries were spewing so much sulpher into the air.
My point was that we are witnessing a progression, or continuation, of our past. That the bird losses, and other species losses, is not a new phenomenon. It’s been going on for thousands of years. The Wooly Mammoth and Saber Tooth Tiger, Grizzlies and Wolves, humans kill off the predator species, and then exploit the rest. Our Christian European heritage, tells us that we are seperate from nature, and that we are the masters of nature.
But when I see the wild parrots thriving, and surviving, it gives me hope. The alternative is despair. So forgive me. Voxclamantis thanks for the update on Mingus. I saw Mark Bittner strolling through North Beach a month ago, he had a contented smile on his face, and that made me feel good as well. It makes me happy, when all species, are happy.
Ramsay
kloro:
I concur.
http://wip.warnerbros.com/marchofthepenguins/
“his article underscores the arrogance of our unfortunate race, that we imagine ourselves entitled either to decimate or conserve animal populations. We have no more right to “manage” other creatures than we have to kill them off. The depth of our psychosis is perfectly reflected in the picture of Audubon and his fellow hunter-conservationists, conflicted between the love of birds and the irrepressible desire to flock-shoot them into extinction. From the standpoint of nature we are Clovis man, a malignant virus that has not yet run its course.”
**quoted for agreement. Humans are not managers of nature–all the examples of humans saving a species resulted from damage caused by other humans.
A worm is a manager of nature–and yet humans belittle them.
And the idea that hunters make the best conservationists is like saying nazis used kosher gas chambers.
Hunters want to stock animals so they can keep killing them. Leo Tolstoy was a hunter turned vegetarian. He understood that.
Game departments deliberately skew numbers so they can have more animals to kill each year.
You can find the statistics here: http://animalvegfaq.tripod.com
And zoos exist to imprison animals. If humans have a right to stick an animal in a cage then we should also have the right to snatch isolated tribes people out of the jungle and stick them in a cage for their own protection.
The first action to reduce human destruction is to attack human arrogance. When humans understand they are an embarrassment of Nature, a pitiful clown, a joke, a failure as a species according to their own standards of value, then we can begin to fight human supremacy myths–which do infect inter human relations(racism, sexism etc).
Willy Bill and Ticonderoga:
Willy Bill wrote:
>>tj February 24th, 2008 2:47 pm ..Did I miss something? The title I just read is “The Relationship Between Humans and Nature…….”. Was it changed and I missed it? Please ’splain, Lucy….>>
The original title when I first read the article here was “The Relationship Between Man and Nature: What a Little Bird Told Us.”
The original title in the LAT article is:
>>What a little bird told us
In the extinction of the Carolina parakeet is a parable on the relationship of man and nature.>>
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-rosen24feb24,0,6033118.story
The Commondreams editors (evidently) inserted the original subtitle fragment into the title. Then they substituted “Humans” for “Man” *after* TJ’s comment, to their credit. Bravo CD editors!
Maybe TJ thought the word “humans” excluded wemon and children.
“This article underscores the arrogance of our unfortunate race, that we imagine ourselves entitled either to decimate or conserve animal populations. We have no more right to “manage” other creatures than we have to kill them off.”
Agreed, voxclamantis. I’d like to see anyone try stepping outside of nature in order to study or conserve it.
A comment about the “hunters often make the most pragmatic, and effective conservationists” line. I think it’s important to note that technically, this statement is factually accurate, since conservation and preservation are two fundamentally different things. The former implies “protection for use by society” (e.g. state wildlife areas or national forests) and the latter implies “protection from use by society” (e.g. wilderness areas). Whether one prefers preservation over conservation is a different story.
Many hunter’s I’ve met don’t fall into the “conservationist” category, but most do. It’s something of a no-brainer that without habitat there would be no “game” to kill. All legal hunters are forced to protect wildlife habitat when they buy a license, and wildlife agencies end up protecting huge swathes of sensitive ecosystems (forests, transition zones, wetlands, etc.) from development specifically to maintain stocks of “game” animals. In Colorado, the state FWS protects (through leasing and ownership) some 750,000 acres of wildlife habitat. Regardless of my view on the morality of killing animals for food or sport, I’m glad that these areas are available for wildlife to hopefully survive the coming crash of civilization! Yay for the nazi conservationists!
That said, great article on the need to reevaluate the social norms for viewing the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world, and some interesting comments as well!
Human beings can’t live with one another without turning sadistic and murderous. They may be more sentimental about animals (I have yet to see a US article which really shows regret for the one million Iraqis murdered by the war), but don’t expect to see Nature’s most selfish and violent animal changing its ways now. With the threat to our cosy way of life, Nature has had it, I fear. Ask an American to give up his SUV to save a parrot and expect his precious gun in your face.
I guess that not too distant headline will read, “Dominant Ape Species Vanished Because It Destroyed It’s Own Home.” Sad. A better one would be, “Dominant Ape Species Saved Itself By Learning To Control Its Excesses.”
Earthian, thanks for the clarification.
Excellent article, wholly appreciated, and I like the closing paragraph, wherein Rosen correctly says that while we have the major issues of the GWoT, we do need to not forget about wilderness, Nature, our major impact on it. I regularly bitch about anti-war movement people focusing more on the torture crimes of the Bush-Cheney regime, far more focus on this than on the need to stop the whole GWoT altogether, f.e. But that’s only because the torture would not be otherwise happening, and the GWoT wars are the far greater crimes, far more deadly and destructive. If we want the torture to end, then people wanting this need to strongly focus on the GWoT wars [and] on giving Sibel Edmonds and the need for her claims to be thoroughly investigated, etc.
The difference is that wilderness is a wholly distinct topic, so I can not speak against activism about this. Hence my non-bitching about the need to be active ‘citizen naturalists’.
” Doom n Gloom February 24th, 2008 2:01 pm
I no longer hear the evening call of the whip-or-will, or see the black and white flashing wings of the red headed woodpecker. The Quail’s (bob white) voices no longer ring in the fields. So much has been lost since I was a kid. Biologists tell us that hunter-killer man seems to be winning over civilized man. If true that could spell the end of human life. …”
THAT’S BECAUSE hunter-killer “human” is, in some cases, more numerous, esp. if we consider people who aren’t hunters themselves, but who support the hunter-killer “people”. And when hunter-killer “human” and their supporters aren’t more numerous, then we still have little to speak of in terms of truly [civilised] humans.
That may possibly depend on how each person thinks of what ‘civilised’ means, but it’s the way I think of it. Many who are well civilised in some respects are the opposite on other matters, and this does not make for particularly civilised people; not in my book.
Truly civilised people are very [holistic]; it’s what’s needed in order to not be prejudiced. I’m prejudiced alright; against evil, wickedness, psychopathic violence, etc. And I’m personally okay with such prejudice; giving it my authorisation.
If we’re not holistic in outlook, then we’re going to be harmfully prejudiced and selfish; hence overall remaining uncivilised, still having work to do to become truly civilised.
It’s a lot to ask for or demand of North Americans, f.e., but it’s a requirement; not a luxury.
And deliberately killing little birds is not what I consider ‘gathering’ them, as Rosen referred to it. It’s the sole part of his article that I disagree with. For a brief moment, I thought he literally meant ‘gathering’, but he speaks of hunting them and not for purpose of food, which makes it understandable when people choose to refer to such acts as ‘murder’.
We gather berries and food crops; we capture, gather animals not meant for food only when we aren’t killing them. Else, we’re killing, not gathering; though gathering up what’s been killed, yes, and obviously.
When I was young child, friends had beebee and pellet guns, and it influenced me, I also wanted one. After some years of asking, my parents finally bought me one, and I started using little birds in our area for target practice. Soon, birds didn’t come any longer, and figuring it was because of my misdeed, I stopped it. Soon again, birds were coming back, and I’ve never sought to harm birds ever again since; except the few times I went partridge hunting and for food purpose.
I will NOT harm [any] wild animals that are naturally present and therefore not harmful to the habitat and its wildlife inhabitants or residents, temporary and long-term. Only for food can I see doing otherwise as justifiable, and it must be non-abusive hunting, so no poaching of any excessive kind.
Poor people illegally hunting for food because they can’t raise their own food animals and can’t afford the expensive prices of meats in stores is acceptable to me, but not to political schmucks.
When it comes to recreational fishing, people should use [barbless] hooks and accept the risk of losing more fish. Why? Of course with the fish we’re going to keep to filet and cook up, barbless or barbed makes really no difference, but most fish are usually returned to their environment, and removing barbed hooks can do considerably more damage, while barbless slip out with ease, making only a pin-hole penetration, which’ll quickly heal. It depends on how roughly we bring or reel in the fish too, but a [good] fisherman knows how to play a fish in a way to cause the least injury to the fish.
My aim when going fishing, though, is always to get food. I don’t fish just for fun. Instead of doing that, I prefer to do wilderness observation or just go trekking.
Slightly misstated my point in comparing the activism against the torture crimes, for that’s not to mean to infer what the ACLU’s been working on doing, and lawyers working for detainees. I’m all for those aspects, as well as for some activism to help support these efforts. It’s just that great emphasis must be placed on stopping the whole GWoT and on providing Sibel Edmond’s efforts all the support citizens and residents of the USA can provide her; she’s gotten awfully little, so far, and she’s in possession of among the very most key and incriminating information.
I used to hunt. I don’t now. I grew up poor if it were not for ‘government beef’ (whitetail deer) we would not have survived. We ate what we shot and we didn’t shoot anything rare or endangered. The official deer season was bucks only. We ate mostly deer who nibbled on the garden on moonlight nights. Man, that garden raised a lot of venison. We fished and ate them a least once a week, plus smelt netted out of lake Superior during the seasonal run. We also ate the fish eggs, deer hearts, livers etc. We also ate home grown vegetables and berries year round.
I knew a family that ate or used every part of an animal except the noise it made. They could also find every edible leaf, root, fungus and berry in the woods you could eat or use. Many made fun of these people, but I was close enough in poverty to know better. I wanted to have these people handy in case of survival needs.
It is funny how these people could live for years in the same bountiful forest, use the same garden land and never deplete it. Corporate farms wipe out everything except one puny crop off a piece of land it would take a century to restore to actual productivity.
I watch these jackasses in their plastic coats and shoes protesting because someone eats an animal, makes a coat out of it’s fur and shoes and gloves out of the leather. Look at the plastic flotsam twice the size of the United States in the Pacific ocean, the devastation of the oil and coal business and massive sprawl and habitat destruction in the current lifestyle.
The earth is a connected thing. It must be treated that way. I believe it was made for us to tend carefully others believe it evolved, either way we only have one of them we can live on and even if we find a new place we have no capacity to move to a new planet.
As the caretakers of the earth we suck!
We do not include ecological information in national indices like GDP and it is largely missing from prices (the only connection is supply, which is relative but not absolute). We have little to no understanding of the economic system’s connection to the environment. How the monetary system is created to continuously expand, which expands consumption, which cannot grow forever. Same for the financial markets. If neither grow recession and depression follows. How do we moderately correct the situation when resources are finite and the monetary system, financial markets, GDP and prices act as if they’re infinite? If growth is not possible forever who controls the resources and what happens when growth stops? Logically when growth ends, so does capitalism. Private control over dwindling resources by small, powerful segments, would give elites power over every day people on levels never seen before. Keeping the current power structure in place in a no growth economic system would be the worst type of dictatorship.
These articles on nature are like a breath of fresh air after the constant barrage of the idiotic politics we can’t do anything about. We can do something about nature and what is happening to those small being humanity is so bent on destroying.
Voxclamantis said it right - “Hanging out with animals is a real eye opener.”
In the past five or six years I’ve had three birdhouses in my small backyard, and each spring was able to watch the sparrows that nested in them, from beginning to end. The only thing I was never able to watch was the young ones leaving the nest.
I watched an adult pair sit huddled close together on my patio rail, grieving for the young ones from their extended family, taken by bluejays from the nest in the spruce next door. They reminded me so much of a human couple grieving.
For two weeks I watched one of my males grieving after a cat got in my yard at dawn one morning and caught his mate, who was ready to start laying her eggs, and must have gone down for breakfast. This bird stayed in my little tree for two weeks, crying, telling what happened, even showing what he’d seen when he’d flown to the fence to watch, unable to help his mate. He told about the babies they would have had, or maybe he was telling about the ones they’d had that still needed their mother. For the first week no other birds come into the yard. Then at the middle of the second week, his son from the previous year came, and stayed with him a couple of hours. Later, a couple of his daughters came, and he left with them, but was back in ten or fifteen minutes. I think that was the first time he’d eaten. I started putting out bread crumbs on the patio below the nest, with his mate’s feather I’d found behind a container in the garden. He came down and ate some of the crumbs, and took the feather. I think he put it in the birdhouse. He slept there. My heart broke for him. His pain and misery was so obvious.
One day, while working in my garden, six or eight male sparrows came. I recognized the oldest male as one of the three that raised his families in one of the houses. He sat on a trellis on the patio, and the others started doing various things. One went into one of the houses, and others would fly to the hole and look in, then fly away. Every so often two would get into a fight, and would go to the ground fighting. And they’d all start yelling at me, from the tree and other perches. Every once in awhile the old male would call out to them during all the activities. I finally realized what I was watching was a well-executed training session for the young males, teaching them how to feed the young in the nest, fight off other males that would try to take over the nest, and how to try to scare off preditors.
I don’t think I’ve ever gotten as well educated as I did by these birds. While I was never able to recognize the females, except for one that was very calm and didn’t fly away when I went out, the males were easily recognizable.
Last year, I came to the realization that the sparrow population is doing just fine, and because they are what they are, will probably be like the cockroach - here when all the rest is gone. One group of young that returned often to the yard chased away a pair of chickadees that were building a nest in another birdhouse with smaller holes. So I took down all the bird houses, and when the sparrows finally understand they need to find another nesting site, I’ll put the other house back up for those little birds who need the help.
I’ve been ’saving’ insects and spiders for about eight years now - not something I had anything to do with deciding - I was compelled by something outside myself (Mother Earth; our Creator - I don’t know. The sense was that I must save the lesser life forms, and so I do), and my absolute terror of spiders has left me. They are an amazing group of being, and some that I’ve managed to observe under a magnifying glass are amazingly beautiful. I talk to them all and none run away from me. The jumping spider just sits and looks up at me. They’re my favorite. I’ve almost reached the point where I will let one crawl onto my hand (not one of the widows though. Those I have a healthy respect for, and always know where they are). I couldn’t believe the saddness I felt one day when I found the black widow that had lived in one corner of my yard for a year, and would run out every time I’d water and a drop would hit her web, dead. I’d always laughed at her because she never learned to tell the difference between a bug and a drop of water.
Unfortunately, last year I only saw a couple of the larger sized spiders. There were plenty of the small black or brown ones that live in the lawn, and run to the flower beds when I mow the grass.
My neighbor has the exterminators come in every year and soak every surface in their yard. I’m sure that makes a difference with the various populations living in my yard too.
we are in serious trouble, many natural and social indicators make that clear. i remember reading in one of joseph chilton pearce’s books (i think “crack in the cosmic egg”) his metaphor for our rapidly collapsing society as something like an accelerating train, not only going faster and faster, but laying the track down as it goes. and there is no one at the wheel. on our present course there is little hope. i used to look for distal causes - domestication, patriarchy, cartesian worldview, all of the above - and still do, but richard heinberg (”powerdown”, “the party’s over”, “peak everything”) has convinced me it’s emergency time and we better think about proximal causes. the most obvious is our little 150 year old obsession with oil, which so much underlies the current context of our lives that we don’t even notice. it is most definitely the elephant in the room. we’ll never get at distal causes, nor will we survive, until we deal with the ecological dilemma posed by oil: overpopulation, resource depletion, and habitat loss.
There is a joy in nature, in wildlife, that cannot be replicated in any man made invention. When I bought my little house last year, my daughter built a bird bath and her first customer was a beautiful Stellar Jay. She was amazed as she had grown up in apartment living where there were no trees, plants, flowers or birds. Although we have a small yard, there are conifers, firs, cherry trees, pines, and scores of rhododendrums and with just a couple of bird feeders, and a squirrel feeder, we have a regular zoo to watch and care for every day. Nothing is more relaxing and human than to watch these critters every day and the little food and a couple of bird houses will help some of these lovely birds to carry on. Not all humans carry the destructive gene, the impulse to murder, contaminate. It’s all in our education, that any saving grace can be found.