Tamed and Untamed

by Sy Montgomery

  “There is something enormously satisfactory about a weasel,” New Zealand researcher Carolyn King writes in her book The Natural History of Weasels and Stoats. “It has the perfection, grace and efficacy of well-designed tool in the hands of an expert.” New England has several species of weasel, all just a few inches long, the smallest of which (the least weasel) is only as long as a man’s finger. All are brown with light bellies in summer, and when they turn white in the winter, they are known as ermines.

  These are the world’s smallest carnivores. It is as if all the ferocity of the world’s wild hunters—lions, tigers, wolverines—has been concentrated and compacted into a creature smaller than a vole. Quick as lightning, an ermine can leap into the air to kill a bird as it takes flight, or follow a lemming down a tunnel. It can swim, climb trees, and bring down an animal many times its size with a single bite to the neck—and then carry it off with a bounding run. An ermine consumes five to ten meals a day. It needs to eat least a quarter to a third of its own weight just to survive in captivity, and much more in the wild, especially during the cold winter. These little animals’ hearts beat nearly four hundred times a minute. No wonder they kill everything they can at every opportunity.

  The ermine held my gaze for perhaps thirty seconds. Then it popped back into the hole. I desperately wanted my husband, Howard, to see it. What were the chances the tiny animal would still be there, much less show itself again, when I came back? Yet I put down the hen where I had found her, ran the five hundred yards back to the house, alerted Howard, and then together we returned to the coop. Again I picked up the hen. And again the ermine shot its head from the hole, its black eyes blazing from that luminous white face as its piercing, fearless stare met our eyes.

  Even in the wake of tragedy, we could not have felt more amazed had we been visited by an angel that Christmas morning. In our barn we had, in fact, beheld a great wonder—as the magi had in the barn that they had visited so long ago. Our Christmas blessing came down not from heaven but up from earth. With its dazzlingly white fur, hammering pulse, and bottomless appetite, the ermine was ablaze with life: so pure and so perfect that in its presence, there was room in our hearts for neither sorrow nor anger, just awe.

  One Mouse

  — Liz —

  This is about a mouse who was lying unconscious under our refrigerator. Perhaps a cat had caught her outdoors and brought her in through the open window or found her in the basement and brought her upstairs and then lost interest when she fainted. I thought she was dead and wanted to throw her away, but I couldn’t quite reach her, so I went to get a broom. When I came back she had moved to another place, but she still seemed unconscious. So I put her little body in a cage with food, water, and cotton balls to make a nest, although I thought she would die during the night.

  But by morning she was better. I put the cage in a closed room with the cage door open. She ran out of the cage and hid under the radiator. That night she came out to explore the room. I’d intended to leave the door open so she could depart if she liked, but because the cats might find her, I made another plan. She had an appealing personality, she represented one of the world’s most successful species, we shared a common ancestor, and her direct, more recent ancestors had connected our species to cats. Who was I to break with tradition? I brought her more food, water, and cotton balls and shut the door. My plan was to keep her as a pet.

  When this account was published as a column, I expected angry mail from readers pointing out that mice are pests who carry human diseases and should be exterminated, even though humans carry more human diseases and we don’t exterminate one another, or not for that. “Find a phone,” I planned to tell such readers. “Call someone who cares what you think.”

  Mice have been here longer than we have. We share a common ancestor and much of our DNA. To keep this mouse was almost like helping a relative. Or sort of like helping a relative. One night I stayed a long time in her room after bringing her food, standing still, hoping to see her. When a tiny ant tried to cross the floor, she ran out from under the radiator, ate it, and ran back. This little mouse might have enjoyed the help I gave by feeding her, but she certainly could feed herself.

  I seldom saw her in the daytime or when the lights were on at night. Sometimes by moonlight she would run along the wall, glimpsing me as she went speeding by. But sometimes she’d stand still so we could consider each other. Our size difference seemed important—she was three inches long, I was sixty-three inches long; she weighed less than an ounce, I weighed 140 pounds; she was the size of a walnut, I was the size of a leopard—but even so, we watched each other. We both had brown eyes.

  Sometimes I’d leave the door open, having confined the cats, but the mouse knew they were out there and stayed in her room. Mice live in colonies, and our house may have had two. I didn’t know which colony she belonged to, but if she found herself in the wrong one, its members would harm her. Maybe that’s why she stayed in the room. The radiator was warm, the food was plentiful, and if I came in now and then, perhaps that wasn’t so bad.

  Even so, as time went by I realized that I liked her more than she liked me. We humans are not the only species that connects with others—we’re merely an example of how this is done—and in various ways many animals have connected with me, including rats. But rats have very different personas than mice (there’s a reason why calling someone a mouse means one thing and calling that person a rat means something quite different), and this might explain why the mouse and I were not connecting.

  Or did our size difference explain it? Even elephants are not as big in proportion to me as I was in proportion to that mouse. Also, elephants stand on all fours so they can lower their heads and put their trunks down where we smaller creatures can touch them. If I were to make a similar contact with the mouse, I’d need to lie on the floor, but even if I put my chin on the floor and she stood on her hind legs facing me, her head would only come up to my nose and my eyes would be way above her.

  Three weeks passed. I could see from her droppings that she spent most of her time under the radiator, and we’d made no connection, so I gave up. I got my longest scarf out of the drawer and draped it over the sill of the open window in the mouse’s room. One end of the scarf was on the floor and the other end was on the grass which, as it happened, bordered a stone wall and a collection of bushes. She could stay outside if that’s where she’d come from, or if she wanted to be indoors she could find one of the many small entrances to our basement that mice use in the fall.

  I gently closed the door of the room. When I opened it a little later, the mouse was gone. For several days I left the window open with the scarf in place in case she changed her mind, but even after all I’d done for her, she wanted freedom more than safety and food, and far more than she wanted human company.

  Pink Dolphins

  — Sy —

  “In Iquitos, many years ago,” our Amazon guide, Moises Chavez, told me my first day in Peru, “before the Belen market was built, Indians lived there, on the banks of the river.” On Saturday nights the young men and women from the village would gather to dance beside the river. What the people didn’t know, Chavez told us, was that a dolphin was watching them. And the dolphin fell in love at first sight with one particular girl.

  “Some people say the dolphin’s just a dolphin,” Chavez said. “But the Indian people, they know a different story.”

  It was the stories about the strange, pink dolphins of the Amazon River that first drew me to Brazil and Peru. People say the dolphins are magic. They claim the animal can change into human form and shows up at dances as a handsome stranger. The dolphin can seduce you and may take you away to the Encante, the enchanted world beneath the water. Those who visit this world seldom return, because everything is more beautiful there.

  The stories sound impossible. But so does a pink, river-dwelling whale. Yet these dolphins really can be pink. Not a
ll are; some are grayish or pale. But some are as pink as bubble gum. And like all dolphins, they really are a kind of whale—but this whale lives in fresh, instead of salt, water. I know this is true, because by the end of my four expeditions to the Amazon, I had observed pink dolphins for hundreds of hours.

  And I, too, fell in love with them.

  Unlike marine dolphins, these creatures don’t leap from the water in spectacular displays. Their athleticism comes from their balletic flexibility, which they need to navigate often dark waters that rise, during the wet season, high enough to engulf trees. They must fly like birds through their branches. Their pectoral fins look like wings. Their faces, when they poke through the water to look at you in your canoe, look rather like ours. That is, until they open the tops of their heads and gasp, “CHAAAA!”—and then dive.

  How could I not follow?

  In fact my first plan, before I arrived in South America, was to follow these dolphins on their migration. I had read preliminary studies by researchers Vera da Silva and her late husband, Robin Best, suggesting these dolphins travel seasonally across international borders. I proposed to follow them to find out where they go. But when I arrived in the Amazon and met da Silva, she told me that the suggestion she made in the paper had been proved wrong. They aren’t migratory.

  So I followed them in a different way. I followed them not from point A to point B but as a disciple follows a leader. Or as a lover might follow the beloved.

  My travels with the dolphins led me back through time. Following their lineage through prehistory, I discovered they are the remnants of an ancient whale lineage that entered the Amazon River from the Pacific—before the rise of the Andes Mountains 15 million years ago. And even further back, thanks to the pink dolphins, I found that the whale lineage grew more surprising yet. The ancestors of whales once walked on land; the first aquatic whales, whose fossils were recently discovered, had small, vestigial hooves.

  I followed the dolphins through the stories of the local people. Chavez told me a story he had learned from his grandmother when his family had lived in the remote Napo River region among the Yagua Indians.

  “One day—a day like today—they gonna celebrate a really big party,” he began. That night a handsome stranger, with light skin and blue eyes, showed up at the dance, and he gave the girl he fancied a big diamond and a gold watch. He asked her to tell no one, and that he’d meet her again at the next dance. She agreed. But the girl broke her promise, and she bragged about her gifts to her father and brothers. At the next dance the men tried to restrain her lover. But he broke free and dove into the water. When he disappeared, her ring turned into a leech; her gold watch turned into a crab and crawled away; and the girl was heartbroken and lonely forever.

  I heard dozens of stories like this one all over Peru and Brazil. Many people—including one of da Silva’s assistants—told me they had actually met enchanted dolphins. One had nearly been seduced!

  So are the stories true? Is the Encante real?

  It’s true that the world beneath the river harbors wonders more spectacular than our wildest dreams. Scientists tell us that in the Amazon basin there may be plants and animals that offer cures to our worst diseases; they insist hundreds of new species await discovery. Many species we already know about surely qualify as magical. Where but in an enchanted world could you find pink whales who fly between the branches of treetops?

  But this magic place is under siege. Like the girl who betrayed her pink dolphin lover, we’re forgetting our promises to the natural world. Due to timber interests, mining, cattle ranching, and fires, half the Amazon’s rain forest could be lost by 2050. Dams built across the Amazon basin block migratory routes for fishes and ruin animal habitats. Pink dolphins are even being slaughtered for catfish bait.

  The pink dolphin stories ring true in a very deep sense: It’s important to honor the connections we share with our fellow species. If we do not, the world loses its enchantment, and we risk destroying what we love most.

  Happy Rats: Playful, Ticklish, Optimistic

  — Sy —

  “Honey, can my friend the anaconda tamer come and stay with us for two days?” I asked my husband.

  “Is she bringing an anaconda?” he asked, alarmed.

  “No, the anacondas live at the aquarium,” I replied. “But she’s bringing her six rats.”

  “Six rats!” he exclaimed.

  “That’s why she can’t stay at the inn,” I explained. “And one of the rats is sick. So she can’t leave them at home.”

  In the end my gracious husband welcomed our multispecies guests, but only two of the rats showed up. Then Liz was upset. “What happened to the other four?” she asked. She, like me, had wanted to meet all six and was disappointed that my visitor had left four behind.

  Rats bring out vastly different feelings in people. Those who despise rats are usually laboring under one of many rat misconceptions—like the recently exploded myth that rats brought the black death to Europe. (Maligned for eight centuries, black rats were recently exonerated when University of Oslo scientists discovered the culprits bringing plague-infected fleas were really Asian gerbils.)

  Those who appreciate rats tend to be folks who can look beyond an animal’s reputation and see the creature’s true nature—people like my friend, the anaconda tamer, Marion Lepzelter. (And no, she does not feed rats, or any live animals, to the anacondas.)

  “Rats are as smart and affectionate as dogs,” Marion assured me as she took Zero, a white rat, age two, out of her sturdy travel cage for me to hold. Soft and warm, Zero looked me in the face quizzically, whiskers questing, eyes bright and curious. I offered her some yogurt on the tip of my finger. She licked it speedily and cleanly with her tiny pink tongue, and thereafter we were fast friends. “This is Sy,” Marion told her, just as if she were introducing two people.

  Rats understand some human words. They easily learn their names and will come when called. They can fetch, walk a tightrope, and sit up, among other tricks. Marion has taught several of her rats to “play basketball,” eagerly carrying a ball toward a mounted hoop, standing up, and then pushing the ball through the hoop with their tiny, dexterous hands. A Belgian charity has trained giant African pouched rats to detect landmines and diagnose tuberculosis.

  “Zero’s just a plain old white lab rat, but she’s the snuggliest rat I ever had,” Marion told me. As she chucked Zero under the chin, Zero closed her pink eyes in ecstasy.

  Zero came along to provide comfort and companionship for Pepper. At age three, Pepper, named for her dark fur, is ancient. She’s blind, missing some teeth, and like many elderly people takes a variety of medicines, including Viagra (which was originally developed as a heart drug). But she still relishes loving touch. When she’s not cuddling with Marion, Pepper snuggles with Zero, who is her best friend.

  All rats—the genus Rattus has more than sixty species—love to snuggle. Rats are social animals. They help other rats in trouble, establish friendships, sleep together, groom and play with each other.

  And like people, rats laugh when they’re happy. Using a bat detector to make their ultrasonic chirps audible, neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp discovered this in 1990. Rats laugh when they play with each other, and they laugh when they’re tickled. Laughing rats playfully seek tickling from their people just like dogs urge their people to play.

  In later experiments Panksepp discovered that happy, laughing rats are more optimistic. He trained rats to associate pushing a lever that yielded a treat with one tone, and a lever that could avert an electric shock with a different tone. He then tickled one group of rats and merely handled another. Then he played a third tone, one that sounded similar to both the others. The rats who had been tickled rushed to press the lever that yielded yummy food. Because they had laughed and were happy, they expected good things from life.

  Perhaps we can learn from them, and from Pep
per and Zero. When we approach an animal expecting it to be clean, intelligent, and friendly instead of dirty, stupid, and mean, more often than not we may find our expectations rewarded—and begin to enjoy the company of an animal we may have previously feared.

  Part Five

  Tiny Animals

  If you consider our species in relation to others, we’re midsize, meaning we’re big enough to be seen at a distance but not as big as a whale. This is also true of the species with which we’re most familiar. For example, when a horse or dog walks by, we instantly know what we’re seeing. But most of the life-forms we live with are small. We usually don’t see them, don’t know what they are if we do see them, know next to nothing about them, and have little if any interest in them. If one of them walks across the table, someone usually whacks it, not caring what it was or why it was there.

  Such mindless hostility describes our relationship with all tiny animals except butterflies and bees. At least we know what these are, sort of, in that butterflies are pretty and bees make honey, so these little souls have value in our eyes, unlike the thousands of other small animals surrounding us who are unknown to us, however remarkable. Anyone’s lawn, for instance, could harbor hundreds of tiny creatures.

  Do we ever ask how someone so small survives a winter? We don’t, so we’re surprised to learn that some of them freeze solid. Consider the woolly bear, for instance—the larva of the tiger moth. This little caterpillar hatches from his egg in the fall and roams around until winter, which freezes him solid. It’s said that you can ring a bell with him. In spring he’ll wake up to do his caterpillar duties, learning then what he needs to remember for the rest of his life. This can go on for several years until he pupates and emerges as an educated moth. He and many other tiny creatures take refuge in leaf litter dropped by the plants in the fall, and some of the others also freeze solid. This means it’s wrong to rake leaves from your lawn in the fall. You should rake them only in the spring, after the tiny inhabitants are up and moving.