I’ve been following a wild animal sightings page for a couple years and it started with useful game cam shots and pictures of tracks, a place a wildlife biologist might pause while scrolling. Lately I see more from hunters hoisting lifeless bags of fur in their arms, which is a form of sighting, though I prefer living wildlife to not. Scientific articles and important commentary pops up and I’ve gotten a few useful leads from the site, but you have to weed through thousand comments of people screaming at each other’s walls.
One question in bold that got hundreds comments and ten times as many likes and dislikes was, simply, “WHY DO LIBS LOVE EVERY SPECIES MORE THAN THEIR OWN?”
Comment sections are hell for faith in humanity. I don’t know who the libs are exactly, but in a world of heavy industry and mounting dangers posed to most species, people who love animals more than ourselves are absolutely needed.
I found this to be an insulting question, insulting to those who don’t vote Democrat, or whatever the definition of libs is. In my travels, I’ve found just as many conservative folks who care for and see animals as equals.
An ecologist of mixed Raramuri and Western Apache descent recently said to me, “Humans are the dumbest of the animals.”
This post originally appeared in 2011, when apparently I had the sensation of technology accelerating into escape velocity. I could have had no idea what was to transpire 14 years later, but looking back at this piece, the toddler still seems like an emblem of the age—our new age of AI.
Little fingers swipe and stab at the iPad screen. An arrow traverses the “slide to unlock” bar and the monitor scrolls to the third page of apps, where YouTube’s icon zooms into yesterday’s search results. My one-year-old son chooses his favourite episode of Pocoyo – an animated, Spanish children’s show that’s been translated into English and narrated by the incomparable Stephen Fry.
Before my son was able to utter the word “poco,” directing an adult to find the TV program for him, he could do this series of actions to meet his own needs. When he tired of Pocoyo, he could press the square button to close YouTube, scroll over to the videos app and press play on Curious George, restarting the movie if necessary.
Much as I’d like to attribute his ability to early signs of brilliance, a more parsimonious explanation involves the intuitive user interface, combined with his native status in this generation of technology users.
Anyone else having trouble focusing? Me, too. This week, while trying to write this blog post, I spent an inappropriate amount of time looking at prepared meal delivery services with no plan to purchase anything. The food just looked so calm and pretty in its little jars.
So I do what I often do when I get stuck: I texted Helen to ask what she thought I should write about.
She responded almost immediately. “Something nice and small that knows nothing about the absolute [redacted] chaos around it.”
So, my friends, let me introduce you to Delectopecten thermus.
This first ran on June 15, 2020 but it is about what happened the previous January. January 2020: things were objectively scary, what with an honest-to-goodness international pandemic and a blind-sided health community. I don’t think things have objectively improved since then, not on the whole, because even though that pandemic wound down, the next one is casting a birdy eye at us; and our leadership is objectively breaking records for human fuck-ups. Anyway, the sky is pretty orderly and predictable, and that was comforting then and still is and maybe for you too.
Last winter I was staying with friends who have a dark sky. (I don’t have a dark sky and even on clear nights I can hardly see Orion, which makes me sad but I’m used to it.) It was New Year’s Eve and as usual I bugged out early, went up to the guestroom, adjusted the blinds so that lying in bed I could see the sky, went to sleep. Fireworks at midnight, woke up, looked at the sky, watched the sparkles for a while, rolled over and went back to sleep. A couple hours later, my brain woke me up so it could look at the dark sky some more. I rolled back over, looked through the blinds at the sky, and there, sliding fast and exactly between the slats was a shining and glorious little meteor. Oh my! I thought. Oh my goodness gracious sakes alive! What an excellently superb way to start the new year, I thought.
I wondered whether my meteor was part of a shower. I didn’t know of any, though I looked it up later and maybe it was one of the Quadrantids, also maybe not. Anyway, I rolled over again, went back to sleep. But my brain had gotten obsessed with the sky and wasn’t about to give it up.
So I kept rolling over, looking, then rolling back over and going to sleep, then rolling over again, looking again and again. No more meteors. But the stars were so bright, one in particular which was maybe Arcturus or maybe Polaris, which in either case I thought was Venus because I wasn’t used to stars being so bright (Baltimore’s fault). Every time I woke up those bright stars were still there the way stars always are, always there.
Later, though, one time I woke up and looked again and the bright stars weren’t there. It must have clouded over, I thought. So I looked for clouds; no clouds. Then what happened? did something go wrong? Then I remembered that the earth turns, so the bright stars weren’t there because they had rotated behind the trees. Oh ha ha, I thought, silly you, forgetting that you should never second-guess the sky.
Which reminds me of the time years ago I got up in the middle of the night to look for an eclipse of the moon, the earth’s shadow crawling across the moon, turning it blood red. I looked out the window, no blood moon. The eclipse must be delayed, I thought, it must be running late. Then I remembered that eclipses don’t do that, eclipses are punctual, reliable, completely trustworthy. So I checked the clock again and yes, of course, I was wrong about the time. Don’t second-guess an eclipse either.
I love the mistake my brain was making — predicting the sky based on human norms. Second-guessing human events is fine, smart, a survival strategy: people are mistaken, things get delayed, situations get screwed up. When something is unexpected, isn’t going according to plan, look first for what went wrong. Our current combination of wired-in racism and a raging pandemic is a fine example, and the list of things that went wrong and are still going wrong must be setting some kind of historical world record for human fuck-ups.
For the universe, though, the standard operating procedure is order. The universe doesn’t go wrong. Even the change is orderly: the meteor follows the orbit of its disintegrated parent, Betelgeuse gets fainter and then brightens again. The universe operates lawfully on mostly-known physics.
I do love it when things that are so obvious and logical, things as widely-known as Newton’s laws, turn out to be a surprise. I love it even more when the universe continues to opt for order.
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Meteor, slightly cropped, by Tom Lee, via Flickr; Night sky, cropped, by Mathias Krumbholz via Wikimedia Commons;
Nest type: Burrow, northwest-facing, mid-slope, concealed from above
Penguin: Male, toe-tag no. 14113/RFID no. 37189
Device: AX3 accelerometer no. 99290, day three of a five-day deployment
Nest Contents: Two eggs
Notes: Purpose is to ground truth time-stamped accelerometry data from AX3 with observed behaviors in an effort to determine how frequently an incubating penguin goes down to the ocean to get a drink, among other things.
My favorite tree in the world grows about a mile along my favorite hiking trail in my neighborhood. I wouldn’t say it is the most beautiful tree; it is a little scraggly, and its trunk is not straight, and its needles seem a little thin. There are prettier trees on this particular trail, even, and certainly lovelier trees in other neighborhoods, and they are all perfect and their presence helps me to survive. But this one is my favorite, which is the right kind of tree, and also the toughest.
My favorite tree of all trees grows right through a granite boulder. It is such a big boulder that it feels like it should be honored with a different title, like it is an extension of Earth, not a loose rock left there by a glacier. The large boulder is the size of an enormous boulder and it is so large it makes me think of Half Dome, or some other pluton.
The tree is growing through a crevice in this boulder, and the tree’s main root, which is serpentine and thirty feet tall and looks like a trunk, is expanding that crevice as it grows. It is forcing the rock apart, and consuming part of the rock and the dirt beneath it.
The tree is the most determined living thing I have ever encountered.
Approaching the tree
I think about its genesis every time I visit it. I imagine two scenarios.
Maybe, a seed fell onto a divot in the boulder, which was filled with dirt and pollen and other litter. Then the seed froze in snow, which ponderosa seedlings require for germination, and in the spring the seed sprouted. The small bit of litter provided nutrients. Its tiny roots took hold in the divot, and eventually pushed down, and its roots and the ice cycle split open the boulder.
Or maybe, the huge crevice was there all along, and the seed fell from a bird’s mouth and slipped inside, tumbling all the way down. It froze, thawed, and took root. The tree then grew up through the crevice, feeling minimal sun, but finding shelter from the cold within the darkness of the boulder.
I am not a tree scientist, but I think either scenario is equally plausible. So either way, this tree as an infant saw some real difficulty, and persevered. Either it split a granite boulder and reached down, or it was consigned to live within the split and still made its way up toward the light.
What I mean is that it is possible to find the light and to split open the darkness. It is not easy. Darkness will always return, on cycles that can last a day or a month or four years or a generation. But life will flourish, even when light is not pooling down easily and constantly, even when what little light there is must be actively sought.
What I mean is that a ponderosa seedling can do it, and maybe so can I, and probably so can you. Trust my friend, the bravest tree.
Note: This post is best read on a computer screen, but a phone’ll still work.
One day last year, my friend Tonya messaged our group chat with a lovely update: a heron had landed in front of their house to eat a fish. The rest of us were enchanted by the thought of it, but none more so than Tye, who’d misread the message and thought the heron had laughed, not landed, in Tonya’s yard.
An even better image, we agreed. “A heron laughed in my yard,” Tonya said. “Now everyone complete that poem.”
