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FOR MY SISTER, KELLY—
A HIGH SCHOOL SCIENCE TEACHER
WHO HAS INSPIRED THOUSANDS OF STUDENTS
WITH HER LOVE OF NATURE
The Bestiary’s Bestiary
A Note on Process
Though I always like to write outdoors, I made it a point with this book in particular to work outside whenever possible, to immerse myself in the world I was writing about. This meant constant interruptions—crows alerting me to the presence of a sharp-shinned hawk, bugs in my hair, squirrels that required chasing before they ate every last cherry on the tree. And from these interruptions came observations and ideas that needed to be in the book—not in the chapter I was working on, but somewhere else altogether. I would pause, and then quilt the new thoughts into my notes.
Writing outdoors also meant a fair bit of thermoregulation. I commonly needed another sweater, or more shade, or, since I write in Seattle, a big umbrella. In the cooler months, I often built a fire in the backyard fire pit, extending the season of the outdoor writing studio (and providing the opportunity to fortify myself with the perfect lunch: s’mores). Though it wasn’t my initial intent, I believe all of this helped to deepen my empathy with the creatures in my neighborhood, most of whom contrive some kind of shelter but none of whom (excepting the pair of squirrels that have taken up in my attic cornice) have access to anything as stalwart as my own heated wooden house. The most disconcerting thing about writing the bestiary in this manner was that it completely upset my normal writing process, which is to write a chapter, tidy it up, write another. This book seemed to me entirely haphazard, with all the chapters being written at pretty much the same time. This offended my sense of calm order and made me worry that in all of these disheveled words there would never be a book at all. But I started to realize that this rangy form mimicked its subject: the ambling, lateral knowledge of the wild—unfolding constantly, simultaneously, and without any regard at all for my own insistence on what is best for it or for me.
One of the things that emerged from my unorthodox writing studio was a kind of sub-bestiary, what I think of as the Bestiary’s Bestiary—a list of animals that I observed while writing these pages. And not the animals I saw over the course of time during which I worked on the book or sighted while camping or hiking or birding, but the animals I spotted while actually putting pen to paper, or fingers to laptop, and without getting up from my desk at the window/patch of grass/perch on a cozy tree limb in my backyard or urban park. I love that these animals reflect both the typical urban generalists (eastern gray squirrel, American robin) and those particular to my place here in Seattle, with park benches along the Puget Sound shoreline (Pacific harbor seal, osprey). I list them here in part to acknowledge with gratitude the role they played in this project by way of inspiration and holy distraction, and because I hope that they may inspire others to create their own working bestiaries—an increased attentiveness to the animals that cross our paths daily. While writing this book I was visited by:
MAMMALS
Eastern Gray Squirrel
Pacific Harbor Seal
California Sea Lion
BIRDS
Common Loon
Western Grebe
Horned Grebe
Double-crested Cormorant
Great Blue Heron
Gadwall
Mallard
Surf Scoter
Red-breasted Merganser
Canada Goose
Bald Eagle
Red-tailed Hawk
Cooper’s Hawk
Sharp-shinned Hawk
Osprey
Domestic Chicken
Killdeer
Glaucous-winged Gull
Caspian Tern
Rock Pigeon
Anna’s Hummingbird
Rufous Hummingbird
Belted Kingfisher
Red-breasted Sapsucker
Northern Flicker
Pileated Woodpecker
Steller’s Jay
American Crow
Violet-green Swallow
Black-capped Chickadee
Chestnut-backed Chickadee
Red-breasted Nuthatch
Bewick’s Wren
Pacific Wren
Golden-crowned Kinglet
Ruby-crowned Kinglet
Varied Thrush
American Robin
Hermit Thrush
Cedar Waxwing
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Townsend’s Warbler
Orange-crowned Warbler
Wilson’s Warbler
Western Tanager
Spotted Towhee
Dark-eyed Junco
Song Sparrow
House Finch
House Sparrow
BUTTERFLIES AND DRAGONFLIES
Lorquin’s Admiral
Western Tiger Swallowtail
Mourning Cloak
Painted Lady
Cabbage Butterfly
Common Green Darner
Cardinal Meadowhawk
Eight-spotted Skimmer
A singular awareness never abandoned me: though these were the animals I chanced to see, there were far more creatures across the taxa seeing me.
One of the most difficult tasks for this project was choosing what animals to feature in the chapters. An exhaustive coverage of even the most common urban animals in my rambling essay form would result in a biblically proportioned volume, far beyond the scope of this small book. My intent was not to be all-inclusive, but rather to treat species that are common in most urban places and those that have a particular lesson for coexisting with wildlife that can be extrapolated to other species, including the many that are not directly considered here. I tended not to include animals with strongly overlapping natural histories or similar ecological lessons/strategies. Thus I included squirrels as the representative small rodent (rats are considered alongside squirrels, but without their own chapter), moles as the subterrestrial mammal (rather than the more geographically limited pocket gopher), and coyotes as the top urban-wild predator-trickster (rather than foxes, which are also present in many places). The struggle over what to include and what to leave out was especially problematic for birds—not only my area of expertise (so I was inclined to get carried away), but a group with nearly a thousand species in North America, hundreds of which are present in urban areas, far more than mammal species. Again, I did some generalizing and chose a few common, widespread, wonderful species that challenge our everyday perceptions of city birds. I know that nearly everyone reading this book will be able to say, “I wish she’d written about __________.” But my goal, my dream, actually, is that this is just the start of a huge, earthen bestiary, an invitation to wild intimacy, written daily by all of us, through attention to the creatures in our midst.
PART I
Entering the Bestiary
A New Nature, a New Bestiary
It sounds like an urban myth, but it isn’t. One day a lost coyote wandered into downtown Seattle. It was promptly discovered by a group of crows, who hate coyotes for their habit of preying on crow fledglings. The crows began to chase and dive-bomb the coyote, who, inc
reasingly confused and disoriented, attempted to escape his tormentors by scampering, no one quite knows how, through the front doors of the Federal Building. From there, things got even worse for the young coyote, who had never been indoors and, horribly frightened, began running blindly about, slamming his thin, gangly body into the glass walls until he spotted the refuge of an open elevator and quickly slipped in. The doors closed, and the coyote was caught inside. Not knowing what to do, the building officials rang the police and the local wildlife officers, but help was delayed because no one would believe that there really was a coyote stuck in the downtown Federal Building elevator. Nearly three hours later, state fish and wildlife officers managed to trap the coyote—who was found to be a healthy male, probably just eight months old—and then relocated him unharmed to a suburban forested area.
Of course, no one was able to see the coyote inside the elevator. At first, I imagined him relieved. No people, no crows, a chance to draw a breath. But it is much more likely that his terror only increased in a cramped space with no exit, no glimpse of sky or earth.
So many of us are seeking gracious, creative ways of inhabiting our urban homes in this time of ecological upheaval. We want to respect the wild animals that make their homes alongside us and help them to flourish. But what does this really mean? The downtown-coyote incident, and so many others like it, unleash a tangle of questions that force us to revisit the depth, complexity, and necessity of these interrelationships, questions that are deeply relevant to all of us, whether we keep urban chickens and a garden, or live in a tiny, rented studio apartment: What is that coyote doing here, out of its forest? Whose “home” is this? Where does the wild end and the city begin? And what difference does it make to us as humans living our everyday lives?
As human habitations cut more deeply and rampantly into open space, wild animals are left with smaller, more fragmented areas in which to live, eat, and breed. The rural buffer that once separated cities from wilderness in the past is disappearing as small farms are overrun by big agriculture and urban sprawl. The tidy divisions once labeled, respectively, urban, rural, and wild are breaking down as animals that once lived well beyond urban edges are now turning up in city neighborhoods with some regularity, and human-wild encounters of all kinds are increasingly frequent, startling, and confusing. Some of these animals have long coexisted with humans, and we simply see them more often now because there are more of us living in close quarters: many songbirds, hawks, raccoons, skunks, squirrels, and opossums. But a few of these animals are unsettlingly wild: Coyotes. Even bears and cougars. Seeing them, we have conflicting thoughts rush through our heads. We can almost glimpse the fresh mountain streams, the images of bright, clean wilderness these creatures signify within our psyches. We want to run toward them. We want to run the other way. We notify the media. We protect our cats and shield our children. We hope that they thrive. We wish they would leave. “It’s the city, they don’t belong,” some suggest, and argue for eradication. “They were here first,” others say generously, but far, far too simplistically. And when they do leave, we crane our necks for the last glimpse of fur, tail, paw.
The practice of assembling written bestiaries—compendiums of animal lore and knowledge—began in medieval times. They were often lavishly illustrated volumes, lettered by monastics on vellum, edged with hand-mixed colors and gilt. The medieval bestiaries were wonderful in that they blended the best of medieval science—what was believed to be factually true about each animal—with unreservedly fanciful descriptions. These were not meant to be fantastical, and they were based on a combination of observation, conjecture, and pure imagination. All of this was presented as equally objective, with no teasing out of the observed, the assumed, and the conjured. This is in line with a broader reluctance in the highly superstitious medieval culture to distinguish the real from the fabulous in daily life. In The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England, historian Ian Mortimer writes, “At times it seems that medieval people pride themselves on the quantity of their knowledge, not its quality or correctness.” While there were scientists and rationalists, Mortimer suggests that you “will find their writings even more outlandish than the prophecies.” All of these medieval tendencies are recapitulated in the extant bestiaries, and in them we also glimpse the ray of light that Mortimer finds in such scientific murkiness: “It is from the same belief that anything is possible that the greatest discoveries are made.”
Perhaps the most famous and beautiful extant bestiary is the gilt-edged Aberdeen Bestiary, penned in the twelfth century. The Aberdeen Bestiary spent much of its circuitous history in ecclesial or monastic settings, but we know that for a time it resided with the English royal family. The manuscript entered the library at Westminster under Henry VIII, and it bears his royal shelf mark. It is unclear how the book came into royal keeping, but Aberdeen history of arts professor Jane Geddes suggests that it was likely “plucked” during the dissolution of a monastery’s assets. We don’t know whether Henry himself had any personal interest in the volume, though some members of the royal family were captivated by the subject of wild creatures. That the book was thoroughly studied and not just an objet d’art like many of our own coffee-table volumes is revealed in the well-thumbed corners of the vellum pages. In the early seventeenth century, when the Scottish king James VI became King James of England, the Bestiary passed from the royal collection to Marischal College in Aberdeen, and it is housed today in the Aberdeen University Library.
The Aberdeen Bestiary’s entry for beavers exhibits the classic medieval bestiary components of observation, imagination, and allegory. The beaver is accurately described as possessing a tail that is flat like a fish’s and fur that is soft like an otter’s; it was prized for its testicles, which were said to contain a medically potent liquid that could cure headache, fever, and “hysteria” (this liquid would have been castoreum, located in a small glandular sac at the base of the tail on both male and female beavers). It is noted, impossibly, that to keep from being killed by a hunter, a beaver would castrate itself and toss its testicles in the hunter’s path, and if it encountered another hunter, it would lift its tail to demonstrate its useless, testicle-less condition. Morality-laden allegory is woven throughout the Bestiary. Here, like the beaver, men should castrate their vices and toss them away to avoid the devil. Elsewhere, the jay is “the most talkative species of bird and makes an irritating noise.” Just as we try to close our ears to such chatter, so should we avoid the “empty prattle of philosophers or the harmful wordiness of heretics.” Less often, an animal’s behavior is held up as a model of virtue rather than vice, as with the dove, who rests near flowing water so that it can spot the reflection of an overhead hawk and flee to safety, just as we should study scripture to “avoid the plotting devil.” With more dovelike qualities, we, too, might “assume the wings of contemplation and fly to heaven.” But it’s not all moralizing. There are hundreds of sweet, earthen moments in the Bestiary, evidence of quiet and humble observation:
The ant has also learned to watch out for periods of fine weather. For if it sees that its supplies of corn are becoming wet, soaked by the rain, it carefully tests the air for signs of a mild spell, then it opens up its stores, and carries its supplies on its shoulders from its vaults underground out into the open, so that the corn can dry in the unbroken sunshine.
We may chuckle over the misguidedness of beaver-testicle tales, but despite the scientific strides that have brought us to the current moment, our own cultural/zoological mythology is fraught with misinformation every bit as false as the beaver-castration story. Nature books, television shows, and conservation organizations educate us about the remote wild and endangered species. Certainly knowledge about all earthen creatures is wonderful and essential, but very often we know a great deal more about the Chinese giant panda or the lowland mountain gorilla than we do about the most common of local creatures, say the eastern gray squirrels in our backyards.
It is time for a new
bestiary, one that engages our desire to understand the creatures surrounding our urban homes, helps us locate ourselves in nature, and suggests a response to this knowledge that will benefit both ourselves and the more-than-human world. We were born for this knowing, for a quick, innate sensitivity to other animals. We are evolutionarily formed to be attuned to the presence and habits of animals. Studies show that we register the movement of biological things more rapidly than we do those of mechanical things. If two entities about the same size, say a Mini Cooper and a bison, are positioned at the same distance in our peripheral vision and both of them suddenly and simultaneously move a foot forward, our precognitive nervous systems will more quickly recognize the movement of the bison. (Naturalist and entomologist E. O. Wilson coined the term biophilia to refer to the innate human affinity for the natural and biological dimensions of earthly life. Thinking to borrow the notion to speak to our particular bond with animals for the purposes of this project, I invoked the Google Oracle to see whether anyone had thought of it already: I naively typed zoophilia into the search bar. Mistake. I was immediately directed to dozens of sites featuring man-on-sheep sex acts.)
Why a new bestiary? There is much available on the interwebs. Everything you need to know about how to identify urban animals and keep them out of your house is a click away. But a bestiary is another matter altogether—entering a bestiary, we cross the threshold into a world in which our imaginations, our art, our bodies, our science, our mythology, all have an exuberant place. Mythology in particular is underrepresented in our modern ways of knowing; it has become suspect, synonymous with the primitive, the irrational, the unscientific, or simply the untrue. But myths have always given our meaning-seeking species a way to find the thread of pattern, significance, and timelessness underlying our chaotic and unpredictable daily lives. Karen Armstrong writes in A Short History of Myth that “mythology and science both extend the scope of human beings.” Myth invites us to decouple our modern conflation of truth and fact. Armstrong considers it “a mistake to regard myth as an inferior mode of thought, which can be cast aside when human beings have attained the age of reason. Mythology is not an early attempt at history, and does not claim that its tales are objective fact. Like a novel, an opera or a ballet, myth is make-believe; it is a game that transfigures our fragmented, tragic world, and helps us to glimpse new possibilities.” In this bestiary, as in its medieval precursors, mythology is among the many lovely paths toward human knowing: science, natural history, personal observation, everyday storytelling.
The Urban Bestiary Page 1