I was in Kentucky visiting friends who took me on a short hike on Berea forest trails. These friends are “bird” people – bird watchers and photographers. So, on the hike, we would stop often when they heard some bird and they would look up to try and capture a photograph – which I also got into and starting pointing out birds in the canopy of the trees. When I saw them my description limited to “…a small black one there..” or “…a large black one over here…”. They would look at it and say something like, “…that’s a yellow rumped warbler…” and then my friend would take some pictures with the huge lens attached to his camera.
These are what my “little black birds” really looked like!
They live on a 13 acre farm in rural Kentucky, with a view of a pond and lots of trees and vegetation. When I walked down their stairs to their living room I see five cats looking up at me (they are also “cat” people); in the morning the back yard is full of birds looking for food; in the evening the raccoons come around to their porch and eat all the cat food.
My friend, a close buddy from college, got his first SLR a few years ago and now has become a really good bird photographer. Just around where he lives, and mostly from his porch itself, he has photographed and identified over 130 different bird species. Some of these are just magnificent, a few pictures below.
The fact that over 130 species in that area of KY alone was mind boggling – well it turns out there are over 10,000 bird species in the world. Add to that all the different mammals, sea creatures, reptiles and the 10 quintillion insects – and we are reminded how vast the living world of nature is. Human beings share this earth with all these living creatures and only represent one species out of tens of millions. While it is no doubt that we are the dominant species in modifying, building creating and overcoming our environment to make it easier for us to live, we still only represent a small fraction of all the co-inhabitants of this earth both in numbers and even in actual mass.
All this is a constant reminder that humans, representing such a small portion of all living beings, have no right to destroy the environment, the nature of this world, due to their activities. As Spinoza says, God is Nature and Nature is God. So, let us never forget the environment and our duty to protect it