Caterina > Recent Status Updates

"What is going to help?" Mrs. Arnold said. "Is everyone really crazy but me?"
"Mrs. Arnold," the doctor said severely, "I want you to get hold of yourself. In a disoriented world like ours today, alienation from reality frequently--"
"Disoriented," Mrs. Arnold said. She stood up. "Alienation," she said. Before the doctor could stop her she walked to the door and opened it. "Reality," she said, and went out.

All life-forms are in fact processes not things. ...Nature is an event that never stops. As William Bateson, who coined the word genetics, observed, "We commonly think of animals and plants [and fungi!] as matter, but they are really systems through which matter is continually passing.

Fear & guilt are sisters; Theodora caught her on the lawn. Silent, angry, hurt, they left Hill House side by side, walking together, each sorry for the other..Each was so bent upon her own despair that escape into darkness was vital, & containing themselves in that tight, vulnerable, impossible cloak which is fury, they stamped along together, each achingly aware of the other, each determined to be the last to speak.

We have allowed alien plants to replace natives [everywhere].Our native animals and plants cannot adapt to this gross and completely unnatural manipulation of their environment..Their only hope for a sustainable future is for us to intervene to right the wrongs that we have perpetrated.In order to let nature take its course,we must first recreate nature.
[IMO This was not perpetrated, it happened by accident.]

I hate her, Eleanor thought, she sickens me; she is all washed and clean and wearing my red sweater.
"Nell?" Theodora looked up at her and smiled. "I really am sorry, you know," she said.
I would like to watch her dying,Eleanor thought, and smiled back and said, "Don't be silly."

When it comes to supplying food for other animals, no group of insects surpasses the moths and butterflies..The fat, juicy larvae [caterpillars] are favorites of birds..If we..care for only one group of insects in our..ecosystem, we would do well to choose..Lepidoptera. Fortunately moths and butterflies are not innately repulsive to most people. [I'd say unless they are in our pantries, woolens, tomatoes, peaches..]

These beetles fly to the top of mountains and scan the horizon in search of forest fires [using] specialized heat sensors that can detect infrared radiation emitted by burning trees up to 80 miles away. If they detect a fire, they fly to it and lay their eggs in the weakened trees even before the trees stop burning.

[Wow. I'll never underestimate insects again. And how did scientists figure this out?]

Perhaps Hill House has a tower, or a secret chamber, or even a passageway going back into the hills & probably used by smugglers..Perhaps I will encounter a devilishly handsome smuggler and..
She turned her car into the last stretch of drive leading her directly, face to face, to Hill House and..sat, staring.
The house was vile. She shivered and thought..Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.

The value of oaks for supporting..wildlife cannot be overstated. Acorns fill the bellies of deer, raccoons, turkeys, mice, black bear, squirrels & even wood ducks. Cavities ..supply vital nesting sites for dozens of species of birds..What we have underappreciated..however, is [that] no other plant supports more species [butterflies & moths (caterpillars)] thus providing more types of bird food, than the mighty oak.

But there's the rub. How do we know which ornamental aliens have the capacity to become invasive?..The fact is, it is very difficult to predict..Most of our worst invasives did not become aggressive for many years.Japanese honeysuckle, for example,was planted as an ornamental for 80 years before it escaped cultivation.No one is sure why this lag time occurs.The..responsible course of action is the most unpopular one.

When I compared natives to aliens [plants] in terms of their production of Lepidoptera (butterflies & moths) [whose caterpillars feed on the leaves] and sawfly caterpillars-the largest diet component of insectivorous birds [and what most birds feed to their nestlings]-I found that the native plants in the study supported a whopping 35 times more caterpillar biomass than the aliens..No wonder our birds are struggling.

Memories have colors. Everything before the war I remember in motion. It moves and changes colors. The colors are mostly bright. But, the war, the orphanage, it all becomes still, and the colors turn gray....
...And then my mother located me and came to the orphanage. It was completely unexpected. What joy! I run to Mama. I open the door and there stands a ... (continued in comment)

The first part of this book offers a very enlightening primer on ecology, recent scientific thought on biodiversity & why it matters: it makes ecosystems more resilient --less likely to collapse -- more productive -- of oxygen, plants, animals, water filtration, weather buffering, carbon sequestration etc. -- and less susceptible to takeover by aggressive introduced species (which DT calls alien invaders).

Sisyphus kept pushing his rock up the hill, and Coyote kept rolling it right back down. Short of carpeting the country with our new nuclear weapons, nothing was going to get rid of coyotes. Were we really willing to continue this level of cruelty [killing millions with excruciating poisons despite solid scientific evidence that they were not predators of game animals or cattle] in the face of unending failure?

The ecological niche breakthrough [by Joseph Grinnell, 1924] was critical for understanding wild coyotes & appreciating predators generally. In nature a "niche" is analogous to an occupation in human culture..Niches for predators had existed across time as part of the balance of nature that ancient societies had marveled at. In scientese, the coyote trotting across America..occupied the niche of a mid-sized predator.

Humans are ancient veterans of..pushing fellow animals into the black hole of oblivion..Even so, few if any organized states have ever been so coldly calculating about species cleansing as to set into law..a strategy to exterminate a single mammal native to its continent. If the residents of [New York City] want to know why coyotes are sleeping in their flowerbeds..the interrogation can begin here...

[Mark] Twain..hit stride in what became a classic description with a long reach.."The cayote is a long, slim, sick&sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerable bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness &misery, a furtive&evil eye,&a long, sharp face..He has a general slinking expression all over. The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want."

I often hear people say "my mother" or "my father." I don't understand. Why "mother" and "father," as if they were strangers? It should only be "Mama" and "Papa." And if mine were alive, I would call them "Dear Mama" and "Dear Papa." Those are golden words.

--Ira Mazur, 5 years old when she watched her mother die by a Nazi bullet; she also lost her father to the Nazis.

Coyote (capitalized to distinguish the deity from the ordinary coyote trotting by while you read) is the most ancient god figure of which we have record [in N. America]. No one knows when..or exactly how Coyote became a principal figure in so many different peoples' creation stories and ruminations on the human condition.No other native deity in America came anywhere close to inspiring such a vast body of literature.

[For 15,000 years] Something about our lifestyle has always drawn coyotes to human camps, villages & cities. That something is ecology at its simplest, even if it makes us squirm a bit. A coyote's primary prey happens to be our close fellow travelers, the mice and rats that flourish around us in profusion.As for fearing us too much to tolerate our presence, coyotes have taken our measure far too perceptively for that

But the range expansion of a wild animal for thousands of miles in every direction, often through dense settlements of humans who in recent history have been committed to that animal's eradication, is truly remarkable. ...
Southwestern Hispanos have a rich folk tradition about coyotes and have long said that the only thing smarter than a coyote is God.

We cherished each cow..After the umpteenth bombing we were left without our cart & I walked in front of our herd, tied to the bull, Vaska. He had a ring in his nose with a rope tied to it, & I tied myself to the end of the rope. For a long time the cows could not get used to the bombings..After the shelling it was hard to round them up. But if the bull went on the road they all followed him, &the bull obeyed only me.

Studies show that animals will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid the perils of our highways, often making early attempts to utilize wildlife crossings before they're even finished. Once construction of an overpass or underpass is completed, it can reduce animal-vehicle collisions by up to 97 percent...Across the Mountain West..many native animals are returning to areas they had been unexpectedly cut off from.

My childhood ended with the first gunshots.
We left Hatimsk (sp?) on a cart. .The bombing started. My sister was holding two nice apples & we began fighting over them..My mother yelled Hide! but we were quarreling over the apples. I said, Give me at least one apple or I'll die without having tasted them. She gave me one-the nicest one. Then the bombing stopped. I didn't eat the lucky apple.

At school I went to the sixth grade. During the lessons of literature and history, the teachers talked to us, and we sat and knitted socks, mittens, tobacco pouches for the army. We knitted, and memorized poetry, recited Pushkin in chorus. We were waiting for the war to end. It was such a cherished dream that Mama and I were even afraid to talk about it.

Our house burned down. The garden burned down. There were baked apples hanging on the apple tree. We gathered them and ate them.
.
-- Varema Presnikova Kaminska, 6 years old. Now, a worker. (Spelling of name unclear; this is an audiobook.)

I approached..the cave mouth to see the subtle undulations of the emerging Batnado on full display..As the small cyclone whipped closer, its intensity grew. With every rotation, thousands more bats leapt from their niches on the cave wall to join in, like a giant spool of black cotton candy..I soon had tens of thousands of..bats barreling around just inches above me, generating an astonishing amount of wind.

She lay for two days & couldn't walk, and on the third they took her away on a stretcher. There was only one way out of the camp: thru the chimney. Straight to heaven. . At night, she & I talked. "Does an angel come to you?" I wanted to tell her about my angel. "No. Mama comes to me. She always wears a white blouse. I remember this blouse she had, with cornflowers embroidered on it."
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There was only one way out of the camp: through the chimney. Straight to heaven.

I've told you that I want to become a restless tongue, feeling the world like a dark, wet mouth, finding its chips, blisters, and cracks. When I saw the steppe I wanted to capture it. But a tongue isn't enough for the steppe. Nothing is enough for the steppe..The steppe requires a song with words as precise as an instrument for seeing the most distant stars. But I had no words, & it was as though I didn't even exist.