Basho and the Grebes

The Japanese haiku poet Matsuo Basho

I've been writing stories about recently extinct species to raise awareness that the latest spasm of species loss, which we are in the midst of, includes much more than the Dodo, the passenger pigeon and the great Auk. One of my stories, "Basho and the Grebes," was just published in the online journal Toad. The story begins like this:

This is a story that ends prematurely. Once there was a diving bird that lived happily on a lake. This grebe, like grebes everywhere, had an elaborate mating ritual. Males and females faced each other, bobbed their long swan necks and preened their feathers in rhythm. They dove into the shallows, rose up breast to breast and, feet paddling furiously, waltzed around each other with a bill full of reeds as if proposing to build a floating nest together. Then they dashed side by side across the surface of the lake like fools in love before diving under.

You can read the rest of the story, and find out how the great Japanese haiku poet is connected, here.

And, the clip below shows aspects of the grebes' mating ritual (the same clip is here):


                              

Learning from Nature -- Alison Hawthorne Deming

What can we learn from our encounters from nature, particularly from the great animals like elephants? This is Alison Hawthorne Deming writing about being stuck in the mud on a safari in Africa: 

Being stuck is how any earth cel­ebrant might feel these days, con­fronted by the habitat-hogging reign of human culture over the planet.  But one of nature's little tricks is that our better intentions can be fueled by the simple contemplation of natural beauty.  Whether our empathy for other spe­cies is sufficient to motivate the level of care that the damaged world requires remains an open question.  But to feed one's wonder and love for the varieties of earth's self-expression is one of our better desires. You can read the entire essay from which this excerpt was extracted at the NRDC's 

OnEarth Magazine


As a bonus, listen to a podcast from OnEarth magazine in which Deming reads the essay 
and talks in more detail about what we can learn from nature. 

Poet Alison Hawthorne Deming on What Nature Teaches -- If We Listen | OnEarth Magazine

Also see an earlier post about the emotional life of elephants here.