Whoever walks a furlong without sympathy
walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.
~ Walt Whitman
I am watching birds again. It’s not one of those brief, stop-the-conversation observations. Look! A fairy-wren … on the fence! Nor is it a thorough, binoculars-and-guidebook excursion. I’m just taking a long, leisurely look at a group of very ordinary silver gulls. They’ve gathered on the beachside grass as I wait for a friend.
One gull lands beside another, stoops, arcs its neck, lets out a chirring call, magnifying the red inside its open bill. The dispute, or is it a mating gesture, abruptly ends when the flock squawks and takes to the air en masse. Rumour of chips? A coming threat? Or is it simple group joy at the ability to fly?
I dream of flying. Most of us do. But what is flying really like? I watch one of the gulls closely, thinking to pick up some tips. Initially I’m underwhelmed. For such a sleek, handsome bird, its take-off looks wobbly and ragged. With each down stroke it hitches its belly skyward, only to have it droop groundward at the end of the upward stroke. There’s a touch of pre-spinach Popeye about this. But as my gull rises, its grace grows. It circles, glides, then spirals seaward, turning tightly on scimitar wings.
Carl Jung interpreted flight dreams as a longing to break free of limitations. He had a lot to say about dreams, even dreams about snakes. He saw serpentine locomotion as a metaphor for having the wisdom not to be too direct. “The crooked way, the detour, is the shorter way,” he wrote.
So I watch snakes too, occasionally and carefully. As I watch I ponder life inside a serpent’s skin.
Lying in a sun-patch beside a bush, I start at the thump of approaching feet, more felt than heard. I’ve scarcely flicked my tongue out to taste the air when the impulse to move tickles in my ribs – left and right – then runs down my sides. Long strands of muscle coordinate with my ultra-flexible spine and backward-facing scales to propel me forward. Slight sideward movements, first to one side, then to the other, more whipping rope than flying dart, cause my rapid, undulating forward movement. I don’t pause to consider all this. The steps are close.
What would I even know about these approaching giants? Would I stop to check whether the thumping, binary gait means humans, or might such curiosity slay the serpent? I’ve heard that humans, bizarrely bifurcated beneath impossibly broad bodies, have brutal stomping boots!
It was The Once and Future King, TH White’s wonderfully eccentric take on the King Arthur legend, that piqued my curiosity about how other creatures experience life. In the book, Merlyn the magician transforms the young Arthur, into various creatures. The boy experiences life as a fish, an ant, a falcon, a goose, an owl and a badger. It is a brilliant way for a human to gain insight into the marvellous complexities of life in this world.
. . .
I once flew low over Tasmania’s south-west. The wind whipped at my face – because the door was open for a photographer. Otherwise the ear-splitting, bone-shaking judder of the helicopter erased any suggestion that this was dream flight. I concentrated on looking at the tweedy buttongrass slopes beneath. To my surprise, lights winked back at me, thousands of them. It took a moment to realise that the whole of this region was waterlogged. Yes, annual rainfall here is measured in metres, but I hadn’t imagined that every slope, no matter how steep, could hold enough water to mirror the sunlight as we flew over.
There was a further explanation, an ecological one, for some of this liquid light display: crustaceans. The land beneath us was a paradise for rain crayfish. While most crayfish are free-swimming water dwellers, these small crayfish are land lubbers, living in an intricate system of watery burrows. In such waterlogged country these gill-breathing, water dependent creatures, proliferate.
Virtually every square metre was underlain by their tunnels, many of which ended in skyward-facing craters. These gave them access to land, onto which they sometimes ventured, especially at night and in damp conditions. Much of the water mirroring the sunlight back at us came from this crayfish city, with its thousands of watery craters.
Had Merlyn turned Arthur into a crayfish, what might he have learned? Lacking a magician, I consulted my friend Alastair Richardson, a zoologist with a wizard-like knowledge of crayfish. Zoologists are not trained to answer questions such as what would it be like to be inside the shell of a rain crayfish? But when I asked this over coffee, Alastair didn’t flinch.
He painted a picture of a life that would be utterly alien to us. These are creatures whose world is overwhelmingly dark, dank and tightly cloistered. While they do have eyes, these are small and of limited use in their dark burrows. The vast majority of their sensing is done by touch. They not only touch using their antennae, they can taste via them too. And they also sense their surroundings via tiny hairs on their claws.
Warming to his theme, Alastair fetches a fibreglass resin cast of an actual burrow. What he holds up looks like a large reindeer antler, multiple prongs branching off a main stem. Each burrow, he tells me, must always reach down to permanent water. Usually it’s one crayfish to a burrow, except during the autumn mating season, and during the subsequent nurturing of the young. At the bottom of his burrow cast he sheepishly points out the remains of its former inhabitant. Sadly it was “cooked” when the hot resin was poured into the burrow.
While rain crayfish will eat small invertebrates, the bulk of their diet is the roots of plants. In Tasmania’s south-west that’s usually buttongrass. Alastair and some other zoologists speculate that crayfish may, in a sense, farm the buttongrass, as they move from feeding chamber to feeding chamber in their underground castle. They hypothesise that by eating the roots that line their burrows, the crayfish may stimulate the plant’s growth. And the burrows themselves may help aerate the oxygen-deficient soils.
. . .
Walt Whitman wrote of another sort of deficiency. I’ve long thought that a lack sympathy towards others, including other species, results from a combination of ignorance and self-obsession. So how, I wonder aloud to Alastair, can we humans grow a sympathy for creatures as alien-seeming as crayfish? Again undaunted, Alastair recounts his experience teaching school students about crayfish. He starts from the known, noting that many of the country kids are already alert to crayfish in their dams. Once he’s stirred their curiosity about these, they’re ready for more.
“Sometimes I see the light go on,” he enthuses. ”Or I hear them say, ‘This is really cool’.” He shows some photographs of primary school students modelling crayfish. They make anatomically accurate models using found objects from the school grounds. One student even dresses himself up as a crayfish, and lies on the ground, hands raised as claws. The rapt look on so many of the students’ faces gives me a thrill of hope.
A few days later I’m walking along a Tasmanian beach, pondering all this, when I’m again interrupted by crustaceans. This time it’s the busy, scuttling movement of tiny soldier crabs, hundreds of them, that catches my eye. As I walk slowly by, some are spooked and spiral their way into the sand. But many others keep up their dibbling, excavating little balls of sand which they leave on the surface, like an elaborate braille message. It reminds me afresh how blind I am to the life going on beneath my feet. Whether I’m wandering on a sunny beach or walking through the wild hills of the south-west, what do I actually know about the millions of life forms – not just the crustaceans – with whom I share these spaces?
For all of our constantly scanning vision, and connection-making brains, we humans miss so much. I wonder if we received our species name twice – Homo sapiens sapiens – to remind us to be wise, really wise; just as a mother calls your name twice to make sure you’re listening.
A crayfish’s vision might be poor; its brain small. But oh what use it makes of those antennae! As I stand on that beach, I sense a challenge from something the size of a prawn. How can I engage the antennae of my imagination? Well-tuned, and fact-fed, these “antennae” can help me feel, taste, and begin to know how utterly remarkable the life of this world is. That kind of feeling knowledge might just be Jung’s “crooked way” for sapiens sapiens to learn how to fly.
Peter Grant lives in the foothills of kunanyi/Mt Wellington with his wife. He worked with the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service for 24 years as manager of interpretation and education. His passion for the natural world led him to write Habitat Garden (ABC Books) and found the Wildcare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize. More of his writing can be seen at naturescribe.com.
