Nature a good guide for lessons in humanity

The images of the early summer landscape, if one could portray them in perfect words, would read like a melodic, whimsical poem.

If it’s possible to “see” a poem rather than hear its words, my daughter Emma and I did just that on a short walk from one garden to another. Thirteen goldfinches – 10 brilliant yellow males and three dapper females – sat chattering on a roll of wire fencing. Jumping from wire to wire, they rearranged themselves dozens of times, singing and chirping to each other until all at once they flew away.

Then, a lone male bluebird studied us as we held hands and walked on. He jumped from the handle of the pitchfork to the top of the pergola. As we passed, he flew to the top of the greenhouse. When we got to the greenhouse, he flew to the top of the barn, then to a hay rake in the field, then to the pine across the road. His bobbing from place to place was a funny little display of his alternating curiosity and fear.

In early summer everything seems eager to live. In the past week a few experiences have illuminated for me creatures’ incredible capacity to find what some of us may at times take for granted: a safe home.

I was shearing a dwarf Alberta spruce tree recently, clipping, snipping, haphazardly brushing away the tiny needles that sprayed the shrub with every snap of the shears. While toiling, I noticed a dry piece of straw hanging from a parting in the branches of the little pointed shrub. Thoughtlessly, I yanked at the straw to pull it from a perfect scheme of evergreen needles. It wouldn’t come. My first horrified thought was confirmed as I peered down through the branches and saw a tidy nest with at least one set of scared eyes looking back at me. A baby bird sat in the nest attached to the piece of straw. I looked down through the branches of the shrub to see if I’d shaken any baby bird from its home, and couldn’t find or hear any evidence.

What an oaf! What a buffoon! After chastising myself sufficiently I stepped back away from the shrub and only then noticed a little female finch tweeting frantically and jumping along a rock wall trying to steer me away from her young. When I stepped back away from the shrub, it seemed perfectly obvious that something was dwelling there. The “parting in the branches” was actually a perfectly round hole, just big enough for momma finch to squeeze through.

I went back the next day to make sure she hadn’t deserted her young one (although I had no idea what I would have done if she had). I watched her several times dart out to the lawn for food and take it back to the baby bird. Even with that small comfort, I proceeded to spend several days wondering what that poor baby bird thought of its world being shaken and clipped by a careless giant invader.

Given this absent-minded display, you might find it hard to believe that I’m actually quite thoughtful about why things live where they do. I’m fascinated by the fact that a spider can make a living in a quarter-inch crack of an aging telephone pole. Its finely woven web is an engineering marvel in which a host of black flies and other tiny insects have met their demise.

Then there’s the salamander we found embedded deep within a tall pile of wood chips, the tiny ant farm that appeared overnight in the gravel of our driveway, the amazing lacework of earthworm paths we found under rocks as we removed them from the garden, and the deer beds we’ve found under cedar trees in the woods.

My girls and I talked about the word “inhumanity” this week. Everyday the news causes us to think about inhumanity in our world. And every day our garden – and our life – causes us to put into action humanity. The word implies that humans are responsible for holding the standard when it comes to treating all living things with respect, I told them. We should treat living things the way we want to be treated, we concluded. Perhaps it’s learned, perhaps it’s their nature, but my kids know that humanity means we can raise our own meat, treat the animals with respect and still eat them. For example, our little pink pigs, Oink and Boink, are in love with my daughter Julia. They’ve figured out that she gives the best back scratches. She enjoys these “scratch fests” as much as they do, yet she still says, half joking, half with unhampered confidence, “I like them best as chops with applesauce.”

All observations of nature in action, whether an example of life in growth or life in decline, offer an opportunity to learn about our own humanity. I think about the baby bird I nearly flicked out of the tree, and I cringe to think that I could have killed it. But I cringe even more to think that there might be a person out there who might not have cared one way or another if they had killed it.

Indeed, I have humanized the bird, wondering how I’d feel if someone did that to my house. I think about Oink and Boink, too, and I push their inevitable end to the back of my mind.

What must be, must be, I tell myself. And on some days, the nature of it all makes perfect, complete sense. On some days I don’t question it, but I still respect it. These lessons in humanity are easy to learn if you use nature as your guide.