Audubon on Other Minds and the Secret Knowledge of Animals

“In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear,” Henry Beston observed of other animals two generations before naturalist Sy Montgomery reflected on her encounters with thirteen different animals to insist that “our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom.”

An epoch before Beston and Montgomery — before ...