Invisible Beasts (13 page)

Oh no! Oh shit! Oh, no
.

And it was stupid to have marched over, crunching leaf litter under my boots. Stupid to have knelt by the woven nest-cup, putting my big human paw there, tossing eggs into the woods, good riddance to bad eggs, to thuggish cowbirds. I detest cowbirds. For every cowbird egg stealing space in another species' nest, there's one more disappointment in the world. Okay, and it was stupid to have panicked when I found myself electrified, on my feet, backing away from a three-foot-high chunk of enraged lapis lazuli with ruby eyes and crimson crest, stretching out his wicked long neck with a blue beak and a black tongue hollering like a turkey on the warpath,
Rotter-rotter-rotter-rotter-rotter-rotter-rotterrrrr!
I took to my heels. Laugh if you like, it was terrible. I had finally met a male Foster Fowl. There was nothing soft in his feathers or his comportment. I'll never know whether it was he and his mate who wove the nest with that last, sole egg . . . that last egg at the bottom of the nest, which may, or may not, have been a Foster Fowl's. I came back later. The nest was moved. I don't blame them. I will never know.

T
HE NEXT SUMMER
, I set out my chicken-egg lure: no Foster Fowl came, though raccoons did. I waited all summer. The summer after that, I set out eggs again: no Foster
Fowl came, though raccoons did and trashed my porch with my own trash. I spent the summer lurking in all her usual spots; I watched the poor, bare eggs, in many an abandoned nest, snatched up by squirrels, crunched down by foxes, engulfed by snakes. And the summer after that. And the summer after that.

W
HEN MY SUMMER FUN
appeared to be gone, I did what all humans do when their fun is gone. I looked around for something to blame. I picked up the phone and called Evie, who as a biologist was interested in the whole story, up to my sighting of the male Foster Fowl, and as a sibling, was amused at the thought of her older sister acting like a nitwit.

“Wow, that was really stupid,” she said. “Cowbirds are evil? Compared to, like,
humans
?”

“Do you think they'll ever come back?” I begged.

“Um, Sophie, I would guess that your birds are over-producing females, which species do in hard times. And this heavily female population is moving north, because their habitat's screwed up. That's what ornithologists call the
escalator to extinction
.”

I imagined an escalator on which grinning human skeletons, clutching handbags, rose into a dark department store.

“What that means,” Evie continued, “is like, birds follow the plants and animals they eat into cooler climates.
The farther north they go, the worse they do, because they're going into conditions for which they haven't evolved. The thing is, your females don't sound very weather-resistant. So if they're dying in the winters up here, that puts, like, more pressure on the species. Which, in response, produces even more females, who die in the winter. You follow?”

“Yes,” I said, repressing the urge to say I wasn't stupid, because I was.

“The species gets thinned out. It's a vicious circle. If climate change weren't happening so fast, maybe they'd adapt. Like, a mutation could produce hard-feathered females who could survive the cold. As it is . . .” A near-audible shrug. “Some of my colleagues think that global warming will wipe out like thirty percent of land-bird species in this century.”

“Are you joking?” I croaked. “Look, I know you think I'm crazy. But please.”

“You,” laughed my sister, “totally have an imagination. And you care about animals. You know what I think? Without imagination, we can't stop extinction. That's the main problem with getting people mobilized. Thirty percent of land birds—it's not just about, oh, I don't see my woodpeckers at the feeder, oh, I can't bag my pheasant, whatever. It's not about fun. It's about survival. Because a bird touches so much—the plants it pollinates, the organisms it eats, the predators, the whole incredible cascade of species it affects. I mean, mass extinction is incredibly
dangerous. But for most people—hey, the world is full of animals, the sky is full of birds, like—nobody has to imagine life without them.” Evie spoke with passion, which made her sound like someone with pressing errands to run. I was standing in the sunlit porch, phone in hand, hanging my head. Shadows of leaves trembled over the stone floor, as if fossil leaves, embedded in the slate, were struggling to surface.

T
HE BLAME FOR LOSING
the Foster Fowl fell squarely on me, the only human being who had seen her, yet taken her for granted. Why hadn't I trapped one, built a rookery, nurtured a breeding pair? Why hadn't I used my special gift of seeing the invisible to protect what others couldn't see? It would have been no more than what naturalists and biologists do when they try to protect some unsung creature performing the work of life, some necessary being that lacks the allure of a politician's face, an entertainer's breasts, or a soldier's corpse. The longer I reflected, the larger loomed the loss. I missed my fun, then I mourned the Foster Fowl's absence in the world and would have been overjoyed to know, sight unseen, that she still existed, rearing the abandoned young of others. Then, gradually, the grandeur of the chance that I had squandered became apparent. If My Blue Heaven could teach a duck to swim, an owl to hunt, and a vulture to scavenge, what might a human being have learned from her? We don't really know
what we're fit for, what human nature really is or might be, but we do know that our nature fits into the space created by all the other animals, a particular wisdom learned among them, and the Foster Fowl was the best teacher of them all. Too late!

Reader, when I die, and my soul goes to be weighed, when my soul is weighed as the Egyptians prophesied, on a scale against the weight of truth itself—a single feather—which way will those scales tip? I don't know. You tell me.

*
    
I did try to find out if Foster Fowl chicks were being hatched out here by tweezing apart the regurgitated pellets lying under owl nests. I probed the pellets of short-eared owls, great horned owls, and Owls of Aurora (invisible owls that hunt at daybreak, although their skills are far more suited to nocturnal hunting, so they don't do too well, but never learn any better). No owls were regurgitating Foster Fowl bones.

4

P
icture this allegory: Two angels stand on either side of Evolution's throne, each holding a symbol. Competition holds a lamp that, like a predator's eyes, shines on the circle of creatures favored by natural selection. Symbiosis holds the rainbow, whose arch spans the horizon of the living earth. Around Symbiosis's feet grow flowering plants that co-evolved with pollinating animals. Symbiosis's trailing sleeve is beaded with tiny eukaryotic cells, from whose merging of bacteria and archaea all the earth's plants and animals spring. Without Competition—chaos. Without Symbiosis—nullity. This is a tale on the side of Symbiosis, and I have mentioned angels because when I ponder the existence of the soul and spiritual things, I think of Beanie Sharks
.

Beanie Sharks

I
T WAS ON THE TOP FLOOR
of a natural history museum, where they keep the artifacts of oceanic tribes, on a rainy afternoon. There were pools of light, and in one of them a display case, and near it a bench on which I sank in disbelief. I went back up to the case, put my hands in my pockets, craned forward again, reread the typed labels. I stared at the remains of an animal that had been misclassified as “ritual object, or toy.” Then I returned to the bench and tried to absorb what I had seen, hanging my wrists over my knees and staring at the floor. To know that an extinction is coming and be unable to sound an alarm, because the creature is invisible . . . But most beasts are invisible, more or less—people don't know about them, or don't pay attention to them, and then they disappear, invisible forever and to everyone. It's no consolation to think that even if most people saw invisible beasts, they still might not care.

I got up again, went over to the display case, and looked at the remains again, the way you look and look at
the accessories of a pet who has died. Or the way people look at a stuffed extinct animal, like a moa, arranged by a taxidermist to seem capable of coming back to life, so that we lower our voices and suppress notes of wonder, as if the beast could hear us, which is what we really want—after all, our murmurs tell the stuffed corpse, we can see you, know you, so you must be here, not altogether gone? Surely you are still somehow here? But the stuffed thing doesn't move from its wired spot in the museum diorama. Thanks to the longevity of museums it will likely outlast us, and when we're dead and buried and in the carbon cycle, it will be still sitting with its moth-eaten fur, its desiccated feathers, its upholstery scales. Of all humanity's monuments—ideas, structures, artworks, devices—the ones that represent us most enduringly are those unique and eternal absences, the extinctions.

I knew this animal. It looked like a beige porcelain Frisbee, and was the shell of a giant limpet attached, in life, to a much bigger, invisible beast. Half a partnership lay in the display case, between visible and invisible. Morosely fingering the plastic museum pass that couldn't be shredded, and shouldn't be chewed, I sighed. What if our own bodies had invisible parts, unseen symbiotic partners who helped us function? Not souls, exactly. They would be animals, as real as the invisible Beanie Shark, whose visible partner, the Cap limpet, lay here. The parquetry squeaked as I leaned forward, breathing on the glass. “Unknown ritual object, or toy.” I didn't know what made me sadder, the
Cap limpet, sedulously mislabeled—or its Beanie Shark, somewhere in the ocean, bereft of a partnership that after hundreds of millions of years was now dissolving . . .

T
HE OCEANGOING FISH
are hard to know. The original vertebrate lineage, they dwell in life's essential sphere; if you broke the continents and melted the volcanoes down to stubs, nothing much would change for them. Yet when we think of human babies, we ought to think of sharks. They are the animals who most closely resemble us in embryo, reports a Harvard biologist. Shark heads and human heads develop very similarly, from four embryonic scallops called the gill arches. Each gill arch develops into an area of the human, or shark, head; and each gill arch contains genes that direct its development, so that sharks become sharklike, while humans become humanlike. Bones that become jaws in a shark, become ear bones in a human. (A very bad sonnet by Keats says that his ear is open “like a greedy shark”—technically, he wasn't far off.) In embryo, humans, basking sharks, and Beanie Sharks look exactly the same. A Beanie is an invisible basking shark, and would be identical to the visible kind if not for the giant limpet, programmed to grow along with it, that tweaks its genes in embryo. As a result, the Beanie's head is altered slightly. But first let me tell you about basking sharks, those noble fish among whom I've swum while scuba diving off the coast of Scotland.