I didn’t have to work today, so I made it out in the field at dawn (which is 8:00 this time of year). I saw more bucks than usual—they tend to lay low during the day. These winter dawns are not spectacular. Heavy overcast, so I couldn’t even tell when the sun did come up. I could just tell it was getting lighter. No color. It was 28° which is warm for January.
I saw a couple of eagles and several hawks, as well as a lot of geese and ducks. I was wearing
I wasn’t surprised that it was carrion—most likely roadkill—that brought a convocation of the big birds to the valley this time of years. The bald eagles are very good looking and lazy. They prefer scavenging or stealing food from other birds, such as ospreys. Only as a last resort do they hunt.
They’ve long been an important symbol in North America, though it’s not their opportunism that attracts the glory. They are capable of taking muskrats, hares, pheasants, ducks, gulls
I’m glad their populations have rebounded after huge losses during the 20th century. There’s a lot we don’t know, such as how they might adapt to the increasing human development of landscapes near large bodies of water, which are favorite nesting sites. They like to keep their distance from people.
The question was “what was the most important thing you didn’t learn in school?” My immediate response was “how to steal fire from the gods.” School has interfered with my education at least as much as it has contributed to it. All that time—all those annoying assignments wasting time, the essence of life, in ways that might have a point in some totalitarian dream. One of the more important things I’ve learned has been how to steal fire from the gods—a task I haven’t heard explicitly mentioned in any classroom.
Eric Voegelin is best on how that works: great artists perceive in the metaxy some cosmic order. We all have glimpses of the eternal way things are, but our greatest artists give those glimpses tangible form in an artifact that others can experience. This brings the divine order within reach of people who are building an earthly order.
Such glimpses occur in proportion to the amount of time we spend in nature, trying to see. Nature is the great text of this world. But it is not a simple text, and we see much farther into it when we study the heritage of great literature that we have. The history of humanity has been a long process of waking up, and we latter-day have more riches available than we have time to access.
A simplified formula: All civilizations are formed around a core of great literature. The source of all great literature is divine revelation from the Beyond.
To be fair, I have done a lot of reading in response to school work, and that reading has been vital to all my most important learning. In my best classes—those taught by professors who enthusiastically knew more than they could say—I read many more
But it has been writers who have been my primary teachers. From
The pronghorns have outlived the Pleistocene predators that once hunted them by 10,000 years. The females can run up to 70 miles per hour.
The pronghorns are the only survivors (besides the timeless coyotes) of the Pleistocene that we still see on the Great Plains. They now have no predators (except when they are fawns) because they can run up to 70 miles per hour and the fast cats that were once here have been gone for 10,000 years.
A strong “sense of place” is often made mainly of a sense of time. Pronghorns were not long ago here in the millions, sharing the vast savanna landscape with bison, elk, grizzlies, and wolves.
And before that with mammoths, ground sloths, stag-moose, saber-toothed tigers, giant American lions, short-faced bears, and 200-pound American cheetahs.
Many Red-Tailed Hawks are overwintering in the valley. Driving the backroads in the prairie pothole ecosystem west of the mountains, I often see several per mile—often perching and watching but also often hunting.
“Nature is a haunted house—but Art—is a house that tries to be haunted.” –Emily Dickinson
It’s been below zero this week. I thought most of the Red-tailed Hawks would migrate to somewhere warmer, with less snow. But the density of hawks in the prairie ecosystem west of the mountains, is dense. One can almost always see one or several, perching and hunting alone.
I just learned they are monogamous and often mate for life. They share the work of brooding their young each year. The female does most of the incubation and the male brings her food. The young fledge at about 45 days, but some of the young remain with their parents as long as six months.
These facts don’t fit the image I had formed of them, hunting individually through the summer. In July I saw one perched on a fencepost, holding down the shredded remains of a baby skunk with his talons and ripping off strips of flesh with his bloody beak. His brow was genetically angled to make him look angry, and his beak formed a perpetual frown. He was the very image of ferocity and cruelty.
Of course, he was neither a loving spouse nor an evil monster, but a hawk. He cannot see his meal from both his point of view and that of the skunks. Eating is not a moral situation.