Tamed and Untamed

by Sy Montgomery

  Fear of the Dark

  — Liz —

  If your child is afraid of the dark, give the child a night-light. That child knows what he or she is doing, although perhaps not consciously. We are born with fear of the dark, although as we grow up most of us overcome it. But we can notice a residue of fear when we come home on a dark night. The first thing we do is turn on the lights. It’s worth noticing the slight sense of relief we feel when the light goes on and we see what’s around us. For this we can thank our ancestors.

  We inherit this fear because it helped us survive. If a fear is hardwired, we don’t have to learn it, which would have been risky, considering what it’s about. And this, says ecologist Craig Packer, was probably lions.

  In the fascinating paper “Fear of Darkness, the Full Moon and the Nocturnal Ecology of African Lions,” Packer and his coauthors discuss fatal attacks on people by lions, which most often take place during the first few hours of the nights that follow the full moon.

  Today we don’t pay much attention to the moon, and not everyone knows that the full moon rises at sunset and on the following nights it rises later, getting smaller, until the last three days of the moon’s cycle, when it rises with the dawn. We don’t see its little crescent until late afternoon. After that, until it’s full, it’s in the sky before the sun sets, so it’s already there when it gets dark. On those nights, our ancestors had less to worry about because they could see what was around them. And so could the animals that lions normally hunted, so when the moon was lighting the sky, the lions would grow increasingly hungry. All this changed on the night after the full moon—the nights were dark for increasingly long periods of time, and the lions were hungry. It was then that the people were in danger.

  People of industrial societies no longer cope with lions, but people in African villages do. In one of the languages spoken by the Kalahari San—the first people, and also the last, to live as hunter-gatherers—a metaphor for “lion” is “moonless night.” In the not-so-distant past, at least two such societies held their important safety-promoting dances in relationship to lions, the San dancing on nights of the full moon and the Hadza on the nights of absolute darkness. During the dance, the San trance dancers ran out in the dark away from the dance fire and cursed the lions, telling them to go. And according to Chris Knight, an anthropologist who studied the Hadza, the Hadza referred to the songs they sang during the dance as scaring away predators. They said, “We are singing for our lives.”

  When all of us lived as hunter-gatherers, the lions knew about our encampments and had no reason to fear us. Our weapons were spears with stone points—not much use against a lion—or perhaps poison arrows, which take days to kill a victim, or fire, which the savanna animals would have known as well as we did. A raging brushfire started by lightning might seem scary to a lion, but a campfire would not. If a lion came near one of our encampments, the firelight might show his shining eyes, and we could pull a burning branch out of the fire and shake it at him—that’s what the San did—but many lions seem to know that their eyes shine and can approach without being noticed, especially if it’s very dark. If we tried to run away, they’d catch us. The world’s fastest person once ran at twenty-seven miles an hour, but almost any lion can run at thirty-seven miles an hour, at least for a short distance, and that’s all she needs. We would have been easy prey.

  So we would see the full moon with mixed emotions: It would light up the world all night that night, but its presence would signal that dark nights were coming when lions would be hungry. Thus our fear of the dark had survival value. It kept us near our campfires with our children close by. Surely we’ve had it since we came out of the trees, so it must be older than our species. Without it we might not be here.

  Fear of Snakes

  — Sy —

  In a single glance I could see thousands. They were all around me. When anyone moved I could feel it. Normally I dislike crowds, but happily I was not in a stuffy room at a busy party or a packed stadium. I was delighted to be sitting in a pit with 18,000 snakes.

  The Narcisse Snake Dens in Manitoba, Canada, host the largest aggregation of snakes in the world. They’re all red-sided garters—who, like nine-tenths of world’s more than three thousand snake species, are harmless. Sitting among these soft, shiny, beautiful reptiles was thrilling.

  But not everyone would like this. In reports from Gallup polls to YouGov surveys, snakes consistently top the list of Americans’ fears. Snakes are ranked scarier than public speaking, heights, or even death.

  Marion Lepzelter is used to seeing the terror. As a volunteer at the New England Aquarium, she used to handle the anacondas—constricting snakes who are strong enough to subdue and eat jaguars in their native South American jungles. Some of those anacondas were fourteen feet long. “How can you like snakes?” folks used to ask her. “How can you touch that thing?”

  Members of the visiting public were astounded to see one of the giant snakes, a female named Ashley, slither up to the slender young woman sitting in the anaconda exhibit and place her head trustingly in Lepzelter’s lap, while curling her tail around her legs in a serpentine embrace. Ashley clearly trusted Lepzelter and enjoyed her company; Lepzelter felt the same about the snake.

  “They are beautiful. They’re amazing. Every single one of them had their own personality,” agrees Jennifer Berry, a librarian for the Pima County Public Library system in Tucson, who has owned pet snakes since she was eight.

  “A lot of people think snakes are stupid automatons,” says Berry. They’re not, of course. Snakes learn to recognize individual humans, as anyone with a pet snake well knows. Some are bold; some are shy. Some like to cuddle. Some prefer to be left alone. “They’ll communicate,” Berry learned. “You just have to listen and watch. Animals will tell you what they’re going to do. You can relate to them on a pure, honest level. They’re far more complex than you give them credit for.”

  A special few Americans do appreciate snakes. According to the US Department of Agriculture, possibly as many as 2.5 million of us keep reptiles—mostly snakes and turtles—as pets. Snake keeping is even more popular in England. The Federation of British Herpetologists says there are now as many as 8 million reptiles and amphibians being kept as pets there—outnumbering the estimated British dog population of 6.5 million. (Of course, snakes and other reptiles and amphibians can be appreciated without welcoming them into your home, and they are almost always better off living in their natural habitat than in your house.)

  But getting the good word out to the larger public about snakes is an uphill battle. Many people believe that humans are born with a fear of snakes. Experiments have shown otherwise. Babies don’t fear snakes; it’s a learned response. University of Virginia researchers Vanessa LoBue and Judy DeLoache showed videos of snakes to babies, some as young as seven months old. The infants watched calmly.

  In another experiment the same researchers paired silent videos of snakes with the sound of an adult speaking in frightened tones. That’s when the babies got upset. Concerned, the babies watched the snake video closely. When the snake videos were paired with an adult speaking in an upbeat, happy voice, the babies paid no special attention to the snakes. They watched with the same level of calm interest with which they viewed other films of elephants, birds, polar bears, and other animals.

  But the most interesting aspect of human fear of snakes is that while it is not inborn, it is extremely easy to learn.

  Martin Seligman, a Pennsylvania psychologist now better known for his studies of happiness, was one of the first to show why these fears are easy to come by. We may be genetically preprogrammed, or “prepared,” to learn to fear dangers that confronted our early ancestors. He found that while it is possible to make volunteers fear pictures of flowers or clouds by pairing the images with repeated electrical shocks, it took only two small jolts to induce a phobia of pictures of spiders or snakes.


  Why might this be? Humans evolved in Africa, which, unlike North America and Europe, has a large number of venomous snakes, many of whom hunt primates. So it’s no wonder that our close relatives also learn quickly to fear snakes, as Michael Cook and Susan Mineka showed in experiments published in 1989 with captive rhesus macaques. These monkeys had never seen a snake and didn’t react fearfully to a snake-shaped toy.

  But then researchers turned on the videos. One group of monkeys watched a fellow monkey acting frightened of a plastic flower. Another group saw a movie of a monkey scared by a plastic snake. The videos were edited to make sure the monkeys in the films looked equally upset. But the audience reacted quite differently to the two objects: When handed a flower, no one was afraid. But when handed a toy snake, the monkeys who had watched the snake horror film were fearful.

  Wild snakes apparently feel the same way about us. Most of the time, when snake and human meet, both flee in alarm. If we could only get to know each other better, things might be different.

  Though gentle, the snakes I met at the Narcisse dens were not shy. They had just woken, chilled, from their winter slumbers packed deep into limestone sinks. Discovering the welcoming tunnels of my sleeves, they happily slid inside to warm themselves next to my skin. I was honored.

  The Spirits among Us

  — Sy —

  Halloween pumpkins, Christmas wreaths, and Easter eggs summoning the spirit of the holidays help remind me to keep celebrating the ordinary spirits that animate our world.

  In other cultures, spirits are on everyone’s mind every day. While working on a book on moon bears, a now-endangered species once common in many countries in Asia, I traveled around Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. Everywhere I’d find little structures atop short pedestals that looked at first like elaborate birdhouses. They’re called spirit houses, and they fascinated me.

  I found spirit houses in remote villages and at the edge of shopping center parking lots. They were outside restaurants, gas stations, and hotels. There was even one at a Bangkok internet café.

  Some were quite well appointed. The one by a hotel I stayed at in Thailand, for instance, was flanked by two tiers of flower boxes and had a whole herd of stone and carved teak elephants massed outside the house proper. Another spirit house, outside a travel agency in Chiang Mai, had tiny Christmas tree lights strung all over its pagoda-like roof, which winked at night like fireflies. All the houses were stocked with rich offerings for the spirits: fresh rice, bananas, and sweets, prepared daily. Each morning I could see that the offerings had been consumed.

  One night, on Jomtien Beach, Thailand, I crept out from my hotel to visit the spirit houses and see if anyone showed up.

  I was not disappointed.

  Bats flitted in and out of the flower boxes lining one spirit house, sipping the nectar. Mice and rats hurried to carry off grains of rice from a spirit house “porch.” At another I saw a flying squirrel steal away with a slice of banana. And at nearly all the spirit houses, ants flowed up and down to partake of the food offerings.

  In early morning, spirit houses provided a wonderful bird-watching opportunity. Birds would fly in, perch on the elaborate structure, and feast on the offered grain.

  Did this mean the local people were duped into believing supernatural creatures took their offerings, when in reality ordinary animals were eating them? I don’t think so. Southeast Asia is full of spirits—from river spirits to mountain spirits to (according to at least one hill tribe in Thailand) a spirit who presides over the cooking of tofu. But unlike gods, who are worshipped, and ghosts, who are feared, the spirits for whom these houses are built are rather ordinary. They’re neighbors—neighbors whom nobody wants to offend.

  The houses are built for the spirits who inhabit that particular place—like the one who lived in a tree that used to grow where a house now stands, or those who inhabited the soil now paved over for a gas station or parking lot. All of these spirits—from the ants to the birds to the squirrels, and surely many other creatures as well—had a perfectly good home until some human came along and took it. These structures provide alternative housing and food for the rightful owners of the place.

  Spirits are not necessarily supernatural. The origin of the word spirit is the same as for the word inspiration—the common root is the Latin word spiritus, which means “breath.” The spirits I met feeding from the spirit houses were all living, breathing creatures—and in many cases, creatures whose homes actually were usurped by a manmade structure, just as people believed.

  Spirit houses remind us that resources and space are finite, and that in our hunger for more houses, more hotels, more shops, more gas stations, we humans continually disrupt and displace other beings. The least we can do for them is make some offerings to those who live among us, like neighbors—and who, like us, are hungry and eager to go home.

  Part Two

  Birds

  When we think of commonality with animals, we think of common ancestors, which for us would be bonobos and chimps, or the gibbons before them, or the monkey types before the gibbons and maybe the lemur types before the monkeys. That would involve about 55 million years, so we seldom think back beyond lemurs. Yet here we are, finding commonality with birds, and we would have to think back more than 300 million years before finding that common ancestor—a lizardlike protoreptile descended from a salamander-type amphibian with scales, who had learned how to live on dry land.

  So in evolutionary terms, a midsize ape known as a human is a long way from a tiny avian dinosaur known as a hummingbird, three inches long, weighing less than three grams, flying around that human’s red-colored, syrup-filled hummingbird feeder. For two utterly different organisms who have been on totally different evolutionary pathways for 300 million years, isn’t it strange to have a feeder in common?

  The question may never be answered, but it’s nice to think about—it suggests what works and what doesn’t, so that organisms with vastly different characteristics can make sense of the same things, albeit for different reasons. As for the feeder, the bird is getting sugar to strengthen herself for the arduous migration she will soon be undertaking, and the midsize primate is gratifying social desires he inherited from his forebears over thousands of years, showing that often enough a cooperative social environment can be better than a selfish, combative one. In his case, to expand his social connections he bought a feeder to attract a hummingbird.

  But that’s minor compared with some other examples in this section, where you will see the story of a cockatoo who dances to music. The music has nothing whatever to do with birdsong, is a completely human invention that no bird in the wild has ever encountered, was totally alien to the protoreptile ancestor, and yet this cockatoo not only understood what it was for but unerringly danced to the beat.

  Do we see why this is amazing? Songs serve a different purpose for birds than our music serves for us, so Snowball’s ability to internalize and act upon a very complicated, multilayered noise that was produced entirely by an alien species could not have been predicted. When we look back 300 million years to the protoreptile who gave rise to generations of ever-changing life-forms, we struggle to imagine the thousands if not millions of evolutionary issues this must have involved, and when we see that one result is a bird dancing with a person, we’re confounded. Our grasp of science, whatever it may be, doesn’t help us here. All we can do is say, “Oh!”

  What else was trundling down these lines of descendants? One characteristic appears again and again, not only in us but also in birds, which is the concept of doing things together. No doubt the practice was meant for same-species cooperation, but it’s a good concept and often works well, and sometimes enough of its essence leaks out to cause one species to help or cooperate with another. Such are the puffin and his science-minded, caring followers, as shown in this section, also some fascinating chickens and their keepers.

  Yet what we e
asily accept as normal should strike us as the most astonishing—our relationships with birds of prey. The unit formed by a person with a falcon on his glove could almost be the ancient, lizardlike, ancestral vertebrate put back together after 300 million years. A falconer and falcon are essentially one unit with a single purpose: The falcon gets a rabbit that both of them may eat.

  Birds and people together . . . what to make of this? About all we have in common is the basic vertebrate body and the scales from our ancestral protoreptile’s skin, which came to birds as feathers and to us as fingernails. We do share a few other tendencies, however, one of which is to notice elements of ourselves reflected in other species. The falcon who returns to the falconer, the hummingbird who alerts the human when the feeder is empty, the cockatoo who matches his steps to the human’s while dancing so that both are on the beat, what do these tell us? Could the lizardlike ancestor, taking sips from a stream in eastern Pangaea 300 million years ago, have had genes that gave her a spark of affinity, perhaps with a fish she happened to notice? Were those genes in the embryos she left behind when she buried her eggs in leaf litter?

  A question like this requires an important, inspiring answer, but here we’re still asking. I like to think that in the future, scientists could discover some fossilized thoughts that fell out through that protoreptile’s nostrils when she looked down at the fish. If they’re in sedimentary rock and if radiometric dating suggests that they fell from their host approximately 300 million years ago, we could safely assume they belonged to a member of our ancestral species. We’d know more if such thoughts could be found and studied.

  —Liz

  Birds Rock the Beat