Eagles eating seagulls; or, the Circle of Life

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Nature is fun, isn’t it, kids? And so lovely! You’ve got your bunnies, and pretty flowers, and dear little deer prancing through the woods.

 

 

Also you’ve got animals eating one another.

 

 

From a recent Sierra Club email:

 

 

This Sunday morning we'll be going to Swan Point Cemetery on the East Side of Providence for our "Eagles Eating Seagulls" outing. Swan Point is one of the best birding spots in Rhode Island and along with our regular winter feathered friends, we could be fortunate to see some rare finches that have come into the area this winter and hopefully the bald eagles that regularly come down to hunt along the Seekonk River. We are lucky to have locally renowned environmentalist Greg Gerritt to lead the outing.

 

 

Yes, we will be lucky to have Greg Gerritt to lead the outing. Luckier than a few seagulls I can think of.

 

 

Now, mind you, the Swan Point Cemetery is actually very lovely; it’s very old, and looks out over the Seekonk River. But there’s something peculiarly ironic about going to a cemetery to watch bald eagles rend and devour seagulls.

 

 

I never liked seagulls much. They’re big and fat, generally – they eat garbage, and seem to thrive on it – and are entirely appetite-driven. Also, they seem mentally challenged at times. More than once I’ve seen them perch near a person sitting on the ground and sneak up on them, as if they’re going to mess them up and take their lunch.

 

 

They are menaces in outdoor restaurants, especially in Rhode Island, especially in summertime; they land on your table and stare at your food.

 

 

But they don’t deserve to be ripped up by bald eagles, American national bird or not.

 

 

I’m thinking about going vegetarian. How about you?

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Cabbage butterflies

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I like butterflies, especially the big 747 models with snazzy colors, like the monarchs and the swallowtails. But I also have a nice feeling about the simple dull colorless ones; they give a pleasant fluttery feeling to the day when you see them, and they seem pretty harmless. (As Bart Simpson once said: “No one ever suspects the butterfly.”)

 

 

For example: now and then I see cabbage butterflies, AKA cabbage moths, AKA Pieris rapae. You know them: the white ones that swirl and dart through the garden like animated dinner napkins.

 

 

My parents used to grow basketball-sized cabbages, and the cabbage butterflies loved them. They don’t eat them, you see; they lay their eggs in them. Then their children (green oozy-looking caterpillars) eat the cabbage.

 

 

My mother hated those caterpillars. She had a giant salt-shaker of some infernal pesticide, which she used on the cabbages the way you’d sprinkle Parmesan on your spaghetti. It certainly didn’t kill all the caterpillars, and I marvel that it didn’t kill all of us. (One of our neighbors saw her strewing poison on her cabbages once, and wrote a letter to the local paper about “my neighbor lady who sprinkles poison on her vegetables.” He also said something like “I’d rather eat a bug once in a while than poison my own food.”)

 

 

(We thought he was crazy. Forty-five years later, I see that he was ahead of his time.)

 

 

Mom’s poison didn’t seem to reduce the population of cabbage butterflies, as I recall. And what’s a summer day, after all, without a few cabbage butterflies wheeling and pirouetting in the sunlight? 

 

 

I suspect that, if I’d been born a butterfly, I’d have been a cabbage butterfly: not extraordinarily beautiful, but with my own quiet charm.

 

 

And I do like cabbage once in a while.

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Thinking vegetarian

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What do plants eat? They eat dead animals; that’s the problem. For me that was a horrifying realization. You want to be an organic gardener, of course, so you keep reading ‘Feed the soil, feed the soil, feed the soil…’

 

 

All right. Well, what does the soil want to eat? Well, it wants manure, and it wants urine, and it wants blood meal and bone meal. And I…could not face that. I wanted my garden to be pure and death-free. It didn’t matter what I wanted: plants wanted those things; they needed those things to grow.

 

 

So I sort of played a moral hide-and-seek in my mind. I was left with this realization that I could eat an animal directly, or I could pass an animal through a plant and then eat it, but either way there were animals involved in this process. I could not remove animals from the equation.

 

 

I had to accept on some level that there was a cycle here, and it was very ancient, and ultimately very spiritual. It was really hard for me to accept the ‘death’ part of that equation. It took me years to finally face it. But there wasn’t any way out of it if I was going to grow things.

 

 

 

(Lierre Keith, on gardening as a vegan; October 8, 2009 on Underground Wellness Radio)       I am not a vegetarian. I have eaten enough meat to feed a thousand third-world kids for ten years.  But I think about it a lot. I like the idea of eating only vegetables; I hate the idea of animals dying to feed my appetite.     However: chicken, and pork, and beef (and goat, and eggs, and cheese, and mutton) taste good from time to time.     I love the advice Mark Bittman gives: be vegetarian as much you can, but don’t go crazy. Meat can be a side dish, a flavoring; it doesn’t need to be a main dish.     But the Lierre Keith piece above (which I found on Tumblr) gave me pause.  She’s exactly right. There’s no escape from death. Plants love the death of animals; it feeds them. Plants love the waste and decay of the animal world.     Quite obviously, plants and animals feed on one another.     Sad, and creepy. But true. Even when you’re eating a salad.     I think the important thing is to be mindful of what you’re eating. Don’t not think about it. Don’t wolf down a cheeseburger without thinking about it. Same with a salad. Think about where the ingredients came from, and what nutritional requirements are being filled by what you’re eating.     It’s all about mindfulness.     (Oh what a priggish New Age pseudo-Buddhist nerd I have become!)

 

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