San Diego Zoo, Fall 2010

Photo credit: Carter Blanchard

New Noahs

Those of us who can- literally- afford to struggle with ancient questions about our relationship to our fellow animals. - questions older than history. Some answers have been painted on cave walls, found in graves, written in ancient texts, and handed down in stories. In the Jewish Torah, we find in Genesis accounts of our mutual creation and, later, of our mutual salvation, thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Noah. So grateful and charmed by the pairs of species saved, we rarely stop to think about the myriad lost in the great flood.

Today we face various devastating changes to our environment, and the question is who will survive and how. Zoos were originally build for the amusement of the rich, but they may be our modern arks.

As I child, I found zoos exciting, but also creepy. They used to be built like maximum security prisons, with cement floors, steel walls, and layers of bars and fences. Walking through a lacy, treed aviary –a stories-high outdoor sanctuary full of Seuss-like birds – was the exception. As a child I felt excited feeding peanuts to our zoo's four elephants, but discomfitted by the chains around their ankles anchoring them to a cement slab. The more experience I had with animals, the more I grew to hate zoos.

My boycott lasted only a decade. My excuse was that I wanted my children to see in flesh, feather and scale, to experience other sentient beings and come to admire, if not love, them. But it’s me who can't walk away from the experience of entering another's life, from sensing a different kind of intelligence, seeing the world as similar and yet radically different from the one I inhabited.

Recently I found myself drawn to the zoo again, taking advantage of courses offered through the local adult education program for classes and tours. After learning about big cats, one of their keeper's - a petite brunette- took us behind the scenes to meet the two tigers and very senior lion. I was surprised at all the training that goes on, coaching the animals to come to the fence for shots, and to stand on a scale to be weighed, as well as tricks. The cagey old lion has learned to use a wall to make himself sound younger and bigger. Check out his bona fides here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmzKQKl3Gjw

We learned that, at eighteen he’s eight years older than a lion in the wild would be, and his mane is full and well-groomed, where a wild adult lion’s mane would be worn and mangy. After another class - on lowland gorillas - I got to spend an hour and a half watching the resident tribe of eight. Guarding a four day old baby from her curious father and two eager sisters, the mother snatched a few minutes rest before foraging for snacks the keepers tossed in various places for them to find. Any mother could relate!

It’s lucky that I went back, because, as Paul Simon sings, “It’s all happening at the zoo.” By visiting most zoos today we support modern arks, spaces nurturing and stimulating to many species, some of which are threatened with extinction in the wild. A number of the animals in today’s zoos have been rescued from private attempts to keep wild animals and from aging out of circuses. Today’s zoos share resources, knowledge and stewardship of the gene pools of species in captivity.

Noah would be jealous of today’s zoo keepers, who are much better equipped to keep their charges healthy, both emotionally and physically. Of course we’d rather the animals were free and able to live their wild lives out in their homelands - and it's tragic that they're so threatened. Fortunately zoos provide us with a way to observe and appreciate other ways of being, learn what we can do to protect all the homelands, and wonder anew at the variety and beauty of Creation. Zoos may be one way we can serve as Noahs.

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To find out more or peek at animals doing their thing via webcams, please check out these sites as well as your local zoo: http://www.zoonewengland.org/Page.aspx?pid=219, http://www.rogerwilliamsparkzoo.org/, http://www.sandiegozoo.org/

To learn more about a pioneer zoo director and get a behind the scenes look at the challenges of zookeeping, look for "My Life in a Man Made Jungle," by Belle J. Benchly.

Meanwhile, Back at the S.P.C.A.

Compared to most other animals, rabbits have the neatest poop ever. That’s one thing I was grateful for this morning as I cleaned cages in the Small Animal part of our local animal adoption center. I was also enjoying how quiet rabbits are until Houdini, a white furred, pink eyed, good sized, Easter-style rabbit huffed at me. Hufff hufff huff!

Here am I, Bunny Goddess, about to bestow fresh bedding and alfalfa pellets, and he has the nerve to get all huffy at me. But I gave him some space and hurried up with the food, so he got quiet again and munchy. I tried to remember if any divinities were ever so humbled by those they patronized in the old stories.

Later in the morning, I took on a new job helping with a show and tell and story program for young children. We set up coloring stations and put on music, placed quilts on the floor for the story time, and greeted our guests. They were so young that they were mostly pre-verbal, but bright-eyed and pink cheeked. Today’s animals were conures, small parrots with large black eyes, green and blue bodies, red tails and almost iridescent, sturdy beaks. We put a little fence around the cage against the curiosity of little fingers.

Encouraged not to expect too much from such little ones, I noticed that some wandered off or sat down to coloring. Before long children and adults surrounded the cage where One, Two, Three, Four and Five were perched like a line of clones. Five pairs of birds'eyes followed us. Our leader pointed out the special features of birds – wings, feathers, beaks – and a few children flapped their arms and grinned. They got it, the sameness and the difference of these jewel bright animals.

As the room filled up with toddlers, infants, and adults, the birds suddenly relaxed and moved to the bars, the swing, the seed cups, whistling and calling out – to each other and to us. Suddenly we weren’t people staring here and birds frozen in fear there, but two communities appreciating one another, talking and connecting in ways you could barely see but could feel. The room got noisier and noisier and the leader clapped her hands so the people knew to settle in for a story. And the five green birds, they grew quiet, too, and stayed that way until the story’s end.

Being with animals often reminds me of my perch in the grand schematic, which is good for the ego and lifts the spirit, kind of like wings.

Early One Morning

The long stare. Designed on purpose to make you feel like prey, the long stare is what they call the look some canines give to, well, their prey. Grabbed by that stunning stare, my friend and I were mesmerized. What was that animal? A large German shepherd? Too tall and healthy looking to be a coyote. Maybe a wolf? No, not in New England. No any more.

Most probably it was an eastern coyote, which can have a little dog or wolf mixed in. Canis latrans (barking dog, its scientific name) is one wild animal we have in common. Clever, elusive, and adaptable, coyotes range throughout most of North America to slightly south of Mexico. As our local predators literally lose ground, coyotes move into the vacuum, even in urban areas. How do they manage to thrive in so many places? They’re opportunistic, hunting day or night, and easily evading us, one of their few predators.

Today most of us live in range of a coyote, which means coyotes hunt, mate, and whelp in our neighborhoods. (Over 10,000 live in Massachusetts alone.) Some of us like this idea, some of us are rightly nervous for our pets or even our young children, and some of us want them dead. While it makes sense to be aware of their untamable nature, fear too often leads to panic and violence against them.

It also makes sense to think about things from the coyote’s point of view. Small animals equal food, garbage cans contain food, and so our landscape becomes hunting grounds. Some people feed coyotes, in effect training them to think people = food, which is rarely a good idea. (But then seed producers have started to market squirrel food which, if you’ve ever tried to get squirrels out of your attic, you know is super unsmart.)

Like many of you, I live in a place where wild, domestic and human animals share space. We build porches and skunks build their dens under them. We feed birds and squirrels come running. We let our cats out and coyotes seeking food for their young come hunting.

Yes, coyotes are killers. Just like us, they’ve got to eat. And they’re also parents, faithful partners, and helpful pack members. They eat mostly rodents, the kind that can become pests, like mice and rats. They sing and howl, bark and huff, like we do. Indians had such great respect for the coyotle that they made him a star trickster and a deity in their stories.

I was relieved to find my town is smart about these neighbors. Animal Control has a very useful coyote page that shows where they’ve been seen and how they’ve been behaving. The deep snow we have means they’re spotted more often, but they’re being very good given how hard the hunting must be. The story this site tells is that we're being good, too. We're being sensible about our pets and other things, like pet food, that might entice them to come closer to humans than is wise.

A world without wild is an empty world. We’re all safer – wild and tamer-- if we respect one another, letting each species do what it needs to do to survive with a minimum of conflict.

Make Way!

Welcome! This blog is about the interconnected web of life that weaves us together. Long known in India as the god Indra's jeweled net, this sparkling cradle holds all sentient beings.

Having lived in the country, the suburbs, the ex-urbs, and now the city, I've become an avid student of this fabric. Because there's less cover in the city, the threads of the web often stand out in relief. One melting morning in this very snowy winter I rounded a corner with my dog to find a mallard in the middle of the street delicately drinking water from an icy puddle. He looked healthy, but didn't move away when he saw us, so I tied up my dog and went to check more closely for injuries and get him to a safer spot if needed.

The minute I stepped off the curb, he got up and sidled onto a low drift on the far side of the street. A few minutes later, he was gone. There are ponds, reservoirs and a river nearby, and I couldn't figure out what would drive a duck away from them until I mentioned my rescue attempt to a friend. She thought that the usual duck hang-outs were most likely frozen. I have another theory: since we're halfway to spring, the duck might have been scouting for a new house lot and got thirsty touring the various neighborhoods.

His careful sipping, the surprise of his nearness, and the reminder of coming spring all gladden my heart. Even more heartening is how wise people were to preserve a necklace of green spaces, realizing a jeweled web for us all. And this legacy now includes charm bracelets, rings, and many similar treasured places across the land. If you're like me, you can't remember a time when creatures didn't feature in your life. Or maybe you came to know and love them later. I look forward to hearing about your encounters with and concerns for our web.