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.â€