-- Intermission ("They are other nations...") --

-------------------------------------------------------

A while back I remarked to someone that “the natives are restless” in reference to a lot of splintering/infighting within the so-called IBWO ‘believer’ community — different believers, believing different things about different bits of evidence (always the case to some degree, but with perhaps wider/deeper fissures now). 

Even IF the Ivorybill is finally documented by someone I wonder how long the kumbaya moment will last before recriminations surface. To the victor go the spoils (the fame, the glory, perhaps $$$)… the also-rans will want to claim, ‘see, I told you they existed; I told you I’d observed them’ — yet their claims will stiiiiiiiill need to be separately documented to hold water — the hint of possibility may be stronger, but no true validation for them. Documenting the IBWO in any one locale will/would be a momentous, joyous, celebratory event… but also clearly the beginning of a LOT more work and effort and questions ahead!

Anyway, for now, maybe just a brief meditative intermission through some of the Arkansas Big Woods:

And lastly, as a Sunday sermon, I’ll re-employ this famous quote from writer/naturalist Henry Beston which I've used before:

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” 

-------------------------------------------------------