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Hudson, by contrast, thought that humans were generally overrated, and didn’t think it was an insult to be compared to an ass or a cockroach.
Hudson regretted that people were so often repulsed by the animals who understand us best, from rats to city pigeons; every living thing, he believed, had a right to be respected for what he called its “manner of life.”
Peregrines love solitude, crave routine, and avoid mistakes; Johnny rooks love novelty, crave company, hate boredom, and do risky things all the time, investigating anything that catches their curious eyes. Like us, they seem to have an uncontrollable urge for discovery.
During their long separation, the two New Worlds might almost have belonged to different planets, not least because the Cretaceous extinction occurred while they were independent of each other, and they were repopulated by different sets of survivors. These species radiated into new forms as the world recovered, and when the Americas finally joined hands again, their separate casts of living things met for the first time, in a moment one paleontologist called “one of the most extraordinary events in the whole history of life.”
It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. —John Fowles
chemical ecology, the study of how living things perceive the molecular world they can’t see or hear—and how they use it to lure, warn, and seduce one another.
Sifting through the ruins of these villages became a preoccupation for Hudson as he recovered his strength, and his discoveries came with a piercing sense of loss. He tried to keep this feeling at bay with two lies that comforted many Europeans in the New World: that the Amerindians’ demise was somehow inevitable, and that the people who had survived disease, war, and exile had been so debased by the ordeal that they no longer resembled their ancestors, who might have deserved respect.
the Quechua and Aymara languages spoken by subjects of the Inca Empire are still spoken by as many as ten million people in the highlands of Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Chile—a number nearly equal to the population of the Empire at its zenith, when it stretched from present-day Ecuador to Chile.
