Wildlife everywhere!

After a slow start (it's almost June now) Spring is altogether here. The previous two years we were away in Scandinavia at this time of year so missed the best of Ottawa's springtime: the buds, the tulips, the later sunsets reflected in the rivers, and the arrival of the birds. This year, forced to stay at home because of the Covid-19 emergency, there's nothing to stop us from appreciating our home surroundings to the full, as everybody else is suddenly doing.

We have been watching bees feeding from the scyllas, chickadees, cardinals, junkos, a goldfinch and his mate and and house finches with pink feathers on their heads, chipping sparrows, white-crowned sparrows, ordinary house sparrows, merganser ducks, geese and (this week) goslings, herons, ravens, crows, wild turkeys (at Rockcliffe airport), black and red squirrels, a raccoon (one on our roof and one washing its paws in the Rideau River), chipmunks and a beaver swimming underwater in clear water by the Minto Bridges. Every evening, an American robin gives a song recital from the top branches of a tree in the driveway. Red-winged blackbirds, grackles and starlings make their presence felt too; they sound more uncouth, raucous. Swallows are catching midges over the river. Do the swooping gulls catch insects too?

Multiple geese in our neighbourhood park

Lately the cardinal pair started "kissing", the male one apparently offering his mate seeds from his beak. The last couple of days I haven't seen the female so I hope that means she is on her nest. I saw one of the chickadees with a beak full of fluff this week.

Either we have all become more observant since the start of the Emergency or the birds and animals have become less afraid of us, because extraordinary encounters with animals have been reported these last few weeks, mountain goats rampaging through towns, suburban gardens overrun with deer or rabbits, empty streets in various parts of the world filled with wild pigs, monkeys and so forth.  Apocalyptic scenes! We may not all admit it, but, in a mysterious way, humanity is thrilled by such news.

Hohler in 2018, ©AyseYavas

This morning with my Deutschsprachige Konversationsgruppe we read the transcript of an interview with the aging but still very lively Swiss writer and entertainer, Franz Hohler, who since the 1970s has been writing about our relationship with the natural world, sometimes in a funny and whimsical way, sometimes in a mood of deadly seriousness. He is the author of Die Rückeroberung, a fantasy about a possible future (a utopia? a dystopia?) in which the animal world takes control of a city (Zürich) to such an extent that its human citizens become insignificant. (Our group read this story a few years ago.) In the interview Hohler quotes from Genesis in the Bible, where God gave men supremacy over the beasts and the licence to exploit the natural world.

... and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Hohler says (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) that this is where the trouble started. And now we have the climate change crisis, a distant result of our perceived "dominion". "Wir sollten uns als Untertanen der Erde erkennen, nicht umgekehrt." We should recognise ourselves as subservient to the earth, not the other way around. Climate change protests are "an idea whose time has come" he says, and calls Greta Thunberg with the Pippi Longstocking hair, als hätten wir auf eine Jeanne d’Arc gewartet, "it's as if we were waiting for a Joan of Arc"  ... auf eine Symbolfigur jedenfalls (a symbolic figurehead at least). She has caught the world's attention in a way that the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace have failed to do, previously. Franz Hohler has been a green activist for decades; the interviewer says that Greta Thunberg could well be his granddaughter.