Our Relationship With Biodiversity

Written by Sid Andrews

Our relationship with biodiversity begins with a sense of place.  My childhood was spent on a former dairy farm in what could barely be called a hamlet known as Willowbank.  The farm had only 27 acres and so in the era of the Milk Marketing Board’s start-up in Ontario; it was too small to maintain a quota.  To me and the family mutt, Sally, it was paradise.  Oh the adventures that funny little dog and I had!

There was a field behind the barn and a windrow of apple and hawthorn along the east fence.  Across the highway was another field, a small pond completely full of cattails, and the prized part of all—a dock on a ‘crick’ with a very oozy marsh on the other side.

Oh, the days and early evenings spent across the road were countless it seemed.  No matter the weather or the season, Sally and I would be out exploring.  Spring was particularly fun when the snow would melt and the runoff would trip over itself to get down to the creek to eventually spill, within a quarter mile, into the St. Lawrence. Damming the culvert was an annual enterprise.

By age ten I had became interested in the many kinds of birds to be found in my dog’s and my little universe.  The universe expanded as I learned to identify more and more birds, amphibians, reptiles, fish, insects, and plants.  One of my favourites was the American bittern, who I tracked down using bittern logic and managed to get within 10 feet or so undetected of one male preoccupied with pumping—what a splendid production!  And the protest when he discovered me and panicked to get away!  I learned that birds can lighten the “load” in impressive quantity if they are suddenly startled.

The common gallinule, or common moorhen in today’s taxonomy, was for a long time a mystery to me.  This little black and blue denizen of the cattails with a gaudy red bill was quite vociferous when hidden in its marsh of green. Finding it was hard. I finally did when I had taken Sally home for supper and “snuck” back to the dock while she slept off her dinner. 

At dusk amongst the cacophony of mosquitoes, bull and green frogs, and the cacklingof gallinules I finally saw one glide out of the marsh and into the creek.  Was I excited!  How I remained quiet I don’t remember.  Astonishing—the size of a “bantie” hen but much sleeker— it swam, head abob like a chicken’s, across the water to another clump of cattails and as suddenly as it had appeared it disappeared. The air was fetid with the smell of spring spawn in the creek and I stayed for a minute more just soaking it in before I went home to bed.

Some year’s later, I found a story by a retired RAF pilot in the New Yorker for the week of September 26 in 1977.  In it he told of how he felt safe and whole each time his fighter plane made it back in over the cliffs of Dover.  He continued to discuss this sense of place, although he did not call it that.  I became so absorbed in the story when he began to speak of “quérençia”, a Spanish word, which translated into idiomatic English is akin to “affection for the place one calls home.”  

“But no”, he protested, it is more than that.”  It is deeper than feeling safe once in over the white cliffs, he explained.  It is deeper than patriotism, although he certainly felt that. His analogy described my attachment to Sally’s and my little universe near Gander Creek to a “tee.”

It is, he said, like the farmer sitting on his porch after a long day of toil in the fields.  As he enjoys the sunset and sips his tea his wife joins him.  As she settles in, he gazes into his field across the dirt laneway and, there, on a knoll, is a groundhog standing on his mound, chewing some fresh grass as he soaks up the last of the warm sun as it sets. QUÉRENÇIA!

My sense of place is rooted in some wondrous habitats, some amazing landscapes, and some extraordinary assemblages of creatures and plants. It is that connection to other life-forms and their place and mine in the natural world which began in the cattails, fields, and crick near my childhood home.

It is sense of place and our connection to other life-forms that will be salvation for them—and us. It is the biological diversityor “biodiversity” of Earth that brings it to life and animates it.

E. O. Wilson, pre-eminent entomologist (a very great bug man) is a proponent of the hypothesis of Biophilia. Biophilia is, he professes, a very deep and intimate place within us that we, as advanced as we think we are, in fact, are still connected to the grand biodiversity of life on Earth and all its interconnections.  I’ll end this missive with a promise to look more closely at biodiversity itself in issues to come. Let me end with this thought from Mr. Wilson.

“The true frontier for humanity is life on earth, its exploration and the transport of knowledge about it into science, art and practical affairs. ….. Life around us exceeds in complexity and beauty anything else humanity is ever likely to encounter.”