The True Extravagance of Wild

There’s a particular awe I used to experience in “nature.” It’s the awe of seeing a flock of birds rising into the air from a field or pond and lifting my heart in gratitude to the abundance of nature. It’s gratitude for a glimpse into what I thought of as “their” world, the mysterious lifeways and migratory paths of birds. It is an awe of appreciation, but also of disconnect. 

The first time I went to the Kachemak Bay Shorebird Festival, I carried that sort of awe with me. The joy of seeing birds flying from… somewhere… to … somewhere else. I was a blip in their journey. I planned to enjoy the experience, then let it go. But I got to know birds better during and after the festival. I learned about them as species. I spent more time observing individuals. The more I get to know birds, the more I experience awe of a different sort, an openness to sharing their experience, a heart connection that stays with me as I go about my day.

What got to me first was numbers. The gaze of awe sees a flock of thousands upon thousands of tiny shorebirds rising into the air, shimmering in the sun as they move like particles in a cloud, then landing again. Identifying them reveals a dozen-plus species within the intertidal crowd. The seagulls aren’t just gulls, they’re Glaucous-winged Gulls and Aleutian Terns. The sandpipers are not the same as the Dunlins and Dowitchers. There are seven kinds of Sandpipers that fly through Kachemak Bay, nearly a hundred species worldwide. Specific species fly to Alaska from a variety of different places, from Africa to South America to Australia to Asia. Sandpipers live on every continent but Antarctica.

The more you know details of bird life, the smaller the numbers get. Some species I spotted in Kachemak Bay have tiny populations. There are only 11,000 or fewer Black Oystercatchers in the entire world. That’s fewer than the number of human beings in the small Ohio community where I grew up. About half of the Black Oystercatchers live in Alaska, but even here, they are a rare sighting.

A wide range of species means that some species have narrowly specific habitats, like the surfbird that nests on arctic mountain summits, or the species featured in the Flyways movie that travel very specific paths to their nesting grounds. Or the endemic species I got to see on my trip to the Galapagos, where one (or maybe a few?) species of finch evolved into 18 to benefit most from the diversity of food sources on the islands. Specialization of daily habits allows for species diversity.

The same is true of plants. I’m reading Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden by Camille T. Dungy. Like me, Dungy and her spouse are new(ish) to appreciating the more-than-human world. She and her husband laugh over his realization that each plant species has its own season. There is not just one “growing season.” Each plant species (and sometimes each individual plant) has its preferred time and conditions to sprout, leaf, reproduce, and die or hibernate.

So often, when we think of non-human beings, we think of “birds” or “lawns” or “trees,” and we lose sight of the diversity of species and the very narrow specialization that allows for such diversity. We ignore the individual stories of species with very specific needs. Many of us love “nature” and support “bird” habitat and “wildness” with little concept of the extravagant diversity of the more-than-human world. We admire a body of water without realizing it is everything for a specific species of frog. We decimate a piece of wilderness to build a house and replace the wild diversity of plants with a grass lawn and a few trees.

Monoculture isn’t just a farming problem. It’s human blindness. It’s a problem of vision.

So today, I invite you to exercise your eyesight for diversity. Find a space near you that isn’t exclusively human. Maybe it’s your yard. Maybe it’s the vacant lot you drive by on your way to work. Maybe it’s your living room that you share with your jade plant, a dog, and a parakeet. Count the species. Don’t forget to count the species that found their own way into the space: the mosquito in your bedroom, the dandelion in a crack in the sidewalk, the weeds in your yard. Is it more than you expected? Less? Does the number of species feel extravagant to you? Does it feel wild?

Bonus: Think of one thing you can do to encourage diversity of the space.

“Efforts to reduce natural diversity nearly always result in some form of depletion.”—Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden

Are you enjoying what you're reading? Please share with your friends! And remember: this is a reader supported publication. All content is free, but a paid subscription helps keep the lights on. Consider supporting content you love!

(Please note that I am not a non-profit organization. These gifts are not tax-deductible.)