“In a world older and extra full than ours they transfer completed and full, gifted with extensions of the senses we now have misplaced or by no means attained, residing by voices we will by no means hear,” Henry Beston noticed of different animals two generations earlier than naturalist Sy Montgomery mirrored on her encounters with 13 totally different animals to insist that “our world, and the worlds round and inside it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we can’t fathom.”
An epoch earlier than Beston and Montgomery — earlier than we had the science to fathom how owls see with sound, how dolphins and whales talk in supersonic hieroglyphics, how hummingbirds defy the physics of gravity, and what birds dream about — John James Audubon (April 26, 1785–January 27, 1851) noticed with astonishment and awe the myriad methods wherein birds reply to the world with qualities of thoughts his contemporaries thought of singularly human: tenderness and anger, reminiscence and foresight, prudence and percipience about tides and tornadoes and the forces of nature far past mere intuition, far past human understanding.
Whereas engaged on the brown pelican divination for my Almanac of Birds, I used to be struck by a strikingly delicate and scientifically prescient passage in Audubon’s essay on the species, suspended like all of his writing partway between ornithological description and lyrical memoir of non-public encounters. Lamenting the inhabitants decline of the brown pelican in his lifetime, he marvels on the mysterious intelligence of those unusual and historical seabirds:
The Brown Pelicans are as effectively conscious of the time of every return of the tide, as probably the most watchful pilots. Although however a short while earlier than they’ve been sleeping, but with out bell or different warning, they instantly open their eyelids, and all go away their roosts, the moment when the waters, which have themselves reposed for awhile, resume their movement. The Pelicans possess a data past this, and in a level a lot surpassing that of man close to the identical topic: they’ll choose with certainty of the modifications of climate. Must you see them fishing all collectively, in retired bays, be assured, {that a} storm will burst forth that day; but when they pursue their finny prey far out at sea, the climate will likely be superb, and also you additionally could launch your bark and go to the fishing.
In consonance with Beston’s insistence that “we’d like one other and a wiser and maybe a extra mystical idea of animals,” Audubon provides:
I ponder on the schools which Nature has bestowed on animals which we merely take into account as possessed of intuition. How little will we but know of the operations of the Divine Energy!
Audubon typically contemplated the intelligence of birds in his journal, nowhere extra so than in an 1833 entry in regards to the species to which he would quickly dedicate the best variety of pages — twenty — in his voluminous Birds of America (and which yielded one of the direct and sobering hen divinations). Writing on the summer time solstice, he jabs at our human hubris:
The Wild Goose is a wonderful diver, and when with its younger makes use of many lovely stratagems to avoid wasting its brood, and elude the hunter. They’ll dive and lead their younger beneath the floor of the water, and at all times in a opposite route to the one anticipated; thus should you row a ship after one it’ll dive beneath it, and every now and then stay beneath it a number of minutes, when the hunter with outstretched neck, is wanting, all in useless, within the distance for the silly Goose! Each time I learn or hear of a silly animal in a wild state, I can’t assist wishing that the silly animal who speaks thus, was half as sensible because the brute he despises, in order that he would possibly be capable of thank his Maker for what data he could possess.
Complement with poet turned environmental historian and thinker of science Melanie Challenger on the best way to be extra animal and artist James Bridle on rethinking intelligence, then revisit the story of the seamstress who laid the inspiration for the examine of octopus intelligence the yr Audubon contemplated the brilliance of the goose in his journal.
