Many thanks to Marcella for providing the link to today’s topic: animals and the fools who watch them. I’m being mean; it’s actually a very engaging piece of writing by an author I’ve never heard of (Richard Conniff), but whose book (Swimming With Piranhas at Feeding Time: My Life Doing Dumb Stuff With Animals) I just might head out to buy, having read this piece in yesterday’s New York Times. (If you’re too lazy to click the link, some of my favorite bits are just across the jump):
When I’m heading off on assignment as a wildlife writer, to study spider webs in Costa Rica, or chase lemurs in Madagascar, people often say, “You’re going where? You’re going to do what?” Doubtfully, they add, “And somebody’s actually paying you for this?” Then they ask if they can come along. Secretly, my neighbors suspect that I am a hit man.
I’ve always wanted to be a suspected hit man, or maybe a suspected CIA agent. Ever since I started watching Chuck, the bug has bitten even more fiercely… But all fantasies aside, Conniff makes a point that strikes very close to home, and is very much the point I’ve been trying to make all along in this blog:
You don’t have to go anywhere to see animals do interesting stuff. Or rather, you just have to go outside.
Conniff’s piece riffs on this stock answer to the incredulous people who don’t, or perhaps can’t, understand why the spectacle of the natural world can captivate so many of us. (Of course, he loses a bit of my sympathy when he relates the fact that he can, without even going outside, see things like a hawk landing in a tree 100 feet from where he’s sitting. If my yard view was like that, I might seriously push to work from home, too!)
Whether your view is, like mine is right now, a computer screen in front of a blank wall, or whether it’s, like mine could be if I turned around, a nice little park viewed from seven floors up, take the time to look. You just mind find something worth watching.