"The world is so full of a number of things I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."
— Robert Louis Stevenson
The authors noted in this column all demonstrate the truth in Stevenson's words: by revealing the variety of nature, they offer us multiple paths to happiness. Their books range from the lapidary to the encyclopedic, and from city streets to the highest and lowest places on earth. They are linked, however, because their authors are both compulsive observers and exceptional reporters.
In Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness, Lyanda Lynn Haupt rejects the "chasm we set up between our daily lives ('non-nature') and wilder place ('true nature')." She hopes to use "the single most oft-encountered native wild animal" on the planet to show how we can become more aware of our place in the natural order, simply by attending to what we can see whenever we walk outside. Crows, she explains, amply reward our undivided attention. Birds that can recognize and even hold grudges against humans, play games among themselves, and even learn flying tricks from watching acrobatic aircraft certainly deserve more attention than we normally give them. And from crows, it is an easy step to connecting with the nonhuman lives around us everywhere.
In Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild, on the other hand, Eileen Meloy travels the wilderness of the American Southwest, following the bighorn sheep to understand how these ruminants survive despite threats ranging from mountain lions to military bombing runs. For Meloy, observing animals is a direct path to joy: "Something in the mind's structure, something physical, thrives on, depends on, the notice of other beings." By the end of her book, the reader is as engaged with the Blue Door Band of sheep, and their cousins, as if he or she had studied them at Meloy's side.
Two other writers reveal the world of predators: a raptor with whom humans have partnered for millennia, and a felid that preys on and is preyed on by humans.
Helen Macdonald's Falcon, one of a series simply labeled "Animal," describes the biology and behavior of falconidae, with chapters on Military, Mythical, Trained, Threatened, and Urban falcons. Macdonald recounts falcon feats — diving at up to 200 miles an hour, surviving G-forces four times as great as those that cause jet pilots to black out — and explains the birds' anatomic complexity, including five kinds of feathers, and an ability to use their beaks to draw from their glands a substance that both waterproofs their feathers as they preen and deposits a "vitamin precursor that sunlight converts to vitamin D," to be ingested at the next preening.
Macdonald observes that we employ falcons to confirm our views of human life. Earlier ages justified human hierarchy by projecting it onto the natural world and then using nature's "nobility" (falcons, lions, oaks) to show that class and caste were inherent in the world. Today, some see falconry as continuing a noble tradition, while others decry the brutality of both bird and sport. Macdonald notes, "This kind of analogical thinking can reach alarming heights." One British soldier and naturalist argued that birds of prey weeded out the weakest, and saw the defensive mobbing of predators by prey birds as "hysterical, abnormal, irresponsible" and "atrocious bad manners."
John Vaillant is the author of two remarkable books on nature, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed and The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, each set in a remote region where human impact has radically altered the landscape and its inhabitants. Reading The Golden Spruce on a train in British Columbia, I felt as if I saw more through Vaillant's eyes than I did through the train's panoramic windows, so I added The Tiger to my bedside pile. Opening the book, I was surprised to discover it wasn't about India, but about the Russian Far East. Tigers? Yes, for as Vaillant explains, "If Russia is what we think it is, then tigers should not be possible." But they are, because Amur tigers are huge "pair[ing] the agility and appetites of a cat with the mass of an industrial refrigerator," and so heavy-coated that they are acclimated to arctic conditions.
Unlike Haupt's crows, tigers everywhere cohabit uneasily with humans, and nowhere more so than in this region, nearer Beijing than Moscow. Vaillant's particular tiger apparently carried out a fatal revenge against a Russian hunter, and matched wits with a band of trackers and environmentalists for weeks until his death. Vaillant's portraits of the tigers, and of the subsistence hunters who share a brutal climate with them, show us the beauty and the cruelty of a marginal and threatened environment. (Vaillant is, by the way, a terrific advertisement for independent education. He attended Shady Hill School in Massachusetts, where his classmate was Sebastian Junger of The Perfect Storm.)
Caspar Henderson's The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary caught my eye in a museum store, because its cover was a work of art. Henderson's abecedarian volume uses drawing, microphotography, manuscript illumination, and skilled language to reveal 27 exotic creatures, from axolotls to zebra fish, with which we share the planet. (He doubles his X's to give us both xenoglaux and xenophyophore — one an owl, the other an abysmal foraminiferum. Now that we clarified things…)
But these 27 are only a start: Henderson informs us that there are hundreds of species under each label: more than 300 different octopi, 12 different families of eels, and 750 types of waterbear (don't worry, they're each only the size of a period). Henderson's ark is more spacious than Noah's, largely because two-thirds of his creatures live in the Book of Common Prayer's "great and wild sea… wherein are creeping things innumerable." In fact, many of these animals have only been discovered in the past half-century, and, Henderson notes, "a great number of very strange species still lurk on the threshold of human knowledge." His analysis is richly anatomical: he describes the variety of ways animals have found to take in light and other waves, as well as their strategies for reproduction, digestion, and thinking that outdo the most creative science fiction writers.
All these creatures exist in environments that are shared, daily or with great effort, by humans. As many of the writers observe, only by slow and attentive movement through the world can we understand the place we live, our planetary neighborhood. Two singular British walkers, for example, read nature through the lenses of literature and history. For Olivia Laing, going To the River means following the 42-mile course of the river Ouse (one of whose tributaries is the Uck) from its origins to the sea, always recalling that Virginia Woolf lived beside and died in these waters, as did hundreds of fighters in the Battle of Lewes (1264) between King Henry III and his barons. Her two-week journey takes us through a living, history-riddled land, with excursions into Greek and Roman myth, Shakespeare, Iris Murdoch, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, The Wind in the Willows.
In The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, mountaineer Robert Macfarlane treks across Britain, Spain, Palestine, and Tibet, taking as his companion the great walker and World War I poet Edward Thomas, whose last days in France are given their own somber digression among Macfarlane's varied peregrinations (a word, notably, applicable to both humans and falcons). Macfarlane walks "that man alive should understand man dead," in poet John Masefield's words. After many near-exhausting journeys, on precipices and under the threat of military fire, Macfarlane concludes with a short beach stroll, stepping in 5,000-year-old human footprints that were covered by the sand for millennia and are now revealed for a single low tide, reminding us of our evanescence and our permanent ties to nature.
These writers see more than the rest of us see because they know what they are seeing. Walking through a field, they find infinite variety where most see only generic greenery. In one small field, Olivia Laing names 21 growing things, including bent, brome, Yorkshire fog, and "great masterwort, also know as melancholy gentleman."
All have mastered special languages that help them differentiate what to us would be only "a blooming, buzzing confusion." Macfarlane offers a treasury of names for paths found across the countryside: drongs, sarns, snickets, bostles, lichways, herepaths, and a dozen more, each with its specific characteristics and human uses. Macdonald tells us that everything a falcon has, is, or does has its own vocabulary: falcons have petit singles and pounces, crines and filoplumes; falcons, be they eyasses, passagers, or haggards, will snurt, pitch, bowse, and feak.
Finally, writers report what they see in style as rich as their observations. Macfarlane, for example, chooses novel verbs. Flowers in a meadow were "boiling with bees," coastal land was being "bitten back by the ocean," and "the sea shampooed the rocks." Meloy loves similes. On a cold day, she says, "my hand and foot bones felt like x-rays look." The horns of large mountain sheep appear "like melting Viking helmets," while threatened musk oxen "stand shoulder-to-shoulder… like a cinder block wall that overdosed on hair-growth stimulants." Henderson plays with the languages of science to give us such images as a pink octopus, which spreads its tentacles into "a bathypelagic tutu." Just flipping from text to dictionary was a sheer delight, leaving me with such knowledge as that, in some contexts, "guddle can mean to fossick."
But sadness runs beneath the joy in every book, born of awareness that the species or landscape, or the whole cornucopia, are at risk from the most destructive of all its inhabitants — us.
My next column will look at the larger issues of conservation, preservation, and survival.