Absence of Being

What an odd fall......  no birds....no birds around my feeders. Like toy     shelves stocked for Christmas, with employees lying in wait, ...cash registers brimming with change---all in anticipation of meddling ones who will flock in to just gaze, or touch, or to take off the shelf and feel and drop, yes, so are my feeders. They lie in wait in the breeze, as I hear the wind blow thru the half-naked trees, a  gust pushing the chimes....a car swishing by....but still they lie in wait. The thistle is all 'thistled' to the top , yet nary a gold finch. Feeders plump with seed and not a lonesome dove. Suet sticking to the sides and perhaps, yes...perhaps...one little downy visiting now and then as if that is enough to quench my hunger for to view these flying creatures. 

I know.....I have read up on this...... too warm up north...too much food...feeders are not needed. Hey, isn't that a good thing? Yes, it is nice to know that we as humans are not 'that needed', although we like to believe we are. Most of the time we involve ourselves in the practice of destroying so when our services are rendered but not used, we feel a bit abused. But wait, Arnold had it right when he so eloquently stated, 'I will be back'..... So will the birds.

But a soft morning such as this, where your eyes naturally wander outside to see movement in the branches and ground, a sudden gasp of breath occurs as your mind skips a thought or two, it is a scary thing of what 'might be' more common than not. My grand kids are a 'few months to 5+', and I wonder....as an adult, as the years mitigate youth, as they sit here on a Sunday morning, will they be astonished by what is not, or....will they accept simply what is? 

Fifty years from now.....where will our birds be? Will our 'kind' during these years have saved wildlife or will we have made wildlife an anomaly of nature? Think of that, will wildlife be reduced to simply that of an anomaly? To go beyond birds,  will we have elephant heads on our walls to grandly display the power that man has conquered over a mere beast, or will we have an elephant in the wild to actually view and smell and sense it's power? Sitting on a plane the other day, I was chatting with my neighbor Arturo Izurieta, who is the director of the Charles Darwin Research Center in the Galapagos. We passed the time between late hours talking about the loss of large sharks in the Galapagos. Yet, it could have been anywhere. In future years will this anomaly of lacking wildlife be a permanent loss found within our birds and at our feeders? Will birds occasionally drop in to our feeders, as a grandparent does now, or will we have lost the same in large quantities due to our poisoning of the land or even a simple thing such as using 'lead in shot'....What will my Jonah, my James and my Amy view when they gain their years as easily as pounds? What will be your grandson's and daughters understanding of the same? What will be their anomaly in nature? Will it be nature itself, or perhaps it might be 'us' as humans....as our growing advancement in humanity appears to be steered to the lack of humanity, a loss of a race. We will become a blend of Artificial Intelligence and human.... We might have artificial hearts as well as mind as human organ creation moves ahead into a Brave New World. There will be those true 'humans' ....lost souls etched in the past, who remain one hundred percent human.....and abhor change to become this blend of human/chip. A human chip....an HC. No longer 100% human but a blend. But how much is a blend...80/20....50/50....20/80 and what about 0/100? Yet there they will sit, on the fence...watching humanity slowly shift towards an anomaly itself as these seemingly life forms of nature become a varied mix of chips and the like. As our earth evolves around our sun one too many times, even my grandkids in time, those who might elect to sit on the fence, hoping to remain human,....will die, as all living mass does. But their grandsons and daughters, my great or great great grandsons and daughters will gladly accept the only thing they know...whatever it might be at that time. For we only really accept what we know, right? Those who straddle the fence and between the posts, only last until their experiences fail to stretch to the deep and then, they vanish. A pure human will be an anomaly perhaps admired or lured to thought in history books alone.  So the 'fence' will be moved into a no-man's land and pushed past who we are as selves.

View your birds....sparsity or not....relish their simple movement and complex migration....they are not yet quite an anomaly.