The Benefits of Personal Stories in Nature

I was photographing an Osprey from a public walking trail near Seattle, shooting across a river at 600mm equivalent. The Osprey are at a safe distance for viewing and used to human trail walkers.

The male Osprey was eating his fish on a utility pole, where a hungry crow decided to move in for a handout.

After the crow arrived, the Osprey sat on that fish, without eating, for almost a half hour, as weather changed from blue to gray and blue again.

Meanwhile, the hungry female Osprey called over and over from the nearby platform. The male finally flew over with the remnants of the tail, which she swallowed whole, mumbling.

The area around the nesting platform is surrounded by office parks and secure business installations. So, nearly everyone walking by was wearing a credential or lanyard. And, I would say 95 percent of them stopped to ask me questions about the Osprey.

The first question was usually, “are those eagles?” The next most popular was, “is that a baby crying in the nest?”

I’m not an Osprey expert, but I explained what I’d been watching — how the female was crying out from the nest for the male who had the food. One person said, “so, they have domestic issues just like everyone,” and another, “just wait ’til the kids come.”

In some circles, this would be red-alert anthropomorphism. I mean, I was trained to say “aesthetically pleasing” instead of “cute” to depersonalize wildlife. I realize that an Osprey’s home life is radically different from mine — except for the fact that we each live in small apartments.

I also believe that when those people walk by on their lunch hour now, they’ll be looking at the Osprey through a different filter. They won’t be looking at the silhouette of bird with no personality. They’ll be extrapolating some of what we talked about, onto that distant form calling out from the nesting platform. They’ll see the Osprey unit as a family — not as a wildlife resource which is a lot easier to objectify.

It’s as inaccurate to apply our preferences onto another species as it is to deny that species their full social and emotional lives. We share some traits with non-human animals, and I respect that similarity as well as an animal’s unique and rightful entitlement on this planet.

I love biologist Marc Bekoff’s term deep ethology: ‘Respecting all animals, appreciating all animals, showing compassion for all animals, and feeling for all animals from one’s heart.'”

I’m not sure how one comes to feel “from one’s heart” without some degree of personal association and empathy. It’s difficult, at times, to create that association through a two-dimensional image. But I think the stories we can tell through those images and around those images go a long way toward breaking down the damaging “us versus them” methodology of species interaction.