The Quail Diaries: Part 2

We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire. (T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets)

I don’t pretend to understand it. That single curved branch, blackened.

The quail were out today, again. Devlin keeps asking why I like to catch and watch quail. I try to explain, but it is not easy. It is intellectual and something else. Two today, my god they are beautiful.

Sabbaṃ bhikkhave ādittaṃ
(Bhikkus, all is burning, Buddha, The Fire Sermon)

And all is and all.

I wandered down the path into the heart of where the fire burned. The fire burned differently in different places (hotter here not as hot there) and burned different materials in different ways, into different shapes. Certain plants fell into ash, others burned black but held strong. Glass shattered and stones turned black. Shoes were eaten away, cans seared, and that one cactus swelled and dessicated, leaving a ball on the ground.

The experience of coming onto the site to start up field work just after the burn is a strange one. In the searching for quail and setting of traps, and in wandering around the fire, I feel transported in a way. I am something else, something more able to absorb–more open–I hate to say it but, I am a “Transparent Eyeball!”

All is Aflame. The Eye is Aflame
(Buddha, Fire Sermon)

But as Buddha and the neurobiologists tell me, I know I am not really absorbing in the way Emerson thought one might. My vision is obscured. But it feels like a closer contact when I am out there and focused. I feel the hold, the control, the connection, slip away. It is the way in the field and the way when I write. Which is possibly why both seem almost necessary.

Language and cats

Natalie Angier, in the New York Times Science Times on 4/29/08, covered a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

She discusses the way humans categorize other species and then use these categories, especially if they are negative, to justify eradicating (AKA killing) individuals of these groups in the name of conservation (e.g. cowbirds) or environmental preservation (e.g. pigeons).

This issue has bothered me a great deal because I am currently studying feral cat population dynamics and the utility of the spay neuter release approach to population control. The controversy over this approach vs. eradication (AKA shooting, poisoning, etc.) is heated and vehement and I do not want to go over it right now (do a web search and you’ll find folks on both sides) because the lack of data and the verbal sparring with loaded terms (note my parentheses as an example) gives me a headache.

But, I want to put forward the argument that we need to consider how we approach these other species in a way that explores all aspects of our mutual relationship–how they got where they are (usually we moved them their so the original culpability and responsibility is not theirs but OURS), what their actual present day impact is (not just what happened when they were introduced, as a novel predator, 100 years ago) and ALL of the options open to us now, not just the easiest or most emotionally satisfying (e.g. shooting that damn cat that has been eating the birds; and ignoring the cat that shows up in its wake [see the New York Times Magazine 12/2/07.

Essentially, I believe we have to recognize that the cats are only feasting on the remains of our destructiveness. When we consider what to do with the multitude of feral and free roaming cats that may or may not be threatening bird and other species we need to recognize that we carried them all over the world and we have a responsibility to consider humane approaches to managing their numbers rather than simply label them invasive and shoot them on sight.