field notes:

4.01.2005

“Where does Spanish moss get its nutrients”?
“What’s the name of that flower”?
“What do these jellies eat”?
“What will happen when that crab reaches that jellie”?

Just a sampling of the questions asked by my niece two weeks ago on her first visit to Teacher’s Beach and the Bay Area. Humbly I answered, “I don’t know”, or “Let’s look it up” to each one. She has the inquisitive nature of the born-scientist—seeing easily what needs to be known in order to understand the systems she was viewing for the first time.

I saw the same untrained scientific thoughtfulness demonstrated by Mark Bittner in the movie, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill recently. Open to the art of observation, and truly unencumbered by any formal pre-set ideas about the parrots, about birds in general, or about scientific method, he carried no nativists’ prejudice against the “invasive” species, no scientific mores that would prevent him from caring about the birds, forming relationships with them, or taking them inside when they were ill or needed preening for lack of a mate. Instead, his beautiful spirit came through in every interaction with the birds, and still he continued to make fresh observations.

If you aren’t coming at it with that open spirit, what value is nature to humanity except as pretty views, resources, and alien otherness. Or, as another family member said last night, walking to the beach on my beloved path—a creekbed overlaid with mossy oak branches, banks of ferns and buckeye—“Weird. This is weird”.

posted by Lisa on 6:27 AM link |