The “Wow-ee!” response of the scientists involved would make for an interesting study, as well as the “maybe it’s the first example of invertebrate tool use but maybe it isn’t” facet of the story.

Everything is smarter than we think and has the prospect of becoming smarter, including us, if we could just get over thinking we’re smarter than we actually are.

Here’s another octopus story.

Took Otto’s wardens long enough to figure out what was going on.

Here’s a story about barn swallows you might have seen.

My experience with octopi is unfortunately limited (thanks to a high school guidance counselor), but I’ve watched swallows for hours—barn, cliff, and violet green.  They exhibit flying skills that shout mental sharpness and high engagement with their surroundings.  Their language, too, is lovely—soaring phrases and jazzy riffs that light up whatever spaces they breeze through.  Beside white-throated swifts (and, of course, park pigeons) swallows are one of the species of birds that show the greatest tolerance for people’s presence.  Many times they’ve let me in among them while they’ve dipped and whirled very close in.  For me, watching them fly is like watching a group of mathematicians scrawl out geometrical problems at high speed on a three-dimensional blueboard.  Very satisfying for this mind to try to follow.

The debate over animal intelligence is progressing very slowly.  The holdup?  Well, that would have to be … us.  We’re hung-up on wanting to be the smartest creatures on the planet, to play the lead roles on this living, growing, prowling, blossoming, metamorphosing stage.

I’ve had enough experience with animals to suspect strongly that the “I’m smarter than other species and even smarter than others of my kind” mindset is not unique to people.  I lived with a Siberian husky that definitely thought herself smarter than other dogs (she was) and smarter than I was (yes, at times), and she absolutely believed herself physically superior, to the point of challenging me to follow her in intimidating feats of derring-do.  I’m uncertain how her rangy, forty-pound body supported such an ego.

And the coyote is not cast in folk stories’ trickster roles by happenstance.

But human beings exert more influence upon the world than dogs or coyotes, from our tool-grasping gift for altering the physical environment to our cosmoplastic abilities—our narrative prowess—and the effects they bring to bear upon all life.  That we struggle with the question of whether or not animals exhibit intelligence might speak more to shortfalls in our awareness than it does to the question of what’s actually happening around us.  That is, our wonderment over animals’ intelligence and feeling might posit some narrative failure on our part, which means it’s a failure of relationship, narrative being one of the primary approaches we take for exploring and developing connexion.

Furthermore, the slowness of our thinking about other species is not something isolated to our relationship with the nonhuman world.  The levels of imperceptiveness and bad behavior people demonstrate toward nature is but an extension of the bad behavior we exhibit toward each other. Thus any progress we make in our behavior toward nature ought to be paralleled in improvements in how we treat each other, and the other way around.

If we can figure out how better to pay attention—if we can tune our minds for deeper engagement—then learning from nature at a higher rate of speed than we do and applying with grace what we learn to humanity’s condition could work out very well for us. For some people, I know it does work that way, as well as the other way around—nature learns from its contact with us. This is not to say that we’re no different from other species; obviously we are. Perhaps we’re the farthermost extension of an entire system’s quest for greater consciousness; perhaps we’re seeking broader dimensions to creativity–maybe even godhood. We have our narratives to explain who we are and what we’re about, but those can and should change. Jesus initiated a powerful narrative shift, new language–and thus a new way–for being in the world and for being-with-others (including animals) when he broke up the unyielding eye-for-an-eye storylines of the Mosaic Law.

Perhaps we think we can get away more cleanly with careless relationships with the natural world, which we appear to believe has no law or awareness, than we can with mankind, which has an extensive and evolving set of laws governing its behavior along with somewhat heightened consciousness where the well-being of our own kind is concerned. But the abuse, exploitation, destruction, apathy, annoyance, clumsiness, insensibility and so on we display towards nature is not behavior we exhibit only toward nature. If we’re doing it “out there,” it’s happening inside governments, businesses, communities, and homes in one form or another. We may not be aware what things that we’re doing to each other are destructive, clumsy, etc. We might say, “This is the only way to handle this. Nobody knows a better way, so there must not be one.” We might say, “This is how it has always been done.”  We have reams and reams of “look no further” language arranged in unmoving narratives.  Meanwhile, Otto is shooting out the irritating lights above his aquarium with a highly accurate water pistol.

Why?

Because they’re there and he’s there, and because his circumstances changed him to the point where he figured how to change his circumstances.

Is this not one chamber of the heart of the creative mind?

September 17th marked the two-year anniversary of the closing of Crossfire Canyon (real name: Recapture Canyon) to off-highway vehicular (OHV) travel.  Since then, the canyon has become an even more volatile epicenter of rhetorical and legal power struggles over land use policy.  Private citizens, environmental and off-road advocacy groups, and the federal government have all entered dogs in the fight.

I’m not privy to the strategies “tree huggers,” off-road enthusiasts or the governmental agencies involved (like the Bureau of Land Management) play against each other.  I’ve heard that, based upon the canyon bottom trail’s historical use, OHVers applied to have Crossfire reopened as a public right-of-way.  I’ve read that the BLM is invested in closing Crossfire for good, shuffling OHVers onto designated routes set aside specifically for their use and reserving canyons like Crossfire for what one group calls “quiet users”—hikers and the canyon’s wildlife (and, apparently, cattle).  This summer, the San Juan County group SPEAR (San Juan Public Entry and Access Rights) reported in a flier they handed out to bystanders at Blanding’s Fourth of July parade that “BLM informed us that [Crossfire] is no longer a priority for them.  It is now being considered for a special ‘World Class’ archaeology area.” 

As an archaeologist friend remarked a few nights ago, if the BLM is serious about designating Crossfire as a “World Class” archaeology area, they’ll have to designate much of the surrounding region as a “World Class” archaeology area, too, because nothing in the canyon’s cultural-resource-rich environment sets it apart from the cultural-resource-rich ground surrounding it—for hundreds of miles. 

The June11th arrests of twenty-four residents of area towns—including the Mormon pioneer towns of Blanding and Monticello—by FBI agents executing BLM warrants for violations of antiquities law has further complicated Crossfire’s status.  Before the raid, Crossfire’s closure rendered it a poster geo-child for various groups’ causes.  To the OHVers, it became another case in point for what many consider the federal government’s unconstitutional manipulation of public lands.  For environmental groups, Crossfire was battle won, an éclat worthy of celebration. Who knows what it was for the BLM.  Neither the environmental groups nor OHV advocates have kind words for them.

Since the raid, Crossfire, whose length runs a couple miles just outside Blanding’s eastern boundaries, has become an even hotter zone.  Apparently concerned about retaliation from angry southeastern Utah residents for the 6/11 raid, the BLM has rolled back its ranger presence, leaving this canyon and, as I’ve heard, other areas unmonitored and unmanaged.  The usual BLM representatives were also conspicuously absent from the line-up for the Fourth of July parade.

I hike Crossfire three or four times a week.  I make regular use of the illegal trail that provided out-of-area parties the evidence they needed to catalyze Crossfire’s closure to OHVs.  During the time between the canyon’s closure and the 6/11 raid, I met often enough to expect to run into them BLM officers, visitors to the canyon, neighbors on horseback, and members of various interested parties.  Now and again, I saw tire tracks irritated ATVers left on the trails along with other small evidence of sagebrush rebellion.  Since the June raid, I’ve met nobody (except for these two ladies, who came to the canyon days after the raid but had no idea it had happened).  Tracks in the dirt show only occasional hikers and a few horse riders.  To my knowledge, the BLM has stopped patrolling Crossfire, at least for now.  Locals who used the canyon as an OHV corridor no longer include it in their jaunts.  Along its verboten five-mile corridor, Crossfire has become a long crease of quiet. 

Right now, most days, it appears to be just the wild turkeys and me. Like the turkeys, I’ve been reintroduced to the area in recent years. Oblivious to the drama clouding the canyon, the turkey population appears to have exploded.  If somebody held a contest to determine which of us—the turkeys or me—are the quieter users, the turkeys would lose.  Also, as far as littering is concerned, the birds shed impressive feathers along the illegal trail, which trail they make heavy use of, in company with coyotes, deer and many other animals that seem to take no offense at its presence but treat it as a convenience of home.

Of course, some fuss must be made over illegal trails, or people will be blasting them in all over the place.  What interests me is how little provocation it takes to inspire folks on all sides of the issue to rev up four-wheel drive rhetoric and spin wheelies over each other’s linguistic terrain.  “Quiet users” who congratulate themselves on their deeper insight into and their true love for nature, who gush about Crossfire’s “recovery” from ATV offenses, enthusiastically yee-haw their ways across others’ interests, grabbing air in wild jumps via name-calling and other acts of labeling and free-wheeling reductionist language.  Some visitors to the backcountry pack out their waste lest contamination of important water sources result.  Yet they engage freely in bad behavior in regions of human language that likewise contain powerful currents.  Language, too, has a downstream principle: The words we release into its rivers, streams, water tables and soils can and will affect others in the present, the near future, and quite possibly in generations to come, often in unpredictable ways.

It runs all ways, of course.  Folks who hold their homes sacred, who keep up their yards and in other ways are conscientious about being good stewards, without much thought dump toxic verbiage into what has become a language-dependent world.  We’ve wised up somewhat to the effects on people and other species of contaminants that used to be commonly flushed into the country’s waterways—earlier generations’ hazarding of the future with heavy metals and poisonous chemicals.  But in the human rhetorical environment where language-thirsty minds live and grow, lead-based warring language, the mercurial taint of ad hominem wielding tribalism, and the poisonous insecticides of guilt, shame, and seduction meant to improve harvests without thought of effects beyond the scope of the season’s take still permeate that glass of water drawn at the household tap. 

For my part, I will no longer speak of Crossfire Canyon as “healing” or “recovering from” the effects of ATV riders bumping through and the unprecedented access the unviable (as I heard a BLM ranger call it) and ill-begotten trail enabled.  I realize now that such words not only risk imposing upon the nature of the canyon, which may or may not have suffered as much as everybody says from the presence of the trail and trail riders, but also they attempt to manipulate attitudes toward others invested in the outcome of the battle over Crossfire, implying intention of continued exploitation or abuse. 

Over the last four years, I don’t think anybody else has spent more time in this section of Crossfire than I have.  I see that since the trail was closed to motorized traffic, the canyon has changed.  How much of that change would have happened anyway, I can’t say.  I do note that the most striking transformations have occurred as results of the beavers’ recent arrival on Crossfire Creek.  But given the weighty importance of what I don’t know about this place, I’m cleaning up my language: “The canyon has changed.”  From there, I’ll figure out what to say and what other ways lie open to my describing my experiences in and around it.  But after close inspection of these four words, they are as much as I feel confident will do little or no harm to the world as I release them into streams of human discourse already clouded with doubt.

Then two years ago, members of that same storytelling festival committee recruited me to participate.  I was assigned to write an introduction for the festival, a preamble that would signal to visitors that the storytelling was about to begin.  Another purpose for the introduction: To support the opening ceremony during which each of the evening’s participants carried a lit candle into the auditorium as they entered single file.  The candles symbolized the intentional passing of stories–heirloom narrative valuables–from generation to generation. 

I decided to write a story–a faux folktale–explaining where the old stories came from.  It was an interesting process, composing a story that all the cultures involved found acceptable.  I had included a reference to the German story about the wolf who ate a family of goats.  One of the Navajo committee members asked that I take that out because, as she said, “Navajos can’t hear about bad things happening to their animals.”  Navajos, of course, herd goats and sheep.

Through this revising process and that, I worked up a story that all approved of.  It’s just a light thing, addressing an audience containing children, meant to support the festival’s theme and to work in the significance of the candles.  But the festival committee liked it so much that they used it for two years in a row and plan to use it every year.  So my dream of releasing a story into the common narrative environment, free and open to effects of use, came true.

I tell about this here at WIZ because I consider language to be part of the natural world and human language to be something creation has given rise to for purposes perhaps beyond our ken and certainly beyond our grasp.   To my thinking, the condition of this planet is deeply dependent now upon the quality of human language giving rise to expression.  One of narrative’s most important energies: creating and communicating the range of possibilities from which other beings in the world might choose to create their own prospects.

Here’s the story:

Pass the Flame

A long time ago, a man and woman had many children.  They taught their children how to walk, wear clothing, and eat food to stay alive. 

But they didn’t know how to teach their children to be wise.  So the children made the same mistakes over and over, which caused everyone a lot of trouble.

The man said to the woman, “The things we taught our children aren’t enough.  We must teach them to be wise.  But how?”

“We have nothing of ourselves we can do this with,” said the woman.  “We must look for a way.” 

So the man and women set out on a journey.  After walking many days, they came to a strange mountain.  On one side was a desert with sand dunes.  On another side was a tropical rainforest.  Yet another side was covered in fir and pine.  There was frozen tundra up there, too.  The sea lapped at the mountain’s foot.  On this mountain, summer, winter, fall, and spring happened all at the same time.

The man and woman climbed the mountain and sat down to wait.  “How will this place help us?” they wondered.

They saw shapes in the distance moving toward them.  The first one was a bear.  When the bear reached them, it said, “I will tell you why I have a short tail instead of a long tail, like I used to have.” 

Behind the bear was Coyote.

“This is what happened when I stole the sun and the moon,” said Coyote. 

Behind Coyote was an Eskimo.  “This is how mosquitoes came to us,” the Eskimo said. 

“This is why my tail is bald rather than bushy, like it used to be,” said Possum.

“This is why I have big eyes,” said Owl.

“This is how I taught Anansi not to be rude to guests,” said Turtle.

“This is how me and my blue ox Babe carved the Grand Canyon,” said Paul Bunyon.

“This is how I became a spider,” said Arachne.

“This is the sad story of how I became a weather cock,” said Half-a-chick.

“This is how I tricked Raven into dropping his cheese so that I could take it from him,” said Fox.

“This is how I defeated the dragon with my golden reed pipe, thereby saving my sister,” said a boy named Bayberry.

“This is how I learned not to speak to wolves in the woods,” said a girl in a red riding hood.

And so it went.  After many days, the man and woman were so filled with stories their eyes glowed with light.  The animals and flowers and trees and people who had told the stories said to the man and woman, “Now you have some wisdom to give your children.  But for the wisdom to work, your children must in turn tell the stories to their children, and they must tell them to theirs.  If they don’t, life will go back to the way it was, with everybody making the same mistakes over and over.”

The man and woman thanked the creatures that told the stories.  They went home and told their children all of the wonderful tales they had been taught.  When the children heard the stories, their eyes also glowed with light.  It was as if someone had touched a burning candle to an unlighted wick in each one, causing wonder and wisdom to leap up like flames.

Tonight, we who have inherited these stories and the love of storytelling honor those who taught us by doing our duty and bringing our tales to you like lighted candles.  We invite you to tip your candles toward us so that we may pass the flame.

_________________________________________________________

For Cara’s bio, go here (scroll to end).

Earlier in the spring, I began walking on our back porch for three hour-long stretches every day, pushing my special needs child back and forth in her wheelchair along the porch’s forty-foot long, second story vantage point for her pleasure—one of the few she has.  The herd’s pasture bounds our property on three sides, so this year I’ve been privy to more equine social dynamics than I’ve ever witnessed. Watching a herd with a stallion in it has been especially interesting.  But of the herd’s five members, Nanny Horse has shown herself to be by far the most alert and responsive of the bunch.

Like many girls, I grew up wanting a horse and fancied the standard chestnut coloration—that bright red coat sparking with copper or golden highlights.  I liked big, leggy chestnuts of long, graceful bodyline.  I remember riding in the family station wagon, in my usual place in the middle seat next to the right-side window, scanning the rural Virginia pastures streaming past for glimpses of such an animal.  I fantasized about finding “The Horse” and shouting to my parents, “Stop! That one—that’s the one I want!” 

But alas, in spite of the fact five wonderful acres surrounded our house, half an acre of which was planted in Kentucky bluegrass so luscious horse-owner neighbors asked to graze their animals on it, my chestnut dreams never came true.  My parents weren’t inclined to take on domesticated animals beyond cats and the occasional dog.  Who could blame them?  They had six kids, with me channeling a constant stream of turtles, snakes, lizards, field mice, praying mantises and other creatures into the household. It was always fun, however, waking up to discover neighbors’ escaped horses running free on our acreage, kicking up their heels, grazing contentedly on the yard grasses, and otherwise making themselves at home.

Moving into rural San Juan County and its horse culture sort-of kind-of aroused again my desire for the companionship of a horse.  Watching Nanny Horse demonstrate her at times surprising levels of social consciousness and foresight, seeing her smarts twinkle in a dozen ways every day, I found myself thinking, “If I were to buy a horse, it would be that horse.” 

When the foal reached about a month old, the stallion began copulating with the mother.  Usually, he initiated his mating ritual with a throaty, emphatic call that bordered at times on a roar.  Then he’d trot a tight circle around the mare, neck arched, leaning in toward her, seeming to weave a circle of influence to bring her to a standstill.  She’d come to a halt, or if grazing, lift her head and devote attention.  Assured of her receptivity, he consummated their mutual interest.  Often, I observed Nanny Horse watching the proceedings from a distance, but she made no move to interfere or present herself for breeding, nor did I witness the stallion direct any of his sexual posturing toward her.  For whatever reason, he preferred the foal’s long-torsoed, short-legged mother, her body form vaguely reminiscent of a dachshund’s.  
        
I don’t know enough about horses to understand what the stallion’s lack of interest in Nanny Horse means, or, for that matter, what her seemingly deliberately maintained sexual distance from him might imply.  The grulla did disappear suddenly and mysteriously for a couple of months, and I wondered if her owners had either sold her or pastured her elsewhere for reasons related to breeding.  The evening that she was returned to the herd our household erupted in excitement.  “Nanny Horse is back!” my daughter announced happily.  We went out to see.  The silver dun assumed her position in the little herd with her usual aplomb. After a day, it was as if she’d never left.

A little over two weeks ago, setting out for the canyon, I walked out our back door.  I noticed the herd in one of the pastures nearest my neighbors’ house but didn’t pay attention.  Walking around the house’s west side, I was surprised to find Nanny Horse in the pasture bounding that portion of our yard, well away from the herd wherein she has maintained her social role conscientiously.  She stood broadside to the barbed wire fence line running parallel to the street.  Next to her, outside the fence, as near to Nanny Horse as he could get through the barbed wire barrier, stood a rangy chestnut stallion.

It took me a moment to recognize this animal as being from the corral down the road.  I don’t see him often, but a few years back he broke loose with two or three other horses. He trotted up and down the road past our house, bugling his challenges and displaying unabashed interest in the palomino mare pastured alone across the street.  He bickered with the big buckskin that was head of the herd our neighbors kept at that time.  They snapped and boxed through the fence.  I walked the other loose horses back to their corral, to which they readily returned.  But the stallion liked his freedom.  He had things to do and he meant to do them. Concerned that someone might be injured—including motorists driving too fast around the bend—I told my neighbors their stallion was raising a ruckus in the neighborhood. Immediately, they set out to drive him home—a challenging job.

Now here he was again.  In unison, he and Nanny Horse bent their necks around and looked at me.  It was a stunning sight—the tall, sharp red chestnut and the graceful silver dun—but their steadfast gazes, fixed on me, drew my attention more directly.  They gave an impression not only that I was intruding but also that they thought me a threat to their tête-à-tête.  As I walked toward our gate, I wondered what the stallion would do.  The nearer I moved to the road, the more agitated he became ‘til he drifted away into an open pasture.  Nanny Horse stood watching his retreat anxiously, attention fixed upon him.  I closed our gate to prevent his trampling our garden in search of easier access to Nanny Horse.  For a moment or two I wondered if I ought to alert my neighbors that their stallion was loose again.  I glanced at Nanny Horse.  It didn’t take a horse whisperer to interpret her look: She wanted to follow the stallion.  I decided against saying a word to anyone.  Feeling unhappy about disrupting their tryst, I went on my way. 

When I returned home, the truck the stallion’s owner drives sat in front of the pasture where the horse had slunk away from me.  The horse was nowhere in sight.  But Nanny Horse remained in the paddock where she had encountered the chestnut, looking down the road toward his corral, calling, calling.

For the next three days, the grulla remained in an agitated state, spending more time apart from the herd than with it.  She paced the fence line where she had met the chestnut, returning again and again to the spot where I had found them standing together.  She looked down the road toward his corral, neighing.  Or she separated herself from the herd in other ways, standing alone in one pasture or the other, making herself available.

Watching her part from the herd to open her prospects for joining with another reminded me of when I was fifteen, living on those five acres in Virginia.  I used to play basketball—often H-O-R-S-E—or baseball, softball, or football, mostly “catch” games—“500” or variations—with the neighborhood boys, who ranged in age from slightly younger than I was to slightly older.  Up ‘til I turned thirteen, I was able to outrun and out-wrestle them.  Even when they began surpassing me in strength and skill at sports, they let me in among them, a years-long history of companionship granting me sister status in a rough-and-tumble brotherhood.  There might have been little jolts of intrigue here or there, but mostly—really, it’s true—we were all just pals.

Except for one boy, Carl, a year older than I.  He was a back-of-the-bus boy, a troublemaker, with hell-if-I-care eyes and a dangerous mouth, when he felt like opening it.  To break up the back-of-the-bus boys, the bus driver assigned seats, placing Carl next to me.  We said not a word but built between us a thick barricade of schoolbooks and their discourses.  I remember wondering if he ever cracked his books open. Eventually, Carl drifted back to the bus’s emergency door.  Relieved to have the seat to myself, I stayed where I’d been put.  I had as little to do with Carl as possible ‘til he started showing up at my friend’s backyard basketball court.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.  What began as antagonism became a classic good-girl-bad-boy story.  My parents weren’t paying attention—in this case, a stroke of luck. When we were all together—me, Carl, Genie, sometimes Mike and Steve, sometimes my brother Paul—Carl treated me roughly.  I stood up to it, refusing to let him to drive me away, especially when the game was being played on my backyard court.

For a while, that’s how it went—Carl roughing me up, trying to get me to go away, me hanging tough.  Then the routine began to shift, moving off-court and off-diamond, onto the thick Kentucky bluegrass.  As daylight darkened, the other kids’ parents sent younger siblings or called the boys home by other means. Carl, who never seemed to have to answer anybody’s summons, stayed behind with me.  The court cleared, night fell, Carl’s touch softened.  We began horsing around in the cool bluegrass, choreographing as we went along a very private, deeply entwining dance spun of good-girl-bad-boy tensions.

Soon, my interest in playing basketball rested on whether or not Carl showed up to join the game.  I started separating myself from the boys, from my family—choosing times to hit the court when I knew the others were unlikely to come, usually after dark when only Carl was free to play.  His house stood two fields away from mine, but I knew that the twang of the basketball hitting the hardened dirt court surface carried across the distance.  Or sometimes, I’d skip the bouncing basketball call and do something cute, like blow bubbles with homemade “bubblestuff” beneath the streetlight that stood in front of our house.  Watching the bubbles drift through the light and fade into the night sporting baubles of streetlight glare intrigued me.  But more satisfying—the sight of Carl’s lean form materializing out of the darkness in answer to my bubble-invitation, often carrying a basketball we weren’t going to use.  Much.

Watching Nanny Horse return to the point of last contact over and over during those three days raised in me these strong memories. As I rolled my daughter’s wheelchair up and down on the porch, I recalled palpably how it felt to step into that irresistible influence clouding the edges of who I was, sweeping me away from familiar relationships into unknown depths of first love. I thought about how if these were wild horses, or even if they weren’t wild but had no fences drawing the lines, the drama would have been more intense.  Maybe the yellow dun would have driven Nanny Horse back to the herd or met the chestnut’s challenges to his sovereignty directly.  Maybe Nanny Horse would have looked for opportunities to get away, sneaking off her home range under cover of night.  But—at least this time—a few strands of barbed wire and post-wire or metal gates did three-quarters of the yellow dun’s work for him.  After those three days of fruitless searching and calling, the gulla gave up, rejoining the herd without prompting, turning her mind again to the business of finding a few blades of green sprouting from overgrazed ground, clipping them off with her teeth.

A real biting, kicking, screaming fight between stallions would have been an event. As it was, what happened between Nanny Horse and the chestnut stud registered barely a blip on the neighborhood’s screen.  They’re horses—just horses.  They’re everywhere.  They get loose.  Their owners recapture them.  Often, they go back to the pasture or corral without much of a protest.  When somebody wants to ride a horse, they entice it, sometimes with something as obvious as a nice mix of oats.  Folks breed their horses as they wish or according to some strategy that they have in mind, maybe a strategy they’ve used for decades, perhaps refining things a bit here or there as more information on genetics emerges and somebody reads an article.  It doesn’t matter to the horses.  After all, no stallion bears the slightest interest in whom his daughter marries.  And no filly or mare is picky about with whom she chooses to horse around.

One of my hobbies is collecting words carrying the meaning of “understanding” and whose root words are bound up in the metaphorical pairing of perceiving and grasping—of aligning the focus of attention on something and the physical act of laying hold upon or seizing.  The American Heritage Dictionary gives the following definition for “understand”: To perceive or comprehend the nature and significance of; grasp. See synonyms at apprehend.”  There follow three more definitions relying upon the words “comprehend” and “grasp.”  At the heart of both “apprehend” and “comprehend” lies the Latin root prehendere, “to seize.”

Here is a partial list of other words and phrases conveying the concept of understanding that contain root words set in the act of grasping or seizing:

apprehend
comprehend
comprehensive
prehend
apprehensive
grasp
get
prehension
seize
have hold of (an idea)
take hold of (an idea)
get hold of (an idea)
prehensile

The list goes on.  Interesting to know: the root of prehendere, “ghend,” meaning “seize,” “take,” runs deep into words like get, also formed from “ghend.”  The word beget means, at its depths, “acquire.”  Words like forget mean “lose one’s hold.”  The fun word guess means, at its playful roots, “try to get.”

Also related:

apprentice (formed from the past participle of apprehendere, “to seize”)
apprise (also from apprehendere)
comprise (from comprehendere)
reprehend (from prehendere)
prize (as in “something worth gaining,” from prehendere)

And so forth.

The root “ghend” likewise figures into words like predatory and prey.  Well, naturally.

I wonder what it means that so many of our words for knowing or learning rely so heavily on the physical fact of the structure of the human hand and its ability to close over or upon objects—on the act of manipulating or acquiring.  I’ve wondered how deeply this metaphoric take on knowing has affected the way we understand, form our worldviews, and otherwise approach being-in-the-world. 

What, I’ve mused, is knowing or understanding to creatures who don’t have hands or whose hand-like structures have become adapted for other purposes—you know, like birds’ wings are for flight?  In his book The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild, Craig Childs notes that if you inspect the bones of bird wings, they will “anatomically correspond exactly to each human bone from the arm to the longest finger.  But in birds, the forelimb is compacted and simplified so that the wrist, hand, and fingers are fused into a single elongated bone.”  He concludes, “one of the more structurally advanced animals of the planet is the bird” (p. 101).

What is knowing to birds, whose tipmost wing feathers are able to spread on the moving, changing air like open fingers of an ungrasping hand?  If so many of our words for learning and knowing are based upon our all-important opposing thumbs and the mechanics of grasping, are birds’ conceptions of their being-in-the-world based upon the physical structure of the wing and its ability to gain lift?  Having watched swallows, swifts, and golden eagles as they work with wind flow and gravity, high above any perspective I can gain from my place on the cliff they zip by or wheel past, I’ve begun to think their language and being rides, so to speak, on the wing.

Personally, I think humans missed out when they chose opposing thumbs over wings.  This, though our ability to grasp and hold in part made it possible for us to conceive of and build airplanes.  And, using our hands, some of us can swim, something only a few birds can do.  It might be said we’ve got the best of all possible worlds, but I wonder if, at times, we might rely too heavily upon the this very basic action of grasping in defining ourselves in relation to the world around us.  At times, does knowing as a form of grasping lead us astray and cause us to miss that which cannot be seized upon?

Another thing—why do so many of us limb-grasping, ladder-climbing, hand-over-fist human beings dream of flying after we close our eyes at night?  Is this some yearning or understanding that exceeds our grasp-sense, maybe even carrying us beyond its reach?

When the mind opens to new awareness, is it actually “grasping” a new concept or is it letting go of  a favorite perch?  What is flying to humans, that we should dream of it when we let go of the day?

____________________________________________________________

Childs, Craig.  The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1997. 

Just as satisfying as the re-immersion into moving depths of beauty have been chances to learn how to live with other species with whom we share this place.  It’s been decades since I lived in an area as—can I say “wild”?—as this, where encounters with insects, animals, and undomesticated plants happen most days, even in winter.  It’s become clear to me that I’ve lived most of my life with a raging case of what Erich Fromm called biophilia—an attraction to living things and zoetic systems.  I deeply enjoy finding a stance in relation with creatures of all kinds.

I’ve written many times (here, here for instance) about the Woodhouse’s toads (Bufo woodhousii) that live in the yard.  The second spring after our arrival we hired a man with a small tractor to plow our garden area, which resulted in the gruesome deaths of two toads still hibernating in the softened and better-watered garden soil.  It hasn’t been lost on me that this common toad, one of the most efficient biological pest control blessings that can come to your garden, is disappearing from areas that used to support healthy populations.  Cars, lawnmowers, and loss of breeding habitat have hastened its loss.  I hoped to make my garden into a toad-safe zone, not only for the advantage their presence provides the garden but also to enjoy their charming company.  Thinking about the tilling/toad mortality problem, I decided to try building raised-beds, which we’re still in process of putting in.  The beds are three feet wide—the width of a roll of weed barrier—and about ten feet long.  In the spring, I can easily turn the self-contained dirt over with a shovel, which so far has not resulted in injury or death to a single toad. 

The big surprise has been how much the toads like the beds, especially the ones sporting weed barrier covers.  The first year I put beds in I noticed that the weed barrier would start rustling loudly at sunset.  Toads emerged from beneath the plastic through the holes I’d cut when I set tomato, pepper, or squash seedlings through through it.  It turns out these animals prefer to aestivate in the softer, deeper dirt beneath the weed barrier, which keeps the beds warmer, more moist, and makes them more inviting overall than surrounding bare ground, which bakes hard in the high desert summer.  The beds also seem to make up somewhat for the loss of gopher and prairie dog burrows, disease having shrunk down the populations of both animals to almost nobody.  Toads, tiger salamanders, and various insects are among those who make heavy use of active and inactive burrows.

This spring, I put in five new raised beds.  Old hands at recognizing them, the toads laid claim as soon as I finished building, filling, and covering them.  Last spring, I also put in a “toad spa” at the end of the flowerbed, a black plastic seed tray I keep filled with water.  Because we ended up with three or four very small toads last year, I added flat stones to the spa so that the little guys, able to plop in easily, would not find themselves trapped by the tray’s straight walls. They learned immediately to use the pool stairs.  On evenings capping off hot, dry days, it’s not unusual to find at least one fat bufo lounging in the spa, re-hydrating as it sops up water through seemingly impenetrable warty skin.

Over the past couple of years, the Woodhouse’s toads that frequent our garden have become more vocal, emitting chirps and other short noises.  I’m not sure what to make of these mostly silent toads suddenly speaking up. 

It isn’t that toads never talk.  During the mating season, the males gather around irrigation catch ponds and belt out their wh-u-u-a-a-aah love bray.  The garden toads’ words or single-sound sentences remind me of the language of small birds—high-pitched pips.  In the past, we’ve heard them occasionally make sounds like these when the cats harassed them or some other insult befell.  But now some of the toads chirp frequently when we’re out among them.  I suspect they might be developing this system as a kind of warning to help us avoid stepping on them or otherwise colliding.  If that’s the case, I appreciate their help in avoiding accidents. 

The hummingbirds that begin arriving mid- to late April have also made an impression on my family, one that carries into my children’s dreams.  We set up feeders the first spring after we moved in and the kids began establishing a pretty intimate relationship with these intelligent, tough little birds.  Back then, the black-chinned hummers (Archilochus alexandri) felt confident enough to sit on my kids’ fingers to dip into the nectar cups.  Acquiring cats broke that trust, with some of the birds falling to the cats’ predation.  Since we invite the birds into our yard, we have tried teaching the cats to leave them alone, with some success.  Still, we keep watch and have not encouraged the birds to return to that previous trusting relationship.

Even though the hummingbirds do not behave as familiarly as they did, they’ll still flock to the feeders if you stand in front of cups and keep still.  Some birds that return every year understand how the system works.  Like the toads, they put it to good use.  When the feeders run dry, one or more of the bolder hummers find me and urge me to refill them.  This happened just a few days ago when a black-chinned bird, an immature male or a mature female, accosted me almost as soon as I stepped onto the back porch to wheel my special needs daughter up and down in preparation for feeding her.  The bird followed flying off my right shoulder, then passed me, did a U-turn, flew back, then hung in the air about two feet out until it felt assured of eye contact.  It whirred back to the empty feeders then repeated this phrase of flight.

Also on that same day, for the first time, a male rufous hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus) made a gesture of interest.  I’m not sure why he did this, since these birds are generally very skittish, nowhere near as sociable as the black-chinned hummers.  At the feeders, they are the most aggressive competitors, warning the black-chins off with angry buzzing chirps and unceasing midair body-slams. Habitual barroom brawlers, the rufi.

A mature male rufous is a spectacularly done-up bird, adorned in shiny coppery or orange feathers and, at his throat, a neon reddish-orange gorget.  As I approached the feeders while pushing my daughter in her chair, this bird left the feeders—totally expected.  But as I turned the wheelchair I noticed he didn’t simply zoom away but flew parallel to the porch and then hung in the air, hovering just the other side of the nearest post.  Something was up. I watched the bird closely as I turned the wheelchair and started back down the porch.  When I had taken just a couple steps, I saw the bird hovering.  At my look, it made a wide arc onto the porch and headed toward me.  This bird was making an approach; after four years of hummingbird watching, I recognized the particular phrase of flight.  The rufous flew directly at my face at a cautious, non-aggressive speed then stopped inches from my eyes and hung midair, looking me over.  Birds absolutely make eye contact. Along with other animals, they accomplish a great deal of communication this way.  It’s a bit hard to feel hummingbird eye contact because their eyes are so small and dark, but you can learn.  Hummingbirds were my first teachers in the art of avian eye contact.  That was absolutely the closest I’ve ever seen a rufous hummingbird and I stood still and held my breath as the strikingly handsome bird satisfied whatever questions it had then buzzed away.

European paper wasps (Polistes dominula) have built nests under the back porch roof, along the cobblestone retaining wall, and in upper corners of garage doors.  As the name suggests, these wasps are not native to this country but live abundantly from the Mediterranean Sea to China.  They arrived in the U.S. in the early 80s and have spread across the country in less than thirty years.  Their black and yellow striping sometimes causes them to be mistaken for yellow jackets—my daughter made that error—but they’re longer in the body, have longer legs, and behave nowhere near as aggressively as do yellow jackets. 

I lived with European paper wasps in Payson.  They hung their paper nests beneath the front porch roof and flew down to drink whenever I watered the herb garden.  As closely as we sometimes shared space, I found these wasps respectable neighbors.  For an invasive, non-native species, they provide appreciable biological pest control, feeding upon cabbage butterfly larvae, tomato hornworm larvae, and tent caterpillars.  The other day, we witnessed one catch a fly.  Some fly bites not only hurt but can also result in (among other illnesses) cellulitis, a painful, even dangerous disease. 

European paper wasps frequent the hummingbird feeders to sip sugar water, resting boldly on the nectar’s surface tension, legs spread wide like water striders’.  Look-alike yellow jackets have neither the right body shape nor the necessary confidence to set down directly on the water.  They land on the cups’ edges, balance there, and dip in or, if the cups are low, scrabble carefully down to nectar’s edge.  When yellow jacket traffic increases toward the middle of summer and into autumn, they’re inclined to fall in the nectar and we have to rescue them.  This never happens to the European paper wasps, who also drink water from the toad spa, the ends of their legs visibly dimpling the water’s surface shine. 

European paper wasps can and will sting any creature they think poses a threat to their nests, but I have yet to have one sting me or even make a warning pass.  I’ve been stung lots of times by yellow jackets, including one very close call where my children, their uncles and I stirred up a nest as we hiked through a forested canyon.  Paper wasps appear to study the situation before acting.  They not only seem able to recognize a frequently appearing human but also able to recognize non-threatening activities around their nests, such as running a garden hose up over the retaining wall very near their paper combs.  Also, it’s not unusual for a wasp to fly up to me while I’m wheeling my daughter up and down and even to follow us, as if out of curiosity.  I’ve witnessed similar behavior from other wasps when I’m hiking.  A pepsis or tarantula wasp might suddenly alter its course to circle me closely two or three times as I walk along then fly off to go about its business.  Because my daughter doesn’t react well to insect bites or stings, I tend to shoo off paper wasps to reduce the risk of accidents.  They don’t seem to take my dismissal personally, even when I clip them. 

European paper wasps might pose a threat to some birds, not because they dislike birds but because they like to nest in birdhouses.  While these insects are experiencing what’s called “ecological release”—that is, they have no native predators or parasites to control their numbers—many experts assert confidently that, sooner or later, some opportunistic species or another will begin culling their numbers.  Right now, they’re living in their golden age.

So, questions: In living so closely with these animals and insects, have I stripped them of their wildness?  Are they being domesticated, cultivated, or tamed?  Am I doing the toads disservice in providing them comfy beds and a garden that attracts insects they like to eat, a spa where they can satisfy their thirsts, and safe passage? 

In supplying the black-chinned, broad-tailed, and rufous hummingbirds nectar to fuel their daily bug-hunts, am I somehow disadvantaging them?  Does responding to the birds’ social gestures somehow ruin them? 

In taking the risk of allowing paper wasps to live in peace on my back porch and retaining wall rather than blasting them at night, when they’re blind, with a can of insecticide fitted with a nozzle that shoots a 20-ft. stream of poison, am I failing to do my part to further mankind’s dominion over the earth?

The reason I wonder is because in reading Terry Tempest Williams’ Finding Beauty in a Broken World I came across this sentiment:

The prairie dogs in the far north area are unmarked, unstudied—wild.  They are so beautiful in this mountain setting of ponderosa pines and sage meadows (p. 141).

By “unmarked, unstudied” she means in comparison to the prairie dog population she’s helping conduct research on.  Her words suggest that the prairie dogs that are being studied, each wearing paint tagging to help researchers identify individual dogs, are no longer wild and suffer diminished beauty because of the human touch upon their lives.  This, even though the dogs live free in their home colony in Bryce Canyon National Park.

Which led me to wonder:  Just how do folks define the word “wild” when it comes to Nature?  Why might an animal be thought so much more beautiful for having little or no contact with humans than an animal of the same species that interfaces even slightly with people? 

If human contact de-wilds a creature, does that mean that people cannot be considered cogently wild in any remote sense?

Do you know what’s really wild?

However, something did come to mind the other day, musings upon a kind of predator-prey relationship that I jotted down in my hiking journal as I strolled through Crossfire.  It isn’t pretty, but I thought I’d pass it along.

Warning: This post shows Patricia in a mood.  If you’re in a mood today,  you might want to skip this one.   

May 21, 2009

Overcast, humid, cooler-that-has-been morning.  I set out for Coyote Way, the trail leading down into Crossfire Canyon.  As usual, I pass my mouldering friend, the dead coyote  lying off to one side of the trailhead.  I stop to look at him whenever I take this path.  

After a month of decompostion he looks considerably worse for wear, though that lovely triangular earform still holds up well.  Gone, the shine and softness his coat had when he was first dumped.  Matted patches have loosened, as if he were going through a heavy shed, or they have been peeled back in the course of some other scavenger’s work.  A gaping entrance into his inner cavern has formed in his side.   His coat has taken on the patina of old carpet across whose nap mud has been tracked and into whose fibers a wide variety of liquids has soaked.  The flies that earlier clouded his vicinity have gone through their cycle; no insects are visible, though something must be creeping through the body. Every time I stop here, I wonder how and why this animal died.  Anything could have happened, but the dominant reason folks kill these animals—if, in fact, he was killed—can usually be summed up in this word: competition.

 A week ago, winds blowing up out of the canyon carried the scent of the coyote’s chemical crush into the earth.  Today, cliffrose pollen lightly perfumes breezes swirling past.

Cliffrose bushes growing along the trail into Crossfire and scattered along its rim are approaching anthesis—their peak of efflorescence.  This time of year, the desert wind goes swaybacked carrying its heaviest loads of flower fragrance.  Nights have been awash with cliffrose musk, that grainy silver light the moon sheds, and loosely-jointed notes of mockingbird song. 

A few days ago when I was out here with my two ambulatory kids the wind raised redolent breakers of cliffrose pollen that splashed over our olfactory senses.   

Daughter: It smells like those three-color candy canes out here.
Me: That’s interesting.  I was just thinking how the desert smells candied.
Son: Just be glad we’re not living in the late Cretaceous Period.
Daughter: Yeah.  That’s when many plants smelled like rotten meat.
Me: Really?  Huh!
Daughter: Some plants still have that rotten meat odor.  Like carrion flower and skunk cabbage.

My son explained later that some scientists believe that when plants first began developing flowers they scented them like decomposing flesh to attract potential pollinators who were not yet pollinators, insects and animals that had evolved knowing nothing but decay.

Lately, Crossfire’s canyon bottom has smelled of cows and their calves.  I catch wind of them as I descend the last fifty or so feet into the stand of ancient cottonwoods that have begun dropping heavy limbs almost every storm.  The herd has been keeping to the better-watered sections of the canyon, clinging to the pools behind the beaver dams.   This happens to be the same section I travel on my walks.  Unlike the cow-less canyon rim, where flowers bloom untrodden, uneaten, and freely fragrant, here waft the ammonia and manure odors of cow urine and feces.  Fewer flowers bloom on this ground; either they’ve been eaten or, as I’ve seen before, they’ve been trampled before they could go to seed.  Cows’ hooves, bearing their 1000-1300 pounds of weight, churn up the ground, breaking it away in chunks along stream and arroyo banks.  Walking beside the stream, I discover cows have been using one of the beaver dams as a bridge, grinding it into the creekbed. 

Looking into the water below the dam I see tadpoles lying at the bottom of the creek.  Occasionally one stirs from place and shimmies to a new spot in the current.

About a week ago I came into the canyon only to be met by at every turn by the herd of black Angus (or maybe Angus-cross) cows and calves.  They’d spread themselves out along both sides of the creek and were drowsing in the heavier shade falling across the trail.   The trail itself was a mess.  I tried to avoid the bovines, but everywhere I walked I either rousted cows or they rousted me.  Their acrid odor hung thick around them.  That day, I saw a fair number of spring wildflowers blooming in the canyon.  Now, splashes of color from purple broadleafed penstemon and scarlet desert trumpet are greatly reduced.  Only the cacti thrive, having cleared safety zones around their succulent pulp with their pointed and hooked spines: clarets cup, hedgehog cacti, prickly pear, fishhook.  Their flowers proceed unmolested in efflorescence.

Two weekends ago the ambulatories and I hiked Kane Gulch.  That was a beautiful canyon, I intend to go back, but cattle had trodden heavily there.   Their waste showed that at the very least they likely had giardiasis, a highly contagious disease caused by a microscopic parasite of the Giardia genus, usually Giardia lamblia,  common to the region.  Over the last twenty years, giardia has become a prominent  cause of waterborn illness, infecting animals such as beavers and many domestic animals as well as humans.  Symptoms of the disease include flatulence, nausea, stomach or abdominal cramps, and severe diarrhea.  Rapid weight loss often occurs as a result of a giardia infection.

Kane Gulch was the worst-smelling trail I’ve ever hiked.  The air was bitter and weighted with the odor of disease—another kind of rotten-meat odor.  Rather than cow pies, sickly manure plastered the dirt of the trail.  The Crossfire cows seem healthier, but in the last four years I’ve been hiking that cayon I don’t think I’ve seen the ground in greater disarray, even when ATVers roared up and down the trail.

As I stand on the bank of the stream studying a beaver pond, I hear a sound and look up to catch sight of black hulks moving through the p-j forest on the opposite side of the creek—cows, lumbering, I think, more deliberately than usual.  When cows walk through the desert, they walk with a grumble, stamping the ground heavily.  They are the picture of awkwardness, moving along with the heavy crackle of brush, the clomp-clomp of their footsteps, and the clack of dislodged stones. As I watch them, my ears pick up an un-cowlike sound, a sharp metallic clatter over stone.  Looking upstream I see a young man wearing a baseball cap riding his horse down a stony knoll, cattle-driving.  Does this mean the cows are leaving Crossfire, at least for the time being?

Well, I’ve done a little cattle-driving.  Back in my BYU days, one of my roomates hailed from the Malad Valley of Idaho.  Whenever it worked out, I went home with her for the holidays.  While there, we helped out the family with ranch chores.  Once, her father asked us to move a herd of cattle to a fresh pasture, so we mounted up, my friend riding an experienced cutting horse, me riding a mare with a new black foal.  The foal felt afraid of me, panicking somewhat over my interest in his mother, but once I was on his dam’s back he pressed up against my leg as I rode, thinking me part of her.   The three of us plus my friend and her horse rode into the pasture, opened up the gate to the intended fresh-grass goal, then carefully worked the herd into that corner of the grazed-down field.  Just as we were about to drive the cows and calves through the gate, that shy little foal got a notion into his head.  He ran into the middle of the herd of cows and bucked madly, scattering them.  My friend and I laughed in surprise and started all over again.

Another time, we took a small herd up into a nearby canyon.  This one had a bull with it.  With dogs helping, we moved the cattle across the fields, me feeling slightly intimidated by the bull, behind whose ponderous rear end I rode.  

The buckskin gelding I rode wasn’t intimidated.  Periodically, it extended its neck and bit the bull on the rump.  The bull skittered forward.  Meanwhile, the dogs milled around the herd, nipping at heels and biting legs, generally lording it over the cattle.  From time to time, the dogs turned to look anxiously into their masters’ faces, watching for cues, listening for praise.  They respected the horses because people rode them.  In this community of life, a clear hierarchy emerged to my view, one where cattle occupied the bottom rung and the ranchers the top.  Even that little foal had seemed to understand that small and new as it was it stood a little higher than the cattle.

While this barnyard caste system is in some ways inherent in the ancient history and natures of these animals, each of which have competed against the others over millenia for territory, food, and continuation of life, I think it wouldn’t exist to this degree, with cattle suffering as they do the arrogance of other animals’ supremacy, if human beings hadn’t through  intention and choice brought these creatures together in such tightly controlled social stratification.         

Right now, my concern is to stay out of the young man’s way, so I move out of his range of activity and minimize my presence.  We pass each other without a word, he on one side of the creek up in the p-j, I on the other.  I have no wish to holler across to him, and he makes no inquiry about my being there.  Like hikers and ATV riders, hikers and cattlemen have few words for each other.  Had I been on his side of the creek, I’d have spoken, but trying to make myself understood in an echoing shout?  Silence seemed the better option.

As I walk further north, however, I hear him whooping at the cattle: “Hey-yey, hey-yey, hey-yey, hey-yey, hey-yey, hep, hep, hep!”  Echoes fly loose, multiplying his notes and occasional sharp whistles.  I backtrack to listen more closely.   The canyon fills with this one voice, brims with it.  Its masculine quality stands out clearly, distinguishable in echoes.   In spite of its abrasion of the birdsong and overall quiet, I think, “That’s a beautiful and interesting noise.”  It reminds me of a male coyote’s call, which I’ve heard, a long wolf-like sound that halves the silence.

But having already begun over the last few years questioning my reasons for eating meat, recent experiences have cinched it: my days of eating beef are more or less over.  Ecologically, aesthetically, teleologically, the raising of cattle for human food is a disaster.   If I came across such messiness in language, my mind would reject it in distaste.  As I leave the canyon, stepping over cow pies, picking my way over rough-up ground, I think: There’s nothing here for me anymore.

Two afternoons ago, I stepped out onto the porch to see a male black-chinned bird flying anxiously feeder-to-feeder, all of which stood obviously empty.  Upon my appearance, he pivoted mid-air and zoomed half the length of the porch—about twenty feet—up to my face, so close I went cross-eyed looking at him.  There he came to a sudden, mid-air stop, forcing me to blink.  After a three-second hover four or five inches from my eyes, he turned and buzzed back to the nectar cups, indicating on them with his bill. 

It took some nerve on my part not to flinch, bat him away, or recoil reflexively.  Over the last four years, I’ve learned to trust hummers’ flying skills and to appreciate their gift for interspecies communication, but sometimes their less-than-subtle approach still shakes me a bit.  With a drop or two of adrenaline kicking my heart, I said, “All right, all right,” went back into the house, and mixed a fresh batch of sugar water, which I dutifully divided between the four cups.

A few days earlier I performed this replenishing ritual with a bold, black-chinned male hovering around my hands.  The first step is to clean and rinse out the open cups with hot water.  Along with the jar containing the sugar water mixture, I set aside the wash water then tap the feeders to warn ants gorging on remains that the apocalypse is at hand.  Most run for it, I shake out those that don’t then set about washing the cups.  That clever male, possibly the same one that accosted me a few days later, understands that if the sugar water isn’t in the cups when I’m there, that means it’s in one of the two containers sitting on the railing.  He hovered anxiously, occasionally trying to taste the hot water, but I shooed him off to prevent his burning that long, thread-like tongue.  The last time I shooed him, I clipped him.  Alarmed that I’d actually touched the bird, I watched for signs of insult or injury.   He appeared unfazed, urging me to be done with my business so he could get on with his.  Surprised by his lack of concern, I remembered: these guys body-slam each other mid-air all the time.  What’s one soft finger flick to him?

Until we put up those feeders, I had no inkling that black-chinned hummingbirds had an aptitude for close human interaction.  Hummers always seemed skittish to me, half-immersed in another dimension of being, an accelerated world co-existent with mine that sometimes slowed down to intersect with mine but that withdrew beyond reach in a flash.

When we moved to southern Utah, we put up household hummingbird feeders for the first time and marveled at how the birds swarmed to them, sometimes as many as two-dozen at a time.  My kids learned that if they sat or stood very still by the feeders and placed a finger along a cup’s edge, the birds would perch there as they dipped into the sugar water.  After that, it didn’t take the hummers long to begin pestering when the cups were drained, flying up to us when we stepped onto the porch, hovering just off our shoulders when we walked in the garden.  When we were in the yard, they would even fly down to us from the feeders, and, once they had our attention, swoop back up, alerting us to their need.  In these ways, the birds began braiding their ways into ours, winding deeply into our souls.

Commonly, three species of hummingbirds visit our feeders: the black-chinned (Archilochus alexandri) which arrives the earliest and stays the longest; the broad-tailed hummingbird (Selasphorus platycercus), a beautiful bird that makes a bell- or cricket-like trill as it flies; and the rufous hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus), the most aggressive of the three, the males of which species show flashy, copper-colored feathers and iridescent orange gorgets.  In the spring, these three species arrive in that order, with the rufouses showing up in June.  The black-chinned hummers are not only the most populous of these three species of Trochilidae but also the most human-tolerant.  The broad-tails will approach gingerly if we hold very still, but the rufouses prefer not to have to look on us at all if they can avoid it.

That first year we lived here we were surprised to find at the feeders robin-sized yellow-orange birds with white-striped black wings, and sporting, as my kids put it, black goatees and sunglasses.  We identified them as Bullock’s orioles (Icterus bullockii), an orchard bird that I’m guessing observes where hummingbirds flock to locate the good stuff.  The orioles remain constant patrons, showing up in the area slightly after the black-chins arrive.  They don’t like the ants and with their beaks flick them off feeders.  This year another oriole showed up, the Scott’s oriole (Icterus parisorum).  He upset the feeder community with his possessive attitude.  A pair of house finches (Carpodacus mexicanus) stops to drink several times daily, the female chittering the whole time in the lyrical language these birds speak.  Though we can’t get as close to them as we do the hummingbirds, the Bullock’s orioles and the finches have become similarly human-tolerant.  I can carry on a phone conversation within eight feet of the orioles and they’ll continue drinking, keeping an wary eye on me. The finches will come to the feeders while I’m sitting directly across from them.  If I move much, they choose the better part of valor.

As I learn better how to interact with other species, I recall often something Barre Toelken says about Euro-Americans and Native Americans in his book, The Anguish of Snails:

…since we have pushed ourselves into the Native consciousness for the past five hundred years, much of the traditional art is already addressed to us, aimed at us, and performed in front of us (in many cases because of us).  It reflects our presence as well as tribal consciousness.  So our considerations are not just another charitable exercise in understanding “the other” but an attempt to recognize our own presence in the picture, a picture that, despite this ironic inclusiveness, is nonetheless constructed and understood from a different set of assumptions than our own (38-39).

We could say something similar about human relationships with animals, domestic and wild.  Swap the word “animal” for “Native” (though “native” works for animals as well as for indigenous peoples) and substitute “thousands of years” for “five hundred years,” switch “behavior” with “traditional art,” and I think that first line would remark well on the nature of and potential for our involvement with animals as well as serve as a statement about our current dilemmas of relation with them.  As with the Euro-American stance toward Native Americans, human efforts to preserve or allow for the presence of other species needs to be more than a “charitable exercise in understanding” Other—which, regardless of its seeming a charitable stance, is still just the usual human tendency to objectify and separate out the “not us,” even if benignly.  To act well toward Other, we need to be able to imagine ourselves in relation with that other, not acting from a stance outside the realm of shared community.   The latter approach is not approach at all but almost always proves to be a managerial and manipulative position assuming control rather than a dance of life.  Also, as Toelken remarks, it’s important to consider how any relation might be constructed and understood from a perspective sharply different from one’s own and pay attention to what arises.  Animals will tell us just about anything we want to know, if we teach our eyes to see and ears to hear.

I’ve mentioned this before, but since that first year of close interaction with the hummers, my son, now nineteen, and my daughter, now twelve, have wakened late March mornings for the past three years and walked out of their bedrooms with these words: “I dreamed the hummingbirds had returned.”  They speak these words as the birds turn their minds toward working their ways back to our area from Mexico and Central America.  These dreams have become a rite of spring, the awakening of consciousness to the impending arrival of some Other, now no longer strange, but a willing bond of life to life.  That bond is never what we think it is—it is always more.  Be that “Other” animal or person, misunderstanding is inevitable, but rather than pointing up the futility of reaching accord, misunderstanding lights up the depths of possibility. The longer the dance, the deeper the meeting.

Less than a week ago, the ginger-colored palomino gave birth to a pale palomino foal with a white blaze and one white sock.  Watching the equine tyke grow has been great fun.  The birth of the colt stirred up the herd.  Naturally, they were curious about who had come and wanted to pay their respects.  But the dam has been fiercely protective of him, biting and kicking to drive herd mates back.  At times, she’s separated herself and the colt from the herd, running with him down into the forested plot behind us to send a message to the others.  When she’s done that, they’ve neighed, bugled, and nickered, calling her back, especially the stallion.  Despite the dam’s threats, the dun mare has insisted on following, keeping a close if much discouraged companionship with the dam and foal.   Eventually the mares rejoin the herd, the dam, uneasily.  She stands ready to flash out a hoof or two if anybody gets too close to the colt.

Yesterday afternoon the colt was snoozing on the ground of the middle pasture while his mother grazed her way to a point some distance off, the pale dun mare at her side.  The yellow dun stallion, the colt’s sire, was also lying down several yards from the colt.  I missed how this happened, but I looked up to see the stallion on his feet charging the colt who was running in terror in the wrong direction, away from his mother.  The commotion drew the attention of the colt’s dam and the dun mare, who streaked toward the stallion as two arrows flying toward one heart.  With precise and forceful body language both mares placed themselves between the stallion and the colt.  They bit, kicked, and postured to drive him back.  Then, walking with the colt sandwiched safely between them, they escorted him to the next pasture. The two geldings followed these three, but the stallion, properly chastised, remained alone in the middle pasture.

Later, I looked out to see that the stallion had slipped into the front pasture with the others.   The dun mare noticed, too, and quickly herded him back into the middle pasture, nipping his neck and making it clear that he wasn’t welcomed.  Then she stayed in that pasture with him, guarding the gateway and blocking his way back in, occasionally moving in a little closer to graze at his side.  I think this was not only a continuation of the social drama—that is to say, she was still correcting his behavior toward the foal—but also I had the impression she stayed with him to offset the anxiety a stallion would feel being cut off from his herd.  The stallion is heavier and stronger than the dun mare, but where that foal is concerned, her will burns more brightly than his.

As the afternoon wound down, the dun mare let the stallion back in with the others, but at his every movement, very deliberately, she positioned herself between him and the still-united body of mother and colt.  I found watching the body language of the horses very interesting.  Much is said through eye contact and body posturing; through those gestures, much is understood.  Also interesting: the joint, focused intent of the two mares in nurturing the foal, one the mother, taking stellar care of her gangly little offshoot, and the other assuming the chosen role of resolute guardian, not just of the foal, but of his mother, too.