Owls and Herons

Both are quite stunning and beautiful birds. I often see a Great Blue Heron swooping in and plucking fish out of the pond at the golf course by our house. The very picture of majesty. An owl, however, is quite a bit more elusive. I have only ever seen an owl in captivity and yet there have been times when I have sat in my old basement and heard its soft purring cry in the night. So soft and even comfortable, yet much like a cat it has deadly purpose despite all its cuddliness.

(And now I will shamelessly promote the movie Legend of the Guardian, which just came out last Friday. Absolutely incredible. Go watch!)

Philip K. Dick's character in the exerpt 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' and I both share the same reverence and protectiveness of the owl. A rare creature even before they were supposedly extinct in this story, Dick's characters finds himself against incredible odds to try and find an owl to eventually possess since it has become an almost priceless creature in this alternative universe. He shares many of the same sentiments with Sylvie, the heroine in 'A White Heron.'

Sylvie, so familiar with the feathery denizens of the forest, likes the wealthy young man on the search for the white heron, but is dismayed at how he constantly ceases the music of the song birds with his gun. She is fully aware of the consequences of telling him where the white bird may be found, but it also piques her curiosity and in the early morning with nothing else stirs, she climbs the giant pine that can show the area for miles and miles.

Suddenly she can see from the birds-eye view and where she saw hawks as merely silhouettes against the sky, no she sees their brown and cream patch of feathers and their broad, powerful wings as they soar above the ground. And amidst the hawks she sees the White Heron.

Though 'The White Heron' was written in the late 19th century (1886), Sylvie had already learned how to value the wildlife around her, even with $10 testing her decision. She and her -grandmother are stated to be poor and $10 was a lot of money - and for the location of a bird nonetheless - but she found that in spite of that, it's life was of far more import than even $10 could buy. And, although there is only one White Heron apparently in the district, it is certainly not the last White Heron alive. Sylvie is surrounded by an abundance of life and green leaves.

It takes the apocalypse in Philip K. Dick's story for people and corporations to understand the value of the wildlife. Businesses start private collections of some of the most inane animals - inane to us, at the very least - and an animal like an owl is soon considered one of the most valuable and priceless on the planet.

- All right, a side note: If the apocalypse has happened and all the animals that are so familiar to us now are just about all dead, then how in the world are any humans alive? I'm assuming if most of these animals are dead then the plant life is pretty scarce too and we get our oxygen from plants. At any rate, the ecosystems have collapsed and the world is, thus, barren. So how do the humans breath? Did technology save them? Can they somehow turn Carbon to Oxygen and make a continuous recycling of the air? Where do they get their nutrients? Fake plants and meat? Well, other worlds were mentioned, so perhaps technology did save us in teh end and instead of all life being extinct it could just be that the life we know it is mostly extinct and new life forms have since developed. I guess I'd have to read the book to find out. -

Given the chance, would the character in "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" do his best to protect the animals of the Earth before the nuclear warfare? I do not know the whole story, but I am merely assuming that this poor man simply was not alive before or was too young when the nuclear holocaust began. Or it could simply be that he did not care until it was almost gone.

And so Big Yellow Taxi goes:

"Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
'til it's gone
They paved paradise
Put up a parking lot"
-Joni Mitchell, American Earth, pg 490