Nature

Yesterday as I headed down my driveway I came across a turtle crawling across the road from our pond and presumably, on his way to our neighbors pond. I stopped and got out to move him and my ears were immediately filled with a high, piercing sound, repeated over and over. I turned and saw a beautiful little bird dancing around on the ground trying to get my attention, broken wing dragging dramatically.

A-ha. I must have stopped right near a nest. Leaving the turtle for the moment, I walked carefully towards the Killdeer Piper, who was putting on an impressive display of how ready for the dinner pot she was. Sure enough, there on the side of the road in a small, circular nest of stone and pebbles, blending perfectly with the driveway gravel, rested three perfect little eggs. I felt like the luckiest treasure hunter in the world, to have puzzled it out and found this delicate little piece of proof of Nature's resilience. Killdeer Pipers are known for nesting in strangely open and flat areas that seem highly unsafe and yet, they are ubiquitous in Texas. So I guess it works well enough for them.

To the great relief of the Killdeer ( whose wing magically mended as soon as I walked away) I turned my attention to the turtle, still huddling in his shell in the middle of the road. I picked him up and was about to set him down in the grass and go on my merry way but instead I sat down and took a closer look. What a strange, strange creature a turtle is. From a far he looks like a greenish grey lump of nothing special, but up close I had to marvel at the finely scalloped edges of his shell, the markings on his wrinkly skin, the perfect pattern of his body armor. Even his funny little face expresses more personality than some people I know. I sat there and marvelled to think that this little guy was just another turtle in a long line of a species that has been around for over 200 million years. So however odd I may find them, I guess it works well enough for them.

Driving on to my errands, I got lost in thoughts of our natural world. How resilient yet fragile it is, vulnerable to our insanity. I thought about rhinos who have roamed our planet for 50 million years but today are more in danger than ever of going extinct. I thought of giraffes and how they have become a bizarre target for some trophy hunters although their numbers, too, are dwindling rapidly. I thought of lions whose numbers have dropped below a palsy 30,000 in all of Africa. I thought of a majestic bull elephant, a real Tusker named Heritage who I think I saw in the Mara but will never see again for sure. Poachers made sure of that.

Photo: Mara Elephant Project

I thought of the sheer brutality with which poachers are now killing off our fellow planet dwellers. Literally hacking the tusks from elephants and horns from rhinos while they are still living. Strangling giraffes and antelope in wicked snares. They don't even afford them a clean death. The pictures I have seen but will not share haunt me. They would haunt you too, so - I won't share. This one is bad enough.

I thought of the dramatic increase in poaching over the past few years and the estimates that tell us that if this continues or, God forbid, escalates, we will have no elephants left in the wild in just a decade or two. I know the end of their species would be just the beginning of the end of an untold number of species who live in perfect symbiosis with the elephant, a keystone species, depending upon them as landscape architects to provide food, water and shelter.

Photo : Billy Dodson

www.savannaimages.com

I thought of a world even less populated by wildlife than the one we live in today.

I thought of a world in which I could not bear to live.