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April 20 - April 23, 2022
after breakfast we took the boat around the bend with Rambo and Brian, where the half-eaten fish dangled from an overhanging limb like medieval convicts at a gibbet.
Thousands of ants boiled out of the ground, bent on defending their queen and her brood, and I bounded away as fast as I could, spiders and snakes be damned.
I gazed at it, unsure how to feel, or what to say, in the presence of yet another mind-boggling animal I never knew existed.
I wanted to tell him that spending time with him in the bush auntie-man’s ancient home had been one of the greatest privileges of my life. But I couldn’t think how to say it in a way that wouldn’t sound insincere—or, worse, make him wonder if I was mocking him. So I am saying it now.
Dove opened a hinged panel on the back of its cranium to reveal the nest a wren had built in its brain case, using its eye sockets for a front door.
“Remember, man, that ye are dust.” The thought that a bird could one day build its home in my head was reassuring, a reminder that the natural world will always be heedless of human time, human history, human interest.
Islands are sometimes called laboratories of evolution, since their unique opportunities and constraints can produce strange and wonderful creatures—dwarf elephants, giant tortoises, flightless birds. But they can also be an evolutionary trap.
If they’re really so clever and flexible, why didn’t they conquer the world?
One of their regurgitated pellets, tumbling in the wind, was a tawny packet of fur and beetle shells.
So long as there’s enough water and sunlight, city life seems to suit ginkgoes just fine, and they’re so legendarily hardy that six trees even survived the atomic blast in the center of Hiroshima. But they’ve made it to the present only because we took them under our wing, moved them in with us, and refused to let them die.
And in January 2018, a young striated caracara named Louie escaped from the London Zoo in Regent’s Park and took up residence in nearby Kilburn, where he was spotted walking down a high street and, per the Camden New Journal, “ripping into a whole cooked chicken.”
Like them we’re a contradictory species, obstinate but flexible, and even though we chafe at change, we can bend our lives to fit almost any shape.
I couldn’t have imagined a clearer reminder that transplants and migrants of all kinds can be surprisingly resilient, and that though their lives might take new forms in new places, they always carry their first homes within them.
he did think that our unwritten history was woven into our bodies, and that civilization was only a “crust of custom around the still-burning core” of a deeper and older human nature.
In the last months of his life he was seen striding down the beach in all weathers as he gradually retreated from a civilization whose endless wars and political intrigues saddened and perplexed him. “The world is a shambles,” he wrote to a friend, “but I wasn’t born to set it right.”
This was his greatest theme: that only by looking to the nonhuman world, with all the tools of science and art, can we see what we really are—and that we aren’t as alone as we feel.
Despite their occasional griping, their fondest wish seems to be that the rest of us will one day come to meet them there, gaze with wonder and curiosity at the hidden story of life on our planet, and marvel at how little of it has been revealed.
A dark stream of blood trailed from the cow’s empty eye socket, and the martial-looking bird glared at us from beneath its dark crest, unwilling to abandon its prize: Yes, I eat dead things; and I look good doing it.
One story relates how the first women descended from the sky, but the men waiting below couldn’t have sex with them until Carancho removed a set of teeth from their vaginas;
Forgive me for staring, the Florida bird might continue, but I always thought we were the only ones. At which its cousins might throw back their heads and karruk- karruk for a long time. Señora, one might say at last, there are more of us than you could imagine. We have an entire continent.
always reminding me that not everything known is written, and not everything written is known.
From their point of view, you’re a figure from an ancestral nightmare—the boogeyman, come to life.
I’d see more and enjoy myself a lot better than getting put into jail for the night, you know, waking up with a hangover, and not knowing if you’re going to catch gonorrhea.”
“You know,” he said, “evolution is a great theory. But it doesn’t explain why all this shit is here.”
According to one example, peregrines would see a 24-frame-per-second film, which appears fluid to you and me, as a series of distinct, stuttering images. For a peregrine, the images would only begin to smooth out at 192 frames per second.
Father Cobo, one might read, I write you with good news, as one admirer of Reason to another. We have both seen through a glass darkly. The surface of the earth is in constant motion—and there have been many arks.
Male yapoks, uniquely among marsupials, also have a belly pouch—in which they tuck their genitals while they swim in rivers filled with hungry fish.
Wasps’ many disquieting variations on these strategies can make them seem almost sadistic, and even Darwin admitted to a friend that the elaborate cruelties of solitary wasps led him to doubt the existence of God.
It struck me that this was what people usually mean when they describe a place as “Edenic”: a palpable sense of being only one species among many, and not the most important one, either.
