<html>
<p><img src="http://www.greensboro-nc.gov/modules/showimage.aspx?imageid=5014" width="180" height="240"/> <a href="http://www.greensboro-nc.gov/index.aspx?page=1363">[source]</a></p>
<p>I went on a bike ride with my sketch pad this morning. There’s an old railway that’s been converted into a trail, which runs <a href="http://www.greensboro-nc.gov/index.aspx?page=1363">north from my neighborhood</a> in Greensboro, and <a href="http://downtowngreenway.org">south towards downtown</a> (or it will, when it's completed). On other rides I’ve taken it as far as the bridge that crosses <a href="http://www.greensboro-nc.gov/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=18363">Lake Brandt</a>. Today I got distracted as I passed a storm water retention pond. There were a couple of turtles floating at the surface, their shells at a 50-degree angle. Three more tiny ones were on a small branch. The thing that stopped me, though, was a furry head with a wake behind it. I’ve been watching out for beaver all spring since the ones at the Audubon Natural Area on Tankersly abandoned their broken dam. I was only 50 yards away or so, but I’m no expert, so I can’t be absolutely sure it wasn’t a beaver. However, it looked more like a groundhog to me. Swimming! </p>
<p>I was intrigued and stopped. It clambered out, shook itself off, nibbled some grass. I still couldn’t see it very well through the grass, but it looked more gray than brown, and its head seemed a bit pointy. Carnivore pointy, I wondered, like a mink? But no, it definitely ate some grass, and when it stood up on its haunches, I was maybe 80% sure it was a groundhog. From a distance its tail looked furry and not flat and scaly like a beaver’s. It went back into the water with no hesitation at all and swam, in no hurry, straight across the little pond to disappear into the woods. </p>
<p>Once I was off the bike, I hung around for a few minutes and started to notice other things. There were dozens of June bugs zizzing drunkenly around the lawn. A male cardinal flitted around the bushes as easily and smoothly as I steer my bike. There were two-foot long fish cruising slowly below the muddy surface of the pond. Through the water I could see silvery sides, and maybe some hints of color? It would be a terrible place for a giant rainbow trout to live. The habitat said carp to me, but I’ve never seen silvery carp, not even in a koi pond. Then as I turned and pedaled for home, I noticed a nearby kudzu vine in bloom. The flower heads looked almost like purplish wheat, before the individual scales opened up into purple flowers. </p>
<p>I’ve always found it easy to relate to mammals, less so birds (except for raptors), and while reptiles, fish, and insects are interesting, they’ve rarely been the targets of my loving-kindness meditations. So I read <a href="http://symontgomery.com">Sy Montgomery</a>’s books with a grain of salt stuck in my craw, to mix a metaphor. </p>
<h1>She writes of overflowing love for every damn thing. </h1>
<p>The last one I read, <em>Birdology</em>, was about what it’s like to <strong>be</strong> a bird. This one, <em>The Soul of an Octopus</em>, follows four Pacific Giant octopuses at the New England Aquarium in Boston, as well as the eccentric community of keepers and volunteers who take care of them. Octopuses – not <em>octopi</em>, which would be Latin and not the proper Greek – don’t live very long, and so aquaria have to keep catching new ones to replace them. SM says that the <a href="http://www.seattleaquarium.org">Seattle aquarium</a> (which I visited once), which can find them locally right there in Puget Sound, sometimes returns them to the wild after they’ve grown up, but the <a href="http://www.neaq.org">New England Aquarium</a>, which has to order them through the mail, keeps them until they die. </p>
<h1>This makes for fairly regular mourning among the volunteers. </h1>
<p>Here’s what I find ironic. Octopuses are predators, of course, and they need to eat. The volunteers take great delight in feeding the octopus by hand. In the wild octopuses eat basically whatever they can catch, but what they get at the NE Aquarium is mostly a particular fish called capelin (which I assume are cheap) and squid. Squid are also color-changing, relatively intelligent molluscs. What’s more, squid are social like we are. How easy it is for us hypocritical humans to extend our tribal boundaries for an individual, to consider that individual a Person, and to just as easily retract them for a nameless, faceless group, which are just food for our Person – <strong>our</strong> octopus. </p>
<p>Sy Montgomery does not touch on this particular issue, but she’s definitely a philosophical sort of thinker, ranging across natural history, molecular biology, religion. Here’s a sample: </p>
<blockquote>“Beneath the water, I find myself in an altered state of consciousness, where the focus, range, and clarity of perception are dramatically changed … The ocean, for me, is what LSD was to Timothy Leary. He claimed the hallucinogen is to reality what a microscope is to biology, affording a perception of reality that was not before accessible. Shamans and seekers eat mushrooms, drink potions, lick toads, inhale smoke, and snort snuff to transport their minds to realms they cannot normally experience.” </blockquote>
<p>She’s also a pretty good wordsmith, definitely way better than <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/08/hp-lovecraft-125/401471/">that other cephalopod aficionado</a> who I still read occasionally. I personally am a little less effusive; I rarely “weep with joy” or get “drunk with strange splendors,” but I believe her when she says that she does. </p>
<p>I don’t scuba. I just watch a lot of underwater documentaries. This book was just as good as any of them, even with only a total of 15 pictures. I learned quite a bit, including some new research on how some species of octopuses may be <a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/07/140728-social-octopuses-animals-oceans-science-mating/">more social</a> than we thought they were. It made me very curious to see what the Greensboro Natural Science Center will do with their octopus.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.animalplanet.com/tv-shows/tanked/videos/greensboro-science-center-gets-tanked/">http://www.animalplanet.com/tv-shows/tanked/videos/greensboro-science-center-gets-tanked/</a></p>
<p><em>This was written in June of 2015, but never posted anywhere. </em></p>
<p><em>Coincidentally, today is the end of </em><a href="https://www.facebook.com/CephDays/"><em>Cephalopod Awareness Week</em></a><em>.</em></p>
</html>
hiveblocks