With a Capital N

A friend, who is kind enough to read some of my posts, even more kindly sends along comments from time to time. His last message was appreciative of my observations about the natural world—I would say Nature, with a capital N.

Somewhere along the way—early teens I believe—Nature became more than a playground, at the beach in Florida, or chasing through the woods in Minnesota. However, despite my inclination to find respite by myself out there as opposed to inside, I am no dewy-eyed Romanticist.

Witness the world that I see, the red fox carcass picked over by Turkey vultures, the fox that killed rabbits, the hunting hawks overhead diving after prey, the minnows fleeing bass. Yep, it’s that jungle as advertised.

Let me tell you a story. Earlier this week I watched 2 dozen geese take off to the northeast from the lake and as they rose to treetop level, they began a turn clockwise to the south. Except just as they were clearing the lake’s airspace, all but 3 suddenly made a sweeping turn counter-clockwise.

The larger group circled back over the lake and pointed themselves southward. The first 3 also then swung back toward the lake, but just as they reoriented over the water, one of them turned hard right and flew off by itself due north. The other 2 continued after the rest of the flock.

Now at this point, my mind could easily construct a human-flavored conversation among these birds a la Over the Hedge or Ants. At the very least, a “What the hell” from the 3 lead birds when the others turned away.

By the way, much honking was going on, so it’s not like some kind of stealth operation was underway. See, how easy to overlay a human sensibility.

Let me tell you another story. Last week I saw two Red-tailed hawks flying wing-to-wing over the lake for two passes and then they landed on the same limb of an oak at waterside. Two firsts for me, a pair flying together in formation like that and two sharing the same limb—I have seen two egrets do the same.

One hawk was clearly larger than the other, and it was the larger one that lifted off first and began circling out over the water again. After several turns, the calls began, not the piercing, shrill cries I hear with hawks, but a softened cry. Within a few moments, the smaller bird that had been looking off up the hill, joined the crying one in the air and off they flew.

Mating pair? Parent/offspring? I do not know. But, as I said, nothing I had ever seen before.

Now what I would say to my friendly correspondent is that these scenes appeal to my sense of Nature as opposed to human world where, as I told him, so much stuff is made up. That is not word for word, but close enough to reflect my thinking.

Was my life any better, or worse for that matter, for bearing witness to such scenes? Taking time to take in the natural world as my biological clock keeps on ticking?

Well, let me take the larger leap. When I say Nature, I mean to include the entire universe, which includes humans. Surely, that is expansive enough for a capital N.

Since I am a self-proclaimed scale and complexity guy, I am awed by scale of the universe—time for U-niverse? I am also awed by the complexity of the mechanisms, the forces, the tiniest to the largest, the sheer detailing of it all. Capital A. So, capital N.

But, dewy-eyed? Hardly.

P.S. First bald eagle sighting of 2019 this afternoon. Awe-some.