Fauna

Heartist Day

February 16, 2006

Like many other lucky people, I received Paulus Berensohn’s Valentine card this week. This year his drawing is, at once, more powerful and more pleading.

valentine_help1

Opening up the card, Paulus writes on the inside:

“Help”
the cry of the Heart
— to offer and give
— to need and receive
— to each other and our earth

For Paulus, the heart, in all its manifest shapes and sizes, is asking for help. In this time of global chaos, the cry of the heart is not specifically personal or solely human. Gaia also is hurting; anima mundi also is hurting; all creatures great and small are hurting. Love is needed everywhere.

pygmy_possum2 On the morning of this Valentine’s Day, I found, half drowned in the bottom of a water jug, a Little Pygmy-possum desperately trying to stay alive. It had fallen in looking for something to drink, but due to its small size—two inches long, 60 mm—it was unable to climb or jump out of the jug. Boy, did it look miserable.

While resident artist, Sally, cuddled the little guy close to her belly to help lessen any hypothermic conditions, a hot-water bottle was prepared and positioned in the bottom of a box, followed by lots of soft clothing. Here, the pygmy-possum was gently placed in a warming hollow of clothes. Giving us what looked like a heartfelt “sweet thank you”, it then burrowed deep into the fabric and disappeared out of sight.

Nothing could be done now but wait until nightfall and see if this tiny nocturnal marsupial revived enough to climb out of the box and find its way beneath the oven where, I suppose, it feasted nightly on the bits of food and crumbs dropped by the messy chef.

When Sally and I returned late from a trip to Hobart for our own food gathering and a dinner out, we noticed that the box was empty. We went to bed sleepy in the contented knowledge that all had turned out okay.

pygmy_possom_baby But, as in all matters of the heart, the doors of compassion, joy and pain keep opening and shutting. The “little guy” turned out to be a mother as, the next morning, I found two dead babies on the kitchen floor, most likely drowned while in the pouch of its mother and subsequently removed when she, herself, recovered. A third was later found by Sally.

All three are now buried under a stone at the base of the ancestral midden. May their little spirits rest in peace.

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Who’s winning?

January 12, 2006

Wedge-Tailed Eagle: Aquila audax; wing span approaching ten feet/ 2.9 meters; female larger than male; nest is a huge pile of sticks lined with fresh eucalypt leaves, often high.

Forest Raven: Corvus Tasmanicus; wing span approaching three feet/ .9 meters; large stick nest lined with bark, wool, 10m or higher in fork in forest tree.

These two wonderful birds are always hanging around Windgrove; the eagle majestic in flight, the raven cocky and cheeky.

eagle_an_raven But why can’t they get along? Singly or in groups of up to five, the much tinier raven will harass and dive bomb the eagle until the eagle drifts off slowly. I’ve watched ravens pump their wings furiously for long lengths of time to keep up with an eagle only to have the eagle soar off easily without the pesky raven bothering it. Minutes later the eagle returns and the chase is on again. How much energy is expended in an attempt to protect territory; territory that in the end is not protected. You see, the raven never wins. Somehow, though, it must gain some satisfaction (or entertainment value) from the harassment.

Some days I feel like the eagle, other days the raven.

Gunn_road_sign Recently, I put the large Gunn’s sign back out on the main road as my way of being the raven. The logging can’t legally be stopped, but I sure love harassing the bastards.

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Rent-a-Crowd

November 17, 2005

Here’s an interesting fact: If all the 6 billion people on this earth were to be placed in Tasmania (about the size of Ohio or Ireland), every person would have the equivalent space around them of a small back yard in which to live. Considering how over populated the world is, this almost seems an impossibility. Just goes to show that the problem the world faces isn’t so much the numerical number of people, rather their consumption habits.

If humans were equally spread around the globe, there would be so much space between each human that they wouldn’t see each other. They would then, should they desire company, be forced to make friends with all the other “people” in the animal and plant kingdom.

echidna_young Yesterday I went for a walk around the Peace Path in order to visit my nearest neighbours and said hello to around 50 wallabies, one echidna, 2 blue tongue lizards, 3 yellow crested cockatoos, 2 wedge tailed eagles, 2 kookaburras, 12 pademelons and a wombat in a burrow. And this was just the animal kingdom.

soccer_day The deck (with picnic table) on the ocean side of the house looks out to Storm Bay through about 75 wind shaped silver-peppermint gum trees. These “tree people” with their dancing arms doing a mass South American salsa, are alive with individual personalities and whenever I walk among them or sit on the deck with them, it is hard not to feel a real presence.

soccer_night Little wonder, then, that last evening when Australia played Uruguay in the final match for a qualifying position for soccer’s World Cup, I took my TV out of the closet and onto the deck.

I mean, really, who would want to watch such an exciting match as this all by themselves?

The game went into double overtime and finally settled with a penalty shoot out. The trees enjoyed the night in.

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Ancestral bodies

August 4, 2004

Walking along the beach this week, I saw several “creatures” washed ashore. Looking into the eye of one of them, the squid, I couldn’t help but see a portion of myself.

squid

Are we related?

When we hear the word “ancestor”, who does that bring to mind?

penguin 1 It is easy to hold to the notion that one’s grandparents or great, great grandparents are our ancestors. Even going back ten, twenty and thirty generations is easy enough to hold to the notion that those people born 1000 years ago are biologically linked to us.

What gets increasingly more difficult to embody is the notion that our “ancestors” might not look like us.

bird bones 2 I’m not talking about “Cro-Magnon” ancestors; I’m implying someone, something who was our forebear in the very, very, very distant past. Not in the Tertiary time period, nor the Cretaceous or Jurassic. Or even the Devonian. We’re looking back 500 million years ago into the Cambrian when the earliest members of our family tree were floating about in sun warmed ponds.

In this family, one brother swam off to the right, a sister swam off to the left and your great grandmother (to the 10th power) stayed put and married the boy next door.

The rest they say, is evolutionary history. The ancient brother’s fate eventually led to today’s Fairy penguin; his sister’s fate the Squid; all of us reading this blog arrived as humans, and, somewhere in all this the sea gull flew in.

Bill Bryson, in ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything, says this:

“The tiniest deviation” (i.e. swimming left or right) “and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms.”

And, for a good reason to wake up with a smile every morning, consider this by Bryson, as well:

“Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favoured evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely — make that miraculously — fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you.”

Three cheers for our good fortune. May we do good with the time we have been given.

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Ant

July 12, 2004

In our cultural mythology, ants are considered “community minded” and “patient” and “disciplined” builders of their miniaturised, yet vast, highly “militarised” societies.

Isn’t it marvellous that such tiny creatures could be such good role models for us “advanced” humans?

ants Being sick last week I had some time to read up on ants and follow them around the still green lemons in the atrium.

I’m sure all of us have seen ants moving along a line on the kitchen counter and have observed their antennal communications. What the occasional observer might not see is that, along with “touch”, what is more crucial to the ants’ organised behaviour is “smell”.

Depending upon the species, ants produce ten or twenty different pheromones to signal specific requests and warnings, passing them through physical contact or leaving them behind as chemical trails.

Aside from the numeric information that ant species number over 11,000 and their combined weight equals over half the weight of all insect species (total of 750,000; mostly beetles), it is the ants’ etymology of their entomology that most fascinates me.

Take their phylum, “Arthropoda” . Most of us would look at this and our minds will either go blank or some fearful image of a third grade teacher will bring a sense of dread or panic flooding back into consciousness.

However, we all know the word “arthritis” and know that it deals with “joints” (if somewhat swollen or inflamed). We, also, might know that podium, pedestal, pedestrian and podiatrist have something to do with feet. Therefore, ants belong to the phylum that simply means “jointed feet”; a phylum comprising classes of Insects, Spiders, Crustacca and Myriapoda.

The class of Insects has various orders, one of which is Hymenoptera. This contains ants, as well as their evolutionary cousins, the bees and wasps. The key to understanding why ants are included with bees is found in the breakdown of Hymenoptera. Every teenage boy knows that a Pterodactyl is a “winged” creature from the age of the dinosaurs. This same boy might also have discussed “hymens” with his class mates during lunch time with giggles of assured adult knowledge. “Hymen” is Latin for membrane. “Pter-” is Greek for wing or feather.

Hymenoptera is simply a membranous wing; something every queen ant has.

Within the order Hymenoptera, one family — Formicidae — contains all the true ants. The form of the ants is easy to recognise as compared with many other insects as all are the same basic shape and have a characteristic kink in their ever busy antennae.

Of interest here is that “form” in Latin means shape and beauty. It also means “ant”.

A person who studies ants, however, is not a formicologist; rather, a myrmecologist, from the Greek “myrmeco-” for ant.

Lastly, and of great interest is that to “formicate” (as opposed to fornicate) is to crawl like ants and to swarm with moving beings. Just possibly, group sex could be associated with new meaning.

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A close encounter

June 20, 2004

Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does It End?

There are things you can’t reach. But
you can reach out to them, and all day long.

The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God.

And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.

The snake slides away; the fish jumps, like a little lily,
out of the water and back in; the goldfinches sing
from the unreachable top of the tree.

I look; morning to night I am never done with looking.

Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around as though with your arms open.

And thinking: maybe something will come,
some shining coil of wind,
or a few leaves from any old tree —
they are all in this too.

And now I will tell you the truth.
Everything in the world
comes.

At least, closer.

And, cordially.

Like the nibbling, tinsel-eyed fish; the unlooping snake.
Like goldfinches, little dolls of gold
fluttering around the corner of the sky

of God, the blue air.

Mary Oliver (from Why I Wake Early)

Where Does the Encounter Begin, Where Does It End?

And yesterday, walking my morning walk,
looking at the dawn of a new day,
the world did come a little closer

in the form of a wedge tail eagle
(wing span 2 meters/6’6″).

Several times it swooped passed.

If not the eagle’s feathers,
than surely the draft from its wings is what
I felt upon the nap of my neck
when I bent my head to the side
as it flew by.

An extended arm could easily have
grabbed a talon had one
or both
been distended.

Twice it landed upon the hillside above
around 15 meters/ 50 feet away.

Twice I walked to eagle as Mary Oliver
would ask of us:
“Reach out with your arms open.”

I am not professing that a great spiritual encounter
came with this engagement.
In eagle’s eyes, I might
only have been a possible breakfast.

But the knowing that fills me,
is that being “present” every waking
hour here at Windgrove is transformative.

By walking and looking, by swimming and looking,
by constantly “reaching out”,
I am slowly dissolving into earth;
into earth’s cycles of life and death.

Peter Adams

wedge tail eagle The eagle I encountered today was not afraid of my human form. In eagle’s eyes was my body on offer to feed him/her yet? Happily for me, no.

Will my body be on offer in the future? Happily for me, yes.

I have taken from the earth all these years to sustain myself. It will be an honour to give back what flesh is left on my old bones.

This solstice eve, I give thanks that, although the dark is at its longest, the light that comes into our lives on even the shortest of days can be staggering.