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Musings Report 2021-48 11-27-21 Rat, Human, Hawk: A Fable from Real Life
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Rat, Human, Hawk: A Fable from Real Life
Both fables and Nature are open to interpretation. Fables that endure tell a story--fly too close to the sun and your wings will melt and you'll fall to your death (Icarus and Daedalus)--that encapsulates a basic lesson that is open to interpretation.
The life lessons attributed to Icarus's giddy flight and subsequent demise include:
1, Hubris, i.e. excessive pride, self-confidence, defiance of greater powers due to a belief in one's own god-like powers: Icarus says to the sun, "I can fly just as high as you! Higher, even!"
2. Aim for the middle course and avoid extremes.
3. The recklessness of youthful Icarus caused his downfall.
4. The tragic consequences of excessive risk taking.
5. Listen to your elders precautionary instructions
Nature is also open to interpretation. If you're watching a nature program on TV that's following a family of prey animals, the announcer will announce the loss of one of the brood with sadness: how tragic that this young life was snuffed by a predator. But if the program is following a hungry family of predators, then the announcer's voice is tinged with warmth when the predator parent brings home the dead prey animal to feed its hungry offspring.
I never imagined I'd witness a predator-prey interaction in my urban back yard that lent itself so readily as a fable.
The prey in this case is the rat, a remarkably adaptable mammal much like the small proto-mammals that scurried about in the night during the reign of the dinosaurs. Rats live wherever humans live because humans tend to leave all sorts of food around. Rats' reputation leaves something to be desired, due to their association with pestilence (Black Death, etc.), sewers, garbage dumps and reeking, filthy slums. If Disney's character had been named Mickey Rat, he would not be quite as endearing.
Rats are ever-present here because the flora drops food virtually year-round, the weather is mild and forests or overgrown wild patches are generally nearby. Rats proliferate when well-fed and they don't stray far from their burrows, so you don't want rats to nest near your house and let their astonishing reproductive capabilities manifest.
Our primary tools are to avoid putting any meat or fatty food scraps in our compost, and deploying a live-trap cage, a wire-mesh box that you bait with some goodies that drops a door when the rat enters. The cage is then transported to a forest far from houses and the rat is released.
Rats are smart and every once in awhile a rat figures out the trap is to be avoided no matter how enticing the goodies.
So now we have two characters: the wily rat who's figured out how to evade the human's trap and the easily outsmarted human.
Our house (68 years old) has a spacious outside shower (5 ft. by 5 ft.) that's very convenient when finishing an afternoon of grubby, sweaty yard work. A high window affords tall people a view of the back yard and our neighbor's house some distance beyond our trees.
A few days ago I saw something I'd never imagined I would witness in our urban back yard. While taking a shower I saw the tall papaya tree by our rose bush sway as a heavy bird landed. This unusual movement attracted my gaze and I saw that it was a large bird, about 18 inches tall (file photo attached), clearly a Hawaiian hawk, ('io in Hawaiian, pronounced ee-oh). Positioned on a high perch without sight obstructions, the hawk surveyed the back yard with great intensity.
Having known of the hawk but never having seen one despite many long hikes through the Big Island's wilderness, I was transfixed. As I watched, it suddenly swooped silently down to the fallen tomato vines just outside the window and landed on a small gray animal which I immediately knew was the rat I could not entice into our live trap. The 'io looked around to make sure the coast was clear, and then flew off toward our neighbors, the rat squirming helplessly in its talons, with a few powerful strokes of its wings.
The entire captivating sequence took only a few moments.
I looked online to research 'io range and habitat: each pair mates for life and defends their nesting territory. 'Io prefers native ohia forests but is often sighted in agricultural areas. The location of their nest is a mystery, but our yard must be on the fringes of their territory.
Traditional cultures tend to put great store in experiences like this, and the oddity of it--the first time I see a hawk, it immediately spots the triumphant rat and delivers it as a fresh warm meal to its hungry chicks--impressed me greatly.
The fable I see here is two-fold: the limits of human ingenuity (my traps failed) and the hubris of believing that one's superiority in the human realm (the rat's ease in evading the trap) freed one from Nature's constraints. As the saying goes, Nature bats last, and Nature is capacious in its reach and power.
How does this fable relate to today? In my view, all those who believe the Federal Reserve has god-like powers that free markets from any constraints of Nature are like the rat who reckoned evading the human trap meant living would be easy.
Hubris is everywhere: markets will never go down because the Fed has god-like powers, human ingenuity will create unlimited energy that is beyond the constraints of the planet's resources, our science is delivering the pandemic into the dustbin of history, and so on.
Hubris arouses nemesis, and the hawk is about to swoop down on all those overly confident in humanity's god-like powers.
Highlights of the Blog
Two Things to be Thankful For 11/25/21
When Risk and Opportunity Become Personal 11/24/21
When Everything Is Artifice and PR, Collapse Beckons 11/22/21
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Finally have the new book cover in hand.
From Left Field
A kind reader notified me that these two links in last week's list were broken:
Mao reconsidered
Everything we 'know' about the rise of Man is wrong -- commentary on Graeber's final book....
The 50 Most Beautiful Colleges in America-- My alma mater is #1: University of Hawaii at Manoa: Honolulu, Hawaii
A red light on the dashboard--energy rules all....
"A Secular Shift": What The Black Death Tells Us About The Labor Market--labor choosing leisure over longer hours...
How supply chain chaos and sky-high costs could last until 2023--make that 2923....
Another Winter of COVID--easily predictable....
Feeling, in situ: What if emotions are not universal and hardwired but exquisite acts of meaning-making specific to context and culture? -- all emotions are not universal....
Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science-- garbage science comes with the pressure to publish or perish....
The Devil’s Currency – Part I: Fiat Emperor
Is social media killing intellectual humility? -- no, it's killing intelligence, too....
The Future of SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination — Lessons from Influenza
COP26 will be a colossal mining cop-out--every EV uses 6 times more minerals than internal-combustion engine vehicles... but never mind, we can stripmine the planet without any limits....
The case for making low-tech 'dumb' cities instead of 'smart' ones--you mean like ancient cities before hydrocarbon energy?
The Ghost Workers in the Machine--modern-day serfs toiling for Big Tech nobility....
"Sometimes I try to imagine a world where scientific young minds enjoyed greater rewards for revolutionizing farming methods, manufacturing, or energy, rather than the dark patterns used to optimize ad-clicks at Google and Facebook." Edward Snowden
Thanks for reading--
charles
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