The Peregrine, the Octopus and The Hidden Life of Trees

A gift of "The Peregrine" captivated me and, as is so often the case in my own combustible personality, once it got me going, there was no stopping the conflagration: So I am now reading "The Peregrine," and "The Soul of an Octopus" and "The Hidden Life of Trees."

"The Peregrine" is a work not just of intensely fascinating natural writing, but real high grade literature. J.A. Baker wandered the English flatlands, communing with peregrine falcons in a way which would dazzle Thoreau. These birds  have eyes which are far larger, proportionately, and heavier than human eyes. If human beings had eyes this size they would be 3 inches across and weigh four pounds. 

But the peregrine is only 2 1/2 pounds, and fast.  It can fly up 1,000 feet in the air, and come out of the sun, so even other birds cannot see or sense it coming. Falling 100 feet it can attain enough speed to snap the neck of large birds, gulls, ducks, pigeons. Then, snatching up its kill from the ground, it soars off with it.

"Evanescent as flame, peregrines sear across the cold sky and are gone, leaving no sign in the blue haze above. But in the lower air a wake of bird trails back, and rises upward through the white helix of the gulls."

This is a thrilling book about a thrilling creature.
But it is a creature one can see and understand. It is a vertebrate and obeys vertebrate rules.

Not so with the octopus, a creature so alien we cannot even imagine what its consciousness might be like. It both tastes and feels through the suckers on its gelatinous legs. It has an eye with a slit pupil and its mouth is under an arm. Its beak  is hidden. It has "three hearts, a brain the wraps around its throat and a covering of slime instead of hair. Even their blood is a different color from ours; it's blue, because copper, not iron, carries its oxygen."
It can slither through the smallest hole because it has no bones or joints, and its brain is malleable as silly putty and octopuses often escape their containers because there was a crack nobody saw, or they simply unlock the locks with their arms and suckers. 

They turn colors with different "emotions" from white to red to brown and their skin changes texture and tone. 
They live only three years.

For trees, on the other hand, three years--even twenty years-- are the blink of an eye. There's a tree in Sweden thought to be 9,000 years old. There are redwoods and sequoias in California who were alive at the time of Jesus Christ. 

But the most amazing thing about trees is not their longevity; it's their connectivity. Trees put communists to shame. They are connected but underground fungal strands which allow them to shunt sugar from one tree which is doing well to another which needs help. Mother trees grow crowns which deny light to their children for decades, centuries, until they are ready to retire, but the children are not injured by this--the delay forces them to develop tightly packed innards which resist insects.

Tree leaves can "taste" insect saliva so they can emit just the right toxin for the particular insect and when giraffes graze on acacia trees, the trees not only produce toxins but aerosolize scents so other acacia threes down wind do the same to ward off the giraffes, who leave the scene or simply walk up wind. 

Some years ago, I criticized Dr. Nadine Unger,  a Yale professor of forestry because she suggested that  northeastern deciduous forests being dark green, may absorb heat and actually not ameliorate temperatures on the planet, but contribute to global warming. I did not want to hear that forests were anything other than "good guys" in protecting the planet from global warming and lambasted her. I was not alone:  dozens of  outraged readers posted insulting comments on that blog.


Professor Unger calculated that the clear cutting of northeastern forests in the 18th century reduced global climate temperature by 0.1 degree, or something like that. Forest emit volalitile compounds which may contribute in some way to global warming. That was incendiary stuff, because it suggested that global warming and climate change may not be entirely owing to works of man, and in fact man, before he started erecting smoke stacks, man may have benefited the climate by clearing fields and growing crops.
Liberals, who are not immune to bias, did not want to hear that.


Only Maud stepped forward as the voice of dispassionate reason.
I am now chagrined at my own spasm of irrational speak. 

Professor Nadine Unger

Forests have their own logic, trees their own ways.

Truth is truth, no matter how it may undermine your most cherished beliefs.