Broken Instincts

What is owed, how we wait, and what is grief.

We put out feelers in this world for those we want to share it with, those with whom we want to create something new. Pheromones, floral scents, vibrant displays of color and dance, subterranean tastes in the dirt felt through the skin or a sensitive whisker. We are in search of pollinators or mates.

The very smallest of creatures have no drive to connect. They divide and multiply; some even live forever that way, or seemingly so, through clones of their DNA (does it all come back to DNA? that invisible code? and if I could see my own—would I believe it more?) Sex, however, requires recombining genes and finding a partner; it also necessitates death. Of course, sex on its own “requires” no such thing—there is no imperative to continue the Homo sapiens species. It has had a good (terrible) run. But continue it does, regardless of individual decisions: how much do they matter? If one decides not to have children, to whom does one owe anything?

The question becomes more complex disconnected from biology and inheritance. Ironically, it becomes about selection. Is it owed to the land? To one’s community? To whom am I responsible without progeny? Outside of the FAMILY?

Humans can pretty clearly see to the end of their own survival early on. We are always thinking about what we will leave behind: for our families, for complete strangers, in the wilderness, at the doctor’s office, for the tooth fairy, on walls and in wood and stone. This legacy mania is what makes us distinctly unanimal. The animal is born, lives, and dies without thought to what it leaves behind. The animal doesn’t know about its own DNA. Our own understanding of to whom the animal owes something is very rudimentary, and colored by our human ideas of what a family means.

The bushtit, for example, is a very small bird that travels in flocks close to the ground. They work together to build nests that look like tiny cozy sleeping bags woven from lichen, moss, and spidersilk that dangle from the branches of a tree. But it’s very difficult to tell bushtits apart. They are smaller than an unripe apricot; males and females are the same gray dun save for the females’ golden eyes. And they never stop moving. Try to count a bushtit flock and you will never get the same number twice. We don’t really know that it’s the same male-female mated pair going in and out of the nest. That’s what researcher Sarah Sloane discovered when she watched a colony of bushtit nests closely. Birds were constantly visiting other nests, delivering food and checking on young genetically unrelated to them. Mutual aid, cooperative breeding—whatever you want to call it, bushtits¹ are better at it than us.

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A few years ago, I received a box of books from my dad in New York state. Periodically he deaccessions books from his library in the attic by shipping them to me (I’ve made him promise not to get rid of any before I’ve had the chance to go through them.) One of these books was a beat up dime store copy of a book called One Day at Teton Marsh by Sally Carrighar from 1972, although it was originally published in 1947. I’d never heard of Carrighar before this, but I’ve since become a devotee of her unusually detailed works of natural history based on years of observing animals in their natural habitats. Her two classics, the aforementioned Teton Marsh and One Day on Beetle Rock (1944)², contain some of the most unusual and moving writing about animals I’ve encountered. Take this passage about the deer mouse, which the weasel is hunting:

A thick scent rose from the mice—mice eating away the grass to form new runways, divining where seeds were sprouting and scratching away the soil, mice scurrying beneath the arching stems, or sitting motionless on their haunches feeling the good seeds start to digest, while their eyes, grave with little dreams, looked down the moonlit avenues of their grassy world.

Each chapter in these books by Carrighar follows a different individual creature over the same length of time, so that while the mouse is digesting its seeds, the Sierra Grouse (now known as the Sooty Grouse), is quietly watching the world go by from her perch: “[S]he and the cock were birds to whom waiting was not a vacant time, but a way of full living.” Sentence after sentence knocks me over like this, from bird to leech to snail to deer. I read a lot of early twentieth century philosophers agonizing over the difference between intelligence and instinct like it really matters what separates us from animals, and then I read Carrighar and remember “oh, right, this feeling of alienation and fear and occasional peace—that’s instinct.”

Look, despite everything, I am not an expert on nature writing. I have strong opinions and I know what I like. And yes, sometimes when the world feels like too much I enjoy reading about the imagined lives of mice running through their little tunnels and eating their little seeds. I like thinking about a world devoid of war, where death is meaningful primarily for how it continues the cycling of nutrients through an ecosystem, despite the fierceness with which the mother weasel will fight to protect her kits from the starving coyote. There is no perfect template for how to hold the lives of animals alongside our own, and I wouldn’t like to follow it if there were one. It should be constantly in flux—relational, in negotiation—constantly in motion like the flock of bushtits that has just now alighted on the plum tree outside my window as I write this, each one plucking ants from the sticky overripe fruit I could never manage to pick more than a few handfuls of.

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One more bird vignette to close this out. A few weeks ago I went for a birding walk along the Columbia Slough, a backwater channel that meanders alongside the larger river and is walking distance from my home in North Portland. Near the end I crossed a bridge where the water below had evaporated in the late summer heat leaving behind a muddy expanse dotted with weeds, driftwood, and trash. A lone Canada goose sat on the mud directly below me, and as I watched her through my binoculars she stood up and repositioned, allowing me to see the desiccated corpse of her young gosling (or what was left of it) which she continued to brood. There were no other geese around, and very little water.

Was it through grief that she kept watch over the dead? Or was it simply broken instinct? And what’s the difference? While I watched she got up to walk around and browse the skinny green shoots puncturing the silty ground. She moved slowly and methodically, either unaware of me or confident that I could do her and her young no further harm.

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Updates & Happenings

I’m teaching an appropriately spooky class starting in October: A Body Horror Class is part workshop and part survey of what makes effective body horror in literature, comics, cinema, and video games. Starts October 22, sliding scale. On Zoom.

smoke and mold is open for submissions for Issue 11: Disability Justice, through the end of the month. We’ve also got almost all of our archive of back issues now browseable on our new website. It was a lot of work, so go read them!

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1. If you are keen on bushtit-related clothing and groups who do other rad things with birds in the Portland area, check out the new merch drop from birdherspdx.

2. Part of Carrighar’s myth is that she decided to start writing about animals after finding a singing mouse in her radio. Whether or not this is true, it does illuminate why twenty years after its publication, Walt Disney Studios released a grossly anthropomorphized one-hour adaptation of (more like loosely inspired by) One Day on Beetle Rock.