Little Boy Blue
Thursday May 13th 2010, 10:48 pm
Filed under: Wildlife

The best thing I can think of to say is not mine to say at all; it belongs to the late Henry Beston and came to me courtesy of Evet, the moderator of the peregrine falcon group in San Jose.

There was a naming contest among the local schoolchildren for the falcon chicks, and today the winners were announced.

Yesterday there would have been three.

Today there were two.  The blue-banded male had started earlier this week to show signs of being ill and had stopped eating; he bedded down for the night last night with his siblings around him and his mother standing guard on the ledge above, his father nearby, and by morning had slipped quietly away.

A member of the San Francisco group offered the comfort of coming to see their webcam, where their four eyases are toddling and exploring and well.

Evet offered Henry Beston:

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.
Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in
civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge
and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion.
We patronize them for their incompleteness,
for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves.
And therein we err, and greatly err.
For the animal shall not be measured by man.
In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished
and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or
never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.
They are not brethren, they are not underlings;
they are other nations
caught with ourselves in the net of life and time,
fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

6 Comments so far
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Wow! That is poetry talking about poetry… Very touching.

Thank you for sharing this with us!

Comment by Suzanne in Montreal 05.14.10 @ 4:33 am

Marvelous. Marvelous. and sad.

Comment by twinsetellen 05.14.10 @ 5:11 am

I totally enjoyed the web cam and reading the “profile” for George and Gracie. It never “gets old”. Year after year it’s a developing miracle.

Comment by Joansie 05.14.10 @ 5:59 am

Lovely words. Sorry for the little male who slipped away overnight.

Comment by Channon 05.14.10 @ 6:51 am

Humans (and a few other mammals) do grieve over loss, but humans are not in a position to judge other species. It is the way of nature thatsome live longer than others, and hthere is nothing we can do about it.

On a different note —

From church bulletins:
~ The ladies of the church have cast off clothing of every kind. They can be seen in the church basement Saturday.

~ At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be “What is Hell?” Come early and listen to our choir practice.

Comment by Don Meyer 05.14.10 @ 9:28 am

Beautiful quotation. So true. Thanks, dear Alison.

Comment by Karen 05.14.10 @ 1:00 pm



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